Hotly contested last year – but put aside for future review – a pay-to-play student sports system is once again under review in the Jefferson County School District.

Some coaches and administrators wonder if its adoption is nothing short of inevitable. They say money to help support school sports has to come from somewhere.

”In a small community, in economic times like this, we cannot keep going back to the businesses and asking for money,” said Margaret Sturza, the athletics and activities director at Madras High School. ”This is not a bottomless pit.”

But whether anyone is happy about the fees is another story.

”No way in hell do I want participation fees, but I think we’ve come to the time where we have to have them,” Sturza said.

After tabling a proposal last year to charge students a fee to participate in school sports, the school board is reconsidering the policy. Last year’s proposal required middle and high school student athletes to pay to try out and participate on school teams. The fee would be refunded to those students who didn’t make the teams.

PAY INSTEAD OF CUTS?

As it was proposed last year, the policy would have required high school students to pay $50 per sport. Middle school students would have paid $25 per sport. Parents would have been able to receive a waiver after paying $300 in any one school year.

A pay-to-play system is expected to earn about $30,000 for the district.

”Cutting is a nasty word to me,” said Sean Gallagher, the principal of Madras High School. ”If you’re talking pay to play versus cutting, I’ll take pay to play any day.”

For $30,000, you can hire about six coaches, he said. ”If you don’t have a coach you don’t have a program, so there goes six programs,” he said.

”That’s why I think it needs to be looked at.”

Sturza said some coaches have suggested changing the policy so that kids wouldn’t have to pay the fee until after they made the teams. ”We don’t want kids to be discouraged from turning out, because they can’t afford it,” she said.

Many other school districts throughout Central Oregon have had pay to play fees for years. In 1993, the Bend-La Pine school district asked students to pay fees to play on school teams after drastically cutting the district’s athletics budget, according to Peter Miller, a program administrator for the district.

At $100 to participate in each junior varsity and varsity high school sport and $35 for seventh-graders and eighth-graders, the fees have not gone up since 1993, Miller said.

Now the district is considering a proposal to drastically increase those fees, ”to basically double” the numbers, Miller said.

As Greg Hammond, the athletics director of Bend High sees it, a pay to play system has undoubtedly had an impact on the school’s sports program.

He knows, because he’s seen the number of kids who come to his door looking for financial help.

And the number of kids who came out for the football team went down after the district adopted the policy, he recalled.

”We lost a lot of kids. We didn’t have the numbers we had before,” Hammond said.

”The hard part about it is knowing how many kids would turn out if they had the financial ability,” he said. The school has a fund it relies on to help kids in need.

HELP FROM COMMUNITY

Anonymous donors and community members have given the school money to help cover some student athletic fees. It’s dependent upon the generosity of the community, so the fund grows and shrinks over time.

”It’s not something we can count on,” Hammond said.

He’s seen students work digging ditches for contractors to earn the extra money for athletic fees. Sometimes they ask if they can pay a little late, after they get their next week’s paycheck.

But not every athletics director has a similar story. At Hugh Hartman Middle School, Patty Schulte, the athletics director, said that all of her kids who play on teams want to participate. ”Any of the kids that cannot pay, we take care of and they know that,” she said.

The athletics budget and community donations help cover those fees when kids need help, she said. Students pay $65 per sport at the middle school. About 20 percent of student athletes are on some form of scholarship.

Athletic fees vary throughout Central Oregon. At Crook County High School, students pay $50 per sport. At the middle school, students pay $15 per sport.

Only a handful of students seek out scholarship help at the middle school, said Stacy Smith, the athletics director.

”I would rather not have it, obviously,” he said. ”I don’t know it’s kept anybody from participating.”

The sports fee is slightly higher at Redmond High School where students pay $90 per sport.

At Jefferson County Middle School where fees could run $25 per sport next school year, Simon White, the athletics director, said he saw it as ”only fair” for athletics to take a cut when other programs and activities are taking cuts.

The fee was unfortunate, but ”pretty nominal,” Simon said. ”But it’s still an effort on the school district’s part to find some middle ground.” He does worry that some parents won’t be able to manage the fee.

”I don’t want anybody to feel like they need to ask for a handout,” he said.

The booster club, a group of parents who help raise money for school activities, plans to try and help. ”From our standpoint we’ll do our best to provide as many scholarships as we possibly can for those students who have an inability to pay,” said Dean Boyle, the president of The Buff Boosters.

”We’ll support whatever the school board decides we need to do,” he said.

Julia Lyon can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at jlyon@bendbulletin.com.