First in a series
School boards are making some tough choices these days in the wake of Gov. Tom Corbett's slashing of their budgets.
The Northern Tioga School District, which formerly included Elkland, Cowanesque Valley and Williamson schools, now includes just Cowanesque Valley and Williamson. Elkland schools have closed and their students will attend the other two schools, depending on where they live.
The Juniata County School District has passed pay-to-play fees of $250 per sport for its schools, Juniata and East Juniata.
Bloomsburg School District is eliminating long trips for athletic scrimmages, and many schools are cutting several or all junior high sports. Others are standing pat on equipment upgrades for the foreseeable future.
Closer to home, Mount Carmel Area recently effectively did away with its volleyball and softball programs by expanding its cooperative agreement with Lourdes Regional in those sports. Lourdes, of course, dropped its football and baseball programs and its players will play those sports at Mount Carmel. That's not a strange move for a small, private school,
but it is a little odd for a larger public school to give up two sports and send its students to play at a smaller private school.
On the same night Mount Carmel's board did that, the board also agreed on $15,000 in funding for new football uniforms. Although it now appears that football boosters are raising the money for the uniforms, the symbolic damage was done - the board OK'd new football uniforms on the same night it cut two girls sports.
Football has always been king at Mount Carmel and at many other Pennsylvania schools, and indeed, money raised at football games with attendances of 5,000 or more often helps pay the freight for other less lucrative sports. But the board's action, and subsequent refusal to allow volleyball boosters to privately fund that program, has given critics more room to lodge complaints about some practices regarding football and other sports programs.
Such as redshirting.
Redshirting, the practice of holding a student back a grade for sports purposes, has been going on at Mount Carmel and other area districts for at least most of the past half-century. Mount Carmel became famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view, for it during Coach Joe "Jazz" Diminick's tenure from 1962-1992. Diminick was always upfront about the practice.
As one longtime area coach and broadcaster once described MCA's redshirting, "That whole community really bought into the concept."
But in an era when girls sports are being jettisoned, a fair question being asked by some taxpayers is whether school districts can afford to hold back students for sports purposes. Figures vary on how much it costs a district to educate a student, but Pennsylvania Department of Education figures from the 2008-2009 school year showed local districts averaged about $10,000 per pupil.
So, if 10 to 15 students stay back a year, that's $100,000 to $150,000 the district could be using for other purposes. Or is it? And is it right to ask taxpayers to fund it?
Ned Sodrick, former superintendent at Shamokin and Line Mountain, said claims of the cost to local taxpayers are somewhat exaggerated, because of the state's ADM (average daily membership) reimbursements to school districts.
Still, even that money has to come from taxpayers somewhere, if not just at the local level.
Not official
Officially, there is no holding back kids for sports purposes. They're held back for maturity reasons, for emotional growth, a medical reason, but not for sports.
As Shakespeare wrote, though, "Ah, but there's the rub. ..."
All it takes for a parent to hold a student back is to find some physician, psychologist or counselor willing to sign off on it.
"Ultimately, it's in the parents' hands," said Mount Carmel Area Athletic Director Greg Sacavage in a recent interview. "The parents control the morality of the situation. They're the driving force. We only have kids six hours a day."
Sacavage began that interview by handing out a copy of the district's promotion and retention policies.
"We actually have a policy," Sacavage said. "You just can't come in and say, 'I'm retaining (my child). You have to have an explanation, a doctor's excuse with some kind of medical reason, be it emotional or physical. They then have a meeting with an administrative team, and it's discussed and a decision is made. There's a timetable on it, and it has to be done some time in the early spring for next year."
Sacavage said he thinks Mount Carmel has been the victim of an unfair reputation ever since the late James Michener devoted a couple of pages to the district's redshirting practices in his 1976 book, "Sports In America."
"Jazz wasn't doing anything every other coach wasn't doing. The idea was out there, and they've been doing it in college for years. They never complain about the colleges doing it," Sacavage said.
But colleges do it with athletic budget money, which in many cases is separate from taxpayer money for the general school. And college redshirts just skip a year of competition while they go to classes.
"The perception is that it's a blank page here," Sacavage said. "And we go back to James Michener. The Jazz thing happened because someone internally had problems with the Mount Carmel School District. When they did the figures around the area, our (redshirt) numbers were lower than Pottsville's and most of the school districts around us, but we got the publicity right off the bat because James Michener came to town. Because Michener came to town and stayed with Bernie Romanoski and the guys in Shamokin, and they all said, 'That no good Mount Carmel, they're doing such and such.' But what if James Michener had stayed in Mount Carmel, and it was Shamokin that was in 'Sports In America' and not Mount Carmel. Mount Carmel got put on the map because of that situation. Since that point in time, Mount Carmel was the redshirting capital of the world.
"I don't think it's a fair perception, at all. We're a school district, like any other school district, that these concerns come up with. We deal with it on a case-by-case basis, and that's why the policy was made. Maybe that's one of the reasons why we have a policy down in writing, so that perception out there isn't as justified as people believe it to be."
But that perception is there, not only about Mount Carmel, but about Shamokin and other districts at this end of District 4, according to Shamokin Athletic Director Rick Kashner. Kashner has a unique perspective. He is in his second tenure as AD at Shamokin, and has also served in that post at North Schuylkill and Hughesville.
"The reputation was there (at other Heartland Conference schools) that Shamokin and Mount Carmel did it, that we did it in the past. When I was at Hughesville, they asked me about it. We didn't do it at Hughesville," Kashner said.
Parent driven
Sacavage and Kashner agree that redshirting, as done now, is more parent driven than school driven.
"If a parent wants to do it, they can just start them later," Sacavage said. "If parents are so focused on this stuff, and some parents are, they're already thinking about it when the kids are 3 and 4 years old."
"I think now it comes mostly from parents," Kashner said. "When I did it (Kashner and Sacavage both stayed back a year in school), I think it came mostly from the schools and coaches. Now, we have a lot of parents who think their kids are going to get a scholarship."
Southern Columbia athletic director and head football coach Jim Roth acknowledged that redshirting is one of a number of things the Tigers' successful program is accused of, but said it's not done, at least on the secondary school level.
"I don't know what's going on at the elementary level. The bottom line is that the school really can't stop it if a parent wants to do it," Roth said. "If a kid isn't struggling academically, I don't see any reason to do it. But we're always getting accused of it, and all sorts of stuff. Like we stay at Class A by sending kids to (Columbia-Montour) vo-tech."
Roth said he thinks whether or not a district practices redshirting ultimately comes down to what a particular school board thinks about it.
Line Mountain Superintendent David Campbell and Athletic Director Jeff Lagerman acknowledged occasional instances of redshirting at Line Mountain, but none recently.
"When we had some of our good wrestling teams, there were some families who redshirted their sons," said Campbell. "But there were some other families who were really opposed to it. It caused some friction at the time."
(Coming Monday: Repeating eighth grade loses popularity while PIAA rules look to control age eligibility.)