Cut Tucson School Staff or After School Sports?

by David Safier

TUSD is talking about cutting somewhere between 100 and 282 positions due of its current budget shortfall. Yet I have heard not a single word about the possibility of saving money by cutting back on after school sports programs. It hasn’t been mentioned as a possibility or issued as a threat.

Schools can be closed, teachers can be fired, but our competitive athletic programs are sacred.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ve seen me talk about cutting after school sports here, here and here. Today, instead of suggesting that cutting the sports programs will save money, I want to show how it can actually make money, and even be a benefit to the neighborhoods surrounding the schools.

Take a look at this Google Earth photo of Catalina Magnet High school.

I’ve drawn a red line around the buildings and the parking lot. (Click on the image to see a larger view.) Pretty much everything else is athletic field, which is something more than 50% of the total land: 3 baseball and softball fields, 10 tennis courts, a swimming pool and a football stadium. The land use is typical of Tucson high schools.

I used Google Earth to look at some high schools in European countries. I found very little space devoted to athletic fields.

The only reason for such a huge amount of land for athletics is the need to have practice and playing fields for three seasons of sports teams, each of which has a freshman, jv and varsity squad. Physical education classes could be run using a fraction of the space.

So here is my proposal: sell or lease 25-50% of the land devoted to athletics. You can see the houses surrounding the school, so you can imagine how many houses could potentially be built if just the baseball field in the top left hand corner were carved out. I created a box in green about the size of a block-long strip mall to show how many businesses could fit on the land.

Think about it. This is prime city land. The District either gets a huge chunk of change up front by selling it, or it leases the land and gets revenue for years to come.

And also think about the urban planning gains. We’re always talking about the need for infill — building homes, apartments and businesses in the city rather than sprawling onto more suburban land. Many planners talk about the social and economic value of placing businesses in the middle of dense residential areas. The problem is, most of these plans involve tearing down houses and businesses to rebuild. Here we have level, open land, perfect for building.

If we have to balance our school budgets, why do we always talk about huge cuts from the school day? We can save money, even make money, by cutting back on the least essential part of our education budget.