This year at Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Technical secondary on East Broadway, the public school relied on teenage athletes to fund roughly half the $20,000 budget of its athletic department.
At Britannia this season, the school could spare no money for sports. Instead, teams relied on charity and grants in addition to a seasonal $30 fee, which many student-athletes couldn’t afford.
At Windermere, some boys on the senior basketball team paid their coach in installments to meet the $80 team and $55 tournament fee. Kitsilano asks for $600 from each senior boys basketball player to fund a long and ambitious competitive season.Â
Each of Vancouver’s 18 public secondary schools funds its athletic department differently through a combination of fundraising, revenue, parent advisory committees, charity and student fees because provincial government funding is not used for school sports and each school has less money to spend on sports. When asked by the Courier, the Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»School Board could not readily report the money individual schools spent on athletics.
Increasingly, students are charged more to play within a user-pay system.
“The kids know they’re paying. The parents know they paying,” said Paul Jones, the athletic director at Killarney secondary. “I get the feeling some people and even some teachers, when they ask me for things and I say, who is going to pay for that…? They think we’re funded by the school board and we’re not.
“Just the fact that they’re talking about cutting [the district athletic coordinator] position, shows where they stand on athletics.”
The Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»School Board nearly sacrificed the position to balance the 2014-15 budget, but instead came close to depleting the contingency fund along with others. The leagues will run smoothly next year, but students are still on the hook if they want to play high school sport.
The VSB faced a projected shortfall of $11.56 million for 2014-15 and is required by the provincial government to balance the budget. The board has now cut $58 million over 13 years.
According to Statistics Canada, B.C. spends less per student than every other province except P.E.I. In 2010-11, the most recent year that data is available, B.C. averaged $10,405 per year for each public elementary and secondary school student. The Canadian average was $11,393.
B.C. was one the only province to spend less in 2010-11 than it did the previous year.
“If a student wants to be part of a team and they’ve made the team and they can’t pay the athletic fee, somehow, we find a way to let the kid play,” said Beverly Seed, the principal at Van Tech. “No kid will be left behind. More and more kids aren’t paying fees and it’s harder and harder to stretch the dollar.”
Van Tech contributes a fixed amount to the athletic department from revenue drawn partly from auditorium and classroom rentals, including those paid by filmmakers who shoot movies on campus. The school decreased the money it put into sports from $12,000 three years ago to $10,000, in part because of declining vending machine sales.
According to the school’s athletic director, Mike Allina, student-athletes pay $40 for each junior team and $50 for each senior team, a cost that has doubled from the $25 fee in 2010-11. Roughly $20,000 funds 30 teams.
Today’s student-athletes pay more fees than any previous generations because two main sources of funding have been eliminated in the past decade. Vending machines no longer carry sugary carbonated drinks, which sold better than healthier options like fruit juice, and schools can’t fund athletics through fees charged to the broader student body.
When more money flowed through vending machines at Van Tech (before the snacks were mandated to be healthier and before administration directed much of the remaining money elsewhere), Allina said an athletics department could look forward to as much as $8,000 a year.
Killarney, like Britannia, receives no money from the school but can rely on roughly $3,000 a year from a portion of vending machine sales. “That used to be quite lucrative, but it’s less so now,” said Jones, a teacher at Killarney since 1991. He said money from pop companies, which would cut a cheque in appreciation of the easy access to thirsty students, was once as much as $20,000. Now that’s gone.
“Everything we get now comes from the students,” said Jones, noting Killarney faces another challenge shared by Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»schools: “We’re dropping teams that we’ve traditionally always had. Part of it is the lack of coaches. A lot of it has to do with teachers who aren’t coaching anymore. It’s after school community sport, run in high schools.”
Killarney charges all student-athletes at every level a flat rate of $50 per season. Grade 8 players subsidize senior teams, which cost more to run, but those students will eventually be seniors themselves.
Seniors on some teams pay an additional $100 tournament fee, a cost structure that other schools share. “Our biggest expenses are officials and tournament entry fees,” said Jones.
At Van Tech, Allina estimates that volleyball and basketball tournaments alone cost $2,000.
Parent advisory committees (PACs) once chipped in thousands for marquee equipment such as a wrestling mat or high jump landing system, but are now called on to replace basic essentials like team uniforms or fund a trip to Abbotsford.
The kids on the margins, those least able to pay, are those who need sport the most, said Ksena Tatomir, the athletic director at Britannia who also runs the Bruins hockey academy.
“Sport makes us stronger, it develops character, it’s so much more than hand-eye coordination,” she said. “Sports gives people direction. It provides opportunity.”
An opportunity that, for now, Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»student-athletes must pay for.
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