I would like to discuss one of the greatest injustices in the field of education today. If you have a child in middle or high school, then you have most likely experienced this titanic unfairness for yourself. Yes, I’m talking about charging parents to attend high school sporting events.
Last week, I went to see my daughter’s high school football team play. I was turned away at the front gate and informed that I had to go to the box office and purchase a ticket for $7. When I asked why, I was told it was to support the school’s athletics program.
This, to me, was a slap in the face. If my child is participating in high school sports then, as a parent, I am already supporting the school’s athletics program. The parent usually pays an initial fee just to allow their child to play. The parent pays for uniform rental and cleaning costs. The parent pays for equipment their child needs in order to participate. The parent pays for their child’s expenses when the team is bussed away to play a rival school. And let’s not forget, it is the parents that are the ones buying all those cookies, magazines, and candy bars that come home in great big yellow boxes during the annual team fund raisers.
Now, we have to pay an additional fee when we actually go to watch our child compete? This practice directly targets the parents of the players. Because, let’s be honest, who besides the parents is going to any of these games?
If you are an adult with no children, and you are watching high school kids play sports, unless you live in one of a few small communities in west Texas, you probably need to rethink your social calendar. Or maybe the police should be taking a closer look at your hobbies.
My personal situation is even worse than most. You see, my child is not a player. She is in the marching band. She is required to be at every home game for every sporting event throughout the school year, from an hour before the game starts until the final buzzer. And I have to drive her there.
Over the past few years, I have paid for musical instruments, music lessons, band uniforms, and trips to Reno, New York, and Disneyland. My daughter travels all over the United States playing music while I sit at home eating cat food. (The cat has to hunt for mice outside since those cans are single serving only.) Then at football and basketball games, because I don’t want to sit in the car out in the parking lot for two hours waiting to take her back home, I have to pay more money to sit on a hard bleacher seat and watch a bunch of kids I don’t know run around chasing a ball and crashing into one another. How is this allowed to happen? How has California not already outlawed this practice?
As parents, we are handing out money hand over fist to cover our children’s participation expenses. Charging me to go see a game feels like forcing me to pay a second time for something I already bought. It’s like paying for a hot dog and a bun, then being told that as soon as I put them together I will owe an additional $7 before I’m allowed to eat it.
To be fair, maybe I would feel slightly different about the added expense if our team could be relied upon to win a damn game once in a while. Watching them play this year has been like rooting for the Washington Generals at a Globetrotters performance, only nobody gets confetti thrown on them, and no one gets their pants pulled down. Well, there was that one kid, but I’m almost certain that was an accident.
To sum up: do I want to pay $7 every game to support the student athletes? No. No, I do not. If this is the cost of having a child involved in extracurricular activities, I’m thinking I might just buy my daughter a new video game so she has something she can do at home.
And I can watch her play it for free.