The Cahokia (Ill.) School District 187 board last week unanimously voted to cut the high school’s athletic director, any coaches, extracurricular activities, and extra pay stipends for the 2013-14 school year, the Belleville News-Democrat reports.
“We have to live within the means we have,” the paper quoted Superintendent Art Ryan as saying, referring to the fact that state funding to the schools, on which the district heavily relies, may be cut next year from the current level of 89 percent to as low as 80 percent, according to an April 11 report in the Mt Vernon Register-News.
A 45-day notice is required before laying teachers off as a means of reduction in force (RIF), so the board had to take action at this time. Although it’s still possible this worst-case scenario won’t come to pass, the board took precautionary action anyway.
“It’s very depressing and very hard to keep motivated,” Mr Ryan was quoted as saying. “But I have a lot of confidence in the staff and the teachers in the district. They understand that it is not an act of the board. We’re being mandated to deal with the fact that unfortunately we live in a state that is broke.”
If the cuts stay, the district will lose 52 teachers, 13 support staff, three secretaries, and 11 bus aids, according to the president of the local teachers’ union. In addition, several administrative positions have been vacated or reclassified.
One parent at the board meeting, whose son is now a sophomore at Cahokia High School and an honors student who’s passionate about basketball, said she may have to move her family out of the district if her son can’t get the things he needs from District 187.
We’ve often reported about the importance of extracurricular activities, particularly fine arts and athletics, on school performance. This tragic event in southern Illinois, however, gives us a chance to bring in yet another study, this one written about a decade ago by Jilann M Bush for her honors project in psychology at Illinois Wesleyan University. It wasn’t reviewed by peers or published, but the analysis and methodology look good. The conclusions stress the positive correlation between participation in athletics at the high school level and staying in school:
The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between participation [in] extracurricular activities and school dropout. Social and classroom engagement were analyzed as possible mediating factors in the relation. Longitudinal data from a [1995] study … was used in the analysis, along with extracurricular data collected from school yearbooks. [Of five types of extracurricular activities (athletics, fine arts, academic clubs, interest groups, and leadership positions)], [p]articipation in athletics emerged as the only significant predictor of school dropout. Social and classroom engagement were found to have significant effects in the relation between participation in athletics and school dropout, but the effect of participation in athletics remained significant also, indicating that participation in athletics has a unique effect on school dropout, independent of engagement.
Cahokia High School doesn’t have a terrible graduation rate—it was at about 75 percent in 2012 but needed to be at 82 percent to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law—but cutting extracurricular activities is not likely to help that rate.
It’s just that, if the district can’t borrow money or raise revenues, they have very little choice in the matter—unless they want to run out of money in March and have to turn the lights off.
