The High Cost of Extra-Curriculars
This story in the New York Times earlier this year came to mind when I was reading a Facebook page on the Kent School District. The Times' story is called 'The Income Gap is Becoming a Physical-Activity Divide."
Over the last two decades, technology companies and policymakers warned of a “digital divide” in which poor children could fall behind their more affluent peers without equal access to technology. Today, with widespread internet access and smartphone ownership, the gap has narrowed sharply.
But with less fanfare a different division has appeared: Across the country, poor children and adolescents are participating far less in sports and fitness activities than more affluent youngsters are. Call it the physical divide.
With youth rates of obesity going up, this is very troubling.
The costs of putting a child in a sport,whether in a public school or a private club sport, makes it difficult for some parents to allow their student to participate.
The Aspen Institute found that families spend on average $1,188 per year per child for soccer, $1,002 for basketball, $714 for baseball and $581 for tackle football.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that 70 percent of children from families with incomes above about $105,000 — four times the poverty line — participated in sports in 2020. But participation was around 51 percent for families in a middle-income range, and just 31 percent for families at or below the poverty line.
A 2021 study of Seattle-area students from fifth grade through high school found that less affluent youth were less likely to participate in sports than their more affluent peers. The study also found that middle schoolers from more affluent families were three times as likely to meet physical exercise guidelines as less affluent students.
“Particularly for low-income kids, if they don’t have access to sports
within the school setting, where are they going to get their physical
activity?” Mr. Solomon said. “The answer is nowhere.”
So why is this happening? Some districts cannot afford to subsidize sports any longer. Or they have cut the number of sports. Then you have the very expensive club sports which involve not just money but out of town travel as well as uniforms and equipment.
Beyond the physical health benefits, playing a sport also boosts mental health and keeps some kids in school.
But the issue at the Kent parent discussion page was about this issue - the cost of going to an event for a kid in a sport. The parent said that a team banquet got arranged at a country club and it was going to be $50 a person. Apparently enough parents pushed back so the banquet was changed to a more reasonable location/cost. The writer was wondering how the event even got by the coach.
Comments
Leisure Gone Amok
Parent interested in helping kids at the back AND front of the lines
The serious money is paid to put your kids on club teams, which operate almost year-around. They have many of the same expenses -- field rental, referees, equipment, some paid coaching. It's definitely a luxury, but even club teams come at a range of levels, costing from about $300 per year to more than $3,000. Psychotherapy is also a luxury, and if you are lucky enough to have the choice, club sports is probably a better investment than therapy. To me, it's well worth it to have the kids active, running around, and not looking at their phones for at least 5 hours per week. N.b. students do make high school teams from the least expensive, rec-league level of club sports.
Mental and physical health are not the only advantages. Now that public schools have been completely dumbed down, and operate on a can't fail, do the minimum, no challenge basis, club sports provide life lessons that kids can't get in school any more. Lessons about the relation between effort and results, for example.
The schools could spend more on sports to make sure non-wealthy students had more opportunity to participate. They could do it by spending less on force-marching all students through a one-size-fits-all academic program for which many students are not suited. Students would have overall better outcomes. But that is not the spirit of these times. Now it's all about dropping the ceiling, and preventing any student from doing too well. If everyone ends up in the basement, that's equity. It wouldn't be a surprise if high school sports get gutted for budget reasons.
Does anyone's elementary have choir? My kids' school did but that was long ago.
There was choir in the elementary years before that too.
School experience would be much poorer without the sports and music.
Different kids will find different ways to excel - music, sports, drama, STEM. Finding what's good for them is the most important part of education.