You don’t often see Millikan, Wilson, Poly, Lakewood, Jordan, and Cabrillo all standing on the same side of an issue when it comes to high school sports.  After all, there are some bitter rivalries in that pack, and decades of competitive history.  But a recent proposal by the LBUSD has Long Beach’s athletic directors, coaches, players, and boosters united—and they’re asking that you show up tonight, Tuesday at 5pm, to the LBUSD School Board Meeting to show your support.

At stake is a proposal to push all school sports outside of the school day—meaning that all practices and sports activities would start after school’s final bell rings.  The idea would be that coaches would do all their coaching after school ended, and spend the periods they currently coach teaching other classes.  The LBUSD’s initial claim was that this would save $1.2 million. 

Now, were that true, there would be some meat to the debate—but the initial proposal failed to take into account the money the school district would spend paying coaches to take on additional classes, and the money lost by having all school grounds unavailable to the public, rec leagues, and anyone else who wanted to use them (since they’d be occupied by school teams).  In addition, the district did not provide any kind of arguable evidence for how that number (1.2 million) was created.

The detriments caused to a school’s athletics program with a move like this are well-documented—you don’t attract good coaches, you don’t encourage good habits for athletes (in addition to waiting around for an hour or two in the community, before practice starts, athletes don’t get home until much later in the day, leaving less time for homework and studying).  But again, if this plan were going to help keep the doors of our schools open, those would be tradeoffs worth talking about—since it won’t end up saving that much (if any) money, it really doesn’t seem worth destroying a century-old tradition of high school athletic excellence in Long Beach.

We were going to tell you about this earlier, but we heard that after seeing the financial review, superintendent Chris Steinhauser decided to overturn the proposal—we assumed things were safe.  We just, however, heard that the proposal is apparently still on the table for WILSON and MILLIKAN—which is why we’re telling you about it at the last minute.  If you’re interested in making sure that doesn’t happen—or just in learning more about this issue, join us at the School Board meeting, tonight at 5pm at the LBUSD headquarters.  Info below—hope to see you there!

LBUSD School Board Meeting, Tuesday 5pm
1515 Hughes Way, Long Beach, CA 90810