A proposal that would create a way for New Canaan High School club sports to apply for some public financial support through the district was met last week with a raised eyebrow from at least one town funding bodies’ member concerned about its scope and timing.
Town Councilman Jim Kucharczyk during a budget presentation last week called the $35,000 that the Board of Education is seeking to set aside for a pilot program “a nontrivial amount.”
“In a year where we are already funding a major renovation project at Saxe” and facing a required, steep increase in healthcare costs in the district, Kucharczyk said he would “raise the question: Is this really the year we need to allocate $35,000 with everything else that’s going on to the fencing and ski teams?”
His comments, made during New Canaan Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Bryan Luizzi’s Feb. 2 budget presentation to the Town Council and Board of Finance, address a proposed new policy (embedded in full as a PDF at the end of this article) that the Board of Education supported by way of including the additional $35,000 in its final proposed spending plan.
Sports such as squash are not part of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, or CIAC, because not enough public high schools in the state have a team. That often relegates a sport to private funding only in New Canaan, because it means the district’s Athletic Department cannot offer funds, and the bylaws of the New Canaan High School All Sports Booster Club only allow disbursement of funds to CIAC sports.
The new policy would see club sports—such as fencing, skiing and squash—apply each September to the Board of Ed for a portion of the money they’d need to operate the following academic year. The application, which calls for teams to detail nine criteria—such as participation and competition levels, required funding and season length—also would be open to proposed new club sports that need funding to get up and running.
Luizzi said during the meeting that although the program would not provide full funding of the sports, it would “help with some of the costs.”
Kucharczyk said he had “a lot of confidence in the creativity of our students”—presumably, referring to their ability to fundraise privately—and that he had “no doubt that that $35,000 would be oversubscribed.”
The councilman also said more information is needed—for example, about how putting taxpayer money behind the club sports would increase overall participation in extracurricular activities among NCHS students.
Board of Ed Chair Dionna Carlson described the new policy as a mechanism to field funding requests from club sports in earnest. When the NCHS Squash Team in November 2014 came forward with a request for $20,000, “there was no procedure in place and as a board we didn’t feel comfortable just giving one club that comes in with a request without standardized approach to talk to those other organizations,” Carlson said.
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