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Partly Cloudy Student petition saves JV cheerleading
Program taken off chopping block at budget meeting
At its third budget hearing last week, the Oceanside Board of Education voted unanimously to rescind a proposed cut to the district’s 2012-13 budget that would have removed the junior varsity cheerleading program from the high school.
One of the main topics of conversation at the meeting on March 13 was the district’s spending on interscholastic athletics, which will total just over $900,000 next year, more than $60,000 less than this year. Most of that reduction will result from cutting assistant coaches at the high school and doing away with the district’s two remaining ninth-grade sports, basketball and baseball.
“We have a sports program with 100 coaches and probably about 65 teams, if you count seventh grade, eighth grade, junior varsity and varsity,” said Superintendent Dr. Herb Brown. “We have a very extravagant sports program. So [cutting ninth-grade sports] certainly doesn’t do anything to destroy our sports program.”
The main reason for the cuts, Brown explained, was a dearth of competitors on ninth-grade teams. Jeffery Risener, director of phys. ed., health and interscholastic athletics, Brown said, “looked at the ninth-grade basketball and the ninth-grade baseball and indicated that there really aren’t that many high schools that still have ninth-grade teams, so we have no one to play against. And [Risener] said the other night that there are only three high schools left that have ninth-grade sports.”
JV cheerleading was on the chopping block because, as always, the district was looking for places it could cut. Since there is a varsity cheerleading squad, school officials reasoned, the JV squad might not be necessary.
“So we threw it out to the board as a possibility,” Brown said, “and there was really no specific issue why we chose JV cheerleading, except that we have a [varsity] cheerleading squad, and if you’re going to look to cut, do you need to be cheering at the JV games? Is that going to be the highest priority? So we felt that we could consider cutting that.”
