School chief: Slow sports plan
He seeks more time to study offering of athletics during day
ROGERS — Rogers School District officials are seeking more time to examine the costs and benefits of a plan to expand the number of sports offered during the school day at middle schools.
“I’d love to have a chance to take a deep breath here and come back this fall with a little more detailed study,” Marlin Berry, district superintendent, told the School Board last week.
The board in February 2016 approved making eighthgrade football, volleyball and basketball part of the regular school day schedule starting this school year. The board also agreed at the time to add cross country, track, cheerleading and pompom activities to the schedule for the 2017- 18 school year.
This is the first school year athletics have been part of the day for eighth- graders since 2008, when the district eliminated junior high schools and put all sixth- through eighth- graders in middle schools. Sports became afterschool activities when the eighth grade was moved to the middle schools.
The board’s decisions came several months before Berry joined the district. He said he understood that the board wanted to boost participation in athletics, the theory being that lack of transportation discouraged some students from staying after school.
“And then also very much, the thought had to be to increase skill, to increase our competitiveness,” he said. “I think that’s some of the conversation you had, and that our community continues to have in terms of how competitive are we in our sports compared to our neighbors.”
Berry noted, however, that moving sports to the school day is no “silver bullet,” adding, “We’ve not seen some of the things happening that we thought would have, in terms of participation or the way practices are being handled and so forth.”
Participation numbers weren’t provided at the meeting.
The new arrangement also has presented some complications in that it has forced some students to choose a sport over another elective, such as a foreign language or band, he said.
There are personnel issues involved as well. Some of the coaches of the sports that could be added to the school day this fall are also core- subject teachers at the middle schools; the addition of an athletic period to their schedule would mean they could not teach one of those core classes.
The cost of hiring additional staff members to cover those necessary classes next year would be $ 305,000, Berry said.
Several of those coaches also would need to become certified to teach physical education, he said.
Berry said if he thought that moving eighth- grade athletics to the school- day schedule was the answer to boosting the district’s competitiveness in athletics, he would push for it.
“But I do not believe it to be the answer,” Berry said. “There are so many other variables that create that competitiveness that start with high- quality coaches and facilities and the support and a lot of things.”
Berry didn’t ask the board last week to make a decision, but said he’d like time to better understand the impact the athletics move has made and will make, then develop a recommendation for the 2018- 19 school year.
Bentonville, Fayetteville and Springdale all have athletics for eighth grade during the school day.
Charles Lee, the district’s assistant superintendent for secondary curriculum and instruction, noted that Rogers is the only district among its peers that doesn’t have junior high schools.
“So I think there just needs to be a little more caution and examination, research and conversation with stakeholders,” Lee said.
Middle school class schedules differ somewhat from the junior- high structure, and the district’s middle school schedule is “pretty tight,” Berry said.
Sterling Wilson, a School Board member, said he’d like to see some kind of study of how sports classes affect a school’s athletic performance. Sometimes it’s just a matter of having some strong athletes in a particular class, he said.
Wilson also suggested that coaches make the difference.
“A good example is Russellville,” Wilson said. “They didn’t have the very best football teams, but they got a new coach in and all of a sudden in two or three years, they’re winning a state championship.”
Russellville won its first state championship last fall in Billy Dawson’s second year as head coach there. The Fayetteville School District hired Dawson in January to be its next head coach.