Play Ball: School Board Slashes Middle School Sports Fees

It will cost $50 for middle school students in Brick to play sports this spring, school officials announced at the Brick Board of Education meeting on Thursday night.

Thanks to budget figures released on Wednesday that show the district will see an increase in state aid to the tune of about $1.3 million next year, officials decided to use funding it was saving under the Education Jobs Bill – a piece of federal legislation designed to save teaching positions – to pay stipends for team coaches.

The $50 fee will cover transportation and other fees associated with the sports programs that cannot be covered under the bill, according to Superintendent Walter Hrycenko.

"We couldn’t use the Education Jobs Bill money [to fund sports] until we knew exactly what was going to happen to it, and that our state aid was not cut," said Hrycenko, who added district officials were afraid that state aid would suffer an additional cut this year.

The district was awarded $1,292,939 under the Education Jobs Bill, according to a federal government accounting database.

Last year, Brick saw its state aid cut by 15 percent, which amounted to approximately $6.8 million, according to James Edwards, the district's business administrator. On Tuesday, Gov. Chris Christie announced every school district statewide would receive an increase in aid for the 2011-12 school year. The exact figures were released on Wednesday.

Under a so-called "pay to play" plan approved by the board Feb. 9, parents would have had to pay fees of up to $376 per student for them to participate in middle school team sports. Most middle school sports programs were eliminated from the school budget for the 2010-11 school year. The district has yet to release its budget for the 2011-12 school year.

Parents originally had until Feb. 22 to pay the fees in order for their children to participate, a date which has been pushed back to March 4 under the revised plan. Parents who already paid will receive refunds for the portion of money they paid in excess of the new rates, Hrycenko said.

The fee schedule in the original pay to play plan , who expressed outrage over the cost of sports programs at the Feb. 9 board meeting.

The district will offer baseball, softball and girls' and boys' track and field teams this spring.