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Student athletes will pay a flat $675 per sport with a family cap at three activities for the upcoming 2026/27 school year.
School Committee Chair Tim Matthews said this is the first time in seven years there has been a significant increase in the athletic fees.
The School Committee voted 3-2 to set what they are calling a one-year bridge structure.
Officials said when a new athletic director is hired, that person, along with a working group of parents, students and coaches, will take a more systemic review of the fees.
Matthews, along with committee member John Bellaire, voted against the flat rate, favoring a tiered fee structure instead.
The options
According to a survey put out by the School Department, the majority of the 502 respondents also preferred the tiered plan, believing it to be more fair.
Superintendent Dr. Frank Hassett cautioned the committee about voting in favor of the tiered structure.
“If you go down the path of a tiered fee structure right now, that’s very hard to unwind,” he said.
Even if the committee doesn’t want to unwind it, only tweak or change it, decisions made now would be very hard to back away from, he said.
Hackett said he wasn’t trying to be obstinate or too philosophical “but I, I think fundamentally we’ve got to decide whether we’re going to run a comprehensive athletics program or not. We can’t nibble around the edges of this forever.”
If the committee is going to shift models, from a flat fee to tiered fees, there is a reality gap that needs to be considered.
“If we’re really going to shift the model, that has to be a larger community conversation, and people who are really vested, who understand the programs better than we do, need to be really solid at that table,” he said.
School Committee member Stefanie Mnayarji said she liked the flat rate largely because of its ease of implementation. She called the tiered rate something they should work towards, but that it would be too complicated to undertake for the next school year.
“Because we want this to be a sustainable process,” Mnayarji said. “We want to look at sponsorships and ticket sales and advertising, all these things that we can factor into an operating budget year after year, so we have a more reliable and robust fee structure.”
The both initial proposals put the family cap at five sports, but committee member Tom Hopcroft wondered if there was a magic number that might be lower than five, but still get them to their destination, which is to close a $246,000 deficit.
Operations and Finance Director Andrew Marron said, “all things being equal,” and taking the current year’s levels of participation, if option A had a family cap of three, it would benefit roughly 60 families and the operating deficit would be about $70,000. However, a 10% drop in participation would leave a deficit closer to $110,000.
Bellaire said the flat fee option didn’t sit right with him. He essentially called it unfair to charge a child who runs cross country $675 to run in The Fells or do laps around Horn Pond when they could get a gym membership for $15 a month.
“I worry that with a $675 fee, we will have students that won’t try a sport at all, because it’ll be too expensive,” he said.
Matthews echoed his concerns. He said he believes they will see a drop in the number of students playing two or three sports, which could result in the loss of revenue and a bigger deficit than what they’re modeling.
Matthews also worries that students who might not be stellar athletes, but play for fun, fitness and camaraderie will in the end also end up dropping away.
Bellaire also said he was frustrated by the fact they had been working on this issue since February but had yet to solve it.
Hackett said he understood the frustration, but reminded the committee the target to re-examine fees, which is done every year, changed this year when the override failed to pass.
Had the override passed, there was talk of eliminating fees altogether, Hopcroft added.
Matthews argued that tiered fees are largely accounting for the fact the town doesn’t have a swimming pool, golf course or hockey rink, which means there are outside vendors to pay.
Hackett said there is also a value in that they offer a true venue for their top athletes.
Hopcroft said he’s fully supportive of the decision they made to keep all the sports programs for now, but wondered if there were opportunities to do “a lighter version” of some of the programs in the future.
Hackett said that would be part of the budget review as well. He said they simply can’t say they’ll run every program the same as it’s been run previously.
Chris Stevens is an award-winning journalist who has spent 25 years chasing, editing and photographing stories on the North Shore. She is the co-founder and managing editor of Gotta Know Medford.
