Member-only story
Do We Need State-of-the-Art Sports Facilities for High Schools?
Op/Ed: Sharing my view on spending millions of dollars on huge sports complexes for high schools — a common trend.
This summer my husband and I moved out of our resident school district, where we lived for the last twenty-three years, and relocated to our cabin, three hours away. Our boys are all young adults now, negating the need to stay in our home.
Over the years spent in our school district, one of the fastest-growing areas of Wisconsin, we saw many changes. The prairies and cornfields were eaten up by houses. In the houses were children, and most of those children came to school in our district. I say most because Wisconsin has an open enrollment policy that allows families to disenroll from their resident district and re-enroll in another. We took advantage of that once — it's a long story and not really relevant to this post.
In 2009, our district needed to build a new elementary school due to busting at the seams with students! The elementary school my boys attended was overflowing. My youngest was in second grade. In first grade and kindergarten, art was taught from a cart. Rooms were shared by music teachers, ESL, and Title I staff. There was nowhere to hold any kind of student group — for enrichment…
