NANKIN — The Mapleton Local Schools Board of Education voted 5-0 in June to keep the district’s pay-to-participate fees for 2024-2025 at the same level as the previous school year: $400 per sport for high schoolers, and $200 per sport for middle schoolers.
Those price points were first set by the board in June of 2023, according to previous Ashland Source reporting.
The district has individual caps set for student athletes. High school athletes’ cap is set at $1,000, while middle schoolers’ cap sits at $500.
The fees were increased from a cost of $75 per student per sport at both the high school and middle school level during the 2022-2023 academic year.
That increase came because the district’s athletic fund sat in the red at the end of the school year. District treasurer Katy Wiley said $14,630.16 had to be transferred from the general fund to the athletic fund to balance it in July 2023.
In addition to the pay-to-participate fee increase, the district has tried other methods to keep costs down. According to previous Ashland Source reporting, Mapleton did away with assistant coaches for most sports, unless it was necessary due to the number of students on the team.
Board members previously expressed raising the fees came as a last resort. The district has tried — and failed — to pass a levy three times in the last two years.
“When you haven’t passed levies, I think that the public’s misconception maybe has been, ‘We always make it work,’” board president ShaNa Benner told Ashland Source in February. “But you get to a point where you can no longer make it work.”
Mapleton Supt. Scott Smith said the district won’t attempt to put a levy on November’s ballot this year.
Crunching the numbers
The athletic fund had a positive balance of $2,911 at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, Wiley said.
Wiley said costs for coaches’ salaries and benefits, along with transportation costs, came out of the district’s general fund rather than the athletic fund in 2023-2024. Those expenditures came out to a total of $236,289.46, according to Wiley.
(Below is a PDF, provided by Wiley, displaying athletic expenses and receipts from 2021-2022, 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years.)
Other athletic expenditures — which includes activities like hosting tournaments or paying referees — were taken from the athletic fund. That totaled to a cost of $93,119.16 coming out of the district’s athletic fund.
The district brought in $101,282.74 from gate and event fees, which went into the athletic fund.
With the increased pay-to-participate fees, Mapleton raked in $106,871.20. That’s more than an $80,000 increase from the previous year, when pay-to-participate fees only netted the district $26,335.
The district deposited pay-to-participate fees into its general fund in the 2023-2024 school year, Wiley said.
“Those fees contributed a lot,” Wiley said.
Wiley said while the athletic fund had a positive balance this year, that wouldn’t have been the case if the district had paid coaches’ salaries and benefits and transportation costs out of that fund.
Next year, those salaries, benefits and transportation costs will come out of the athletic fund, Wiley said. If that had been the case in the 2023-2024 academic year, the athletic fund would have had a negative balance of $121,254.68, even with the extra funding the district earned from the pay-to-participate fees.
Pay your way
Wiley said many teams have fundraised to cover the increased pay-to-participate costs for students.
Previous reporting from Ashland Source highlighted some teams’ efforts to do so, along with the work of athletic director Shelly Stackhouse.
Stackhouse said in February she was helping with fundraisers, along with developing payment plans for families who couldn’t afford a lump-sum payment for their child to participate.
The cross country team raised $15,000 last year, according to coach Joe Ortiz. The track team, which he also coaches, hosted fundraisers throughout the winter months to bring the cost down for families. Matt Stafford, formerly Mapleton’s football coach, also said his team had fundraised students’ ways.
Wiley said fundraising has already begun for students at Mapleton Local Schools this year.
She pointed to a bratwurst fundraiser for the Mapleton football team, which she said raised enough to cover fees for “most, if not all” of the athletes this fall.
