It’s no secret that local sports gets a lot of attention in Austin.

Tuesday, July 10, 2001

It’s no secret that local sports gets a lot of attention in Austin. I suppose that’s part of that American fascination with bigness, and the theory that every area, no matter the size, focuses its attention on the largest area sports team.

In Austin, a relatively small market, favoritism doesn’t revolve around particular sports, like baseball, football or hockey, but around the team that plays them, like Austin High School, which may, in a really good year, win one state championship in a single sport.

The loyalty Austin residents and businesses show high school sports is remarkable, but it overshadows other programs and events that take place at the high school, particularly within the performing and industrial art departments.

At one extreme, there are the Austin High School Break Dancers, who performed at the start of school’s Annual Arts Assembly. They’re an unofficial organization, have no faculty supervisor, and do whatever they want as long as they can find a shinny floor and some good beats. Their audiences are inconsistent at best.

The band program, on the other hand, is well funded through private donations. Tim Davis, who worked at Ellis Middle School last year, just raised $16,158 for 10 new instruments. More importantly, unlike the Wescott Field improvements, Davis didn’t require a special bill in the state Legislature to get funding from private sources. Attendance at band and orchestra programs speaks for itself.

Down the hall, art students Joe Karow and Jesse Seavey used their welding backgrounds, art teacher Bruce Loeschen’s advice, wood shop teacher Bob Christianson’s free time and some scrap metal from Crews Auto Salvage to build a dragon, which now lives at the Austin Auto Truck Plaza after owner Kermit Watts gave the art department $250. Many Austin residents probably saw the dragon at the art department’s annual show at OakPark Mall, and anyone passing through town now can see the dragon.

Speaking is also an art, and the high school has debaters who compete both nationally and statewide. Naomi Hatfield, who used to be the athletic director and now has the broadened title of activities director, demonstrated her Austin High spirit by attending the Minnesota Lincoln-Douglas debate championship, where Jason Baskin, Austin senior, placed first, but few if any students followed Baskin’s success at the national level until he came back to town with a massive trophy.

All this diversity might teach us that the high school behaves more like a conglomerate, where a wide variety of uniquely successful programs receive unequal funding and unequal support. This explain how the school system operates, but it complicates the funding question.

One answer could be that teachers who don’t get a lot of attention from large corporate donors should resort to hard work and use private initiative to raise money and awareness. That is good. On the other hand, some popular programs need money, even though the school has little to give. That is not good.

In truth, the school district should figure out a way to coordinate all of their programs under one umbrella, and proceed to treat them in relatively equal ways. I’m not saying that the break dancers should get as much money as the football team, or that students like Seavey and Karow should be able to take things like basketweaving if they want. I am saying, however, that each student should be allowed to have some amount of freedom when it comes to making their artistic and athletic potential public, and that the school should do as much a it can to support them, particularly when it comes to private dollars, which are generally targeted to programs that get the most attention, and not to stuff like break dancing, which, as I learned last month, is as much an art today as it was 15 years ago.

Sam Garchik’s column appears Tuesdays. Call him at 434-2233 or e-mail him at newsroom@austindailyherald.com.