In sports-mad Texas, where Friday-night football is nearly as sacred as Sunday morning church services, one rural school district is taking the once-unthinkable step of shutting down its high-school sports program.
Officials in Premont, about 150 miles south of San Antonio, hope that eliminating sports this spring and next fall will save enough money to keep its struggling schools open and help keep the small ranching town alive.
The state is threatening to shut down the district, whose 570 students have performed poorly on statewide tests for years—and whose truancy rate is high. The district also has longstanding budget problems, which it says have been aggravated by recent state-wide budget cuts.
But closing the schools would mean sending students 35 miles to the nearest districts. It would also eliminate one of the biggest employers in a town of 2,600 people, where the largest tax generators are a restaurant and a gasoline station. The residents of Premont are for the most part low-income, with 80% of the student body qualifying for free lunch.
So the citizens of Premont are rallying reluctantly around the new superintendent’s last-ditch plan to buy time by suspending sports and using the money to make improvements mandated by the state.