Friday Night Lights Prove To Be Budget Busters

[This article was first published as Friday Night Lights Prove To Be Budget Busters on Technorati.]

To not like football, somehow seems un-American.

And if you hail from the great state of Texas, to say anything remotely negative about Friday night lights and high school football, well, that's akin to trying to yank the buckle off the belt in the South. (And if you don't know what that means, then maybe you need to dust off the Good Book.)

So before we go anything further, let me just say I do like football, and I'm even the proud owner of season tickets to my town's high school football games.

But while I may be a football fan, I am first an educator.  So I read with interest (and a touch of dismay) an article in The Dallas Morning News about how high school football revenue rarely generates a profit, and, in fact, sustains pretty hefty losses. 

Of the 31 schools the newspaper surveyed in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, only three schools generated revenue over a five year period. The rest lost between $132,000 to almost $11 million over those same five years. 

Of course, that kind of loss had to have been absorbed somewhere in all those school district budgets.

You know, the budgets that cut funding for classroom supplies. The budgets that cut teachers. The budgets that cut field trips. The budgets that cut electives. 

Yep, those budgets. 

What's even a little more disconcerting is I'm pretty sure Texas isn't standing alone on this one either.