High School Coaches Ensure Athletes Have Paid Fees
High School Coaches Ensure Athletes Have Paid Fees
Editor,
Your editorial (“School Can’t Afford to Let Fines Slide,” April 24) and article (“High School Struggles to Collect $100,000 in Student Fees,” April 24) about student fees at San Benito High School contained some misleading information that I need to clear up for you.
As a longtime coach at San Benito High School, I can assure you it has been the policy of the athletic department since the early 1990s that students are ineligible to compete in athletics if they have unpaid fees or bills.
To be eligible to participate in sports you must be eligible in three ways.
First: Academically eligible with a grade point average of 2.0 or above, or for one grading period be on probation with between a 1.6 and 2.0.
Second: Behaviorally eligible, meaning you can’t have been suspended for three or more days for any reason in a six-week grading period.
Third: Student activities eligibility. You have to have a current physical, proof of insurance, athletic code of conduct and no outstanding fees or bills.
When a student goes to the student activities office to enroll in a sport they are checked on the SASI system for fees and bills, and their medical card is not released until they are cleared up.
Transportation fees are a little different, in that most coaches do not demand that they be paid up front, but usually allow a couple of weeks for a student to either “try out” for a team, or if there are no cuts to make sure they are going to “stick with it” before collecting the transportation fee.
Once again even if a student “skated by” in one sport he or she would be caught when going out for the next sport.
I can assure you that many students could not come out for my wrestling or track teams until they had paid fees from the year before.
In fact on the last day of my sports, football and wrestling, I give the kids their medical cards so they can go out for basketball or baseball, which have cuts.
I always get “yelled” at by the student activities clerk because these kids may have outstanding fees or bills and then she or the AD have to “yank” them out of practice.
Mr. Robledo, the student activities director, should also be fired up about this article as all students who go to the winter ball or the prom must have all these fees and bills paid.
The problem lies with the kid who flies “under the radar” – someone who never participates, isn’t on a team and doesn’t go to any dances.
Then four years later at graduation he or she finds out they have hundreds of dollars worth of fees or bills.
The athletes, ASB kids, and other students who are involved in extra curricular activities have been and I hope will continue to be held to a higher standard than other students.
Randy Logue
Hollister
