Big public school budget cuts for 2023!

[StealthRabbit]

Originally Posted by texasdiver

...
But my larger point was that keeping youth sports in schools is actually cost effective. It would be more expensive to manage all youth sports through community sports centers like they do in many Euro countries.

Cost effective for the deliverables of the school system? or for the parents / students who want free / low cost sports?

Much of what we as adults choose to pursue has relative costs associated with it. (as it should)

Taxpayers subsidizing alternative entertainment and programs that are beyond the educational deliverable may not make reasonable business sense, if we (USA) were actually delivering an education. (If there was any sense in taxation for schools who don't (can't) teach).

Intramural 'play' / activities can be of value to exercise, health, comradery, and energy drain, but they don't require empty stadiums and athletic staff at the expense of an education.

Music, drama, debate, business clubs, can all be met within schools, without a huge and expensive infrastructure, as can sports .

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by StealthRabbit

Cost effective for the deliverables of the school system? or for the parents / students who want free / low cost sports?

Much of what we as adults choose to pursue has relative costs associated with it. (as it should)

Taxpayers subsidizing alternative entertainment and programs that are beyond the educational deliverable may not make reasonable business sense, if we (USA) were actually delivering an education. (If there was any sense in taxation for schools who don't (can't) teach).

Intramural 'play' / activities can be of value to exercise, health, comradery, and energy drain, but they don't require empty stadiums and athletic staff at the expense of an education.

Music, drama, debate, business clubs, can all be met within schools, without a huge and expensive infrastructure, as can sports .

Cost effective for society.

If you want top quality public youth sports opportunities for all children and not just the affluent who can afford private clubs then you either pay for it through the schools like we do in the US, or you pay for it through community sports facilities like they do in Europe. Either way it cost money. We get off cheap in the US because we rope so many teachers into coaching and supervising youth sports for pennies on the dollar and we piggyback on school existing school facilities (gyms, tracks, etc.) that would exist anyway just for PE if we eliminated after school athletics.

I prefer not to live in such a dystopian and miserly society in which we choose not to pay for any athletic opportunities for our youth. Not when we live in the richest society on earth. We are better than that.
'

[MechAndy]

We had sports in the 7th grade when I was in Germany in the 70’s.
It was done in 2 four hour classes so total of about 8 hours per week.
There were 2 kids in my home room class that had gifted talents.
One was in speed skating and one was in something else that I can’t remember.
Anyways the speed skater was a friend of mine so I kinda knew his schedule a bit .
They increased his physical training by near double the normal amount at an off site training center.

This is the first I heard of no sports in German schools and I have several cousins, their kids and grandchildren that went there.
Odd that this was never mentioned.
When did this happen?

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by MechAndy

We had sports in the 7th grade when I was in Germany in the 70’s.
It was done in 2 four hour classes so total of about 8 hours per week.
There were 2 kids in my home room class that had gifted talents.
One was in speed skating and one was in something else that I can’t remember.
Anyways the speed skater was a friend of mine so I kinda knew his schedule a bit .
They increased his physical training by near double the normal amount at an off site training center.

This is the first I heard of no sports in German schools and I have several cousins, their kids and grandchildren that went there.
Odd that this was never mentioned.
When did this happen?

I think you are conflating PE with competitive sports. Of course they have PE in German schools.

What they tend not to do is have varsity sports with stadiums like in the US where high schools compete against each other in soccer or football or whatever, and then have playoffs and state championships. There is no "Friday night lights" in Germany. We had a German exchange student a few years ago and she found all the competitive HS sports very different. She was a soccer player who competed on club teams in Germany and found it interesting to compete on her school varsity team in the US.

All that sort of competitive athletics tends to happen through clubs not schools.

[MtnSurfer]

Originally Posted by texasdiver

I think you are conflating PE with competitive sports. Of course they have PE in German schools.

What they tend not to do is have varsity sports with stadiums like in the US where high schools compete against each other in soccer or football or whatever, and then have playoffs and state championships. There is no "Friday night lights" in Germany. We had a German exchange student a few years ago and she found all the competitive HS sports very different. She was a soccer player who competed on club teams in Germany and found it interesting to compete on her school varsity team in the US.

All that sort of competitive athletics tends to happen through clubs not schools.

Did you guys watch the great Syrian refugee movie called 'The Swimmers?' They fled to Germany and one of the teenage girls, Yusra Mardini, ended up swimming competitively eventually going to the Olympics in Rio. All of that occurred outside German schools but instead through swim clubs.




Derek

[TurcoLoco]

Originally Posted by MechAndy

When I went to school in West Germany in the early 70’s and we had a much more efficient system than this American school system by far.
It was shocking how much more efficient it was.

We had a rotating class schedule where we took classes for 4-5 hours straight instead of this inefficient 45-50 minute thing we do here.
The 45 -50 minute classes are very inefficient when you consider how long it takes the class to get rolling and then when it is going good it is time to stop the classes momentum and waste near 25% of an hour to start learning something in the next class, only to repeat this cycle day in and day out.

This had be rolling. Where I am from, you'd have to keep us at gun point for that long, even then...

On a more serious note, experts also agree an average person's attention span for efficiently absorbing new info is about 20-25 minutes. For super hyper bunch of kids, probably more like 2-2.5 minutes?

I think the probably is the enforcement of cookie cutter education system, a very generic and broad studies of many areas which are neither that helpful to most anyone in real life, and also far from interesting/exciting. Biology? Blah.

We also had testing on what skills we excelled at and got shifted into those areas.

You are onto something there. There should be an entity, like an official organization separate from any school but still a part of the government's educational system that properly and accurately assess each kid at a very young age (perhaps again at a later age to ascertain) and their aptitude and skills from a mental and physical perspective to figure out the fields each kid would likely to excel in. They should have at least 3-4 suggestions for each to consider.

Just my 2 cents worth.