Editorial: To Fund or Not To Fund

In one corner, it has been a well known fact for years in Hopkinton that the town highly favors their high school sports teams, more specifically the baseball, soccer, and field hockey teams. Besides those, there are twenty other high school sports that are supported and funded with part of the school budget. Many students take advantage of the availability of these many sports, and most of the school’s population is made up of athletes of some kind.

In the other corner, the arts department resides, barely funded but yet full with nearly as many students as the sports department, if not more. The arts department includes theater, music, and fine/studio arts, and has never had as much funding as other departments in the school. The department is too small and is shrinking with every budget revision.

And....fight.

The problem with the excessive funding to the sports department is that despite how good many of these athletes are, there is a very slim chance of any of the students making a job out of their athletic ability in the future. The world of professional athletes is not very big, and many of these students will inevitably enter a different field once they get to college. With the arts department, there are many more possibilities for a profession and by far a lot more job opportunities. 

So if the students in the arts have a better chance at learning a worthwhile career, why are the sports so overly glorified? Why is the sports budget large enough to water its fields and wax its gymnasium floor constantly, while the theater department is forced to buy their own set materials and costumes out of their own pockets each and every year? The right thing would be to increase the funding provided to the arts programs and possibly take away some of the sports funding. The sports department does not necessarily need all of the money it has, so why not give the excess to the arts? That would seem to be a logical action, but yet the town and the school manages to cut the arts funding even further with each town budget meeting. It’s high time that this changed, because the starving artists shouldn’t be starving.