Or they have a lot of football fans that will ultimately pay for the stadium.
It’s a lot harder to monetize the special needs students.
One thing that’s relevant but often overlooked when discussing these mega-stadium stories is the somewhat unique nature of Texas independent school districts.
In most large metropolitan areas, the main school district is also often the largest and poorest - think Chicago Public Schools or LA Public Schools - the tax base that supports these districts is very broad but so are the geographic boundaries. Usually these districts require dozens of high schools (along with many, many lower schools) to service the huge numbers of kids spread out across the city. Funding is usually supplied by the general fund from the county and/or state. The tax base is very broad but each school only gets a very tiny fraction of the available funds.
In Texas, the large metro areas (Dallas and Houston) are ringed by smaller, totally independent suburb cities like McKinney, Richardson, Plano, Allen, etc. These districts are small geographically but usually much more affluent in terms of property holders - and schools are funded almost exclusively from property taxes and get very little from the state coffers.
So a district might have just 10,000 kids (compared to 100,000 for a large inner-city district) with big houses and relatively rich parents whose property taxes goes straight into funding just one or two mega-sized high school campuses that each service thousands of kids. The district can concentrate all of their resources on a very small number of really expensive and elaborate facilities instead of having to spread the money across hundreds or thousands of geographically dispersed buildings.
As a consequence, the athletic departments rival many small college programs - each athletic program has the pick from thousands of talented kids trying out for the teams. They can choose the best of the best for the varsity teams and also support huge marching bands, cheerleaders, flag wavers, pep squads, etc, etc…They also offer boutique programs like fencing or equestrian - elitist sports that can only be afforded by high income families. And parents often invest thousands of dollars on private coaches and year round traveling club programs so that Suzy and Trevor can really exploit their talents and get that coveted college scholarships.
To be fair, most of these districts also have very well funded academic programs and highly paid teachers as well - it’s not just sports that gets all the money. But the football program is often the largest and most prominent.
So a $70 million dollar high school stadium makes sense when you consider the student body sizes and wealth concentration found in these small but wealthy independent school districts. It seems absolutely obscene to the rest of the world but the economics work in the suburban bedroom communities of Dallas and Houston.
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Say hello to the McKinney High School Kinesiology Center and Football Museum!!
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And somewhere in it’s shadow, a homeless person will die of dehydration.
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I read somewhere that stadiums never really pay for themselves.
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Even professional sports stadiums are a terrible investment from a monetary standpoint, that’s why the the taxpayers almost always have to foot the bill even though the franchises are the ones who rake in all the dough.
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But football teams don’t need fancy stadiums to be winners, c’mon y’all, we covered this is season 4
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Let’s see, 18,000 seats at $75 season tickets, 1.35 million a year, add in some concessions to bring it up to 2 million a year and they could make it work after 35 years.
It’s a good thing they don’t need uniforms or anything else. Truthfully though, this was a bond that was voted on by the citizens. Their call for their students. The issue is when the NFL gets 350 million from locals for a stadium when owners literally make billions.
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Why is this a surprise? It’s not like they were going to spend the money on educating the kids. They don’t need that kind of thinking down there in Texas!
As long as they know about American Jesus and guns, they are ready for the world!
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Up to a certain point, that’s true. Truly rich districts fund poorer districts. They can sometimes get around that through PTA-type organizations. A nearby district had to cut the theater program due to budget issues. The community was able to raise enough money to fund it for another year, but they couldn’t give the money to the school. If they did, that money would have been taken and given to another school that was even worse off. IIRC, the PTA was able to hire somebody to “volunteer” to teach the kids. I might have that wrong though (seems to me the union would have a problem with that).
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Does this end in the students being required to take out federally subsidized, no-discharge or bankrupt available loans?
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This is called the “Robin Hood Plan” - something that came into effect after I graduated from another nearby rich Dallas suburb district. It was a huge topic of discussion among my parent’s social circle at the time. None of the parents wanted their “white” money going to support some poor “colored” district.
So they devised many work-arounds to make sure the bulk of the property taxes stayed in district. That’s actually another reason why these mega-stadiums started going up. Passing bonds to fund expensive facilities allowed the local school district to be benefit the most instead of some poor inner-city school.
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Hey, teachers, leave the kids a loan.
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In a single school district.
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Don’t Mess with Texas Musical Theater?
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There are many things about Texas I don’t understand.
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Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o, Fighting Ignoramuses!
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And this site puts 3 Texas high schools in the top 10 nation wide.
If you make it through high school, you’ll probably be okay. Texas’ public universities are pretty darned good.
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The coach is quoting Jesus. Vince Lombardi and Robert E. Lee!
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Great, keeping up with the Joneses to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars. Hey, we’ve all decided that football is awesome, so we should definitely use all these extra resources we have, since we’re not paying teachers a living wage, or providing students the materials they need to be properly educated. Because if they were better educated, they might realize what a pointless waste of time organized sports is. So, well done?
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