Fairness In School Sports

PLEASE SEND TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

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To: FCCPTA 

While I do not belong to any PTA, I have grandchildren who attend Silverbrook Elementary School. It is because of them that I have taken an active interest in the systemic failures of our school district. I have seen the deplorable conditions of the trailers at their school which lack running water, bathrooms and are unsafe during inclement weather. Every time I visit Gatehouse I and see the sales brochure for Gatehouse II, I am disgusted by the extravagant work facilities for the FCPS administrators and I compare that with the deplorable conditions of our schools.

Since our earlier email exchange I have taken your advice and visited your website.  Since the minutes from your monthly meetings are not available for any date after April 2007, I find it difficult to gain much information about what your organization does accomplish.  I did however notice, under your positions, that there was no mention of the tragic problems within our school district regarding dropouts, minority underachievement, low minority SAT/IB/AP participation at many of our schools as well as any mention of FCPS’s discriminatory practices within the disciplinary area, including the misguided and racially offensive “Morality Gap Report” and FCPS’s recent decision to install lunch line cameras in our high poverty schools.

I only wish some of your indignation and disgust towards me could perhaps be redirected in a more constructive way towards Stu Gibson and his deliberate unlawful actions regarding the privacy violations of a FCPS special education student.  Or maybe you could send an email to Kathy Smith expressing your outrage at the email she sent to a Westfield parent who opposed the redistricting and went on to call this parent “Vile and toxic.” Both Gibson and Smith openly and actively disregarded your organization’s position on PTAs being neutral during redistricting efforts and courted the PTAs in order to advance their own agendas. Perhaps this is a reflection on the amount of influence your organization has with this School Board.

Maybe if your organization was not a launching pad for School Board elections, you could actually provide FCPS parents and students the advocacy they deserve.

One final note, since my grandchildren have attended school in these poor air quality units, they have been out sick at a high rate.

Mike Grasso

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Once again it has started where almost half of all high school baseball coaches are telling their new and returning players where they MOST go for winter clinics. In some cases the players/parents will be making out checks to their coaches who have for profit private business.

All of the above is known to Curran and yet he does nothing. Most high school sports are a pay for play program. If you do not pay your chances of making the team are slim.

I suggest that Curran does his job and remove coaches who are breaking the regulation and are in violation of code of conduct rules.

If Curran wants to know who the coaches are, he knows my number.

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There is no fairness in high school sports when the rich get richer and the poor get nothing.

Curran does nothing with all of the following:

My guess is the athletic boosters. If Chantilly is anything like Robinson they raise a TON of money beyond the concession stands from things like sports camps. My guess is that the Robinson athletic booster budget is well north of $200K and as of August they had  $200K in the bank.

That money goes a lot of places with much of it spent of additional pay for coaches and facility improvements. FCPS allocates a fixed amount per sport for coaching salaries and the boosters supplement the head coach and allow for additional coaches to be hired. I would not be surprised if some football coaches make an extra $20K per year - maybe not just for football, but from being the “director” of summer sports camps. Take a look at Robinson’s stadium and fieldhouse and you will see new scoreboards and other enhancements paid for by the boosters.

These groups are what really separates schools like Robinson, Lake Braddock, Centreville, Westfield and Chantilly from schools like Marshall, Mount Vernon, Herndon and Edison.

Its a battle between the haves and the have nots.

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