Schools

No Taxpayer Baseballs at Sprayberry

The Cobb County School District responded to a question from a Northeast Cobb resident.

When Northeast Cobb resident James Parker noticed a number of baseballs sitting near the varsity fields at Sprayberry High School recently, he had enough questions to write a blog post about it.

In a post published on Monday, Parker figured the estimated cost of the 20 or so baseballs he discovered was around $100, which led him to wonder if the Cobb County School District was spending needless money on baseballs:

"And since Cobb has at least 15 high schools, and each high school has a baseball team, are we wasting $1,500 a week on lost and unused baseballs?"

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The school district -- which has 16 high schools with sports programs -- offered a response on Tuesday, issuing an emphatic no. Spokesman Doug Goodwin told Patch that money for baseballs and other equipment used for varsity athletics is raised privately by independent booster clubs.

The district pays for construction and maintenance of athletic facilities on school grounds, such as fields and gyms, and pays for coaching stipends and bus transportation for athletics.

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Among the proposed items for consideration before the Cobb Board of Education is the elimination of funding for stipends, transportation, field maintenance and ambulance services at sporting events totalling $2.7 million.

But the school board did not include any of those cuts when it tentatively adopted a fiscal year 2014 budget on Monday.

Parker also posed a question on his Twitter account Monday about a dumpster he saw on the Sprayberry campus: "So how are we controlling costs of materials used or abused at schools? CCSB needs to dumpster dive!"

Goodwin said the dumpster is located there temporarily for the disposal ofΒ  items from a recent school clean-up day.


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