THE ETHICIST
Being a Good Sport
By RANDY COHEN

When a newly passed austerity budget cut sports in our school district, community members organized fund-raisers to restore them, but my husband and I declined to donate. We fear that private fund-raising will encourage further budget cuts. And we've heard the (unconfirmed) story that a coach might make a family's donations a factor in who makes the team. Should we donate? Anonymous, Goshen, N.Y.

Write that check: if you and your neighbors do not, there won't be school sports. Fairness requires every family to bear its share of this burden, although many of your neighbors refuse to do so (hence the austerity budget). And when you pony up, you may grit your teeth and mutter darkly -- at their miserliness and their shortsightedness.

Coaches should not make a child's participation in a sport contingent on a parent's willingness or ability to pay. A policy of equal access for all kids should be declared and donor privacy protected so coaches do not know who has given what. But that step defuses only the obvious and local danger. Private financing frequently means in-demand programs survive while equally worthy but less popular pursuits wither. Worse still, while kids in wealthier parts of town will have sports, children in poorer neighborhoods will not.

Relying on private financing suggests falsely that sports programs benefit only children actually on a team. It's not just kids who hike in Yellowstone or call the fire department or attend public school who gain from these things. We all do, even those who've never had to extinguish a burning bear during recess. To take a stingy view of what it is to be a member of a community, to balkanize financing, frays the ties that create those communities.

So don't limit yourself to pay and dismay. Efforts to forestall those dismal effects should accompany your check-writing. To provide sports programs for your kids effectively means working for policies that finance them, something you can't do alone. In this, ethics necessarily expresses itself as politics.