Assuming you actually have funding it's a good idea
Aiming for Sports Renaissance for City's Young Schoolchildren
By BILL PENNINGTON
With the last class complete at P.S. 308 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, so many basketball players have filled the school's tiny gymnasium that there is barely space to bounce a ball. Boys and girls swarm a floor roughly half the size of a regulation court.
Soon, P.S. 308's boys basketball team will begin a spirited practice, the players' shouts radiating beyond the gym walls - sounds of life in cheerless streets enveloping the school on a cold December afternoon.
"If there were no sports, people would be in the neighborhood causing nothing but trouble," James Fernandez, an eighth grader who is one of the team's captains, said afterward. "I don't know what we'd do without our sports."
Even though the boys team practices three days a week, it has not played an organized league game against another school for two years. That hardly makes Public School 308 unusual; the majority of New York City's nearly 1,000 middle and elementary schools have not had formal interschool athletic play for two decades.
That is about to change, leaders of the city's Department of Education say. They intend to create a new framework for competitive athletics in middle and elementary schools, and they hope the city will be at the forefront of an athletics renaissance, offering more supervision and, in some cases, financing for teams.
The teams and the formal competition disappeared in the wake of the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970's, a whitewash of a system that had once sponsored citywide leagues in sports like soccer, track and field, baseball and basketball.
But the desire to play, and to compete, is hard to arrest. Over the years, the vacuum left by the budget cuts has been filled by myriad community groups, ad hoc organizations, corporate partners, parents and teachers who have formed hundreds of teams. This bred an unsanctioned sports network in elementary and middle schools that has operated largely under the radar of the city's Department of Education, even though the games are played in city schools, endorsed by local school officials and frequently supplemented by other city-financed services.
This vast subculture, a confusing quilt of advocates directing after-school activities as diverse as tennis and tai chi, has existed for years, mostly unsupervised by the city's education administrators.
"There hasn't been oversight and accountability in this area for many, many years," said Lori Benson, who was hired last year as the Department of Education's director of fitness and physical education.
Kathleen Walker, one of several new regional fitness directors appointed by the city, added: "I don't always know what those community organizations are doing in the gyms, because they don't contact me. I just know they're in the gyms."
