We are petitioning the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD), the Art David Athletic League (ADAL), and the city of Palo Alto to consent to our teams representing their school in the ADAL.
Any of these organizations can help us: PAUSD can take responsibility for advancing the best interest of their student athletes and allow our student athletes to represent their school, ADAL could allow our teams to compete even if PAUSD declines to take responsibility, and the city could choose to treat us as partners rather than competitors in providing positive experiences for Palo Alto middle school student athletes.
Below, we discuss our rationale for forming our organization and the efforts that we have already made to obtain support from stakeholders.
The JLS cross country and track and field teams have been competing in the Art David Athletic League for decades, along with the other middle schools in PAUSD (Fletcher and Greene), as well as schools in San Carlos, Belmont, San Mateo, Foster City, and Half Moon Bay.
Our teams have been managed by unpaid volunteer parent coaches with little support from the city of Palo Alto, who PAUSD has outsourced to nominally manage middle school athletics. We parent volunteer coaches recruit other parents to help us coach, plan our practice schedules and coaching assignments, plan and supervise practices, plan meet entries, organize meets, officiate meets, organize carpools, drive athletes to meets, and celebrate our athletes' achievements.
Meanwhile, the city of Palo Alto has been collecting all of the registration fees for PAUSD middle school athletics while providing inadequate support. Overall in the 2023-2024 school year, 65% of their $403,155 budget compensated five city employees: one full-time city employee, one full-time city employee partially funded by the Middle School Athletics program, and one part-time athletic director for each middle school.
Our two teams alone generated $50,585 in revenue for the city in the 2023-2024 school year. Since our sports are not allocated paid officials for competitions and none of our teams' coaches were paid, our revenue went almost entirely to overhead: after removing the 6% that was taken as profit by the city, 95% of our revenue went to compensate the city employees, with 3.6% going to replacement jerseys and supplies, 0.8% to insurance, and 0.6% to league fees.
We have been receiving only a basic level of support from these city employees: jerseys that were ordered late, a small amount of equipment, and coverage for a coach who broke her leg, except that we found out later that the covering city employee had been leaving the practices unsupervised. We have been unable to convince the city to provide small services such as paying for pizza at an end-of-season party and painting a finish line and other markings on the community track, even though these markings would benefit both our student athletes and the community.
There are also numerous other ways that we could support our student athletes with a bit of funding, including improving our community track and field facility, training coaches, paying coaches, and paying meet officials.
For these reasons, we created PAMSACO as a way to spend registration fees more efficiently and transparently on services that serve our student athletes instead of unneeded overhead costs at the City of Palo Alto. We hope to help all PAUSD middle school student athletes in one of three ways: other teams may join, the city may adopt successful practices that we prototype, or PAUSD may use our program as a model for how to manage middle school sports more effectively without outsourcing to the city.
We politely and persistently sought to discuss our concerns and plans with PAUSD from 5/28/2024 until Superintendent Austin denied further communication on 6/28/2024. JLS Principal Grierson initially supported our plans when we discussed them in person on 6/14/2024, but he said that he did not have the authority to help us, instead directing us to the district office. Numerous staff at the district office heard and empathized with us, and we finally had a meeting scheduled for 7/10/2024 with the Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Education Guillermo Lopez and the Chief Budget Officer, but Assistant Superintendent Lopez canceled the meeting and Superintendent Don Austin forbid any future meetings between us and PAUSD on the matter. Principal Grierson also retracted his support in writing, presumably under pressure from district administation.
PAUSD's position appears to defer all decision-making for middle school athletics to the city: as Mr. Lopez wrote, PAUSD does "not want to give the impression that we are considering this matter, nor do we wish to engage in discussions about city-run sports." We disagree with PAUSD's position and believe that JLS and PAUSD administrators are responsible for the best interests of their student athletes. For more context, please see the Transcript of emails with PAUSD.
We have also been discussing our plans with Jim Geers, President of the Art David Athletic League (ADAL). We are hopeful that we can address the league's concerns around having multiple teams for one school (in the unlikely event that the city creates a second team, we would be happy to combine), league decision making, and responsibilities to the league. Naturally, the league would prefer its member schools to be aligned, so the league has looked to the City of Palo Alto for input on whether to allow our teams to represent their school in the ADAL.
Finally, we discussed our plans with Kristen O'Kane, Director of the Palo Alto Community Services Department, and Adam Howard, Palo Alto Recreation Supervisor, on 7/9/2024. As summarized in an email (see Transcript of emails with the City of Palo Alto), the city's position is that they would prefer to work to improve the city program, but they are unwilling to consider changing the framework of their budget, which allocates $260,953 to compensate city employees while only allocating much smaller amounts like $5,000 (across all three schools and all sports) to categories like "other contract services" that might be used to directly benefit the teams. As a result, the changes they could make can only be incremental; in particular, they were able to decide on the spot that they would not consider several specific ideas that we proposed that would benefit our and other teams.
We asked the city at the 7/9/2024 meeting to consent to our teams participating in league competitions, and they declined.
Unable to advertise through official channels, we opened registration for our JLS cross country team on parent WhatsApp channels and explained the risk of not being able to compete in league competitions. Despite these disadvantages, 62 athletes signed up and started practicing on 8/19/2024, more athletes than signed up in the previous year (59). The city created a competing team, which, from observing their practices from a distance, seems to have fewer than 10 athletes practicing.
On 8/24/2024, we asked the city to discuss how we could best support all JLS cross country runners on both teams, and the city declined (see Transcript of emails with the City of Palo Alto).
Perhaps under pressure from the city, the league did not include our coaches in any communications about the meet schedule. On 8/30/2024, we made reservations for three dates at Bedwell Park and offered to the league president, Jim Geers, that we "would be happy to host one or more meets there on any of those three weeks when there aren't better options for our and other teams." Mr. Geers wrote that replied that "we have enough venues." However, when we asked Mr. Geers if he had any objection to our team participating in two league meets, he wrote, "Sorry, we are already maxed out with runners at all our venues." (See Transcript of emails with ADAL.)
Given our inability so far to obtain sufficient support from PAUSD, ADAL, or the city to guarantee that our teams can represent their school at ADAL meets, we ask you to please sign our petition at the top of this page and share this page with your contacts and on social media.
We are also in discussion with members of the Palo Alto City Council, and we are hopeful that they can help.