Aug 26, 2017 3 min read

Consider the following scenario:

A public high school somewhere in the American heartland announces it is opening a theater on campus that would rival anything on the Great White Way.

Furthermore, they will hire a corps of top-notch theater professionals, so the school can stage productions of “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables” that will dazzle the senses and ignite a love for drama across the student body.

Not just content to stage familiar musicals, they’ll dig deep into the canon, staging works by Shakespeare, Moliere, Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Miller and on and on.

And if this weren’t enough, officials at this school announce they will set aside a dedicated classroom for art, and make sure the library is so well-stocked it would render the nearest Barnes & Noble irrelevant.

Hard to believe? Sure it is. Extracurriculars outside sports are frequently the first to get trimmed away when public schools face unhappy spending choices, while athletic programs go mostly untouched. School officials rationalize that sports – football particularly – can be a source of community pride, and that competition can teach its participants cardinal values like teamwork and perseverance. Of course, anyone who has ever tried to learn page after page of lines and interact with other performers before hundreds of people can vouch for the teamwork and perseverance necessary in that endeavor.

We’re heading into the fall and, sure, high school football enjoys Taylor Swift-level popularity in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and has for decades, but we’ve got nothing on Texas, the land of “Friday Night Lights.” High school football is followed with religious devotion in the Lone Star State, and if you need proof, consider that a Houston suburb recently opened a stadium for its high school games that cost $70 million.

And it’s just one of a handful of high school football stadiums in Texas that have cost that much. A stadium expected to cost about the same amount is being built in an affluent Dallas suburb. Another Houston suburb is planning on spending a mere $48 million for a stadium set to open in 2019.

To put this is perspective, $70 million is about one-third of the cost of PNC Park.

In fairness, these coliseums were built with voter approval in affluent districts, and officials argued that extravagant stadiums can be tools to attract additional well-heeled residents and commercial investment. Whether or not a high school sports palace that has a video screen that costs more than most of us will make in a lifetime will provide an economic boost is questionable – studies have found new stadiums built for professional sports teams don’t deliver the economic jolt their proponents promise – but it says something about the priorities of voters in Texas when spending per pupil is otherwise 36th in the nation.

It’s been said that the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army, thanks to the outlays for the Pentagon and entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. Given the wheelbarrows of cash these Texas school districts are pouring into their stadiums, it makes you wonder if they see themselves as quasi-minor-league sports franchises that just happen to also offer classes in history, English, mathematics and the sciences.

Texas has given the world Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, Buddy Holly and Cormac McCarthy, and The New Yorker recently ran a story headlined, “America’s Future is Texas.” We can only hope that’s not the case when it comes to high school football stadiums.