What's It All About?

Here in Texas high school football is not a sport. It's a religion.

I'm as big a football fan as the next guy. I really enjoy going to our local high school's games on Friday nights. But we keep it in perspective, more or less. Here's two places where they've gotten just a teensy bit carried away.

Allen High School unveils $60 million football stadium

As far as seating capacity, there are bigger football stadiums than the 18,000-seat fortress Allen High School will unveil this fall.

But it's that $60 million price tag - $59.6 million, to be exact – that raises eyebrows even in a state where high school football is an obsession.

"Most of the negative stuff that comes out are from people outside of Allen," football coach Tom Westerberg said. "I don't really worry about that a whole lot. We've drawn quite a few people to the games and I think for the majority of the big games it will be full."

Allen raised the money for its new stadium as part of a $119.4 million bond package in May of 2009 that passed with an impressive 63.66 percent of the vote.

Even with such support, there have been critics who say spending $60 million on a football stadium is outrageous at a time when education budgets are being slashed.

And I'm one of them. $60M for a high school sports palace? What's the funding level for the library? Or the science labs?

"What do I say to that?" Allen school district athletic director Steve Williams asked rhetorically. "I say we're in a community that overwhelmingly voted to build this stadium."

Yeah, and in 2008 America voted overwhelmingly to elect barack obama. How's that working out?

Allen's voters are getting their money's worth. The stadium is a sunken bowl with decks on each side. There is a three-tiered pressbox on the home side and a giant video screen on the end zone scoreboard.

The school district didn't budget for individual stadium seats. They surveyed season ticket holders as to whether they would be willing to pay an additional $60 per seat to have the chair backs. The response: aluminum bleachers with seatbacks will be fine.

$60 million for a stadium, and it doesn't even include seats? Geez, where'd the money go?

But schools don't just overspend on stadiums. They're also in love with humongous video screens.

The only thing bigger than football in Texas might be the scoreboards.

Taking a cue from Cowboys Stadium and its 160-foot long video board, the small East Texas town of Carthage on Friday debuted the largest video screen in a high school stadium in the state — and maybe even the nation.

Carthage's video board measures a whopping 26-feet high and 44-feet wide — some 1,200 square feet. It's bigger than the video screen at the new $60 million high school stadium in Allen, Texas, which also made its regular-season debut Friday night.

While Allen is a Class 5A high school with an estimated 5,388 students, Carthage is a mere 3A school with 741 students. That makes the entire scoreboard structure, measuring 50 by 58 feet, stand out even more at such a small school.

"It is the biggest screen in the world in high schools," Carthage ISD athletic director Scott Surratt told the Longview News-Journal.

Such size comes with a cost: about $750,000. Carthage voters overwhelmingly for the scoreboard in a bond election with 68.6 percent of the ballots approving the expense.

A $750,000 scoreboard for 741 students works out to approximately $1000 per student. Can you imagine how much more they might have benefited if that money had been spent for academic purposes?

The Carthage football team did a good selling job by winning state titles in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

"They've earned it, that's for sure," Gabriel Jimenez, who manages a sporting goods store in Carthage, told the News-Journal.

Oh, well, that makes everything okay. Win a few state titles, get the world's largest high school video scoreboard.

I teach at a state university that's struggling with budget cuts in a tight economy. When I see money wasted on stadiums and scoreboards, I weep for students - and the future.

Priorities, people, priorities.

Last time I looked, MIT didn't have a football team, and they're doing a pretty good job of educating students...