BIDDEFORD — The athletic programs at Biddeford High School and Biddeford Middle School face what Athletic Director Dennis Walton called “devastating” cuts to their budgets if Biddeford residents vote for a zero-percent tax increase in the 2013-14 school budget.

In an effort to avoid a repeat of last year, when it took four referendum votes to approve a budget, Biddeford Superintendent of Schools Jeremy Ray was asked to create several versions of the budget, including one that would not raise the current tax rate.

At Tuesday night’s school committee meeting, Ray presented the zero-increase budget, which at $31.4 million would necessitate about $1.83 million in cuts, including the elimination of stipends for nine seventh-grade team coaches and five freshmen team coaches that would in total save $31,960.

Another proposal under consideration that would cut about $1 million from the current budget would increase the mil rate by 35 cents, but wouldn’t affect the stipends.

A special school committee meeting to discuss the budget will take place tonight at 7 o’clock at the middle school, where the school committee will be vote on which budget proposal to send to the council. Walton encourages Biddeford residents to voice their opinions. If the no-tax-increase plan were to pass, Walton said it would mean the  eradication of those 14 coaches and 12 programs altogether.

“I think the approach at this point is you have to go forward with the assumption that the programs are not going to exist,” Walton said.

In the past few years, Walton has had to make small cuts to his budget, which has meant the elimination of the freshmen softball coach, the junior varsity golf coach, an outdoor track assistant and the complete elimination of the diving program.

Walton said those cuts could be justified due to lower participation numbers in those sports, but that the potential future cuts would be more hard-hitting for an athletic program that saw athletes competing in more sports. In 2011-12, a total of 113 freshmen, or 53 percent of the freshmen class, participated in at least one sport, with 37 percent participating in all three seasons.

“The first thing we looked at is in our athletic program, where are our numbers down. The numbers aren’t down really anywhere,” Walton said. “When we looked at our individual programs, our numbers are strong pretty much across the board, and it would be a very subjective decision to say we’re going to eliminate this sport or we’re going to eliminate that sport in trying to justify it.

“As far as handpicking different sports, I think the overall consensus was you should do it across the board at a certain level.”

The likelihood of JV teams filling the gaps and take on the added freshmen is small, Walton said, as numbers on those teams are already near their limit, creating “cuts across the board.”

Keith LeBlanc, the freshman football and boys basketball coach, as well as varsity baseball coach at BHS, said that would result in many kids being pushed to the side.

“As far as my varsity program, I think it would be a real detriment to the program as a whole,” he said. “There would be kids who would end up getting weeded out potentially earlier than they should. “You see at lot of kids in high school who aren’t developed as a freshman, but they might be able to kind of hang on within the program a little bit longer, and then contribute once they develop their skills. I feel like the cuts would affect a lot of those kids.”

It could also force many kids to look elsewhere for a sporting outlet, Walton said.

“Our fear is that our freshmen are going to come into Biddeford High School and do what’s becoming popular now anyway, which is AAU basketball or junior hockey,” he said. “And once we lose those athletes to those types of programs, we’re probably not getting them back.”

On top of losing kids to non-school-affiliated programs, Walton said he’s also concerned about Biddeford ”“ with one of the lowest enrollments in Class A ”“ potentially losing students to other schools because of the lack of opportunity the cuts could cause.

“I know times are tough, but I’m very concerned that if we eliminate opportunities for seventh-grade kids and for freshmen entering high schools, how many families are going to say it’s time to look somewhere else? There’s a lot of families in the community who have the means to send their kids to a different school if they believe that’s in their kids’ best interest, and you really can’t blame them,” Walton said. “If my kid loves to play basketball, and you eliminate freshmen basketball, Catherine McAuley is a pretty nice alternative for her.”

That, in turn, could create a domino effect ending with the varsity coaches.

“I fear that if something like this happens, I may have varsity coaches who just say ”˜You know, it’s just too big a mountain to climb,’” Walton said. “We’re already having a difficult time competing with much larger schools, and to pull a program’s feeder team out from under them, I think there might be some coaches who say ”˜We can’t be successful under these circumstances.’”

In addition to potential pitfalls athletically, Walton said the elimination of these sports could hurt the school academically.

In a study he did of 2010-11 school year, Walton found that of the students with a GPA of between 5 and 6 ”“ using BHS’s six-point scale ”“ 71 percent played at least one sport. For kids with a GPA between 4 and 5, 55 percent played sports, and for GPA’s between 3 and 4, it was 37 percent.

Walton also found that the average number of days of school missed per quarter for a student not playing a sport was 4.1, while the average days missed for an athlete was 2.1. And of the students who played sports in all three seasons, the average number of days missed a quarter was 1.8.

“We’re constantly telling kids that the best thing you can do in high school is get involved,” Walton said. “It is the single most important thing because there’s a direct link between involvement, whether it’s athletics or not, with academic achievement.”

Maureen Fortier, the head of the math department, as well as the freshman girls basketball coach at BHS, said her own six children played for the Tigers, and she’s seen the correlation between academic achievement and athletic participation first-hand.

“It teaches students time management,” Fortier said. “When they have all this extra time because they’re not playing, they end up not doing their work, and what I see is the skills that students learn in time management makes them not procrastinate and get work done when they can, because they just don’t have the time.”

In addition to the cuts to the athletics budget, the no-tax-increase option would also slice from many other areas, including eliminating librarians at the primary school and middle school; three nurses, serving kindergarten through fifth grade; three special education technicians; a foreign language teacher; two bus aides and a bus driver; a half-time music teacher at the high school; a literary specialist at the primary school; and a home economics teacher at the middle school.

In that kind of atmosphere, Walton said that he understands that sports may seem like discretionary spending, but at less than 1 percent of the overall school budget, he also said that athletics is a very small part of the problem, and that cutting so many programs could do a great deal of harm for a relatively small amount of savings.

“I think sometimes that people might have the mentality ”“ and you can see where it’s coming from ”“ of ”˜How can we cut these teachers, and we’re not cutting coaches?’” Walton said. “No one is arguing the importance of one over the other, the problem is, in order to save one teacher’s salary at an entry level, I’d have to cut the equivalency of 14 track coaches. So it’s like throwing pennies at the problem.

“It’s difficult to take a hatchet to less than 1 percent of the budget.”

“I’m not saying that athletics are more important, they’re not,” he said. “I’m just saying that sports are an intrinsic part of the overall experience of kids. And the gain that we get from our programs when you consider the money being spent is a bargain.”

— Contact Staff Writer Cameron Dunbar at 282-1535, Ext. 323.