West Virginia Bill Seeks to Require Athletic Directors for Schools

April 16, 2009

The Charleston Daily Mail of West Virginia reveals recently that the state legislature is currently reviewing a bill introduced by Brady Paxton, D-Putnam, of the House of Representatives and Bob Plymale, D-Wayne, in the Senate calling for the state’s high schools to be required to hire athletic directors in order to maintain secondary education sports programs.

The legislation, notes the Daily Mail, seeks to require every high school in the state with 13 or more varsity sports to hire a full-time representative at the position of athletic director, while institutions with 12 or less would be mandated to bring a part-time director on board. At this point in time, the article states that “only about a dozen full-time athletic directors” are currently employed by schools in West Virginia.

Hoping to address an expectation which currently encourages school administrators already stretched thin with issues relating to academic performance and matters of discipline to double as the managing party for their respective school’s athletic programs, the bill has gained strong support from many local boards of education. The legislation faces what the Daily Mail refers to as “an uphill battle,” however, given that the move to require athletic directors in the state’s high schools would come at a cost nearing $6 million.

Paxton is quoted in the piece as stating, “We’re running into some resistance because of the funding and the amount of money it would take” to get the program off the ground. This has become increasingly a point of contention for those debating the bill in the state House and Senate, especially given that the original legislation says nothing about how West Virginia would work to pay for the program beyond hinting at the fact that incurred costs would be paid either by the state’s 55 county school systems or individual high schools. For schools already fighting hard to keep even subsistence monies flowing through their doors, such additional obligations would truly be a major cause of additional strain on an already-taxed educational system.

Harold Erwin, executive director of the West Virginia Athletic Directors Association, hopes to the make the burden of hiring an athletic director an easier one to carry, telling the Daily Mail his primary goal in supporting this legislation is to ensure that individuals filling these positions be recognized in state code. Such a move, he states, would legitimate the role which the state seeks to have athletic directors play, making them, says the article, “as necessary as teachers and school counselors.” “If it’s not in state code,” Erwin comments, “then we can’t go from there.” Still, the ultimate purpose of seeing such a bill become law would ultimately prove beneficial, with Erwin concluding, “We feel like every school should have an AD . . . [as] we think that’d save everybody a lot of problems.”