[ntd]

Originally Posted by BrockSamson

I went to the CyFair ISD schools, home of Ken Pridgeon Stadium and Richard Berry Stadium. The new Berry Complex - at a cost of $75 million (including a 16,000 seat stadium for football/soccer, a 9,500 seat arena for bball and graduations, a 450 seat auditorium, and a 16,000 sq.ft. conference center) - should be the nicest HS facilities in the nation. Cause for talk, indeed.

Need: In 1997, CFISD opened HS#6. In 2002, they opened HS#7. This year they open an eighth, with #9 and #10 scheduled to open in 2008. With 6 HSs using Pridgeon, there were games Thurs, Fri, and 2 on Sats [not every weekend, but most]. Thursday night games suck, and Saturday afternoon games are downright brutal. Something had to be built before it came to Wed. or Tues. night games.

Funding: It's all voter-approved bonds that essentially jack up your property taxes - or so I think. In addition to that, you sell ads in the stadium, get revenue for renting out your facilities, etc.

I don't think a bond referendum has been voting down in a long time (for CFISD). It's a good thing, too, because they are building new schools as fast as they can put them up and overcrowding is still a problem.

Educationally, the only problem is a lack of lockers/textbooks. Hell, they even built CyFair College - sometimes referred to as 13th grade - which has to show a commitment to education.

There are essentially zero school districts in Ohio outside of huge cities that get to be that big...obviously the inner city schools don't have the cash for monstrous stadiums...There are starting to be some wealthy and large school districts in Central Ohio that support athletics, Dublin and Olentangy come to mind first, Dublin has 3 high schools, Olentangy 2 but both districts are growing pretty rapidly. They both have pretty nice facilities but each school gets their own, so as you can imagine the money is spread out to build 3 very nice stadiums, but not quite like these

Massilon has a pretty nice stadium, holds around 17,000 and has a decent press box...Canton schools share a stadium, Canton fawcett and it is very nice partially because the NFL put some cash in it (they play the hall of fame game there every year).