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Indiana auto dealer Ray Skillman was incensed.
He had just heard that his local school system was so strapped for funds that it was going to charge students a fee to play football this fall.
Forget that, he decided. Instead, he tapped the advertising budget for his dealership group, which has 17 franchises spread over nine locations outside Indianapolis.
"We told the school system, 'We'll pay for it,'" Skillman says. "'All of it: the football programs, the other sports programs, the school bands, the art programs. Just add it up. We'll pay for it.'"
Before local football practice started this summer, a deal emerged with the Center Grove Community School Corp. amounting to a $1 million-plus advertising contract. For five years, Ray Skillman Auto Group will pay $210,000 a year for sports, plus another $10,000 a year for the school system's fine arts programs, including school bands, drama clubs and choirs.
With that arrangement, the school board in the unincorporated community 10 miles south of Indianapolis has dropped its plan to charge every high school athlete and cheerleader in the district $170 a season to participate. Middle school athletes were going to be levied $80, arts program participants were to be hit with their own fees, and some coaching salaries were in question until Skillman picked up the tab.
'Real budget issues'
"We've had some real budget issues," says Richard Arkanoff, superintendent of the eight-school, 7,800-student system. "The decision to charge those fees was a tough one. But Mr. Skillman called up my board president one day out of the blue. He told her he'd been thinking about how hard...