Activity Fee Family Cap Reduced For Families Only With Gibbons Students

The Westborough School Committee has lowered the activity fee family cap for families with students just at the Gibbons Middle School.

The new cap for these families is $400, which is a $100 decrease.

The school board also voted Wednesday night to keep the interscholastics sports fee for those families at $200 per sport. The activity fee for all other activities was reduced to $150 per activity, from $200.

School committee Chairman Ilyse Levine-Kanji said the board increased several fees last year for the first time in a long time.

The school committee has since heard concerns that "some of the participation at Gibbons has been down this year, particularly in intramurals," she said.

Statistics provided to the board Wednesday night comparing this year to last year showed 91 fewer students in intramural basketball, 51 fewer in intramural volleyball and 42 fewer in intramural floor hockey.

Only two sports or clubs saw participation increase: track, up 27 students; and cross country, up 10 students.

Although Gibbons has a $500 family cap this year, "a lot of districts do is they have a smaller family cap if they only have students in the middle school," and "the middle school kids have more incentive to participate, try out things" as a result, Levine-Kanji said.

"We used to have a differentiation between Gibbons and the high school. And what we decided last year was we made it all the same," she said.