At Saturday’s Annual Town Meeting and Tuesday’s town election, voters will be asked to consider an override of $107,000 to reduce the amount of school user fees paid by families of students at the Bromfield School. If passed, the override would add approximately $58 per year to the average property tax bills of Harvard residents.

The override was proposed by the Bromfield School Council, an organization made up of Bromfield students, parents, staff, and residents. Bromfield Principal Jim O’Shea said in a phone interview with the Press, “The School Council was asking for this [relief from high user fees] when I arrived here four years ago.” O’Shea explained that in the school year “there are three athletic seasons and when a student plays a sport in all three seasons, fees can be substantial.”

Currently, athletics at Bromfield are funded 100 percent by user fees. The 2010 spring season user fees were $300 for outdoor track and $365 for junior varsity and varsity baseball and softball; 2009 fall and winter fees were $425 for basketball and $350 for soccer. These high fees put economic pressure on families, as indicated in the climate survey conducted last year at Bromfield. In that survey, 46 of 194 parents (23.7 percent) responded “yes” to the question, “Were your children discouraged from participating (or did they not participate) in Bromfield sports or activities because of the user fees?” (134 of those taking the climate survey skipped this question.)

In a letter to the editor of the Harvard Press last week, Rachel Jorgensen, Bromfield Student Council vice president, stated, “More than half of our student body participates in one sport or more.” Her letter went on to say, “High user fees prevent many students from taking on a second or third sport or trying a new activity.”

School Committee member Virginia Justicz said, in an interview with the Press, “This is particularly problematic at the middle school, where it is important for students to try new sports and other activities, but difficult for many families to pay as much as $425 per sport.” She added that families with more than one student in an athletic program can easily pay thousands of dollars in user fees.

The override would relieve this economic pressure by lowering the cost of participation per sport to approximately $225 and by capping the amount paid per student at $600.

The cost of athletics programs at the Bromfield is approximately $276,000, of which $138,000 reflects the amount of stipends received by coaches and staff. The Harvard Finance Committee report for this year’s Annual Town Meeting notes, in its State of the Town section, that the user fee override proposal would mean the town would pay 38 percent of the cost of the athletic program, $107,000; the schools would pay 12 percent, or $31,000; and the parents would pay the remaining 50 percent, approximately $138,000.

If the override doesn’t pass, the user fee structure from last year will be updated to reflect costs for the upcoming 2010-2011 athletic year, keeping fees at about the same level as those for the 2009-2010 seasons.

An August 2009 Boston Globe survey of high school athletics programs showed that athletics funding models vary widely from town to town. Many schools were listed as having no user fees, while a few of the user fee-based towns had expensive programs for hockey (Pentucket Regional, $850) and football (Hamilton-Wenham, $940). The average user fee per sport in the towns listed by the Globe was approximately $280. Some schools had a “family cap,” a mechanism for capping payments for families with more than one student participating in sports, ranging from $425 in Lynnfield to $2,125 in Winthrop.