Pay-to-play and offering naming rights to the district's numerous athletic facilities are just two ideas submitted by the public to help the district close the budget gap. Neither option will raise the millions needed to keep the district's sports and academic programs going at full pace. Time and again, parents, community leaders and students have urged the board not to eliminate sports for fear that it would give at-risk children nothing to do. Former elected school board member and city resident Ronald Burkholder writes in a Patriot-News op-ed piece this week, "If Harrisburg ever needed all the civic pride it could muster, it's today. The boys' basketball and football teams must be saved. The girls' basketball team ... should be saved, too ... these teams have long, proud histories of success. Don't kill that."

At the heart of this year's turmoil is the state's rejection of 10 of the district's 11 School Improvement Grant requests that are crucial to closing the holes in Harrisburg's schools' budget. Some attribute part of the chaos surrounding the grant-writing and general operations to the firing of former Schools Superintendent Gerald Kohn last spring by the Board of Control appointed by Mayor Linda Thompson. Thompson had made Kohn's firing a centerpiece of her mayoral campaign's education platform. No clear successor has been chosen and the search for a new superintendent is ongoing. The state confirmed this week that Harrisburg did an extremely poor job in writing its grant applications, at one point writing, "We are extremely disappointed in the quality of this application." One piece of good news: The district will get a second chance to capture the money in a new round of applications.

Shawn Farr's budget-slashing proposal is just a starting point for discussion and a worst-case scenario. However, barring higher property taxes and more state aid, it could become reality for the city's schools and their students. Residents voiced some other ideas and one popular one on Monday night seemed to be the call for a freeze on administrative and teacher salary increases. The Patriot-News quoted one parent, Angila Johnson, who scolded the board that without vo-tech classes, "You will be turning out another generation of men that will never be entrepreneurs. Do you want to be remembered for that architect or that entrepreneur? Or do you want to be remembered for that felon that you created?"

Tough words and a very tough challenge for the Capital City. We'll delve into the school funding crisis with Lola Lawson and Tim Allwein, assisant executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, Thursday night at 8 on WITF-TV. Please join the conversation!