Plan to Limit Interscholastic Sports to After School Draws Opposition : Education: Supt. Tom Payzant says his proposal would save San Diego city high schools $520,000.

Parents, teachers and principals from San Diego city high schools will place a full-court press on the school board this afternoon to argue that a plan to put interscholastic athletics completely after school makes no sense financially or educationally.

Supt. Tom Payzant has proposed the move to save $520,000 as part of the district’s wrenching effort to slash $10 million or more from next year’s budget. State funding is expected to be at least $10 million less than what the district needs to keep all existing programs afloat next year.

Payzant’s plan would eliminate interscholastic athletics as a credit course for students during the sixth, or final period, of a high school’s academic day.

It would mean that teachers who now handle one of the district’s many organized athletic offerings would have to teach a regular academic or physical education course during the sixth period. They would run organized sports after school only.

That would, in essence, allow the district to save the equivalent of 10 teaching positions, or more than $500,000 annually.

The plan also fits Payzant’s philosophy, enunciated last week to student government leaders during a question-and-answer session, that the school district’s mission is one primarily of academics, and that athletics--as distinguished from physical education--belongs outside the formal class day.

But trustees are expected to face a hornet’s nest of opposition today in a replay of the storm of protest that hit the board last year when some budget proposals called for slashing $1 million or more from interscholastic athletics.

Led by students and principals, the opposition argument will make several points:

* Some class sizes will increase at high schools as students who now take athletics during the sixth period will end up in English, math, art or other courses instead.

* Some students who now participate in athletics will no longer do so because the extra academic class will mean more homework. And, the later start to sports practice will mean getting home an hour or two later and allow less time for homework.

* The later practice times will force the hundreds of minority students who do not attend their neighborhood schools to scramble for transportation to get home, unless the district changes its bus schedules to match the later times. Schedule changes, however, would cost thousands of dollars more and negate some of the savings envisioned by Payzant.

* Some coaches will refuse to run athletics any longer because they will have a fifth academic class to teach, in addition to the demands of coaching a sport. They already earn only about a third of their hourly teaching pay for the extra coaching time. Schools will be able to hire “walk-on” coaches--persons who have no connection other than to run the specific sport. But principals say these coaches often create problems because they have no stake in a student’s academic career other than to make sure the student stays eligible in any way possible.

“What bothers those of us the most is that the district keeps talking about shared decision-making, about restructuring to let individual schools in on plans, and then, in this case, they don’t ask the people who do all the work,” J. M. Tarvin, principal at La Jolla High School, said Monday.

“Here we have everyone involved in opposition, and all we get are partial truths instead of the whole truths,” Tarvin said. “It’s a matter of integrity.”

Tarvin’s student commissioner of athletics surveyed 939 students out of 1,351 in the school and found that, of 728 who now participate in athletics, only 181 would be likely to continue if the changes were adopted, he said.

Patrick Henry High School Principal Shirley Peterson said parents and teachers support the existing setup because they believe that athletics “should be part of a student’s educational experience.

“And we’re bothered because this whole concept was not developed in conjunction with the principals and teachers,” Peterson said.