Freshman sports are back at Montclair High School this fall after the school district threatened to cut the program due to budget constraints. The Montclair Athletics Blue and White Club, a parent-led non-profit managed to raise the necessary funds to keep it safe. But this is not the finish line.
The club has raised close to $200,000 since its original campaign, closing in on a broader $350,000 annual goal it says the athletic department needs to stay stable for years, not just one season. Four months ago, the fight looked different: four weeks to raise $176,000 or watch freshman teams disappear entirely, part of a $257,000 cut to athletics, clubs and extracurriculars during the district’s budget crisis. The club hit that number, then set a bigger one, and it has not stopped raising money since.
“I feel amazing,” said Laura Quiros, the club’s co-founder, on the Montclair Pod. “I think that we did what we were asked to do. I’ve gotten a lot of emails and texts from freshman parents from various sports, coaches thanking us. So I really just want to thank the community. It was a community effort. We leaned in and freshman sports are up and running.”
Why Is Montclair Still Fundraising for Freshman Sports?
Last spring’s campaign was a sprint, built around close to 500 individual donors racing a June deadline. This one is a longer game: continued donations through the club’s Givebutter page, a fundraising site the club has used since its first campaign, plus a fall fundraiser, a spring fundraiser and outreach to corporate sponsors and organizations willing to match gifts. A single well-run event can move the needle fast; when the football program’s booster club hosted a fundraising night at Just Jakes last spring, it brought in more than $45,000 in one evening.
This year, Quiros and her fellow Blue & White fundraisers wants a different pace. “We realize that there’s a lot going on for the community and we don’t want to tax people, mentally, financially,” she said. “I think we have to be real with ourselves that the budget deficit is still there. One year is not going to fix it all. This is a work in progress.”
The club plans a general membership meeting, tentatively set for October 6 pending a location, to lay out the year’s fundraising plans and recruit people to help run them.
Money alone will not settle the bigger question underneath all of it.
Should the District Be Paying for This, Not DONORS?
Montclair Public Schools posted a positive fund balance of about $1 million at the August 5 board meeting, a reversal from the $12.7 million deficit reported a year earlier. With the district’s finances improving, should Montclair schools be funding freshman sports itself, instead of leaving it to a parent-led nonprofit?
Quiros pointed the question back toward the district rather than answering it head on. “That’s a question for Dr. Turner,” she said, referring to Superintendent Ruth B. Turner. “I’m not a finance person. I do know that she is in full support of Montclair Athletics, living in the space of equity. I think with money stuff, that quote unquote surplus might not necessarily be a surplus… Healthcare costs are rising, gas prices are rising. All of these external factors impact the budget.”
She stopped short of predicting when, or whether, the district takes this cost back over. “I don’t have a concrete answer to that,” she said. “We’re going to need money for freshman sports and we’re going to need money to enhance Montclair athletics. That we know. It’s an ongoing effort. I feel like that’s the journey we’re on as a town.”
What she will say plainly is what happens if nobody steps up. “Once you lose a freshman team, it’s gone, you know, for maybe forever,” she said.
That same urgency is what pulled Quiros into Montclair Athletics in the first place, long before the budget crisis existed, for a reason that has nothing to do with money.
Does Montclair Have Mental Health Support for Student Athletes?
Quiros is a licensed clinical social worker. Before she was fundraising for freshman sports, she was pushing the district to treat a struggling mind with the same seriousness as a physical injury.
“Just like you sprain your ankle or you break a finger, our mind gets hurt, our mind gets tired, our mind gets overstimulated,” she said. “Athletes need help too, in terms of their mental game. Performing anxiety is real, even at the high school level… oftentimes the pressure comes from internal, even more so than external.”
That thinking took a concrete form this month. The boys soccer team worked with a mental performance coach who built a seminar with his father and delivered it to the team. Quiros hopes it becomes a recurring program rather than a one-time visit, with spring sports next in line.
“Just like we should have a physical athletic trainer, I think that every high school should also have a mental athletic trainer as well,” she said.
The same instinct shapes how she talks about the fundraising fight itself. When the conversation turns to whether over the deficit or the pace of donations, she steers it elsewhere. “It’s so easy to place blame,” she said. “What is our ideology? What’s important to us? Is it necessary to push back so much all the time, or is it necessary to kind of be like, okay, where can I help out here?”
How to Support the Blue and White Club This Fall
Donations go through the club’s Givebutter page. Businesses interested in sponsoring the club, or matching employee donations dollar for dollar, can reach the club directly through its website ahead of the fall fundraiser. The general membership meeting, expected in early October once a location is confirmed, is open to any Montclair parent who wants to help plan the next push. For a town that just proved it can raise $176,000 in four weeks, the ask this time is smaller: show up once, and see what a full year of that same effort could do.
