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Have you ever been to Wellsboro? It’s a very lovely town. In fact, many of the Northern Tier towns are attractive places. Troy is another.

But beauty often hides what’s beneath the surface, and right now, Wellsboro’s school budget is an ugly mess, nearly $700,000 in the red. You know what’s coming next.

The Wellsboro Area School Board is considering cutting four sports – wrestling, boys and girls soccer and cheerleading (notice the nice Title IX symmetry) – as a way of erasing that budget shortfall. That would save the district approximately $28,000, about 4 percent of the budget gap. You can read details in this story by the Williamsport Sun-Gazette’s Mitch Rupert.

Of course, nothing draws a crowd to a school board meeting like a program being slashed, and Wellsboro wrestling coach Rick Mihalik, who has already lost a wrestler to Central Mountain (Brian Brill), didn’t want to see his entire program go away. So he took to the floor of the meeting and pleaded for his program’s survival.

In the process, Mihalik said something interesting: “In this day and age, we need more programs not less.”

My instinct is to agree. But my head says no.

Wellsboro is simply an early entry in a race that virtually every Pennsylvania school district will run and run soon. By law, the state’s Public Schools Employees Retirement System (PSERS) must be fully funded in 2012. Right now, it is not, in large part because school districts have been paying the minimum towards its mandated obligations and because market conditions have deteriorated so badly since the end of 2008. (It should be noted here that school employee contributions have been more than adequate and that the fund has been very well-managed over the years. But no fund, no matter how well managed, could avoid the gale winds of the market the last year-and-a-half).

In short, school districts across the state will be on the hook for millions of dollars annually – not just in 2012 – when the law kicks in. It’s been projected that some districts will have to pay up to $25 million above their current annual budgets (many will have a smaller obligation) to meet the law.

When that occurs, there will be no question that sports will be affected. That’s why, as much as I want to agree with Mihalik, the reality of what’s facing the public schools trumps what’s in the heart.

As much I would love to see all sports programs not only survive but increase, the harsh reality is that taxpayers just won’t be able to afford all of the goodies in the near future. The only real option out there is private funding, either by pay-for-play (direct contributions from students via their families) or booster dollars. Either way, it will be messy and painful, as Wellsboro is finding out.