School & Skis

When it was discovered about twelve years ago that the slopes around Aspen, Colo, could be mined for skiers' dollars as profitably as they had been worked for silver 75 years before, a permanent snow blindness began to cloud the vision of Aspen (pop. 1,200). This year, with the dollar-mine booming, the malady gripped the school system. School officials have long since been faced with the looming, 11,300-ft.high Mount Aspen tantalizingly visible from classroom windows. When book learning shuts down at noon every Wednesday, almost the entire school population gathers at the ski school on the mountain. The high school's ski team is among the state's best, and individual students rank high in nonschool meets.

Eligible Pupils. Trouble began in January. With intellectualism back in style, and with the out-of-state intellectuals (who have made Aspen a kind of wild-west Athens) clamoring about education, the school board grandly boosted athletic eligibility requirements from the rock bottom required by the state (passing grades in at least three subjects) to a new high: all Cs.

Within a few weeks Math Teacher Sterling Cooper, 26, had torpedoed the high school's four best skiers below C level. Among those sunk: 14-year-old Sharon Pecjak. the best junior girl racer for miles around and daughter of Schodl Board Chairman Rudy Pecjak. The following week the four were to ski in elimination races to determine the area's squad for the National Junior championships. Although they would not race under school auspices, Superintendent William Speer held that eligibility rules covered the elimination races.

Over Speer's protests, and with the informal support of fellow board members, Papa Pecjak took Sharon out of school the day before the meet, drove her and other nonmathematicians to the elimination races at Winter Park, Colo. All four made the Nationals; Sharon won both the downhill and slalom races in her division.

Cooperative Teachers. The victories solved nothing. Superintendent Speer and the weekly Aspen Times blasted the school board for not following its own ruling. Earlier, Pecjak had offered to resign, was refused with thanks. Now Speer turned in his resignation, had it accepted by an unruffled school board. Last week Superintendent Speer turned over his job to the assistant superintendent, who also happens to be supervisor of high school ski instruction. At week's end Pecjak was standing firm on his statement that may have voted for that eligibility thing, but that doesn't mean I feel a C in every subject is necessarily right. You have to have cooperation from the teachers."

Math Teacher Cooper, who grouses that "Aspen is suffering from a national disease known as general education, whose symptoms, sores and scars are in full display," was prepared to pass out Ds and Fs whenever necessary. Sharon and her buddies were prepared to ski in the Nationals. And the other Aspen schoolchildren were prepared to have a rousing good time. A couple of weeks ago, acting on the newly discovered principle that a parent can yank his child out of school whenever he feels like it, 15 of them got parental consent, hookyed off to watch some ski races.

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