Milwaukee ? In another sterling example of your tax dollars at work, 17 football players announce their choice of colleges at a nationally televised high school all-star game in San Antonio paid for by the United States Army.

Two days later, the Mequon (Wis.) school board discloses that it’s considering raising its athletic fees to as much as $110 a sport to help cover a budget shortage.

What’s wrong with this picture? Or put another way, who’s stealing high school sports?

Co-curricular fees including athletic fees are always a bad idea, because they discourage kids from taking advantage of the priceless extra credit that schools have to offer after the bell rings. It might not be long before many kids are deprived of those crucial lessons entirely without helping anybody’s budget crunch enough to notice.

High school sports need nationally televised all-star games the way your 16-year-old needs a Porsche for a birthday present. They present teenagers with a skewed view of the universe, and the money would be better spent elsewhere. On eliminating the demand for athletic fees, for instance.

Times are tough in education, but there’s money for high school sports. It’s just floating to the top these days.

If the Army has extra tax revenue burning a hole in its fatigues, it could always send it directly to the high schools that are scraping to keep their athletic programs going. That wouldn’t do much to recruit soldiers, of course, but when did high school sports become an advertising vehicle?

They aren’t for selling hamburgers or promoting grocery stores, or for filling up network programming schedules. And they’re certainly not for helping college recruiters flout their success stories on national TV.

If every dime that companies and networks spend on sending high school standouts to all-star games or basketball teams to Hawaii or baseball teams to Florida were instead spent on giving a maximum number of kids a chance to play something, maybe more than half the school districts in Wisconsin wouldn’t be charging fees.

Those are Doug Chickering’s numbers, and he says they’re growing. Chickering is the executive director of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Assn., and he sees it getting more expensive all the time for families to let their kids compete.

He’s worried that program cuts on freshman and JV levels will show up soon in varsity numbers, and he wonders what the national spotlight on special kids does to the other kids.

“We want to focus programs for everyone, not just the elite,” he said. “That’s what we lose when we have a national agenda.”

Kids also lose their chance to be kids when they’re treated like pros at 17 or 18. And schools lose tradition. Tuesday night’s crosstown rivalry pales when the next game is scheduled for Saturday night in Orlando.

The WIAA allows its members to play out-of-state games as long as they’re in season. If they let them play them all year long, there would be no end to the seasons. But even that meets resistance.

Not that it was ever the high schools’ job to get athletes ready to play college ball. Chickering knows the high schools’ job, and he knows how he’d do it if he were king for a day.

“We would have as many programs as we could possibly have at all levels to satisfy the interests that kids have,” he said. “And people who participate wouldn’t have to pay.”

That’s about what it would take to steal high school sports back.