Bad idea, high school radio stations should teach the students how to program local radio, not run networks.
This is a much larger discussion, but why teach them to program local radio instead of running networks? What situation are they more likely to encounter should any of them actually pursue a career in broadcasting? I would argue that perhaps they should run more local and act like a prototypical "college rock" station because it's more fun for the students...but it's not better training for the "real" radio world.
Anyways, Massachusetts is another state with a lot of high school radio stations...
14 I believe in all (and Scott Fybush agrees), although not all that long ago there were 16; WPAA and WSRB both went dark since 2000. Why so many? I have no hard facts, but I suspect it's because of Ed Perry, GM of WATD, Marshfield...one of the best local commercial radio stations in the country (and with the awards to prove it). Besides being an incredibly knowledgeable, passionate and all-around nice guy, Ed had a real thing going back in the 1960's and 1970's to help get small non-comm stations on the air at both colleges and high schools. (and remember, there's some 60-odd colleges & universities in Greater Boston alone) I think Dana Puopolo deserves some credit on this front, too.
Anyways...many people, myself included, have vaguely tried to unite the high school stations, and the college stations for that matter, in MA into some semblance of a larger organization...nobody's succeeded yet. The greatest problem in Massachusetts' case is the nature of the government there, believe or not. Mass has counties but realistically the counties exist solely for voting precincts and courts; there's no real power or organization at the county level. So it's all down at the city/town level, and there's 351 cities and towns crammed into a fairly small state...and every single one of them acts like an island unto itself.
Accordingly, the parents that effectively control the high school stations. Even if there's a professional hired to run the station and teach radio classes...he/she answers to the school board who answers to the parents. And by-n-large only the wealthy towns have radio stations at their high school so you've got rich parents to boot. And these parents will be damned if they let anyone from outside their control have even a hint of control of their radio station. Plus, from their perspective, there's no disincentive to not joining...nobody cares if nobody's listening, everyone makes sure there's enough funding (usually they can afford it out of pocket if they have to) and the FCC's never going to come in and bust them for the myriad array of equipment & operations violations common to many of these stations. Not all, but at least 30-40 percent in my experience (and I've visited or interacted with at least 50% of the stations on that list).
The college stations are a similar lot; most of them in MA don't have any professional management. Maybe a faculty advisor who is barely involved, otherwise it's all students running the joint and they're notorious for believing that their way is always the best way and any other way of doing things is automatically crap. And again, they face no disincentive for not changing their ways; the funding from the Student Activity Fee is usually not enough to do things "right" but it's enough to limp along indefinitely, and if things go really bad (busted transmitter, collapsed tower, etc) they know the school will pony up the cash to fix things. (well, given the fiscal state many colleges find themselves in, maybe it should be they "think they know")
The biggest draw is public involvement. A lot of stations don't want the public involved. This is a hard sell to adminisrators.
You got that right. To expand a bit on this, administrators look at any "outsider" and generally they see "liability"...either legal or political or both. That's a hard hurdle to overcome.
It'd be a little different if there were a way these little stations could realistically bring money in the door to the point where they'd not just be self-sufficient, but also would make the parent school some money. FCC/legal issues aside (and there most definitely are some) that's damn hard to do for any non-comm, and it's virtually impossible to do it at the Class D 10 watt or small Class A level; especially in the more non-urban areas where these stations tend to be. So basically you've got to sell an admin on the idea that your network might reduce costs slightly at best, but will more likely touch off a political firestorm internally that you've "sold out to outside interests". Not hard to see why the default answer is usually "no".
Just look at what happened when UMass Lowell tried to "professionalize" WUML (then WJUL). That was a mess on both sides of the issue.
OTOH, if you approached PUBLIC high schools (private schools would probably reject it on general principle) and offered them $100k each to buy the license outright but would allow X hours of student programming per day as a condition of the deal....given what many public school systems are facing budget-wise I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them accepted the offer. Beats me if you'd ever see ROI on the deal, though.
