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Thursday, December 1, 2011

Champion chess team looking for help in Brooklyn

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2011

Hello everyone,

Nicholas Fevelo for News

Yuxin Zhou plays chess at Intermediate School 318 in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Wednesday. Her championship-winning team is struggling to raise funds to attend competitions.

A Brooklyn middle school’s championship chess team is trying to avoid being checkmated by budget cuts. Students and faculty at Intermediate School 318 in East Williamsburg are frantically trying to raise as much cash as they can to keep funding their top-shelf chess team.

School officials said budget cuts and the economic slide have made it nearly impossible to make ends meet. “It’s kind of like a double whammy,” said Assistant Principal and chess team organizer John Galvin. “We don’t have the money and \[parents\] don’t have the money, but somehow we’ve got to make it happen.”

Galvin said he was able to use school funds to run the $100,000 program, which boasts 28 national championships, before the cuts started in 2008. Now, administrators need to come up with at least $60,000 to cover the costs.

Student chess players have already raised $12,000 from selling chocolate bars, and administrators were able to scrape together an extra $10,000 from private donations. Money has gotten so tight for the team that Galvin said he ran up an $8,000 tab on his credit card two weeks ago covering the team’s hotel and airfare on a trip to Dallas for a national competition. The team won in the eighth-grade division. You can read the full story here.

Read our earlier post on Brooklyn Castle:
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