Oswego School District Looks To Fund Clubs

by Steve Yablonski | June 1, 2010 10:29 pm

OSWEGO, NY – Some of the clubs whose advisors’ stipends were eliminated from the 2010 – 11 budget maybe getting a reprieve.

At Tuesday night’s Oswego school board meeting, member Dave White sought to have the funding returned for the Buccaneer Bulletin (school newspaper) club as well as for the yearbook, drama and sailing clubs.

Some of these clubs have been a staple at OHS for more than five decades, he pointed out.

“The sailing club,” he pointed out as an example, “has been around for over 30 years. I’m familiar with the sailing club because (advisor) Joe (Rotolo) is in my back yard.”

“I think we need to put these things back. We have a long history with them,” he continued. “If we’re going to get rid of some of them, certainly we have an opportunity to do that. But, I think that we kind of might have acted in haste (cutting the funds). I would like to see them back; they serve a good purpose.”

“Just a general comment about all of these clubs, in fact what you’re seeing here are the stipends,” Superintendent Bill Crist explained. “The club itself hasn’t been cut. What we’ve cut was the stipend.”

That is just a nice way to say we haven’t cut the club, White noted.

“It’s like saying we haven’t stopped you from driving your car – but we aren’t going to give you no gas,” White pointed out. “If you look at these clubs, and the length of time that they’ve been here, I just think we should put things back.”

“Why do you need a yearbook club and a yearbook class?” board member Fran Hoefer wanted to know.

There is a lot of work that goes along with publishing a school newspaper and yearbook that takes place outside of the school day, board vice president Jim Tschudy pointed out.

Both the yearbook and Buc Bulletin are award-winning publications, and have been for a number of years.

Is there money in the district’s budget for the next school year that can be found for some of the stipends, the district’s business manager Pete Colucci asked rhetorically.

“We’ll march through the year, if it’s the board’s wish to put these back and at the end of the year we’re $36,000 over the $74.848 (budget); the board wishes to increase the budget at that time to make up the difference, I think we can figure something out,” he said.

“The problem is, once these things get eliminated, for any reason, they tend to stay eliminated,” White cautioned.

The board will need to, at some point, come up with $11,316 to fund the stipends White mentioned.

“I am all in favor of this. But I am not in favor of increasing the budget,” said board president Sam Tripp. “We put a budget number out for the public to vote on and they voted on it. I don’t think we should be raising it. If we do this, we need to find the money elsewhere.”

Source URL: https://oswegocountytoday.com/news/oswego/oswego-school-district-looks-to-fund-clubs/

---