News
District enters into a purchasing freeze
Governor Chet Culver has mandated an across the board budget cut of 10 percent from the original budget issued for the fiscal year of 2010. For the district this means a $17.5 million cut. The majority of the money will be coming from the State Foundation Aid, which is the money used to fund public schools. Now the next fiscal year appears to be even worse, with 300 jobs on the chopping block and a $33 million cut leaving classrooms with less money than they have ever had.
What this means for the school is that anything that needs to be purchased must be approved by Principal Doug Wheeler. Wheeler has been instructed to only approve what is necessary for education at the school.
Vocal music director Anna Wolf has not been completely affected by the freeze but explains that her department is lucky.
“I have purchased what we needed up to this point; we will see as we get closer to contest,” Wolf said.
The choir department is not able to purchase new music, so Wolf is now forced to borrow music or use what is in the vocal music library.
“There might be things that we can’t do which we have normally done in the past,” Wolf said.
The department must now resort to fundraising for anything extra such as accompaniment fees and videotaping and sound technicians for concerts. Wolf does take an optimistic approach to the tough times however.
“I don’t think it has affected education quality yet, I think it just makes teachers have to be more creative,” Wolf said.
Librarian Pam Pilcher has also spent the majority of the library’s budget during the summer and fall and like the rest of the school, the money she does have left needs approval to be spent.
“Hoover’s library has an average copyright date of 1993 which is somewhat lower than other schools, especially some of the suburban schools, but for Des Moines our school has a nice library,” Pilcher said.
Pilcher plans as every year to go through the books, weed the older ones out and move in updated books, which according to her is nothing out of the ordinary.
Director of community relations Leigh Mcgivern has regrettably come to terms with the budget cuts.
“Any cuts always affect education, last year was three percent. This year was 10 percent. Over the past nine years we have had $55 million in cuts which had not affected the classroom, but now we are looking at scenarios that may affect them, it’s not something that we want to do,” Mcgivern said.
Pilcher Agrees with Mcgivern.
“We just have to bear it, we don’t have much control,” Pilcher said.