$100,000 split among student programs

The Olympic College Business Office notified the Associated Students of OC leadership team the projected Services and Activities revenue calculations were more than originally projected, which allocated an extra $100,000 to S&A funded programs, according to an email sent out Thursday.

According to Kim McNamara, dean of Student Development, the projected S&A budget for the 2011-12 academic year didn’t look correct so she looked into the discrepancy.     

“It didn’t make any sense to me based on the number of students we had,” said McNamara.

McNamara said Vice President of Administrative Services Bruce Riveland and Director of Fiscal Services Janell Whitely looked at the S&A fees and realized they had forgotten to note the 13 percent increase in tuition from last year in calculating those programs’ budgets. This increase gave $244,000 more than expected. Of that money, $120,000 went back into a depleted reserve allocation, $24,000 went into a contingency, or emergency, fund and the remaining $100,000 went to S&A funded programs. 

“We were very disappointed with how little we were able to fund student programs,” said McNamara. “It’s their money, they should get to use it.”

Of the 20 student programs, four didn’t need any more funding, so the $100,000 was split between the remaining 16. The ASOC Leadership team then devised a system of how the money was to go to programs, where each program was first designated a “high” of $6250, a “medium” of $4166, a “low” of $2083 or no money. If, after this first phase, a program had reached the amount of money asked for in March, they weren’t given any more.  In the second phase, the remaining 11 programs were given either $2773, $1848, $924 or no money from the remaining $30,505. After some corrections were made, those 11 programs then split the $2992 remaining for $272 each in the third phase. Of the original $100,000, $6 remained, which went into the contingency fund.

“One of their principles is ‘how many students does a program serve,’” said McNamara.

The programs that received the most money were Recreation, ASOC, Athletics and Tutoring Services, with $9295.

“If you look, those were programs that took huge hits,” said McNamara.

At an Executive Council meeting on Friday, ASOC VP of Shelton Nik Pucci recommended that the Recreation and Tutorial Services programs consider giving their extra funds to the satellite campuses.

At the same meeting, ASOC VP of Student Affairs Giovanni Salas said, “I would like to remind the departments to please, please, please make sure this money goes back to the students.”