On Sept. 16 at the start of the school year, during a staff meeting, the CTE Director Mark Madison revealed that all out of state CTE funding would be cut. This cut made it so that any club that would like to do anything that costs money out of state wouldn’t get any funding from CTE. This cut in theory would affect most major clubs like HOSA, Journalism, and TSA making it hard for them to go to any event outside of state involving those clubs, making it so that if they wanted to get some kind of funding for trips out of state they would have to find their own way of acquiring it without help from the school, making it hard for them to get recognized outside of state and earn awards for these clubs. Jami Wollan, the advisor of HOSA, said this when asked how the budget cuts affect her. “If the student was not CTE they always had to pay anyway, but we could usually use our fundraising to lower that cost. But now, every student will be required to pay for basically what we were having to pay for non CTE too” This obviously caused more uproar in students participating in clubs like the ones mentioned, making more people opposed to these cuts that continue coming up.
With all these cuts you have to wonder why? The Edmonds school district has already cut millions of dollars in funding, so why do we need more cuts? The district has said that these cuts are due to a significant decline in student enrollment; this decline in student enrollment affects how much funding the district receives from the state. Not to mention, the current economy in our country right now is in a steady decline because of things like inflation, war costs, tariffs, debt, and this list could go on. This causes our state not to have a lot of funding for needed education resources, and in turn our district not receiving much either.
Because of these money problems clubs, teams, and other CTE funded activities have to adapt to these lesser fundings. Brandon Owings the advisor of the esports club and the robotics team Vex says this in regards to how Vex adapted to the cuts “we recognise that Vex is expensive, the alternatives are more expensive, but, like for the classroom, why are we pushing this 45000 dollars of bots? When we can build the same thing for under five” These cuts push clubs, and this push can be healthy for the students participating. It has the students participating learn new skills to help promote their groups, and find new ways to make money as well as finding cheaper methods. Owings says this in relation to students adapting to cheaper cuts, “If I’m building a 1500 dollar Vex bot, and you fall in love with robotics, the only thing I taught you is that you need 1500 dollars to start and that’s really expensive. Or if I give you a $100 robot and you sit there and go, I’m learning this, I can use off the shelf parts, there’s so much available to me, now you have a future where anytime if you decide you want this you can spend a few hundred dollars or spend 50 bucks and gets started programing long after you left my class, as hobby, which is awesome!”
But if these cuts continue, which it seems it will, what can you do to help school clubs, teams or activities with these cuts? I recommend going to held events! Most of these events are held by people trying to get funding for their activity while also trying to make it a fun experience for people that come, some of these events could be dances, plays, sports games, music performances and many others that have paid entry.
Another way is to buy, or donate to these activities, especially during events like the winter bizarre, or buying merch from these events.
Or, if you don’t want to spend any money, you could always join in helping run these activities. There is nothing that helps more than being part of these community events, and you might in turn find something you care about.
