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High school ASB fund empty

Doug Flanagan/reporter@qvpr.com
May 13, 2010

The Quincy High School Associated Student Body reserve fund has run out of money.

At Tuesday’s Quincy School District board of directors meeting, QHS principal David Talley said the fund, which had swelled to between $50,000 and $60,000 about five years ago, is now empty.

“A few years ago, we had a large reserve. Maybe it was too large,” he said. “Our gate revenues used to be higher, and our costs were lower. We used to have a lot more vending machines in the schools that would generate revenue before health guidelines curtailed some of that. For our expenditures, we have continued to spend out of the reserve, and now it’s gone.”

The ASB fund is used to provide for costs accrued by the school’s extracurricular activities, mainly clubs and athletics. The money for the fund is generated by students through fund-raisers and other activities, as well as the sale of ASB cards and gate receipts from certain athletic events.

Talley said recently there’s been a “disconnect” on the part of coaches and club advisers about where the money came from and how they could go about using it.

“They’re taking money out of the reserve and not fund-raising to put it back in,” Talley said. “Everyone I talked to said they didn’t know they were supposed to do that. They’re not understanding that the word ‘budget’ means that they have the capacity to spend a certain amount of money; it doesn’t mean they have the money. They have to raise that money and put it back in the reserve.

“The district has always supported the ASB and athletics, but it doesn’t help with the bats, balls, helmets, etc. That’s what the reserve is for. But nobody wants to point fingers at anybody else or anything like that. We want to work together to try to get this fixed.”

Manny Ybarra, who coached the QHS wrestling team from 1985 to 2008, told Talley, Dickerson and the board that the high school’s coaches were given faulty information about their budgets in 2008 and 2009.

“I’ve done some research, and during those two years, there was virtually no money transferred from the ASB to athletics,” he said. “I was told that I had $1,000 to spend (for one year) and not to overspend, so I spent about $800. The next year I was told that my budget was $1,000 and not to overspend, but I didn’t know that only $200 was in the coffer. The coaches didn’t know about that, and they’d continue to spend and spend. That’s how we drew ourselves further into the hole.”

Ybarra said that he’s been in contact with several current QHS coaches who are seeking answers.

“Why aren’t the sports getting some of the money that they’re raising?” he said. “Shouldn’t they at least get a little bit? Why are the revenues going into the general fund? Why aren’t they going back into athletics? Why was athletics cut out of the transfer from other departments? The coaches feel as if they’re getting pointed out for doing certain things, but they didn’t know exactly what was going on. I’m trying to figure out why we weren’t told about some of these things. If coaches are told not to overspend their budget, the majority of them aren’t going to overspend.”

Talley said that in theory, if a sport generates money through a fund-raiser or other activity, the money should go to the specific sport’s line item and not into the general fund. One way of generating money for the fund, he said, would be to organize bigger fund-raisers that would contribute to the entire fund instead of having individual teams or clubs raise smaller amounts of money for their particular activity.

“This needs to be a collective effort,” he said. “We need a more clearly-defined and systematic way of fund-raising.”

Talley said the school is looking at purchasing computer software that would help coaches and club advisers to more easily track their particular budgets and see exactly how much money is coming in and going out at any time.

“That will help out with the transparency,” he said. “We want to reduce the amount of questions and increase the scrutability of the system. The more eyes we have on the budget, the better off we’ll be.”

Dickerson added, “We want to be open and clear about how this is done. We want people to be aware of how this works and have access to the necessary information. Under Mr. Talley’s leadership, it appears as if that’s going to be the case. There’s obviously a great need for clarity. Nobody wants to do anything wrong. We just need to get a more functional system, and that’s what we’ll do.”