Jason Andrew & Josiah Thomas
November 8, 2024Earlier this month, the carver community received additional funding from the school district of philadelphia thanks to our 811 currently enrolled students.
This funding was designated to go towards hiring new staff, club extracurriculars, and security. One of those receiving funding, Eliott Vezzosi-Bickel said the funding was preapproved to increase afterhours programs allowing him more time to coach his students.
"So until that increase, I had told my robotics team we could only meet for two hours a week even though we usually do three," said Vezzosi-Bickel.
The reason for this, Bickel explained was because he was only receiving pay for 2 hours for coaching. Now, with the increase in funding the robotics team will now be able to meet for three hours a week which will allow them to continue to flourish.
"The amount of the time we spend at the club makes a major difference in what we are able to do each year,” Vezzosi-Bickel said.
While the Robotics club have received this extra funding, other programs like Makerspace, run by Scott Koehler, are continuing to take money out of their own pockets to keep their programs running.
"We get $200 for all the classes per teacher, and that has to cover everything. So that's extremely hard to manage from an individual teachers standpoint, and I've over the years, I've spent hundreds of dollars on my own pocket just to operate extracurriculars.
In addition to Koehler, other teachers such as David Dekorte are continuing to pay for afterschool programs out of their own pockets. Dekorte emphasized though that the funds for Carver HSES have to cover more than just extracurriculars.
"I'm looking at the bigger picture. There's more than just clubs that run the school"