Student money goes towards the co-curricular budget for campus activities

With finance council meetings running this term to decide upon the 2012-13 budget, not to mention a sum of over $1,000,000 on the line, students should keep their eyes peeled these next couple weeks as the co-curricular groups and athletic department attempt to juggle with the heap of money.

Why should you care?

You should care because $757,000 of that pool of money is directly taken from student fee revenue, meaning taken from your hard earned money.
To be exact, the total amount of student fee revenue used is $757,190, in addition to $228,483, which is carry over from the remnants of last year’s budget.

As such, when you are attending MHCC, you’re essentially paying for all events run by the Student Activities Board, as well as costs associated to the MHCC athletic teams.

But the main reason students should be watching closely is because the finance council itself is made up of roughly 12 students themselves, taken from various co-curricular campus groups, such as ASG, KMHD, Forensics, etc, and from the athletic department, including members of the track and field team, softball, etc.

The purpose of these finance councils is to establish how much goes to which groups, which all depends on how much is requested by each sub-group within co-curricular and the athletic department and how much funds are available.

Thus far, the athletic programs have requested a total of $540,505, which is an increase of over $100,000 from last year’s $430,800, which can be attributed to new hires within the department, and various other small changes.

Co-curricular programs requested $477,277, an increase of about $10,000 from last year’s $463,180.

Both programs have been meeting on a weekly basis to discuss how to distribute the over $1,000,000.

After the finance council votes to pass the budget, it goes onto the student forum, which year after year has seen very few students participate.

With $1,000,000 on the line, and the vast majority of it being taken pretty much straight from student pockets, it is a bit shocking that there is a lack of interest from students to be aware of where this sum of money goes, especially when they have some control over where it might go, if not to simply voice where they think it should go.

Students that should be paying attention even more so than others are those that are actually a part of these various programs.

Whether you’re on the softball team or forensics or any other group affiliated with the co-curricular or athletic department, in these next couple weeks, fund cutting may happen without your knowledge, which means you might be forced to do less of the things you love, and if you won’t speak up for your program, who do you expect will?