Park is considering requiring all clubs to have a 25 dollar fee to join next year. Club leaders said this will negatively affect many clubs, especially student-run clubs, who already operate on little money. With this potential change, student club leaders have been speaking out about how they get funding and how they could benefit from more support from the school.

Environmental club vice president Karen Dworsky said this year the club has been focusing mainly on small fundraisers in ways that can connect with Park.

“We did a fundraiser with Parkway pizza and we got 10% of the profits from 4 – 10 p.m., and we created a movie night for elementary schoolers where they paid for admissions,” Dworsky said. “We’re just trying to find ways to connect to the community and work with others.”

Art club president Sofia Jerney said managing funds for a club on her own can be difficult.

“I have to balance my personal life, other extracurriculars and schoolwork, so I don’t really have time to sort through all the complicated rules we need to follow in order to get fundraising in order,” Jerney said. “There’s a lot of rules and legal issues, so it can be frustrating not knowing what we’re allowed to do and what we’re not allowed to do.”

Club operations supervisor Abby Schraeder said the new club fees have to go to the school funds and are not allowed to be used for personal club funding.

“Any fees the district collects for our student activities will be used to offset the cost of advisors or other costs that are accrued in the general fund,” Schraeder said. “The district can’t donate the collected fees to student activity accounts if these fees collected exceed the cost of the advisor — it’s just going to help pay for other advisors. Any fundraising done by the clubs will only go to those student activity funds.”

Dworsky said she wishes the school could support student-run clubs in some other way so that they can focus more on making an impact.

“Getting help from the school would help us start out so that we wouldn’t have to focus as much on fundraising,” Dworsky said. “The Environmental club isn’t about trying to find ways to make money, we’re trying to make a difference and do projects to create a better environment. We’re a new club this year so we’ve just needed money to get started, and if the school was able to help clubs with funding we would have something to start out with so that we could actually do something.”

Schraeder said Park is trying to support student-run clubs, but it’s been difficult with all the changing rules.

“This is so new for our high school specifically,” Schraeder said. “We are under some new state guidelines and that’s what’s making this all messy. Between the state guidelines and the funding cuts, we’re just trying to find the perfect mix of what it looks like and how we can help, knowing we also have to keep our classrooms staffed and have supplies.”