Throughout time, Pasco High has been in need of upgrades regarding many things. This has been noticed by the school population, leaving some to wonder if we have enough school funding.
Chelsea Rangel, a Junior here at PHS, shares her viewpoint on the school’s quality, mentioning a few things worth fixing.
“There are a lot of things they could do, first of all, the bathrooms need to be private, they’re too open, half of the doors are very exposed, they need to put hooks, so your backpack doesn’t get wet on the floor,” Chelsea said. “Also, ACs, heating, and cooling. The quality of the building itself is not great, but it still works; it’s something.”
Most students are not around for long enough to see this building progress, but Mr. Hockaday, the journalism teacher, has. He has been teaching at PHS for 18 years.
“I’m the head baseball coach, so I got a whole new baseball facility that we desperately needed, we got a brand-new student mall because the old cafeteria is where the music rooms are, we’ve got new science labs, new library,” Hockaday said.
Some sections of Pasco High are older than others, complicating the process of renewing and or upgrading aspects of our school.
PHS gets its main funding from the federal government, Washington State, and as well as grants. The amount of money that we receive also depends on the number of students and the student demographic attending our school. This means that once our current scholars disperse into other schools, we will have less funding.
Some may think that our school funding is awful, considering our outdated bathrooms with broken locks, or our AC unit issues, but they are in the process of being updated.
Things such as teacher salary and benefits, extended trimesters, summer school, paper, printers, balls, and nets for the P.E facility, etc., all take up the budget we have to work with. Our principal, Mrs. Machado, explains why it has been difficult to work with the budget given to run the school.
“This year is a very unique year because we have had our budgets frozen, so that means that there has been a limitation in what has been used,” Mrs. Machado said. But in the past years, we have been pretty good at estimating what we need to use our money for, if there is a priority, then I do plan for it, and I plan on when to address those needs.”
This, however, has not stopped Mrs. Machado from noticing issues around our school and doing her best to do something about them. Take into account our air conditioning, we have been having issues with it for a while now, experiencing random cold temperatures and uncomfortably warm rooms all throughout the building, and our principal has reported it to her superiors.
“Our AC units are the ones that are a little hard to fix,…upgrading the AC units is expensive, so we got a 2 million dollar grant from the district,” Mrs. Machado said.
Rebuilding and fixing things is not an easy process, but it is possible. Mrs. Machado mentions that she hopes that PHS will be rebuilt by the mid-2030s.
