Not making cents Money disappears from tutoring budget

staff in July.

Center for Academic

Success Director Crystal Kiekel expressed relief after the CAS budget was restored into their account Monday morning, following Kiekel bringing the issue of missing money to the attention of the Pierce College community.

In June 2019, Kiekel was told that everyone received a 5% budget cut across the board, and that $40,000 had been restored to the CAS budget. So Kiekel hired the fall of 2019 tutoring

However, in early August, when asking to make a routine modification to one of the positions, she was notified the CAS had no budget.

“Assuming this was a mistake, we went on with our business,” Kiekel said. “But we kept asking questions of anyone who would listen about what was going on with our budget.”

In the beginning of the 201819 budget year, Kiekel looked at the CAS budget and saw it was at $0, so she reported this to the Earic Dixon-Peters and Juan Carlos Astorga, and CAS went on spending, assuming that the “glitch” would be fixed.

“When the year ended, we were told that the CAS had overspent its budget. I again reminded our dean and VP that I told them at the beginning of the fiscal year that our money was somehow glitched away, and I didn’t hear anything about it again,” Kiekel said.

When Kiekel realized this wasn’t just a glitch and the CAS wasn’t going to have the funds to pay the tutors for the month of November, she decided that making noise just to administration wasn’t going to be enough and she had to go public.

Pierce College provides about 10% of the tutoring budget.