The Sedona-Oak Creek School District approved a memorandum of understanding with the Rotary Club of Sedona Charitable Fund for funding for the Wildcat Extended Day program for up to $105,000.
Charitable Fund President Jean Barton said the club’s already raised $95,000 and she and the rotary president, Dave Young, will be signing the memorandum this week. Much of the funding came from grants.
“The first funding came from the Arizona Community Foundation of Sedona to the tune of $25,000 that people connected with education came, like, the end of January,” Barton said. “We got $18,000 from the city of Sedona, and we may get another $2,000, I’m not sure. And then we just got money from the Lutheran Foundation, but all of these organizations ask you, ‘what are you going to do with the money?’ And the answer … is, we’re going to give it directly to the school for the afterschool program.”
The MOU gives the club a more official pathway to show the money will be heading into education.
The Wildcat Extended Day Program isn’t particularly new, the meeting to start it took place several years ago with the superintendent, the principal of the West Sedona School and several other local people connected with education.
“Approximately 80 children from kindergarten through fifth grade participate in the Program and are present before and/or after school,” the MOU reads. “Roughly 60% of West Sedona School children come from low income families. A wide range of parents and caregivers benefit from the ability to drop their children at WED [a no-cost program] before their normal work day begins and to pick their children up after their normal work day ends.”
The MOU says many of these families work in the trades industry, hospitality, retail and health care.
“Our superintendent and the head of our school board had a background in early childhood education, and knows that if you help kids before they fail in school, you will have a lot fewer problems downstream,” Barton said.
In the beginning, they faced two problems to get the program off the ground.
“One is staffing, and the second is funding,” she said. “At the time, there were some Arizona Community Foundation, Northern and Arizona Health Foundation and a variety of others said, ‘Well, we’re past our grant cycle,’ but by the next year, they were able to help with some funding, and the folks, the Mahers [Basil and Mimi], who are now on the school council, happened to be at the table at the time.”
The Mahers began to help fund the very first year of the program. Rotarians began donating to local groups with the idea of supporting “working hard for working families,” and looked for other programs to invest in. Last year, Rotary donated about $15,000. Now and moving forward, it plans on funding the program much more extensively.
“Funding for the program this first year, it was primarily for the program director,” she said. “In future years, it’ll probably be for the program as a whole, not a specific job, but the program.”
The MOU, which the school board signed on Sept. 9, includes an allocation of $50,000 of currently held and committed funds to support the compensation package for the Extended Day director, the compensation package for the entire 2025-2026 academic year, and quarterly payments for the rest of the academic year.
“Basically, we are about to reimburse the school for the first quarter of the program director’s time,” Barton said about what’ll happen once the signatures are finalized.
Much of the funding for the program, specifically for Director Jessica Sweeney this year, came from the school district’s educational foundation.
“We started with a memorandum of understanding,” Barton said, “and asked the school to revise it to what was practical for them, and they sent it back to us, and we — Dave Young and I — read it, we are both on board.”
