Columbus School 11th graders are behind in making their payments for the 12th-grade prom in May because student participation has been poor. It has long been a Columbus School tradition that the Junior class pays for the prom, which is attended by both juniors and seniors.

Since August, when group of 11th-graders including Camila Velez, Pablo Monsalve, Daniel Posada, and Maria Paula Jimenez, organized a committee to raise the money needs to finance the prom party for the seniors. The money is collected from students in monthly installments of 55,000.00 pesos.

“We have been preparing this since August, it has been a very hard task because we have to be  working all day on the same thing and asking people for the monthly payment,” Velez said.

Juniors have been very inconsistent with the  payments and so far, only 33 million pesos projected budget is of the 60 million pesos budget is in the bank account, making it very hard to plan. 

“Some parents have already paid the total amount, but we also have some parents that haven’t even paid the first month. By March we need at least 60 million pesos and if not we would need to find other ways to gather the money,” Monsalve said.

Three emails have been sent to parents to remind them of this obligation, but in many cases the prom committee doesn’t doesn’t recieve a response. Juniors are reminded almost once a week, but many ignored the announcements. Raffles are  one of the backup plans that the prom committee has if they don’t gather the total money by March.

“I am tired of people ignoring the committee emails. We have thought of calling each parent, but if we do that probably half of the parents won’t answer. We have thought other ideas of collecting money such as making raffles or selling things at school,” Velez said.

Some Seniors have expressed disappointment with the lack of support for this year’s prom because they did the job of collecting the money for last year’s prom for the graduating class of 2016 and now that it’s their turn, there is concern about  insufficient funds for their prom.  

“I think it’s completely selfish how juniors are acting, seniors don’t deserve a bad prom because we took our time and money to plan a good party for the 2016 graduates,”  Senior Sofia Restrepo said.