Pioneer High School to receive $92,000 donation for athletic facility improvements

The Ann Arbor school board accepted a gift of more than $92,000 from the Pioneer High School Booster Club on Wednesday to help fund improvements to athletic facilities at the school.

Betsy Petoskey, co-president of the Pioneer Booster Club, said the donation will help improve athletic facilities and avoid potentially harmful cuts to athletics.

“Recent years have led to frustrations at all levels of public education,” Petoskey said. “Continuing budget cuts in athletics seem ill-advised and we worry that our student-athletes will one day be just the elite whose families can afford to pay for the entire cost of competition.”

Among the gifts the donation will fund are:

New equipment for the new athletic trainer room and two new concession stands.
Whiteboards for the new team rooms.
A public address system for the practice field.
A competition wrestling mat and a reconditioned practice mat.
A baseball storage shed.
A softball batting cage.
A pole vault pit.
Reconditioned volleyball poles.
3 platform inserts for the weight room.
Main gym scoreboard.
Wheels for the soccer goals.

Petoskey said the booster club identified facilities as the weakest link in the athletic programs at a three-day goal setting retreat about 10 years ago.

Among the proposed donations since then was a $3 million health and fitness center at Pioneer, which was denied about six years ago. Boosters announced their intention to raise the money for the facility independently of the district but the funds never came to fruition. The facility is now being built with a combination of sinking fund and bond dollars, which are not funded by the district's general fund.

Trustees unanimously approved the most recent gift this time around. Trustee Christine Stead said the gift will impact students for a long time.

“It’s remarkable that you’re doing this at this time for us,” she said. “We need these kind of partnerships more and more and we’re struggling to protect the good things happening in our schools.”

Kyle Feldscher covers K-12 education for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at kylefeldscher@annarbor.com or you can follow him on Twitter.