The Spokane school board has decided to wait until August to approve the district’s budget for next year.
Administrators presented a $460 million plan Wednesday night. But board members say they want to take a few more weeks to consider using about four million dollars that were destined for a reserve account to restore proposed cuts.
Spokane school administrators knew this year’s budget was going to be a doozy. In April they announced the district faced a projected $31 million budget deficit. To chip away at that, budget director Linda McDermott says they followed three basic principles.
“Protecting basic student needs, maintaining our essential support services and then also meeting legal compliance and educational standards," McDermott said.
The school board declared a financial emergency to allow the district to suspend some of the provisions in its labor agreement with teachers. Administrators made targeted cuts; for example, the controversial move of eliminating librarians and letting teachers take some of their duties. The district reduced its custodian staff by 30. Just two examples of dozens of changes. All in all, the district whittled more than $18 million. It also gained about $12 million as the legislature adjusted education spending in the spring. Bottom line:
“It is essentially balanced for the ’19-20 school year, with an operating surplus of just under $1 million," McDermott said. "And then the budget also complies with the board policy of having a fund balance, an unrestricted fund balance of the range of five-to-six percent.”
In this case, almost six.
It was that little detail that caught board member Michael Wiser’s ear; we’ll get to that in a minute.
In public comment, Louise Chadez lamented the loss of librarians in favor of teachers.
“They (teachers) just don’t have the same educational level," Chadez said. "A librarian knows how to bring that book to a kiddo, to help those kids who are sometimes lost to engage reading, which is one of the best, most important skills any one of us have.”
District custodian Daniel Robertson worried the cuts in his ranks would lead to schools that are not only less clean, but less healthy.
And so board members, like Michael Wiser, started thinking about ways to restore a few of these cuts.
“We’re looking at a 5.89% ending balance in our fund balance for the end of next year. If we were to drop that down to our minimum of 5%, that would leave us $4 million," Wiser said.
What could we do with that money? he wondered. Maybe restore some custodians.
Or, said his colleague, Deana Brower, what if we reversed the decision to dismiss elementary school students at 1:45 every Friday afternoon, instead of 3:00? Just four years ago, the school board voted to extend the elementary school day by a half hour as a way to give teachers more time with children.
“We are shortchanging our delivery of elementary education to 16,500 students to the tune of a savings of $1.4 million," Brower said. "To make that change, it would seem the savings would need to be more significant than that.”
If we are going to dip into our reserves, Brower argued, this is the type of service we should restore.
It’s a significant challenge to make such a big change in staffing just six weeks before the start of school, said budget director Linda McDermott.
“Yes. It would be probably 600 staff movement," McDermott said.
But it can be done, she said. So the board, including Deana Brower, decided, there’s still enough time before the mandated legal date of August 30 to approve a budget, to explore where reserve funds could be directed.
“In recent years, we passed our budgets in the last meeting in August. I’d like to think we can put our heads together as a board and work with staff to find a solution that best serves our students and our community,” she said.
Administrators will spend the next couple of weeks devising options for restoring programs and then brief the board before its next regularly scheduled meeting August 14.