During levy campaign season, superintendents spend a lot of time explaining the complexities of school financing. In a video on the Medical Lake School District website, Superintendent Kim Headrick takes to talk first about the district’s educational programs and operations, or EP&O, levy, then its capital projects levy. On the same website, the district displays a variety of pie charts and bar graphs that break out where local property tax money is spent.
“For every levy dollar, 48 cents goes directly into education programs and school support. That’s adding additional teachers, paraeducators, that are above what the state provides funding for, based on the prototypical school model. For us, that’s probably about 10 teachers,” she said.
The other 52 cents breaks out like this: 19 cents for maintenance, 15 cents for extracurricular activities such as sports and music, six cents for technology, such as Chromebooks, four cents for safety and security, including a county sheriff’s resource deputy, three cents for special education and five cents for nursing and mental health services.
“Nursing and mental health services has been a growing area,” Headrick said. “The state, our funding model for our size of a district, provides less than one full time nurse and we have three. In essence, that’s because we have needs in our district, health needs of our students that warrant that level of support.”
Like the other districts, Medical Lake draws money from state and local taxes, but it also has another source most don’t. The district receives federal money because it teaches students whose parents work at Fairchild Air Force Base. That adds a level of complexity because of the uncertainty in Congress.
“The fact that the budget for this year hasn’t been passed does impact our potential of our impact aid funds. That’s about 41% of our local dollars,” she said.
In terms of facilities, Headrick says the district is finishing a six-year capital levy and sharing what has been done with that money. She says it paid to repair about 90% of the school roofs, update mechanical systems, replace students’ computers and fund security improvements.
“We created secure access in every single one of our buildings, so we have a buzz-in system, double-entry access and we just finished with our middle school, just actually in the last two weeks,” she said. “We just replaced a boiler. They’re not fancy by any far stretch of the matter, but they are needed improvements.”
She says, this time, Medical Lake is running a shorter version, a three-year levy, looking ahead to a time when the district will be planning a larger project.
“We have a building that will be eligible in the next three years for state match money for renovation,” she said. “So we’re using this to say, in the next three years let’s look at it. We have a facilities planning committee, looking at those needs and are we ready? In order to do the level of renovation needed it would require bonding.”
In the meantime, if the new capital levy is approved, “we’re going to finish up the roof issues. We are going to continue to look at HVAC. We need new controls, some of those kinds of things to bring us closer to being in compliance with some of the green energy expectations, those kinds of things, and really build efficiencies within our heating and cooling systems,” she said.
Both levies need a simple majority to pass.
