Some highlights:
When you look into the future, what things weigh heavy on your mind?
Kim Headrick (Medical Lake): About 43% of our student population is military-connected and so, for us, our biggest concern, and I think it’s a continuous practice for us, is to understand how we can best serve all of our community, both the small community of Medical Lake, that bedroom suburb community of Spokane, as well as the families that we see regularly out at Fairchild Air Force Base. For us, it comes in the form of enrollment… we really have not recovered yet from the losses of COVID and so we are continuing to seek to understand how we best serve all of our students of the families of our community and build some growth.”
Alexa Allman (Deer Park): We are growing. Folks who are looking for more land and a quieter space are moving out to our area. That’s one of our challenges. I want to make sure that we know every single student, individually by name, strength and need…That’s a big task. Making sure that we are setting them up for college readiness, if that’s the desire, and where they want to go. Making sure that we are setting them up for success, whether they’re heading to the military or heading right into the workforce or into the trades. That’s our job….On a different note, since 2018, our legislators have mandated 77 new requirements in public education. That’s a lot for us as small districts when we as superintendents wear many, many hats.”
When you think about state funding, what’s the narrative? What are our needs and what is the conversation with our state legislators?
Kim Headrick: There are three areas where the focus is: special education; materials, supplies and operations costs (MSOC), that’s our insurance, everybody knows how insurance has gone up, utilities, those kinds of things; and then transportation. Specifically for us in Medical Lake, when it comes to special education, we have about a $350,000 gap, which is small, but when you look at percentage of our funding, it’s significant…We are focus on providing inclusive classrooms, which means our students with disabilities are learning right alongside their typically-developing peers. They have access to grade-level standards. We are about 94% across our district of included.”
Ken Russell: The piece of the pie of the state operating budget is really the issue that we see. In 2019, 53% of the state operating budget went to K-12 public education. In 2024, 43% of the state operating budget went to K-12 education. You can see how that would be a problem funding education fully. And in addition, we’ve heard in this legislative session, it’s probably going to drop down even more to 42%, 41%. So my worry is that we’re not going to be able to maintain the expenditures that we need to run a solid K-12 educational system.
