Tumwater School District officials said during a town hall on Wednesday that any staff person who is attached to a building, including teachers and paraeducators, could be put on the chopping block in the coming weeks to help the district make up for its remaining $4 million budget deficit.
The next resolution and series of cuts will be presented to the school board on Feb. 13.
The school board adopted a resolution Jan. 23 to begin making budgetary cuts at the district office and in support staffing. It included eliminating 27 people from next year’s budget and a cost-of-living wage freeze for non-represented and administrative staff for the next school year.
All administrators also will take three unpaid furlough days next school year. Superintendent Kevin Bogatin and Assistant Superintendent Ben Rarick will take four unpaid furlough days.
Cuts already made will save the district about $2.6 million. Rarick said he can’t say how many positions will be cut from school staffing to make up for the remaining budget deficit, but the district has to reduce its spending by about 5%.
Kira Acker, director of finance and operations, said the school board chose to go with a plan that ultimately eliminates roughly $7 million so the district doesn't run out of money again right after getting back into compliance with financial policies.
"It's going to be an ongoing process," she said. "We'll have our resolutions that we bring before the board, and we go ahead and go through this reduction in force, and then into the next year, continue to eliminate through attrition. We wouldn't have to do an additional reduction in force, but it will get us closer to our goal of meeting the board's minimum fund balance of 6%."
Rarick said the board wanted to make cuts furthest from the classroom first — reductions at the central office and support services staff. The board will entertain a resolution Feb. 13 to make reductions associated with school level staff, which includes not just teachers, but any staff that are associated with a school building.
Materials for the Feb. 13 meeting will be posted on the district website on Feb. 7, and the reductions exhibit will be posted a day or two before the meeting.
School-level impacts
Acker said there has been a lot of discussion around district departments about where costs could be cut to avoid more layoffs. She said staff have been working to cut materials, supplies and operating costs, and all departments can expect to see cuts to their 2025-2026 budget.
Paraeducators will be on the reduction list. Rarick said the district has a contract with the Tumwater Education Association that stipulates class sizes and caps, and classrooms will still be fully staffed. He said the best way to think about it is that not all of the district's teachers are classroom teachers, so the most obvious change might be in the way the district deploys the teachers it currently has.
Rarick said he wanted to emphasize the role for the legislature — to step up and recognize that most of the larger districts in the state are being affected by the state's funding model for public schools. He said the district's local levy and federal money are relatively small portions of the overall budget, and they rely on the legislature to keep pace with actual costs.
"There has been this wave of cuts across the state," he said. "And clearly, it isn't an issue of an individual district not being able to manage its money. This is happening all over the state, and so we are encouraging people to make their voices heard with the legislature, because there's clearly a flaw in the state funding formula."
Rarick fielded a question during the Feb. 5 town hall about whether the district's budget issues are the fault of anti-tax activist Tim Eyman, who has proposed and won passage of many limiting initiatives over the past three decades. Rarick said he didn't want to attribute fault to one individual, but maybe that was a diplomatic way of saying it is partially Eyman's fault.
Rarick said he's worked in a few different states, and they all fund their schools differently. He said there isn't one perfect way to do it, but each way has its pros and cons.
He said Washington is known for having a funding formula opposite of districts in eastern states. He said those states get a majority of their money from the local tax base, and state funding is a smaller percentage of the pie. It's the opposite in Washington.
"The state is by far the most prominent piece of the pie, and the local taxes are a fairly modest part," he said. "And then federal funding is very modest."
He said Washington's model presents certain challenges, particularly when school district costs are rising quickly, as insurance, energy and food costs are now. He said there's a cap on the local levy and how much the district can ask of its voters, which limits them even further.
He said every district is required to have insurance, but costs have risen significantly. He said 10 years ago, the district spent less than $300,000 a year on insurance. Now they spend more than $1.7 million a year.
"Then you go to bus fuel, then you go to food for our child nutrition program, PSE, energy costs, all of these things really took an inflation-based spike during the COVID and post-COVID years, but the legislative funding has not kept pace, so that has just created more and more and more pressure," Rarick said.
"I feel like that's part of why we are seeing this statewide phenomenon now and again," he said. "We're certainly over 100 districts by now that have had to make reductions of some size, and some districts that have literally run out of cash. And so it feels like a system that is ripe for reform."
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