School Districts Planning Conservative Budgets

Education

Faced with stagnant enrollment forecasts and cuts in state funding, bean counters for North Side school districts have written tight budgets with lots of hope between the lines.

But until students walk through the door on the first day of school - bringing with them about $4,000 each in state funding - public school business managers can’t be sure their budgets will balance.

“A lot of what goes into it is sort of a guess, so you go on the conservative side,” said Deer Park Business Manager Wayne Leonard.

Because the state allocates money per student, forecasts are often low. If budgeters optimistically predict lots of new student and hire more teachers, school districts can be in trouble if students don’t show up.

No North Side school district has budgeted for significant enrollment increases this year.

“We learned a couple of years ago you don’t add teachers until you see the whites of (the students’) eyes,” said Nine Mile Falls Business Manager Floyd Smith. “If they don’t show up, you can be in real trouble.”

The annual guessing game is more difficult this year because of cuts in state funding for special education and vocation programs made during the last legislative session.

Those changes especially hurt smaller school districts, such as Deer Park, Riverside and Nine Mile Falls, which all have higher-than-average numbers of special education students.

That’s where the hope comes in: Those districts are praying they qualify for “safety net” money for districts hurt by the special education cuts.

The state superintendent of public instruction has not completed the guidelines for qualification; those are expected in before school starts in September.

But budgeters cannot count on the money, so they are making cuts.

Deer Park is eliminating two classroom positions.

Riverside, counting on some state assistance, would need to drop its reserve from $495,000 to $195,000 without it.

Nine Mile Falls was also affected by the Legislature’s decisions, but a larger levy approved by voters last year helped the district balance its budget, according to Smith.

Although none of the districts in the area expects hordes of new students, school districts are shuffling teaching positions to deal with “bulges” of students.

Spokane School District 81 has added two positions at Shadle Park High School and one at Rogers High School.

Several North Side elementary schools will each lose a teaching position.

Logan Elementary will be down two spots.

There are no significant changes at District 81 middle schools.

Mead is adding three “para-educators,” nonteaching staff, to give at-risk students one-onone assistance. The district currently has 130 para-educators working with students in kindergarten through high school.

In addition, the Mead School District is setting aside $60,000 to give teachers and staff at Mead High School and Mead Junior High School time to prepare for changes when the district’s new high school opens in 1997.

That money, according to Mead High Principal Steve Hogue, will allow teachers and staff to rewrite lesson plans.

Ninth-graders in the district will be shifted from high school to junior high schools when the new school opens. That change will affect curricula at the junior high and high schools.

, DataTimes