Mead School District Proposing Budget Cuts

Mead School District officials propose cutting spending for supplies, teacher training and travel to balance next year’s budget.

The plan, if adopted by the school board, will mean a minimum 10 percent reduction in all non-salary spending. No staff will lose their jobs, but several positions will be eliminated through attrition and retirement.

The district’s wallet has been stretched taut by construction of a second high school, by a new state law restricting property tax levy collection and by slower-than-expected student growth.

That combination has settled like a dark cloud on the district’s budget planning for the 1997-98 school year.

Among the specific cuts proposed:

Field trips trimmed by 50 percent.

A 20 percent cut in overtime and substitute teacher budgets, used to release teachers from classrooms for training and planning.

A moratorium on district-paid travel outside Eastern Washington (student sports teams are exempted).

Committees for equity and staff health eliminated, saving $15,000.

Some laundry services eliminated, forcing students to bring their own gym towels.

M.E.A.D., the district alternative school, loses one of its 10 teaching positions.

Cuts in budgets for gifted programs, reading assistance and social workers; two positions lost at the elementary and about one at the middle schools.

Superintendent Bill Mester said he hopes teachers and the community will be understanding.

“When people are touched by this, we will have reaction,” said Mester. “As administrators, we could make a case for restoring each one of these.”

The Mead Education Association, the teacher’s union, is studying the proposed cuts to see if “any of our members rights were violated,” said president Lou Kister.

The MEA contract expires in August, but Kister refused to speculate how the proposed cuts would affect negotiations. “We know we are in for some tight times,” said Kister.

In explaining the cuts, administrators vilified a mandated reduction in property tax levies, which dropped Mead’s budget by about $1 million from last year.

The change in statute means the district can ask voters to approve a levy that is 20 percent of its budget. Mead voters have routinely and overwhelmingly supported levies at 24 percent.

“The Legislature is refusing to honor the community’s wishes,” said Kister. “So much for local control.”

The other 80 percent of Mead’s budget comes from the state and federal government.

The change returns Mead’s levy to the level it was five years ago.

“We are going to Legislators, telling them the impacts,” said Mester, who just returned from a lobbying trip to Olympia.

Most other large and affluent school districts are lobbying for a return to the high levies. Spokane superintendent Gary Livingston has also lobbied legislators.

The reduction occurs as the district is boosting it’s budget to staff and equip Mount Spokane High, which will open this fall. Administrators are cutting back on some staff positions at Mount Spokane and Mead High, leaving both schools with less support than at the current high school.

For example, the district had hoped to fund 10 custodians at each school and five counselors at each school. Each school will have eight custodians; Mead High, with all the district’s seniors, will have four counselors, Mount Spokane three.

“The collective opinion of everyone in administration is that it will be painful,” said Al Swanson, assistant superintendent for finance. “You can see by the way we currently spend that we value each of these services.”

And the district is growing slower than projected. Five years ago, when the bond issue for Mount Spokane High was approved, the district expanded at least three percent yearly.

Now the district is growing by about 1.5 percent annually, leaving vacancies for about 400 students at the high schools. The state pays school districts for each student enrolled.

In cutting the budget, administrators chose not to eat into the district’s small savings account, about $800,000 on a $43 million budget.

And it chose not to cut administration. Mead’s administrative office budget is well below the norm, about 5.3 percent of its budget. The state average is 7 percent.

Mester said the cuts are still tentative, subject to discussion with the teacher’s union.

But the money must be cut somewhere, he said. If these cuts are approved, other areas of service, such as the 5 p.m. activities bus, can be axed.

“I think we’ll know a lot more in early March,” he said.

, DataTimes