School budget steps on fewer toes

Sarah Laudenbach is one of those parents who watch Spokane Public Schools like a hawk.

She wants to ensure that Spokane County’s largest school district continues to fund multiple programs for gifted students, something not required by state law.

“As budgets get cut deeper, deeper and deeper, it’s harder (for the district) to meet all these demands,” Laudenbach said Monday afternoon. “In District 81, they don’t have to provide all of the programs they do. We’re truly lucky that the district goes above and beyond what the minimum requirements are by law. I hope we can sustain that.”

However, not everyone’s so lucky. In a $271.9 million budget that makes no major program cuts like in years past, there still will be casualties.

On Wednesday, the Spokane Public Schools board of directors is expected to vote on the proposed budget. The district will end a three-year habit of cutting programs because, under advisement from the board, budget officials will pull $2.3 million out of savings to make ends meet.

In the last three years when program cuts became an annual occurrence, parents swarmed into district-hosted budget forums to show support for their favorite programs. Laudenbach attended meetings last year to share her concerns.

This year’s budget was a different story as only a handful of people attended the district budget forums.

Evidently, the targeted areas in the proposed budget did not hit a nerve.

The district will save $100,000 by not filling a vacant teaching position at Sacred Heart Medical Center. The teaching assistant who helped teach school-age children in the hospital was transferred to another position out of the hospital, Anderson said.

Another $100,000 was saved in the district’s professional-technical programs, which include areas like woodshop.

“They will spend less in supplies than they originally planned,” said Neil Sullivan, executive director of finance for the district.

In an online chat with community members earlier this year, Superintendent Brian Benzel responded to the issue of a shop question by saying the wood shop at Shaw Middle School is being temporarily removed from the curriculum in the upcoming year “because we cannot fully replace and update needed equipment.”

Benzel added, “During the next school year, the middle school principals and district staff will be discussing sustainable ways to address equipment and resource needs of the program.”

What also helped the district was the Legislature providing more money.

Due to extra state funding, the district was able to shift 25 people off levy-funded jobs to state-funded jobs, Sullivan said. The levy provides about 25 percent of the district budget.

The district also is saving about $600,000 because three elementary schools being torn down will send their students and staff to host schools for a year.

While it has been a tame year in terms of public response to the budget, Sullivan and Anderson said the following budget year will be rough.

The 2006-2007 budget will be confronted with the added costs of putting three elementary schools back on the budget. Each school has its own janitorial, secretarial and administrative staff, not to mention heating-cooling bills and maintenance costs.

At least for a year, the crowds of concerned parents have not felt compelled to lobby for saving their favorite non-required district programs.

“It’s a year we earned because we had some discipline in facing the music of what’s going on in our district,” Sullivan said.

“In the last three years prior, we have been cut, cut, cut.”

That pattern may return, depending on the Legislature’s allocations and the continuing district concern of declining enrollment, which is projected to dip below 29,000 next year. State funding depends on student numbers.

Anderson said his staff predicts the decline in the early grades will continue through 2008 before increasing again, a population pattern seen in many districts.