Spokane Public Schools Board approves $600 million spending plan as staff union ratify new employee contracts

All the pieces fell into place for the first day of Spokane Public Schools, which open Tuesday.

Perhaps not the flashiest, but certainly integral to the district, the school board adopted its $611 million operating budget for the upcoming school year Wednesday night, continuing a streak of steady contraction since the expiration of one-time COVID relief funds.

Moments later at a separate meeting across town, members from the Spokane Education Association union voted to ratify a new three-year contract that starts this school year, outlining details of staff members’ pay, calendar and classroom conditions. Contracts include a 2.5% salary increase for all employees in the first year.

“It’s very appropriate that ratification is happening on the same night that we’re approving our budget, because we want to have fiscal sustainability and a balanced budget, which we do, and we also want to have a contract agreement with our labor partners, which we do,” Superintendent Adam Swinyard said after reading the news of ratification.

Union members present at Wednesday’s general assembly meeting voted 91.3% to ratify the tentative agreement that had been struck after midnight the day prior in extensive bargaining sessions with school district and union representatives.

“Our bargaining teams were happy to bring members contract language that addresses things they indicated in listening sessions and surveys,” SEA President Sara Munro wrote in a statement. “We are pleased that the District works with us and respects the work employees do and they showed that through the negotiation process.”

A pay bump is in store for district employees to the tune of 2.5% for the coming school year. Pay increases the following two years are subject to the Legislature’s annual decisions on raises for state employees based on inflation. The union represents eight different employee groups, including certificated staff, educational support staff, trades staff, custodial staff, nutrition staff, secretarial staff and information technology support.

Teacher pay is based on years of experience and degrees earned, ranging from $54,700 to $117,000, as of last year’s salary schedule. The average teacher in Spokane Public Schools earned $90,000 in base pay the 2023-24 school year, according to OSPI, plus an extra $12,500 in supplemental pay for other duties.

Costs for personnel make up the lion’s share of the school district budget adopted Wednesday. More than 75% of expenditures go to the pay and benefits for the nearly 6,000 people employed by the third-largest school district in the state.

The district has been slowly but surely shrinking its operating budget by around $15 to 30 million each year emerging from the pandemic, Swinyard said in an interview Thursday.

“By contracting slowly, we’re able to reduce the number of employees we have at the rate of attrition, which allows us to avoid layoffs while at the same time ensuring that we don’t have any massive programmatic reductions or eliminations,” he said. “So it’s been a highly successful plan.”

Around 150 employees retire or resign each year, Swinyard said, enough so the district can reduce spending by not filling these positions with new staff. In some cases, employees are transferred or “involuntarily reassigned” to another building or grade level to fill the needs left by departing employees.

This year, there were around 60 staff involuntarily reassigned and 65 fewer certificated positions filled than last year. The number of classified positions like support staff increased by around 10.

“Our staff are noticing that there’s less adults working in the schools, but we believe that we’ve done it in a way that’s been methodical without creating massive disruption to our kids,” Swinyard said.

The district anticipates a revenue of around $608 million, less than its expenditures by a few million but still in the 3% comfort zone, Swinyard said.

Nearly half of that comes from the state apportionment based on student enrollment, another 23% also from the state in the form of grants, 15% from local taxpayers collected under levies and around 8% from the federal government.