‘Defund admin.’ Unions rally against Tacoma Public Schools as cuts to continue
As Tacoma Public Schools continues to grapple with its looming $30 million budget deficit, a coalition of the unions that bargain with the district rallied to call for the district to maintain its support for education-support staff and early-career teachers.
The district’s board on May 22 met to discussits efforts to address a $30 million deficit, just days after Gov. Bob Ferguson signed the final $78 billion state budget into law. District chief financial officer Rosalind Medina provided a more detailed overview of the district’s roughly $577 million general fund budget, noting that without any reserve funds, the district is “dangerously close” to binding conditions – a situation in which state officials must intervene to help struggling school districts balance their budgets.
“We do still have budget reductions coming,” Medina said at the meeting. “We have not finalized our budget. We have not finalized making decisions about our positions, and so I don’t want to give false hope that this is the end, unfortunately.”
The meeting came after the district implemented its first round of cuts in an effort to reduce expenditures, largely citing inflation and insufficient funding in the state budget for education. The district did not renew the contracts for 105 provisional employees and made changes that “directly impacted” 118 education-support professionals and 30 office professionals/professional technical staff.
Teachers, support staff and parentshave criticized the district for making reductions before taking pay cuts to their six-figure salaries, saying that the first round of staff cuts have disproportionately affected the district’s most vulnerable staff and early-career teachers, many of whom work in special education.
That outrage was apparent both before and during the board meeting, when hundreds marched from First United Methodist Church to the district’s Central Administration Building. Participants in the rally held signs that read “schools just want to have funds” or led chants saying “defund admin.” Nearly every chair in the district’s regular board meeting room was taken, with protesters lining the walls, waiting in the hallway, filling out an overflow room next to the main board room and gathering in the parking lot to chant during the meeting.
“You shouldn’t be making over $200k,” a protester called out as Superintendent Josh Garcia was speaking during the meeting, met with deafening applause from the audience.
Medina said the district would continue to implement cuts and changes to address the deficit, including a new “pay to participate” model for student athletics participation that the board unanimously approved at the same meeting. Under the new model, which would go into effect during the next school year, students must pay $90 per high school sport they want to participate in and $50 per middle school sport.
The program would raiseroughly $260,675 in revenue from schools across the district, which would be used within the district’s athletics and activities department for student programming. Students who qualify for free or reduced lunch will be exempt from the fees, according to the proposal.
“No student will be denied participation,” Garcia said at the meeting. “If a family comes to us and says, ‘Hey, we don’t qualify but we just can’t afford,’ we’re not going to turn a student away.”
The district will continue to make cuts and changes before the next deadline of June 13. Tacoma Public Schools most recently on May 20 listed 58 new job postings for the 118 education support professionals whose positions were “impacted” by the recent staffing changes. The district is encouraging staff who have been displaced to apply for those positions, it said in a statement.
“Our Human Resources team will prioritize displaced building or school support ESP staff applications for these openings and place staff first based on the minimum qualifications and then based on seniority within the school district,” the statement reads.