MISD Faces Cuts a Fourth Time as New Budget Approaches

For the fourth consecutive year, local school teachers could again see layoff notices this June as state and federal funding reductions take hold next school year, school officials said at a Feb. 24 school board meeting.

Executive Director Dean Mack told board members that the district faced a possible $1 million in cuts from a combination of sources from state and federal programs.

"We prepared a budget last year that accounted for what we knew," said Mack. "Since then, everything's changed."

The Legislature returned early this year to pass several stop-gap measures to reduce funding in several areas, including education. To balance the expected shortfall, Mack gave school board members preliminary estimates and assumptions for the 2011-2012 year to consider. The MISD is assuming enrollment will stay about the same as this year (4,000 to 4,020), the Mercer Island Schools Foundation will contribute as much or more this year for teacher funding as they did last year (14-15 positions) and the district will eliminate one empty maintenance and operations position. But most worrying to most Mercer Island parents will be the estimated reduction of teacher staffing by approximately .5 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions per grade level, or roughly 6.5 FTE overall.

"We certainly are aware of the statewide budget cuts and that they'll affect our district," said Mercer Island Education Association President Tani Lindquist, head of the local teacher's union.

"We're in an interesting situation, in that we're in a growing district and our facilities aren't designed to hold the students we have. These cuts won't resolve the overcrowding issues."

One of the most frustrating cuts, according to Mack, was approximately $213,958 cut from MISD's existing fund balance to reduce K-4 class for the current school year. Mack said the Legislature used an "erroneous" end-of-year fund balance published by the Legislature to calculate MISD's share of I-728 funding. 

"They made a serious error in judgment," Mack said.

The published balance, he said, included funding donated to the district by the local PTSA and Mercer Island Schools Foundation raised for the 2010-2011 school year that was already programmed for uses completely unrelated to basic education or classroom sizes.

Officials believe a further $365,740 in K-4 classroom size funding will be reduced this year—the district's entire fund allocation.

"We are focused on preserving class size funding," said Lindquist. "We're trying to encourage the Legislature to honor K-4 reduction monies that the voters approved so many years ago …. You've got to keep those class sizes at reasonable levels."

Other cuts include the scheduled disappearance of $435,610 in federal "stimulus" funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds and the possible disappearance of $37,439 in gifted student funding.

To recover some of their lost funding sources, according to Mack, a 4 percent temporary levy-lid lift to the district's Maintenance and Operations and two pieces of legislation to protect the calculation of the levy base could recover an estimated $400,000. The rest, officials say, would have to come from alternate sources, such as the schools foundation Breakfast of Champions and Bridge the Gap fundraisers.

"Classifieds reduced to bare bone," said MISD Superintendent Dr. Gary Plano. "There isn't any fat to cut. We're in the bargaining mode."