TPS cuts to be ‘indefinite' unless state changes school funding model, district says
Tacoma Public Schools officials say the district will continue to make staff and program cuts 'indefinitely' in the years to come unless the state changes the way it funds public education.
The district is contending with a $30 million budget deficit for the 2025-2026 academic yea, and has started to cut staff positions and eliminate programs in an effort to address the deficit. This year's $30 million deficit is only the latest in years of budget deficits that the district has faced – going back to the 2023-2024 academic year with a $10 million deficit and the 2024-20205 academic year which saw a $40 million deficit.
Ultimately, Tacoma Public Schools has ended each academic year with a balanced budget – meaning expenditures do not exceed revenues – which it has achieved by making strategic program and staffing cuts and drawing on the district's now-depleted reserves. The district had $11.1 million in reserves by the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, a pool that's continued to dwindle to zero since then.
Rosalind Medina, the district's chief financial officer, said unless the state changes the way it funds public education, Tacoma Public Schools will never have enough money to maintain its current level of offerings to students, faculty and staff.
The district has started to make cuts that will affect the student experience, such as the elimination of offerings like elementary counselors and bilingual specialists, and it has no more reserves to draw on to mitigate current and future deficits, Medina said.
Tacoma Public Schools has consistently cited insufficient funding from the state and rising costs among reasons for the current and past deficits. Medina said the state's model for funding public education is not sufficient to support the district because it doesn't account for step increases, which are employee pay raises that come with experience. The more time employees stay with the district, the higher salary they earn. The district has high amounts of experienced staff, meaning it has higher employee compensation costs – costs that the state doesn't cover, Medina said.
Beginning and top salaries for teachers at Tacoma Public Schools also rank number one out of the top 10 largest school districts in the state and among 12 neighboring districts, Tacoma Public Schools previously reported.
'If the state is never going to fix those things, then they're never going to fix the situation of what we're seeing in school districts,' Medina told The News Tribune.
Medina said the district had been heading in the direction of increasing budget deficits for some time – but federal dollars it received during the pandemic via the American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER, helped delay the problem by a few years.
'Had COVID not happened, I think we would have hit this point a lot sooner, but COVID masked that problem because we had a disruption in our operations, and so everything looked different – and then we got all of the ESSER money for the federal stabilization,' she said.
T.J. Kelly, chief financial officer for the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, said the state has noted that more school districts are contending with financial troubles since the pandemic. Some of them are in that situation because they used temporary COVID relief funds to build new programs that they now want to keep, Kelly said – though Medina said that was not the case for Tacoma Public Schools.
'That doesn't imply that we would fault districts for how they spent the ESSER money,' Kelly told The News Tribune. 'I think a lot of districts spent the ESSER money on what they intended to be temporary programming, but then their community members liked it so much that they're trying to figure out a way to sustain those efforts, and yet they don't have the available resources to do so.'
Tacoma Public Schools officials have said that the district has depleted its reserve funds and that financial insolvency is a possibility. They've also said that 'binding conditions' are a possibility – a set of financial benchmarks that state officials provide to districts to help them balance their budgets. Kelly said districts must request binding conditions if they submit a budget for the upcoming school year, a revised budget for the current school year or a financial statement for the prior school year that indicates a negative fund balance.
The state of Washington has six districts on binding conditions, of the 295 school districts across the state. Kelly said it's the highest number of districts that have been on binding conditions in at least the last 10 years.
'We've had a lot of unique things happening post-pandemic,' he said. 'You had the sunsetting of the federal ESSER money, you've had enrollment declines, and in a lot of cases, that enrollment hasn't rebounded yet. There are many factors contributing to just the financial circumstance of all districts right now that are easily identified and pointed to.'
Binding conditions is the first in a multi-step process of increasing state involvement in a local school district's finances, starting with the setting of financial benchmarks for a district and ending in directly helping to make decisions about the management of a district's budget. If a district cannot address its budget challenges within two years of being on binding conditions, it would move to a state of 'financial oversight' and eventually 'enhanced financial oversight' if necessary, according to the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Under enhanced financial oversight, all of a district's financial decisions would be made by a financial oversight committee made up of school district experts from around the state.
If the increased oversight is not enough to help a district with its budget, the process would end in dissolving the district and having it be absorbed by a neighboring district, though that has only happened at one school district in Washington within the last 50 years, according to Kelly.
Both Kelly and Medina have said that the conditions that led to the dissolution of the Vader School District, located in Southwestern Washington along the I-5 corridor, were unique. The district had a much smaller tax base than Tacoma does, and it ended up in a position where it could not offer students the full 180 days of instruction that the state requires. Medina said she doesn't foresee Tacoma Public Schools ending up in such a situation, but she did warn that the district will need to see significant changes in the funding it receives from the state for the district to be able to stop making cuts.
David Knight is an associate professor of education finance and policy at the University of Washington. Knight agreed that the state's funding model for public education in Washington is unsustainable. He said the only solution to address it would be for the state to identify new revenue streams – a difficult task in a state without an income tax.
School funding has long been a point of contention in Washington. The state Supreme Court ruled in favor of plaintiffs in the lawsuit McCleary v. Washington in 2012, which alleged that the state was failing to adequately fund public education. The Supreme Court noted in its response that it was the Legislature's 'paramount duty to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste or sex.'
Tacoma Public Schools officials have said that the share of the state budget dedicated to education has declined in the years since the decision on the lawsuit.
'That is part of the reason why we feel the crunch of revenues,' Medina said at the district's May 22 board meeting. 'We're not able to keep up with inflation, we're not able to keep up with the competitive market driven salaries that we offer, and the state is not providing us with revenues in order to do so. We're seeing the effects of that in the current year.'
Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, a Seattle Democrat who is also the chair of the House Education committee, said the structure of education funding in Washington is 'mired in 19th century ideas,' in which available funding dictates the education delivery system and not vice versa.
'I think that there is a point that is made by the local districts that we have not really tackled as a state what will it take to adequately fund the 21st century education system that we all demand for our students and of the system,' Santos told The News Tribune. 'So until we start with that question, as long as we continue to fund with this 19th century model, then yes, we will always have a challenge.'
Santos said inflation has been 'the biggest challenge' in recent years for school districts and the state.
'I can appreciate the perspective of local districts,' Santos said. 'There's not going to be a single district that says that the state provides enough funding.'
Knight agreed that it's unlikely that Tacoma Public Schools could face dissolution. He said school districts across the state are feeling the impact of insufficient state funding and rising costs, and it's only a matter of time before another lawsuit comes before the state, making the case that the state has not been fulfilling its promise of maintaining public education as its 'paramount duty.'
'At some point, as they make more and more cuts, school districts will have a strong legal case, to bring back to the courts to say that the state legislature is not amply funding education,' Knight told The News Tribune. 'That option is never off the table.'
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Politico
29 minutes ago
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Yahoo
an hour ago
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Florida faces alarming rise in student absences; see the data for your school
Ivan Flores didn't love school before the pandemic hit, but his views soured more when he did ninth grade online and off campus. 'I was just at home doing nothing, waking up late, missing assignments,' he said. When he resumed in-person classes at Evans High School in the 2021-22 school year, that habit stuck. His attendance was spotty and his classwork often undone. In tenth grade he estimated he missed nearly 60 days of school, or a third of the academic year. He is part of an alarming trend. Absenteeism across Florida skyrocketed beginning with that COVID-19 interlude — and, confounding experts' predictions and defying educators' hopes, it hasn't come back down. Nearly one million Florida students missed more than three weeks of school last year, a staggering number of chronically absent children undermining their academic success. In the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic, about 20% of Florida's public school students missed 10% or more of the school year, meeting the state definition of chronically absent. That figure topped 32% the year after COVID shuttered schools and has barely inched down since — remaining above 31% in the 2023-34 school year, the latest year for which data is available, an analysis by the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel shows. Central Florida's schools counted more than 145,000 chronically absent students who missed 18 or more days out of that 180-day school year. Orlando's three downtown sports venues combined couldn't hold them all. Though 2024-25 attendance information is not yet available statewide, early data from Osceola and Seminole county schools shows some modest improvements but rates still well above pre-pandemic levels. Educators say the pandemic, which shuttered all Florida schools and forced students to study online, fundamentally broke some parents' and students' bonds with education. COVID-19 created new hardships especially for families living in poverty, and those challenges impacted their ability to get their children to school. But something less tangible shifted, too. The pandemic disrupted attendance habits, accustomed students to looser standards and convinced them in-person classes mattered less. 'Once they got comfortable with not going into that building, they got comfortable,' said Tequila Dillon, whose daughter ran into serious attendance problems at her Orange County high school before turning things around. Chronic absenteeism is a nationwide phenomenon, one that is fueling falling test scores in this state and others. But Florida so far has failed to take a comprehensive approach to the problem. Last year, Attendance Works, an education advocacy group, urged all 50 states to recognize absenteeism as the most crucial issue facing education and tackle it with an 'all-hands-on-deck approach' from the governor's office on down. Florida has not followed any of its recommendations, such as launching a statewide public awareness campaign, holding schools accountable for reducing absenteeism or publishing a real-time attendance dashboard. The state hasn't even adopted common measurements for tracking absent students. And when Attendance Works this year contacted all 50 states seeking their latest data and information on absenteeism, Florida was the only one that did not respond, according to the advocacy group's report released Tuesday. The state's indifference has left districts on their own, notching defeats and some small victories, like Ivan, who ultimately realized his behavior was undermining his future. 'This was little kid stuff,' the Valencia College student said of his former patterns. But there are not enough Ivans. The news organizations' analysis of attendance data since 2018 found that: Absenteeism is most pronounced among high school students, with 37% of students missing a large amount of school in 2023-24, up from less than a quarter pre-pandemic. Chronic absenteeism also surged in elementary schools, from 18% to 28%, and in middle schools, from 18% to 31%. Chronic absenteeism in Florida has gotten worse in 66 of the state's 67 counties. The only exception is Hendry County, a tiny district serving fewer than 8,000 kids in southwest Florida. Absenteeism grew in all of the state's large metro areas, rising from 21% to 35% in Orange County, for example, from 29% to 45% in Duval County, from 19% to 31% in Hillsborough County and from 19% to 28% in Miami-Dade. At schools where the majority of kids live in poverty, about 35% miss school regularly, compared to 19% for schools where fewer than a quarter live in poverty. At Leesburg High School in Lake County, about three-quarters of the students are economically disadvantaged and chronic absenteeism jumped from just over one-third in 2018-19 to almost 60% last year. But even in wealthier places, schools now wrestle with attendance problems far more often than before the pandemic struck in March 2020. Consider Oviedo High School in Seminole County, the region's most well-off county, where 13.5% of students were chronically absent before COVID-19. That rate has since doubled, sitting at 28.6% last year. The implications are vast. 'If the pandemic was an earthquake, the subsequent rise in absenteeism has been a tsunami that is continuing to disrupt learning,' said Thomas Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard University, in a Harvard publication posted in February. Math and reading test scores have dropped since the pandemic, and that can be linked to the large numbers of students who are chronically absent, said Kane, co-author of the Education Recovery Scorecard, which tracks how districts nationwide are recovering from COVID-19. Florida's middle schoolers posted their lowest reading and math scores in more than 20 years on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, called the 'nation's report card.' The state's fourth graders scored a 20-year low in reading. Florida high school seniors in 2024 posted the state's lowest SAT scores in a decade. Nationally, students also performed worse in 2024 on reading and math NAEP tests compared to before COVID-19. And across the country, chronic absenteeism almost doubled from 16% before the pandemic to about 28% during the 2022-23 school year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. Florida's nearly 34% chronic absenteeism rate for that school year ranked 40th nationally, meaning it performed better than only ten other states. To combat absenteeism, local educators say they have tried almost everything, from home visits to find out the why behind the absences to pep rallies and pizza parties that try to make school fun. They offer programs to help students catch up on missing work, partner with nonprofits to provide families with needed social services and sometimes use truancy courts to prod those with the worst attendance records to come to school regularly. They're making inroads, but progress can be slow. Janet Rosario and her daughter Jahlisha, the youngest of her five children, appeared in Orange County's truancy court last month, one of the regular hearings they must attend. That court, overseen by Magistrate Lisa Smith Bedwell, heard 128 cases this year where it can order counseling, community service, and even legal action. Jahlisha, a student at Sally Ride Elementary School in Taft, entered the truancy court system after she missed about 50 days of school during both the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. She's missed more than 20 days during the just-finished school year, an improvement but still a serious problem. Talking with Janet Rosario conveys the depth of the attendance challenge. Until March when they moved into an apartment, Rosario, her husband and their children were living out of Central Florida hotel rooms, with the seven-person family often crammed into one room with two beds. Rosario said the family doesn't own a car, so their transportation challenges coupled with her long work hours at a restaurant and the family's housing problems sometimes meant school attendance wasn't top priority. Two of Rosario's other children are in truancy court too. That May afternoon in the hearing room, Jahlisha sat next to her mother with a pair of headphones around her neck. She said little but exchanged smiles with the court's bailiff when she walked in. Rosario explained to Bedwell why Jahlisha had missed three more days of school since their last hearing: a stomach bug going around the family. 'You can see it in her eyes … she's not 100% today,' Rosario said to the magistrate. She also told Bedwell that she hoped that the family's constant moves were over and that Jahlisha would be in school regularly in the coming academic year. Rosario told a reporter later that she knows it is important for her children to be in school, and she worries when they are not. 'Why do you want to have them locked up in a hotel? They think too much. They're stuck in four walls, and they just look around,' Rosario said. Across Central Florida, school officials labor to translate realizations like Rosario's into better performance. Kelly Maldonado, principal of Forsyth Woods Elementary School in Azalea Park, visits four or five of her students at their homes every week, trying to figure out why they're missing so much school. All of Forsyth Woods' students are from economically disadvantaged families. Before COVID-19, about 22% of its student body missed 10% of the school year. Last year, 38% were absent that often. Maldonado once visited the family of a first-grader who had missed more than 150 days of school since kindergarten. The student's father had passed away, the mother was struggling with her mental health, and the child had moved in with their grandparents, who weren't bringing him to school. The mother felt ashamed that her son had missed so much school. 'I just gave Mom a hug, and I said, 'No one's here to judge, no one's here to place blame. We just want the baby in school. We just need him to come back to school.'' she said. The student returned the next day, and has only missed 10 days of school in the last four years, something Maldonado calls her 'greatest success story' as a principal. The bottom line: 'If they're not here, if they're not sitting in that classroom, they cannot learn,' she said. At Central Avenue Elementary School in Kissimmee, Amber Blondman spends her days trying to reach the families of absent students. All the school's students are from low-income families and the percentage of chronically absent students hit 44% last year, up from 34% before the pandemic. But families struggling financially often change addresses and cellphone providers, making them hard to track down. Blondman, who oversees the campus' attendance efforts, estimates she gets one response for every seven phone calls, emails and texts she sends to parents. When she does reach families, she often learns of serious struggles. And sometimes, Blondman finds a child who just doesn't want to come to school — and a parent who doesn't force the issue. One of the school's kindergartners this year racked up almost 60 unexcused absences by March. She didn't like school, her mother told Blondman, because she fell on the playground back in August. Blondman and other school staff met with the mother and daughter, stressing the importance of daily attendance and suggesting a way to change the 5-year-old's attitude. 'We created a plan where, if she came to school every day for a week, on Friday, mom would take her out to ice cream,' Blondman said. 'It made her want to come to school.' At Evans High School in Pine Hills, Tequila Dillon's daughter liked school before the pandemic hit, but the Orange teenager's time doing online classes changed things. Jon'Tayasia Dillon-White returned to campus as a 10th grader, but most days she skipped, with her grades plummeting as a result. She fooled her mother for a while, telling her on many mornings she was getting ready for school but going back to bed as soon as her mother left for work. 'I didn't want to listen to my mom,' the teenager said. 'I didn't want to get up and go to school.' When someone from Evans knocked on their door, Dillon learned how many school days Jon'Tayasia had missed and that both of them could be headed to truancy court. Evans offers a noon-to-5 p.m. catch-up program for students, one that predates the pandemic but has proved crucial since. It is a way, administrators say, to reconnect students to Evans High in a smaller setting with a schedule more appealing to those constantly skipping. In that program, Jon'Tayasia made up missing work and by last May had earned enough credits to graduate. Evans High, where almost all students are from low-income families, has knocked down its chronic absentee rate in the past few years but it was still at 55% last year, meaning almost 1,500 students skipped at least three weeks of classes. That's an improvement from the 2021-22 school year when it topped 67%, but far above the 45% rate before COVID. Kenya Nelson-Warren, Evans' principal, said she's open to almost any tactic to combat attendance problems, even if that means heading to a nearby fast-food restaurant. There she and a dean sometimes look for students who, after they've been dutifully dropped off by their parents, have walked off campus. 'This is not Evans High School,' Nelson-Warren will shout to the teenagers hanging out or sleeping at the restaurant's tables. 'You aren't learning here at McDonald's.' During the pandemic, when all classes went online, students could find assignments and class resources on their laptops. Now, some think they can do whatever work their teachers post, and that means being in class is optional, she said. But missing class means they miss instruction, practice and discussion — and that makes it hard to fully learn the material, particularly in math, where students lost the most ground because of COVID interruptions. 'You're trying to complete the assignment blindly,' Nelson-Warren added. Schools' efforts to combat absenteeism matter, but so does a state's, said Hedy Chang, executive director and founder of Attendance Works. 'State leadership to reduce chronic absence is crucial to ensure that all schools and districts, not just a few innovators, have the tools and skills to support excellent attendance,' she said in a statement released with the group's recent report. State Rep. Dana Trabulsy, R-Fort Pierce, sponsored bills this year and last that would have been a small step toward that goal for Florida, requiring common standards for measuring absenteeism. Currently, each school district can decide how many hours of a school day students can miss and still be counted as present. 'We can't allow them to be the lost generation,' Trabulsy said after the 2024 legislative session. But her proposed legislation never got out of committee last year and this year, though it passed unanimously in the House, it died in the Senate, which never took it up. Senate leaders view attendance as a local matter best tackled by school districts, said Katie Betta, a spokeswoman for the Senate president's office. 'There is no question that absenteeism is a problem, but the question is whether interventions and solutions should be determined at the district level, or dictated from Tallahassee,' she said. 'The Senate has generally taken the position that individual school districts know their communities best and are better able to design, implement, and maintain their own policies.' Experts question that approach. Kane, the Harvard researcher, agrees with Attendance Works that state and local governments should do more. He suggests making absenteeism a public cause. 'Most mayors can't teach algebra one, but they could do a public information campaign,' he said. Indiana, he said, posts a regularly updated attendance dashboard on its education department website. The state's legislature also just passed a law requiring the Indiana Department of Education to study absenteeism, collect data on the reasons students are missing school and publish the information each year. Last year, Indiana's chronic absenteeism rate dropped to below 18%, its lowest mark since the pandemic, though still above the about 11% rate it had in 2019. Ivan's attendance record turned around after he was offered a place in Evans' noon-to-5.p.m. program and encouraged to consider the offerings at the local technical college. A welding class intrigued him. Soon missing so many school days stopped making sense. Ivan graduated from Evans in May 2024 and then enrolled in Valencia's welding technology program. He is slated to graduate from the college program at the end of this month. 'I needed to calm down,' he said. 'I was getting too old.'
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an hour ago
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Analysis-US stocks heal from tariff pain but trade news to keep markets edgy
By Lewis Krauskopf NEW YORK (Reuters) -After months of Wall Street gyrations to the twists and turns of U.S. trade policy, signs suggest stock investors are becoming more resilient to developments and cautiously defaulting to optimism that they have weathered the worst of the tariff-related shocks. U.S. equities have edged higher over the past two weeks as they digest a sharp rally that has brought the benchmark S&P 500 within 3% of its February record high, fueled in part by easing fears about the economic fallout from tariffs. A case in point: stocks ended Monday's session higher even as markets had grappled with President Donald Trump's announcement of doubling steel tariffs to 50%. Trump's stunning "Liberation Day" tariff announcement on April 2 sent stocks plunging and set off some of the most extreme market swings since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Since then, volatility measures have moderated considerably, and, with the market's rebound, there are signs that technical damage from the slide has healed. Still, investors are mindful that markets remain susceptible to daily swings stemming from negotiations between the U.S. and trading partners as key deadlines near in coming weeks, with elevated valuations making stocks more vulnerable to disappointments. "What has allowed this almost full recovery in the stock market hinges on the negotiations that are now under way," said Angelo Kourkafas, senior investment strategist at Edward Jones. "Markets, consumers and businesses have vested interest that we get clarity sooner than later," Kourkafas said. "So potentially it's going to be a critical summer that is going to test the market's momentum." After falling to the brink of confirming a bear market on April 8, the S&P 500 has surged back nearly 20% and erased its losses for the year. Near the halfway mark of 2025, the index is now up 1.5%. While Trump's tariffs remain a risk, the market no longer is perceiving them as "this big outlier event," said Keith Lerner, co-chief investment officer at Truist Advisory Services. "We went through a period where the only thing that mattered for the markets was tariffs," Lerner said. "And now we are in a period where tariffs still matter, but they are not the only thing that matters." Truist is among the firms becoming more upbeat on the outlook for equities, with RBC Capital Markets and Barclays this week lifting their year-end targets for the S&P 500. Deutsche Bank strategists this week boosted their year-end target to 6,550, about 10% above current levels, as they cited a less severe expected tariffs hit to corporate profits. The strategists noted they expect the rally to be "punctuated by sharp pullbacks on repeated cycles of escalation and de-escalation on trade policy." Several investors and strategists pointed to a "base case" on Wall Street emerging for Trump's tariffs - 10% broadly, 30% on China along with some specific sectoral levies. The market "started saying the worst is behind us in terms of this whole tariff discussion," said King Lip, chief strategist at BakerAvenue Wealth Management. "The U.S. and China still have a lot of things to work out, but likely the worst is behind us." MODERATING VOLATILITY Volatility measures indicate calming fears about trade. The Cboe Volatility Index, an options-based measure of investor anxiety, reached 52.33 in early April, its highest closing level in five years, but has steadily receded and hovered at 17.6 on Wednesday, around its long-term median. In another sign, the average daily range of the S&P 500 has fallen to about 75 points, on a 10-session basis, about one-third the size from April during the height of post-Liberation Day volatility. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has traded above its 200-day moving average - a closely watched trend-line - for about three weeks. The percentage of S&P 500 stocks trading in some form of an uptrend has jumped from 29.4% at the April 8 low to 60% as of last week, said Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial. "There is a growing list of technical evidence that suggests this recovery is real," Turnquist said in a note this week. Options data also suggests growing bullishness. Over the last month, on average about 0.84 S&P 500 call options traded daily against every put contract traded, the most this measure of sentiment has favored call contracts in at least the last four years, according to a Reuters analysis of data from options analytics firm Trade Alert. Calls confer the right to buy stocks at a specific price and future date, while puts grant the right to sell shares. To be sure, some investors warn the threat of tariff disruptions is not going away anytime soon and are wary of market complacency. "There is still just so much uncertainty," said Matthew Miskin, co-chief investment strategist at John Hancock Investment Management. Indeed, talk of the acronym "TACO" - Trump Always Chickens Out - has spread on Wall Street as a rationale for why markets should not fear harsh tariffs because many believe they will likely be walked back. But some investors are worried about a backlash from the president. BCA Research strategists said they were wary of "relying on a TACO backstop." "Trade tensions may have peaked, but we are unwilling to assume they won't sporadically rise from current levels," BCA said in a note this week. Stock valuations also continue to swell, with the S&P 500's forward price-to-earnings ratio reaching 21.7, its highest level since late February and well above its long-term average of 15.8, according to LSEG Datastream. Stocks are at "a more vulnerable level," said Chuck Carlson, chief executive officer at Horizon Investment Services. "The market is probably going to be a little bit more sensitive to what it perceives as negative news."
