3 days ago
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.'
