More cuts ahead at Tacoma Public Schools? District again preparing for budget shortfalls
Tacoma Public Schools is anticipating a steeper budget shortfall to come than it faced during the current school year, in which it slashed positions and enacted other cuts to bridge a roughly $15 million gap between revenues and expenses, district officials said.
Officials for the largest school district in Pierce County, as they did last year, attributed budget woes to declining enrollment and inadequate funding from the state to cover basic education costs. Inflationary increases in the price of supplies, nutrition, transportation and insurance also play a role, as could potential cost burdens that might result from state legislative actions.
“We know there is a delta between what we have and what we need,” TPS spokesperson Tanisha Jumper said in an interview Wednesday.
Rosalind Medina, the chief financial officer for the district, told The News Tribune that it was too early to know the exact shortfall for the 2024-25 school year, with “so many variables” still to be sorted out and the district awaiting February apportionment data to help form a clearer picture.
“I would say the total overall impact would be worse than what we saw last year,” Medina said, noting that the district was bracing for a “multi-million-dollar impact.”
The district’s draft general fund budget for the current school year totaled $554 million.
TPS announced in April that it had eliminated nearly two dozen administrative positions and cut $6 million in expenses to try to offset a then-projected $10 million budget deficit for the 2023-24 school year.
That shortfall later grew to approximately $15 million or $16 million, according to Medina.
In response, TPS made moves to address the deficit and to put the district in a better financial situation for the upcoming school year, including recently enacting mid-year reductions.
TPS cut 14 office support staff, who will be leaving in the coming weeks; redeployed teachers in the district’s central office into classrooms; and snipped allocations for supplies, materials and contracts, Medina said. A hiring freeze remains in place.
Only two years ago, voters passed a $319 million replacement levy that officials said would fund 15% of daily operations and stave off cutting 500 staff members.
“It’s definitely an important part of our budget,” district spokesperson Kathryn McCarthy said Friday, noting that levies are fixed and do not flex to meet rising costs.
Voters also approved a $650 million bond measure this month to replace five deteriorating neighborhood schools and make major renovations to others.
“Even though we’ve had some reductions in enrollment and staff, we still have needs,” McCarthy said. “We still have buildings that need repairs and facilities that need renovations.”
Jumper said that budgetary decision-making was guided by how to best support students and that TPS had trimmed a little from a lot of areas this year.
“We’re not going in with a hatchet,” she said. “We’re going in with a scalpel.”
As TPS prepares to transition into the 2024-25 school year, it is “looking at everything” to arrive at a balanced spending plan, from potentially offloading surplus district properties to redeploying more staff, according to Jumper.
Districts across the state are likewise grappling with budgetary issues, TPS officials noted, even after state funding into basic education increased by billions of dollars following the state Supreme Court’s McCleary decision in 2012.
Prior to the 2019-20 school year, TPS announced it would lay off 31 people amid budget constraints. The announcement came after the district, then facing a $30 million budget shortfall, cut 43 administrative positions to pay for teacher salary increases to resolve a bargaining dispute.
While a number of staff members are expected to separate from TPS as part of normal attrition, Medina said she didn’t currently foresee layoffs being part of reductions ahead of the upcoming school year, at least not on a broad scale.
Ultimately, TPS was seeking to be thoughtful, nimble and effective with spending money, according to Jumper.
“We’re just going to keep working at it,” she said.
