Parents, staff, students rally against cuts at this Pierce County district
At a busy intersection a couple blocks from the Franklin Pierce School District office, more than a dozen parents, staff and students held colorful signs calling for district support and accountability in a time of budget cuts and allegations of discrimination.
Cars passing by honked in support as the group marched to the district office Tuesday evening ahead of the school board meeting. There, more than 60 people crowded into the board room, standing, sitting on the floor and overflowing into another room. Twenty-nine people spoke at the public hearing.
Last year the Franklin-Pierce School Board laid off 60 full-time staff, including 41 teachers amid declining enrollment and a projection of expenses higher than revenues, as previously reported by The News Tribune. On May 6 this year, the district cut 9.5 additional full-time positions, and staff were notified May 15. Most of those positions were at the high school level, said Joel Zylstra, public information officer for the district.
Teachers of color are the most impacted by the reductions in force due to seniority, Zylstra said. More than 60% of the students in the district are people of color, and many students and staff said Tuesday the district’s cuts have broken trust and damaged valuable student-mentor relationships.
In addition, the district announced in May it would be cutting its arts programs, several months after unveiling a new $12.6 million Performing Arts Center in January. Zylstra confirmed Wednesday that Washington High School’s and Franklin Pierce High School’s choir teachers positions were cut, and the band teachers would be teaching both band and choir next school year.
Zylstra said those staffing cuts were made based on student-registration rates for those classes. The number of students who signed up for choir made it “hard to justify having an entire staff member” dedicated to teaching five class periods, he said. Any student who wanted to sign up for choir will still be able to take the class, Zylstra said.
The Franklin Pierce School District includes an early-learning center, eight elementary schools, two middle schools and three high schools. There were 7,030 students and 568 certified instructional staff in the district in the 2023-2024 school year, and the district expected to spend about $127 million on personnel costs that biennial, according to a May 2024 school district presentation. Zylstra said the district’s preliminary budget figures for 2024-2025 are between $138 million and $140 million.
Zylstra said the district tries keep a fund balance at least 5% over its operating budget.
“We are under that,” he said Tuesday. “So part of our desire is to get that fund balance up so that in the future we’ll be able to have more savings going from one year to the next.”
‘They’re cutting ... the ones making the biggest impact’
Several dozen teachers, students and parents spoke at the public hearing Tuesday, denouncing the cuts to the arts, saying music education is essential to students’ growth and sense of community. Others said the choice to force band teachers to teach both band and choir was unfair, and they begged the board not to do it.
Savannah Willis, a junior at Franklin Pierce High School and former president of the Black Student Union, said, “The staff this year that they’re cutting are the ones making the biggest impact.”
“The place that those staff members hold is too important, and I can’t afford to lose that,” she said. “Those are the people that have definitely inspired a lot of kids to want to come back to our community. But I feel if they continue making actions like this, there won’t be a community to go back to.”
As a Black student, Willis said, “It really hurts” to see Black women like dean Marcisa Johnson be laid off after spending so much time making positive changes and connecting with students.
“I feel like a lot of these decisions are really reckless, and they’re just not comprehending the deeper effect,” she said. “My brother just graduated [Washington State University] with a degree in social studies. He went to Franklin Pierce High School as well … it was always his dream to come back as a teacher to FP, but if they can’t hold their promises to the staff that they have now, how do I expect them to protect my brother, not just as an employee, but as a Black man?”
District cites funding, enrollment issues
Zylstra said the cuts have been a result of the district using a staffing model based on higher enrollment than reality. The cuts also come at a time when federal money it received during the pandemic via the American Rescue Plan fund is going away, he said.
Franklin Pierce School District’s budget issues aren’t unique. The Tacoma Public Schools District is contending with a $30 million budget deficit for the 2025-2026 school year and didn’t renew the contracts for 105 employees, as previously reported by The News Tribune. Rosalind Medina, that district’s chief financial officer, told The News Tribune that 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.
About 70% of the Franklin Pierce School District’s operating budget comes from the state, 14% from local tax levies and about 7%-9% from federal grants, Zylstra said.
“The state model for funding, it doesn’t really account for, 1) the basic level of infrastructure that schools require in this era, and 2) when there are increases in investment, it doesn’t trend at the same rate as cost of living and [the implicit price deflator]” that impacts how much property tax revenue local governments can collect, Zylstra said.
Compared to other parts of Pierce County, the birth rate in Parkland is trending down and more students are transferring out of the Franklin Pierce School District to other districts that have more options for virtual school and specialized programs like trades, he said.
“And then we’ve also got certain social, familial circumstances. Some of the data that we often see is the lack of child care options in our area. So if you’ve got family in another district, it might be more convenient for them to be your child care, and then also have your kids enroll in school closer to them,” Zylstra said. “Also with employment, a lot of people leave our area to go work every day elsewhere, and so sometimes it’s easier for people to drop their kid off at school on their way to work. There’s a number of factors that go into [declining enrollment].”
Zylstra said he doesn’t anticipate there will be more cuts in the 2025-2026 school year, but the district will assess the situation again in 2027-2028.
“We certainly don’t want to make any promises from year to year, especially given the kind of the trend that we’ve seen,” he said. “There’s a mutual concern as to the impact of limited resources.”
Parents say they are frustrated
Some of the teachers, parents and students at the rally Tuesday said they were frustrated and felt like the school district and school board has heard their concerns but hasn’t implemented tangible changes.
Sharon Gold recently resigned as a clerical staffer with Franklin Pierce High School because she thought she’d face discipline for speaking out.
Gold said, “There are a lot of people who don’t realize that what’s happening is so severe because we’ve been dealing with it for so long, so it’s just like the norm.”
Data collected by the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction shows that Ford Middle School has the highest Black student discipline rate in the county, at 32.5% in 2023-2024. Gold said that rate is alarming and denounced Ford Middle School policies like a lunch-detention policy that requires students to silently face a wall for the duration of lunch in front of their peers.
“On paper, our school district says a lot of things, and then in practice, what’s really happening is not that,” said Gold, who is running for school board in November.
Alisha Chang is a substitute teacher in the district and the parent of four children in the district, one of whom recently graduated. She served as the president of the Parent Teacher Association and is the director of the Summit-Parkland Youth Association.
“I just find that there are a lot of barriers and unwelcome doors. Parents don’t feel comfortable coming on campus. Communication isn’t great, there’s not a lot of personal contact from the principal,” Chang said. “My intention this year was just to ride out the last two years that my family has at Ford. But then, you know, hearing about individual students experiences with what goes on at the school just kind of ignited me a little bit. I’ve never really liked the culture at Ford and the way they treat the kids, the way they talk about the kids, the way they talk about families, parents, students, just never sat well with me.”
Chang said she feels like the lunch-detention policy “is very punitive” and knows of families who have pulled their kids out of the district due to feeling unwelcome.
“I feel like [school administrators] are not holding themselves accountable,” she said.
When asked about Ford Middle School’s lunch-detention policy, Zylstra said he wasn’t very familiar with the situation and said the district doesn’t have one policy on how to enforce discipline. He said the district would be open to hearing from students and families and staff about their concerns and find the best solution.
Zylstra said the district is “certainly aware” of concerns about racism and discrimination in the district, which many speakers alluded to on Tuesday night. He said the district needs to pay attention to people’s experiences and said the disproportionate student discipline rates have been a focus of the district for the past couple of years. Zylstra said that rate has gone down “pretty significantly.”
When asked what the district is doing to increase enrollment and get families to stay in the district, Zylstra said there’s more the district could do.
“In the daily grind of managing schools, it’s kind of a hard thing to prioritize sometimes, but it’s vitally important. Something I think we can do better is to understand for those people that are choosing to leave their circumstances better,” he said. “And in the case of some of the familial situations that I mentioned earlier, could we be partnering with child care providers to provide child care alternatives in our district, or could we be working with workforce development to be able to create more opportunities?
“For students who might be leaving for concerns related to academics or behavior happening in their school, we need to do some work, to hear from them and understand what conditions led to them wanting to leave and be focusing on what we can do to create a better learning environment for them.”
