Tacoma Public Schools manages to close its $30 million budget gap
After months of cutting positions and displacing staff, Pierce County’s largest school district has finalized its budget for the 2025-2026 school year, closing the $30 million budget gap it was tasked with addressing.
Tacoma Public Schools has seen expenses exceed revenues on the scale of tens of millions of dollars in recent years, and this year sounded the alarm about the state of its finances. District officials have spoken publicly about how its reserves have been depleted and said TPS was dangerously close to what state officials call “binding conditions” – when the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction is required to step in to help the district balance its budget.
The district has come under fire from teachers, parents, staff and students for the way it has gone about addressing the $30 million deficit, saying the cuts it has made will disproportionately impact Tacoma’s most vulnerable students and staff.
The budget that the board approved in a 3-0 vote on July 10, with board members Enrique Leon and Elizabeth Bonbright absent from the meeting, listed total revenues in its general fund at $587,835,217 and total expenses in its general fund at $579,275,119. Chief financial officer Rosalind Medina said she anticipates the district will start the 2025-2026 academic year with an increase in its reserves by about $5 million.
The budget was approved after a public hearing that drew only one public commenter: Kari Madden, president of the Tacoma Federation for Education Support Professionals. She called for the district to get creative in its efforts to balance the budget with strategies like a freeze on administrative salaries.
“What I have been looking for most is transparency. If these measures have been considered, tell us. Tell us what creative solutions you have considered, and why you don’t believe they will work for Tacoma,” Madden said at the meeting. “Without that it just feels like you’re ignoring us and continuing with what’s easy.”
Recent budget adjustments
After the U.S. Department of Education announced it was withholding grant funding for certain federally funded programs, the district said it could lose about $2.5 million for programs that are designed to serve migrants and English-language learners.
Medina said at the meeting that the news came too late in the district’s budgeting process to account for the potential loss of those dollars, so the budget for the next school year has been built on the assumption that the federal government will provide the district with that money.
“If we lose those resources, we now have a budget issue moving into the ‘25-’26 year. It’s a fluid activity that we’re still engaging in,” Medina said. “As I said, it’s a plan.”
The Olympian reported that Washington’s Democratic members of Congress recently issued a letter calling for those funds to be released by Aug. 1, and state superintendent Chris Reykdal warned that “the rule of law is on its final breath” after the news of the withheld funds broke last week.
Superintendent Josh Garcia said it’s possible that district staff might have to return to the board to make a budget adjustment in the fall if the federal government does not deliver the money.
“We may have to bring an additional adoption for you in August if the federal government withdrew those funds, because we are so tightly in that space,” Garcia said. “In this landscape it is going to be so dynamic.”
The district also was notified late in the budgeting process that the state would not be covering the district’s transportation safety net, about $750,000 that Tacoma Public Schools typically uses to cover the cost of transporting homeless youth to school. Since the district is required by federal law to do so, it added a $750,000 cost to its budget-balancing efforts.
Tacoma Public Schools’ general fund budget is largely made up of compensation costs, which Medina said make up 84% of the 2025-2026 budget, down from 86% in the last budget. The approval of the budget also comes after the board finalized last month a new collective-bargaining agreement with the Tacoma Education Association. The approval of the union’s new collective-bargaining agreement meant an investment of $2.4 million every year for all three years of the CBA.
The new CBA includes minimal salary increases for employees represented by the union, according to union president Angel Morton. Given the district’s financial situation, the union focused on securing changes to the contract that would improve teachers’ working conditions, rather than significant pay raises, Morton said.
The contract includes an annual cost-of-living raise but stops short of giving teachers raises beyond that, and among other things sets a cap on the number of students added to special education classes, to ease the workload for teachers. If students are added, the new contract requires that a paraeducator, also known as education support professionals or ESPs, be added to support the teacher.
“Our main concern with our high-needs kids, our special populations, is that we want bodies to be able to do the work,” Morton told The News Tribune. “Just throwing money at overages, as is often the easy solution, it doesn’t help the teachers have the time to do the work to meet the needs.”
Morton said the district initially offered the union a 1% raise in addition to the cost-of-living raise, but TEA opted to take only the cost-of-living raise to allow the money for the additional 1% to be invested in the policies that would ensure more ESPs can remain employed and teacher working conditions can be improved.
“But really, what drove the conversation is the needs of the students,” she said.
