BBCC eyes budget and spring enrollment

May 5-MOSES LAKE - During Big Bend Community College's April 30 board meeting the college President, Sarah Thompson Tweedy, shared the counts for spring enrollment and Full Time Enrollment numbers for Spring of 2026 along with updates on where the budget sits.

"We still have some work to do in terms of systematically going through our expenses and seeing how much of the requests that we have before us, how many of those we can put off," said Thompson Tweedy. "There's the opportunity to close that gap by reducing our expenses, but the challenge is, we've also had some expenses go up."

As of April 15, 2026 the spring quarter head count was up nearly 18% from 2025, but total FTE's and state-funded FTEs were down 6.9% and 11.6% respectively, according to the board agenda.

Budget wise, as of March 31, 2026, BBCC collected 87.89% of its projected revenues and have expended 82.74% of the expense budget for the year. Both revenues and expenses are higher than budgeted amounts for the 75% point of the year.

Thompson Tweedy said projecting a yearly budget can be challenging since there are things such as utilities that the college can plan for but they never know what expenses are going to come up in any given year.

"Sometimes a boiler goes out or you have an expense that you didn't think of, so what's making it harder for the community and technical colleges is that we also have capital expenses and the legislature not fully funding the (cost of living adjustments) puts us in a position where we have to find that money," she said. "If our Running Start enrollments go down or tuition revenues go down, we still have to fund those."

The Running Start program allows qualifying students to attend college while still in high school.

Big Bend administrators have created a "budget simulator" as the college gets closer to the end of the 2025/26 school year and ready for the 2026/27 school year. The simulator allows people to look at expenses and income and try to build their own budget.

This simulator is something Thompson Tweedy said that can be used as an educational tool for those around BBCC that are interested in how budgeting at the college works.

She said there are often questions brought up on whether the school can lower or increase tuition or other functions that the school doesn't have control over. This simulator gives insight into what levers the college can pull and lets the user explore where changes can be made.

"There's just some things that are unknown, but with that budget simulator there's a lot of context, so when the user pulls up the tool, they read what's the context here of the levers we can pull," said Thompson Tweedy. "They get to kind of be CFO for the moment."

The BBCC President said that regardless of where the budget lands for the future, the college has a resilient community and great faculty that care for the students.

"Our faculty are going to do the very best they can to teach our students and the staff are going to take care of them," said Thompson Tweedy. "My job is to do the best I can by the faculty and the staff to try to get as many resources as I can into their hands so that they can do the job they love to do."

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This story was originally published May 5, 2026 at 1:41 PM.