Blaine school board delays vote on cuts

In front of a standing-room only crowd inside the Blaine school district boardroom, the Blaine school board delayed its vote on a reduced education program for the 2024-25 school year by one week. The next special school board meeting will be held 7 p.m. Monday, April 29 at the district boardroom.

The board was presented with a plan to reduce roughly 30 positions throughout the district, including a K-5 principal, four special education staff, and other positions.

The proposed budget reduction would allow the district to avoid a $2.5 million deficit by reducing 11 percent of administration staff, 12 percent of classified staff, and 11 percent of teaching staff.

Blaine school board members agreed to an extra week of time to meet with the various labor unions involved and find “creative solutions,” as newly-appointed member Ryan Swinburnson said during the meeting.

“I want to be able to say, ‘This is why we had to cut the library staff person, this is why we had to cut special education,’ and I can’t answer those right now,” Swinburnson said. “I can’t answer why those cuts are the best cuts, and I think that’s what everybody deserves.”

Various staff members spoke during the public comment period of the April 22 meeting on how last year’s staffing cuts impacted the district, how more cuts will increase the workload on remaining staff, and the negative impacts it will have on students.

Carol Crauswell, a special education paraeducator at the high school, said cutting classified staff would lead to more stress, not only for the remaining classified staff, but for teachers as well.

“I don’t see how cutting classified [staff] is going to make the classrooms any safer,” Crauswell said. “I see wonderful teachers throughout the day who are so stressed I just want to give them a hug – but you can’t keep going every day hugging the teachers.”

Last year, the district eliminated 59.5 positions due to budget restraints, as reported previously by The Northern Light. Since then, voters approved a $7.5 million operations levy, which helped the district avoid even more dire financial straits, but cuts were still needed for the district to operate with a balanced budget.

“There’s no fat left to trim after last year. This is all meat,” Swinburnson said. “This is stuff that is vital to every student.”

District superintendent Christopher Granger mentioned the lack of funding from the state as one of the primary reasons for the cuts, a sentiment that was echoed by other school board members.

“Certainly, nobody on our leadership team, our department heads, our campus administrators, want to do any of these things,” Granger said. “However, we do have to balance the budget and continue to advocate in Olympia for the full funding of public education, which is [the state legislature’s] obligation under the state constitution.”

Another $500,000 in non-staff expenditures will need to be cut from the 2024-25 budget, Granger said during the meeting, and the superintendent still has the ability to adjust the final budget before board approval.

One contributing factor to the district’s $2.5 million deficit is the ending of federal government-issued emergency relief funds through the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act. Nationwide, those funds totaled more than $275 billion, with Blaine school district receiving nearly $6.25 million, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. But that money is now dried up, with no plans from the federal government to continue.

Enrollment also has an impact on how much money the district can collect from its own levies. Per state law, Blaine school district can only receive the lesser of two amounts when collecting taxes from enrichment levies like the one that passed in November 2023: $2,500 (adjusted for inflation) per full-time equivalent student, or $2.50 per $1,000 of assessed property value.

In a “property-rich” school district like Blaine, where many home values are higher than the state average, the lesser amount will always be the $2,500 (adjusted for inflation) per student amount. For the 2024-25 school year, the district will collect roughly $7.5 million.

According to district figures, before the state Supreme Court ruled in 2018 to protect funding for basic education – the McCleary case – Blaine could collect roughly $4,518 per FTE student. Now, they can only collect an inflation-adjusted $2,988 per FTE student, a difference of roughly $3 million in levy collection.

The money Blaine school district can collect through its levy is directly tied to its enrollment, which has declined 8 percent over the last five years, according to district documents. Declining birthrates in the state and Whatcom County, along with secondary students electing for online-only curriculum, account for much of the enrollment decline, according to the district.

In an attempt to retain more students, the district announced it would be launching its own online-only high school in the 2024-25 school year.

“I don’t understand how cutting programs and classified staff is going to bring any more students back to Blaine,” Crauswell said. “To me, it seems to be driving them away and there has to be another way to do this.”