Budget

A Message from Superintendent Greg Baker

Dear students, staff, families and community,

We are continuing to plan our budget for the 2026-27 school year, and I want to provide an update on this difficult budget cycle.

I also want to acknowledge that there is a lot going on across our city, state and country right now with unrest and uncertainty.

Our schools provide safe, loving spaces for our students – ALL students, and that will not change, regardless of any challenges.

First, gratitude

 We are so grateful to our community and the support you give our district through levies and bonds. Our recent levies helped significantly but didn’t solve all our shortfalls. Levies are capped by the state, restricting how much we can collect. This is especially challenging because the state legislature continues to fail to provide ample funding for PreK-12 education.

More than two thirds of our revenue is funded by the state, but we won’t know how much we are getting until legislators finish their budget session, scheduled to end in mid-March.

While we wait to see what happens in Olympia, we are focusing on balancing our budget.

Increasing costs and inflation

There are many examples of districts facing increasing costs and state funding falling short. One example in our district is the cost and reimbursement of utilities and insurance costs.

Because the state underfunds districts across the state, including ours, and the governor’s budget proposal does not include additional funds for public education, we need to look for cost-savings.

I have accepted the recommendation of the high school schedule committee, which calls for shifting from our current eight-period schedule to a seven-period schedule. This will significantly save money while still allowing the most choice and instructional time for students. See more about the high school schedule.

I’m grateful for those who served on the high school schedule committee and those of you who offered feedback this fall, which helped influence our desire to maintain as many classes and electives for students. We will be looking at other ways to save money across our district, and we will share those plans in future updates.

Declining birth rates, enrollment

Our state superintendent recently spoke about the upcoming legislative session and birth rate trends and shared the graph below. I encourage you to watch his press conference.

As you can see, the number of births across our state is declining, which means lower enrollment in schools.

 

This trend is consistent with what we see in Bellingham; enrollment projections for our district show a continuing dip in the coming years, despite continued growth in the city, in part because the new construction isn’t affordable for families.

Our district needs to be judicious and flexible as we experience ups and downs in enrollment so that we can continue to offer a robust education while being efficient with facilities and staffing.

We will be engaging our community in several ways to continue this conversation; we are working with a demographer to better understand enrollment trends and potential ways to contract and expand across our 22 schools and additional programs.

This could mean adjusting construction timelines and/or repurposing some of our schools or sites. Regardless of growth or reduction, we want to ensure our schools are high-quality and modernized.

I am confident we can weather these challenges, and that students in Bellingham will continue to receive a great education, despite limited resources from the state. This is thanks to the unrelenting dedication of staff, involvement of parents/guardians and support of the community.

What can we do?

If you have made it this far, maybe you are asking what you can do to help.

One way to advocate is to share your views with your state representatives.

• This one-page document summarizes shortfalls and our messaging to the state. It also includes some creative ideas that are cost-neutral to the state but would greatly help districts by giving them more flexibility.
• We will continue to advocate to our local legislators. Our school board is involved in these efforts, as well. They recently approved a resolution urging the state legislature to honor its constitutional duty to fully fund public education and penned an open letter to legislators.

All efforts are appreciated.

We will continue to work on a balanced budget for next year and share more information soon.

Our district, our students, our staff and our community deserve better from the state.

Please share questions and thoughts here.

Greg Baker

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To Whom it May Concern,

Washington’s Constitution is crystal clear about one thing: educating our children isn’t just a budget line — it is the State’s paramount duty. Our public schools are supposed to be funded fully, amply, and equitably so that every child, in every community, has access to a high-quality education.

That’s not happening, and the consequences reach far beyond school walls.

School districts across Washington — including Bellingham — are being asked to serve more complex student needs with less and less support. Inflation has pushed the cost of heat, insurance, transportation, basic staffing, and special education far beyond what the State funds. Districts are cutting back, draining reserves, and relying on local levies to fill gaps that, by law, the State is supposed to fund. As a result, school districts like Bellingham are cutting programs, draining reserves, and forced to consider options that are likely to increase class size, reduce student choice, and add to educator and staff workloads.

This doesn’t just hurt children — though it most certainly does. This legislative failure harms our entire community, our workforce, and the long-term health of Washington’s economy.

Here is what this looks like in real terms:

• Essential operating costs have skyrocketed — insurance up more than 100%, utilities up over 40% — while state funding has barely moved.
• Special education is dramatically underfunded, forcing districts to shift millions away from general education and leaving all students and teachers with fewer supports.
• Outdated state formulas — including regionalization and experience factors — fail to reflect current housing costs and labor markets, and they fail to honor our teachers commitments and experience.
• Regionalization adjustments — meant to account for local housing and labor markets — no longer match reality, leaving Bellingham with the lowest adjustment in the county despite having the highest median housing cost.
• And when enrollment fluctuates, the State has considered pulling back already-budgeted dollars — even though schools’ fixed costs don’t shrink when student numbers dip.

When we underfund public schools, we all pay the price.

 Students lose opportunities.

 Families lose stability.

 Employers lose a prepared workforce.

 Communities lose the very institutions that hold us together.

 And the state loses the long-term economic strength that only a well-educated population can provide.

We can do better. And the Constitution requires us to do better.

We, the undersigned labor, community, education, and advocacy organizations, call on the Washington State Legislature to:

1. Honor the Constitution and fully fund public education
2. Stop tying essential funding to enrollment fluctuations
3. Fix outdated formulas — including MSOCs, regionalization, and experience factors — using current data
4. Fully fund special education and other state-mandated services
5. Create a stable, equitable, sustainable revenue framework for the long term that strengthens not only schools, but our entire state.

Fully funded public schools are not just an investment in children; they’re the foundation of a strong workforce, a healthy democracy, and vibrant local economies. Every child, in every community, deserves a school system that prepares them for a thriving future. Their  well-being—and our state’s--depend on it.

We call on the Legislature to meet this moment and keep the promise our Constitution makes: that Washington’s children, families, and communities will never be asked to succeed without the tools they need to thrive.

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A Message from Superintendent Greg Baker

Dear students, families, staff and community.

Thanks to those who shared input on possible changes to the high school schedule. Our feedback form is still open, and we’d love to hear from you.

We recently filmed a “What’s Up, Doc?” episode all about high school schedule and budget and I encourage you to watch or listen (Apple or Spotify) as we discuss common questions.

Thank you to Mira, who attends Sehome High School, for her thoughtful interview and questions around this timely topic. We discuss state funding, AP courses and class size, among other things.

 

Chapters are listed at the bottom of the video, and you can bounce between topics that interest you.

We appreciate your interest and feedback!

Greg Baker

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A Message from Superintendent Greg Baker

Dear staff, students, families and community,

Bellingham Public Schools, like other districts across the state and country, continues to face budget challenges, and we continue to seek ways to proactively balance our budget.   

• Local levies: we are so grateful our voters have checked that box for us! Thank you, local voters for supporting our district via the supplemental operations levy and the facilities maintenance levy. The levies approved last week help our budget, but unfortunately, as we have shared previously, they do not fully solve all of our budget issues.  

• State funding: we will continue to advocate the legislature for additional state funding and revisions to the state’s public education models that are inadequate, outdated and broken.   

• Reduce expenditures: we will continue to evaluate costs, including schedules, staffing and programs. One example that has continued to come up is our high school schedule, which we enhanced with more electives in 2018 when state funding more adequately covered needs and created opportunities.  

I have received some questions about the high school schedule, and I want to clarify some things.

• We do not have plans to reduce or eliminate AP or other college prep courses, regardless of schedule.
• We have not made any decisions to change our high school schedule.
• We are doing an initial exploration of different high school schedules through a committee made up of staff to help evaluate positives, challenges and questions, should we decide to change ours in the future.
• The committee is still meeting, and I plan to share their thinking with our community and ask for input from students, families and staff.

In the meantime, we welcome your advocacy as well as your understanding of the difficult choices districts face due to inadequate state funding. Please feel free to share input here.  

Greg Baker

Bellingham Public Schools’ budget is prepared in accordance with the laws and legal requirements of the school district board, Washington state and the federal government. The budget is a document that demonstrates our values and how the school district will direct limited resources to achieve the goals described in The Bellingham Promise, our strategic plan. 

We receive most of our funding from the state and through local levies and bonds. We get additional dollars from grants and the federal government.  

Visit the budget for current and historical budget information and ASB reports. 

Compared to 2019-20, our enrollment is down about 482 students.

When we dig into the reasons why some students have left Bellingham Public Schools, it’s mostly due to interest in homeschooling or moving out of the district. Some have assumed we have “lost” a significant number of students to private schools in the area, but as private schools are not required to report enrollment to the state, this assumption is difficult to verify. Unfortunately, we are also seeing declining birth rates in Whatcom County and across WA State, which will not help our future enrollment.

Our budget challenges are not unique to Bellingham. School districts across our state and the country are facing similar funding challenges.  

School districts, including BPS, are facing reductions for a number of reasons. The most significant reason is that state funding is not keeping pace with inflation and district demands.  

Our state’s funding models and formulas are flawed.  

Like nearly every district in Washington, we rely on levies to provide essential funding for programs not fully funded by our state. Like other school districts in Whatcom County and across the state, we put forth two levies every four years for voters to consider: an operations and technology levy. These replacement levies pay for nearly 25 percent of the cost of educational services that the state does not adequately fund.  

Because the state’s funding has been limited, we rely more and more on our levies to sustain our budget to pay for staff and programs. We are not using levy funds as they were intended for enrichment, rather they help fund “basic education” and daily operations.  

Student enrollment is the key driver for the state funding formula.  We are eligible to receive funding from the state for every student enrolled in our district. Enrollment is a critical factor in determining our revenues and costs.  In recent years, our state, including Bellingham, have experienced low birth rate trends and a slow recovery of enrollment since COVID.  As our enrollment decreases, funding declines.  

We do not know specifically what programs or positions could be affected or reduced. We will rely on our guiding principles and input from our community to help us make tough decisions, as needed.  

We use the adage “bonds are for building.” Funding for any of our new schools (Sehome, Sunnyland, Parkview and Alderwood), fields (Squalicum, Bellingham and Sehome) and our new District Office were all built thanks to supported bonds from 2013, 2018 and 2022. We cannot use bond dollars to pay teacher salaries or other teaching and learning programs. Bond dollars are restricted to construction and remodeling projects. 

School districts are placed into binding conditions when the district’s budgeted expenditures are higher than revenues and savings (fund balance) combined.  When the fund balance is too low cash flow becomes a problem, and they are not able to pay staff and/or regular bills. Bellingham Public Schools is not in binding conditions.

We do not receive an experience factor funds because the state model uses old, outdated data. The state recalculates every three years, instead of every year. Last year, legislation was proposed to change this.  It did not make it through. If up-to-date data was used, we would be receiving $3.6M additional dollars for the 2024-25 school year.

At this point, we believe we need to cut millions of dollars in our budget, which will likely impact our work force as staff make up over 80% of our budget. If we need to reduce full time equivalent (FTE) staff, we will try to do this with attrition when possible, which means not replacing positions when someone retires or leaves. You can see our guiding principles we use when making budget decisions.