A Message from Superintendent Greg Baker

Dear students, staff, families and community,

Thank you to those who have emailed me directly or filled out the feedback form to share questions or comments about our budget plans for 2023-24.

We are updating our FAQ in an effort to provide answers to common questions, including a Q&A video. If you are someone who likes more context and detailed information, please peruse that webpage.

One of the most common questions I have received is why this budget challenge is even happening.  There are multiple factors and decisions that contribute to the budget situation we are facing. Some of these we control at the local level, and others we do not control. Please continue reading for more information.

Here are the main contributing factors:

1. Enrollment

Enrollment drives how much money we receive from the state. For each student enrolled, the state allocates funds. Pre-COVID, we could anticipate a relatively stable increase in enrollment each year. This predictability allowed us to match the needs of the enrollment with the number of staff in our schools and rely on increasing funding from the state. With the COVID pandemic, our enrollment has gone through some dramatic changes, similar to districts around the country. You can see in the graph below that we have maintained a higher staffing level despite a declining enrollment.

2. Staffing levels, student needs and the COVID factor

We knew the COVID funding from the federal government (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief or ESSER) was short-term, and we chose to invest it in people to help get our students and schools through these challenging times. You’ll remember that during the pandemic, many people had a lot of uncertainty and stress regarding their jobs as well as the future of schools and education. Even though our enrollment dropped during COVID, we did not lay off any staff during the pandemic, thanks to these federal funds. Not only did we not lay off staff during the pandemic, we were also able to provide childcare for first responders throughout those difficult months and bring back our youngest learners as early as possible in November 2020. This was a huge service to our community. 

For context:

• In 2016-17, we had 1,192 staff with just about 10,798 students enrolled.
• We currently have 1,396 staff and we predict we will have about 10,746 students enrolled next year.
• That is a difference of over 200 staff with about the same number of students. Combined with the loss of $24.5 million in federal relief funds, this has created a need to reduce staffing. This is our reality, even though we continue to see the need for extra support for students post-pandemic.

Below are the projected staffing levels for 2023-24 and comparison staffing levels over the prior seven years for certificated staff, classified staff and administrators. This data is based on OSPI enrollment and staffing data/reports.

Click here to view staffing/enrollment chart or click on image to enlarge:

During COVID, we prioritized retaining our staff and ensuring smaller class sizes to ease concerns about disease spread, especially prior to vaccines being available for first adults and then children. After retaining staff and buying personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks and air ventilation systems, we still had significant funding remaining. We made a conscious effort to invest in staff to help us manage the pandemic, including health services staff, mental health specialists and safety and security staff. Although these roles are still so needed, the emergency funding that made them possible is going away. That said, we are able to maintain some of these staff thanks to grants.

During the budget development process, we have looked at the system as a whole as we made reductions and tried to maintain some of the supports that are still needed. These include keeping class sizes at a reasonable level, providing needed mental health support for students and families, and keeping additional nursing support added during COVID.

3. Inadequate funding from state

School finance relies significantly on the actions of the state legislature. Coming out of COVID, school districts anticipated the state legislature would offer additional resources to districts for next year and into the future. However, the legislature had different priorities this session. In the state legislature’s actions this session, they have prioritized increases in compensation to address cost-of-living and inflation and added support for education in a few areas. But other actions have actually caused a decrease in our revenue. Here are a few ways the state’s actions have impacted our budget situation.

• Inflation: Inflation affects us because the legislature determines cost-of-living salary increases for school staff. For next year, the legislature has made the decision to fund an additional 3.7% in a cost-of-living salary adjustment. Yet the state only provides funding for about 70% of our staff, therefore, to fund the cost-of-living increase for all employees, the district must make up the difference through local funding. The state provides about 60% of what is needed to provide this increase, leaving districts paying the balance from local levy dollars. Beyond this, costs for everything, from fuel to electricity, supplies, food, equipment, etc., have risen dramatically, which has further strained the district’s finances.
• Regionalization formula: Additionally, the state has reduced our funding for staff compensation from previous levels. This is due to a factor known as regionalization, which is supposed to help address cost-of-living differences, adjusting dollars for districts located in places where it is more expensive to live and work. The state’s formula has reduced Bellingham’s regionalization factor each of the past four years, resulting in an additional reduction of state funding of nearly $1.4 million next year.
• Inadequate funding model: The state’s “prototypical funding model” is not realistic or adequate. For example, for a district our size, the state says we should have six nurses, but only gives us funding for 4.5. We currently have eight nurses, thanks to funding from our local levy, and most people in our community would say that we should have one at each of our 22 schools.

Just one of these factors would have made a tight budget year, but the combination of all these factors equates to a significant and painful reduction.

Roughly 86% of our budget represents the cost of staff. That is to say, our ability to reduce non-staffing expenditures is limited. While we will all have our views on where these reductions should or should not occur, where the need for staffing is greatest, the reality is every area is important and there are no reductions that are less painful than others. Every one of our staff members makes a difference in the lives of students and nothing related to staff reductions is done without regard to those contributions and the needs of the students we serve.

I hope this context helps, and again, I will continue to share updates. Our feedback form is still open as is my inbox, so do not hesitate to reach out.

Greg Baker

reply to greg.baker@bellinghamschools.org