Spokane Public Schools approves $590 million spending plan with reduced staff, no layoffs or cut programs

Spokane Public Schools approved a $590 million general budget at its Wednesday board meeting, contracting to brace for the sunset of COVID-era federal support but cutting no programs or staff.

The board approved spending $590 million in its general fund for operations, $53 million to repay interest on previous bonds and $46.5 million for school construction.

The lion’s share of the general fund goes toward teaching, with more than 56% for classroom instruction, extracurriculars and teacher salaries. The next-highest category is the 17% that pays for transportation, insurance, nutrition services and other noninstructional support services.

While the district plans to spend $590 million, the budget projects $16 million less in revenue, but that’s just as the district intended, Chief Finance Officer Cindy Coleman said.

“You will notice that is the deficit of what we have,” Coleman said. “That is part of our plan.”

To continue operations as they are, the district is compensating by dipping into its fund balance in each spending category and reducing staffing through attrition. The plan is to prevent “disruptions to programs and services.”

“We need to go back about four years to when COVID started and we saved money, we built our fund balance with the plan that when our (COVID) funds were gone, we would draw that fund balance down,” Coleman explained to the board.

“Our school board has been extremely thoughtful to have a five- to seven-year budget plan, always thinking about multiple different modeling scenarios,” Superintendent Adam Swinyard said. “So that when we’re ever contracting, we’re planning for that in a way that isn’t going to create any significant disruption to services.”

They’re also employing 77 fewer positions this year compared to last.

As some of their 6,000-plus staff retired or left for other jobs, the district didn’t fill some of these positions. Swinyard said they also created efficiencies in some roles that can be filled with AI, such as in data analytics or payroll, though they didn’t lay off any employees.

They’ve budgeted 20 fewer classified staff positions and 39 fewer certificated employees such as teachers and paraeducators.

“When you’re contracting, you have less total staff working inside of your schools and the needs are greater than ever,” Swinyard said.

“Yet, our total number of staff are contracting, but we’ve planned to do that at a pace that allows us not to have major, significant disruptions.”

There are two major stressors leading to the budget’s contracting, Swinyard said: the sunsetting of federal support and revenue from the state that he said isn’t keeping up with inflation increasing costs.

“Everything costs more,” Swinyard said. “Diesel costs more, chicken nuggets cost more, paper costs more. Everything that it takes to run a school, like wages, we’re experiencing significant inflationary differences compared to the last several years.”

In reviewing its budget, the school board priorities included expanding extracurricular offerings and increasing ridership eligibility on school buses.

New extracurricular offerings include tackle football in middle school, junior varsity cheerleading in high school, unified sports that appeal to players of all skill levels and some elementary sports expansions.