PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles School Board has unanimously approved a $55,600,867 budget for the 2023-2024 school year that will mean larger class sizes, not filling positions left vacant by resignations and retirement and reducing and eliminating some offerings.
One of the hardest-hit programs was sixth-grade band, whose instructor John Kilzer retires at the end of the year. His position will not be filled until at least 2028, when the renovated Stevens Middle School opens.
More than 30 people attended Thursday night’s board meeting to show their support for the program, including students who held up a sign that read, “Sometimes you have to take a stand to save the band.”
Port Angeles Symphony Conductor Jonathan Pasternack was among nine people who spoke to urge the board to not eliminate the program.
“Doing so as a short-term stopgap solution to the current budget problem, as real as they are, would deliver an enormous blow to this school district’s highly valued music performance programs struggling as they are to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Pasternack said. “Find another part of the budget to trim.”
High school band student Abby Seevers made an impassioned plea for keeping the program, telling the board that the effect of cutting it would ripple out beyond the classroom.
“The band does so much for the community and the community supports the band,” Seevers said. “Our band is such a big part of the high school and if you cut sixth-grade band that’s just making our program even smaller. It’s not equitable, and it’s not fair.”
Board members were noticeably moved by the, at turns, emotional, candid and heartfelt appeals to not cut the program.
“I had a very strong reaction the first time I saw the sixth-grade band program on the list to cut,” board member Katie Marks said. “But I feel it’s not permanent.”
Board member Mary Hebert said that as much as she valued the district’s music programs, as a former longtime educator in Port Angeles her priority was the well-being of teachers in the district.
“The hardest part for me is to lay teachers off. To be riffed (reduction-in-force) is an impossible thing to face. I was riffed the first year I started teaching. I have delivered RIF letters to teachers,” Hebert said.
“Ultimately for me, if we could come up with some magic solution to save music I’m with the rest of the board, but the teachers who teach in this district are valuable to me and I will stand with the union that wants to save and protect teachers’ jobs.”
According to the budget reduction plan, the district anticipated revenues of $55,600,867 against expenses of $60,601,110 that created a $5,000,243 shortfall the district was tasked with closing.
”It saddens me to bring this resolution to the board this evening,” Superintendent Marty Brewer said. “We have not been dealing with this for a single year but for multiple years.”
Brewer cited declining enrollment, inadequate special education funding and changes to the state’s basic education funding model as causing “a perfect storm of revenues versus expenditures.”
The district lost 174 students from the 2019-2020 school year when the pandemic began and schools closed to the 2021-2022 school year when students returned. The drop in enrollment meant about $2 million in lost revenue from the state, Brewer said.
The district also will have to pay $1.5 million out of its Educational Programs and Operations levy for special education. The amount is the difference between what the state funds for special education and the cost to the district to provide these programs.
When the Legislature this session bumped up special education funding from 13.5 percent of a district’s total student population to 15 percent, it provided Port Angeles a little bit of relief, but not nearly enough, Brewer said, when 18 percent of the district’s students have development, learning and other disabilities.
Like other districts around the state, Port Angeles uses dollars from its Educational Programs and Operations levy to fund the special services these students need and the district is mandated to provide.
The loss of regionalization factors that benefited the district, a staff mix formula that rewarded it for its experienced educators and levy equalization that helped property-poor districts like Port Angeles together contributed another $1.5 million in lost revenue, Brewer said.
Among the strategies for closing the budget gap the board approved were:
• Increasing class sizes that would bring them up the maximum number of students agreed to in last year’s bargaining agreement.
• Not re-filling the positions of sixth-grade band teacher, general education teachers and a registered nurse; shifting the high school assistant principal role to a half-time position with the other half as CTE director.
• Eliminating special education assistant director, truancy secretary and elementary school deans, NatureBridge and some contracted services.
• Cutting an athletic director position to half-time; reducing the number of educational coaches and paraprofessional hours.
Transitional kindergarten, which had been slated to be cut, got a temporary reprieve that was contingent on funding from the state.
Board member Sandy Long laid blame for the cuts on the Legislature.
“We have a levy that is for enrichment. I assume everybody in this room voted for it because you love music and music is part of enrichment,” Long said.
“The state doesn’t fund music, you fund music. By passing a levy, you fund our music program, you also fund our athletic program and our counseling program. The reason that we have to fund special ed out of the levy and not music is because the law says we have to. That’s the only place we can get it.”
Long encouraged people to contact state Reps. Mike Chapman and Steve Tharinger and Sen. Kevin Van De Wege — all oif the 24th legislative district — and press them to fully fund special education.
“If you want more funding for music you need to contact those three people,” Long said. “They are leaving us in such a precarious position of having to RIF people and programs.”
The Port Angeles School District 2023-2024 budget reduction plan can be found here: tinyurl.com/2p88e98d
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached at Paula.Hunt@soundpublishing.com
