At a school board meeting last week, members of Vashon’s certificated staff voiced concerns about the adverse impact on students they believed would result from a proposed reduction in force (RIF) and other cost-saving measures before the board.

In a period set aside for public comments, Anneliese Steuben-Maiye, a language arts teacher at Vashon High School (VHS) read a statement, which had been drafted by members of the Vashon Education Association (VEA).

Some of the teachers, wearing red shirts to signal their union affiliation, were also in the audience at the Feb. 16 meeting.

The statement took particular aim at the administration’s plan to increase class sizes to up to 28 students at both McMurray Middle School (MCM) and VHS — stating this action would crowd classrooms, decrease the district’s appeal to commuter families, diminish the number of elective courses offered, cause hardships for students most at need, and create incentives for other students to exit the district for such programs as Running Start, fully online programs, and private schools.

“We are already in a situation at the high school where we have 30 students with a late start or early dismissal, some with multiple free periods partially because VHS currently does not offer enough electives,” the statement said. “This is noticeably more than we have seen prior to this year.”

Increasing class sizes, the teachers said, could make it necessary for them to serve as many as 143 students per day in regular classrooms — a number that would increase to up to 172 students per day counting homeroom and SMART periods. The increase in numbers in the classrooms, the teachers said, would be especially difficult given the diverse mix of students in district classrooms.

Invoking the district’s recently passed strategic plan, promising equity and opportunity for all students, the teachers said that VISD’s most at-risk students would be the most impacted by the district’s plans.

“As our educational programs become more stripped to the bone, we will lose commuter students and will find ourselves in a spiral of contraction,” the statement said. “We know that the students who will experience this suffering the most will be those who are already struggling, including the equity priority groups to whom we made our most important promises of investment.”

In their statement, the teachers asked the board to explore other options for curing VISD’s budget deficit and applauded the administration’s current actions to advocate the state legislature to increase VISD’s revenue.

“What else is possible?” the statement asked. “Can we apply for additional federal grants that could fund certain areas of our programming while we shift money to other areas? Can we increase our visibility and profile among neighboring districts in an effort to bring more commuting students into our school community and stabilize enrollment?”

Plan aims to “right size” district

The RIF and broader solvency and sustainability plan, developed by the district’s administration over the past few months, is aimed at curing a projected $800,000 to $1.1 million deficit in the district’s projected 2023-24 budget.

The plan, as described in a PowerPoint presentation by Superintendent Slade McSheehy at the Feb. 16 meeting that is also viewable online aims to “right-size” the district’s programs to match its projected revenue — cutting both staff and increasing class sizes throughout the district.

“As program and school enrollment decreases or remain flat, we have to adjust staffing accordingly,” the plan says.

The RIF measure — set for a vote next month by the board — now calls for cutting 2.4 full-time certified instructional positions at Chautauqua Elementary School (CES) and 8.0 certified instructional positions at MCM and VHS.

At the secondary schools, these cuts would affect English, Math, Social Studies, Science and Health/PE instructional positions, as well as some counseling, library and electives instructional staff. Other cuts would eliminate the position of the district’s facilities manager, and shave hours from food service and classified instructional staff.

Long process led to announcement

The announcement of possible staff cuts comes after a months-long process by the school, which started last fall with a budget review by the Washington Association of School Administrators (WASA).

WASA’s 20-page financial review of VISD finances was presented by its author, consultant Jacob Kuper, to the school board on Oct. 13, and is viewable here.

In the report, Kuper examined trend lines in the district’s general fund balance — used for liquidity and unforeseen budget issues — and projected that if no corrective action was taken by the board, VISD’s fund balance — a type of rolling savings account used to ensure liquidity in the district — would drop to 3.71% of district expenditures in 2023-24.

“The district has been deficit spending, i.e. spending more than it takes in in revenue, since 2020-21, with a projected decrease in [the] fund balance of approximately $800,000 from 2020-21 to 2023-24,” Kuper wrote. “This will be a 44% reduction in reserved balances (almost halved). The current level of spending, assuming no additional revenue or budget reductions, is not sustainable.”

The report compared VISD’s labor expenses to four comparably sized and situated districts: Bainbridge Island, North Mason, Port Townsend and Meridian School Districts. In 2021, Kuper said, VISD’s budget expenditure for salaries and benefits was 83.8% — within industry standard, and below an 85% threshold considered as “the canary in the coal mine” of financial insolvency.

However, he noted that among the districts he had selected for comparison, VISD had the second-highest teacher salaries — with only Bainbridge Island’s exceeding VISD’s — as well as the lowest fund balance in the group.

On a longer timeline, the WASA report followed a two-year rollout of pay raises across employment classifications — adjustments championed district-wide by Superintendent Slade McSheehy as a means to bring VISD salaries more into alignment with those in nearby districts.

In May and June of 2021, the board approved packages of raises for top executives and other staff members in the district’s office, as well as a small group of full-time tech workers in the district, that came at a cost of $62,000 to the district.

Last spring, the board approved a 5 percent raise for school administrators including principals, assistant principals and other learning leadership positions, as well as new three-year contracts for teachers and educational support staff members.

Those contracts gave those union-affiliated staff members a 7 percent raise in the first year. In the second and third years of the contract, they will receive raises according to the Implicit Price Deflator (IPD) — currently set at 5.5 percent but expected by some to rise due to current inflation — plus an additional 1 percent.

Another bargaining agreement, with members of the school’s Services Employees International Union — a group that includes custodial, food service and maintenance staff — was also approved by the board in the spring of 2022. As a result of that agreement, district costs for these workers will rise 15 percent over the course of the next three years.

Finally, McSheehy also received raises in 2021 and 2022, bringing his base salary in those years up from $175,000 to $189,000. His 2022 raise was approved at the same meeting, in April 2022, when the board first reviewed a RIF measure for the 2022-23 budget year.

At recent board meetings, and in an email with The Beachcomber, McSheehy has also detailed another aspect of the district’s budget crunch: the last of the approximately $1.6 million dollars received by VISD in federal and state pandemic relief funding in the years between 2020 and 2022, will be exhausted at the end of this budget year. That remaining amount, which McSheey estimated at approximately $465,000, is currently all budgeted to be spent on salaries in the 2022-23 fiscal year.

District blames state for funding woes

In numerous communications regarding VISD’s upcoming reduction in force, aimed at parents as well as school staff, McSheehy and board members have been vocal in placing the blame for the district’s budget woes on the state’s inadequacies in funding basic education.

This state’s current funding model only pays for approximately 80 percent of all VISD staff. Additional teachers, para-educators, custodians, and specialized services such as nursing, counseling, and special education are not fully funded by the state, and instead must be funded by grants or levies.

Additionally, they have said that VISD only receives state cost-of-living adjustments for state-funded positions, accounting for only 80 percent of the district’s staff.

McSheehy and board members have regularly pointed out that VISD’s state “regionalization rate” — assigned by the state as an adjustment allocated to different staffing groups for local housing costs — is set by the state at 12 percent, lower than surrounded communities.

At the board meeting on Feb. 16, McSheehy said he would soon know if VISD would receive any adjustment to this regionalization rate, and said it was possible the rate could increase to 16 percent for some but not all staffing positions at VISD.

To find out more about VISD’s budget calculations for its 2023-24 school year, visit the district’s website.