One of the tasks of working at The Beachcomber — when writing articles about our school district — is to pore over previous coverage of the district, checking recent history, facts and numbers.

That’s what we did this week when we needed to know if our district had ever considered furloughs or pay freezes for school administrators, as part of a package of staff cuts. We discovered that they had, in March of 2019, and read all about it in an article by former Beachcomber editor Susan Riemer.

This week, we report that the Superintendent, Slade McSheehy, has advised the board that the district’s legal counsel has now warned that such a move might prompt legal action against the district — so that’s something new, in 2022.

But so much else that happened three years ago seems to mirror and even predict what is happening now.

Riemer’s 2019 article was topped by a striking photo of a crowded board meeting, filled with teachers wearing red shirts to proclaim their solidarity. It looked a lot like a photo we took a few weeks ago, minus the masks.

There was also the following passage, echoing our recent coverage:

“District officials have given several reasons for their financial concerns, including an enrollment decrease …. Long-term insufficient funding for special education … also plays a role. Moreover, McSheehy and other district officials say the landmark McCleary decision and resulting state education funding plan have caused economic challenges of their own, including limiting districts’ levying capacity, and for Vashon, a smaller “regionalization” factor than other nearby districts received…”

Everything old is new again, it sadly seems.

Something else in the 2019 article also caught our attention:

“McSheehy has said he expects the district to end this year with $244,000; by the 2021-22 school year, he anticipates a nearly $600,000 deficit.”

In hindsight, we now know that deficit projection didn’t come to pass — perhaps in part because federal pandemic relief funding, known as ESSER, has for the past three years infused VISD with much-needed, unplanned-for cash.

Washington’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) listed the top priority for spending those funds as being “to support students who are furthest away from educational justice.”

The last of VISD’s almost $1.6 million total funding from ESSER, amounting to almost half a million dollars, is still in the district’s coffers, with all that money currently earmarked for paying staffing costs at VISD in the 2022-2023 school year, we learned this week.

What will happen when that half a million bucks is gone? How much worse could the next package of staff cuts be, a year from now?

In a long interview with The Beachcomber last week, school board president Toby Holmes said he looked forward to the development of a three-year sustainability plan, which district financial executive Matt Sullivan has been tasked with creating.

VISD’s financial future, he said, would be in part dependent on increasing enrollment by attracting more off-island students to Vashon schools, given that the island’s own demographic of school-aged children is declining.

VISD’s financial problems are deep and have been a long time in the making, with factors both outside and inside the district’s control at play.

But in an effort to attract more students, we hope the board and administrators will deeply consider why families would want to send their kids across the water on a ferry boat to attend Chautauqua Elementary, McMurray Middle School, or Vashon High School.

Does our district have robust and thriving humanities, fine arts, languages, music and theater programs? Are its STEM programs rigorous enough to steal students away from other districts or even private schools? Are the needs of its special education students centered? Are extracurricular programs for socio-emotional support of all students firmly in place, with adequate staffing and more than one-year-at-a-time special funding? Will the district be able to continue to offer the kinds of enrichment programs, such as outdoor education for grade-school students, that so many generations of its students have enjoyed?

Finally, does the district really walk the walk when it comes to equity and educational justice for all its students, and not just talk the talk?

We want our schools to succeed and hope for more visionary leadership in the district, so that no one, in 2025, will look back at this issue of the paper, and realize it’s the same story, all over again — or one that is even worse.