By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
After months of work and deliberation, the Sitka School Board passed a budget for the next fiscal year last Wednesday, but did so with warnings about future financial issues.
Board members balanced the budget by digging into reserves and leaving a number of vacant positions unfilled. As passed, the budget totals $22,306,185.
The budget passed in a unanimous vote, but Superintendent John Holst warned the board that reserve accounts are thin, and in coming years more reductions could become necessary.
Looking ahead, Holst anticipated an annual shortfall of about $1 million.
“With the assumptions made there is roughly a $1 million shortfall every year going out and… you’ve got about $270,000 left and you’ll need a million plus to get into the next year and balance your budget. And the following year you’ll have the same issue,” he told the board.
While federal relief funds from coronavirus-related legislation will buoy the school budget for some time, he noted, further cuts are coming.
“When the COVID money runs out… you better be preparing before then or you’re going to be making huge, huge reductions in one year. So the message I’m trying to send is we’re not going to be able to keep the same number of teachers and balance the budget, pretty simple, straightforward,” he cautioned.
Sitka isn’t alone, he added. Juneau schools are spending their reserves down to the last pennies for the fiscal year 2022 budget.
To balance the budget, the district will leave vacant the assistant superintendent job, two classroom positions at Keet Gooshi Heen, and one teacher at Baranof Elementary, along with other reductions. At Keet, Holst noted, the reductions are possible without changing Pupil to Teacher Ratios because of declining enrollment.
The district also chose not to continue funding for Community Schools, but voted to fund activities travel and the pool.
“We’re going to do a very cutback version of Community Schools for a year. So we’ve managed to eliminate two of the three pieces of that. And I didn’t feel comfortable with recommending cutting the activities travel, because all that would do is increase fundraising needs and the businesses in town would be absorbing a lot of that – not a good time to be even thinking about that,” Holst said.
Diving into specifics, the superintendent said that in coming years, the million dollar deficit would mean sizable cuts to teaching staff.
“You’ll need a million plus to get into the next year and balance your budget and the following year you’ll have the same issue. The only way... if we were going to balance the budget and not use reserves, revenues match expenditures,” he said. “That would mean 11 fewer teachers than we were planning on having. That would mean the seven departures (that happened this year), we would have to add four to that. Just to break even. Now we have reserves, we have COVID money for a couple years… It’s almost like you can’t get there from here.”
Holst advised the board to spend the relief funds wisely.
“You are desperately going to need every penny of that to get through the next two years… Be careful how you spend the COVID money and you are going to end up spending it on balancing the budget, which is staffing,” he said.
The board did not discuss possible uses of those relief funds at last week’s meeting, but will do so at the regular board meeting next Wednesday, May 5.
Board president Amy Morrison said it’s difficult divining the future of school budgets while planning.
“It’s hard enough to balance this year’s budget, much less looking at the ones in the future and trying to balance those. Because I can tell you sitting here two or three years ago… there’s no way we could ever have foreseen all the different factors that went into our budget this year… I do want to be fiscally responsible. I hesitate to put too much money aside in anticipation of what may or may not happen in a year or two,” Morrison said.
The board meets again next week.
