May 8th, 2008 - Letter from Dr. McCammon Regarding Budget Cuts

Dear Community,

I wish that this communication was bringing better news, but as I am sure you are becoming aware by reading about the financial struggles of districts around the state, another budget shortfall is looming over all of us. In fact, we recently have heard that North Thurston School District is reducing over 70 teaching positions and nearly 100 classified positions in order to balance their budget and other districts such as Tacoma, Puyallup, Enumclaw and White River are projecting deficits ranging from $1.7 to $10.0 Million dollars and some are actually ending in the red with no fund balance left at all. Over the past few days the shortfall impact on our district due to underfunded raises and COLA, retirement impact, underfunded medical insurance costs, rising fuel, insurance and food prices, stagnant enrollment, as well as other financial factors beyond our control has grown to date to nearly $1.2 million. Here we go again. I have been in constant communication with our school board this week and I have sat at the table with our administrative team to let them know that once again we will be in reduction mode. In 2003 we cut $750,000 and followed up the next year with a reduction in staff and program of over $1.2 million dollars while opening CJHS. Fortunately, due to good fiscal management throughout the district, we are one of the few districts that at least have a solid enough fund balance to help offset a little bit of the pain. But the reality is that with each subsequent cut you go deeper and deeper and to be candid, these cuts will be felt much more so than in the past.

Of course, I will commit to you as we did in those other difficult years that we will keep the cuts as far away from the classroom as possible. Our well documented history over the past seven years has been to look first at administration costs and personnel, then to look at program and support, followed by fund balance adjustment and then and only then any reduction of teaching force. Our goal would be to look toward not reducing existing positions, but dealing with some of the shortfall through attrition and in moving individuals around. Since this is our fifth round of forced reductions since I have taken this seat I can only commit that this will be our effort and we can only know as we get into the reality of the reductions. In most cases we will see class size increases and yes support personnel may also be affected this time around. We are of course freezing any commitments to new spending for next year as well.

As we complete our decision-making process over the next few weeks, as usual, I will give you a detailed plan for our remedy to this situation. The actual figures from the state which reported the actual dollar impact of the raises and COLA were just released a few days ago and that is why you are seeing a great deal of information on this release all at once throughout the state. This simply combined with the rising costs of many facets of running our $28 million dollar organization is causing us to once again tighten our belts.

I will be in touch with you soon with a progress report, but for now I simply ask for your patience and understanding as we work on this problem. I thank you once again for you steadfast support of the important work in our school district.

Thanks for reading,

Steve

Dr. Steve McCammon

Superintendent

Fife School District No. 417

Standard Bearer School District

Phone (253) 517-1000