As the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District grapples with an $8.5 million forecast budget shortfall, school board members are crowdsourcing ways to save money, including at a budget town hall this week. It’s becoming something of an annual tradition – school district officials gathered with attendees in Kenai Central High School to talk about how far in the red the district is.
“As you can see, our revenue is less than our expenditures,” said Reena Voivedich, the district’s finance director.
She’s standing in the high school library clicking through a slideshow and explaining how the annual budget process works. About 25 parents, school staff and community members watch from the sparsely populated audience.
The district is going to come up about $8.5 million short if it wants to operate next school year with the same number of employees and programs as it is this school year. It’s a smaller gap than the roughly seventeen million dollar shortfall the district faced last year. But it sets a familiar stage for tough budget talks.
Dan Beck says budgeting has been a roller coaster. He’s the principal of Kenai Central High School and says it’s hard to plan for the upcoming school year when he doesn’t know how many teachers he’ll have.
“I try to keep that attitude more positive yet that we're going to get it figured out, versus, you know, doom and gloom,” he said. “So I work hard at making sure I buffer some of that and also try to keep it positive.”
Nearly all of the money the district expects to have next year will come from the State of Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula Borough – more than $140 million in total.
But those funding levels won’t be nailed down until the Alaska Legislature passes the state’s annual budget – ordinarily, in May, but sometimes much later – and potential line-item vetoes from the governor are resolved. If the state could commit funding sooner, Beck says that would make a big difference.
Last year, state lawmakers increased the base amount of money it gives school districts per student. It was the first major permanent increase to that amount in roughly a decade. The bump let the school board reverse its budget cuts. But this year, the district says the per-student increase won’t go as far.
State law outlines the minimum and maximum amount of money the borough can give the district, with borough assembly members making the final call. Last year, assembly members overrode the borough mayor to give the district the maximum funding allowable, also called the “cap.” This year, the school district is asking them to do it again.
“The borough's currently telling us that they're going to give us $59 million but they actually can give us $68 million,” said Assistant Superintendent Kari Dendurent. “What's the difference between 68 and 59? Nine-point-six million? We have an $8.5 million shortfall, they can give us $9 million.”
The borough’s proposed funding level comes from Mayor Peter Micciche. He favors a 2.5% year-over-year funding increase boroughwide. He says that covers inflation while keeping the borough financially sustainable.
Rebekah Ivy says the borough should fund to the cap. She has three kids in brick-and-mortar schools on the central peninsula and attended Tuesday’s town hall.
“It's my tax dollars,” she said. “I have three different properties I pay taxes on and it's my kids' future. I was born and raised on the peninsula, and I'm raising my children on the peninsula, and how do we get kids back in schools? The population is just dwindling so much, and so it's like, how do we get kids and have a better future?”
State law says the district has to submit a balanced budget to the borough assembly by May 1. School board members have already pledged to close school pools, are considering closing schools and have created a spreadsheet of additional cuts it will consider to close the gap. The next fiscal year starts in July.
