School crisis: Ideas but no solutions

With only four weeks to go before a critical May 7 budget meeting, the Sisters School District appears no closer to a definitive total solution to their $800,000 shortfall. School board members, staff and citizens are working on a variety of ideas, but as of yet there is no clear course of action to overcome the deficit.

That's because there are no straightforward solutions - at least none that come without serious pain.

With a four-day school week on hold for now, there are still several potentially large reservoirs of funds that could help solve the problem. But taken individually, none of them will solve the crisis by themselves, and the return on most of the "reservoirs" is risky and unpredictable at best.

If no other options pan out, cutting days and staff remain the most direct option, but these solutions also carry risk. Such cuts are the basis for union bargaining issues and as such cannot be taken unilaterally - or without risk of other unintended negative consequences such as loss of reputation and loss of students, especially out-of-district transfers.

In the face of slashed school budgets across the state for the last four years, the Sisters School District has fared far better than any of the other Central Oregon school districts. Sisters was able to maintain some of the smallest public-school class sizes in the state. The district was also able to keep the number of contact days nearly fully intact.

Years of conservative budgeting had left the district with contingency reserves far more substantial than other districts, but by maintaining low class-sizes, these funds now are depleted.

Add in a significant drop in enrollment of the last several years, and you have a basis for the current budget crisis.

At the lightly attended meeting, Superintendent Jim Golden called upon Jay Wilkins to use his MBA skills and his experience running his own business to help simplify a presentation on the causes of the shortfall. Wilkins' brief group of slides helped the audience visualize how the combination of falling enrollment, depletion of reserves and a shortfall of state funds brought on the current crisis.

Golden also outlined his current recommendations to the board based in part on citizen input from last month's town hall. His recommendations were:

• Establish a "Keep Sisters Strong" task force to market the district and grow enrollment.

• Establish a task force with a January 2015 deadline to complete a four-day school analysis and conduct public hearings so if enrollment continues to be problem next year, the district will have a fully vetted plan that can be put in place to cut $500,000 from the budget.

• Establish a task force to fully detail the potential cost savings and plan for closing one school and the district office.

If none of these bear fruit, Golden said he would proceed with the "traditional method" of balancing the budget (cutting days and staff).

Retired longtime school board member Jeff Smith gave a brief presentation refining his response to the solving local option "compression" issue that has $385,000 of voter authorized local option funds "locked up."

Smith provided a path where citizens can look up what they "should" have paid in local option taxes, and also how to look up what they have actually paid to date. Smith is suggesting that concerned citizens send the district a tax-deductible check for the difference between what they "owe" and what they have paid.

Despite the fact that the four-day week was off the table, a number of the speakers from the audience spoke in support of creative ways to use an open fifth day. It was suggested that the fifth day could be a "private institute"-for-pay day. It was suggested that specialized courses could be offered off-site by local professionals for a fee. The proceeds could go to those teaching the specialized courses (local teachers) and into the school coffers for registrations and administration fees.

Several speakers offered their pro-bono services to the Keep Sisters Strong task force for building and operating an aggressive website, complete with PayPal, for collecting those underpaid local option taxes and other donations.

A successful $8-million school facilities bond in November could help reduce the budget shortfall by covering about $400,000 worth of current obligations.

A great deal of behind-the-scenes citizen work is being done to flesh out these and other potential solutions before the May 7 budget deadline.