Tumwater superintendent says $4 million in district budget cuts is needed, eyes staffing
.JPG "Tumwater School District Building on Thursday, April 14, 2016.")
Last week, Tara Richerson was told her job in the Tumwater School District won’t exist next school year.
Richerson, the district’s data and assessment supervisor, spoke during the Thursday, April 28 school board meeting about Superintendent Sean Dotson’s proposed cuts across the district to save the district $4 million.
But Richerson isn’t alone. Dotson’s plan includes cutting her position as well as the assistant director of the district’s special education program. He said the district needs to cut about 22 full-time positions and reduce funding off the top of programs across the board.
The move to cut funding and staff comes after months-long research and debate on how TSD went $4 million over its 2021-22 budget. In the end, it came down to a lack of communication on hiring and planning.
Dotson’s proposals for cuts were passed by the school board on Thursday night, but they won’t totally be in place until the 2022-23 school year. From here, administrators will meet with district leaders and principals, as well as create opportunities for public input on where parents’ priorities lie when it comes to program support.
A handful of parents and students raised concerns during the board meeting about potential cuts to the highly capable/self-contained program. The program gives kindergarten through 12th-grade students access to education programs that work at their pace and are often more advanced. The program was included in Dotson’s budget survey for review.
One parent said the “high cap” program has enormous community support and has changed the lives of many students, including his own. He said in the budget survey, the program was tied for fifth on a priority list.
Ben Clark, a fourth-grader in the program, said since he’s been involved, his teachers have kept him interested in subjects and take the time to find things he wants to learn about. He said he’s worried that if it’s cut, he’ll lose interest in school.
“In first and second grade, I had little interest in work and I had trouble paying attention,” Clark said. “Most days I came home feeling like I had a terrible day and I felt bad about myself.”
But Dotson said no large program cuts have been proposed. Instead, the majority — $2.4 million — will be coming out of full-time positions. He said luckily, most reductions can be done through attrition, using resignations, retirements and reorganization.
Certified, full-time instructors in Tumwater start with a base salary of $54,532 per year and with time and experience, teachers can make upwards of $102,000 annually, according to the district’s 2021-22 salary schedule.
He said the special services assistant director position will be replaced with a second on-the-ground certified education specialist position. Richerson said during the meeting that Dotson told her she’d still have a job next year, but he didn’t know what it would be.
She said the current special services assistant director already has accepted a new position with the Olympia School District.
The position makes more than $125,000 per year, according to the district’s salary schedule. Richerson makes more than $126,000 per year.
Once the district has successfully persuaded some people to retire, Dotson said the plan is to do some restructuring to shed some smaller positions and move people into vacant ones, if their qualifications match. If they don’t, that’s when layoffs could happen.
With restructuring comes more responsibility put on some full-time employees, he said. Richerson wonders why she hasn’t been offered one of the two student learning positions that will likely take over her responsibilities.
“There’s no easy options here when you start to reduce,” Dotson said. “We’re already a pretty lean team. That’s something we need to acknowledge upfront.”
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