Meeting Thursday night to discuss layoffs, other cuts as result of Yelm levy failures
The Yelm School District’s Superintendent Chris Woods said the district has started delivering layoff notices to 120 teachers and 100 other public school employees to make up for a $15 million budget deficit.
The decision affects about a third of the district’s 350 teachers.
Woods said the budget deficit is a result of a double tax levy failure. The most recent levy came before voters in April of this year, and it lost by 61 votes in Thurston County.
There will be a community forum to discuss potential cuts to programs and services at 6 p.m. tonight at Yelm Middle School. And Woods said more cuts will be discussed at the school board’s May 23 meeting.
Woods told The Olympian he thinks there’s a number of reasons the Educational Programs and Operations Levy failed. People are feeling the financial strain of taxes, he said, and the state isn’t actually funding public education to the fullest.
“We rely on levies to bridge the gap between where the state funds us and what is actually needed and required to offer our students an education that puts them in a place to be successful beyond high school,” Woods said.
He said he thinks the public also wants more transparency on how their dollars are spent in the district. And in some cases he thinks the issue of levies and bonds gets caught in the political crossfire, when what it really comes down to is providing a full education to all public school students.
“But the hardest part is we’re talking about people that have been very valuable and part of our family here in the community of schools,” Woods said. “And we’ve had to notify them that they may not be coming back next year.”
According to an article from KIRO 7 News, Yelm students staged a walkout Wednesday in support of their teachers.
Woods said after the district is done creating its budget for next year there will be more hard decisions to be made. He said they may run a local levy again in February 2025, but there needs to be conversations around what to ask voters to approve, and how to better educate the public on the need.
This story was originally published May 16, 2024 at 1:22 PM.
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