Juneau School District officials are preparing for major budgetary decisions in 2 years due to enrollment decreases and key funding sources run out.
In a budget-related public forum held on Thursday Administrator Services Director Cassee Olin revealed that the district will be facing an $4.7 million deficit in the next financial year.
The increase of $30 to the allocation for students to base boosts the state’s funding to District by an additional $243,000 in the words of the superintendent Bridget Weiss. However, this isn’t sufficient to help keep the school from running out of deficit, as costs increase and enrollment falls down.
The district isn’t yet feeling the full financial burden of a 11% decline in enrollment between now and 2020. It’s due to states hold harmless policy which assists districts that’ve been losing students, by slowly decreasing their state money they receive over a period of three years rather than immediately.
This provision provided the district with an additional $2.1 millions of state funds this year, as per Olin. In the next year, that cash is gone.
Middle, elementary as well as high school administrators discussed their budgetary goals with district leaders during the forum on Thursday. They discussed avoiding increases in classes and keeping counselors and reading specialists.
The district will be in the same situation in the coming year, after one-time COVID relief from Federal Elementary as well as Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund is exhausted. Weiss stated that the district has the equivalent of $1.6 million available from the ESSER fund available for spending the next school year.
“So there’s another thing to consider when we consider the road to FY25 , and how we’ll manage the stairway step away from ESSER as we’re trying to deal with this year’s steps away from holding in the event of a breach,” she said.
The city and district officials have begun discussing longer-term budgets for the district during an assembly on Friday. Estimates of enrollment show that the district is likely to have fewer than 1,100 pupils in the year 2023 than currently.
“It’s alarming but it’s not the trend in demographics that any of us would like to see, however, I believe the data support this,” City Manager Rorie Watt said.
This data contains state-wide trends that show the population of Alaska is aging, particularly in Southeast. The younger population is moving out of the state and those who remain are having fewer kids.
“Changes in projections are likely to be caused by us believing there are people moving in Juneau and entering the area and that our population is expected to increase and I don’t think anyone’s actually predicting that in any way,” Watt said.
Weiss stated that that a proposed increase of $1,000 on the allocation for students to base offers “a glimpse of possibility” for the future.
In the meantime it is expected that the Juneau school board has to create an unbalanced budget by March. The budget will be presented to the Juneau Assembly for final approval in May.
