Classes are wrapping up, but the district’s work is far from finished.

The Bainbridge Island School District convened for its final scheduled board meeting of the 2024-25 school year June 11.

The board and community weathered sudden transitions in upper leadership, a budget crisis, a fight for funding at the state level, and a crucial special election. The district is still on shaky ground, but budget projections demonstrate a slow but steady recovery, said Kim Knight, district financial director.

“I am happy to report that our levy collections have finally caught up,” Knight said.

Knight’s fiscal report showed that BISD will end 2024 with a fund balance of $4.2 million, or about $1.2 million less than last year. That’s far from the greatest funding disparity the district has or will see this year — in January and October, both lean months in the school funding cycle, the gap is projected to reach over $2 million — but it demonstrates that the district’s efforts to cut spending is having an impact. The district saved about $423,000 more last month than its original estimates, and revenues were up by about 4% compared to May 2023.

Part of the recovery can be attributed to the shift of some employee salaries and benefits to the technology and capital levies, which now account for about a third of the technology levy budget capacity.

Kiyo Toma, district director of technology, shared some ways that the department is pruning its spending, such as sunsetting program licenses that were underutilized. It helps, but the tech levy is still under pressure from several angles, he said.

“Nothing ever really stays still with technology, and that’s something that we, I think, do pretty well with,” Toma said. “So we set budgets, we commit to living within the tech levy for a specific amount of years. It’s a fixed budget. We don’t really have the capacity to go up or down – we just have to manage a basis as best we can and try to make the best decisions around where we’re going to invest dollars for that given year.”

Apart from district budget updates, the Long Range Strategic Facilities Planning Committee held its final meeting of the year June 5. Any capital projects that the committee chooses to put before the board will be revealed at the July 22 meeting.

“When we meet at the next board meeting, the superintendent and (facilities director) Dane Fenwick will be looking for direction on how they want us to proceed and move forward,” board president Mark Emerson said. “It’s not, ‘We’re going to have numbers attached to the bond,’ if there’s a potential bond, if that’s how we want to go — it’s ‘Now, the next step would be move forward and get us the numbers for that.’ There’s a lot of discussion that has to happen.”