Budget talks returned at the Oct. 10 meeting of the Bainbridge Island School District.

Boardmembers heard presentations on school improvement plans districtwide, the budget advisory committee and its financial forecast for the next few months.

Kim Knight, district financial director, talked about the District Budget Advisory Committee, a group of BISD employees and community members who discuss the district’s spending and provides input to the school board. The committee focused on catching new members up to speed and getting the fiscal lay of the land at the state level. The district’s fund balance for 2023-2024 was $4.15 million.

Officials said there are three specific areas in which state funding has routinely fallen short in Washington: special education, transportation and materials, supplies and operating costs. In the past five years, BISD has seen a cumulative shortfall of about $20.25 million, with special education making up the bulk of the fund shortage at $11.25 million.

“Everybody is very emphatic that that needs to be fixed. We cannot run a district without insurance. We cannot run a district if we can’t keep the lights and heat on. And they have not come close to giving us what we actually need for our buildings,” Knight said.

Also, in September, “expenditures far exceeded our revenues,” Knight said. Income for the district totaled about $5.29 million, with expenditures of $7.2 million. The $2 million discrepancy can be attributed to the higher-than-average payroll in August, due to the lump-sum payment for staff professional development days.

In coming months, the district’s financial outlook will wax and wane. October will be better than September because tax collections from levies will become available, which will help for a few months, Knight said. But come February, the district’s cash flow will significantly taper, and it may have to seek an interim loan until the next time it receives another infusion of local taxes in April.

Budget cuts, while not yet a certainty, are becoming more likely, boardmember Robert Cromwell said. He asked the committee members to prioritize preparing advice for the board during hard conversations that the community will be having in coming years — “what would we need to do to balance the budget? Are there recommendations they could give us as a board, in terms of how we would approach that?”

Knight said: “It absolutely is difficult work, and our request of DBAC was that they do exactly that — develop a platform of recommendations, a one-, two- and three-year plan, and have a ‘callback list.’ Which is, if the legislature does come through with this amount, what are the first programs and things we would like to ‘call back’ and reinstitute.”