Popular BISD programs could be key to more state funding

Nontraditional education options may be the key to more state funding for school districts, but whether the state will open the chest is still up in the air.

Bainbridge residents got a policy temperature check from their state representatives at a Town Hall meeting March 22. The legislators covered various topics, but the hottest one was school funding.

Increasing revenue is only part of the Bainbridge Island School District’s budget rescue operation. The energy at the meeting rode the first stormy waves from the budget crisis that has hit the community, as leadership announced its initial reductions-in-force March 21.

0 seconds of 0 secondsVolume 0%

00:00

The RIFs are the first step toward fixing a $6.6 million funding gap in the 2025-26 BISD budget, about 83% of which goes toward teacher salaries and benefits. If the district ends this school year in the red, it may become subject to a few years of state oversight, called “binding conditions,” meaning some loss of local control, school officials have said.

While a complete list of reduced staff will be released May 8, certificated staff were the first to be notified. All certificated librarians and the 5th and 6th grade band programs were cut. Elementary, some middle and high school PE class offerings were reduced, as well as at class sections in lower grade schools, following downtrending enrollment.

Additionally, staffing levels for the Highly Capable program and interventionists were reduced to one of each, serving kindergarten through 12th grade and K-6, respectively.

“I want to express my sincere sense of loss and profound concern for all of our staff members. There is no way around this—these are very tough times,” superintendent Amii Thompson said. “I am also immensely grateful for the heart and compassion our staff, students and community have for one another.”

District stakeholders pressed the state officials at the meeting for answers about a new bill that could lift the levy collection lid, boosting levy support from the state. If passed, students in Alternative Learning Experience programs, who are usually not full-time enrolled students, could be counted toward the benchmark for state levy assistance.

These policies are of particular interest to the BISD because its ALE programs are in high demand and have a relatively low cost of staffing, which means they are among the only education offerings that are in the black.

While all three initial levy bills introduced this session died in committees, “the game is afoot,” wrote the Washington Association of School Administrators. A new bill that combines essential parts of all three is coming soon, but the question is whether it will include the parts that BISD needs.

Town Hall meeting

Bainbridge Island’s three state legislators—Rep. Greg Nance, Rep. Tara Simmons and Sen. Drew Hansen— spoke to a packed house of over 400 people in the Bainbridge High School theater the morning of March 22.

Residents filled every seat in the room; some stood or sat in the stairways, some held young children, some arrived in motorized wheelchairs. While the meeting was not exclusively about public education, it was top of mind for many: around one-third of attendees carried signs referring to the district’s budget and wore red shirts and pins, the symbol of a national grassroots movement by parents and teachers to support public education.

The lawmakers expressed support for public schools, but balked at committing to supporting the changes to levy funding that BISD leadership has been advocating for as a budget lifeline.

One of the first questions asked was if they support levy regionalization, with and without local effort assistance, or LEA.

LEA is a subsidy that the state provides to school districts in areas with lower property values to offset the cost to residents, which helps them pass levies. Currently, the state calculates the amount of money by looking at their full-time equivalent student enrollment, meaning all students in a traditional learning environment.

Senate Bill 5772, introduced by Hansen but struck down in the Senate Rules Committee, would have created a new definition for “enrollment” that would include students in ALE courses if they exceed 33% of the district’s average FTE. That adjustment aims to ensure that funding calculations more accurately reflect the student population that requires support, the bill’s authors write.

With LEA and a regional levy collection system, schools would have a larger area from which to draw funding – easing the tax burden on residents in cash-strapped districts. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, Hansen said.

“The trick is, every time you bump up that levy regionalization number at the local level, you run a real risk of creating inequities between school districts, as districts that don’t have enough property or enough money are not able to keep up,” he said. “That, theoretically, is where LEA comes in, but the problem is, not everybody gets LEA. So it is enormously difficult to try to figure out what you’re going to do to give local districts the ability to collect more, to make what a community demands for enrichment, without creating very significant inequities across the state.”

In the audience, Thompson shook her head and spoke up.

“With all due respect, I didn’t hear an answer to the question. Would [the legislators] support levy regionalization with LEA, or without LEA?” she said.

“There’s no world in which we expand levy capacity and don’t expand LEA. That’s not going to happen,” Hansen responded.

After the meeting, Thompson expressed some frustration. Since many locals are well-versed in K-12 school finance, “sharing more details and actual likely outcomes would have been a service to the community,” she said.

James Kyle, software engineer and BI resident, agreed, saying his main takeaway from Hansen’s statement was “the levy system is designed to prevent local communities from fixing their budgetary shortfalls so they’ll be more motivated to support statewide initiatives, a strategy that seems woefully ineffective in the face of persistent underfunding by the state,” he wrote on social media.

Thompson added: “I am aware of the many asks from constituents that they are trying to balance, so I understood that the Town Hall could not be fully focused on education,” Thompson said. “But depending on the final version of each bill, we may end up seeing very little new revenue in the BISD after this legislative session.”

Funding sources

If the new bill passes with both levy regionalization and changes to LEA, it could become a funding waterwheel for BISD, turned by the revenue stream from its ALE programs: a part of the district that pays for itself, and then some.

Since COVID, many school districts nationwide have seen enrollment decline. Combined with rising rates of mental health challenges and more remote-learning options catered to neurodivergent students, public schools have struggled to retain students whose needs exceed those of the average student.

However, BISD’s programming for those students has grown since 2020, and it’s brought over $785,000 to the district so far.

BISD’s ALE programs housed within Commodore Options School—like MOSAIC, Co-LAB and Eagle Harbor High School— cater to students who need additional support or a non-traditional learning environment. So Commodore helps BISD retain students who otherwise would seek out private or homeschooling programs. It also attracts students from off-island who need more support than their district offers, Commodore principal Tricia Corsetti said during a District Budget Advisory Committee meeting.

“The beauty with ALE is its flexibility. I’m buying flexibility, I’m buying independence, personalization, and I’m not stressed out about attendance, like everybody else is all the time,” she said.

Many Commodore students are partially enrolled, meaning they spend less than 30 hours per week at school. Each student sees a teacher or necessary specialist for a couple hours a few times a week, following an individualized learning plan.

The exact structure of a student’s day in ALE looks different depending on if they are being homeschooled through MOSAIC or attend a half-day classroom like Co-LAB. But because students usually spend fewer hours at school, fewer full-time teachers are needed, which means the cost ratio is relatively low.

The crucial part is that ALE is considered basic education, not special education, so when state funding apportionment comes around, the partial enrollments add up.

About 62 part-time students at MOSAIC may see two full-time teachers, which costs about $240,000 on average between salaries, benefits, transportation and specialist support. But the students’ enrollment generates about $630,000 for the district.

“I’m not just a mini-BHS model following that same funding, because I won’t have six classes with thirty kids in it. I’m still generating enough money to pay for my staff,” Corsetti said. “I get it — in the surveys, people all say like, ‘Close Commodore,’ or ‘Just get rid of all the Options programs.’ The reality is, we’re still going to need to support kids in our community. It’s an opportunity for us to grow and respond in this time of, not only financial crisis, but clearly a crisis in public education, where we have to come up with creative solutions.”

It’s not just MOSAIC. The new Co-LAB program generates about $155,000 in district revenue, with only about 11 students. There are more inquiries than spots in the program.

“That’s something that other districts are not doing, and it was a void in terms of offerings that we have for our students that we could not serve in a traditional school,” said Kim Knight, BISD financial director. “A lot of what we saw that came back in terms of, ‘What are your ideas for revenue drivers?’ that we have spoken about in the past, have revolved around student aid. We’re just really lucky to be in a place where that has been embraced.”