Joe Vreeburg has never dealt with an economic crunch quite like the one the Tahoma School Board is trying to get a handle on now.

Vreeburg is president of the board this year and has served on the board for more than a decade.

“We’re affecting people’s lives,” Vreeburg said. “This is my 16th year and we’ve never had anything like this. This is new ground.”

Last year the school board came in on the budget planning process earlier than ever. Bill Clausmeyer, the president at the time, told The Reporter last summer that the gap between what the state would fund and what it required districts to do would grow “and that all districts will have to dig deeper.”

This year the board asked administrative staff to look at making more than $3 million in cuts in the 2009-2010 budget, which according to district officials, is based on Gov. Chris Gregoire’s projected budget as well the district’s revenue projections.

A committee of school administrators has been crunching the numbers while reviewing the general fund budget, which covers daily operations, to find places to cut or ways to increase cash flow.

So far the public and the school board have been left in the dark while the committee works on developing its proposal for reduced spending up to $3.35 million. Those findings will be presented to the school board and community leaders at a meeting April 13.

From there the school board will have three work sessions April 15-17 to process that information which will be followed by a trio of public meetings slated for April 21-23. The plan is to adopt a final budget on May 5.

The board has identified eight criteria, which Vreeburg wouldn’t identify in an effort to maintain objectivity in the process he explained, with certain criteria holding greater weight than others in the budget reduction process.

“Right now, we’re not sure how much we’re really going to have to cut and we won’t know for at least another month,” Vreeburg said. “The whole idea is that we would take potential cuts and run them through and weigh them against our criteria.”

Vreeburg said this will be difficult because the Tahoma School District is already “a pretty austere district.”

“There’s not a lot of cuts to be made,” he said. “We want to be objective as possible when we consider cuts. We’ve put a process in place to try to minimize emotion. You’re never going to be able to eliminate emotion when you’re talking about people’s children.”

A key piece of the process will be making sure residents will have an opportunity to have their say in the process, Vreeburg said, as well as have a grasp on what cuts will be made and why.

Vreeburg said that this has been a growth experience for the five member school board which he explains is trying to “protect the core values of the school district.”

“It’s an evolution,” he said. “What has changed is we’ve more formalized the process. There’s a fine line between saying we’re here to do this job and here’s what we did versus trying to gather the feedback, receive that feedback and not take the wheels off this system.”

It is possible that teaching positions could be reduced but Vreeburg said the board would like to keep that to a minimum. The primary reason the budget has to be adopted by May 5 is to give enough time for staff to work with the changes.

“The people that are going to be most upset are the ones whose programs or projects are eliminated for budgetary reasons,” Vreeburg said. “What we’re trying to minimize is elimination of teachers. How do you do that? How do you minimize that when you’re already running a tight organization?”

Tahoma School District officials have set up a 2009-2010 budget section on its Web site. There is an explanation of the process, a discussion board where suggestions can be offered — after they are screened — as well as a calendar of upcoming meetings related to the budget process.

http://swift.tahoma.wednet.edu/csc/tbudget/index.php