Like every other district in the state, Tahoma School District officials have been playing the waiting game, and as a result are just about to wrap up the annual budget.

With the state Legislature’s special session, school districts have all had to put off approving a final budget, which needs to be approved by the school board and the state superintendent’s office by Aug. 1.

From that, at least for Tahoma, the budget looks to be solid this year though waiting for the final numbers to come from the state was challenging at best.

“The bad news is we’re getting a very late start,” said district director of finance and operations Lori Cloud. “We’ve done some pretty good estimates on where we believe we’re going to be. Thanks to a healthy fund balance, because we saw this coming, and thanks to the levy we passed last spring, we’re going to be able to weather at least one year of the biennium without impact to programs or the students.”

Cloud explained that the budget will not see many changes from the previous year and there won’t likely be staffing increases.

The district will need to absorb the elimination of aspects of K-4 funding, she said, as well as figure out how to manage the 1.9 percent cuts to base salary of teachers and classified staff in addition to a 3 percent cut mandated by the legislature for administrators.

“The only other major hit – and we don’t know yet what the impact is going to be – is they’re cutting the alternative learning experience, which would include our Russell Ridge Center, and they’re cutting it anywhere between 10 and 20 percent,” Cloud said.

Work began on the district’s budget in January. Typically the budget is complete in the spring, usually in March, but generally no later than May.

“Keep in mind we didn’t know our budget for this year until February,” Cloud said. “That’s unprecedented.”

And the cuts on the state Legislature’s chopping block were significant, she noted.

“We have to finalize our agreements with the unions and then it’s just a lot of work to get it all into the system and balanced and reviewed,” Cloud said. “It’s going to take a lot of work to get us there.”

And as part of the process, Cloud said, they are looking ahead as far as they can.

“We’ve been trying to do that the past few years, positioning ourselves so we don’t have to lay off a lot of people,” she said. “The next biennium is what I’m worried about. Something is going to have to change or things are going to look very different.”

And not just in Tahoma, added district spokesman Kevin Patterson, “things are going to look very different for education statewide” two years from now.

Tahoma has 657 full-time equivalent employees this school year and about 7,300 students.

This coming school year the failure of the construction bond measure won’t have much of an impact, however, there are maintenance issues that were rolled into the measure that may have to be addressed.

“An example of that would be the boiler at Lake Wilderness Elementary School,” Cloud said. “We need to have a contingency plan in place if something goes wrong with that boiler. The board asked us for a list of our top concerns.”

Among those would be roofs on various buildings as well as LP siding on a number of elementary schools. The siding is notorious for failing and is no longer used in the construction industry.

Still, things could be worse, Patterson noted.

“We didn’t know for so long what the legislature was going to do,” he said. “It turned out better than we expected when things got started in January.”