PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles School District is preparing to vote on a $38.97 million budget for the 2010-2011 school year Aug. 23 after receiving no comment from the public during an informal session earlier this week.
The board offered an opportunity for the public to speak on the budget, but no one asked any questions or offered comment at a presentation of the budget Monday.
The School Board is expected to adopt the budget Aug. 23 and will conduct a formal public hearing prior to consideration of adoption on that day.
The hearing will be at 6:30 p.m. at the Central Services Building, 216 E. Fourth St., prior to the 7 p.m. regular board meeting.
To balance the budget, the district cut 5.345 teaching positions — but all positions were eliminated by attrition, so no teachers were laid off.
The budget could draw on reserves of about $600,000.
Jim Schwob, executive director of business and operations, said the $600,000 may not be needed but is budgeted in case the reserves are needed.
At a previous meeting the School Board had also voted to cut out six teacher training days because the state funding had been lost.
That amounted to about a 3 percent pay cut for teachers.
However, other sources of funding have allowed the district to restore four training days for other kinds of training and to evaluate how students are progressing, Schwob said.
“They come from a different funding source, but there are four days that we can use some funding for,” he said.
The 5.345 teaching positions eliminated will save the district about $427,600.
The budget cuts para-educators by 2,070 hours annually, or a 1.25 full-time equivalent.
The board cut $1,970,373 from the draft budget because the state had slashed funding programs and because of declining enrollment.
Public schools are reimbursed money from the state for enrollment.
The trend for several years throughout the North Olympic Peninsula has been a decline in enrollment.
In Port Angeles, the enrollment peak was in 1967, when 5,138 students attended. A new low was reached in 2009-2010, with 3,721 students.
Projected enrollment for 2010-2011 is 3,588.7 full-time equivalents, Schwob said.
Copies of the preliminary budget are available for review at the Port Angeles School District Central Services Building.
Agendas and other information are available at www.boarddocs.com/wa/pasd/Board.nsf.
The School Board is also preparing to talk at upcoming meetings about a possibly placing a replacement maintenance and operations levy on a ballot sometime next year, the board said at the Monday meeting.
The levy would not be a new tax but a replacement of the four-year levy, passed in 2007, which will run out at the end of 2011.
No amounts have been proposed, and no vote has yet been taken on the issue.
The current levy supports about 19.5 percent or $7,439,312 of the proposed 2010-2011 budget, Schwob said.