The Sitka School District is writing its budget for next year and – as usual –  is hoping additional funding comes out of the capitol to make ends meet.

At a recent budget hearing, Sitka School Board members – and a lone member of the public – shared their frustrations with the process.

The district is currently projecting a deficit of roughly $3 million for the school year starting next fall.

Members of the Sitka School board flew to Juneau earlier in February to meet with state legislators. At a community budget hearing on February 15, board president Tristan Guevin said the fly-in was productive.

“It was a little bit more hopeful, maybe, at the capitol than last year,” said Guevin, “but it’s an uphill battle, and having the state with the strongest governor –  and line item veto –  means that it would take a two-thirds majority* to override any veto like last year.”

Editor’s note: For appropriations and raising revenue, it takes three-quarters of the legislature to override the governor’s veto.

Last year the legislature approved a one-time increase to per-student funding of $680. Gov. Dunleavy used his veto power to slash that by half, forcing many districts to rewrite budgets that had already been adopted.

Sitka’s situation is not as precarious as some other districts around the state. Board member Tom Williams thanked the school’s business office for helping to limit the damage to the district’s finances.

“Juneau’s got a $9 million deficit, and Ketchikan has a zero fund balance,” Williams said. “You wouldn’t want to be running your checkbook if you had zero fund balance in it. Other school districts are talking about negative fund balances or minimum fund balances. If they had an emergency facilities failure, they don’t have the resources to bond and would be looking to the state to either fund them, or shut them down.”

The February 15 community budget hearing was attended by only one member of the public: Sarah Ferrency is the interim director of Cultural Resources, Education, and Employment at the Sitka Tribe of Alaska. She’s a former assistant superintendent and former principal in the Sitka School District. Ferrency urged the board to be more proactive about budgeting.

“In my experience of a couple of years of doing this, the district budget pressures tends to be reactive,” Ferrency said. “It tends to be like, ‘Okay, here’s what it would cost to do the status quo, we have to cut $3 million.’ I think, for the past 20 years, we’ve had to cut $3 million at this time of year, and then we have all these conversations about what we’re going to cut. And then everybody who likes those things comes out and says ‘Don’t cut that.’ And then we have conversations about different things to cut, and we pass the budget and cut them. It’s just hard, it’s exhausting. And it doesn’t feel very forward thinking. It doesn’t feel very purposeful.”

Ferrency added that prioritizing programs would help teachers know where they stand, and reduce the uncertainty – or even panic – experienced by staff wondering if they’re jobs will be cut.

Board president Guevin agreed.

“I know one of our goals as a district has always been to move more towards outcomes-based budgeting, or something of that nature that maybe is a little more forward thinking,” he said, “and so hopefully we can get our strategic plan going, and dovetail that with the the budget process as much as possible this year.”

Budgeting remains one of the school board’s most important tasks, and there is likely nothing more frustrating. Board member Todd Gebler said the process sometimes made little sense.

“It just goes on and on and on,” he said. “It’s just a lot to think about  –  just the unknown. We won’t know anything for quite a while. I thought this last year and I thought this the year before: You can’t even really call it a budget because a budget means some way to foresee the future, and we have no way to foresee the future to put money where we need to because we don’t know what the money is.”

The Sitka School Board plans at least two more budget work sessions, on March 7 and April 11, before holding a final hearing and budget adoption on April 17