Even if a new “enrichment” levy passes next February, the Grand Coulee Dam School District is set to lose $800,000 per year the way things are currently budgeted, the result of recent changes in state law. If the levy doesn’t pass, that loss figure is closer to $1.2 million.

According to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, many districts are on a course to lose major dollars.

The 2012 McCleary decision by the state Supreme Court ruled that the state wasn’t fully funding basic education, and it required the Legislature to do something about it.

To fulfill the requirement, the state, in essence, then told districts they couldn’t ask for as much money in levies and began taking 81 cents per thousand dollars of assessed property value to the state to fund basic education — money formerly taken by the local schools in “operations and maintenance” levies.

New laws changed the former O&M levy into two seperate levies — a capital projects levy, and an enrichment levy.

Additional restrictions on how schools could spend money collected from those levies, plus a 15-percent pay increase for teachers, and 6-percent increase for other school employees in the district, complicated the budget process.

The school can now take in about as much money as before — if the enrichment levy passes in February — but now also has increased expenses.

Superintendent Paul Turner said in an interview that he will offset about $200,000 of the $800,000 disparity by funding technology expenses from the Capital Projects Levy passed earlier this year.

But even by doing that, in 2020 when a School Employees Benefits Board program takes effect, even employees who work only a few hours a week will be entitled to full benefits, unlike now when benefits are given to scale considering an employee’s hours.

That SEBB program will, in effect, cost the GCDSD $200,000 more, Turner said, thus bringing the budget problem back to square one, an $800,000 disparity.

“We’re short about $1 million on a $12 million budget,” Turner said. “That’s just under 10 percent of our budget. How in the hell are we supposed to operate? … We have to roll up our sleeves and figure it out. We have to do our budget by July. We have to make cuts.”

Whether those cuts will come from staff or programs, both, or otherwise is still to be decided.

And this local district isn’t alone.

Numbers from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction project an estimated $1 million loss from the Tonasket School District, $145,000 from the Nespelem School District, $670,000 from Brewster, $541,000 from Okanogan, $868,000 from Omak, $540,000 from Wilbur, $316,000 from Creston, and similar numbers from other area school districts.

“Something has to happen [to the law] because this is going to bankrupt school districts,” Turner said, frustrated with the state.

OSPI is working on a bill that could be a partial solution to this problem and would help make up for about half of those lost funds. The earliest this bill could take effect, if passed by state Legislature, is 2020.

“The intent of our proposal is to restore about half of the lost levy capacity,” explained T.J. Kelly, director of school apportionment and financial services at OSPI. He said that the new law results in annual losses of about $1 billion statewide for school districts. “The (OSPI) superintendent’s proposal restores about half of that,” he said in an interview. “If the locals, by exercise of vote, want to contribute more to the educational systems, they should be allowed to do so.”

Kelly explained that smaller schools used to be able to get more dollars, as if they had more students, but that these benefits for rural districts have gone away, resulting in more losses in rural districts than in urban.

While hoping districts don’t experience such losses, Kelly acknowledged the harsh realities of being short on money.

“For whatever reason, if districts are experiencing a downward tick in resources, or expenditures are increasing faster than revenues, then their only resources to balancing their budgets are cutting programs or cutting people. So it’s a complicated situation.”

If the OSPI bill passes, it would bring in an estimated $1.2 million into the GCDSD, so rather than being $800,000 short annually, it would put the district $400,000 ahead.