Bellevue School District Could Cut ~90 Staff Positions Due to $10M Budget Deficit

At this week’s Bellevue City Council meeting, Bellevue School District (BSD) officials revealed they’re facing a severe budget crisis that could result in significant staff cuts. I watched the presentation (available on YouTube, starting at about 1:00:00 in) and wanted to share some details:

• BSD faces a projected deficit of $10 million this year and $16 million next year. This is what they need to cut to have a balanced budget.
• Shortfall is due to increasing costs and stagnant state funding. There’s an interesting explanation of BSD’s income sources here.
• If they don’t get more funding from the state they are looking at “cutting about 90 staff members from all over the place“. This includes teachers, and other essential employees in our schools.
• To address the $10 million budget shortfall this year the school district is doing a hiring freeze, cutting from materials & supplies, and trying to cut out inefficiencies.

I’m surprised this isn’t getting more coverage in local media like The Seattle Times or Downtown Bellevue News, am I just not looking in the right places? What do people think our community can do to help address this? For those interested, I’ve included some slides from their presentation below (original PowerPoint). BSD also made a blog post about this.

State spending on education has plateaued, while spending on other things has only been increasing.

Since 2020 Belelvue has been underfunded in Special Education, Materials & Supplies, and Transportation. They say the state pays for students to get 2/3 of the way to school, but the last 1/3 BSD has to find funds elsewhere

This complicated looking chart is showing Bellevues “reserve funds” have been going down, and they can’t go below $8M which means they have to cut spending.