The Paso Robles Joint Unified School District is facing a $4.9 million budget deficit.
Superintendent Jennifer Loftus says the deficit is based largely on the district's declining enrollment.
"We've lost a few hundred students over the last couple of years," Loftus said. "The challenge with declining enrollment is that the way our school funding is built in California is that the funds we get are based specifically on the number of students we have."
She says additional funding during the COVID-19 pandemic helped keep them afloat temporarily.
"In education during the pandemic, districts received a lot of one-time monies, so there was a huge influx of financial assistance given to school districts and that was wonderful. However, we used those dollars, what we call one-time dollars — meaning they're not funds that we will continuously get — we used a lot of those resources to employ additional support staff for our students."
She says while enrollment was declining, staffing was not.
"We were not right-sizing with our declining enrollment and we also were hiring additional staff with those one-time dollars," Loftus said. "It really resulted in a situation where now that the one-time dollars are all expiring, they're going away, we don't have the ongoing funds to be able to continue to employ the staff that we have."
Loftus says they're now offering a supplemental retirement program for educators.
"If they were thinking about retirement in the next year or two, they were offered an incentive to maybe perhaps retire this year," she said.
The school district is also asking for feedback from parents, teachers and students in grades 7 through 12 for other ideas to help balance the budget.
"A lot of our teachers and classified staff have their very own children going here, so it means a lot to them to hold onto their jobs if possible," said Brenda Matthysse, Paso Robles High School teacher.
Matthysse says she took the survey the district sent out.
"Class size is a huge consideration for the teachers and also directly impacts students, so that was something that I mentioned when I filled out the survey," she said.
Loftus says class size is one area they want to prioritize when making adjustments for next year.
"Weighing the needs and the priorities of everyone and what research says works best, it's really a balancing game, and so that is the goal," she said.
Loftus adds that while survey results are in, it will likely take a couple of weeks before they make recommendations to the board of trustees. She adds that any reductions in staffing won't be implemented until the 2025/2026 school year.
