Some superintendents still unclear about their district's future

By Doug Nadvornick, Spokane Public Radio

Administrators in most of Spokane County’s public school districts went to work this morning, knowing they would have local support for the next few years.

But, for a few, the future scenarios are still unclear.

Spokane School district officials were smiling after their replacement levy won 66-percent of the vote. Spokane Superintendent Brian Benzel says the process of building the next budget started today (Wed).

“We’re in the middle right now of trying to figure out what the governor’s gonna do with her budget, or that the legislature passed,” Benzel said. “It has some wrinkles in it that will certainly cost us money and require us to make some tough choices.”

Among those wrinkles are requirements that districts contribute more money for employee retirement accounts and that they give raises to certain employees, even though the state isn’t providing the money for those raises.

For superintendents in a few districts, however, the fiscal future remains murky.

The West Valley maintenance-and-operations levy is failing, but the vote is close enough that absentee ballots could reverse the result. Mead and Nine Mile Falls school administrators are also keeping a close eye on the absentees, hoping to change the outcome of their district’s technology levies.

The Central Valley school board met briefly this morning to celebrate last night’s M-and-O levy win and to decide what to do about the district’s 55-million dollar facilities bond issue. The measure won 56-percent support, short of the 60-percent needed. The board decided to wait until its March 27th meeting to decide whether to put the issue on the ballot again in May.

Spokeswoman Melanie Rose says the district is adjusting to communicating with voters before an all-mail election.

“What we were finding over the time period between when the ballots were mailed and when the election actually happened is a lot of people calling into the district not clear about what they were voting on and what the ballot actually said,” Rose said. “That was cause for concern that people that people really didn’t understand what they were voting on although we had a lot of information out there.”

Two levies outside of Spokane County failed. The levy in Colville won nearly 58-percent support, not enough to satisfy the 60-percent threshold. And a school facilities levy in Coeur d’Alene won less than 45-percent of the vote.