Vancouver Public Schools is the only Clark County district to receive a financial warning from the state for the 2023-24 school year. The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction created the School District Financial Health Indicators Model to measure the financial health of school districts by assigning a score from zero to a perfect 4.0. Districts with scores below 1.75 receive a warning. In the 2023-24 school year, the two smallest Clark County districts — Mount Pleasant with 67 students and Green Mountain with 169 students — received perfect scores. Vancouver, with 22,014 students enrolled, is one of the largest school districts in the state to receive this warning. Vancouver’s first warning in the past decade was for the 2022-23 school year with a health score of 1.90. The district’s score fell to 1.50 the following school year.

The warning “highlights concerns for the future if nothing is amended,” Vancouver’s spokeswoman Jessica Roberts said in an email. “Last year, our school board and administration made difficult decisions to cut our overall budget for this year by almost $35 million dollars to address our financial situation and the trajectory we were on,” Roberts said. OSPI assigns financial health scores to each district in the state based on four benchmarks: ending fund balance-to-revenue ratio, expenditures-to-revenue ratio, cash on hand and four-year budget summary plan. Roberts attributes Vancouver’s low score to the district’s continued use of reserves in the 2023-24 school year for student supports, despite the decline in revenues. The district anticipates that the 2024-25 score will increase due to the reductions, bringing expenditures closer in line with the reductions, she said.

“We used federal pandemic relief funds to maintain positions for as long as possible before having to make reductions,” Roberts said. “We have also tried to find efficiencies in our service models.” The district cut administrative and office staff, counselors, as well as elementary, secondary and library teachers, according to the district’s May 2024 reduction-in-force table. “Reductions were felt across all basic education categories,” Roberts said. Costs have increased, but state funding has not, according to a presentation at a July board meeting before this school year’s budget was set. For example, Vancouver’s special education program has experienced a $31.4 million budget deficit over the past five years. The state’s funding increases alongside the program’s expenses each year but at a slower rate, according to the presentation.

School districts’ state funding is mostly dependent on the number of students enrolled, and enrollment has inconsistently declined since 2018, according to OSPI’s enrollment reports. “Large gaps remain in what it realistically costs to run a school in a way that is safe, effective, and welcoming and what the funding provides,” Roberts said. “We eagerly await the outcomes of this year’s legislative decisions as this will also impact what may be in store for the future.”