Summit School District officials unveiled an initial budget proposal for the 2024-25 school year during an April 25 board of education meeting. 

The multimillion-dollar spending plan will still be subject to change ahead of the board’s June 30 deadline for approval, and one of the biggest factors that remains to be finalized is salaries for teachers and staff. 

“At this point I don’t have any assumption for salary increases for employees,” said Chief Financial Officer Kara Drake, who added that salary negotiations with district leadership are currently ongoing. 

---

---

Last year, officials approved changes to salary schedules that included raising wages for new teachers from $50,000 to $52,200 and higher pay for longstanding teachers, leading to an average 12% salary increase. Support staff, principals, assistant principals and bus drivers also all saw pay increases on average. 

The changes helped drive a roughly 10% increase in the district’s overall proposed expenditures for the 2023-24 school year compared to the year prior, with an approved budget of $53.8 million. Actual spending, however, is expected to be higher at $54.7 million, a 14% increase over the 2022-23 year, according to financial documents presented by Drake. 

---

---

Without knowing where salary negotiations will land, the current budget proposal for 2024-25 would keep expenses fairly flat at $54.6 million, a 0.1% decrease from this school year. 

The district’s revenue will be aided by additional state spending after both the Colorado State Senate and House of Representatives approved an increase in K-12 funding that will pay off what is known as the budget stabilization factor, a Great Recession-era mechanism that has diverted money from public schools. 

Long a pledge of state lawmakers, the buy-down of the budget stabilization factor coupled with a per-pupil funding increase of $419 should boost the state’s public education spending by $561.7 million for a total of $9.7 billion. 

Officials believe this will translate to just over a 5% increase in the district’s general fund revenues from the Colorado School Finance Act for the 2024-25 school year. 

At the same time, the district is preparing for cost increases that include an additional $667,000 in spending on health benefits and more than $100,000 for purchased supplies. Other increased costs are aimed at meeting some of the priorities pushed by community members and parents regarding additional learning support and bilingual staffing. 

Calls for more teacher support, language services 

Prior to the meeting’s budget discussion, district teachers packed the board’s meeting room to voice concern over their lack of dedicated planning time for lessons. Several said they were forced to work long hours outside of school that, coupled with the high-cost of living and lack of affordable housing, threatened to intensify teacher burnout and turnover. 

“As a teacher who’s been here for almost a decade now, I see a lot of staff members come and go,” said social studies teacher Joe Kassay. “And if we can’t keep people in the classrooms consistently, none of the initiatives we pursue are going to be successful.”

Also in attendance were several Spanish-speaking parents who spoke about the need for more bilingual staffing, which continues to remain a top focus of parents groups as well as Mountain Dreamers, an immigrant-advocacy nonprofit. 

“It is time for the school district to invest the necessary resources to address positive change in the life of our students and to foster new relationships with teachers, parents, students and administration,” said Yerania Reynoso, a district parent of two and Mountain Dreamers staff member. 

The nonprofit recently compiled more than 150 signatures from Spanish-speaking residents in support of hiring more bilingual staff, particularly in the form of family liaisons who serve as touch points for parents at various schools. Currently, the district has one districtwide interpreter, an on-call interpreter and five family liaisons who provide interpretation and translation services at the district’s nine schools.

Because liaisons must split their time between each school, Spanish-speaking parents say they often don’t have anyone to communicate with when they walk in the door or are attending important meetings about their children’s education. 

“We believe that hiring more community liaisons offers greater equitable and inclusive opportunities,” Reynoso said. 

The 2024-25 budget includes $61,000 in new spending to hire an additional translator and interpreter to support families of children with individualized education plans, which are tailored to students with different learning difficulties. 

“One of the things we learned as we looked at this need for bilingual support was that translation for (individualized education plans) is particularly difficult,” Drake said. “It really is a special skill to be able to translate all that technical language and provide good support in those meetings for those families.”

Doing so, Drake said, should free up family liaisons to “be more available to support at the building level” and “be available for families who come in at the front desk.”

The budget also calls for a $255,000 increase in special education staffing, enough to pay for two-and-a-half full-time positions, Drake said. 

Preserving reserve funds 

Any spending increases are likely to continue to drain the district’s fund balance, which serves as its reserves. Beyond the limited increases for bilingual and special education staff, district officials said they want to reallocate existing resources next school year to address those needs in ways that don’t require new spending. 

Since the 2020-21 school year, the district’s fund balance as a percent of the total general fund budget has been nearly cut in half, going from 22.1% to 11.5% in 2023-24. State policy mandates the district keep at least 3% of its general fund in reserves while the district has its own policy to keep an additional 7% in reserves — though officials are now pushing to increase that to 10%. 

It means that, in total, the district should be maintaining a fund balance of at least 13% but if expenditures continue to rise, the balance is projected to fall to 10.3% in 2025-26 and 9.5% in 2026-27.

“If we don’t start spending less than the new revenue coming in, we’re going to continue using fund balance year over year over year,” Drake said. “So the way to get our budget back into better alignment is to start closing that gap.”

Superintendent Tony Byrd said the district already has little wiggle room to accommodate major spending increases. Compared to other comparable school districts including Eagle and Roaring Fork, Summit spends the second most of its budget on staff salaries and wages at roughly 88%. Only Boulder Valley spends more, Byrd said. 

Byrd said it presents “a real dilemma” when it comes to meeting community needs around things like bilingual staffing, adding, “We’ve got to really think about family liaisons and translation and interpretation … can we really squeeze it out of what we have, or do we need to add?”

Board members said wherever possible, the district should strive to find creative solutions. 

Board member Johanna Kugler said the district could look into partnering with nonprofits such as Mountain Dreamers and the Family & Intercultural Resource center, which already have translators and interpreters, to provide more services. 

Board member Chris Guarino said he wants officials to look at grant opportunities that could help cover costs that may otherwise be paid out of the district’s budget. 

As the 2024-25 school year budget continues to be fine-tuned, board member Vanessa Agee asked Drake, “Will there be a time when you’ll come to us with the things that staff have figured out they can cut in order for us to narrow that gap?”

Drake, in response, said the district has pushed departments to look for areas to reduce spending as officials build the coming budget but added that most have “very little discretionary spending.”

“Everyone feels like it’s very tight and we’re in an environment of rising costs,” Drake said. “We see that in our own personal budget, we see that in all of our services, all of our supplies, the costs are going up. So the goal this year was really to reallocate dollars and limit any adds to the budget as much as possible.”

Any additional cuts, Drake said, “will come with some sacrifices.”