The story behind the numbers of a school district’s annual budget often indicates the level of investment in teachers, facilities and programs that prepare students for the future.
Following the Philomath School Board’s adoption of a $57.1 million budget Thursday night, Superintendent of Schools Susan Halliday and Business Manager Jennifer Griffith both said that the district’s top funding priorities come down to student success.
“Student success and maintaining as much of the staff as we can to be able to keep things moving forward — that’s a big part of it,” Halliday said.
The school district’s declining enrollment figures will not impact the 2025-26 fiscal year budget. Griffith said that because of an extended weighted average daily membership calculation (often referred to as extended ADMw), 2023-24 enrollment levels are used.
“So this current year, we didn’t get as big a hit but going into next year, it’ll be the highest of either the current year or next year for what the state school funding is calculated on,” Griffith said. “So as we decline in enrollment, it slowly catches up to us. It’s not an immediate hit.”
In other words, the use of the extended ADMw does not impact allocations for most programs when a single-year drop occurs. A sustained drop over multiple years will have an increasing impact over time.
Based on the latest figures, the Philomath School District’s total enrollment has dropped from 1,660 at the end of the 2023-24 academic year to 1,612 in the current school year.
Asked if the school district needs to be prepared for future cuts, Griffith said, “I think so, yeah, costs are outpacing the revenue increases so it’s got to be on our horizon to see that.”
Added Halliday, “We have to watch what happens with federal funds, what happens with all those kinds of things to be able to make determinations about where we have to pick and pull.”
The biggest financial risk at the moment, Griffith said, comes down to the current state of the economy and how that impacts future state-level funding.
“We know right now that the food service is going to maintain — kids will eat free, which will be a great thing,” Halliday said. “But we also know that we’ve gotten some external support for preschool to be able to help Strengthening Rural Families. We won’t have that same level of support so once again we’re back in the conversations about what does it mean and how do we support but not break the bank?”
Elsewhere, Clemens Community Pool has the potential to be a money pit for the district and school officials might need to brace themselves for worst-case scenarios.
“I just wanted to raise one thing that we all need to keep in mind and that is that there are some inspections happening on the pool and that might have an effect on the budget — depending on what we find out,” School Board member Erin Gudge said during the meeting. “I just wanted to raise that as a point of awareness and that it’s something that we should be monitoring moving into the next budget.”
The budget’s ending fund balance would come into play in such a scenario.
“If we have to put money into that, there will be money to put into it,” board chair Rick Wells said. “But if it’s a lot of money, we might be having a different discussion.”
It’s that different discussion that can get a little scary. Clemens Community Pool is an antiquated facility — it opened the day after Christmas in 1960 — and there have been a lot of Band-Aids applied in recent years.
“If we have some major renovations that have to be done, are we going to afford it or not?” Griffith said. “Do we need to work with the city to come up with a better plan for a citywide community center? That’s always in the discussion.”
The general fund serves as the main operating budget for the school district with those dollars coming from the State School Fund, local tax revenue, the local option levy and various other sources, including special revenue accounts related to major grant funding that comes in. Another part of the budget involves a $20 million sinking fund, which is money that the school district has been saving gradually to make a final bond repayment in 2027.
“That’s continuing to grow … that’s what’s making our budget get so much bigger,” Griffith said.
At the state level, education funding for 2025-27 came in at $11.36 billion.
“So the feeling of being able to move forward with approval of the budget has a little bit more of a level of certainty than we may have anticipated even three weeks ago,” Halliday told the board. “Now we just have to wonder about the ancillary Student Investment Account, Measure 98, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act funds.”
The State School Fund provides the bulk of K-12 public education funding. School officials have indicated that the $11.36 billion is about what is needed for most school districts to continue their same level of service over the next two years.
Taking a closer look at Philomath’s budget, the general fund alone dedicates $16.3 million to instruction while federal and state programs add another $2.4 million. Associated Student Body funds chip in nearly $825,000. The district is investing over $10 million in support services, which encompasses behind-the-scenes staffers from custodians to counselors to librarians.
As far as major needs with school facilities, nothing really jumps out. Griffith mentioned the possibility of painting Philomath Elementary and some carpeting projects but no major construction. The district is also not seeing any large-scale programming changes other than software adjustments and the adoption of new curriculum for middle school science and high school health.
Halliday pointed to the district’s reserves (over $21 million in unappropriated funds) as a part of the budget that she said is in great shape through Griffith’s efforts.
“If we have a driver’s ed car that dies, we want to be able to buy a new driver’s ed car,” Halliday said. “You don’t want to all of a sudden have to pull however much money out of the general fund to do that. And so how do we plan for technology needs, that driver’s ed car, facility needs — things like that that we can be proactive with in that way?”
There were no comments during Thursday night’s public hearing and Griffith said she received none via email.
In addition to adopting the budget, two separate resolutions to impose and categorize the tax were unanimously approved. The school district imposes property taxes in three categories — permanent rate tax ($4.8664 per $1,000 of assessed value), local option tax ($1.50 per $1,000 of assessed value) and general obligation bond debt service ($2.2 million).
