The Battle Ground Public Schools Board of Directors approved its 2025-26 budget Monday, Aug. 25, finalizing $14 million in cuts to staffing and programs after voters rejected the district’s replacement levy earlier this year.
The cuts eliminate 116 full-time positions across the district — 56 certificated and 60 classified staff — while also removing or scaling back several programs.
The 2025-26 reductions also include eliminating all middle school sports and coaching positions, ending free school supplies for primary students, cutting the Kindergarten Jump Start program, removing all instructional coaches and teacher librarians, reducing paid crossing guards, mental health therapists and nursing positions, consolidating bus routes, and suspending new curriculum purchases. The district will reduce, but not fully eliminate, its ASPIRE magnet program by cutting the third-grade cohort.
Superintendent Shelly Whitten expressed concern that support from the state, which provides 83.2% of Battle Ground’s annual budget, has steadily dropped in recent years, leaving the district increasingly unable to operate effectively without local levy funding.
“Since 2019, we have dropped from over 50%, which aligns with our constitution that says education is the paramount duty of the state, to 42% of the state budget is now going toward education,” Whitten said. “Something has happened in the last six years where funding is apparently not the paramount duty despite the fact that our constitution says that.”
Whitten affirmed that without federal COVID-19 relief dollars, Battle Ground and other school districts would already be in deeper financial distress.
“The only reason that we were in a better place was because of the federal dollars that came in during COVID,” Whitten said. “That allowed us to catch our breath, adopt some curriculum, do some things that we needed to do. That allowed us to get a healthy fund balance, and we haven't been as free with our spending as maybe some other districts have been. Otherwise, we would have already been in this kind of dire straits.”
Whitten said she and other superintendents across Washington are preparing a joint statement to state lawmakers, warning that K-12 schools face worsening instability unless legislators increase their financial support.
“It seems to be falling on deaf ears that we are headed into trouble,” Whitten said.
Chief Financial Officer Michelle Scott told the board that without passage of a new local levy next year, the district will run a negative ending fund balance by 2026-27. To prevent insolvency, more than $20 million in further cuts would be required.
If that happens, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) would intervene and place the district under binding conditions and direct financial oversight.
“I think everybody in this room could probably sit here and (put) out five things that the state's done to make this more expensive,” Board Member Ted Champine said. “It's frustrating to hear things like they're gonna come down and do budget oversight on us, and I'd love to sit here and point fingers. (It’s) frustrating.”
The district will continue relying on its capital projects levy, approved in 2023, for building improvements and safety upgrades. However, officials warned that the future of classroom staffing and programs depends on whether voters eventually approve a replacement levy.
“We have no middle school sports,” Whitten said. “We have no curriculum adoptions happening this year. We have a variety of positions that are cut; people aren't going to understand the impacts of those until we get started. Class sizes are going to be higher, custodians were reduced … There will be a nurse on the campus, but there won't be a nurse in the building. So what is that gonna look like? It depends on what happens and so some of those things you can't, you can't project fully.”
