In less than a month, the Central Valley School District (CVSD) is scheduled to start classes. But as of now, it’s uncertain whether there will be money to buy gas for the school buses to run or to pay teachers to greet their new classes because the board has not passed its budget for the year.
Though the approval of the budget has been scheduled for August in the past, this year the vote was scheduled for a July meeting after an informational presentation in late June. Instead of approving it though, the board voted to defer it. Then, the board took its second July meeting off, as it usually does. With only two board meetings left on the schedule before classes are slated to begin — tonight at 6 pm, and August 26 — the board is down to the wire to approve the budget, or there could be no cash to turn on the lights come September 5, when classes begin.
Board President Pam Orebaugh said that some members of the board may be hesitant to pass the budget as-is because the costs of operating CVSD schools have increased but enrollment has remained stagnant.
“I think that has been part of the hold up: if our enrollment is the same, why is our budget so much higher?” Orebaugh said in an interview with RANGE, citing questions like these as a cause for concern amongst members of the board. “Is it, you know, salaries? Is it insurance? Is it fuel?”
She said her approach to the budget has been not to “rip it to the ground because we’re cutting so much,” but to avoid frivolous spending of taxpayer money. “There’s a balance [between] what the district really needs versus what the taxpayers can afford to give us,” she said. “And we just need to take everything into account when we’re looking at that.”
Cindy McMullen, who is the longest sitting member of the board, told RANGE the problem is relatively simple: “Our costs have gone up, just like in the general public.”
The version of the budget prepared by the staff and presented in June “basically will continue the same level of services to our students as this past year has done,” McMullen said.
Stephanie Jerdon, one of the two newest board members alongside Anniece Barker, told RANGE she wasn’t worried about the fast-approaching deadline, as the board had passed the budget in August in previous years.
“It is not unusual for the board to take time to review the budget and ask thorough questions to ensure the budget is both fiscally sound and reflective of our Central Valley community values,” Jerdon said. “As a newly elected board member, this opportunity to work with our executive financial officer to learn in depth about district expenditures and allocations has been extremely helpful in understanding our district’s challenges.”
McMullen said in the past, there had been far fewer questions about the budget and that while she personally was “very comfortable” passing the budget as the staff presented it in June, she doesn’t know where her fellow board members stand.
“It’s kind of up in the air right now, which, for me, is very difficult because we’re only a couple of weeks before the school year starts, and we are not authorized by law to spend any money unless we have adopted a budget,” McMullen said. “I know we have one more meeting, but if we don’t pass the budget as proposed, that means there’s going to have to be some kind of rewrite of the budget, and that takes time.”
Spending skepticism
While McMullen, Orebaugh and Jerdon all told RANGE a version of the same story — questions from new board members and a desire by some to spend less money had delayed the process — some parents of students in the district worry that the delay is coming down to stone-walling from Orebaugh, Jerdon and Barker, members of the board who were financially backed in their elections by the advocacy group Citizens for CVSD Transparency, a group of volunteer conservative traditionalists trying get “woke culture” and “political correctness” out of education.
“There are three board members who, during the last few board meetings, have been the ones that have been prolonging this process,” Teresa Tapao Hunt, a parent of students in the district, told RANGE. She said the three board members — Jerdon, Barker and Orebaugh (who received support from the group before it officially became a PAC) — had many questions about the budget, specifically around trying to reduce the district’s spending of taxpayer dollars collected by its most recent levy.
Citizens for CVSD Transparency was formed in 2021 “to remove and replace school board directors of the Central Valley School District who seemed unresponsive to parents’ concerns about academic performance, excessive spending and ideology in the curricula.” It’s position on the budget that the district spends too much money without enough citizen oversight. Along with getting rid of comprehensive sex education, protecting students from “the corrosive teachings of Critical Race Theory” and preventing school from being a “playground” for gender identity “ideology,”, one of the group’s main priorities, according to its website, is to install a “citizens oversight committee to analyze expenditures, especially as to the use of local levy monies.”
The question of how to use the levy funds has been a central point of conflict as the CVSD board has debated the budget.
Orebaugh said that while the levy was passed fairly and legally, “we also have to realize we represent the entire community, and it barely passed. Some people are struggling to put gas in their car [or] to eat,” she said. “Part of what is driving our overall budget is we need to be very mindful and very cognizant that we are spending the money very, very wisely. Because we understand that our community is struggling, and the levy barely passed.”
Jerdon told RANGE in an email that “for the future success of district levies, I feel it is vitally important to assure our stakeholders the district takes its stewardship over public funds seriously while providing as many opportunities for our students as possible.” She also claimed, both to RANGE and concerned parents, that the levy passed with much less support this year than in previous years.
While the district’s levy in February of 2024 passed with slightly less support than the previous levy in 2021, CVSD’s support for levies over the last few years has been all over the map, rather than showing a consistent trend of support that fell this year.
In 2024, the levy renewal was passed 52.75% to 47.25%, as opposed to 54.29% to 45.7% in 2021. When it was on the ballot in 2020, though, it passed by a slimmer margin than both of those years — 51.28% to 48.72% — and in 2018, it passed by a massive margin of 70.28% to 29.72%, according to the county’s voting records.
McMullen — who won her most recent election against CVSD Citizens for Transparency-backed candidate Jeff Brooks, who opposed putting a levy on the ballot — thinks the yo-yoing support for the levy shouldn’t impact the passage of this year’s budget. “The voters entrusted us with the full amount of the levy, and they expect us to use that money to provide the very best education we can for our students,” McMullen said. “For the board to decide to do something different than that, we’d have to think long and hard about it.”
Tapao Hunt, who runs the Facebook group Parents in Support of CVSD, said if the district doesn’t use the full levy funds, “it would be disappointing because we want to make sure that we are keeping with whatever a free and fair election resulted [in].”
Tapao Hunt said that the majority of voters approved the extra money, and if it’s not spent to maintain the current level of services and improve buildings, then “there’s an obstruction of funding for education for my kids.”
She also said she knew people in the community that moved to CVSD because levies were not being approved in North Idaho, which left them disappointed in the diminishing quality of their children’s education. Now, she fears the same could happen in CVSD.
If funding is not approved in time, “there’s not going to be buses to pick your kids up,” Tapao Hunt said. She wants parents to know that the budget process is coming down to the wire and it’s not too late for community members to “come and voice their concerns and be a part of the process.”
The school board will meet tonight at 6 pm at 2218 N Molter Rd in Liberty Lake and will take public comment near the top of the meeting. The vote on whether or not to adopt the budget is scheduled as the first Business Action Item.
Editor’s Note: This article has been edited to more accurately represent Pam Orebaugh’s position on the budget, and clarify the budget adoption timeline.
