The Lagunitas Teachers Association has asked to renegotiate three critical pieces of its contract, including compensation and class sizes. 

Though reopening contracts isn’t necessarily out of the ordinary, the request comes after five years of deficit spending by the district, which expects it will fail to meet state-mandated requirements for reserves in three years and will be insolvent in four if substantial changes aren’t made.

In a letter sent on Sept. 12 to the Lagunitas School District superintendent, John Carroll, the teachers association asked to negotiate three articles of its contracts: salaries, “with the intention of improving total compensation…to include but not [be] limited to increasing salaries, stipends, hourly rates, etc.”; benefits, “to improve district support for health and welfare benefits”; and class size and case load, “in order to address concerns relating to teacher staffing and class sizes.”

The board’s decision last spring to cut one of the three elementary programs, the Waldorf-Inspired Program, spurred a reorganization of students into remaining programs. At the time, some teachers expressed frustration that the Waldorf classes were so small—last year, two of the three had just 12 and 13 students—while teachers in the other two elementary programs, Montessori and Open Classroom, were covering between 23 and 26 kids. 

A new state policy calls for districts to make progress toward a 24:1 student-teacher ratio. But there is no financial penalty in place for districts like Lagunitas, which simply keeps all its property tax revenue rather than receiving a per-student allocation from the state; however, Bruce Abbott, the district’s business manager, said the state could in the future create some mechanism for imposing penalties.

This fall, most class sizes in district’s two remaining elementary programs are still in the same range they were last year, with between 23 and 27 students. Only the class with 27—Laurie Riley’s fourth, fifth and sixth grade class in the Open Classroom program—is over the current contracted limit, which is 26 for elementary grades and 28 for middle school. Another, Anita Collison’s third and fourth grade classroom in the Open Classroom program, has 25 students, one child over the state goal.

At the board’s regular meeting last Thursday evening, president Richard Sloan said the numbers still seem high. “These classes, in my mind, are large,” he said. 

Montessori parent Jodi Newdelman said she was vexed that the restructuring of classes caused by the influx of students from the former Waldorf program didn’t comport with the program’s philosophy. 

Last year, the program had three classes: a kindergarten and first grade class, a second and third grade class, and a fourth and fifth grade class. Ms. Newdelman said this achieved the program’s goal of having children spend two years in a class—one year as the younger cohort, the next as the older. “We value those experiences: reaching forward to the next grade, and rehearsing last year,” she said.

But now there are four Montessori classes, include a kindergarten-first grade class and a first-second grade class, disrupting that pattern for some kids. “We’ve had to compromise that philosophical approach… That flies in the face of what the Montessori program is trying to accomplish,” she said.

Though Ms. Newdelman recognized the financial constraints that public schools operate under—particularly when funds are tight—she asked the board and the administration to consider how their decisions impact the program.

(A co-chair of the Montessori Parent-Teacher Organization, Catherine Granville, said in an email that the issue hadn’t been discussed at their last program meeting. “This is a transition year for our program moving from 3 to 4 teachers, and I think most families understand that classroom configurations have been affected by that,” she wrote.)

But trying to accommodate both philosophical integrity and the teachers’ call for better compensation could be difficult, given the budgetary constraints the district is facing.

Last spring, Lagunitas was on the knife’s edge of a different funding model that some parents said could bring in more money. At around 300 students, it was unclear whether the district would end up with an enrollment that would keep it a Basic Aid district—meaning that it receives funding from local property taxes instead of a per-student state allocation, since the property taxes are worth more per student—or whether higher enrollment might switch it into the per-student formula. But after the board voted to close the Waldorf program, the district lost about two dozen students, solidifying its Basic Aid status for at least the next two years. 

(The state, not the district, decides whether schools are considered Basic Aid. Enrollment projections three years out, even without Waldorf, will again put the district on the cusp of moving out of Basic Aid.) 

Waldorf advocates, as well as Mr. Sloan, argued at the time that the district could have lured more inter-district transfers to the Waldorf program to switch into the per-student formula to boost total revenue. But Mr. Abbott said having fewer programs made it easier for the district to organize classes in a way that made them more economical, since they allow for greater student to teacher ratios. And if a larger lottery were to bring more students with Individual Education Plans (or special education students), costs could have quickly jumped, too.

The revised budget

On Thursday, Mr. Abbott presented a revised budget for the 2014-15 school year. After the layoffs of two Waldorf teachers, projected expenses this year have gone down by about $120,000, but the district also bumped up its estimate of operational expenses—by about $80,000—because of a settlement with a teacher no longer employed by the district. (Lagunitas teachers are making an average of $69,548 this year, with another $10,017 in average benefits.) Special education now costs the district almost $100,000.

And because projected revenues were also revised down—new estimates for parcel taxes collections and certain federal funds dropped by about $50,000—its projected deficit this year has increased after the revisions, to $285,000 of a $3.5 million budget. By the end of the school year, Lagunitas will have about $623,000 in reserves. The district’s multi-year projection shows that reserve dwindling to $213,000 by the end of the 2016-17 school year.

Mr. Carroll discussed restarting a finance committee to take a look at the budget and consider what could be cut.

It was not lost on the board and administration that another West Marin school district, Shoreline Unified, was that same night approving resolutions that could issue 16 employees lay-off notices this spring because of its own budget crisis, brought on by years of hiring during influxes of cash that have now evened out. “They are under the gun to prove they will not fail and go to insolvency. They are being forced to lay people off. That’s what happens when you go insolvent in your third year,” Mr. Abbott said.