In November, voters in Rathdrum, Twin Lakes and Spirit Lake were asked to fund the Lakeland Joint School District's two-year $19 million replacement levy. These funds would have made up close to a quarter of the district's budget for employee salaries, extracurricular activities and transportation.
However, in a tally separated by less than 300 votes, the levy failed for the second time since the current levy — which only lasts until June 2025 — passed in May 2023. This leaves the district $9.5 million in the hole for its 2025-2026 school year without a concrete plan to address that shortfall.
The district's School Board and top administrators, such as Superintendent Lisa Arnold and Chief Financial Officer Jessica Grantham, have been working for the past month-and-a-half to figure out how they can fill that gap.
"We have been working pretty much nonstop since the levy election trying to figure out the recommendations that we want to make to the board for consideration as we try to reduce our budget," Arnold said at a Dec. 9 School Board meeting.
At the meeting, Arnold presented the board members (minus Ramona Grissom, who was absent) with some cost-cutting ideas to consider. One of the first ideas she recommended discussing was whether to close one of the district's six elementary schools and rezone the attendance boundaries for the remaining schools.
In total, Arnold said the district has more than 1,800 elementary students between six schools. That number has been declining since the pandemic and hasn't made a rebound yet. If the district were to close one of those schools, she says each of the remaining schools would have 374 students. For reference, in 2023, the district's elementary schools each had 340 students on average, collectively serving more than 2,000 elementary students, according to the Idaho State Department of Education.
"It's hard for me to visualize how we can take 300 to 400 kids out of one building and spread them across the other buildings and not have increases in class sizes beyond what we currently have as expectations," school board member Bob Jones said. "You can redistribute kids pretty easily on paper, but when it actually comes to moving from one spot to another based on their neighborhood and other kinds of things, it becomes a whole different kind of ball game to deal with. That's part of my reluctance to go down this path."
The board also discussed moving the district to a four-day schedule, similar to a move the Post Falls School District made two years ago. This saved the Post Falls district $200,000 in utility costs by not opening any school on a Friday, Arnold explained. The other idea was to move teacher planning periods to the end of the school day. This, however, was not recommended in tandem with the four-day week, as Arnold believes it would overload Lakeland's teachers.
None of these recommendations included details on the full financial impact, nor a thorough list of benefits or downfalls that the district could foresee under either plan. However, Arnold said that was intentional, as the discussion was only meant for the School Board to guide her team on which proposals to explore further.
The board was scheduled to meet on Dec. 18 for another work session to further discuss budget cut options, after the Inlander's print deadline for this issue.
"I just want to make sure that everyone understands that we have not yet taken off the table rerunning the levy, albeit maybe a different levy than the one we ran before," Jones said at the Dec. 9 meeting. "We're not giving any illusion that that's out of the window." ♦
