The Bend-La Pine Schools will be bleeding staff in its next budget.

A total of 77 positions will be lost. It will be formally announced at Tuesday’s school board meeting.

It’s not a big percentage of the overall staff in the district. The district has roughly 2,100 staff members. And all of positions will be lost through attrition.

But the number may have to double in the following year.

Some of the reason is a decline in enrollment. The projected enrollment for 2024-2025 is 16,940. It was 17,134 on Oct 1.

The district makes adjustments every year in staffing to set the district up for what it believes enrollment will look like. That only accounts for 17 of the 77 positions.

“Will there be a pain point with the reduction of those 60 positions?” Superintendent Steve Cook said to us on Friday. “Well there has to be somewhere. I mean that’s 60 less people helping kids. But we don’t have the funds that we have been using.”

Funding for Bend-La Pine Schools is hitting a cliff. The end is near for federal one-time funds that were basically sent to help schools make up for learning loss from the pandemic. Those all go away. They have to be spent by Sept. 30.

Do all the needs of the students disappear on Sept. 30? No.

The federal funds did enable the district to help many students and create room in the district’s budget to accommodate rising costs and the new employee agreements. Without the federal support and looking ahead with financial and enrollment projections, the district has to make adjustments to put it in a good place for the future. More salary increases will come. The cost of PERS, the state retirement system, may rise as much as $3 million a year for the district beginning in 2025.

If the district did nothing, it projects it would face a deficit in its general fund.

So to match the projected costs with the projected revenue, the district is making cuts. And that’s where the 60 positions come in.

There are two big variables.

The first is what the Legislature will do when it meets in 2025 about school funding. Districts across the state are making personnel cuts. Legislators and Gov. Tina Kotek also did not miss the tough bargaining that Bend and Portland went through on teacher salaries. So maybe they will be making an extra effort to see what they can do to fund schools.

“We are asking for more money, because what we are seeing in our schools are more needs, whether they are mental health needs or reading instruction or intensive tutoring,” Cook said.

The second variable in the Bend-La Pine Schools is what happens with the school levy on the May ballot. The question many of you will be voting on is: Shall District levy $1.00 per $1,000 assessed value for five years beginning 2024-25 to bridge funding gap, support priorities?

It would raise about $21 million in the first year.

“The priorities of the local levy are already the priorities of the district,” Cook told us. “One of the things that will happen if the levy passes is many of the positions we are cutting that will impact class size we are going to put right back in.”

There’s something to think about as you weigh how to vote on the levy.

Lots more information about the district’s budget can be found here: tinyurl.com/Bendschoolbudget.