WASHOUGAL — The Washougal School District received a financial warning from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction indicating the district is facing potential difficulties.
“We had already been communicating concerns about enrollment, expenditures versus our revenue. And to see that we are identified on a list based on these indicators was very concerning,” Interim Superintendent Aaron Hansen said. “We knew that we were going to need to make some reductions. This just affirmed that.”
OSPI created the School District Financial Health Indicators Model to gauge the financial health of school districts. The model uses four weighted benchmarks: fund balance to revenue ratio, 40 percent; expenditures to revenue ratio, 35 percent; days cash on hand, 15 percent; and four-year budget summary plan, which measures how many years a district reported a negative fund balance deficit, 10 percent.
The model assigns values from zero to 4 in each of the categories. Each district’s score is the sum of each category score multiplied by the weighting factor. The combined score determines the district’s financial health. A 4.0 is a perfect score.
Clark County school districts financial health scores, 2022-2023
A 4.0 is a perfect score. Districts with a score below 1.75 receive a financial warning from OSPI.
Mount Pleasant: 4.0
Battle Ground: 3.05
Camas: 3.35
Evergreen: 2.25
Green Mountain: 3.75
Hockinson: 3.35
La Center: 2.30
Ridgefield: 2.95
Vancouver: 1.90
Districts with scores below 1.75 receive a financial warning. Nineteen of the 265 school districts in Washington received a warning for the 2022-23 school year, including Washougal with a score of 1.55.
Forty-three districts received a perfect 4.0 score, including Mount Pleasant, one of Clark County’s smallest districts.
OSPI Chief Communications Officer Katy Payne explained that the data lags.
“The most recent data in the model is from the 2022-23 school year, and we won’t have the data for the 2023-24 school year inputted into the model until the data are finalized in March or April of 2025,” she said.
Districts with higher scores generally have more ability to adapt to unforeseen budget cuts, revenue losses, unexpected expenditures or other “extraordinary items,” according to OSPI.
“Certainly, we definitely want to be off the warning list,” Hansen said. “This is one of our goals, to be good stewards of our resources and make sound fiscal decisions, and I believe we are doing that.”
The district announced a series of staff and program eliminations in the spring to reduce expenditures by about $4 million for the current school year. The district has 380 employees, down 9.5 percent from the start of the 2023-24 school year.
The district’s year-end fund balance has shrunk from a high of 18 percent in 2017-18 to 5 percent in 2022-23. It increased slightly to 5.71 percent at the end of the 2023-24 school year.
“We clearly made adjustments. Because of moves that we were making last year, our fund balance is moving in the right direction,” Hansen said at the school board’s Oct. 22 meeting.
Washougal’s enrollment dropped 2.7 percent from 2,726 full-time equivalent in 2022-2023 to 2,653 students in 2023-24. The district originally projected an enrollment figure of 2,530 for the current school year.
Hansen said the district currently has no plans to make additional cuts during the 2024-25 school year.
