As the 2024-2025 school year comes to a close, the Shoreline School District is nearing a crisis. All throughout Shorewood and beyond, nervous whispers of budget cuts, unreserved funds, and debt have been heard for months. On Tuesday, April 1, these concerns came to a head at the School Board meeting at Shoreline Center.
Superintendent Susanna Reyes and Assistant Superintendent Angela Von Essen kicked off the meeting by presenting to the school board a draft of the Reduced Educational Program (REP). The REP was suggested to be implemented during the 2025-2026 school year, with its objective being to counteract the drastic financial decline that our school district has been experiencing since around 2016.
The REP aims to increase the district’s unreserved fund balance at the end of the school year. If the district ends a given school year with an unreserved fund balance of $1 or more, everything will continue to operate regularly. However, if the district ends a given school year with an unreserved fund balance of less than $1, it will enter binding conditions.
According to the presentation run by Reyes and Von Essen, binding conditions mean that if the less than $1 unreserved fund balance continues for two more years, the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) will place the district under financial oversight. Once under financial oversight, Shoreline School District’s budgeting efforts will be at the virtually undisputable discretion of OSPI.
As revealed by Reyes and Von Essen, the main budget-cutting method proposed for the REP is the removal of several occupational positions within the Shoreline School District, in a process called “employee reduction.”
The cutting of these positions, according to the presentation, will save the school district $1.5 million.
The positions to be cut are one Purchasing Supervisor, one Accounting Tech-Cashier, one Printing Technician, one Payroll Technician, two Technology Assistants, two Behavior Tech Assistants, two Drug and Alcohol Counselors, two School-Based Custodians, one Night Custodian, one warehouse employee, and one groundskeeper.
Following the presentation, the meeting was opened to public comments from the attending audience. This part of the meeting was highly emotional. There were a total of 32 individuals who made comments to the school board, 24 of which were in-person and eight virtually via Zoom. These individuals ranged from those holding the to-be-cut positions, students, teachers, and general members of the Shoreline community.
All of these individuals spoke with the same purpose; they asked for a retraction of these job cuts and revisions or refusal of the REP.
Shorewood Drug and Alcohol Counselor Amber Langon said cuts to her counseling position will be detrimental in many ways. “I urge you to make reductions further away from students in need of the most support. My work extends far beyond drug and alcohol. It is about building trust and creating a safe place where students feel comfortable opening up about struggles, ranging from family challenges to emotional stress, substance abuse, and crisis intervention,” Langon said.
Dave Brown, Head Day Custodian at Shorewood and union steward for labor union SEIU Local 925, questions Shoreline’s vision of the greater Shoreline staff as a family.
“The district likes to call the Shoreline community family. […] we’ve never felt like a part of the Shoreline family. Whenever this district decides to implement budget cuts, we are always at the top of that list,” Brown said. As of April 6, 2025, the REP has been passed unanimously by the School Board, giving them the authority to enact any and all of the budget cutting measures listed in the earlier presentation.
