The Issaquah School District Board of Directors held a public hearing for the 2016-2017 fiscal year’s budget at the Aug. 10 meeting.

The fiscal year covers the time between Sept. 1, 2016 and Aug. 31, 2017. Action is expected to be taken on the budget at the Aug. 24 meeting.

While no citizens came forward to speak during the hearing, Issaquah School District Finance Manager Jake Kuper did present the Board with a detailed plan and explanation for the budget.

The budgeted revenue for the fiscal year is over $232.3 million. Of that, 63.9 percent will come from state apportionment.

As a portion of the whole, this is an increase of 0.8 percent from the 2015-2016 fiscal year, Kuper said, but it is “still well below our peak, ’08 to ’09, the ‘good old days.'” During the 2008-2009 school year, 68 percent of the district’s operating revenue came from the state.

“We’re clawing back slowly and we’re …still 4 percent below the peak,” Kuper said.

“I think it’s a little disingenuous to say, ‘Look, we’ve given you all this money,’ when we can point back and say, ‘Yeah, but it’s still 4 percent less than you were funding us in 2009 to 2010,”‘ District Superintendent Ron Thiele said of the state legislators. “When you cut out 10 and restore eight, you don’t just get to claim credit for restoring the eight.”

About 20.3 percent of the district’s revenue comes from the district’s local maintenance and operations levy. A category entitled “local fees, tuition, gifts, fines and rents” — which includes, according to Kuper “food service and gifts and school-age care” — provides 12.7 percent of revenue. The federal government contributes 2.9 percent of total revenue.

The budgeted expenditures for the fiscal year total approximately $235.4 million. Although this appears to be a deficit of over $3 million, Kuper said that a difference this large between expenditures and revenues is typical for the district and is made up throughout the year.

“We budget for capacity in this system — for either unanticipated enrollment growth, unanticipated gifts and/or flexibility of timing of large purchases,” Kuper said. “There has historically been a $2.5 million to $3 million gap, and it’s been that way for many, many years. It seems to work because we don’t have to do annoying mid-year budget revisions.”

Of the expenditures, 63.9 percent goes to the classroom, 12.1 percent funds classroom support, 9.1 percent covers special education, 3.5 percent goes to transportation, 2.1 percent pays for food service, and 8.4 percent goes to other grants and programs.

Part of the reason for the high expenditures is that the district finds itself filling gaps left by the state and federal government. For example, for the $21.4 million special education program, the district anticipates having to backfill $4.2 million.

“The district participated in an appeal to the state Supreme Court regarding the inadequate funding of special education programs,” the district’s budget information packet states. “The district lost its case against the state, but still believes that the Legislature should define special education as part of the basic education program, and require it to be fully funded under the parameters established in the state constitution.”

Kuper said that the funding gap is not only at the state level, but at the federal one as well.

“The feds … are statutorily obligated to fund 40 percent of the costs of special education — they’re not even close,” Kuper said. “On both sides of the coin, we continue to backfill.”

The state also funds only about three quarters of the cost of transportation; the district must pull the remaining quarter out of levy dollars.

The state constitution mandates that the state fully fund basic education, and the 2012 state Supreme Court McCleary decision reinforced this. Transportation is one example of a cost that is included in basic education, and should therefore, according to the state constitution, receive full state funding.

The Legislature is set to resolve the McCleary issue in the upcoming legislative session, meaning that future Issaquah School District budgets could look very different.