When Lakeland School District’s levy failed in November, everyone from trustees to teachers to parents had ideas of how to make the budget work. But it’s the district’s head of finance who has to make those ideas pencil out. 

The Coeur d’Alene School District faced a similar dilemma. 

In March 2023, Coeur d’Alene’s levy proposal failed. After a two-month long scramble, where trustees and the district’s director of finance created two budgets, a two-year, $50 million supplemental levy found community support and passed. It passed again in November. 

Lakeland, however, is still in scramble mode. 

Since the $9.5 million levy failed in November, the Lakeland board has met eight times and has asked CFO Jessica Grantham for multiple budgets, with and without millions. But her budgets lack details as trustees and superintendent Lisa Arnold have not been able to agree on where to make cuts, especially when it comes to staff. 

“Where do you want me to cut them? Do you want me just to start picking people at random?” Grantham said at a December board meeting. “I need to know what positions you want me to cut.”

Trustees very hands-on in Lakeland

Grantham, 42, took the job as Lakeland’s CFO in 2023, after 14 years working in North Idaho College’s finance department. 

Her first budget process was in 2024. 

Governmental accounting is “needlessly complex,” Graham said. “Our board likes to be educated and they’re very hands-on.” 

She started budget meetings early in February last year to give herself time to explain to trustees salary-based apportionment, a formula where districts get state dollars based on their salary averages and the state’s career ladder, along with the state’s general funding calculation. 

With 87% of Lakeland’s budget paying for staff salaries and benefits, staffing is the focus, she said. 

Last year, the district had to cut about $2.3 million to deal with the dropoff of COVID-19 funds. 

When the budget was finalized in June and then set to the state the next month, Grantham expected to spend the fall generating year-end reports for the state and federal government. 

But that all changed when the levy failed. 

With the levy and without

Grantham spent a lot of time collecting numbers and running reports. Trustees wanted to know exactly what the levy was funding, but that wasn’t clear in the financials Grantham had inherited. 

She and the district’s controller, who typically focuses on school-level budgeting and funds, went back to 2016, about when the levy jumped from $5.3 million to $8.9 million and began looking at what was added to the budget in each of those areas. 

“It’s … difficult to pinpoint,” Grantham said. 

The school board has repeatedly emphasized they don’t want to cut teachers and want to minimize classroom impact with the loss of $9.5 million in levy dollars. Grantham says that’s impossible. 

“When the bulk of our budget is instruction … it is impossible to do it without touching our classrooms, unfortunately,” she said. 

Grantham noted Lakeland has historically focused on small community schools, which require more staffing. 

“We’re not following the state model,” Grantham said. “What we have in policy for classroom sizes is definitely smaller than what it is across the state.” 

Most financial documents, Grantham said, are created for other experts in governmental accounting at the state and federal level. Those documents are nearly impossible for a layperson to comprehend. 

The levy failure was a sign that the public wants more transparency and for the budget to be explained to them in a user-friendly way, Grantham said.

“In the absence of information, that’s where you get conjecture.”

Passion over profit in Coeur d’Alene

When Coeur d’Alene’s levy failed in 2023, Director of Finance Shannon Johnston took that as a sign of voters’ desire for more transparency. 

Johnston began a two-month scramble to create two budgets, one with the levy and one without. She worked 70- to 80-hour weeks to create a prioritized list to cut the budget by $20 million. She frequently met with trustees and answered their questions, along with district leaders. 

“It was about being a team,” she said. 

The trustees put their faith in Johnston, then made their tweaks to her recommendations. 

“This is our specialty, this is our job to know everything about our budget,” she said. “Our board has absolutely given us the trust and respect to be able to do that work.” 

The district got approval from the state to declare a financial emergency, which allows districts to reopen union negotiations and impose a last best offer. 

The process was challenging because Idaho districts rarely find themselves in that position.

Ultimately, the levy passed in May, just weeks before the budget needed to be finalized. 

While the crisis was averted, the experience fundamentally changed how CDA approached budgeting, Johnston said. 

The district began using a nationally recognized budget process to align spending with the district’s strategic goals. 

Johnston created a subcommittee that includes representatives from the teachers’ union and trustees. She reworked the budget document with charts, graphs and additional context to make it easier for patrons to read. 

Still, her number one wish is that patrons better understood Idaho’s complex funding formula and the importance of levies, especially in North Idaho. 

“It’s intentionally made that way,” Johnston said. “So there’s local control over what the school does for the community and they have a say and how they envision our school district and what’s important to parents.”

The work Johnston put into educating the community and trustees on the budget process paid off, when last year the district had to cut $4 million and close an elementary school to balance the budget. It continued to pay off this year, she said, when the levy passed. 

‘I just want a solution’

During this time, Grantham said she is drawing on the expertise of others, like Johnston and the Idaho Association of School Business Officials. 

She is working to get the two requested budgets in shape. She also updated the district financial transparency page in hopes of educating voters. 

“I would say almost all of my time recently, from the failure of the levy to now, has been spent preparing additional reports, just trying to provide that in-depth history from where we’re at to where we’re at now,” Grantham said. “I just want a solution.” 

Trustees are set to discuss and likely vote to re-run the levy at Wednesday’s special board meeting. 

Then it will be a mad dash to finalize both budgets ahead of the May election date. Whatever the outcome, Grantham will have just weeks to give public notice of the budget before submitting it to the state. “It’s so tight,” she said.