Tahoma EP&O Levy – Sports, Clubs, and Activities
by Jenn Askew with additional editorial support
When the Tahoma replacement EP&O levy failed to pass in February, the community started wondering and worrying about what would need to be cut. According to district materials, the EP&O and Tech Levies represent roughly 17% of the district’s budget, with the EP&O levy being the bulk of it, so if the levy fails a second time in April then immediate cuts will be necessary and likely substantial. The district has not released an explicit list of cuts, but there are a few impacts that can be anticipated based on what we know of how the district operates. Today I’m just focusing on a few of the ways that sports, clubs, and activities that take place at the schools will be impacted.
Coach Stipends
This cost is one of the primary ways that the district currently supports extracurricular activities in a direct way. Coaches and assistant coaches for sports and clubs receive a stipend, on top of their regular pay for teaching or other district work. This stipend is paid by the project and is typically less than a teacher may make hourly for their regular pay, but can still be thousands of dollars per coach. This stipend might be a fairly small amount for a once-a-week Zero Hour at an elementary school or after school chess club at a middle school, but will be substantial for a sport like football with many coaches working several extra hours daily along with travel obligations.
Facilities Fees
You can view the Tahoma Facility Use Fee Schedule here. There are four levels of fee, paid by School groups, Community youth non-profits, Non-profits, and For-profit/commercial groups. For example, a group associated with the Tahoma school district will be charged nothing – $0 – to use a high school baseball field, but that price climbs to $150 for a for-profit group. For locker rooms it’s $10 for a school group but $90 for a for-profit group. Some items aren’t even included on the current fee schedule, like the cost to use the high school PAC, which is heavily used by the Tahoma Drama Club as well as the music programs.
The state provides no funding for schools to be open outside of regular, “basic education” uses. With a levy failure, the full facility cost will have to be passed along to the sports and clubs using them in Tahoma. We anticipate that cost to be the full For-Profit rate or potentially even higher.
Associated Student Body (ASB)
The Associated Student Body, usually shortened to ASB, is a separate funding source at each school. The district does not fund or control this program, though they do provide salaries for the ASB/leadership teachers at each school who also coordinate ASB funding and spending, and for the cashiers who process all school payments, including ASB. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of ASB here, but here are a few resources: Follow this link to OSPI’s full ASB guidelines, here is WIAA’s explainer for booster clubs, and finally the Washington state laws are here.
ASB takes in money through the sale of ASB cards, pay-to-play fees, and donations. When you sign up a student for a sport or club, there is often an associated fee that is typically under $100, along with a requirement that the student owns an ASB card. The ASB also relies on donations, either run by specific groups or school-wide like the Run Rock Read fundraisers at Summit Trail and Maple View Middle Schools every year. The ASB money then gets allocated to the various sports, clubs, and activities in the district, with an eye toward enrichment, equity, and adhering to Title IX laws. ASB covers basic uniforms, materials, and some transportation. This funding would still be available to help defray the loss of the levy dollars, but it is not enough to fully run all of the extracurriculars in Tahoma, especially with the additional facility fees.
JV Sports and Robotics Summer Camps on the chopping block – among other things
At the Spring Athletics parent night at the high school, parents were informed that in the event of a second levy failure the district will prioritize varsity sports. They were told that JV and C sports teams would be the first to be cut in a funding decline, and that parents would be responsible for transportation of their students. (ASB funds are used to cover transportation costs, but presumably those funds will be needed for things like coach stipends and facilities fees going forward.) These high level program decisions will ultimately need to be made by the district’s Athletic Director, which is a position that is paid for by the levy.
Other programs will also be impacted in the district. One example is the summer camps put on by the Bear Metal Robotics Club. These camps are fully run by the students in the club with support from the robotics booster club, and are the primary fundraiser for the club each year. (Robotics clubs are very expensive to run and must seek additional funding outside of ASB, including corporate sponsorship.) The club has put out a save the date notice for this summer’s camps, but has not started selling spots. This is because they’re not sure they’ll even be able to hold the camps this year, or what they will cost if they do. The facility fees for using the high school for the length of the camps would be so high that the club would make little to no money at their current price. They would either have to pass that cost on to parents, which would substantially reduce enrollment, or cut the camps altogether. There is also a possibility that the district will opt to fully close down the schools for the summer, to save as much as possible in incidental costs going into a budget deficit.
Title IX
Some parents are able and willing to pay more for their students to participate in extracurricular activities and sports. Even if we ignore the inequity that a fully pay-to-play system in Tahoma would create, there is also one large potential problem here: Title IX. Title IX is a federal mandate that “protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities.” In short, it requires that public schools offer the same number of athletic positions to female and male athletes. If, for example, a large program like THS Baseball decided they could afford to keep their JV teams, another equally sized female program would also need to be kept. Ensuring the district’s adherence to Title IX is part of the Athletic Director’s job.
Field Trips
This is another area where the costs could, in theory, be passed on to the students’ guardians, but those costs may be substantially more than people realize. For starters, the district must abide by state regulations requiring that they cover the field trip costs for any student receiving free or reduced lunch. (This also applies to sports and other extracurriculars that charge a participation fee.) Camp Casey gives us some insight into this. You can see last year’s Camp Casey proposal here. Doing the math, it looks like the free/reduced cost that was passed on amounted to $40/student, raising the total fee for participants to $250.
Then there was an additional $67,395 in staffing costs for Camp Casey in 2023 that the district directly paid for, using levy dollars. That would amount to a further fee increase of $115 per non-free/reduced camper. That is a substantial increase over the current $250 fee and would likely result in more campers having to stay home.
Other field trips are cheaper, obviously, and district funding depends on the need for extra hours, staffing support, or substitute teachers and paraeducators in situations where only a portion of a teacher’s students attend. All of those costs would have to be included in the participation fee, and you might see even more fundraising requests by PTA/Os.
Other School Groups and Non-profits Will Also Be Impacted
The other main school groups that use Tahoma facilities are the parent-teacher groups. These go by PTA, PTO, or PTSA, and there is one at every school. They have monthly meetings on school grounds and host a variety of events including movie nights, dances, and carnivals. All of those would result in facility fees going forward, sometimes at significant cost.
Several local youth non-profit groups also use Tahoma facilities. These groups include Girl Scouts, Scouts, Tahoma Bears Junior Football and Cheer, Tahoma Bears Junior Wrestling, Tahoma Lacrosse Club, Tahoma Hoops Basketball Association, various cultural groups, Maple Valley Parks and Rec, and many more. There are also regular non-profits like local HOAs who use meeting spaces in Tahoma. You can get an idea of who uses Tahoma facilities by peaking at the District Facility Use Calendar here. You can filter to non-profits.
What Happens if the Levy Fails Again
We anticipate that if the levy fails in April, cuts will begin immediately with an eye toward a budget deficit in the tens of millions of dollars annually. The district could try yet again, on a ballot later this year, but that would still result in cuts starting in April. Because of the way levy collections work, a November vote would result in a six month gap in funding for the district, with no guarantee of success in that election. With an April failure the district would have to go forward on the assumption of an ongoing deficit.
We’ve seen some folks in the community argue that the district should just take a year off, reassess, then come back to the voters with a new levy next year. This would result in a full year’s loss of levy funding for the district, with no guarantee of a future levy success. The cuts in this circumstance would not be easy to unwind a year later, and complete programs may go missing from Tahoma. Students currently working toward certification in a CTE series, or enrolled in other programs like the advanced math series, could be cut off at the pass.
The district also has a few underfunded mandates, mostly in special education. These are requirements passed down from the federal and state level, that the state does not fully fund through their basic education model. The annual deficit for special education is over $3 million/yr, according to the district. We anticipate that the district will begin looking for ways to come up with this money, through items that it can currently charge for. Things like facilities fees and lunch prices may well go up. We also anticipate that fundraising groups like the parent-teacher groups and the Tahoma Schools Foundation will ramp up fundraising efforts to try to close some of this gap, and may wind up cutting some of the “fun” money that these programs usually spend.
Correction: We incorrectly stated that stipends are paid by the hour. They are actually paid by the project, and the hourly rate can be variable. This has been corrected in the article above.
This article was written by a member of Tahoma Values with support from the rest of the team, and we are always looking for new article submissions! If there’s something you’d like to publish with us, send your submission to tahomavalues@gmail.com
