When the Oak Harbor School District announced millions of dollars would have to be cut from the 2007-2008 budget, the teachers’ union examined budget information to find out what caused the budget crisis.

The district is projecting a $3.5 million budget shortfall next year and school leaders are busy trying to make appropriate cuts.

According to information provided by the Oak Harbor Education Association, the school district drifted into the current budget problem over the past several years by not adjusting expenditures appropriately.

“The superintendent and school board should have been making cuts proportionate to the problem,” said Peter Szalai, president of the OHEA. “That way the severity of the cuts is minimized.”

Superintendent Rick Schulte said he’s been telling people for years the current budget problem was coming. He created committees in previous years to come up with a list of preliminary cuts, but the consensus was to make small cuts and continue using the fund balance and see if state and federal funding would increase.

“By using the fund balance, we were buying time. That was the preferred way to approach it,” Schulte said. “Nobody wants to be involved in making decisions that would cost people their jobs.”

Szalai said the teachers’ union would have been willing to make gradual cuts in previous years to avoid such large cuts this year.

“The school district has a credibility problem because of its long history of making predictions of cuts in the spring that fail to happen in the fall,” Szalai said.

He added the local community has to provide more financial support by approving a larger maintenance and operations, and capital facilities, levies.

The school district earns $1.9 million from the voter-approved levy passed in 2005. It goes before voters again in 2009.

Szalai said if the school district asked the maximum allowed by law, then a maintenance and operations levy would bring in $8.1 million. He added the school districts along the I-5 corridor approve the maximum amount.

“The community needs to do its job,” Szalai said.

OHEA members were also concerned about money being moved out of the district’s general fund and into the capital projects fund, such as money used to pay for stadium cost overruns.

Schulte said he has only glanced at the 22 pages of union analysis, prepared by the Washington Education Association, and said union officials didn’t ask school officials any questions, which would have helped with the analysis.

He pointed out the WEA is a special interest group and they left things out of their budget work. For example, analysis appears to have excluded such information as tri-day increase, which is basically extra pay for teachers.

He also said the union document has two contradictory ideas, namely that the fund balance was going up yet the school district didn’t cut expenses.