When a controversial and, to some, shocking $98.6 million slash in education funding rumbled in with the state’s final budget last week, the reverberations were felt immediately among Island County school officials.

The impact of the budget cuts on local school districts is significant. According to figures projected by the state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Coupeville schools will lose $177,486 in state funding, while the Oak Harbor district will see a whopping $574,335 go away.

Critics of the new state budget, including the Washington Education Association and the League of Education Voters, have blasted education cuts as a hidden repeal of voter initiatives 728 and 732, the former of which aims to lower class size while the latter pegs teacher salaries to annual cost-of-living increases.

Oak Harbor School District Superintendent Rick Schulte said on Tuesday he was deeply discouraged by the legislature’s lack of support for education. He added that the cuts in funding to his district equal the cost of 7 full-time teachers.

“I think my general reaction is probably the same as all friends of education,” Schulte said. “We’re all severely disappointed. “It is going to have a negative impact on education.”

Such sentiments were echoed by Coupeville Superintendent Suzanne Bond, who said she was disappointed and a bit befuddled by the new cuts.

“Frankly, it’s hard for me to understand, given the high expectations that we all have” for schools, Bond said. “We’re all working so hard at creating highly effective schools. Certainly we need that support.”

Coupeville school board president Mitchell Howard said as an education leader “it’s not easy to be happy” about cuts in school spending. He added that when it comes to education funds, “they should be putting them into something pretty close to a lock box,” instead of being treated on an equal basis with other areas of state spending, such as transportation.

“If it has to be education supported at the expense of roads,” Mitchell said, “I’d say, ‘Yep, it should be’.”

If school administrators expressed outrage over the general significance of funding cuts, there was no less consternation over the line-item specifics of how money is being taken away. A superintendent in Bellevue, in fact, described the legislature’s cuts as a “shell game.”

For instance, so-called Block Grants — funding assessed at $18.48 per full-time student — have been eliminated completely and replaced, in part, by “new” Flexibility Funds. However, these new funds are a kind of catch-all, meant to be applied not only to defunct Block Grants but to a spate of funding that has been eliminated. Districts must now use Flexibility Funds to pick-and-choose among a total of eight funding sources that have either dried up or been whacked in half.

Coupeville will lose $19,667 in Block Grants; Oak Harbor loses almost $109,000.

“I appreciate flexibility, but they haven’t really given us more flexibility,” Schulte said. What most concerns him, he said, is the deletion of the Safety Allocation, which funds school safety programs to the tune of $6.36 per full-time student. This is one of the sources school officials can opt to replace with Flexibility Funds, to the expense of Block or Complex Needs grants.

Oak Harbor School District loses a Safety Allocation of about $37,6000 under the current budget.

“In a day and age when we’re very concerned about security and safety, that’s very disappointing,” Schulte said.

Better Schools funding, intended to limit class sizes, has been eliminated, as has one Learning Improvement Day (LID) for teachers. Oak Harbor will lose $202,502 in Better Schools money and $90,150 for LIDs; Coupeville loses $32,193 and $15,568, respectively.

Both Schulte and Bond rued such cuts, claiming they take away teachers’ ability to be effective educators.

“It looks to me like we will have two LID instead of three,” Bond said. “That impacts our ability to provide staff development time, which is essential.”

“That’s important time,” Schulte said, explaining that LIDs are typically used for team planning, staff development and the implementation of new educational standards.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the new budget, however, is the use of a so-called Staff Mix Factoring Average. Previously, only basic and special education staff were weighted in a mix factor (average education and experience) to assess state allocated salaries. Now the process will lump together all certificated instructional staff in the district, including janitors and such. This produces a savings for the state, because mix factors are lower among staff not in basic and special ed.

This new formula cuts $184,547 in staff funding to Oak Harbor — about the equivalent of three teachers — and just over $6,000 to Coupeville.

“That’s a complicated one to explain,” Schulte said of mix factor average. “In a nutshell, they’re going to give us less money for teachers’ salaries.”

“The state is saving money in the way they’re calculating now,” Bond said. “If you have staff members you hire out of levy funds, now those are figured into staffing mix. We’re getting fewer apportioned dollars,” she added.

In addition to these concerns, Schulte said it would be “difficult to mount an effective campaign to the legislature” against mix factor averaging, if only because the formula is so complicated.

“On the one hand, it’s a clever thing for the legislature to do because it’s hard to lobby against it,” Schulte said. On the other hand, he added, “the net effect is equal to cutting three teachers.”

Of course, the state budget is not final until it is signed by Gov. Gary Locke, and many school officials, while disappointed, are also hesitant to say what the ultimate effect on local schools might be.

“What all this is eventually going to mean, I don’t know,” Schulte said, adding that Oak Harbor School District is scheduled to adopt a budget this coming August. “We have other funding sources that we need to look at now,” he said.

Howard, as Coupeville school board president, said he is still waiting to find out exactly what the local impact of the state budget will be. Either way, he said, he believes the school district will continue to be a good one.

“In the end,” Mitchell said, “if the Coupeville school district finds a way to overcome the challenges, it’ll be the same old way we always have — being as creative as we can with the deployment of the funds we have, and looking to community energy to take up the slack.”