Piercing school number puzzle

It’s a numbers game in Kalispell Public Schools — a numbers game that is hard to keep up with.

In early May, voters turned down a $4.1 million building reserve levy request for Kalispell high schools but approved a $211,500 request to pay for extra staff for overcrowded elementary classrooms.

Later in May school trustees approved 1.5-percent pay increases for everybody from janitors to teachers to administrators.

Then in June the board decided to ask elementary district voters for $3.35 million to build eight new elementary classrooms and a new central kitchen. Mail ballots will go out later this summer.

Meanwhile, the district is trying to sell the Auxiliary Services Building (formerly Laser School). But they’re not yet ready to sell a white elephant of a piece of property on Meridian Road that once was destined to be the new central kitchen.

And at the end of the fiscal year, the schools have an extra $400,000 as a result of savings in energy and insurance costs plus personnel changes.

This welter of numbers is enough to make the casual observer’s head spin.

On the one hand, school officials pleaded their case that the building reserve desperately was needed to make building repairs that in some cases, it was intimated, were life-safety issues.

And then they turn around and increase everyone’s pay and still have hundreds of thousands of dollars left over going into a new budget year.

Something doesn’t quite add up here.

We don’t begrudge the district staffers their raises, but it’s a safe bet that most private-sector workers (at least those who have jobs) aren’t collecting higher paychecks this year. And those workers are footing the bill for the schools and are the ones voting on school funding requests.

It seems like the district never has the money to do what it needs to do — unless it does have the money.

As we head down the road toward the next funding request — money for new classrooms at two elementary schools — it might behoove school officials to be a little clearer about what they want and why.

The bond request for more classrooms may fare better than the building reserve request because only Kalispell voters would have a say.

City voters generally support school funding measures; the outlying school districts have not been so generous for high school money.

There may be a silver lining, too, in the school expansion project. If the money is approved, the classroom construction will mean jobs for workers — and construction workers have been among the hardest hit by the prolonged economic downturn around here.