The Seattle School District is facing a grim-looking budget for the 2009-2010 school year, and the massive cuts are going to be felt across the district, not excluding West Seattle High School.

This winter, West Seattle High's Building Leadership Team created a budget outline for the school based on the budget cuts, and it was voted for, and approved by 80 percent of teachers. There’s no way around it, the school will lose teachers, staff, and funding for programs.

West Seattle High has two sources of income. The first is money that comes directly from the district that has tags on exactly what it needs to be spent on. The second is school “baseline” money that funds teachers. Both are being cut.

Because of the huge cuts on the district side, the school has to use more of the “baseline” money for other purposes, meaning cuts for teachers. There will be three full-time positions lost due to the reduction in baseline money.

The Pathways program which encompasses math and language arts has been cut from the specific district funds, as well as four support system positions, meaning the career center specialist, the counseling secretary, etc, and .5 cuts in sports medicine and business technology, meaning a full-time position will be reduced to part-time.

Departments such as social studies, family consumer sciences, and physical education, which are considered overstaffed, will most likely receive the cuts.

However, that probably won’t be the only change in teaching positions seen. Because of the school district’s policy of seniority, if a teacher from another school gets cut but has been working longer than a teacher from West Seattle High, they could come into West Seattle High and bump a teacher out of their job. This means that the newer teachers at Westside are at risk of being put out of a job and replaced with teachers unfamiliar with the school.

In addition to cutting positions, the new budget isn’t leaving much room for programs. There will be less money given to special education, free and reduced lunch, bilingual, and vocational programs. Along with cut programs, there will be approximately 68 less students enrolled in the school next year, and a reduction in per-pupil spending.

Such large budget cuts are bound to create controversy, but at least on a school level, there wasn’t much of a choice on how to deal with the reduced budget.

“We really tried to be the least destructive,” said Laura McCarthy of the Building Leadership Team.

On a district level, in a recent discussion with Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, she admitted that there is no one in the district offices that is assigned to look for sources of income or fundraising for schools, saying that they let the schools do that.

The Building Leadership Team was able to maintain positions such as the school nurse and all of the school counselors. They also are setting aside more money than this year for many departments. McCarthy said that they looked over dozens of scenarios before they finally settled on this one.

“Nobody else proposed another budget option,” said McCarthy, who also pointed out that this tight district budget is a result of a struggling state budget, as Washington state deals with the recession.

Mattie Bess is a West Seattle High School journalism student and this article appears originally in the school newspaper, The Chinook.