Ferndale School District superintendent thanks voters after second levy
Voters in the Ferndale School District have passed the school programs and operations levy after it went before them a second time.
A grateful Superintendent Linda Quinn thanked the community for its support of students, staff and schools.
“This measure will ensure we have continued funding for staffing, technology, programs and extracurricular activities such as athletics, drama and music,” Quinn said in a news release after the first ballot results were posted on Tuesday, Nov. 3.
The levy needed a simple majority to pass.
Early election results showed that it was doing so handily, with about 62% of voters approving the measure and a little over 37% voting it down.
Voters originally voted down a request to replace the existing levy in the Feb. 11 special election.
The district’s school board subsequently changed what it was asking for, returning to voters with a lower rate of $1.50 per thousand of assessed value for two years.
Quinn thinks that partly made a difference this time around.
“We listened to the community and lowered the tax rate. We did a lot more outreach to inform people about the levy,” she said in an email to The Bellingham Herald.
Under the new levy amount, the owner of a home assessed at $400,000 will pay about $600 a year starting in 2021.
The levy will bring in about $8.2 million in property taxes for Ferndale schools in 2021 and roughly $8.6 million in 2022.
It replaces a levy ending in 2020 that has a current rate of $2.17 per $1,000 of a home’s assessed value — or $868 in property tax money for a home assessed at $400,000.
After the levy failed in February, the school district laid off 100 employees to contend with a $6.5 million deficit, the superintendent said.
The school district won’t be refilling all of those lost jobs.
“This levy that passed was only 60% of the amount we originally asked for, so it will not support the number of staff we employed before,” Quinn said. “The pandemic-related decrease in enrollment has left us with another $3-plus million budget shortfall this year. The passage of the levy means we don’t have to make more cuts at this time.”
All seven school districts in Whatcom County asked their voters to approve four-year levies in the Feb. 11 special election. Ferndale’s was the only one in Whatcom County, and among the few in Washington state, to fail.
School officials have said that such local levies are critical to their efforts to educate children and pay for technology, adding that they help bridge the gap between what the state provides for education and what it actually costs.
Now that Ferndale voters have passed the levy, Quinn said the school district’s next steps were to “get back to focusing all of our attention on educating children and youth.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 8:44 AM.
