Three hundred and eight.

That’s how many faculty and staff positions Beaverton schools officials announced they’d lose over the summer when they rolled out a budget proposal to mitigate a $35 million shortfall.

Grotting’s proposed $500 million budget represented an increase of $11.7 million over this year’s.

Community members were incensed, filling school board meetings to demand answers why a district with a steadily increasing budget was making such deep staffing cuts and pulling $9.7 million out of its rainy day fund. At the Capitol, school advocates cited Beaverton’s budgetary straits as evidence the state’s $9 billion school funding plan wasn’t generous enough.

But it turns out that a $12 million chunk of the district shortfall for the coming year was a result of several accounting errors from the 2018-19 budget that will carry into next year.

After those realizations dawned, the district found other sources of money and different ways to deploy its funds to lessen how dramatically it would cut teaching positions to balance the books.

Officials in the budget office, then led by Chief Financial Officer Claire Hertz, who was since hired away by Portland Public Schools, built the current budget using an assumption new hires would come in at the bottom of the pay scale. They also miscalculated average salaries, which led to a faulty estimate of how much benefits would cost in the coming year.

Those three mistakes combined meant the district had to spend $8 million more than it had budgeted.

Miscalculations in enrollment figures cost another $1 million, while officials in the finance office underestimated how much the state’s new pay equity law would require in salary adjustments to the tune of another $1 million.

Beaverton schools officials originally planned to cut 308 faculty and staff next year. Now, those cuts will be closer to 115.Oregonian file photo by Stephanie Yao Long, 2016

“We were one of the first districts to dig in and comply with Oregon’s new pay equity law,” Superintendent Don Grotting said. “And we discovered it was going to cost us a significant amount of money.”

In order to maintain programs and staffing levels at this year’s level in 2019-20, the district would need $35 million more than they have to spend. So, they have to find something to cut.

More than half of why the district needs to spend so much more — about $17.9 million —is the much-higher required contributions to public employee pensions and rising healthcare costs. Both obligations have risen over the last few years as the district’s spending on salaries has only modestly increased.

In fact, the district's contributions to the Public Employees Retirement System relative to salaries will top 27 percent next year.

“There’s no doubt that the PERS cost increases in the last two years have been a significant problem for schools,” Grotting said.

The district’s new chief financial officer, longtime district finance official Gayellyn Jacobsen, submitted her resignation letter to Grotting on May 8, effective immediately.

A $12 million accounting error and about $19 million in increases in employee benefits made up the majority of the district's shortfall.Oregonian file photo by Stephanie Yao Long, 2016

The document, obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive through a public records request, contains three sentences.

“I am resigning my position effective May 8, 2019," Jacobsen wrote. “It has been a joy to serve the Beaverton School District for the last sixteen years. I truly believe it is the finest district in the state of Oregon.”

Gotting recruited Jim Scherzinger, a retired money expert who ran Portland Public Schools’ budget and served as the state human service agency’s budget director during his career, to replace her on a temporary basis.

District officials have revisited their financial plans since state lawmakers approved $9 billion education spending for the coming two-year budget cycle, about $100 million above what top legislators proposed earlier in the year.

That boost provides just over $493,000 for Beaverton schools. The district also plans to pull another $1 million from its rainy day fund — for a total of $10.7 million — to lessen proposed teacher job cuts.

And, most significantly, the new budget plan will cut all employees’ days worked – and thus their pay – to preserve teaching positions. The revised budget includes the loss of five teaching days and nine work days for classified employees to save $9.6 million.

Grotting has also proposed an additional $4.6 million in spending reductions at the district’s central offices.

Under his plan, up for a school board vote this month, nearly all those adjustments —$15 million worth – will preserve teaching jobs to stabilize class sizes.

That would reduce the total number of staffing cuts to make next year to about 115, district officials told The Oregonian/OregonLive. That’s roughly one-third as many as Grotting originally proposed. But that doesn’t mean more than 100 employees will necessarily lose their jobs.

Grotting said a layoff announcement, if there is one, is still a few weeks away. The district always loses educators to retirements or to jobs elsewhere, and it remains to be seen how those numbers will shake out.

“It’s hard to say right now, how many people we are having to walk up to and say they don’t have a job next year,” Grotting said. “We could very possibly and might likely be going out to hire in some positions.”

District officials will present the revised document to the district’s budget committee — made up of board members and citizen volunteers — on Monday. That proposal will include a new $7.3 million expense not included in current budget documents: A 2.5 percent cost-of- living increase for the district’s teachers, a result of union negotiations that just closed.

That additional money will also come out of the district’s rainy day fund, Scherzinger said.

Although Beaverton schools in the end appear to have staved off the deep cuts that made headlines earlier this year, the district’s lobbyist worries that could be undone if voters strike down a $1 billion-a-year corporate tax package passed by state lawmakers’ at the ballot box.

Although the first $1 billion won’t reach school budgets until 2020-21, $200 million in proceeds from the tax is baked into the $9 billion state funding package for the coming school year as well as the next.