Coos Bay schools wipe out red ink, restoring nine lost school days.

Byline: Winston Ross The Register-Guard

COOS BAY - After lopping off nine school days in the 2004-05 school year and 10 days in 2005-06, educators in Coos Bay Public Schools are celebrating this spring. Financial windfalls and some belt-tightening have allowed the district to restore nine of the days cut from the schedule this school year.

At an estimated cost of $80,000 per day, the district needed about $1.4 million to restore all that tutelage time. Some came from grants, some from bolstered state funding and some from cost cutting.

Every unexpected dollar is welcome news to the school district.

"We are quite delighted," said the 3,600-student district's superintendent, Karen Gray. "When we closed nine days last year, there was a huge emptiness. A sense of death. I remember feeling very well like we'd lost something."

What's remarkable is that the district has been losing students at the rate of 80 per year for the past dozen years. Say goodbye to the $5,100 per student per year in state funding and it doesn't take long to figure out why the school board ran out of options.

"It was a line in the sand," said business manager Rod Danielson, of the decision to lose days. "We said we're not doing this anymore."

The enrollment declines are something of a puzzle in Coos Bay, where the high school has been graduating about 350 students a year since the overall numbers started dropping. The kindergarten classes, however, have been enrolling only about 250 students per year, meaning "The families are here, they're just smaller," Danielson said.

The budget cuts have strained local educators, and led to the closure of three elementary schools in five years. The district also converted its two middle schools into one school with fifth- and sixth-graders and one school with seventh- and eighth-graders.

Average class sizes have jumped to about 25 in the elementary schools and 30 in the high school. In addition, the district sold $1.5 million worth of surplus property to help relieve budget woes.

What's changed? The district landed about $500,000 in grants for this year, and cut about $900,000 worth of expenses, for a total of about $1.4 million. (The general fund budget is $26 million.)

Earlier this year, the district restored five of the days it had cut and, at its most recent school board meeting, the board decided to salvage four more.

"It's the best news we've had in a good while," said board member Tom Bennett. "We have in Oregon a barely adequate school system right now, given our funding situation. A shortened school year is no good at all."

Winston Ross can be reached at 541-902-9030 or [e-mail].