College Update – OFM Correction to Funds Issued 

Dear Colleagues, 

I hope this message finds you well and that you are looking forward to welcoming our students back for the Fall Quarter in a couple of weeks. My apologies for sending this on a Friday afternoon, but I received some unexpected news regarding our funding from the Office of Fiscal Management that I wanted you to hear from me first.   

The State Board has informed the Community & Technical College (CTC) presidents that the Office of Fiscal Management (OFM) made an error in our system-wide budget allocations for the current biennium (2023-25). Specifically, OFM over-allocated $47M (broken out as $19M for 2023-24 and $28M for 2024-25) to the CTC system. 

As a result, the state is asking the CTC system to return the $28 million that was over-allocated for the current year. They have not yet said anything about the $19M over-allocated in 2023-24. 

While amounts of overfunding to each college vary across the system, for Shoreline that means a portion of the 2024-25 budget totaling approximately $1M (one million) dollars will likely need to be returned to the State. This will obviously have an impact on our overall 2024-25 budget. I am hopeful that through increasing enrollment and keeping an eye on our expenses, we will be able to return the over-allocated funds without sacrificing any services to our students. I also want to assure you that I do not plan to make any reductions to our current workforce. 

I’ve already met with the Executive Team and our Union leadership about this issue.  I will be working with them over the coming days, and plan to share more information as it becomes available. 

The CTC presidents have our work cut out for us going into a legislative session where we will be advocating for the next biennium, and our goal will be to preserve as much of our funding as possible. So, for now, let’s keep our focus on serving students well, and increasing enrollment and retention. We have dealt with much bigger budget challenges in the past, and I’m confident we will get through this as well.   

I look forward to seeing you all next week.  

Best, 

Jack