We spend a lot of time in this place rightly celebrating all that is good, fun, exciting and encouraging that’s happening at Moffat County School District. This week’s column isn’t by any means not that, but it is a bit more of a serious discussion about a hard topic.

Moffat County School District’s student population is shrinking. We’re down about 400 students from five years ago. It’s not because students are leaving for other districts — the numbers for students who live in our district and have started attending nearby districts or other alternative programs including homeschool are pretty stable and relatively small year over year.

It’s because families are leaving the county, and fewer children have been born here over the last 10 or so years than in previous years. With our changing economy, it’s hardly a surprise that this would happen.

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It’s possible the population bounces back in the future, as new economic drivers take root in our valley. But in the meantime, MCSD funding, like that of all school districts, is tied directly to our student population. If we have fewer students, we have less money with which to operate.

However, over the same period of five years, our staffing costs have grown substantially.

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Our total staff compensation (a mix of absolutely necessary and deserved increases to salaries and largely uncontrollable increases to benefit costs) as a percentage of our total revenue has increased so much in recent years that we’re currently spending about 113% of our per-pupil funding on compensation. We have a few other funding sources, and a fairly robust reserve, but that’s a totally unsustainable number for a school district.

There are only two directions for a school district in a situation like this to move forward.

We can increase our revenue, either through increased pupil population (something we can’t control directly at this moment in time), or through an increased mill levy (which voters must approve), or we can decrease costs. It’s possible we’ll look to voters to approve a mill levy override in the future, and it’s possible we’ll bounce back in student count in the future, but those aren’t guarantees, and they aren’t now.

Now we have to act.

Decreasing costs isn’t easy at a school district. We still have to maintain our facilities. We still have to transport students. We still have to keep the lights on and the internet flowing and the food cooking, and we need to be improving all of those facets of our work, as well.

Those costs are not super-feasible to trim from, though of course we will continue to be responsible with spending of all kinds. And we still need to compensate our people well so that we can employ great people and reward them for choosing to work and live in Moffat County.

The hard truth is we have to address our biggest recurring cost. We have to right-size our staff. It’s an absolute necessity.

Over the last few weeks, MCSD leadership has been working very hard to find a way to do this in as natural a way as possible. Our superintendent’s mandate was to keep these changes as far from the classroom as possible. He’s leading the way by taking about a quarter of the needed cost decreases toward next year’s budget (roughly $2 million) out of his own administrative staff.

But we are eliminating 20-plus positions from the district. That’s hard. We don’t like it.

But we’re working diligently to do it while eliminating as few actual jobs as possible. That means not backfilling certain positions when a teacher leaves the district or retires. It means closing one position but moving that individual into another position where they’re qualified that opens up through natural means.

Unfortunately it also means making some extremely hard decisions, too, but that’s the tough truth of working in a business with declining revenue. We’re doing as little of that as possible, but we don’t want to diminish the reality that some difficult decisions are being made that affect people we care about.

Here’s the end result: We’re being responsible and doing what is necessary, but we’re not giving up one inch on our mission. We’re actually doubling down on it, and we’re finding ways to do it appropriately relative to the size of district we are right now.

That doesn’t mean class sizes will get bigger than policy allows. It doesn’t mean we won’t have highly qualified, well-compensated, motivated, trained teachers in classrooms.

It doesn’t mean we won’t keep doing the business of running a district, managing facilities and transportation and technology and nutrition and health services and administration and everything else. It just means we’ll be doing all that with a few fewer people than before.

And that’s appropriate, because we’re doing it for a few fewer students than before.

This is hard, but it’s going to be OK. Moffat County School District is still growing — in quality, in energy, in direction, in capacity. It’s just not growing in population at the moment.

Stick with us, Moffat County. We’re moving forward, responsibly, with you and for you.