San Diego Unified officials said Monday they have identified roughly $100 million in budget solutions to address the district’s impending $176 million deficit — but it hasn’t yet published details of what exactly will be cut. District leaders plan to pursue similar budget cutting methods to last year, according to their first board budget workshop for the year, held Monday afternoon. They will focus cuts on central office services to minimize impacts on classrooms but acknowledged schools will still feel impacts, since some central services directly benefit schools. Like last year, they will also make cuts through attrition, cutting positions as they become vacant and moving staff around to those that need to be filled, and they plan to offer early retirement incentives to encourage staff to leave. The district prefers to reduce staffing via attrition but has not ruled out layoffs. San Diego Unified faces a $176 million unrestricted budget deficit for next school year and a $230 million deficit for the year after that. The district used up $114 million of its reserves to make ends meet for the current school year, whittling down its ending fund balance to about $44 million. District leaders attributed the deficit to several factors, including enrollment drops, higher operating costs and this year’s expiration of pandemic funding. They have consistently argued that state and federal funding is insufficient. Some community members have also pointed to a large cost increase they say is fueling the deficit: In 2023, the district gave employees 15% raises that at the time were estimated to cost an extra $208 million a year. “There is a significant contributor to the budget deficit that was not listed,” said Tamara Hurley, a parent of district graduates, during public comment Monday. “These pay raises ultimately caused deficit spending.” District leaders say the raises were needed to retain and hire staff as costs of living rise. “We had to take action to ensure that we were compensating our staff fairly and competitively,” interim Superintendent Fabiola Bagula said Monday. Even as the district plans to cut staff to make ends meet, Bagula noted that it’s struggling to fill vacancies in needed positions, such bus drivers and food service workers, because it doesn’t pay as much as outside companies. Board Trustee Cody Petterson also said the district’s pay raises haven’t kept pace with inflation, which rose by more than 20% in San Diego from 2019 to 2023. Staffing has long been by far the district’s biggest spending category. San Diego Unified spent more than 85% of its total expenditures on personnel as of two years ago, School Services of California associate Vice President Matt Phillips said at Monday’s meeting. That’s almost 8 percentage points higher than the average for California’s unified school districts, and significantly higher than that of the state’s other largest unified school districts. Los Angeles Unified spent under 79% on personnel. While Phillips agrees San Diego is an expensive place to live, “the rate at which the district is spending on people, in my opinion, is unsustainable,” he said. The district leaves just 15% for everything else, from utilities to insurance, and “all of those costs are increasing as well,” he said. San Diego also has had significantly smaller reserves than other large unified districts. As a percentage of total expenditures, its reserves were less than 9% two years ago, compared to an average of almost 24% for all California unified districts and nearly 42% for Los Angeles Unified. Part of what is likely fueling those disparities, officials said, is the fact that other large unified districts including Los Angeles get more state school funding per student. That’s because they have higher percentages than San Diego of low-income students, English learners and foster youth, and the state’s funding formula awards more money to districts with higher concentrations of those student groups. The San Diego Unified School Board will discuss the budget again at a meeting in December. The district is inviting budget feedback on its website.