Until this year, students going to Meadowdale, Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace high schools have been able to get into the International Baccalaureate, or IB, program at Edmonds-Woodway through a random lottery system.

IB is a rigorous program offered only at Edmonds-Woodway that draws students from other district high schools, where fewer honors and AP courses are offered.

But now the IB lottery system has been dropped for fall. In its place, honors courses will be offered at each of the other high schools, officials say.

Right now there is no funding allotted for the courses, and no additional staff. Offering the courses will mean that teachers fill in that gap, officials say.

Times are tight. The district is facing about $4 million in cuts, and some high schools are losing staff to declining enrollment and making cuts for that reason.

The district plans to offer honors courses in science, English and social studies next year at the three high schools, said Ken Limon, assistant superintendent.

“It’s a definite thing,” he said. “Teams of teachers in English, science and social studies have been meeting on a regular basis to look at what honors courses would be like for ninth- and 10th-graders.”

It’s a challenge to be able to offer the honors courses in fall, Limon said. Existing teachers will be the ones to teach the classes.

“We are asking educators to do more with less,” he said. “We are providing them with the resources to the extent possible to develop a new course, but at the same time they may be teaching more classes in their own schedule.”

Faced with the challenge, teachers are looking at ways to offer the classes, Limon said. They’re looking at whether they could offer an honors portion within a regular course with the other students, for example.

The teachers are getting some training from the manager of the district’s highly capable program.

Officials are also looking for a way to fund a person at each building to act as the coordinator for the honors program.

Students who are able to take honors courses in ninth and 10th grade at their school could apply to transfer to the IB program at Edmonds-Woodway as juniors. Juniors at the schools could also take the courses if they wanted.

As for the IB program at Edmonds-Woodway, students in the district’s gifted program and Edmonds-Woodway students living in the school’s attendance boundary, can still get into the program.

Officials decided to shut down the lottery system at Edmonds-Woodway in part because of crowding at the school.

“This year we’re just busting at the seams,” said Edmonds-Woodway principal Michelle Trifunovic. “It’s to try to give us a little relief.”

The school isn’t large, physically, and classroom space is an issue.

In the past, about 75 students a year came to Edmonds-Woodway through the IB lottery. Now that the lottery is done, the school will lose about 60 students for next year. Over the years, the loss will add up and mean even more room at the school.

That will also give Edmonds-Woodway students more of a chance to take honors courses at their school, Trifunovic said.

Still, she regrets that students from other schools don’t have easy access to an IB program.

The program is funded with money for the gifted and talented program, but IB isn’t just for gifted students, she said.

“If you fund the program from gifted and talented money, do you exclude kids who should be part of the program?” she said. “To ask the other high schools to build those honors programs with no increased staffing will really be difficult for them to do.”

The lack of state funding has put districts and schools into situations where they have to make these difficult decisions, she said.

“I feel really frustrated at the lack of funding from the state,” she said.

Officials have other reasons for the changes next year, they say.

“We created this honors program in other schools with the intent of providing some of the same opportunities for students in their home school that are provided for the IB kids,” Limon said. “Instead of having Edmonds-Woodway be the only school that appeared to be where the rigorous diploma was.”