Principals around Portland Public Schools warned their staffs this week that cutbacks are coming, kicking off what promises to be painful and contentious negotiations over the budget for the 2024-2025 school year.
District fiscal officials say they need to trim $30 million from next year’s budget, the first true financial reckoning after the three week teacher strike in November that ended with a 14.4% compounded cost-of-living adjustment for teachers over this and the next two school years.
That’s less than what teachers had sought but more than what the district had said it would be able to afford without making cuts.
Complicating matters: Federal pandemic relief funding, targeted at helping students fill in the learning gaps left after months of virtual and hybrid school, expires this fall. The district received $73 million to spend over the last three years, the largest chunk of which went to licensed educator salaries, but that money is gone after September of 2024.
And, while the precipitous enrollment drops that characterized the pandemic period have tapered off, next year’s enrollment could see renewed declines, due to a falling birth rate and families seeking alternatives. That’s potentially ominous, because state funding is directly tied to student enrollment.
In a letter to families, outgoing Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero wrote that the district plans to spend down its reserve funds by millions of dollars, leaving only the 5% minimum in savings that the school board requires, in hopes of blunting the impact to students. He said $15 million of cuts would come from the central office budget — about 6% of the overall administrative budget — and another $15 million would be spread over the district’s 86 different schools, or about 2% of the school buildings’ budget.
Several teachers, all of whom requested anonymity in order to be able to speak without fear of retribution, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that in these early stages, cutbacks appeared to be focused on social and emotional supports for students, including to school counselors and behavior specialists, as well as to so-called “specials” teachers who lead art, music, physical education and other enrichment classes and will now be more likely to split their time between schools.
In his email to parents, Guerrero also warned that “we anticipate that some schools will see teacher-student ratios increase by one or two students on average.” Large class sizes were a key point of contention during the strike, and as a result the district is set to phase in school-level committees that will brainstorm potential solutions to crowded classrooms.
None of those cuts are set in stone. Historically, the outlook changes after feedback from teachers, other district employees and families. The school board will not approve a final budget until June. Finances can shift too — for example, state lawmakers are currently considering a $50 million allocation for summer school programming across all Oregon districts, which could potentially free up money earmarked for that purpose to be spent elsewhere.
Nor does it likely mean widespread job losses, given expected retirements. But some educators may find themselves assigned to different buildings.
Portland Association of Teachers President Angela Bonilla, who was recently reelected to her post without opposition, immediately blasted the district’s plan in an email to the 3,500 teachers in the union, calling it “unacceptable.” If cuts are needed, they should be made “as far away from students and schools as possible,” she wrote.
The district spent nearly $30 million less than it had planned to do in 2022-2023 according to its own end-of-year accounting, she said, suggesting that similar underspending could surface this year, offsetting cuts. She wrote that the balance should come from cutting back on contracts with outside vendors.
— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com