Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
Eugene School District 4J is closing its Center for Applied Learning and Community Impact and online middle school offering, scaling back several academic and student support programs and cutting its nutrition services budget. The district is also reducing administrative staff and district-level staff across departments.
The Eugene School District 4J board voted unanimously to approve up to 127 more end-of-year staff layoffs during its Wednesday, Jan. 14, meeting.
Along with 28 already approved administrative position cuts, the 127 full-time equivalent jobs represent the human impact of the programmatic and district-level cuts Superintendent Miriam Mickelson announced at the Jan. 7 board meeting.
Those cuts include the closing of the Center for Applied Learning and Community Impact and the district’s online middle school. Several other district programs, departments and administrative positions will also be significantly scaled back. The reductions total $18 million, 60% of the district’s needed reductions for the 2026-27 school year.
While Mickelson said the district will probably not lay off all 127 allotted full-time equivalents, the district can now cut up to 55 licensed and 72 classified full-time equivalent positions.
The personnel cuts were in phase two of Mickelson’s three-part presentation of the 4J’s planned $30 million budget reduction. The district is facing a significant budget shortfall due to enrollment decline, increased personnel costs and the end of one-time COVID relief funds in 2024. The board decided to use $26.5 million in reserves in 2025 in order to preserve student-facing positions, but reserves are now close to the board-defined minimum.
“I think we’re doing a really difficult little job in the best way we know,” said board Chair Tom Di Liberto, addressing those who sent feedback to the board about cuts. “We’ve learned some lessons along the way in the last few years, so in a sense, I’m proud of that, but I still feel pretty helpless about this.”
Teacher, parent pushback
A small crowd of about 40 attended the Wednesday meeting and four people spoke during public comment, including staff from the Center for Applied Learning and Community Impact and the Eugene Online Academy.
Ryan Hansen, co-teacher of HumaniTech, one of the Center for Applied Learning and Community Impact programs, teaches engineering skills while students make adaptive toys and electric vehicles for students with disabilities.
“Aspects like block scheduling, co-teaching, direct community involvement and the frequency of seeing our students every day for multiple hours has an immeasurable impact, and it’s a crucial component of what we do, as is access to this program by all district students, not just those at a single school,” Hansen said. “I’m here to ask for your help in preserving as much as we can.”
While components of HumaniTech will remain in engineering technology classes at South Eugene High School, the class will no longer be offered across the whole district, will not be co-taught and will not have block scheduling, according to Mickelson. Across the current programs at the Center for Applied Learning and Community Impact, 11 full-time equivalent positions will be cut and one class, EmpowerEd, ended.
Angela Pruce-Finneran and Stephanie Luiere, both from Eugene Online Academy, expressed dismay at the eight positions that will be cut from their 14-member staff, which serves students who often feel like they don’t belong in or, for a variety of reasons, cannot attend a traditional, brick-and-mortar school. Three of the eight positions make up the middle school program, which is closing, and the other five are high school teachers. Luiere said they will also lose their assistant principal and contract with StrongMind, a virtual learning platform.
Pruce-Finneran and Luiere said many of her students come from marginalized groups or have chronic physical or mental health conditions.
“Many of our students lack the capacity to return to a traditional school day,” Luiere said. “We may expect a large portion of these students to seek alternatives or enroll in fully online programs elsewhere in Oregon, taking (state funds) with them, and deepening the budget crisis for our district.”
There are seven sixth and seventh graders who will be affected by the closure of the online middle school program and 79 high schoolers who will be affected by reduced staff and larger class sizes. About 500 students who attend brick-and-mortar schools also use Eugene Online Academy to take credit-recovery courses. Mickelson said the staff reductions will make the teacher-to-student ratio larger, but still smaller than the ratio at in-person, comprehensive high schools.
How phase two cuts will play out
The High School Extended Day Program, a credit-recovery program serving about 90 students, will relocate to the Early College & Career Options building, an alternative 4J high school commonly known as ECCO, starting in February. This will save the district money spent on staff travel to all the high schools and a part-time secretary position.
The BEST program will operate on a $450,000 budget next year, purely funded by federal money. The district has not yet worked out what the program will look like in its consolidated form, said finance director Matt Brown.
The district will apply for a state grant for its summer programs, which, without the grant, would be reduced to credit-recovery classes and transition programs for students who need extra support going into kindergarten, sixth and ninth grades.
Before the vote, board members expressed their heartache in cutting programs, especially those that serve the students who are already at a disadvantage.
“I want to acknowledge that some of the hardest hit programs are those that are serving some of our students who need a different pathway other than your standard pathway,” Maya Rabasa said.
Rabasa and fellow board member Ericka Thessen also said they hope the community service aspects of HumaniTech and Creative Current will remain in career and technical education classes. Board member Morgan Munro shared her desire for staff not to burn out by trying to do the same amount of programming with fewer staff.
“What can be intentionally set down, as hard as that will be to do, to have some chance of making it through,” Munro said. “I hope that there’s a realistic eye towards the work that continues with realistic staffing to do it.”
