Our View: Eugene School District's $16 million blunder can't be swept aside

Another Lane County school district, another major budget misstep.

Two months after Eugene School District 4J leaders said they completed steep cuts to next school year’s budget, and one month after announcing their deficit was much larger than anticipated, we learned last week the true size of the hole: $44.1 million.

That figure represents a $16.4 million miscalculation by 4J’s finance team. It means the district’s three-phased reduction plan for next year — 269 staff cuts, the co-location of two schools in one building and fewer elective classes for middle school students — only totaled two-thirds of the savings needed to balance the budget, a must under state law.

How could such a major error slip under administrators’ radar? It was particularly egregious for the finance team not to realize when they created a budget model for savings from staff cuts that they had failed to account for disappearing COVID money that was being used to support positions.

While we appreciate the finance team’s candor about mistakes made, they feel too big to dismiss as mere errors. A $44 million budget gap is nearly 8% of the district’s entire budget. That’s a massive hole.

And it’s little comfort that the district plans to fill this new gap by dipping into its dwindling reserves and transferring millions of dollars from facility maintenance, instead of cutting deeper into staff.

Students and parents won’t feel any disruptions this year — unlike at Springfield Public Schools, where that district’s own budget mistakes resulted in midyear teacher cuts in January. But 4J’s reliance on one-time budget gimmicks is starting to feel dangerous. The district’s reserves have dwindled from $75 million two years ago to less than $20 million budgeted for next year. What if we’re in the same spot a year from now?

A $16 million mistake calls for more transparency than the district has provided so far. A good start would be a commitment to sharing three things, starting at next week’s budget committee meeting:

Best- and worst-case budgeting scenarios that account for different possible outcomes, not just what the district thinks the most realistic one will be.

A summary of what the finance team learned in recent talks with other school district budget directors about their budget forecasts, and how they might change 4J’s forecasting models as a result.

A sense of how it plans to budget beyond next school year. What additional cuts might need to be made if its revenue outlook doesn’t improve? Are there any one-time savings left to dip into? Might the district test voters’ appetite for increasing the current tax levy voters passed in 2024?

The district can’t wait until next year to start working on next year’s budget. Administrators might consider all this oversharing. Conversations about school closures and other drastic money-saving measures are difficult and emotional to have with the community, even when they are purely theoretical.

But there are downsides to undersharing, too. Given the fiscal headwinds districts across Oregon face from declining enrollments and rising personnel costs, we hope to hear more, not less, about 4J’s financial thinking going forward. Even if we don’t like what we hear.