Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
To work on a school district’s finance team is to hold one of the most thankless jobs in government administration. If the public is talking about your work, in all likelihood, it’s because something went wrong.
Lately, things have gone wrong at Lane County’s two largest school districts. And preventable mistakes cast uncomfortable spotlights on the work of financial leaders at Eugene School District 4J and Springfield Public Schools.
The budget slashing each district undertook this year isn’t any one person’s making. Nor are this year’s steep budget cuts unique (see: Portland, Salem, Bend, Medford). But as Lookout Eugene-Springfield reported this week, flawed assumptions baked into the 4J and Springfield budgeting processes in the past year eroded trust between district administrators, school board members, teachers and the public.
This editorial board already said plenty about Springfield Public Schools’ failure to budget for expected teacher raises during contract negotiations last year, and about 4J’s $16.4 million budget forecasting miscalculation. What matters now is what school administrators and school boards do to improve their budgeting processes and restore trust with their communities.
Eugene district leaders have said the right things since finance staff in March realized they weren’t properly tracking which staff positions were supported by federal COVID grant dollars. That mistake essentially blew up the district’s already significant deficit reduction plan — a mistake the superintendent and finance director apologized for.Â
We note that the district’s own 2021 audited financial statements (the year before the current finance director assumed the role) called out that COVID grant funds were supporting staff positions. The district apparently had the information to avoid its $16.4 million mistake years ago, but that knowledge seems to have been buried until this spring. This, despite the district’s budgeting team starting its budget process last July, a full six months earlier than usual.
Digging out of the hole will take time, and require hard conversations about additional cuts beyond those already made. But in the short term, we think the district should take three steps to correct its problems:
- Make early budgeting the norm until financial conditions improve significantly.
- Commit to reviewing — and learning from — what their own district has said in the past.
- Improve communication and trust between finance staff and the elected school board. Board members should feel comfortable asking questions about the budget and seeking information from staff outside of meetings.
The board isn’t immune from criticism either. They should pay more attention than they have in the recent past to administrators’ calls for fiscal restraint. Reserves that the district spent down in recent years amid public and board pressure to stave off cuts were seen as wise at the time, but seem less so now that another round of steep cuts on top of this year is all but guaranteed to happen again next year.
Restoring trust will be even harder at Springfield Public Schools, which has an interim superintendent next year while it searches for a permanent replacement to Todd Hamilton.
We haven’t heard any contrition from the district for its still-confounding decision not to budget for teacher raises — a decision that resulted in midyear teacher layoffs and contributed in part to two school board members resigning.
None of this is to say budgeting is easy. Far from it. School districts use complex formulas to forecast how revenues and expenses will fluctuate over time. It’s that much harder in Oregon, which suffers from one of the most arcane K-12 education funding methods in the country — a formula that’s increasingly raising calls for reform.
But mistakes made by local leaders shouldn’t be swept under the rug, either. We’ll be keeping close tabs on 4J to see if they make good on their pledge to do better, and on Springfield to see if they’ll try transparency for a change.
