4J budget committee members receive training on their role, with deep cuts on the horizon

In a special school board meeting Wednesday, Dec. 3, Eugene School District 4J prepped its budget committee for the inevitable cuts the district is facing.

Since October, the district has been transparent about its $30 million budget gap and the reality that the district will have to lay off staff. The district has a budget gap due to declining enrollment, increased employee costs and the end of COVID-era relief money.

The budget committee, a group of 14 people that include school board members and an equal number of members of the public, will be the first public body to approve the district’s budget in the spring. While they will not officially meet until March 31, the Wednesday session gave members a primer on their role in the budget process and 4J’s budget realities.

Budget committee 101

According to Oregon law, every school district in Oregon must have a budget committee. Non-school board members are chosen by the school board, serve for three years and cannot be employed by the district.

All 4J budget committee members for the 2026-27 budget have previous budget committee experience, but superintendent Miriam Mickelson brought in Krista Parent and Candace Pelt-Perez from Coalition of Oregon School Administrators to review the budget committee’s role.

Parent and Pelt-Perez are former superintendents and teach school finance classes to administrators-in-training at the University of Oregon. They broke down the budget process, which will happen in three steps:

Step 1: This year, 4J administrators will present their proposed budget cuts in a phased approach during school board meetings from December through February in order to give staff and families advance notice. Meanwhile, administrators are preparing to present a full proposed budget document to the budget committee in the spring.

Step 2: The budget committee will have three meetings, starting March 31, to review the proposed budget and give the public an opportunity to provide feedback and ask questions about it. The committee then has the power to change how much money is appropriated to each of the budget’s six main categories or “funds,” which are defined by source and purpose of the money. Many of these fund amounts are determined by how much money the district receives from state and federal sources.

The budget committee cannot, however, make changes to program-level funding, such as how much money is appropriated to music classes or athletic teams. They can make recommendations, though. The budget committee then votes to approve the budget. This approval is a formal recommendation to the school board on whether to adopt the budget, reject it or adopt it with modifications. For example, last year, the board voted to accept the budget committee’s recommendation to add back certain positions the district had proposed to cut.

Step 3: The approved budget then goes to the school board which will hold a public hearing and then vote for final adoption. School districts are required to adopt their budgets by June 30. The 4J school board adopted its budget for their current fiscal year on May 21.

What the committee’s role is

The question of how deep the budget committee’s oversight should go was a main point of discussion during the evening. Committee members asked about the gray area of recommending changes to the budget.

While Parent, Pelt-Perez and 4J district administrators urged budget committee members to not “get in the weeds” in their recommendations, some budget committee members, including Abbie Stillie and Amy Fellows, expressed desire for more detail in the budget they receive.

In the face of this tension, board member Morgan Munro, who has served on the 4J’s school board since July 2023, argued that the transparency and community input baked into the budget committee process is more important than the committee getting granular in their recommended changes.

“For a lot of other communities and other states, even this level of information would be unheard of and we kind of forget that because we’re here and we just want more information,” Munro said. “Having only one piece of the process can be really frustrating. But that piece of the process is really valuable.”

Parent encouraged committee members to make budget decisions based on 4J’s predetermined priorities. These include protecting what is essential, centering students, equity and access, fiscal sustainability, efficiency, empathy and transparency. She also pushed members to train themselves on how state school funding works in Oregon and how to read a budget document.