4J Budget Committee poised to vote amid outcry over layoffs, forecasting errors

Eugene School District 4J’s Budget Committee is expected to vote on the district’s 2026-27 budget at its meeting Wednesday, May 6.

While the school board has the final say on adopting the $532 million budget, the Budget Committee gives first approval. The committee is made up of the seven school board members as well as six members of the public who are chosen by the board.

The committee reviews and votes on the appropriation amounts of the budget’s six categories or “funds,” but cannot make changes to program-level funding, such as whether to add or subtract money from music or sports programs. It can, however, recommend such changes, which the school board can refuse or accept. 

The school board already approved a reduction of up to 269 full-time equivalent positions next year, in anticipation of a large budget shortfall, which resulted in 177 employees receiving layoff notices. The district budgeted for 2,205 full-time equivalents this year. Those earlier approvals laid the groundwork for the $27.7 million in spending cuts included in the 2026-27 budget. Districts across Oregon are facing significant spending cuts due to declining enrollment and rising personnel costs that outpace state funding. Some, like 4J, are also contending with past delay of eliminating positions previously propped up with COVID-19 relief money.

After the board approved layoffs, district leaders discovered forecasting and organizational errors that revealed an additional $16.4 million shortfall causing the district to use one-time funds to cover the gap. The district will need to make additional cuts next year to spend within its means.

The district has been responsive to the questions following the error, laying bare many of the district’s budgeting weaknesses, but members of the public and board members have expressed disappointment and a loss of trust. Meanwhile, staff received layoffs messages last Friday.

What cuts will entail

The district’s 2026-27 budgeting process was unusually long and drawn-out due to the magnitude of cuts expected. Administrators started the process early, hosting multiple in-person and virtual public forums and sending out an online public opinion survey to gather input and present information.

Superintendent Miriam Mickelson then sought board approval of an estimated $30 million in cuts in three phases, giving the district the authority to lay off up to 269 staff members. The superintendent also made the decision to reduce her cabinet of assistant superintendents.

Each round of cuts brought disappointments, including the shrinking of career and technical education opportunities, reductions to academic support and extracurricular funding, large reductions to school meal funding, moving Family School to the campus of Camas Ridge Community School, reducing middle school electives and significant reduction to staff supports including instructional coaches and mentors. 

The district ultimately cut 265 full-time equivalent jobs across all staff categories, as well as three assistant superintendents.

The savings of these cuts ended up totaling $27.7 million, not the full $30 million. The $2.3 million difference, added to the gap from the forecasting errors, make up the $16.4 million additional shortfall.

Errors caught late in the game

The district broke the news of the additional unaccounted-for costs in March, laying out the reasoning behind the errors in the April 8 Budget Committee meeting and going into more detail in the April 22 budget committee meeting.

At the core of the district’s failure to account for the $16.4 million in additional costs was the use of salary averages to forecast layoff cost savings, which did not take into account seniority rules that often lead to the most expensive employees keeping their jobs, as well as poor tracking of the cost and revenue source of each employee, known as “position control.”

Other unaccounted-for expenses included additional buffer funds to adjust staffing in the fall in response to actual enrollment, pension contribution increases forecasted in January, unexpected cost increases in contracted services that mainly serve students with disabilities and new state policies that were unaccounted for when the district started forecasting in the summer.

Board member Jenny Jonak asked Finance Director Matt Brown in the April 22 committee meeting why the financial reports in January to March did not include known changes to the forecasted expenses, such as the increase in pension contributions 4J learned about in January.

Brown said the late notice of accounting mistakes hinged partly on finance staff waiting until the district and classified staff union had come to an agreement (the board ratified the collective agreement in late January) to start using “actual” costs in their accounting.

He said he and his staff usually wait to use current school year actual costs in projections until January’s financial report because of the volatility of enrollment and staffing in the beginning of the school year. This year, it didn’t happen until March because February was the first payroll when all employees received only their contractual salaries. January paychecks included backpay for classified staff. 

In the January and February monthly budget reports, staff did not factor in forecasted costs they were discovering because they were still using 2025-26 budget numbers (the estimate of what they would spend) for forecasting, instead of actual costs.

“That is one thing in retrospect, we should have started including those things in our January and February forecast when reporting those during our budget reports, but we did not,” Brown said.

Brown explained that the current accounting software that staff use at 4J is difficult to use, making calculations more complicated than they have to be. The district will implement new, more user-friendly software next year that many districts across the state use, allowing staff to use per-person costs instead of salary averages to make forecasts.

The Budget Committee will meet for their final planned meeting at 6 p.m., Wednesday at the 4J Ed Center, 200 N. Monroe St.

This story has been updated to clarify how many staff members recieved layoff notices.