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The committee voted 6-3 to approve the budget at their May 7 meeting. The members who voted no cited a need for more time and a desire to not cut more teachers after this year’s midyear layoffs.
The Springfield Public Schools Budget Committee approved the 2026-27 budget and property tax rates at the May 7 Budget Committee meeting on a 6-3 vote, moving the budget to the Board of Education for final adoption in June.
The budget for the 2026-27 school year, which was officially presented for the first time at the May 7 meeting, includes $4 million in spending cuts across all funds compared to the current year’s budget, and the projected use of $6.2 million in reserves. The cuts include 33.7 full-time equivalent employee cuts. The staff reductions are in addition to 27 teachers laid off midyear and other positions cut from the budget over the summer due to agreements with employee groups.
The district, like many in Oregon, is facing declining enrollment and rising costs. Springfield’s biggest increased costs included salaries, benefits, pension payments and the cost of contracted special education services for students with the highest needs.
Springfield Board of Education is set to vote on a “reduction in force” resolution at their May 11 budget meeting, effectively giving the district authority to start the layoff process. Brian Richardson, Springfield Public Schools communications director, said district administrators will not know how many people will actually lose their jobs until they go through the complex reduction in force process.
Richardson said the district will use attrition to the extent possible.
Concerns over rushing the process
Committee members who voted no were Hollea Puzio, Patty Gutierrez and Amber Langworthy, all of whom are parents with children in the district.
Puzio said after the meeting that she voted no because she wanted answers to the questions committee members asked before deciding on whether to approve the budget. Unanswered questions included what student-to-teacher ratios would look like next year.
“I honestly just wanted more time so that I could see the information that the school district was going to send to us that they didn’t have on hand,” she said.
Langworthy also cited a desire for additional time to review the budget.
Gutierrez, who volunteers at her children’s school, said she saw the faces of students flashing through her mind when she was about to vote.
“I don’t want to see any more loss in staff,” she said. “They are essential to why kids keep coming to school.”
Gutierrez said she knows other parents who have already left the district, turning to homeschool and online options. She’s worried that with continued losses of teachers, enrollment decline will accelerate because families will leave.
Finance director Brett Yancey said he does not think enrollment decline is driven by families leaving the district. He thinks it’s driven by families failing to come to the district due to declines in the birth rate, housing prices and lack of jobs.
“I want to disrupt the narrative as much as I can that families are leaving our district, because if families were leaving our district, they’re leaving every other district because there’s a statewide enrollment decline,” Yancey said.
Springfield Public Schools’ enrollment is declining faster than it is in neighboring districts, Eugene 4J and Bethel. From the 2016-17 school year to the 2025-26 school year, Springfield has seen an enrollment decline of 18.2% when including alternative education and its one charter school, and 16.7% when leaving out alternative and charter schools. In the same span of time, 4J saw a 9.7% decline in enrollment and Bethel saw a 11.6% decline.
Midyear cuts and an underspent budget
Cuts to staffing are not as severe as they could have been due to summer and midyear reductions, administrators noted. They also saved 12.5 licensed full-time positions by using other sources of funding. The projected cuts to current staffing levels are as follows for each employee category (note that FTE does not always equal a single employee):
- Licensed (examples are teachers, school counselors): 12.1 FTE
- Classified (examples are cafeteria staff, bus drivers, secretaries): 10.1 FTE
- Administrative (district office staff and principals, for example): 11.5 FTE
The midyear layoffs are still a point of contention for teachers. Springfield’s teachers union filed an unfair labor practice complaint against the district over the layoffs, which the union claims were intentionally done to undermine bargaining and sow discontent and anxiety among members. The complaint is under investigation by the Oregon Employment Relations Board.
In 2025, Yancey told the Budget Committee and Board of Education members that the proposed budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year did not include any cost-of-living increases for staff. At the time, he said that any raises for employees that were included in new contracts — which were being negotiated at the time — would force position cuts.
What wasn’t clear, according to board chair Jonathan Light, was that any necessary cuts could occur midyear. Light said he assumed licensed staff cuts would happen during the next budget cycle so as not to disrupt the school year.
“From my perspective, there was not clarity, not to the degree of specificity needed,” Light said in an interview with Lookout Eugene-Springfield.
According to the district budget, the district’s projected ending fund balance for the end of the current fiscal year is $14.8 million, $6.5 million more than the district originally budgeted. In December, two weeks before the layoffs were approved, Springfield estimated that its ending fund balance would be $4.8 million over the budgeted amount.
Richardson said the district decided to make midyear reductions to be fair to the other employee groups (classified staff and administrators) who had settled agreements in the summer to reduce staff positions in exchange for cost-of-living increases. These negotiations, however, were brief reopenings of past agreements compared to the full-scale, formal bargaining process licensed staff and the district engaged in to reach a new contract.
The teachers union also decided to take the summer off of bargaining, Richardson said. Richardson said more cuts would have had to be made if the district waited until the end of the year to adjust staffing levels to reflect new salary and benefit costs.
Brandon Ferguson, president-elect of Springfield’s teachers union, was one of the teachers moved to a different school in the midyear reshuffle caused by the cuts. The transition was difficult for him and his new students, he said.
“The most important thing is (the students’) relationship to that teacher,” Ferguson said. “I would do anything to avoid midyear cuts.”
