Public schools on a tightrope as they try to keep trust while slashing budgets

In April, teachers, parents and school leaders gathered in the light-filled Springfield High School cafeteria for the district’s last public budget forum.

After a 10-minute presentation about the district’s budget realities and need for cuts, attendees gathered in small groups. Administrators sat face-to-face with parents and teachers, answering questions and noting feedback.

Special education teacher Pauline Pham asked how staff-to-student ratios would be determined. Her students’ behavioral and emotional needs have significantly risen since the pandemic, and she hoped cuts would not touch her program. 

Pham said she was glad the forum was happening. She was wary, however, about the promise that district leaders would take her concerns into consideration. She hadn’t felt heard in the past.

“Our words seem to go out into the void, and we haven’t seen any response to that,” she said. “I actually like that we are at the same table with people who can provide a real human response.”

Joyce Smith-Johnson, Springfield Public School’s elementary director, was listening on the other side of one of the tables. She said she heard some compliments among the complaints.

“Although we’re trying to focus on what they really are enjoying, they’ve given us some areas of improvements, too, and we’re taking that down and listening, and we’ll do our best,” she said.

The budget forum was one of Acting Superintendent Jodi O’Mara’s efforts to rebuild trust in the wake of a tornado of top leader resignations, midyear teacher layoffs and a union vote of no confidence. The face-to-face conversations in the school cafeteria held both the tension of the past and the cautious hope for a different future, despite impending cuts.

Budgeting took center stage in local public education this year as Eugene and Springfield districts faced significant losses. And while numbers can be black and white, human decision-making is decidedly not. Fumbles in forecasting, transparency and fiscal responsibility have eroded trust between local district and board leaders, leading to power struggles and divisions.

With more difficult budgeting years ahead, many leaders say a better future for school governance lies in a more collaborative, forward-thinking approach to leadership — both at the local and state level.

The starting point is understanding the forces and players that go into making budgets.

Who shapes a school budget

Finance directors Matt Brown and Bob Blyth of Eugene School District 4J normally start forecasting and planning for the next budget year in December. But for the budget year that begins July 1, they started last July — almost a full year ahead.

They weren’t the only education officials getting an early start: In the Bethel School District, Andrea Belz, business services director, and Kraig Sproles, the superintendent, started meeting with a long-range planning committee in spring 2025 about the possibility of closing Shasta Middle School — the district’s main budget cut going into next school year.

In a “normal year,” school budgeting is an annual process that takes districts five or six months to complete. When budget reductions are likely, the process sometimes starts much sooner.

In the process of drawing up a budget, finance directors consider a complex equation: the district’s fixed costs, the cost of running a building or employing a principal, for example, plus variable costs, such as how many students they expect and who those students will be, and try to balance that with revenue, which comes mainly from state taxes and local property taxes.

This money is funneled through an equalization formula which means that wealthier districts draw more heavily on local property taxes and poorer districts are funded more on state money. Eugene 4J is the only local district with a voter-approved levy that boosts funding.

Student enrollment determines much of the district’s sliver of the State School Fund pie. Depending on students’ poverty level, language-learning status and other factors such as whether a student is pregnant or parenting, the district also receives different weighted funding from the state.

“Each child does not turn up with the same basic skills, abilities, and needs as the next,” Belz said. “And it’s often very hard for us to make a projection. We do the best we can of (predicting) who’s coming and how we will serve them.”

Superintendents and finance directors have a large influence on school budgets.

When Sproles arrived at Bethel in 2021, he and Belz saw the writing on the wall: enrollment was on the decline and they needed to create a runway for the district’s inevitable losses. Nothing would be done quickly or without extensive planning, they agreed, but they had to start planning.

Four years later, Bethel was the first among the three local districts to close an elementary school because of enrollment declines. Both Springfield and 4J lack long-term financial plans that consider facility use. Blyth and Brown, the 4J finance team, say such a plan is on their list. 

Since Brown arrived at the district four years ago, he’s worked under four superintendents, all with different approaches to budgeting.

Each superintendent “changes the outlook and the culture and the morale of an entire district,” Brown said.

Though leadership stability in 4J has been rocky, Brown and Blyth began their own initiative, “Budget Roadshow,” to better engage the 4J community in the process. This school year, the multiplatform approach included nine in-person and virtual meetings for families and staff in the fall and a community survey filled out by more than 1,300 people.

Blyth said the idea behind the presentations was to change perceptions of the district’s financial department: “Finance was thought of as this evil box downtown that just said no,” Blyth said. 

It also was important for him to build relationships outside of the “evil box” — even though he said it sometimes could be difficult to meet first-year teachers, who are usually the first to be handed pink slips during layoffs.

Brown and Blyth said Superintendent Miriam Mickelson, who in her first year at 4J took on the monumental task of making a budget with $30 million in cuts, pushed for transparency. 

After district leaders put together a budget document, it moves on to the budget committee and school board for approval. A school board’s relationship with its superintendent, its only employee, is a critical component to this step.

Curt Nordling, vice chair of the Bethel School Board, said one of Bethel’s strengths is the communication between board members, Sproles and Belz. Board members asking questions about the budget is the norm in Bethel, Nordling said, and has been for a long time.

“I think that board members need to be engaged annually, year-round, constantly giving feedback, and constantly getting feedback from their superintendents of ‘Where are we at? Where are the numbers? How are they looking? What is this? What’s happening in Salem?’” Nordling said.

He said asking questions and getting answers not only gives board members more understanding of the budget, it also ensures the superintendent and finance director are doing their best work.

Lost trust and power struggles

While finance staffers work through projections and budget drafts, members of school budget committees and boards prepare for the public-facing phase — which can introduce public pressure and ignite long-simmering issues about governance.

For example, at a December training meeting of the 4J Budget Committee, as Brown and Blyth spoke about the need for $30 million in budget cuts, Krista Parent and Candace Pelt-Perez from the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators urged committee members not to “get into the weeds” in their recommendations.

The committee had gotten into the weeds the year before, something board Chair Tom Di Liberto regrets. As jobs and student outcomes weighed on board members’ minds, he acknowledged the decision to add back specific positions disturbed the delicate balance between district and board involvement in the budgeting process.

But he also doesn’t regret the board’s decision to add back support staff positions using $3.2 million more in reserves than the superintendent had recommended.

“I think the pandemic, and perhaps other factors, really did some damage to education in general, and it’s taken a long road to get us back,” said Di Liberto.
“So I think using those dollars that we had was money well spent.”

Brown said that before 2023, the district had been racking up reserves from COVID-relief dollars that were going unspent, as well as from a conservative budgeting approach. In 2023, 4J’s reserve balance was nearly $80 million and expenses and revenue nearly matched.

But starting in 2024, the district began spending more than it was taking in, using reserves to avoid cuts. In 2026-27, after three years of significantly spending them down, reserves will be at about $14.6 million.

While expenses were rising and enrollment was declining, it was hard to convince board members of the importance of using the reserves as a cushion while gradually making the inevitable staffing cuts — instead of using reserves to serve kids who had high needs following the pandemic. The board chose to use reserves to maintain student support services.

Brown demurred when asked whether he thought the board’s decision last year was financially sound.

“Finance is a piece of the leadership team,” he said. “We’re not there to ultimately make any decisions. We’re there to provide what the financial result is of doing A or B or C.”

Four months after 4J’s budget committee training, the group was back together, this time for their first official meeting.

The tone was tense. District leaders had just announced that due to forecasting errors, there was an additional $16.4 million budget deficit. Committee members asked questions and heard district leaders’ responses and apologies for two and half hours.

“This does some damage to us as far as trust from the community and our front line educators,” said board member Rick Hamilton. “That’s what really bothers me about this whole thing.”

To the east, Springfield Public Schools also faced a loss of public and employee trust this year, but for different reasons. Springfield’s abrupt decision to make midyear layoffs in order to pay for teacher raises in the new union contract caused the union to file a still-pending unfair labor practice complaint with the state. And 64% of teachers voted they had no confidence in four top district leaders.

While district leaders said the cuts had been planned, the midyear timing put off staff and some board members due to its far-reaching disruption to a school year that was already underway.

Springfield school board Chair Jonathan Light voted against the midyear layoffs. He said while he voted to approve the 2025-26 budget — which included no money for teacher raises — he believed that if the contract was settled during the school year (which it was), any necessary cuts would not take place until the end of the year.

“Our vote is reliant and only as good as the information we have received,” Light said.

During last year’s budget committee and board meetings in Springfield, Brett Yancey, the district’s chief operating officer, frequently noted that the budget did not include money for any cost-of-living adjustment that would be included in any contract agreement, and that any raises would result in staffing cuts.

Light said he would have preferred the district use its reserves to cover raises, even if it meant more severe cuts the following year. But he was in the minority. The board approved the midyear cuts on a 3-2 vote.

In response to questions about why the district proposed a budget with no teacher raises and whether it was a mistake in hindsight, communications director Brian Richardson replied: “Those questions involve ongoing and complex labor and budget considerations that are best addressed through formal public processes and board discussions.”

Yancey declined an interview request from Lookout Eugene-Springfield.

Disconnection starting at the top

Finger-pointing in education circles runs deeper than just the local level.

At Bethel’s June 10 school board meeting, Jamie Myers, Eugene teachers union president, spoke to the board about the statewide teachers union Oregon Education Association’s plan to ask legislators for more school funding in the upcoming 2027 legislative session through a potential increase to the Corporate Activity Tax or other sources.

However, Sproles, the Bethel superintendent, said he’s cautious to ask legislators for more money without first showing improved test score results, something legislators have told him they want. 

But Sproles acknowledged that he believes student progress isn’t being fully captured on the state tests that Oregon uses. He wants a better test.

The conversation also touched on the consistent complaint among local school districts: that education reforms mandated by the state or federal governments often don’t come with any additional money. Still, districts need to factor in these unfunded mandates when they build their budgets.

One of the major underfunded programs, Brown said, is special education. Under state law, districts receive double the regular per-student funding for a student with disabilities. But there’s a catch: The extra funding is capped when a school’s population of students with disabilities reaches 11%. A district like 4J, where 15% of students in the 2024-25 school year were identified as having disabilities, is left finding ways to cover the funding gap.

Another famously underfunded requirement for districts in Oregon is their contribution to the Public Employee Retirement System, the pension system for teachers and other state workers.

This underfunding has caused tension between districts and state leaders. Blyth’s biggest frustration lies in the “seeming lack of engagement” from state decision-makers who determine funding.

Poojah Bhatt, an education policy expert who worked as an adviser for former Gov. Kate Brown and Gov. Tina Kotek, is studying the disconnect and has ideas to fix it.

Bhatt has a new initiative to build understanding between local leaders, districts and the state about how Oregon’s education funding and accountability models need to change.

She said both parties blame each other for bad education outcomes and a lack of resources, and Bhatt thinks there’s a seed of truth on both sides. While Oregon ranks 20th in the nation in per-student spending, according to fiscal year 2024 data from the U.S. Census, the state system that funds Oregon’s schools is fragmented, Bhatt said, and inefficient.

Bhatt compared the state’s patchwork of grant programs meant to increase education funding through specialized initiatives to a box of LEGOs that is dumped into schools across the state.

“Educators on the ground, and classrooms, have to figure out how to sort these out, and they don’t have time,” Bhatt said in an interview with Lookout. “They’ve got kids that they have to manage with rapidly increasing social and emotional needs, behavioral health issues.”

Through her nonprofit Oregon Network for Educational Excellence, one of Bhatt’s goals is to empower local school board members and superintendents with information to better run and advocate for their districts.

“Oregon has a very weak statewide infrastructure about sharing best practices, sharing how to do things well,” she said. “And everybody is on their own to figure it out.”

This includes good governance practices, Bhatt said.

A better future for school governance

On the night the Springfield board passed the district’s 2026-27 budget, community members showed out in force to protest Springfield’s cutting of its Spanish dual immersion program.

The cautious optimism of the April community budget forum in Springfield High School’s cafeteria was gone. The community felt blindsided. Some choked on tears as they spoke to the board. 

“Families deserve to understand what data and analysis were used to support these decisions,” said parent Guadalupe Anguiano. “If our neighbor districts, like Eugene 4J, are facing similar financial enrollment challenges while maintaining their K-12 immersion pathway, why is Springfield choosing a different approach? I don’t understand.”

District leaders did not present information about program changes or cuts during the meeting, but Richardson, the communications director, said in a response to Lookout that the cut was made with feedback from budget forums and the community survey in mind.

For the foreseeable future, school districts will continue to face difficult budget cuts. How collaborative boards and district leaders are in these decisions, however, may prove nearly as important as the decisions themselves.

Light, the Springfield school board chair, was a school board member about 20 years ago. Board members didn’t always get what they wanted in decisions then, he said, but dialogue felt more encouraged.

Former Springfield board member Todd Mann, who served from 2019-2023, said Springfield district administrators encouraged him to ask questions — but not during public meetings.

“School board members, I think, are often viewed as liabilities for a district,” he said. “They can be hard to predict, hard to train, hard to control.”

One of Mann’s biggest frustrations was the district’s dismissal and avoidance of his questions and conversations about enrollment decline and how to address it. Springfield has experienced the second largest enrollment percentage drop in the state out of Oregon’s 197 districts, according to 2015-25 state enrollment data.

Bhatt believes good school governance practices include transparency, systems of accountability and systems for sharing knowledge — including knowledge about enrollment decline.

The power struggles and divisions between boards and superintendents come from a loss of trust, Bhatt said. Districts lose the trust of their boards and the public when people don’t have clear information and don’t feel like they have a voice. When boards cannot access information, they should have protocols in place for how to escalate the issue, she said.

“I think high-functioning boards have effective partnerships with their superintendent,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that they agree on all the things, it doesn’t mean that they’re not going to have healthy conflict and healthy tension.”

Mann said he sees district and board tensions arising from a natural desire for districts to protect themselves. Mann thinks districts have put up more barriers between themselves and the public over the years to reduce risk, whether it’s from school shootings, litigation or personal feuds. To give more access is to introduce more risk, he said.

“Some people believe there’s a lot of mal-intent, that there are bad actors doing bad things for bad reasons,” Mann said. “I don’t believe that at all. I believe that everyone is largely just doing the best they can and with situations that they were given, but that doesn’t always equate to good outcomes for the kids.”