The state added nearly 12,000 employees since 2020, but school districts face layoffs as budget cuts loom
By Khushboo Rathore, Oregon Journalism Project
As Oregon public school leaders face reductions in state funding, they turn to their biggest expense to find cuts — about 85% of their budgets go to personnel.
This time around, they have more staff to cut: Over the past five years, the number of full-time employees at the state’s 197 school districts has grown by nearly 17%, according to an analysis of Oregon Department of Education data.
At the same time, student enrollment has shrunk nearly 3%.
The staff growth — 11,740 full-time equivalent employees, according to state data — is the product of more than $1 billion a year in additional funding from 2019’s Student Success Act. The landmark legislation is mostly paid for by a corporate activity tax.
Since state funding is calculated per student, fewer students, significant federal funding cuts, and a lagging state economy have shrunk the pool of money available for school districts, and some education leaders fear cuts of 2% to 5%.
But if decision makers look at where staff growth took place since 2020–21, they will find increases in instructional assistants, administrative staff, special education and student support roles.
The number of teachers during that period barely budged, increasing 1.7%.
These additional jobs were used to address behavioral and emotional needs of students following the pandemic, says Andrew Dyke, senior economist specializing in education at ECOnorthwest, a Portland research firm.
The investment of the Student Success Act, which in part supported rising salary and pension costs, finally brought the state above the national average for per-pupil K–12 funding. Oregon now ranks 19th in state funding for K–12 education, according to the Education Data Initiative.
But this didn’t slow years-long declines in elementary reading and math scores.
Dyke, however, says it’s premature “to expect to see immediate, stunning results after just a couple of years of increased investment.”
Ashland.news is a partner publication with the Oregon Journalism Project, a new, nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom for the state of Oregon. Email Khushboo Rathore at khushboo@oregonjournalismproject.org.
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