The State School Fund grabs the spotlight, but anyone who has looked at a school district budget knows education funding comes from many different directions.
Savvy education advocates also keep tabs on the Oregon Department of Education’s funding bill. It is stuffed with grants and supports for school districts, including two of the highest profile funding sources: the 2019 Student Success Act and the High School Success Fund, known as Measure 98.
Legislative Highlights has offered a weekly look at state support for schools: “Funding Oregon’s Future.” The Senate Republican walkout has blocked most bills from passing in the Legislature, but the Joint Ways and Means Committee has continued to work budget bills. Although the walkout could kill those bills for this session, the bills will likely provide budget templates for a special session.
The Joint Ways and Means Education Subcommittee on Wednesday, May 31, approved the Legislative Fiscal Office’s recommendations in House Bill 5014, the ODE budget bill. ODE implements state education standards and monitors compliance, but it also provides crucial school district services and allocates additional funding for specific student needs and programs.
HB 5014 directs $5.5 billion to ODE, more than $2 billion of it from federal funds that nearly all go to schools. The LFO recommendation includes 595 positions, adding jobs related to the Student Success Act, student mental health, rural and small school technical assistance, research and analysis, and program administration.
The LFO recommendation is $750 million and 40 positions above the estimated 2023-25 current service level, while still less than Gov. Tina Kotek’s proposed budget in some areas. The budget is more than $2 billion and 300 positions smaller than 2021-23, though, because the Early Learning Division was moved out of ODE to create the new Department of Early Learning and Care.
ODE’s budget is rife with accounting quirks that draw program money from multiple sources or shift around funds and costs while not detailing all the programs it supports. Typically, the bill’s details come out earlier in session so education advocates can go over it, but this year they had little time. The Wednesday hearing on the recently detailed bill included long explanations about aspects of ODE’s budget as well as extensive supporting documents, but legislators did not take public comments.
Upwards of $4 billion of ODE’s budget flows through the agency by way of more than 100 “grants in aid” for specific student needs, school requirements and state initiatives. Examples include $310 million for Measure 98 grants and $941 million for the Student Investment Account of the Student Success Act. Although sizeable amounts, the Measure 98 amount is essentially flat from the previous biennium. The SIA is only about a 5% increase even though the corporate activity tax resources that support it have increased around 9%.
Two other big ones are $242.5 million for bonding related to the Oregon School Capital Improvement Matching program and $336 million for early intervention services and early childhood special education programs for nearly 25,000 children. Education advocates say the early services funding severely underestimates the number needing services.
The ODE budget also includes estimates for pass-through money, such as the Common School Fund grants and federal school meal reimbursements. ODE has little say over how much money it will get from those sources or where it will go.
The LFO-recommended budget amendment approved Wednesday included a couple of budget notes of direct interest to schools. The bill directs ODE to study how to make school and district-level financial data more publicly available. It also includes $2.5 million to be set aside for panic alert systems in buildings. Districts could get one-time grants of up to $2,000 per building.
– Jake Arnold, OSBA
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