While Portland Public Schools teachers were on strike in November, the Lebanon Community School District was bargaining with teachers and staff. (Photo by Sarah Brown, Lebanon Local)
The Portland Public Schools teachers dispute is reverberating through school budget conversations all over Oregon. It stands as a stark reminder of the similar problems schools face and the local differences in the ways they can be solved.
“Portland Public obviously sets the bar for the state and nationally even,” said Susanne Stefani, Lebanon Community Schools communications director. “What they arrive at is relevant for educators throughout Oregon. That said, it’s apples and oranges when we are talking about Lebanon.”
Stefani was at the bargaining table as her district reached a tentative agreement with its teachers recently. She said Portland didn’t directly affect negotiations in their much smaller district of nearly 4,000 students southeast of Albany but the negotiating teams couldn’t just throw up their hands and declare “we’re different here.”
Portland students went back to school Monday, and the school board and teachers approved an agreement Tuesday. The strike that kept Portland students out of school for most of November was a sobering worst-case scenario for school communities. Oregon’s biggest district has drawn worried attention from districts facing similar union rumblings and thrown fuel on discussions of the state taking more control of salary negotiations.
At the heart of the dispute were questions about how much the Legislature should have allotted schools and how Portland Public is spending that money.
On Tuesday, Gov. Tina Kotek announced plans to try to answer those questions. She is creating the Office of Transparency within the Oregon Department of Education to provide more understandable school district budget information. She is also asking the Legislature for a proposal for minimum teacher salaries to keep Oregon competitive with other states and a review of the state school funding methodology.
Rep. Courtney Neron, D-Wilsonville, said the Portland strike gave a lot of legislators a first-hand look at the strain on teachers from limited classroom resources. Portland teachers were negotiating over salary, class size and classroom conditions, which are statewide concerns. Neron said the strike would likely add some urgency to legislative action.
“If we had fully funded education, we would not have a sector that relies so heavily on volunteers and donations,” she said.
Neron, a former teacher, is chair of the Interim House Education Committee and co-chair of the new Joint Task Force on Statewide Educator Salary Schedules. The task force is looking at whether Oregon needs a state-led answer to perennial arguments over school funding and teacher pay. Possibilities include instituting statewide minimum salaries, mandated pay levels, Salem-led bargaining or changes to the school funding formula.
OSBA Legislative Services Director Lori Sattenspiel is a member of the task force. During OSBA’s fall regional meetings, she helped lead sessions asking school board members what they thought about a statewide salary schedule.
Sattenspiel said board members are becoming more open to the idea. Local decision-making, which OSBA has vigorously defended in the Legislature, remains deeply important to school board members, but a statewide salary schedule could make bargaining a little simpler.
Ever since the state took over providing the bulk of school funding in the 1990s, legislators have wanted more say in how the money is spent. When education advocates and the Legislature haggle every two years over the State School Fund, the amount needed for increasing staff compensation is a major point of difference.
“The state has no control even though it is providing the dollars,” said Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland. Dembrow is co-chair of the task force and chair of the Interim Senate Education Committee. “We gave them the State School Fund they were asking for. Because of the way bargaining goes, it turned out not to be enough.”
Portland Public Schools told teachers they couldn’t meet their pay increase demands because they didn’t get enough money from the Legislature. The 2023-25 State School Fund of $10.2 billion came close to what school business officials said most districts needed to maintain current staff and programs, but school leaders warned some districts would still face cuts.
Dembrow said the Portland strike calls for a fresh look at the decision-making around school funding. He said the task force was unlikely to offer legislation before 2025, but some legislators could attack the problems with individual bills in the 2024 session.
Lebanon School Board Chair Tom Oliver said he hopes the pain of the Portland strike is a call to address state school funding structural problems. Some districts have more expenses per student based on location and student group, and the formula doesn’t account for all those variations.
The negotiations laid bare some of the illusions about “local control,” he said.
“You don’t have a lot of levers you can move in terms of funding,” Oliver said.
Although he sees benefits to a statewide salary schedule, Oliver is skeptical that it can sufficiently address local needs.
“We already have a broken model,” he said. “I don’t see that making the model any less broken.”
Ashley Carson Cottingham, a Salem-Keizer School Board member, said that every district that inks an agreement has an impact on how other districts are approaching bargaining. Salem-Keizer Public Schools is in mediation right now with its teacher union and its classified employees union.
“It would be nice to have a floor for incoming educators but having the same schedule, a one size fits all, does not seem feasible because our state really likes to have local control,” said Carson Cottingham, an OSBA Board member.
The real problem, she said, comes down to finite resources. To raise pay levels above the Legislature’s formula allotment requires cutting somewhere else. Staff costs are more than 80% of most districts’ budgets, making employee positions the most likely target for cuts. Reducing staff compounds problems of class size and insufficient classroom support, though, which leads to teachers calling for higher pay.
“We need more funding for our public schools,” she said. “If we don’t get the money from the Legislature, … we don’t really have anywhere to turn.”
– Jake Arnold, OSBA
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