Jane Vaughan: We're here to talk about school funding in Oregon and how the state government calculates how much money each district gets. So first, can you tell me a little bit about how that works? For example, certain groups receive more money.
Julia Silverman: This is a question that I get all the time, so I'll try to make it digestible. Essentially, Oregon guarantees a base amount of per pupil funding, and that is just for your straight ahead kid. Take my son, who is a Portland Public School student. He does not have special needs, he does not speak English as a second language. He's white, and he is from a financially stable enough family, so he gets the base amount of funding, or rather, his school does.
Now we know that it costs more to fully educate kids who do fall into some of those groups. Kids who have special needs, for example, need more services. They might need speech-language pathologists or dyslexia specialists, and support. So that costs more, so there's an extra amount of funding given for them. The same for kids who are learning to speak English. They require a different level of focus and attention than maybe my son does. So that's called weighting, and it means that, depending on where they fall in a different category, they get an additional weight of funding.
JV: You've done some reporting that there have been some complaints about how the state calculates its funding formula. So let's break that down. What's the problem there?
JS: I'm going to focus on the poverty weighting formula in particular. So Oregon gives an extra 25% on top of the base level of funding for students who are from low-income families, and that's about roughly a third of all students statewide fall into that category. Now, how do we know that? We know that because the state uses a pretty precise method called direct certification, and direct certification means that it matches individual students with food stamp benefits or other government services that they might receive.
It used to be, and many listeners will probably be more familiar with, the number of kids who were in poverty being correlated with whether or not kids got free school lunch. But surprise, during the pandemic, Oregon began offering, like many other states, Oregon started offering free meals to all kids, regardless of their family's income. And once everybody qualifies for free meals, you can't really use that as a metric anymore. So they switched to direct certification, which more precisely counts the number of kids in poverty.
So here's the problem with that. That is not the method that the state uses to calculate how much money it apportions for students who are from low-income families. To calculate that, they use census data to calculate students in poverty, and it is a lot less precise than the direct certification metric that they use to, say, report on how many students in poverty have graduated in four years or how many students in poverty can read at grade level. So that results in an undercount. That means more low income students exist than the state is giving that extra poverty weight for. Does that make sense?
JV: It does make sense. So there's the direct certification method or the census data method. The state is using the census data method to figure out how much money to give to districts, to kids that need it, to kids that are in poverty. What is the benefit to the state of counting it this way, using census data, rather than just using the direct certification data that they already have?
JS: It costs a lot less money. And if you want to fix this, a new analysis by the Salem-Keizer School District has found, you could either decide to put a significant increase of money into the system, maybe as much as $300 million per year, or you could take the pot of money that already exists, and the state school fund currently stands at about $11.36 billion, that's billion with a B, and reapportion it or redistribute it, and you'd create a system of winners and losers, basically.
Now that's a tough ask of districts that have budgeted for a certain amount of money and might see a cut, and that includes wealthier districts or districts with lower poverty levels, like Portland Public Schools, like Ashland Public Schools. The beneficiaries would be places like Salem-Keizer, Klamath Falls or Klamath City Schools and a number of really small rural districts throughout the state. These are districts that tend to educate a large percentage of students who are learning to speak English and maybe a disproportionate number of students of color as well. Also, if you step back and you ask yourself, what is the moral and ethical thing to do here? You may have a different answer about this.
So as I said, I'm a Portland Public Schools parent. Of course, on many levels, I want my son's school district to have the moon, right? Everybody wants their kids to have the moon, but if I can step back from that for a second, and think about all the kids in Portland whose parents are financially able and have the luxury of time to provide them with things like a tutor if they need it or after school enrichment programs or great summer camps, that's not the case necessarily for low income families. So, where should we as a state be putting our money to help the kids who need it the most? It's an interesting question.
JV: It's a really tricky question. And you said the alternative is maybe $290 million to to fix it. But the alternative, as you're saying, is, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the effects that the current funding formula the state is using, what effects is that currently having on school districts, on students, and, like you mentioned, smaller rural school districts? I imagine that impact is not shared equally across the state.
JS: Thank you so much for asking about that because here's where it gets the most important. There is no category in which you do not see a disparity between high-poverty students and students from financially stable families. I like to say often that poverty is the common denominator. In other words, if you look at, say, a Black student from a financially stable family, that Black student is statistically going to outperform a white student from a low-income family, and that is just it is almost universally true. Poverty is the common denominator.
Now, who is poor in our state? Well, we know historically, it's immigrant families, it's families of color, and it's very often rural families because jobs in the metro areas tend to pay more. You see this show up in virtually every single academic indicator, whether we're talking about whether kids can read at grade level, or whether they can do math in fifth grade, whether they attend school as regularly, or whether they graduate on time. And this matters. And I try so hard to make this connection in my work.
This really matters, not just to that individual student and not just to that individual student's family, but it matters to the entire state because, to borrow a line from is it Stevie Wonder? I believe the children are our future. This is about Oregon's economic future, right? This is about the people who will grow up, who will become our taxpayers, our inventors, our health care professionals, who are going to be the future of the state.
JV: It sounds like this is a pretty new switch for the state, like you said during COVID, providing school lunch to all students. So it sounds like it's really only been in the last few years that this funding model has switched, or do I have that right?
JS: No, actually, that's not quite right. Oregon's current funding formula has been mostly the same for the last 30 years. It's only just that the state used to use free and reduced school lunch qualification as a metric for reporting academic outcomes, and now it uses direct certification as a method for reporting academic outcomes, but it has always, or at least for the last 30 years, used census data as the primary mechanism for determining the poverty weights.
JV: So why are we hearing so much about this now? You're doing all this great reporting on this. Why now?
JS: For that answer, you have to look to the Legislative Policy Research Office, which is known as LPRO, in Salem. Last winter, there was a data analyst who worked there named Jesse Helligso, who was charting the disparities in the poverty funding formula and realizing the impact that this was having. According to a whistleblower lawsuit that he has now filed, he tried for months to alert not just his supervisors but also lawmakers to what was going on. I think the phrase I've used in reporting on this is, according to his lawsuit, he was stymied at every turn. And eventually he came to The Oregonian anonymously, but provided me with all publicly available data that is nevertheless pretty difficult to find unless you know exactly what you're looking for and was very wonky (and) pointed me in the right direction to be able to write a story about this, which I did last May.
Two days after that story ran, he was called into his supervisor's office and fired, not because they could prove he was my source, but because they felt that he was not demonstrating the necessary non partisan objectivity because he had been advocating for the state's poorest students to raise the alarm about what he saw was a discrepancy in the state's funding formula. Again, this is all according to his lawsuit. He was fired from his job. I have never personally had that happen to me before in 25 years as a reporter. I did cry. I felt terrible. He has now filed a lawsuit, and that has kind of pushed this out into the open.
The other factor that is really elevating this is that the Salem-Keizer School District, which is the school district that A, happens to be right there where legislators meet, and B, is one of the districts statewide that is the most impacted by the current poverty funding formula, decided to commission their own model of the school funding formula, to be able to kind of reverse engineer it and see what was going wrong. And they reached the exact same conclusion, and they have now been sharing that model, or portions of it, with lawmakers, the governor's office, the Oregon Department of Education, other school districts, in an effort to raise this issue and encourage change, if not in 2026 because that's just a short legislative session. Lawmakers just meet for a month next February. I think we'll really see a big push on this in the 2027 legislative session.
"It's very difficult to ask any school district in Oregon to make do with less — if that was what had to happen, if money had to be redistributed."Julia Silverman
JV: You're feeling like this will probably be looked at in the legislature soon because it sounds like changing the funding formula would have to go before lawmakers. That's how that would happen. Does that seem likely to change?
JS: I don't know is the answer. I think there are certainly powerful forces that will want to keep things status quo. So I don't know whether there is going to be enough momentum to make a change here. I plan to keep reporting about this. Earlier this year, I wrote a number of stories about a mid-year budget gap at the Reynolds School District, which is a school district in east Multnomah County that is one of the highest, I think maybe the highest, poverty district in the Portland metro area. They had a $5.5 million budget gap this year, and they wound up closing it primarily by cutting six days off the school year.
So that means that some of the state's poorest students, already starting from behind many of their peers, will now get six days less of an already short school year. I think that's a pretty good example of how reporters can look to really contextualize the impacts of this and the real day-to-day costs that the state is paying and that, frankly, its poorest students are bearing as a result of the current distribution formula.
JV: You say there are powerful forces that want to keep the status quo. What is the argument for doing it this way, as the state has done for 30 years? Like you said, it saves money, and we know there's financial crises, not only in the state, but also at school districts as well. But what is the argument on that side for why this is the way to keep doing it?
JS: Well, I think you'd be upending budgets in some of the largest school districts around the state. Portland has announced that they need to make $50 million in cuts for next year. And that's not easy to do. And then you'd be presumably, if you were not going to add more money, if you were just going to redistribute, you'd be asking them to make even more cuts. That is complicated because it requires a really honest look at what the spending priorities are and how and if and whether those priorities should continue.
And I would say that a district like Portland with 42,000 students, might be 43,000, is a complicated one because not all of those students are wealthy, not by a long shot, and many students have really heightened needs, right? There are behavioral challenges, there are special education needs, there's language needs, so the adults that are working so hard in schools, they are needed. I'm just saying that it's very difficult to ask any school district in Oregon to make do with less — if that was what had to happen, if money had to be redistributed.
JV: The other thing I'm curious about is, how does Oregon compare to other states in terms of how we approach this problem? How are other states addressing funding their highest poverty schools and students?
JS: That is such a terrific question. There is a nonprofit called the Education Law Center that looked at this exact issue. In 2024, they put out a report that ranked Oregon dead last among 48 states for its regressive funding system's impact on high-poverty schools. So that outlet found that, on average, high poverty districts are getting 23% less per pupil than high income districts. That's a difference of about $3,800 per student.
JV: So Oregon is doing less well compared to other states in terms of funding its higher poverty students that need funding.
JS: Not just less well, the most regressive system in the country.
