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When the final school bell sounds this spring, students will head to summer camps and swimming pools—and thousands of school employees will begin collecting unemployment checks.
That’s because of a bill quietly passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2023 that allows classified school employees to collect unemployment during school breaks—that is, for about three months a year.
Senate Bill 489 was a breakthrough for the Oregon School Employees Association, which represents non-licensed education staff. That union has argued that classified employees—crucial to sustaining school functions—deserved access to the same benefits as other seasonal workers. Such employees include paraeducators, bus drivers and administrative assistants.
But now, after its first year of implementation (the bill went into effect in January 2024), SB 489 is sending school districts scrambling during an already fraught budget season. That’s because school districts, like other public employers, shoulder the full cost of unemployment benefits when they’re used, reimbursing the state dollar for dollar.
Oregon long prevented classified school employees from collecting unemployment if there was reasonable assurance that they’d be employed again at the start of the new school year. Over a series of bills culminating in SB 489, OSEA argued that proving reasonable assurance was a convoluted process that denied employees the right to collect unemployment.
Discussion about how districts would pay cropped up here and there during hearings on SB 489. One of its chief sponsors, state Rep. Paul Evans (D-Monmouth), told the House Committee on Education in March 2023 that he didn’t think the bill would be “a significant budget buster.”
“My perspective is, it’s just the right thing to do for the people who are now the reason some of these students continue to go to school,” he told colleagues.
Here’s what’s happening:
WHAT DISTRICTS SAY: SB 489’s financial effects are rippling across districts big and small. Seth Gordon, a spokesman for the Oregon Employment Department, says the number of school employees paid at least one week of unemployment between March 31 and Dec. 31 increased by 151% between 2023 and 2024. Total benefits paid to school employees also increased about 82% between those two years, from $11.5 million to $21 million.
Gordon says there’s no way to tell whether the increases are exclusively because of SB 489; more layoffs in schools and other school workers who benefited from other OSEA-led bills to help them claim unemployment benefits might also have contributed. (He says sharing the specific amount districts have had to reimburse would be difficult because it would require looking at each individual unemployment case.)
In March 2023, then legislative services director Lori Sattenspiel of the Oregon School Boards Association said it would cost school districts that responded to an OSBA survey upwards of $90 million total.
At Portland Public Schools, spokeswoman Sydney Kelly says the district budgeted $5 million toward the new expense this year, but expects once all employees know about it, the cost could be closer to $11 million a year. (For context, the district faced a $30 million budget deficit for the 2024–25 academic year and faces a $40 million one next year.)
Kelly says 112 PPS employees used the bill during summer break, and 82 did during winter break.
Dr. William Fritz, superintendent of the Knappa School District in rural Clatsop County, filed opposition testimony to SB 489 in 2023. Classified employees, he wrote, took these jobs knowing there would be frequent break periods.
In the first quarter of this fiscal year, he says SB 489 has cost Knappa $35,000, equivalent to the salary and benefits of one classified position in the district (the district has 80 employees total). “State School Fund revenue is minimally sufficient, and this unfunded cost from the Legislature takes away services for our students,” he says.
WHAT CLASSIFIED EMPLOYEES SAY: Supporters of the bill have long said it would help retain important school employees and save schools the money of recruiting and retraining workers for high-turnover positions. (Classified staffers across the state make about $30,000 a year, according to Susan Allen, government relations specialist for the Oregon School Employee Association back in 2023.)
Three classified employees WW spoke with said the bill is about giving classified school workers the same rights to unemployment as everyone else for a tough job. As school budgets have stretched over the years, they say the responsibilities for classified positions have also expanded.
Dena Green, a paraeducator in Beaverton, says her work is “pretty thankless.” She spends her days helping kids in special education, and says she recently came home with a concussion after a student she works with jerked his head and hit her in the chin.
Green claimed unemployment under SB 489 last summer. “I used it to try and get caught up,” she says. “Bills have grown at a rate that my wages just can’t…we just do the best we can do to get through.”
OSEA spokeswoman Maggie Karl says that while the organization has sympathy for the challenges districts face with budgeting, laying off classified staff for school breaks is not a solution to addressing shortfalls.
“That practice is a big reason why we’ve seen so many highly qualified classified staff leave the education sector in recent years,” Karl says. “It isn’t sustainable to consistently place the burden of balancing district budgets on the shoulders of some of the lowest-paid public employees in the state.”
Green adds: “I see what our administrators make. Some of them make as much in a month as I make in a year. I don’t think we’re the problem.”