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Portland Public Schools officials on Wednesday released its initial proposal for bridging a $41 million budget deficit for the 2025-26 academic year, which district leadership says is fueled by rising costs, limited revenue and declining enrollment.
The first draft of their proposed reductions includes $12.2 million in cuts from the district’s central budget and $29.1 million from its school-based budgets. As it stands, 230 positions across PPS could be eliminated, 207 of them school-based. (This year, the district is running on an $853 million general fund budget. In 2023-24, the district reported 8,200 employees.)
At a press conference on Wednesday morning, Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong stressed that the district is in its early stages of developing the budget. It will change as Oregon finalizes its own budget and as parents, staff and the School Board discuss the proposals. Armstrong says she expects to finalize the budget in June.
“We’re going to continue to lead in and with community. We want people to show up and share their concerns or thoughts about what’s on the list,” Armstrong said. “Our questions are simple: If not that, then what?”
PPS has been making cuts since the 2022-23 academic year, but incurred additional costs when it signed a new contract with its teachers union following a strike last fall. It also faces increases to pensions in the Public Employees Retirement System. Governor Tina Kotek’s proposal for increased state funding, district officials say, is entirely taken up by PERS increases.
Still, the district did not dip into school-based budgets until this academic year, when it cut $14.2 million from them and another $15.7 million from the central budget.
The upcoming academic year will be the first where school-based reductions outpace those in the central office, and rather significantly. “We are in the third year of reductions here,” said Michelle Morrison, PPS’s chief financial officer. “We have done a lot without impacting schools.”
Related: We asked a departing school board member about the district’s financial trajectory.
Armstrong said early feedback from the district’s human resources department indicates most of the personnel savings can be achieved without layoffs, through employee attrition.
But today’s first draft is packed with places where students will take the hit. School-based budget cuts are full of reductions to licensed and classified staff, including kindergarten educational assistants in classrooms of less than 20 students in Title I schools (these schools receive federal funding for their proportions of low income students), a cut which will eliminate 18 positions and save $1.2 million.
The biggest staff reduction in the proposal would take place across multiple school levels. It’s to reduce the number of licensed supplemental staff, including instructional coaches, interventionists, school site instructors and social emotional support staff. That would save the district $10.4 million.
Multilingual learners—which are one of the only student groups seeing increasing enrollment numbers in Oregon and one of the lowest performing demographics—are also impacted in the cuts. The district’s proposing cutting seven staff positions in the English Language Development Program, saving $1 million.
School board member Herman Greene, who attended the press conference, said the cuts are unwanted and that the district should prioritize students at every turn. He said when making choices on the budget, he’ll make sure no stone is left unturned.
“The money is not there, and until we can do something about the real issue, which is making sure that we have the funding that we need to support our schools and support our kids, we’re going to continue to have these types of problems,” he said.