School districts all around Oregon will roll out strategies in the coming weeks to cope with tight budgets for the upcoming school year, from cutting teachers to dipping deeply into reserve funds.
Only a handful plan to close and consolidate schools — for now.
But the few planned closures that have been announced thus far are canaries in the proverbial coal mine, said Kraig Sproles, superintendent of the Bethel School District on Eugene’s outskirts.
His district is one of the only ones to have announced plans thus far to close an elementary school in the face of declining enrollment, an end to federal pandemic relief funding and state funding that hasn’t kept pace with rising labor costs.
In schools with shrinking enrollments, “the economy of scale is pretty profound, especially if you are wanting to offer universal services across the schools,” Sproles said. “We want a vibrant art and counseling program and a speech language pathologist at every school. But as the numbers of students in the schools start dropping below 300 and hitting the 250 range, we are operationally not funded from the state to run schools at that level.”
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The situation is particularly acute in urban and some suburban areas in the Willamette Valley, many with high housing costs that have priced out young families and declining birth rates among those who are left.
Forecasts from demographers at Portland State University project that next school year, 20 of Portland Public Schools’ elementary schools will have 300 or fewer students – almost half of its 45 K-5 schools. The small schools include both campuses in wealthy neighborhoods close to downtown and higher needs, higher poverty schools in east and North Portland.
A smattering will likely enroll under 250 students, including Irvington in Northeast Portland, Creston in Southeast Portland and Peninsula in North Portland. One K-5 school, Whitman Elementary in Southeast Portland, currently enrolls just 180 students.
Some are so small because they were recently converted from K-8 schools as the district slowly switches to a standalone middle school model. But even redrawing attendance boundaries won’t necessarily solve an issue that’s been driven by profound enrollment declines, exacerbated by families who left the public school system during COVID-era building closures.
Portland spends about $5,000 more per pupil at its smallest elementary schools, including Woodmere and Vestal in Northeast Portland, than at its largest elementary schools, including Alameda in Northeast Portland and Ainsworth in Southwest Portland, according to a Edunomics Lab database that tracks school spending and performance.
In the state’s second largest school district, Salem-Keizer, nine of 42 elementary schools enroll 300 students or fewer. The district is planning for $70 million worth of cuts next year, including 400 fewer positions in schools districtwide, Superintendent Andrea Castañeda said Thursday.
District leaders did not consider school consolidations as a cost-saving measure, she said.
“Schools are incredibly precious to their neighborhoods,” Castañeda said. Making those changes would require extensive community feedback and shouldn’t be rushed, she said, a tough task in a year in which her district was engaged in complicated negotiations with its labor unions and ultimately managed to avert a teacher strike.
In Oregon’s third largest school district, Beaverton, only five of 34 elementary schools have such low enrollments. Its largest elementary, Sato K-5 located north of the Bethany neighborhood, has nearly 900 students, larger than any middle school in Portland. Sato is big enough that the district recently built four new classrooms there and enlarged the library to accommodate the growth.
Typically, elementary school buildings in large and medium-sized cities such as Portland, Eugene and Corvallis are older than those in fast-growing suburbs and weren’t built to accommodate as many students as Sato or some of Beaverton’s other large elementary schools.
Closing schools in most cases prompts a storm of emotion and pushback, said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, a research center that focuses on school finance. She pointed to Seattle, where a recent proposal for school closure met with such an outpouring of criticism that the district scrapped the plans and decided instead to borrow money to keep schools open. That money will need to be repaid with interest, Roza noted.
Smaller schools can be economically viable, she said, but not if they are staffed with all the same programming as far larger schools.
“If you are trying to run a whole bunch of smaller schools, the cost per student goes through the roof and you end up stripping the staffing from every school — maybe there is no vice-principal or the electives are going away,” Roza said. “People think, ‘Phew, my school is not on the closure list.’ But if other schools don’t get closed eventually, your school will lose some of its staffing to prop it up.”
In Bethel, Sproles said, the district saw an influx of students in the late 2000s when a large affordable housing development was completed. But no similar developments have followed, he said and enrollment is down 700 students — enough to fill three elementary schools — from its peak. Bethel also had more elementary schools than its size would dictate because it was created by the merger of five smaller school districts, he said.
Clear Lake Elementary, the school designated to go out of existence, won’t close until 2025-2026. But families in its attendance zone are being given the option to move to their newly assigned school starting next fall or else remaining and then moving over in fall 2025. That means Bethel runs the risk of operating Clear Lake with what Sproles said staff members worried would be a “skeletal” program. The school board wanted to give families as much runway as possible to get acclimated to the change, he said.
Parents with students at Portland’s small elementary schools are caught between being protective of their well-loved communities and pragmatic about scarce resources, said Haley Hatfield, PTA president at Irvington Elementary, which enrolls 235 students after losing about a third of its students when it shifted from a K-8 model.
Being so small has joys, she said, including the knowledge that every adult at the school knows every child by name and looks out for them. Losing her neighborhood school to a merger would be a huge blow if it comes to that, she said, and “a very difficult political call to make.”
But, she said, “There will always be some heartbreaking things. The state needs to increase funding for schools generally. But PPS could also spend their money more efficiently by organizing things in a different way. I think even a lot of people at our school recognize that.”