Portland Public Schools (PPS) is dealing with a major budget crunch—a situation that, former school board member Andrew Scott says, shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“We’ve known for a long time that costs for education are growing faster than the funding that school districts receive from the state, and that’s been something that, when I was on the board, we talked about a lot, and talked to the state a lot, and tried to lobby, with very little success,” Scott said.
Now, the district is approaching what may be an inflection point. PPS is facing a $50 million budget shortfall for the coming academic year, and the district has already taken measures in the interim like shortening this year’s school calendar and considering school closures.
PPS is far from the only public school system in the state scrambling to manage a budget gap this spring. School districts in Salem, Bend, and Eugene are facing similar budget issues, with the Eugene School District set to eliminate more than 250 full-time equivalent positions in the coming year. PPS says it plans to cut 288 positions, including 108 from its central office.
“This is not a Portland Public Schools issue,” Scott, who was first elected to the PPS board in 2019 and served until last year, said. “If it was one district, you could say, ‘Oh something is going on in that district we need to look at.’ But it’s not. It’s very widespread through all corners of Oregon—which points to a systemic funding failure.”
Ashley Schofield, the PTA president at Bridlemile Elementary School and the leader of an advocacy group called Community and Parents for Public Schools, agreed that the bulk of the responsibility for PPS’ budget woes lies with the state.
“Two thirds of our public school funding comes from the state, and according to the Quality Education Model, the state has never fully funded [schools],” Schofield said. “So our schools have always been in a delta in terms of budget gaps. That’s the real problem here.”
In Portland, the fallout from the budget crisis is still taking shape. PPS and its teachers union—the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT)—agreed in March on a plan for district staff to take four furlough days to prevent midyear layoffs, shortening the school year for students by three days.
Layoffs are still a possibility in the coming year, as are school closures—PPS is considering shuttering between five and 10 schools in the next year, with Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong planning to present a list of proposed school closures to PPS board members next fall.
PPS did not respond to a request for comment on this story. In an explanation of its budgeting process on its website, the district said it’s been “taking cost-containment steps since 2022” to address what it calls a structural deficit. That year, PPS reported a massive projected enrollment decline, due to families moving out of the district, homeschooling, and a declining birthrate.
“Ongoing changes in enrollment, rising costs, and the loss of one-time funding mean this work must continue as part of a long-term effort to stabilize the district and protect student learning,” the district explained in an FAQ page.
Schofield said that at Bridlemile, where her child currently attends fourth grade, the plan is to cut classrooms: moving forward with just two fifth grade classes, for instance, despite having three fourth grade classes this year, and increasing class sizes by a third.
“We’re cutting off muscle,” Schofield said. “There’s no fat to cut. There’s no hidden money at the district level. They’re cutting us left and right because they have to—there’s no money that’s funneling from the state to help bridge all these deficits.”
Angela Bonilla, president of the Portland Association of Teachers [PAT], said she feels administrative bloat and soaring student transportation costs have exacerbated the district’s budget issues—but only to a point.
“Part of it is district mismanagement and budget mismanagement, absolutely,” Angela Bonilla, president of the Portland Association of Teachers, said. “And I think a big part of it is that this is a reflection of our faulty state funding system.”
PPS is currently operating with such limited financial flexibility that the district faced a mid-year budget deficit this year due in part to unscheduled maintenance costs and a $5 million gap in levy funding due to a downturn in the city’s commercial property market.
Bonilla said the patchwork funding system the district has relied on in recent years, which includes the property tax levy, is not adequate.
“We do not get enough funding to maintain the current service level, let alone fix buildings,” she said.
PPS officials and parents did have one potential relief valve this year: the state’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, a $1 billion fund the governor and State Legislature can use to supplement education funding in times of budgetary crisis.
The State Legislature has tapped the fund before, including in the midst of the Great Recession in 2009 and during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This year, however, despite frequent lobbying from both PPS and local and statewide teachers unions, neither the Legislature nor Governor Tina Kotek moved to unlock the funds.
A spokesperson for Kotek told the Mercury that “school funding was prioritized and protected during the 2026 session,” highlighting the $11.36 billion school funding bill approved last year, and said legislative leaders as a result have not expressed interest in tapping the emergency fund.
Bonilla called Kotek, who is running for re-election as one of the least popular governors in the country, the “biggest barrier to increasing school funding.”
“Her perspective is that what we need to make our schools better is more accountability on the educators—which builds on the archaic mentality that started with No Child Left Behind,” Bonilla said.
Kotek’s issues with educators appear poised to persist into the summer. Last week, Kotek issued an executive order barring school districts from cutting instructional hours to address budget gaps—a move that Bonilla suggested was retaliatory after the governor failed to secure the endorsement of the state’s largest teachers union for her re-election campaign.
Meanwhile, as the effort to unlock emergency funding for next year’s school budgets failed in Salem, efforts aimed at the kind of structural revenue reform advocates believe is needed to fully fund the state’s schools fizzled as well.
Last year, a kicker reform bill introduced by state Rep. Mark Gamba to allocate money from the kicker to public services like schools, housing, and infrastructure died in committee. A kicker reform effort led by state Sen. Floyd Prozanski in the Oregon Senate stalled during this year’s special session as well.
Kotek did not publicly support either effort, though she did back a proposal to use kicker money to fund wildfire response efforts in the state last year. That proposal stalled as well.
So far, even as the state’s budget issues have mounted under the Trump administration, plans to funnel more money to public education—either through kicker reform or corporate or property tax reform—have failed to gain significant traction.
Kotek’s spokesperson said the governor has increased investments in early literacy and summer learning and remains open to additional conversations about education funding, with one caveat.
“The Governor has been clear [that] conversations around education funding are also paired with accountability conversations and how we improve student outcomes,” Kevin Glenn, the governor’s spokesperson, wrote.
Nationwide, Oregon has consistently ranked toward the bottom in student proficiency in reading, writing, and math.
Without structural revenue reform, Schofield said PPS and school systems across the state will continue to struggle to face budget shortfalls with regularity—particularly at a moment when the state is facing budgetary pressure due to Trump administration cuts.
“We can kick the can down all the aisles, but it keeps coming down to: we don’t have enough money in our general fund,” Schofield said. “There’s not enough money in the pie.”
Bonilla, who said she supports an equity-based districtwide redrawing of school boundaries prior to the finalization of closure decisions, also noted that while the PSU Population Research Center projects that PPS enrollment will continue to decline in the coming years, that decline is not projected to last indefinitely.
“The steep decline that we’ve seen starts to level out in 2035,” Bonilla said. “So what happens when we see, in 2035 and beyond, those populations start to come back up? We need to be prepared for that, and not just make rash decisions because we need cash now.”
Scott said what districts like PPS most need, perhaps even more than emergency funding for the next academic year, is the kind of political leadership that can make more substantive changes.
“If we’re going to continue limping along as a state when it comes to public education—yeah, you can patch things for a year,” he said. “But we need a longer-term solution.”
