Schools would get more help with student behavior under Salem-Keizer budget proposal

The Salem-Keizer School District will add 66 employees next school year despite declining enrollment and escalating costs, a change Superintendent Andrea Castañeda said is needed to create “a safe and supportive learning environment” by adding educators in special education and to help with challenging student behavior.

Castañeda presented her $1.15 billion budget proposal Tuesday evening to the school district’s budget committee, sounding a familiar warning that even with proposed funding increases, state money for schools is not keeping up with rising employee and pension costs or with the myriad social services schools are expected to provide.

Other large districts in Oregon are facing budget cuts and employee layoffs this year. Castañeda last year led the district through $70 million in cuts that included eliminating about 300 jobs and laying off about 100 people.

Her proposed budget adds some positions intended to deal with cuts that went too deep, in addition to significantly expanding behavior support. Eighty percent of new employees will work directly in schools.

“We cannot take our eyes off the health of our school system, and so we have to find the balance between giving ourselves time to react and recover and find new ways to do as well as we can with even less,” she said in an interview Tuesday.

The budget projects that local schools will enroll 37,189 students next year, a decline of about 700 from this year. Student enrollment has been falling since the Covid pandemic.

Castañeda said it’s worth spending more now on help for students struggling with behavior despite forthcoming budget challenges, calling the new positions “long overdue.” The district will spend $53 million total on such help next year.

“We believe that that is the most important working condition for our students, for their families and for our staff right now,” she told Salem Reporter. “I don’t believe we will be able to sustain this level of behavioral health staffing … But behavior is the dominant emergency in our buildings right now. We cannot look away. We must keep investing, and we will get a handle on it, and that will allow us to reset in ways that are appropriate later on.”

Castañeda’s budget doesn’t provide a breakdown of the job descriptions for new added positions, but she detailed some additions.

Here’s an overview of what the budget proposal would do.

Special education and more behavior support

Many of the added positions reflect two new programs the school district is starting next year.

The first is a significant expansion of its existing Behavioral Intervention Center, an intensive program for students of any age with significant behavioral issues. 

That program will move from two smaller school buildings to one campus in a wing at Straub Middle School in West Salem. The expansion will more than double the space available to 45 students, requiring several additional teachers and classroom assistants.

Castañeda is also proposing to add 10 behavior interventionists who will work directly in schools with struggling students.

Twelve employees will be hired as part of a new partnership with Western Oregon University to increase the number of licensed special education teachers.

Participants have already applied for the program, which allows them to work as special education assistants in the district while studying to become licensed teachers at WOU. The goal is to ease recruiting for special education jobs, which are particularly difficult to fill.

The budget leaves unchanged the number of security officers in schools. A slate of conservative school board candidates have called for the district to address behavioral issues in part by returning police officers to schools and beefing up discipline.

Castañeda said challenging student behavior in schools requires clinical help and said the vast majority of behavioral issues in schools are not disciplinary in nature.

“They are children, often young children, who are dysregulated and they do not understand the scope of their behavior, in some cases the extremity, and almost always the implications,” she said. “A school resource officer is never going to be the person who provides the therapeutic support necessary for a child to recover from trauma.”

Other jobs

Other positions being added are mostly to reverse cuts made last year or address the impact of cuts.

Those include:

• Four elementary school assistant principals who will split their time between several of the district’s largest elementary schools. That’s intended to address the cut last year of instructional mentors, experienced teachers in every school who helped principals plan professional development and take on other administrative work.
• A district worker to oversee library media assistants, a job cut last year that led to significant pushback from school library workers. “There’s a lot of complexity in that job, and they needed more capacity than we left them with,” Castañeda said.
• A plumber, bringing the total number of district plumbers to three. “School bathrooms get hard use, and very often we need a licensed plumber to fix them,” Castañeda said.
• Two people in human resources support, including one who processes employee leaves, and a recruiter who was cut last year.
• Two financial analysts to work on the district budget.
• Two data engineers to improve the district’s data dashboards and visualizations so schools and district leaders can get timely data about how students are performing.

Rising school costs

Escalating state pension costs and negotiated wage and benefit increases with employee unions continue to drive school district spending up faster than taxes keep up, “rapidly spiraling us back into a structural deficit,” Castañeda wrote in her budget message.

The district is proposing a $691 million general fund, up from $647 million last year. That money pays for most school operations – chiefly the wages and benefits of more than 4,500 employees. Other district funds are restricted to specific grants or other uses.

The superintendent’s proposal means the school district would spend about $46 million more than it brings in next year. The district has enough savings to cover the gap, and Castañeda expects vacant jobs and other savings will reduce the size. But she cautioned the current trend remains unsustainable.

Most of the increase is due to the cost of keeping current employees, not the new ones Castañeda is proposing to hire. The district will spend about $20 million more next year on pension costs for already retired employees, for example — money that doesn’t add any services to schools or benefits for current employees.

The gap exists despite a proposal from Gov. Tina Kotek to increase school funding to a level that was intended to keep pace with rising district costs, Castañeda said. She said the district’s cost for employees will rise 9% next year at minimum — and the final figure depends on the cost of the contract district leaders are currently negotiating with the Salem-Keizer Education Association.

The budget comes amid significant uncertainty over the future of federal funding for schools, particularly in Oregon, which has pushed back on efforts by the Trump administration to curb diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools. Salem-Keizer receives about $80 million per year from the federal government.

A recent White House budget proposal includes deep cuts to or elimination of many federal programs that send money to local school districts, like money to serve migrant students and those learning English.

What’s next

The district budget committee will meet again on May 14 and 19 to discuss the budget proposal. The committee may meet as needed on May 20 and 21 if more time to discuss or modify the budget is needed. All meetings are at 6 p.m. and open to the public.

The committee includes all seven elected school board members and seven appointed community volunteers.

The committee will vote to recommend the budget to the school board, which will vote on adopting the budget June 10.

See budget committee meeting information, including information about how to make a comment on the budget, here.

Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.

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