The head of Salem-Keizer Public Schools spent nearly a year painstakingly holding meetings and restructuring staffing plans to close a $23 million budget deficit for the next school year.

By early February, Superintendent Andrea Castañeda shared the plans publicly with staff and media, describing it at a news conference as a “proactive measure for us, because we actually are in pretty solid financial condition, but we think it is important to get ahead of the pressures that are coming.”

She could not have anticipated the $5 million pressure coming just three weeks later.

On Feb. 20, she learned Salem-Keizer Public Schools was among many Oregon districts that would have their state school funding reduced, in large part because the Oregon Department of Education readjusts its formula for doling out money to districts based on annual releases of U.S. Census Bureau estimates on student poverty.

Those federal poverty estimates, using two-year-old data, are vastly different from the state’s own accounting of students in each district experiencing poverty. And because of federal shutdowns and delays at the bureau, schools didn’t get the data until months after they’d finalized their annual budgets.

In response, Castañeda and 10 other school superintendents from around the state on Thursday reupped their calls to the State Board of Education in a letter and at its monthly meeting. They called on the board to change the school funding formula, and to remove or diminish the role of the federal poverty estimates, which they say continually lead to an undercount and underfunding for their schools.

Relying on estimates

Oregon is unique in relying heavily on the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates — an amalgamation of SNAP beneficiary data, tax data and poverty estimates based on them — that showed most recently, in 2024, the number of Salem-Keizer students experiencing poverty dropped nearly 27% from 2023 to 2024.

The federal estimate put Salem-Keizer’s overall proportion of students experiencing poverty at just 13% in 2024, down from 18% the year prior.

But the Oregon Department of Education’s own data shows that in 2023, 41% of students in the Salem-Keizer School District were experiencing poverty, and a year later in 2024, that had increased by 1 percentage point to 42% of students. The state’s data directly matches each student registered in the district with Oregon Department of Human Services data about the food, housing or other assistance they receive from state and federal programs. Poverty is measured as living at 130% of the federal poverty level, or a family of four living on about $42,900 per year.

The federal data measures every kid in a district’s boundaries, even if they go to private school or are home-schooled, and poverty is measured at 100% of the federal poverty level — a family of four living on $33,000 annually.

Unexpected losses

At the same time Castañeda learned about her district’s cuts, Greater Albany Public Schools learned its poverty adjustment will leave it with $1.1 million less from the state school fund than expected.

The Woodburn and Hermiston School Districts will lose $800,000 each. In the Klamath County School District, the adjustment will cost schools $750,000.

Glen Szymoniak, superintendent of the Klamath County School District, said the district has never experienced swings as big as this year in the federal poverty estimate. He said it won’t just cut into his district’s allocation from the state, but also its federal allocation. The federal government uses the same Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates to dole out Title I funds to high poverty schools.

“$750,000 is a significant amount of money, and most of that goes into people to serve as tutors and paraprofessionals, people who can do small group activities like reading groups,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll have some attrition and we can repurpose some of those positions, but it’s highly likely we’ll have to let some people go.”

Mike Wiltfong, director of school finance at the Oregon Department of Education, said it’s hard to know what made the federal poverty estimates so anomalous for some districts in the most recent report. He speculated about student migration post-COVID, as well as possible survey or modeling changes.

Legislative choices tie education department’s hands

Calls to remove the use of the federal estimates have been ongoing since it was first incorporated in 2013 due to a legislative mandate, Wiltfong explained. In essence, lawmakers were working within a limited number of state school fund dollars and, rather than meeting the needs of every individual kid, preferred to know the ballpark estimate of students experiencing poverty and to send a proportion of existing dollars commensurate to that.

If the state started using its own data, which show significantly more poor students, the state school fund would need a lot more money, or many more schools would be splitting the same amount of money, he said.

“Much of our constraints now are with the Legislature, not necessarily what the Department of Education or what our staff are willing to do,” he said. “It’s more so that the Legislature is driving much of how we’re defining that (poverty) for the state school fund.”

In its most recent estimate, the U.S. Census Bureau put the estimated number of kids experiencing poverty in the Hermiston School District boundaries at 800.

“It doesn’t seem like that is actually reflective of our community,” said Tricia Mooney, superintendent of Hermiston Schools.

State data shows more than 2,000 students are experiencing poverty in the district.

“If the state has more accurate data that we use for other things, why aren’t we using those data sets?” she asked.

 

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