Ashland Senior High School. The school district has proposed laying off some staff to balance its budget.
Erik Neumann / JPR
The Ashland School District is planning to lay off some of its staff to fill a $1.3 million funding gap. The district has had declining student enrollment in recent years.
The district is considering eliminating at least 27 positions, including administrators, support staff and temporary teachers.
At the school board meeting on Thursday, the Ashland Education Association’s Tia McLean said the district has known for months about many of the financial issues it’s facing, including over-hiring staff and declining enrollment.
“This is the largest avoidable financial crisis the Ashland School District has faced,” McLean said.
District Superintendent Samuel Bogdanove said the district’s extra spending during the pandemic was meant to ensure students and teachers were successful. Now, it has to address the resulting budget costs. The district received almost $6.5 million in federal pandemic relief funds. That money was spent within the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly for hiring temporary teachers.
School districts receive funding from the state based on their number of students, and ASD has been experiencing declining enrollment since 2017.
Bogdanove said the district has lost around 300 students in recent years. Some of those declines are because of a change in Oregon law that makes it harder for students to attend schools in districts where they don’t live.
“Reasons really varied. Some came for the theater program, some came for other reasons,” he said. “Some in situations where the families may have worked in Ashland and they wanted to be able to have their kids come with them and go to school here.”
Bogdanove said Ashland disproportionately benefited from open enrollment, which ended during the 2018-19 school year. A loss of 300 students translates to a decline of around $3 million from the budget.
Other factors leading to shrinking enrollment, include some students switching to virtual learning and others moving away because of the 2020 Labor Day fires.
Bogdanove said the staff layoff proposal isn’t finalized, since next year’s enrollment numbers aren’t in and the district is still negotiating union contracts. Staff being laid off should be notified by spring break in March.