It seems like every year, Valley Inquiry Charter School has a new principal. State records show the Salem charter is on track to have its fourth principal in five years this fall. Board members say the turnover is even higher.
That realization this spring was a call to action for members of the charter’s board. They decided to change their entire staffing model so that everyone who worked for the school would be employed directly by the charter, rather than splitting the responsibility with the district that allows them to run.
Over the following several weeks, the small K-7 school faced vocal pushback from several students and parents and eventually lost nearly all of its classroom teachers.
Valley Inquiry, commonly referred to as VICS, enrolled roughly 200 students last year and is housed in Salem-Keizer Public Schools. The school is open to any student in the district through a lottery system for free. Valley Inquiry is also one of the few schools in the district that teaches the advanced International Baccalaureate, or IB, curriculum.
While the drama this community is facing may only directly impact a small number of Oregonians in the grand scheme of things, the issues they’re dealing with are a microcosm of what districts and charters across the region are grappling with today — staffing needs, budget constraints, uncertain enrollment and a fight for control.
Going ‘full charter’
As part of the state’s second-largest district, Valley Inquiry enjoys several perks. For starters, Salem-Keizer owns the charter school’s building and gives VICS a break on its lease.
This is part of an interconnected structure. The district has to give 85% of the money from the state school fund meant for the charter to the charter. The remaining 15% goes to Salem-Keizer to help offset the costs of supporting the charter school. The district helps, for example, with technology and special education services, maintenance, meals from the district’s food partner Sodexo, among other things, and they share a common substitute teacher pool.
And for the school’s nearly 20-year history, the charter has relied on district-employed personnel to help staff the school. Close to half of Valley Inquiry staff, until recently, were employed by the district, while the other half were employed by the charter school directly. Charter staff make substantially smaller paychecks and have worse benefits — an issue seen in charter schools nationwide.
Among the district employees was the VICS principal. Board members said this structure typically meant they’d end up with only a part-time principal, high turnover in the position and slim pickings for candidates. Most of the people who’ve served in the role, they said, haven’t had charter school or IB experience and, therefore, couldn’t properly support staff.
Board members said they’ve struggled with this reality for years, long wishing to sever that tie to the district so they could have a stable, more qualified leader at the helm.
This became especially important when Salem-Keizer’s teachers were preparing for a possible strike this spring.
It was an especially unique school year for school strikes across Oregon and southwest Washington this year. Portland Public Schools had its first-ever teachers strike that lasted nearly the entire month of November, and it seemed at that time that Salem-Keizer was about to follow suit.
FILE - Extra signs sit to the side of a Salem-Keizer Education Association rally at the district's administrative offices in Northeast Salem on Dec. 19, 2023.
Natalie Pate / OPB
The possibility of a Salem-Keizer strike presented a split reality. Charter staff aren’t represented by any union; they have a separate legal contract with the school. But teachers employed through the district are subject to the union contract and collective bargaining actions, like a strike.
Losing striking teachers to picket lines could have forced VICS to close or extend the school year, as Salem-Keizer might’ve had to do across district schools. But the charter school wouldn’t have been able to furlough charter staff or add days to their year — resulting in higher costs and greater complications from having two sets of employees.
“I’m like, holy cow, if [the] district union does strike and the school closes, we just may lose school days, like the kids may just lose education opportunity,” said parent and at-large board member Stephen Staten. “Because we may not be able to extend our school year, and we won’t have enough staff to safely open the school and operate it.”
For Staten, who’s in his first year on the board, that potential problem felt like the moment for the charter board members to control their own destiny — they either needed their leaders and staff to be all Salem-Keizer employees or all VICS employees.
“[We need to] make sure that we’re set up in a way that protects the kids as best we can so that they’re getting the best education, the most opportunity for education that we can possibly provide as board members,” he told OPB in early June.
Fellow parent and board chair Cammi Carriere, who’s served on the board for two years, agreed, saying it felt like their hands were tied and their ability to provide for the students was at the district’s discretion.
So, they made a change. In late April — a month after the Salem-Keizer Education Association reached a deal with the district and narrowly avoided a strike — the VICS board voted to hire a charter-employed administrator and switch to a “full charter” staff.
Students, parents and teachers shocked, many upset by board decision
The day after the vote, on a Thursday afternoon, the school board notified staff, students and families via letters. Many were shocked. Students quickly hung posters in the hallways in protest. Some supported the change, but some community members were livid.
“Older kids found out because their teachers were crying,” parent Reuben Gershin said.
A fifth-grade student named Quinn La Paz-Snook made a petition on Google Docs with the words “Save Our School!” at the top. About 100 students and staff soon signed the pages, some with notably young handwriting and added notes to the side, like, “iF thay [sic] leave we leave!”
La Paz-Snook was one of the handful of students and about a dozen other people who gathered a few weeks later for a rally outside the school on May 13 before a scheduled board meeting.
“My biggest concern is losing the teachers, mostly for the future generations and the generations that are already here,” La Paz-Snook told OPB during the rally. “Also, for the younger kids who are uninformed and can’t be informed, who find out their teachers have just disappeared and will never be coming back.
“They would probably just, I don’t know, be really sad,” she said. “And most of the parents would probably move them to a different school. And if most of the students are gone, there’s no use of having a school.”
Parents and students concerned about staffing changes rally outside Valley Inquiry Charter School in Salem, Ore., before a board meeting on May 13, 2024.
Natalie Pate / OPB
Parents like Gershin, who are opposed to the change, say they aren’t necessarily against the policy itself but the process. They’re upset that there was little to no community engagement with the board or public meetings leading up to the decision and that there doesn’t seem to be a clear plan in place by the board to transition.
Gershin — a former teacher for Salem-Keizer himself — also perceived the change as a last-minute decision in an attempt to take advantage of Salem-Keizer employees being laid off in the district’s massive budget cuts this spring, who might be more willing to accept a lower charter school salary and benefits given the circumstances.
“It, candidly, hurt when we saw some of that misinformation and accusations come across because that really wasn’t our intent,” Staten said, adding the board did a deep budget analysis and forecasting to try and figure out how much they could improve offers to keep staff on. “I can see how they got there, but that certainly, at least in my mind, was never a factor at all.”
“Misinformation” or “accusations” aside, community members emphasized to board members in April and May that the effort to force staff to become direct employees of the charter school — even with incentives to keep them — was forcing them to leave.
Changes backfire. Will time help?
Still, the school leaders pressed on. The VICS board passed a new salary schedule on May 13 that will raise charter employees’ salaries and help close the gap between them and traditional district pay, effective July 1.
This, chair Carriere explained, helped increase pay from 5% to 31% compared to the existing salary schedule for charter staff.
The lowest-paid employee would be a beginning support staff member at $17 per hour, under the new VICS pay structure. The highest-paid person would be an experienced and state-licensed teacher earning up to $50 per hour.
The range for a state-licensed teacher at VICS is about $29 per hour up to that $50 per hour. This compares to the $33 per hour low-end and $64 per hour top range, according to data from the Salem-Keizer Education Association.
The VICS board also added an incentive for district employees who already worked at Valley Inquiry, allowing them to maintain their district salary for five years, if they stayed on as charter employees. The hope, they said, was that the salary schedule would be even higher at that point. But the hourly wage comparison doesn’t fully reflect the difference in total compensation, due to the district employees’ better health and retirement benefits.
During the meeting when this passed, one parent asked Melissa Colby to share her thoughts on how staff would respond. Colby was a founding parent of the charter school, as well as the school’s IB coordinator and educator in charge of academic intervention.
“I’ve been with this school for 19 years, and it breaks my heart to see what’s happening,” Colby told the board. “I’ve seen board after board after board come and go. That four people have made this decision,” she paused, “I feel like I’ve been betrayed and disrespected, and I don’t know that I feel I can go on working for you.
“And even if I did, even if I decided that, OK, you’re going to pay me my current salary for five years, then what?” Colby continued. “I don’t have a position with the district anymore. What am I to do at that point? I’ve lost 700 hours of sick leave, and my PERS is lower than I’m getting.”
Her voice started to break. “I love the kids more than anything, but I don’t see an incentive to stay,” she said, “and I don’t think you’re going to get a different answer from anyone else on staff.”
The board had to finalize the plan by May 17 in order to meet the district’s contractual timeline for staffing assignments with the union and to adopt the spring budget. Staten said they wanted to respect this timeline especially so that if any district-employed staff members did leave, they’d have the best chance they could to be placed elsewhere in the district.
The board hoped the salary increase and five-year protection would convince at least some of the district-employed staff to stay on. But their plan didn’t work.
Not only did all of the Salem-Keizer employees leave, but a few charter employees have resigned as well.
Carriere said she was under the impression that the charter-employed staff who left, did so under normal reasons for attrition, typically retirement or, in this case, going on to the next opportunity. Staten said he believes the drop in benefits coverage district staff would face switching over was the big deal-breaker.
But with more than half of the school’s workforce gone, in a community with only about 20 staff members total to begin with, the change hit hard.
“At the core of this decision lies our unwavering commitment to prioritizing the well-being of our families,” Colby and five other district employees wrote in a joint resignation letter to the VICS community.
“We firmly believe that every educator deserves access to essential benefits such as full health insurance, paid family leave, equitable retirement plans, and a salary that is respectable for the time we have put into earning our degrees and continuing our education to hone our teaching craft,” they wrote. “These are not luxuries; they are fundamental necessities that ensure our ability to provide for and care for our loved ones.”
Valley Inquiry now has to hire a librarian support specialist, which was vacant before all of this happened, classroom teachers for all grade levels K-5, a principal, an office manager and an IB coordinator. This is further upsetting to the school as they’d already paused a full middle school expansion for financial reasons. Board members say their goal is to have as many of the positions filled by July 1 as possible, especially the principal.
“We’ve got postings out, and we’re getting, honestly, really good response to that, so I’m pretty confident we’re gonna end up in a good spot, but it is a lot of change,” Staten said.
A sign flashes news outside Valley Inquiry Charter School in Salem, Ore., on May 13, 2024.
Natalie Pate / OPB
The charter will still enjoy most of the benefits from its partnership with Salem-Keizer. The district, for example, will still provide special education services, and the charter will still be able to use substitutes from their pool, according to district officials. However, some ripple effects are less clear, like whether VICS will need to find a new building eventually.
And where critics have argued the board doesn’t have a plan — particularly for day-to-day operations in the fall as the school transitions to a largely new staff — Staten says they are staying flexible to adjust to the new principal and skills of incoming staff to carry out the board’s larger, long-term goals.
“We really were hoping to keep as many staff as we possibly could, and unfortunately, that didn’t work out entirely the way we had hoped,” Staten said. “So, there is short-term pain, more short-term pain than we were hoping for. But really, we’ve been operating from a standpoint of: ‘How do we make the best impact long-term? How do we do the greatest good for the greatest number of people?’”
Meanwhile, parent Gershin said it’s going to take a lot to rebuild. He wants to see more from the school’s leaders, going so far as to apply to be on the board himself. But Gershin said he’s been unimpressed with the board’s willingness to encourage discussion or incorporate feedback so far.
“Everyone I know is looking for something else,” he said. “A few were brave enough to leave immediately.”
Enrollment numbers, which influence school funding, are especially important for such a small school. Prior to the decision, VICS numbers were actually bucking state and national trends and increasing. In fact, according to data from the Oregon Department of Education, the school’s grown from 165 students pre-pandemic to about 200 last school year.
But now, Gershin said he knows a handful of families who aren’t planning to come back. The full impact won’t be known until enrollment numbers are reported this fall.
“As a parent, I have only gotten more concerned the longer this situation has gone on,” Gershin said in an email. “I chose VICS because it was a GOOD school. That school was destroyed, and it is unclear what will replace it.”