Sweet Home and other districts with high poverty rates and numbers of special education students need advocates in Salem as the Oregon state legislature kicks off its long session, Kevin Strong told Sweet Home School Board members Monday, Jan. 13.
Speaking at their monthly meeting, Strong, the school district’s business manager, told the board that the way the state funds special education students hurts Sweet Home, while benefiting larger, more affluent districts that tend not to have as high a percentage of students with special needs.
He said a proposal that is expected to go to legislators in the long session, which opened Tuesday, Jan. 21, would increase funding for “high cost disability grants” for students who cost districts more than $30,000 per year.
“What’s interesting about that, though, is you look at those districts that benefit from that grant the most and they tend to be the most affluent districts,” Strong said. “I’ll use Lake Oswego as a perfect example. Lake Oswego has a local option levy, they pay their teachers more, which allows them to spend more per student.
“In addition, they have a lower overall percentage of special education, as far as a percentage of their total student population, and so when you take a special education director and divide his or her salary over the number of students, it’s not as watered-down as a district that serves a larger percentage of special education students.”
For that reason, he said, “districts like that really benefit from that type of disability grant. Right now that is one of the proposals, to see that increased.”
In distributions of state revenue to schools, Sweet Home also does not benefit from the fact that it has a high poverty rate, he said, also noting that the state does not count homeless students in calculating funding for special education.
“If you take all the school districts in Oregon with 1,000 or more students, Sweet Home has the fourth-highest poverty percentage reported this past year. Yet, when you look at the funding formula, poverty is really a relatively small component of the funding formula, compared to some other factors.”
He suggested that it’s too early to tell which bills will get legs in the legislature.
“This time of year there are lots of proposals, and we’ll just have to wait and see what happens,” Strong said.
It would be wonderful to have someone advocate for us,” he said, adding that “no one is in a rush to really champion this, but as a relatively high poverty, high homeless student, high special ed school district, it sometimes feels like our students aren’t getting the same funding that students in other communities are.”
Board Member Mary Massey asked whether the board would have the power to advocate for the district, which prompted Strong to add: “Rep. Jami Cate has been doing an outstanding job.”
More Money Talk
Strong also reported that the district’s audit report for the 2023-24 fiscal year has been completed and the auditors, Pauly rogers and Co. of Tigard, have given the district a thumbs-up on its finances.
“The key takeaway is that the auditors issued a clean opinion,” he said, adding that representatives of the firm plan to attend the board’s February meeting by Zoom to go through the report.
“We were in a good financial position as of June 30, 2024,” Strong said.
In his budget report, Strong told board members the district has spent just over $746,000 more than it had at this time last year, halfway through the fiscal year.
He attributed those increases to higher labor costs and the fact that vacancies that existed last year at this time have been filled.
Board Member Floyd Neuschwander asked whether the district is seeing continuing increases in property and liability insurance premiums.
“I would expect that to continue,” Strong responded. He said that what is happening in Southern California will likely impact the overall insurance market.
“Where lots of costs are growing 3-4-5% per year, insurance has been increasing by double-digit percentages. In all likelihood, that may very well continue.”
Other Board Actions
Supt. Terry Martin reported that enrollment at Sweet Home High School dropped by 25 students since Nov. 30, from 731 to 706, and overall the district dropped 31 students in the month of December, totaling 2,196 students, which is exactly 100 less than at the end of December 2023.
He said the high school often sees drops in enrollment numbers at this time of year, due to students opting to leave school or graduating early.
He acknowledged that this year’s decline may be due to sickness, affirming that the district’s 10-day drop rule – in which students are dis-enrolled if they miss 10 days of school in a row – applies to sickness as well.
In other action, board members:
- Approved the hiring of Lisa Leatham as principal for the remainder of the school year, after she has served as interim principal during recent months.
- Accepted the resignation of Richard Smithson, the high school’s technical education teacher, effective June 30, 2025.
- Approved an action plan for services provided by the Linn-Benton-Lincoln Educational School.
Agreement for ESD Services
The board also unanimously approved a Local Service Plan, an agreement for services to be provided by the Linn Benton Lincoln Educational Services District for 2025-2027.
Sweet Home is one of 12 districts served by the Albany-based LBL ESD.
Martin said that the ESD provides “things we couldn’t necessarily have here.”
He noted that the district has unsuccessfully posted job opportunities for a speech pathologist, to no avail over the past several years.
Services provided to Sweet Home by the ESD include:
– Speech pathology and audiology services to Sweet Home for students who demonstrate significant difficulty in communicating. In fiscal year 2023-24, 506 audiology hearing screenings were performed for Lebanon students.
– Early intervention-early childhood special education specialists who can evaluate children suspected of having developmental delays or disabilities. The district received 24 such evaluations in 2023-24. The ESD provided 15 severe disability supports and 30 early childhood special education evaluations during that period.
– Occupational and physical therapy for children who need such services, including direct consultation, coaching, modeling, making adaptations to the environment and tasks, and providing in-service training to staff. In 2023-24, the ESD provided two physical and occupational therapy grants to Sweet Home. It provided 44 autism spectrum disorder grants to the district.
– Special education services, which include technical assistance and materials, financial compensation, consultation and access to materials.
– Crisis prevention services, designed to support students whose behavior is “challenging,” with “person-centered and trauma-informed approaches,” including “multiple levels of prevention and intervention strategies for managing escalated behaviors.”
– Support for home-schooled students, including registration and enrollment record-keeping. Home school parents have the full responsibility for their student’s education, including all curriculum choices, record keeping, and testing compliance.
– Family support services that include behavior consultants, family support liaisons, home school, MAC Survey (a method of identifying and accounting for the time spent by public school staff on Medicaid-related activities), crisis response, grant exploration and coordination, and collaboration with youth serving agencies specifically addressing health and social services.
– Administrative services and a wide variety of technology support for school districts.