A look at the key education bills in the Oregon Legislature

Oregon lawmakers are once again debating how best to allocate education funding to improve K-12 attendance, graduation rates, test scores and other key metrics of success. Meanwhile, parents and educators are pushing to remove restrictions on the amount of money school districts can receive for students with special needs. Lawmakers are also considering a bill that nearly passed last year that would block schools from removing certain books from libraries and classrooms.

Natalie Pate is OPB’s K-12 education reporter. She joins us to talk about all of those efforts and more.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon lawmakers are considering a bill right now that would increase the amount of money school districts can get for students with special needs. Another bill would block schools from removing certain books from libraries and classrooms. Natalie Pate has been covering these bills and others. She is OPB’s K-12 education reporter and she joins us now. Natalie, welcome back.

Natalie Pate: Hey, Dave, thanks for having me.

Miller: So let’s start with this effort to increase the amount of state money that schools can get to support students with disabilities. How does the system currently work?

Pate: Yeah, well, Oregon school districts get extra money from the state depending on how many students with disabilities they serve. But that SPED cap, as it’s often referred to, limits how much they can get. It’s capped at 11% of their total enrollment, and that’s been around for decades. It just hasn’t been adjusted to keep pace with the need.

Miller: So what is the need? I mean, what percentage of students on average have disabilities that require special education services in Oregon schools?

Pate: The average is actually much closer to 15%, and that’s more than 82,000 children in the 2023-’24 school year. For some districts, that percentage is even higher. And that means around 20,000 students are not receiving money for the services they need. Some school districts will apply for what’s known as a cap waiver with the state, but thousands of students still need more.

Miller: So what do families say this means for the education that their kids are getting?

Pate: Well, in order to cover that gap in funding, schools have to steal money that would otherwise go to other programs, or they have to sacrifice some of their special education services. It’s a really tough choice to have to make.

One parent who testified talked about how her child, who was diagnosed with autism, was really struggling when she started school, despite all their efforts, there just weren’t enough people there to support her daughter. She kept leaving class without permission more than a dozen times a day and sometimes even leaving the school building altogether, which puts her and others in harm’s way and she wasn’t learning what she needed. But when she was able to get an adult assigned to stay with her, it made a world of difference, and that’s what advocates want to be available for all students who need it, without having to take money away from other kids.

Miller: How much would it cost the state to fund special education at the level that advocates are asking for?

Pate: Education leaders have said that eliminating the cap would address a gap of $750 million per biennium in special education funding. Now, that’s the gap, right? We just don’t know how much it will cost to close that gap. There are some bills, other bills that are suggesting that we just increase the cap to that 15% average. Others want to remove it entirely. Either way, a change like this will adjust the state’s school funding formula. The bill in question has been referred to Ways and Means to get further cost analysis, to try to figure that out.

Miller: Is there any organized pushback to this proposal?

Pate: There’s not much that’s substantial or public by way of pushback. One concern may be that lifting the cap would incentivize schools to over identify students for special education as a way to get more money. But as advocates have pointed out, it is a very extensive process to get a student on an individualized education program, or IEP, or any other formal plan for a student for that matter. And most of those are heavily regulated by federal laws. One thing to keep in mind too is that ultimately this money will come out of the same limited pot of money from the state, and there’s always tension around K-12 spending. In fact, a new six-part study that was presented to the legislature last week evaluated Oregon’s funding structure and gave suggestions on how to improve it. One of the key suggestions was to remove the special education cap.

Miller: Let’s turn to another bill. Advocates call it the Freedom To Read bill. What would it do?

Pate: Yeah, so that bill would prohibit book bans and other forms of censorship in Oregon public schools, if the attempt constitutes discrimination. And that means a book couldn’t be banned based on things like race, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religion. disability or military status. There was a very similar bill, you might remember, that attempted the same thing last year. It passed the Senate on party lines but died on the House side when Republican delay tactics effectively ended the session early – but supporters still think it’s important.

Miller: What prompted this?

Pate: Book ban efforts have rapidly increased locally and across the country. In recent years, Oregon has faced the most challenges to school and library books in state history. State trends are mirroring national ones, which is that the books under attack are often by or about People of Color, women and folks from LGBTQ+ communities.

Miller: A member of a group called Moms for Liberty Douglas County submitted testimony against this bill, saying that quote, “Removing obscene, offensive or non-age appropriate materials is not discrimination against any class of individuals but keeping children’s innocence, and schools should already be actively doing that.” Would this legislation prevent districts from removing certain books?

Pate: I mean, you’re getting to the kind of core opposition to this bill, which is that we’re hearing people say parents should get to decide what their kids read. And the answer to your question is a little bit of yes, a little bit of no. Oregon already has laws that require inclusive selection of instructional materials and go against discrimination in education. The bill does not mandate what materials are presented. It still allows parents and guardians to request to remove books. School administrators are free to consider those requests. The bill also will not prevent school boards or staff from considering things like age appropriateness, obscenity, educational value, when they’re making those selection decisions, which is what they already do.

So, in short, books can still be removed, they just can’t be removed if the reason for taking them out is discriminatory in nature.

Miller: What other education bills are you paying attention to right now?

Pate: As we mentioned earlier, funding is huge. That goes for total school funds, but also for very specific things: literacy, summer learning, special education, even outside of that cap that we were talking about earlier. There are also several attempts to bring more accountability to the way we fund schools, how we spend that money and the academic results that we see from that spending. There are several student safety bills as well, tackling issues like child sex abuse, gun violence, mental health, wildfire recovery. And there are other day-to-day things too, things like cell phone restrictions in the classroom, possibly later start time for schools. Some of these won’t make it through the session, but we are keeping an eye on them.

Miller: You covered a report earlier about changing school funding in Oregon. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that report looked into?

Pate: Yes, so you’re referring to the American Institutes for Research Study that was presented to lawmakers last week. It’s a very in-depth six-part report, and it had several moving parts to it. A lot of it was fact finding in nature. It was looking at, what’s our current system? Is that effective? How are we comparing our outcomes like state test scores and things like that to other states, where do we rank in that? How did COVID hit us? How did that affect our schools and what should we be doing about it? The results from that study were not specifically as targeted for policy decisions. It wasn’t so much, you should do XYZ … though there were some specifics, like removing the special education cap.

But some of the big takeaways were that, according to this study, we need to be spending a lot more money and we need to be smarter about how we spend it. Things like, hey, some of the rural school districts in Eastern Oregon, their spending looks different than the Portland to Eugene corridor, and that needs to be adjusted in our school funding formula.

Miller: What are you hearing from districts right now about what all of the federal chaos might mean for them? What kinds of things are they talking about or scared about?

Pate: There’s a lot of uncertainty right now. Just like with a lot of these decisions as they’re coming in, people are trying to figure out how it affects things locally. Federal funding contributes to a lot of things in local public schools. We’re talking Head Start programs, Title I funding for schools that serve kids from lower income families and neighborhoods. We’re looking at services for students experiencing homelessness, special education … IDEA is the federal Individual Disabilities Education Act that is set up through that. So there’s a lot of questions around that. Grants come in that get funneled through the state that pay for building upgrades for Oregon schools and things like that.

So there’s definitely a lot of uncertainty and a lot of questions right now about, is that money going to get cut off? And if so, what do we do?

Miller: Natalie, thanks very much.

Pate: Thanks for having me, Dave.

Miller: Natalie Pate covers K-12 education for OPB.

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