Salem-Keizer superintendent shares more on proposed budget

Some of Oregon’s largest school districts are facing cuts this year, including Portland Public Schools, Eugene 4J School District and the Beaverton School District. However, Oregon’s second-largest school district, Salem-Keizer Public Schools, is looking to spend more. Superintendent Andrea Castañeda shared a proposal last week that aims to increase the budget to invest more in mental health and special education. This comes after last year’s dramatic cuts that led to nearly 100 layoffs. Castañeda joins us to share more about her budget proposal and what the district’s budget could look like in the future.

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

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Some of Oregon’s largest school districts are facing large cuts for the next school year. Portland Public Schools, Eugene’s 4J District and Beaverton schools could all see significant reductions in staff. But Oregon’s second largest school district, Salem-Keizer Public Schools, is actually looking to add staff. Superintendent Andrea Castañeda shared a proposed budget last week that would invest more in mental health and special education. This comes after last year’s dramatic cuts that led to about 400 fewer positions.

Andrea Castañeda joins me now. It’s good to have you back on the show.

Andrea Castañeda: Thank you. I’m pleased to be here.

Miller: I want to start with last year, because it’s a pretty important context for what this school year has been like and the way you approached adding positions for the next school year. So, if you don’t mind just reminding us what kinds of decisions you had to face about a year ago.

Castañeda: Yes, a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, was a really hard time in Salem-Keizer. We made $70 million in cuts and adjustments. And just to put that in context, right now, Portland is making $40 million, so we made nearly twice as much as they make in a single year. That did include, unfortunately, the reduction of almost 400 FTE. Those were teachers, support staff, they were district administrators. It was a painful but necessary adjustment to bring us back into a balanced budget.

Miller: The hope, obviously, when you make cuts like that, is that they would have as limited an impact as possible, but when there are that many positions that are cut in so many different kinds of jobs, there has to be some kind of impact. Where do you think you saw it?

Castañeda: We felt it all over our system. Our reductions last year were almost 250 licensed teachers, another almost 140 support staff, so those are like instructional assistants and office managers, custodians. And then we had about 15 district administrator reductions. We feel it every day. Now, we are one deep throughout our system. And that means that if a licensed teacher is out for a day, we’re scrambling to cover. If a district team member goes out on leave, we’re scrambling to cover. And this is the convicted but fragile state of affairs for public schools in Salem-Keizer – and I predict soon, across Oregon.

Miller: If you could go back a year ago, would you do anything differently? Are there any cuts that you wish you hadn’t made, assuming that the overall number of the money you had to cut was the same?

Castañeda: I think our listeners should be mistrustful of any leader that has to go through something that difficult and says they did it right, and we certainly didn’t do everything right. I think we were probably 95% to 97% right. And a couple of things that I think we got wrong … one is communication. I would have communicated differently. I would have communicated more frequently. And I would have been even more clear about the devastating impacts of this reduction in anticipation of them.

I think we also cut a little bit too deeply into some core functions, so we made our best estimates about what we could absorb. We cut too deeply into our nursing team. We cut too deeply into our curriculum support team. This year, our budget that we proposed includes some of the corrections to account for those errors. But in the scope of the work, with this level of complexity and hardship, I feel proud overall of the work we did and the decisive nature in which we did it.

Miller: So let’s turn to the current situation. How is it that you’ve been able to go from such enormous cuts last year to having enough money to hire some more staff for the coming year?

Castañeda: Well, first, I think it’s a mindset issue, partially. I mean, in the end, mindset doesn’t impact the bottom line, except that I don’t believe that any of us can afford, in any institution, to fall into a chronic scarcity mindset. It suffocates our belief and joy about what’s possible, and it also suffocates our risk taking and making investments in targeted areas that are going to have long-term dividends for the system.

So we are proposing modest, but we think really smart, increases to support our students’ behavioral needs, our special education team, and to continue expanding what is increasingly a nationally best in class dual-language program. Even when times are tight, you keep investing in what works and you keep investing in what’s needed. You can’t just crouch in the corner and hope that the storm blows over.

Miller: So let’s turn to some of the specifics. You want to expand the behavioral intervention center. What is that?

Castañeda: We have students in our system that have some significant behavioral needs. And for everyone listening, I want to be clear, we are not talking about students that struggle to follow the rules and need more discipline. We are talking about 1% of students who, in some cases, have lived a lifetime of trauma, and they need clinical and therapeutic support. Their feelings are bigger than they are able to manage their emotions and they need help learning how to regulate in spaces that are designed for them.

So we’ll be opening a behavioral health center that will serve 60 students throughout the year, K-12, with the right kinds of supports, clinicians and setting attributes that will help them succeed. That is on top of opening a clinical day treatment center in partnership with a mental health provider. And I will just pause to say, this is what’s happening in Oregon – there are almost no pediatric and adolescent clinical services available for students who need them. So what that means is that those students are served in classrooms. Salem-Keizer is responding to the absence by building our own. And I feel proud and I feel confident that that is the right step for our community.

Miller: Let me make sure I understand correctly though. Is it fair to say that because of the lack of adequate psychiatric care or behavioral health care for kids in Oregon, that you’re spending public education dollars to fill that gap … money that otherwise could go to a math teacher in 10th grade, it’s going to basic behavioral health?

Castañeda: Yes, that is 100% what’s happening in Oregon and in Salem-Keizer, and it’s for a very simple reason. We welcome everyone, regardless of student needs, but not all needs can be served in a traditional classroom. So our schools are left with the impossible choice, which is to serve students with more traditional needs in classrooms that we can all easily imagine, and to build the facilities and train the staff necessary to meet behavioral needs that were once met in clinical settings; or, to pretend that the clinical needs aren’t actually a necessity for education at all and expect students to succeed in places that were not designed or staffed for them.

It is an impossible situation, and it is why our budget for behavioral and mental health services is growing every year. It was $46 million last year. It’s $53 million this year. I expect that number is going to keep growing because the needs of our students are growing quickly too.

Miller: So there are the two centers you mentioned, which seemed like, almost by definition, that those are outside of mainstream classes. You also want to add 10 behavior interventionists. Those would be people who would be working with students inside classes?

Castañeda: Yeah, students and staff inside classes to teach the skills of de-escalation, emotional regulation, to work directly to help identify what is perhaps triggering a student into a behavior. So the classroom teacher and the behavior team can identify those triggers in advance and mitigate them, and in so doing, support a student for a successful learning experience.

Miller: I mean, it seems like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs here, that even if you’d want to add more 3rd grade teachers or 8th grade English teachers, the best use of the limited money for new staff is for you to to help in a much more basic way to help with behavior.

Castañeda: Yeah, let me tell you a story. I was in a classroom, a school recently, and we had a 3rd grader who was really struggling. He was having a very hard day. And he had so much hurt and anger trapped in his little body, that the best thing we could do for him is take him into a safe room, be there, be present with him, talk to him and just give him a large padded, weighted ball, to throw against the wall, to express all of his emotional needs. And we kept him safe. We kept ourselves safe and we supported him through that moment.

But you can just imagine how asking that child to sit at a desk or to sit on a carpet, when what he really needed was to physically express his emotions, would never have worked in that classroom. And that’s what we need more of, safe spaces, well-trained clinicians, and staff who know exactly how to intervene and support a young person who is in that moment in their lives.

Miller: How many of the positions, just broadly, that you want to add for next year are actual replacements of jobs that were cut last year?

Castañeda: Oh, that’s a good question. I would say probably, of the about 66 additional positions we’re adding, I think probably about, I don’t know, five or six of them are replacements. Most of them are really just pushing into these growth areas where we know we have school need. And we also have an enormous amount of pride. So, for example, we’re going to be adding almost 20 additional licensed teachers for dual-language expansion and to continue to serve our growing English language learner population. Those are pure additions because we’re so proud and grateful of the community we get to serve and the way that we serve them.

Miller: Am I right that the proposal means dipping into savings as part of the way that you can pay for this new staff?

Castañeda: I think what I would say is that we are closing this year with a balanced budget and a healthy reserve. Over the next biennium, we’re expecting almost $80 million in increases just in personnel costs. That’s for offers we’ve already made to our licensed association and contracts we already have with most of our workforce. That $80 million, and the PERS increases on top of it, that is what is driving us back towards deficit spending. It is the single largest contributor, our personnel growth is growing by almost 10% a year. And imagine that …

Miller: Just so I understand, the cost of existing personnel is growing by 10% a year. You’re not adding 10% more employees every year?

Castañeda: No, the cost of our existing personnel is growing by almost 10% a year.

Miller: And that’s a combination of PERS costs, so retirement plan costs, and salaries and benefits.

Castañeda: Sadly, most of the PERS increases are in addition to that.

Miller: In addition to the 10%?

Castañeda: Yes, it’s an incredible dilemma that Oregon public schools – and I would go so far as to say, governments in Oregon – find themselves in right now, which is the escalation of personnel costs driven by inflationary pressures and public sector bargaining. The changes in the actuarial predictions for PERS, it means that we are far outstripping any additional revenue we receive just to pay for the pension and the compensation commitments we’ve made to our existing workforce. And this is why you see libraries, counties, cities, school districts, state agencies all facing the same difficult moment, now and over the remainder of the new biennium.

Miller: In some states, blue and red ones – Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Texas – teachers are forbidden from going on strike, which takes away, I think it’s very fair to say, the most powerful collective bargaining tool that they have. Would you support that in Oregon, where we’ve seen a number of teacher strikes in recent years or near strikes?

Castañeda: No, I’ve worked in states that are similar to the ones you’ve listed. Here’s what I’ll say about that. In states where public sector unions are not well organized, and clear advocates and powerful voices for the workforce, the workforce gets exploited. That is true. And here’s what I’ll say about Oregon. The challenge here is that the demands at the bargaining table are absolutely, positively unachievable for the finances that the public sector government is receiving. There is no way we can keep pace. It is not so much that labor is wrong about their advocacy. It is more that there is a serious mismatch between the nature and the scope of their demands, the urgency with which they pursue it and the actual revenue that anybody of government is receiving to keep pace.

Miller: That’s a long way of saying … well, let me ask you this as a question. Is that a long way of saying that Oregon should have higher taxes to put more money towards K-12 education?

Castañeda: I think it’s a long way of saying we need everyone who is an actor in this space – legislators, public sector unions, institutional leaders – to be able to come together and have a balanced conversation about the realities of the moment. It currently isn’t balanced and the whole onus cannot fall on the legislature to increase taxes. It cannot fall on a superintendent to manufacture revenue that doesn’t exist. It cannot fall merely on labor to take up the slack of an underfunded system. Right now though, the conversation is not balanced and too many of the instruments of change are stacked up in the direction that makes our financial trajectory unsustainable.

Miller: I want to go back to your district itself. Once again, you’re projecting a decline in enrollment, something that districts around the state are talking about in different ways. It’s modest; 700 fewer students overall are projected to be in the student body next year, you’re assuming there’ll be about 37,000 total. How much do you think that reversing this trend of enrollment declines is within your control, a district’s control?

Castañeda: That’s a great question. I’ve looked into it, our team has too. Briefly I’ll say, major contributing factors [are] increases in homeschool rates, increases in participation in especially virtual charters. And for either of those, I think we need to take a piece of responsibility. There is a reason that families are choosing us slightly less frequently than they used to. We need to know more, we need to know why and we need to know whether we can address that. The largest contributor is declining natural birth rate and that is obviously not within our control.

Miller: Luckily.

Castañeda: Yes, but here’s what I think is most important. Public education does need to take seriously the question, why are people making other choices? It doesn’t mean that we can answer that question in its entirety, but if we’re not asking it in a curious and earnest way, we are letting this happen to us.

Miller: Andrea Castañeda, thanks so much.

Castañeda: Oh, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

Miller: Andrea Castañeda is the superintendent of the Salem-Keizer School District.

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