Lauren Weisskirk hadn’t heard the phrase “No School November” until she moved to Portland seven years ago. In her group chats with other moms around the country, her friends have a running joke.
“‘Hey Lauren, are your kids in school today?’” Weisskirk said. “Because they know there’s a high chance that the kids aren’t.”
From parents at the local level to the state’s top elected official, Oregon has long been known as a state with a short school year. Recent research backs that up.
Lauren Weisskirk has two children in Portland Public Schools and says Oregon could learn from other states in how to provide more instructional time. A new report suggests students in some Oregon districts get the equivalent of eight fewer weeks of school than kids in other parts of the state.
Elizabeth Miller / OPB
Now, a new data tool from Stand For Children offers details on just how short Oregon’s school year is — and how broad the variation is from district to district.
“We’re not interested in comparing a single district to one another, but we do want to highlight a system with a serious design problem, one that combines our statewide low expectations with very high degrees of flexibility, a long history of cutting days when budgets get tight, coupled with some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in the country,” said Sarah Pope, executive director of Stand for Children, a national education nonprofit based in Portland.
The analysis was completed by ECOnorthwest and charts how many hours and days a year Oregon students spend in school. In the study, “student contact time” includes lunch and passing time. That’s different from Oregon’s definition of “instructional time,” which mainly consists of time in class but can also include parent-teacher conferences and staff professional development, as well as recess for students in grades one through three.
Related: Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek orders schools to maintain instructional hours: What happens now?
According to the tool, students in some districts have as many as 177 days of school. Others only have 137. That’s a difference of 40 days — or eight weeks — of school. The numbers and hours can vary, but that variation is widespread across Oregon.
Oregon doesn’t have a mandatory minimum number of school days. Instead, the state rule is based on the number of instructional hours. As a result, school districts where the calendar of school days may look very different could be somewhat similar when it comes to counting hours.
For instance, Oregon has a number of school districts that only run classes four days per week — and those districts tend to have similar time in school compared to those operating Monday through Friday. Despite having 20 fewer days in elementary school, students in the Mapleton School District in Lane County only have one less hour of school than elementary students in the Parkrose School District in Multnomah County. Both Mapleton and Parkrose have some of the lowest elementary contact hours in the state.
Compare that to Lincoln County, on the Oregon Coast, where students have more school days and almost 150 more hours of contact time annually than Mapleton or Parkrose.
Those hours and days add up.
“Students in the lowest-time districts may receive up to three fewer years of school than students in the highest-time districts,” Pope said.
Short school years aren’t Oregon’s only problem. Oregon also lags when it comes to regular school attendance. A recent analysis from Stand for Children found that if school attendance returned to pre-pandemic levels and the state’s school year averaged out to 180 days instead of 165, academic outcomes in the state would improve significantly.
Virtually all of Oregon’s 197 school districts are meeting Oregon’s instructional time requirements, which are 900 hours for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, 990 hours for students in grades nine through 11, and 966 hours for 12th graders. The majority of states, including Washington, require a certain number of days every year. Oregon does not.
According to Brown University researcher Matthew Kraft, Oregon ranks 47th in the nation when it comes to time in school.
Carrie Pierce is a parent of two children in Portland Public Schools, including a son who receives special education services. Appearing at a press conference organized by Stand For Children, Pierce said that when school is cancelled or interrupted, it is destabilizing for her son.
“He ruminates on the change, becomes anxious, and talks about it long after it has passed,” Pierce shared. “Some disabled students we know also experience sleep disturbances and behavior struggles on half and no school days. It can be hard for some of those kids to re-engage in the classroom when they get back.”
This new tool arrives almost a week after Gov. Tina Kotek announced an executive order prohibiting school districts from cutting school days to balance their budgets. Also under the order, districts will no longer be allowed to classify professional development or parent-teacher conferences as “instructional time.” Currently, districts can include up to 30 hours of professional development and 30 hours of conferences in their instructional time count.
Stand for Children executive director Sarah Pope announces a new data tool that shows how much time in school Oregon students receive. The report suggests students in some Oregon districts get the equivalent of eight fewer weeks of school than kids in other parts of the state.
Elizabeth Miller / OPB
Pope was at last week’s announcement.
“What the Governor’s order does not do is get us to the national average, it simply stops the cutting of one of the shortest school years in the country,” Pope said. “That is an important first step.”
Pope and others at the press conference are pushing for more steps.
Oregon Rep. April Dobson (D-Happy Valley), who also serves on the North Clackamas School District board of directors, said she’s looking to the next legislative session to “raise the statewide floor”.
“I’m committed to collaborating with districts and educators around how we give students more time to learn, but the outcome is not negotiable,” Dobson said. “We need to do this. And we need to do it now. It’s what Oregonians expect, and it’s what our children deserve.”
But it will probably not be easy. As a state, Oregon has long prioritized local control over school operations, including the length of a school year. In addition, the length of the school year is going to have a direct effect on when school employees are working, which would require negotiations with labor unions.
Then there’s the role of the state as the primary funder of schools: Extending the school year would likely cost more. Those higher costs follow years of increased spending, but funding has continued to fall short of what districts say it costs to maintain services and avoid layoffs.
Dobson, the state representative and school board member, said there has to be a willingness at the state level to hold everyone — from legislators to school districts — accountable.
“We really need to fight against our own indifference to public education in the state of Oregon. There just have been assumptions for decades since I was a high schooler and Oregon passed Measure 5, that we could do anything that we want around funding for schools, that we can make any changes that we want around how much time kids are in school, and everybody will be fine,” Dobson said.
“And the kids are not all right. They’re not doing well.”
