School districts spend most of their resources on personnel, meaning administrators, educators and support staff. Teachers occasionally feel that there are too many administrators working in schools, and that having fewer boots-on-the-ground educators makes their jobs harder.

With the coming expiration of pandemic-era relief funding, there will likely be district budget cuts in the fall. How many administrators are there compared to educators and support staff in Central Oregon districts, and how might that change in the future?

More Coverage

COCC’s community health worker certificate opens pathways for students

Administrators actually make up a small percentage of employees in Central Oregon school districts, which include Bend-La Pine Schools, Redmond School District, Sisters School District, Jefferson County Schools, Crook County Schools and Culver School District.

Education officials said there is no set ratio of administrators to educators that a school district should have. Each district has a unique number of students and set of needs.

In Central Oregon’s six school districts, administrators represent between 3% and 7% of all staff. Principals, assistant principals, superintendents, assistant superintendents and program directors are all administrators who either work at a school or in central administration for the district.

Certified staff — teachers, educational assistants, speech pathologists and more — represent between 38% and 52% of all employees, depending on the district.

Classified staff — bus drivers, nutrition services workers, custodians and more — also represent between 38% and 52% of total employees.

The Bulletin obtained March 2024 employee lists from the districts, divided by classification.

Growing numbers of staff

Each district has a distinct number of students to support through graduation, and must implement staffing levels to suit its own needs.

David Liebowitz, educational policy, research design and statistics professor at the University of Oregon, focuses his research on school leaders, policy and school principal effectiveness.

He said staffing has expanded in Oregon schools over the past few years, especially as the effects of the pandemic required more counseling staff to help students with behavioral and emotional issues. For example, schools have increased support for students who have harmed others in order to hold them accountable while also prompting them to apologize for what they did.

“I’m not surprised to hear people say that there are growing numbers of staff in roles at the central level,” he said.

Districts have increased the number of administrator jobs. This growth is part of a national trend, but was also accelerated by the use of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds. The relief funds had a number of possible uses, including after-school programs, summer learning, mental health supports, improving indoor air quality in schools and helping students recover from learning loss.

This fall, those funds expire. District leaders will have to decide whether budget cuts will need to be made, and in which categories, since the funding will not be replaced.

“It’ll be interesting to see the evolution of how districts grapple with this cliff,” Liebowitz said. “We live in a world of limited resources, and so the question is always about trade-offs.”

It’s easier to cut a school’s second assistant principal, while it’s harder to let go of a principal, he said.

District officials are likely thinking about core essentials first, which include staff, student disability needs and English learner needs. Fixed costs, such as transportation, facilities and administrative staff, also make up more of the budget for rural and smaller school districts.

Though there is evidence that students are struggling with mental health challenges, Liebowitz said there is also evidence that recent tutoring and guidance counseling interventions helped improve student success and enrollment in college.

A rise in salaries

According to the 2012-13 school year budget, administrator salaries at Bend-La Pine Schools were over $4 million. By the 2023-24 budget, it had jumped to over $8 million.

John Rexford, previously the deputy superintendent of Bend-La Pine Schools and superintendent of the High Desert Education Service District, said the district was operating on a thin margin of administrators in the years after the 2008 financial crisis. He left the district in 2012 and now serves on the Quality Education Commission.

Even now, he sees the demand for administrators growing.

“What we require administrators to do now is increasingly complex,” he said, including dealing with new funding streams and the recent emphasis on social-emotional wellness.

Additional administration does mean there are more people available to handle bureaucracy, but the cost can be a drag on resources. The main positive of fewer administrators is being able to maintain more resources in the classroom, he said.

In the 2012-13 budget, Bend-La Pine Schools’ salaries for certified staff was over $40 million. By the 2023-24 school year, it had jumped to over $63 million. Similarly, classified staff salaries jumped from $16 million to over $26 million.

“Districts make a whole variety of choices on how they pull this thing off that we call public K-12 education,” he said, especially as public education is not fully funded.

According to the Joint Public Education Appropriations Committee’s December 2023 report, the $11.7 billion the Oregon Legislature funded through the state school fund and student success fund for 2023-25 was 11.5% under what the Quality Education Model recommended.

As Rexford put it: “It’s like trying to do 10 pounds of work with 9 pounds.”