Officials at Oregon’s largest school district have been telegraphing for months that they’ll have to make dire budget cuts for the 2025-2026 school year.

On Wednesday, Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong planned to unveil the first detailed look at what $41.3 million in cuts could mean for students, teachers and school communities, including the loss of 228 positions across the district. The details of her proposal were posted online ahead of the event.

For context, the district has an estimated 8,700 employees and is operating this year on a $853 million general fund budget.

A proposed budget is always a moving target. Numbers and impacts are likely to shift in the coming months, as community members make the case for preserving programs and jobs, and as the Legislature weighs how much it will be able to dedicate to public schools for the next fiscal biennium, which begins in July. And changes that impact terms agreed to during labor negotiations will need to be worked out with union leaders.

But the proposed reductions that Armstrong laid out Wednesday during a press conference at the district’s North Portland headquarters include $12.2 million from the district’s central office budget and another $29.1 million from school budgets.

That does not necessarily translate into widespread layoffs, because retirements and other forms of attrition naturally trim employee numbers each year. But it does mean that there could be as many as 228 fewer adults in the district’s schools, come next fall.

Money-saving measures Armstrong said she’s weighing include:

• Reducing four professional development days for teachers, which amounts to a four day pay cut for licensed educators. That would save $2.2 million, the district says.
• Cutting the budget for contracted services by $3.4 million.
• Eliminating or leaving open six senior leadership positions, for a total of $1.5 million in savings.
• Eliminating 18 kindergarten educational assistant positions at Title I  elementary schools for class sizes of 20 students. Title I schools receive extra federal funding to serve  their relatively high concentration of low income families. That would save an estimated $1.2 million.
• Slightly increasing the class sizes across the district’s high school to save $2.8 million by paying for 20 fewer teachers.
• Eliminating 15 positions due to enrollment declines, including both licensed educators and support staff, across elementary and middle schools, for a savings of $2.2 million.

Among the biggest of Armstrong’s proposed reductions would be to cut way back on instructional coaches who work with their fellow teachers to help them develop curriculum and teach effectively, along with academic intervention specialists who work with struggling students, one on one or in small groups, and social/emotional specialists, an areaa in which Portland and other districts significantly increased staffing post-pandemic.

That three-pronged group of educators, who work with students at multiple grade levels within a school, would see a $10.4 million cut under the proposed reductions, meaning there would be 69 fewer of them in schools next year.

District budget officials say the cuts are coming as a result of inflation, plus the rising costs of the Public Employees Retirement System, the end of federal pandemic relief dollars and a continued enrollment decline, which has outpaced the drop in student numbers statewide. In Oregon, state funding is tied to enrollment.

— Julia Silverman covers education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com

©2025 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.