Schools can’t afford to just kick the can down the road

The last of the big local public agency budgets, that of the McMinnville School District, won final committee approval last week. And after a long, steep and steady enrollment decline, one that’s projected to continue unabated, it requires the cutting of 47 teaching positions, along with an administrative post.

The good news in that — if there can ever truly be any good news associated with having to eliminate jobs in our community at a time of increasing economic uncertainty — is that teachers opting to retire, change careers or move on to educational posts elsewhere reduced actual layoffs to a mere handful. Some teachers are facing transfer to new assignments, but that certainly beats outright loss of employment.

The district began warning early in the year that it would be needing to trim payroll, which accounts for about 85% of its total spending. Realizing normal attrition might not prove sufficient, its governing board put the staff, union and public all on notice early on, and refined reduction in force policies in preparation.

The district has had to resort to RIF layoffs several times over recent decades, but considers it a last result, to be avoided if at all possible. This year, that just wasn’t feasible.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell:

McMinnville High School has a record 630 students graduating this spring, but the district’s elementary schools enrolled 350 only new students into kindergarten last fall.

Each new class seems destined to be smaller than its predecessor, making the problem endemic. Total district enrollment stood at 6,700 just a few years ago, but was fewer than 6,000 this year, and is being projected at no more than 5,780 when the 2026-27 school year opens in September.

The district is holding firm on its class-size standards — 20 in kindergarten, 24.5 in the primary grades, 25 in grades 4 and 5, 29.5 in the middle school grades and 30.5 at the high school. But it takes fewer teachers to do that every coming year when the incoming classes become progressively smaller.

The fact is, family sizes are shrinking all around the world. And McMinnville’s growth rate is too modest to make up the difference locally.

In addition, public school systems are losing an increasing number of students to online, home school and private school options, which adds to the challenge.

The local teachers union petitioned the district to use some of its reserves to ensure all current teachers were retained. That might make sense if this year were an anomaly, but it’s not by any stretch.

The district is facing an annually recurring gap between teacher supply and student demand, and the fundamental laws of economics dictate supply and demand remain in tandem. Otherwise, the whole enterprise, whether public or private, inevitably founders.

Superintendent Kourtney Ferrua was right when she said it’s imperative the district “right-size” its staff to reflect reality on the ground. And she received a vote of confidence on that this spring in her first official evaluation since being named to the superintendency.

The committee approved a $104.8 million general fund budget for the coming school year, anchoring an all-funds budget of $154.6 million.

That sounds like a lot of money until you begin diving deep into the details. But without tight fiscal controls and clear-headed management, it’s easy to run even the largest of agencies onto the fiscal rocks.

The district did have a big piece of good news a couple weeks ago, when it landed a $2.6 million state grant allowing it to offer a full K-8 summer school program for the next three years — something it has not been able to manage on its own in recent years. This kind of short-term good fortune doesn’t do much to ease the district’s long-term challenges, though.

Eliminating jobs should not and does not come easy to responsible managers. But we can’t have them shrinking from such action when it becomes a necessity, as it appears to be in our local school system this year.