Messing with the books in Newberg-Dundee
This post was written with the amazing help of Alan Gao, a long-time reader of the newsletter who answered my call to help put together critical workups of particular districts. I’ve gotten so many requests to do these workups that I need help, and thanks to Alan for doing research and outlining for this week’s post!
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The economist of education Martin Carnoy once wrote that schools play a mediating role in society. They try to accommodate, and even soften, the tensions that emerge from contradictions in and between political power and economic power. As the class struggle grates and grinds, gets turbulent, schools—as a set of institutions responsible for maintaining the continuity of social relations, caring for dominant and insurgent ideologies—have to hold these tensions and try to smooth them out.
The ideological struggles in US school districts over the last five years have been intense. Everyone knows about Moms for Liberty, the rightwing backlash to the George Floyd rebellions in the midst of the pandemic, their well-funded and sort of well-organized attacks on what they called ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’. This racist, patriarchal, transphobic ideological formation, underwritten by privatization advocates, have brought these energies to school board meetings, school board elections, and produced gobs of posts, reports, and screeds as part of a rightwing incursion into the schools.
They’ve only been partially successful, with the center-left and unions pushing back mightily and gaining some ground back. But the pressures on schools from our current conjuncture’s contradictions are only mounting with the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, school shootings, social media, and climate catastrophe.
I’ve been interested in how all this ideological froth has come to bear on school finances. What has this meant for school districts materially? One easy hypothesis would be that all this turbulence will hurt schools’ money, but when it comes to seeing exactly how the turbulence hurts schools, it’s not as clear. I got a request to look at the situation in Newberg, Oregon’s school district recently and I think, in this case, we have an example of exactly how all this conjunctural pressure can come to bear on a school district’s material conditions. Also, as we get the steady flow of repulsive appointments to the next Trump administration, we can see in this case a school district-level example of what happens when rabid rightwingers take state power.
Bad numbers in Newberg-Dundee
Last year, Newberg’s district, Newberg-Dundee School District, announced a nearly $4 million budget deficit. Leaders attribute the deficit to increasing special education costs (specifically students with severe disabilities), constituting about half of the deficit. The other half, it turns out, comes from a wrong assumption about the increase of support service costs, which include vehicle maintenance and professional development.
The district is responsible for estimating those costs based on current and past needs. For instance, $1.3 million in transportation costs were under-estimated. That meant, when the time came for the state funding formula to generate grants for the district, the district didn’t budget properly for the correct amounts. This is coming on top of an enrollment decrease, like many districts are facing. Officials say that student counts have decreased by 18%, which is high (Portland, by comparison, only saw a 7% decrease). That reduces their state grants even further.
The acting superintendent Paula Radich has proposed layoffs for about 30 employees, along with reductions in administrative costs, reducing contracts with outside providers, cutting electricity costs. They also want to lease school space to a local university and a dental equipment manufacturer. Hopefully they can get a discount on mouthguards from all the teeth-grinding they’ll be doing.
A problem with the books
I want to focus on that more than $2 million underestimate of support service costs. How’d that happen? Well, the context here is fascinating. In 2021, that rightwing wave descended on Newberg-Dundee. There was a new rightwing school board that got elected. The new leadership prioritized banning LGBTQ+ and Black Lives Matter flags in classrooms and talking a big game about banning books, but, it turns out, they didn’t quite understand how these kinds of policies work. A county judge overturned the ban. Then the sitting superintendent, Joe Morelock, refused to enforce it. The new board fired Morelock and appointed a rightwing superintendent, Stephen Phillips, which began an administrative churn, including “significant turnover among administrators, including its directors of finance and communications as well as the director and coordinator director of special programs."
When you look at Phillips’ record, you might understand why. There have been four separate labor complaints against Phillips that are ongoing, as well as a lawsuit brought by a former student who claims that she alerted the district to having been sexually abused by a teacher when she was 14. The district didn’t do anything about these complaints during Phillips’ tenure.
The people of Newberg didn’t appreciate their new school leaders either, so they voted out the rightwingers in 2023. But when the new, more progressive leadership team (called the Yamhill Group) came into their positions, they found the money was in disarray. The rightwing superintendent, Phillips, had stayed put. He assured the new board the district’s fiscal situation was good and that, while there would be some deficits, they could be covered with savings.
Then earlier this year, Phillips abruptly took medical leave. The board appointed Radich, who’d been a superintendent before, to fill the position. And Radich discovered that the deficits couldn’t be covered by savings. There was a $4 million hole for the school year because of bad assumptions about support costs, as I said, and even more troubling was a nearly $11 million deficit projected for the next school year, which is already underway. This looks like it might reduce the school year by ten days and imperil new science and health curricula that were set to be implemented. The whole situation prompted student walkouts last spring. Meanwhile, the rightwingers are still making noise, suing the progressive leadership for what they call illegal contracts—which are probably just the new leadership trying to fill administrative positions in the wake of the turnover that happened during the rightwing regime.
This situation actually mirrors a kerfuffle-turned-budget crisis in Ann Arbor that I wrote about before, where a politically contested administration made a big budget mistake with a pension contribution expenditure and created a gaping $14 million hole in the next year’s budget, leaving a new acting administration holding the bag for their mistake. In Ann Arbor, the issues were swirling around a ceasefire resolution and decreasing enrollment.
It’s pretty clear in the Newberg-Dundee case that the rightwing takeover of the district’s leadership led to big fiscal mistakes, leaving progressives to clean up the mess, along with a dramatic decrease in enrollments. I’d love to know whether that decrease was more political, a kind of strike rather than a drop. But in case, we can see here that the interest in banning books led to a problem with the money books, the ideological froth clouding the district’s ability to deal with its fiscal needs.