Oregon schools have some of the shortest school years in the country. And when budgets are cut in the middle of a year, sometimes school boards make those school years even shorter.
Under an executive order issued Thursday, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek wants to stop that.
“We simply cannot backslide on the instructional hours we have,” Kotek said at a press conference announcing the order Thursday morning.
“We don’t have enough of them, and we certainly can’t go backwards.”
Kotek’s order outlines several steps to keep school years intact, even as administrators and school board members face rising costs, insufficient revenue and limited options to balance the budget.
School districts including Portland and Reynolds voted earlier this year to shorten their school years to deal with mid-year budget cuts.
“I know some districts are going to say, ‘You’re asking us to do things we can’t afford,’” Kotek said. “We can’t afford not to stop losing instructional hours.”
“The clear lead to our districts today is we can’t cut any more hours, we have to come up with better solutions within the existing budgets we have.”
Joining Kotek at the press conference was Sarah Pope, executive director for education advocacy group Stand For Children, and Kate Lupton, a Lake Oswego parent of three and graduate of Salem-Keizer Public Schools.
Pope shared data her organization commissioned through the economic consulting firm ECOnorthwest. The report found glaring variability in how much time students spend in schools, district by district.
“Students in the lowest-time districts can receive three fewer school years than those in the highest-time districts,” Pope shared.
Years ago, Lupton spent time as a public school teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. There, she saw differences. For instance, she couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving because she had to work the first few days of that week. In her children’s school district, students have the whole week off.
Kotek, Pope, and Lupton all said Thursday’s order is just the beginning of an effort to change Oregon’s short school year.
“That is something we can fix, that is something we can reach for,” Lupton said. “With this executive order, we have the opportunity to take that first step towards 180 instructional days for all public school students, and we can stop reducing our already-short school year.”
The governor’s order prohibits the Oregon Department of Education from issuing “waivers” of instructional time requirements — which ODE has routinely approved over the years when school districts in difficult financial situations have requested them.
For the 2024-2025 school year, the last year for which ODE has school year district reports, four school districts reported not meeting instructional time requirements: Portland Public Schools, David Douglas School District, Falls City School District and Greater Albany Public Schools. Portland and Great Albany did not meet requirements due to teacher strikes; David Douglas fell short due to weather-related closures, and Falls City due to furlough days.
Kotek is calling on school districts that have already approved instructional-time reductions below minimum requirements to restore the time by the start of the 2027-28 school year.
Kotek’s order also seeks two broader changes to instructional time guidelines. One would no longer count certain uses of time as “instruction.” Under current state regulations, schools can include “non-classroom activities” as instructional time, including time teachers spend receiving professional development and meetings they have with parents. The order spurs the State Board of Education to “immediately prioritize policies that prevent any further reductions in student instructional time due to budget or operational pressures.”
Order raises questions, evolves at state board meeting
The Oregon State Board of Education already had a packed agenda ahead of Thursday’s executive order, including a first reading of the new statewide performance targets for attendance, test scores and graduation rates.
Kotek’s executive order drew a strong reaction as the board was tasked with creating rules to implement the order.
“We’ve made this choice as a state to have lower instructional hours. We’ve allowed, as a state, for districts to count this,” said Becky Tymchuk, school board advisor to the state board.
“How in the last week did this become an emergency?”
“When we look at where we are per the rankings we’ve discussed and all the hard work districts are doing, we need to pull each and every lever we can to start moving the needle,” said ODE director Charlene Williams, responding to Tymchuk.
Tymchuk’s questions were answered with more questions from her fellow board members.
“School districts have been sounding the alarm for a very long time, with little action from the legislature,” said state board vice chair Shimiko Montgomery, sharing a concern that this order will lead to more staff layoffs.
“What are the levers for us, as a state board, to reduce the harm this will cause? And if we pass this, how exactly will ODE be helping local districts who are out of options without increasing funding?”
Echoing Montgomery’s concerns was the State Board of Education member who represents local superintendents — La Grande Superintendent George Mendoza.
“Implementing this executive order will create more challenges than solutions without the resources,” Mendoza said.
Mid-meeting, there were updates made to the state board’s temporary rules codifying the order, with two contentious parts of Kotek’s order crossed out — for now. The crossed-out sections relate to outside-of-classroom time that school districts have been able to count toward instructional time requirements.
Kotek wants to prohibit school districts from what’s been an accepted practice of using up to 30 hours of teacher professional development and 30 hours of parent-teacher conferences as part of a district’s calculation of instructional time. ODE Deputy Director of Academics Candice Castillo said those rules will be a part of the “regular engagement” process, similar to how permanent rules come to the board.
The state board approved rules codifying the other parts of Kotek’s executive order, including a requirement for ODE to track and publish every district’s instructional time annually.
After more questions and comments, the board approved rules, but not before Tymchuk spoke again about a lack of strategy in Oregon’s education policy.
“Educational policy in this state needs to be a much bigger vision, it needs to be urgent, it needs to be well thought-out,” Tymchuk said.
“We are putting together a patchwork quilt, and to be putting together educational policies through emergency orders ... I absolutely, as a school board member, agree with the result. I do not agree with the methodology.”
Tymchuk said the state needs to work more collaboratively at state and local levels to improve educational outcomes and be more transparent.
“If we really want to make a difference ... we have to be smarter, we have to do this better,“ Tymchuk said.
Responding to the order Thursday, the members of the Portland Public Schools board sent a letter to the state board with concerns. In the letter, the board mentioned the four furlough days that PPS teachers are taking to prevent laying off 200 teachers.
“Mandating the recovery of lost instructional time without new funding will necessitate even deeper cuts to essential student services like access to mental and behavioral health care — and the dedicated staff that provide them,” the board members wrote.
Teachers union, administrators group push back on order
The executive order appears to have taken some leading education organizations by surprise, including the powerful statewide teachers union. The president of the Oregon Education Association, Enrique Farrera, said the union agrees with the goal of increasing instructional time for students. But he argued in a statement that the governor’s order is the wrong approach.
“Instructional time is what public schools are all about,” Farrera said. “OEA members are asking for more time; leaders are just not funding it.”
School funding is largely set by the Oregon Legislature. School superintendents propose spending plans, with the approval of local school boards, based on state funding levels. Local budget decisions are often approved in the preceding spring for the coming school year. Making mid-year budget cuts, as some school districts have done this year, is unusual — and school leaders often have few options about how to make them.
“We are alarmed that Governor Kotek, and the State Board under her direction, are ramming through a major policy decision this late in the school year, with no resources to support it and no public process to speak of,” Farrera said. “OEA is currently evaluating the language in the executive order, as are many of our partners. If needed, we will use any tool we have to challenge this order.”
Kotek’s order also raised concerns with the statewide organization that represents school executives. The Coalition of Oregon School Administrators pointed out that 85% of school spending goes into people and that the time educators spend in classrooms is part of collective bargaining agreements. As a result, changes to instructional time will have implications for funding and employee contracts.
In a statement in response to the executive order, COSA saw an “opportunity to work together”.
“The Governor’s Executive Order introduces an additional challenge for districts already navigating declining enrollment, rising [public employee retirement] obligations, increasing operational costs, and the financial pressures facing educators themselves,” COSA executive director Krista Parent said in a statement released Thursday. “While we share the goal of protecting and expanding instructional time, we believe that a mandated approach at this moment is unlikely to produce the meaningful, sustainable change Oregon students deserve.”
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.