Parents and teachers sought answers from Portland Public Schools officials at community forums this week meant to provide an opportunity to offer feedback about the district’s preliminary proposals to cut $50 million from the 2026-2027 budget.
But at this early stage of the process — the final budget won’t be approved by the school board until June — there wasn’t much concrete information to be found.
The forums were a preview of the complicated dynamic likely to unfold over the next several months in Portland as plans for cuts — which represent about 5% of the district’s overall operating budget — firm up. Preliminary plans call for a reduction of 288 employees, including 180 fewer employees in the district’s 81 school buildings and 108 fewer staff members in its central office, many of whom juggle assignments in multiple schools.
There is no single factor underlying the perpetually tight budgets, but contributors include enrollment losses, rising costs of special education and ever more complex student behavior needs, spiking payments to the state’s public employee retirement system and the price of labor to keep pace with inflation.
At Thursday night’s forum at Cleveland High, a teacher at Abernethy Elementary School asked whether the district would be providing training for teachers who will be asked to take on combined first and second grade classrooms for the first time, part of a strategy to save $6.8 million by blending underenrolled grade levels, eliminating as many as 43 jobs in the process.
In practice, that means teachers will be leading larger classes, in addition to two separate grades. At Cleveland, district officials could not yet say what the “cut-off number” would be to trigger a classroom blend.
A teacher from Atkinson Elementary School asked whether the district planned more support in the future for third graders emerging from blended classrooms into a pivotal year, in which they are expected to transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
And another elementary school teacher said she was skeptical of the district’s plans to spend $1.4 million for “lunch and recess support,” while simultaneously making cuts to educators and support staff. Such jobs — typically low-paying and lasting just an hour or two in the middle of the day — are hard to fill, she pointed out, and require the skill to be able to deftly balance student behavior outbursts and social dynamics.
Several parents noted the district’s plans to build in some flexibility by funding a floating staff member at each building and allowing principals to determine what position was most needed. One parent asked whether that staff member could wind up being a classroom teacher, as opposed to a schoolwide position, like a reading interventionist, while others urged that positions for social workers, school counselors and other behavioral health specialists be protected.
Angela Kelly, a Franklin High School parent, said she’d seen her child’s school this year invest in teams to combat high levels of absenteeism among students, and said their efforts are succeeding.
“Kids are coming to school because of them. How can we lose those programs?” Kelly asked. “Having less counselors, or even less help with languages? I can’t fathom it.”
One father, from Creston Elementary, asked Renard Adams, the district’s chief accountability and equity officer, whether there was any way for parents to help fund staff members at their children’s school, in order to make up for some of the cuts. That option was off the table, Adams said, after a previous school board decision to shift to a district-wide foundation model, instead of allowing individual schools to raise and spend money internally.
Adams did provide some clarity for families looking for further explanations of the district’s preliminary proposals. For example, he said, a proposal to “consolidate and optimize non-mandated bus routes” to save nearly $3 million means it is likely that transportation could shift for non-neighborhood choice schools, like language immersion programs.
Karl Logan, a senior director of schools, fielded one of the thorniest questions of the night, this time from an Abernethy Elementary school parent, who noted that 2026-2027 will be the third year in a row that Portland Public Schools has faced multi-million dollar budget cuts. Would it happen again for 2027-2028, she wanted to know?
Logan said the answer depended on a number of outside factors, from state revenue to inflation, and was unknowable, at least for now.
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