Feb. 18, 2026 | Abbi Duhart | News Editor
With schools in Oregon continually facing budget cuts, the Salem-Keizer school district faces a $23 million budget deficit due to declining enrollment. Currently, the school district has 37,208 students enrolled, which is a 4,900 student decrease since 2018, with further decline anticipated over the next couple of years.
In explanation, Superintendent Andrea Castañeda said, “What it comes down to is mostly that people are having fewer babies than they once did and as those smaller number of babies hit kindergarten, it just starts squeezing our enrollment down and down and moves to the grades.”
Castañeda has discussed the urgent need to stabilize the school district’s finances, but efforts to do so have been difficult with the continually declining enrollment in public schools. Castañeda has also expressed her growing concerns with the lack of finances the state legislature has provided, emphasizing that the amount is not enough to support schools.
Salem-Keizer district leaders plan to cut around $14 million from schools in the area. While cuts are meant to align with projected enrollment for the coming school year in order to keep student-teacher ratios where they should be, cuts to school staff are also being considered in order to decrease salary expenses. As of now, it is expected that anywhere up to 129 school district jobs could be removed for the next academic year.
More specifically, about $9 million is planned to be cut from administrative offices, including classified, licensed and administrative staff, technology equipment and maintenance supplies. Additionally, the cuts plan to reduce the number of blended classrooms — classrooms that combine two grade levels, such as fourth-graders and fifth-graders — in order to reduce expenses and improve elementary literacy rate and teaching conditions. Teachers are also facing possible mid-year revenue reductions.
In explanation of the many cuts, Castañeda said, “Oregon school districts are responding to a very difficult combination of things. We’ve got declining enrollment, escalating costs and a faltering Oregon economy upon which school districts rely. We cannot undo or change some of those pressures, so we have to respond to them.”
With concerns about the large number of budget cuts, many district administrators are urging Oregon to tap into revenues purposefully saved, such as the Education Stability Fund containing $1.2 billion, which was last used in 2021.
The amount of budget cuts and final decisions on what is expendable is still up in the air. Final projections and decisions are expected in April of this year.
Contact the author at howlnews@wou.edu
