Portland Public Schools allocated more than $2 million in coronavirus relief funds over the past two years to ensure its class sizes did not increase, and now, the city’s teachers union is striking over class sizes.
The funds, which were allocated to the district through the American Rescue Plan Act signed by President Joe Biden in the early days of his administration, were spent during the last two school years before the Portland Teachers Association launched its first-ever strike to demand higher pay and smaller class sizes.
EXISTING HOME SALES FALL TO LOWEST LEVEL SINCE 2010 THANKS TO HIGH MORTGAGE RATES
According to publicly available information, Portland Public Schools was granted $73,869,716.23 in COVID-19 relief funds through the American Rescue Plan, of which $70,472,382.63 was budgeted by the district. This included reserving $852,068.44 for the 2021-2022 school year and $2,155,620.44 for the 2022-2023 school year for the purpose of maintaining class sizes.
The funds from the legislation also included $13,523,355 allocated for “Instructional Professional Development,” $1.086 million for “high dosage tutoring,” and $9.4 million for summer school. On its website, the school district said it had allocated $26 million of its total grant toward addressing learning loss but listed “racial equity” as a problem of learning loss.
Now, the Portland Association of Teachers is demanding that the school district commit to harder caps on class sizes as the union launched its strike at the beginning of the month. The union argues that teachers have had to contend with increasingly larger class sizes, even as the number of students in the district has declined.
In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment in the district has dropped from 49,550 students in the 2018-2019 school year, the last pre-pandemic school year, to 44,771 for the 2023-2024 school year. The district had 3,667 teachers in 2018, while the Portland Association of Teachers reportedly had 3,587 members in the 2023-2024 school year. There are also 495 nonrepresented district employees, which could include teachers who have not joined the union.
The strike began on Nov. 2, and since then, students have been out of school, and the strike has yet to end. Portland Public School officials say the price tag of the union’s demands exceeds $200 million, funds the district says do not exist.
With so many missed school days, the union and the district have now begun negotiating how to make up the missed days once classes resume. Students could lose a week off their winter break, and classes could extend later into the summer under the main proposal under consideration.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
On Monday, it appeared as though there might be a breakthrough in negotiations, but reports later indicated that the district’s proposal on class sizes was a “nonstarter” for the union.
The rejection came hours after the school board rejected a settlement that would have allowed parents to be a part of “class size committees” at schools, the Oregonian reported. The district said that the proposal would violate student privacy laws because parents on the committee would require access to the private information of other people’s children.
