The Salem-Keizer School District is launching an effort to persuade lawmakers and the Oregon Department of Education to correct what the district’s leaders believe is a systemic, decades-long undercount of more than 100,000 of the state’s poorest students. At stake is at least $290 million that they say districts are due to help students from low-income families. The school district, via its law firm, commissioned an analysis of Oregon’s funding formula. They found a correlation between underfunding of high-poverty school districts and academic outcomes for students of color, a protected class under Oregon law. The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained portions of Salem-Keizer’s school funding and outcomes model through a public records request. It found that the state’s longstanding decision to rely fully on census data to count how many of its public school students live at or below the poverty line has resulted in outdated and imprecise data, even though state officials have a far more accurate dataset at their fingertips.
The Salem-Keizer School District Disputes State Counting
