Jane Vaughan: We’re here to talk about school funding in Oregon and how the state government calculates how much money each district gets. So first, can you tell me a little bit about how that works? For example, certain groups receive more money.
Julia Silverman: This is a question that I get all the time, so I’ll try to make it digestible. Essentially, Oregon guarantees a base amount of per pupil funding, and that is just for your straight ahead kid. Take my son, who is a Portland Public School student. He does not have special needs, he does not speak English as a second language. He’s white, and he is from a financially stable enough family, so he gets the base amount of funding, or rather, his school does.
Now we know that it costs more to fully educate kids who do fall into some of those groups. Kids who have special needs, for example, need more services. They might need speech-language pathologists or dyslexia specialists, and support. So that costs more, so there’s an extra amount of funding given for them. The same for kids who are learning to speak English. They require a different level of focus and attention than maybe my son does. So that’s called weighting, and it means that, depending on where they fall in a different category, they get an additional weight of funding…