Eighty-Eight Percent

Ashland School Board · March 12, 2026 · 1h 30m · five directors and two student representatives present.

The March meeting was the first since February 22, when two Ashland High School students died and three others were injured. The superintendent closed his report on it, and this file will report only what he said, because the rest belongs to the families.

He thanked the high school leadership team, who came in on a Sunday, called staff members personally, and built a crisis response plan before Monday morning. He noted, correctly, that “there’s no amount of preparation that can truly prepare a community for such a loss.” He said mental health supports at the high school will continue “for as long as they’re needed.” He thanked everyone who came to the vigil.

Every director mentioned the vigil in their own report. One attended “not just as a board member, but as an affected community member.” The student representative’s report began: “Obviously AHS has had a very challenging last few weeks.”

Some of the business below is small. It is written down anyway, because the budget year does not pause and the levy is on the ballot in May.

The Levy, In Numbers

The Youth Activities and Academics Levy — everyone calls it the YAAL and nobody says it the same way twice, the superintendent included — goes to voters on May 19 as a replacement. He said, accurately, that as superintendent he cannot campaign, only supply facts. He then supplied the best set of facts anyone has put on this record.

First, where the levy money goes:

• 34.78% athletics and activities
• 22% fine arts — band, theater, orchestra, choir
• 19% classroom instruction
• 15% world languages
• 8% counseling and mental health

That is the ordinary way to present it and it undersells the stakes. The superintendent then turned the question around, which is the part worth keeping, and asked what share of each of those programs the levy carries:

• Athletics and fine arts: 88 percent levy-funded. Twelve percent general fund.
• World languages: 75 percent.
• Counseling and mental health: 24 percent.
• Classroom instruction: 4 percent.

Read the second list against the first. The levy is not a supplement spread thinly across the district. It is very nearly the entire budget for everything that happens outside a core academic course. If it fails, band, theater, orchestra, choir and every sport lose roughly seven of every eight dollars, and Spanish loses three of four.

Set that beside what the February meeting established about Ashland Middle School, which has already lost a band section, an orchestra section, a PE section and its full-time Spanish teacher to enrollment decline, with the levy in place.

This desk does not tell anyone how to vote. It does insist that a voter be able to find the number, and until March 12 the number was not anywhere a voter could find it.

The Finance Report

Sherry Ely, the interim business manager, reported by Zoom, lost her screen share partway through, and delivered the rest from memory while a staffer drove the slides. It went fine, which says something about how well she knows the document.

Two reductions, both real, both already booked.

The state school fund is down about $250,000 for the current year. A director asked whether that was a projection. It is not: “that was an actual reduction that we’re going to see in our funding for this current school year.” Two causes, neither of them Ashland’s doing — the routine January-to-June ADMw trend-down that ODE applies to every district, and a reconciliation ODE ran in February after other districts submitted corrected property tax and transportation data. Ashland’s funding moved because someone else’s paperwork did.

Title I is down 8 percent for 2026–27, about $54,000 out of a total just under $700,000, because the federal government’s annual recalculation found Ashland’s poverty rate lower than the year before.

A director asked the right question about that, and it went unanswered: “Well, is that real, or did they just change the bar?”

Ely could not say, and was candid about why: “they don’t show us the numbers that they’re working with. They’re just giving us kind of a narrative about it.” She undertook to forward the email and seek the calculation. The superintendent undertook to ask at his state meeting the next day.

So the position is that a school district is losing $54,000 on the strength of a finding about its own community that it is not permitted to see, and neither the finance office nor the superintendent can tell the board whether the finding is true. That is not a scandal. It is a description of how federal formula funding works, which is arguably worse.

Against those, the ending fund balance still projects above $3 million, the appropriation compliance report is clean, and Ely introduced a cash flow report — new this month, showing every fund and every bank balance, actuals through February and projections to year end. Four of the five directors thanked her for it by name. It is the second month running that this board has been handed a document it did not previously have, and both times somebody said out loud that it helps them do their job. Worth noting in a district whose auditor flagged document retention in January.

The School Presentation: Walker

Principal Jamie Strawbridge and counselor Brooke Thompson presented. Walker has 219 students, blended across three grade bands — three K–1 classes, three 2–3, three 4–5 — and a YMCA preschool operating inside the building, a partnership the principal uses herself and would like to expand.

Language arts state testing last year: 79 percent proficient or above. On the new IXL assessment, 44 percent in fall, 55 by the end of January. Math: 42 in fall, 54 in winter. Attendance is at 76 percent regular attenders against a 79 percent goal, after what she called “about two weeks of flu apocalypse” — the same illness that cost the middle school six points.

One number on that slide deserves to be lifted out and looked at. Walker’s environment goal is to raise the share of students reporting a sense of belonging at school from 29 percent to 50 percent.

Twenty-nine. That figure passed without comment, in a presentation that was otherwise cheerful and deserved to be — the school has just come through a near-total rebuild, three fifth graders came to the podium to say the new playground is better than the old one, and the behavior team has been reorganized around what is going right rather than what is going wrong, which now includes a whole-school reward day the children earn collectively and which the principal reports is among the best-attended days of the year.

A school can be doing everything in that paragraph and still have 29 percent of its students say they belong there. Both facts were in the same slide deck.

Curriculum

The science committee will recommend staying with Amplify for K–8 rather than adopting something new, and revisiting in 2028 when a revised edition arrives. The committee’s reasoning was partly curriculum fatigue — “curriculum fatigue is real,” said the committee lead, in a district that changed its assessment system this year and may be made to change it again — and partly that a known disappointment is easier to plan around than an unknown one.

Middle school teachers asked the publisher for printed books. The answer was no, and the reason was cost: at that grade level there is more text, and the readers are expensive. Elementary keeps its hard copies. So the district’s own committee, which has said in two consecutive meetings that it wants “actual hard copies of books in the hands of kids,” will get them for the younger students and not the older ones, on a publisher’s margin.

Health: the Great Body Shop for K–8, Live Well for 9–12, chosen from what the committee described as very few options. Materials go on display at the district office over spring break and into early April. A director asked how the public finds out, and how many ever come. The honest answer was that math and language arts draw a crowd and science draws “a trickle.”

Odds

The legislative short session ended. For schools, the headline is what did not happen: the overhaul of K–12 funding never reached the floor. SB 1581, which would have required every district to serve meals to all students, also failed — Ashland already does it as a federal community eligibility site, so nothing changes here, but nothing is locked in either.

What passed: SB 1507, disconnecting parts of Oregon tax policy from the federal code, which preserved school funding at a level a director described as “still a cut because costs go up.” SB 1538, barring discrimination in education based on immigration or citizenship status, effective July 1. HB 4149, writing federal McKinney-Vento protections for homeless students into state law. And HB 4154, which from next school year requires ODE to calculate and publish regular attendance and chronic absence figures quarterly — which will make the numbers in these recaps public four times a year instead of whenever a principal volunteers them.

The OSEA representative used part of his report to speak about US strikes on a school in Iran, which he said killed about 175 students and educators, and to note that Ashland High School has students with family in the region. He asked the community to contact its representatives. Reported here as testimony, which is what it was.

The 2026–27 calendar was adopted at draft seven. School starts August 31; conferences move to October 29–30 and February 11–12, answering the complaint every building in the district lodged in February; the two days before Thanksgiving return to instruction; last day June 11, half day.

Inter-district transfers for 2026–27: 10 slots in per grade, none out, except no incoming twelfth graders, because a senior year at a new school lowers the odds of graduating. Ashland took 21 transfers in this year and 47 the year before; the drop is because a neighboring district stopped letting students leave. California students are not eligible except as tuition-paying.

Susan Hollinsworth stays another year as Helman’s interim principal. The transformation timeline was published to every school website the following day.

The Docket

No work session in March — the one listed for March 19 was cancelled. Next regular meeting Thursday, April 9, 6:30, City Council chambers.

Due: the science and health curriculum recommendations return for adoption in April, so materials can be ordered before August. Staffing proposals from every principal and department director are now in and under review against the budget. Bargaining with the licensed union is under way; the classified union follows.

And on May 19, the levy that pays 88 percent of the athletics and fine arts budget.

The meeting closed in executive session under ORS 192.660(2)(i). No decisions are made there and none were reported.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the March 12, 2026 Ashland School Board regular session. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech, with bracketed interpolations where the repair is interpretive; names are attached only where the chair’s own words or a speaker’s self-identification confirm them. Levy allocations, enrollment and financial figures are as stated by staff in open session. Statements by union representatives are reported as testimony. The events of February 22 are described only as the superintendent described them in open session.