With Regret, I Make The Motion

Ashland School Board · May 14, 2026 · about 2h 10m · five directors present · no public comment.

The insurance committee had finished its own meeting ninety minutes before it walked into this one. Twelve people — four certified staff, four classified, four from the district office — had spent four months turning over every stone, and the motion they brought, the committee’s actuary told the board, “started with the words with regret.”

On October 1, Ashland School District stops running its own health plan.

Eighteen Years

The history, as presented by Kelly Grebinski, a consulting actuary who has worked with the district since 2011:

The district has been self-funded since OEBB — the state’s school employee benefit board — began, around 2008. Self-funded means the district is the insurer. It holds the risk, pays the claims directly out of its own money, and buys a stop-loss policy only against catastrophic cases. Fifteen Oregon districts were exempt from joining the state pool in 2008 on the strength of already doing this, and were required to prove every two years that they delivered equal or better benefits at lower cost, or be moved into OEBB automatically.

Ashland passed that test for years. It went eight consecutive years without a benefit change or a rate increase. Grebinski’s firm has used it as the example it shows other clients: “if you wanna know what a well-managed, wellness, engaged, informed, educated members” plan looks like, this is the one. Vendors who presented to the committee, he said, followed up afterward to ask what exactly was going on in that room, “because we’ve never been asked such tough questions.”

The comparability test itself was abolished about eight years ago — in part, Grebinski said, because OEBB “didn’t want to hear us talk about how much better we were at managing benefits.” His firm kept running it privately as a check. In 2025 Ashland was very close. In 2026 it was slightly worse. Projected into 2027, the district would not pass.

The reason is not mismanagement. It is that OEBB has statutory advantages Ashland does not — caps on what it pays hospitals and providers, limits on its own premium increases — and that medical costs since 2020 have gone up in a way that a pool the size of one small district cannot absorb. This is the same mechanism the interim business manager described to this board in February, when she said a healthy balance in the fund would be $1.5 million and she expected $400,000, if the district was lucky.

What Replaces It

Not a straight move into OEBB’s standard offering. The district will buy a higher-deductible plan with a much lower premium, then fund a health reimbursement arrangement that buys the deductible and out-of-pocket exposure back down — so it looks and behaves to employees more like the plan they have. The HRA is budgeted at about $700,000 for the first year and will be administered by a separate vendor, not by OEBB.

The numbers, as stated:

• Projected saving in 2027 against what the self-funded plan would have cost: more than $3 million.
• One-time cost of closing the plan — claims incurred before September 30 but paid after, plus administration and stop-loss run-out: about $1.5 million, falling within roughly four months of termination.
• Employee monthly contributions: projected down across all four bargaining groups.

Dental, vision, life and disability move over as well, having been found as rich or richer at comparable or lower cost.

What the district gives up is control. Grebinski was direct about it: “We will not have the same authority to make decisions around plan members if they get in a bind, to look at our benefits and review them and tailor them however we want to.”

The committee members have been at this a long time. One has served nine years. Another found minutes with her name on them from 2009. Neither was asked to justify the decision and neither tried to; they credited their consultants and said the collaboration is why they could ask for a comparison and have it the next week.

There was no vote. The report was informational. The plan closes on schedule.

The Assessment, Again

In January the superintendent told this board that IXL — the assessment Ashland adopted last spring and implemented this year, on a three-year contract — had not made the state’s proposed list under Senate Bill 141, and that the district would submit public comment.

The comment did not work. On May 14 the assistant superintendent recommended abandoning IXL and returning to i-Ready, and the board approved it.

The sequence, since it is now complete:

Last spring the district switched away from i-Ready, primarily to save money and partly for better in-year information. i-Ready had cost between $12 and $14 per student. IXL came in around $39,000 a year for both subjects. The board adopted it for K–10 and staff spent this year implementing it.

SB 141 then required interim assessments statewide, three times a year, from an approved list of four: i-Ready, STAR, MAP, and the Smarter Balanced interims. Smarter Balanced does not go below third grade, so it cannot track a K–10 cohort. The committee looked at STAR and MAP and was not interested. That leaves i-Ready — the product the district left.

The consolation is real: ESDs negotiated consortium pricing, and i-Ready now comes in at $6.60 per student per subject, roughly $26,000 a year for about 2,000 licenses. That is cheaper than IXL. The IXL contract can be exited. Teachers keep IXL’s learning paths, fed by i-Ready data.

Districts were offered a one-year grace period. Ashland declined it, reasoning that the less time since it last used i-Ready, the cheaper the retraining.

The cost is not in dollars. It is that Ashland has now changed its measuring stick twice in two years. Every principal who presented to this board since January has had to explain that their fall baseline is not comparable to anything — Bellevue in January, Walker in March, the high school this evening with a tenth-grade data point representing exactly one student. That is two years of a growth record the district cannot read straight, and it was imposed from Salem after Ashland had already paid for the switch.

The state will reimburse some of the cost. Nobody knows how much. The assistant superintendent’s summary — “not a completely unfunded mandate” — is the most qualified endorsement in the transcript.

The Superintendent’s Contract

The board read its annual evaluation summary into the record. It finds “strong and effective leadership during a critical period of financial and organizational challenge,” credits work on stabilizing finances, transparency and community engagement, and observes “meaningful improvements in trust, culture, and communication.”

It also contains the sentence that tells you what the board thinks is unfinished: “While much of the superintendent’s focus has necessarily been on fiscal and operational priorities, foundational work is underway to support future gains in instructional leadership and academic outcomes.”

The contract was extended by one year, to three. A director asked, for transparency, what changed. Salary moves at the same rate as administrators; the one substantive addition is an 8 percent tax-sheltered annuity, which the original contract provided for on positive performance.

Ashland High School

Principal Francisco Lopez and two colleagues presented, with two students, in 15 minutes and 33 slides.

The academic numbers are the best in this file all year. Smarter Balanced English language arts proficiency has gone from 39 percent to 71 percent in three years. Within it, students above grade-level standard in reading went from 20 to 34 percent while those below fell from 31 to 9; in writing, above-standard went from 12 to 30. Science moved from 44 to 52 percent proficient, and the far-below group was cut from about 40 percent to about 22. Mathematics held roughly steady and dipped last year against a newly aligned test.

Lopez gave the humanities department the credit.

On the survey side, belonging sits in the 73rd percentile and the principal attributes much of it to the school’s affinity groups — a student on the panel described them as “small but mighty,” ten to fifteen members at the largest. The two lowest themes are academic challenge and college and career readiness, the latter in the 19th percentile.

Lopez’s answer on that is worth keeping, because it is an honest description of a measurement problem rather than a defence: the score rises steadily by grade, lowest in ninth, highest closest to graduation. “How do you know if you’re ready for something that you never did?” A director called it “a question design flaw to ask a ninth grader if they’re ready to go to college,” which it partly is — and the Oregon average line on the same chart is still above Ashland’s.

One incidental fact, offered while explaining that a shift to the standard response protocol turned crisis drills “from being scared to being prepared”: the high school can evacuate its buildings, crossing streets, in 55 seconds. They have had more fire drills this year than anticipated.

Odds

Officer Michael Bates was named the National Association of School Resource Officers’ exceptional service award winner for Region 9 — Alaska, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — and the district’s SRO programme will be recognised nationally in June, in its second year. NASRO recommends one officer per thousand students; Ashland’s ratio is worse than that, which is why Bates’s report leans on partnerships with Ashland Fire and Rescue and the State Fire Marshal. One goal from last year was abandoned: tracking engagement data proved impractical, because when a principal needs him they call his phone rather than dispatch, and nothing gets logged. The district has expressed interest in a second position; the police department cannot staff one yet.

Finance: ending fund balance projected at $3.1 million, a little over 7 percent, and the business manager said she is being deliberately conservative. The May catch-up payment from the state will be $80,000 to $100,000, against the $300,000 she originally projected, because ODE changed how it allocates high-cost disability funding. Her explanation of why is the most quietly damning account of state school finance yet recorded here: districts misreport their estimates to time their own cash flow, so ODE keeps inventing averaging models to correct for it, and everyone else’s numbers move. “We just ride the wave.”

The district received a $350,000 summer learning grant over three years, aimed at about 350 students, literacy first, running August 3 to 21, with ScienceWorks and the YMCA as partners.

Four student board representatives were confirmed for 2026–27: Tobias Pugh and Leah Lynette as primaries, Sylvia Fox and Thea Vogel as alternates. A director added a letter of support for the city’s Opportunity Zone 2.0 application to the agenda under new business.

The Docket

The budget committee meets Wednesday, May 20, 6:30, district office, and again Wednesday, May 27. That second meeting is where the levy contingency lands: the 2026–27 budget was built assuming the levy passes, with the schedule of reductions held separately.

The levy is on the ballot May 19 — five days after this meeting, and the day before the budget committee first sits.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the May 14, 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. Insurance, assessment and financial figures are as stated by presenters in open session; the insurance committee’s report was informational and required no vote. Runtime is approximate, measured from the first to the last caption timestamp.