# With Regret, I Make The Motion

*Civic Beat · May 18, 2026 · by Alan Decault*

> After eighteen years, Ashland School District is giving up the self-funded health plan that once went eight consecutive years without a rate increase. It will save more than $3 million and cost $1.5 million to close. Also: the assessment the district adopted last spring is being abandoned because Salem left it off a list.

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**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.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/civic-beat/2026-05-18-with-regret-i-make-the-motion