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Portland Public Schools reports November finances near plan; committee weighs supply-allocation caps
Summary
Finance staff told the committee November revenues and expenditures were roughly in line with expectations, flagged $600,000 in grant revenue still pending booking, and presented supply-allocation scenarios that would cap school-level swings at ±5% or ±10%; committee members asked for additional scenarios and cautioned against reducing any school's supply budget.
Lisa Beck, Portland Public Schools finance director, told the Finance, Personnel and Operations Committee on Dec. 15 that the district’s November financials (five months into fiscal 2026) showed revenues at 39.5% of the year and general-fund expenditures at 39.9%.
"If revenues were to be evenly received across the year, that would mean we would be at 41.7%, and we're at 39.5," Beck said, noting some grant revenue for November remains in approvals and an additional roughly $600,000 is expected to be booked to November. Beck also said the district received an unbudgeted $94,959 from the Portland Housing Authority for student homelessness prevention and reported $1.2 million in Title carryover among a total of $2.0 million rolled into FY26.
Beck outlined how the district modeled a district-level 2% placeholder increase for non-personnel school supply budgets and distributed that amount using a formula of 75% by total enrollment and 25% by counts of special education, multilingual and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. She said the modeling showed large swings for some schools without a cap and that the staff presented capped scenarios at ±5% and ±10% to moderate changes.
"For every 1% we increase the school supply budget, it adds about $9,205 to our proposed budget," Beck said, framing the options for committee consideration.
Board members pressed staff for further scenarios and more school-level requests. Board member Auberman said she would prefer a 10% increase across the board but worried about reductions for some schools, and several members favored the 5% cap as offering the least negative impact. Committee members also requested that staff produce additional runs (for example, raising the district placeholder from 2% to 3% or testing intermediate caps such as 7%) and said they wanted to see the schools’ submitted requests when staff compiles them.
Beck said the enrollment numbers appear in the appendix of the presentation and that staff will return with more scenarios in January so the committee can recommend a prioritized approach to the full board.
Next steps: staff will model the requested scenarios and present a refined package at the Jan. 12 committee meeting ahead of a full-board vote planned later in January.
