![Reaching out. Christopher Lesh, student at Central Catholic High School, serves ice cream during the event on March 2, 2025, at the Portland waterfront. Central Catholic was just one of the schools that sent student volunteers out to cook, prepare, dish, and serve food. Interact club’s co-president Rachel Gerber, junior, plated the food during the event. “I like how direct the contact is,” Gerber said. “You’re there [and] you’re just doing something good. It’s simple, it’s easy, you can feel good about it.”](https://wlhsnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/interact-1-edited-1200x744.jpg)
Following the announcement of the West Linn-Wilsonville (WLWV) district budget cuts, teachers and administrators of schools across the district organized a walk-in to fight against them.
At 8:10 a.m. on May 1, teachers from each school throughout the WLWV district stood in front of the school, where they would be until the first bell rang at 8:28 a.m. Matt Bell, history teacher and teacher’s union president collectively brought up the idea during a teachers union meeting two weeks ago, with most of the organization being done by Carly Voigt, equity and community organizing chair.
“We’re here about stronger state funding,” Bell said. “Lower state funding has led to teacher layoffs, which will lead to [larger] classes, which will lead to fewer electives. So it’s going to impact staff poorly with larger classes, that’s going to impact students, and so we want to bring more awareness to that. The state budget isn’t due until June 30, so we’re just raising more and more awareness as we go.”
While fighting for the budget cuts, staff are also fighting for a raise in the special education funding cap, which currently sits at 11%, a figure based on the average amount of students receiving services at public schools back in 1991. Over 30 years later, it is now being argued that the cap should increase to 14%.
The funding cap set the statewide budget for public schools, which was estimated that 11% of a school’s population would be entitled to double the funding awarded per student. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), “school districts can apply for a cap waiver, but thousands of students are still left without adequate resources.”
Rachel Ellis, special education teacher and a building representative for the teachers’ union, has been speaking up about the budget cuts to Oregon representatives to voice her concern.
“I attended a town hall meeting at the Tualatin library a couple of weeks ago with some other teachers to talk to two of our representatives and Senator Robert Wagner about their state legislation,” Ellis said. “We all wore our West Linn shirts, and asked questions about what they plan to do to try to fund education, and they talked to us about what they want to do and what some of the obstacles have been. We’ve been out there trying to advocate for all of us.”
Currently, the budget cut plans to remove $15 million from the district budget for the 2025-2026 school year. This will also contribute to the problems schools around the country are facing when trying to fill teacher vacancies.
According to K-12 Dive, 74% of the 1,392 schools that were surveyed from around the nation have been struggling with filling vacancies during the 2024-2025 school year.
While the walk-in was mostly staff, some students participated as well. Kiera Kuehn, sophomore, has a parent working as a paraeducator at Willamette Primary School, and joined the walk-in at both Willamette Primary and West Linn High School.
“I’m just trying to be educated. I’m trying to be aware of what is going on, not just at the local level, but at the state and federal level. [I want to be aware of ] the ripple impacts this trickle down idea of why we’re impacted and how I can speak up,” Kuehn said. “I am planning on attending a school board meeting to talk about funding cuts and also how there are underrepresented programs within our school. For example, with the Science Department, we don’t have a Science Honor Society, despite having honor societies for other departments.”
Kuehn believes that the district budget cuts can affect more than just West Linn and the community, but also the entire district as a whole. She also thinks that it will make connecting with staff harder than before.
“It can shift around connections that have been made between students and teachers, and it can just impact the students, paraeducators, and the teachers who have relied on each other and have built this sort of community,” Kuehn said.
Erin O’Malley, French teacher and a building representative for the teachers’ union, is now the sole teacher for the entire French program after Marguerite Stewart, French teacher, went to the district’s middle schools to teach French there. O’Malley hopes that with this walk-in, they’re able to raise awareness of schools’ low funding.
“It’s to bring more awareness to the importance of funding for schools, and fully funding schools, and especially in our district, so we can hopefully have some more teachers return that may have been laid off to keep our electives and lots of choice for students, and to keep our class sizes lower,” O’Malley said.
During the walk-in, teachers, administrators, and others who were participating wore the color red as a symbol of learning. Improving student learning is the goal in convincing the district to rethink the budget cuts.
“We all care about the students and the teachers, the whole community, and if we want to have a strong school, we need to fully fund it,” Ellis said. “We’re red for Ed, which means ‘ready to teach, ready to learn, and ready to engage.’ We love our schools. We love working here. We love teaching the community and [we want to] fully fund our schools.”
