The Newberg School District board of directors put the troubled Willamette Education Special District on notice Tuesday night: At the end of the school year, the local school district will part company with the ESD.

The notice, which the board had to approve by Nov. 1, is the first step in a multi-month process for Newberg to severe most ties with WESD.

By next year the local district intends to only purchase a handful of services from WESD, because it can provide the others in-house at drastically lower prices, superintendent Paula Radich told the board.

Newberg is joining the Salem-Keizer and McMinnville school districts in choosing to leave. Silver Falls postponed a planned vote but is
expected to consider a notice before the Nov. 1 deadline, as are the rest of the districts within the WESD service area.

ESDs were created to provide services that can be onerous for a single district, such as some special education programs where a district might only need an employee for a few hours a week and recruiting someone with such highly specialized skills might not be feasible.
Newberg plans to continue to purchase some services from WESD, including some data warehousing services, a therapeutic intervention coach and software to manage student information. Other services could be purchased as well if the cost analysis is favorable to WESD, Radich told the board.

The same evening, the board approved purchasing a new financial management software to replace the software the school district has been buying from WESD. The license and implementation cost is $152,811 and the annual cost for Northwest Regional ESD to host it is $3,000. Newberg piggy-backed on an existing contract to save money. The annual fee per ADMw (a statistical way to represent students that is a common way services are billed to school districts), is $5.49, instead of the $9 WESD was charging.

The cost of WESD services has been a recurring point of contention for Newberg’s staff and board of directors.

“One of the reasons I recommended leaving is that costs are prohibitive,” Radich told the board. “If we can broker services to other districts for $2,000 to $3,000 less per student, why can’t they?”

Newberg started offering its own lifeskills program for severely disabled students last year and saved $140,000 in the process.
While Newberg is expecting to save money by leaving the ESD, some of the practices that have rankled the board in the past will continue. WESD will retain 10 percent of the funding the state funnels through the ESD on Newberg’s behalf and both Radich and board chairwoman Melinda VanBossuyt have been told that districts that leave the ESD will be billed at higher rates for the services they purchase than districts that remain.

“It is puzzling why it would cost more,” Radich told the board.
VanBossuyt was more pointed in her remarks. “It’s punitive and it’s wrong,” she said, adding that it simply smacked of the behavior that caused the district to want to leave WESD in the first place. “I think the Legislature needs to know that.”

By Laurent Bonczijk, Newberg Graphic