The PPS budget is two documents of over 200 pages — which are impossible to explain quickly.
But at the end of the day, one thing remains clear. Students are the product.
Bryan Smith, the Portland Association of Teachers representative for Benson explains how children are, in a way, commodities. “It’s not like [Portland Public Schools] buying raw materials, paying their labor, and then selling it and making money. They get money from the state, and then they allocate that money to whatever it is they allocate it to [….] Because they don’t make anything they don’t buy any raw materials. Raw materials. Just walk in the door at age five or six. And then we work on them till age eighteen and then off they go.”
A school’s budget is dependent on the amount of students who attend. Principal Curtis Wilson shared that, “each school is allocated a certain dollar amount per student. The more students you have in the building, the more money you’re gonna get. We actually call it FTE.” FTE stands for Full Time Employment. “For every 30 students, we get an FTE, which means that we can hire a teacher […] So every thirty students that come into this building, the district gives us money to help support those students, because all those students have to take eight classes.”
Simple, right?
Nope!
When discussing the budget, you also have to take in account grants, federal funding, taxes, and many other incredibly complex variables that take over 200 pages to explain.
But in short, PPS schools have been facing enrollment declines, and because of that, schools aren’t getting the number of students they need to maintain their budgets. However, due to our remodel, Benson hasn’t been facing the same issues.
Smith shared that, “Benson was the only high school that didn’t have budget cuts and lost FTE this year because of the budget situation, because our graduating class was 131 students less than our incoming freshman class.”
In the 2024-25 school year, Benson had an enrollment of nearly 900 students. For the 2025-26 school year, we have well over 1,000. Due to the increase, Benson faced no budget cuts and gained FTE, going from 70.5 to 72.5. This increase can be attributed to our remodel, which encouraged students to enroll.
While the modernization will likely encourage more students to attend, concerns over resources still stand. Electric teacher Mr. Booker expressed, “Do my classes have the resources it needs for this school year? I’m going to say no [… ]with this new remodel modernization, we got a lot of money pumped into other departments and we’re still using the same tools that we had here when I was a freshman […] but when it comes to what we got in the remodel, not much.”
