Copyright The Oregonian
A former data analyst for the state of Oregon has filed a wrongful termination suit alleging that he was dismissed after trying for months to call attention to systemic problems with the state’s method for funding schools that serve large numbers of students from low-income families. Jesse Helligso’s suit against the state of Oregon and the Legislature was filed Nov. 5 in Marion County Circuit Court. He is seeking $556,667 in damages to compensate both for lost wages and the physical and emotional toll of the situation. The lawsuit describes Helligso’s effort in the winter and spring of 2025 to alert lawmakers to fundamental issues with the formula it has used for decades to calculate how much extra money is due to schools according to how many of their students live at or below the federal poverty line. The existing formula, his research found, suggested that Oregon was accomplishing the opposite of its stated goal, sending more money per student to districts serving higher income students than those with more low-income families. By every measure, Oregon’s neediest students read, do math and graduate from high school at far lower levels than their peers from more financially stable homes. They’re also more likely to miss big chunks of the school year. At every turn, the lawsuit alleges, Helligso was stymied. He alerted co-workers at Oregon’s Legislative Policy and Research Office, and then his supervisor in hopes of reaching lawmakers responsible for crafting the state’s education budget, the suit claims. A planned meeting with the Oregon Department of Education was canceled, and meetings with colleagues from the Legislative Revenue Office and the Legislative Financial Office, which advise lawmakers responsible for putting together Oregon’s $37 billion budget, were rescheduled, according to the lawsuit. Finally, he was told that leaders at his office had met with their counterparts at the revenue and financial offices and decided to table his concerns until the 2025 session had concluded, given “the short timeline to remedy the issue,” the lawsuit claims. Helligso’s suit states that he then anonymously contacted The Oregonian/OregonLive, which later wrote a story detailing that the state was using an outdated method of counting the number of students in poverty. The newsroom in May reported that the methodology resulted in a significant undercount that disproportionately hurt districts including Reynolds, Salem-Keizer, Woodburn, Klamath Falls City, Sweet Home and Milton-Freewater. Within hours of the story’s publication, Helligso was called into the office of the Director of Research, Misty Freeman, and “interrogated” for half an hour, the suit says. He was fired two days later because he “lacked non-partisan objectivity,” according to the lawsuit. The Legislature ultimately approved a $11.3 billion budget for the state schools fund, which Helligso claimed left in place a “discriminatory and illegal funding formula,” according to the lawsuit. Oregon’s whistleblower law states that it is against the law to discharge, demote, suspend or in any manner discriminate or retaliate against a worker because the employee in good faith reported information the worker believes violates state or federal law, rules or regulations. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said the office had not had time to review the lawsuit and could not offer comment. A spokesperson for Gov. Tina Kotek said her office does not comment on pending litigation. Helligso’s research highlights that Oregon has the ability to use a far more precise measurement to calculate poverty levels, known as “direct certification,” The Oregonian/OregonLive previously reported. In that methodology, the state matches individual students with the food stamp benefits or other services they receive, to capture the number of students in each public school who experience poverty. Direct certification has been used for the purpose of publicly reporting academic outcomes since late 2022. By that point, virtually every school district in the state had begun offering free meals to all students regardless of their income, making the previous use of free or reduced-price lunch rates as a poverty indicator obsolete. But state statute requires the formula used to calculate the extra money meted out to districts who educate a high concentration of low-income students to rely at least in part on child poverty estimates the U.S. Census Bureau generates each year, which are significantly less accurate. The state and the Oregon Department of Education have been aware of problems with its funding formula since at least 2013, when school finance expert Michael Elliott testified to the House Education Committee that the current formula was “using outdated data that does not reflect current poverty across the state.” But making a change is politically tenuous because — absent a new revenue source — it means that some districts with lower overall child poverty levels, including Portland, Beaverton and Bend, would lose funding. In other words: If the state were to give an extra $3,000 per student or so to the districts that educate roughly 177,000 children on food stamps or other forms of anti-poverty aid, or who are homeless, in foster care or from migrant families, there would be significantly less money per student for the approximately 66% of Oregon schoolchildren who aren’t in those categories.
