Family matters: gearing up for the political season
By: Julia Silverman
For a group that doesn’t have a single highly paid lobbyist claiming a seat in the proverbial backroom, the children of Oregon have had some big wins over the past few years.
There was the statewide expansion of children’s health care coverage in 2009, allowing kids whose parents make less than $44,000 (for a family of four) to get free health care. Then, earlier this year, Oregonians voted to raise taxes on corporations and households making more than $250,000, preserving $6 billion in K–12 school funding.
Now, the small, passionate band of children and family advocates who advocate for kids’ issues in Salem and in city halls and county seats around Oregon are gearing up again for a pivotal round of elections in the fall, including the one to determine the state’s next governor, and not long after, another legislative session in January 2011. Portland Family took a look at some of the key players and issues to watch as political season kicks into gear.
Stand for Children
This statewide group has emerged over the last few years as one of the most quietly effective parents’ groups in Salem, in part for its ability to mobilize hundreds, even thousands of families from all over the state.
Dana Hepper, the group’s policy director, said Stand for Children’s number-one issue for the election, and the upcoming session, is to finally pin down a constant source of funding for Oregon’s “rainy day” fund, an emergency pot of money that tends to fill up during flush times and then be immediately raided during downturns.
One goal, Hepper said, is to convince legislators to overturn Oregon’s popular “kicker” law, which mandates that if state revenues are any more than 2 percent above what state economists have predicted, the overflow is to be divvied up among the state’s citizens and corporations. In 2007, the last year that the state could afford to send out kicker checks, refunds went out to the tune of $1.1 billion, much of that to the state’s wealthiest residents.
Overturning the kicker, which is a part of the state constitution, could be a tough sell: Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski, not up for reelection because of term limits, tried to pitch the idea this year during the month-long special session in February. But legislators, who do need to worry about reelection in November, dismissed any idea of messing with the politically popular kicker.
Still, don’t underestimate the power of Stand’s advocacy, Hepper says. “We don’t want this next session to go by without finally solving this problem,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be hard. It can be bipartisan, inclusive, and make a real difference for schools in the long run.” The kicker isn’t the only source of money for a rainy day fund, she said. In 2007, lawmakers earmarked a small percentage of their overall budget for such a fund. That was a one-shot deal, but Hepper said Stand for Children will be pushing to make a budget set-aside permanent, regardless of the economic status of the state.
Additionally, she said, Stand members are hoping legislators will take a fresh look at the state standardized tests that kids in all public school districts take. The results are used to rate their schools and glean information about what areas a class needs to focus on. But Hepper pointed out that on national standardized tests, which are taken by only a small sampling of Oregon students each year, the state’s rankings have been steadily slipping. That suggests, she said, that it’s time for a top-to-bottom review of the material Oregon students are expected to learn and of the tests that measure their individual progress.
Any new funding, though, will likely be tough to get. Though the state’s economy is rebounding from the depths of the recession, the recovery has been frustratingly slow, and in 2011, lawmakers won’t be able to fall back on the billions in federal stimulus funds that Congress approved in 2009. So any new program will have to be a proven one.
The Chalkboard Project
Stand for Children’s third big priority overlaps with that of another key advocacy group. The nonprofit Chalkboard Project, begun in 2004 with a grant from a handful of Oregon-based foundations, has the aim of unlocking the key to great schools. A program, dubbed CLASS, focuses on teacher training, mentorships, and clearer evaluations. Pilot versions are being run in three Oregon school districts right now, with promising results.
Sue Hildick, Chalkboard’s executive director, said she’s hoping that the pilot results from Tillamook, Sherwood, and Forest Grove will convince lawmakers to take the grant program statewide, at a cost of about $100 per student.
“We know that the quality of teachers in the classroom makes the most impact on increasing student achievement, in terms of in-school levers we can pull,” she says.
The proposal could run into a roadblock from the powerful Oregon Education Association, the teacher’s union that’s a major donor to the Democrats who dominate the state House and Senate. The proposal includes a plan to allow districts some flexibility over teacher pay above and beyond union contracts. Union leaders have long worried that such flexibility could backfire by allowing principals to play arbitrary favorites, or by tying teacher pay to test scores without consideration of external pressures, such as lack of support from parents.
But Hildick said the program would be voluntary for districts, who could only participate with buy-in from their local unions, and who would have the freedom to put together the details of their version, so long as the focus remained on teacher training, mentoring, and development.
Ultimately, she said, one of Chalkboard’s key goals is to get the state to be smarter and more targeted in its investments, to look at proven research about what works in schools and spend the majority of its money there, instead of doling out small chunks of cash to dozens of pet projects.
To that end, she said, Chalkboard’s advocates will also be partnering with the Portland-based Children’s Institute and other groups to lobby for more investment in the early grades, a strategy that’s been proven to pay off as kids advance through school. The investment might take the form of reducing class sizes in kindergarten and first grade or providing more reading tutors for struggling readers in the early grades, for instance.
Family Forward Oregon
Public education might be the biggest piece of the state budget pie, taking up about 50 percent, but it’s far from the only kid-centric issue on the table in Salem. One of the biggest—and so far, though it’s come up session after-session, unluckiest—is paid family leave. Advocates of the policy are hoping Oregon can finally join Washington and California as one of only a handful of states in the country to offer paid family leave.
Some powerful business groups have fought tooth and nail against the proposal, arguing that financing such leave via a 2-cent-an-hour payroll tax would place an undue burden on employers, particularly smaller businesses struggling to stay afloat in the state’s still-lukewarm economy.
And even in a legislature dominated by Democrats, with a Democratic governor, the bill, which would allow full-time employees to take up to six weeks a year of leave to care for a newborn or a sick family member, at $300 a week, has still fallen by the wayside, with conservative Democrats siding against it.
The cause’s true believers aren’t giving up. They’ve formed a new nonprofit, Family Forward Oregon, that plans a renewed push for the legislation in 2011. Andrea Paluso, one of the group’s founders, said there’s new momentum around the proposal given that President Barack Obama’s proposed budget includes matching funds to help states set up paid family leave programs. That gives Oregon has an opportunity to emerge as a leader on the issue, she said, and grab some extra federal dollars along the way.
Family Forward Oregon is also working to line up more business support, she said, meeting with local business associations from across the state who can in turn reach out to individual legislators.
Some of those involved with Family Forward are putting their money where their mouth is, starting up a separate political action committee, called MotherPAC. The idea, Paluso said, is to raise money for candidates who pledge support on family-friendly issues, including affordable child care, paid family leave, paid sick days, workplace flexibility, equitable part-time work, and toxic-free products for kids; the goal is to raise $25,000 for the November election. “If mothers don’t start writing some checks to some candidates, we are never going to be taken seriously,” she said. ‘We want to get moms’ voices heard.” From the candidates themselves, she said, she’ll be looking for not just promises of more jobs, but a commitment to the kinds of programs that let people keep their jobs, such as non-discrimination policies for caregivers.
Children First
Children First, a Portland-based policy think tank, will be pressing for programs that help foster kids and children from low-income families. That could mean playing defense in what’s expected to be a dismal budget situation, said Regan Gray, the group’s policy director, so it will focus on key items, like protecting existing subsidies offered to help poor families pay for childcare.
The group is also working on an agenda for one of the neediest, but often-forgotten about groups of kids in the state: foster children who “age out” of the system and find themselves on their own at 18, with no family to fall back on.
Children First already won the battle to get former foster kids extended health benefits under the state program. Now, Gray said, they’ll fight to get some money set aside to help foster kids with college tuition, or with their first month’s rent as they get their first job, to match them with potential employers, and to make sure that they’ve got their driver’s license so that that key to independence will be within their reach.
Julia Silverman is a Portland writer and mother of twin toddlers, Eleanor and Benedict.
