Education Service Districts help schools with many tasks

There are 20 Education Service Districts (ESDs) in Oregon. They serve the 199 regular districts that operate the public schools, kindergarten through grade 12.

ESDs remain one of the most obscure entities involved in public education. Obscure to the general public, but not insignificant.

The ESD that encompasses Sisters and the other three school districts in Deschutes County (Bend-La Pine, Redmond, and Brothers) plus Crook County School District used to go by the name Crook-Deschutes. Last year it changed its name to the High Desert ESD.

It has a current budget of roughly $25 million and 240 employees (190 full-time- equivalent). And while the core services it provides are focused on schools in the two primary counties, it furnishes a variety of other services on contract to districts in at least seven other counties -- Jefferson, Lake, Harney, Grant, Sherman, Gilliam and Wheeler.

The local ESD is governed by a seven-member board elected from the two primary counties. The chief hired hand, who occupies modest offices on Salmon Avenue near the Redmond Airport, is Dennis Dempsey. He came down from Alaska in 1992 to become the principal of Sisters High School, which was opening after the district had been without a high school for 25 years.

Dempsey, now 51, worked in Sisters until becoming ESD superintendent in 1999 (see story page 4).

ESDs trace their organizational history to the mid-1800s. From 1945 to 1962 their predecessors were called county rural school districts. In 1963, the Legislature made them Intermediate Education Districts. The current nomenclature was adopted in 1977.

Since at least the 1960s, the basic idea has been that these entities would help local school districts obtain certain educational services on a regional basis that many could not afford on their own. Equalization was always an element of the system, the hope being that regionally pooled local funding would enable smaller, poorer districts to get some things otherwise accessible only to bigger, richer districts.

In recent years, as the state has taken over responsibility for most educational costs, ESD funding has come mainly from the state rather than from shared local funds. Today, five percent of the money the Legislature appropriates for schools statewide is reserved for the state's 20 ESDs.

Some of each ESD's money covers administrative and other operating costs. But 90 percent of it is divided among the school districts within ESD boundaries. They use it to buy services from the ESD.

Which services? That depends on the wishes of the constituent districts. They vote on what they want their ESD to offer. Their boards adopt resolutions of approval for specific services, and the ESD can offer only services supported by a majority consisting of two-thirds of the school districts representing more than half the student population.

Once the menu of "resolution services" is established, a participating district is free to purchase as much of any service as it chooses, within the limit of its state allocation.

The High Desert ESD this year is offering 13 resolution services, the largest overall category related to special education or help for children with special needs. In the last school year, 2003-04, Sisters School District "bought" $517,000 worth of resolution services from the ESD. The two largest categories were special education ($128,000) and early childhood services under the Birth to Five program ($107,000).

But resolution services are only part of the picture. The larger part, representing three-quarters of the ESD budget, consists of services provided under contract.

An ESD is free to offer contract services to districts outside of its own boundaries.Most of the contracts are financed by state and federal funds. This is the area of activity that finds the High Desert ESD reaching into seven counties beyond the two that form its base, providing everything from early childhood "intervention" to legal services.

It was in the area of contract services that one of the state's more ambitious ESDs, covering Union and Baker counties, got into trouble during the past year. The state has forced the transfer of a number of those contracts to the Umatilla-Morrow ESD, causing the loss of 40 to 50 jobs at Union-Baker.