NEWBERG, Ore. — Newberg School District superintendent Stephen Phillips is taking unplanned medical leave for two months, with an interim appointee taking over operations starting Wednesday. The district's school board announced the news and confirmed former Newberg superintendent Paula Radich as acting superintendent at a meeting Tuesday evening.
The board claimed in a letter last month that it only recently learned from an independent audit that the district faces a nearly $3.7 million funding shortfall for the current school year and a $10.7 million gap for next year, and board members expressed hope that Radich can help stabilize the situation and give the board a clearer picture of the district's finances.
"I do want to say, and I assume most of you — I'm frustrated," said board member Sol Allen. "I'm frustrated that we still haven't gotten answers for so many of the questions that we've been asking, that we haven't actually had an update on our current budget situation in weeks now."
Board chair Nancy Woodward said she and the other members only learned about Phillips' decision on Monday, and after consulting with Willamette Education Service District superintendent Joe Morelock, she called and asked Radich to step in. The 60-day appointment can be extended if needed, Woodward said, and Radich agreed to do the job for free as a volunteer.
In a statement shared with Newberg parents and students on Wednesday, Radich said she wanted to increase engagement with families and "move forward as a school community."
"I want to take a moment to connect with our families," she wrote. "I know that, while the days ahead will be challenging, we will come through this together. We will continue to serve our students and their families well in these final days of our school year."
Parents who spoke to KGW echoed the hope that Radich can be a source of transparency as the school board works to learn more about how the budget crisis arose.
"I'm angry," said Shauna Karver, who has two students in the district. "I'm hurt, I'm mad, I'm frustrated. As a taxpayer, I'm furious."
Phillips' leave of absence comes as some parents have been calling for his resignation, placing much of the blame for the budget crisis on his shoulders. The board itself implied similar blame last month, stating that it had previously been "regularly assured" by Phillips that the shortfall could be managed through savings from retirements and voluntary staff departures.
"There were many issues, but the biggest one was they didn't really understand how to do school budgeting," said Irene Dunlop, a mother of two Newberg students.
Tuesday's meeting and a preceding budget meeting on Monday made it clear that more drastic action will be needed. The board voted Tuesday to formally notify the teachers union that it will need to conduct layoffs, although the exact number has not been finalized.
At the budget meeting, the board considered a slate of cutbacks, including 60 layoffs, 10 furlough days and delaying a new science and health curriculum, which together would shave about $12.2 million from the 2024-25 school year, a nearly 18% cut to the small district's overall budget. The board has until June 30 to come up with a final budget.
"I didn't want people to lose their jobs," board member Jeremy Hayden said Tuesday, visibly emotional. "Even potential furlough days, that impacts so much more. And many of you know, this has impacted us already, my family, and I don't wish that upon anybody else."
Radich was also appointed to serve as clerk and interim chief administrative officer of the district for the 2024-25 school year, unless superseded by a later board resolution, and the board also appointed Gayellyn Jacobson as deputy clerk and budget officer. The board said the appointments were necessary to fill additional vacancies and ensure that the district has the required personnel in place to keep conducting financial transactions during Phillips's absence.
Board member James Wolfer also spoke out during the meeting to address what he described as misinformation circulating around Newberg, which he said included claims that the board plans to shut down one of the district's schools and that the district's teachers are to blame for the budget crisis. Neither is true, he said.
"We need to put that to bed," he said. "I don't know why a few people in our community insist on spreading that, whether it's out of being misinformed or for their own agenda, but that is absolutely not the case."
Years of turmoil
The budget crisis and abrupt administrative shakeup are the latest twists in a tumultuous four-year period that has seen rapid-fire turnover among the executives and elected leadership and routinely landed the relatively obscure 5,000-student district in regional and at times national headlines — and the circumstances surrounding the hiring of Phillips are near the center of the controversy.
The churn dates back to the May 2021 election, which locked in a conservative-leaning four-member majority on the nominally nonpartisan school board. In August of that year, the board voted to ban Pride and Black Lives Matter signs and flags from district buildings, a decision which drew local and national backlash. Morelock, who was serving as the district's superintendent at the time, said he would not enforce the policy because district lawyers had advised him it was illegal.
The board switched to a less-specific ban on all "political" displays several weeks later, but the policy remained controversial, with critics arguing that the new wording was a thinly-veiled attempt to maintain the earlier policy while warding off legal challenges. Both votes were 4-3, with the conservative wing outvoting the three other more liberal members.
The controversy sparked several lawsuits over the following months; the teachers union sued the district over the policy and the ACLU of Oregon later sued on behalf of an individual teacher, arguing that the policy was too vague and allowed the board to selectively target signs its members disagreed with, including a sign in the teacher's classroom that sparked a complaint.
The four conservative board members filed a lawsuit against a group of Newberg parents, alleging that they had violated an Oregon "anti-doxing" law by posting information about the board members' employers on Facebook (they eventually lost). A separate group of parents sued the conservative board members, alleging that they had violated Oregon public meetings law by meeting privately to plan and conduct district business without input from the other three members.
The controversy erupted back into headlines in November 2021 when the board abruptly voted 4-3 to fire Morelock despite strenuous objections of the three liberal members, who argued that the decision had been rushed through and would leave the district on the hook to continue paying out Morelock's contract in addition to a replacement superintendent's salary.
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No official cause was given, but the firing came during a meeting when the board was previously scheduled to consider whether to overrule Morelock on a recent decision; a Newberg citizen had filed a complaint about a specific sign in a teacher's classroom, and the complaint had been escalated to Morelock, who concluded that the sign did not violate the district's policy.
The controversy sparked recall campaigns against two of the board's conservative members, although both efforts failed. The board's overall ideological makeup also tilted steadily further toward the conservative wing over the following year as each of the three liberal members resigned — in some cases implying they had been bullied out of their positions by the other board members — and were replaced by appointees confirmed by the remaining members.
The board voted to hire Phillips as a new permanent superintendent in May 2022, a decision which also drew controversy because Phillips had previously resigned from a position at Beaverton Public Schools after retweeting a racist post. He subsequently became superintendent of the Jewell School District, but the remaining liberal Newberg board members objected to his hiring in part because, at the time, he was reportedly on paid leave from Jewell pending an investigation.
Later that year, a court ruled in favor of the ACLU's lawsuit and concluded that the political sign ban was unconstitutional, and the board formally rescinded the policy in January 2023. The teachers union claimed that the rollback was part of a settlement agreement in its own lawsuit.
The series of departures and appointed replacements meant that five of seven board seats ended up on the ballot in 2023, and the result appeared to be a wholesale rejection of the conservative slate that had dominated the board for the previous two years; three of the four conservative members who voted to fire Morelock lost their reelection bids, along with two of the more recent appointees.
The third appointee apparently resigned recently; the position is currently vacant and the board interviewed replacement candidates at Tuesday's meeting. At this point, only one member of the original conservative wing remains on the board: Trevor DeHart, who was elected in 2021 and whose term runs through 2025.