An effort by Oregon School Employees Association to track safety incidents in schools once again died in the Oregon Legislature.
House Bill 3357 would have created a statewide system for educators to report workplace safety incidents, including when school workers are injured by students. The House Committee on Education held a public hearing on the bill March 3, but didn’t take action before April 9, the legislature’s self-imposed deadline for bills to pass out of their first committee.
“We believe most legislators understand that tracking workplace injuries in schools is an important step to ensure proper trainings, staffing and class size ratios,” OSEA said in a statement provided to the Labor Press. “OSEA will continue advocating for standardized reporting legislation until all school educators, including the 25,000 workers we represent, are assured a safe environment to work and educate our children,”
“We cannot fix what we do not measure,” said State Representative Lesly Muñoz (D-Woodburn), one of two chief sponsors of the bill, at the March 3 hearing. “HB 3357 is a crucial first step in addressing workplace safety in education, ensuring that we have the necessary data to take meaningful action in the future.”
At the hearing, OSEA members and other educators described sustaining injuries on the job and facing hurdles in reporting the injuries, including having school administrators discourage them from filing a report, not being able to locate their school’s existing form, or not having the time to fill out the report.
“This bill is a necessary step to provide data which will substantiate what our members are sharing with us: unsafe conditions which are causing staffing shortages, educational burnout, revolving door employment trends, and physical and mental injuries that cause traumatic harm to us and our students,” OSEA Vice President Teri Jones testified.
Alicia Infante, political action chair for Hillsboro Classified United, the union representing non-instructional staff, told the legislative committee that staff members are kicked, hit, scratched, or bitten every day.
“However, because these incidents often do not require medical treatment or extended time off, they go unreported. This lack of documentation has normalized a dangerous reality where staff are expected to tolerate daily physical distress without consideration for their well-being,” Infante said.
The system the bill proposed was modeled after a similar workplace incident reporting system used by the Oregon Nurses Association and Oregon Health Authority, OSEA said.
Disability Rights Oregon opposed the bill over concerns that the data would be used to punish students. The form would not collect the student’s identity, but in small classes, their identities could be easy to deduce.
Other opponents, including the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators and the Oregon School Boards Association, said HB 3357 had unclear definitions and other technical issues.
Like a similar bill that failed in 2024, HB 3357 did not include any funding to build the new reporting system.
As a retired public school employee, I understand and acknowledge the need for this bill. There are people who have been so injured that they can no longer perform the duties of the job. As constituents of school districts, we seldom think of the level of violence that some of the students can inflict on staff and other students alike. When the ‘no child left behind’ bill was first brought forward and now the ‘every child succeeds’ bill has come to pass that means that even those with serious violence issues are in our schools. Until this country sees what has happened, our school children and the employees are in peril each and everyday.