It's perfectly possible it's someone with deep domain experience, or someone who has product design or management skills. Regardless, dismissing these people out of pocket is not likely the best choice.
I'm no longer living in Oregon but remain closely connected. I can't opine to the behavioral challenges, but in terms of the raw score drop I think there's also the one-two punch here of:
1) Schools were closed from Covid for a long time. Not here to debate whether that was good/bad/otherwise, but it is factually accurate to say Oregon schools remained remote longer than almost any others in the country, and we now know the duration of closure had pretty direct influence on learning outcomes.
2) In the past decade the Portland metro area has seen an influx of migration from economically disadvantaged families who are immigrants / first generation citizens / non-native English speakers in the home. Students from these families are lagging significantly behind their peers in terms of post-Covid recovery, which if I recall correctly, follows national trends as well.
You can tell when this deal started to come together by looking at the history of the website on Wayback Machine. In fall of 2024, the website had a checklist comparing SDF to dbt and claiming SDF had a better feature set than dbt Core (page rendering is hit and miss right now for whatever reason):
https://web.archive.org/web/20240919110243/https://www.sdf.c...