r/Portland • u/itsgloriabitch • 5h ago
Discussion I dug into a bunch of data around PPS "Rightsizing" -- the plan is a disaster waiting to happen, so I made a website to explain why
Hi r/Portland first-time caller, long-time listener. I'm a parent of a third-grader at Laurelhurst K-8, and I've got training as a professional historian and in web programming, so I combined those and my ADHD and did a deep dive into the plans to close 14 schools and convert 7 K-8s into K-5s, with a focus on my kid's school. It is a bad plan, and it has no implementation details whatsoever.
Edit: I made the html/css/js/charts/graphs using Claude.ai but the research, argumentation, and writing are all mine. I added this for transparency, not to brag that ai thought up the ideas -- it didn't. Y'all just hate using modern tools for coding so you assume I used them for thinking, but that's simply not the case. People assume the worst and then feel smug about it, but that's your made-up narratives, not what actually happened.
In any case, if you don't hate it, please share it with parents of school aged kids you know in PPS. tyvm!
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tl;dr The whole site, the short version. Every point links to the numbers behind it.
PPS says 360 students is the threshold for a sustainable K-5. Six of the seven K-8s it wants to convert would start out below that as K-5s. The four K-8s it keeps? Already below its K-8 threshold. Plus, closing three elementary schools in inner NE and SE Portland creates a school desert, surrounded by schools they’re planning to destabilize.
So, PPS says K-8s cost more on average, but their average includes the most expensive K-8s that they don’t even plan to convert (and all the lottery ones are safe, too). Instead, they convert the most cost-effective ones.
What’s worse, the projected savings for Laurelhurst are so small, the cost of busing its students further away and the risk of losing some families to private schools could wipe out any theoretical savings.
PPS doesn’t say what busing costs, but using some really basic costs divided by counts, it’s probably over $38K per route. Laurelhurst would need 1–2 buses, but I haven’t looked at how many the other K-8s might need. Loosey-goosey projections could be 30–50 new routes; that’s a lot of money.
PPS has never closed more than four schools in a year. Now it wants to close 11 to 14 at once. When it hasn’t found a new use for a closed school, the building has sat empty for 17 years on average. Smith has been empty for 21 years and still costs about $70,000 a year (for a total of $1.5M and counting).
What’s more, closing schools doesn’t lower anyone’s taxes. The tax rates are fixed by the state constitution, set by voters, or tied to debt PPS already owes. State money follows students, not buildings, so closures don’t automatically save anything, but every family that leaves PPS because of them takes $11,000+ a year away.
As for the K-8s themselves, four of the strong ones do a better-than-PPS-average job of teaching literacy and math to their students. Laurelhurst really excels at teaching reading to its Hispanic/Latino and poor students; it’s literally the best neighborhood school in the district at middle-grade reading. Vernon is doing way better at math than you’d expect; it’s the biggest difference over its projection for any neighborhood school.
The research is clear that moving kids to a new school for 6th grade hurts their academics, more for the kids facing (any) adversity, and it takes years to recover. And it hurts their attendance and behavior, too.
PPS has a long history of converting about 20 schools without a plan: in the 1970s they went to middle schools, in the 2000s to K-8s, and starting in 2016 back to middle schools. Since 2016, it’s converted 14 K-8s to K-5s, and five of them are now on the closure list. Sabin was a K-8 with 551 students; as a K-5 it dropped 40% in seven years, and now it’s closing. Vernon, right next door, would start out as an even smaller K-5 than Sabin did. PPS is on track to repeat its previous mistakes verbatim.
For Laurelhurst in particular, enrollment has been holding steady for school-aged kids (over the last 30 years!), it has new low-income housing coming in soon, and there are more boomers poised to retire and open up homes to new families than in any other neighborhood in Portland. PPS says enrollment is dropping, but that doesn’t check out for Laurelhurst. Oh, and Sunnyside is also growing, but they’re not my example here.
Despite being affluent, Laurelhurst families love their K-8: it’s got a really high capture rate, even when you account for private schools. And the students have higher attendance rates, which don’t drop in middle school (unlike the rest of PPS), for all families. If PPS antagonizes the affluent families and they choose private schools at the rate of other affluent neighborhoods in Portland, that alone could wipe out most of the projected savings on the K-5 conversion.
Why is Laurelhurst even being converted, then? Well, PPS redrew the attendance area for Mt Tabor Middle School in 2023 and left it with not enough students to fill the campus. Now it’s under-enrolled, so they’re going to move all the students from Laurelhurst over. The whole plan is whack-a-mole that damages one school to save another, over and over again.
And there’s more
And this is before we talk about how awesome the environmental program is at Sunnyside, or how Laurelhurst has nearly as many “enrichments” as the stand-alone middle schools.
The rest of the plan
I haven’t looked at the entire plan. There are so many problems for just my kid’s school, and for K-8 conversions in general, that it seems incredibly unlikely that the rest of the plan should be approved as-is, either. I heard compelling arguments about why the Vietnamese immersion program shouldn’t be moved, or a Spanish language one. Irvington parents made a strong case for supporting their school instead of closing it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but PPS probably ought to wrap up its current set of scandals before asking anyone in the district to trust them to shuffle about a quarter of the district’s K–8 students.
The answer is really clear: tell the school board to vote NO on either plan, and to come up with a detailed, reasoned consolidation plan, including the phased implementation of any moves or closures.
Portland, but especially our kids deserve better than this.
