Hoarding Schools

[May 23rd, 2007] Portland Public Schools is turning its back on monthly income of at least $13,000 while denying public schoolchildren classrooms in publicly owned buildings.

How? By rejecting applications from public charter schools wanting to lease space from the district—despite a dwindling enrollment that has created an oversupply of exactly what these charter schools demand.

"I don't think it's right," says Kaaren Heikes, director of Oregon Charter Schools Development Center, which advocates for the independent but publicly funded schools. "The district loses its money, and children lose suitable spaces [for class]."

Parent David Smith first felt the district's apparent unwillingness to lease empty school buildings to charter schools in August 2005. That's when his group initially proposed renting the shuttered Smith Elementary School building in Southwest Portland for his Southwest Charter School. Organizers are continuing negotiations in hopes that the district will agree to a short-term lease. In addition to paying rent, the charter school would pay for utilities and maintenance.

The district has also denied bids for other closed school buildings from the Portland Village Public Charter School and hasn't reached an agreement to rent its unused space with any other charter school within its borders.

A total of eight charter schools—with a projected enrollment of 1,200 students, or 3 percent of the district's overall enrollment—will be operating in Portland by September, just not in district buildings. The $13,000 represents the proposed monthly rents of just two schools that have sought space in district buildings—Portland Village and Southwest Charter.

"We were all set to open last year," says Ann Powers, a Portland Village organizer whose third-grade son will attend the Waldorf-style charter school this fall at a property owned by the Catholic Church. "The thing that stopped us was a lack of a site; it was a real heartbreaker."

Portland Village put in two bids on Applegate Elementary School, the North Portland school that closed in 2005, and a third bid on the Foster School, a long-closed building in Lents. While both schools sat empty all year, the Portland Village school had to delay its opening from 2006 until 2007. It could not reach a rental agreement with the district or find another suitable site for its 130 students.

"They should want to fill those schools," Powers says.

That contrasts with the Salem-Keizer Public Schools system, where three of the four charter schools within the district boundaries are in otherwise unused or under-used Salem-Keizer buildings. Although those schools don't pay rent, they do pay for maintaining, cleaning and powering the classrooms they use. The fourth charter school operates out of the state-run Oregon School for the Deaf, and does pay rent.

Portland Public Schools chief operating officer Cathy Mincberg says it does not make sense to lease available space to charter schools or other organizations until the district has completed its year-long study of long-term facility needs. And district officials are waiting to see how the most recent school closures and reconfigurations shake out, she says.

"We generally find it's extremely rude to lease a building and then say, 'We need it back,'" Mincberg says.

But a recent and so-far-successful attempt by the school district to challenge a House bill before the Oregon Legislature suggests Portland Public Schools may simply have a problem with sharing—in this case, sharing its unused classrooms with charter schools.

HB 3178, which helped craft the Legislature by Heikes' group, would require Oregon school districts to negotiate rental agreements with charter school operators in good faith. In an unsigned letter on district letterhead, the Portland Public Schools requested that the good-faith requirement be deleted from the bill. And the Senate version of the bill reflects that.