Taken For Granted

[September 5th, 2007]

As superintendent of Portland Public Schools, Vicki Phillips closed schools and frustrated parents along the way. Now it appears the move may have cost the district at least a portion of $1.1 million in federal funds.

At issue is a three-year, $5.2 million grant awarded in 2004 to Portland Public Schools from the U.S. Department of Education. According to federal officials last week, more than $1 million of the grant will not be given to the schools in the Jefferson High School cluster that the grant was designed to help.

“That’s criminal,” says Jim Hartley, a parent whose children are in the second and sixth grades at Chief Joseph and Ockley Green schools in the Jefferson cluster.

Recently released documents from the federal Department of Education withhold large portions of the correspondence between Washington officials and Portland Public Schools administrators concerning the grant. But a letter from the federal government dated Sept. 16, 2005, indicates former superintendent Vicki Phillips and her school-closures plan is to blame for part of the loss.

The federal grant, called the Magnet Schools Assistance Program, had the dual purpose of creating an arts magnet program in the Jefferson cluster and easing racial segregation in the school district. But after the grant was awarded in 2004, Phillips closed elementary schools in the cluster, including Applegate and Kenton. And while Phillips promised parents in a televised March 3, 2005, school-closures meeting that the grant money would “follow students,” it appears in at least one instance that was not possible.

“We find, however, that the merger of Applegate Elementary School with Woodlawn Elementary School is not consistent with either the purposes of the MSAP or the objectives of the approved project for the reduction, elimination or prevention of minority group isolation,” a director with the federal education department writes in September 2005. “We do not approve this change.”

Lynn Schore, a parent in the school district, decided in February 2006 to follow up on the grant as a result of Phillips’ pledge to parents. But the Freedom of Information Act request she filed in June 2006 (which was filled in July 2007) produced more questions than answers.

For example, a three-page follow-up letter to Phillips from the federal government, written on Sept. 30, 2005 (two weeks after the first letter to Phillips regarding the school district’s “unsatisfactory performance”), is redacted entirely.

A spokesman for the schools acknowledges the loss, but explains it by saying, “When the buildings closed, the need was reduced.