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It's school integration, the 2015 edition.
Under a proposal floated this month, buses for Portland Public Schools would ferry white kids from the ritzy West Hills across the Willamette River to attend the poorest middle school in the district, and the only one that's majority black and Latino.
The busing proposal was brought up for discussion Dec. 5 by the committee guiding the politically fraught process of drawing new school boundaries. The head of that committee, Jason Trombley, announced the idea of taking West Hills children currently attending Skyline K-8 School and sending them to George Middle School in St. Johns.
It's an informal idea. But it already faces fierce opposition.
"I grew up with forced integration," says Tim Reifsteck, a retired Intel engineering manager, 59, originally from North Little Rock, Ark., whose eighth-grade daughter Lizzie, 13, attends Skyline. "It does disrupt neighborhoods…. Did it improve some opportunities? Yeah. But I don't think it necessarily created equal opportunities."
Racial and economic equity has been the centerpiece of Portland Public Schools Superintendent Carole Smith's work, and what happens with Skyline and George will be a test for just how far the district is willing to go to back up its equity talk with action.
School boundaries matter, and not just to parents. They affect real-estate prices. They affect traffic. Redrawing them embodies this city's love of process and civic engagement, but it also raises questions about whether Portland's commitment to equity is genuine or will fall victim to the objections of some of the city's richest residents.
"The placement of a [school] boundary can really concentrate either wealth or poverty," says Portland School Board member Mike Rosen.
He says he's willing to consider the busing plan. "If it's going to build a better school and a better outcome for the majority of students—absolutely. Will people read that and become concerned? Absolutely."
Portland Public Schools is redrawing the map for its schools serving kindergarten through eighth grade. The plan is simple, at least in concept: The district is trying to move students from crowded classrooms to empty ones.
But it's also a matter of making sure schools have enough money to give those kids a good education. (Funding follows kids in the world of education, so changing boundaries can boost school budgets by bringing in more kids.)
Hanging over all of this is a question of how to bring together students of different classes and races when neighborhoods already sort families into rich and poor.
"In my experience, Portland is a less diverse city, but it's still segregated," says University of Portland sociology professor Ashley Mikulyuk. "In the neighborhood-based school system, if there are segregated neighborhoods, there will be segregated schools."
Earlier this fall, Trombley told Oregon Public Broadcasting he would no longer view the Willamette River as a dividing line. That briefly opened up a discussion about bridging the east-west divide of school boundaries in the city.
But when district staff put together two possible "scenarios" for public comment early this fall, neither included a mash-up of east- and westside kids. Both scenarios played around the edges of socioeconomic integration with just a few schools changing their populations to a significant degree.
Under both scenarios, PPS data show that George Middle School—where district data show upward of 86 percent of students have qualified for free or reduced-price school lunches in recent years and a quarter are African-American—would actually see its poverty rate climb. That's ample reason for trying a more radical plan.
"The scenarios would effectively concentrate poverty in North Portland at George. That seems to me to be a very poor idea," says School Board member Paul Anthony.
This month, Trombley, a public-relations consultant who helped stump for a school construction bond before he landed on the boundary committee, announced a more drastic idea.
Skyline, currently a K-8 school, would become an elementary school. And its sixth- through eighth-graders, currently around 100 students, would ride the bus for roughly 10 miles to George, the closest middle school geographically to the remote, rural neighborhoods of Northwest Portland.
The move to diversify George could bring middle-class kids to the classrooms but also middle-class parents—with their time and money. (Skyline parents raised more than $75,000 in private funds last year, but that money was also buttressed by the volunteer hours they logged: 4,000 last year, according to the PTA. Put another way, that's three parents working nearly full workdays every single school day, at a school with just 300 students.)
Moving West Hills kids to North Portland might also be a small step toward alleviating overcrowding at Lincoln High School and adding students to Roosevelt, where George students go to high school.
"I think there are going to be too many students on the west side of the river," says Dave Porter, an education activist from Southeast Portland. "That's where Skyline comes in. I think it's the most obvious one of the feeder schools. It's actually closer to Roosevelt than to Lincoln."
But Anthony and two other board members—Julie Esparza Brown and Pam Knowles—tell WW they oppose busing Skyline kids, their reasons ranging from population shifts to the safety of the roads along the route. (Two other board members, Rosen and Steve Buel, haven't ruled out busing kids from Skyline. Buel says he was waiting for the committee recommendations before digging into the details.)
So far, Superintendent Smith's record on equity is more talk than action.
A report this fall ranked Portland near the bottom of the 50 largest U.S. cities by one measure of equity. Black students living within city limits were about four times more likely than white students to attend a public school scoring in the cities' bottom 20 percent on math exams, Seattle think tank the Center for Reinventing Public Education found. Only Miami and Seattle were worse.
When it comes to switching school boundaries, Smith and the School Board have prioritized providing similar resources at every school.
"It's not so much about economic diversity," says Esparza Brown. "It's that we're trying to make schools have the right amount of students so that everybody has this basic program."
In 2010, Smith led an effort to change high-school boundaries, with a similar worry in mind: too many students at the high-performing schools, too few at low-performing schools. But her remapping hasn't significantly changed the imbalance in high-school enrollment, as WW reported in November.
Smith won't tell WW whether she'll support the busing plan.
"Superintendent Smith is not going to weigh in on any specific proposals," says spokesman Jon Isaacs, "until she has received a recommendation from [the committee]."
Portland has long taken pride in attracting the middle class to traditional public schools. Just 12.5 percent of kids enroll in private schools, 2 percent are homeschooled, and 3.2 percent attend charter schools, according to Portland State University's Population Research Center.
To be sure, not all Skyline students are wealthy: More than 27 percent received free or reduced-price lunches last year. But the district has reason to fear white flight if Skyline students are bused to George.
"I would seek an alternative without a doubt," says Jason Resch, 40, a design industry professional and father to Skyline fifth-grader Tucker, 11, who currently heads up Skyline's parent fundraising operation and also opposed sending Skyline students to West Sylvan, the district's lowest-poverty middle school.
"And this is the president of the foundation speaking," he adds. "I wouldn't be willing to support a school I was forced to go to."
Skyline parents continue to argue that there's no need to change a successful school. But open a conversation in North Portland about what should happen to school boundaries, and old wounds quickly reopen as well.
The school closings and creation of K-8 schools a decade ago are widely considered disastrous, but North Portland has experienced more closings and consolidations since then.
Many parents are watching with skepticism to see if the district can get it right this time.
"The next time these boundary changes have a positive effect on children of color will be the first time," says Nichole Maher, a parent in Portland Public Schools and former executive director of the Native American Youth and Family Center.
Willamette Week