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The Portland Public Schools Board on Tuesday passed a resolution to wrest control of the shuttered Grant High School athletic field from Portland Parks & Recreation through a long-term lease, and repair it as soon as possible.
The vote was unanimous in a room thronged with Grant athletes and parents wearing blue-and-white Grant shirts and holding signs that read, “Grant Us Home Turf.”
Unlike other PPS schools, Grant doesn’t own its field, known as Grant Bowl. It’s city property, and it’s managed by the parks bureau, which closed the field last month, just days before fall training for football and soccer was set to begin. The crumb rubber and sand in the artificial turf have become compacted, making it unsafe, the parks bureau said.
The resolution directs Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero to find the money to replace the field, which involves rolling up the turf, removing the compacted rubber and replacing the entire structure down to a base layer of earth. The resolution also calls on the city to give PPS a long-term lease on the Buckman Track near Benson Polytechnic High School, another city-owned asset that’s closed and in need of repair.
Board member Julia Brim-Edwards, wearing a Grant shirt, introduced the resolution.
“There’s an urgent need to ensure that the Grant Bowl and the track are safe and useful for our students,” Brim-Edwards said. “Having a long-term lease from parks so that we can provide good facilities for our student athletes is really important.” PPS needs a “different long-term relationship with the city so that we have some certainty for our student athletes and equity across the district.”
Board member Andrew Scott compared the failure of the field to a roof collapse at a school.
“When assets fail, we need to treat that issue with some urgency,” Scott said. “And people have heard me use this example, but if we had a roof collapse at a school, we would move students out and work as quickly as we could to get those students back into school. We would pull out all the stops.”
Grant parents have been sharply critical of the city parks bureau for failing to maintain the field, and for what they see as lack of urgency in response to the outcome. Last month, the bureau put out a three-paragraph description of its repair plan. City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who oversees parks, and School Board Chair Gary Hollands said they would replace the artificial turf field in time for fall sports in 2024. In the meantime, the parks bureau and PPS would work together to find other fields for Grant’s athletes.
Grant parents excoriated the parks bureau in testimony before the vote. Kim McGair, parent of a senior on the women’s soccer team and co-founder of the Grant Bowl Community Coalition, tallied up the class time that students would miss because they have to leave early to commute to Delta Park and the old Marshall High School campus for practices and games.
“I’ve done the math,” McGair said. “The men’s and women’s [soccer] teams will collectively miss 463 hours of instructional time just this month to play their home games. Not to mention when they have to go on the road, it will be well over a thousand hours of lost instructional time for the season.”
In an interview earlier in the day, Portland Parks & Recreation deputy director Todd Lofgren said that the bureau and PPS were working together to repair the field as quickly as possible but that the job is unlikely to be complete before next summer.
“It’s not just a minor repair,” Lofgren said. “If we can move it forward faster, we will.”