Fight Over Field at Hosford Middle School Escalates as Principal Says Dog Owners Harass School Staff

Earlier this summer, WW wrote about how a Portland middle school field had become a contested greenspace.

The massive field at Hosford Middle School in Southeast Portland had, for decades, been used as a de facto dog park. For most of those years, it was a peaceful relationship between pup owners and the school: Dogs could roam the field surrounding the school so long as owners cleaned up after their pooches and kept them leashed.

But last year, Portland Public Schools finished erecting a fence around the field and locked its gates, after a number of incidents since 2019, including a student being bitten by a dog and an armed man wandering onto the property.

Since then, dog owners have been routinely cutting locks, entering the field and getting in heated confrontations with school security guards.

And the battle has escalated since school began last week.

In a letter sent to school families and neighbors last week, Hosford principal Jill Liddle wrote that dog owners were regularly harassing, following and threatening school staff since school had begun. She reported that people were throwing feces at the building.

A video shared with WW shows a campus security guard asking a dog walker to keep his dog on a leash as he’s leaving the field.

The man starts screaming at the guard: “Fuck you! We hate you! We fucking hate you! The whole community despises you now! We’re going to keep cutting this shit open day after day!” The guard reminds the man it’s his own tax dollars paying for the repairs, and the dog owner approaches him, yelling: “Why don’t you shut your fucking mouth? You’re obviously fucking unhinged!”

In her letter to parents, Liddle listed a series of event that precipitated the locking up of the field: an armed naked man running onto the field in 2019, another man in the midst of a mental health crisis who removed his clothing later that year, adherence to the on-leash rule dropping in 2020, and a student being bitten by a dog in the spring of 2021 during a fire drill.

The harassment of campus security by dog owners, Liddle says, started in earnest this spring after the district decided to fence off the field. She wrote that between May and August, “threats and hostile verbal attacks against custodial and school staff from neighbors increase exponentially.”

Liddle levied a warning: “We will be seeking no trespassing notices to those who have engaged in destruction of property, harassment and/or threats.” She said calling 911 was another avenue to enforce the rules.

The school district provided a list of repairs at Hosford since late 2021. Twenty-eight separate times, district staff installed new locks, chains and cattle guards for cut fences, gates and broken locks.