Community Meetings Postponed as School Board Considers Lowering Modernization Costs

Portland Public Schools canceled an upcoming design workshop for Cleveland High School in an email sent to parents Friday afternoon.

In the email, the district says all community engagement meetings scheduled for the next several weeks will be postponed as PPS assesses lowering costs for what would be among the most expensive high school modernization projects nationwide.

The conversation about lowering the cost of the district’s last three high school modernization projects has been ongoing. In an Oct. 21 board meeting, PPS staff presented options for how the district could best spend funds from a proposed May 2025 property tax bond. The option popular with the board was the one that prioritized high school modernizations. But the costs staff estimated for those projects were high: $125 million more for Jefferson High School, $450 million for Cleveland High School and $435 million for Ida B. Wells High School.

Jefferson’s modernization was partly funded by the 2020 PPS bond. The additional $125 million would bring the total cost of the Jefferson modernization to about $491 million.

Those figures dramatically outpace previous district modernization efforts. The district’s current costliest project is the modernization at Benson Polytechnic High School, which was dinged by cost overruns, going from a projected $212 million budget as part of the 2017 bond to $416 million when the doors reopened. In 2022, Lincoln High School was completed for $242 million.

At the PPS Board’s facilities committee meeting on Dec. 2, staff presented new, lower-cost options, as The Oregonian first reported Wednesday. The latest draft of the 2025 bond budget gives no more money to the Jefferson modernization and puts Cleveland and Wells at $340 million each.

“The three high school modernization teams have been tasked with reimagining the projects to align with the target budgets noted here,” PPS chief operating officer Dan Jung noted at the Dec. 2 meeting. “The savings could go toward modernizing middle schools and elementary schools.”

PPS Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong and several board members have expressed their desire to modernize the remaining high schools without running costs so high. At the Dec. 2 meeting, Armstrong said she believed the projects at Cleveland and Wells could be completed for less than $450 million.

“PPS leadership believes that the costs for the three new high schools should be scrutinized and made more manageable,” the email read. “In order to achieve this goal, each school’s design team is pausing current work on the projects and will focus on preparing options for design, schedule and budget which the Superintendent and Board of Education will review at a future board meeting.”