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The Portland Public Schools Board will discuss its proposed $1.83 billion bond package at its meeting Tuesday, its last discussion before Jan. 7, which is when the board plans to refer the bond to voters on the May 2025 ballot.
The latest proposed draft, produced Dec. 13, will be presented to the full board for the first time on Tuesday. Different drafts of the bond have been making their way through the School Board’s facilities committee. The Dec. 13 option is mostly in line with previous cost forecasts, coming to a total of $1.83 billion, slightly over the board’s desire for the upper limit of $1.8 billion.
That’s mostly due to a doubling of administrative costs for the bond—which covers program costs to support bond work, including staff, insurance and issuance costs. In a Dec. 2 draft, district staff had put $41.4 million toward administrative costs. In the Dec. 13 draft, that number is now at $83.5 million.
“My understanding is that earlier estimates were very preliminary. and now that the bond package is close to final, [staffers] are able to more accurately estimate costs,” says board member Andrew Scott, who chairs the facilities committee.
The new figure comes to about 4.5% of the total bond budget, which is still lower than the 2020 PPS bond, for which administration costs took up about 5.2% of the bond budget.
The latest bond draft will also put $269 million toward physical facilities improvements in the district, including $79 million for athletics. Those funds will go toward deferred maintenance and HVAC for schools. Another $242 million will go toward educational and technology improvements, including curriculum and student devices.
Athletic funds will provide needed renovations at schools that include Franklin, Roosevelt and Grant high schools, which could finally mark an end to the yearslong saga at the Grant Bowl.
As part of the athletics fund, PPS staff has proposed adding lights and seats to the bowl. Grant is the only 6A school in Oregon without lights at its athletic fields, meaning students often have to miss class to commute to faraway fields for nighttime games (“Degraded Asset: Grant Bowl,” WW, Aug. 22, 2023).
At a Dec. 2 facilities committee meeting, Marshall Haskins, PPS’s athletics director, said the improvements are “just getting us done what we said we were going to do originally.”
The draft also allocates $1.15 billion to school modernizations at Jefferson, Cleveland and Ida B. Wells high schools. The modernizations have been among the most hotly debated items in the bond, especially as board members and PPS Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong have been eyeing ways to reduce the costs of what would have been some of the most expensive high schools in the U.S.
The latest bond draft does not provide specific breakdowns for how much upcoming high school modernizations will cost, though a budget estimate at the Dec. 2 facilities meeting had Cleveland and Wells at $340 million each.
At a Dec. 3 board meeting, Scott, whose zone encompasses Wells, said trying to reduce modernization costs is not about trying to take something away from Cleveland or Wells students. Instead, he said, cost-cutting measures could mean more money for other students (elementary and middle schoolers) in PPS who could also benefit from infrastructure improvements.
“I think if we refer a bond that had $430 and $460 million for two high schools, it has a much higher likelihood of failing,” Scott said at that meeting. “They would be the most expensive high schools in the country on a square-foot basis. That is not an award that Portland Public Schools wants to win.”