Portland Public Schools Estimates 1,700 Native Students in District

Portland Public Schools has long struggled to improve student achievement among its most marginalized students.

The topic recently came up ahead of the School Board’s Jan. 7 meeting to refer a $1.83 billion bond to the May ballot. The final vote included some debate as to whether to add a $40 million line item to fund a Center for Native Student Success, which parents said would help consolidate resources to support Native American and Alaska Native student achievement.

The investment drew parallels to the district’s Center for Black Student Excellence, which an auditor recently found hadn’t spent any of the $60 million allocated toward it in the 2020 bond. And while that center is meant to serve the district’s 3,678 Black students, PPS’s 2024–25 enrollment data shows the Native American student population is much lower, at 237.

But that latter number turns out to be a matter of some dispute. It didn’t match up with the one district leaders used as they discussed Native student achievement at the Jan. 7 meeting.

While the School Board ultimately rejected adding the center to the bond, many leaned into a plan PPS Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong presented that night to help boost Native Student Achievement.

In that plan, Armstrong announced she’d dedicate funds immediately to help improve results for the district’s Native students. That money would go toward an additional 100 hours of tutoring, establish clear K–12 pathways for Native students, and hire a tribal liaison for the upcoming academic year.

The number of Native students Armstrong said her counterproposal would serve was 1,900. In other words, the superintendent’s figure was about 1,650 higher than the number of Native students in PPS’s official report.

So which number is it, really? After the tumult of this month’s meeting, WW put that question to district officials.

PPS spokeswoman Sydney Kelly says that when the district reports numbers for the federal racial code of American Indian/Alaska Native, it has just over 200 students who fall in that category. But the district’s numbers are much closer to the superintendent’s than its enrollment data, at 1,700.

The federal code counts multiracial people as separate from those who only identify with one ethnicity. Kelly says because of this, PPS looks at the data more closely to arrive at a better estimation.

“We also examine the number of students who select American Indian/Alaska Native as a part of their ancestry when choosing ‘Two or More Races’ or ‘Latino/Hispanic,’” Kelly wrote in an email to WW. “When we look more inclusively like this, we have over 1,700 students with Native ancestry.”