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On Jan. 7, the Portland Public Schools Board referred a $1.83 billion bond to voters on the May ballot. It’s meant to fund modernizations at the final high schools that need them, curricula and technology improvements, and work on deferred maintenance projects.
The meeting also marked Andrew Scott’s last with PPS as a board member. He represented Zone 1, which covers much of Southwest Portland, including Ida B. Wells High School. In November, he announced his resignation, citing “personal reasons” for moving out of his zone. (On Jan. 13, the board appointed his replacement, Christy Splitt, who will serve through June 30.)
Scott, who first joined the board in 2019, has been with the district through many transitions, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the hiring of a new superintendent, Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong. He faced public heat during the Portland Association of Teachers strike in fall 2023. Deputy chief operating officer at Metro during the day, Scott built his reputation on the board on his fiscal savvy.
So who better to walk us through spending a couple of billion bucks? WW sat down with Scott last week for an exit interview. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.
WW: You chaired the facilities committee that built the May 2025 bond through the latter half of this year. What do you think about the product that you’ve put on the table?
Andrew Scott: I’m excited. We’re finishing the high schools. The reason for that promise was really sound. It’s that once you finish all the high schools, every single student in PPS will go to at least one modernized, new facility in their school career.
We’ve included other things to deal with a lot of the maintenance issues that came up during the strike. It hits families and teachers on a daily basis when their schools are really cold, when there are rodent infestations. There’s some money in there for that. I think it’s a good package overall.
You’ve touted flexibility as a key component of this bond and haven’t broken it down into specific parameters like other bonds. Why is that?
There’s a real political pull. The more specific we are, the more confidence voters have when they vote on something. But frankly, there’s a false level of specificity that we should avoid. There are other people on this board who want to be very specific about every single dollar. There was a real push by some to say we want to know how much it is for roofs, how much it is for HVAC, how much is for other changes.
That’s a huge mistake because we need to be making those investments where they’re most needed, but we won’t know where it’s most needed until two years from now; something might break, and we should fix it. Four years from now, there might be something that we were unaware of that we need to fix. So I think that flexibility is important.
Why are these high schools 40% more expensive than the one Beaverton is rebuilding?
We’ve hired a consultant who has not delivered a report yet. There are some reasons why, but I’m speculating. We do have our Climate Action Plan, which increases costs but for very good reason. We’ve got some other workforce equity requirements, some other apprenticeship and contract opportunities, requirements, all increased costs.
My daughter’s a junior at Ida B. Wells High School. I’m a graduate of that school. I want to see that be a really nice school. But it’s to come in and say, do we need to build a $450 million school, or can we give you a gorgeous, beautiful, fully outfitted school for $375 million? If we can do that, we should.
PPS isn’t assigning specific dollars to each high school modernization. How can the district be held accountable for being on budget on a high school if there’s never a set budget to begin with?
When governments go over a planning number, and we get dinged for that, it’s not a fair level of accountability, because we’re taking some of those early planning numbers which were never intended to be budget numbers. When the district signs a contract with a general contractor and says, we’re going to build this high school for X amount of dollars, 100% they should be able to deliver that budget, on that project, on time and on budget. Looking back at what was estimated a year or two or three years before, that is not a very relevant or important number.
The teacher’s strike resulted in PPS conceding to demands that it did not have the financial resources for. What do you make of the district’s financial trajectory?
It’s challenging. We made $30 million of cuts. Another $40 million is going to be really hard. It’s going to require cuts that are going to harm students and classrooms. There’s no way to cut $40 million that doesn’t do that.
Are we doing enough to hold teachers accountable for the results that we’re seeing in the classrooms?
No. Our teachers are the most important thing for student success in the district, and we have incredible teachers. As with any job, you’ve got really, really good performers, and you’ve got some mediocre performers, and you may even have a few bad performers.
What I would love this district to do, and what I would love PAT to be a partner in, is how do we train, how do we get our top performers to be helping bring everybody up to that level? And how do we help some of the teachers who really maybe aren’t cut out for this to move on to other professions?
The last bond included a Center for Black Student Excellence. Now you’ve seen a new audit that shows the project is incredibly behind and hasn’t spent a cent. What do you make of that?
We have $60 million that the voters expect us to spend on improving Black student excellence in the city, and it’s bond dollars, so it has to be capital. I would encourage this board and the superintendent to really go back and reassess. Let’s set some timelines. What’s the right plan for moving this money out the door in the next, say, 24 months? Because I think that is what the voters expect.