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Portland Public Schools has a long history of underserving its Black students, who face an achievement gap, higher rates of chronic absenteeism, and lower graduation rates.
It seemed the summer of 2020, marked by the murder of George Floyd and ensuing civil unrest in Portland, brought the district to a turning point. Since then, PPS has pledged to aid its Black students through three capital projects. The Center for Black Student Excellence and the Jefferson High School modernization both appeared as line items on the 2020 schools bond, while an effort to relocate Harriet Tubman Middle School received a boost from the state in 2022.
But none of the three projects has broken ground. As the district loses track of time, it’s also losing money to inflation. Now, as PPS prepares to present voters with a $1.83 billion bond package in May—one meant to fund the remainder of the Jefferson modernization and two similar projects at Cleveland and Ida B. Wells high schools—WW is examining what’s happened to these three projects.
Lost cost from inflation was calculated using the most recently available Portland Construction Cost Index from Mortenson, a construction and real estate development company.
CENTER FOR BLACK STUDENT EXCELLENCE
PRICE TAG: $60 million from the 2020 schools bond, with implementation to begin in September 2021
LOST COST FROM INFLATION: $6.28 million
WHY THE DELAY? Since its inception as a last-minute bond addition in 2020, plans for the CBSE have remained vague. In a document outlining the project’s vision, the center is described as ensuring an “aligned coordination of efforts so that every Black student succeeds,” or a resource center of sorts for Black students and their families. (It also commits to supporting the projects at Jefferson and Harriet Tubman.)
The details were supposed to be hashed out with the community through the first half of 2021, but that effort stalled well beyond the first year. In December, Cathy Brady, a principal at the auditing firm Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting, warned the district that the center was falling behind. “The risk is that, from our perspective, CBSE will not be delivered on schedule or as intended,” she said. The firm left PPS with four recommendations to put the center back on track.
WHAT’S THE LATEST? District spokeswoman Valerie Feder says Toye Watson was hired as CBSE director in September. At a Jan. 22 meeting of the PPS Bond Accountability Committee (a citizens’ group that reviews past and present bonds), the district’s Stormy Shanks shared that Watson’s job is “to define [CBSE] and to complete the implementation plan, the management plan, and create a vision and a structure for CBSE as a program.” Shanks added the director would present an update to the School Board—but no date has been set. “That work is largely complete, it just needs to be communicated to the public.”
HARRIET TUBMAN MIDDLE SCHOOL
PRICE: $120 million from a March 2022 end-of-session funding package from the state of Oregon.
LOST COST FROM INFLATION: $1.93 million
WHY THE DELAY? The project to relocate and rebuild Harriet Tubman Middle School gained traction in 2018, when a Portland State University study warned that expanding Interstate 5 next to the Rose Quarter school would only worsen already poor air quality. PPS spent millions on a new roof and HVAC system, both of which aimed to improve air quality inside the existing school, but the district ultimately asked then-Gov. Kate Brown to prioritize relocating the school away from the highway. In 2022, with Brown’s help, the district received money to do just that.
In the first half of 2023, the School Board held a series of meetings to determine a new site for the middle school. Different sites were controversial for different reasons, but alternatives were ultimately exhausted in June of that year, when district staff and community advocates recommended dropping all proposed locations and heading back to the drawing board. In May 2024, the district posted another update, writing that staff had “aggressively studied, engaged in dialogue, and pursued a number of alternate relocation options.”
WHAT’S THE LATEST? In a Jan. 27 email to Tubman community members, PPS put the project on indefinite pause. The district blames the delay of the I-5 expansion and its inability to find a location. “The PPS Board of Education has closely studied the viability of several potential properties, but most were cost prohibitive and none stood out as a desirable home for Harriet Tubman students, staff and families,” the email read.
JEFFERSON HIGH SCHOOL
PRICE: $311 million from the 2020 schools bond, with plans to break ground in June 2024
LOST COST FROM INFLATION: None yet.
WHY THE DELAY? Figuring out where Jefferson students would attend school while their Albina neighborhood campus undergoes modernization became a real challenge for the district. The original plan for students to attend high school at the district’s Marshall campus—11 miles away—drew backlash from parents. Delays in design and planning stages also pushed construction back to late 2025, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting. The good news? Inflation hasn’t yet inflated construction costs since last June.
WHAT’S THE LATEST? The bad news? The price for Jefferson has ballooned beyond what the 2020 bond can shoulder, and this particular project is back on the ballot for more funding in May. Efforts to keep students on site and to do away with a historic central building, among other heightened costs, raised Jefferson’s price tag from $287 million to a sky-high $491 million at an October board meeting. Since then, the district has asked planning committees at Jefferson, Cleveland and Wells to find ways to cut costs, while leaving specific budgets for each school vague in the upcoming bond. Feder says ultimate cost-cutting decisions will be made by the School Board “in full transparency at a future public meeting.”
For the 2024–25 school year, the district reported Jefferson’s enrollment at 459, about half the size of the second-smallest high school, Benson Polytechnic. As the smallest high school in the district, Jefferson might indeed benefit from a refresh; the district has stood firm in its position that a brand-new building would draw more students. That’s been backed up by district data for other schools it’s modernized.
In a recent interview, outgoing School Board member Andrew Scott said the delay on the CBSE alarms him. “One of the things that we need to do is move projects forward,” he told WW. “I am concerned about this because I’m concerned that we still, five years later, don’t have a solid plan in terms of what it’s going to be.”