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The race for a Northeast Portland school board seat will be between a student and a parent.
Virginia La Forte, a long-time Portland Public Schools parent activist, filed her campaign for a School Board seat representing Zone 5 on Thursday. She will try to replace Gary Hollands, who dropped out of the race today.
Her competition, Jorge Sanchez Bautista, is an 18-year-old McDaniel High School student.
La Forte, a strategist by day, has most recently been active in the Grant community, where she co-founded the Grant Bowl Community Coalition. The parent-led effort is raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to install lights and seats at the bowl, the only 6A athletic field in Oregon without lights.
But she says she’s most proud of her work to establish an Environmental Technical Advisory Committee for Harriet Tubman Middle School, which commissioned a Portland State University study on air quality at the site and raised $10 million to help students breathe clean air.
If elected, La Forte says she has two top priorities. The first will be to engage all PPS communities with “urgency and speed” around the use of PPS bond dollars (if the $1.83 billion bond passed in the May 2025 election).
“There’s so much that needs to be done when it comes to modernizing and addressing safety issues in our schools. There are so many buildings that haven’t been touched in years,” she says. “I’m not talking about a community engagement that takes months and months. I’m talking about get in, get out. Let’s get down to business.”
The second will be to address chronic absenteeism. PPS reported about 36.8% of its kids as chronically absent last year.
La Forte has already garnered a number of endorsements, including from Hollands and his fellow board member Julia Brim-Edwards. She also has support from former County Commissioner Sharon Meieran and City Councilor Dan Ryan.
This is not her first bid for the Zone 5 seat. La Forte lost in 2017 to Scott Bailey, another parent activist. Bailey garnered about 63% of the vote in that election, and La Forte got about 26%.
La Forte says she’s running because growing up, her educators and schools were the thing that gave her life possibility. “It really shaped my experience, my beliefs that every kid deserves to feel valued, capable and supported in their learning environment.”
“The buildings are crumbling with unreliable funding. Our support services are lacking. There’s no accountability measures,” she says. “At what point are we going to start taking a look in the mirror and figuring out how we’re going to change our strategy to build a better district for our students and educators?”