Too Many High Schools

Portland Public Schools has a math problem.

The district enrolls 13,138 students across its nine major high schools. But enrollment numbers are in a steep decline. By the 2033-34 school year, population researchers at Portland State University project, those same schools will hold just 10,765 students.

School buildings across PPS are in bad shape. The high schools are no exception, which is why the district has renovated six of them over the past decade. Each now has capacity for 1,700 students, except for Roosevelt High School in North Portland, which was built to hold 1,350 and has since expanded to a capacity closer to 1,600.

Three high schools remain to be rebuilt: Cleveland, Ida B. Wells, and Jefferson. In May, PPS will ask voters to approve a $1.83 billion property tax bond, with $1.15 billion of that reserved to build up those schools to a capacity of 1,700 students each.

Can you spot the problem?

Pencils down. The answer is that Portland Public Schools will have capacity for 15,200 high school students—2,000 more than it has now, even as its halls continue to empty out.

If the projections hold true in eight years, each high school except Roosevelt would be about 550 students below capacity if students were evenly distributed. In total, the district is overbuilding by more than 4,400 students—enough to fill more than two high schools.

That doesn’t just mean the unpopular kids will have cafeteria tables to themselves. PPS is already making difficult cuts in the face of operating budget deficits. Running too many high schools could have major consequences for sustaining basic school functions, says Carrie Hahnel, a senior associate partner at Bellwether, an education consulting firm.

“When districts have too many sites given the enrollment, they’re spreading their operating funds thinly across the district, and that reduces the opportunities students can have,” Hahnel says. “Even if you have a [building] that can support terrific athletics, science and arts programs, if you can’t afford educators to staff those programs, you’re not going to be able to offer them.”

The district knows it’s losing students to declining birth rates and rising costs of living in Portland’s inner core (“Big Kid on Campus,” WW, April 12, 2023).

PPS cites its falling numbers as one factor in the $40 million budget deficit it faces in the upcoming academic year. (In Oregon, schools are paid per student they enroll.) And at a district budget forum in February, PPS Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong announced the district was gearing up for conversations later this spring around enrollment balancing and school closures.

The May bond’s lofty construction plans seem to defy that reality.

When WW asked members of the School Board to justify rebuilding high schools when population trends don’t support it, they replied that new schools could be key to revitalizing Portland and attracting new families. “We’re not building high schools for the next five years. We’re building them for the next 100 years,” School Board chair Eddie Wang says. “We also need to be part of the revitalization of Portland. Schools draw people in.”

For supporters, the May bond is also about fulfilling a promise, one the board made in 2012 to voters. “The reason for that promise is really sound,” says former board member Andrew Scott, who led the drafting of the upcoming bond. “It’s that once you finish all the high schools, every single student will go to at least one modernized, new facility in their school career.”

“What we’re trying to do is modernize the buildings under the understanding that if you build it, they will come,” adds School Board member Michelle DePass, whose zone encompasses Jefferson. “Every high school that we’ve rebuilt, the population has come out and shown up. In fact, a couple of our modernized high schools are overcrowded.”

But will they come? John Tapogna, an education economist and senior policy adviser at ECOnorthwest, says it’s incumbent on the superintendent to join forces with partners—like City Hall—to ensure housing units and attractions that will bring families into the city for the long run.

“In some respects, the school district is sitting by itself. I don’t know if they consider it an optimistic building strategy, but there isn’t a collective action in this,” Tapogna says. “For them to justify building as much capacity as they’re currently on track to do, they need to have more partners to justify that optimism.”

Skeptics say the numbers don’t lie, and they point to bleak national realities about declining enrollment in public schools the district needs to face (see “Magic 8 Ball.”).

Former School Board member Scott Bailey, an economist who teaches a course on economic geography at Clark College, says the promise in 2012 was made in a different time, when Portland was on a growth trajectory and numbers backed up the district’s vision. (PSU’s June 2012 projections forecast the district would have 51,490 students this academic year. PPS reported 43,375 in October 2024.)

“You can say, ‘Oh, we made a promise’ and go ahead and, in my view, waste hundreds of millions of tax dollars,” Bailey says. “Or you can say, ‘Things have changed. We need a new plan.’”

So then: Let’s tear the Band-Aid off and consider what that plan might require.

Right now, closing a high school is not on the table. The issue at hand is whether to modernize them. But that choice will go a long way toward determining whether a school stays open.

Nationwide, conversations about closing or downsizing high schools have been politically explosive; enough, at times, to drive superintendents out of their jobs. PPS is no exception. Members of the school community feel the district made them a promise, and critics point to the numbers. At the heart of it all is the fate of the district’s largest bond yet, which hangs in the balance.

Here are five paths the district could take moving forward. Each comes with assets and drawbacks.

Estimated costs of renovations, as outlined by WW, have not been updated since the School Board met Oct. 21. Since then, district officials have said they hope to shave $20 million to $40 million from each project.

1. Don’t rebuild Ida B. Wells High School.

Year built: 1956

Cost of renovation: $435 million

Current enrollment: 1,650

Projected enrollment in eight years: 1,257

Reasons to halt modernization: Ida B. Wells in Southwest Portland is among the newer PPS buildings, and is not yet falling apart like the other two high schools on the drawing board for overhauls.

Reasons not to: In the next eight years, Wells could still hold a comparatively robust student population. “If you look at our geographical map, there are only two high schools on the westside, Lincoln and Wells,” says School Board chair Wang. If those students stay west of the Willamette, Lincoln High School would need to hold 2,543 students to make closing Wells pencil out. Unless the district wants to bus students across the Ross Island Bridge, this option makes little sense. “We have to build Wells,” Wang says.

2. Don’t rebuild Cleveland High School.

Year built: 1916

Cost of renovation: $450 million

Current enrollment: 1,422

Projected enrollment in eight years: 914

Reasons to halt modernization: If PSU projections hold true, Cleveland will be the second-smallest high school in the district in eight years, with just 914 students attending.

Dr. Ethan Sharygin, director of PSU’s Population Research Center, says the center’s projections for Cleveland’s student population are based on faster-than-anticipated declines in enrollment (already down 20% since fall 2021). He says elementary schools that feed into Cleveland are seeing lower enrollments in early grades, speeding the decline in numbers.

Cleveland also faces unique site constraints. The school is close to busy Southeast Powell Boulevard and stands on just 4 acres of land, the smallest of any PPS high school campus.

Challenges presented at a recent meeting of a design advisory group included additional costs for storage of construction materials, parking restrictions for construction workers, and overtime costs. (A district-commissioned report by Cornerstone Management Group found PPS could save $53 million on Cleveland by building it in three years instead of two, though many parents have been displeased with the decision.)

Reasons not to: Cleveland is falling apart, and it’s not safe. Former journalism teacher Jan Watt, who recently retired after 56 years at the school, would know. She says it’s taken a team of dedicated teachers to keep the school running for years, painting walls and fixing fallen ceiling tiles.

“This building is ancient,” Watt says, adding it’s been “hanging by a shoestring” since modernizations began with the 2012 bond. In public testimony and interviews with WW, Cleveland students and parents have expressed a range of concerns about the degrading elevator, inaccessible entrances, tight classrooms, and lack of turfed fields.

The district must also consider the fierce advocacy of Cleveland students, parents and teachers, who are already displeased that they’re last in line for an upgrade.

Parents Liz Super and Megan Steffek, who co-run Turf Powell Park, say they know of families who’ve opted out of attending Cleveland because of the state of the building. They say those families would bring their children back for a new one. And they point to Cleveland’s status as a successful, high-achieving high school in Oregon as another reason the school should be given a chance to succeed with a new facility.

“If Portland invests in childhood and creating safe spaces, we’re actually going to get our money back on the back end,” Super says, pointing out that a strong education can serve as a preventive measure against problems the city struggles with, like addiction and homelessness.

Wang says Cleveland and Wells are the only two schools he sees up for discussion about halting modernization, given that no PPS bond has funded modernizations at the schools since the district started passing bonds for high school upgrades in 2012. But he says both neighborhoods have enough students to fill high schools.

“I think we’re kind of in a trap because if you wanted to have that real discussion about not building a high school, I think what we needed to do was have that conversation back in 2014,” Wang says. “The issue now is that the last two high schools that need to be built are not the ones that we can sacrifice.”

3. Don’t rebuild Jefferson High School.

Year built: 1908

Cost of renovation: $491 million

Current enrollment: 459

Projected enrollment in eight years: 515

Reasons to halt modernization: Yes, PPS already earmarked $311 million for Jefferson from its 2020 bond, and allocated another $55 million in contingency funds for the project. But work hasn’t started. Several complications, including contracting and where students would attend school during the overhaul, have slowed the process—and made it more expensive.

Jefferson currently enrolls 459 students, half the size of the district’s next-smallest high school, Benson Polytechnic. In the next eight years, it’s projected to maintain its enrollment, but it won’t come close to the 1,700 mark that the district is preparing to build for.

For education economists WW spoke to, Jefferson’s size raised red flags. “I just would hate to see scarce dollars wasted to build a great deal of capacity that dwarfs their enrollment numbers by a factor of three,” says Dr. Thomas Dee, an economist and professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

Bailey was on the School Board when the Jefferson modernization was referred to voters. “I can take some responsibility for maybe not the best planning process,” he says. “But Jefferson is a third full. Where are the students going to come from? You have to build for what you have.”

Reasons not to: It’s hard to overstate the role that Jefferson plays in the historic consciousness of Black Portlanders. The school stands as a symbol of the Albina neighborhood, the city’s Black Main Street until gentrification priced out its residents. A rebuild of Jefferson is a piece of a promise to bring those families back.

“It’s Black people having to move away because they can’t afford to stay there, even if they may have wanted their kids to be at Jeff,” says Dr. Lisa Bates, a professor of Black studies at PSU who is also affiliated with the university’s urban planning department.

Black leaders in Albina, including Tony Hopson Sr., founder of the education nonprofit Self Enhancement Inc., told WW they see the high school as playing a “key” role in the revitalization of the Albina neighborhood.

But right now, they say, Jefferson lacks a building necessary to attract students.

“We’re trying to rebuild Albina and we’re trying to bring our people back into Albina,” says Richard Hunter, who has chaired several Jefferson modernization planning committees. “But it’s not going to just be us. We got a whole lot of white families that have gentrified this area that will be happy to send their kids to Jeff…if you had a state-of-the-art [school] for your kids to go to. Otherwise, why would you want your child in that school?”

Hunter adds the district will need to get serious about redrawing Jefferson’s attendance boundaries, which currently allow students around Jefferson to choose to go to Roosevelt, Grant or McDaniel high schools instead. Grant is currently overenrolled.

DePass, whose zone encompasses Jefferson, has been one of the school’s most vocal defenders. She points to multiple efforts—including by SEI and the Albina Vision Trust—to bring Black families back into the Albina community by buying back land and building affordable housing.

Hopson adds: “This is the first time in the history of the Black community that Black people are in control of the components to positively impact the future of Jefferson High School. That’s a first, and that, to me, is the difference maker right there.”

4. Rebuild all three schools smaller.

Reasons to build smaller: Hopson says it would be fair to build a school like Jefferson to a capacity of 800 or 900, with the possibility of expanding later. “If we’re not ready for 1,700, let’s not build 1,700,” he says. “But let’s build something that has the ability to expand to that. I mean, how hard is that?”

Ron Herndon, a longtime Portland education advocate, seconds Hopson. He says the upcoming bond will be a hard sell in the political climate, and that if Jefferson advocates are going to push for 1,700 students, there needs to be “some strong data indicating when we anticipate that many Black families returning to Albina.”

“I share that aspiration,” Herndon says, “but if I’m going to ask people to fork up millions of dollars to support that, I deserve to have some data that shows when we anticipate that occurring.”

The School Board has decided it’s comfortable cutting square footage from each of its high school builds to trim costs, down from about 310,000 to 295,000 square feet per school. (At a Feb. 4 board meeting, Armstrong, the PPS superintendent, said it would save the district about $24 million across all three schools to trim the square footage.)

But in a framework it approved Feb. 11, the board wrote that each project must meet education specifications set by the district, which means high schools will still be built to hold 1,700 students each. (Valerie Feder, a spokeswoman for PPS, says that is not a ceiling but a target capacity.)

Building smaller could also be an alternative to school closures, which can be damaging to student learning, especially during high school. There’s a catch, though: No one wants to see their high school get less than the others.

Education experts told WW that other districts nationwide have cut costs by not building athletics facilities at some schools, turning schools into magnet programs that offer specific trades or even collaborated with cities to double city library spaces as school library spaces, thus saving costs on libraries.

None of those sounds palatable to Herndon. “If the forecast for the next 10 years is 500, then I want to make sure those 500 students have a world-class education,” he says.

Reasons not to: Wang, the board chair, says there are some cost savings that come with making schools a little smaller, but such savings are “not significant” when it comes to the longevity of these high school builds, which he hopes will serve students for the next 100 years. He says bigger spaces can also be an asset for teachers and students who can use those spaces for collaboration and to move around more easily.

“You don’t want to get into a situation where you build [schools] only to capacity, because then, if you get to 1,500 or 1,600 students, are you building portables?” asks Dr. Andy Saultz, interim dean of Pacific University’s college of education. “You want to give yourself room to grow, but it’s an interesting calculus.”

Hahnel, the consultant at Bellwether, adds there may be certain fixed costs for each high school modernization, all of which cost money. Spaces like gyms, science labs and performance rooms come regardless of how many students attend, she says.

Then, there’s what happened at Roosevelt High School. The North Portland school was modernized to hold 1,350 students when its enrollment was low, about 950 students. It’s since skyrocketed to more than 1,400, and Feder says PPS has had to install multiple additions since it reopened—ultimately to hold a capacity of about 1,600. “The district has learned that it is more efficient to build to capacity the first time around,” she says.

5. Change nothing.

Reasons to stick with the status quo: For supporters, the May bond is also about fulfilling a promise the board made to voters in 2012. Such a promise carries a lot of political weight, and moving the goal posts now risks alienating the bond’s strongest supporters (see “AP Political Science,” page 14).

Hahnel says she understands the pressure School Board members and district officials feel. “They have to ensure that the budget is balanced, and they have to get reelected if they want to be, and they want to be responsive to their constituents.”

Tapogna, the ECOnorthwest economist, says the modernizations are not inherently defying the numbers. “I have always thought of the high school rebuildings as Portland’s bet on itself,” he says.

Reasons to do something: The district’s in the midst of a deficit budget season that will be marked by difficult cuts, and declining enrollment is only projected to continue.

“The important thing here is that the district leaders have the backbone to make really hard decisions that are going to be unpopular with some parts of the community,” Hahnel says. “It feels to me like there’s a refusal to acknowledge facts and to make really fiscally prudent decisions for the future.”

If the bond passes, choosing not to modernize a high school would immediately free up $400 million for other projects across PPS—especially upgrading elementary and middle schools. Many of those schools are also in desperate need of maintenance work, which the bond could cover.

That’s not on the table for PPS. Feder, the district spokeswoman, says the district will instead launch a Recruitment, Retention, and Recovery enrollment campaign, a data-driven effort to boost numbers. (Sharygin, the PSU demographer, says about 90% of all high schoolers in PPS’s boundaries already attend a PPS school.)

“While modernized buildings help attract families, we know facilities alone won’t fill classrooms,” Feder says. “We’re focusing on areas with the most significant declines, using marketing, outreach, and engagement to bring families back.”

Seven education experts WW spoke to agreed that the district must consider what it’s giving up when it chooses to spend on each high school. “We always have to frame an expenditure in one area in terms of what we are forgoing in another,” Dee says.

PPS, he adds, must begin a frank and painful conversation.

“This is a moment that I think requires leadership to figure out how to make the best decisions,” he says. “And I would stress that to not make the decision is itself a choice, and potentially a deeply painful and incorrect choice.”

NEXT WEEK: WW explores another way a $1.83 billion bond could be spent.