Hopson's Choice

FOUR MORE YEARS: Tony Hopson says Jefferson should get that long before Portland Public Schools gives up on it. IMAGE: chrisryanphoto.com

On June 21, the Portland School Board and Superintendent Carole Smith shelved until September any decision about closing high schools and redrawing boundaries.

After nearly 30 months of deliberations, hundreds of thousands of dollars of staff and consultants' time, and countless public meetings, they put it all off for another three months.

Why?

Largely because they didn't want to confront a question that has vexed Portland Public Schools for more than 30 years: Should the school district finally admit defeat and close Jefferson High, a school 79 percent of its North Portland neighborhood students don't even attend?

Last week's announcement of the delay was greeted with loud applause from Jefferson's boosters and alumni.

Probably nobody at the meeting was more buoyant about the delay than Tony Hopson, a 1972 Jefferson graduate who runs Self Enhancement Inc., a $12.5 million-a-year nonprofit that serves at-risk African-American youth.

Hopson believes he can solve Jefferson's woes. "The answer to this is three things: leadership in the building, teachers who are teaching and, in my opinion, community-based programs like ours that can fill all the gaps," he says. "Because if little Johnny hasn't eaten and his mom is cracked out, it doesn't matter who the teacher is, it's going to be tough to teach that kid."

This spring, Hopson's SEI applied for a $5 million, five-year federal grant to work with Jefferson students. The goal? To match every ninth-grade student, regardless of race, with a case manager from SEI who will guide the student through graduation and beyond, to college or a career. SEI already does that with a much smaller number of Jefferson students, and the results are impressive; students remain on track to graduate, and most go on to post-secondary education. Given the decades of mistakes at Jefferson, Hopson is either on a fool's errand or engaged in an act of bold leadership.

This much is certainly true: Portland's complicated attitudes about race will drive the school district's ultimate decision about Jefferson, Oregon's only majority-black high school. So will Jefferson's unusual status. It is, by many measures such as test scores or graduation rates, far from Portland's worst high school, except in one category: It loses students at a far greater rate than any other.

And who will decide Jefferson's future? A majority-white School Board that would like to do the right thing just as sincerely as it does not know what that is.

"I say, give us four more years," Hopson says. "Four years from now, if Jefferson is exactly like it is today, man, you get my vote. If they give us what we're asking for and Jefferson remains the same as it is today four years from now, close it down."

He adds: "I think that here in Portland, unlike Detroit or L.A. or St. Louis, we actually have a shot at really getting it right."

To say that Tony Hopson has charm is like saying it sometimes rains in Portland. Take a stroll through a North Portland community event, like Good in the Neighborhood last weekend, or go to a School Board meeting when Hopson speaks and it's palpable how his charisma draws people in.

The 56-year-old grandfather is a former basketball star at Jefferson who has been a fixture in Portland since 1981, when, after graduating from Willamette University in Salem, he started a summer camp for a couple dozen boys. That camp eventually grew into SEI, which now serves 2,500 children a year and has 120 full-time employees.

A spiritual person, Hopson says he goes to church with some of the same families he serves, though his annual salary of $170,000, according to SEI's 2007 tax returns, puts him in a far different income bracket.

And while SEI serves students from Benson and Grant high schools, Hopson has never hidden his affection for Jefferson or his frustration at the school's plight. "Jefferson is the most obvious challenge that this district has been facing for 30 years," Hopson says. "I also have multiple reasons for dealing with Jefferson. I'm an alumnus; my kids went to Jefferson; my granddaughter is at Jefferson today."

When the Portland School Board this month discussed the possibility of closing Jefferson as a neighborhood high school, it surprised no one—and everyone.

Smith spent more than two years studying how to redesign Portland's high schools, and she argued that neighborhood high schools need at least 1,350 students to be financially sustainable and offer the breadth of courses students today seek. In the past school year, Jefferson had less than one-third that number—435 students.

On the other hand, there is no high school in Portland that has had more second chances than Jefferson.

And yet, time and time again, policies that were intended to save Jefferson have nearly killed it.

The prospect that Jefferson might cease to exist as a neighborhood school became clear June 10, when a majority of the School Board signaled they were prepared to close Marshall—one of the district's poorest high schools and in some respects its lowest-performing—and Jefferson.

"What kind of message is that to people of color and poor folks?" Hopson asks. "If you're poor and you're a person of color, look out. Because this district doesn't have any respect for you. Because that's basically what they're saying."

Hopson was ready for a fight.

"I knew it was on," Hopson says. "Once Jefferson was put out there, I knew that it was going to be hard. 'Jefferson only has 435 kids. They've never gotten it right.' So if they're looking to close something, we're the easiest target."

"Closing" Jefferson doesn't mean shuttering its doors. What the School Board wanted to do was abolish Jefferson's neighborhood boundaries and reassign children who live four blocks from Jefferson to different high schools 40 blocks from their homes. The board would then invite any student from anywhere in the school district to apply to go to Jefferson, which would reopen as what's called a "focus" school, offering a number of classes under one theme (like art or biotechnology).

But to Hopson and others in the black community, that option was an affront. "Jefferson is very much a part of the fabric of the black community of Portland—almost as important as church," says Ron Herndon, who in the 1970s helped usher in new School Board members who then ousted a superintendent who condoned racist integration policies. (That superintendent, Robert Blanchard, died of a heart attack shortly after he was fired. In an ironic tribute, the district then named its headquarters the Blanchard Education Service Center.)

"Jefferson is an institution that is reflective of the aspirations and the hope of the black community," Herndon says. "It hasn't always lived up to that, but there's always been the feeling this is a significant part of the community."

On June 16, Hopson sent busloads of Jefferson supporters to the Blanchard building to protest the School Board's proposals. The crowd ranked among the largest School Board audiences in years. It was certainly the only one to have police officers in recent memory. The following week, on June 21, the School Board postponed making a decision about Jefferson.

That position didn't please everyone. "Once again, we have a situation where what's good for kids takes a back seat to pressure from adults," says Marc Abrams, a School Board member from 1995 to 2003. Abrams has long advocated closing Jefferson, which hasn't lacked for additional financial resources. "We've spent two times as much per student there as any other high school. We've trotted out reform after reform after reform, and the test scores show no progress. The community buy-in is lacking."

On the green-tiled walls of Jefferson's cafeteria this month, hand-painted depictions of tombstones carried the names of those who once tried to "fix" Jefferson. Several were named after former principals like Leon Dudley, the legally blind, former bailbondsman from Texas who lasted less than one year at Jefferson. Others showed the names of bygone reforms that, when reduced to edu-speak, appear sadly comical. Jefferson, the gravestones reminded visitors, tried "horizontal academies" one year. When those didn't work, administrators tried "vertical academies" instead.

Jefferson is 101 years old, but the school district's constant tinkering with the school started about 50 years ago, when Jefferson's African-American population reached 25 percent. Examining whether Portland's black students got the same education as white students, Portland Public Schools formed startling conclusions in the 1960s.

"If Negro children who have been poor achievers in their predominately Negro schools are dispersed they will be stimulated to better achievement by association with higher achieving white children, first by increased competition, and second because the factor of isolation will no longer be a barrier to motivation," reads a 1964 school-district report called "Race and Equal Educational Opportunity in Portland's Public Schools." "Greater contact with white children will accustom Negro children to standards with which they must become familiar in order to take an effective place in our society after their formal education is completed."

Guided by this ethos in the 1970s, Portland Public Schools bused black children from the Jefferson neighborhood to other, predominately white schools. But white students rarely went the other way. That is, until 1980.

Under pressure from black leaders who objected to "one-way busing," the School Board adopted a policy in 1980 sometimes called "voluntary" desegregation. That policy was intended to integrate Portland's schools by letting white students transfer to black schools and black students transfer to white schools.

Thirty years later, the opposite has happened at Jefferson. Not only did white students from other neighborhoods not transfer to Jefferson, the white students who already lived near Jefferson fled to other schools, too. Today, one-third of the neighborhood's high-school-age population near Jefferson is white, but only 53 of those 456 students attended Jefferson in 2009-2010.

ROOM TO GROW: If every current student at Jefferson spread out among the building's classrooms, only five or six students would occupy each room. IMAGE: chrisryanphoto.com

The desegregation policy—which evolved into the current transfer policy that lets families choose their students' schools—had a second adverse consequence at Jefferson. Given the opportunity to leave, black students fled as well. In 2009-2010, 458 of the 650 African-American teenagers in Jefferson's boundaries left Jefferson (although some black students from outside the neighborhood transferred in).

"That dismantled the whole system," says Maggie Mashia, president of Jefferson's alumni association, of the district's transfer policy. "It's what killed us all."

In 1998, the School Board made more dramatic changes intended to save Jefferson. It had appointed Diana Snowden, a utility executive with no prior educational experience who was the wife of former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, to be the school district's new superintendent. Snowden quickly pushed for "reconstitution," a radical plan that allowed her to fire all of Jefferson's 60 teachers and force those teachers to reapply for their jobs.

"She, all of a sudden, said we're going to reconstitute Jefferson," recalls Sue Hagmeier, a School Board member from 1995 to 2003. "She not only said we're going to reconstitute, but we're going to do it now."

The development ripped apart Jefferson's faculty, and gave parents and students heartburn. "Jefferson Teachers End Era With Tears," read a headline from the June 11, 1998, edition of The Oregonian.

In hindsight, reconstitution did more harm than good, teachers and then-School Board members say. A number of the school's best educators left and never returned, including Gail Black and Linda Christensen, who both taught English. That was hard on students, "like going to a different school," says Black, then also a union representative at Jefferson.

Reconstitution also precipitated more than a decade of instability at the school; since 1998, Jefferson has had more than two dozen administrators. "My gut feeling is that they've been worse since reconstitution," says Hagmeier, who counts her vote for reconstitution among her biggest regrets. (Snowden could not be reached for comment.)

Three years later, the feds dealt Jefferson another blow when then-President George W. Bush introduced the No Child Left Behind Act. If the transfer policy initiated Jefferson's enrollment decline, the 2001 federal law exacerbated it.

That's because Jefferson failed to meet No Child Left Behind's minimum standards in the very first year of its implementation. After the NCLB sanctions came into play, the school district had to offer all Jefferson students the opportunity to transfer. Enrollment plummeted 15 percent in a single year.

"No Child Left Behind intensified the problem, made it more public," says Steve Olczak, principal at inner-Northeast's Benson High, which took in many of the students fleeing Jefferson after 2001. "The sanctions did not make Jefferson better, they made it worse."

Starting in 2004, Jefferson's structure changed multiple times. Under the direction of then-Superintendent Vicki Phillips, the school district divided Jefferson into small schools with millions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Then Jefferson added single-sex academies. Then the boys' school closed within two years, and the small schools fell apart. The only thing that held steady was the exodus of kids.

(Top Left) GRAVE DECISIONS: Superintendent Carole Smith at Jefferson on June 14. IMAGE: WW Staff (Bottom Left) CHOPPING BLOCK: Before Jefferson, School Board members considered closing Benson. IMAGE: WW Staff (Right) CLOSED CALL: Marc Abrams, former School Board member, says close Jefferson. IMAGE: chrisryanphoto.com

Hopson knows all the reasons students have decided to leave Jefferson for other high schools.

"I tell folks kids have good reasons for leaving," Hopson says. "We need to give them equally good reasons for staying. Until that happens, things won't change."

Some are skeptical of his advocacy. In 2007, the president of the parent-teacher group at Jefferson penned an angry screed to then-Superintendent Phillips, accusing Hopson of meddling in Jefferson's affairs. "Mr. Hopson has been granted overwhelming, inappropriate influence in matters affecting JHS for many years," Glenda Walker, a fellow 1972 graduate, wrote on May 2, 2007.

And to the extent some people argue Jefferson should be closed, Hopson's endless optimism could be viewed as prolonging the inevitable. "As with anybody who's promoting the idea that the patient can be sustained indefinitely on life support, they have some responsibility," says Abrams, the former School Board member who has long said Jefferson should close.

Hopson calls his less charitable detractors "haters."

"I don't think my optimism has hurt Jefferson," he says. "I think the fact that some people see SEI and see me in a certain kind of way could bring less than positive thoughts because I'm involved. Because, like I say, this is a small town and sometimes people look at me and sometimes look at SEI in a less than positive way. But in the neighborhood we say we just have a lot of haters. People are hating on us because we're successful. But we're successful not because we talk a good game but because we walk the talk every day."

It does frustrate him. "It says in the Bible a man can get no honor in his own town," he says. "We get more respect elsewhere."

Some wonder why Hopson's activism doesn't always extend to Latino students at Roosevelt or poor white students at Marshall. "People look at us and say, 'Why are you always playing the race card?'" Hopson says. "'Why is it always about race?'"

But he has an easy answer for that.

"Jefferson as a majority-black school has had stuff done to it forever, as if to say, 'Those black kids over there just can't get it right,'" Hopson says. "So now we're at the point where they're saying, 'Let's just turn it into something else,' as if to say, 'They're never going to get it right.' That suggests we basically can't educate large numbers of black kids at Grant, at Benson or at any other school. If there's a majority, we can't get it done."

Hopson, however, insists Portland can.

"Every board that's come through here fights the same fight, and most of them come to the same conclusion, in the last 20 years, that we should close Jefferson," Hopson says. "I'm just looking for somebody to be different and say, 'Let's really flip the script here.' Instead of closing Jefferson, what about making it a winner? Because if we can do that at Jefferson, man, it becomes easy to do it everywhere else."

GOOD IN THE 'HOOD: Children play at King School Park on June 26. IMAGE: chrisryanphoto.com

Hopson says SEI will find out this summer if the U.S. Department of Education wants to give his organization the $5 million grant to serve Jefferson's students.

Linda Wright, SEI's board chairwoman, acknowledges the task ahead is huge. "The students who go through the SEI program at Jefferson currently are very successful," Wright says. "The more young people we can reach, the more successful the school will be."

Corrections: An earlier version of this story misstated Tony Hopson's annual salary. It is $170,000. The incorrect number, pulled from 2007 tax returns, included benefits. Also, Superintendent Robert Blanchard was misidentified.WW regrets the errors.

A Slideshow Of Jefferson History

The history of Portland Public Schools and Jefferson High: A timeline found on one wall at Jefferson on June 14.

WWeek 2015