Closing Franklin would be so devastating to my neighborhood. We bought our house in South Tabor in part because of the great park and school grounds and have met so many of our neighbors there. I really do hope there is a great turnout Thursday and that PPS realizes that the impact of closing Franklin greatly outweighs any benefit.

The real story here is that this kind of rumor circulated before meetings at Cleveland, Grant and Jefferson. You're picking up a story that does not cite any district sources, and repeating it without contacting the district.

While they may well be planning to close Franklin (or Marshall, Cleveland, Grant, Jefferson...), district administrators have consistently stated that they are nowhere close to deciding which schools will be closed or converted to focus options.

Sarah: who is Molly Cliff Hilts, and where did she get the info that Franklin and Marshall are the ones on the chopping block, rather than all the other district high schools that have already been rumored to face the same fate? Just curious why we're treating the Franklin/Marshall story with more legs than the dozen previous similar stories that haven't been reported here (i.e., talks of Benson closing have been circulating for two years). Thanks.

Once again speculation and rumors are abound.
The district has not determined which schools (if any) will be closed. The letter from Molly did not state Franklin or Marshall would be closing. Her letter was a notice to the communities that the district is concidering a few high schools in the district. Unfortunately the Examiner and now the Mercury have posted this as fact.
To find out more information about PPS High School Redesign plans, attend a meeting at Madison this Tuesday or the meeting at Franklin this Thursday. Both meetings are from 6:30pm - 8:00pm.

I agree that offering a full range of AP classes is very important. There are several ways to do that, one is tracking not just the students, but the schools themselves. I'm not sure that that is a good policy, the point of school isn't just "book learning" but also teach people to interact in socially acceptable ways. The other obvious way is to increase density in the community. Real density has been going down in this city: People are having less children, less people have roommates, and more single people own houses than before, all leading to less people per dwelling unit, even as the number of units has risen. Certainly one way to increase density is to build more units to combat that, but the other way is to simply drive the cost of housing up to the point that people/units goes back up. It works for almost all large cities, and Portland is growing, (more out than up, unfortunately,) so these is no reason it couldn't work here.

Given that the neighborhoods tend to oppose more units anyways, but want to keep "their" schools, I only see them working in one direction, (which actually does make sense given that most neighborhood association boards are made up of homeowners): Increase the land values.