FEARING THAT SCHOOLS in low-income and minority neighborhoods of Southeast Portland will be unjustly closed, last Thursday approximately 50 parents, children, and school advocates stood chanting to a group of Portland Public School (PPS) bureaucrats at Harriet Tubman Middle School. “The people, united, will never be defeated,” they yelled in unison, surrounding the handful of school officials.
The protestors were from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national organization of low- and moderate-income families. They are concerned that PPS will close schools because it is a cheap solution to a tight budget, rather than considering the long-term damages to low-income and minority populations.
Recently, PPS commissioned Cushman-Wakefield, a property management company, to assess the property values of each school in Portland; the schools in Southeast Portland had the lowest property values, making them the biggest financial burden on PPS. Instead of restoring the schools, ACORN fears PPS will simply close them and invest in schools with a greater property value, such as those in Southwest Portland.
As ACORN points out, the schools in Southeast Portland have some of the highest attendance numbers in the district. ACORN fears that school closings will only worsen problems of overcrowded classrooms and teacher shortages. In addition, ACORN anticipates that students who would normally attend these schools will be bused to other parts of town.
ACORN protested last week’s meeting of the Best Use of Facilities Task Force, a group set up to decide the fate of these schools; they will make a recommendation to superintendent Ben Canada on February 15th as to whether and which schools will be closed.
“We believe that neighborhoods are an essential part of community living, and closing schools is detrimental to neighborhoods,” said Andrew Ginsberg, a member of ACORN and an organizer of Thursday’s protest.
In a recent study, Barry Edmonston, the director of Population Research at Portland State University, verified that enrollment numbers in Southeast Portland are climbing. Based on their recent growth, he predicted that Southeast Portland is actually one of the school districts most likely to increase the most in enrollment in the next decade.