Jessica Fletcher has spent more than five years building up a community biking and walking program at James John Elementary School, a Title I school in North Portland. Every day, volunteers accompany kids—some on foot and some on bikes—to and from school.
Fletcher says there are about eight kids who join the group every day. Dozens more join a weekly “bike bus” (in which a group of kids and chaperones ride their bikes to school together on a fixed route) and monthly “walk and roll.”
Fletcher has seen the program have a big impact on the community over the years.
“It’s been my joy,” she said. “These are kids who weren’t going to school, and now they are.”
James John serves a large low-income student population. Early on, Fletcher realized a lot of kids at the school didn’t have bikes, or know how to ride them. She’s been able to teach kids how to ride bikes, and help hundreds of kids and their families get free bikes and gear.
“We’re starting to get regular riders who never saw themselves biking,” Fletcher told the Mercury. “There’s just something really wonderful happening here.”
Last month, Portland Public Schools (PPS) confirmed James John is on the list of schools expected to close as part of the district’s plan to consolidate students in fewer buildings. PPS’s proposal, which it has dubbed a “rightsizing” plan, could see up to 14 schools close, effective next fall, and result in significant changes at dozens more. PPS says its plan, a response to declining school enrollment numbers linked to lower birth rates, will result in better-resourced, more stable schools across the board.
The announcement immediately sent shock waves through the city. While families at some long-underserved schools feel a major change is needed, many others have a long list of questions and concerns. Fletcher immediately thought of the loss of the bike and walking programs she and others have spent so long developing. She knew many kids would struggle to get to their new schools.
PPS leaders have said they want to ensure the plan they implement minimizes transportation disruptions. But many parents don’t see that reflected in the district’s proposals. They fear the school closures will halt efforts to ensure kids are able to walk and bike to school safely, forcing parents to resort to the car pickup and drop-off lines.
Some parents have raised concerns that the school closures will erode the district’s stated climate goals. In 2022, the PPS board voted to adopt an ambitious climate plan, tasking the district with achieving net-zero emissions by 2040. The plan included specific objectives related to transportation emissions, including a goal to reduce single-occupant car commuting for both students and staff.
“This is going to create a situation where the majority of families have to drive,” one parent, Jodi Jacobson, said. “When I think about the Safe Routes to School initiatives and what the Portland Bureau of Transportation is trying to do to make this a more sustainable city… it just feels, all around, like a terrible idea.”
The PPS plan
Earlier this year, Portland school board members agreed it was time to take a hard look at school consolidation. The district, like many others across the country, has faced a significant decline in enrollment in recent years, and the trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
In early October, after months of deliberation, PPS leaders proposed two school closure scenarios, identifying 11 schools for closure in the first scenario, and 14 in the other. In addition to the schools slated for closure, the rightsizing plan would have ripples district-wide. Dozens more schools are expected to see significant changes to grade levels (several K-8 schools may change to elementary-only), specialized programs like language immersion, and enrollment boundaries.
PPS Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong said it was “extraordinarily difficult” to consider closing any school. But she said district leaders had to examine PPS “as a whole and consider changes that give every student access to strong programs, stable staffing, and the opportunities and support they deserve.”
With closure proposals still up in the air, there’s a lot of room for families to speculate about how everything will play out. Transportation impacts are a top concern for many.
“We recognize transportation is a significant concern for families, particularly those who may be asked to attend a school outside their current neighborhood,” PPS spokesperson Valerie Feder told the Mercury. “Because these are still proposals, specific transportation arrangements have not been finalized.”
In the meantime, many parents are left mapping out different scenarios and grieving the anticipated loss of what they’ve built.
Tough positions
Amber Kinney and her husband Rob helped start a bike bus at Maplewood Elementary School in Southwest Portland’s Multnomah Village—one of the schools PPS has slated for closure under both scenarios. The district proposed sending Maplewood students to three different schools in Southwest Portland, between one and three miles away from their current school.
The majority of students would be diverted to Hayhurst Elementary, about a mile to the north, with a minority going to Rieke Elementary, located more than two miles east of Maplewood. Children with special needs enrolled in Maplewood’s intensive skills classroom would be diverted to Markham, more than three miles away on the other side of I-5.
Kinney said her husband wanted to bike to school with their older child several years ago. But they didn’t always feel safe riding alone, with the area lacking infrastructure like sidewalks and bike lanes.
“It was just so sketchy back then,” Kinney said. “[Rob] would try to ride every once in a while with our kid, and then he started inviting friends so he could gain visibility and make it safer with bigger numbers.”
Over time, Maplewood’s bike bus turned from an ad hoc group of families to an official, weekly event, attracting as many as 100 riders when it’s nice outside.
Kinney, whose elementary-aged children would go to Rieke if the district plan is implemented, says the route to the new school is long and hilly, making it very difficult to imagine a large group of kids making the trek.
On October 16, hundreds of Maplewood students and their families attended a bike bus rally to advocate for the school. Kinney said she saw the event as a “farewell tour”—but not one she embarked on willingly.
“I am so sad, and I don’t understand. There are so many questions zipping through my head about all of this,” Kinney told the Mercury. “Maplewood’s bike bus has achieved a successful model we’ve been told repeatedly by leaders in our city and our state is a priority.”
Families are also concerned the hard-fought investments in infrastructure to make it safer for kids to bike and walk to school will now sit unused.
“I know that as a city, we have fought tooth and nail for investments in Safe Routes to School, in transit, sidewalks and other safety infrastructure,” Shawn Fleek, a parent of a child at Irvington Elementary, said. “Every dollar that you spend on something like that is a dollar that you don’t spend somewhere else. And so, just from a transportation perspective, if those schools lie fallow, then those sidewalks could have been sidewalks somewhere else.”
Unequal impacts
The school closures may have a particularly dramatic impact for students enrolled in specialized programs, notably those in dual language immersion (DLI) classrooms. Currently, PPS offers Spanish DLI programs at nine elementary and eight middle schools, with programs in four other languages available at six other elementary and five middle schools.
Both school closure scenarios would consolidate DLI programs across the district, particularly impacting Spanish language programs. For example, students currently enrolled in Spanish DLI programs at North Portland’s James John, Beach, and Sitton Elementary Schools would all move to César Chávez School, which is located two or more miles away from each feeder school. Spanish DLI students at Atkinson Elementary School, located on Southeast Division and 58th Avenues, would move to Lent, a little more than three miles away on the east side of I-205. Sitton and Atkinson are both expected to remain open, but would no longer offer DLI programs.
The district says the DLI “hub” model has shown positive academic results and would enable language immersion students to access more concentrated resources.
Parents with children enrolled in Atkinson’s DLI program have many concerns about the move, transportation challenges not least among them. Many students enrolled in the district’s Spanish DLI programs come from Latino, Spanish-speaking families. At Atkinson, PPS data shows, the DLI student population is roughly 70 percent ethnically Latino, compared to only 8 percent in the neighborhood (non-DLI) program.
Federico Pérez Fernández and his kids have commuted to Atkinson Elementary School by electric bike from Northeast Portland for several years, with his children enrolled in the school’s Spanish dual language immersion (DLI) program. PPS plans to move Atkinson’s DLI students to Lent Elementary, a little more than three miles away on the east side of I-205.
Pérez Fernández said the program has been “life-changing” for his family. But he’s not sure how his family would navigate the commute to Lent. They’re considering other options, including trying to find a spot at another Spanish immersion school closer to home, if there’s any availability.
“If we don’t find that spot, we’re going to be in a tough position,” Pérez Fernández said. “For us, losing the DLI program would be a big blow.”
Jorge Dorantes and his wife, Claudia Halfen, enrolled their older child in Atkinson’s Spanish DLI program this year. Dorantes is from Mexico, and said it was important to him to keep his family’s cultural heritage and language alive in his kids.
“They can work on their language skills and create community with other people who also speak Spanish and are also connected to the traditions,” Dorantes told the Mercury.
Dorantes said he can tell his daughter feels more confident about speaking Spanish because she sees other kids speaking it at school, too.
“She feels comfortable using it in different situations instead of feeling like maybe isolated by speaking a different language,” he said. “It creates a sense of community, and normalizes the idea that it’s okay to have different cultures.”
Dorantes and Halfen live near Atkinson, and say they walk or bike to school every day. They said moving to Lent would require an impossible commute, and also feel it would remove them from a school community they’ve grown to love. Perhaps more concerning is a sense many families share—that the district’s plan will isolate and segregate Spanish-speaking students from the wider school community.
“Creating these hubs of minority populations in the peripheries of the city is mind-boggling to me,” Pérez Fernández said.
Not everyone has experienced the district’s announcement the same way. Blake Goud, a dad to two kids, has been a Cėsar Chávez K-8 School parent since 2020. While Goud raised some issues with the district’s closure proposal, he generally supports PPS making a big change, seeing how his kids have been impacted by low enrollment and disinvestment in their Title I school.
“It’s a really great community,” Goud said of Chávez. “The issues really come down to how well the school can function the way it’s set up.”
Chávez is a K-8 Title I school serving a racially diverse and economically disadvantaged community of a little more than 400 students. Goud said the school currently lacks a full-time librarian or counselor, and has seen high teacher and principal turnover. Compared to students at other K-8 schools, middle school students at Chávez have had limited access to classes outside the core curriculum. These are just a few factors that have made it clear to Goud something needed to change.
Under the district’s plan, Chávez would become an elementary-only DLI school, bringing together Spanish immersion students from across the North Portland peninsula. Goud said it’s been “dispiriting” to see the overwhelmingly angry reactions from parents across Portland, considering the benefits he thinks the plan would bring to high-need schools.
Goud currently serves as the Safe Routes to School coordinator for Chávez’s Parent Teacher Association. He organizes a weekly walking school bus (like a bike bus, but on foot) that typically includes about 10-15 students, as well as a monthly bike bus. Goud has seen the program benefit students and families, but noted it has struggled with a lack of resources, including volunteers. Goud acknowledged the possible transportation challenges for new Chávez families, but said he hopes the new school community can combine resources to address problems like that and others.
PPS board member Rashelle Chase-Miller also defended the district’s plans on the basis of equity. In a blog post, she wrote about how they differ from previous decisions, in decades past, that placed “the weight of integration and system change on Black families” in North Portland.
“A great deal is at risk, but significant gains are also on the table as we direct resources toward North Portland schools serving students furthest from educational justice,” Chase-Miller wrote, saying the decision was about “whether the next generation of Black and brown kids in our city get the full, rich, unapologetic education they deserve, or if they continue to bear the brunt of a broken, underfunded status quo.”
Next steps
Anger and fear about the closures are spreading outside just the immediate school communities. In response to overwhelming community backlash, Portland City Council unanimously signed onto a letter to the PPS board and superintendent last month, asking district leaders to pause planning and extend the timeline for final school closure decisions. The Council’s letter pointed out the school closure decisions will have far-reaching consequences for the city at large.
“The school locations influence where families choose to live, how children travel to school, and whether communities have access to essential services,” the City Council letter reads. “The City’s investments in affordable and family-sized housing, community centers, safe streets, and neighborhood development are closely connected to the availability of strong, accessible public schools.”
Representatives from several Portland transportation advocacy groups also wrote to district leaders highlighting the potential costs of the rightsizing plan.
The letter said the decisions could “potentially unwind years of investment and community effort to make walking and rolling to school a safe and viable choice that many families rely on,” and asked for transportation to be a significant factor in the district’s decision.
“Walking and rolling to school cannot be dismissed as a nice-to-have privilege,” the letter states. “We ask that this issue not just be considered, but be factored in a significant way when evaluating how proposed changes would affect students’ ability to travel safely and independently to school, given the importance it has on kids, families, neighborhoods, and our region.”
What happens next remains to be seen. PPS leaders have been inundated with pushback over the proposal, but many appear to be steadfast in their commitment to making changes. PPS will hold several more engagement sessions throughout November and early December. The board is expected to cast their final vote on the matter in December, determining if one of the closure scenarios will move forward, or if the district will opt to defer.
