Sound the SE Portland alarm bells. As part of a major overhaul of Portland Public Schools (PSS) that administrators hope will improve equity and boost graduation rates, PPS is contemplating closing some public schools and shuffling students and classes to fewer, larger neighborhood schools. Potentially on the chopping block are Franklin and Marshall High.
That doesn’t mean Franklin High School is failing; it’s graduation rate is nearly 20 percent higher than Portland’s city-wide. Marshall High’s BizTech school isn’t doing as well. According to The O, it’s facing sanctions for missing No Child Left Behind targets two years running.
The Southeast Examiner‘s front page story spelled out the options facing the two SE schools:
A. Franklin closes and the students move to Marshall High School, which becomes a Community Comprehensive School
B. Franklin becomes a Focus School and the neighborhood school becomes Marshall
C. Marshall closes and the students move to Franklin, which then becomes a Community Comprehensive School.
According to the Examiner, PPS will close either Marshall or Franklin by 2011.
A sure-to-be-tense public meeting about the future of Franklin High is going down this Thursday Dec. 17th at Franklin (5405 SE Woodward S) from 6:30-8 pm. PPS is definitely expecting a large turn-out: they’ve decided to also stream the meeting live on their website.
Slightly more info from PPS about the closures here.
Update 12:28 pm—Portland Public Schools spokesman Matt Shelby (who was unavailable for comment until noon) says the Examiner article about the closures is “not necessarily inaccurate, but incomplete.” All Portland’s schools, not just Franklin and Marshall, are facing the same discussion over whether they’ll be closed or restructured in some way. “We’re not talking about specific campus closures and we’re not trying to pit one schools against another.”
More on the PPS plan below the cut!
PPS is moving toward running fewer but larger “community comprehensive high schools” that would offer a more equal host of classes than the disparate levels of languages, AP classes and electives available at schools across the city right now. Before PPS starts talking about closures, they’re taking public input to define what a community comprehensive school would be like: what classes specifically would it need to offer to be “comprehensive” and how big could it be? Right now, PPS is assuming each future school will offer a full slate of AP classes and languages and serve 1,200 — 1,350 students (Franklin is just over 1000 right now and Grant is at 1600).
So in coming years, all of Portland’s high schools will either be turned into these larger, comprehensive schools, be turned into smaller magnet schools or be shut down. What’s the possibility of PPS closing a school like Franklin and selling off the land entirely? “I have not heard anybody talk about selling off any land,” says Shelby. Abandoned schools like Rose City Park could be used as “swing space”—housing students while their regular high schools are remodeled—says Shelby.
After this winter’s public meetings, like the one on Thursday, the PPS admins will make a recommendation to the school board about which schools should be changed and closed. The board will take a vote “soon after.”
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.