Schools and Neighborhoods in the Pdx Tribune

How exciting to read today's Portland Tribune article on the movement that is afoot locally to connect schools, neighborhoods, and families.    Exciting because it's good stuff and because we were recently dreaming of just such a connection.  And good thing they checked in with Tony Fuentes of Milagros, who sums it up well:

In my childhood, school was a community gathering place, you would just go there.  In my experience with neighborhood schools in Portland, sometimes there’s this separation; sometimes accessing them for public meetings can be a protracted process. There’s so many things that could be happening at the school that I feel aren’t happening now.

There were some other inspiring quotes in the article showing promise for more holistic thinking about how schools fit into their neighborhoods and how the city can partner with PPS to make that a reality.  For example, Deborah Stein, the city's supervising planner, said: “This is the first project where we said, ‘Let’s look at … schools as essential components of community planning."  Hear, hear! 

Do you think this effort will bring us closer to the schools-as-community-nexus ideal?  When we met with Portland city council candidates recently, Nick Fish used the brand new Rosa Parks Elementary as an ideal model of a school designed to serve the greater community, not just its kids.  Waddya think?

Comments

[steve]

PPS closed my neighborhood school, which is a mid-century modern classic. It has an efficient gas heating system. It was recently seismically upgraded. It was upgraded to be fully ADA compliant. It has great flexible community spaces with movable walls to support a variety of activities, but most important, it was the heart of our community.

PPS now says my neighborhood elementary school is across the freeway, adjacent to the interstate, in an old rambling structure, which was originally built as a High School. It has an inefficient old oil burner heating system and a leaky roof. It couldn’t be made ADA compliant due to the rambling topography of the building. It is inefficient because it is only partly filled, though PPS continues to grow its student catchment boundary.

Now PPS wants to raise taxes so my neighborhood can have an efficient, seismically safe, ADA compliant, school with great flexible community spaces, with movable walls to support a variety of activities.

What is it called when someone steals something from you then tries to sell it back to you?

[steve]

Connecting schools with neighborhoods is NOT a new movement in Portland. Portland’s Neighborhood Schools Plan has been in place for 50 years. It has just been in the last decade, during the “shock doctrine” era of the PPS “funding crisis,” that the city leaders ignored connections between neighborhoods and their schools.

With the current “reshaping schools” push to demolish small neighborhood oriented elementary schools of 200 to 300 students and replace them with much larger schools of 400 to 600 students, the talk of neighborhood-oriented schools seems to be another smoke screen to hide the super sizing of our elementary schools.

[LTF]

Steve: The small schools closures are a step in the wrong direction for neighborhoods, parents, and students, I would agree, on many levels. As is the increase in school size, IMHO.

Since the recent move toward larger (and K-8) schools and the recent closures were decided under Phillips' tenure, do you see that trend changing under Carol Smith? Some of it is not reversible, I realize, though if I recall she did reverse at least one small elementary school closure. Also, I wonder if you see these changes as being in any way more cost-effective? I don't know, personally, but am curious if that argument holds water ore not.

[SW Parent]

Isn't it wonderful, schools can be centers of a community! Wow, city planners are beginning to see the connection between schools and land use planning. What a concept!

Gee I wonder why this epiphany is only occuring in areas where developers want to rebuild on school land? It's so cutting edge, so ground-breaking, I hope this concept eventually spreads across the district so that those other poor schools can benefit from this brand new approach to creating schools as integral to their neighborhood and as a community center with a park maybe, and walkable and bikable. Wouldn't that be great! How stunningly brilliant! How visionary! Why didn't anyone think of this before? (That's what we had at KING SCHOOL!)

Too bad the epiphany comes to late to save all our marvelous neighborhood schools, many designed by Lloyd T. Keefe and Amo De Bernardis under the historic Neighborhood Plan for Portland.

Almost all of the following schools are walkable and bikeable, yet they that have been CLOSED by PPS in the past six years or so, leaving their neighborhoods impoverished -- and children unable to walk to school in elementary: Youngson; Wilcox; Meek; Brooklyn Neighborhood; Kenton; Applegate; Whitaker Middle; Ockley Middle; Harriet Tubman Middle; John Ball; Clarendon; Richmond Neighborhood; Smith; Edwards; Bridger Neighborhood; Rose City Park; Kellogg Middle.

The ten new replacement schools are deigned to close twenty more schools. But don't worry Activistas, those closures probably won't affect your neighborhoods!

[LTF]

SW Parent: Thanks for pointing out that the many closures in the recent past have had significant downsides. It is useful to share that information with newer Portlanders or those of us who don't have kids in the system yet who may not know the full history. That's why this dialog forum is so effective, people can learn from people in other parts of town with other experiences and opinions.

Next time you share your insights - which I appreciate and value - you might consider a more respectful tone. In my experience, it is harder to convince people of your views -which I imagine is your goal here - when you alienate them with irony and insults and quite possibly incorrect assumptions.

[steve]

The “reshaping schools” plan to demolish Rieke School and rebuild it as a larger school tells me things have not changed under Carol. Rieke was most recently remodeled in 2001, and had a new portable classroom added several months ago; its condition certainly doesn’t justify demolishing the school. The only reason to demolish the Rieke School is to rebuild it double the size or larger.

At least some of the people at Rieke understand that the brand new expanded Rieke will draw more of the highly mobile students in SW Portland. This will result in draining enrollment from nearby Capital, Hayhurst and Maplewood Schools and most likely, one or more of these small schools will close. We should remodel these neighboring schools, at least to current condition of Rieke, before we do anything more to Rieke.

As for cost savings, the little operational expenses saved through closures have been MORE than offset by the loss of revenue from lost enrollment resulting directly from school closures. We estimate between a quarter to a third of the students from our neighborhood were lost to private school options or to other districts from the closure of our neighborhood school. The amount of bad will created by the loss of our exceptional, efficient, well-attended school will take a generation to be repaired, if ever.

This story of exceptional, small schools being closed and their students being sent to larger, lesser schools was repeated many times throughout the city in the last several years. The parents involved with these closures see the new “Reshaping Schools” plan as Act 2 of a three-act play. A play to super-size our elementary schools and further sell-off our schools, school lands and open space.