Read this before you vote on Tuesday

Why is PPS asking us to build three of the country's most expensive high schools?

There’s an election this month! We vote by mail in Oregon, so if you’re a registered voter here, you should have received your ballot by now. It needs to be mailed or dropped off at one of these sites by Tuesday, May 20th.

The elections are mostly for school board seats and urban flood safety and water quality directors, but the biggest item on the ballot is the Portland Public Schools bond, which asks voters for $1.83 billion to repair aging elementary and middle schools ($190 million) and renovate and/or rebuild three high schools ($1.15 billion).¹ The first bit is entirely uncontroversial—several of the district’s elementary and middle schools are in dire straits with classrooms that are too hot or too cold and/or that have tiles that fall from the ceiling on kids’ heads, and 19 of these schools are built of unreinforced masonry that could completely collapse in even a moderate earthquake. But the second “bucket,” as the district calls it, is controversial, even among its own board, because it asks voters to continue paying their current tax rate—one tax among many here that make the cost of living so high—so it can build what will be three of the most expensive high schools in the country.

For context, nearby high schools in Beaverton and Rainier Beach in Seattle cost a mere fraction of what the high schools in Portland will cost.

The total cost numbers are based on figures the architects gave the school board on April 8th after the district asked them to implement cost-saving measures. Still, they were only able to cut between $33 million and $67 million—less than 5% of the total.

There are a lot of little reasons² and a few really big reasons why this is so. I am going to focus on the big reasons, which I’ve divided into two categories: reasons that make sense and the data supports and reasons that do not make sense and the data does not support.

REASONS THAT MAKE SENSE

1. It’s more expensive to keep students on campus during construction. This is why Jefferson High School, which voters approved to renovate in 2020 for $366 million will now cost an extra $100+ million to build. At first, the district tried to avoid this extra cost by insisting that students bus to Marshall High School, approximately 45 minutes away, but community members vehemently opposed this fearing it would increase the dropout rate and/or decimate enrollment at Jefferson entirely, pushing more parents to send their kids to Roosevelt (also far away) or Grant (already overenrolled), as the dual zoning policy would allow. Esmeralda Caldera and Andrei Haynes know well the consequences of sending kids to a school far away, because they sent their two oldest children to a school on the other side of the river for a Spanish immersion program. “And they tell me, you were never there,” Caldera says. “At that time, I was working a lot of hours and I gotta admit we've had a lot of Dr. Phil moments just because I wasn't able to be there, because of the commute and the logistics.”  Her oldest kids told her they didn’t feel they had a real sense of community going to a school so far away, and if there was anything they wish their parents had done differently in raising them, it would have been to send them to their neighborhood school. So when Caldera and Haynes decided to have two more kids later on in life, they made a conscious decision to do exactly that.

   

   Andrei’s quote is further down, embedded in the piece. Illustration by Deepti Menon.

   The refrain I heard, over and over again, when talking to parents and grandparents in the neighborhood is that to lose the school—even for the three or four years it would take to complete the renovation—is to lose the community. There are some conservatives for whom this is still not a strong enough argument, as fiscally it would probably make more sense to close one of the high schools and build only two. But there are some things worth the extra cost and, to me, preserving community in one of Portland’s only historical black neighborhoods is one of them.

2. The high schools will have all-electric infrastructure, which adds about $10 million in costs to each project, according to an audit commissioned by the district. But board member Christy Splitt makes a good point in an interview with the Willamette Week about this: “All electric buildings, in the end, save money—they’re more efficient,” she says. “We also know that in Oregon, we only have about 25 years left of even having natural gas left in our system, according to state law. So we would end up building schools for 100 years that depend on a resource that’s going out the door, and then we’d have schools on the hook for things like maintaining pipelines with fewer ratepayers contributing to maintenance costs.” Also, energy consumption by buildings is the largest contributor to the district’s greenhouse gas emissions, and everywhere we can possibly cut emissions, we should.

These are, arguably, good reasons for the high costs of the high schools to which most voters should at least be somewhat sympathetic. But if we prioritize that students can stay on campus during construction and the schools will be all-electric, we must cut costs elsewhere—much more so than the district has been willing to do this last spring. Several board members seem perplexed at how to do do this, but it is not actually a mystery and it would not be as difficult as they make it seem. The problem is they tried to begin with the designs and construction costs, instead of questioning the very things that they asked the architects to design and the contractors to estimate in the first place.

REASONS THAT DO NOT MAKE SENSE

1. Jefferson High School currently has 459 students enrolled. The Population Research Center at Portland State projects even fewer students will be enrolled there—and at schools district-wide—in the future due to a declining birth rate and a lack of affordable housing in Portland. Yet, for reasons that are truly unclear, the district absolutely insists on building Jefferson for 1,700 students. (It also insists on building Cleveland for 1,700 students, despite projections that its enrollment will also shrink.) The audit the district commissioned in an attempt to better understand the high costs of the high schools estimated that reducing each building by 20,000 square feet would result in $24 million in savings. To the district’s credit, it did task the architects with cutting approximately 20,000 square feet from each high school, and this did yield some savings. But the district needs to cut more—much more. If we extrapolate on the math from the audit, then cutting an additional 50,000 square feet from Jefferson, could reduce the cost by $60 million. This is entirely possible if the plans are for 700 or 800 or even 900 students—still double the projected enrollment, but 800 (!) fewer than the current plans are designed for.

   Caldera agrees with the district on this—she sees young families all over the neighborhood and thinks once the renovation is complete, parents who might have previously sent their kids to Grant or Roosevelt will choose Jefferson instead. She might be right. Projections are just projections and they might be off. But if they are, they’re likely to be off by a couple hundred—not 1,200. Furthermore, there is no reason why a smaller building, built for a smaller student body, still can’t be modern, beautiful, and world class. In fact, several of the country’s most elite, private high schools are small, and this is part of their appeal. Small schools are known to yield closer relationships between students and teachers, more opportunities for personalized learning, and a stronger sense of community, all of which often result in happier students and better academic outcomes.

2. The Education Specifications the district created and then handed over to the architects to fulfill in their designs read like they’re a first draft of an extensive wish list written as if costs are no concern. Even as it became clear that costs were a concern, the district did not revisit these specifications to edit them with any real vigor or commitment to nixing items that, though well-intentioned, are not actually necessary.

   For example, both Jefferson and Cleveland include plans for teen parent centers that should have, according to the specifications, an infant room, crawler room, toddler room, breastfeeding room, changing area, nap area, and kitchen. These centers are in addition to 1,600 square foot health centers at both high schools and in addition to the services the district already provides teen parents: two teen parent social workers, two teen parent home instructors (one for math and science, and one for language arts and history), and a teen parent career educator. (The district also already has at least one teen parent center at Lincoln High School.) In February, board members Splitt, Gary Hollands, and Julia Brim-Edwards issued a memo stating that projects should only have teen parenting centers if there is a “demonstrated need” at each school. It’s unclear if they followed up to confirm such a need (I wrote them to ask after I published the piece—apologies to you, reader and to them—I didn’t get the numbers from the district until late last week and needed to publish because ballots are due tomorrow—and will update with their reply when I hear back), but I filed a public records trying to find out the very same thing. Here are the numbers the district provided:

   

   The district does not collect data on how many PPS students are parents—just how many receive teen parent services.

   It’s no doubt very difficult to be a teen parent, and it’s good the district employs social workers, home instructors, and a career educator to support them. But three teen parents at Jefferson and four teen parents at Cleveland is not by any stretch a “demonstrated need” for two 2,500 square foot teen parent centers. Even Caldera and Haynes question the district’s insistence that the space be used this way. “We don't have that many teen parents and we don't want to encourage that as part of the curriculum,” Haynes says. “We need to promote teen education, teen stability. Couldn't that space be better used?” Yes. Or—and I know not everyone wants to hear this—but maybe the school should not have this much space at all.

   Would cutting the teen parent centers drastically reduce the cost of construction? No. But they are one example, among many, of extraneous amenities in the current plans that if cut all together could drastically reduce the cost. (Other suggestions: cutting the spinning/aerobics room or at least combining it with the dance room, reducing the size of the library from 8,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet, reducing the size of the theater to hold 250 people, not 500 etc.) The teen parent centers were also of particular interest because they’re indicative of a problematic pattern in which elected officials in Portland tend to engage: in trying so hard to accommodate and support a vulnerable population (in this case, teen parents), they pass tax rates that make Portland such an expensive place to be, other vulnerable populations (in this case, working class families) can’t live here. What is the point of big, brand new public schools if there aren’t families who can afford to live here, much less send their kids to school here?

The Willamette Week’s editorial board and (and Professor Eric Fruits, who the board interviewed and who also appears to discuss the bond on this episode of NW Fresh) remind us there is precedent for voting no on a bond that’s too big and vague and letting the district come up with a new, better bond—perhaps one that puts the safety and seismic upgrades of the elementary and middle schools first, and includes plans for high schools that match actual population projections and demonstrated student need—that we can vote yes on as early as November.

1. There is also an estimated $321 million for education materials, technology (to replace or provide student tablets and laptop), and upgrades to some athletic facilities.

2. PPS is set to pay contractors in some cases triple (!) what Beaverton paid for so-called “general conditions”—administration costs, essentially. As Julia Silverman wrote in the Oregonian: “For Beaverton, that cost is around $13.7 million. For Cleveland, it is estimated at $42.5 million; for Jefferson, it is estimated at $56.4 million and for Wells, it is estimated at $44 million.”