Later, Jeff

[January 23rd, 2008]

Jefferson High School freshman Josh Osteen had been trying all week to get on TV. This was his last chance to get before the cameras that had trailed Mayor Tom Potter to his school.

It was just after Potter’s State of the City speech Friday, Jan. 18, in Jefferson’s auditorium. As news crews raced to interview departing notables, Osteen hustled for some face time. Osteen, 14, settled for WW with obvious disappointment. He said the mayor is “a real good guy.” Then he bailed to chase KGW.

Osteen didn’t make KGW’s 6 pm news that night. If it was any consolation, neither did his classmates. Potter got some airtime—but not as much as the mayor of Arlington, Ore.—a 524-person burg that’s 140 miles east of Portland. Then again, Potter wasn’t featured like Arlington’s mayor on 20/20 after posting pictures of herself wearing lingerie on MySpace.

Instead, with much fanfare, Potter made his offices at Jefferson for a week, concluding with the annual speech usually delivered by the mayor downtown to the City Club of Portland.

The point of Potter’s week at Jeff was, as he put it, “to open this place up and let people see how great it is.” On Jan. 19, The Oregonian editorialized that “Potter put some of the city’s African-American, low-income teenagers front and center in an entirely fresh way.”

Not quite. The mayor was front and center last week. Jefferson’s students, parents and teachers were, by and large, off-camera. And the press was often off-message.

After the State of the City speech, KGW reporter Randy Neves signed off that night not from Jefferson, but from outside City Hall. “Portland’s mayor plays the race card,” went the lead-in to KATU reporter Bob Heye’s roving report on the State of the City. In fact, Potter had said “race remains an ugly, open sore on the body politic.”

KATU aired a brief clip of Potter’s warmup act, a student gospel ensemble—not an “entirely fresh way” for viewers to see black kids. KOIN’s Jan. 18 report plugged Jefferson right away—and followed with file footage of a police car with flashing lights. The image was meant to illustrate Potter’s call for more public safety funds, but the juxtaposition was, ah, unfortunate.

The Oregonian went largely for feel-goods, covering the “bittersweet homecoming” of Potter’s wife, Karin Hansen, a former Jefferson teacher, and City Hall’s effort to “support students at the ground level.” (O columnist S. Renee Mitchell saw through the show, asking readers to “come back after the media have moved on.”)

Jefferson students did ask visiting elites for support last week. But then, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, The O ran an op-ed piece by Bureau of Environmental Services employee Paul Schuberg advocating the closure of Jefferson so it can be consolidated with Roosevelt High School.

Maybe this is the answer to a question posed by Jefferson sophomore Ariel Reynolds in the Jan. 16 Portland Observer : “What’s going to happen when the mayor leaves?”

The Observer ’s skeptical, ground-up coverage was probably the best to come out of Jeff Week 2008. “We understood what was going on before he got there,” says editor and publisher Charles H. Washington, a Jefferson grad whose office is about 10 blocks from the campus.

For the mainstream press, the guided-tour feel of Potter’s visit seemed to skew its view. Sophomore Robert Gill, a 16-year-old class vice president, lost count of how many times he’d been interviewed. Not all students were so engaged.

“A lot of them don’t really care. It’s just another week,” Yurico Solis, a 17-year-old Jefferson senior and self-described “nerd,” told WW , before a reporter from The Skanner nabbed her.

Solis, who volunteered to hand out fliers to guests and make photocopies of the mayor’s speech, scored a few business cards from the likes of former state Senate Majority Leader Kate Brown, who asked her, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (Answer: a civil engineer.)

If Potter’s visit was less than a success in spotlighting Jefferson’s greatness, it at least got some older wealthy white folks out of their comfort zones for a day. “Is this the Broadway Bridge?” a woman wondered aloud on the public school bus that ferried City Club members to Jefferson. “No, this is the, uh—Fremont,” said another passenger. “This is the bridge that people jump off of.”