Portland Public Schools Works to Reopen Shuttered Kellogg School

Almost a decade after shuttering Kellogg Middle School, Portland Public Schools is working toward reopening it.

The South Tabor neighborhood school, parts of which date to 1913, fell victim to 2006's Hurricane Vicki — the storm also known as former Superintendent Vicki Phillips, who closed and consolidated dozens of schools in a period of declining enrollment and crunched budgets.

Now, according to a notice on PortlandMaps.com, PPS plans to reopen the school for 500 students in August 2017. It's not clear whether it would operate as an elementary school, middle school or K-8.

The plan comes as PPS nears the end of a months-long process to redraw school-district boundaries and reconfigure existing schools, dismantling some K-8 schools in favor of additional K-5 and middle schools. The goal is to make room for additional students (PPS now projects enrollment growth over the next decade) and balance enrollment across PPS, where some schools are overcrowded and others are under-enrolled.

When PPS closed Kellogg in 2006, it sent students to Southeast Portland's Creston and Arleta elementary schools, which became K-8s. Kellogg sat vacant. Meanwhile, the population exploded at nearby Harrison Park K-8 School (the result of Clark Elementary School's merger with Binnsmead Middle School). PPS puts Harrison Park's capacity today at 113 percent.

Education activist Dave Porter was the first to report the news on his blog Global Strategies.

Jon Isaacs, a spokesman for PPS, did not return multiple messages seeking comment. (UPDATE, 1:20 pm: Following the publication of this post, Isaacs says he did not receive several of WW's requests for comment.)

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