Kairos PDX Charter School Wants Space in Humboldt Elementary

The North Portland charter school is looking for space in the formerly shuttered school.

Kairos PDX Charter School in North Portland, which serves a majority African-American student population, needs more space. Parents there are asking Portland Public Schools to provide room in the former Humboldt Elementary School building for the 2016-17 school year.

The district plans to reopen the Humboldt building in 2017-18 as the new site for ACCESS Academy, a school for gifted students, nearly 72 percent of whom are white.

"I personally see this current plan as the embodiment of purposeful gentrification of North Portland," said Deanna Wesson-Mitchell, mother of a Kairos kindergartner. Wesson-Mitchell put up a change.org petition two days ago, which 162 supporters have now signed.

Humboldt had a majority African-American student population when it closed as a neighborhood school in the spring of 2012. Kairos PDX opened in 2014, with a mission of closing the achievement gap between white students and students of color.

"Every day, twice a day, we commute back to the neighborhood we grew up in, but where we could not afford to purchase a home," wrote Wesson-Mitchell, who works as public safety policy director for Mayor Charlie Hales but says she was advocating as a parent, in a letter to the School Board.

"The Board approved Kairos as a Charter School to help create innovative ways to do what PPS has failed to do for decades—successfully close the achievement gap and educate our black children, preparing them for life."

ACCESS is currently located in the Rose City Park building, which the district plans to reopen as a neighborhood school in 2017. ACCESS would move to Humboldt to make space for the neighborhood school.

The request from Kairos does not necessarily conflict with plans to move ACCESS to Humboldt, though Wesson-Mitchell called for PPS to reconsider that move as well as to reconsider the way the district funds high-poverty charter schools that serve students of color.

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