IMAGE: Jonathan Hill

After more than two years of planning, the Portland School Board voted 5-2 Monday night to approve the broad outlines of a new high-school system for Portland Public Schools.

Superintendent Carole Smith now has 45 days to return to the board with a detailed proposal of the changes she envisions beginning in September 2011.

Unless the board finds an additional $4.5 million to $9 million a year in operating funds, one key detail already appears likely: the closure of two or three neighborhood high schools to balance enrollment across the remaining campuses.

The prospect of Portland’s first high-school closures since the 1980s has already produced strong opposition from parents who want all nine neighborhood high schools to remain open.

For the most part, the loudest critics have come from more affluent neighborhoods, such as those around Grant High in inner Northeast. Residents there fear that even if Grant stays open, Smith’s expected enrollment target of 1,350 students per high school will reduce Grant’s enrollment of about 1,600 and, as a result, eliminate some programs for the students who remain.

The opposite is possible at neighborhood schools like Marshall High in Lents. Marshall has fewer than 800 students spread across three so-called “small schools” within the school and could add programs as it adds students. “Schools like us, we’re thinking, ‘Oh, finally we’re going to get something for our kids,’” says Tricia Pietrzyk, mother of a Marshall senior.

Given the polarizing nature of what could happen to the current high schools’ haves and have-nots, two critical elements of the redesign—one good and one bad—have been completely overlooked. Until now.

PRO: Closure of small schools within schools would help immigrant and refugee students learning English.

Two of the nine neighborhood high-school campuses, Marshall in Southeast and Roosevelt in North Portland, are each divided into three small schools. Each small school contains between 186 and 309 students but is expected to offer the same range of programs as much larger Grant.

Further complicating matters, close to 20 percent of students at Marshall and Roosevelt are English-language learners, double the percentage for the rest of the district.

The small-schools model started in 2004 under then-Superintendent Vicki Phillips. The idea was to promote personalization. As a result, however, students couldn’t take classes in the other small schools on the same campus (even if they met across the hallway from one another).

Guidance counselors protested this policy. And a 2009 state audit of PPS programs for teaching English to foreign students confirmed their criticism; the audit found ELL students weren’t getting the academic or English help they needed, in part because of the artificial divisions. “Small schools haven’t worked for ELL kids,” says Kim Nguyen, a former Marshall guidance counselor who now manages the district’s family support center at Kelly Elementary School. “We don’t have a good critical mass to form good programs.”

The superintendent’s redesign would spell the end of PPS’s experiment with small schools as neighborhood schools. And it would end de facto segregation of immigrant and refugee students in separate small schools.

The change would not be enough, however, to make the district’s programs for ELL students automatically successful. “But we think this is a great first step,” says ELL teacher Kathy Paxton-Williams.

CON: The closure of certain neighborhood high schools would disrupt crucial programs funded by Multnomah County for low-income students.

Multnomah County currently serves about 4,000 high-school students in PPS through its county-funded health clinics and another 1,700 high-school students through its after-school programs.

The district’s discussion on high schools hasn’t publicly acknowledged this $3.3 million county investment in Portland’s high schools.

But right now the county has school-based health centers at Cleveland, Grant, Jefferson, Marshall, Madison and Roosevelt high schools.

Closure of any of those schools would greatly affect the county’s clinics, which provide students with free physical exams and sports physicals, prescriptions, as well as services for mental health and birth control. Each county clinic on a high-school campus has medical exam rooms and counseling rooms.

The county also employs a juvenile court counselor who works from Marshall to help students comply with court orders to attend school and vocational training.

“For kids who need those opportunities, it’s important,” says Pietrzyk, the mother at Marshall, of the county’s range of programs. “For families that have absolutely nothing, that would be crucial.”