Los Angeles has great weather and the entertainment industry. Boston has Harvard and MIT, Seattle has Puget Sound, and San Francisco has Silicon Valley.

But Portland has something that virtually no other major American city has--a public-school system supported by the middle class.

Unfortunately, Portland now also claims something no other city wants--the nation's shortest school year.

A projected $50 million budget deficit has led the district to slash its calendar from 172 to 157 days; the national standard is 180. If Measure 28, the proposed income-tax hike, fails in January, more cuts could follow, accelerating middle-class flight from urban public schools, a curse that has plagued nearly every other major American city.

"I think we're at a tipping point where people in state and out of state are asking about lopping the school days off," says Bill Scott, who headed the Oregon Economic & Community Development Department for nine years.

On hushed phone calls and in school parking lots across the city, parents are asking the same questions:

"How expensive is Oregon Episcopal School?"

"Can you even get into Catlin Gabel these days?"

"Do you know anyone who home-schools?"

"Got the name of a good realtor in Lake Oswego?"

In short, is it finally time to give up on Portland Public Schools?

"Every year, I'd draw a line in the sand and say that if it gets any worse, we're leaving," says Marianne Lynde, a nurse and mother of two. This year, Lynde refused to move the line again. She has pulled her daughter out of public schools, and there's unmistakable evidence that others are following.

You might ask, "Who cares if the middle class leaves?" After all, the middle class is on the enviable side of the yawning achievement gap. They hog the best teachers and facilities. Maybe low-income students would be better off without them.

Wrong. It is middle-class parents who have the time and flexibility to volunteer and, more importantly, who wield the district's political and financial clout.

Lose them, many people say, and you imperil not only the city's most fundamentally (small-D) democratic institution, but far more.

Jim Francesconi, the city commissioner most involved in education, says middle-class flight from schools could have a ripple effect on Portland, crippling employment, the tax base and, with it, parks, libraries and public safety.

"We're at risk of losing the city," he says.

Advocates for low-income students have hammered district leadership in the past few years, their passion fueled, in part, by the knowledge that poor kids have no alternative. But middle-class parents can vote with their feet.

When such parents choose private schools or move to the suburbs, the history of cities from Boston to San Francisco shows that urban centers become polarized between rich and poor--and their public schools are nearly always full of the latter. (See chart, page 25.)

Portland can only get so much mileage from its well-documented ability to attract newcomers. While the city offers a vibrant cultural scene, cool housing and great transportation, our schools, antiquated and forlorn, exude a whiff of the failed systems that taint cities such as Hartford and Baltimore. "If the schools have to take the cuts that are being projected, I think that's a kiss of death to the community," says former School Board chairman Ron Saxton.

Anne Meadows, now in her 13th year teaching in Portland Public Schools, is in a better position than most parents to judge the district.

Outwardly, things are going well. Portland continues to rank near the top of the class nationally on SAT scores, and state test scores continue to rise.

But those gains, made during a decade of austerity, have come at a cost. At Franklin High in Southeast Portland, where Meadows teaches English as a second language, she says students are offered little except what's covered by state tests. "We used to have photography and marching band, music at all levels and lots of different art classes," says Meadows, 39. "It's all been gutted."

Music and art in particular have disappeared from Portland schools. A decade ago, every school had a music program; this year, 28 of the district's 61 elementary schools have no music teacher. (See "The Day the Music Died," WW, May 22, 2002.)

Last year, Meadows, who lives in Southwest Portland, reluctantly moved her daughter from Rieke Elementary, one of the city's best, to Portland Waldorf School (tuition $7,400). "Rieke's a great school and my daughter had a great teacher, but she was only getting music twice a week for 30 minutes and the art was ad hoc," Meadows says. "At PWS, my daughter gets violin, folk dance, two languages, knitting, and she's learning how to draw and sculpt."

Meadows fears things may get worse. "This is the first year I've ever been scared for the future of the public schools," she says. "We're headed the way of Los Angeles and other failing urban districts."

Lynde, a critical-care nurse who lives near Grant High, has reached the same conclusion. For the past decade, her two kids have attended some of the east side's best schools: Hollyrood and Laurelhurst elementaries and Fernwood Middle School.

Like other parents, she and her husband, a contractor, watched in disbelief as Portland Public Schools withered like a terminally ill patient.

Last March, when interim superintendent Jim Scherzinger announced that this year's school calendar would be shaved by nine days, Lynde and her husband decided their last line in the sand had been crossed.

Their daughter was finishing eighth grade at Fernwood, a Frisbee toss from their home. She was all set to waltz across the street with her friends to Grant High for the 2002-3 school year.

"I was already worried about Grant because I'd heard that some of the classes are so crowded that kids sit on the floor and don't have books," Lynde says. "So when I read about the cuts, we said, 'That's it.'" She enrolled her daughter at Central Catholic (tuition $6,600).

Even the district's staunchest supporters are being tested. "A friend called me the other day to ask if Arbor School [a private school in Tualatin] is any good," says Karla Wenzel, the chairwoman of the Portland School Board. Saxton, a former board chairman, reports that he got three such calls on a recent day.

It's too soon to know how many families will follow Meadows and Lynde when Portland schools are open less often than state liquor stores, but statistics show that they are part of a snowballing trend.

Historically, Portland school-district boosters have beaten their chests about the city's rate of public-school attendance.

Districtwide, according to a study released earlier this year by Portland State University demographers, that rate dipped only a couple of percentage points in the past decade, from 86 to 84 percent.

(National statistics are not collected, but in Boston, according to a school-district spokesperson, the rate is 75 percent. A San Francisco district spokesperson says the rate there is 50 percent.)

But behind Portland's seemingly rosy picture lurks a less healthy reality. In the enrollment areas of the city's two most affluent high schools, Lincoln and Wilson, the percentage of students attending public school dipped by about nine points in the past decade, to 73 percent. Public-school attendance also decreased about 6 percentage points in the Grant High neighborhood, which includes some of the east side's ritziest neighborhoods.

Overall, despite a population increase of 26,000 during the '90s in the district's enrollment boundaries, school enrollment grew by only about 251. That measly rise was primarily due to an increase in empty-nesters and a decline in birth rates, but the trend overall is clearly downward. Enrollment reached a recent peak of 58,000 in 1996 and has decreased steadily ever since.

The lousy economy may actually be working in Portland's favor in a couple ways--it makes private-school tuition less affordable and makes relocation out of Portland more difficult.

But former Secretary of State Phil Keisling, now a board member of Portland Schools Foundation, a nonprofit established to provide support for Portland public schools, says that cutting the instructional calendar may add urgency to the exodus. "I would argue that the district erred profoundly when they even put the length of the instructional calendar on the table," says Keisling, whose kids attend Portland public schools. "There's absolutely nothing to suggest that this current deficit is a one-year problem. It'll be even bigger next year, and if the solution is cutting days, you're just accelerating down a slippery slope."

If Portland schools are careening downhill like a novice snowboarder on Mount Hood, it's not just a problem for parents and teachers. Political and business leaders fear that the struggling district may plow right over the region's economy.

"The companies we have are not going to stay here, and we won't attract new ones," says Commissioner Francesconi. "No CEO is going to want to have his family anywhere near a city with the shortest school year in the country."

Scott Gibson, a co-founder of Sequent Computer and now a board member of Pixelworks, OHSU, NW Natural, RadiSys and other companies, says he was recently involved in recruiting a new CEO for a local tech company.

The executive and his wife were insistent that their children attend public schools for diversity reasons, Gibson says, "But when [the CEO's wife] started reading the papers, it was almost a showstopper. We had to work hard to get them to come."

Not only is education the key to a productive home-grown work force, Gibson says, but in a knowledge-based economy, schools are of paramount interest to anybody considering moving to Oregon. "The first thing that knowledge workers are concerned about is school quality," he says.

Gibson argues the state's future depends on the health of Portland's schools. "The Portland school system is the underpinning of the main economic engine of the state," he says. 'If it fails, everything falls apart."

While government officials have focused on infrastructure projects such improving highways and dredging the Columbia shipping channel, quality of life--a prime component of which is good schools--may be more important. "It's increasingly clear that having a place where people want to live is the secret to economic success," says Joe Cortright, an economist with the consulting firm Impresa Inc.

Keisling, now a vice-president for business development for another consulting firm, ProDX, says that Portland's truncated calendar will be used against the city.

"A development commission in a city competing with Portland is going to talk about our 157-day school year," he says. "You talk about something that demands some explaining.... How do you put a good face on that?"

There are at least a couple of reasons for the district's predicament.

The first is money. Education funding is like fresh air or chocolate--there's no consensus on how much is enough. A state audit released last week shows that per-pupil spending here--$7,149--is near the national average.

By historical measures, however, Portland's current budget is anorexic. If Measure 28 fails, the district's general fund will be $342 million, an increase of less than 4 percent over the past 10 years. Over the same time, the state's general-fund budget, even after $1.7 billion in recent cuts, has increased by about 80 percent.

Part of the problem is that Portland has suffered under the transition from local to state funding. In 1990, when Measure 5 passed, 70 percent of funding came from local property taxes; today, 70 percent comes from state income taxes.

Previously, Portland could spend whatever local voters approved, which was far more per student than in many Oregon districts. Today, Portland gets the same per-capita funding as every district in the state.

Although equalization flattened the tires of Portland's Cadillac-quality schools, most education insiders say that it improved the lot of more than half of Oregon's 198 districts, particularly those in rural areas.

Portland officials complain that the district gets shorted under equalization because it spends $13 million more annually on special-needs students than it gets in reimbursement.

Shrinking enrollment has also battered Portland's finances. Here's why: Portland gets about $5,000 in state funding for each student. If enrollment drops by 1,000, as it has for each of the past five years, that costs the district $5 million. Eliminating the 40 teaching positions that covered those kids, however, only saves about half that much because other costs, such as utilities, maintenance and administration, remain.

Some argue that district leadership has exacerbated financial problems by failing to make hard decisions. "Management is a disaster," says longtime schools advocate Kathie Humes. "They just can't stop spending."

For example, Portland has awarded teachers the most generous medical benefits in the state, has been slow to close schools as enrollment declined, and has clung to underutilized facilities--such as the district headquarters on North Dixon Street. The 10-acre Rose Quarter site includes a 347,000-square-foot building, only 15 percent of which is office space.

In part, a series of cash infusions from the city, Multnomah County and even the teachers union enabled the district to follow its live-for-today strategy.

That approach, which included draining the district's reserve, was a bet on a legislative bailout that never materialized. Portland came into this school year having overspent last year's budget by $2.8 million, while other local districts sat on fat wallets.

Lake Oswego, for instance, began the year with a $6.7 million reserve, more than 10 percent of its budget; David Douglas, a less affluent district in East Multnomah County, carried a reserve of $8 million, about 13 percent of its budget. "That's what's saving us right now," says Courtney Wilton, David Douglas' chief financial officer. "We're not cutting any school days this year."

Wenzel, the Portland School Board chairwoman, says the board decided long ago to defer pain. "One of the ways that we've kept middle-class parents is by offering special programs," Wenzel says. "When you look at how much we would have gained by cutting those programs, it wouldn't have been worth it."

Saving Portland Public Schools is not simply a question of more resources. "This would be a lot easier if it were only about money," says Cynthia Guyer, director of the Portland Schools Foundation.

Ralph Shaw, the dean of Portland's venture-capital community, says nobody has convinced voters that schools are a good investment. "I don't think that this community is anti-education, but it's not pro-education," says Shaw, whose speeches about Oregon's dire economic prospects have been widely circulated in recent months. "We have an extraordinary lack of leadership, politically and in the community."

Although education was on the agenda at Governor-elect Ted Kulongoski's economic summit on Dec. 9, Kulongoski has said repeatedly that schools need to demonstrate accountability before he'll fight for big changes.

That's not surprising. Nearly 30 years ago, legendary Gov. Tom McCall was brought to tears by the failure of a statewide ballot measure designed to provide permanent, stable funding for schools. Half a dozen subsequent attempts have also failed.

Although the popular approach is to point fingers at tight-fisted legislators, there's plenty of blame to go around.

The School Board's refusal to make deeper cuts sooner, for instance, is defensible in some ways, but critics say that the board has struggled to communicate a vision. That failure is best exemplified by the board's inability to hire a permanent superintendent for the past 18 months.

"Portland has a reputation of being a place that isn't very stable and doesn't have its act together because they can't even get a superintendent," says Hayes Mizell, a school-reform expert at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York.

The Portland Business Alliance, the city's most powerful lobby, has ignored education until very recently. Instead, the Alliance spent its energy fighting for parking on the bus mall and a ban on panhandlers. Only in the past month did Alliance boss Kim Kimbrough form an education committee, which Saxton will run.

Francesconi, who has tried to play matchmaker between the district and downtown, applauds that move. "Without the business community, we're not going to save our schools," he says.

In the same breath, Francesconi concedes that City Hall hasn't done much to find a solution for schools either. "We've had too many priorities as a city," he says. "We're spread all over the place."

Other cities are more focused. In Eugene, which, like Portland, faces declining enrollment, voters approved a tax levy in the November election that will transfer about 5 percent of school-district expenses to the city.

In Portland, by contrast, the city and the county put forth three tax measures that will raise $46 million annually for parks, libraries and kids' programs, causes arguably less pressing than school-district needs.

Under the arcane laws that govern the use of property taxes, the city no longer has any capacity to raise money to help the district. "School funding can't be on the ballot coming from the City of Portland," says Linda Burglehaus of the Tax Supervising and Conservation Commission. "There is no room left under the property-tax cap."

It's not too late for Portland's schools to pull back from what Scott, the state's former development chief, and others call a tipping point. A couple of key dates loom on the horizon.

The first is Jan. 28, when Oregon voters will decide on a $624 million income-tax measure that few people expect to pass. If the measure fails, the Portland School District faces another $9 million in budget cuts.

The announcement of those cuts will coincide with the admissions process of several of the area's leading private schools. To hold onto families who have options, Guyer says, the district and those working on its behalf need to provide them some hope--quickly. Monday's announcement that Portland is axing spring sports won't help.

Currently, a coalition of local business leaders, school supporters and politicians are exploring using Metro's taxing authority to raise money for schools in Metro's service district. Guyer says that group thinks that a statewide solution is years away.

For Anne Meadows and Marianne Lynde, both of whom have kept their younger children in public schools, what happens next will be crucial. "My 4-year-old goes to the Franklin pre-school, and it's wonderful there," Meadows says. "I don't want to give up on this system."

Lots of cities have something Portland lacks.

Los Angeles has great weather and the entertainment industry. Boston has Harvard and MIT, Seattle has Puget Sound, and San Francisco has Silicon Valley.

But Portland has something that virtually no other major American city has--a public-school system supported by the middle class.

Unfortunately, Portland now also claims something no other city wants--the nation's shortest school year.

A projected $50 million budget deficit has led the district to slash its calendar from 172 to 157 days; the national standard is 180. If Measure 28, the proposed income-tax hike, fails in January, more cuts could follow, accelerating middle-class flight from urban public schools, a curse that has plagued nearly every other major American city.

"I think we're at a tipping point where people in state and out of state are asking about lopping the school days off," says Bill Scott, who headed the Oregon Economic & Community Development Department for nine years.

On hushed phone calls and in school parking lots across the city, parents are asking the same questions:

"How expensive is Oregon Episcopal School?"

"Can you even get into Catlin Gabel these days?"

"Do you know anyone who home-schools?"

"Got the name of a good realtor in Lake Oswego?"

In short, is it finally time to give up on Portland Public Schools?

"Every year, I'd draw a line in the sand and say that if it gets any worse, we're leaving," says Marianne Lynde, a nurse and mother of two. This year, Lynde refused to move the line again. She has pulled her daughter out of public schools, and there's unmistakable evidence that others are following.

You might ask, "Who cares if the middle class leaves?" After all, the middle class is on the enviable side of the yawning achievement gap. They hog the best teachers and facilities. Maybe low-income students would be better off without them.

Wrong. It is middle-class parents who have the time and flexibility to volunteer and, more importantly, who wield the district's political and financial clout.

Lose them, many people say, and you imperil not only the city's most fundamentally (small-D) democratic institution, but far more.

Jim Francesconi, the city commissioner most involved in education, says middle-class flight from schools could have a ripple effect on Portland, crippling employment, the tax base and, with it, parks, libraries and public safety.

"We're at risk of losing the city," he says.

Advocates for low-income students have hammered district leadership in the past few years, their passion fueled, in part, by the knowledge that poor kids have no alternative. But middle-class parents can vote with their feet.

When such parents choose private schools or move to the suburbs, the history of cities from Boston to San Francisco shows that urban centers become polarized between rich and poor--and their public schools are nearly always full of the latter. (See chart, page 25.)

Portland can only get so much mileage from its well-documented ability to attract newcomers. While the city offers a vibrant cultural scene, cool housing and great transportation, our schools, antiquated and forlorn, exude a whiff of the failed systems that taint cities such as Hartford and Baltimore. "If the schools have to take the cuts that are being projected, I think that's a kiss of death to the community," says former School Board chairman Ron Saxton.

Anne Meadows, now in her 13th year teaching in Portland Public Schools, is in a better position than most parents to judge the district.

Outwardly, things are going well. Portland continues to rank near the top of the class nationally on SAT scores, and state test scores continue to rise.

But those gains, made during a decade of austerity, have come at a cost. At Franklin High in Southeast Portland, where Meadows teaches English as a second language, she says students are offered little except what's covered by state tests. "We used to have photography and marching band, music at all levels and lots of different art classes," says Meadows, 39. "It's all been gutted."

Music and art in particular have disappeared from Portland schools. A decade ago, every school had a music program; this year, 28 of the district's 61 elementary schools have no music teacher. (See "The Day the Music Died," WW, May 22, 2002.)

Last year, Meadows, who lives in Southwest Portland, reluctantly moved her daughter from Rieke Elementary, one of the city's best, to Portland Waldorf School (tuition $7,400). "Rieke's a great school and my daughter had a great teacher, but she was only getting music twice a week for 30 minutes and the art was ad hoc," Meadows says. "At PWS, my daughter gets violin, folk dance, two languages, knitting, and she's learning how to draw and sculpt."

Meadows fears things may get worse. "This is the first year I've ever been scared for the future of the public schools," she says. "We're headed the way of Los Angeles and other failing urban districts."

Lynde, a critical-care nurse who lives near Grant High, has reached the same conclusion. For the past decade, her two kids have attended some of the east side's best schools: Hollyrood and Laurelhurst elementaries and Fernwood Middle School.

Like other parents, she and her husband, a contractor, watched in disbelief as Portland Public Schools withered like a terminally ill patient.

Last March, when interim superintendent Jim Scherzinger announced that this year's school calendar would be shaved by nine days, Lynde and her husband decided their last line in the sand had been crossed.

Their daughter was finishing eighth grade at Fernwood, a Frisbee toss from their home. She was all set to waltz across the street with her friends to Grant High for the 2002-3 school year.

"I was already worried about Grant because I'd heard that some of the classes are so crowded that kids sit on the floor and don't have books," Lynde says. "So when I read about the cuts, we said, 'That's it.'" She enrolled her daughter at Central Catholic (tuition $6,600).

Even the district's staunchest supporters are being tested. "A friend called me the other day to ask if Arbor School [a private school in Tualatin] is any good," says Karla Wenzel, the chairwoman of the Portland School Board. Saxton, a former board chairman, reports that he got three such calls on a recent day.

It's too soon to know how many families will follow Meadows and Lynde when Portland schools are open less often than state liquor stores, but statistics show that they are part of a snowballing trend.

Historically, Portland school-district boosters have beaten their chests about the city's rate of public-school attendance.

Districtwide, according to a study released earlier this year by Portland State University demographers, that rate dipped only a couple of percentage points in the past decade, from 86 to 84 percent.

(National statistics are not collected, but in Boston, according to a school-district spokesperson, the rate is 75 percent. A San Francisco district spokesperson says the rate there is 50 percent.)

But behind Portland's seemingly rosy picture lurks a less healthy reality. In the enrollment areas of the city's two most affluent high schools, Lincoln and Wilson, the percentage of students attending public school dipped by about nine points in the past decade, to 73 percent. Public-school attendance also decreased about 6 percentage points in the Grant High neighborhood, which includes some of the east side's ritziest neighborhoods.

Overall, despite a population increase of 26,000 during the '90s in the district's enrollment boundaries, school enrollment grew by only about 251. That measly rise was primarily due to an increase in empty-nesters and a decline in birth rates, but the trend overall is clearly downward. Enrollment reached a recent peak of 58,000 in 1996 and has decreased steadily ever since.

The lousy economy may actually be working in Portland's favor in a couple ways--it makes private-school tuition less affordable and makes relocation out of Portland more difficult.

But former Secretary of State Phil Keisling, now a board member of Portland Schools Foundation, a nonprofit established to provide support for Portland public schools, says that cutting the instructional calendar may add urgency to the exodus. "I would argue that the district erred profoundly when they even put the length of the instructional calendar on the table," says Keisling, whose kids attend Portland public schools. "There's absolutely nothing to suggest that this current deficit is a one-year problem. It'll be even bigger next year, and if the solution is cutting days, you're just accelerating down a slippery slope."

If Portland schools are careening downhill like a novice snowboarder on Mount Hood, it's not just a problem for parents and teachers. Political and business leaders fear that the struggling district may plow right over the region's economy.

"The companies we have are not going to stay here, and we won't attract new ones," says Commissioner Francesconi. "No CEO is going to want to have his family anywhere near a city with the shortest school year in the country."

Scott Gibson, a co-founder of Sequent Computer and now a board member of Pixelworks, OHSU, NW Natural, RadiSys and other companies, says he was recently involved in recruiting a new CEO for a local tech company.

The executive and his wife were insistent that their children attend public schools for diversity reasons, Gibson says, "But when [the CEO's wife] started reading the papers, it was almost a showstopper. We had to work hard to get them to come."

Not only is education the key to a productive home-grown work force, Gibson says, but in a knowledge-based economy, schools are of paramount interest to anybody considering moving to Oregon. "The first thing that knowledge workers are concerned about is school quality," he says.

Gibson argues the state's future depends on the health of Portland's schools. "The Portland school system is the underpinning of the main economic engine of the state," he says. 'If it fails, everything falls apart."

While government officials have focused on infrastructure projects such improving highways and dredging the Columbia shipping channel, quality of life--a prime component of which is good schools--may be more important. "It's increasingly clear that having a place where people want to live is the secret to economic success," says Joe Cortright, an economist with the consulting firm Impresa Inc.

Keisling, now a vice-president for business development for another consulting firm, ProDX, says that Portland's truncated calendar will be used against the city.

"A development commission in a city competing with Portland is going to talk about our 157-day school year," he says. "You talk about something that demands some explaining.... How do you put a good face on that?"

There are at least a couple of reasons for the district's predicament.

The first is money. Education funding is like fresh air or chocolate--there's no consensus on how much is enough. A state audit released last week shows that per-pupil spending here--$7,149--is near the national average.

By historical measures, however, Portland's current budget is anorexic. If Measure 28 fails, the district's general fund will be $342 million, an increase of less than 4 percent over the past 10 years. Over the same time, the state's general-fund budget, even after $1.7 billion in recent cuts, has increased by about 80 percent.

Part of the problem is that Portland has suffered under the transition from local to state funding. In 1990, when Measure 5 passed, 70 percent of funding came from local property taxes; today, 70 percent comes from state income taxes.

Previously, Portland could spend whatever local voters approved, which was far more per student than in many Oregon districts. Today, Portland gets the same per-capita funding as every district in the state.

Although equalization flattened the tires of Portland's Cadillac-quality schools, most education insiders say that it improved the lot of more than half of Oregon's 198 districts, particularly those in rural areas.

Portland officials complain that the district gets shorted under equalization because it spends $13 million more annually on special-needs students than it gets in reimbursement.

Shrinking enrollment has also battered Portland's finances. Here's why: Portland gets about $5,000 in state funding for each student. If enrollment drops by 1,000, as it has for each of the past five years, that costs the district $5 million. Eliminating the 40 teaching positions that covered those kids, however, only saves about half that much because other costs, such as utilities, maintenance and administration, remain.

Some argue that district leadership has exacerbated financial problems by failing to make hard decisions. "Management is a disaster," says longtime schools advocate Kathie Humes. "They just can't stop spending."

For example, Portland has awarded teachers the most generous medical benefits in the state, has been slow to close schools as enrollment declined, and has clung to underutilized facilities--such as the district headquarters on North Dixon Street. The 10-acre Rose Quarter site includes a 347,000-square-foot building, only 15 percent of which is office space.

In part, a series of cash infusions from the city, Multnomah County and even the teachers union enabled the district to follow its live-for-today strategy.

That approach, which included draining the district's reserve, was a bet on a legislative bailout that never materialized. Portland came into this school year having overspent last year's budget by $2.8 million, while other local districts sat on fat wallets.

Lake Oswego, for instance, began the year with a $6.7 million reserve, more than 10 percent of its budget; David Douglas, a less affluent district in East Multnomah County, carried a reserve of $8 million, about 13 percent of its budget. "That's what's saving us right now," says Courtney Wilton, David Douglas' chief financial officer. "We're not cutting any school days this year."

Wenzel, the Portland School Board chairwoman, says the board decided long ago to defer pain. "One of the ways that we've kept middle-class parents is by offering special programs," Wenzel says. "When you look at how much we would have gained by cutting those programs, it wouldn't have been worth it."

Saving Portland Public Schools is not simply a question of more resources. "This would be a lot easier if it were only about money," says Cynthia Guyer, director of the Portland Schools Foundation.

Ralph Shaw, the dean of Portland's venture-capital community, says nobody has convinced voters that schools are a good investment. "I don't think that this community is anti-education, but it's not pro-education," says Shaw, whose speeches about Oregon's dire economic prospects have been widely circulated in recent months. "We have an extraordinary lack of leadership, politically and in the community."

Although education was on the agenda at Governor-elect Ted Kulongoski's economic summit on Dec. 9, Kulongoski has said repeatedly that schools need to demonstrate accountability before he'll fight for big changes.

That's not surprising. Nearly 30 years ago, legendary Gov. Tom McCall was brought to tears by the failure of a statewide ballot measure designed to provide permanent, stable funding for schools. Half a dozen subsequent attempts have also failed.

Although the popular approach is to point fingers at tight-fisted legislators, there's plenty of blame to go around.

The School Board's refusal to make deeper cuts sooner, for instance, is defensible in some ways, but critics say that the board has struggled to communicate a vision. That failure is best exemplified by the board's inability to hire a permanent superintendent for the past 18 months.

"Portland has a reputation of being a place that isn't very stable and doesn't have its act together because they can't even get a superintendent," says Hayes Mizell, a school-reform expert at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York.

The Portland Business Alliance, the city's most powerful lobby, has ignored education until very recently. Instead, the Alliance spent its energy fighting for parking on the bus mall and a ban on panhandlers. Only in the past month did Alliance boss Kim Kimbrough form an education committee, which Saxton will run.

Francesconi, who has tried to play matchmaker between the district and downtown, applauds that move. "Without the business community, we're not going to save our schools," he says.

In the same breath, Francesconi concedes that City Hall hasn't done much to find a solution for schools either. "We've had too many priorities as a city," he says. "We're spread all over the place."

Other cities are more focused. In Eugene, which, like Portland, faces declining enrollment, voters approved a tax levy in the November election that will transfer about 5 percent of school-district expenses to the city.

In Portland, by contrast, the city and the county put forth three tax measures that will raise $46 million annually for parks, libraries and kids' programs, causes arguably less pressing than school-district needs.

Under the arcane laws that govern the use of property taxes, the city no longer has any capacity to raise money to help the district. "School funding can't be on the ballot coming from the City of Portland," says Linda Burglehaus of the Tax Supervising and Conservation Commission. "There is no room left under the property-tax cap."

It's not too late for Portland's schools to pull back from what Scott, the state's former development chief, and others call a tipping point. A couple of key dates loom on the horizon.

The first is Jan. 28, when Oregon voters will decide on a $624 million income-tax measure that few people expect to pass. If the measure fails, the Portland School District faces another $9 million in budget cuts.

The announcement of those cuts will coincide with the admissions process of several of the area's leading private schools. To hold onto families who have options, Guyer says, the district and those working on its behalf need to provide them some hope--quickly. Monday's announcement that Portland is axing spring sports won't help.

Currently, a coalition of local business leaders, school supporters and politicians are exploring using Metro's taxing authority to raise money for schools in Metro's service district. Guyer says that group thinks that a statewide solution is years away.

For Anne Meadows and Marianne Lynde, both of whom have kept their younger children in public schools, what happens next will be crucial. "My 4-year-old goes to the Franklin pre-school, and it's wonderful there," Meadows says. "I don't want to give up on this system."