Skip to main contentThe campaign for Portland Public Schools' $548 million construction bond officially kicked off Monday, when School Board members voted 7-0 to refer the money measure to voters in May.
"This is a lot to ask, and we know this," board member David Wynde told his colleagues Dec. 13. But, "our buildings and our students cannot wait," added board member Pam Knowles.
Three little-discussed factors have the potential to blow up as issues that shape the outcome of the election five months from now.
1) The last-minute inclusion of East Sylvan Middle School on the list of nine schools that would be rebuilt with money from the bond could generate a new groundswell of support.
East Sylvan Middle School, home only to a sixth-grade class, sits in the Sylvan-Highlands neighborhood of Southwest Portland in Multnomah County. Technically, however, the school is part of the West Sylvan Middle School campus for the seventh and eighth grades—1.5 miles away in Washington County.
Last month, when Superintendent Carole Smith gathered a roomful of local reporters to unveil her plan for the six-year construction bond, she never mentioned the words "East Sylvan."
Instead, Smith proposed rebuilding just Cleveland, Jefferson and Roosevelt high schools, plus Faubion, Laurelhurst, Rigler, Markham and Marysville primary schools. In addition to fully modernizing those schools, Smith proposed completing design work on a new Lincoln High School with money from the $548 million bond.
At the time, the nod to Lincoln appeared designed to win support for the tax increase from deep-pocketed parents on Portland's west side. (Markham, also on the west side, serves mostly lower-income families.)
Between Nov. 8, when Smith introduced the bond and Dec. 13, when the board approved the measure, district officials slipped the project to rebuild East Sylvan on the site of the West Sylvan campus into the $548 million bond without raising the price tag on the effort.
"Is this just us throwing a bone to the Lincoln community?" Wynde asks. "My answer is no."
2) Four members of the Portland School Board are up for re-election at the same time voters will consider the construction bond.
Only one of those four School Board members, Bobbie Regan, has said she would run again. The other three—Dilafruz Williams, Ruth Adkins and David Wynde—have not said whether they will seek re-election.
If they choose not to run, those vacancies could generate three hotly contested races.
That, in turn, could open the door for disgruntled candidates angry about the current state of the school district. At a time when it will be hard enough to ask property owners to pay an average of $300 more on their annual property tax bills, those individual elections could prove a crippling distraction.
In 2005, 12 candidates ran for three seats on the Portland School Board. One of those 12 candidates was Charles McGee, now executive director of the nonprofit Black Parent Initiative. He sees the potential for a positive impact from open seats in 2011. "It would give us the opportunity to have a substantial debate about where the district is headed," he says, "and include new people in the conversation."
3) In January, School Board members will consider whether to ask voters in May to renew a local-option levy that expires in 2012. That could overwhelm cash-strapped voters or appease parents worried about funding for programs.
That local-option levy, first passed in 2006, now contributes about $40 million a year to the district's $430 million general-fund budget. It largely supplements the budget for paying teachers.
A decision about when to renew that levy remains uncertain.
Many parents have told the School Board updated facilities will not satisfy them if the educational programs within those buildings crumble due to lack of funding.
"It's going to be a blood bath in Salem," says Lainie Block Wilker, a parent in Northeast Portland. "We're going to be talking about new buildings at the same time we're talking about lopping off another week of school."
WWeek 2015