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MORE STUDENTS CHOOSE ALTERNATIVES TO PPS: At a May 12 meeting of the Portland Public Schools Board policy committee, committee chair Julia Brim-Edwards sounded the alarm on the district’s capture rate—the percentage of kids living within the district who enroll in PPS schools. In answer to a question from Brim-Edwards about enrollment decline fueling the district’s $40 million budget shortfall, district officials wrote that the capture rate of students enrolling in PPS schools this academic year was 69% for high school, 71% for middle school, and 75% for elementary school. The rates, calculated using census data, vary by high school attendance area and grade level, but are generally lower than PPS rates in the past. The news also comes as PPS’s enrollment is dipping faster than at school districts statewide. Researchers at Portland State University, who compile an annual forecast and report on PPS enrollment, indicated the district’s “recent high” in overall capture rate was 83% in the 2018–19 school year. Brim-Edwards is using that data to push the School Board to make the PPS’s kindergarten enrollment policy more friendly to families, especially as it prepares to launch a districtwide enrollment campaign. At the meeting, she said the enrollment trends were broadly concerning. “I’ve never seen our capture rate so low at PPS,” she said. “That shows that we’re losing lots of families…a third of families.”
OHSU PAID LAWYERS $5.8 MILLION IN FAILED MERGER: In its attempt to buy rival Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University hired one of the best health care merger firms in the nation: Washington, D.C.-based Hogan Lovells. Among its partners are Jeffrey Schneider, who has expertise in deals involving academic medical centers. He represented the State University of New York when it bought several hospitals and sold one, according to his online bio, and he helped Vanderbilt University spin off its medical center. Another partner, Ken Field, is an antitrust expert who helped LCMC Health overcome antitrust opposition from the Federal Trade Commission (where he worked for six years) to purchase three hospitals from HCA Health in Louisiana for $150 million. According to public records obtained by WW, OHSU started paying Hogan Lovells as early as Jan. 26, 2023, a month after the university approached Legacy about a deal. The first bill was for a modest $18,236. That August, when OHSU announced its intention to buy Legacy, Hogan Lovells billed it $72,056. Monthly payments rose to $454,333 by December 2023 and peaked at $560,713 in June 2024. In total, OHSU paid Hogan Lovells’ team $5.8 million over 26 months, billing records show. Schneider and Field declined to comment. In many cases, deals like OHSU’s require extensive, costly advice on how to navigate anti-monopoly statutes. But because it’s a “public corporation,” OHSU faced no anti-monopoly review by either the state or the federal government (“Operation: Merger,” WW, April 23). Beyond describing an “evolving operating environment,” OHSU hasn’t said why it abandoned the Legacy purchase. OHSU, which provided the billing documents, didn’t return an email seeking further comment.
COUNCILORS DEBUT COMPETING PLANS TO FUND PARKS: Four members of the Portland City Council have drafted competing ideas to avert deep cuts to parks maintenance in the upcoming budget. Councilor Candace Avalos proposes to reduce the police staffing budget by $1.9 million to offset cuts to outdoor parks maintenance proposed by Mayor Keith Wilson. Councilor Eric Zimmerman last week suggested cutting the Urban Forestry division’s regulation team from 37 employees to five. Councilor Steve Novick recently proposed shifting $2.6 million from the Police Bureau, savings he says would be made possible by not dispatching sworn officers to welfare checks and instead sending public safety support specialists, or PS3s. And Councilor Mitch Green has floated borrowing $10 million from the Portland Clean Energy Fund and then repaying it before the money is spent on climate-related projects. Councilors begin discussing budget amendments this week.
AI DRAFTS OREGONIAN STORIES: Eagle-eyed readers of The Oregonian recently noticed a disclosure at the end of several stories published on OregonLive.com this month. “This story was drafted with the assistance of generative AI,” it says, “and reviewed by Oregonian editorial staff.” That’s a significant advance in the newspaper’s use of artificial intelligence to write story drafts. Editor Therese Bottomly announced in 2023 that The O would use AI to summarize real estate transactions. The more recent examples, however, were rewrites of press releases: one from Travel Portland on Food Cart Week, and another from the Oregon State Police describing a Clatsop County car wreck that killed a driver and injured his 9-year-old passenger. (WW and its partner organization, the Oregon Journalism Project, do not use AI to write stories.) Bottomly tells WW that most of The Oregonian‘s AI use centers on transcribing podcasts or translating stories into Spanish. In an email, she said it’s “hard to say” on which stories the paper would use AI, but in all instances an editor, reporter or both would review the copy before publication. “For newsroom-generated work, we disclose on the post we used AI and that we reviewed it,” she wrote. “This is policy.”