At Faubion PK-8, Parent Outcry Brought a Classroom Back

Nine-year-old Marlowe’s fourth grade year at Faubion PK-8 School in Northeast Portland is shaping up to be her best yet.

That’s thanks, in large part, to the advocacy of Faubion parents, who campaigned to save her fourth grade class from the budget ax. Amid lower than expected enrollment numbers in Faubion’s fourth grade class, Portland Public Schools announced Sept. 4 it would dismantle one of the school’s fourth grade classes and move its teacher to kindergarten.

Two weeks into the new school year, the news was devastating for Marlowe, who’d spent every morning of third grade struggling in a 33-student classroom.

“She’d start to panic thinking about school,” says Sarah Dillon, Marlowe’s mother. “She’d be like, ‘What day is it?’ constantly because she wanted to know, ‘How many more days do I need to endure?’” With her new teacher and 20-pupil classroom, Dillon said her daughter was flourishing, describing school as “calm and peaceful.”

Faubion parents, frustrated with the sudden development, came out in droves to support the fourth grade classroom. They met with district administrators on Sept. 5 and amped up public pressure through letters to the editor. On Sept. 8, parents got what they wanted: PPS reinstated the classroom.

“There’s nothing like the ferociousness of a mama or papa bear stepping in and saying these children, whether it’s my child or kids within our community, are being underserved and we will not allow it,” says Lillon Anderson, who helped lead the effort to restore the classroom. “I think that there’s a very real concern about communities leaving their community school, and so [PPS found] coverage.”

But the Faubion fight has also raised larger questions about how administrators came to their decision to shut down the classroom, and reignited tensions around class sizes in the district. Though PPS was able to save the classroom, continuous budget deficits also mean the district will have to figure out a strategy to navigate parental pressure in the coming years.

In a Sept. 8 email, Faubion principal Anthony Bromberg credited outreach and advocacy for the saved positions at the school.

“We have been able to adjust some resources to be able to keep the position,” he wrote. “We know stability and consistency are important every year and are thrilled to provide more of it for our students in this way.”

Faubion PK-8 captures a demographic of students most of PPS does not. Three-quarters of students who attend are of color, and 84% qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Faubion is both a Title I school and has a Comprehensive Support and Improvement designation, meant for schools in the lowest-performing 5% statewide. Many students, Anderson says, are on individualized education programs or 504 plans, which both support students with disabilities.

The school is also underperforming in terms of its educational outcomes. Just 26% of its students meet reading proficiency standards and only 15% are proficient in math. That compares with 55% and 46%, respectively, districtwide. Dillon says her daughter, whose behavior is “rarely disruptive,” slipped under the radar and is an example of a student who is below grade-level proficiency in reading. Dillon flagged Marlowe’s dyslexia early, and she is now receiving tutoring.

Large class sizes at Title I schools like Faubion, parents say, mean teachers can miss struggling students. “They are as attentive as they can be,” Dillon says.

The district’s choice to assign three teachers to Faubion’s fourth grade, instead of two, had come about because while PPS makes staffing decisions through a formula that considers enrollment projections, the district typically does not finalize actual enrollment numbers until October. It is around then that PPS adjusts staffing to meet student needs.

To qualify for the three fourth grade classes Faubion has, the school needed 67 fourth graders. It reported about 61, Anderson says. “Despite our best efforts, our current enrollment numbers in fourth grade do not support the number of teaching positions allocated to Faubion,” read a Sept. 4 email from Principal Bromberg.

But parents say the experience at Faubion has shown just how destabilizing that strategy can be for some of the district’s youngest learners. Anderson says she doesn’t think the district considered the social-emotional effects of pulling a classrom out from under children. The district, she says, must find a way to address staffing challenges “without disrupting the classroom.”

“A lot of kids who are coming into Title I schools are coming from trauma,” Anderson says. “How do we set this up to where kids who maybe don’t have a stable home life know they’re going to a place where they can trust that when they have a teacher, their teacher’s going to be there?”

Portland School Board member Rashelle Chase-Miller, whose Zone 4 encompasses Faubion, says the district does use different formulas to staff Title I schools. (In most grades, she says, those formulas begin with a difference of one fewer student per class.) But while the district is following its class-size cap of 33 in fourth grade classes at Title I schools, those are “unreasonably high and don’t set students or teachers up for success.”

Chase-Miller says the district’s decision to maintain three fourth grade classes at Faubion “speaks to the power of community advocacy.” But she adds that this was a one-time fix—the superintendent, she says, was able to free up some Title I funds from elsewhere in the district for position stabilization.

“It’s important to remember that class sizes are too high all over the district, and that is a result of the state’s chronic underfunding of our schools,” Chase-Miller says. “Kids won at Faubion, but we need long-term, statewide solutions that will ensure reasonable class and sufficient resourcing for every school community.”

Even with the victory, Dillon says the situation has motivated her to become more engaged in how PPS determines class-size caps, especially for Title I schools. She says that when schools are chronically underresourced, it can create a “self-perpetuating” cycle. When parents pull their children out of school because of a lack of resources, she says, the resulting enrollment means even more resources stand to go.

Dillon, a self-described “die-hard advocate” of neighborhood schools, says PPS needs to be more transparent with its class-size formula, especially at schools where students are more at need. District representatives did not respond to WW’s request for comment.

“I think they would have gone forward with it had we not made a lot of noise about it,” Dillon says. “My major concerns are how destabilizing these kinds of decisions are to kids, how we address the big funding picture, and how we truly create equity in classrooms.”