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The clock was nearing midnight by the time a Portland Public Schools employee started her public comments at the Sept. 9 meeting of the School Board.
Keisha Locklear, who works as a senior project manager at the district’s Office of School Modernization, sat down to talk about a PPS proposal to extend a contract with Procedeo, a Texas-based construction management firm, for $487,000. Amid some shaky leadership transitions in the office where Locklear works, PPS officials wanted Procedeo to assist.
Locklear’s testimony described diminishing morale at OSM. Staff was working with a firm that had been largely absent from meetings and often underdelivered on “impossible” promises, she said. (As The Oregonian has reported, Procedeo has so far produced a one-and-a-half-page report, far short of promises to deliver a comprehensive analysis of PPS’s construction processes and management practices.)
The testimony was enough for multiple members of the School Board—clearly exhausted from a nearly seven-hour, jam-packed agenda—to voice their concerns.
“I can’t unhear what I just heard,” said Michelle DePass, the board’s vice chair. “The whole thing.”
DePass’ comments were met with nods from the bulk of board members. And yet the board passed the contract extension with Procedeo nearly unanimously—Stephanie Engelsman was the only board member who voted no, arguing she wanted to see the firm produce its promised deliverables.
The Procedeo approval opens a window on the philosophical shift of what is shaping up to be a dramatically different School Board than the one at the start of 2025. The May election altered the School Board’s composition—three longtime incumbents bowed out, and four moms took their seats. The fresh crop of electeds has presented an opportunity for the board’s leadership, DePass and Board Chair Eddie Wang, to shape what they hope will be a unified group that supports PPS Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong and district staff, one concentrating more on big-picture outcomes than fiddling with small details.
That’s a big change from boards in the recent past that were more skeptical about each piece of the process, leading to inefficiency and internal strife. (For example, efforts to cut costs on three high school modernizations led to delays that, in some cases, increased costs.)
Hangover from the previous board might, in part, influence a desire by board leadership to try something new: Stop sweating the small stuff.
“One thing I was really frustrated with the previous board was that reluctance to look at ourselves and say, ‘Hey, what did we do to make this problem better or worse?’” Wang says. “I’m super hopeful for this new board because I think the people who are on it are a lot more open-minded and willing to try something different.”
Whether or not the School Board moves in unison, it faces a tough year. PPS will weigh consolidating schools and redrawing boundaries, conversations that have been emotionally explosive and logistically complex nationwide. The Portland Association of Teachers must negotiate its next contract with the district, and PPS’s student outcomes still leave much to be desired.
The bumpy road ahead is part of what motivated DePass, despite her concerns, to vote yes on the contract extension. Like a pilot flying through turbulence, she calculated that the only way out was through. The longest-serving member on the board, DePass says she had to weigh her complicated feelings toward the contract against another couple of years of stalled progress on projects that parents, teachers and students are expecting. She says she had to model her own leadership philosophy: prioritizing the bigger picture and moving toward it.
“We need to move forward,” she says. “I’ve been sitting here for six fucking years, watching nothing happening…we need to get the job done.”
Getting seven members of the School Board on the same ship is no easy task. Wang and DePass will have to navigate at least a couple of members who see value in picking apart the details.
Engelsman, the lone “no” on Procedeo, says her vote came not because of an inherent lack of trust in Armstrong or the firm, but because it felt “premature” to extend a contract before seeing the firm’s work. For her, asking questions is important because it prevents an impression that the School Board is just rubber-stamping things, and helps instill community trust with the people who voted her in.
“I have a lot of confidence in Superintendent Dr. Armstrong. She’s doing a terrific job,” she says. “I do not think it’s the board’s job to just place unbridled consent with her. Otherwise, what is the purpose of us?”
School Board member Virginia La Forte agrees with that assessment. She says she regrets voting yes on the Procedeo extension—especially without a solid request-for-proposal process—but felt some pressure to conform. “I won’t make that mistake again,” she says.
“A unified board is not the goal; it’s a possible outcome,” La Forte says. “My goal is for the board to truly walk the walk when it comes to accountability and transparency. By saying you want a unified board, I believe it creates a perception that the board could potentially prioritize unity over responsiveness, and that would be a problem.”
Dr. Andy Saultz, dean of Lewis & Clark College’s Graduate School of Education and Counseling, says a school board’s role is fundamentally to hire and evaluate a superintendent and exercise fiscal authority over things such as a budget and bonds. But school board members, he says, often disagree on the methods to get there.
What’s happening on the Portland School Board illustrates two common approaches to board leadership, Saultz says. Some members embrace a collaborative approach with the district and the superintendent, he says. “They don’t want to make the superintendent look bad because it hurts the district if people think the superintendent doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
Other School Board members may take a less congenial approach, Saultz says. They may feel that the superintendent works for them, and that “part of holding someone accountable is making them uncomfortable.”
Wang, who is firmly in the first camp, believes nitpicking every contract and every choice is what has stalled PPS from any real progress. “Imagine working for a boss that has charged you with accomplishing a goal, yet every day they second-guess your choices,” he says. “I’m pretty sure you’d quit.”
For Wang, accountability comes not from picking apart processes, but from setting outcomes-based goals and checking in frequently. The trap of the school board system in Oregon, he says, is that it’s “designed to fail” if boards get too caught up in undertaking a managerial role.
“Study after study about school boards across the nation have pointed out that the school boards that are supportive of their superintendent see outcomes,” he says, “and the ones that don’t see the status quo.”
And for DePass and Wang, there’s another consideration: the image the board presents to a public that’s going to have a lot of change to digest, some of it painful. (As Saultz says: School board meetings “set a tone for the district.”) DePass argues that sometimes, presenting a unified front is as crucial as the subject under consideration. Wang adds that once the board approves something, even if it’s not unanimous, it’s important that even disagreeing members stand behind the district’s vision.
Engelsman agrees that unity is important. She sees a successful board as one that’s comfortable with disagreement, aligned not necessarily on votes, but on shared guiding principles.
“Unified, I think, is having our north star as the students. I guarantee you everyone on the board right now has that as their north star,” Engelsman says. “Our priorities, our objectives, our values, is where we’re going to be unified. We do not have to be unified in our decisions.”
