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A Glencoe Elementary School parent on Monday filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Portland Public Schools has engaged in race-based discrimination by using a staffing formula that partly prioritizes more full-time employees for schools with higher percentages of students who are Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Portland by a legal team that includes a former state lawmaker, represents a significant challenge to what the school district calls “equity funding”: a formula that considers poverty and which races have been historically underserved by the district when awarding additional staff. (Race is a small fraction of the overall formula.)
The lawsuit also alleges that the Portland School Board’s decision to move fundraising toward a district-wide model in May 2024—by barring parents at individual schools from fundraising for staff—further compounded inequities. That School Board policy, known as the “Districtwide Advocacy and Funding Policy,” established The Fund for PPS as the district’s main fundraiser. The board did so in part because the previous model, which allowed parents to fundraise for staff at their individual schools under local school foundations, disproportionately benefited whiter and wealthier schools. The lawsuit alleges that factoring in that consideration is unconstitutional because it was in part based on race.
The plaintiff in the case is Richard Raseley, who has one daughter at Glencoe and another enrolled in private school. Glencoe had an active foundation, which Raseley helped organize, and is not a school that in the current academic year receives any additional equity funding. The Raseley family is white, and contend that the district discriminated against them twice over: first by awarding additional staff to other schools based in part on race, and then by barring them from compensating for the staffing loss through fundraising.
“As the parent of a child attending PPS, Mr. Raseley is very concerned about the quality of the education his child receives,” the lawsuit reads. “In line with PPS’s public position that allocating additional, scarce resources to particular schools promotes higher achievement in those schools, Mr. Raseley believes that additional funding for Glencoe correlates with a higher-quality education for the students.”
The attorneys representing Raseley include Julie Parish, formerly a Republican state representative of the Oregon Legislature, and Robert Renner with the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit Washington D.C. law firm that has long focused on challenging affirmative action and what it sees as race based discrimination.
The lawsuit alleges the district is in violation of the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. (The former assures equal protection of the law for all, the latter prohibits racial discrimination in programs that receive federal financial assistance.) The movement to challenge institutions nationwide for racial preferences has gained momentum since the Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found the consideration of race as a factor in college admission violated the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment.
“PPS can’t discriminate based on race, either overtly or with the intent of discriminating based on race, and then cover up what they’re actually doing,” Renner says. “We just want to stop discrimination based on race.”
Renner says the lawsuit does not intend to ask for monetary damages, but for the district to declare that they have violated and are in continued violation of the U.S. Constitution. It also asks for the courts to compel PPS to stop engaging in “race discrimination” in its equity funding policy and to block it from enforcing its 2024 fundraising policy.
Spokespeople with PPS did not immediately respond to WW‘s request for comment. The Fund for PPS’s board chair, Jackie Wirz, said she did not have a comment ahead of deadline. The district has, at least since 2013, used an equity formula to distribute additional staff to schools with the most need. The district’s 2025–26 adopted budget outlines the process for K–5 and K–8 schools, and racial considerations count for up to 2% of the overall staffing formula.
“The equity allocation in grades K-8 is 4% of the total K-8 Teachers allocated across grades K-8, with 2% allocated based on Socio-Economic Status, and the other 2% allocated based on Combined Historically Underserved,” the district’s budget reads. Schools qualify for the socio-economic status staffing if more than 20% of their students are eligible for free meals by district certification. “Combined historically underserved” is defined as schools where 40% of students meet at least one of the following criteria: special education eligibility, limited English proficiency, free meal eligibility by direct, Black, Hispanic, Native American, or Pacific Islander race.
The district adopted a Racial Equity & Social Justice policy in 2011, which called attention to its wide achievement gaps and committed to tackling them. Almost 15 years later, gaps are still persistent. Though PPS saw a return to pre-pandemic rates of proficiency on the 2024–25 Oregon Statewide Assessment, its Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students are still underperforming their white counterparts. For example, while 70.8% of white students demonstrated proficiency in English and language arts in PPS, just 18.6% of Black students did last academic year.
“The U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t accept that as a compelling reason or a legitimate reason to adopt a racially discriminatory measure,” Renner says, in response to questions from WW about PPS’s persistent racial achievement gap and past rationale for allocating more funding toward those students. “We think that everyone should just adopt a non-discrimination policy, and we think that’s what the Supreme Court has mandated.”
For years, schools fundraised for additional staff through auctions, galas and other events. Historically, Glencoe Elementary, located at 825 SE 51st Ave., raised anywhere between about $23,000 and $88,000 each year. Raseley says he helped raise between $100,000 and $150,000 during his two years as chair of the Glencoe foundation.
The new model, mandated by the School Board last year, pools all fundraising dollars into a district-wide account and allocates them through a board appointed Parent Advisory Committee, comprised of nine parents and two students across high school clusters. That committee last year allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to high-impact literacy tutoring across the district, among other investments.
However, the districtwide model has struggled to attract the same level of parental enthusiasm. The Fund for PPS underperformed expectations in its first year, raising $593,324 when local school foundations previously raked in between $3 million and $4 million. The Fund’s leadership and advocates have outlined their hopes that broader community engagement and new fundraising strategies will help get it on track.
“We’ve watched our kids’ schools lose librarians, counselors, and classroom aides—not because our community stopped caring, but because the district won’t let us help," Raseley wrote in a statement to WW. “Portland has put up two barriers: one based expressly on race, and another that blocks parents from supporting their own kids’ schools. Both need to come down.”
PPS is already facing federal scrutiny under the current administration for a policy related to transgender student-athlete participation. And the Trump administration in September axed a grant for the Oregon DeafBlind Project meant to help deaf and blind students, citing PPS’s plans to open a Center for Black Student Excellence. The vast majority of students that the DeafBlind Project serves do not attend PPS schools.
Renner says CIR hopes the case will set broader precedent in other parts of the country. “We think there is a need, because we think other school districts are engaged in similar conduct, to clarify and establish the case precedent that this is not permissible,” he says.
