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A Monday afternoon meeting of the Portland School Board’s facilities and operations committee grew heated after its members split on whether to discuss prepared updates on the Center for Black Student Excellence.
The committee is chaired by Virginia La Forte, and also includes School Board Vice Chair Michelle DePass and board member Rashelle Chase-Miller. A couple of hours before the meeting, staff at Portland Public Schools posted a couple of items to the agenda related to the CBSE. (PPS is currently conducting due diligence on a development in Albina called One North, and the documents posted contained new information about the CBSE’s programming, alongside additional costs the center would incur.)
The conflict emerged at the outset of the meeting, after DePass asked La Forte to remove the agenda item from discussion, arguing that Black community members who had advocated strongly for the project were not given enough notice to attend. La Forte initially refused to do so, arguing that the committee was just receiving a due diligence presentation and that there would be no deliberation. Deliberation, she noted, would take place Nov. 18, where she encouraged community involvement.
DePass is one of two members of the School Board’s leadership who’ve tried to usher in a new era for the board since four new members took their places in July. That new era, board leaders previously told WW, would be one in which a previously bitterly divided School Board could grow more collaborative. The vision was also to better support district staff with more targeted tasks, to make sure staff had time to pursue its own work independent of the board.
Monday’s tense conversation offered a glimpse into how that vision is playing out in practice so far. It showed the School Board is not getting along as DePass had hoped.
“I’m hoping to be a team. I’m hoping to work collaboratively on this committee and all of our committees,” DePass said.
She argued, however, that discussion of the CBSE required the presence of people who advocated for it. “I feel like it’s a great disservice to the community that has had so much stolen from them in this neighborhood and in this community in Albina.…It’s important to the Black community that’s not here. It’s a grave disservice to discuss this behind people that have been advocating for it for five years.”
After numerous public commenters spoke about seismic upgrades, the other major agenda item at Monday’s meeting, but the CBSE received just one public comment, Chase-Miller took DePass’s side. “We can’t have an item on the agenda that’s had so many advocates for it and then an item like this that the community is not here to be present for the update,” she said. (The one person who testified, Center for Black Excellence director Aryn Frazier, said in part that her remarks were brief because she’d been given little time to prepare, and that the lack of audience in the room did not reflect the “swaths of people who have invested time and energy and heart” to get the CBSE to this moment.)
But La Forte argued that she had not been the one to deprive the Black community of the opportunity to come to the meeting, noting she’d begun pushing for the posting of the CBSE agenda item since Oct. 30. There was further dispute about if and when the CBSE discussion had been temporarily removed from the agenda. It became quickly apparent that the delays on the agenda item were not for La Forte’s lack of trying.
Instead, Deborah Kafoury, the district’s chief of staff, confirmed that board leaders had asked to move the item to a regular meeting of the board on Nov. 18, allowing for the district to present a more complete due diligence report and a more thorough discussion among all board members. DePass says that delay reflected an attempt to “balance demands on staff.”
It appears, however, that the miscommunications only complicated things for staff members.
“It’s similar to when Mom and Dad are having an argument and you’ve got the kids stuck in the middle,” Kafoury said. “That’s honestly kind of where the staff have been, between a rock and a hard place.”
La Forte also asked why, when she discussed the agenda item with both DePass and Chase-Miller the day before, neither had brought up their concerns. Chase-Miller said she’d expressly flagged her concerns, while DePass said it took her some time to process hers. Board member Patte Sullivan, who was present for the meeting but is not a member of the committee, said this demonstrated the board “obviously need[s] some discussion about how to communicate,” and sided with La Forte.
La Forte ultimately agreed to strip the item from the facilities agenda at the end of the meeting. She took part of her explanation to flag that the board’s leaders had not conducted a transparent process. (DePass, for her part, acknowledged that board leaders should have consulted La Forte ahead of their decision to remove the agenda item and apologized.)
“The reason the community did not have a chance to be here is because senior leadership declined repeatedly to notice this agenda item…[this is] not how we’re going to build trust on the board,” La Forte said at the meeting. “I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that we’re responsible for this oversight that is related to a multimillion-dollar real estate transaction.”
In a follow-up conversation with WW, La Forte said board leadership does not have the authority to set or change committee agendas. (While the board chair has the power to set agendas in general meetings, as outlined by board policy, committee chairs are given agency to “co-develop” meeting agendas with staff leads.)
“The majority of the board gave clear direction at the Sept. 9 regular board meeting to run due diligence through the Facilities Committee,” she says. “I did exactly what the majority of the board requested in a public meeting.” At that meeting, the board did not formally vote on a directive to run updates through the facilities committee, though School Board Chair Eddie Wang said updates would be presented at the committee “if needed.”
Wang tells WW a different story, and says the majority of the board wanted a more thorough update on Nov. 18. “The role of the board chair is to ensure efficient governance and to uphold the will of the majority,” he says. “It doesn’t do anyone any good to force staff to present when they’re not ready and the information is incomplete.”
This article has been updated to clarify that the board chair sets agendas in general meetings, but that committee chairs are given agency over their individual ones.
