Updated PPS Seismic Formula Prioritizes Risk

Portland Public Schools unveiled an updated seismic formula on Monday to the Portland School Board’s facilities and operations committee.

Many of the buildings in the district’s aging portfolio are not seismically safe. The $1.83 billion school bond voters passed in May was accompanied by intense pressure from parents for that money to include funds for seismic retrofits. A May School Board resolution called for money in the bond to be prioritized toward mitigating seismic deficiencies, particularly “at the 8–10 schools assessed to pose the greatest risk of injury or death in a significant seismic event.” Currently, that budget stands at about $100 million.

PPS officials faced additional blowback last month when a draft seismic formula weighed risk as 35% of the total consideration for what buildings would receive seismic upgrades. Advocates with Safe Structures PPS, a group of parents pushing for the district to follow through on its May promises, said then that the district should not prioritize “low-hanging fruit” over risk.

In response, the district’s new model weighs seismic risk as 90% of the prioritization score for buildings receiving seismic upgrades. The other 10% is split between deferred maintenance considerations and enrollment, a prelude to the right-sizing and school closure conversations the district plans in the near future.

Using that formula, PPS has also landed on a list of nine schools that are so far slated for either full or targeted seismic retrofits.

Beverly Cleary K-8 and Rose City Park Elementary School are the two schools receiving full upgrades. Ainsworth, Beach, Capitol Hilll, Kelly and Richmond elementary schools and Vernon and Winterhaven K-8s are the schools receiving targeted upgrades. Work on these projects is slated to begin earliest in 2027.

Dr. Jon Franco, PPS’s senior chief of operations, said the list, particularly for targeted retrofits, was subject to some changes, adding that the district had so far slated upgrades totaling $75 million, giving them space to brace for unforeseen circumstances. (The School Board previously indicated interest in a hybrid approach between full and targeted retrofits; the district is applying for additional state grant money to fund full retrofits.) But Franco confirmed that both schools receiving full retrofits rank highly in terms of need from all weighted formulas and the district plans to proceed with those remodels.

“We acknowledge and understand the difficulty of this process,” Franco told board members on Monday, noting that several buildings are going untouched thus far. “Unfortunately, we have a limited amount of money in regards to this and we have a number of buildings that we need to obviously fix up from a seismic perspective.”

Monday’s meeting also offered some insights into a key question about an August seismic risk report from Holmes Consulting Group, which PPS commissioned. That report ranked buildings by seismic risk on a scale of 1 to 10, though many of the district’s buildings are clustered in the 9 and up range.

Jennifer Eggers, a structural engineer at Holmes, said it’s hard to say exactly what will happen to a building in an earthquake, as one quake could affect a structure in a different way than another. But she said unreinforced masonry buildings in general rank highest in risk and she would expect higher damage to those structures. In comparison, the district’s concrete buildings would experience less damage but still rank between 8.5 and 9.

Some School Board members on the facilities committee, as well as members of the public, expressed concern that the district had overcorrected and was now ignoring schools attended by low-income and BIPOC students.

The old formula gave some prioritization to Title I schools, for instance, that is not accounted for in the new formula. Of the nine schools selected, only one is a Title I school (a school where a high percentage of students come from low-income families). “I’m concerned that if we’re not thinking about equity that we’re going to end up in a situation where the schools that kids of color go to are the ones that collapse,” said School Board member Rashelle Chase-Miller.

Franco said, however, that the district has already made efforts to prioritize such work. Sixteen of its 25 Title I schools have either received full or targeted retrofits, he said.

School Board members on the committee further pushed for the district to consider plans that would be most efficient in the broader picture of deferred maintenance and school consolidation. For months, district leaders have said that the seismic conversation should take place jointly with those two subjects. Chase-Miller said she was hoping the district would consider consolidating into safer schools, thereby saving resources that could be allocated elsewhere.

But the answer to her question revealed that the reality of considering all of these factors in tandem is harder than the district may have initially anticipated. Tom Odgers, the district’s chief of integrated operations, called the deferred maintenance piece a “slippery slope.”

“A lot of the sites that have a very high seismic [risk] don’t necessarily have a high deferred maintenance score and vice versa,” Odgers said. “Even though it might be a suitable site to fix the seismic, we still have got a lot of deferred maintenance to do.”