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Portland Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong released her recommendations Thursday for how she thinks the School Board should end the practice of allowing Northeast Portland students to take their pick between Jefferson and three other surrounding high schools.
Armstrong has selected the option that would send Irvington Elementary students to Grant High School, while the other elementary feeders to Harriet Tubman Middle School—Sabin, Boise-Eliot Humboldt, and King—would be zoned exclusively to Jefferson.
The district is eager to fill Jefferson, especially because the high school is slated to receive a $466 million modernization with voter funds from the 2020 and 2025 property-tax bonds. This academic year, Jefferson enrolls 391 students, just a fraction of the enrollments at other PPS high schools, which range between 1,025 and 2,074. That’s in large part due to a district policy that currently allows students living in those zones—many of those neighborhoods historic Jefferson feeders—to choose between attending Jefferson and three other surrounding high schools. (Those are Grant, McDaniel and Roosevelt high schools.)
The School Board in 2022 charged the superintendent with developing a plan to fill Jefferson, allowing for the school to receive comparable academic programming and extracurricular offerings. Since mid-October, the district has engaged in a public process surrounding Jefferson’s boundaries that has at times grown heated.
It has presented three scenarios to try and bolster Jefferson’s enrollment, labeled A, B and C, and proposes implementing one of those scenarios starting with the class of 2031, currently seventh graders.
In recent weeks, much of the conversation around boundaries has centered on Scenarios B and C. The primary difference between the two is which high school Irvington Elementary School students would attend. That school feeds into Harriet Tubman Middle School, alongside Sabin, King, and Boise-Eliot/Humboldt elementary schools. Under Scenario B, its students are zoned into Jefferson; under Scenario C, its students are zoned to Grant.
Students at Vernon K-8, Faubion PK-8, and most elementary schools that feed into Ockley Green and Harriet Tubman are zoned for Jefferson under the district’s recommendations. Peninsula Elementary School and the Beach Elementary School Spanish Immersion program are zoned to Roosevelt.
Since the district’s initial release of plans, some families at Irvington and Sabin elementary schools have organized strong opposition against those two schools ending up at Jefferson, citing everything from proximity to Grant versus Jefferson to those elementary schools’ historic standing as Grant feeder schools. (In 2018, as the district prepared to reopen Tubman and turn most of its K-8 schools into elementaries, Sabin and Irvington middle schoolers were zoned into Tubman.) There has been an effort by some of those families to present their own scenario, termed “Scenario F,” which would zone both those schools into Grant.
But in recent weeks, another organized campaign of parents from across Jefferson’s boundaries has made a coordinated plea to the district to choose Scenario B, arguing it is the option that allows for the greatest continuity (middle schoolers sticking together), and that didn’t compromise any one school’s enrollment. (District officials have said that high schools need a minimum of 1,100 students to function as comprehensive high schools.)
Armstrong has sided with Scenario C.
The superintendent’s recommendation comes after the district hosted six community engagement sessions at middle schools and collected public feedback via a form. A Nov. 25 summary of those community engagement sessions noted that of the 244 responses the district received, nearly half of respondents preferred Scenario C. (That memo notably mentioned that because those surveys did not collect participant demographics, “we can draw limited conclusions about how representative attendees were of the affected stakeholders.”)
“This plan will bring enrollment and program growth and predictability back to Jefferson, while still maintaining robust offerings at neighboring schools,” Armstrong’s recommendation reads. “Additionally, almost all students who live within one mile of a high school will be able to attend their closest school.”
Under Scenario C, the district projects that all four high schools affected by the redistricting will see enrollments above 1,100 students in the 2030–31 school year, though parents have asked for longer-term forecasts. That academic year, the latest one PPS forecasts, would see Jefferson enrolled with 1,232 students, Grant with 1,416, McDaniel with 1,524 and Roosevelt with 1,153. If enrollment projections from Portland State University hold, PPS will in future years struggle to hold all of its high schools above the 1,100 student figure.
The School Board will make its final decision on how to fill Jefferson in January, meaning there are still some engagement sessions parents can attend. The superintendent’s recommendation further indicates there are more consolidations to come.
“This is the first step in a systemwide review, not a standalone change,” the recommendation reads. “The next phase of school right-sizing will begin in 2026.”
