School Board Approves Plan to Fill Jefferson High School

The Portland School Board agreed Tuesday night to end a policy that allowed students to opt out of attending Jefferson High School, and to redraw the school’s attendance boundary with maps recommended by Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong.

The votes were unanimous to end Jefferson’s “dual assignment zones” and 6–1 to adopt Armstrong’s recommendation for the high school’s attendance boundary, with board member Stephanie Engelsman voting against it. The resolutions’ passage means today’s seventh graders living inside Jefferson’s boundary will be the first class without an option to attend either Grant, McDaniel or Roosevelt high schools.

Jefferson is slated for a $466 million modernization and currently enrolls 391 students. Portland Public Schools officials have warned for months that the district would end the policy allowing student choice to boost enrollment.

Now, they also have the stamp of approval from the School Board to draw new boundaries the way the Superintendent recommends. Known widely as “Scenario C,” these new boundaries will zone Peninsula Elementary School and the Beach Elementary School Spanish dual immersion program to Roosevelt; Irvington Elementary School to Grant; and all other elementary schools feeding into Ockley Green and Harriet Tubman middle schools, alongside Vernon K-8 and Faubion PK-8, to Jefferson.

The votes bring an end to a policy that has drained Jefferson’s enrollment since 2011, though the school has suffered since the 1980s from various desegregation and district policies that have emptied its halls. Today, the school’s student body is comparable in size to that of some PPS elementary schools.

“It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to right a historic wrong,” said board member Rashelle Chase-Miller. “Jeff means so much to our community, and I want to hold space for that. It’s really an amazing opportunity and privilege to be here now in this moment when we see the promise of Jeff being restored.”

Scenario C emerged in early December as the leading choice for Armstrong because it balanced enrollment across affected high schools and allowed most students living within 1 mile of a high school to attend that school.

But it was, in some ways, also the scenario that didn’t please anyone. Proponents of the other strongly considered choice, Scenario B, said it was wrong to split Harriet Tubman up and send relatively affluent Irvington students to Grant while the other three feeders routed to Jefferson. (Where Irvington would be zoned was the sole difference between Scenarios B and C.) And Irvington families who want their children to attend Grant hoped the district would consider a scenario in which they could be joined by students from Sabin Elementary School, a historic Grant feeder. Under both leading scenarios, Sabin was zoned to Jefferson.

Like conversations nationwide on redistricting, discussions of new Portland school boundaries were at times heated and emotional. Since the district began community engagement in mid-October, there has been a camp of parents eager to send their children to Jefferson, and strong opposition from some in the Irvington and Sabin elementary school communities.

Redistricting raised hard questions in North and Northeast Portland, as WW reported in December. For some families, it was a reckoning between their liberal values and where their own kids would go to school—some parents drew the line at sending their kids into a building that currently lacks comprehensive programming and extracurriculars. And for Jefferson families and supporters, the process led to hard questions about why the high school’s students had not been given the same access to opportunities guaranteed to students at other schools in the district (“Choosy Moms Choose Jeff,” WW, Dec. 10).

But at the Tuesday night meeting where the School Board approved the resolutions, the board room was oddly quiet. No one registered for public comment, and most of the discussion centered on future plans for Jefferson. Compared with the outcry in inboxes and at community forums through late fall and early winter, the contrast was notable.

Some School Board members outlined their initial preferences for Scenario B, but noted that Scenario C best balanced enrollment across the three high schools most affected by the policy change.

The resolution presented to the School Board also included some remedy to quell the concerns of polar opposite sides in the debate, which found common ground in wanting to hold PPS officials accountable to deliver their plan for comparable academic and extracurricular programming at Jefferson.

“This next chapter will be written together and require focused, collective effort,” said Margaret Calvert, the district’s assistant superintendent of school improvement and modernization, “so that the students at Jefferson and all four high schools can attend well-resourced schools where they flourish and demonstrate their brilliance.”

The resolution outlines PPS’s commitment to continued engagement with students, families and staff to scale programming and development of academic pathways. It commits to funding up to two additional full-time positions at Jefferson each year through 2030–31, even when enrollment might not justify them. (The 2030–31 school year is when the student body is projected to cross a 1,100-student threshold to justify comprehensive programming.)

It also commits to informing families at Jefferson, Grant, McDaniel, and Roosevelt with annual progress updates to the board regarding those specific schools. The reports will include “changes in staffing levels, descriptions of staff recruiting efforts, how stakeholders were involved in identifying and designing course offerings, impacts on athletics, visual and performing arts, extracurricular activities, and other pertinent information.”

Engelsman proposed an amendment that the district also commit to a course catalog to be presented to families, part of a timeline the district presented but was not part of the resolution. Instead of an amendment, Armstrong committed to honoring that timeline.

Casting the sole “no” vote, Engelsman wrote in a Thursday statement that she was concerned about how pulling students from other robust high schools to Jefferson would affect offerings. She said she would have preferred an alternative that ”strengthened all of our high schools while also providing Jefferson with the enrollment to function and thrive as a comprehensive high school.”

“Roosevelt had very low enrollment prior to its modernization...reducing enrollment at Roosevelt might be a significant step back for that school,” she wrote. “I am [also] worried about Grant’s ability to continue to offer a diverse range of courses and extracurriculars. The forecasting for future attendees in the scenarios is higher than actual attendance today.”

School Board student representative Ian Ritorto voted against Armstrong’s recommendation, noting a vote by the 22-member district student council in which he says the vast majority of students supported Scenario B. (Three representatives supported Scenario C, he says, two from Grant and one from Jefferson. The other Jefferson representative was absent.) He also raised concerns as a Roosevelt High School student about tanking enrollment at that school. Roosevelt is, in all scenarios PPS seriously considered, set to be the lowest enrolled high school in the district within a few years.

Ritorto said all students, however, supported filling Jefferson.

“Everyone agreed that something is fundamentally wrong and we need to change this,” Ritorto said. “It’s necessary to make sure Jefferson has a real future as a comprehensive high school.”

This article was updated with comments from School Board member Stephanie Engelsman.