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In selecting nine schools for seismic retrofits, Portland Public Schools picked buildings at high risk of collapsing on kids during an earthquake, but passed over some buildings too expensive to renovate with the money available from its 2025 school bond.
A staff memo released ahead of a Tuesday meeting of the Portland School Board provides the most thorough explanation of how the district reached its final list of buildings to retrofit, and comes as seismic safety advocates have criticized the district for not showing its work.
PPS used the formula it details in the memo to select Beverly Cleary K–8 and Rose City Park Elementary as the two schools receiving full seismic retrofits. Ainsworth, Beach, Capitol Hill, Kelly and Richmond elementary schools—and Vernon and Winterhaven K–8s—are slated to receive targeted upgrades to specific, dangerous parts of their buildings.
The memo, authored by Dr. Jon Franco, the district’s senior chief of operations, breaks down the three factors PPS ultimately considered in building a seismic prioritization formula. Holmes Consulting Group, which PPS commissioned for such work, assigned buildings seismic risk scores on a scale of 1 to 10, with higher scores indicating greater danger during an earthquake. The district also assigned each building a score of 0 to 5 to represent overall facility condition, including any backlog of deferred maintenance work.
And notably, it assigned a yes or no metric to buildings around enrollment or “right sizing.” Using enrollment projections from the next three years, it prioritized schools with enrollment thresholds over 300 students for seismic improvements. (The School Board is also expected to hear about early plans for school consolidations on Tuesday. It appears enrollment will be a consideration for PPS.)
The district converted all scores to a 0-to-1 scale and measured them by assigning 90% weight to seismic risk, and 5% to both deferred maintenance and enrollment.
“In practical terms, this formula prioritizes campuses with the greatest potential for structural failure or collapse in an earthquake,” the memo says, “while modestly accounting for facility condition and the number of students served.”
It should be noted that the final list district officials arrived at does not address all of the most dangerous buildings in the district’s portfolio. PPS engaged Holmes to run several iterations of its prioritization formula as it tried sensitivity testing, and staff noted some schools appeared regularly no matter the adjustments. Those included Beverly Cleary, Glencoe, Grout, Kelly, and Rose City Park elementary schools, and Jackson and Roseway Heights middle schools.
But several of those high-risk campuses “would require very large investments to achieve a full seismic retrofit,” the staff memo notes. The final schools selected struck the balance between reducing life-safety risk and staying within the $100 million budget allocated toward seismic improvements in the latest school bond. Some schools, for example, could see big improvements in safety if a key building part were upgraded, a much cheaper alternative to retrofitting a full school.
The result is that schools like Glencoe and Grout elementary schools and Jackson and Roseway Heights middle schools did not make the short list for retrofits with 2025 bond funding, even if they consistently scored high.
It’s been well known from the start of a renewed push for earthquake safety this past spring that money from the May bond would not cover all needed seismic improvements across PPS.
“Those campuses remain high priorities for future funding,” the memo reads. “Sequencing reflects affordability and deliverability constraints within this bond cycle, not a diminished commitment to the safety of the students served in those buildings.”
The staff memo does little to address equity concerns some parents raised. (The district changed its seismic prioritization formula drastically from October to November, eliminating an explicit equity weight.) PPS’s final list includes just one Title I school, Kelly Elementary, receiving a partial retrofit in the district’s planned list, which parents say raises concerns that PPS is not spreading the funding it received evenly around the diverse array of communities its students come from. The memo notes briefly that there was an equity adjustment in the deferred maintenance score.
In an accompanying presentation for Tuesday’s board meeting, district staff compiled locations of seismic work across PPS, breaking out Title I schools. The graphics indicate that in the past five years, the district has completed work at 31 Title I schools. (There are 34 Title I schools in the district this year, though that number fluctuates.) Five of 15 school buildings that have not received any seismic improvements are Title I schools, the presentation indicates.
About 70 parents of students in North Portland schools delivered an open letter to the Portland School Board and PPS administrators on Saturday, calling for the district to reevaluate chosen schools and urging further transparency beyond the staff memo.
In a message delivering the letter, César Chávez K–8 parent Lindsay Jensen wrote that “an undisclosed percentage of 5 percent of a formula does not constitute meaningful incorporation of equity as required by the Racial Educational Equity Policy and the guidance for allocating seismic bond funds.
“Furthermore, the materials have not provided the alternative formulae and the actual calculations showing how these schools were selected, and are therefore not adequately transparent to inspire trust in this process.”
