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Portland Public Schools began its community engagement process on school closures with an April 11 forum at Kellogg Middle School.
The meeting officially kicked off what’s expected to be a months-long process that Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong has estimated could result in five to 10 of the district’s school buildings closing.
As WW has previously reported, PPS will consider many factors during the process, from facility condition to transportation and where affordable housing may go in the future.
At the April 11 engagement meeting, PPS introduced another metric into the mix: “utilization,” defined as a school’s enrollment divided by its functional capacity.
Sydney Kelly, a PPS spokeswoman, says functional capacity “is a practical estimate of the number of students a school site can accommodate.” It is based on classroom capacity, which is informed by square footage and how often instructional spaces are used. Kelly adds that it’s a different number than the maximum occupancy of a space.
Utilization rates of different buildings in the district’s portfolio vary dramatically, from 25% at schools like Rosa Parks Elementary and Jefferson High School, to 110% at Winterhaven K–8.
Portland School Board Chair Eddie Wang cautions against conflating utilization rates with which schools will ultimately close. “If there are two schools near each other that we are looking to consolidate,” he says, “it does not automatically mean that the lower-enrolled one will be closed. We need to look at a lot of factors.”
Wang adds that higher utilization rates aren’t ideal because they indicate that all instructional spaces are occupied to capacity all day. Over occupancy could mean a science teacher, for example, has to move items necessary for experiments from room to room and cut into instructional time to set up each new classroom.
In an email to parents, Armstrong wrote utilization merely helps the district understand where it has space, and where it’s over capacity. The district, she wrote, must consider how these rates affect resource distribution.
“Rightsizing is about ensuring every student has access to a high-quality education, strong programs, and the resources they need to succeed, no matter where they live in our city,” she wrote.
