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As Portland Public Schools grapples with at least a $50 million budget deficit in its upcoming 2026–27 school year, the Portland School Board will return to a hot-button issue: Its 2024 decision to phase out local school foundations.
Local school foundations, or LSFs, existed for decades at a number of PPS schools. Foundation money raised could fund extra staffing positions at a foundation’s school. To foster equity, LSFs were required to contribute one-third of revenue after the first $10,000 to the PPS Parent Fund, which then distributed that money to at-need schools throughout the district using demographic data.
The system came under intense scrutiny in the 2023–24 academic year, with those opposed to the model asserting that it was unfair to some of the district’s most vulnerable students. (Indeed, schools with foundations were often wealthier and whiter than the district average.) The School Board at the time agreed, voting 5-2 in May 2024 to alter the district’s fundraising policy. The upshot: The Fund for PPS took fundraising for PPS districtwide, and LSFs are effectively barred from raising funds to spend on additional staff at individual schools.
Board members made that choice even as supporters of foundations warned that the district would be losing a valuable source of funding, and gaining little to replace it. In the years since that vote, The Fund for PPS has hauled in less than LSFs once had. In the last three years LSFs operated, they generated an average of $3.3 million a year for PPS. In 2024–25, the Fund for PPS collected $593,324. It has raised about $200,000 in the 2025–26 school year, according to The Oregonian’s reporting from February. (The fund’s target goal is to raise $1 million this school year.)
Now, three school board members: Virginia La Forte, Stephanie Engelsman, and Patte Sullivan, have expressed interest in pausing the 2024 policy that eliminated LSFs. (Sullivan was one of the two board members in 2024 who opposed the fundraising policy change, and appears to be leading the charge to revisit the policy.) At an April 14 board meeting, Sullivan argued the tight turnaround between sunsetting LSFs and scaling The Fund for PPS had not equipped the districtwide model with the time or resources it needed to succeed.
“Although the policy change was made to support equity, it is important that we look at intent versus impact,” Sullivan says. “The intent of the rule change was to make things more equitable. Instead, it has negatively impacted all students. We put too much hope in the legislature and not enough work into establishing a new fund.”
The renewed interest in foundation policy comes at a delicate time for the district. Aside from its continual budget crisis, only exacerbated by an unexpected one in the middle of the year, it faces a legal challenge to its foundation policy. A PPS parent sued the district in October, alleging the district’s staffing formula, which partly prioritizes more full-time employees for schools with higher percentages of students who are Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander, is racially discriminatory. And the parent, Richard Rasely, argues in the lawsuit that the change to foundation policy further disadvantages schools who had previously made up for that staffing loss with fundraising.
Rasely has since formed a parent group called Families for Fair School Funding, which signed on to the lawsuit on April 16. That group calls for deeper transparency into how the district allocates its resources, and for a re-examination of the foundation policy.
That doesn’t appear to be the only effort to bring local school foundations back. At the April 14 meeting, a number of parents testified in support of reviving LSFs. Jen Stenson, an Ainsworth parent testifying on behalf of a “growing coalition” of parents from Abernethy, Richmond, Forest Park, and Duniway elementary schools, alongside Laurelhurst K-8, said she was not re-litigating any of the debate around foundations, but “here to talk about revenue and survival.”
A pause in the rule change, Stenson said, would cost the district no money and put another source of revenue on the table. And she said that when parents are confronted with multi-million dollar deficits year after year, they are disincentivized from giving. The power of foundations, Stenson said, is that parents can see their dollars translate into their local classrooms and school.
“By pausing this ruling, you re-engage the community. You give parents a way to see the immediate impact of their contribution on their child’s classroom, and they will find ways to give,” she said. “Pausing a strategy that isn’t yet meeting its target isn’t a sign of weakness or a failure. It’s a show of strength and leadership.”
Most School Board members did not comment much on the foundation policy on April 14 because additional discussion has been reserved for an upcoming board meeting. The Fund for PPS’s board chair, Jackie Wirz, says she does not have formal comment at this time. (The fund, its supporters say, has certainly faced some bumps in the transition. But many of them argue that reform has put the district on a more equitable track.)
In the current academic year, the fund allocated $660,000 to high-impact tutoring for K–3 students, $70,000 to math supports for ninth and 10th graders, and $200,000 to food pantries in 20 community schools this academic year. Additional funds went to everything from electric buses to arts at the district. (Those funds, Wirz previously told WW, were available because of past LSF activity.)
“We are a new board facing a new reality, a harder reality than what we were facing when this change was made,” Sullivan said. “We need to back up and take a fresh look at what is possible to support our current situation.”
Ian Ritorto, the district’s student representative, was the sole person vocal in his early opposition to re-establishing foundations in any capacity on April 14. Ritorto, who does not get a formal vote, said many of the schools facing some of the deepest cuts to full time employees amid budget cuts did not have foundations in the past. Instead, he pinned blame for school funding problems on “Oregon’s broken tax system and the failure of our legislators to prioritize public education.
“While there are numerous ways to mold the system into something that can better serve the community, bringing back the foundations isn’t one of them,” Ritorto said. “Blaming the foundation is just avoiding the real problem.”
