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Jason Lee Elementary School buzzes long after many parents have picked up their students from class.
On a nippy Wednesday afternoon in early April, a steady hum carried through the halls as dozens of students snacked on goldfish crackers, waiting for the start of an after-school enrichment program—offered free of charge through Multnomah County’s Schools Uniting Neighborhoods program. Workers shuffled around a weekly food pantry as visitors stocked bags with bread and canned beans. A Vietnamese translator sat in deep conversation with a parent.
The array of services on display at Lee Elementary reflects just how much schools have changed in the past decade. At many Title I schools like Lee—schools where at least 33% of families receive government support—buildings are now much more than learning spaces. They’re often neighborhood hubs that help families navigate everything from electricity bills to the immigration system. Lee stands on Northeast 92nd Avenue in the Madison South neighborhood, a place where parent Leslie Brown says those services are otherwise difficult to come by or afford.
“Schools are being asked a lot of right now, not just Title I schools,” she says. “But if you don’t have the resources to pay for services, if they’re not available to you easily, those services become even more important.”
That’s a concern that’s been top of mind for Brown ever since Portland Public Schools announced in March it intends to close between five and 10 schools across early grade levels by fall 2027. Though PPS has emphasized that student enrollment is just one of dozens of factors it will take into consideration as it decides which buildings might shutter, Brown says a WW story showing Lee as one of the lowest-enrolled schools in the district raised alarm bells for her. Of PPS’s 15 lowest-enrolled schools, seven are Title I schools, a disproportionate number.
Brown has seen enough past decisions PPS has made around school closures to spot how often low-income and racially diverse neighborhoods have taken an outsized hit. In the past few weeks, she’s led an effort to create a parent coalition across the district’s more than 30 Title I schools to give often underrepresented communities a louder voice in the closure conversation.
Parents at these schools say PPS must weigh how its decisions could disrupt delicate support systems, especially ones that aid the district’s neediest students. And they say it’s paramount that PPS understand the deep trust some of the district’s most vulnerable families have placed in staff at these buildings.
David Jones, a parent of a fifth grader at Vestal K-8 and president-elect of the Oregon Parent Teacher Association, says that’s all the more important because fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has left children more distressed while reducing the number of community organizations equipped to help.
Jones says the coalition wants to hold PPS and the Portland School Board to their promises of equity as they pick schools to close.
“One school that closes might need more support than another school,” Jones says. “It’s our responsibility as parents to let them know about the impacts in our community so they can fairly judge those and anticipate issues if indeed one of our schools closes.”
Thalia Delgado sees a big difference between what she dealt with attending school in Portland and what her kindergartner gets at Lent Elementary, another Title I school.
Delgado remembers serving as a translator for her parents while she was still in elementary school, even as she was just learning English herself. At Lent, a fully Spanish dual-language school, she says there are teachers and staff who can help immigrant students and multilingual learners grasp material more effectively. And she says there’s benefit to having somebody who can help a student navigate complex emotions in their native language.
At Lent, Delgado is a part of both the PTA and Mama Leopardas, an affinity group of moms who meet weekly to discuss life inside and outside the classroom. Funds raised by the affinity group directly support school families, she says, from paying for legal fees to providing rent assistance. When a Lent family needed furniture in their home, Delgado says, the school community mobilized to donate and deliver several pieces.
“I don’t want to see that community disrupted for families that have found a place where the school is uniquely trained and has the skills to serve Latino students in a way that I have never experienced in Portland, even as a native growing up here and going through the public school system,” she says. “I never had the resources and that stability in the early grades as a Latina student.”
With time, Delgado says young children in these schools learn to trust the staff they see and work with on a daily basis. Parents say that uprooting children and families from those networks they consider safe has fallout that extends beyond what more privileged communities could imagine.
“If you’re a family who’s worried about your current immigration status, who’s a trusted organization that you can go to and say, ‘I need help’?” Jones says. “What a school becomes is a place people can go and they know that there’s no chance of them getting reported or getting in trouble for asking for help.”
School Board member Rashelle Chase-Miller, whose own kids attend Title I schools, says she has thought a lot about the roles that such schools play in their neighborhoods. When balancing students among buildings, she says it might initially be tempting to try and reduce a school’s poverty by moving wealthier students into it.
Chase-Miller says there’s a lot of risk in ignoring that vulnerable students need more resources to thrive.
“Balancing the schools [that way] will not change the socioeconomics of our city,” Chase-Miller says. “Reducing Title I schools really just means that there will be fewer resources for the kids that really need them...and we are also throwing out all of the assets and attributes that those communities bring with them.”
Brown says her overarching hope in forming this coalition is that PPS will not be able to bend to some of the loudest voices in the room. Wealthier communities, she says, often have more power to mobilize in support of their schools. For her, it’s broader than trying to prevent Lee’s closure. She sees the effort as one that centers the struggles and concerns of many schools in a similar position.
It’s up to coalitions like the one that’s forming—Brown has so far gotten six or seven schools to join the effort alongside Lee—to hold the district to not abandoning its guiding principles when the conversation inevitably gets heated, she says. (An example, she says, is caving to families who might otherwise put their kids in private school.)
“If my school gets closed, that will be painful,” she says. “But if my school gets closed and it feels like it was because my community wasn’t heard, because they were centering more resourced communities, I will be angry.”
