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On a muggy May afternoon in Creston Elementary School’s cafeteria, no one is quite as busy as Bridgitte Lynch.
Lynch, the site manager for the Schools Uniting Neighborhoods community schools program at Creston, rushes in and out of the cafeteria doors, passing students over to their families at pickup time. A heaping pile of art projects are scattered across a long lunch table. In between conversations, she tries to remind students to take home their pieces. In no time, it’s all cleared out.
May 28 was the last day of SUN after-school care at Creston for the academic year, Lynch explained that afternoon. There was a deeper worry in the air, too.
Under Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the SUN school program at Creston, and ones at eight other schools across Portland Public Schools, would be fully eliminated. (The others are at Beach, Buckman, Peninsula, Rose City Park, Sabin, Vestal, and Whitman elementary schools, alongside Kairos PDX.)
“I was shocked [to hear Creston’s SUN program might close] because of everything we do for thai school, I couldn’t even imagine this school running without us,” Lynch says. “I was kind of not surprised because of all the cuts that are happening with social services.”
Help is on the way. Commissioner Meghan Moyer has proposed an amendment that would realize those savings by reducing the county’s internal administrative costs, and it’s likely to be voted on as part of the budget approval on Thursday. But in the meantime, schools like Creston hang in the balance, and the families who utilize their services say they worry they’ll lose an integral piece of their school’s identity. (PPS has already made hundreds of school-based cuts in reaction to a $56.3 million budget deficit in the upcoming year.)
“To cut another program that is essential to the community, I don’t know what else is left to cut at Creston,” says Johanna Anderson, a parent to a fifth grader at the school. “I just fear that the school loses yet another draw. SUN is a big anchor in our community.”
SUN community schools are at 92 schools across multiple school districts in the county. The mission of the program is to transform schools into neighborhood community centers and resource hubs.
After-school care is just one piece of that goal. At Creston, Lynch says SUN has overseen a winter gift shop every year, where the school collects donations and then allows students to “shop” for their parents and siblings. She hosts clothing and food drives, and hosts events including a Family Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math night. There’s also a parent-led mutual aid group who say that the SUN staff are crucial to identifying families in need of additional assistance. That group meets monthly and, with the help of SUN, coordinates everything from support for gas and surgeries to furniture.
Parents at Creston say they question how a school with many families at need could have been identified and slated for closure.
Alicia Menendez, a county spokeswoman, says the presumed cuts to the program come as the Department of County Human Services tries to work with a 5% general fund constraint. The county determined it would cut sites in PPS using demographic and poverty data, she says.
Menendez says the county consulted PPS for its input as it weighed what sites to close. “The input received from the district was aimed at minimizing disruption to students and families while distributing impacts as thoughtfully as possible across the system, reducing concentrated impacts in one catchment area,” she says. “They identified a cohort of schools that would be reviewed by the county if the reductions had to move forward.”
Valerie Feder, a spokeswoman for PPS, says the school district does not support any reductions to SUN programming. “The county holds final decision-making authority,” she says. “PPS was asked to provide input, but we are not the decision-maker regarding which sites are funded.”
Kira Jacobson, the extended day coordinator at Creston’s SUN program, says she fears for what might happen to Creston’s attendance if the program is cut. The school building is, for many families, the first place they can interface with many social services, she says, and is bringing many kids through the school’s doors.
“We know for a fact that there are students who would not be in school if it were not for this program. Very literally,” Jacobson says. “We have several families that, them having guaranteed care after school is the reason why their parents are able to work, and are the reason that they get their kids to the start of school every day. That feels really significant.”
That holds true for Elizabeth Yanez, a mother to a second grader at the school. For Yanez’s daughter, who is a Spanish speaker, the interactions she’s had with others in the program have allowed her English to blossom. She says she urges the county to consider the soft skills that children develop in programs like these, noting the program has boosted her child’s confidence, imagination and intelligence through its different classes and opportunities.
Yanez wonders what she might have to do to make ends meet without the after care SUN provides, as well. She thinks she’ll have to cut back on the wages she can bring in, reducing overall household income.
“As a mother, this creates pressure for us to rearrange our work schedules—maybe closing off opportunities at work, or for extra money—because we have to come pick up our kids right when school normally lets out,” Yanez says. “[Cutting SUN would] bring instability—more worries, stress, anxiety that as parents we tend to reflect onto our children, which isn’t something we like to do, but which is sometimes unavoidable.”
Jacobson says that she sees SUN as preventative work. It’s valuable, she says, for students from different backgrounds to learn to overcome their differences early on.
Recently, Jacobson says, she was working with Spanish speaking students and one of Columbia Regional Inclusive Services’ deaf students (the program is housed at Creston). She remembers watching as students across different grades navigated translating from Spanish to English to sign language, adopting different rules as they went.
“What is so valuable about this program is that community work is happening here at the elementary school level,” she says. “The work that we all have to do as adults, to learn how to build these bridges and figure out how to get on the same page, those are soft skills that we’re able to facilitate here in a really special way.”
