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Portland School Board Chair Eddie Wang faces a prospective recall petition.
On Tuesday, former School Board member Mike Rosen, a school advocate who held the Zone 7 seat from 2015 to 2019, filed a prospective recall petition with the Multnomah County Elections Division, seeking to remove Wang from his position on the board. The petition is the first step of what will likely be a monthslong process. A spokeswoman with Multnomah County says Rosen will need to collect 34,950 valid signatures on his petition to put Wang’s recall on the ballot; the county requires he collect signatures equal to or more than 15% of the total number of ballots cast for governor in Wang’s electoral district.
Rosen says he’s felt frustration mounting against Wang’s leadership since the chair steered the board through a controversial December vote to approve a $61.5 million contract with Texas-based construction firm Procedeo to oversee bond program management services for Portland Public Schools. (Voters in 2025 approved a $1.83 billion school bond to modernize three high schools—Procedeo is also overseeing the construction of the Grice Adair Center, formerly known as the Center for Black Student Excellence.)
But Rosen did not feel compelled to initiate a recall until a few days ago. On Tuesday, WW first reported that PPS’s external bond auditor found that since the signing of the December contract, the district has become “overreliant” on Procedeo, and failed to establish a sound business case to offload bond management services to an outside firm. On the construction firm’s recommendation, PPS terminated about half of its internal staff that had previously overseen bond services, and as a consequence, the audit found, the district lost institutional knowledge.
The audit also found that PPS overspent on its contract with Procedeo in comparison to the market for such services, and has overpaid the external consultant thus far. Notably, it also found the School Board did not adequately scrutinize Procedeo’s contract and “has a narrow view” of its fiscal responsibilities.
Wang, who was first elected to the School Board Zone 7 seat in May 2023, is up for reelection in May 2027. He has previously indicated he may be interested in running for a second term but has not formally launched a campaign.
Rosen says he filed the recall to discourage Wang from running again, and wants to pressure him to resign. Ahead of the Procedeo contract approval, Rosen says, Wang shut down board discussion and pushed the vote forward.
“The board has three responsibilities: manage the budget, manage the superintendent, and set policy,” Rosen says. “The board has shown under his leadership no sense of fiduciary responsibility. That’s my primary complaint.”
In a statement to WW, Wang says fear of change is behind Rosen’s petition. He says PPS is seeing the needle move on student scores in reading and math after decades of stagnation, and the district has broken ground on Jefferson High School after more than five years of delays. “Cleveland and Wells will see a brand-new high school sooner than if we had done nothing,” he adds.
“Unfortunately, the bulk of these allegations are unsubstantiated and purely conjecture at best,” Wang says. “I stand by the board systems, oversight, and leadership I have developed, all of which have been based on nationally studied best practices for school board governance.”
More broadly, Rosen says Wang’s leadership does not give him confidence that he is a suitable leader to guide the district through the school closures process. This fall, the district will consider closing 10 to 20 of its elementary, K-8 and middle schools.
“My primary concern is that the leadership on the board blindly follows the district leadership,” Rosen says. “I have no faith in their capacity to do this.”
Another tension between the two: Wang was one of seven current and former Portland School Board members who signed an open letter to Multnomah County voters in July warning that Julia Brim-Edwards, a former School Board member and current county commissioner running for county chair, was not fit for office. Rosen, who served on the School Board alongside Brim-Edwards from 2017 to 2019, has publicly endorsed Brim-Edwards and vocally defended her campaign after the open letter’s publication.
