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In June 2025, Portland Public Schools officials entered into a relatively small, $149,500 services contract with a Texas-based construction firm called Procedeo, at the time a newcomer to Portland. The firm was there to find ways to make the planned $466 million modernization of Jefferson High School cheaper and faster, and the school district initially waved Procedeo through with a contract just under the threshold that would have required approval by the Portland School Board.
Procedeo would soon have its moment in the spotlight. By December 2025, the School Board, on a 5–2 vote, extended both the scope and size of the construction firm’s work for the district dramatically.
On Dec. 3, the district signed a $61.5 million contract with the firm for five years of bond program management services, giving Procedeo key oversight of the modernizations of three high schools and the Grice-Adair Center, formerly known as the Center for Black Student Excellence. It will also manage bond-funded work on seismic upgrades, athletic facilities, and everything in between.
The School Board hoped the contract would be a small price to pay for keeping bond projects under control. After all, the district had racked up headlines that year for pushing forward with building some of the nation’s most expensive high schools, and for falling behind on other bond projects. Now, the contract is, in some ways, out of the board’s hands. And it may come to threaten the political futures of board members and the PPS Superintendent, Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong, who championed the contract.
Procedeo’s contract approval was controversial. A couple of board members wanted more time to see results from Procedeo’s earlier contracts before approving one much larger. Others were fed up with cost overruns and project delays that had plagued recent district builds. In sum, the debate over the contract hinged on a key tension: whether it was worth it for board members to risk project delays to more thoroughly vet Procedeo.
The conversation to approve the contract has had a lasting effect on the School Board’s dynamics. Since that night, its seven members have seemingly pushed on with open wounds. And in recent weeks, those wounds have been bared to the spotlight, thanks to a leak of a draft external bond audit that criticized the district’s choice to engage Procedeo, and an Oregon secretary of state investigation into PPS’ engagement with Procedeo that’s resulted in a referral to the Oregon Department of Justice for criminal investigation.
All that noise has certainly shaken some Portlanders. But it doesn’t seem to have changed anyone’s mind on the seven-member School Board, which, on this point, remains as divided as ever. Here WW takes a stab at what we know—and what we don’t.
How and why did PPS engage Procedeo?
The school district’s initial decision to hire Procedeo came at a delicate time. In the months leading up to signing the contract, district officials had one big priority: ensuring passage of the May 2025 school bond. PPS needed the $1.83 billion to deliver on its promise to modernize all nine of the district’s high school buildings, the last three being Jefferson, Cleveland, and Ida B. Wells.
As the bond made its way through a spring election season, last-minute anxieties at times put its passage in jeopardy. Some now-departed School Board members were increasingly concerned about the ballooning costs of the high school rebuild projects. There were last-minute panics about money for seismic retrofits at the district’s schools. And voters had, not so long ago, watched the district struggle to deliver projects on time and on budget. (Look no further than Benson Polytechnic High School.)
It was during this stretch of time that PPS connected with Procedeo, though the firm first connected with the district after a conference in October 2024. Between the months of March and May 2025, the district refined its first contract with Procedeo as the firm suggested it could help alleviate some of the district’s cost- and delay-related pains. Under its initial contract, it would start with Jefferson High.
Before district officials and School Board members received the Jefferson report, however, district leaders brought a contract extension to the board for Procedeo in September 2025, increasing the firm’s fee by $487,000. The district’s internal Office of School Modernization had experienced some turnover, particularly of its director, and projects needed to be kept on pace. The board, on a 6–1 vote, approved the contract extension, giving Procedeo temporary oversight of OSM. By December, that oversight would become long term.
What’s made the Procedeo contract so controversial?
One of the earliest bumps in the road came during the September board vote to extend Procedeo’s responsibilities. Back then, board member Stephanie Engelsman cast the sole vote against the contract extension, not because of any gripes with the firm, but because she wanted to see Procedeo’s work product before spending more.
In October, Procedeo produced a report for PPS that outlined three options to streamline construction at Jefferson and realize potential cost savings. The district struck down two of the options. The third stoked some optimism because Procedeo indicated it could open Jefferson’s doors a year earlier than expected, in fall 2028. But by March, Procedeo had determined this plan was unfeasible, too, ceding that it would at best shave only a few months off of Jefferson’s construction.
As Procedeo strived to secure the district’s much larger bond program management contract, some School Board members worried the firm’s selection had not followed the standard process. But district leaders were reluctant to postpone the vote, citing the risk of delays. That was enough to sway much of the School Board into approving the $61.5 million deal with Procedeo in December.
From the jump, Procedeo and its contract were not without controversy. In spring, The Oregonian reported that the firm had hired Armstrong’s daughter for an office job, which raised ethics questions. So did the subsequent hiring of two former School Board members, Herman Greene and Gary Hollands, which The Oregonian reported on just months later.
Why are people talking about Procedeo again?
On Sept. 15, WW first reported on a draft of a routine external bond audit that found PPS’s bond program was at heightened risk for fraud thanks to its Procedeo contract.
The draft audit by Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting, which is more than 100 pages long, makes dozens of findings. But key ones revolve around this: In January, on Procedeo’s recommendation, PPS terminated about half of its Office of School Modernization staff. That move, auditors found, resulted “in additional cost for contracted services, loss of historic knowledge and long-term project delivery capacity, and gaps in the ability to provide contractor oversight at the owner level.”
The big picture: The audit warned that PPS had replaced its own in-house experts with a firm on which it had since become overreliant. The auditors found PPS failed to establish a sound business case to offload bond program management services to Procedeo, whose contract was priced well above market value. And it found that Procedeo at multiple times could have influenced PPS throughout the contract solicitation and review process, “giving the consultant an unfair advantage.”
It was also critical of the Portland School Board’s members, finding they had failed to fulfill their fiduciary duties. In pushing for the Procedeo contract, auditors wrote, district officials had misled School Board members and the public by painting “a more dire picture” of OSM than was warranted. The audit found, contrary to PPS claims that work on bond projects would stall without the external firm, that the Office of School Modernization had been largely effective in completing projects and could have carried on accordingly. OSM’s effectiveness is a key point of disagreement between PPS and its auditors.
PPS says it does not agree with every finding in the audit, but is committed to transparency and accountability around its bond dollars.
Wait, the Secretary of State’s Office is involved? What is it looking into?
The secretary of state received a tip from Oregon’s Government Waste Hotline about the Procedeo contract and launched a preliminary investigation of its own in April. So far, that investigation has produced findings that appear to have raised Tobias Read’s eyebrows. In a referral letter to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission that WW obtained through a public records request and first reported on Sept. 22, Read’s deputy, Michael Kaplan, wrote that the agency had referred potential violations to OGEC for civil investigation, and the Oregon Department of Justice for a criminal probe.
The letter is vague, but the ethics commission was alerted because the secretary of state found potential violations of two state laws that prohibit public officials from using their positions for financial gain. State officials have not indicated which public officials might be implicated.
A PPS spokesperson says the district plans to fully cooperate with the appropriate state agencies as they review the matter.
Has any of this changed anyone’s mind on the School Board?
The short answer is that it hasn’t.
WW spoke with six out of seven of the Portland School Board’s members for this story. (Michelle DePass declined to comment.) The School Board is still mulling its joint response to some of the auditor’s findings, so all members spoke in their individual capacities. (The board was set to refine a response shortly after press deadline.) And when WW asked board members if, knowing what they knew now, they’d vote the same way that December night, everyone stood by their decision.
Eddie Wang, Rashelle Chase-Miller and Patte Sullivan each said they would still vote to approve the Procedeo contract. They said they were satisfied with the firm’s performance so far.
Wang, the School Board chair, tells WW that the status quo of delays and cost overruns was no longer acceptable to him. The vote came “at a point where we needed to decide if we were going to drastically change how things are done, or commit to the status quo, which would have meant we would have needed to tell either the Cleveland or the Wells community that they’d have to wait for a future bond to finish their high school,” he says.
And Sullivan perhaps echoed the yes camp’s sentiments most succinctly: “The process to hire Procedeo was legitimate,” she says. “I felt the questions were answered for me.”
Christy Splitt, who had voted yes on the contract, did not indicate she’d change her vote, and notes she is proud of PPS. Her comments centered on the audit’s recommendations, noting she’d be eager to see and implement the final audit. “I believe that our bond program can become a good-news story as audit recommendations are taken seriously and projects are completed to improve our buildings,” she says.
Other board members who voted yes were more willing to question some of the draft audit’s findings.
Chase-Miller tells WW that while the audit process is “vital,” she doesn’t agree with the full substance of every finding. She says the business case for Procedeo is “very clear” and that the board “had sufficient time for due diligence” ahead of its December vote. “Sharing the incomplete draft only creates confusion and furthers mistrust, and it takes our focus away from where it should be: improving academic outcomes for our students,” Chase-Miller says.
Virginia La Forte and Stephanie Engelsman, the two “no” votes on the contract, both agreed they’d cast the same vote again. Engelsman says she’s worried Procedeo has not at this point delivered Jefferson faster or cheaper, and that she’s aware of a few smaller projects that are currently delayed.
Board members on either side of the divide say they welcome any findings from the secretary of state’s investigation.
“I welcome the investigation. If there have been wrongdoings or improprieties, those should be brought to light and addressed,” Chase-Miller says. “And if the investigation reveals that the allegations are without merit, hopefully we can consider the issue resolved and move forward.”
