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The Portland School Board took its first stab Tuesday night at publicly reckoning with a searing audit of Portland Public Schools’ bond program.
By the end of the night, the board had agreed that in the upcoming year it would work to sharpen its understanding of its fiscal responsibilities and its oversight of capital funding, capital projects and the district’s bond programs.
The seven-member board met Tuesday to draft its response to 10 recommendations laid out to the body in an external audit of PPS’s multibillion-dollar bond program. While not unanimous at every turn, a majority of the board concurred with each of the auditors’ recommendations. Those notably include suggesting that the board develop new protocol around individual board members’ abilities to ask questions, and some recommendations to bolster staffing in the Office of Internal Performance Auditor to add an extra layer of accountability to bond work.
WW was first to report on a draft of the district’s external bond audit, a routine process to ensure PPS is held accountable for bond dollars. (Voters most recently approved a $1.83 billion school bond in May 2025.) The audit asserted that the district’s bond program was at heightened risk for fraud, in part thanks to its contracting with Texas-based construction firm Procedeo to oversee bond program management services for the district.
Auditors found PPS had terminated in-house staff on Procedeo’s recommendation and replaced some with external consultants, which auditors cautioned had made PPS overreliant on Procedeo. Auditors recommended the district renegotiate its contract with the firm, rebuild internal capacity on capital projects, and strengthen oversight of spending.
It’s important to note that most of the auditors’ dozens of recommendations are outside the Portland School Board’s purview. (PPS officials are working on their responses, which will be released alongside the final version of the audit.) But the draft audit was unkind to the School Board, which “did not fully seize opportunities to exercise its oversight related to district controls and risks surrounding bond contracting and the accuracy of information presented” about the Procedeo contract last fall.
In other words, auditors found the School Board should work on better understanding its fiduciary duties.
“These missed opportunities to exercise fiscal oversight have affected the bond program through an overpriced binding contract,” the draft audit reads. “The board-approved bond management contract reduces future competitiveness and increases reliance on an external firm given PPS’s termination of project delivery staff.”
A section of the audit dedicated to scrutinizing the board’s role in the Procedeo contract sounded an alarm specifically on the December 2025 meeting where the board voted 5–2 to approve the contract. Auditors voiced concern that board members with questions about the large contract had, that night, been shut down from asking them.
Auditors noted that the board’s leadership (at the time, Chair Eddie Wang and former Vice Chair Michelle DePass) had a narrow view of their ability to oversee bond activities. Wang’s choice to end discussion and proceed with the night’s meeting came because he questioned the “scope and scale” of the board’s oversight responsibilities.
“This narrow view of board fiscal and fiduciary responsibilities does not align with statutes or industry best practices and increases risk to the bond program,” auditors said.
The board will, through several recommendations, work on a new “Expectations and Operating Protocol” to ensure board members are given the opportunity to ask questions and receive answers. It will also improve transparency to the public by tracking unanswered board member questions and posting them publicly, barring any legal or privacy constraints.
The audit also determined that, on the night of the Procedeo contract approval, district officials did not provide the public or the School Board with accurate information about the internal Office of School Modernization, which had previously overseen bond work. Still, auditors noted it’s up to board members to scrutinize the information they receive and exercise due diligence. As such, it also recommends that the board rely more on the district’s internal audit department. (The board employs the district’s internal auditor to stay independent of PPS.)
The audit found that to date, the OIPA has focused more on nonbond operations and academics and requires more support to provide oversight of the bond program. That should be done, auditors recommended, by engaging an additional internal audit employee “with capital delivery and bond program audit expertise.”
An additional recommendation by external auditors noted that the OIPA should be responsible for “annual review of bond expenditures and provide assurance to taxpayers that bond funds are spent only for their intended and allowable purposes.”
There was perhaps the most tension on Tuesday between board members on whether to hire an additional auditor. Board Chair Wang was among a handful who expressed hesitancy on the matter, noting PPS already had multiple layers of accountability surrounding the bond, including an external auditor, Bond Accountability Committee, and related groups.
He said that if the district were to hire another internal auditor that would remain employed at least through the end of the 2025 bond cycle, it could cost a couple of million dollars in bond funds.
“Committing to hiring someone is, I believe, somewhat premature,” Wang said. “I think there needs to be analysis done first in terms of where we can maximize our effectiveness…$2 million could be the difference between whether, you know, a school gets a seismic update or not.”
But a majority of the School Board disagreed, arguing the district was entering into unprecedented times with Procedeo as an external contractor. Ultimately, a majority voted to move forward with hiring an additional employee with bond auditing expertise, to be implemented by June 2027.
“While I trust that their best interests are in line with ours, I think we owe it to ourselves to have that work checked by somebody internally,” said board member Christy Splitt. “By saying that we are not sure that we think that that’s important enough to hire a person to do that…makes me really concerned that we’re not taking the audit and the recommendations seriously.”
The final audit, with responses from the board and district, is set to be made public on Oct. 6, with a presentation to the board to follow on Oct. 20.
