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Portland Public Schools Superintendent Carole Smith stood before a group of school volunteers last week and signaled the end of PPS's decade-long experiment with K-8 schools. Sort of.
"What we're looking at is, 'Where do we have the buildings that could actually house a K-8?'" Smith told volunteers with the Districtwide Boundary Review Advisory Committee on May 28. "I'm believing that where we're going to land is probably closer to the predominant configuration will be K-5 and middle school, but that we'll still have some K-8s that probably end up being ones that are opt-in."
For months, volunteers with D-BRAC have been studying how to fix PPS's primary and middle schools. They're not concerned with classroom instruction. They're looking at how to redraw school boundaries to balance enrollment across buildings and help ensure they have similar resources. Right now, some schools have too many students. Others have too few. And since funding follows students, schools with small populations miss out on programs that bigger schools get.
Smith's brief talk with D-BRAC seemed to signal she's not willing to make a definitive break from K-8s, which emerged under former Superintendent Vicki Phillips when Smith was her chief of staff. This reluctance stands in contrast to newly released results of a PPS survey that shows 71 percent of respondents favor middle schools over K-8s.
OPB was the first to report on Smith's remarks.
K-8s emerged a decade ago amid declining enrollment districtwide.
With very little planning, PPS merged elementary schools with middle schools, creating dozens of K-8s. Not every part of town got K-8s, though. The hybrid schools landed mostly in North and Northeast Portland and in other lower-income communities. The west side, for example, today has only one neighborhood K-8—Skyline, in the rural section of Northwest Portland. Wealthier neighborhoods got to keep their middle schools—and the diverse enrichments that accompanied them.
People complained about the inequality from the get go. And in 2009, WW looked at the divide between K-8s and middle schools in a cover story called "Left Out."
Despite years of protests about the inadequacies of K-8s, Smith didn't appear ready to let go of them when she launched the boundary review last year. She said only that it was worth having a conversation about.
Last week, she struck a different note. "The moment the K-8 configuration happened was in a declining enrollment moment and a way-reduced-resource moment, and it happened too quickly without planning," she said. "Period. I'm not going to go further down that trail except to say we're in wholly different territory now, because we're looking at another 5,000 kids in the next decade. So we're now planning for growth."
If PPS reverses the K-8 conversions—or some of them, anyway—it will be a slow process.
"I don't imagine an overnight conversion," Smith says.
WWeek 2015