In budget cuts, Portland Public Schools targets programs working on achievement gap

Jo Ann Hardesty

Young women from the Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy for Young Women (LAYW) made an appearance at City Hall on Friday. As social justice advocates gathered to see Dante James introduced as the first Director of the city’s new Office of Equity and Human Rights, articulate young women worked the room, alerting us to the fact that their ambitious curriculum for college-bound girls is about to be dismantled. They were bright and articulate kids.

In the past year, Portland Public Schools (PPS) has adopted a Racial Equity Educational Policy. The school district hired a Chief Equity Officer to lead its own Office of Equity. As late as January, PPS was touting equity work being carried out at 10 ‘Beacon Schools,’ designated pilot schools sent to the forefront of addressing racial disparities in educational outcomes.

The other school being closed in June? Boise-Eliot. It is in its second year of designation as a ‘Beacon School.’ Both K-12 campuses are in North Portland about a mile apart. PPS leaders have decided, with little community input, to not only blow a hole in a neighborhood like the food desert that appears when grocery stores pull up stakes, but also to dent all the reasoning that supported the millions of dollars spent preparing to reduce the achievement gap between white and minority students in our city. Enrollment at Boise-Elliot is about 90% non-white. Almost all the children qualify for free or reduced meals.

What else has PPS targeted? The Center for Intercultural Organizing (CIO) reports the district intends to eliminate all four bilingual-bicultural family engagement staff. This 100% reduction in manpower will terminate PPS attempts to build a culturally competent and diverse workforce. These cuts will have a huge impact on immigrant and refugee communities and condemns a certain population to less effective home/school collaboration.

You’ve heard me say that, “When the U. S. economy catches cold, Black People get pneumonia.” Unemployment among people of color runs deeper and lasts longer than for Whites. Here we have another corollary: when budget planners fail, and funding cuts become attractive, Portland puts institutions that best serve disadvantaged populations on the chopping block. School administrators consume countless hours of volunteered community input to design equitable solutions for race-based disparities. When PPS steps away from these social covenants, they do so like autocrats … without community participation … having come to behind-closed-door conclusions that the poor must do without in tough economic times.

PPS is due to settle on a new budget on May 14, however the School Choice Lottery closes on April 13. Moving briskly – as if dismantling educational opportunities for those on the downside of power is already a done deal – PPS will rush LAYW parents into a meeting on Tuesday, April 10 to usher them through a field of broken promises as they disrupt the educational trajectory of these exceptional young women.

Perhaps the race-based gap in the educational achievement of our schoolchildren bothers you. You don’t have to be smarter than a high-achieving young woman on the Harriet Tubman campus to see how these funding cuts are targeted. Despite having layers and layers of equity planners, it might be up to Blue Oregon readers to get involved and demand that we exit this seemingly endless spiral of offering some children better opportunities than others, and basing this decision on who has political clout, economic power or the preferred skin color.

CIO will hold a press conference on Monday, April 9 at 4:30 p.m. at Cleveland High School, 3400 S.E. 26th Ave. It would be a good time to sign up and testify at the PPS budget hearing that is to follow at 5pm. PPS will also take your testimony Wednesday at 6 p.m.; at Roosevelt High School, 6491 N. Central St. Otherwise email your testimony to [email protected].

By Jo Ann Hardesty April 09, 2012