PPS has faced ongoing budget crises, program cuts, and enrollment declines as families flee to charter and private schools or leave the city entirely. Is this a state funding failure, local mismanagement, or both?
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Add your commentI've been a PPS teacher for 16 years. I spend roughly $800 of my own money every year on classroom supplies. I'm done defending the administration. I'm also done pretending the state funding is adequate. Both things are simultaneously true.
My kids' elementary school lost its music teacher, its PE teacher, and half its library hours in three years. Then I see the administrative headcount at the district office and I have questions. Loud questions.
The enrollment decline IS the budget problem and the budget problem IS the enrollment decline. Families leave because cuts are bad, cuts get worse because families left. I don't know how you break that cycle and neither does anyone at district HQ apparently.
My family has been in Portland since 1962. My dad went to Jefferson. I went to Jefferson. I would not send my children to Jefferson today and that fact breaks something in me that I can't quite name.
At some point we have to talk about how the city keeps funding other things while schools deteriorate. Priorities are choices. These are choices being made by people we elected.
The number of former PPS kids now in Tigard, Lake Oswego, West Linn, and Sherwood school districts is a real data point that I wish someone in city hall would study seriously instead of pretending people leave for housing prices alone.
hot take: we underpay teachers, overload them with administrative nonsense, under-resource their classrooms, and then act shocked when test scores drop. you get what you pay for and we are not paying for much.
I'm a brand new parent, just enrolled my kid in kindergarten at Abernethy, and I am BAFFLED by how you're supposed to navigate all of this. The PPS website is a maze, nobody calls you back, and the information about what's actually happening at your specific school is basically word of mouth. This is how you lose families.
Oregon's school funding formula is actually broken in a specific technical way — it ties education funding to income taxes during recessions, which is exactly when you need it most and have it least. That's a structural problem above PPS's pay grade.
anyone who thinks this is purely a state problem should look at how Beaverton SD manages the same funding formula and delivers better outcomes. It's both. It's both things.
My child has an IEP. The special ed staffing situation in PPS is genuinely concerning in ways that go beyond budget debates into questions of legal compliance. I'll leave it at that.
We pulled our daughter out and put her in a small private school in Lake Oswego. I felt guilty about it for about two weeks before I saw what she was getting. Now I just feel sad that not everyone can make that choice.
Oregon ranks 40th in the country for per-pupil education spending. FORTIETH. This is a state problem first. PPS leadership can be bad AND the state can be failing them simultaneously. Why do people act like it has to be one or the other.
I just want to know why every discussion about school quality immediately becomes a political fight instead of a practical one. Fix the math curriculum. Hire the counselors. These are not ideological asks.
Genuine question for people in this thread: has anyone actually attended a school board meeting and tried to engage? I did once. It was chaotic, there were seventeen agenda items, and the public comment period was three minutes per person. The process itself is broken.
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