Mike Miller's blog

Board Members:

Congratulations on a great day in Salem! Now we have to lean on legislators to provide appropriate long-term funding and perhaps revise their formula for allocating education funds, so that Portland gets back its fair share of taxes paid by Portland residents.

Special thanks to Doug Morgan for a well-run meeting Thursday night. It has been quite a grueling week and many of us, parents and Board members alike, are getting a little worn out as we burn our respective candles at both ends. I am going to use the sunny weekend to recharge and hope you take the opportunity to do the same.
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Board Members:

I want to thank you for taking the time to attend tonight's community
meeting at Rieke Elementary School. It means a lot to our community.

Some comments and reflections on the meeting itself:

1. Cathy Mincberg was the lead PPS representative at the meeting, handling
most of the questions. This was a little unfair to her, to say the least,
because she is so new to the District and really knows very little of the
details regarding school buildings and neighborhoods, at least here on the
west side of town. She was unable to offer specific answers to any of the
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Regarding the sweeping changes to PPS proposed by Superintendent Vicki Phillips this week: all this talk about "favorable educational outcomes" is just political cover for her, as she moves to downsize the District's physical footprint.

No responsible educator would propose such a sweeping reconfiguration in the midst of a funding crisis.

No prudent educator would move forward with such a plan without first having a long and thoughtful discussion with the community about the best grade configuration model for the District.

No serious educator would commit to a plan that embraced a myriad of grade configuration models in the same district, even in the same high school cluster, dictated not by the educational needs of the students, but rather by the size of the buildings available in each area of the district.
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After last night's Board meeting, it is apparent that Vicki Phillips and the school board are set on pursuing a disastrous course of action that will eviscerate a once fine public school system. It is reckless management and we need to stop it.

PPS and the Board have known for several years that large budget shortfalls were likely to happen when the i-tax sun-setted, yet here we are once again, unprepared and in total crisis mode. We promised voters the i-tax would be temporary, a bridge to allow us to come up with permanent solutions. The falseness of that promise was revealed when PPS and the Board floated the idea of extending the tax and paid for polling to test the waters. Unsurprisingly, the poll revealed little support for extending the i-tax. After all, we promised voters it would only be temporary.
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Did any of you happen to hear the OPB story about yesterday's summit meeting? I caught pieces of it. One audio clip from a representative of Qwest really got me steamed. She was lecturing the group about how unreasonable it was to expect the business community to step forward and bail the schools out. "Maybe you can't have a neighborhood school in every neighborhood anymore," she said. "We [Qwest] used to have a call center in every town. You just can't afford to do that anymore if you don't have the money to fund those."

I hope someone from PPS explained that closing schools usually results in lost revenue to the district, while any realized operational efficiences are minor. The net effect on the budget bottom line is almost always negative. (Oh, I forgot, Vicki never conceded this point in our discussions with her last year.) At the very least, they might point out that closing a typical elementary school only results in operational savings of about $250,000 for each school closed. Even assuming that there is no commiserate loss in per-pupil dollars from the state due to parents pulling their kids out of the district (an unrealistic assumption), just how many schools does this Qwest flunky think PPS would need to close to come close to eliminating next year's funding gap? Talk about fuzzy math! (You could close 50 elementary schools and only realize $12.5 million in annual operational savings. Of course, you would have hundreds of students per classroom, or more realistically, you would have a mass exodus from PPS.)
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