Active parents are the district's core constituency, ground troops, voting support and capital assets: Sarasohn Editorial

Excellent opinion piece by David Sarasohn of the Oregonian:

PORTLAND SCHOOL FIGHTS

Sunday, May 07, 2006

David Sarasohn

Down by the river where Portland got started, on a fountain where hardly any carriage horses drink anymore, is engraved a century-old motto that keeps popping up here when we've run out of other clues:

"Good Citizens Are The Riches Of A City."

Maybe everybody involved in the current episode of the Portland Public Schools soap opera should go down there for a drink.

Active parents are not only the district's core constituency. They're also its ground troops, its voting support and, increasingly, its capital assets. And any budget has to consider its effect on your assets.

One more time, in the latest but hardly the last round, the school board wrestled with a budget deficit, declining enrollment, school closure and reconfiguration plans. Monday and Thursday evenings, the board -- often on 4-3 votes -- hammered out decisions that closed some schools, split some differences and left most participants in a position to fight again another day.

Given the district's economic and demographic realities, no outcome could make everybody happy. But this process has been frustrating and painful even for people who ultimately caused the board and superintendent to alter plans for closing their schools.

Parents from Rieke -- a small, highly successful K-5 school -- showed up in numbers at meetings in Southwest Portland and before the board to argue for preserving their school, targeted for closure for being undersized. Eventually, the board voted to let Rieke parents try to save the school by recruiting local students who might be going to private schools.

The new definition of "right" enrollment would actually be too big for Rieke's size, meaning it would require added or temporary classrooms. Rieke would be the right size only if it was overcrowded.

Its advocates are not all pleased.

"I'm a bit angry," says Rob Bremmer, a Rieke parent and corporate software trainer. "The feeling is a little like being mugged in an alley, and just when you think you're going to be shot, you're told to run for your life. You're wise enough to run for it, but you're not happy."

Hollyrood, a tiny K-3 school in Northeast Portland, came off the closure list for a new plan making it an adjunct to an expanded Fernwood Middle School. There's not unalloyed delight around there, either.

"The elegance of the solution," says Prashant Dubey, a Hollyrood parent and general manager of a litigation consulting company, "is completely overcome by the level of carnage along the journey. The memory of the journey is in people's minds."

Dubey started Operation Lemonade (www.lemonops.org), an alliance of parents from threatened schools, a group with the only slogan that makes any sense in the Portland public school system: "Optimism in the face of reality."

At this point in the struggle, unhappy parents have several questions -- notably why a dramatic emergency reorganization designed when the district was facing a $57 million shortage somehow persisted as the shortage dwindled. But there's another question about the target of the district's efforts, about whether the schools leadership is betting on a dramatic strategy aimed at the business community and voters without school-age children.

In March, pollster Lisa Grove warned the Portland Schools Foundation about closures, "No successful business doesn't listen to its customers, and the business community should understand that. The customers are the parents and the kids. Not the people who may or may not write checks to a tax campaign."

What's kept the district above water for the last 15 years are the parents who backstop diminishing staffs and growing classes, who run fundraising campaigns to provide things the district can't and who, when a money measure goes to the ballot, not only vote for it but also run phone banks and knock on doors.

None of them do it out of loyalty to Portland Public Schools. Their feelings are focused directly on the schools their children attend.

Not to mention the district's riches.

David Sarasohn, associate editor, can be reached at 503-221-8523 or davidsarasohn@news.oregonian.com.