By Mark Kirchmeier
Enrollment and accolades have soared for Roosevelt High School and its feeder schools in recent years, despite a declining number of school-age kids in the city and nationwide.
But the Roosevelt cluster is not immune from the effects of lower birth rates. Portland Public School enrollment has decreased by 11 percent since 2019. PPS Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong has acknowledged that the district needs to raise enrollment numbers or else close some schools in the future.
Some North Portland community leaders, including former PPS school board member Herman Greene, warn that Peninsula and James John Elementary Schools could be at risk. Peninsula is one of the smallest grade schools in the city with 177 students, and the James John building is one of the oldest in the district.
The prolonged COVID building closures also caused some families to leave PPS for home-schooling or private schools. Others had to leave Portland because of housing costs.
PPS to launch marketing campaign
To counter the decline the district is now preparing a marketing campaign to attract more families with “highlights from each school,” Candice Grose, the district’s chief of communications, told Oregonlive.com.
The campaign will make a particular effort to reach parents of sixth graders who are thinking of taking their students out of the PPS system for middle and high school.
It will be tricky to tout the value of a PPS education while Superintendent Armstrong simultaneously proposes a major review of the district’s 81 schools, identifying some for possible consolidation or even closure.
The stakes are high for neighborhood schools, said Mike Verbout, a retired James John Elementary School principal and teacher. “Once you close a school, the whole community is negatively affected. James John is a historic focal point for the heart of downtown St. Johns.”
He worries about how the PPS board will resolve the issue. “When discussions about closures go before the school board, it’s just extremely political,” he said. “Politicians will deny this but, believe me, when the school board debates closures, there’s a huge amount of politics. They almost instantly protect anything that threatens the Wilson [now Ida B. Wells] or Grant high school areas,” he claimed.
Verbout added that some past PPS enrollment forecasts have been wrong, and he holds out hope that will be the case again. Verbout might be onto something there. Just before the North Peninsula Review deadline, PPS announced an unexpected fall 2025 enrollment surge at Grant, Lincoln, Cleveland, Franklin and Wells. The updated figures showed Roosevelt’s remain steady, but Jefferson reported a dip toward barely 400 students.
Verbout is particularly hopeful that steps by Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek to aggressively spur housing growth while holding the line on property taxes, will lower housing costs and enable more families with children to stay in Portland.
Open enrollment helped Roosevelt and Grant, but hurt Jefferson
While Roosevelt high school drew more than 1,400 students and Grant 2,200 students last year, Jefferson’s enrollment dipped to barely 500.
A major reason for this is the district’s dual enrollment policy that allows students within Jefferson’s boundaries to instead attend Roosevelt, Grant or McDaniel. The policy intent is to encourage families to keep their kids in a PPS school, and 1,358 Jefferson-area kids did last year — by transferring out of Jefferson. Their doing so helped the overall PPS enrollment numbers, but came at Jefferson’s expense.
The policy allowing Jefferson students to transfer to other schools has been in place since the 1980s, later reinforced by the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. The long-term cumulative effect on Jefferson’s enrollment has become so severe that PPS administrators sounded the alarm in a May 29 memo to the board, recommending starting a public conversation to end the dual enrollment option.
$1.83 billion bond raises hopes
PPS has done major renovations of six high schools in recent years including Roosevelt, Grant and McDaniel in order to make them more competitive. It’s now Jefferson’s turn, as voters approved an $1.83 billion PPS bond on May 19, earmarking monies to renovate the three remaining high schools: Jefferson, Cleveland and Ida B. Wells.
But the success of the bond measure caused skeptics to question why the plan is to invest so much money into renovating Jefferson to draw more students, when PPS’s dual enrollment policy undercuts the school by making it easy for Jefferson-area parents to send their kids elsewhere.
PPS is creating an advisory group and scheduling public meetings this winter to discuss enrollment strategies for Jefferson, including whether to change the dual enrollment policy.
“These conversations cannot happen in a vacuum,” said PPS Board member Michelle DePass. She said the board will take into account declining enrollment, essential masonry and seismic upgrades and student, family and community perspectives.