To keep 26 children from being yanked out of their Northeast Portland elementary school mid-school-year, Multnomah County will spend $48,000 to cover the steep rent increases that threatened to displace them and their families.

The money is enough to keep the Rigler Elementary families in their homes through the end of the school year.

It's an unusual move and won't become the norm, even as Portland's housing crisis continues to rollick school communities.

"We had the funds to help this particular time, but the fact is that the safety net we have in place is just not big enough to respond to this community-wide crisis," Rose Bak, co-director of the youth and family services division at Multnomah County, said. "Every year I think it can't get any worse, and it does."

Portland's City Council is expected to approve a new rule Thursday designed to help tenants caught in the same squeeze as the Rigler families - although it would not prevent them from having to move.

Under the new rule, landlords must pay $2,900 to $4,500 to any tenants they evict or whose rent they raise by 10 percent or more in one year. The money is designed to help them pay first and last month's rent at a new home.

Rents at the Normandy Apartments are slated to more than double after a new owner purchased the complex on Northeast Killingsworth Street and made plans to repair and upgrade the units. Willamette Week first reported that the county would help Rigler families who would have to move because of the rent hikes.

Rigler Elementary School is in the county's SUN Community Schools program, which provides after-school activities and social services to disadvantaged students. The county-connection made a crafty reallocation of funds possible, according to Bak.

County officials decided that, through the SUN program, they'd made an investment in Rigler children's success and wanted to support that community in this instance, Bak said.

The normal county process for offering rental assistance likely wouldn't have prevented the children from having to change schools, Bak said. Due to rising demand for such help, it would have come too slowly, if at all, she said.

Keeping the kids in their homes through the end of the school year will go a long way to help what's a strong, tight-knit community, said Zandy Gordon, who coordinates the SUN program at Rigler.

"That's a giant portion of our school and our community," she said. "There would be friendships that would be destroyed."

Gordon said the children are "scared and sad," especially since many have been fearful since the presidential election that they will be forced out of the county because they are Latino or Muslim.

"I think everything is kind of hyperbolic for them," she said. "Some are worried they will be kicked out anyway, and now there really is another situation where they will have to leave this community possibly."

The money will not go to tenants who do not have a child at Rigler.

The toll the housing crisis has on children has come into sharper focus recently.

Willamette Week first reported that five percent of Rigler Elementary may have to switch schools because of a rent increase.



But it wasn't the first time housing trouble pushed children out of Rigler.



"All the teachers are concerned. Every one of our teachers has at least one student that's affected by this, but, you know, there are 14 kids who have been economically displaced from Rigler already this year and they're gone," said Rigler PTA President Noelle Studer-Spevak. "This is really tough for all of our school communities to manage. We've never had to deal with this kind of situation before, this mass displacement."



-- Bethany Barnes