Oregon's largest school district plans to jostle 5,000 students —10 percent of its enrollment — as part of a long-awaited effort to fix education inequities.

Portland Public Schools rolled out a proposal last month to open two new middle schools and redraw more than a dozen schools' boundaries. Not surprisingly, emotions are high. Many parents bought a home with a keen eye toward school boundaries. And some worry that more powerful and privileged parents will steer the system in a way that once again shortchanges low-income students and students of color.

"It's a terrible political puzzle," Daneen Bergland, the secretary of the PTA at Scott K-8 School in Northeast Portland, wrote in a letter read at a recent listening session on the changes. "We support you as you deal with fierce blowback that you are going to be receiving from more well-heeled communities, and we urge you to please do what's right for all kids."

More than a year ago, the district identified K-8 schools on Portland's eastside that disproportionately serve low-income students and students of color as unfair. The schools' relatively small enrollments in grades six, seven and eight meant they offered fewer programs and options than the district's middle schools. Changing K-8s back to elementary and middle schools, however, log-jammed.

The school board-endorsed plan to reopen Tubman Middle School and to convert Roseway Heights K-8 to a middle school got delayed a year. Opening them would have broadened offerings for middle grade students now attending seven small K-8 schools. The district's vacancy-plagued central office simply didn't have the capacity to pull it off on time, then interim Superintendent Bob McKean decided.

The delay is a particular frustration for two of the district's three new school board members. Scott Bailey and Rita Moore served on committees that issued the call to fix those inequities and it has been a central part of their advocacy.

"A lot of people have been dealing with the boundary kerfuffle and the reconfiguration and all the rest of it for years and years and years," Moore said at an August board meeting. "What they want is a plan. What they want is some hope."

Bailey has characterized the effort as "a longterm trainwreck."

The plan is to open the two promised middle schools to serve broad stretches of North and Northeast Portland. Therein lies the disruption. To make sure no school ends up understaffed or overcrowded, students must be shuffled.

Broad outlines are clear: K-8s near Tubman will send their middle schoolers there; K-8s near Roseway Heights will do the same. But some details of how exactly that should, or will, work remains unclear. And to affected families, those details matter ­— a lot.

The district has held meetings to explain options and gather public opinions. Parents have also taken to Facebook groups to speculate, strategize and vent.

The boundary line that determines which students will go to Madison High and which to Grant High is perceived as a third rail issue, charged and untouchable. But district leaders' plan is to touch it and shift about 100 students to Madison. Parents are already digging in their heels. At a recent meeting, doe-eyed youngsters went before the school board to testify that a future at Grant High had been promised to them all their lives.

Some parents are afraid the grand scheme has blind spots. Vestal K-8 would become an elementary school and parents in that community fear the moves will leave it under-enrolled. Parents who counted on going Beaumont Middle School, but will now be shifted to Tubman, are agonizing about a longer, less-walkable commute.

Another issue that's become a flashpoint: the staff recommendation to evict KairosPDX, a public charter school that occupies the former Humboldt Elementary School. Access Academy, a program for highly gifted students, is housed at the former Rose City Park Elementary. But district officials plan to reassign some students from overcrowded Beverly Cleary School to attend a reopened Rose City Park Elementary, so Access must move. District officials say Humboldt is the only place they can find to put Access.

But that proposal has rankled both communities and drew criticism from Portland's mayor and other prominent officials. They and many others have decried the move to boot Kairos, a small elementary that's done well by black students and families. Black residents of inner North Portland, where Humboldt lies, have been treated as less-than by city and district officials for more than a half century; to eject the school now that is established seems directly contrary to the district's stated aim of racial sensitivity and inclusiveness, they say.

The Access community has chafed at being dragged into the fight, which pits their overwhelmingly white school against a majority black one. Most Access parents had to fight to get their child into the school after their neighborhood school couldn't meet their child's needs. They dispute broad glosses of the program that imply Access is for privileged children and an extra, as opposed to a program their children need in order to get an education. Only children shown to need something their neighborhood school can't provide are admitted to Access, which has historically had a long wait list. That's part of why Humboldt is unappealing to parents of highly gifted students: It's too small to allow for growth.

Board members are worried about whether this latest push will work out.

Bailey has said he is "extremely frustrated." McKean pushed back the middle schools' open date because he said the district had too much on its plate. But the committee working to address boundaries didn't meet for months — and wasn't told why.

That was disrespectful and caused the district to blow an opportunity to plan, Bailey said at an August meeting.

"If we do anything to hold up this train at all, then it looks like we are the bad guys," Bailey said. "And yet the other alternative is for (the district) to go ahead and come up with quite a risk, I think, of setting up a system that then needs to be radically changed in order to work for the entire eastside."

NOTE: This post has been updated to accurately characterize the proposal to eject Kairos charter school from the former Humboldt Elementary building as a recommendation, not a done deal.

— Bethany Barnes

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