Benson High.JPG

Benson High, along with Lincoln and Madison high schools, would get a full upgrade under proposed bond options being presented to the Portland school board Tuesday. The board plans to decide by late February what it will put before voters in May.

(Brent Wojahn / The Oregonian / 2013)

Leaders at Portland Public Schools now plan to include complete modernization of three high schools -- Lincoln, Benson and Madison -- in a proposed bond package aimed at the May ballot, they disclosed late Friday.

Full makeovers for all three were deemed in July to be too expensive to accomplish in a single $750 million bond issue, raising the possibility that only about half of Benson High would only get updated until voters approve another bond issue four or more years down the road. But three full re-dos are now considered possible and included in all four proposals that will be put before the school board for consideration Tuesday.

Bond proposal options in a nutshell

Portland Public Schools leaders will present the school board Tuesday with a proposals and options that could include these elements:

Total cost: $745 million to $802 million, depending on if and how Kellogg is upgraded

-- Modernize and expand Benson High: $202 million

-- Build a brand-new Lincoln High and demolish the old one: $187 million

-- Modernize and upgrade Madison High: $146 million

-- Fix all lead paint, lead in drinking water and radon hazards; replace five of the worst school roofs; upgrade fire alarms and sprinkler systems in up to 13 schools: $150 million

-- Modernize and upgrade Kellogg Middle School: $57 million

-- Or, build a brand-new Kellogg and tear the old one down: $45 million

-- Contingency and miscellaneous costs: $60 million

source: Portland Public Schools

The main reason for the change? District leaders are proposing that the bond pay for only $150 million of health and safety fixes touching nearly all the district's 90 schools. When concerns over lead in school drinking water were at a pitch last summer, some school board members had declared a minimum of $300 million in bond spending should address lead in water and paint, radon and asbestos, seismic strengthening and the like.

Courtney Wilton, the district's interim chief operating officer, said a careful, well-reasoned look at the district's many health and safety challenges -- and a measured assessment of which present the greatest and most likely risks to students -- makes spending $100 million to $200 million seem appropriate.

Another odd wrinkle in the district's plans, revealed late Friday, is that district officials now estimate building a brand-new Lincoln from the ground up and demolishing the current 1951 building would actually be cheaper, at $187 million, than to modernize and expand the current building, which it says would cost $252 million -- making that option $65 million more expensive.

The district's approach has generally been to preserve the historic shells of buildings, preserving their historic character and reusing the existing foundations, walls and other elements. That's what is taking place at Franklin and Roosevelt high schools and will at Grant High.

But Lincoln, built in 1951, "exhibits a low horizontal massing," as architectural historians put it, rather than project the stately historic beauty and character that schools such as Roosevelt and Franklin do. The first Portland high school built after World War II, Lincoln was designed and constructed at a time when, "emphasizing the need for economy and rapid construction, the designers adopted new materials that were standardized and mass produced including steel, plywood, glass block, and aluminum," the district's historical review says.

Rebuilding an entirely new school on land that now holds the Lincoln football field, then knocking down the entire 1950s building to create a football field there would be faster and cheaper than using a preserve-but-modernize approach -- and has the unanimous support of the Lincoln master planning committee, said district spokeswoman Courtney Westling.

Portland Public Schools is currently on what it hopes is a 30- to 50-year-long series of successive bonds that will modernize and upgrade all 90-plus of its school buildings, which average about 70 years old. Eleven were built more than a century ago.

The district suffered a painful election loss in May 2011 when it first sought voter approval of a half-billion-dollar bond proposal to kick off those efforts, but it secured overwhelming voter approval in November 2012 for its current $482 million rebuilding effort.

Now it's trying to shape the right bond proposal that will get voters to say yes to a second, even more expensive round of building upgrades. The school board scuttled plans to put one before voters in November to give district leaders more time to thoughtfully plan how the bond would address lead and other safety hazards and also to give them time to show voters they're not as incompetent at managing money and facilities as it appeared at the the height of the lead crisis.

Wilton says the district plans, with proceeds from its next bond, to fully mitigate the risks of degrading lead paint, lead in drinking water and asbestos in every building where those problems are present -- and virtually all of the district's 90-plus schools contain lead paint and drinking water hazards. Doing so would cost about $46 million, with the largest chunk going to replace every drinking fountain and water filter in every school plus about 20 percent of school pipes districtwide, Wilton said.

Wilton and the district's deputy chief executive officer, Yousef Awwad, said it makes sense to devote the rest of bond money to fully upgrading Lincoln, Madison and Grant high schools -- and probably Kellogg Middle school too.

Doing all that plus spending $150 million to address lead hazards and other health and safety problems would bring the total bond cost to $802 million, Awwad said. The price could be brought down to $790 if Kellogg is rebuilt rather than upgraded, or $745 million if Kellogg is left entirely out of the package, he said.

But Awwad and Westling stressed the importance of bringing Kellogg, which has been mothballed for years, back into operations as a fully modernized school. It is the only option to allow Southeast Portland to take part equitably in the districtwide move to reopen middle schools so that K-8 schools can be made back into elementary schools, they said.

That switch, endorsed by a district advisory committee that looked at fairness and the quality of educational offerings, is set to take place in two or three years around the district, including at Roseway Heights School and Harriet Tubman School. Bridger, Creston, Lent and other K-8 schools would need Kellogg to reopen if they are to become elementary schools again.

Awwad and Amy Ruiz, a political and communications consultant hired by the district to help with the bond, said a recent poll of 400 people likely to vote in the May special election found they favored a bond of at least $750 million by a wide enough margin they believe the bond can win.

Details of the poll, which also asked likely voters if they would approve an $850 million bond, will be made public Tuesday at the school board's scheduled three-hour work session to go over the bond options and proposals.

Architects will present detailed overviews of their plans to upgrade each of the three high schools, which vary widely in age, size, style and condition, Ruiz said.

-- Betsy Hammond