Portland’s Rosa Parks Elementary is officially losing its year-round calendar. The Portland school board on Tuesday voted 5-2 to end the special schedule, which is unique in the district.

Board members Julia Brim-Edwards and Michelle DePass voted against nixing the calendar.

District officials said the decision was needed to bring the elementary school’s calendar in alignment with neighboring George Middle School and Roosevelt High, which Rosa Parks feeds into. They also said the year-round schedule didn’t work to improve students’ test scores or attendance.

Instead, reading, writing and math scores dropped by about 5 percentage points across grades 3-5 from 2018 to 2019. Russell Brown, the district’s chief of systems, said that in 2019, fewer than 5% of Rosa Parks’ black students met state math proficiency standards and about 10% of those students scored as proficient in reading.

But some staff, faculty and parents contend those statistics reflect the dearth of support the district has offered the North Portland school, where 87% of the student body is composed of children of color and many qualify for free and reduced lunch.

The decision to put Rosa Parks students on a traditional , summers-off calendar was made with little community input, even after Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero promised better communication following last year’s vote, staff and parents allege.

“The community engagement wasn’t really engagement,” English as a second language teacher Beyoung Yu told The Oregonian/OregonLive ahead of the board vote.

Shanice Clarke, the district’s director of community engagement, said central office staff assembled a calendar committee to gather feedback from Rosa Parks parents and staff and hosted five meetings at the school between November and February.

When DePass, the only person of color on the school board, asked Clarke if the district met with groups such as the Coalition of Black Men or local chapter of the NAACP, members of the audience, including former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith, started loudly murmuring “no.”

The year-round program at Rosa Parks was a pilot launched in 2014 intended to last three years, according to a district report. The school board voted in May of 2018 to end the program, effective in August of the following year.

By March of 2019, parents, faculty and staff incensed by what they characterized as a poorly communicated decision pressured the board to reconsider. The school board voted to extend the calendar for another year as then-Chair Rita Moore told Rosa Parks staff and parents to sit tight as the district figured out “next steps.”

On Tuesday evening, those next steps were outlined as a transition to a traditional calendar.

As part of that transition, district officials are establishing an after-school program that runs until 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. But it might not be up and running until January 2021.

The district is also providing childcare for students in kindergarten through second grade, Chief of Schools Shawn Bird said.

Incoming Rosa Parks kindergarteners will also get a boost from a three-week summer transition program for the coming school year. Officials say Student Success Act funds will provide a reading specialist and mental health professional to the school starting next school year.

Still, Yu and other proponents of the year-round calendar contend they could have used those same resources without taking summers off.

“They never set us up to succeed,” Yu said.