Oregon Public Broadcasting

Portland school officials are still months away from deciding which high schools they will close.

That hasn’t kept parents and students from theorizing, and worrying, that their school may be on the chopping block. But there is one aspect of Portland’s high school overhaul that is already on the table.

Rob Manning reports on the district’s initial plan to dump a policy that allows students to transfer from one school to another.

Parents and students at Northeast Portland’s Grant High have already started organizing to keep their school open, with online groups and a Facebook page.

They’re not the only ones who are worried. Southeast Portland 8th grader, Hana Schiff is wary of rumored changes at the high schools near her.

Hanna Schiff: “They’re also going to be closing Franklin or Marshall, or merging them. So it’s going to be a lot more kids, and just going to be really different.”

But Portland superintendent Carole Smith says those decisions haven’t been made.

Carole Smith: “Oh, it’s all premature speculation, and that’s been true all the way through this. People have wanted to be in the conversation about ‘my school, my kid’ all the way through.”

Smith would rather hear about how the system as a whole should change. And she’s suggested at least one controversial place to start. 

For years, Portland students have been able to move from one neighborhood school to another. But recent studies have shown that the district’s liberal transfer policy has created problems.

It has increased racial segregation at the high school level. And transfers have caused financial inequities between schools. 

Funding follows student enrollment. So transfers bring money to the schools they move to, and cost the schools they leave.

Superintendent Smith has proposed largely ending neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers for high schoolers. She says this can work, if all the schools have equitable offerings.

Carole Smith: “We should be able to create comparable programs at each one of the neighborhood schools. If we’re doing a smaller number, we should be able to resource them all comparably. And so the desire to need to transfer shouldn’t be there in the same way it is now.”

Smith’s plan would allow transfers to small magnet high schools – but she hasn’t discussed any details.

Dina Yazdani attends a popular transfer destination, Lincoln High School. At a recent district meeting, she summarized the thoughts of a group of middle and high schoolers.

Dina Yazdani:  “Should you be able to have the option to transfer out of your high school to another community comprehensive high school, if your high school is bad, or doesn’t have, like theater or dance?”

Southeast Portland 8th grader, Hana Schiff, knows how she would answer those questions: she thinks transfers should be allowed. The re-design won’t begin until Fall 2011, but her preferred high school – Cleveland - is limiting transfers already this fall.

Hana Schiff: “I’d rather have an option than be completely isolated, all the time, I’d rather have an option. Because you know, schools do change. In the middle, if I don’t get into Cleveland, and I’m going to Franklin, and I don’t like the school, do I have an option to transfer? Not that I’m saying that Franklin is a bad school or anything, just if I decide that, in the middle.”

Four years ago, the district took on a similarly huge restructuring effort, when dozens of elementary and middle schools merged or expanded, to become K-to-8 schools.

The K-8s offered fewer electives. They had problems with space. Magnet programs and traditional middle schools lured students away from the K-8 programs.

In fact, school records show more than twice as many students transferred out of the new K-8s, as transferred in, between 2007 and 2009.

One of the migrants was Donna Wax’s son, Atticus. Like dozens of others, Donna Wax sent her son to the local middle school, instead of a K-8.

Donna Wax: “We transferred to Beaumont because they have a fabulous music program, as well as advanced math classes – so he’s going to start at Grant with high school credit – and also very, very strong science curriculum.”

Wax says it was a tough choice. She says her younger son may return to the neighborhood K-8. But the departure of so many families has taken a toll on the K-8s.

Alisa Wood-Walters: “So Roseway Heights is losing the middle school-aged kids, to go to the other schools....”

That’s PTA leader Alisa Wood-Walters.  She led a  recent meeting where K-8 parents expressed concern about transfers. District officials helped boost parents’ spirits by sharing test results that show students at many K-8s are faring better academically than students the did at the middle schools they replaced.

But that doesn’t fix the problem Constance Plager is seeing as a parent leader at a K-8 in the affluent Irvington neighborhood. She’s seeing some of the same problems as the high schools in less affluent parts of town, where students transferred away.

As students leave, funding gets tight, staffing gets thin, electives shrink. And when that happens, parents start to look at other schools.

Constance Plager: “We always understood that some kids would make those choices, but as the district has created a system where there are more and more choices, close-in to where we are, it’s really difficult to hold onto our middle schoolers. So we’re worried that we can’t create a strong program without those kids in there.”  

But in the future, with the new plan for high schools, the district would cut off transfers, and keep resources equally divided across the campuses.

Magnet programs, designed to attract students with special interests, are in the works. And there will still be charter and alternative schools. Plus, as it stands now, the federal no child left behind law authorizes transfers under some circumstances.

The district is considering two other exceptions to the “no transfer” rule. If students are already in a specific program – like a Japanese immersion program – they could follow that program wherever it’s located. And transfers might be allowed if the incoming student would bring socio-economic diversity to a school.

That’s a priority for the school board student representative, Henry Johnson.

Henry Johnson: “I believe that one of the core values of all of our high schools should be a standard of diversity, in that Portland can be a segregated city in certain neighborhoods. So in order to achieve that standard of diversity, we may need to employ the transfer policy to gain diversity.”

Research has found that Portland’s current transfer policy actually intensifies economic and racial segregation.

But Seattle schools saw the U.S. Supreme Court reject that district’s consideration of race and diversity in its enrollment policy.

So Superintendent Smith’s current plan emphasizes economic diversity.

The bigger question is whether the limited transfers would allow enough choices for Portland parents.

Superintendent Carole Smith says she’s been asking what the parents and students want so she can include those things at all schools.

Carole Smith: “Part of what this is, is being driven by what people say they want. So hopefully, we wouldn’t wind up with the transfer-out phenomenon. But clearly, we could.”  The school board is holding a work session Monday on the high school re-design, and a hearing is scheduled later this week.