The Portland public schools are aiming to ensure that all students have equal outcomes and equal experiences, according to a revealing presentation delivered at a meeting of a Portland Board of Public Education committee on Thursday.

Portland’s “Attendance Boundaries Advisory Committee” has begun its work to evaluate and make recommendations for redrawing the school district’s attendance boundaries in order to address “demographic disparities.” The goal of the new equity-based boundaries will be, according to the committee, to eliminate all differences in outcomes and experiences across the student population.

In June, the Board voted to adopt a resolution establishing the community advisory committee on attendance boundaries for pre-kindergarten through 8th grade school.

The membership of the 14-person attendance boundaries committee was announced and approved by the Board on Aug. 7, and the committee held their first meeting this Thursday.

Attendance boundaries are the means by which the district determines what school a student shall attend based on where in they district the student lives.

Portland Public Schools last adjusted the attendance boundaries in the mid 2000s, according to the Board’s resolution.

Since that time, the student demographics in the district have “changed substantially,” which has resulted in “substantial imbalances in the enrollment and demographics” in Portland’s elementary schools, the resolution states — particularly among students who are “economically disadvantaged, experiencing homelessness and/or multilingual learners.”

When outlining the proposed attendance boundaries committee, Portland Superintendent Ryan Scallon stated that the demographic disparities have led to “inequitable resource allocation across the district.”

Scallon wrote in his summary of the proposed resolution that forming the committee would support the Board’s top priority in their Comprehensive Plan, “Equity,” under which the district “strives to be an anti-racist, inclusive district by vigilantly supporting each student to achieve their potential and rooting out systemic inequities.”

This goal was reiterated at the opening of the attendance boundaries committee’s Thursday meeting, which began with a reading of the Portland Public Schools’ mission statement and “Definition of Equity.”

According to the definition presented, equity will only be achieved in the district when “there are no identifiable differences in outcomes and experiences for any population sub-group (race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, etc).”

Portland School Board President Sarah Lentz then led the committee on what appeared to be a team building exercise centered around committee members indicating how they felt that day by identifying with various pictures of goats.

Share this media

Later in the meeting, Superintendent Ryan Scallon shared data with the committee regarding the demographics of Portland Public Schools at-large and of each school in the district, highlighting the disparities between the percentage of students at the schools who are “students of color,” economically disadvantaged, or learning the English language.

Across all Portland Public Schools, roughly 26 percent in the 2023-2024 school year were English language learners, according to the data presented by Scallon.

The percentage of English language learners at each school varies, however, with some schools having a proportion of students learning English as high as 50 percent, while others are as low as five percent.

Committee member Ariel Linet asked Superintendent Scallon if the committee would be focusing its work primarily on redrawing the district’s attendance boundaries, or if the committee would also be talking about busing students to different schools in order to address the demographic disparities.

Scallon said that busing has “trade-offs” and is “a question that could be explored by the committee and one that could be weighed.”

“I think that is something that if you go to our neighbors to the south [South Portland Schools], that is actually exactly what they’re looking at,” Scallon said. “They’re looking at busing students to address inequities in terms of disproportionality in terms of their student population.”

Board President Lentz added that the Portland School Board does not yet have an opinion one way or the other on the issue of redistricting versus busing, and will be looking to the attendance boundaries committee for that recommendation.

The attendance boundaries committee has meetings scheduled on the fourth Thursday of each month, and is slated to deliver a report of its findings and recommendations to the Board by February 2025, in order to implement potential changes for the 2025-2026 school year.