A member of a Portland Public Schools committee charged with redrawing the school district’s attendance boundaries in order to address “demographic disparities” suggested at a meeting this Thursday that the district should try to minimize school choice in order to increase diversity across Portland schools.
Portland Board of Public Education established the “Attendance Boundaries Advisory Committee” this August, with the purpose of evaluating and making recommendations to the full board for overhauling the school district’s attendance boundaries.
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’s attendance boundaries were last adjusted in the mid 2000s, and since that time student demographics in the district have “changed substantially” — particularly among students who are “economically disadvantaged, experiencing homelessness and/or multilingual learners,” per the board’s resolution establishing the committee.
At the center of the redistricting effort is Portland Public Schools’ goal of “equity,” defined at a previous meeting of the Attendance Boundaries Advisory Committee as only having been achieved when “there are no identifiable differences in outcomes and experiences for any population sub-group (race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, etc.).”
According to a presentation shared during the committee’s Thursday meeting, a guiding principle of the committee’s work on attendance boundaries will be to take a “district-wide perspective by considering socio-economic, linguistic, and racial diversity within and across schools.”
During the meeting, Superintendent Scallon called evening out the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at certain schools in the district an “impossible task.”
“We saw that on demographics, when we looked at it in the introductory meeting, I think there was a 50 point difference in socioeconomic,” Scallon said. “If the committee said we want that to be balanced, equal, that is an impossible task, because communities are also by their nature uneven.”
“And so trying to get to equal is not possible, the question is from a committee charge, is 50 percent right, or is that something that is the committee saying, ‘no, we want to take a step in that direction,’” he added.
Data presented at the first meeting of the committee in August showed that some schools in the district have a student population of over 60 percent economically disadvantaged students, while others are as low as 31 percent.
Attendance Boundaries Committee member Kate Knox referenced this point when making her comments regarding school choice and diversity at the Thursday meeting.
“For me personally, that demographics — I think it’s ‘B’ — around socioeconomic, linguistic and diversity is incredibly important to me, so I want to see that,” Knox said. “I know, I actually really appreciate the comment about for socioeconomic, if we have 50 percent, we can’t — people live where they live, so we may not be able to get to 100 but to me that’s important.”
“I know we see a lot of sort of divisions when we get to the high school level because of school choice,” Knox continued. “I would like to see us try to minimize those, and keep a level of all those kinds of diversity weaving through our elementary and middle to the degree we can do that while balancing these other things.”
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Knox, one of 14 members of the Attendance Boundaries Advisory Committee, is a former member of the City of Portland’s Racial Equity Steering Committee and Zoning Board of Appeals.
The Attendance Boundaries Committee 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.
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