Comments on: A Letter From A Marshall Teacher

By: Steve Buel

Steve Buel — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:23:55 +0000

Here’s what the loss will mean to the PPS board — they can put more emphasis yet on “their” schools and won’t have to worry about the people out in the Marshall area, wherever that is …..

By: Zarwen

Zarwen — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 01:17:30 +0000

Not until after it happens. That’s how they plan everything.

By: Carrie Adams

Carrie Adams — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:12:12 +0000

Show Me, You need to stop saying that about me. The Marshall community has been close in the past and this screwed up redesign has brought us closer. I want this community rise up and take our school back.

The superintendent’s high school resolution states “Portland is a city that is built on a foundation of strong neighborhoods. Portlanders believe that strong schools are a central tenet of a strong neighborhood and often are an anchor institution within a thriving neighborhood.”

As property owners, taxpayers, parents and community members we’ve invested in our neighborhood and we expect to be able to stay in it. Moving our kids out to other schools means a loss to neighborhood businesses, risks student safety, and creates additional academic achievement barriers to students needing the most support.

The PPS board members moving forward on the Marshall and Jefferson closures are idiots or heartless, nevertheless, they are the majority.

Marshall’s only hope is to secede from PPS. I wonder at what point board members will figure out what that loss will mean to PPS.

By: Show Me

Show Me — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 06:39:06 +0000

Susie, your letter is well written. I hope the board will listen. Regardless of what happens, I hope Carrie has a plan for Marshall. When PPS chose to close Marshall, they forgot about Carrie Adams.

By: Steve Buel

Steve Buel — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 06:03:57 +0000

Julie, all new 9th grade students go to school in their neighborhoods. The money for each neighborhood school stays in that school according to the kids in the neighborhood. If kids transfer for NCLB. Fine, let them. But the money stays. This sounds silly at first, but right now the “haves” are saying their schools fill up at a certain point. Yet, take Grant, it used to hold 3,000 kids. No ‘kidding. In the 60′s. Yet, we say it is full. So how have we decided that? Why is it full at the numbers it has?? How do we get around NCLB if we say a school is full when there are still rooms used by organizations and more seats can be crammed in classrooms. Since we aren’t following NCLB in one instance and nobody says anything then why do we have to follow it when it doesn’t benefit the “have” schools? It just seems to me that the school district destroys certain schools through their policies, then turns around and closes them because they are not good schools and have low attendance. Maybe Jeff and Marshall should be closed, but we can’t arrive at that conclusion through the process we have used. If you want to arrive at that conclusion then you have to reach it through a fair and equitable process. Don’t like mine? Fine. No problem. But what is the one the school board can use which is fair and not obviously laced with politics where poor people lose everytime?

P.S. Of course, we need to repeal NCLB — it is wrecking the schools.

By: Julie

Julie — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:05:31 +0000

To Steve Buel: But under No Child Left Behind, you can’t close off transfers from low-scoring/low-attendance schools, so what would you do about large numbers of people still transferring out of a neighborhood school? Would the school(s) they transferred to just have to have enormous class sizes? I’m not quite getting how your plan would work.

If you say we also need to repeal NCLB, I’m on board with that, but it seems that’s not going to happen any time soon.

As for Marshall, I have substituted there a few times and was very impressed with the way the kids felt about being in small schools… it did seem to be a lot of what made them passionate about Marshall. The older kids, especially, seemed to support each other in their work, and consequently were more thoughtful and focused than at many high schools. I have no idea whether I was speaking to a representative sample of students, or whether Marshall is the appropriate place for a small focus school, but I do hope PPS includes small schools as more than an afterthought.

By: Steve Buel

Steve Buel — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:48:44 +0000

Also, this could have been done in a month’s time. No problem. Just phase it in.

By: Steve Buel

Steve Buel — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:46:52 +0000

People can argue all they want to not change their school or not close their school. I worked for 10 years in a middle school that feeds into Marshall and I can truly attest to what you say. But in the end the whole approach is wrong and can’t really end in equity. As the person who probably started the whole equity argument 6 years ago when I ran for the school board I am pretty dismayed with how the school board has approached the whole issue. What should have taken place is that the school district should have drawn attendance boundaries with each of the nine schools having equal numbers (about the way it actually was). Benson was preserved. Which would have put what, maybe 900 kids in each school. Then money and programs were equally distributed keeping in mind the needs of kids in each school. Hence some schools might have more AP classes and some more credit recovery to begin with. THEN when everyone was made whole, the process of how to make the whole system better should have begun with everyone on an equal footing and taking into account the horrendous middle grade problem which makes the high school redesign look Mickey Mouse. That would have been equity. Closing the two poorest schools and asking those kids to get on the bus for huge intervals of time to add to their already school difficulties preserves the Wilsons, Clevelands, Lincolns, and Grants, but it is not EQUITY. And do you know what else — it is not fair. Why is it happening as it is? Well, the more well to do areas of the school district have more political power …… plain and simple.