Black History Month
February 28. 2007
Page A7
at John Adams?
ing and research, and sent a long
proposal to dozens o f school dis­
tricts across the country.
Portland Public S chools was
game. Four o f the Harvard group
went to Oregon, w here Adams was
already under construction. After a
year o f planning, Adams opened in
the fall of 1969 with 1,300students.
"W ecalledthem ‘the Harvards’,”
said former Adams teacher Steve
Anderson, who ran the gamut of
staff positions at the school from the
fall o f 1969 to its closing day in the
spring of 1981.
The Harvard students brought
their influence to Portland.via a pre­
sentation: “a model o f what a high
school should look like in the 1970s
and beyond.”
This ideal high school was one
where students d idn’t get lost in the
system. Core classes with smaller
sizes established a personal connec­
tion between student and teacher.
The ideal high school integrated
all areas of study, the “interdiscipli­
nary studies” model. Adams teach­
ers prepared the curriculum as a team,
which resulted in a free for all with
business teachers assessing gram ­
mar and math students relating equa­
tions to physical education.
“The model was ‘let’s tie this all
together’ and the focus was multiple
issues," Anderson said. "O f course,
inthe 1960sand 1970s we had lotsof
issu es.”
Anderson noted this created more
strain on teachers than at traditional
high schools. During the first few
years staff arrived around 6:30 a.m.
daily, som etim es staying late into
the night.
"I'd say 10 to 15 percent o f staff
left after the first two years," he said.
Another significant flaw in the
ideal was that it was the conception
o f Harvardian minds, meaning the
school modeled a large university
and inherited problems that plague
such sizable institutions.
“Y ou’d walk in the door and prob­
ably 50 percent o f staff were student
teachers, interns or aides," A nder­
son remembered.
"The people from Harvard got
together and asked what type of
high school would we have liked to
go to," he said. "There might have
been a disconnect betw een the
idealist’s high school and a practi­
cal, day-to-day high school.”
Leaning toward the left
A classroom photo from a 1970
N ewsweek article best described
A dam s’ unstructured vibe: it cap­
tures a handful o f students, some
sitting in their chairs and some atop
their desks, one girl w andering
around and another boy gazing down
at his hands.
political clout, rejected the Hag based
on the group’s racist affiliations, and
staged a walk-out that earned them
labels like “black radical."
It was such incidents that upset
the balance o f a traditional, status
quo school practices and riled con­
servative com munity members.
T he DAR snub put principal
Robert B. Schw artz in a bind - he
had to accept school board policy
and many were calling for his resig­
nation, but he also had his students
to answ er to.
Students raised enough money
bination of chaos, voluntary atten­
dance, fights and drug use and con­
stant structural reorganization.
Even though the staff and district
addressed these issues early on, in
many ways fighting public percep­
tion was hopeless.
The district eventually tried to
revert Adams to a more traditional
school, but the damage done in the
initial years was proved terminal,
said 1974 graduate Mark McLain.
1978 graduate Jonica Perry re­
m em bers that her personal experi­
ence did not match the sch o o l's
The halls of Adams high were places to gather. Because the school had one of the most diverse
student bodies in the state, racial tension existed, but never to the extent o f the reputation the
school couldn't seem to shake.
T h e p h o to c a p tio n rea d s
"Portland’s Adams classroom: An
experiment in nobody saying 'n o '."
E arly A dam s stu d e n ts w ere
granted considerable freedoms, in­
cluding their presence at faculty
meetings and the ability to vote on
school policy. But this lack of restric­
tions, coupled with their well-docu­
mented concerns for racial justice,
soon scaled their reputation in a run-
in with the Daughters o f the Ameri­
can Revolution
The conservative patriotic group
traditionally presented new Portland
high schools with American flags,
and Adams was to be no exception.
But students, armed with their
to buy their ow n American flag, and
that may have earned them a sense
of decision-making, but the episode
resulted in Adams being labeled "the
com munist high school.”
It w asn't just politics that fueled
A dam s’ bad reputation. Attendance
w asn't mandatory in the beginning,
creating disorder in the halls when
students should have been in class.
On warm days they filled the adja­
cent Fernhill Park.
“A day o f attending Adams was
to sign in. then it was off to play,"
remembers 1976graduate Jerry Shea.
Adams eventual ly became, at least
in the minds of many who chose
where to send their children, a com ­
image.
“During the time I was there they
didn't have riots," she said. "I heard
itw asutterchaosin 1969, with white
middle class combined with lower
income African Americans, at the
height o f when people were still fig­
uring this out.”
That "bad school" image stuck,
and led to a decline in the num ber of
families wanting to send theirkids to
A d am s. P o rtlan d w as a lso no
stranger to "white flight,” a nation­
wide dem ographic trend in which
white, middle class families moved
from non-white neighborhoods to
f|ie suburbs. That trend didn't begin
to reverse until around 1990.
John Adams was full o f elongated walkways and even a catwalk
from the main building to the second floor gym. “The part that
was the most difficult for me was the long hall between the
office area and the cafeteria," said 1974 grad Rex Goode. “It
became somewhat of a ‘gauntlet’ with jeers from a lot o f bored
teenagers."
Adams did not lose students in a
dramatic drop-off, but nonetheless
enrollm ent declined slow ly and
steadily every year. Each drop af­
fected the student-teacher ratio for­
mula followed by the district. This
meant for every 100 students who
did not return to Adams, about four
staff members lost their jobs.
W hen Adams lost its credibility it
began losing its ability to justify the
very ed u catio n al m odel it w as
founded on. With a blight o f staff
there were not enough resources to
maintain the “school w ithin a school
system .”
The snowball was in full effect,
despite annual im provem ents in
terms o f attendance, graduation and
behavior.
The final say
As they lost resources Adams'
staff was under fire to work harder,
and became a magnet school in the
m id-1970s. Sti 11. they were not able to
replace the loss o f students because
the strength o f the programs had
been eroded.
Adams spent its final few years
flirting with the chopping block. The
ax descended slowly in 1981, but
retreated after a rally o f community
support led to a school board vote to
keep the school open another year.
A m id -M a y b o ard e le c tio n
changed everything, bringing new
m em bers w ith a new decision.
A dam s’ fate w as sealed when they
reversed the positive vote, ju st
weeks before the end o f the 1980-81
school year.
So after a dozen years. Portland’s
newest high school ceased to exist,
with any hope of Adams returning to
what it once was, or what it could
have been, extinguished with that
final vote. All that rem ained was an
misunderstood icon, frozen in the
volatility o f the 1960s and the ideal­
ism o f the 1970s.
“W e were the bad kids,” Ander­
son remembers. "W e were the op­
portunity, but also the em barrass­
ment o f the district.”
In a school newspaper articledated
Oct. 24, 1969. student writer Greg
Hamilton acknowledged how mis­
represented Adams had already be­
come.
“Most o f Portland has heard the
rumors about that first day o f school,' ’
he wrote. “Black students beating
up on white students, white stu­
dents calling names at black stu­
dents for no reason at all."
It is likely that Hamilton didn’t
know how his next statement would
sum up much of the Adams experi­
ence for the next 12 years, and ulti­
mately lead to the school's demise.
"Som e o f the rumors were true,”
he wrote, “some were built up and
lots was left out."
But in spite o f its failure, part of
A dam s physically lives on in the
curriculum created there, cal led "Ex­
tended Day Program .” w hich later
becam e the Portland N ight High
continued
on page A8