Page 6
April 25, 2018
Staffing Plans Upend King
c ontinued froM p aGe 3
a traditional neighborhood pro-
gram, which is enrolled through
boundary designations. The two
strands are funded separately and
have widely different enrollment
figures.
“Hidden in the averages, what
you don’t see, is that our neigh-
borhood strand looks to have very
large classes, a single class for
each grade,” said King PTA Vice
President Megan newell-Ching.
“The actual situation that we’re
looking at next year for our Fourth
and Fifth grades is going to be 30
students.”
Next year the Mandarin only
side is projected to have class siz-
es ranging from 15-25, while the
English only side will have class
sizes from 23-33, school Prin-
cipal Jill Sage told the Portland
Observer. There are currently 125
students in the Mandarin program
and 174 on the English only side
and those figures are likely to be
flipped next year, she added.
Newell-Ching said the new
formulation was supposed to sup-
port the district’s equity goals, but
instead they continue year after
year policies that “have led up to
the situation that we’re in now. I
mean, that’s not equity.”
Over the years the district has
applied a number of “bandaid
fixes” to the school which has
struggled with low performance
levels in the past, Newell-Ching
said, like implementing King as
a Turnaround Art school and then
abandoning the program prema-
turely. A Mandarin immersion
language program within the
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school in which half the lessons
are taught in English and half in
Mandarin, from Kindergarten on,
was started at the school in 2014.
The school is also designated as
an International Baccalaureate
program, for all students.
The district’s equity goals pro-
vide for the maintenance of rea-
sonable class sizes and baseline
academic program offerings at
every school. Staff re-allocation
decisions should consider school
stability “in schools that have
been historically under-enrolled,”
according to the policy.
Precise allocations of staff
won’t be locked down until next
fall when enrollment figures will
be known. The staff that gets cut
from one school may very well
end up hired at another school,
like one of the two new middle
schools opening next school year,
Harriet Tubman and Roseway
Heights, PPS media relations spe-
cialist David Northfield told the
Portland Observer.
80 students are projected to be
leaving Martin Luther King Jr.
School and moving to one of the
middle schools next year, bring-
ing the total enrollment to around
310. School administrators have
said King will also likely lose at
least three staff members of color
due to the reallocation, accord-
ing to the school’s PTA President
Shei’Meka Owens.
King Elementary has the small-
est catchment area in the dis-
trict—the geographic area from
which enrollment is derived—
and been under-enrolled for many
years now. In fact, many parents
who want their child to attend the
school in the surrounding com-
munity, sometimes just 3-5 blocks
away from the school, have re-
sorted to using a friends’ address
within the catchment area to get
in, Owens said.
In the 2000-2001 school year,
King had a robust enrollment of
733, a number that steadily went
down through the years, according
to a 2015 Portland Public Schools
informational video, “Growing
Great Schools.” By fall of 2017
their enrollment was only 390.
Redrawing of schools’ bound-
aries, which has been in talks
district-wide since 2014, was sup-
posed to help ameliorate MLK
School’s under-enrollment issue
and hence provide more staffing.
The enrollment balancing ef-
fort was formulated to accommo-
date city-wide population growth
across the district that is continu-
ing to occur to this day. But the
School Board has postponed such
changes time and again in the face
of periodic backlash with individ-
ual school communities.
“It’s a complete failure of lead-
ership on the part of the district
that they haven’t done the enroll-
ment balancing. And frankly it’s
because they’ve listened to the
loudest voices, which are the par-
ents from higher socio-economic
status schools,” Newell-Ching
said.
Any enrollment balancing ef-
forts the school district attempts
now will likely occur after the staff
cuts take place, Newell-Ching
said.
The parent leaders suggest a
couple of ways the school district
could help mitigate possible un-
derstaffing at MLK School going
forward, the first being dedicating
unassigned staff, which the school
district keeps a pool of on reserve,
to the school and other small, un-
der-enrolled schools like it.
“And then the other thing is
they could put legs on their con-
tinued promise to address our
boundary issue. We need to see
action, we need to see them begin
the process of doing what they
need to do to change the bound-
ary,” Newell-Ching said.
“We’re asking to have not just
a real conversation, but some real
movement,” added Owens.
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