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O CTOBER 29, 2014
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V OLUME XXXVII, N O . 4
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C HALLENGING P EOPLE TO S HAPE A B ETTER F UTURE N OW
Ferguson
Leader
in PDX
25
WALKOUT!
Rev. Robert White
headlines police
accountability forum
By Lisa Loving
Of The Skanner News
PHOTO BY SUSAN FRIED
L
ocal residents will have a chance to
hear and speak with a leader in the
police accountability movement from
Ferguson, Mo., when Rev. Robert White
speaks Nov. 1 at 3 p.m. at the Maranatha
Church, 4222 NE 12th in Portland.
White is the president of Clergy United
for Peace in Ferguson, Mo., where riots and
protests have rocked the city over the Aug.
9 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown,
an unarmed teenager walking down the
street with a friend.
The event is a Race and Police Accounta-
bility Forum, sponsored by the Albina Min-
isterial Alliance Coalition for Justice and
Police Reform.
The event includes an update on the new
twist in the City of Portland’s settlement
with the US Department of Justice, which in
2012 filed a lawsuit, U.S. vs City of Port-
land, charging that the Portland Police
Bureau has engaged in improper uses of
force against mentally ill people or those
who the police thought were mentally ill.
The federal government declined to
charge the bureau with disproportionate
uses of force against people of color despite
a large volume of complaints from the
African American community about police
shootings, Tasings and arrests that many see
as unfair and unjustified.
After two years of negotiations, hearings
and forums – which this summer culminated
in an order by US District Court Judge
Michael H. Simon requiring judicial review
of how police reforms progress — Portland
City Commissioners voted Oct. 23 to appeal
the judge’s accountability requirement.
Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner
Amanda Fritz pushed for the appeal, both
suggesting that the City itself should pro-
vide oversight – a position that community
members have savaged.
“The settlement emphasized community
engagement,” Fritz said in a statement
Last Thursday hundreds of Garfield supporters thronged outside the red-brick school in a rainstorm to protest a
proposed teacher cut which – if carried out in mid-semester -- would have left an estimated 150 students suddenly
without one class per day and could keep as many from graduating on time.
Walkout at Seattle’s Garfield High
District stands firm in transferring teacher, but makes concessions
By Lisa Loving
Of The Skanner News
T
he dramatic walk-out of
Garfield High School
students and staff last
Thursday – led out the door by
its signature student drum line
to protest the late transfer of a
core teacher weeks after the
year had already started – has
failed to sway district adminis-
trators.
Interim Seattle Public
Schools Superintendent Larry
Nyland on Monday announced
that he is going ahead with the
Garfield transfer, but will wait
until next semester and won’t
See FERGUSON on page 7
INDEX
News ...................4,5,8
Opinion .....................2
Calendars ..............3,6
A & E .........................8
Bids/Classifieds ..........7
eliminate an instructor in a
core subject, as had been
feared.
The district’s announcement
on Oct. 17 that because of a
drop in “projected enroll-
ment,” they would be transfer-
ring a core teacher at Garfield
to an “overenrolled” school
provoked outrage and head-
lines around the country.
For its part the district has
denied that it issued an “ulti-
matum” on the teacher trans-
fer, and that several other
schools received the same
message; however one school,
Gatewood Elementary in West
Seattle, reportedly did raise an
estimated $90,000 within one
week to avoid loss of a teacher.
The district says that every
October they look at enroll-
ment to rebalance teacher
assignments, so that schools it
deems are too crowded receive
teachers transferred from
schools where the student pop-
ulation has gone down.
Hagopian and school sup-
porters argued that enrollment
was up for this year, and
School Board District 4 repre-
sentative Sue Peters, a
Garfield parent, reportedly
asked the superintendent per-
sonally to take a second look
at the enrolment statistics. But
the district says those numbers
don’t count.
“The district initiated a
review after Garfield reported
that 49 additional students
appeared to have not been
counted toward the official
October enrollment,” Nyland
wrote in his statement Mon-
day.
“The review of each of those
individual students indicated
that 29 of them attend the Run-
ning Start program, which
allows 11th and 12th graders
to take higher education class-
es. That means they do not
See GARFIELD on page 5
‘Old Houses’ Event Recalls 1989 Protests
Campaign offers lessons from history amid Portland infill boom
By Arashi Young
Special To The Skanner News
O
n the corner of 16th and NE Going
Street lies a vacant lot surrounded
by a chain link fence and bright
orange construction netting. A concrete
stairway leads up to yard of 2-foot-tall
bleached yellow grass with an excavated pit
outlining where a house once stood.
A year ago, a 104-year-old house stood on
the lot. It was painted yellow and featured a
distinctive porch that wrapped from the
front door to the side yard. Porch columns
and a chimney were built from brown, grey,
and golden yellow river rocks.
On Feb. 28, the house had been sold to the
Portland Development Group for $380,000.
By April 4, they received a demolition per-
mit and by April 7, the house had been
demolished. Permits have since been filed
to divide the lot into two and to build two
townhouses on the property.
This story of infill development is playing
out in neighborhoods across the town, from
Eastmoreland to Laurelhurst to Alberta,
where old houses are being demolished to
make way for high-price, higher density
See HOUSES on page 5