Portland Public Schools weighs options as it pushes to make Jefferson High a neighborhood school again

Drake Shelton would love to have an overcrowding problem at Jefferson High School.

This is Shelton’s fourth year as principal of Jefferson High in North Portland. Since 2011, Jefferson’s unique structure as a dual-assignment school has allowed students to have a lot of agency and mobility in their education, but it’s also led to persistent under-enrollment at Jefferson.

Portland Public Schools is working to move away from that system in the next few years.

“High enrollment, oversized classes,” Shelton said, “those things would be a good problem for us to have right now.”

Dual assignment allows students living in the Jefferson school boundary to choose between attending Jefferson or one of several other comprehensive high schools — Grant, McDaniel or Roosevelt — depending on which side of Jefferson they live on. It’s the only school community in the district with a choice like that.

Years ago, when PPS leaders created the dual-assignment area involving the four high schools in North and Northeast Portland, the idea was that Jefferson could be smaller, but its partnership with Portland Community College’s Cascade campus would attract students interested in earning college credits while in high school.

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However, with the other Portland high schools offering larger communities and more classes and extracurriculars, a lot of students have opted for those schools instead.

Jefferson currently enrolls fewer than 400 students, Shelton said. Meanwhile, the other area high schools in Oregon’s largest school district enroll well over 1,000 students each, with Grant above 2,000.

“We know it’s a challenge,” Shelton said, adding that low enrollment makes it hard to keep up class options and student morale. “So, what can we work with right now to build it up for the future?”

Portland Public Schools has to figure out how to move forward with Jefferson, not just because of low enrollment, but because the district hasn’t followed through yet on its promises to improve the building itself.

In 2012, 2017, 2020 and 2025, voters approved capital construction bonds to modernize PPS schools. And yet, building hasn’t started at Jefferson.

Additionally, the Portland School Board in 2022 passed a resolution directing the superintendent to resolve Jefferson’s student assignment structure by 2027. Last spring, Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong told the school board that she would push to end the dual-assignment system and return Jefferson to a comprehensive high school model.

Now, the district is hosting a series of community feedback nights to present the options for next steps and gather feedback from the families who will be most impacted by the changes. They held one of the sessions at Vernon K-8 School on Wednesday night.

“We’ve got [hundreds of] students that are at Jefferson right now that deserve a community to wrap their arms around them and want to do life with them. They deserve that,” said Nichole Watson, senior director of PPS’ Family & Community Engagement office, as she welcomed the roughly 100 attendees to the event.

“So, we’re gonna keep our babies, that community, center of our conversations tonight.”

The district plans to break ground at Jefferson this coming spring, as leaders explained at the event. Construction is set to take place in phases over four years, with the final work to be completed by 2030. Students and staff will remain on campus during the construction.

As they change the enrollment structure across the schools that feed into Jefferson and the other high schools, the district has to juggle two major factors: balancing student numbers across all its comprehensive high schools and ensuring that comparable curriculum and programming are available at each.

In the end, the revamped Jefferson is supposed to offer state-of-the-art facilities and enroll 1,700 students.

The question is: “How?”

PPS was originally considering five options, which they’ve whittled down to three. The scenarios show what future enrollment at Jefferson, Grant, McDaniel and Roosevelt high schools would look like if current dual-assignment areas were changed to regular attendance boundaries.

Several things are consistent in each scenario: The district would phase in the changes year by year, starting in the fall of 2027, which means it will affect current seventh graders. Beach School’s Spanish dual-language immersion cohort would go to Roosevelt. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School’s Chinese dual-language program would go to Jefferson. Students at Vernon and Faubian K-8 schools would also go to Jefferson.

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What changes between the scenarios is which elementary schools feed into each high school. In some scenarios, the new feeder patterns could mean students who attend middle school together would go on to different high schools.

In Scenario A, all feeder elementary and middle schools within Jefferson’s dual-assignment area would feed to Jefferson, with the exception of Beach’s Spanish immersion program feeding to Roosevelt.

In Scenario B, Peninsula K-5 School would join the Beach Spanish immersion program in feeding to Roosevelt. The rest would go to Jefferson.

Scenario C would include the Scenario B feeder pattern for Peninsula and the Beach Spanish program going to Roosevelt, plus Irvington Elementary School students would be assigned to Grant. All other schools in the dual-boundary area would feed to Jefferson.

District leaders acknowledged Wednesday night that Jefferson has been at the center of a drawn-out, complicated and costly process. Participants brought up a range of concerns and clarifying questions as they spoke in small groups.

Would the partnership programs with Portland Community College continue at Jefferson, for example? PPS officials said it would.

One parent raised the concern that there might be “a lot of pressure from some other schools.” However, he hoped that socioeconomic diversity and equity would still be prioritized by the board in making their decision.

Another participant spoke to rumblings she’s heard about what the experience might be like for those first rounds of students transitioning to Jefferson. “I think the enthusiasm and the ability to commit to delivering a fully comprehensive high school from the get-go is going to be important,” she said.

Other concerns have been shared online in PPS discussion groups, too, such as parents upset about being forced to attend a school that’s going to be under construction much of the time their kid is there.

The district is still figuring out some of the answers to these concerns.

District leaders will present feedback to a teaching, learning and enrollment committee on Nov. 13, and a public meeting is scheduled as well for Dec. 10. District leaders are planning visits in the coming weeks to local middle schools and Jefferson to hear students’ perspectives. All of this is meant to inform the recommendations to Armstrong and the school board.

Assistant Superintendent Margaret Calvert said the school board will have a work session in December and ideally vote on which scenario to move forward with in January.

“You are asking really good questions,” Calvert said to the attendees Wednesday night. “You want to advocate for your kids, absolutely. That is 100% what should happen.

“We [at the district] have to apply it not only to your family but to every other family,” she added. “And … this is where the conversation is really critical.”

As changes come down the line over the next few years, Principal Shelton doesn’t want to lose the things that make Jefferson special — the reason he thinks of Jefferson as “home.”

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He described it as the “last, true Black family high school in Portland, Oregon.” More than 40% of Jefferson students identify as Black, according to the state’s most recent data. Another quarter of the students identify as Hispanic or Latino.

Shelton said he’s doing what he can to provide a quality education and learning environment for all students there now, while getting the community ready for what comes next.

“How I describe it is ‘grandma’s house.’ You know, you always got that warm feel when you go to grandma’s house,” he said of Jefferson. “What I wanna make sure of, even with this new build and we bring in all these new students, is that it still feels like grandma’s house.

“We just had to change the furniture around a little bit.”

The final community engagement night is virtual and scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 5, from 5:30-7 p.m. Access the Zoom link here.