A Short History of Rieke, v.1 (Construction to 2003)

I think the only way to really understand the current growth in enrollment at Rieke is to understand its recent (and maybe not-so-recent) history. In this and a couple of subsequent posts, I'll try and summarize what's happened over the years, and what led up to the Rieke Growth Plan and the current increases in enrollment. Comments welcome; this first installment addresses the construction of the school through 2003; you can find full details after the jump.
[Originally posted 11/18/08; Bumped upon Publishing Part III]

Rieke was constructed by Portland Public Schools in 1959-61 during the post-war “baby boom” that dramatically increased enrollment in public schools around the nation. It opened to classes on February 20, 1961 as the “Wilson Park Elementary School,” with David McCrea as the first principal.  Oregonian, 2/14/1961, p.11.  In 1978, the school was renamed the “Mary W. Rieke Elementary School” to honor Mary Whitelaw Rieke, a former PTA member at Fulton Park, Robert Gray, and Wilson schools, a 12-year board member of Portland Public Schools (1958-1970), and a member of the Oregon House of Representatives (1970-78).  Enrollment data from this time is lost to history (or at least to web-based electronic history). We do, however, have original plans for the construction of the school; those plans included a potential future expansion of the school out the north side of the current multipurpose room, to include several additional classrooms and a dedicated gymnasium. (See Growth Plan (2005) at Reference page in the growth plan.) That wing, however, was never built. Initial construction consisted of the main wing of offices and classrooms, with the multipurpose building (without the classrooms) built in 1968, and the additional classrooms attached to the multipurpose building were added a year later, shortly after the peak of PPS enrollment in the early 1970s.

As the baby boom kids grew up, the number of children attending PPS schools fell dramatically. Rieke Elementary's enrollment tracked this demographic trend, and closed to regular students in 1984. Susan Falk, "Rieke School Will Close," Oregonian, May 11, 1984, p. C6 (Forrest Rieke, Mary Rieke's son, voted with all but one other board member to close the school).  Most of the current Rieke Elementary attendance area was brought within the Hayhurst attendance area (although some students near Barbur Boulevard attended Capitol Hill Elementary). For nearly a decade, the school was used only for special programs, primarily TAG programming, offered by the district.

In September of 1992, in the face of growing elementary enrollment in Southwest, the District reopened Rieke to regular neighborhood attendance. Suzanne Richards, “Public Schools Gearing Up For '92-93 Academic Year,” The Oregonian D02 (August 12, 1992). Hayhurst had approximately 600 students in the 1991-92 academic year, and the District concluded that Rieke needed to open in order to accommodate the overflow of students.

When the district drew the new Rieke attendance boundary in early summer 1992, substantial disputes arose. Hayhurst parents expressed concern over the degree to which the new boundary would divert active parents to Rieke and away from Hayhurst, and the decision was challenged as ripping the Hayhurst community apart. See Bill Graves, “Board OKs Plan To Reopen Rieke School,” The Oregonian B03 (June 6, 1992). In addition, the School Board was forced to strike a difficult balance between taking too many students from Hayhurst and not sending enough to Rieke; on top of that, the district struggled with how to draw boundary lines in light of two housing communities located to the west of Rieke, across Bertha Blvd. Retaining their lower-SES students at Hayhurst might permit that school to retain federal Title I money; shifting those students to Rieke might result in the total loss of such funds to both schools. The resulting boundary lines placed students located just across Bertha from Rieke within Hayhurst’s attendance area. Thirteen years later, this boundary was criticized as exclusionary, cf. S. Renee Mitchell, “Rieke’s Secret is Out of the Bag,” The Oregonian, B01 (March 24, 2004); KOIN News report of 3/18/03, and Rieke parents (especially future School Board member Ruth Adkins) worked with parents from Maplewood and Hayhurst to encourage the School District to redraw the boundary to its current location. In a 2005 Board Resolution (see p. 369 (pdf 309), March 14, 2005, Resolution 3253), the District did just that.

From the time that Rieke reopened in 1992 until 2006, its enrollment was largely stable, fluctuating between 260 and 300 students. See Rieke Enrollment Chart. By contrast, many of the other elementary schools in the Wilson cluster were losing enrollment. This drop in enrollment was part of the larger trend faced by the district; in the early 1970s, district enrollment was nearly twice as high as it was in the early 2000s. While a number of schools had been shuttered in the intervening years, the District continued to make occasional noise about the need to close yet more schools. The concern about the “excess” footprint would have a direct impact on Rieke in the years from 2003 to 2006.