The long, steady decline in PPS elementary enrollment (from its very crowded early-'70's high) led the district to close a number of schools throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2003, the rolling closure wagon appeared to be heading toward Rieke. Email communications in January of that year suggested that PPS staff was preparing a recommendation to go to Interim Superintendent Jim Scherzinger that would propose closing Rieke and several other schools in the district. While that proposal was ultimately dropped after opposition from the parental community, a second proposal for closure came in 2006 under the leadership of Superintendent Vicki Philips. After the jump, I describe in further detail how the Rieke community came together to keep the school open in 2003; in Part III, I discuss the closure proposals in 2006, and take us through the present.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, PPS facility reviews consistently indicated a belief that falling enrollment required a smaller number of schools in the district. A 1998 performance audit by KPMG concluded that given enrollment, the district should close one high school, one middle school, and eleven elementary schools. 1998 Comprehensive Performance Audit Final Report at II-14. The district pursued this recommendation, closing a number of schools, including Youngson and Wilcox elementaries on the East side in 2002.
For the district, those closures were not enough. A combination of budgetary pressures and a perception that the district had too much space for too few students (though a perception rooted, perhaps, in a failure to recall the overcrowded early '70s), meant that closure proposals remained on the table. In early December 2002, the Portland Tribune ran an article suggesting that further closures would be suggested soon. Soon thereafter, parents at Rieke received the first inklings that Rieke might be listed as a recommended closure by district staff, and as students returned from winter break in January 2003, concern was sufficiently high for a meeting to be called. On January 9, parent leaders at the school met and formed, along with other interested community members, "CARE" (Community Advocates for Rieke Elementary). Between January 9 and the final decision of the Board of Education in early March, these parents met with district staff in an effort to identify and respond to the articulated reasons for closure. They also prepared for a February 5 meeting with PPS staff in the Rieke Gymnasium.
At that meeting, as well as throughout the subsequent debates within PPS, CARE made an effort to present data-driven analyses and rebuttals of the staff's articulated rationale for closing the school. Though occasionally the parents discussed the possibility of involving students (and some other schools did), it was CARE's belief that appeals to emotion rarely worked, and were easily brushed off by district staff and board members as expected emotional response. The parents believed that it was best to keep the students focused on learning, and to let the parents persuade district staff that the school was an efficient, excellent, appropriately sized elementary school for the Hillsdale neighborhood.
At the February meeting, as well as throughout the subsequent debates, the parents, along with many others in the community, pointed out that Rieke's per-student costs were reasonable (largely in the middle of the pack). They argued that it was well-placed in the community, in a geographically central location in SW Portland. They emphasized its relatively good physical state (as assessed by a recent Long-Range Facilities plan completed by the District) that concluded that the school was appropriately sized to its population). They pointed out that the school was located in a Metro-designated Town Center, the Hillsdale town center, which was intended to serve as a central location for community resources and high-density development, and worked, with outside assistance, to develop maps for display that demonstrated the large geographic gap that would be left in SW Portland were Rieke to close. They pointed out that school closures generally are poor ways to save money in the district, given that the students will have to be served by teachers and administrators at any school they attend and the risk of losing students to other schools. Finally, the parental opposition challenged what appeared to be the fundamental position of the district's staff -- that the school was simply too small. The parents pointed out that Rieke remained a well-attended school with steady-state levels of enrollment, which strongly suggested that even though the school's capacity was not as large as that at some elementary schools, it was still appropriately-sized for the community. Despite the conclusions of the Long-Range Facilities Plan, which appeared to praise the value and efficiency associated with smaller schools, district staff went the other direction, preliminarily concluding that elementary schools should be closer to 400-600 students in order to offer certain efficiencies of scale. The difficulty, of course, was that a substantial portion of PPS elementary schools had capacities of less than 400.
Thus, while district staff apparently believed that smaller elementary schools (certainly those under 300, and probably those with enrollments of under 400 as well) were inefficient or in some other way inadequate, Rieke parents argued that Rieke and other small schools in the district served as a demonstration of why those schools were, in fact, highly sought-after and successful schools that served to keep parents in the district. Parents also pointed out that there were complaints of crowding in the cluster of schools feeding Lincoln High School, and they suggested that the district should conduct a comprehensive review of the boundaries throughout the West Side in order to evaluate whether closure was truly the best option. (A CARE-developed set of talking points from late January 2003 can be found here.)
Despite these arguments, the staff presented to Interim Superintendent Jim Scherzinger a memo recommending that that Rieke, as well as Edwards and Meek Elementaries on the East Side, be closed. (See the 2/2003 memo here.) Based on the premise that a "proposal" to the School Board, once supported by the Superintendent, would be largely unchangable before the board, the CARE parents continued to press district staff in an effort to correct misperceptions regarding data. In meetings with School Board members and the Interim Superintendent, they argued for the value of small, well-performing neighborhood schools. A huge amount of volunteer time was spent by Rieke parents during this period (by one calculation, well over 1700 emails were sent between the most active parents in the two months between January 10 and March 10, 2003).
By the time the Superintendent presented the Board with his proposals (at a meeting in March of 2003), it was apparent that the long efforts to head off Rieke's closure were successful -- at least for that moment. While the Superintendent and staff unfortunately continued to recommend closure of two eastside schools -- Meek and the Brooklyn neighborhood program -- the program at Edwards and Rieke were paroled for the time being. Rather than close Rieke, the Superintendent agreed with his Staff's ultimate recommendation that it made more sense to comprehensively evaluate enrollment issues in schools throughout the West Side. The Board adopted the recommendation and initiated the Westside Boundary Task Force, a group of parents, community leaders, school staff, and other interested parties who were to meet to "___ (ID purpose) ____" (Cite board resolution). Mike Miller was appointed the parent representative from Rieke, and put in long hours over the Spring and Summer of 2003. Rieke was safe for the moment, but for a couple of reasons, it was not yet out of the woods.
First, the Board resolution explicitly noted the possibility of further closures once the task force work was complete. Second, despite the long work of the task force, it was unable to reach any consensus decision regarding how the district was to manage the overcrowding in the Lincoln Cluster schools or the perception of lower enrollment in the Wilson cluster schools. The majority vote on a somewhat divided task force recommended that transfers should be limited into Lincoln in order to solve the problem of crowding. An alternative plan, recommended by a smaller number of task force members, would have shifted some students from the southern edge of the Bridlemile attendance area into Wilson cluster schools such as Hayhurst and Rieke. While Bridlemile had once fed to Wilson, opposition in that community, as well as PPS's longstanding resistance to shifting boundaries, led the Superintendent to go with the majority's proposal to limit transfers into the Lincoln cluster.
The perceived problem of underenrollment in the Wilson cluster elementaries was not solved, and the result was another closure in SW -- this time of Smith Elementary in far SW. In the runup to that 2005 closure (see Board Resolution 3254, Agenda of 3/14/2005, dividing the school's population between three adjoining elementary schools), Rieke was not specifically mentioned, but the possibility of further closures remained. (Indeed, in addition to the closure of Smith, several other excellent small schools in the district were closed between 2003 and 2006, including Edwards, Kenton, Applegate, the Richmond neighborhood program, and Whitaker middle school.)
Finally, the very fact that Rieke had been mentioned in 2003 meant that it would be an easy target in subsequent closure discussions. Projections of continued enrollment declines over the next decade created a hydraulic pressure that led the District, continuing to seek out cost-saving measures under the new Superintendent, Vicky Philips, to continue developing plans for consolidation and closure of schools.
While Rieke's enrollment continued to hover around 260-280, it was the belief of many parents that the fact of the closure discussion, and the ongoing suggestion that additional schools needed to be closed, interfered with the school's ability to attract students. The result was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with suppressed enrollment (albeit enrollment at a level that provided a very good education to families in the surrounding neighborhood) prompting closure rumors, which further suppressed enrollment. The most surprising thing about the 2003-06 period, perhaps, was that the school managed to maintain its enrollment at historic levels despite ongoing rumors of closure. In 2006, the rumors again became quite tangible; for that discussion, see Part III.
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