The April 8 meeting of the Portland Public Schools Board featured an unusual sight: Three weeks before May ballots were to land in voters’ mailboxes, board members squabbled about what would be included in the district’s construction bond.
Portland Public Schools’ $1.83 billion bond is intended to finance curriculum, technology, and deferred maintenance.
But three high school modernization projects have dominated School Board members’ discussions since the fall.
The district has budgeted $1.15 billion—nearly two-thirds of its bond—to overhauls of Jefferson, Cleveland and Ida B. Wells high schools.
If built to their current budgets, they will be some of the most expensive high schools in the nation.
What set the School Board members off, however, was a much smaller number.
District officials who had pledged to come up with cost-savings measures presented board members with a proposal to trim between $33 million and $67 million off all three projects, combined.
That’s a savings, at best, of less than 5% of the total construction budget.
Two board members, Herman Greene and Gary Hollands, questioned why the savings were so limited.
“The math ain’t mathing,” Greene said at the meeting.
“Find me another school [district] in the country that’s building a single solitary school for 400-and-something million dollars, and then let’s talk about it. Until then, what the heck are we doing spending so much money on a single solitary school?”
That board members like Greene are still disputing the costs of what should be in the bond is “unbelievable,” says political consultant Liz Kaufman.
“It’s way outside the lines. It’s way outside coloring. And I think it’s, to a certain extent, taking the voters for granted.”
Kaufman knows of what she speaks: She helped lead the last Portland school bond measure campaign that failed, back in 2011.
(Voters in Multnomah County rejected the $548 million bond 50.24% to 49.76%—by less than a quarter of 1%.)
Kaufman says that by this point in a campaign, there’s usually no more debate about how much schools should cost.
Attention has typically turned to more detailed aspects of design, she says.
Without outlined budgets for each of the high schools in the bond (the district currently lists the three high school projects and any spillover under one broad “modernization” category), Kaufman says she worries it will be hard to hold PPS accountable for the final costs of those schools.
“Nobody knows how much money they’re passing or saving,” she says.
In a follow-up interview with WW, Greene says he believes voters should approve the bond because the district’s students need every penny they can get.
But he adds that if he, a fervent supporter, still has questions, so do thousands of voters.
Not to speak up with concerns, he says, is also a disservice to the other students in the district who could benefit from newer facilities; the district is trying to allocate any extra funds to aging middle and elementary schools (“Shake Shacks,” WW, March 26).
“I think the fear that everybody might say no is causing people to not want to talk about it at all,” Greene says.
“My opinion is that that’s what’s making people not want to vote on it, because we’re not talking about it.
We need to put it all out there.
We need to be extremely transparent.
We need to say this is what it is.”
The projected cost of each of the three high school rebuilds on the May ballot is coming in at close to half a billion dollars—the district has budgeted $491 million to Jefferson, $469 million to Cleveland, and $455 million to Wells.
That’s higher than schools in other similarly sized, progressive cities.
The Oregonian has previously reported that Seattle Public Schools will spend less.
The district plans to spend $283 million on its Rainier Beach High School campus for 1,600 students.
(Portland’s three builds are for a target capacity of 1,700 each.)
WW has found other examples: Denver Public Schools spent $139.5 million on a ground-up rebuild of Montbello High School, which holds 1,500 students and opened this past fall.
Baltimore County Public Schools will completely replace Lansdowne High School for $154 million.
The school’s capacity will be 1,759 students.
Scaling down the price tags of Portland’s high schools has been a hot topic for months.
In December, PPS chief operating officer Dan Jung proposed cutting costs to $366 million for Jefferson and $360 million each for the other two high schools.
“There’s no high school that’s built in the state of Oregon, on the West Coast, across the United States for over $450 million for a single high school site,” PPS Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong said then.
“We have information that will tell us in the coming weeks why [the high school costs] were inflated.
I believe that we can build schools for less.”
But the report she referred to didn’t give the district the answers it wanted.
Cornerstone Management Group was tasked with comparing current Portland builds to former PPS high school modernizations and a nearby project at Beaverton High School.
It found that a number of added costs to build all-electric schools, site constraints specific to Portland, and high general conditions costs for contractors made projects in Portland significantly more expensive.
The district’s hopes for $100 million in savings per school dimmed.
In February, the Portland School Board tasked district officials with cutting costs based on a board-approved framework that called for cost savings by reducing square footage of buildings from about 320,000 to 295,000 square feet, reevaluating LEED Gold sustainability standards, and building teen parent and health centers only if necessary.
At that meeting, Hollands pushed for district officials to come up with their own cost-saving measures, independent of board guidance.
His frustration was palpable April 8, when he asked again for input from district staff.
“The only savings you guys are talking about is what we provided.
We’re not the experts.
You guys are the [architectural and construction] experts,” Hollands said.
“Where’s your guys’ recommendations of cost savings?
Where are your guys’ expertise?”
(The district did not answer his questions that night, citing COO Jung’s absence.)
Dr. Andy Saultz, interim dean of Pacific University’s college of education, says variable building costs are pretty unpredictable right now.
Higher-education construction projects he knows of, for instance, have struggled recently with high materials costs.
What’s more surprising to him is the tweaking that’s still happening among members of the School Board.
“Usually they’ll come to an agreement and then hand it off, and it feels like people will have clarity on when those handoffs are going to happen,” he says.
But Saultz says he doesn’t think the average voter is going to pay all that much attention to the fine details of the bond, or the margins around the total cost of projects.
“My sense of the bond is what voters will pay attention to is which high schools are getting rebuilt,” he says.
Dan Lavey, another Portland political consultant, says the frank debate at this stage of the bond might reflect the School Board’s confidence in the bond passing.
“They don’t have any fear that their lack of clarity, their lack of specificity, will cost too many votes,” he says.
“In fact, I think they have a fear that specificity will cost them votes.”
The district, for its part, says the cost savings are preliminary.
“We still have ongoing efforts for finding additional cost savings,” Stormy Shanks, senior director of the district’s office of school modernizations, said at the meeting.
Lavey and Kaufman both say the lack of a formal campaign opposed to the bond will make accountability more challenging.
In areas she has worked where school bonds don’t consistently pass, Kaufman says there is more rigor, especially with cost analysis.
“In Portland, most interest groups and elected officials start with the premise that whatever they propose will be approved by the voters,” Lavey says.
“So it makes you undisciplined, it makes you flabby, and it makes you get away with half-baked proposals.
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