Comments on: It’s all about choice

By: Liz

Liz — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:47:03 +0000

I’m a north portland resident. I attended Skyline-holbrook and Lincoln. I have always believed in neighborhood schools. I wanted my daughter to go to her neighborhood school, Roosevelt. Add in the promises that Roosevelt is on the rise. First let me get this out of the way there are some amazing hard working teachers there, Thank you. But there is alot of bad ones there. Is this a place for burned out teachers to come to so that they wont have to work? My daughters first love is math. Well thats gone. After our numerous attempts to get get some results she stopped going to class altogeather. No one noticed for three days. No one in the office had time for her. Her spanish class, she did all the extra credit she could get her hands on,attended every day and really worked at it. She barely passed and a student who never came to class got a better grade. I’m talking about an A/b student. The classes are mostly badly managed. My daughter is a very good athlete, shes had private and club coaching and experience. She no longer plays basketball, because of all the fighting and lack of respect for being on a team. And her volleyball coach is an outright abusive, intimidating and a passive aggressive bully. I scheduled a meeting with the campus principal so she could hear from my daughter about her experience. She offered up a transfer! Maybe we should take her up on that offer. Heres the tragedy, if its not working for my kid, its probably not working for any of the kids at Roosevelt. I don’t want to jump ship. But please don’t believe all the articles that tell you Roosevelt is doing great, in lots of respects its not. Its no wonder people move out of the area. When we attend volleyball tournaments elsewhere people express their sorrow that our children attend PPS. Unless you play boys basketball.

By: Zarwen

Zarwen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:34:22 +0000

Steve B. is right. Hard to believe that only 15 years ago, the course offerings from school to school actually varied little. And yet, returning to that state is apparently “Mission: Impossible” for this School Board. How did something so simple get so complicated in such a short time?

By: howard

howard — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:34:19 +0000

Inequity in PPS is really about PPS offering choice to middle and upper class parents to keep their kids’ fannies in the seats so as to maximize revenue. And it started in the 1960s when Jefferson was THE school in PPS.

Additional special interests have arisen in PPS since the 1960s and today PPS is a dysfunctional stew pot of clashing agendas, crisis negotiations and lawsuits.

Where there is no honest reflection and trust there can be no peace.

By: Nicole

Nicole — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:44:16 +0000

Thank you Nancy!

By: Steve Buel

Steve Buel — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:55:39 +0000

Thank you Nancy! We are likely the only school district in the metropolitan area, including Vancouver, that has such a bankrupt system. And it wasn’t always this way in PPS. It started with Bierworth and the advent of The Portland Schools Foundation. I talked to an old area director yesterday who documented the changes — he was actually told to give the upper middle class school in his area more perks than the lower economic school. It is just not a figment of our imagination.

By: Terry

Terry — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:59:46 +0000

Brilliant! And even poetic.

I hope you’ve decided to make yourself available to serve the district as a school board member. We need people like you to correct the “shamefully unacceptable” condition of education in our once proud public school district.