If you ask Portland Public Schools, the decision has been made.

Starting next year, Jefferson High School students will be bussed 11 miles away to the former Marshall High School campus on the southeastern edge of the district. PPS officials say this temporary relocation will last three years while construction is underway at the historic North Portland school.

District officials see Marshall as the best option in terms of cost, available space and safety. Marshall has been significantly upgraded, and it has all of the facilities students and staff will need. Plus, there’s precedent. Other schools, including Franklin, Grant, McDaniel and Benson, were also moved to Marshall during renovations.

But if you ask Jefferson families, Marshall isn’t a valid option at all. In fact, many see it as a move that could significantly harm students and their ability to stay in school. Opponents feel the Jefferson community has been lied to and kept out of the decision-making process, and they want the district to go back to the drawing board.

“There are other solutions out there rather than shipping our kids all the way out to Marshall, which is, at minimum, a 45-minute commute for the majority of Jefferson students,” said Sondra Cozart, a Jefferson alumna and parent of a Jefferson sophomore.

Of the schools relocated to Marshall, Jefferson would have the farthest commute. It has a substantially smaller student body. And community members argue there are better options. They’re also upset the district is going back on its original promise to keep students at Jefferson during construction. Two Portland high schools — Lincoln and Roosevelt — were rebuilt in the last few years without moving students off campus.

Cozart and other community members are pushing back against the current plan. They’ve sent letters to school and district leaders and contacted city officials. Students have talked about starting a petition.

“Some of our kids, some of the families, will not survive this,” Cozart said. If students are forced to spread out across the district, drop out or leave, she believes it will significantly change the makeup and identity of the school community, which is largely comprised of people of color.

Angela Bonilla, president of the Portland Association of Teachers, spoke to that concern at the PPS board meeting Sept. 5, saying she’s heard from several educators about the move.

Like students, they, too, were promised they would stay on-site during construction. Now they want clarity on why that changed and why they found out about it from the news.

“I’m really, really concerned that this will lead to lowered enrollment at Jeff over the lifetime of this project, and I worry that we will harm this school that has a really strong and rich history … in our Black community here in Portland,” Bonilla said. “We wonder what other options there are besides bussing students. Again.”

No further community meetings have been scheduled. Opponents of the plan hope the district will pause and reevaluate.

“They said this was final,” Cozart said. “But, you know ... for us, it’s not final.”

The decision to move

Jefferson is one of the last Portland high schools scheduled for a thorough renovation.

Voters approved a $1.2 billion capital construction bond in 2020 that made the projected $300 million renovation of Jefferson possible.

The district has been discussing design goals and guidelines for a few years, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that building experts concluded the construction demands would require students to move off campus.

School and district officials wrote a letter to Jefferson families last month. In it, they said it became clear that to safely keep students and staff on-site, and move them around as construction progressed, would take an extra year, be “prohibitively expensive” and was overall “impractical.”

The district spoke with Jefferson families about the final decision to relocate to Marshall during a community meeting in late August, a couple days after the letter was sent. The choice was an internal district decision, according to Valerie Feder, director of media relations for the school district, and was not made with community members, staff or student input. Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero ultimately has the final say.

“Moving students off-site during construction is not an outcome we had hoped for or anticipated,” officials wrote. They acknowledged there will be logistical and cultural impacts from moving out of the historic Albina neighborhood.

“We know this news will be especially concerning to every community member who engaged with us in the modernization process over the last year and heard commitments from PPS about keeping students on campus.”

‘I just felt like they lied to us’

Sammy Pitchford couldn’t tour Jefferson when her family moved to Portland in December 2020. Because of COVID-19, she and her twin sister would have to decide another way whether to attend Jefferson or go down the road to Grant.

Jefferson is part of a dual-choice system, which gives its students the unique option to transfer to another school in their residential zone or attend the small high school of about 600 students.

Sammy spoke with counselors, school administrators, neighbors and a Jefferson graduate to make her choice. She learned about Jefferson’s Middle College program that allows students to take courses at Portland Community College across the street, which was especially appealing to her.

It was an added bonus that everyone spoke so fondly of the school’s community, describing it as warm and tight-knit, a place where multiple generations of families chose to enroll. Sammy had never been to a school as large as Grant, which serves nearly four times as many students, and she learned that at Jefferson, “everyone knows everyone.”

District employees told Sammy about Jefferson’s construction and the fact that it would start in 2024 — her senior year. They also assured her that students would be kept on or near campus during that time. Knowing that, Sammy chose Jefferson even as her sister enrolled at Grant.

So when the plan to relocate students to Marshall was announced, Sammy was shocked.

“I was so angry,” she said. “I just felt like they lied to us.

“We spent all this time deciding what we wanted the building to look like and what options we wanted. And all of that was under the assumption that students could remain on campus,” she said. “Now, it feels like … we never actually had an option. And they were just stringing us along, hoping to get as close to the remodel starting as possible before they had to break the news so that we couldn’t fight back.”

The PCC option

Once it was decided the district wouldn’t keep students on-site during construction, project leaders looked at three possible destinations for the students.

The closest options were Portland Community College’s Cascade campus across North Killingsworth St. and the Kenton Elementary School building about two miles north of Jefferson.

Kenton was considered too small and lacking in high school program amenities, such as science labs and athletic fields.

Meanwhile, PCC-Cascade seemed like the obvious answer. Jefferson students are accustomed to taking courses there through its partnership with the school.

But in the letter to families and at the community meeting last month, the district claimed the college isn’t properly zoned to be used exclusively as a high school and that it “could take years” to change.

That claim was made, according to Feder, based on officials’ previous experiences with zoning issues. But Jefferson families weren’t buying it.

Cozart and others reached out to city planning officials and were told the city makes amendments and rule changes all the time. It also became clear the district never had a conversation with the city to explore this option.

Magan Reed, a spokesperson for the City of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, said the bureau only learned about the issue from OPB’s reporting. Planning staff then proactively contacted the district to evaluate the problem, learn about possible plans with the college and determine solutions.

“To date, we have not heard of solutions from either,” Reed said Tuesday. “Neither has asked us to look at anything.”

Depending on the amendments made, Reed said the city could issue an emergency temporary allowance that would allow PCC to align with high school zoning. She said that would only take a matter of weeks.

“That would have been really clear if anyone approached us ahead of time,” Reed added. “We’re willing and ready to go if that solution comes across our desk.”

But the college doesn’t want to pursue that plan either.

James Hill, a spokesperson for PCC, said the college can’t accommodate a large-scale move of Jefferson students to the Cascade campus due to “capacity and increasing enrollment.”

Preliminary data shows the college is regaining numbers lost during the pandemic. PCC as a whole is up by more than 9% in total headcount for the upcoming fall term compared to last year. Cascade specifically is up about 8%, or nearly 560 students. More than 40% of the college’s classes are in person or do a combination of remote, in-person or online learning.

“We have a fully functioning campus at Cascade and do not have the space required for a move like that without impacting our own students and services,” Hill said.

Feder later told OPB that zoning and capacity aren’t the only issues. The district also has to account for the availability of specialized classrooms and educational spaces, as well as its ability to provide lunches, cybersecurity and physical safety.

Hill added that the request from PPS was for 15 dedicated classrooms in order to keep high school students and the college’s adult student population, whose average age is 29-30, apart.

Still, the college is talking with the school district to accommodate a smaller number of Jefferson students where possible.

Feder said the district is working out how to continue the Middle College partnership. One possibility is for students at Marshall to use the college’s Southeast campus.

Stuck and out of trust

Sammy sees other options on the table. Maybe the district could use another, closer school. Maybe they could split grades to use different facilities or explore the option of portables. But if the Marshall option moves forward, she doesn’t feel like she has much choice.

Sammy can’t graduate early without taking night classes, and she doesn’t want to miss out on important moments with her friends senior year.

She wants to study math in college — maybe even get a graduate degree in it — but she’s too advanced for the courses at Jefferson. She needs access to Calculus 3 and linear algebra classes at PCC, which already have limited times available.

She could stay at PCC near Jefferson for those class days, but then she’d still have to drive across town in peak traffic to make cross-country practice.

“It is really unreasonable for me to transfer schools at this point,” Sammy said. “I mean, I just have a year left in high school. I have relationships with all of these teachers and staff members. Our curriculum at Jefferson is different. And so I’d be going into a school not having the background knowledge.”

District officials said they will provide buses for students participating in extracurricular activities as they have for other schools under construction. Feder said the district’s transportation department is fully staffed with bus drivers for the current year.

However, Sammy said she’d heard from Benson High students who went through this not long ago that there were a lot of bus problems. They’d run late, or not show up at all.

Sammy acknowledged that she’s coming from a position of privilege: She wasn’t born and raised in the Jefferson community. Her parents can drive her to Marshall if she needs.

“I’m just being inconvenienced,” she said. “(But) there are a lot of students where this is life-changing for them, and it will affect their ability to graduate high school.”

Sammy is especially concerned with how this will impact Jefferson students who already face added challenges.

“Jefferson is a historically underprivileged community,” she said. “And I know several classmates who have to work jobs, help support their families, or are in charge of transporting siblings to school before they’re dropped off.”

Sammy’s mom, Monika Pitchford, emailed the Jefferson modernization committee and several others about her concerns. In an already small community, she said it feels like they’re being “ripped apart by this.” She only heard back from one school board member.

“It’s been total crickets,” she told OPB.

“It feels like they’re treating us like either we can’t understand a complicated issue, or that they are trying to obfuscate for some other reason,” she said. “I think that is a big part of the frustration, as far as the parents are concerned — why aren’t they being direct and clear? It feels like they’re kind of hiding the truth, and we don’t know why.”

Correction: Valerie Feder is the director of media relations for Portland Public Schools. Her title was incorrect in a previous version of this story.