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Activist targets Multnomah County homeless school

Questions raised about educating kids out of the mainstream

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, Jan 23, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (4 Reader comments)

DENISE FARWELL / PORTLAND TRIBUNE

Kansas Boshell (front), 5, and classmates (far left to right) Marques Paine, 5, True Mitchell, 7, and Baileigh Jamero, 6, listen while being read to at the Community Transitional School.

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One of Portland’s longtime activists on homeless issues is calling for Multnomah County to stop funding the private, nonprofit Community Transitional School, the city’s only separate school for homeless children.

Chuck Currie, the interim minister at Parkrose Community United Church of Christ, is known as a fierce advocate for the homeless who has served on numerous local and national homeless coalitions and ran the Goose Hollow Family Shelter from 1998 to 2003 before joining the seminary.

Last week, Currie sent a request to the county board of commissioners to end its $52,000 grant toward the Community Transitional School unless it produces test results to show that its students are performing at the same level as homeless students in the local public schools.

He raises a debate that’s been percolating here and across the country for the past decade: whether homeless children should be educated in mainstream public school classrooms, or separately in programs such as the Community Transitional School, which started in 1990 at the Portland YWCA.

Currie strongly believes that separate is unequal and kids are best served in the mainstream. He doesn’t think the government should help fund this school since Congress passed legislation in 1998 that said no school district could subsidize a school for homeless children unless it received an exemption from the law.

As a new board member of the National Coalition for the Homeless, Currie said he played a large role in getting the legislation passed.

As a result, Portland Public Schools pulled its funding, which was about a third of the school’s budget, of the Community Transitional School.

That year, the Community Transitional School received its nonprofit status, and it has subsisted since then on the support of the county (for about 10 percent of its budget), foundation grants, churches, civic groups and individual and corporate donors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which chipped in $300,000 so the school could secure a permanent location.

Since 1998, the debate has mostly been quiet here; the biggest challenge for the Community Transitional School has been to find a stable location, after problems with its lease agreements caused it to move five times.

Most recently it moved to the Mt. Tabor Presbyterian Church at 5441 S.E. Belmont St. Next summer the plan is to break ground on a new building at 6507 N.E. Killingsworth St.

But now, Currie is stirring up the philosophical and legal debate again, his latest ammunition being a recent report that cast doubt on the performance of students at the Thomas J. Pappas School in Arizona, the nation’s largest school for the homeless.

The Pappas school was created in 1990 and consists of three schools serving 1,100 students in Phoenix and Tempe. The report, cited in the Dec. 6 issue of the Arizona Republic newspaper, revealed that Pappas students scored worse than homeless kids in the public schools in both math and reading at every grade level.

Currie fears the Community Transitional School could be providing a subpar education, and would rather see the county direct its funds to the public schools.

Most of the city and county’s homeless children attend public schools; at last count, Portland Public Schools served 1,500 homeless kids, many receiving mentoring, school supplies and other support from an afterschool program called Project Return.