School board weighs cost versus size

Small schools are the district’s ‘jewels,’ but are they worth keeping?

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Feb 5, 2002, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Eighty-nine years old, with shiny wood floors and a jungle mural on a hallway wall, Kenton Elementary School sits in the middle of North Portland. And sits, seemingly, at the center of a bull’s-eye.

Kenton Elementary recently made a top 10 list Ñ of the smallest elementary schools in the Portland Public Schools system. And in this case, for Kenton, small might not be so good.

Portland Public Schools leaders’ focus is beginning to turn to schools such as Kenton as they consider what to do with more and more school space in a district with declining enrollment.

With 233 students last fall, Kenton is among the largest of the 10 small schools. The smallest has 177 students. Still, Kenton’s enrollment is projected to decline to 168 in eight years. And the question that school district leaders are increasingly asking is this: Are the advantages of such small schools worth the premium they cost to operate?

A school district that had 80,000 students 25 years ago now houses 54,000 in about the same number of school buildings. And as building space increases in pockets across the district, pressure builds to merge elementary school programs, reconfigure school boundaries and close a few or more of the buildings. Running Kenton costs about $683 per student in operations costs, according to a study of district facilities released last week Ñ more than 50 percent higher than the district average.

“I think one of the big questions floating out there É is the issue of the 10 smallest schools,” says school board member Marc Abrams, who thinks some elementary-school programs need to be merged.

But focusing on the 10 small schools leads inevitably to focusing on their quality and to questions of quality over efficiency.

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