The Portland Public School District is like a dysfunctional family that has decided the answer to its problems is to remodel the living room.
And Oregon’s Commission on Public Safety is like an investor who is contemplating moving money out of the one account that is paying dividends.
These two entities are engaged in the same kind of deception – pretending to study an issue in search of some bold ideas, when actually the outcome has been preordained by bureaucrats and politicians who are part of the problem. These bureaucrats and politicians are not interested in ideas. They are interested in money.
First, the Portland Public School District.
This week school board members nudged a little closer to putting a bond on the November ballot.
The cheerleading for a bond actually began last year with a 39-member committee appointed by school officials to look at long-range facilities. The committee members were from the community – business owners, union representatives, neighborhood association leaders, parents. Some committee members were from professions with an interest in school buildings – architects, engineers, construction companies.
The committee held nine public meetings, which I attended as an observer. The first meeting was filled with high aspirations. One member said she wanted to “pick the best things from other countries.”
That didn’t happen. The committee’s overseers didn’t even want to look across the river at Vancouver, Wash., to see what was working there. Whenever Kevin Truong, one of two student members of the committee, suggested that Portland schools could learn something from Vancouver, he had few takers.
Each meeting was steered by a school administrator or a “facilitator,” selected by administrators. Each meeting was blanketed with issue papers, white papers, graphics and agendas laying out what would be studied and what the options were. Certain “truths” were constantly repeated, e.g. the importance of natural light in education.
Out of all these meetings came four bond proposals, each dealing with a variation on renovating or replacing selected schools.
After that came still more meetings, this time to unveil the proposals and test the public waters. At each meeting were more reports, more discussion groups, more guidance by school officials. The last meeting at Lincoln High School on May 24th reminded me of a high school rally before a big game. Lots of enthusiasm, some of it forced.
Occasionally, someone would raise an inopportune question.
Kate Swindell, the mother of a Lincoln freshman, held up a paper describing the four bond options and wanted to know if they had thought about a totally different concept, maybe building smaller, brand-new schools for less money. She had recently been involved in the construction of a medical building that was supposed to cost $11 million, from the ground up, but it came in well under budget.
“Can you build a school for $11 million?” Swindell asked. Nobody answered.
The school board is expected to give the go-ahead for one of the bond options later this month. If it does, board members might want to pay attention to what’s happening at the Commission on Public Safety before they start politicking.
They could avoid repeating the mistake school trustee Bobbie Regan made this week on OPB’s “Think Out Loud.”
Regan, the longest-serving member of the Portland school board, complained about how education “has been squeezed by Public Safety and Human Services.”
Check out the state’s general fund pie chart on Page 12, and see who’s getting squeezed. (Total education funds take 50 percent and 38.7 percent go to K-12. Human Services receives 26.2 percent. Public Safety/Judicial receive 17.2 percent.)
When “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller asked Regan if she was suggesting that money should be taken from Public Safety and Human Services and given to schools, she dissembled further: The state Legislature’s hands are tied on public safety “locking up the drunk drivers,” she said. “When you lock up the drunk drivers, you are taking money from somewhere else… .”
The problem, Regan said, was all those Oregon voters who keep approving tough sentencing measures.
How tough is Oregon on drunk drivers? For many years, the state virtually had no felony drunk driving law. About a decade ago, the law was changed so that on a fourth conviction in 10 years, a drunk driver could face prison (the fourth conviction was really the fifth, since a first conviction was a freebie).
Then in 2010, voters passed Measure 73, which called for a 16-month prison sentence for a third drunk driving conviction in 10 years (which really meant a fourth conviction, since the first was still a freebie).
After much outcry about how costly this was (most of the state’s newspapers piled on, as did then-gubernatorial candidates John Kitzhaber and Chris Dudley), the legislature rewrote the law, so now the most a repeat drunk driver might get is 90 days in jail, provided he doesn’t kill anyone.
But Gov. Kitzhaber feels Bobbie Regan’s pain. That’s why he created the Commission on Public Safety last year and stacked it with folks like then-state Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul DeMuniz; former Gov. Ted Kulongoski and state Sen. Jackie Winters (whose late husband was an ex-felon, a fact she is proud to share with anyone who will listen).
The charge Kitzhaber gave the commission was “justice reinvestment” or finding a way to spend less on prisons because, he said, crime is going down.
If crime really is going down, could it be that the prisons are successfully contributing to public safety?
For Kitzhaber, that’s not the point. He’s looking for some money to shift to the schools. (I think it would make more sense to take money from the Department of Human Services and give it to public schools, since the latter have practically become the modern alternative to orphanages.)
But “justice reinvestment” has become a popular buzz phrase, and various think tanks have smelled opportunity. Last year, Kitzhaber’s Commission on Public Safety held four, day-long public hearings and received the kinds of reports and PowerPoint presentations that generally supported what the governor wanted to hear – about all the great justice reinvestment that was going on in places like . . . Texas.
There was push back from Oregon’s prosecutors (who noted there was no District Attorney on a commission about public safety). Several state legislators also grew suspicious about the true nature of the commission, so Kitzhaber added a few new members – including a DA, a defense attorney and director of the Oregon Dept. of Corrections – and brought the commission back this year.
Last week, the commission had a brief first meeting in Salem. It started off not unlike last year’s meetings, with someone from the Pew Center on the States sharing good news about justice reinvestment in places like … Georgia.
This time, though, there was a DA on the commission.
“I’m curious, can you tell me how we stood in our incarceration compared to states you have worked with?” asked Clackamas County District Attorney John Foote.
“You have a real moderate incarceration rate compared to the rest of the nation …,” said the Pew’s Zoe Towns. “Certainly your incarceration rate doesn’t look anything like Georgia.”
Foote pressed her: “I guess your answer would be Oregon is one of the lowest states you have looked at?”
Towns squirmed in her seat, turned and consulted with a colleague.
“It’s on the lower end,” she finally said.
When people like Bobbie Regan talk about shifting money from public safety, which inmates does she want to release?
Oregon only locks up its most serious offenders.
While she was on “Think Out Loud” Regan continued to praise UPSET – Underfunded Parents, Students and Educators, Together – a group started this spring by a Grant High School teacher.
She might want to pay some respects to a group that has been around a lot longer – MADD. There’s a reason why that organization has been active for more than 30 years.
UPSET will calm down and go away when their money woes are taken care of. MADD answers to a higher cause.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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I don’t know anything about the Portland school board. I was over here reading something else, and can only tell you from my experience dealing with a school board in another state, most of them are nice white ladies who mean well. There idea of being bold is serving ethnic food in the cafeteria.
The thing that saved my son was sending him to private school.