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Aaron Mesh - Should Portland Keep Half-Empty Schools Open Just to Save Jobs?
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Aaron Mesh, managing editor for Willamette Week, joins Lars to discuss Portland Public Schools considering closing 10 to 20 schools as enrollment continues to decline and the district faces a $65.2 million budget reset. Should Portland keep half-empty schools open just to protect jobs?
Hey, welcome back to the program and welcome back to the Radio Northwest Network. Consider this one of the best things that public school systems do in both Oregon and Washington is maintain empty buildings. That's right. They keep those schools, they'll stay in the neighborhoods, it keeps the real estate values up. But does it actually do any good for the kids? No, I don't think it does. But to talk about it, Aaron Mashjoins is now managing editor at Will Emma Week and can find their stories at W Week.com. So, Aaron, Portland public schools are losing students hand over fist. And now they're talking about closing as many as 20 of its elementary and middle schools, and yet the teachers union is going to call to keep the schools open?
SPEAKER_00
It's looking that way for sure. So have we talked about this issue before? I can't remember if we've got to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01
I know I've brought it up before because it angers me that you'd spend money on empty buildings instead of spending money on educating children, which I thought was the point.
SPEAKER_00
So the the big question that PPS faces, the the existential crisis that PPS faces, the which I know you and I have talked about, is the fact that enrollment continues to drop. That uh that the district will almost certainly be uh be dropping by another 10 to 18 percent uh of student body in the next 10 years. Uh it has already seen precipitous declines uh as the student body continues to shrink, and it's shrinking for reasons that I think I've outlined with you before, which uh would have to do with families fleeing the city of Portland, uh, other families choosing to pull their kids out of the public school system and go to private schools or homeschooling. But the the pool is shrinking of students, uh, and the pool of teachers hasn't shrunk with them, and the pool of buildings hasn't shrunk with them. So the reality is that you're facing a uh depleted customer base, if you want to be crass about it. Uh and when you have fewer customers, you need fewer buildings to serve them. Um this is the same kind of contraction that leads to like a McDonald's or Burger King shuttering. Uh if there are just too many uh on one block, they uh they close down. Uh and uh that's what's happening to the school system. And and the reality, of course, when you shut down uh if there's no longer uh McDonald's on uh on uh foster in 80 seconds, and there's just one up in Montevilla in 80 seconds, that means that there's going to be uh a lot less burger flippers uh when there's when you shrunk the number of McDonald's by half. And I use this analogy because uh it just seems to me that like some of the basic economics seem to be lost on the teachers union uh when understanding what it is that's gonna have to happen when you have a depleted customer base like this.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and there's a way to try to turn it around, but it's not what the public schools have been doing lately, especially, you know, we pointed out earlier this week having a drag queen welcoming all the kids back to school in a video message from the district doesn't seem like the way to communicate to parents you take the education of the kids seriously. And so you have fewer teachers, and yet the teachers' union may say keep those buildings open, but how does that benefit the teachers?
SPEAKER_00
Well, it benefits the teachers because there are more jobs. So uh when you eliminate a building, uh that means that uh that you are going to begin eliminating some of the support staff in that building. Very likely if you eliminate an elementary school and you go from like uh two neighborhood schools, let's say we go from two neighborhood elementary schools to one neighborhood elementary school, uh, well, you just lost a principal. You probably just lost an assistant principal. So the question is like, did you just did you like uh bust them back down to being teachers inside that school? And if you bust them back down to being teachers, well, then suddenly you probably have a couple too many teachers uh inside that new contracted school because the principal's now a teacher, right? So like now like there's a question of like who's gonna get bumped out at that point, and probably it's the most recently hired teacher. So look, the unions have a job to do, the unions are gonna advocate for their uh for their membership. Um I I think what makes this sort of interesting is that uh parents also don't like when a neighborhood school closes. And so if you have a teachers union that is advocating for its membership not to close the school because it's bad for the teachers, at least in the short term, although long term there are enormous benefits to teachers in closing schools. Uh if you have the teachers union looking at the short term about how many jobs they're going to lose, and you have parents looking at the short term of not wanting their kids to have to travel further away from home to go to school, and you have a uh school board that is um filled with quislings who are terrified of uh alienating their uh their union backers, then you may have a process that isn't going to end in a district that is the right size.
SPEAKER_01
I guess what I wonder is is they know the school district's in financial trouble. They know the number of kids is declined. It used to be in the 50,000 range, now it's about 42,000. And as you said, it's going to drop another, you know, maybe 18 percent over the next 10 years. So as long as you keep employing a lot of teachers and teachers you don't need for the students that you have, um, then you're not going to have the money to pay them. But if you actually reduced the number of teaching positions uh and you have fewer teaching positions and the same amount of money, then you'll have more money to pay each of those teachers, and you won't have the budget problems anymore. And if you look at their most recent numbers at air and distance, that's ought to stun anybody. Because I know there are people who listen to what I say about it, and they say, Oh, you're just wrong. Okay, let's take their own numbers. 43,000 students, 42,785, 2,700 educators. You know what the ratio of that is? It's 16 kids per teacher. I mean, that sounds like the best private schools out there. And yet you'll you'll hear everybody say, oh, we've got these overcrowded classrooms and we got 40 kids crammed in with every teacher. Well, the math doesn't suggest that's the truth. It suggests more like it's 16 to 1, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00
Well, it does. Uh I and I and I understand from talking to Joanna who wrote this story, Joanna Ho is the right uh the reporter on this story that the the al the the the allocations across classrooms are gonna vary, right? Like there are some high schools in which there are a bunch more kids, and there are some middle schools in which there are a bunch less kids. Like it's never gonna be as clean as 16 to one per classroom. But what but your your basic math is correct, and I think another really important statistic is that from 17 until now, we've seen an enrollment decline of 10%. During that same time, we've seen a contraction of teachers via layoffs or other re reasons, a personnel decline in teachers of only 1%. So what that means is that again, the the labor reality isn't matching the customer base. So um that's a math problem. That's an economics problem. There like uh there's politics here, but one one of the things that drives me a little bit crazy is when um is when we have political conversations that don't seem to be rooted in like a basic understanding of shared facts. Those numbers don't change no matter how you like shift them around and stare at them from different angles. It's not a magic eye painting.
SPEAKER_01
No, and consider this the other story that Well Emmet Week has done a fantastic job on the half billion dollar high schools that Portland is building right now that are some of the most expensive high schools in the United States of America, bar none, at almost half a billion dollars apiece. And at the same time they're building these massive big high schools, they're losing the students. You can read the latest story at W Week.com. Aaron Mesh is its managing editor. Back in a moment. And Oregon sanctuary law. Let a convicted child abuser walk free again and again. We'll get to that next.
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