School closures are on the horizon for Portland Public Schools, and now several dozen parents are calling for the district to begin with Access Academy, its specialized school for talented and gifted students that has a waiting list longer than the number of students currently enrolled.
In a petition that's garnered about 40 signatures, the group of parents call for Access to be closed to help shore up underenrolled neighborhood schools.
"Our preference would be to bring the money [that it costs to run Access, or about $3.4 million annually] to the neighborhood schools and serve kids there. We are concerned that a program like this detracts from how neighborhood schools could be even better," said Nicholas Hengen Fox, a parent whose child attends Sabin Elementary. "[Access] serves only about 8% of the students who are qualified. If it is really such a vital service, then we are doing a bad job of providing services to all the kids qualified to receive them."
Access families, meanwhile, have mobilized quickly to defend the program, which enrolls about 320 students and has a waitlist of 340 students for a spot in grades two through eight. They say that rather than close the program, Portland Public Schools should expand it to meet the need that the mile-long waitlist suggests.
"Their solution to this problem is to eliminate Access?" asked parent Jonathan Pulvers, whose daughter is an Access student. "It's an odd solution to that problem. Why not increase supply? The sentiment at Access would strongly support a second program."
District leaders and school board members have sent signals that they are not especially interested in closing Access, several parents from the school said. The Oregon Department of Education has repeatedly warned the district it has not met state requirements for meeting the needs of gifted students, and the district has also faced multiple lawsuits over its TAG programming or lack thereof..
But the push and pull over Access provides an early preview of how charged and personal the politics around school closures can become, a cautionary tale for Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong, who has said that Portland Public Schools may well need to consider closures this year, along with redrawing of attendance boundaries, given declining enrollment projections.
Portland Public Schools has a complicated modern history with schooling for exceptionally advanced students. In 1997, a group of parents filed a complaint with the Oregon Department of Education alleging that the district was out of compliance with state rules requiring them to provide services to talented and gifted students.
The following year, state regulators agreed with their contention, and ordered Portland Public Schools to get into compliance or face consequences.
Access Academy was a solution. To enter the admission lottery for the program, prospective students must score in the 99th percentile of a nationally normed test in reading or math or cognitive abilities, and demonstrate via testimony from their parents and teachers that their needs are not being met in their neighborhood school.
In practice, Pulvers and Fox agree, talented and gifted services at neighborhood schools vary widely, even from classroom to classroom. The school district screens every student for talented and gifted identification in second grade, using a nationally normed test.
Students who score in the 99th percentile on either the reading or math section of the test are notified that they are eligible to apply to Access. In 2023, about 1,200 families received such notifications, according to the district's TAG plan.
Not every family chooses to apply, and not every family who enters the Access lottery gets a spot. That means in theory that talented and gifted students who don't attend Access should get instruction tailored to their level at their neighborhood schools. But in the absence of dedicated resources and amid so many other pressing needs, such differentiation varies from classroom to classroom, parents on both sides of the Access question agree.
Access's demographic population has shifted along over the course of its 20-some years in operation, as it has moved locations.
It opened at Sabin K-8 in Northeast Portland in 2001 and then moved to Rose City Park Elementary school a dozen years later, where it stayed until that building was repurposed as a neighborhood school, to relieve overcrowding at Beverly Cleary K-8.
When Guadalupe Guerrero, Armstrong's predecessor, first came to Portland in 2017, he proposed several different locations for Access, infuriating communities that such a move would have displaced in the process. All those locations were shelved, along with Guerrero's proposal to create talented and gifted "hub" sites at neighborhood middle schools, similar to the "Summa" model in place in the neighboring Beaverton school district.
Eventually, a temporary solution was found in 2019: Split Access into two programs, one for elementary pupils and one for middle schoolers, and co-locate it at Vestal Elementary and Lane Middle School.
A few years later, Access landed in its current location at the long-shuttered Terwilliger Elementary School in Southwest Portland's John's Landing neighborhood.
Portland Public Schools provides transportation to Access students who live more than a mile from the campus, which sets the program apart from the district's handful of "choice schools" -- non-neighborhood magnet programs that specialize in science, the arts or social studies -- which require families to work out their own transportation to and from school.
Access families say the program's current location in Southwest Portland has likely contributed to its critics' concerns that the program serves fewer Black and Latino students and more students from higher income families than district averages.
According to district data, 17% of its students are from the Wells High attendance zone in Southwest Portland, 16% are from the Cleveland High cluster in Southeast Portland and 15% are from the neighborhoods where schools feed into Franklin High School in Southeast Portland. By contrast, only 8% of its students come from the McDaniel High attendance zone in Northeast Portland and 4% of its students are from attendance zones around Roosevelt High in North Portland, which are both farther away and serve larger shares of lower-income students.
Fox said income inequities are at the heart of the concerns of those who want to see Access closed.
"There are a lot of inequities," he said. "And the fact that a lot of those kids come from higher socioeconomic status ZIP codes makes it hard for me to weigh that against kids who really need reading and math supports in order to graduate. Couldn't the [TAG] needs be met at neighborhood schools? I have seen how great they can be for kids in a lot of different ways."
But Pulvers cautioned against assuming that displaced Access students would automatically return to the public school system. His own child would do so, he said, but "some minority of students would not return," as their parents sought alternatives to best fit their family's needs. "It's a fact, not a threat," Pulvers added.
-- Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com