As a Portland School Board member, I will champion a positive, proactive, citywide effort to increase enrollment in Portland Public Schools. Instead of reacting to demographic shifts and the departure of families to the suburbs with destructive and self-defeating closures and consolidations, let’s focus on stabilizing and improving both schools and our city.

Let’s all work together — Portland Public Schools, the City, Metro, the County, neighborhoods, the business community, parents, teachers, and staff — to retain and attract families to our public schools.

Here are just a few of the positive ideas for increasing enrollment that I will work for as a School Board member:

• Partner with the City on the Schools, Family, Housing Initiative, which will increase housing that is affordable for families while helping improve school facilities. As a taxpayer and a citizen, I want to see the schools and the City working directly together for the common good. This initiative provides an exciting opportunity for partnership and real progress for families, schools, and neighborhoods.
• Expand programs introducing local, healthy food in our cafeterias, cooked by our own cafeteria workers, including partnerships between farmers markets, community gardens, and nearby schools.
• Build upon successful programs such as Safe Routes to Schools and the Bicycle Transportation Alliance's biking safety classes to encourage as many families as possible to walk or bike to school. It's healthier for our kids and our neighborhoods to get out of our cars.
• Explore ways to bring the community into schools buildings, such as designating community meeting rooms within schools, co-locating local agencies or nonprofits within schools. This would not only help with the costs of maintaining buildings, but also would increase involvement and connections with the broader community.
• Pursue placing a quality, affordable preschool program at every school. Once they “belong” to their local school, families are less likely to go elsewhere. Quality early childhood education is an investment that pays off for our entire society.