Portland Tribune, 4/7/06: "Phillips’ schools plan put under microscope"

Superintendent Vicki Phillips’ proposed budget and plan to close and reconfigure schools this week caps at least five months of polls, tax scenarios, community meetings, rallies and competing visions of what Portland’s schools should look like.

That’s why it took Phillips nearly an hour to explain the sweeping proposal to the media and public on Tuesday, leaving most of the crowd of parents, school board members and observers scratching their heads and trying to digest it all.

“The devil’s in the details. We’re still trying to look through it to see what it means,” says Ruth Adkins, a member of the grass-roots Neighborhood Schools Alliance. The day after the announcement, the group raised at least a dozen questions about the logistics, rationale and validity of different aspects of Phillips’ plan.

Among them: “Why must successful neighborhood schools close simply because they aren’t big enough?” “Why the sudden, headlong rush to K-8?” and “How much will we really end up paying to carry out this huge, complex transformation?