Portland Examiner: No on construction bonds

From the Portland Examiner:

My personal favorite construction project in the $178 million unnecessary repair portion of the bond issue is providing covered playgrounds for schools with very uncertain physical education program funding. Yes for protected playgrounds. Maybe not for physical education teachers.

Jefferson High School: After years of failed reforms the only solution for PPS is more money

Portland's Jefferson High School has suffered through 40 years of reforms, realignments, and overhauls.  With every change, more and more students flee the failing school. As the Oregonian reports:

Wholesale reinvention is not new for Jefferson. Since the late 1990s, the school has been subjected to a constant churn of reforms and changes, many of them ill-conceived, poorly supported or both. As principals came and went, sometimes several in a single year, the faculty has been upended and the school remade into subject-area academies, then grade-level academies, then back to a unified school.

Portland Public Schools latest plan is to spend tens of millions of dollars to rebuild Jefferson as a mini college.  Remember, this is the same school where more than half the students do not meet state standards for math or science.

And now they're ready to go to college? Early?

The Oregonian reports that interest in the program is weak:

Although nearly 400 eighth-graders live nearby and have limited choices apart from Jefferson, however, the school has not been swamped with interest.