A guide to school district data

1The big picture

Why Portland Public Schools is talking about closing schools.

Portland Public Schools (PPS) is one of Oregon's largest school districts. Enrollment has been falling for about a decade, and PPS's forecasters expect it to keep falling. Fewer children are being born in Portland, housing costs push families with young children out of the city, and some families moved to other districts or to private school during and after the pandemic.

The number of school buildings hasn't changed to match. A school costs a certain amount to run no matter how many students it has: it needs a principal, an office, a custodian, heat, and a roof. When enrollment falls but the number of schools doesn't, each school gets smaller, and the district spends more per student on fixed costs. At the same time, PPS's costs are rising faster than its revenue, mostly because of salaries, health care, and pensions (see section 7).

Rightsizing is PPS's name for the process of matching its schools to the number of students it actually has. In practice that means some combination of closing or merging schools, changing which grades a school serves, moving programs, and redrawing attendance areas. In October 2026 PPS released two draft scenarios: Scenario A closes 14 schools and Scenario B closes 11. The superintendent recommends a plan in November and the school board votes in December.

2Kinds of schools, and how students get assigned

Not every school works the same way, and that changes what its numbers mean.

Grade configurations

PPS schools are grouped by the grades they serve. An elementary school is usually kindergarten through 5th grade (written K-5). A middle school serves grades 6 to 8. A K-8 keeps students in one building from kindergarten through 8th grade. PK means pre-kindergarten, which some buildings also house.

Grade configuration matters for rightsizing because changing it is one of the tools. "Converting a K-8 to a K-5" means its 6th to 8th graders move to a middle school, which shrinks one building and grows another without closing either.

Neighborhood schools and attendance areas

Most PPS schools are neighborhood schools. Every address in the district is assigned to one elementary or K-8 school, one middle school, and one high school. The area a school draws from is its attendance area, also called its boundary or catchment. These all mean the same thing: the map shape that decides which school a child is assigned to by default.

A boundary change redraws those shapes, so some addresses switch schools. It's the quietest rightsizing tool, because no building closes, but it can move a lot of students.

The chain of schools a neighborhood's students move through (elementary, then middle, then high) is a feeder pattern. Changing one school can ripple down the chain.

Focus options, alternative schools, and charters

Some schools don't have an attendance area. Focus option schools offer a particular approach (environmental science, arts, or a program for highly gifted students) and admit students through an application lottery. Alternative schools serve students who need a different setting from a standard school.

Charter schools are public schools, free and open to anyone, but run by an independent organization under a contract (a "charter") with the district. PPS sponsors five. They're shown on this site for context, but PPS can't close a charter through rightsizing.

Dual language immersion (DLI)

In a dual language immersion program, students learn in two languages, often with half the day in Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, or Vietnamese. Admission is by lottery. Many immersion programs share a building with a regular neighborhood program, so one school can contain two groups of students: the immersion strand and the neighborhood program.

This matters because the two groups can behave very differently. An immersion strand draws students from across the city, so a school's total enrollment can look healthy while its neighborhood program is small, or the other way around. In the scenarios, an immersion strand can move to a different building on its own.

3Counting students

Why the same school can have three different enrollment numbers, and how forecasts work.

Enrollment counts

Enrollment sounds simple, but it depends on who is counting and when. The official count is taken on October 1 each year. PPS publishes its own counts in late October. The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) publishes the state's version, called Fall Membership, a few months later, after cleaning the data. The two usually differ by a few students, and they can treat programs differently: ODE, for example, reports Hayhurst and the Odyssey program it houses as one school.

You'll also see 2025-26 style labels. A school year starts in one calendar year and ends in the next, so "2025-26" is the year that began in fall 2025.

Enrollment forecasts

PPS's enrollment forecasts come from Portland State University's Population Research Center (PRC), which produces them each summer, ten years out, for every school.

The method is called a cohort model. A cohort is a group of students moving through school together, like this year's 2nd graders. PRC looks at how many students usually carry over from one grade to the next at each school (its grade progression ratio) and rolls each cohort forward. Kindergarten is the hard part, because those children aren't in school yet: PRC estimates it from births and the share of local five-year-olds who usually enroll.

PRC publishes a low, medium, and high scenario. The medium one is the planning number. Forecasts for middle schools are more certain than for elementary schools, because most future middle schoolers are already enrolled.

Housing and future students

New housing can bring new students, so the site also shows new residential permits and Metro's forecast of where housing will be built. Metro's forecast comes from its Buildable Land Inventory (BLI), which estimates how much housing each piece of land could hold under current zoning.

"Sustainable" school size

In its scenarios PPS uses a minimum size for a school to work well: at least 360 students for a K-5 and 500 for a K-8 or middle school. The idea is that a 360-student elementary school has about two classes per grade, which gives flexibility to balance class sizes and pays for staff like a full-time librarian or counselor. A school with one class per grade has no room to adjust when a grade is unusually big or small.

4Buildings and capacity

How PPS measures how full a school is, and why people disagree about the numbers.

Gross capacity

Start with the building. Gross capacity is the most students the classrooms could physically hold. PPS measures every room of 500 square feet or more and assigns it a student count by size: 24 students for a room under 800 square feet, 27 for 800 to 1,000, and 30 for anything larger. Add them up and you get gross capacity.

Functional capacity

Not every classroom is used for a regular class. A room might be a special education classroom, a preschool, a computer lab, an art room, or leased to an outside group. Functional capacity is PPS's estimate of how many students a building can actually serve after those uses are set aside. It's built in two more steps:

• Subtract rooms used for something else. Each special education focus room removes 12 seats; each preschool room, learning center, gym, computer lab, art or music room, or leased room removes 27.
• Apply a utilization rate. Elementary and K-8 buildings count at 100% of what's left; middle and high schools at 85%, because students move between rooms and not every room can be full every period. Schools with extra federal or state support designations (Title I, TSI, CSI; see section 5) lose 5 more points each, to leave room for smaller groups.

Utilization

Utilization compares students to that capacity:

A school at 60% utilization has room for about two-thirds more students under PPS's planning rules. A school over 100% has more students than its planning capacity and may be using portables or converting other rooms.

Seismic risk and URM buildings

Portland sits in an earthquake zone, and many PPS buildings are close to a century old. A seismic retrofit strengthens a building so it's less likely to collapse in an earthquake. The riskiest type is unreinforced masonry (URM): brick or stone walls with no steel inside to hold them together. In a strong quake, URM walls can crumble.

In 2024 Holmes Engineering estimated what it would cost to fully retrofit every PPS school. These are ROM (rough order of magnitude) estimates: good for comparing schools, not a construction bid.

Bonds

Voters approve bonds to pay for construction and major repairs. Bond money can only be spent on buildings, never on teachers or programs. That's why a district can be rebuilding schools and cutting staff at the same time. When this site says a retrofit is "funded," it means a voter-approved bond covers it.

5Who the students are

The measures used to describe a school's students, and what each one actually captures.

Poverty: free lunch and direct certification

Schools don't ask families their income directly, so poverty is measured through school meal programs. There are two common measures, and the difference matters.

Free or reduced-price lunch (FRL) is the older one. Families fill out a form with their income, and children below certain limits qualify. It has become less reliable: many high-poverty schools now serve free meals to everyone (a federal option called the Community Eligibility Provision), so families have no reason to fill out the form.

Direct certification skips the form. The state matches school enrollment against records from other assistance programs, and a student is certified for free meals automatically if their household gets SNAP (food stamps) or TANF (cash assistance), or if they're in foster care, homeless, or a migrant student. Because it only counts families already enrolled in means-tested aid, it captures deeper poverty than FRL and doesn't depend on paperwork.

It's also the stronger predictor: on this site, a school's direct certification rate tracks its test scores more closely than FRL or any race or ethnicity measure. PPS uses it to direct extra staff to schools.

Title I, TSI, and CSI

Title I is the largest federal program for schools that serve many low-income students. A school with enough poverty can run a "schoolwide" Title I program, using the money for extra staff and support for everyone in the building.

TSI (Targeted Support and Improvement) and CSI (Comprehensive Support and Improvement) are designations under federal accountability law. The state gives them to schools where some or all students are falling well behind, and the schools get extra help. PPS reduces these schools' capacity slightly to leave room for smaller groups.

English learners

Students still learning English are called English learners (ELs), multilingual learners, or in older federal data, LEP (limited English proficient). They get English Language Development (ELD) instruction until they test as proficient.

Talented and gifted (TAG)

Oregon requires districts to identify and serve talented and gifted students. Most TAG students stay in their regular schools; ACCESS Academy is PPS's school for highly gifted students.

Test scores and attendance

OSAS, the Oregon Statewide Assessment System, is the state test in English language arts and math. A school's proficiency rate is the share of students who score at "meets" or "exceeds" the state standard.

A student is chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of school days, for any reason. ODE also reports the flip side, the share of regular attenders.

Class size and students per teacher

Students per teacher divides all students by all teachers, including specialists who don't have a class of their own. It's always lower than the class size a child actually sits in. Both are useful, but they aren't interchangeable.

6Special education

How students with disabilities are served, and why closures raise specific questions for them.

IEPs and SPED

A federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), guarantees students with disabilities a free, appropriate public education. A student who qualifies gets an Individualized Education Program (IEP): a written plan, agreed on by the family and school, that lists the student's goals and the services they'll receive. Those services can be speech therapy, time with a special education teacher, an aide in class, or a specialized classroom.

Special education, often shortened to SPED or SpEd, is the umbrella term for all of it. "Students with IEPs" and "special education students" mean the same group. Across the 74 schools on this site, the typical school has about 18% of students with IEPs, and the share ranges from about 7% to 34%.

The law also requires the least restrictive environment (LRE): students with disabilities should learn alongside students without disabilities as much as their needs allow.

Learning centers and focus classrooms

Most students with IEPs spend most of the day in a regular classroom and get some services from a special education teacher, often in a room called the Learning Center.

Students with more intensive needs may be placed in a focus classroom: a smaller, specialized class with more adults. PPS has several types, including Social Emotional Skills (SES), Communication and Behavior (CB), and Intensive Skills (ISC) classrooms. These are housed in particular buildings, and students may travel from across the district to attend them. Creston also houses a program for students who are Deaf or hard of hearing (DHH).

Inclusive Community Schools

PPS is moving toward an inclusion model, also called the Neighborhood School Model. Instead of busing students with IEPs to a focus classroom elsewhere, the goal is for them to attend their neighborhood school, in general education classes with siblings and friends, with support brought to them. PPS's phrase is that special education is a service, not a place. Schools running this model are called Inclusive Community Schools. The model started with kindergarten at pilot schools and adds a grade each year.

Inclusion depends on staffing: case managers (the special education teacher responsible for each student's IEP) and paraeducators or "paras" (aides who support students in class). In PPS's budget, these schools show up with extra "NSM building paras."

Why closures raise questions here

When a school closes, its students with IEPs move with everyone else. The question isn't whether the share of students with IEPs changes much at the receiving school (it usually doesn't), but whether the receiving school gets enough staff and space for a caseload that may double or triple. Focus classrooms also have to go somewhere.

7Where the money comes from, and where it goes

The basics of a school district budget, and why closing schools doesn't change revenue.

The General Fund

A district keeps its money in separate funds, each with its own rules. The General Fund is the main one, used to run schools day to day: teachers, principals, buses, utilities. Bond money, federal grants, and school meals are in other funds. When people talk about "the budget" and cuts, they usually mean the General Fund.

Revenue

PPS's General Fund comes mainly from three places:

• Local property taxes.
• The State School Fund, Oregon's formula for paying districts per student. Students who cost more to educate count extra in the formula: students with IEPs, English learners, and students in poverty, among others. The weighted count is called ADMw (weighted average daily membership).
• A local option levy, an extra property tax Portland voters approve for schools, most recently renewed in May 2024.

Spending, FTE, and central staff

About four of every five General Fund dollars pay for people, in salaries and benefits. Staffing is counted in FTE (full-time equivalent): one full-time position is 1.0 FTE, and two half-time positions add up to 1.0 too.

Some staff are assigned to a school through a staffing formula based on its enrollment. Others are central staff: assigned by the district and shared across schools, like special education, English language development, nutrition, and custodial staff. PPS's published per-school dollars leave out central staff, so they understate the full cost of a school.

Purchased services are payments to outside companies and agencies instead of PPS employees: bus contracts, utilities, payments to charter schools, and so on.

Pensions (PERS)

Oregon public employees, including teachers, earn a pension through the Public Employees Retirement System (PERS). Employers pay into it as a percentage of payroll. The state sets that employer rate every two years, based on how the pension fund's investments are doing and how much it owes retirees. PPS's rate has risen from about 4% of payroll to about 20%.

Some districts, PPS among them, borrowed in the early 2000s to pay down their pension debt early. The borrowed money sits in a side account that lowers the district's rate. Many of those side accounts across Oregon run out in 2027, which is one reason pension costs jump for school districts starting in the 2027-28 school year.

The structural gap and the reserve

A structural gap means ongoing costs grow faster than ongoing revenue, so the problem comes back every year instead of going away after one bad year. Oregon law requires each year's budget to balance, so the district has to close the gap before it adopts a budget, by cutting costs or using savings.

The reserve (or contingency) is the savings cushion. PPS's policy floor is 5% of the General Fund, and it's at that floor now. Federal pandemic relief (ESSER) paid for staff for a few years and then ended, which is part of why the gap opened.

PPS projects a gap of about $65 million for 2027-28. It plans to close that by reducing the budget, including proportional cuts to central departments. Separately, it estimates closures would free up $10 million to $12 million a year, which it plans to reinvest in the remaining schools rather than count toward the gap. PPS says that reinvestment is permanent and goes mainly to school staffing.

Budgets come in stages: proposed (the superintendent's draft in spring) and adopted (what the board approves in June). PPS publishes the budget in volumes; Volume 1 is the district overview and Volume 2 has school-by-school detail.

8Rightsizing, step by step

The vocabulary of the scenarios, and what actually happens to students.

Closures, merges, and receiving schools

When a school closes, its building stops operating as that school and its students are assigned elsewhere. A school that takes them in is a receiving school. A merge or consolidation is the same thing described from the other side: two school communities become one, usually in one of the two buildings. A closing school's students may all go to one receiving school, or be split among several, sometimes by neighborhood and sometimes by program (immersion students to one school, neighborhood students to another).

The other tools

• Grade changes: a K-8 becomes a K-5 and its older students go to a middle school, or the reverse.
• Program moves: an immersion strand or focus program moves to another building.
• Boundary changes: attendance areas are redrawn so students are assigned to a different school.

Most scenarios combine all four. That's why the district dot plot on the Scenarios section shows four categories, not just "closes" and "stays open."

What closing a school saves, and costs

Most of a school's budget is teachers, and the students still need teachers wherever they go, so those costs mostly move rather than disappear. The savings come from things a building needs regardless of size: a principal, office staff, custodians, utilities, and upkeep. There are also costs: moving, transition support, longer bus rides, and sometimes extra staff at a receiving school that grows past a staffing threshold.

9Reading the numbers

A few habits that keep data from saying more than it does.

PPS's figures and this site's estimates

Most numbers here are PPS's or the state's, copied from their reports. Some are this site's own estimates, like how many students a receiving school would have, or how much closures might save. Those are labeled as estimates. They use simple, stated assumptions and leave things out (boundary changes, for one), so treat them as a rough guide and check PPS's own numbers when they come out.

Counts versus shares

A count is how many (120 students with IEPs). A share or rate is how many out of the total (20% of students have IEPs). Big schools have bigger counts of almost everything, so counts mostly tell you about size. To compare schools of different sizes, use shares. Use counts when the question is about workload, like how many students a counselor or case manager has to serve.

Correlation

A correlation measures how closely two things move together across schools, from −1 (one always goes down as the other goes up) through 0 (no relationship) to +1 (they always rise together). It's written as r. As a rough guide, r around 0.2 is weak, 0.4 is moderate, and 0.7 or more is strong.

A result is called statistically significant when it would be unlikely to show up by chance alone. With only a few dozen schools, fairly large correlations can still be chance, and "significant" doesn't mean "important." Correlation also doesn't tell you why two things move together: high-poverty schools have lower test scores, but that alone doesn't say what would raise them.

Different years

The sources were published at different times, so a school's row can mix years: 2025-26 enrollment, 2021 capacity, 2024-25 test scores, 2020-21 staffing data. Each column on the site says which year it's from.

Term index

Jump to where each term is explained.