Things just got a little brighter for Portland Public Schools with the overwhelming election of Ruth Adkins. Adkins garnered endorsements from all four major Portland print media outlets, and trounced Doug Morgan by nearly 20 percentage points.

Michelle Schultz, who did not have such establishment support behind her, still managed a respectable showing against the pre-anointed David Wynde. Bobbie Regan, running unopposed, lost 3% of the vote to write-in candidates.

Those who hired and supported Vicki Philips are now in a minority on the board. With Philips gone and her cheerleaders backed into a corner, we can now start rebuilding in earnest.

Congrats to Ruth!

It takes great chutzpah to choose Rachmaninoff’s infamous 3rd Piano Concerto as an 18 year old. It takes even more chutzpah — and raw talent and sheer dedication — to pull it off with aplomb.

Judy Park did both Saturday with the Portland Youth Philharmonic. Park led off the PYP’s final concert of the season, also the final Portland concert with Mei-Ann Chen as Conductor.

As chance would have it, Wacky Mommy and I put off buying tickets until just before the show, and chose seats I normally wouldn’t consider from the few that were remaining. Front row, keyboard side, with a perfect view of Chen, Park (and her hands!) and the first violins. Park nailed Rach 3 technically, with strong backing from the orchestra. It was an audacious choice of material. Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote it to show off his own virtuosic piano skills, and many seasoned professionals shy away from it. It’s considered the most difficult concerto in the classical piano repertoire.

Despite all these warning signs, the young Ms. Park plunged ahead and pulled off not only a stunning technical display, but also a nuanced, emotional and powerful rendering of the beast. It left me wanting to hear more of Park, and I have a feeling we will have the chance to hear much more from her as she matures as an artist and enters the professional world.

After the intermission, the brass section took up two opposing formations for a brief antiphonal fanfare by self-taught Japanese Composer Toru Takemitsu, from his Signals from Heaven. Takemitsu claimed Debussy as his “teacher”, and Chen followed his sleepy fanfare with a Debussy Nocturne.

The evening was capped off with Béla Bartók‘s Concerto for Orchestra. I’m kind of a Bartók nut, so this was a great capper for the evening. There is nothing on this Earth that compares to sitting in the front row with your eyes closed, enveloped with the three dimensional world of sound sketching the ethereal outlines of Bartók’s soul onto your psyche.

I’m ashamed to say that this is the first PYP concert I’ve been too. I’m very sad to have missed Mei-Ann Chen’s tenure here. Judging from her final concert, she is something of an undiscovered genius. She had an obvious rapport with the musicians (several of them presented her with flowers and touching tributes at the end of the evening). But she is also an obvious task master, a stickler for details, and forceful, emotive and sure in her conducting. She had this band of teenagers playing together in ways many (ahem) professional orchestras don’t pull off on a typical night.

You still have one last chance to hear Chen lead the PYP, May 27, 2007, 4:00 PM at the Resort at the Mountain in Welches, Ore., featuring highlights from the ’06-’07 season.

Ballots are due in a week for the May, 2007 special election on May 15. This is a very important election for the struggling Portland Public Schools. The Vicki Phillips era is thankfully ending, and two of her major supporters have worthy opponents in the race. I’ve already gone on record in my support of Neighborhood Schools Alliance founder Ruth Adkins, who is running against Phillips’ cheerleader Doug Morgan.

I’m also throwing my hat in the ring for Michele Schulz, who is challenging another Phillips supporter, David Wynde.

Victories for Schulz and Adkins will be a major win for the children of Portland, which is to say the future of Portland. Both represent grass-roots, community based ideas, and both represent a positive change from leadership that has given us the Jeferson Cluster debacle, fast-track school closures and radical school reconfiguration, all with token (if any) community involvement.

Please vote soon so that you don’t forget. As I mentioned in an earlier post of the subject, even if you just skip the city charter change questions, just mark the ballot for these two candidates and stick it in the mail. It’s that important!

Ballots are arriving for the May special election in Portland. Don’t forget to vote for Ruth Adkins for school board! Ruth represents an opportunity for a fresh start and a new direction at Portland Public Schools. Even if you don’t vote for anything else on the ballot, please mark this one and drop it in the mail. With the departure of Vicki Phillips and the district in near chaos, we need Adkins’ vision, leadership and common sense more than ever.

The news today that Vicki Phillips is stepping down as Portland Public Schools Superintendent comes as good news to those of us who have been critical of her leadership.

Perhaps her three-year legacy can best be summed up in three words: Jefferson Cluster Fuck. The planning for Portland’s only majority black high school and its feeder schools has been an abysmal failure of imagination and leadership. With only token community input, Phillips produced a disjointed plan that the community overwhelmingly rejected. The Jefferson campus was to be segregated by gender, with Tubman Middle School closed and the building used for an all-girls 7-12 school (two miles from the actual Jefferson campus). The boys would get their 7-12 school in Jefferson proper (shared with three other 9-12 “acadamies”). You see, you can’t trust young black men around young women. Also, you need discipline, so these 7-12 schools would require uniforms.

It is inconceivable that this type of plan would have been floated for a majority white school in Portland. It is further inconceivable that this was floated as a way to increase attendance and save Jefferson. Inconceivable, I tell ya!

But it gets even better. In order to add to the chaos, Ockley Green, the other middle school in the cluster, was converted to K-8 (how does that articulate to a 7-12 high school?), with plans to turn all the grade schools into K-8, too. Or just close them (this part they didn’t say out loud, but it’s been widely suspected that schools that are too small — or too close to Ockley — don’t have a part in this bizarre plan).

Because of tremendous public outcry, and underwhelming applications to the gender-segregated 7-12 schools, that part of the plan was delayed until the 2007-08 school year. We can only hope that with Phillips’ departure (and her hand-picked Jefferson principal floundering on administrative leave — see number two below), this asinine plan will be scrapped.

So here, in the spirit of Thursday Thirteen, are Thirteen Reasons Vicki Phillips Needed to Go. (Many thanks to the Neighborhood Schools Alliance for keeping such good tabs on Phillips during her stint here.)

1. The Jefferson Cluster Fuck, as detailed above. This alone was enough to disqualify her from further employment.

2. Leon Dudley, while technically part of the Jefferson Cluster Fuck, deserves his own item in the list. The district paid a head hunter $30,000 to help find him, but evidently they failed to take into account his troubling work history before offering him the job.

3. Her affinity with church-based education, exemplified by her attempt to sneak a church-run alternative school (to be housed at Jefferson) past the school board after they had unanimously rejected it as a charter school.

4. Sadly, this is part of a pattern of channeling taxpayer education funding to church-based organizations.

5. Her emphasis on closing down small, neighborhood-based, walking-distance schools, in favor of large, centralized schools.

6. Her alliances with conservative business interests and right-wing think tanks.

7. Her outsized PR budget.

8. Her general shoddiness in including the community in planning school closings.

9. Her general shoddiness in including the community in planning school boundary changes.

10. Her duplicitiousness on racial segregation. At the beginning of her tenure in Portland, she made a speech to the City Club of Portland decrying the trend of resegregation, correctly pegging it to liberal school transfer policies. (I can’t find the transcript anywhere, darn it.) But her policies, particularly with regard to Jefferson, seem designed to perpetuate segregation.

11. Her mismanagement of a $6.2 million federal grant that nearly led to its termination.

12. Her mis-diagnosis of declining enrollment as an artifact of demographics, and her failure to identify and address the true causes.

13. That hair. Good God, woman, are you hoping to get an award at your high school reunion for the one who looks the most like her senior portrait?

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist that last one.)

In all seriousness, I had high hopes for Phillips, as did many of my fellow Portlanders. And I realize that with unstable and inadequate school funding, there’s only so much you can do. Still, Phillips managed to blow it in ways nobody could have imagined three years ago. Good riddance.

You may have noticed that I’ve gotten really bad about writing these lists. For a while, it was a good impetus to write every week, but lately I’ve been pretty uninspired. Also, I don’t exactly fit in with the “TT” crowd, and I’m not good about visiting everybody’s blog to leave comments. Most of my online reading is political, and my writing tends that way, too. That’s a whole different ball of wax than most of the TTs, which tend toward the personal. Plus, I haven’t even been able to come up with thirteen things the last couple of times. Lame!

But since I’ve written some pretty snarky things about North Portland and Portland Public Schools lately, I thought I owed one to North Portland. Here goes. (Let’s see if I get to thirteen on this one.)

1. Great transportation. We’re two blocks from light rail transit, just a bit more to I-5. We can be downtown in 10 minutes by freeway or 15 minutes by train.

2. Hockey. The home of the Winter Hawks is in North Portland, just four light rail stops away.

3. Real neighborhoods. The streets are laid out in a grid. There are sidewalks. Parks. Nice old houses. Tree-lined streets.

4. Great views from the bluff.

5. More and more, nice urban amenities like bakeries, restaurants and shopping within walking distance.

6. Socio-economic diversity.

7. My choice of churches on Sunday.

8. The Peninsula Park sunken rose garden.

9. The Peninsula Park Community Center and pool.

10. The Portland Ship Yard on the site of the old Swan Island airport. This is viewable from the bluff, especially from University of Portland. It’s pretty cool to see the big ships in dry dock, and the old, gigantic tankers in fresh water storage before they’re sailed or towed to Asia to be scrapped.

11. My lovely wife.

12. My beautiful children.

13. My happy home.

Edited Friday, 4/20/2007: I can’t believe I forgot the St. Johns Bridge.

While I appreciate the New York Times Travel section doing a flattering story on Portland (I’ve still got my ode to the “Ugly Beauty” that is Portland in draft form to be published here soon), I wish once — just once — somebody would write a story about Portland that didn’t gush about Powell’s Books, the Rose Garden, Saturday Market, and all the hoity-toity restaurants in the Pearl.

So, in response to the NYT piece, here’s my 36 real Hours in North Portland. Maybe Portland isn’t so Nice after all.

Friday

6 p.m.
1) REAL PERSPECTIVE The roses in North Portland’s Peninsula Park won’t be in full bloom for several weeks, but you can get in a game of foosball or ping pong at the community center at the opposite end of the park. Don’t fuck with the surly teenagers gathered by the playground on your way, and they won’t fuck with you. There’s no view of the skyline here, just a real slice of Portland life.

7:30 p.m.
2) BRIGHT BURRITOS Walk north on Rosa Parks Avenue, taking in the view of the parking lot known as I-5 North (things may actually be breaking free by this hour), and grab a cheap burrito at El Burrito Loco. Don’t be put off by the filthy-looking, crumbling facility; this place regularly scores above 90 on county health inspections. After your burrito, play a game of Street Fighter or Michael Jackson Moonwalker, or grab a candy bar from the quaint vending machine padlocked to the booth.

10:30 p.m.
3) NOPO NIGHTLIFE With one of the most extreme free-speech clauses of any state constitution, Oregon has an over-abundance of strip clubs. No pasties and g-strings here, my New York friends! North Portland (known as “NoPo” to the gentrifying hordes of yuppies moving in on the cheap real estate) has it’s entry in the naughty naked category in the Dancin’ Bare. Hop on a modern and efficient MAX train at Rosa Parks and Interstate, and find a seat next to somebody who isn’t slumped over, smelling like cat pee, beer or vomit. This might not be possible, so you may want to just stand by the door and breathe through your mouth. Get off under the giant statue of Paul Bunyan, grinning contentedly across the tracks to the lovely beige edifice that is the Dancin’ Bare. Mix it up with all the local color of Harley-ridin’, knuckle-draggin’ mouth breathers on offer at this fine establishment of gentleman’s entertainment.

Saturday

10:30 a.m.
4) HANGOVER HELPER Nurse your Dancin’ Bear hangover with breakfast and a Bloody Mary at the Nite Hawk, one of Portland’s only restaurants with a unionized workforce. Just stumbling distance from North Interstate Avenue’s many neon-bedecked roach motels, the Nite Hawk has served customers at the corner of Interstate and Rosa Parks (formerly Portland Boulevard) since 1931.

12:30 p.m.
5) STRATEGIZE OVER LUNCH Head back up Interstate to Michoacan Restaurant, which doesn’t always score so great on the ol’ health inspections. Make sure to get plenty of fresh lime and chili with your meal to help fend off any microbes from improper food storage and handling.

2 p.m.
6) COFFEE OR SHOPPING? Why not both? Head a little further up Interstate and land at what the police warmly refer to as “The Gates of Hell,” better known to locals as Fred Meyer or simply “Freddy’s”. It looks a lot nicer since they knocked down the old shit hole facility that sat on the same site, but it’s still a haven for tweakers, shoplifters and street walkers. And it’s still chronically understaffed. But now they’ve got a Starbucks instead of Mickey D’s, so you can sip a latte as you stroll the friendly aisles, taking in the local color.

4 p.m.
7) ROLL OUT OF TOWN QUICKLY Ask a Freddy’s clerk to get a bike down off the rack for you to look at, and when they’re not looking, make like the locals and run out the front door with it. Take a pleasant ride heading west on North Lombard, fighting traffic all the way to the Peninsula Crossing Trail. Take the trail north, directly to Portland’s main sewage treatment plant. Take a break there before returning your bike to the friendly security guards at Freddy’s.

6 p.m.
8) CITY OF KOOKS Head back down Interstate on the MAX and do cocktail hour at the the Alibi, a fabulous tiki lounge . They may not have the karaoke fired up yet, but this is a great place to see and be seen by other North Portland tourists. Don’t expect to see anybody there who actually lives in North Portland, of course.

8 p.m.
9) NO RESERVATION REQUIRED The cheap, strong drinks at the Alibi will probably have you pretty tanked up by now, so you might as well stay put and order some delicious fried food from the nearly spotless Alibi fryer.

10 p.m.
10) HANG ON, ROCK OUT Hey, unless you really want to see some more of that action down at the Dancin’ Bare, you might as well stick around at the Alibi and watch the drunks embarrass themselves singing karaoke.

Sunday

8:30 a.m.
11) UNE GRANDE GUEULE DE BOIS, S’IL VOUS PLAîT Portland booze hounds don’t get up this early, so why should you? Sleep it off for a few hours. Most of the motels on Interstate rent hourly, so even if you sleep past checkout time, they won’t ding you for another full day.

9:30 a.m.
12) HOW NICE The meth monkeys in the unit next door have just rolled in after an all-nighter, and they’re having a knock-down, drag-out screaming fest. And looky here, the police just done showed up to take their two children into protective custody.

Print that, New York Times.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Portland dodged a major bullet yesterday, when a federal bankruptcy judge ruled that they don’t have to sell any properties to settle child sex abuse cases. In an answer to their prayers, they get to transfer church and school properties to the parishes. This is exactly what the gambled on when, in 2004, they were the first archdiocese in the US to file for bankruptcy protection in the face of hundreds of millions of dollars in sex abuse lawsuits.

Wacky Mommy took one look at the picture in the paper of St. Andrew’s Church in Northeast Portland and said “I wish they’d make them sell off their churches, and then they’d have to open up store-front churches like all the other churches in North Portland.” You know, like “Christ Died For Your Sins on the Bloody Cross of Holy Redemption Church of God in Christ our Lord.” But seriously, the Catholic Church’s holdings, including St. Andrew’s (pictured above) are quite ostentatious compared to the rest of the churches in the neighborhood. Would it kill them to cough up a little more to atone for protecting child sex abusers for so long?

North and Northeast Portland are home to the only historically black neighborhoods in Portland. Store-front churches abound, but with gentrification pushing in (and Portland Community College’s Cascade campus expanding), they may soon be an endangered species. So while Wacky Mommy took the Wacky Kids to swim lessons this morning, I took a brief tour of North and Northeast Portland churches.

First stop was the Christ Memorial Church of God in Christ, with its adjacent “Future Home of Community Center & Basketball Pavilion.”

Next comes what we refer to as the “LoveLee Ladee” complex, which includes both the Holiness or Hell Church of God in Christ and the Jubilee Tabernacle Full Gospel, Pentacostal Church. We refer to it as “LoveLee Ladee” because of the painted-over sign above the entrance to Holiness or Hell, indicating it used to house a beauty salon, or, uh, well, you know.

The entire complex used to be Holiness or Hell, but at some point the Jubilee Tabernacle came in.

Across the street from LoveLee Ladee is the Full Holy Ghost Mission Church of God in Christ, Inc., fronted by a lot of blacktop and a forbidding chain-link fence.

A block further, we get a threefer: A More Excellent Way Christian Center, Northwest Voice for Christ Community Church, and The Ark of Safety Church of God Pentacostal, all housed in a building with a facade made to look like Noah’s Ark.

Just a few blocks over, we come upon the Open Door House of Prayer.

I’m not posting pictures here to make fun of these joints. Even though I am a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, I respect the right of people to worship (or not) as they choose. And I am impressed by the humility of these neighborhood based churches, many of them unaffiliated with larger governing bodies. They stand in sharp contrast to the Catholic church, one of the wealthiest and most powerful organizations on the planet. And every Sunday finds them brimming over with lively music and sharply dressed parishioners (oh the hats!).

The gentrification I mentioned before recently claimed the only black funeral home in town, and turned it into a pub. I’m not shitting you. Across the street from that is the Florida Room, a hipster restaurant whose reader board proclaims it as the Church of the Bloody Mary and for a long time also sported the message “Go Team Evil! Sin all the Damn Time!” This is just a stone’s throw from the LoveLee Ladee. Of course, as an atheist, I have no problem with this personally, but it is culturally insensitive (to say the least).

In ten years, there will probably be no more store-front churches in this neighborhood. The part of me that sees religious belief as the source of global strife doesn’t care. But the part of that appreciates diversity and humility is saddened.

Portland was once admired among cities for the fact that the middle classes had not yet given up on its public schools. But after a series of ballot measures in the ’90s requiring severe property tax limitations, a major economic downturn, and a complete lack of leadership from two Democratic governors (not to mention a Republican state house with a strong libertarian bias against public anything), Portland’s public schools seem to be throwing in the towel.

Today, in part one, I focus on the funding crisis.
Read the rest of this entry »

Suddenly Wacky Mommy has a wild hair about moving from Portland to — get this — Iowa. Here’s the deal: I grew up in Iowa and left in my early twenties. She grew up in Portland and is still here. So somehow dragging me back to the place I fled as a young adult is okay, but staying in the town she grew up in is not.

Now, when I say Iowa, you have to understand, I’m talking about Iowa City, a.k.a. the Johnson County Free State. It’s got an inordinate amount of culture for a town of 60,000. Anyway, I never really considered it until I had kids and discovered how crappy and underfunded the schools are in Portland. Anyhoo, WM is pretty sick of P-town, and blogged all about it today. To counter her bile, I’m going to list Thirteen Things I Love About Portland.

1. The weather. Nine months of rain just makes you feel, uh… wet.
2. Libertarians. Low taxes. Crappy schools. Could there be a connection? Nah!
3. The northern light. Ah, darkness at 4pm.
4. The amazing traffic engineering that makes it impossible to get around town unless you already know where you’re going and exactly how to get there, turn by turn.

   Okay, seriously, I’m not as down on P-town as Wacky Mommy. There are many things I’ll miss.

5. The professional theatre scene.
6. The mountains.
7. The ocean.
8. The Columbia River Gorge.
9. The greenness. (The flip side of nine months of rain.)
10. The weather. Yeah, it goes both ways. It may be raining, but you can survive just fine without winter gloves or hats or scarves or boots. Or long johns or sweaters.
11. The northern light. Ah, twilight at 10pm.
12. Summer. The most perfect three months you can imagine. You can almost forget the nine months of rain.
13. It’s the place I met my wife, and where my children were born.

So you may have discerned that I’m a little conflicted about leaving. Wacky Mommy’s champing at the bit, though, so we’ll just have to see what comes.