Two of Portland’s Largest Excessive Faculties Are Transferring to Distant Studying
Two of the city’s largest high school buildings will close on Friday and students will be given online tasks to do themselves due to staff shortages, Portland Public School sources said late Thursday evening.
After that, students at McDaniel High School (Leodis V. McDaniel) in NE Portland and Cleveland High School (Grover Cleveland) in SE Portland will attend classes exclusively online starting next week.
In total, about 3,000 students will be affected by the Portland closings.
According to the county’s COVID-19 dashboard, four adults are currently in isolation at McDaniel’s due to the virus, and another is in quarantine due to an off-school exposure of a total of 109 teachers.
Cleveland currently has 10 adults in isolation from a total of 84 teachers and three more are in quarantine due to off-site exposure. Elsewhere in the district there are a handful of schools with similar numbers of staff that are being quarantined and isolated – particularly at Mount Tabor Middle School and Vernon K-8 – but these schools have so far not announced any closings.
The news comes against the background of industrial disputes between the Portland Association of Teachers and the school district. In the autumn, representatives of the teachers’ union advocated incorporating significantly more planning time into everyday school life and adding up to six non-teaching planning days to the calendar. The district countered by offering more limited early discharge days and flexible time frames, but fewer non-class planning days, citing the documented toll of distance learning demanding on student academic, mental, physical, and socio-emotional health.
Negotiations stalled during the winter break and the teachers’ union announced its withdrawal from the negotiating table.
As the Omicron variant has spread across the country, some school districts have switched back to a distance learning model; elsewhere the debate has become more controversial, such as in Chicago, where teachers have refused to work in school buildings and the district responded by withdrawing their salaries. Meanwhile, in San Francisco on Thursday, 20 percent of teachers and aides were absent from public school classrooms after a group of educators publicly called for a sick note to protest a lack of COVID safety protocols.
The Portland Association of Teachers did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday night.
