May 23, 2003
On Parent Activists and School Board Winners
Writing in today's Oregonian, S. Renee Mitchell looks at parent activists:
Portland's public schools couldn't have been saved without you. Multnomah County couldn't have raised its income taxes without you. And longtime parent volunteer Bobbie Regan, in a nail-biting race for the Portland School Board, couldn't have been elected without you.
You were an amazing hurricane of volunteer energy. And look at all you've done: The phone calling. The door knocking. The late-night stretching to dawn organizing. The canvassing. The e-mailing. The money raising. The ballot collecting.
Whew. You must be exhausted. OK, so now what?
And the Portland Tribune checks in with the four winners of seats on the Portland School Board:
Like the three other Portlanders elected with him to the Portland school board, Doug Morgan has definite ideas on leading the state's largest school district.
Foremost among them: He wants the board to actually lead the school district.
"Whatever it does, it's got to do it as if it were in charge of something," said Morgan, who heads the Executive Leadership Institute at Portland State University and was elected to the Southwest Portland board seat.
"I don't want to criticize the previous board," he said, "but the perception was ... it was in a reactive mode, responding to external forces and never quite ahead of the curve. Whatever we do, we have to do it in a position of taking charge."
According to the Tribune, the "three issues that new board members talked about most in interviews this week" are: Student achievement nd narrowing the gap in learning between poor and minority children and more well-off white students; dealing with the rising costs of district-provided health insurance for teachers; and relations between district management and its employees unions.