Don’t fix one boundary problem by creating another
In 2023, PPS redrew southeast boundaries and left Mt Tabor Middle School with too few neighborhood students to fill its building. Rightsizing proposes to fix that by moving Laurelhurst’s 6th through 8th graders there. That doesn’t solve the shortfall: it moves it to Laurelhurst.
What PPS changed in 2023
- Before 2023, Mt Tabor’s attendance area covered the Glencoe and Atkinson elementary areas, about 2.5 square miles. PPS’s southeast boundary changes moved the Atkinson area to another middle school, leaving about 1.6 square miles, only 64% of Mt Tabor’s catchment in place.
- Enrollment followed: about 740 students in 2018, about 430 in 2025-26, a 42% drop.
Attendance area before 2023
~2.5 sq mi
Glencoe and Atkinson elementary areas
Attendance area, 2026-27
~1.6 sq mi
Glencoe elementary area only
This plan moves an under-enrollment problem from one school to another. It can’t fix what’s actually wrong: the boundaries PPS drew around Mt Tabor in 2023 were never sustainable. Only about 270 PPS middle schoolers live there, far short of PPS’s own 500-student threshold for a middle school.
- Laurelhurst attendance area
- Mt Tabor Middle School area, 2026-27 (Glencoe attendance area)
- Mt Tabor Middle School area before the 2023 changes (Glencoe and Atkinson)
- 1.5 miles from Mt Tabor in a straight line
- About 1.5 miles from Mt Tabor walking on streets
Moving the shortfall to Laurelhurst
PPS’s Rightsizing plans set size thresholds for a sustainable school: 360 students for a K–5 and 500 for a K-8 or middle school. Laurelhurst meets its threshold today. Taking away its middle grades would push it below the line.
Laurelhurst as a K-8, 2026-27
574 students
Above PPS’s 500-student threshold for a K-8
Laurelhurst as a K-5, after the move
~350 students
Below PPS’s 360-student threshold for a K–5
And enrollment is falling
- Portland State University’s forecast for PPS expects Laurelhurst’s enrollment to fall about 23% over the next ten years.
- As a K-8, Laurelhurst is forecast to stay above PPS’s 500-student threshold through 2032-33.
- As a K-5, it would start below the 360-student threshold and keep falling, to about 320 by 2031-32.
- A plan built to make schools sustainable shouldn’t create a new school that starts out below the line.
What else the move would change for Laurelhurst families
- Leaving the Grant cluster for three years. Laurelhurst students currently go on to Grant High School, while Mt Tabor Middle School’s neighborhood program feeds Franklin High School. Under both proposals, Laurelhurst’s middle schoolers would spend grades 6–8 in class with neighborhood students headed to Franklin, then split off to Grant for 9th grade. PPS’s own audit of the 2023 changes found this pattern harmful. Creston’s middle graders moved together from a K-8 to a middle school, then were split between two high schools. Families described the loss of friendships and community as “a major harm” (p. 79), and said the split made middle school sports, which are organized by high school cluster, “almost impossible for many kids to participate in.”
- Busing. About 29% of Laurelhurst’s attendance area is more than 1.5 miles from Mt Tabor by street, the distance at which PPS buses middle schoolers. PPS runs no general bus routes to Laurelhurst today. See the busing math →
- A full, chosen school. Laurelhurst’s building is 93% full, and 85% of the PPS students in its area choose it. See the neighborhood numbers →
Both Rightsizing plans, Scenarios A and B, already redraw Mt Tabor’s boundary. Before moving Laurelhurst’s middle graders, PPS should show a plan that brings Mt Tabor’s own neighborhood back up to size, without moving the shortfall to another school.
Sources and method
- 2026-27 boundaries: PPS 2026-27 Attendance Boundary & District Properties map (48×36 in.). I traced Mt Tabor’s and Laurelhurst’s areas from it; the tracing is accurate to roughly half a block.
- Pre-2023 boundaries: National Center for Education Statistics, School Attendance Boundary Survey (2015-16), which agrees with the older School Attendance Areas layer on PortlandMaps.
- Areas are measured from those boundary shapes and rounded.
- Enrollment and immersion counts: PPS enrollment data via ppsdata.info, 2018 and 2025-26. The “about 270” figure is the 271 PPS students living in Mt Tabor Middle School’s attendance area in PPS’s October 2024 capture-rate report.
- Size thresholds: PPS, “Rightsizing: Comparing three scenarios,” updated October 4, 2026: sustainability thresholds of 360 students for K–5 schools, 500 for K-8 and middle schools, and 1,100 for high schools.
- Laurelhurst enrollment: 574 students forecast for 2026-27 and 525 for 2031-32, from Portland State University Population Research Center’s PPS enrollment forecast, 2026-27 to 2035-36 (via ppsdata.info). Grades 6–8 enrollment of 226 is from PPS’s October 13, 2026 presentation to the Board’s Teaching, Learning, and Enrollment Committee. “About 350” is 574 minus 226. “About 320” for 2031-32 assumes grades 6–8 stay the same share of Laurelhurst’s enrollment as in 2026-27 (about 39%); it is my estimate, not PPS’s.
- Feeder patterns: PPS, “High school residents and feeder patterns” (2016), lists Laurelhurst as a Grant feeder and Mt Tabor as a Franklin feeder. Families’ experiences of split feeder patterns are from Green and Hanson, Equity Audit Evaluation of PPS’ Southeast Enrollment and Program Balancing Initiative, prepared for PPS, June 10, 2026 (posted on PPS’s SEGC documents page): “Families Described Loss of Cohort, Friendship, and Community Continuity as a Major Harm” and the sports quote (p. 79); Creston and Hosford (pp. 86–88).
- Distance from Laurelhurst: street-grid distance from each part of Laurelhurst’s attendance area to Mt Tabor, compared with the 1.5-mile middle-school busing threshold in Oregon rule OAR 581-023-0040. By straight-line distance, only about 2% of the area is beyond 1.5 miles.