The Portland public schools are aiming to ensure that all students have equal outcomes and equal experiences, according to a revealing presentation delivered at a meeting of a Portland Board of Public Education committee on Thursday.
Portland’s “Attendance Boundaries Advisory Committee” has begun its work to evaluate and make recommendations for redrawing the school district’s attendance boundaries in order to address “demographic disparities.” The goal of the new equity-based boundaries will be, according to the committee, to eliminate all differences in outcomes and experiences across the student population.
In June, the Board voted to adopt a resolution establishing the community advisory committee on attendance boundaries for pre-kindergarten through 8th grade school.
The membership of the 14-person attendance boundaries committee was announced and approved by the Board on Aug. 7, and the committee held their first meeting this Thursday.
Attendance boundaries are the means by which the district determines what school a student shall attend based on where in they district the student lives.
Portland Public Schools last adjusted the attendance boundaries in the mid 2000s, according to the Board’s resolution.
Since that time, the student demographics in the district have “changed substantially,” which has resulted in “substantial imbalances in the enrollment and demographics” in Portland’s elementary schools, the resolution states — particularly among students who are “economically disadvantaged, experiencing homelessness and/or multilingual learners.”
When outlining the proposed attendance boundaries committee, Portland Superintendent Ryan Scallon stated that the demographic disparities have led to “inequitable resource allocation across the district.”
Scallon wrote in his summary of the proposed resolution that forming the committee would support the Board’s top priority in their Comprehensive Plan, “Equity,” under which the district “strives to be an anti-racist, inclusive district by vigilantly supporting each student to achieve their potential and rooting out systemic inequities.”
This goal was reiterated at the opening of the attendance boundaries committee’s Thursday meeting, which began with a reading of the Portland Public Schools’ mission statement and “Definition of Equity.”
According to the definition presented, equity will only be achieved in the district when “there are no identifiable differences in outcomes and experiences for any population sub-group (race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, etc).”
Portland School Board President Sarah Lentz then led the committee on what appeared to be a team building exercise centered around committee members indicating how they felt that day by identifying with various pictures of goats.
Later in the meeting, Superintendent Ryan Scallon shared data with the committee regarding the demographics of Portland Public Schools at-large and of each school in the district, highlighting the disparities between the percentage of students at the schools who are “students of color,” economically disadvantaged, or learning the English language.
[RELATED: Portland Schools Seek to Spend $224,000 on Hiring English Language Teachers for ‘new arrivals’…]
Across all Portland Public Schools, roughly 26 percent in the 2023-2024 school year were English language learners, according to the data presented by Scallon.
The percentage of English language learners at each school varies, however, with some schools having a proportion of students learning English as high as 50 percent, while others are as low as five percent.
Committee member Ariel Linet asked Superintendent Scallon if the committee would be focusing its work primarily on redrawing the district’s attendance boundaries, or if the committee would also be talking about busing students to different schools in order to address the demographic disparities.
Scallon said that busing has “trade-offs” and is “a question that could be explored by the committee and one that could be weighed.”
“I think that is something that if you go to our neighbors to the south [South Portland Schools], that is actually exactly what they’re looking at,” Scallon said. “They’re looking at busing students to address inequities in terms of disproportionality in terms of their student population.”
[RELATED: South Portland School Board May Restructure Elementary Schools to Improve “Diversity”…]
Board President Lentz added that the Portland School Board does not yet have an opinion one way or the other on the issue of redistricting versus busing, and will be looking to the attendance boundaries committee for that recommendation.
The attendance boundaries committee has meetings scheduled on the fourth Thursday of each month, and is slated to deliver a report of its findings and recommendations to the Board by February 2025, in order to implement potential changes for the 2025-2026 school year.
The only way to have equal outcomes and experiences is to lower standards so much that even the dumbest of the dumb can pass, which punishes smarter people who could succeed with higher standards.
Can we give Portland to Massachusetts ?
The people there look more like Massholes than Maniacs .
What has happened to our state ?
Life isn’t fair. Let them measure up with every one else What are they going to be like when they’re adult?
The object should be to raise the standard for all students. There are those that learn faster than others, some students excel in the sciences, others in the arts.
NOT ALL students are equal…Maybe teachers should be teaching the three ‘R’s’ instead of trying to indoctrinate the students into various social extremes. Educators educate not instill their believes on their students, no matter what the Dept of Education says.
“Across all Portland Public Schools, roughly 26 percent in the 2023-2024 school year were English language learners.”
Previously, Pineland Center was closed and the mentally challenged were mainstreamed into the classrooms. Now, over a quarter of the students need ESL courses.
Tell me again how these policies benefit the education of native born students whose parents are paying the taxes to operate these indoctrination centers.
Impossible, unless everyone gets a trophy..
Exactly the right thing to do if you want to make Portland more like Venezuela or North Korea.
Equity is based on an incorrect theory. The whites that immigrated to the US over the years did not receive the same treatment as the existing population, unless they were part of one of the ruling majorities. But they worked hard, educated themselves and succeeded.
If ME is going to push equity, then I want my due for my mothers family growing up as a minority in Maine 90 years ago. And I want compensation for my uncle who was forced to change his name to suit the ethnic groups in power. This wont happen because we are white and I am only making an example on how life was tough on many.
Boxcar, They won’t grow up to be adults. They will however grow to be spoiled, pampered truncated versions of adults that expect to have everything handed to them and will whine like stuck pigs if they don’t get it.
On the goat spectrum I feel baaaad.
Ahh, so the natural extension is, to achieve the same outcomes, the teaching would have to be exactly the same, so the teachers, regardless of knowledge, skills, further education beyond teaching certificate, or other abilities, would be treated the same. And so it follows that there is no need to interview teachers, they are all the same. And just like there needs to be no differentiation in outcomes (children), there needs to be no differentiation in compensation for inputters (teachers), therefore the NEA is obsolete since all inputters need only one wage, to be equitable. Same goes for Admin, they are all the same, so to be equitable, the wage should be the same across the collective of educators as they believe it should be in the outcomes (students). I believe the State has said that $40K is the equitable salary?
The concept of equity in education is absurd. How can there be equal outcomes when kids don’t have equal intelligence and ability and don’t try equally hard.
Sounds like busing to me. When I was in high school in Portland I had to go to a different school than all of my friends because we lived one street over the line. This is absolute BS.
So they all become doctors or they all work at Walmart??
The idea of equal outcomes in education is absurd because kids don’t have equal abilities and intelligence and don’t try equally hard. This is another excuse for dumbing down the high achievers who should be our future leaders.
Do the Attendance Boundaries Advisory Committee all wear armbands and have fancy identification necklaces ?
They should .
I pay taxes for my house and property here …..not there .
You can send your kids there if you like .
Oh ….that’s right YOU don’t have kids ….just a couple of cats .
Thanks for volunteering to screw up my life .
It is hard to come up with the words to describe this stupidity. The idea of equal outcomes is right out of the communist playbook. The whole result of communism always is that those in power accumulate all the wealth as those who believed their silly lies die from starvation, if they are not just murdered before hand.
Sadly the communist political machine based in Portland is overwhelming the rest of what used to be a great state to live in when I was a lad. Then southern Maine, with all their leftist implant massholes, from that awful state, along with tons of criminal immigrants who broke the law to come here, are showered with gifts from our commie governor while the rest of us get the shaft.
Conservative Mainers are sure getting the dirty end of the stick from this outfit.
Who in their right mind would live in Portland and raise a child? Portland is a cesspool now and not worth visiting let alone living there. Give the entire city back to Massachusetts since its pretty much filled with Massholes.
Good one! Maine wire makes a Shofar reference in article image. We all know who the disciples of satan are.
Communism – is a political and economic system that seeks to create a classless society in which the major means of production, such as mines and factories, are owned and controlled by the public (Mills?). There is no government or private property or currency, and the wealth is divided among citizens equally or according to individual need.
Beige, beige – everyone should be beige. Christians, Budhists & you too Muslims… men, women, no difference.
Hmmpfff
Just give everyone straight A’s and Diplomas. Close all the schools and reduce property taxes!
Obviously their real goal here is to oblige illegals and screw the entitled resident children.