Faced with a collapsing budget, decades of declining enrollment and near the end of a year-long campaign to downsize high schools, the Portland School Board may choose to close three neighborhood high schools next week -- including North Portland’s embattled Jefferson High.

The school board must not delay difficult decisions. The number of high schools the city supports is far less important that the quality of education they can deliver. And by that fundamental measure, it may be time to close Jeff.

In March, the Sentinel’s last printed editorial recommended that PPS close Jefferson and retool it as a career-focused school in partnership with Portland Community College. This idea has come up several times since March. The plan could bring a new focus to the Jeff campus and also relieve overcrowding at PCC.

In May, Superintendent Carole Smith suggested that Marshall and Benson close instead of Jefferson. But in the last two weeks, faced with a state imposed $18 million budget cut, it appears Jefferson, too, is back on the table.

So, once again, things are going to get heated on the campus sitting between Killingsworth and Kerby. But in order to make a rational and informed decision on Jefferson’s fate, the hard issues of race, discrimination and PPS’s decades-long decline need to surface. Here are a few points about each:

No high school in Portland has such a fixed sense of communal identity as Jefferson. In a city that takes a unique pride in its high schools, that’s saying a lot.

The school’s great legacy as the only “black high school” in Oregon is felt acutely by both blacks and whites due to the fact that Oregon and Portland are so overwhelmingly white.

According to the Census Bureau, in 2008 Oregon’s African American population was a scant two percent, compared with the 12 percent national average. Portland was only six percent black 10 years ago, with roughly 35,000 of the state’s 60,000 blacks living in North/Northeast.

One of the cultural roles Jefferson has fulfilled is that of being a place that blacks can go and not feel like minorities. That, however, has become a more tenuous distinction in the aftermath of gentrification that has sweep thousands of African American families out of the Jefferson neighborhood and into Gresham and southwest Clark County.

However, this unfortunate demographic shift should be seen in light of a larger and more unhappy picture. While the Portland Public Schools still capture roughly 84 percent of the school-aged children in the city, the total amount of children in the city has dropped from 80,000 in the 1960s to some 47,000 children today. 

The result is that the District is holding onto a school system built to serve roughly twice as many children as it now contains. That reality won’t change any time soon. Only in recent years has the District faced up to the fact that their patient, the school system, is dying and that triage is needed. A round of school closures and consolidations that began under Vicki Philips, Smith’s predecessor as superintendent, is now headed to its logical conclusion: high school downsizing. Once this is done, a massive campaign of reinvestment and rebuilding of schools should follow.

But given the grim realities, the question remains: Should Jefferson close?

As one who watched while St Johns’ North Precinct was shuttered, we do not take the closing of local institutions lightly.

Much like the choice the Portland Police Bureau faced, the key issue is not about a building or cultural symbol, but about achieving goals with the scant resources available.

We've never heard anyone say they want to deprive African American students of a culturally supportive school environment. Nor should anyone deny that the African American community has been the victim of discrimination, disinvestment and neglect.

Surely everyone is in favor of the idea of Jefferson High School. What is in dispute is whether or not PPS can support the reality of Jefferson High School.

The school district’s first responsibility is to educate its students in a fair, rigorous and equitable way. Currently, PPS is failing that test.

Too often, African American students in particular have been denied an education equal to their peers around the city. Clearly the issue is less about the building that houses African American students -- no matter how hallowed it may be -– and more about the quality of the education that is delivered. Decades have been wasted by reforms that fiddle around the edges and that failed to deliver results for Jefferson. The major issue now is no longer, “Can we fix Jeff?” but “Can the District even afford to keep two North Portland high schools?”

To that end, if the District closes Jeff, will the students of North Portland, black or white, rich or poor, get a better or worse education? That is the ultimate measure of success.

If PPS can deliver more classes, more teachers and more money to students by sending them to Roosevelt, Grant and Benson, then, sadly, that is all that need be said.

There is nothing happy about the idea of closing a high school. It hasn’t been done since Inner Southeast’s Washington-Monroe was closed in the 1980s.

Since Ballot Measure 5 passed, restricting property-tax increases, the State of Oregon’s leaders have shown a lack of courage in addressing the funding inequities of the educational system. At the same time its residents and voters have shown no willingness to sacrifice their tax dollars to ensure a better future for the state’s children. Meanwhile, families with means are able to do little more than buy time for their children by moving to other school districts that are momentarily better off or try private schools or roll the dice on a charter school.

Clearly these issues are too big for one community or one school district to tackle. PPS under Smith and Philips before her, show some courage in facing the awful truth.

Now as before, I see no future for Jefferson as a neighborhood school. It’s better suited to be a special focus school conjoined in some way with PCC. While that may be less satisfying for Portland’s political culture, and its compassionate vision of itself, it seems more fitting for its anemic somewhat less-rosy economic reality.