Adult store near N. Portland middle school shutters, local teen makes the cut for ‘Jeopardy!’ tourney: The week in education

With graduation season in the rearview, Portland-area students are either looking forward to a three-month break or their first year of (near) total independence as they either begin their freshman year of college or enter the workforce.

But even though the kids have left the buildings, the wheels are still turning as budgets firm up and teachers and administrators move around.

Here are this week’s education stories from Portland and beyond:

From the inbox — or the school board meeting minutes:

Franklin High School’s new mascot is now officially the Lightning.

As school officials discussed the process of dropping the Quakers moniker and adopting the community’s choice of replacement, board member Scott BailBailey said, “It’s really a striking one.”

But he didn’t stop there.

Bailey also said he got “really charged up” listening to school officials and students speak about the name changes and said the board would agree to the name change “with thunderous applause.” The change was initiated by a 2015 complaint from a parent who said the Quaker name was an “offensive appropriation of a religious faith and must be changed.”

First day of school at Vose Elementary, 2016

$12 million accounting error, soaring pension costs put Beaverton schools in dire straits

An increase in K-12 spending from the state hardly made a dent in the shortfall facing Oregon’s third largest school district.

From around Portland:

Students in Oregon’s largest school district have long lobbied for a climate curriculum promised to them since 2016. Next year, they’ll get their wish as the school board approved a budget that provides $145,000 to begin researching the curriculum this fall, then implement it by the 2020-21 school year. The New York Times featured the effort this week. Check out the bottom of this post for links to our previous coverage.

We’re a little late on this next item, but figured it was worth highlighting even if it should have been included in this month’s first education roundup:

An adult video store that opened to outrage among parents at a North Portland middle school in 2003 quietly shuttered earlier this year. Pat Lanagan, owner of the Fat Cobra on North Interstate Avenue, said business had been on the decline for years. He told The Portland Mercury’s Andrew Jaknowski that a tax hike under the Trump administration was the final nail in the coffin. Lanagan contracted Guillain-Barré Syndrome after a disk replacement surgery in December 2018, he told the alt-weekly. The store was situated just across the street from the school

And around Oregon:

U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., is calling for the resignation of the federal Bureau of Indian Education director over the agency’s management of the Chemawa Indian School in Salem. This comes weeks after Tony Dearman was grilled by a congressional committee on Capitol Hill. OPB’s Rob Manning has the story.

OPB’s Elizabeth Miller also has a two-part story on how the Corbett School District, where half of the student population is made up of families taking advantage of the state’s so-called “open enrollment” law, which sunsets July 1, plans on adopting a charter to mitigate its losses.

Portlanders have consistently renewed a five-year property tax levy to fund its public schools. But it’s not the state standard. In fact, Eugene and Portland are among a handful of cities that routinely vote to raise their own taxes to support schools. The Register-Guard’s Jordyn Brown reports.