Portland’s Only Title I Arts Focus Elementary School is Slated for Closure in PPS’s Rightsizing Process

Dear Members of the PPS School Board and Rightsizing Committee,

We urge you to keep Portland’s only Title I Focus Option elementary school open. For over 35 years Buckman Elementary has been an embodiment of the Portland community’s value of equality and public commitment to creativity, freedom of expression, and innovation in learning. It has functioned as both a neighborhood and lottery magnet school, always valuing and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion, things we need to continue to be able to offer children now, more than ever.

As the only Title I Focus Option elementary school in Portland, for over a quarter of a century Buckman has offered something rare and valuable: a program that uplifts an underserved student population while enriching every child and family who walks through its doors. In collaboration with the SUN program, the school offers resources such as a food pantry, clothing swaps, a holiday gift drive, culturally-specific community events, and inclusive after-school classes.

Our decreasing enrollment numbers do not accurately reflect a lack of interest and demand, but a district-wide drop that has been painfully amplified by its limited lottery allocation. The school has consistently had a waitlist after allowed spots were filled. The lottery-bound impediment to more robust enrollment is an administrative choice the district could easily remedy, and it should not be used as a rationale for closing this beloved school.

Buckman has also historically done its part to support itself and the larger community. For over 30 years the Buckman Art Show and Sell has celebrated and uplifted local city artists while raising money to fund its Art Focus offerings. Its unique and beautiful Arts program nurtures what makes us alive, connected, caring humans and citizens. Closing the school would truly be a deep loss, not just to the neighborhood families of Buckman, Kerns, and all its lottery families across Portland, but to the city itself.  

A testament to the positive effects of its Arts Focus, Buckman is already performing academically in the top 20% in Oregon, and was noted in a January 2026 Willamette Week article as one of seven PPS elementary schools designated as “Exceptional”—in the top 5% of the state for outscoring their expected reading proficiency.

The school also successfully supports a significant neurodiverse student population, ALL of whom benefit from full access to its multidisciplinary Arts offerings. Its special education resource classrooms serve students from across the district, often assigned to Buckman by PPS because they cannot get what they need to access their education at their own neighborhood schools. These dual-enrolled students and the educators who serve them are integral to the fabric of our neurodiversity-affirming school community.

Buckman is more than just a learning space; it is an essential community resource. It is where connections are formed across social, economic, and generational lines. It is where working families find a dependable support network and where students with a diverse array of lived experiences come together to get an equitable foundation for their educational journey. Buckman is a model of the vitality and positive impact of community based neighborhood schools, providing real, meaningful value to its PPS students and families, and to the larger Portland community. It is worth saving.

We ask the Portland Public School Board, in the interests of Equity, to:

• Please prioritize keeping Title I Buckman Arts Focus Elementary Open 
• If our school cannot survive as a Focus Option in your final Rightsizing plans, please prioritize allowing Title I Buckman Elementary to retain its Art Focus as a neighborhood school in its physical location to continue to honor its rich Arts legacy, reduce undue transportation burdens on its most vulnerable families, and avoid creating a school desert in our area of Portland

Sincerely,

The Buckman Community

+ Check out this trailer for a recent Preservation Pictures documentary that leveraged film education at Buckman to create a project that connected its students with elderly Portlanders at risk for social isolation, highlighting how the power of human connection transcends the boundaries of age.