Back in 2011, Cleveland High School’s students, staff and families first got their hopes up that their historic but crumbling school building would be renovated as part of the first wave of Portland Public Schools’ ambitious effort to remake all of its neighborhood high schools over a 20-year span.
Sixteen years later, on Friday, their collective wish finally began to come true.
At a groundbreaking ceremony for the new high school, speaker after speaker noted that the community had waited more than a decade for work to begin after voters in 2011 rejected the school district’s first attempt to pass a construction bond, which would have paid to modernize aging Cleveland, Jefferson and Roosevelt high schools…