Was the low point of last Tuesday’s Portland Public Schools board meeting when Vice Chair Michelle DePass decried the district’s “13 years of failures” in managing its school bond construction program – glossing over the on-time modernizations of five high schools, a middle school and a PreK-8 that have delivered top-notch learning conditions for tens of thousands of students?
Or it might have been when people in the audience heckled Roosevelt High School senior Ian Ritorto, the board’s student representative, for rightly noting board members’ duty to consider the concerns of people who couldn’t make it to the evening meeting as well as those who were present.
Or perhaps it was the many times that Board Chair Eddie Wang allowed audience members to jeer board members – who then directly engaged back – prolonging an exchange that only raised the temperature. Or when Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong derided the district’s Office of School Modernization – her own employees – as having fallen apart…