When it came time for Zah’Ryiah Allen to decide where she wanted to go to high school, the answer was a no-brainer.

Her father had gone to Jefferson High School, and following in his footsteps meant everything to Allen, now a senior at the school.

“I used to live right by Jeff,” she said, using the nickname for the Albina high school that’s long been the pride of Portland’s Black community, even as generations of its longtime residents moved east and north as gentrification upended their neighborhood.

“I have my community,” she added. “I felt I belonged there. All my friends were there.”

Just who else belongs at Jefferson is the subject of tense debates these days all over North and Northeast Portland, at PTA meetings, in private online chats and in playground conversations.

Portland Public Schools is looking at overhauling the school’s enrollment boundaries to draw in far more students, in concert with a $465 million campus renovation. Enrollment could surge from just 391 students today to about 1,320 in the years ahead.

But doing so, a new analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found, may have significant impacts on three other high schools in North and Northeast Portland. That includes potentially tamping down enrollment at Roosevelt High School below a crucial threshold, imperiling the diverse St. Johns’ school’s academic offerings, from advanced courses to career-technical electives.

The delicate dance over Jefferson’s enrollment boundaries — and the pushback from some more affluent families whose children would have to change schools — lays bare many of the thorniest and most intractable problems facing Portland Public Schools, from its fitful attempts to rectify decades of unkept promises to the city’s Black students, to the shrinking of its student body, and the question of who, exactly, gets to benefit from the system’s increasingly spread-thin budgets.

The problem: Jefferson’s enrollment is now smaller than many suburban elementary schools. That’s thanks to a 14-year-old rule that allows families who live in the high school’s boundaries to choose it or one of the three comprehensive high schools in North and Northeast Portland, depending upon their address. Without adjusting that policy, the district would be spending a stratospheric $1.2 million per student on Jefferson’s renovations.

Mindful of past damaging decisions and their impact on the Black community, the Portland school board twice convinced voters to approve bond money for the Jefferson project, in 2020 and in 2025. It will be the last high school in North and Northeast Portland to receive an upgrade, after the district poured money into overhauling six other schools citywide in recent years.

The solution to address Jefferson’s low enrollment problem, per district leaders, is to not only sunset the high school choice option but to also funnel a to-be-determined configuration of students to Jefferson, starting with this year’s seventh graders. The most contentious of their proposals includes ultimately sending students from the predominately white Sabin and Irvington elementaries, both historically tied to Grant High School, to Jefferson. An alternative proposal, which would split middle school feeders to send solely Irvington students to Grant while keeping Sabin students at Jefferson, has sowed further division.

Whatever happens, it will be the latest transformation for Jefferson after decades of the school being a testing ground for reforms, some of them short-lived and bearing significant leadership churn. In its most recent incarnation, the school has partnered with Portland Community College to offer students the chance to earn college credits while in high school. That has resulted in a graduation rate for Black students there that far outperforms the state and the district, but also saw many families choosing other options in search of a more traditional high school experience.

School board members have the final say on who’s in and who’s out of the Jefferson enrollment boundary. Their vote is expected in January.

But there are only so many ways to rearrange the deck chairs, when those deck chairs are students and an enrollment iceberg looms large in the background. Like urban districts nationwide, Portland Public Schools has fewer students coming through the pipeline thanks to high housing costs, a declining birth rate and the aftereffects of pandemic flight.

And any way you look at it, sending more students to Jefferson will mean fewer high school students at Grant (now 2,074 students), McDaniel (1,629 students) and Roosevelt (1,419 students).

Those three schools are slated to lose anywhere between 160 students at McDaniel to 900 students at Grant by the 2030-31 school year, according to the district’s projections. That will translate to less crowded hallways and less competition for spots on varsity teams and lead roles in plays — but also significantly fewer teachers and course options for students at those schools.

Are there enough students for four high schools?

The school district’s goal is to keep at least 1,100 students each at the four North and Northeast Portland high schools.

Assistant Superintendent Margaret Calvert, a former Jefferson principal, says that’s the threshold needed for advanced courses and career-technical education electives to pencil out; go much lower, she says, and it gets prohibitively expensive. Even 1,100 is on the small side for a comprehensive high school that competes in the highest classification of sports programs; the neighboring Beaverton School District, for example, maintains larger enrollments in its high schools, at 1,400 to 2,300 students each.

And whether that magic 1,100 student number will stick is tough to say, especially since district officials have declined to project enrollment numbers at the four high schools past 2031, when current 7th graders will be seniors.

They say that the further out from the current year, the less reliable enrollment forecasts become, adding that forecasts from Portland State University’s Population Research Center show error margins between 8-10% seven years out.

Ethan Sharygin, who directs the Population Research Center, which constructs the district’s enrollment forecasts, disputes that assertion.

“I would characterize our forecast accuracy quite differently,” he wrote to The Oregonian/OregonLive. “Excluding the COVID years, our accuracy is within 2% after 5 years, and (within) 5% after 10 years.”

The perceived lack of transparency has led some parents to darkly theorize that the district knows that it is spreading enrollment too thin in service of expanding Jefferson, and that Grant, Roosevelt or both will drop below the 1,100 mark within the next six years. McDaniel would be comparatively less impacted, because it is only losing students from two feeder schools.

“I worry, and other parents worry, that PPS is carefully selecting the data they are showing,” said Erin Brasell, who has a fourth grader at Sabin K-5.

To provide a sense of the impact that the enrollment changes could have beyond the 2030-31 school year, The Oregonian/OregonLive built its own model based on the projections put together by Portland State University. The news outlet incorporated current enrollment numbers to determine a grade-by-grade, year-by-year share of a school’s total population, under the two scenarios, known as B and C, that are considered most likely to be adopted.

The newsroom’s analysis found that the risks of low enrollment are greatest at North Portland’s Roosevelt High School. That school could dip below 1,000 students by 2033-34, when the current first grade enters ninth grade, and be below 1,100 students in the three years before that, the analysis found.

Numbers at Grant and Jefferson, meanwhile, see-saw depending on which scenario the school board chooses. The newspaper’s model shows Grant with as many as 1,305 students and as few as 1,161 between the fall of 2031 and the spring of 2035, while Jefferson would range between 1,168 and 1,322 in that same period.

That still means Grant would be about 800 to 900 students smaller than its current incarnation, a huge change for what is now the district’s largest high school.

The newsroom’s analysis is slightly less conservative than Portland State’s forecast, projecting about 31 fewer students would attend the three schools in 2035 than currently estimated without any boundary changes.

District officials did not directly address the newsroom’s findings about Roosevelt and what those attendance levels could mean for course offerings.

Renard Adams, chief accountability and equity officer, reviewed the news outlet’s calculations and said he did not “have significant concerns regarding the methodology used.”

“We continue to hold that modeling that far into the future has historically not produced results as accurate as we would like,” Adams said in a statement. “With student projections, the further out that predictive modeling occurs, the less precise the numbers become as the margin for error increases.”

In every scenario under consideration, portions of expensively renovated schools with space for between 1,400 and 1,700 students would go unused by high schoolers, since the district has already spent nearly half a billion dollars over the last decade to modernize Roosevelt, Grant and McDaniel.

In information limbo, questions – and rumors – persist

There have been no public engagement events for families who will remain zoned for Roosevelt, Grant and McDaniel to explain what they can expect when they send their children to schools that will be smaller than they are now, with less programming, since funding for staff follows pupils.

Some parents say they worry that communication all around has been lacking, allowing rumors to flourish, including that the district had stealthily asked the city of Portland to update PortlandMaps, used by real estate agents citywide, to reflect the rezoning before any board vote. (Calvert said this was a glitch that had nothing to do with the district, and it has been corrected.)

Calvert has acknowledged that the district made a tactical error in its mass email to families from impacted feeder schools by titling the communication “Jefferson is Rising!” Many families did not read the message, she said, assuming it was solely about the construction plans, not attendance rezoning that could directly affect them.

In-person listening sessions for families at the impacted middle school community felt stage managed, half a dozen parents who spoke with The Oregonian/OregonLive said, with an hourlong data presentation, followed by small group sessions where attendees were asked to respond to a series of predetermined questions. In response, district leaders have added more engagement opportunities, including an open house at Jefferson on Dec. 6, and a listening session there on Dec. 8.

“A lot of families have been surprised by this,” said Brasell, the Sabin parent. “We are shocked that PPS hasn’t done better outreach to the community to explain why such a large catchment area is necessary to fill Jefferson.”

The plan to sunset the ability for families to opt out of Jefferson also has passionate supporters, including parents who have urged the district not to carve out an exception for the comparatively whiter and wealthier Irvington and Sabin schools to remain zoned for Grant.

“Parents have a responsibility to take a hard look at what they consider a ‘good’ education,” said Addie Humbert, who has a seventh grade son at Ockley Green Middle School who plans to attend Jefferson. “I feel I have a responsibility to the larger community to make a choice that other parents might see as less-than-ideal for their child’s education.”

Currently, their family would be able to choose whether to go to Jefferson or Roosevelt as their neighborhood school.

Humbert said she’s watched coaches from Roosevelt come to youth sports leagues at Ockley Green to talk up their school to future athletes, and has seen plenty of families seduced by Roosevelt’s new building, wide array of Advanced Placement classes and electives and strong extracurriculars like this year’s league champion football team and an award-winning student newspaper.

“For me personally, the metrics of what I would consider a ‘good’ education take into account more than what electives are available or how robust the sports program is,” she said. “Supporting a community that has not had a lot of support over the past decades is important. Teaching him that being part of a community that has struggled is worth it.”

Hannah Love, who has a 4th grader and a kindergartener at Vernon K-8 who would be zoned only for Jefferson under the district’s favored proposals, said she’s made it a habit to point out Jefferson whenever she’s in the vicinity with her child, to establish a connection to the school early and often. She’s urging the district to provide as many specifics as possible about what advanced classes and electives it plans to add to Jefferson to reassure anxious families who will be in the first wave of attendees.

For too long, she said, Jefferson has been hollowed out by white flight to the larger high schools, with families overlooking the college preparatory benefits of Jefferson’s partnership with the Portland Community College branch just across North Killingsworth Street. Interrupting that dynamic, she said, is both a fraught and moral imperative.

“We are certainly seeing some resistance from predominantly whiter, wealthier neighborhoods that may be asked to give up their option to go to a different high school,” said Love, who is also white. “That is scaring them, for reasons we can all speculate on, or think about.”

Other families share Zah’Ryiah Allen’s perspective — only about their own neighborhood schools and generations of community ties.

“It is not a bad thing to care about your neighborhood or your individual child,” said Haley Hatfield, an Irvington K-5 parent whose family allegiance has long been to Grant and whose house is within sight of the high school’s football field. Under at least one of the proposals that the school district is seriously considering, her four children would be zoned for Jefferson.

“We want to be able to participate in the community that we have been part of for generations,” she said. “The district says people should not have to leave their community to ‘access robust programming.’ But that is what they are asking us to do.”

Hatfield said the district’s proposals risk alienating some families who might give up and peel off to private schools or move to another district, potentially leaving the district’s already bleak enrollment picture even worse.

At Jefferson, preparing for an influx of new families

School board member Rashelle Chase-Miller, a strong Jefferson supporter, said she’s ruminated on why the generational and emotional ties to the school feel so consequential while the same sentiments from comparatively wealthy Grant families hint for her at elitism.

“The difference for me is that the Jefferson community, and more broadly, Portland’s Black community, had to fight to maintain location and proximity,” she wrote to The Oregonian/OregonLive. “There was a diaspora, and Jeff is a touchstone for us. If a Grant family had to send their kid anywhere in the district, their kids would still land in a community that reflected their culture and context. When our kids are dispersed in the broader community, they’re always the minority.”

At a recent forum for Jefferson families about the proposed changes, there was palpable joy about the plans, mixed with some dismay over the planned influx of new students, most of them white. Under all of the district’s proposed scenarios, the Black and Native American proportion of the student population at Jefferson will plummet, from about half of the school to about a quarter.

Those are demographics that will change the very nature of the school as surely as development in the surrounding Albina neighborhood has done to the shops and restaurants along North Williams, North Vancouver and North Mississippi avenues.

“Keep the dual enrollment. Keep Jeff a minority school,” suggested current Jefferson parent Stephanie Penson, whose daughter, Amiyah, is in 11th grade. “Let them go. Jeff will get filled up.”

Penson and fellow Jefferson parent Telisa Brazile acknowledged that plenty of families of color have voted with their feet in the last decade, passing up Jefferson in favor of Grant, Roosevelt or McDaniel and their more robust programming — about 61% of Black students opted for one of the other three schools, instead of Jefferson last year, according to the district’s figures.

Even Penson’s own daughter gave Grant a try for a few weeks, before transferring back to Jefferson and a familiar homebase, Penson said. But she and Brazile, who works at Faubion and has a seventh grader headed for Jefferson, said they have faith that the lure of a beautiful new building, full of hope and promise, will bring students back in droves.

Based on recent history, it is likely that Jefferson would see a “new building bump” when the construction is finished in 2030. Even without redistricting, newly refurbished high schools have proved a powerful draw at Roosevelt, Franklin, Grant, McDaniel and Lincoln.

But the district’s plans call for sending students to the Jefferson campus before construction is complete, another sore point for some parents – including those who’ve balked at sending their students into a seismically-unsteady construction zone for their first two years of high school, or who worry that academic offerings will be lacking as the school builds up its enrollment.

“The fact that the district is forcing new students into the building during construction for four years raises serious questions about student safety, educational quality, and whether enrollment numbers are being prioritized over my son’s learning conditions,” Sabin parent Harry Ford wrote to board members, in a letter that he shared with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “These questions remain unanswered. When we asked at the Harriet Tubman engagement we were told that PPS would capture that feedback — and that was that.”

Jasmine Livingstone, a junior at Jefferson, will graduate just before construction is scheduled to begin. Even so, she said she would not change her high school experience, though she had the option of attending Roosevelt instead.

“People vibe at Jeff,” she said. “All of my support system is at Jeff. The dance community is a family. It’s welcoming and accepting.”

In the short term, this year’s eighth graders will still be able to pick between Jefferson and one of the other three high schools. They’re weighing their options right now.

Outside a mid-November community forum at Self Enhancement Inc., held to discuss all the possibilities for Jefferson’s future, Iranelly Juarez, an eighth grader at Harriet Tubman Middle School, said most of her friends were planning to choose Grant next year, as part of the likely last class that will have a choice.

Juarez was still leaning toward Grant based on the strength of its band program, although she said the eventual promise of a new school at Jefferson was appealing.

“I know this one girl who wants to go to Jeff because of the dance program,” Juarez said. “But I really want to stick with my bandmates.”

Data analyst Mark Friesen contributed to this report.