Portland Public School Closures Data Explorer

On March 10, 2026, Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong announced PPS will close 5–10 of its 74 elementary, K-8, middle, and alternative schools by fall 2027. The driver is a decade of declining enrollment (projected to fall another 13% by 2034-35) and a structural budget gap.

No formal criteria have been published, but PPS and school board members have pointed to current enrollment, building utilization (students/sq ft), seismic risk and building condition, recent or planned bond investments, and equity considerations such as Title I status and neighborhood demographics. The official shortlist is expected Nov 2026, with a board vote in Dec 2026.

This explorer gathers data to visualize these factors side-by-side for every PPS school, with an emphasis on the 15 lowest-enrollment schools that media has listed as potential candidates. Academic performance is included for context, though it is notably absent from the criteria PPS has discussed publicly.

Map — all 74 in-scope PPS schools

Each marker sized by 2025-26 enrollment. Red = closure candidate, blue = other. A red ring indicates an unreinforced masonry (URM) building.

Scatter plots

Closure candidates highlighted in orange. Click & drag to zoom.

All schools ranked by building utilization

Students per square foot — lower bars mean emptier buildings. Closure candidates (orange) should cluster at the bottom if the closure list tracks underutilization.

All schools — sortable table

Click a column header to sort. Hover the i next to each header for a definition and source.

Methodology & sources

Each of the 74 rows is one PPS school in the closure-announcement scope (elementary, K-8, middle, and alternative — PPS's 9 high schools are excluded per the March 10 announcement). Columns are pulled from the sources below and joined on a mix of NCES school ID, Oregon ODE School Institution ID, and manual name mapping for recent renamings (e.g., Madison → McDaniel, Wilson → Wells-Barnett, Fernwood → Beverly Cleary). Geographic signals (affordable housing, permits) are aggregated to each school using its actual PPS attendance boundary, with a 1-mile haversine radius as a fallback for focus-option / alternative / embedded programs that don't have a published catchment.

Enrollment & demographics

Oregon ODE Fall Membership
2025-26 and 2024-25 school-level enrollment, race/ethnicity shares, grade-band.
NCES CCD (via Urban Institute Education Data API)
School addresses, lat/lon, 2022 enrollment baseline, free/reduced meal counts, direct-certification counts.
US Dept of Education Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC, 2020)
Chronic absenteeism, English Learner (LEP), and IDEA/SPED counts. Note: 2020 COVID year may suppress some metrics.

Academic performance

Oregon OSAS state assessments (2024-25, 2023-24)
School-level ELA and Math proficiency rates (meets/exceeds, all grades, all students).

Buildings & seismic

KPFF Seismic Report (2009)
Year built, square footage, and construction type for every building in the district. Note: square footage predates recent bond expansions.
Holmes Engineering URM Assessment (2024, via WW)
Unreinforced masonry classification and retrofit cost estimates for 18 PPS buildings.
PPS Bond — Seismic & modernization
Retrofit and modernization status (full, targeted, planned under 2025 bond).

Title I & federal programs

PPS Funded Programs
Title I-A schoolwide designations, 2025-26.

Housing & neighborhood growth

Oregon Affordable Housing Inventory (OAHI)
Existing and pipeline affordable housing projects with unit counts, bedroom mix, and status. Aggregated to each school using the school's PPS attendance boundary (point-in-polygon) rather than a fixed radius; schools without a published catchment (alternative, embedded, or focus-option programs) fall back to a 1-mile haversine radius.
Portland BDS Residential Building Permits (via PortlandMaps)
4,144 permits issued 2022 – 2026-04 that created new residential units; 12,401 units total. Single-family, ADUs, and multifamily — market-rate and affordable combined. Attributed to each school by point-in-polygon against the PPS attendance boundary, with the same 1-mile fallback noted above.
City of Portland School Attendance Areas
PPS attendance-area polygons (elementary/K-8, middle, high), dissolved from the City of Portland School_Boundaries FeatureServer layer and saved to data/raw/pps_boundaries_*.geojson.

Regional context (not attached per-school)

Metro Council's 2045 Distributed Forecast (Ord. 21-1457, adopted Feb 2021) projects City of Portland growing from 668,429 to 774,219 residents (+16%) by 2045, and unincorporated Multnomah County from 19,328 to 40,490 (+110%). Metro only publishes this forecast at city/county level (no tract or TAZ breakdown, and no age bands), so it is not attached to individual schools here — it is background only. PSU Population Research Center explicitly does not forecast Multnomah County, so Metro is the only public long-horizon population forecast for the PPS footprint.

Closure candidate list

Willamette Week (2026-03-18)
The 15-school ranking. Derived by WW from criteria PPS said it would use (enrollment + building utilization). PPS's own shortlist is expected Nov 2026 with a board vote in Dec 2026.

Caveats

Building square footage is from 2009 and may understate capacity at schools expanded under recent bonds. CRDC LEP/IDEA counts are from 2020 (COVID year) and are divided by 2025-26 enrollment to derive shares — treat as approximate. Free/reduced meal shares use 2022 counts over 2022 enrollment; post-2022 trends are not reflected. Permits represent approvals, not completions — a permit may be issued but not built.

Source code

This dashboard is open source. Review the data pipeline, open an issue, or submit a pull request on GitHub.

github.com/meub/pps-closures

Errors, feedback, feature requests

Spot something wrong? Have an idea for another view or data source? Get in touch.

alexmeub.com/contact