Metropolitan Learning Center high school ending
School district blames declining enrollment
Metropolitan Learning Center will no longer offer high school classes after this school year, Portland Public Schools announced Tuesday.
“This was a difficult decision driven by sustained under-enrollment,” read a letter to MLC families from Chief of Schools Isaac Cardona. He wrote that “funding limitations that make it increasingly challenging to support a full high school program with the breadth of coursework, staffing stability and services students deserve.”
“MLC as a school is not closing, and K–8 programming will continue,” wrote Cardona.
MLC was created by PPS in 1968 as an experimental program for students not well suited to the conventional classroom approach. It is housed in the former Couch School at 2033 NW Glisan St., next to Couch Park.
“This is terribly sad,” wrote Sabrina Lala on the Facebook page of an MLC teacher. “It was such a haven for weird, different, creative, and promising individuals who would have been crushed by being in a big school like Lincoln, Cleveland or Grant. I was so grateful to return to MLC for my senior year after the social pressure cooker at St. Mary’s.”
The school board will listen to students and parents reacting to the announcement today, Thursday, Feb. 12, at 4:30, at the Prophet Center, 501 N. Dixon St. There will be a YouTube livestream: https://www.youtube.com/@ppsboardofeducation/live.
I too have a friend who graduated from MLC in the 70’s who greatly benefited from the program.
We are living in an age of rapidly increasing public expenditures and a struggling/ declining tax base. All of us are going to have to lower our expectations about the breadth of public entitlements, and our politicians will have to become fiscally disciplined and focus on basic infrastructure and public safety rather than their pie-in-the-sky schemes du jour. It’s simply the new reality.
As an MLC parent, I’m devastated. I still don’t have words, but incredibly angry that we weren’t given any opportunity to give input or advocate for our school. My alternative high school literally saved my life when every other school and system failed me. Now, many students like I was will not have an alternative so desperately needed and possibly life-saving. 💔