Official signed letter (PDF document) can be viewed here: RCPNA-letter-to-PPS-2026. Or, read below.
RE: Rose City Park Elementary School
November 3rd, 2026
Dear Portland Public Schools Board of Education and Superintendent Armstrong,
The Rose City Park Neighborhood Association opposes the closure of Rose City Park Elementary School. We recognize that PPS faces growing financial and infrastructure pressures and that change will be required. However, Rose City Park Elementary meets the key indicators for a school that should remain open.
PPS assessment data show that Rose City Park students exceed city and state averages in both attendance and academic performance. In 2025, the school enrolled 417 students, well within the PPS sustainable enrollment threshold. Of those, 226 belong to underserved student groups.
Today, 2,893 households in Rose City Park have children under 18. Additionally, housing investment is accelerating in our neighborhood, especially along the NE Sandy Boulevard corridor, where hundreds of new units have been built. Developers have indicated to our neighborhood association that they plan to continue building large-scale housing developments along Sandy Boulevard within the Rose City Park Elementary catchment area.
The Ellington Affordable Housing Community, operated by Home Forward, has plans to redevelop with an additional 150-200 units of up to four bedrooms for renters earning 60% or less of area median income. We expect the number of children living there to increase significantly. Today, Ellington students walk to Rose City Park Elementary with a grant-funded walking school bus, and participation continues to grow.
Rose City Park’s parent organizations, Hội Phụ Huynh and Rose City Park PTO, have shared that many Vietnamese families describe their experience not as immigrants, but as refugees of war. The trauma of necessary relocation to a new country with an unfamiliar culture and language has created ongoing challenges as families learn to live, work, and build lives in a new environment. The Vietnamese Dual Language Immersion program at Rose City Park has given these families and their students a source of stability. Uprooting this program would force them into yet another displacement and would create new barriers to their ability to succeed in their new country.
Rose City Park Elementary is a true neighborhood school: 89% of students in the neighborhood program and 33% in the Vietnamese Dual Language Program can walk or roll to school. Nearly all our streets have full sidewalks, and neighborhood greenways and paths give students safe routes on to Roseway Heights Middle School and McDaniel High School. Closing RCP will create the largest school desert of any proposed closure, leaving the vast majority of households with children living too far to walk/roll to school. What are now short, safe walks to school will become significant transportation barriers. Families without a car or with inflexible work hours will face longer trips and more difficulty getting their children to school ready to learn, likely leading to more missed and late days. Particularly for our at-risk children, we foresee the additional barriers created by closure will reduce regular attendance and lower academic achievement.
In addition to the impact on academics, closing Rose City Park would undermine progress toward the climate goals of the City of Portland and PPS. Because so many families walk or roll today, closing one of the district’s most walkable, bikeable schools will push more families into cars for the school commute. That means more single-occupancy vehicle trips, more traffic congestion around schools, and more air pollution and carbon emissions, the opposite of what our shared climate goals call for.
Rose City Park Elementary does not fit the PPS criteria that would justify closing a school. Its enrollment is sustainable, its students are succeeding, and its neighborhood is growing. Closing Rose City Park will put new barriers in front of our most vulnerable students, threaten the very attendance and academic performance that make it a strong school today, and undermine our traffic safety and climate goals.
We respectfully ask the School Board and Superintendent to keep Rose City Park Elementary open, so that it can continue to support the personal and academic success of our students and their families.
On behalf of the Rose City Park Neighborhood Association, sincerely,
[signature]
Zachary Lauritzen
President, Rose City Park Neighborhood Association zlauritzen@rcpna.org
541.805.5425
CC
Hội Phụ Huynh
Rose City Park PTO
Sheryll Orbase, Principal, Rose City Park Elementary
Tiffany Koyama Lane, District 3 City Councilor
Angelita Morillo, District 3 City Councilor
Steve Novick, District 3 City Councilor
Thuy Tran, House District 45
Khanh Pham, Senate District 23