We just had an off-year, off-season election here in Portland for local school board positions and ballot initiatives.
It's been a turbulent year for the school district. Lead was discovered in the drinking water; a public health disaster and an indication of the sorry state of our infrastructure. Voters on the state level rejected a corporate tax initative in November and left Oregon's public schools in a budget hole. The district was sued to the tune of $1 million for racial harassment. The search for a new superintendent has been an inconclusive mess. No doubt prompted by the chaos, turnout for this election was higher than usual at a staggering 31%.
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Most importantly, voters
overwhelmingly approved city measure 26-193, raising property taxes to repair and modernize PPS buildings. Portlanders also voted to allow taxes on AirBnBs and to award more independence to the city auditor's office.
Two of the three vacant positions on the school board were filled by overwhelming majority. Scott Bailey took 62% of the vote against two minnows in Zone 5. Former board member Julia Brim-Edwards took nearly 67% in Zone 6 against a fractured opposition. Brim-Edwards's nearest opponent was Trisha Parks, a teachers' union official who pulled in 16%; nobody else broke 10%.
I mapped the only race that was even vaguely close: the
Zone 4 contest between Rita Moore and Jamila Singleton Munson. This one was interesting. Singleton Munson is a black woman and was supported by a broad slew of local racial justice and community groups – understandably, given the aforementioned lawsuit and a lingering racial achievement gap in Oregon schools. However, she also has deep roots in private education and the charter school movement: before moving to Portland, she was a charter school principal. It’s no surprise that folks were a little suspicious of her conversion to the cause of public schooling. The teachers’ union and other left-wing and labor groups endorsed Moore, a PTA activist, instead. So did most local newspapers, praising Moore’s longer history of involvement in the Portland school system.
Moore won handily, 58% to 42%, but the unusual coalitions formed in this election turned Portland’s
normal political geography on its head.
Rather than the river or freeway as dividing lines, the city is mottled. Singleton Munson’s support is strongest in the inner North and Northeast neighborhoods that used to form the core of Portland’s African-American community. While these neighborhoods have been gentrified over the past two decades, pushing black Portlanders towards the periphery of the city, they’re still home to traditionally black churches and other institutions that got the vote out for Singleton Munson.
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The zones overlap; I could vote in all three and I chose Moore, Bailey, and Parks respectively.
For the first time in my life I’d actually met one of the candidates outside a campaign setting. Zach Babb, running in Zone 6, attended Reed College for a while and we were both part of a student club that organized beer gardens on campus. Babb dropped out to become a successful app developer – he designed the mobile ticketing program first used by Portland’s public transit authority and now copied around the world. He didn’t have much of a profile in the race, though, and only pulled in 2.18% of the vote.
