Lewis Families: Take Action

There is significant concern about the possibility of a large earthquake hitting Oregon. The potential devastation has led PPS and Oregon to invest significant money making schools safer. While it has been a component of each bond since 2012, only seven buildings serving elementary-age kids have received full seismic retrofits; of these seven schools, Lewis and Marysville are proposed to close.

In both cases, our students would move into buildings with outstanding seismic needs, including unreinforced masonry.

Every parent wants their child to be as safe as possible in a natural disaster, and that means keeping them in a seismically retrofitted building. It also means putting as many kids as possible in that building so they can be safer in the event of an earthquake.

Learn more about our building.

We agree with the goal of full, well-resourced schools. What’s troubling in our situation is – we had one. In the SEGC analysis requested by the school board, Drs. Green and Hanson found that Lewis “had exceeded the district’s 80% target utilization in recent years” until “[the district] made [Lewis’s] catchment smaller.” With that change, our projected 25–26 enrollment decreased from 358 students to 281 students. 

Given the 360-student threshold set in this process, it is reasonable to think we might not be on any list if our boundaries had remained stable three years ago.

We are also adding significant new single-family housing that is designed to be more affordable. New du-, tri-, and quadplexes have been springing up in the Lewis catchment (pg. 19-22) as part of the City’s residential infill project, which was designed with the specific purpose of creating denser, family-friendly housing west of 205. This isn’t a guarantee that people with kids will move to the neighborhood, but it deserves to be considered as part of enrollment projections.

Walkable neighborhood schools were one of the board’s core priorities. Currently, Lewis sits quite centrally in its catchment zone, and that zone is almost entirely in the Woodstock neighborhood.

Most families with the time and ability can easily walk, bike, skate, or scooter to and from school. A high-frequency bus also runs along the east side of campus, making it easy for caregivers to walk kids to school and take public transit.

But under the proposed changes, our new school would be on the far-southern end of its catchment zone, and in an entirely different neighborhood. Most families would now be over a mile from their school – prohibitively far to walk for many, especially in the rainy Oregon winter. This wide boundary would also incur new school busing costs and leave families nowhere near a bus stop.