Tuesday night at the drama factory

The Portland public school district is at it again tonight, doing what it does best, which is traumatize kids and their parents. The schools aren't anywhere near as good as they used to be, Portland as a city is scaring away parents, and as a result, there are no longer enough students to fill all the seats. And so now, beyond just talking about closing a dozen or so schools, they're naming names as to which schools that will be.

So many parents are so angry that this evening's school board meeting is being disrupted, and it may have to be resumed with no audience. But even if I can't watch the outrage streaming on the internet, I can see the unhappiness just by looking out the window.

Here in inner northeast Portland, they're proposing closure of both Irvington and Sabin elementary schools. Kids from Sabin School will be moved to MLK School at Sixth and Alberta. Someone living where I do would have to schlep their kids to MLK, which is a 1.8 mile drive away. And yet there's a perfectly good elementary school, Alameda, four short blocks from here. You could walk it in five minutes.

The closures being considered, and the crazy boundary lines both old and new, are the product of non-stop bad management over several decades. Among many other errors, millions have been frittered away on management fat and ideological correctness agendas. Meanwhile, bank-breaking billions have been spent on construction projects, and there, the school district's performance has been so questionable that a state criminal investigation into it is reportedly in progress as this is written.

Perhaps the most galling feature of all this is the fact that the long-time queen of the school board, Julia Brim-Edwards, is now a front-runner to become the chair of the Multnomah County commission, where she'd have an even bigger operation to oversee badly. Her campaign ads brag about how she's tight with the labor unions and nonprofit organizations "that you trust." It's a bad joke.

I hope that all the frazzled parents who are up in arms about the school board's latest blow to their well-being take a moment to reflect before they cast a vote for Brim-Edwards. Some of the latest drama, perhaps most of it, is her doing.