The new mascot and nickname for Franklin High School will be Lightning. The process to determine a new identity for the school was finalized Tuesday, when the Portland Public Schools Board of Education unanimously approved Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero’s recommendation.

Dear PPS Community,

We have come to the end of what has been an ambitious and groundbreaking school year at the Portland Public Schools. I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to our amazing students, their supportive families, our dedicated teachers, hardworking support staff and dynamic school and district leaders who made it all work.

This week in PPS Pulse: A full summer of modernization and improvements projects; district launches enrollment and program balancing process

This summer promises to be the biggest of the PPS bond program so far. School modernization and improvement projects will touch almost every school over the coming months with security upgrades, new roofs, asbestos remediation, new fire alarms, ADA improvements and a seismic retrofit in the works. 

Portland Public Schools has launched a two-year process to develop a framework for balancing enrollment and school programs across the district. The goal is to use data and community input to build a thoughtful and equitable plan that addresses all schools and programs as well as short- and long-term student, staff and community needs.

Anyone attending a meeting of the PTA at Scott Elementary School would surely have been struck by the conversation -- in Spanish, with headsets used to provide interpretation to English. The innovative setup was a way to show English-speaking families how it feels for the school’s Spanish- and Somali-speaking families to attend meetings held in English.

Since its inception, SafeOregon has become a reliable way for students, families and community members to report unsafe situations. Since September 2017, when Portland Public Schools started encouraging its community to utilize the tip line, the district has received 259 tips on a variety of issues.