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Portland Public School’s Visioning process will hit the road for a guest spot at one of Portland’s iconic attractions, OMSI.

On Saturday, May 11, the Visioning core team will present an innovative, interactive exhibit of its work so far. PPS launched the Visioning initiative in 2018 as a way to identify and define what PPS can be, what it should be, and how students, staff, families and community can get to a defined and shared “North Star” for the district.

The Portland Public Schools Visioning initiative continued to benefit from an outpouring of participation in February and early March, as students, families, educators, administrators, central office staff and community members weighed in on three major focus areas at community meetings across the city.

Due to today’s weather-related school and district office closure, the Visioning community meeting scheduled for tonight at Grant at Marshall High School will not take place. We apologize for any inconvenience and invite you to join us at one of two remaining Visioning community meetings this week:

The PPS Visioning initiative reached its most active stage to date in January, as the district hosted dozens of community meetings and offered to the public a multi-language, four-question survey. Those efforts, culminating with a large-scale community meeting at Madison High School on Feb. 26, resulted in over 12,000 comments, ideas and dreams about the future of PPS from students, teachers, administrators, families, central office staff and community members.

One week after the conclusion of dozens of PPS-hosted Visioning community meetings, the PPS Guiding Coalition is set to gather for the second series of meetings, on Feb. 1 and 2 at Franklin High School.

Portland Public Schools marked a significant milestone in the work to bring a long-term vision to the district earlier this month, with the first meetings of the PPS Guiding Coalition. The meetings, which included about 100 participants and were themed “Let’s Dream Together,” took place Dec. 7 at the Blanchard Education Service Center and all day Dec. 8 at Faubion School.

The PPS Guiding Coalition includes students, educators, administrators, parents, business and community leaders, and central office staff. These individuals were identified and invited to join the Guiding Coalition by the Board of Education and Superintendent Guerrero.

The Guiding Coalition will serve as the district’s steering committee for our Visioning work, which will continue through the spring. The Guiding Coalition will help us ensure that we are hearing from throughout our broad, diverse, dynamic school community, that we capture and synthesize what we are hearing, and that the final PPS Vision addresses and respects the dreams of those we serve.

We are excited to gather our Guiding Coalition for the first time, in December. The PPS Guiding Coalition is the steering committee for our Visioning initiative and represents a cross-section of our PPS stakeholder community.

Dear PPS Colleagues, 

When Superintendent Guerrero first introduced the PPS Visioning initiative in June, we promised to keep you updated and apprised as we moved forward. I am excited to share with you our progress over the last several weeks, and to give you a peek at what is to come.

First, we have named the initiative: Reimagining PPS Together. We tried to capture what it will mean to identify and define the district’s “North Star,” to determine what PPS can be, what it should be, and how we can get to our North Star together, as one, united district.