• Ceremony will celebrate re-opening of Grant High School

    9/3/2019
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    Grant High School re-opened after two years of modernization work. (Photo by David Mayne)

    After two years of construction and students relocating to another campus, Grant High School re-opened on Aug. 28. Thanks to the generosity of Portland voters who passed the 2012 School Building Improvement Bond, Portland Public Schools was able to create a Northeast Portland high school that, while keeping parts of the historic framework of a campus first built in 1923, now offers a fully modernized campus for learning in the 21st century.

    PPS will celebrate with a ceremony starting at 10 a.m. Saturday. The public is invited to attend the event, which will include speeches by:

    • Ted Wheeler, Portland mayor
    • Earl Blumenhauer, U.S. representative
    • Guadalupe Guerrero, PPS superintendent
    • Deborah Kafoury, Multnomah County chair (and a 1985 Grant graduate)
    • Scott Bailey, PPS Board of Education member
    • Carol Campbell, Grant principal
    • Ruby Paustian, Grant student body president

    Other event highlights include:

    • Performance by the school’s choir, the Royal Blues
    • Native American recognition ceremony
    • Ribbon-cutting ceremony
    • Student-led tours of the campus
    • Alumni basketball game (12:30-2 p.m.)

    Grant students, who relocated to the Marshall High School campus for two years as construction was undertaken, got their first look at the new campus during registration, then got the full experience as school started on Aug. 28.

    The Grant construction involved 2,056 workers who put in 705,361 hours of work installing, among other things, 28.5 miles of electrical conduit, 160 miles of wire, 15.15 miles of pipes and 280,000 pounds of HVAC ducts.

    Opening day at Grant drew plenty of media attention, with outlets filing stories that included:

    Grant High School is the final high school modernized as part of the 2012 bond, which also funded modernizations of Franklin and Roosevelt High Schools and the building of a new Faubion PK-8 School. It also brought improvements to 51 other schools across the district including new roofs, seismic upgrades, accessibility projects including new elevators and upgrades to middle school science classrooms. 

    The success of the 2012 Bond paved the way for the 2017 bond, which continues our commitment to rebuild all of our schools over the next 30 years. This summer, construction began on a modernized Madison High School and a new Kellogg Middle School. At the start of next year, the rebuilding of Lincoln High will get underway.

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