Ryan Scallon is superintendent of Portland Public Schools. He can be reached at superintendent@portlandschools.org.

I’m writing a series of columns about the impact that our new Portland Public Schools’ five-year strategic plan will have on students in the classroom. This month I’m focusing on our plan’s central priority: equity.

Our strategic plan has five priorities: equity, achievement, whole student, people and systems. Each priority has four to seven strategic initiatives to help us achieve the outcomes we want to see. There are too many initiatives to complete in one school year, so we’re starting now and sequencing more initiatives over the next four years.

Our equity priority states that our district “strives to be an anti-racist, inclusive district by vigilantly supporting each student to achieve their potential and rooting out systemic inequities.” At its core, this means ensuring that all our students graduate prepared and empowered for a future of their choosing.

This goal isn’t new – we’ve been actively working on it for the past seven years, beginning with the Portland Promise, our previous strategic plan. To cite just a few examples, our progress on equity includes aligning our budget to our equity mission in such ways as supporting multilingual students and families by investing in additional instructional capacity, intake support, language access and case management services. This year’s budget also includes the addition of special education coordinators at each school to better facilitate delivery of our special education services. Additionally we launched the Equity Leaders Cohort, a train-the-trainer model for building district capacity and ensuring professional development on the topic of equity at all school sites. The Portland Board of Public Education also has passed a variety of policies to address systems and structures in our district that may lead to inequitable outcomes and experiences for students.

However, we still have significant work to do in order to reduce achievement and opportunity gaps between students with and without special education needs, multilingual learners and non-multilingual learners, and students who are economically disadvantaged and those who aren’t.

Our work this year starts with those who work most closely with our students: our staff.

The initiative we’re concentrating on in 2024-2025 is: “developing and implementing a plan to advance staff mindsets and cultural humility in support of equitable outcomes and experiences for our students and families.” We’re focusing on professional development that aligns to the needs of our educators and supports student outcomes.

To enhance this work, we recently launched a partnership with a national education organization, The Leadership Academy, with the financial support of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.

In collaboration with PPS staff and The Leadership Academy, we are developing a comprehensive suite of professional development opportunities that will begin to be implemented early in 2025 and continue in the 2025-2026 school year. As an example of a future professional development, educators across the district will participate in the launch of a focus on “Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Leadership and Teaching.” This focus will help staff reflect on specific classroom-level practices that maintain high expectations of students and ensure effective engagement with our learners from all cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

The work aligned to this year’s initiative will be ongoing, but for 2025-2026 and beyond we’ll also focus on these equity initiatives:

• Expand opportunities and improve systems that accelerate outcomes for our historically underserved students and families.

• Design and implement improved adult education programs that aim to provide the learning and knowledge needed to accelerate career opportunities and provide multi-generational support to PPS families.

• Expand and strengthen programs that accelerate outcomes for and develop multilingual learners (e.g. students with limited or interrupted formal education, unaccompanied youth, transitions).

We’ll continue to monitor and refine each initiative every year.