Portland Public School Board members voted 5-2 Tuesday to award a contract worth up to $61 million to a Texas-based firm that will oversee the modernization of three high schools and the planned Center for Black Student Excellence over the next five years.
The vote capped an extraordinary flurry of debate over the proposal to bring in Grapevine, Texas-based firm Procedeo to manage the four projects, worth nearly $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars. And it came despite the looming possibility of a legal challenge from the construction management company that lost out on the competitive bidding process.
School board chair Eddie Wang, vice-chair Michelle DePass and directors Rashelle Chase-Miller, Patte Sullivan and Christy Splitt voted in favor of hiring Procedeo, saying they believed the firm could bring needed order and stability as the district nears the crux of a 20-year effort to rebuild all nine of its comprehensive high schools.
Directors Virginia La Forte and Stephanie Engelsman voted against the plan, arguing vociferously that it needed far more public scrutiny, beyond the 150 or so people who were able to attend the board meeting, and a complete cost-benefit analysis. Board members received the contract late last Wednesday afternoon, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, giving them in effect only two business days to ask questions before their vote. The student representative to the board, Roosevelt High’s Ian Ritorto, also voted no, though the student vote is non-binding.
The final vote was a victory for Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong, who is 15 months into her tenure at Oregon’s largest school district and has said that reshaping the district’s approach to its aging physical facilities is among her highest priorities.
She and senior members of her staff urged board members to support Procedeo on Tuesday night, saying any delays risked forward momentum in the district’s ambitious construction plans, which call for opening Jefferson, Cleveland and Wells High Schools simultaneously, in the fall of 2029. Each is projected to cost well more than $400 million, making them among the country’s most expensive high schools, even after square footage was trimmed to cut back on costs.
Since 2014, Portland Public Schools has seen six new high schools open to great fanfare — though in some cases, construction issues have cropped up even after students and staff moved back into the buildings.
But the effort to remake all of the city’s high schools, which has spanned several superintendents and a pandemic, has also been plagued along the way by significant delays, cost overruns and turnover within the district’s Office of School Modernization. Meanwhile, a deferred maintenance backlog has taken a toll on most of the city’s middle and elementary schools, many of which have aging heating and cooling systems and have not been fully shored up against the threat of a massive earthquake.
In her pitch to the school board, Armstrong said that by hiring Procedeo, the district was consolidating under one contractor work that has been parceled out among half a dozen different firms over the years, with varying results. The goal, she said, is not only to complete the three high schools on time and on budget, but to overhaul Portland Public Schools’ approach to maintaining its more than 80 facilities.
“When accountability is spread too thin, progress slows too much,” Armstrong said. “As superintendent, I am and should be held to a high degree by the amount of incompetence I allow over time. That’s a standard that requires us to confront and correct the systems that have not worked….Tonight is not about blame. It is about responsibility. It’s about restoring trust, and it’s about delivering results.”
Skeptics of the contract pointed to Procedeo’s sparse record of work in Oregon and what they said were unusual aspects of the contract, including $6 million in potential bonuses payable if all three high schools are completed on time.
Kiesha Locklear, a senior project manager with the Office of School Modernization who has led the Jefferson High School and the Center for Black Student Excellence projects, told board members Tuesday that she did not disagree that her office needed a new infusion of leadership and direction. But the $61 million contract was far too expensive for the district’s needs, she said. Locklear has previously said the price tag is too high for the scope of work, given the district has already completed a large amount of planning and preparation for the projects.
“It seems highly irregular, at minimum,” Locklear said. “It’s not a negotiation when you come to the table with a $60 million contract and you know that the scope isn’t anywhere near that in cost.”
The district’s lawyer, Sharon Toncray, told board members that Procedeo’s take-home will be less than the $61 million, because that figure also includes the price of the district’s in-house staff.
It’s not yet clear what that breakdown will be, said Deborah Kafoury, Armstrong’s chief of staff.
“The staffing analysis for (the district’s Office of School Modernization) has not been completed,” Kafoury said. “At the same time we are taking on this new firm, we are also in the process of cutting $50 million (from the operating budget for the 2026-2027 school year), so there is a lot of activity going on.”
Now that the Procedeo contract has been finalized, Kafoury said, a staffing plan will be forthcoming “very soon.”
The construction management firm that finished second to Procedeo in the district’s competitive bidding process may seek a judicial review of the district’s decision under Oregon public contracting rules. The president of the losing firm, Turner & Townsend Heery, has contended that there were scoring irregularities in the process and a conflict of interest among the evaluators, one of whom is a district employee currently reporting to a Procedeo employee.
Tuesday night’s meeting put on full display the fraught dynamic between Portland’s school board members and Wang’s brand of leadership in particular.
He has made it clear that he sees the board’s role as limited to setting policy, vision and goals for the district, supervising the superintendent and setting the budget — what that does not include, he suggested Tuesday, is close scrutiny of management-level decisions made by Armstrong.
“If the superintendent wants to make staffing decisions, that’s her right,” Wang said. “For us to start getting into that, we are working outside our wheelhouse.”
La Forte and Engelsman contended that it is well within the board’s purview to keep a close eye on the expenditure of public funds, particularly for multimillion dollar contracts like the one in question.
Later in the meeting, Engelsman tried to ask a series of questions, including how many district staff might be let go under Procedeo and querying the feasibility of Procedeo’s time-saving proposals for Jefferson High School. But Wang stopped her, first asking her to limit her questions to those that would impact her vote on the contract, and then cutting off debate entirely to move to a vote.