PORTLAND, Ore. — Five-year-old Brom Brisbois doesn’t yet speak in full sentences.
His significant cognitive and speech issues make communication difficult. But his mother, Marilyn, believes that if he could, he’d tell her how much he loves his school.
That’s why, at a tense meeting in early December with teachers and officials at Peninsula Elementary in North Portland’s Kenton neighborhood, she tried to emphasize the positive even as she pressed for more support for her son’s disabilities.
Advertisement – Continue Reading Below
“I told his teacher, ‘You’re doing a good job. My son wants to return every day, so you need to focus on that,’” Brisbois said. “I said, ‘It’s not all bad. He’s not getting the help or the education that he deserves, but at least he wants to be there.’”
Their family’s story underscores both the inherent promise and the significant challenges of Portland Public Schools’ four-year-old effort to include students with profound medical or behavioral needs in general education classrooms at their neighborhood schools, rather than enroll them in specialized classrooms, sometimes in schools far from their homes.
In theory, the district’s neighborhood inclusion model aims to replicate the same supports in a typical classroom that a child with highly complex needs would get if they were instead placed in one of the district’s 38 “focus” classrooms in elementary and K-8 schools. Such “focus” classrooms feature low student-teacher ratios that are expensive to maintain.
Those supports could include help from paraeducators — educational assistants who work solely with children with disabilities — or lessons designed by a special education teacher. It could also mean regular visits from speech-language pathologists, mental health providers, occupational therapists, adaptive physical education teachers or school psychologists.
The goal is to keep such students together with friends from down the block, and prepare all students to be a part of the wider world beyond school grounds.
But turning that goal into reality, and moving roughly 950 children with complex needs into general education classrooms, has been easier said than done, parents and teachers said. That’s particularly true when school districts around Oregon are coping with a shortage of both paraeducators and special education teachers, a growing population of students with disabilities and stretched-thin budgets.
Some parents at Portland’s pilot site schools — especially at Sitton Elementary, where the inclusion model has been in place since 2022 — say they’ve been encouraged by the spaces created in mainstream classrooms for their children with complex medical and behavioral needs. But that’s not the case everywhere, including at Peninsula, where multiple families said that 18 months into the experiment, the situation has reached a breaking point.
A paused rollout
Peninsula is one of eight schools across the district, mostly in North Portland, that have rolled out the neighborhood inclusion model in early grades over the past four years. The others are Sitton, Rosa Parks, James John, Marysville and Whitman elementary schools and Cesar Chavez and Aster K-8s.
The school district’s original hope was to have expanded to more schools by now. But that wider rollout was paused this year. Only a small number of additional schools will likely start the model in fall 2026 or 2027, said Jey Buno, the district’s senior chief of student services.
“We made a decision as a district last year not to move forward with more schools being added in because we really wanted to be able to learn and understand and support the eight schools that were currently implementing inclusive practices,” said Kelli Charles, the district’s senior director for special education, at a forum for families in early December.
In some rooms, Charles said, inclusion could mean audiobooks provided during reading time, or support from paraeducators; in others, it could be a school’s special education teams reviewing a general education teacher’s lesson plan ahead of time, to make sure it is accessible for all.
“It’s not about placing every student in a general education classroom without support,” Charles added. “Inclusion must be purposeful and supported, not just a physical presence.”
Across the eight schools, that purposeful approach is hit and miss, said Alisha Chavez, vice president of the Portland Association of Teachers union, who taught for 10 years in the intensive skills classroom at Atkinson Elementary School in Southeast Portland.
For example, she said, Marysville K-5, in Southeast Portland, used to have a dedicated social-emotional skills classroom with assigned qualified mental health providers. Now the school is on the neighborhood model for early grades, she said, and an inclusion specialist and school counselor are trying their best to fill the role the mental health providers once did.
Perhaps nowhere has the implementation been more challenging than at Peninsula, where teachers and support staff filed a grievance with the school district in December, contending that far too many students with disabilities at the school were not getting the support they needed to learn.
Families were frequently asked to pick up their children with complex needs during the school day because of staffing shortages, staff wrote. They also noted that key special education jobs sat vacant, classrooms were regularly cleared when a student’s behavior became too disruptive and specialized education plans for individual students went too long without meaningful updates.
That interrupts the education of the rest of the student body, educators wrote, a dynamic that several parents at the school said had added to tensions and divisions. The school’s principal, Claire Skelly, went on leave after the grievance was filed in December; in early February, parents learned that she would not be returning.
Buno told The Oregonian/OregonLive he “could not recall” any complaints filed by parents with either the school district or the Oregon Department of Education on either inclusionary practices or the neighborhood school model. But after the grievance from their teachers, dozens of parents at Peninsula signed an open letter to Portland Public Schools Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong calling for a “clear, concrete action plan” to address concerns at the school.
“Peninsula has been told that as a neighborhood school model site, it will have the support students need to access their education,” the parents wrote. “This is simply not true in practice. And our children are paying the price, in lost learning time, emotional distress and a school environment that does not feel consistently safe. It is a broken promise for everyone.”
Buno said that Peninsula should have four special education teachers, but only has two due to resignations in October and January. He said the district expects to place new special educators there within the next few weeks.
“When you don’t have the teachers you need, when you have students who present complexities, it creates instability in their daily programming,” Buno said. “I recognize what is being said. I get the need for strong licensed teachers to be in place. We are committed to getting that done.”
Brom’s story
Brisbois landed in Portland with her three children after bouncing between the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation in Idaho, where they are enrolled members of the tribe, and southwest Washington, where Brisbois grew up. Currently, she works night shifts as a mechanic for Vigor Marine Group on Swan Island and grabs sleep when she can during the day.
Being in a classroom with typically developing peers at Peninsula increased her son’s desire to make himself understood, his mother says, a glimmer of the potential of an inclusive classroom. Right now, Brom uses an iPad and hand gestures to try to communicate with his classmates.
“He is just wanting to communicate more,” Brisbois said. “Even if it is just gibberish, he talks all the time now. And there is an improvement in his handwriting. Before it was just squiggly lines, but now he can do circles. He can’t read, but he can point at stuff and he knows what it is.”
At his preschool, Brom started to come out of his shell. His teachers there said that to thrive, he’d need speech therapy and dedicated support from a paraeducator who could help him navigate through the school day. They also said he would need continued access to the tablet to communicate with classmates.
But Brisbois said that despite that advice and Brom’s kindergarten teacher advocating on his behalf to school leaders and her colleagues, she wasn’t able to meet with the teacher and other school staff to discuss the individualized education program to which her son is entitled under federal law until three months into the school year. That’s when she said she was told that there was no budget for a paraeducator for her son. At a follow-up meeting in January, the message was that the school thought he needed to learn to work more independently and not rely on full-time help from an adult, she says.
Buno said he could not comment on Brom’s situation specifically, because of student privacy laws. But he said one-on-one adult assistance is assigned when a student has a “clearly demonstrated need,” and is not denied for budget reasons.
A Peninsula staff member who works with Brom but requested anonymity because they did not have permission from the district to speak with a reporter said that he is clearly bright and smart and wants to learn.
“But if he is just sitting there with his device, he is not getting the academic language,” the staff member said. “There should be someone to help him. Many teachers believe in this model with the right resources and collaboration time. They are not providing that. I want the district to acknowledge that one size cannot fit all.”
‘A brewing divide’
There’s no single blueprint for how to staff an inclusion classroom, since every student has different needs.
Statewide, the West Linn-Wilsonville School District has had an inclusion model in place for more than a decade, but relatively few other districts have followed suit until now. Besides Portland, the Bethel School District near Eugene and the Phoenix-Talent School District near Medford are also implementing the model. It is much more widespread in Washington, where lawmakers have set aside millions of dollars to train educators on how to support inclusion and pilot programs are underway in nearly 250 school districts.
In Portland, Chavez said the union has pushed for more training about inclusion for everyone in a school building and for joint planning time between classroom teachers and their special education counterparts.
Families from Peninsula say they had very little notice that their school would close a classroom focused on K-2 students with disabilities in 2024-25 to pilot the inclusion model. The change began with kindergarten and added first grade this year.
Special education has been top of mind at the school for years; 31% of its 250 or so students have disabilities, far above the district average of 18%. In 2023, the Oregon Department of Education ordered the school district to pay for outside help for more than a dozen Peninsula students who’d failed to get consistent help with academics, speech issues and social/emotional stability.
Aine Mines’ son, now in fourth grade, spent two years being taught under the old model in a focused communication/behavior classroom at Peninsula before moving this year to their neighborhood school, James John. Peninsula was a struggle, she said; her son’s time in general education classes was limited, and it took months for his individual education program to get set up, amid special education staff turnover. Frustrated, her son, who has autism, acted up in class, compounding the problems, she said.
Things at James John seem to be going better, she said. Leaders from the school visited Sitton early on, she said, and came back excited about the neighborhood school model.
The 19% of James John students who needed special education services there is also less than Peninsula’s 31%, she said, and things feel calmer even though the school is larger. She said the biggest drama of the year in her daughter’s second grade classroom came when another student broke the electric pencil sharpener by putting the eraser end in first, just to see what might happen.
“I want PPS to help Peninsula get to that level of low-grade drama too,” she said.
Back at Peninsula, parents of children without disabilities are also feeling anxious.
Parent Alissa Leeper said every classroom needs enough staff, planning time and behavioral support so that all children, including those like her typically developing second grade son, can learn without constant disruptions and upheaval.
“What is happening is that basic needs — being seen, being heard, having academic belonging, being tracked in reading skills, people knowing your name — are not being met,” Leeper said. “All of the attention and focus and resources are going to children who have mental, physical and behavioral needs going on all day long. The teachers aren’t able to focus on the creative, joyous, challenging ways of education that they were trained for.”
Peninsula parent Erica Borman, whose daughter has autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, said the answer isn’t to reverse course on the inclusion model, which she said would “alienate children from their own communities, force them to travel farther and deny them the education that is protected under federal law.”
Instead, she said, fixing the neighborhood school model at Peninsula and ensuring that it will work across the district requires resources, training and buy-in from administrators, educators and parents alike.
“You know whose fault this is not? It is not the kids’ fault. None of it is the kids’ fault,” Borman said. “These kids deserve to be in their own communities, with the people they know.”
Meanwhile, at a follow-up meeting in late January, more than halfway through the school year, Brisbois said she was promised that other teachers in the school would spend more time supporting Brom, but that one-on-one paraeducator support remained off the table for now.
Still, she said she was glad for any extra help for her son, and grateful that though the year has had more than its share of ups and downs, Brom was still finding a way forward.
“Some of his classmates come up and say hi and give him hugs,” she said, hopefully. “And he just won an award for bringing joy to the other kids.”
© 2026 Advance Local Media LLC
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
