Rob Galanakis desires Portland Public Faculties to see the forest and never simply the bushes outdoors classroom home windows. His marketing campaign for a seat on the PPS Board leans closely on the concept PPS goes about its enterprise largely with its head within the sand whereas options to many issues will be discovered within the streets simply past faculty grounds.
Galanakis, a co-founder of BikeBusPDX and software program firm proprietor who moved to Portland in 2014, biked over to the BikePortland Shed on Wednesday to share extra about his imaginative and prescient for Portland’s troubled faculty district.
Portland presently has about 20 lively bike buses they usually’ve grow to be one of the crucial highly effective forces transportation activism in our city has ever seen. Galanakis is on a mission to affix every one in all them throughout his marketing campaign and he’s practically reached that objective. From Alameda to Lents, he’s seen an unlimited array of variations amongst them. “Every one is completely different. Every one has its personal tradition. Every one has its personal variations with its routes,” Galanakis shared. The rides have additionally given him an opportunity to watch the customarily chaotic and unsafe morning drop-off zones in entrance of faculties.
Requested how he’d clear up the drop-off and pick-up site visitors issues, Galanakis supplied what he feels is a straightforward repair: Add extra exit and entry factors and disperse them throughout a wider faculty frontage zone. “When vehicles all funnel to at least one place, you may’t keep away from congestion,” he says.
Galanakis is a faculty and transportation advocate and a relative common at Portland Metropolis Corridor the place he’s given testimony on every thing from PPS’s local weather coverage to the city development boundary. He has an expert background as a software program entrepreneur and enterprise proprietor, however he doesn’t convey a enterprise strategy to instructional policymaking: “There’s an enormous distinction for me between the non-public world and public world. Within the non-public world, you are able to do a factor and fail… and that’s okay. We solely have one public faculty system. Our public faculty system can’t fail. We are able to’t let it fail.”
Galanakis has some novel concepts for the best way to meld land use, transportation and concrete planning options to stronger faculties. As an illustration, faculty alternative insurance policies permit households to gravitate towards higher faculties; however these faculties are sometimes in locations the place it’s costly to dwell. To assist stage the enjoying area, Galanakis desires the College Board to take a extra lively function in housing coverage. “In case you are low revenue, you’re much less prone to dwell in Alameda, Hosford-Abernethy, or Mount Tabor areas — and in reality, in plenty of these areas, the one place you may afford to dwell is in an condominium on a harmful, soiled arterial road the place your children usually tend to have bronchial asthma, they’re extra prone to have site visitors accidents, they usually’re much less prone to have a spot to be outdoors,” he says. “What we actually ought to have is broad up-zoning throughout the inside east aspect so we are able to construct family-size flats to permit these lower-income households to maneuver. Why can’t they dwell in an condominium on Lincoln? The Lincoln and Harrison Neighborhood Greenway might have flats…. All this stuff are related, we are able to’t simply consider housing as a factor that occurs to us. It needs to be a factor PPS actively advocates for.”
The central principal of Galanakis’ marketing campaign is that PPS wants to interrupt out of its silo and see how scholar outcomes are impacted by issues nicely past faculty campuses. By pushing for more healthy streets and a extra humane metropolis past faculty grounds, Galanakis believes all college students will do higher.
As a major instance for a way PPS is trapped in their very own bubble, Galanakis stated the district is “One of many main impediments in the direction of bettering our neighborhood greenway community.” “A majority of our elementary and center faculties are on greenways and PPS is not going to prohibit any driving entry to their properties. This implies we are able to’t have modal filters, we are able to’t have diverters, and we might not even have the ability to have pace bumps… If you need a related greenway community, among the best issues you are able to do is get the varsity board involved in getting extra households strolling and biking.”
Right here’s one other method Galanakis lays out his concern that PPS must broaden its lens:
“PPS thinks about solely what occurs on their property — on the curb and within the constructing — and transportation for them is barely yellow faculty busses. PPS is likely one of the largest landholders. It’s one of many largest employers. It’s the biggest automotive journey generator within the metropolis. It’s this actually integral entity. You’re by no means greater than a mile or mile-and-a-half from a faculty wherever you’re in most of Portland — they usually’re simply not involved in how the faculties combine with the remainder of the town. So I bought into it with this transportation lens, however then I noticed it impacts well being, it impacts housing, it impacts local weather, it impacts monetary stuff… that’s what bought me right here.”
Galanakis hopes his message of how we’d like an excellent metropolis to have nice faculties evokes of us who don’t have school-aged children or different connections to colleges to vote for him on Could twentieth.
Watch our full interview within the video beneath (or on our podcast quickly). For extra about Galanakis, try his web site at RobGForPPS.com.
