Former Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury — once considered a likely candidate for governor in Oregon — will start Tuesday as the chief of staff to Kimberlee Armstrong, the new superintendent of Portland Public Schools.
Kafoury, who grew up in a politically powerful family and served years in the Legislature before winning two terms as chair of Oregon’s most populous county, is Armstrong’s first announced hire and a splashy one.
Since leaving the county commission in January 2023 after 14 years, including eight as chair, Kafoury has remained relatively under-the-radar — “decompressing,” in her own words, and volunteering, including on the board of directors for the Albina Vision Trust, whose ongoing project with Portland Public Schools will be part of her portfolio.
A graduate of Grant High School, Kafoury sent all three of her children to district schools as well. Portland Public Schools has had a challenging few years, she acknowledged, given the pandemic’s prolonged building closures, 2023′s bruising teacher strike and other upheavals.
Armstrong said she pursued Kafoury for the job and said she sought people with a demonstrated commitment to Portland and the Pacific Northwest, regardless of whether or not they had previously worked for a school system, which Kafoury has not.
“We cannot do what we have always done and expect Portland to rise,” Armstrong said.
Her predecessor as superintendent, Guadalupe Guerrero, brought in a handful of senior leaders from around the country during his first few years in Portland and subsequently struggled with high levels of turnover.
In choosing Kafoury, who will be paid $219,000 a year, Armstrong also made it clear that she was looking to amp up the school district’s political muscle. Unlike cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, city and county leaders here have very little to do with the district’s day-to-day operations, a disconnect that’s been evident everywhere from a local government officials’ muted public response to school safety challenges to their distinct lack of involvement during the month-long teacher strike.
Kafoury’s hire will help shift that dynamic, Armstrong said, underscoring the link between the success of the school district and Portland’s ongoing efforts at post-2020 reinvention. She also said Kafoury will also be a key player in Salem, where a minefield of a conversation on how to overhaul the state’s education funding formula is looming and Armstrong is part of a coalition of superintendents from the state’s largest school districts pushing for change.
But Kafoury also brings political baggage from her two terms as county chair, the second of them very much colored by the pandemic. Her tenure was largely defined by the hand she played in the region’s deepening homelessness crisis and for her clashes with Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler. She was a steadfast advocate for building permanent affordable housing and keeping at-risk families housed. She kept at bay most calls from city leaders to invest more in shelters and transitional housing, even as encampments mushroomed, frustrating both powerful downtown business interests and some of her colleagues.
Before her time at the county, Kafoury represented North and Northeast Portland in the Oregon House for six years, including the final two as head of the House Democratic caucus.
While heading the county government, she spearheaded construction of a new Sellwood Bridge and the Multnomah County Courthouse, among other projects. And she is from one of Oregon’s most politically connected families: Both of her parents served in the Oregon Legislature and her husband, Nik Blosser, was the chief of staff to former Gov. Kate Brown and a special assistant to President Joe Biden and publicly flirted with a run for Portland City Council.
Kafoury was also a key architect of the much-beleaguered Joint Office of Homelessness Solutions, a city-county partnership that has frayed at the edges as the two governments have at least for a time disagreed over everything from whether the county should distribute tents and tarps to funding for mass shelter sites in every quadrant of the city. Kafoury is a long-time ally of the current Multnomah County chair, Jessica Vega Pederson, who has often clashed over policy matters with fellow Multnomah County Commissioner – and longtime school board member – Julia Brim-Edwards.
Her portfolio at the school district will include several of the thorniest issues facing the district, including a reimagining of the Fund for Portland Public Schools. The districtwide foundation is charged with both attracting corporate donations and rebuilding faith with individual parent donors who were infuriated by the district’s decision this spring to shut down a long tradition of school-specific fundraising to pay for extra staff.
Kafoury is a former PTA president at Duniway Elementary, a fundraising powerhouse that routinely raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support staff there. She noted in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive Monday that the assumption that some schools would raise money on their own used to be baked into district budget assumptions; with that no longer the case, she added, there will have to be “some give and take.”
Kafoury will also be a point person for the delicate negotiations over the relocation of the district’s headquarters, which sprawl over a coveted parcel of land in North Portland. The school board has given the right of first refusal to the Albina Vision Trust, a nonprofit that’s seeking to redevelop the city’s historically Black Lower Albina neighborhood.
The nonprofit, in turn, has offered to help the district find and purchase a new, slimmed-down central office, perhaps downtown, though that concept has drawn internal pushback from employees. (Kafoury pointed out that Portland’s still-depressed downtown market is yielding significant bargains, such as the 10-story J.K. Gill building at Southwest 5th and Washington, which just sold for less than the price of a five-bedroom home in Lake Oswego, as reported by Willamette Week.)
Related questions also loom: What should happen with the district’s drive to relocate Harriet Tubman Middle School away from a planned expansion of the Interstate 5 freeway? And where should it locate its long-in-the-works Center for Black Student Excellence?
Kafoury also arrives as the district is weighing what to put into a massive construction bond slated to go to voters next May that is likely to be the largest in the state’s history. Her portfolio will also include the district’s lofty climate justice goals, which have attracted national attention. That work will include examining deferred maintenance and “how our schools are being used – which are under-enrolled, where are we over-enrolled,” Armstrong said, including, potentially, school closures.
Forecasts from demographers at Portland State University project that next school year, 20 of Portland Public Schools’ elementary schools will have just 300 or fewer students – almost half of its 45 K-5 schools. The small schools include both campuses in wealthy neighborhoods close to downtown and higher needs, higher poverty schools in east and North Portland. By contrast, some bursting-at-the-seams suburban elementary schools house more than 700 students.
Armstrong, who served as Portland’s chief academic officer before spending a year as the deputy superintendent of the Evergreen School District in Vancouver, said she is also seeking to hire a chief financial officer and a chief communications officer, both of whom will report directly to her. She is pruning the district’s most recent organizational chart, eliminating two deputy superintendent positions, one that oversees business and operations and one that supervised instruction and school communities.
— Julia Silverman covers K-12 schools and education policy for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jrlsilverman.