Free Republic

Hundreds of infuriated parents and staff members descended on Portland Public Schools’ headquarters Tuesday night to protest far-reaching proposals to close up to 14 schools, shift grade configurations and programs and redraw attendance boundaries. In numbers not seen since the Portland Association of Teachers strike, demonstrators chanted and cheered outside the district headquarters and scolded school board members during their meeting inside the building. about half of the district’s elementary schools have fewer than 300 students and a handful have only half that number — it gets harder to afford stable staffing.

In front of a crowd of angry parents, teachers and students... San Francisco's Board of Education Thursday night voted to close, merge and relocate more than a dozen public schools...due to declining enrollment. The board did its work during a five-hour meeting before hundreds of angry parents, students and teachers who filled the Everett Middle School auditorium and occasionally shouted -- or wept aloud -- as the panel voted on a case-by-case basis. The first vote hardly caused a stir in the crowd: the Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program will be merged into Rosa Parks Elementary School... But when the board...