A History of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School

Nov 11, 2026 · @Patrick

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School sits at NE 6th Avenue and Alberta Street, in the heart of Albina, the part of Portland where the city confined its Black residents for most of the 20th century. It is the school students renamed for Dr. King in 1968, weeks after his assassination. It is where Albina Head Start and Portland Public Schools built a Mandarin immersion program together so Black and low-income children could keep learning the language they started in preschool.

Between 2015 and 2026, three district proposals would have changed or displaced King, and each drew a strong response from its families. This page records the school's history, from Highland School to 2026.

Highland School

Before it was King, it was Highland School. The district bought the site in 1898, and its first building was moved there from the old Albina Homestead School. The building our children walk into today was designed by district architect George Jones in a Collegiate Gothic style and completed in 1926; an addition followed in 1952. (PPS Historic Building Assessment)

In those early decades, Highland served a largely immigrant, working-class neighborhood. Albina had been its own city, a Union Pacific railroad town, until Portland annexed it in 1891. Many Volga German families, who had come from Russia to work for the railroads, mills and factories, settled in Albina. The neighborhood around Highland was about to change.

Confined, flooded, cleared: how Albina became Black Portland

Public and private policies made Albina the center of Black Portland, and later policies reshaped it again.

Confined (1919 onward). In 1919 the Portland Realty Board changed its code of ethics to bar agents from selling homes to Black buyers in white neighborhoods, on the belief that a Black family within "four blocks" would lower property values. For the next three decades, red lines on city maps decided where people of color could live, buy property or get a bank loan. That meant Albina. (City of Portland; Wikipedia: Albina)

Flooded (1948). On Memorial Day 1948, the Columbia River broke through and turned Vanport, the wartime housing city north of Portland, into a lake. About 18,000 people lost their homes, a quarter of them Black. With the rest of the city closed to them, most Black families who stayed in Portland moved into Albina's aging houses. By the late 1950s, about three in four Black Portlanders lived in Albina. (City of Portland)

Cleared (1950s to 1970s). Beginning in the 1950s, public projects cleared large parts of Albina. Hundreds of homes in Central Albina were razed for Memorial Coliseum and then Interstate 5. In 1967, Emanuel Hospital announced a new campus and cleared more than 200 properties. A 1971 agreement promised 180 to 300 replacement homes; they were never built. The Eliot neighborhood alone lost half its residents, 3,000 people, between 1960 and 1970. (City of Portland)

Bused out (1970s). Desegregation policy also shaped where Albina's Black children went to school. Under PPS's desegregation policy, Black students from the King School area were bused to as many as 42 different schools. In 1978, Ron Herndon, director of Albina Head Start since 1975, founded the Portland chapter of the Black United Front with Rev. John Jackson of Mt. Olivet Baptist Church to oppose that policy. In 1980, the Black United Front and other community members negotiated a plan that ended busing as the district's desegregation method, and they pushed for the 1982 hiring of Dr. Matthew Prophet, PPS's first Black superintendent. (Oregon Encyclopedia: Ron Herndon)

1968: students rename their school for Dr. King

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. In the weeks after his death, Highland students, led by the older grades and backed by their teachers, petitioned the school board to rename their school for him. The board approved it on April 24, with Coretta Scott King's permission. Ronda Chiles, then a sixth grader, remembers her teacher Matthew Helm telling the class it had passed, and the room erupting: the students "didn't think it was going to happen." (KGW)

Students hung paper banners reading "Martin Luther King Jr. School" over the old Highland signs. Senator Edward Kennedy visited, and the school was dedicated on May 9, 1968. King is believed to be one of the first schools in the country named for Dr. King. (City of Portland Parks; KGW)

The park next door opened in 1979 as King School Park. In 2022 the city corrected its name to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Park, to match the school and use Dr. King's honorific.

Priced out: the second displacement

From the 1990s on, rising rents and home prices displaced many Black residents. Across North and Northeast Portland, the Black population fell by about 3,800 in the 1990s, and by another 7,650 in the 2000s after the city targeted the Interstate Avenue corridor for urban renewal. (City of Portland)

In 1990, about 3,274 Black residents lived in the King neighborhood, 61% of everyone there. By 2020 there were 1,361, or 20%. That loss of 1,913 Black residents is the largest of any Portland neighborhood over that period. (1990 Census; Portland State University and City of Portland 2023 Neighborhood Profiles. Counts are preliminary; 1990 counts Black residents alone, later years alone or in combination.)

King School changed with its neighborhood. In 2018, as PPS rebuilt its middle schools, King went from K–8 to K–5, and its students began going on to the newly reopened Harriet Tubman Middle School.

In 2015 the city launched the N/NE Preference Policy, which gives priority for city-funded affordable homes to people with generational ties to North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods harmed by urban renewal, including those displaced and their descendants. Some King families returned to Albina through the policy.

Built together: Albina Head Start and the Mandarin Immersion Program

King's Mandarin program grew out of Albina Head Start. In 2012, Albina Head Start, led since 1975 by Ron Herndon, began teaching Mandarin to its preschoolers. It started in 3 classrooms and grew to 18. Herndon has described the program as a door into the global economy for children from a neighborhood that had been shut out of opportunity for generations. (Albina Head Start Mandarin)

Albina Head Start pressed PPS for a nearby elementary program, and in 2014 PPS opened Mandarin immersion at King "as a way for Albina Head Start students to continue their Mandarin learning." PPS's stated purpose was "to close the opportunity gap for historically underserved students" at a school that was then majority low-income and about 46% Black (2014–15). The program reserves seats for Albina Head Start graduates. (King Mandarin Immersion Program)

The program opened in 2014 with kindergarten and first grade, 59 students, and added a grade each year; 2018–19 was the first year with all six grades. Students learn about half the day in English and half in Mandarin, taught by a team of one native Mandarin speaker and one English teacher at each grade. Graduates continue Mandarin at Harriet Tubman Middle School. The nonprofit JinRen supports Mandarin learning across Albina Head Start, King and Tubman.

Enrollment grew from about 160 students in 2018–19 to 203 in fall 2026, the program's largest to that point. Albina Head Start graduates accepting a Mandarin kindergarten seat at King went from 6 in 2021–22 to 26 in 2025–26 and 19 in 2026–27: 45 in two years, compared with 28 in the four years before.

In fall 2026, 140 of the program's 203 students were students of color, and Black students were its largest group. By PPS's 2025–26 count, 43 of the district's 77 Black elementary immersion students were in King's Mandarin program, or 56%. Its Black share was about seven times that of any other PPS elementary immersion program.

In the Portland Observer in November 2026, PTA President Minyana Bishop, a former Albina Head Start parent of three, told the program's story through the people who built it. Albina Head Start has served Albina families since 1965. Kelley Corona, who helped Herndon build its Mandarin program, remembers a PPS dual-language leader at a preschool graduation: "We began to imagine a future in which children could continue learning Mandarin beyond preschool." Herndon wrote: "This was not simply the placement of a language program into a school building. It was the creation of a pathway." (Portland Observer, Nov. 4, 2026, p. 7)

Bishop described the pathway in stages. It crawled through its first years, with a few small classes and families taking a chance. It began to walk in 2018–19, when every grade from kindergarten through fifth had Mandarin students. It began to jog when its first students reached Jefferson High School in 2022–23. By 2026 it was running: its first students graduated from high school that spring, and the program was projected to reach 246 students the following year.

"We believe that history matters," Herndon wrote. Bishop described the program as a bet that Albina Head Start and PPS made on the neighborhood's children in 2014.

Proposals affecting King, 2015–2026

Each time, King families organized in response.

1. 2015–17: King as a middle school. In 2015, PPS briefly considered converting King into a middle school, then dropped the idea when the school community objected. In 2017, when air-quality and landslide concerns put Tubman's reopening in doubt, PPS planned for Tubman "or an alternate site," and King families feared their building would be the backup. (OPB, Oct. 25, 2017)

2. 2021–22: Tubman. PPS named the King building as a possible new home for Tubman Middle School's students, to get them away from the I-5 freeway. Families rallied, and PPS dropped King in January 2022.

3. 2026: Rightsizing, Scenarios A and B. PPS's district-wide rightsizing scenarios proposed moving King's Mandarin program to Boise-Eliot/Humboldt and sending Sabin's students to King. The Board's vote was scheduled for December 15, 2026.

The Tubman proposals. Harriet Tubman Middle School sits beside Interstate 5, and the state's Rose Quarter widening plan was slated to bring the freeway within 25 feet of the building. In November 2021, PPS named the King building as a possible new home for Tubman's students, which would have displaced King's students and staff. (Portland Mercury)

King families responded. On January 14, 2022, the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, hundreds of parents and students rallied outside the school. "Dr. MLK Jr. School is one of the last homes we have here and now they're trying to shut it down," said PTA President Tiffany Robinson. A neighbor, Rosie Willis, asked: "This is a legacy. Why, why would you do that?" (KOIN; KGW; KATU)

Two weeks later, on January 28, 2022, PPS announced that Tubman would not move into King. The district said a new Tubman should enhance, not displace, existing school communities in Albina. (Portland Mercury) In January 2025, with no site chosen and the freeway project delayed, PPS paused the Tubman relocation indefinitely. (Willamette Week)

No record shows PPS formally proposing to move Tubman into King in 2017; the 2017 concern was the unnamed backup site described above.

Rightsizing: Scenarios A and B (2026). In October 2026, PPS released two rightsizing scenarios to close schools across the district. Both proposed moving King's Mandarin program, 203 students and about two-thirds of the school, to Boise-Eliot/Humboldt, and closing Sabin and sending its students to King.

At the time, King's enrollment was growing, from 319 in October 2025 to about 332 in fall 2026, while district enrollment declined. At an October 13, 2026 committee meeting, district leaders asked why a program that was fully enrolled would be moved. PPS staff explained that the program was connected to the enrollment of neighboring schools, including Sabin.

King families responded again. In an October 2026 PTA survey, 147 of 153 responses opposed the relocation. Families wrote letters, hosted town halls with the Superintendent and Board members in November 2026, and spoke at Board meetings. The Superintendent's recommendation was scheduled for November 17, 2026, and the Board's vote for December 15, 2026.

King today

King is one school with two strands, English Scholars and Mandarin Immersion. Children in both share classrooms by grade, lunch, recess, specials and assemblies, and teachers plan as grade-level teams across both programs. No racial group is a majority, and the school holds Black, Latino and Asian American family nights as one community.

King had about 332 students in fall 2026, up from 319 in October 2025, with full kindergartens and waitlists in 2025 and 2026. In reading, the share of King students in the top two national MAP groups rose from 19% in 2018–19 to 53% in 2026. The King School Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 2014 with Portland State University and run with students as curators and docents, has filled the building with art.

King's history spans more than a century: Highland School and its immigrant neighborhood; the confinement, clearance and displacement of Black Portlanders in Albina; the students who named their school for Dr. King in 1968; and the Mandarin pathway that Albina Head Start and PPS built together beginning in 2012.

Sources

• Historic Building Assessment: King, Portland Public Schools

• Historical Overview, N/NE Neighborhood Housing Strategy, City of Portland

• Portland Housing Bureau celebrates 10 years of the N/NE Neighborhood Housing Strategy, City of Portland

• Albina, Portland, Oregon, Wikipedia

• Ronald D. Herndon, Oregon Encyclopedia

• 50 years later: How students at Portland's Martin Luther King Jr. School made history, KGW

• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Park, Portland Parks & Recreation

• Board Resolution 5528 (middle schools), Nov. 2017, Portland Public Schools

• Portland Middle Schools Plan Put On Hold, OPB, Oct. 25, 2017

• Albina Head Start Mandarin Program

• Mandarin Dual Language Immersion, Portland Public Schools

• Mandarin Immersion Program, Dr. MLK Jr. School

• School Profiles 2014–15, Portland Public Schools

• Harriet Tubman Middle School Relocation Will Not Replace MLK Jr. Elementary, Portland Mercury, Jan. 28, 2022

• Portland Public Schools plans to rebuild Tubman Middle School in Albina, OPB, Jan. 28, 2022

• MLK Jr. Elementary PTA: "We need to preserve our historically Black schools", KOIN

• Families rally to save Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, KGW

• Families gather in NE Portland to keep Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School intact, KATU, Jan. 14, 2022

• Minyana Bishop, Portland Observer, Vol. LVI, Issue 17, Nov. 4, 2026, p. 7

• PPS Says It's Paused Harriet Tubman Middle School Relocation, Willamette Week, Jan. 28, 2025

• King School Museum of Contemporary Art

• PPS enrollment reports (2018–19 to 2026–27), PPS Scenarios A and B family guides, and the King PTA family survey (Oct. 2026)