At Portland’s Franklin High School, a year no one could have predicted

When the members of the Franklin High School class of 2023 take center stage at Providence Park on Tuesday, it will cap off a singular high school experience.

Like so many other classes of 2023, their freshman year was cut short by COVID-19. They were sophomores during the pandemic’s height, their classmates black squares on screens. Junior year, they streamed back to the building full-time, masked and uncertain.

Senior year was supposed to mark a return to, if not normalcy, at least predictability, defined less by pandemic strictures than by the big milestones and tiny moments familiar to nearly any recent graduate of a large urban high school in America.

And in many ways, those familiar rhythms and their attendant imperfections were back: There were crowded hallways and homecoming in the fall and prom in the spring. Kids hid out in the library and the bathrooms instead of going to class, especially in the loosey-goosey months after spring break, when summer beckons. There were long lines in the cafeteria, anonymous Instagram confessions about mad crushes, valedictorians with serious scholarship hauls, sweet success for a new debate team, deep breaths in a mediation class that exploded in popularity.

But Franklin also sat at the jangled nexus of some of the saddest and sorriest problems battering Portland this year. The community held two funerals for two students in 2023, one for a 17-year-old boy who died from gun violence, another a 15-year-old girl who died from fentanyl poisoning.

The loss of their classmates was an epilogue to a school year that kicked off with reports that guns had been spotted in cars looping past the high school and in the hands of a student at nearby Clinton Park. There were rumors of bomb threats and shootings made via social media; the hallway fights that occasionally erupted were captured by students wielding ever-present cell phones. In early March, students huddled together during a late afternoon lockdown, after a student’s empty car was shot up a block from campus. That came only weeks after gunfire in the school’s parking lot during a Portland Interscholastic League basketball tournament game between two other Portland high schools.

Save for the two young adults they buried, Franklin’s story is not unique. Roosevelt High School, too, lost a student to gun violence this year, a 12th grader who had enrolled this year after attending Franklin. Jefferson High School’s campus was shaken by two gunfire incidents in the fall that left victims with non-threatening injuries. Cleveland High School closed for a day after gunfire near campus during school hours sent one of its students to the hospital with minor injuries and again after its students witnessed a death from a horrific car-cyclist collision.

At Lincoln High School, multiple swastikas were found drawn on bathroom walls. At Reynolds High School, in eastern Multnomah County, a 16-year-old student was arrested after a shooting in a park next to the school. High schools in Tigard, Beaverton and Eugene have coped with disruptions to the school day after phoned-in threats that turned out to be bogus.

High schools are delicate ecosystems, prone to such rupture and repair.

But at Franklin this year, the extreme highs and lows kept on coming.

Leaning on hope

After nearly a decade at Franklin — four as a vice-principal and five as its principal, a long tenure by PPS standards—Chris Frazier chooses his words with care.

He’ll allow that the school had its challenges this year, that things have felt different than in the past. The word he lands on most often is resilience.

“We believe in our values and our beliefs, and we believe in one another,” he said during an interview in his office, which is festooned with Franklinabilia. “We also recognize that some of the trauma that we’ve experienced comes as a result of things that we’re seeing in our larger community.”

Franklin has changed during Frazier’s tenure. The school got much bigger, for one thing, especially after its top-to-bottom remodel was completed in 2017. Its 1,900 students make it the second-largest high school in the district, trailing only Northeast Portland’s Grant. It’s also among the city’s most socio-economically diverse high schools, with boundaries that stretch from Mount Tabor’s leafy slopes to working-class neighborhoods that straddle Interstate 205. Nearly half its population are students of color; under Frazier’s watch, 100% of the school’s Black students graduated last year.

As for principals everywhere, it fell to Frazier to be the traffic controller of the collective readjustment when Franklin reopened full-time in fall 2021; the fallout still demands his daily attention.

“Our students, you know, spend a lot of time on devices, and not being in partnership and collaboration with their peers,” he said. “We want our students back and in our building.”

Inside of school, he can celebrate their triumphs, getting goosebumps at the raw talent on display at the school’s annual Visual Arts showcase or listening in to a spirited debate during a seminar-style Advanced Placement class. Outside of school, he and his staff cannot shield them from the temptations and tragedies of guns and drugs and social media’s casual viciousness.

It pains him that he can’t fix everything. When sorrow enveloped the school this year, particularly after the lockdowns and the two student deaths, the district sent in extra counselors to help students and staff process the trauma. But relatively few students sought those services.

And when there is a problem — particularly during a lockdown — parents, understandably, want the most up-to-the-minute details, answers that Frazier doesn’t always immediately have to give.

It’s in those moments, Frazier said, that he’s found himself “leaning on hope.”

“And that’s okay,” he said. “Life is always evolving and going to change.”

And at the very end of this turbulent year, there will be more change for Franklin: Frazier is leaving for a new job overseeing all of the district’s high schools and his fellow principals.

Franklin’s new principal has yet to be named.

Coping through feelings

Most of the time, a classroom full of teens with their eyes closed is not a good sign.

Not so in Nic Johnson’s mindfulness elective at Franklin, where 30 or so students at a time come to take deep breaths, listen and find some peace. Nearly every class begins with a few moments of guided meditation, Johnson’s voice an invitation to rest and be present. Most of the teens close their eyes immediately. A few peer around to see what others are doing before following suit.

Some students are there because their counselors thought it would be good for them to learn how to cope with the big emotions that swell inside them. Some confess they thought it would be an easy A. Collectively, they had to get past the initial awkwardness of the exercises Johnson has taken them through, from journaling to sustained eye-gazing with a partner, a helpful exercise in connection for a generation used to communicating through screens. The throughline: Johnson asks them to choose acceptance over judgment and meet the world with gratitude and generosity.

Unusually, not a single student checks their phone for the duration of the hour-long class.

“Mindfulness, it has helped with some of my trauma,” 11th grader Tynisha Crawford says. “My family has some anger issues, and I work two jobs. But I haven’t felt so much stress. I’m calmer, because whatever happens, happens.”

“I use mindfulness a lot, in school, out of school,” said Fatima Sandoval-Hernandez, a senior. “I lost my dog this year, and it helped me cope through my feelings. I was recognizing how I felt.”

Word has gotten around: 150 students signed up to take the elective next year, Johnson says.

In a perfect world, every student at Franklin might enroll in a class like this — and maybe every student everywhere and all the grown-ups in their lives, for good measure. Maybe more mindfulness would reduce fights like the one caught on video and uploaded to social media last fall in which a student lies curled in the fetal position in a Franklin hallway while another student aims a kick at his face as an adult tries to pull them apart and yells frantically for help.

Like other schools, Franklin has struggled to hire and keep counselors charged with providing mental and emotional support for students. The well-regarded student newspaper, The Franklin Post, reported that five of the six counselors on staff turned over in the space of a year.

The newspaper has also reported on students’ mixed reactions to the four schoolwide “Franklin Talks” conversations, designed to be open forums on race, justice and inequity: The conversations are optional, and some students peel off, claiming that there’s not much to be gained by participating.

But the losses don’t mean the year has been without its fizzy intrigues, like the ongoing mystery over BubbleButt, a beloved blue betta fish who lived in Spanish teacher Ruben Navarette’s classroom. At least he did until spring break, when he mysteriously disappeared. Navarette put up posters around the school and promised a reward, no questions asked, for the fish’s safe return.

BubbleButt hasn’t turned up, but anonymously posted pictures of his adventures around Portland have, including jaunts to high-end coffee shops and outings at Mount Tabor. There are ransom notes, a GoFundMe page and Homeland-style posters connecting the dots of the various theories, including that Navarette himself is the culprit. (Follow along with the continuing saga on Instagram at @spanishwithmrn).

And Franklin students have hit their share of academic highs, including an honor roll that’s over 1,000 students strong. On that list: seniors Bella Scholl and Sophie McEwen, who captured second place at the statewide speech and policy debate championships, a big victory in a town where the debate scene has long been dominated by powerhouses Cleveland, Grant and Lincoln high schools.

The two credit their success to AP world history and Introduction to Law teacher Brian Halberg, who started a mock trial elective at Franklin a few years ago that, like mindfulness, has exploded in popularity. He promised his mock trial students that if they made it to state, he would wear an inflatable dinosaur costume for an entire school day, McEwen and Scholl said, and held up his end of the bargain when they hit their goal.

“He was both overjoyed and resigned,” McEwen said. “He taught class in the dinosaur costume, and walked around in it. Everyone was really excited that he held up his end of the deal. There were some complaints that he was distractingly crinkly, however.”

By the time prom rolled around this spring, giddiness fully had set in. Students packed the dance floor at the Aerie at Eagle Landing in Happy Valley and posed for pictures on the lawn, Charlie’s Angels style. The biggest trend of the night was to match your date or friend group —bright-blue leather slip-ons the exact shade of the tips of her French manicured nails, purple highlights matching the eggplant jewel tones of a skinny tie.

‘They are going to be okay’

In March, a week after the nearby shooting that rattled the Franklin campus, former special ed teacher Mercedes Muñoz came back to her old stomping grounds to volunteer in a senior English class. She left brimming over with joy.

A former Oregon Teacher of the Year, Muñoz worked at Franklin for nine years until she left in 2022 to help start up a charter school aimed at Black, Latino and Indigenous elementary students in the Reynolds school district.

Back in class at Franklin for the day, “We talked about (feminist author) bell hooks and love as a radical, transformative currency,” Muñoz said. “I came out of that building singing, because I had hope. This is the generation that will lead us. It’s not about these young people growing into someone else. They are already who they are designed to be.”

The week before, she hadn’t been singing. Like any Franklin parent — her daughter is a sophomore – she’d been frantic when she’d heard about the lockdown. She’d broken her personal protocol and called her daughter during school hours, reaching her hiding in the school library.

Some parents were frustrated that Franklin closed the day after to give staff time to prepare to help students through any attendant trauma. Muñoz wasn’t among them.

“I was appreciative that they were taking things seriously,” she said. “You still have to go back the next day and lift again. My former colleagues, the teachers of my daughter, they get all my compassion and respect.”

Parent Julie Larson, who has two sons at Franklin, said she worried this school year that her children were becoming numb to bad campus news. For her, nothing matched finding out about the death of Eskender Tamra, the 17-year-old Franklin student shot in North Portland over spring break.

Larson had tutored Eskender when he first arrived in the U.S. in 2009, right when then President Donald Trump was cracking down on immigrants and asylum seekers. He and his sister knew virtually no English, so Larson and a few other moms at Glencoe Elementary School volunteered to tutor him, and her son became his friend.

“He would hug me, full-blown, arms out,” she remembered. “He’d sit next to me on field trips. I felt like he was excited to be here.”

The last time she saw him, she said, was during the school closures, when she’d run into him at Franklin, picking up pandemic-era free lunches. He seemed “pretty aimless,” Larson said, and her antennae went up. She got word of his death while at the grocery store and nearly collapsed, she said, mourning for the bright-eyed fifth grader she’d tutored and for the whole school.

“Every single person on the staff at the school is carrying a torch” for their students, Larson said. “The school has so much going for it. It’s just bogged down, by the climate and the circumstances.”

Muñoz is clear-eyed about Franklin. After working there for years, the school is family, she says, and the problems it faces are citywide, statewide, American. She’s entrusted Franklin with her daughter, because she believes so deeply in the community.

She quit the faculty exhausted and overwhelmed by the pandemic era’s toll. But, she says, “I left a big part of my heart and spirit there, with her. They are going to be okay.”

— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonlive.com