How Can We Expect PPS To Take Care Of Kids When They Can’t Handle Plumbing?

If you owned 8 million square feet of buildings, you’d put someone competent in charge of that multi-billion dollar investment, wouldn’t you?

And when forecasters give days of warnings about freezing weather, you’d expect them to take precautions, right?

At Portland Public schools, apparently not so very much.

We know that snow and freezing rain shut down the schools most of last week.  

But now, a bunch of schools are closed because of burst pipes.  

The average homeowner knows how to keep that from happening.  

Insulate the pipes, keep the heat on and if you can’t do that, strategically leave some taps running to prevent freezing. 

Portland Public Schools brags it has 85 full time employees on staff in every building speciality.

And they can’t keep pipes busting? 

The Daily Dead Fishwrapper puts it charitably “Portland Public Schools appears to be an outlier among the larger metro area districts in being unable to complete repairs to its buildings last week.” 

Translation: a lot of places where it got a lot colder didn’t have this problem.

PPS blames it on the age of buildings…which is 65…exactly the average age of houses in the metro area.

And yes, some homeowners suffered frozen pipes although the vast majority did not.  But how many average homeowners have a full-time maintenance staff?