Rob Galanakis wants Portland Public Schools to see the forest and not just the trees outside classroom windows. His campaign for a seat on the PPS Board leans heavily on the idea that PPS goes about its business largely with its head in the sand while solutions to many problems can be found in the streets just beyond school grounds.
Galanakis, a co-founder of BikeBusPDX and software company owner who moved to Portland in 2014, biked over to the BikePortland Shed on Wednesday to share more about his vision for Portland’s troubled school district.
Portland currently has about 20 active bike buses and they’ve become one of the most powerful forces transportation activism in our town has ever seen. Galanakis is on a mission to join each one of them during his campaign and he’s nearly reached that goal. From Alameda to Lents, he’s seen a vast array of differences among them. “Each one is different. Each one has its own culture. Each one has its own differences with its routes,” Galanakis shared. The rides have also given him a chance to observe the often chaotic and unsafe morning drop-off zones in front of schools.
Asked how he’d solve the drop-off and pick-up traffic problems, Galanakis offered what he feels is a simple fix: Add more exit and entry points and disperse them across a wider school frontage zone. “When cars all funnel to one place, you can’t avoid congestion,” he says.
Galanakis is a school and transportation advocate and a relative regular at Portland City Hall where he’s given testimony on everything from PPS’s climate policy to the urban growth boundary. He has a professional background as a software entrepreneur and business owner, but he doesn’t bring a business approach to educational policymaking: “There’s a huge difference for me between the private world and public world. In the private world, you can do a thing and fail… and that’s okay. We only have one public school system. Our public school system can’t fail. We can’t let it fail.”
Galanakis has some novel ideas for how to meld land use, transportation and urban planning solutions to stronger schools. For instance, school choice policies allow families to gravitate toward better schools; but those schools are typically in places where it’s expensive to live. To help level the playing field, Galanakis wants the School Board to take a more active role in housing policy. “If you are low income, you’re less likely to live in Alameda, Hosford-Abernethy, or Mount Tabor areas — and in fact, in a lot of these areas, the only place you can afford to live is in an apartment on a dangerous, dirty arterial street where your kids are more likely to have asthma, they’re more likely to have traffic injuries, and they’re less likely to have a place to be outside,” he says. “What we really should have is broad up-zoning across the inner east side so we can build family-size apartments to allow these lower-income families to move. Why can’t they live in an apartment on Lincoln? The Lincoln and Harrison Neighborhood Greenway could have apartments…. All these things are connected, we can’t just think of housing as a thing that happens to us. It has to be a thing PPS actively advocates for.”
The central principal of Galanakis’ campaign is that PPS needs to break out of its silo and see how student outcomes are impacted by things well beyond school campuses. By pushing for healthier streets and a more humane city beyond school grounds, Galanakis believes all students will do better.
As a prime example for how PPS is trapped in their own bubble, Galanakis said the district is “One of the major impediments towards improving our neighborhood greenway network.” “A majority of our elementary and middle schools are on greenways and PPS will not restrict any driving access to their properties. This means we can’t have modal filters, we can’t have diverters, and we may not even be able to have speed bumps… If you want a connected greenway network, one of the best things you can do is get the school board interested in getting more families walking and biking.”
Here’s another way Galanakis lays out his concern that PPS needs to broaden its lens:
“PPS thinks about only what happens on their property — at the curb and in the building — and transportation for them is only yellow school busses. PPS is one of the largest landholders. It’s one of the largest employers. It’s the largest car trip generator in the city. It is this really integral entity. You’re never more than a mile or mile-and-a-half from a school wherever you are in most of Portland — and they’re just not interested in how the schools integrate with the rest of the city. So I got into it with this transportation lens, but then I realized it affects health, it affects housing, it affects climate, it affects financial stuff… that’s what got me here.”
Galanakis hopes his message of how we need a great city to have great schools inspires folks who don’t have school-aged kids or other connections to schools to vote for him on May 20th.
Watch our full interview in the video below (audio is better on our podcast just FYI). For more about Galanakis, check out his website at RobGForPPS.com.
Thanks for reading.
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Here’s the guide I’m using this year. Max Steele is one of the few local writers that sees through the DSA madness:
https://recalibrateportland.substack.com/p/school-board-election-extravaganza
I think the idea of public schools influencing city design isn’t so far-fetched, and I wish Galanakis all the best, but from what I’ve seen is that many public schools in Portland are themselves major violators of basic city code of having sidewalks at all, let alone ADA-compatible sidewalks, in the newer more suburban parts of Portland. School officials are also notorious for being massively opposed to high-density developments, anything that adds large numbers of poor low-income students to their enrollments.
Failing to get elected by local voters, might I suggest everyone join their friendly local neighborhood association and break the cycle of aged nymbyism that many accuse NAs of? Add younger more active bicycle-riding members who are actually in favor of major changes to land use and more traffic diverters? And if you later have political ambitions, NA experience is often seen as a plus for potential campaign donors. Nearly every NA is desperate for you to join.
Thanks David.
> School officials are also notorious for being massively opposed to high-density developments, anything that adds large numbers of poor low-income students to their enrollments.
I think that may normally be true but not now, and especially not in Portland. Since we have income-tax funded education, each student acts basically as a job subsidy.
> Failing to get elected by local voters, might I suggest everyone join their friendly local neighborhood association and break the cycle of aged nymbyism that many accuse NAs of?
I agree! I am a board member of the Mt Tabor Neighborhood Association. It’s something we push members to do through Strong Towns and Bike Loud as well.
Is this true for all 9 public school districts that serve the city of Portland, none of which are entirely within city boundaries (not even PPS, which serves about 2/3rds of the city but has a tiny piece in Beaverton)?
Yes, Oregon has income-tax funded education. I don’t follow other school districts closely but would be surprised if they’ve been outspoken against greater density, especially in east portland. I will say I did talk to a West Linn-area candidate who advocated strongly for increased sprawl, but she wasn’t against density either (she was against housing subsidies, which she though should go to education instead, without realize the enormous subsidy sprawl requires).
Hi Rob,
Maybe it’s because I mostly know of you through this site, but I have no idea what you would do for education if you were on the School Board — your big interests seem to be housing and transportation, which I don’t consider big issues at PPS. I think you’re running for the wrong office (just as Vadim Mozyrsky was when he was running for County Commissioner on a City Council platform.)
But, to give you a fair shot, how would you propose we deal with the PPS bond measure? Trim the school construction costs (how?), or go big? (If we can’t beat Mississippi in education, perhaps we can do it in school construction spending!)
And how would you fix the utterly awful state of PPS education (which, to remind folks, is their central mission)? We’re creating kids who can’t read or math to a degree that goes beyond alarming and ventures well into disgusting territory.
If you want to represent me, tell me how you’ll fix that. How do we get back to at least a state of mediocrity?
I agree, that Rob’s platform is focused on issues that are important but really beyond the scope of the position he is running for. We need board members focused on facilitating strong educational opportunities using the resources available and to lead hard discussions about educational priorities, accountability, and costs with both administration and teachers.
I voted for his opponent Stephanie Engelsman as the least bad choice from Zone 6 as she articulated a more focused platform in her literature. Ideally the candidates would take a more balanced stance toward the PAT. The board’s primary duty should be oriented toward the students and the district as a whole first and foremost, rather than being so openly in the bag for the PAT. The PAT has clearly tried to promote a broader ideological agenda, not just an agenda focused on labor conditions and pay for teachers.
Great questions Watts. I have answered them in various video interviews, but I’ll answer them here too, since I know it comes up and it’s at the crux of skepticism of my platform.
There’s no “wrong office” involved in improving our city. As someone who follows transportation closely, you know how interlinked it is with everything else the city cares about. I have experienced firsthand how PPS is closely linked to it as well. PPS is one of the largest employers, landholders, car trip generators, carbon emitters, etc. But it does not even have a liason with the city government, and negotiations like how Parks & Rec, or PBOT SRTS, work with PPS is extremely unproductive. Parks & Rec is a clear example, where budget cuts put SUN programming on the chopping block.
I’d also remind you that “increase school funding” is at the core of most candidate platforms, despite school boards having even less impact over school funding, compared to something like transportation and health. Sometimes this call to increase funding is explicit, more often it is implicit (solutions, like decreasing class size, that would require massive new funding).
Regarding the bond, I’ve written on it extensively here: https://www.robgforpps.com/may-2025-bond
That article was written before the reality of the tariffs, and I think Cleveland for example will be over $500m. I am not going to pretend those costs will magically come down if I’m elected. I cannot make any stronger promises than anyone else (except to say I have run businesses and the way the planning was done here was a mess). I would rather level with our electorate. I am very worried we’re going to have an even more massive crisis of trust in a few years if we continue to deceive voters about this bond. Instead we get infantile arguments like the “promise we made to voters” which I talk about in the article.
I wish I likewise had easy answers on fixing PPS education. The reality is, no one running (or having served in recent history) does. It’s all just vague ideas, almost all of them unfunded, or based on impossible-to-scale dreams like unpaid student labor or nonprofits. I do know, as studies show, that if we can get our kids more exercise, they will do better (and the only way to do this for free is via active transportation to/from school). I do know, as studies show, that the only way to fix our enrollment crisis is by adding school age population to Portland. There are many more such examples which I go over on my website.
I suspect, as the number and variety of people who have failed would indicate, no one actually knows how to “fix” PPS education. I at least accept that we need to at least have results on par with our funding (mediocre/mediocre), and that is the first step to a truly great education system. But even that is hard to see a clear path to- I suspect it will take the right superintendent, at the right time, and the impact of the board on it beyond its hiring/oversight responsibilities is limited. On the other hand, I do know that there are many other levers we have to pull, that may raise performance by a few percentage points, or increase enrollment some, or reduce debt a bit, which we can pull, because they haven’t been a priority.
Everyone we elect claims to have some magic hammer that will smack in these giant nails for which all other golden hammers have failed. But there are a whole host of *other* nails which are actually easy to smack in, and that is where some of our focus can be (there are 6 other voting board members, after all).
If you don’t buy that, and you’d rather buy another person who is selling more comforting (generic, unfunded) ideas, then that is understandable. But after 4 years, they’ll have accomplished nothing, whereas we could have made at least marginal progress elsewhere. But if that’s what we elect, it shouldn’t be a wonder when little seems to change.
I disagree. Just as I wouldn’t vote for someone for mayor just because they had great ideas about education, I wouldn’t vote for someone for school board based on their thoughts about transportation and housing. Even if your ideas are great, there’s not really much you can do as a PPS Board member to apply leverage on those issues, and if figuring that out proves a distraction from the things you should be doing, then you’re not really helping.
I agree with a lot of the other things you wrote, and I did read your position on the school bond on your website, so I have a much better idea where you stand on that.
I’m still not sure how I’m going to vote on any of it, but I do think the current PPS Board lost a lot of credibility when they proved unable to pare back those hugely expensive HS projects in any sort of meaningful way. If the bond passes now, we’re going to build three more golden high schools for students we may never have and (almost) everyone knows we don’t need. Maybe the right thing is to forge ahead anyway. I don’t know. It’s a lot of money that we won’t be able to spend on something else.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, but see it differently- most candidates and board members spend way too much time lamenting a lack of school funding (even though it’s about average!), instead of figuring out low-cost, quick-to-implement solutions (like increasing active transportation), or advocating for long-term fixes they can more realistically impact (especially as they don’t require massive new funding), like housing (enrollment) and transportation reform (consider moving Harriet Tubman will cost someone $200-$300m). My experience has made clear there is much more PPS can do on these issues; for example, I am convinced much of our city’s inability to make a cohesive Greenway network is due to PPS, not PBOT. We’re all banging on about things we can’t do much to impact. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think we lose anything by trying!
Yes, I have a massive issue with how all of these bonds were pitched and designed. It is non-profit/public funding dysfunction to the max: instead of identifying the problem/need, and figuring out the most cost-effective solution to fix it, we decided far in advance to do a thing (rebuild all high schools), mixed the bond funding together (funds in one bond to plan for work in a later bond), and now are on an unsustainable debt path. On top of that, is the recent blatantly political seismic commitment the board recently made to shore up support. I support the bond, am voting for it, but will not be sad if it fails. It is a big disappointment the current board put so many people into this conflicted scenario.
As much as I love active transportation, it isn’t the fix for our crappy schools. I agree that exercize is good for kids and their attention, but biking (or walking) to school would be marginal at best compared to, say, more recess time (that would benefit all kids, not just those who could bike to school). And, regardless, the problems with walking/biking aren’t things the School Board can do much about anyway. Those are primarily PBOT and community issues.
I think this is nonsense. What you lose by trying to improve greenways from a perch on the School Board is that you are not focusing on the core problems the district faces. Our schools are not in their awful state because the greenway system could be improved, and by working on that issue, which you would have only a tiny bit of leverage on, you would not be working on the more important issues, principally school performance and facilities.
In light of what you said above about the bond, why would it be better to pass it now rather than force the board to wrestle with some of these issues before trying again? I think it’s quite likely that if the bond passes, the board won’t deal with those issues at all. How does the risk of a year’s delay compare to the risk of spending a huge amount to rebuild schools we don’t really need?
I agree with that! But more recess or gym requires massive funding changes or tradeoffs (facilities changes, PE teachers, longer school days or less instructional time), whereas more active transportation is, in every important way, free. This is at the core of why I’m running- I think we’re leaving very important marginal gains on the table, in many areas, but don’t know how to make progress on bigger issues (in fact, experience says we need to make the marginal gains to move the needle on bigger issues).
Fair enough, but do consider that the problem was so significant it is what prompted me to run for school board. I have a lot of other things I can be doing with my time, I hope we can agree I’m not a dumb person, so maybe there’s something to it.
Again, fair enough, but if this is true, there should be some explanation about why dozens of school board members have failed at improving school performance and facilities. I mentioned mine earlier (we’re actually quite limited in impact), but I’d be curious to hear if you have a theory.
A few thoughts:
The more I write, the more on the fence about the bond I become!
I don’t doubt that you were motivated by these issues, but as I said in my first post, I think you are running for the wrong office. If you want to make gains on transportation and housing, City Council would be a better place compared to School Board. I think the way to push for improved walking and biking conditions is community-up, rather than a perch atop the School Board.
That said, I do not think you’re a dumb person, and it is quite possible you see levers for action that I don’t. I’m hoping you’ll tell me what they are.
I think the school board has been unable to make gains in student achievement and facilities because the questions are both genuinely difficult and politically fraught — no one wants to tell parents their kid’s school might need to close, or to tell teachers that no, they can’t call in sick the last week of school because they had vacation plans jeopardized by the need to make up instruction time because of a strike earlier in the year, or to tell administrators they have to get disruptive kids out of classrooms where they make learning impossible for everyone. Yes, it’s easy to point fingers (as I am doing), and much harder to create policies that actually fix the underlying problems, which I don’t think I could do, and which the School Board has likewise not been able (or willing) to do. I have no way of telling if you’d do better at that than your opponents.
I’ll reflect on your points about the bond, but one consideration I think you may have overlooked in your list (as well as on your website) is that the bond would only rebuild the final 3 new high schools (which we might not even need); we’ve already rebuilt the rest, so I don’t expect a mass exodus out of Portland if this bond fails. Possibly out of the Cleveland, Jefferson, and Wells catchment areas, but I doubt it. Kids in school there now knew they would never see a new school, but they didn’t leave town, so I’m not sure why that would change if we delayed things for another year. The real danger is that the School Board can’t make hard decisions, in which case it might be better to know that before committing to a big new bond.
If that’s where we are this far down-thread I have not done a good job explaining Seriously though I think you probably have some idea from my website and don’t think I have the energy to get into the weeds here at this point (but could answer more specific questions). Maybe in another forum.
I think those are all very true, though probably necessary but not sufficient (though maybe blocking the remaining things that would need to be done, so need to be done first). As for whether I’d be better at this than my opponent, I don’t know either, but I do know that “lack of funding” is often a scapegoat that I refuse to lay blame at. I’ll also mention that one big reason I lay out so many specific policy positions (including a couple dozen testimonies) is that I think it’s important voters know where someone stands, for exactly the reasons you allude to; and that a half-dozen generic values statements allow you to pretend to be everything to everyone.
I think of it more “lack of growth in those areas” rather than “exodus out of Portland”, and we really need to grow as a city- so those clusters (esp Jefferson and Cleveland) are, IMO, potentially existential. But the point stands in that case too. It’s a more than fair concern. Ultimately I don’t think anything is assured with regards to the Board and schools, and I’m voting to give the district and our kids the best chance of success; I’d have to reevaluate those odds in light of your point.
This is embarrassing. You seem to know nothing about schools except for how to get there. I am sorry but you are beyond a Hard pass.
I volunteer at a local elementary school and have for years.
It is beyond this forum to discuss all the challenges public schools have but GETTING there is not even on the radar for helping public schools teach children.
Class size, teacher performance, how to deal with the small minority of troubled kids that dominate school time are the issues.
Find something else to do.
Thanks BB. How do you suppose School Board Members, who do not control funding, handle class sizes? How do you suppose policies deal with troubled kids, again without additional funding?
Why do you think school board members have failed to address these issues for the last 20+ years?
On the campaign trail, I haven’t heard remarkably different ideas or urgency from these candidates compared to previous years. I really do like many of the candidates running (including my opponent!) but I would like to understand why or how you’d expect the issues you mention dealt with. I have heard very few concrete ideas; nearly all of them require massive amounts of funding or misunderstand basic aspects of scale and cost; a handful of them seem practical and worth doing but don’t impact anything you mention.
Thanks!
Bike Loud? Yikes. The same group that has called for less police in Portland?
Sorry but I’m going to have to pass on your candidacy.
Rob, I fully support the bike bus program if it moves more in the direction of equity and outside interstate 205.
Data Questions for Rob. How many days does your data show Lent Elementary students have been logged on bike bus supported rides to school this academic year? What is the mean and median size?
I hope you keep data as you receive Federal funding through Oregon Metro, and you are a tech worker. If you don’t have that data, what’s the general data look like? Estimate the bike bus size for Lent. Guess at the number of days they had a bus this academic year?
Here is why I ask. You list Lent Elementary on your bike bus website. People should know you were on the PTA for Glencoe Elementary, and that is the 9th most white school out of 71. Glencoe is 74% white and on the West slope of Mt Tabor. Compare that to Lent with less than 25% white students. Lent is Steel Ave at 97th, the playlot faces Interstate 205.
Your website does not contain the word equity. I think we should get some perspective on equity. Let’s look at the top bike bus school. What is the name of the school that has the most or biggest bike bus? How many bike bus rides did they have this academic year? What’s the average bike bus size for that top school.
I assume you had to submit some data to Metro to win that grant. Would you share what you submitted with us bike Portland readers? I paid Jonathan quite a lot as a subscriber long ago, but ended that when I saw too much bias. I am not new to the fight for equity.
You have received Federal funds for the bike bus, and there are restrictions on using those funds for elections. You are a federally funded group. When I raised these concerns you dismissed them. It is clear that you continue to use the bike bus brand as part of your election strategy. The Ladds 500 is one example.
Last Questions: Why do you feel qualified for a seat on a board that you interacted with very little in 2024 and prior? Your life has been to make money in technology, and you are running against a woman lawyer who has spent her whole life fighting for social justice of youth. It’s worth repeating: Your website does not mention equity once.
I did a records request and found only 2 places you contacted the board 2024 and prior. Two PDF files below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tV5IVXO0gnTlZ_CmF7IHjBnQC9V9UdRl/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bTni2-t93Uo_IgbsFsjDrWPGFeHlhc1F/view?usp=sharing
Joe, I am not going to indulge your ongoing bad-faith vendetta against me (why you’re on it, I don’t know), but I will correct the record here as it’s a blatant lie I have already corrected over email:
“Bike Bus PDX” is an informal, unincorporated association of individuals. The linked post clearly states the organizations the grant was awarded to and who are involved in its application and implementation. The Metro RTO grant funds awarded for Bike Buses are not used for any political purposes. Me wearing the yellow “Bike Bus” anorak is obviously protected free speech/expression, the same way any other clothing is. If you don’t buy this, I would encourage you to continue to file election complaints, instead of repeating lies in a public forum which is bordering on libel.