The Portland School Board is acting in open defiance of state law regarding the state mandated number of school days that the district is required to provide to the students. The board has openly declared that the policy of the district will be to close schools early in the face of budget limitations.

The April 26, 2004, letter from the then superintendent of the Portland Public School Superintendent, Jim Scherzinger, to the Portland School Board is posted on the PPS web site..

The General Counsel of the district must surely be presumed to know of this policy, unless there is or was some extraordinary circumstance of justifiable misfeasance. The General Counsel must likewise have alerted the new Superintendent Vicki Phillips, and each of the current members of the Portland School Board, that the District cannot lawfully choose a course of conduct that defies state law.

Let me explain by analogy. Suppose I said that I believe that it is safe to drive 100 miles per hour from Portland to Salem on I-5 in a fancy BMW. Most everyone would know that I could not merely, all by my lonesome, decide for myself what the speed limit should be for me. The cop who pulls me over, for doing 100, would kind of chuckle at me as if I were crazy if I tried to argue that the speed limit did not apply to me.

The Benton County Commissioners recently learned that limits on conduct do not merely apply to individuals that speed in defiance of the law but to the policy choices of elected governmental bodies. That is, Benton County could not simply declare that they would not issue Marriage Licenses. The court, in a legal action against the county, ruled that tolerance of such local government defiance of state law would result in the equivalent of anarchy.