Portland Parent Group Joins Federal Challenge to Portland Public Schools’ Race-Based Funding Policies

Richard Raseley spent two years as chair of his younger daughter’s school foundation, raising up to $150,000 for classroom staff. When Portland Public Schools banned parents from donating directly to their children’s schools, Richard founded a new group of Portland parents—Families for Fair School Funding, a nonpartisan association of Portland-area residents committed to ensuring that Portland Public Schools allocates resources fairly, transparently, and according to educational need, and not based on race. 

Represented by the Center for Individual Rights, Families for Fair School Funding has joined a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Portland Public Schools, originally brought by Richard in October 2025, challenging two District policies that distribute school  resources based on race and ban parents from donating to their own children’s schools.   

“FFSF was formed out of necessity,” said founder Richard Raseley. “Parents are afraid to speak out publicly because they have seen the kind of harassment that people like me face for speaking up. Even in this climate of intimidation, our members are united in one belief: Fairness cannot be achieved through discrimination.” 

Since 2013, Portland has used “Equity Funding” to allocate staff and resources to each school based on two “equity measures,” both of which the lawsuit challenges as discriminatory. Under the first measure, schools with at least 40 percent of students classified as “Historically Underserved”—a category defined in part as Black, Latino/Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander students—receive extra staffing and funding. The second equity measure relies on the percentage of students who qualify for free meals through a government-assistance program. Although facially race-neutral, it was adopted to advance the District’s racial equity agenda and is, in the District’s own words, highly correlated with the racial makeup of each school.  

In the 2025-26 school year, at least 20 K-8 schools received zero equity funding. “Under this policy, two schools with identical academic needs and identical poverty rates could receive different resources based solely on the races of the children who attend them,” said CIR’s Senior Attorney Mike Petrino, lead counsel for Richard and FFSF.  

The lawsuit also challenges the District’s May 2024 decision to abolish the local school foundation fundraising model in favor of centralizing all donations and redistributing them according to “Racial Equity and Social Justice” values. In the last year local school foundations operated independently, they raised $3.4 million. Under the new policy, that amount dropped by more than 80 percent, collapsing to $593,324.  

The Supreme Court held in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Portland has not identified any discrimination by the District that its policies are designed to remedy. The lawsuit asks the court to declare both policies unconstitutional and prevent the District from enforcing them.  

“Portland Public Schools boasts that race ‘suffuses’ every decision it makes,” said CIR’s General Counsel Darpana Sheth. “The Constitution calls that discrimination—whether it’s college admissions, government contracting, or deciding which public schools get additional resources. Portland students deserve a school funded by what they need—not by what they look like.”