Making It Hard to Say No
By Scott Learn, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Feb. 20–Mee Lor sits with anticipation as the school bus rumbles south on Interstate 5, baby Kay in her lap, 6-year-old Marilyn in front playing tic-tac-toe on Post-it notes with a friend.
For Lor, the distance between Thailand refugee camp No. 4 and the Creston Elementary school bus covers 18 years, two continents and more than 7,000 miles.
But today’s journey is shorter, to Salem, site of a Presidents Day school rally at the Capitol. In Lor’s purse is a carefully handwritten copy of a short speech for a legislator she drafted in her Southeast Portland apartment Saturday night, Marilyn pestering at her elbow.
“I’m excited,” Lor says. “Because I’m a voice. I’m going to be heard. I’ve never done anything like this before and it’s important things I’m going to be talking about. It’s very important.”
The pro-school rally drew an estimated 3,000 supporters Monday, from Lincoln City to Portland to Medford, roughly the same turnout as the rally in the last legislative session in 2005.
Speakers stumped for full funding of Head Start and for a $6.3 billion K-12 education budget for the next two years to begin addressing past cuts. That’s about a 17 percent increase per student, and $240 million more than Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s proposed $6.06 billion K-12 plan.
The event, sponsored by Stand for Children, the Oregon Bus Project, the Oregon Head Start Association and others, was designed as a show of force and a chance to lobby legislators en masse.
For Mee Lor, it was her first trip to the Capitol — and as a Hmong immigrant whose child attends the mainly working-class school, the next step in her evolution as an unlikely schools activist.
Lor and her family moved from the Thai refugee camp to Stockton, Calif., in 1989, when she was 7. She entered school and was quickly lost in classes of as many as 35 kids. She didn’t learn to read until sixth grade, when a teacher took a special interest in her. Her parents couldn’t speak English or read or write in any language.
Today, at 25, Lor says she will not let history repeat itself. Her husband, Da Cha, works as a machine operator. She stays at home full time, regularly volunteering at Creston, near the intersection of Southeast Powell Boulevard and Foster Road.
“I know if you participate in your children’s education, they’ll learn better,” Lor says. “I wanted to be involved to learn as much as I could myself, and to be able to know what the teachers are talking about.”
Lor signed up when Stand for Children came knocking last fall for volunteer phone bankers to support Portland Public Schools’ local option levy. “I get excited very, very easily,” she says. “When a nice person answered and said, ‘Yes, I’m going to vote for it,’ I say, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you.’ People were talking about that.”
On Monday, Lor listened closely to the speakers on the Capitol steps, cheering and clapping often. Her strongest reaction came to the words of Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem: “The main thing wrong with young people and children are adults,” he said.
“That’s true!” Lor exclaims.
After the rally, Lor huddles with other activists and Creston parents in a makeshift lobbying room to prepare to meet with Rep. Diane Rosenbaum, D-Portland. Rachel Langford, a Stand for Children organizer, wants Lor to make “the ask” seeking Rosenbaum’s commitment for $6.3 billion.
But Rosenbaum unexpectedly bows out of the meeting, relaying through her staff that she can’t leave a revenue committee session. Instead the group crowds into Rosenbaum’s office to meet with her legislative assistant, Patton Price.
Lor sits in front of Price. She pulls out her speech and unfolds it. “This is what I have to say,” she begins. Creston, in the process of converting to a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, doesn’t have a counselor or a librarian, she says. There’s no study of second languages and little study of other cultures.
She asks for $6.3 billion, then looks up from her paper. “Can we count on having your vote on that?” she says very firmly. “Can we get a definite answer?”
Price smiles sympathetically. “It doesn’t work like that,” he says. “If the money is there and it’s a realistic goal, she’ll be there. But you don’t know how the budget process will play out.”
Back in the lobbying room, Langford gives Lor a big hug.
“Mee, that was a very fine ask,” she says.
“We didn’t get an answer though,” Lor says.
Langford smiles. “But it was the right question.”
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