The effort by a group of parents to close ACCESS Academy, which serves highly gifted students in Portland Public Schools when their neighborhood schools can’t (“ Portland parents petition to close school for gifted students amid school closure talks ,” Sep. 3), is deeply misguided.

This group is targeting a single school with misleading arguments and appeals to anxiety about the district’s budget. The truth is that closing ACCESS would eliminate a critical service — with no plan to replace it, much less expand it to meet skyrocketing demand in recent years — while adding only a fraction of 1% to the budgets of other PPS schools.

Worse still, these parents are sowing divisiveness at a time when the entire district community should be united in working toward a stronger PPS with more opt

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