In the mundanity of typical Portland Public Schools (PPS) Board of Education races in the May 2025 Oregon special election, one race stood out; Virginia La Forte, a longtime Grant High School parent activist, was up against Jorge Sanchez Bautista, a senior at McDaniel High School at the time, to represent Zone 5 — an area which covers some of northeast and southeast Portland, including the neighborhood surrounding Grant High School and its feeder schools.
La Forte emerged as the winner, but the election was incredibly close: Bautista lost by around 400 votes.
While the recent special election may have been what first catapulted Bautista into the public eye, he has participated in activism throughout his life. “I’ve always had the characteristics of always wanting to help in some way,” he says.
In 2017, when Bautista was in elementary school, he became involved in tenants’ rights protests against gentrification and rent increases in the Cully neighborhood, where he lived. While he didn’t completely understand the issue at the time, Bautista saw the fear that his community was experiencing. “The more I grew up, the more I understood what it was that was happening in 2017,” he says. “Later, I was like, ‘Oh, okay, this is (about) housing stuff so I wouldn’t have to move schools.’”
From there, Bautista focused on local climate issues by meeting with government officials to express “demands and urgency to do more regarding climate matter.” Particularly, he focused on pressuring the city to audit and investigate Zenith Energy, an international oil and gas company which had been accused of breaking various environmental laws in Portland.
He now serves as a co-lead organizer of Portland Youth Climate Strike (PYCS), an organization dedicated to “demanding bold action” to protect the environment from the threat of climate change. It was in this group where he met Terah Bennett. They soon became friends.
Bennett says that Bautista is the “hardest working (and) most driven” person she knows, consistently making personal sacrifices to further causes he believes in.
Bautista says he tries to engage with larger, “youth-oriented” issues: “There’s a bunch of nonprofits and a lot of advocacy groups with a lot of older people,” he says. “But there’s not really any groups that are … youth-led, or that are made up of young people focusing on all sorts of matters.” He believes that his perspective as a young person gives him a unique ability to tackle important problems that most affect him and his community.
It was this point of view that led him to run for a school board seat, a position typically filled by older individuals.
Bautista’s contrasting experiences at the PPS elementary and middle schools he attended gave him a unique angle for his campaign. At Rigler Elementary School, he dealt with an extremely high turnover rate of teachers and administrators. Rigler was also composed of primarily Hispanic students and had some of the lowest test scores in the district. He observed that some of his friends who went to whiter elementary schools didn’t have to deal with the same challenges.
However, when he entered Beaumont Middle School, he noticed his classes had many more white students than he was familiar with. “Me and my class … we were always in a room filled with people that looked like us,” Bautista says. “And then we got to middle school — not the case.”
Bautista hoped to use his personal experiences to help create more equitable schools. “Seeing
the comparison, the inequity and then the lack of resources and lack of funding was one of the main reasons that led me to running,” he says.
During the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) strike in 2023, Bautista got more involved with PPS, serving as the primary “liaison” relaying information about the strike to students.
Bautista then also started closely following the PPS Board of Education. “I had attended the meetings every month, just kind of seeing the vibe,” he says, “And that’s when I was like, ‘Oh my God. These people cannot be our representatives.’”
Bautista’s feelings were compounded by the results of the 2024 presidential election. He worried that the board might not be best fitted to handle the attacks that President Donald Trump’s administration would levy on the Department of Education.
So, in early 2025, Bautista officially announced his candidacy. He would originally face off against then seatholder Gary Hollands, who eventually pulled out of the race and was replaced by La Forte.
Although Bautista and La Forte were opposing candidates, they didn’t have many disagreements over policies — their largest difference in that regard was on how certain policies should be implemented and issues should be tackled. Instead, Bautista says, the key contrast between the two was their perspectives. He thinks that he would have been able to provide a needed viewpoint: that of a student.
Ultimately, it would all come down to what the voters decided on Election Day. When votes first started being reported, it seemed decided: Bautista would lose by more than 10 percentage points and around 5,000 votes. Yet, as more votes were counted, the gap narrowed, until eventually he was expected to lose the election by only 801 votes. It became so close that the PAT, one of Bautista’s greatest supporters, organized an effort to “cure ballots,” or fix and count ballots that were originally rejected because of human error. After the curing efforts, Bautista lost by less than half a percentage point and 419 votes.
“Usually when young people run, it’s not a very close race,” says Bautista. “Obviously everyone who loses a campaign is disappointed and saddened, and I was like that too. But then I realized … At just 18 years old, being a full-time student and for my first political race, I was able to make it this far and this close, compared to everyone else.”
Bautista graduated later that year. Now, he plans to attend Portland State University, majoring in political science.
“(Bautista is) everything that a politician should be today,” Bennett says. “He’s, I think, what we need most desperately in administration of any sort in this country, city (and) world right now.”
Referring to whether he plans on running for more elected positions in the future, Bautista says, “You shall see in the coming years.”
