PORTLAND – Eight schools in Oregon have fallen prey to the No Child Left Behind law and must offer students free bus rides and priority transfer rights to attend better-performing schools.

Some of the schools, such as Milton-Freewater’s Central Middle School, also must pay for their students to get free tutoring because their test scores have been low for too long, state officials said Monday.

Under the federal law, schools don’t face consequences until they miss achievement targets for two straight years. The consequences grow more severe each year that a school fails to climb to acceptable performance levels.

Central Middle School has known its test scores haven’t been up to snuff the last two years, said Milton-Freewater Superintendent Marilyn McBride, so the listing isn’t a surprise.

The district created an after-school tutoring program, called the Central Learning Center, to help improve test scores and help improve the school’s rating, McBride said.

“It’s hard for people to understand that to get out of that low rating, it takes time,” she said.

The other consequence outlined by the No Child Left Behind law requires schools to allow students to transfer to higher-performing schools within their district. Central Middle School would have to allow its students to have a choice, but there’s no other middle school within the district.

“This law is coming out of Washington, D.C.,” she said. “They don’t really understand a rural community.”

Most of the eight Oregon schools that triggered federal consequences for this fall had unacceptably low performance schoolwide.

But Central Middle School and Heritage Elementary in Woodburn made the list because a single group fell short. At Central, fewer than 40 percent of Latino students met state benchmarks in reading. At Heritage, only students with disabilities fell short of that target.

Of the other seven schools, four are in Portland and three are in Woodburn.

Hardest hit are Jefferson and Roosevelt high schools in Portland, where test scores and dropout rates remained at unacceptable levels for a fifth straight year. The two schools probably will have an outside educator paid by the state assigned full time to their campuses this fall to try to raise achievement and shrink the dropout rate, state officials said.

Monday’s announcement involved only the 11 Oregon schools that had missed the state’s performance target at least once. The federal government required Oregon to raise the bar this year. Three of them – Swegle Elementary in Salem, Central Middle School in Culver and Greenwood Elementary in La Grande – registered achievement gains and met the new targets.

On August 12, the state will announce whether the rest of Oregon’s 1,250 schools met the higher targets. Hundreds won’t, according to Vickie Fleming, Oregon’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.

All Oregon schools are supposed to get 40 percent of their students to meet state reading standards and 39 percent to measure up in math.

Schools must achieve those targets in both subjects for all students, including those who are disabled, low-income, white, black, Native American, Asian American, multiracial students and those who speak English as a second language.