2012-12-03 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2012-12-03
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education, 12/03/2012 Study Session Part 1 of 2

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this study session of the board of education for december 3rd 2012 scout order welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers this meeting is being televised live and will replay throughout the next week two weeks uh please check the world website for replay times uh please note that action on the resolution approving renewal and enrollment uh cap request for portland village a public charter has been postponed to december 17th also it should be noted that there is no action tonight by the way in regards to planned parenthood nor on the jefferson cluster enrollment balancing this is a a study session um also for folks that are here for the first time welcome um and it should be noted by the way that in terms of science uh please you know have them in front of your body so that it's not to block the the view of other folks behind you and we'd appreciate that and please uh try to clear the aisles because uh because of the fire department um i think it's important to have those clear eye aisles so i appreciate that folks sitting on the on the front row um we're gonna ask you those uh to vacate those seats after the the public comment as we're gonna we set up those seats temporarily for the roosevelt cluster presentation so i appreciate your your assistance in that with that uh we begin our meeting and uh for us we have uh a presentation uh for the center for for women policy and politics uh and director knowles is gonna guide us to to this one uh would you guys go ahead and come on up to the lectern and and tell us how you want to i think you have a short presentation to make and then we're going to do some sashing great thank you for inviting us my name is janice stilch i'm the project director of century of action oregon women vote it's a hundred years this year since since oregon women did gain the right to vote in the state and we think that's pretty significant we've all just been through an election cycle and so we know we've heard a lot of comments about the rights of citizenship and participation in the political process and so we think it's important that current residents of oregon and future residents of oregon and future voters know something about this history and so i'm just going to give you a very very brief overview of what that struggle that lasted for 42 years in this state these women and men were persistent in thinking that voting was important and essential and they weren't going to give up until that right was extended to all citizens of this state and they actually had voted on this issue five times finally successful on the sixth which was more than any state in the nation so we have that dubious honor here in oregon and it really began in 1870 when a woman named abigail scott dunaway and others formed the first equal suffrage association in the state of oregon and they placed the issue on the ballot in 1888 in 1900 in 1906 in 1908 and in 1910 and so by 1912 they were feeling like we need to try some new tactics we need to do some something different because it's really time or washington and california and idaho all the states around oregon had given women the right to vote and women often asked what's wrong with oregon men and they decided to say well nothing and so a very lively campaign unfolded during 1912. there was use of what was new advertising media women rode around and put up hand bills saying women pay taxes why shouldn't we have the right to vote also they had advertisements in newspapers they gave speeches on public corners and finally on november 5th 52 percent of oregon men decided that yes women should be equal partners in this ability to vote and so it passed and on november 30th abigail scott dunaway who was then quite an an aging 79 year old signed the oregon's equal suffrage proclamation with then governor oswald west and that proclamation was actually hand written and it is at the state archives it still exists and it's actually on display through the end of the year but of course oregon women who gained
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the right to vote didn't want to rest on their laurels and so they continue to work for the 19th amendment which is in our national constitution that guarantees all women the right to vote across the nation and that was an important development as well and so with that i'm going to turn it over to nova newcomer who's going to talk about kind of where that went and and how you can learn more about that well thank you to the school board for having us here and um i just want to recognize jan dilchu's the co-founder of the oregon women's history consortium i serve on that board and i've also worked as a staff member member at the center for women politics and policy and our two organizations have been partners in this celebration and one of the things the center really took on um in tandem with the educational website that um is online for century of action at centuryofaction.org was to really look at educational curriculum and resources that we could be providing to the school system in oregon so our executive director at the center created a six through twelve women's history curriculum that's downloadable for teachers it's a five-day curriculum but really any of the five lessons could be downloaded and and taught to students and and really bring in new information one of the things i like to say the reason i got involved with this is that i went through an entire oregon education all the way through college and graduated college college not knowing the name of betty roberts who was our first female on the supreme court so there's obviously a lot of work to do to educate all oregonians on the important achievements of women in our state and the impacts that they've made the other thing that the center has done and i'm going to have to stand up for away from the mic is we've created a companion poster that will go be sent out to a thousand classrooms in oregon we have a fundraising campaign that we're doing um with that but we actually had a great uh sponsorship from the oregon commission for women to get these posters out to classrooms so any teacher in six through twelve we're hoping we might be able to open it up with additional funds can request one of these posters online and i'll show you an example um they're really quite stunning and actually anyone who would like to can order one and if you order one of these posters online they that will also add an additional school that we can send these posters to one of the things that we thought was really important was to capture women's oregon women first across all fields representing diversity of experience and backgrounds as well as racial diversity what we do know is that you can't get all of the oregon women first with 14 women on a poster so this is just you know maybe this is round one um we actually have a website where people can submit additional oregon women first that we may not know about because one of the things we found when we did this project was that there were you know we really had to had to make that first selection and that we were so excited to see that there were so many that people kept suggesting as we talked to them about this project so i hope that any teachers who are in the room will request a poster online cwpp.pdx.org poster will get you um to a link that will allow you to do that the special ceremony that we planned today was actually instigated by pam knowles on the board and she actually serves uh on the board of the center for women politics and policy and she felt that her colleagues on the board should be sashed and this is a verb that we've created i'm not sure if in an educational format whether that's appropriate word or not um but governor roberts like to say likes to say that we created a new word for this um a new verb for this action um so what i'd like to do is uh ceremoniously sash um come up and these sashas say votes for women they're sort of a the standard fair that you would see in historical photos um you're joining sort of an illustrious crew of public sashimi and we actually haven't forgotten the
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men either because of course they were the only ones who could actually vote and so we have long live organ men which was from a congratulatory telegram that came because one more oh you want us to go up there hang on again thank you all for your presentation and thank uh director knowles for her leadership and making this thing happen so we're going to continue with uh with public comment at this time we allow 20 minutes for public comment ms sophish do we have anyone signed up for public comment um do you want to go ahead and call the first two people bildis ron johnson and i'm going to i don't see the other person or the person who's coming oh he's coming okay um i'm just going to read the the the instructions for uh public comment our responsibility support lies in actively listening and reflecting on the thoughts and opinions of others guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration when referring to board members staff and other presenters we have a total of three minutes to share your comments please begin by sharing your name and spelling your last name for the record during the first two minutes of your testimony a green light will appear when you have one minute remaining a yellow light will go on and when you have when your time is up the red light will go on and a buzzer will sound we respectfully ask you that you conclude your comments at that time we sincerely appreciate your input and thank you in advance for your cooperation there's no adjustment is there i don't think so but you want to go ahead and sit down and that way you know you both can you should you should start it you need to go first okay well my name is ron johnson and my last name is j-o-h-n-s-o-n and i'm among a group of people tonight who are concerned very concerned about planned parenthood and the partnership that has been forged with the portland school district um i'm not one of the people who was involved in very much of the things except an email letter writing campaign to trip goodall several people school districts and also schools and i got an appointment originally with a school at madison it was cancelled sent back said you got to go talk to the district the district had first told me you'd go talk to the school they make the decisions about these programs and in the process i wrote probably 30 different letters copied many of you on the school board about them trying to get a meeting and talk about mainly the process how did this get started why is there a program in the first place and if there's a program you decide there is one why did you select planned parenthood were there other people involved other organizations that you considered if not why not um no answers for any of these things whatsoever from anyone we know what the top program is they kept explaining it giving me little blurbs and stuff but it i didn't get the feeling that anybody was really interested at all and i also provided many links of things for school board members and others about planned parenthood what their true agenda is sexual promiscuity abortion birth control those issues they have there's a mafa documentary program about black genocide in the united states nobody would want to listen to it i there's programs that planned parenthood has on their websites take care down there very sexually explicit things on their websites i ask people to comment on them do you know about them no answers no replies no nothing that came about we found out about the program actually being initiated is in schools the four schools that were selected are also the four schools with the highest minorities population in them which was a little bit troubling
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so all of these things brought up just all kinds of questions i did not feel from at least as my individual perspective that there was much interest at all in sharing any kind of information we found out about a parent approval form that had to be a form to get into this thing which the kids take home to the parents and shove it in their face like a lot of them do they get paid five dollars for it after they turn that in to planned parenthood then the student is given a sexual survey form of which i also asked multiple times to get copies of nobody says they have it nobody says they know anything about it and that form when it's filled out goes back to planned parenthood not the school not the parents not anyone all of these things seem to be troubling aspects of the program so thank you thank you i want to ask folks to hold the applause down otherwise i'm going to have to cut back on the on the time that the presenters have okay thank you madam superintendent chairperson mr gonzalez and all the members of the board and all the members of the public thank you so much for being here tonight in three weeks from tonight around the world the many people be celebrating the birth of our savior many people have something like this at their house but it's usually a little bit bigger but what's so interesting about that day is that the god who created all of us you know came and took the form of this little person you know it just wasn't wasn't a theory he came you know as this little person that we all see here and it's very important unfortunate that every year planned parenthood just in our own country kills you know third of a million babies just like this and if you take that with the school population you know they kill enough babies every year to fill all of the schools over seven times and our school population right now is back down to where it was in 1920 and that that just seems like a diametrically opposed of what we're trying to you know build up the school population and at the same time you know we're bringing in planned parenthood who isn't about large families or for that matter almost any families and the other reason i bring up the point of of the of the birth of christ our savior because because he came to save all of us and to heal us and i know that you folks have gotten a lot of information about the disgusting stuff that planned parenthood has if anyone tried to actually read it you would probably shut us down which they've done in salem and in other places but i think what happens most the time where people keep propagating that type of behavior in other people is it's something in their in their own past and obviously i think some of you have have some things we all do okay i don't have to say what they are but i would i would just encourage you to to try to look at those things so you don't have to keep keep pushing pushing that stuff on on other people and you know many people who are you know in their 50s and 60s have run into some troubles whether it's abortion or promiscu promiscuity or pornography but this is just such a chance to get healed so that that that filth does not have to be handed on to other people thank you and god bless all you thank you excuse me can you say your name again okay can you say your name for the record i mean william see this thank you next we have dr toffler and dr tom owens hi i'm dr william toffler i'm a professor of family medicine and for 27 years i've worked at ohsu teaching residents medical students doing research and caring for patients my wife and i support the portland public schools with our property taxes i speak in support of mr bill dis who has the integrity to risk his livelihood in the best interest of his students as i understand it representatives of planned parenthood sought to interrupt his mathematics tutoring in order to talk to students about sex education as a physician educator who teaches about behavioral interventions and has given national presentations on
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the topic of sex education what does and doesn't work such interventions by planned parenthood are at best ineffective and at worst harmful why is this let me explicitly share some of the few messages that i looked at with just two clicks on the planned parenthood website entitled information for teens quote mutual masturbation is also a great way to have safer sex and to prevent unwanted pregnancy end quote and this about the advantages of quote outer course then court end quote outer course can completely satisfy both partners outer course helps partner learn about their bodies and how to give themselves and each other sexual pleasure really outer course completely satisfies and won't lead to intercourse to be clear i'm not opposed to sex education in fact for more than 15 years i've been invited to teach an annual father-son program where i share information with young adolescents with their fathers present we cover science and sexual intimacy and procreation at the same time the emphasis on is on responsibility respect and commitment responsibility for your actions and their inevitable consequences most importantly i emphasize the need to fully respect all women the complexity of our bodies and their unique role and capacity to bring forth new life and the need for commitment before openness to sexual intimacy at the same time filed only five days ago the oregonian reported that oregon has the fourth worst graduation rate in the nation in the area of science only 60 percent of portland 11th graders are meeting standards while these poor performance problems are multifactorial one of the solutions is to provide exactly the kind of tutoring and science mathematics that mr disc does so well on the other hand what merit is there to intrude on mr dissa's time to instead teach the titillating details of masturbation as teaching teens about sexual stimulation become more important than teaching about science i hope not planned parenthood tactics have not been a part of the incremental success both in our nation and state and lowering teenage pregnancy and abortion rates finally i also believe in diversity the diversity of talented educators some of whom may share my concerns and some of whom may not so i ask each of you do you also believe in diversity will you allow a committed talented and award-winning teacher to maintain his integrity will you protect his right of conscience i sincerely hope so i hope so you because mr dis is exactly the kind of teacher that i would want for my children not only because of his talents but most importantly because of his role modeling in short mr dis has demonstrated the capacity to follow the courage of his convictions in so doing he's providing a priceless lesson not just for students but for the entire portland community thanks for your help thank you my name is tom owens o w e n s i'm a retired educator who taught in public schools at the middle school high school and college level i've also worked as an educational researcher in the portland area for over 25 years i've served as a school board member and hold a phd in education from the ohio state university i'd like to share with you today some of my concerns about the involvement of planned parenthood with the teen outreach program and the community voice program being used in several schools in the portland school district my concern center around three areas first the emphasis of planned parenthood on casual sexual behaviors as separated from the emotional aspects of a committed relationship second the disrespect shown toward young people who may prefer to abstain from sexual behavior before marriage and third the emphasis for pregnant teens on the option of abortion with minimal attention to parenting or adoption recently i checked out the planned parenthood website and viewed some of the videos involving young people in the section marked be the smart person in bed it was just i was disturbed by the images songs and messages approving of young people having free and unlimited sex without considering the responsibilities that go with such actions the only responsibilities mentioned were for teens to use condoms and check for sexually transmitted diseases similar planned parenthood videos such as taking down taking care down there make fun of young people who choose to abstain from engaging in sexual behavior based on their own personal moral values or perhaps those of their families this disrespect for such students and their families i feel should not be tolerated in our schools the planned parenthood website also places a much heavier emphasis on abortion as the first of three options for unplanned
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pregnancies followed by adoption and parenting for example under parenting the questions they suggest students ask themselves are primarily negative such as am i ready to cope with a tighter budget less time for myself and more stress in summary i feel the participation of planned parenthood in the teen outreach program and the youth community voice program at benson and other high schools distorts the meaning of true loving commitments and encourages our youth to regard sex as only an enjoyable pastime i therefore recommend that the school board carefully review the involvement of planned parenthood and not renew the contract to participate beyond this year i believe a number of people here in the audience would support such a recommendation you want to repeat those names again laurie porter harold burke sivers i'm laurie porter i'm co-founder of parents rights and education i'm uh i have an mat in education and the debate about wyman top program is national uh this book teaching you're teaching my child what by miriam grossman is we'll give you a quick read on what is happening across the country not just portland it doesn't matter if you're pro or against comprehensive sex education or your pro-choice pro-life the bottom line is parents rights in this top program are they truly being appropriate are they really having best practice and what who gets to prove that and will it really increase academic success where are the evidence of evidences of that talk claims that they have reduced the program reduces the risk of teen pregnancy or fathering by 53 percent 62 percent reduction in the risk of school suspension and 60 reduction in the risk of course failure really i've been an educator for 22 years i have not seen a program that's that successful and by the way that report was done by someone affiliated with planned parenthood so go figure conflict of interest the northwest coalition of adolescent health is comprised of six parents right excuse me six parent planned parenthood affiliates so there's six states in the area that are affiliated with wyman top program there's evidence quote evidence expert advice that i'll share with you here in a bit because i don't have time to read at all but one of the one of the sources is the oregon youth sexual health plan that is a plan it's not law and in that it advocates 18 years or younger having access to emergency contraception gynecological exams etc go ask alice is a website that planned parenthood advises or advocates for young people to take a look at here are some of the topics contraception erotica pornography masturbation tools and toys you can figure that one out is eating faces safe breastfeeding my partner yearning to drink my urine also emergency contraception is there as well at hotline in addition scarlettine also advises kids how to get emergency contraception without parental notification take care down there you go to their website i suggest that you do and i'll give you the information about that quickly on the front page horse penis virus bring your sister i didn't spew it's really embarrassing for me to say this in front of precious children i hope it makes you uncomfortable it makes me terribly uncomfortable but the point is this is stuff that our youth are able to access and are encouraged through the talk program through planned parenthood hey thank you my name is harold burke sivers i'm president and ceo of server
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enterprises here in portland and first of all i'd like to just thank you for your service on the board i myself served as the chair of the board for the department of public safety standards and training under governor kitzhaber and kulingoski and so i know that to do this type of job you have to have a heart and a love for children and their education what disturbs me about this program whether it's planned parenthood or who is just the idea that the reason you're hearing some of these things they're encouraging behavior that many of us parents and i have four young children myself uh find defensive and the reason why they promote that is that you know the ultimate end is abortion i mean when you look at the schools that they're in jefferson benson roosevelt madison have the highest minority rates of the schools in portland um and and just just a couple things about abortion the black community again again these are numbers from the center for disease control since 1993 legal abortion has killed more black americans than aids cancer diabetes heart disease and violent crime combined every week more blacks die in american abortion clinics that were killed in the entire vietnam war abortion kills as many black people every four days the the ku klux klan killed in 150 years so you know but what no one no one's done so far is to bring you alternatives um one i would like to present is from northwest family services uh i serve as chair of the board and they have wonderful programs that are holistic they look at developing the entire child adolescents and they're doing they're having tremendous results in success in some schools in portland and through throughout clackamas county as well they focus on the many strengths that our youth possess and they give them the equipment the skills support the motivation to navigate and succeed through adulthood they teach them about alcohol drug use risky sexual behaviors gang involvement all those kinds of things that we parents want to make sure that we stay uh steer our uh kids clear from i mean for the approach that is being taken now for example we don't want our kids to do drugs we wouldn't say well let's give you you know you're going to do it anyway so let's just give you drugs you know so you're going to do it anyway or we want you to smoke we'll give you cigarettes because we know you're going to do it anyway so why would we say we don't want you to have sex but we're going to give you condoms and we have a program because you're going to do it anyway just as as a parent it just doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense um so i just want to again present an alternative program that i think would not be offensive to anyone here that really accomplishes the goals that i think all of us want to to see with our children and i just want to thank you again for your service this community thank you thank you okay so thank you all uh for your testimony we are gonna move on on the agenda and as i mentioned earlier we're going to be asking the folks in the front row if they can please allow for that folks from roosevelt high school cluster to come forward because we're going to be moving on to that presentation tonight we will hear the third in our series of high school cluster presentations this presentation fishing or a different school cluster each month will allow the board to conduct a deeper dive on milestone data at the school level we have allocated one hour for this discussion staff has about 30 minutes to present that and it's just a reminder for us as board members that uh this is an opportunity to for us to learn more about what's going on at each cluster and i know they're going to be setting up here soon and probably provide an opportunity to for other people to move around so superintendent smith it didn't sound like is it on now welcome suanne higgins who is our chief academic officer up to the podium as well as greg wallach the regional administrator for high schools for the roosevelt cluster and sasha parents who is the regional administrator for all the k-8s and then welcome all the principals um from the
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from the roosevelt cluster to come on up in the red chairs up here so that where we can visually see you guys uh way to represent two just saying yeah that's good so are all the folks here that need to be here carol is suen greg and sasha suanne can come in are you going right straight to you guys you know where she is i think we're probably just going straight to you guys hang on just going to wait until the crowd kind of goes a little bit here suanne she's here somewhere i'm just going to wait till they kind of clear out a little bit here before and suanne's not here yet either okay hey greg wallick come on up we're gonna go ahead and start okay so as director gonzalez shared with us this is our third presentation and it's really our opportunity to hear from the entire feeder pattern in the roosevelt cluster about what's what what's happening what your data is looking like where your effective strategies are and where your challenges are so i will turn it over to sasha and greg to get us started thank you thank you madam superintendent co-chairs gonzalez and belial and directors for your time this evening to share the successes and challenges of the roosevelt cluster i'm sasha parens i'm the regional administrator for roosevelt um the cluster for the pre-k eights and i'm greg wallick i'm the region administrator for high schools i work with chip goodall and supervising and supporting the seven comprehensive and the two focus option high schools one of which is roosevelt i'm going to ask the k-8 principals to introduce themselves to you now my name the peninsula is the tampa bill principal in rosa parks pre-k thought joe lafontaine principal at sydney elementary k5 carl newsome principal of astor k8 beth shelby principal james john k5 charlene williams principal roosevelt high school i'm david wood assistant principal at peninsula k.a lisa shore vice principal roosevelt high school good evening levert robertson principal cesar chavez hi greg newman vice principal roosevelt high school thanks for having us and ben keefe for principal george middle school um now i'm going to ask three of our pre-k 8 principals to come up you might want to speak a little bit sorry now we'll ask three of our pre-k-8 principals to come and speak with you beth shelby ben kiefer and carl newsome i was told to sit close to the microphone is this working first of all again i'd like to say thank you for having us here and it's great to see so many faces who have already been out to james john i want to let you know that we greatly appreciate it and our kids appreciate it and my staff keep asking when you're coming back so that that speaks highly of the importance to have you visit along those lines i'd like to talk about something we're doing in the roosevelt cluster that i feel is making a big difference and i within our cluster and also sharing with the lincoln cluster we form triads of principles and we've been asked to partner
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with a newer principal if possible as well as a principal from a very different demographic so in my case i'm very lucky to be partnered with cindy roby from ainsworth and then also with david wood from peninsula i specifically asked to go to peninsula because i wanted to know about the great things that were going on at peninsula and what was working so well so thank you carlos for welcoming me and thank you david because it was great and as a result of that i had two teachers who said they wanted to go visit peninsula so now we're making that an opportunity and both of those teachers are teachers on my equity team they wanted to go to peninsula because they wanted to see what was working for students and what strategies were being used that maybe were more effective than the strategies that they were using in their own classrooms we are getting to the point at james john where our predominantly white staff of teachers is beginning to understand that they need some different strategies to work with their predominantly students of color and they're wanting to know what to do differently and i see that as incredibly exciting so then they came back well i don't think they visited yet we planned it but then the conversation went from there to how can i visit my peers within the building and we haven't been able to create a time for that like a professional learning community time where it was happening during the day where teachers could get into each other's classrooms then my pe teacher stepped forward and she said you know i've got a couple of times during the day that i have free how about if i go in offered to go into classrooms and cover the classrooms of other teachers so that they can go visit their peers and see what's going on so for she she identified about two half hour slots during the week and that's her intent to be able to just walk into a classroom take over free up that general ed teacher to go into another teacher's classroom and see what's going on now i bring that up simply because within our cluster i see collaboration happening on a really really neat scale within my school i'm seeing that collaboration and i know among principals it makes a world of difference to me in my thinking and how i approach what i do every day and i know it does for my teachers as well if we expect to eliminate the achievement gap we have to do a better job and we have to know what strategies are going to work for other children and i'm left with a lot of hope i'm pretty excited actually about the things that are going on and i'm very proud of both my teaching staff and the roosevelt cluster so thank you good evening once again carl newsome and i'm very happy to be here tonight representing the astor eagles and our astor community and it's very exciting to be here tonight to share with you and there's so much to talk about that is very difficult to pare it down into what can be shared tonight but i'm going to make every effort to do so first of all i'm very excited to make mention of the fact that a very we have a very strong legacy of success that has been established at astor by our by my predecessor principal john walden as well as the aster staff and community and what they've been able to forge over the years has just given us a great start of where we are now in terms of seeking as best we can to foster the success of of our high test scores and and high achievement which is in no which is which has a lot to do with the commitment of our staff and their willingness to undertake this mission and impact our students in the positive ways that they have done over the years in fact the stability of our staff in terms of low mobility has been one of our greatest strengths
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and on the flip side of that the challenge is this is a retirement year where we have at least six staff members who will be retiring and so that's going to be very challenging to continue to fill those roles in in such a manner that will allow us to continue to build on what we have established in the past um another thing that i'm very proud of is how is the work of our equity team we were very we were a we are a strand too we were very fortunate last year to begin having our equity team impact our staff on the late openings by presenting the courageous conversations professional development and it was very interesting to compare our to compare our equity survey from the previous year with the current year and to see the continued increase as far as the interest of the staff in being a part of that conversation and impacting our students in such a positive way and we had a variety of different strategies that we utilized that were very inclusive for the staff which really helped to make it that much more meaningful and it's no different this year in fact even tonight before coming here uh i was i'm sure you're aware of the exhibit that's going on at omsi right now race are we so different and with the equity team and our staff in collaboration we decided to trade out one of our staff meetings to uh use it to be at omsi uh to have the opportunity to go through that exhibit and so we did that today and it was just it was powerful there were about 31 of us and to just see the staff throughout the exhibit engaging with one another and getting totally absorbed in what was being shared and what was being presented was very excited very exciting and uh it gives me hope for the future steps that we're going to take as we reach the point where this great work trickles down into the classrooms where we'll have the opportunity to impact our families impact our students and impact our community at large another challenge was of course we were title one school last year we lost our title 1 status when the minimum percentage was increased but fortunately with the fte that we received we were still able to keep our title 1 coordinator in the role as reading specialist so that she could continue to act up to so that she could continue to impact the students who needed that support and hopefully with our fall campaign in terms of encouraging parents to fill out the applications we would reach that status once more but uh it's still been it was very we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to keep her in that role so that she could continue to make the difference and so as we move forward with our staff getting immersed in the professional development around the new common core standards working very diligently with that as we move forward to the future we are very excited about our future prospects are as we continue to push our students to strive for them to seek to do their best with the support of their parents with the support of our community at large with all of us being on the same page to equip our students for the 21st century so that we can be very certain that every opportunity they can avail themselves of for success it is indeed happening and thank you again for the opportunity to share this with you hi my name is ben kieffer and i'm the principal at george middle school uh i'd like to echo my colleagues uh you know thank you for the work that you do for the board obviously superintendent board members it's a it's a great thing that you do and i'm excited to talk about roosevelt the cluster of roosevelt and i'm proud to be the middle school that feeds into roosevelt high school and those pieces that we've worked on i was asked to talk a little bit about some of the strategies that we've been utilizing to try and open our practice beyond the classroom but also wanted to talk a little bit about some of those cluster level strategies as well uh charlene ed roosevelt and her whole entire staff has been really welcoming to the folks at george in terms of trying to let us in on some of the wonderful things that they're learning and doing that way so we've been doing a two-way piece where we've been going up and down and we've had some of their instructional staff come over to have meetings with us so we can hear about what they're doing we've also gone and participated meetings with them in an effort to try and make sure that we have an articulation and that's something that we've now grown this year to be working out at the cluster level to try and do some k12 articulation talk about what's special about roosevelt and there's a whole lot special go rough riders all right and in addition
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to that what we can do with that what's special about us and how we can have that identity grow and be something powerful so we recognize that in light of declining resource that that presents a challenge but it also presents an opportunity for us to tighten up a line and become really powerful together as a group so that's something that we're working on under the encouragement of sasha and he really has helped frame this for us in terms of trying to share practice really encouraging us to go out and learn from our peers and then the push this year we've been trying to start to share some of that technologically so the district has sharepoint there are a few savvy folks who've gotten out there and done some things i've learned from some other principals tim lauer and kevin crotchet and gone with google apps for education for a a website that we've set up but then what we've done is then figure out how to translate that into something that everybody can do because not everybody's familiar enough to set up your own domain and do all that kind of stuff so we have a sharepoint and what sharepoint allows us to do and there's many departments that are already taking great advantage of this is to set up a place where people can connect to resource and have discussions and different ways to hang files and just have those out there and something that we can share so beth raced us all and i think tamla was the other one and they started posting stuff on sharepoint and those are some things that we can do to start to share that great work because as we're going from building to building what we're seeing is there's a lot can be learned in any of the buildings that you walk into in portland public schools there's a nugget going on in just about every single place that somebody else could walk away with and if we really broaden and expand that learning then we're going to take advantage of something that's already available to us and we don't have to go anywhere for it so we just need to make sure that we share it and that's something that i'm really excited about some of the pieces that we've done in building on what beth's talking about we're working with merrellhurst to do something called instructional rounds and so it's it's exactly like it sounds it's the same thing that doctors do they go and they go on rounds and they talk about what it is that you're going to be doing that you go in you look at a case you come back out you have conversation after the observation about what you saw and how it went and so what we've got now our teachers and student teachers are going and they're going to a teacher and before they go they have a pre-conference there's a framing question they head in there they do an observation then people come out and they have a post conference where they talk about how to go you know do you have any questions here's some feedback and then that's all done in the frame of whatever it is we're working on so whether it be student engagement or particular strategies that we're looking for people to model and so we've got some support through merrill hurst to do that as best said there are ways that you can carve that time out without money uh having a little extra funding makes it nicer i mean we're able to do some stuff through merrellhurst just to to make a little easier on folks to get some food they they usually meet at lunchtime and our bonus on that is we give them some food while they're meeting at lunchtime through mayorhurst so people are pretty great about that and and so that instruction round piece is really just helping us and and i think you know challenges you know there's no shortage of challenges uh to look at in the roosevelt cluster and one of the pieces for us is a disproportionality in data specifically for me around a george of students of color behaviorally and really specifically black students behaviorally because actually our hispanic kids get in trouble less than our white kids which is so what can we learn from that and then academically we need all of our students of color to be performing at a higher level so we came out from under sig funding for because it showed that we were getting a lot of growth with our students but we still have a lot of work to do in order to get them where we want to be and that's something that we're using data wise is in a school improvement process to really focus the conversation around a school of a cycle of inquiry around school improvement and a means of having teachers empowered to have that conversation with us on how we're going to change things what we're going to do what are the mid-term and long-term data collection strategies and then how are we going to reflect on the process and how that worked so that's kind of what's going on at george thanks okay 12 you guys somebody's keys swear no all right somebody's gonna sit there or somebody will come back i have the pleasure tonight to be here with charlene williams the principal of the new roosevelt community comprehensive high school i say new roosevelt because this year charlene along with vice principals greg newman and alisa shore and their staff students and families have completed the conversion from three small schools to one unified campus school this transformation supported supported most recently by a three-year federal school improvement grant actually began almost 10 years ago when the campus first moved to small schools all the work since then has been in pursuit of the best structure and best instructional program for addressing the needs of the changing student body at the school the structural changes as part of our district high school system design process had contributed to the enrollment growth
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growing this year to 826 including 273 9th graders this puts us on a trajectory to reach our target of 1200 students by october of 2016. a school of that size is better situated to deliver the comprehensive program and instructional supports roosevelt students need but changes in structure are just part of what's happening at roosevelt charlene's here to talk more about what else is happening at the new roosevelt campus i'm really excited and thank you directors and superintendent smith for number one putting your support behind the bond that is going to continue to energize our community around roosevelt's rise giving us a new facility a 21st facility that will make our students globally competitive in the field of education and with opportunities beyond high school and i think you are also hearing a theme tonight that we are roosevelt k-12 you heard from roosevelt james john campus you've heard from roosevelt george campus we have roosevelt peninsula campus and others represented roosevelt wrote writers at rosa parks and we are very intentional that the the education of a student doesn't stop at eighth grade and begin anew at ninth grade but we have to be very intentional about how we collaborate and partner with one another our leave the remainder of this presentation about what's going on at roosevelt our successes and challenges with my esteemed colleagues that i'm so proud to work with elisa shore and gregory newman who will be up here presenting about the remainder of our our success thank you having been at roosevelt for those 10 years that greg mentioned it's really excited to exciting to talk to you today about where we are and where we're headed roosevelt is truly on the rise we've seen a dramatic increase on our enrollment in our student achievement and our graduation rate in fact we looked at our current 11th graders so students who have been with us three years as part of this transformation and their 10th grade scores in reading already surpassed last year's scores so they haven't even taken the test as juniors and we already know they're going to do better than our kids did last year so we're really seeing this growth and that growth couldn't happen without an increased focus on instruction as a staff we've identified three non-negotiable instructional practices that prioritize high-level strategies these practices are supported by instructional coaches in subjects specific to the content and are mentored and trained by national consultants including barbara waxman of penn and debra pickering of the marzano lab the coaches work with teachers monday meetings after school and wednesdays to provide what we call evidence-based collaboration time to look at what are kids actually doing what do they actually know where the holes and how does that relate to what i'm going to teach tomorrow and next week the other way we've seen this improvement is through a strong college going culture we have a revamped college and career center one of its key focal points is the avid program we currently have 220 students enrolled in avid and that is sheer because we can't put any more in there because of the teacher so we would be able to probably put our whole school in avid if we could there are many ap classes in portland state inquiry that allow kids to have access to college-level curriculum while at roosevelt and then one thing our college and career center has been able to do is make sure kids see themselves as college students so they've taken every year group of students down south where they visited historically black universities and gone through a civil rights tour to really see the empowerment education can have on their lives students have come back from that project motivated to make a change in their community and they've created a writing center that allows kids to really focus on writing that was one gap that they saw that we as our our kids don't write well and so they've created a writing center that partners with local universities to really improve that we have a strong spanish immersion program led by the oregon teacher of the year really providing kids opportunities to learn in both languages and make sure they're college ready in spanish for our native speakers and our students coming up from immersion k-8s we additionally have learned that it's not just good teaching that in some areas we need extra time and so we have double blocked math classes algebra geometry and calculus a b that really give kids that extra scoop that extra time to make sure they're mastering the material as greg mentioned also we have restructured again our current program design we have two academies or teams at each grade level providing teachers a small group of students and peers to collaborate with and provide instruction so we have a 9th grade gold team and 9th grade black team 10th grade gold team 10th grade black team and those will feed into an 11 12 college really focused on college success getting kids ready for college and that is currently in design
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this year and that is greg's program thank you superintendent smith and members of the board as always it's a pleasure to address you as a proud member of team roosevelt charlene and lisa have shared some exciting information on the work of our school and i hope to bring to light some other information and some great things that are happening at roosevelt high school with regards to student supports the vast majority of our 11th and 12th grade students who have met who have yet to meet their essential skills with regards to reading and writing have been double blocked into a literacy workshop class that is taught by one of our best and brightest instructors miss melody hughes these students are doing intensive work on test preparation as well as work sample i'm happy to say that i have the pleasure of signing many students out of this class every single day as their fulfilling requirements at a very rapid pace uh it's our goal to have all of our students completed with all of their essential skills before spring break and we're well on our way to that this work is made possible by the incredible work of our counselors who are in very close collaboration with the admin team teaching team to ensure none of our kids fall through the cracks and that we are doing everything in our power to see them cross that stage in june and move on to the post-secondary success that we know they're all very capable of and what we expect of them at roosevelt we believe in the power of restorative justice as well we know how disruptive exclusionary discipline can be to students and we do everything in our power to keep students in school even after they make mistakes we understand that these hiccups can be learning opportunities whenever possible we include re reflection with any student suspension we'll always consider in-school opportunities as better ways of handling these situations we also utilize what's called our saturday academy for reflective conversations regarding these hiccups that i've spoken about and also attendance in other areas that we can help kids on we all know that we need kids in school to learn so this is something we take very seriously and we make sure we exhaust all options to ensure this happens next slide we are also very proud of our athletics and activities programs at roosevelt we are proud to say that over 400 students represent the rough riders in some form or another in our student athletic programs these student-athletes are making their academics to the next level as well as their athletics through mandatory study tables which are paying huge dividends for example not only did our football team have an incredible run in the field of competition this year they also finishing second place in the pil they also had a cumulative gpa of over 3.0 um it is our expectation that all of our students live up to this high expectation associated with being a rough rider and by the way has anybody seen our new track and field it's pretty awesome it's a huge source of pride for our community and roosevelt high school our award-winning drama and theater arts programs need no introduction as the work of ms joe lane inner students is at a national championship level i invite all of you to come watch our latest performance of the christmas carol this week at roosevelt it's truly inspiring and entertaining work coupled with our growing musical programs roosevelt has much to be proud of with regards to student athletics and activities a major focus of our sig grant that roosevelt had received three years ago was an upgrade in our technology in our building this has allowed us to provide media cards for all teachers to increase the engagement of our learning and instruction um in our classrooms as opposed to in our ability to bring technology directly to students as opposed to teachers having to wrestle for computer labs and we know what a hassle that can be we are also leading the way with our new ipad one-to-one initiative this has been made possible through the hard work of jake either melissa lim and other members of our incredible i.t department through an aggressive grant made possible through mount hood cable regulatory commission or mhcrc we are on the verge of sending over over 400 ipads with our students to move the learning beyond the school day i'd be lying if i didn't say that that's very scary because it is but uh we are putting all safeguards in place to ensure this investment in our students is protected and used properly to push our students to the next level of achievement because we know this is the kind of technology and uh skills that our kids need to succeed at the next level which is our expectation we have big plans for the ipad one to one initiative no more paper no more textbooks those are all goals for roosevelt high school in the future and we're going to get there as always it's an incredible opportunity to represent roosevelt high school in our community and i thank you for the opportunity to speak you tonight all of this work could not be possible without a numer without numerous partnerships we focus those around two areas one being student success and the other being a college going culture we have partnerships with sun school through neighborhood house
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providing our kids programming up until 7 pm most nights we also have step up that really mentors our freshmen to get them school ready we also have local businesses churches and all sorts of community members who partner with us to provide community closet food bank hoodies as you notice for all of our students things like that and then our college going culture is supported by again numerous partners especially local universities we even have americorps workers that actually are staffed out of like western oregon for example that partner with our kids who are down there our graduates and then come back on the weekends who mentor our current students thinking of going there next year so really making sure we have strong partnerships to continue our work of which we have some challenges we have some opportunities and some next steps coming up sustainability is a big word right now around roosevelt we're on the end of our sig grant and really look into what we looking for what we can do to make sure this work continues our sped and esl data still are not where we want them to be and so we're drilling into those to focus those and we're really working forward on the implementation of the common core so making sure that our kids are leaving college ready and meeting those standards now to do that we are looking around the district and what other programs are working one specifically is franklin's advanced scholar program that we're looking to go over and learn from additionally focusing in on our 11 12 program what does it mean to be a junior and senior at roosevelt headed off to college what skills do i have where am i headed and as several administrators have mentioned tonight really solidifying what it means to be in the roosevelt pre-k to college pipeline what is going on in kindergarten what's going on in middle school what's going on at high school and what's going on at university and we are excited and blessed with the opportunity to have a new roosevelt in the next few years and go through that process thank you very much for your time tonight thank you again thank you all for for coming tonight to share your your reports uh and at this point i think we're gonna get started with some questions we received quite a bit of data from uh in preparation for this so who wants to get started director knows looks like she wants to get started i'll just say it's it's really fantastic i just love roosevelt i love coming to visit you guys i think you're doing a fantastic job i just every time you come to present to us i just get more excited about what's happening so let's give up the good work so as carl was presenting for astor um you know i was looking at the milestones the third grade milestones and i mean they're just off the charts amazing um and so my question was going to be and i was actually going to ask it to anyone other than you what is aster doing um that is getting these kind of results um then as i was looking through the data i was also seeing that your student population is a little bit different and i wanted to see if you could address that someone could address that as well it doesn't matter so because you're the only non-title one school at this point so starting this year you actually are getting presumably less funds starting this year only though and so i guess i think the question i wanted to ask was actually not to you but to the other principles what in your opinion is aster doing that's making a difference in getting these kinds of results and is this something that can be replicated what do you what can you learn from astr and carl you can answer that question too but i want to give her the opportunity check one check well i i just having known john while he was there and and knowing carl i mean you know some of the consistency the the program's been in place for a long time but they've been really focused for quite some time on really high levels of instruction and we can all learn from that because it is about being focused keeping your eye on what it is that you want to accomplish and then working in a really diligent fashion over time to accomplish that and i think carl i mean from what i've seen both from john and from the work that you guys are doing you've got a lot of people focused and pointed in that direction and it doesn't hurt and so uh go ahead because that to me that that response to
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me sounds like it's about leadership but when i look at all of you i know you're strong leaders and so there's got to be some more come on well you know going back to what sorry about that going back to what ben was saying i can't say enough about the commitment and the initiative on the parts of the of the staff in terms of pushing our students to seek their best for example i was just in a one of our first grade classrooms a few weeks ago as they were doing math corner and the teacher was sharing with them they were just starting to use the number line to add and subtract and she was saying now this is where you would typically be as a first grader and this is where you would be as a second grader i want you to be pushing towards what those second grade objectives are and we and and not to say that i mean the other the other thing we talk about there is the way and there is the astor way and what we call the astor way is this uh initiative that the teachers take to push students to their best to the to the to the extent of their ability and it doesn't you know there's that thing of well just because you've done something a particular way doesn't mean it always has to be that way i recognize there's always room for change but by and large this is so immersed in the culture and it's a part of it's just a part of what teachers do and students know this is the expectation when they walk into that classroom that you expect to put forth your best effort regardless of what that may look like for each individual student i could follow up on that one i think we'd all agree that test scores are not the only measure of the quality of a school so i'd love to hear some thoughts apart from test scores around just examples of successes or things that are happening in your school that you're really proud of that maybe people wouldn't know otherwise if they didn't look maybe beyond that first level of data so we've been working really hard at george to encourage student voice student ownership this year we've instituted a student government and our students are who are on that were voted in joe t magnot is the president he went and introduced john medina at the amle with diana gutierrez they spoke in front of like 2500 people killed it did a great job and every single lunch they give up their lunch to meet as a group to talk about how they can make george a better place to be and that's what we're trying to really encourage is like that the the astor way is something everybody ought to have right like super high bar for everybody a reciprocal accountability where kids can expect a lot from us and we want to expect a lot from them and then figuring out a way particularly in our community to engage parents in a meaningful way and all parents and so it means some real specific things for us in terms of reaching out in some different ways to try and encourage folks who haven't been real comfortable coming through the doors of our school to try and meet them wherever they're at to try and figure out how to connect them to our school and so we've been working really hard to do that we've got a community room set up and are really working hard to see some positive strides and i do agree that you know over time that relates itself into test scores but you have to create the community and you have to have that feeling in order to set the table for long-term sustainability i want to piggyback on what ben's saying about parents um i think one of the things that i heard going into roosevelt and overcoming that oh you work at roosevelt for the first couple years and now like yeah you're at roosevelt i think there was a lot of assumption about the community that we served our students our families and their level of wanting to commit or get involved et cetera but when you are intentional about building the relationship and creating opportunity you have a year like me not having to worry about my front office a couple days a week because they're running it they uh the that wonderful track dedication that you saw that we were able to put on parents had a huge piece in coordinating those efforts and um the from the resources that our parents have which is diverse and varied to the talents that they share and the way they are showing up and at the table is a really powerful presence at roosevelt that i don't think has necessarily been known or celebrated and i think that is a key success that we're having
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good evening director superintendent smith i represent rosa parks and we are a priority school and we could take that one or two ways we are a priority um not to say that when we first heard the news i think it was my birthday present this year that i was really excited but i had to really stop and do just what you said director atkins i had to look at our test scores and i could get stuck there because they aren't good but also had to look at our school community that is excellent and it's full of heart and passion it is a model campus that is a community campus with partnerships that build to school when there was no money to build a school and really reflect on those things we've done so i'd like to share a phone call that i made right before coming here this evening we had a parent come in this morning or called this morning and um demanded a certain teacher and she's coming to this school and she needs this that and the other and i was like looking at my secretary because we have a little protocol we follow and uh later on the parent showed up to register her student and i was on my way to staff meeting and i stopped and i could see this parent was advocating for a particular teacher even though they had never had a student attend rosa parks they didn't know rosa parks but they were advocating for something what the mother wanted was a culturally responsive teacher for her african-american son and i stopped and i looked at her and being an african-american mother of two sons i understood and i said let me call you i'm on my way to staff meeting but i will call you and i made that call before i came and she said let me pull over i'm driving i said this is not a good time oh no no no i've already pulled over and we went on with the conversation for 30 minutes as this mom poured out her heart and she said we moved from one side of town to this side of town and we were here in september but everything i heard about when i looked online and heard about rosa parks i just was not comfortable sending my child there and i said and i understand and because what's online is test scores it doesn't tell the heart and the passion of our schools in this community and she went on to say that she had talked to a friend of hers and that parent was so excited about their child attending and have been attending rosa parks but she continued to go to the school that her son was in and she continued to take him there every day and she walked in and she heard something that no parent should have to hear a teacher say to a child and she said i knew then he couldn't go back and so what i saw and what i heard that day was i'm here to advocate i need this for my son i need him to be somewhere where he looks up and sees somebody that looks like him that will hold him accountable but will teach him like he can learn and when i told her i said stop there i will honor that request she said i just feel like crying and so we went on to discuss the fact that oftentimes the gift that is right in front of you is a gift that may be overlooked because of perception and when we talk about the equity work and courageous conversations we need to talk about that lens of multiple perspective so yes we have work to do test scores are important only because it can be a gatekeeper it doesn't mean that our students are not as smart as any other student in this school district i wonder what people would have said about me because i am a product of portland public schools and i stand before you now having accomplished things because in part of portland public schools but not all to be contributed to portland public schools and so it is important that we don't forget the test scores yes we want our kids to be successful we want them to know how to take tests but we want them to have the heart and passion in the soul to accomplish and be whatever they can be and we're doing great things at rosa parks and i want to tell you you need to come and visit you need to come into the classrooms you need to see what our teachers are doing every day because i stand behind my teachers they have the heart and passion for this work and we're working one of our one of our target groups that is at the bottom is our black boys and i ask myself how can this be how can this be i get it but how how is it what do we need to do and so we jumped on that bandwagon we are doing that work
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we are using a book called um african american male learning styles and uh by dr konchufu we are learning what it means to have culturally relevant instruction before our kids because you know what i found is not that they're not smart they're not engaged and it is our job to keep our children engaged in the education that is going to get them to the next level and ultimately determine their success in life um as american winner the one thing that i will say that just stands out with me uh that's their slogan is that the future belongs to the educated thank you thank you i just i guess i have a question that follows up a little bit with that and also leads into not that i'm moving transitioning or discussion but leads into or connects to a discussion we're going to have later about enrollment balancing and as i was just looking at numbers not test scores just enrollment numbers what i've heard in our jefferson cluster discussion is what makes a strong school and then how do how do strong schools when when do we start noticing them declining in strong schools and how do we get ahead of that and so i noticed two schools in this cluster i think it's chavez and rosa parks who used to be up in the 500s for enrollment and they're declining and so i'm curious if you guys could each talk a little bit about what you're seeing happen so as again we think about the jefferson cluster who says boy why didn't you guys catch this ahead of time which is what i've heard um what what what do you attribute that to and i think some of it might be what you just referenced with test scores there's a bad rap and how do we make sure that we get ahead of that well actually um let me give you a little history on that um because i happen to know because i wonder where my kids were going right when we opened the boundary hadn't been totally decided and we opened for two years as a k-6 and so we had sixth grade which was an additional about 75-80 kids and what happened is after the second year part of those kids then went um our seventh the seventh the kids that were leaving rosa john ball this was when we were transitioning that whole piece um stayed with us we kept sixth grade the sixth graders then went to cesar until they got the george boundary worked out and we realized that george would be our feeder school okay so meanwhile we show back up to school and we're missing like 60 kids i'm like where are the children did somebody move out and forget to tell me and we found out that what happened is that his parents were applying for again perception about our middle school as parents began to apply for school choice in k-8s they'd get there and then they'd realize well i have to be at both schools at the same time it's just easier for me to take the younger children with me so it really impacted us by choosing to remain back seven years ago by choosing to remain okay a k-5 and we did that for several reasons one reason was the ball community was promised a new school so now a year down the road we're going to get up and say oh by the way we really didn't mean you so we're going to now redo the boundaries make this a k eight and the original ball community would have been we would not have been able to accommodate the numbers so it is something that we we didn't think ahead or we didn't think about or realize that we would believe be losing those numbers when normally when kids go off to middle school the younger siblings stay where they are so that had a real big impact and we've not quite you know we didn't recover from that so each year we use lose some sibling groups thank you let me did you want to add something to cersei chavez all right good evening and thanks for having us tonight in my first year i don't want to misspeak um but what i've noticed is that being an rti school there's lots of programs we're given and i don't think our teachers have had enough time to wrestle with the program to work the kinks out of the programs and our families feel the urgency for educating their children and again i don't want to misspeak in my first year but i think some families couldn't wait for us to work out the kinks in the program and so this year we have a lot of great things going on at cesar chavez and we're moving beyond collaboration and to collective impact taking all of those great things and aligning them so that we can better serve students there's something i heard not too long ago at a workshop i attended he said in many districts we're program rich and system poor and so we've taken that to heart at cesar
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chavez and we're working together with the community and our teaching staff to not change our programs but take a closer look at our programs and try to figure out what works and how we can build on the programs that we have at cesar chavez and so we're building a sense of urgency so we can move this work along a lot faster so our families feel as though they can be committed to chavez for the long run and that their kids don't have to be the test examples so let me you know given that we haven't gone there in regards to the test part in the results in this discussion at least from the from the board side but what i see i mean one of the things that i notice in in regards to this is cesar chavez um george james john let me see rosa parks had a drop particularly in the end in the past year or two you know it's pretty significant drop in regards to in terms of the test scores for in eighth grade and in fifth grade for example in fifth grade uh particularly in math uh i don't see the same thing by the way for peninsula or or aster so i'm wondering what the what the learning is there um both sides of the of the all the spectrum here in regards to what was done to maintain or to improve and what was the challenge that you all see reflecting or analyzing on those on those results i know that people want to concentrate in terms of the the community and that stuff that's fine and dandy but you know we also when people question us as a district and as people sitting up here in front they're looking at the results right and i think there's a couple of things i mean uh you know specifically at george you know we we try to utilize the systems that were in place to see how those worked in the vein of you know seeing how that went and and what we realized was that some of those things weren't as tight and with some of the people gone who are helping make those systems work the way that they would normally or you would want them to work normally just some of the testing protocol around that definitely didn't hit the mark in terms of being as good with students and having them understand the sense of urgency as libert said around why it's important for them to try their best on the the tests and to do their best work and then just some of the pieces that we had around that piece for the last couple of years you know as a response to intervention school significant amounts of additional support a lot of that's gone away and so we need to work out how to do some of the things that we were doing previously with what we have now because you know this isn't getting better anytime soon and we're not getting an influx of money that i know about but if you guys do let me know um and and honestly in all seriousness so part of that is a re-examination of how we're working together to have a collaborative impact because there it could be easy to make a slide like that and i don't know if pamela you know would speak when i look at that you know it was weird i found it strange it felt like the there was a flaw in the model because i looked at what you looked at for george and i felt like we should have been a focus or priority school because we had a pretty significant drop but if you looked at how they calculate that piece when you look at those the students with similar test scores we actually performed very well and in a lot of areas where had a growth you know in the growth area had fours and so it's how do we adjust that up because that's not good enough it isn't just good enough to be able to point at growth and say i'm not a sig school anymore or you know i'm not a focus or priority school we're not there we've got some stuff to work on so it's translating that growth into a trajectory for meeting the the peace that we need which is for them to be successful passion all that but we want kids to be able to perform and i need to send kids to charlene who are going to help them reach their goal and so that's part of what we spent last year was trying to define what that means what do my eighth graders leaving george need to be able to do to walk into roosevelt and be successful and the better we do with that the more likely those scores go up but also the more likely our students walk into roosevelt rooney to be successful and participate in a college-bound culture and i would agree wholeheartedly that we absolutely have to get our kids to the skills and the level where they can access the next academic level they can't do it if they're missing the foundation or huge pieces and i think a lot of what ben said would be correct but also look at the fact that
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not to make excuses but when funding goes away so do positions and supports and in two years rosa parks has lost about 175 000 just with title one so yes we're still a title one school so our challenge is and we're going to step up to meet that challenge is to look at okay so these are the funds we have how do we allot them differently to put the supports in place that absolutely have to be there because our kids can't pay for that they can't they can't continue to pay for that we also continue to need support through training for teachers so we have a new math adoption and is essential that that training that we got the teachers had last year that that supported that model of classes so i have new teachers that were hired this year and there have been no classes and we we have to have that support level we have to have those teachers to be able to go to get the training they need if teacher instruction is the number one um the number one condition that has to be in place teacher effectiveness then how do we make effective teachers when we don't have the support so for us that's a challenge we're working with it we're not only just working with it my school improvement specialist my coach from the state we're looking at all of those things as we speak we met today in fact and in our plan that we are working to write those are the things that we'll be addressing along with working with our district academic uh court um achievement coordinators thank you and we are working with them actually we have a math uh person that is actually working with us so we can build that and put that support system back in place because you're not going to get it if teachers aren't trained and if you're not spending that time moving and i would agree with the testing as well that um we we just lost so much in trying to hold it together we also piloted another testing program and one of the things that we realized that we did in working with our test research and evaluation department is we over tested kids we had kids not performing their best so we have taken steps to correct those things as we really are able to determine and do the best assessments but also find out how to use those assessments to then take kids to the next level because we have to know where they are we want to move them along in the curriculum and there was just one more piece i wanted to add around like something that we can do so just the notion of time i know it's something that if you talk to charlene about some of the work that they've done the ability to meet mondays and then wednesdays to do the work i would love to entertain that idea with the board it was something that i brought up as a waiver and i get how that's hard but i i really think that if we want teacher effectiveness to be what it needs to be we need to recognize the amount of effort and energy that teachers put in in the environment that they're working in and how we can support them and how we can do so in a way that wouldn't necessarily cost money but definitely would take a lot of explaining and we would have to work with our public to understand why but if i had that time to do that work and dig in they're they're it's not even about excuses it's about having a chance to deepen and dig in and really get some time for folks to practice and get good at what we want them to do and so for for me that's one of those things where i don't think that's thinking outside the box but just thinking about what's in front of us and not nothing's getting better so can we look at something like that to try and get some of that time because i have to own the fact that there's some things that we need to do it's just with the number of things that we have in order to do them well we need an amount of time that we currently don't have so what you have is people trying to juggle and and not necessarily the way that we want to a number of things that make it so that we delude our efforts so i i just however we can grab more of that time i think is a pretty powerful tool i'll just mention that i was really excited to hear about what you were talking about how doing a pre-conference going in and observing a lesson and then coming out in debrief that just seems like standard professional practice for a profession so thank you for taking initiative on making sure that happens because i think that should be system wide and that requires time right you need a pe teacher you need somebody to step into that class and you need to be able to pull all your teachers around so that you can descend upon one classroom and actually see the class and somebody's got to be covering those classes director sergeant i just like to follow up on that so how would you get the timing what would you need from the central office the board what change would you need did you really give me that opening i'm ready all right no so here it is because it's already there i mean you're talking about early release or laid open and you're talking about growing that and i get the trade-off because you're talking about a reduced number of instructional hours but i would posit to you that really simply if you make people more effective
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that hours that you would trade would give you incredible dividends on the other side of it because what we do is wear people out and if you look at where the attendance rate are the lowest in terms of teachers you're looking at the most impacted schools let me just ask you a question so you have some late on things right you have eight or something during the course of the year so what do you need more than that i honestly i mean yeah i i i asked i asked for every week i mean that's that's what i asked for i asked for the same thing high schools get because i could learn from charlene and i could learn from the work that they're doing at roosevelt and i think we ask a lot of our teachers and then we don't give them enough time to do it in an environment where we can provide them practice and support and i get that that's a huge trade-off because that really does add up to something and i get that but we're giving that up in an environment where our students in high schools are asked to go 990 hours i know that you guys know what that is and yet they're doing it somehow in high school and so there's a reason why we thought that trade-off was worth it and it's because efficacy is important it's the single most important thing you put effective teachers in front of kids and they do a better job period and so how can we do that how can we encourage that and i just think that that takes a broader conversation because we do have to work that out with our families we do have to figure out how to do that um maybe a little easier for me now in middle school than it would have been when i when i was at skyline to say oh kindergartners just every week you'll keep them for a few extra hours whereas middle schoolers can typically get their you know themselves to school but i just think that that's conversation that should be had because it's already an option that's there and we already have the ability to do that right now step in that direction is for our focus on priority schools um they have the opportunity and we're looking at proposals actually next to tomorrow from those schools for using it more time on those delayed opening days to do the kind of work that um ben has been talking about so a step for us is to look at those proposals from the focus and priority schools of which we have 12 and beginning in january or in the case of rosa parks perhaps sooner they'll be using the more timeless delayed opening days to do this kind of work so it's a step in that direction is there extra funding available for those schools and that's why they're able to do that or they do have a bit of funding through their focus or priority status but to do this is really us making a decision with them based on their plans that we're going to sacrifice some instructional time to provide the professional development time that they need so it's not a cost factor in doing that okay so do you have any questions over there no yes did you want to get a question i didn't get a question i only got a comment so we have an ongoing conversation at the board and within the district about k-8s and middle schools you guys have both in your cluster so i'd like to hear from each of the k-8 principals about the benefits or the challenges that you have with k-8s and then i'd also like to hear from ben about what he thinks with the middle school and then from charlene i'd like to hear about how you think the students are prepared when they come to roosevelt and by the way it would be good to hear from those principals that have not said anything just in case that you know they might want to share something well i'm ready to go again as all my colleagues said thank you for having us here today but um i've been the past principal openness you want to identify yourself just because the folks out there carlos galindo principal peninsula so i've been there five years and um i think one of the strengths that we've been able to do at peninsula is to keep our elementary students into the middle school level even though we don't consider ourselves a middle school but yet the district sees us as six aides middle school so i think that's been great for our students but the challenge is that those kids need to go as long as a typical middle school student and they don't they're about 25 minutes less than our middle school students and so you talk about how can we improve professional development prove teacher effectiveness teacher instruction if our six 8 students went 25 minutes longer than our k5 students that would be great because right now based on teacher contract the middle school teachers get an extra 45-minute planning period that their k-5 counterparts do not and i think that's been the biggest challenge and then as a ka we are asked to have enrichments so that our students are able to attend these enrichments but yet the middle school classes end up getting them more and longer because i have to accommodate a planning
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period for those teachers but you know peninsula k we've proven that k-8s do work i enjoy being the principal of the k-8 i enjoy kindergarten through eighth grade students it is nine grades which can be difficult but our upper grade students work very hard with our younger students we have a lot of buddy systems and so forth we have classes that attend field trips together so when you're in a community where you struggle for getting some parent involvement for field trips it's our upper grade students that can easily go on those field trips and chaperone so there's a lot of pros and cons that take place in the k-8 and i was just going to add as well to go along with what carlos is saying the beauty of relationships over that k-8 span and it's interesting to see a sixth or seventh grader who can still have a relationship with the kindergarten or first grade teacher who was who had a pivotal role in their in their growth and development and to see all of that culminating the celebration of that student as they are an eighth grader getting ready to transition to high school and to recognize all of these people have had a very uh pivotal role in being a part of that success going back to the adage it takes a village to raise a child and of course you know there are those additional challenges with our uh with our upper grades for example we we have uh limited specials or electives compared to a a a to the traditional middle to the traditional middle school for example our only electives are basically pe spanish and library and when we're talking about spreading those resources as best we can across the k-8 divide that's very challenging and it would be i mean and i came from a middle school where we had six to eight and of course i recognized those are the middle school grades but we had six to eight electives that students had choices with and so that's like we are very challenged right now with music and we've been very fortunate with our run for the arts uh solicitations and with our very strong ptso to be able to make up for those deficits by uh having partnerships with say the oboe adi legacy foundation and we're now getting ready to do a program through ethos where we're impacting uh vocal music but that's a challenge and it's a stretch and the more we can do the more opportunities we can have through partnerships and otherwise to foster those to make them stronger it only makes our students that much better and makes their edu and enriches their educational experience all the more so having had the pleasure of being in both you know there's definitely some distinct differences you know middle school all adolescent all the time you lose a 30-year population every year just start to start with so time's precious you have to build community in a hurry you have to really do some intentional things to try and create some of the conditions that are really important to have in the school and and i agree that um you know the notion of the k-8 you're known you you get time you know you you don't have that same sense of urgency in in terms of they're going they're gone and so you know that's not all bad and and definitely some of the things that you can do as a middle school are i think really great things i i think size is important in any school and scale is challenging when you get towards the smaller end of a viable school and you start to push those issues you end up either getting creative or limiting people's options and so you know whatever you can do to try and stay up in that range where you have a little safer amount of students so it gives some flexibility in scheduling i think really is helpful and talk to anybody who's in a small kid or a small middle school what you end up doing is making choices we provide a lot of response to intervention and so that means that we provide less electives than we would otherwise and that's just a trade-off because we need to have students making progress so those kinds of things are things that you see but i see them both as they're both very viable school models i can see wonderful reasons why people like to be a part of both uh and and they're a neat thing i think having a pattern i mean with us not working with roosevelt i wouldn't understand you feel like you're on an island with us connecting with roosevelt and understanding where they're going and also working with their feeder schools to understand where they're coming from it makes you feel part of a connected system ditto ditto ditto i don't think i have much more to add i
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think it was really summed up extremely well by my colleagues thank you just real quick from the high school perspective i had i taught middle school was at roosevelt for a number of years and then went to aster for a year and then came back to roosevelt and what's been really interesting is to follow those kids and so there are 11th graders now that i can very quickly have a conversation with like you didn't do that in eighth grade you didn't do that night great you can't do that now do i need to go get so and so from aster to come talk to you and it's just that that relationship is different because of how long these kids have been known the same with the parents i think the parents are more involved at a six at a k-8 at the middle levels then because it's still the same school the same teachers the same programs and so when they transition to high school they're a bit more involved and so we're starting to see kind of that play out in high school we're also seeing k-8 students come who maybe aren't as used to the freedom so there's a bit of a challenge too when they transition because they haven't you know there's just been 50 of them in a grade and the cafeteria and everything has been right there so they haven't had to negotiate a big building and so high school's scary so there are definite trade-offs and there's one person over there thank you good evening i'm joe lafontaine i'm the principal of sitton elementary it's not like me to be the last one to speak i um first i want to give you a little bit of a lens it's my first year here in portland public i've been in education 30 years in administration 21 of them and i'm really excited to be at sitton and a part of the roosevelt cluster there's a couple things i would like to share with you this evening number one and one of the things i'm very excited about is the authentic teamwork that's going on inside the cluster we're talking about not just some you've heard a little bit of it tonight about some um vertical articulation between grades but there's a lot of horizontal articulation as well from a great different principles at similar levels to see that good practices that are taking place we're able to get into classrooms to see exactly what's going on i know that's effective practice and i'm excited about that i'm excited about the leadership we have in the cluster because it's giving us time to have those important conversations that we need to have with each other much like we talk about the time that our teachers need we as leaders need that time to talk as well and we're being afforded that i think that's very exciting and i'm very optimistic about that the other thing i'll give you in regards to a school lens at sitting is sitting is going to be is already a different school this year as it has been in years past because um we have our out of our 13 core instructors we have seven new ones and so that with a change in leadership a change in just some focuses that we have foci we're we're actually heading down a different road than we've been on before in regards to how we're looking at our instruction and the amount of energy we're giving to good practice i'm i'm optimistic not just about where sitting is going to be this time next year but where this entire cluster will be because i think that we have the right people doing the right work and i'm proud to be a part of it thank you thank you i we're about 10 minutes over in our time for a lot of listings i know there are many questions and now superintendent smith wants to you know and i just want to thank you all it's really great to watch you just present as a team and as a cluster and see what kind of relationships have built across the cluster and how tightly you are working together and representing um as a whole a whole cluster so i just want to say thank you so much for the presentation you did tonight i love doing these too by the way i just um but you showed up great and i think of the visual of the kids on the dedication of the field and you had the flags of all nations with the kids from the feeder schools going around that roosevelt track and you just feel roosevelt on the rise so it's a great day to be uh you guys thank you so much yeah thank you thank you for it you know one of the things that that i i gotta share i think you know it's it's i think it's impressive i think what what you stated there at the end i think the the the importance of building that collective work um it's gonna pay off i think in the in the long run uh then thank you for for your challenges i think in regards to the the uh what what you put forth and something i think for the for us as a board to consider in regards to how we looking at allocating resources but also how do we challenge
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the the state in regards to you know looking at instruction the other part and this is more like i have to let you know the state is here so doris we're going up here he's listening to all this so good work martin and so let me let me then go even farther on this one and and and that is that i think that we also need to to to challenge our partners that are providing the teacher uh in this area i raised it before uh and i think that they need to come out with better preparation but also you know there is an investment that the students have made and the states have made and they need to get their money's worth and so if they're not getting that then we need to get the i think the partnership from the universities and the schools of education to say okay how do we how are you going to support afterwards because i think you know one of the discussions that we had earlier uh and this i think it applied within the context of uh when we were having a discussion about you know how effective folks were or how ready they were to be to be principals i think the director knows at that point in time says well why are we hiring people that are not ready to perform uh you know why do we have to train them i think you know it's it's not that we don't have to invest in regards to professional development i don't think anyone's of us will argue against that but i think that we do have to challenge the institutions that are providing the the teaching staff uh to deliver on on on on good work so i thank you all for bringing that to our attention and also to look at the governor for an investment on professional development without necessarily taking away from all the other things that we have to have in the classroom and in these schools because then it's like it's like a shell game and and you know enough politicians have done that already we don't want that to continue so thank you all for coming we truly enjoy your presentation uh we're gonna do you know what we've done with the rest of the folks from the other areas and you know roosevelt is gonna be more represented if you can take a quick picture here uh would be greatly appreciated with the board myself i know oh okay okay social

Event 2: PPS Board of Education, 12/03/2012 Study Session Part 2 of 2

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we're going to get started back again so that we have the comprehensive annual financial report uh that we heard at the last uh session uh superintendent smith is going to introduce this item actually sheree lewis who is our director of accounting will come on up and as um director gonzalez mentioned this is the second time that this will be in front of you and tonight for official action and tkw will also be joining us yes um we had made uh i want to introduce yourself for the record just uh sri lewis finance director since the last time we had one change from the staff report roughly we added the revenue expenses as you requested treaty and the we made additional clarity to the self-insurance so out of the staff report that we submitted on the 26th that's the only changes that we have on that report since then okay and now i'll leave it up to tim gillette who will discuss the financial statements great good evening thank you i am tim gillette audit partner with talbot corvola and warwick your independent auditors and accountants here to present the audit report for your comprehensive annual financial report or kafir and some other things as well i'd like to talk first about the calf or my version looks like this yours might be a little bit different but you should all have a a large financial statement yeah the same thing oh great looks exactly the same most of this is actually the the the work of neil and sheree and their and their great staff my part actually begins on what's labeled as page one but it's maybe a quarter of an inch into the thing this is the independent auditor's report you have a clean opinion which is the kind that you want to get from your auditor one of the one of the three choices that the auditor can can give the really the the good part of this is the third paragraph where it says in our opinion the financial statements uh present fairly in all material respects the financial position etc the report then goes on it takes up two full pages to talk about the degree of responsibility the auditors take for other financial information that appears in the cafe and so forth generally it's it's there are some parts that we don't opine on at all and there are other parts outside of the basic financial statements that we given what's called an in relation to opinion where we say that it's materially correct or fairly presented in relation to the basic financial statements and again there are no no issues in any of those things i always refer people to management's discussion and analysis which follows the auditor's report it's a great place to spend some time to help you understand the financial statements gives you a high level overview to help put things in context and then that that's followed by the basic financial statements themselves both the the entity-wide statements and the various fund statements followed by the footnotes i'm not going to spend a lot of time going through any of that stuff because i think you've already done that i'm happy to answer questions and and if questions come up even later on if you all want to call me at my office or drop me an email i'm happy to happy to go over anything you want with you actually the next part of this that's mine is way at the back page 138 there's another independent auditor's report this is the things that are required by oregon state regulations and we talk about uh well a number of of different things that that are required uh the format's been simplified in the last couple of years we don't have to address each of them individually there's nothing too exciting to report back here which again is a good thing the next thing i would talk about is the the so-called single audit report the one that we do for the federal government on your expenditure of federal awards my version looks like this i don't know is it attached sheree so it's at the back of yours again my part of it starts on page one there there are actually two two reports here that look pretty similar but
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they're actually a bit different the first one internal control over financial reporting and compliance it's it's really related to the financial statements themselves and the part we have to do again for the federal government and you'll see there there is one finding mentioned here it's uh it's uh there are various levels of what findings can be the worst thing would be a material weakness this is not a material weakness the next level down is a significant deficiency we would call this a significant deficiency has to do had to do with the review of p-card purchases neil and sheree were already aware of this and were already addressing it by the time we brought it up so i wouldn't say a huge finding as far as the single audit goes but yes i'm sorry but i just want to clarify for the public at home that p-card purchases our procurement card purchases yes sorry that's okay thank you didn't mean to get into the lingo the second report is our report on compliance with basically the federal requirements over the grant spending fund spending of the grant funding i can spit that out and there were no findings with any of that part uh it's followed by details on all the various federal awards as you know you get a fair amount of federal money it was 68 million dollars that was spent this last year so to have no findings on on that is a is a good thing that's followed by a summary of the auditor's results a single page and there's a page to talk about the about the finding with more details if you want that and that wraps up that one and finally there's the report to the board of education and my apologies this is my fault this didn't get to you until today i think and uh yeah i'll take full responsibility for that sheree did not get it before today either this is still a draft and actually there is a correction in here i wanted to point out there are some things that under professional standards auditors are required to communicate with those charged with governance that would be you folks of course and there are a number of topics that we have to communicate on and i won't go through all of these because most of them are it's it's a fairly clean report there's nothing unusual there weren't big disagreements with management or you know significant issues etc the error i discovered when i was looking this over before coming over is on page three where it talks about a letter communicating material weaknesses that that is not true there were no material weaknesses there was just that one significant deficiency so i will correct that before this gets finalized in my apologies um it's followed by kind of a summary of accounting estimates the part i might spend just a teeny tiny bit the recently issued accounting standards just to kind of put you on notice there are some changes that are coming both of these that are talked about in here are things that will be effective next year your the year we're currently in june 30 2013 and i think the the second one is probably the more significant although i don't think it's a huge change but it will change you'll no longer get a statement of net assets as your entity-wide statement uh what might be compared to a balance sheet in a commercial setting you'll get a statement of position and there are some reasons for that that probably none of you are very excited about franklin and i think that's really all i've got again it's very clean uh very clean report for an organization the size and complexity of portland public schools i think you guys probably deserve a pat on the back i really like to thank neil and sheree and i think i saw dave and cheryl and and the whole finance and accounting staff here at portland public they do a a very good job and we couldn't do this without their help and assistance of course so again i'm happy to take questions or discuss anything in more detail or i'm happy that are there any quick questions thank you very much sure thank you great thanks thanks very much we will now consider resolution 4687 acceptance and approval of the comprehensive annual financial report reports the management and reports on requirements of the single audit and omb circular 8-133 do i have a motion in a
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second director knows moose check and director reagan seconds the motion to adopt resolution for six a seven um is selfish is there any comment is there any additional board discussion we talked about extensively last time but i think that i just again want to thank staff that i appreciate you calling out that in an organization this large and this complex to come out with such a such a clean record is a really testimony to to staff and the work they do and i guess i'll thank you too as a as an auditing firm that um i hear you kind of come and set up shop for three to four months as you work through all of this information so i know working in the hallowed halls of besc um thank you for for all the time and effort you guys put in thank you thank you the board will now vote resolution 467-4687 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed to indicate indicate by saying no resolution for six a seven four 4687 supply photo70 represents yes thank you again thank you thank you so we move on to enrollment balancing for the jefferson cluster and i remind people that there is no vote on any of this thing today and so supernova smith regular updates on the jefferson enrollment balancing process and judy brennan harriet adair and antonio lopez are the three people who together as a team have been leading this process and just to remind you this started back in the summer with a team of roughly 30 members of the community who worked with us to plan what the process would be that then went to a num individual schools k-8 schools in the jefferson cluster each had their own meeting the planning group came back together and made sense of what they heard in the individual school meetings we then had a meeting at jefferson high school of probably 300 members of the community and did work together as an entire cluster and then went back to the community with the scenarios that you are going to see here tonight which are probably not what any of the final scenarios are going to look like but are really meant to weigh concepts and pros and cons and play out some of the ideas that were heard during the first round of community meetings so that you see what the concepts look like in fact and feedback that we get from these scenarios will then go into developing a smaller number of um of scenarios or options so i'm going to ask that the team would when you give us the update please um there's been much concern about as we get as the process gets tighter and we're looking for the sweet spot about what's um what's the process on the planning end can you just lay out what the timeline looks like so people get their head around what kind of time we still have as we're weighing these things so i hand it over to you thanks well um good evening to you also on behalf of our team i'm going to um try and cover the first part of this which will be a quick summary of how we got here and a brief walk through of the scenarios we'll try and keep it to about 15 minutes but may need a little bit more time just to make sure that we cover these important topics that we've heard a lot of commentary on in the last couple of days and then most of our time tonight we'll be listening to you and hearing you know what strikes you and what advice you have for us as we move into this next important phase and my esteemed colleagues will be answering most of your questions i get my work out of the way early as a reminder by itself it's not enrollment that will directly impact our student achievement but balancing enrollment does create conditions that we see as essential for increasing student achievement so i admire the colleagues from roosevelt cluster who provided a wonderful comprehensive presentation to you a little while ago when we come to you with our work we're really narrowly focused on one element that we know touches the whole but it's we always want to start from that place reminding us that we're not looking at all of those changes here focusing on one area why does it matter because staffing is based on student enrollment and when enrollment is low staff is going to be small and that increases the likelihood that not all of our students are going to have access to that core program conversely when enrollment is oversized in our small buildings we wind up with not enough classrooms to effectively be able to provide that core program and especially in small schools where little changes in populations can have big impacts frequent enrollment variation leads to staff
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and program and stability people questioning whether it's a good program that they want to stay in over time lower capture rates and the like so we see balanced enrollment as resulting in stable right-sized student populations equitable access to robust academic programs safe and effective learning environments that's why we come to you every year here are the targets that we've collaboratively established that we're trying to shoot for these numbers are largely minimums and more important than the overall student number is the number of sections or classrooms per grade level that we see as essential to provide a court program effectively to all of our kids and you see what can happen when it's too small and again what we said what happens when it exceeds or goes above that hundred percent utilization um we're going to share with you just just visually the difference when you have two small schools that are only operating with one or two sections per grade level that come together to be a larger school that the amount of program and opportunities that are available not just for students but for staff is is a big difference it's a notable difference um and while we are not here to brag about the process that we did with the community to get to this result when we hear from parents and community members and staff in those schools they speak very positively about those changes and what it means for their students so the cluster that we're talking specifically about with you tonight is described here it includes our humboldt and tubman campuses that don't have students this year we'll also be talking about the access program and we'll note that it may be necessary to involve other schools to fully right size if that's the route that we choose to take so a little bit about how we've developed what we're calling scenarios which is what we're spending most of time on tonight um we started by looking at our overall enrollment so right now there's about 4 200 kh students who live in the in the um jefferson pre-k cluster it's not growing as fast as some other areas of the district we see about 4 300 in 2015 and we kind of use 2015 as our target year to see if the changes that we were thinking about that we were conceiving of could make enough a difference by that point or be trending in that direction so you'll see 2015 as the number that we refer to through this judy are these pps students or the okay so there are other students that we're not aware of that aren't reflected in this this reflects public school students that we can count okay thank you um so what we see is relatively low capture rate so um we have charts that are you can see this one here and then there's another one for the audience over there that shares that baseline condition with the of the schools and you see that our capture rates in these schools the number of neighborhood students who choose to attend that school is lower than it is um in in most other clusters i think in all other clusters and again that's students who are attending public schools there's a lot of reasons for that but one thing that we see and we've heard clearly from community members is that if more students were choosing to attend the schools in this cluster there are enough students to fill eight schools so because we look at closures as a last resort we started from that place and said what does it take to fill and use eight campuses well across this cluster and that's what you'll be seeing tonight we also did research and dr adair can go into much more depth with us about configurations specifically about middle grades configurations and the question being what is there one ideal configuration where you can assure greater success for students the answer based on this research is no that it's um more than the size of the school or any specific grade arrangement it's the number of students in a grade level that matter more than across a whole school and it's the um the quality of the curriculum the programs and the implementation of of what you're doing what you try and do as long as you do it well you have a better chance of being successful um so we've also used this to to drive our thinking around the scenarios and finally um as superintendent smith mentioned we've gone through a robust community engagement process and i've heard from hundreds of stakeholders in this cluster and the they helped us develop these what we're calling guiding principles many of these statements coming out of the meetings that we've had with these families what they see is most important for their schools and for their students many of these universal concepts that you would want to see in any school articulated clearly for the jefferson pre-k cluster so those are sort of the three areas that most drove us to develop scenarios and we use the term scenario because it
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is broader rougher and less precise than words like options or recommendations we are not making recommendations at this time we're trying to carve a set of views of how the things could change so that we can start have a better sense of how those changes might work might play off each other and then take it to a next level of something more concrete so we have six broad sketches that we've released to the community last wednesday and that we would like to share with you tonight they're intentionally meant to contrast the degree of changes that could impact each school and and we believe that that will help us and community members identify pros and cons and the types of trade-offs that you have to make between the schools to achieve better results than what we see now beyond this we will be developing a next set of options two or three narrowing down from six down to two or three hoping to do that in time for winter break so people don't go through that long period with no more knowledge than about the sun that they have now um and we see that those might be hybrids of the best ingredients if you will from the scenarios that we've started with um we it's important to say that they will include more details than what you see about the scenarios now so things like boundary changes high school feeder pattern impacts um even possible boundary changes with schools outside the cluster are something that you will see more specifically when we get down to a smaller set of options instead of trying to model every single outcome for a lot of options facility transportation staffing impacts an overall timeline for how we could effectively implement this we'd like to see changes start next fall so that we can begin some changes so that some of you know so that we can get closer to increasing program access and relieve some overcrowding but we don't know that all of them would be implemented in one fell swoop certainly the fabian rebuild portion won't be we also know it's important to look at the impact to specific programs in special education special student populations and we fully intend to do that in collaboration with staff from other departments so that's what you can look forward to in the next couple of weeks it's critical that we do some listening now from you to listening to you and others to get there as you look through these scenarios please keep in mind that we see a potential for an early learning center on the humble campus and have designated that as the most likely use because of that we're not modeling pre-k classrooms in the future at any of our um other schools that you see in this we want to acknowledge that every configuration here for fabian is considered temporary and that the long-term opportunity to um to build on the three to phd partnership and to modernize the school means that a full set of changes for that are is still going to be developed however it's one of our smallest campuses they're growing they don't have enough room to continue growing through that change i also want to point out that we did not model any facility changes in these scenarios so we didn't assume that we could bring on portables add classrooms we assume our facilities stay if they are how do you change the enrollment to meet the facilities if there are opportunities to change the facilities along the way it could modify these scenarios um i also want to point out that oclegreen will convert to a neighborhood program you know it's operated for several years the k5 arts and technology focus option we would see that ending through this it's one of the smallest components of the school and we would look to use it primarily as a neighborhood program and that access as a program is included in five of the six scenarios but of course and we will be starting conversations with the access community tomorrow afternoon to talk through what these mean for them okay so in a moment i want to walk you through at a pretty high level what's in those scenarios we'll be doing this same thing at a series of meetings that you can see up here that are all happening this week we think it's very important that we go from development stage to listening stage remember we're a pretty small lean staff that don't have a lot of resources to do this but we're so we're doing our best to change from coming up with ideas to listening to a broad group of stakeholders to what those ideas could mean we're hoping by through next week so up until december 12th it will have enough input that we'll be able to tailor options down to a leaner set that we can add many more of those details to that people are are really craving and that's what we
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would be releasing back to you probably around winter break i also want to point out that there are multiple ways for people to give us input we learned through this last round of having 11 meetings in the community it was wonderful to see so many people turn out for meetings but not everybody comes to a meeting and so we've arranged for feedback sheets that people can pick up at schools we're talking about having staffed tables at schools for at least one day during this time so that people can come and drop off and ask questions and of course there's the meetings there's our online resources so we're trying to have as many different ways we're also doing um direct phone calls um in languages other than english to families so that they're getting the call in their native language and can talk through the scenario the ideas in their native language over the telephone instead of having to come to meetings so after all of this we see coming back to you in january with the smaller set of scenarios continuing community input probably more of at least one more forum in the community at that time before making a staff recommendation to the superintendent which would also ultimately come to you ideally decisions are made in january but it may take a little bit longer it just depends on how much time we need to fully feel like we've heard from everybody that we need to and that we've crafted the best results okay so now i'm gonna move you into the scenarios and um how i thought i would do that is just put up a big map and um i can use the cursor to oh no i can't um this would be funny i i can use the cursor to point to things a little bit it's just a little tricky i don't have a laser pointer with me tonight so bear with me um see if the laser works in that it wasn't working earlier you also you should also have a larger version of these at your desk and there's about 20 of these up in the back there if there are any community members who want a better peek at it and i'm also referring to the to the two page handout in little tiny font that we shared last week so what i thought i would do is just describe at a high level which each of these um changes bring i don't know why that happened because we're messing with the cursor oh and um then we'll be ready for your for your questions okay so this first scenario we're calling scenario a and it imagines that the entire cluster moves to a k-5 middle school configuration so one of the perpetual questions in this cluster is should we bring in a middle school to meet the needs of mid-level learners this says the answer is yes and we'll do it for all students in order to accomplish that two schools become middle schools ockley green and tubman i'm not going to try and point in this ockley green is fed by beach chief joseph woodlawn and part of fabian so when i say part of fabian let me describe that and some of you may know that the fabian boundary is very very large it includes the area around concordia university closest to the school and it also includes the area near delta park hayden island and reaches far north it all it it wraps around and covers industrial area that doesn't have students it certainly brings in many students from hayden island delta park area right now those areas have different high school options so the northern part has the option of attending either jefferson or roosevelt for high school whereas the concordia area of fabian has the option of attending madison or jefferson so in a couple of these scenarios where we take fabian down to a k-5 school in temporarily until it's rebuilt we do split those middle grade students in places that sort of follow those high school lines so in this case fabian would become a k-5 school and some of the students the students north delta park hayden island would go to ockley green which is a which and the rest of those kids would feed to roosevelt whereas the other part of fabian would go to tubman another thing that i want to point out regarding the ocle green feeder pattern is that so chief joseph is a school that's becoming very crowded and beach is a school that has a relatively small neighborhood program in comparison to spanish immersion which is in high demand so this um imagines that chief joseph becomes the spanish immersion campus that we we just the line the neighborhood line between beach and chief joseph disappears and they become one neighborhood with a k5 school
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neighborhood school at beach and then the immersion program as a whole school moves into chief joseph so moving down to tubman which would be the second middle school in the cluster you see the feeder pattern of the portion of fabian that i mentioned as well as vernon king and boise elliot and i want to point out that because these um are either relatively small capture catchment areas like king is one of the smallest catchment areas and or because of traditionally very low capture rates this leaves a set of pretty small feeder schools so they're small as k-5s and they're small as enough to they're almost too small to build a critical mass of students into tubmen so in order to expand this scenario and make it more workable we would likely either have to involve additional students coming in from outside the cluster so from like create other feeder schools outside of the cluster line into tubmen um and that could be done in a variety of ways and or make significant boundary changes to right size the k5 boundaries for specifically king and maybe vernon and possibly even look at consolidating within those schools so in order to go with an all k5 middle school configuration there's a lot more work that we would have to do to sharpen this up but we wanted to show it as a representation of what could be and sort of the ultimate answer to the question of if you had middle schools what if you had all middle schools k-5s okay i think it's also an answer to the question of why aren't there two middle schools in the jefferson cluster which gets asked pretty consistently so we have two other ways of envisioning middle schools returning to the cluster the first of these sites it at ockley green and you can see the feeder pattern is is similar to what you just saw and these are double-sided so you find this on the back side in this case we didn't mess with chief joseph and beech we let them stay as they are but keep in mind that means that chief joseph probably stays overcrowded um and the neighborhood program at beach stays relatively small in comparison to spanish immersion they fit better in the building because it's only sixth grades instead of nine and in this scenario all of fabian comes together to one middle school excellent and um okay and then there are three schools that remain k-8s in this configuration and they kind of have the grayish background on them um vernon make there's no changes to vernon in the scenario at all and because right now their program is is in the lower grades it has a good size but by the middle grades they lose a lot of students there are some concerns about leaving them with no change although capture rate increases would be good there the access program moves from saban which is the next school over to king in this scenario and those two things to get two entities together king neighborhood and access are about the size that we would want a k-8 school to be and bringing access on board it would be similar to when you add something like a spanish immersion program all of the students don't merge all day long they're separated um for most of their core classes by grade level and their staff that way but you have the ability to consolidate your needs for enrichments for administrative for supports and additional services professional development there's a lot that you can get out of bringing two schools together which is why we're envisioning it here and with boise alley at humboldt there's no change proposed for them in this however there is the opportunity to look at repurposing the tubman campus which may be more suitable over time to serve what could be five to 600 k-8 students so that's a conversation that we would want to have continue again i want to point out in every one of these you see humboldt early learning center in the center right there by jefferson high school um okay so then i think that's everything on this on the second middle school scenario and the third way that we are looking at the potential of bringing a middle school in the cluster would be to have that one location be tubman which is a campus that doesn't have kids on it this year here's the feeder pattern that it would likely take to bring enough kids forward to make that a full middle school again because of the relatively small size of some of those programs that would be feeding it so in this one all of fabian students would come together to tubman again temporarily likely until a more long-term decision is made woodlawn doesn't change it's similar to the circumstances i described with vernon a moment ago a relatively small middle grades program that wouldn't be enhanced in any way with these changes
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i want to point out that internal boundary changes in the cluster could make some small improvements there and as we go to a smaller set of scenarios we will definitely be trying to point out places where we could see potential for boundary change we bring the ocle green and chief joseph campuses together here and we think that by adding the access program we would have sufficient students to continue operating on two campuses one challenge is that in looking at what access where access could maximize their unique program and how it serves students is they like the opportunity to have younger students on a campus with older students so that they can access higher level curriculum in this scenario because you'd have one campus serving lower grades we don't know exactly what the configuration would be k3 k4 or something you wouldn't be able to do that quite as much as if all the kids were all together on one campus so that's one thing to point out so as i said three different ways to look at how we might bring a middle school into a cluster that currently does not have one oops that's an important one so um because beech and king okay because as i said before king is a relatively small area right now that would be a small k5 we looked at basically erasing the boundary line between those two schools allowing one school to serve as a standalone spanish immersion and the other to be the more robust neighborhood program we would have to decide exactly what that would be it's it's viewed here as beach being the immersion school and king being the all neighborhood school so you get a better neighborhood bigger neighborhood school you get the potential to increase the numbers of students in spanish immersion the downside is you have to split them between two campuses that are not right next door to each other to achieve it so i'd like to move on then to our last three scenarios which show you how we could reconfigure the cluster without converting any schools to a middle school and the first of these is the most imaginative it's the most dramatic um it brings all dual campuses or shared campuses into the cluster so as i've described to you in a couple of these where we bring ockley green or chief joseph together or beach or king together in this one we said what if that was the whole cluster what could we do to maximize the number of students by grade level that are attending k-8 schools keep as many kids as possible in their local area and better use our buildings some of which aren't big enough to house you know seven or eight hundred students so we hit upon the idea of creating shared campuses and you see the four pairings here chief joseph green and we would consider access to be a part of that beach with boise elliot again with the potential to see if the um tubman campus is an appropriate use for that con and that part of the configuration king and vernon who also have the added benefit of both being international baccalaureate schools so you get more robust program opportunities across grade levels for kids whether they're in the pyp or the middle years program and then fabian woodlawn temporarily sharing a boundary and configuring in a way to use the fobby and can maximize the fabian campus in the short term than deciding in the long term how to work together so okay so i'm just going to let you sit with that one for one second and then say if we weren't making quite as many changes to arcade structures but we were still largely working in a cade environment um the next two scenarios posit a smaller number of changes that we could make that still move us in the direction of balancing enrollment so i'm going to start at the bottom on this one where boise elliot humble stay without change beach days without change boys the elite humble has the continued option to look at migrating down to the tubman campus in this scenario access comes over to king which is right at the next school of where it's located right now chief joseph and oakley green come together without access there may not be enough students to support both campuses over time so we're starting from the assumption that students who have come to ockley green as part of their k5 choice program would be allowed to continue and merge with the chief joseph students so they wouldn't be assigned back to their neighborhood schools necessarily but as those students aged out there would be a smaller group a cohort of just neighborhood students coming behind them with fewer transfers and if that happened there may not be enough students to support both buildings so we may have to phase into a time when only one of those campuses occle green being the biggest one might work if we went with a scenario like this and thought that this was one of the strengths that we should
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continue and then regarding fabian again converting back to a k-5 school but having its middle grade students split in two locations one over to one set would go over to vernon they would continue to have the same high school choices as the rest of the vernon students and it would increase the size of the middle grades program in that k school they do have to merge into an existing cage school to do that the students in the northern part the delta park hayden island would come on down to woodlawn where they would share the same high school options and finally our last vision for jefferson cluster or um our last starting vision let me say it that way because there are many more visions to come we hope um many of the things that you saw in in the last model boys elliot humboldt staying the same king and axis coming together um in this one we think about splitting fabian differently and we decide that perhaps that humble early learning center where we expect to have pre-k head start wrap-around services would also be a great place to house a kindergarten level program for fabian temporarily while we're waiting for the modernization and if we did that then the rest of the grade structure first through eight would likely be able to remain on the fabian campus so because of that no fabian students coming into vernon or woodlawn middle grades they would stay as they are now it does i've mentioned a couple of times these challenges with beach having smaller neighborhood than spanish immersion and chief joseph being overcrowded well this conceives of not just a dual campus but a tri-campus where you would create a larger neighborhood program okay neighborhood program between the beach the chief joseph and auckland green boundaries and you would lose use two of the campuses for that and then you would use one campus for your k-8 spanish immersion program so it's a way to try and solve the problems that you have within those buildings and those boundaries in those neighborhoods just within those three schools so as you've heard over and over again these are conceptual ideas that we've brought forward to try and elicit a level of response from you and from community members about what could work for you and what you would like us to never consider again and that we would then take that learning and sharpen it down to something more meaningful so um that's staff breeze that's my part of the presentation amazing experts here to answer questions and we're happy to listen to your comments let's get started i'm curious about um a lot of the scenarios are particularly those affecting beach in the immersion program tell me a little bit about the options for continuation of that immersion program post post beach let's leave we can look at scenario a i guess so could you clarify continuing continuation if if parents or if students decide we want to continue an immersion program what's the option after leaving that school oh beyond eighth grade right right um that will be roosevelt yep yeah would continue okay and another thing too and i don't know if this is a question but but more of a comment some of these particularly when we're looking at um separating out the particularly a beach the neighborhood portion in the immersion portion looks like most of the scenarios it would be a combination of that you know that neighborhood school at another location or a combination of locations but it would require some uh some growth in the immersion program that would fill a school so this is where you know the devil is in the details a little bit how do we how do we know we we're going to be seeing some growth in that immersion how do we make sure we accomplish that growth so we don't see a few years down the road an immersion program that was once successful but was never really able to ramp up and that would be that would be the challenge well not a challenge i think that we have enough parents in the neighborhood that are interested in the immersion program that we can start for example three kinders and just continue that pattern uh right now they have two in the early grades so i do not think it will be very difficult to grow the program okay and then the potential for that to take
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away from other schools and then that whole unintended consequence of more kids going to one school and there are fewer and the other i mean i don't know if you've modeled that at all with if if beach spanish immersion were stand alone and grew uh there's just one of five main factors to consider here but um i can tell you that we've modeled um we didn't model the on paper we did some modeling we said with a double sized neighborhood half of that new class of 26 or 28 kids would come from the neighborhood so that's 14. does that mean the neighborhood program would still be big enough probably those other 14 are likely to come from six to ten other students so the impact is maybe one to two other students per school per year so it's not a big hit what we would most want to see with this expansion because it's in line with what you've heard from gm garcia and vantron is um making sure that it's our um esl students who have you know high access to that so it's really identifying the and those students are pretty broadly dispersed right so okay i have a question so i think you guys have probably been in the audience a couple of times when we've talked about middle schools versus k-8s and we asked roosevelt about it and i think we asked the franklin cluster about it talked to the grant cluster about it and i appreciate the references that you all put together i also have seen studies that say k-8s are the way to go so i guess my question has to do more for the board not really for you all but uh i think we need to make a decision about k-8s versus middle schools and you know how do we want to proceed as a district do we want to continue to have a split in our clusters about some kids some middle schools do we want to say do we want to take a position that one is better than the other i i don't want anybody in any of our clusters to feel like they are a second class cluster because they don't have middle school i think that i don't think that's why we pick a middle school for a cluster versus having everybody be ka but i think that's one of the foundational or fundamental questions that we got to talk about before we make any decisions as big as these and i think that it will help us as we move through our other clusters and are doing our excuse me doing our enrollment balancing to just have a couple of these questions that keep nine at us so that we keep bringing up over and over again somewhat settled so that the public understands where we come from as a district and if it is going to be that we just want to throw it up in the air and try and make a decision based on i don't know what then that's fine too but i think that we need to have a conversation about it to decide where we're going to go so that's one of them and then the other one that i was concerned about was the split campus idea and that i'm concerned about that because i live in the beverly cleary grant neighborhood and i don't hear i don't hear any good about that i only hear complaints and that's not to say that we couldn't do it differently or better or anything i just am just making that aware and then the other thing that i had two other two others um i think we also need to make some decisions about immersion and learn a little bit more about immersion and where do we want immersion to be and how important is that to us and and uh that'll factor directly into this decision around beach and then also i want to make sure that we're being aware of ib the one scenario that has vernon and king sharing because they both have ib i think that's great not that i like all the rest of that scenario but i think that that's a something that we should consider as well so those are my those are my four big ones that i think we need to think about my list is long enough that i'm not i wasn't really expecting answers really tonight i'm figuring there's going to be an faq and other opportunities so i just wanted to get these out there so i'm not expecting so i guess first one would just be around the racial equity lens tool that we now have and wanting to make sure that is folded into this invisible throughout this both for the community and for staff and for us so just wanted to say that and i'm looking to see that when we get the next level of analysis from staff and i'm looking including myself that we will all
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um commit to using this lens when we make this decision um second you mentioned the special education but that was one thing that was really glaring um in the first round of what about special education so i appreciate that um you're going to be including that in the next scenario so we know what about minimizing disruptions where what classrooms go and i want to be confirmed that that special education staff are deeply involved in all of this um another one is just if there were you know just to have more um transparent and open discussion about his staff really thinking that there does need to be a closure or two now and if so have you envisioned a scenario where there could be sort of a planned reopening in the future should growth occur and what could that look like i think the district has done closures on kind of a negative downward spiral kind of mode here we have an acknowledgement that we have the number of students living we just don't have number of students attending so how would that be a positive at all if it's possible and or could we do something like the growth challenge that the district issued to ricky that you will grow or you will be closed and here's you know supports and well that actually wasn't was more giving the parents the opportunity to do the marketing anyway that kind of challenge to grow has that been tried in jefferson what could that look like given um the huge amount of parent involvement that we're seeing which resulted in a significant jump of enrollment enrique to the point where they're now overcrowded which is another issue um let's see access you talked about they are going to start now going to be involved which is great i was concerned that they hadn't been today because that's such a huge piece and just more you alluded to this judy but just a little more in detail because we've had some issues in the past with shared programs in the same building and it hasn't always panned out very well so would really want to be thoughtful about that and understand the benefit for the neighborhood side if you will in terms of what the students would have access to as well as accesses i understand they have a long waiting list so do they have a long-term need for more space and you know i don't want to move them and then have to move them again and cause more disruption around the hybrid model i do believe in a hybrid model because that's what we have in most of the district i think we need to be more planful about what we're providing for sixth or eighth grade students no matter what the configuration is i think one works well for better for some students than the other we have strong adherence for both and it works really well for different students in our but to me the issue is that lack of choice um within a cluster so i'm very interested i'm not dead set on it but i'm really interested in pursuing a viable middle school within this cluster so i i'd like a lot more detail about how the formation of a news if there's community feedback that that's something that folks want to pursue um how would a formation of a new middle school plan for success look like would there have to be could it really happen next fall would there need to be sort of a year transition time to close this school like hypothetically if you closed ockley green you'd hire you know fabulous new team it would could be renamed tubman being hypothetical here but what would that process look like in terms of ensuring that we would have a successful start and and sustainable school in terms of i mean parents aren't going to come unless they know what they can have there for their students right so if we knew x number 100 of 400 500 600 what could be provided conversely if only 100 200 or 300 show up what does that mean you talked about a 2015 kind of target date so does that mean there's kind of a grace period i don't have the sense we have a lot of extra funding to subsidize during growth so just all those issues um let's see and relatedly is there any possibility of developing any kind of new program whether it's immersion finally replicating sunnyside environmental ib whatever it might be could we replicate da vinci middle school which has an extremely long waiting list what would it be entailed and that is that realistic just just to have that discussion um i'm concerned about the suggestion that boise elite and hubble might need to move to tubman because of overcrowding why would we have moved humboldt to boise elite if there isn't room for them so maybe i'm misunderstanding that or if it's an issue more around wanting to use the tub and building for the sake of using the tub that wouldn't concern me because i would really like to see some stability for at least a few years for that community i'm almost done um and then more detail around the access to pre-k would work how that would work with an early learning center humboldt what would the catchment area be in terms of family travel times and would we still have head start at other locations would we end up bottom line is would we end up with fewer slots for pre-k kids more or the
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same number what what would be i know we'd gain the additional wraparounds in other pieces the pd the professional development that you mentioned which is which is great um three more real quick so other one is it comes up a lot that there needs to be district support for the schools in the jeff cluster and that there isn't i think it would be helpful within the racial equity lens but also to be detailing what are those additional supports that do currently exist and could there be more what would they look like under the different scenarios but just to really bring out whether it's sdi wrap-arounds other instructional specialists whatever else again i want to confirm my understanding about this timeline and is there kind of a transition period that you're allowing for and what does that mean in terms of communities really working on building their enrollment and getting their capturing up and working with their with their folks who may have been reluctant to attend um regarding fabian i'm hearing you say that they really can't that there has to be some change for them that they really cannot hang on for just a few more years in their current building with their current configuration and i just want to check that cause i'm again really concerned about creating upheaval for them when they're about to be completely changed potentially and then my last comment is just the split campus thing is i would have a lot of questions about that so thank you for indulging me and reading all that and i'm sorry to take up so much time i'm gonna look to this side before we continue on this i just have a couple of things which are somewhat fundamental um my two big questions really are how does the addition of a middle school help this cluster when the problem seems to be small k six to eight populations so if we're if you want i think that there has been a lot of success in in the k-8 model and i don't see how putting a middle school in the mix helps when the problem is small populations in your middle grades so i'm just perplexed by that and then the other really fundamental question is what about this is going to cause the capture rate to go up because if you move everybody around in different buildings but the capture rate i mean the highest capture rate in this cluster is maybe 60 and the lowest is 33. um what what about this is going to make any difference because you're you're basing it all this number of school on getting the capture rate to 80 and i'm i'm not seeing there's got to be another piece to the puzzle before i'm going to accept that that is going to work so those are those are kind of my foundational concerns before i can get into who should go where um i also wanted to ask about the middle school idea because when we when you put out the sheet and you talked about identifying goals you talked about talking with hundreds of parents and students and staff and community members over the past few months and then you came up with kind of five bullets of things that everybody for the most part agreed to and having a middle school wasn't on that list instead it said that all middle school grade students deserve access to high quality programs and qualified teachers it sounds to me from what i've heard that that's the key interest more than having a middle school i think their perception is if you have a middle school maybe you'll have more but i don't know if that's the reality so i i kind of have the similar question about did we really hear that people want a middle school um or not i kind of have a 30 000 foot level question which might get to this capture rate idea you know when we talk about the humboldt and boyz elliott merge one of the things that people seem to say is with so many more students all of a sudden it's such a stronger program and when i look at some of these scenarios you're still ending up with lots of schools with less than 400 kids i mean not even beginning to meet the minimum target so if there is an assumption that some larger schools would provide more opportunities i guess i i question what we have down on our sheets as our targets so right now we say our program size target for k-5 is 450 students for k-8 is 500 students that one i don't understand at all and for six eight is 600 students so one of the things that you said earlier judy um was that what's the most critical is that you have a strong number of kids in each grade level it's it looks to me like in our k5 model at 450 that's assumes
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three grades three classes per grade level if you followed that up through a k-8 scenario you would be looking at 675 students if you have kindergarten through eight nine grades three levels each that comes to 675 so i'm not sure whether this 500 number is an old number that we looked at once upon a time or whether we've revisited it but i think it would be worth revisiting and then same for a middle school we say here that here i'll let you talk one second what we say here is that a middle school should have at least three feet or k five schools so again three grades coming up times three schools is nine grades nine classes per grade gets you to 675. so i guess i'm i know everybody hates the idea of talking about consolidations and closures and at the same time when we saw what happened with boise elliott and humboldt i think people are seeing the impact of having slightly larger schools in terms of what we can really offer our kids and to me that might get to your question about why would the capture rate change because we have more robust programs in the in the area so i guess i'm challenging the assumptions on school sizes completely as you were talking is that i think the problem with a say suggesting that k-8 should be that big is that we don't have buildings that big so we have very few places where we can have that bigger cave we do have some if we're going across the district um but we don't have any place to put those students now we well we have the offline green building and we have the tubman building for starters i mean but we i mean yeah i agree um so the um and just one caution from me would be on fabian um i have a lot of concern about doing temporary changes especially as we're going into construction there and i would hope that we could come up with some other scenario so um i guess for me i don't necessarily like the idea of having kindergarten or somewhere else but at least it keeps the k8 functional um so i guess i would be leaning more in that direction if we could that the temporary changes here and there i think are just incredibly disruptive so just a couple of quick comments i think it's uh i'm in a processing phase right now and and uh thinking about where what makes sense to me and maybe what doesn't um i think the one thing that the capture rate and true to you had mentioned this um assumptions around capture rate increases i mean that's a it's huge plays a big role in in the success of these whatever scenarios we we choose and it makes me consider a number of community members representing a number of schools saying give us time give us time we'll build our we'll build our middle middle program that's what we're asking for in these scenarios is time to build our capture uh the uh so that's that's something that that it does concern me and particularly and perhaps this will come in more detail but particularly without a strategy around around that um this has been mentioned before but the the split campuses um shared campuses it seems really complicated and and seems perhaps gives us some flexibility if in case there isn't an increase in capture that that one closes down and then another one um or the other one stays open that that just seems like us sort of setting ourselves up for a scenario that isn't going to be is it going to be favorable um i'm really interested in finding finding a way for for this cluster to build a robust immersion program i think it's something that that we've seen is is a big interest to individuals to draw from within the cluster and draw from outside of the cluster too but i think and it certainly is benefiting those students that's also one of those programs though that you need to be able to recruit an adequate number of native speakers of that immersion program and i know that's also been something that has not necessarily come easily for us the i want to echo what folks have mentioned around fabian uh what a great little community there that um that exists at that school and and uh during a really exciting time i'd love for us to to keep them together as as much as
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possible um and uh and that i'll leave it at that but uh the other the other piece and and some of these scenarios particularly when we're pulling folks out of um i guess this is a point of clarification uh like scenario a for example where we create tubman as a middle and fabian students are are being pulled out into that tubman fabian students that would normally be sort of in this jefferson madison split does that mean that they go to a jefferson grant split and does that or do they stay in that jefferson madison split based on whether where they live okay i just wanted to wanted to clarify that because that obviously has implications for madison in that case um and and lastly one of the things that uh that i've heard um do you know in community input you know as the community come out and said we want ka so they come out and said we want um middles and the answer is yes to vote to both um the uh and i think it you know and a little levity there but it really is and i think because people recognize that it is a matter of fit it is a matter of choice i think that the numbers sometimes although numbers we've been shown recently show that it's kind of a wash in terms of test scores um in kate's outperforming middles in in some ways and vice versa and others um it offers more of a distraction than anything and really what it is is a is a matter of what's going to be best for the individual student what's going to be best for the family and what what they feel comfortable with and having that option i think is is important in in the cluster i think uh i think the caveat to that is having a really strong option um having one that has a robust curriculum offerings and people are confident in sending their their kids too i just want to i guess it's a question around the middle school and this idea of choice if you have a middle school in a cluster because it's not really choice it's if you live in the part of the cluster that has that that has the middle school you get to go to the middle school what if we made it a choice well that's my second part um we did that with beaumont and we found you guys probably remember this that it sucked the students out of saban and irvington and made their six eights very weak and only now that we've stopped that have saban and irvington started to grow in their middle school years and been a stronger program that was also i hear what you're saying that was also in the era when we had not when it was still in the implementation of the k-8s where that did not get started out with a clear sense of what the program and or building can provide or should provide in other words that was early and a very flawed implementation of the k-8s we're a lot farther along i think we have a lot better sense of what kate's need to provide so i would hope that we would be able to figure i mean to me if we did this hybrid it would need to be both ways so that if you were in whatever set of schools ended up being k5 to support a middle school if possible ideally those families would have the option to choose a k8 in the cluster instead and vice versa and i don't know if that's feasible or not but that's you know but you're right i mean you'd have to it would be a definite concern i would be concerned about the k-8s and the funneling off and i think that i think that director regan's uh point is the one and mass as well are is the point that's that we really need to worry about and that is are we offering our middle schoolers and our k-8s as strong a program as we're offering in the middle school and if we are then there shouldn't be any issue so are you concerned about the jefferson dual assignments that have the option to attend other high schools do you think that would have the same effect of giving people an option to attend a middle school so i think in a couple of the drafts that gives people the option so you could choose jeff from addison and that was cool that's the way it is now it's always been that way oh it has okay yeah but not always just last night yeah yeah i mean there's already that level of complexity in this cluster so it's like would be great if we could come up with something that when we made reduced complexity oh when you're here i don't mind having you the conversation but i think it's important for the people to be able to hear i can't even hear it myself by the way so i was just trying i was just
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explaining to alexia that we've been in this jefferson model for a couple of years and it came about when we made jefferson into a magnet school and wanted to provide the students who were in that area an option to go to either jefferson or grant or madison or roosevelt depending on where they lived so and i don't know what our percentages are right now i'd be very interested in that other questions i have a couple questions a couple comments but i'm going to take a step back because i know that we have some folks who are in the audience currently that have been through this process and part of this process and i want to thank them for sticking it out till 9 10 and there were many more folks here who had signs and their um their presence got a little mixed in with um a previous comment so i just want to acknowledge those parents because i know that they were all here and i know they wanted to make a respectful showing that that there are some requests and i think the request specifically has been more time because these are really complex and all of a sudden it's feeling rushed i'm still hopeful as i judy i think you did a really nice job of explaining the process and why this first proposal is out and where we hope to get to by the time winter break and then have a whole another month and a half to actually get down to the details which i think a lot of people are asking questions about whether that's not whether that's enough time i appreciate you highlighting that it's ideal and we understand that there may be some additional things so i just i want to acknowledge the parents and the folks and i'll call out the levin project because they facilitated a meeting on saturday um that we're doing nice work of organizing parents to get together sorry i'm going to still congratulate parents because the other thing that i've been really impressed with is whether it's on their facebook page or whether it's in person the dialogue has been respectful they've challenged each other about i didn't say that or you don't want that or just because you want that doesn't mean i want that and it's been all the way through respectful understanding that these are our kids and these are really big decisions and that these are really hard and for those of us for those folks who can't spend 10 hours a day looking at these numbers and trying to figure them out this feels like it's moving really fast all of a sudden with not an understanding of why it took us so long to get here so there's many pieces to this so i just i guess i want to highlight that and hold out that i still think that there's hope that we can get to to a place where where people look and say okay this scenario actually does make sense or it doesn't make sense um and i just want to highlight or echo from the from the parents i've spoken to is just this real desire for dialogue that even this format you guys speak we speak we talk they think we you know it's a little bit artificial and so finding ways and i'll just encourage colleagues to find ways to engage and i know we hear from many folks in the cluster outside the cluster encourage that i'm going to take a quick step back and just double check because i've heard a couple things that i guess i want to double check director atkins mentioned special education have special education parents receive the same information of these cluster schools that the folks who are neighborhood schools have received okay i'm seeing head nods because i've heard that the special education folks that have classrooms in in those schools have not been notified i'm still seeing some just enough why i'm seeing some community members in the back saying no they haven't so it was it was a concern that we might want to double back to make sure um because anyway did we send scenarios home in backpacks to everybody or did we how did we notify folks we distributed a one-page flyer that was a high level you know their scenarios out we delivered hundreds of copies of the scenarios to the schools so that parents could either request them come and pick them up we made them available through our website which is how many people choose to access them thank you just a thought we might want to consider once we get down to narrow just to emphasize any information that we've done whether we're it's something going home in backpacks it's something that's going to an auto dialer anytime we've done any outreach to a school it's to every student who's attending that school regardless of their classroom regardless of their special education their language okay thank you now to the scenarios sorry um i want to rec or echo director regan's concern about the target numbers um i i think that portland our public we're doing a disservice folks pride pride themselves on small neighborhood schools and i'm just going to share this publicly that i think if the city's plan is small neighborhood schools 20-minute walkables walkable we have to work with work work with the city to find ways to make that a reality because the reality is our neighboring districts have realized that that's not affordable and we're trying our best to hold on to those and so i really think that we need
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to look at those those sizes to offer the program the other piece i want to mention is that this is an enrollment balancing process we know that enrollment balancing was one of your first slides doesn't equalize doesn't make the school more attractive automatically we know it presents the the funding necessary to make the conditions necessary to make it happen and so i know some people have expressed a disappointment that we're not looking at you know some people have mentioned immersion programs as a high draw what what's working at those schools so that we can make sure that we're attracting that capture rate eighty percent capture rate i don't think is realistic right now um so that concerns me um i don't i think the k-8 middle school hybrid if we can figure out how to let people choose without siphoning off i i don't know how we don't do that but if we can figure that out so because it's clear the cluster wants both i think and some people um so i'd i'll be interested to see i also not crazy about fabian being pulled apart and back together um and as i as i think about the humble early learning center some things that i heard um parents saying is that it was a challenge to go from one school that starts at the same time as the next school and starts at the same time as the next school especially when they have transportation difficulties and so i'm not sure how that plays into this or is considered but it would be as we're changing from it being cited at the school that somebody has pre-k eight at their school which makes it really convenient to drop off um how that impacts some of our families so can i just speak about someone quick point of mind that the school size issue i mean actually absolutely absolutely agree with you around the 20-minute neighborhood and really being clear on what we can afford and what makes sense but i also want to just point out that it's throughout this entire district we have schools that are below the ideal size whether because of building constraints boundaries enrollment is so i wouldn't want to say that we have to hold one cluster you know uniquely to a rigid or artificially you know and then not are we going to make a slew of changes in the very next year or two to the whole rest of the district practically we've got imbalances everywhere and i know that we can't often hear it just do it all to make every all the changes well we i know that it's not possible to make all the changes all at once but i just want to you know put out that reminder that we can't just hold one um cluster to a higher set or a different set of standards than that we are through the rest of the district thanks for that reminder that i appreciate you clarifying that because that that wouldn't be my intent my intel oh i know i'm not saying that because we do all of this um and the last i guess comment or question i have um is it's similar to what you were saying director atkins when you were saying the challenge of having a a neighborhood program inside with an immersion program there are competing interests sometimes i think i hear both folks both sides say that that's a challenge i hear principals administrators say it's a challenge because they're competing for attention so when i look at an option something at king that has ib has special education and then we put in access i think wow that administrator just inherited quite a challenge and i'm not sure well i'm going to guess who's going to get the attention for example it's a guess not going to call out which one but there's going to be one program that's going to demand some attention and the others are going to feel short slated so considering that as we put these into the options i think is is a reality okay i know i said that was my last one last one is sorry it's just it's so rich with so many things and um people are transferring a lot in and out of all of these schools sometimes it's me because i want pamela spoke to it in the roosevelt cluster i want teachers that are responsive to my kid and my culture so they move to this school this school is seen as really not good with this culture this group of people or whatever and so i'm going to transfer that one it's it's very real and until we we elevate it and i've heard some parents wanting to elevate it i think that's something that we should try to through this process intentional conversations about what does it mean and how to how does it affect how does it affect us thank you i agree with you may i just share one clarification because it's been mentioned a couple of times and i feel bad that this wasn't clear when you look at this and you see that 80 percent i want to point out that the model is that 80 attend one of the schools in the cluster not just their own neighborhood school so when we've talked about our capture rate which is average 51 percent in the jefferson cluster we have a significantly higher number of students who are moving around in the cluster already so about two-thirds close to those that many kids are
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staying in the cluster now that's what we would look to say like can 80 of the kids stay in the cluster we would hope that more of them eventually would would also be attending their neighborhood school so i just wanted to clarify that because i'd heard it in a couple places clearly i didn't do a good job before we'll make sure that's clear later so i mean we're over the the limit then i see a few of my colleagues already saying hey you move along um and about that no no no no i mean i i think it's important i mean i'm not sure that you know whether you got enough you know feedback today in regards to the scenarios i mean part of the the deal is not necessarily that we're looking to towards answers immediate right now but i think that in regards to being able to provide some guidance in regards to initial reactions from from the board in regards to the scenarios and and i think the other part of it is i think the task for us is as as board members identifying those those areas where we do have to take some responsibility whether it's on the the creation of of those special programs or um you know the the way that the lines are are drawn in this in this maps because we in some ways we're still working from the context of what's there already and so it's somewhat fine-tuning and and i see a lot of squiggly lines like going there are no real straight lines and and i'm not sure that's the topography of the of the i know it isn't but you know of the region in regards to how the lines were drawn but but it's also i think you know eventually we need to address those things um some questions i think that have come up that i think that that clearly you know point towards um us as board members kind of providing more clear direction because i there is no consensus i think in in regards to out there that they were here for sk8 or or the middle school option in in the community um and we can try to hear from the folks that speak the loudest or or deal with the reality in regards to what is the what is it that we're proposing that is going to actually result in in better at the academic achievement or better educational options for for our children in this district and i think you know the reality is to point it out i mean this is just one element of that but it is a an element that if we put in place is going to impact the offerings uh and so we we just got to be conscious of of of that alone so that's a question to staff i mean we didn't have time tonight to get into uh you know tearing apart or putting together did you get enough feedback from us i know there's going to be lots more feedback in the next several days now i know we gave you way too much feedback but i mean in terms of the actual scenarios themselves we didn't give you real specifics is that okay and you're going to hear a lot i'm sure in the next several days what would happen is that just the conversation that you're having is the same conversation the community would have right or it isn't our expectation that it's one of these scenarios or over the other it's that through thoughtful conversations and posturing and what is what does this mean had you thought about this that people would come very close to looking at i'll just use as an example we really value having a middle school in the cluster but not at the cost of having four other school communities disrupted to create the middle school because that's what you'd have to do to get the numbers we'd really like to have a all-immersion program but at beach but um our building is too small but we don't want to move into chief joseph uh i mean there's a lot of that all of these scenarios have the things that really work for it and not and we want the community to begin having those conversations while we're listening this is probably the most quiet i've ever been in any presentation i've made to the board and um so that we can say okay this is what we heard here the key things this is the thing we heard over and over and um so that needs to be in the smaller set of scenarios that we um ultimately present so it's about having them help us hear more clearly what they think are the things that are really truly their priorities and then making certain that then that gets reflected in what we put down into the smaller set over a period of time i would just you know i cannot not say something about all this mid-level conversation i've gone from all ends depending on which thing i was doing the mid-level redesign or the k-8 implementation implementation and it really does come down to whatever the scenarios are it has to be an enhancement of the middle grades and the boise elliot piece to be honest with you is i know that they're on the in the bond
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with the improvement of the science labs it isn't that the population is necessarily too small but if you wanted to enhance the middle grades and we'll just focus on science which has been a a key uh piece creation of a science lab at boise is a little tight and that it's not the number of kids it's now when you take a look at actually creating that program can we actually get a quality mid-level program in a building that was at once a k-8 and then we deliberately redesigned it to be a pre-k five school and that's very different so that's why you see the tubman piece in there um it's not about so much about the frustration again it gets back to you absolutely the forethought of what do we need to provide for middle grade level kids and the district has not been doing that these these many years so that's and our ka programs do need to enhance um at all multiple levels facilities wise as well as program-wise right so we will be back we did hear it they've taken great notes um i'm kind of glad we didn't have to have the answers we would have never been able to you all would still be here tomorrow morning so that's a this was like this was this was exactly the level of conversation though i think you guys did good modeling of when you're looking at the scenarios that triggers you to be concerned about things or excited about things that's kind of what we're trying to call so you did good modeling of what we're looking the kind of conversation we're looking for so you guys thank you if i can i just one thing i think what uh uh call uh director you know co-chair will i also it's about we're really really thankful for the parents that are here the parents that are uh out there in the community because they have been very very helpful and instrumental in helping us navigate these are difficult discussions and and and we acknowledge uh that they're not perfect but our purpose our intent is to do the best that we can and our parents in the whole cluster have been really just amazing in helping us navigate this yeah one more one more go at where we're gonna be um tomorrow night at 6 30 at beach this will be a bilingual presentation so presented in native spanish sir i'm sorry six six o'clock i'm not sure if that's correct six to seven thirty i heard six thirty so i'm six to 7 30. um same time frame at fabian 6 to 7 30. we'll have translators there as well but we expect to be able to do a full bilingual presentation um in spanish english don't forget to talk about the other things if you don't come to the meeting there don't come reaching out absolutely we've got those feedback sheets that you can get online or at a school or call our office um we can walk you through the scenarios we're working on the faq right now to put online so we keep trying to take you you know everything that we're hearing here and and send it back so that people can can continue to process and go deeper if they choose thank you and so moving on we have the uh creative advocacy network in a governmental agreement uh this will be the board's second discussion the proposing a government intergovernmental agreement uh superintendent smith yes and our deputy cfo david wind is going to present that um the revisions to the intergovernmental agreement that came out of the board's discussion at our last meeting and tonight is really looking at okay is the language now really hasn't addressed the concerns that were raised in the last meeting we will then prepare a resolution for you and bring it back for a vote on the 17th david wanked thank you co-chairs board members um you had two versions of the iga in your board packing i'd like to draw your attention to the second one and the key place to go on this is page four of the document and the the second one on page four should have fairly extensive redlining and so we made changes predominantly to section six the supplemental funding section and section eight the sequential what is now called the sequential course of study section um in an effort to reflect the concerns that we had heard from board members at the last meeting i do want to clarify
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there is one additional change to the wording of paragraph six that you don't have yet and that is the second sentence funds from the arts education access fund will be used to meet voter approved ratio of one to five hundred for a certified arts or music teacher at each non-charter school within the district that the words non-charter should be deleted and the words public inserted so that that reads at each public school within the district educates k-5 students and i can explain that change for you in fact i better do that now so we got a question at the our last discussion about how does this agreement and plan applied to charter schools and at that point um director belyle stated his understanding and i confirmed that that was my understanding and i have to apologize to you to say that my understanding was in error and we have now clarified yet again with the city exactly how this works and charter school students are included in the number of k-5 students that we use that we inform the city of that informs the amount of funding that we get and we do pass through pro right of the dollars for those charter school students so that those charter schools can actually make use of this so it does apply to charter schools on a pro rider basis i think that's fair i think there were some raised eyebrows at the last meeting when we explained how we thought it worked and people thought well we clarified that so it it needs to say public school rather than non-charter school and they would be under the same criteria that they would use those dollars for arts education yes so um as i say what we've essentially what we've done here is um assert that the intent is to add to the number if possible funds will be used to meet that voter approved ratio of one to five hundred which i think was something that felt was important and the one full-time equivalent is clearly an aspirational goal and is limited and qualified by the district's financial outlook etc and then in section eight the sequential course of study it's a clear acknowledgement the district will work with the iraq staff to align that uh taking into account um the situation we find ourselves in and i think qualifying that language in a way that we felt was balanced was that i mean i know that uh director sergeant you raised some of the questions particularly some of that language before was that adequate in regards to those things or at this point or i i'm i'm much more comfortable with the with the changes in the language i'm still a little bit um the sequential course of study um language i i think that this gives lots of room for us to to work with this but right now the this this whole proposal applies very broadly to the arts and we don't have a sequential course of study for even one strand of the arts in our schools so um i i don't see how these and if we said really what we're going to do is have sequential course of study in music and say that's that's the strand we're going to have then you could work with that or so i'm not sure how where we end up here and and i think it's a discussion that um we'll have to have i guess in in the context of doing this and figure out where where it is we are going with the arts and maybe in certain places you're going to have music in other places you're going to have art or i don't know what we're going to do but at least this language gives us flexibility to work with what we have now and build upon that and doesn't tie us into saying we shall do this k to 12 because i don't see how we could possibly do that in in the short run um so so i feel um that is much improved and and the supplemental funding language gives us room to talk in the budget discussions about how we're going to use these funds and the existing funds um in our schools and
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doesn't tie us to that we have to have uh use these funds so that every school has a full-time arts teacher whether it's 200 students or 700 students um and so that makes a lot more sense to me and then we can have discussions about with these funds adding then perhaps we can have arts in the k-8 world for all of our students um and we don't have to kind of focus on k-5 students which is what this tax provides us extra funding for k-5 but we may want to use our other funding to make the course go through the eighth grade and into high schools and so balance the funding in that way and this i think provides us the flexibility to do that so i don't know if people have other questions i have some other questions about some things you know jumping on a bunch of questions um on the title of this david it says intergovernmental agreement between school district number one j multiple county oregon and the city of portland for one-time funds and ongoing partnerships what does one-time funds mean um because it's going to be reassessed after one year i think that's i think that's part of it that's the title of the city put on this yeah and some of the funding is grant funding which would be one-time money there's capacity within the arts education and access fund for grant funding as well as continuing funding so it's an ongoing partnership but there is also the possibility of one-time funding okay under the recitals i was curious why in c we use a 2010 graduation rate when we have 2011 numbers and then in d we use 2012 data there just seems to be a real inconsistency in how we're presenting it and i you know especially in terms of see where it says as of 2010 44 of portland high school students did not graduate are we talking there about all of the portland high schools that will benefit from this and that's their combined number or are we talking about portland public schools specifically and why are we using 2010 numbers when we have 2011 numbers um so i have a bunch of questions like that that i could go over with you later if you want but yeah it there seems to be there were several times when i was asking is this referring to portland public schools or portland heist portland schools so the wording of the intergovernmental agreement is standard wording for all six of the school districts this particular version has been in the header and in the sort of very first paragraph and in the signature blocks has been customized for this district but the wording from the word recitals through to the signature blocks will be the same for all six districts so to that extent where it says portland it means it does not mean portland public schools it means portland the i believe so this says that in 2010 if you look at all of portland high schools not just portland public schools but all portland high schools this is saying that 56 there was a overall 56 percent graduation rate in 2010. that's what this is saying and i believe well anyway no matter what it would be nice to get it updated to 2011 i mean we have those numbers why wouldn't we update it but and i think that i i would have to check this but i think some of this um was put into mirror some of the language that was used in the ballot material and campaign materials and things like that so so the recitals mirrored that kind of conversation okay i forgot to ask this last time the other districts were going through a similar process with their staff have they raised other questions or or just us oh that's seriously all right i'm not sure you really want me to answer that question
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okay well that doesn't sound right the um interaction that we collectively have had with the city has been substantially more extensive than the interaction that other districts have had with the city so that doesn't sit right with me that other districts and other boards wouldn't have that same opportunity that we do and i'm talking about to the city not to you oh it's not that they don't have the opportunity okay oh this that we that they we're the only ones who are having so okay then put it another way if we are the ones who are are being difficult and raising questions are we giving the opportunity then for our colleagues and other school boards to be able to disagree with us or weigh in and it's not a question of being difficult i certainly didn't use the word make difficult we fulfilled our obligation in regards to our responsibilities our district so that's that i just would like this to be more of a cooperative process i didn't realize it wasn't it is a cooperative process i mean but you know amongst the differences not just between the city and portland public is what i'm saying yeah i mean i would like to be very clear i am not intending to imply that the board or anybody in portland public schools is being difficult about this i think that we've raised a number of concerns and questions are the districts are smaller um it's not as complex for them and the process they go through to approve an intergovernmental agreement is not necessarily the same as we go through um and they're happy with where things are and and i every uh i have every reason to believe based on my conversations with city staff that they'll be fine with the form of the agreement that we end up with so we're not creating unintended consequences for other districts well ruth keep in mind that we've got 58 elementary schools most of the other districts have a few of a couple so it it it feels real i think it's a really different conversation that we end up having i i don't think anything that i don't think anything that we have asked for if if the intergovernmental agreement ends up in the format that it is here i don't believe that that is creating a problem for anybody else okay because um i'll stop there i don't think it's creating i think it's creating additional clarity that will be appreciated by all the districts okay i think everybody will benefit from this extra attention we've paid to getting an intergovernmental agreement that reflects what we wanted to reflect i just don't want to add to the existing development i think it's it's it's been good clarity in the process what i have been concerned about is that the governmental intergovernmental agreement reflects what is actually in the middle east and that there aren't additional things that are imposed upon the district which i don't want us to commit to something that we can't perform on and so i want us to be clear about what we can perform on and honestly if other just could be that all the agreements are not the same if that is not satisfactory and that that's something that maybe the city would have to consider but it seems like we're getting to something that everybody can live i think we're getting i think we're getting good clarity in a document that we want good clarity in so i think it's been worthwhile to have the process that we've had with us and with the city so so getting back to the cleric daniel that uh director sergeant had an uh additional question i do have a couple i one it was just a matter of um interest and the document on this is fine but what i wondered is do our boundaries extend outside the city limits are all our kids within the city limits so we don't have issues about counting kids who are where our kids reside the way the agreement is worded if students are attending a a school that is within the city limits and all of our schools are within the city limits if it's one of our schools it doesn't matter whether those children are city live within the city limits or not the only point the only place in which the question of do the kids live within the city limits or not is an issue is with charter schools and so when it comes to i mean in an agreement in 3 e k5 students mean district students in grades kindergarten through five portland k5 students means students that reside within the geographical boundaries of the city of portland so our kit our students have to reside within the geographical boundaries of the city of portland in order to be portland k5 students and that goes into how you define
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no your kids right no so in 4a in 4a it says district shall provide to the bureau the number of k5 students from school within the district catchment area and the current teacher salaries in the case of charter schools the number shall include only portland k5 students that's interesting so they define k-5 students and then they define portland k5 students and that's only used with respect to charter schools yes because they're concerned because charter schools have broader um could be statewide and so they deliberately they deliberately wanted to make sure that if there was a a school that was drawing enrollment from across the state that it was only city kids in the case of district run schools as opposed to charter schools the key thing is where is the school okay um and and so for some of the other districts that incentivize things for us for us it's yes it does all of our school of the schools that we're all of our schools and not implying that charter schools aren't our schools but for the purposes of this the schools that the district runs are all within the city so that it's not complicated all right so at least one other concern which i which i sent you a note about earlier and i don't know if you respond to it because i was in meetings and didn't get back to it but i wanted to just discuss is how do we know especially as this starts up that we have adequate funds right um collected from this tax that we will have we will be able to hire teachers at that 500 to 1 ratio described here so tell me what you know about that here's what i know about that so you asked how will the tax be collected individuals will file an annual tax return due on april 15th the tax is effective for the 2012 tax year the first return is therefore due on april 15 2013. the return will be simple and would be no more than one page in length there would be a simple online filing and payment option the use of which would be strongly encouraged taxpayers would have the option of paying with a credit card bearing in mind this is a flat 35 payment um i understand today from the city rev from the city revenue office they expect to be able to give us a report on on how much money they have collected starting may 15th which is i checked today with our finance and accounting staff in terms of what what kind of protocol we have in for schools where absolutely um i'll try not to dance even though this is an arts measure um the it's similar to what we would do with what we do with our foundations so we have a may 30th date for them to confirm funding um so we would have a good sense may 15th of what the revenue collection is looking like one of the things that we talked about at the last meeting as you pointed out your no direct decision this is the first year so it's you know it's a little bit more uncertainty the first year the funding for the teachers is the first use of funds and the estimate for how much they expect to raise is um you know significantly more than so i think if they the last time i looked at the numbers if they collect about half of what they expect to collect there would be enough money to pay for the teachers so i think it's reasonable that when the superintendent proposes a budget on april 15th coincidentally the same day that the tax return is due but just coincidentally um we will be assuming a level of funding and we will be able to confirm that um you know within about a month which is as i say similar to what we do for foundations that's good that makes me more comfortable with it good thank you that that makes that makes good sense yeah um see if i had anything oh okay so i do have another question about coordination with the coordination with racc provision says the district will coordinate with the regional arts and culture council to ensure that the district is providing high quality
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arts and music education so what's the intent here and what what what does this mean and what does this mean to us so i think what this means is that we will have there's a couple of mechanisms for this one of them is that the sort of superintendent level there's an annual meeting involving superintendents but more importantly there's going to be in fact we um melissa golf director of the office of teaching and learning and i met i don't know it was last week with folks from the mayor's office from the campaign from the regional arts and culture council to start talking about how things will work what their thinking is for the staffing for the rac staff in this and it's really that mechanism that they'll just be regular dialogue about how this is going to work and how this builds on some of the programs like right brain initiative and every given child that are already there the discussion the other day was on um to the extent that there is funding here that where iraq will be hiring the coordinators that you see referenced in here sort of discussion about what kind of role might they play how can they best leverage what's happening in schools already and so on and so forth so i think our experience already has been a positive one and they're committed to um trying to find the most effective way with scarce resources to have this be as positive experience for everybody yeah i think with that particular piece i i noticed that as well i think if i don't know if clarity needs to be made in this iga but the that kind of relationship that position focusing more on creating opportunities for collaboration opportunities to bring additional resources to schools experiment and opportunities for them to experience art that's a great coordinator role to play oversight however is not a great role for coordinator a coordinator of that capacity to play because we have mechanisms already in place within our schools to to assure that we're providing a robust quality education so again i don't know if that's necessarily a clarity that needs to happen in the iga but but it's probably something that's important for us to to know well it is i mean the language in this is is somewhat concerning just because it's saying that if it if the racc notifies the district that they're not meeting the expectations then that could be a dispute which would require us to go to mediation and so it's not we're not talking about coordination we're talking about judging what the quality of the arts education is and i don't know how they're going to do that um so i'm not sure what the purpose of this is here or that they're qualified to do it how are they going to do that um and why is that why do we have that in there um i think at some level they want to have some level of accountability for the fact that they're providing us with money taxpayers are providing the and there is a citizen accountability committee also that would be looking at this in terms of this measure which i was going to ask you about in terms of the voter pamphlet statement itself and this are you done with your line of questions um under accountability it says an independent citizen overview oversight committee that is representative of the city's diverse communities will be formed to annual review fund expenditures and report on the impact and then these audits will be made available to the public annually so my question on this is i'm not sure what the city's diverse communities means in this context i mean with portland public schools have a spot on this committee or do you know what this has has this come up at all because i would be curious the city is in the process of recruiting members for that committee and do you know whether that's like school community like each district will have a representative or is it talking about it's a broader thing than specifically districts it's it's i mean that's it's the cities
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committee yeah because they're the ones who put the measure on the site over the districts well it's it's oversight over the heart no it's not just over the districts because bear in mind that this this measure does a number of things in addition to funding teachers and providing some money to rack for coordination it also provides grant funding for schools and other folks and it also provides access by which they mean opportunities for disadvantaged communities to have access to arts programs so that committee is is overseeing the whole thing and the variety of of um programs and goals that the program that the arts education activities have uh superintendent whether david williams is involved with this and paying attention to this because he's not he's not all right could we have somebody david wine and melissa have been our two people so you're looking at this as well yeah okay i don't know if that's more of a government relations thing or if this is this so um i would think it would be good for us to pay attention to who's on that committee as we go so um and i had one question in terms of when this comes back to us for a vote there was a staff report that would come with it and i this is the staff report is still reflecting i believe the old language about um uh in order to meet the minimum goal of one fte in each school we will have to fund 13 to 14 positions in our general fund and so if we could make sure that this is updated so you will so part of what tonight's intent was was for you to see if the iga had reached um was closer to having addressed the concerns that were raised last time and then we'll bring you back an updated staff report and out of data resolution so you don't have a resolution either and we're shooting for the 17th then is the date that it'll come back to you for a vote so we'll go prepare and david in particular when it talk when you talked about the charter school funding being different than what we thought i just would like us to make sure that we understand what this will actually support in terms of positions now because we say we have 58 schools and this would support 45 44 to 45 positions but if our charter school students are assumed in the overall right count of teachers and and we're going to be sending some of that money outward that in china schools china schools would be about one and a half yeah it's not a lot but yeah the the clarification about charter schools is something that we learned during the day-to-day so that and when i did the arithmetic on how many students that is it's the equivalent of about one and a half but we'll update that's great well and take all of that given that the language now is much more about um i mean our commitment under this wording is to meet the voter approved ratio with an aspiration to do more than it that changes the whole balance of um how we would phrase that particular sentence but we wanted to wait and see if we got got to an iga that was going to work the board will not consider the the remaining items on the business agenda having already voted on resolutions four eight six seven oh hang on for a second yeah four six eight seven i'm sorry um is sophie's are there any changes to the business agenda well we removed uh having removed uh from this uh business agenda resolution four six eight eight um so there are no other items i i had a question on one of the resolutions but i don't know if you want to put that forward to resolution number 4689 which is the intergovernmental agreement with the city regarding transportation safety improvements i was just confused about something is there anybody here who can oh so do i have a voice in a second to adopt the business agenda so director lion moves and director one of the directors over there atkins or so now discussion business agenda director reagan has a question so in resolution number 4689 which is a intergovernmental agreement with the city regarding funding of transportation safety improvements and there's a cap
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five million dollars on it i had a question which is under b i it talks about what this money would be used for and it looks like the money comes out of the capital bond all of it that's correct so what i was confused about exactly where you are in the agreement though i'm looking at the recital although i could look at i think you had a staff memo that came out with it as well right so did you say b is in boy b and the very first bullet under b cj go ahead and look at the staff memo it'll it'll be the same question that's okay i was looking at the iga and not the resolution well the staff memo says that this limits the district required off-site transportation improvements to 5 million for life of the 2012 eight-year bond program so i'm assuming that the money comes out of the bond that's correct what i was confused about is it directs funding priority to middle schools that added younger grades k-5 through the district's k conversion process and i don't recall us talking about that as part of our bond so i was confused about that i understand the transportation improvements related to our comprehensive rebuilds that that makes sense to me but the other pieces of it i don't understand how those come out of the bond thanks paul cathcart project manager with facilities the resolution is kind of pointing back to the iga which was a kind of a negotiated agreement with a city that stemmed from some zoning code changes a few years ago and the city's desire to have kind of a broader look at transportation needs at schools and part of what prompted that question was schools that did not go through the city's land use process through the conversion so part of what we discussed with them is taking a look at those schools through this process to fund that but the priority is going to be on those schools receiving modernization and the iga also talks to the city and the district being able to look at what the higher priority schools are so it may include those middle schools but if there are other higher priority schools that will devote funding to developing the transportation plans for those schools so i guess i wanted to make sure under b i that when we talk about these three things that will be paid for out of this that that is within the scope of our current 2012 bond not our may 2011 bond it looks to me like this whole process started before the may 2011 bond you did and is now continuing and i guess what i wanted to make sure as we approve this that this is all still cool within the bond that we just passed it is consistent with the ballot measure language and the explanatory statement language for the november 2012 um bond measure okay any other questions nope thank you all right is there any more discussion uh is it there was no public comment i take it on this uh the board will now vote on the business agenda only favorite place indicate by saying yes yes please nikki by saying no the business agents approved by a world of seven to zero which will represent the garcia voting yeah and our next meeting for the board we are very cheat on december 10th at 6 00 p.m and this meeting is adjourned thank you

Sources

PPS Board of Education, Archive 2012-2013, https://www.pps.net/Page/2225 (accessed: 2022-03-24T00:57:54.937864Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)

2012-12-03 PPS School Board Study Session

Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

Materials

Minutes

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education, 12/03/2012 Study Session Part 1 of 2

Event 2: PPS Board of Education, 12/03/2012 Study Session Part 2 of 2

Sources