2013-01-14 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2013-01-14
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education, 01/14/13 Study Session Part 1 of 2

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study session of the form education for January 14 2013 to salt water welcome everyone present for television viewers this meeting is been televised live thank you and we will play throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times interpreters are available in the five major languages I'd like to ask interpreters to come to the speaker's table at this time and introduce themselves with and stay for they're going to be located which will be the lobby potassium voice up in high school now Rachel eating baked ricotta you come here olympus I kapamilya Tatiana is full of motion physical checks Rose covering second our music folk are appreciative thank you we're gonna start with public comment and at this time we're going to allow 20 minutes for public comment miss Susan do we have anyone and signed up for a public comment yes we have six our first to Greg Garcia and Sienna Shepherd as you take a seat I'm going to read the public comment instructions and i know you have watched this party meetings before but wanted to state that our responsibilities support lines in active listening and protecting thousand opinions of others guidance of all the game put emphasize respecting consideration for referring to port members staff and other presenters you have a total three minutes to share your comments please begin by stating your name is 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 time except the red light will go on and it possible sound we respectfully ask you that you conclude your comments at that time we sincerely appreciate your input and thank you in advance for cooperation welcome anything I'm Greg Garcia GA rcia super Dan Smith and Steve members of the PPS board I begin first by thanking you for your time we offer gratitude to Steve Gonzalez artistic director of Jefferson dance and Margaret Calvert principal at Jefferson High School for you all we have dance company calendars please enjoy them I'm here tonight speaking on behalf of the parents whose PPS students might possibly be affected by the recent announcement of forced enrollment at Jefferson High School they wish to continue as Jefferson dance company members our issues and concerns as parents are as follows as much activity in backpedaling PPS seems to be doing regarding these few students not until the recent are the receipt of a letter dated December 3rd 2012 to Jefferson dance company families were we ever informed by anyone within PPS that enrollment requirements were changing for JD company members you might have thought administration communicated to school staff to school counselors and to high school principals throughout PPS but nothing nothing until our letter our receipt of this letter was ever conveyed to us either verbally or in writing at the audition phase in May acceptance phase in june and the contractual signing and obligating and committing the students jefferson's dance company was there ever ever any written correspondence or verbal communication tellin esta there would be enrollment requirements at Jefferson High School for all the meetings and internal communications I'm guessing a heavily administrative and political organization like PPS mus have not once did a single delivery of information reach the actual students whose lives you are intending to affect with this newly announced information since 1997 500 or more students have been accepted a grandfathered into the Jefferson co-op dance company you can be assured that if there was clear guidance of enrollment changes given the students along the way with their own peer group communication
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skills this information would have quickly and efficiently trickled down to them but to suddenly announced to a very few in a December dated 10 line letter without any prior notice is wildly inconsistent and clearly unfair to these already academically committed students there are only five potentially affected dance company members the remaining 35 are already grandfather all have already set their academic course at their current high schools and they are all excelling in the spring of 2013 those not already grandfather Jefferson company interested dance students can receive the Jefferson High School in Holborn requirement written communication before deciding to audition accept and contractually obligated to the Jefferson dance program but these five some of whom you are about to meet deserve your equal grandfathering they deserve your consistency and they deserve your commitment but their current academic course and their dance company membership will not be disrupted thank you my name is Sienna Shepherd Sh ep ard and I'm a sophomore I want to start by presenting my analogy for this whole situation it goes something like this have you ever discovered a type of food and it was just so good one of those foods that is guaranteed to always put you in a good mood your comfort food maybe it's ice cream maybe it's bacon now what if i told you that one day the stores made it so expensive to buy that food the only way to eat it was to stop eating anything else what would you do you would have to choose between your comfort food and all the other nutritious things you eat and the worst part is that price inflation had come right out of the blue without any warning the stores had not put up any sign saying this good is temporarily on sale and will resume being sold for much more starting next week so there you are left to choose between your food cravings well my name is sienna and my comfort food is the jefferson dancers I look forward to going to dance every day and it is guaranteed to lift my spirits I'm part of a community there a friends and teachers and i have already embarked on a journey in which i grow as a dancer every day I've seen the Jefferson dancers perform every year since I can remember and I finally become a part of that legacy I was not warned that upon joining Jefferson's second company I would be involved into an environment just to have it taken away from me again no I just got a short letter in the mail one day in December what I'm trying to say is i received no prior warning before i fell in love with my comfort food i'm stuck making a choice between the jefferson dancers and everything else i eat it's not simple in any way shape or form I love dancing at Jefferson but i also have so many other things that make me a successful happy person not only if i spent the last two years making friends at my current high school i want to set academic course i'm going to take AP tests and four classes next year i also am a full part of my school community over the last two years I've helped organize my school's food penny and blanket drive i participated in assemblies as well as been involved with student government different clubs like math club peer mediators and ski bus both my school and the Jeffers and dancers have shaped Who I am they're part of who I am yet I have to choose to give up a part of myself quite honestly I don't think it's fair we just happen to be part of a number a deadline the class of 2015 and there are only six freshmen and sophomore company members who are stopped choosing between our two halves Jefferson and our other school community we have equally invaluable experiences from both and we cannot ignore or forget them this is why just like the juniors who are on Jeffersons dancers first and second companies we feel we're equally integrated into both school and dance programs at a level that is too deep it would be an immense hardship to ask us to pull out of one of them now we kindly request for the six freshmen and sophomore Jefferson first and second company members to be grandfathered in just like the juniors thank you thank you and I'm going to remind people that we have three minutes so if you can stick to that would be greatly appreciated thank you for coming our next two speakers are Mikey Garcia and Natalie ward my name is Mikey Garcia GA are CIA dear PBS school board members this evening I come to you as a student of lincoln high
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school as well as a member of the jefferson dancers in hearing news that co-op students will have to transfer to jefferson high school this fall to continue their dance training I have been forced to stand at a crossroad between my education and my upcoming three years working with the Jefferson dancers upon hearing this news I couldn't believe it I was absolutely devastated i have already planted my roots in more ways than one at lincoln high school yet i am being asked to rip myself away without any prior warning not only will i be leaving my friends behind but i'll see a steamed IV track that i am already on as well as looping tracks with two of my four teachers these ties are unmatched at Jefferson and it would be a complete and utter hardship to force me to change schools I know that switching is a personal choice yet I feel extremely committed to both programs the emotional hardship of leaving either program would be extraordinarily upsetting i will have wasted a vastly productive year at lincoln or an immensely inspiring near with the jefferson dancers neither of which contain any value if pursued for only a single year my relationships with teachers students and faculty would have to start from scratch or would my dance training and besides the dance program i would be arriving into a completely new atmosphere at jefferson that i would not be prepared for I was not made aware of this earlier than December third 2012 when I received a letter welcoming me to Jefferson High School for the fall of 2013 it was not stated at my audition in my acceptance letter or even in my contract with the Jefferson dancers only in a short undetailed message from the principal of Jefferson High School that i received on december 3rd giving me less than eight weeks to make the devastating ultimatum for the rest of my high school career under these taxing circumstances I implore you to grandfather the remaining six students into to the Jefferson dancers program while still allowing us to remain at our current high schools thank you thank you hi my name is Natalie Warren WA Rd I'm a thriving student in the IB program at Lincoln High School and I am on track to test in 3 I be subjects next year over my last two years at Lincoln I've been preparing to take my IV exams my June during my junior year a switch in my educational path is counterproductive to all the hard work I put in to the Lincoln High School IB program the Jefferson High School middle college program is beneficial for students entering Jefferson High School as a freshman because they are immersed in the plan curriculum from the very start of their high school education much like how Lincoln has started me on a plan academic path the middle college is great however at this late in my education without proper planning it is not beneficial for me to switch gears this leads me to my current hardship facing the decision of abandoning my current progress at Lincoln for the excellence of the Jefferson dance company this year I worked extremely hard to maintain my high GPA and be a part of the rigorous and rewarding Jefferson dancers much like how the IB program has prepared me academically Steve Gonzalez of the Jefferson dancers has contributed greatly towards my growth as a dancer and artist the company steve has created allows me to truly express myself in a safe environment through dance I am firmly integrated in the academics at Lincoln and a change at this point is unnecessary I'm also learning how to be a part of a preferred ish professional dance company under the direction of Steve Gonzalez which is invulnerable and I am firmly integrated at Lincoln which allows me to become such a great student please grandfather us six students in and allow us to decide if transferring mid high school is most beneficial for us I am torn apart to let go there go of either Lincoln or Jefferson High School this hardship is unfair for the six of us caught in the middle of this unexpected change please allow us six students to continue to have a choice for dual enrollment thank you for your time thank you lastly we have Elise cohen and Greg Burrell hi I'm Alice Cohen coh en and I am a parent of a second grader at Chief Joe elementary school i'm also a middle school teacher in the beaverton district and this is my first time speaking to the board but I'm here because I really believe in the importance of our children's education
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as well as the future of our neighborhood the Jefferson cluster has seen schools closed and reconfigured and reconstituted numerous times over the past decade and we just heard some students talking about those changes we know that schools need stability for success and that schools are the anchor of communities and we feel like Portland Public Schools has been cutting our anchors and then wondering why our schools are drift these changes in the enrollment balancing we recognize that there's going to be some short-term hardships but we hope that there's going to be some long-term gains for our students and for our neighborhoods this is our chance I believe to reverse this pattern that we've seen in the Jeff cluster and to find a way to have very strong leadership across all of the schools as well as a rigorous curriculum for our students as we get them ready for the 21st century I think this is a big issue of inequity between the schools and our cluster as well as across the district our high school is a work in progress we're the only cluster in the district without a middle school a comprehensive middle school and I mentioned that I'm a middle school teacher I've had XP is teaching in both k aids and comprehensive schools in the metro area and I know from firsthand experience that one type of school does not fit the needs of all students the importance of having our students career and college ready is crucial and I know that a comprehensive middle school can offer the types of varied resources that will meet the needs of a diverse population more course offerings and services that can help kids in all areas also the opportunity to have a relationship with our high school all of these things are really developmentally appropriate for middle school students Chief Joe is a successful school we have trusted relationships between the staff and families and we want to see our success replicated in schools across our cluster we want to work with the district and the parents of the other schools to see this to fruition I realize that there's no easy solutions but I hope that you guys can look to the future and help our cluster become the strong future that it can be thank you thank you my name is Greg Burrell that's be you are our I ll and born co-chairs members superintendent Smith ladies and gentlemen thank you I am a teacher but today I'm talking to you as an education stakeholder I want to thank you all first for the all the work that you do I've been watching and learning about how my school system works and I know you all have a really difficult job running a school district with less than eighty percent of the dollars you had available in 1990 implementing mandates many of them unfunded from the state and federal government I've been a Portland Public School substitute since 2005 and I have seen the most amazing students parents teachers administrators education support personnel coaches volunteers in the community you name it we do excellent work in fact the vast majority of us are doing a wonderful job considering the circumstances so I come to you today not to criticize any dedicated educators and administrators but to point out a simple fact the most important job of any human being is raising and educating the next generation of human beings there is no one more important to the future of America and humanity than parents and teachers so given the importance of educated citizens to the future of our nation we can't continue to create so many adults who lack the skills necessary to succeed in a knowledge-based economy you know when I eaten faculty lounges and I go to a different school most every day and my colleagues don't recognize the letters Oh eib Oregon in vegetation Investment Board for those not up on the latest acronyms I fear for the future of Education in Oregon when I see how little assessment can go on in high schools where teachers have a hundred and eighty students to grade watch teachers have 90 students but only paid for half the job they must do to make a necessary difference in children's lives I'm deeply saddened the answer is simple we must adequately fund education so I'm here to ask you to do three things first and this is the hardest believe that Americans can recover from the era of talking about taxes as if government steals taxpayers money and learn how to
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talk again about the things of free people need to spend their tax money on demonstrate lobby right to representatives educate agitate for the money we need for education Public Safety Public Health and our infrastructure and do not sit idly by as the goal of making money overtakes the value of the things our money pays for I'll take me awhile to say all I have to say in three minute increments but I'll be back thanks for your time and attention thank you miss you soon that's it thank you thank you all for your testimony tonight again as I mentioned at the bigger beginning we don't necessarily address and respond to those things right right away but they will be given consideration and staff will also be looking into some of those things that were raised our next item on the agenda is the Cleveland cluster presentation and tonight we will hear the fourth in our series of high school cluster presentation this presentation station different high school cluster each month we'll allowed allows the board to conduct a deeper dive on the milestone data at the school level we have allocated one hour for this item 30-minute presentation max 30 minutes for questions from the board and discussion as a reminder that the milestones are on the borsa work work plan isn't as a monitoring I am for us to pronounce Smith and I'll just start by welcoming our Cleveland cluster principles and they're totally representing across the front of the rim here so it's good to have you here and Sue Ann Higgins I'll welcome up to the front to introduce the presentation and as director Gonzalez said this has been our opportunity to really get a view of what's going on in the cluster what are the things that are really you're feeling proud of and that are working and that are getting really intentional results for our kids and where are the places you are feeling challenges so we look forward to hearing the picture of the Cleveland cluster Celia good evening it's a pleasure to welcome the Cleveland cluster administrators as well as trip good all our high school director and Larry Dashiel the Regional Administrator for the Cleveland cluster Cleveland in Southeast Portland comprises about 6,500 of our portland public schools students more students than many whole districts in our state so it's an honor to just have them share some of their stores so you'll see portraits cific portraits from four of our schools tonight and have the opportunity to hear from leaders of those schools thank you he makes a grant 10 min Smith or chair Gonzalez and school board members it's just an honor and a pleasure to be able to be here tonight with the Cleveland cluster this is my third year as are a working with the Cleveland principles and I also include the high school piece of that because I had a long career in the high schools important public schools so I know the administrators at Cleveland High School very well and also put them on my visiting rotation when I when I visit their environment as you know the RAS have been visiting schools and I try to get to them at least once a month on a regular basis to talk about equity talk about milestones talk about discipline and talking about teaching and learning and that's been a very very pleasurable experience to be able to do that I'm glad the job presents itself that way and so tonight we will have two elementary principals share and one middle school principal and assistant principal and in our high school principal again it's great to be back and number four so we're really looking forward to being able to present Cleveland so now i'm going to have what i call the sweet 16 introduce themselves and then we'll have a presentation from Cerrejon it done away and Susan McElroy at grout good evening my name is Kevin Bacon I'm the principal at hosford middle school good evening I'm Maryland John assistant principal at hosford middle school I guess we'll stand kit ok mark sandy lands principal at Winterhaven hello Tim Lauer principal Lewis elementary Susan McElroy principal at Daniel grout
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elementary school Kevin Taylor vice-principal cleveland high school vice-principal ahead cleveland high school good evening I'm Paul Cook principal cleveland high school good evening I'm Sarah hon I'm the proud principle of Dunaway elementary good evening I'm Mary Patterson principal at Woodstock elementary and I'm Lori Clark I'm the principal at Whitman elementary Seth Jones the assistant principal at selwyn and I'm Charlie Russell I'm the principal at southwood middle school good evening Brian Anderson Buckman elementary arts focus Tammy baron principal and Abernathy steve bell prints both Llewelyn Thanks I'm Susan McIlroy and the principal a Daniel grout elementary school and so I just want to give you a little snapshot of my school this evening some of the things that we're doing and some of the things that I'm most proud of at my school we're located not too far from hosford we have a huge attendance area all the way from the river 240th we are in an building that looks like a lot of portland public school buildings and we're pushing 90 at this point but still in great shape considering our how old our building is one of the questions I frequently a mask is where did you get that name and so Daniel Alexander grout is an early Portland superintendent from the 1920s and he has a school named after him after he passed away he was an early advocate of something that we take for granted now and that is having parks and fields with our school but at the time that was a novel idea the you've probably had the demographics in front of you I put them up here we are a very diverse school and the demographics themselves don't tell the whole entire story we do have to refugee populations our Somali bond to students came to us in 2005 we also have a number of Burmese refugee students our students represent more than 24 different countries and speak 20 different languages our milestones are up there in addition I've put our overall reading and math scores and if you're looking at the milestone data our largest gap is between our black and white students and our English language learners there's quite a bit of overlap most of our black students are English language learners and then our special education students one of our focuses it has been our school climate we have participated in both the foundations of safe and civil schools and are currently participating in the positive behavior intervention supports intended to give staff the skills and tools to work with all students we do use steps to respect and second steps as well as other anti-bullying programs I do keep a full-time counselor and we do have a couple of social service interns they provide social service supports to families in need we are a play work school play works is a program designed to really help students with conflict resolution so I have a full-time coach who works with students so all of my kids know for example the same games with 20 different languages there's certainly room for misunderstanding so for us this really has been a excellent school climate piece and a leadership development piece for our students we have a number of social service partnerships and grout is a son school so we have a Parks Department as a partner providing after school academic and other classes for the kids in particular we have tried very hard to be creative about maintaining an arts program and arts focus even though we're not a focus option school we do have a theatre program for kindergarten through fifth grade we have a strong visual arts program and we support that
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through residency's and then we are working with a group called the music workshop to provide music for our students we've also maintained a strong science program particularly partnering with Reed College and the city of Portland environmental services and Parks to provide some of our education outside of our school we now have two gardens both a vegetable garden and a bioswale those are both courtesy of our PTA and the grant writing done by the PTA and then you know lastly I just want to point out that as with most schools we can't do it alone and so this just gives you a little bit of idea the number of community partnerships we have that support grout the programs that grout evening I'm so excited to talk to you about done away it's one of my favorite topics so I decided in presenting to you tonight then I'm going to focus the entire time on my milestone data it isn't by accident that we're a high-achieving and high-performing school there are a lot of systems and structures that we have in place that not only have gotten us to where we are but our continued growth and so I'm going to go through those so all of the slides in the data you'll see I'm isolated the third grade data so looking at our third grade demographics data if you look over the left two years this is my third year it done away i started in 2010 the first cohort of third graders that we had close to twenty-five percent of my third grade students were students of color and i think that's important to recognize and Casilla of the demographics data over the last three years we have more third-grade students now than we did when I came to Dunaway although our our current cohort this year and the kids were moving towards milestone we do have fewer kids of color in third grade this year we're at twelve percent for our specialist students when we talk and we think about the milestone data it done away it isn't just about third grade we know that starting early and talking about kinder first and second grade is just as important if not more important than what we're doing in third grade our milestone data for third grade reading to learn we know that if we're going to read to learn our focus is on comprehension in our in reading research you can see that connection between vocabulary and comprehension we focus a lot on vocabulary when students know fifty percent or less or fewer words in a passage their reading comprehension drops and so if we're talking about reading to learn and students understanding what they're reading we really want to focus on vocabulary and we do that it done away over the last two years last year for the last two years we have an increase in the number of students meeting or exceeding our milestone benchmark an eight percent increase for our white students we have one hundred percent of our Hispanics to is that met standard last year and we'll talk a little bit about the invisible data that you don't see on here in just a few minutes we've also had an increase of five percent for all of our students meeting milestone data in the last two years so its expectation of Superintendent Smith and Larry Dashiel our Regional Administrator that we have two things improved achievement for all students it done way we've demonstrated that narrowing the gap between groups and when we compare our Hispanic students to our white students at times they're outperforming white students so one of the things I want to point out though and I'll of data and I really liked data analysis is we're at a glance you might look at the Dunaway data it is something to celebrate be proud of but I'm always looking to read between the lines and what I do and I look and I analyze our milestone day in the first year that I was there what's important to know is that it all of our students and again this is two thousand ten to eleven data we had 16 students of color but when you look at the way the data is presented when there's a subgroup a racial subgroup where you have less than six students represented the data becomes invisible and so when you look at that and you can see that from one of the earlier slides there wasn't a graph there although there were maybe five students or for students in that racial category and it's my expectation of myself as an instructional leader I think as a principle that we make sure we don't let data become invisible especially when we're talking about racial data so we did have one hundred
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percent of the students Hispanic students meet the milestone here's the invisible data the ten students of color that you didn't see on the graph which represent fifteen percent of my third-grade students they weren't reported because the subgroup may have had less than six kids so that's where us tracking students individually and having conversations monthly and data teams is very important and we do that it done away when we look at last year here's where we read between the lines again we did have one hundred percent of our white students meet or exceed the standard on a milestone but ninety-seven percent of all students met or exceeded so of course we can assume that the nine students of course spread across racial subgroups there are some students there who didn't meet when we we isolate that we want to know who these kids are we're expected to know every student where they're at and where they're going and we know that when we look at that invisible data for those students were Hispanic and five of them were multiracial students and some of them didn't meet the milestone even though they didn't show up on our data so how do we respond it done away to visible and the invisible data there's a lot that we do we know where every child is performing one hundred percent of the time we use qualitative and quantitative methods for collecting data on our students I meet monthly with teachers they're accountable for their data they're accountable for their teaching and we have conversations about that and they're accountable to each other although we have had reading support in the past we don't this year but that just means we need to work harder as a team to get kids where they need to be we focus the last two years on our professional development for differentiated instruction even though we're a high-performing school we have students who are on IEPs and have goals we have students that don't speak English or have limited English proficiency and it's expected that all teachers learn how to and implement differentiated instruction in my role as an instructional leader in the classroom is providing feedback to them on what they need to do to help move kids forward in their learning and and we spend time on that too so our largest gap or our achievement gap it dead away it lies between our general EDS students and our students on IEPs and our special ed students last year we had eight third grade students on IEPs we worked closely between our specialized staff and our general Ludd staff and we had 75 percent of those students being the milestone at the end of the year this year we're on track to have all nine students of our third grade students that are on IEPs meet the milestone so things that we do to respond to our gap that exists have to do with the connection between our general LED staff and our specialized staff and having consistency and our program implementation so that staff general Ludd staff and specialized staff are working together on getting kids to their goals and reaching their potential we also involved parents in the conversation of what we're doing and why we're doing it we outline their role for how to help help their child succeed and how to work closely with the school so and finally you know we want to continue to grow as a school we want to move every kid forward and and so there's some things that we have in place that create sustainable growth it's our sustainable growth model so that each year we're moving ahead and here's some of the things specific to the milestone data we're talking about reading we're talking about literacy we maintain an emphasis on quality instruction especially at k2 of course school-wide focusing on the big ideas the five areas implementing our core reading program at the district with fidelity one thing that we've done it done away to is evaluating what we do with kids well we're in a guided reading group what are they rest of the kids doing when they're functioning and working independently in the classroom we use research based activities and tasks that we expect kids we want kids to be able to work independently but also know that they're growing in their skills to get them where they need to be even if they're not working directly with the teacher or volunteer we continue to collect a variety of assessment data that helps to inform our instruction especially in the primary and we keep the invisible data visible it's really important that we know and where every kid is and and we have systems in place that done a way to do that and so when we look at our data as a school it isn't by accident that we've been able to grow its their grade the number and the percentage of students meeting the milestone we have a very intentional plan as really excited to share it with you tonight
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next we'll have solid middle school set and Charlene but good evening I'm very thrilled to be able to represent sellwood middle school in its community we have a very strong a tradition in the sellwood community of connection with our school our school is almost 100 years old the building was built in nineteen fourteen so we're coming up on our big anniversary we have very skilled and committed staff who know and appreciate mid-level learners we have wonderful middle school students who at time are utterly fabulous and a joy to teach every day and also we have a very strong parent community that is involved in our school and has supported the school and been involved along with the community for a hundred years and we have a strong academic program there our percentage of students reading at the benchmark level for six to eight is about eighty-seven percent math is about eighty percent and in addition to the strong academic program that we've been able to maintain its Elwood we have a wonderful array of electives and the one elective program is highlighted by a fabulous instrumental music program they were very happy and thankful for that we've been able to hold on to we have five different bands advanced intermediate and beginning band jazz band and two marimba bands fifty percent of our students three hundred two hundred thirty kids are and the students are involved in and play an instrumental instrument at sellwood and wonderful concerts I'd love to have you join us those bands perform all over the city and the region they were the only metropolitan we were the only Metropolitan performed at the middle school national middle school conference in November and we're also really thankful to be able to have a foreign language we can offer Spanish for high school credit and also Chinese we have a strong visual arts program and physical education a lot of our challenge has to do with making sure that every single student one hundred percent of our students are ready for high school and ready to be successful in high school and we've put in place increasingly put in places placed to support all of the students at so what we'll be hearing a little bit more about that and particularly focusing on eliminating the predictable achievement gap that is at sellwood and with children of color and also disabled children we've been involved in intensive equity work and are with our staff last year and this year particularly and and also have had psyop training and we redesigned our master calendar in the last two years and reclaimed increased instructional time it actually ended up being an increase of 11 and a half school days of instruction with the redesign of our schedule we went to an a/b schedule for the 6th and 7th grade so the 6th and 7th graders have an additional language art social studies period every other day and that allows them to to focus in on writing instruction and also reading which will help as we try to meet the standards in the new Common Core State Standards it also allows the 6th and 7th grade language arts social studies teachers to only teach language arts social studies and not an elective and so that they have you know two classes 60 kids that they're focusing on so that's quite an advantage for reading and writing instruction and we also do have done a mock writing test as you probably under know that the state has done on demand direct writing assessment for years and has it in the last two years because of funding problems so we have hired a state score to come in paid for it out of our consolidated budget so that our students still have that direct writing assessment in the fall and in the spring helps inform instruction and also gives feedback to students and teachers and parents on how the kids are doing in writing scored by someone who's totally objective in its uniform across every single child in the 6th and 7th grade to the writing information and we have been working to quite extensively on discipline and and also helping kids the struggling students and Seth my colleague Seth Jones who's assistant principal is going to tell you more about that alright thanks for lane so my name is Seth Jones I'm the assistant principal at so it and part of being an assistant principal as you get to work with discipline quite a bit and when you're at a middle school and you're with middle schoolers there's a lot of
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discipline issues that can come up so what we try to have a positive spin on it and I know we're trying to avoid acronyms as much as possible but PD is is positive behaviors interventions and supports I know we talked about this in schools a lot but it really comes down to a four to one ratio where you want to have for positive for every one corrective bit of feedback this works with your kids works with spouses to from from what I'm told so a big part of what we're doing is we're trying to do this we're also trying to make our expectations really explicit so we make a big to-do of last year so this is the second year that we've been involved with student services and the PBIS rollout another thing that we're just really thankful for that I'm really thankful for in the district is student services and how supportive and and reliable and proactively are so the we've had Dru Lawrence as a PBIS coach he comes out and he leads our staff through the champs training champs is another acronym but it's it's a student management curriculum essentially so it helps us helps our teachers helps us think about how we set up our students for success how we handle those challenging questions as they come up so that's been that's been a big help and so we've done that during art our late starts once a month we show discipline slides so the slide over here looking at our three-year discipline comparison I'll get to momentarily but we do look at our discipline data once a month and then we talk about so where are students getting in trouble what time of day we look for other patterns and other things that they have in common so we can try to anticipate and catch kids before they actually get into trouble we have a great PBIS team it's myself or counselor five fantastic teachers we meet once a month and we talk about what are ways that we can get positive feedback to students what are we what are ways that we can adjust our practices to keep students from getting into trouble so right after the winter break we plan this out in December we did something called a station rotation activity so we had nine stations within the building for nine common areas so you've got your hallways your cafeteria your gymnasium and the bus we've been having troubles on our school bus which I know it's it's unthinkable to middle school buses and problems but we actually the district was great we had a bus pull up right out front when it drops students off in the morning and this was my station so I was on the bus and there was another PBIS team member in the hallways and Charlene was in the cafeteria so then we had divided the school up so they took the students around in nine different groups and they had seven minutes at each station so you got all of the students in the school in nine different times on the bus and I was able to with a drive around there show them there's a camera in front of the bus there's a camera in the back of the bus this is what you do this is what you don't do and if you do this and if you flick rubber bands you're going to be suspended from the bus so it was just a way of trying to keep it light and fun at the same time serious because everyone's got a right to feel safe on the bus anyway we've been doing things like this and we've been having tremendous success so if you look up at this slide over here we are the blue line this year so the green line was the year before the black line was year before that so we've made great strides as far as this year and I didn't include our suspension data because I don't want to take up too much time but this year we've had five out-of-school suspensions last year we had had 34 so is really really working so we really appreciate it and I think that's it thank you thank you just a reminder you have about five minutes remaining Paul time to close it out Cleveland four high schools five minutes super ten Smith and board members it is with considerable pleasure that introduced Cleveland's principal Paul Cook Paul has the distinction of being the longest standing high school principal and PPS but not the oldest and I thought I was given this some considerable weight there but the laughters he served at Cleveland for over 10 years and since arriving at Cleveland over a decade ago Paul's established strong partnerships with his community in his alumni he's established a robust IB program created successful ninth grade academies to personalize learning and created opportunities for students needing additional assistance in core content areas additionally he led a successful campaign to redo the athletic field and track he believes in providing students with opportunities inside and outside the classroom to keep them engaged and committed to learning
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in 2012 US News and World Report recognized Cleveland as a civil metal awardee and as a high school in the top 10 of Oregon so truly it sees a phenomenal person to work with a great colleague Paul Cook Thanks trip um I have a few minutes 5 10 minutes I I'll go as quick as I can I know you have our profile in front of you I want to review a couple things there and try and give you a best snapshot of Cleveland as i can in just short amount of time as i described the successes and challenges at Cleveland High School please understand the teaching and support staff have had to adapt to some very far-reaching types of reductions over the past couple of years actually several years but staffing through staffing and budget and that they continue to do great work on behalf our students and Families so just as we talked through these these points obviously remember those points we have a great staff enrollment characteristics it's on it's on the profile our breakdown of students as far as ethnicity as well as our free reduced lunch program and number of tags students I won't go into that I do want to say that by the senior year our students make some decisions and they in planning college for college six percent of our students plan to go to a four-year college in twenty-four percent plan on going to a two-year college the rest of the students are either undecided military or into the workforce I want to talk about assessment first of all our state assessment scores on meeting and exceeding as far as all students in reading ninety-three percent of our students have met or exceeded in math seventy-six percent in science seventy-two percent and writing eighty-nine percent if I want to break it down by ethnicity and I want to break it down by just student numbers itself not by percentages so you get the feel of we're talking about actual students that are not passing these these tests so break down by ethnicity in reading these are students that have not passed so none of our african-american students that have not passed the reading test is 66 students have not passed and has six too many American indian/alaska native to students asian five Hispanic seven and white 12 students have not passed yet in math using the same have not passed african-american nine students American Indian Alaska Native seven Asian seven Hispanic 10 and white 63 students in special populations dll 114 students have not passed sped 12 and free reduced 18 but I want to pay particular attention to the PLL students 14 students have not passed we had one student pass I'll get to that in our challenges I want to talk more about that but I really wanted to make that visible in regards to writing scores the number of students not passing they compare very closely to our reading scores our 10th grade milestone students earning six credits and more as well as reaching nine percent attendance and better overall seventy-eight percent of our students have met that benchmark break down by ethnicity American Indian Alaskan native sixty-three percent have met the bench MIDI milestone Asian Pacific Islander 91% african-americans seventy-nine percent Hispanics seventy-six percent multi-ethnic eighty-one percent and white seventy-eight percent our four-year cohort graduation rate milestone overall eighty percent of our students have met or have graduated in four years break down by ethnicity American Indian Alaska Native eighty-six percent Asian Pacific Islander eighty-three percent african-american eighty-eight percent Hispanic seventy percent multiracial sixty-two percent and white eighty-one percent even though we are highlighted last year as one of the two high schools in Portland debts I double-digit increase in a graduation rate which is great we still have a long ways to go looking at the percentages they should be a hundred percent academics I want to talk briefly about our international baccalaureate program we have been up and running for about the past ten years at Cleveland High School we've seen a lot of growth in the number students that have been rolling into ib classes currently sixty-six percent of our students enroll into at least one or more Ivy classes and that's in the junior senior year sixty-six percent ninth grade academy or ninth grade academy work has also helped prepare students for the academic careers of IB through their organization schools skills they learn and they do interdisciplinary work by writing across
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the curriculum in their Academy so is a nice kind of precursor for ib ib is recognized by colleges as a rigorous academic program that prepares students very well for college colleges have noticed the skill the college readiness and the retention rate has increased for students who have completed IV coursework in their high schools well I'll talk briefly about a manager immersion program we begin a Woodstock elementary then they continue on to hosford and then they come to us at Cleveland High School the program offers content based courses that are taught in Mandarin with the aim of students becoming bilingual and by literate with a high level of multicultural understanding our ninth grade academy that's been in place for almost ten years now we have five academies so every freshman student is in an academy the academies are not tracked meaning there's not an honors honors academy students can do an honors contract with any one of the Academy's but they are all mixed so we have all academic but we spread out specialized students academic priority kids re ll students that are all spread out to the dura fiber academies we have a very strong performing visual art program we have bad we have choir and we have drama we have drama by the way everybody got to say that when you're in a high school don't say we also have beginning art classes and go on and to intermediate and advanced our classes as well as I be art classes we also have ceramics last year we began an avid program and abbasids for advancement via individual individual determination it's a wonderful program we currently have a ninth grade class and a split ten 11th grade class ab a-- class that offers to support in rigorous courses and all content areas the classes help with the opportunity gap giving students more access seventy-five percent of students in avid are students of color the goal is to have 100 center students ready for college entrance equity work with our staff we've been working on our professional developer the past year and a half we have a strong equity team made up of teachers and administrators ten of us are on that committee that planned professional development each month we are making great strides in a lot of awareness and look at our instructional practices and how it's affecting kids and we have more work to do there pd on our professional development on teacher grading practices trip and I've had numerous discussions discussions around great practices at the high school level we begin our professional development work around that looking at grading practices for example looking at the power is zero when when students are zero on a written exercise or homework and what does that mean and what kind of impact does that make on their grade so a lot more discussion on that and a lot more professional development our instructional coach has been so valuable John golden is a gym and I will speak later about one of the challenges in making sure that we continue with their instructional coaches such as John Gould netter school so two challenges I have a few challenges that I want to just just give to you and let you know and then I want to finish it up with some honors so while the challenges is been the cut in special education we've had we had to cut one and a half FTE last year we do not have a B program all students are our split or spread out within the specialized teaching staff we have a larger caseload for our special ed teachers and it's making an impact it's hard to get as personalized as we used to we have a small number of ll student population we have around 50 students with less students you have less support you have it less FTE and that makes a difference too we're challenged with ll students and without the newcomer program has affected us we don't have the sheltered classes as some schools may have we don't have that and obviously parvis do too just a smaller number of students what we have instructional coach like I've mentioned before it is so important last year was the first year we had an instructional coach and we had the whole for a full-time position he did more than just professional development for staff he's working with teachers we're going to teachers one-on-one something that teachers love to have have another eyes in the classroom besides an administrator but one of their peers in a classroom working with them and coaching them very very important 9th grade support last year we had in last few years we've had
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academic priority monies to support our students and this year we we don't last year we were able to use some of that money to allow teachers to work with students during intercessions intercessions or times that the end the quarter and the semester it helps students give them that boost that maybe they're there they're just failing a class and get that extra boost to pass the class and we had a lot of success with that the also we lost our support classes last year we had 15 ninth grade support classes this year we have three we can't keep up the numbers when you look at comparing classes not just compare ibeke an IV class has 40 kids in there has support class that has 10 and with the bit with the with the 180 number trying to balance out teacher loads is pretty difficult so when you have a comprehensive high school that has all these things going with I be with support classes with academies with immersion with art that's great I'm painting a good picture of a grid of a very good conference of high school but there's needs and we all know that i'm not i'm a there's not a blame game I'm just I'm just if you can wrap it up would be really appreciated what's that if you can wrap it up with big really blows away Kevin time I will catch I'm right here this is it I want to end on a high note I kept that challenges in the middle or at nearly abut I'm going to end with a high note I want to talk I want to say that the organ part of Education released report cards for every public school district throughout the state we earned an outstanding great reflection of our staff and students recently the oregonian ounce the top ten schools in each classification the oregonian cup is awarded to schools that exhibit a combined excellence in academics activities athletics and sportsmanship this past fall in the 5a state we are in 6 and state last spring trip mentioned we've earned top 10 in the state in the US News and World Report and in top 4% in the country and activities athletics has been a great year for our student-athletes we have around 900 student athletes compete in a fall winter spring sport we currently have over 30 active charter student clubs our speech and debate team earned its third district title and earned first and state honors drama department for very well this past fall winter and and and we have a spring performances coming up jazz band great job first and second place finishes and very prestigious competitions last spring our choir place first and pio competition and also first and state we have a great pair community they support us they supports with the oxygen with the foundation they do everything they do they can do they sell pepperoni sticks they sell everything they can besides the clothes off their back to support the school and our alumni are amazing our alumni are just fantastic and what they've helped us to and like trip mentioned about some of the bigger projects that we did they were a major player in making those things happen for Portland kids not just for Clavin kids but for Portland kids they use that field if you ever drive by the Cleveland field just watch how many kids are using that on the weekends or after hours teams that are practicing on that that have a muddy field to practice for state playoffs like Grant High School have come over user prac art term for practice that's pretty dang cool and then lastly this is it our students have had some many successes of successes over the past several years which is due in part to this drunk preparation from our elementary and middle schools yes at our high school teachers the staff have prepared them well for the next journey into college military or to work for Workforce along with the continued support of the parents we can expect our students have acquired a solid foundation to become successful citizens and thank you for your time thank you so now for our time to be able to ask some questions or to have some discussion in regards to the presentation compressor from Cleveland or comment sir well I just like to say thank you to all of you and Paul I want to say thank you especially for pointing out the challenges you don't have to apologize for those we know that there are challenges and it I think it helps us when we're making our decisions around budgeting to know what those challenges are and how prior cuts have affected your schools and so we really do appreciate you highlighting those things for us and we wish you didn't have them thank you I had a general question I'd love to ask sort of the k5 middle school in high schools maybe some representative responses if our governor
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and state legislators came up with more funding than is currently on the table and you were each given another hundred thousand dollars to play with you've talked about amazing programs amazing teachers and counselors and you know all kinds of things if you could help us understand what would have the most impact if you had a little bit more money at each of your levels I'd love to hear that thank you a great question Brian Anderson Buckman I think the hardest part in my four years at Buckman has been the loss of our support staff we when I first got there we had a reading support and we had math support and you know it really and with the difference in the test scores changing the last couple of years our kids have always been one or two points away from the next level and I think that our our special I'd kids are doing very very well in comparison to our genetic kids which I'm really proud of but it's been noticed by the teachers by the community even by the students at that small group support for the kids that are really struggling I feel we're really tackling the enrichment opportunities and I think we're really tackling those middle level kids that are succeeding but we have really all the cuts have happened with our support staff and they were amazing and they met with the kids pulled them out at times it didn't affect that they're learning but it really helped them and I really seen a difference in the data and we've been focusing on parent enrichment opportunities for kids and support opportunities but it's just not the same when it comes to having those professionals in working with those kids that's what I would thank you beautiful and I'm Tammy Baron at Abernathy and we've grown from a small school to school now over 500 and I have to say the same thing as Brian I have no counselor I'm the counselor one secretary of me no Peres and so you we've made some incredible improvement but that's because of our strong parent population and we have parent tutors throughout the building but what I don't have I've no reading support what I used to have was a reading teacher and those are one of the things that is eaten away at what we've been able to do and so it's those kids that are struggling both emotionally and academically and even though there aren't a lot of them there are enough that makes it very difficult in that way so when you ask what's really helps it is that those extra adults in the building that can give someone the time to spend with them I'll speak for Cleveland High School give me another teacher a hundred thousand dollars a teacher teacher and half I don't care teacher and a quarter I need more classes I need smaller class size and I want to keep our special programs intact like avid I need teachers to teach the teacher kids and that's a support program for kids I've already talked a lot but I would also provide support for summer school for those schools that have high populations particularly of English language learners to have kids out of school for three months and not getting any reading or English support is only is a long time and it makes it much more difficult for those kids to catch up I am Tim Lauer Lewis you said about a hundred thousand dollars I just want to impress upon I mean I it's it's helpful for us to hear it as we go into the budget cycle but it's also I think helpful for our governor and our legislators to understand that this money has a real impact and so that's why I'm trying to be better Steve um our particular program at first grade we have 32 kids in each class we have 33 at second grade so if I had that amount of money I would buy a teacher and do a blend at 12 Lewis is one of the eight or nine schools that used to be a title one school and as a result of that we have of our 63 kindergarten students we have I believe 11 or half day so they're dermis lead out on a full day experience and in the class size and because of the adjustments in such we've had to make those kind of shifts thank you all the questions thank you data a lot of semis
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test scores and clue you guys doing pretty well but I would like to hear more about your school's I don't think these are necessarily representative of your student body what their interests are what students are working on Cleveland mentioned there's Speech and Debate team and other various programs and I'd like to hear more about those sort of things in schools so I have the mic I'm very uh all of our students at Lewis have music twice a week we have a tremendous music teacher who with before and after school programs probably works with about 120 students with quarter Club strings instrumental band in an orphan sambal guys fantastic Mary Patterson at Woodstock so we have the Mandarin immersion program at Woodstock which feeds into hosford and then Cleveland and so it's a unique school in the sense that we have a neighborhood school that comes from people who live within our catchment area and then we have people from all over the city who come in for the lottery so the Mandarin program pulls in after-school activities which include a Chinese dance class which really lends itself to teaching more widely about the culture of China and then students who are in the neighborhood program we have teachers who join us as exchange teachers from China and I make a point of having them go into the neighborhood classrooms and teach the children some basic Mandarin and a little bit about the culture so that we try to operate as one school and not two schools within one building but linking both questions your question Bobby about what to do I think it's very similar story across the district in terms of as we lose staff then as principals we're faced with what do we cut do we cut music do we cut PE do we cut our counselor for a building with over 500 students a neighborhood program and an immersion program when work Hut I'm trying to balance the immersion staff with my neighborhood I can control the numbers coming into the immersion I cannot control the numbers coming in to my neighborhood and that's growing cebit kindergarten class of 33 in the neighborhood how do i balance that with my immersion classrooms I have a half time counselor now with 500 and some kids no music but i do have PE so we have lots of different activities going on in each school is very rich and what it can provide I think we're all struggling to continue to provide that level of richness yeah okay sorry want to hear more about the different activities between light of the time I want to just call out and commend sellwood on your outstanding results on the discipline and I know we're waiting to hear is aboard the update from the discipline policy in terms of results district-wide and by cluster so looking forward to more hopefully similar data soon so I guess it's more just a comment and maybe a question out to your regional administrator or and or the superintendent just in terms of are we seeing the same level of you know a the ability to invest sounds like the professional development has been key in this but also be just the accountability of the focus that we're clearly seeing it solvent in terms of really focusing in on getting this type of result which is what exactly what we're looking for yes one of the things that I talked with all the principles about and their AP its disciplined and we go over what happened last month and how many and you know looking at the decrease and we also look at the students who are your students students of color you know are they right students as you know the Cleveland region population we have a combination and many of them in their situation would be white students because it's a larger part of the population or they special needs students in the different classrooms that you may have so we have good sit down we look at the discipline we look at the situation that may have happened and some of them at the elementary level don't have much discipline at all others it starts to creep up as they get older and other things start to come into play thanks and do you have a sense in terms of the investment in the challenges in terms of the budget that it's going to have an impact as well in other words are we going to have challenges and being able to maintain the professional development and the other pieces that have really been key yes some of the schools are able to do PB is at one time we were doing sorry safe and civil schools sometime back and a lot of shoes got involved but it didn't continue so now we're moving into the positive behavior intervention supports but that's also depends on how principles are able to balance their money if they can do that or not do that some of our title one schools and last
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year we had a few people who are sitting here we're title one schools and had some additional funds and services and they're no longer title one schools anymore not so much that they don't have a different student population but that we changed the formula and so that took funding away from them when we had to do that and in programs that they had in place aren't there and I just have to say I greatly appreciate the efforts of the high schools of having been a high school principal and knowing you have a couple assistance to back you up I greatly appreciate the middle schools haven't been a middle school principal and knowing you have a couple of ApS or at least one to back you up and usually at least a half time counselor but many of the elementary folks it's them in their secretary and then maybe the next person who is able to be at about is their custodian you know and then the kitchen help and when you're dealing with four or five plus hundred students that's a lot of little bodies with a lot of little issues that come with that and so I think the job is getting extremely challenging especially for people who are running solo in a lot of these buildings with some of the challenges that are just coming up when we don't have those supports in place that's you from I want to go back to T'Pol and the the cohort graduation rate I mean this is a really great chart of with really big games last year and I and some fantastic games with kids of color and so can you give us a couple of lessons learned what is there something that you could point to where you went this is what we did that really made a difference with these kids this class specifically that the senior class was the one of the years when we as ninth graders as in their ninth grade academies they were signed to mentors teachers of the ninth grade academy as well as administrators and counselors we all had four to five kids that we mentored and we checked in all year long and we felt like that made a real impact and set them it was a connection that we had all four for the whole four years I knew four to five students very very well more than I ever knew him before because I met with him all the freshman year and then continued on to throughout the rest of yours also I have to say our credit retrieval program helped it allows students to stay at Cleveland to retake classes and earn credit that they had failed before it's not that they hadn't taken him they they failed him and they were very close to passing so I didn't have to go to night school and change your whole schedule around to make that fit because he also made him worked or in other activity so they stayed engaged to the high school and we kept him there and that was that was a great part so I think both of those things really really made a difference so have you continued those things going forward I mean he said well that clumsy were able to heart yeah part you know with the mentoring piece there was some obviously some hours involved in paying teachers you know yeah it was only a couple hours and they put in many many many more hours in that that was part of it the credit retrieval we have a few classes and credit retrieval this year but again it's a staffing issue how many classes can we really afford to offer you're doing your intensive again to you made that decision oh we had our intensive last year we had 15 and this year we have three so what is that this support classes freshman support classes that our academic priority kids are usually in our intensive classes getting extra help from ninth grade academy teachers we just don't have as many this year compared to last year you don't have as many classes of support but you use have this same number of acne mostly kids ocean oh yeah and you just couldn't get the class numbers right high enough right you know they intentionally smaller so last year I think the average was probably around 10 students a class but when you lose that ft it's really difficult to offer classes of 10 students so the other difference to those we made a difference we made a choice to have more academies this year we have five academies in the past we've had a lower number or maybe we had five academies but more students so we we just said as a ninth grade academy we're going to make our academies smaller if we can't have all the support classes that we knew we couldn't have let's try to make our academies a little smaller and so we did that by having less students coming into cleveland as freshmen and then spreading those students that was in five academy so instead of having 35 kids in an academy
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they're more like 28 29 so that helps that that will help this year for sure when they don't have that double block class of support i'm gonna you know thank you for your you know for that information because that you know we were here at that point i think when we're beginning to have those interventions you know for 9th grade but i'm not sure that we have gotten folie à in understanding in regards to what was effective in regards to you know the different strategies that were applied I remember your presentation when you came to the board and that you know excitement i think in regards to the you know saying i'm going to have 45 students that I'm going to get to know and that other adults in the building are also you know making that commitment to do that and I think it does make a difference is i also want to thank you and appreciate the fact that you you know mention the actual numbers of students in regards to what that means because sometimes we you know we get kind of comfortable with the idea that you know percentages you know are you know that that looks better but yes it doesn't it doesn't have a better outcome for those other students that are not making it within that percentage and I think that we we lose you know quite a bit of that in way in regards to I think the continued commitment to those 12 students that are not making it because we know we say you know we we made the target but right at what cost right so thank you I don't know if they're all her comments I mean one of the things that I saw in and I seen this it other reports is the drop in math in some of the schools 5th grade math and I haven't gotten this early a an explanation that that well not that it's trying to satisfy me but you know trying to get an analysis in regards to what it is because you know and there was no mention regards to whether the adoption of the new math had anything to do with that so I'm wondering whether why sure so do you want me to mention the school that I still saw that often just made a good thing it just one thing that I'd like to comment about that is I do feel that the first year our teacher I'm a big fan of bridges I was also a fan of investigations but I really understand how much bridges really is covering those things that the kids were missing but the teachers had a learning curve you know we were doing math a lot more than we ever have as well as our number corners in the morning I really foresee that this is going to be an incredible adoption and I think it's going to make a big difference for kids I know if I had learned this kind of math when I was a kid I would have a lot more confidence so I feel it's that and I also feel that the change in scores for the state tests really made a difference for a lot of kids that were so close that the cut scores and so I think there's a combination of things happening at the same time common core standards a new adoption a teacher learning curve but I go into those classrooms now and I've never seen the commitment to math like I'm seeing any excitement level of the kids and those kids that used to just own out so I do believe that it's a work in progress and we are going to see much growth in the future thank you again and thank you again for that commitment to the one hundred percent I think that we need to I think strive for that even more and I think you know if we set that as a gold I think that we can meet it but we have to do that stretch so thank you all for for sharing all this information and going wait for my presence on the TV okay I'm Kevin Bacon I'm from Hofstra in middle school and I know one thing that's really important to the superintendent and also to the board has been the over referral of black and brown boys to self contain special that classrooms and I just want to say that at hosford we have what's called Abby Abby room program and to explain an acronym so I don't get in trouble later that's what's called a behavior room it's called a special learning center for behavior kids kids with IEPs for behavior challenges and we have our fabulous 14 of those students and with the help of the district you know we
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decided that we were just going to blow that model up and those kids were going to return this fall with full schedules like every other student and I got to say that in doing that we had to prepare the parents we had to prepare the students we had to prepare ourselves myself and Marilyn for for that transition but you know the staff has really embraced that and those kids are 100-percent mainstreamed we've been working with Mary Pearson the director special add along with Jeff Brown who's our program administrator and of course Larry and you know we've seen a little bit of a rise in our discipline data as a result of this mainstreaming but far and away far and away the benefits that we've seen from the students who who were not getting core instruction from highly qualified teachers you know they were getting self-contained instruction and once you move into the middle the middle level you know that that instruction is just more than one teacher can really handle to try to deliver science language arts social studies and math so those kids are out in those classes and in doing well and so we just want to want to highlight that and let you know that that that some of that work that you wanted to see done is happening and those kids are are thriving and they're going to be better prepared for high school because once they left hosford in eighth grade and went to their various high schools all of a sudden they were sort of turned loose into those academies which are real supportive but at the same time it's just that was the first time they were really out there with their peers and so I just want to highlight that and say that before before we adjourned thank you for stepping up and if we all can come to the front we're going to take a photo s we usually do and then

Event 2: PPS Board of Education, 01/14/13 Study Session Part 2 of 2

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we're going to resume our meeting so if folks that they need to continue the conversation if they can do that on the outside will be greatly appreciated we are next on our agenda is the enrollment balancing for Jefferson and pk-8 and superintendent Smith there's two this one i'm going to call up Judy Brennan who is our director of enrollment transfer Harriet Adair who is the executive director of schools and operational support and Antonio Lopez who is our regional administrator for the Jefferson cluster and these three have been leading this process that actually began last summer and we have the most recent stage in the process we've had six and six potential scenarios that were really making visible all the potential ingredients that would could go into what may become the final scenario and we then went out and listen to people's response throughout the community both internally and externally I think we've had more than a thousand people weighing in on just what the various features what the impact is what we're trying to accomplish with this is a number of classes offered at each grade level that lets us provide the most robust program and access to program for students so that's our primary driver particularly at the middle grades where we've got schools that have been too small to have the kind of robust programming we want to offer tonight we will have two scenarios that come before you that really now bring that both of which could be viable both of which are still a work in progress and will feed the next the next period of public input that now I become the listener to that will inform a proposal I come back and present to the board on februari first or release at februari first for president to the board in February forth so we're again still in process you're going to hear two proposals that have features it's not a vote on one proposal or the other it's really putting forward here are the ingredients that get us the thing we were shooting for which is robust access to robust programs for every kid in that cluster that adequately prepares them for high school so before I actually go to the meat of the presentation what I want to make visible is just what the processes and opportunities for input because the public will again have a lot of opportunity to weigh in so today before actually bringing this to make this public before the board staff at each one of the schools that were impacted we're presenting to the school staffs at each of those schools we have school-based informational sessions for families that will be held on January 17th and january twenty second we'll be having a session that specifically for partners pastors and policymakers on January 18th we'll have a community input session for language specific communities on january 24 and then another community input session on january 26 which is a saturday at one o'clock and we will have various members of the board myself and the team that's been leading this as well as principals and leadership from the schools at all of these sessions listening but all of that then feeds what will become the final proposal so we're really looking for response to any aspect of the proposals that people want to respond to so with that I will turn it over to our team to get into the specifics of what are now the two proposals Thank You superintendent Smith ah co-chairs Gonzalez vallejo two Raptors the student representative and superintendent my name is Antonio Lopez I'm the Regional Administrator for Franklin and Jeff person and tonight in the hour that we have we have three objectives and the objectives to review the enrollment and balancing process the second to describe that two options for a dye Jefferson pre-k a cluster the community engagement plan and lastly to listen to your questions and feedback so we're going to start with this is a cycle that you have seed and right now we are in that listening and proposal we will move into the decide and eventually to the implementation and then we start the cycle again in terms of assessing whether the employment issue was successful so as you can see we're in
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the right in the middle where we're ready for the next step and like a superintendent Smith described there is a process and that eventually it will be coming to this wall for a for a boat for a decision okay we do have this set up in a process for how we're going to do this basically what we're going to talk about today in terms of the process of how we came down to the two scenarios we looked at after listening to all of the input from the variety of audiences internal external stakeholder groups and multiple in multiple venues and forms we did decide on a couple of things and prioritized around a couple of things but things to keep in mind is that we know that the enrollment balancing of the balancing of enrollment by itself is not going to improve student achievement that what we're looking for our numbers that would get to the point in the Jefferson cluster so that every year annually would not have to be reducing staff because we don't have sufficient numbers in the building to be able to maintain the programs that we have in place so in setting the priorities for these last two options we basically came up with a way of balancing enrollment in two different strategies that would give us a significant enough numbers so that the resources that go with the numbers once you get them could be stabilized no matter which one of the two processes the focus is on academic achievement in the acceleration of achievement and the elevation of achievement the other focus is on making certain that all students have access to programs that we have already know will prove to be effective across the cluster so we're not looking at new things some new idea that we dreamt up but ideas that have proven to be effective in this cluster and we are also looking at establishing a sense of having students recognizing that pre-k through 12 is the trajectory for college choices and post-secondary options that you don't start at ninth grade to begin talking to students and getting them to start thinking about how what they might want to do once they exit the k-12 arena so over the years because the numbers in the in the cluster have fluctuated that has led to programmatic instability staffing instability and the inability to get these programs that we know are good things for kids in place long enough to get the results that we would like to have happen so the cluster once again to remind you are the eight schools that have guaranteed enrollment to the Jefferson middle college and we are also talking about the Humboldt and Humboldt buildings King and aqua green has low enrollment at all the grades fabien Vernon and woodland lower upper grade enrollment and Beach Chief Joe fabien limited class space across the building and boise le and humble has the potential for crowding in future years without changes we would see that constant up and down and sway that has been impacting this cluster for a number of years now so once again as I said we are going to try and right size these two proposals right size to school to make certain that we have strong academic support the emphasis is on the quality of middle schools across all of the input that we got consistently one of the things that we heard was things are great we like our primary grades or we really like this but every school every audience spoke to needy to strengthen even if they were pleased with what was happening they knew that they needed to have a much more robust middle grades program in all of the schools we also want to make sure that the enrollment changes will result in something that's an outcome outcome of equitable and high quality academic programs in other words why do the change if it isn't going to improve the academics in the building and as I said linkages to the high school curriculum and access to colander college and post-secondary opportunities of course we would like all of our students in the Jefferson cluster to feed Jefferson High School we proud of that school we support that school but if they make other choices we obviously want to be successful no matter where they go and so we're looking at Advanced Placement and other high school options and other higher education partners are linking with us like the PhD two three piece with Concordia we are looking for kids to be able to be academically successful so they can take advantage of any option that comes their way and of course we want to nurture college-going college-going cluster across oh this is hard to say college-going culture across the cluster okay who but that sends in
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there all right so here's the process do you want to do the process Judy okay so as superintendent Smith said we began the process in the summer but actively since the fall we've held a number about 20 formal meetings we release six scenarios for feedback we received about 250 written comments on those scenarios alone and over 600 comments written comments so far all of those comments are documented in binders that are in the board office and as we continue to get them we'll continue to update that body of information we now are at the point as you heard that and we'll be talking about tonight we have two options where we've called down the feedback on the scenarios to to workable sets of infirm we're proposing six meetings and will run through that list again there's a few things that that maybe are even change since since earlier looking towards the superintendent's recommendation and then your actions coming next so this is just a quick reminder that we have different types of tools that we can can use an enrollment balancing that make different kinds of changes and some of them such as changing the transfer policy tightening down transfers or making boundary changes are what we call slow change so it can right size over time but it doesn't bring a lot of immediate impact particularly when you're looking at the middle grades because we start things like boundary change at kindergarten and that's it has the biggest impact at the lower grades it takes years in a cave school before you see that impact in the upper grades other things such as grade reconfiguration consolidation enclosure does cause existing students to move so it's more impact immediately it's more disruption but you get bigger results and of course we always look at things like facility changes options as well but as we know we're limited due to cost and so that's just the framework of changes that we're designing these options with it and finally I just wanted to mention as you've heard we're focused on strengthening strengthening the middle years we're looking at having at least two classrooms for grade level in a k-8 even in those grades six seven and eight which means you need more kids at the lower grades so trying to right-size schools in an effective way is an important part of this and in a way that crosses all of those grades we would look at it having at least six classrooms per grade level in a middle school which is three to four feeder schools and at this point there's no middle school in the cluster now okay all that preamble we would now like to describe for you the two options you've received a packet of information that includes maps and hopefully those will be visible where you are i'm going to put some on the screen here i don't know how helpful i'm going to be so let me know later if any of this information up here isn't visible okay so in the first option our focus is on maintaining the KH show that it exists in the cluster now but consolidating in a couple of particularly taking three schools and consolidating down to two in order to increase access to programs for students so in this change Chief Joseph oakley green and woodlawn come together next year as a single pre-k school that operates on two campuses with this the Woodlawn building would close after that point the boundary for Woodlawn would be divided between Chief Joseph aqua green king and access or sorry King and Vernon and additionally the access program currently at Saban would move to King so visually here's what this looks like with not sure that's going to work very well so you see the Woodlawn campus closing the boundary the potential boundary change in the portion of the Woodlawn boundary that would become part of the Chief Joseph ugly green boundary the portion that would become part of the king pounder II and the portion that would become part of the Vernon boundary and you see ockley green and Chief Joseph of becoming a dual campus single school that yes that would sort of probably grades pre-k through eight you see access coming into King and a small boundary change that over time builds enrollment at Vernon one of the questions that you may have is why would Woodlawn be the school that we would look at for a closure in this scenario we visited Woodlawn a couple of times this fall made many other visits there the Regional Administrator the former regional administrator there are a lot of strengths and values in Woodlawn teachers parents students working very hard on achievement other factors that we see though are that a capture rate in
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their neighborhood area that's chronically low that's hovering around forty percent so more than half of the students who live in their neighborhood continue to make other choices and even though they've seen growth at the lower grades it's still it's still so low and so suppressed it's going to take a long time for those changes to impact the upper grades where the sizes are smallest in addition we see continuing low achievement data and we understand that that means that we we have to accelerate and elevate our academic efforts in that school it makes it much much harder to do that at the middle grades when their numbers are really low so we see that we need a more immediate change in order to give students the access to programs that will nurture that academic success there are other possibilities we want to quickly mention aligned with this option as you can see we have no direct change for Beach Boys ele and Humboldt or Fabien in this option however there are possibilities in the future there could be immersion changes that are aligned with the district's immersion plan and that could have an impact on on beach in some way Boise Elliot humble could look at moving to the tub tub and campus in the future Fabien is slated to receive portable classrooms in advance of its full modernization and continuous partnership with Concordia and 32 PhD there are additional boundary changes that we could look at in the future to right-size neighborhoods within those schools so there are some unusual aspects to their neighborhoods that we we would be happy to go in and clean up once we get these major all structural decisions made Humboldt could become a regional early learning center in 2014 or later we want to align that overall Early Learning Center plan for the Jefferson cluster and the rest of the district with state objectives and that and you'll see more of that coming later in the interim we believe that all the schools that have pre-k now will maintain pre-k so long as funding is still available for that and finally we want to say that it's important to probably look at our high school duel assignment choices for future students and make sure that they're appropriately lined again once we make these important structural decisions these are the types of changes that could come behind quickly by the numbers here are estimated enrollment impacts you can see what the current enrollment is at each school what the estimated enrollment would be if we did nothing and what the change would be I probably should have just highlighted the schools that change and let those that say the same but you can see particularly the Chief Joseph line is the line for the combined Chief Joseph ugly green and woodlawn so about 1100 students divided between though between the teachers of an aqua green campus allows us to fully utilize both of those schools off the green would be full for the first time in a long time Chief Joseph would not be overcrowded so long as we could make grade structure changes that made the most of a larger building still serving Chief Joseph serving for the lower grades you see King growing both from the inclusion of access and from the beginning effects of the boundary changed 636 we still believe that there's some room for growth between the the King boundary and the access program and then Vernon continuing to grow through through an enlarged neighborhood and also through increased capture rates so what you've seen then is we have immediate and program access improvements particularly for Woodlawn Chief Joseph oxy green and Kings students we have slow but steady growth for Vernon this option does require that we close the school it requires that we develop a strong shared campus model and it'll mean that we'll have additional transportation needs including some students who are now walkers to their current school other specific resource impacts will be modeled if this option becomes the superintendent's recommendation so we would imagine that there are many more questions that you might have a community members might have and we will do our best to resolve those questions as soon as we were able to sort out which of these options indeed is going to be moving forward so that's my brief summary on option 1 i'd like to turn to option 2 this is another way of leading to similar outcomes but using different structures and impacting different schools so it brings a middle school back into the cluster as well as ensures that the remaining k age are programmatically strong certainly if you're bringing strong middle grades competition to schools nearby you want to make sure that the caïds that are left are ready to stand up to that
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competition in this the current ugly green school we close at the end of this year and then reopen in 2014 as a junior middle college school serving grades 6 through 8 so that would require a planning year and during that time current aqua green students would move to Woodlawn many of them are from other neighborhoods because in grades K through 5 it's a focus option choice so the students would also have the right to return to their neighborhood school they preferred that we also would need a location for the aqua green neighborhood 6th grade so the kids that are from the Chief Joseph neighborhood for fifth grade and that could be woodland there's also the option if that doesn't work of portables on the Chief Joseph campus but that comes with cost in addition to that change that is to setting a middle school at aqua green that's fed by four schools that slide name the four schools no why don't I name those four schools they would be Beach Boys II Elliot Chief Joseph and woodlawn in addition to that king and Vernon would consolidate into a single school an International Baccalaureate school both of those schools currently have that program it would be a larger and more robust school under this change we envision two ways that that consolidation could happen the first the most abrupt the most traditional is that one of the schools closes the other all the students go to the to the largest building that would likely be king and then we would do boundary changes to make sure that that neighborhood was right size to fit that one building but we also want to continue some of our out-of-the-box thinking and recognizing the programmatic alignment that always already happen to those schools and that we'd like to find another home for access which is right now at Saban we would also proposed that it's possible to have both campuses remain open in a shared campus model similar to what I just described her aqua green and Chief Joseph and that the access Academy their grades one through aid would exist on one of those two campuses and as I said if we go with a traditional consolidation we would have to do boundary changes so I'm going to flip to the map here and you see the for feeder schools feeding into aqua green you see the one you're the shift for aqua green current students on to the Woodlawn campus beginning next year and then aqua green open in 2014 you see our either/or way of consolidating King and Vernon that may include access or may not and you see the potential for some boundary changes that might have to be made if we go through traditional consolidation King becomes the new school the Vernon building closes though boundary changes would likely have to move through fabien and fabien isn't a school that can accept more students for several years so there's some complexities that could come with that one of the questions that you might have or I just wanted to spend another minute on this detail that's in this particular option of our request for a planning year to develop our middle school model it's a traditional method for opening a new school where you take the time to hire your administrators select your curriculum build your relationships both with your feeder schools and what the high school that you're going to be sending students to build up your marketing strategy give your feeder schools time to adapt and then you go ahead and open the school so those are some of the things that we're looking for here we believe that that time will be extremely valuable in getting that new school off to a strong start again some future possibilities that I mentioned before exist as well with this plan including future possible changes with immersion the fabien plan remains largely the same under this as it did what I described before we might still have additional boundary changes between some smaller in some smaller neighborhood areas the Early Learning Center potential exists and the need no doubt to realign our high school duel assignment choices or at least examine them make sure that they're still appropriate after we decide these structural changes the impacts that we believe come with this option are improved access to our middle grades programs and to high school and beyond that it really galvanizes the notion of a junior middle college as a theme that drives that college ready culture what cluster wide you're right that's hard to say across across the the area that there's strength in a planning year but it does require additional staff and student movement it requires us to decide to either closer school or
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develop a dual campus model that'll be additional transition and transportation for many students and there are other specific resource impacts that will be modeled if this is the option that becomes the superintendent's recommendation finally by the numbers you see Beach Boys II Elliot Chief Joseph and woodlawn as our feeder schools as k5k fives that doesn't include their pre k if you look at for example chief joseph at 513 Woodlawn at 444 like if under this model that's a that's a place where a boundary change might make sense might be just enough to build Woodlawn right to the size that we would want and provide a little more space at Chief Joseph which is full right now so that's an example of how a future boundary change might support this overall structure change you see the the middle school in 2015 with 522 students in it what's going on in the cluster right now is that you have significantly high numbers of students in grades four and below so for that first year I mean we can count how many kids are attending the schools and those clusters and we see that it may start with a relatively small like sixth grade but it'll grow over time so starting with about 480 in the first year 522 on the way up to 600 this would have an opening sixth grade class of about 200 students which is what we look for in our middle school model okay so that is the place summary and then we quickly go over where we are with ya so today we met with the staffs of our schools aqua green chip Joseph Wald lon and further the princess will work out a talk to the other schools and what you have right now is the plan in terms of how we're going to take these options to the community and as you can see we're going to be pretty busy in the next two weeks so we have a variety of meetings in the different schools we have on january twenty second we meeting with the planning team to help us in the beginning in terms of the planning we meet around that one hitter with the ESL families you see that we meeting with King and access and then in January 26 we have the community forum that will be at Jefferson we also have a meeting with all the special education families we have our online survey that runs through the 28th if wishes the communique give us ideas of P back parties process and one thing that the wheel with that we keep in mind is how do we make sure that we hear from the families that that for some reason or another historically we have now heard from special you know families of color I mean everyone but how do we how do we intentionally go and look for the families that historically have not cannot be now represented how do we also engage our partners and we have a meeting with a with the partners with our ministers in that community in terms so we want to hear their voice and also including that different organizations like the local churches sei the Latino network airco and those organizations all right so we're ready for any questions suggestions concerns thank you very much I guess it just a couple of questions off the bat I'm in option one I see some still having some some middle grade issues with King and Vernon I know the King numbers were increased because of the access program but is that program going to operate separately from the other middle programs I mean we'll have students under that you know under the roof but that may not be exactly what we're looking for we might be looking for students within those particular middle gear classrooms so I'm not really sure how that program is going to integrate so we may still see some number issues within King I think the same is true with Vernon I mean we're looking I think the comment was slow and steady I don't know if slow and steady is is where we
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need to be at this point i i i think the other the other piece I'm not going to touch the shared campus issue because I think some of my colleagues might but the the beach essentially leaving beach alone in this case which which some might seem think is being appropriate you know I'm not quite sure how how we can continue to support with the size of that space support both a version of the community portion of the school and the immersion portion of the school particularly with with goals of the district moving towards increasing immersion as an option so those are some of the initial questions pardon me initial questions that I have with with option one I can throw some questions out so a couple questions this one would be around the emirate again around the immersion piece and when we would see recommendations or what some scenarios or ideas for that could be because it's pretty unclear open-endedness information here so that would be helpful to be clear on that obviously the dual campus models leave an area for a lot of questions from a lot of folks I'm sure what type of grades split and numbers and what would make sense yeah mmm and then another piece would be just additional detail and I understand that maybe for some of this you're wanting to wait and is that wait and see how much how deep at the detail you go on which scenario when you're not sure which scenario you're proceeding with but having said that in that one that has a middle school I think would be really helpful at what as soon as possible or feasible to have more detail about what exactly that program could provide and what that would look like so there's just I'll stop there and let others way I know director no sent a bunch a question so I know she wants to articulate and them I can just give you guys my list of questions that i shared with board members yesterday i think it was him but i will bring up a couple of them one had to do with immersion very similar to the questions that Ruth tour director Adkins was asking another one had to do with Concordia i still havent some of these questions or questions i asked about a month ago when we were all together and I still haven't heard an answer on any of them so one of them had to do with Concordia and what kind of discussions are going on and what do they think about a k5 versus a k-8 I think that'd be helpful and then of course there's the question of k 5 vs k 8 and i know that you know the original intent intent which was before i was on the board was that the k-8 were supposed to be better or serve students better and so i am again asking for information about k 5 vs k 8 someone left me a sheet from december of 2011 so I wonder if we have any updated information about a comparison of how our kids are doing in the K fives versus the K aids and how they were doing those students who are in k aids now what's the history on those students before how are they doing before I know they're not the same students but what kind of a difference has it made in that neighborhood having a k-8 versus a k5 so I'm looking for things like test scores milestone comparisons discipline referrals attendance records all of those kinds of things and high school success what it's looking like when those students get to high school k aids versus the K fives I'm a I'm a little concerned about the split campus to me it just seems like a bigger middle school with a few more grades in it is it going to be a 48 or is it a 38 or is it a 58 or what is it going to be and then I also you know my own experience with the split campus is the Holyrood one because it's in my district and I haven't heard much good about that so I'm just a little concerned about that whether it's really the best thing for children and
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then I be again what's our policy how's it going to go in elementary schools is this something that provides so much benefit for students that we should be converting all of our schools is it a matter of cost and if it's a matter of cost is it something that we want to put as a priority for in these constrained budget times for access same question kind of the same question as around Concordia what's been the conversation with the parents there what are the interested in what the requirement is for access is it 99th percentile and is it every student there has to be at least 99th percentile poor plus ok I knew it was hi I'm just thinking 99 plus ok there's no criteria as well that's right yes so what's the criteria and then I had a question around utilization because I couldn't find my book that had how big each school wasn't how overcrowded some of them are and whether we could actually fit a k-8 into some of those buildings or no is that just an impossible dream for us to put a K a full-sized kade in there and then I guess for my colleagues on the board if we're talking about size of schools and one of the issues is the size what do we need to start thinking about for the next bond I know that we've been focused on high schools but if we really are having these kind of issues with our k eights maybe there's some question about we can do something in addition to just our high schools or or some little tweak into that so I don't have any I don't have any really strong feelings about either one of the options right now i just have as you could just tell a lot of questions and i think some of these questions are questions that we need to deal with on a policy level as a board and I would like to see us be able to do that before we make a decision on this but I think that we're probably now getting a little cramped on time for that so but answers to the questions would be fabulous so thank you that's just a one question you said k 5k pies and cakes or did you mean middle school in case um middle schools in Cades okay that's re okay so that's just an answer well I suppose it would be a good both would be the best I mean rk5 students doing better in a k-8 or then this you know so you could use you could do vote especially in comparison to how they were doing before they were k aids so very good um thank you for all this work and I think I I do immediately have a preference at this moment in time for the first option seems like it makes a little bit more sense to me but I'm excited to hear kind of what the community reaction is to it as hard as it is I think it's good that we're looking at potentially closing one building to try to make sure that we have enough kids in the rest so in either option that works I think an option one my biggest concern is I think what director Morton said which is the actual size of King and what really is the benefit in terms of the curriculum or the enrichment opportunities by putting access in that building i'm not sure that there would necessarily be a lot of overlap with the kids maybe there's a benefit in terms of teachers being close but i have big concern about the size of the Kings student population still under this scenario and would love to have more information on that and I guess I also am curious to know whether we looked at providing access with its own building because again I think when you have two programs that are so different sharing a building it ends up often times having difficult consequences so I'm just curious whether or not we looked at I was curious why access was thrown into this whole conversation to start with and I'm still curious about how it benefits in this case the students at king or the program at King maybe is what I should be saying a couple of other just more general questions I love the fact that we have the IB program at a couple of our schools here I would still like to understand if we're considering an ib high school option for those kids as
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they matriculate I think there's an assumption here that are that our pre-k kids would stay put for a year and then potentially move to the early learning center I still don't feel like I have my arms around whether that's a good idea or a bad idea to have an early learning center I think it's a different conversation perhaps but at the same time it impacts the numbers in all of these buildings and it may impact whether or not families feel a connection to the school right from the start so I just have a general question still about the direction we're going there and again it may potentially be another conversation but it certainly impacts this conversation and then i guess i do want to understand a little bit more the benefits of the shared campus model I mean I see it at Eastern myself and it it works it's it's fine i think there's some benefits and there's some real challenges and so as we as we look at a potential chief joe aqua green shared campus i think it would be worthwhile for us to all be very transparent and what's good and bad and difficult and challenging and beneficial to that model so so just following up on that one of the you know you said you've got these two options and so you don't want to go too deep on each one until you decide what structure you're going to go but I think for people to understand these options you may have to go a little deeper than this and so the idea about the shared campus at an option one that's a really big number of kids how would you split that and what would that look like because I think for families to have a strong opinion they'd really have to have more information about what that would look like and that's it that's a big number kids 1100 kids I don't think we have another school with this shared campus with that many students you know maybe it's fine because it split between two schools and it's manageable but how does that work so I think a little more development on that is important and then you know the idea of a junior middle college program what does that offer what's you know what is that we haven't had any discussion about that before so in order to choose between these things you have to know something more about what's what's the appeal of that and and then we have to have some pretty strong understanding about the numbers that you could support the numbers in a middle school and in the its remaining pre-k programs because we're not solving the middle grade problem with you if you weakened the remaining ka program so I have a you know strong concern about that that we go for one of these options or some mix whatever wherever we end up we want to end up with strong programs in all of our schools I'm the on the IB question it's intriguing to me to combine the resources for those Ivy programs in one building so that that seems like a plus because those are resource intensive and require a lot of staff development so if you have that in one place that that could be a real a real plus in terms of staffing I would think so i think that we need a little more a little more information to go on for us and for the community to understand what the choices really would mean what they would look like so when I guess I just want to highlight director Knowles your question about I be and whether or not it's we know that it's rigorous and we know that it's also resource intensive and I think that in some ways it's rigorous because its resources intensive and so whether or not like as a discussion is this what we're prioritizing i think is a good question just across the cluster and i'm not sure i was talking with one administrator and they were saying there there hasn't been a lot of research done an ib is equity how it works with different populations and so it'd be interesting discussion i think at some point um there i'm going to give some of what I kind of like I the shared campus like again director Knowles it seems like just renaming a middle school in an elementary school and maybe saying its share campus because it doesn't fit the exact
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enrollment grade configuration and I'm not sure that I'm i guess i need to be sold a little bit on unshared campuses I appreciate the boundary changes in option 1 i'm curious why we didn't i know that a lot of fob ians isn't developable land but i'm curious why we wouldn't look at that option and then to director knowles brought up the bond but when we're going to rebuild fabien i'd be curious what size were rebuilding it for and i don't want us to have to build a new school in three years in sale by that way by the way that means we're going to automatically close to more schools around i'd like to make that a really full campus and then again and our budget constraints i feel like we do have to be looking at building utilization as far as we have to be putting the most number of kids in the most in the biggest schools that we have and so you know i know that oakley I don't know how big opera greens facility is off the top of my head but that's something that I like about option two is combining two ib schools that are already on progress Vernon and King into a much bigger school like when I what I heard from from community members is that yeah what work we'd be happy to have a middle school if we could open a middle school with aiming for nine hundred because whether some people will leave or whether or not but they would feel really good about those options if you can't do that then it's almost like well then we'd rather prefer we'd rather stay with what we have and I'm not sure and some of these options that we get to a level that that folks would be excited about and the last thing I guess I'll say about option two is it it feels a little bit like what what what people who don't have to make the decision um get to imagine like we'll do a little of this a little less and there's a couple areas on here where we're not quite sure where they go we'll have to figure that out but we have to figure that out and specifically I'm thinking about those boundary change areas where it doesn't seem that they fit in this school and they don't fit in that school an option that I'll just toss out there ganks I heard in the community that if you're looking at option to building that aqua green middle school or maybe it's the middle junior middle college i'm going to get confused with all those names i'm going to tell you but that there was at one point a discussion if if beaches for example immersion program there middle grades would then move would there be benefit too at grabbing peninsula folks and i don't know what you know peninsula hasn't been engaged in this conversation i don't want to freak folks at pendants allowed but what would that make would that make sense to bring those two together and i don't know i don't remember what's on our list the next time but so i guess those are those are some of my reactions i do think that there will have i prefer a school or to closing in those options because i'm not sure that we're right sized in this cluster and that's always hard but i want to thank you for your plan to outreach from here on out because i think there have been significant sections of our population that we have not been engaged with when i look at the proposed closures or when I look at it affects really strongly one demographic of our population and that that just doesn't sit well with me so we need to figure that out so they get to loosen more today right but but there was a you know activities one mighty so my children went to school was a middle school what was the size at that point in time for probably about six energy 50 and 80 something right and that was their capacity I don't know that it was it at full capacity but it was pretty close to capacity 17 hundred yeah remembering what it was a little boy I know my car gone I can hear you fine it's just her okay um can I jump in with a couple go ahead here looking so option two it just a couple of court just maybe clarifying questions that I'd like to hear a response from if tonight is appropriate that'd be great but that I think director Belial men talked about the Spanish Immersion peace at beach if this is now a k5 is there any sort of Spanish Immersion post k5 what that what that looks like might be curious about that I think too
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eyes wise you look at the shared campus or consolidation of Vernon Vernon in King and you know 2015 projections with access is 985 does that can King hold a thousand students no no that's it that would they would have we would have to use two campuses in okay in that model exactly and if I could just really quickly the intent of the k5 beach k5 is that both neighborhood and murs and then go to grade 6-8 at oxy green the immersion program would then continue to feed into Roosevelt Beach neighborhood students also have the right of either attending Roosevelt or Jefferson middle college they have a guarantee table right so the immersion program would continue to oakley as well absolutely okay thank you director working can I just double check so King he could hold 735 well is that correct when I was the principal at Kean our number was around 800 so yes King can hold seller 1935 and the neighborhood facility was not part of the configuration at that point so the answer is yes okay i'm hearing yes and I'm seeing body language that might challenge that not from you from somebody else well the reason i would say that is because remember when i was principal there it was a pre-k five school so now you have six if he had 6 7th and 8th graders there you have the science lab that you have to put into the configuration we had computer labs and so forth and so on one of the things that we've talked about doing is having a neutral which i do not consider myself to be educator who has familiarity with those grade levels walk the building with a facilities person to really get a better sense of it because when they look at it with one eye and an educator looks at it with another I you get a different kind of an answer but I I believe you could get 700 students in that building and our practice something of a different right in terms of all this year some in terms of what people are doing this tastes based on the complexity of the program that was I was running when i was there actually it was a much more complex comprehensive program than in terms of some of the additional services we were providing and actually what's in the building right now is when we actually had money well we had more money from different kinds of sources we had the deseg money we had the what they used to call state disadvantage money he had title 1 money plus you had general fund monday and the way that the buildings were staffed was different at that point in time so it was a much different configuration but we had music and strings and no but all kinds of different kinds of things I want to be mindful the time that there and provide an opportunity for our stone represent to say something there but I want to take also my colleagues further bringing up the the dual language immersion you know one of the I guess the challenging things is you know the I guess from where we start I mean that that involvement does not guarantee necessary increasing and academic achievement and conversely you know more numbers doesn't necessarily without changing the academics you know there are taught in that building does not necessarily guarantee that they're going to continue to maintain those numbers as we have seen I think in the in the in some of the schools i think within the cluster in the I guess the discussion I me a part of it is that that you know the timing of planning and those things but you know changing in regards to the whole thing at beach I mean for example there are a number of folks that apply that get turned away because there is not enough capacity there and yet you know there is no immediate plans or that have come forth in regards to considering other schools within that cluster that would be interested I know that there at least from what I hear from parents at King there were some discussions at these and some interest from some of the parents there and and I haven't had those kind of discussions with other parents in that area but I think what the graphic Belial says I mean it's also if if we are feeling this now me the feeder pattern is that it you know they go to Roosevelt for for that you know what are what are other neighboring schools that can also be considered when that within that process I think would be important the challenge part of course we only dealing with numbers right now not programs but the argument
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that I keep hearing from people outside in the community is that ok but what are you actually doing to to entice people to remain in their in their neighborhood with with programmatic work that is you know that is of interest and I'm not sure that even with some of the proposed changes that are here even you know that there is mixing of of things that that will be sufficient to to guarantee that that enrollment that that we're looking for the greatest potential I mean I think in I think more than any other cluster it's in the Jefferson cluster and particularly I think that corridor of MLK are close to it in regards to including I mean increasing enrollment but I think we still have to talk about program and I'm not sure that you all I mean at what point I mean you're you're looking at that right well and I mean I mean I right but the way our system is set up right now right and this is community right it's this team's tasked with coming up with how to get the numbers right there's another team with how do how do we get the academics and how do we have a district-wide strategy for the programs but i agree but but if it could it just be in terms of the examples of what we could provide a different numbers what are this what if the program's could look like I think that's the level what is a program that would draw numbers to these schools right there plenty kids in this cluster the question is what what are the programs that people would say I want my kids to stay here in the middle grades but I think you heard Harriet speak to this a little bit and this has been a conversation that's been laced in with this but again we're not doing program development on this many models however what you did here is building programs that are college going building a college-going culture across the cluster you've got one that's a Spanish Immersion that you've got another one that's I be you've got voice Elliot Humboldt that's starting a stem program yeah I mean you've got like we've got the concept of the the junior middle college which would be like preparing students to be ready to enter a college prep kind of high school experience so you've got concepts they or things that are already in motion and number of schools across the cluster that do weave together in a how do you do a cluster wide college-going culture so I think you have that much of a concept and then you keep building but this has been a very robust conversation internally with our pre k-12 cabinet with our immersion folks with the principles at the schools with the community so I think it's kind of concentric circles of conversation that when we zero in on which one of these then you start to take the other conversation deeper I think we really what I'm thinking is that we need in order to be able to for the community and others to give input as to which of those you should select there we need that additional information we need we need greater detail what you know the same things we miss any way so things you outlined tonight yeah and I think thought that can we can do on some of the ones that the questions that you raised tonight but my point is it hasn't been absent conversation about program it's been very much conversation about program and what are the drawers and whether the places we're building on strengths of existing program so yeah just so I would say that I think that's the most important piece or those some of the most important pieces I think we've had a lot of focus on community input and I think that's important but I think that as the board we need to look and see what do we know is the best thing for kids and fit that with what the community says and I'm a little concerned about the conversation around aqua green as a college junior college prep program because i like to think and at least in the schools that i've been in in the cluster and in other clusters i'm finding in the k-8 and in the middle schools that they focus a lot on college going I mean there are college banners all over there's discussion about college in the classes and so I wouldn't want people to think that we're not looking for a college bound or career bound students and every single one of our middle schools they don't need and it's not necessarily a junior middle school where you have to go if you want to go to college so I would just be a little careful about using that language rope real quick but i can't i'm and I and again if you can explain this tonight that would be great but so options A&B that you had you showed us
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in December show a Woodlawn k5 estimated 2015 enrollment at route 389 tonight as 3 or 4 43 how do we account for the extra 50 plus students in the last month if you recall in order to create aqua green recreated as a middle school the current students that are there have to have options to call source so in this scenario you have a cohort of woodlawn students joining in with woodland k 5 students so you've got aqua green and woodlawn coming together then the middle grades splitting off in 2014 the difference of those additional k 5 students that are currently at aqua green going woodland is the difference that you see in the numbers is that right okay mm-hmm thank you you will any other questions comments I just had one more in terms of having aqua green an option to become a middle school is it necessary to wait a full year is that a nice to have er is that a must-have and I guess I'm asking because we have lots of middle school models we we know what the general curriculum is I'm I guess I'm asking the why why why wait a year and why wouldn't we be able to pull this off next year well there's many reasons why I don't think you could pull it off by sep tember of next year's if you went with that option if you were thinking he'll need a full year I'm thinking that the disruption it would cost and then after the year had begun you know that I wouldn't suggest right I don't so I think that's why you end up with a full years because I don't think if between februari and sep tember you could conceptually get the piece together because you want to do a couple of things that we haven't done one is that you want to have as much potential input from the communities as possible to answer the question of why would I want to send my student here and part of the reason they we want to send their student there is is that they would have some input into the programmatic base that ultimately gets put in place and in addition one of the things that also became very clear in terms of some of the conversations that we had is that organizationally there tended to be a sense that we don't fully plan out what it is we intend to do before we do it and then once implementation begins the lack of planning that came before ends up in the implementation not being as robust in as full-blown as it needs to be which ultimately then leads to lack of commitment to the follow-through which doesn't make the program go where it needs to go so it's really more of that than anything else I just had one more piece of information that might be helpful or maybe you've decided that it's about what reason but that in one of the options are in a couple of the options it talks about more kids being on a bus and buses in my head I mean extra expense and so I'm not sure obviously there are costs associated but it be as we as we reduced bus service produce bus service that be curious to find out what what additional cost that is especially as we talked about portables and temporaries and I just want to compliment the staff on getting this down to two options i think the six options were confusing and frustrating for the community so i think this gives us the opportunity to to really understand what we're all talking about so thank you for that thank you for your questions thank you yeah I hope that was able to provide some useful information to you I think that this point there's at least my sense there is quite a bit of hesitation on either model that that is being proposed and I think that it's much more parotid that we have into some other questions they got pose I think we'll be able to move forward or not and so I think looking forward to the next updated report thank you very much thank you thank you we have the next on the business agenda so the warmer now considered business gendarmes Houston is there any changes live is magenta yo do I have a motion a second to adapt to business gender sir moved director Reagan moose and director sergeants no no director Regan director knows that correct I heard it this way
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ok let's whatever is there I think the cat who got it first and so if I don't say it is there any board discussion twisting agenda misuse the journey public comment on lavista genta the ball now boat on on the business gentlemen favorite fish indicate by saying yes yes i'll post basilica by saying no the business Janice approved by the world 70 was doing representing us here holding yes wanted to announce before we adjourned that 2012 Oregon School Board Association elections have been conducted and I am pleased to announce that director regan has been elected to serve in the position number 17 in the OSB a board Doug Montgomery is also representing malama County he will serve position number 19 congratulations to both the next meeting of the borokii estate session on Tuesday generated 22nd 2013 at 6pm this meeting is adjourned thank you

Event 3: PPS Board of Education Study Session - Enrollment Balancing Excerpt

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my name is Antonio Lopez I'm the Regional Administrator for Franklin and Jefferson and tonight in the hour that we have we have three objectives and the objectives to review the enrollment and balancing process the second to describe the two options for a dye Jefferson pre-k a cluster the community engagement plan and lastly to listen to your questions and feedback so we're going to start with this is a cycle that you have seed and right now we are in that listening and proposal we will move into the decide and eventually to the implementation and then we start the cycle again in terms of assessing whether the employment issue was successful so as you can see we're in the right in the middle we're ready for the next step and like that superintendent splitter described there is a process and that eventually it will be coming to this world for a portable for a decision oh okay we do have this set up in a process for how we're going to do this basically what we're going to talk about today in terms of the process of how we came down to the two scenarios we looked at after listening to all of the input from the variety of audiences internal external stakeholder groups and multiple in multiple venues and forms we did decide on a couple of things and prioritized around a couple of things but things to keep in mind is that we know that the enrollment balancing of the balancing of enrollment by itself is not going to improve student achievement that what we're looking for our numbers that would get to the point in the Jefferson cluster so that every year annually we did not have to be reducing staff because we don't have sufficient numbers in the building to be able to maintain the that we have in place so in setting the priorities for these last two options we basically came up with a way of balancing enrollment in two different strategies that would give us significant enough numbers so that the resources that go with the numbers once you get them could be stabilized no matter which one of the two processes the focus is on academic achievement in the acceleration of achievement and the elevation of achievement the other focus is on making certain that all students have access to programs that we have already know will prove to be effective across the cluster so we're not looking at new things some new idea that we dreamt up but ideas that have proven to be effective in this cluster and we are also looking at establishing a sense of having students recognizing that pre-k through 12 is the trajectory for college choices and post-secondary options that you don't start at ninth grade to begin talking to students and getting them to start thinking about how what they might want to do once they exit the k-12 arena so over the years because the numbers in the in the cluster have fluctuated that has led to programmatic instability staffing instability and the inability to get these programs that we know are good things for kids in place long enough to get the results that we would like to have happen so the cluster once again to remind you are the eight schools that have guaranteed enrollment to the Jefferson middle college and we are also talking about the Humboldt and humboldt buildings King and aqua green has low enrollment at all the grades fabien Vernon and woodland lower upper grade enrollment and beach chief Joe Fabian limited class space across the building and boise le and humble has the potential for crowding in future years without changes we would see that constant up and down and sway that has been impacting this cluster for a number of years now so once again as I said we are going to try and right size these two proposals right size the school to make certain that we have strong academics or the emphasis is on the quality of middle schools across all of the input that we got consistently one of the things that we heard was things are great we like our primary grades or we really like this but every school every audience spoke to needing to strengthen even if they were pleased with what was happening they knew that they needed to have a much more robust middle grades program in all of the schools we also want to make sure that the enrollment changes will result in something that's an outcome outcome of equitable and high quality academic programs in other words why do the change if it isn't going to improve the academics in the building and as I said linkages to the high school curriculum and access to college
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college and post-secondary opportunities of course we would like all of our students in the Jefferson cluster to feed Jefferson High School we proud of that school we support that school but if they make other choices we obviously want to be successful no matter where they go and so we're looking at Advanced Placement at other high school options and other higher education partners are linking with us like the PhD two three piece with Concordia we are looking for kids to be able to be academically successful so they can take advantage of any option that comes their way and of course we want to nurture college-going college-going cluster across oh this is hard to say college-going culture across the cluster okay who but that sentence in there all right so here's the process do you want to do the process Judy okay okay so a superintendent Smith said we began the process in the summer but actively since the fall we've held a number about 20 formal meetings we release six scenarios for feedback we received about 250 written comments on those scenarios alone and over 600 comments written comments so far all of those comments are documented in binders that are in the board office and as we continue to get them we'll continue to update that body of information we now are at the point as you heard that and we'll be talking about tonight we have two options where we've called down the feedback on the scenarios to to workable sets of infirm we're proposing six meetings and will run through that list again there's a few things that that maybe are even changed since since earlier looking towards the superintendent's recommendation and then your actions coming next so this is just a quick reminder that we have different types of tools that we can can use an enrollment balancing that make different kinds of changes and some of them such as changing the transfer policy tightening down transfers or making boundary changes are what we call slow change so it can right size over time but it doesn't bring a lot of immediate impact particularly when you're looking at the middle grades because we start things like boundary change at kindergarten and that's it has the biggest impact at the lower grades it takes years in a cage school before you see that impact in the upper grades other things such as grade reconfiguration consolidation enclosure does cause existing students to move so it's more impact immediately it's more disruption but you get bigger results and of course we always look at things like facility changes options as well but as we know we're limited due to cost and so that's just the framework of changes that we designing these options with it and finally I just wanted to mention as you've heard we're focused on strengthening strengthening the middle years we're looking at having at least two classrooms for grade level in a k-8 even in those grades six seven and eight which means you need more kids at the lower grades so trying to right-size schools in an effective way is an important part of this and in a way that crosses all of those grades we would look at having at least six classrooms per grade level in a middle school which is three to four feeder schools and at this point there's no middle school in the cluster now okay all that preamble we would now like to describe for you the two options you've received a packet of information that includes maps and hopefully those will be visible where you are i'm going to put some on the screen here i don't know how help all kind of piece so let me know later if any of this information up here isn't visible okay so in the first option our focus is on maintaining the KH structure that exists in the cluster now but consolidating in a couple of particularly taking three schools and consolidating down to two in order to increase access to programs for students so in this change Chief Joseph aqua green and woodlawn come together next year as a single pre-k school that operates on two campuses with this the woodlawn building would close after that point the boundary for Woodlawn would be divided between chief joseph aqua green king and access or sorry King and Vernon and additionally the access program currently at Saban would move to King so visually here's what this looks like with not sure that's going to work very well so you see the Woodlawn campus closing the boundary the potential boundary change and the portion of the Woodlawn boundary that would become part of the Chief Joseph ugly green boundary the portion that would become part of the
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king pounder II and the portion that would become part of the Vernon boundary and you see ugly green and chief joe to becoming a dual campus single school that yes that would serve probably grades pre-k through eight you see access coming into king and a small boundary change that over time builds enrollment at Vernon one of the questions that you may have is why would Woodlawn be the school that we would look at for a closure in this scenario we visited Woodlawn a couple of times that this fall made many other visits there the regional administrative former Regional Administrator there are a lot of strengths and values in Woodlawn teachers parents students working very hard on achievement other factors that we see though are that a capture rate in their neighborhood area that's chronically low that's hovering around forty percent so more than half of the students who live in their neighborhood continue to make other choices and even though they've seen growth at the lower grades it's still it's still so low and so suppressed it's going to take a long time for those changes to impact the upper grades where the sizes are smallest in addition we see continuing low achievement data and we understand that that means that we we have to accelerate and elevate our academic efforts in that school it makes it much much harder to do that at the middle grades when their numbers are really low so we see that we need a more immediate change in order to give students the access to programs that will nurture that academic success there are other possibilities we want to quickly mention aligned with this option as you can see we have no direct change for Beach Boys ele and Humboldt or Fabien in this option however there are possibilities than the few sure there could be immersion changes that are aligned with the district's immersion plan and that could have an impact on on beach in some way Boise Elliott humble could look at moving to the tub tub on campus in the future Fabien is slated to receive portable classrooms in advance of its full modernization and continue its partnership with Concordia and 32 PhD there are additional boundary changes that we could look at in the future to right-size neighborhoods within those schools so there are some unusual aspects to their neighborhoods that we we would be happy to go in and clean up once we get these major all structural decisions made Humboldt could become a regional early learning center in 2014 or later we want to align that overall early learning center plan for the Jefferson cluster and the rest of the district with state objectives and that and you'll see more of that coming later in the interim we believe that all the schools that have pre-k now will maintain pre-k so long as funding is still available for that and finally we want to say that it's important to probably look at our high school duel assignment choices for future students and make sure that they're appropriately lined again once we make these important structural decisions these are the types of changes that could come behind quickly by the numbers here are estimated enrollment impacts you can see what the current enrollment is at each school what the estimated enrollment would be if we did nothing and what the change would be I probably should have just highlighted the schools that change not those that stay the same but you can see particularly the Chief Joseph line is the line for the combined Chief Joseph aqua green and woodlawn so about 1100 students divided between though between the teachers of an aqua green campus allows us to fully utilize both of those schools off the green would be full for the first time in a long time Chief Joseph would not be overcrowded so long as we could make grade structure changes that made the most of a larger building still serving Chief Joseph serving for the lower grades you see King growing both from the inclusion access and from the beginning effects of the boundary changed 636 we still believe that there's some room for growth between the the King boundary and the access program and then Vernon continuing to grow through through an enlarged neighborhood and also through increased capture rates so what you've seen then is we have immediate and program access improvements particularly for Woodlawn Chief Joseph oxy green and Kings students we have slow but steady growth for Vernon this option does require that we close the school it requires that we develop a strong shared campus model and it'll mean that we'll have additional transportation needs including some students who are now walkers to their current school other
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specific resource impacts will be modeled if this option becomes the superintendent's recommendation so we would imagine that there are many more questions that you might have a community members might have and we will do our best to resolve those questions as soon as we were able to sort out which of these options indeed is going to be moving forward so that's my brief summary on option 1 i'd like to turn to option two this is another way of leading to similar outcomes but using different structures and impacting different schools so it brings a middle school back into the cluster as well as ensures that the remaining k age are programmatically strong certainly if you're bringing strong middle grades competition to schools nearby you want to make sure that the caïds that are left are ready to stand up to that competition in this the current oakley green school would close at the end of this year and then reopen in 2014 as a junior middle college school serving grades 6 through 8 so that would require a planning year and during that time current aqua green students would move to Woodlawn many of them are from other neighborhoods because in grades K through 5 it's a focus option choice so the students would also have the right to return to their neighborhood school they preferred that we also would need a location for the oxy green neighborhood sixth grade so the kids that are from the Chief Joseph neighborhood for fifth grade and that could be woodland there's also the option if that doesn't work of portables on the Chief Joseph campus but that comes with costs in addition to that change that is to setting a middle school at aqua green that's fed by four schools that slide name the four schools no why don't I name those four schools they would be Beach Boys II Elliot Chief Joseph and woodlawn in addition to that King and Vernon would consolidate into a single school an International Baccalaureate school both of those schools currently have that program it would be larger and more robust school under this change we envision two ways that that consolidation could happen the first the most abrupt the most traditional is that one of the schools closes the other all the students go to the to the largest building that would likely be king and then we would do boundary changes to make sure that that neighborhood was right sized to fit that one building but we also want to continue some of our out-of-the-box thinking and recognizing the programmatic alignment that always already happened to those schools and that we'd like to find another home for access which is right now at Saban we would also proposed that it's possible to have both campuses remain open in a shared campus model similar to what I just described her aqua green and Chief Joseph and that the access Academy their grades one through aid would exist on one of those two campuses and as I said if we go with a traditional consolidation we would have to do boundary changes so I'm going to flip to the map here and you see the for feeder schools feeding into aqua green you see the one year the shift for aqua green current students on to the Woodlawn campus beginning next year and then aqua green open in 2014 you see our either/or way of consolidating King and Vernon that include access or may not and you see the potential for some boundary changes that might have to be made if we go through traditional consolidation King becomes the new school the Vernon building closes though boundary changes would likely have to move through fabien and fabien isn't a school that can accept more students for several years so there's some complexities that could come with that one of the questions that you might have or I just wanted to spend another minute on this detail that's in this particular option of our request for a planning year to develop our middle school model it's a traditional method for opening a new school where you take the time to hire your administrators select your curriculum build your relationships both with your feeder schools and with the high school that you're going to be sending students to build up your marketing strategy give your feeder schools time to adapt and then you go ahead and open the school so those are some of the things that we're looking for here we believe that that time will be extremely valuable in getting that new school off to a strong start again some future possibilities that I mentioned before exist as well with this plan including future possible changes with immersion the fabien plan remains largely the same under this as it did what I described before we might still have additional boundary changes between some smaller in some smaller
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neighborhood areas the Early Learning Center potential exists and the need no doubt to realign our high school duel assignment choices or at least examine them make sure that they're still appropriate after we decide these structural changes the impacts that we believe come with this option are improved access to our middle grades programs and to high school and beyond that it really galvanizes the notion of a junior middle college as a theme that drives that college ready culture what cluster why'd you write that's hard to say across across the the area that there's strength in a planning year but it does require additional staff and student movement it requires us to decide to either closer school or develop a dual campus model that'll be additional transition and transportation for many students and there are other specific resource impacts that will be modeled if this is the option that becomes the superintendent's recommendation finally by the numbers you see Beach Boys II Elliot Chief Joseph and woodlawn as our feeder schools k 5k fives that doesn't include their pre k if you look at for example Chief Joseph at 513 Woodlawn at 444 like if under this model that's a that's a place where a boundary change might make sense might be just enough to build Woodlawn right to the size that we would want and provide a little more space at Chief Joseph which is full right now so that's an example of how a future boundary change might support this overall structure change you see the the middle school in 2015 with 522 students in it what's going on in the cluster right now is that you have significantly higher numbers of students in grades four and below so for that first year I mean we can count how many kids are attending the schools and those clusters and we see that it may start with a relatively small like sixth grade but it'll grow over time so starting with about 480 in the first year 522 on the way up to 600 this would have an opening sixth grade class of about 200 students which is what we look for in our middle school model okay so that is the place summary and then we quickly go over where we are with ya so today we met with the staffs of four schools aqua green chip Joseph Wald lon inverter the princess will work out a talk to the other schools and while you have right now is the plan in terms of how we're going to take these options to the community and as you can see we're going to be pretty busy in the next two weeks so we have a variety of meetings in the different schools we have on january twenty second we meeting with the planning team that helped us in the beginning in terms of the planning we meet around that when ether with the ESL families you see that we meeting with cleaning and access and then on january 26 we have the community forum that will be at jefferson we also have a meeting with all the special education families we have a online survey that runs through the 28th it wishes the community can give us ideas of be back about this process and one thing that that we always that we keep in mind is how do we make sure that we hear from the famil is that that for some reason or another historically we have now heard from special you know families of color I mean everyone but how do we how do we intentionally go and look for the families that historically have not gonna be now represented how do we also engage our partners and we have a meeting with a with the partners with our ministers in that the community in terms so we want to hear their voice and also including that different organizations like the local churches sei the Latino network airco and those

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)