2013-04-29 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2013-04-29
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Board Meeting - April 29, 2013

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good evening this meeting of the board of education for april 29th 2013 is called to order i'd like to welcome to everyone present and our television viewers all items that will be voted on this evening have been posted as required by state law and this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times it's also streaming online and will be archived on the board website this evening we have the great fortune as many of you who are here in the room have already realized we have the beaumont jazz band with us this evening we'd like to welcome them and uh music director cynthia planck if you could tell us a little bit about the the pieces they're going to perform and then performing a very special tune for you it's called charmaine this was a commission that we had arranged with a friend of ours a beautiful very old-time piece of jazz something that you very rarely get to hear and then after charmaine we're playing don't get sassy thank you thank you is so um so so um so so that's one kind of swing music and this is a very different kind of swing music
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so so uh oh uh wow my so that's great at this time miss plank if you want to come down to the testimony table and say a couple words about the music program at beaumont and i also want to acknowledge that miss elizabeth caston taylor is with us who's the principal of beaumont welcome here yes that'd be great
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so i am so pleased to be here this is my 11th year at willmont middle school and i've been really fortunate to have very supportive administration and very very active parents and students who are willing to be taught so i feel blessed and lucky to have this job and i try to take these guys around and show them off so thanks for having us here this is my second time doing this show last year i got to do the oregon pta that was really fun yeah that was a good one thank you for having us and thank you i was so impressed to see so many people here tonight who care about education in portland i'm so thrilled that you make it a point to come here i've been on boards and done a lot of meetings and i know it is not always your first choice for a monday night and yet i am so thrilled that you are here to help us very nice thank you thank you welcome i know that we have a number of parents in the audience that the parents want to stand up we can acknowledge you too there are not only current parent banned parents here i can't say that but there are past band parents here grandparents please stand up so we can give you a round of applause too great thank you all very much we appreciate your coming and we are very fortunate to live in portland where a community that cares deeply and passionately about education thank you so much thank you thank you with that we're going to move on to our next item on our agenda which is the superintendent's report superintendent smith um high school constitution team they're in washington dc and they're in the final ten and we're awaiting news so we're just letting them know we're with them and then i wanted to let you know we portland this year hosted the oregon leaders network conference which is really a and we had numbers of our schools featured and presenting there so irvington boyce elliott humboldt and jefferson high school as well as our esl and dual language departments led presentations and portland was hosting this this year this network includes 16 school districts from coos bay to forest grove that are intentionally working on equity to raise achievement for all students while accelerating the progress for their historically underserved students i joined the deputy superintendent for the state rob saxton and offering a welcome and he was formerly the superintendent and tiger tualton who was also engaged in courageous conversations about race and this is a cross-district statewide network where we're all sharing best practice so it was really exciting to have the work of our schools being featured in the last three years we both raised achievement for all students and narrowed the gap at key milestones and five of our high schools franklin grant jefferson roosevelt and wilson have not only narrowed but closed the gap between graduation rates between our white and black students grant has also closed the gap between white and hispanic students and at grant all three groups posted rates between 83 to 86 percent with black students posting the highest so we're excited about that a key focus of the work is what's actually happening in classrooms and we had a student group from jefferson along with their teacher andy kulak demonstrate a socratic discussion method for the entire conference and we wanted to play you a clip of those students who did us proud it was really awesome watching them in action with their teachers so we'll show you that clip right now i believe and while we're waiting for the clip in their white peers my purview especially in the high school classroom because of this our district as you've heard forged a relationship with pacific education group specifically their work with courageous conversations about race so the building leadership created the space for the teachers to be leaders in their own action research in doing that it allows teachers to create space in their classroom to allow students to become the facilitative leaders of the future looking at this model of leadership really beyond being inspiring it's also very sustainable last year we had three teachers in a care team this year we have our entire staff on care teams so to me that's the evidence that it's clearly effective what was class like for you before inner circle during and after so at first it was like we weren't really interested into it because it was kind of something new we never did it before and so as the year progressed we started getting more interested in it because it
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was something that was new and we're willing to try new things you know i like to win so i was like interested in law and this like gave me good practice so i was very interested in the inner circle for me going into inner circle outer circle it was kind of like a new chance to hear the other voices in the classroom because he was mr kulak was doing it with his two separate english classes and we were able to like out even outside of the classroom we were able to meet up and like we could talk about what the discussion was that day so it wasn't that the only time we talked about those discussions was in the classroom but we were able to go outside and it made us that you're a lot more like involved with the other students in the room as well as like other students in the class itself i think for me in the beginning it was just like it was something new so i wasn't used to it it was like i was routine to coming in and having kulak tell us what we were going to do the agenda for the day so when he was talking about we're going to have a socratic circle i was like all right we're going to have to talk and people are going to be interrupting each other voice is going to be over each other so like in the beginning i wasn't really fond of it but then i grew to love it because everybody's voices was heard every opinion was stated people came out of their shell people who weren't confident in speaking grew so it was just a learning experience for everybody and at the end i think everybody enjoyed the topics because it was really relevant culturally relevant urban politics just you know just stuff that's going to affect our life so in the beginning we talked about things like homework and different articles that we weren't interested in at all but as it drifted um we started talking about things like trayvon martin coney 2012 things that like dj said things that really affected our lives so when we had those intriguing topics like that that's when myself and my classmates really got into it and it was a life-changing experience so part of why i wanted to show this to you is it was a courageous thing for that group of students and their teacher to come just open up what their practice is to a room full of 300 other educators from around the state and they did a fabulous job so please just join me in thanking them and beaumont jazz band and cynthia as you guys are packing up liz as you're leaving thank you so much that was awesome it was really awesome performance we had five of our high schools who made the grade this year for u.s news and world reports best high schools which they do this every year they do their best high school rankings and this year grant lincoln wilson cleveland and franklin are listed as oregon top performers and we're really excited about that so please call us tamara lanusom the principal over at rosa parks is here to talk to us about a partnership with oregon museum of science and industry that's been a really like high energy partnership for that school and i'm going to let you come on up and tell us about the partnership thank you very much superintendent smith and to all the directors uh coach here greg milan thank you for having us we're honored to be here this evening and to share a little bit about some something that is so fantastic that's going on at rosa parks sometimes we may make the news and it's not always you know like we like to make the news but this is really an awesome partnership uh i would like to tell you this partnership has been in full swing for about a year but actually it goes back a little further because it was about somewhere around 2009 2010 that i got a call from jen who's sitting next to me this evening uh about a partnership with our fifth grade uh students being able to go and have some hands-on there had been an anonymous donor who had donated some funds wanted to really engage kids in north portland we were very excited to be part of that and our fifth graders rolled up and rolled down to omsi to take classes not just to go through the museum which is always great but actually to participate in some classes hands-on at omsi and that was really enjoyable for our students it's awesome to be able to do those kind of wonderful learning field trips and especially when you don't have a lot of funds everything was paid for the buses and everything it was about six eight months later jen called me again and said well we have a money and again somebody has donated this money and they would like to offer you we'd like to offer you a science family
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night and so we were excited i said tell me more about it well we on mondays will close so on monday evening you can bring your entire school community and we also have some buses to go with that so i was like you're kidding so yeah i know free and so we uh we got busy and we put out the message to our families and they showed up in fact i added two extra buses because i just want to make sure the transportation was not a barrier for us to get down to amazing and spend the evening we had a fantastic time our parents showed up and we rolled out we had the buses we have parents that did drive and we were probably close to somewhere around 400. the following year uh i called jen i was like well jen do you have any more money because we really like to come back for a family night and the parents have been asking about it and talking about it and so once again she said well we can do the scholarship part i said well i'm gonna do the buses like i had a thousand dollars okay so a lady walks in and i she said you know i want to give back to rosa parks this year so well what do you need i said and i was telling her trying to think you should always keep a wish list and i was telling her about these buses and i'm thinking if she gets two buses i can do this well she walked back the next day with a check for a thousand dollars and she bought me five buses so once again we loaded a packed to the brim we went down to the tune of close to 500 and this year as part of the grant that jim will tell you about um we once again uh rolled out for family night in the fall times it's become a tradition i don't know how to get it next year but just in case anybody yeah um so this this along comes uh susan jordan who was doing her job and she puts out information about a grant and the grant was for somewhere up to 60 or so thousand dollars and i was like now this is a grant i need i want omsi just infused into my school so i called jennifer jen can you guys help me write this grant and she said well send it over and they looked at it and they called back and they said well we can do better than that we can write the grant for yes and now that's what i'm talking about so they wrote the grant we got the grant to the tune of 56 thousand dollars from the honda foundation and i'm a legend tell you what we did with that money thank you i'm jen dawson i'm the school partnership manager at omsi and um when i got the phone call from pamela about the honda foundation grant it was a no-brainer for us we just saw a real opportunity and we just jumped at it um in part because tamila is such a visionary for rosa parks and her vision combined with the power of that grant just made it perfect it's like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich just went together so we were awarded 56 000 from the american honda foundation to support stem programming for rosa parks and part of the process for writing that grant was including tamila's vision so that we knew it would we'd be going in with as much possibility for success as we could um and tamila right out of the gate said we have to engage the parents we can't do just a student focus grant and we said great check that box we'll engage the parents she said we have to engage the teachers it can't just be a one day workshop i want teachers to have science at their fingertips throughout the year check that box we can do that and then she said i want the students to have the same thing science throughout the year so we embarked on a journey that we had never done before with omsi and we engaged three different audiences with the same school and really brought in and brought together a community in a way we haven't done before we engaged parents through two family science nights one at omsi and then one just last week at rosa parks where students could show off their activities throughout the year to their parents which again was very well attended we also wanted to be a part of the daily lives that the parents experience at rosa parks so on a monthly basis we joined the parent coffees on fridays and with the parents we did activities science-based activities that they could do with their children at home with everyday items that exist in their cabinets you can build bridges models of bridges with just spaghetti and marshmallows and those were the kinds of activities we wanted to get the parents engaged in we wanted to break down this notion that science is scary and make it accessible for these families we engaged teachers with a day-long workshop at omsi to kick off the partnership last august where teachers spent half the day with us talking about the grant and really realizing what that was going to look like for them and half the day with pamela planning for the year and as part of that process we had a professional development engagement coordinator work with teachers throughout the year as a mentor so when teachers were trying to engage their
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students with their everyday subjects in their classroom and maybe wanted to weave in some science into a writing assignment or weave in some science into a language arts or reading assignment they could call karen our coordinator and say how do we do this are there any resources on this and karen would come out and meet with them or send them resource after resource where they could access that kind of information so really being a tool rather than somebody coming in and taking up time out of their precious day we also monthly on a monthly basis joined the staff meetings where we actually presented a science lesson for the teachers just to help increase comfort level so after engaging the parents and the teachers we formulated a plan to really engage the students and each student in kindergarten through second grade took part in a six-week introduction to engineering program where they studied structural engineering with omsi shake tables they would build buildings and then see if they could knock them down or how sturdy they were they engaged in chemical water and musical engineering where they made their own musical instruments that they got to show off throughout the school in the classroom and they also did other engineering projects and they even learned a song and a dance for the engineering design process the third through fifth graders we worked with them on a robotics programming lab where they had six weeks of time to try and test various programming options for their own lego robot and it was really wonderful we were for both of these cases able to come into rosa parks and use designated classrooms throughout the year so that we could just be part of the community there and the students were able to showcase their robots and show off their programming and make their robots turn circles or go in straight lines and we saw them do that for their parents at the family science night in addition to those six weeks of programming for each student we also brought them to omsi for a field trip which turned out to be rather timely as you were discussing these amazing conversations happening around race the students could come to the race exhibit that was on display at omsi in the fall and in addition to seeing that exhibit and having healthy conversations when they got back to school they participated in some private reserved lab time that allowed the teacher to pick something that would support her classroom curriculum his or her classroom curriculum so students were able to dissect a squid they took a bridge building class where they learned about portland bridges and then made their own bridges they took part in chemical reactions in this in the chemistry lab so the students really had a chance to be engaged at rosa parks as well as at omsi and finally as if all of this weren't enough we also wanted to support the curriculum that teachers were already teaching in their classrooms with what we provide on a daily basis to schools in the area so each teacher picked out two different omsi classroom programs these are canned programs that we take all over the state in varying topics we have a life-size whale that we bring in and some students took part in the whales program other programs include working with batteries and circuits so the teachers had a chance to bring in something to their classroom that meant something to them and their students as well this partnership again as i've said was the first of its kind in engaging all three audiences and it has been monumentally successful for omsi it has been explosive for us and it's been incredible to be a part of this school that is living and breathing and we've been so blessed to have been a part of that and having space on site at rosa parks that has designated omsi space has also been tremendous and we've really felt like we've been a part of rosa parks this year so i want to let tamela speak to some of the impacts it's had for her students so in wrapping up i think you look for things that have made a difference that that as she says jen says has impacted i came back from spring break and i opened the office door and i walked in and there were these towers of kids and i was like what is this and and uh went over because i'm nosey and i looked in and they were science kids and the office was full of them and what it said to me is the teachers are getting that last bit of science in there they're getting excited about teaching science and we we know that this is a future for our students and so that was one sign that teachers are doing this they feel supported they've gone to workshops at amazing that's another piece that they got to attend any class or workshop throughout the
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year at no cost to them and they took advantage of that and then we're in the process of planning our career day and our counselor is working with the kids and talking about careers and seeing what interests they have so we know to have you know some good speakers that interest our students and one of the things you know we always get the ball players we love them and you get some traditional kinds of fields of interest you know for our students but this year we heard a lot of i want to be an engineer i want to be a scientist and that's what i'm talking about so i applaud omsi for taking this journey with me and actually helping me get on the journey and we're just happy to share this evening with you what it's done thank you so much for coming and sharing the partnership and i think actually part of what we want to call out here is the power of partnership and the power to transform a school when i went to visit rosa parks staff meeting one of the thing and i'm making i visit the staff meeting every week one of the things their staff called out that they were most energized by and really animated describing was this partnership so that's another indicator i would say when they're wanting to tell me what's happening at their school this was a big feature so thanks you guys um so i would like uh anyone who is here that is part of the all-city middle school honor band inquired to stand and let us acknowledge you and i will tell you what that is and i mean teachers principals students and for those of you who don't know what this is we do the middle grades band students from boyce elliott hosford robert gray da vinci mount tabor sellwood and wes sylvan and choir students from creston jackson robert gray sunnyside and da vinci practice individually at their own schools for a part that they then come together and pay for the first time in front of an audience and it is totally awesome and you guys rocked your concert this year i got to catch some of it and i was totally moved it was really wonderful so we just wanted to invite you here and say thank you for all the work that goes into doing that and it was really exciting to see a city-wide band come together and perform so thank you for your your uh your talent and bringing that to us and i'm going to keep on going because we've got really great stuff happening for our kids which is they we have a number of gates millennium scholars scholars again this year this is a big deal so there are 50 000 applicants throughout the country a thousand of them get chosen to be gates millennium scholars which means this scholarship can be used at any college or university and it includes personal and pre professional development support through their leadership programs but they take a full ride all the way through graduate school so this is a really big deal scholarship to receive we have angelicia frierson from jefferson high school middle college for advanced studies who has received one sabrina muhammad from benson high school nathara osman from madison high school alexis phillis phillips from franklin high school kevin trong from benson and also on the superintendent advisory committee warren vang from roosevelt high school so please join me in just a really huge congratulations i also wanted to acknowledge we have one pps grounds foreman mark franklin received a prestigious bill nato community tree award at the city's arbor day festival he has been an employee with pbs for 29 years and in charge of caring for and maintaining 817 acres of district grounds and is one of six employees who cares for our ground so when we say we're thin in a lot of places this is one of the places where thin they have a huge responsibility and he was acknowledged with this award we just want to say we're so proud and congratulations to him and then finally we had high school teams from benson lincoln and grant at portland state's innovation challenge which was put on by their college of engineering and computer science so dean ren sue did this challenge and students have been working on these since september they presented this saturday to an audience of people who were really looking at their challenge to figure out how they would solve problems about high schools of 2025. our students did an awesome job it was really fun i went to try and go to the beginning of it i ended up staying for the whole thing and was really inspired by every one of the teams we also had a voice elliott in jefferson high school presenting at the
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intel stem posium on friday and showing off their work boyce elliott where they've raised salmon fry and then did a release with the department of interior which was an awesome project and jefferson about presenting about their both sustainability work and their bio um bio medical research piece of their program at jefferson middle college so i'm going to just say our students are showing up really publicly all over the city and really showcasing their work and it's really exceptional work so i we should just feel really proud of our kids so please join me in just acknowledging that thank you superintendent this time we're going to move on to student testimony ms houston do we have any students sign up great our first group is a group of three from grant high school collin finn and nikolai as you guys make your way to the table i'm gonna just read the um comments for public instruction or public comment um so our responsibilities aboard lies in actively listening and reflecting on the thoughts and opinions of others the board will not respond to any comments or questions at this time but we will follow up on various issues that are raised guidelines for public input emphasize respect consideration when referring to board members staff and other presenters should any testimony include concerns or comments regarding individual employees we ask that you not use specific names or be disrespectful in any way you have a total of three minutes to share your comments please begin by stating your name and spelling your last name for the record during the first two minutes there's going to be a little green light that goes on when you have a minute left the yellow light will come on and then when your three minutes is up the red light will come on with a little buzzer and at that time we ask that you conclude your comments thank you and i don't know who's starting but welcome um i'm cohen jenkins jenkins spelled j-e-n-k-i-n-s i'm finn tupleman topelman is spelled t-o-p-e uh i'm nikolai lujan baer that's l-u-j-a-n hyphen uh b-e-a-r um i'm christopher johnson j-o-h-n-s-o-n we all want to help others because usually that seems the smartest but doing so often smothers the people who work the hardest if you can afford to send your child to private school you still have to pay for other kids now doesn't that seem quite cruel public schools are part of the government so they ought to be kept small homogenize the teaching let one size fit for all you want to cut the arts that i can clearly see but if you're fighting with the theater then you fight with me drama is good to have in school because it gets you thinking it releases the mind in your imagination and i'll see you trying to cut the classes ap so the colleges are wanting you to take three you're just sitting around cutting and getting fat man i just want to take pc problem stats let's stop and it says pull back the excess don't go to t just to rest so we can pass this test and i know that you would have to be daft to cut basic english science or math they need an education on some study hall vacation and the people teaching us ain't just administration i hope kids like you stay stupid it's better that way so i can put you in long hour jobs with minimum pay electives are a waste of money we don't have just stick the kids in one room cut down on all that staff sure jaws will be lost but there's no need to frown shower me in wealth then it'll all trickle down who needs acting or rhythm or rhyme because we don't have the money and we don't have the time and who cares about special kids who needs to give them hugs because they won't be around the day atlas shrugs now people please respect that i'm taking a stand and i'm fighting right now just to keep my pencil in hand you want all of us kids stuffed up in one room too tight just like sardine can of do what do you think is right to cut and cut the whole night even in light of these facts it seem he won't stop to cop your attacks stop and it says pull back the excess to put our teachers to rest so we can pass this test i'm not rapping against your preserves authority i'm rapping for my deserved seniority i'm stuck in salvation i'm in anticipation for when this congregation has the realization that our education shouldn't be our damnation our education should be our salvation let's stop and assess pull back the excessive teachers to rest so we can pass this test stop and assess pull back the excess teacher's arrest so we can pass this test
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thank you very much gentlemen that was great and um your testimony not only artistic but to the point thank you next we have lauren gramberg and emma rosen i'm lauren gramberg g-r-a-m-b-e-r-g i am a junior at franklin high school and i'm here today to speak directly about my experience with the portland public school budget cuts and how they've affected me um from the age of 11 i've been taking advanced math classes with older students in my sophomore year at franklin i decided to continue with academically rigorous courses and enrolled in pre-calculus this is the first year of the new schedule and as the year continued i started to see the effects this new schedule was having on my peers my teachers and i in class the extended periods made me fatigued and i lost interest in the subject quickly outside of class i put off my homework for days and eventually forgot the subject material together it was here that i received my first b in a class angry and frustrated i searched for an answer as to why this was happening and why my education was at stake i left sophomore year with the 3.75 gpa and the enrollment in ap calculus a b this year in that class was the worst of all my experience in this math class has been the most stressful and upsetting thing i have ever endured with school my teacher is great he cares a lot about us and definitely knows his material it was the budget cuts that caused this great teacher to be burdened with a large classwood that did not allow for individualized attention or understanding of the material i went through months of difficult testing and math concepts that i couldn't get a hold on and without the new schedule and the lengthened classes i think this year could have been much more successful continuing on the subject of how this has greatly affected me and the people at my school i was forced to only receive six credits this year being upperclassmen the new budget cuts have cut our program so much that a majority of us were only allowed to take six classes each semester this adds up to about 540 hours of class time not spent in the classroom this worried me and after visiting colleges the anxiety heightened after speaking directly to the admissions offer officer at an out of state university and telling her about my situation i got the reaction well why don't you just switch schools after contemplating this question for a while an answer arose in my head i could switch schools but i can't switch school districts the truth is i don't want to switch schools the teachers that have educated me and the friends i've made make my high school experience better than i have ever expected the academics at franklin are some of the most rigorous in the district and i will always have the experience with some of the best ap teachers in oregon but is the stress that these teachers have gone through worth the cuts the real question is about in this matter is rather why shouldn't i be getting the proper education that i need i want to succeed in life in my life do something for the world and for the people around me so why should i let this stop me i have support i have ambition i have a determination to achieve high academic excellence but what about those who don't there's nothing left in the budget to cut and although you may not see it firsthand every small change you make has the biggest impact on my generation and the future ones to come education and knowledge are the most powerful tools and right now it should be your first priority to educate those who need it thank you my name is emma rosen r-o-s-e-n so i'm a sophomore at cleveland high school and i'm here to talk to you a little bit about why requiring study hall as a class isn't a positive use of our time and increasing that class from one to two periods is even less positive use of our time so let me start off by saying this in study hall no one does their homework okay that's just that's just a given um and it's either because our classes are too crowded or they're very loud and that's definitely a big thing but also they can be dead silent and i know i had i was a freshman last year and i had to take study hall and we were often threatened
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with referrals for talking too much and even though i had a morning class if we got tired and tried to put our head down we got in trouble and we're told to sit up this isn't a class that promotes efficient working it was one that promotes unearned discipline what did happen in this class however was ridiculous displays of boredom we had kids who would make catapults out of forks or like hide peanuts around the room for other peoples to find this is all true this is um and paper football was just that was always happening and also in my class in particular some boys took to drawing uh exaggerated renderings of male anatomy that's how i'm gonna put it um just just everywhere all the time and that was awful um but people shouldn't be surprised by this um when i talk to people adults in particular they're always shocked like how could this happen but i think it's totally predictable that when you put a large group of adolescents a large number of adolescents in one room have them they can't leave they have to stay there for an hour and a half i think it's totally predictable that this will happen when their only instruction being given is sit down and shut up what's also predictable is the amount the amount of copying that goes on i mean you can't get any help from any trained professional in that class but luckily the kid in your math class is right next to you and he's happy to just slide the answers right over my final point here is that study hall has a detrimental impact to the teachers teachers who have free period or elective classes during a study hall period have become essentially refugee camps for kids who are no longer interested in attending their class which i also might add is not a problem the only consequence offered by not going to a study hall class is an automated message to your parents that says you miss this period and that's the only consequences consequence offered anymore because study hall isn't even worth credit it used to be worth a half a credit on a pass fail basis but it's no longer worth worth even that so for the students who don't attend the class that leaves them wandering the halls or trying to switch into other electives electives during that period which means which means all the other teachers are forced to pick up that slack of those students and they're already over crowded classrooms so with this in mind i hope the board recognized that wasting even more class time on study hall is simply not worth it thank you thank you that's it i'd like to thank the students i it's always enjoyable to hear from our students and have your voices present so thank you for taking the time out of your evening and with that we are going to move on to our student representative uh report so student representative alexia garcia so i'd like to start off by talking about my trip to washington dc and a few weeks ago i was able to go to washington dc and participate in the occupy the department of education event put on by united opt out and we sat outside the department of education and listen to speeches from teachers students parents and others involved in education some of the most amazing speeches were given by a blogger and former department of ed worker diane ravich chicago teacher union president karen lewis and students from chicago colorado florida new york ohio and new jersey what came out of the protests were relationships we finally connected some of the student unions from across the country now weekly myself and other students from the pps student union video chat with students i met giving updates on what our respective student unions are working on and supporting each other's events it's exciting to see that both colorado providence and chicago have had protests against their local standardized tests chicago students are fighting to prevent school closures in their district and students in newark new jersey protested for a higher education budget although it's unfortunate the issues surrounding public education are national issues and it's exciting to see that students across the nation are thinking about these issues and challenging the current system myself and other students were also able to meet with the department of education's director of youth outreach sam ryan and after be being treated pretty poorly by the department of ed's security team we talked to mr ryan about some of our concerns surrounding graduation rates race to the top common core state standards standard and standardized testing in general one student from florida shared her story about opting out of every state test being told she would fail but actually being accepted into quite a few highly acclaimed colleges another student shared his concerns with the school closures in chicago and how those closures would affect gang violence in their community i'm not sure what mr ryan took away from the conversation however it's what he needs to hear as our current education system is incredibly flawed we also made clear that if they want student voice they should reach out to the established student unions and we can help provide student voice or facilitate conversations that will get the department of ed more real student
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voice i've since followed up with mr ryan providing him with contact information for each of the student unions i have connections to during my time in dc i was also able to talk to representative bonomichi's staff about a concern surrounding standardized testing no child left behind in sequestration what really came out of the trip was the connections and networking that have led to our weekly video chats and it's really moving to see that there are so many people who care about education and it also gives me hope that there will soon be a student-led revolution in education and i hope we can send more students to this event next year beyond that i would like to respond to the negotiations between the district and the portland association of teachers first off i continue to hear that every school ben every school board member has signed off on the proposed contract and as i have not signed off on the proposed contract and as it currently stands i'm not supportive of the proposed contract in reviewing it i have quite a few concerns surrounding basic labor rights some of the changes surrounding sick leave and family leave seem to violate those basic worker rights the proposed contract appears incredibly vague in places for example the previous contract specified that teachers would teach 7.5 a 7.5 hour day however that 7.5 has become an eight and a generally was added to the contract that leaves the contract open to requiring greater than eight hour work days something that can easily be abused management is given control to do whatever they please as long as it doesn't violate the contract with that said this contract is difficult to support as its vagueness allows for a few things to violate the contract i understand that it's my job to represent students on the school board and i believe that i'm doing so in responding to the district's contract proposal i want to reiterate that teachers working conditions are our learning conditions and if we ask them to teach more students for a longer period of time the courses in many cases will lack the proper planning necessary beyond that if we burn teachers out then we have burnt out teachers who in many cases have seniority also i'm assuming teachers look at the contract with the district prior to accepting teaching positions and with the current contract our district is a pretty unappealing place to work we're not going to be able to attract good teachers to our schools if we do not honor basic worker rights and seeing the relationship between the portland association of teachers and districts i've learned this year that a relationship cannot exist without trust that is the source of the problem and it's going to come down to relationship building and i once again encourage the board to meet with the pat leadership as we need to build back a relationship which will lead to better serving our students beyond that this wednesday the superintendent student advisory council will be joining up with our other local union unions at a mayday protest the plan is to leave that protest and march the board budget hearing here at 6 pm to ask the board to dip into the reserves and fund our high schools adequately we'd love for everyone students parents teachers alike to join us in that march we'll meet at o'brien square at 5 15 pm and march here to the besc again we'll be advocating for the board to dip into the reserves and protect programs that are that are looking to be cut we don't we do not want to be pitted against other schools and asking for money for high schools and that's why we ask that the money come from the reserves we do our best to advocate for money in salem having gone down three times this year as well as attending various local town halls with our representatives ways and means committee meetings and city council meetings to advocate for youth the pps student union understands that salem at this point and i have no doubt that our presence will be even more visible next year however in seeing that the predicted budget is risky relying on cuts to pers that might be a leak might be found illegal and the arts tax money coming in we think it's time to dip into the reserves great thank you representative garcia i appreciate your distinction um that every school board member it's the ones that are elected by the populace right in general election and i do appreciate in your final comments talking about how risky our budget is currently based on a budget from the state that's not quite passed yet and why it might be important for us to have have reserves and have them available for us with that we are going to move on to public comment at this time we'll allow for 20 minutes for public comment there were two errors this week in our signing up people for public testimony so we have two additional speakers that we're making room for so it might be a little bit longer than 20 minutes ms houston can you please call our first folks we have lindsay levy and darcy mondro and i'm just gonna run through real quickly the the citizen comment just in case i see a lot of new faces here um because it can be a little bit foreign for people to sit in front of us and not get a response from us and so it it feels a little artificial so just a reminder that our responsibility as a board lies in actively listening and reflecting on the thoughts and opinions of others the board will not respond to any
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comments or questions at this time but we will follow up on various issues that are raised guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration when referring to board members staff and other presenters should your testimony include concerns or comments regarding individual employees we ask that you not use specific names or be disrespectful in any way you have a total of three minutes two minutes the green light's on one minute the yellow light comes on and then at three minutes the red light will go on and we ask that you wrap up your comments at that time i probably will interrupt because we have a full agenda so whoever would like to start my name is darcy mundorf m-u-n-d-o-r-f-f superintendent smith and school board members i have two children enrolled in pps a sophomore at franklin and a sixth grader at mount tabor middle school i also have a 2012 franklin graduate who attends the university of kentucky both of my parents taught in pps and have more than 40 years of service to the district between them i am a product of pps i am here tonight to demand that you stop the disinvestment of our high school students in 2010 the disinvestment began when the district decided to balance the budget on the backs of our high school students by moving to the eight period schedule but denying the majority of students from taking eight academic classes this led to the cutting of more than 40 high school teachers it is time to add those teachers back to our schools by disallowing students from taking a full academic load the school year has essentially been shortened by about 21 days now you want to limit our students even more allowing for the majority of them to take no more than six academic classes this shortens the school year by about 43 days this is unacceptable our high school students should be ramping up their class loads in preparation for college technical school or the workforce instead they have mandated late arrival or early dismissal or are forced to sit in study halls within excess of 100 students at franklin many of them are jammed around tiny bistro tables leaving little room for books pen or paper what happened to the rigorous and robust comprehensive high school education that was the talk back in 2010 when portland public schools was deep into high school redesign students and parents were whipsawed by that two-year disabling process and now this has been added on top of that in addition to the fact that franklin and other high school students will have time to hang out on hawthorne master the xbox in their friends homes or engage in unsafe behavior this generation of high school students will not be afforded the same educational opportunities that students had access to just two years ago with the limitation of six classes our students will spend most of their school hours all four and a half of them fulfilling state requirements and have less opportunity to enroll in ap or dual credit courses without those courses they will miss out on earning college credit and lose the opportunity to reduce the future cost of college while it is your job to ensure students have a full school day and leave pps prepared for college or the workforce i urge you to contact the southeast parents coalition for recommendations on ways to fund the restoration of teachers in our high schools honestly it feels as if the district has given up on franklin high school students i'm not asking that you give something extra to franklin and other high school students i'm asking you to restore the educational opportunities that were taken from them when you started preventing students from taking a full day of academic classes it's time to give all pps students the education they deserve no more part-time high school in pps thank you thank you my name is lindsay levy l-e-v-y i wish that both pps and the teachers union had a more transparent process and would just stop engaging in finger-pointing and get down to genuinely addressing the real problems in both of their systems which would only result in benefiting our kids accountability or the lack of accountability appears to be an ongoing problem for both pps and the teachers union at skyline a k-8 ib certified school which my son attends we have had two different principals in the last two years neither which has previously been a principal or had ib certification in these frugal times the district has now paid to train three different principles in ib philosophy and implementation as well as undermining the stability and trust of the students in the community this year we have had 14 students that i'm aware of trying to transfer out of our middle school two of these students that i know of will be attending private schools when you look at the actual headcount of our middle school that level of obvious dissatisfaction represents a staggering amount of children possibly up to 20 percent it appears to the skyline community among other schools that the principal placement process is purposely vague and
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appearingly arbitrary with little to no follow-up after the placement has been made in regard to the union's continuing insistence the teacher placement be so highly based on seniority it has left our students in the hands of people individuals that no longer have the skills if they ever did patience or commitment to educating our children an obvious example i can give is that at skyline we are currently on either our fourth or fifth spanish teacher in as many years this situation is unacceptable and the lack of accountability of the union has left our students in the position of no continuity and at best a serious lack of faith that they will ever learn the language when both pps and the union continually refuse to acknowledge the problems and address them in an honest way and dismiss the grave impact their decisions have on students in the community you are representing the worst that both systems have to offer as a parent money may come and money may go but the quality of my parenting is consistent my expectations and my process are clear to my children i never belittle their concerns or treat them as if they are too ignorant to have a real understanding i owe them at the very least the opportunity to be listened to and a dialogue about the decision we have come to it is clear that our students and community deserve the same standard and that as times get tougher if the policies of both pps and the union do not change then we will either be sacrificing the well-being of our children or demanding results society can no longer bear the burden of paying people that are ineffective in their positions especially in the field of education our future depends on it next we have stacy and emiliano alonso can we just interrupt and do this yeah grant just won nationals i was going to say that would be portland pps two national champions in a row last year lincoln this year grant alexia you can go ahead and start thank you my name is stacy alonso a-l-o-n-s-o i live in northeast portland i have a kindergartner and a second grader at the ainsworth spanish immersion program i'm here today because my son isaac feels intimidated harassed and bullied by his kindergarten teacher i am here today because there have been at least 20 complaints about this teacher in the past three years i'm here today because the principal is ignoring discouraging and misrepresenting the parent complaints i'm here today because the regional administrator has not conducted an acceptable investigation into these complaints but most importantly i'm here today to protect my son and the countless other children that this teacher will see in the future this is what we're asking for you this is what we want and we've asked this since the beginning we want an independent investigation into our complaints by a trained harassment investigator the regional administrator informed us that he did not have any investigation experience or experience with using evidence-based strategies the principal should be relieved of duties of handling complaints we want the kindergarten teacher to be replaced with the substitute teacher pending the investigation and the resolution of the complaints to ensure that our children are protected we want assurances that our families and staff members will not be retaliated against for filing complaints or cooperating in any investigation the best case scenario is my son isaac he's afraid to go to school he's afraid to raise his hand the worst case scenario is we have kids who are currently taking medication who are seeking counseling and therapy for this teacher's actions i realize this is probably the first time hearing about this issue tonight and i truly regret this i've been following the pps complaint procedure beginning with first i met with the with the teacher during conferences and then i met informally with the principal she explained to me that in order for anything to be done about this that i would have to write a formal letter of complaint that it would have to be signed that it would have to be shown to the teacher i didn't write it for weeks and weeks because i was afraid of the retaliation that might occur showing it to the teacher after learning that this was not policy i did write a formal letter of complaint after yeah sorry i asked the principal that to conduct an investigation and asked my son to be transferred to another spanish immersion classroom i've
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never heard from her i haven't reserved to received a phone call not an email not a letter i then moved to the second step of the complaint procedure i met with a regional administrator in our meeting he did not ask me one question he doodled on his paper while i spoke i asked many questions to try to better understand the policies and procedures of how we can make this better he told me he'd get back to me at the end of the week then he told me to get back to me at the middle of next week i've never heard from him not an email not a phone call nothing not to my surprise in the end the original administrator and all of our complaints were unfound were found as unfounded what you won't see in his report are the countless examples of intimidation and harassment seen by witnesses the regional administrator also stated in his letter that it's not uncommon for teachers to behave this way as an educator myself i strongly believe that a teacher behaving this way is not acceptable thank you can you please wrap up your comments two more sentences although we have a long list of complaints i don't think it matters if it's one child or five children or 26 children in the classroom if they feel like they're intimidated and harassed it's not okay even if it's only one child it's the teachers and the administrators responsibility to ensure that it stops thank you my name is emiliano alonso alonzo a-l-o-n-s-o i am isaac alonso's father i'm here because my son has a principle that lacks leadership skills and accountability i'm here because my son has a teacher that lacks adequate training and experience and i'm here because the regional administrator lacks ability to ensure he himself and those under him are following pps policies and procedures at last week's board meeting the principal reported to you that one of the biggest challenges at ainsworth is that latino boys are behind in reading well how is my son going to learn to read when he's afraid of his teacher how motivated will he be to learn to read in first grade when he's already learned to hate school our plea tonight doesn't even touch on the fact that many of the complaints and the binders that you have there also talk about the kindergarten teachers ineffective teaching methods and poor spanish i've volunteered in the classroom and like others witnessed incorrect teaching of spanish grammar i've witnessed kids struggling to understand what the assignment is not because she's speaking in spanish but because she's not delivering the instructions in a way that makes it understandable please look at the binders we want the board to know that this surely isn't the only struggling teacher that there is in the district we're asking the board to be leaders and change to ensure our students are taught by caring teachers who are trained and experienced i've heard that isaac's kindergarten teacher was hired two weeks before the start of the school year i know that my older son's situation was the same we didn't know who the teacher was until just before classes started we must hire our teachers earlier and provide effective systems of accountability to ensure our teachers are providing excellent teaching every day and not just on the day they're being observed for reviews these reviews are not a clear picture of what's happening in the classroom on a daily basis we're asking the board to be sure to stop this practice kindergarten is a powerful year of schooling it sets a foundation for the love of learning that they carry with them through high school kindergarten teachers must be kind and compassionate and provide a supportive learning environment to ensure all students have the best start to their schooling experience we all understand that pps has a lot of difficult challenges right now but my son is intimidated and bullied by his teacher and administration continues to look the other way children should never feel harassed or intimidated at school especially by their teacher this is about a poorly trained teacher placing my son in reasonable fear and emotional harm feel free to contact me or my wife for anything about this thank you both next we have next we have carol souvenir and mike rosen
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hello my name is carol souvenir s o u v e n i r my husband and i have a second grader a sixth grader and a tenth grader who are enrolled in portland public schools and i'm here tonight to urge you to vote against the proposed budget for one main reason we need more teachers in our classrooms our on-time high school graduation rate is 62 percent and i'm urging you to find 26.5 more fte to put into our classrooms so that we can offer seven classes out of our eight block schedule which is what we were told last monday night during the board meeting my daughter is a tenth grader at grant high school and she currently gets 25 and a half hours of instruction time per week which is unacceptable she has a three and a half hour scheduling gap on wednesdays and a two and a half hour scheduling gap on fridays i don't agree with the superintendent's budget leadership team who decided that even with declines of federal funding and other grants for next year that pps has to maintain all of those programs with all of the administration to by adding them to the general fund budget we can't afford it we need to review the results of those programs prioritize those programs and cut some of those programs so we can have more fte in our classrooms on page 37 of the budget it shows that there's a 20 fte increase to support services general administration and an increase of three fte to central support so essentially there were increases to the central office even though it's impossible to tell from the budget how many people work in the central office if you look at the fte that's listed on pages 33 to 38 of the budget document portland public schools has 4 900 fte working for it 2 000 2128 of them are in instruction which is 43 of our fte and another 832 are in special programs which is 17 so essentially 60 percent are teaching our kids and where is the other 40 percent why can't more of them be in our classrooms according to david wynn the budget for each teacher in pps is a hundred thousand so we need those 26.5 teachers 10 of them have already been withheld held back and if we got 16.5 fte that's basically 1.6 million more dollars on page 73 of the budget we're spending 246 million on salaries so i'm asking for at least one percent to be shifted to high school our budget process is backwards we need to look at staffing our core programs in our schools please we can do better thank you thank you mike rosen r-o-s-e-n cleveland high school parent this morning i spoke with superintendent smith's political advisor he contended that my quote broadcast saturday on opb would undermine constructive discussion with the district over the superintendent's proposed 2013 budget my quote we can't tolerate any more the misuse or misappropriation or the ineffective appropriation of dollars in the portland public schools i told him i knew exactly what i was saying and why i was saying it we now only provide 17 percent of all high school students with full school days due to an insufficient number of teachers assigned to high schools yet the superintendent can hire a full-time political advisor for a hundred thousand dollars a year and spend three hundred thousand dollars for an outside contractor to manage current teacher contract negotiations while at the same time the district employs a robust human resources department this four hundred thousand dollars could pay for four additional high school teachers last thursday i made half a dozen calls to the district office requesting a complete set of portland public school district staff organizational charts showing all filled and vacant positions i was told this information doesn't exist if so i can't understand how the superintendent can even begin to build a meaningful budget so i ask again whether this information has been compiled or not please provide it and please include a complete list of unassigned teachers that serve in district support roles superintendent smith i was also told this morning that this is not your budget it is now the school board's budget this is the superintendent's budget yes your staff developed it but
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it was approved by you and introduced by you to the board and the public and you need to own it the school board excluding chairs reagan and sergeant regan and sergeant has systematically dismantled every meaningful opportunity for the public to engage in the budget process case in point this budget was produced behind closed district doors without the benefit of a budget committee in the past the budget committee of board members would have deliberated with district staff and meetings open to the public at the very least this allowed the public to preview evaluate and comment on preliminary budget concepts the board needs to restore this process the bottom line is for is that for the last two years we failed to provide full instructional days to our high school students in order for this superintendent and school board to save four million dollars parents were skeptical two years ago and asked fundamental questions to assure successful implementation and those questions went on answers parents re-asked the same questions a year ago and requested a program audit and these requests again fell on deaf ears i also learned today that the city of portland cannot and likely will not guarantee that sufficient arch tax revenues will be collected to cover the cost of the new arts teachers the district will hire further there is no guarantee that the art tax will not be overturned as such the district must not hire these new teachers until the city guarantees the cost will be covered regardless of the legality or the level of tax collection we do not need more excuses to hold available teaching positions back from high schools enough is enough restore all of the high school teaching positions that were taken away in 2010 a third year of sending the majority of high school students home without a full day of school is unacceptable lastly we have carmen rubio and lisa zuniga good evening my name is carmen rubio and i'm the executive director of latino network and as you deliberate the proposed budget i'm here today to share some thoughts on behalf of our organization and the youth and families with whom we work first i'd like to thank you for taking the step to prioritize equity in this proposed budget the adoption of the racial equity policy clearly outlines that the district has committed to differentiated resourcing and alignment in order to close the achievement gap we believe that this budget does that for decades upon decades our communities have been requesting that we focus on the success of all students only to be disappointed at yet another generation of failing students particularly students of color english language learner english english language learners and those with disabilities and each year parents advocates and teachers have hope have hoped that maybe this year was the year that things would turn out better for them what we are hearing from committed teachers today is that despite this hope year after year of using the same approach makes it harder and harder to close the gap and for the first time we are seeing our most inspired and committed teachers getting really tired hope only gets you so far we've been waiting for action pps must tackle the real needs that students have now otherwise we will never see an end to inequality what this budget does is finally recognize that all while all students deserve a quality education that all students needs are not all the same what it also does is to align our decades of hope with deliberate action this saturday i was at benson high school with a couple of hundred latino students and parents teachers administrators and advocates who came together for the third annual latino family conference a couple of you were there there was a lot of energy laughter discussion among parents as well as expressed concerns and hope for their children's academic success as i was walking down the hall with all this energy and enthusiasm around me i thought wow wouldn't it be great if every time these parents or any parents went into their children's schools they felt this comfortable dissupported this engaged well we believe that they can right now is a pivotal time point in time in which we can take a big step forward together for the first time maybe ever we feel that this proposed budget reflects ongoing your ongoing partnership with our communities and also reflects your commitment to equity by aligning resources to where they are most needed we applaud you for your your courageous steps to prioritize equity and encourage you to stay the course we are standing there beside you thank you
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thank you my name is lisa zuniga z-u-n-i-g-a i'm a parent of three children in pps including a sophomore at franklin high school i volunteer both in the classroom and at the school level in all of my kids schools and i've seen firsthand what's happening in the high schools two years ago the decision to change the high school schedules saved a few million dollars by cutting 44 classroom teachers the unintended consequences however cut far deeper interestingly my daughter's class the first to experience the new schedule was in kindergarten the year pps panicked parents and teachers with the announcement that they were planning to lop five weeks off the school year the entire city mobilized and averted that crisis and we've been doing that again and again for more than a decade these kindergarteners are now sophomores and they've known nothing but program cuts and springtime anxiety about the stability of their schools your latest proposal has them poised to enter their junior year with limited access to classes maria and her peers are grappling with what it means to be forced to take a part-time class load they know in their gut this can't be what we mean when we emphasize the importance of education but they do what they're told as her mom i'm grappling with what it would mean for her to be in class for roughly four hours a day not only in the here and now but for all of her tomorrows will she and her peers be prepared for college and work i honestly wonder but this isn't about any one child or anyone graduating class or anyone high school we have an obligation to restore high school schedules so that all students graduate prepared for community college college or technical school the proposed budget continues the practice of warehousing younger students into mandated study halls or perhaps worse dismissing them as early as 12 30 in the afternoon perpetuating the idea that time spent in school is anything but precious it quietly lowers the standards of our high schools and actively devalues a pps diploma i'm convinced that pps students including my daughter will limp out of high school clutching transcripts that simply can't compete nationally we have an obligation to show them that we value education and that quality instructional hours are not spent in so-called study halls really holding pens or hanging out in the halls on the hill or at dairy queen or at nearby homes where there may or may not be an adult we have a responsibility to teach them that leaving early and showing up late are not best practices your budget must be revised to put students first franklin students need you to do this as do students at high schools around the city no more blockades to learning no more shutting them out of class no more impediments to their futures adding back 58 classroom teachers to ensure that all of our high schools can provide a full school day for all students is the only choice we're about to send these young men and women into the wider arena this is our last chance to give them back what was taken from them in two thousand ten thank you i just wanna take a moment to thank everybody that testified this evening we know it takes time out of your days and out of your schedule and you can begin to hear the challenges of of balancing this budget um and so just thank you everybody for for coming to to talk with us because your input's important with that tonight we're going to move on to our benson high school presentation tonight as part of our high school presentations we have principal carol campbell from benson high school those of you who have been watching us have seen us go cluster to cluster getting different bringing the whole cluster together to hear reports from our clusters benson is a little bit unique in a focused options school and doesn't have a feeder cluster and so we allotted some time to hear from from benson we've allocated 20 minutes from this item 10 10 minutes for your presentation and then 10 minutes for our questions with that superintendent smith would you like to introduce this item um yes and i'll introduce tripp goodall who's our director of high schools who will then lead off the presentation and you've already introduced principal carol campbell so i'll let trip take it away okay superintendent smith for chair of lyon board members i am very honored once again to introduce an outstanding high school principal carol campbell of benson high school this is carol's 29th year as an educator nine of those years were spent at grant high school as a biology teacher she was principal for four years at newburgh high school and is in her second year at benson she believes in benson and what benson means to this community she's the proud principals you saw earlier of two gates millennium scholars which again as a superintendent mentioned is an extraordinary accomplishment for our students in a thoughtful reflective creative way she's established strong partnerships with the benson alumni dale's here tonight to speak to that and with the portland business community you know when i first
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came to portland i heard often that benson built portland and i really believe with all my heart watching this principle over the last two years that she is going to be the principal recognized for building a modern urban cte program right here in portland so carol campbell thank you and thanks for uh i'm gonna move over okay thanks for giving us the opportunity to talk a little bit about benson i've attended most of the high school cluster presentations and i'm a believer in portland public schools and glad to be back here every school i've worked in i really loved it i've been in three different districts and four different schools and portland has always been my first love and every school i worked in was my first love and now benson has become that to me so um i'm gonna i'd like to introduce dale bayema he is a benson graduate and our current site council chair and the site council has been working on a project that i want him to talk a little bit about too so just painting the picture briefly of benson um 68 of our students are on free and reduced lunch we have 55 percent of our students academic priority with the graduation rate in 2011 of around 85 percent and the grad rate last year around 83. um our enrollment is we're probably the most diverse school in portland of the high schools with almost 25 percent asian black hispanic and white students last year we had a 11 gap between our white and hispanic students in reading and it looks like this year we are at three percent so that's something different students but i'm doing a little better um and in math we had a 16 gap between our white and black students in math and this year it looks like it's about 13. so we're making some some gains in those areas and a lot of it is due to the hard work of the staff and around uh collaborative professional development and i'm going to talk a little bit about that in the successes but they are very hard working and the equity work that we've done this year around courageous conversations um another area where we seem to be making some progress is in the discipline and i know that's been reported at other board meetings um this year already but when i started at benson there were 600 there were 600 referrals the previous year and the first year we cut those in half by simply expecting teachers to handle most of their classroom discipline and not send students to the office so that was a way to address that and then it looks like our the balance of referrals there was a high number of black students being referred for discipline and now that has shifted to the white students so uh i don't yeah i think that it was paying attention to who's being sent to the office and who's misbehaving and really focusing on race which again is the courageous conversations work so i'm proud of that so now i want dale to talk a little bit about the site council work okay let me first start by saying my brother and i both graduated from benson my father taught at benson for over 30 years i am the past chairman of the alumni association and been on the site council now for four years since last fall the benson site council has been working on a five-year plan we believe that an agreed-upon published plan will better guide the variety of current and anticipated efforts to further improve the performance of benson students especially those efforts that will enrich the student ct experience while they're at benson we think that when there are many people with many ideas and projects involving benson that our plan is necessary to focus their efforts energy and available resources on the highest priority projects and tasks and thus avoid people working at cross purposes and getting diverted onto lower priority projects and what we say this week this includes the benson teachers and staff students and parents business partners community supporters and the alumni this plan that we're putting together will have a set of agreed upon goals for the coming five school years with measurable steps to be achieved that will lead us to the completion of those goals this plan will complement and provide a larger context for the required school improvement plan the substance of our plan will be divided into three parts instruction community building and development and these will work together to support benson's mission as a focus option high school in portland particular attention is going to be given in the plan to academic achievement equity issues and improvements in benson's unique cte programs every plan of course must start with key
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assumptions and we believe that we have some realistic ones one there will be continuing tight budget constraints over the next five years though with modest increases in the latter years two there will be a further increase in partners offering support to benson cte programs this is based upon the growing number of new business partners in the past two years and carol has to get a lot of credit for making that happen increasing alumni support and a new memorandum of understanding that was signed earlier this year between benson and the oregon institute of technology three benson's teachers and staff will continue in creating additional connections between the school's academic programs and the curriculum content of the ct classes as well as to be more effectively using resources from every source the site council expect to have a draft of this five-year plan by the end of this school year we hope that we'll have an opportunity to discuss it in further detail with all of you during the summer so before we start implementing it this fall so i want to thank dalford's work on the site council it's been really helpful so just a few highlights for for the successes of benson we've increased the number of apprenticeship opportunities for students this year with uh particularly the addition of blunt international chris king enterprises we have students working at those places now we have a new partnership with the oregon institute of technology and i want to point out marla edge is here from oit to support me tonight and we are going to be articulating some core content classes with them beginning next year in math uh for sure and then writing 121 and 122 will be offered at benson um either at free for free or for 25 dollars per credit um so we're excited about that partnership uh benson students uh in 2011 12 earned 1235 credits from pcc for a savings of 97 000 um we already have several of our cte classes most of our cte classes are articulated with pcc you've probably heard about our fit to live and learn program it's been featured on on television and a documentary was filmed through funding from health corps nike is a partner in that and we hope to continue that program work on integrating cte and core courses is a focus at benson right now and we will be trying to add a geometry and construction class next year for incoming freshmen we're going to do some action research and see how geometry works for freshmen when it's paired with a class around building and constructing and designing and we've got two teachers who are going to attend a workshop in arkansas for a week to get that curriculum um our challenges um benson can be a great school with the capped enrollment but under the current formula for allocating fte our decreased enrollment has has put us in the same kind of situation that the comprehensive high schools were a couple of years ago with declining enrollment and not enough students to generate fte to to keep programs so benson has experienced severe cuts in the last two to three years and we also have a problem the same problem that our industry partners do with an aging workforce all of the cte programs have been pretty much cut down to one and or two staff members and benson has the highest percentage of teachers with the most years of service so we're we've got five 1975 high school graduates in our cte programs right now and they're going to retire soon so we don't have the resources to get people into those positions to be mentored and we'd like to be part of the teacher mentor program if possible benson students are coming from all over the city they do not have to meet entrance requirements any longer they are academic priority 120 of our incoming freshmen next year will be academic priority they need seven classes as well benson potentially could be the only high school in the district next year not offering seven classes to freshmen and sophomores so i'd like that to be benson to be considered our students needed i'm here to advocate for students um and that's what that that part is about um finally in our work to develop like dale talked about we're trying to put programs in that are 21st century and programs that are attractive to students we don't seem to have any problem getting applications and getting student interest in benson but we also want to be putting out students that are competitive in the world of work we want to put out students who can go to college if they so desire benson right now we don't have the space that we need to expand some of the classes we are have been inundated with outside programs that are currently housed in benson and taking up shop areas and other spaces that make it difficult we are pretty much at our maximum capacity and just like the the fte formula across the district doesn't necessarily
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work at benson neither does the square footage formula that says now there's only 850 students there and so you have all this space so those are our challenges right now and happy to take some questions and thank you great thank you comments questions so let's just go right back to the student schedules and explain how you get to the place where your freshman won't have seven classes um benson last year was the offered the smallest percentage of seven periods to freshmen and sophomores our freshman last year average six and a half classes and our sophomore's 5.4 and our elective classes are our cte classes those are the only electives we have and all students are required to take them it's not like they're not taking them they're taking what is available for them to take so i think it comes down to uh the number of students that can be in a cte class is smaller than uh 30. so when you start putting students in those classes you end up with not enough fte to really provide additional electives we figured it out and we're probably 1.7 fte short from offering seven classes to every freshman but it's not going to happen without the the fte we're going to have a hundred freshmen without seven classes next year is what it looks like some will be in spanish we don't have enough seats for everybody to take spanish we only offer two years so we're pretty much utilizing every available seat that we have there are no other electives there's no band music drama art anything like that left it really is just the cte so that's where we come up a little short okay so and the staffing for high schools you get some non-formula ftd we do but that isn't enough for the lower class size in your cte classes so your other classes have 30 kids or core classes are yeah they have 30 in those okay thank you in terms of the study hall issue or the sticks of eight and all those pieces is that any different at benson than the other in the comprehensives and any comments on that um any different in the sense of well are you able do you also have the study halls that the comprehensives are having to offer and how is that working do you have any different ways i mean it just seems like each school is handling this a little bit differently you're just interested in how you're on your hand right so my first year at benson i wasn't very happy with the study hall structure in fact we made the newspaper because we had the largest study hall in the district you may remember that betsy hammond came over so this year is she here today this year we tried to build our schedule so that we had fewer classes offered at the beginning of the day and the end of the day so unfortunately we did that to purposely have more kids coming late or leaving early so we wouldn't have 200 kids at a time and we built our schedule so that we tried to balance the number of seats available every period across 9 10 especially 9 and 10. so none of our 9th and 10th graders had an open period in the middle of the day where they could wander around and juniors and seniors there were a handful that had an extended lunch we didn't want that either so and we also had a voluntary school choice grant this year which allowed us to staff our study hall with someone who happened to be a licensed teacher just hired for that grant and we put the study hall in what we labeled a learning center that had about 60 computers two big spaces with an open doorway in between and that's also where we put our online learners so we tried to create a situation where this teacher was able to check in with their the students teachers he had iss access and he could conference with them and try to ensure that they were working so um it was better this year and next year we kind of want to run the same kind of thing but it's going to depend on you know again building the schedule so i think our biggest one this year was 45. okay and is that another one of those grants that's run out it is it is yeah but in the non-formula fte this year we have a study hall supervisor and that will be a licensed teacher no it'll probably be a classified person but i hope to find someone who is able to tutor and and is interested in building relationships with students and not just someone who wants to sit there and really be just a supervisor of students carol we've heard from many many many in the community um about the size of benson and that we need to lift the cap when i'm looking at your data here in 2008 you had 110 students and today you have 889
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so i think that's about 250 less than a few years ago the reason the cap was put in place was to try to equalize or strengthen some of the neighborhood schools do you have a sense if we started a gradual process of lifting a cap of what what it would mean i mean what would be meaningful at some point meaningful in the sense of a target a full program um like i said it's you know when you get more students you you get more teachers and that's just the way it works but you know i think i really believe in the in the comprehensive high schools too i understand the importance of having strong neighborhood schools um what i see what i see from my end are the students that don't get in and the impact it has on them and their families and i'm going to say that the the idea that students are running away from their neighborhood schools is not the only story out there there's lots of other stories so you know getting getting really personal with people and listening to them and listening to their students and reading their essays makes it more for me it's more about advocating for for families and students about what they want for their high school education than it is about a target number i believe that this district has an opportunity to make this school a national model and that it is the cte school of the district you're not going to be able to recreate it at every high school in the district but making it available to as many students as possible i think should be the goal as many students that that want it and that can um that see themselves being successful there i think that's why the school is really diverse we have a lot of first generation immigrant families at benson we have we have students who see themselves uh entering the world of work as well as going to college over 80 percent of our students go to a two-year four-year college and they don't all enter benson thinking that way they develop it over time we have lots of students that go to work so i'm not sure about a target i don't know the answers i know that some parts of it aren't working and i think it it would be this would be a good time to start looking at it because it takes time to to change any of it um but i i strongly suggest that there be some consideration for the families and the students who are who are selecting benson and then not being allowed in there were 200 families last year and another 200 this year that that didn't get in so follow up on that i mean at one point i think there was a discussion about exploring um options such as having flexible access for maybe 11th and 12th graders which potentially would both bring an additional fte and provide more access for students around the district since as you say we aren't going to be able to recreate medicine in every comprehensive so is that still under consideration is that still a possibility i don't know if that's for you or for carol or otherwise we're open to it um we we have some seats available for students to come in in some cases there's a problem with the prerequisites that they haven't had the two years they haven't they don't know the safety thing so they'd have to come in and do and we don't have enough teachers to put them in freshman sophomore classes but i think there is a way to work that out i think an unintended consequence of the high school redesign is that it's pitted the high schools against each other and we're we're kind of fighting over kids and in some cases maybe three high schools are fighting over the same 250 families so unfortunately you know we would have to have more of a collaborative relationship where the comprehensive high schools would be willing to let students come over um and and and collaborate on building the schedules would be crucial you know there's a a good story about a senior at cleveland um who is who was interested in learning about auto automotive and and the cleveland principal and i worked together um it fitted to her schedule she did all the legwork and figured it out and just came over and said can i come over here and she's coming and doing the automotive class in the morning and then goes to cleveland for her core classes it can work i mean it just seems like especially since we have the trimet passes and there's such a you know such constrained resources and the needs both at benson and the so that would be a natural thing to to try it at least to pile it if not roll out more widely so i'll just throw in that so we've been talking about what's both what are what's possible within the current structure but also how do we thoughtfully start looking at how we lift the cap and what's what are program programmental increments that make sense for benson but also how do we not destabilize what has started to stabilize for some of the neighborhood schools but we're actively in that conversation at this point and then the other piece to that is also doing as we're looking at our high school facilities including a cte specific vision conversation with our facilitators that really looks at both
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vision for benson and what how does it connect to your long-range plan which i'm thrilled to hear more detail about that was great um but also cd across the district and benson specifically and really doing the vision conversation in that context which i think we're getting ready to do pretty soon um but we're actively in the how do we thoughtfully lift the cap and over what interim time interval and how does that connect to our district vision is there anything we can do for next year though well the conversation you're the one you're just raising we have had this conversation about whether kids students from upper grades can enter um later on and and the other feature of recent years under carol's leadership has also been stronger retention of students at benson so we haven't had the same phenomenon of students leaving they're they're staying so some of the growth you do see is they're staying so so the opportunity at the higher grades is less available i just have a quick question for you carol you've had some pretty phenomenal results in closing your achievement gap can you just give us a little snippet of what you think are the most powerful reasons for that um i have to give credit to the to the teachers and the work that they're doing i mean i came on board last year and and implemented some things that were a little drastic and and kind of not uh what the how things were done in the past and they have been um extremely uh patient and cooperative and some things work and some don't but um like today for example we were meeting and we've had plcs all year and professional learning communities professional communities yeah and teachers chose the the areas of focus and they got in their own teams and now we're they're presenting their work for the year so the peer observation group presented today and then the other teachers give them feedback and i read some of the feedback and they have a nice powerpoint it's a technical school so we got prezis and all kinds of things going on um which wasn't required required um but the comments from the other teachers as well i wish i would have been in that plc um this is really great work it makes me want to go watch my colleagues the kind of work that they're doing is about instruction and i'm a firm believer in if you're going to change anything about the achievement gap it's got to happen in the classroom so we got rid of all of our non-pd meetings and all of it is about collaborating working together several teachers are doing action research that's how the fit to learn program came about teachers interested in kind of looking at different ways to teach health and pe so i have to give credit to them i think benson has the beauty one of the beautiful things about benson is that kids come there because they want to and they come with a desire to stay there for the most part every once in a while we run into somebody that's not a good fit for but for the most part um they are motivated this connection between cte and common core i believe has to stay it's not a skill center it is a place where for a four-year education where students can actually see the benefit of learning to read and write and do math and how that translates into a living wage job or a college degree or whatever it is they want to pursue so i think it's a combination of of all of those things but i have to give the teachers credit for for most of it thank you thank you with our capital facilities bond one of the things that we are looking at in terms of our contractors is that they provide opportunities for students around internships mentorships career technical education really um are you front and center working with our facilities folks on engaging your students in this whole process or how is that all working i'm not yet i've had a couple of conversations um with them but we would like to have our students involved in the planning our students are really busy too so but i know that that would be a good experience for them probably about 35 to 40 of my job is meeting people and going to places and going to businesses until every place i go people hand me business cards and when people know that benson is a viable option and benson is still operating it it does attract people in this city that's why i think it is a it is a good investment for the school district and i think it will probably it will continue to bring partners and partners that can be partnered with other schools not just benson in developing some of these programs so i would like to our students to be more involved and i hope that you know down the road benson benson needs to move into the 21st century and update some of the things that we have but everybody that comes into the building in most areas say i i really we want our workers to learn what your students are learning um and they'll be prepared for what we do in our place of business so we're not that far off but there are some things to improve that's great can i do a quick shout out dale thank you as an alumni for being so engaged
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i'm on the oregon school board association board of directors and as i'm around the state i am constantly almost harassed by benson alumni who just love love this school absolutely love this school and you are just an example of an alumni who has just stayed so engaged and are fighting the fight and i'm really grateful thank you and before you we conclude i want to go back to to a statement you made um i was glad that by the way to to to hear more about the students why they're going in and they're interested in the family beyond escaping another school i think that's important to continue to to to share but the other part and i was struck by it in regards to that we are at capacity uh because benson has had a number of programs that that have come in can you talk a little bit about those and and what the plan is to actually say okay well this program actually makes sense to actually have house here particularly if we're looking at uh you know the potential of growth in in that area and the expectation that people have is that and and i think we heard it during the high school redesign discussion uh you know you know with all due respect to the alumni were looking at having it in the times that they were they were i don't know 1500 2000 2500 students at benson and that's not necessarily what what you're saying today that there is capacity to grow that much i don't know if i want to be the principal of a 1500 or 1600 school where they're using saws and welding you know yeah again yeah i think expectations on the community i think is important to address i i just wanted to not focus on the number because i don't think the number is the critical thing i think it's the as long as the school is desirable and it's it's sought out by students because they see it as a means to get their education then i think it's worth it it's worth it to let students go there as much as we can without you know detracting from the comprehensive high schools some way i don't know what the answer is the other programs that are in the building they were all there when i got got there i think except two the dart program is there and they've taken over what was or used to be the drafting portion of the building it's the second floor kind of in the back by the parking lot um and then there's the reconnections program the alliance day and evening school summer school evening scholars might be forgetting something because there's several and they mostly have taken over the sea wing which is one the one back hallway where the manufacturing area is and some of those spaces have been partitions have been put up for example there's a shop area that has a partition put up to be turned into two classrooms and most of those programs have few students i mean all collectively together they're the number of students is maybe two to three hundred but their footprint is big they have office space they have storage space they have they you know they're always asking for more they need confidential counseling space so that's pretty much eaten up everything that's available in that wing what we have open at benson are a couple of science classrooms upstairs and i think one classroom in the front that that's a small we use it's in our math social studies area so if i want to have a geometry construction class with 40 people i don't really have a space to put it but there's space available but there's another program in there and those programs are not transitioning students into benson these are programs that could be anywhere in the district and i know space is a is a premium but if benson is going to continue to be a premier cte school and we're going to put in programs and continue to develop new programs like this opportunity to combine these two courses we need the ability to use our own space i love alternative ed also i'm a big supporter of alternative ed and we have had two students transition we've got one right now who's transitioning from the dart program into a class um and we had a student who was in one of the i think in reconnections who is now a full-time student at benson and maybe because they were there they see the school and they want to try classes there that's great but for the most part we don't interact um with them they cause a huge amount of traffic in our main office um which is another you know kind of a thing that we have to deal with with phone calls and people wanting to go here or there where is this program where is that program but they are cooperative i like the administrators in all of those programs it has nothing to do with that i love the kids but i just don't know where to go with
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these yeah okay thank you i think we're gonna move on thank you for being here thank you thank you we're gonna ask you to take a picture with us right here and maybe an uh iphone picture how about the vinson uh yeah any benson alum that want to come up and be in this picture maybe some folks in orange and some tech men events and alums come on down troy how are you i have a real camera thank you but if you need to take one dude we are going to now move on to our budget discussion so we are going to recess the board from its regular meeting and convene as the budget committee now as the budget committee the board received the superintendent's budget messages proposed and proposal and proposed 2013-14 budget on april 15th and we'll be having our second discussion on the proposed budget tonight as a reminder a public hearing was held on the proposed budget on april 18th and an additional public hearing will be held this wednesday may 1st at 6 pm here in the board auditorium just a reminder if you'd like to sign up for that testimony please contact the board office ms karen houston in addition to tonight's discussion on the proposed budget the board's also going to be hold future discussions on may 6 and may 13th and we aim to approve the proposed budget on may 20th now with that superintendent smith would you like to introduce this get us started so my question to you is whether or not we might since we're missing three board members we might take a break because the information we're going to provide you ends up bringing you up to date on what's happened with staffing which will be funny if we give it to we can do that to four of you and not the other the budget committee will take a five-minute break good thank you they thought there was gonna be some i was but it's but it's still weird reconvene as the budget committee and with that we'll get started on our discussion of our budget so we're missing our student board member student representative garcia student representative garcia can you join us thank you okay so tonight before you engage in your budget conversation we have two updates for you from the staff one will be about the operational savings that were part of the proposed budget and the second will be an update on staffing because as um as you know we had do the set-aside every year where we then do the apply the formulas to our staffing and then um go through a period where each school ends up doing an analysis of what that impact is and then we go through a process of figuring out what of the set-aside we release now and what we hold on to to resolve issues in the fall so those are the two things we're going to bring you up to date on and then the other piece i think just in listening to the all the conversations about this budget i just want to come back and and remind us of like what the the message is in this one which was a level of stability at the state that their state is shooting for um in the 6.75 budget did a couple of things which were halting erosion and allowing us to offset losses that were federal losses we're still highly sensitive to student enrollment numbers and what how this is how this plays out is we still see places where we're we're seeing cuts or we're seeing the ability to offset loss but it is not it is not a build back
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budget so over the uh this was like the the pause and from a state point of view the stability the stability biennium which heads us towards a reinvestment biennium and i i just say that to you once again because i feel like that some of the hope of what this budget is there's is being dashed by the reality of what kind of a pause we're in and um and how we are still trying to make the best use of scarce resource and what you hear is a lot about still wanting to be able to offer more robust programming in our k-8s and in our high schools and you're going to hear about like exactly where we think we are what threshold we're at part two i think the conversation about federal sequestration where you have heard an outcry from other federal aviation where there have been exceptions made and where there may be still opportunity to raise our voices on behalf of kids of looking at at similar exceptions uh to where sequestration does not apply so i'm just going to say like even the places where we're seeing forward motion from our state we still have opportunity to raise our voices in terms of what's happened with the cuts that at a federal level that are impacting our most vulnerable kids so that was just anchoring you back to our big picture and i will ask cj sylvester our chief operating officer to walk us through some of the operational savings that are investments over the last couple of years that realized savings in our budget this year that allowed us to put that towards program and kids cj good evening cj sylvester chief operating officer for portland public schools and just as a reminder operation consists of six departments its facilities its office of school modernization nutrition services security transportation and information technology and as the superintendent indicated the budget that she has proposed includes a number of operational savings that are being realized in the 13-14 fiscal year and so i'd just like to talk a little bit about those and what those investments were what the savings are and ultimately what that means for the 1314 fiscal year budget in 2009 a number of you were sitting members of the board at the time when we did nine roof replacements that included solar installation and it was the first large-scale solar roofing project undertaken by a public school district in the state of oregon at the time and um we currently on average are powering about 18 percent of the nine schools with those uh thin film solar panels but as a result of the work we received an energy rebate of approximately 1.2 million and so we have a one-time savings in next year's budget of 1.2 million in the facility's capital budget as a result you might recall from previous budget years that every year the facilities department has a 3 million dollar capital budget for our 101 sites and 280 buildings so the size of it um is less than adequate um but it is what we've been able to to work out over the years in order to try and accomplish some things so this is reducing then the general object the general fund obligation by 1.2 million for next year as a one-time savings on utility savings uh we've had a series of things that have been ongoing for several years the s b what used to be called the sb1149 money which is now part of the cool schools program is administered by the oregon department of energy and we've done over 380 energy efficiency projects over the last two and a half years that have got an average payback of about 10 years uh the total cost of those projects is 2.9 million dollars estimated annual energy savings of 384 000 uh just in terms of the sb 1149 projects the recovery zone bond projects you may recall is us in partnership with the city of portland who received an allocation through the american recovery and reinvestment act the stimulus monies and we were able to take 11 million dollars in recovery zone bond to improve district energy and water consumption and those projects are saving the district about 1.8 million and we've got what can i say we've got a whole series of savings related to the recovery zone bond projects but the boiler burner conversion project is another one where what we did is we borrowed funds in order to be able to convert our 89 remaining heavy fuel oil burning boilers at 47 different schools to natural gas the original estimate was that we would be saving a total of 1.8 million dollars a year in
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utility savings fuel savings and that has now been adjusted to 2.1 million a year so a lot in addition as part of the entire operating utility improvement program we are now getting ready to save an additional 620 000 over what had previously been estimated in the 13-14 year so as we've been going along and implementing the projects the improvements that we've been seeing and the reduction in utility bills is greater than had even been anticipated and that is the net result in transportation we had a several year request for proposal and very intensive negotiations process for a new transportation contract and the net result of that is that we are saving about 670 000 a year starting in 2013-14 uh in terms of the purchase of propane because that is a cost that we were able to pass on to the contractor at no additional cost to ourselves and in the last several years transportation has been working with our special education department to work on alternatives to cab service for some of our special education students and now that is resulting in an additional savings of one hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year in information technology information technology also has our reproduction department underneath it and through a partnership with multnomah county we're purchasing paper or they're purchasing paper through us is actually the way it's occurring and improved processes we're projecting 200 000 in savings for the general fund annually starting next year there is a federal e-rate program reimbursement uh we're projecting that we're going to get 1. 1 million reimbursement to the general fund for the 13-14 year and we've also phased out some software maintenance agreements and implemented newer applications with lower annual maintenance costs saving an additional 285 thousand dollars a year and a smaller one but nonetheless important is that in an effort to control custodial overtime eight additional full-time custodians were hired to work the necessary absences required the necessary hours required by absences this efficiency saved the district general fund 40 000 annual starting in 1314 even after adding the additional eight full-time equivalent positions so the superintendents of fiscal year 1314 budget reflects a total proposed savings from the operations departments of 3.2 million dollars and so we simply wanted to be able to bring that to your attention this evening as you go into further deliberations on the budget thank you cj thank you and i don't know if people have questions for cj before otherwise we'll i just had two quick questions yeah what's the federal e-rate program i don't remember anybody else knows what it is um the ee rate reimbursement program is uh related to our implementation of technology and so actually the 3.2 million does not include that 1 million e-rate reimbursement because that simply goes into the general fund so this the 3.2 is outside that 1 million but what it is is that for certain kinds of technology investments that we make we are eligible for reimbursement from the federal government the program varies over time and it has multiple tiers and so we can never be sure that we're going to receive reimbursement for certain investments we make we know for a certainty that we are getting at least one million um for the 1314 fiscal year because that has been confirmed by the federal government so when we were redoing marysville for instance there were certain improvements we made at marysville that were e-rate reimbursable and so we do it on a project by project even school-by-school basis as we get into the school modernization program we'll be using e-rate reimbursement funds to improve technology in those schools as well as bond funding great thanks my other question is just about the custodial overtime and efficiency i was wondering we've talked about the boiler burner project and how much less maintenance a natural gas burner requires compared to the oil burner and i wonder if we've seen a reduction in custodial time or custodial overtime as a result of that work what kind of results have we seen unfortunately i'm not the best person to address that um but tony magliano is out of town right now what i can say is that um
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those custodial hours instead of being spent on the boiler themselves are being spent inside the building inside the classrooms inside the hallways inside the cafeterias so we do know statistically that we remain understaffed for the number of custodians we have per square foot of school and that's based on council of great city school statistics and any other kind of professional standard so while we've recovered additional time for the custodians it doesn't mean that we still we have adequate maintenance staff and custodial staff for our buildings okay as a practical matter all right i appreciate that could i ask one quick question um you i think mentioned and correct me if i'm wrong on the nine schools with the first large-scale solar projects um i think you said that we're seeing an 18 say reduction in cost for electricity is that right um well we're covering i heard you say something 18 we're covering 18 of our utility usage across those nine schools through the solar panels yes do you know what that means in terms of money no i'd have to get that calculation for you but i can get that okay i would significant though yeah i would love to get that because at some point i'm curious if we should be looking at something similar to the oil conversion where we might want to borrow money put solar up and pay it off through those kinds of utility savings yeah especially as we're starting through the capital bond project where we have an opportunity we're putting all these new roofs on you know even if we did a pilot project to kind of see what kind of savings we could get it would be exciting to see so i'd love to get that number i agree thank you any of your comments or thoughts for operations great thank you move on okay thank you and next i would like to invite up suanne higgins our chief academic officer and her special assistant sarah singer and they're going to walk you through an update of just where our what's the current state of school staffing good evening we wanted to provide a little additional information this evening around school staffing particularly because at the end of last week and today we've made some adjustments in staffing to some schools and so we just wanted to update you on that so we'll start with just looking at the set-aside fte so it's necessary each year to distribute the maximum amount of fte that we can while reserving some to address enrollment shifts etc so we just wanted to talk about a little bit of work that we've done on that since last week so to be thank you so to begin with the set-aside fte is to address enrollment projection shifts and again that would typically happen in the fall would also address when allocation formulas fail to meet unique situations so where a school may have fallen two students below the number required to receive an assistant principal but has had an assistant principal for several years so we would look at a situation like that and determine you know is this is the formula the thing so so those sorts of circumstances um and so in total beginning this year we had 49 set aside fte and we've reviewed those um couple of other times so at this time we've made several decisions to distribute more than half of that pot of fte right now so and this is called planned fte distribution because some of it will actually load into the school systems tomorrow morning so but we have allocated 11.33 of those 49 fte set aside to the k-8 system and so while that's 70 percent of our schools we've made those allocations at this time and those um are related to places where we had shortfalls in of a variety of types for the high schools we did something somewhat different so we made the decision to expand all of what
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we would consider fall balancing fte to the high schools now in order for them to build schedules and have that fte at this time and we'll talk a little bit more about that and then we had another 6.29 fte that we distributed again to address some of those unique program needs and so could you give us an example of a unique program need just so we know what we're talking about sure so um wes sullivan has 900 students um but only one counselor so we thought that that qualified as a unique program need another situation is some of our schools got they have two behavior classrooms but only one principal so they need additional support so that would be the kind of examples okay so the good news is that we have pushed more fte out to the schools at this time and the risk in that is that if we had significant shifts um or other unforeseen circumstances we have a little bit less in our pot going into the fall so we have about 20 ft remaining and so for the high school fte set aside to maximize our ability to provide classes for all students we looked at distributing the 10 fte we had using a formula that would allow us to add staffing capacity to each of the high schools so that they could provide seven classes for all ninth and tenth graders and six classes for all 11th and 12th graders which in total is slightly more than the number of classes being taken at those levels this year if you average all the high schools together and then we also differentiated the student-to-teacher ratio somewhat because we left the equity allocations in place as had been intended so sure so i just want to kind of um provide a brief overview of how our staffing initially worked so we started with a 30 to one ratio for all of our high schools we then included a weighted equity allocation based on ses and combined underserved can i can i just go back for a minute because there's something in that number 30 to one if i remember correctly we changed how we directed some more admin table for school-wide support that changed that number so it may not actually be a change in classroom teacher to student ratio ft's can you remind us about how because i think people are looking at that saying see there's another cut and what was that change absolutely um thank you for that reminder so um in in past years the ratio um let me start with that we this year added made our school-wide support table more reflective of what actually occurs in high schools so in past years high schools were dipping into their basically their teaching fte to then support more school-wide support sort of administrative type positions and they they said these are critical positions they were complete people like counselors campus monitors positions that there was uniform opinion amongst our principals that are needed in in the high school building to operate a high school building so we changed the school-wide support table to better reflect what actually occurs on the ground and what has always been occurring on the ground so just to see if i make sure if i'm restating it correctly so that doesn't mean 30 to 1 doesn't mean a 31 to 1 ratio in every classroom or more it's talking about the number of more accurately reflecting that the number of adults isn't necessarily um being reduced because of this it's just reflecting how the adults are used within the building correct so how does it relate to the ratio and the lower grades what would be the equivalent high school ratio versus one through eight ratio i'll have to get back to you on that one um because the the middle schools i think their ratio fte is more reflective of their teaching fte however it is also possible that this occurs at
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the k8 level where some of the the current k-8s are using their ratio fde to support administrative positions i don't think that it's it was near to the extent of the high schools so um i would need to kind of get back to you to give you the apples to apples comparison okay i'd appreciate that i'd like to i like that figure it is in the budget book and i apologize that i don't have it handy so you can tell me where it is page 24. page 24. sorry okay so um so after we started with our ratio fte we then included the equity allocation which you have heard is based on both socioeconomic status and what we call combined underserved populations we then allocated additional fte to focus and priority high schools that would be jefferson and roosevelt and then we added on top of that fte to benson and jefferson for their unique focus program so you just heard from benson there's a need to support cte so we added that into the non-formula as we have done for many years in the past we've added about that same exact amount so then looking at the set-aside methodology we so we have this extra sort of fte that that we alluded to called set-asides and how we decided to allocate that was we looked at the comprehensive high school by size and then we looked from there to see if we added additional high school that we picked 11 fte i'm sorry 10 fde and then looked at from there how many classes could be offered with that allocation it was every school but one school at that point could offer and from our analysis we felt could offer seven classes for freshmen and sophomores in six classes for juniors and seniors except for one school and that that was lincoln so we added an additional fte to lincoln so they too could offer seven classes for freshmen and sophomores in six classes for juniors and seniors and i'm just going to clarify that the six classes for juniors and seniors does not mean that we're then saying only offer six classes to juniors and seniors it's saying you've got the capacity to do that some kids will could sign up for seven and and as we know many don't so like the that you can still offer students seven classes as long as the ebb and flow works out that way so so that's what i'm i'm curious about i know you mentioned suen the the average across the high schools and but i guess what i'm interested in is what is the what is that variation when we separate those how often do we see lincoln students taking seven classes and junior and senior year how often are grant students and so on right um so do we have that included here not by school so we don't have that by school that's that we have that information and um in my mind lincoln in particular didn't stand out in fact what you there's um like roosevelt um so think the schools that have more academic priority students and special education students are going to have more classes um and they're yes and they're allowed to rely on their staff for that right but we have a three-year trending as well and that three-year trend holds up as well with with those schools as well so i think one of the challenges that i'm hearing with with the three-year trend is that our schedules changed so much so originally right we were on um a seven period schedule right um and then we went to six of eight um but if you go to the year before we were on the seven schedule we were on a six hours like a six period schedule so there it doesn't feel like there's a good comparison and i heard something today that for example for some high schools to mitigate this they actually capped they actually did cap their students they said you can't take more than six which would artificially deflate um so so to compare it to a year prior and say well most kids aren't actually taking that average um so the three years and there's no ill intent but i think it's hard to use those numbers to get a real gauge of what kids would do so we'll show you some three and four years look back so that you can see what what we're looking at as comparators as well um so that you so we're just over one and a half years into an eight period double block schedule so going back three years does have us on the seventh period day and four years
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takes us back so so let me just um walk you through so the key assumptions in terms of this high school set-aside distribution that we just made was that um the assumption is that all the ratio and equity allocation fte is used in classrooms so how do we arrive at this calculation so that's one way another way is that the discretionary and directed fte that's in the administrative support table was not counted as teaching fte so additionally no foundation funding or other grant funding was included in those calculations the esl and special education fte also is not included so that's strictly classroom ratio and um only academic priority and special education students may take eight classes due to the arbitration requirements so um so those are all factored in as we made those um distributions so if you is i i know we keep snapping but it feels a little bit more work session as we try to figure out we have um kind of a general fund budget fte that we were given this is how it goes by school we're given a special ed here's how it goes by school we were given ell by school um and it you can add them all together right and it sometimes the numbers match from what i'm hearing and sometimes the numbers don't it'd be really helpful to just kind of get here's the total fte at this building from one year here's the total category it's becoming really challenging and it it makes i think us unsure of what information or how to articulate it that would be great okay thank you thank you and maybe even showing uh the proposed versus what's happening this year yes proposed number of ft and then you'll get out for next year this is what's happening in the school this year and this is what's happening what's proposed for next year yeah and does that i mean i know you already have this column in there but the enrollment piece is really important too so people understand the context of enrollment shifts because that often gets left out of the conversation but that's obviously a huge driver of this as well okay so thank you so on this one um the fte by school after the set-aside allocation so in other words with the 11 fte 11.16 ft we just distributed so the overall teaching ratio and again i just described the things that we did count and did not count in that moves us to below 28 to 1 in each of the high schools and then you still see that the equity allocation provides some variance again in those schools we know that we have more academic priority students and so it allows them additional flexibility to provide an eight period day for more students and when it's all said and done can we get a copy of this presentation so that we have it i don't know did you get received it no we don't i apologize i thought you would receive them okay we'll take a minute so you can all be looking at the same thing and do you know well we're getting this information do you know how this ratio would compare to this year in general because i think i think some of what we're hearing is one not only a frustration not being able to provide a full day which has been consistent over the past couple of years but this messaging right that state school funding is stable and we're seeing cuts right do we know how this compares to bruce prior and gender in general um can you when you say years prior are you talking about ratio i'm sorry yes the ratio we have a slide that we'll get get to that it won't be the teaching ratio but it will be the overall ratio thank you um it might be most helpful actually to look at this one next so this is slide nine and this is our historical data on number of classes students were taking so this one goes back three years so 2010-11 the school year the last year that we were in the seven period schedule on average across the district students were taking 6.1 classes and this current year students are
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taking 6.4 classes across the grades and so and then we've broken it out by actual grade levels so um in the current school year freshmen are averaging seven classes tenth graders slightly fewer 11th graders slightly fewer and then seniors significantly fewer so at 5.4 classes per senior and again there are many factors to that an eight period schedule over time accumulates more credits than students are required to have for graduation and that's part of what accounts for so some students still prefer to take more classes and others don't and again the space allowances that have been referred to have also been a factor and a challenge in providing all of those opportunities so um so i'll just give you an interrupt quick question so but is a study hall being counted as a class so i'm just looking at sarah for the calculation i do not believe it is but i do not believe it is but let me double check with the person who created analysis i do not think it is and yeah and our classes our classes under six of eight are shorter every single class is shorter so when you have the average number of classes do you also have the instructional time periods are longer right the periods now are shorter or an hour and a half but the amount of instructional time over the course of the year over those two double periods of classes for the year instead of seven right so it's a double block but each of those individual blocks is less time so i think the total number right so what i'm interested in understanding is in each of those years what's the typical instructional time that students have not including late arrival early dismissal or study halls right so um there are we know that there are fewer instructional hours in the year with the eight period schedule and so um so the comparability so i have not calculated the comparability difference between the 6.4 on an eight period double block schedule and the 6.1 from the seven period but we can get back to you with that i mean the thing i would say about that calculation because i've been you know listening to other people's estimations of that right and we will come back to you with our calculation but what is um a bit deceptive in that is if you assumed like when we were on the the seven period schedule um do you assume a 51 minute period or did you assume a 47 minute period because it makes a huge difference in the calculation and um in from when i went back and looked at kind of history typically we were on a 47 minute period another thing to think about is passing time when you have seven classes in a day there is you need to you need to allow more time for passing so you actually lose instructional time there and then when you think about every time you start and stop a class you actually lose some instructional time there so these are some key assumptions and i just don't feel like the some of the stuff that i heard have necessarily outlined some of those assumptions so i think we need to to be really clear about that and then when we're talking about the um you know our er eight period day it's similar like what what are the assumptions that underlie that are we saying it's a 94 minute you know block or are we saying it's it's uh you know a 75 minute so i just think we ha and unfortunately the reason why this isn't like a super easy calculation is that our high schools this year last year the year before the year before that were all on different schedules and they all had different like some of them had different early releases some of them have early late starts so it just doesn't turn out to be like a super easy calculation to do so we can come back with a really with our best estimate but i would just just i just want to lay that copying out there is those assumptions make a huge difference because i've started this calculation and i end up anywhere between you know zero time difference to 45 hour difference um i don't end up uh you know with months difference like some of the things that i've heard so if i could just go back to this chart for a second um so i'm looking at an average of seven periods a day for ninth graders um but we're saying that our academic priorities students should all be taking eight classes so what percentage of our population is this academic priority because i think it's pretty significant and if you've got a third of your students taking eight periods then you've got another 30 year students taking six periods in ninth grade
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so that that concerns me um and actually some chart i saw said really only 17 of our students are taking eight periods now maybe yeah so you know the numbers are concerning but we look at that and we say oh ninth graders are taking seven periods but if a whole bunch of them are taking eight periods then a whole bunch of them are not taking seven periods right um and then the numbers go down from there because i think at one point you know in in some more earlier discussions i think the figure that that was being used was like 30 of students that were coming into high school were academic priority was i mistaken on that yeah that's right i i don't know if it was only grant maybe so what's the number district-wide right so anyway but you're right i mean i think that you know to go back one i mean i think that you all done a lot of work uh before in regards to the variance of of uh of instruction at the high school level i think i remember during the high school redesigned i mean i think that was one of the the the predictable inconsistencies you know in in that whole system that there was no real um no real consistency in regards to what were they actually getting and and again in regards to how many students were actually taking that that full load that was questionable so this is another slice of the historical data so one of the challenges about getting a year-to-year comparison of teachers to students in the high school system is as sarah was referencing we know that at least four percent of teacher fte was being deployed in the administrative table type roles last year like the current school year so we made adjustments there but that's part of why one of the calculations we've looked at is the total number of adults in the in the full staffing for each high school um as it compares and so that changes the number i think one of the other telling things in this one is that you see in 2010 you have just under 11 000 students and so you see that we've had an attrition of 473 students over those for the three years up to current and with the projections somewhat down in high schools again next year so um so you see this you know there is a downward trend of fte some of which is explained by the actual attrition of nearly 500 students from the system so we know that we have a lower birth rate group running through our high school grades and while that is increasing in the grade school years particularly pre-k through three we still see this low bubble this low number of kids moving through our high school system and so um we expect to be out of that within two years so um so at any rate we have um sorry what yes did we close marshall 2010 marshall was closed at the end of 2011. so um last year 11 12 was the first year that we had one fewer high schools correct yeah so can i see if i'm doing my math correctly i'm trying to figure this out so our total enrollment from 2010 to 2013 yes for high schools only because the district of rome what's gone up but for high schools is down about 473 am i doing that right yeah yep um but the number of teachers in our building right is down by 51 adults the number of adults in our building is down by 51 so if you were to take the total enrollment loss of 473 and divide it by 30 so you figure 1 to 30 ratio sort of and i know this is rough math we would have lost about maybe 15. and instead we're down 50. right right however so that is true and um uh so the current year that we're in is less favorable than next year which is trending up so while we know that we
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have a pretty flat budget we have a slight increase for next year in fte distributed to the high schools at this time well and i'm i'm curious about that calculation uh direct readings i would be curious i'd be curious to figure out what that then similar calculation is for k5 and k8 yeah because in k5 and k8 i'm not i'm not hearing a lot of schools saying we're adding teachers and so i think the system as a whole is losing teachers and the question then would be is it proportional is it compared to the percentage of population dip in k5k8 is it proportional to what we're losing in high school kind of thing that's fair enough yeah yeah that's fair enough i mean it appears disproportional right if you look at this chart on page 24 it appears disproportional and that was a decision i think that was made a couple years ago um and we're seeing from our community that they're not happy with that decision that that is not um wearing well over time so the question has been raised what would it take to actually change so we just wanted to show you kind of four different calculations so if you started at the very bottom of the chart um here so what would it take to have capacity for all students to take seven classes or all students to take eight classes while also maintaining our current level of differentiation of resources based on our equity and our focus program support so if you start at the bottom of the chart so as i said earlier the distribution that we made on friday allows high schools to schedule at grades nine and ten for seven classes and grades eleven twelve for six classes so that's the numeric calculation there and that distribution and so if you completely eliminated the equity differential it would take another 16 fte to get all of the high schools to a place where all grade levels could be staffed for every student taking seven classes to keep the current equity differential in the schools that same change to seven classes for all kids would cost 59 fte so um and then similarly if you rolled that up at eight classes for all assuming that you completely eliminated an equity allocation you could get to eight classes for all students with 67 fte and or roughly six and a half million dollars and then eight classes with the equity allocation would cost 117 fte so so we just wanted to scale that and make sure that you had a sense of what what it would take to consider that so i just want to make sure we understand this are you saying that you would eliminate the equity differential at high schools or the equity differential district-wide high schools so there's 43 staff positions through the equity differential for high schools no if you project it out to seven classes for every student and applied the current differential that's what it would take yes i don't i don't know i don't follow that because just try saying it again the whole differential the whole equity differential is something like 47 fte correct across the district right district-wide so how can the equity differential at high schools be 43 or 50 no it's a really good question it doesn't make any sense to me what you've got there i'm sorry yeah that's a good question so i feel like we need to get back to you i apologize okay so i mean we need we need yes accurate information i think it's just yeah i mean i can try to explain it but it's incredibly complicated it's if if all classes if if everybody was to take seven classes and you wanted the same if you wanted to maintain the exact same sort of equity differential that you have in place today so remember when you saw those ratios this is how much fte would be required but at some point you can't have kids taking more classes i mean if you have everybody taking eight classes you can't have another 50 fte to give an equity differential for kids to take more classes because i mean i guess they could be in half the size of the classes they'd have smaller classes but there's a limit of what what point you can get to right so yeah
02h 45m 00s
i mean some schools in here would be like um if they'd be overstaffed they would have very small they might have small class sizes and and um yeah okay okay so this is this is not a helpful calculation from my point of view i don't i can't speak for anyone else i mean i think the point is like if you just look at if we just add had the seven classes um for all schools for all grades and you added 16 fte what you when you look down at the ratio you you begin to see that madison and grant and lincoln and wilson are staffed with the exact like very very very similar ratio and so i think that's that's just something that's kind of food for thought and i actually i think the equity ratio is including both the um the equity ratio staffing ratio and also the folks in priority school bump is that correct right um and the uh non-formula fte i think you i think it was a combination of what are the things that you do to both staff every student for x number of classes and then what are the things that you're doing to recognize difference and a need for additional support i just have difficulty understanding why we would need an extra 43 fde for example in a few schools to to to have an equity differential because i don't see how they can honestly be used they follow and the equity formula at high schools goes across all the high schools so it follows individual kids not a floor like it does in the k-8s so like every school would end up with some amount that is following your kids that need some kind of additional attention which i'm gonna say you always need so like in terms of your struggling kids so i get what your question is but it does go across all the schools it's not healthy if i'm trying to think of it at a school right it would be not only do you have a classroom teacher but you also have reading support or you have targeted interventions where this person can can push in and pull in or pull in academic support you know what i mean like additional math support right where you can have really small it's not it's you're right it's goofy to think about it in terms of classes because they can't have more than eight classes and there's a limit to how much you can intervene because you want them in their classes with their classmates learning what they need to learn so i'm not finding this useful so we heard the question we're going to see the numbers um all combined right for the general fund and the esl and especially so we can just sort of see what's the total number of fte and the comparison and then i guess and adding in the set-aside that you've just put in so that was the 11.16 right so i guess for me at this point it would be most helpful just to kind of see a little more clarity and detail on what that will mean in the different schools next year and does that if not solve but ameliorate you know how how well does that mitigate the problem i guess is where where i'm at right now to try to understand and process all of this um so if there were a way to sort of show you know get that combined chart and ideally what i would love to see is something school by school a little kind of a little you know bulleted summary or something that kind of explains because there has been so much variability to school school and how principals have dealt with the study halls and the six of eight and all the other pieces like how are they gonna how will this work for them next year you know is this gonna work what are the are there still gaps because it's just for me just trying to understand what is has this um add back or you know we'd call it a different thing set aside the set aside thank you how well is that mitigating and where are we now as a result of that that's kind of what i'm looking for right now um and then i mean it's not the full and i think um someone testifying or they talk about the program audit it's it's really like how many you know what are the number of kids how many classes and electives and and and how are principals handling the study hall and i don't know how um i mean i know principals are scrambling right now just to try to do the work let alone to describe it and write it up but if there are some way it just would be helpful for me to understand what's the reality on the ground how are principles strategizing as a result of this set aside additional and what are they going to be able to do and then i had a question just in terms of you're releasing the set-aside because one of the key uses for that in past years has been for kindergarten and children's showing up and being able to make sure we don't have super high kindergarten so right do we still have any fte available for that yes that's in that pot of 20. is that plan to be all for kindergarten or is there i mean there's going to be additional changes at high school or wherever in terms of kids showing up so
02h 50m 00s
can you just give a little more detail about how we're going to deal with that so we earmarked 10 of those fte for kindergarten in the last couple of years we've not needed that much but because we're you know really determined to have you know a low target kindergarten size right some schools go above that target size in part because they don't have space to open another section or whatever in which case they're given additional staff so that all comes out of that same pot and so um so that but that's the plan with the um for balancing kindergarten so the same as in series we still have the same number absolutely yes and then i'm sorry i have another question just in terms of the we're talking so much about high school that the 11.3 released in two cades meaning all grades k through eight so including correct so middle schools k eights and k fives so we could also maybe see the school by school how that broke down because again hearing different concerns from different schools about the cuts and not knowing does this mitigate that you know where are we as a result after you're releasing some of those yes the other thing too i think that um it concerns me and i know i don't i haven't heard it too often i know this slide uh this slide brings it up with uh eliminating equity differential i think what concerns me about this is that that equity differential particularly for our underserved populations is directly tied to our achievement compact it's directly tied to our milestones yes directly tile tied to minimizing our achievement gap yes um it's also directly tied to improving our ell and then improving our special education offerings to students so i'm i would be concerned about uh pulling that out because of so much of what it's tied to with our the goals of the district and the the expectations that the state and others have right on our outcomes and and so we we point both out simply because you can make the mathematical calculation um by because the schools have slightly different um so if you look at the overall ratios here what you see is that to get to seven classes for all students if you're staffed at this ratio you can do with less fte than if you're at this ratio so so and it's our belief the reason we have recommended this staffing differential is that we need to see differences in the staffing in the schools and so and i guess i would follow on that i in terms of the equity ratio i think there's general agreement on the board that we want to see a differentiated resources um i think that if you're looking at figuring out how to get beyond our 63 graduation rate and i've said to many people that i i wish that we would paint a big 63 percent on this wall back here to always keep us focused on what we're trying to do which is to increase that number um you need differentiated resources and we need our high school kids taking a full class load it's not an either or so let me ask a question of folks we heard a little bit of the context of the current budget state budget hold steady federal budget cuts i guess i'm challenged to find a way other than representative garcia mentioned in her report of dipping into reserves um i've heard other people name something like there's that central office position and there's that central office position kind of taking onesies which eventually gets you to to something other thoughts or ideas about where we find some of that funding do we know how much money we have in reserves yeah but i think it's also the risk factors that we need to weigh right obviously as you highlighted in your report so maybe that would be another piece just to have staff reiterate for us and for the community here's what it is but here's what we're
02h 55m 00s
shooting for here's what we're required to keep and here's the various risk factors that we're facing that would impact um you know weighing that weighing that choice because your your decision was to recommend not well so i mean just maybe before you get there because someone i want to throw in something that was part of somebody's testimony um and there is something on the our tax i mean because that's a potential um shortcoming and one of the proposes there don't hire any of those teachers i'm not sure that does anything in regards to that the the budget um you know unless we we have collected some money already on that but but the risk is there in regards to the the potential does the the need to actually have much more in regards to the reserves and and hold those reserves in place if if the path is i'm not sure there's any real savings in regards to holding off on on those things right now or then the initial investment that we're making so well it's so in terms of like waiting to implement until we actually collect first and then implement but i know there is an agreement in place in a contract that that was put in place so if you can talk a little bit about that because the assumption is we can cover everything else with it so do you cut the pieces that you've named so reserves you've got roughly 20 20 million or 4.1 percent in reserve the arts tax is 4.5 million or 45 teaching positions that that yes either we're moving forward with assuming that we are doing those or we are assuming 45 less teachers in our system and waiting to see what happens till october and then acting so we would be in a layoff situation so that's kind of a decision point there um and then the difference between the 2.55 i mean the 6.55 billion and the 6.75 billion at the state level is an 8 million dollar impact to pbs which if we can again assume the 6.75 which is what people have said we are hell or high water getting to and we've been assured that or go ahead and do the requisite layoffs to assume the 6.55 million right now so truly like on the most conservative end like what we could decide to do is play conservative all the way down and go through layoffs and see what happens and all those other places and then add people back when we when we have certainty so that i mean you have you do have there are options in here and those are the kind of the bookends of the risk in each one of them and if if i heard you correctly 45 our tax 8 million if we don't get to 8 million is the difference in that in the state budget and 4.5 million in the arts tax and and 20 million in reserve so that's 125 teaching positions we could if we decided to take the most conservative approach budget for 655 and not to plan for the arts cap tax we would look at reducing not what you proposed for your budget with reductions here but we would be looking at laying off 125 staff under 55 stuff right although some of the 45 are numbers some of the 45 haven't been so about 545 may not have been hired yet and some would be but we would be reducing by 45 positions from this current budget yes right whether we actually yeah reducing positions yeah and in this budget you remember we had 110 teachers that we had one time money which we then said okay we've not only replaced those 110 but we added an additional 66. so it's really 176 teaching positions that if we were at current levels without that one-time dollars that was our starting place in this in this budget process so again 176 new general fund and then you had you know blah blah blah on the sequestration in federal so this is hard part of the complexity about this whole picture because we're both wanting to do heading in the right direction with our state the work that's happening at the state and yeah i mean it's so co-chair um getting back to your question about how we get there um if we're looking at 59 fte if that's the number it's still not clear if that's the number which would be seven classes in every half for every high school kid at a minimum and um the equity differential i guess i would suggest that we ask superintendent staff to come back to us and say what would that look like
03h 00m 00s
go find 5.9 million yeah i'm sorry so in other words what what where else would we cut yeah i mean i mean they're the ones who put the butt you're the one to put the budget together you have all the information on what was prioritized and what wasn't prioritized and maybe we ask you to come back and show us what we'll look like and we can decide sorry i would agree with that that's the staff knows where the money is so and if there isn't any then that's fine but yeah i mean i think in terms of um giving us what the other places would be and what in other words sort of a preliminary okay that's where here's where we would go down in other words i'm not saying i don't think i wanted you to go away for two weeks and then come back with here's the new right in other words it's like what are some of the options and possibilities where would what would be the impacts of cutting in different places we just talked about the risks of the dipping into reserves so in other words at a kind of a high level i think we need to i think we need to know what would the trade-offs be where would we have to cut elsewhere if we were to if we were to do this and one of them i think is looking at the fte at our lower grades you know i'm sorry i don't want bigger class sizes at lower grades but having our kids our high school kids out of school the extent that they're out of school is not a healthy thing for them it's not good for their education it's not good for them in other ways and i think that we are we are not serving them with this high school schedule i think the minimum is to get that every student can take seven periods and in the long run i think we need to look at whether we can afford an eight period schedule because i don't think that it serves high school students to be part-time students i think they need to be full-time students and this is this is not what kids should be doing when they're in high school they need to be more fully engaged than they are currently especially when we have a 63 graduation rate well even if they were graduating at a higher rate but if they weren't doing anything for three quarters for a quarter of their time in high school they're not ready for college because they're not working hard enough they're not ready for work because they're not working hard enough it's not a good thing for high school students and we we need to do something different here whatever it takes so i don't disagree that it's not good for high school students um it'd be interesting to see what happens if we i'd be interested to see what happens if we change the student to teacher ratio at the lower grades um i feel from when i heard our original discussions that this budget reflected some of the guidance we gave and again playing a little bit devil's advocate not that this is necessarily where i stand because again i think it's fair to say that none of us is excited about offering a part-time high school situation for our school i would challenge the fact that our students aren't prepared for college because i don't have data to support that but i do the fte for younger grades um i guess i'm curious what we we describe our state budget as stable and we described our federal funding as diminishing we say that we're concerned about those kids that are struggling the most in our schools and all of a sudden three years a year and a half two years into this this schedule um where all of a sudden like it all of a sudden it's got not good enough when we see student achievement rising we see it's not fast enough i could guarantee that unless we're at 100 by the end of this year it's not going to be fast enough um so i guess i i'm struck and i i don't know how to articulate without feeling like oh directional aisles all of a sudden okay with having kids be out of school all day um which i'm not um i just i don't i don't understand our sense of all of a sudden this it's unacceptable and we have to because i think that what would happen is all of a sudden we'd have a room full of not high school parents but we'd have a room full of kindergarten parents or first second grade and we know that investment in early ages that's what we i thought we were prioritizing in our original discussions saying we know that early intervention we've set we've set a milestone for a hundred percent of our third graders reading my benchmark we i thought we believed that that will translate into a better graduation rate so again i i feel like i'm playing devil's advocate with something um
03h 05m 00s
because because in many ways i agree with you all i don't think this is all of a sudden i think this has been going on for quite some time since we went to the schedule um i for one waited watched see how see to see how it was going and i'm i'm sorry but i just don't see how we can continue to have our students with these reduced schedules i don't see how we can have them out of school so much in the middle of the day in the beginning of the day after i'm with director sergeant i don't think they're getting prepared well i don't think they're getting prepared well for a work schedule i don't think they're getting prepared well for college i just i think that it's important for us to provide a floor for all of our students and right now what i'm looking at what we're suggesting to me is not a high enough floor and so i'd like to see us add more teachers and what i'd like i mean i would like staff to look at this and tell us where else is we might be able to find some funding i don't like the either or with our equity work i think we can have both and i'd also like to see the next time we meet i'd like the principles here i'd like to hear from each of the principals about the problems they've had in the schedule or the last year and a half and whether they think what we're currently doing is going to help remedy that or if the problem is going to get worse i'd like to hear from each one of the principals high school principals yes i think with that uh it sounds like like i have my own schedule i have a day where i only have one class and yeah that results and like sometimes i just don't go to school for a whole day but i think like every high schooler has their own experience and i would like to go take this back to the student union and the super sac and get their opinions on it because i think we've seen quite a variety of schedules in the last couple years so i'll do that and report back next week yeah that'd be good i think it'd be particularly valuable to hear from our juniors and seniors who have been on both schedules and we heard today from a math student who just is really struggling under this schedule where she used to be great at math and now math is really hard because she has long classes every other day don't work and and i've heard that from other students that in math it's particularly challenging in foreign language it can be particularly challenging so in the long run we need an analysis of does is this really the best schedule for our students i don't know that we can have that conversation by you know staffing our schools for next year um but we have to at least give students enough of a schedule that they're engaged in their education sorry no good okay um the two things that i would say we should be um paying attention to in terms of the last year and a half is our act scores which i think have been pretty dismal and maybe we should get those brought back so we can kind of take a look at that it's supposed to be kind of a sign of how our kids are doing um and the fact that our graduation rate only increased 1.1 percentage point last year and that to me was really scary i mean we have got to see way way way higher growth than that and so and that was on the six of eight schedule with kids part-time high school so i think my uh my piece i you know obviously we need to create a full and rigorous academic schedule for all grades uh uh pre-k through 12. i i don't disagree with that i think the the one challenge i have um particularly with uh so by any means necessary is what i what i don't want to see are some of the some of the essential uh things that the supports that are offered students that actually help them help them navigate the system and get through school and find opportunities to graduate where they didn't have otherwise i think that doesn't necessarily happen always happen in the classroom so what i what would i would push back a little bit is where are those areas that aren't in the classroom that that are absolutely essential to uh overall student success graduation rate again going back to where are we at with our milestones where are we at with that graduation rate where are we at with our achievement compact all these things that we've uh throughout the year throughout the two years that i've been on the board we've over and over again reassured that these are the things that are important to us um so that's what i i i do want to make sure and i it it is hard not to feel sort of the robbing peter to pay paul type of scenario here because it i mean we're talking about a finite resource one that is
03h 10m 00s
we can probably all agree that is insufficient uh but creating a you know almost a 500 million dollar budget it seems as though we can get to a place where not not to say that that this has not been the best effort so far because i think initially looking at this budget i was pretty pleased i think overall i am pretty pleased but i think we're able to we could be able hopefully through our conversations be able to get to a place where it reflects the the desire of the board to move move our high school work forward support our high schools it to a little bit different degree i i do want to say i mean maybe i'm just contradicting myself i'm really hesitant to to look at reserves i i'd like to see you know we've been we've been very aware of our achievement gaps we've been very aware of our graduation rates um for years and where have we differentiated resources to address those issues this being you know this being the first year uh so i would be i would i would challenge that and maybe i'm not maybe i'm not right about that but i would challenge that and say uh i don't know that's just something that that i guess i i think about when i think about dipping into dipping into reserves something that i don't think we've done before at least in a scenario like this well one of the things i just say on the reserve issue and staff can correct me if i'm wrong you know we're talking about approving this budget may 20th but the final approval of the budget isn't until later in june we will have more information about the budget from the state so you know we're going with the the hope for you know statewide budget but before this our own district budget is finalized we should have that well that may regulate the forecast and we'll have hopefully we'll have some we made an adjustment yeah right i mean you've had to do it so so to some extent i wouldn't worry about the reserve issue so much until we get towards the end um the question about the arts tax is really do we go forward with whatever level of risk there is to that arts tax which is a risk to our reserves um or not and that's i think for another day but that's a conversation that we um are probably going to have to have um yeah i guess i'd just determine i would um echo some of what um director belial brought up just in terms of you know i'm certainly willing to hear if there's you know here where would we cut elsewhere but those theirs are going to be painful cuts is my expectation i'm not i mean if there's places that staff or anyone else can come up with that are easy cuts that's awesome but i don't think there are going to be any to make it so that we can do it all with non-end resources so you know yes but you know i i don't i'm not seeing um any easy solutions to any of this and i know staff worked really long and hard to come up with this budget um so i'm certainly willing to say okay well we could potentially cut in this area or we could potentially get here but then again those all those cuts have real consequences for students as well right so i mean that's just that's my caution going into it and then the again i'm i would like to sort of let the prince i would like to hear from principals after having heard heard from you about the set-aside release you know what does that mean now because i really think that's an important piece as even though it's a relatively small chunk of fte we've seen some amazing things that our principals can do um at all levels of just trying to make it work without enough resource all around so i guess for me i'd want to kind of let them absorb that and figure it out and and maybe we could get some information back about okay so now where are we for next fall how is it how is it looking that's that's where i'm right now knowing how much work and time and effort and good really tough trade-off thought went into developing this budget i'd wanted to sort of say okay let's let's hear where we are now after this setback and you know the set-aside being put back in and um but again needing to hear more from principals in terms of the gaps in the school day because not every school has had these same gaps in kids wandering around in the middle of the day so i really want to hear what are some of the strategies going in next year to where how we can can mitigate that in terms of upperclassmen i you know a they don't need to be taking eight
03h 15m 00s
classes in my opinion and b sometimes having it's appropriate to be able to have more flexibility to do other things when you're an upperclassman in particular so that's just a little bit of my pushback on the sort of complete um i think yes we need more information about it but it's not as cut and dried as this is absolute to me that this is an absolute crisis or an acceptable situation it's particularly after the set aside's been put back in so i just need to hear more just uh you know as i listen to all of you um i mean one thing that comes up that again it's not budgetary i think director knowles uh mentioned it i think there is you know a broader discussion in regards to the whole the academic side of it uh as she stated that you know the students are not coming up prepared i'm not sure that they were coming out any less prepared than they were before even when the when we had more more classes so i mean you know i think that's that's a discussion i think that we can have i think at some point the other part is either way we don't want it no no no either way you know i i think it's important i mean i think that you know to to to look at that because i mean in some ways i mean we we continue to to to try to strive to replicate a model that that in the past has not worked that well right um at least for all students you know given that you know you know if before you know we're now at 62 before we were at less than that uh and i mean if we look at places around the world i mean students some students not all students some students go for less time to school and and they tend to perform better than than some other students at the us so you know at some point at one point i think that we need to most places go to school i'm sorry i think around the world most most countries students go to school more than our school i was thinking i was thinking more in regards to finland and that discussion that that happened at lincoln in regards to that and it seemed that they were going less maybe i didn't quite catch that discussion um so but anyway i think that that is important to to at some point i think look at you know more the instruction and and what we've seen is that um you know how we structure you know the the the work and in particular how we how we look at in regards to that professional development how that you know peer learning happens and and how destruction gets changed in that in that process uh makes a greater difference that to me so i would i would invest more on those things than than what we're doing um but the the other part and i and i think this is important you know and i i'm glad to hear you know my colleagues that uh state that you know we shouldn't counter post you know the the whole uh commitment to equity and and closing that achievement gap you know versus you know doing this um you know addressing the needs of the at the high school level uh so i was i was glad to hear that um so you know i i think it's a good idea i think to to to you know have that principal discussion because i think that that um hopefully would it would address some of what are the the the potential creative ways in which they can look for a solution without you know again doing the the straight ratio that that we're talking about here but how do we actually meet the needs of the students that they have you know in the in those buildings um i'm not sure that that anybody you know if they come here they're going to say no i actually don't need that um but maybe i'd be surprised the part that i think that it that is that is important to look at is you know the set aside that that was there um somehow we don't at least in the presentation i i didn't see how one you know what what the cut was and and then what the add back was in some of those schools and how visible that that was in that whole process uh and even with that i mean how what that impact was or or or not in regards to what they were able to offer i'm with you know uh director morton in regards to you know looking at you know maintaining some of those other other supports that we heard you know uh from people you know like say roosevelt high school you know before that you know the the person that was doing the connecting for some of the additional services for those students
03h 20m 00s
made a great difference in regards to those students actually staying in in those schools so i mean i think that the staff can go back and look at those things but i would i would caution against eliminating those things uh and doing and doing those those things years ago um when i was sitting on the other side um the district had this um what i said i don't know how i can describe it this um great idea that said that we're gonna be saving saving saving money by by cutting the custodians and putting it out to outside contractors and it turned out you know not to be quite the what they were expecting i also sat on that side you know advocating for those custodians because in my school for the one in the school that my children went those that custodian had a better connection than some of the teachers in that building with my my children so for them it was like their support but yet the district chose to eliminate them so i went to you know cautioning us like i guess delivering some of those positions that you know are not seeing us like in the classroom without looking at the impact that also has in regards to that student participation so again i look forward to whatever creative ways we can resolve this but understanding that you know this was to some extent the a postponed decision uh in regards to impacts of the you know last year uh in regards to you know one-time solutions to protect 110 positions um you know we knew this was coming it is here um added to that there is some other things that are coming into play that yes we know we we can mitigate with the with the potential additional funding from the state but there is also some some losses at the at the federal level so again so we're going to be talking about again next week but final final comments we have some guests with our bond advisory committee that are holding on with us thanks i don't you know i don't know if this is going to contribute to the you know the problem-solving portion but um but i think it does it's something that i've been concerned about and it really comes to uh the consistency of our decision-making and and as a board what kind of credibility we have in that what what our community can expect from us in our decision making a lot of this particularly the you know it's not just this year and i recognize that but but particularly this year some of the challenges that we're having are the the lower enrollments the enrollment value that we're seeing in some of our high schools last year we you know in my zone we consolidated a school and closed a program that had had student enrollment issues now thankfully we're not in a position this year at least not yet to have to close to close anything or consolidate anything but um but i i think we have an opportunity to be consistent and say we're going to take we're going to take an approach that weathers a storm we're going to be conservative about how we how we use our reserves how we use our resources we're going to be able to still invest in programs that allow for students to be successful in school both in the classroom and also have those supports outside of the classroom that help them be successful inside the classroom which are all some of the things that we talked about last year around this time when we were debating consolidating the consolidating two schools and closing closing the program so um i think this is more of a caveat to my earlier comment about the the relative discomfort i have about dipping it you know dipping into reserves or or finding finding the money and and perhaps pulling out an essential program that that really is offering some uh some academic support and helping kids graduate or helping kids and you know reduce that achievement gap so uh i wanted to mention that to my colleagues because i i and again i know it's not probably something that's uh contributing to hey here's a great idea but something that i'm i'm thinking about as we go through our decision making process so i'm just gonna let you know another impact because we will take this back
03h 25m 00s
and do more thinking i am now pushing the pause button on any staffing or smts or anything which will mean that will not get kicked into motion for much longer this year so just also having an expectation that that goes swiftly we're agreeing that we're pausing that while we take a look at all of this is that correct you understand what i'm saying i mean because normally we wouldn't instead normally smts would be due yeah so right now if we're taking a look at what else we can do it means i'm not pushing go on staffing so it means we're going to we're back with that so here's your staffing and build your staff so we don't have that we're not there is what we're basically saying because you're asking yeah i just want to be clear that that's part of the impact of this and the implication of when that will allow you to actually yeah exactly what kind of timeline are we talking about i don't know because i don't know what this will take yet but i'm more just saying it would be we'd be pushing go like in a minute and i'm now not going to push go because i don't know exactly what i'm going to if i need to do a little conversation with you about where what you're really asking for me to look at but i'll just i'll just say that like always to the extent that you know that that you're expanding an immersion program and you need new teachers or people are leaving and you need to replace them then you do that staffing there's a two-part staffing here and you should understand in terms of it should be there needs to be a clarification though how much additional what scale of additional work we're asking to do and how much time we're asking for so i just want to be i don't want to be launching on something that is so expensive i mean from my perspective i'm not expecting you to be able to say ta-da here's an easy solution to this that we didn't find before so i'm i'm not wanting to necessarily invest a ton more time that's delaying all this only to come back and say well we could make this you know we could have make this cut and then we'd have a whole other discussion about how horrible the impact of that would be and how unacceptable that is so i i guess i'm i'm pushing back a little on how much more time we're asking staff to put into this versus a sort of higher level you know something that any one of them who's been immersed in this for months could be able to kind of pretty quickly just turn around and sort of the not down to the you know tiny little ends of the degree but just to kind of give us a higher level sense of it and what the trade-offs and and would and i don't think that should take that much time since you all are so immersed in it but that's where that's where i'm at anyway i don't think correct me if i'm wrong i don't think she's saying that it'll take time to get us this data what is what i hear the superintendent saying is that typically principals would right now have their their fte locked in and they would begin the process of you're being laid off i can offer this course next year i can and because we don't know whether we're going to push in zero more ft 10 ft 16 or 59 fte it's really she's saying i'm not going to close that right now i'm just saying that we should need to be clear what we're asking and i agree with that that's great and i'm just articulating that for me personally i don't want to staff to spend a ton more time i want to hear back from them but you're looking for conceptually what are other ways we could approach this that would get us 5.9 million more dollars that let us have a different conversation or let us do a different approach to how um how we end up tackling the budget and here's what i'll say so two things one is i feel like um i also have distress about where we are in terms of what we're able to offer and sitting in this seat for the number of years i've been in it where what we've done is cut every year and try and figure out how we do the very best we can with what we have to give maximum programming to our students is is a tough challenge so i am not defending give less to our kids i would never defend that so i'm not in a position where i'm saying oh hold on to a shortened school day i so get where people's distress is about what we're able to offer and i feel like we've really worked hard to figure out how we hang on to all the capacity we have to serve the very needs of our kids i'm glad to hear people's voices really saying we want to hang on to our equity commitment and and our commitment to differentiate and i totally get the desire for um how are we maximizing what kids are getting in high school so like those pieces we will go back and do can we come at this some other way you know we will go do that and my comment of just that we're not going to push go on staffing is we could end up with something very different that is and i'm more just noting that i'm not going to push go on staffing because we could end up with something that's really different here schedule wise number of staff staff-wise um so but i want that to just be understood that that's what i'm going to do the one thing i walk away from this is understanding we've got a longer process before we get to what we think our our
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budget picture is fair enough just over 80 percent of our schools submitted all their staffing today by today and the rest who had some fte adjustments will do so by tomorrow so that's the timeline we're on that backs us up to completing all of our hiring at the end of june so so it's so that's the the tension point of of delaying at this time is just that the the number of processes then that take place in terms of determining where positions are and and which employees are licensed for those positions etc so that's the stage that we move into from here so i think just from my point of view that this whole 16 versus 59 issue i i'm not really still quite comfortable that that 59 is really real and so i'd really like a clear understanding of what difference what difference are we shooting for if we've already got 30 extra fte in the staffing why we need another 43 to keep because you have undo present because the 30 what you'd be doing with the next batch of ad is evening out here was your differentiating 30 now you're adding back to make everybody even so you undo the differentiation and the the differentiation was the 30 so you would make everybody even and so it's really the 30 plus plus the 9. it's the 30 plus the differentiating is the 30 which is the equity formula plus the nine point whatever that were the um non-formula ads we'll go back and take a look at this this is a reasonable ask we'll go back and take a look at it and we'll come back to you with with some what's some thoughts right now great i i'm gonna thank you these are challenging frustrating discussions when they're scarce resources um and i just really appreciate everybody hanging in there and not taking it personally and advocating for what's best for kids so thank you with that we're going to move on to our bond accountability committee report um we are very excited to hear this report even though it's late in the evening thank you all both for sticking around and i'm going to turn this over to we have three board members that sit on this committee uh director regan director sergeant and director knowles letting go of her seat as she retires from boardwork and director atkins will be replacing her but with that director knowles i'm going to pass it over to you to introduce our guests okay great thank you co-chair belial um i'm very happy to see you guys here today we promised portlanders that we would be that we would have a citizen-led committee to oversee the capital improvement bond when we went out for this election we wanted to assure the voters that there would be a formal chartered committee responsible for ensuring good stewardship of the public trust today we're pretty excited because very soon first of all the bond passed hooray but also we're very excited because this summer we're going to be starting some substantial work um on roof replacements and seismic strengthening of several of our um elementary schools um and at wilson high school so we have a seven member group of volunteer citizens with exceptional expertise i as a coach here beliel said i've sit on this committee and i can tell you these are people who are very um they're exceptional i guess that's the best way to put then building design construction public contracting budgeting auditing and they've committed their personal time to overseeing this very important work that we're doing on the bond so with us today to talk about the role of the citizens bond committee and their work as far as the committee chair kevin spellman kevin is a retired construction contractor and local management consultant and trainer for construction owners contractors and industry professionals and i see john is here with him is that right yeah so kevin if you'll go ahead and introduce john we're delighted to have you here this evening and we're looking forward to hearing your report on what the committee has done thus far and what you're seeing in the future okay thank you um we will be brief and try and leave time for questions um i do want to introduce john john mullis is a committee member and he's executive secretary of the building trades council we also have in the back another committee member tom peterson who'll be up here in for future reports tom is chief engineer for port of portland and while we're at it the other
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committee members are anita decker who is ceo of bonneville power louis fontenot development manager of tramwell crow company steve march whose multnomah county auditor and willie paul is executive director of kaiser permanente facilities so far your committee has met three times and i want to thank the board members who've braved those meetings as you all know and again for the record those meetings are publicly noticed and open to the public for comment as well as just observation um so far we've been spending most of our time trying to wrap our arms around a complete understanding of the program and to agree with the staff on how we're going to navigate our way through this relatively complex process that we we have going here how the staff is going to report to us and then how in turn we're going to try and translate some of the more technical stuff to to the board i do want to report that your staff has been incredibly open and willing to work with us we haven't received no resistance of any kind and there is some tension and necessarily in this relationship and and there will be i'm sure at some point but across the board it's they've been very um accommodating we've looked at the program's organizational plan and and the the people who are now filling some of those slots we've looked at the conceptual baseline schedules for the entire program as well as some of the individual projects the overall budget and breakdown estimating methodologies plans to meet equity goals and of course the reporting processes in terms of budget and schedule the immediate focus is on completing the ed specs process that's kind of the preliminary piece setting district-wide standards for the entire program plus uh the summer 2013 projects at five schools and preparatory work for the major upcoming work at roosevelt fabian and franklin so we wanted to report really on three areas of concern maybe too strong a word at this early stage but the things that we really want to focus on first off budget we certainly can't report at this very conceptual stage that there's any problem with the budget nor can we say the budget's good because well um the the issue about the budget that's caused us a little concern and discussion is uh the presentation and the transparency of how we're going to show that and later on jim is going to make a stab at doing that here and good luck jim you know on the other hand having seen your challenges with your operating budget it may not be that hard so but we want to work with staff to make to create a more transparent reporting process so not only so you but the public can see how we've got things budgeted why money is being moved from one place to another it we just need to be more transparent number two schedule um we've looked at the conceptual and now the baseline schedule because it's starting to get a little more uh detailed um and so far we found it reasonable as far as we can tell i know that this process seems frustratingly slow because the bond measure passed and everyone wants to see carpenters work in the schools unfortunately it's not quite that that quick we have heard some suggestion that the roosevelt high school schedule is not aggressive enough that schedule is going to be reworked a number of times here but we do want to take a closer look at that schedule so we're going to have a small subgroup of the committee work uh with staff schedulers uh next week i hope to review that a little more
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closely and see if there are other at least to kind of challenge some of the thought processes um the third area relates to equity we have discussed the district's equity goals particularly as mwesb subcontracting targets such minority women emergency emerging small business and i think the consensus of the committee that is that the 18 percent aspirational goal uh will be a stretch at least in terms of the summer work programs and the reason for that is is actually twofold but one is that those are design bid build projects so the contractors are selected on price there is a methodology where they do outreach but nevertheless they're selected on price so we expect that at least in the early stages of this program that the report on that part of the equity thing will not be that great we don't know that but that's the expectation the other part or one other part of the student participation piece relates to student participation and it's pretty early to be doing too much there but even the summer work contractors are required by contract to engage with students through the biz connect system etc and we're expecting a report at our next committee meeting looking forward what we i guess what we've been doing so far is really foundational and organizational and now the pace is really going to pick up there'll be summer work at five schools ed specs will be complete this summer we'll have design teams for two high schools we'll have design advisory committees for two high schools we'll be considering alternative procurement for those projects we'll be thinking about selection criteria for summer 2014 work and a lot more and actually one of our challenges is to kind of stay far enough back from the detail but close enough to really figure out what's what's going on so with that we're open to questions do you want to add anything just if i could uh john wallace with the oregon state building trades council just a couple of real quick things and i just volunteered to be here in support of kevin uh as the chair giving the report tonight but i i think it's important to recognize that either as a public owner a private owner now is an extraordinarily good time to be building things at our last meeting they reported on the first bond sale and i don't have the the numbers on on that sale or that transaction and maybe that's part of jim owens report but i know it was uh the report was it was very successful money is cheap right now it's a very good time to borrow money if you have to do that and you know we're coming off the worst recession slash depression in the building industry you know over the last five years since the great depression so there's a lot of contractor and worker availability out there it should be a good time to take bids and and get good numbers in the door for your projects and kevin referenced the rest of the committee members earlier and i i think it's it's been really several of them i knew beforehand a couple of them i just met for the first time through this process but we all bring a different uh set of skills to the table and different backgrounds and different sets of knowledge and i know the last meeting tom peterson who's in the back and who kevin referenced earlier brought up a question about timing and getting information and stuff out in the cmgc process which will be you know in some of the projects further down the road something that would have never entered my mind so i think you're well served by having a diverse group of individuals on this committee that will look at this work in different ways and bring up different questions uh and you know different values as this proceeds so with that we'll do our best to answer questions thank you questions i'll ask a quick question um kevin you you mentioned i just want to ask you you said something about reporting and being a little bit more transparent and i just want to drill that down i've gotten to sit in your last couple of meetings um and i think when you transparency sounding it makes it sound like something's being covered up or not and
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i i think what and you can correct me if i'm wrong i think what you're saying is that what i remember is seeing some of the budget numbers and as you said things were moved from here to here which required a lot of additional explanation of why right i think what you're saying is in the reporting finding a way that it's just really clear to anybody who looks at it it's not that we're covering something up it's just nothing's being covered up absolutely and and you're absolutely right the the the challenge with all reporting methodologies is is to to um avoid the necessity and necessity for additional explanation and i think there are two aspects and i'll you know you'll get to see it yourselves in a few minutes one is is some of the transfers from one budget item to another needs to be clearer and the other is maybe even just nomenclature because there's some big numbers under in an area called program costs and that sounds like administration supervision overhead well you know half of that is more than half of that is escalation and contingencies well i think you could argue that yeah those are program costs but to the public i think there's a there's a different perception so i think it's a nomenclature issue as much as anything else thank you so actually um did you ask that question i thought about we're going to hear from jim owens a little bit later about the balance scorecard but i'm hoping that you folks are weighing in on developing the kind of tools that um will make sense of the projects to us and to you and to the public so that you're in that conversation with staff as they're doing that is that a fair assumption we are seeing um uh we've seen two rounds now the balance scorecard and we're seeing more detailed data behind that that you won't necessarily see because it's the nature of your role versus overall okay that's that's what i was hoping i thought that he was going to be first and you were going to be second so since you're here i thought i'd ask you about it um so that's that's good to hear i just wanted to tell you how pleased i am that you're going to be looking at the roosevelt schedule and the possibility of compressing that a little bit so thank you for that sure sure you know i don't think we should hold high hopes for something changing at our next at this meeting because this is a process we don't even really know the scope of that work so putting together some kind of detailed schedule is a challenge but we should have our goals in mind as it is developed and ultimately it won't be until we have a design team and ultimately a contractor on board that will really know what the options are great thank you very much for joining us thank you for all your volunteer work and although it's volunteer it's incredibly highly skilled it is a pleasure to be in the room and listen to the different lenses and the different expertise that's in there that you all bring so thank you very much with that we're going to move on to our first of what are scheduled to be monthly capital improvement bond updates um superintendent smith i'm going to toss it over to you to introduce some familiar faces to us cj sylvester chief operating officer and jim owens executive director of office of school modernization will take us through our next installments one moment thank you very much i would like to echo your thanks to chair kevin spellman of the bond accountability committee and john mullis and tom peterson for being here this evening it wasn't a short one for them and then also just a reminder that all of you as you know you've recently completed a review of five different um bond program components and so this is the first in what are intended to be monthly updates to the board regarding the bond program and so you'll be seeing tonight for the first time the proposed reporting format that was developed in a collaboration with the bond accountability committee so we need your feedback on this this month in subsequent months we'll also want your feedback over time on the frequency of the reporting as well is monthly reporting too frequent do you want it
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more than once a month and as we go through the program that because the program has gotten different ebbs and flows to it you may make we may be reporting to you monthly during certain very intense periods of construction and you may have us go to every other month so just keep in mind that uh this is something that we need your feedback on and and some direction from you as well and so tonight is the start of that monthly reporting for our 2012 bond program and i'd like to turn it over to jim owens the executive director of the office of school modernization thank you cj and good evening first off i'd like to thank kevin for the entree to our presentation tonight thank you kevin we've been collaborating very closely with the bond accountability committee and i know as cj had said we really have enjoyed working together providing the level of information that will allow both of us to be reporting to you as the school board relative to the progress on the program i know it's a continuation of the commitment we've made the transparency with the community and seeing a consistent message from both the bond accountability committee and staff we think will be will be really important we're going to move through this fairly quickly tonight i know this is relatively new to many of you use of the balanced scorecard as a tool that we've adapted we think is is an appropriate approach to being able to present information and do it in a way that's very understandable and i think easy to to see whether we're on track whether off track see where some of our challenges are so in your board packages you have some information that looks a little different than what we're presenting tonight we're in a abbreviated format here to to allow it to show a little better on the screen but the in your board packets there's an explanation of the balanced scorecard or reporting tool and its application to the 2012 bond we think it's particularly relevant to examine the bond program execution status at both the program and the project level and i would say the contract level as well incorporating four perspectives the budget schedule stakeholder and equity all four of these are relevant to our program and i think you'll all agree that this type of information the way it's presented will be very relevant to what what the voters approved last last november the way the balanced court card is set up we've developed strategic objectives performance measures and performance targets i won't go through those in detail tonight but after we're done with our presentation we'll certainly open up for questions that you may have on them and how we landed on the targets that we did the color coding is aligned with the targets themselves and so it's a it's a pretty simple stop light type of a display with green being good caution flag being the yellow and red being where we have some some real concerns and we're really in trouble so as we go through this tonight this very early stage in the program i think we can be very confident in reporting that we're solid green on our on our active projects we're also using this tool as kevin spellman mentioned with our bond accountability committee they've actually seen this twice now and director knowles has as well as the as the board liaison and so this tool is not only being presented to them on a quarterly basis as we meet but also we're putting it on our public website so for a community for public to be able to see this information and as we get questions from community and from different constituencies we're certainly we staff are certainly prepared to uh to respond to that so as cj mentioned we do plan to present this information to you on a regular basis we're prepared to do it monthly if you'd like or less frequently or more frequently we also would invite any feedback that you have for us tonight on different aspects of the balanced scorecard that you'd like to change we'd like to see more information on and so forth so in walking through the scorecard we start with the overall perspective which really pulls together the the four perspectives budget schedule stakeholder and equity and i'm just going to quickly really go past the narrative comments rather than getting into the detail of the strategic objectives and highlight some of the main items of the program as it as it is currently since this is an april uh update we're actually reflecting where we are as of as of this month we've mentioned the educational visioning and ed spec work that's underway although not not technically a bond project it's certainly an important precursor activity to informing our design teams as we get into the project work and it
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really will provide us with a lot of insight in terms of what our schools like look like at the different configuration levels certainly starting with the high schools this will be particularly important to have a clear understanding of that we also are moving rapidly into our first bite at the apple so to speak our 2013 improvement projects or as we colloquially refer to it as ip13 and this is a collection of five schools that we actually began design in back in september where we're doing roof tear-off and replacement seismic upgrade ada improvements and a science classroom improvement at one of the schools laurelhurst really happy to report that we're very much on schedule on track right now with those we had some concerns over some of the engineer estimates about a month ago but based on the bidding climate that we're operating in right now the pricing came in for that well under our budget well under what our thinking was so that's that's a great place to start i think it's fair to say that the business community is still pretty pretty hungry and the pricing that we're seeing is uh is very favorable to us so it's a good place to be as we as we get started with the work we're also moving ahead by placing some re pre-engineered relocated buildings at fabian school and this is an important component that will not only help fabian with their enrollment challenges but will also position the district to be able to move these portable facilities which have two classrooms each to other sites particularly at roosevelt so we don't need to swing students off to another location so that's also on track and proceeding so that we're able to position both of the portable buildings at the site by the end of the summer we're also staffing our our team our bond team and having a proportional approach if you will to it we're not hiring all the staff we're going to need but the ones that we need to have in place now for the for the projects are aboard with exception of two positions one is the capital communications manager position and the other is a educational liaison position both of those were moving forward on with now and we should have those filled here before the end of the spring we're also beginning work on our two high schools as we know we have a schedule that has both roosevelt and franklin proceeding pretty much on a concurrent schedule they're probably about two weeks apart from one another so they're they're moving ahead we are working on the statements of work and because of the size of these we need to get those solicitations developed and issued so that we can begin selecting the architect engineer teams that are going to be working with us i'd like to pause briefly and introduce two of our newest members of our bond team both of whom are project directors and will be managing the project in fact ladies if you can raise your hands michelle platter who some of you know from the marysville project is the project director who's managing our roosevelt high school project and michelle has decades of experience doing this work and based on what she did with marysville i know we're going to see great things from her and roosevelt is a really exciting project just delighted to have someone of her caliber and experience with us the other new project director is debbie pearson debbie also brings decades of experience tourists she is on the franklin high school full modernization project which also includes the improvements at marshall debbie was recently the project manager on the sandy high school project in oregon trails so she brings recent relevant experience on this work both of these ladies are already fully engaged at the building level and are meeting with the principals and staff on a weekly basis so they're really doing a great job hitting the ground running and getting us to where we need to be to get these high schools moving forward and lastly on the narrative commons for the overall is the methodology for our improvement projects uh recall that when we looked at the programs as we talked about in our program overview presentations that we needed to have a method where that we would use to select the schools so we're currently working on that and we expect to have something shortly in terms of what our improvement project 2014 will look like it's looking at about twice as many schools as we have this summer about 11 schools actually that we'll actually have included in that in that package on the screen you'll see the green boxes that indicate the projects that are active meaning those that we've actually encumbered dollars on and the two over on the right hand side program contingency and program costs contingency is green because that's the 20 million dollar component that we
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haven't uh we haven't tapped if you will or we haven't we haven't used and i think that's important because the way the bond is structured you as the school board actually have to approve any use of that 20 million contingency thank you so the next perspective is the is the budget and this is an important one and we actually have more detail that we'll be hitting on here momentarily but this perspective looks at the the budgets that have been developed as i mentioned are ip2013 we were anticipating higher costs on this but with our good results turns out we were almost 650 000 under what our budgets were which is really a significant number also on the really good news front is we've been successful in identifying the first bond sale recall that we're doing that at increments and i think the number is actually a little over 158 000 or 158 million why it's late and that's our first increment and we're looking at having that in the early part of may so really just next week we expect to have that of course what that will provide is the cash that the program requires to get contracts awarded and in place and then lastly our program contingencies and program cost components have been established as we'll go into some more detail here momentarily this slide is a depiction of what the bond measure actually included and you may recall that we have these categories that were identified in the voter package and in our explanatory statement the full modernization of replacements for the three high schools in fabian our educational facility and physical facility are the 63 schools where we're doing the roofing the seismic ada and classroom improvements and then our debt repayment component and then our program costs and as kevin mentioned we've had some movement in terms of uh budget for reasons i'll explain here in a moment we also wanted to capture other funding sources that are used as part of these projects not part of the program per se but it makes sense to include other fund sources in this work so that we're doing we're planning designing and constructing the work at the same time so some of the additional funding that is currently in is the seismic rehab grant program srgp that's the work at alameda 1.5 million and we're also using general fund money that facilities asset management has identified for for the some of the schools so although we're going to chew up every month to the 482 million dollar number we'll also see a larger figure based on additional fund sources that we're able to inject this slide is extremely busy but it represents what staff developed in terms of a project framework and you may recall during the discussion on budget and finance that we went through a description of how we took the voter approved bond program and divided it into projects and we've landed on 20 projects and those are all depicted on this slide that show the different classifications and those letters actually connect to the previous slide so we're always able to true up the budgeting information to what was in the what was in the bond this also provides additional detail in terms of adjustments to budgets how much is encumbered or committed and an important component that we call the estimate to complete and so the estimate to complete is always a moving target it reflects the project team's uh perspective on what the final cost will be on the project and over on the lower right hand side you'll see a number in parens 60 million 458 thousand uh that is actually the number that we're currently projecting that we're under budget in the 482 million dollar program and you may wonder why is that why are we so far under the budget as as we start well the principal explanation is because the projects and the program all have various types of contingencies built into it and so since we're at a very early stage and haven't gotten into the construction work yet we still have those contingencies available to us so that 60 million dollars for example includes the 20 million dollar program contingency that is available again to you as a school board it also includes contingencies at the project levels for our high schools for fabian for our ip projects as you see those displayed and so until we actually have a need to use that that is actually something that we forecast
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again we'll be presenting this on a on a regular basis and you'll be able to see how those figures change over time and then last column is an expended data that shows how much we're actually paying out in terms of invoices obviously at this stage there's not a lot there since most of the work that we're doing is with with consultants and this third slide is a quick summary of a project that is subject to a lot of questions that being the bond 2012 project and so this is depiction of our program administrative costs our transportation agreement with the portland bureau of transportation pbot bond issuance costs our construction escalation and then contingencies that are captured one that's called ceo chief operating officer and the other board of education the chief operating officer contingency is intended to capture where we have excesses or surplus available on projects when we complete them or if we need to draw into that to support shortfalls we'll actually be showing that again on a regular basis as that changes the nature of bondwork is very dynamic and it changes from month to month this tool will allow us to present that information not only to you but to the to the committee to the accountability committee and to the public okay moving into the scheduled perspective another important perspective to look at is as part of what we call our three-legged stool is schedule how are we progressing relative to the planning phases the design phases and construction phases we're green here on the active projects ip313 of course is the one that's before us and we actually tonight have an item on the consent agenda to uh where staff is recommending award of a multi-million dollar contract to begin the work at alameda we have three others that are following in the meeting on the 6th of may along with another project grant high school where we're doing field work with with some bond funds and so you'll start to see the flow of these documents when we're recommending awards when they exceed a million dollars we've also highlighted in the narrative a couple other aspects of schedule including the methodology for the improvement projects and then our high school schedules kevin mentioned the conceptual schedule that was developed and presented to you back in november after the bond passed we currently are working what we're calling a baseline schedule it's a draft baseline and we're going through a very detailed analysis of it including application of use of alternative procurement cmgc and to see how we can we can further develop these schedules so that's that's still working progress and next is the stakeholder perspective this is a view from the the several of the client constituencies the first being the building level this targets the building principles in terms of the satisfying educational adequacy of the work the level of engagement at the building level these are very key stakeholders who are involved during the planning and programming phases throughout design and through through construction and our project teams are very focused on ensuring the communication there is is maintained secondly our operations and maintenance group are also completing a survey to evaluate how they're being engaged in the work in the planning and design and construction work as well and the third category that we haven't we haven't scored yet is the design advisory groups we are planning to put design advisor groups in place for the three high schools and for fabian and so we'll be developing a survey instrument for them to evaluate how they're being engaged and how effectively the team is is supporting the dags and then wrapping up the last perspective is the equity perspective and this is one that we developed based on our district equity in public purchasing and contracting which was a policy that that you approved about a year ago and staff has developed a administrative directive that we'll be presenting to the superintendent here shortly that will address three different aspects of our equity and public purchasing and contracting uh the first being the business equity our aspirational goal of 18 and pleased to say that although the dollars are still small since we're working with consultants we're actually hitting about 33 currently secondly secondly is our apprenticeable
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trades and this applies to the construction uh contracts of course we don't have those in place yet so there's no score for that but we're looking at participation levels for for for women and workers of color and we have targets that are included in this that we will be developing in conjunction with the city of portland who will be working with us to administrate to help administer this program and then thirdly is one that i know we've all talked quite a bit about that being the student engagement and having the consultants and the builders to actually register on a software program called we're on a web-based program called bizconnect to align the the firms with students and we're working very closely with district staff and building level counselors to connect students with the consultants and the builders who are going to be doing the bond work so that's a very quick and abbreviated run through on our balance scorecard and we'd like to open up for any questions that you may have all right we are it's getting late um if but if i were the public i happen to like i said caught the last meeting so i think i understand i know i understand the answers to these questions but on page three of the balance score card we've made some financial changes and all the center program costs seem to be much higher than originally proposed in the bond can you um articulate why that looks like that certainly what did we do so in the bond measure we had identified specific budgets for the for the high schools for example and for our educational and physical facility improvements from a standpoint of managing the program we extracted the oversight costs that staff would incur to to manage the work it's it's easier to manage the cost that way because as we looked at the bond-funded team we identified so many ftes that would be involved in the work so that was brought into the program category for administrative costs subsequently on an annual basis the labor costs will actually move back into the projects because our accounting procedures require that we actually invest in the in the site so the cost of the labor gets added in so the reason it's higher currently is as we pulled the resources out of the projects and we were essentially looking at about five percent of what were called the soft costs the owner costs and the consultant costs we landed on a number that's uh that's a little bit higher than what we initially had anticipated and these numbers are all somewhat relative i'm only be careful in terms of how i characterize it because the framework of these projects was developed by staff and as we report on it we want to be able to account for the expenditures so the numbers that are showing do give you an indication of what the initial thinking was relative to cost versus what we currently think it is and that number will will change some we're being very deliberate about not bringing additional staff on at the early stage of the program until later when we have we have greater need for it and i think i would add to that that the allocation of the program cost to the projects and the explanation you just heard is part of what kevin spellman was talking about in terms of what is the easiest way to make this information visible to the public so because it's not particularly intuitive it is uh appropriate from an accounting standpoint and from a project standpoint and so what is it we need to do in terms of how we're reporting it to make it easier to understand right that's exactly and that's i mean that's what i wanted to highlight is again somebody just looking at this it would feel like whoa all of a sudden we're going wild with the costs and related to that on page five of the presentation um if we look at the balance score card in program administration it looks like we're four million dollars over budget all of a sudden and there's a similar issue there but can you talk to us a little bit about that i think that that was actually what i was explaining that's that's the the program administration which includes the staffing costs uh the line below it shows the uh the allocation of program administration and the program pmcm that's here international as it moves by fiscal year across the eight-year program and so as we look at the as we look at the numbers you know four million over but then offset by the um by the other allocations that will go
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back into the projects and then the co contingency you see is a 2.8 million so that actually offsets that at this early stage this plan is actually very much on track uh oversight costs are running about four percent of the program which relative to public agencies managing programs is is actually on the low end that's great great thank you very much and we are now to our business agenda um ms houston are there any changes to the business agenda no there are not do i have a motion and a second to adopt a business agent um director gonzalez moves director act in seconds to adopt the business agenda is there any citizen comment on the business agenda no board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no the business agenda is approved by a vote of 7-0 with student representative garcia voting yes yes as a reminder this the board sitting as the budget committee will hold a public hearing on the proposed 2013-14 budget this wednesday may 1st at 6 o'clock here in the board auditorium our next regular meeting of the board will be held on monday may 6th at 6 pm we are adjourned uh

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)

2013-04-29 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Board Meeting - April 29, 2013

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