2013-06-03 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2013-06-03
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - June 3, 2013

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okay good evening this meeting the board of education for june 3rd 2013 is now called the order i'd like to extend a welcome to everyone present and to our television view audience all items that will be voted on this evening have been have been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times we're also streaming live on pps's website and we are also the meeting will be archived on the pps website if you'd like to view it later or want to refer somebody refer somebody to something that we spoke about this evening just a note that director adkins and knowles are absent this evening tonight is a night of lots of celebrations and it is so fun to get to celebrate so many of our students uh this evening so we will hear from three athletic teams and acquire and acknowledge them for their accomplish accomplishments this year um and i i request that all the teams uh remain until the end so that we can get photos of us with with all the different teams but before we move on to that portion i'd like to introduce the recipient of this year's board scholarships gabriella lange from jefferson high school the board scholarship award was established in 1989 by the by the then current members of the school board as a way to encourage outstanding students to return to portland and become teachers the fund symbolizes the founders belief in the importance of education to our society and of the teaching to and of the teaching to education this year's award is one thousand four hundred eleven dollars and will be sent to gabby's college of choice um gabby is already at the speaker's table and so um if you could say a few words and um tell us what your plans are hello uh thank you very much i know there are people behind you but there's a camera in front of you that will get you hello i just want to say thank you very much i recognize superintendent carol smith and talked on the phone with greg he gave me the great news i'm just really happy to be here uh in the fall of this year i'll be attending pacific university in forest grove so this money is very appreciated very much appreciated uh i'd really like to thank uh one person that's in this i mean i'd like to thank everybody very much personally i want to thank mr oscar gilson he is uh the vice principal of jefferson high school i've only known him for a couple years but this man is such like he's a very influential part of my life because i look to him as a role model and a leader and i don't know how this the last couple years would have turned out if he hadn't been there giving me a thumbs up and smiling at me when i get really upset in class or at school so i just want to thank all of you guys very very much and let you know that this is greatly appreciated not only by me but my family and my friends so oh wait before you leave wait before you leave don't run off don't run off hold on i just want to point out that miss calvert um the principal of jefferson high school was sitting next to her um and is um the teacher oscar mr gilson mr gilson is he here just want to acknowledge you a great example of how important it is to have great educators great people in our schools working to provide a wide variety of role models for for our students um i i have a um i have a little certificate to give to you which i'll give to you now but hold on to it because we're going to take a photo with it later but uh i also want to recommend or ask you to stick around until we get through all the recognition so we can do a photo with you okay sounds good anyway congratulations thank you
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i also realized is your mom here she's not she wasn't able to be here okay she might be watching on tv so i just want to say congratulations to her mother i know that i got to actually talk to her first and she was very excited and obviously very proud of her daughter and it takes so much work to get our youth supported in all the way through school so she is just elated and congratulations to you again moving on yeah moving on to our next recognition each of the teams being recognized uh this evening received the highest honor in the state of oregon winning first at the state level competitions we are full of champions in the state to start this off i want to invite the grant high women's cross country team up front and sit oh they're asking to go second yes we can move you to second apparently they're running here from their latinos um so we are gonna move on to the jefferson high school men's basketball team now we're talking if the jefferson high school basketball team could come up and join us in the red chairs up front that would be great and yet again i'm feeling short it's not unusual right superintendent smith the board is my pleasure my name is ricky allen vice principal jefferson high school good evening it's my pleasure to introduce to you uh 2013 5a jefferson high school state champion the demos also sitting right beside me we have pil coach of the year and 5a state coach of the year mr pat strickland who's young man who i had an opportunity to work with since the sixth grade so i'm extremely proud first i want to say thanks to the super attendant and the rest of the board this was a very special year it's always special when you have the cameras following you the whole year and you can end up cutting the nets down at the end of the year i want to thank all my players i want to thank the administrators at jefferson all the parents because without them none of this would have been possible it was very special in another sense that we fought through a lot of adversity through the year you know players were missing due to various reasons we maintain to stay together and um it's very special at the end um the community uh just everybody it was like a perfect ending story and we have it all on camera thanks for having us so can i can i ask you a quick question so you said you worked with him in since sixth grade does that mean you came up through have you been are you a pps grad and now coming back to coach yes he's a state champion he's a state champion himself at wilson high school wow that's a great example of the tradition and thank you for coming back and serving the community with these great guys congratulations gentlemen before you leave us again i want to hope that you guys stick around so that we can get a picture with you guys but congratulations we couldn't be proud um oh yeah let's let's get all the let's get all the team i'm sorry and then i'm going to ask for your parents to stand if you're here too after that no yeah just introduce yourself so go ahead start with coach bob assistant coach dale ball craig gabe garrett sophomore oh my name is dario i'm from sensei i'm a sophomore uh my name is suny edwards and i'm a junior daniel pablo sophomore courtney salt junior sophomore victor i'm a senior hayden hall i'm a senior i'm a sophomore silas nelson i'm a junior i'm a junior wow for those of you for those of you on camera there were two seniors who were obviously great role models but the rest
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of it were all juniors and sophomores so we're looking forward to next year thank you so much all right if you guys want to have a seat real quick while we acknowledge if your parents are some of your parents here could you guys stand up so we can thank you guys too great thank you congratulations it sounds like some of you guys might even be be up for three more years of championships great thank you all again stick around but if you guys could move to the back oh yeah yeah i could just one quick i just wanted to acknowledge uh our new athletic director for the first year miss jackie sage brought up with some great karma so i just wanted to recognize the sage that's great thank you congratulations all right now i think oh okay pretty sure they're running laps around the building um we are going to move on to the wilson choir if the wilson choir could come down and join us in the red seats wilson choir oh here we go i got the trophy we brought the trophy to show you that's fantastic you win hardware you get to bring the hardware well thank you for this recognition um we're really proud of our will singers this is quite an accomplishment we've never placed at state and to get first is just blew us away but the choir blows us away so they're they put their heart into everything they do i have four of our seniors here ethan conroy sam donnelly alex huey and nick huey diaz huey that's great congratulations thank you guys for joining us and again we hope that you guys stick around um the the cross country team has gotten me off my script um so then other than congratulations um other than congratulations if we could have are your parents are some of your parents here no oh here we go all right i'm very proud parents we all are great congratulations if you guys could stay with us so we can get a picture with you that'd be great thank you thank you all right grant high school hi women's cross country ready or not you're up and there is a microphone in front of you if you want to i don't know if you want to have them introduce themselves well i just want to say that our grant cross country team is a wild crazy phenomenon we had over 160 uh people on the team so one out of every 10 grand students was running for our team wow next fall it'll be 200 runners which is an insane amount but with quantity we also have quality our team this year was really built on sisterhood and they um they were in their heart and soul every meet um throughout the season they're just winning meets left and right and we do have two biological sisters and the uh ella donahue and piper donohue we have randy kendrick and parks kendrick but we have two non-biological sisters kazmarowski is our team captain and senior and we also have libby kocus who's just incredibly improving and helping our team immensely so i'm really proud of them it's been a joy thanks that's great congratulations thank you and i don't know if any of your parents were able to make it were they great if if your parents are here at the cross country team can you either wave to us or stand up great congratulations i know it i hope it doesn't defeat the purpose of having all these champions but it's just extraordinary for us to have this many people that are working to the top of the game um regardless of whether it's in athletics or at school um it's just a great example and congratulations because i know that that's a lot of miles that's a lot of hours it doesn't just happen so congratulations thank you and stay with
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us so that we can get a picture back in foyer thank you uh now we're up to lincoln women's tennis team if the lincoln's tennis team come on up all right this is the 2013 2012 2011 and 2010 6a state champions wait say that again start chronological how many years is that four four years wow so we're short in numbers tonight a lot of our are taking tests but we are huge at heart and it took a whole team to get us to qualify to get to the tournament because we play in the at the metro league which is a pretty tough league to qualify players for so it's especially a sweet accomplishment and uh we have a lot of seniors uh ali and katie hefner and mackenzie's not but and sarah shattuck were our captains lily and paige and mackenzie that's great congratulations and um thank you and um at this level they only play on not clay or grass right they play on is it what hard surface hard court hardcore although some of the girls may play in tournaments outside of school which might have grass or clay that's i was going to ask how many of you have played on other surfaces are already playing on other surfaces okay wow that's fantastic four years running we look forward to seeing you again next year and um i think at this point we are am i right we are going to take photos um oh i'm sorry and i don't know if your parents are here um are you any parents from there we go the tennis champs parents congratulations so um we're going to take some pictures back here and while uh the pictures are being taken uh if the principle or principles if the principles for the jefferson cluster presentation could come join in these red seats that would be great we're going to take a quick break while we take some photos responsibility as a board lies in actively listening and reflecting on the thoughts and opinions of others the board will 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 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 and during the first two minutes you'll have a little green light that comes on and then when you have one minute remaining the yellow light will come on and then at the end of your time the red light will come on in a little buzzer and if you can wrap up your comments at that time it'd be greatly appreciated but we thank you for joining us and we appreciate your input dear superintendent miss carol smith and our polar public school board members my name is ahoy t tran my last name is tr am i am vietnamese community of orient vice president of human resources it is honored for me to represent for vietnamese community of oregon more and vietnamese people to be here today we would like to present to you some ideas first i would like to thank uh superintendent and all of you for giving us opportunity to let our voices to be heard by porn public school board and you got really engaged with the vietnamese community
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since then we are meeting on may 12 2013 since then to present even though only two weeks vietnamese community with a big effort have been collecting 1840 signature for community members to support for vietnamese language immersion program so hear that all right i brought the whole box for you that's great so during this project we're not only collecting the petition letter but we also educated community members about the program and get them involved as a result of number as you said the signature you know how much support we have about this program we ask you all to consider choosing vietnamese language for this program because first vietnamese is the second largest language spoken in poland public school and e and in english second language program only after spanish language next there is a collaboration between paula public school and vietnamese community approving to the last meeting on may 12 2013 at la bang school and paris the vietnamese community also have a three big vietnamese school to teach students to speak vietnamese they could be the wonderful resources for the vietnamese language immersion program of portland public school we also have many vietnamese teachers in metro area including portland public school and i am the one of them last but not least thank you for listening to us and give us opportunity to raise the spirit of our community it is phenomenal the people gather the signature would i present them to you today are from different groups from the vietnamese schools the churches the temples the markets boy scout and even individuals who walked to the neighbor houses brought the ladder to work at school talk to friends and so on again thank you and god bless you thank you is that only two minutes it went a little bit over but it's good okay thank you uh of store uh story we will tell you the one real story that will in the poland new york congregation the story we taught the human heart beginning of the father will teach the children how to drive the dry illness in the whiteboard can the children don't know how to write regardless the father are with again but we slowly look on bank but the children doesn't know how to rise the father really anger and write the letter hope on the whiteboard okay you may all learn then the children will suffer they have hope or if that's the children say oh that's the hope hey no the father thin because of the grammar error when when you get that outside then you can configure then the the grammar and that's why the reason the children can can rise ladies and gentlemen this is the the
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really problem my german new toys like the parents look like myself vanguard and my friends reply we really want to help our children in the study may like but however uh the illness we have we don't have enough knowledge to to explain for a children my god for the children can understand the vietnamese for the parent can date them by vietnamese okay big looks when we hear the portland public school martial children can study um easier then between the father and children more closer from yeah because they need to the parent will um really happy with the um the way to help the children to study more in the subjects and ho right and we will support the teacher in the in the school gone from godoy and a children to hong kong london not alone in the in the study without hey go yeah because of the they are the parents to live like myself and all the parents you cannot regret before we think this program is really really really important we hope students on the cooking program will early uh will up thank you and gentlemen for listening thank you the next the next two speakers are marie nguyen and ethan medley well so who's who's the first person we can have one person just come up to the table marie nguyen okay then we'll just have the last two speakers join at the table at the same time this one good evening everybody here i'm very honored to be here to speak for vietnamese community for my family in for generations living in poland oregon i am the second one thanks god for putting me and my family in the christian country on earth
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i'm very proud to be an american citizen to work for monument county for more than 20 years and i'm working here in the building we thanks america and all the country all over the world giving the vietnamese people freedom humanity respect and dignity we thanks american school especially the poland public school who recognized the diversity and their roles in society to create the english as second language english as non-native language and other numerous community programs to help and assist vietnamese refugees relocate and become acclimated in their new home land thais poland's school board of education providing the public for meeting to giving us an opportunity to serve students family and society better i'm here today not to speak for only vietnamese student family or cultural benefit but also for the poland community community as well i would like to bring up many reasons why vietnamese should be taught in fallen public school i could hear many times asian population population in poland oregon the vietnamese is among the highest preceding the chinese population hispanic or latinos come in second of all everyone could probably agree that spanish is taught in our school because their population is very high in the united states which we could use the same reason as to why vietnamese should be tossed as well communication is very important and if non-speaking vietnamese has the opportunity to speak to learn to learn to speak the basic then communication can be more efficient also not just for those who don't speak vietnamese but for those who do speak it but not fully and want to advance the vietnamese speaking skill the second thing is vietnamese is one of a few languages in asia that use latin alphabet instead of symbol was developed by french jesus missionary missionary who came to vietnamese in 17th century which made easier to learn and interpret learning vietnamese would probably have the highest success success rate of learning i guess what if you could wrap up your comments that would be great another another little that relate to easy communication is that when people have knowledge another language besides english is a plus in applying for a job a lot of places in poland either required or design a circle language usually in spanish or vietnamese and that reflects one the population this facility one accepts to buy language employee because it will make the operation work better one more interesting thing i want to bring up teacher and student relationship in vietnam teach you even though they are young and joy great respect and presence in vietnamese society in vietnam the student relationships retain much of the quality of a son respect for his father's wisdom and of further concern for his son's welfare the respect that students show to the teacher is also evident in linguistic behavior the term of address that students you in speaking to their teacher are the same as though to you in speaking to their friends we strongly believe can you can you jump to the end of your comments yes thank you we strongly believe and encourage vietnamese should be taught in portland police public school to benefit to the community of poland as a whole thanks very much for listening thank you thank you next we have ethan medley and andrew kernan thank you pps board and superintendent smith ethan medley m-e-d-l-e-y andrew kirken and k-u-r-k-i-n-e-n uh we are grateful for your support in our of our modest enrollment increase earlier this year and when we're speaking on behalf of the portland village school board
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and we are pleased to offer this brief update on how we have engaged the issue of student achievement and the achievement gap this year there are many things we could highlight but this is one that is particularly important in his report to the district our principal mr berg identified the top two challenges facing our school as closing the achievement gap particularly between african-americans and white student populations and increasing diversity of admissions in our family applicant pool to address these challenges he has intensively focused our teaching staff on several things data analysis focusing on subgroup achievement gaps equity lenses and the alignment between internal and external assessments working together to dissect the student the student achievement data from both external and internal assessment sources considering not only the overall trends but also class by class trends and over the summer this analysis will lead to specific strategies to put in place by the start of the next year to address the most persistent gaps we expect to continue we expect to continue this momentum through continued professional development of our staff notably in next year we will have a high percentage of returning staff retention and stability are important factors in this ongoing work that is taking place around diversity equity and student achievement virtually all full-time teachers will be supported this summer in attending rudolf steiner college in sacramento california where they will be part of the grade level cohorts learning waldorf practices and planning for next year in addition we hope to secure extended contract opportunities for curriculum development work and move forward to address our achievement gaps for subgroups of students our board is committed to addressing the achievement gap as one of our four core goals in our strategic plan and this plan which is currently circulating for community feedback includes strategies to define achievement and the achievement gap and effectively measure and report student success build our collective skills to support uh to successfully address the achievement gap strategically implement waldorf pedagogy and other best practices and diversify portland village school student body staff and leadership we are proud that in the adoption of our budget we have earmarked 23 000 specifically to an equity and achievement fund to support plans of action for each student currently not achieving expectations we know that eliminating the achievement gap is a challenge we share with most other schools in the district we are committed to demonstrating success within a waldorf inspired framework and look forward to continuing to partner with you to implement best practices we've captured a few of our other highlights of our year on a written update that i'll share with you at the end of these remarks before i leave i'd like to introduce andrew kirknen who will be our president next year andrew is a former pps teacher and now runs his own business thank you for your time this evening and for your service to this board we extend our thanks to outgoing director sergeant and gonzalez for your dedication to all of the pps students we look forward to working with you in the future thank you thank you last we have scott bailey good evening members of the board and superintendent smith my name is scott bailey b-a-i-l-e-y i'm with our portland our schools i want to make a few brief comments it was a busy week last week for us with a number of major meetings going on one of them was the the sort of big tent meeting around the facilities vision process i want to focus on two things from that meeting one there was broad agreement that the outreach leading up to taking input in that process was really fabulous and reached out to a lot of folks who are often not included in pbs processes and i want to say a big thumbs up on that when when pbs engages in that kind of outreach it really builds trust in the community and leads to better decisions down the road i want to contrast that a little bit with the roosevelt design advisory group the recruitment for that yielded only a handful of applicants from the community opus and the roosevelt campus improvement committee have met with pbs staff and offered to help with improving that outreach in the future and we're confident we can do that together it would have been better to do that up front so that we have a better process going forward the same uh could be true we'll we'll wait and see how the franklin process is turning out a second thing take away from that facility's vision process and what the
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community said to portland public while it was a facility's vision process embedded in that was were a lot of comments about educational vision and i don't think it was lost on anybody in the room that the what was stated in terms of educational vision by community members was almost directly opposed to the direction of federal and state policy current policy and i thought it was pretty interesting thanks for your time and your service thank you so this time we're going to move on to the next item on our agenda which is we get to hear another installment of our high school cluster presentations these presentations featuring a different school cluster each month allows the board to conduct a deeper dive on milestone data at the school level we've allocated one hour for this item 30 minutes presentation and 30 minutes questions from the board superintendent smith do you want to get us started like to extend a welcome to all of our cluster leaders from jefferson cluster and introduce suanne higgins our chief academic officer who will introduce the regional administrators and do more individual introductions of all of our principles so see you in good evening it's pleasure to be joined tonight by the leaders of the jefferson cluster schools and their regional administrators beginning with the k-8 regional administrator antonio lopez and tripp goodall will also join him our director of high schools thank you good evening co-chairs gonzalez directors student representative and superintendent it is indeed a pleasure and an honor to be here in front of you to present the jefferson cluster this is a group of amazing administrators that are working very hard in terms of giving our students the education that they deserve to provide us a safe and nurturing environment we know we have a lot of work to do so uh you know we are we are indeed working very hard in terms of establishing those systems and uh interventions uh to to move our students to the level that they deserve to be so i'm going to have the principles of the administrators of each school introduce themselves and also tell you about the things that are happening at their schools so we're going to start with okay oscar gilson middle college director vice principal at jefferson high school margaret calvert principal at jefferson high school hi rebecca torres i'm the principal at beach school just to tell you guys a little bit about our school we have over 600 students we're very proud of our dual language immersion program right currently we have 11 sections going strong some of the neat things about our school is we're really big on the walking and biking to month school uh to school month and um we're anticipating winning the award the third year in a row this year for 90 participation we have a bike fairy who leaves little treats on the on the bicycles and that offers hot chocolate in the mornings some of the other things that we're really proud of at our school is that we are a right brain immersion school as well so we are we had over six residents that came to our school and 100 of our classrooms participated in those things as well conrad hurdle principal of aqua green school joe golotti current principal at chief joseph elementary robin morrison principal over at woodlawn and i'll just take a couple minutes to highlight some of the things that we've been doing at woodlawn and i'm going to start with talking about our disciplined data i don't know if you're going to look at our current data but when i look at the dashboard it has significantly significantly decreased and i believe that it's because we're in our third year of being a pbis school and we have really implemented the theory and we're going to take it to the next step and so we're really excited about that and then the other thing that i think is really important is through the enrollment and balancing jefferson process our parents came together and we had some very strong voices that came from our community that really supported woodlawn and kind of came out of the woodwork and i'm really proud of that and that includes our pta board which has tripled in size over the last year and i'm really excited about that one of the things that they did just last friday is we put on a fair called it takes a
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community and probably about 150 200 people showed up to that and there was a dunk tank and the good fairy from the north east came that would be me um who was dressed as a ferry and um it was put on totally by our community and our community came out and it was really exciting exciting to see but i think the last thing that i want to illustrate is we just received word from the state of oregon that our comprehensive achievement plan was accepted without any revisions and except for except for a budget piece but overall i mean that was like one little item and i can tell you is that's our school improvement uh plan and it was very difficult um to do because most of them were sent back for either many or major revisions and so we've also had exemplary in several areas and so we're really excited about that and that's been a whole community process so those are three things that i'd like to share with you all so so good evening everyone i'm lashawn lee the proudest principal in pps and farming pre-k a school it's a pleasure to be here today just to brag about our school in our community actually at a powerpoint yes thank you so building our community together is our theme this year with the help of our parents students teachers and valuable partnerships i'm going to turn the microphone over to jen our assistant principal to give you a little bit of information about our students hi i'm jen mccauley i'm the ap at fabian giving you a quick overview of fabian school we have 462 students today that changes that's a running joke in our building we've actually increased 35 students since october 1st our numbers have been as high as 4.75 we bounce around quite a bit we have 71 percent of our students are students of color which we're very proud of it's something we actually really celebrate in our building we have 114 mid-level learners and 348 pre-k through 5th grade students we're 79 free and reduced lunch 14 esl 15 sped and we have a seven percent of our tagged population we do have our tentative testing results back from 2012 2013 this school year our biggest accomplishment is in eighth grade if you look down in the yellow we had a 14 increase a 14 point increase in eighth grade reading scores and a 12 increase in eighth grade math scores and we are really proud of that so one of the things we're going to highlight today is an ipad donation we received so in february we were at a concordia event um honoring governor victor atea and hot choc um the director ed fields was one of the presenters and the idea had been to try to fundraise a little bit for some technology for fabian we have one working laptop cart for a school of 462 students which is hard when you have testing then you have no technology when ed fields walked up to the podium he said oh we need to you know earn money for 120 ipads and you know what we've got it and everyone just kind of looked around said what he and his company purchased all 120 ipads right there on the spot and donated them to fabian school so what you see in the pictures right there is dr seuss day was our big roll out there's lashawn with all 120 ipad boxes in front of her very excited we kicked it off by having our youngest learners our four and five-year-old sitting in the cafeteria in a big assembly with a seventh grader learning how to read books on the ipad and so they were reading dr seuss books on the ipad we've used the ipads for instructional reasons our middle mid-level learners have recorded severe weather forecast reports on it we've used khan academy our youngest have practiced reading fluency and changed their voices and got to hear themselves back we've used it for classroom management reasons all in all it's really revolutionized the way our teachers are teaching april 27th comcast adopted our school and provided just a little spring cleaning much needed spring cleaning on campus as well as offering a technology class to our jefferson cluster families over 300 comcast employees volunteered and dedicated an entire weekend day to weed in the garden painting repainting our basketball back boards and build us a beautiful welcome fabian sign to to top this day off comcast gave away two ipads and donated a check for 25 000 to fabian and i mean that was the
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best birthday present of my birthday ever so we're also excited as you all know about our deep partnership with concordia university our neighbors just 102 steps away as you know concordia has the largest college of education in the state over 1700 students on campus and 250 of their student teachers practicum students and interns in our building within a given school year thanks to our voters fabian and concordia will embark on embark on a joint venture to rebuild our campuses together we're ready we're building and more to come thank you good evening i'm kim patterson and i'm principal of martin luther king jr school and we have a wonderful student and parent community at martin luther king junior school including many families who choose king because of an historic the school we are especially proud of our implementation of our school improvement grant and this upcoming school year will be the third year of that two million dollar grant there are three strategies in our grant that i would really like to remind the board of because those grants are meant to seed the district with some ideas that might transform practice across the district so the first piece that we're extremely proud of is our extended school year so feel free to stop by in july all teachers at king's school and all students will be deeply entrenched in learning in the month of july and we we call that month and extra scoop and we really encourage you to think about a balanced calendar for portland public schools we believe that the learning loss that happens in the summer is needless and we would encourage you to make that a priority the second piece that we're very proud of is king school over the last three years has become a pyp authorized school and a middle years program international baccalaureate authorized school as well and we invested in that strategy to provide level two and three training for our teachers and at king's school we like to think that teachers are creators and the sig grant has given us additional time for planning and planning constructivist and inquiry-based curriculum for our students and it's a reminder that at schools where there is a high number of students of color and students of poverty that they are usually the least likely to receive that kind of constructivist curriculum and so we're really pleased with those efforts and we believe that our academic gains are part of that effort the third piece has been that from the very beginning the arts were part of our achievement strategies and last spring we were selected as one of the eight turnaround art schools in the nation and um usually people want to ask us about sarah jessica parker or things like that but really we like to remind everyone that we we had really simple strategies like having african dance and ghani's culture for all of our students and we really see the joy and the pleasure that the arts give our students and so one of the other reminders is that nationally and in the portland metro area it's students of color and low-income students that sometimes have the least of the specials and enrichments in their schools and we really are committed to that and so um in this last year we hope you stop by and check it out and and we really are our academic gains have been noticeable so thank you i am gina roletto and i'm the assistant principal at vernon school and i'm here with my principal tina acker she's right down here at the end thanks for letting us come to present i'm going to go ahead and start off and then i'll pass it on but i think one of the things that i wanted to share is that we're coming to the end of our second year with our transition that we had with our additional students from the wrigler community and it's been a great achievement with the students i presented a lot of unique challenges but what was great was seeing our verna community be so welcoming of all the families and the students and i think it led to a lot more a lot more vision for our community and what we meant to be what it meant to be to be a community and so it definitely was something that we learned a lot from in welcoming those students and making them a part of vernon and in that process too we wanted to thank the board and the district for continuing to support us through those two years both through resources and encouragement
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of additional things that we could bring for our students while those students were there and and i think our cluster learned a lot too in regards to the processes of bringing those communities together even though it was a smaller dosage of it but it was over a hundred middle school students that we had acquired and we're we're sad to see them go and and so it'll be ending here for them um at the end of this school year so i'll pass this on to tina acker good evening everyone i'm tina acker and i am the proud principal at vernon school and this is my fifth year serving as principal at vernon in the vernon community there's a couple things that i'm really excited about and pleased about in terms of our progress over this year our equity work has been one of those pieces it was really important for us to move forward as with the district's mission and focus on equity and how that impacts our schools our both our students and our families and our staff and so at the end of the year last year we formed our equity team and we made some plans to dedicate our two-hour late start professional development time to the equity work and it's been we've been everywhere across the compass and experienced discomfort and speaking our truth and going through and learning each other and getting to know kind of who we are and what we bring to the table and i think that's really important as a starting place the other thing that's been really nice is that our we have a group of parents in our community that had expressed the desire to engage in the conversations and learn about what that means and what that impact is and how as parent a parent community they can support the work that we're doing and so i'm really happy to share that we had our initial parent meeting focused on equity a few weeks ago and we had a follow-up meeting that was an affinity group one of the things that we've been working on is ways to engage all of our community we saw that we needed to do some things a little bit differently to engage other people in our community and so we had an affinity group meeting for our black and brown families that went very well a week ago and we will have another meeting so our second meeting with our families with everyone together before we leave for the end of the year and that will happen next week so i'm really excited that we're getting deep into the work and we know that it's not always easy those conversations can be challenging at times but i think times but i think it's essential that we engage in that dialogue especially if we're going to impact what happens for all of our students so that's been something that i've been really proud of this year the other piece piggybacking off of kim and the focus on ib vernon is the second school in the jefferson cluster that is an authorized international baccalaureate school i feel like my kids are rocking ib they've shown in many ways that they are embracing what it means to focus on inquiry-based instruction about caring about others in the community what it means to be a citizen and think about others and not just themselves and so i'm seeing lots of evidence of the beauty of what it means to be an ib school so our school is authorized in our primary years program and we're prepared for authorization we're very confident that we will achieve the authorization for our middle years program that will happen in the fall of next school year but the work that needed to be done in order to be prepared for authorization is completed we actually took a group of students that focused on community and service to a recent leadership meeting in our district and so i had students presenting in front of over 200 administrators and their focus was on the things that they chose as projects and an emphasis on getting out into the community and helping others and what that means and so they did a beautiful job um we also had a couple of students that shared projects that they they presented that were tied to our partnership with the east portland rotary we are very grateful for our pta and rotary and the work that they're doing in our school to bring more art and music into our school the pta and the rotary have made a three-year commitment to fund our halftime music teacher and so the rotary has donated 12 500 for the past couple of years and next year will be the third year but in addition to that they show up to our building so they are showing what happens when people reach out and take time and invest in our kids and it means a lot to us we have a group that meets once a month as a committee and then in addition to that they are
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volunteering in the school working with our students with our passport club and other activities we've got community people that are coming in talking about business opportunities and options that are available to our students so they see the reality of what what that what their futures could be and so it's really important for us that we maintain that partnership but that we celebrate that and we express to the board the importance of continuing to build partnerships like the partnership that we have with our east portland rotary in addition one of the things that we did as ib schools there are four in our district um we got together with our teachers it was one of the things that they asked for was time together with each other and so instead of if you're a specialist and you're the only one in your building and you're doing the work in isolation we brought our staffs together and so all of our primary years teachers were at one building i hosted one building and kim hosted the other and so saban skyline vernon and king we all got together a couple times this year for some professional development with all of our schools as ib schools and there was really value in doing that it's something that we want to continue doing into next year and so um we appreciate that we have had support from the district and there's evidence that there's that continued support for something that i think is extremely valuable for students at my school so we've been very grateful for the support that you all have shown to us and we're looking forward to continuing the work so thank you very miss much before you before you get started i just want to let everybody know you got about five more minutes for the staff presentation part all right i'll hurry i i'm not trying to rush you i'm sorry all right i'm molly chen um principal at boys elliot humboldt this year has been a highlight it's been an amazing journey so about you know a year ago at this time we began the process of a merger with boise elliot and humboldt and i think we we were very well prepared for what the work ahead due to the work that we've done as a beacon school for five years um we i think it was so meaningful for both staffs and for families because we were able to capitalize really on the experience of being a beacon school gone gone through the equity work and what that really meant to our families we embraced it as a chance to really examine social justice issues and displacement of families our theme for the year is place race and justice we had a curriculum camp this summer that was funded by a grant with oregon writing project where 14 teachers from both staffs came together and developed units around place race and justice at developmentally appropriate levels uh pre-k through eight um the teachers have been teaching those lessons and those units throughout the year we got together in august as a combined staff and went on the urban housing tour and really continued you know the exploration of displacement and what that means for our families in portland especially in the albino neighborhood and it was just a great springboard for the year ahead we started our year with a big celebration we had a staggered start so half the kids came on the first day of school half the kids came on the second and then we had a huge assembly barely all fitting in the cafeteria with our new boise elliott humboldt t-shirts so the year it started out wonderful and it really has been a great experience um what i like to say is humboldt's the best thing that's happened to boise elliot um and i get emotional sorry but um the passion and the commitment from teachers and staff and community and children has just really demonstrated the resilience of a community in it sorry sorry sorry i'm emotional anyways because you know what's coming at the end of this year but in addition to that one of the big highlights for this year has been our stem partnership with the portland metro partnership we and jefferson were the um two schools from portland that were asked to join as transformational schools and another you know it's this great interconnection of initiatives um stem really adds to the relevance and rigor and relationship and realness which is the transformational form or framework of the care work through through equity we from the stem work we were able to hire a full-time stem tosa and she's done an awesome job of just spreading the word spreading the knowledge getting everyone
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in the building using inquiry notebooks and the science has just become a part of our life at boise elliot humboldt which is really exciting at a much higher level than it had been in addition to that we became partners with the department of fish and wildlife through our stem work but also through the equity department equity department with portland so melissa gaw and lolinzo po kind of facilitate facilitated it for us this the office of civil rights from the department of fish and wildlife came and asked for a school to participate and they recognized us and so we developed this amazing partnership that is just has been life-changing for kids they brought a fish tank with 150 salmon eggs and as an entire building and community we washed our eggs our salmon eggs develop into little fry and every grade level came to visit the eggs and watched the development we kept an ongoing video journal photography journal kids you know recorded everything in their inquiry journal we had biologists from the hatchery a little white salmon come and demonstrated some great lessons with the kids at the end they got to actually dissect you know salmon not our salmon but big salmon they're the ones that already made the trip the ones that already made the trip back so but um and then they sent uh three charter buses to pick up all the fourth and fifth grade and families lots of grandparents that were you know fishermen came it was wonderful and then we went to the hatchery and released our salmons the kids were emotional crying writing letters to their salmon just it was it was darling it was just an amazing experience um and we've just kind of formed this great partnership now with the department um last week they brought out the lamprey and they're not nearly as cute as the salmon so i don't know if you know about lamb free but they are but the kids were so excited about these creatures and um we have and next year they're coming in september to develop the backyard or actually it's the schoolyard habitats program so it's been a really exciting adventure and then senator merkley came to visit boise elliott humboldt because to kind of highlight the work that we had done that we have done with the stem and he was dropping a bill at the same time in support of funding for stem so that was really exciting and then just this last saturday we had stem saturday at boys alien humboldt which was oh my gosh it was an amazing event there were about 60 kids and families that came from about eight to one and we had solve and saturday academy and mad science and first that came and did just great interactive hands-on science projects the kids were so engaged and um it was really exciting so what i can say is you know them it started out as kind of you know a challenge as far as the consolidation in the merger but um with the passion and commitment of the community it became an amazing amazing experience and will continue to be and and really just interconnecting the initiatives of equity and stem and the social justice justice issues so thank you thank you so after that and being the last one i will be very brief evelyn flowers assistant principal at woodside humboldt and i think for me you've heard some of the details about what makes our buildings so magical and there's many more things that could be said as well but for me being a part of the jefferson cluster has been such an honor because no matter what challenges we are asked to address everyone in our cluster rises to that occasion so it is a very proud moment to be sitting here before you i realize now that it's a little unfair to ask principals to speak about the things they love the most about their building and then cut them off um we're at times so if you want to say some final comments and then i think we just um we've used too much time so jefferson doesn't get to go i'm just i'm just kidding but if if we could wrap it up quickly can i just ask for a couple of minutes for uh for conrad thank you everyone conrad hurdle again principal of the green school and as i think about what to say tonight i can summarize some of my comments in three words occle green is an engaging inspiring and winning school i say engaging because we have a great after-school program schools united neighborhoods program called sun and
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they do some amazing work with our students we have intramural sports throughout the year but also this thursday and friday we're going to have a great drama performance and so all of you are invited to come the performance is called words and it's going to happen thursday and friday at 7 o'clock in our auditorium and words is a play about words and how words can hurt you know my students they're very creative some of the words are good some of the words are questionable but uh you know just helping them understand the power of your words but this has been great this is totally a grassroots effort we have a great drama teacher parents work with her to help her out and the program is going to be stellar so if you can come please come also i want to share that aqua green is a very inspiring program as well this year we really focus on empowering the students to have a love for reading also their homes as well so we work with our teachers around a book study called the book whisper and one of the ambitious goals we have this year is for all of our 4th to 8th grade students to read 40 books this year so if you come into our building you'll see a star around our hallways representing a book that the children have read we've also have established some outstanding partners the children's book bank and also a brazilian books these partners have worked with us in providing our books so parents and students can select books to add to their home libraries that's very important that all of our homes are literate and making sure our homes have the literacy in in them we want to make sure that we're empowering our parents to help us but we also want to help our parents too so that's been a great connection and lastly i just want to say ocla green we're a winning school we have a great uh program called mesa for the television audience that stands for a mathematical engineering and science achievement program this is a stem program that's been around for a long time mesa is really there to counter any injustices that are out there for for for underrepresented students the whole premise of the program is to make sure that underrepresented students have the science mathematical and technology background to compete in college or in the workforce so i'm so proud mesa has been around in knocking the green for a long time and during may 10th we had a great um showing there was a competition at portland state university i'm very proud to say we won nine medals that day in 2009 we were the national championship national champions for for mesa so we have a strong history in math and science at actually green with this program we have some great coordinators esther romero but now we also have mrs moon that's in the audience as well as our mesa coordinators so um those are some words i want to describe dr green and thank you i'm going to pass it on to my partner joe i just want to say moving the schools together actually green and chief joseph as we emerged together has been a very powerful experience working with mr gulati and making that transition happen as smooth as possible as i've listened tonight to everyone that has spoken from the jefferson cluster there's nothing but deep pride that i have for my colleagues because they're able to focus in on those special unique qualities of each of their buildings tonight i want to share with you where chief joseph is we are the jewel of the north and as we move through the journey of emerging two buildings i would ask that prior to that you come out and visit the building and you come out and see the mural that we are so proud of our native american chief joseph nez purse you'll see our garden and you'll see a huge mural that truly speaks volumes to the ethnic breakdown of our building i ask that when you come out and see it you look into his eyes two weeks ago we had our honoring of him and i wish to say thank you to our keynote speaker matt morton who came out and presented and we were gifted with the presence of chief joseph's great granddaughter mrs britton and for her to sit there and for our kids to be able to meet her and be near her and to see an elder is probably the most moving thing that our kids will ever remember about that yes we have tremendous teachers yes we have a tremendous community but we have incredible young students that continue to shine and demonstrate their skills and as we merge our two buildings together i have nothing but praise for our parents that have worked so hard to make this merger a reality and before i leave as you always know you never come to chief joseph without me bearing a gift for you so thank you for inviting us here
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tonight thank you for the opportunity to share the great things that we have in our buildings and do not lose the opportunity to come out so i can brag about that gorgeous mural jefferson high school so if we could go ahead and get started we're running a little bit behind thank you well i have the honor of presenting another principal high school principal margaret calvert margaret is an outstanding principal who is an enthusiastic ambassador for the middle college program she believes in jefferson and she believes in what can happen at jefferson and believes in every student that walks through that door she's reflective she's insightful and she's determined you know some things you didn't know about margaret she's a trained economist she was a big ten varsity crew member at wisconsin she was an outstanding i went to university of washington she was an outstanding math teacher and an outstanding coach of women athletics while she was in pps most importantly she's an outstanding instructional leader and she's an outstanding leader of equity margaret calvert so good evening and i realized we were behind so i'm just going to do the front slide in the back slide and call it good really not but just a quick quick move here uh two years ago we started on a journey called the middle college program um i don't have to take you through the history of this but um the design principles were simple take what was working in the building and take it to scale and the two of the foundational partnerships that were working were with self-enhancement incorporated and with pcc then we said okay wrap that around with uh building and supporting the successful academic programs that were currently in the building at the time which were the health sciences biotechnology program the dance program and digital media so in beginning in the fall of 2011 we said okay can we make uh we set out not only to transform individual student lives but actually to transform the community and the goal is uh ambitious one to be certain and you're looking at a cohort of people that are working towards the same vision and that this is not something that starts at high school this is a k-12 vision and every single piece of pride and program that is in place in the k-8s is foundational to the success of the program at jefferson one of the key things that we brought into the building was our freshman academy and this the students travel in a cohort like many other high schools but probably the level of collaborative work that happens with our teachers is just at a dramatically higher level we have a freshman academy coordinator who is a talented teacher it's also a tremendous task master and sets agendas organizes professional development and supports the teachers a fairly prominent principal from grant high school named tony hunter once told me that the most important thing was to have people that love freshmen and that they taught them willingly we now have a group of teachers in the building that are clamoring to teach in the freshman academy they want to help support students make that bridge to high school so i think in tony's honor i hope that she is listening and she feels proud about that we also made a commitment to say that we were building a program for the students that were currently there and we were not looking to see success of a school be based on different students the commitment was to transform within the community itself and so what we're looking at is you know we track closely have the demo are the demographics changing and what does that look like for the most part they've stayed pretty stable with we're seeing a rise in actually the number of academic priorities students who enter our building and what that means is we have a fairly tall task the task is to change the trajectory of their learning and to get them accelerated and ready to go so that they are
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able to take not only advantage of the middle college program by the time they're juniors but to successfully complete classes and coursework there the investment in our freshman communities and our freshmen is absolutely critical to making sure that the kids make the transition to high school and then get on track to really accelerate and change the trajectory of their learning so our demographics have been remained stable over the last four years with our freshmen this is probably the most significant graph and i went through and i made it this morning and then i went back and i looked at it again and then i looked at it again this afternoon and i said maybe the numbers are wrong so when we look at if you think about in 2010 and 11 this is when the board made the decision to do high school redesign right there was the chance that jefferson would close and when we look at what has happened since then i believe we're on the right track so when we look at freshman enrollment in the four years since that last the last two years we've been just slightly over 127 incoming freshmen next year's freshman group is at 160. when we look at sophomores when we look at sophomores and juniors and seniors what we see is it is stable so when i look at last year's freshman 127 there's 127 sophomores and when i look at two years ago there were 130 or 127 freshmen there's 127 soon-to-be juniors so we're not seeing mobility in the same way we've had in the past and this is true this is tremendous beginning so the class of 2015 is the inaugural class of the middle college their current sophomores and we're seeing that they stayed they're not going they're staying and they're working through the program when we look at students with the 10th grade milestones we're looking at a progression of how students are attending school we see dramatic increases in the amount of time students are in the classroom we realize we can have the most important thing is to have a skilled teacher in front of students the second most important thing is to have the students actually in the classroom with the teacher right so we're we've made a lot of focus on what and attention to what that looks like in the last three years our 10th grade milestone data has increased dramatically so our current seniors enter their sophomore years about with just a little over one in four being on track to graduate our current sophomore is well over 50 percent did and the district overall was looking at 70. our goal is not to see five percent gains we don't want three percent gains we want to beat the district and we know we're chasing that but as we get better that pushes that bar up which means we're going to be chasing it forever but chase it we will so the 10th grade milestone comparisons on the right are the is what pps has done overall in the last three years so it's been about a it's been 63 63 than 70. so on the left is what has happened at jefferson over the past three years if we look at what happened with performs of black students again jefferson is on the left the we have seen that they actually are black students are outperforming the district overall that is not to say that we don't have work to do when we look at our performance of our hispanic students although they're increasing it's not increasing fast enough and we certainly are lagging and we look at our performance of our white students we are getting closer to what the district is doing overall here are the pieces right we have success and challenges and that's what everybody has described and i selected these slides these pictures for a reason so earlier today you heard from our championship basketball team and this is about collective team effort and so it's a school of uh champions in the school of pride as are two of the monikers that are of jefferson and it's critical that it's both happen and when you see the level of teamwork and what happened with this group of young men that got documented in a documentary they're actually previewing tonight at jefferson it's tremendous that you could not have written a better ending to a story if you tried to come really from nowhere to ending up with a state championship it's just a testament to hard work and fortitude and the guys lost a lot of games prior to winning so this was not just like right out of the gate saying it was going to be successful the middle picture is a is when we were at our sustainability fair um we had angelicia fryerson who is our student body president was named a gates millennial scholar and it just so happened then senator ron wyden was there
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that day so we said hey why don't you come on up and shake her hand and he actually offered her an internship on the spot so i told her that's when you say yes to and she's actually going to go to howard university which is a pretty darn good fit for being a intern for senator wyden so these are about individual and collective successes and then the last picture i have here is of one of our long-standing symbolic challenges this is the wall that is the fence that surrounds jefferson high school so in a 12-year effort to get the fence down at jefferson we finally got part of it down this is going to be dedicated on wednesday to a visionary in the in the north northeast uh portland neighborhood named carl flipper who has worked for literally this was a 12 year i had the initial architectural drawings in my office 12 years ago this project was started and we will complete it at least the frontage part of it um in the in this coming time it's about strategic investment the wall represents so much it's about access it's about allowing people in to a space that should be about education it is about making sure that we are allowing our students and access and the community access to a school that makes it the center of the community and what should be one of the most highlighted education zones in the city it is tremendous that this has happened it is a start what is followed up with this is potentially a new track which fall off with this is potentially a new field and all i can say is that this is more than symbols this is about tangible visible investment in a community that it starts to lead to transformation so we're starting to see families say that this is a place that we want to go to school we're starting to see that we're getting academic success in a way that we haven't realized before and i think the final piece is it's not that it's easy it's everyday very hard work very dedicated staff to make the gains and we don't always get it everywhere so what we see is a lot of effort and and focus on supporting our freshmen and our seniors and a little bit of hope that it all works out in the middle and the reality is we just do not have enough resources at this point to provide support all the way through all four years at a level that would really get us to the point where we're saying we're not providing students opportunity or access to things but we're guaranteeing success we're not there yet but we're getting closer and i think that the the pieces that we have in place are starting to be foundational the last piece today that i just wanted to share um i went back at some point our our yearbook advisor put some quotes up around the building and the analysts read it too it's from hopkins jenkins he was the first principal at jefferson so this is from 1909 and he uh this is as true today as it was in 1909 so he was a fairly long-standing principal which in the history of jefferson most recently has not been the case so as a good friend of mine said to me tonight i hope you're there for 31 years i don't know about that but we'll see so the piece that that he said was jefferson is not the work of any one person as a result of the cooperative efforts of a devoted faculty and loyal student body you built it better than you realize the ideals of jefferson's formative period which continues right now into the 2013 were still in a formative period have been carried on by every class you are jefferson and jefferson is you and it is something that is as true today as it was in 1909 thank you for your time thank you and i'm glad that you didn't go from the first slide to the last night there was too much good data in there thank you um with that uh an opportunity for board to ask questions or discuss good question so first of all thank you so much it was inspiring to hear from each and every one of you and you can feel the jefferson pride come through so really appreciate it i want to go on a very positive note which is when i looked at the milestone data in particular for king i'm looking is the one that really
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stood out in terms of the jumps in achievement and when you're looking at the third grade milestones for black children 42 to 91 percent for hispanic children 11 to 86 percent 100 of white students all students 33 to 91 percent amazing um kim you talked about three different things that you're really proud of in the school and i'm kind of trying to understand if there's one in particular and i don't know if there could be so let me just remind people it was the extended school year and it was the ib and it was the arts turnaround program and the fact that you had the sig rant but i don't know if there's like any one thing that kind of and i think that's the problem before before you answer can we get you a microphone i think there's i want everybody to be able to hear what you're replying you know often we're asked to isolate down to the one thing and um there have been a lot of into the end of the year surveys for chess for success and what i would say is i really believe that it was all of those consistent efforts but i feel very strongly about the way that the extended summertime has really decreased that gap and and i i think the teachers would probably rank that very high because what we know is that particular students fall further behind every summer and so i i i think that we would offer that up but it really is hard to extract uh what it was and just the joy from the arts um you know one of the things that we've talked a lot about across the cluster and right now in some of our data meetings is just the curriculum sometimes that's the choice when students are struggling that has been the choice um over the past 10 years and so i i can't say enough tina and i i think the ib curriculum and i think it's similar to what molly says about stem but the curriculum where teachers are planning that and there's creativity and it's a constructivist approach so i really can't take out one i know one thing i didn't mention though that i'm excited about is that we are partnering with portland state university's masters and fine arts program in a small amount of the king facility and some of our building and really trying to make sure that that we're good stewards of this uh grant money that we had and so so that we have extended uh partnerships and arts partnerships that's great okay can i just follow up um on that because i'm i'm interested in your comments about the extended school year and with the grant funds you were able to add that instruction so it's not a balanced calendar in the sense that you're spreading the school the same number of days out over a different schedule but actually you're you're adding how much time in the summer so we're adding three weeks 12 days we have fridays off and so you know another tribute to tony hunter is i think a decade ago she sent me to bardstown kentucky to look at a balanced calendar and so in a time of scarce resources a balanced calendar allows you to decrease that summer gap and so in reality you would spread those those vacations and breaks across the year and net students would never have a break longer than four or five or six weeks that's about when you see that decrease in learning in times where you can invest again districts like bardstown nashville during those breaks there's often intersessions for middle schoolers in high schools high school students where maybe there's a three week break and a student that's struggling in algebra can have a week intercession credit retrieval maybe they have a d in algebra and they move it to a passing grade and so if we're moving from a time of economic scarcity to a time where we can gain back that a balanced calendar can provide all kinds of opportunity i know i hear other schools in portland say that they would be interested in such a thing but it really has to be a metro effort and i've said many times we're fortunate to have a superintendent that has that kind of metro lens i mean it would be an amazing thing i i appreciate those comments because i i think that as we all hope that the economy improves and that there is more money for schools and that's something to be really thoughtful about how do you invest the additional funds maybe you don't necessarily reduce your class size maybe you extend your year so that you have kids in school longer because that's where you're going to close the gap so i think that's something that that
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the district should really be thinking about going forward so um i guess this uh this presentation for me is less about the business and more about the inspiration which i i feel so deeply when our principals and our parents and our staff and our kids from the jefferson cluster talk and i i i feel it again tonight so thank you all for the the information that you've shared and the the really the the inspiration but also the inspiration that's really the to me is wrapped in this value of kindness uh i think that's something that's really it's important to me and i think it's something that that we see in the jefferson cluster but i also want one of the things that that really um this last year when we went through the jefferson cluster enrollment balancing that we'll be talking about a little bit later i'm getting up on that uh one of the things that i found was especially fun and neat about the cluster were the the willingness of the parents the families the kids to be engaged in in the dialogue and it isn't just about what we can figure out from this dais or what the the district can figure out the staff can figure out from this building or even the principles from their offices it's really about how this community wraps its arms around its schools and its students and uh that to me is incredibly inspiring and i kind of you know i hesitate to say it but i kind of say number schmombers we you know there's lots of stuff that we need to we need to work on there's lots of stuff that that we can improve on and that will always be there but really um and to hit on your point of having a you know having a teacher there ready and excited about educating excited about the kids in their their classroom i see that a lot in the jefferson cluster and i'm you know i feel lucky that my son is going to be a student in the jefferson cluster so thank you for all the work that all of you do i just also wanted to mention that i met with some jefferson seniors um about two weeks ago in preparation for i'm going to be doing the little four to five minute talk at the jefferson graduation this year and one of the things that they talked about when i asked them who they wanted to thank in the community they talked about the alumni in the jefferson cluster and how the alumni have fought and fought and fought for this school and for this cluster over the years and that it inspires them so it was really cool to hear the students recognizing the love of the adults in the community so i just want to share that a couple of them were here earlier too so it was nice to see him here so um i i have a couple more um challenging questions for for some of you all um and some of it really is about um thinking about what are some of the barriers that are keeping us from getting equitable outcomes at your at your schools because really when we look through it's obvious that families and there's a lot going on that are it's going really well but there are also some significant really significant racial gaps there are significant achievement gaps some of the lines are trending down the wrong way um so i'd be curious to hear um and i'm gonna call out some schools and any one of these schools i won't put any one school on the spot but if you could talk a little bit about what some of those barriers are for you achieving um and i will highlight i'm going to take one off the fact that you can say this i will just note that every school that received a school improvement grant in our district has seen extraordinary growth and that is a testament to the leadership that is a testament to the staff in that building that is a testament to the communities and the kids and it's a testament to the power of investment in our schools there's just no getting around that so i'm going to take off investment you can't use that as one of your options so i'm specifically looking at jefferson with the gap with with hispanic students you referenced beach is on a really big decrease in white student achievement and using third grade milestone data boyce elliott has a really large hispanic gap chief joseph black and hispanic fabian 36 a big gap with black students ockley green
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significantly low achievement with black students and all students again using these data numbers vernon black and hispanic woodlawn hispanic so can can some of you talk a little bit about what's keeping what's keeping us from achieving there because my guess or my assumption is it's not the students right yep if somebody could pass the well i i think something that we are really we've been exploring a lot this year at boys elliot humboldt um um and it's not just hispanic we do have a gap with black and white students as well one thing that is very prevalent is stress and trauma in our kids lives and i don't want to generalize because many of our students are doing well with the same stress and trauma but what we are lacking in our schools even in a comprehensive school you know now with the the pre-k 8 merger and and more staff is wrap around service that we can really support our kids um i believe completely in the staff at boise eliot humboldt we've been trained we understand reading and math instruction but there are situations that our kids live through and come to school with that it um engagement can become a real issue so when we can bring in programs that are rigorous and really can change a pathway in a child's brain and we can bring in the arts that do the same it gives kids another pathway another way to learn how to persevere and how to really have that stick-wickedness in any content and we we are seeing a transfer of um just a challenge in in changing pathways because what we notice and we um really look carefully with the rti model not just with academics this year with but with behavior and our tier three kids we have over 35 kids in the building at the beginning of the year that are tier three so tier three means these are children that need intense intervention and it's not academic kids are very bright but it's being able to stay in a classroom to stay focused to stay engaged and most of that is based on just trauma that is you know based on poverty on racism institutional you know school whatever it might be displacement in the community merging schools all these things really impact our kids so we have 35 kids in the building that are on success plans and they have a daily intervention that's happening whether it's you know check-ins with teachers and that could be once twice three times a day it's meaningful jobs that they are doing just all kinds of things where adults are touching children we have another group in the middle about 70 kids that are tier two and um so when you look at that and and they receive interventions too on a behavior level so it's teaching and re-teaching and supporting kids in just the area of resilience and school behavior um so when you look at that that's you know over a hundred children which is a quarter of the kids that you serve a quarter or even you know more of the kids that you serve on a daily basis and these are children whose families believe in the school they give them everything they've got they want the best for their children teachers who spend hours and hours and hours and hours planning and preparing and attending events for kids and developing relationships but there's just mental health and wrap-around services that our kids absolutely need and as a school district we can't provide that and we are relying on sun school and we're relying on sei and our partners but it really impacts engagement you somebody else yes so at aqua green this year we were designated as a priority school and so one of the things that we did this year is we had a full day of professional development to really go deeper in instruction one of the strategies is around having higher expectations and targeted expectations for students so in this we had a expert tamika fuller she's working with kimberly mateer here around assessment
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and she she's working with us in a program called maps measurement of academic progress and you know we had a session that really for me highlighted what we need to do more of there was a teacher who brought in her lesson to tamika our task was the teacher needed to tier her lessons out for a high student a medium student and a student that is still developing the area of math and those lessons the teacher had to give the lessons to different students so the student the fifth grader looked around the room so this is a developing fifth grader he saw his peer doing a higher level lesson he looked at the teacher he said i don't want this one i want the higher one right there that was a moment that do we have all the data to really make sure we're giving students the highest expectation and that teacher said you know what all year long in mathematics this student was pretty much engaged disengaged i did not think and this is a stellar teacher i did not think he would want this higher expectation so the lesson was still around the bridges curriculum but it was more intense so how are we providing students with more acceleration increasing the capacity in our program to make sure that that's not isolated moment but that's happening for each child every day and that was uh that was powerful for me another thing is that looking at students building relationships with students but also looking at some alternatives to out-of-school suspensions so i'm very thankful for the staff this year because so we looked at our school climate and we began to think about some alternatives to out of school suspension so one might be after school community service time where the student would have to help us after school in some way to improve our community you know my thing is if you make poor choices in school in front of other students those same students need to see you making good choices in our school to make our school better so being creative in ways to keep students in school is also a powerful piece but also building those relationships with parents in those ongoing conversations and meetings is important the last thing i want to say is the pre-k programs are outstanding that's the way that we can close the gap before they even open at ockley green this year we had we had we've been wanting to pre-k for years but this is our first year actually i received one and i tell you we have youngsters of all colors who are ready to read they have those school readiness skills they're not going to come in kindergarten figuring out what to do they're going to know what to do from day one so that's another point of accel acceleration so pre-k programs those higher expectations around accelerating students and looking at all alternatives to student management are some strategies that i know we need to deepen in my school thank you since i'm sorry do you want to add something around this lines i'm just looking at the clock and it's 8 o'clock and um and i know he's going to be cutting us off pretty soon here but one of the things that i wanted to come back to is this is i think what you raised uh uh conrad in and that is the whole question of discipline and and i think woodlawn uh also raised that in regards to the the um changing the stats i mean in terms of you know have an impact in regards to discipline i was at a meeting last week and and and to some extent i think it said you know it's a comment was made that that um that in terms of discipline you know that the um the approach is not necessarily you know that systematic you know across the district um and two is that that um you know the the the allegation i would say is is that the problem still exists in regards to discipline it's just that the way that people are recording the the the incidents um that's different than than saying we are changing how we approaching and and what we're doing which is basically what you're saying in regards to what are we doing what are we how we are we are changing in practice you know in terms of looking at uh you know keeping students in school versus um you know how we record this statistic okay so can you speak towards that in regards to because i don't want you to be you know one you know regarded as one of those schools that are saying that they're just changing the way they're recording the statistics there's actual change in regards to the the behavior and the impact that we're having in students in regards to keeping them in school
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um one of the one of the things that we've done over the last two years as a pbis school is have some very what pbis use for that for the general audience positive behavior intervention supports system and what it is is it's a philosophy of a school-wide look at how we work with kids and and set up our classroom management systems and for instance is we have four um school-wide guidelines be safe be respectful be responsible and be kind and under each one of those every single classroom teaches the expectations of what that looks like what that sounds like how what it is and what it's not um three times a year we set up stations around our school common area stations like the bathroom so it's go flush wash leaf there's a routine there's that we teach all of the kids so they're in and out in a very unsupervised way um we also have little chance for at the drinking fountain and how you behave at the drinking fountain um i run the station of our assembly behavior and so we talk about what it's like and what it looks like what it sounds like when we have a an assembly behavior so we're teaching direct skills to kids then the expectation is is that in every single classroom the classroom teachers again are teaching their expectations for their classroom management system we've also had some very in-depth conversations about um what problems the teacher needs to take care of and what problems the administration needs to take care of and we talk about these in minor and and major so if you have a child i mean we used to see kids on a daily basis for making noises tapping pencils jumping up and hitting the top of the door the door frames and these were kids who were sent out of the classroom with referrals and basically we went through with our staff and said these are classroom behaviors that the teacher has to take care of and figure it out and so we've set some systems up where the expectation is the teacher has a conference with the child the teacher calls home and has a parent conversation with the child and it really has turned how we are are dealing with it so we're not changing how we're inputting it we're just not seeing it because teachers are taking the responsibility because they're professionals and they're teaching the kids the necessary skills and they're keeping their kids in class and so that's been that's been pretty tremendous i think thank you does that answer your question oh it definitely does okay before you give up the microphone though um i just and i this is true at a couple of of schools in your cluster but also having gone through the jefferson enrollment balancing and knowing a lot of families in in this cluster there are a lot of really um revolutionary ideas and changes going on in special education in this cluster people really dedicated to including all students when they say all students so i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the work that you're doing at woodlawn because you have this great continuum i am so proud to be the only school in portland public schools to have a k-8 cb continuum and for those people that don't know what a cb continuum is it's communication behavior which i think is um it's to me it's a negative connotation because it's kids who are on the spectrum on the autism spectrum and so what we have is we have a um k2 it's a multi-age and cba where the kids spend the majority of the day in the classroom and then we also have a cba 3-5 where the kids spend a lot of the time in the classroom and then we have a 6-8 cb team which is very different because the majority of the days my boys because they're all boys we've got we've got 11 boys are mainstreamed in the 678 and so the general ed teachers have to really understand um how to differentiate and understand what it is to be autistic and so these the the kids are just absolutely wonderful at the 3-5 the kids are mainstream a lot of the day i mean kids go out and come in just for very specific instructional strategies for like social stories because autistic people don't have the executive functioning and that's the part
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that we have to teach them is they don't read faces and so there's a program that we use where um a lot of and i can't generalize but a lot of our autistic kids and autistic people are um attracted to trains and so there are human faces on these trays that teach the kids how to appropriately socialize because they don't understand this is my space that is your space you know you're not supposed to touch my necklace i'm not going to talk to you for five hours about um a star trek in in that sense and so we're directly teaching these skills and what's really interesting is um i was uh at a cluster meeting uh with um oh where's kevin um i'm tired uh what hasberg no we're literally our leader our leader he was he was showing us a program called mindful mindful program which is um goalie han i don't know how she's come up with this but i'm going to actually purchase this for my entire staff and it's great lessons for all of us to use around teaching really specific executive functioning skills that our kids across the board are are lacking and so our all of our students will benefit from it but it's it's really i mean they're great kids and it's a great program and i am very proud of my sped staff who have built it because when it came to my school um it was there was no training there was no planning and the first year they like pulled it together and just one last story is i have a parent who is now a big advocate for woodlawn and you all have heard his story i'm sure with the enrollment and jefferson uh enrollment balancing process but when he came to our school he came kicking and screaming and i met with him at least four times and he was like i don't want my child to go here my child this is this is my child's neighborhood school i haven't heard anything good about it and this gentleman has done a 360 and he now is a strong advocate for not only this the continuum program but woodlawn school and so i'm i'm very proud of uh what what my teachers have done what we've done so thank you for giving me that opportunity i'm not a good bragger i just want to add this was totally inspirational to listen to you all present the cluster and i found myself close to tears many times listening to you but i would just say like i frequently think of it being really about the leader and i'm sorry i'm doing that i thought i was past it in terms of how you engage with partners and how you engage with your parents and the quality of how every single one of you describe what's going on in your school and how you've engaged with partners to make a rhetoric experience for the kids in your school i would just say as a cluster you have and it's each unique to your own school community and it's each unique what you have figured out how to lean in and and make really exciting things going on that are about your school community but that you're really connected to one another um i just am so impressed but it is so about your leadership as principals that you have figured out how to do that to really meet the needs of your kids and there is and i know this from being in your schools and interacting with your partners who talk about what it is that's really meaningful partnership where they're really connected to your school community and to your kids and to you um but it's true of your entire cluster and that's really powerful to me and it's also i think fundamentally part of what margaret talked about at jefferson which is how do you build about strengths that are in the school and in the school community not paste in things coming in from the outside you guys have just been building such a vision across the entire cluster uh with each other that's really i think foundational for these kids and for this community for years to come so it was wonderful to sit and listen to it as a one united portrait of what's happening in the cluster the other thing i'm just so struck by is having done the merger with voice elliott humboldt which was really a hugely challenging how do you build community and bring together communities and i think you guys have done a fabulous job you and your staff of really leading that and having it be a strong community that the parents feel the kids feel and your entire staff feels in one year it's remarkable and they speak to that and it comes out in how everybody talks about what's going on in a way with such pride that i'm just really moved by and to the two of you who have been preparing for a merger where you're then going to leave and go off and lead other schools but where you have worked
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so solidly as a team in preparing your communities have how to come together to be a single community um and then molly leaving yours to then go move you've just got an incredible amount of art going on in how you are leaving that i just want to fully appreciate it was really wonderful and then margaret and oscar and ricky who's now back at school you guys have just done a magnificent job of what is happening at jefferson right now that i feel so excited and so proud of so that again i attribute to the whole the whole team and what's happening there at jefferson talking to your staff when i was just listening to you talk about the freshman academies every teacher in that building believes in that freshman academy because of the difference it's making for what happens as students move through and you can feel the collective energy of your entire staff who understand exactly what it is you're building and how you're building strength in those students truly excel and take advantage of the opportunity that's there so again just tribute to all of your leadership i just was moved to tears many times as you can tell because i'm still there so anyway thank you for tonight you just did a fabulous job um indeed thank you very much because we know that it is hard work every single day and there are amazing things going on while we can look at places to be improving um it is great work so with this we're going to let you get home or get back to work whichever you're going to wind up doing but before you do that if we could have you step in front of the dice with us so that we can take a picture with you and then we're going to take a short five minute break i was trying to figure out if i could project it off my phone oh my god i know yes oh jeez literally in the middle i'm fine i'm cool hey uh if you're heading up to get a cookie greg
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now we're coming back after our break um at this time we're going to move on to jefferson enrollment balancing superintendent smith judy brennan who's the director of enrollment and transfer antonio lopez who is the regional administrator for the jefferson cluster and john isaacs who is senior policy advisor to the superintendent to come up and talk to us give us an update on implementation of jefferson enrollment balancing process so we'll kick this off um very quickly with the higher level pieces that we're in the jefferson enrollment balancing cluster recommendations and before you go back down and and talk deeply about the same school so thank you for the opportunity um we provided a memo and we know that we're running a little late so we're not going to go into a lot of detail we can stay if you have questions or would like additional information so two initiatives were called for as part of the outcome of the jefferson enrollment balancing process two initiatives that affect schools district-wide one of those is to revise enrollment and transfer policies and the other to um look at all of our boundaries across the whole district brief update on where we are with those mostly what we have to report tonight is quite a bit of progress around the enrollment policy work and the work of sackett which is the superintendent's advisory committee on enrollment and transfer it's been a standing committee for four years there are 17 members eight of whom are recent appointees they've been providing advice on a number of enrollment and transfer related issues and are now ready and willing to dig deep into this this broad request they have new co-chairs allison burnett jason tromley um jason's in the room tonight um and uh as is scott bailey another long time second member so um you don't have to go far to find sackett members actively engaged in a lot of pbs issues a very diverse group um the superintendent has delivered this charge to them um regarding uh making revisions to recommending revisions to enrollment and transfer policy to improve alignment with the pbs strategic framework and our racial educational equity policy she's also to ask ask them to stand ready to participate in the district-wide foundry review process this is the list of the policies that will be the focus of sackett's work uh briefly what's happening with those policies as we've said before we identify that there are largely policies that were developed at other times to solve different problems from what we're facing now that they don't clearly acknowledge or offset any of our existing inequities particularly to access the area of access they don't address the needs of all pps students and don't allow flexible use for our schools so some of the changes that we can make through these policies are such slow changes that they don't allow us to respond to overcrowding and the like so what does that mean graphically well this depiction shows you our current
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pbs k-12 population and how they're distributed by different school types so about 67 percent of students in ppsk 12 attend their neighborhood school 14 attend a different neighborhood school 12 percent of focus option or pps alternative uh four percent a community-based partner program or special service and about three percent in a pps charter now if our policies were producing equal results in all ways then when you looked across the district different geographies different racial groups any way you wanted to slice it you should see somewhat similar results well what we see instead so this chart and this was developed during the jefferson enrollment balancing process so it's not new but just to remind you this is a picture of seven of our pps clusters and each bar represents a racial group with the bar to the far left being all students and you see about 67 percent indeed attending neighborhood schools so pretty similar to what the overall graph was but when you look across different racial groups for most you see different bands the size of the band meaning different participation in different school types particularly in the darker purple band which is our focus options and in our light blue band way up there at the top which is charter schools okay so so hold that in your mind for a minute and now i'm going to show you specifically the jefferson cluster and actually so i should point out that these charts are focused on our k-8 students not k-12 but even in the k-8 spectrum just the difference between what it looks like across seven clusters and what it looks like in one cluster is a telling sign that our policies and how we're implementing them are not producing results that are equal across all groups and therefore raising a large amount of equity based issues there are many other aspects to our policy that are worth looking into and that's what sackett's going to be taking on what we see is a potential outcome of their review process is some recommendations that will both interrupt and remedy inequities in our current system a road map to achieve more equitable outcomes and there the final delivery from sackett is likely to be some kind of document with both policy recommendations analysis rationale and process so at the end of their work you can expect something like that what we've been spending time in the last two months is forming the committee and deciding on how that work is going to flow so we have a draft work plan um we're still in that orientation stage and about to move into sort of deep dives into some of these policy areas they've agreed to work through the summer um and then some then move into the recommendation stage what you should what we see consistently across all of them is um a lot of training and support to enhance their own racial equity understanding so sackett is receiving a customized version of the beyond diversity training which is i believe the first time we've done that for an advisory group and that's that'll be happening this month they're also going on the fair housing busing tour and doing some other things to make sure that they're focus on equity is consistent with the tools and practices that we use across the rest of the district we are very much looking forward to the involvement of board members throughout this process and we're also right now um setting up a way to have principal panels so that sackett can hear and engage with principals around these issues in similar ways that you were able to do in some of the panels that you've had we expect a broader community involvement process particularly when we get to a recommendation stage so when the committee has something for the public to respond to we definitely expect to be moving into a community environment for that it's important to note that the actual timeline for this we believe should be shaped by the progress the committee is making we don't know quite how long this will take to get it right and we believe getting it right matters more than getting it fast however we know that there's a great amount of urgency surrounding these issues um and so we'll be doing our best to balance both of those things so that's a quick update on what's been happening with sackett where a lot of our staff work has been focused in the last couple of months we also have this parallel effort of a district-wide boundary review now unlike the um the policy work where we had a standing body that was ready to be activated and engaged we don't have a standing body that's private that's teed up to take on this work so we've had some conversations with planning partners such as the city of portland that we would like to be involved in helping us shape a plan a process that would that would allow us to take a deep look at what our boundaries are now what our values are for the schools that
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those boundaries are supposed to serve and and be really clear on the values level before we then go into sort of the mechanics or the the data technical analysis that might produce you know different outcomes so um we see the long-range facility planning process that happened last year with a large stakeholder group as perhaps a template that we'll be following and um there's a sense of the different um types of partners types of activities that we would expect to happen with that and now that we are we're sort of settled on a plan for how sac it's getting started we'll be turning our attention to more clarity around the district-wide boundary review process so that's the update that we had for you tonight did i miss anything john any clarifying questions for us we can step back and lots of other people to hear from tonight go ahead for my thank you very much um i'm really excited to see the direction that we're going uh the one that's more consistent across the district but also more consistent with the policies that we have now that we didn't have when uh the enrollment transfer policy was was designed several years ago one of the things that uh i'm i i was kind of under the impression prior to receiving my packet and prior to tonight that we were going to be talking a little bit more about the um uh the resolute the information that was embedded in the resolution particularly around the uh the work in preparing oakley green and chief joe to merge is that going to be something we're getting next yeah we're getting out of the way thank you very much there's a lot of good stuff on i'm still on the docket tonight i just wanted to give you that high level well thank you i'm glad i queued it up for you although if people have questions about how we're moving this process forward now is the time to so that we don't kind of set this in motion with sackett if there's something else and we are identifying board liaisons to this that we've said will both interact with back and forth with the committee like get some stuff from the committee perhaps sit in and watch deliberations of the committee but where we want a group of board members who are really up close to this and really feeling you know how it's moving the second one that judy mentioned that i'm just going to underscore is we were really clear in the charge of this one that we're going to take stock uh in no like october november to see where we are and if there are things that could impact the next enrollment and transfer cycle but we are not saying we're trying to end up accomplishing the work to impact the next enrollment transfer cycle so that we don't end up with a false deadline that compacts the work that i mean we believe this one is one that we really want to have um the thorough and desired impact over time and not to try and have it accelerated to me to false deadlines so just but we want the opportunity that if we feel prepared and there's something we want to be able to implement in the next cycle that we take stock at the right moment to allow us to go through the processes to do that so we're trying to hit that nuance of um allowing deep work and the deep work that's going to impact you know change over time i've had a lot of people at the district say to me when i'm talking about language immersion programs and are hopefully introducing more language immersion programs that you know wait wait wait that's all going to be part of the enrollment and transfer discussion and it's not clear to me that that's actually the case and so i guess i want to hear a little bit more about how the whole language immersion piece might fit into this one so for example we've talked about perhaps opening more spanish immersion programs we've talked about the huge demand for mandarin and whether or not we want to replicate that we've obviously heard a lot of testimony from the vietnamese community and you know and yeah i mean there's environmental schools so there's a whole variety of different things but i guess i'm trying to understand whether those discussions will be on parallel tracks or whether they will be one conversation um or not so can you help me with that i'm gonna let judy do and then i'll so it's been a pleasure working with um gm garcia and others on on that process of trying to look at expansion and um i think when we get to the time that so you've got a group who's working right now to identify places where expansion makes the most sense and what that timeline like what it will take to have those programs be successful but at some point the capacity in the schools and the type of enrollment that
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we expect in them will become an important factor and at that moment it will intersect with this process and i think what we would like to have is at the end of district-wide boundary review a um a road map if you will for where we can expect change over time and where we would then pop in programs because we believe that's that's the right time and place for it um and where you can go ahead and start a program now because because those um the environment uh exists to make it to make it work instead of continually taking a piecemeal approach you know sort of one at a time like everything becomes a one-off decision i believe that that this is the time to try and put all those pieces out together on the table and try and make sure that they're connected and then go and implement um in places where it'll help us close the back of the gap and and do the most for kids so so i'll just say one of the conversations that sackett has been having and knows is part of what they're trying to grapple with is the um just the dynamic of the whole system and that healthy neighborhood schools and what amount of choice we can have and have it be all sustainable um and um so that is in the broad sense some of what they're going to be looking at and yes at the same time we've got a track of how we're moving with and a goal of how we're adding the dual immersion uh for the coming year but yeah it totally intersects as judy just said um and some of this is totally what sackett has been grappling with and what they will continue to grapple with is just how do you how do you do both of those things and the ecology of a whole system that then um you're not draining the ability to have healthy programs so and i could see it intersecting so for example if sackett decides that the policy to make it most equitable right is to is to not have choice um and so that means we're going to allow certain language programs or whatever the focus option program is when you cite them they're going to be in specific locations designed for certain purposes or what amount of flexibility are we going to do that are we going to move this to here so it they seem intertwined and parallel but i feel like sac second needs to do kind of their work about how these all interplay but we're not waiting for that work in order to keep the work going on the dual immersion programs like that that's what i'm saying it's all in motion so like we're also looking for what are the program language version that we're going to expand and the one that i keep thinking about also is the idea that we have these four regional high schools that are supposed to be our regional immersion programs and some of them are frankly floundering and some aren't and i i just want to make sure that that conversation is moving forward and i keep feeling like i'm i'm being pushed back like you know we have to get through this other thing first of all this this enrollment piece uh enrollment and transfer policy piece feels really big because it is because it is um and so i worry about other things getting stuffed behind it and i don't think we can afford that so if i could say part of the taking stock moment is probably trying to to make sure that the parts that can and should move with more urgency are on a path to do that and the parts the pieces that maybe will take more time need more time have the we have the ability to do that it's great thank you now we are going to move on to the jefferson enrollment balancing update all right that's involving some of the same people what i'm going to give you is a brief description in terms of what has been happening with the ocean chief joseph consolidation um i told the parents i promised the parents since they have young kids over here that they will go first so there's going to be three people or three presentations the members of the transition team then there will be a presentation by molly and then one by um rudy rudolph and those are promised to be sure but to the point again i'm here in front of you to talk to you about in terms of the consolidation how's it going and again i'm blessed to work with such amazing people you know parents teachers and just how they came together and and just the level of dedication for our kids for our community is just just amazing i am again um really really amazed of all the things that they have done so i'm gonna have members of the transition
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team come and talk to you about what the transition because right after the board resolution they were already engaged with us in shows so how can they engage the district in order to make sure that we have collaboration that we have transparency that we engage engage our parents and engage our community and engage our teachers so i'm going to have some of the members of the transition team and give you a little bit description of what has been the work what has been successful what have been that or are the challenges and what are the recommendations that they have for us okay hello my name is shonda justice i'm jake s-h-a-n-d-a-j-u-s-t-i and i am a member of the transition team i'm also a parent of two children at auckley green one in the seventh grade and one in the first grade and i'm proud to be part of this team because it's made up of teachers parents and community members who all voted their time in their families to help bring these two communities together we understand the importance of working together and striving to improve our school and once the district made the decision to combine the schools it was kind of quick and it kind of made some of our families feel unease and so that's why um we thought it was a good thing to come together to show one another that we're going to do this um and we did it on our own without the districts asking us to do so and so what we've done is i'm at both schools when there's community events we've gone to both schools we've supported one another there was a watches grow event dance parties movie nights at each other's school and also put together the tours at each school so that the communities both can one get comfortable with the um with both campuses and also get to meet the new families that we're going to be involved with so that we can get familiar with each other's faces and with doing that it's been good a little struggle but for the most part it's good and i think the best part is our kids get to see one another and play with one another and meeting new friends and also seeing other parents who are in the same boat and wanting the same thing hi my name is jessica thompson j e s s i c a t h o m p s o n um i have a son at chief joseph a fifth grader at kk he's here with me tonight and he'll be attending ockley green next year as a sixth grader i'm a former language arts teacher so i wrote my speech out and it's a little long so i apologize just like do as i say but not as i do to all my former students i'm sorry all right i'm greeting school board directors and superintendent smith thank you for the opportunity to share the chief joseph ockley green pto pta transition team experiences with merging our two schools into one school community moving forward we sincerely hope that you take our feedback and use it to improve the community engagement procedures when you consolidate two schools as we stated earlier the team met every tuesday evening for two and a half to three hours starting in february we ended at the end of may because we each have unique perspectives and because our school communities have not historically had much of a relationship these conversations were often very intense our merge is operating within the complex construct the complex context of gentrification race class privilege and historical institutional marginalization we shared anger tears hope and optimism as we had the difficult conversations necessary to move forward to a new reality a unified school on a dual campus here is what we accomplished in the month of march and the beginning of april we organized weekly tours of each building for parents whose students will be attending the other school we wrote weekly columns in the chief joseph friday flyer we maintained bulletin boards at each building with updates on merge
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information as pps developed that information we hosted three community meetings one to give feedback about what we want in a principal and after our principal was announced we hosted two with molly chun antonio lopez rudy rudolph and the just do it team we wrote a family perspectives about our schools and the merge survey and collected the responses from both parent and staff communities we compiled that information and shared it with principal molly chun we work closely with aaron barnett to help write and distribute faq sheets about merge related information such as transportation before and after school care staffing and other transition related issues that were near and dear to the hearts of our families and students finally we work closely with district staff to make sure that information was translated into vietnamese spanish and somali we also advocated that robo calls go out prior to each meeting and this is more difficult than you could possibly imagine we also advocated that our principals hold shared weekly parent coffees at each school to ensure that we were all getting the same information at the same time and i guess finally finally we had a parent show up um at our first meeting he was so inspired by the merge that he just came with some logos and branding for our two schools to help build the community we have some examples of those to share with you today one is london do you want to go show the board members he brought everybody in the on the transition team some examples of some buttons that he created to distribute to apple's schools so we the transition team thought it was a good idea we ordered enough for every student and staff member at each building and in this time and place that is pps enrollment balancing madness we joined the ranks of many jefferson cluster schools and created lawn signs to show our support encourage those attending private and charter schools to attend our school so lots of things went right however we also encountered some challenges and they are as follows one ensuring equity as far as community process it was difficult to both advocate for information and communicate the information in a manner that was inclusive of all for example there are families in our communities who believe they should be a part of every decision-making process and there are families who just want to be given the information suggestion moving forward make a timeline available early in the consolidation process that will provide provide an outline of what information will be available when and what department will be in charge of that decision two because there was no mandate from the bor because there was a mandate from the board to engage the community but no protocol on how to do that we spent a lot of time running in circles and again that cannot be overemphasized some folks took us seriously while others did not when things went well it was often because we had direct intervention and help from aaron barnett and antonio lopez suggestion moving forward as parents we can be your allies establishing communication protocols and ensuring all parties understand that protocol releasing an incoming principle one day a week to focus on their upcoming school especially when you're talking about a merger with a dual campus is crucial that cannot be overstated our communities needed and still need time and support as we do the work of coming together together we realize that pps has done their best in terms of the logistics of this merge but on a relational level we are working against years of misrepresentation rumors and the reputations of our two communities suggestion moving forward we need time and professional facilitation give communities time give us professional facilitation emerge like this is more than logistics trust that you have committed families willing to collaborate and give input in a meaningful way facilitating restorative listening and courageous conversations are two places to start in conclusion we have made progress yes but please don't think that this transition is in any way comparable to boise elliot humboldt merger or beverly cleary merger there are many more dynamics at work here the transition team has only skimmed the surface in bringing our two communities
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together there remains tremendous mistrust of pps deserved or undeserved to give true support to this merger and to do the hard work that is required there remains significant walls to effective communication between both parents and staff yes we have put a dent in the work that needs to be done and yes we believe that molly chan is a strong leadership choice for our new schools but she is not super human and your work you the pbs administration and the board your work is not done here we have expectations that you will now take the reins and do what is required to make this school succeed there is a long road ahead our school communities stand with you in ensuring that we build a strong stable unified school community thank you so next oh i'm sorry it's okay before they leave i just want to thank them again for their time so thank you for being here and i hope you guys can get some rest thank you so next again it is an honor and a privilege to introduce molly shang the new principal of chief josephine hi again um so i'm just going to give an kind of an overview of what we've been doing and and the work that um has happened since the announcement of the merger um actually quite shortly after it was announced i had a joint staff meeting with both staffs and really had a chance we actually had some courageous conversations did some equity work and i was able to give just kind of a clear vision of my style and what i saw as the benefits of the merger and where i felt we could go number one being that this is a way to strengthen the jefferson cluster and that the work that we do benefits not only the children of chief joseph and ockley green but all jefferson students in creating that pathway to jefferson high school okay so after that then we had a transition meeting which was great and the first meeting was held at ockley green where rudy and the jaded team came and really laid out what was happening i think one of the frustrations with the community and the family is in the families was that there wasn't enough communication about what was actually happening that there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes but it was not being communicated um to the families and and with that a lot of anxiety is created and so as we went through the process the more information that i could provide and that antonio could provide and the jaded team could provide anxieties went down however there's still there's still a lot of worry and concern about what this is going to look like um finally i'm sorry before you go on i we're using jaded and i'm not sure that most people understand what j word is it's just do it just it's just do it team but it's the james bond sure that's right that's okay um and i had the experience from last year to know that it is um there's so much that happens between all the departments that you really don't want to know i mean it's just ongoing tons of communication i'm in constant communication with them but it's it's a lot of information that families don't necessarily want to know however not knowing creates that anxiety so i was able that first meeting to really go through what i knew about a merger and the trust that i had in the departments as far as facilities and i.t and textbooks and hr and you name it i mean it's just it's pretty amazing um so that you know i think supported the work um i was then able to meet with every teacher in both staffs um so i spent a couple days at each school and just doing one-on-ones to make you know to figure out where people wanted to be what they wanted to do make sure that when it came time for staffing which included is you know a joint seniority list so it's taking both seniority lifts from the two schools and working from that to really have a clear idea of where people wanted to be and wanted to land at both schools i think it was about that point that it was very clear that we were going to be a k-3 at chief joseph and a 4-8 at ockley green and then then the process of actually
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staffing the two buildings was pretty crazy i was stabbing boys elliot humboldt at the same time i was staffing chief joseph ockley green however i didn't have access to the smts for chief joseph and ocala green so that was done kind of on paper kind of blind with hr at the same time i was staffing boys alien humble so these are these are some real challenges someone jess talked about you know um not that i was willing to give up a day away from boise elliot humboldt but it is it's it's a pile of work that's um it's pretty intense but we we got through it i was able to staff both buildings and um was able to email all chief joe and ocala green staff what assignment was going to be and as soon as that process was over then it's space assignment so we really looked at the two buildings and jaded the team walked through both buildings with me we looked at every single classroom every single space and really determine best use of space really thinking about what grade levels should be together for the most conducive collaborative work that we could do so for the most part most teachers in both buildings will either change a space in the building or will move between buildings and so you can just imagine how complicated that gets with moving materials and furniture and i.t and everything um so it's a challenge it's kind of fun actually but it's very time consuming um so now so we got through that part and at the same time really you know kind of landing on programs and um we were able to we will have a full-time pe teacher between two campuses a full-time dance teacher between two campuses 0.5 we had a full-time art teacher but with the art tax reduction we'll have a 0.5 art teacher spending most of the time at ockley green because of the facility a 0.5 counselor on both campuses a we'll have esl support 0.5 on both campuses we'll have special ed distributed between the two campuses based on the needs of students we will have a classified staff librarian at chief joseph .5 and a full-time certified librarian at ockley green 1.0 we just found out that through the work with facilities and maintenance and everybody i mean i can't say enough about the departments and how they come together in these projects that at ockley there will be a couple construction i guess remodeling or i don't know the correct term but there's this really crazy hall upstairs in um in oakley that used to be just a passageway hall between two wings of the building and then someone got real creative i think maybe in the 70s or 80s and chopped it up and added doors and it drives me cray when i was there before i was in ap i got lost kristen can i get lost every time but um it's just crazy and it's just a big safety factor because if we want kids to pass between you know maybe the sixth grade hall and the seventh and eighth grade hall they have to go downstairs and around because the doors aren't open so don hold did his magic and he's actually going to be able to remove those walls and it's not a very expensive project so we'll have a clear passage that will be much safer for kids and we just found out today that the industrial arts room is actually going to be remodeled into a dance studio so we are going to have a dance floor and um the cabinetry in in that facility will be removed so that it's it's a perfect space for for dance and if we are really serious about developing a dance program that is a pathway to jefferson and we actually have kids from the jefferson neighborhood as jefferson dancers it's it's a very exciting program i'm really thrilled and we worked out transportation we'll have different start times because of the buses chief joe will be 8 30 to 2 45 and oclu will be 8 45 to 3 o'clock the older students will be able to actually
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ride the bus with the youngers and back and forth so that families that need olders to walk younger's home we'll we'll be able to provide that we worked out a contract with art for life which was the it's the child care program that actually is housed at chief joe and they will be on both campuses now sun school has been awesome we've met many times really trying to figure out a program and and being able to support both campuses right now sun school is at ockley we're hoping that it'll be on both campuses if not the youngers will be supported on the ockley campus and we'll have transportation but our goal is to have art for life at both campuses and sun school sdi has been great in their support as well um am i what am i forgetting i think did i rudy i think um so there's been a ton of work that's gone in in the last six weeks sorry rudy rudy is my oh she's my right hand though i i have to give her tons and tons of credit she's amazing we're starting the teachers are starting to pretty much organize because they need to have you know all their spaces cleaned out we've moved all the textbooks at ockley to one location so we're kind of in that e-waste has come and picked up most of the corded wasted materials you know the old tech stuff and classless teachers have been amazing they're contacting me all the time via you know email and phone calls really can really excited about the new year but concerned you know just the unknown teachers have almost completed all their class list and um one of my secretaries at boise eliot humble patty will be following me to chief joe and she's done a lot of follow-up work um to support the merge already um she's typing up you know class lists and doing everything that she can do to support so it's it's um it's a it's a joint effort and we've had um two or three two transition meetings whole group so we had the one at ockley and then we had a follow-up at chief joseph um i've met with site council and pta pto um i don't know i think that's yeah and that's right last week we had um a family night for esl families so that we could really make sure that information was getting to to everyone i think i think that's good come on up rudy am i on i'm hello yeah yeah okay just a couple other things did the just do it team was we we gave it that name because every time there's a closure or a merger people make something like the marshall transition team or the marshall committee and so on and so forth and it gets confusing so if we just do it to get it done that's the best name for us because we do it every time and we have it down to uh i think a very almost like a science we have 22 departments that work whenever there is a merger or closure or a move such as the move that's going from saban access going from save and rose city park it's the same team of people who do all of that she mentioned the transportation department and arranging all the busing for the two sites i would like you to know that we did listen to parents and there had been some concern about the original time we scheduled for starting both schools and there was a concern about how late that was for parents being able to get to work and terry brady raise your hand terry brady wonderful transportation department director was able to readjust bell times and bus schedules so that's we could start a little bit earlier at both sites the i.t department is making certain that the old there's two computer labs that occle green and one of them has tons of old computers we're pulling all of that out and replacing them all with new laptops she mentioned the facilities department besides the ockley green things they're actually also going to be striping the pavement in the parking lot of chief joe and when you move teachers from one site to another or from one grade level to another our instructional resource center makes
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certain that every single teacher has all their teachers additions all their curriculum materials full sets and everything ready for them in the fall and that will be taking place in both sites and library services when you're merging two schools such as well consolidating two schools such as this you have two separate libraries and you're going to have a k-3 all moving to one site and four eight to another so library services send someone out to help both librarians so that they can weed through those things box the ones up and then they all have to be re-cataloged and re-barcoded and so that takes time and so we have library services helping out with that and as uh i i have to also thank the communications department aaron barnett's been wonderful about communicating with um joe glotti and conrad about keeping you know everyone informed and getting things translated they've been extremely helpful in working with her and as i said she said we met our core team of jaded we had about five departments that meet with the staff we explained how we move the district materials that they use we explain to the staff how they pack their personal items and we provide all the boxes for the teachers and no teachers are required to pack any district materials so that's just an idea of some of the things that these 22 departments do my job is as i was named by carol smith years ago as the connective tissue i'm the connective tissue between these departments and the principals who go through this with the departments and i've i i really enjoy that job so that's what we do and i will add she's brilliant at it yeah she totally is she's got like total principal in her blood and so she totally can see everything from the eyes of our principal and weigh attention to detail and in terms of the connect 22 departments and you're hearing the level of execution here that's pretty remarkable um but just she is totally rudy total connector and he asked me because i'm obsessive-compulsive well anyway can i tell you what and we have figured out how to totally like utilize that strength we really need it so i'm just going to say it's been a perfect match yeah so thank you and then the um there's another team and i always forget the name of it the brr or something that meets every thursday and that's what harriet adair and antonio and myself and aaron barnett and judy and that and we just it's just a time to connect and make sure that we're all on the same page and um things are moving awesome i think that's it thank you antonio are you doing a wrap on this yes joe and conrad as you will you just turn around and take a bow here because i'm going to say these guys as we said earlier like truly you have like worked as a team the entire way with your communities and just the description of the back and forth and keeping people in a loop and working with molly as you you the three of you are figuring out how this all fits together just thank you so much you drock thank you and just to let you know uh we we were meeting with the transition team we started meeting after february 25th we were meeting once a week uh before mali was named uh then on i was meeting with the district team with rudy uh and with harriet once a week on thursday and then i was meeting on fridays with conrad and joe so it there is it's it was a very complex uh it's a very complex process but you can see that you know we still have some work to do but i can tell you that all the people that work on this today really did their best and and and i i feel pretty confident that we're gonna we're gonna really create just an amazing and amazing place the other things that i want to let you know about the other projects we want to let you know about the the partnership and i think came from king's school talk talked a little bit between a king and psu in terms of their arts program this will allow graduate students from psu to be able to work with king's school embedding the arts and also to other schools in the in the cluster we also want to let you know about the conversations that we've had with concordia university that they're not only uh definitely they're excited about working with fabian but also they're excited about working with wollon and vernon in terms of the the the partnership those are yeah those are the the two things uh
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uh kim already talked about the tara memory american music program to king and also talk about joseph jessica parker and what she's been able to do for king thank you questions thoughts comments i do have a couple of questions that maybe this is for principal chun as well but um so a little over a week ago we received a letter from senator shields and representative frederick's asking really for a second look at supporting in this transition and they made some specific requests but i'm really curious i mean the amount of i couldn't keep track thankfully we have a report i could keep track of all the ft here here and there and um but it seems like there's a there's a lot going on in this transition and i'm i'm really curious one of the important things in this process we heard from parents and and the support that they're bringing into this but how can we as a board and as a district create a softer landing for these students during this transition point and their families too because that's an important piece and is there anything right now and i'll say this not having anything in mind in terms of what we could actually do at this point but i'm really curious is there anything at this point where we can we can create an opportunity to to offer that software softer landing um during this transition year particularly as we ramp up to the next school year so i'm are you talking about staffing staffing i mean it's it's up to you staffing wise or fte or whatever if you're gonna answer can you come can you come up to the table sorry um i do worry about um number one that um ockley was a priority school and that that now that is not the case because of the merger um though i i'm very confident that we can rise from that status i still what we found at boise elite humboldt with the merger was that it was really important to have a padding of extra support people so we had full-time counselor we had a student management specialist we had an sis we had the stem tosa myself and um our ap and that provided a student support team is what we called that group of people and really moved the work as far as climate and engagement and looking at the tiers of behavior and making sure that we were providing support to kids that really needed it so um right now and and also we had three secretaries which was amazing and and that was based on the fact that we were expecting more numbers um to actually arrive at boise that didn't and then when we didn't get the numbers i mean we i think we were like 40 short something like that um we were allowed to keep the fte for the year and that was huge it really did make a difference to have the extra adults and the support because kids are in new buildings and they have new adults that they're working with and they need that one-on-one if you know that's the case um to support them so at um with this with this consolidation um we have a 0.5 um counselor in each building because because there are two buildings so that that's the thing that really complicates this um you you might have the same amount of support but it's spread between two buildings and that makes a huge difference so enrichments are spread between two buildings um counseling support is spread between two buildings esl is spread and sped so that that's that's one of my kind of worries um it would be great to have and i have a 0.5 um instructional specialist who was an sis um and i worry about our priority kids and not having you know an instructional and extra instructional support person to see us through the move and also student management specialists we don't have a student management specialist because we have the two assistant principals but if if we have an assistant principal on both campus and i'm running in between i just i worry that we may you know run into a need of having someone that's an extra body whether it's a full-time counselor in each building or an sms that's really supporting the needs of children and again in the enrichment the classrooms the classroom situation looks really
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good right now with um very reasonable numbers we have at um chief joe we have four k's four ones four twos and four threes um with about 24.25 i mean they're nice-sized classrooms and at ockley we have um three or four fours three fives two six two seven two eights and we are departmentalizing um ockley was not it was self-contained and um i just can't do self-contained middle sorry i mean i i really believe strongly that kids need that experience of departmental they need to be able to get away from each other it's really hard for middle school kids to be with the same kid same teacher all day long that's my personal experience and so the middle school numbers are a little bit smaller just because we're growing that program and for scheduling it's it's a real challenge that was another that's another huge part of name talk about was is just building schedules for two buildings one set of enrichments that serves everyone and that remember the enrichment teachers the time that the children are with the enrichment teachers is the professional development embedded time for teachers for classroom teachers so the schedules can get really wonky when you know someone has to be in a building in the morning and then they travel to the building the second building in the afternoon it's just a very interesting dynamic it's a lot different to have that same number of enrichments and support people in one building but to have them in two separate buildings is is a it's it's going to be a challenge so you mentioned the priority uh the priority status and my understanding is that there really there wasn't an fte loss in that or was there and um it sounded like most of the resource coming from the priority status was was really accounted for out of the expectations of being a priority status school so i'm i'm wondering what the was there was there a net loss with well then student um what's the sis was that stanford student yes student improvement specialist that actually came from the zone school so awkwardly was his own school and had an sis and then last year became a priority school that didn't bring in extra personnel it just brought in some grant money for professional development and reform but the teacher i mean the staff and principals actually went through the process and you heard robin talking about um robin morrison talking about the plan the cap so that process started at ockley but then it didn't so so we don't necessarily have a plan in place um not that i'm i'm excited about developing that plan and putting systems in place with staff but um you just worry about kids that are a school that's a priority school and that status is taken away and i know that there are a lot of um reasons why you don't want to be a priority school as well so i'm not sure you know i don't not as familiar with priority status so i don't know what i'm giving up or but i do worry about support for children and i worry about being able to provide interventions both academic and behavior interventions where needed and emotional and relational uh support for kids yeah i appreciate that i think um the uh the one that you know the one piece really that i'm that i'm uh kind of uh picking at here is i think the comment that jess thompson made about you know our work in the district isn't done uh in this in this transition and it isn't just your job although i would make an argument that you might be superhuman in this in this process being like principal over three schools and doing staffing so i would probably have a solid argument about that but the um but our job isn't done so what can we do to to make sure that we have the support someplace where the principal and the administrators and the counselors and the teachers and the students first and foremost can be successful in these new surroundings or same surroundings but different conditions and and i think that's going to be really important for us as we again i think you know to me it just makes sense to call it a soft landing um so i would i would really encourage the the administration the staff to to look at what can we do that we're not doing right now that can create that kind of environment where everyone can be successful and the realization too and i kind of talked about this earlier that the stress that it does cause families and especially families that are already stressed um it's it's it's it's pretty amazing you know um i don't think we understand the impact
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until we live it with our families so just also to answer your question we'll be monitoring in terms of what are the needs that we see and advocating for those so so uh this is not the end this is really the work continues and and we know that we have some things that we need to play to pay close attention in terms of the focus and the priority just a little background in terms when the focus and priority ugly green was designated as a priority school and they started uh the process with the state when this merged the state was still in the process of deciding what the focus and the priority was going to be in terms of how their their plan their school improvement plan at that time they had over 200 indicators they later they narrowed down to i think 36 indicators so that's why that was one of the reasons because the state still was trying to find out how they were going to monitor that in terms of uh now with the plan that they came about with the school improvement plan that they came about i think that there are some really good things that we can we can borrow and and and implement to make sure that we we're doing uh whatever we need for those kids that need the extra support i had one i think quick question um in your memo there's a sub head here that's called early childhood aftercare and sun liaisons and i know that conrad and doctor greene had talked about a pre-k program at aqua green there is no pre-k component at the school no sequestration victim yes i i don't really understand that but i i guess piggybacking a little bit on wanting to get a soft landing and make sure that you have the support that you all want i guess i'm struck about some of our decisions as we go into adopting our budget next week about how really we've we did we made some choices about where we're putting fte to make sure that students have a high school schedule which at this point assuming and these are assumptions because the state has not passed a budget but it limits some of our flexibility i feel like with our fte at these k-5s k-8 k-8 levels so hopefully the state will come out with a budget better than what we're we're hoping for and that might allow us some flexibility to to have that because it is really important to be spread i mean it's a challenge to be spread across two campuses it's a it's a challenge to have some of the students that are experiencing trauma in their home all of a sudden here at at school experience a real big shifting in their environment which could be another really traumatizing and i guess i i would encourage folks again i'm gonna sound like a broken horse but we have focus and priority schools and they came with a small amount of funding for professional development and no other resources and so alluding to what i said in when we talked about the jefferson cluster where we see movement where we see gains is where the state or the federal government has invested in so i hope that the state can come around and do right by these students so that we can so that we can support them in their success and if i can say one more thing um that as i as i leave boise elliot humboldt um if that is still in the forefront that that's one year merger um one year consolidation and and as we you know as we think about supporting chief joe akley green we cannot forget about boys elliot humble because we have we've had a great year and we need to contain you know continue that momentum and um there's a there's a great deal of need there that's a great reminder and i'm sure that if um vernon were here i mean as they lose their their last group of eighth graders regular i know that that school experienced a big infusion of resources as they gained middle school and so there are places in our in our system where we have to continue to watch for students and support them thank you for the reminder thank you both for being here any other questions thank you both for being here and i just again want to say principal chun thank you for all your work it is obvious how much you love your current community um and it is a ton of work what you're doing and so thank you for throwing yourself into it and i think about the skill set that it's required not only to be an educational leader but as you said this this whole merger and how complex and it's kind of fun it takes a very unique individual to enjoy that and to understand it and to be able to lead through it so thank you thank you molly thank you i also want to thank antonio
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for your leadership of this entire cluster presentation and then of this transition so thank you for that thanks molly thank you we are yes and principal john i believe uh you were my brother-in-law's second grade teacher who's your brother-in-law mark samco and yeah yeah so you see when you stay around us that's right thank you sorry greg that's okay that's great we are gonna move on to our um last couple of items um and perhaps they will go more quickly um so at our at our may 13th board meeting a first reading was held on the proposed amended cash management policy after 21 days of being open for public comment and receiving none the board is ready to vote on the proposed amendments um neil sullivan chief financial officer is here if we have any additional questions are there any additional questions no um so we will now consider resolution force sorry mr sullivan we will now consider resolution 4764 the cash management policy 8.20.01-p do i have a motion in a second to approve so moved second director morton moves and director sergeant seconds the motion to adopt resolution four is ms sofic is there any public comment on this resolution no no is there any more discussion on the resolution no the board will now vote on resolution four seven six four all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes i'll oppose being please indicate by saying no resolution four seven six four is approved by a vote of four to zero with student representative garcia voting yes yes that's the cfo two step i think that i saw you know cfo two-step um speaking of two steps this is step two for second reading of amended capital asset renewal policy at our may 13th board meeting a first reading was held on the proposed uh amendment amended capital asset renewal policy after 21 days of being open for public comment and receiving none the board is ready to vote on the proposal i saw chief operating officer cj sylvester is here if we have any questions do we have any questions no we will now consider resolution 4765 do i have a motion and a second to adopt it director sergeant moves second director morton seconds to adopt resolution five missile which is there any public comment on resolution four seven six five no no is there any more discussion on the resolution board will now vote on resolution four seven six five all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no vote 4765 is approved by a vote of 4-0 with student representative garcia voting yes yes we'll now consider the remaining items on the business agenda having already voted on resolutions seven six four four seven six five misowic are there any changes to the business agenda yes resolution four seven six two has been removed four seven six two has been removed do i have a second drive a motion and a second to adopt the business agenda i wanted to make a comment on the school safety resources or do we want to do that let's do that um when we have the two motions so i move the agenda do i have a second second director regan moves to adopt and directors sergeant and morton's second the adoption of the business agenda mrs is there any public comment on this nope no now director regan if you'd like to make a comment thank you for yeah so i just wanted to um mention that we have a resolution in support of our school safety resource officers and i wanted to kind of explain uh why we're coming forward with that so back in april um i testified in salem with some other school board members from around oregon in support of some reasonable school safety bills being considered by a legislative committee and at that time during the testimony i took the opportunity to thank our mayor and of portland and our city council for their ongoing partnership support of portland public schools and in particular of the fact they partnered with us on our school resource officers often called school police or school safety office or whatever um and the city of portland provides these not only to portland public schools but also to david douglas and to park road so during that time when i testified i said at that time in portland we have a mayor and city council who allocate nearly a dozen school resource officers patrol our district's 80 schools they spend much of their time in our high schools and alternative schools developing relationships with our kids and communities and becoming a go-to resource if students hear rumors or have concerns about safety in the event of a crisis these officers are armed nearby and specifically trained for such situations our job in portland public schools is to
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teach and their job is to protect and so we're grateful to the city of portland for this partnership so what was interesting to me as i wanted to then i realized you know wow we should be saying that directly to um the mayor and to our city council and that's the reason that we're bringing this forward today but um just to highlight the great work of our school resource officers in this partnership i was at madison high school on friday talking to a group of seniors who are graduating and when i asked them who they would want to thank as they're graduating from madison they went on and on and on about several teachers and then the next group they talked about was their school resource officers and i thought oh my god isn't that amazing so um i think they really are looked at as a go-to resource and a support so as the mayor was looking at a cut of 25 million dollars out of the city budget this spring george wetheroy who is our director of security services here and i and john isaacs came to one of these we met with most of our city commissioners just to help them understand what an important resource these officers are in our schools to our principals to the staff to our students and really to the whole community and they were retained in the budget and even though there's going to be a slight cut i think that we wanted to acknowledge and appreciate both our school resource officers themselves and the role that they play for us but also to thank the mayor and the city council specifically for this uh really quite unique and amazing partnership that we have to support our kids so that's why that's in here and i'm asking for your support great thank you thank you bobby and thank you for leading the efforts on that it is an amazingly valuable resource um and i was appreciative of your time down in salem and for your time with our local folks to help them understand um that this is an e either or and that this is a great way to support education and how much we rely this is one way our community supports um us supporting our kids thank you any other discussion on the business agenda okay board will now vote on business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no business agenda is approved by a vote of 4-0 a student representative garcia voting yes it is um so we are about to adjourn but i just want to highlight uh director reagan just reminded me that this is uh student representative garcia's final meeting with us um so we wish her the best and we thank you so much for your dedication and commitment in serving with us um and you know where we will be so we hope you come back and see us and just for those of you that are joining in tonight and didn't see our last meeting we we did our recognition more formal recognition of student representative garcia at our last meeting so and we will have a new student we have a new student representative who's been sitting dutifully through the meetings with us so thank you we look forward to your joining us andrew we have a seat for you right up here so our next meeting the board will be a regular meeting on monday june 17th here in the borah auditorium and the regular meeting of the board is now adjourned

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)

2013-06-03 PPS School Board Study Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - June 3, 2013

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