2013-08-19 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2013-08-19
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - August 19, 2013

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good evening this meeting the board of education for August 19th is now called to order I'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewing audience all items that will be voted on this evening have been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next 2 weeks please check the Board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our PPS TV services website um and you can link through that through the Board website on PPS website and it will also be archived there for future reference just to note that director Morton is absent this evening at this time we will have public comment Miss houon do we have anyone signed up for public comment yes we have our first two speakers are Deborah Barnes and Margie Brown I don't see Miss Barnes in the in the house but Miss Brown while you're making your way I'll just read the instructions for public comment like to thank you very much for coming taking time to come to our board meeting we deeply value public input and we look forward to hearing your thoughts Reflections and concerns our responsibility as a board lies in actively listening and reflecting on the thoughts and opinions of others the board will not respond to any comments or questions at this time but the board or staff will follow up on various issues that are raised please make sure that you have left your contact information either phone or email on the signup sheet guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration when referring to board members staff and other presenters while we value everyone's perspective our rules do not allow criticism of individual staff members by name during public comment you have a total of three minutes to share your comments please Begin by stating your name spelling your last name for the record during the first two minutes of testimony a green light will appear on that little box when you have have one light remaining a yellow light will go on and when your time is up the red light will go on and a buzzer will sound that time we respectfully ask that you conclude your comments we sincerely appreciate your input and thank you for your cooperation and thanks for coming uh bargie Brown last name Brown b r WN as a co-chair of the Portland 8 centers for Education e Excellence I attended the July board retreat and my comments Center on the district's commitment to improve student achievement results otherwise called outcomes well I appreciate the fact that the milestones and student achievement compact uh multi-year goals were discussed at The Retreat we believe there should be a deeper more concentrated and continuing focus on academic achievement recognizing that there are many pieces to the puzzle it is only by putting a spotlight on the outcomes that PPS staff will give the milestones and compact term goals the attention necessary for our students to achieve and progress to be prepared for College and Career at an increasing rate reaching these goals are crucial for our city and they will be accomplished they won't be accomplished with the businesses usual in Innovation and change are necessary we propose that the board require PPS staff to provide a simple three-part oral quarterly report which would include what are the quarterly processes or project goals of selected key departments for achieving the yearend graduation rate and third grade reading outcut in the compact agreement what was accomplished during the last year's quarter including preparation during the summer and what are the significant plans for the next quarter it is only by focus focus and more focus on the few critical initiatives related to student achievement that PPS will be able to move the dial you can't wait until the end of the year to find out if we are going to be successful you need to have both process and outcome measures during the year to track progress and ensure that adjustments are made and best practices shared to keep us on course thank you our next two speakers Michael Kelly and Ayanna horn you
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have um my name is Michael Kelly and I'm the parent of a student at ml c um Michael Kelly k l l y my name is Ayana horn horn h o RN and I am also the parent of a student at mlc members of the board superintendent Smith thank you for giving us an opportunity to speak tonight um as a consequence of the recent negative publicity regarding our school mlc a group of us felt compelled to come here tonight to share an alternative perspective and make public our commitment to resolving the issues at our school at mlc we are a family we are the village raising our children it doesn't matter what race you are or ethnicity it doesn't matter what house you live in or the car you drive if you are part of the school then you are part of the family and and it's not just the children and the parents it's also the Educators and the classified staff and the school leadership our principal mcari Trum and Jeff Spalding our vice principal we are all family this single fact makes mlc an amazing Place unique among schools I'm tempted to recommend that you take it as a model for other schools but I'm not convinced that you could replicate it as a consequence you should expect that we will be fiercely fiercely protective of it sometimes this puts us in conflict with the district and sometimes the conflicts are internal no doubt this is not unlike any Vibrant Community that plays such a vital role in the lives of its members in that respect we are not not unique but perhaps we can be unique in our response to these conflicts at this time can we have the members of the mlc community who are here in support of the following commitment please stand those who are already standing raise your hand we the members of the mlc community who stand before you are uncompromisingly committed to constructive engagement in the resolution of these conflicts engagement with the district engagement with the school leadership and engagement with the members of our community who find themselves in conflict and we will endeavor to do this with courage compassion self-discipline integrity and respect the five key character traits mlc expects of its students and traits befitting of all members of our family thank you thank you and thank you all who came to join we've heard a lot of um had a lot of comment and correspondence about mlc thank you for sharing with us this evening Miss Houston before we move on to the next um oh I'm sorry did you have yeah um adds two do I have an additional two minutes okay and what I will read now is my family's own personal perspective we are Ayanna and Tim horn and mlc parent Volunteers Of The Year and we have two children one a rising second grader at mlc and one who has yet to experience the beautifulness that mlc is as a proud and active parent of an mlc student as and as one of the few families of color our perspective and experience is quite different than some of those that have been expressed regarding mlc while we are active supporters of mlc at this community we feel it is important to bring to the board's attention that recent public statements about mlc and our principal in particular is not a perspective shared by all and not by our family in particular having worked with principal trainum and many teachers over the past two years we are largely encouraged at the potential growth mlc has yet to tap and feel that that principal trainum specifically is the right administrator at this time for our school I understand that change while sometimes challenging to embrace is a constant is as constant as learning and by working together with the administration constructively and collaboratively I feel that we are on a clear path to strength strengthening strengthening the learning environment here and making it more attractive and inclusive to many more students and families who can truly benefit from the unique learning experience that mlc continues to offer please understand while I do understand and recognize that opinions differ I feel the leadership here at mlc is making the best decisions for all of our children while taking to account the varying array of opinions as a family and together with other families we stand in support of our principal and the staff at mlc as we work together to realize mlc is potential as a school and as a community thank
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you let's do before before we move on I I just noticed that Miss Barnes um made it here and I know that we skipped over her spot so if we could um call her up with the next uh so Scott Bailey and Deborah Barnes I heard traffic is terrible on that aw thank you for the record good evening I'm Deborah Barnes and um I am the first vice president of the Oregon Education Association but I come to you tonight in my role as the president of the north Clackamus Education Association um I sat through a couple of your bargaining sessions and uh my district the past two times has gone through IBS interest based strategies in a collaborative environment I uh actually addressed my own board last week for the first time that they met and explained what I had seen and they said really why aren't they doing what we did and so I have to ask that question we're all public Educators I understand the position you're in I was on the Milwaukee city council for two terms I answered to my constituency but I know in your heart you wouldn't be in this position if you didn't care for kids and if you didn't respect the Educators that you've hired to serve those kids so from my perspective from the outside from another large school district and as a leader who has to bargain there's nothing better than to be able to share a margarita with your superintendent when you're done bargaining or sitting and having a conversation with a school board member during bargaining and saying you know this is my perspective the one thing we learned going this way is my superintendent had no idea as did many of my board members what a room clear was when we went through bargaining and a room clear is when a student who has multiple problems decides to act up in class and the rest of those students have to go stand in the hallway until that student is finished well when we brought those pictures to the board who bargained with us and the superintendent that opened up this whole different conversation and things changed I'm going to urge you I know it's late in the process but start building capacity with your union leaders start building capacity with your community many community members sit in during these bargaining sessions and they're looking for guidance from board members who will stand up and say I believe in my teachers I believe in our staff and I know they're here and everyone in the public is bouncing on us right now look at Oregon live we need to work together as a team it pays off the last thing I will I share with you at the end of our session our superintendent our community our business leaders and both the association staff of the classified and certified sat together we went down to Salem last session as a team with the board and bargained and sent our message to those members at the legislature we were so much stronger working as a team than as individuals and as separate associations think about that as we move ahead nobody wants the dirty laundry in public and I know each of you wants the school year to start off right with all of this over with so please on behalf of every public school teacher in Oregon looking at you guys right now stand with those folks and find a solution as quickly as possible thank you thank you don't read the comments on Oregon repeat after me uh good evening my name is Scott Bailey b a i l y um thanks for listening to me tonight I do want to say before I start that I'm lucky I have a job with flexible hours I can leave early and get here at 5 o'cl there's a lot of people who can't do that uh I'd ask respectfully that you consider pushing the the public comment back to a later point in the meeting to allow more people access okay my three minutes are starting uh I'm here on behalf of our Portland our schools um Portland Public schools has put Equity at the center of its work and we'd like to bring to you uh an equity issue tonight for your consideration we're in favor of Shifting the school year to a balanced calendar uh in which the school calendar would be adjusted to shorten up the summer break uh and there would be several three-week breaks during the year uh now there was the same number of school days because of funding but spread out through the year there's been a number of articles
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in the media lately about this one in the Sunday Oregonian I think it was uh there's a slate magazine article that uh cited research that showed that um that just the differential impact and the huge amount of the achievement Gap that appears to be uh uh caused by the long summer break uh lending darling Hammond has been uh in town a couple years ago saying the same thing uh and recently in June when the Jefferson cluster principal were testifying to you um Kim Patterson of of King talked about the importance of not only that extra three weeks of instruction that kids got but but that it shortened the school that that break and she thought both factors were important in the Improvement and achievement at king um she also thought that PPS should lead the whole metro area uh towards the balance calendar school year that would enable all the the child service vendors to be on the same page in the same market so um I'm in my last minute here um finally uh you've increased the equity formula for uh High minority schools um and I think Trudy Sergeant brought this up um when Kim was testifying whether it might make sense to use some of that funding to add a couple of extra weeks to this to the summer break as opposed to uh dropping class sizes uh balanced calendar school year is the cheapest way we can think of to have an immediate effect on the achievement Gap if it's going to happen in Portland it's really essential that you guys take the leadership in making it happen uh we would firmly support you in that uh and help with all the public process that we need to happen to make that happen um and hopefully we can all work together to drag our metro area into the 21st century thanks thank you our last speaker is Ree Bushman thank you for your time today uh my name is Ree Bushman and I'm a proud parent of an mlc student uh we have an amazing School uh I unequivocally support the statement that was read earlier by Michael and aana it's a wonderful Declaration of reclaiming the traits and the values of our school that can sometimes be a challenging to uphold and they've not always been present of late unfortunately especially when we reach different conclusions or or see things from a different perspective I wanted to personally make a statement to you today beyond that because I recognize that you in the district have not heard a large portion of the mlc community at all all Please be aware that there are many more varied opinions than what you've heard I don't pretend to speak for the entire school but I think I can speak for at least a part of it and in the spirit of the earlier statement and in an effort to contribute to the needed healing in our community I'll refrain from addressing specific stories and specific people uh despite the various different viewpoints of our community we're United in our advocacy for the school and for our children that's not always easy when we don't reach the same conclusions and unfortunately each of our individual narratives has made it sometimes very difficult to see eye to eye it's really been very interesting to see how the exact same facts can read so differently into each of our narratives and uh that's been one of the challenges really for us our school is certainly unique and in many ways it has a a very long and Rich tradition for the most part part it served our students extremely well to me mlc represents an incredible balance between more traditional and non-traditional learning which you don't find very often in public school setting my uh dad was a principal and a teacher and uh I've learned quite a bit of that over the years and mlc is really a treasure for us to cherish having said that it's not perfect and some of those imperfections are not newly developed having there are students at mlc who could be served better by the school I'm sure that's true throughout the district and I think that some of the concern over the current climate at mlc does not always recognize this or sometimes that the causes for it are misidentified I support our principal mcari Trum and I support her leadership to me her Integrity is exemplary I find her to be a tireless ad advate for our children she's demonstrated in many ways how committed she is in her advocacy for each and every one of them even at the cost of her own reputation she's demonstrated to me that she clearly values what she believes is right for our students more than she values herself for her own ego not easy thing to do the attention she's drawn to some needs at our school is critically necessary but it has not always been well received I think in many ways fear and misunderstanding has colored how some of those efforts have been seen the
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rich 45 year history introdu of our school in the special place that it is can sometimes unintentionally draw away from how it can be improved and I believe that our principal is uniquely qualified and committed to shine a flashlight on some of these areas so that we as a community can work together to help make our school even better for all of our students while still preserving this is important what has made it so special please help our community all of our community including our principal so we can both preserve and improve our school mlc is a treasure it requires your protection I think this is true more now than ever before for our Administration staff and Community we need your help to survive the pressures and preserve some of the unique and invaluable traits that make it such an incredible place thank you thank you thank you everybody again for your comments um please make sure that um our board secretary has your contact information if if we're going to follow up so we can send you some information moving on to the next item the annual survey of public education priorities has been moved to um another agenda I believe it'll be the first meeting we have in September so with that we are going to move on to some very exciting news about our substitute contract superintendent Smith yes and I'll ask Sean Murray who's our chief Human Resources officer and Brock Logan director of Labor Relations to come on up and talk about our substitute teachers contract thank you good evening board members and superintendent my name is Shan Mur I'm the Chief Human Resources officer for the HR department I also have Brock Logan with me who was the chief negotiator for the rounds of contract negotiations before the board for consideration is the adoption of the substitute teachers contract that covers July 1st 2012 through June 30th 2016 having negotiated 12 times including uh two sessions within mediation the parties were able to reach a tenative agreement on May 10th 2013 four uh major topics that in that are included in this contract includes the implementation of the asop subsystem which changes the way substitute teachers are called for assignments also health insurance the elimination of subon plans which move Subs to the same plant as other employee groups with the cost savings to the district of about $40 per affected sub which translates to approximately 50 ,000 a year also added is a provision to help keep long-term consistent working subs from losing insurance benefits and a clearer process for employee discipline and building restrictions any questions I don't think so um I just want to say on behalf of the board we're very happy that we've reached common ground with um the pat substitute partners and we look very we look forward to continuing the good work that brought us as settlement thank you both we'll now consider resolution 4795 the 2012 2016 agreement between Portland Association of teachers substitutes and School District number one J mola County Oregon do I have a motion and a second director Regan moves and director Atkins seconds the motion to adopt resolution 4795 Miss Houston is there any public comment on the resolution no no is there any board discussion on the resolution okay seeing none yeah indeed um the board will now vote on resolution 4795 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any extensions resolution 4795 is approved by a vote of 6 to zero with student representative Davidson voting yes yes thank you thank you both thank you next item on our agenda is the audit report um last year the board commissioned uh Richard Tracy our auditor to look at high school graduation rates um Mr Tracy welcome um I see you're coming to join us thank you we'll start with your presentation is that correct and then we'll have time for our questions thank you it's a pleasure to be here again um thank you very much for uh scheduling this presentation um this is a a large and complex topic as you well know and um uh I looked at a piece of it and uh What uh what I did was want to compare Portland to others and to see what we can learn from what other districts are doing both
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in Oregon and in other states as well as well um so it's a big topic that could go in many directions uh a little of this uh background information I just wanted to share with you which is in the audit report which I hope you've had a chance to review and i' be answer any questions that you might have now or at the end of the presentation um there are any number of things that cause graduation uh problems or Dropout problems there are probably three major ones attendance behavior and and basic course performance or academic performance those are the research over and over basically points to these three things as being some of the major factors that that contribute to graduation problems and dropouts Oregon um um somewhat surprisingly has one of the lowest graduation rates as a state in the nation um and our our district has one of the lowest in Oregon uh as we'll get to a little bit later the uh um the state and our district um is engaged and has been engaged in now for a number of years of ways to improve it um both the state in their 4040 40 4020 plan and with our milestones and with our um High School System uh redesign is all connected to this notion of improving graduation rates and and and reducing the number of dropouts um I won't go into the high school system Des design we've covered that certainly I can ask some questions I'm sure that um superintendent Smith can ask answer some of those better than I can um but it's it's involved in this whole discussion that we will talk about uh today so jumping into the the results from the audit um I looked at the 10 largest uh districts in our state um for the 20112 cohort group or class if you will um and compared to the uh other large districts we are the lowest at at this stage um as we'll find out later we've improved uh over the last four years but we're still at at the low end when we compare ourselves to other large districts um our completion rate is about the third lowest and our Dropout or non-completer rate is about average compared to the state and to our other large districts um uh this is the the the the table that's in the report and uh it shows basically the categories that I just talked about and it shows that uh Portland um Public Schools is is at the low end of these of these 10 Mr Tracy before you move on um for folks that might be looking at this and not sure what the difference between a grad rate a completer rate and the dropout rate sometimes we hear folks say things like well with 37% dropouts using the inverse of a graduation right and it's not exactly at all the inverse so can you can you talk a little bit about what I think the most confusing part of is the non-completer or Dropout when we look at dropout rate um that's calculated by uh basically enrollment at the beginning year and what it looks like at the end of the year for all four grades as opposed to this which is looking at one class or one cohort for one year what happens at at the end of four years as opposed to a Dropout which is simply that one year from from beginning of school to the end of school and what happens in the number of students that drop out and it's in this report there's a definition of those two uh uh measurements in the appendix uh to give hopefully gives a little Clarity on that does that help uh it does I just wanted to make sure for folks who might not have access or go through reading it that's right yes and it is a confusing uh a topic um so look looking at a little more detail uh about our cohort our 20112 cohort this group that we've talked about I wanted to look at um special student groups um and those student groups relate to um underserved ethnic groups excuse me um economically disadvantaged students limited English proficient students and also students with disabilities to see how we compare to the other 10 other nine large districts in in our state um once again we we don't uh compare favorably uh particularly with economically disadvantaged students um or with uh students with um um um uh Bas e underserved ethnic groups which basically includes uh Hispanics Native American uh Pacific Islanders and and black students we are about average or so with
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the limited English proficient students and a little lower than other districts when we look at students with disabilities um and and so even with some districts that have very comparable student groups than we do for example um Hillsboro OR Salem Kaiser they're doing better with these more difficult student groups than we are um so that also is a is a problem for us now we look over a period of time we however we do see some improvement both in the graduation uh rate statistic but also in the dropout rate statistic the last uh 4-year period Portland has increased its graduation rate from 53.3 to 63.1 about a 9.8 Point Improvement some of this is due to some degree with some errors that we had in the data and some corrections that we made a couple years ago that improved the statistics but other could be real Improvement that we're seeing in the work that we're doing here in the district um the dropout rate has also improved over this time frame from 7.5 to 3.4 we're still uh um some districts have a better dropout rate or higher dropout rate and some districts have a lower dropout rate but we're we're are improving uh more than any other District in this statistic over the past four years so what I also wanted to do um so that we could learn and and inform the discussion about what to do and how to continue to improve was I did some case studies um I selected six districts four in Oregon and two outside uh uh West Coast districts in Long Long Beach California in Seattle Washington and in Hillsboro Salem Beaverton and Long Beach just to see um what they do how they describe themselves so I had several interviews with principles and with um a management employees and others in the district to learn about what they do um both in terms of the factors that affect graduation rates from from their perspective um major interventions interventions that they might pursue um alternative schools and the management model they might employ to manage their District to see if we could learn something that we could apply um there was a lot of things and I hope you have a chance to read the case studies there's lots of different things in there I pulled out four uh I thought were sort of interesting highlights they're not the only things that I think are interesting about the case studies but for the sake of time this evening these are the four I thought uh were kind of interesting and perhaps we we should learn more about um uh one is that some of the successful schools um in in having better graduation rates and lower dropouts had a very intensive and systematic focus on attendance um that they really focused on it um and I know we focus on attendance too but not in a systematic or rigorous fashion particularly as as Hillsboro does they have a quite interesting attendance manual in a process for focusing on attendance um attendance low attendance being one of those major factors that affect graduation rates so that was one of the things I thought was interesting some of the other districts do as well um some of the districts had um a a real focus on coaches and mentors really individual coaches and mentors um to help at RIS students and to uh deal with Dropout issues or people or students that had low attendance a real more systematic approach to looking at helping individuals um I thought this was interesting I don't know if it means anything some of the districts were reducing their Reliance on alternative schools or options Seattle had as many alternative schools as we had a decade ago now they have a handful of alternative schools um uh Salem has reduced the number of Alternatives they had um different kinds of districts different kind of communities um I just thought it was interesting that there was a t a trend for using alternative schools less than than we do and also there was particularly in Long Beach and this is probably an interesting Factor again I don't know how much this affects graduation drout but there was a a real exposure to career in college uh at both at the elementary school and at the
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middle school uh Long Beach even had a um kind of a a commitment an agreement that they would have with students um that they would um learn and think about college um at the elementary level which is uh quite remarkable so there's this connection to something that happens to Beyond High School uh was uh I thought an interesting highlight in the case studies as well I also wanted to look not just at you know anecdotes and comparisons and what people have told me when I interviewed these other districts um uh I hope that's not me uh uh I wanted to see what some empirical information that there has been studies or or or um um uh academic research that actually has has shown or proven in more than one location some success in reducing dropouts and improving graduation rates and um there were I thought four or five um interesting things um I'm getting ah held myself this is I want to go backwards here a little bit one of the factors I I wanted to make sure you understood is that our district does many of the same things that other districts do so it's not like we're not doing things we're doing a lot of things um and some of the things that are important to this District that other districts use are um early warning system systems we have this academic priority uh uh where we identify students that really are having either academic issues or behavior issues or or or uh ten tenance issues that's a really powerful tool that we have to degree it's used throughout the district that would be another topic for an audit do we use this fully and it's completely in as effectively as we could that I didn't learn about um we have a number of Support classes and and teams of English algebra support uh credit retrieval options we do a number of things that other districts do uh that are that point to good things happening we have this High School graduation initiative project which is Federal grant which is really probably the the real good pilot case of intensive focusing on with students mentors coaches using uh individuals to address students needs uh that's probably the best example we have here it would be wonderful if that was available throughout the district um it's very similar to what uh Salem has in their graduation coaches and Hillsboro has on their care teams they're very it's very similar to this pilot project we have at Roosevelt and Franklin um and we have a variety of educational options plus we do a number of things in tutoring and after school support through uh Sun schools and and um other activities Step Up up and other things that we do now getting back to what I was prefaced before in terms of the exemplary practices um the uh these are these are practices that have had de demonstrated success in more than one location and I thought these are the ones that I thought made the most sense when looking at the what works database that the federal government produces on educational research one what seems to work is a focus on attendance uh what seems to work is an intensive engagement student engagement um one-on-one engagement um more effort at the middle school level as more as a preventive Factor rather than you know ninth and 10th grade it's it it it's almost you can catch them in nth and 10th grade but some programs are finding if they focus more at the middle school level they're having more success being prepared prepared when they get into nth grade which is obviously one of our milestones and one of the things we want to track that we do in our Milestones um and then structured mentoring and after school programs there's a number of examples of these uh we have a number of of after school programs to to the degree they're a system and they work together I'm not so sure they're comparable to some others and other communities that I that I read about so these four particular uh what works examples uh are we're thinking about and to see how we do these things here in our district and finally um I thought there was some need for additional information it's always need for more information when you start looking at these things you want to know more and the things that occurred to me in doing this that I that I wish could have gotten more into was how effective are some of our approaches now we do a number of things um which ones work the best which ones deserve more Focus which
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which ones could we not do anymore um th those would be good to know more about um student opinions about what works for them uh I know our research and evaluation group did a initial survey of students a few years back about what they took and how they would rated certain interventions they received uh that was kind of a good first start but maybe there's more that could we could do with that data or um a better way of learning more about what students think helped them stay in school and and finally the Fidelity of implementation how consistently and completely are we implementing our current interventions and our current Services um again uh we do a number of them which ones work and how they are consistently implemented across our district which is an ongoing problem with any large organization how do we get people to do the same things in the same way for Effectiveness uh in that in that regard um my recommendations are uh a very I would call them permissive in a way they are there's so many successful approaches there's so many ways to address these problems um my recommendations are really consider some of these things um to engage students to reduce dropouts and increase graduation rates and also to do some additional research and evaluation to learn what works and what students think and how we're implementing some of these interventions that we're currently uh implementing throughout the district the um the report is available on the website or at least she should be either this evening or first thing tomorrow morning on the board web page like all the other performance audits are and as I've always said when I do this presentations the the superintendent's written response is also included in the report uh so you will be able to see how uh she responded to the report and the recommendations uh in the report um and that's my presentation I'd be glad to answer any question questions that you have thank you questions comments I I have a few just questions sir one is um could you just go back to that the data figure the correction because it it uh some of the Improvement is due to Corrections in the data submitted by Oda Portland to reflect more accur yeah page 16 M and you you referenced it in your in the presentation and I um it left me wondering so could you give me a little more specifics about this well when we did submited up updated information um to the organ Department of Education the data was improved and updated how much is it was result of the data Improvement and how much what percentage of it was result of actual improvements in what we do it's hard to tease those those numbers out that's what I was trying to say so so the jump the jump between 53 and 62 is um the some of it it's data but and but some we don't know what sum is right yeah whether it's 50% or 90% or 30% okay I think I think we do I mean what I remember is when we when we resubmitted our data um there was a change and we knew exactly the percentage of jump I don't remember it off the top of my head I don't remember off the top of my head either I want to say but but there was a data but it was a flaw that that um that evidently impacted multiple years so that by the time we corrected we didn't go backward and keep untangling what the flaw was so and yes we could we can identify what was progress and what was Data I don't know that off the top of my head right now I was was curious because it just word some in a report no it was it was a Cate a category of how we were tracking a certain group of students that then didn't show up in the final data that we then went back and corrected with Department of Education that impacted our our data and I sorry for not for not being so specific about that it's just that sometimes if I if I don't have adents to show me I I use weasel words like some I'm sorry it's good I appreciate that yes we can be more precise in that yeah I was just C curious um and then in uh you spoke with managers and principles of others districts and in our district you spoke to principles and as well or not uh yes I did and I and I spoke to uh Central management staff as well but not teachers not teachers okay yeah it's very difficult for me to talk to teachers and it has been for the last four or five years because they're in they're in school and when I'm available often times they're not available either doing prep or teaching so it's it's always hard to do
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that and students I did not talk to students no um and then I I I was curious if you could uh talk a little more because I look at these numbers in and the report and it says to me hey um other districts are doing better with less money uh and um and and so I find your recommendations and and I know strategically that you you said they were permissive and so I but I wanted to push you because I think that the report um calls out for maybe a little less permissiveness uh and so I wanted to push you on the um maybe a little bit of the management model uh and you talk about other districts and how they're set up and I mean how much is in that piece versus um things that we're doing programs that we're doing well being interested in organizational management I think management is a big part of making any organization better from the leadership through executive management to principles I and I think it makes a difference if you have good management and if you effectively Implement your systems um what I what I couldn't do is say how effectively we do that because I that wasn't the subject of the audit uh it would be interesting to see by visiting schools and high schools in particular but middle schools as well how various in interventions that we believe are being implemented are implemented and that's something I wasn't able to do right and and some and I'm not I mean my question is a little bit different which is more of a systematic uh model so you there so one is okay you have a model how well is it being implemented but you talked about several different models out there and comparing those models to our model um are there takeaways from your Viewpoint um in a couple areas um a few of the other districts um um have a a clear um line from strategic mission and goals down into what each individual school does there's a clear you can see a clear line than ours although you know we have milestones we have measurements we have a lot of the things in place that other districts do not um that that that clear from Mission down through what we want to do is not often time as clear I did report uh before you were on the board on the school Improvement plans um and those School Improvement plans that when I looked at them were varied in their quality from school to school to school and that's one example of a more consistent uh connection and link between um the mission and the goals of the organization and what schools do in pursuing that mission and goals is something um that other other districts do but I think all districts have that problem because we have decentralized uh uh schools we have different locations and different people manage them okay thank you so I wanted to um first of all say that of all the audits that I've seen of yours so far this one to me was the best in terms of really talking about what we are here to do which is to educate kids and graduate them ready for colleg and career and so um there were just so many pieces of this uh audit that were helpful um and what I um especially appreciated is is the comparison to comparable districts and some of the sharing of best practices from District to district and what we could learn from each other because we don't do that enough um and I think it's it would be good for us to get into that practice um as we go um it's interesting to me that Oregon has the lowest one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation and um I think what we often don't think about is that fact that Oregon also has one of the shortest school years in the nation Oregon has some of the largest class sizes in the nation I mean in some ways it shouldn't be a surprise that uh our graduation rates are where they're at um and and um and even for Portland Public
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Schools until this year as we're coming into this year we weren't even offering a full high school schedule to some students so I mean there's a whole lot of factors that kind of play into where you end up um so the good news is that we've got a much stronger investment from the state um going into this year and that's um you know a thrill um and the other thing that I always like to remember is that uh Portland Public School students represent about 10% of all students in the state and and to the extent that we as a district increase our graduation rate it's going to have an impact on that state number too so it it really matters um not just for us and for our kids but you know for Oregon's uh reputation perhaps um I wanted to ask a couple of questions and uh I'm not sure specifically that I need an answer they're probably more for you um superintendent Smith as we go uh one of the things that was um highlighted in this report is that many districts are moving away from community- based alternative school programs and uh I was curious um to hear more about that and what the results have been and why they've moved them inous and whether that was a financial decision or was it an academic success decision I know that we've struggled with some of our alternative schools in terms of the results they're getting but they're also dealing with kids who have had real challenges and so um I'm curious if we are relooking at that at some level so and it um you know this is one of the things we looked at during uh High School System design and we actually went through a process of um increasing what the standards are when we did our last request for proposals and um and what the metrics are we're measuring and working to align more closely um what uh what the alternative schools are working toward with what the district is and they're included in our staff meetings in our professional development at during the last RFP process we actually reduced the number number of alternative school providers um just by virtue of who was able to meet the the the um increased standard and who was not um the our alternative Ed providers have continued to work on um a rigorous um system of metrics that are being applied um and actually this year we'll be able to report to you on what the new metrics are but we're we're aligning more tightly what um what's happening in altern or our contracted alternative schools specifically with what we're doing in the district so and I imagine it's been like Portland has always had a really large number of Alternatives relative to other communities and people have frequently looked at us as a uh um as being an Innovative way of serving students um so like now when now we're on the okay yeah how are we making sure that students are getting rigorous Ed education if in fact they're in a community- based alternative that also has wraparound Services which is generally what the benefit is is you've got a whole array of services that come with uh an educational provider but we're continuing to tighten and next time we go out with a request for proposals which should be in the next couple of years um I would imagine we'll be again ratcheting up what's the expectation and how are we aligning it with um with what we're trying to do as a district I think it but it also gets to the central the Comprehensive High Schools too and the whole question of referral and keeping keeping kids in the comprehensives and regular education before they neighborhood need to be referred so it's it's the Ecology of our whole system and that's yes I remember during High School System design we talked about we were um there was in the report that we weren't matching kids very well that we had kids that didn't meet the demographics for a typical alternative school going to alternative school and so I think the high school action team is what I recall working on that about how do we properly how do we ensure right match so we've got a couple active groups right now that actually are going to be using the some of the um this the findings of this audit and also just our own data um and the the outcomes from high school system design and the report you got in December on impact one year in to of to implementation but we have a high school um action team that has across District stakeholders including some of the alternative schools and comprehensive schools and parents and um and centralized staff and then second we are working with um the Cross City parents coalitions um is working with our high school team on College and Career Readiness but both are really going deep on figuring out okay how do we further tighten what strategies we're using and investing in and are we how um what's the Fidelity of implementation of strategies that work I mean that's the other thing our the successful schools framework we've talked to you about is systemwide not just High School really looking at where are we getting the outcomes we're looking for in our own system and how are we then replicating and expanding across the entire system so that's like again getting more and more focused CU we've done things that
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we see islands of Excellence that we then have not successfully taken across the whole system so ensure there was accountability across the system or ensured we're accountability we haven't even really done full replication of things that we know are outstanding practices so like I think that's one of the things we're working to do yeah and then once we're doing it are we holding people accountable wa um another question I wanted to ask you about is um your familiarity with what the Salem Kaiser School Foundation um does with its funds versus how our uh Port School Foundation funds are used um because I know that the Salem Kaiser School Foundation basically funds dozens and dozens of U mentors uh for struggling students and it I I find it to be a really interesting idea interesting model and one that we could potentially even fund through the Portland schools Foundation if we wanted to change the model um have you had much opportunity to talk to the Salem superintendent about that and what success they're they're getting out of that particular leverage point I know a small amount so the what we were referring to as graduation coaches and then they've been really excited about what they've accomplished with that model the the graduation graduation coaches are are full-time classified employees the the mentors are usually graduate students or other volunteers bilingual that are trained and ambitious paid by the foundation right and they're trained and mentorship skills and then assigned to specific students as the way I understand anyway I would love for us to understand a little bit better that model because again there is at some level a funding stream since 30% of our foundation funds raised go to that and obviously it would also mean that we wouldn't do some of what our current Foundation funds are doing so we'd have to balance it but I would love for us to look at that and this just kind of highlighted it again good as as an option I have a couple of other questions but why don't other folks go and then I'll you can come back to me if they if you haven't hit do let someone else go okay I'll go ahead then um thank you so much I really appreciate reading this report and it was just so inspiring to read the case studies and know that there's um W we're doing lots of great things or some additional things or similar things that we can improve in what we're doing um trying to read my my own handwriting here um I guess I also had the question by the alternative Ed and I think I referenced um superintendent in your response that there was going to be a steady so that's what you were talking about that there would be a steady in terms of the um effectiveness of the alternative Ed anyway I just generally wanted to flag that want to follow up and hear more about that because it came out as a real theme I'm in the report and a question around that um question of principal accountability particularly for focus on academic priority students that's a question that came up for me and how we're ensuring that again the Fidelity of implementation um I guess a lot of my questions or comments just re revolve around waiting to see and hoping that the high school action team is going to be really covering all these details and whichever you know however they're going to be reporting back to us in the public um and then also the middle schools just wanted to confirm it sound as if you were implying that that's part of what they're going to be looking at cuz that definitely seems an area that we're at least as far as I know falling short um and it's a huge area that we should be doing more in and just I mean we've always had this middle learner you know had initiatives come and go and so many then we had the whole K8 so right now we're right now we're working in a hybrid model of middle schools and k8s and just needing to always try to keep our focus on those sixth to eighth grader um eighth grade kids and um the transitions they're going to and then I guess the other just Rel related to all this is just a question around um if you could remind me of the timeline for the high school action team when are we going to be when are they going to be kind of at a point of reporting back or I'm sorry I can't never remember are they they're in the middle of their work right now yes they were just convened towards um the end of the Midway through the year last year and we'll be doing reports throughout the year and I don't know specifically when they're next when their first do we have a Le board Le on on that so hang on just a second I'll let me ask suanne if she'll come on up and speak to that question suan Higgins you can tell there's a great eagerness suan Higgins is chairing the high school action team and suan as our chief academic officer good evening uh the high school action team began meeting in April and um is reviewing a number of studies this um the work of um Mr Tracy's audit will be the next kind of data point additionally we have a new um study that we will be um reviewing soon that is a
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deeper look a segmentation study so where we looked at um how do you look at who's doing well in the schools who's not doing as well in our schools um what do we make of that and then how strong is our match of supports um internally and externally for students who aren't doing this well so that we have a a really clear accelerant effect for all kids who may be struggling in the system so that's the next Next Step our goal is to have um a report or a set of recommendations to go to the superintendent um hopefully uh by January and the goal there would be that if there are any things then that would have bearing on the budgeting cycle for next year in terms of resources um that that would then be in the conversation for that timeline so that's our plan right now great thank you so much do do we have a board Le a honor to to the high school action team think that was your other question I don't think so okay could we we do not at this time we be happy to have one like two or three yeah for now yeah okay so um thank you very much Mr Tracy as always It's a Wonderful report full of great information and even more questions um for us um the thing that kind of popped out to me on this report in addition to all the things that the other directors have talked about were um were the were the things around attendance and also um the reaching down into the lower grades uh to solve the problems before they start um although we're talking about high school graduation rates it seemed to me that the the schools that were having success were those that were um approaching students at an early age especially around attendance um if they're not showing up to school in first second and third grade chances are they're not going to show up even more in middle school and then in high school as you get further and further behind they show up less and less so I really was interested in all of the work that the different districts were doing around attendance and that reaching down into into um into the lower grades and I don't know uh superintendent Smith if you can talk to us a little bit about what we're doing there it seems like there was a a pilot project or something that we had going around in uh contacting students who had excessive absences early on or parents or families or if we don't we should I'm gonna ask suan to come on back up when while she's coming back up I will say one of the things we're doing as part of cradle to Career uh in the um communities impacting youth is focusing on attendance across the six districts and really trying to look at the practices that are being most successful at um and who and getting a common attendance structure for common attendance policy across the six districts but it's been the deep focus there the other has really been looking at kindergarten attendance because it ends up being the right predict it is it's the predictor um going forward so if you can really get kids learning and parents learning good School attendance behavior in kindergarten it ends up um carrying through your whole trajectory of attendance uh and suan want to speak to anymore um so the place where we have the most explicit Str iies is as dick referred to um in our high school graduation initiative um program school so that was a federal Grant it is a Federal grant so we're starting the third of the five years of that Grant um it focused on the qualifying schools that had a graduation rate that was at or higher than the states excuse me a dropout rate that was at or higher than the state's dropout rate at the time that was Marshall High School and Roosevelt High School and and um subsequently we were able to move the grant over to Franklin High School where a large number of former Marshall students attend so students in the feeder schools to those two high schools grades 6 through eight as well as all the high school students are um supported and impacted so it targets students identified as academic priority students um so it uses our own early warning system that we developed around these critical areas the same ones that um were referred to in the audit and it provides um mentoring support attendance um initiatives and then we are about to launch our third annual um uh come on back to school campaign and we invite the community to join us so on our our district website um you can go to um reconnect and our um so what we've done there the last two years is um send out community volunteers and District staff
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to on a Saturday um to knock on the doors of students who haven't returned in grades 9 through 12 and um invite them notify them and their families of what um how much we want them to continue with us to how to re-engage um what some options may be um try to find them a way to um use our resources to unpack whatever it was that's been in the way for them returning to school and get them back um so we've had high degree of success of students returning over 70% of the students who have returned as a result of those through our reconnection Center work and looping out to all of our schools including the high school graduation initiative Grant schools um over 70% have stayed a year later so um so we see really good um good results from the work that we're doing there so so again I guess I would just emphasize the reaching down and I love the part about Kinder starting a kindergarten and and uh going from there but I think that once you're in high school I'm happy to hear about the 70% that's wonderful um but I think it's harder to get those students to come back and to make them stay and to have them graduate so and I nobody disagrees I'm sure so yes thank you Mr Tracy you're welcome maybe a question before you get up and they have to come back uh the um so superintendent Smith in in your in your letter uh of responding um several things jump out at me but the the first two uh steps kind of next steps are uh basically saying hey it's more than just about the graduation rate it it's really about um making our kids prepared for Life After High School and whether that's in college or Community College or with the trades or with Community it that's what it's about um so that is I think really important that you put that in there uh I'm curious to know on in terms of these what the timeline and frankly maybe in on all these that we haven't covered what the timeline is because these are all important things and I think we need to know okay when's it going to happen and and so I didn't know whether I'm on these whether you two and person so really our next step is to um share this um with our high school Leaders with the rest of our um School District leaders and um to develop a work plan so that we really begin um you know so there are some research steps to implement there are some um uh we see an opportunity to do site visits and really gather additional information and um and then also to do practice sharing internally where we have um this you know where we're beating the odds within our own system so we have some schools that are um who are clearly leading Us in terms of um changing our outcomes more rapidly than the rest so um so the work of the high school action team our work with the parents Coalition and our um district and school-based leaders so so our next step really is to develop that work plan so like with the with the uh the college career ready Focus yes we don't have a a timeline for that yet uh so we do um so that's one piece that we were already in process with um relative to our just our larger 4 to 4020 goals so actually all of these that are listed in here are at some degree of in process right now and we could do something that lets you know here's the next step as as it relates to each one of these things here's what the timelines are that relate to each one of them which is kind of I think what you're looking for like the 40 4020 for us our next step is really looking at what's our own Baseline data and the entire state is trying to figure that one out right now um because we'll essentially set a milestone that goes beyond our current set of Milestones that is what happens after kids leave us um and how do we track what that is um and how many of our kids are actually going on to foury year how many are going on to two-year how many are getting but some of ours is knowing what's our Baseline data so like that one has kind of a data piece to it in terms of what's our North Star here um and and then we've got action teams that are already in motion and in and doing work but we can tell you what comes next for each one of those teams that looking for yeah okay yes we can do that I two more things I wanted to ask about um and one is for the superintendent and then one's for um dick the um superintendent one of the uh things that was highlighted in terms of what some of the other districts are doing is um either small school programs or small schools for uh students who are dealing with suspensions or expulsions
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and I know we've had that conversation in the past that it seems like a suspension or expulsion is the exact opposite of what you want to do for a child who's struggling um but I don't know that we've taken it farther than that and I'm curious if there's any as I'm seeing other districts doing that again I'd love to hear more about what success they're having with those programs um and whether that would be something we would consider at some point so yes we can put that on uh because part of what we've put on here is saying let's have teams be able to go and visit good um successful practices in other districts uh and we'll let you know when we set those up in case you're wanting to go along on any of those great that' be great and we actually do have a uh the desk program which is our own in school um suspension and expulsion program so we have an example of it uh and as you know our other successful practice has been restored of Justice which we've in the budget this year looked to expand the number of schools that are um are using that great practice so but yes we'll go visit other other districts which leads me into a question for you if you can give us some advice on this one of your recommendations is to conduct additional research and evaluation in order to obtain more complete understanding the impact of it ex existing supports for ADV students when you're a district that's doing so many different uh interventions and so many different supports at you know variety of levels prek through 12 um how how do you isolate one or two or three um and and get that information I mean I know sometimes you can do a control group and sometimes not do you have any advice for us on even how to go about that um uh it would seem to me that you'd want to um choose three or four MH that have the most um that are used most frequently that have the most students that are involved in it as opposed to a small number um so the greater number of students that participate in a particular intervention it might give you better results or you get data that might be more reliable um and I know there if you look at the number of kinds of interventions we do it would be Pages probably and some of them have small numbers but you'd want to pick those that have the larger numbers um uh I would probably uh want to pick those that may connect to some of the things that you feel most strongly about um that that attach the goals that you're trying to achieve those goals that are most important to you um those that have the most potential impact on your Milestones um other than that that's just off the top of my head see and I'd even say some of what we did during High School System design was try and identify where the successful practices were and last year was the first year of really implementing freshman cies I mean we had numbers of things we said okay here these are being successful in some schools can we replicate those across the system so we're a short way into trying to say can we get you know how do we do that across the whole that double blocking of classes using Avid as a strategy to get an onramp things we doing yeah but we did some that we then did replicate across the system or put across the entire system but we ear in implementation so and there's some practices that we use that have actually been shown in academic studies to be effective um so that might we wouldn't necessarily have to evaluate that this is an effective practice has been shown by a bunch of others um some of some real evaluation of is expense and it takes a long time and there's just so much you can do um so a real thorough evalu valuation with control groups probably would not be practical so I would also urge for practical evaluation rather than you know extensive yearlong studies so I will say the other thing we are doing as part of successful schools framework is looking at our own data and what schools are getting the results we're looking for so like the advanced Scholars Program at Franklin where we were getting really outstanding um success is a program we will probably look to replicate just because the kind of success we're getting in in the school that has implemented it most um deeply so like I think that and that's some of what we're doing across the whole system is where are we getting the outcomes we're looking for and how do we look at those practices and see if they're replicable the the academic priority system that we have is is a I can't say enough it's a noteworthy system it really is powerful yep it has really good information in it yep and it if it's used fully to the extent we can it's a very useful tool to see change and
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Improvement want I just add one other piece um about successful programs and that being um Career Technical education Benson has a very high graduation rate one of the um studies that you uh cite in your uh report has uh students saying that opportunities for real world learning to make the classroom more relevant 81% of students said that would be something that would have held them in school if they had had more of that so I think we need to really continue to think about what we're doing for our students in Career Technical education both at the high school level and again down into the uh middle schools I would just say that I think that all of this um also though is a testament to the Investments that we currently have in our Suns schools and our partnership with SEI in terms of long-term mentorship and academic coaching our step up after school tutoring and mentorship so so those are all places where we have really close alignment with these most um promising practices and where we have strong data demonstrating that they're having a big impact so so just as a small aside I was going to ask if the co-chairs or um dick if you have um sent a copy of this to the districts that you all talk to because I would think it would be really great for them to be able to read this as well I promised I would send it to them too good and will you send it to their school board members too I'd be happy to do please Mr Tracy thank you very much for this study um what I'm about to say doesn't reflect on you or the study necessarily but when I see these kinds of studies I have a lot of trouble with trying to figure out what we're trying to do we're building on a foundation that doesn't seem to want to exist and so we end up making these responses to errors that we've previously made without identifying those errors at least and thinking about them and working with them for instance uh 47% of the kids say their classes were not interesting well we we that we're in charge of those classes and they're not interesting and they're and one of the reasons they're not is because we keep moving in directions that don't make those classes interesting social psychology which isn't mentioned at all in here talks about the you want in order to have your employees do their best job you want a large amount of autonomy and trying to do the accountability business makes them do often a worse job instead of a better job that's a fairly solid uh social psychology maximum I guess uh so from my point of view what we want to do is create more autonomy for teachers and have them make more interesting classes and that comes down to what Pam talked about about the opportunities for Real World Learning and one of the things it seems to me that we haven't done and that wasn't addressed in here was we haven't as a district spilled out what we want to do educationally and I hope as we move along because that's something we're starting to look at I think what was that thing we talked about a couple days ago um where we're and I asked you where we did it and I had it wrong you said no that's in the future what was the name of that program the one about how we're going to look at our education itself what we're doing the visioning process yeah the visioning process well if we if we don't do that we can we're going to continue to do all these other things and in in response what for instance if you go back to the four I'll just take these section by section the the four research finds Why students drop out one Behavior well that would mean to me that we would make try to make sure if you tied that in with this idea where they talk about uh had too much Freedom that we would want to make sure our schools were solid behaviorally and we went to PBIS and and that's what we're having I think for me that's where I'm having trouble we go to PBIS which is a system it's a response we should have as a value that we have engaging classrooms where kids are actually engaged in the work and that should be our value and that's the value we should be communicating in order to build upon instead of going to a system that maybe might work or not but we don't have the value and I don't see that here the second one is uh school performance and you have low achiev achievement but achievement are you
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using the word achievement as a testing or achievement as classroom achievement or both hopefully it would be both but we don't we think almost because since you can't measure that classroom achievement very easily we have a tendency to move to the other but really the classroom itself the interesting and the kids wanting to do well in the classroom would seem to me to be a much more sensible approach none of that shows up in your recommendations nor in the super tenants recommendations that I can find then we talk about the poor ATT tenants well kids don't want to go if it's boring and Rotten School of course they don't want to go to school I can remember lots of kids I had in Middle School in Portland when I taught in the Middle School in the 1990s in Portland and no they didn't like school they're dropping out in middle school I guarantee you they weren't dropping out the door they used to say oh I'm going to drop out and I say well there's the door go down turn turn left go down the stairs and you're out and and they were always you know they would threaten to drop out but the point was really that they did not have we did not have interesting stuff if you go across the river to Vancouver and you did I noticed you didn't pick up Vancouver in your stuff but if you go across the to Vancouver it's unbelievable what they have in their middle schools if you go just out to David Douglas they have way more activities and things now we do some things where we T we have some nice things that go on uh the Sun school but we don't have the tie-in we don't have the marching band that has 70 kids involved in it and we don't have the plays going on and we don't have those things which we could begin to work in then we don't we don't have the sports stuff and we don't look at that we look at instead of laying out a foundation for good schools we have a tendency to look at uh the practices which have been successful someplace else we're looking at their little things instead of laying out this and and that b bothers me that we we don't talk about that because it has a huge effect on attendance uh and then the last one's a family background it's the same thing even if you have your schools work well you have to make you have to do those conditions that help kids come from the family background into the school and if they have a rough family background or have difficult things then you got to be able to work with them that's I really like the Hillsboro stuff I think that what they're doing out there seems to make a lot of sense to me it would make sense all the way to down very expensive I would assume and and pretty hard to do but we would have to shift things to do that instead of worrying about all testing testing testing say Common Core Common Core which is what the state is pushing Us in those directions we should be worrying about how's this kid doing and we have the early part of that we have the early warning system going but we not really doesn't appear to be falling through there as well as as well as we need to do do that and so for me that's that stuff's more important than uh what are they doing out at Clackamus they may be doing some nice things and I like borrowing those things but that's not we don't have the foundation and what we need to do I think to lay the foundation is to lay out what it is we really believe we want to do educationally we're not doing that now we took the the Common Core Curriculum K through three no no K through3 teachers involved in the entire thing and we bought it as a state and bought it as a district so we are now going to use a the standards that for our district that not one k through3 teacher was involved in and we didn't run them through the K through3 teachers in our district to ask them about it either and so of course we're going to have problems when we when we approach it that way and i' just like to see us move differ and looking at at superintendent Smith's recommendation I don't see what I'm talking about at all in here I see a lot of neat stuff but it's not what I'm talking about and I think we have a tendency to go that direction often and uh it doesn't make sense to me that that's the way we want to go I would say some things that we might want to do and you might suggest engagement in school so we actually engage the kids as opposed to saying we're supporting their un engagement because since they're not engaged we we're going to support the fact that they're not engaged as opposed to engaging them so our supports for middle school kids are supports build around academics not build around engaging them in school uh the curriculum itself we need to look at making it much more interesting than it is including things that like Pam talked about what happened to the shop and art we could put a lot of that stuff back in the middle school and the the connections with staff which are critical for kids the mentoring but are
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we education has a real problem with that right now it's hard for staff to get connected to kids because I mean because of the child molestation problems and stuff and and we have we need to look at that and see what can we do there to connect up better uh more help in transforming from home to school we need and the other one is we need kind of order more orderly classrooms and orderly schools and and so all those things I'd look at that at those things really way more than the other things necessarily though I don't have any problem with the other things and here's my question po Greg over there is just trying not to interrupt me uh the so what do you think of what I just said I only have a few seconds uh you said a lot uh and and I don't know if I have a frame of reference to answer any question at this point so um I'm I'm going to say that uh most of what you've talked about is a little bit out of the scope of this report not to say they weren't that's what I thatas but they were out of what I the objectives of this report so uh I don't have a lot of response to some of the comments because I I don't know the answers any other comments or questions i' just excited see the next steps and how we use this knowledge we've gained to implement it into our system uh I also think it's uh really important to note uh last spring we had the budget listening session for students at Roosevelt and a few of the positive things that you talked about like extracurriculars individualized support programs CTE and support in Middle School were all things that were mentioned at that student listening session so these aren't you know know things that are out of kids' minds they're definitely thinking about it a lot and so I think it's just thank you so much for reminding us about that I think is that the first time we had done yeah okay because that was just great so keep that no we did two last year though instead of just one sure uh just going on what Andrew said Benson works the Dropout rates low there and the reason in my opinion that it is is that those kids are engaged in what they're doing so if you can engage kids makes a huge difference great Mr Tracy thank you very much for being here thank you for the report as you said we'll get that up on our website it sounds like we'll be sending it back to the districts that you worked and I thank the districts for talking with us so that we could have some context yeah I think they're going to love to read this it's really interesting thank you very much thank you very much thank you I will I will just remind as Mr Tracy's leaving that Mr Tracy um is an independent contractor with the school District um specifically with the Board of Education he is not a PPS employee um he works on our behalf and he works at the schope and our um our Direction so thank you you're welcome moving on we're going to move on to the equity implementation Plan update tonight we're going to receive the progress report on our Equity implementation plan superintendent Smith can you introduce this item I will and I um am it's my pleasure to introduce lenzo po who's our chief Equity officer and Janine fakuda who is the project manager in the equity office good evening chair bow board member superintendent Smith lenzo po Chief Equity officer and partnership director uh the racio education Equity policy required the superintendent to semiannually update the progress of the equity plans to the board tonight we're presenting to you the update date on the 20123 annual plan in doing so we do want to highlight several areas of positive progress and where we are continuing to modify our plan so that we can get to the point of progress that we all desire excuse me we also want to highlight tonight two areas of important note of the work that the equity program has done for the district and really looking at how we utilized equity budgeting and we also want to highlight how the equity work is moving in our special air department and the kind of gains and outcomes they're seeing we also want to be mindful that while we only have a limited time for our update if there's a areas by which you really want to go deeper in the discussion around the plan we'll be happy to make time for that to occur so we do know and understand the time is limited tonight and we want to recognize that I also want to reiterate that the office of equity and partnership is charged
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with leading and supporting the district cultural change as we move to a culture of inclusivity and equity and we believe that that is carried out by policy by the practices and the Workforce Development The District undertakes in 2013 a couple of significant policy initiatives that were passed was the Contracting for equity which reflects the district's commitment to include mwsb in the work of the district in particular around their bond work and in June we passed our affirmative action policy that will again begin to show a level of transparency as we begin to move our Workforce to one that closely mirrors the populations that we serve and in fact bring us closer to the aspiration and goal of the state of Oregon's minority teachers act we have seen several significant practices some of which one of which the board and the central leadership that took training and use of the equity lens board members began to after training utilize the Lend as a way to do a cursory review and Analysis of those things that are Equitable or where inequities might exist and things that are being talked about and proposed and triggering a place where really might want to address those inequities and how we may be able to mitigate them we also as you will hear a little more later use the equity lens in budgeting which is one of the things that the board clearly said to us as a district last year you really wanted to see how we in fact we employing the equity lens and how we're budgeting again the number of the equ equity lens tools are utilized and how we are Contracting looking at Contracting with including our mwb S's and and the business District's business and in Workforce Development clearly looking at how we transform the work Force again to be to mirror the populations that we serve 48% of new building administrator hire in this past year were administrators of color 38% of our new hires were bilingual our central office Equity teams there have created 10 Central departments that have created Equity teams who have spent over 50 uh 50 training sessions where in fact the work and the leadership of central office have began to take the workep deeper and deeper into Central operations we have to align the work that we're doing around Equity with what is going on our schools so that we in fact have a culture that is Equitable across the district you have heard during the previous year from in cluster presentations how our buildings are successfully integrating Equity into their buildings you have heard of their successes as princip principles talked about the work they're doing around equity and how they're utilizing it you you've also heard of some of their challenges so you have that as a backdrop we are clearly excited about the direction of our work we recognize that there's still much to be done we also understand that when you're doing cultural change in organization that it is sometime messy it is some sometimes slow and it's sometime uneven but again we're excited about it and we want to present to you our annual plan so you'll get a feel for the progress we want you to hear from two areas whe the work is taken hold and then we'll open up for questions with that I like Janine Puda to walk you through the annual plan document that was submitted to you good evening so in your board packet you received a copy of our annual progress report which summarizes all of the year end progress towards a 2012 to 13 goals um for each of the 18 priority strategies that were identified in the 5-year Equity plan um each of the Departments identified specific actions to focus on for the the 2012 13 year and so progress is described you'll see in the it's the second to the last column um and is indicated by either green yellow or red where green indicates on track yellow indicates on track with considerations and red indicates behind schedule we are now in the process of creating the annual plan for the 20134 year um and will continue to monitor progress this coming year at the end of our presentation we'll respond to any questions you have but before that um I'd like to first turn it over to David Wine our Deputy of CFO and also then to Mary Pearson our director of special education who's going to tell you a little about a little bit about their Equity work this year show issues here um co-chair pal board members
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superintendent Smith um David we Deputy CFO and budget director so our um racial education Equity policy makes two references to differentiation of resources and um I think we've been we were challenged uh 15 months ago when we presented the budget for 20121 13 with folks asking us to do a better job of demonstrating how that differentiation of resources actually played out in practice in the budget so this year as we were working on the development of the budget for 20134 which I'm still struggling to call this year but it is this year um we did a couple of things um many of you will remember that when we're developing the budget we've got parallel streams of work going on we have the district Staffing team that's looking at the Staffing ratios and the Staffing um in schools and we have a another team that looks at what we're doing for more centrally allocated resources in the case of the district Staffing team what we did this year was early on in that process we had um folks trained in the use of the the use of the racial equity lenss and um and that informed the discussions that we had as part of that process and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in just a second and then on the other side where we were looking at the centrally allocated resources we um developed a process that we talked about when we were proposing and presenting the budget to you called the budget leadership team which was central office um leadership and we asked all of the budget holders to um prepare a budget submission that talked about the work that their groups did we asked them to take a look look at a hypothetical 5% budget reduction and specifically what we did in the context of equity we asked each of those uh submitters using a districtwide racial Equity lens please describe the impact of that 5% reduction on the service that you provide so when we came together as budget leadership team we were able to look at the impact of those services and a change in that funding level um on different racial groups um and we used that information to help inform the budget so how did that translate into any difference and any kind of differentiation of resources as far as the district Staffing team is concerned um you'll recall that in this year's budget we have an equity allocation where 8% of the budget is allocated based on either 4% is allocated based on socio economic status but what's new this year is 4% is allocated on a ratio that we called combined underserved which is a state defined ratio that includes the four historically underserved racial groups special education English language Learners and um free reduced lunch percentages so we we fundamentally changed that allocation formula to make race and other undeserved criteria a portion of how we allocated money to school Staffing well the office side I I should back up and say also during the budget development process we met a number of times as a um budget team with the Coalition of communities of color to outline what the budget process was going to be to review the forecast for um our revenue and our overall budget situation and so we had a continuing dialogue with that group and the organizations they represent so on the STA on the school Staffing side it was the Staffing formula change that I mentioned and again on the on the century allocated resources there were a number of things that the superintendent referenced in the budget message that were a direct reflection of the conversations that were provoked by that Equity lens question so in no particular order um the we included funding for uh policy development work and to support the affirmative action policy when we were struggling to deal with reduction in federal funding in title one we ensured the general fund funded uh a a staff program that supports young men of color in the Roosevelt cluster we made sure that there was funding to support the alignment of the enrollment transfer policy with the district's racial education Equity policy in response to the over representation and ex exclusion in student discipline we contracted for we provided funds for a contract for a third party hearings officer to calibrate for
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consistency we changed the way that we uh administer tag resources to ensure Equity of access across schools we added some money to expand the restorative justice investment that you heard about and we maintained our investment in Central Family engagement staff and capacity to contract with culturally specific community- based organizations so those changes were a direct reflection of that Equity work um in the budget and uh I think the fact that as part of the budget process we heard public testimony from the Coalition is a reflection of at least a change in the nature of that relationship as well okay can I get the good evening board members and superintendent Smith I'm um we're very excited to be here and especially with um celebrating some success in the special education department and I wanted to start by just saying although we are headed in a trajectory that is positive that we're really happy about we are by no means there yet but um it's good to be here celebrating so I wanted to start with um our mission statement we started um the beginning of last year building on the great work that the previous director Robert Ford did um we worked as a team and did some vetting with our community and parent par and came up with a I think a very um strong mission statement that um we are using to drive and be the foundation of our work and this is something that we revisit in in everything that we do uh the next thing that we did was we um made a very conscious effort to align our work and our practices in um with the rest of the district and with the Strategic framework of the rest of the district so really pulling out in those um individual um areas what that means for kids with special needs um we we also started out with um really making a certed effort to um address some of these things through that uh strategic framework and through our mission statement so some of the work that we did this year is we started um sort of an equity PLC with our school psychologists our early childhood team who does initial eligibilities for special education for young children birth to five our autism Specialists osis um and really um exploring some of the bias the cultural bias around initial identification of um special education we also did uh a roll out the beginning roll out of our um patterns of strengths and weaknesses which is a way of identifying students with learning disabilities that really looks at data and having to demonstrate um you know appropriate instruction um rather than looking at a deficit model and along with that was looking at um really um purchasing and adopting some culturally relevant assessment tools and making sure that we were you know um using an equity lens when looking at that and looking at language development you know ESL and things like that um the other thing that we started this last year is um working collaboratively with principles to look at their building data and um develop building support plans so our program administrators having uh a plan that they've developed with a principle around what kind of support they would like to see in their building in order to move some of these issues forward so looking at their um initial eligibilities and discipline data and if they're you know really really making a concerted effort to Target certain certain things um we also have What's called the um intervention resource team which has been in um it's actually been a a process that we've used for the last couple of years but we really uh work to make that process a little more collaborative this year but that is essentially if somebody if a team wants to move a child to a more restrictive setting so to a f Focus class or a special school they um come to this team and they present um data and we talk together about you know is there any other supports that we can put in place or is there any other way we can support the team to keep the student in a less restrictive setting but what this has done is it's really um sort of increased the uh the rigor of the interventions and the data that they're coming to this team to present and it's and it's really um developed into much more of a collaborative process between our department our the supports that we have and
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buildings um the other thing that we're we started rolling out last year is standards based IEPs so writing our IEPs that are aligned with the common core and state standards um and this is a new thing for our special ed staff so last year we laid down the the framework for that and um that will continue to roll out fully will be fully out this school year um the other thing we we actually have started our program administrators really um creating a culture of data so using our administrative meetings to look at data and really develop um professional learning communities around that um we have also done the same thing with our behavior intervention class rooms and have seen some tremendous shift in um the amount of time that kids actually spend spend in those classrooms so we have C several celebrations across the district where um uh kids that are actually in the behavior Focus classrooms are getting the majority of their support in a gen class with the support of the behavior classroom so they're really um having more access to core instruction and it's this was a very when when you start putting um a light on something and you start celebrating it just starts to snowball and that's definitely what has happened there um I think the other thing that we're we're making a a huge effort in engaging our parent community and our um just the the larger Community um so we've done a lot of work with our parent advisory group last year and we'll continue to do that and reaching more out to other community organizations um so these are just some of the data points that we're here to celebrate um in looking at new special education eligibilities we want to decrease that especially in um our ESL population and making sure that we're identifying kids that truly have a disability and not students that have an that are learning another language so we've seen a decrease um slight increase or decrease in Asian students slight um decrease in our African-American population and Native American populations I think another um place that we're celebrating is um Federal placement so looking at the percentage of time that students are actually removed from core instruction and um so this area that we're looking at is students who spend 80% of their day or more in core instruction instead of in a special education classroom um and we've seen some real movement there as well um in those ethnic groups um probably the biggest celebration is our discipline data um we're very happy about this we were um we we were um T we were selected for a significant disproportionality for the last couple of years and we are no longer selected for significant disproportionality in um it was specifically around our African-American population um but we're seeing movement across the board as far as and what this is looking at is students who were removed for 10 or more days in a school year students with disabilities that are 10 or more days so if you look at our African-American population went from 44 students to 16 which is pretty amazing um we've seen decreases also you know big decreases with our white population and um I think our Native American population is is a good celebration there too so um yep and that was it thank you thank you and uh we're available to answer any questions you might have either from the document or if there's areas of which around the equity work that you would like to go deeper we'll entertain that and figure out how to make sure that we get that to you a lot of nice stuff here in your in this document than thank you uh particularly around adults I'm I'm curious of of the directions that we going for kids in this in the equity stuff I mean as a distri because I'm new to this so have we laid out what's the long range plan for dealing with actually getting things down into the classroom I mean like uh cultural curriculum things stuff like that that's my first question well first do we have a plan for that well we're looking at how you begin to develop what becomes
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students specific curriculum that can be taught into schools there are some cooperations with PSU and others who are teaching culturally relevant curriculum our school strategy really is culturally relevant strategies around teaching so that's about kids in school our whole uh courageous conversation work really is about preparing adults to help kids in school in order to do that we believe you have to take the entire District under cultural transformation all but one thing in mind and that's about helping kids and moving it all down to the classroom so what about are we do we are we teaching children to not be racist well I don't think I mean are we teaching children about cultural their cultural history say you know black history I couldt tell around the specific curriculum maybe SW could do that but my hope would be that at at some point we are really talking to kids about cultural history probably take that as a no yeah I wouldn't take it as a no take it as that I don't have the specifics on that but I would hope that we are so have that specific the specifics on that so I will say like as lenzo just said part of what we're doing is really looking at impacting um the culture impacting the culture of adults and how we work with kidss so that is the main I don't any however we have had like Franklin High School has a class that um has taken it to students and actually leadership students who are are deeply in the work uh I know elementary schools that actually are doing the courageous conversations and that's going to be more schoolto school based on um individual teachers development of of the curriculum and taking it to students so our emphasis at this point as a whole district is about the adults um and the ways in which we work with kids and the ways in which like as you just saw with special education how are we intentionally serving every single one of our students so that is the emphasis of this at this point but yes it's it is reaching students in terms of curricular focus in some in some places some areas the U that's so that's about what I thought uh the elll stuff is a little different you got the kids from Somalia say uh how does that how does that play into the Equity work that we're doing in other words uh if you have a kid from Somalia are we dealing with teachers and teaching them how to deal with culturally relevant things for various different cultural groups throughout the school district in other words the kids from uh I don't know go from the Ukraine even though they've been around for a long time the Ukraine but I mean do we have any program prrams that are directed at that part of the equity uh stuff I'm not aware of that level of specificity that's but we do however engage in with our Community Partners a number who from those ethnic communities to help integrate their support and assistance as we help kids through their culturation and understanding their culture and particularly in your transition to this country could you give me one example of that uh we work with ero who works with our African African Refugee Community who supports Us in schools and making sure parents are connected kids are beginning to interact from a cultural Paradigm that's important to them do we do we Central do we have that centralized say if you have kids in five different schools do we somehow work with that group to deal with all the kids in those different schools because this is real this is real I want to kind of go this direction in the next year is we do administer essential contracts we're asking for our providers to work with broad-based communities those are referred in partnership with a family engagement and in partnership with schools and all our partners so to say we have one specific place I'm sure in some cases that's how they deliver the service our role is to make that available in two Multicultural areas and that's what we do yeah so there's nothing really that goes directly out to teachers that says okay this kids from how we're going to get kids from Molly probably down the line here we don't have things that go out and say if you if you got a kid from Molly this is some cultural relevant information to help you deal with these children in the CL what we do is to work to make sure that the information in our schools they have the information in our schools of what our contract providers provide so if they have a particular need they would know how to access and connect those students to that particular service so I'm wondering at this point if if there's a little bit of a misunderstanding of what this work is about um it it's not us I I don't
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understand this work to be now we're going to be culturally relevant and that means Latino kids are going to learn about Latino culture that might be a part of it but it's reflecting on our institutional and or professional biases that like I anybody who's had kids I think can look at this and say you know I'm going to use this example with my kid and then you realize that they don't have a context um for that example that you were just about to do because they're not old enough and so when I hear about teachers reflecting on this or our departments reflecting on it it's about what are the things what are the assumptions we make that somebody would understand or um walk into or presume that might actually wind up putting us in Cross crosshairs of of actually serving a student or a family in in a in the right way I think that's kind of so it's not whether the students from Mali or you've used examples of Syria or China or wherever they come from it's about how do we ensure our our assumptions our um racial background our ethnicity our assumptions don't get in the way of us effectively working with that student could I ask a question of the of the special ed director or you want to wait thank you on the where the numbers dropped on on the kids who were expelled those are explosions right mhm what that's uh suspensions for more than 10 days so it could be oh suspensions for more than 10 days okay great that's right uh what what did we do differently that cause that do you think um Ian aiet steps we took I think um I think the equity work and the continued focus on the equity work is making people more aware so more aware of um how maybe a different a student from a different background or racial background might present differently in a classroom so I believe that teachers are adjusting their instruction and the way that they interact or support students so I think part of it is just the continued uh focus on that and and it's it's starting to take hold and so people are are doing things differently um I think there's been uh sort of a paradigm shift in the district around um students and uh it's more about students and so how can I as a teacher change what I'm doing to meet the needs of my students um and I think that building administrators are driving that message and so it's it's slowly starting to sort of take hold so I I really I really believe that that's part of it um there was also part of this uh a sanction so we had to divert 15% of our um idea budget to prevention so there was um that was given to Student Services by way of um Positive Behavior Support um toses or specialist Behavior Specialists so that work was being done in the front end so teaching buildings and teachers the strategies that they need to create more of a student focused Positive Behavior Support Focus so thank you let's hope that just add on too I mean I just the sense that special ed and English language learning Department both are more at the literally at the table you know and and it's no longer we're trying to change the culture from other those kids over there are someone else responsible to this is all kids are all of our kids and that also gets back to kind of the core um point of the equity work of that every adult in the district owns and believes in every child so I mean that's really that's really where we're we're headed and so it's just so encouraging to see the progress that you're making and kind of the both the the spotlight on where we're falling short but also really um some significant gains so it's exciting and I would say just to the the part you know OTL as a group working together is is huge I mean we can't take credit it's not like we're doing this in a vacuum I think that we're really working together to make this happen so thank you very um quick question um lenzo I think you mentioned that of the and and Sean I might this might be a question for you uh of the principles that we've hired new for next year for this year um 48% are um principles of color and 30% of 38% of those are bilingual that's amazing it's really exciting new high administrators so
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that's both principles and assistant principles and vice principl but all of our building administrators yeah those were that was the amazing work and my question and I don't know if we have it yet is whether we have a figure for our teachers and for classified new teachers and new classified um and we if we have those kind of numbers and if we would see some similar dataw we don't you have you have the substitute pool data in here like we realized at an earlier moment in time that I'm we end up hiring 40% of our of teachers out of our substitute pool and we've increased steadily every year the number of substitutes who are substitutes of color or bilingual which is great Sean Murray good evening board members we're still in the process of hiring so we still are collecting that information so we don't have a final count yet as far as with our teachers because it's clearly a focus with hiring teachers and other staff as well correct great that's exciting I look forward to hearing that actually I'm going to tell you this because the substitute pool um 19% were teachers of color which was an increase of 7% um more diversity in this year's subpool than last year's subpool and then we have a cohort of 55 teachers who are working for their um esol endorsement this year was one of our goals was really to increase the number of teachers who had the um esol endorsement so we've got measures on a number of fronts that are moving just in general the hiring piece was just so exciting really teachers project and say we did it say they nine of 10 and yes of the Portland teacher project gra uh graduates this year we hired nine of the 10 graduates with early letter so I'm just going to say that was our other attempt was doing um early letters of intent yep that's doing a tremendous job doing a tremendous job team effort but when you see that kind of focus and attention can drive result results is exciting I'll just call out I mean there's I mean so many I guess overall this I really appreciate and this is a very large document but it's really great I really appreciate the level the level of of detail that's in here so it both you know kind of moves you through without overwhelming you with data but really is down to the level of who is the lead staff person who owns this and what progress there's a few places where I would have liked to have seen a little more specificity and the data um probably and I know that this is on our um year priority work plan so that we'll be hearing again we'll probably be doing more in depth um uh deep Dives on some of these pieces also the discipline in particular waiting to see where we are with that so that's that's great but just in general just you can kind of feel through reading this just how as you were saying that it's getting embedded in our culture throughout the district um and while there obviously still is a lot of that needs to happen that just the feeling of momentum is really palpable just in reading this this document so it's really really appreciate that um things like the tag identification although sadly for all you know all our tag students I wish we had the resources to provide them with the but but to not to not um to reduce the disproportionality for the identification is is great work um and there's also a number of pieces in here in addition to um maybe just a few more data points being add added where um there's really I mean it gets back to this the piece we always come to the Fidelity of implementation so the shelter and instruction how are we making sure that that's it's being done effectively um and so on and so forth The Parent Academy what's the feedback we're getting from the parents who participate all those pieces and I know that going into next year's budgeting process again with an equity lens we'll be wanting to hear about the um the effectiveness we'll take a deeper look for you and see what we can get yeah but again just um to everybody and the entire District just really appreciate the sustained effort and the great work that's going on and I know I share this with my colleagues in the district how important it is that you as a board has really assumed the leadership role it it truly makes a difference when the community and the district see that the leadership at all levels of this district is supportive of the work and that's Pro uh moving the work and the feeling in the district really is one of this is all of our work we know we haven't gotten it we cautious about tooting our horns right but there are places where it really feels good we're seeing some results places where we know we got a lot of work to do and people are rolling up to sleep to do their work but thank you too yeah and just for me personally you know having two years left on the board it's so vital to me that we this that this initiative this work gets embedded truly in the district that is isn't just a passing thing um so figuring out ways that we can make sure that this is sustainable and and permanent um as boards come and go is really really important Yeah question relates to the the audit
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these other districts that um that that we looked at in terms of performance um do they have a program like this are they are they doing things different than than we are in in this regard or are we leading the charge and I can't speak to all of them I know the Seattle school district is doing an equity initiative come down and talk to us theyve visited us I know a number of the state schools that are part of our uh State Network are doing this kind of work uh so a number of them yes they are involved in this kind of work yes I I just had a couple of questions some of it's just um a request again when you come back for for data there are a couple of times where we we reference year end intended outcomes in relative rates but then when we see progress they're in percentages of subgroups or something and that it just makes it hard to know where we're at um there are a couple of um places where um Baseline metrics are left empty um that even if they're not technically September 2012 because we didn't have them right at some point it' be helpful to have Baseline metrics okay and then there was one place where I just I was a little confused that on um and this might be really more specific than to jump into but on page nine um in our September progress we talk about um how we're seeing anecdotal feedback from participants showing positive impact on expulsion discipline but previously on page so just in case you wonder if we read all the stuff you give us no I have no doubt about that previously on page six when we look at September 20133 progress we indicated that we're disappointed because the relative or we're making better improvements with students of students who are white than we are with um the students of color and so those seem contradictor contradicting messages to me but I'm maybe I'm not understanding something I think on on page nine that comment is uh talking specifically at sort of different schools that are showing specific results versus the comments on page six are more of a systemwide and we I think in specifically around the expulsion discipline I think we're coming back next month to do a in-depth report and we can clarify so where we've invested in making we're making progress there fo systemwide we're still struggling and the last question I had was there there's a data point in here that talks a little bit about um ESL student enrollment in dual language program um represents at K level 50% native language speakers um it's on page four teaching and learning PRI priority strategy for um and I was curious um if I'm assuming we're taking that as a systemwide as a districtwide and I'd be curious if we if you um ever pull that out school by school what it reminds me of is a little bit of attendance data where your average daily attendance is fantastic but some schools are really good and some schools are really struggling with that do we have that data are we going we do have that we could sh interest you know whether or not that seems to be the case at some there is some difference but it it depends on the type of program because we have different dual language programs in the system um and I think that they came to you with that um about six months ago explaining the differences in programming but yes there they are at different levels and the goal what made me think about it is that I knew some schools seem to be under enrolled in Native and I just want to make sure we don't right we don't want to lose that so other questions thoughts and actually I just wanted to appreciate lenzo's leadership and Janine as the assistant director for her um perseverance in helping us all learn to use a tool like this because as you no this is a really different behavior for this organization and just really um because Janine and this team is really working on rolling up data and metrics from numbers of departments who are really trying to articulate what is the thing that's really going to is the thing that is the right thing to be measuring and then figuring out how we're measuring it appropriately so um this very streamlined document is actually a tremendous amount of fine-tuning to get to what we've got at this point and it's really us learning how to do a five-year plan that means something um and where we really can watch our progress so I just want to say thank you to both of you for your work on making this happen indeed thank you very much thank you we're going to now move on to our educational specifications facilities Vision draft resolution discussion our office of school modernization has begun a process to Envision the future of Education facilities and develop educational standards and specifications
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for all district school buildings superintendent Smith can you provide us a little more I can I will introduce Paul Cathcart who will introduce um our guests to present uh our visioning report and thank you to everybody who's here to join in the presentation good evening chair bile directors superintendent Smith my name is Paul Cathcart I'm a project manager of so's and asset management it's good to be here this evening um find my presentation this evening I'm here this evening to uh give you a presentation of the education facilities Vision developed as part of the educational specifications project that's been ongoing since earlier this year uh we will be back before you on September 11th U for your consideration of a resolution to adopt the vision documents we're just pres I don't want to interrupt but that meeting has been moved to September 9th okay I think we'll be back on September 9th thanks for the clarification joining me this evening as the consultant team of John weeks partner with da IBI group Architects and Nancy Hamilton of Nancy Hamilton Consulting um who've helped us put together uh this process and have um done great work in pulling together the vision process and working with constituents in the development of specifications da is a local architectural firm specializing in K12 schools and uh has a portfolio around the world so they do local work and schools um all over the the world Nancy's a longtime School advocate in the background in local and state governments and she some of you may remember and shared our long range facility um planning process last year so John and N are going to do the bulk of the presenting this evening and uh but I want to give you a quick overview of the process that we've all been privileged to be a part of this spring as we listen to a variety of groups and organizations and individuals and their desires for the future of our schools and buildings and the development of the vision that will talk about tonight and I think I can speak for everybody who's been part of this project and everybody who's been involved in the conversations that we're thankful to the board for the opportunity to have these conversations it's U been really interesting work and meaningful work so before I give you a quick overview right on the right is the en vision statement that's found on page one of the vision document I just want to go through this quickly I think it summarizes um a lot that we've heard in the last few months so Portland Public Schools seeks to be the best Urban School District in this country in the 21st Century Learning takes place everywhere all the time and buildings play a critical supporting role ensuring all of our students emerg as lifelong Learners ready for the world that awaits them we seek to create learning environments that nurture Inspire and challenge all students regardless of raceing or class we aspire to provide safe healthy accessible School environments Foster productive relationships for all children families staff and Community Partners so let me give you a little background on the project overall the development of educational specifications or another term we've used as building design characteristics was a future step identifying the long range facilities plan so and education specifications are a set of guidelines that establish the way school buildings support programs and curriculum and established Baseline facilities standards across the district so as specific School sites approach significant modernization as we're looking at with a couple of our high schools and foban school building design criteria are tailored through a master planning process to suit individual school program and Community through through staff student and Community engagement with design professional so we're engaging the master planning work at Roosevelt and Franklin right now and we're working uh with these uh specifications in this Vision to influence um that Master planning
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process so we've approached this in a couple phases uh this spring we engage in the en visioning process which is to guide the future design of District school buildings and we're currently in the process of working with teachers principles students and the development of educational specifications that'll be used by those design teams to undertake Renovations in school buildings and so that's work has been ongoing this summer and this fall and we hope to be back um next month to give you an update on those specifications and and get into some of those designs so that being said I'm going to turn it over to John weeks and and John and Nancy will kind of go through the process that we've undertaken the last couple months and I will sit here and advance the slides so thank you Paul um I think what we would like to do is explain the process that has resulted in the document that's sitting in front of you this is a summary uh that the way we'll explain it to you will be in summary form there's lots more detail to it and if you have questions about uh the detail of it please feel free to ask at the end as we go along so the visioning process started in March of this year um we wanted to build on the work that have completed to date by the school district in the previous years that led up to the successful Capital Bond C uh Capital Bond passing we did not want to revisit that which had taken place but rather build on top of reinforce and do a deeper dive into exactly what what that all meant most importantly we wanted to engage communities in Portland that generally don't have a voice with Portland so while the work that had taken place in advance of the the bond had a lot of The Usual Suspects was a term we we heard a lot we wanted to engage those that may may not have had a chance to say or to provide input but are your friends and are your observers and are your PE are the people in the Portland Community who want to participate and and provide that which um we were looking for and so we began by creating a list of Community Partners we call them Community conversations um that was augmented by the executive advisory committee which was formed to got provide us guidance as we went along um 20 to 30 citizens from across Portland and we wanted to in fact complement the last five years as I said earlier in all we had about 16 Community conversations those were lasting anywhere from 2 to four hours a piece uh there was more than 360 participants and there was approximately 200 participants in an online survey that we use at the end to check to see if what we were doing was okay to give you a sense of who they are to my right and to your left is a list of the people that were involved um we we were very grateful for the people that came to the table and we asked that they provide the conveners they be the conveners of the group so we didn't we didn't look to um edit or cherry-pick those that would come it was more important to have a have the group be the convenor and to bring the people to this table to our table to the table of visioning process those who had were thoughtful had something to say as it related to the development of facilities in Portland Public Schools as you go forward had ideas that had not been heard or had been heard but could have been rounded out and had a perspective from from their Community their communities of color or their communities of expertise or in some cases their communities of business and knowledge all of that came together in ways that um were unique we believe and the outcomes were actually quite powerful to that degree we had a series of things we wanted to make sure happen our interest was to find way to ask them if we are moving forward if Portland Public Schools is moving forward what is it that we need to be aware of to create meaningful learning environments for our students and for the teachers that teach there and the communities and the neighbors that use our schools the second way is how do we effectively Forge relationships with the neighbor neighborhoods and the communities in which our schools reside and what is it that schools can provide school facilities can provide and what is about the programs that we might think about in order to ensure that as as we go forward our schools become powerful centers of the communities in which they reside and last we wanted to ensure that we had places we wanted to
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understand from their perspective what does it mean to be S safe and what does it mean to be healthy and what is an accessible School environment regardless of who you are and what you are your disabilities or your strengths and most important we wanted to know how that works for all children and all families and the staff that work with within the schools itself those are the challenges we brought in each of the community conversations and thousands of comments were collected as we went along good evening um my name is Nancy Hamilton thank you for having us here tonight this has been a very exciting process for all of us um as John has suggested we really um were inspired by the feedback we got AC across a very diverse um array of communities that we met with during the course of this time and many of you um here tonight were part of one or more of those conversations as well um and Andrew sat on our executive advisory committee before his um tenure beginning here on the board so thank you uh in particular for that and um so as you'll see through uh the next few slides we've just sort of highlighted certain groups different people in in one way different people had different things to say but um the most interesting intriguing outcome of all of these conversations was how much we have in common as opposed to how much we differ and that was um it was hopeful to hear that as we went through we weren't we didn't come to the end of this process and go uh oh we've got this bifurcated series of communities who don't see things the same way um and so what I'll do is just give you a few highlights from various conversations we had high school students were interesting and and perhaps the most one of the most important conversations we had on the one hand you know they wanted to remind us that the food sucks you know got to do something about cafeteria food um they wanted more ubiquitous Wi-Fi they didn't have enough room they wanted more places to gather as um kids in groups so that they could just hang out have it be more of a welcoming place during non-school hours um but the other thing they said that was very important we felt from a facili perspective was that schools are what they're looking for after school requires a different relevant learning environment today than has historically been available to them they want real world learning environments everything from Career Technical education to um more opportunities to work directly with business community and the various sectors out in the public where they're going to eventually be um to director C comment earlier um we want to be looking at lifelong Learners and how do we create opportunities that that connect those dots for them that was a big deal to students um it was also a big deal to teachers uh teachers in partic oops sorry I'm in the wrong order um I can talk about the futurists the futurist group we met with was probably the most fascinating in that I mean we had a guy who's building a do-it-yourself space suit for Mars we had people who are thinking so far beyond today that um their their mindset is is um important to hear because they really are where our students are going to be in 20 years and they're already there on the bleeding edge of some of this work um and and probably the most important message we heard from them was change happens more and more quickly as we move forward learning happens all the time everywhere and schools have to be the centerpiece for that during these first years in people's lives and you can't keep doing things the way you've done them because the world that all of these young people are about to inherit is going to be operating on a very very different scale and um and we've got to play catchup and they were very excited though about how we can you know sort of the the state of our buildings today is so far behind that it's actually kind of good news because we aren't we don't have to try to figure it out around the edges we have this moment this perfect storm at this incredible time of learning and future thinking where we can actually take these schools and really Leap Frog over today's world and move to tomorrows world so um systems thinking lifelong learning change all the time teaching and learning happening everywhere and how can buildings be part of that uh it was a very inspiring conversation it was pretty heady in some ways but it was was interesting um we also met with teachers and teachers were uh an interesting group um to talk to because on the one hand they along with students are the people in these
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buildings every day and they had some very specific tactical on the ground desires and needs and concerns so it's storage and you know um testing capacity and better technology and bigger classrooms and like that but they also talked quite in a quite inspired way about um all the work that's been happening in this District over the last several years and feeling a real sense of of movement and that the the capital bond has created sort of some energy that is um unusual because we're a district that is often having a conversation about resour resource constraints and for this moment we're saying you know what we we actually can do something here um and teachers were very very excited about that they want flexible learning space a lot more focus on teaching and learning moving forward as you all know is around this um broad range of individualized learning one-on-one and then broader group learning multi-disciplinary learning multi-grade learning um and getting out of that sort of historical Silo teaching learning um approach and and needing buildings to be more flexible and breathe with that um the other I'm trying to remember the parents obviously um had a lot to say we we always do wearing my parent hat um these are these are these folks kids um the interesting thing about the parent groups we spoke to is how diverse the groups were but how aligned the message was so we had a migrant parent association meeting all in Spanish um and I speak some Spanish it was really fun to have a chance to have a conversation in a language other than English with parents who are here with their kids in a it's um they're very hopeful for their kids' future and listening to that on the ground for kids was very exciting um Karina Ruiz who works with daa is um her first language is Spanish and she helped lead this um and it was just a very exciting day we then met with special education parents we met with the black parent initiative we met with the Latino Network which was comprised of not just parents but other folks in the Latino Community which is as we know you know the single largest growing Community here and how do we ensure that we're supporting culturally relevant culturally sensitive thinking as we move forward um and the special ed Community was pretty interesting and particular because so much learning with children with special needs is individualized already and when you look at Future teaching and learning models it's more and more of that and so interestingly the special ed Community wasn't saying we want this we want that they were saying let us show you how we're doing successful work and how we can mainstream some of it and it was a very generous thoughtful inspired conversation from the special ed community in particular um I think that generally there were a couple of key um themes that were ubiquitous uh one was that folks wanted schools to be more inviting more welcoming uh listening earlier this evening to some of the conversations and director bule your comment about cultural sensitivities um we have a very diverse community that goes to our schools and finding ways to make that feel inviting the minute you are near the building um and having culturally sensitive and relevant books in the libraries murals on the walls opportunities to teach and learn all day long throughout the building um we also heard a lot about safety and there was um a pretty broad range of perspective on that I think if there was one issue where we heard a variety of of solutions to making sure that we're safe it was on the safety issue some people felt it was important to have everyone know each other and that creates safety others wanted cameras and swipe cards and so that's going to be a a big issue from a new building perspective that the district is going to be challenged with and we got a lot of really important information that we hope that you weave into those decisions at the building level um people wanted the buildings to be more healthy uh and that stemmed from food and what people ate but also around light and air and that was a comment we heard everywhere no matter who we spoke to light is important air is important um people are healthier that way and and you all know the absentee numbers around teacher absenteeism from asthma and other air related issues that impact not just achievement but also um um your bottom line operations costs because people are not healthy and so that's a very big deal um we the I think the biggest um takeaway from this and having
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toiled in a lot of this work for many years as as many of you have is that um people said to us we're really excited we're really feeling heard this is kind of cool we have this moment where we're going to kind of start doing things differently and and the stakes are really high but the opportunity is huge and um people felt heard they felt acknowledged they're um they're very concerned that this is not a oneandone conversation and the district has made a steadfast commitment to continue this dialogue as the work evolves this is going to continue to happen through the dags and through other community um engagement opportunities moving forward and um I would implore you to to hold true to that because the community is really excited about continuing this conversation and they have really cool stuff to talk about and um I think the final comment I would make as you all know only 20% of of the folks in Portland Public School District um geographically actually have kids in our schools and the other 80% uh live here too and no matter who we spoke with everyone agrees that schools are Center of community they're a vital part of a strong and thriving healthy neighborhood and uh there's a great deal of excitement about what this might might accomplish for us for the Long Haul and um we're excited to see what happens next it's been a really incredible opportunity for me and for uh and for all of us and Paul I want to do a hat tip to Paul cathart who is a quiet thoughtful steadfast uh staff person you have a gem in him so please remember that he might be quiet but he's a a really hard worker who's got his eye on the ball so he made our job a lot easier thank you you'll be back in a minute so so I'd like to explain or I'd like to what Nancy talked about was um the the three months from March till May in which we were two three times a week dealing with people I I don't mean to cut you short but can we do we have about five more minutes yep okay that'd be great perfect so at the end of May we had we brought everybody back together all those all of those groups or representatives of those groups to the Rose Garden for a half day Summit and the purpose was to test to see if in fact what we had heard and how we heard it was proper represented and we did that in two ways one is we asked a series of critical questions of them those questions and and those questions were developed actually by the people who were in the conversations not us so they asked things of each other about if we if schools could tap everyone as a resource for learning your for your wait what if schools could tap everyone as a resource for your child's learning are we ready for Change and are we ready to do the heavy and hard work are we ready to redesign our schools and make them vibrant and and wonderful places we tested that through a series of uh two ways one is through a conversation with them in which they could report out and two electronically we asked them um to look at and hear what we had heard and to weigh in if in fact it was correct just by using an electronic voting machine and everybody in the room was individually had a chance to vote and and and surprisingly I thought for ourselves the lowest the lowest was 70% usually we were hanging between 75 and 80% of everybody in the room saying yeah you nailed it that's exactly what we were talking about that's exactly what we were looking for and that is exactly what we want you to carry forward those things were uh cataloged again they were put forward in the document that you have and they are in four categories one is about teaching and learning and you and please read what that would be the other one is about the learning environment itself and how critically important it is that a learning environment does what is necessary today and in the future for teaching and learning to thrive the third has to do with the communities and our schools and what that really means and there's not only a framing statement that that is in your document but a series of guiding principles on underneath that to help better flush that out and last was this whole idea of we call facility support but you have to whatever has to happen here has to be sustainable not only in the green way but in the operating budget way that whatever emerges and how it emerges it's really important that it lasts and so the careful attention needs to take place to that so that as you go forward and do the heavy and hard work of Designing through the lens of the of this vision statement you accomplished that which which was all tested again in an online survey and we had 200 some odd responses and that was again confirmed
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so all of that was brought together and given or Consolidated written and it's in front of you today I know we're under a time crunch so I'll just uh close with the notion that this has been exciting work the community has some high hopes for what next and and people are sitting at the edge of their seats now that the um work has been allocated for the Franklin and Roosevelt projects and the Fabian project is now on the street and rfps are going to start coming in and people are leaning in and looking and excited and want to help and uh we look forward to opportunities to create more Community engagement on this thank you any questions comments sure thank you first of all for the presentation of this information it's really exciting um I was glad to see in your presentation that you did a conversation with teachers because when I looked in this um earlier today um when I look at the executive advisory committee members and um your list of who you had Community conversations with and even the summary of the conversations I didn't see that group in there so I don't know if it was just an oversight or not but they probably identified more specifically let me clarify that we had teachers in a variety of groups but not teachers specifically and the second phase of the project the educational specifications we've uh had meetings with high school teachers and Ka teachers and those meetings are ongoing getting into more specifics that are bridging kind of the vision discussion into the uh more specific layout and design of spaces so the visioning the community conversations we've had teachers um as part of those conversations but not a specific conversation ations with teachers not exclusively teachers in a real because I know I saw um you had administrators in one group and administrators of color and so I just want to make sure that voice was in there so it sounds like it's in there not as a standalone but correct grew out and that those are the conversations you're having now right invite them as a group what's up did we invite them as a group we did yes yes and so they chose not to participate is that that's correct understanding oh okay that okay um so as I'm as I'm looking at your vision statement um in some ways it's wonderful and in some ways there's a couple of pieces that I feel like are missing and I'm trying to understand when we as a board have an opportunity rather than just voting yes or no do we have an opportunity to impact this still yes okay is this our time this is our moment um there's um there's three things in terms of the vision statement that I think are important and I'm not sure if they're in here strongly enough uh one is that we want these to be environmentally friendly sustainable buildings and again it's it's in there in different places but it's not in the vision statement which is I think what you were actually going to be asked to adopt right um and the other another one would be um that we want our buildings to ultimately reduce our operational facilities cost so we can put more money in the classroom and at least that's something during the campaign that we talked about quite a bit that we want the systems to function in such a way in terms of Energy Efficiency water savings all of that that ultimately the costs of our buildings will go down maintenance all of that and we'll have more money to put toward teaching and learning and um and a final one is the the whole notion of um our schools as as community centers or community hubs and um you know kind of that 247 uh 365 day use for the community and um I guess when I'm looking at this education Vision I think about things like air conditioning I mean I I hope I hope I hope that all of these buildings will have air conditioning in them so that we can talk about a balance calendar or year round or year round use of our buildings so those three things as I was reading through this I didn't feel that they were in the vision statement as strongly as I'd like to see thanks for those comments we'll bring them back go ahead Mr uh I just like to say thank you to all of you for doing what you did I think um maybe we we've been accused of not doing public engagement well and sometimes and and maybe that's deserved and this seems to be done really very well um so thank you and and uh Curious from a budget perspective what what's the cost of of phase one and what's the cost of phase two for this public
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engagement um I'm not going to have the correct uh dollar amounts off the top of my head I can provide that again with you but it's um a lot of work has gone into phase one there's a lot of time involved here um more meetings in Phase One than phase two um so the um I think I'll get back to you with those numbers versus quoting something off the top of my head I'll provide that with you I appreciate that that's kind of a dumb question I think but after following up on on Bobby's really good questions terrific question seriously Bobby really good uh do we are the windows going to open in all of our buildings that we're building because I spent my my entire life practically in buildings where the windows didn't open and we you know knocked down Adams High School with after became Whitaker because the building the windows didn't open and it gets 110 and the windows don't open and down goes the air conditioning I mean do we have is that part of our specs in the long run that the buildings the windows will open in the buildings it is a dumb question but not from my perspective I don't think it's a dumb question we heard a lot in the visioning process about light and air and needing more of that everywhere that's going to follow into the educational specifications we're developing now in a separate effort we have construction design guidelines that'll get into some very specific details about how things are going to be built so I don't think we can say every single window in a building will open but there's I mean there going to be Windows that'll open more more light more air especially in the classrooms is a high priority thank you any other comments or questions i' just like to make one more comment um again I'd like to e Echo nany's thanks to Andrew Who provided a lot of assistance in pulling some students together as did director Morton Who U pulled together a conversation at the NAIA Family Center for us that was a very powerful conversation and appreciate his assistance there thank you all very much for coming this evening and we will see you in early September honorable for adoption thank you very much thank you we're going to now move on to a public hearing for alternative Contracting process construction management general contractor for Franklin and Roosevelt high schools remodern anization process um at this point uh the board will um convene as the local contract review board or going revise statutes and our own public Contracting rules provide special procedures to allow for exemption from competitive bidding and instead use an alternative Contracting method superintendent Smith would you like to introduce this um yes and I'll ask Elaine Baker who's our director of procurement and Jim Owens who is our executive director of office of school modernization to come on down and present this piece I'm not sure of the formalities but at this point I'm just going to go ahead and open the public hearing um for your presentation and we'll go from there I'm sorry y I'll open the public hearing director bu wants a g on the Franklin High School alternative Contracting process thank you good evening co-chair B board members superintendent Smith my name is Elaine Baker I'm the program director of purchasing and Contracting for Portland Public Schools with me is Jim Owens Jim is the executive director of The Office of school modernization you have before you the report providing our draft findings and recommendation to approve the use of a con construction manager general contractor or cmgc alternative Contracting method for both the Franklin full modernization project and the Roosevelt full modernization project we've considered these projects over the last several months and we've determined that each of them is well suited to a cmgc process these are tightly scheduled multifaceted projects the cmgc allows the district to engage the general contractor early in the design phase making the project more efficient this is an alternative Pro process to our standard process and it will reduce costs by allowing for coordination and value engineering during the initial phase of the project thereby reducing errors and the need to make changes later on this also reduces the need for contract changes changes to the drawings and speci specifications and both projects are very complex both compass compass campuses have historical value and components um and its specialized
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expertise is needed to manage this complexity and the work successfully in challenging conditions utilizing an RFP process instead of low bid allows the district to select a cmgc by evaluating a firm's qualifications specialized expert and experience on like projects in addition to price finally the district has successfully utilized this alternative RFP process in previous projects so do you have any questions for us um so that just to walk us through here how we're doing this so this is a public hearing for Franklin's um shortly after this one we will move on to Roosevelt's um at one point we will close Roosevelt and Franklin's and then we'll have a motion and a second to adopt um or deny the recommendation and at that time we would have a discussion about the resolution so at this point we'd be asking questions about what um Miss Baker and almost said Miss Hol um Miss Baker um provided us or any questions about what we just heard specifically around Franklin question sure director real um so if you you have a certain number of people that you I mean certain number of uh of uh companies that you would expect to bid on this anyway I mean upfront you're bidding for the whole thing you want to start them up front and run them through so do do they bid to do that is that how it works when I respond to that question director bu the approach with cmgc is to to retain a builder who initially provides preconstruction phase services so as we're going through the design process there actually is a single firm a builder a general contractor who works with the design team uh subsequently we work to develop a what's called a guaranteed maximum price and with the a GMP if it were as it were and with the GMP then in conjunction with District staff the general contractor actually bids the trade work some of which they can self-perform based on discussion so typically on a large project like this you'd expect somewhere between 15 to 18 firms 15 18 firms at the outset that are presenting in order to be chosen not not at the outset just how many firms at the outset at the outset it would just be one firm so how do you decide what one firm does the outset it's based on a qualification based selection process very similar to what is used for design professionals and so the builders that compete on the work actually provide input during design and then when the construction phase actually begins that's when they actually will will bid competitively bid the trade work for the subcon for the subcontractors go back to my the beginning because I I got lost in the middle okay the so how do you decide who the first firm is that you're going to work with that's the that's what I want to know the the firm is selected based on a uh an RF solicitation a request for proposal solicitation so how many firms will do that so typically with the RFP that's that's uh solicited there are a number of firms that will respond to that with written proposals and District staff will go through a a scoring process a a ranking if you will and then the top rank firm we then would enter into a contract for preconstruction phase services so you might have five let's say five firms that put in and then you would choose between those five for the original person to do the preconstruction my experience is it's typically um somewhere between five and 12 firms that would respond to a RFP proposal thank you and what would happen if if once this firm is uh selected that you couldn't agree on there was not agreement on not to a maximum guarantee not to exceed that's a great uh question director ker the process that we follow and again it's very similar to what we do with Architects Engineers if we cannot reach agreement on the guaranteed maximum price District under uh under purchasing rules has the ability to go to the next firm to uh to reach agreement on the guaranteed maximum price it's very unusual for that to occur but that flexibility is built into it so when we contract with a firm to do the preconstruction phase services and they work with us over the period of time and our thinking is they would come on early in design so they would be with us for something over a year if we're unable to reach agreement then we actually can go back to the the second
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rank firm and to to negotiate if you will with that firm to reach uh to reach a GMP that is consistent with the district's uh budget thank you how do you control in the end the making sure you come in under budget I mean do we if we budget for somebody and they say this is going to cost more than we thought you know three months into the project do we say too bad finish it budget it we got a budget with you that's what you do we have the ability to work with a design team on what the budget is for for the work uh we had a methodology that was developed to determine what the the budgets were so as the general contractor comes on and is working with us some preconstruction phase they know what the the price limitations are where can become challenging is if the budget is inadequate to complete the the scope of work then there are adjustments that uh that are made at that time such as yeah that's my question how do we make those adjustments because if you say well let's say this cost 23 million some part of the project and that's what they bid and it comes in and guess what it's going to cost 23 5 million do we say well too bad you should have budgeted you should have given us a better bid or do we then kick them more money how do we make that how do we make that decision I'm always looking at these public projects where they end up spending more money than they budgeted if you come into my house and say it's going to cost you $30,000 to do the kitchen I don't want to hear that later it's 35,000 I mean it cost me 5,000 but we're talking millions of dollars here how do we control that it's it's controlled through the the scope development through the uh the design development documents that establish what the what the pricing is um I think what you're asking is when we go through the competitive bidding process that the general contractor does in conjunction with the district uh you determine what the uh what the pricing is what I'm asking is if as they move along they find out they screwed up on the bid and under bid it where and they really can't perform the bid that's the question I'm asking do we then say hey that's the breaks buddy because uh that was the bid and you bid it and you bid to do this work and you did or do we somehow say or do we turn around and say oh okay well yeah you under bid so we'll give you some more money how do I mean how do we make that decision we actually have specific uh sub budgets for the trade components so we know what our mechanical electrical Plumbing components are and so when we go out to to bid that trade work we know what our what our limitations are we know what we can afford it's very similar to when you do competitive bidding you know what your budget is and if you're unable to achieve it for the amount that you have budgeted you have the ability to uh to back away from it and then to restructure your uh your construction documents because the Builder is part of developing the construction documents with the design team you have a lot more control over the over the budget aspects there's also a contingency component that's built into the guaranteed maximum price typically it's it's 10% and so that can be used for for certain adjustments but it's a a very U it's a very proven method to to manage costs and because of the contractor's involvement during the design you significantly reduce the number of change orders during the during the construction phase thank you can I ask what we're being asked to do here it sounds like there's a traditional way of bidding a project and what we're specifically being asked to do is to do it a different way way that's Cor and and that's the main thing that we're being asked to do tonight okay yep and can I ask if uh did we use the um uh alternative Contracting method of construction that for Rosa Parks do you know when we did Rosa Parks did we a b answer that um we actually did that uh uh with in partnership with the housing authority of Portland the housing authority of Portland had a contract with Walsh and they contracted with Walsh so District did not perform the competitive procurement the housing authority of Portland performed that competitive procurement okay we have as as we noted though that there are several projects when in which the district has utilized this one somewh ago was the DCI high performance classroom great yeah I mean it makes sense to me that in general we wouldn't necessarily want to go with low bid so you know as long as we're with our budget parameters it makes sense to me no further comments Miss Houston do we have anyone signed up for public testimony no no okay then I will close the public hearing on Franklin High School and open the public hearing on Roosevelt High School alternative Contracting
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process I'm assuming our questions have been taken care of Miss Houston do we have anybody signed up for public comment no we do not all right I'm gonna ask one more question so when we talk about um Grant an exemption from the traditional design bid build process or the least cost process is that true additional basically Oregon law and so what we're doing is is that's the reason we have to vote on this is we have to get an exception from Oregon and this is also this process is is specified in great detail in Oregon law as well so um we are following the exemption process under ORS 279 see any anytime we use uh process other than traditional which is our invitation to bid and use an RFP for public Improvement construction we're required to you know request an exemption and so with the exemption then staff has the ability to prepare the RFP the solicitation which we haven't done yet that won't come until later in the fall and then move forward with it but basically as the board you have to come to us and we are the ones who okay great and then we would come back to you again when the award recommendation would be made with no public comment I'll close the public hearing on Roosevelt High School and ask the board now to consider resolution 4796 Franklin High School full mod modernization project and Roosevelt High School full modernization project exemption from competitive bidding and authorization for use of construction manager general contractor alternative Contracting method that was a mouthful so Mo director rean moves and director nolles seconds the the motion to adopt resolution 4796 is there any other board discussion on the resolution hearing none we'll now vote on resolution 4796 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes I'll oppos please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 4796 is approved by a vote of six to zero with student representative Davidson voting yes yes thank you both the board will now reconvene back to its regular meeting moving on to monthly Capital Bond update um tonight we're going to receive our monthly update Capital Improvement Bond superintendent Smith um yes I'd like to ask Jim Owens to come up up and Michelle Sheron is it just you Jim Owens great Jim come on up well thank you s superintendent Smith and good evening again board I get to stay here for another presentation uh tonight uh as the superintendent mentioned we're updating uh Bond program status for the month of August and we're going to mix it up tonight and provide a little different format to share some experiences uh that we've had at one of the uh schools that's in our Improvement project 2013 uh Wilson High School and there's three of us up uh here tonight because we want to to share with you the uh educator uh perspective uh at the school in terms of how this work will influence students when they return next month uh we also have and that's Erica Myers seated over to my uh far right Erica is the business manager at Wilson High School and has been very involved in this work uh seated next to me is Steve Anderson who is one of the owners of PNC construction who is a general contractor that's doing the work at Wilson High School and Steve will actually uh walk us through some slides and highlight some of the work and highlight some of the accomplishments uh you may recall that when we were planning this work at Wilson we weren't confident we'd be able to finish all the roof tear off and replacement over the nine-week construction period and PNC showed us that they were more than up to the challenge and we're really pleased to report that that work will complete on time and on budget so really pleased with that and Steve will highlight some of those accomplishments as well before I introduce or before we get started with the with the comments from Eric and Steve I'd like to briefly touch on the balance scorecard that's in your board packets uh information on the balance scorecard uh highlights changes from month to month and while I'm not going through a formal presentation of it i' just like to highlight a couple of changes uh that have occurred uh first that we've added uh three more active projects on our listing our two high schools Franklin and Roosevelt now that we have our two uh design teams aboard and also our Improvement Project 2014 which is next Summer's work and you may recall on consent uh agenda uh at the
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last meeting we actually you actually uh approved staff to execute contracts to three firms so that we could get started with the work uh at 12 of our schools for uh for next summer that's seismic Roofing Ada and science lab improvements so we're really excited to get more active projects on U since the program really is picking up steam um secondly in your packets attached to the balance scorecard is is a financial update which highlights uh how we're looking at the program across the eight-year uh timeline and in there you'll see how staff has structured the uh the projects terms of budgets uh revisions adjustments that have been made as well as forecasts and you'll notice as you look at the document that we are projecting being under budget uh not only because of our experience this summer but also as we look at into the future we're not uh at this point anticipating using contingency so it's a it's a report that we'll be providing on a monthly basis to you whether we again whether we report here or not and then thirdly um in finalizing the work on Improvement project 2013 uh please to say that we're uh we're on schedule and budget uh and we've been visible to the community uh throughout the summer which is what I'm important objective as part of our transparency strategy and we've gotten a lot of interest and a lot of uh a lot of attention I think on the work all of the schools all six of the schools will have ready in time for the return of teachers on the 28th and uh for students on on September 4th so we're really pleased uh with that um we do have some construction punch work that will by necessity uh extend into September but it'll be done on a not to interfere basis with uh with students uh and staff so we're very confident um we also had a project separate from uh from from this Summer's work well it's part of the Summer's work but it's not in Improvement Project 2014 uh that being placement of two relocatable Port Portable Buildings at the Fabian K8 uh this is very significant we're adding four classrooms there which will really help with the uh with the capacity challenge that they have at that school and those are relocatable so they can support some of our construction activities ities at Roosevelt High School later on uh finally as a follow on to a meeting that we had in June when we were presenting a program update you had asked about the number of workers that were that were on these schools so we looked at our construction daily reports and estimated over the course of nine weeks an average of how many workers we had on each or on total of all all six of the schools is coming out to approximately 150 workers so that's 150 workers per day over the course of of nine weeks so I think that's an indicator of the extensive amount of of effort that went into this work and certainly as we went out to look at the schools you could see a lot of workers on site and you know very very busy and getting getting this important work completed okay what I'd like to do next is introduce Erica who will talk a little bit about what the students can expect when they return next Meek so Eric so it's interesting because um we're getting a lot of conversations through email um to myself and to the principal is school actually going to start on September 4th and yes keep keep wishing kids keep wishing it's going to start and registration um typically at Wilson High School happens um uh would would be next week but it's actually going to be extended starting on SE or August 28th and 29th and it actually we're going to be prepared for it and we're excited to have students in the building on that day and I'm really excited that we've been able to partner with the facilities department and project managers and um having students in the building um it will be kind of interesting as we go through the north side of the building of Wilson High School will not be complete probably until mid September but it won't have any um problems with students accessing both sides of the building and erass um I don't know it's been great every week it's been really nice to be able to meet with project managers I've met with Randy Miller and um Michelle Sheron and Rando and we meet over Baker and spice over in Hillsdale um and they give us great updates on it so I felt like we've been really well communicated with and the process has been really great Community has been very supportive as well I'm excited that we're not going to have any drippy um classrooms when we return and some Ada improvements and seismic improvements that we'll have that um just really excited for our school thanks Erica we'll provide an opportunity for questions after we're complete with our presentation next I'd like to reintroduce Steve Anderson seated next to me Steve is an owner with PNC construction and is uh the general
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contractor that's been doing the work at Wilson over the summer and Steve has some slides that he'll be showing us that'll highlight the work so yeah thank you so much thank you Jim and school board for having me as your guest um I have a few fun facts about Wilson we have 2.62 Acres of new roof that's Acres uh we have two local roofing subcontractors that because of the size actually combin their sources together they're competitors on most jobs on this one they're joint venture with PNC very unique but due to the size and our ability to get it done in one summer that's our strategy to get the work done we have 49 working days on this project uh with the contract over 40 or excuse me 4 million that's over $100,000 a day in work that's a lot of work getting done done every day uh the peak number of workers Jim alluded to this total districtwide on the projects um we had 73 working on one day on one site we average between 45 and 50 workers and I will say that safety is priority number one we've had no incidences and no recordables which is outstanding work from everybody on the site that's very important to PNC and very noteworthy on this project and I do have a few slides I wasn't quite sure how to thanks Terry there we go no peeking yeah okay cool is this just right here ter okay uh okay so this is an aerial view of Wilson High School before we started work back in June and uh superintendent uh you may see some uh leaking holes there from the buckets I can remember on the first day when we had the groundbreaking that was very noteworthy you see the pool up there on the left which uh we remain operational all during the summer so this is before we started work uh this is a photo uh in the PNC office with all the team members from the architect who representatives from Portland Public Schools are Roofing subcontractors their safety manager so this is the infamous group hug and I can say to this day we could still have that same meeting and everybody would have a smile in her face which is very uh very fun to have that kind of group mentality for this project um a lot of detail here but just in summary this is our Logistics plan of how to get the work done in one summer you'll see a lot of areas some of the smaller printed some dates so this was put together by our field staff of how to get the work done before we started the work dividing it up between Snider Roofing and McDonald wed work after hours all that good stuff so everybody had a plan going into it very important there and uh I would say construction is a lot of nuts and bolts and all that kind of stuff but really it's about the people so these are uh photos taken about a week ago of our folks out on the job site uh this is over the auditorium doing some tear off you just see the excuse me the closeness of of working and and all that uh the stuff that goes on on that roof here's a photo looking through the courtyard and as uh I say my wife went to Wilson High School and she calls this the H Courtyard so she's very familiar with the H Courtyard I assume it's still called that uh up in the top left is a tower crane which is a a tall crane just to lift uh materials onto the roof uh very unique but of a project deci side it really helped uh with schedule and Logistics and safety here we just have some photos of folks doing their work see hard hats the boots uh gloves all that safety uh uh is important to us a tie off there in the left hand side if he gets close to the edge here we have uh three fellas working on the infamous tar bucket as they put tar onto the roof uh these are two PNC laborers or excuse me Carpenters here doing some uh uh event work on the roof see them with their safety vast hard hats and you know just getting into the details as I say some more photos there uh fell on the left is the safety Observer just making sure things are going correctly nobody gets too close to the edge here is the uh the north entry that I think uh you referred to is not quite getting done as school starts but is isolated lot of challenges in this area so work is progressing as plan and this is a photo taken about uh about 10 days ago from the air and you can see all the work still going on roof getting finished up on the left hand side over there on the right with or in the center excuse me with the wider roof the cap sheet so on schedule the auditorium up there in the top left is uh figured out a very Innovative way to
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get that done on time so that was a a real challenge there uh just a lot of work going on on the roof um an interesting story if you see our trailer down there at the left the the white trailer kind of at the bottom there was a elderly lady that walked through that parking lot every day to market so when we mobilized in June we put up fences and didn't allow that and I don't know if Ken is here with PNC but one of our other uh fellas who was on site escorted this elderly lady across the site every day she says I've been going this way for 40 years I'll be darned if I'm not going to go this way while you guys are here working during the summer just kind of a fun story and that's how we approached it so we escorted her across there and and uh I built quite a friend there and then I did want to allude um the fellow there on your left is um Mitchell Angelo from Benson uh he worked with us for five days uh as a summer intern and the fell on the right is a project engineer this is uh Mitchell in the office and each day he uh shadowed a different person and um his favorite experience on day one was opening the mail because there's a ton of mail okay on uh day two he's a project engineer he said he got to learn the paperwork side went to Wilson High School and saw the uh A View From the roof it was really cool day three he worked with our estimator he got to see how a job was put together how estimates work and what things cost and he said that that was one of the most exciting days that he found for PNC on day four he followed our uh delivery person and our tool expert so he got to fix tools he got to purchase some new tools and he said um except for sitting in the car while we drove from job to job it was really a good time and then day five uh he worked with the project manager for the Wilson High School project Brian Shoemaker he got to go to a meeting and he said uh he got to see how a huge printer works and he did say that there's a lot of papers the meeting was qu kind of long and kind of boring but he learned a lot so uh Mitchell could not be here tonight but I did want to give a summary of of his experience for the 5 days uh working alongside the PNC folks we felt like he got a great experience he learned a lot and he was involved in the Wilson High School project so he can certainly say that that was one of his projects for the summer so that's all I had for for a summary of the work thank you Steve and PNC is an example of just one contractor who's engag students we had four builders four generals who worked on our Improvement project 2013 and each have had a number of students who have been involved but I think that's indicative of the kind of experience the students are having on these on these con construction project at this point i' like to uh invite any questions comments that you may have I'll just uh just as a Wilson neighbor about a block I just my house is just off one of those the aerial view it's really really appreciate seeing the photos and just want to say how much uh you know just as a neighbor the great work that you all have been doing and just on Saturdays as well but you know it's just been um I'm out there with my dogs every day I don't get the personal escort through the site okay that's okay I'm I'm willing I'm willing to go around the fence that's no problem anyway just thank you so much and uh really excited to know that kids are coming back without leaks in the classroom I had a question real quick around about the trim that you have um at the upper Edge and is that does that have any seismic structural um function uh not necessarily that trim I'm not sure the specific piece but well just on the edge of the the top edge of the the brick wall all around the building there's appears to be a new kind of trim I call it I don't know what the technical yeah so you're yeah you're talking about the parit so we did do seismic upgrad to that parit as we tied in a new roof and probably what you're seeing is a sheet metal flashing that caps everything off so that that in itself doesn't have any the work that we've done yeah that's part of the this upgrade with the okay because I figured that was the the seismic tie that helps strengthen building to some degree it's actually not a seismic component it's really helping uh protect the cap sheet and it provides more of a watertight Integrity feature to the to the roof okay that's great and it also actually looks attractive it's makes it so you can see even though because one of the things about Roofing projects of course is you can't see the Improvement necessarily but it actually looks a lot nicer so anyway um great work and I'm just really excited to see it come to completion Dr uh Steve do you what do you look for anything that comes out of high school when you hire people um yeah that's a great great question what we look for is a hardworking person and um as I've been in this business almost 30 years now it's not necessarily the technical knowledge that we see from folks or or where what their resume looks like but it's how hard they work and interesting
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when we uh looked for a summer intern we were at a career fairback and I believe it was March or April and we had folks come up and fill out a little survey and that's how we landed on Mitchell he filled out a survey we got to know him a little bit we had about 10 or 12 applications for this summer intern position so we really look for that for the hardworking people with the background of just I want to learn which typically high school kids you know when you get to that point you have the ones that want to learn a little bit more and have an experience so that's what we look for thank you m question Ruth will you I've been to a couple of um Wilson football games and I'm recalling that the school colors are green yes so is it a requirement for our contract contractors to wear their school colors as soon as you came up I thought oh my God per yeah I wish it was that easy right Jim do we have any more schools with Green for their colors that I should be pursuing no um I had one more serious question which is Could you um assure me that um the roof as it's now built is capable of uh having solar panels on it at some point in the future uh I'll help you out get go ahead Jim would like to answer that question but if I in all seriousness from a design aspect I think that's better Su that actually isn't an area that PNC was was involved in the work that our consultant solar engineering is doing is is looking specifically at the feasibility of the of the crystalin panel array as well as the thin film solar uh we're expecting that report here shortly and it'll give us a very good sense of both both the placement potential at the Wilson roof and also about the structural implications I would add just in in doing a quick review of the plans that because of the type of Roof System there this type of roof will generally be able to accommodate Crystal and panel arrays more readily than many of our other schools that are wood Trust Systems so well I'm just recalling that when we were out there that day with of the groundbreaking or whatever we would call it that there were old solar panels on the roof hyd he panels the weight would be similar so in all likelihood this this roof system would would be able to accommodate that they were connected with a pool weren they correct right it was a student project and those have been removed yeah no I know that those have been removed they were old and removed but it was more looking ahead that we still have the opportunity to go back and put solar in good great um first of all thank you very much for both of you guys to be here today it's really exciting to see the work that's going on at at Wilson and I'm thrilled that we're on time and on budget and the way we go um Jim I had a couple of questions for you on the balance scorecard it had to do with the equity perspective there's one um that is red Consultants percentage payments made to minority women emerging small business and then to follow along with um the meet student participation it was great to hear that you had a student who was an intern but I don't see any indication on the scorecard of student participation with either Consultants or with contractors so I just wanted to see if we were needing to fill in some color there um we we are actually uh next month we were planning to highlight in more detail the number of students that were involved not only with the builders but also with our consultant teams great um and we'll highlight we'll highlight that um this is intended to to look at each project separately so the red cell that is over on the right under program costs is a reflecting is reflective of a single contract that we have with here International and the percentage of mwsb uh payment uh is actually below 10% currently overall program wise we're we're right at about 14% okay and that number will change from month to month based on based on the invoices that we received okay thank you any other comments or questions thank you all three of you for being here but especially those folks who aren't normally here with us thank you very much we're going to move on at our last meeting director bule introduced a resolution to change the board meeting date and time and we at that time tabled the resolution at our board retreat on last Friday we talked about the topic and a new resolution was drafted um director bu I'll ask our um if you'd be interested in withdrawing your resolution I withdraw that motion great who I think didn't Bobby second I don't remember who seconded the Second Great uh so director bule uh resends his resolution that the regular board meetings of the school
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board be held on Tuesday at 6 p.m unless change for reasons of conflict by chairpersons of the board with that the board will now consider resolution 4797 a proposal to revise the calendar of regular board meetings for the 2013 2014 school year is now before the board do I have a motion in a second director noes moves and director Regan seconds the motion to adopt resolution 4797 is there any board discussion on the resolution for those of you at home that are not reading the resolution it's um to ask the staff to come back to the board with a a new um a new calendar with board meetings on Monday night starting at 6 PM so I think um Mr Bailey and public comment asked uh that those also be moved so that is the new direction we are heading make note on your calendars to come join us on Mondays at 6 PM the board will now vote on resolution 4797 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 4797 is approved by a vote of six to zero was student representative Davidson voting yes yes that also means that rep student representative Davidson um can now join us actually for the board meetings he had a conflict with the Constitution team at Grant which we are very pleased that you get to join us um the board will now consider the remaining items on the business agenda Miss Houston are there any changes to the business agenda no okay um do I have a motion in a second to adopt the business agenda so moov to Second director noes moves and director Regan excuse me can second the adoption of the business agenda Miss Miss Houston is there any public comment no no is there any board discussion on the business agenda I had a question about these are all could the someone just explain pick one and explain what districtwide alternative education services actually consist of or we paying or paying them to hire people or are we pay I mean how does this particular stuff work and actually uh suan Higgins do you want to our chief academic officer do is Karo wolf with us there she is sorry I thought I saw you earlier and then but Karina is um the Director of Education options which um does the Contracting and these are Community Based organizations that we contract with and Karina I'll let you do a little more explanation absolutely so our community based good good evening hi um our community- based alternative schools our community based organizations um we have 14 two at the middle school level and 12 at the high school level and they serve students who the average age is 16.6 17.6 excuse me and more than six credits behind in school so what what what our alternative schools are is our part of our safety net and so we're um educating our students in the through uh middle school and high school to postsecondary readiness and high school completion so these are basically catchup yeah so if you're Pathfinders of Oregon which is 97,3 13 what are we paying for there so at Pathfinders I believe I have it actually in here uh we're paying for slots for uh a number set number of students and at Pathfinders they specialize in serving pregnant and parenting students so it's tailor made to special especially to serve our pregnant and parenting students to wrap around work with their children and work with them and their educational needs how about how many kids are there there uh I believe there's 32 but I can look and they go how often about every day every day for all year yes basically yeah and so for $197,000 worth of serving 32 kids basically every day I mean is that what it comes out to correct and they're so how many what is that two staff three staff two staff you know when we contract with the alternative schools they hire their staff um and I can look here and say Pathfinders um so it says 27.5 so it uh so what we have for this current um school year that we're going to start next week is to serve 27 the the funding to serve 27.5 students students for basically 200,000 so does that does that do those numbers work out say like Rosemary Anderson High School it's a million
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165,000 so 161 students 161 and that would be how many staff so each of the schools the community based alternative schools hire their own staff and so they responsibility as an alternative school is to meet the requirements for for the high schools for high school completion so they so they need to cover all the core content areas and to what degree they hire a point three in language arts or a05 in math the school determines that now how does that benefit us is it cheaper to do it with them do they do a better job teaching than we do I mean we could set up that program in Marshall High School and run all these things in Marshall High School or something some to I mean how does this how is this benefiting Portland Public Schools either monetarily or educationally that's a great question so one of the things that two great for me tonight by the way and only one for curler over there there you go there you go and the night's not over um so there's a few things that are really unique about alternative schools one is it's a small school setting and there's a lot of personalization around our individual student needs for instance one of the other programs works with homeless children so they specialize in certain student populations and they're really talented and skilled at serving that specific population the other is again for the vast majority of our students they've gone to other a number series of other high schools or schools where traditional schools where they have not been successful and so one of the other reasons um and and great um gifts that we get from Community Based alternative schools is they keep our kids engaged and enrolled so one of the things we have is we have um we have more information that's in the and uh superintendent Smith referenced it earlier tonight in our um High School um school system the high school redesign system in that document it talks about the specific um purposes of our alternative programs and how they are part of our high Continuum of high school services are they cheaper um I think to some to some degree they serve they serve to some in some instances I would say absolutely and and the thing the primary thing that happens though is that they keep our kids in school and so these are kids who like I said have been unsuccessful in other schools who have been to comprehensive schools who have been to focus schools who may have been to other alternative schools and then they found a place where they have fit and I heard director bile I heard you say earlier um tonight in one of the conversations about really working and director n's Really T talking about students in school fit and I think that's one of the primary focuses that our alternative schools pay a lot of attention to I'm gonna maybe have to talk to you more and not take everybody's time if I can because I'm still not understanding would that be I'll just maybe give you a call and we can with that's we can actually offer you to take you around to some of the visit some of the programs too which is is really um would help you get a sense of it the other thing I will say is all of these programs are run by Community Based nonprofit organizations and many of them actually do private fundraising or have wraparound services that are part of the the services that they offer as an organization that our students benefit from so frequently like we flow through dollars in a contract with a program um and those programs will privately fundraised to match that um in a way that actually buys more service for those kids so it actually ends up being a great partnership kind of leveraging partnership that gets more service and more targeted service for specific kids one just followed question so are those the money that we're paying for the kids in these schools is PPS responsible for any other money outflow that that goes with those kid kids or like this one that you mentioned is roughly $77,000 per head MH um are we spending any more money on those kids other than that school I'm sorry I guess I'm not does it cost us more per kid than it does for no no are other expenses that go along with that student that aren department in central office for example right and then maybe special yeah I mean it's the it's the trying to get it Steve's Point here just just from a cost standpoint the student ratios are the same as far as how the students present in the different populations so for special education or for English
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language Learners or for pregnant and parenting students the the reimbursement rate from the state or the ADM rate from the state is is elevated it's more than the 1.0 for uh kind of a general student so it's the same in that respect so it typically flows through yeah okay any other questions any other questions no as enough here okay thank you great thank you thank you m the board will now vote on business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes I'll oppose please indicate by saying no I I would say yes thank you are there any abstentions the business agenda is approved by a vote of 6 to Zer a student represented Davidson voting yes yes um I know director bule has I believe two other motions that he's interested in um in order for us to um consider these motions um board members would have to agree to a suspension of our standing rules which takes a majority of vote um so I'll just ask for vote last time we did it just by General agreement all those in favor of suspending our rules to consider the two motions by director bule please indicate by saying yes yes yes all those opposed by saying no it doesn't at this point it doesn't matter um so uh the additional motions and suspensions of the rules will not be considered this evening with it being defeated by a vote of two to three no two to four um with student representative voting yes yes the next meeting of the board will be held on Monday September 9th 2013 at 6 p.m. the regular meeting of the board is now adjourned

Sources

PPS Board of Education, Archive 2013-2014, https://www.pps.net/Page/2224 (accessed: 2022-03-24T00:57:54.073648Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)

2013-08-19 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - August 19, 2013

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