2013-09-23 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2013-09-23
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - September 23, 2013

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good evening this meeting of the board of education for september 23rd 2013 is called the order i'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers 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 two weeks please check the board website for replay times it is also being streamed live on pps's website and will be archived there for future reference if you are so interested just like to note the director director atkins this evening is absent tonight we get to recognize some of our community partners and we are so thankful that you are here and able to join us um our partners are vital to the work we do at portland public schools and obviously very much appreciated i'd like to ask lolenzo poe and melissa goff to step forward to the testimony table good evening chair blau and board and superintendent smith lolinzo po chief equity officer and partnership director tonight we will once again recognize one of the many partners who give of their time resources and volunteers to contribute to the academic success of our students we're really excited about tonight's partnership because it helps us extend into the classroom and so with that as an overlay recognizing that this is one of many opportunities over through the year that we will get a chance to reach out and recognize those partnerships again who gives so much to help make sure that our district is able to help support the students in portland public schools so with that let me turn this over to melissa golf and andre jackson who are going to introduce our partnership tonight thank you and i've got it thank you members of the school board and superintendent smith for this opportunity to recognize this unique collaboration between ohsu doernbecher children's hospital and randall children's hospital at legacy emanuel to bring health related supplemental instructional resources to our teachers and students ohsu doernbecher children's hospital and randall children's hospital at legacy are underwriting the cost to make the online resource healthteacher.com available healthteacher is an online resource of health education tools including lessons interactive presentations and physical activity games to integrate health into any classroom subject area at all grade levels this supplemental resource will not be or excuse me will be available to pps teachers who choose to use it in any subject area not just health use of the health teacher resource is in no way required but we believe it will be a valuable added tool for teachers who are looking to integrate health messages and lessons into everything from science to social studies we have been working with these outstanding partners for several months to put this together i would particularly like to call out the work of andre jackson and deeply appreciate their collaboration for the good of our students now to say a few words about the partnership i would like to introduce and i'm going to ask them to to come take these three chairs as i stand up and and let them speak ed fitzgerald the director of special projects for health teacher wayne clark the vice president of marketing and communications for randall children's hospital at legacy emanuel and jody combs vice president of women and children's service ohsu doernbecher children's hospital if you could come forward and say a few words thank you thank you all very much i'm ed fitzgerald with health teacher and we are very pleased to be part of this partnership and to provide this incredible resource to your teachers along with the license fee and all the associated costs with that the sponsors are also providing ongoing training and support for the entire duration so there will be a local person here who will do training and support for the entire duration so that's kind of a unique part of this partnership and we're very proud of the partners we have here so you also have a packet tonight in that packet there are some explanations about health teacher and go noodle including an entire scope and sequence that shows some 325 lesson plans and and the activities that we use as brain breaks in the classroom so we'll be rolling this out with the teachers as quickly as possible and we hope to see lots and lots of usage there okay
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hello all it's good to be here my name is cindy hill and i'm the nurse executive for randall children's hospital at legacy emanuel and i am not wayne clark so i would like to point out wayne clark is here with us he is the vice president of marketing communications for legacy health sitting next to wayne is pamela weatherspoon and she is our community relations individual for randall children's hospital at legacy emanuel and an emanuel legacy emanuel medical center so thank you so much for having us here and again we're privileged to have the opportunity to work as partners with ohsu doernbecher to bring this program to you i in fact um practiced one of the modules on the weekend and i need to bone up on a few things like how much sleep children need quite surprised anyway but randall children's hospital legacy manual and legacy health are proud of this partnership with both health teacher portland public schools and ohsu doernbecher portland public schools has outstanding teachers and innovative health teacher programs which will be able to teach students to be healthy happy and active and i want to emphasize active there's a strong component that randall children's hospital has been placing in the last few years on activity as the obesity rates in our nation and children continue to rise we'll encourage students to adopt healthy behaviors benefiting them through the school years and into adulthood we know for sure as the evidence is there in the literature that healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults randall children's hospital is devoted and has been devoted for caring for children our community and in the region for um over for since about 1960 i've had the privilege to be with randall children's hospital since 1979 and um our commitment to healthy environments and healthy lifestyles for children continues randall children's hospital and legacy we have a long lasting commitment with our community partners on fostering health education and healthy literacy health teacher embraces kids understanding their health and making healthy choices we're excited for the partnership and thank our partners help teacher and ohsu doernbecher for being giving us the opportunity to be a part of this thank you hi my name is jody coombs i'm the vice president for women and children's at doernbecher children's hospital at ohsu and i am thrilled and honored to be here this evening and to again celebrate and this collaboration both with randall children's and healthy teachers in the portland public school i'd like to acknowledge two of our portland public school teachers here in the audience that teach up at ohsu that's um heidi warden and lisa toole we are thrilled to be able to work every day and watch them teach the kids who are hospitalized and and extend that out past you know through the school systems that you all have here and our mission and passion really is around improving the health and well-being of children in oregon and beyond and this is such a exciting and thrilling opportunity to be able to partner and and see this come to fruition as we look at the health and well-being of children of our state and we're excited and just overall thrilled and i'd like to thank you all for for supporting us as we as we join uh join hands and and trying to really make sure that the kids of portland get the didactics and the curriculum to stay active and healthy so thank you very much thank you all very much for being here again we really appreciate all the support our partners and this is just a great example of one partnership and we couldn't do all the work that we do without you um at this time i'm going to call all the folks from the organizations together or up to front i'm going to read what the plaque that we're going to present you with this evening says and then we'll take a photo in front of the diocese so we'll take a little minute so um the um i haven't seen say the same thing so they one's being presented to wayne clark not cindy wayne clark with legacy health and the others being presented to you jody um at doernbecher children's hospital and it says in recognition and appreciation of your contributions to the students and staff at portland public schools and it says september 23 2013 carol smith superintendent greg belial and pam newell's co-chairs so come on up and congratulations thank you
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thank you thank you very much okay you guys are gonna have to really like hold in if you would please um one on the iphone for twitter hold on here thank you so much now we will move on to the superintendent's report superintendent smith okay so um first two weeks of school sue ann higgins our chief academic officer and i got to be out in 35 of our 85 schools and it was totally an awesome start to the school year i'm just gonna say and it and it is it's really clear just school communities were in really positive mode like i had such wonderful conversations with our custodians who are totally proud of the floors that were really buffed and ready for kids to be back um kids come just ready for school and i felt that across the board at every single school i visited we had parents out greeting kids as they were coming in the door principals out greeting kids and i got to be in a fire drill i got to be in a back to school assembly we had corn fest we had barbecues we just had whole community coming around to welcome kids back to school and it was awesome the one thing i will tell you the front office staff that i checked in with in every single building we visited we are now converting to synergy so our old student data system is no longer available to us we're all converting to a new system synergy and the thing i will say everybody was reporting like the snafus and the things that were not going smoothly however to a person people were in good problem solving mode um so i'm really just expressing my thanks and appreciation for the people's patience and moving to a new system but awesome beginning of a school year i think just about as smooth as we possibly could have hoped for so that was wonderful our project community care which is really where the whole community comes together to get grounds and buildings ready to welcome kids back to school we had 6594 volunteers in 64 schools and grounds looked beautiful and i heard commitments in different schools about here's how we're going to maintain this and keep how beautiful it looks right now as the year goes on so like let's just say yahoo and a big round of appreciation both to folks who donated materials and supplies for us bark dust the kinds of things that go into actually beautifying and the blood sweat and tears that were poured into the schools that day to welcome kids back to school looking snazzy we also completed our first round of bond work on the school so this summer we had um crews that were were fixing leaking roofs and making schools safe against earthquakes so we replaced and did roof repair at alameda bridal mile laurelhurst lewis and wilson uh and the thing that is amazing about this is the short window of time to like literally a school year ends ramp up cruise wilson alone was um is three acres of rooftop that has to be completed in a very short window of time and then really there's no squish worm we've got to be ready for kids to be back in school all completed on time on budget uh with kids able to be back in school like that's a pretty um awesome looking project when you look at wilson from the air but this is the first installment on our bond project and as you know a 482 million dollar pps school building improvement bond so we're entering the planning phases for the modernization of franklin and roosevelt grant will be soon on their on the heels of that and then also the planning for the fabian k-8 so that was all off to a great start and it was really wonderful to be able
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to see the completion in time for the first day of school to welcome kids back so that was a whoo-hoo we we also part of that was also science classrooms at laurelhurst k-8 and ockley-green campus of the chief chief joseph ockley green k-8 school so that was exciting for those schools friday not part of the bond but part of a project that's been in motion for 10 years we celebrated the completion of the grant track and field and inaugurated that field for their for their first game and carol campbell principal is sitting in the back row here woohoo and they won their first game played on that new turf wow and actually i'm going to bring photos for my next superintendent's report because it was a really magnificent ceremony and a true testament to partnership over a lot of years and a lot of perseverance so this was deep involvement of the school district port city of portland parks and rec nike and then friends of grant athletics which has been a community group that's really been the engine to keep the eye on the ball and make sure this thing came to completion we had a number of people gathered a number of the principals who've been part of it over the 10 years and it was a really grand celebration an inauguration so congratulations carol and to the whole grant community and you can see the t-shirts actually andrew and pam sporting from the celebration of the day another like exciting thing this summer was we had an expansion of our early kindergarten transition program which has been a really successful program for our pre-kindergarten kids to practice what kindergarten will be and for their parents to actually practice what it is to to go to school and how do you have school going behaviors and how do you leave your mom in the morning to go to school i mean it's totally an awesome an awesome program but we had this going on this summer at harrison park jason lee james john woodmere and lent k-8 we had parents who attended weekly sessions and we're looking at trying to continue to expand it and we now know other have other districts who have um are replicating this model so this started in pbs and it's now being replicated in other districts partners in this effort include head start home forward erko the immigrant and refugee center of oregon multnomah county library sun community schools ready for kindergarten program and multnomah county so again a true testament to our work with our partners in terms of providing great services to our families and kids and it was a total it was a blast to go visit this program the kids were just so excited about about school so reconnections campaign this is another one we're in our third year of doing a reconnections campaign which means we have a group of this year it was 40 pps staff and community volunteers who on september 14th on a saturday went out to knock on the doors of kids who had not yet um showed up for school so were enrolled last year and hadn't yet returned to school and folks go out and knock on doors and invite them back and this year we had 81 students who were contacted directly and invited to come on back to school this has made a huge difference in the last couple of a couple of years and we've had some really powerful stories of kids and the difference it made to have someone come to their door and say come on back and i think we're showing a short video about that day once i really hit high school you know there's a multitude of reasons but i would probably say i wasn't really challenged at the high school i was at at the time and it just seemed like you know there's a lot of fun of things that i could be doing essentially i had a revelation um junior year once i had been dropped out for about six months and i realized that all my so-called friends weren't really doing much in life and i always had dreams and aspirations of being somebody being a professional in whatever field it may be vice principal levert robertson of franklin high school recommended a military high school to me the oregon e challenge program after i successfully completed the program i came back to the reconnection center and that's when i met suzanne cash phillips one of the student outreach coordinators and we really bonded and she really helped me decide to go to a smaller high school instead of a franklin high school where i probably would have had other distractions they really you know got up in your face and said hey how are you how was your day i ended up leaving school like a couple months before my freshman year ended and some of the reasons were because i had some bad influences around me some friends that uh were skipping school and doing other things i wasn't really good at some of the subjects at school and i was failing some of the teachers were like
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trying to help me out more but i was kind of pushing them away it was actually dennis he was the one that helped me he kept constantly coming to my house calling me just about like to go back to school to do my best and like some of that motivation just like like he told me a lot of stories he had that he had um had struggles in school too and it kind of just like motivated me to like do what he did because he has a really good job right now and that's kind of what i want to do so everybody had already started sports everybody already had knew each other so i had a hard time making new friends and my grades started going down i left home when i was 17 years old and i moved in with a friend in reality you know basically caught up with me i dropped out one of my friends actually told me about portland night high school that program did so much for me i made a lot of good connections with my teachers the best part about it is just the small environment like the one-on-one with my teachers but it's like family like they care about you me and my friend came back to visit portland night school she had graduated and my friend started talking about how many credits i had i think i only needed like two credits and cheryl overheard and she was like what you need to come back to school right now give me your number let's get her done and ever since then she was just on top of me throughout the whole process there are quite a few students that have life outside of going to school and it can take over um and they just need someone to push them so now i'm gonna be looking at school we're thinking of psu for the criminal law um program you can do it or to you know run her from here to there so she could drop off paperwork or make a payment or whatever she walked across the stage in gym and we were all there to say yes yes and actually i believe director bobby regan participated in that campaign to the door knocking campaign as well as a number of our staff and volunteers from the community so thank you for participating in that huge meaning for the students that are coming back to school so we really appreciate your effort the other i'm going to thank our partners for the their contribution to our wellness efforts this is again a district-wide um wellness effort and we'll be doing an upcoming meeting our annual report to the board on progress on our wellness policy we've had a couple things that are an update last year we had a pilot wellness works program that we did with in 44 of our schools and this is really targeting employee wellness um and it involved it actually was available to 3200 of our staff this past year so we had healthy you teams that were at different at various schools and also in central offices where people were working on drinking water using pedometers walking gaining their steps we kicked off this years with a a walk that timber joey came and did with us around the besc but part of what we're trying to do is really just introduce activity and and healthy habits in the workplace so this year we're going to kick that off to be available to all 6500 of our employees it includes a foods offering nutrition classes to our employees fitness classes that are offered on at district sites around the district stress management activities and the ability to participate in healthy u teams and what we're really trying to do is just promote a healthy work environment we had carlton public schools was recognized as a fit friendly company in portland by the american health association my heart my life initiative which was part of how we happen to have timber joey here leading the walk with us which was part of trying to kick off and say how do we get this being a really part of our organization-wide culture um in our educa our nutrition world um we have now got the oregon department of education child nutrition program certified all pbs nutrition service menus are now meeting the new higher u.s department of agriculture requirements of the healthy hunger-free kids act of 2010 and the ode certification provided reimbursement of six additional cents per lunch that sounds little it actually makes a big difference in terms of what we're able to provide for kids the new certified menus continue to provide delicious high quality nutrient rich meals that feature unlimited fruits and vegetables with lunches whole grains one percent low flat fat and non-fat milk and lean entree choices so we're really excited about that
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a two year usda fresh start farm to school grant is also helping nutrition services increase our local purchasing and develop whole new grain breakfast items for all of our students and the grant provides resources to connect school gardens with second and third grade classrooms and with cafeteria activities that support our harvest of the month and oregon agriculture at some of our schools so we're excited about that and then finally in terms of building healthy preventive habits we had target work with us on teaming up with our schools to improve the safety practices of employees as we were packing up at the end of last school year and they then did a drawing of the schools that had no injuries over the course of the year and we had two of our schools benson high school and roseway heights who each received a thousand dollars to purchase educational materials and supplies so again it's another incentive to try and have us focusing on prevention and safety and just how do we how do we do our work in a way that takes care of all of us so thank you to target again a partner who's working with portland public schools and then finally i will just our human resources department produced their equity team produced a new employee on onboarding video that really talks about welcoming our new employees to portland public schools and introducing them to our equity initiative and i wanted to share that with all of you as a way of welcoming our new employees this year hi i'm carol smith superintendent of portland public schools and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our team whether you're in one of our schools in central office or part of one of our programs you are part of the largest school district in oregon our team of over 6 000 employees supports a diverse population of approximately 47 000 students in more than one hundred schools and programs we may not all work directly with students but everything we do supports our mission by the end of elementary middle and high school every student by name will meet or exceed academic standards and will be fully prepared to make productive life decisions making our mission a reality requires dedication from everyone within our district our board staff students parents and communities portland public schools is committed to academic excellence and personal success for every one of our students central to this commitment is educational equity we have as a district formulated a racial educational equity policy we have a fair contracting policy and all the work that we're doing to ensure that the district really means all kids academic success it's clear you know we want to reduce the dropout rate we want to increase the graduation rate you know we're focusing on equity and we're also looking at the achievement gap the honor of having someone say to me this is my best child and i'm trusting that you will make sure that my child will have the best education it is an absolute joy to get up and come to work even in the trying circumstances because it is a place that while we are recognized that we don't have all the answers we are working hard and diligently to get to that point and we're seeing results for what we do so it's an exciting time i remember not having a lot of teachers that look like me so it's really refreshing to be in a place where that is valued where the population of teachers is starting to reflect the students more as we go into the world we will see that it is a diverse world and it's going to benefit all of us to be able to say we want to make sure that everybody has the best opportunities possible diversity has been very much a benefit in my class i'm very open to kids sharing their culture in class and they're very proud to teach the class you know how to count to ten in russian or that they know different words in other languages so it's very important for the students to feel that they're valued and can openly show other students their culture we're able to see that we all come to this building and every building at pps one in one thing and that is to provide the best education we possibly can to all students everybody is willing to pitch in you know that if you fall you've got a team behind you that can support you i'm more directly working with people to solve problems and not just one person or one small group of people and i've come to see you know some amazing people who do some great work and it's nice to be a part you know of the team
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i enjoyed it every day winter time summertime fall every day it's it's it's even tomorrow i'm looking forward to tomorrow that's how much i like it and i have no problem getting up at three o'clock in the morning coming to work every morning we're all on the same page and you get that sense of camaraderie and togetherness and that's one thing i really enjoy about pps how easy it is for me to make friends with everybody to recognize people and i always like to say good morning to you good morning to you and always expect that in return and that just makes it feel much better it makes things go much easier every day everything that is done is to try to approach those goals so when you have clear goals and you work with good people it's a great environment and you know you love helping kids that's why i became a cop because i love to help people how could you not love this job it's incredible it's about the passion of kids and helping kids reach their maximum potential recognizing that education is the best indicator of future success for all kids so it is really about kids getting a solid equitable education i know portland public schools is doing something no other school system is doing in this country it is very exciting to work here and be part of this change i would say that for all those who are joining us you're joining us at an incredible time and incredible opportunity with an incredible amount of work to do but you're joining the time with an incredibly good group of people who are committed to all kids learning and welcome on board and i hope i know you'll be as excited about pps as i am i am very honored to work for this district and i'm very happy to be here malign page of portland public schools welcome to portland public schools juan ying laita will destroy welcome to my school bienvenidos cola welcome to my school for the lunch welcome to portland public schools yeah welcome to portland public schools your day welcome to portland public schools i'm welcome to pbs yeah welcome to portland public schools welcome to portland public schools we're excited to have you on our team and with that i just wish all of you a great start to the school year so thank you thank you superintendent smith um at this time we're going to move on to student testimony miss houston do we have any students sign up for testimony no no okay then we're going to move on to public comment do we have any anybody signed up for public comment yes our first two speakers jessica thompson and terence moses as you two are coming up i'll read our instructions for public comment we'd like to thank you very much for coming to share your opinions your thoughts with us we deeply value public input we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns our responsibility as a board lies in actively listening and reflecting on the thoughts of others the board will not respond to any comments or questions this time but the board or staff will follow up with various issues that are raised please make sure that you've left your contact information either phone number or email on the sign up sheet guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration when referring to board members staff and other presenters and 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 during the first two a green light will appear during when you have one minute left a yellow light will appear when your time is up a red light will appear and a buzzer will go off and we ask that you respectfully wrap up your comments at that time so with that thank you very much for being here and one of you may start good evening school board members and superintendent smith the last time i was here before you i was speaking solely as a parent concerned about the possibility of closing chief joe now i'm back as a chief joseph ockley green pta board member as a result of the merger of our two schools we have brought different communities together and created one unity community and a strong passionate pta board as well we embrace our new environment that experience has been mostly encouraging and we have the hope for our future it has been especially rewarding to see our kids adapt to all the changes in a graceful and accepting manner the classroom environments are productive and the mornings or halls are filled with the voices of teacher greeting kids and parents today we have had four very successful attended joined
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attended joined community events including back to school barbecue pta meeting back to school night and dance night we have many more opportunities scheduled in course of we have many more opportunities scheduled and of course you are all invited molly amber and jeb have worked hard in a short period of time to engage both communities listen to feedback and make changes as needed if the if the first three weeks of school are in any indication we have the potential to achieve great things in the future and continue to surprise everyone both of our communities have gone through tremendous uphill upheaval phase challenges and experienced emotional highs and lows many of us are still at different stages of acceptance as we continue throughout this process however we have made a concentrated effort as a community to take what was dealt to us and turn it into something great make no mistake things are not the same but we are creating a new normal every day and many things are better than we imagined they would be we all are well on our way to creating something special and unique something that will not only benefit our children but the future generations of north portland children thank you thank you greetings school board members and superintendent smith my name is jessica thompson j-e-s-s-i-c-a-t-h-o-m-p-s-o-n it's an honor to be here to give feedback about the results of your vote last february to merge our two schools into chief joseph ockley-green k-8 perhaps the state's only k-3 and 4-8 dual campus school although we have had many successes we've also experienced struggle they're as follows the two major issues that we've come up against so far is one the front office staff we have incredibly amazing front office managers one at chief joseph and one at ockley green we also have a .7 support staff member miss nancy who started last week and who i believe was hired through an all hands in equity grant our secretaries have to triage the needs of parents students teachers and administrators all this while monitoring the security of our front door entrances this is an incredibly tough task but imagine it at a new school that's essentially a dual campus it has been so difficult for them and they are handling it with such grace but neither of our office managers are leaving much before five o'clock every day and they're having to deal with a lot of different emotions and questions throughout the day so if we could get some help from you and getting some help for them it would be much appreciated secondly we have some serious concerns about safety as far as our kids get into school because we have so many parents dropping off so many little ones in the classroom and that's what happens when you have a 350 plus k3 we have a lot of traffic congestion both at chief joseph and at ockley green additionally now that the fourth and fifth graders moved up to ockley green we lost our safety patrol at chief joseph so the kids are having a hard time crossing rosa parks and denver chief joseph campus in particular is tucked away in kind of like a little sleepy neighborhood and you have to cross some major streets to get there the congestion created at both campuses because of buses walkers and parents dropping off is a concern a real health and safety hazard for our children ideally we like many jefferson cluster schools would like you to hire professional crossing guards in light of budget restraints we know that this is highly unlikely so instead we're asking you to advocate immediately for a traffic study we know that the transportation department is starting to work with safe route to schools in the city and we welcome this partnership our concern is the timeline please call transportation department and advocate for traffic safety assessment and plan for keeping our kids safe during this period of transition with three new administrators who are working diligently to problem solve and engaged and committed family systems and a pps school board advocating for getting a traffic study done now for the well-being of our students we know we can accomplish the goal of creating new procedures for getting our kids to school safely thank you for listening to our testimony thank you thank you both for coming next we have bernie bottomley and eliza earhart eisen you can members of the board uh superintendent smith bernie bottomley with the portland business alliance uh thank you for uh letting me uh visit with you for just a minute uh i'd like to share with you uh briefly the results of a public opinion survey that
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we conducted this last july of 600 registered voters in portland regarding their attitudes about education and portland public schools not surprisingly we found that portlanders want all our children to be academically successful involved and responsible citizens no matter what their ethnic background or household income they want the school system not only to prepare students for life but to help us foster a sense of community in our neighborhoods and in our city our survey shows that the values and objectives reflected in the board's contract offer reflect the values and the objectives of portland citizens for their schools and in many important respects the survey also reflects the attitudes of households with public teachers as well our survey shows that portlanders love and respect their teachers and want them to be treated fairly and they want them to be paid in a way that reflects their value to the community however at the same time portlanders also see the need for significant changes in the existing labor contract i'd like to give you just a couple of examples two-thirds of portlanders portland residents support shifting to an eight-hour day to ensure that students have added instructional time and in fact 56 percent of households with public teachers also say that an eight-hour day is an important indicator of whether the district is providing a quality education experience two-thirds of portland residents also support updating the contract so we're not locked into how schools were working 15 years ago more than 70 percent of portland residents want to see the teacher hiring process change to prioritize hiring the most talented new teachers not just those with several years of experience in fact households with public teachers agreed with this by a margin of 63 percent more than 70 percent of portlanders feel parent teacher conferences are so critical that they should be held when parents can attend percent of households with public teachers agreed with that sentiment and more than 73 percent of portland residents agreed that in a fiscally constrained environment the district should give teachers a small raise that is in line with projected state revenue and gives the district the ability to hire more teachers in future years and 63 62 percent of households with public teachers agreed with that sentiment as well the alliance has reviewed both the district's contract offer and the proposal from the portland association of teachers we believe that the district's offer more closely reflects the community's views about how to achieve our aspirations for our schools and our students the community wants changes from the current contract that will allow the district to put the very best teachers in every classroom the message about or the message from our survey is clear the status quo is not acceptable we want to encourage the board to stay confident in knowing that the values and principles reflected in your contract offer are in line with those of the portland community thank you thank you my name is eliza erhardt eisen eliza last names e-r-h a-r-d-t hyphen e-i-s-e-n sorry i know it's a mouthful um i'm one of the co-chairs of the portland 80 percenters for educational excellence and one of our co-chairs has been present in each of the bargaining sessions all summer long we might be crazy committable but we've been doing that and we did it to monitor the impact of the contract on student achievement and we have established four contract priorities that we feel are crucial to enhance student achievement and outcomes in portland public schools and we hope that as the negotiation process is proceeding that you keep these priorities in mind first priority is to have great teachers in every classroom with specific contract language that enables professional growth through mentoring evaluations and professional development language that enables early hiring and allows final offers for new hires by the end of each school year so that pps can hire the best available candidates who have time to prepare for their assignments lastly we strongly support incorporating the oregon state statute definition of competence as it applies to transfers reductions and layoffs our second priority is optimizing instructional hours one of the current proposals now freezes instructional hours to the 2012-2013 standards when most high school students schedules did not comply with state mandated instructional hours at the barest minimum the contract language on instructional hours must comply with the state statute but really instructional time needs to increase as much as possible to raise our graduation rates close the gap and improve our dropping test scores the third priority is to enhance parent communication and engagement the contract language must allow frequent and important communication to parents via online assignments grade books conferences progress reports report cards and getting to see their own child's work parents can only partner with professional educators if they're aware of their students progress and ways that they can help their students succeed the last priority is to enhance volunteerism and community engagement
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we have portland 80 percenters who are doing our part by serving on the k-3 reading initiative and on the diploma college and career initiative but we need you to ensure that there is any language in the contract that is barrier to volunteerism since volunteers that can support teachers and help increase student achievement we recognize the very significant teacher workload issues which impact students directly to we asked the district to be creative to address this issue perhaps a memorandum of understand of understanding that most or certain percent of potential state funds or levy funds can go directly to hiring new teachers so that you get a certain until you get to a targeted student teacher ratio we know we need more teachers to make class sizes more manageable to serve our kids better but we also know the reality is there's a finite pool of dollars but ultimately the buck stops with you the school board we elect you to serve our community and our kids you will settle this contract with the union and we need you to reach an agreement not based on politics not on the backs of our kids but rather on what serves our kids best while supporting teachers well we want you to hold our four priorities in mind when you're close to an agreement and verify that the decision you make serves our kids better if you do that we'll be here to back you up thank you i really like to that to be your legacy going forward thank you thanks our last speaker is greg barrow excuse me my name is greg barrell b-u-r-r-i-l-l and i address you again today as an education stakeholder i want to start by thanking director knowles director reagan and director buell for coming by the p-a-t picnic it was great to see you and you know i had these remarks prepared but i've just seen and heard some things that make me want to change a little bit what i was going to say because basically i saw a wonderful commercial for how great portland public schools is it was it was inspiring to me i didn't get a chance to work on my speech because in the school i subbed today there was an emergency it took my planning time and then some to resolve it but so i apologize but one of the things that i'm thinking is i watch this and i hear statements like oh we don't want to be locked into the way things were done 15 years ago is that before the great recession we were educating our kids with 80 cents on a dollar what we had in 1990 and the great recession i don't know what the new statistic is but the class size the things that are going on are the result of the lack of resources and what what i see over and over again at these meetings is people asking for you to give them a little more at somebody else's expense it's time that we really uh do what's necessary to well for example director buehl i know you remember what schools were like in the 80s before this happened there are plenty of citizens that remember what they were like and i want to envision a school system with a variety of course offerings we used to have the bands the orchestras the sports programs the foreign languages but nowadays for the 21st century i'm looking forward to this cultural diversity in our workforce more and better interventions like reconnect the best counselors speech pathologists nurses psychologists no onerous class sizes no pupil loads no unresolved grievances so how about this how about if we start with fewer central office personnel for example why can't our i.t department be run by tech teachers who also run the department why can't ptosis show how good they are by being in classrooms in addition to their special assignments why can't curriculum specialists take time off from teaching children to develop curricula that they will actually use in the classroom the following year you get the idea i am thrilled by the vision of education education that students and teachers are sharing with me in my interviews for my book thank you very much for listening thank you thank you everybody for coming to speak to us tonight we are going to move on to the next item on our agenda which are comments by the portland association of principals and school administration
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administrators also known as papsa payton chapman president of pabsa has requested a few minutes on our agenda this evening peyton thank you for coming down to our speakers table and i see a lot of administrators in the principles in the audience if you're a principal or administrator in one of our buildings could you please stand up just so we have a sense thank you and while you're standing up i want to thank you for what seems to be a very smooth and effective start to school so thank you i know that being here tonight on what is the second monday of the beginning of school is tough to be here but thank you thank you director i'd also like to say it's nice pepsi has not spoken before director buell and director kohler so welcome and it's always i always feel so proud as a principal that we have a student on our school board and we're modeling civic involvement and it's nice to see you director davidson good evening superintendent smith and members of the board my name is peyton chapman and i currently serve as the president of the portland association of public school administrators also known as papsa papsa represents administrators kindergarten through 12th grade as well as principals who are serving in alternative schools and those on special assignment paps aboard and pabsa membership are here tonight to show our support for our colleague principals who have been working hard to help negotiate a contract that supports students student achievement teachers and high quality instruction we understand the hard work that teachers do every day in their classrooms as we too were all once teachers we also understand the needs of students and families who ask us for their help every day we are here tonight to clearly communicate that when the principals on the bargaining team speak they speak not just from their own perspectives but from our collective perspectives with our many years of service and experience as both teachers and administrators principals and vice principals want to honor teachers skills needs and talents the current contract has too many barriers that make it difficult and sometimes impossible to hire and retain teachers with the right training and experience this hurts teachers and it hurts our students principals know that a more streamlined hiring process with just one hiring round would help us keep the talented teachers in whom we have invested time and resources a more streamlined process would help us complete hiring earlier in the spring so that teachers would know where they will be teaching before the school year ends and have more time to think about their classes before school starts this change would benefit benefit teachers and students when our principals have spoken on these kinds of issues they have spoken for all of us who serve teachers and students in our schools principals know that our teachers need time to prep during the school day but we also know that students and families need to be able to meet with their teachers during the regular school day we know that parents must be our first partners and that families are crucial allies who can help teachers resolve academic issues help teachers better understand a certain student's learning needs and sometimes even share important information about what's going on at home counselors and administrators need to be able to schedule short meetings with teachers and families to review ieps and 50504 plans during or just after school currently this is not possible when our principals speak on these kinds of issues they speak for all of us who have served as instructional leaders in our schools as we are in service to our teachers and our students we want to acknowledge and thank charlene williams ben kiefer and marty diaz for their leadership representing the needs of our students our families and our teachers in portland public schools thank you superintendent smith and members of the board as well as p-a-t leadership for all of your hard work on this contract we all as papsa members hope that portland public schools and p-a-t will be able to reach in a negotiated agreement that allows us to better serve our teachers and our students and our families thank you the pepsi board thank you very much for coming to join us this evening again we really appreciate it we're going to move on no we're going to move on to our next item on the agenda educational specifications high school area program the first draft of the area program for comprehensive high schools and the district-wide educational specifications has been completed superintendent smith can you introduce this item well so paul cathcart who's a project manager in the office of school modernization and jim owens the office of school modernization executive director and
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john weeks will be who of dawa who is part of putting this together will be presenting this report thank you superintendent smith and good evening school board we're pleased tonight to present a report on the development of our educational specifications for the comprehensive high school area program and i'd like to emphasize that this is a preliminary report there may have been some confusion in terms of how the headspec work is is developing we're actually planning to go through each of the school configurations starting of course with the high schools then followed by our k-8 program our mat our middle schools and then our k-5 schools and then later in the fall in december time frame we're expecting to come back again with a full presentation and a resolution to propose adoption of the area programs so paul cathcart project manager has been working through the phase one work which was our facility's visioning and john weeks with the dow ibi group are here to walk us through the area program after they complete going through the material we'll be happy to entertain any questions that you may have regarding the program paul thank you jim paul kafkart with uh facilities and asset management and as jim said i want to give you a brief overview of the educational specification project to date and how we are have arrived at the area program overview so the development of educational specifications was a future step out of the long-range facility plan that the board adopted in may of last year they're meant to be a set of solid guidelines that establish the way school buildings support programs and curriculum and establish baseline facility standards across the district yeah mr catherine can you talk speak more into the microphone or community i think it's hard to thank you appreciate the prompts as specific school sites uh approach significant modernization building design criteria or the the ed specs will be tailored through a master planning process such as what franklin and roosevelt high schools are going through at the moment to suit the individual schools and the program and community through staff student and community engagement with the design professionals which are currently in place for those two schools this project has undergone a couple different phases including the education facility's vision to guide the future design of school buildings last time i was before you the board adopted that vision document we are currently into the education specifications that will be used by the design teams undertaking renovation of school buildings so um our work to date on the ed specs is focused in design primarily to work with teachers administrators um and community partners to identify the character the components and the feel of comprehensive high schools and again as jim said we're focusing on high schools tonight other area programs will be forthcoming so today we've also been working with pka teachers and later this fall we'll be working with middle school and teachers administrators from the pk5 schools over halfway through our focus group work process and at this point i'd like to turn it over to john for a little bit to kind of talk about what we've heard through that process so what have we learned to date and it is the basis by which the area program has been developed and is in front of you is a series of conceptual ideas and characteristics of the school and then the spaces that are desired to be in a highest comprehensive community high school in the future as portland begins the wonderful task of modernizing or modernizing roosevelt franklin and grant so here are some key themes that have emerged by far not not the only ones of course there's an interest in more light and air there's an interest in having a heart in the school a place that is a center where all can gather and there's a place within the school itself that can tell the story of the school they there's a real interest by kids for a place to hang and to collaborate and to come together in other words a student-centered kind of environment for teachers there's a request for open office environments for them where they can be together outside the classroom on a daily basis again to team and collaborate the cafeteria has been not only mentioned by the community in the envisioning process but also by everybody in the schools themselves that should not be some such a surprise but the others two themes about that a
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cafeteria is we know it is not necessarily desired more of a food court a wonderful place to eat a student union-like place in a heist or a college but also it has multiple uses to it and it doesn't sit empty after 12 o'clock or before 10 o'clock every day and last in terms of the media center or the library people are looking for a state-of-the-art place where information is stored disseminated and distributed across the school the types and sizes the spaces needed for a comprehensive high school is based on the following that the in this document that's in front of you one was a grew out of the high school redesign activity that the district went through a few years back and adopted and two both the core and the capacity the core facilities for the high school and the capacity high school will be 1 500 students the educational specifications on the other hand it helps to describe not only what those spaces are how big those spaces are but the nature and character and quality of each of those spaces that are in the school go ahead so so the area program identifies a series of components that are that are before you one are classrooms for core and advanced programs as identified in the high school redesign two there's an addition of smaller instructional spaces for a variety of activities that are currently not supported in the high school environment but do need space for smaller activities and work that has to take place arts programs are are maintained and strengthened in the program itself athletics pe particularly has been provided space within the school administrative and student support spaces is a component that is not only the administrative spaces for principals but counselors sped and other programs are within the school itself and last there is a component for community partnerships that's both partners that come and work in the school or around the school wrap around services and those that are a part of your community that wants space within the school itself thanks john i want to do some highlights of the area program that speak to kind of what we've heard through our conversations but maybe also highlight some differences in opportunities to teach within schools that have the benefit of the district-wide at spec so the area program you'll see here in a minute has spaces for teacher offices for planning collaboration as john said to be higher utilization of classrooms because of that again teachers ability to plan in a teacher office and collaborate with others the intent is to use more of the classrooms more throughout the day the design of the theater would be to seat 500 students or spectators for plays and other performances and student assemblies would be designed to be held in the gym on the gym large enough to hold the full on student assembly and lastly enhanced elective and ct space options will be determined through the master planning process every comprehensive high school has somewhat different cte program or elective spaces and through the master planning process we'll elect what kind of program to pursue and the spaces that will be there to support that will be different at every school i apologize that this might be a little small to see but i want to run you through a little bit of the area program in the summary here we talk about the core teaching spaces the first column identifies the number of teaching spaces and the areas associated with him pardon me the cte elective spaces identified in the area program at this moment it is kind of a bulk space of 6 000 square feet a few more slides here i'll get into some of the details of those programs as john said we're also providing spaces for partners in community use as well as wrap around
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services that are in our schools to support them so with this draft the total overall area comes to a little over 250 000 square feet the slide talks about the core programs english math social studies and again going back to the high school system design the classes that were identified in that program to carry forward and to support high schools science labs and that's general to include physics chemistry astronomy and so forth and finally the teacher offices about 20 staff per office and that would include small office area and kitchenette and so forth to collaborate undefined uh performing arts opportunities for two and three-d art a band or orchestra room and a choir room as john said we wanted the area programs brings forth what we heard through the visioning process and wanting to support those programs dance and theater again i theater for about 500 seats and supporting rooms and other uses for that particular program this slide we were asked many times to find opportunities for classrooms to do double and triple duty so we've identified the advanced courses that are currently offered through many schools and programs and noting that the core classes can support those spaces a key thing to note about athletics here is two gyms a large gym with track and an auxiliary or practice gym as many people in high schools know there's a lot of desire for gym use in those schools the education support part of this the part i will note here is a student center with able to serve about 600 students in one lunch and again provide opportunities for additional student community gathering so let me quickly look at the cte program we've identified or broken these up into three different kinds of spaces unique spaces such as shops or sports medicine that will have their own unique layout and equipment needs their other classroom type spaces that will be supportive of cte or elective programs many of those are about the size of normal classroom but others are larger and then finally computer labs that would support specialized computers or software in support of a elective or cte program we've through the partner community uses we've identified office space for some of our partner like the sun program and so forth provided them office space which is always at a premium in our high schools and under um my apologies this became small to read but the two primary components for wraparound services are a health clinic and a teen parent services program that would provide infant care for teen parents and while not included in the overall area total we have looked at a few different options for stem programs in high schools and tried to identify those spaces that could support both stem as well as core or advanced programs so that's believe it or not a quick overview of the area program and as jim said we're happy to take any questions and any feedback you might have at this point thank you so this is our opportunity to talk about the area program and the ideas concepts and or what other questions we might have thank you that's that's uh quantifying each of those pieces um i i'm glad it's not my job but i appreciate the work that goes into it direct reagan um i wanted to ask um director morton you did you serve on you served on this education specifications committee in part oh okay i want to see if you want to oh okay i want to kind of give you the opportunity to kind of
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share not really okay okay sorry um so i had a couple of questions thank you very much sorry um first of all i was really pleased to see that you have student uh spaces in the building in terms of like student government spaces i thought that was awesome and so i thank the group for coming up with that i had a specific question about education specifications for the outside of the building because when we were at the roosevelt design meeting and i don't know if this greg came up at the franklin design meeting one of the things that we were asked to do was look at the outside of the building and not only the fields and the rest but also the outside learning spaces and i don't know whether this group had an opportunity to kind of look at the campus also or if you could comment on that we did receive some feedback from teachers administrators both on what to do outside of the building the area program is really designed to look at what's inside of the building the next step the educational specifications will talk about what should be developed as part of the site sports fields and so forth and gardens and kind of this size and to what standard those should be developed so that'll be part of the next part that'll be coming out of the educat the ed specs themselves for high schools so they're not contained here in because we're this is just identifying um building space okay because i know that would be helpful at least with the community members i was with there were some comments about you know are there going to be is it expected that there will be outside you know classrooms outside like covered spaces gardens any of that so i'd love to hear a little bit more as you go whether we want to try to come up with specific specifications on that or not one more piece excuse me one more piece of feedback we've heard quite a bit about designing classrooms that have the opportunity to open up to the outside or provide that connection to an outdoor space or potentially a garden so that's um will be as part of the ed spec itself where those opportunities allow design for that so both to have nature come in but also to provide access to the outdoor learning potential and direct gregor and i would i would also add that much of the site many of the site considerations will actually be addressed during master planning and so each of our sites differ somewhat from one another so when coming up with a standard if you will we need to be able to look at each site individually and determine what's possible what the configurations of the play fields are exactly how it'll configure and again that'll be part of the match planning documents that we'll be bringing forward when we get to that point that um i'm just trying to envision is that an is that an auto shop plus some other spaces is it i mean to help me understand what we're talking about are there lots of opportunities within six thousand square feet or a couple or does it depend typically that would be about the size shop whether that would be auto or otherwise um again looking at um there may be auxiliary users that go with at a computer lab or something so part of it is the cte space but what do you put adjacent to it that might be used for core programming as well so shops typically around 6000 square feet if they're all classrooms that would be about six classrooms it depending on the on the mix and what the master planning process at each school pulls forward as far as cte or electric programs so as we look at other high schools that have recently been built in the area is that about what they tend to include in their specifications or do you have any idea i've done a little research to find that out and have not come up with conclusive numbers but in talking with tacoma school district they've identified they're very similar to us their space dedicated to cte program varies depending on what the program is at each school so tonight i don't have a area comparison and we'll bring that back to you but i know other school districts have that variation in amount of space devoted to cde your question um trick reading um it varies depending on the school and the community with it within which the school resides and the neighborhood within which in a school might reside within a school district they're all
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very much different and so high intensive shop spaces that were usual and customary in the 1960s have given way to much lighter and agile cte spaces around technology-based programs cad design website design film audio visual communications so those require smaller spaces the big traditional wood shops metal shops and auto shops require bigger spaces so depending on the mix in the neighborhood and the interest of the school one could say that six thousand square feet could end up with three to five cte programs within it depending on on the interest of that place if the interest is um the trade and i don't want to use the word traditional but you know the shop space that we are new in the 70s and 80s 6000 square square feet might be one or two depending on what the program is so i guess one of the questions i would have uh related to cte is as we go through the process how much flexibility we would have with that 6000 number because if a school chooses to do auto shop for example i don't necessarily want them to be precluded to you know that said and i don't know whether we have the opportunity still to have some flexibility around that so that we say 69 000 square feet or whatever it might be as as we narrow it down but i guess i'd like us to at least consider that i think relative to the uh the use of the enhanced elected space cte stem space uh during master planning again what you'll see when we come forward with the plan recommendations are exactly how each of those sites wanted to customize or configure that and at both roosevelt and and franklin for example there will be differences in terms of how they approach that what the ed spec provides us with is kind of a generalized guidance if you will something to uh to start with but we're not locked into success right it's not a these aren't hard lock numbers and of course this what you're hearing tonight is is is a draft of where we are currently we have more work to do to further develop this and this is how this is occurring concurrently with the start of master planning for uh for roosevelt and franklin so as we get more information i think as we come uh we come back with it i think you'll see more of the details on that it um i think we're i mean we're looking at 50-year buildings here so uh space that that may be used for auto shop in the next 10 years may be used for something else and then 10 years after that i think some re-purpose similar to what's happening in ocala green repurposing an industrial art space into a dance studio is something that if if that's possible that's an effective way to stay up with what what we need to offer in the classroom um i'm particularly concerned about 6 000 square feet for cte i'm i'm not sure that that is enough um i we hear from the community constantly about benson and everybody putting all their eggs in benson's basket we cannot serve all of the students that want to be served with cte at benson high school especially if we're looking at 40 40 20 you're looking at 60 percent of our kids potentially not going on for a four-year high school degree a lot of those students are going to want cte and they're going to want trades it's not going to be all computer labs videos it's still going to be the kinds of things that are happening at benson but you can't service all of those kids at benson high school so i'm really i'm concerned about the 6 000 square feet two i'm also concerned about it because if we do something like an auto shop or whatever in that one spot i'm concerned about what do we do with all the rest of the cte work that we're going to be doing with students generally as they're going through their high school years so i think that again it's a real it's a concern for me and i don't want to say anything about negative about the arts or athletics because i think they hold kids in school but so does cte and when you look at the space that we're allowing for both the arts and athletics it's a huge amount of space of course i realize that auditoriums are big gymnasiums are big that makes sense but i think that we also need to think about how much space we put aside for career technical education given that 60 of our kids may be students who want to use that kind of or need that kind of educational service so i just uh and you know i was
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looking at the memo that we got and um nowhere in this memo doesn't mention cte either so i just want to make sure that we keep it at the front because again uh every week we receive emails from parents about career technical education and from not just from parents from the business community very concerned about how they can partner with us um in in developing cte so i'm also concerned about how we're reaching out to the community something that we will do i know it's not for ed specs to do but uh definitely for us to to be reaching out to the community to see what the needs are there so that we're not heading down a track um that that industry doesn't need so just my concern my question is in terms of that how did 6000 feet come to be as jim said this is a draft document and kind of looked at the programs that were being offered out there right now and what variety of spaces could we serve through that so it was a number we just developed kind of on the average of the spaces but i certainly hear the concerning questions about is is that enough and that's something we'll we'll go back and re-examine certainly what vocational ed teachers included in the in this survey or in any conversation so you had i didn't see that in here either and i you know the phone i know that we're a little short on those these days as are most uh school districts but um and i know that it's it's a difficult thing right now to even get vocational ed teachers out of uh university so something else we need to work on but just curious about who was included or if those kinds of people were included in that discussion so my recollection is we had elective teachers certainly not the full gamut of what's offered through cte so thank you go ahead uh so i was curious about the note next to theater in finding performing arts uh it says for 500 script rent bump at greater than 599 can you explain that to me company that owns the rights to something they have tiered rates for what house you're going to play to so if you're under 500 i don't know if there's also a 250 or something but if you're under 500 it costs one thing but if you're going to be able to if you're going to perform it for a thousand then they actually increase the amount that you have to pay for the rights to put on that production and i think that education folks are saying you know we probably don't have that kind of money to play to that so we can we're okay with a 500 but i don't know if that's no that's a very good uh description of that and that's what we've heard from the performing arts teachers that we've talked to um and in negotiating the um how much to pay for the script the question that comes up is how large is your um theater so in response to that we can say it's it's 500 students or spectators for that performance um and if it's a popular performance it's something that's you know you hold three or four showings of um it also allows for and this is a lot of comment from john a better theater more intimate performance space higher quality performances are typically held so a lot of high schools in the area are going for this smaller version of a theater and getting better quality productions out of it all right okay thank you i had one other question um and this is about comments that you might have received from teachers about the offices versus classrooms having been a classroom teacher for a period of time i know i always always felt very possessive about my classroom but now being at university in the university level you know i don't have any strong feelings about classroom and have an office so i'm curious what the feedback from teachers was about that having an office versus having that classroom so the conversations started around the potential to do professional development development with their colleagues and uh many teachers mentioned that it was difficult to do in the classroom or they needed some conference space and so we talked about the idea of individual offices or kind of a suite of
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offices and that my recollection is that was led by the teachers wanting to have that kind of space available for them so um i think there will be both out there teachers who both sides both sides but i think it's a great idea but the the opportunity to do that and collaborate and have a kind of a private space to do some lesson planning was um appealing i know if you had any other thoughts john yeah i i think there was there it's not a new idea um there are other high schools particularly around this area that have provided that for teachers and the teachers that are in the room and also administrators who happen to have been in schools elsewhere around the upper willamette valley and southwest washington where those functions that function been provided taught how valuable that had been and they were talking from it from their perspective as a teacher because they had been a teacher in there and the things that had happened and what was going on and so they were supportive of carrying forth that idea these are our teachers they were your teachers these are what our teachers were saying okay yes thank you following up on pam's really good questions and stuff comments um the one question that i had about uh cte and the shop stuff is are we putting in enough hardware so to speak elect electrical things and whatever you know those things are we putting them in there in that 6 000 foot space so that we don't have to i mean you because what happens is when you down the line if somebody says well we want to shift to this we've got this program number now and we want to and you have to i don't want to have to come in with the jackhammers and dig up the concrete i mean is it already there is it in the plan so this is where there's gonna some overlap between educational specifications the district design construction design guidelines and then what will be designed at each individual school so the educational specifications will talk about having enough power enough data enough daylight for what's going to happen in each of these spaces including a shop space so the program element of that that'll be discussed at master planning and taken on into design will provide that for whatever shop or space goes in there and we'll have some thought about where to locate um things in the walls or floors elsewhere for future years but depending on we won't know what the future use is and the design of that space will provide whatever power and data and ventilation will be needed for that space so the answer is no in the um is that correct but that's part of your design you're not really designing that six thousand square feet for making sure that you if they want to shift it to a shop that it's it's already ready to roll that there's not a that there's not a barrier to doing that for instance you've got to go back out and make changes in order to do it which stops us i mean i'm beginning to learn how we work up here and when it's if we all if we don't have it it's very hard to get it if it's already there then it's easy to shift if they shift that so the answer to my question is no correct a lot of space uh these spaces will be designed for what the need is at the moment but not for the long-range need thinking in terms of of having some space in those schools where you can put a shop easily without having to reconfigure everything so the answer is no we don't have that unless they decide they want it now is that correct and let me try to add to what paul said i think it's important to recognize that whatever space we end up uh determining needs to be designed we'll configure that space with all the utilities all the mechanical the cuticle plumbing all of the it configurations that are needed as part of the master planning if there's additional spaces that are identified for growth in the future we would be identifying for future development additional utility support additional mechanical electrical plumbing components so i don't i don't think it's a no per se i think it's we're tailoring our planning our master planning and our design to the spaces that we end up choosing as part of our as part of these elective programs i don't know if that completely answers this is a longer now it's
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it it essentially uh it takes into account the flexibility that's that's possible uh to us these sites are very restricted in terms of uh in terms of how how much space is available there so that all needs to be developed and i know i've said this several times tonight but as their master plans come together i think there will be more clarity on this the the question of cte that you're speaking to tonight i think is important to go back and and look at in a way that when we come back to you we we're more responsive relative to how cte will be configured directory can ask for clarity you want um clarification on your part by asking that question are you giving input to staff to find a way that we can build in so build in additional space um i i know some community members might say it's over build but push that in in additional spaces look for ways to do that so that we don't have to go back is that because this is our time to give that feedback it's doing if you're doing feedback from me is not from anybody beyond me is i yeah it makes it would make sense to me that if you are going to move towards cte possibly which we might be doing it kind of get that feeling we may be going that direction anytime you can get pam and i do agree on the same thing it's a pretty strong direction and and so i just want to make sure that that i would like to suggest that that option's out there because what happens is you go into the school they got the 6 000 square feet it's a shop but you're going to have to go in there and spend all this huge amounts of money to do the stuff and they won't do it they won't do it so but if it's set up to do it they might do it right and i think that's i mean to my my comment earlier i think creating creating space that has a possibility of upgrade a possibility of flexibility depending on depending on what era we might be in and what cte cte might be defined over the next 50 years because again we're building 50-year plus buildings here or renovating for the next 50 years i think having space i mean 50 years ago we wouldn't have been able to sit here and say what's your wi-fi capability what's your ethernet capability what there's going to be there's going to be something that of course a a big box a room that has conduits that you can pull wire a room where you can you can attach um you can attach wi-fi or what-have-you uh is going to be something that's more flexible in the future versus something that uh that is going to be stuck in the era in which it was built we're also planning to do some upcoming cte specific visioning sessions that are really convening people to talk about this particular subject correct could we maybe speak to that a little bit so people understand where they could plug in with some of the ideas that we're hearing because i think we've got many members of the community who may also want to participate or have a way of plugging in so one of the next phases of the ed spec project is to work with some business and industry partners that have some of which you have noted have been vocal with pps to talk about current needs and desires for cte programs and as part of that we can identify those programs and then um look at those spaces that we have identified here and update as necessary to talk about both the design of individual spaces but to director nola's point is what's here for six thousand square feet is that sufficient for a comprehensive high school so um kind of a bigger district-wide look at that that'll have some translation into individual spaces um but that's we're hoping to start convening those meetings next month and have a series of conversations around that point um this might sound a little goofy but did the group look at configurations of hallways and the reason i'm asking is when i was on the design team for the forest park elementary school we essentially eliminated hallways and kind of developed the classrooms around neighborhoods or pods and i'm remembering i believe john that you designed the oregon trails school and i'm recalling that the classrooms had an extra there was there was sort of glass toward the hall and then there was an extra area where there was a couple of small tables so that a teacher could essentially send some kids out to do small group work but
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still be able to supervise them so i don't know whether there's has there been any discussion about hallways or hallway spaces or making them more friendly so the answer to that is yes um and in particular in particular there's a lot of conversation around that one of the challenges of high schools are particularly the ones you have you're dedicating up to 35 percent of your core of the gross area of the building the corridors and those corridors are used about five minutes or ten minutes every hour if you're lucky and the rest of time they sit empty and that's a lot of space to be dedicating to moving a kid from point a to point b and having no other use for any other time of the day right and so what we talked about was well what is what can be done to turn that into usable extension of the classroom for benefit of the teacher that are there or are there ways to group classrooms in that you can create teaming groups around a commons area if you will by using the quarter to help you do that so that you're turning corridor into usable space in the time it's not being used for corridor perfect to get from point a to point b and that is part of one of the key characteristics within the program itself that you will see coming forward that the grouping of classrooms as best as can be accommodated in some of your schools in which they were not designed that way because of the envelope that you work hard to create groupings of classrooms and turn corridor space into usable educational space extension of the classroom or a way to group classrooms together for teaming or collaboration purposes or to creating departments or interdisciplinary units however wants to be done great thank you i i just have a couple of comments one i really from what you can get from this document which is a pretty dry document i got really excited about the library about including including the large medium and small gathering spaces when we went on our tour up to seattle as the design advisory groups people would walk into libraries and when there were glassed in rooms that could still be accessible people just got really really excited including the teachers so i was really excited to see that and i look forward to starting to see some of the actual plans to make that happen and then i had a question about designing our lunch areas or our commons for 600 and i'd be curious to hear what my colleagues think i mean that's design that's based on keeping an open campus um and cycling at our current a little bit higher capture rate than we currently do because i guess and maybe this is just a traditional person in me what i grew up with is what i kind of expect um but i just we don't keep our kids on on campus and i'd be curious to hear what other colleagues think if that's a direction we want to head if it is then our common area needs to be i don't know bigger or at least we're having three or four lunches which i think would be a scheduling difficulty other colleagues thoughts so i i grew up in an open campus okay and uh you know i think that uh sometimes i i'm a little concerned about them with our really young students our freshmen that makes me a little nervous about open campus sometimes but generally i don't uh i don't have any issue with it and the other the other part that i heard somebody talking about at one time was um something closer to like carts i'm not a food cart aficionado but having places throughout the building where students could get food is is an interesting concept to me especially since um at least when i've been in the high schools at lunchtime uh you see a lot of kids go through the cafeteria line and then they're out in the hall or they're outside or they're you know they're not sitting down in the cafeteria anyway so i mean those that those are just my thoughts about it but is that because there's not enough space and they're not inviting places that open up to like could we describe think about think about the cafeterias i mean the ones that i've seen there are some that are in the basement right well i think if you if if you're going to use them not only for that lunch time but also as a student gathering place that's a that's a really important thing to think about because it would be wonderful to have them up front in our buildings if they really are going to be student gathering places um like like a true commons or an agora or you know something really like in the i'm currently involved in the design i'm not designing it of course
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of um uh our new business building down at oregon state and the fur the main floor is a you know a small restaurant and then it's all space for students to gather tables and couches and and then down the sides are as you guys were talking about open rooms small project rooms for maybe five or six students to be behind glass doors and do projects which is what i see a lot of our high schools the project work and the collaborations being done in classes seems to be somewhere we're heading in the high school as well so just closed campus all the way greg i'm with you you can tell who has young kids um no i think i think one of the really interesting things to me uh from past presentations and and my participation in some has been uh the idea of uh sort of just changing the perspective a little bit and creating community space or open space within a school versus having a community space with a school surrounding it and it's this i think it's an idea of how welcoming is this space and how are you bringing your community within it even during those school hours um the idea as as pam suggested having you know pods with you know food court areas or whatever you want to call the custodial nightmares um i think is a really interesting one but i think it also lends to a uh lends to a space that is also attractive to students to to socialize in i mean that's one of the things that we you know we're just saying oh and you mentioned a lot of our high schools we they're not very appealing spaces uh the cafeterias but there are more appealing spaces and there's spaces that actually are centrally located and you see movement and you have an opportunity to socialize and be around folks that that maybe you wouldn't see throughout the rest of the day so i think it's an interesting interesting problem um and when hopefully we'll we'll be able to get our hands around it's another use for those hallways other thoughts about that and director reagan just i know you didn't mean it this way but um this is actually reflected on feedback that i've heard about students at cleveland in particular who make their way to a local fast food restaurant and i get to hear stories and perhaps they're anecdotal perhaps they're not about about students not coming back about and teachers who has the time to go find them and make sure they're back and so yes i have young children i actually would feel very comfortable with my 10 year old going out just fine maybe more than what i anticipate for my teenager but i can't say that quite yet the other um comment i guess or two comments i wanted to make is one i appreciate director morton i think director bule you were both saying that and trying to anticipate what might be needed in in 50 years or 100 years you know nobody would have even 50 years ago thought that health occupations would need the kind of space and nobody would have ever dreamt what kind of machines that would need to be there what kind of facilities so how challenging that is to not over build for today when when we know that the change is happening so quickly but still to adequately prepare because you're right director buell it's it becomes a barrier when we try to go in and make any kind of change later because it becomes cost prohibitive and i guess the last feedback i want to put is that i appreciated i noticed an inclusion of multi-generate gendered bathrooms or unisex bathrooms or gender neutral bathrooms and i'd like i'd be interested i think that we're going to see much more of this and so i wonder if we don't have to change a little bit in our scope and how we how we work to accommodate that rather than one set of bathrooms or two set of bathrooms how would we accommodate that and i also think that we should look at changing facilities we have a boys in a girls locker room and i think that's over the next 100 years or 50 years that's going to become more of an issue that we i would like to be on the front end of and so other comments thoughts great thank you all very much we are going to move on yes as noted in our as noted in our revised agenda that we sent out earlier today we changed this topic to an information only item this evening the board will not hold a vote on this topic until october 1st we'll have a short noon meeting to discuss this to give opportunity for feedback tonight the board will discuss the designation of the building area for franklin grant and roosevelt high school modernization work efforts um superintendent smith would you like to do this item and i know that we have one gentleman that signed up for public
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comment so maybe before we move on to that we invite citizen testimony it because it was an action item we were going to have testimony or do we normally introduce it and then have citizen testimony remind me i'm blanking meaning do the presentation first and then ask for the testimony is that your yeah yeah is that does that make the most sense i'm blanking so presentation first and then presentation first and then that okay um thank you so to do the presentation i will introduce cj sylvester who is our chief operating officer and again jim owens who is the executive director of the office of school modernization thank you superintendent smith staff is recommending adjustments to the capacities of the three high schools that are being fully modernized as part of the 2012 school improvement bond these high schools are franklin grant and roosevelt the first thing i want to be clear about is that this recommendation does not impact the district's high school system which remains at seven comprehensive and two focus option high schools and it does not impact other bond projects which remain wholly intact as does the 482 million dollar bond program in its entirety making a final determination about the size of these high schools at this time in the process allows for the franklin and roosevelt projects to remain on schedule there are a number of circumstances that serve as background for this staff recommendation we have completed the draft comprehensive high school area program as you have just heard we are benefiting from high school enrollment stability as a result of the implementation of the 2010 high school system design process we have updated enrollment forecasts and anticipated improvements in capture rates for these newly rebuilt facilities that speak to the need for larger capacities metro and the city project significant longer term demographic changes in the portland metro area and the recommendation further acknowledges that common areas cannot be expanded once constructed so staff is proposing capacity changes that take franklin from a 1500 common area and 1 500 classroom capacity in terms of the number of students to a number of students of two thousand in the common area and one thousand seven hundred and fifty in the classroom with grant uh we are recommending that we move again from fifteen hundred common area fifteen classroom capacity to capacity of 2000 students in the common area and 1 750 in the classrooms we are recommending that roosevelt remain as was initially proposed with a common area of hundred students and a classroom build out of twelve hundred students the impact of larger buildings has a related impact on project costs the bond program reserve was established in order to accommodate project scope changes such as staff is recommending without impacting other bond projects scopes and budgets staff has proposed for the full modernization of franklin grant and roosevelt high schools that the budget be revised from 247 million to 257 million the 10 million dollar increase would be funded from the bond reserve each project which would retain its 15 percent contingency and the cost per square foot for all three projects would be reduced from two hundred and twenty dollars a square foot to two hundred dollars per square foot we're happy to answer any questions you may have about any part of this recommendation and i would also like to acknowledge that kevin spellman who's the chair of the bond accountability committee is in the audience this evening would you like us to vacate for public comment yes that'd be great thank you yes correct ms houston can you call our citizen comment that would be scott bailey great mr bailey i'm going to forgo the directions that i read this earlier to this evening about com public common input but you'll also have the three minutes with the two minutes of the green light one minute at yellow light and red light buzzer means please stop thank you and welcome you know i don't pay attention those anyway if we get to the right i'll help you remember um thanks and good evening um our portland our schools has uh was briefed on this friday morning and we have a number of comments and concerns which i understand have been floating around the district so what the heck first thing is if my memory serves and i apologize if i'm a little fuzzy on
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this but i believe we brought this issue up a year ago i know that during the long range facilities plan i asked portland state about long-term forecasts longer than the 10 term and they said 60 000 was a reasonable number for the district you need to if you divide that out that's over 2 000 students in nine high schools as an average so conceptually we support would support looking at increased numbers but would also ask why 2000 is that enough considering that uh the city portland is projecting a 50 increase in population over the next 40 or 50 years uh that would push it well beyond 60 thousand um second thing uh why not roosevelt to 2000 given the growth coming up uh we know if we're planning for more growth imagine along lombard a whole bunch of new apartment complexes like are going in right now along division along mlk and so on um why not 2000 at least have a conversation with the roosevelt uh community before going forward and saying 1500 here 2000 there and i'm speaking for course spaces not for the classroom build out and i will say director reagan raised some interesting questions about the classroom build out that that should be looked at we worry about the loss of quality going down to that 200 dollars per square foot we have no idea what that means we understand that's a conceptual number but the the bac has said that's an issue finally we worry about the increased risk we just had a conversation about cte and flexibility and maybe we should build built to more capacity just in case that that's a cost this proposal would do away with half of the reserves before we've even dug into these three high schools and had the oh my god this is going to cost more than we thought because of what we found when we started tearing them down finally i want to say that some comments about cte the process seems to be ground up individual school at a time that's not the way we should be planning cte can i finish my thoughts about cte 30 seconds or less okay um over in clark county today i was at a planning meeting we're looking at combining cte planning for the large school districts up there we need to have a comprehensive view that then has the individual school communities fitting into that comprehensive view and yet we're launching a couple of high schools right now we need to have that plan now and you know we've had so many blue ribbon committees over the years and we still don't have a plan that doesn't speak well about the leadership thing in this district thank you mr bailey now stop there now cj and jim if you could come back up as we talk about the recommendation questions thoughts comments i'd be happy to start i'm glad we're having the discussion now um clearly it's the time to have it uh if not even sooner um i'm generally open to and wanting us to build to a larger core for the facility and so people understand that what we're talking about is actually why don't you go ahead and explain what core means so people can follow along okay we're using the words core and common area interchangeably and what that means are the areas that all of the students and teachers use so it's cafeterias it's uh theaters it's gymnasiums it's um the commons or the agora to the extent that that's above and beyond you know the cafeteria square footage it's restrooms uh it's the kind of uh central core facilities um administrative spaces administrative spaces yes yep hallways corridors to the extent that they're not being used right i know they just said they were designing them out but so i'm i'm generally open to a larger core i'm um i'm not decided on whether roosevelt's course should be built out as far as the other two just based on
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the population that we're seeing at this point clearly roosevelt and franklin have a much lower capture rate in terms of students than the others so i'm open to the discussion i haven't kind of figured that piece out what i'm more concerned about as i'm looking at this is how much classroom capacity would be built out initially because when you look at franklin grant and roosevelt and the number of students that are projected to be in those buildings um projecting enrollment for 2017 and 18. um there's a huge variance and so my concern is that grant high school if we build it out to 1750 students now is going to be too small it only gives us fudge room of about 60 students or probably two classrooms on the other hand you're looking at roosevelt which would under your scenario be built out to accommodate an additional you know 10 or 11 classrooms and so i'm trying to understand how some of that makes sense and and certainly part of it again is that grant has a capture rate of 50 of 80 versus you know 63 or 53 for franklin and roosevelt but what i don't want is for us to um be completed you know complete a building and then have a whole wing that's not used either so there's a balance there i agree i can tell you we are a little bit at the um the demographer the demographic information that we have is what leads us uh in certain directions and so for uh the 2025-26 school year franklin high school is being shown at 1643 grant high school is being shown at 1622 and roosevelt's being shown at over a thousand uh grant at what over a thousand over a thousand grant um based on uh of you know a surge that we have goes up to uh 1723 in 2020 21 and then goes back down to 1622. so there's a bubble working its way through the system uh in the grant cluster currently that's going to be reflecting in those years so that's the best information we have you know today looking out to 20 25 26 which is as far as the psu demographic projections take us are those assuming the same capture rates those do assume the same capture rates and so as we indicated in the staff report with roosevelt at a 53 percent capture rate in franklin at a 63 percent capture rate we we would assume based on what's happened in other school districts that are comparable that those capture rates are going to increase when we have new facilities available in those areas with grant already at 80 percent we would expect that the increase in capture rate would be something less than what we would see in the other two areas where it's so low so cj can i follow up on that this might be a question for enrollment and transfer but i don't know all the the schools the feeder schools to grant right now but i just think about our discussions in the past couple of years that beverly cleary is bursting at the seams right we're doing everything we can alameda bursting at the seams so 2025-26 that brings the current kindergartners right up to high school um there seems to be from without looking at all those numbers there seems to be a surge so i'm not sure how it comes down we have bigger numbers in the middle grades is that is that what we're saying that the three four five fifth graders are wrong numbers it's actually grant that has a surge between 2020 and 20 uh 23. so there's a three-year period in there where it goes up over uh 1700 and then it goes back down into the 1600s i'm just i'm trying to mesh those the data knowing that demago demographers right i mean it's funny sometimes people say oh look psu says you're really growing at this and other people like how why do you use that psu number like so it plays both ways but i'm just trying to jive it with the with my understanding of what what i hear at those schools today um and i feel like there are more kindergartens in that cluster now than than there were three years ago so that may be true but i don't have the kindergarten data right that's what i'm saying it might be an enrollment transfer but it can help me to know as part of this discussion and i guess my my bigger question is that if we're looking all the way out to 2026 at roosevelt and you're only looking at a thousand plus kids as a projection um i i a little concerned about building
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it out quite as much at this time that's not to say that we don't have the capacity to do it at a later date but i'm i'm not i'm not understanding why we would build that school out to an extra 200 kids when you're building grant out to an extra 60 kids or franklin for that matter i think the difference is uh the capture rate with roosevelt currently at 53 percent even a 10 increase in terms of the capture rate would take us up to 1100 students and if it's more than that of course it will be even more so um i do believe that that's you know the significant difference between roosevelt and grant for instance well i think the i'm no demographer uh but the where i mean anecdotally where i see the the population growth uh booming is in north northeast portland it's in southeast it's farther southeast not inner southeast those are also the communities that have a higher birth rate in comparison to those those families living primarily in sort of inner northeast or southwest those are the families that are having three four children um and and i think that's something that we have to take and take into consideration too and i think one of the one of the trends that i'm really interested in hearing from the portland state demographers is the as our community and our students become more diverse um what does that do if anything to the capture rate within those uh within those uh those clusters that's something that i asked i think two years ago and they said we don't track that and maybe they do now but um but i think it's something so we can use that we could use uh that sort of disaggregated data on as a just another variable and to figure out does 1500 make sense in a school like roosevelt that is one of the most diverse diverse schools in the most diverse neighborhoods in the city um for uh for our future projection and clearly uh the board understands that staff will be happy to design and construct whatever it is you want us to design and construct so you want to make sure that you're you're familiar with and i understand that it comes with dollars too oh yes of course anything is possible so um i have a question because we just there's the board and then there's the voters yes uh and so we just voted on this bond and we put something in front of them what what exactly has changed information wise from 2012 when we put this out well i'd say there's several things i mean one is the the fact that high school system design has had a stabilizing effect on our enrollment that every year we get updated enrollment information from not enrollment but demographic information from psu and it does change the city of portland just released in may of this year of 2013 uh they're projected uh their growth projections for their long-range planning uh which is something that mr bailey who was speaking briefly you know referred to as the fact that they're anticipating another 280 000 people here inside the city limits of portland by the year 2035. and so where those people are actually going to reside whether they'll be in our district or in some of the other portland districts and the demographics of those that in migration we don't know so how many of those will be families you know how many will have school-aged children whether they're going to land in the west side inner east side outer east side north northeast is speculative at best but we do know that portland's going to be growing so and that's been part of the comprehensive plan work that the the city of portland's been working on for a number of years and that that report was just published in may of 2013. okay and then in terms of delivering what we said we would deliver and going down from 220 to 200 dollars per square foot and maybe we should have the back member come and talk to us about this but um could could you talk to us a little bit about that the you know it's are we going to be able to deliver at 200 square feet 200 per square foot at what we we will design and build to budget um it means that there will be a whole series of decisions that get made as we go through the process that have an impact on the final cost of the project and so it's um too early to know because of course we're just have just started input
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sessions on the master planning about whether some of that's going to come in structure depending on you know do we go with steel do we go with concrete what are the relative prices and the costs and the benefits i mean so there's a whole series of decisions that get made through the entire design and construction process that need to bring us in on budget and so it's not possible for us to tell you right now what those decisions are going to be and what the difference is in terms of that 20 dollars a square foot i would also add that in looking at our our conceptual estimates when the bond program was being developed that we used third party estimator writer level bucknelt who's a nationally prominent estimating firm that looks at different categories of construction and as they looked across the uh the k-12 arena they target uh high schools and elementary schools across the nation and they have specific data for portland and the portland data at the time showed a range of between 190 dollars per square feet up to 250. so parametrically or conceptually we we selected the mid-range going to 200 we are still within that range and so as we have the opportunity to master plan and then start our design process we this is a time now where we can flex to that and as cj mentioned really managed to the budget that would that would go with these projects okay thank you the first couple questions are ones that i was given by someone else one of my constituents and asked me to ask and i thought and i went through them when i'm out but there's a couple of them here the psu thing was june 2012 right the one we've looked at so we've known the ps4 we've known the psu stats since june 2012 and then we added in what else that made the change here to all of a sudden it comes up now because that's quite a bit that's what 14 months that was the length of my second marriage so what else came into play there what else caused us to what else caused us is there must be something else to cause to bring it now like last friday or something when we got it what was it what else came into play well we were just um talking about the may 2013 city of portland growth projection report that was the one that changed everything um now i would say it was a combination of things actually that that was part of it the stabilizing influence of high school system design in terms of what we've been able to accomplish with that in terms of our enrollment us being able to anticipate based on discussions with seattle public schools and other urban school districts who have gone through this same kind of work in terms of increases in the capture rates so also the education specification as you heard uh just this evening has recently been the draft for the comprehensive high school has recently been completed we had originally estimated um that and this was for bond purposes that we would need about 160 square feet per student and in fact the high school ed spec is coming in at more like 166 square feet per student so even based on retaining the same capacity the schools are are going to be larger or would be projected to be larger based on the ed spec than what was in the bond so what i would say is there is a whole uh there are a series of issues that have been refined over the last 12 months and so we have more and better information now as a result of work that's been done over the last 12 months since the bond was approved in november actually i guess it hasn't even been 12 months yet 10 months this next one's a little longer oh but just basically what it asks is that why roosevelt's not increasing in our population projections uh the population objections what matt said he said and i think there's a lot of truth in it that that's where you're getting you've got housing opportunities out there you've got all this stuff in north portland going on housing opportunities increased growth they've had uh let me see since the curriculum expanded and stabilized in the last two years a dramatic increase in enrollment has brought the current actual enrollment in
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roosevelt to approximately what was projected for 2026 and so we're still we're saying that's going to slow down some way we think or no actually i mean what we're identifying as our recommendation is that we have a core capacity for 1500 students and with this bond we build out for classroom capacity for 1200 students to accommodate growth so you're saying that's it that's supposed to accommodate this other these other increases supposedly well that's supposed to accommodate the increases that that we have as good of knowledge as we can today in 2013. i read a book called the signal and the noise by nate silver talks about the incredible difficulty of predicting those things out and one of the things he says when people get in trouble when they do predictions is by doing it by the numbers as opposed to taking all these other things into account and uh so just i guess adding that on all right let's try again just a couple more what about what's the actual deadline for making the decision well you say that didn't that would not disrupt the construction schedules in a perfect world we'd be making the decision tonight um but in fact i understand that's not going to happen so we have identified and put out to the public to about 5000 people emails and flyers and other materials that indicate that we're going to come back to the franklin and roosevelt communities on october 12th for one of them on october 19th for the second one with options uh for their consideration for master planning if we believe that the decision uh will be put off longer than next week which i understand is what's currently being contemplated then we would need to change those dates and that would have a ripple effect through the balance of design and construction last question from the constituent then i have one on my own what's the chance of putting together the long range facilities planning committee to consider these changes and fully fit the implications a couple of these had been asked previously by mr bailey so well i guess there would be two parts to that answer actually the long range facilities planning committee um had a charge based on oregon revised statute 190 that had a 10-year time frame so the long-range facilities planning committee is not the group that put together the bond materials because they've got a 10-year planning horizon and one thing we indicate in the staff report is that we have to look beyond a 10-year planning horizon in terms of the schools that we're looking to design and construct there was actually a separate committee a bond development committee that worked with the public and the school board regard guarding a variety of options for the ballot measure consideration so the long-range facilities planning committee um isn't the one you'd want to do is what you're saying well i i don't know that it's just a it's a it's a funny mix of um of characterizations is how i would put it in terms of the fact that we had multiple committees involved with different pieces of this and it was a very linear process at the time and so to go back to one you would think that we would want to go back to multiple and um and this is really you know a policy level decision for the board oh here's my question and this is you can tell that mine's a dumber one i'm um trouble with the with the size of the buildings grant used to have three thousand kids in it now we're rebuilding it and it's got it's got two thousand what happened to the parliament burned down and i missed it or something i mean what's what what happened there no actually i mean it wasn't re i know 3 000 was squeezed in there but it had 3 000 kids in it and now we're going to drop it to 2000 when we build it well and i would suggest that educational delivery has changed a lot over the last um you know three four or five decades we now have yeah we we now have requirements uh regarding the provision of services around special education around english as a second language and a variety of other kinds of interventions and pedagogy so the the kinds of schools that you and i went to are different even though they look
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exactly the same right now because these are the schools that the school district currently has and they're old enough to have represented the era in which we graduated from high school i probably uh look a lot like the ones three years ago when i was teaching school though in the brand new building up in vancouver there i i don't know about that but i can say that that teaching and learning have evolved uh significantly since the time you know that we were in high school and our buildings need to reflect that we are looking at expanding grant which actually is probably contrary to what you're thinking in terms of the fact that there used to be 3 000 students there but we're looking at taking both franklin and grant up to just over 300 000 square feet each in order to accommodate the common core of 2000 students and and then of course the classrooms for one thousand seven hundred and fifty and now the last part of that number question is right now roosevelt's bigger than franklin in terms of existing square feet square feet yes yeah and so how does that come in to play with what we've done in the bond planning i mean are we we've got more kids in because we're saying okay we're gonna put more kids in franklin than roosevelt but right now roosevelt's bigger and franklin smaller well we're looking at taking franklin uh based on the proposal based on the education specifications franklin would go from its existing 218 000 square feet and if we kept it at 1500 core and 1500 classroom capacity it would go up to about 250 000 square foot with the recommendation in front of you this evening with a 2000 core and 1750 classrooms it goes up to just over 300 000 square feet so franklin will get significantly bigger under either building to the education specification at 1500 or if we increase the capacity is recommended thank so um you really quickly first of all i want to thank both of you for the extensive staff report that you provided to us the materials are superb so thank you very much i could tell a lot of work went into these um and then i guess my uh i just have a comment it's not really a question um and it's something that i think you reminded me of and we've had other people remind us of and that is that we have other levers available to us and i'm thinking particularly on grant and maybe franklin eventually that we have as a board adopted and those lovers include boundary changes and we also have a school an empty high school marshall in um you know that is available to us at some time as well so as we're looking at these numbers i think that as a board given the fact that we have said that we are going to look at that as one of our major levers that we need to remember and keep that in consideration while we're looking at the rest of this and i would say that the long-range facilities plan indicates that very thing that enrollment boundaries should be considered as the first option rather than the last one and that capital options should be secondary to them whenever possible and then also the idea that yes we we're talking about three high schools right now but if we move forward as had been proposed in 2012 when this ballot measure moved forward and we follow this with another three high schools followed by another three high schools we have a series of tiers that we're going through and we'll have the opportunity as we go through this to make adjustments with each group of high schools that we're talking about so that as better and more information gets developed whether it's as a result of long-range planning by metro and the city that's coming to fruition or anything else changes can be made in the tier of high schools that's currently under consideration to help adapt to that that better information thank you um but not before you go but before we move on um i know that um both kevin spellman and louis fontenot are here from our bond advisability committee bond advisory committee and i don't want to put you both on the spot but i know that you sent us a document that we just received recently could one or both of you be willing to come up and share with us your perspective somebody referenced a concern you had in one of these documents and provide your perspective on this on these changes or recommendations i thought if you're going to sit here until this late at night doing volunteer work we could at least hear from you i have several more questions greg when we're done okay
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members of the board uh superintendent smith i'm kevin spellman chair of the bond accountability committee and with mrs louis fontenot one of our members we did send you a document we were briefed on this issue last week and the committee's reached a general consensus and essentially uh we we certainly don't take a position as to whether you should adopt this resolution or not that's not not our business what we tried to look at was what would be the effect if you did adopt the resolution and we found that to the best of our knowledge this is this could be done within the scope of the existing bond program and cj and jim have both done a good job i think of explaining that i'd i'd like to kind of commend them in in their approach in the to the degree that it's very transparent what uh they're proposing it's simply taking 10 million from the bond reserve and reducing the cost per square foot of these high schools doesn't touch um other contingencies it doesn't touch escalation it doesn't touch soft soft costs it doesn't touch the other work and really there are a lot of moving parts in this um bond program and and the temptation certainly is there to to move money around um the um there's no question that this proposal would increase the risk be simply because the cost per square foot has been reduced to the lower end of the range and that's a risk issue and takes 10 of the 20 million dollars bond reserve which is a risk mitigation fund if you like the other concern that came up really is not driven by this proposal because it existed already as we looked again at the escalation uh contingency we have concerns about that and this this proposal doesn't change that so we wanted to put that back out uh front and center i guess um schedule is a concern with as cj said we're really looking for direction one way or the other so we can move forward with this the the i know you all have concerns about schedule and so as does the public and this is kind of a day-to-day thing now we delay these decisions it has the propensity at least to delay uh the entire program um lewis want to add anything to that and certainly you opened a question you've covered pretty much everything there um the number one thing in in my mind or close to the top of the list is this is coming out of the board's reserve and it's half the board there's a good portion of the porch reserve so now is the time that you make the decision if you spend the money then when you know four months down the line when you're halfway through the design you go oh we really need this x you know the money's already been allocated and so you that opportunity um will not be there as robustly you won't be able to you know put 20 million towards it because half the money has been been reserved now so that's my concern but then again you're in schematic design now this is when you make those decisions two quick questions pieces to add i think that that are relevant um one is that what we've seen so far from the project management of this bond program has been really good and you know the summer work is really a small part of this program but it's not a trivial exercise to to achieve what's been achieved so that gives us confidence in in the ability of this team the other is you know when you when you increase risk and you reduce contingencies it can have the um the effect of imposing discipline on everybody and and that would respectfully include all of you um it would be very clear that we no longer have any kind of fluff here if there ever was any everyone would understand
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these targets are at the lower end of the range and it does limit the flexibility that's a plus and a negative of course so thanks i know director reagan you had some additional questions but while we have um if you're open to questions if folks have a particular question for these two uh i do in terms of the the escalation reserves that that uh you're concerned about what sort of mitigation can one have with that concern or or you just sit there and sweat uh well to a degree you sit there and sweat um that the the good news is that that these high schools are front loaded in the sense that we should have if we can stay on schedule we should have guaranteed maximum prices on roosevelt and franklin within a year from now so it's not like we got a guess what construction costs will be five years from now for most of this contingency grant is a little further out um the the other mitigations are uh are dealt with through the design process where for instance you know if if one kind of product um its inflation um goes higher than others that can influence uh product choices uh steel concrete all the way through the uh the um process louis you deal with this all the time so yes um the design risk um that i see or the the construction risk is is going to be inflationary um where we are coming out of the great recession whether we're you know people say we are not but we're we're coming we're coming out of it and so we've not in my day-to-day business we've not seen um inflation pressures yet in construction but we know that they're coming um we're talking with contractors every day that everyone's you know we're nervous but we still have to plan for the future we have to build for the future and and that's and that's what we're doing here so with those risks you you hope that your assumptions are the best um uh that you use the the best most accurate models possible and then you put on your pants and yeah you get to work i think that's what we're doing here okay thank you so one of the things you talked about i think would also be called opportunity cost if you go from 220 a square foot to 200 a square foot at this point we're precluding spending money for other things so two of the issues that i've talked about as wanting to include in these rebuilds are things like the opportunity for solar on the roofs so that we can hopefully lower operating costs over time or to ensure that we have air conditioning in these buildings um so that they truly would be year-round community use buildings um i still don't have a clear understanding of whether either those options are available and i would specifically want to know whether we would preclude those options by doing this and i'm not sure that you would answer that as opposed to them but well i i just don't i just don't want to come back and have this conversation and say oh because we increase the size of the building we can't do solar bobby sorry or we're not going to do air conditioning bobby so i i i believe that those are still on the table now because the buildings are yet to be fully designed well i'm not sure who's the most appropriate people to answer okay so that sounds great thank you both thank you thank you very much thanks for all your work on overseeing this and making sure everything is moving forward okay so we know what our first question is so the change in the cost per square foot does not change the scope of the project in terms of the fact that we still know that these facilities need to be 12-month facilities and uh we still have a one and a half percent required by state law that we need to put into either solar or other very limited uh green kinds of construction work and the conversation we're having now is if we're capable of bringing in a partner to a partner with us on the solar then maybe we can use that one and a half percent in terms of some of the super passive elements of the building um that help us further with the 12
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month um but if not it will be used for solar so so we're looking at solar either way under either circumstance at all three high schools and fabian and the possibility for air conditioning also yes okay that's when i say a 12-month school that's what we're talking about okay uh a facility that's capable of making sure that is in the minutes thank you what i'm not saying necessarily is that it's air conditioning i'm calling it a 12-month school because if we're able to go super passive and we're able to accommodate an appropriate temperature range over a 12-month period by doing it through other design features and we could actually eliminate the need for air conditioning i still want that to be on the table so this is also a very linear process that involves many steps that will help us further refine the scope the quality and the budgets and i think as we go through master planning as we get into schematics we come back to you with our schematic design package you'll have a lot more clarity in terms of what we're proposing to accomplish uh which will then align with our builder as we bring them on under the cmgc methodology that you had approved last month we'll have a really good sense of a guarantee maximum price if you will in gmp and that will give us a much stronger sense of confidence as we move in the construction phase on these schools a lot more cost control knowing where we're going to land when we complete these schools director beale all right the window is going to open if we have if we have air conditioning it depends that's a nice legal answer it depends on where are we now are we thinking i spent my life practically in buildings where the air conditioning broke and the windows didn't open we have a we have a very good example of the problems of that in adams high school which we demolished because it had mold every place because it didn't end out i by the way i'm the only person probably in the city parliament who knows where that mold came from but i'm not telling you um i need help remembering what the question was sorry i got so excited i think the question was about it sorry about that i got lost somewhere in there um in all likelihood there will be some operable windows it depends there's a series of decisions that need to be made particularly around our three his school high schools that have historic facades about whether we're going to be rehabbing the existing windows and doing some kind of interior storm windows that also have an operable component or whether we're going to be replacing those windows and then there's the question on opera on operable windows about whether they're operable at the whim of whoever's in the room or whether they're operable under certain circumstances depending on the um uh the temp the interior temperature so all of that's part of the conversation that takes place during design i i think i can say that uh architecture in general has gone away from the closed building that became fairly popular particularly in the 70s and even through the 80s where the thought was that everything should be fully closed and you would have just an artificial ventilation system and that things have come a long way since then and that indoor environmental quality indoor air quality access to natural ventilation is part of also the leed certification system that will be part of what we'll be doing as we go through the design process thank you um so a couple more questions um what is what will we notice um as a difference between uh 220 square foot building uh cost per square foot versus a 200 dollar cost per square foot obviously we had 220 in there for a reason so what kinds of materials would change that's where we don't have an answer until we get into the design process i think i indicated before i mean you start having those conversations at the really rudimentary level or like i shouldn't say rudimentary sorry to all the structural engineers who are listening um you know in terms of deciding uh what's uh what structural method are we gonna are we going to go with concrete are we going to go with steel we're going to go with the mix what's what are the various um you know cost return on investments in terms of that and that's going to feed through every single decision we make throughout the entire design process in order to get to that 200 a square foot so it's not as simple because we're at the front end of the process if we were deep into the process and the only thing we could impact for instance were finishes then you could say gee instead of this finish you're
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getting this finish but because we're at the very start of the process when we're doing this it's it's an integrated design process and so every single decision will be valued against its durability its operability and maintainability and us giving you know the greatest value to the voters based on on what the bond had proposed okay i think it's also fair to say that the the science that went into the 220 per square foot was was a conceptual or parametric estimate taking data for regional portland metro for high schools and so we didn't have a precise scope that was established with that instead we had a we had a range and we selected right in the middle we selected right right between the two numbers so as we get started we're we're at a lower end certainly but as cj mentioned it it really becomes the discipline of how we look at the scope and how we manage what we're actually going to accomplish and then as we develop our plan i don't think it'll it'll be very evident actually the difference between 220 and and 2 220 and 200 because we'll approach it from the beginning using a 200 number also i think it's worth emphasizing that we're inflating these numbers based on when construction starts we actually have a methodology that allocates escalation dollars uh to the midpoint of construction phase so we're actually taking the time to look at escalation over that period what it amounts to and as we get into the as we complete our schematic design we'll be allocating that so we'll have a much better sense of of that and the actual dollar per square foot will go up at that point because escalation will will have that influence on it so yeah the 220 and 200 is a comparison of second quarter 2012 dollars so it is it is an even comparison and so escalation will simply take that 200 dollars and inflate it up based on the construction index so the one thing i also wanted to ask my colleagues was that the question that came up about the core building space and whether we should be building all three of these to the same core 2000 versus two of them to 2000 and then roosevelt to 1500 and i don't know if anybody has a strong opinion about that and i don't know whether or not you cj could tell us what the difference in cost would be is that going to be a huge difference in cost i i don't know what a it is well i don't know it's huge there's a difference in cost it's about 3.1 million if we took roosevelt from a core of 1500 and a classroom of 1200 to a core of 2000 and classroom of 1200 it's 3.1 million okay that's helpful to know and what and so what would you see what would you feel what would what would be different would it be a different size gym would it be i mean do you have any sense of what that sure well it's all the core facilities and you may want to talk about the methodology so the gymnasium the uh the media center uh the commons uh the administrative spaces the corridors uh one of the items that was in the area program that we didn't talk uh i think john mentioned it briefly but we put a gross to net factor in basically 30 on top of the net area so all of that collectively accounts for increased commons in your memo in the packet that we had provided in the area program we highlighted a methodology where we incrementally increase the core space based on the amount of student capacity so we took a that spec was developed around a 1 500 student capacity 1500 core and we expanded it to the 1750 2000 and there was a method that actually showed how we got to that and it's really boring to go through it because it's it's a it's a math exercise but it but it was a way to highlight the increased size and increased size then connects to increased costs and that was the methodology important and that's the the final piece of the memo that he's referring to is one that jim authored that was part of the staff report for the uh an attachment to the staff report for the high school area program in tonight's packet so so i just don't know if my colleagues have any sense of where they would land on that one because thank you for actually asking except before we wrapped up i wanted to make sure because we aren't going to have a discussion before we come together and vote on this so staff are going to need some kind of sense of what what this resolution should look like to come back to us so i'd i'd like everybody to weigh in on that if they could i'll go thank you i i don't have uh an issue with recommendation i think as the gentleman from the accountability committee suggests this is the moment in time during the process that we actually make decisions like this and i think it's perfectly appropriate
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i of course i'm relying a great deal on the expertise of that committee and the expertise of our staff to to inform us on what are the best the best choices in front of us at this point one of the some of the things that i do worry about one is i don't in a few years want to hear about value engineering i i don't want to hear about uh we we made this decision in 2013 and now it's a little bit more expensive and we're going to have to cut some costs i think you were referring to that um so but i also know we don't have our crystal ball here the other other piece too and bobby this is maybe specifically to your question one of the things that i hear particularly with these pretty significant publicly funded bond efforts is as soon as the kids move in the building is full and or the building is obsolete or the building doesn't work the way they expected because of x y z and uh if i were to have one wish with my magic wand it would be that we don't hear that uh and a part one of those things we can actually affect now by saying uh build it bigger um build it build the capacity obviously to grow based on based on a logical uh projection but um yeah so i don't i don't have i don't have a uh any particular conflict with with the recommendation um but again i want to make sure that we're not uh in a couple years a couple years down the road talking about value engineering and trying to cut corners in places where we probably shouldn't have so what i'm hearing is um no complaining later from staff about the dollars you're giving us to work with right make it work okay others steve all right steve yeah i have complete confidence that you are making the right decisions probably within the building i don't have much confidence with our ability to predict the numbers and that's a real big problem for me because we've got roosevelt which is often a school that takes it in head anyhow and we're knocking them lower and based on some numbers which i don't think we really have any i i just don't think we did the numbers right even i mean when they're it just i just didn't sound like we were confident in the numbers so i'm not confident in the numbers i don't so i don't know exactly what to do i'll have to think about it i guess well and i i can't put a little postscript to that which is as the photographers would say any further than five years out and the children haven't even been born yet sure have any idea they're the professionals on which we're relying in order to to do the best effort but there are those those people's predictions aren't going to be very good either that's why i mean we're really stuck in a spot where we really don't know about that roosevelt neighborhood and what's going to turn around what's going to happen and so we're and we're shortchanging it slightly by building it smaller and i'm not sure that's what we want to do but i honestly don't i honestly i can't predict it i don't know i'm worried about him so you want to hear from each of us is that yes please so um first of all i just want to again thank the staff but mostly this time for just catching this i mean here we have all these changing numbers and um bringing this to our attention so that we can do something about it now versus when matt says after we've already got them open and are too many students so i appreciate that um and i also um you know i'm not a construction expert and i rely on you and i rely on the bond accountability committee whose work i appreciate to come to us and tell us what this looks like at least as far as the construction part of it and the numbers and the money not the number of students but the money part appreciate that and then to follow up with steve you know predicting the numbers is we can't predict the numbers so um i think that it's in our best interest to build to what you are suggesting um and then again i'll mention the lever that we have with boundary changes that we can also work with that in order to maybe overcome any any
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extra in population that we might uh might see or a decrease i mean we just don't know crystal ball um yeah i also appreciate the uh the work on this um you know i'm a teeny bit perplexed when uh we when the long range committee says the first lever is boundary change and transfer and the memo says we're not considering that so it makes me scratch my head a bit i think that it uh one thing that we have to do is keep faith uh with the voters um certainly if we can pull this off and um and we're successful we'll we'll have more than kept faith with the voters because we're giving them more um than what than what we told them for the same price um in terms of the numbers on the roosevelt i share everybody's concerns about that and i i want to take some more time to think about it and hear some input which is one reason why we're not voting on it tonight but but the but the direction of where we're going and making these uh high schools have a larger capacity i think is a good one um so thank you again for those work it's really great i would like to piggyback on what director curler was saying about this is a really great opportunity and i think we're moving in the right direction but i also don't think i can make a decision quite yet i still need to think about a little bit because although i think we're on the right track you know like people have been saying it's really hard for anyone to predict and i think it's just something i'm gonna have to think about hear more i like what the contractor said just put your pants on and go to work you gotta make a decision you know you can't put it off that's actually a good recommendation regardless no no i was just going to comment on our process so first of all i'm glad we're not voting tonight and i think that you started the conversation that led us to slow this down a little bit because i definitely want to hear from community members who have been really engaged in this before seeing where i'm finally at in general i'm very supportive of moving forward with building a larger core i think it's short-sighted to not do that i at this point don't believe i'm open to uh doing the roosevelt court of 2000 when we only have 900 kids at this point um and even though it's a low capture rate that's doubling the size of the the building doesn't seem like it makes sense to me um but i'm i'm open to hearing what the community thinks about that i would say my immediate concern would be the classroom capacity build out that's being proposed for grant at 1750 when the expectation is that when we finish the building there will be 1690 kids that's only two extra classroom spaces for grant high school i don't know why we wouldn't build it out another couple of classrooms to have a little bit more fudge room there so that one doesn't make sense to me um i guess that's where i'm at at this point i just wanted to make it clear that we're not giving you any directions because in order for us to give you directions we have to vote but what we're doing is giving you our suggestions and that's different than getting directions from the board correct thank you on october 1st we're going to vote that's right and whatever they come back with we'll vote on or make amendments right and so we have a better chance of them giving us something if we give them something right i just wanted to make it clear because you had it's yes it's semantics but it's also an important point um so i guess i just to add my voice to this i i think this is the right direction i think to tom's point about holding faith with the voters and to matt's point about not overbuilding but under building um we don't have a crystal ball we're never going to have a crystal ball and so it could very well be that something changes dramatically but i i think that the numbers that i've seen based on what we have um make sense and i think as again as we
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went through the bond campaign and i heard people talk about oh you're building palaces they're going to be lush they're going to be over and other people are like wait you're just not it's not big enough like our numbers so this begins to to more strike that balance which again we knew we had to strike a balance when we went out to voters and i think that there could be that come in the next four years or five years when people start to see these facilities that the next group of schools might people might say you know what we need to go bigger like or they might say you know what that's the right science because i think about if we built roosevelt to a certain size it's going to compel us to want to make sure it's a full building which people in our community have also said we value neighborhood schools and we can redraw boundaries until that whole north portland all goes to one school but to people that are living somewhere else it's not going to feel like a neighborhood school and so we do have to strike this balance of size and i just i don't know that we'll have a crystal ball so i just i'm generally comfortable or i am comfortable with the numbers you've presented in that direction obviously i'm open to other information if if something comes available but i i i don't i'm i i can't imagine what information i'm going to get in the next week um that's going to change this um this for me so so thank you we are going to move on thank you the board will now consider the remaining items on the business agenda with resolution 4806 which was the one we just discussed with drawn miss houston are there any other changes in the business agenda no do i have a motion and a second to adopt the business agenda do you want me to do a segregation vote at the end like we were talking about with an amendment not at the beginning correct so okay that's fine we'll give that business to okay director knowles moves to approve the business agenda director curler seconds to adopt the business agenda um ms houston is there any public comment on the business agenda no there's not director buell at this point is when people would make amendments you wanted this agenda all right is there any others yes i'd like to move that ncs pearson incorporated number 60142 uh be segregated so we have a move to amend the business agenda to remove from current consideration the new contract in resolution 4805 ncs pearson inc contract for four hundred thousand dollars no no they wrote on it separately right now so it's gonna be we're talking about we're gonna remove it at this point and it'll become its own okay um so with that contract removed are there any other discussions about our business agenda yes i have a question okay uh the us department of education race to the top funds like to know what what we are getting and what our responsibilities are because we had the big fight over the race of the top funds not when i was on the board but previously it was even brought into the newspaper and stuff and it was an incredible stuff and here we're back with the race to the top funds again i just want to be careful that we're doing what i mean what are we going to get for these and what are our costs for these in other words what do we have to do and what are we going to get out of the rest of the top let's deal with uh we've got it with just to kind of help people in the audience who may not have with we're going together with beaverton salem and eugene to do something but i don't know what it is so this is actually a on the revenue contract and it reflects um a grant application that we've not yet submitted but makes it visible the um that we're in discussion um and preparation to submit as part of a consortium as director beale just indicated with salem eugene beaverton and portland and it is to create a college and career readiness consortium between the four largest districts um and it is a actually it is a a grant we were in discussions in the last one of the previous rounds for a race to the top application with association of teachers on a different application this one actually the core of it started with eugene's application and then and salem they both did independent applications focused on college and career readiness they then subsequently invited um beaverton and portland to participate in the conversations to see if we could as the four largest districts really collaborate about what we're doing to prepare students for college and career readiness it dovetails with some of the work that we're each independently doing in our own districts and we have the
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opportunity to tailor it to our own districts it does require that all four districts have the participation and the sign on both of your mayor of this our respective cities our us as a school district and our teachers association so um and the teachers associations of all four districts have been in communication with one another it's one that both eugene and salem have been their associations have more deeply been involved in the preparation because this was a continuation of a previous grant whereas beaverton and portland were more um in the conversation yeah as newcomers to this particular one but really again tailoring it to ourselves so we are in that conversation with p.a.t and um and with the city of portland so what do we get out of it and what do we have to do what do we get from it i mean it's a consortium what what is so here's a consortium we're going to buy people but and are we going to have to then uh spend more time training our people i mean what is how does it work so director did you get the application i believe the staff forwarded that to us so it's 133 page that would articulate all the information that we're required to do and there's all the stuff i got yeah it would have been via email because a question came up and so they sent it to us 133 pages my email yes yeah you did and actually i can get you a copy that's a full copy of the app of the application and it's actually in draft form at the moment what does it do what does it do and what do we what do we end up so having to do what what do we get out of it and what do we end up having to do so it is and i'm going to actually ask you to i'll prepare a copy of the application for you okay can we move this table this till next time and add this to our meeting so i can get the information and theoretically read 133 pages which i didn't i don't know did you give me a copy of it well i don't remember seeing it on the email so i mean just roughly speaking part of what we're collaborating on is um with the four districts looking at what we're each doing to prepare students for college and career readiness we're also partnering with the university of oregon epic on college college and career readiness assessment tools that we're that we would each be utilizing in order to measure college and career readiness so are we giving kids more tests beyond what we're giving them now if they would be employing um some of the assessment tools yes as part of this um in terms of what we actually do to participate some of the requirements to race with for race to the top also require us to participate in how uh specific ways we evaluate our teachers specific ways we evaluate our superintendents but i mean so there are requirements that we're saying which is the substance of the conversation we're engaged in with our teachers association so so in anticipation of uh director buehle you possibly wanna pull us out i realize that we can't have two amendments um without voting so you had originally amended our original business agenda um to remove the ncs pearson contract to move to its own um to its own resolution if this has to be okayed by the maybe i can get us out of this hole here i can get myself out dude this has to be located by uh our teacher union okay in order to get the grant yes okay and they haven't okay yet we're in the conversation all right fine and and the second thing is that if if somebody's gonna ask me 133 pages i'm not tracking this at you but i don't want to read it off my computer yes i mean i'm 68 years old my eyes aren't that great it's very it's i read off the computer all the time but if i'm going to read 133 pages on something that's really important to me i don't want to do it off the computer i'm sorry and i don't want to do it i apologize so director bill i'll be happy to provide you with a full time that would be great and why don't i just abstain from voting on the business agenda on this this part of the business so that's what i'm saying so and then uh then i can let that'll let us go forward because i'm sure the votes can be six now let's let's let's do this so let's vote on um all in favor of of amending our business agenda by pulling out the nc pearson contract all those in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all those opposed please indicate by saying no no no so by a vote of five to one uh oh sorry was student representative voting yes yes um by vote with five to one with student representative davidson
03h 00m 00s
voting to remove ncs pearson from our business agenda to its own resolution now at this point director buell you can we can move on and vote on the entire business agenda that's the best for the board okay or we can also remove that and make its own resolution and you can vote how on the rest of the business agenda i don't think it makes much difference go ahead and do the fastest which is just go ahead and now um we will now vote on the business agenda as amended with nc pearson inc contract for four hundred thousand dollars removed all those in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions abstain by a vote of four to zero with one abstention and direct and student representative davidson voting yes yes and the business agenda is approved no it was it was one two three four four three five director buell is it five oh sorry five bruce math is it nine o'clock already five to zero um or five to zero to one with student representative yes could i just i i just wanted to comment on this collaboration with these other districts and as a general rule i'm really excited that we are looking at this kind of collaboration as far as i know all of these districts have better graduation rates than us we can probably learn something from them and what i'm excited about also is that this isn't just about kids graduating it's about college and career readiness specifically um so uh i'm i'm wide open to any kind of collaboration like this with other districts i'm sorry if i missed you during the comment section we will now vote on resolution 4809 which is the ncs pearson inc contract for revenue contract for four hundred thousand dollars can i get a motion and a second to adopt removed second director regan moves to adopt resolution 4809 director morton seconds is there any more discussion on it director buell can i apologize before this comments on this because this is before this discussion because it's going to be just a little bit longer i want to explain what this how this works to people in the audience people on television and to i don't know if i need to explain this to board members maybe i do uh the way this this kind of stuff i want to ask first the superintendent does does this deal my because i ask these questions and try and tell the staff ahead of time and what the things that i got back were kind of unclear a little bit the the the response and it this doesn't this also deals in similar with the proficiency based a uh house bill two two two zero that's the proficiency bay that's the proficiency grading stuff so what this so some of this has to do with that so what this um is specifically a contract for is professional development for over a three year period for both teachers and principals in proficiency based credit awarding of proficiency based credit and also formative assessment and so it is a contract specifically for professional development and training for our staff does it do does it have to do with the proficiency based grading hb2220 proficiency-based creating yes okay all right then let me explain how this stuff comes about what happens is you have you have a group called alec which we know about which is pretty pretty right wing group of legislators national legislation group and its legislators all over the country in this group and large corporations come to that to those people and they do they lobby them and give them money in order for and what alex does alec does then is they come up with templates and templates of legislation across the country and they send those templates out to different legislators who are an alec and those people then bring those to the state governments and try and get bills passed that had to do with this ultra-conservative pretty right wing even though our a lot of other kind of people get involved in this uh like our governor was in alec not when he was governor but previously at one point and so this these then come into state legislatures and state legislatures make motions and those motions generally have to do with
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who the people who gave money and lobbied alec was now pearson who we're talking about here is one of the is the biggest people in the country that do this it's a huge corporation and they have an agenda and their agenda basically is we're going to push things that eventually then make us money and so if you think i think if you go back and you think about uh the cartoon character that camel used you know to try and get their kids involved or you think of a happy meal at mcdonald's well pearson basically does the same type of thing now is this evil i wouldn't say it's even it's business practices this is not a conspiracy theory this is business practice and business practice is to get these things in the state legislatures that then they push which causes people to buy things from pearson so we had proficiency-based grading which doesn't really do anything for our kids and we got that and that came through on the slide 2011 on the slide nobody's paying all the attention to it like they were in the last legislature where people were paying attention to everything but this kind of slips through and now they're saying to us okay you've got to do this even though it's not helpful for our kids now here's the tricky part is it's got a little bit it's got this german truth in it wouldn't it be nice to have my to have uh to understand how my kids were doing in everything without their homework involved maybe or without uh their attendance involved well you of course would be nice the the the classic example of this is the stuff that we're doing with teachers that came through which is we're going to use the children's test scores to evaluate the teachers that's a classic alec move and so what happens with that is even though it's no good and everybody who pays any attention to educational research or educational stuff knows that the test scores are worthless basically in evaluating teachers everybody knows that but we still got it through and so these things come through like that and so here's this is another example of coming through the legislature comes out to us starts with pearson or whomever maybe it's these big huge corporations that want to make money and so they push these things through and they go all the way into state legislatures we don't think about it we think oh it came down to oregon no they come out these are national things and they end up in our legislature cause you always find somebody if you're going to give them enough money or you're going to give them such and such to do these things so here we get to pearson 400 000 and what does it do it deals with proficiency-based grading which came out of the legislature which probably came out alec though i'm not sure came out someplace and came eventually from probably person to begin with this thing's around now i think somebody has to say no to this kind of stuff no this isn't good for our kids necessarily even though it has this journal of truth in it and what i say that what i say about it is not just no it's not good because of this system it's no because we can't afford it we don't have hundred thousand dollars to put into taking this stuff and dealing with our teachers and trying to get them to understand proficiency based grading let's go down to medford i think has a pretty good plan let's go down and just you borrow their plan let's give them ten thousand dollars so we save 390 000 uh or let's hire our own person for a hundred thousand dollars and give them a forty seven thousand dollar budget a dollar for each kid and then have them come up with a plan but coming up with this type of this spending 400 000 is not what we can afford think what you could do with 400 000 we could put a a half-time librarian certificated librarian in every one of our eight bottom k-8 schools bottom in terms of test scores k-8 schools in the entire in all eight of those schools we could put in a halftime librarian for 400 thousand dollars i mean it would be an incredible thing anybody who does research knows that almost the most the best thing for teaching kids to read is to have a certificated librarian in there so instead of spending four hundred thousand dollars for certificated librarians which by the way would not benefit pearson education at all christian education doesn't get benefited by anything that goes directly to kids and they don't get benefited by any time you add staff they don't get anything out of that so it comes around and we're handing them four hundred thousand dollars which we could really spend someplace else we can't afford this i'm gonna vote no on it thank you thank you director beale any other
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comments okay well now i i i share directing fuel's concern about alec for sure um i i don't know or understand that pearson is completely tied to them but i haven't they're not completely but they do yeah i have huge concern about alec also i think it's something that we all need to be aware of and be paying attention to um i'm not sure i see the direct correlation here director curler we i guess i have a question for uh superintendent smith so if um if we all voted no on this what's the impact to uh to us to our students and to the district i'm going to say that i think proficiency based credit allows us to be responsive to students in terms of really assessing where they are in their learning and continuing to provide opportunities for them to gain proficiency so like i think we have a deep interest in having our staff and our instructional leadership trained in a common means of of assessing that regardless of whether we have this in the legislature or not it's something that we're interested it's a direction we're interested in moving as a district in terms of what's what meets the needs of kids the other thing i'll say so i mean would we invent another way to figure out how to do this yes the opportunity to work with the two people rick stiggins and ken o'connor who we would be in doing through this professional development is a great opportunity so rick stiggins is somebody local ati is the company assessment training institute that was acquired by pearson so we had a relationship with them prior to them being acquired by pearson um and they've been a you know good professional development um opportunity for us that meets our needs so would we invent another way to do it well we would figure out another way to do it so yeah i just wanted to make sure two things one i know this didn't necessarily come from alec that's a typical thing so i'm not you know this is a typical alec thing though this is where where this is how it works but i i've heard wonderful things about rick stiggins and this is not in any way i just want to make sure it's never in any way directed at him he's evidently he's a guy i'd love to have i think he's a great guy to have working with us from what i can make out from friends i have who really know him and he was one of the early guys in oregon save our schools that they talked about hey this guy does some really good research this guy does some good stuff so that's it i just don't think we can afford it part of our job as are the stewards of the money we can't we can't afford this if we can afford let's take this money and put it where it makes more sense so can i make two other comments just one that i i also appreciate um director bill's concerns about alec and impact so that one uh you know i totally appreciate that and the other one is just um the impact of having professional development that we're providing in a system our size the ability to provide consistent professional development of something we're trying to move across an entire system is an invaluable investment of getting the consistency of practice across the system so and the opportunity for people to work on that so that's the other place that i also would say it's an investment in our folks and in improving our practice i know you want to let me make one more comment and then we're home free no we're moving on to a vote oh i just wanted to comment doing it no we're not recognized on the floor 400 000 we're not going to vote on i don't know 4809 nc pearson inc contract for 400 000 all those in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all those posts please indicate by saying no no resolution 4809 nc pearson revenue contract for 400 000 is passed by a vote of 5-0 with student representative davidson voting yes yes so there's been a request there's been a request for uh um for a call to the vote miss houston can you call off uh roll call so that we can vote individually please so it's five yes and one no director yes director morton yes director curler yes director noel yes director fuel yeah i chair below yes resolution passes by a vote of 5-0 a student representative still voting yes yes thank you the next meeting in the board will be a business meeting on tuesday october 1st 2013 at 12 noon this meeting

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)

2013-09-23 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - September 23, 2013

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