2014-01-21 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2014-01-21
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - January 21, 2014

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good evening this meeting the board of education for January 21st 2014 is called to 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 this meeting is also being streamed streamed live on our website and will be available archived On The Board website for future reference at this time we'll have our public comment Ms Houston do we have folks signed up for public comment yes we have six our first our first two speakers are Aaron's errands as you as you're coming up to the speakers table I'll just remind folks of the instructions for public comment I'd like to thank you both well all six of you that are signed up very much for taking the time to come to our board meeting we really 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 and opinions of others guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration when referring to board members staff and other presenters the board will not respond to any comments or questions at this time but the Border staff will follow up on various issues that are raised please make sure that you have left your contact information either phone number or email on the sign up sheet so we can get a hold of you if there's some follow-up for it pursuant to board policy 1.70.012 speakers may offer objective criticism of District Operations and programs but the board will not hear complaints concerning individual District Personnel any complaints about specific employees should be directed to the superintendent's office and will not be heard in this forum you have a total of three minutes to Sherry comments please Begin by stating your name and spelling your last name for the record during the first two minutes of your testimony a green light will appear on that table right in front of you when you have one minute remaining a yellow light will appear and when your time is up a red light will appear in a little buzzerable sound and at that time we ask that you respectfully wrap up your comments again thank you both for being here and we look forward to hearing from you hi my name is Zoe LeDoux l-a-d-u and I'm frustrated with the school board with the district and with the quality of my education I am sick of my education being treated as a commodity my intelligence is not for profit throughout negotiations the district has only wanted to focus on aspects of the contract with a price tag do you really want the quality of the Next Generation to be based on a business deal I see money leaving my schools through the hands of people who claim to represent the students if the PPS District really represents us why are they not listening to what we have to say and why do we have to push so hard to have our voices heard tell me why people who supposedly care for our schools are funneling money out and away from them when our education is based on the profit of others we all lose thank you hello my name is Aaron smirle s-m-i-r-l you might be wondering why director Buell has a peanut butter jar and the photo of a young woman on his name plate here's why at Beverly Cleary Elementary School there is a first grader who has a life-threatening nut allergy Complicated by asthma if for instance he came in contact with peanut butter he could die what makes this a special problem is that Beverly Cleary is a crowded K-1 school with no cafeteria and hence the children sometimes eat in their rooms or even in the hall the staff and the parents at the school have been very Cooperative in making sure they don't bring nut products into the school after all this is not a matter of a tummy ache or a few hives it's a matter of life and death they understand that and have responded accordingly so where's the problem the problem is that PPS Nutrition department continues to send peanut butters and jelly sandwiches to Beverly Cleary as a staple for children who have forgotten their lunch that day and while they have put some controls on where these sandwiches are supposed to go uh any teacher can tell you how easily a mistake can be made in a crowded classroom of first graders and a mistake in this case could be a disaster Eve has tried to appeal to the administration for three months to have the district make a minor adjustment for sending in a different type of sandwiches to the handful of children that this affects he has appealed to the Nutrition department the superintendent
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the district lawyer and tried to bring a motion to the school board which would make Beverly Cleary a peanut free school similar to many schools across the country the school board has gone as far as do not allow him to even make the motion so who's the young woman in the photo she was a student in Elkridge School District in Sacramento who during a summer camp bit into a Rice Krispie Treat and died the Sacramento School District immediately held an emergency meeting and declared their 39 elementary schools to be nut free so tonight Steve is going to try again to bring a motion at the end of the meeting which would designate Beverly Cleary at Hollywood as a nut-free school and thus stop PPS from sending in Time Bomb peanut butter and jelly sandwiches um this creates kind of a Minefield for this little first grader who we're told sometimes cries himself to sleep because he's afraid he'll die at school so the main person whose vote is needed to override the Chairman's refusal to allow the motion and to vote on this motion is Matt Morton we are appealing or I am appealing to Matt to make a decision as if this child was someone he knew we don't expect Pam Knowles Greg belisle or Ruth Adkins to support having this mother uh I'm sorry to support having a mother of this child not suffering through this child's death but we think Matt has it in him and would understand why so please Matt we're asking for your vote to help support this motion and thank you our next our next two speakers are Kate Barnes and Sakai Edwards hi hi my name is Kate Barnes that's b-a-r-n-e-s and I believe in youth we sitting here before you we are the Next Generation to lead this world it saddens me that as young people there are so many limits and stereotypes placed upon us people think that we are immature and that we're impulsive we cannot be trusted because we don't have the experience of the older generation our opinions are disregarded for lack of wisdom and our good decisions are retributed to other parties I've heard countless comments calling us simply the Pawns of the teachers for what we did last Monday why is it so unbelievable that youth would want to fight for our own education in an interview with K2 last week I was asked why I cared so much a reporter said you're 15. why are you so invested in the fights of your teachers I'm 16 for one for another why wouldn't I be last week at a meeting of all the Portland unions and iww members said this he said students and teachers have a symbiotic relief relationship and he's absolutely right as has been said time and time again in this campaign the teacher's working conditions are our learning conditions that's why I'm demanding a voice in this fight that's what I told the K2 reporter why wouldn't I care so I believe in youth I believe in a greatly educated youth who can harness all the rash potential that we hold I believe in an education that will teach me how to think rather than what to think I'm sick and tired of sitting in classes of 30 people being taught right out of the textbook so that I can Master the task that is based on the textbook I just want to learn I want to talk about what I'm learning and I want to hear what my classmates think about what they're learning I'm done having teachers who teach almost every period of the day so that they can't grade my test and they can't give me proper feedback on my papers I want what the Pat is fighting for not because I'm a pawn of my teachers but because I respect my teachers they spend every day with me in those classrooms and I believe that teachers have an innate quality to care about the students that they're teaching I believe that my teachers want me to harness my youth and they want me to harness it now young people are special because we aren't afraid to make change we're different from older people because we haven't quite accepted the way that the world is I believe in the power of a fighting youth who sees only the way that things can get better and I think I speak on behalf of many of my students when I say that we won't stop fighting in this battle either I see a better education in my future and I will fight for the changes that I dream of and the changes start here with smaller class sizes and with more accessible teachers thank you very much thank you
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my name is sekai Edwards s-e-k-a-i-e-d-w-a-r-d-s I attend Jefferson High School but I've been a part of Jefferson High School since I was born as the daughter of a Jefferson High School teacher of the Arts I've watched Jefferson Jefferson fall from its Glory Days I have watched as the Arts have been ripped to shreds and the community destroyed but this was not a sad accident or due to poor leadership this was due to the racism that plagues the public educational system you sit here in front of me with my education in your hands and a set of affecting positive and meaningful change you are Pawns of Corporations making money off of standardized tests that will only help expand the pipeline of blacks from the failing educational system to the failing Correctional systems I do not see fair and equal schools like I was promised at one point in my life I believe that I was going to be treated as equal in the beginning years of preschool before Society got its hands on us and turned us into racist and prejudiced human beings we believe that we were all equal and we believe this because it is true but as we grew up these fairy tale Notions disappeared the first Elementary School I attended was amazing we were taught two languages and our classrooms were beautiful and playgrounds clean and libraries always stopped this was a white majority School but soon my mother realized that I was becoming aware that I was the only African-American student and she switched me to another school this school was diverse with black and white families however most of the white families were gentrifying the neighborhood and removing black families from their homes they had lived in for years but hey home values were going up but this still majority black school had far more kids in their classrooms than at my first school the teachers had less help the families worked many jobs and the fifth graders walked their first grade sisters and brothers homes at my other school the white mothers and fathers who could work part-time or not at all um would sit down after school and hand out organic snacks to their children while these kids caught the bus home and walked home I was eight years old and in the third grade when I realized that this educational system is not equal so how long will it take you to realize it it does not take a rocket scientist to see that the school closures are racially motivated that schools with majority black students are underfunded and overlooked I am from Jefferson High School and we are dependent on our school for survival but I would like to ask which one of you speaks for our struggles or does our voice no longer matter which one of you is looking out for the needs of black students which one of you can speak to the experience of a black child experiencing of a black child growing up in an educational system that says you are a failure from the day that you walk into your kindergarten classroom which one of you has the voice and how common core will affect the African-American community and what it means to our education that's right none of you can you can speak to the rich white elitist kids and guess what they are succeeding but before you look me in the eye and tell me that you are making the best decisions for me that you know what is right for me well I am not a statistic or a test score I am not a bubble fill out sheet I'm not just another student I'm not just another black student I'm a representative of the very students you continue to fail and I we will not stay quiet anymore thank you our last two speakers are Elijah cedis and Jasmine Pierce yes I mean yeah um yeah I know I just see this c-e-t-a-s um yeah so I was asked to write this today so I apologize on everyone's behalf if I'm less eloquent um yeah then those amazing speakers who just went before me um so I just want to say a short thing um I wanted to stress uh that you as a school board are elected and that you were elected by the community and as evident by last week the community has spoken and so it's
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your job to represent the needs of the community and to stand up for the benefit of the community and to do that if economics are really a problem as the argument is to do that you need to start pushing upwards because we've been pushed down and already we have very little say in our education and you all have a huge amount of say and if economics are the problem you need to say that and we all need to work together with all of you to push upwards and to start getting more money in our school so that we can talk about the things we want to talk about so that these things do not become permissive um yeah okay what else do I have um because when this struggle is over however it turns out in these next months or weeks um we're going to be facing the exact same problems years from now if we don't start pushing up and I don't know how you're gonna do that but I think the first step is to agree that we're all on the same page and to agree that these are the same problems we want to change and so I urge you to settle with a fair contract hi I'm Jasmine um I go to Cleveland and I want to say thank you for listening to us today but last Monday the majority of you decided to ignore the students and not listen to us to ignore a list of Demands that Portland Student Union compiled so I'm going to ask the students to join me in a mic check number one class size is less than 20. number two proper funding of the Arts more time with guidance counselors student teacher collaboration and building curriculum teacher relevant curriculum not common core Democratic process and the allocation of funds Democratic process um restorative justice not suspension and explosions restorative justice not suspension and exposed children funding for wraparound programs support for all of our wonderful teachers no school closures and I want to say this is our education this is our and there should be no compromise thank you just want to say a double thank you again to all the students that come out it's always really enjoyable to to hear what you have to say so we really appreciate your coming to share your perspective um at this time we are going to hear from Gwen Sullivan the president of Pat Portland Association of teachers Miss Sullivan welcome our contract with Portland Association of teachers allows them to have a few minutes on our agenda welcome good evening for the record my name is Gwen Sullivan and I'm the president of Portland Association of teachers I'm here to talk to you this evening about trust all of the issues in our schools one of the most important is the need to reduce not maintain but reduce class size student loads at every level our classrooms are too crowded for teachers and students or for teachers to teach and students to learn for weeks and months we have heard that this board shares these same concerns about class size but could not maintain a class size reduction in an ongoing way now we learn that this is simply not true the budget documents that you have in front of you and are prepared by your own budget staff outlining a proposed budget amendment that you'll be voting on later next week these documents reveal that the district has approximately 30 million at your disposal money that the current budget which most of the public had no idea was there the district's contingency fund will now increase to 34 million dollars which is millions more than necessary that's a
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lot to stash in a rainy day fund at a time when it's clearly raining very hard on the schools without much of of an umbrella in the past the board's failure to provide meaningful class size of reduction was troubling but now it's astonishing your own budget document shows that you are sitting on a budget surplus planning to over fund contingency and are looking forward to financial stability in the coming years it is crystal clear that you can afford to reduce class size and student loads yet yet at this point you simply refuse to do so I have nearly 3 000 angry and hurt Educators and thousands of parents and community members who really want to know why I for one cannot begin to Fathom the answer thank you thank you at this time we're going to ask superintendent Smith to walk us through I know that we've all been eagerly awaiting and interested in what's going on in the negotiations we've asked her to come with an update after the talks last week so superintendent Smith very much so as most of you are well aware we have been in mediation for 16 days 13 of those days since December 5th these have included 13 15 and even a 21-hour day during the 21-hour mediation session on January 6th and 7th we are working on Frameworks for settlement and believed we were close and I want to be clear PPS remains committed to reaching a negotiated contract settlement that is best for students the school district mediation proposal that was developed within the settlement framework addresses the areas the association identified as critical for a settlement those were workload relief and we spent a lot of time working on figuring out what that actually meant and how it could be quantifiable in the context of a contract understanding that much of it would also be addressed as part of a budgeting process secondly maintaining current level of District contribution for health care benefits which was the other critical issue identified as necessary to reach a settlement the district mediation proposal remains on the table we have received questions about the district's mediation proposal and the key elements of that proposal are as follows you'll see up above salary over three years of the contract would be steps plus two percent per year over three years this equals a seven to Seventeen percent increase for every teacher every teacher over the life of the contract an additional one percent for two additional days added to the school year on insurance we have we are proposing in our mediation proposal to leave it at status quo which mean the district maintains current share of insurance premiums at 93 percent or 1 397 dollars per month professional Educators would also maintain their current share at seven percent which is about a hundred and Seventeen dollars per month our hiring practices um would be one one round of in the internal of an internal transfer process as part of spring Staffing and using the state definition of competence when making layoff and transfer decisions workload relief and there was much conversation about how to do the how to do workload relief in inside the context of the contract the proposed The Proposal says that we would direct 100 so all of the 7.8 million of the pro radish share from the special session to hire more professional Educators for the 2014-15 school year which would be approximately 88 FTE or full-time equivalent and again I stress that this is part of what would be part of the contract additional conversations about Staffing occur as part of the um the budget process which are at the front end of student loads would be reduced to 2010 Levels by the year 2016-17 and there would be a joint committee to Define workload and address in workload concerns but that could be raised by individual classroom teachers
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student instructional days the mediation proposal adds two instructional days to school to school calendar for K-8 students three instructional days for high school students and allows for the continuation of the eight period High School schedule and meets Oregon department of education course hour requirements so that's the proposal that's on the table remains on the table and I would just again state that PPS remains committed to reaching a negotiated contract settlement that's best for students and that's really to clear up the questions we've been getting of people saying we don't really understand what the district what that what that proposal is so there you go thank you very much with that we'll move on to our next item on the agenda which is the discussion on Ed specifications phase two our office of school modernization is currently in phase two of a process to Envision the future educational facilities and develop education standards and specifications for all district school buildings superintendent Smith can you introduce this item I would I'd like to introduce CJ Sylvester who's our chief operating officer and let you introduce the rest of the presenters thank you thank you step in our process to fully modernize our school buildings your last actions were in September when you approved the district-wide facilities vision and in December when you approved Master prolands for Franklin and Roosevelt high schools tonight our project manager Paul Cathcart and Consulting architect John weeks will talk to you about our comprehensive high school education specifications it has been a privilege for all of us to work with Portland's own John weeks John has extensive National and international experience in K-12 education design and brings a deep passion and understanding about Portland our students and community he has served on the leadership board of the American Institute of Architects committee on architecture for education in Washington D.C assisting 70 000 AIA members with current emerging and future Trends in educational planning and Design his school designs and related projects have earned the highest available awards from both design and educational organizations he has worked tirelessly to analyze evaluate and create educational programs that tackle the complex needs of today's schools and create a framework for our school district as it moves forward so at this time I'd like Paul Cathcart and John weeks to come to the podium good evening I'm Paul Cathcart with facilities and asset management and we have a brief presentation for you let me find that here thank you for having us this evening again I'm Paul Cathcart with facilities and asset management and John weeks as introduced by CJ um so we're going to give you a brief overview of the work on education and specifications for comprehensive high schools and I believe we'll be back next week to consider adoption of what's before you this evening so as a brief refresher Ed specks as we'll refer to them this evening were identified as a future step for implementation of the district's long-range facility plan that was completed in May of 2011 and was the basis of a lot of our bond work currently ad specs are not blueprints or designs for individual schools but rather they are set up facility guidelines for design teams that establish the way school buildings support programs and curriculum and provide Baseline facilities across the district that allow flexibility to meet program needs of individual schools as as a specific School approaches significant modernization the Ed specs are tailored through a master planning process which we have two schools into right now to suit that individual school and its program and Community needs through staff and student and Community engagement with design professionals district-wide aspects are being undertaken in a couple phases we're in phase two now the first phase was the education facility division which John and I presented to you and you
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adopted last September and now the education specifications by current School configuration High School Middle School PKA and pk5 in September we also presented a draft area program for comprehensive high schools and since that presentation the Ed spec project team in consultation with project teams for Franklin Roosevelt High School I've developed more of a baseline model for the comprehensive schools that provides a range of sizes from many spaces and identifies a number of optional spaces individual schools can pursue to meet their program needs as they get into Master planning so with that I'm going to turn it over to John for a little bit here thank you Paul so the headspec process provides an opportunity for the school district for the first time and probably over 50 years maybe 100 years to take a look at its facilities in a fresh new way it is it is fair to say that the school district has over time built schools but there has been a large gap in time since the last time you did that in any meaningful and systemic way across the school district and much has changed during that time it has changed in the way our neighborhoods have been made it has changed in the way our children learn and most importantly it'll change because of the way teachers teach and the kinds of tools and support they need from a facility to make their lives easier and more effective for what they do every day so over the summer and building off of the visioning process we gathered teachers and administrators from the high school buildings to have a conversation about what Portland Public Schools buildings should be in the future drawing on that which they had learned in the past or had learned from the buildings which had been built hundreds of years ago it seems but at least 50. um but from that information we really focused on what is it that Portland Public Schools needs from its facilities to be effective places for kids to learn and teachers to teach in the decades and decades to come and so we engage in those conversations about the character the components the feel of a comprehensive High School what should be in it how should it work and what are the most important characteristics you should see within them the conference the conversation centered around best practices as your teachers and administrators knew them and how a modern school can school could design as we all have seen across the country can respond to those that input and a lot of that information if you're interested is in the meeting notes that are in an appendix C of the document that you have after the focus group meetings were complete we took the time to analyze what the information was had been received and begin the process of developing two components one an area program that which describes the spaces that would go in the building but more importantly what the nature and shape of those spaces should be that was not done in a vacuum in fact it drew on best practices in the industry but most importantly it drew in a collaborative relationship with this pps's office of schools and operations as we looked and we talked and we began to understand better at a deeper level what it is that schools in the decades to come to in the decades forward should be the Ed Speck has two primary components to it the first is area for 1500 students in this case area is the is the space is necessary to hold program the second component is planning principles and guidelines that go to shape what a comprehensive high school should be that is the things that across all high schools you would like to see as common characteristics within the high schools and those things at each high school that can have its own Flair or sense of place that grinds grounds it not grinds it it grounds it in the neighborhood in which it resides it describes the character and nature of the space and while it's a great exercise to imagine what the future of schools will look like in function like it also needs to be recognized it had specs regardless of where and how they are developed and implemented are fundamentally designed to change update and modernize your schools in a in a systematic way in which all people feel that if they've had a chance to participate which we believe they have so starting with the Ed specs and going through the design process it is fair to say that a lot has been learned and a lot may change because of what we have
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learned compared to the older high schools that you have now and if you look at the kind of kind of ideas that have emerged they are they are implementable within the shells of the buildings you have but they will be powerful reminders of what our schools can be as we go forward the Comprehensive High School Ed specs also outline components and functions they are to your right these are um these are might be referred to as a major components of the building within each one of them there are sub spaces and programs and functions that go to help support what the overall building is and so those are for your review they are at the very beginning of the document and they are also in this document in the end is used by the design professionals that you already have on board and will have on board as you go to remodel immediately Franklin and Roosevelt Grant in the next round and the high schools you choose to pick in the in the coming bonds that you may or may not propose to the public it is a framework it is a sense of what all high schools within Portland should have but it is agile enough so that at each of the school levels you can spend the time necessary to ground what that school needs in the context of its neighborhood and and and grow a school that is not only part of a larger system but unique to the place in which it resides the Ed Speck also outlines performance requirements for the building you'll look and there's lots of detail about what a floor might be in a window or a whiteboard or how a door may lock or not lock and whether there should be a sink or Cabinetry or what the Myriad of equipment that would go into the room it also goes to describe how how the things that the school district and the teaching staff see they need to be doing in the future or want to be doing in the future so one of those things is the idea of collaboration the existing schools are in fact probably an impediment to a strong way for teachers to get together and team and collaborate and work together and learn and move forward and so by example the schools that they had spec rep or provides places that are professional in nature for the teaching staff office open environments in which they can meet and and grow and work together as as the school moves forward in the coming decades it goes to describe functions in the building that may be familiar to you but actually are much more robust in their capabilities and characteristics a theater at 500 that is almost professional in nature with all the key attributes and characteristics and equipment that you would have in a professional theater today and that you do not have in your theaters now is something that is desired it becomes an extraordinary place to learn the craft of drama or music or gathering or speaking or being part of a of a group of people coming together for an event and in doing so what it requires though is some shifting is another idea within the conversations with the with faculty and the administrative staff that assembly now moves from an auditorium to a gym and in fact by doing so you can actually get an entire school to meet as one group particularly the larger high schools whereas today that you would still need to have two convocations or two assemblies even in an auditorium to allow that to happen so it provides even a better way to make things happen thanks John as I mentioned earlier the Ed Speck provides some flexibility in sizes of some spaces such as the gym or the theater what the black box theater to allow individual schools to tailor these uses to their program needs the inspect also makes a number of spaces optional such as the auxiliary gym or enhanced elective spaces although we are maintaining a minimum of six thousand square feet for CTE spaces again to allow each school to kind of Judge what's important to them in a lot um build those spaces that their programs require so our challenge has been in developing this district-wide specification to develop a document that adequately sizes spaces for modern learning while
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providing flexibility to modernized spaces in existing buildings and accommodate individual school program needs so we're balancing a lot of things here so what's before you tonight strives to balance the aspirations of the facility's vision document we talked about a few months ago program principles we heard from teachers and administrators through our focus group meetings and identify the realities of Budget Building as site constraints and program variations throughout the district by providing preferred and optional spaces that individual schools can choose from as they go through the master planning process so our next steps are the adoption of the Comprehensive High School Ed specs and then the completion of the ad specs for the remaining School configurations again middle Pre-K and pre-k5 to bring to you later on this spring so with that we're happy to answer any questions you might have for discussion comments thank you very much both of you appreciate your comments and your explanations and enjoyed looking through the Ed specs I did have one area which I have had pretty consistently over our discussions about this that I'm concerned about and that's Career Technical education again um and I have a couple of concerns and mostly just questions or that you don't have to answer for me tonight but I would like to to see some difference in the Ed specs based on conversation I mean that is the first one is CTE which tends to get lost in something called electives and I don't really think that's what we want it to be CTE through our high school system design I actually pulled out the resolution we had before as part of our core program and it's not an elective and I think that until we start treating it like it's part of our core program and including it in our Ed specs and all of our other conversations about CTE it won't rise to the level where we actually paying attention to it and putting adequate resources toward it and directing our students there and excuse me hoping our teachers um so I think that we need to shift where we see that in our documents to being part of our core and not and um so then the other piece of it has to do with almost exactly the same thing we end up with I'm looking on page 33 where it lists the area program and the summaries and you see enhanced elective down below with CTE not up in the core required programs and then again just to note we have 6 000 square feet for that enhanced elective if CTE happens to be the one I don't I'm not sure because I don't think we've had adequate information presented to us about whether six thousand square feet is really an adequate amount of square footage for CTE we've seen several of us have been out and seen other high schools and they range everywhere from Sixteen thousand square feet to six thousand square feet so there's a broad range and I think it's difficult for us to designate just six thousand square feet if in fact it is six thousand square feet because it's only an enhanced elective and it may not be six thousand square feet or maybe zero in our schools my point is that we need to have better information about CTE options for our students and how much square footage those options require and I'd love to see that someplace in this report some information about that kind of thing and I know that you've done a lot of work in this area but I'm just not seeing it in the report and I'm sure you've got the right at your fingertips I would love to see some more information about it before I make any decision about whether I can support this document contractor now can I just ask what information different than what would I see on page 44 and 45 of our of our books that I think what I just heard you asked for is information about which each enhanced elective or CTE or stem would require is there something more than this that I'm well what I see what I see on these two pages are specifics for each of these
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spaces but you know if you'll notice that many of the things that we that are listed as enhanced electives take up six thousand square feet all all on their own right and then there are a number of others that take up 2500 square feet or 1200 square feet so I guess the issue for us and it's partly for us as a board is what what how much how much how important do we want CTE to actually be and we talk about it um but I'd like to see us actually being more proactive and making sure that it's something that we keep in our schools over the last 20 years we weren't here but CTE was peeled away from all of our high schools I'm not convinced that we will peel it back in unless we actually set it aside and say this is important to us and this is important to our students we have students who learn this Hands-On way it's important for us to connect with our community and with industry for our students it's important for us to have our students have the ability to go on to careers all those things are need we need to have CTE in our schools and I'm not convinced through these aspects that we're giving it it's just due so you're asking a question I'm sorry asking a question to us as a group whether or not we should increase the amount dedicated to see it do you I'd like more information about this and I'd like I'd like us to talk about it some more we haven't talked about it very much I guess I read it a little differently I mean what I read was a minimum of six thousand square feet and in a bunch of the different in many places throughout this vaccine whether it was in the Arts or other aspects of the program there was sort of the minimum and then there was the preferred so for example you know having a separate choir room rather than a combined band in choir would be preferred so there were a number of places where the square footage would could Flex up or down and obviously there's going to have to be some bottom line total that we can afford and that will fit into our constrained spaces so what I saw from this was a minimum of six thousand here's some options of these different possibilities that you could mix or match to be able to have a CPU program Plus if I understood right the stem spaces within classrooms regular classrooms that would be connected in an integrated way plus the Arts and the other pieces that we're not going to be able to get are preferred for everything obviously so I just saw this document as providing like you said a flexible and agile framework but that there would have to be trade-offs which I think we've talked about all along we haven't gotten to that point yet at the individual building levels okay we really want to have you know culinary and auto shop and something but we also really wanted the Black Box space and we want to have a separate choir room so figuring out what what that solution is going to be that's going to be a tough I agree with you there there's the minimum and then there's preferred but I don't even see minimum here the six the six thousand square feet if you want to have a design space that's it and then the other I don't know 20 other things that might be in CTE you don't get unless they can be done in a classroom which I thought maybe it could be some of them but some not again I think it's a I think it's partially the issue is our discussion and not having had an adequate discussion which makes me nervous about approving something I know that we have a time period which within which we have to make decisions but I'm not sure that I have the information that I need I just I want to make sure you get that information that's why I was trying to figure out what what more or is it more of the discussion about what our priorities are right both hand s yeah I I guess I have a question first of all um director knows I appreciate exactly what you're saying and support it um and so then the question is about the time line I mean we we have Master plans that have been improved and so we have these two high schools and then we have this other document that is um that the high schools have basically been planned from but which is also going to provide the framework for future high school so what is the timeline for us approving this is there so that we can have this discussion a little bit further is there time for us to do that or is it like we have to do it next meeting for a particular reason I believe the design teams are we've had a lot of conversation with the design teams about this document and what's it's part of where the the shifting and collaboration has happened with this document so I know the design teams would very much like this document to be
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adopted in the question about CTE has been wrestled with and continues to be wrestled with at each school but we've kind of set a the floor of 6 000 square feet and you know each school can in essence buy up from there depending on what their program needs and desires are but my understanding from the project teams is they were like this adopted as soon as the board feels able to do so it might help us to understand the ramifications of because right now it's slated to come back to us next week and it'd be interesting feedback from the design teams I think to know what happens if it's the next meeting or if it's the end of February for example I know both teams are going into schematic design and are trying to set a baseline of what it is they're designed towards for a CJ Sylvester Chief Operating Officer for the school district in December you approved Master Proliance for Franklin and Roosevelt high schools and upon that approval those designs entered the schematic design phase with both of those design teams and so they are moving forward and we have schedules currently for public workshops for open houses and for your approval of those schematic designs in April uh so the way that Paul characterized it was very well done which is as soon as the board feels it's in a position to be able to approve it the design teams would have loved to have had this approved last September we haven't been in a position to bring It Forward because of all of the additional work that was needed on it in terms of the relation between the program elements the desires of the of the visioning and the focus groups and the budget and the site constraints so the dynamic has been very complex and it's taken us this long to be able to to bring you something forward that reflects everyone's best thinking including those two design teams uh having served on the Roosevelt design team it's very clear that the Roosevelt design team was told you have six thousand square feet so there was no discussion to my recollection about how much square footage there should be it we were pretty much told that so I guess one of the questions I would have is how do we come up with six thousand square feet so the so the school district except in some specific high schools it does does not have a very robust CTU program is tractor Knowles books points it out so you have a blank slate from which to work you know in essence you had a blank slate from which to build from the question at the time was well what is the nature of what would the nature of CTE be in Portland Public Schools and that was um that was not that was not well defined as you as you notice because you're still discussing yourselves about what what's the nature of it is it big CT small CTE the CTE happen in a in a in a graphics lab which is attached to Art all of those kinds of questions were on the table so the first thing we did was we took a look at what the all the possibilities that we knew within the Portland Public School System that could be classified as a potential CTE both big cities pull and small CTE or some career related track and identified what all those would be the second thing we did is we took a look at programs that were around the basically the upper Willamette Valley Southwest Washington to see you know for comparability there are it is fair to say there are programs in which there's 16 000 square feet of CTE but most of those are places that have one high school or or the CTE program for that particular School District resides at one high school and and so the question was where when you have a place that has multiple high schools Portland being the one with practically the most where where you know what are they doing in each of their areas and and that average averaged and so there are some that had none and there were some that had ten thousand square feet and or or thereabouts and so it was a it was an average of that so and and a conversation about the ability to build from there and hence the preferred and the optional and the um and the minimums so that we weren't
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saying it was locked we were just saying it's a place to start from and that there are a tremendous amount of programs that you could do um no particular school would do them all and they would only do a few and we weren't certain what they would be so you provided a bank if you will of space to draw from and if that wasn't sufficient you would build from that by having a discussion about all the other programs you wanted to have within the school hence that's how the program was intended to be described did that is was that clear no so is it accurate in terms of process that this thematic design will be where the final decisions are made about whether we have a bigger theater or a smaller Theater which what particular CTE spaces we would have or whether we would have that extra gem or whatever those trade-offs would be excuse me I think schematic design would be the primary place to do that um As you move further into design and narrow it down there's your flexibility becomes more and more detailed but that would really be where that conversation and process would happen in terms of making those trade-off decisions of program and this facility right yeah it might be but I just I guess I want to encourage us that we I feel like we keep raising these questions and then it keeps becoming later and later in the process and we say well we don't really have to decide now so I just um I hear a lot of interest in CT not not a lot of clarification on where how these numbers were developed or satisfaction and that's the right size so other people other folks who have other thoughts let's stay with CTE at this point and or what information specifically are we looking for so that we can get to make that decision so we don't keep a schematic design teams waiting so there's two things I'd say right off the bat first is in your presentation tonight there was a slide that talked about optional spaces and the two bullet points under optional spaces were an auxiliary gym ncte now I can tell you having had kids in the only High School in Portland that only has one gym and no auxiliary gym that it's a disaster for high school kids in terms of trying to support them in any kind of sports and after school sports programs you have kids who are expected to come to basketball practice at 6am or leave at 10 p.m because there's only one gym it's crazy so I don't consider an auxiliary gym as an optional feature for a modern high school and I certainly don't consider CTE as an optional feature so just for fun I want to read from the conclusion of a report that we are given tonight when we're talking about the Benson enrollment adjustment recommendations because it's relevant so the conclusion when we're talking about lifting the cap for Benson tonight which is our Career Technical education High School is there's three sentences we know that Benson is unique so we have a graduation rate in Portland Public Schools of 63 percent conclusion we know that Benson's unique CTE focused educational experience is successful 81 graduation rate and in high demand that's the first sentence next sentence another sentence the district is currently updating plans to improve and increase access to CTE and CTE educational opportunities for Portland Public School students with the vision of building the strongest career education programs in the region and the next sentence is continuing to support and build a strong Benson Polytechnic High School combined with improved unique CTE offerings Community High Schools is identified as the essential factor in all of these plans so I'm totally supportive of lifting the calf at Benson I'm totally supportive of us making that you know the state of the art CT High School in the region but the whole idea in our high school redesign was to ensure that every single high school student in Portland Public Schools had access to a pretty rich Career Technical education opportunity and even in these Ed specs it talks about that in terms of our learning environments so the concern is six thousand square feet and when I look at this on page 44 it looks like if we want to have a shop or maker space that is six thousand square feet everything else goes away unless you can put it into a regular classroom is my assumption I don't know if that's a true assumption or not but that's what I'm sort of hearing and even in terms of you know stem and Engineering Labs I'm I'm just not sure I guess I'm not ready to settle or to make trade-offs I want to make sure that when we are building these schools what we have in mind first and foremost is to ensure that we have the absolute best
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educational and learning environment to make sure our kids can be successful and graduate ready for college and career so that's the piece I'm not seeing yet I would need to understand what we actually are going to get for 6 000 square feet because it doesn't look to me like we can have a shopper maker space and some career Pathways for our children when it comes to success and square feet It seems impossible and I haven't been convinced otherwise yet so I'd also and I would like is for us to stop referring to CTE as optional or elective agreed it's core slide to refer to director Regan um talked about the auxiliary gym being optional to allow other spaces to be built or installed and it was six thousand square feet as a minimum allowing the area program in Pages 44 and 45 to kind of be assembled as each School sees fit so if a 6 000 square foot shop is in conjunction with some other CTE space some flexibility throughout the area program to allow that to happen so again trying to build off of budget and site constraints allowing that flexibility so that's why auxiliary gentlemen was identified as a as an optional so which is why I asked a question earlier about the timeline because I think we have two issues first issue is um how what are we going to build with the money that we have in this current Bond another issue is what should these ideal high schools look like and in my mind they ought to have an auxiliary gym and they ought to have a state-of-the-art maker space and we shouldn't be faced with that trade-off well today we don't we don't have the money to do it all so that's what as a board we're grappling with going forward we ought to go forward on a budget that allows us um to to do what we really need as director rigging set so where my head is as a board is looking at some creative options on how how do we um preserve the option if the money is available throughout this whole bond process for what we need today and then be sure to include the the larger specs going forward what I don't want to do is take this um Ed spec document and narrow it down to the existing budget I want an edge spec document that is true to what we need going forward so it has to be used for what we are doing right now the money that we do have right now so I mean I totally hear what you're saying in terms of wanting to be true to the vision of it and I guess again when I saw those required and preferred options across the entire building as well as the pieces in there that are just going to be there that we don't have right now you know dedicated space for wraparound Services better places for our teachers to collabor and work and and so on and so forth all those pieces in the modern building that we don't have right now um I I guess you know again I I what I got out of this is we're going to have to make the trade-offs and that it's and there's flexibility in here and um I mean I I still think we need to do a lot more to try to clarify I I feel like we're narrowing what we when we say Career Technical education again I think I totally agree with you um director Noel so we haven't it's just sort of flopping around there without being nailed down as to what are we doing what does it mean what does it look like what would a program look like and that might be helpful um just for everybody really to talk about what would that pathway look like or what would the what would the range of common the combination of I'm seeing from this document be the core courses and classrooms plus some combination of what you call the enhanced electives and we can change the name and and my I guess one of my biggest concerns though as we bring this up is we not lose because sometimes what happens is a piece of when we have every time we have these discussions when we have limited resources one concern comes up we really need this this is really important everyone says yeah that's really important and we agree it is really important but then the other pieces get lost in the other what gets sacrificed so for me reading through it it would be for example the
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Arts oh my gosh how tragic if we didn't have I mean when you go to the Suburban theaters and they have a regular theater a black box space and practice rooms rehearsal rooms oh my God the things that the kids in Westland and those other places have that our kids need and that we would be able to get out of this I'm just worried because there are again we do have the limited budget and space I just want to make sure that when we're making the trade-offs we're looking at all the pieces here and not just one piece that albeit important is not the whole story for our students and what we're trying to give them in these buildings protect your Beale yeah thank you director Nelson director Reagan Pearl making your statements on that I'm certainly in agreement uh I had two questions that and this one but probably just brought up about we have auxiliary gyms in all three schools at this point don't believe we do in the mat in the plan that we have coming forward we have auxiliary gyms in all three we have an auxiliary gym right right I mean in the I'm sorry in the two I'm thinking ahead though right we've got auxiliary gyms in both and they're gonna understand okay good and the question that the only question that people keep asking me that is are we forcing teachers are we building this these the number of classrooms different than what we have now and forcing teachers out of their classrooms during their prep periods is that how we're building the gym I mean building their schools for that are we forcing the teachers out of their classrooms for their prep periods what what the Ed Speck um that's before you tonight it lays out the teacher work areas for that to allow the collaboration and professional development that John talked about um can you speak up just a little bit for some reason my errors are plugged up tonight I don't know what the deal is getting older I guess the the uh Ed spec uh has teacher work areas identified as something that would be part of the overall program for a school how that works out at individual schools is going to be a case-by-case basis it's going to be dependent on number of students number of teachers and scheduling but the planning time for teachers in a teacher work area would be in that area and um have the potential of some of the core classrooms being shared by teachers what is the potential of some of the core classrooms mean I mean that's every day you can't get in your classroom or does that mean that uh 10 of them are shared do they I mean we've done I'm sure we've done those figures right you've got a certain number of teachers and based on a certain number of students I mean we have we know that information pretty good at least in a minimum so and then we put in a certain number of rooms and then we extrapolate from there and my understanding is the possibly those prep periods aren't available in your room now I I don't know if that's the case or not that's why I'm asking a question and I just kind of people keep asking me that question that well I better ask that one uh the uh I taught 40 years and there was a couple years that I was forced out of my room during my prep grade and it was hard I had one guy was a pretty good guy who let me come in and sit and and use my computer because I got my computer that I'm putting in right there on my desk and I mean so it makes it very very difficult to to have that situation I was just wondering what were our Ed specs our ad specs that were that were doing that is there certain percentage of teachers that are being forced out how did our figures come out when we figured that in it was a different for the two different schools or again it's kind of the situation would be different school by school but it's the core classrooms English math and some of the humanities the kind of General classroom that's best suited for uh having more than one teacher work in that space the the teacher work areas our um would have a desk for all the staff would have opportunities for conferencing and perhaps kitchen areas as well in our conversations through the focus groups again we're brought forward from the high school system design there's a lot of mention for professional development staff and opportunities to collaborate so we brought that idea forward the
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the our focus group meetings thought that was a positive idea and we brought it forward in the document there's something like if if I go out of my classroom and I'm forced out of my classroom and can't be in there during my prep period and I'm there for I go into a shared space is that what you're saying right okay so if I go into that if I go into that shared space I now have a computer in that shared space yes is that purchased where is that purchased from the bond I mean because I've got a computer in my room and I got the screen and I can do stuff on the computer back and forth I might even have one of those fancy boards that the superintendent has upstairs it's a good one where you you can change things around so so uh if I go into the shared space I can't put up my bulletin board and stuff without maybe disrupting the other class but it it's guaranteed that there will be a computer there that is mine and I have one in my classroom that is mine also so I got it in both places so I can actually go work because if the classroom's sitting back I mean the computer's sitting back in my classroom they're not going to help me when I go into the shared space and if the computer's in the shared space that I'm using with a lot of my lesson plans and stuff on it's not going to help me when I'm in the classroom so I have to have two is there two that's that's no but I mean what I'm talking about is that I've I've got access under all circumstances both in my classroom and in the other areas that's the intent okay actually the intent is that teachers have laptops and it's not required then that you have two desktop computers you have a laptop that goes with you so if you've got then then that laptop works fine for everything that you need at your desk and in deal and we're guaranteeing that those teachers have all those laptops down the line for the next 50 years well well you know for on a budget to budget year that we're not capable of guaranteeing anything for 50 years past laptops and so well that's right in 50 years it certainly won't be laptops I mean technology changes quickly too so um but what you're talking about is at the time when the building opens as uh teachers are moving between their classroom and their office area they've got a laptop with them where they've got access to the student information system to their curriculum materials to anything that they've got on their computer it is it it moves with them okay and we're guaranteeing now yes we have to provide technology to the teachers or we're guaranteeing that no one's going to come back to me and write me a note next year that says I don't have what I need to shift from my classroom to my schools won't be done next year well whenever yeah just I don't know if it's at all helpful but when we went towards in school excuse me high schools up in the Seattle area back gosh before we tried the first time to get the bond yeah but we saw some of these collaborative spaces and it was really cool to see where teachers could have their desk and I think they had a little kitchen area and it was a meeting space so that they could the teams I think it was by subject in this particular school and I'm looking at you about because I'm trying to remember that we were on that tour but so that students could have there could be you know office hours there there were team meetings professional development all those other pieces so anyway I was from what we saw of that tour and what we heard it was actually a pretty exciting and and a great model so so what's the percent what's so we are guaranteeing that that's wonderful to know that and what's the uh what's the uh percentage of people that are being forced out of their rooms into those areas actually all of the teachers will have teacher office space and access to the collaborative work area so um if your question is what percentage of teachers are not going to have their class A hundred percent of the time I don't have a classroom I don't I don't have that number in front of me did we look at that though yes we have we're running schedules different kinds of schedules different options on schedules to see how many people are in impacted and in what ways we can bring more of that information back to you Monday night if you would like um maybe send it to me on the computer still have I don't even have it might be nice to have John weeks be able to talk a little bit about what he's seen in other schools that he has designed and he's collaborated with who have had teacher work areas if you're interested in hearing that I'd love to so the um the characteristics that you see in a
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contemporary High School not only around here but Across the Nation or similar to what are in part what you saw when you went to see the high schools in Seattle and in what you mentioned director Atkins today in the high school environment there's a lot of investment in creating professional work environments for teachers and that is an open Office environment systems furniture that you would see in a in an office in downtown Portland with all the all the technology tools and communication tools at the desk for the teacher and the capability for them to move between their desk and an appears desk next to them to talk work together um to collaborate which is the big word that is all part of what you're trying to create and have agreed to create in in the schools you're You're Not Alone um schools across the country are doing that all the time all the time and providing that space when that happens at first teachers um or not at first but generally the teachers leave their classroom to go there to to do that that you see them there in the morning before classes start you see them there at their break in their prep time and you see them there after school and then while they're using their using a teaching station a classroom obviously they're in that classroom so it does open up the opportunity for the use of that classroom for others and in into your question director Buell and I don't know what that percentage is the program that's an easy thing to try and figure out but but the Genesis was the conversations that grew out of visioning and then ultimately list looking at the systems redesign and then more importantly having those summer workshops with teachers and saying what is it you need and how do you need it and where does that best happen for you and hence that's how the office environment got you know was created and it's consistent with what you see your peers both in urban and Suburban environments here and elsewhere across the country providing today with teachers we met with that's what we heard um yeah but I I want to actually shift to another topic yeah is that okay yeah you're going to move my mind broken uh I guess so we actually we went to teachers in Roosevelt we'll say and we asked them you know we have two choices one you get your room all the time or you have a section uh area where you can go and collaborate and they're answering their answer was we'd rather have the section where we collaborate what was the vote that was not the nature of the conversation that was not the nature of the conversation it was it wasn't in either or never asked one or the other well if we asked them what would they have come up with do you think on them you don't know how would you know I don't know so the focus group meetings this summer we invited teachers to participate we had three meetings had a variety of teachers from a variety of schools come and part of the first I believe first conversation was the idea of professional development how do you best do that and we had teachers comment that they don't really have the chance in our current layout of high schools to talk with their their peers or talk about students specifically and brought forward this idea and they thought it was a good idea so question was never laid out either or it was how do we provide that space to do so and brought forth the idea that as John said is being used in many other districts of teacher work areas so that was the nature of the conversation did we have a uh we sit down in a staff meeting with the whole Roosevelt staff and talk about this and see what they had to say and said say whatever you want here you can say whatever you want what is it you would rather have did we did we we did not go to staff I thought maybe we had and again okay there is a and I'm this I'm not doing this at you just I'm directing this people in the audience and also my colleagues on the board not you you but the teacher the principal of the year in Oregon who was the only per only guy in the focus priority schools in Oregon who's actually up towards the top the only one in the Middle School in the whole state of Oregon the first thing he did when he became a principal was to cut the
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collaboration time down just an interaction I just think it's interesting to have that to do with that thank you go ahead Tom I'm sorry so Switching gears and um John you mentioned the theater and I I was just curious um I was at a Holiday choir celebration at Cleveland High School this this December and there was um there were over a thousand people there um and I don't know what the current theater is at Franklin and uh and you know so there were parents and students and alumni coming back who sang and um so the so that caught me because I think I'd been looking through the ad specs and I realized okay well now we're going to do these things at 500. um so can you walk me through the thought process on how that accommodates um such an activity it was a great activity and you know full of community spirit and um yeah so the the first the the issue of what is the nature of theater and what should it be in the high schools going forward was uh started with the conversation about what are the existing theaters and um how are they being used and it was fair to say that there are some high schools that have large theaters that are you know can fill them Grant being one Cleveland being another but there are a lot of high schools that have large theaters that they get 300 or 200 or 500 or 400 people and that's that's a good night and and that was talked about and so there was a disparity clearly between some high schools and other high schools those that are less full have a really rough time making that theater experience feel worthwhile um as you can imagine it's like sitting in a empty movie theater by yourself on a Sunday morning you know watching the movie that sounds good to me personally being an introvert yeah yeah it does to me too um so so then to be then the question became well what what makes for a good theater and music experience and from the drama side a thousand seats is an awful hard thing to make work well and from a music side every it's you know um if you have a very robust program you can run a number of shows or a number of concerts and and they felt that that was better but more importantly what it became was what what is a good potential teaching station also and a theater of a thousand you could not afford to buy all the kinds of equipment and attributes that go into it to even make it a theater that would work well but more importantly a good teaching environment and when I say teaching environment teaching around the drama Arts music you know the programs that are would use it not a teaching station like a lecture hall or something like that and so looking around and and looking at what other uh school districts have done and what the trend seems to be one of those is is that the smaller theater bomb 500 represented um a uh a threshold at which that became real possibility that you could begin to put all the other equipment and capabilities into the into that space to make it a really truly well done um place the second thing was about money because when it comes to for example Scripps there's cutoffs if you will in terms of what it costs to get us to rent your scripts and so the number presented was about 500 and then when you go above that then all it becomes more and more expensive to rent the scripts and this happens to be for drama so I you know that was a piece it certainly wasn't a driver but it's a piece that you know there's operational concerns when you get really large the third thing was well we have assemblies which have nothing to do with drama or you know music or anything it's just all school events coming in and a rally or whatever or a special speaker but but at a school of 1700 or School 1500 none of the theaters would hold the whole school anyway so the question became well where then if you had that an all-school event would it be better to have the all school all everybody present and where where can you really do that and that became the gym and and that it has to be acoustically attuned to allow that to happen you know there needs to be
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special care so you don't have a big rattly box and so the Ed Speck says you know let's be careful about how we tune this thing up acoustically to provide for a decent place to assemble and that that the 500 becomes a place on average across the school district that is a workable and and robust teaching area for drama in arts okay but that was the thinking that God everybody and and in the summer the drama and arts were really well represented other comments thoughts about ad specifications so just a general clarification question have design teams begun to choose some of these specific programs at the at Franklin and Roosevelt specific programs are you referring to such as like yeah robotics shop Sports Medicine those kinds of things I don't know the answer to that question I can get back to you on that but um what I can tell you is that the design team which is you know really the architectural team working with staff and with the design advisory groups are having conversations now through the design Advisory Group meetings about the nature and extent of the program offerings for each of the schools so it is currently occurring in public meetings okay so at this point do you feel like any of the teams feel restricted by the space issues you know 6 000 square feet are you getting that impression I think there are a number of restrictions on the space issues that are not limited to ctes of enhanced electives is how I would characterize it I think between the site and the budget that we have limitations period and that affects not only our CTE and enhanced electives but other areas of the program as well great thanks other comments okay well thank you I I guess my my only thought before we go is um related to what I think you just ended with CJ is as you can hear our high schools are beloved places whether it's um gyms so that students don't have to be there at five in the morning to practice or leave at 11 o'clock at night or whether or not teachers want their own classroom so they can create the environment that's best for their teaching whether it's CTE or the Arts um there's a finite amount of space a finite amount of dollars and I appreciate folks continuing to look at this to make sure that what we do build is right for our community that it doesn't limit us so that we say oh sorry we forgot about that or we missed something at the same time looking for Creative options to figuring out how do we how do we make sure that as we go through this we we can be ready for a next phase or another step if that's if that's possible thank you thank you citing that we have this opportunity at all and as as grumpy as we sound sometime I think it's important to know that we're grumping about incredible new opportunities for our kids and community so even just reading about there's going to be a dedicated wash ER and practice rooms it's been pretty exciting actual office dedicated space for our partners who provide wraparound Services it's just it's awesome this time we'll move on to our next item on the agenda which is the 2012-13 budget amendment superintendent Smith can you introduce this item um yeah and I want to thank the Ed specks team as you're wrapping up thank you John thank you Paul um okay our next item is uh are looking at our first budget amendment and I'm introducing Deputy CFO David wind and assistant budget director Sarah bottomley to do the presentations walk us through thank you superintendent Smith coaches board members um we're here to cover two things the first budget amendment for the 2013-14 budget we'll be following that up with a review of a forecast for the 14 15 school year these are separate topics but they are somewhat connected as will become apparent I think so just a quick refresher you have a staff report attached to which is a draft resolution and a whole set of tables um for the budget amendment which we hope you will be voting on at your next meeting there's a couple of other attachments to that and we'll summarize that material for you so just in terms of budget process we operate under the adopted budget which you adopted in June until we make changes to that and as part of that budget adoption you appropriated dollars under that budget in some broad categories like instruction support Etc in a number of funds including the
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general fund we're going to talk mostly about the general fund tonight and um we are under budget law we're allowed to amend that budget under certain circumstances and every year around this time we do what we call a full balancing budget amendment which is um which I'll talk about a little bit more just want to remind people a budget is an accumulation of estimates and forecasts at any point in time we do our best to get clear what we think the numbers were going to be and then we revise those over time so the full balancing budget amendment is US chewing up both resources and requirements resources and requirements is budget speak for the revenue side of the equation and the expenditure side of the equation we're doing that in response to the 1213 audit which confirms for us what the numbers were for last year we have a better sense of property taxes now and we have a better sense for our likely expenditures during the current year so during this budget in this budget amendment on the resources side there are three primary things that we're doing we're recasting our beginning fund balance to rep to correspond to where we ended up last year we're increasing local option revenue and we are proposing to eliminate a transfer into the general fund from a purse Reserve fund and on the requirements side we are cheering the budget up for lower forecast pers expenses lower average salaries and therefore corresponding benefits in schools and increasing expenditures in a number of ways that will describe and and I didn't realize how topical this was going to be before I came to the meeting tonight funding a transfer into an I.T Capital fund for the purchase of Technology bundles for teachers in two-thirds of our classrooms so more about that later but specifically we're going to start by talking about the ending fund balance which becomes the beginning fund balance so the 1314 beginning fund balances increase in this amendment by 16.3 million to match the 1213 ending fund balance in the kafir a number of factors contributed to this increase we appear to have reached an inflection point in local option Revenue until last year we've been experiencing increasing levels of compression that Trend appears to have bottomed out and we received a million more in 1213 than estimated pers expenses were 1.5 million lower than estimated the rates for the employees on opsurp are lower than those on tier 1 tier 2 and as the mix of employees on tier 1 and tier 2 versus obserp shifted more rapidly than expected when we budgeted we received 1.2 million in Federal e-rate reimbursements which weren't budgeted because they're from the part of the program where reimbursements are notoriously unpredictable in timing and also inconsistent utility savings from the boiler burner upgrades were even better than expected we saved an additional 1.4 million there so those factors account for about 5 million of the ending fund balance variants the remaining 11 million represents about two and a half percent of the budgeted expenditures and it's attributable to factors like central office vacancies and cost control measures we've mentioned the apparent unwinding of compression of the local option Revenue as the housing market starts to come back the difference between the tax assessed value and the real market value increases which reduces compression and this is a property by property calculation so it's difficult to project in November we received information from the counties on the taxes that were imposed we then apply a collection rate to those numbers based on a six year average of collections based on that information we're increasing our local option revenue and other revenue from local sources by 5.2 million in this amendment this amendment also includes elimination of a transfer of 1.9 million from the pers rate stabilization Reserve fund given the additional beginning fund balance it makes sense to conserve this money until the 1517 biennium when the rates will next be revised and in terms of touring up the requirements side two factors have an increase across many departments and reduce requirements for
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1314. pers expenditures are reduced by 2.6 million from the adopted budget at adopted we had estimated the impact of the pers reforms which reduced the level of The Purge rate increases so rates still increased but not by not as much we received revised rates from pers over the summer which were confirmed in the fall also average teacher salary is another area where we seem to have hit an inflection point during the years we were in Cut mode we were seeing salaries increasingly concentrated towards the higher end of the schedule as we start to hire back teachers we are seeing a shift here as part of the Fall balancing process we true up Personnel costs for actual salary placement on a position by position basis in this way we capture the impact of retirements new hires and increases for professional growth as a result of that process this year Personnel costs in the schools are now budgeted 3.9 million lower than it adopted so it's not a reduction in the positions it's simply touring up for style replacement so normally the full balancing budget amendment is not considered by the board until December or January as we find ourselves this year this year the superintended acted earlier in order to have an immediate impact on schools throughout the 2013-14 school year you will recall in early October once it became clear that the higher than expected ending fund beginning fund balance was evident the superintendent announced the number of budget steps that amounted to about six and a half million dollars in additional expenditures for the current school year first of these were the addition of 30 fde in school Staffing normally during the budget process there's a portion of school Staffing that is set aside to deal with enrollment fluctuations during the fall this year as the budget was being completed the board directed the superintendent to push all of that set aside Staffing out into high schools in order to improve High School Staffing that left us with no set aside for the fall and you may recall we talked at the time about the fact that we have to do something in the fall and how we were going to do that would depend on our resources at the time as I said earlier back in October we identified that we did have additional funds available which allowed us to fund those 30 FTE in schools which is indeed what we did in addition to those positions we added a half-time classified position in 68 schools all schools but high schools we added um nine hundred thousand dollars to the Athletics budget which allowed us to hire part-time trainers at high schools reinstate the payment for third tier coaches increase funding for transportation and start to make a beginning modest investment to support programs at Middle grades to improve feeder patterns at high schools in addition to that the last thing there's a small amount of money in that budget which is to support athletic activities in Middle grades because because in because the new athletic director had identified a a real disparity in participation levels between and among high schools we have um two grants through the Oregon Department of Education one was to increase PE teacher Staffing in 10 Title 1 schools that required matching funds and in addition we renewed a new teacher Mentor Grant through ode which also required matching funds we increased the funding for career coordinators in high schools and the adopted budget the funding was adequate for a part-time position we increased that funding to cover a full-time position and also added a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to establish funding to pay for support for grading of essential skills work samples and other activities to support students graduating on time and finally we added an Arts toaster an arts teacher on special assignment which is a position we have not had for some time to provide support to teachers in part in response to the additional Staffing created by the city arts income tax also increasing expenditures during this amendment are a number of things that we did not talk about in October there is a new housing development in the Wilson cluster Stevens Creek Crossing which is going to expect it to bring additional number of students in a number of schools and so we've provided for up to six FTE in schools in the in the Wilson cluster in response to those additional students we're restoring the we're proposing to restore the Ombudsman position to improve responsiveness to
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parent Community concerns we are funding increasing funding for restorative justice programs to respond proactively to student discipline issues interestingly heard that as one of the student concerns identified earlier there's some money for high school acceleration strategies at Madison Franklin and Roosevelt high schools additional funding for information technology they have a number of maintenance contracts on software and other systems and these renew each year with built-in cost escalation and there is an additional hundred thousand dollars needed to meet all of those costs we're adding um three positions in central departments one is a paralegal in the legal department there's a program manager in the office of schools to help support the work of the high school action team and a position in the research and evaluation Department focused in particular on student discipline and student services and the remaining funds are to address technical Corrections and rebalancing adjustments across a whole variety of departments in total between the adopted budget and this amendment we're adding 89 fde in schools and school supports the budget amendment identifies revised appropriation levels for instruction instruction and support services these budget categories are defined by the Oregon Department of Education we have to follow their categorization of expenditures there is some movement in this amendment of funds between instruction and instructional support that happens every year at this time instructional support includes positions like counselors and Librarians during the adoption of the budget the default allocation of funding in school Staffing is to instruction as individual schools make decisions about hiring if they add a counselor or a librarian then money in the budget has to flow from instruction to instructional support you will see in terms of the sort of formal appropriation categories we added almost 45 fde in instruction the budget impact of that is more than offset by the reduction in average salaries in the lower and forecast pers rates that you heard described by Sarah earlier so the net result the total appropriation for instruction is reduced by two million dollars to 276.8 million at the same time student instructional support is increased by 3.3 million dollars because the 44 fde added there are only partly offset by the reduction in average salaries and post costs the final thing that you can see in terms of increases other than the contingency which I'll mention just a minute is we're proposing to transfer three and a half million dollars from the general fund to the it systems project fund and that is to finance the cost of completing the teacher Tech bundles program whereby all PPS classrooms are equipped with enhanced teacher technology that includes a laptop a data projector document camera speakers cable locks and a cart and when I wrote this I didn't realize how timely that was going to be either but they're at the Buell um whilst we can't guarantee anything for 50 years this amendment does provide the funding those teacher Tech bundles have been rolled out to about one-third of Portland classrooms and we've been struggling to find the financing source to complete that this budget amendment allows us to do that it'll cover us for a few years and in budget in in public education budgeting a few years seems like an awful long time under this budget amendment contingency has increased by 14 million to 34.2 million which is 7.4 percent of total expenditures total expenditures and transfers exceed total revenue by about three million dollars in the budget in the budget amendment you can see there's a there are changes to a whole bunch of other funds other than the general fund in the vast majority of those um I'll come back to that in the vast majority of those what we're doing is truing up the beginning fund balance in some of the capital funds we do this we know we're going to have this every year because we appropriate money for capital projects and it's notoriously difficult for staff to know when over the summer that work is going to be completed the fiscal year end is June 30th and so there's always some roll over there I did want to call your attention to one of some of the data that we had
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in there which is summarized in this chart this actually shows our budget by those major ode budget categories comparing where we are after this budget amendment with where we were in 2007-2008 which is the last time we had the substantial lending fund balance you can see that over that six years over that six year period we have struggled each year with um budget cuts because State funding has not kept pace with what we needed so none of these numbers increase in the way that they needed to having said that the amount that we've spent on instruction over that six year period has increased by 11.8 percent the amount on instructional Support Services which includes counselors Librarians School psychologists and other staff has increased by almost 41 and the two other support categories General Administration and Central activities have been reduced by 3.5 and 1.9 respectively as I said about the other funds we drew up the beginning fund balances we make those adjustments on Capital funds the construction excise tax is accounted for in a specific fund and we have increased the amount that we we've chewed up how much we expect to receive from the construction excise tax to reflect what our experience has been in the last year or so when their level of that funding has increased slightly and then finally in the I.T Capital fund you'll also see us appropriating that three and a half million dollars to be spent on those Tech bundles so that is the story of the budget amendment if you have any questions we would be happy to take those any comments questions director curler yeah just I was confused and this is simple answer I'm sure but the uh so we're um expenditures exceed revenue by 3.2 million and so that that comes out of contingency yes okay 50 questions pretty close to it I think uh let me see if I can get to illustrate this whole process if I could sure back in September or October we found that we had about 16 million dollars more than we thought we were going to have at that point we knew that our ending fund balance yes we had it we had a sense of what happened 16 million and we took we we the superintendent came forward with uh the idea that she would spend six and a half million of it that was the famous where I wrote the thing where we all nodded it off and I was pretty upset because the super didn't we didn't give her a directive to do that and I was told by chairman Belial that we would do that in November or December and look at that stuff and now we're looking at it here on the today the 21st 21st of uh of January after or halfway through the year so it's be pretty hard to shift any of these things the way that I see it for instance at 68 EA people if we would have a tough time I think shifting them around at this point in the year or withdrawing people from things so so I I've been really I mean that that whole process of how we did this was really upsetting to me I don't understand why we did it that way but well I think I do but I didn't like it but uh the let me ask a couple one let's start with the 68 ft where we put out one in every school the EA I assumed I'm kind of directing this on my colleague said to equity equity we never put that through an equity lens that I can see one every place and I like the equity lens stop I think it makes a lot of sense but we didn't do that so I was upset about about them the 30 FTE I'm not sure I wanted to put it out because he went and brought this back there's things I was going to talk about to put it out through the schools in some sort of priority did we come up with a priority basis of how to spend that in other words did we say for instance like a first grade teacher with 34 kids at uh Jason Lee school was a higher priority than a than 180 kids in Wilson High School for uh for an English teacher and that that was a higher priority than music classes that
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had 50 kids in them I mean how do we decide to do that what were our priorities for the spinning there how do we order that money to be spent because one of the things that I kind of don't like particularly is taking the money and for fde and just generalizing across the whole system because if you drop from 29 to 27 kids it's not much of a change if you drop from 37 to 28 that's a heck of a change so I like to kind of Target that money and make sure we're targeting did we target obviously we didn't Target the EAS the educational assistants we didn't know well we go with them but what about the the 30 ft and did we actually spend 30 ft I wasn't under the impression maybe it was 25. so that's a question did you get a question out of that someplace I got two questions okay good here I had a meeting at least maybe at least two maybe three so uh question number one did we spend all 30 FTE I believe we've allocated almost all of that 30 FTE yes number two what was that all or almost all I mean 25 is almost all I guess 25 or 30. it's if we have anything left I believe it's less than one FTE okay so we did 29. it may be a fractional number left there's still hope out there for that guy that has 36 first graders that he might get so the second question was did we put that through an equity lens and the answer that is no okay the equity allocation that we did in school Staffing this year was the eight percent of the school Staffing that we allocated in two ways part of it based on the number of friend of students on free and reduced lunch and the other part being the number of students who qualified in our regular budget we did a lot of nice things I I understand that so the whole purpose of the the Ft the 30 FTE was to address situations where schools had more students show up then we're forecast so each year when we're allocating staff into schools in the regular budget process we have an we have an estimate of how many students we think will be in that school and they get FTE based on that number of schools and every year some schools are pretty close to the number that we thought they were going to be some schools have fewer students and some students some schools have more students and in the case of kindergarten for example we have a very specific cut off of when we start when we expect to allocate more staff to those schools in order to keep those class sizes down and then in a number of other places there were more students show up and so that 30 fde was all allocated to schools where there were more students who showed up in the fall than were forecast to be there when we did schools or general targeting not a specific targeting it was it was a case-by-case school by school that had more and then we gave them more okay and that's it and the 68 wasn't targeted at any place no the 68 was a half-time EA to each of the k5k8 and middle schools did you want to add something to what he just said it was fine you do every year yeah I know okay so just so you know do we find 16 million dollars in September every year though no but what here's but Steve here's the the key thing is is that we it's part of the budget so we normally would budget 30 FTE that are part of the budget and the timing with which it would happen would be exactly the same time it happened this year last year rather than have that 30 that pool of 30 still remaining for us to do the balancing in the fall we pushed it all out last spring during the budget and to do into the high schools and what we said is in the fall we're going to evaluate where are we with the budget if we have dollars to actually do balancing we'll come back to the board and do so this was actually a conversation we had last spring we'll come back to the board and ask for the FTE to do the balancing if we don't have it schools understood that we would end up pulling staff that that were already in schools and if they had a lower enroll you know a higher lower enrollment than was anticipated they would lose staff to schools that then needed it we did not have to do that which we were really thankful for um when we were able to do this which is part of why we acted swiftly in the fall was to be able to respond and get staff out into the schools immediately rather than move people out we were going for stability okay but it's a process we do every year so I just would you not see this did you get the staff report on this information I'm reading up you so you did you know did describe so bottom of page three that describes this process right yeah yeah I I I'm asking you specific questions that maybe aren't described there though uh what about those I just wanted to make sure you're
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yeah Greg appreciate that uh what about the middle grade Athletics what what did we I mean they mentioned it it's something that I've been trying to get us to do since 1970. five I think and uh did we put in a soccer team or did we spend it up here on some sort of planning thing so I don't have the details immediately to hand um I can get more specifics from Marshall Haskins on that but I believe that it was it's a relatively modest amount of money but it was specifically to support actual programs in schools so you know basketball programs and um and soccer programs and track programs and cross-country programs for middle grade can you get that information sure I'd really appreciate that because that's gone down the right Road from my point of view uh another question that I don't understand is on on the information that I was sent uh the the contingency went from 14 million to 34 million 20 million dollar jump no that's what it says here contingency is increased by 14 or by 14 million I'm sorry I apologize by 14 million so the contingency was 14 month did that include par the uh the 9.5 or so out into 16 million 14 million where did that I mean I don't understand what happened there so we started we ended up starting the year with 16.3 million dollars more than we had in the budget added to that we have 5.2 million dollars of local option more local Revenue than we thought we were going to have that's 21.5 million dollars and that's offset by the fact that we are not making that 1.9 million dollar transfer from the purse account so you take 1.9 from 21.5 you get 19.6 million dollars so on both sides of the equation in the budget after we do the amendment so if you subtract a six and a half from then you come back I'm coming to that and then on the other side of the equation we have um 2.6 million dollars less pers expense we have 3.9 million dollars Less in average salaries so we have 6.5 million dollars less expenditures than we budgeted but now we have 6.5 more of from the October staff 2 million more from the um the second set of additional expenditures we talked about and three and a half million dollars which is the transfer out of the general fund into the I.T Capital fund so that 2 million and that 3.5 is 5.5 million dollars you take 5.5 from 19.6 and you get 14.1 and that's the increase in contingency thank you on that yeah on the ombuds person when is that person starting we have a we have a hundred we have a hundred thousand dollars for the ombuds personally when does that person start assuming that you will approve the amendment next week we will immediate I am I believe that staff will immediately proceed to hire that position so if we have a half a year left we'd spend a hundred thousand dollars so it'd be a hundred thousand dollar position a hundred thousand is the full year cost of that but why would that pull your cost show up here when we're only going to have the person for a half year I guess that's my question there because in order to keep in order for the budget system to handle it we need to put that as a full-time position we can't we can't handle the half year funding because it won't work in our budgets do we only we only pay them for half a year though I want to be a reasonable salary for a ombuds person where does the other 50 000 go then can I have that to spend it on Roosevelt uh per half a year that'd be about 50 000 for the Roosevelt uh uh social service coordinator because I like this and I remember way back when we did it as bad as my memory is that Bobby said hey let's do the ombuds person I'm going yeah that's a great idea and so I like this but it seems like we have fifty thousand dollars floating around which wouldn't pay for my idea at the time which was the Roosevelt uh social service coordinator out there with all which we have at Madison and you have this really poorer kind of school in terms of a lot of kids need help and need to get connected with agencies and we know and we took that person out can we kids are fifty thousand dollars here to put that person back that's a half here that's not my call that would not be my cup that's not my decision to make no but I mean is the money there to do that
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if I made an amendment here this next week to do that is there 50 000 here that we could can we get it right here we I don't see why not right because we're only in a pan for half a year even if we hire them for the whole year that that would be part of the truing up the budget at the end of the year I don't know whether to take that as yes or no I'll take it as a yes and we'll go from there I guess because I happen to like that and uh like it having us what about what's the acceleration Pro strategies at Madison so um I believe and the replication of the advanced Scholars Program that's been one of our successful practices at Franklin and doing an um replication of that program and it's both being able to stabilize it at Franklin and begin the replication the restorative justice program which is 400 000 is what does that actually entail now I like restorative justice stuff I think it's doing some really nice work but is that to pay for FTE or is that to pay somebody upstairs to tell them that they should be doing this work that they already know they should be doing or is the majority of that money is contracts with resolutions Northwest who are making partner who who is up on Uranus across the schools in operating those programs yes so they come in and train us I I can't I'm It's a combination of Staffing and professional development well how much is Y which is what how much is stamp what do we staff for restorative justice if it's a program that we do in our schools do we staff somebody in the school or do we establish Ed we've had this that uh a number of different models so different schools it's looked different in different schools and part of what we're working on with resolutions Northwest and I can't give you the specific we can bring you the specifics because they we've been working with them I've had how they can build our capacity to do this more systemically and that's part of what the conversation is with them Island it's been in a pilot and it's been ones where we've had either a contracted staff who's part of the staff we've had ones where it's our staff who's trained and has the capacity during the day to do it and it's a really a broad spectrum of models that we've used so far so we're working with resolutions Northwest on what's most effective what schools are actually have the Readiness factor to actually Implement restorative justice so more complex answer we can bring you details yeah could you say that would be that'd be helpful I really appreciate that and the close to the last question and maybe the last question is oh we have how many kids did we actually add up there at Wilson 6ft we should have added six times let's go 30. yes right in the Wilson cluster so 6 FTE should be 180 kids no the Staffing ratio is some is around somewhere between depending on what grade level we're talking about is 24 or 25 to 1. I'll buy 25 to one but a lot of that's already there you already have a principal you already have a yeah no but but if we had for example if we had 24 more students in an elementary school that would qualify for one addition right and so how many kids did we have totally coming in from that that we didn't project that we were going to have because this is an add-on right this is an add-on and we have we at the beginning at the beginning of the year we had much less Intelligence on um how many kids we were likely to see so I believe this was somewhere 100 plus or minus students in the in the various schools because it's not just it's hayhurst and at Robert gray and at Wilson so it's 45 to 50 students at Wilson 40 students at Robert gray and 75 to 85 students at hayhurst was the projection that we got most recently from I believe the house and how much more was that than we projected at the start of the year we didn't at the start of the year have enough data to be able to predict how many kids there were going to be then we project some though I mean you would think we we thought there can be zero kids in all those apartments we waited until we had better data from the Housing Authority before we made this detention so we set money aside we what we said was in October we said we know this is coming and then this is taking the place in that bookmarked money no we did not bookmark any money we bookmarked the conversation when we came to in October and said this will be one of the things we come back to you now in January as well as a Housing Development that was going to impact our schools thank you very much for your patience and the patience for the people and my colleagues and Ruth actually had more detail on this
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getting warmed up for the budget stuff so and we will eager and excited because all about this work in the Wilson cluster and just the challenges and opportunities of the kids having the new home but thank you other comments questions about the budget amendment yeah so um I think this is to to superintendent Smith but maybe it's to you as well but I just wanted to understand the thinking on contingencies so 7.4 percent seems high to me um I know we've talked about five in the past personally that seems high to me but um so why aren't we spending some of this money now is I guess my question more of it so I'm going to say this is probably why we're connecting it to the revenue projections for next year so I would say maybe let's finish that conversation and then come back and it may be that you would choose to spend it this year rather than next year which could be part of the conversation but so part of it is thinking is that we it's part of why it's linked yeah and you'll get a total picture and then you could come back and revisit yep okay that's what I would have said too good answer point three million dollars um I just wanted to highlight that about three quarters of that comes from central office vacancies and cost control measures that the district has taken including one big project which we did a year or two ago which was the boiler project and converting our old heavy oil furnaces to natural gas and that was something that treaty Sergeant on the board had really championed and we knew it would save a few million dollars and in fact it saved even more so I'm really thrilled to see that and that felt at the time a little bit like a risk for us because we actually as a board decided to borrow money to do that but it clearly paid off and you know the result is you end up with more money that we can eventually put into the classroom so um congratulations on some of those cost control measures to folks and to me yeah the discussion of having 7.4 percent in the continuous see is just such an exciting place for us to finally be when I came on the board in 2003 we had way less than a percent in our contingency as far as I recall and slowly but surely we've been trying to get that up to a place where you have three and a half to five percent so it's actually an exciting discussion to have and it's a discussion that we want to have within the budget context so that we're looking at it in kind of a real holistic discussion with the entire community so so the other thing I'll add to that one is you remember back when in October when we had the conversation about what we were going to spend this year we also said we wanted to look at this as a two-year expenditure so that we would make be able to make sure we could do those same things the following year so we weren't saying spend this all down we wanted to say do this so you spend we're planning for a two-year cycle rather than a single cycle so that's part of also the the trail of God on that one any other comments questions about the proposed budget amendment see you next week would we have an ombuds person job description do we have that already could I get that sent to me thank you all right thank you for our discussion about the budget amendment we will now move on to our budget forecast superintendent Smith I don't know if you have anything to introduce with this one no I'll just carry on these are connected discussions okay so we'll move on to talk about the 1415 forecast so the first thing I want to say is this is a forecast we're going to outline the assumptions that we are making as part of this forecast these are estimates and we will be revising some of those estimates and some of this is about timing the one guarantee I can give you on these numbers is that they will change it I wish that we had more certainty about our numbers but there are a number of factors that go into why these change from time to time but we'll walk you through some assumptions and then we'll show you what the forecast looks like for next year and then what are sort of 64 000 foot strategy is for the outcome of the forecast so assumptions on the resources side at this point in the year we are not making
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the assumption that there will be any additional beginning fund balance for 14 15 beyond our budgeted contingency for 1314. for local option Revenue we're currently assuming the same level of increase for 1415 as we saw between 12 13 and 13 14. so it's about 3.4 million in State School fund resources we're assuming 51 percent of the 6.55 billion appropriation for the second half of the biennium as well as the 100 million awarded Statewide for 1415 in the special session our share of which is about 7.8 million and we just want to take the opportunity to remind people that while two-thirds of the state school fund is the state appropriation and there's a lot of visibility around that number one-third is the permanent rate taxes across the state so if someone's referring to the state appropriation or the number increasing by a certain percentage that doesn't apply to the rest of the state school fund finally the state is considering changing the methodology for calculating the poverty Factor they believe it will be a more current and accurate reflection of poverty in the districts our forecast is based on the state's initial estimate that PPS would receive an additional 800 000. and the State Board is set to vote later this month on that change on the requirements side on the expenditure side we made the following assumptions when it comes to salaries we assumed that salaries would increase by three percent that across the board for all employee groups and that includes steps that's not a three percent Cola for everybody that's steps where that applies for folks and additional increases on top of that to average three percent we realize that we are in contract negotiations with teachers right now and we have um we will have open contracts with other employee groups for 14 15 at this point we're making that three percent assumption on health care we assume a six percent increase in the cost of health care for teachers and a fifty dollars per month increase for all other employees purse ual which is The Debt Service on our significant pers debt which is a big part of our post expense we know what that number is for next year so we plug that in and all other expenditures we also use three percent at this point as an inflation factor for those costs in this forecast we set the contingency at five percent of expenditures which is the level that this board has indicated as its aspirational level the state school fund is allocated out using a fairly complex formula one key part of which is average weighted average daily membership a key indicator of that is the student numbers at this point we're assuming the same number of students in PPS as this year um we will be looking more closely at that assumption as as the months go by we expect to have more students next year than this year the key thing in the allocation of the state school fund is not whether or not we have more students or not but whether our rate of change is different from the rate of change across the state because the state school fund is a finer an amount of money and the formula just allocates out that pot of money we can have more students but if everybody else has more students in the same percentage as us we don't get any more money if we get if our rate of increase is greater than other people then we will see a financial benefit but for the time being at this point in January we are holding those numbers constant and then um Sarah talked at some length earlier when we were talking about this year's budget amendment about the fact that we have seen average salaries in schools both for administrators and for teachers lower than we budgeted we think that's another inflection point um because we are in an expansion mode and now adding more people the The Leverage there has changed at this point we're still using the average number for the current year we have some more work to do to try and figure out if we're safe forecasting a continued reduction in that number so before I talk about this year I wanted to do a historical comparison so I pulled up the PowerPoint presentation from this time last year where we were talking about the budget forecast for the current year and this time last year on the 22nd of January
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the we had just done the full balancing Amendment and as part of that we were revising our estimate for the current year from a shortfall of 22 million dollars to a deficit of 17 million dollars so that's where we were we were 17 expecting to be 17 million dollars in the hole this is our budget forecast for this year this is a spreadsheet which I think you may have a copy of this is all of the numbers plugged in there I'm going to highlight two numbers so when we ran all of the numbers that you heard about for those assumptions and we totaled expenditures under those assumptions and we compared that with our resources and we set contingency at five percent that left us with 15.7 million dollars additional money that we have available to invest first time director Regan has been on this board for 10 years she has never heard somebody with a number that's green or not in parentheses or doesn't have a negative sign I mean this is it is a big Joe Biden deal because we actually you know we have something to do now there's another number on this spreadsheet which is down in that bottom corner that is 7.9 million dollars and I'm laboring that structural deficit and I just want to point out to you what that is if you take our Revenue and you compare that to our forecasted expenditures assuming we do the 15.7 million and our transfers we would be spending 7.9 million dollars more than we have in Revenue we're spending the reserves down by excuse me 7.9 million dollars I believe that's the right thing to do which is why I recommended it to the superintendent the important thing to know is that the following year in 1516 in order for us to sustain that level of expenditures we need eight million dollars more Revenue just to keep going at the level we're going so it's important to remember that because a year from now when we're talking about oh look we've got this new Revenue the first eight million of that is gone already just to keep us doing the things that we're doing so I just want to mention that as a caveat so director Cola to your point of view about you know spending down reserves it's the right thing to do at the right time but it's not you know you have to be careful because it's not sustainable I agree this is exactly how you spend it maybe not structurally right so that's what are we talking about here well not necessarily I mean one way to offset that would be to if you spent a portion of that money on one-time things then you don't have to worry next year about how do we find that money but to the extent that we spend all of that money on ongoing ongoing costs and expenditures we're banking on the fact that we're going to have more Revenue in 1516. I I think that's a reasonable assumption to make but we just have to bear in mind that all of that additional revenue is not available to increase expenses even further some of that additional Revenue we get in 1516 is already spoken for to keep Pace with what we're planning to do for next year assuming that everything else is as we are forecasting it right now and you know some of those numbers will change and we'll update those in as timely or fashion as possible so how might we spend 15.7 million dollars in the budget we do want to indicate some possibility about that so what the superintendent has suggested is that we break that 15.7 out in the three following ways so 9.8 million of it allocated to school Staffing which ultimately is recommended to the superintendent through the district Staffing team and that 9.8 million dollars might be 7.8 million dollars which is the amount that we're getting that's our Pro writer share of the grand barging 100 million dollars 7.8 million of that to allocate directly to teachers in schools to reduce student load and workload a million dollars on Staffing in elementary schools that would allow for increased planning time for teachers in grades K-5 another million dollars to be available to tackle individual workload issues as they are identified so that's 9.8 million dollars for school Staffing 2.1 million dollars is the cost of adding two days to the school year two days to the contract year for employees which as you heard earlier when the superintendent was talking
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about the mediation proposal is two additional instructional days in elementary and middle schools and three additional instructional days in high schools and finally 3.8 million on district-wide programs which are allocated through allocated centrally through the budget leadership team so that balances out to 15.7 that's one that's one way of of allocating out that money we've had some questions before about what what's the difference between school Staffing and those district-wide centrally allocated programs and so to give you a reference point for that can't see this very well I apologize it doesn't blow up well but it's in your packet so you will remember that on December 2nd we did a budget prioritization exercise with you and we had a number of different programs that were part of that exercise two of those classified staff in schools and middle level support at k-8s are School Staffing a number of those Athletics expansion of avid Central support capacity and infrastructure culturally specific supports custodians deferred maintenance early Learners programs literacy materials outdoor school student technology teacher mentors those are all examples of district-wide programs where those budgets are allocated centrally so they would definitely fall into that third category and then there's some programs like career related learning discipline reduction strategies High School graduation online Blended learning and wraparound services that may be school Staffing or maybe centrally allocated depending on how it's done so one example wraparound Services is something we've heard a lot of support for if you take one specific example of what that might mean a social worker at each High School if that position is part of the school-wide support table then it's School Staffing if those positions were part of student services reporting up through Tammy Jackson then it's a centrally allocated budget so in each of those cases are the yellow ones and again I apologize in your packet these are green yellow and red you didn't get this no okay well you will get it very soon um I'm very sorry about that but it is the same thing that you guys did your budget exercise yeah it's the same ones but I wanted you I'm very sorry you I I was before I go home tonight I will email you all something that looks like this which is it's really just breaking out those programs that we talked about and illustrating which ones are which when it comes to school Staffing or district-wide programs allocated essentially so that that's the forecast questions comments it's great and I just really appreciate this well it it it's a fundamentally different position to be in and it changes it actually as as we mentioned there's a number of ways in which we've hit inflection points local option and compression unwinding is one of them um School Staffing and salaries is another and and this is another one and and frankly you know the way that we feel about having the ending fund balance be higher that we budgeted feels differently looking at this than if we were looking at a deficit because if we were looking at a deficit having the ending fund balance be higher than expected would be a buffer against making cuts and that's how it's been for a long time it also it reminds me a little bit of what the students were saying earlier about how do we put pressure upward or how do we how do we Advocate together and I just again want to thank some of our partner organizations including some folks who are still here in this room of the amount of effort and work that the state legislature did with us to make sure that they increased funding so that we were in this situation for the first time as you pointed out in a very very long time now we have to ask ourselves whether this is enough whether this suffices and I think that I heard a lot of students say tonight that it's not um but I look at that structural deficit it is almost exactly our appropriation from the the grand bargain that happened the this this Fallen legislature um so other comments director Buell
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we talk about we always seem to talk about workload as costing as money workload relief workload relief can save us a lot of money in a lot of different areas I'm going to explain somebody I want to take your time now we can save a lot of money through work a lot another whole category but just in terms of I understand correctly I think that Congress did finally pass some form of budget and that it has gone a little ways toward restoring some of the sequestration cuts to Title One and Head Start and special education so again while those weren't even where they anywhere near where they should be they were cut even lower and I I think it's correct that they've been at least somewhat restored so that's a little bit potentially of less bad news going forward but again that's one where for years and years the federal government has underfunded compared to the need and that obviously impacts us as well so that's an important Point um which allows me to emphasize that what we're talking about here is the general fund and as you said there's been some activity federally about budgets we're still in the process of trying to digest what that means because it's a little tricky to figure that out so in terms of title one and idea and those other Federal funded budgets we don't have a clear sense of next year relative to this year but we're trying to we're trying to get more clarity about that as quickly as we can again that that upward pressure that's part of the whole that's that's part of the picture of what's happening in our country with public education so any other comments questions I was just going to mention just tagging on to you uh director Adkins that I will be going to DC with a group of school board members from the Oregon School Board Association again in two weeks to Lobby the federal government once again in our Congressional Delegation on you know trying to restore some of the sequestration cuts and to stabilize title I and special ed funding and to hopefully not be putting it into special Grant type programs but instead allocated out to school districts so that we have the ability to use that money as we see appropriately I was also tell me if I'm doing this correctly when I'm looking at the 9.8 million dollars in school Staffing and I'm looking at the district-wide 3.8 million dollars and I'm dividing that by what it costs to hire someone full-time it looks to me like we're talking about potentially adding 140 or so positions out in schools next year which will ideally do what the teachers have been asking us to do which is to hopefully reduce some class sizes and reduce some workload so what we've been saying all along is that what we need to do is to have the opportunity to do this through the budget cycle and this gives folks an idea that it's exactly what we're intending to do so and just to pay you back on your first comment about Federal budgets I would be remiss since you gave me the opportunity when it comes to Federal funding idea was passed several decades ago and at the time that the federal government passed that bill which imposed an obligation on school districts to provide access to a free public education for students with disabilities which is an obligation that we justly accept at the time that they did that they talked about funding 40 of the cost of those programs they have never funded above 20 and we're in mid teens at the moment so there is an enormous way to go for the federal government to meet the promise that they made many years ago when it comes to special education funding and I know that you know that and so I just thought I'd remind you of that because our federal delegation likes to say that education funding is a state issue and that's primarily true but special education is an area where it is that there is a federal obligation that they have never lived up to and more and more the Federal Department of Education is putting more and more mandates and requirements on how funds are used and that's another thing that we will be talking with them about and trying to get them to move away from some of the rigidity of how we are to use this funding I think that's it for our conversation on the budget forecast thank you both for being here I know that we have folks waiting in the wings for enrollment update and enrollment balancing but I'm sensing a a lack of a need to I need to get up and move around a little bit so we're going to take a short recess thank you
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foreign we are back from recess and we're going to get moving with our next item thank you all for your patience at this time we're going to move on to the enrollment update Beverly Cleary Lincoln Benson and general superintendent Smith can you introduce this item Services who is going to walk us through what are what the enrollment uh over enrollment kinds of crunches are that we need to address this year while we're in the bigger process of looking at our boundaries and our women to transfer policies so Judy questions and comments so two objectives for the next few minutes first of all do a little bit of that big picture context setting what does enrollment really look like across the district this year and then dive into a very small number of short-term issues some of which are coming to you for action in the next week so we want to make sure that you're aware of that and we have a preview of what your questions and concerns might be um why do the big picture now of all the things that you get to hear why this um well it is something that we um that you have a policy that says that we should do every year and um we also just like to to bring you that larger sense of what's Happening across the district in terms of enrollment numbers we added targets to part of that assessment a year ago so I'm going to talk about that very briefly and I'm going to call out here and elsewhere that decisions that you made outside of this direct enrollment lens for example increasing your Equity funding wound up reducing pressure on some schools to hit enrollment targets so we talk about enrollment here but it's really linked to other decisions that you wind up making elsewhere and I just wanted to highlight what that linkage was so um here are the enrollment targets that we established in past years and we call out in this process schools that are either well below the target size or schools that are above 100 of the capacity utilization in that building um I and just to note that these targets apply to our schools that have neighborhood programs or a combination neighborhood Focus so we we don't apply these same targets to our Focus option schools which are often intentionally designed to be different sizes um in your packet you have a set of tables that show you how schools line up against these targets I'm not going to show those to you tonight but I'm happy to answer questions about any specific schools um really is 13.50 for enrollment this is current enrollment it's not your facility capacity size it's your current the high school system design Target sizes 13.50 it was the what would allow us to offer a full um we were shooting for the 1350. good different thing than looking at facilities or what we were going to be over time it was what allowed us to offer a program the minimum allowing you to do a program yes so what's limiting about looking at these Roman targets that while they provide this General rubric for measuring relative enrollment Health across a set of schools I always remind myself and would remind others that there's no clear correlation between school size and student achievement you can look at our own Milestone data and see successes and challenges across our size and configuration Spectrum and again pointing out that when other decisions such as increasing the equity funding formula in our schools in the budget process reduces the importance on schools hitting enrollment sizes so yes enrollment matters but it's not the only thing that matters targets are not designed to address a number of other critical enrollment issues such as the proportion of students who are attending neighborhood schools for Focus options that capture rate issue and that space and resources that we allocate to partnership programs to Early Learning the impact that that has on how we use our buildings those are really important topics
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and this look at Targets doesn't really illuminate that very clearly having said all that I still think it's worth doing equalizing enrollment as as many schools as possible conserves resources for other Equity focused work so the more we do that we can make equal and efficient the more that's left over to really emphasize Equity needs okay so what's going on in the big picture our enrollment is growing we were up by more than 500 students last year so yay to enrollment growth that's five straight years of enrollment growth our overall population is right about where it was 10 years ago so we have come out of this lump we are on the way up that enrollment is not spread equally across all schools though we have about 250 more students I compared 10 years ago the 0304 school year to now we have about 250 more students across what I call our mainstream k5k to Middle Schools those that either have neighborhoods or you get to through the lottery that I manage but we have 2500 fewer students at our mainstream high schools and the difference between the two are accounted for in part by 1300 more students in charter schools K-12 and then more students in other kinds of schools across the system so even as we're coming back in enrollment numbers we're not coming back the same way we were it'll be quite a while before we recoup at every grade level enrollment that we had in an earlier time and through reconfigurations through consolidations we've taken a lot of classrooms offline in these past 10 years so even as funding is Improvement and that's a huge wa which you just had a yay moment a little while ago around improved funding but when you combine that more kids and the ability to fund more teachers for those kids it accelerates our need for more classroom spaces and that does can leave us with an uh oh um again on where we are with enrollment ranking this year so this is just by type of configuration the number of schools and how many are falling in either below those um at those under enrolled Flags or above that over enrolled mark these numbers are actually better than they were this time last year we have fewer under enrolled schools but we also have more schools facing over enrollment and overcrowding you can see that more than half of arcade schools are outside that sweet spot that we would want to see with enrollment the same is true with our high schools with more than half and we have almost half of our middle schools smaller than we'd like them to be uh one thing that we're doing to address this is to convene a district-wide Vander review with our partner PSU Center for Public Service it seems to me that Target enrollment sizes are boundaries School configurations are all going to be explored in depth during that three-phase process they're starting they're in phase one right now in assessment it'll become a much more public visible and intensive process over the next six months and we would imagine between 9 and 12 months from now recommendations that would actually be before you having vetted them through the community and then time for for your decisions in tandem with that we have an enrollment Terrence for policy review process I I want to call Out director Atkins director Regan who attend many of the superintendent's advisory committee on enrollment and transfer meetings where this is their work and the co-chair Jason Tremblay in the room with you tonight again similar time frame for moving really major district-wide work around enrollment and transfer forward in this upcoming school year fiscal year in the meantime uh we have a very small set of enrollment issues that we don't think can wait for 2015 for resolution and we worked really hard to make the set as small as possible and what that means when you get to the bottom bullet there is there's a lot of schools uncomfortable that are going to be even a little more uncomfortable next year who are very anxious for some level of permanent relief and are willing to wait and be a part of the district-wide process but I'm sure in your visits to schools you're experiencing that when you're talking with um teachers principals community members so here's the list of things that we're going to talk about tonight my esteem colleagues from Dual language have some very exciting information about dual language expansion so I'm going to try and get out of here quickly and give the floor to them but before that we wanted to share information about a pilot plan for Benson and talk about a couple of schools that are facing very serious overcrowding um I there's some information in your packet about inter-district transfers the state legislature is brought in a number of
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rules in the last couple of years about how we work through the interdistrict process so there's information for you I'm not going to be talking about that tonight we will be bringing an action item to you sometime in the next few weeks around that um okay so I'm gonna pause just for a second and say that's the big picture that's PBS enrollment from 50 000 feet we're about to dive down some of my um colleagues and this are in the room to help answer questions but before we get there um I'll ask director Belial should we take questions on the big picture now or do you want to defer till the end other questions at this point got the go signal all right okay so I'm going to start with Beverly Cleary um and here's a little bit of the specs on it in your packet was uh some more detailed information I'm just going to hit the high points we're bringing this to your attention because it is a school that we think is very overcrowded um uh teachers community members administrators have noted a number of health and safety concerns across both the Beverly Cleary campuses they're experiencing large class sizes and there's no space left for elective support and Community Based programming be added so um last spring the community and the district agreed to make facility changes at both campuses that was intended to be a two-year solution unfortunately greater than expected enrollment this year has taken up all that new space and we feel that we need an additional but temporary solution for 2014-15 we say temporary because recognizing that Beverly Cleary is one of our number of crowded schools or schools with expanding programs in the region we don't think that we can make a permanent solution without bringing all of those other issues to the table we know there's a process to do that we need something else in the short term so last week and we don't think that there's any more feasible facility solutions that we can bring to the table on this so last week we were out with the community appreciate director Knowles being there last Thursday night and we shared three different ways that we could make enrollment change in the short term and you see them before you I will say that these are unusual ways that we would solve issues in Portland Public Schools especially on a temporary basis um and the first we would create essentially a third campus by moving two grades from the um either Fernwood or hollyrood into the Rose City Park Campus where they would share space with access another way to do it would be to create a temporary boundary change where we would draw lines and ship students on other sides of the lines probably students in lower grades to nearby schools and here you see which schools could be affected by a change like that and finally we could conceivably cap enrollment for all grades so no new students from the neighborhood would be able to add in to Beverly Cleary next year we would limit kindergarten to three to the equivalent number of students to three classrooms and that would mean students beyond that would have to go to nearby schools so we would create some overflow schools and We additionally we would move out non-neighborhood students back to their neighborhood schools these are not activities that we would typically as I said that we would typically carry out in Portland Public Schools and some of them would require board action so we wanted to make sure that you were aware that we were even having the discussion in the community um We Believe at a staff level we can Implement any of those we believe that they are all hard um and we are really looking for the community to help guide us on the decision of which type of change to pursue so if we once we get past which of those three big areas to focus on we'll go deeper and look at the specifics if any of them require board action we would then keep you well informed and come back to you for decision in a relatively short period of time ideally um we would have a decision at least on the type of change that we're going to make and a clear timeline for what that final decision-making process would be by the time of their scheduled connect to kindergarten event so the community is very focused and plugged in it's been it's been a great learning experience as staff working with them so far will be out there again on Thursday night and and we will keep you informed on how that process moves forward so quick pause any comments or questions specifically about Beverly Cleary or the process very quick question sure one of the things supposedly we learned in the north Northeast Coalition stuff was to go out into the neighborhood school and ask them what they think before we give them any
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any strategies did we do that this time did we go out and say here's the problem what do you think and we sat back and let them go and fight and we listened and then we went back and took their stuff and then we came up with strategies and we went back because I keep hearing that's not necessarily how we did it am I wrong or were the people who told me that wasn't necessarily how we did it wrong I mean did we do it that way I mean did we have no options the first time we went out we had no options no and we didn't share any options the first time we went out there so bring and we gathered a very large amount of input from them last spring we came back in in January with a set of options that were largely informed by what they brought to the table and we talked about collaboratively last year when we went out in the spring and just start with no options at all when we went out in the spring we didn't we didn't offer any solutions or suggestions our first meeting with the Beverly Cleary Community back in Winter 2013. we did not bring forward any specific options we talked about what the problem was we listened to a lot of input we came back later with two options they provided input on those options we implemented one of the options the one that they preferred we then watched what happened that was for last year that was for last year when we came back this year we did not start from a place of what do you think we felt we had a lot of information from the community we started from the places this is what we've heard and this is where we are I'd have done it this year we go back for meeting first with no options too just to make sure they understand we're not afraid to do that but I think what you did thank you any other questions about Beverly Cleary what what else can participation looks like in this process so far it's been very brief We There were 225 people approximately at the meeting on Thursday night we gathered comment cards from them those comment cards got typed in and represented 14 pages single spaced of comments and questions there were approximately 108 questions that we've responded to that I submitted back to the community today they have a survey online that they've had at least 250 responses to as of yesterday I was at a meeting with some of the community leaders for about three hours yesterday around this we've had staff at information tables so to make sure that people who couldn't come to the meeting were getting the information it's been very active and very engaged so let me just since I was at the meeting Julia I'll go ahead and add a little bit I thought it was one of the best community meetings I've ever attended it was facilitated by a parent and the community was very thoughtful you could see that they were looking at every one of the options and there were many like Judy said many many cards that people turned in on every single option and then there was a little bit of time for questioning at the end but overall it was more of a feeling of we've got a problem and let's all get together and figure out how we're going to solve it was it was a it was great meeting looking forward to the next one I had a question about whether or not um you've one of the things that you're looking at I know in terms of the Lincoln overcrowding is the opportunity for families to voluntarily move to other schools are you looking at that in this situation not in this situation we don't believe that it would help us achieve what we absolutely need in that building next year which is one to two preferably two freed up classrooms in the Hollywood campus and one to two preferably two classrooms freed up on the Fernwood campus so through volunteering we may get a little more Elbow Room at different grades we doubt that we would get full groups of students that would would hit the right number when I discussed Lincoln in a moment I think that we still have an opportunity to just have some flexible movement across grade levels that would free up enough space we don't have it's not as acute yet at Lincoln we don't believe there may be other things that we could do this is a good time to try the voluntary effort we don't believe voluntary would be sufficient in Beverly Cleary unfortunately at this time okay and then two other options I was curious to hear a little bit more about is the idea of 8th graders going to Grant I know we did that recently with another school I'm trying to remember was it yes yeah um and I think it worked fairly well but it it doesn't look like it's being given serious consideration here so could you just talk through that and then the other one I was curious about is whether or not there are any opportunities at
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Beaumont middle school for them to pick up any of the seventh or 8th grade students as an option okay and whether those have even been looked at um so no we haven't moved eighth grade to Grant forward in part because we're trying to preserve the K-8 experience which is one of the values that people have shared with us and so maintaining a configuration or a relationship that's aligned with the K-8 versus moving directly into high school isn't something that we've heard parents say they're very interested in and is one that requires a lot more planning for that educational transition so that's been one of the primary reasons that we've looked to see if we can maintain kids in some level of a k structure um it would also require um a conditional use for the grant campus to add eighth grade there that may not have been something that we did every other time but the city is making sure that we follow through on those things now so right so technically right now we can't house eighth graders at Grant without that conditional use doesn't mean we wouldn't get it but it that's an additional requirement and regarding um Beaumont um it's possible that there may be some room for some level of transfers beaumont's pretty full now that we've added regular and they're housing and Spanish Immersion program they're largely not open to transfers at most grades but it is something that and and it's one of the things that have come up in the comments people have asked well what about Beaumont so it may be something that as we look through the transfer process that we may want to make that window a little bit more open that's a potential for Beverly Cleary students and then one final question is it fair to assume that through the enrollment and transfer process last year we didn't allow any outside students to transfer in yeah we did allow siblings of transfer students to start at Beverly clear last year there was a small number of them I think five okay and there is a special education classroom that draws students in from across the district and that's but that's that's the limit of it okay great thanks so Judy before before you go on I'm looking at the enrollment data analysis that you provided us that talks about utilization okay um and so I hear you say something like Beaumont doesn't have room I'm just not sure how to make sense of these numbers because right now according to this the utilization's 74 okay and then there are some schools that seem like Astros at 117 but somehow we're not talking about Aster we're talking about other schools that have slightly less so I'm just I don't understand how to make sense of those numbers uh what they're telling me um they're not like the sapphire Simpson scale where the bigger you get you're absolutely sure that the condition is significantly worse um but it may be Astor is a school that I would I would categorize as uncomfortable that's concerned about their enrollment but they've managed to cope well within the spaces that are available to them they got a couple modulars three years ago that's helped with that it when I say that that I see Beaumont is full I don't mean the building can't hold additional students um within the Staffing that's provided within the structure that they're operating now they're operating as a as a full Middle School it doesn't mean that we couldn't add additional students in there it wasn't one of our first considerations um I would say we probably well I don't know maybe I shouldn't even say that to move an entire say seventh and eighth grade over there which would be approximately 180 or 200 students and to make a big impact on a school that's only going to last say for a year is a significant change and we have to be really cautious about that big of an impact on an existing building that's already operating operating at sort of full size now what what's available at Rose City Park right now is essentially half an empty building with um half of it being used for Access so access has moved in they're in about half the building um and there's a lot of available space right there that doesn't require a lot of Shifting or changing for the program that's on site it also so so that's why we've gone there but I would say like these options are not necessarily set in stone um we've asked we gave a lot of information to the community last week a lot of it's based on what they had said to us in terms of you know values and interests in the past we'll see what comes out of Thursday nights and then as I said we'll come back to you to keep you abreast of how things are moving forward and to your point that you just made I mean taking seventh and eighth graders and putting that Beaumont goes against what I heard you say is the community value of a K-8 they would lose their seventh and eighth grade so right yeah director wheel how many come out of
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school systems where they used a lot of modular classrooms actually 10 of them in a brand new school after that they built two years before in Evergreen School District that I was in they build the classroom and got all these kids and they put in 10 modular rooms in there that doesn't seem to be one of our other it seems like in Portland Public Schools we totally shy away from that almost all right why don't we just put two modular schools at Beverly Cleary the upper and two over there plenty of room down there and a little Beverly Cleary at Holly Rood and be done with it and move on so I'm wondering if uh Tony magliano or CJ Sylvester happens to be in the room and wants to um just check to make sure that Judy doesn't say they're wrong I know we even have some old ones sitting around to buy new ones I would like to say that it's not it's not PPS necessarily that's shying away we're not shy about Portables or modulars Villas Portables I like Portables we are uh they are a significant investment our city here in Portland which may be different than in other places has a lot of requirements that come with what it takes to bring those on the ground it takes about 10 months to go through the entire process of sighting and placing the investment is significant we don't have the luxury of just placing very temporary structures in most of our campuses and specifically at Beverly Cleary we have some significant field modifications that were funded through a grant correct that were just finished recently that would have to be the site for the new modulars lobbying to get them to put in more reasonable things for us to be able to do that when we need to do that and further over the short term you know we lobbied we down there lobbying it whoever's doing the making those rules I mean you know see what I'm saying if they're if we're out Beyond we're not like I say when I was up in Vancouver uh teaching in Evergreen I had a brand new building they put in 10 Portables but like the second year put in eight then ten and and they did it right away kind of you know over the summer right we're going to be short so we put in some Portables we can't do that in Portland or are we lobbing why don't we go down and Lobby them and say hey hey you know we need to have this kind of flexibility you're messing us up I mean the city the city's willing to work with us on Tony magliano deputy chief yeah I know the city will work with us on modular placement the timeline for doing that um usually you want to start that process early December and sooner in order to have them in place but it Beverly Cleary there really isn't the space there to put them that field like on Judy mentioned was built using grant funding and to take that away it also takes away play space for kids what about the one in Hollywood at Hollywood there seems like there's space down that one side when I was after it also so if we're in placing modulars for smaller kids the cities um made a requirement that they need to include restrooms and they have to be what we call a wet modular so the cost to put in a modular with water and plumbing believe it or not is over the 400 000 Mark for one month for one modular so two classrooms um in terms of what we've been spending out of the facilities budget in the last six years that I've been with the district is really taking away from our ability to take care of basic needs in our schools so the facilities is funded to fix roofs maintain classroom spaces and and not funded to do the to add modulars or or to do the capacity improvements and that's having a huge impact on our budget so we've been looking for lower cost solutions that provide that can still provide adequate learning spaces for kids so I think that's what's Driven us to these options which are also as Judy alluded to Community Driven options as well I don't know does that answer your question oh yeah yeah an answer my question real well Tony thank you very much appreciate it please okay thank you for your comments um regarding Beverly clear I'm going to shift a little bit to Lincoln High School and here's the stats on Lincoln another school that's been growing in a pace above what is anticipated and one that we're watching very closely they're
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experiencing very large class sizes limited common spaces what we've done over the last years is curtail transfers there are no regular transfers into Lincoln High School although we have maintained the Spanish Immersion program there um and there have been a number of really creative facility changes that have been implemented with a lot of support and guidance both from the administration the community and there's a lot of shared sacrifice on that campus people are willing to hold classes in difficult spaces do their jobs in spaces that it's very different than they would in other places I know some of you are very familiar with that we are concerned that additional growth is going to lead to even greater health safety and student achievement challenges we think it's serious enough that we should try something this year instead of just waiting and watching and and seeing them in an even more difficult situation next year so what we would like to propose is that we would allow voluntary transfer to Wilson High School and that that be a guarantee and because it comes in at the guarantee level it's actually something that requires board action and that's why we're bringing it um to your attention and we'll come back to you for approval next week and the bridal mile neighborhood has had this option available for almost 10 years and there's some statistics I think in a memo that's in your packet on on how well that's gone we think expending it expanding it to the rest of Lincoln would be helpful will some want to point out that Lincoln students have other great options available across the city strong programs in less crowded environments that they can take advantage of as well um and finally that we're going to be watching this really closely we hope that voluntary transfers are something that will provide enough relief that it's more comfortable at Lincoln next year um but we may come back we would certainly come back to the community and school leadership if these strata if this isn't a successful strategy to see what else needs to be done and we would do that in advance of coming and talking to you anymore about any other changes that we would make at Lincoln we are not proposing the kind of difficult enrollment changes that I just talked about at Beverly Cleary for Lincoln at this time um we could but we don't think that it's going to be necessary and we would want to avoid those kinds of changes especially later in the spring so we're going to be watching this really closely working with both Wilson and Lincoln to try and encourage that and the feeder schools I think Jackson and West Sylvan where those 8th grade families are is a good place to for Wilson to have a lot of conversations to see if it makes a positive difference for Lincoln and trip Goodall and John Isaacs are both here to help answer questions so if there's any questions about this option director yeah so um why so Wilson transfer it at will um why not the other schools Wyoming through the lottery oh thank you um let me clarify that um Wilson wouldn't be open to transfer for any other students um except for this option whereas the other schools do have transfer slots so there's ample room for transfers at Roosevelt at Jefferson at Madison there's considerable space at Benson I'll be talking about that in a moment so there's already a mechanism in place that would allow those students to transfer under other circumstances there wouldn't be this mechanism for Wilson Grant and Cleveland so we're happy with that enrollment so this is an Avenue well I'm just asking why why wouldn't other kids have an opportunity to transfer into Wilson I mean that I think was your question right sort of your question yep so there's 1230 students at Wilson this year and through the normal Lottery mechanism students at Lincoln could wind up getting bumped from students from other schools so if we're most concerned right now about providing an option that would bring relief to Lincoln allowing the guarantee assures that it's not a lottery it isn't subject to chance it isn't subject to whether other kids would be permitted to come in or not our thinking was that there would be a sufficient number of students that would take advantage of that that we wouldn't open Wilson to other lotteries but we haven't opened the lottery slots aren't final so those decisions are made by the regional administrator's principles and through the superintendent so can I just do a little follow-up just so I'm sure I understand this Wilson makes some sense in terms of
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proximity but if Benson Jefferson Roosevelt and Madison are currently under enrolled would you look at doing a guarantee I mean if you're really trying to give Lincoln families an opportunity to move out is there a reason why you do a guarantee only to Wilson as opposed to any of those schools no we could guarantee to the others no I can guarantee the others as well if it provided additional incentive we don't um we don't think that a Lincoln applicant especially given what we're about to talk about with Benson who applied to any of those other schools would be denied through the regular Lottery whereas at Wilson if we open the lottery and there were applicants from other spaces without the guarantee a Lincoln applicant could be denied we would want to avoid that but at the other schools because of their capacity because of their size in the lottery because of other things and if that is just too much Insider knowledge and it would just be a lot clearer if we said if you're in Lincoln you're guaranteed to go to another school that has space and here's the schools um we could do that too I was just curious okay is that more what makes more sense can I can I ask a quick question before you move on from this um at some point we were it was framed as transfer students are down significantly at Lincoln but when I look at the the graph I mean it's down 16 from 2008. can you talk to me how is that happening so we've curtailed access for new transfer students but Lincoln houses a Spanish Immersion program that still has kids that come from other schools outside of their region their region is is all of Wilson and Lincoln cluster but there are other students from outside that region who are in the program as well and they do have a classroom that's part of that Pioneer program for special education students so there's a couple of reasons that we know kids would be there from other places additionally Portland Public Schools has our very generous Clause that allows students to enter a school as a neighborhood student and then if they move they could stay to the highest grade so there's a variety of factors that lead to that number the annual Lottery three is probably the least likely way that those kids got into Lincoln it's often what we think of when we say transfers and my last question some of my board colleagues were probably here for the original discussion I was not and this might be opening a whole huge can of worms into the communities that I'm about to say this I apologize I'm not trying to dig up something but is there a reason that we wouldn't just temporarily and I know that we have a district review process but why the recommendation isn't to take for example Bridal Mile and move those kids to Wilson just change the boundary for this temporary time it's part of the broader process but I just wonder why that's not a suggested relief which would bring immediate relief well it wouldn't have taken well not at Lincoln right that's right shift the problem perhaps over to Wilson too I mean I'm not sure that that's I I think that the idea here was to try to figure out something on a temporary basis until we could have a deeper discussion about the overall issue and that can include a whole variety of things but I think that's I assume that's why it wasn't in here and to the degree that we have a voluntary option that we believe will be successful then we would like to avoid the mandatory forms of transfer that are a lot more um difficult for families and schools to respond to especially in a short period of time we understand that the Beverly Cleary Community is going through this right now um at that more difficult level they're also there are different factors that influence that but we don't think we're there yet with Lincoln we'd like to not get there we believe the long-term process is the best way to sort out that and many other issues so is it safe to say in our in our memo a couple of uh staff suggestions were made on other options other than voluntary transfers and it sounds like Judy and your presentation that you're not really looking at those I'm sorry please please restate your question it's restarting on its own for me and that distracted me I apologize um in your in your memo to us it looked like staff was providing some other potential options if the voluntary transfer situation didn't work out but in your remarks it sounded like you're kind of moving away from those at that point with the hope that the voluntary option works is that fair enough to say it is and the intent of the memo was to discussion instead was to describe what
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could be but was not it wasn't a threat and it certainly wasn't a signal of clear direction that we know we would take at another point it was just an indication that we're serious about it and that we would be we could look at other things in the future but not that we were intent on doing those things at this time and just to be clear thank you very much that's helpful in terms of we could look at it are we talking about we the whole Lincoln Community are we talking about we staff I think that any actions that go beyond this voluntary transfer would have to include a broader group of community stakeholders thank you we'd pledge to do that thank you I think you just have to push cancel all right gang yes and we're from a current slide we are back on track thank you for that technical assistance so just remind everybody that when you have an 87 capture rate at one of our high schools and we have close with some of our others that's something that we all should be celebrating and oftentimes we seem to present these as problems and so awful as opposed to oh my gosh isn't this amazing we've got 87 of families choose to send their kids and we have several high schools in that category and it is something that especially as an urban District we should be celebrating this is the right problem for us it's still a problem and we want to take it seriously but thank you for reminding us why it's a good thing um okay so our final topic for tonight before you get to switch gears a yet again um is about Benson High School another one that you would think well can't this wait for the long-term process we believe that it should be a part of the long-term process but we'd like to try some things now to inform that long-term process so we're going to talk to you for a minute about that and again trip John Isaac's here to um to help with any questions that we have um so Benson currently has about 830 students it was approved through High School System designed to be 850 um that approval wasn't meant to last for all time there was supposed to be a lot of review of that and part of that review is happening now we see some interesting factors with Benson high demand and many of you may have heard last spring when we had 407 applicants for those 250 seats and a lot of students denied a lot of pain came with those denials And yet when it was time to actually get started this fall many of the students who initially opted in opted out leaked out to other schools or left the system we went back through the entire wait list and still only went up with 240 approvals into ninth grade this year in addition we saw a higher level of attrition fewer students remaining from 9th to 10th grade and 10th to 11th grade is what we had seen in past years and they're not dramatically different Trends but it's enough that that we worry about that long-term sustainability so we look at Benson's enrollment and we think oh maybe there's room to grow here and to change things but we also are very conscious when we talk about Benson enrollment it's more than just a number and underneath that number are some some remarkable notes for example in 2012 71 of the kids at Benson came from just three neighborhoods those three neighborhoods made up 35 percent of all the high school kids in our system but double that proportion was actually attending Benson High School so anything that we do to make changes at Benson is going to have an impact elsewhere and specifically an impact on those schools I'm moving very quickly there's more information in your packet we're happy to answer questions which cut right to the chase we are proposing increasing the 9th and 10th grade slots for Benson slightly next year to help offset that lower number that was in there this year and we also believe that we need to do that within a frame of a pilot waiting to improve the geographic parity of student approvals and I'd like to spend a moment talking with you about that because that action requires your attention it requires board action so that's one of the reasons we're emphasizing it with you but it's all really what we consider a package deal there are multiple ways to address enrollment at Benson we met with the psych Council and PTSA and Alumni Association last week and they're all in to help support all of these options including allowing more upper grades transfers for students who may be at other schools identify that that Benson hands on style might be appropriate for them and through an individual process through referrals with counsel colors get more kids coming across into Benson right now you can't enter Benson outside of the lottery so no slots at 11th or 12th grade and then finally efforts to beef up their retention rate so that the kids that they get are the kids that stick so as I said I'm in a focus on the what we're calling the regional balancer and
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even even better if you know the I call it the Benson balancer you know like the Benson bubbler and nobody's laughed at that yet you're really tired if you're laughing at that one now okay um I'm focused on that in part because in my wonky world it's interesting and I'm the one sitting in front of you and also because it is the one that requires your action um so there's a table in your packet that gave you a little more information about how it could work a couple of the high points are that our standard Lottery just doesn't consider where a student lives as a factor so we see the impact of where kids live on the other side after all is said and done but the lottery doesn't see it up front so this is a way for the lottery to see something else up front um two of our schools specifically Madison Roosevelt have routinely had more than 50 neighborhood students approved to Benson each year and that gets them to that to FTE place where you're moving you know you've got two fewer FTE in a school um the school that they're leaving behind so what we see is that when you that 50 is almost like a a Tipping Point where you can almost assure a negative impact on the students and programs at the schools that you're leaving behind so we look to see is there anything that we can do to bring in some balance so that fewer schools were seeing approvals above that 50 student Mark and what would the impact be on other schools so as I said there's a chart that sort of takes you through different models we modeled the 2012-13 and 2013-14 lotteries to see if it would work the regional balancer finds the highest possible numbers of students who could be accepted from all schools that's on the end of that so how many schools could could get to that number and it kind of it works within that number it's not a cap or it's not uh we often called buckets because then you would be obligated to fill the whole thing up and if you you might be able to get to an even lower number so it doesn't start from like a maximum number of the kids you would take it it just kind of finds a level number in between so here's my brief example between Franklin and Madison the number of applicants actual approvals and the and how you would have if you had balanced approvals what the difference would be between the two um that the bottom line is you can increase your slots without exacerbating the negative impacts on smaller comprehensive schools so if you're really interested in giving more access to Benson for kids across the district this is a way to achieve those goals um we're looking at this as a pilot we hope that it works and we hope that it's right but we want again we want to watch it closely there are additional efforts that are underway that may just equalize the applicant pool if the applicant pool was equal like if kids were equally applying from everywhere you wouldn't need these kinds of balancers increasing CTE at comprehensive high schools which is an important topic in the community and with you as a board is one way that we may have more equal interest so maybe less interest from some places more interest from others we know that we won't be able to replicate every program at Benson we hope that there's always strong interest for that school and also raising greater awareness of Benson's programs at schools who have had traditionally lower applicant rates so particularly schools on the west side don't seem as interested in Benson now as they did a number of years ago maybe that's something that we can we can work on um it's important to point out that the balancer May uh will probably have an impact on the racial and social economic diversity at Benson and other schools if we are not mindful how for how we apply it so this actually came to our attention when we were with psych Council last week at Benson and they asked if we could be very clear that the weight that's available for socioeconomic status in the lottery would certainly be applied to students who were applying from the schools coming into this so that the socioeconomic Factor would still be present and make a difference even as we were applying the regional Factor um we haven't revised any language in the draft resolution to reflect that yet we're still thinking about it but we're really intrigued by it and it seems like a reasonable point that we absolutely want to pursue um and that ultimately the results from this would be incorporated into our district-wide process okay so um that's the brief overview on the regional balancer and other efforts to adjust enrollment at Benson questions or comments for us tractor Buell why don't we just do this you got 50 kids that come from Madison to Benson so essentially we take and we following those 50 kids we moved to FTE into Benson correct am I correct there that's oversimplified but yeah that was the point that I was making okay and we
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have 50 kids that come let's say from Jefferson and 50 kids new kids that come in from Roosevelt and so the F so essentially six FTE moves into Benson why don't we just Lee put the FD in Benson and then leave the FTE in Madison Roosevelt and Jefferson so when those schools when when kids leave those schools they keep the FTE there which means that the program gets richer because now they have two extra ft and 50 less kids and that all for a total of six hundred thousand dollars which I can find tomorrow talking to Mr Winn ifs or Mr Sullivan if someone would like me to do that I'll sit down and I'll find that money so we just for six hundred thousand dollars we create a better deal of Madison we open up Benson I mean it seems to me like a might be a good way to go possibly I don't know so is your enrollment director I'm not sure that I'm the best person to comment on that well I mean what's wrong I appreciate these what's wrong with my suggestion if we have the 600 000 which we have so I I believe that your suggestion is oriented towards how we might just um spend or use our resources differently and not just have the dollars follow the students and um as you know the superintendent and that's working through the budget process could absolutely do that in that case so one of the things that concerns me about trying to regionally uh balance stuff is one of the things about Benson is they pick up specific types of kids and those specific types of kids are ones who really want to do hopefully what's at Benson and a lot of times that's their step out of poverty to some degree I mean that's a role that Benson's played for years and years and years so why don't we just spend six hundred thousand dollars and solve the problem and Benson does has more kids and we don't have to restrict the kids from those neighborhoods who want to get up and want to do that and we keep their high school with that extra 2ft they have less kids but we do we just leave the Ft there I mean it seems like a very very very small cost six hundred thousand dollars in our budget to do that hardly nothing well I mean would somebody consider that I mean how would I go about would I have to make an amendment or something here down the line I think what I hear um Judy's saying is that she's not that's not her role to do that that that is a budget discussion um about FTE Judy's role is to fix the he could do it oh she could suggest it uh superintendent could suggest it through her and say Here's how we should solve this problem but she could do that right actually we have done it that way and times like a part of the time part of the impact of as you end up seeing where the enrollment disparities you can't we haven't been able to cushion programs exactly the way that you're suggesting so in other moments in time I think we have done that more yeah and it's a good idea to do it again it's also worth noting that if you look at and I was just looking it up on their website if you look at our school profiles and I think it was I think I was looking at 2012-13 is the latest one on the website if you look at the amount we're spending per student at our different high schools there's already a huge swing where we're almost spending twice as much for example at Jefferson and Roosevelt and we are at you know the two lowest ones are Lincoln and Grant and you'd be exacerbating that even more at some level so I think it is something that would should be part of a budget discussion rather than you know tractor curler did I see you yeah thank you uh what would be the result if if you put this Regional balancer your Benson balancer uh on and you lifted all the cat you had you had no cap what what would what would that look like what would it look like next year you mean if we just took every applicant which capture yeah I'm referring to the the there's a there's a cap on Benson at 800 and 50 and there and now there's and there's been a cap for freshmen correct yes yes we set enrollment slots to a certain number so you're proposing that there's no limit yeah what what would that look like with your Regional balancer well the regional balancer wouldn't make a difference it wouldn't do anything because of everybody who applies gets in then your school looks like your applicant pool so your school is going to look like you know so what do you think that'll look like next year if we didn't have the Gap um I think it do you mean do you want me to guess what the number of kids in Benson might be
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um that's really hard to tell um but imagine a freshman class of 350 instead of 250 so that's an additional 100 kids and I mean you'd be it probably maybe 960 970 next year but I but you um but you could calculate pretty clearly where you would have lower enrollment in the system to right yeah right because of that um okay I I mean just personally just I I'm I'm really uncomfortable with it with a with a cap because I think it I'm uncomfortable a with the cap and I'm also uncomfortable after reading this memo is that we don't really know what the right enrollment is for a healthy thriving Benson is what I read in this memo is that true um I don't know that our objective was to call out what a healthy thriving enrollment at Benson is I mean we just came off a two-year process that set our high school system and put Benson at 8 50 in that system and set out a number of parameters around trying to create parity across the comprehensive schools so from a system level it's hard to look at optimizing Benson without looking at what that does to the rest of the the system if that's your interest or if that's your you're wondering right now is what what's optimal size it said in the memo that we we that we don't know what the right enrollment is for Benson for it to be a healthy school and a recommended school size has not been developed so uh director curler John Isaac senior policy advisor the superintendent I think what you're referring to is that the high school system design report said that there would be work with Benson stakeholders in identifying and an optimal enrollment for Benson High School and it is true that that the optimal enrollment for Benson has not been identified as explained in high school system design so that is that is true yeah one thing I'd like to add to this is that in developing these recommendations we had significant dialogue with the Benson stakeholder Community with the PTSA Benson alumni the Benson staff the administration we also dialogued with uh high school principals from Jefferson Roosevelt Madison and with the parents from Madison High School the PTA leadership and the leader of a group that calls themselves mad parents which I think is pretty cool and what what struck me is at a values level in those conversations that the Benson Community what they were really looking for is a the district looking to engage with them and creating a pathway to Future growth and that they were actually at a values level level interested in a solution that does bring more Regional balance to the student body at Benson they're just as concerned about the low what they perceive to be low enrollment as they are the fact that we only had four applicants from the Lincoln cluster last year so what I heard at a values level was appreciation that we're looking at how we can put Benson on a path to Future growth in a way that does bring Regional balance to the student body because they see their school as something that should be serving the whole community and not just having nearly three quarters of the student body coming from one part of the city what um I heard what we heard when we met with the Madison parent leaders was um refreshingly a real interest in being creative and how we can continue to support the future growth of the enrollment at Madison which is their main concern and director build of the points you raised I I can tell you my dialogue with the Madison parents they would be concerned about a technical solution that would allow more kids to leave Madison they want to see us have a plan to continue to grow the enrollment there and it's more than just FTE it's about support for programs after school programs Athletics and everything that comes with having a larger school but they appreciated that we need to put Benson on a path to being able to grow the enrollment and they were willing to work with us in a way to do that so what I heard from the two communities wasn't hey just think about us what I heard is hey this is really creative thinking we appreciate this we like the district's looking at ways to find solutions that supports the continued enrollment Health across the system but also recognizes that we need to put Benson on the path to to growth and as laid out in your memo the whole way to do that is laid out in high school system redesign we said there's going to be a proportion of
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the enrollment at Focus option in high schools we're not there there's room to grow our Focus option high schools within the target set in high school system redesign but High School System redesign said we're going to work to bring a balanced student body to Benson and that clearly hasn't been established the cap has helped it's been a tool in helping bring the balance across the system but I think as we said in the memo it's sort of a crude solution and it's not it's it hasn't done anything to change the proportion of the enrollment and so this is and we received positive feedback from the Benson leader the the leaders of the site Council and the the stakeholder groups we met with that they think this actually can be the solution to bring future growth to Benson while bringing that Regional balance to the student body yeah and I would just I mean just this is just all discussion so yeah uh and thinking about it my own but I mean I think the the way to um bring about really robust Regional participation in Benson is to give Benson what it needs to be the best Career Technical education School in the country um and you don't do that by capping it so those are these are the kind of things that I'm personally struggling with yeah may I make one comment I just want to we don't believe and we didn't that the Benson Community does not believe that students from certain areas should not be served by their school a different concern is that kids from certain areas might look at Benson as oh a better solution because they don't think they can get a full comprehensive program in their neighborhood school and so Benson is more of a draw and it may not be they I agree that Benson draws certain students and attracts those those students my own student when my own son went there but um it needs to be a poll and not something that kids are running from so having strong comprehensives and everywhere in our city helps make sure that kids aren't running from that they're running to and that's one of the reasons that we're interested in the balancer and the last thing I'd say is that from a staff recommendation perspective this is definitely about in terms of what the superintendent asked us to do creating the foundation in order to grow the enrollment so that we would expect that if the balancer works the way the modeling projected that would it would result in us coming back to the board in in future academic years with the recommendation of increasing the target enrollment above the 850 where it is now but in order to get to that 850 as you know we said we already have to increase the number of opportunities that the freshman and uh sophomore level because we fell below that this year the other thing is in high school system redesign there's already a precedent that when Benson is successful in retaining more kids than projected that the district has allowed the enrollment to grow above that 850. so that was laid out in high school system reesigned as a precedent so that's why um we and the response we got from the staff that was very positive to that in terms of working on better retention strategies there that would grow the enrollment to somewhere around 900 this year and put it on the path to growth in the future go ahead um I thought it was interesting that you were having the discussion about our kids going to Benson or running from these other schools um this is sort of bringing us full circle for with a conversation we had earlier my personal opinion is if they are going to Benson because they want the Career Technical education opportunities it is even more important that we ensure that our comprehensive neighborhood schools like Roosevelt Madison actually have strong Career Technical education opportunities right there in their own neighborhood school and in fact that might give students the opportunity in their Junior and Senior year if they realize that they absolutely love those Hands-On learning opportunities to think about transferring into Benson and doing the whole deal there so it kind of brings that whole conversation full circle that if they're if they're running from schools because they're not getting what they want let's give them what they want in their neighborhood schools and by the way let's flip the cap at Pinson as soon as we can so I was glad to hear you kind of doing that conversation though I had um two questions for you one's a little off the walls but the first one is it you seem to be indicating that we don't seem to be retaining students at Benson the way we have in the past which is a little bit alarming in terms of their graduation rate that we've you know been talking about is pretty wonderful or it has been so do we understand what's happening there and then I have a slightly Off the Wall question after that
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okay so um the the changes in retention year over year that we saw between 12 13 and 13 14 aren't dramatic and it isn't the kind of change that would influence those long-term graduation rates that you're thinking about but to say it simply over the last couple of years more kids that started at Benson have been remaining at Benson and then last year we saw lower numbers coming back so um we're not quite sure what's underneath all of that but um but Benson is a school that that keeps a lot of its own kids it doesn't have um another way for kids to get in and upper grades so that's really important and they take this very seriously but we did see a little bit of a change in that this year and it helped contribute to them being at 8 30 instead of higher numbers it wasn't just the freshman class that made a difference but it puts a lot of pressure on having a huge freshman class and a huge Lottery output if if you if you have to plan for a lot of attrition between 9th and 10th 10th and 11th and 11th and 12th so we think that we can Shore it up in multiple ways that's why we we raise that issue we're not concerned that they're not retaining kids or that it's unhealthy it's just that um in a in a school like Benson that's by Design at this point pretty small the more kids you keep the better it is in the long run it matters more there than it does probably in a comprehensive where you have kids that can move in and the like okay do you know where those kids are going Kitty um not exactly and I I will I will just say to you right now this has been a difficult fall to answer those kinds of important questions in part because of the changeover in our student information system and the ability to really track where kids are we're just not quite where we would normally be at this time of year so good question Off the Wall all right so after all question um we're talking now about kind of geographic balancing in terms of the student body at Benson one of the things that I noticed is that our student current student body at Benson is 55 boys 45 girls are we looking at any gender balancing approach because I'm assuming most of our other community comprehensives that's not the case so is there anything that we're doing to try to increase enrollment of girls at Benson well we there's a a weight in the lottery to make it easier for girls to get approved over boys it's a very simple point it's a very small way and and it doesn't it's not a big enough weight that it overcomes the applicant pool right so when you just have a whole bunch more boys than girls even a little bit of even a weight doesn't do that much the whole question of whether the weights for socioeconomic status and gender are big enough and there should be other ways are really the kind of thing that Sackett is going to be chewing on a lot because they're they're important for these kinds of questions but there is a wait in place right now other comments questions just one one last comment which is uh to say thank you I know there's been a lot of work put on in this and superintendent I know you've been helping direct it and so it's um so thank you thank you yeah see you next week I'll just add in but I really love the creativity yeah nice way to finesse it and to make sure that we have students from across the district that are going to Benson I like it it's great thank you very much thank you thank you we will now move on to our dual language immersion update the initial recommendations superintendent Smith and I'm just going to welcome this very patient group who's been waiting all night to do a really a presentation that the board has actually been waiting for for a number of years because it's been a priority of the board to expand our dual language immersion programs and we have been working and preparing for it and you're now going to hear the rollout so Debbie armandara dual language program director Michael bacon assistant director hi good evening um so just to reintroduce myself I'm Debbie armendariz and I'm the interim director of dual language immersion and I have with me Michael bacon who's assistant director and we are just going to dive right into our presentation seeing as how my bedtime starts in about five minutes all right so uh today I'm going to share with you the context for expansion of
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immersion programs I'll talk to you a little bit about the community and stakeholder input process that we followed um that really really kept uh kept us energized and engaged in the work and I'll talk a little bit about the impact of expansion on increasing access for all students to immersion programs and then I'll share with you the recommendations um you which you did receive in the packet and the public can link to at the immersion website all right so the context for immersion there was a board resolution that was passed indicating that we were to expand programs and this is after um an understanding from the board and Portland Public Schools that we are identifying the expansion of dual language immersion programs as high leverage for closing the achievement Gap with emerging bilinguals but also with our historically underserved populations we have aligned their work to the Strategic plan for closing the achievement Gap and I want to call out two segments of that plan that is collaborating with families and communities which we did extensively through this process and the idea of providing relevant and rigorous programs for all students we believe that in teaching students in two languages is rigorous and that providing students with instruction in their language that supports their cultural background Israel relevant we were also Guided by the racial Equity policy and plan and specifically strategy number four calls out providing access for native speakers of other languages to dual immersion programs as a high leverage strategy the key performance indicators that are aligned to the racial Equity policy and plan were also an anchor for us and I'll talk a little bit about um key performance indicator number six in another slide that I have but that one is about um acknowledging that for our students of color it is a helpful and supportive that their the staff who teach them reflect the racial cultural and ethnic background this work also comes in the context of our spell work and our spell work is um has been driven by the special ed department and the ESL Department working collaboratively so spell stands for special education and ell for English language Learners so the place where those where we have students that um that qualify for both of those services that is a place where as a district we are really underserving students I'll give you one example of a statistic that shows this and that is as a district 13 of our student population qualifies for special education but within the English language learner population 17 percent qualify for special education so we believe that there's an over-representation of students who are English language Learners within our special education programs and the majority of those students are actually classified under community Disorder so our hope is to turn a communication disorder into a child who is bilingual bicultural and biliterate that's where all in um so in the fall I think I was uh eight days or so into my work and I shared with you the interim recommendations for expansion um since then we have been working in uh engaged in a feasibility study looking at which of those recommendations we can really bring to fruition through this process we have engaged the our communities extensively and let me see there I want to call your attention to some specific Pages within the recommendation that call out the process that we followed for each one of those different language groups and that's on page 10 for the Mandarin program page 16 for the Vietnamese program and the Spanish program is on page 21. so we talked to teachers at the schools we talked to community agents that are already connected to the parent populations we talked to other school staff we talked to school Community organizations ptas and site councils they were all very very engaged in the work they had a lot of questions really good questions that you will see
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reflected in the FAQs that are attached to each of the recommendations and we worked with our community partners with I want to call out just a few of them with the Asian Pacific American network of Oregon apano and the Vietnamese community of Oregon with Benco as well as the Albina Head Start so Michael and I have really enjoyed working with these partners and developing a relationship that has helped us develop the recommendations that we're sharing with you tonight but that will also develop Partners For Us in moving the work forward and identifying additional sites for expansion and how to move through implementation we talked with parent communities in their language so for each one of these programs we had meetings in English and we had meetings in the partner language all right so I want to share with you just a little bit about where we are um currently with DOI programs we have over 4 000 students in dual language immersion program 56 of those students are students of color and 40 of them are on free and reduced uh lunch so it's a quite quite a diverse group we have approximately 130 teachers and 66 percent of the teachers are teachers of color so this part is the part that really aligns to key performance indicator number six we believe that in the immersion programs children are more likely to have a diversity of teachers and more likely to be able to see themselves in the face of the teacher that's teaching them so our recommendations for next year would increase the kindergarten enrollment in dual language immersion by 200 students as those students go through High School in 13 years if this were the only expansion that we did we would have an additional 2 600 students in immersion programs we are currently at 21 schools we're looking at adding four schools next year then there would be two additional schools as they go through the middle school and high school to 27 schools and I want to share with you this is really my most exciting slide this is the the the for the first time kind of pieces that our recommendations take us to I hope you will share in my excitement feel free to interrupt with Applause all right for the first time in PPS all of our immersion programs will be reserving slots for native speakers thank you some of our immersion programs were not created with an equity lens they were not created for the purpose of closing the achievement Gap and now that we're in a different place we are able to bring these programs into alignment with our strategic plan with our Equity policy with the values that we hold for the first time 23 native Chinese speakers will have Equitable access to our only Mandarin immersion program these families when we talked with them at the community meeting were very engaged and I would say angry that they have not been able to access these programs 100 students will be participating in the Mandarin immersion program at King and 50 students in the St John's area will participate in the Spanish Immersion program the St John's area which is sitting in James John represent the two largest schools that have the largest number of Spanish speakers that are not accessing immersion programs and for the first time PPS will launch our first Vietnamese immersion program in our state go for it all right so I'm going to go through the recommendations the first one is the Woodstock so again this is a program that was not created for the purpose of serving students from different backgrounds equitably it was it was not created to give Equitable access and what our recommendations will bring in line with that so 41 of the slots would be reserved for Native Chinese speakers at the Mandarin program in Woodstock through the community engagement that we had there we identified we were able to rule out the Turning Woodstock into a full immersion school there was a lot of support for the neighborhood program and we identified a priority that um that it was important to to make sure that the neighborhood classrooms the neighborhood kindergarten classrooms were balanced um were comparable to the immersion classroom in size right now they're not um so we really struggled to look at the slots and figure out a way that we could still Grant access for transfers native English transfers from outside of
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Woodstock to provide Equitable access for our native Chinese speakers and to create class sizes that were going to be comparable in the neighborhood and the immersion classrooms so our starting point is 41 percent of slots reserved for Native Chinese speakers moving towards 50 percent we will be increasing we're looking at um Plus for heritage thank you for asking that we have an epic yes yes I'm going to explain what you just said we have an FAQ about that um within our Mandarin program what so what she asked were about Heritage speakers so the DLI Department acknowledges that Heritage speakers sit in a tricky place um we are we can easily identify native speakers and we are providing a definition for native speakers but our heritage speakers are students who have a tie in this case to China whether it's by birth or by a parent but they don't speak the language um so right now our difficulty in reserving slots for Heritage speakers is that it has been legally problematic to sort students by their place of birth or by their ethnicity so we are able to to prioritize spots and Reserve spots for children who speak a particular Lane language but not not by their race or by their birthplace so in that that FAQ I think lines it out a little more eloquently than I just said it but that's on page seven roller state Federal yeah everybody in the country serves any Heritage uh spots for any of their children in any of their emergent programs in the entire United States I'm not aware of what what I mean it's it's possible um but what we've what we found is that we cannot do that thank you pardon what we found in talking with our legal council is that that would not be advisable for us that would be I mean that's not that wasn't my question my question is there any place in the United States that does give an edge to Heritage speakers is there any place in the United States have we researched that I Central and basically our legal counsel probably isn't as she researched that and given you a written brief you could share with me showing that we can't actually Reserve spots for Heritage speechers because nobody in the United States does it because it's a federal law she she has not given me a legal brief we had a conversation that was her guidance so that's what I'm doing we're going on a conversation not a research I mean if you go to New Mexico does New Mexico have Heritage speakers in any of their programs or Minnesota or New Jersey have we looked at any of that stuff um I I really I can't speak for for all the ways that our legal counsel arrived to that decision but I know that it is based on uh what happened in Seattle yeah so the Supreme Court is it was the Supreme's Court's gaze similar what could you send me that case can I send you that case yes um sure yeah my pleasure okay Heritage Spears did I answer your question said to me to me if you have I mean I've I've had parents who have come to me they've adopted a child from China they want that child to be able to retain that part of their Heritage and it just seems like there should be an opportunity somehow some way you know if there's federal law that precludes that it's a different discussion I guess but it does seem unfortunate it's it's very unfortunate and I would even say that through our Equity work one of the the one of the things that we have discovered is that students that show up in an environment ethnically one way or are racialized to be of a certain ethnic background but then they don't have the language to back up that racialization really are doubly marginalized so we definitely have an eye for that and would love to figure out a way to include Heritage speakers we have not been able to do that so far for me a lot of this conversation boils down too expanding access programs period yes doing I mean so that's yes that's the bigger value and appreciating that we need to do it in a thoughtful and do it well and not just you know expand it so fast that we that we mess up they're bad programs but that that there are lots of that's this huge issue you bring up yeah native speakers this huge issue and and just everyone can benefit so yeah uh it is our hope that we would expand programs and access so much that we wouldn't that wouldn't be an issue at all
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okay thank you thank you Nicole and uh we would be increasing the total slots from 4 to 56 uh by four I'm sorry 256 and we'd be increasing the neighborhood slots to 31 students increasing the neighborhoods Lodge will really be able to help us balance the class sizes on the neighborhood side and on the immersion side I remember a discussion discussion last year with it um with the Woodstock families we were bringing them down from three kindergartens of 20 which was 60. to actually equalize we thought it was unfair what we were doing that they were having classes of 20 at kindergarten and their neighborhood class had a really high kindergarten it doesn't sound like that proposed solution brought about the desired parity between those programs um is am I reading that right it moved us closer and I think that that this is going to we hope that this will get us even closer to that so I think that the spirit of that adjustment is the same as the spirit of of what we're doing to try to get some Equitable class sizes um we're just going about it we've got another piece in it by providing access to native speakers and um we're just giving it another shot in the summary of recommendations this is this a misprint it says uh is in Woodstock immersion program it says increased total slots by 4 to 56. that's correct is that correct yes so there's 28 kids in class okay yes and in King it says 50 slots at first grade yeah we're trying to be responsive to the communities and um to the to the class sizes that are currently existing in the communities after talking with teachers and with family members at each of those um it is our recommendation that those would be the best lots for each of those schools so over a king that teachers are saying we only want 25 kids in a class but over at Woodstock the teachers are saying who are willing to take 29 28 kids in a class so I didn't engage with a teacher in where they told me that at all but we talked with the entire community so that includes the teacher the principal the staff the parents in that school community and the parents interested in that school Community there's also um different there's just different um different allocations for those schools and there are different allocations for those schools because somebody out in the community said they should be different or the discussion came I mean I don't I'm not following your reasoning I'm having difficulty pulling your reasoning why it's different in each school now I don't maybe there's a good reason for it I just can't follow your reason well there's additional students of color and students in poverty at King's school and so our Equity formula it's my understanding that adjusts for that and as we provide Staffing so are we doing that in our regular classrooms across the district where we're adjusting each classroom size in every school different in other words in other words in King school we are saying we're limiting numbers at King's School in the third grade not in immersion but just in the third grade 28 but over at Forest Park it's okay to have 36. is that that's an equity formula and we're using it you're saying that the equity formula is the reason you're doing this and but what about the rest of the district are we doing class size by Equity permanents throughout the whole District we didn't do it when we did EAS say we could have cut down I don't know it's confusing your answer is confusing for me so I guess I can just stay confused but that's okay I don't mind doing that I've been confused on and off my whole life and the equity formula when we're doing our regular Staffing is actually impacts the whole school as opposed to individual grade levels or classrooms is it classrooms are smaller and and on the average well it it provides more adults into us the equity formula has the impact of providing more adults to to us but we have a class size formula that's based in the district on how poor a school is or how wealthy so if you're sending your kid out there to Forest Park you're going to have a class size formula the only place the only grade level at which we actually say a class optimal class size is kindergarten where we're shooting for questions so we don't have
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a class size formula based on Equity anyplace else but these two schools we do a equity waiting in terms of how we always yeah Elementary School how much do we weight the difference what's the difference well let's let us provide you some of that of that presentation I mean truly I can give you some stuff about what our formulas are that will be how how we do the Staffing and where where we do waiting we can give you all the formulas yeah um so the slots at Woodstock would be adjusted to reflect the chart um that is here that is in your recommendations um and I want to make a distinction between Mandarin and Chinese Mandarin we use to describe the program because the language of instruction is English and Mandarin and Chinese is uh the a language umbrella for all the languages that are spoken in China okay so on to the king program so at King we are recommending the establishment of a mandarin immersion program uh this would have an instructional model that would be um just like the one at Woodstock it would start with two kindergarten classrooms and um this is uh this second part is really something that we put in here completely based on the community input that we received through this process we will be we would be starting with two first grade classrooms we heard from the kindergarten parents at King very loudly that they were very disappointed that they had not had an opportunity to participate in this program and that they would very very much like to for their children to participate so starting an immersion entry into immersion can really happen in kindergarten and first grade so that's why we're proposing a kindergarten classroom as well as two kindergarten classrooms as well as two first grade classrooms because the model will follow the Woodstock model then for this we would only need two Mandarin teachers and two English speaking teachers and the the slots at King are also um I I just have to tell you that through the community engagement process Michael and I learned so much we we really every time we talked to um to teachers or to Community Partners or an organization or a parent group are thinking around the recommendations was adjusted every single time this reflects our work with Albina Head Start which actually this was the the community partner that first called us wanting for us to provide additional opportunities for their students because at Albina Head Start they currently have been providing Mandarin instruction to those students so we would be reserving 21 slots at each grade level for students from the Albina Head Start we would be reserving 11 for The Sibling of of current King students and that again is because of the the engagement of those parents we would have 10 slots that would be for for neighborhood or transfer students throughout the district and we would be reserving 15 of this Lodge which would be eight in this case for native speakers that would want to access the program at King right Rose Way Heights oh I did want to say about the king program that those slots we know that that families in that area aren't always ready to go for the lottery on February 3rd which is when it starts and then to turn in all that paper we're going to meet all those criteria within our regular timeline so one of the ways that we are removing barriers for our families is that we will run the regular Lottery but we will hold all those seats so that we have time to to recruit families throughout the spring and perhaps even into the summer oh yes and um part of part of the the piece that we believe we will be able to resolve is the lack of representation by African-Americans in our dual language immersion programs the um the recommendations call this out that currently uh 11 of our students are African-American but only two percent of our students in the Ali programs are African-American so we were very strategic in the way that we structured that lottery so that um that we can provide Equitable access to all of our families so in the Vietnamese program we are proposing the establishment of a dual language program in Vietnamese for next year at Roseway Heights the program would start with two kindergarten classrooms
04h 05m 00s
and the model for the program is yet to be determined we did receive a grant from ode and we have some advisors that come with that Grant we are eager to hear from them what their perspective and input is into the model that would that would be best for our startup program yeah whether it would be a 50 50 or a 90 10. so whether kindergarten kindergarten would start with 90 of the time in Vietnamese or whether it would start with 50 of the time in Vietnamese okay can I ask just out of my own ignorance is Vietnamese a phonetic language or is it a character language it is a phonetic alphabet she actually uses the romanized alphabet okay okay great thank you see there you go check with Michael critics marks all over it because it's a tonal language a question on the Vietnamese on page 16 you have a list of who they met with now in all the other three schools you had met with staff at the school but you don't show it here is that just a misprint no that is not a misprint the difficulty with the Vietnamese program has been in identifying a site so our process for engaging communities is ongoing and we are moving towards that we have just identified a site for the Vietnamese program um the the difficulty there has been that our Vietnamese Community lives on that 82nd Corridor and that initially we were really following the children and trying to identify schools that had the most number of Vietnamese children it turns out that those schools are also suffering from overcrowding and so we really started moving down the schools and and trying to see where we could find some space that would still meet the needs of the Vietnamese community and the priorities that that Community had identified for us and when did we identify this site January 8th or no right two weeks January it was after the meeting maybe it was around January 8th so I've just been since Christmas and when is our meeting to meet when is your meeting scheduled to meet with that staff I don't have that schedule okay you don't have it scheduled or nope you haven't scheduled a meeting with the staff at Roseway Heights that's right thank you okay so the final recommendation is around the St John's program and that is to establish a St John's Spanish Immersion program with one kindergarten class uh at sitting in one kindergarten class at James John and we heard from the community we heard a lot of um a lot of different perspectives the in the Latino parents were very very much wanting immersion access for their children we heard a lot of sadness from this community that they had many children that would not be able to participate in the in any program that we would open up and and we heard a lot of concerns about starting an immersion program that would be completely new we know that in order to start immersion programs we have to have them large enough so that they're viable still in middle schools in the Middle grades so starting one at sitting and one at James John feels like the right balance they will be meeting at George and provide a um a robust program so because of the space constraints at both of those schools and really the desire of the community as well both of these programs will be neighborhood programs only so these schools really do not have space to take on transfer students and this is also a really good fit again because of the barriers that we have identified to our traditional Lottery process because they will be remaining at the neighborhood side we'll be able to recruit families throughout the spring and these two schools will run a lottery that will be in the spring so I want to share with you a few ways that we're increasing access through all of our programs families will not be required to attend the mandatory meeting in order to apply so traditionally families have had to attend the meeting before they could apply and now what we're saying is yes please attend the meeting we still have all of those scheduled but they don't have to have attended in order to apply once they apply the winners the people who do get a seat in the lottery then will need to participate in in a mandatory meeting and we will be able to recruit and support those families and being able to attend so that's a big one we have a single definition of a native speaker throughout the district so that families don't feel like well my child's a native speaker at your school but not at your school
04h 10m 00s
and we'll be removing all the mandatory language assessments of native speakers in the partner language so what we found were that there were instances where we had children sometimes immigrant children maybe immigrated in the third grade and they were not able to get access to an immersion program which would definitely be the best program for them because they weren't literate up to the third grade level so they were actually testing out and testing into monolingual environments where they didn't understand the language and as I said all of our DLI programs will be reserving slots for native speakers of partner language all right that is my presentation for you today I'd love to take some questions we have additional questions that we didn't ask along the way at least um for the Saint John's Spanish immersion programs it sounds like those are going to be neighborhood programs and that makes sense but the Vietnamese program it sounds like you've decided that you want that school the Vietnamese school to be part of a neighborhood program at rosary Heights you said it presents a better opportunity for students in the program to experience a rich educational program rather than a standalone immersion program I get that but the question I have is you say that neighborhood or transfer students would have equal opportunity to participate so if we're wanting a robust neighborhood experience one of the bonuses often for a neighborhood school to accept an immersion program and have it in that because it is difficult challenging to have both why wouldn't we give an opportunity for Roseway Heights neighborhood kids to have preference yeah preference um there's a couple of things that when I when one in particular that we have learned through this process and that is that when we put neighborhood preferences on these programs we really affect the real estate values of homes in those neighborhoods and positive way usually in a positive way but then the access is limited um we heard from the Woodstock families a lot of the families that were not able to gain the neighborhood preference that exists in that program because they could not buy homes in that neighborhood so a desired to have that preference but an inability to access it because of the The increased price um now I will say though that that is where our thinking is today with this particular program but um as director Buell has indicated we have not talked with the staff at Roseway Heights and we haven't talked with the current community at Roseway Heights so that is definitely a piece that that might be adjusted we have not set the the lotteries for that one yet so our our hesitation is around the impact that we have on um on real estate and then on access for families but as long as it's an open discussion so you restrict the people within the neighborhood sort of to houses don't go up so the neighborhood kids can go there is that correct is that what you're saying I didn't restrict the neighborhood so the neighborhood kids can go there but we restrict them from going there so they can go I don't no we don't restrict we don't restrict neighborhood students from attending you know but you put transfer kids in that was your answer that was your question kind of wasn't it uh yeah I was just asking why we wouldn't have some sloths reserved for neighborhood kids yeah right so but the reason we don't is we restrict them so that they stay in the neighborhood and but still can't go I I'm okay it's fine I just I miss wondering about thank you so now we've got these new programs thank you for your vote of confidence what do you worry about most in terms of executing so that these are the the best programs I worry about most another way of saying is you know what are the keys to successes so that we actually get it done the right way well I think that through our racial Equity work we one of the things we have identified is that the system is um is set right now with specific outcomes outcomes that are not Equitable for our students right so we have an achievement Gap and and we have barriers to DLI programs right now my um my fear always in all of this is that we will not be smarter than the system
04h 15m 00s
and that in our best attempts to yield different results for historically underserved students we we won't do that and we will actually perpetuate discrepancies so um I think that the only way to um to do that is to be smarter than Michael and I can be alone so through engaging the communities we've been able to come up with recommendations particularly for the lottery and for the way and the places to expand that are much smarter than us and the people that we work with and have really um have really committed to continue engaging those communities and the teachers in those communities who know those communities best in order to come up with a way of going about this that really really will yield the results that we know immersion programs can have for all of our students say you know thinking back to that that resolution and just you know appreciating kind of seeing this this Arc of leadership from Carol and her staff in getting us to this point which is so exciting despite the late hour I know we're all kind of wrong this is really exciting and um so I just I just really appreciate that that we you know we've had a number of meetings over the last several years where we're saying we want more immersion we want to go faster do it quicker or do this why not you know and now here we are we're finally getting a big stride forward and hearing that there's more to come and and yet that you're doing it in this very um you know you've been doing it in a very thoughtful um thoughtful way that I think has to give us very great chances for Success so I'm just I'm just thrilled and just grateful for the kind of um the integrity and the achievement that we're seeing here I'm just I just can't tell you how excited I am even though I'm exhausted so thank you and I just I can't wait how are you here at king or what what you and you and Community are imagining because I I'm hearing King as an immersion Chinese immersion program coming from the community they're currently in arts turnaround school I'm not sure that we have settled on a sustainability plan for that as it sunsets its Grant it's also an IB School that's a lot of stuff going on at one school to make sure that they all fit can you talk a little bit about how they fit there and how folks are feeling or imagining that okay good um that is we did hear that from the community and from the principal from the parents in that um that Community what we heard from parents was that they really liked that IB they talked about that in particular they were concerned that um that the arts program was based on grants and so it was going to go away and their concern was that the um that the immersion program would be the same way so it took a lot of communication on our part to share with them that immersion programs aren't Grant based or Grant funded but that they really continue the another aspect of the IB connection is that a second language is required and this program would um would be able to do that it would maintain a second language we heard too from the Latino parents at King that they wanted to maintain the Spanish World Language which they currently have so we have assured them that we'll be able to do that I think that that the thing things that the the programs at King like the Arts and the IB um are in my mind such easy Integrations with dual language immersion programs I think that they will require some intentionality and definitely some professional development but I think that the the opportunity to provide our students with by literacy and a bicultural experience at King is is too great to shy away from it just because it presents additional challenges does that help that start is yeah she's huge and just learning yeah that that program existed and that as my understanding if I recall correctly is that none of those children were able to get into the Woodstock Mandarin program so oh my gosh here I'm just and I just learned about that fairly recently so to hear that you're coming forth that we're actually going to fix that it's just I'm thrilled and is it an appropriate takeaway that I from what what I think you just said was that it is possible that a student could come out of King as trilingual that they would be English in the Spanish American English speaking or Chinese speaking English Michael's saying yes taking a world language is Spanish okay
04h 20m 00s
yes no actually yes it is now we're talking yes thanks any other comments yeah the Board Association or other opportunities there's two things I talked about often about Portland Public Schools well actually really three our capture rate is a big one that I talk about but the other two I talk about is the equity work we're doing it's just it just Wows people when they hear about the equity work we're doing and then the other one I talk about is the immersion programs that we do and the fact that now we will have six different languages if you include our French Charter School French speaking charter school I mean we actually have six different languages now that we are doing important Public Schools it's absolutely amazing um so the one thing I just don't want to leave this conversation without at least mentioning is clearly the emphasis right now is to be doing more and more immersion programs because of the incredibly huge impact it has for our emerging bilingual students and that makes sense at the same time we have a whole lot of other students who are just wanting to learn a second language and the best time to learn that is starting preschool or kindergarten and on up and so I don't want to I know that we're hitting some of those students but I think there's a whole lot of other students that over time I hope we're going to be able to hit as well in terms of you know maybe eventually having all of our schools be immersion programs of some kind but they're hoping you said that they were leading you to be able to ask for that so they could say great you're there but I do want to say incredible I have a kid right now who's in Bilbao Spain he's taking all of his courses in Spanish he didn't have the opportunity to go through this but we as Paris forced him to take World Language as his electives all the way through middle school and you know thankfully it's paying off and he had the interest to continue it but every student should have the opportunity to be bilingual and if we really want our kids to be World citizens we have to move in that direction I do want to clarify though that most students in our immersion programs are not English language Learners and that our emerging programs are Reserve half the slots for students who are learning that language for the first time right so so while I I know that I'm so supportive of the whole okay you know emerging bilingual and how we can support them in the most appropriate ways I just want to say it comes down to more more you you want me to expand that to all students got it I think it's a great vision for us I mean it is remarkable as a public school district that we are doing the kind of critical language that we're doing and it would be an awesome Vision to be saying we're doing that with every student well and that's the conversation some of the conversation at Sackett as well has been just the excitement about that possibility in the vision before we wrap up I just wanted to just express my gratitude and excitement for the leadership that you two have demonstrated in doing the preparation really awesome and the extensive community and participation and involvement because it's been extraordinary just how much has happened in a really short window of time it's and I've just heard really good feedback from people too so thank you very much thank you before we leave this conversation I also want to highlight from my colleagues we got a one pager that has color um on it because I don't want us to be all excited about this and then have a budget discussion and leave it high and dry that it's very clearly laid out what essential requirement investment would be to to do this program as recommended which would be 400 000 roughly to do it adequately I would be 639 5 about and fully supported would be 800 000 and in the spirit of director curler there's not a fourth column that says best in the nation which might be beyond the fully supported you might want to figure out what that column also says but I just want to acknowledge that we're going to have some choices in our budget decision and as we go through the process of approving this moving forward that becomes a budget decision and at what level we're going to do it are we going to do it essential or are we going to do it adequately or fully and that would come out of that district-wide centrally supported category that you were looking at that was 3.18 3.8 million thank you very much thank you it's been great fun thank you we will now an hour and a half after a lot of time consider our business agenda Miss Houston are there any changes to our business agenda do I have a motion and a second to adopt the business agenda director Atkins moves and director director Noel seconds the adoption of the business agenda Ms Houston is there any public comment on the business agenda no
04h 25m 00s
is there any more discussion on the business agenda director Buell yeah I'd like to make a motion after you're done with the business agenda and if you're not going to let me make a motion I'd write down ask for a uh I'd like to challenge that okay just slapping it down right at the end is there any more discussion on the business agenda the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes I'll opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions business agenda is approved by a vote of seven to zero a student representative Davidson voting yes yes director Buell yes I'd like to make the following motion I'd like to declare an emergency emergency and designate Beverly Cleary at hollyrood as a nut-free school the second emotion the chair rules that the motion is out of order point of information agenda point of information Dr Buell so we're going to vote first on whether the First on whether or not this motion's out of order if we vote Yes then the motion can be taken and then we would vote again on the motion is that is that everybody straight so there'll be two votes so there will first be a vote on whether or not the chair is well first the chair's ruling would need to be challenged which I did I'm sorry Challenger okay well you got a point of information you can challenge after I explain okay um so it's been ruled out of order um that if there's a challenge to that um then there would be a vote on whether that challenge whether the chair's ruling is upheld um if the chair's ruling is upheld and that it is in fact out of order then the motion no emotion would be lost my yes is to uphold the order and know as to nautical so so would be to have the possibility of making this moment the question that will be put before the board will be whether or not the motion of the chair um is correct so a yes would mean that it would upheld uphold that the motion is out of order and we would then not vote on the motion does that explain it yeah that's great could I ask that we pull the board please can we what ask that we pull the pull the you know that everybody says you want to roll call yes sir um so we're at the point where the chair has ruled that the motion is out of order I think I heard director um so the motion isn't on the agenda it didn't go through the process of being set on the agenda and so therefore the emotions out of order this is where you would challenge it if you want to change yeah challenge thank you I was going to talk to him but you don't get to talk to him okay um so the question of the board is whether or not the ruling of the chair that the motion is out of order is upheld all those in favor all those in favor and Miss Houston I'll ask you to call a roll um all those in favor please indicate by saying yes when your name is called for roll yes I've tried to get this on I'm going to and it hasn't been allowed to be on though that's why brought me this forward I've asked that I'd be on and I'm voting uh no you're Morton yes director Regan the motion is lost the next meeting of the board will be held on January 27th 2014 this meeting of the board is now adjourned thank you

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)

2014-01-21 PPS School Board Study Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - January 21, 2014

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