2014-03-10 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2014-03-10
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - March 10, 2014

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foreign good evening this study session of the Board of Education from March 10 2014 is called to order I'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers while our study sessions are generally limited to our receipt of information from staff and discussion of that information at times we conduct votes during the study session any item that will be voted on this evening has 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 playing times this meeting is also being streamed live on our PBS TV services website at this time we'll take public comment Miss Houston do we have anyone signed up for public comment we have one person Greg Burrell today is your day no no laughs oh Mr Burl let me run through um the instructions do we have public comment on any of our other matters this evening uh I know that you've been here many times so I'm going to not run through our instructions for public comment but to remind you that three lights in front of you a green light will come on first you have two minutes a yellow light one more minute red light time is up and if you would keep your comments short after that that would be great thank you okay good evening my name of course is Greg Burrell b-u-r-r-i-l-l and one of the things that I spoke about last week was the fact that I've been hearing the teachers at Roosevelt High School in Franklin High School are feeling left out of the conversation about the building remodeling um and I've done a lot of research over the past week and it seems as though it's the intention of PPS to use designs for schools that uh without you getting adequate teacher input so I'm working on this issue I think we'll we'll see what happens next but this week and the next board meeting I want to talk about remember I always remind you that I just am about to finish my ninth year subbing for PPS and I want to talk about schools that I've subbed at for years but I'm having trouble deciding to go back to see this is a shame because I really care specifically about these kids as a matter of fact these are the kids that I got into teaching in order to help um but I'm on the pat substitute committee and so I hear from substitutes that they are getting no discipline support in the classroom and the principals are trying to get them disciplined as ineffective teachers and you know and then I hear from teachers at some schools that they're so frustrated they're thinking of quitting in the middle of the school year because of uh discipline problems and the fact that they're not getting administrative support so today I want to talk about Cesar Chavez a school where I've taught every year for the past nine years and have had two days this past year that were so difficult for a sub um that I've told the teachers I said before that I don't want to come back this year um for my first year I sub for Janice Ingersoll a great teacher who decided to retire early because of the never-ending mandates and the changing pension situation I never had anything but excellent days in her classroom uh the same kind of days that I expect when I go to the schools of privilege um I also for years after that some for Eric Swala who now teaches kids that are too young for my skills so he's a great teacher and I always had great days I talked with one of the strongest teachers I know at Cesar Chavez and he tells me that the principal and the vice principal are very good so why don't I want to go back I think the last time I was there most of the staff was out being trained and without those core teachers that the kids know they were having a field day sinking the subs and so it's it's this kind of problem that really makes me worry perhaps you don't see what's happening as a result of some of the budget cuts and the mandates and the training and the principles being out of the building but this is my next area that I want to bring to your attention thank you very much thank you um so the next thing on our agenda is a discussion of the 10 great Fields project plan and financing program superintendent Smith would you like to introduce this item
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would be happy to and I'm going to invite Tony magliano who is our Deputy Chief Operating Officer and David wind our Deputy Chief Financial Officer come on down and Julia brim Edwards our partner from Nike good evening board chairs board directors superintendent my name is Tony magliano I'm the Deputy Chief Operating Officer with me tonight Julia brem Edwards strong partner in our great Fields Nike and Julia has a lot of history about this project dating back to the early 2000s we're here this evening with a draft resolution that recommends completing our remaining High School track and Fields using the construction excise tax as an internal funding mechanism um at this time um I'm going to ask Julia to talk about the history and benefits that these fields provide to the community great thanks Tony um I'm Julia brem Edwards uh I'm the global director for government of public affairs at Nike former Portland Public School Board member parent of three kids who are students are alumni of Portland Public Schools and also a sixth sport athlete from the pil so long history playing on fields in in Portland Public Schools and I was just asked to provide a quick history of the fields project um so we call it either it started as attend greats Fields project it's kind of morphed into the places for sports but I thought I'd talk just briefly about Vision benefit the community what's been done how to get over the finish line so the vision I'm going to take you back to 2000 the early 2000s and at the time when I first got on the board there was this really cool project happening with the electricians some Community Partners they want to Delight the fields um at Cleveland Roosevelt and Marshall and uh you know I'm going to tell a little bit of story through the history of t-shirts because uh this was the Cleveland Friday Night Lights uh first time they'd ever had a football game under the lights uh 2004. they were shortly followed by the Marshall High School field lighting and then after that the just the the community energy that came about from having communities have a place to gather whether it was Friday night or a Tuesday night soccer game um really spread across the district and individual School communities started talking about raising money to put in sort of year-round artificial turf fields and tracks and Lincoln was the one that first successfully raised the community funds to put in an artificial turf and field and then shortly after that Cleveland and Grant we're planning their Community fundraising and as a Boardman at the time and the parent of students in PPS it looked like um we were going to end up only with fields in those parts of town that could afford to raise the money so a real Equity issue for our high school school communities and if you've been to one of these fields where there's a great game going on you know kind of what community building it it the potential it could have um so it was clear that if every student in a PPS High School would um were to have access to an artificial turf field that we need to have a community-wide effort versus just having a school a school-based effort so at the time working with Pam Brown who was the director of facilities we pulled together a number of Community Partners Oregon Sports Authority Nike I wasn't there at the time pil alums the Portland parks commissioner at the time it was Dan Saltzman and then parents of student athletes and from this sort of these Community conversations we created sort of the 10 great Fields project and the goal was that every high school student um where you lived in the city you were going to have access to a high quality turf field uh so who do we what would we've done if you can well first of all let me just talk about the community benefits as you all know and I know some of you have been to the field dedications that um these the fields serve as Community gathering places uh certainly in the Northwest where there's lots of rain it it greatly expands the amount of time
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that kids can play in the field so whether it's PE classes or Sports the having an artificial turf field allows you to basically use it year round so lots more opportunities for kids the other thing the phenomena if you talk to parents who had kids active in sports a lot of times they were at the end of the school day leaving Portland Public Schools and driving to Gresham Hillsboro Beaverton where kids had the opportunity to play on a field year round so if you want to create do Place making and create places for our kids in our own communities in every neighborhood we really needed to do something about it and um I will say um so what have we done over the last 10 years and based on the partnership of Portland Public Schools Portland parks this the City commissioners um Nike and school communities we've knocked out five Fields so um five Fields have been completed about six million dollars have been raised and in 2006 I want to say the school board created the director Regan would know this the great Fields fund was it 2006. okay I created the great Fields fund and an equity formula so that PPS could provide support to the project in addition there was these ongoing strong Partnerships built between PBS and the community and the fields that have been done Buckman Benson that was a collaboration between the city and the school district PCU St Mary's I mean really a broad partnership Cleveland High School that was one of the first ones again PBS provided in-kind Services City put money and Nike had a substantial stake in that Lincoln has been done twice now Roosevelt this is one of my favorite field projects it was a several year long Community fundraising fundraising effort and the night that they had the Field opening you could just tell it was going to be a game changer for the community and a really important support to what was happening inside the building and the classrooms to also have kids have an opportunity in other ways to express themselves and be proud of their school and their community and then most recently Grant High School again a collaboration between the city the school district Nike Community Partners and one thing I'd say about the grant project is the grant project started before I was even on the school board so I think in 2002 they had their first meeting and they took almost 12 years of fundraising um for the Grant Community to be able to afford the field and um so I would say if you look at the the the work that was put together and the Partnerships that were built and you think about how are we going to get across the Finish Line we had a great conversation with the superintendent um and director belisle about finishing off the project so that the vision of every kid and every community in every neighborhood having access to a field we need to we needed to accelerate the progress so um Nike is has said that we'll assuming the school district is prepared to move forward we have another 700 we've put 1.7 million dollars into the field to date we have another 700 000 to put into the into the projects and working also with the city to also contribute so we'd hope that the board would look favorably on the resolution tonight it's been a great partnership going forward and if you look at the schools that are remaining these are in communities that all would benefit from having a great asset in their own backyard and so I think that I have a bunch of the shirts from all the different openings but I think my the one that I'd want to leave you with is the one from Wilson which is the one that's not yet done and it's a dream of fields so you got to know that a lot of student athletes um it's not great it's um a lot of student athletes uh in this city and just a lot of students and community members are dreaming of fields and you guys can make it happen and it's a great thing for the board and the district to be able to do for students in the broader community so hopefully you'll look favorably on the resolution so game on
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and actually before Tony starts I just want to say a huge thank you to Julia again for being with this project all the way through and part of actually bringing other partners to the table and really helping us come up with a strategy of how do we bring this to completion so every student has access to a field but Julie you've been awesome as a partner and through this entire effort thank you I assume I need to keep working until it's finished yes so like Julia said this effort began 10 years ago and it began as a Grassroots effort where our high schools were left to fundraise and work on their own to get these fields done working with their communities to fundraise and really only two high schools were successful Cleveland and Lincoln in 2008 like Julius said the Board District recognized that um it wasn't progressing and that was um why the board adopted resolution 3896 that set aside two million dollars to help kick-start these projects that effort along with the effort of many of the partners that we have enabled the completion of Benson High School field the Buckman Field which is park zone the Roosevelt High School track and field the Grant High School track and field which is also Park zoned replacing the league Lincoln field and resurfacing the Madison track a few before and after shots here you can see an aerial of Grant High School and what that field looks like today an aerial of Roosevelt and what that field looks like today so where does that leave us there are still projects remaining and these are some of our most underserved communities Jefferson High School field and track Madison High School field Marshall High School field and Wilson High School field while we continue to work with our partners to include the city of Portland on our fundraising efforts we believe that we've reached as deep as we can reach with our partners the cost to complete the remaining Fields is approximately 7.2 million dollars our our partners have contributed about 1.5 million dollars leaving a gap of about 5.2 million dollars and that's pending any further contributions from the city designs are nearly complete and the timeline would be to con to construct these remaining four Fields over this summer staff has met with each City Commissioner Parks and Recreation and the mayor and the mayor while there is great support from all it's too early in their budget cycle to know whether or not there's additional funding um to help support the remaining fields so why now I've asked Marshall our District athletic director to come up and help with answering part of that question and some of the other benefits that it provides to the Athletics and our students hello everybody I'm Marshall Haskins thanks for all the work you do um I'm excited and I I guess I'll start with the fact that um all three of these the schools that are in play here are schools that I've worked at so I'm a little nervous as to you guys no one did the schools I worked at Tony so that's not good but on another note I just think of the opportunity that I had to be at the grand opening of the grant field and the excitement that that Community had yes Grant's a big school they've had success in athletics but I've never seen them that excited or related in the whole Community coming out the little kids coming out from the different schools middle schools out there on the track and that and that just this kind of a microcosmic of what happened in districts where we get when we get turf um but for us as simple things um we have a situation where kids are choosing schools whether they want to go to our Public Schools or our private schools and a lot of kids and families chooses based on facilities so when I have kids who are telling me they're going to go to Central Catholic because they had Turf prior to Grant getting it and now Grant has Turf but have the same issue in the Wilson Community where kids want to go to Lincoln instead of Wilson or go to Jesuit instead of Wilson because Wilson doesn't have turf and to us as adults that isn't like a big deal but to them that's huge that's huge it also shows the investment that we're making in Portland Public Schools that race to Athletics our facilities have
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been less than competitive and so they're just a commitment to have bills across the board will be great and then when I think about the communities of our low-income communities three of the four fields are in those communities and when we talk about equity and the fact that we want to make sure all of our kids have Equitable access to normalize equal facilities the fact that three of these communities are low the three other communities are low-income communities suggests that we should make a commitment to have that what does that mean for those communities when I look at soccer across our city I could go to turf fields and show you the just rate it right down you go to top ones who got Turf they're the best soccer programs we have when I think about the number of kids who have youth youth football or youth soccer and those kind of things it's the places that have more time for kids to be on the field practicing just left the meeting today with the Franklin athletic director and he was saying how he's really excited to get Turf in this year that they have to wait because if they have it in Marshall the following year would be great but this year he's concerned that the football Field's not going to last so people want to rent the field and he's like it's all it's in April and I got to keep people off my field to be able to have my fill in play for September we're four or five months away and we're already thinking a deficit model that our kids can't use our fields or people our community can't use our fills because they're going to be muddy because it's raining already it's going to be muddy so we got to try to protect it which then leads to another thing that just what it really means to a community I think about Lincoln and the fact that we have the hardest time having access to renters for Lincoln's Phil but it's because the band uses the fill the cheerleaders use the fill the choir uses the fill the cross which is a club sport uses the field rugby uses the fill all the youth sports want to use the fill it becomes a hub for everyone in that Community because it's a place where we know there's going to be accessible because it's Turf versus versus the mind and then the last thing I'll say is when we think about having games and you can go to a game on grass you go to a game on Turf when you go to a game where this Turf feel it's like the whole thing comes alive and I I don't know why because you would think it would be just as electric but it seemed like there's more electricity in their environment because it just looks so good I was at the Roosevelt State Tournament game against Ashland and it was just so neat that the people from Ashland came and we had a high quality environment for them being not that it wouldn't have been good at Wilson it wouldn't have been good at Franklin but it was unbelievable at Roosevelt because they came to a low social economic place and they looked and they were expecting something less than and they got a Cadillac model or what a football facility should look like so that's what it would do for us athletically before before Wine's coming down to present the funding plan the two questions were asking the board to consider are whether you concur with the plan to complete these fields and whether you concur with the funding mechanism we're presenting before David Gets start started I wanted to just throw up um it approved it on March 31st that we would come back if approved you know in total the completion of all of these fields is around 15 million dollars and our partners have contributed or will have contributed 46 percent of that cost so it's a it's been a huge undertaking by the community to get us um as Julia said to the finish line thank you coaching Knowles board members superintendent Smith I'm David Wine I'm the Deputy Chief Financial Officer and the budget director but I'm also a soccer coach so before I talk about financing um let me just tell you a simple story about what a tough what a difference a turf field makes I coach a U13 girls team and on Saturday we held our first practice at the spring season at Grant High School on the field it was raining the good news was that we left that field in just as good condition at the end of an hour and a half on the turf field as it was when we got there if that had been a grass field I wouldn't have taken the girls onto the field because we would have cut it up and I'd have been in trouble with someone for using it you can play games all weekend and the people who play at 4 30 or 5 o'clock on Sunday have just as good an experience as the people who play at eight o'clock on Saturday
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morning and the the sense of pride engenders in the kids is pretty amazing the these girls actually played in a tournament game on that field in the fall and most of the girls on this team are students who will go to Grant High School and they'd never played on the field before in the fall and when they stepped out on that field for the first time they looked around and they were totally thrilled and how cool it was in fact there was one kid on the team whose sister played on one of the grand played JV at Grant and the field was new enough that the JV soccer team hadn't played on it yet and her younger sister who was playing Rec Soccer for PCU got to play on the ground field before the older sister which caused quite a dispute in that family but these it really does make a difference if you have a field like this you can have Club teams you can have high school teams the club teams feed the high school programs to you know one of the things Marshall's going to be talking about later is how you build a feeder system for high school sports these fields really do make a difference so um seven million dollars is what it's going to take to finish the fields up we have just over seven million we've got a couple of million dollars already earmarked from Partners we need 5.2 million dollars the recommendation before you is to use funds from the construction excise tax fund to pay for the completion of this work we have uh as some of you may know the board adopted to Capital asset we have we have enough money in the CET fund to do this that's the first thing to tell you we when the board adopted the capital asset renewal plan which is the plan to make sure we have enough money on hand to take care of the capital maintenance for the new school buildings that we're constructing one of the things that the board did was to earmark a portion of the proceeds from the construction excise tax to be the funding for that Capital asset renewal plan so a portion of the balance of the CET fund is dollars that are earmarked for that Capital asset renewal plan this proposal is actually going to draw some of those earmarked funds and use those in the short term to complete this work the reason we can do that is because the majority of those earmarked funds are not needed in the next several years and the income that we're going to be collecting each year on the construction excise tax is going to be enough to sort of replenish that earmarked portion of the funds so the 5.2 million dollars 3.5 million comes from that sort of earmarked balance and 1.7 is from the uncommitted CET money we've been setting aside one and a half million of the CET money each year what we do is increase the amount we set aside from 1.5 to 2.2 million dollars each year to make sure that five years from now we've still got the money available for the capital asset renewal plan that we need one of the questions that I saw earlier in the day is what is this you know what does this do for other money available through the CET fund we expect that this year and next year we will collect somewhere between three and three point four million dollars each year from the CET and you know exactly how much we collect has been increasing in the last couple of years because this is a fee on new real estate development activity and so as the economy has recovered our Revenue stream has picked up if you approve the resolution and approve this work 2.2 million dollars of that annual revenue stream is going to be earmarked for the capital asset renewal plan so if we collect 3.4 million dollars like we're forecasting that would leave 1.2 million dollars available for other capital projects and the CET money has to be used for Capital you can't you can't hire teachers whether we can't buy textbooks with it it has to be for capital projects so again if you if this plan is approved we estimate that we'll have about 1.2 million dollars of additional CET money available for other projects and if the revenue goes up per year and we've got um and we'll have a carry forward balance of just over a million dollars as well questions okay just remind everybody that the two questions that staff is mostly looking to us for have to do with support from the completing the great Fields generally and then also support for the
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funding plan so questions related to those question to this gentlemen yes right now director Buell it's probably not a very popular question but Marshall High School his letter was closed we're going to put some people out there evidently for a couple years so why are we putting a new field out there we've had people we've had high schools who've lasted firm 100 years without us without appeal can we run two or three years without the field and say one point six million dollars to put someplace else I mean how does that all come down so much I'm thinking what's the thinking behind them so Marshall will be a swing site so Franklin will be at Marshall we've worked with the community there and they would like to come back to Franklin and have a brand new field to play on so while they're at Marshall they'll be playing on a field they'll have a home field it's likely that may be the same place another High School may end up so over the next 10 years we'll have high school students at Marshall and they'll have a home field to play on that Franklin's going to Marshall correct and who's then who's going to go Grant's going to Marshall for how long they'll each be there for 18 months to two years and then who goes next um that will be up to the board's decision for soon we have to get another bond in order to have anybody else go so essentially we're putting in a field for a the community is the that's an element of it the community we have a lot of partners that are willing to um that are also partnering in giving us money to get the Field built and they're also willing to play on the field at Marshall as well so pay to play which would help sustain us having a field there um pay to play yeah they have to pay to play at Grant Now Grant is a park zone field so we don't program you pay to play Buckman Buckman's also a park zone field Lincoln you pay to play Lincoln you pay to play Roosevelt you pay to play unless you're a school-based Athletics but any of our partners that come in a soccer league um uh youth football they pay how do we decide who pays if it has to if it's a park Department thing you don't have to pay Grants Park Department you said had some Park Department backing you know Parks has Parks has a fee that they establish on their fields that they charge users we don't we don't even program those fields for users they give us hours for our Athletics that we don't pay for and then they program the use of that field outside of that so we have we don't Place anybody else on those fields to play because the city owns those fields so that's how it was decided is that the Buckman Field of Grant field are on cityland we can't get the city to about do the Marshall field since we don't even have a school there well the city has been a big contributor to us getting our Fields done they've contributed I've I I think close to a little over five hundred thousand dollars around there and we're asking them to contribute toward the completion of these fields that includes Marshall that includes Marshall that is Marshall it includes Marshall Jefferson Wilson and Madison Fields we've asked for the city to contribute to the completion of those fields as well they haven't answered us yet again director Bill the other thing is we actually program Marshall right now so Benson practices at Marshall because after school that there there's a small window that they can use that because the spark Bureau so it was already rented out to someone else we have freshman JV games freshman JV football soccer games there at Marshall and then during the Spring we have track there year-round and then our youth sports will be using that site as well so it's it's programmed fully it's just it's just as much as any of our high schools currently the Marshall site that's a good answer thank you so I went into start by acknowledging a few folks first of all two former school board members
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Julia has been absolutely amazing in supporting this project and also she was the coordinator with the Blazers on getting all of our high school gym floors redone and that has made a huge difference also in terms of student safety and pride I think as well and and I talked to Trudy today Trudy Sergeant to let her know that we're finishing this project because once uh Julia left the board I think Trudy kind of took it up so I just want to acknowledge and thank both of you for staying so involved and engaged and Julie in particular in terms of so much effort in this area I also want to uh just for tonight I also want to thank our state legislature um because a construction excise fee came about a couple of years ago they passed that they allowed school districts to assess this fee and it's on any new Living Spaces that are built there's a small fee applied and then school districts could actually collect that with the idea that it has every time you add living space it has some impact on schools and public build public spaces like this and there should be some sort of a charge assessed for that the reason that they did that is because in Oregon there we have system development fees Most states do but in Oregon the system development fees don't cover public education and public school facilities so when you build a new development anywhere in Oregon you pay system development fees as the developer for things like water lines and sewer and Street lighting and all kinds of things and it's absolutely crazy that you don't include public school buildings in that because you have so many you know you you plop 2000 houses in a development and the school district is less left to fend for itself so I think that construction excise tax was an effort by the legislature to try to kind of help school districts with facility needs and it's very clear that the construction exercise tax can only be used on facilities that can't be used on teachers and so um we're I'm incredibly grateful that we have this source of funding it's much smaller than what would happen in a system development fee but it does allow us to do some uh work very needed maintenance and upgrades so it's exciting that we have this uh fee that we can tap into for these projects so thank you to the state legislature for their wisdom in doing that um I guess one of the things I just want to say is I'm a huge supporter of this project especially because in Portland Oregon it rains all the time and this allows us to pretty much program these fields year round it seems that every school that's added turf fields and there's been a couple of elementary schools also who have added her fields of late one I know is in a recognition of a teacher who passed away one was in recognition of a student who passed away and it just makes such a difference for the whole community and Community engagement involvement and Community Access year round um I also think that certainly sports like theater like music band or something that just keep kids engaged and keep them in school and anything we can do to support our kids academically and this is one thing that I think does I'm wildly supportive of and I think the final thing is that I think these fields really do help us both attract students to Portland Public Schools they're sort of one of those first impression visuals for community members in terms of Community Pride I think they keep our alumni somewhat tied in and engaged and mostly it's just an incredible Community Building opportunity so I'm very supportive of us starting and finishing this project and grateful to everyone involved director curler sure couple questions one is just how long do these fuels last approximately eight to ten years is our planning factor for them it depends a lot on use um we got just about 10 years out of the Lincoln field and that was the first field we've done we're planning on Cleveland in um 2018-19 time frame so when you redo them it is it's cost the same I mean other than you know inflation is it is it cheaper to redo them than to put a new one in right so the plan what we use for planning is you don't have to typically you don't have to do the sub base right when you replace it the first time the second time because of drainage and silt and things like that you may have to scrape it so it's
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it's likely that the second time you replace it the cost could be near what it would cost to put it in does that make sense so is it basically a 10-year cycle correct and have we built that into our that's built into our our maintenance budgets it's built into our Capital asset renewal plan so when we and field revenues go into that into that plan so the revenue we generate off of paying users is earmarked to go toward the replacement of fields um and uh so I was just looking at that graph that's a great graph so congratulations to everybody involved that really speaks volumes I think where are we exactly with the city of Portland we we've talked to everybody in there so they'll get back to us does this proposal assume something from them this this proposal assumes nothing so should we leave a little bit for them we can very easily not use as much of our money if we get money from them I guess I can mention that again staff and I and Julia met with each of the Commissioners and and the mayor and they're they're all very well aware of this but they have their own budgeting process to go through similar to us so as as Julia pointed out in the beginning um commissioner Saltzman was the first one to start this project with us and so there's been a long line of of parks folks that have been really supportive of this even though much of the money didn't come from Parks so I'm hopeful they're very well aware of it but of course just like we do we have hard decisions they have hard decisions but I would guess that if they're able to come through as partners then are are borrowing from our own fund would be less well I had been under the impression that in the bond money there was also money for the field of Marshall is that not true Marshall um was not we didn't consider that a bond school um so but Grant was paid for through our Capital program as well as Franklin will be but there there is money in the bond program to upgrade so as a swing site but it didn't include costs to up to do the field okay um and my other question was uh do these numbers also provide for bleachers and or lights no they do not so it's just the the field or the track correct okay yeah once it's there I think that's see see the need and that it will happen I guess you know I'm I'm super supportive of this and really eager to see this Dimension but my my concern is just a caution or a worry just about all the other um whether routine Replacements or adversity and graphic in emergencies and crisis and activities that we would need to know just getting ready for so that's that's my only my library here so I mean for instance your memory you mentioned 1.7 million dollars anticipated to replace the alarm system in Madison I believe it was and that's just one system at one school unless our entire District so that's my nervousness and my fear that there's going to be whether it's around you know ing that we have lots of challenges around overcrowding that we only can sequence so many odd projects at once obviously like decades to go before we did so and again God forbid the unforeseen disaster or crisis striking so that's that's my worry and I don't know if there's I guess I would feel better if I knew that staff had sort of mapped out at least the things you know that you know some of the things that are concerns and that you know it's just getting to that Comfort level that we're taking this risk to allocate them this morning for this incredibly worthy and important project but that we're not going to be caught shorter out on the land something goes anticipated and or underneath it comes out comes up so we have we have had that discussion we have we will have some additional CET money available as well as a modest carryover balance we do have in the budget each year a modest level of capital for the
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facilities it's you know just it's emerging three and three and a half million dollars there's a lot to do with that Tony can tell you that um and I think you know we had we had a staff discussion on Friday about this um and and part of it's a trade-off which is that we've got a number of schools that have this kind of facility and a number of schools that haven't and we've we've lifted every Rock and kissed every frog to get to the point that we've got so far and at a certain point you come to the fairness thing about the kids in those other schools deserve the same thing and you know we can't tell you that there won't be some completely unforeseen thing um but we think on the balance this is a reasonable course to take going forward Dr Blau mine's more of a comment than it is a question I mean as I think of director Atkins your comment there I mean that's part of why I always like to keep our contingency at closer to five percent because that allows us some of that flexibility in those unforeseen instances and um thankfully we're in a position to to be more likely to be able to do that this year um I just director curler you pointed out that slide where 46 is by partners and 54 percent is by by PPS and I just I I think that's an astounding number it is a great example of using public money to seed private investment and I can't say enough thanks to to Julia brim Edwards for seeing this through and Nike I think of all the spaces that Nike has contributed to in our community to make them usable and and presentable as well as the city of Portland the city of Portland has been a great partner they understand every time I drive by Franklin in their field all the time every time in and out of my house and it's always being used it's being used in the daytime by community members that are walking around that field it's used on Sunday mornings by somebody playing kickball maybe director Morton's down there um and I it's pouring rain and they have two games going on it's phenomenal the amount of investment that it brings to a community and the livability that it creates in our space not to mention that and I'm excited for our next conversation about the athletic discussion about how we're going to reinvest in edu in athletics because it's such an important experience for our students to engage in and I know that as we went through Bond there were two sides of the coin facilities don't teach kids and so they don't matter but I think our community really understands that the facility does demonstrate a commitment to those people using it and so again I think this is another example where we say you deserve good facilities and good facilities are important because they actually help you play better which help you stay in school and again our next conversation while we're using Sports to engage in academics is very exciting so I just wanted to say thank you to both our partners I'm hopeful that the city council will come through that they'll see the and understand that the community um livability issue with that and again I just want to thank Nike because they've been extraordinary Partners in helping us through this so I think group I'd like to call out of just part of the partners and Nike has helped us organize this in each of the local communities but it has been the alumni and boosters and local donors and companies that have created an incredible outpouring of local support for each one of these projects and again Nike has done loaned Executives to us to help us support communities doing some of the local fundraising so truly there's been a real web and I see Mike for about back here who was part of the Roosevelt the group that helped organize some of the funding for Roosevelt but it was championed over years Grant when you heard 12 years I mean this was a group of people who really stuck with the vision of what they wanted for their community over 12 years to see it through and totally energizing at the point that we finally hit completion points so it's been a huge number of Partners in that part of the pie there Dr Martin just real quick some of the concerns that I had maybe a couple of years ago or a year ago was mostly around how do we maintain these these fields as they age that was addressed again a year or so ago in the development of the long-range facilities plan uh strategy and maintenance plan strategy and uh and that really that really uh put me to rest I think at the time we were experiencing a significant sort of immediate issue of almost condemning the Lincoln Lincoln High School field and we were able to repair replace that but it was done in a way that that really wouldn't be ideal isn't about sort of having a plan in place
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that allows us to continue to maintain our fields which is what we do now for not only our Fields but also our buildings which is is pretty important so my issues challenges were were met a while ago with that and frankly I mean the uh a while ago now we met out at Wilson and the principal mentioned that over 50 percent of their student population is involved in sports now not all those sports are field sports but a big a big portion of those students at that school use that field that to me is an indication that it it is a tool that helps draw kids to school keep kids in school makes a big difference and I think this is a great investment so thank you it also is a a really excellent example of public-private partnership and and Community Partnership as well so I don't think we can say that enough Vector Buicks Mr Haskins I know you're quite a competitor have you ever considered the fact of just letting these fields totally mud up totally using them because when the other school comes in you're caked with mud and freezing I grew up in Tillamook and played football and stuff in Tillamook and Tillamook it rains more than any other community in the Pacific Northwest by far and I'm telling you it was a heck of an advantage when they when you played in the mud and were freezing all the time you got used to it and when they come in one time it makes so I you know all these other ritzy Suburban schools come in you could really maybe you know just something to think about and consider Maybe okay take care of those sissies um okay so just briefly did you have something else go ahead Bobby so I had a quick question this is really and not just a great Fields project it's also a great fields and track project um so I had a question about um four tracks I think I know the answer on one of them but um it looks like we have uh you know track and field completion at or we will have at most of our schools so I had a question about the track at Marshall I think we've already redone that's right um and then Wilson Benson and Lincoln can you give me a status on those so you're correct Marshall was done last year um Wilson was constructed in 0.607 time frame um and then Lincoln recently had an issue where the track was being slick it was slick and felt unsafe so I don't know whether it's been cleaned yet but we're cleaning it's being it has been it's being cleaned right now so we're hoping to get a few more years out of the Lincoln Track before we have to replace that one so it's a Park's owned field but we're working with Parks because it is worn and it could use some repair so we're working with this city on that with the parks department okay so likely next up in a couple of years would probably be the Buckman and the Lincoln Fields would be next okay yeah good thank you great so just uh I just had two questions and more it's just refreshing my memory because I know that you've you've talked about this before Tony but the cost of maintaining the fields when they are grass as compared to renewing those fields every 10 years there's a what's the correlation there so it depends on where you are but here with the amount of rainfall we get and the bill it's it's a lot less taxing on our maintenance Workforce to take care of these synthetic Fields than a grass field and the other thing we add into these construction costs and as we go forward is equipment so when we build these fields we we get equipment for that particular field so that that's been one way that we've outfitted our maintenance department with sweepers um and and tractors to be able to clean and maintain these fields it's great so the other thing that I would just make a comment about is safety I know David talked about not wanting the girls to tear up the field but I know that also it's much safer for our students to play on Turf than it is to play on a pockmarked field where they're turning their ankles and whatnot and then as a mother who drove endlessly when my son was playing lacrosse out to North Portland and to the fields out at Delta Park I was really happy to see Grant field go and even though my son isn't going to be using it anymore I know a lot of other parents it's it's so much nicer to have your children in your community when they're taking part in these athletic events just wonderful so very supportive
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of this and also I think Julia took off but I wanted to also thank Julie there she is for both her role as a Nike but also personally because I know she's put a lot of personal time and energy into this long before Nike was involved and we really do appreciate your work on this effort for all of our students and then of course to our community and our partners and all the wonderful parents and alumni groups so thank you any comments about the resolution okay all right well thank you you are so next steps would be March 31st I think that would be back and I think that's it David and I are available between now and then if there are any questions great thank you both okay oh in terms of comments on the resolution I was I wanted to suggest on the resolution the Board of Education supports safe places year round great I think we should emphasize the year-round nature of this so if we could just add that and it would be great yeah that'd be good anything else anyone okay um next on our agenda is a discussion um of the 10 oops that's 10 great fields we did that is a 2014-15 budget and Athletics uh in January of this year the board approved the superintendent's recommendation of adding nine hundred thousand dollars toward the district's athletic programs superintendent Smith would you like to introduce this item I would and I would like to bring up trip Goodall who is our High School director and Marshall Haskins who is our District athletic director and part of what we wanted the opportunity for Marshall to put in front of you specifically we did do the investment in the budget amendment and there will be something coming forward in my budget proposal and I wanted Marshall to have the opportunity to really lay out his vision for rebuilding our Athletics program for the district so trip I'm starting sure superintendent Smith co-chairs Knowles and Belial board members um thanks for some time tonight to hear from our director of Athletics Marshall Haskins about Athletics important public schools and before I start tonight I just want to State up front that our athletic department is in the process of creating a football schedule for Benson Tech and that no decisions have been made regarding other sports events and moving forward I've asked that our athletic department continues a dialogue with principals Calvert and Wilson at Jefferson and Benson to set up a series of meetings with our community with our interested parties at both schools focused on their athletic programs and I also want to say that I really very much appreciated the respectful way in which the Benson students and Community came forward to express their concerns that it really demonstrates quite a bit about what's happening at Benson today and in the past um you know I've said this before when I've had a chance introduce people but I am really fortunate in my career to work with some very outstanding individuals who who really believe passionately in their work they're willing to ask tough questions and they're willing to challenge the system to be better as the new director of Athletics Mr Haskins has brought a vision around what the pil can be a vision around what it means to be a coach in our league and a focus on how best to provide each student athlete a positive athletic experience while competing for their school a former Jefferson High School standout Marshall is a pil Hall of Fame inductee he was a high school athletic director a state championship coach a vice principal and most importantly for me a mentor to young adults throughout his career emphasizing the importance of success in the classroom on the court and in the community I feel really fortunate again to have Marshall in his new role with that I'm going to turn it over to Marshall okay let's hear it no I'm uh I I'm just um Overjoyed to be here I I'll just say a little thing that I went back to school to become a principal and um I applied I didn't get it and I was a little disappointed and I think sometimes you want something you really don't want you end up getting something better so I'm fortunate to be here and having something I think is better suited for me in terms of what I really want to do which is make sure the kids have Equitable opportunities so as I said in front of you today I just want to share with you I will answer the question in terms of our budget but I think I really want to share with you our division we have for athletics so that as people talk with you you're just as excited as I am about what I think that Athletics could do for the whole city of Portland I have a friend who lives in Camas and I went
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over to visit them and they said oh let me take you to the high school where my son goes and I'm sitting here salivating that like what Athletic program look like and I'm thinking why can't ours be like that and I went by I couldn't get into a football game the Rivalry game because we got there late we couldn't get in I'm thinking wow that's how it used to be when I played at Jeff and we played against Grand in sports why can't it be that way and I think it can be so my plan is about um revitalizing Sports in Portland it's about galvanizing communities it's about building better young people to character development and it's about making sure there's Equitable opportunity so when I uh director notes talked about when you guys talked about the number of students we have we have about 5500 kids who participate in sports which almost exactly half or athletes but if at Wilson who has 1200 kids they have 900 kids participating Roosevelt house about 750 800 kids somewhere in there they don't have 75 percent of their kids participating that's a gap to me and how do we close that Gap so I'm excited about being able to answer some of those questions like don't go to sleep sometimes thinking about them or think about how I can get a trip to agree with me to do what I want to do so with that being said um the vision for athletics my athletic vision uh statement is we want to build character community and academic Excellence through Ecuador athletic programming in order to do that we're start thinking in my office and talking with people that have the predecessor to my job in different communities about what are the things that are really important to to bring the people back to prominence and so these are the areas that we kind of settled on one which addresses the issue what do we do with the nine hundred thousand dollars that we're so elated to get which is student safety and um another one is 6a competitive development enhancing visibility and value of Athletics parent Community engagement student leadership development and then what the common fed throughout it will be Equitable opportunities for all kids uh basis on my plan I actually had a unique situation that I've uh I started back in 1986 as a basketball coach and integration specialist at Madison High School I've had opportunity to work at Jefferson Wilson and Franklin High School so I think I have a pretty good feel for what those communities bear and then I started thinking about what what is that I really want to do and it's the inequities of facilities opportunity supports and both internal and external and I started thinking about all the things that I would want to change that we didn't have turf everywhere which sounds like we have an excellent chance of good things to all the partners and everyone in the city we want to have sports opportunities for all kids so when I think about a grant they don't have enough kids to really have a wrestling program and what do we do to build that or I think about Benson kids who want to swim but they can't because there's not enough kids to have a swimming team or Jefferson baseball or one of if not the best baseball in the city certainly one of the top players in the state they don't have enough to have a varsity baseball team so he has to make a choice whether he plays baseball at at Roosevelt which is a neighborhood school or he attends Jefferson to get the excellent Focus option that they have program expectations it's not the same across the system we don't have multiple levels for appropriate development of kids we don't have everyone does have freshman Dave University every student should have an academic choice and an athletic opportunity that was one Mantra I would leave that would be it and then the lack of competition outside of our league how do we compare affair with with the other leagues across our state solar things that we talked we wanted to fix I'm not going to go into detail about all of the areas because I sent that to you but there's a couple things I do want to share I think that are really important part first one is enhancing the visibility and value of our Athletics we have a very unique situation that we're the biggest city in the in our state and we have a host of alumni who have not only work great in the pil I think we have 400 people in our Hall of Fame but we have a another 100 200 000 people who play sports in Portland who are still alive and around that have nothing to do with our athletic departments and or our schools and when I hear colleges talk about I worked at college for a couple years I heard Oregon State a guy at Oregon State said you know what the best thing about our
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football program is our architectural program grew and I I didn't get the correlation because what that meant is when the football program was having great even though guys didn't play football they said wow I'm so happy about Oregon State I'm going to give some money to the architecture program because that's what I graduated in we don't have those same relationships with our alumni we can build those and we're going to ask part of what we want to do part of them is let them know the the state that we're in and that we want them to help we want them to come back to be a part of what we're doing um in terms of internal stakeholder buying and education I've met with Cherie today she came over to her office and we were talking about her Department accounting and payroll and and just how there's just this this distance between what's happening in central office what's happening in the athletic world and and how do we close that and we had a really good meeting today I think of talking with uh superintendent Smith and just kind of educating her about Athletics and its importance and and her and someone telling me that she was at the Cleveland opening for their concession standards or and how amazed that she was there and just seeing the level of commitment and support that people will have for athletics and as people begin to see that they begin to understand how important it is for us we want to do a couple fundraising things as we as I talked later about just budgeting part of fundraising and I I worked with self-enhancement 14 years and was a vice president of operations and of daily operations for for eight of those years and fundraising is a major part of what we do but the fundraising part of it is for money but part of it is the visibility and getting people to to want to support what you're doing so we have three big fundraisers that we're going to want to do in athletics one is the Pio 500 where we're actually going to reach out to 500 alumni on an annual basis and ask them to give us a thousand dollars and we have probably I'm gonna say we were we were rolling pretty good into the strike stuff happened we were kind of rolling pretty good with commitments from people but I say we probably got about 75 people have already committed and we haven't done a a grill a Groundswell effort and we haven't sent to the 400 people in the Hall of Fame yet and they're upset that we haven't asked but we just have to stop uh second thing we're going to do is um we want to have a golf tournament we have a couple alumni who own uh Pumpkin Ridge and who want to help us out and set up a situation where we can probably raise 100 to 150 000 annually in a golf tournament and the third thing we want to do is we want to do a a walk run relay a relay race to all of our high schools there's 48 mile Loop and so we would have teams and we did this thing once called save our schools and people came save our Sports and people came out and the organ is a big running place and this could be a tremendous effort to get the community out to support what we're trying to do we have several people who are interested in doing that we have a person that we're looking to hire here and a short span as a consultant to help with developing some our athletic director the athletic director development but he's also well connected with all the runners and so when I told him about the idea he literally got on the phone sitting there called three or four people a person who owned Hood to Coast those kind of runs racist got him on the phone and they were all ready to go can we start right now like no we're not ready yet we got some things to do so I think people are excited to come and help out the city of Portland and Athletics especially those who were athletes themselves shifting over to pernic and cluster engagement the top bubble there increased opportunities for multiple Same Same Day events part of what we have is we don't have communities invested in our Athletics I really invested in coming to the schoolhouse so what we want to do is we want to move some of our games we're going to move some soccer games to Friday night in front of football games and so instead of being at Delta Park where no one sees you you get a chance to be in your home stadium where everybody gets to be there under the lights and it becomes a community event we're having uh as part of our Middle School track program so I'll talk about a little later but we're actually going to do middle school high school track meets together so again it's a community where people come in and start being a part of the community and investment um we're looking at moving some of our girls boys basketball games back together and 6A they do that because of the travel distance but it was a very very successful for granted Lincoln to do those so we want to bring that back in terms of parent engagement for the first time we have a parent advisory
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group that I meet with on a quarterly basis and I'm not techno savvy at all but I figured out how to do a Google doc and so we're putting it in there and they're going to be back and forth communicating because they're actually helping me develop the Strategic plan so we're really really excited about that the other thing they were instrumental in helping us work towards working with everyone to help make sure we secure the dollars that we've got I'm really thankful for for what they're doing um education and character building one of the things that Athletics provide for us is this excellent captivated audience and so for me in order to change a school if I got at least half the school involved in athletics and we can do character building with them at least we have a 50 chance of having a really good school but if we have 75 percent that have started in our middle school program and have been doing character development for three years prior to high school and then in high school they're doing character development with their coaches then it changes the whole school not just athletically but the whole school we're currently doing a pilot program at Franklin with boys this year for every voice board called coaching boys into men as a program called Futures out of San Francisco the idea Franklin I went to a training we implemented it and it's gone really really well as a matter of fact I tell you that's why the football team went really did really well this year is because they have their relationship with coaches because they're talking about serious topics and issues in building relationships with kids and becoming more accessible to kids problem as we do it across the board next year everybody can't be six and three so we'll see what happens with that but uh but we're excited about this we're gonna do that in middle school and and High School uh we're also going to add in athletic requirements for Middle School sports you'd be amazed at how many kids we lose from the first quarter of Eligibility as a freshman at the semester in February how many kids we lose especially we lose them in November at the quarter because Athletics was never part of the academics was never part of their Athletics so we're excited about that and all the middle school principals are excited about about having the academics be a part um um student safety which leads us to the point of running nine hundred thousand dollars we put the whole 900 000 right here in student safety or 95 percent of it when I got the job a couple things that were in front of us one um kids were driving kids to games um we had a policy that basically said you know what we're not involved in transportation however you get there you get there in my heart I knew kids were driving kids to games and that was not okay um since then I got letters from parents going wow my daughter came home talked about the great experience she had on the bus that they wrote together as a team they lost but on the way back to coach talked with them and they they felt good about that experience but we've had the converse we had teams going to state tournament and instead of little yellow bus we put them on the coach bus and and they're talking about the experience they had driving over the bend and been a team and and just getting to be a kid and we have kids going down to the state tournament and provide transportation they're just Overjoyed with not having to drive but more importantly being able to be together and it being a learning experience versus who knows what was happening we didn't have athletic trainers and I can't I wish I'd pull up all the emails from parents but I remember one uh from the Madison basketball coach last week they were in the state tournament and they had a trainer and they hadn't had a trainer there for three or four years and he was like Marshall thank you so much you have no idea one player twisted his ankle in warm-ups so they literally stopped and taped him up and he was able to play had he not not trained or not have been there it would have swollen another kid cut his finger and blood was gushing on the floor had there not been a trainer who knows what would have happened I mean so he just went through three or four things like that that happened that it won't show up anywhere but for the kids and families and coaches that was a huge investment that we made this also makes everyone who looks at us and go wow they got trainers too all of our surrounding leagues all have trainers we were only ones who didn't have it and then the last thing is we had coaches who weren't getting paid and so we had this financial Fiasco where some people were paying people on their table they can afford it other people weren't getting paid at all and that was just unfair to our kids because some programs we didn't have programs because we'd have coaches then others we had this discrepancy and what they were getting paid so the dollars that you guys allocated to us just cleaned all that up for us and we're very very
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excited about that and then the last area which is they're all equally important but this one's uh uh pretty I'd probably say my top list um one is in order for us to be competitive um people say you want to be 6A competitive I would tell you all the things that we have on here are things we should have been doing whether we were 1A two-way 10A they're things that needed to be done we needed trainers it didn't matter we needed transportation we need to develop our coaches you know we need better facilities we need Equitable opportunities for kids that didn't matter whether we were 1A 286a but in terms of being 6A what it means we want to be able to compete with the Suburban schools so how do you do that first you make a commitment and an investment and you've done part of that the second thing is you have to build feeder school programs and when we look at the programs we have in the Pio that are really good programs they all have feeder programs they have some middle school and even to some extent some elementary schools feed the middle school that then feeds the high school in our low social social economic programs they don't have feeder school programs and when you go watch a game you can see it and so we have inequities in sports so like there's an article in the paper about should there be a mercy rule in high school athletics because we have a school in Portland Public Schools there's averages about 15 points a game on varsity basketball that shouldn't happen but it's happening because we don't have Middle School sports and we don't have a way to make sure that in this case girls who want to play a sport has a place to go to develop something they love to do we don't have that in place for them but in a more affluent pro pro areas we we have some of those things so how do we balance that and make sure we have Equity across the system um athletic and athletic director and Coach professional development when I met with my parent advisory group one of the things they said Marshall this is a great plan this is wonderful we're going to help you fundraise this is great but you know what if you don't increase quality of your athletic directors who then can impact and develop the coaches then we can't ever impact the outcome for our kids and I took that to heart and so we made a commitment that we have a athletic director development plan that were put in place uh starting in April and then we will then develop our coaching plan that we'll put in the following year that'll start in the 14 15 school year so we're really excited about that and then the last two things down here is one is different energy supports and oh I got to say this about the Middle School sports I'm oh I forgot about how excited I am so um two years ago Roosevelt had 10 kids in their track program Wilson has 120 Franklin accounted today as 147. Grant usually has a 175 or 80 Roosevelt had 10. last year they had 25. this year they think they're going to have 40. so part of our Middle School sports program I'm so excited is I met with their track coach and what we're doing is we're having the head coach of whatever's work we're offering is responsible for the system of sports in that cluster so this case the Roosevelt track coach is responsible for the Roosevelt Youth track program so I met with him and one of the coaches from Cesar Chavez and one of the things that happened was even though Cesar Chavez has one of the best track programs in the state it only has 30 kids who are part of it it's a really select thing Roosevelt only had 10 kids how can that happen if they have 30 so 30 60 90 kids should have been at Roosevelt at any point that had been a part of this and they weren't running there was no connectiveness so as we sat there and we were brainstorming putting together our our youth track program it became clear that we need to build this so the coach that Cesar Chavez said well we're going to build a youth track program I can't have only 30 kids so she says I think we're going to have 60 at my school but when you add in the three other feeder schools they're all think they're going to have 60. so we have 240 maybe kids running youth track for Roosevelt never happened that's going to get an adult positive adult coaching them that's going to be a part of a positive team have something to do three days a week more importantly that they're going to get character building it's going to change so instead of there being 10 kids at Roosevelt track two years ago three years from now we're
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going to have 110 120 in Roosevelt track more important than that kids are going to now begin to see Roosevelt as a more viable option because the track coach at Roosevelt is having a youth come up to their school to practice so he can begin building relationships with them that is I want to jump into a jumping jack trip that is so exciting that that is just wonderful I don't know it's not the place to do that okay all right so we're really excited about that about about being able to do that and um but that's part of what we said about differentiating supports and making having equal opportunities for kids so I'll start there because I can talk all day about this because I'm excited about it and usually people I talk to get excited about it so I'll stop there and maybe answer some questions great thank you very much for the presentation questions from the board excitement from the board director curler yeah so you were talking about the bringing the girls basketball and the boys basketball together could you explain that to me because so um I'm not saying I said bring the girls and boys yeah play in the same night so the girls would play Varsity so to be JV boys versus JV girls varsity boys varsity girls and then flip-flopping so it'd be in one place so all the same place all same site same Check Yes okay that'd be great yeah but everybody Community will be there that's right so that'll be good so a lot of pizza director popcorn I have been on the board for 11 years now and um and you've been here about a year so I wanted to compliment you on your passion and your excitement and your vision um I don't know that our former athletic director ever presented at a board meeting in those 10 years I don't know that I ever heard about a vision for athletics when we were doing budget cuts we were cutting Sports we were even cutting PE one year I don't remember any advocacy whatsoever from the athletic director so and it is such a thrill to have you here and to have you promoting Athletics with so much passion so I really appreciate it makes a big difference um so I had one question for you and then one question for the superintendent the question for you is whether or not you have been doing any Outreach yet to the high school booster clubs are you meeting with them in any kind of regular way well not yet because actually in some places we don't have booster clubs so that's one of the things maybe I should be saying are you helping them create but on the other side yes because that's part of the the parent advisory some of those people came come to the meetings and they're waiting for opportunity and um one of the things we recognize and I guess I'll just click to this slide so I'll just get in trouble here but um one of the things that that we recognize is that when I took the job we had our budget was 2.7 million dollars and when we added in the the 900 000 obviously we can add that comes with 3.6 million dollars most athletic prop departments in the in the metropolitan have multiple schools in their District the budgets are at the minimum is 0.91 percent of the general budget so my goal at some point is to convince you guys that we need to be one percent at least one percent of the general budget I don't want to leave without that so I know Tripp I shouldn't have said that but I'm gonna say so that's that's one of the things that that we really want to push because we want to have great opportunities for our kids we have scored the scoreboard at Madison High School they don't even make any more it was a scoreboard when I coached there and it was a scoreboard when I played at Jefferson that's the same scoreboard the Benson scoreboard has the bottom three rows don't even work anymore that's the state of our athletic department and we have to we have to change those things um the other thing I wanted to say is the fundraising piece I we're looking at even if we got one percent we're still looking at trying to raise 1.2 million dollars just to have a great Athletic program I don't want a kid at Roosevelt not being able to play because their parents don't have money but I also don't want a kid at Lincoln to go to a game against Jesuit and go wow look what they have and look look what we have that shouldn't be the case it shouldn't be that we we don't have jumbo javelins that stick in Turf because we can't afford to have it so we don't have Javelin or we can't have pole vaulting because we can't have football team pits that that shouldn't be the case anymore for us so that's part of that advocacy so yes I do intend to go to booster clubs
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um I I think there's a huge place for them part of my conversation today with uh with what Jerry Lewis was well how do booster clubs work because I have some booster clubs who generate 50 60 000 for the athletic program and I have some schools who get nothing so in my original plan it was actually some dollars allocated to develop booster programs at all of our schools and help them figure out how to fund a raise in their community and it doesn't matter the all of our communities in Portland have the capacity to help out their school it's just a matter of helping them should I expect the same amount from all the communities no but I know like the Benson alumni I was talking with their athletic director they don't have this gigantic booster club there's a lot of prominent people that went to Benson that can step in at home how do we get them to want to step in and see themselves as as boosters as athletic boosters I think we can do that great thank you and then I had it may be more of a comment than a question for you um so first of all I'm completely thrilled that we're focusing on a middle school sports program and I guess what I see a lot of times from kids that I talk to is they have a lot of the kind of wax poetic about their Elementary School experience and I love their High School experiences those middle years that are just a little funky and you can just tell kids just don't have as much excitement about that so I think that bringing back you know bringing some sort of a athletic presence to our School kind of to our middle school programs is great but I guess the area that I'm also wondering about is areas like band where it just changes the high school experience when you have a band and they're at all of our sports games and the rest but it's really hard to have a band program if kids haven't had that experience leading up to it so it's a similar kind of thing so I guess my question or suggestion is I know that with the city arts tax we now have an opportunity more Arts and Music and the rest of teachers at the K-5 area but to the extent that we can support our middle school kids more and I know the Arts tosa the teacher on special assignment that that you have on board is supposed to kind of give us a kind of a pathway from that K5 up through high schools but at some point it might be worthwhile elevating that position to you know a Portland Public School Arts director like we have an athletic director and really focusing in on what we can do at the middle school level to keep kids engaged because we know that a lot of times if kids it's that eighth ninth grade transition you know if they you know if they have the music or the band or the drama or the Athletics or whatever it is that just pulls them right up into high school it's such a better experience for them so anyway I just want to plant the seed seed planted and I will say so Marshall when he was has been talking about the building of the feeder patterns into high school he had me out in other districts where I was sending photos back of the the signage up at other schools recruiting at the Middle grades and Elementary grades for the high school teams and building the feeder pattern so he's had an immediate impact on but I I have to just say I'm really excited about the vision that Marshall has brought to Athletics and um and as I said you will see something in my budget proposal that is continuing to build on his capacity to make that be a division become real and the the investment we made this year was a a big deal relative to the fact that what's been happening is just continuous cutting and erosion and this has been a really significant opportunity to start to rebuild and there's great excitement around the community about about the fact that we're rebuilding so Steve I think it was about 1975 when I first came to a board meeting and talked about engaging kids in middle school in things major portion of which is Athletics and so I have two hours worth of questions easily I don't think my colleagues want that I wanted to be okay if I came in and scheduled some time and chatted with you specifically about these things because I've got a whole lot of things and so I guess maybe I'll just do that I do have you know there are basically three things that bring kids out for athletics or stop them really and one is the quality of the coaches and a lot of that quality isn't is built around their Dynamics and their relationships with the kids I mean I can I'll give you a whole lot of that now there is the money we're charging kids how much are we charging now to play if
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you're playing basketball or high school about high school it's 200 is 235 dollars for spring reduce for a month for free and we just launched just 35. 2049 yeah it's uh it's too much we need to do something about that I don't know what we do about it I know that's way too much uh and the third is the 1.5 million 1.5 it can be free I got it if you got 5500 at 200 a piece so I got it down here at 1.1 million huh 5500 kids at 200 a piece 1.1 million that's what I I wrote that down that's what they all pay I vote I vote for that right I vote for that in a second okay send you that money all right uh and the third thing is whether they played in middle school no I I taught for 10 years in Evergreen school district have you been up ever are you familiar with their Middle School athletic programs are unbelievable they had 500 kids out of the thousand in our school involved in the music program we had teams all over the place that got on buses played games uniforms jackets blue and it was it had a tremendously positive effect on the middle schools and then third comment I had I think for public discussion not a lot I really will hopefully if it's okay come in and chat with you at some length about certain stuff and the the other comment is we need to be figured out how to work K-8 Middle School because K-8 kids need these things as much as anybody else and I don't know or if we're thinking that through or we have some stuff I come in and and I'd like to I probably have some ideas so why don't you go ahead and answer the question so so we have this unique situation in Portland where we have 43 schools that have six seven eighth graders in them that's a lot so what we did rather than have a girls basketball team in every school what we did is go Grant youth basketball and then we'll have two three teams from that cluster at that grade level so when I look at us at a school so there'll be 24 girls who would be a part of the sixth grade basketball program that would come and want to be a part of that 21st 7th graders and 24th graders if there's more student interests we would add teams we will all be under the guise of grant you the basketball not necessarily Cesar Chavez or Beverly Cleary and that's the only way you can do it because how this structure just there's no way to do that in my neighborhood in class so to be my neighborhood and cluster it'll all be coordinated from our office yeah so I could address that too so the park I'll use track as examples or track has um I walk run something they do it at Grant every every Saturday and you come up and you pay your two dollars you're not coach you're not anything you just show up and you pay your two dollars you get a t-shirt one time and you run your race and you're done well we actually are trying to prepare our kids to be a high school track athletes so we're having practice two days a week and we're having at least one meet a week and we're providing Transportation but more importantly we have paid coaches who actually know something about track so kids are actually being able to develop their talent and we have days where kids are going to come up and they're going to get exposed the first day is going to be an exposure they're going to go through all the track events to find something that they like or have aptitude for and then they're going to get coached in that so we're totally different than Parks and Rec Parks and Rec needs to exist we want them to exist we want to coexist and in the best of all worlds what we would hope is park and rec has like a like uh level a level B level C and then it has what they call High School prep which means and girls basketball for example in in a b and c they do running time which means a clock never stops 32 minutes and the scores are 12 to 8 at the end of the game well in High School competitive league and everybody gets to play it's qualified and everybody gets to play every four minutes you stop and the high school league it's like a regular High School game where you have better officials you have stocked stop time you have kids that have played kids that are practicing two three days a week and that's where we're concentrating our effort on as on the High School prep piece the recreational pieces is in place through the park Bureau and we don't want to replace that
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Christian Star Trek the directory has a child and so I just want to call in your Carol tradership overall in launching this hiring you you know New Year and then and then Marshall really this is incredibly exciting um so I'm just thrilled in the Middle School sixth grade grade piece it is huge as well as as you know that you're bringing around here you but I just wanted to Echo my acceptance enthusiastic as far as that Marathon all around between High School I could I could maybe like I think the board should be two teams right here five to five yeah and um director Beale I think most Middle School fields are grass so most of the Middle School fields are grass and muddy so we'll be okay director gentlemen you were not finished yet you guys thank you um and I think if I did the math correctly you said it was about 48 miles and you just broke the board into two teams that means each of us has to run 12 miles you can walk or run okay so somebody have to do it twice is it a week long I'm just kidding I look forward to it I'd love to join a team um I just want to Echo what my colleagues said how exciting it is um to one be focusing Again On Athletics because it's such an important engagement tool as director Buell pointed out how important it is for for students to develop just as the whole selves and I really appreciate I know you didn't spend a lot of time on it but combining the academics with with the expectation of sports that you do both this isn't an either or piece I just I really appreciate that so thank you for taking the time to develop that and I guess I'm just I'm really confident that this will engage students in a way that we haven't been able to do um so again I'm just gonna keep pointing out that we're in a unique position this year from in years past where we are able to make these they're really small Investments as you pointed out if we could do one percent or one and a half percent um it would make such a such a significant difference so yes thank you superintendent for realizing how important this is to our students putting the people in place to to make it so that it's it's a possible in reality and again I just hope that we can continue to Advocate that our resources don't go back to the old pattern of being reduced thank you very much okay our last big agenda item is also a budget item for early learning um superintendent Smith would you like to go ahead and introduce this I would and I'll invite Dr Harriet Adair to come on up um to do our early learner presentation and Sue Anne Higgins our chief academic officer um as we tee up the presentation and again this is something that you're going to see something come forward in my budget proposal but I want you to get a sense of the vision from Harriet and much of this is not going to be new to you but it will be putting together the pieces and teeing up what you're likely to see in this in this next budget well good evening and I've noticed how many times I heard excited about this and I hope that maintains itself through this presentation I want you to get really really really excited about this so today I'm going to talk a little bit about the early Learners um educational centers that we're opening and the Early Learning programs in Portland Public Schools and it's going to be a very brief presentation talk a little bit about the why which is going to be covered by this little video you're going to see because it captures it quicker better than I could and then we're going to talk about the what of important Public Schools okay so go ahead okay thank you
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thank you videos put together by the government that's much slicker than anything I could have ever come up with and cost me no dollars I'm not sure about that tobacco tax any window here okay so that's basically the why and I'm going to just going to basically just have you go through how we're going um okay thing there we go these are basically I'm going to briefly tell you you know all these things these are all the programs that we've had in Portland Public Schools since the 60s and we're right along with uh where we are now is basically right along with where the president's agenda is where the local agenda is where our state agenda is and our city agenda is which is basically making sure that more students enter kindergarten ready to learn that they exit reading ready to read that they then meet the third grade Benchmark one of those standards being of course that the inner fourth grade reading to learn so we basically have in Portland Public Schools our agenda deals with the continuity of things it deals with the fundamental commitment that we've always had it is a transformative perspective because it basically is something that we're looking at something that goes not only from kindergarten to first grade but also across all the Continuum of grades and it's cost effective return on our dollar we made these decisions about what we would do because we knew that these supports were necessary but we also know that we couldn't fund all of the things that we wanted to have done in our schools because we just don't have all the dollars we're coming to a place now where having been in the system for a while I know that since the 90s we've been in Decline and it's now time for us to start looking at going back up again so we're trying to figure out how can you stretch those dollars further we know the transitions are critical and that the transitions now are very different than the transitions used to be in the um 80s when we first started some of our other Pre-K programs we also know that program monitoring and standards that were aligned were lacking because we started these programs in isolation and in small numbers and we know that some of our program decisions relative to movements to k-8s and the addition of dual language programs has caused some space constraints that were not necessarily anticipated so looking at all those we knew we needed to do some different things so we decided to figure out how could we take what we were doing all along and make it work better for more students and move in the direction that all of the research is telling us we need to go so here's what we're thinking about I want to say before we go that we have a group of folk that are working with me one of those members is here one is in the back one that's with me is um Deborah Berry who's the director of The Head Start program for Portland Public Schools and in the back she said she had to sneak out as Nancy house who's our free-for-service kindergarten person but we have what we call as a group of early early Learners and we have this as a working group this is not just a group of people that come together just to sit around and talk and share information on that group our teachers from Head Start and Pre-K special education fee for service kindergarten options um Pathways to monthly Pathways to schools Title One Head Start Early Head Start and the equity office and collect and Community Partners and we come together to talk about what we think we need to do and that's where most of our ideas came from first were generated from and then we moved them forward okay so here's where we're moving and this is what's in the budget we have and I I know you have this in your packet so I'm just going to kind of go through it and then I'm assuming you're going to ask some questions we're basically moving toward Regional Education Learning Centers we're calling them and that we're planning on trying to open up one in September at Clarendon and this would have a center would serve about 120 students in 2014 and 15 and pick up an additional 120 in 15 16 and this is part
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of the total support program that we're putting into the Roosevelt cluster I'll talk a little bit more about that and it's graded funds we are going to have one Spanish-speaking classroom and one in Indian education program classroom we used to have a Title VII Indian Ed program Montessori program here that we're going to reinstate at the Clarendon site in addition to our mecp programs those students would be part of the integrated into the classrooms the other four classrooms in the program we're also involved in ongoing conversations with Foster about with Naya about opening the Foster site and of course the Fabian Concordia program we are also looking at making sure that we're expanding our cultural specific and and dual language programs not only at the Claritin site but other places we're looking at realigning some of the programs and of course having the kindergarten connect programs ban across January through the summer then we have what we call the early learner Thrive by five agenda which is the ekt program we're looking at talking to see about a milestone that could be added to our Milestone chart that basically shows ready to learn as one of the first Milestones hey Harriet when we do the ekt just for our viewing audience will you say sorry early kindergarten transition program that we have had and typically in four schools but now we're putting it in all of our focus and priority schools this upcoming year this year now we know that in um 20 2015-16 we're going to be moving to full day case so we're actually going to start planning for that transition this is the state move to full day K we already have full Decay here in our system but there are some definite things that we need to put in place because we're anticipating that some folks who had not been placing their children to kindergarten might actually take advantage of that um I already talked about the expansion of the kindergarten connect activities and looking for additional ways to fund all of the above other than just the general fund but we're looking for Grants and other ways to see how we could fund these programs so why are we moving to Regional centers well um basically it says that one of the things we know is that if you have the integrated services that are going to be involved in these programs especially in terms of special education and ell because in the early learner centers it's more about language development everybody's learning language at that point in time it's not necessarily about English as a second language it's actually about just acquiring the language skills so that we know that when these programs are co-located you end up with a number of students that when they exit that needs what we call spell Services they need special education and ell Services we also know that it's the family engagement opportunities when you start with those early and you transition throughout the grades then you end up having more sustainable impact at the other end when they get to the Middle grades that you were just talking about and into high school as well we have space and funding constraints that mean that we are not unable to provide as much service to students as we'd like to provide to students so co-locating different programs in one place allows us to stretch those dollars and those Services across versus trying to get from one building to another building to another building to another building we know that we need to partner well because our Partnerships end up having us have more things available and it's cost effective because we have aligned standards and inclusion of critical program components so I talked a little bit about the Roosevelt cluster we're starting at Clarendon this is a conscious thought not only because the Clarendon building is available to us and makes it possible but what we also have going on in that cluster is they are invested in systems planning across the cluster schools this is all of the schools in the cluster they also have Avid in that cluster they also have gear up in that cluster so you have the ability to keep start working with parent a certain set of parents and following them all the way up through the 12th grade Continuum of skills so it's just consciously impacting Support Services across the cluster with an attention that you would end up with better attendance because Roosevelt has historically not had the best attendance of the schools in the system and it also means that you have relationships that you form with the community and with the parents in that community so just emphasizes that we're talking about Regional centers but we're not talking about eliminating the Pre-K programs that are single programs in a building even though we'd like to see a way to enhance those programs because they also those students could also use these supports so we're looking at both and we want you to think in terms of I know some of you have visited I just saw director Atkins out at one of the centers that is the one that people talk a lot about the Gladstone Family Service Center that was where we just are we want to have those kinds of programs available but we also know that we want to have uh One-Stop places like the Earl Boyle Center that other people are talking about which is in the Gladstone District where they have a single unit of kindergarten I mean Pre-K available and it's just a neighborhood School based program if you live in the Earl boils feeder pattern
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you have that program you have access to that program if you don't live in that feeder pattern you don't have access to that program so we're talking about Clarendon which is in deep North Fabian which is a little further in closer to the Cully neighborhood and then the Foster Nea program or the centers that we're talking about bringing online within the next two to three years and um these are targeted toward what we call our high impact High need areas and populations this is also where there is an expansion of population along those corridors so in terms of funding this year we funded ekt at the priority and focus schools we have someone who's helping us to coordinate this we piloted the the kindergarten Readiness assessment that's the KRA and we started some of the collaborative work at the Foster site we also applied for State um Oregon Community Foundation funds the city and other early learner resources to help pay for things for this year and for next year we did get the OS ocf money as a matter of fact and we have phase one next year of the Clarendon Regional Center we're looking at flexible funding because we have to look at flexible funding because the Pre-K programs that we currently have in this District are funded through title one so you cannot supplant Title One programs with general fund dollars so you have to figure out how do you expand and know that all these budgets are in tight limitations so we have that's why we're braiding the funds um we also are looking to expand the transition activities up through grade three so we have that fourth grade handoff and we're also looking for this to be the lead someone to have actually the responsibility to be a lead for this program you see me sitting here but that's not my sole responsibility we often call on Nancy for things we often call on the Head Start ladies for things we need to have somebody clearly identified that as we move this work into something that's more coordinated and continuous that they know who the contact person is so that we can have that person lead this work um we have looking at um as I said before the mixed funding and Head Start expansion sites and then finally in 2015 and beyond that we would have um full day k district-wide a mix of school-based and Center programs Cully is a priority which we haven't identified at this point in time how we could help that or how we could serve that but as you know there's kind of this vast area between about 33rd all the way up to 82nd and then all the way out almost to um Stark where there's apps there's a lack of services available that we we know we need to have something there to help that with that population and that the KRA would be fully implemented this year all the KR what KRA was a state mandated um process and this year they just looked at participation rates and I'm assuming that they're going to be looking at data and other sorts of things in the future that's the kindergarten ready Readiness assessment yes thank you for making me get off my initials and then um we would have expanded culturally specific programming and support for families right now we have several Spanish speaking classrooms we're looking at extending those classrooms into other languages and also expanding our supports to other cultural groups as well so always nice to look at little people just to kind of remind you that College and Career Readiness begins in pre-kindergarten just thought I'd put that plug in and I do have for each one of you what we gave for our kindergarten teachers this is something we stole we're going to add that to this but as you notice this says College begins in kindergarten we're going to add and career Readiness and this is what we gave all the kindergarten teachers this time and this is a poster that the Ed trust originally put out and no longer distributed so they allowed us to count to capture this and distribute it with their their information so there we are that's my presentation I'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have thank you thank you very much questions and comments from the board no one I'm liking that director Reagan go ahead uh so excited amazing so thank you thank you thank you for all this that's right good work so a couple of softball questions first um when you're talking about early Learners what ages are you talking about well actually we have on ours p through three which is third grade is the three but the P could be um because we are partnering with Early learn with Early Head Start could actually be prenatal but we're not going to provide that service I want you to remember that that would not be where something we would provide we are
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currently doing that right now because we have a contract with albana Head Start early Learners program and at Roosevelt the teen parenting program is what they are supporting those parents but when you're talking about the program at Clarendon there they will have um a classroom of um Early Head Start at Clarendon that will be from the albino Head Start they are applying to money from um they are 18 months thank you I didn't see Ali joined us by the way the other director of hit Early Head Start I mean of Head Start so it's 18 months I'm sorry starting at 18 months 18 months around but again that would be through the partnership yes no and I guess that's uh so my two big questions are around Transportation especially if you're using a hub approach um what would we be looking at in terms of Transportation versus uh you know at their local elementary school would be one of the questions and then the other question is just around funding and who's paying for all of this so okay can you uh walk me through those too I have some other questions but hopefully my colleagues will hit some of them okay right now we provide no transportation to any of the Head Start sites and that would be the same as it is for the regional centers we're not providing transportation and then funding funding I saw your question but unfortunately I saw it on my way as I was heading to another meeting so I didn't answer but basically the funds are braided and so I'm going to try and give you as much clarity as you ask for right now we they would be funded by um Title One title step Title One which is how we fund our pre-ks we have Head Start title one dollars as well from the federal government we have Oregon Pre-K dollars that are going to be that'll be folding in we have Portland Children's Levy dollars that are coming in we have title seven which is how the Indian education Montessori program was funded we have special education dollars from what used to be Multnomah County but now it's the David Douglas District got that Grant got that got those dollars we have the ocf grant we have Early Head Start dollars and then we have general fund dollars the the grant dollars before I hit the general fund dollars are what typically will pay for the the instructional pieces because that's the the the formula we have now we cannot use general fund dollars to pay for teachers and that and the educational assistance in the program the general fund dollars then pick up the cost of things like the materials for the classroom the activities for the classroom and um those sorts of expenses the external to the classroom expenses and how about facilities upgrades the facilities upgrades I was hoping my oh my Gentleman is right here to talk to you about this keep Operating Officer there's a couple of pieces to the facilities upgrades clarendon's been a building that's been sitting Idol for a while it's become a you know an eyesore in the community and it's one of our assets that I've recognize we need to take care of so split between this fiscal year and next fiscal fiscal year we were already planning on fixing the roof and repairing the basic interior of the building I mean you can imagine when a roof leaks as bad as that one's been leaking what happens inside that building so we're taking care of those things now when you say we is that so that the district is the district that's through facilities and maintenance so it's a portion of the three million dollars that facilities gets um so so but now when so when the building's in that condition we could either lease it out or we could provide it to support one of our internal programs when you do that there's some that could trigger a thing called tenant improvements meaning the building isn't designed to meet whoever's moving in there when you lease it out you can pass that burden on to the tenant in this case it would be our own internal program our Head Start program so that Clarendon they would need some internal demolitions some new walls to create space adequate for learning Ada improvements in the building there's a lot of other floors and walls that need to be patched and fixed the kitchen is completely dysfunctional and would need to be upgraded so there's a lot of work that would have to go in so when you look at the Early Learning budget in the facility these things in there that's talking about the tenant improvements necessary to make it fit
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their needs and that will all happen before August that's what we're planning on so we're we're already rolling on the the things prior to the tenant Improvement so we've already begun the work to get the roof repaired we haven't started it but we began the process so we hope to get a jump start on those things and the roofs probably that is the biggest thing and would take us out of this year's budget right we had already put that in this year's budget that we needed to do that repair on the roof regardless of how the building was used so yeah and then there's also some ongoing o m when you open up a building to make it operational you need to have custodians the level of Maintenance you need to maintain the utilities go up so you'll see that included as ongoing in the early learning budget so um I'm still curious to understand what this whole program is going to cost in terms of our general fund allocation because generally our general fund is kindergarten through 12. so obviously we're diverting some funds in the hope that kids will be more prepared to be successful when they hit kindergarten but I'm just trying to understand what amount of funding we're talking about here and that's part of what you're hearing Harriet describe a very complex when she's talking about braided funding and actually of the classrooms that we were talking about being at Clarendon next year three of them I think are already in neighborhood schools that would be moving to Clarendon and creating relieving some space issues that we currently have and then three are new is that correct so um or would be newly kids that we don't already serve in in the classrooms but it's combining a bunch of them and even between what we're what you're hearing described here there are a set of costs um that I would propose as being one-time costs that would be ones that I would say are things that would fill in the one-time cost category and then others that are ongoing costs and that's part of what you'll see coming forward in a budget proposal in terms of what would be asking for it a general fund but just just here I'm still working through which pieces of it I'm going to actually put forward to you you'll hear it next Monday and the reason I'm saying that is just because there's a bunch of trade-offs right now and this one's a very full package that I'm I'm looking at at this moment some of which could be like phased in over two years some of which I could recommend to you I would do all at once and where we're looking at what's the interaction of all these different funding streams with each other so like when you're using Title One it may preclude there are things that by using one funding stream then you can't use another one partnered with it so we're in that kind of a conversation right now but next Monday I'll bring forward an actual proposal to you so sorry I can't be more specific at this point but yeah this one all PPS programs that co-locating different pieces but also the Early Head Start as well and like some of the other models and maybe other models that we would do in the future it's not the broad or co-location of health and you know mental health it's not it's not that actually we are looking at adding some of the mental physical health pieces in as well and we are looking at and we are looking at trying to um see if we can add some of the ocf grant actually is a partnership with the neighborhood house which is um on the other side of the river that's going to provide the Sun School programming and there are people that are contacting us to see about before and after care so it is a partnership of other kinds of programs so that's why I say if we partner well we can have some very full-bodied program that isn't coming out of our dollars but in essence supports our students yeah and our families will and we were just going into some of that at a glass into the hearing from the superintendent about how they put that together and how they did sort of a almost customized agreement depending on the partnership and what the partner brought whether it was money or in kind or various so they've worked it out in the wonderful generous you know and you we've forgive you their operating agreement so we can learn they learned from us originally at Rosa Parks now we can go back and learn some more from them so that was really exciting to hear can I go off on the side a little bit on the funding just around the federal piece which of course is out of our control but just to highlight I mean President Obama's Vision in his budget our Congress hasn't come nowhere near right funding that so just just to point that out I mean right we have this this vision and this potential for what we could be doing as a nation for our children and Congress has failed to fund that so just you know put that out there and however though I think there was um the sequestration cuts that we had that impacted our Head Start slots did
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get restored somewhat in the federal budget so if you could just give us a little bit about that we don't have any Clarity around how much that is or isn't but okay with the region 10 folks last week and they mentioned that and of course we perked up but nobody ever gives you a okay so we don't know in terms of the number of kids that we can serve right okay but that's that's coming so it's a little glimmer at least it's not as bad as it had been before in terms of the disinvestment in children but once again as we continue to talk about advocating and I know that a lot of our organ delegation or most if not all is very supportive of this but there's other other members of Congress or not unfortunately and we totally understand that there's competing agendas I mean everybody really I mean every there isn't an age group they couldn't benefit we told them director Morton um I just have a couple of quick comments one is this is an area that I have particular urgency around and we have I think all shared that urgency of one point or another um one of the things as you were speaking I looked at the the Coalition of communities of color report in 2010 specifically around Early Learning and uh a couple of things that really striking to me and I think we have to be aware of uh about half of all little over half of all white children participate in some sort of preschool before entering kindergarten but when you enter into you look at the disaggregated numbers based on race particularly those under served populations it goes down significantly about 16 percent in the Latino Community participate in preschool prior to kindergarten 27 of the Native American Community 32 percent and the African-American community so there's significant barriers that exists prior to kids entering kindergarten and I think that's an that's important to note because we're looking at we're looking at just a small piece of the overall or Early Education pie here um you know you think about k8s and krk pardon me k-12s being sort of anemic Head Start Early Head Start pre preschool programs are historically and consistently anemic in terms of resources so um so I think when we create opportunities to invest some general fund dollars to support preschool education or or pre-education I think it's well worth the money the other thing too and this is my last point is this is an incredible opportunity to leverage resources we talked earlier about the the 40 you know leveraging 52 percent to 48 or 54 to 46 percent participation in the great Fields project this is an opportunity where there's millions and millions of dollars coming in from multiple sources including private sources like um like foundations you mentioned Oregon Community Foundation the Portland Children's Levy is a tax revenue um as well but it's also a competitive Grant process to in in many others in fact The Gates Foundation has uh has announced that uh Early Education is a priority that they want to they want to fund at this point we're talking about that this afternoon we actually went over to see our grant writer today to say okay what do we need to do internally to see we can bring people on board to say can we get discounts we're on it yeah so uh but it is a great opportunity for us to leverage a small investment on our end that can yield quite a bit of investment from a number of different sources uh so I'm I'm really in support of it and I know the work that uh that you all do um is is good work helping to prepare our students for that next level kindergarten so thank you okay that Andrew yeah I'd just like to thank you for the presentation and focus again on the fact this is an investment that we're making you know it's not something that just stops at the program it goes on through high school you know through college and through you know the the students careers so it's something that I'm really excited about um I'm I'm really looking forward to the recommendation we get from the superintendent so thank you good yeah I'm just so excited by this thank you thank you so much for this and um I just wanted to put in a plug or a request it as we go I'm really excited about the the both and approach um and I think there's going to be so starting with the the regional centers and those the Partnerships and wraparounds is going to be awesome but I also want to make sure that we're really clear around the school-based plan and that we don't lose sight of um just being really clear and planful about how
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we're going to avoid that bumping and shuffling around and so as we go forward I'd love to see more information about what's that stat plan for mapping that out given that we have you know the overcrowding schools and the boundary changes in the bond and on and on to make sure that truly our early learning is integrated with the rest of the system and the planning that we do so that's a piece that I'm looking for as well as being super excited about seeing Clarendon reopen for this awesome use and and the other Partnerships coming down the line so thanks so much probably tack onto the both and comment too because one of the things that I look at if you look long term our goal was to have a 30-year Bond program and uh clearly we're starting the first couple of bonds to try to rebuild our high schools but as we go and even in the first Bond we have the Fabian Concordia partnership my understanding with Fabian and that rebuild is that we'll include an early learner Center and my guess is that the fact that we're doing this initial program now and the fact that we probably won't be rebuilding our elementary schools for another you know five or ten years this will give us a really good opportunity to see how the Fabian model is working see how the hubs are working and see whether we want to do more of the early learner centers built right into our next you know either k-8s or K-5 schools as we go so I think it does give us a quite an opportunity to to be planning ahead and figuring out the bolt and piece of this so it's exciting let's see if I can understand this because I'm we have about 4 000 kids if we had everybody in kindergarten we would have 4 000 kindergarteners right because you'd said 48 000 divided by 12. well we wouldn't have quite that many because you're inviting the K by 12-2 right it should be a little less so we what we're looking and we have Title One programs and Head Start and a lot of pre-K programs that we give money to through some ways in different ways to another one okay now the three hubs that we're talking about Clarendon Bobby and Foster all three of those are Pre-K hubs yes which are what came out of the oeib Ood recommendations I want to say yes but I have to tell you that um we were already thinking about doing those sorts of things so yes we're lined up with them but we were already working on them actually director Beulah part of the Pre-K thing came out of your last watch on the board in the creation of the early childhood education centers is where we actually first started the Pre-K um efforts in Portland Public Schools so that's why I'm kind of hesitating in the segregation plan yeah that's right the so but they are are these three of the hubs that if I go down to the oaib and I say hey we're doing hubs where are we doing them oh no no no no their hubs are funding sources no I'm talking about the hubs that they're talking about no these are these are totally our own these are our own so did we get money from them for them because I on my understanding when I was a doab that one of the hubs that we were looking at from the from the state was was on the Foster side I mean we talk about that type of stuff all the time down there these are not we're not these are not we have no these are not part of their 75 70 million dollar Grant we are applying to them for Grant dollars but none of that has been awarded to us at this time so some of those dollars might come to us it's the only reason I can't tell you definitely yes is because you know when you apply for something you don't know whether you've got it right that's that's but their talk all the time about the hubs and putting these hubs around the states having one in Portland they talk about that all the time and they're taking credit for these homes so these hubs aren't theirs after all or did are they going to do other hubs or well let me let me just tell you there's a hub Gap here so here what we have going on is that this is why we're calling ours Regional Regional Educational Learning Centers early learner centers the hubs that the states are at state is talking about are funding sources they're going to be the ones that have the money to distribute out to the various programs and Elm is the Hub that I'm certain that you must be referencing that's going to be in Multnomah County and it's the early learner um Multnomah and so that is not a Portland Public School Hub but definitely Portland Public School will benefit hopefully from dollars that flow through Elm that I think is what you're
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referencing so so when I'm talking about uh what we're doing that's why I'm calling them we call ours something different than hubs they're Regional early learner centers and not that this will create any Clarity at all but that's being co-convened by United Way right and Multnomah County County right partner so if we have four thousand kids let's just say 4 000 for my from people aren't as quick in math as some of you are offer us people are dead sharp amount for if we had four thousand kids how many kids do we have in out of 4 000 say would there be in in all of these preschool programs without these three Regional Learning Centers without the three Regional Learning Centers and if we were to just maintain basically it sounds like what you're saying if we just maintained that we had a great level of pre-K supports we currently have five classes of pre-K which run around 20 kids in the classroom and 100 that are in the various sites we also have 804 Head Start students so we're basically looking at what about a thousand kids and this adds how many the the four hubs if the three hubs if they got up and running and Clarendon were looking at six classrooms that's about 240 half of that are would be new service so that's about 120 at Clarendon we're looking at the possibility and these are all still in the sketchy stages I have to tell you because you know some of these are like two or three years out this is what we were just talking about um we're director Atkins was with us but potentially having at the Foster sites six classrooms which would be um an additional what's that 66 90 that'd be 180 so I'm just going to round up to about 200 so that's about a thousand twenty right there and then the the Bobby Insight is currently has one classroom of pre-K on-site but I think they're looking to move to three three classrooms I'm not sure I'm thinking three classrooms so we pick up maybe about 1500 kids so the how do you decide which 1500 to pick up well we focused in the regional centers on the highest need population Head Start population is the highest populate highest poverty population there is so and then one level above that which is Title One and we're locating them in the areas which have high numbers of those populations okay so when we go into that neighborhood and relocate it how do we decide which kids get to come they we actively look out and recruit them this is the Head Start wait list what if you had more kids than you could service how do you decide well that's what we end up with waiting lists that's what we end up with but I mean you do it in who comes first I know they came back here to dispatch park now give me support but I'm going to put them Jeffrey Berry director with Head Start we have a recruitment process that the children our families are prioritized according to income needs let's say for instance if um our family from they have alcoholism as a a problem they are given points and so if they have been in the program prior children have been in the program and so that according to the point systems they can have say roughly 100 points and from those hundred points everyone would not receive all of the points so if they are a family that has mental health issues and they've been referred from an agency they're given points and so we have a child plus system that really prioritizes the families and then families are entered into the program according to their points so it's safe to say there's nowhere near the resource or the capability to serve the need that exists we're not going to serve all of them so basically we wait we wait it and then we decide based on how much we can serve when we go down that foreign populations we take the highest need in the highest need populations okay here's my 10 of our children are coming to the program have special needs we start out with 10 and currently we have 16 or 17 percent of the program have specials would you repeat that again currently uh with the Head Start performance standards 10 of our children have to have our enter the program at the beginning of the school year identify with special needs that's 10 of the 804 throughout the year we identify additional children so currently we have probably about 16 percent of our 804 children are identified as special needs well do you get points for having special needs
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yes they are in other words you go to 10 special needs okay we have the 10 and then at the beginning according to our priority list 25 points if I remember correctly are given to children with special needs okay so you do get you get points but we don't have enough kids with special needs that we fill up the whole thing with kids with special needs no we wouldn't we would always try to have a balance so that we had our role models in the classroom but if you have if you have if you're giving points for special needs and you're weighting everything on the points then wouldn't eventually all those special need kids take over all the slots well not necessarily because of income some of the families that uh try to register into the program they're over income and so those families even though they have special needs they would not qualify for the program or they would not be one of those prioritized because of their income okay thank you I have a one other question and it has nothing to do with this it has to do with the early childhood let's talk about the Common Core you know one of the things that's happened in the uh in the kindergarten situation Kindergarten now because we're talking really kindergarten here too because these are transitioning in one of the things that's happened Nationwide is they put together a common core kindergarten curriculum people say oh it's not a cricket but it is of course because anything you look in the dictionary anything you teach is a curriculum so if you're teaching anything related to The Common Core it's part of a curriculum so it is a curriculum but there's a lot of criticism about the Common Core Curriculum not just because it was put together by people who had no experience whatsoever in kindergarten there wasn't anybody at 135 people who put together the common core and nobody in the whole 135 people had ever taught in the classroom kindergarten through third grade not one so zero people zero experience so they took that Common Core curriculum for kindergarten kids and they put it in 45 States and then they sent that they the federal government basically did that because it was tight end and then they said okay you have to we want you to take the Common Core we're going to give you money and then they sent it out to the state and in our state and I've been down there for two and a half years watching them no one vetted the programs there was no vetting we haven't vetted any Common Core stuff any place that has to do with that so we then the state takes a totally unvetted program so it's not vetted in the in the federal government it's not vetted in the state government and they send it down out to us for kindergarten to use and say basically you need to use a common core kindergarten program okay which is totally unvetted it's never been vetted any place by any kindergarten teachers or first grade teacher anybody who has ever taught in those things so I guess my question is this how are we vetting it did we take for instance like this did we take something like this this would have been a way to vet vet it we take all our best we we take our best kindergarten teachers maybe 15 or 20 of them or whatever and we sit them down in a room and say we want you to look at the common core and we want you to tell us where the problems are where are the problems for kindergarten if we're going to teach to the common core and what do we need to do to make that work because I keep talking to kindergarten people and they don't have they're going no this is no good we don't want to be doing these types of things in our kindergarten program and the part of the deal is that that has a tendency to sneak down into the other stuff the stuff that's not very good supposedly so I'm curious about how we did we vet it and how did we vet it the kindergarten program from the Common Core that kindergarten teacher kindergarten teacher starts saying this stinks does this stinky Pro this is stinky stuff we shouldn't be doing them okay what do I get to if I get to talk I guess as much as I want if I got down so let's let her answer actually um I'm going to let my colleague here answer this question because my understanding is there's a meeting coming up to talk about this in more depth about this very topic so I'm deferring to Miss Higgins so I'm about um
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the specific ways that we or what actually how you determine what vetting looks like what I would say is that the common core standards are predicated on what are the outcomes that we need at the end of the system and then how do you build down through each developmental stage and each phase the thinking skills and experiences that allow students to complete the system with a slightly different set of outcomes than we used to be targeting so we were targeting get your Carnegie units make sure you've got credits and all these things and you should be good to go and what we've seen over time is that the high school diploma as the target hasn't gotten us where we're going and so um so this standards um in the Common Core help us shape what we do with our curriculum and so but I would be happy to research this more and let you know how we've looked specifically at the kindergarten standards for you so the answer basically is that we haven't done a real vetting of the kindergarten standards yet because because the part of the misunderstanding you think that's what I've just said what I just said was I would be more than happy to look into that and find out from our team and our teachers and what we have what they did do that nobody really is I mean you don't know and and oh people here don't know what we've vetted them nobody knows I mean no okay all right I do know Steve but nobody hear it nobody here knows but other people do know Okay no Okay let me ask a question uh follow up then on that uh the Common Core stuff is different in kindergarten than every place else yeah it's I mean it's it's thought of differently than every place else because it actually moves fully away from what a lot of the past things that we've done the fifth grade Common Core you can argue it one way or the other probably you can do a lot of stuff with it you can mess with it you can say I don't like this I don't like that I mean when I looked at the sixth grade Common Core for literacy it doesn't have it doesn't have much to do with a lot of the things that we used to teach maybe in some cases but the kindergarten thing evidently is different it's almost taken this big jump in a totally different type of thing we moved from play activities and learning through play to uh activities that have specifically to do with academic orientation uh in fact and it kind of leaks into the first grade there was a I saw the other day a new Pearson first grade textbook which talks about ah producers goods and consumers and and in the first grade seriously I mean and it was pictures of people not I mean we used to teach from this good literature maybe and now we're moving to that and so it really makes me afraid that we've gone in this kindergarten Direction without really sitting down with our best kindergarten teachers and saying does this make sense for us and we're maybe stuck with it to some degree but how can we adjust it so it's not as damaging maybe as people think it might be so that's all I'm saying I'd love to have you tell me if we're good but I'm more interested I'm guessing we haven't done that I'm more interested in knowing if we are going to do that with those really outstanding kindergarten teachers in our district of which I'm sure we've got it tons of them so and this may be one that we want to schedule a future conversation because a couple things I'd throw in here Steve one is as the state was doing you know their committees on looking at the Common Core we actually had PBS people who went and served on some of those committees and secondly when we do materials adoptions we actually do do the process that you're describing sure and I I don't know that we've done this grade level by grade level looking at the common core standards I don't believe we have but just a different question totally get you I'm just saying it's the kindergarten that worries me we should be doing a grade level by grade level but it's the kindergarten where the destruction really gets nasty according to Canada and we looked at some of the uh the what were the um the measures at the kindergarten level I'm grading cards that some of them were really disconnected from what you're actually doing in kindergarten but I identified earlier and having more conversation about having more comfortable and there's also the whole issue of the transition and
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the um the um smarter balanced assessment and how that what potential so this is a really huge important issue so that isn't the topic right here this presentation so I just wanted to um chime in with the agreement you know that we need to be talking about this but that I'm just looking for when we're going to I think we still need to go back and look at what are the remaining issues that we have um between now and the end of the year and how we want to Let's schedule time and get the right people for the conversation yeah correct and it is on our schedule and we will get to it tonight is not the night right where we're discussing Common Core right and staff isn't prepared with people here to discuss Conference of course we will get to it I I understand that so thank you very much others who have comments about actually the Early Learning Centers director Belial hi hi um just want to say one I'm really excited about this um two I I have I have two questions and then the rest is just um what I want to pull out to highlight is something that I appreciate one is going to Early Learning Centers could potentially increase a transition right it inserts another transition from pre-k into K can you talk to me a little bit about the plan for support like there's a couple of different places we see support for Kate or excuse me Pre-K to K but can you help me understand that a little bit better well I did talk a little bit about the increase with the early kindergarten transition piece but that actually is for those um students and families who have not had access to the Pre-K experience that's right now who are reaching but in the regional centers what we're planning on doing is having a family um Port people who would actually be working with the families throughout to help with that to help with the transition both for the families and also to help with the transition teacher to teacher into the schools that these students would feed into so that's part of the wrap around services so we're consciously going to be not just doing doing some of the same things that we're currently doing now but enriching them in other words hopefully what we would do is um identify where the child might be going to kindergarten make certain that we have some time for that transition to occur where the teachers have an opportunity to talk one to one on what's happened with these students as well as time for the families to to actually sit down and talk with the incoming teacher when you have them in a space where you know where they're coming to you it's easier to do that than when you don't know who's going to show up so between the expansion of the early kindergarten transition and the regional centers I'm using the Clarendon as the example we should hopefully be able to capture most of those students in that transition and have it be more formal and the handshake be more firm than what we currently have if it works well in the Roosevelt cluster then definitely we would be looking at trying to expand that in the other centers as they open up great thank you for highlighting that because I I was a little concerned because I know that even right now in our head start Pre-K that transition because you don't know where they're really going to register right um that handoff can sometimes challenging so thank you for for highlighting that the second question I have is in one of the slides that we didn't actually get to see here but we're in our materials um I noticed that it was called out for help with transition from pre-k to k k to first and then it skipped to three to four right and I was curious just not understanding Early Education maybe as well as I could um why was there not support there for the first to second second the support is going to be there I just didn't call it out in terms of my talking because of the difference the the transition from pre-k to K is the ready are you ready to learn the K to one are you ready to read the one to two which I could have talked about is are you actually reading and then jumped up to the three to four to see if you're reading to learn so there's still some transitions that are happening in the primary grades but definitely we're focusing on all of the primary grades great thank you and so some things that I just wanted to highlight that I really appreciate about this plan is one I really value expanding our capacity I'm hopeful that someday state will decide that a universal Pre-K is the direction we want to go and that they will find a way to do that absolutely and not make it at the expense of K-12 or higher ed funding we can do this if we find a way to reform our system of funding second thing is I really wanted to express appreciation for understanding how important it is to partner whether that's wraparound services or culturally specific or culturally targeted opportunities it's just a really important piece and as director Morton pointed out there's just such a big gap between um families who have been traditionally underserved by the K-12 education system so I really appreciate and put high value on that I also want to acknowledge and I'm not sure how it'll wind up rolling out but by bringing folks together you know it when we did when we did High School System redesign and when we looked at
02h 35m 00s
Target sizes for elementary schools we always said that it was important to have multiple grades of one or multiple classes of each grade because how important that is about I'm struggling with this or how do you do this that that collegial learning and I imagine that this will improve that I guarantee that but definitely one of the goals really excited about that opportunity and then last I just want to say again this seems to be a theme from the night whether it's our great fields or whether it's our high school or Athletic program and now with ekt just the opportunity to leverage resources this really is an important piece is when you guys talk about braiding funding it's such an important piece that we not take on all of anyone because there are great resources out there for us to be able to do this and I really do think that our public is looking for opportunities whether it's us building buildings or in our programming opportunities to leverage resources and so I just want to say Express appreciation for that opportunity thanks anybody else you know I'd like to just do one with them the one thing I also want to make sure that we do as we go and I assume that you're doing this already is I'm assuming that as kids come through programs like this the early Learners program that we are kind of tracking their success compared to kind of a Baseline and I guess I want to make sure that that's embedded in this new investment that we would be thinking about making so I at some point I'd like more information on how we've done it in the past how we plan to do it going forward and I'd be happy to have that conversation actually that's probably something that we have not done as well as we could have potentially done it in the past but we definitely have built that into this to have program monitoring because that's how we're hoping to um make the mid-course corrections that we need to if something is off track that we can make that mid-course correction that's how we intend to do that so absolutely we'll be ready to have that conversation thank you well like everyone else I'm very excited to hear about this and thank you I'm not going to keep you any longer thank you very much thank you for your presentation tonight your passion and thank you for your questions they help us get better we really appreciate it thank you Bob okay yeah Distributing yes please okay um tonight last thing is our business agenda Miss Houston are there any changes there is one change resolution 4891 on page 44 has been withdrawn 4891 okay soaps yeah this one no more yeah well we have when I asked for comments okay okay do I have a motion a second to adopt the business agenda director Atkins moves and director Regan seconds the adoption of the business agenda Miss Houston there is no public comment correct okay um board discussion on the business agenda director Buell we're hiring teachers and we're doing non-extensions of teachers and we had a an executive session on this and I I just had to comment that it really it's it's beginning to worry me that we have the wrong template for good teaching and it came out of them reading some things when we were doing the executive that came out in the executive session that that we I think we need to really take a harder look at what our template for a good teacher is we're getting it seems to me that we're getting lost a little bit when I keep talking to people in we're getting lost in the reform movement template or are we uh uh assessing well and are we doing uh uh best practices and so forth and so forth and so forth and by by over emphasizing that we're we're missing the other things that are critical for teachers creating joy in your classroom and learning uh doing doing those types of things that that for years have been what makes a good teacher and we're moving to these other things and it concerns me I just wanted to throw that out so people can maybe think a little bit about that what is our template for a good teacher is it one who uses proper assessment or is it one that creates
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this welcoming atmosphere and the joy of edu the joy of learning and so forth which is it I think we're kind of going with this type of assessment and stuff versus the other and it should be a balance we got caught in the balance thing for instance and we do it all the time in education we grab something and just run with it like crazy and just drive it into the ground uh those of you who've been around a while know a little bit about uh uh phonics and whole language and and the issue around phonics and whole language was phonics people were phonics and the whole language people were whole language but the truth is there's a balance where you meet and we have a tendency to go way too far in One Direction and another without getting that balance that really makes a good teacher and I just thought I'd throw that out because that kept coming up in things for me thank you superintendent Smith I just wanted to do a brief comment um director build about the teacher evaluation tool that was recently developed that was a actually a work team of teachers and principals over probably 18-month period is still existing but part of what yeah they use the Danielson but they also tailored it locally for us and part of what that was that I'm proud of because it's the first redesign of the evaluation tool in 30 years and it really was a conversation about what do we believe is good teaching and how do we know it when we see it and how are we being really clear about what that is but it was jointly developed by teachers and principals and teachers and principals then designed the training and we had teachers and a principal and a teacher from each building come in and do that jointly designed training now I will say that we we need to continue continue to build on how we build a consistent understanding across the whole system but it was a really robust kind of process it was very good my concern is that when it's coming down sometimes it's getting forgotten and that I will it is then it's the how do we keep it alive and how do we train but as opposed to what are your test scores what are are you are you assessing uh in the appropriate manner are you always assessing are you using best practices that's not what really makes a good teacher and it's I'll bet you it's not what that evaluates and that's not what that yeah that the other piece to this is there were two options about one that was using the rubric that was designed but secondly um was an alternative assessment method that after your first round of being evaluated you can opt for that was much more portfolio based so well Roosevelt was has been piloting so my concern isn't so much that the evaluation my concern around the evaluation system is that some people keep telling me that their principal is using it as a gotcha system as opposed to a support then that becomes is part of our training yeah and that's a training issue but I'm concerned about the template in general that we're doing as a whole District kind of what we're looking at as a whole District when I hear things when I read things that the template is not necessarily built around this idea of of working with children as opposed to working with this systematic approach that's all I'm saying that it's just something I think would be a good idea if we kind of just think about that's all I think if I can add something director Mark I actually thank you I uh you know I I actually think it's it's a Act of a of a healthy District to continue to uh go back and re-examine and and look at what is the process that you take within uh within your organization to evaluate your staff um so I would I mean I don't know if I'm I don't think I'm far off from what you're saying is what what do we continue to to think about in terms of quality education and quality educators and uh and I think there's also a piece of that is how do we you know how does that look different than what it has in the past um our our the demographics of the children that we're serving the the issues that they're coming to uh our schools with are very different things are changing things are evolving the way we learn is evolving and uh and how do we how do we develop a system that allows to accommodate that kind of need within our schools and that's you know it seems like that's really in partnership with uh certainly not just our teachers but our teachers included our our families and our youth and our institutions of higher education that are actually partnering with us and and Carol I know you're engaged with um with a group of of uh programs around the city that really are designed to or at least the conversation is designed to get to the point of how do we how do we create Educators for this century um and I think that's how that's you know finding an evaluation that's fair for for that uh teacher group is is going to be important as well so can I
02h 45m 00s
do one last thing of invite uh Andrew Davidson to give a little pitch for your testing Forum oh yeah do you want to do that because that kind of feels appropriate here in the conversation we're having yeah so um on March 20th we will be having our standardized testing form it looks like it might be at Grant now we're having to switch around the location but uh we'll get that publicized when we you know actually nail it down but we'll be having a community conversation with parents teachers and students as well as you know anyone that wants to come about standardized testing what it means for our community and the role we think it should play and multiple perspectives and then just say what the multiple perspectives are sort of like who's going to be on the panel oh right so well yeah we'll have uh some community members that have been really outspoken about standardized testing we'll have uh some teachers parents and students so maybe one of each is there going to be any information uh we we're hoping to have actually someone I think actually I may have meant forgotten to mention this one from PBS who will be providing the state perspective is what we're hoping oh okay and I thought you were doing an ode person too but okay yeah yeah together you have a time for that or a time or a place uh yeah I think we were saying seven o'clock seven p.m yeah and where would you hold it uh we're hoping grant for now I need to get that first High School right and this is super Sac organizing this yeah yeah it is great yeah thank you awesome thank you very much that's great two follow-up comments to what Matt said one I'm somewhat familiar with the Naya program and I watch it all the time on Facebook on Facebook and the stuff that he puts and it's a wonderful program and and the other thing and and we should be doing more things in our schools like they do at now uh but the other thing is you can't find of well really expensive K-12 School in this country probably that teachers like the corporate reformers keep telling us to teach and the state department keeps telling us to teach if you go to Oregon Episcopal St Mary's you go to they just don't teach that way we teach that way because I guess we're told to but those those schools don't and for me that makes a lot of sense how come they don't teach how come they're not pushing Common Core at at Oregon Episcopal how come they're not testing their kids into the ground at Oregon Episcopal because they know that's not the best way to do it and they can spend they have so much money they can do pretty much what they want and so they don't do what we're doing there you go thank you we're all looking forward to it too so um director Buell or director below sorry yeah thank you um I just wanted to say that um one I appreciate director Buell what you're saying that it's not usually an either or that there is a balance how important it is and um I appreciate the the thoughtfulness staff has had on our um on our renewals and our non-extensions non-renewals and I just also want to let folks know I thought about calling people out that I know on this list of teachers um but then I thought the list kept getting longer and longer and I just want to say that as I look through this I do actually read every single name that we're looking at that we're looking to renew and I don't mean to imply that my colleagues don't but I just want to assure people that I do and it's just such an honor and privilege to look at the Quality staff that we have as teachers to know the work that you're doing every single day I just wanted to say that I recognize you in this list and I'm excited to get to get to renew your contracts and I'll second that okay the board will now vote on the business agenda anybody else I'm sorry did I okay Ford will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed say no any no abstentions the business agenda is approved by voter 7-0 with student representative Davidson voting yes great the next meeting of the board will be held on March 17 2014 this meeting is now adjourned thank you all for being here tonight really

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)

2014-03-10 PPS School Board Study Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - March 10, 2014

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