2014-03-17 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2014-03-17
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

AGENDA 03-17-14 (4542c9f39af18b3d).pdf Agenda

Materials

03-17-14 Final Packet (3413a686651c5588).pdf Meeting Materials

Minutes

None

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - March 17, 2014

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he's claiming that's green bottle top okay ready good evening everyone this study session of the board of education for march 17 2014 is called the order i'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our tv audience this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed through the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our pbs tv services website uh just a notice that director morton is absent tonight he's off uh he's in ecuador in a leadership program so we're very excited for him and hope he stays safe down there on the amazon okay at this time we'll take public comment um miss houston anybody yes we have six okay our first two speakers greg burl and dan richardson okay while you guys are coming up i'm going to go ahead and do the instructions for public comment thank you very much for taking the time to come to our board meeting we deeply value public input and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns our responsibilities aboard lies in actively listening and reflecting on the thoughts and opinions of others guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration when referring to board members staff and other presenters the board will not respond to any comments or questions at this time but board or staff will follow up on various issues that are raised please make sure you've left your contact information either a phone number or an email on the sign up sheet pursuant to board policy 1.70.012 speakers may offer objective criticism of district operations and programs but the board will not hear complaints concerning individual district personnel any complaints about specific employees should be directed to the superintendent's office and will not be heard in this forum you have a total of three minutes to share your comments please begin by stating your name and spelling your last name for the first two minutes of your testimony you'll see a green light come on when you have one minute remaining the yellow the yellow light will go on and when your time is up the red light will go on and a buzzer will sound and we ask that you conclude your comments at that time thank you again for being here tonight we sincerely appreciate your input okay good evening i'm greg burrell b-u-r-r-i-l-l and i had to come back this week because of something i said last week i was talking about schools where i have subbed for years and suddenly have had days where i thought that kids safety was in jeopardy and perhaps even my job and so i mentioned cesar chavez and because i mentioned them by name i went and i talked to two of my favorite teachers to sub for they had wonderful things to say about their administrators wonderful things to say about their fellow teachers and so i went back and i subbed there a couple of days last week and had a really good experience during my free time i was subbing for the esl teacher so i had free time i met with the administrators and looked in classrooms to see what was going on and overall i was impressed i was going to go there again today and i found out that most of the teachers were having subs all at the same time so that the teachers could do data analysis and i i'm glad that i wound up being sick and not able to go to school because in in a situation like that the teachers relationships with the students are what is a major part of the learning and the social interaction that goes on in the day and so i know that no teacher and no administrator made the decision that everybody should be out of their classrooms at the same time to do training or data analysis or anything else so i'm asking that whoever makes these decisions take into account perhaps you should have all the people at a certain level out on the same day perhaps you do training with multiple schools but emptying the school of the personnel that have the relationships with the kids is a recipe for failure at another school which will remain nameless because of the things that i've heard about it and haven't yet confirmed a weak administration tries to tell subs that's a classroom
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management issue and threatens to discipline anyone that can't keep order and so as a member of the substitute committee i'm aware of schools where substitute teachers won't go a second time and this is brand new so because like i say i've been doing this for nine years and so i just wanted to bring this uh to your attention and hope that we can come up with a better way of dealing with training and data analysis than disrupting the kids daily learning thank you good evening my name is dan richardson r-i-c-h-a-r-d-s-o-n father of willa first grader at llewellyn elementary 31 students in a first grade class recently i learned that our school will be facing staffing cuts potentially resulting in even more large classes in fact some would be the largest classes in the district again the welding is a small overcrowded building in a great neighborhood that supports its school we are willing to accept creative use of our classroom space and we all pray that no seismic activity happens in the next few years but enough's enough concerned parents recently met to address class size for our students when we found out that llewellyn would likely lose a second grade teacher next year fully two-thirds of the first grade parents were in attendance often questions we get more questions and through our research we discovered that llewellyn is a school chronically starved of resources far more than any other comparable k-5 school in the district in fact llewellyn elementary is the lowest funded k5 school in the district and has been for at or near the bottom for the last six years four thousand four hundred and seventy five dollars per student at llewellyn versus an average of five thousand one hundred and thirty one dollars we would like to know why this disparity has gone on for so long and why if llewellyn was funded to average levels we could have four additional teachers to assist in our overpopulated school currently we're at 112 capacity i'm just asking for three there are numerous quality studies demonstrating the importance of lower class size for early elementary years i'm sure you're familiar with them even the most experienced first grade teacher is going to have trouble meeting the needs of a diverse set of learners with 31 students in their class this has been a tough year for us we request that portland public schools fund llewellyn elementary at average levels for three years so additional fte be can be allocated to create an effective learning environment for our children thank you for your consideration and for making the right choice for our students thank you our next two speakers are dominic lafave and don gavita am go ahead okay my name is dominic lefov i'm a special educator it's l-e-f-a-v-e i'm a special education teacher at wilson high school and i'm here tonight it's not normally what i would do is come to the school board and talk but i'm i'm here to talk about budget priorities and the main reason is as a teacher i really see what impacts kids what makes education better for kids and i just don't see those things being given the proper priority being funded at the level that they need to be funded we need to reduce class size we need more teachers desperately and 150 teachers that we agree to in the contract is not nearly enough and i guess i'm still a little taken back and by the whole you know contract bargaining where we brought up many many things and especially class size and caseload size and during that time and it seemed to get pretty much rejected
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out of hand it's to me it's outrageous these were things the schools portland students deserve was important to me we were talking about things that impact kids lives um you shouldn't reject this and we're told at that time that this was the forum to talk about those things so i'm hoping that you know you've said you care about kids and i hope that's true because we really need to reduce class size we need more teachers and and the classroom should be our priority as a special education teacher i i just hope that you understand something about what that's like we're required to do a lot we have enormous amounts of mandates on our job and these are coming from the federal government the state government and the district and we have to do this paperwork we have to do the assessments it's required we'll lose our jobs if we don't do that it's it's absolutely necessary so what happens as you increase our caseloads we do more we we prioritize the paperwork we have to do it i have seen across special education teachers who have become i.e iep mills in our public schools these are the kids that need the most teaching they need direct instruction they need care and attention from qualified educators who know the kids and the kids thrive on relationships as the previous speaker said it's it's horrible it's it's a travesty and you need to do something about it i i want to tell you that teachers across the district are watching you they're watching you budget and i know that parents are too and we need to do what's right by our kids and reduce class size hire more teachers thank you thank you hey everybody the i'm don gavitt g-a-v-i-t-t-e even got on the button so the um i teach government philosophy and history at grand high school and i just want to tell you about uh the student government i advise the excuse me the we did uh they did a survey a few months ago where they just asked the student body if we could have it what do we want and they specifically were looking at different classes that people wanted and the top two classes that the student body at grant decided they wanted was ap psychology and home economics the and one of the candid comments about the home economics class was i am going to have massive student loans i need to know how to make my own muffins the um so we were really proud that they did that the comments were great but that that wasn't the main point the the thing was that when you ask the students they want more classes and more teachers as well the and let me just have a a two-prong um request there one grant is a high school with means we have um we have a parent and family population that can afford to to help us out a lot and they always have we have hours and hours of of parent contributions that uh make grant a great place not all schools have the the benefit that we do let's even that out in in the smallest of ways by providing a literally five thousand dollars per high school to make sure that every high school has a student government with a budget to start off with and not a budget that they just have to fundraise to to get going something that the principal is is available to the principal only to use for student government and that money the the students can get that data which they can do so much more cost effectively than an outside advisor the by simply finding out what that student body needs and wants and what that community wants um and and then just give us the opportunity to to to give it to them the let's buy those stoves let's get those muffins going the let's dust off those ap psychology books and get a teacher in front of those kids exactly as they very professionally and
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with tremendous confidence competence have asked us to do and i'd really appreciate it thank you for your time thank you both our last two speakers adolfo garza cano and lori williams hello good afternoon hi my name is adolfo garza last name g-a-r-z-a um i guess did i get a green light this is my first time right there in front of you okay sorry it's my first time speaking here um like i said my name is adolfo garza i've been a kindergarten teacher for seven years i've been with portland public schools for eight years um i came to talk about class size but before i do that i wanted to introduce to you who i am i am a student that has fallen through the cracks but i am here till today i didn't um when i was younger i never thought i would be somebody i was even told by teachers and administrators that i wouldn't amount to nothing after getting in trouble over and over and over and over again nobody seemed to make any kind of connection with me for some reason perhaps it was because nobody looked like me nobody spoke the same language as me nobody understood what my life was like outside of school it was only a counselor that spent extra time with me after i had graduated that had pulled me back into the school system and helped me with my academic career and helped me how to apply for college the point is i never made any real relationships with any teachers until after i graduated when talking about class size that's what matters when teachers build relationships with students education researchers suspect that class size reduction in early grades helps students achieve because there is a greater opportunity for individual interaction between student and teachers in small class sizes when talking about numbers we also need to understand that 20 students at skyline alameda is way different than 20 students at woodlawn where i work students need to be weighed instead of counted as a number when students come in they come in with various needs some of them have special needs some of them come in with ieps some of them have been to pre-k some of them haven't been in pre-k some of them come with emotional and communication problems and disorders i have students many that have only a single mom or a single dad or that lived with divorced parents and spend sometimes here sometimes there sometimes they get along good and sometimes they have custodial issues students i also have students with parents who are incarcerated students who whose parents are dead or missing in action due to abuse i also have students whose parents have been deported and families who have ripped apart we have kids who don't get a good night's sleep we have students who are homeless but despite these obstacles they are expected to be ready to learn at any given time i'm out of time in conclusion i believe that in order for me to increase individual one-on-one time teachers need smaller class sizes and class size limits that allows teachers to spend quality time teaching and establishing a lifelong positive relationship that will help these students reach higher levels of education and achieve in their academic career great thank you very much my name is lori williams w-i-l-l-i-m-s i'm a special education teacher with pps i have taught for six years in portland public schools i have 13 years of teaching experience in both the mainstream and special ed setting in order for you to understand workload for special ed teachers i felt the best way to do that was to talk about my ear last year my position was cut i went from a 1.0 and was unassigned 0.5 i was left scrambling looking for a position to pick up a 0.5 to stay full-time i went on six interviews i had five years of experience in this district not only am i qualified and do my job
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well i did not get one of those positions instead i was placed by the district at a school not of my choosing on the opposite side of town the furthest point from my first school i'd had to drive half day 0.5 one school 0.5 at a second school let me tell you it was not fun eating lunch in my car so i could get to school b so i could be on the playground to do my supervision not enough time to get through traffic leaving students who needed my help in north portland to come over to southeast portland those two schools had very diverse needs and i i have to tag team on what my former speaker said about students and their need two very different populations same need fabian school is where i was assigned grade sixth seventh and eighth grade forty percent are at or below poverty most of my caseload we're working and live or living in foster homes then my second school high functioning asperger's in southeast teaching at winterhaven if i were still at those two schools my caseload would now be around 60. in november i was released from fabian with no choice i had to leave a great steve teaching staff great students i had no choice in the matter now i'm teaching at almost 60 kids at two schools i'm still over 30 at my one it's unethical it is not right i want to know where the special ed money goes it doesn't come back to the student it doesn't come back to the classroom it certainly does not come back to the school it's not ethical it is not right one student with 350 minutes counts is one one student with 40 minutes counts is one they are not equal it is not right thank you thank you very much thank you to all of our speakers if you make sure you leave your contact information with miss houston thank you a comment if you'll let me make them uh we're going to move on to the next part okay thank you let me make it right thank you steve okay we're going to move on in our agenda um over the past few months the board's worked to establish priorities for our budget because of our prior commitments to add teachers expand dual language immersion and continue to provide programs that have proven success in raising student achievement the unrestricted funds that we as board members have to review is small compared to our budget as a whole just last week we reviewed athletics early learning and 10 great fields as an example we've also been reviewing things throughout the year that superintendent smith will cover as well all very all these things are worthy of our support all of the things that are mentioned today are worthy of our support tonight we will hear about staffing plans superintendent smith would you like to present i would and i'm actually going to start with um a little snippet on 10 great fields or places for sport which was a discussion that was had last um at our last board meeting that i wanted to play a quick clip from and dan okay friday night lights will soon shine on new and improved football fields in the portland public school district last night we told you about a proposed plan to give all pps high schools a new track and synthetic turf infield well that plan passed the knight team's katherine cook is live at lincoln high school tonight to show what it all means to students catherine laurel you are looking at it right here a synthetic turf infield for students that are lucky enough like those at lincoln to have it their communities have raised money for it for everyone else this plan puts all other high schools in portland on a level playing field all right we're all meet at the stairs at madison high school the gates of opportunity are opening and this is a red letter day tomorrow even better yeah yes things are looking up after having to look down at this there's never been grass here in my four years that i've been here our maintenance crew does an excellent job trying just it gets so beat up during the season that there's no way this ever recovers for head football coach adam skyles it's an eyesore for his players it's an everything sore you're running around and your foot will get stuck in the mud and then you kind of tweak your knee or
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something that it's not fun today is the beginning of something new for madison and every other portland public high school still playing in the mud all pill high schools will have a turf field here very shortly last night the school board passed a proposal ensuring every pps high school will get a new track and turf infield it's a 7.2 million dollar project 5.2 million will come from school construction tax revenue 2 million will come from community partners like nike and the timbers army two years ago madison got a new track but funding for a new field was a hurdle they just couldn't clear until now i had no words i was just like i'm so excited that we're gonna get this turf field it won't just be for students you're going to come by on saturdays and you're going to see youth soccer games going on and sundays you're going to see adult leagues and you're going to see use on this field in this community it's going to bring people together right now the track is closed to the public but that too may change when the turf goes in i think it should because i think we need more uh opportunities for just for people in general to be more active it's another resource either way the grass will be greener when it's turf and this gets put out to pasture no not sad at all construction is set to begin on four infields including madison's as well as one track this summer they should be good to go for next fall sports season back to you okay and actually as dan is getting me set up to do the powerpoint on the budget i just wanted to make that visible this actually comes to the board next uh on the 31st for a vote but this is a project that's been in the making for 10 years and has involved the city of portland the county nike community partners at every single school as well as a 10 great fields fund that the school board set up and then did an allocated on an equity basis so that we would end up being able to have playing fields across the whole district and we're set to complete it this summer so it's just an exciting moment and that was nice coverage for us so i just wanted to do a an upbeat at the beginning here okay so what i'm going to walk you through uh at this point is is a two-part um staffing and preliminary budget plan and it's a little different than how we normally do the budget so tonight the school staffing plan that i present to you tonight we've actually had a board work session on staffing we've had a district staffing team that has been looking at staffing and how we would do allocations much of what will be contained in the staffing plan is building on last year's district staffing team works we have not changed formulas it's adding new staff in and some of what i'll talk about is the prioritizing the staffing in schools actually starts tomorrow and so what i'm going to put out for you tonight is the actual staffing plan that we'll we'll punch go on tomorrow the new pat contract provides the opportunity to accelerate our hiring process so part of what we wanted to be able to take advantage of is doing that and taking advantage of the fact that that's true this year and we'll actually be starting our staffing process four weeks earlier than last year this year so i'm excited about that part two is a preliminary budget plan so i'm going to walk you through what the rest of the budget will con i'm i will propose is going to contain but then i'm going to be engaged in listening sessions with with folks and i don't actually present the proposed budget and budget message until march 31st so on march 31st then i take that proposal which i can tweak between the 17th and the 31st so i'm still listening to people's response to what i put out tonight and on the 31st i then hand it over to the board the board is then engaged in the listening session so there are multiple points that there's it's still in motion uh and at the end of this presentation i'll talk you through what the next steps are until we get to an approved budget and then adopted budget okay so what has gone into feeding the budget so far starting back in september we did a program update on dual language immersion dual language immersion an expansion of that as a an instructional strategy was actually something that the board passed a resolution on probably a year and a half ago we have had a team of people working on that's had its own engagement process really looking uh in a feasibility study looking at where we would actually expand dual language immersion as a strategy so that team came back and presented on september 16th and recommendations are now informing the budget we then had on december 2nd a budget priority prioritization exercise that the board engaged in looking at how they would prioritize what centrally allocated funds might be directed towards
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on january 21st we then presented what we what we know about the 2014-15 budget forecast so what the revenue picture looks like on the 20 sorry february 12th we had a presentation on college and career readiness and this is another high school action team was a multi-stakeholder team that was established actually last spring but began its work really in earnest in the fall with the intent of informing the budget process and they were really looking at strategies that work within our district and also looking at successful strategies in other districts they came and presented to the board in a work session march 3rd we then did a work session on school staffing and really looking at what kinds of decision points there will be in prioritizing how school staffing gets allocated uh and then last on march 10th we did an content session on early learning and on athletics so these are all pieces that are giving the board the opportunity to discuss content of things that will show up as part of the budget proposal and all of those sessions were on channel 28 as well so just kind of leading you through building blocks other community engagement that occurred prior to this point so we did the same prioritization workshop with coalition of communities of color with the superintendent student advisory committee with the high school action team with the achievement compact advisory committee with the district employee leadership stakeholder team which is are the leadership of our unions and employee associations the dual language immersion program expansion engagement process that i mentioned previously and then again with the citizens budget review committee okay so this we are in the second year of the biennium so we know more of what's contained within the resources we have to work with so we're not waiting for a budget number from salem we also have this uh in this budget the legislative special session that added funds for the second year of the biennium so that um which it translated 100 million translated into 7.8 million in additional funds for portland public schools a big deal for us given that we've been in a negative a cutting conversation for for decades this is a big deal to end up with something that we're looking at additional funds and then there were in the last couple of months the economic recovery also improved property taxes and we had noticed that we were going to receive an additional 4.6 million dollars so the combination of our ending fund balance and those two additional sources of revenue coming from the state we're looking at 20.1 million dollars to invest which has an assumption of taking us down to the five percent uh in contingency or reserve which i'll talk more about in a moment but that's sort of starting place in terms of resources we have to work with um which is a yay yes so the improved financial outlook uh allows us to both increase instructional time for students sustain and build upon our existing strategies and investments minimize disruption of teams meaning that we aren't like doing the kind of shuffle that we have been doing as we cut and then bump between buildings and take up build teams and then take them apart for uh the coming year which we've been doing non-stop we have nine schools and i say minimize disruption rather than like not have any we will still have schools that are impacted by a decrease in enrollment and there are some mitigation potential within that but there will still be schools that have drops in enrollment when it's been a small drop we've worked to hold it steady if it's a significant drop it may be that there is a reduction in staffing so i'm being want to be very clear as i'm talking about this that it there still is the nuance of looking at ebb and flow of where are students actually showing up that will impact staffing and then the last one is just strengthening our organizational capacity okay so proposed investments and i'm going to keep using the coming back to this slide is the one that kind of marks different sections in terms of school staffing right now we're looking at 12.8 million going into school staffing instruct the additional instructional time we're looking at the 2.55 million we established a workload committee that i'll talk a little bit more about that has a million dollars allocated we have centrally funded supports to students in schools 3.75 million which gets us down to the 20.1 million that i that i just identified that gets us to the contingency reserves being at five percent and when i'm looking at the budget i think whatever goes above that five percent we're looking at wanting that to be something we can sustain from year to year so people and staff that we don't want to be you know adding them for a year and then cutting them i'm looking at anything that is staffing would go above that line
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what i'm putting will be putting forth to the board in my proposal is that we also have a some one-time investments that take us down to the four percent in contingency but again one-time investments meaning we don't have to sustain them so that i i'm going to propose that we take ourselves to the 4 level this year and do those one-time investments of things we have put off investing in and you'll see what that list is because i don't want to use dollars that have to be sustainable dollars they will make a difference in terms of what we're doing for kids so i'm going to do a proposal in the budget that will actually propose spending 24.85 million so first the school staffing which is the 12.8 million and school staffing again this the district staff the board did a discussion in a work session and we went to the district staffing team because we were in negotiations up until a minute ago we have some processes that are shorter than they would normally be but we're building on the work of last year so we're not starting from scratch on these and largely we're using formulas that have already been in place last year the district staffing team put forward the desire to invest resources by school type and achievement needs not solely by just number of students and you heard some of this spoken to in testimony that we need to wait based on needs of schools and students not just count the kids and then secondly to provide enough time for resources to shift culture and to build capacity so for instance last year when we did an equity formula we did not tinker with that and do something different this year we basically are saying hold steady whatever that theory is and let us play it out and see whether it makes a difference last year the equity formula largely meant you got cut less because you had the equity formula this year it may mean you get a bit of a bump in terms of what adults are in a building and and there to be working with kids okay so specifically the recommendation is to maintain the equity formula within the staffing ratio allocation to maintain what we call the non-formula editions that address specific considerations that a school may have so for instance a split campus any recent program changes like consolidations um any unique programs like jefferson dancers or benson end up getting bumps for the kind of programs that they um that they have that require more intensive staffing and then to minimize disruption so as i said there are some places where um the there may have been a slight reduction in students that we aren't then doing a okay bumping a school down we're holding them steady we can't do that below a certain level however okay the the piece that lets us then address individual concerns that come up are we hold back what we call a set aside or a pool of 30 um fte that aren't allocated in this first round of allocating that allows us to then address where an actual number of students who show up are different than what the estimates were so that we're able to respond quickly we've already got the pool of fte and this is largely kindergarten where it's hard to um to hit it right so you know like we'll frequently have like higher or lower numbers in kindergarten we've got high school scheduling needs that may be that kids forecast for different numbers of classes than what we planned for specific program challenges another special situations we'll do a check in the spring based on um like what numbers of kids actually forecast and are landing different places that we already know in the spring we'll do another bump or influx in in the fall so that by the time like preferably by october we will have moved all the um staffing that we have into the schools but we do it so we can be responsive to where the actual students show up that may be different than what we think so this is some of where our mitigation ability is okay priorities for this year we've looked at we did an amendment to the budget this year that added 68 classified staff into the schools it added another 30 teachers into the schools those all stay in and we're not pulling those out and starting from scratch so we're holding steady on those investments as of this next year we're looking at adding counselors so both at elementary schools who currently do not have counselors we're at we'll add those to the support table in high schools we're looking at moving the ratio from what is right now 400 to 1 to 350 to 1 so that there's just better accessibility for kids to their two counselors and then looking with the rest of the and that is really the one strategic ad is the ad counselors and the rest is really going to improve staffing ratios at all levels k through 12 and special education caseloads
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so with that individual schools will get some direction saying please pay attention to the following things ensure access to the core program at all grade levels pay attention to early literacy so if you have the ability to do smaller class sizes at lower grades please focus on doing that increase the teacher planning time in our k-5 schools and this is something that will happen across all of our k-5 schools and there are guidelines for that manage the student loads at high schools and focus on providing strong 9th grade supports and we have different schools that are really focused on making sure special attention to 9th grade where upper grades actually will say okay we can take a bigger case load because ninth graders we can see the difference it makes if ninth graders are truly getting everything they need so just saying and different support strategies ninth grade academies double blocking classes so please put emphasis because that makes a difference in a kid's entire high school experience so the numbers we are looking at our portland state forecast of an increase in 314 more students in our schools so that's what we know right now which will increase the fte in the by formula by another 19.4 and i'm showing you this because i want to be really clear that that is separate from the 150 that is part of the mou in the t that we just agreed to in the teachers contract and then an additional 10.25 fte that will go to sustain and increase support for focus and priority schools so three different buckets of fte going in here and they all go into the calculation in a little bit different way so a total of 179.65 is almost 180 fte in the schools the 150 pa team members specifically the 10.25 and the 19.4 more flexibility about what the strategies are but 150 could be teachers social workers librarians counselors but pat pat members okay so the existing staffing formula and this is tough to see but i'll tell you that the combo here is the ratio f of t that's assigned by by size or number of kids uh the ratio fte that's assigned by the equity allocation and i'll tell you a little more detail about that in a second the school-wide support table and that you see right down here which is administration counseling secretarial so the support that any any school needs goes in a support table so that it's got some thresholds of size in it but it becomes the things you need regardless of what size you are as a school and then there are non-formula fte or full-time equivalent staff that ends up making up the total fte so that's the general how do we actually build out the staffing formula those are the ingredients that go into the staffing formula the equity allocation 92 percent of the school staffing is allocated by a ratio based on number of students and eight percent and you heard some of the testimonies speaking to this eight percent is allocated via an equity allocation through two different formulas the first is four percent which is allocated based on the number of students receiving free or reduced priced meals last year we added a second four percent that's based on the number of students who meet criteria for being combined underserved which is a state definition the combined underserved is based on the school's number of students who meet one of the following criteria special education eligibility limited english proficiency eligibility to receive free or reduced price meals so it gets counted again and then african-american hispanic native american or pacific islanders so historically underserved racial groups and part of this this is one where what this just does is gives the opportunity to have again a more intensive group of adults it's like a slight bump in the number of adults in your building so it's not funding particular programs it is to be determined by the school how this additional fte is utilized and last year largely what this did is it meant that you got cut less so you may not have when we had the the combination of losing title dollars and we had federal sequestration so we had some decreases at the same time we had an up um increase allocation from the state this allowed you to be feel less of the hurt of what went away with the federal dollars this year it actually should feel like a little bit more of an increase so that's a great thing okay so in elementary schools specifically we will have an improved fte for the elementary middle and k-a schools that adds teaching positions in the school-wide support that will that allocation will be adjusted so that all schools regardless of size we receive a counselor and we have had a number of small schools that do have not had a counselor at all every school this
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next year will have a counselor the non-formula fte were adjusting the allocation so that schools that were formally getting school improvement grants or other title schools will receive additional support um and also uh there are some allocations to schools with unique configurations to just allow them to handle split campuses or recent consolidations those kinds of things specific and you guys i'm so glad to just have such group people here for this much detail because i am just happy to have you all getting this much detail so the teacher contract mou added 70 professional educators into our elementary schools which means the school all schools will have at least a 0.5 counselor which adds 4.7 fte our k-5 ratio will improve from 26.9 to 1 to 25.8 to 1 which adds an additional 18.76 fte our k8 ratio will improve from 25.6 to 1 to 24 to 1 and adds 36.88 fte and our middle school ratio will improve from 25.25 to 1 to 24.75 to 1 and adds 5.19 fte and i am going to be really this specific about it because this is significant that these we haven't been able to have this kind of improvement in our ratios in a really long time so i'm celebrating each one of these in terms of feeling like we're we're we're on the right track we have five schools that will receive added staffing because of their focus um and priority improvement status so that adds 7.25 fte um and then we have priority for adding staffing that we is more direction that we give to schools and it will be the things that you already heard me mention but i'll say it again because this is elementary specific that will be meeting the new planning time commitment for k-5 teachers meeting core program requirements and making sure all kids have access to core program supporting early literacy or our third grade reading milestone goal and other strategies their alignment with the successful schools framework including class size reduction in early grades so that's the specific guidance that's that schools will get and hang on because i'm going to do a quick okay and the schools that are getting the um the pro focus and priority are boise elliot humboldt lee king and george so they're either newly identified or recently losing a sig grant so that we're trying to hold people constant so you don't end up with a you get an infusion and then you have a cliff we're trying to do a glide path on strategies that have been successful strategies would you would you list those again carol i would elliott humboldt lee king george and i missed one so i don't know what the fifth one was so the comment up here just to make sure people understand this the ratio does not necessarily mean it doesn't mean class size it means this is what's allocated what's allocated to your school class size have a number of other different variables in terms of numbers of kids at a grade level you know you've got a bunch of other variables that figure into class size but it is the ratio that we use to staff okay so changes in high schools we will do improve the ratio to increase the number of teachers and apply the equity allocation improve the counseling ratio to be 350 students to one counselor adjust the allocation so that former school improvement grant school which is madison in this case will receive support and do fte to schools with unique programs or configurations and that was like when i just like jefferson dancers benson things like that and most of those have been standard over years so they're ones that schools know that they get so in high school specifically we're adding 50 professional education professional educators to high schools the two things i just said the counselors adds an additional 4.25 fte and then the rest goes to the staffing ratio so which goes from 25.72 to 1 to 23.65 to 1 and adds 40.52 fte the one school receives so madison additional staff because of their priority status and the direction for high schools is higher teachers to meet the maximum and average student load provisions and lower class sizes expand career learning opportunities specifically that could be home ac if you're choosing to add home back in your
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school so just take that advocacy there students on track in ninth grade so really prioritizing again double blocking support classes ninth grade academies those things but again these are school to school conversations about that prioritizing it's that as a system we're trying to build our capacity to have increased career learning opportunities for kids so we're saying do this but then school-based decisions about what the actual things are that get added special education so in special ed we're looking at the addition of 30 fte i'm going to be so creating an early childhood team with this configuration of staff improving learning learning center ratios which adds another 9.5 teachers improving the school psychologist ratio with an addition of 3.8 fte improving the speech pathologist ratio by adding 5.6 fte adding an ell school psychologist tosa one one full-time equivalent an instructional specialist tosa one full-time equivalent adding a class to the community transition program which is a teacher and four pair educators an intensive skill center adding a class with one teacher and three para educators for emerging bilingual students we're looking at maintaining the same staffing ratio and overall staffing expanding content-based english language development from 10 pilot schools in 2013-14 but and adding 10 to 20 more schools in 2014-15 we're reviewing the numbers at k-8 schools to add additional staffing in situations such as split campus if there's less than one fte serving nine grades with multiple proficiency levels adding 0.5 fte at roseway heights for a new immersion program and 1.5 fte targeted native language literacy pilot programs in two schools pisa which was the portland international program that was this operating this year at benson had strong outcomes in the first year of operations but still drew a smaller number of students than we had originally planned so we're reducing staffing there by 0.5 fte and targeting student growth over the coming year and again we're holding steady with the strategy here and getting getting good outcomes for that program in its first year okay with all this addition of staff we are also adding the capacity to both recruit and support new teachers so recruitment we're adding staff and funds to support the expansion of targeted recruiting diverse hiring doing background checks and references and benefits management for new teacher and other employees which is 387 thousand dollars we are also adding seven seven more teacher mentor positions to support the increased number of new teachers this has been an incredibly important support for new teachers and we are looking at as we start new new folks we have teachers that stay with us a really long time and helping people get a strong start in the district and feeling like they're getting the support that they need right out of the gate huge investment also for the teacher mentors where you sign on to be a mentor for three years and then you're back in the classroom the folks who signed on to do that this year are so enthusiastic about what this is doing for their practice and they're really excited to be able to go back in and be bringing that back to the schools they go back and teach and so i just this one we want to continue to grow okay instructional time 2.55 million which is essentially extended school year so two added instructional days that will be added to the calendar for all students and then for our focus and priority schools two days for professional development which are added to re reduce the impact of lost instruction on the students in their schools because there's an incr increased expectation for professional development in those schools so um so that's an addition additional two days for those schools the workload committee we've added a million dollars that is available to the workload committee which will have five pat members five district members they're making recommendations to the chief academic officer about specific workload situations so this could be you know a full range of um but they're ones that we're saying bring forward something that is an anomaly that would be something that we can actually bring resolution to swiftly and it could be something that this would not necessarily be just fde it could be subs it could be more available tests so we're not having to share these tests it could be there could be a number of strategies that come forward to this committee
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but it goes as recommendations to the cao so that it works in concert with those 30 balancing fte that i talked about earlier we don't want to end up where we're trying to solve the same problem in two different places but recommendations will come here and we'll see how this goes but a million dollars for that committee to work with and then we have our 3.75 million dollars of centrally funded supports in that group we have the regional early learning center at clarendon which came before the board at um on march 10th it would be six classes in 2014-15 both pre-k and head start three of those classes are ones that are currently located in schools that would be moving to clarendon and three would be class new new kids that are not currently being served by pps this leverages dollars from title 1 title ii title vii head start the multnomah education service district grant funds that totals about 1.4 million the general fund request for staffing operations supplies roughly 481 million i'm sorry thousand oh see a deal 481 thousand rather than a million thank you it also is the at this moment looking to return funding of the head start director back to the general fund it was moved over into head start funding for a while this moves it back which allows us to repurpose the money that's currently paying for the director to fund more classrooms and then a director of early learning that will oversee all of the early learning centers that are happening both here foster site fabian clarendon uh and then finally tenant improvements at clarendon and this will show up again on my one-time list but it would be this dollar amount going in to get the building ready to serve kids and this in the current year we've actually been at have the budget to do the re-roofing on clarendon which has been out of service for a number of years uh second in this category is the dual language immersion expansion so adding three new dual language immersion programs at four schools chinese at king vietnamese at roseway heights spanish at james john and sitton vietnamese tosa was funded this year and will continue next year spanish tosa transportation and this shows you the 220 000 but a net 66 because we get reimbursed from the state for seventy percent of our transportation costs and then curriculum materials again that one i'm putting in the one time okay people do not get to leave when i'm doing this budget presentation you're held captive okay high school support strategies this one we've had a number of groups who have been working really hard on identifying focused strategies that increase our successful support of students in high school so we had the high school action team we've had a diploma plus team that's been looking at so we've had multiple strategy strategist groups that have funneled forward recommendations for the budget the ones that are on the list so uh career technical education and career readiness kind of investments so we have a college and career readiness grant from ode that this 50 000 for the coordinator would be a match for that grant a hundred thousand dollars worth of consumables and equipment and computer labs that support this in our high schools which is again going to show up on the one time list jefferson middle college this is the increased cost of funding tuition at pcc for those students who are jointly enrolled at jefferson middle college and i mean at jefferson middle college and pcc and again this one's been one that we've grown from freshman year we add a year each year and have increased the what does it cost us to support kids actually doing this so this is the addition for this year high school acceleration strategies we in the budget amendment this year we put in dollars to support advanced scholars at franklin which has been a really highly successfully locally developed strategy that was dollars to actually continue that strategy at franklin this is fifty thousand dollars in addition to that to have uh homegrown strategies that are informed by advanced scholars so some kind of collaboration across the three but not looking for it to be you know replicated in its entirety just to say that the strategy has been an effective one so to add that at madison and roosevelt we're looking at 60 000 of one-time funding to build an early warning system and this is one that is actually contracting with someone who will help us build a formal early warning system similar to what we
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do with academic priority students of students that are likely to struggle how are we identifying and monitoring them making sure that they're getting but doing that system wide and tracking and making sure they're getting the services that they need and again one-time one-time fun were you looking at adding is that somebody's phone extended responsibility for high school teacher leaders this one is looking at adding the ability to adding to consolidated budgets for the high schools the ability at the comprehensive high schools to add four extended responsibility to do four teacher leaders we have i think it goes four for all the comprehensives four for benson three for jefferson two for alliance and one for mlc so that every everyone with high school age students has has some of this uh some of these dollars athletics we did a significant ad in the current budget nine hundred thousand dollars this year that was primarily focused on student safety we're looking at the an ad of another five hundred thousand dollars in the coming year in addition to the nine hundred thousand that is still focused on student safety which largely means adding coaches trainers transportation and it's really working to build back the supports for us to be doing a robust athletic program some of this is going to build the feeder programs in the middle schools and the particular thing about this 500 000 is we're moving the dollar amount we gain from gate fees in the general fund which right now feeds the general fund we're now saying okay we'll move that amount into athletics and allow them to have if they start to exceed this have that feed the athletics budget rather than the general fund so it's a baseline moment that they can start to end up being revenue generating oops sorry um next two are adding social workers one for dropout retrieval and another one that is a high school social worker that will be matched by multnomah county that allows us to actually supervise other social work interns so it allows us to expand and then finally ap ib and dual credit materials will be part of the the one-time list that you'll see at the end okay then there is another group of central supports to students in schools that includes avid support and expansion so this is really in the in the roosevelt and madison clusters where we have avid at the which is advancement via individual determination and really is a support program for students to be able to access more advanced courses and be college college going college ready we're going to build this back through the cluster down into the feeder schools online learning we've been building this capacity over time and this allows us to add one more certified teacher to do what blended learning so really supporting kids who are doing online learning sun schools and again this one is has been leveraged between the city and the county and the school districts over many years we are losing funding for three sites that will where this funding will allow us to maintain those three but also add an additional three sites uh and again that's leveraged across all of our partners so it's really six sites that we get for this this dollar amount we have rosa parks proposing to do a balanced calendar or a year-round calendar this is what it will cost us to do that you're going to hear more about that in the substance of the meeting today as part of the calendar presentation self-enhancement at jefferson this again was the other part of the partnership with pcc jefferson high school and self-enhancement to do the wraparound service that's supporting those students be doing the middle college this is again we've added a year each year so we're doing full school model and this is the wraparound support care teams this is part of our equity work and really looking at how we're building culturally responsive instruction across in our classrooms across the district and infrastructure for and staffing for doing this a lot of this is one one coordinator position but much of that is subtime adding a regional tag coordinator at english language arts tosa in translation interpretation adding spanish and aroma capacity and then we're increasing schools consolidated budgets by approximately three percent this is a big deal this is another thing that people have not seen an increase in in years and it's really the the dollars that um that schools have some control over to do the things that come up at their building building efficiency this is a person who is monitoring all of our
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automated controls for um for building functioning that allows us to gain the efficiencies in use of utilities and bills and it actually pays for itself i just put it in here because it's one of the things that we're doing that allows us to keep dollars going to the classroom groundskeepers steve buell please note this one so this is adding two more staff for groundskeepers and over on the one-time ads you will see equipment so that they actually have mowers to um to do the grounds and i will say when we i did this this morning with principals this was the one that was like so um and then finally our equity in public purchasing and contract policy implementation and monitoring it's 37 000 that is the um basically implementation of this policy and monitoring that that it people are experiencing what we're intending uh as it actually hits the ground finally the one-time investments and this is again if this list would take us down to four percent in contingency reserves on the one-time investments most of these you've already heard at some other section that it connected to but the early warning system for our high school students this is our english language arts and english language development curriculum materials which was a budget proposal last year and was postponed because we didn't have the dollars for it this one 1.6 million dollars but proposing to actually do that adoption this year the dual immersion curriculum materials necessary to do the um dual immersion expansion the apib and dual credit materials science pd that is a finish up of some science bds so it is actually one time this year uh i t refresh so continuing to do the refresh on our computers the high school equipment and computer labs specifically targeting career the clarendon tenant improvements and the groundskeeping equipment so that's the list of things that actually support much of what you saw in the people capacity but allowing us to actually these things allow us to actually do those things compensation is another piece of the budget all of these things actually happen in our bargaining with all of our employee groups and this year probably the most notable thing is just the fact that we will actually be doing some kind of an increase for every employee group which has not been the case for a long time so just to say okay i'm really pleased with that too okay the list of things that are did not make it onto the list but are in the wings in case like so right pending update of our local option revenue projections and i say this because this actually actually gets calculated on a property by property basis and we don't like we can guess but we don't really know it yet so we're holding a list of things that were on the on the high priority but didn't make it all the way in this one people are grimacing that it didn't make it in yet so it's more i.t staff to con support the implementation of synergy an affinity group coordinator this is part of the equity office's proposal an additional staff person for managing our charter schools which has grown in terms of what the demand is on that it's a one-person department um an additional grant writer we are having huge numbers of opportunities to respond to grants which this is one that clearly benefits us if we're able to respond effectively and support buildings responding increasing our translation and interpretation services and internal auditor tv services and communications and public engagement and these are for significant processes that we are expecting to conduct and need to support if we're expecting to conduct them so there's that list we'll come back to if in fact we have additional dollars to work with next steps so tomorrow school staffing begins so what i just described to you as the school staffing principals have it we will load our the school staffing programs and principals will start staffing their schools that process continues on until april 4th i believe so that one's one that like it begins but it goes on for a while i will then be conducting listening sessions this next week so pta is hosting one on march 18th the citizens budget review committee i'm meeting with them on the 19th and we're doing andrew a student one on march 10th that andrew is hosting uh in supersaf is that right mr march 20th um that andrew is hosting or not the super sac is hosting on march 31st we are back here and i actually propose a budget so i'm assuming much of it will look like
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what i've just done for you however it could change based on things that people contribute or say as in the next two weeks then it goes to the board board and between march 31st and may 19th the board acts as the budget committee so the board is our budget committee and they include at least one public hearing usually they do multiples by may 19th the budget committee approves the budget and then june by june 23rd the board adopts the budget so that's the full trajectory of of what happens and i'm just going to say you've been a very receptive audience people mostly stayed way tuned in and that was a whole lot of detail to be absorbing so with that i will pass it back to the board you can ask questions and somebody may be able to answer or you can give me issues that you want more on or whatever you yeah although i'm going to tell you that you mostly have done your discussions about the substance here that you've had discussions about anybody have anything else well we just right and then you know obviously isn't the last time we'll be discussing the budget yeah so exactly okay can we just ask a couple sure we're just trying to fly through what you have 10 on page 6 10.25 fte which is sustaining an increasing support for focus and priority schools is that above the eight percent allocation that's something yes that's those are um specifically ads for focus and priority schools that um yes it goes as a non-formula ad and that's is that specifically for six schools who are losing funding or is that or newly added they've become newly added focus on priority schools yes so maybe it's important can we get a list of those again so that was the king that just went off madison that just went off george that just went on i mean sorry lee that just went on and voice elliott so those are humble sort of the ones that had six support okay um when i'm looking at the teacher ratios on page eight changes in elementary schools wait what twenty one page eight i mean page line eight i'm sorry slide sixteen page eight um the middle school ratio improves it it seems significantly less than the k5 or k8 ratio so can you just kind of walk us through how those were made right how those decisions were made because in the k5 and k8s they need to add the elementary planning time specifically so we had to give them the capacity to do the elementary planning time which is straightforward for some and requires the addition of electives and others okay that's helpful so um carol i'm really looking for your next one on slide 23 just in terms of the additional um for two days for professional development to reduce impact on focus and priority schools so that's outside of the school year so that means fewer days where there's you can talk more about that um so yes so the focus and priority schools um we've had that issue of that they both need more professional development but those are the kids who must need to have their futures with them so that conundrum yes so what we did is give ourselves the ability within the teachers contract to add additional professional development days for the focus and priority schools that's dependent on the budget so this year we're saying yes add two um and it is it up to the individual school how they schedule those days so it could be that they use the um teacher in service day which we right now do not pay for that could be one of those days okay um it could be that they out of date at the beginning of the year but not during the regular instructional calendar right it's in order to preserve the instructional calendar and use that as instruction time they but still do the required professional development that is expected of focusing priority schools and not provided any additional funding for from the state i just say that for the many many every time i bring that up it also is a mechanism that if a sig school had a grant that would allow them to afford to add another day for their school specifically they they could add the third day as an individual school so because we've got the ability to okay so in a number of these you're combining support both for the schools that had the school that's significant in fusion of funding through the school improvement grant that's going away and for focus and priority schools yes okay but it's for this one is really targeted
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preserving instructional time for students and this was like i will say p-a-t this was one of their things that they really advocated for as a way that we had instructional time so on slide number 26 on page 13 for early learners slide number 1 26 page 13. i guess i'm still struggling to understand the early learner funding piece and what comes out of the general fund or how that's funded because i think our general fund typically is for k-12 students so i'm i'm still struggling to understand this piece can you get into that a little bit better with us so harriet probably did a more complex job than i will be able to do for you this is part of why we showed you all the streams that it funds so head start is some of the funding for it title is some of the funding for it um but it looks like you were taking some out of title funding and wanting it to be funded as a general fund we are so we're taking something out of head start so i'm take asking to move the right the director who previously was a general funded position that we moved is harriet there come on up harriet come on up and answer these questions of moving that person back to the general fund so it allows us to pay for classrooms out of head start so come on up harriet this is yes what would you like to do hi harriet and actually i'm going to give you my slide on this so you can see what was up right here so harriet i was specifically asking about early learners budget so we want to return funding of head start director to the general fund so take that out of the head start fund and we want to pay for a director of early learning so that's 320 000 between those two so i guess i'm still trying to understand whether we are basically using k-12 funding to pay for pre-k okay what you're doing with the director of early learners it's not just for pre-k it's overseeing things like the early kindergarten transition program it's the move to uh full decay basically overseeing all of these programs that we're getting ready to start so that's actually overseeing those programs that's the role of that director the head start directors used to be paid out of general funds and then when the money got tight in the general fund and there was more money in the federal dollars in the days when all the money with all the a's that's how i always reference it came about we shifted the head start directors into the federal dollars and um freed um so that they had money to be able to continue the same amount of services to the head start program even though um yeah so that they can they didn't get a cost of living increase for head start so what they did was they moved the head start directors out of uh general fund into the head start dollars that allowed us to be able to have some um flexibility with the title one money i mean it was just there's so many different pots that pay for this that we were able to then um have the cost of living increase that the teachers got in the salary but we didn't get in the federal dollars that were allocated to us so now what we're trying to do is recoup all of the above so now that we have an increase in the general fund dollars we'd like to move the administrative cost of head start out because head start dollars typically in portland have always only paid for classroom they pay for educational assistance they pay for the community the wraparound services they pay for the teachers they pay for the snacks they were not paying for the administrative oversight until about three to four years ago and is the director of early learning a new position all together it's a new position um and this we're actually saying is part of how we're supporting our early literacy and really supporting kids readiness for school i mean this is part of a statewide and county-wide um like emphasis on really preparing kids to be ready for school and and is replicated in our program at the ramona at that we'll be at fabian it will be at the part of what so these are all connected the early kindergarten transition how are we getting kids during the summer prior to kindergarten i mean so we've got numbers of programs that become part of this same effort and right now you have multiple people who have jobs that are not necessarily designated for that who are doing that work and you just want to make sure that you have a coordinated aligned program so you need to have some somebody whose job it is to make certain that all the pieces fit together and that's what the director of early learning would do okay i have is the 41
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000 general fund money for and 41 one thousand four staffing operations yes yes yes okay so that's coming from the general fund yes okay so the one point bobby doesn't does that answer your question yeah and i guess that i the 1.4 million up above is what's leveraged with that with the other funding sources but the yeah the number that you're seeing on the that's a general fund number and yes can you do that um our is that are those dollars that really are k through 12 that we're now using for pre-k yes but we're do we are doing that i mean we are doing that and we have been doing that we have two things on community engagement and we have next steps so that's page 2 and page 17. community engagement we do have the district employee leadership stakeholder team but i don't see anything that really focuses in on teachers themselves and then when we get back to the next steps we have superintendent listening sessions pta's the citizen budget review committee super sac but there's no listening session for teachers or our employees i'd just like to suggest maybe that we should have a listening session for the teachers themselves where they could come and ask questions since they're the ones who really know probably the best that's one that's one comment and i gotta go through my notes here sorry on the school staffing which is on page six at the top are all yeah i'm okay thank you yeah i can almost read that a little no pretty close uh i don't have those young eyes like greg yeah i have one i have mine but i look bad on tv with them d uh are all 150 kids i mean are all 150 staff that we're going to add working directly with students yes they're all pat members and so what they can be teachers librarians counselors social workers so and working directly so they're not ptosis in this so like when i'm doing the teacher mentor that's out that's not in that group okay no ptosis is in the one no it's okay it's against doses but okay just checking that out those you also you saw show up in the central um central supports for schools students and schools ptosis on uh page eight slide looks like 16. uh it says support third grade reading milestone goal early literacy so what is that what does that actually mean so it could mean that it's looking at prioritizing lower class sizes in your early grades it could be an instructional specialist that's focusing with your you know early grade teachers like i mean school specific reading specialist who's doing individual groups with kids so different schools are going to prioritize that in a different way but one of our big priorities as a district is getting 100 and as an achievement compact advisory committee is getting 100 of our kids reading and reading to learn by third grade so so things that you would prioritize like we've prioritized kindergarten class sizes staying 25 or less and that's the one place we actually have named a class size or said if you go above 25 then we'll add a educational ea if um if we don't have another classroom or if you have just you know it doesn't make sense to you have a couple kids over 25. but it's a school-based decision exactly could literacy coaches be involved in that school-based decision but it's stored it's yup oh what yeah number nine page nine number eighteen slide 18 yep it says staffing ratio from 25 to 23 so we're dropping two in the high schools and we're dropping less than that in the grade school yep and that's is that because of the 130 hour stuff that we're trying to wrestle with or is that because of we think the high school kids are more important than the little kids we have
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multiple things we're working on with high schools that are compliance parameters so we have an arbitration that limits the student load to 180 and an average student load that is like 134 and we have the 130 class yes we have a number of parameters we have a number of parameters we're trying to meet with that one that is part of why we've got that investment in high school well if they're if they're telling us that we have to do this at high school and we've got kindergarten i mean first grades at 32 or 33. that's are we handling we're those are we because if we're gonna if we're going to go uh generalized class size reduction which is what this looks to me like it is i have no problem with it but on a generalized class size approach you can drop a kid every place and still end up with 34 kids 33 kids in a first grade and is that only the million dollars for the mou i mean for the workload committee that's going to deal with that or are we dealing with we have other we have 30 more fte that's dealing with that that's the other 30 fte well that deal will that get all our first grade class sizes down to anywhere near 30 have we projected that so um so the kindergarten is the main one we've actually put a number on right other than that it really ends up being variation school to school by like what the grade configurations are if we have like we will invariably have something that ends up being a bubble that's working its way through a school that you'll see something weird that that the one yeah we had some this last year where we'd end up with ah like my class and it was we i mean it was unusual in the system this would let us deal with something unusual in the system that somebody could come forward and say like i'm way out of whack to everybody else because i've got this bubble of kids coming through so this could let us deal with that the 30 fte so we've got two mechanisms the 30 and the 1 million that would be things that we can mitigate anomalies but we're basically working to adjust our staffing ratio every time we have the ability to adjust our staffing ratio which is what you see us doing here so does this across the system when we're doing the across the system does this end up with some with how big a variable do we end up with on something like a first grade if we got ones up to 33 when we're all done doing the 30 fde and uh adjustment from the pat workload committee and we have 20 do we get down do we go 18 to 33 or what i mean so it seems like we would direct a little more money at that variable problem as opposed to everybody down and i just was wondering how we've thought about that so that's part of the conversation that happens between the regional administrators and the principals once staffing once we have actual kids and we're beyond the estimates and we actually have students who show up then the regional administrators and the principals are working on how do they deal with the individual situations at each school we actually did we do get a printout it's like this that of class by class number by number that at a certain point in the year that i'll be happy to provide for you so you can actually take a look at it because i i think everybody out here would probably like that which people we have provided for months now yeah so anyway yeah so you could give me that yeah there's a certain point in the staffing process that i will be able to give you okay that would be great if you would and then i can get another 200 emails in from the last time uh uh what about uh on the special ad section that's page 10 number 19. slide 19 for you greg we got ell school psychologist tosa where there's two ptosis there how do we decide to put in a tosa there instead of an actual school psychologist do those school psychologists need somebody to tell them what to do or what hang on one second i'm looking to see if melissa or mary are here to do a little more thanks melissa there's two there did you see them both melissa actually instructional specialist tosa and an ell school psychologist tosa did the ptosis work directly with children no the toasters don't i didn't think so with the children so i and i think i heard you ask however why not a uh how do we decide to do that instead of putting an actual person that's working with kids what's the decision-making process we use there so we did add to the school psychologists as well as part of the ad backs in this case it's providing support to those professionals who don't have someone to pick up the phone come out
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and coach them out at their site help them problem solve with students or support teachers in a different way so that's what toasters do and that's what each of these positions for the respective special programs is for so we think that's more valuable than an actual school psychologist who works with children that's how we've prioritized that evidently because that's where we've come up i think what we've prioritized there is having school psychologists have somebody that they're able to call and and uh provide them with support specific to their craft so they haven't had we haven't had somebody over the school psychologist who works with them like that before um not in a toasted capacity no but you know in an administrative capacity so that's a supervisory capacity and as as you know that's a pretty different relationship than a tosa capacity which is providing coaching as a peer okay thank you very much uh slide number 20 page 10 thank you miss goff this is the benson program with the kids who came in international students now i talked for a long time and i talked hang on just a second van i talked to suanne higgins who's sick today uh about a program that meets does 450 hours of intensive english instruction and then has a different over an 18-week period and so maybe a kid might only need 300 hours or something but it's very difficult to get into a classroom and actually do work if you don't have the english instruction that allows you to do that and we we average it appears to me about 90 that i the best i can make out we average about 90 hours a year per kit half an hour is the minimum state which is what we meet and so if you need about 450 hours of english instruction to be able to actually get into a classroom and it's probably a little more than that uh we're not we have all sorts of kids that so if you come in at the beginning of the eighth grade you get that 450 hours of intense english language instruction that allows you to get into your classes when you walk across the podium i mean you walk across the stage when you graduate because 90 90 90 90 that's five years and we only have 10 kids in this we should have a couple hundred kids at least in this and with four teachers what they have four four original i think they have four fte or something out there and what 10 kids or something i haven't been over there to look so i don't know but the uh but they uh i'm still making a comment thank you on the runway today uh and so what i'm wondering is can we beef that up so here's the and i'm going to let van speak to the success of the program this year this was its first year and it it hasn't grown as much as we thought it would grow this year but we're committing to how do we grow it because it's been successful for the kids who've been in it so there's some real ideas on how to do that ben you want to speak to pisa yes um good evening uh pisa has been very successful this year and i agree that we need to increase the number and enrollment in the program and that's absolutely our goal but right now pisa is a not a mandatory program it's a choice so when a student comes to poland public school as level 1 proficiency they get a choice of attending their neighborhood schools or attend pisa and so that's the choices that the students and the family makes wish at the same as any other families who have the choice choose the choice to make the choice that they want to be at so so far we have 21 students from 12 different language groups and all of the students who has been enrolled in beginning starting being in school year has earned four credits for first semesters and some of them even earn you know two credits in math because we do proficiency based and also a computer-based program so also the proficiency english level has improved tremendously because that's really what we focus on is that english proficiency so so far the data that pisa produces is really overwhelming comparing to
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you know the neighborhood school because they're so intense and they're in the small groups did that answer your question themselves oh yeah yes i think you answered uh part of that question uh the uh so if if i'm a kid and i come in from mali what do you speak in mali anybody know what language i don't i'm not sure but if i'm a kid and i come in from mali and i'm 13 years old and i'm starting the eighth grade we say and the family comes over and here's a kid who's been in refugee camps and i mean they're having a lot of trouble in molly so we're going to start getting some kids we always do all you can do is look around the world and we get those kids of course you know that and we ask them what do you want to do i mean why don't we put him in where we think he needs to be i don't understand why we would ask his family and him who's never been involved in american education ever and maybe never even been in school we ask him where do you want to go and by putting him out someplace in the building and we have to meet his needs or her needs why wouldn't we put them into this program where we have the people there to meet their needs and if you go about 18 weeks in this program then you can end up going out with a lot less problem throughout the system i mean i don't understand why we would choose that maybe you could i don't have to answer that now but yeah first of all i got comment on it i think first of all that we do not have eighth grade right now but if we do we would like to extend it to eighth grade if we have resources to allow us to do so but also that we cannot make student go to certain school because it's um office civil rights that's their right to attend the school we cannot make them attend to a school that they don't they don't want to go to and that would be violation of their rights so if we said to a student look it's a hundred times better for you if you go to this school you can go here but you're not gonna get hardly any help or you're gonna go here and you're gonna get all sorts all sorts of help we're gonna really help you get and you're gonna be able to get that english language and you're going to be then in 18 weeks be able to come out and maybe do some things in the school and the kid would say nah i want to go over here to it doesn't make okay yes okay thank you very much i appreciate it uh okay page 11. okay okay that's fine so i have one question on the general fund fte allocation so i don't know if folks in the audience have this or not but i see it here so this is talking about school-wide support at the high school level and clearly we differentiate school support in some areas in terms of administrative support based on the number of students that we're serving so the vice president vice principal allocation might change or the secretary allocation might change the council allocation we're clearly doing on a counselor to student ratio so when i look at the next six or seven boxes it seems like we're just doing a standard formula an equal formula across the board regardless of how many students we have and so i guess i want to ask if we've looked at that of late and in particular when i see something like it staff and i'm sure every high school would tell you that they need more i.t staff but you have you know one school that has 564 students and you have another school that has 1500 when you're looking at it support of a half-time i.t person how does that make sense when you have a third less students almost why wouldn't we do that allocation based a little bit more on your population of students or how many computers you're supporting in that particular building so i'm going to say sarah singer has been the lead on our district staffing team and has been totally in work in our formulas so sarah thank you yes same as a bookkeeper same with like bookkeeper everybody gets a quarter of a bookkeeper but yeah i have no idea that's why i'm asking yeah so i think it's a really good question and i think if you look at the discretionary support column that is differentiated by size so a school like lincoln does have sort of the highest amount of fte there in comparison to a smaller size school so i think the intent was that every school we know has these things at a bare minimum we don't want to dictate to schools um every position they must have in school-wide support but we want to dictate some positions that we know they all have and so everybody has a minimum at least it's a floor and then there's the discretionary topic that is correct you can build the thing that you need that's correct okay so they can add to it great that's helpful thank you
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thank you sarah and i just wanted to point out i mean just the the hard part in this as we're going to see we already heard tonight i think one comment from one school just in terms of where there was an enrollment drop there are you know there's going to be some fte cuts because there are fewer students in the building and that's going to be really hard when and we saw some of this last year too where we had that as you were talking about carol the mix of you know lower cuts doesn't feel like a good thing but it really anyway so now we're gonna have a situation where by and large this is you know great news and some really exciting reinvestments um but where there are fewer students there so by and large and although again it's could be affected by the equity formula so well and there are nine schools that will be in that position and again those will be conversations they have with their ras so there could be other things that are mitigating circumstances or you know and you again see um enrollment shifts between spring and fall so these also could be enrollments that shift between here and the time school actually starts and so again in terms of the so there's the the um the new workload committee with pat collaboratively as well as the set-aside that we've always had so again and potentially some of these situations where if you did end up as a result of that having a really hugely large lower grade classroom for example that's exactly the thing so like the 30 is all about how our actual enrollment's different than than projected or estimates and then anomalies in the system that you then you that then the ra and the principal work out this is what's going on in my building i all right i absolutely can't meet this core program requirement so like we've done solutions um in moments where we've had um in the k-8s middle grades that are too small to end up with algebra available to every kid where we'll do an itinerant algebra person who shared between multiple schools in order to solve that so it depends on what the issues are that we're trying to figure out how we solve those are the pools of fte that are available to solve them the let's look at page 12 slide 24. this is the workload committee and what you said we're going it's going to handle specific workload situations that's what this dollar amount is for okay and so and then if the workload committee makes a suggestion for the for the where to spend the 1 million it's going to still go to the administrator who will then decide if that's a good suggestion or not it's that so the committee will make recommendations to the chief academic officer who also is working with the regional administrators with the 30 set-aside fte and part of that is so that you've got a coordinated response to the different kinds of problems being solved there and part two the discussion we had during contract negotiations when we were establishing the workload committee is you could end up with a world of workload issues that is bigger than the one million where the committee itself didn't want to feel like okay now we have the expectation and they're the ones who are getting blamed for not being able to solve the issues they're going to identify them they're going to you know think about what the problems are but they're going to recommend it and we have a here's the designated amount of money we have to solve them it then becomes they're not the ones finally holding the bag saying okay no no no to the things we can't address we're the ones still you know having just i'm the one really who willing to say okay when it when your language is specific workload situations can they pretty much go wherever they want i mean is that what we're saying i mean for instance you got some school i've heard about that does uh color code you have to turn in your lesson plans all the teachers school and color code them all right well maybe uh decide well okay you gotta turn them all in but you don't have to cover code and that saves you time can we do that i mean can this workload committee say no we're not gonna we're we're going to suggest doesn't have anything to do with money but we're going to suggest that you that you don't require lesson plans of people at any of our schools and you certainly don't color code them so here's can they go that direction do you think there's two charges to the workload committee one is the specific um situations that occur that we're looking for some kind of immediate resolution to so they don't become chronic and they don't become legendary that's this one thing that we then think is systemic when it really is one classroom because we can go in and solve it so that's one set of the other is to identify workload issues that are more systemic which may become recommendations for the next budget cycle this is one we're seeing you know this is chronic this is one that's you know we really need to put a priority on
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this and really looking at what constitutes workload issues so we said one of the things we want this committee to grapple with is what what are the workload issues what are things that are an initiative but then they become part of your ongoing practice so when does it stop becoming an initiative and start becoming this is how we do what we do are there things when you add them that you let go of something else so there's a bunch of the and we actually identified a number of issues that we're aware of right now that we said this would be the right committee to take it on and think about it and give recommendations but if some teacher in that community said we ought to look at this then they can do the committee will discuss where relative value is putting that up in the uh we've got the early learning person in charge of those three schools and we have that person director early learning at 160 000 a year i assume that includes benefits and everything else what do you make for a salary to get up to 160 thousand dollars a year for benefits it seems i don't know maybe i can apply gold couldn't be on the sign up there oh i don't know some people kind of get away with doing some of that stuff i don't know anything hardly at all about early learning but that was so what's the answer to that and you know what i may need harriet to come on up here too because i don't or david so well the early learning director what is the salary and benefit thing there so we have steve we have several other things on the agenda and people who are here to speak and we're already 20 minutes over so i if you can pick a couple that you are most important and just real quick do the rest of them offline how do you want to do offline well you can just superintendent superintendent or one of her designees that could answer your questions anyone who asks questions sure the rest of us and then we're aware and then we aren't duplicating the same questions and we're aware of it here each other's questions i don't have them as questions like that it's very hard it takes a lot of time this is really a question time not comments this is for questions right now because we do have a lot of other things on the agenda and guests who are waiting to speak so generally this is a question if you don't make a comment it's very hard to put your question in context and so i like to ask the questions in context that's why i make comments on top of the question the question on the table let's let's just move ahead though director of early learning how is the salary calculated the 160. so the 160 is not a salary the 160 salaries and benefits there's a salary scale and the midpoint of that salary scale is what we budget with a new position the midpoint of the salary scale is somewhere around 112 dollars and the other the other money is the benefits that go with that so it's pers it's fica it's um health insurance and benefits thank you very much i appreciate that thank you guys so you want what you're telling me is you want me to park these questions and maybe i can sit down with the superintendent to answer them what i'd like like to happen so that we can move ahead is if anybody on the board has questions who especially if you've asked quite a few already if you could just go ahead and i think ruth's idea of having us go ahead and write those out so that everybody on the board can hear your question and then we'll all get the same answer because that's really why we meet like this so that we can hear each other's questions and get the answers at the same time and not have to ask the same questions of the staff over and over again so but go ahead a couple more it's okay no that's fine i'm not going to write them out and and send them to you though i would i will sit down with the superintendent and ask them if someone wants to call me on the phone i'll be glad to tell you what they are if you really want to know that ma'am um more than happy to do that okay go ahead yes important uh carol what uh two questions um on this particular topic is um we've gone from uconn from 400 to 350 in terms of counselors ratio the recommendation is 300 what would how many more fte would it take to get to 300 um i guess hey sarah to get to the 300 it was like was it seven fte seven so it was three three additional yeah and part of this one is the tension around that we need in order to meet our like we need to be on a glide path in terms of student load that requires us to really have people in teaching classes so like that was the sweet spot of both knowing we wanted to
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add to the council ratio and we need the positions to be applied as teachers plus the high school action team i think that was really compelling around the early warning system and really adding some of those social workers social workers and attendance you know and tracking that anyway just but i can see that you're weighing how to well and those we took those are not part of the 150 though so like the counselors would be coming out of the one the you know the 50 pat members going to high schools the social workers we're doing as part of centrally supported positions as opposed to um in lieu of but yes could you pull three more or pull three more t teachers and have them be counselors and get us to the one to three hundred yes okay and and so then why why aren't we if it's in a really so that's what i do so this is what i'm telling you is that so in order to do the number of teachers to actually have the student loads and classes that we're required to have we need to maximize the number of people we have in those roles as teachers so and that's part of where we're just trying to again it's all sweet spots and how did we both make progress toward the one to three hundred but also maximize teaching capacity and class size which we heard as a huge issue and concern right um okay and then in uh on page 15 and slide 29 um these central this is all new added revenue to what we're doing existing or it or is this wait where are you now um slide 29. page 15. sorry so was this meant to depict additional money that we're putting into these programs or is this the total amount of money for these programs right here this for the central sport this is in it so part of the 3.75 and central support that is the um things that we are adding this year so like i'm considering what we're doing right now is the baseline we didn't take apart our baseline so the things you see on this list are in addition to things we're doing right now got it that's right is that the question that was yeah just confirming that yeah appreciate that uh and then the last question that i have is um it maybe you could just talk a little bit about the need for additional um uh the 387 on on page 11. 387 000 for capacity to recruit new teachers so given and talk about i guess our existing capacity and so we have cut our hr department significantly in recent years it was one of the we've done central cuts like significant central cuts in order to maintain when we were in cutting mode if we're adding what we've got on here like 180 teachers the number of people you interview in order to hire 180 teachers is significant and if we're really looking to recruit diverse candidate means we're traveling other places to try and invite people to come apply at portland public schools and so part of what it takes both to do the interview process the screening the recruitment the the background checks the the technical work it takes to actually bring on new hires and to do the onboarding and the training and the support to retain those new hires it is intensive work for our human resources department so this is adding the capacity for us to do that and actually some of these people i will add now in order to actually be present for the the kind of recruitment like this is a large number of people because we will also have what is our normal turnover in a given year so you i mean we're looking at a really significant number of people we're hiring and it's a 30-year investment so you have people that come into portland public schools and stay for their entire career it matters that we do a good job hiring people and that we're able to really um be timely and turn around and do the right kind of outreach and recruitment so that's what it is that's what it's for how many fte is that you know um hang on one second and i can tell you it is um oh good sean thank you sean murray who's our chief human resources officer thanks sean board members within the budget package it calls for four additional ftes as superintendent smith stated um just looking at the five-year projections in regards to retirement trends uh we average about
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200 retirements a year so if you take that 200 plus the 150 positions that we're adding on we're recruiting for at least 350 teaching positions and it's going to take quite a bit of resources on in order to track and retain those candidates it was a big group it's exciting and it's a big group yes the in terms of the uh the money that's going into high schools for career learning um it seems that that's optional it seems like it's what that it's optional for i mean in terms of the direction to high school yeah for this part of the staffing process yeah or you just no you just uh talk softly and carry a large stick no it's that um okay so there's a two different things so like the counselors where we're actually adding counselors to the the ad the school support table like we're going to go in and place those high schools are all going to receive a different amount of fte and they all have really different kinds of programs what we're saying to every high school is put priority on and this is again the regional administrator and the high school principals will work on what it looks like in each high school so it's yes it's directive in that we're saying what we want as a system is to expand our career learning opportunities but what it looks like in your school is going to be different school to school so we're not being prescriptive about ad x but we're saying expand career learning in a way it makes sense in your school because that's something we're trying to increase as a system and same with the ninth grade each one of our high schools has had really different strategies like we've consistently done ninth grade academies across all of them how every school makes that work really different who's doing what kind of double blocking and how that that works in their day looks different so like but we're saying do things that help you whatever your strategies are focus on those for ninth grade success so those are the two things we're calling out and otherwise it's you know the schools get to figure out the things that make sense for them you've also got on slide 28 the high school support strategies with specific cte investments there which are centrally supported so you got both the strategies happening at the school and you've got the centrally supported strategies got some big grants plus we just got two big grants from the state one that was benson specific and one that was system-wide okay yeah no that's awesome so for me just understanding which we're not going to do now because it takes too much time but well but some of this stuff is in order to like when we're doing the grants we're also doing the things that are our pieces of the grant that are our matches to the grant that is how we make the whole thing work and how we're able to leverage the external resources yeah so okay thank you bobby did you say you have one more question yeah thank you just in terms of so first of all this is incredibly exciting and it's just so nice to be working on a budget where we're not cutting oh my god completely feels completely different so thank you um editions of resources allow um you didn't mention the ombudsman do we already have that we and we added that the in the budget amendment and we're in the hiring process for that right now so that and anything we added in this amendment is carrying forward so we we also i will say so other significant things we added in the amendment some of which are just in the process so you don't feel them yet because we haven't actually hired the people yet but we added somebody to coordinate discipline we added an ad for increasing restorative justice we added the ombudsman um anyway those things will be ones that were then continuing on we added the 68 classified staff which i was really careful to call out because people's needing to know that we're going to continue those things we're going to continue those things so the two i just want to highlight under editions of resources allow is one is the grant writer we have been really successful of like you talked about the energy efficiency position would pay for it it strikes me that that one would likely pay for itself too it comes out of different budgets but it would probably be a really smart place for us to be thinking about and the other question i had was just about the internal auditor is this in addition to what the school board already has yeah this is more about our own ability to follow up on um internal things requiring internal audits it's different you guys are much more program effectiveness kind of audits this one's more like in terms of our own management of the district ability to go pursue something if it's like okay something's a miss can we go audit something that's really good yeah thank i you wanted to echo director reagan your comments about how exciting this is um and from from the discussions that we've had previously about priorities and what i've heard from my colleagues about what folks were looking for about targeted
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investments but also still a significant effort to bring down the ratio in in schools and i appreciate parents coming out and talking about still the anomalies in the system and how do we address those because i think those are real real things my daughter has 35 kids in her fifth grade class um but it's an anomaly and i recognize that throughout the school at the same time it's still her only year in that school so i just want to say how exciting this is and again i hope um one that two things could happen is now that folks see that there is additional resource people could begin to really hunker for their pet project and that's that's how we could spend our next month and a half about it or we can be really thoughtful about saying how do we best leverage resources is this the right balance and so i'm just really looking forward to hearing those discussions from our community i'm looking forward to hearing the the comments and the feedback that you get through your listening sessions um and i just wanted to uh remind folks uh that the the steps that the legislature took um got us got us to change direction and that they began to stop the disinvestment but this budget no matter no matter whether it's 20 million dollars we just aren't anywhere close to still providing the education our students deserve in this district or statewide and so i'm hopeful that you all will continue as we move into the 2015 2015 biennium still work with us to the legislature to increase this investment because you will consistently hear people say we need more teachers we need more of this and it's not always about more more more it's about being targeted in investments that's what i appreciate about your recommendations so far um but it is also about needing more because they're just our students are needing that attention so thanks so one other thing i'd like to add is there was a request for another listening session for teachers specifically and we've added one on thursday night at five o'clock here so and we'll publicize it so thursday this thursday five o'clock in this very location so look at that last question i know i'm coming late late well everybody okay now can you send out the it's not my actual last question about this last question i'm asking the on on page 16 slide 31 have ela eld curriculum materials 1.6 million does that include any of the reading materials that we passed on last year that we're trying to get in for for kids who are really struggling in reading in fact melissa knows this conversation because we had it today so she knows and it is if this includes what we were talking about today so what you have before you includes the sixth seventh and eighth grade band of reading materials so that that proposal is 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th grades it doesn't include the ones for the little kids who are really struggling that we talked about i think we should look at that and maybe maybe think about sneaking that in there someplace thank you nicely done steve so this is what comes with having a pre conversation right before the morning yeah it's good thank you guys thank you so thank you uh esl to everybody all my colleagues um great questions and i know that this is just the beginning we all know this is just the beginning and next into the listening sessions and i hope we'll have a big turnout from our community at those sessions so pay attention and get those dates off the website and um please come and and let us know what you're thinking and i have to say along with my colleagues here i am so excited about the fact that this year we are spending have you have money to spend instead of having having to make those cuts like we have for so many years and that people are here to talk about what we can add in instead of trying to save programs that they love so it's great to be able to have those programs and be thinking about what we can add in in the coming year and i would also echo greg's comments about continuing to talk to the legislature because that addition was wonderful but it doesn't even come close to the quality education model we know that all of our children deserve so continue to work with us down at the legislature and talking to them about how to fund education to the level where we should be funding it in this state so with that we're going to move on to the next piece of our agenda or presentation about go noodle and i'll do it so kabula westbrook i'm going to ask you to come
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on up and i think we may have lost our principles who we were did we do we still have them here no they're still here great so we actually um when we were introduced healthteacher.com this was a partnership between legacy and dorm becker and it was a big deal when we were rolling it out and we now have schools that have been using it that are going to get recognized for their use of it but we wanted to just bring it back before you as now it is something we're actively using and give you an opportunity to experience it so experiential ed teacher you'll get a break uh thank you very much for allowing me to be here uh my name is cava westbrook i'm with healthteacher and as the superintendent just mentioned this is a partnership between doernbecher children's hospital and randall children's hospital it's a five-year partnership or a five-year sponsorship for the portland public school district and i'm gonna get off of here and let's see so there are two products here that are available to portland public school teachers one is healthteacher.com and the other is gonoodle.com i'm just gonna give you a quick overview here of healthteacher.com this is a k-12 health literacy resource that is available to all the teachers and i'm in the process of going around and educating and training the teachers on how to use this resource i can tell you that across the country we've actually partnered with other districts across the country and have implemented curriculum maps and that sort of thing for other schools um but what you see here there are over 300 health literacy lessons on this site we're adding new ones every day there are ways that teachers can access them they're basically each lesson has four components to it they've got usually a powerpoint component that gives students the gist of the lesson then they've got an um some sort of reading q a type of reading comprehension and then a hands-on activity and then either an assessment or a rubric and one great thing about these lessons is they are all common core aligned with english language arts and math so that is just a brief synopsis of health teacher now let's go to the fun stuff go noodle uh as you can see we have a saint patty's day theme going on right now go noodle we have over 35 what we call brain breaks think of them as games that the students can play throughout the course of the day and i will quick and and one of the things that the students love you see here this is their champ uh the champ starts out kind of small and the at each level they'll grow arms heads legs get bigger get stronger what have you and i'll click over here to the games and you can see here we've got 35 over 35 different games we have partnered with zumba so the kids can zumba in the classroom we have partnered with the us olympic track and field team so here this is really great because the the actual an athlete will come on for a couple minutes talk to the kids about how they got involved in the sport uh losing the kids up show them how to do these activities at their desk everything here in go noodle is focused on desk side movement three to five minutes and then you move on to the next the teacher can move on to the next thing so again over 35 we have several that uh four here that are common core aligned with english language arts math freeze it the kids dance this covers addition subtraction geography uh colors prime numbers so the freeze-it is a new one that we put in that covers a lot of different subjects body spell this is great this is for terrific for kinesthetic learners uh because they see it they well first excuse me they hear it they see it then they do it think ymca so they are spelling out the letters um word jam another one for english language arts and then mega math marathon this one uh the students math questions come up then uh the students answer the teacher and can check yes or no if they get it right then they sprint for 15 seconds and again all this is done desk side
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right there so let's uh let me uh up out of here where did my sound go hang on there we go so if everyone will stand up please audience included audience out of your seats audiences you lose them so what we're going to do here is and then when you see the question come up shout out and answer for me 10. all right so sprint in place come on you can do it you can do it another type of thing here at the top this is great the idea here is i'll let you sit down so all right that was helpful so we went up a little bit it gets you can see how this gets them up gets them moving and it's just a teachers love it students love it and we'll move on all right so in february we did the go noodle be a champ contest across portland public schools k through 8 schools um the criteria here was that you had to use go noodle at least 20 actually excuse me at least 17 times during the month of february it was 20 we dropped it down once we so those snow days got thrown in there so 17 times during the month of february the winner gets an olympic athlete olympic track and field athlete to come to his or her classroom and go noodle with the kids so some data for you again february through the 3rd through the 28th so 50 pre-k through 8 schools participated 313 teachers participated and i can tell you to show the success of this 313 teachers participated 150 qualified to have the olympic athlete come to their school and i can tell you other districts across the country that's really really impressive we did this in boise only 20 teachers qualified all right so what that translates to over 6200 brain breaks like you just saw were played in classrooms across pps 16 000 plus minutes of vigorous physical activity for portland public school students and what that translates to is just shy of 300 000 student minutes really really impressive numbers the winning schools king elementary and forest park elementary um in fact i believe yes megan is still here she was the top user throughout the entire district so she will have on april 15th um we're still working on the olympic athlete but we'll be heading to her classroom and that is all i have for you questions thank you that's just a quick question sure um so it seemed the times i've seen it used it's kind of this where the teacher kind of logs in and then the kids all kind of use it as a full classroom um folks aren't really entering their own data like that assessment it's not some collecting student data is that right or student level data like as a kid i'm not logging in and you're checking my progress server no no no no correct it's it's all we we can track that for me from the teacher so we know that the teacher's using it when the teacher originally activates their account they'll put in i have 30 students in my classroom so we can we can track it that way and teachers that want to request that you come work with them on how to get going on this how do they um they can they can get to me um either from my email cable.westbrook at healthteacher.com um or if they go to let's see yep that's the best way it's just email and i've been reaching out to principals and i've getting uh principals coming getting feedback from them getting them to sign up and already getting a couple of sessions starting for the fall so those professional development days and it's only only takes about 30
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minutes for me to take the teachers through how to use it and and it's just uh the response has been just great awesome thank you for working with us thank you and for doing the demo steve yeah steve all right how much time does it take to do i mean is there a set period of time for each of the games you showed games but you had also all these other things involved that we didn't see right so um each of these is only three to five minutes and if it's like we just did a minute we didn't even do a minute 45 seconds it's uh the teacher can decide how long that is used um how long they use it uh so it really is up to the teacher if the kids get back on track and you know they know okay if we do this if we just do this for two minutes uh then then we're going to be back to learning or a lot of teachers will use it guys let me just get you through this and then we're going to do a brain break use it as a carrot kids love it do you do you know what our do we have an art curriculum i mean a health curriculum at say fourth grade i mean are we actually doing and and i like this stuff it's fun and i've taught elementary school a long time and that would have been a nice thing to have get those kids out and move a little get back to work you know i mean we when we went away from recess it was a big mistake but but uh do we have a health curriculum because i've been wondering this question and this is is this frankly no offense to the common core people i don't care if it's aligned to the common core at all i would hope it wouldn't be but it sounds like it is but is it aligned somewhat to our health curriculum do we have a health curriculum and we have a scope and sequence k one two three four five it's aligned to common core standards yes so it's we've it's kind of a new nice part about this health curriculum is because health is such an evolving field it also every day they add lessons well do you have uh i mean do do we have do we have a certain amount of time that a fifth grade teacher will say or fourth grade teacher is supposed to do health a week yes and and and how much time is that i'd have to review we just received it today but i want to say melissa where are you 30 60 minutes a week that's from the top of my head but we have that we have the sheet and we ensure that those minutes are spent and we ensure they're we see them in the teachers plans yes they're delivered we got to write those up yes okay uh and otherwise they wouldn't do it probably huh i don't know but okay thank you i'll look some more i'll look some more into it maybe thank you thank you very much really appreciate it tanya thank you for coming up lots of fun and thanks for congratulations to our winning schools and winning teachers okay we're going to take a three minute break three thank you yes
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so okay back from our break we're gonna go ahead and move on to our next um agenda item which has to do with the calendars we have three separate items uh superintendent smith would you like to introduce this i would so um i'm going to ask amanda whalen who's the advisor to the superintendent and rudy rudolph who has been the uh chair of our calendar committee to come up and present this and the first item will be a discussion about snow days for the current calendar year oh just listen good evening so what you have in front of you is a draft resolution that would add two additional instructional days at the end of the school year specifically june 2nd and
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june 13th to make up for the two and a half days we missed in february due to snow days it also mentions that we had three facilities issues at three different schools so at wilson we had one day where we had it for a broken water main at stevenson 1.5 days for lack of heat and at ainsworth one day for a broken sewer pipe as you know we just received confirmation from the oregon department of education that we have met all of our instructional hour requirements this allows us to stay on track in order to be able to do that and actually all three of these are coming tonight for discussion but they come back on the 31st for vote so like the tonight is really discussion and getting information yeah okay any questions or comments around adding days for snow yes um we had set aside snow days in the calendar and so is there any cost associated with this or no there'd be i mean minimal costs are no that's what i recalled and yes they're already pre-designated in the calendar that in the event of snow days they're already yeah okay i would be remiss if i didn't mention that my daughter had great protest over this she thought it was ridiculous that we were adding two additional days at the end she thought our snow days were just fine thank you very much but thanks for bringing this okay okay shall we move on to uh the calendars so second presentation is the calendars for 2014-15 and 2015-16 and again um reporting from the calendar committee hi so um what you have in front of you is um are the two calendar draft calendars again for 2014-15 and 2015-16 and a draft resolution to go with those um so some of the exciting work that happened in the calendar committee this year was that we were able to put forth two calendars where we moved parent-teacher conferences to october which is something that has been discussed for a long time of parents and teachers wanting those conferences earlier in the year this moves them off of the week of thanksgiving and puts two instructional days in that week the monday and tuesday and puts the conferences back in october the other thing is that we as superintendent smith mentioned earlier we're adding two additional instructional days this year um for the 1415 school year where labor day falls on september 1st we would be adding that day we would be starting on we're proposing starting on september 2nd for 2014-15 and um for the 14-15 no 15-16 school year we are proposing starting the two adding those two days before labor day which would have us starting august 28th 27th i need rudy to do the technical can i just clarify real quickly we we were given some information in our packets on this yeah and then there were two new calendars that were at our seats tonight um but one of the calendar says 2013-14 so you should have okay so what you should have is in your packets you should have had a calendar for 14 15 and for 15 16. i provided you the 13 14 calendar your seat in case there was a question about snow days i was going to direct you to that double beaches current school year in september 4th okay school year for next year um certainly when we added two days to the calendar our hope and expectation was that we would add those prior to labor day with the because we want to have the biggest impact on student achievement and so the earlier the kids are in school the more instructional hours they'll get before especially at the high school level taking you know ib tests ap tests any of the statewide so my understanding is that the calendar committee that met um had put those prior to labor day yes and so can you help me understand how we landed after labor day again because that was definitely not what i had expected was going to be the calendar right so but my under so the belief what we were trying to do was impact student achievement by having as many school days in the beginning of the year versus adding the days at the end of the year um as we said in the memo this is next year 2014 is the year where we have the earliest possible labor day it's september 1st so by adding by
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starting school on september 2nd you actually add a one instructional day before may and one instructional day after so while this is not quite what the calendar committee had recommended we also received feedback from a number of other constituent groups saying that moving this is a late time and we're not voting until you are not voting until may march 31st so this is a late time to do this change for family so many and parks programming and other camps are already set up to run all the way up until labor day this would be sort of a late moment to do that for families we are also already doing proposing the change in terms of parent-teacher conferences so that was two different sets of changes that families would have coming already on march 31st and finally we have a number of our summer bond programs which are going to have both the potential of the two additional days at the end of the school year for snow days as well as the potentially two additional days before labor day which would compress the amount of time that they have to do a lot of projects this summer so i think they were at 65 days prior to the adding of the two additional snow days they're now down to 63 i believe for those for that so this is a way where we would be adding one additional instructional day before the may 1st um compared to this year this year and then we'd be adding two additional instructional days before may 1st for the 1516 school year so when i think about the calendar committee which i have served on for 10 years it's a pretty strong representative group and i presume that they looked at all of the above and they still had us starting i believe on august 28th so i would encourage my colleagues to be thinking about whether or not we could still do that because that would allow our kids the very most instructional time um when it matters i um i am really disappointed that we are considering adding these days um after labor day and that was never the intention i don't believe as we were going through a teacher contract negotiations it was always to add the days up front and i think we have enough warning now to be talking to our contractors and others if we want to impact student achievement we need to be adding these days earlier in my opinion other comments go ahead steve is ready to go oh sure yeah i know i guess you know i i i'm comfortable with this as a compromise solution given all the different factors that that you mentioned and that we will i mean if it would be different if labor day weren't on the absolute on the very first day of september so um so i totally respect everything that bobby's saying this to me given the number all the different factors is a compromise that i could live with and then and then going into next year with with that whole year to prepare then we will actually go into august but you know we'll be starting on september 2nd which is the earliest i can i can recall so um so to me it i'm comfortable with it georgia buell what was the the teacher represented and i got an email that said the teacher representative terry harrington had some questions yet since she represents more people than everybody else put together i was wondering what her questions were she was she was on the calendar committee right and she said i got an email that said everybody was pretty much unanimous except the teacher representative who had some concerns uh the concern that she expressed during the meeting for 1415 was the fact that for elementary children and she's an elementary teacher also that the elementary children would be starting for two days in august if we did the before labor day and then they would have a three-day weekend and then they would have a first full week really wouldn't be a full week it would be four days and when you're trying to establish with elementary children a routine and set your discipline to have to the first two weeks that kids are in attendance be so chopped up um that she was hoping that we would consider starting in 1415 after labor day
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thank you uh mike i have a comment then too the uh well i actually have another question if we go back to the end october here 29th 30th and 31st which is am pm evening am pm evening and then am yes did you want me to explain what that meant no i think i know that part what i'm wondering is why we have a we mess around with the am one we're letting the teachers off to go home early because they did the evening conferences is that where that's going uh when you for every time that you have an evening conference there needs to be some type of uh compensatory right and if you have two evening conferences and those are the choices of the individual schools how they want to do that if they decide to have two evening conferences then that's two half days if if a school chose to have the wednesday thursday evening conferences then friday they would not have conferences and there wouldn't be any students and there wouldn't be any teachers required to come that's identical to what we do now but instead of in october we do that in november in the past we have had monday tuesday two days of conferences and in the case where schools did two evening conferences then wednesday before thanksgiving was no school for students again because there had been conferences and then that comp day where teachers didn't have to show they were excused for the day if however a school decided to do one evening conference then they would have day conferences and evening conference let's say on monday on tuesday they would have a day conference nothing on tuesday evening then there would be a half day for conferences on wednesday before thanksgiving and then the teachers would be dismissed and allowed to leave in the afternoon we're doing that identical setup but in october because we believe it's it's it's very beneficial for families to have an earlier communication and a formal way with teachers so we were striving to do that in october and that was a unanimous decision what's the total number of for an elementary school teacher that has 30 kids what do we figure for conference hours we figure of 30 15 hours well i'm i'm proud to say that in our district the percentage of parents who come to parent-teacher conferences is huge we get a great plan it's tremendous uh and in some cases we have families that are divorced you know divided and so a lot of our teachers are have been willing to have conferences for if they can't come together you know what i'm saying so it's difficult for me to say how many actual hours that calculates out to but if you have 30 students and you have say a half an hour for a conference and you might have to do two twice for for a family it really does add up do you or kids attend any of these days any of these three days uh they don't attend for instruction no i mean for instruction that's like no there's no actual instructions three full days but the um state of oregon counts parent-teacher conferences as days of instruction okay so that's calculated into our all right thank you very much i think this is my last question here and the compensatory time has typically been the wednesday before thanksgiving so why aren't we doing uh parent-teacher conferences on thursday and friday and then having the compensatory day on the 26th so why are we doing all why are we doing four days why are we why are we giving off on the 26th of november and why isn't that being used as a compensatory day i know people like having that day off so why wouldn't that be used as the compensatory days and you move the student teacher the parent-teacher conferences to thursday and friday during the uh calendar committee discussion uh there was that there were different options and having them monday tuesday having them tuesday wednesday wednesday thursday thursday friday that type of thing went on and overwhelmingly it didn't matter whether we were talking to elementary principals whether we were talking to
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a pat representative other related unions parents who were there representing their groups the feeling was that the 26th most families were used to and liked having that time off and i'm not disagreeing with that i'm just asking why we're not using that as the compensatory day so we have that day off and then we just have two days for parent-teacher conferences instead of three because not all by doing that you would require that all schools would do a thursday friday day and evening and right now it is up to the school and if a teacher chooses that she does not or he does not want to do two evenings that teacher would then be able to do that conferences on the half day that would be the comp day and then you would be having that teacher do conferences in october for all of their families except the ones that they would be doing on the comp day which now would be towards the end of november so to keep that consistent you would be doing wednesday thursday friday and because overwhelmingly the committee wanted to be able to have the 26th off the day before thanksgiving they thought that was important for families to still do the choice was to make that a down day for schools but the district would still be open and that was that was again a request of the majority of of the committee right so what we used to do is we used to have the two days plus that third day and what we're adding now is a fourth day that's what i'm concerned about we are now it used to be that the 26th was that yesterday so we would have monday tuesday then wednesday there is another day in the park there is another downside so now we're adding another down day but that day is being we're still having 178 days right because the problem is this is right in the beginning of the year where we're trying to get more instructional time at the beginning of the year that's what i'm concerned about as rudy points out it's only a down day if the teachers decide to do the two evening conferences so that is i mean it's because otherwise they are coming in for a half day but the students aren't coming in for a half day are they yes no students would not be having instruction students come to those conferences most often but they won't be having instruction because right so we now have four days locked up rather than three in the past so i've got a problem with that it seems that we should be able to figure that out so halloween oh yeah wouldn't surprise me if the teachers didn't think hey that's a good deal halloween is pretty hard not as hard as the day after halloween which doesn't exist on this well this is saturday yeah that would be saturday um yeah i mean those are huge i mean we're we're losing several days of instruction at the beginning of the year which was exactly what we didn't want to do i mean right now when we're starting the school year on september 2nd we're basically starting it exactly when we would have even if we hadn't added the new days and we're now losing an additional day during parent-teacher conferences so as far as i can tell we're losing days in the beginning that we could easily we actually we actually would have i'm sorry we actually would have started on uh september 3rd because we had reinstituted a planning day after um labor day last year well we've gone back and forth the last couple years we've had some years where we start the day after labor day most districts start the day after labor now so again if we want to have instruction early in the year we need to be thinking about these things and i'm actually looking for other colleagues to weigh in here because part of what this if you guys are going to vote on the 31st understand where you guys are and what you're wanting us to go back and either rework or that you're feeling like it's on the right track this is your moment which would be have we thought or you know what were the pros and cons of separating high school from the uh the k-8 so separating it internally i'm saying i'm seeing you you're saying that's a bad idea so but i wanted to ask a question in other words bring the high schools in august 28th i'm trying to respond to the concern about the elementary kids uh it's not a concern with high school kids
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well if you start on thursday and friday i mean the kids can get all their schedules in place they can get adjusted i mean i i don't buy the argument personally that it's that disruptive for kids i mean no matter what the first day or two is kind of a getting acquainted kind of time um so i don't buy the argument to start with i think the earlier we're start the better yeah and you know that way on september 2nd if we start on april uh if you start on august 28th for two days then september 2nd they come in you know you're charged you're running so i don't buy the argument to start with and bobby you were not on the calendar committee this year we had one day that we were told the calendar committee would meet and i wasn't available that day and so we had tried to see if another board member could make it and they couldn't i've been on it for 10 years i've heard all of these arguments um but to me we're losing two days early in the calendar that we should not give up if we care about instructional time so i would just i would agree with bobby on on this if you're looking for where where my head's at the earlier the better so i guess i'm not totally understanding it's been a few years since my kids were in elementary conferences so is that why can't we just do a thursday and a friday for conferences and have when i'm not why do we need three days okay it's thursday evening contractually choice a little short here happens contractually right we we can ask teachers to be at parent-teacher conferences for an evening and if we do ask them to do that we have to make up that time for a half and give them a half day somewhere else where they're off if we did it on thursday and friday for two days thursday october 30th and 31st if we did two days of conferences during the day where students are not in session but parents are coming in and if a teacher didn't want to do two evenings and you're talking about a friday evening and i'll also tell you that in our discussion with um the committee having expecting parents to come on a friday evening is you're not going to get a lot of so you don't do the evening okay you do one evening and if you do two days there aren't there aren't and there aren't enough hours to get all the parents in four conferences you need that extra half of a day whether it be two and a half days for conferences is what you're saying right a day in an evening a day in an evening or a day and evening a day and another half day that's the amount of time you need to truly get all of your students families in okay so if we did the thursday friday and we did the two evenings then we're okay i think we're okay but if we didn't do the two evenings when does that other that teacher who doesn't do the other evening do that right okay was that clear i get it's two and a half days that you need and that's that's all i need every wednesday night so okay i'm okay with it as as proposed i do think um if i think of my own situation i think you know coming for a day or two before before labor day i'm not going anywhere it's fine but i do think about some of our students who might might be the first time in school and they really need that time to kind of get there and figure out what are the routines the teachers are really trying to figure out what are their needs so i guess i i hear that you don't agree with the argument about starting and stopping starting and stopping isn't isn't that big of a deal but i and especially for this first year um as as our whole community transitions to that i guess i'm i'm comfortable with it as proposed so you realize that the following year we would start on thursday exactly what you're saying yes doesn't make sense next year that might that makes no sense i guess well on the following i'm sorry i guess the other thing that i find ironic is that we have so many people who are saying that it's so important for us to increase our instructional hours but you don't want to go to school the 26th before thanksgiving the day before thanksgiving that's ridiculous what is that i don't understand that right either either either going to school and instructional hours are really important or you want to go on vacation for thanksgiving i i'm not understanding why
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we're having a day off the day before thanksgiving i guess oh i can tell you that the committee committee felt very strongly that that that's a family time where people are preparing to do whether whether they're traveling far or they're just going across the the town and they're preparing the things that they take to the expression i also wanted to point out when you made the comment about 2015-16 we would start again on a thursday if you take a look at the 2015-16 calendar you'd start on a thursday 27 you'd have friday the 28th but then you have an entire week of school the 31st first second third and fourth you have an entire week of school before you hit that labor day weekend that was the benefit of doing that the ability to do that without having it quite so chopped up because it's the latest we were going from the earliest labor day we could have to the latest labor day most of our contractors we would know well way in advance so they could plan we could plan our summer work accordingly and i that's one of the biggest pieces for me really is making sure that the summer bond work does not get truncated or rushed or thrown off kilter just by a sudden change for this summer so it's there's a lot of moving parts here obviously so my guess is that we are putting contractor priorities in front of student achievement and i don't get that we can figure it out no we're not no we're not we could they could figure it out i mean look you guys it's more it's march now they so they have to adjust their calendar by two days yeah come in with you know i'm going to say something else that i'm i kind of bobby makes some good points but at the same time it is halloween i mean and halloween's a huge thing to uh i mean you know and i do think that i did like that 26 the day before thanksgiving i do like that for people to move but i am a big time bobby what bobby's saying makes very good sense to me but so that doesn't help you at all so really i'm kind of not up but i do have a comment of where i would like to have a huge change here that's what i want to hear i mean truly i'm going to say right now is your opportunity if you guys are looking to have anything come back to you i do differently than what you've got right now right now you kind of have people weighing each other out well as you bring in two of them and we can vote the uh that's how i think you should do it uh instead of bringing in one based on what we think bring in uh okay then should i tell my other one all right we spent 1.9 million dollars to get two more days in the calendar because we care about the days well i'm going to get you three days for free doesn't cost you a dime and actually helps kids to a huge degree because they're in school and that's we eliminate all those late openings everyone we dump them all and the deal the reason you do that is we have 72 hours of professional development that we can use throughout the year which comes to about 10 days worth of we have 10 days worth of professional development built in here because of our two-hour nobody else you know when i was teaching up at covington middle school up in vancouver we we had one day of faculty meetings a month for an hour you don't need all i mean there's a lot of time in those faculty meetings we're filling time a lot of it and it's not like there aren't people use it i'm sure you go out and some people really use it but a lot of what we're doing doesn't make sense so here's three more days you guys who are talking about days here's three just dump every one of the late openings we don't have late openings anymore and do your professional development after school on mondays for two hours and it takes it's it's huge we also have some professional development days built in here at the start which we have you have to be careful really i don't even like professional days built in at the start in those three days teachers come back to school they don't really want to sit in a meeting what they want to do is set up the room what they want to do is organize for their if we expect teachers to be organized to give them for to take their time at the beginning of the year you guys talking about early
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time we want our teachers ready to go because you can actually sit down at the start of the year and if they give you a day and a half you're not ready to go you're coming in other times but you're really not ready to go we should be going three days maybe have a little bit of get together at the start and then dump all these late openings we have plenty of time gives you three extra three days it's huge so we moved from one do you have 179 now no you got 182. you're welcome thank you um you know i'm not really sure um i think we can all agree that uh this isn't really ideal but i'm not sure what i would change you know i don't really have an in-depth knowledge of calendars um i don't really have a problem with starting on the the 27th actually um i i don't think that's a huge issue for me but i i agree with the the concern about losing a day you know one more day um which would be you know the 26th or the 25th um yeah i do have a problem with that but again i'm not sure how that would be remedied so so i don't want to put you on the spot but i think i will only on late opening days what did you use those for think back to when you were a freshman sophomore um light opening days you know that actually is pretty hard to remember oh slipped in probably that's why you don't remember well well i'm trying to think yeah yeah well i don't think we had uh it wasn't a tutorial period right back then it wasn't like we didn't was when my sons were there and they used it but i was curious if they're still using part of that well we don't have uh the two hour late opening in high school anymore so we we have the we get dismissed early on at least at grant it's uh tuesday and wednesday so i know some students use that when we met with supersac we actually talked about that use of time and a lot of students told us it's really valuable to them but again that's not the two-hour late opening for us that's something different so this is the same kind of thing it's the same kind of thing but again some kids use it and some don't so just curious questions superintendent smith yep oh great i was just going to point out that i um i like moving the conferences earlier in the in the year um i i long for the day when we actually have at least two conferences throughout the year that if we could do a spring check-in i hope that we can work toward that at some point and i also what i appreciate not just about an earlier connection with parents in the year but i also appreciate that it was actually removed from that november time frame because i have heard of teachers setting taking the time to set up conferences and then parents being gone but not because not because of some family tragedy or crises but just because they were going on vacation and that feels disrespectful to it to our staff and our professionals so i just appreciate that that relocation takes care of some of that issue agreed agreed thank you superintendent smith you have everything you need not just they have a whack a dude one of the things that would be really helpful just uh following up on what director bules said is we've been doing these late openings now for a couple of years and my understanding is that the teachers actually really wanted that at the time because it allows more professional development within their school but i guess i would like an assessment on whether or not that is an effective use of time or whether we should keep the full days or whether we should get rid of them all together so i i actually would like to get more information on that and what we've learned over the last couple of years and if it is more effective okay and i'll tell you yes what we were doing at the point that we um converted to doing the late openings was going from the things where they were more considered drive-by kind of maybe you can even go someplace else to go do your pd just saying we want site based with our colleagues you know and i remember the union actually one it was a higher education for that as the show i'm not sure well and i will say in the conversations we've had about trade-offs in the high school schedules a huge thing has been not wanting to let go of pd time so i will say that's been a high value there but yes we can get you some more information on the late start i know what i'm gonna say hopefully you gleaned some some some gems of where to go next okay
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so the next piece of part is rosa parks they're the same concepts just apply to our two years yeah you got the same deal going to two years okay and at this point um sasha parents who's the regional administrator for the roosevelt cluster and tamale newsome and rudy are going to present a balanced calendar that has been something this school has been talking about as one of their sig strategies and they're putting it in front of you it was also something i had included in the budget so this was a budget consideration of what it takes for us to do a an alternate calendar so they will present to you both the theory of action here and the what the calendar would actually look like sasha you going to do the intro i i was and um thank you uh i was gonna introduce you i just pamela and yourself and rudy rudolph and we were going to talk to you about the year-round balance calendar proposal at rosa park school and tim will talk a few minutes and then if you have any questions we'll happily respond good evening directors i'm glad to be here this evening especially to talk about something that has become a real passion about the way we educate our students as all of you know we are a priority school and we have been working very hard to change that designation we feel like we're a priority but it has a little different meaning with the stage so we have really been talking about as a staff and as a team how do we um how do we initiate how do we get higher leverage learning opportunities for our students and one of the one of the things that kept coming up and this has been for several years actually is that summer learning loss has been a huge concern that where many of our students are out during the summer they are not actively engaged in any type of education you know or educational opportunities and that's a huge concern we know from the data when they come back our kids have lost it takes them longer to get caught up some some of the kids are taking as long as six to eight weeks to actually get back to where they were when school was out we've been using a an assessment called maps of the data we have a rate in front of us those uh we use it from k to five so it even includes our babies and then also we have teachers who loop with students who know where their kids walked out of the door and they come back and those kids again getting them caught up so that has been really a huge concern and we began to explore the idea of a year-round balanced calendar and what that would mean for our kids by not sitting out of school all summer and then having shorter breaks intermittent but not just the break but actually being able to provide some intervention during that time we want to provide targeted academic support during the intercession and what this would do is actually allow our school year for some of our students our students with the high academic need we would be able to provide anywhere from 4 to 14 days depending on if they qualify to come back for those interventions in the past we have done a whole year and then we realized okay these kiddos aren't where they need to be and we've tried to put together if we have title one dollars or some additional dollars a summer school program and then we chase kids because who wants to be in school and all the kids as i plan in the summer and try to get them to come in and then provide that it just makes a lot more sense to be able to do this at inter intervals during the school year so we are uh very excited about that uh opportunity to really be able to bring kids back so every three week intersession one week would be for academic support and then we're also looking at for kids who are doing well because sometimes they get forgotten about is providing i call it beyond the classroom so more enrichment taking the lessons the things they already know but saying okay how can we who can we partner with in our community that would again provide for them some extension of their learning so we're really excited about the opportunity possible to go forward with this and so hopefully this is something that you will see that you will see what we've seen in it and our staff has seen it that it was we feel like it's going to be good for kids we'll happily take any questions if you have something
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thank you very much ms newsom for being here shows real dedication to come out this evening you certainly have my condolences and uh having said that i uh i really am not a big year-round school fan my wife first wife taught in year-round school peninsula so i'm pretty familiar with it a man who i've been friends with for 47 years very close friend taught in year-round school in woodburn and we've talked about it many tons of times and i don't like it because i think it breaks up it sends those kids home in the middle of the winter to sit on their computer and play computer games and it's very disruptive for families i don't know how you have that worked through but it would take incredible work to do that that's why i'm not a big fan of it i don't buy the agrarian argument that they people always make for year-round school 99 of the places in the country could have switched to year-round school if they wanted to and they didn't do it so uh i and and i don't i'm also a little hesitant about i know there's a huge summer learning loss i don't buy the statistics that it's just in the summer i think that it's also in the winter in the spring and the fall i can remember teaching fractions in the fall and then you a couple months later you teach them it seems like they forgot everything maybe i was just a bad teacher i don't know the uh but but so all that stuff goes together and i have to ask about the disruptions to the families that are out there in those three week periods i don't know how that's worked but i think it takes more discussion than here i i guess we wouldn't vote won't vote on this until next week maybe i could come out and chat with you would that be okay and see your school i'd love to do that okay you're going to be there sometime this week back i won't be there this week but um yeah that makes it a little difficult with next week being spring break oh yeah but uh you'll be there this coming week no no so it'd be the week after so we'll vote before you're there yeah or voting on that i don't think you're voting until the 31st after spring after spring but i'll be there i can sneak out maybe on the 31st i will be there but maybe you could respond a little bit to concerns i know i'd like to hear it yeah so i'm not making the argument and our community is not making the argument about the agrarian calendar because i agree that that may not be i do know that we have breaks already within our school year and on the traditional calendar and so what we're talking about is simply in some cases adding a week here but remember we're also talking about bringing kids in and back to school so they're not sitting at home that third week it is also important to remember that those interventions that they would get along the way means that they're not just continually pile up misinformation we are very fortunate at rosa parks to be partnered with the boys and girls club and also portland park and rec in other words the charles jordan recreation center and then of course home forward now home forward doesn't provide those kinds of services but we are a partnership out in north portland in the new columbia area and one of the things that we've talked about as a partnership is then how can we provide things for kids when they're out of school and other children may be in school during that time and then of course in the summer they'll be in school and other children will be out of school you know for part of the summer and they have stepped up and said we support what you're doing we we agree and that will look different based on the partnership so boys and girls club who's a tax rate in the building and if you haven't seen it i think it's just an awesome program they know that they will be doing some shifting in their program but also opening to have activities for students so that they're not sitting at home doing just what you described and there's just so everybody's clear on this i talked to your vice principal today the assistant principal nice woman and she was very helpful and she's you're basically only considering one week of intervention in that three-week period in the three-week period so so the students are still getting right they're still right we're just we're just here and when i think when um rudy speaks to the calendar i believe it's easier to see when you understand how that's being broke up and then and i know you all have had opportunity to look at a couple and you'll be deciding on which one but i think it's important to know that those weeks yes we're only providing the intervention during
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week three of each intersession however those partners will still be providing programming for kids during the other two weeks so it's a total of four weeks of added on it will actually be a total of anywhere from four to fourteen days so some students it's not it's three total of the whole year total of the whole year three weeks because in the summer we the summer now is much shorter and we have to stop and clean and get ready for the new school how long was your uh how long was your summer school when you had summer school um usually it ran anywhere about 19 days we always took off the fourth of july so usually we started and then we would we would lose that day the other thing is that when we didn't have funds we haven't had summer school in a while because we you know we haven't had the funding to do so um this the funding is built in we're really looking at a way to find to make this work systemically so you've got funding i saw the funding source it only is 60 000 from us i think as well and then we have you know we will be using our money differently because we need to get kids before they get a lot of learning on top of learning they didn't understand in the first place it is so essential and we feel like it will give us a little leverage i might say that when we talk about underserved communities and children that you know i'm working off and on all summer long i come in and buy july missions and i'm ready to come back to school i'm like oh really so our kids really want that structure they do they enjoy being out they enjoy playing they enjoy getting instructions but then oh yeah they're done with that and that's time we can have them back in the classroom and uh our staff feels very strongly about making sure that we're doing everything possible for our kids and as we started you know doing uh surveying parents and talking to them about this uh you know people like when does it start is it starting uh where do i sign on the line you know and so i we realize it may not work for every family we understand that right that's it that's the whole thing about it sure yeah someone works for it some love it certainly doesn't but i think that when parents understand why you're doing it it is a change it's a shift it's a cultural shift in how we teach our children and i honestly believe that with that said uh the giving it a try i think parents are going to be pleased that for parents that absolutely know that this doesn't work for them then respectfully we need to help and accommodate their request for either a different work site or a different school for their children this is going to seem like a silly question but i don't think it person i personally don't think it is a silly question and i would be willing to vote for this the uh rose parks is the is the lowest economic school in the district 95 free and reduced lunch would you trade not going on the uh on the year-round school because i don't think that achievement shows much on it i mean it doesn't make any of the achievement is a much different year-round or not i mean well what the research says it's actually it is when you provide intervention yeah intervention well if you provide the intervention that helps so it's regular straight-up stuff that people want to talk about i had a box one time full of of research literally on year round school and uh so i really have a good pretty good background supposedly traded like this would you take this trade we give you another half-time certificated librarian saying keep your library open we hand you another counselor so instead of having one per 400 how many kids you got in your school 400 and a little under 400 yeah so you have one counselor now when we give you another counselor and we get and we give you a another extra person you can put where you like as a as a community uh uh advocate uh social service would you would you take that and stay on the on the schedule or would you go to year-round school year-round would you i would good i wouldn't i'll take the other things you're offering as well but if i can't have that then i would choose that but you're serious about that if it was a serious thing if we really said that you would take the year-round school instead of this i would because of the time with children and the interventions that we can provide to our kids before again they just keep going deeper in the hole we've got to turn this thing away we have to get you a full-time certificate i mean so your library's open all day we need to do that hopefully we'll do that for those schools i know absolutely need because kids read in order to read you have to get kids
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reading and if you have a certificated librarian it makes a and and your library is open all day it makes a huge huge difference it's the one thing we've overlooked in our reading program well not the one but i mean we really overlook it so i'm going to suggest that for some of those schools when we get into the budget itself so there you go thank you i just wanted to um chime in and just say i am so thrilled that we're doing this and just um very excited and um can't wait to see it roll out and i'm hoping that this is the sign assuming this goes well which i'm sure it will that we're going to have a shift and start doing this more and more across our district i think so my question was more when we used to have one i used to have a year around eight year a year-round calendar at peninsula i don't think it had the intercession feature but and at the time we talked about well we should move to something that's more uniform and and i remember thinking oh you know why aren't we you know anyway so i'm just excited that it seems like we're now getting more of a strategic shift so i wanted to hear a little bit more and we had one a different year around abernathy at the same time so like part of what we are saying and yes we're looking at what um rosa parks is doing as a pilot and there have been other schools expressing interest particularly the sig and focus and um priority schools and the ones with say grants this has been one of the things people have looked at and the one thing we've said is if we do one let's do a standard year-round options because not do one-offs and have them all be variation on a theme because no it would it then requires us to then do central services and it adds another complexity so we are looking to have one that's a true bounce calendar that you get to benefit from the intersessions that you get to really benefit from the model and then do one that we are others could replicate right absolutely that's great i'm just thrilled i just i can't wait to see it in action and thank you so much for all your groundwork to make it successful director so i am really thrilled to hear this plan as well and what i'm especially excited about is it seems that your staff is completely on board and your families for the most part and you have community partners working on it and i guess the reason this one is so exciting to me is we actually have the funding and we're committing the fundings to do the inter sessions right and yeah it's it's that's huge and um to me rather than having kids you know fall behind all year long and then you try to catch them up in in summer school we actually are having these intersessions right in the middle of the semester and so the kids hopefully can catch up and not ever get so discouraged that they give up so to me it's a it's a huge wonderful strategy i'm really really excited that we're doing it i had one little thing in terms of the calendar itself that i just wanted to mention rudy to you which is uh if you look at july 2015 so presuming that we start this in uh july of this summer you would start it it looks like the following year according to the calendar you would be starting school on a friday so i just wanted to have you pay attention to that well we yes and that was something that we discussed and one of the they would have had a year already of an experience with this and pamela believes and i and sasha we all concur that making that first day back a an event a celebration for families i'll let her talk more about that we specifically looked at that as a i'll let her do it go ahead well an opportunity to first of all celebrate the year the 14-15 school year because we know that's going to be a great year and we thought friday is kind of a strange day to start school but if we did that how could we turn that into something positive i'm always about making lemonade out of lemons and so we looked at really this parent engagement we're fortunate to have reiko williams who used to work with parent engagement at the district office and that has been a real focus for us to get parents in school give volunteers in school give parents really understanding what we're asking of their students because we know the home and school partnership is incredibly important so we're going to just we're going to take and make some lemonade we're going to have a welcome back breakfast we've already began thinking about ideas to bring families in get them in classrooms on the first day and they had that the first couple hours before we settled in and then use it just as a reminder they wouldn't have been out of school so you know it's long so we're hoping that we just go right back in we do some general uh kind of activities that day team building and then on monday we're ready to hit we're have ready to hit the ground running
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with the first full week of school so why wouldn't all of that work doing it on a monday and then you just have the rest of the week so i mean this is completely opposite to what we just heard about the regular calendar two days and then you break it up is not good for kids and now we're saying that one day is right i'm not i'm getting i think you know it's interesting because um i i do not envy rudy at all uh doing calendars because just adding the two days and making things work what when we looked at okay we could start you know on a monday but then at the end of the year we is it more important to end with everybody else or is it more important we're going to begin we're beginning school when nobody else is beginning school at this point but to end when everybody else ends we just think that just it's at the end of the year and we know our kids are tired and then we so and by the way get up and come one or two more days because that's what we would have to do we have to get those days in there and so that was our thinking around this it was from june 2016 back mapping to july 2015. exactly well i guess i would again say that to me starting strong is more important than when we end and so i would be concerned about a friday if we're concerned about a thursday start we ought to be concerned about a friday start so i'm not i'm just not following it okay anyway i'm enormously supportive in general that particular little piece doesn't make any sense to me but thank you i just wanted to say welcome it's good to see you and i see your husband has joined you another late night for him family affair nothing better to do than spend nights here at the school board um but thank you i am i also just want to reiterate how excited i am i i do think and steve i'd love to talk with you more about school round or year-round school and hear what you've heard um because similar to what you actually just said about how you start with right you start fractions at one point and then students forget it another three months i think that's originally the intent behind spiraling curriculum is you know that you you lose it or you some kids didn't get it you come back to it again and that just as far as i i've noticed folks learning and what i believe what research says is the shorter amount of time you come back to revisit that you have to have some experience move away from it and then come back to it that's what really excites me about year round so thank you and thank you to your staff for being willing to to go this um i i have to admit that having made a case for not coming in for one day and then going um even though there was a holiday break in in between the other one this is a weekend that calendaring seems seems goofy but thank you this is great so i just had uh one question because you've mentioned your families quite a bit in your staff i'm curious about the outreach to both yeah i mean you gave us this which is wonderful but it looks like it's not this is going to go out later right that will go out later okay so just yeah the outreach that you've had and also uh the feedback from your staff you said that they are really excited about it so if you can elaborate a little bit on that you know the i think the awesome part about the teachers and the staff at rosa parks is really about what's best for kids and so we actually did a survey last year we started that we actually did a survey again at the beginning of this year for new staff and we had about four of our surveys come back out of about i think we collected about 40 of course it wasn't something they had to do but it wasn't about them not agreeing about the year-round school the question was does this work for my family does this work for me as an educator maybe i have young children i'm very satisfied with their school and they're on a different calendar and i fully and highly respect that because it was it was really about the kids um and so again if they decide some i've been in you know one-to-one conversations with and they're like you know i might be able to give this a try and see how it works and there may be others to just say you know as much as i love rosa parks and the kids i need to i need to put my family first and we are really respectful and okay with that as far as our families we've had a variety of focus groups infinity groups by language so we have about 130 esl students so speaking 18 languages or more and so we invited in we had interpreters there for the meetings and informal meetings formal meetings night meetings day meetings morning meetings to reach as many the work if approved oh excuse me when approved then the work
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will really begin for us and then it's about really creating that culture so when that first day in july comes that everybody's ready everybody's knowledgeable and i'm really committed to make sure my family families fully understand and so translations you have the english version but when we roll out the final copy of on our i think we have four of the five major languages and it will go in that but more importantly we also have people who will be familiar with that and can talk directly to parents and answer questions because that's huge um so i'm excited about it's work but it's gonna be work well spent because our families do want their children to be able to be the best they can be and be successful in school all right well great i appreciate that i was just going to say also that we will be working with the communications department and developing a communications plan so there's you know the robo calls at the beginning to remind people and all of that okay bobby and we'll open up the enrollment and transfer process for any families that don't want to do this yeah that's one thing that i would really support so that families who want to do something different because of our timing right would have an opportunity to be able to change because i think it's just as important for families that didn't know about the year-round balance calendar and they may want to come to rosa parks because of that experience so i think it goes so we'll have opportunities both ways i think so good that's exactly great thank you again for coming sounds very exciting thank you you have to come back and tell us how it's going in july maybe august thank you because i have one more question in general on the calendar yeah carol i have one more question on the calendar so sure okay okay go ahead actually so i think i'll just go ahead and call up david williams you want to come on up david and talk to us a little bit about a legislative update and then bobby you can ask your questions about calendars after david's finished thank you uh members of the board david williams your director of government relations um you had in your board packet a uh spreadsheet sort of looks like that and i'm gonna reserve that for a little bit so as you know we've just completed the 2014 february legislative session which is the the legislature's annualized session that they will do every off year uh 35-day short session when this was created by the voters a number of years ago was meant to be a sort of technical session a budget rebalance if needed emergency policy issues etc of course because this session occurs in an election year that isn't always the case we tracked about 40 bills during the legislative session so fairly limited if you recall during a full session we track several hundred bills so certainly a limited scope there was 33 days for the full session and 17 bills affecting education and or pps specifically were approved by the legislature so all in all it was a relatively quiet education related session not to say it wasn't without its bigger issues things like a certain bridge some marijuana issues gun control land use these are the things that grab headlines during this short legislative session so there were certainly issues they were attempting to tackle just not headline education issues the session did however signal for us a couple of issues that we think will percolate going into the full session and this may prove useful for us in the future as this short session is um in a way an opportunity for people to float sort of trial balloons for some issues that they want to have bigger debates and or bigger battles about i i think there's two in particular i want to highlight and i know we'll have much greater discussion about these in the months to come as we begin to think about framing the 2015 legislative platform for the district one is what i'll call mandate by formula so you know we have the state school fund formula the way we distribute funding to districts around the state it is a distribution formula it's not a directive of how to spend funding it's merely a distribution model and as advocates we've done generally a fairly good job at convincing the legislature to not act as a 90 member school board to really distribute the funds in in the most equitable manner that they uh see fit using that formula and to not pass down
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mandates without actually adding the funding to go with that of course unfunded mandates as you call it so a new model we see floated is this idea to come in and modify the state school fund formula and attach a spending mandate to it so there was a a relatively minor bill dealing with long-term care and treatment that got bogged into this because the proposed solution to what is clearly a funding problem with long-term care and treatment was to move it out of a grant and aid budget and create a 3x weight in the formula and require that that 3x weight be all spent on long-term care treatment programs a real big fundamental shift the bill did not gain final approval it was punted to a work group and sent to the school funding task force of which uh director regan sits on show i know she'll be revisiting this issue uh in that venue as well but that i think that that is in if we extrapolate further i think that that is a vein that we will begin to see more and more in the conversation around how districts spend the money that is handed down from the state we've seen this conversation percolate in the past and i think we're going to see it more and more with the state school fund distribution distribution form especially with some pretty big pots in there things like ell waiting in the formula and special ed weighting in the formula so i think those are some sort of key things to watch the other area of signaling was around the renewal of the oregon education investment board the oeib there were a couple of bills in the session that would have added specific slots for members on the oeib one bill created a slot for a school board member required the governor to appoint a school board member to the oeib another bill required a certain number of members of the oeib to uh to be certificated educators whether that be teachers or administrators was unclear in the bill but to create these sort of slot based models the governor made it very clear he would veto those bills if they ever got to him the bills did not get to him but they engendered this conversation among legislators about why should we be talking about remaking the board when we aren't even having that conversation about whether or not to extend that as you may know the oeib sunsets in 2016 which means the 2015 session will be the big debate about whether or not to extend the work of the oeib so i think there was a a bit of a simmering battle um if you will in that conversation about whether or not to renew the oei and i i think those are some some interesting conversations that'll that will uh be brought forth in the 2015 session so two trial balloons that we saw come up um we did see some smaller issues carry the day for education uh some minor modifications to the inner district transfer statute to try to deal with some hardship uh issues among students a small pot of money for targeted for specific schools that are let's call it focus on priority focus on priority like schools unfortunately the qualifications in the bill pps school there is no uh pbs school that that fits that qualification there's only a 500 000 allocated to about a total of 19 schools not 500 each but to be split amongst them some modifications to proficiency grading you may recall we've had these conversations about house bill 2220 in the past there was a bill hospital 4150 that was brought that clarified the requirements in house bill 2220 and as well um basically clarified that if districts were going to go to a more proficiency-based grading system that they have to incorporate educators into the creation that process by either creating a specific committee with a specific makeup in the bill or tasking an existing committee like the achievement compact committees or others with this task and i know that this is our folks working this are keenly aware of the bill and have incorporated this into their work and as well a bill dealing with native american imagery and mascots in schools this was a a very big topic essentially the legislature created a an ncaa-like exemption to the process much like the florida state seminoles have an exemption from the ncaa to be able to use that as a as a mascot because of their agreement with the seminole tribe this will create a similar exemption process in oregon for districts that want to get an agreement with one of the nine federally recognized tribes in the state of oregon to use native american imagery and their mascots as you may know pps did introduce two measures in this session one senate bill 1538 which was a redraft of a bill we had during the full session modifying charter school uh application process the good news is this is a bill that got a majority vote in both the house and the senate the bad news is those weren't in the same session so the bill did not receive support this session for final
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approval and we'll revisit that going forward the next bill hospital 4009 deals with the program providing education services to students at the providence child center this is an issue that came up at the very end of the last full session that we did a stop gap plug the hole got a work group together and really created a great consensus agreement around funding this program essentially the nutshell of it is the state will take responsibility for all of these students and will contract with portland public schools to deliver the education services so no individual district will be claiming these kids for adm or high cost disabilities account etc etc they will simply take money off the state school fund to pay for this program in its entirety now as you may know the issue of course is that more than half of these kids are not residents of portland public schools including some residents out of state yet portland middle schools for quite a while had been simply providing the services as as if they were so we really think this was a great consensus approach so then now we just look forward to 2015. i know there's going to be lots of issues and i know in the months to come i'll be working with the co-chairs to develop a process and figure out how we want to develop a legislative platform and and go forward to that session of course in the intervening time we have an election as a public employee and represent the district i have no opinion on the election whatsoever but certainly as an observer there'll be a lots of interesting conversations during that election and potentially changing landscapes going into next into 2015. you do have the spreadsheet listing every single bill from the session because there were only a handful of them i'm able to put them on three whopping pages if there are questions about specific ones or anything we covered i'd be happy to answer those so ask questions i had just one question on uh hb 4063 and i'm just trying to understand what the intent here was established as a task force on common school fund loans to identify opportunities for making loans from the common school fund for the purpose of financing projects that provide significant in-state economic benefits so what's that yeah so uh great question it just worries me to make loans from the club so so house bill 4063 was a bill brought by uh representative lou frederick it was originally a bill to allow the common school fund to provide loans for super fun clean up work so the common school fund a little bit of background the common school fund is not the state school fund these are different things and often they get interchanged in conversation the common school fund is a pot of money and assets that is primarily made up of state timber lands that were deeded to the state at the date at the time of statehood from the federal government um a big piece being the elliott state forest there's often been a lot of conversation around appropriate yields on the la state forest the common school fund gets the proceeds from any work on the elliott state forest the common school fund is also filled with money from unclaimed property so you you you left two bucks in a bank account that you closed when you were in college and forgot about it well that money's in the common school fund and we're getting the interest off of that and providing that to school districts there's an annual distribution from the common school fund that goes out to all school districts in in the state the common school fund makes a lot of loans in a lot of variety of ways to try to maximize the return on that on that pot of funds and uh representative frederick felt there was a a restriction that could perhaps loosen up funds some funds that would both return investment as well as do some economic good to the state and um what we ended up with out of the session was a task force to look at really what are those and what are appropriate ways to close some of those questions do you have any sense on hb4087 the task force on school safety is there an opportunity for a portland public school representative on that so the task force on school safety is not that sounds very broad it's not a broad issue so the task force on school safety is really charged with looking at the the bill was originally requiring school districts to send blueprints of all school buildings to a state repository so that state and local so that state and local law enforcement would have access to them right should the need arise in a situation where they were responding to a school situation i think obviously the the fear is an active shooter situation where state and local law enforcement may not have the ability to get access to the facilities department of the district to get the blueprints obviously there are some concerns that we might have about positing all of blueprints in one
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specific location um in a state online database that may or may not have the the kind of security we need for that kind of piece of information so this is a task force that will look at what is the best way to do this is it to make sure that districts have the right kind of relationship with local law enforcement so that local law enforcement's know how to get that information when needed or is it back to some sort of state repository as well so yes it really isn't the broader issue it really is not the broader issue of school safety very focused there is there is specific make up of the task force and i believe there is representative from each of the major education advocacy groups uh in the state so osba cosa oea osca as well we'll all be represented on that task force okay could you say could you send me the this so i could share it absolutely and i think this did go out electronically in the board packet i'll be happy to pull it out separately and send it to you for sure so i get it online so i can share it online absolutely a lot of people friends are really interested and maybe to my home email that should be happening thank you the only other thing i'd dude to add is just recognizing david for his um presence on our behalf of the legislature but also he is part of a team that comes and keeps the entire cosa so 197 districts across the state we have a team of people of which david is a part and that tries to have everybody understand what the implications of this are and have us acting as a body more effectively in the legislature so i just want to say thank you for that because it's totally um i think made a difference to have a more unified presence during these sessions so thank you and did you direct your beloved yep it's probably too early to predict as you pointed out we have an election coming up to know how the body is going to change the legislative body but um can you talk a little bit about the sense i keep saying about funding so my understanding is part of the reason why our state legislature um funded second year of the biennium more than the first was because it sets a different starting platform for where they consider for 2015-17 so one can you talk a little bit about what you're hearing or how we might most effectively advocate keeping in mind and i know you have this in mind but i'm saying it just for the general public that my understanding is that if the legislature took cost of living increases and funded whatever that new level was and then they increased the funding by 250 million dollars that alone would essentially pay for our portion of a fully weighted kindergarten which is a state mandate starting in 2015. so i'm worried that the state legislature is going to say we've increased by 250 million and really what they've done is honored their commitment to full day kindergarten without really effectively increasing the ability to spend on class size or whatever else that my case may be can you talk a little bit about funding then i have one one more so of course it's never too early to make predictions um it's just the the level of accuracy is called into question when you make them this early so i think the funding um landscape has a couple of variables to keep in mind as we head towards next session so one is obviously economic recovery all signs point to a fairly um steady but slow economic recovery for the state this is both good and bad bad of course because a more robust recovery means greater income tax collections for the state which means a greater ability to distribute those funds it is good because a greater recovery would potentially trigger the kicker we are projected not to have a kicker however it will be close if we maintain a slow steady recovery there will not be a potential kicker this next year but if there is a sudden spike in recovery or something like that i think you are looking at a kicker and obviously that that does diminish the capacity as you um as it creates a ratcheting effect on state revenues um so i think that that's an important piece to keep in mind as well the risk factor of a a downturn in the economy that would that would obviously be a a big problem so as we look to next session i think um and we saw this carol mentioned cosa and their funding coalition and off the record folks we had a very robust conversation about this a couple of weeks ago in how do we frame that that funding picture going into next session when you are talking about you've got a full day kindergarten kindergarten sort of mandate coming online but essentially uh an equivalent of 250 million dollars yet still making sure that that is outside of what is an otherwise roll-up budget and yet still then how do you make the debate and how do you make the case for increased investment on top of all of those things so those um i i don't have a good answer for how the how the best to frame that um the conversations are active and ongoing
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i think the more we continue to talk about what needs to be done and what we can do and what we have done so a big piece of this is going to be how we as a state education system collectively sort of respond to the fact that the legislature did increase the budget by nearly a billion dollars this last session so that's that's a huge step forward now we can make all kinds of arguments about how that billion dollars is still a relatively short step given um increasing in cost of living increase in health care increasing pers all kinds of cost factors that are outside of our control but nonetheless it's a very significant step forward so beginning to have that conversation about okay here's what we were able to do with that small step think about what we can do with continuing to take steps forward you're not going to take the big step we're certainly not going to get all the way there but but continuing to take those steps forward so that we can make sustained and valuable investments in program the kindergarten is a is a good one and that certainly will allow us to have a conversation about a specific program there is a fine line to walk when we have that conversation too because we don't want it to teeter into the well the legislature is going to fund a grade level so they're going to fund kindergarten specifically then that becomes more of a spending mandate from the state so i think those are some of the challenges we face in that conversation the other piece of course is in working with the legislature and folks like the legislative fiscal office and the school revenue forecast committee these are technical pieces but last going into last legislative session you remember the governor came out with a um his proposed budget which was um we won't even mention the number because it was really really below what we finally got approved and one of the problems is because he based that on a roll-up forecast that was built into the school revenue forecast committee well the problem with that roll-up forecast is the state when it does it assumes that every dollar being spent today is an ongoing dollar it's an ongoing revenue stream where districts are patching things together with days and reserves and other one-time funding sources etc etc federal money all kinds of different patched dollar sources to get us where we are today those those dollars don't roll up right so that's why you had that anomaly because you had really a big amount of one-time funding so being able to work with those sort of technical parts of the process as well so that when the governor and the legislature get the foundational data they need to build their budget they're building it off of the same set of facts we can debate opinion we can't debate facts we don't make sure the fact is right first and then we can debate the opinion about how big the budget bump needs to be above that okay i'm going to skip my second question but i'll just mention that obviously with the department of education ruling about what the 130 hours means it sounds like many metro area and perhaps statewide school districts had an interpretation that allowed proficiency but that's going to have to play because it sounds like very few districts are meeting that if any um well i'm sorry i know there are one or two that are um so i shouldn't say that but how many um but obviously that's partly a budgetary decision um as to why they're not not meeting those hours but my last question and you just touched on a little bit as you pointed out federal we did lose money last year you pointed out in your budget that our equity allocation what that allowed us to do is schools that got title 1 or federal dollars cut didn't see as big of a cut because we backfilled or we filled in with our equity allocation we differentiated resources for the students who needed it the most which is absolutely appropriate can you talk a little bit about at the federal level what what we need to do to begin to see a reinvestment in those dollars three minutes or less as a public employee i have no comments on election results um i i i think that that congress is a much more challenging beast for us to tackle i think that um there i mean you look at legislative session passing 17 bills affecting education in 33 days that's just not the kind of progress you see on the federal level obviously most of this is policy related but even when it comes to money related issues that you just i think while oregon's economy is experiencing a slow steady recovery i think we can expect federal grant programs to experience significantly slower growth i i mean i think you're just really looking at a flatlined approach for the time being okay thank you okay david thank you very much i also um for our viewing audience we'll mention
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that you are about to lead a group of us to the council of great city schools in washington d.c starting on friday including student representative davidson and two other super sac students so we're very excited about the fact that they're going to go uh to that with us we use the team lead very loosely lead chaperone how about that uh and uh you know of course there will have the opportunity to find out more about the federal funding and what we're gonna what's happening on the federal front and also what's happening in our other uh on our other urban school districts so thank you very much for that and thank you for your hard work of the legislature excellent thank you okay oh i'm sorry bobby so um i had one final question on the calendars and specifically this is on the draft resolution which would be the adoption of the calendar for next year and the following year and instructional hours it goes through recitals including d which talks about the continuation of 16 hours of professional development delivered during eight two hour lead opening sessions that's 16 hours what i'm curious about is in the resolution part it looks like you're asking us to agree to a reduction of instructional time for students by up to 30 hours in order to conduct teacher professional development can you help me understand what that is she's been working on this girlfriend so the statutory about the instructional hours statute allows us to do up to 30 hours for professional development counted toward our 990. as i mentioned earlier we did meet previously our 990 instructional hours but as you know it's very close and we're adding days here this is by statute allows us slightly more flexibility and it's an up to 30 in order to count toward instructional hours not that we would go for less instructional hours but that we would be able to count these professional development hours that would take us above where we are now what this also addresses is the schools the focus and priority schools such as that where superintendent smith has recommended adding two additional professional development days there that would allow these to also count for those instructional hours and the professional development is counts toward the 990 but not the ones counting the 130 so so two different calculations so i thought i was under the impression that with our priority schools we were adding back instructional days that had been used for professional development and that the professional development days would be added on top of that which would not have anything to do with instructional time for students we never were going to use those for instructional time so why why are we being asked to add 30 hours why why aren't we just doing the 16 this allows us to contin to add to continue to count those as instructional hours per the statute so it's not that we're asking for less instructional hours for students it's allowing us to add more instructional hours by counting professional development hours as part of those instructional hours so could you reword this sure could you just say that this would allow us to add more instructional hours okay if you're asking me to to approve a resolution that reduces instructional time for students by another 30 hours i'm i'm really not interested in voting yes on that and that's not what we're asking i know it's not and so if you could maybe reword that it would be helpful thanks thank you okay wanted to quickly say that our uh testing form that i've talked about before on thursday has actually been postponed until later date because of scheduling issues so uh i will have details coming forward after spring break about that but it is happening so not march 20th not march 20th so thank you very much appreciate that all right the next meeting of the board will be held on march 31st 2014. this meeting is now adjourned

Sources

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