2014-06-23 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2014-06-23
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - June 23, 2014

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yes up here we go okay good good evening everybody this formal meeting of the board of education for june 23 2014 is called to order i'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our pps television services director kerner is absent this weekend or this this meeting um ready all ready for the weekend huh it's only monday um first on our agenda is the superintendent's report superintendent smith thank you um so i've got a few visuals from the end of the year the first one being our students from benson high's tech geometry program recently donated a home that they designed and built to portland's dignity village dignity village is the city's transitional housing area and earlier this year the students visited the program before designing the structure in order to get a sense of what homeless people needed in a transitional building after that visit they came up with several designs before selecting one and they delivered the home just a few days ago the program is a wonderful example of how stem and experiential learning is preparing students for college and careers and here we have the visual of the home being delivered and the tech geometry class um another year and before school ended for summer break pps distributed thousands of books that were collected during our fall book harvest five of our um k5 schools received eight books for every one of their k through five students so in all more than 17 600 books were distributed um they were donated to us during our first annual children's book harvest which was a really exciting thing that we did this fall students were able to receive were able to select their own books so they weren't delivered a backpack with books they were ended up being displayed and distributed and students were able to select and actually during the year we had volunteers who were cleaning and sorting and preparing and doing interest kind of um categorizing of the books that were in grade level categorizing of the books that were then so that students could do their own selection of books and part of this is the intent is to build home libraries for students who don't have home libraries so kids were really excited about this at sitton um we had uh an event to launch our district-wide third grade reading initiative at sitton and we had portland timbers player gaston fernandez and timber joey at the event along with students and their families in order to get them excited about reading and get them motivated to read over the summer and actually we've held a number of these events around the district with professional athletes as the draw to get kids and their families excited about reading and encourage them to read over the summer and as you see timber joey was having a great time too so our 10 great fields project entered its final phase this month so 10 fields has been a decade-long effort to build brand new turf fields and tracks at every one of our pps high schools and two weeks ago we had the groundbreaking for the final phase at jefferson high school there's the madison drum line jefferson along with madison wilson and marshall will get new fields this summer franklin will also get a new field as part of the high school bond plan and this effort has been a partnership between pps the city of portland nike multnomah county uh city of portland parents and community members and i will just say thank you so much to all of the partners who have worked on this from the beginning because it has as i said been a 10-year project it was really exciting to enter this final phase and i got to drive that thing that was really fun through a banner it was really fun points it was my high point i'm just gonna say it was really great um summer bond work so this year we're continuing work on a number of pbs schools through the bond building improvement program that was passed by voters in 2012. this summer there will be 12 schools getting new roofs seismic
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improvements ada upgrades including new elevators and ramps and new science labs the 12 schools being worked on this summer are arlida beach voice elliott humboldt chief joseph creston grout hosford james john king lane vernon and woodlawn and just another shout out to our community for supporting the 482 million dollar bond that is making this possible over the next eight years um we're really excited about the work last summer we did six schools during the summer improvement um projects and this year 12 so doubling the impact this year um i want to honor the incredible thoughtfulness and creativity of the students at mount tabor middle school who designed a healing mural to celebrate the life of cruz miller a student at the school who died recently the students worked under the guidance of their art teacher molly renault to create the mural out of skateboards the mural will be displayed in the main hallway of the school and i think it was a terrific way to honor their friend and classmate dozens of portland public schools employees marched in the 44th annual portland pride parade on june 15th pbs has had a spot in the parade and sent a contingent of employees to march for a number of years now this year's march was especially meaningful since the ban on same-sex marriage in oregon was recently struck down portland public schools signed on to an amicus brief submitted to a federal judge arguing to strike down the ban we believe in fairness and equity and we're pleased with the outcome of the court case and happy to show our support for the lb gtq community at the parade and again big turnout stevens crossing so this has been a housing development that we've been talking about for a while as we were knowing we were going to get an infusion of students as it was completed so portland public schools was recently recently recognized for its work to support and help build community at stevens creek crossing it's a large affordable housing development in southwest portland hay hurst elementary school principal dion fralick and her team have gone out of their way to welcome more than 60 students from stevens creek and their families to hayhurst they recruited help from a number of organizations to assist in the efforts and home forward the organization that runs stephen creek recognized the district for the work their work to create what they called a community of opportunity uh thanks to everyone at hay hearst for working with the community at stevens creek this kind of effort pays off in improved parental involvement and stronger academic scores for kids so welcome stephen's creek crossing and that's awesome yeah and finally and i think we have a video of our rosa parks youth orchestra and uh their work with bravo the bravo orc they came and did a concert here for us at besc i can't tell you how delightful it was to have the music from their talented musicians is a non-profit organization that partnered with rosa parks to bring a music program to students at the school the program's mission is to create social change through music by providing underserved school communities with rigorous music training they've had a number of opportunities to perform around portland and these students have had instruments in their hands i believe since october and have really they're just like it brings tears to your eyes to listen to them play they've shown music training can improve social and academic outcomes for kids and again it truly moved people here in central office we're grateful to the executive director of bravo seth trouby and roosevelt's principal tamela newsom and most importantly the musicians themselves for their wonderful gift and i will play a little clip of their performance for you to kick off our meetings hey uh
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thank you for that i played the violin when i was that age and i'm sure that it was not nearly as good as they were okay um our contract with the portland association of teachers allows them to provide brief comments at our board meeting i saw her ah there she is i'd like to invite gwen sullivan president of p-a-t to the testimony table for some comments good evening gwen good evening i am here tonight uh i had a you know there was only 207 pages in the board book so um for the a few things that uh came out to me i had some questions and um a couple of the questions actually got addressed today they're still being worked on um but i did want to start by just saying i look forward to renewing the local option levy and i think that it actually makes a lot of sense to to renew it early considering the changes in the legislature and it's that more money it's we're all paying the same and more money will go to where it was intended in the first place which is in the classrooms so um i look forward to actually working together on that one i think with some of these changes it's the equivalent to around 50 more teaching positions and as you know we need a lot more help in our classrooms and our students need a lot more individual attention so um with that i i didn't want to come not be seen up here um but i want to thank the staff for addressing some of the concerns and look forward to having further conversation about this levy so thank you thank you for joining us and i hope you have a wonderful summer okay thank you next on our agenda student testimony i didn't see anybody signed up no students signed up for testimony all gone on vacation already so yay for them however we do have our student representative here so student representative davidson how about uh giving us your final report for the year i can do that thank you superintendent smith and fellow board members thank you for giving me this final opportunity to address you all tonight i would like to start by thanking the members of the superintendent student advisory committee some of whom are here tonight we have meetings every week this year which was in addition to their other activities in pbs committees which these dedicated students may have been members of they are the ones who make my position possible and their commitment and enthusiasm are constantly a reminder of why this work is so important i'm sure many of them remember the open house we hosted at the beginning of the year which wrangled a massive audience of about 15 and really didn't do much in the way of increasing membership despite these challenges these fantastic student leaders remained engaged and committed to standing up for the rights and perspectives of themselves and their peers i would like to also i would also like to thank pps and you its board of directors your commitment to student voice this year and in the past has allowed my position to become a model for other districts both in oregon and across the united states having said that i would still like to see some specificity and revisions brought about to the policy regarding the student representative so the role can be clearer more effective and in compliance each one of the members of this board has worked not only to make me feel welcome but to advocate for me as well i see each of you as a friend and a mentor and i say that with the utmost sincerity i would also like to take a moment to thank just a few of the people who have worked hard to support myself and the other members of super sac this year john isaacs who brought years of student leadership and activism experience his role as the district advisor to super sac andrea wade who served as the advisor my first year in super sac kim fox middleton who recently joined pps and has been working hard to better engage pps students and work in representative positions gretchen hollins who always found time to help me with what i needed and always knew how to get things done and david williams who helped make our legislative visits this year such a success and whose wealth of current information is
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always a major value additionally i would like to take a moment to appreciate the staff and records management who were extremely helpful this year and never once complained when i would come down with questions or asking to look at things as well as a few of the unsung heroes of pbs board meetings terry proctor dan green and frank da doula frank is actually retiring this year having worked at pbs since 1984. his skill knowledge and demeanor will certainly be missed but i hope he remains engaged in pps and enjoys his next adventures i would also like to thank karen houston who among many things the many many things she does never gets angry with me for tinkering with my student reports until the last minute so thank you karen i could talk for hours about the work that supersect did this year for those of you who can testify to this firsthand i apologize but thank you for humoring me unfortunately a lot of the work we did this year was internal out of the public eye we had students on many pps committees of varying topics assisted with pps projects within the community such as the third grade reading book drive cleaning and the marshall high school campus tours had budget listening sessions and gave our initial inputs on the budget just to name a few we also sent a few members to washington dc to learn more about federal education issues in the lobby on the capitol something that i hope will incentivize students to becoming members of student leadership in the district and will provide an extraordinary opportunity to a few students each year i've been thinking it for a long time about what i was going to say tonight whether to leave advice to focus on the negatives or the positives those of you who know me know i don't like to talk unless i have something to say and i don't and i don't want to waste time tonight by lecturing about the importance of lowering class sizes offering better counseling and support services to our students we're emphasizing the importance of nurturing each child as an individual with their own needs and interests rather than a standardized approach instead i would like to talk about the two issues which i think i can say consumed my term funding and contract negotiations i know we would all like to forget about the near strike and move on it was an extremely uncomfortable time for all of us however there's still a large amount of anger and resentment built up from that period and i think we as a district need to make serious attempts to fix this i personally felt caught in the middle of the negotiations i was raised in the pat offices and yet as a board member albeit not an executive executive member i received a lot of insights that were new to me and what was most frustrating to me during contract negotiations is that in the end we all want the same thing to provide an education that will nurture the children of portland to be happy healthy successful and developed citizens and yet despite this resolve we fight amongst ourselves far too often we let politicians come and take photos with our students we let them slap us on the back and tell us what a good job we're doing but yet we are constantly underfunded why have we accepted the status quo education is the ultimate investment we can make in our community and as a community we have to be doing more every second we stand by and accept the status quo every one of us is doing a disservice to this district and every student it serves taking my place as student representative will be mina jayaswal of lincoln high school she has been an active member of super sec for two years and also attended the council of the great city schools legislative conference in washington d.c this spring needless to say she's well equipped and extremely deserving of this position i feel confident that the representation of pps's students is being left in capable hands sarah jose of franklin high school will be the alternate student representative for the coming year should unforeseen circumstances force mina to vacate the position this is an immensely exciting time in pps especially in regards to student voice within district policies and programs which undoubtedly reached a high point this year i would encourage mina sierra and the other members of next year's supersac to ask questions speak their truths and never forget who they represent as our advisor john isaacs said to us all year don't ever underestimate the power of student voice i think this is great advice and would ask that they keep this in mind as they take on a new slate of issues and continue to elevate the amount and quality of student voice within pbs unfortunately mina will not be able to attend board meetings for most of the summer which means there will not be a student representative sitting on the board at board meetings or present at board activities during the summer i would like the board to look carefully and see if there is a way to address this on an occasion to occasion basis director buell in particular in particular has expressed a desire to see a solution to be found on this front and rest assured he and i will be willing to find a way to make this work should other board members agree i would also like to see the student representative meeting on a regular basis next year with pat leadership throughout my time in pbs my teachers were what allowed me to find success and
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pushed me to work harder and to be a better person i would like to end my final report by thanking the teachers that had such a large impact on my life and education and helped me to become an active member of my community so thank you for one of the longest and best years of my life and on behalf of the students of pbs thank you for serving on this board and actually andrew on behalf of all of us something to send you off to school next year thank you so you'll be thinking of us when you're deep in your oh yes and so here today we have abby passion from roosevelt high school and nate carlson who's from franklin high school and they are just two of several of our graduating seniors of super sac this year so awesome thank you great um well thank you andrew very much for your report and thank you superintendent smith for providing andrew with a gift from all of us i know that will be well used at portland state very excited for you especially you're going to be so close and we'll still be able to see you and call on you and that's right and uh all kinds of good things so i i personally want to thank you for the wonderful job that you did um for us this year especially bringing the student voice i always appreciate your very very thoughtful comments um very impressed with your grasp of the issues and your research and your just the thoughtfulness that you brought to everything we did and also was impressed very much with your organization of super sac and i know that there's a ways to go on that still but i think you've laid the groundwork and that's a tough thing to do because students are so busy but you and you guys know how important that student voice is to us and so the more that we can get students to come we should have as i've told you many times we should have six students every time we have that opportunity here we would love to see students come and talk to us about what they think is the most important part for the district so and then finally i just want to say what a wonderful time i had traveling with you to washington dc and i was so impressed with you and with abby and with mina and the work that you did when we were in washington talking to our legislative group about the importance of public education and and what uh the federal government could do to help us so thank you very much andrew and my best wishes for your success as you enter the university others anybody sure i'd love to say a couple of words first of all you started your speech by saying this was your final opportunity to address you tonight and my first thought was i don't think so i i suspect that you will stay engaged and stay involved and i hope that you will um your voice has been just great and one of the things i think that i've appreciated so much about you is your ability to kind of stay above the fray just a little bit and while you were presenting the student perspective it seemed like you had the maturity and the perspective to see both sides of the issue all the time and even in your last comment when you were talking about the contract and that was a really difficult i always felt for you during that in particular and you said that we all want the same thing and i think that's one of the things that i kept saying during the contract is i ran for the board for the same reason that teachers become teachers so we believe in kids and we believe in public education and we want kids to succeed and you kind of wonder why we get into this battle that we get into and so i really appreciate i think you brought that perspective all the time that we can get through this and we can find a path and we need to find a path and we need to be keeping our eye on students and what's what their needs are so i i always appreciated your very clear perspective and your really clear advocacy for students so thank you i wish you all the best matt i think i said it um a few weeks ago on twitter andrew when i said andrew davidson is my hero and you really are the perspective and and certainly what's been said before the perspective that you brought was incredibly valuable and uh and i really appreciated it this year um and i guess that that said i i know this won't be the last that we see of you so thank you for your service thank you down there go ahead ruth i would i agree with everything that's been said andrew you've really
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taken this role to a new level of accomplishment and i mean talking about how the the role is a model i would say that your service in this role has been a model um and as well as as your colleagues and i just really appreciate the work that you have done to sort of make sure that we're expanding student voice and having things for like for example sitting on district committees well it may seem like a small step that's actually pretty important to be on those decision-making bodies or advisory bodies so definitely appreciate your leadership and want to see and i'm sure you will continue to be involved to help us figure out how we move that forward and make sure that it's expanded and built upon and isn't just a year-to-year thing but that you're the high level that you and your predecessors established has really increased going forward and as far as the summer peace i didn't realize that the new student rep wasn't available this summer so absolutely let's talk about how we can figure out a solution there because we totally we don't want to have a gap in our student voice and our student representation but um again just best wishes to you so excited to see what you're going to do next and with your life and your adventures which i hope will remain here in portland we want to keep our graduates here in portland so thanks again for your outstanding service thank you and i get to hop in oops sorry oh go ahead no you don't go ahead i was waiting until all board members got to say there's go ahead i'd like to thank you andrew for doing such a nice job it was wonderful to work with you and you pointed out something that i think and ruth referred to it i think we should have that alternate sit on the board during the summer time and so we have a person in that spot and i also think that we should look at our policy which says that basically does not deny the student representative from making motions or seconding motions that they're a full member of the board with certain exceptions that we've outlined so i think we should look at that and hopefully we'll bring that up this summer at our retreat and get that straightened out because now we're not following the policy that we have and i think we should try to follow the policies that we have so thank you thank you greg so much has been said um so i'll just reiterate obviously um you've been fantastic to work with and much like everybody else you've always maintained a really thoughtful perspective so thank you for your time and similar to to ruth you know you said a lot of your work has been done outside of the public view which is actually pretty normal in the sense of the work that that goes on in the district we come to meetings they come public and that's that's when the big decisions are made but a lot of this work is behind the scenes and i would just say that probably one of the biggest things you could have done which you did is laying that foundation to make sure the students are in those advisory capacities so while it's out of the public view i don't want it to be gone unnoticed that that is a significant amount of work and it's probably if you had to pick the two it's probably the more important work to get authentic student voice so thank you and good luck and again i hope that um if you're not streaming us online um that you'll show your face here sometimes and we'll get to it tuesday nights tuesday nights next time yeah okay i will echo numbers of the things and you know i've loved working with you it has been a great year um and the couple things i the the committees and the work that is that students have had a voice on have been really significant decision making bodies so having students on cbrc having students on the high school action team having students on the superintendent advisory committee on enrollment and transfer you have been the person who's really like made that happen and then been the connectivity that it's coming back together with students that's been that's been a really important role for students to play in the district so thank you for that but the other thing i want to call out is that you also built a strong group that many of whom are graduating this year but but another group of which were coming back next year so you really did succession planning in super sac to make sure that um the strength that you built this year in student voice carries on next year so thank you for that because that has been part of it's not a start from scratch rebuild you've got a good core of leadership ready to keep going for next year so my appreciation to you and it's been a blessed working with you thank you great well thanks again okay now we'll move on to our next agenda item transportation intergovernmental agreement since 2012 steph has been working with the city of portland on transportation safety improvements related to the capital bond work before us tonight is a resolution that reflects that work superintendent smith
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would you like to introduce this item actually i would so cj sylvester and paul cathcart i believe are present cj sylvester is going to come on up and present present cj who is our chief of school modernization school modernization actually this evening justin dollard who has been the project manager for portland public school on this item for the last two years is going to provide the presentation and we also have gabe graf with us from the portland bureau of transportation who has been the staff person on the city side who has worked with us load these many years to get this iga completed evening board members and superintendent smith my name is justin fallon dollar project manager with the district's planning and asset management group gabe graf operations manager from the city safe rochester school program is also here with me i'm very excited this evening to present an active transportation intergovernmental agreement between the district and the city the agreement will align city permitting and land use processes to create safer walking and biking to school routes for our students the agreement accomplishes a number of very important objectives first it limits the district's required off-site transportation safety improvements to 5 million for the life of the 2012 eight-year bond program it directs active transportation project funding to those schools school sites receiving modernization or improvements in the 2012 voter approved capital bond program it brings all district k-5 k-8 and middle school sites into the safe routes to school program it utilizes safe routes to school staff expertise to help identify infrastructure gaps and safety barriers in our student walk areas it aligns the district's student walk area needs assessment with that of the cities and it prioritizes active transportation to encourage walking and biking to schools reduce motor vehicle dependence and sustain neighborhood livability the agreement also requires the use of an equity lens when funding active transportation improvements the agreement adopts the equity weighted capital funding decision matrix used by pbot safe routes to schools this equity lens in fact mirrors the district's own efforts to direct resources to overcome gaps in access and achievement within historically underserved communities the agreement represents a wonderful capacity building opportunity between the city and the district to address active transportation deficiencies within our students neighborhoods and strengthens our partnership with safe routes to schools good evening as justin mentioned i'm gabe graf i'm the operations and safety manager with the bureau of transportation and part of my job there is managing our safe routes to school program and as such i'm very pleased to be here to voice my support for this agreement the agreement builds on our existing partnership between the district and the portland bureau of transportation and recognizes that just as students in the district deserve excellent teachers seismically upgraded classrooms they deserve safe ways to get to and from school i very much look forward to implementing this agreement with pbs staff and i think the outcomes will be very worthwhile thank you okay um okay any i think we'll get a motion before we go ahead and ask questions so the board will now consider resolution 4931 a resolution to adopt intergovernmental agreements with the city of portland regarding funding of transportation safety improvements is there a motion second director atkins moves and director regan seconds the motion to adopt resolution 4931 miss houston do we have any citizen comment on this we do not thank you um is there board discussion director buell i don't know who should answer this but how do we evaluate the various different routes in other words how do we decide what's safe and unsafe do we actually have somebody that does that do we do that yearly do we go out and and i mean i was dealing with some stuff at chief joseph early in the year and they had that problem out in the front with the buses i didn't seem to be able to find anybody to talk to about it do we have i mean is there a process people go through or do we have somebody who checks could you just explain that just a little bit yes certainly so as a matter of fact i was assigned to the chief joseph concern that was raised before this board and that you followed up at on-site um and so we actually have a process where concerns are raised we have pp student pps student transportation has a safety specialist who goes out to evaluate the student walk areas as well
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as drop off drop off and pick up sequences and then any conflicts between buses pedestrians bikes and cars we also then where warranted will involve safe routes to schools so myself and gabe graf actually met with the parent body of the pta and the school side administrators to address their concerns and develop a response plan the pbot also has a process where school site administrators can make a simple phone call to call in the concerns that they're observing or send an email and then that's routed to gabe's team and then arrangements are made usually to meet on site with the school site administrator to make the evaluation often i'm involved as is pps student transportation to address the concerns pps student transportation uses an assessment metric to score out whether walk areas have issues or not they're quite similar to some of the metrics that safe routes to school uses and what the agreement does is actually brings those two metrics into alignment so we're actually working together in parallel processes rather than across purposes when it comes to actually evaluating those walk areas and then directing funding to overcome the infrastructure gaps or safety concerns so the principals are a key person in identification that's correct and do we do we give them information how to go about that and we have do we how do we what do we do with it yeah so approximately currently approximately about a third of our school sites are enrolled in the safe routes to school program and that requires a school site administrator to agree to participate and then there that includes usually then opportunities to learn about safety for walking to school as well as biking and then if funding allows to actually make an assessment of the student walk area the agreement actually will now reach out to every single site administrator at k5k and middle school sites who will receive direct to contact information from both myself and from gabe graf's team to participate in the opportunity to actually evaluate the student walk areas and raise any concerns we also have a series of open houses organized by high school cluster so it really starts at the school site level and we work directly with the principals and the ptas to help us identify those concerns and then we document them as well as we can and then use an equity-based decision matrix to overcome those safety gaps did we have any documented concerns this year that we didn't address and fix there are lots of concerns about how students get to and from school so yes so we do have some still out there that we haven't fixed so to speak we have ones documented like and do we prioritize those how do we go about i would say on the on the first question that we have significant we meaning the city of portland the community of portland and portland public schools infrastructure gaps so we have a number of neighborhoods that have inadequate sidewalks inadequate bike lanes and so the infrastructure that we're talking about is much larger than the single intergovernmental agreement that we're talking about tonight so when we talk about things that are identified but not addressed it's a community-wide conversation about how we're going to fund those improvements but the answer is yeah there's problems that we haven't addressed correct that neither the district nor the city have the resources to address and if we prioritize do we have those prioritized you guys want to talk about health that's done through the ig that's part of this process yeah that's what's so exciting about this particular agreement is um the district and the city the transportation bureau um agreeing on what we think are the most the highest priority so we have a matrix that justin referenced in the agreement that comes out of our safe routes to school equity work that will rank um rank the school ranked school communities school boundaries uh based on the demographics of the students based on the density of the sidewalk network based so sort of there's a there's sort of an equity criteria and then um a sort of transportation infrastructure criteria and then we can work our way down so we'll go through the city high school cluster by high school cluster having a conversation with each school community to identify um barriers that we may have missed because students and families get to schools in surprising ways sometimes and then identify well if these are this is the resource that we have to put against problems in for example the roosevelt cluster these are the these are the top priorities for that cluster to fund and build so the last question i have is though the fact that we have prior unaddressed safety problems if you want to put it that way i guess that's kind of in and the fact that some of those have not been addressed is that up is that a uh the reason for that is that monetary is that well uh organizational structure is that and not enough people what what's the
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major reason that some of those haven't been addressed i think there are multiple reasons um different uh you know from uh some of it has to do with the topography of the city and how it was formed so you think about wrigler and prescott those are two schools that are in the cully neighborhood which were annexed into the city um and maybe the 80s so that was part of unincorporated multnomah county a neighborhood that you know where the building codes were not the same so those the streets in that neighborhood don't have sidewalks they don't have storm water facilities in some cases they don't have curb yeah the streets are primarily gravel um so making improvements in that neighborhood is extremely expensive sidewalk can cost over three million dollars a mile on one side of the street in the kali neighborhood um most of the facilities that pps owns are old so you know your schools were built in the you know 50s or 60s or before when most students got to most before yeah when most students got to school on their own power so um there are many more families are driving their students to school now which creates another dynamic um and there are other issues but i won't believe with the point but certainly lack of financial resources is a significant issue and and also the reason why we're looking at this resolution today that provides an opportunity for us to develop a master list and to prioritize those projects as we move forward so very exciting other comments matt hey there thank you i want to say first i um absolutely support ah in mou i think this is obviously an important topic and and it um does my heart good to hear words like equity based decision matrix because i think in in some cases the the next time's the first time um but the the question i have is uh what are the priorities um that uh that are different depending on the grade levels i know like for example um school zones are often times reserved for uh for maybe k-5s or k-8s but you don't see as many for high schools um but then there are some like for example in my neighborhood where there is still a school zone down alberta humboldt has been closed but jefferson jefferson is there on the other side of the street so i guess that's one of the areas that i think are obviously it makes the zone safe um how do you determine the priorities based on what's going to happen and what's going to be a priority in a maybe a k5 or a ka versus a a high school well i think you um i think we'll we'll look at what the needs of the students and the you know how we for first i guess we're gathering the data how are students getting to and from the school you know for a neighborhood elementary school it certainly would be our desire that the students will be able to get there on their own two two feet if possible so what is the infrastructure that we need to support that what are the barriers that are preventing students within a mile of the school today from doing that from their parents from feeling comfortable doing that you know high school students my understanding is pps high school students are getting to school a lot on transit so what are the um what are the barriers to using transit effectively for each high school cluster um you know we we recently did one of our equity projects we performed recently in safe routes was looking at biking at high schools and which schools had requested uh bike racks and had them and which schools hadn't so we got to work with justin on rectifying the lack of bike rocks at benson and um jefferson so it's sort of case by case figuring out and different tools fix different problems sometimes sometimes a sign feels like it's really solving a significant need but if it doesn't change people's behavior it's not a useful tool for us so just really analyzing the student population and depending on that what part of the mechanism of the iga includes an actual surveying of all our school sites safe routes to school currently does that with participating sites where we do a survey of what's called mode splits how are you actually getting to school in different ways both in terms of being dropped off in pickups are you walking biking try carpooling coming in with just a parent coming on transit and then we try to identify what we can do to reduce the number of vehicle trips single vehicle trips to the school site and raise up either mass transit use or walking and biking so we'll actually be conducting those surveys to their school sites that have not participated in safe routes to school in the past so it's two-thirds of our schools will be brought into that survey and we're going to get a really nice big snapshot of what's going on at our school sites
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thanks for being here um one my first question is actually maybe a technical question um in section two b is in boy e it talks about the city and district degree that projects identified through the application the cfdm for individual schools will be proposed to conditions of approval to meet all are part of the transportation approval blah blah blah and then it talks a little bit whether we placement of portables modular classrooms or reopening of a school site that has lost its school use entitlements i just want to check so does that mean that if we have had a school that is has been closed the building has been closed and merged with somebody else if it sits vacant for so long there becomes a whole different land use issue with it does this does this clause allow us to reopen that school as it was originally permitted or is this something different sure um so i'll look at um to answer your question so this clause actually doesn't have anything directly to do with um land use reviews required to reopen the school if you've lost your entitlements so currently we have actually a fairly extended period of time before we lose school entitlements what it does is that it allows us to actually use the same decision matrix for school sites that are receiving modulars or reopening to address active transportation safety improvements rather than directing city planners toward a vehicle solution on a frontage requirement we're going to be directing them towards walking and biking first that's great thank you that's right it seemed like it had to do still with the transportation piece that we're gonna include them all but i just i wanted to double check um second i just wanted to say how excited i am at this because um as director bule pointed out there really isn't one school that i can think of and i've been sitting here as people have been talking thinking about our schools there are schools in southwest portland when you talk about the ways families get i thinking down the hill literally over the creek through the woods and back all of a sudden you're stephen's crossing and then i'm thinking of schools in northeast that literally don't have streets thinking in southeast they don't have any sidewalks and um when we converted to k-8 we have buses merging with cars merging with kids walking down gravel sidewalk so and that none of that mentions the conflict that creates what i see in almost every one of our schools where parents are dropping off kids and kids are jetting across roadways and buses are trying to take corners i mean it it can be very problematic so i'm really excited about this and i appreciate us finding a creative solution to begin to prioritize and document those so that we can methodically begin to knock those out as funding becomes available because i appreciate the city's awareness that these are really important community hubs and that it should be a priority as far as how are our kids and families getting to our neighborhood school so thank you question bobby in terms of your surveys uh it sounded like you were going to be working with pta most specifically in terms of parent surveys on how kids get to school the way we currently gather information about how students get to and from school is we send home a mailer in the fall in the spring and it's a it's a trip diary so you fill it out for your oldest k-8 student and say on you know monday morning they walked and on monday afternoon dad picked them up so that's that's our data collect you can fill it out online or you can mail it back to us great yeah um i thought you would said something about pta involvement but i guess i would encourage us to be maybe presenting at pta meetings around this issue so people can bring forward concerns in terms of safe routes to schools and also neighborhood associations and just making sure that we loop them into this because it's not a huge investment but five million dollars isn't you know isn't nothing either um so it just seems like a great opportunity to engage both of those groups um to the extent we can how will you report back to us in terms of where the investments are going to go will that just be through a regular bond update or will it be separate it'll be both so um they'll be because these are all bond convincible projects so they'll be part of the bond reporting but also the iga calls for an an annual reporting from pbot to make to the district and then then a representative working on this project whether it's myself or someone else could come then and bring give an annual report on where we're making our progress okay and i love seeing in here uh superintendent smith the joint obligations of the city and district number seven was joint lobbying of existing funding sources to explore additional funding i'm assuming that would probably be like a david williams from portland public
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schools or would that be someone from our transportation bureau or do you know probably accommodation because i think that we need to be doing more and more of that in terms of us partnering with city county metro on a whole variety of issues so i'm really pleased to see that piece in this iga and then my final question was about the it sounds like we're investing another 200 000 with approval of this today is that coming out of bond dollars or is that coming out of general fund where is that coming out that's a separate project so we're currently undertaking a supplemental transportation plan update so students who live outs um outside there's mandatory student walk area so k5 and k8 students it's a mile six eight it's a mile a half if you live outside of that walk area you receive supplemental transportation but if within your walk area there's safety barriers to you getting to school we also provide additional transportation that additional transportation has to receive approval from the state and the the supplemental transportation that we have in place dates to 1991 so we've decided that maybe it might be time to update it we're using that updating process to actually conduct a complete inventory using gis geographic information system to map all of our walking conditions and understand what barriers exist in those areas and what are the safest routes to get to school and direct students toward those routes as a means to prioritize the walk routes themselves as we work down work down the barriers so the project takes place over a couple years and it'll be also in coordination with pbot and that's part of our larger process of community outreach specifically the 200 000 is part of the transportation budget there was some money in this year's budget and money in next year's budget as well because it's a multi-year project so it's general fund money that's great thank you director martin there are just a couple of examples where uh pps education services exist in buildings outside of ones that we own either we lease them or it's happening in another space does this also include those spaces too sure i would think so um i mean we're interested in we're very much interested in making long-term investments in infrastructure just as you are so you know um but the the way the agreement is set up is that the district and um and the bureau of transportation are making the decisions together so i think we'll be we'd be making smart investments in places where we think that both the need is there and you know the students will be there for the long run to use them right thank you infrastructure direct dragons um thank you so much i just wanted to um say how please stand with this and just really wanted to commend the staff from both the district and the city for this this is really an outstanding um example of collaboration and cooperation between the city and the district and i know it's been a long a lot of work to get to this point so just the level of detail and thoughtfulness and the commitment from the city uh to support it and the way that we're working through an equity lens to come up with a transparent and prioritized way of tackling this this backlog and this need is just just wonderful to see so i just really appreciate all your hard work and and your commitment to making these improvements okay anybody else okay the board will now vote thank you very much for your presentation and for answering all those questions the board will now vote on resolution 4931 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no resolution 4931 is approved by a vote of 7-0 with student represent oh sorry tom's not here with student representative davidson voting yes yes thank you again thank you very much thank you okay moving on through our agenda at this time we'll take public comment miss houston we have someone signed up for public comment we do david porter and is mr porter our only person for public comment yes mr porter you've been here many times so do i think i can i think i can just i think i can just uh not have to read through the rules for you okay okay thank you very much go ahead chair knowles superintendent smith board members and members of the public my name is dave porter p-o-r-t-e-r i'm submitting copies of a written memo given time limits on public comment i'm only going to read part of it the time is now and it will not get easier let us bring dual language immersion programs all english native students who want them and to all emergent bilinguals who need them as portland public schools begins
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its district-wide boundary review process portland state university consultants have suggested that pps board and key staff first need to establish internal alignment and clarity on the scope purpose values and desired results of the boundary review process to assist with developing that internal alignment and clarity i urge the board the superintendent and her key staff to adopt the following policies and desired outcomes related to the expansion of dual language immersion programs one that the board state that is the goal of pps to increase the number of kindergartners in dual language immersion programs by about 600 from roughly 18.7 percent to 31.6 of all pps kindergarteners over the five years 2015 to 2020. two that the board requests pps administration to bring a plan to increase the number of kindergartners and do language immersion programs by about 600 over the five years 2015 to 2020 to the board for board consideration by october 1 2014. three that the board reserved the following six vacant or rented out schools for future dual language immersion programs edwards humboldt kellogg smith to williger and tubman four that ward allocate funds by october of this year to repurpose kellogg i have seen an estimate of 2 million needed so that it can house dual language immersion programs starting in 2015-16 further written thoughts information details follow along with my suggested five-year dual language immersion expansion plan for consideration by the pps administration my suggested plan adds three or four new immersion programs per year for five years two of those each year would be neighborhood only spanish immersion programs the remainder are a variety of different immersion programs mostly for english native students to be opened at now vacant schools now is the time to expand new language emerging programs it will not get any easier in the future thank you thank you very much mr porter you've been a great advocate for immersion programs we appreciate your comments okay at this time we'll move on to the next part of our agenda which is the bond performance audit tonight we'll receive our first bomb performance audit so we're welcoming mr tracy superintendent smith would you like to say anything welcome so um very happy to see uh dick back here again is it bill is that right bill hirsch that's great you can start anytime okay thank you um my name's bill hirsch and of course you know uh dick tracy and we've had the privilege of working on the uh first performance audit for the 2012 bond and um you have a enormous summary in front of you it's a very long document and you also have a report from the bond accountability accountability committee and and they start out by saying what we've recognized is uh the district is off to a strong start so that's what i want to re-emphasize that for the first year um it was indeed a very strong start um we the document itself oh and and also i'd like to very much thank um both staff and management for their assistance in producing this um the document is very long it's over 100 pages it includes some background a summary in the beginning there's an introduction there's a lot of content about how the program works we then get into some specifics we make recommendations there's a management response and we have some appendices so quite a long document um i refer you or the public uh to the summary if you don't want to read the entire document and we also have a powerpoint uh to sort of lead you through this um please ask us any questions as we're going through the powerpoint and we're available for questions and answers following it and both dick and i will be talking through this powerpoint the the first um the first slide that we have is that we just want to go over again what the purpose of the audit was and it's very much what you've seen from dick in the past about how performance
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audits work so the first objective is to determine if the bond program is achieving its objectives on time on budget and in accordance with the voter approved bond measure our next step was to determine if adequate and appropriate rules policies and procedures are in place and to implement the program the third was was the district following the rules programs procedures and finally we work with the district to make additional recommendations that we both believe would would assist the program in having an excellence in their program um there are four bond performance audits as part of our contract this was year one um it primarily covered the period from the start of the bond which was november 2012 through the calendar year 2013 we did some testing and we completed some testing in the beginning of this year so we indicate the completion date is march 2014. the focus of the audit was primarily on the soundness of the policies and procedures next year we will spend more emphasis more emphasis looking at the modernization and replacement projects so that's the two high schools in fabian we did review uh improvement project 2013 which was the only full construction project that was complete and throughout the program we will identify opportunities for improvement to increase to well to it to enhance controls uh reduce risk and improve performance before you go on yes i'm sorry to interrupt i just want to confirm dick because you've been had a relationship with the district in a variety of capacities can you guys just state for those who don't have the advantage of the materials looking are you staff are you employees what's your relationship and how how is this happening right um we we are working as a consulting firm with the district so we're contracted employees the contract is with hersh associates and um technically dick is a sub consultant to hershey's consul associates we've worked together as partners on this thank you but you're not employees of the district no we're not that's what we're trying to do the reason we came together on this is because um the desire to have some real expertise in construction management and design and oversight and that's bill's expertise so we've partnered together with hersh associates to provide this independent performance on it um as bill indicated i guess the message you want to say from this first audit is the district has made a strong start there's a number of bullets why why we believe that they have developed a blended organizational structure which is unique and different and seems to be working as it was designed that involves both bond staff and other staff from the central offices of the district working together plus a program management firm and as a team working together to do this major eight-year program um they've developed developed foundation of real strong policies and procedures which we'll talk about a little bit later in the presentation and i know that's what you all love to talk about as policies and procedures but it's important to have those in place for this very important program that has a lot of high stakes involved in it and so having a good guide starting off is important the they've completed the first project the last summer 2013 on time on budget in accordance with the promises that that you made for those that particular first year project um completed master planning for the two high schools and for fabian and they are approaching and i now i understand now construction has actually started for this summer 2014 improvement projects they've selected two well-qualified firms to act as your cmgc firms uh for the for the modernization projects at roosevelt in franklin um extensive communication we found with the with the community with with the neighbors and with uh parents and with the school district and engaged families and others in the design particularly of the high schools and and fabian so those are some of the high points we feel that a strong start has been taken
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the program is i have to emphasize at the very early stages i i'm not sure but i don't believe there's been more than about 14 13 expenditures in this half a billion dollar program so it's really early to say much about achieving objectives but at this stage we can say a few things um the nature the location of the projects uh are aligned to what the bond promises were what the long-range facility plan says and what the public we've been communicating with the public about what we're going to do so that's that's a first objective that's moving ahead as planned we've looked at invoices we wanted to make sure that we don't spend money or that's not appropriate and not for allowed purposes for what capital spending should be uh and that is happening as as appropriate there are allowable expenditures we look at a sample of a number of contracts and a number of invoices success in achieving your equity in purchasing and contracting is mixed at this point it's still early in this program so you know reaching any any conclusions about success is a little early about that um we looked at selection of contractors both consultants and consulting firms whether it was fair was it whether as an objective in accordance with state and and your rules for how to select contractors and that was done appropriately um the major progress right now are about three months behind schedule this is a very current number uh uh basically our report talked about a 30 days or so but it's not currently about three months behind behind schedule um the major part of our report as we indicated is really the processes that have been put in place to guide the program uh to manage the program to ensure that we have a good road map for going ahead there's a bunch of categories program management policies and procedures purchasing planning project construction management cost and budget and public engagement these are all systems and processes that we have the district has put in place to make sure that things go appropriately so for the next few slides um we'll talk about some of these in some of those areas too that that where we feel there are opportunities for improvement as well so i'll pass this on to bill at this point so the first element of this is to look at at the um and what goes on with the bond at the global level at the program level uh the district developed a number of documents i i think the core of them is what we call they call the program management plan um it's a very comprehensive document um however when we reviewed it it was not yet complete um since that point um it has been completed and it the the the final document something will review as next as part of next year's audit there is a master budget and when we looked at the numbers for developing the actual bond projects they were consistent with best practices for the industry particularly for the um the the numbers for the larger schools the master baseline schedules also seemed appropriate and as dick reported the district is reporting against that master baseline schedule and the district is behind on the major projects and independently we will be talking to you about the potential for making up that time um the organizational structure appears to be working as intended in terms of blended staffing we may comment about the what we believe would be ways to improve upon working with a construction program management firm the we have comments within the report about the performance reporting um it's essentially a very solid tool and we make recommendations for improvement in terms of purchasing and contracting um i'm i'm not going to actually talk you through all these slides just essentially say you have an excellent program within the district in purchasing and contracting the district works closely with that department we've made a number of recommendations in that area for improvement some of which the district has already implemented some of which it intends to implement some of which it's considering to implement um this uh addresses both consultants well consultant selection uh design bid bill contractor selection and cmgc selection and so we want to go to the planning and design in terms of um planning and design we wanted to make sure that the process uh that has been used aligns itself with district policy so in that sense we've we've looked at the long-range plan the seismic study uh the historic building assessment 88 deficiency study
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and we find solid evidence that these documents were followed and addressed in ip 2013 and they're part of the process for planning they were included in the master planning they will be included in the schematic and design development for the major projects the ed specs that that occurred in two parts there's a vision statement which we believe is a an excellent document and um i think it'll be interesting for the district to look at this of two three four years from now and match that vision against the objective and subjective results of the construction i think you'll find that very exciting it's one of the things other school districts have done the a lot of time was spent on the on the specifics of the ed specs and it did require more than the scheduled amount of time resulting in a delay in the master planning and it had an effect on the schematic design we make some recommendations how to improve upon this process in the future and particularly with regard to the the completion of the ed specs for the lower grade levels for fabian and for proceeding with grant osm has developed a number of very strong systems for um project management and construction management so we're now we're talking at the project management level and these systems have been integrated closely in with district accounting purchasing and budget controls a district has expired has hired very experienced project directors and managers and they are an important uh element of why 2013 was so successful and um they are assets in working through the design for the new projects um many of the practices that are in place are working as intended we make some recommendations in a manner that existing systems and procedures can be strengthened we're recommending that the standard operating procedures for the construction program be completed and used um there are the district has implemented a new change order system which um for which the goal is to ensure compliance with district policies um there's a a document that's produced that's going that's intended to clarify the roles and responsibilities of the construction manager so that's the person it's an independent contractor it's provided by the cm the c the construction manager program management firm that assists the project manager of the project director with the on-site construction observation and we're also recommending continued enhancements to the program management soft software which is known as e-builder the fifth category of policies and procedures we looked at is how we control cost and how we're controlling budget and once again not to be repetitive but the existing controls and e-builder works work very well together it provides strong accountability for spending and for budget and and it provides good management control over budget in in spending um the invoices we looked at were documents were available viewed and and and approved on time and approved appropriately there um there are a number of ways to uh for the cost and budget reports that they produce that they have developed to that provide very good internal and external reporting bill talked about the balanced scorecard which is an excellent tool for reporting out at a high level they also have good tools that are internal management reporting just for their internal management that also work quite well then that we reviewed quite a few of them um we we do believe that there's opportunities to better integrate their peoplesoft which is our big enterprise accounting system and financial system with e-builder probably will not happen immediately it's a big project but it would be desirable because in the long run it would provide more efficiency if that can be done at some point in the future the final big area of public engagement and and communications the the district through working with sipa have developed a i say draft communication plan it was a fairly complete draft of what they were going to try to do to communicate with the public in all sorts of different forms we found
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that in fact this communication was extensive and in so in many different ways there are things that they can do better and part of that is as is knowing a little bit more about public input and decision making and how public input affects decision making and the role of the public in that process could be a little clearer i think there would be some some real value to evaluate whether the communication engagement processes in fact are having the result that is desired that in fact people feel positive they feel that the district is a good steward and they understand the bond program it would be useful to kind of to do kind of a look back evaluation of that and we recommended that as well to help improve our communication engagement processes we made 27 recommendations in this report and several of those recommendations have multiple parts and some of them are quite technical many of them have been addressed already some of them are going to be addressed in the future over the next six months management has reviewed every one of these they agree with all but 1.5 because one of our recommendations had four pieces they like two and not so much the other two so uh but at 95 percent we feel pretty good that they're going to be addressed uh over the next six months or or so um there is a as usual a management response in this report uh that has been uh responsive and clear and complete and uh that provides a more balanced look at the whole audit report as usual this report will also be on the portland public school district website and it will be available to the public so um we're available for any questions that you might have thank you very much for your presentation and for your work questions from the board director martin i have a couple of comments and one was uh on the uh success in achieving equity and purchasing and contracting is mixed i remember a report out from staff probably a couple of months ago uh talking about a 14 about 14 percent of uh uh the contracting level that we've reached from minority women in emerging businesses uh our aspirational goal being about 18 but that 14 representing about a double digit or more uh jump in contracting is that i don't remember if that was specifically on bond work or if that was about overall contracting this particular what we talked about in this report is for the bond work for for uh at the division 4849 consultant and contractors uh 18 aspirational goal of that spending should be for for minority women and emerging businesses that's the goal at the time of our review it was around close to 12 percent that was three or four months ago um so uh there's progress being made it's just not that at that goal level yet and the district informs us and it and it makes sense that their um their goal would be to improve upon the construction numbers so that's division 49 refers to public improvement contracts for the cmgc contracts the cmgc firm has a better ability to access a greater variety of firms so that's one element of why a district would use cmgc there are many many others right it is a little early to to really address and assess the accomplishments of the other two the participation of minorities in in apprenticeship trades and also the uh the level of student participation in learning opportunities through the bond program um there's there's some reason especially immediate recently some some great participation levels in by students in various activities but i think it's still a little early to say uh whether they're succeeding or not at this point great thank you i appreciate you bringing that up in the audit report i think it's a it's an important part of our equity work and and uh although i think the district has done very well thus far i think it's still a work in progress as it as it always should be the other question i have is actually it's more of a comment rather than a question i appreciate the the public engagement and communications piece and this i think it was clear in your earlier comments that a lot has happened in terms of public engagement but i think it's an important discernment to make that a lot may be happening but do we need to do it differently that gets
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the result that you're expecting and for us internally isn't that anything new is being added to the way we communicate but the how we communicate may be adjusted to better reflect what we actually need to say and should be saying and how it's received on the other end so i appreciate that little nuanced discernment that you had there um when you presented those results so thank you the comments dr regan hi thank you so much for this i always appreciate getting the independent audits it's a very useful tool for us and for the public i of course zeroed in on those two areas where the management response disagreed with your audit findings and i think those were actually the same two areas that director morton was just talking about so when i look at your recommendation is basically to improve the rigor and completeness of the balanced scorecard yes um there were two areas where you specifically suggested some changes one is improving the reliability and relevance of stakeholder perspective ratings by encouraging greater and more complete stakeholder participation in surveys and apparently management disagreed with that so i guess i'm i'm questioning that and trying to understand where we're coming from so when i look at this balanced score card if you can ignore all the yellow highlights and the red all over it that i've written it basically is a white sheet of paper with lots and lots of green on it and i think the overall assumption looking at this is everybody's happy and we're wonderful and in fact i think in general that's not a bad perspective and it's a relatively accurate perspective but there's also some nuances to that and certainly the two things that we've heard the most about are concerns in the franklin area about career technical education and the concern in general about whether or not we have enough classroom space going forward in any of these high schools and so i believe we need to have a nuanced report somehow some way or another way of gaining or acknowledging that stakeholder feedback and in fact we just got a two-page single space memo from our portland our schools with some concerns as well so that would be one area superintendent i'd love for us to go back and rather than just say non-concur maybe we could provide a little bit more detail there and then the second one is on the equity perspective and director morton just you know commented that we've done pretty well so far but obviously we have a huge way to go but again when you look at this quickly you see a whole lot of red which indicates we're not doing very well and again it seems to me that we should have a more nuanced way of looking at this to say you know compared to where we were at we've made huge progress compared to where we want to be there's still some way to go so i guess i would ask us to look at those two places in the audience audit where there was a non-concurrence and i'd love for you to come back and say you know what is it that we are going to be doing in those areas to better reflect um you know the true stakeholder perspective and to better respect how far we've come and where we need to go somehow because it to me this this doesn't work for me i don't think it says it but so thank you the comments director beale you look at that teacher input on these on the high school things i mean that's there was a there was a lot of complaining about the involved the way we involved teachers i mean we have they're like a captive audience two hours a week we could involve them like crazy but for a long time i didn't teacher said well we haven't sat down and talked about this at length or got our input or anything did you did you look at that and then did you also identify some of the things i mean the roosevelt many people in roosevelt were saying yeah no we haven't been involved well i mean did you look at those two little aspects in a separate way we did not specifically look at teacher involvement in the design and discussion of high schools it was not something that was part of our scope but related to the balanced scorecard reporting what our recommendation was is that we feel it would be valuable to have broader and more complete input feedback we were referring to teachers but it could apply to teachers principles but it could apply to teachers as well so that was that's kind of the thrust of the recommendation to is to have more complete feedback right now we we survey principals we survey the maintenance director and we survey uh just begin to survey the the
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design advisory groups which will give some of that community input but this that survey has just now recently been sent out so we don't have results from that yet we uh we know from from osm and from reading the board agenda materials that there's been a lot of discussion this year in 2014 about potential additional criteria for the high schools some of which has been generated by teachers so this will be a subject in part for our audit for the year 2014 which you'll hear about next year thank you atkins thank you so much for this i really appreciate it especially the incredible kind of technical depth of expertise that this went to and those 27 recommendations and ways to improve and then for the staff to have either been already in the process of doing them or having done them or agreeing and getting ready to do them so i thought that was just a really great example of excellent expert feedback and then the district responding to that and i also really appreciated our independent bond accountability committee's memo which if i can just read the last paragraph says in summary the audit validates the district's budget and schedule assumptions that supported the bond and verifies that an appropriate and effective management structure is in place to address the challenges ahead but again i appreciate your expertise in bringing some of those very specific detailed as well as broader uh suggestions for how we can even do better so and around the the public involvement i agree with what's been said but i also think it's important that the way you highlighted having greater clarity around what is the parameter a role of public input and decision making and i think we need to do better at that of setting expectations up front so that we can be sure that we do remain on time and on budget while recognizing that we want of course a huge range in depth of public involvement there's a certain point at which we do need to limit that and there needs to be decisions made by the board and the district and the professional staff so i think we can do we can improve in that regard and look forward to working on that so thank you for mentioning the bond accountability committee i was going to note that there is a memo in our packet for the public and also kevin spellman who's the chair and of that committee is here kevin do you have anything you want to add or anything you'd like to say i don't think so okay great great thank you other comments anybody else director bliss i just want to thank you for a thorough report you mentioned how long it was but it was fantastic i appreciated its length and its thoroughness read every single page of it so thank you um what i really appreciated is i felt like it really validated some of the observations that urban accountability committee had raised some of the things we had been hearing as well as you know you have 27 recommendations out of a 482 million dollar bond program which also says to me how many things are going well and going right with this and what i like about the bond is it's typical right for us to look at where we can improve and try to get on those right away which is right for a learning institution that's what you want you want objective feedback and then you go to it to improve but i just also want to complement staff on how many things there was a lot of question when we passed this bond or whether or not the district had the capacity to manage such a large bond because it had been so long since we had something and this just did a great job of reaffirming at how capable the staff has been at organizing this projecting what the costs are even though there's community input additional criteria these things are living and breathing and we'll continue to run into those but i just really appreciated your thoughtfulness and your thoroughness and your working with with the district and trying to get a bro as broad of a sense with also trying to keep it confined to your scope because i'm sure that there are many rabbit holes of which you could could follow but thank you very much for the thoroughness and i again really appreciated the the thoughtful expertise with which you which you made the recommendations and i'll just say congratulations to staff that it just shows that we set up a great bond program that they they are moving ahead with what they need to and there's room for improvement um and so accepting it in that in that manner thanks thank you thank you yeah i'd just like to say thank you for the complete report and i'm really looking forward to future bonds you know if we really work on these things i'm really excited about it um and i'm also looking forward to more in-depth uh feedback from you know our community about what they're they're feeling like is being taken into account you know with the information they give so i'm looking forward to that so thank you
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ready no mr tracy mr hurst thank you very much for your audit and thank you for being here tonight helping answer our questions looking forward to the next one when you can actually talk about the projects underway yes that's great okay moving on to the next item on the agenda the 2014-17 bargaining agreement uh with the portland federation of school professionals superintendent smith i'd like to go ahead and introduce this i would like to call barack logan who is our director of labor relations up to present the pfsp agreement thank you chairmember knowles board superintendent smith so first of all if you're thinking hey wait a minute weren't we here just a little less than a year ago and ratified a two-year contract with pfsp uh yes you're not losing your mind that did happen but as you know um with very little fanfare like two meetings ago if i remember right you ratified contracts for seiu dcu and atu and the contract that's before you tonight we had a we had a 2013 through 15 contract with pfsp in order to align it with what we're doing with the other contracts and to begin to address equity between employee groups and health insurance pfsp agreed to reopen and extend their contract so what we're doing is replacing that 2013-15 contract now with a 2014 through 2017 contract so for 2014-15 school year it increases the cola in that contract from the one percent that was negotiated to the one and a half which is consistent with the other operational contracts it also increases the district's contribution towards health insurance to align it with what is in all those other operational contracts and again to begin to address the equity within the bargaining units perhaps more exciting about what we're doing here tonight is that with the ratification of this contract tonight we will have um finalized negotiations with every one of our bargaining units through june 30th of 2016. we're excited gives us a little bit of stability and time to work on some other important things with our groups i would want i want to make sure to acknowledge ross hume he's the senior manager um and he's in in my department and he's the chief negotiator for the pfsp contract working with their staff and also gratitude to belinda regan and michelle batten the staff at pfsp to their bargaining team and indeed to all of their members for agreeing to reopen their contract and ratify it so i'm very happy to bring this forward tonight and i'm happy to answer any questions you might have okay great and i see belinda and michelle both up in the back so thank you very much for being here this evening um on behalf of the board we're very happy that we've reached common ground with pfsp partners and look forward to continuing the good work that brought us to the settlement the board will now consider resolution 4932 collective bargaining agreement between portland federation of school professionals and school district number one j multnomah county is there a motion second okay director martin moves and director regan seconds the motion to adopt resolution 4932 miss houston any citizen comment on this there's no there's not is there any board discussion on this resolution just a quick comment again to appreciate the flexibility of our union partners um the good thinking and and kind of um stewardship and and partnership that our staff has done and bringing us about and really having that that long-term vision and wanting to bring around that parity and equity among our employee groups also just wanted to call out appreciation for the um one of the um features of this which would be the adjustment for educational assistance the work they do is so important in our district and really appreciated on that being part of the settlement and then just a general appreciation for the the work of of all the members of this bargaining union and how how essential and indispensable they are in every single school and across this district so i'm very excited and just thank you to our partners and to the staff other comments dr reagan uh brock just so the general public knows what employee group we're talking about the portland federation of school professionals can you just walk through some of who they represent some of those employees just uh sure so um we often call pfcp our classified unit because it's probably i think at one point time we have maybe 60 classifications that are represented so they really represent all of the non-certified staff within our school so that's educational assistance the pair educators in the special ed department in addition all the all the clerical and support staff throughout the district so um in many ways they're the bargaining unit that reaches every corner of the district there's many folks here in this building that do the support of the
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central departments even you know when we talk about atu and student transportation we have pfsp folks out there i think the route schedulers and all that so again they're just throughout and it's it's almost anybody in the district who is not certified who works in the schools and then all of that clerical and support library assistance it's it's really too numerous to list but as ruth pointed out and i know you all agree it's the people that are invaluable in helping everybody else get their work done and that just do amazing work with um really all of our students and our staff so and and the reason i wanted to ask you to do that is just so people understand this is our second largest union representing well over a thousand employees and i think a lot of times our union contract negotiations get overshadowed because of our teacher contract and i think it's important for us to take the time to recognize that we have you know several other different employee groups that make a huge huge difference for our kids and i'm really appreciative of the collaborative spirit and coming together and working on a contract without a whole lot of drama and getting to where we need to get to for kids so thank you thank you mothers coming it's probably already been said but i just want to again highlight um the effort that we're making to begin to find parity between our representatives that really so many of our staff are crucial to the operating of our buildings into the relationships that we do with schools so i've really appreciated both staff's recommendation and are moving towards a greater equity especially pfsp they've they've really been cooperative with us in times that have been really challenging um and so in times when things are feeling slightly improved it i appreciate our effort and i thank them for reopening their contracts so that we can get moving on on trying to bring in some more um more parity with our representative groups so okay the board will now vote on resolution 4932 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no resolution 4932 is approved by a vote of 6-0 with student representative davidson voting yes yes thank you very much so i'd also like to mention the bargaining agreements that the board approved at our june 2nd meeting between the amalgamated transit union local 757 representing our bus drivers the district council union representing trade workers and laborers and the service employee international union local 503 school employees union local 140 representing custodial nutrition service employees all of these unions provide exceptional service to our students and we thank them they keep our schools and our facilities running and and clean they feed our students pps is the biggest restaurant in the state and we get our students to school safely so i'd like to ask for another round of applause for all of these employee groups who help thank you very much i will now we're going to move on to amendment number three to the 2013-14 budget and i will entertain a motion uh to resource recess the board from its regular meeting and open a public hearing as proposed on the proposed 2013-14 budget solution a second director belial moves and director morton seconds the motion all those in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes opposed motion is proved by six to zero with student representative davidson voting yes okay superintendent smith will you introduce this item i will so david wine who's our deputy chief financial officer and sarah bottomley who's our assistant budget director will walk you through the um amendment number three to the thirteen fourteen budget co-chair knowledge board members superintendent smith um happy to be here to talk about the third and final amendment to the 2013-14 budget um you have a a recommendation from the superintendent that details most of this i want to just summarize three or four things that are really here so one of the things that we have to do each year towards the end of the year is to make sure that we have appropriated enough money in each fund by the appropriate appropriation level so that we stay within budget law we think that's important we want to true up some of our funds to
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reflect things that have happened over the course of the year we look at whether or not there's any activity that we want to carry over from one year to the next where we planned on something about it for something to happen this year and in fact it hasn't happened in the time frame that we thought so we'll move the budget from this year to next year and then we look at if there are any other changes that we need to make so in the amendment before you there's examples of of all of those things in the general fund we appropriate money in four or five different appropriation levels we appropriate money for instruction for support services for a little often referenced category called enterprise and community services for debt service and transfer out and then what's left is in contingency enterprise and community services is a small category that covers family engagement staff and community agents and one of the things we're doing in this budget amendment is making sure we have enough money appropriated to cover our expenditures in that area because it turns out we're spending just a little bit more money than we thought at the beginning of the year um in funds outside the general fund we're truing things up for various things that have happened during the course of the year like earning more interest on things and things like that and then transfers there's a couple of things to call out when it comes to transfers one thing that we're doing is paying off some two small debts that we have as a district because our general fund is ending up with a ending fund balance that's in line with where we budgeted we're taking this opportunity to pay off those debts that will help us out in future years and then the other thing that we're doing is kind of bond it's kind of budget geeky so i'm going to walk you through that just a little bit more you will remember that back in may we talked to you about the fact that with the capital bond we had a debt payment that we had to make and the money from the capital bond the tax money comes in big chunk in november and then it comes in increments after that and we had to make a bond payment at the beginning of june at that point we hadn't received the june tax revenues or the july or the euros revenues and we you you approved us making an interfund loan to cover that at the time that we had to close the books on the budget amendment and run the numbers and balance and produce all these documents we hadn't received the june money either and we had to be ready to cope with the situation where that might not be enough money so we put a transfer of a million dollars from the general fund into the debt service fund just in case we needed to do that the good news is that that june 15 payment came in and it was more than enough to cover all of the payments that we'd made it paid off the interfund loan everything's good everything's fine we won't need to make that transfer so those are all the things that are in this budget amendment number three to close out the 13-14 year and make sure our budget is fine thank you very much miss houston is there any citizen comment on this resolution no um okay uh do you have a comment that question do you have a question okay go ahead are you saying we have a million more dollars than we thought we were going to have no okay good thank you okay do we need to put this okay first okay um i had one quick question as i was looking through this energy efficient schools fund to the facilities capital fund it looks like you're moving 361 000 and it looks like it's just a reallocation of funds received under state energy reimbursement program so i'm very interested in energy efficiency and my question is as we shift those funds from energy efficient schools fund to the facilities capital fund will those still be used for energy efficiency initiatives they were used for energy they were they were used okay so they're just being paid for out of uh it's just being shifted it's not a change in priorities or anything it's just being moved it's not a change in priorities at all no we spent the money in the facilities fund and we're we're truing up the accounting to make sure under budgeting to make sure that we have the money coming in and going to the right places okay thank you okay i'll now entertain a motion to reconvene the board back into its regular session for the vote second director regan moves in director belial seconds all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes any opposed the motion is approved by a vote to six to zero with student representative davidson voting yes yes great thank you okay we'll now consider resolution 4933 amendment number three to the 2013-14
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budget for school district 1j multnomah county oregon is there a motion so moved and a second second dr atkins moves and director regan seconds the motion to adopt resolution 4933 is there any other board discussion or questions for staff just thank you for your diligence and hard work as always very much yep the board will now vote on resolution 4933 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed please say no resolution 4933 is approved by a vote of 6-0 with student representative davidson voting yes yes great thank you very much i think they're staying and now we'll move to the next agenda item which is the adoption of the 2014-15 budget on may 19th the board sitting as a budget committee held a public hearing and voted to approve the 2014-15 budget superintendent smith is there anything you'd like to add this time okay okay the board will now consider resolution 4934 imposed taxes and adoption of the fiscal year 2014-15 budget for school district 1j multnomah canada oregon is there a motion and a second second director regan moves and director atkins seconds the motion to adopt resolution 4934 miss houston do we have citizen comment no we do not is there board discussion about the budget sure okay director buell i'm not going to be able to vote for the budget as it is for two reasons and i don't want either reason to reflect in any way whatsoever on our levy that is coming up because we certainly have some nice guidelines to make sure that levy money is spent correctly and according to the how it's laid out in the levy so i don't this is i had two problems with the budget first of all we have a responsibility as a public body with this huge budget to give a to do a good job of taking a look at it and the school board itself did what i could refer as being super kind as a shoddy job we didn't spend time energy that we should have a few seconds per million dollars is what we had scheduled and it was really poorly done and the second part is that did not allow us to look at the what i keep coming up with the number of 14 million dollars of consulting contracts dealing around education not having to do with facilities or special ed or anything else that we really need to take a good hard look at i tried to move a million dollars so we could have high school uh social service coordinators so we could get out and get some of those kids in our high schools who had some really difficult problems and really that wasn't we didn't really take a good solid look at that there were other things that i was really concerned about that we didn't look at and so i'm not going to be able to vote for the budget and like i say i hope this doesn't have any reflection because it doesn't mean on the levee which i support entirely and which is spilled out very carefully so there you go thank you other board discussion director martin one of the things i will be voting for it i would kindly disagree with director buell i think quite a bit of time and effort went into reviewing this including listening sessions that began months before the budget was prepared um sessions that we spent here hours and hours that we spent here um before we received a recommendation from from the superintendent but my my comment is particularly around the eight percent uh equity investment and uh and one of the things that i would like to see i think this was a huge victory uh for the equity work within the district not this budget but the last budget when it first we first approved it happy to see it again this year but i'm really interested in seeing how we track that ourselves in in how it actually addresses issues related to our racial educational equity policy um oftentimes this is we have the formula well we do have the formula that that really adjusts this based on based on fte within certain schools that have a certain sort of the equity students in in those special education english language learners historically underserved communities and those oftentimes show
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up in those buildings as fte oftentimes incremental fte so i'm really curious how we attach that to our strategy around higher selecting and hiring teachers of color interested in in support services particularly for kids who who fall into those categories instead of just where can we i mean i appreciate building level autonomy but i also want to see if this is an equity investment i want to see the the outcome actually do things like reduce the achievement gap like improve outcomes when it comes to our investment in the minority teacher act things like that so that's one of the things as we move forward i would i would really appreciate seeing and and even as we uh perhaps perform our audit and our citizen budget review in the next year look at look at how those things turned out others dr regan so most of my comments are very positive i have one little gripe that i'll start with just for fun which is that i did offer an amendment to this budget which i think was a incredibly reasonable amendment and it was around the administrative tables for our comprehensive high schools and school-wide support which i feel are wholly inadequate and i believe i have some assurance that we'll be looking at that for sure in the next budget round so that's my huge disappointment in this budget um but outside of that um i i think it's worth reminding people that most of our budget we really as a board don't have a lot of control over it's mostly salaries and benefits um and uh the small ability that we do have to prioritize and to influence the budget i think we take pretty seriously and in particular in this case i think we had an opportunity this year through our budget we added we added days we added teachers we've reduced the student teacher ratio we've added counselors we now have counselors in every single school and i'm just just as i was sitting here i just started jotting down some of the things it's just so exciting to be able to be looking at sort of a reinvestment budget as opposed to cutting i've been on the board for 11 years and this is a really fun position to be in to be kind of adding back and making investments where we need them we certainly have done lots of investments to support our struggling students so i think we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our legislators for stepping up this year in such a big way to support us and to support our students i'm grateful that we reached an agreement with the portland association of teachers that i think ended up being really positive agreement for our kids and mostly i'm also grateful to our taxpayers and the fact that we do have a local levy in place there are many districts throughout the last few years who were still facing furlough days and um you know we we didn't the last few years we weren't in the position of uh of cutting days and we in fact have uh tried to maintain reasonable class sizes at some level we've in this budget certainly have enrichments and support so in the last couple of weeks i think we all spoke at portland high school graduations it's certainly i think the most fun that i have being on the portland school board is having the opportunity to see our kids walk across stage and to shake their hand and to talk with them and i i always talk to seniors beforehand and kind of reflect back to them what i've heard and you know one of the things that uh every single year for 11 years and i usually do two or three graduations the one consistent thing i've heard when i ask the questions what do you wish could have been different is students talk about the budget cuts and the impact that that has on them and the insecurity that it um and the the how much they feel for their teachers and and for staff when budget cuts are happening and so i always remind them and it was particularly fun to remind them this year that um one of the things we really need them to do and all of us to do is to register to vote and to participate in the process because that's what makes a difference um ultimately and um you know one of the things that i remind the kids is you know they just received a gift of free public education uh i mean and it's a pretty remarkable foundation that we've um given them so i think with the limited ability that we have to prioritize our budget and to try to have an impact to me when i look at our budget this year we've put it in the right places for the most part and i'm i'm pleased to be able to support this budget director atkins that was beautifully said thank you so much director regan
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i just would add my thanks to the citizens budget review committee for all the many hours of work they put in in the oversight and guidance they've provided on top of the weeks and weeks and months of hard work from the staff that's culminating in this moment as well as by the board and all the folks in the community who emailed and testified and communicated with us in various means although less in past years because we are not in a cuts mode really important reminders of where we are still not whole in our district where we still have class sizes that are too high we still have schools without librarians and so forth where we're still even though we greatly appreciate what the legislature did to turn the corner really important reminders that it was not a uniformly rosy picture we're doing our best through the equity lens to address the shortfalls but we're still not there as a district or as a state so that was really important feedback to hear along the way even though it was by and large a better and welcome change in the budget this year and then finally just thanks tonight to the tax supervising conservation commission whose legal job it is to officially review approve the budget and they did that tonight through a hearing and question and answer with the superintendent and mr wind and concluded by complementing the district on just with they had no comments or concerns about the budget and just complimented the district on an outstanding job given especially the size and scope of the budget so i just wanted to since that was a sparsely attended hearing to say the least i just want to appreciate their work and their oversight on top of the other work and oversight that has happened and again just the expertise and the dedication of our staff is just tremendous so thank you so much thanks so i will also be about a yes vote on this um i i think it's important to note some of director beale's concerns and i hope that at the summer sessions those can be addressed you know whether board members should be able to to look more deeply at the budget and look at where can we really save money you know those kinds of things where should we put more money and i think that's an important step considering you know you're all elected officials i think that's something that you should at least talk about at the summer sessions whether you want to do that or not but i think i really like this budget i think it was a good mix of one-time investments and sustainability investments i'm really excited about a couple of things that we're investing in particular that i really hope will be uh foundations for the future and i'm i'm really excited to be building back it's just a really exciting position to be in so likewise thank you director fuel is a comment um more than i really appreciate director morton's comments about equity and what we should be doing surround that i've been sitting here a year waiting for somebody to work with me on these things i haven't been able to find anybody who is willing to really work with me on this stuff who has some power on this board i want to would like to get our hiring up front uh for teachers of color and other things so much better than we're doing and i can't get anybody to work with me on that i'd like to get the equities the equity issue down into the classroom where we make some real improvements can't get anybody to work with me on that i'd like to get the esl straightened out where we've got a big mess going on and we we're not getting enough time for children in our school system under the esl program can't get anybody to work with me on that so it's nice that we talk about this but i'm waiting i've been waiting a year now i'd be glad to have somebody work with me and kind of who has some power on this board to push for those equity issues and get them done uh i haven't seen anything in the horizon and so uh it's nice talk but i'm ready for some action just let me know when you want to do it folks dr blau coming back to the budget um i just want to say uh that i've really appreciated the process that there have been a number of um discussions and um perhaps at hearing director beale's concerns makes me realize maybe we need to frame some of our conversations and what we're prioritizing so that people are clear that it's a budget discussion because it seems to have escaped um some folks um i also really appreciate getting the two budget books that we get so that we can go in depth and review every line item by line item and i know that you both have made yourselves available as has neil sullivan before he was here when he was here so that we could go line by line if we needed to and had questions and raise it um and i appreciate the opportunity to have made motions or amendments whether they were successful or not is obviously due to a majority of the board but i have appreciated that opportunity
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i wanted to echo director atkins thanks for the tax supervising conservation committee commission for their hearing tonight i thought they asked some really good questions and if folks weren't um weren't able to make it i hope that they can review a transcript of that meeting somewhere because they asked some really i thought great questions that our public would be really interested in and curious about and would be interested in the responses to that and i also want to thank superintendent smith um because through our our budget discussions i think that you were able to craft a message um which by the lack of are changing really reflected a majority of the the concerns and issues and to director regan's point about wanting to amend the the staff admin table i hope that we are still looking at that as we move into the fall and i think again it's a testament to the fact that how well you listen to the community and prioritize to put together this budget and while i do want to thank the legislature for their changing the trajectory of our budgets i want to echo student representative davidson's mentioned that if we believe that this is where we need to be if we don't continue to push for an increase then we are complicit in our current funding for education and i know that some members in the community are tired of me hearing me say that but i'm not going to say it because i'm not going to stop saying it because it's the truth the fact of the matter is we are woefully underfunded and i really appreciate the legislature's attempt this year to change state law so that the funding that voters intended to come back to the district isn't being diverted to urban renewal districts that in fact it can come back to the district and so i'm looking forward to putting forth the local option level for a renewal it shouldn't cost people anything more it's the exact same rate but what it will do is it will again increase the funding by about four million dollars to portland public schools so that we can continue to make these investments and like director regan when i get to go talk with graduating seniors consistently what i hear is our students want more they are not sitting there wishing they could have less work or less opportunity they are craving more opportunity and what we need to do that is more resource and so we've been really effective with the resources we do that we've had we are building back slowly our reserves so that in case and when the economy goes back down we will better be prayer be better prepared to offset some of those decreases but i just want to thank staff for putting together this budget i think my colleagues for having real discussions and continuing to bring differing opinions whether or not we agree with it all or not but i'm looking forward to voting for this and superintendent smith i'll say congratulations on your first budget as superintendent that actually reinvest dollars that are not as a reduction of somewhere else i think frequently about how how your tenure has been plagued by nothing but reductions and how difficult it is to lead an organization when there is no real new investment it's just investment reprioritization because it always feels like things are being taken away so congratulations on a first reinvestment budget even though that reinvestment is smaller than we would hope others so i will just say uh that i thank bobby for her eloquence in talking about the budget nice job and i agree totally um and like everybody i'm hoping that we're going to be able to look back in the fall at the high school staffing table as well and and hopefully we'll have some more funds there that we can fill in a bit with that but especially for the people who are watching us or listening to us later i think it's really important to address director buell's comments about the board not being involved in this budget as director belial mentioned we receive budget books we all go through them in detail or at least i did and i'm assuming everybody else did and our budget process goes on throughout the year every time we're looking at a program we're thinking about that program with regard to the budget when the superintendent went out with her staff and held stakeholder meetings on budget budget priorities those are opportunities and and often the the board attends those as well meetings with groups such as the coalition of communities of color the superintendent's student advisory committee the achievement compact advisory committee the district employee leadership stakeholder team and the citizens budget review committee all groups that the superintendent reaches out to to get their input on our budget
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in addition to that the board heard presentations on a number of our budget topics those things that we went deep into including on september 16th i have a list here a september 16th an expansion of dual immersion on december 2nd on our budget priorities on january 21st how changes might be sustained over years to come because we don't want to make investments that we then have to turn around and disinvest on the on february 12th college and career readiness and athletics on march 3rd on school staffing and on march 10th on early learning and on athletics again so the board spends a lot of time over the year looking at our budget priorities and trying to establish those and we do go into detail in our budget books and we do look at ways that each one of us individually might want to make changes and just because we don't agree doesn't mean that we're not listening or we're not paying attention so i want to thank you superintendent smith for this budget and i also will thank the legislature for that investment that they or i guess the turning of the corner i think is the best way to describe it because it's it's the good thing is it's an investment it's not another cut so i'm very pleased to be supportive of this budget tonight so we will now consider resolution 4934 to impose taxes on the adoption we already did this didn't we the vote the board will now vote on resolution 4934 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no no the resolution 4934 is approved by a vote of five to one with student representative davidson voting yes yes great thank you all very much it's a long process okay 9 10. well we're ahead of schedule by about a half an hour yes uh i think it's because we didn't have any citizens coming and commenting which is not a good thing okay now on to the local option referral the board first heard and discussed this item at our last meeting superintendent smith is there anything you'd like to add before we vote no just that i'll ask john isaacs to come up and be present for any questions that you may have but otherwise you've had an initial discussion and would you excuse me the board will now consider resolution 4935 calling for a five-year local option levy to support schools is there a motion in a second director regan moves and director atkins seconds the motion to adopt resolution 4935 miss houston do we have any citizen comment we do not we do not is there a board discussion on this resolution you all recall that we discussed this at our last meeting is there any further discussion i would dr regan i would just remind people that we actually did have some public comment on this which was our um uh head of our portland association of teachers was here earlier tonight um talking in support of this and so it's actually fun for us to be working together with the portland association teachers on this particular initiative and i think it's um it's it's good to remind people that our entire local levy currently pays for about 600 teaching positions and all we're looking at doing with this renewal is to go out a little bit early and take advantage of a change in the process that the legislature is allowing so that we'll actually be able to capture about another four or four and a half million dollars more because money that voters think is going to pay for teaching positions is currently being moved over to um the city of portland to pay for urban renewal and it's also i think important for people to know the city of portland is supportive of this levy referral also and in this change and actually worked with us in salem on this so um i'm completely excited to be voting in favor of going out for this levy again i think it's the right thing it's going to make a difference for our kids and grateful to our community again for considering it that's it okay okay the board will now vote on resolution 4935 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed say no are there any abstentions resolution 4935 is approved by a vote of
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six to zero with student representative davidson voting yes yes great thank you all right hopefully we'll be clapping in november yes okay let's move on to roosevelt high school schematic design again the board heard and discussed this item at our last meeting superintendent smith is there anything else you'd like to add no just asking jim owens to come on up and be pre available for questions but you guys saw the presentation and had extensive discussion at the last meeting right the board will now consider resolution 4936 approving the roosevelt high school schematic design the commitment of additional funds and initiating the design development phase work do i have a motion in a second exactly director morton moves into director belial seconds the motion to adopt resolution 4936 ms houston do we have any citizen comment no we don't oh is there board discussion on this resolution in addition to what we've already discussed director buell i'd like to ask mr owens uh two questions going back to the stem space and the maker space not being contiguous at at uh rose thank you at roosevelt but what's different about that they've talked about it being different evidently that's in different spaces what's the difference between the makerspace and now and stem space so the space has been reconfigured as part of additional consideration of looking at two primary maker spaces with adjacencies associated with some stem learning areas and so there are basically two areas that are not contiguous but provide the school the opportunity to provide different maker opportunities in each of the in each of the spaces what is it about uh the spaces themselves that are the things that are going to take place in the place of the spaces that make them better to not be contiguous as they are franklin is there something within the situation or you don't want them contiguous for some reason or well it has it has to do with the way the design team approached how the spaces were aligned and to be able to accommodate as much as was possible you may recall early on there wasn't as much of the space at roosevelt so this was the approach the team took to be able to be more expansive and to increase the amount of overall square footage that was available for the maker and the stem spaces so it really reflects an outcome that aligns with our budget targets and aligns with our schedule constraints we had a couple alternative designs that were put forth by members of the community right at the end today did did we evaluate those designs and what was the what were our conclusions why did why did we not like those designs and like the one that we had i guess there was extensive community input around this there's also a continuing effort on the part of the of the principal at roosevelt to engage community in terms of how the curriculum will be delivered in those spaces and that is going to be ongoing over the summer but in terms of the facility layout this represents in the design team's staff's opinion to be the most adaptable in terms of how the spaces would be would be utilized both near term when the construction completes as well as long term thank you dr regan incredibly excited for the roosevelt community just as i was for the franklin community um that we're at this stage where we're voting in support of this i do know that there are some concerns still out there in terms of the design and again there was this one letter that we recently got from our portland door schools my assumption is that as we move into the design development phase there will still be some opportunities for community input and support and engagement and i guess my my big question is what is the future role of the dags the design advisory groups so by by charter the design advisory group will continue to engage during the design development phase and so staff will be presenting the dag with the evolution of the design i think it's worth pointing out that schematic design is really the beginning and so much of what has been laid out will be further developed over the next several months that design development
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will take place the project team will be scheduling design advisor group meetings and there will be opportunity for the for the team to to be presenting how the work is evolving so i think i would just ask what i um asked last week um which is around the cte spaces in particular and how those are designed if we hopefully might bring in some cte actual cte teachers hopefully during the next process to help us design the spaces that we have to be most effective for our kids in terms of their learning experience so i guess that's the one thing i would actually and i may not have been clear we're actually under uh under the principle under charlene williams she's actually uh putting a committee in place that will involve cte teachers okay and she'll get different perspective and they'll be doing that over the course of the summer i know they're looking at that late august time frame to be completing their work but that'll very much influence the configuration of the spaces in addition to the construction there's also the outfitting of the spaces the furnitures fixtures and equipment the technology and much of that will be influenced based on this process and input that goes into how these spaces are going to be laid out great and hopefully we can include some of our cte you know passionate advocates in that process as well because i was very grateful for their input as we went so thank you well i also think that we have to again call out how lucky we are to have an architect with 30 years of experience in over 50 schools where he's been doing this kind of work with cte spaces so we are very fortunate to have someone like this on on this particular project so director martin quick question do we have any seats open on the dag for roosevelt to my to my knowledge we do not okay at this at this time okay that would be something i guess to consider as as seats become available or participation is low perhaps other other opportunities for people to get involved i i guess i would comment that in addition to the the dag members themselves we also have quite a bit of participation by community members who well not dag members attend the meetings provide opportunity to comment about the work and so i would expect that would that would continue that's great the other are any of those cte teachers uh yes one is one is a cte teacher great correct the the other comment i wanted to make and i think i mentioned this when we looked at the when we had the last discussion but it really is a uh what i would consider an inspired design and one and also a design that is is very inspiring and uh and i think that uh to me is exciting to see and i think um the uh it matches my experience with the roosevelt community uh as well because that's an incredibly inspiring school uh both with the staff and and with the student and the students in the community that supports them so uh well done on the design okay the board director bill mr owens are you familiar with uh opus list of seven questions uh no sorry i'm not that's one that they sent to the school board i was not nobody copied nobody copied you well i guess i should ask him off i guess well i want to ask him these seven questions that opus has since he hasn't been copied these things so i hate to do it but it takes a lot of time there are pretty lengthy questions but if he hasn't been copied them and you know maybe director buell do they um have any effect on how you would when mr owens answers have any effect on how you're going to vote do they have something to do i don't know that doesn't have anything to do with the question yes it directly has something to do with it well yeah if you give perfect answers or something i might vote one way or the other i'm actually on the fence well you wouldn't you won't be in order and i i haven't seen the questions myself so i don't know if they're in order i haven't seen my emails well my questions don't have to be in order with you they only have to refer to what we're talking no it's it's whether it's whether they are in order under this particular item on our agenda they're on the order they're all under the order okay now is maybe somebody else there has seen these questions has anybody um have any of you seen these questions okay here we go one what are the formulas paraphrase them a little bit i've tried to but i don't have them memorized well enough to really paraphrase them
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uh what are the and the reason they talked about getting having asked these before and getting insufficient answers on these questions so first one is what are the formula and the numbers behind the changes in building capacity the math for understanding the capacity issues yes you did oh i thought you were interrupting me i got confused there for a while sorry um there'll be some of these questions i'm assuming that staff you won't like that question do you have an answer to that without going back in the capacity looking at this the capacity model is very complex and we would want to be able to to bring a complete response to that question to you and being able to prepare for it and perhaps even having some slides to support the understanding of the mathematics behind the capacity model would be most appropriate so the response there would be mr owens has offered repeatedly to meet with members of opus and to go over these materials with them has gone over some of these materials with them in the past so um so maybe you'll send me the answer i guess absolutely i can forward it to them there we go the problem with that is that these are these should be public questions well then opus could certainly post them on their website and they would be published the be answers mean you know we're asking questions on this i guess should i maybe i just should go on for the other questions georgia morton i think this um i i think these are probably uh we received these these questions and and probably i didn't look at the uh i didn't look at who all it was sent to so uh perhaps it's i i will take partial credit for not forwarding this to uh the appropriate staff but uh but i think one of the things that this this lends to is the uh what we were talking about earlier with our audit uh in our audit conversation and um that there are circumstances where questions persist and we need to and i i believe there are efforts that have been made and i believe there's considerable efforts that have been made but at some point we have to make sure that that the information that we're providing is clear and concise and understandable um and then uh there are moments when uh we've provided as much clarity as as possible and we we move forward um i'm prepared at this moment uh to make a decision and vote for this resolution uh that doesn't mean that these questions aren't important or should not be answered but i'm not certain uh these are questions look rereading these and looking at the the specificity that would be needed to answer them they would be questions that we would be able to answer this evening i think they could be done in in a public setting but i think they could also be something that were published here are some questions that we received and we're publishing them out there in an email or in our facebook page or whatever it might be or on our website we have a faq section on the bond don't we yes we do director buell would that uh suffice for public notice of this if we put the questions up and put the answers on on our frequently asked questions on the web i i think i would emphasize what director morton's saying about some of these are just going to be impossible for staff to answer on the spot here yeah i think so too that they'll kind of be impossible for them to answer on the spot yeah i i have no problem with putting up i would like to ask uh there was a there is one that i'm particularly interested in and so i guess we have these questions with the chairperson then send them to whomever is going to ask them and put them up enough i will certainly send them okay i'm sure that i have them am i on that list i haven't seen them great okay i'll be happy to send them let me ask number six though we heard last week that the per school costs have suddenly fallen is that correct and if that's like correct why is that or why is it not or something you didn't hear the question it says you guys have those questions over there yes oh you do have director that was nice thank you bobby uh number six which is about uh did this per school
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costs drop i don't understand i'm reading the question i don't understand it okay it's gonna be tough to put it on the fact that per school costs have not dropped i don't they haven't none of them haven't dropped but i don't i don't even understand the framework of the question okay i read it but i don't fair enough then they haven't dropped is what you're saying correct okay thank you uh we'll see them up on by when when we see them up by when would staff be able to have those up in a week two weeks certainly seems reasonable thank you thank you okay i guess i can live with that anything else no that's fine yeah all right director belial i'm really excited um for us to move forward with roosevelt it won't surprise you it is um a great design um and i know that staff have gone to extensive lengths to answer questions and provide feedback so i really appreciate all that effort in fact i did have an opportunity to read those questions before and opus specifically says we are choosing not to come publicly in front and make these questions addressed in public to the board tonight because they want to be clear that they support us moving forward and continue to have some questions so we're looking forward to engage so i just to the point of them not being public or whether or not to share them all here this evening i think it's well within the spirit of why they shared it with us um and moving forward to continue to ask questions and work with us so i'm really excited for it for the design this evening um as director knowles has pointed out we have a fantastic art architect um that's working hard and the staff is working really hard on making sure this is i'm going to be an exciting project and i've just appreciated all the efforts and continued engagement through this to get us to where we are so that we can move forward and i just want to caution that as we continue to move forward all your efforts to keep us on schedule despite our delays in continuing to ask questions back and forth i've appreciated your continued positive attitude to try to get this delivered on schedule even though we are now considerably behind 110 days behind schedule so thank you can i add anything else the only thing i would add is i appreciate everything director lyle just said um about us needing to keep on track but really being excited about seeing this come to vision i just keep thinking about i think of the visuals that the architect showed us last time that the entrance to the new performing arts complex the entrance and the community plaza to the wraparound service the entrance to the new i think it was the aerobics community aerobics room weight room athletic facilities that lead to the fabulous track and field that have already been established and especially the opening up of that gorgeous historic front front porch if you will of the front facade of roosevelt so those visuals just keep going through my mind and it's just so incredibly exciting i just can't wait to see it come to reality and we just need to do everything we can in our role to just keep this process on time and on budget so thank you for all your hard work okay the board will now vote on resolution 4936 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no any abstentions one director buell resolution 4936 is approved by a vote of five five to zero with one abstention with student representative davidson voting yes yes thank you thank you very much thank you and i'll forward those questions to you we may want to check with opus to make sure they want them up in public if they don't then it's fine but they certainly should be safe didn't we no we didn't okay let's move on to community eligibility provision superintendent smith would you like to introduce this item i would and tony magliano our chief operating officer is going to give us an update that's highly informational on community eligibility provision good evening chair knowles director superintendent smith um in your board packages is an informational report on the community eligibility program tonight's presentation is to inform the board of staff's plan to implement
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community eligibility provision in september of 2014. all summarize briefly what the program is and then i have this was a cross-departmental effort so i have various staff here if there's any questions when i'm done community eligibility provision is part of the hunger act hunger free kids act of 2010 it allows high poverty schools to offer both breakfast and lunch at no charge to all students while eliminating the traditional school meal application process cep benefits students and the school nutrition department's bottom line it increases participation it reduces school level administrative work and it improves the overall financial viability of nutrition programs in high poverty schools in 2011 and 2012 school year in illinois kentucky and michigan where it has already been piloted breakfast participation increased by 25 percent lunch participation increased by 13 the number of eligible students are determined by those who are directly certified for free meals because they live in households that participate in the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap temporary assistance for needy families tanf or food distribution program on indian reservations as well as children who are certified for free school meals without submitting a school meal application because of their status as being in foster care enrolled in head start homeless runaway or migrant students cep does not impact students already participating in free and reduced meals meaning students who are currently receiving free and reduced meals will continue to receive free and reduced meals regardless of whether their school is cep eligible or not i've included a graph in your pack in your packets hopefully i can figure out the laser pointer on this thing maybe not that's the power i don't want to press that top one while cpcp is authorized to be implemented at those schools where there's 40 eligible students if you look at the graph in your informational report and on the powerpoint you'll observe that there's a break-even point right here and what happens is by being able to group schools together those schools that are high cep you actually are reimbursed at a greater level which allows you to fund these additional schools so the grouping effort instead of only being able to do 10 schools we were able to implement this in 23 schools in addition staff is recommending to the superintendent that both madison and alliance high schools be added to the program because of the many feeder schools that participate in free and reduced meals and the demographic of the students that those high schools serve staff has thoroughly looked into the impact of participating in this program with regard to staffing title one combined underserved and our e-rate in reimbursement and we've determined that it's a negligible negligible impact in those areas at this time if there's any questions we have staff here that are prepared to answer them um i think i just have one quick question on this graph thank you for under for explaining first of all what the um dotted line meant it wasn't marked so i wasn't clear what why that was where the dividing line was the second piece is i just noticed um a school that has recently lost its title one funding in the past two or three years isn't on that graph lewis and i'm just curious if it was inadvertently left off or where it would fall it's lower than 40 percent it's lower than the 40 so these are just showing the schools that are 40 and higher that that's right okay that's surprising because at one point was that 40 so maybe the demographics have changed based on direct certification not on free and reduced launch so it's different oh so that okay thank you that helps director atkins this is wonderful thank you so much very exciting um so it appears if i'm understanding correctly that the federal government for once has actually reduced the burden on families and access to food that is fantastic news maybe not on you all and in doing the administration and compliance and all those other pieces but for families and children that's fantastic news so that's great
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um so for schools that are below the threshold does this mean that this existing system will continue that students still have to apply individually and the federal government isn't providing any means of mitigating that for those students not at this time okay or even simplification of the application process or not yet that's what the cep is for but it's only for certain schools right because as we know when you get with not even at the 40 but below that when you have students in poverty at school that aren't necessarily the dominant population and the big concern of how to serve those students and make sure that their needs are met so this is one step forward right exactly so that leaves my next question which is you mentioned that implementing the new program down to the 40 level would re require the use of the general fund dollars and i was wondering how much and what what would be involved in doing that so the formula is pretty complicated yeah an individual school um it varies what the impact would be if you took the all of those schools that are beyond the dotted line right it's about a 648 thousand 000 um additional costs to bring all those schools um and and for to feed all schools all students in those schools and again that would mean providing a free lunch for everybody in the school because no one has and breakfast because nobody had to apply for it right okay and there again there hasn't been any discussion about sort of the middle path of reduction in that annual certification of incomes and one more form for poor families to fill out not at this time okay that's another thing to talk to our federal delegation about there you go um but definitely appreciate the step forward and be able to feed more children and just really appreciate all your good work and figuring this out and making it work for kids thank you are there comments or questions uh student representative davidson thank you um so i was wondering how often do we reassess this or do we at all on a yearly basis on yearly basis so then how so how are we tracking the the percentage for each school how are we doing that without the free and reduced lunch so it's by direct certification okay all right yeah the students okay great thank you great great thank you very much thanks thank you looking forward to hearing how this works out during the summer um okay so we'll now move to our business agenda uh we'll consider the remaining items uh having already voted on resolutions are there any 4931-4936 to the business agenda agenda the fourth item listed the pearson contract has been pulled pearson contract yes okay is there any um not yet okay do i have a motion and a second to adopt the business agenda um yeah let's let's do this first so moved second second okay director atkins moves and director regan seconds the adoption of the business agenda miss houston is there any public comment yes we have one john richardson mr richardson i think you've been here before are you aware of our rules about public comment you know you've got three minutes total you'll see that you'll see the green light for two minutes the yellow light is your last minute and the red light means and a buzzer means it's time to wrap it up okay thank you very much for being here thank you good evening my name is john richardson r-i-c-h-a-r-d-s-o-n i'm a grant high school parent and a member of the portland parents coalition as you're aware pps has been found by the oregon department of education to be out of compliance with minimum state instructional hours by credit hour 130 hours and further the ode had quote grave concerns regarding the districts compliant with the spirit of the law end quote relating to meeting the annual 990 instructional hours due to its lack of compliance with the spirit and letter of the law pps was required to commit submit a corrective action plan or cap a draft six sentence plan with a new schedule attached was submitted to ode and to the portland school board for
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consideration you're being asked by staff this evening to accept the plan via board resolution 4937 i'm speaking tonight to share the parents coalition's concerns about the proposed plan these concerns have been communicated to you via email earlier and will submit a formal response to ode once the final and hopefully amended plan is approved by you of note one the plan is incomplete as it omits a strategy to address the 990 hour minimum pps did not provide staffing or scheduling information during the spring budget process so it's unclear if principals can provide students with opportunities to take enough classes to meet the minimum instructional hours of nine ninety two pps is not committed in the cap to implementing the may 2013 agreement that superintendent smith signed with the parent coalition pbs cited the may agreement in its initial response to ode and the deputy superintendent referenced it in under the necessary corrective action in its findings in this agreement superintendent smith agreed to build a staffing and forecasting framework and system earlier this year and supporting or to ensure that all the students who needed or wanted a full day of classes can have one without this pps's commitment to staffing and supporting students in taking a full day of classes is diminished or unknown three timely and transparent data was not available during the recent pps budgeting cycle in its cap pps needs to share information with the community on a timely basis things like forecasting data by school staffing workloads study halls etc and commit teaching resources where it's necessary item 4 pps states that a pat grievance has been filed regarding the new schedule but does not provide schedule and staffing options to ensure compliance should the grievance be upheld number five an ongoing audit plan agreed to with the parents coalition should accompany the cap to ensure compliance we thank the district for the opportunity to review the proposed schedule aligned with 130 instructional hours per credit requirement finally pps should accurately describe why students were denied a full school day beginning in 2011. and it's submitted submission of the draft cap to the state the reason why students did not have a full day of classes and receive the minimum 990 hours of instruction is mischaracterized the facts clearly demonstrate that students were prevented from taking a full day of classes because the majority of the school board voted to only budget for students to take a partial day of classes and eliminated more than 40 high school teaching positions we urge you to require amendments to the cap prior to approval and submission to the state thank you thank you very much so is there any board discussion on the business agenda director regan i had wanted to pull resolution 4937 um so i can do a friendly amendment you ask me do i do that now or do i just pull that yeah do i go ahead and do my movement yeah you look at the motion motion all right so my motion is to pull resolution 4937 um which has to do with the corrective action plan um to do a friendly amendment exactly okay the motion has been made and seconded all those in favor all those opposed okay so then do i go ahead and tell you what the amendment is hang on just a second i think i think we're going to go yeah so then i had two other quick questions on the business agenda if people were there with me for a second the first one is on the new revenue contracts page five self-enhancement inc it looks like we are going to be leasing them space at the king neighborhood facility is the amount listed a per year amount or is that a total amount that's for the five year the five years yes tony cheap right now that's a five year amount okay go ahead is that okay go ahead quick follow-up is that the space that was formerly a parole office or is this a space that's different it's in the same building so they're sharing it with the northeast uh neighborhood coalition so sei and but the parole office is gone right yeah i think yeah and then my second question tony you could probably answer as well it's the very first new contract for sheckley northwest the description is purchasing five it looks like new school buses and my question is whether those are relatively energy efficient i know we converted to propane at one point are they hybrid or is there any energy efficient i believe those are
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propane buses okay yes so good thank you okay it's fun to make sure oh wait while you're there tony sorry can i ask you a question because i just wanted to call it this in celebration that awesome to see that's next line down of district-wide purchase of 1506 chromebook computers right and uh just thrilled to see that investment and i know you're not planning to make any kind of presentation about it but i just wanted to call that out as a fantastic and the start of the school year every teacher has a chromebook excellent that's awesome that's great there's actually a lot of really good stuff in here okay any other board discussion on the business agenda except for 4937 nope okay the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor indicate by saying yes yes i'll oppose no any abstentions the business agenda is approved by a vote of six to zero with student representative davidson voting yes yes thank you okay director regan did you want to talk about uh resolution 4937 sure i think you all have a copy of my amendment in front of you and i believe there may be some copies up on the bookshelf over there for anyone in attendance it's a pretty simple amendment that i'm looking at when it was sent out by staff in terms of our correction corrective action plan uh we talked about three things one is the high school hours and the minimum high school hours uh we talked about a parent complaint process and then the third thing is that we're going to be doing an audit um to ensure that the corrective action plan is implemented appropriately and that piece was left off so all i'm doing is on c instead of saying staff has developed a corrective action plan to meet two requirements it would say three and the third one will read the district will submit to a follow-up process to ensure appropriate implementation of the corrective action plan the audit process will be developed and agreed upon in collaboration with members of the parents coalition and will be submitted to ode no later than august 15 2014. so it's just making sure we have that piece in there did you want to move that amendment i would okay is there a second second is there any other board discussion i have a question on this whole thing but we're doing the amendment first yes we're doing the amendment and we're adding the amendment then we're going to vote on the resolution i have a question on the amendment i guess okay you called specifically out the parent coalition to be involved which is fine by me but either they're the agreement they're the ones who made the official complaint okay you want to do that i just wanted to know that of course that's fine thank you yeah the the organ department just checking just reiterating like are there a couple other groups involved okay the amendment to um resolution 4 937 has been made and seconded all those in favor please say yes yes any opposed no motion uh to amend 4937 passes with a vote of 6-0 with student representative davidson voting yes yes okay okay now um we'll go ahead and vote on resolution 4937 do i have a motion so moved and a second second director regan moves and director morton seconds approval of resolution 4937 is their board comment director buell a question for the superintendent uh we sent out we have another grievance coming forth from the portland association teachers around this yes we're engaged in talking and working on that with them and we sent out four schedules to ask to ask high school staffs to vote on and those four schedules i keep talking to people who say we did not where were the good schedules we did not we sent out model schedules for discussion at high school staffs for principals to gain to get input from their staff okay so that was part of the process it wasn't a vote were they allowed to come up with a new schedule to have input did we get anything like that i mean basically as i understand it there were four schedules all of which were not very good and that
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a lot of teachers had another schedule that they'd had in the past that were that they liked and so that wasn't available i just wanted them i don't know if that's the case i've i've talked to an awful lot of people who say that's the case so i i don't know i'm just it's a comment that i'm making more than a question and part of um the complexity of the scheduling was being in compliance with this so the 100 this finding and doing schedules at work so a number of schedules that were presented to staffs were models of different schedules that then they were seeking feedback from staff that the principal would consider in recommending uh to the district this the schedule that they have the four that they had and and what we were going for was also an agreement that we would put all of the high schools on a common schedule so it was it was both within the staffs but also among between schools um what's the schedule we were agreeing to that met this criteria so so yes so that but it was not it wasn't about it it was just a discussion and some of the and and one of the things as i understand it tell me if i'm right or wrong here i guess is that there were differences based around whether you had priority in focus schools where you wanted them on an a period day and the other schools maybe they didn't people didn't want them necessarily so why did we choose to have everybody on the identical schedule is there some sort of reasoning that we had behind that pardon that's just you know there were you know there were there were a lot of features to the schedules that were um and there was not a universal like there were people who wanted seven period days for the kind of subject they teach there are people who wanted eighth period i mean there was a lot of complexity in this conversation um and what's the grievances what's the grievance uh based upon this we keep it come on we keep losing these grievances i'd rather not lose another one uh but i'm just had this sneaky suspicion that we're we're paddling upstream again maybe before before we start i don't really think that this is in order right now to be talking about the grievance we are discussing the corrective action plan and this amendment right now not the grievance the grievance could have to do with the corrective action well i'm going to rule that it does not the grievance has nothing to do with this corrective action plan i'm going to rule that it does not then doesn't so you're saying that so any other based on anything that we're doing in this action plan i'm ruling that it does not that's right are you kidding no sorry it's just kind of making this up as we go along nope nope we're trying not for the minimum instructional hours do you have any other comments about anything your grievances have anything to do with minimum instructional it doesn't have anything to do with this corrective action plan doesn't have anything to do with it okay okay fine okay director reagan so um i just want to again express um appreciation to the parents coalition for basically calling this out because in the end um we will end up with a better high school schedule for our kids and more opportunities for our kids and i just spent the last weekend the whole weekend at an oregon school boards association meeting and one of the things i was able to do was to talk through with the board the fact that you know many school districts across oregon are probably not meeting the 190 or the 990 and i think in fact in the oregonian it's already we're already hearing that many school districts are getting waivers we had to comply by next september already other school districts i think had an extra year to get into compliance and even then i think some of them are have asked for waivers so um and one of the things that i made sure to let them know is that to get into compliance may require changes in teachers contracts and you're going to need a little bit of lead time for that discussion because one of the things that we did was we added a couple of days instruction that helped us get there so um i'm i'm grateful that the parents coalition did this i'm hoping that other school districts are paying attention and in the end we're going to end up with a stronger high school program for our kids as a result so dr belial i just want to let folks know that um i'll actually be voting no on this resolution not because i don't agree with the um the corrective action plan and not because i don't believe that our
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students will get more instructional time and that's good for them but more as a as a protest to the state we often talk about local control and this is um my understanding is part of the reason why so many school districts are applying for a waiver is because they understand that the legislature is actually moving away from seat hours and that they're actually looking to do some action and so they're basically going to wait out the state to change and so i find it i find it inappropriate for them to hold us to a standard that they're willing to waive and that they themselves are beginning to review um and it just feels again like a a sense of local control that the state's interjecting in this especially knowing that our state superintendent himself didn't follow this when he was a superintendent not that that makes us right to shortchange students but i just want to say that my no vote is not again a reflection on whether or not this corrective action plan adequately addresses the complaint now whether or not the complaint of having students in school all day isn't the right choice but the mechanism which is used to do this is an example of the state i think overreaching so okay we'll now vote on okay the board will now vote on resolution 4937 all those in favor yes yes all those opposed no abstentions yes i'm standing because i wasn't allowed to ask questions that i felt were pertinent thank you resolution 4937 is approved by a vote of four to one with three one one well then it's not approved four to one with one abstention with student representative davidson voting yes yes thank you great we're done the next meeting of the board will be held on tuesday july 8 2014 and please note that our formal board meetings will now be on tuesdays for the rest of the school year

Sources

PPS Board of Education, Archive 2014-2015, https://www.pps.net/Page/1893 (accessed: 2022-03-24T00:57:53.371200Z)
PPS Board of Education, Archive 2013-2014, https://www.pps.net/Page/2224 (accessed: 2022-03-24T00:57:54.073648Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)

2014-06-23 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - June 23, 2014

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