2014-07-08 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2014-07-08
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - July 08, 2014

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good evening everyone um this study session of the board of education for july 8 2014 is called to order i'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers 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 tv services website director curler is absent this evening along with our student representative jaswell mina so at this time we will have public comment miss houston do we have anyone signed up for public comment porter so if you guys would just come forward and sit at the testimony table i'll go ahead and read the directions for public comment thank you so much for taking the time to come to our board meeting we deeply value public input and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns our responsibility as a board lies in actively listening and reflecting on the thoughts and opinions of others guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration when referring to board members staff and others and other presenters the board will not respond to any questions or comments at this time but the board or staff will follow up on various issues that are raised please make sure that you have left your contact information either phone number or email on the sign up sheet pursuant to board policy 1.70.012 speakers may offer objective criticism of district operations and programs but the board will not hear complaints concerning individual district personnel any complaints about specific employees should be directed to the superintendent's office and will not be heard in this forum now the good part you have a total of three minutes to share your comments please begin by stating your name and spelling your last name for the record during the first two minutes of your testimony a green light will appear right there in front of you when you have one minute remaining a yellow light comes on and at the end a red light will go on and a buzzer will sound and we will ask that you respectfully end your comments at that time we sincerely appreciate your input and thank both of you for being here on such a beautiful evening my name is dave porter p-o-r-t-e-r chair knowles superintendent smith board members and members of the public several weeks ago my prior public comment to the board urged the board to request the five-year dual language expansion expansion plan from pps administration for consideration in time for the boundary review for consideration i also submitted my own five-year immersion expansion proposal which included adding in 2016-17 a two-strand one-way spanish dual language immersion program at the now vacant george l smith elementary school in southwest portland tonight i am speaking to that issue the need for an additional west side spanish immersion program first there is no immersion program in the wilson cluster it is the only high school cluster without an immersion program at the elementary middle or high school levels second lottery data for the ainsworth spanish immersion program shows that there is enough parent interest on the west side for another spanish immersion program in the 2013-14 pps lottery for kindergarten slots in the ainsworth spanish immersion program 50 were approved 19 weight listed and 55 denied no space a new two-strand immersion program at smith would need about 50 kidney gardeners to be full third about 80 percent of the applicants for the ainsworth spanish emerging program as well as of those that accepted and turned down are from the west side there is enough west side interest alone for an additional spanish immersion program fourth additional classroom capacity is needed on the west side now and into the future six of the ten west side elementary schools are overcrowded data's in the handout fifth opening a new immersion program could draw students away from currently overcrowded schools reducing the need for boundary changes for example chapman is overcrowded yet 2012-13 the latest data only six of its fifteen first-choice applicants for the spanish immersion program at ainsworth were admitted with more space at ainsworth or another immersion program nine kindergartners could have been shifted out of an overcrowded chapman thank you
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hi my name is elizabeth nye spelled nye i'm the executive director of girls incorporated of the pacific northwest as well as a board member of the coalition of advocates for equal access for girls i'm also a parent of a fourth grader at ainsworth and a sixth grader at west sylvan in the portland public school district i'm here tonight to speak on behalf of teen parents it's come to my attention that through the high school redesign process and the educational specifications that have been crafted that child care centers are part of a comprehensive high school plan and i urge the board to consider the needs of teen parents and to keep this as a priority moving forward for these students becoming a parent at any age is life-altering as i know but for parents of teen parents this can be overwhelming we also know that the results the outcome the educational outcomes for teen parents can be dramatically reduced and their lifetime earning prospects greatly impacted we also know that one of the specific issues identified by teen parents for dropping out of high school was lack of transportation between their homes day cares and school for both them and their children we also know that teen parents are seldom asked what resources and types of support would help them be successful in school that their ability to use their voices on these issues are often not fully accessed we also know from research that teen parents say that the biggest support they need is child care and the the least voiced issue for support from them had to do with actually career development programs which i thought was interesting but we also know that research on school-based child care for teen parents unanimously finds substantial and long-lasting impacts for both the teen parents and the children of these parents including emotional support for the parents educational success financial self-sufficiency i'd also like to point out that the children of teen parents when enrolled in school child care settings have higher rate of physical healthy development as well as emotional social growth and we're setting the foundation for future educational success these children will be the children that enroll in pps in the future and i urge you to make sure that their needs are being met thank you thank you very much thank you to both of you and if please make sure ms houston has your contact information okay tonight our next agenda item is boundary review with portland state university center for public service at our june second meeting we had the psu center for public service provide us with a readiness assessment and today we have jim jacks who's going to come up to the table here with us to be a facilitator for a discussion that the board is going to have about the kinds of things that we need to be concerned about as we look at boundary review some of those are what values does the board have regarding boundary review what are the goals what are our goals as a board and as a district for boundary review what's on the table and what's not to have a discussion about that negotiables non-negotiables also what will the board ask of the community to provide input on so the community has a clear idea about what we're going to be coming to them for information about um i think another issue for us to talk about is uh how involved is the board and where are we involved in boundary review and then of course uh what stakeholders do we as a board need to make sure that we're talking to as we're doing this boundary review work so um see jim is at the table now so thank you very much for being here tonight and we look forward to the discussion thank you very much sharon knowles and it has been my tremendous good fortune for the last 15 years to be working in a variety of problem-solving jobs and one of the things that is personally gratifying about it is working with people who are trying very hard to move their community forward in a positive
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direction and i have appreciated very much your attention to this topic over the last few months so and i should also mention that i'm a parent of a incoming fifth grader and eighth grader in vancouver public schools so i definitely personally believe in public education so one of the things that that psu was asked to do is to make some ultimately some recommendations on a civic engagement strategy around boundary review and there are many steps between that and where we are now we've come a long way and we've done a lot of work and we've done a lot of work with the public talking to people doing this assessment and where we are right now is trying to work and touch base with pps leadership to sort out internal alignment and trying to get a better understanding of what are the key topics what are the key priorities and so that drives a lot of what there's only three questions tonight but i anticipate there could be a fairly wide-ranging discussion on each of those and you know better than many just how interconnected a lot of these topics are so this internal alignment phase is really to try and prepare the organization to engage with the public in a productive way around boundary review in whatever fashion that takes the the form of at this point we don't know what that'll look like yet but it's an organic evolving process and as we move forward things will become more clear in the months ahead so one of the things we discovered early on was this realization that boundary reviews happen to greater or lesser degrees on a regular basis and so one of the one of the things we're trying to sort out is how can the district find a way to do this on an ongoing basis in the years ahead and there's a lot of work to do on that still and that's part of what brings us to this evening so how you handle things on an ongoing fashion is where we ultimately would like to present some information and choices to district leadership so at a certain level and i should also say phil kiesling he is traveling on business in eastern oregon and wendy willis is traveling on business in ohio otherwise they would be doing this instead of me this evening we're happy to have you so at a certain level where we got started you kicked this off with the board resolution 4718 directing staff to develop and recommend a process for comprehensive review of school boundaries district-wide so that led to staff working with psu and a lot of the work that led to our report that we presented in june so there's there's a lot of big topics in your resolution and how they fit together and you know how you want boundary review to interact with them is part of what tonight's about so at um so i think at this point i'd like to unless any of you have any uh questions for me at the beginning uh director beal sharp steve did you um one of the things i would have done if i was doing portland state stuff oh i'm sorry okay uh one of the things that i would identify as doing portland state stuff but they wouldn't hire me uh is uh i don't talk to all those disgruntled parents i mean we are still over a year more than that i think later all those disgruntled parents are still enemies of the district to some degree and so i think one of the things i would have done almost first was go and talk to those people and say what went wrong last time what do we need to do different have you done that i mean pulled out those particularly leaders of those community those community leaders that had been upset about it did have you done any of that i mean is that part of your strategy in the community to do that do you need names from the district to tell you who they are or from me i can tell you go on facebook bobby can tell you they are everybody can tell you right who those people are uh in a nutshell we did do some of that um the assessment that came to you or the report that came to you in june was based on about a talk about 25 it might have been 30 interviews with about a hundred people and there were groups of parents that were part of that
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i can't promise that we talked to every disgruntled person disgruntled upset parents who are still some of them definitely were some of them weren't because i've talked to some recently and they don't they weren't contacted i know right really in the leadership of that forefront of that movement to a huge degree so part of what would be helpful to do that i definitely agree and that is one of the goals of a longer term civic engagement strategy that we would design based on the feedback we've gotten thus far would be how to reach out to different communities in the district and engage with them and hear and work with them so from an assessment point of view the key isn't to talk to every single person but to talk to enough that you get a flavor of what some of the concerns are and we definitely met with a number of disgruntled parents from a variety of clusters and an assessment doesn't have to be kind of perfect it just needs to be good enough to help you understand what the next steps are so we think we did enough of that to get a flavor to get a good read of the flavor of some of the concerns and the criticisms and a lot of those made their way into the report that was presented on june 2nd so that gets us part way there where we're trying to do some work now is how can we gather some information to help make some recommendations that would lead to a civic engagement process that could lead to a good set of boundary review decisions over the years to come it's it's easy to skip to the end there's a lot of work between now and then so um bobby thank you jim so i think it's worth remembering that when we've done um some of our school closures in the past um we were in a very different place in terms of often responding to really severe budget cuts and shortfalls and i think that we recognize that our process often wasn't what it should have been and was often too fast and change is really hard one of the things i think we're trying to do with this process is to do it in a much more you know kind of structured intentional way so that anybody looking at a potential school closure and i don't know that we're even talking about school closures here would kind of have an understanding of how we landed there so first of all we're talking about enrollment balancing at this point i don't believe we're talking about school closures and in fact it's hard for me to imagine that we're going to land on school closures because in fact we're in a increasing enrollment situation so for example years ago when i was involved with some of the school closures we had a declining budget situation and declining enrollment situation so we're in a pretty different place today i don't think that we're talking about closures i think we're looking at schools that are over enrolled and under enrolled and actually trying to ensure going forward that there's a much more intentional and transparent process it's never going to be easy there's always going to be some parents who are upset and there's also going to be parents who once they get through the other side of it especially if they're in an under-enrolled school and you know in the next year or two their child ends up with a much more robust program because the school's appropriately sized um who actually you know realized that was really hard but it was okay and my kid got through it so i guess i just want to make sure that we're separating out the idea of school closures from this process not that this isn't going to be difficult but we are trying to be much more intentional about how we go about it and involving the community much more which is why we have psu here to start with i think that uh on the issue of school closures that's another issue that we'll have to discuss amongst the board to see if that's on or off the table that i mean that's the purpose of all of this tonight is for us to all discuss what's on the table what's off the table um and a number of other questions which you're going to get to terrific so the first one in the first phase of the psu team's work we heard a number of reasons for conducting district wide boundary review and enrollment balancing and preserving strong neighborhood schools creating more equitable access to programs for all students but it wasn't clear to us kind of what the primary purpose should
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be and that's part of what we're hoping to hear from each of you tonight based on what you know now with a lot of intertwined policies and dynamics at work based on what you know now what should be the primary purpose of a district-wide boundary review i think for me um where i'm at again recognizing the incredible complexity and interwoven nature of all this but it's to me it's really around that balancing of the enrollment so that we have an appropriate number of students both for the program and for the building and sort of that it's part of a coherent system both incoherent in terms of where the boundaries are located and how we have a what's our pre-k through 12 continuum geography all those pieces recognizing of course that that alone is not sufficient the numbers of students in a building is not sufficient to create a quality school and that there's all the other pieces that we're also working on in other arenas principal quality teacher quality our programs supports everything else so not ever to claim that this is sufficient and we all know that but i think it's important to reaffirm that and be really clear to the public that we understand that um another important piece is and you alluded to this is just that to normalize the notion of boundary changes are sister district to the west and beaverton they they've been a growing district they have they my understanding is they change boundaries just routinely almost just almost i don't know if it's quite just by issuing a letter of notification but it's by no means sort of the huge issue that we sort of have only done piecemeal and with sort of a it's been sort of a crisis within portland public and i think really with psu's help i'm hoping that we're going to get to the place where we do have a coherent transparent understandable rational framework so that as we continue to grow which are going to continue to grow continue to have challenges with our facilities which we will rebuild over time thanks to the voters but it's going to take time that we have that framework and that we don't have both what we have had for a number of years to serve these hot spot crises of super super overcrowded or schools that are struggling due to low enrollment and then not have sort of the and again we heard the feedback very clearly from communities and parents don't just do this one off in one area or one school but you do need to look at it holistically and i really felt as important when the district did i'm doing one of those processes assert very clearly that this is not about people's property values this is about education of our students and i think it's really important to keep that at the forefront i feel like as a city we've kind of many of us have gotten into this mode of we need to get away from the notion that there are some good schools and there's some bad schools we need all our schools to be good and again we have a number of other ways in which we're trying to get to that place i recognize we may not be there quite yet but we need to not have people be basing feeling like it's a life and death decision of what school they get into and basing their feeling that that once they buy a house in that school district that that is forever again we need to be doing everything we can as a district to ensure that every school is a quality school that everyone any child can succeed in so i'll stop there steve go ahead when i tried to get my brain around this it seemed to me and is portland state approaching it this way am i is this is this in line with your thinking just out of curiosity mostly there was two parts to this issue one is the organization the physical organization of the district in other words how close are the children to the schools is one of the physical aspects another is the size of the school itself and and the the third major one what are the net what natural boundaries are there uh transportation corridors train tracks the river those are natural boundaries so has portland state done this taken a map of where the children are and said if we divide if we met this idea of children went to the closest school and do we have a map that laid out that would show what that would look like and then if we had if we then put in the size of the school because that would be a limiting thing and then we put in natural boundaries we would come up with a physical description of where we might start if we just started 100 years ago and we had the same thing i mean have they have
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you done that because that's that's one and then but then this i'm sorry i asked a question then i trust you and then this but i i messed up here and then we would add past practice to some degree and then the next thing then we get into social engineering after we've at least looked to see what that would be to me that seems to make a lot of sense have you done that come up with that kind of a map we've not created a map like that to my knowledge ultimately a map or a series of maps like that could be produced at some point in the future but that my impressions were a long way from that point right now well i would think that would be the starting point to see where we would be physically if everybody went to their neighborhood school and then we had then and tried to jiggle within them it may be that your director of enrollment and transfer has some maps like that i if if she does i'm not aware of it i doubt it i'm not aware of it jim do you want to just briefly go over the purpose of this tonight so that all the board members are clear about what we're actually talking about and where we're trying to get and and where you psu fits in that sure so at a at a basic level what we're trying to do right now is determine the internal alignment of pps at a board level at uh and at the leadership levels within the school district and that will help us make some recommendations on different scenarios that you may elect to do moving forward so at the um so your question um really in in my view skipped to the end of the process right earlier in it there and part of it is um from a boundary view point of view the district will will need to make some intentional transparent choices about how to engage with the public and on what topics and that's part of what we're trying to surface tonight and with these meetings with the district leadership is you know what's the primary purpose of boundary review and if we ask it in four different meetings and get five different answers that's one thing if we ask it in four different meetings and get the same answer that's a different thing and it leads to other it it helps guide how a process might occur so if i can jump in what i what i think i heard from my colleague director huell is that physical attributes are a high priority for for where you would start you would look at physical space i don't see how you can actually go out and talk about the social engineering aspects which everything else is without knowing what it would be if you just had just use the physical situation and so when we went out to uh that's the first question i'd ask if i was a person out in the right audience i'd say well what would happen if everybody went just to this near school right so what i know of it and again i think that's what this discussion is to figure out is trying to figure out what our priorities and what our values are so for example do natural barriers present a problem or do we just skip that for the social engineering factors and i hear you saying no we should start with the physical but our director of enrollment and transfer has produced maps about how many kids how live in each census tract data and we have maps of all our schools so it would not be hard for us to figure that out but i think the tough part is when you say closest school like i think of my house and i'm about a mile away from three different schools so which one do you call closest to me because it depends on this arbitrary line that somebody drew down the middle of a street yeah and but but you if you use just closest and you use the number it once you start with the closest then you go to the numbers then you go to the natural boundaries eventually you come up with something that would happen that would be totally outside of social the social engineering i'm looking for a formula that gives you outside of the social engineering which would allow you to set to social engineering now then we decide or we can decide now what so if we got to that point now what social engineering and and that would be honest and transparent to the community we think that you should have uh uh we should intermingle uh you know economic groups right so no school would be below and or like that but i don't know how you can answer that unless you have the other well and i think part of the part of the discussion um is an acknowledgement of how as you pointed out how interrelated some of these issues are so for example that even if we did that it would assume for example current grade configuration had in our current building so k and so i i could see our public saying right i have a much closer school to me it's right across over there but you're shipping me over there and so do we use vacant
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buildings or and how do we so i think that's the discussion we're trying to have is what are our priorities tonight and again what i hear you saying is look at just map closest maybe you're saying active school same physical priorities maybe they might be should it be the major priority well right now i would say since we don't have any social engineering going on it is right now mm-hmm to start the appeal go to the close of school it would be interesting information bobby so i think this is a worthwhile discussion i look at it more as in page two i mean on question two which you're going to be getting to in terms of the the first question the primary purpose of district-wide boundary review i think that to me there's there's five and we have three the first is balancing enrollment the second is preserving strong neighborhood schools that's obviously a huge core value and then creating more equitable access to programs for all students i'm assuming there that we're talking about focused programs choice programs as dave porter talked about um opportunity to go to a language immersion program that sort of thing so those three i'm what was the first one well it's what's in in our memo balancing enrollment so that we don't have schools that are way over enrolled or way under-enrolled preserving strong neighborhood schools in equitable access to immersion and focused programs the two that i would add and are would be i want to ensure that every school has a robust program and where we really struggle with that is if schools are too small so i to to me i want to be looking at what's happening inside the building and ensuring like in the case of a high school and the rest that we have enough students that we can truly offer a robust program to every single child and the fifth one that i would add is we want to always be looking to preserve our capture rate we want to make sure that right now if 85 or so parents send their children to portland public schools as we're going through this process hopefully we're going to maintain that or even bring it up so to me those are two things that i would add i have a bunch in question number two but those are two key ones that i would look at here because i do think right now we could potentially be losing families because schools you know their neighborhood school that's it elementary school has 800 kids in it or has 300 kids in it so i do think that capture rate piece is important so so i'll just follow along on that one that one was just one of the things that i thought was important and that is i think we need to have a discussion around the k-8s based on because i think it's really difficult to have a robust program in a school that can serve as 300 kids and as a k-8 you just can't do it and so i think we need to look at those k-8 that are in facilities that are too small to actually hold the number of students that you need to have a robust program and a k-8 um and that and that's in addition to all the ones that everybody else has had i think that's an important discussion for us to have where those schools need to main where we need to maintain those k-8s in schools that are big enough to have a full robust program for k-8 and if we don't i guess another question will be where would we put more middle schools if we have to have some of those schools move to k-5s in order to again support a robust program for a k-5 then you're going to have to figure out where those six through eight students go for middle school so yeah and then yet there was one other there's one other um thing that i i was really surprised about recently and that is i i don't know if i should have been surprised or not and i think it was i read it in your report and that is that about 66 percent of our families go to their neighborhood schools and we put such a focus on neighborhood schools and only 66 percent of our families go to neighborhood schools 44 go someplace else um so i think that it's it's not that i am opposed to neighborhood schools i think neighborhood schools are the backbone of our city but i just think that that's an interesting fact that we should probably consider and when we're thinking about our neighborhood schools and how high up the priority list that goes given the priority that 44 percent of our neighborhoods are not 34 excuse me or not so just a quick yeah sure so a couple things um first um totally agree with your comment about the i think it actually is kind of a question two issue just around the configurations because i would agree particularly in the jefferson cluster where um that i believe is the only cluster that does not have a middle
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school option and where um so to i've continued to say that and the problem one of the one of the conundrums here is not wanting to create additional upheaval and change which we keep hearing please do not continue to upheave and change us on the other hand we also continue to hear um both support for the k-8s and support or wish for a middle school access to that option so for me i was really struggling with how could we go ahead and start redrawing boundaries to address the issues of over and under enrollment and have coherent sensible new boundaries until we have resolved that question so it feels like that discussion particularly in that area really needs to be to happen early on um and to sort of map that out and figure out how we have the discussion and then the um the other piece is around just to remind everyone that the superintendent's advisory committee on enrollment and transfer sackett is talking is discussing that very issue pam of of choice and how does this fit in and access to that and i know that um sackett is working with the psu team to figure out how to align their work and so that's that's another part of the the challenge of this work just to point that out bobby i just wanted to add on to the conversation of k-8 versus middle school because i mean as i'm talking to people they're they're i get about an equal number of people are passionate about k-5 middle school an equal number right if the problem is in our k-8s that we can't offer a robust program to our middle school aged kids what i think we need to be looking at instead is what is the ideal size of our schools so in that case a k-8 needs to be larger we should probably have three classes at a minimum per grade level so now you're talking about 700 and i think right now our number is way less than that in terms of ideal size so i guess i want to make sure that we don't necessarily blow up the whole discussion about middle school versus k-8 because there are passionate supporters of either but let's look at how we solve the the core or the key issue that we've heard with k-8s is that we're not offering a robust enough program in the middle school year so how do you do that you need more children and so maybe that's the discussion we need to be having instead i think it's about the end yeah so i've always i've always been a proponent of k-8 so i'm not saying we should do away with them um my concern is and it has been for as long as i've been on the board and first saw the report about our schools that were too small to hold enough kids to do a robust program for a k-8 right if you have a school that can only hold 400 students how can you put six to 800 students in there which is what you need in order to have a robust program for a k-8 so i mean that's those that's a big issue for us i think right so i was just going to say that um that the size i'm glad you brought it up because to me that's that's part of the question is um i don't feel like we've settled on a size the size changes depending on the state's budget um oftentimes i think there's probably some learning from neighboring school districts about what size they have and i think that as we have this discussion they just remind us that um to keep in the back of our mind about when we're rebuilding facilities if we have facilities that are too small and we saw that with the high school right is we've already increased one size i think we have to have to look at that as we begin to plan this but overall i agree that would be useful information to have just a sense of what size the schools can really hold and how you measure that is an ever moving target do you look at number of teachers that have to use rooms do you look at square foot per kid do you look i mean there are a million different ways to do that but it's it sometimes feels like those numbers are more fluid than it feels good to make decisions on but it depends on which methodology you're using to to calculate it and i i do prioritize for myself something about neighborhood schools but i appreciate director knowles what you're saying is i often hear people talk about um they they have a lot of admiration for the program offerings at west sylvan west east silvan um and primarily that's because um of their size they're about 900 students and students are not walking to their neighborhood school in that case people have decided that it's okay to bust longer longer routes to get that kind of a size and get that kind of programming so i think that has to be a real discussion that we have um and again it comes back to size but i i do think that part of why we're interested in doing this is we recognize the history of boundaries in portland um and they were gerrymandered right they were very intentionally to exclude some people from these schools or include people from these schools um so i i think that what i hear director buell and maybe i'm mischaracterizing it but him he i feel like he's just asking for just the data the raw data where where would net where would boundaries
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naturally fall if we just looked at it as a blank because then we can begin to have discussions about do we want equal socioeconomic status do we want this size do we want that size do we want um neighborhood schools are we okay with busing how far is busing what does that do to our costs and then i also i haven't heard people mention this um because right now i think that we we believe that this is a k-8 boundary review discussion but i'd be curious to hear what my colleague's idea right if you change boundaries for k-8s you intentionally or unintentionally and hopefully will be intentional about it may reassign somebody to a different high school and we have to be mindful of that so i'd be curious to hear people's thoughts about that knowing that we just went through a process for that and people um there was something i yes we want these to become more regular so that they don't so that we don't back up 50 years or 60 years before having to do it again at the same time i think it's very fair for our community and our families to to expect some stability that they're not going to move from the school to that school to us the five times in the time that they're with with the district because um while i don't agree with the property values i do i do know that people are making lifelong decisions based on a community and what it can offer which is why i think pam you said it's they are the backbone of a livable city so i just want to throw that i guess out there is that stability is an important piece to me is that we would look at how we would do this in a way that doesn't create insignificant or unnecessary stability instability so you mentioned i'm just trying to get this down greg you mentioned transportation which i think is an important issue um mixed ses as i have in my node and that what is what was that socioeconomic status right there's a lot of research that shows out shows the the more balanced you can have um actually there are exact percentages but that the percentage of um low income or higher upper income makes a difference and not necessarily because of the income but because of the resources and the time that the communities can provide in the school and so you would you would list that as a goal or a value to to change our schools or to make our school set up eventually i think i started with kind of like we've moved into question two i think we've moved into question two and i'm wondering if we want to finish up this question can i just can i finish my comment right um and then the last one you had was some permanence is that is that right okay great thank you matt you haven't you haven't talked yet are you have a comment i do have oh thank you thank you um i'm going to step up in elevation on this uh and maybe mention a couple of the things that i hope will when psu presents back to us these will be some of the the keystones to the the process a couple of words that are key to me one is creating parity across our district another is equity of opportunity uh so phrases like this action promotes an equity of opportunity or parity across our district that's the kind of thing that i'd like to hear um i think two generally i'm looking for a logical smart process perhaps formula that stands the test of time not because it is perfect but because it is designed specifically to evolve with the changing demographics of our community and very clearly i think it needs to uh needs to include input from the community in which we serve and then finally you know this is a this is a hope a wish uh is that we are able to no longer distinguish our schools or the quality of schools based on the zip codes in which they reside i don't think that is something we can do right now and i don't think it's something that we've been able to do for a very long time if at all thank you steve i am following up on what matt said i had five things that just were off the top i just haven't talked to enough people to give you what i think would be really good answers but here's five things off the top first i think is a physical review that you need to do that and secondly i think children should be able to go to the school closest to their house including special ed children as best we can and third i kind of believe that we should have a landing point maybe if you wanted to look ahead was at least one middle school in each cluster so you're choosing maybe which way you want to go kind of meaning meeting up and i think in the end it's going to probably end up being really the details will be done in sections
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i really do think it will uh it's i think we eventually and the most important thing to us to agree degree for me is that we have a really broad input up front i know i'm always talking about that up front first thing we do is talk to people not when we send out the plan but before we send out a new plan we go out and say what do you think in a way that gets their thinking in us and then we deal with it it's not that you it's not that you that that you can agree to everybody it's like this principle stuff we're doing principles for a fit you know yeah well what i want is i want in my kid's school somebody that won't take any crap off of those kids i mean that would be i mean eventually you end up with just all over the place things but it allows you it helps the thinking of our people is what we need not because everybody gets involved but because it helps us focus our thinking our staff focus our thinking when they hear all these various different viewpoints thank you anybody else son first question only on questions jim do you need something here yeah june do you have what you need for question one i have a lot of notes so i'm feeling very good about things right now absolutely no no shortage of opinions yes on the question two so um as we've seen just now you start to begin a conversation around boundary view and a lot of interrelated issues come up and this is where and we've gotten a taste of that but i know some of you have been holding back for this question we're trying to get a sense of what are some of your strong preferences about things that should or should not be included in a district-wide boundary review um you know moving programs or changing programs or school reconfigurations closures all of those things are things people have alluded to or mentioned and there's a whole longer list of what might be on or off the table in your minds around a district-wide boundary review so um back to you anybody um bobby you want to start i think i mean i have notes all over the place i think a lot several of these have already come up through question one um so strong preferences about things we shouldn't we should or shouldn't include in the review um in terms of should definitely the ideal size of schools i think that's probably one of the most important things we need to talk about and i'm going to have these little mixed up i think the discussion about whether natural boundaries um river freeways um i think steve mentioned train tracks um whether whether that should come into play or not um uh what will preserve our capture rate high school assignments came up already the impact of the bond and our ability to potentially build new schools and larger schools as we go uh is is uh i think needs to be in here somehow um in terms of what should be i think we need potentially more detailed and longer term population projections um i'm not convinced i think right now we're sort of looking at a 10-year out and i i think we might need to look beyond that i'd be curious to understand how charter schools and our alternative school networks get into the discussion at some point the one school that's sort of a a little bit unique in our district is skyline elementary school which is a pretty small almost rural school within our boundaries and i think i think we need to decide if we're going to make sort of an exception to whatever the ideal school size is for that and having had kids who went there who were on a bus for an hour each way to go to school back in the day it's just a slightly different phenomenon so i think we need to think about what we would do or whether we would allow an exception in that particular case so those are a couple off the top
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sure uh something that should not be included um frankly i don't think uh i don't think school closures or at this point program closures should be included in the discussion i think we i think if a process prepares us during you know what i would consider you know make it to make wartime decisions or decisions during budget cuts decisions during uh during times of enrollment drops i i think that can inform of how inform us how we're going to do that but i where we're at right now and as bobby described i would not suggest those being those things being on the table yeah i would agree i mean it doesn't seem that i don't i mean potentially there might be a scenario where that would come up as an option but i don't really see how given that this overcrowding is overall is really our issue and coping planning for our future growth um so yeah i would agree with that um and i think you know it's it's given sort of the long list and the complexity of this figuring out again you know i think we've had this discussion before too given that we do have a number of urgent issues in a number of schools of under or on over enrollment how are we going to balance you know really tackling in a holistic way all these different issues and landing it in a way that has allowed time for really genuine public input um while still making some changes and adjustments that we need to make not falling back into the the one-off that doesn't give us the holistic so i'm not you know i don't feel like we've figured out what that balance is and that seems like one of the the key challenges here and i'm not sure so i think to recall that that the sort of charge or challenge from the psu team was figure out a whole bunch of stuff that we've really never have figured out by august and then we can move forward and so you know i that's no problem yeah and there's also issues i mean you know things like you know current policy of um grandfathering around to the to the stability being really having that discussion and clarifying that hopefully up front so if that is a good part of people's angst in this that that can be relieved or at least we can have had that discussion up front so it's not the elephant in the room that is worrying everybody and we're not getting to that so there's pieces i mean and is that where we are going to land or do we have to consider changing that base and that's been some of the discussion at sackett right around sibling preference on the one hand that provides stability for families to be able to both be in the focus option but on the other hand that picks up slots and reduces access for other students and contributes to the fact that our currently our focus options system the demographics do not reflect the demographics of our district and that's an equity issue so wrestling with those things again up front totally hear that and agree with that but at the same time the portland process cannot extend forever we do need to make some some decisions and some changes particularly to relieve schools where there are either aren't enough students to have the program that they deserve or there are so many students that they're just bursting at the seams so i um depending on what psu is crafting for us i don't think i would take closures off the table and the reason i say that is that if this is a long-term process policy that you're that we're working on with you i could foresee in the future as we're doing our bonds some of the smaller schools consolidating and maybe adding middle schools i mean there are many reasons why we might do a closure even though our enrollment is growing based on the condition of our schools and the enrollment of our schools and our ability to put a core program in those schools with a number of students who are able to attend so with conditions right with conditions i don't think i would take i would not totally dismiss closures um as a as something that we should look at and think about during the process i mean then i also would agree with ruth and some of the issues i think that sackett is looking at will have a huge impact on our uh enrollment in different schools again you know you got the 34 percent that are moving around um so i think we have to continue we have to continue to push sackett along and try and get to uh to some decisions there so that we can use those as we're considering what uh enrollment might look like across uh boundaries as we're trying to adjust the boundaries they're meeting also yeah i know they're working hard and i appreciate that so uh but i just yeah
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it's chicken in the egg here so we've got to keep both of them moving we got to move too right oh yeah so on the discussion of school of closures i think the way i might word it is that this process in no way is intended to be a forum for school closures it may be that as we go there's some reasons why it would make sense in terms of again i look at a couple of our schools where we have dual campuses and you know if we are able in a future bond to build a school and bring them together right you know that might feel like a school closure to some although it's moving a community back together there's right there's reasons why it could make sense but i think it should be very clear from the start that we are not going into this process for the purpose of trying to close schools right it's it's actually just the opposite we are we have a very wonderful problem of expanding enrollment which is great right so i would agree with that so i just want to make sure that i'm clear on what we're doing and one of the things that i was looking forward to toward the end of this was a process okay and and a process for doing closures if we do them based on the bond so a full process not just a process for what we're going to use in the next 10 years right and this is the kind of space ideally district leadership and parents and the community have a robust conversation over x period of time and you can design a very textured if then kind of scenario you can set triggers for all kinds of things so it may be that uh your example of you have a bond and you might build a new school and consolidate well that you know if a situation like that comes up you might set in your policy somewhere a trigger that if that occurs then we'll take an intentional look at it or if there's a school that's too based on you know the ideal size school and that might be a trigger if you know you pick and i'm making all this up right now it's a hypothetical so you pick the ideal size for a k-8 school and if it gets x percent above or below then that triggers some kind of a review process that focuses attention on it you can build a system like that based on policies that you approve over time i mean we're not there yet and that's where some of your your key things that are on the table and off the table right now will help guide that in the months ahead as some some kind of large scenario choices about how you might move forward as those get developed and then and then brought to you thank you and i think we do have that to a certain extent i mean we do have i mean i would say size ranges we really need it's never going to be the one size right but i think what staff has worked up is sort of the the range and sort of the where and and the we've seen those charts where there are schools that the building cannot fit and it's over enrolled those where the building can't you know so there's all these different gradations and combinations so i think they have done that to a certain extent there has been in the policy uh you know request that and there is annually a look at that and sort of that's where we have the list of of here's where we really need to figure out what we're going to do so we do have some of that but it's never been again it's always in the previous years it's been in the budget crisis and or declining enrollment crisis we're in a very different place so it's resetting and so that's it's come from similar to with the bond discussion of to get us into a place of this is a positive thing that we are building new buildings and to envision what we can do to get it out of the lost because we've all been in sort of a loss and deprivation and takeaway mode in many different dimensions and how can we as a community and as a district flip that together and and be in a positive places this is about having better stronger schools for our kids that's right this isn't a plot to take away and make things worse right and acknowledging the history and you know all kinds of um yeah the history and the and the pain and the missteps of the district totally not trying to whitewash that but how can we move forward yeah i just i i'm with matt on the school closure issue i think and i guess what kind of with what ruth and bobby are saying do we need to make that up front because that's the trust issue and we have to have that trust issue and and i'm not sure i think that maybe we know who gets their schools closed all across this country and what an issue it is now if you pay attention out there to what's going on in america on school closures and school closures to privatize and so forth and
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so forth by saying that up front i think it allows people to participate you know in a different way than if they're worrying about what you're really trying to do what are you really trying to do that's why i'm trying to trying to get us to separate the physical out front because we need to be transparent on the other things for that trust we need to be transparent are we are are we i mean back in when i was in the school board in 1979 to 83 one of the things when the transfer process was you could transfer as long as you didn't increase the ratio in equity and it was racial inequity at the time and it was basically black white it wouldn't mean with anybody else really it was black wide issues and so you could transfer only under those conditions and it was very clear to everybody they knew it wasn't there wasn't this little hey i got my kid in there and i know how to work the system to make sure it works i mean that's true equity right working the system to make it work is not necessary it should be clear what we're doing economically or we want to and we can't have it clear until we get to physical aspects situated and then we say okay because this is beyond reasonableness almost to begin to go into social this social uh engineering is i mean we should be working on world peace next i mean it's just it's that complicated that messy that much of a and in order to do it we need to get the solid stuff that we can do first that's why i push that i think that's what i think it's okay i'm sorry very good um by the way steve i'd be happy to join you in working for world peace every single day um whether the things we choose to put on or off the table as i'm looking through the list that's just kind of been generated here becomes kind of an artificial boundary so if we for example take off grade configurations then we've kind of forced that issue as as something not to look at and we can make decisions that might change had we considered at all and what i'm what i think i hear or what i'm hoping for and what i think i've heard my colleagues say is really trying to do this in a way that is holistic that actually takes those factors into consideration it makes it more challenging but to not consider all the data is is intentionally putting on blinders at the same time if you don't put on some guard rails or some rails we could spend the next 20 years going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole to not get a decision so one that one that's in my head is something that i might be interested in trying to to kind of contain is somebody mentioned moving or changing programs i think that i would be personally okay if if part of the discussion is doesn't make more sense to move a program from here to there but i'm not sure what the thought is behind changing a program but i would worry that what we will do is um draw out a whole bunch of people that will say well the reason why this school is under enrolled because it doesn't have program x y or z um in which case i think we should consider that but it should be outside of the boundary review it should be part of our normal expansion discussion programs because we have a lot of interests from a lot of different people but a lot of different programs so i guess i'd be curious to hear what other folks at the same time as you pointed out or i think mr porter pointed out there are certain parts of our city that don't have equitable access or haven't had equitable access to some of these programs so that has to be part of the consideration so i'm i'd be curious to hear what people think about that do you mean do you include in there like the smaller programs in terms of within a school sometimes you have a special ed program or esl program and it's too small maybe to and then we end up moving some child childs and special ed moves four times or every year they move to a new school or esl around that type of stuff are you you're talking about that too i mean because you have the bigger programs the immersion programs are big and once you get japanese immersion or spanish immersion or whatever it's big well that's a whole other discussion let's for example say that an immersion program decides they want their own facility like dewey is that part of the discussion yeah um but i guess i'll just say since you brought up special ed is that i agree with your earlier statement about trying to find a system that makes sense that they can if if at all possible or the closest possible to their neighborhood school which again is part of its
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recommendations right and then how do you work with siblings so that parents don't have to drive between two schools because they're siblings um but i guess i'm just trying to figure out how we because again if if we i worry that if we open up boundary review to also the the array of programs that we have um it that will be a really even more challenging than they're already looking bobby so i think there's an overarching um thing here i would prefer that we not end up having a lot of discussions about things that aren't relevant to our students and to their student success so again i think about things like a robust program in every school as being critical what we often find when we're talking about changes in boundaries and the rest is all of a sudden people are talking about their home values and you know other issues that are important and i totally get it but what i think we need to be focused on is making sure there's a great option in every neighborhood and um and that most importantly the the boundaries make sense in terms of offering a robust program to our kids so does it make sense to have a school here with 800 kids because people want that in terms of their home values and 400 here somehow we need to keep the discussion focused on kids and what we want for our students and student success and getting to graduation rates and so um and that's just one example but my guess is we'll have other examples that come up as we go and i'm not saying it's not important it's just i don't necessarily believe that's for what we should be basing boundary changes well i agree in a corollary to that too would be if there are or when there are objections based on fear um or opposition to changing a boundary and going to a different school and how can we have rather than sort of this this this fight over that issue and and parents mobilizing around that how can we have the discussion about well what is it that you're fearing or that you see it as a lack in that potential destination school what are these issues what what's the quality of the program what would need to be different is this perception is it reality and really and again that gets back to what i was saying initially we the bottom line here is that we need to have schools that every school is a go-to school and there isn't this fear that oh if the boundaries change and i have to go to school x then my child will have less than or there'll be a loss or there's something wrong and there's a whole spectrum of reasons and issues there and the socket again has been wrestling with a lot of those um throughout their work but i think to just include that um as just a real transparent conversation rather than spending all the energy on fighting over what's where's the line going to be drawn and and it's it's really let's get to the core issues here what are we really talking about what are the what are the real concerns and how can we address those or if it's perception then say here's what the reality is and here's the decision we're making and everyone may not agree and we're going to move on because this is what's best for kids all right i just i think one of the challenges with that like it sounds so but as i talk to folks around the city what we wind up with is individual families however people define that and what those individual families values and preferences are and so to design a system where everybody where everybody fits into one size or one spot or say this is a good neighborhood school and if you don't like it because of x well that's too bad because that's not a valid reason to not like it that's i think the part where i get challenged is that individuals have have a lot of different priorities in how and why they choose schools one person's desirable schools another person's i'm never going to that school and so how do we balance that and engage with folks to have conversations because um i think of the enrollment balancing conversations i do have some of my favorite parts are when when people got together and had those discussions with each other and saw the the different viewpoints from different people's and they realized it wasn't as simple as they had first thought meaning not as simple that there are just other values that somebody else will uphold that the school may or may not have and so um i just highlight that as an example of some of the challenges i think that no matter what we as we list out our priorities
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let's let's say that neighborhood schools is the highest value or let's say that robust programming or the best programming is the highest value at some point another value is going to come in conflict with that value and where do we land as a board which one do we hold in the highest values the important thing so is it is it well we know that actually if we move these students here but there's a physical boundary there we we just can't do that is it physical i think that's what i i hope that we can eventually get to is as we have these discussions where what priorities do we value and then as bobby pointed out knowing that there might be a time or two where there are exceptions such as skyline or some other school that is in a really unique situation well and again it is in all existing policy right i forget the exact order of the list but it talks about the major arteries it talks about proximity and transportation walkability and that you try to prioritize those so we have some of those pieces there um so again i mean you're exactly right we're not going to be able to we need to be able to have a transparent and rational basis on which to say we have made our best effort to provide the best leadership teaching quality program facility that we can in every single zip code and every single school and and that's the conversation i just want it to be a reality-based conversation of what what's the situation and yeah of course it's not going to fit everyone exactly right yeah i just like to i like your idea greg about prioritizing that's at least one way to think about the complexity of it so it might be a good place to move sometime it's in our policy that's what we're talking about yeah that's good others question three or do you have questions that you need from us uh well i think one thing uh to highlight is that maybe two things um this is an evolving conversation and regardless of how regardless of what kind of scenarios you ultimately pick around boundary review there will be a continuing public conversation about this and so part of part of why we've been engaged is to at least design one scenario that has a very robust public engagement with all kinds of different people in groups in this community and to design it in such a way uh that groups that historically have not been able to participate uh would have a chance to and and so how and there's a lot of ways specific hows and details and tactics and strategies that could be part of a very robust community conversation and that takes time to do and there are urgent issues so there'll also be a scenario that's uh faster shorter and there's trade-offs right and so you know how those get designed and how they get framed and will take a lot of work and that's part of why we're trying to get a sense of what some of the key preferences that you have and we're doing similar meetings in the next couple of weeks with district leadership same kind of thing and at the end of that we'll have a sense of of kind of where the different parts of the organization are where the overlaps are and then that helps our team design some scenarios some kind of policy choices about how you want to move forward so um this is based on what you know now right and based on what the community knows now and over the next six months in the next year two years or ten years there's a lot of opportunities for a lot more information to be shared and for people to have conversations to sort out how you want how you the district and the community want to do boundary changes in an ongoing way and as many of you you haven't said it explicitly but boundary review is not necessarily the right tool to use in every situation it touches many situations and maybe in some scenarios it can help and others it won't and i think for many people in the public the distinction between enrollment and transfer and boundary reviews is i mean it's inside baseball right and um i mean like for me i went through k-12 and i thought i knew a lot about it and it turns out i you know 1988 was a long time ago when i graduated high school and the k-12 system has changed a lot as i'm experiencing with my fifth grader
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and eighth grader so it is um so it highlights to me how the k-12 system is evolving how the community is evolving and how you choose to engage the community over time is going to be really important so i'm sorry i kind of went off track there but let's move to our third question um at oh yes sir a question before that if it's okay yeah sure we're kind of looking at what we want to do what's in i'd be curious about what the negative aspects that we're trying to eliminate now are for me that's it's an important you know that's kind of the way i analyze anyhow from the negative side didn't do it here but it is what negative aspects are we trying to eliminate i mean that's a is that's as important to me in a way is what positive aspects are we trying to get i'm not um i thought i think that might be helpful too so yeah i mean for me it would be having an imbalance in the enrollments across the district so that we aren't able to offer the program equitably or we have struggled to do that despite and we are differentiating in our budget but it's really tough if you have a school that's severely underenrolled as well as the difficulties for teachers and students and staff when the building is overruled so that's one right to mitigate that to have a coherent process that we that again is transparent that's reliable that makes sense even if you don't agree with every single decision of that process rather than sort of going from one sort of isolated hot spot every few years and trying to go in and not really ever having a clear framework for how those decisions are made those would be a couple things does that make sense the eliminating the hotspot yeah yeah well i mean not having a coherent and and um inequity issues a holistic process that is applied in a way that makes sense across the entire district rather than in one-off situations so the equity issues now we have issues that what's equity issue problem i think so i think you've actually addressed a number of what the issues are we're trying to solve framing them and what are the things so that actually having enough students to sustain a viable program equitable access for students i think um stability where you've got some desire for stability in in the community we've got buildings that are over populated um for the size of building and under populated for the ability to actually offer a strong program um i mean so there are all those but you guys have all you've framed it in how do we address those things but those are the things and the need for a transparent ongoing process so we've tackled this as a district cluster by cluster which then doesn't give us all of the potential solutions and it doesn't give us a holistic view so this is the first time that we know of that we are actually looking at this as an entire district process as opposed to problem solving and troubleshooting cluster by cluster or school or school by school yeah so we've done small groups of schools even within a cluster that have the particular issues so i mean is there social is there social aspects of the schools a problem like do we think that it's a problem that you have one school that's economically pretty largely pretty different from another school is that a problem do we see that as a problem what about the racial issues having are we looking for a certain percentage of kids or are we meeting up i don't know i mean do we see particular social problems i mean those are like elephant in the room problems maybe i'm talking about here i mean do we see that as a is that a problem within our system now do we i mean do we look at it i have my idea about it but i think that would be part of the conversation to have it's like is that something where is that where we want to go as a community based on sort of the the geographic and and housing racial and economic segregation in our city is that something that we want to try to tackle with our policies and with our boundaries or or not sackett has had a lot of discussion again around if you have folks in the neighborhood who are not attending their neighborhood school again the neighborhood school and the focus options are not necessarily reflecting the diversity of the of the neighborhood the immediate neighborhood of course the huge issue of gentrification and displacement in north and northeast portland and poverty and folks of color being pushed to east county so it i mean i think again all of these are things we should be talking about with the community because there aren't any easy answers i think the way that i think about it steve is and i and we've all said this i think in one way or another is that we're all into you know our major goal is to have a strong school in every
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neighborhood with a robust curriculum and then uh the next step is is uh to figure out what the triggers are when you know you don't have that what triggers can we pull in order to um see uh to look at a boundary change and then after that it's the process so what is the process that we go through and and by having those triggers or policies in place that provides the community with knowledge about exactly what's going to happen when we when a school reaches a certain or there's a certain trigger that has to to pull over there and then the community will know what the what the outcome is going to be or what the process is that we're going to go through and they'll know how they're supposed to engage i mean that's what i'm hoping that we get so that it's very transparent to the community and i think that that having that transparency with the community about when a trigger will be pulled and what the process is i think will help alleviate some of the tension and um concern about about how we've done these in the past sure i'll just speak for myself i guess i don't um those other socioeconomic or racial um issues to me they of themselves aren't the problem so it doesn't matter how many um we're i i don't feel like i'm entering this process trying to fix anyone that's why i was wondering what what are they do what negatives do we see to me again it's that it's the the right size of a facility to be able to offer a strong program and that's why i think we started with what what is the right size i think that as we go along we may as you pointed out jim that this is an evolving process we may learn additional information as we go along and may want to look at additional things but to me setting out again was what what the superintendent said is that we learned in our other enrollment balancing when we were in budget cuts in crises um that looking at it cluster by cluster didn't provide a fuller a bigger range and it exacerbated some of the inequities that we saw throughout the district and so how do we take a full district view to address those in one in one of those and i i haven't heard anybody say that my school has too many poor kids or my student has too many african-americans like that that's not the issue we're trying to i feel like i'm trying to address with this but at the same time we need to be able to allow race to be part of the conversation and not and not avoid that or skirt around it so i actually really like steve steve's question about what are we trying to fix because it's a it's a very simple talking point then um and i think it's easy for people to kind of grasp on why we're having the conversation at all but i do think i i would generally agree that i i am not necessarily looking to socially engineer our schools in terms of who ends up there and i believe that we do already have a at least a start of a plan in place to address if a school ends up being a more high poverty school or a school that is a serving more historically underserved students we already have a budget process in place to help us provide more supports to that school with our eight percent set aside and it may be that once we go through this process um we end up changing that number i don't know but i think we have other ways to address and provide supports and ensure that every school has robust programs and supports for kids some small schools do very well because they have outstanding teachers i think particularly in particularly in the primary grades i mean one of the things that happened in my opinion when we switched to the k-8 system was that we had enough that i felt the school district was working pretty well in the k-5 but not in the middle and it's an argument that we don't hear much you can have a small little k5 and if you have really good teachers and a really upbeat principal and and you have a little bit of program in there it can be a wonderful school for people they'll kill for it but uh so i'm not sure it's all the pro the robustness of the full programming the k-8s do i agree that you it's more in the middle grades the robust but when people talk about their schools to me they always talk about almost up front the special program things they don't say well you know my kids passing those tests they they always say you know we got music and and we have
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this really neat thing that we do and we go on these field trips and we do these things so i don't i was just tossing that out not that i agree or disagree i was just putting that into the conversation but then part of the conundrum is the that when you do have those additional children then you have additional resources to be able to provide those field trips yeah if you do it you got to do it though when you have the funds to do it and i think the other thing that we've tried to look at is if the program becomes so small that we're ending up having to subsidize to just you know have basic administration basic support in there then all of a sudden it is it does become a district issue rather than just a school-wide issue it's not a it's not a robust program and it's not enough students and it's a drag on the district and other places let's have a sort of a process question kind of going back to our next steps here would be helpful for me i think i said this before but just say it again um it just be able to see kind of um staff's kind of current list of where are the most severely under and over enrolled schools i know there's been discussions in different communities about what are some different possible solutions to those so that we can just kind of get the lay of the land here but what are those range of sort of the most immediate issues again given that we don't want to just go there we've been saying that all along that's one of the key points here but could there potentially not to try to have it both ways but be some sort of hybrid approach where there might be some solutions that won't necessarily take a year long or whatever but the longer option is to get to something that is reasonable and rational or perhaps i know we often we don't folks aren't very nor should we be fond of short fixes then we have to change again but what just what are those possible what are the situations and what are some potential solutions that staff and community have been having looking at that would be helpful for me before we kind of decide we're going to do this all super fast in longer well i know the the families at beverly clary who now have their children in three different schools uh because of overcrowding in the last i think they went from 400 students to over 700 students in just a couple of years i know that they have a band-aid right now the next move they want is not another band-aid they'd rather stick with their current band-aid until we get it done right so i agree with you if there's something that we can do to help them right away that's great but i am going to move this to question three because according to my schedule we have 10 minutes but i think i can give you a little more time than that jim terrific questions so our last question that we're really wanting to get a sense from you is at what specific points in the process should you as a board play a formal role in district-wide boundary review i mean we're assuming that when you guys are active in the community you'll be engaged in the community as you normally are but from a formal role as a board you know how often do you want to be involved in this process bobby you want to start i would propose that we as a board consider a board committee that works with you on this going forward i think if we had three of us one of the things that it might do is help the community see our work and it would keep at least three of us highly engaged throughout the process it would allow a fourth board member depending on what's going on to enter the conversation because these could be publicly viewed meetings to me this is such a huge undertaking that it could be a really good opportunity for us to stay engaged in a really consistent way and hopefully be providing feedback to you every step of the way so i have a little different perspective i feel like this is because it is so huge and unprecedented that it's important for the entire board to have those reports in that engagement so maybe there could be and again this you know we're about to have our summer retreat where we look at our priorities and goals for the coming year so given the range of major issues we want to take on and what we want to accomplish in the coming year to have that conversation about what would those increments be where there would be a setting like this a study session where all of us sitting as the committee of the whole would hear um progress report information as well as i mean if we wanted to have a few folks designated to really commit to going like between them going to all the community meetings for example and having some form of reporting back because it will be logistically impossible for all of us to go to every single meeting um so there could be maybe that kind of combination but it's me it's important rather than having it delegated off to three people and then something of this magnitude to then come back only at the end or when things are fairly far down the path to the whole group i would prefer
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that we get the information and weigh in at key points as a committee of the whole and just to be clear i wasn't suggesting that we would come back to the board only at the end i was suggesting that we would have a committee engaged all the way through with certain data points where the whole board would have discussions points to where yeah great because it's just waiting for someone to jump in there so i don't know that i have a specific time like once a month or something like that because of the the workflow but it seems like a really significant piece of work um so more often than less often i guess and part of the reason i say that is because in our designing of a process for this i think it's really important i appreciate your question about what role do we want to play because there have been other times where we set something in motion as you point out that processes are evolving they're ever evolving and as processes evolve and take turns if we're not involved in that or being intentional with those decisions we can get to the end and not have a product that we're ready to support or feel good about or feel like we can represent to our community because it really is it is a dick conversation with our community about what how do we want our schools what do we want from our schools and what does that look like and so i'll just put that plug-in that's not specific about like again i don't know that i can say monthly or something like that but it has to be regular and i would even maybe say a little bit more regular than what we've seen with the enrollment transfer so particularly i like bobby's idea of a committee because i think it does engage us as we go along in a more because there's a lot of other things that come up and so i would support that but i also think they we need to have regular feedback on what's taking place so we can and have time to ask questions not just have reports right matt so whatever form it comes in whether it's a liaison role or participants and community or as participants in community meetings or via a committee i think something i found really valuable in the past is that board member perspective of here's what i heard because sometimes that's a little bit different and it's from a different lens and i think that's that's a valuable and valuable perspective i i agree with greg you know what i was thinking was early and often um as much as our our schedules and our time allows is probably how we need to be in involved in this and frankly because this is this is the kind of legacy work that uh that can be really impactful to the district both positively or negatively in a very over the long term so it's it's pretty important and i think i think us being involved from the beginning and being involved often is going to be helpful so and i i would be more than happy to engage in what that participation might look like and and certainly myself i'd be interested in participating across the district in these conversations so i just want to clarify one thing i definitely wasn't talking about just an update report to us but a discussion and asking questions as we go just to clarify that so i think my feeling about where the board plays a formal role role is similar to what ruth is talking about i see value in the kind of meeting we're having tonight where we're actually doing a work session um where we can listen to each other's thoughts kind of bringing in what matt's talking about with hearing each board member's perspective because we are all different and each of us have different perspectives or hear things differently i think that's important that we all have an opportunity to hear each other and i'm also an early and often person so uh as we look at our priorities next week i'm hoping that all my colleagues will remember what we're talking about tonight and what a high priority this particular subject has for us and that it will rise way to the top of the priorities that we that we're going to establish and that we're going to work on hard next year and then i think committee community meetings are important for board members and i'm sure we can figure out who can go to what or who wants to go to which ones and those kinds of issues and and as equally as important going to those community meetings is reporting back uh to your colleagues about what you heard at those meetings and
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again that can either happen in a work session that we have or can also happen as you're going to those meetings and just writing written reports back to back to everybody so early and often committee of the whole listening to each other uh work sessions and uh and then of course i think the board's major role will be in establishing the policies um that uh come out of all of these discussions so that's where i see the weighing in for us others anymore well that was a short one thank you very much is there anything else you would like to hear from us or any other clear as much right i have a mediation background so i could ask questions all night but i think we are we have look at what we were looking for for tonight so so can you go ahead and explain to us what your next step will be and when we when we're going to hear from you next steps are we're doing some facilitated meetings with the district leadership there's three or four meetings that'll occur in the next kind of two and a half or three weeks and again kind of similar questions uh around you know boundary review and what the primary purpose could be and how it could support existing priorities that different departments have and just trying to sort out the alignment of you know the things people already have to do how does boundary review fit into that and once we hear from all of that then we'll have a composite of what boundary review looks like to the different parts of the organization and then you'll see where it overlaps and and then that helps guide the development of some scenarios and some recommendations so for how to recommendations for how to move out into the community or how to develop the policies or everything uh everything everything yeah everything excellent do you have a sense of the time frame of that yeah the timing um i think we want to be um well as i said the the facilitated meetings will happen the next couple of weeks my guess is by mid-august uh we'd be circling back probably with the superintendent saying you know kind of here's what we heard um here's some key you know here's what everybody agreed on here's where the differences are you know how do you want to move forward right and what are some of the broader choices because in our in our june 2nd report there was those three options and but those are not by design they weren't fully fleshed out because you know you couldn't flush them out yet but we want to be able to develop those more right right okay thank you very much thank you thank you great discussion okay our next agenda item is the discussion for us around the smarter balanced assessment resolution and i'm going to ask director atkins who led that effort a small task force if you'd like to provide some background and process for the resolution that we have to discuss and i want to remind everybody that this is just our discussion around this is this we're not having a vote tonight but it's just a discussion by all of us about the the proposal that the task force and i should also acknowledge director buell and director belial and our student representative andrew who's up there watching us tonight so so thanks so much so um just to kind of back up and again provide that kind of background and context from my perspective so last summer's priority setting retreat with the board we all agreed that the transition to common core state standards and the smarter balance assessment was an important topic that we wanted to have on our our list for the year during pat contract negotiations as you recall in the preamble that the association had there were a number of concerns and values stated around testing and other educational issues and at that time we made it clear that through our comments and then also through the formal resolution that we brought forward in the fall that while we agree with the values expressed in the preamble the language did not we felt did not belong in the contract so i just wanted to be clear that sort of this this through line here that now we are as taking the opportunity as a board to state our values and position on this issue through this board resolution so meanwhile over the course of the year in addition to the contract negotiations the states continued their preparation for transition to the new assessment including piloting it at 24 portland public schools there's of course continue to be a whole lot of debate both locally and nationally i know director buhl in particular has devoted a lot of time and energy and engagement on this issue and expertise in that and our district staff and teachers have continued working hard on professional
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development and implementation of the new standards so the time is right and it's really important for us as a board of the state's largest district to weigh in stating our position on the transition so in back in april as you'll recall common core came on the agenda for an update and a presentation from staff and a board discussion which was great and but at that point both director buhl and i had prepared separate draft resolutions on the issue so at the end of that discussion during which what i heard was the majority of the board expressing generally support for the standards but a number of concerns about the transition and the new assessment and the implementation of it so coach arnold's asked myself along with director buell coach herbalile and student representative davidson to work with staff um to come up with a single resolution for consideration at a future meeting so staff organized a meeting with with us as well as a number of staff from teaching learning and assessment and then invited in gwen sullivan from the portland association of teachers and we had what i thought was an excellent productive and really collegial discussion we identified a lot of common ground and shared values and concerns so that was great so then following that meeting i took the lead on putting together the resolution my goal being to include and hear input from everybody but to reflect what i heard as the majority position on this issue since of course the goal is to have a resolution that will pass by majority at least um so both staff and i worked on very on different drafts which have circulated by email to the board multiple times director regan in particular has made a number of good edits on a couple of occasions i appreciate that um so what with other issues that are under we're on our agenda like the budget and needing to approve the design for the high schools there's been a bit of a delay in bringing this back to us but here we are so again the plan is that we're going to discuss tonight have a vote at our next meeting i believe so we have been circulating drafts by email for since april basically for edits and input and i hope we're fairly close to a final version but tonight for sure it's still marked draft an opportunity for any board members who haven't yet weighed in to do that and for any final tweaks unknown director buell had some changes which we have here to appreciate that having that in writing and what i would propose is that um during the discussion tonight that both staff and i take notes on the input and any suggested edits we're not formally voting on amendments or anything like that but it'd be great to get a sense just of the level of support a for the resolution itself and b for if there are any major changes that folks would want to see in it to kind of get a sense of the level of support for those and then what we can do depending on how many issues or proposed changes there are again hopefully we're not going to spend a lot of time on small wordsmithing tweaks you could always send those by email but depending on the number of major concerns or changes then we'll do our best to again you know go back maybe have another meeting of our group and kind of figure out where we can land on a final a final version to vote on so that's just in terms of the process around the resolution itself and what we're trying to accomplish from my perspective is that it makes a strong and clear statement of the board's values that we do not believe in teaching to the test that standardized testing is just one of many tools to be used in the assessment of student growth and in the evaluation of teachers that it should testing should not dominate the culture or instructional time in our schools second major theme is that while we do not shy away from being held accountable we want to ensure that any accountability measure for our students and schools is reliable valid and has been adopted with a culturally responsive lens and then the resolution lays out a number of issues and concerns around the state's transition to the new assessment including funding for professional development and technology again ensuring validity of the test providing sufficient accommodations for english language learners and students with disabilities and it calls on the state to not use the smarter balanced assessment for punitive labeling or sanctioning so obviously we cannot control through this resolution or other means the actions of the state and federal government but it is important that we weigh in with our values and concerns and to make clear to our staff in this building and in the schools that we know that they along with the students and families need support during this major transition that we want high standards for our students but that we also want to ensure that our students love learning and that that is what is happening in the classroom so thanks for the opportunity to share that background and my perspective and i'm just looking forward to the discussion so discussion then bobby
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um before we go too far and thank you very much for that framing um on the i'm on the oregon school boards association and i was just at a national school board association meeting and i will try to get a copy of this document that i was going to read from but one this is um from the national school boards association center for public education put out a publication called understanding the common core standards and the reason that i wanted to kind of do this extra framing if it's possible is they say that the public remains mostly unaware of the new standards or how they will affect schooling in their communities and so i just wanted to take a moment to just kind of give a little bit more background on what common core standards even are and i'm just going to skip through a couple of little things here the common core state standards are academic benchmarks intended to define the knowledge and skills that high school graduates will need to be successful in college and careers the standards have been endorsed by a whole variety of organizations including national pta and both of the national teacher unions the common core standards is established grade level expectations specifically in math and english language arts so we're not talking about the broad spectrum but it's in those two areas so it's a little bit more specific there internationally benched mark so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society the common core is not a curriculum it's a set of standards that describes the knowledge and skills students are expected to develop it doesn't prescribe how to teach them and i think that's a really really important thing as a parent i certainly know that i hugely appreciate the creativity of teachers in our classroom so we obviously want to maintain that the difference in common core is the attention paid to high level skills like thinking critically applying concepts learned communicating well using evidence including data beginning in very early grades and one of the things that's i i find really interesting is that the comment common core english language arts standards assume that reading and writing will not be the exclusive responsibility of english teachers but instead it is assumed that these skills will be taught across all subject levels in grade levels and grades and so um anyway i just wanted to share a little bit of that because i think it helps to remind us what we're talking about and what we're not talking about so for whatever that's worth and then i'll engage in the conversation otherwise but i just want to help yeah i appreciate it without additional framing and i'll try to get this all to you i kind of took though i wasn't real happy about how we went about this because i wanted to stay in the committee that we had kind of i don't know if we'd formed it but it was the committee and it had uh for instance it had the president of the portland association of teachers on it it had uh melissa goff on it and she was cheering it up so i thought it was a really good committee greg were you there greg and we had the student representative there and i wanted to go through that committee and end up with uh with what we came out with i was willing to come out and argue it through and come out with because there's this huge this is a complicated issue i mean i read hundreds of articles on this and i've talked to hundreds of teachers probably about the common core and it's it's it's not necessarily that the common core is this evil thing it's really the reverse it's just not necessarily that the common core is this great thing it's you can sit and you can go through the common core and find some pretty interesting things if you went out and talked to all our teachers you would have teacher after teacher say yeah i kind of like this part i mean the new nea the new nea president when said herself you know i really like the common core that was the nea president but she also said the testing needs to get we need to get rid of that the testing is horrible what we're doing with children and how we're using the testing the common core is not it's you know decent it's not a salvation or even close to a salvation it's just another set of standards nobody has ever standards have never been proven to educate children and it's not that it's not a curriculum there's all sorts of
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curricular things in there that parts of speech is in the common core i mean it's the whole situation with the common core is not really is it good or bad it's no different than the standards we've had necessarily it just has a better pr group of people i mean people are making millions and millions and millions and tens of millions of dollars on the common core not they're more than that hundreds of millions of dollars on the common core people are making it and so they come out and push it just like we push all these people i'm walking downtown today and the person that personal person is smoking well why would anybody start smoking because they gets advertised and pushed and so forth and a lot of young people you're going what the heck what's the same with the common core and so the common core if we had this attitude about the common core you would never hear me say a word about it if in the district attitude and this is what i would eventually like to get to we would be able to say you know there's some good things in the common core we need to look and see if there's some good things in there and we need to add them in if there are into what we're doing if we did that i'd shut up and say let's quit it right now but that's not how it works in schools in schools it's we're going to push the common core i talked to a teacher who in this school system he was doing a he was in a little bit of trouble for his teaching and so the assistant principal was in his room 36 times during the year always pushing on common core common core common core common core now i'm telling you doing good common core isn't going to make you a a better teacher really that's not how it works but that's how we as a district seem to be approaching it often and it's not that we're any different than anybody else in the country everybody else in the country approaches it this way and it's the wrong way to approach it we need to approach it in a much more intelligent way so the question really in a way on the common core itself is not the stuff that the national school boards association puts out and no offense bobby but it's not right it's just not accurate it's it's not really it is if you read 200 other articles negatively you'll say oh well they they said this but that's not right it's not it's not put out that way and are is it doing any damage in our high schools the common core itself is probably doing some good things how we're approaching it and i don't mean implementing it i mean approaching it we're doing a lot of damage in the high school but there's a there's a real problem with the common core and that's in the k2 that particularly kindergarten it's doing tremendous damage because i talked to principal a couple months ago and i walked into a kindergarten classroom and and they had it looked like a fifth grade classroom and i and this was a really good principle i could tell by just walking around all the little kids were waving at her and she was a good principal and i've had people speak highly of her and i walked into that classroom i said and to myself this looks like a fifth grade classroom there's kindergarten and we walked out of the classroom and i said geez i didn't see any player yet she says kids can play at home that's the common core they're changing the structure of how we're dealing with kindergarten which then moves into the other areas across this whole country yet they didn't have anybody who ever taught in kindergarten in their entire lives involved in the in doing that so there's there is destructiveness if you approach it wrong which i think we're doing too much of okay so that's step one that's over here though that's not this resolution this resolution is talking about the s back test so the to begin with the the s back assessment does not it doesn't here's what it's not going to do for us it's not going to give us a grade level reading assessment the oaks kind of does that if you look at the oaks questions and you look at the the smarter balanced assessment it doesn't give us a grade level it's not going to give us foundational skills and mathematics it doesn't do that it's not going to give us a writing assessment of our children can our children write well if i'm a parent and i walk into the fourth grade or fifth grade classroom i want to know if my kid is my kid at grade level now we have other stuff that does that but are we doing it and thinking about it i want to know can my kid do foundational mathematics skills i want to know uh can my can my kid write decently well i want to know if my kid's behaving himself or herself that's what i want to know that this test doesn't do any of those things what this test does is tell you if the kid can solve trick questions which are related in some manner to
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some sort of reading strategies that came down from some group of people who weren't classroom teachers had never been in school had not taught in schools and are making hundreds of millions of dollars on it and they developed the test to tell if you're doing it so what do you have to do if you fail that test if your kids are going to now fail that test huge numbers of our kids are going to fail that test we know that they won't even let they won't even let our director of learning and teaching look at the test to see if it's any good and yet we're supporting it and spending probably in the end we're probably eventually spending because we're spending for each test millions of dollars in the district with based on what because we want to test the standards that aren't necessarily any better than any other standards we've ever had i'm just saying let's change our attitude about how we're looking at it and saying why are we being pushed and suckering into this thing why are we coming in so yeah you want to do common core fine kind of do it and go through it's fine it's not going to hurt things as long as you don't over shove it right down teachers throats and demand that that's what they do and under all these circumstances and think it's going to solve your problems because they ain't solving anybody's problems so we spend all this time and energy on solving our problems but we don't get any of them solved and all this money but the testing is is beyond that the testing this should be saying to the state now we ain't going to do this test if we we wouldn't do this test if we didn't have to and we think you're making a mistake to ask us we should be testing whether our children are at grade level in reading we should be testing whether our children can do foundational skills and mathematics and we should be testing writing and then beyond that we should not be really testing anything we should be teaching children science and social studies and pe and so forth and the idea and what's happened everybody in education practically goes overboard where yes literacy is incredibly important but to do literacy in pe which is if you and i can find you ones i could go find literacy things in pe what's the point of that there's not really a point to it we should be doing science and science social studies and social studies and guess what children will learn to read we should be focusing on getting kids to read so we're spending millions of dollars on testing children in this state and we can't even get librarians into our schools which are proven to read no one has proven that this helps one child there's no research that says the common core state standards i've ever helped one kid and so what i'm trying all i try to do is do two things with this resolution and i'll stop here i know it takes a long time but it's i'm sorry it's a long time it's a long discussion i really apologize for it but it is but i was trying to do two things one kind of move out some of the education ease that sneaks in there when we have the administrative educational people write and just kind of move that out and the other thing was this hardens it up a little bit so the problem with it for me if you're really going to look at it and think about it do you want to harden it up or not or not i mean if you want to harden it up fine i heard i made a little tougher and said okay this is a bad deal we ought to know like that i think you should leave the education ease out the rigor and that kind of those kind of words and stuff but but harding it up it's fine i tried to write it so it might actually be acceptable to people i wrote one that would that was the way that we should do it i don't think we're going to do it that way but this one might be acceptable so that's where i'm trying to go thank you for that time i really appreciate you taking it with me let me allow it allowing him other comments no um i didn't get a chance to see your email today so this was the first time i had a chance to advise for that but i didn't see this about us in that community so i waited to the very end i thought we might get down to it um i think though i i really appreciated your comments tonight steve and i and i think there's a i'd be interested perhaps not tonight but but to talk with you at some point about uh the role generally that standards play um in in a classroom in a district because i think there is and i don't think you're suggesting this but i uh anything different but i think there is a role um and i believe you're right standards are standards and uh and that's not what educates our kids um that being said your comments some of your your adjustments i actually feel are completely um completely on par i would probably make some uh some adjustments
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uh because i'm i i'm probably more aligned with particularly in resolutions let's um brevity is is good uh when resolving things but one of the number one you suggest removing the second line is the pedagogy is designed to meet which by the way if you were looking really looking at wanting to eliminate the education ease you would remove the pedagogy is designed to meet the needs of all students and removing the rigorous standards of achievement and to meet the needs of all students i think i i think the point is made that this is something that's designed to meet the needs of our students and i think the clarity in that should be real should be good for our superintendent enough to to follow since this is a resolution directing our superintendent um and also actually you make that clarity of directing staff versus directing the superintendent uh i would probably in that first one i don't know if we necessarily want to go line by line here or and i apologize if that but steve has a few things that he uh a few points and i it's probably just go ahead and go okay um the rest of that i think what has been written uh and what you are are saying are very similar i think you give a direction you know for it hence or for example teachers should not teach directly to the test or spend inordinate amount amounts of class time on testing except for some minor testing minor test taking instructions i actually like the language around and that assessments are implemented to maximize intended flexibility collaboration learning and creativity in the classroom i think and and this might just be sort of my a style difference for me i like that a little better i think it's to me it says the same thing i think i get your point in what you're trying to direct and saying hey we we need a specific example of this i wonder if there's another area where we can provide a specific example um but that's my that's my assessment about that essentially i would i would remove the quote the rigorous standards of achievement and to meet just that part out of your your number one and keep the rest of it okay hold on a second meet the rigorous standards okay so design the pedagogy is designed to meet the needs of all students and so forth and keep correct any other thoughts on that okay great thanks okay steve you go ahead i was just trying to sneak that through there the stuff that you would like to leave in those four things don't say anything to me i looked and i thought you know what does that mean it doesn't mean anything to me really because it's not a direct thing i was trying to say we need to tell our teachers and our principles we don't want you teaching directly to the test and that's what i was trying to sneak in there to go because if you pass if you pass this man i would hammer on this for the next year no that's not we're not you're not supposed to be teaching directly to the test because we're doing that all over the place not in every school but in many of our schools we're doing it way beyond where we are so i was trying to sneak that through and so the question i would say if you want us teaching to the test you think that's a good idea then go back to the old language if you think that we we don't want no old language doesn't say i don't think it's saying that at all really i'm saying we don't want to be teaching to the test out there and we want to teach to the whole child and testing is not where we are as a school district that's what i was trying to say if you want to say that's that's not how we are i have that's not a problem i mean it's a problem for me personally but i feel like that's where i mean that's why we have a pretty extensive recital section that lays that out but the recital is meaningless right on all these because it doesn't have any the recital section has no it has also been unintended it's not it's not yeah you go back if you do but it doesn't direct the superintendent to do the recitals
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i mean i'd have rewritten the recitals if we were going to do it it just that's why i didn't mess with it yeah and i guess to me it's important to craft the resolves in a way that is not creating unintended consequences which is why it was important for me to have this framed in a way that is not i guess i just disagreed that the message that would come from this if we left the language there is that we want to teach to the test because that's not no is that always are you saying in your language or are we on record that your language means right we're directing the superintendent to tell our teachers and our principles to not teach to the test and now we're going to you're going to be in trouble with our uh new administrators if you are if you've got teachers out there teaching the test and and we're not we don't want to do that yes that's what i'm saying in mind by the pbs school board does not support teaching to the test we believe i'm reading c we believe in teaching the whole child and in the ability of skilled educators to creatively instill a lifelong love of learning in accordance with state law and our own values standardized testing is only one of many tools to be used in the assessment of student growth and in the evaluation of teachers testing should not dominate the culture or instructional time in our schools as a school board we believe the ultimate role of assessment is to improve instruction not to demean teachers or principals or to labels can we move that to the resolution if we would move that to the resolution i would stand up and give every by everybody drinks or something let's move that to the resolution and then i'd go oh yeah because so often we say one thing and then we don't do it i don't want to do that put that on the list of support supported chains put it in the resolution and i'm going okay okay so we've got that as so matt had an edit that everyone seemed to be okay with to resolve number one steve suggests moving c do the resolve so i'm just kind of creating a running list repeat it maybe i think you might want to repeat it because it really does tell a story in the recitals i mean there's a reason maybe there's a shorter version yeah i'll put it in both places yeah okay so repeat c in some to some degree so i'm just creating my little working list here okay so then um matt do you want to keep going through you you're on a roll there um steve had some proposed changes to um resolve two and resolve three so i didn't know if you wanted to go working again i now i know these are i felt like these were two different ways to say the same thing right exactly frankly um and uh and i you know i don't think steve is trying to be sneaky uh by any means i think he is um but i think uh but i think it there is a nuance difference one reads the school board calls upon the state to provide the funding necessary to implement the smarter balanced assessment effectively including funding and time for both professional development and technology resource implementation i think talking about that explicitly is is important because those are some of the things that we've already heard our our concerns that we have we could go on all day about unfunded mandates from the state but that's not the focus and then steve's portion is the pps school board calls upon the state of oregon to provide funding necessary to carry out any of the state's educational mandates including standardized testing um i do i do kind of like the idea of uh of including something in there about other statements other state mandates now whether or not that is uh i mean this is a result it may be hidden in a resolution focused on on smart the smarter balanced assessment but i think it is something that probably we could all agree on right oh totally i mean we do have up in i the last sentence adding new unfunded mandates jeopardizes school districts fragile ability to reinvest resources et cetera well i don't think i don't think we have a board meeting that goes by that we don't talk about unfunded mandates from the state and then yeah this is just here for one second i see david williams in the audience and i don't know david and i'm not asking you to come up immediately but would you look at our legislative we every year we pass legislative policies and priorities and i think this is covered in there really clearly already and do you have that language or would you be able to find it for us because it might be worthwhile looking at that because again i i think it is something that we already have on record and that we share with legislators pretty regularly um that there shouldn't be unfunded mandates so i guess i would be a little bit inclined to keep this more specific to this particular issue but yeah can i let me say why i changed it
02h 10m 00s
that wasn't really a trick the the language here sounded to me like you know if you pay us and it sounds to me like this in the language let's wait two years to figure this to figure this out and that's not what i think we should that's where i disagree i don't think we wait two years to see if it works i think we tell them this isn't this isn't going to work this is not going to work i don't care if we wait 10 years how did you know and that's about what it takes 10 years normally because the ayp is and so this language kind of said okay if you'll if if you would just take care of the funding of it we would be fine with it that's kind of what i felt the language and that's not what i was trying to do what i was saying is none of that i was trying to leave in that by going broader and saying okay because i it's not going to work i'm sorry we all know that it's not gonna work and so telling them that it might work if you save us the money is not gonna work it's never it's not ever going to work and i guess i disagree with that so i don't know where other that's true that's the difference so thanks for calling me thank you steve for me um i like the idea of being more specific because i think it's stronger to just say any state mandate that's like i said we do that almost every board meeting and it's in a lot of our other it's in our legislative priorities it's other places but i think that given that this is an amendment or as this is a resolution regarding the smarter balance assessment that we should be specific to that i i just think it's stronger language so okay that's why i'm not opposed to including the big one i just think it weakens the the resolution so it to me it's possible to do an and rather than or i mean if you if you took steve's language it's not contrary to what we've already said right we could potentially say the portland school board calls upon the state of oregon to provide funding necessary to carry out any of the state's educational mandates period the school board calls upon are specifically comma the school board calls upon the state to provide the funding necessary to implement the smarter balances effectively blah blah blah so yeah i like that that's a good solution okay a little bit closer we can constantly include that yeah okay i think that yeah specifically and i don't have a strong preference again to me it does sound the the it states the same thing in slightly different ways but i wanted to clarify steve i think you said that your number two um sends a message that it's not gonna work it's not ever gonna work and i don't i don't read that in number two so i just wanted to clarify is if that's your intent it seems that it needs some significant rewording i don't think anybody would you want to significantly reword it so that is the clearance no i just i don't know i had to re-read it necessary to carry out any of the state's education no it didn't no it wasn't sending that i'm just saying that the reverse sent the other message like it might work mine doesn't my i didn't write in here actually this is never going to work because i but i would i mean because that's the way it actually is yeah okay so that's thank you that's great okay so on that one i think i think i've got that thank you amanda back over here back over to you you actually are the one on the floor okay um so i think number three and this is the last of the the ones that that steve's made some recommendation recommended changes on um if for me again it's maybe the same way if there are different ways of saying the same thing one of the things that i do like is i mean steve you say it i think more emphatically in that quote smarter balanced assessment which does not measure grade level reading basic mathematic or mathematics or writing skills and is an unproven test i think in the the version that that ruth presented says premature use of an unreliable or invalid smarter balanced assessment could undermine st this is where this is valuable to me because i feel like it's it's something that i've echoed um in my concerns and and i know bobby as well and others too but undermine student enthusiasm for learning could create devastating outcomes for schools and frankly we've seen this as oaks and other things come out it's it's ridiculous and could set schools and communities back years if not managed well at the state and local level um levels i like the language around that and if there was a design that could offer
02h 15m 00s
offer sort of an and situation in both of these because i don't disagree with the language again i feel like they're in many ways saying the same thing in different ways but i would like to retain that the premature use of an unreliable or invalid assessment could could do these things i mean i i would probably say will do we're almost assured um it all but assures that these are the outcomes that we'll see but i don't know how others feel about that i don't know steve how you feel about my comments so i think there's truth and i'm still back at the issue of that that premature use of an unreliable or unbalanced marmot well the use of it maybe even dump out the premature because are they ever going to get to the point where if you're just measuring the standards and not i mean that this is worth the time and money and energy and everything that we're putting into it are they ever going to get to that point so i you know take out the word premature and put the use of an unbalance because it's pretty invalid at this point we don't know because we won't even oh just to take out the word don't pretty much take out the word premature sure yeah okay so use it yeah that was what we did i would also take out the words now that i'm looking at if assessments are used in this way we should just take that out we should say the school board requests that the state not use the smarter balance assessment for punitive labeling or sanctioning of students teacher schools or districts periods specifically there must be assurances of the reliability and validity of the test use of an unreliable yeah actually it works great good so otherwise so those changes and that's it for three okay so the only the only other thing i thought was missing in here ruth um was something around the communication and uh with parents and it wasn't here at one point but there's been so many iterations and versions of this so maybe it's not dropped by accident because i thought we had that in there i don't see anything in the i don't see anything in the um resolution around it okay and i'm trying to remember if i saw it in the reception it wasn't an earlier version so i apologize we need something so i agree number eight result number eight oh number eight okay it is a number eight but maybe it needs to be highlighted or written differently so that you so that it's noticeable because if yeah pop out at you then it didn't that means it maybe didn't work uh so in the meantime the school board asks the pps staff state and other partners to continue to expand continue to expand their efforts to inform and engage parents and community during the transition i think you um need to i think that should be the school board directs the superintendent okay because we don't direct the staff we direct the superintendent um and and we can direct the state as well well unfortunately we can't direct the state and ask the state we can ask the state and other partners to continue um and i guess i say we directly we might want to say something rather than to continue to expand and continue and expand their efforts yes and i have felt like some a lot of the communications materials really are just not very satisfactory so i mean if there's a way that and i don't know if the state is ever going to provide ones that are and whether you know we don't necessarily have the capacity that one thing i thought was helpful was our staff produced that video showing teachers in action and right something like that that's not you know that's really or having teachers and principals come and and talk to us and have the public be able to hear how examples and how it works something like that would be would be really great and then on number nine you want to um i think school board directs the superintendent again taking out the staff reference thank you yep see if there's any others with those and there's another one in number one which we'll fix okay yeah so excellent other um and you know this has been there's so many different ways you can write all these different sentiments so obviously there's different ways we could wordsmith it but if there's any other missing pieces things that you need in there director curler isn't here tonight so i'll continue to i mean obviously we'll be sharing the next iteration with everybody i guess one of the things that we should at least consider is if you look at the recital jay many national organizations have called for a moratorium of at least a year this is talking about sanctions um but i think there are many organizations that are calling for a a delay um make sure districts are ready um we should probably at least talk about whether we want to weigh in there
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um on a delay in the test itself not just yeah or um whether the state whether we would recommend that the state consider next year sort of a pilot year rather than a you know you know it really gives us an opportunity to try it without it necessarily meaning anything because we need to make sure we get it right so i guess i'm still open to the suggestion it seems like more and more people are are saying that are we ready are we are we as a state ready and are we as districts ready and i guess you know i look at you know technology and you know all kinds of things that districts across oregon need to be making accommodations around in order to get this right and i mean are you confident right now superintendent in terms of portland public schools that we can that we are ready to at least pull off the testing part of it or would it be helpful for us to be saying to the state you know look at this as a kind of a pilot year and you know we'll see where the kinks are across the state i i don't know i'm just asking yeah no i think that's i mean we piloted in 24 schools this year we don't have the results back from what the you know what happened in the pilot yeah so one of the things and this is uh you know this is information that i received from a second grade teacher about who at one of the schools that uh this is being piloted at but um and this was a little shocking to me frankly is around technology the need for a third grader to go from writing their writing down their thoughts in a paragraph form to typing that keyboard and the skills associated with keyboarding is one uh and and now the need for identifying that as a skill set to begin teaching in kindergarten as a student center so by third grade it's no longer a barrier now one of the things when we talked about this as a a number of weeks probably months ago was that the digital divide that is very real and there are kids entering our system that have no access to computers none and that doesn't change when they get to school unless there's a classroom with a smart board or there's a school that has ipads or there's something like that and that isn't everywhere so i think there's there's significant barriers that we have to we have to consider and that technology and that's why i wanted to be explicit in that that one is certainly one of them but i'm i'm still wrapping my head around a uh learning a typing as a skill set i i think by the time these students who are doing kindergarten the keyboard is going to be obsolete frankly just speak to it uh just dictate that's i mean but we have to now teach that and second or first or kindergarten for a third grader to take a test we used to teach it all the time back in the day i know that that we're not really getting information back from the state on the results of our 24 schools that piloted it but i hope that you or we have been collecting information from those 24 schools on where we tripped or where we realized oops and we it looks like we want to come on let's speak to that one there would be shaking her head that would be helpful information for us to have and maybe to share with our community and again it's not the results but it is the well and then what did you think the really obvious point this is not the last time we'll be talking about this topic obviously we'll be right back so the question is how are we engaging with the users we call those user stories so do you want to introduce yourself um i'm melissa goff i'm the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning um the user stories that we've collected have been very much what director morton referenced part of our challenge in a district where as we have and this is not unique to portland but as we have seen our investments in education decline over time due to the economy priorities have had to be set some of which influenced technology purchasing over time there has not been a large scale investment by the state in technology the reason it's important to note is not only the keyboarding aspect of whether or not that might be a defunct skill in a few years but really practical pieces such as our
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third grade students needing to be able to drag and drop on a screen but they've never worked on a screen where they need to drag and drop so um so we are our user stories that we're collecting are not only telling us about the technology what we're finding is the technology itself that we have available we believe we're going to have enough technology available with the um basic uh productivity that we need in order to test the question is whether or not our students are going to be able to engage in the test and show what they know and are able to do because they don't have access to technology on an ongoing basis throughout their career so i'm hearing then potentially so under k we have a bulleted list of a number of issues it sounded to me as if we're adding adding and we could work with you on how to word this and then run it by everybody but something around the issue of access to technology and the grades leading up to third grade and having those skills and melissa could i ask one other quick question um one of the things i also understand is that the test is not being necessarily translated into every language for kids and so what are the accommodations that will be necessary so there's a delay in that and what we're tr still trying to ascertain is how much uh flexibility we will be having for our students who are emerging bilingual students one of the advantages that we did have with oaks has been that it has been available in more than just english because of as you were stating earlier smarter balanced being developed and field tested as late as spring and us not as a state having access to the results of those field tests until december translating those materials aren't is not going to happen prior to the field testing results being analyzed so it will be a limitation for our students it will impact it will impact us it also has a potential of dramatically impacting the test results then for districts that have more emerging bilingual students versus districts that don't and how how is the state then going to measure that right yeah and i think a very real question that i don't know if we have asked yet but as you bring that up would be wise for us to ask is we are and your resolution addresses uh asking for a waiver from penalty uh we are held accountable to participation in assessment if we have a large number of emerging bilingual students at a site and their native language is other than english and there's not an assessment available in that language in their second year third year fourth year in country and yet still struggling um what happens to participation how do we get them started on a test where they may not be able to engage in the initial instructions all right sorry go ahead i would say as we continue continue along this process i mean i consider this as sort of a first step for our board but as we continue along this i mean my what i'm going to be looking at is how are how are these these tasks disproportionately impacting those students that that as a district we have already identified as underserved as having uh having other barriers and as a district an organization i feel is responsible for removing barriers to student education are we creating yet another barrier to students we're talking about kids who don't have access because of poverty we have a disproportionate number of our kids of color within our district who fall within that category we have students who are within special education students who are english language learners we have students who are on free and reduced lunch these are all students who we've identified as our equity group and that's we've actually invested in them um because of this so how are we creating those additional barriers um and i think that's where that's where my my observation is going to be setting squarely so could i suggest maybe under k on the second bullet is providing of a list of challenges and concerns is providing sufficient accommodations um and smart balance assessment for english language learners and students with disabilities and maybe we need to strengthen that and add to that around the creation of new barriers to student success or some some wording along those lines something around poverty and the ability
02h 30m 00s
or the access to technology the state should not be making things worse or putting us in a position where we're struggling even more to serve our underserved students right right now but the oregon educational investment board has an equity policy as well and with the very similar student populations identified in that equity policy so right that's that's the language that we should be holding oeib and ode accountable to um when the thing is maybe that's including that in the recital would be i like referring to the ib's language about that yeah that's great and then also calling out that we don't want there to be barriers so and well the fact is that our students are english language learners and our high poverty students who haven't necessarily had the same exposure to technology could artificially end up doing way worse on this test when in fact it isn't measuring which i think it's a big issue it isn't measuring what they know at all it's measuring you know how well they use their ability to use technology or their lack of translation services and so that's you know and i think that's what our teachers are constantly saying to us is you know is it a valid test okay right so that's that's excellent thanks so could i get back to what bobby raised as a question around what do we want to add to this something around because we have in here don't use it for punitive labeling or sanctions and don't um i guess i'm questioning how that's different than doing a moratorium and we're actually asking them not we're not we're not putting a time period on this we're saying don't ever do this right i think i think that there are certainly some organizations who are basically saying don't do the test next year at all um we're not ready um and again i'm not convinced that that's where we want to land um but i but i do know if we use it i want it to be a a year in which we kind of figure out and evaluate maybe evaluation to maybe send information to the state on you know here's the things you need to do before we use this in any mindful way as a as a valid asset so it's part of that so it's that question right i i don't know that i necessarily as part of that you'd have to have the state actually let you know how your students did on the test right so what the pieces that we have in here is we don't have in here don't do the test we have when you do this test it needs to be valid don't use it for labeling and sanctioning and don't you can't use it right away as part of the teacher evaluation system because there's no baseline data to compare it to so that's the things we've said thus far so i think it's a really good question of whether we want to say anything additional around even delaying the test itself or strengthen the statement around making it more of a transitional pilot year i i like the idea of a transition transitional year versus don't do it i mean we've already piloted it in 24 schools so i think that that uh i mean that's me i think that we should continue down the road of of uh testing the test i guess see how so something like the first year of testing using the smarter balanced should be i don't know what the exact word is something should be a transitional or piloting year and then you should move into requests that you don't use it for sanctions and so on i'm not sure that i would limit that to a year ruth i think maybe maybe the state needs to figure out the standards uh for when they consider the test to be ready but it needs to be in a transparent way not the black box of the state deciding it's ready without any way of vetting that well again the districts need to have access to those results so that they can look at them and see why some of their students may not may have done poorly on it so i think we're all maybe i'm beginning to fade in my wordsmithing ability here so i don't know if anyone else otherwise we can go back to staff and come up with something and what i'm hearing is something around at the beginning of three that talks about um the transition period of using the task right steve we're we're stepping into our sticky little area with no i like everything that you're doing ruth i think it's great what you're doing there and what we all i pretty much agree with what everybody has said but there's a little sticky thing which is when all these kids do fail we want to we don't want to go outdoor i mean they're getting we're going to have huge failure this this underserved population dealing with this
02h 35m 00s
i mean it's going to be incredible but when that happens we need to respond correctly to it shouldn't be responding by telling our principals they need to start past getting these kids to pass the tests because the tests are no good basically and they're not testing what we should be testing so i mean what i'm saying is when we get to that point i'm hoping that we don't just start saying okay and think of these tests as a test that actually is measuring what we want to measure because it's not measuring what we want to make it's not even it's it's measuring whether we are doing the smarter balanced enough and the way to do that the best to pass the test is to do more and more and more and more of that which is not good education so we have to do i'm just saying and not with the this i'm just tossing this out because it's slated i want to be real careful when we get and talk about this is our children doing well on this test well the way to get them to do well on the test is to not give them a good education to a certain degree to make their education weaker allows them to test better because we focus on those things that we think are going to be on the test and we teach them the tricks you teach them the tricks on how to deal with the this test because eventually people are going to figure that out so i guess for me the part of what you all that you just said that i really agree with is around responding appropriately and i i don't know if we need to add that in at this point but i i think that is a very important point that in the line because we were saying up front these are our values and we don't want to teach to the test we want to build a random education but it's a really important point during this difficult transition we want to make sure that there isn't the reaction of now therefore we have to we need to reinforce that point so i think that's well i think that that's where where that rubber meets the road for us as a board is that in fact the next if and when that happens we're resting and we're responding based on the values that we've outlined here okay that's mine anything less than that i think would be pretty insincere yeah so if the k if the kids do worse on the test we give the superintendent a raise a big one right i don't know that i would say that well that means they're doing better on though that would be incentive having that discussion in the context of what we lay out here okay now how do we respond and what's the appropriate response in terms in the classroom she's back melissa so after the native language uh questions i took a look at the accommodations the recommended accommodations for english language learners and the accommodation that's recommended is read aloud of test directions directions in the students native language which in a district of our size with over 80 languages represented within our schools could lead to a translation opportunity that our city is unprepared to to meet the needs of uh for our students so it's uh and that doesn't extend to the test questions but it does extend to the directions so i wanted to make sure that you had that information accurate and a lot of a lot of those children won't don't have enough language skills to do the test and you read the directions all you want to them right that was a very strength based way to say we can't yeah so could i ask him to follow up to that sure so melissa would you say that um if we are not able if if emerging bilinguals are not able because of this lack of accommodation and translation be able to take this test are there other assessments that we can use in order to assess our students skills and have teachers and parents and students understand what they're saying that's the state of life skills that well that's what i'm saying i mean we refer in here to that there are other assessments that this is not this is obviously a huge one and that's one of the issues of how long it will take but right so there are other assessments the state uses to take a look both at english language acquisition but also about what students know and are able to do part of the difficulty with the number of languages that we have represented is you really do need students to have a certain level of language acquisition in order to get as deeply into the knowledge that that they need to have so it is not probable that we would ever be able to get to the depth of content area knowledge for our students who are for example newcomers into the country speaking a language other than one of our five major languages which we're able to really well support at this point in time we do use assessments that are translated into spanish spanish is really the the best assessment or best uh supported language for assessments in literacy and in mathematics and we do do that presently right now so we're able to to uh test students their native language if it's
02h 40m 00s
spanish but we don't have that same access for our other languages such as vietnamese our second largest language after spanish so when you have we have the issues around the participation and the sanctions around lack of participation as well as not meeting or exceeding um benchmark and the the labeling the sanctions and all the negative things that go with that at the same time of course we all want also the accountability and not having subgroups um being hidden or not paid attention to so like what is that balance of being able to have that accountability without having it be something that's impossible to achieve or unrealistic or that we don't have the tools for and there's no answer to that question i'm just putting it out there thank you so can i can i respond to something steve just said about the our test scores going down um you know as i've looked at a couple of sample questions um from the smarter balance test i mean some of the questions i think actually are much better than in the past much better and they do a much better job of really assessing what the kid knows or doesn't know um i think our our big issue is around communication and i know again when i was at the oregon school boards association one of the things that the board said to that organization also is we just all need to be massively communicating to our parents and to our community and also portland public schools communications department a what common core is because there's just such a lack of information out there and we need to be setting an expectation that this is a more difficult and more complex test that the kids are going to be taking and we do expect that scores will go down they will go down we know that and that shouldn't be a freak out it should be just understood it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad way to go it's just a different kind of an assessment and um and you're not comparing apples and apples to what was um so i do think we have a huge communications challenge and i think pretty much every district across oregon understand across the united states understands and with children too right but doing communicating to children because i mean they're one of the things that these tests do all the tests even the oaks and the reason that i posted the hoax is they're really destructive of children's rights and that's why we have some of our languages not in the little give everybody a trophy thing they're really nasty with a lot of kids so i do think that that's a huge piece of our work in the next year is to be helping work with other organizations around oregon and nationally to get that word out and maybe with the oregonians help and some of our other you know communications partners to you know we need to we need to be informing folks of what the common core is and what our expectations are with this new assessment and council of great city schools has actually produced a number of things trying to make them use available to districts to support that including things like public service announcements and written materials so in several different languages well can i just say thank you not nady language can i say thank you especially to ruth but also to steve to greg to andrew to you know um you know i'm actually really i i don't know that other boards are looking at putting out statements like this i think it's a really important conversation for us to be stepping into in this way so i really appreciate your corralling all of us to get to this point well thanks to everybody and to the staff for their help in crafting it and appreciate really good collective work tonight and beforehand to get it right to a good place so also say thank you to ruth and steve and greg and everybody else who had input on this including all of us and again i think this is another this meeting tonight has been a really great example of how a committee of the whole can work very well we all get an opportunity to listen to each other which i find very valuable to bounce ideas back and forth of course tom has to agree with everything we've said tonight but yeah well tom yes with that i guess we're finished so i will go ahead and adjourn the next regular meet of the board will be held on tuesday july 22nd thank you thank you to everybody in our listening audience

Sources

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

2014-07-08 PPS School Board Study Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - July 08, 2014

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