2014-09-16 PPS School Board Work Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2014-09-16
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	work
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Work Session - September 16, 2014

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uh good evening this work session of the board of education for september 16 2014 is called order like to send 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 and it's also being streamed live on our pps tv website directors knowles morton and buell are absent this evening so we'll kick off a fairly short agenda tonight with public comment miss houston do we have anyone signed up for public comment we do we have five great our first two speakers david porter and greg burl okay so come on down folks i'll just quickly read the instructions so i know you all have been here many times but others on the list may not have so thank you very much for taking the time to come to the board meeting we have all your input and look forward to hearing from you um we are not going to respond to any comments or questions at this time but do please check in with roseanne the board manager and make sure that we have your contact information either your phone number email and she can follow up with you any complaints or issues about specific employees should be directed to the superintendent's office will not be heard in this forum you have a total of three minutes to share your comments begin by stating your name and spelling your last name for the record green lights on the first two minutes one minute remaining a yellow light comes on and then when your time is up your red light goes on and we respectfully ask that you conclude your comments at that time thank you so much for being here and you may go ahead thank you my name is dave porter p-o-r-t-e-r chair atkins superintendent smith members of the board and members of the public first in relation to tonight's board agenda item allocating additional funding let me remind you that i've spoken to you several times about the urgent need to reopen kellogg's school at an estimated refurbishing cost of 2 million reopening kellogg is critical to relieving school overcrowding in southeast portland and to creating needed classroom spaces to open mandarin and vietnamese immersion programs in that area in order to have the additional spaces by next fall a funding decision is needed now second over two months ago in prior public comment to the board i urge the board to request a five-year due language immersion 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 a two strand one way spanish dual language immersion program at the now vacant humboldt elementary school in north east portland in 2017 and 18. tonight i'm speaking to that issue the need for an additional spanish immersion program at humboldt recall that i have previously spoken to the board on the specifics of a spanish immersion program at smith and of a japanese immersion program at tubman hubble elementary school is not now being used as a school it is located to the east of beach elementary school and close to jefferson high school in a little diagram there in the transfer lotteries for the year 2011 through 2014 more than 50 kindergarten applicants for the spanish immersion program at beach enough for an additional two strands have been turned away each year this shows sufficient parental interest to open an additional spanish immersion program nearby portland public schools should respond to this expression of parent preferences over the lottery years of 2012 to 2014 an increasing number of english native neighborhood applicants have been turned away from the kindergarten at beech beach's spanish immersion program for 2013-14 30 out of 53 neighborhood english native applicants were wait listed or denied no space i recommend that when a new spanish immersion program is opened at humboldt neighborhood native neighborhood english native applicants for kindergarten at the beach spanish immersion program be given priority over out of neighborhood english naval native applicants thank you thank you very much hi my name is greg berl b-u-r-r-i-l-l it's good to see you all again um it's been an amazing beginning of the year for me so far i've taught at cesar chavez fabian ockley green franklin and gray i've taught kindergarten middle school and high school academic subjects from math to language arts to social studies a little pe here and there so i'm really getting a picture of what's going on in the district
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this year you are going to hear me speak a lot about my feeling that we spend too much money on personnel in this building here and not enough personnel in schools right you're going to hear me say that certain positions like i.t should all be done by teachers who have students helping the to do i.t in non-um non-confidential areas there's so much that we could teach our students by getting personnel out of this building and into schools and having them perform these functions as well as teaching students and mentoring students to perform them but while i'm talking about bureaucracy i don't want i want to praise your decision to hire an ombudsman i think that is a vital step towards improving relationship between the community and the district but now even though we're getting more money i still think until we have enough money to fund everything it's vital that we look at priorities and we try and spend as much money as possible in ways that directly affect student outcomes and well for example i don't think that testing uh the sbac i mean i've told you before that even the sat is not as good a predictor as teachers grades i would much rather see us spend the money on training teachers to give more consistent grades than on testing and of course when we test there's the opportunity cost all the things that we don't teach our students in that time the use of the laboratory computer labs and so forth for testing oops i really messed that up let's see here's another important one we need teacher training that really benefits teachers rather than fitting the ideas and convenience of administrators i can't tell you how many times any veteran teacher has been told when to go to a room uh given 100 or 200 pages of material someone gets paid a lot of money to talk about 20 or 25 of those pages and then the teachers are left on their own to implement whatever it is so in any event as i come talk with you this year and submit written information i'm going to start to give you more detailed ideas about how i think things should change great thank you so much next we have scott overton and ben barber hi there my name is benjamin barber and that is b b-a-r-b-e-r uh the reason why i've come to today and without much preparation i'm sorry i could have probably done better had i been aware is that i believe that we should perhaps spend some resources in trying to find whether or not we can improve student outcomes in mathematics and science by implementing stuff that i myself and others have been working on in what is known as the maker education initiative and this initiative is meant to accompany regular science education with applied science principles such as how to engineer and produce things of either artistic or useful societal purpose my background in this was i previously was a science educator with omsi my wife is a student a master's education student for special ed and has done language arts education and moreover i have taught first robotics championships teams and have also helped teach at portland state amateur robotics teams as well i um i have some accompanying documents that have examples of budgets and how much it would take to implement something like this but i feel as if the school that i was teaching at mlc really seemed to enjoy this curriculum and these principles we had students who were doing things like growing uh genetically engineered glitter plants uh remote controlled cockroaches building robots making video games and my classes consisted of intricate lectures which are content heavy followed the next period or the next class by labs and hands-on activities that go over the stuff that was there previously i had kids that had been diagnosed with developmental disabilities whose parents told me that my classes were the only classes they were excited about and paid attention to because it fits not only their
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self-expression but also their goal-oriented and mastery skills so i hope that maybe there is a chance that we could develop some sort of uh scientific study to compare control groups of regular science instruction uh and those that have the regular science con the regular science instruction accompanied by the applied science skills such as you know how to engineer and produce uh real world solutions to real-world problems and how to express oneself artistically by using the tools of the 21st century thanks thank you very much hello um i'm scott overton o-v-e-r-t-o-n um co-chair atkins uh superintendent smith and board members hello and thank you for your continued work and dedication for the students of portland it's always wonderful as you know i'm the oregon pta i'm now a vice president of leadership and i'm an active member of the grant high school bta board we're here again to revisit our budget luckily for a positive and not a cutting fix this time around however i would be remiss if i did not remind you all that having all the resources available at the time of budget preparation leads to a maximal program for the year and this is at least the third time i believe that i've been involved in seeing there's adjustments after the fact in a positive way um it's i know that understanding tax revenues probably is not something that we can do a lot about but certainly understanding the cost of of doing business and understanding the cost of what our employees are is certainly something that i think we can do a better job also a more accurate count for the number of students in a school building it's an ongoing thing since i began this process 16 years ago that the number of students has always been underestimated at the building in which my students my children were apart which means you then have to make an adjustment after classes are set and it's not ideal so i really think we could do better about that for example at grant high school we have at least 18 and a half teachers who have a workload of 165 to 185 students and it's in seven areas across the board four in science four and a half in math two in social studies two in spanish three in english two or more in health and one in art so how do we fix this with a little bit of fte i mean do you want to have a find a person who's qualified to teach spanish english and art you know i mean it's kind of a weird position to put people in at this time so i challenge us at this point to face a better time the next time around i'd also like to request more money be supplied for the consolidated budget budgets new classes require supplies books and technology at the pta grant we have been hit heavily already for support the psu ecology and an english class don't have books curriculum in some other classes manipulations in a math class technology for a classroom all have been asked for for these new classes that were developed without any sort of money to to supply that so at this time um and i'm sure that ptas throughout pps are being hit similarly at this time so at this time we are um out asking pta members to support uh the levy renewal with a seven million dollar kind of total budget um so how do we explain that we're using this month we're not using this money to fund positions and programs but we still need more money so i just think about how that will look as we're out working for the levy arena thank you very much lastly we have mike rosen hi um are you ready ready yup go go go ahead hi i'm mike rosen and i'm here representing the parents coalition which is a group of portland parents that believe a full day of high school is essential for all students thanks to taxpayers and the approving improving economy the news is good tonight we have more money than expected and an opportunity to restore needed school services in addition to the superintendent's three priorities which we wholeheartedly support we support filling whatever funding gaps exist at the elementary and middle school level and we're asking that the superintendent and the school board fulfill its promise to fully fund high schools this means providing an adequate number of teachers to allow students to have a
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full day of school and provide a robust curriculum that will make this a priority for all students please fully staff high schools as promised all summer the parents coalition has asked for this and pps has claimed that they don't have the resources but here we are two weeks after the start of school and millions of dollars appear in addition we need to allocate student support to high schools on a modified per student basis whether you're a small or large high school a base level of support is provided larger high schools need more campus monitors to improve safety and the well-being of students and teachers they need more vice principals to improve teacher support which includes coaching and evaluation and they need more media and i t specialists and accounting support to improve the functional operations of high schools we also need allocation of operational funds for new teachers textbooks projectors whiteboards art supplies many newly hired teachers are without even the most basic curriculum support tools and lastly we need more fiscal accountability and transparency last january 20 million dollars unexpectedly appeared due to better than expected revenue from low local property tax and savings and employee retirement costs now an additional 17 million dollars appears as a result of the same factors without better revenue projections we miss the opportunity to optimize the budget by working with principals in the community before the start of school without better budget predictions we lose public confidence in the district's fiscal responsibility and adversely impact public support of future revenue generating measures it also causes a lack of meaningful public input on budget decisions and the late allocation of dollars for new teacher hiring continues to place pps in a less effective hiring position meaning we continue to hire when all the best teachers are taken by other schools and finally we can't motivate students to forecast for full schedule especially in the upper grades if we don't have the resources prior to forecasting to create interesting and sought after curriculums so in closing please consider more direct investment in high schools and less investment in an already sufficient contingency fund thank you thank you very much okay so um smith before we move on to the agenda and did you have it you had an update you wanted to share some we had some good news i did i just wanted to do recognition of a student who was actually covered in the oregonian today theodore motts who scored a perfect score on both the s.a.t and the a.c.t entrance exams and is the first person in oregon to achieve perfect scores on both tests i just want to say a big call out for her the other thing i'd say though part of what the oregonian also covered is what a well-rounded student she is and all the other things she does and the community service kinds of things she's engaged in that she the pole vaulter she does the constitution team she coordinates a tutoring program and she is a member of the superintendent student advisory committee so i'm just going to say this should be an encouragement to those of you who are still thinking about whether you want to join super sac this year so anyway congratulations to people and um maybe our student representative can remind our audience when that group meets and how you can join it yeah so our next meeting is gonna be um next wednesday or wednesday the 24th at 4 15 we'll meet at the bsc right out here and we all walk up to the conference room you can join it just by coming show up and it's going to be fun so it's open to any high school student yeah so any high schooler can come to this and then from there we select a smaller committee to meet with the superintendent but as of right now it's open to everyone awesome thank you so much great okay so back to the agenda um so tonight we're going to get an update on the 2013-14 ending fund balance the 2014-15 beginning fund balance and our budget calendar for the coming year so superintendent smith would you like to introduce the item i would and ryan dutcher who is our interim cfo and david wind our deputy cfo are going to do the presentation tonight and walk us through some of the detail about when we know what and how our budget calendar rolls out and and how the complexity of projections that you just heard people testifying about trying to get their heads around how when do we know what and how do we know what we can make how to make sense of it these guys are going to walk us through it ryan good evening co-chair atkins board members and superintendent smith uh tonight we want to talk to you about the budget more specifically we want to we want um we want to talk through the budget um the budget calendar we manage our budget uh generation through a calendar every year and we're going to share that at a pretty good level of detail so we appreciate your attention on that piece we also we want to uh directly address the fact that our
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ending fund balance is 16.8 million dollars more than we budgeted so we're going to walk through a good reconciliation of what the root causes are behind that and then when we start to think about how we want to uh deploy those resources i mean it's really it's a great position to be in we want to set that in the context of what we know about 2014 2015 and then think a little bit about the future and what we know about the budget environment for the next year as well we're going to next go into a little bit more detail and david's going to talk about the school staffing update because it's important to think about what we're doing today and how that fits in with what we do with these resources and then lastly we'll wrap up with some some recommendations and then talk about when you'll see the next update uh for the for the budget process as well as it is an ongoing process we learn more uh every day throughout the year and and how we bring this data back to you is is going to be important so with that i'll turn it over to david you can walk through the calendar thank you ryan and um we're going to pause for questions at a couple of points in the proceedings so we'll pause after the budget calendar some questions on that and then after we've done the context piece we'll pause then and there'll be an opportunity for questions at the end as well so budget calendar you in your board packet got a detailed page and a half budget calendar which as i believe you had requested and i want to acknowledge a couple of things before i get into detail on this first thing to acknowledge this is a more detailed budget calendar than we've published in the past we think as we've heard um speakers tonight saying as i know you're concerned about we want to be as clear as we can be about the annual process that we go through because there are a number of things here that happen every year and we want to try and be clear about that and the other thing to acknowledge is that whilst this is labeled a calendar for the development of the 2015-16 budget there's really three years worth of activity or there's three years being reflected in this simultaneously so during the current year we're going to be closing out last year which is 2013-14 we're going to be implementing executing and updating this year 2014-15 and we're going to be developing the budget for next year 2015-16 and each of those three years there are things related to them interwoven in this calendar the other thing i wanted to acknowledge up front is you know we're including in the calendar now the idea of estimating the end in func balance in the summer and then confirming like we are tonight what our pre-audit estimate of ending fund balance so we can be as transparent about that as possible previously we really didn't come back and talk about ending fund balance when i was sat up there for eight years we never really had that conversation as explicitly in part because we were in a different fiscal environment so for years and years and years we were making cuts drawing down reserves to mitigate the amount of cuts that we made and then in most of those years our ending fund balance ended up being more than we had budgeted it refilled the pot to allow us to continue to manage and move forward but we were never in a position where we had extra dollars that we could actually spend on anything that's changed in the last two years with the overall improving fiscal climate so now we're in the fortunate position where we do actually get to think about does this create an opportunity for us to spend some money immediately and that's different than a situation we've been in for most of the last 10 15 or even 20 years so in terms of the detailed calendar that you have in front of you i broke it in terms of slides i brought it into three seasons in the summer and the fall we um in in july and august we are updating school staffing allocations it's the second round of updates so um staff are working with principals to problem solve places where the allocation they've received so far doesn't fit for scheduling or the number of students that they expect and so forth the other thing that's important to acknowledge about july and august is we're still spending prior year dollars in july and august that sounds kind of intuitive because our fiscal year end is june 30th and you might think june 30th we're done accounting rules are more arcane than that and we're actually still booking expenditures in july and august for the prior year we don't actually close the books on the june 30th year end until the end of august beginning of september in preparation for the audit and that's important i think to understand in the context of when do we know numbers about where the year ends up we're actually still booking expenditures in july and august in uh the fall like we're doing now we're going to
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publish the budget calendar each year we're revising estimates for the prior year ending fund balance we're providing updates on the current year budget so what's happening in 2014-15 this year and continuing staffing allocation to schools we are we will be bringing you in october a recommendation for appointments to the cbr the citizens budget review committee the cbrc and you as a board will be beginning work sessions at board meetings and at work sessions where you get presentations from staff on programs and services some of which have budget implications as indeed the presentation on september 9th for dual language immersion where you heard staff talking about plans and the possibilities of what might happen next year and potential budget implications for those so that's what happens in the summer and the fall just just for the record we didn't there were the potential budget implications were not revealed on september 9th that's absolutely correct but there but there was an outline of program expansions and reconsiderations that would have implications for a budget if those are implemented and astounding from the board about whether or not that was something that you thought was worthy of future consideration in the winter starting in november you're continuing work sessions the district staffing team which is a staff group that is working on developing recommendations to the superintendent on school staffing begins their work the budget leadership team which is a staff team that is looking at recommendations of the superintendent on central allocated budgets is doing its work we've included in this calendar in november and december budget prioritization discussions and exercises with the number of community partners like we did in the development of this year's budget and we've scheduled we've penciled in a work session with the board for a similar exercise on december 2nd we will in november be coming to the board with a budget update for the current year and the timing of that in november is driven by the point at which we have a better sense of property tax collections local option revenue and student enrollment we will be completing the audit of the last year's financial statements and producing a budget amendment which will come to the board in january which will officially reconcile the end of the last fiscal year and include any changes to the budget that the superintendent is recommending and for your consideration and in january we will have a forecast for the next year 1516 with our best estimate at that point of what the revenue and expenditure outlook might be and traditionally that's also been the point at which we've tried to identify whether we have a deficit whether we have an investable surplus and what the outlook for the coming year is then in the spring march 10th is when we have scheduled provisionally the superintendent to do what she did this march which is present a school staffing plan to you and outline a framework for a budget proposal the following day is when this initial school staffing allocation is made and school staffing begins and that process continues continues through march and april march 11th through march 30th we'll be looking to schedule listening sessions for the superintendent and board members with community partners and other audiences to hear people's feedback on the budget framework that she has outlined there'll be another budget update on the current year in march the timing of that being in part driven by when we find out from the state how their reconciliation of the last year 2013-14 state school fund calculations are going to impact us and then on march 31st the superintendent will propose the budget to the board as the budget committee in april and may the board will hold public hearings state law requires that you hold at least one and last year you held a second one in the language other than english and we will also continue updates on staffing allocation in schools may 12th the citizens budget review committee performs its number one obligation which is to report to you on the superintendent's proposed budget may 26 is when the board would be scheduled acting as the budget committee to approve the budget we staff would then submit that approved budget to the tax supervisory and
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conservation commission which body will hold a hearing on june 23rd the same night as the borders as governing body would vote to adopt the budget impose taxes and appropriate funds for the following year in july we would do a preliminary estimate of how the year's ending fund balance looks do a second update during the summer of staffing allocation to schools and now we're back essentially to the beginning of the cycle and we begin all over again with a pre-order estimate of 1415 and you could turn to the front just change all of the years by one and we're back in the cycle so that essentially is our as i say fairly detailed budget calendar for the next 12 to 14 months and at this point yes we'll pause for questions for questions director curler actually had one earlier that you've been patiently waiting oh okay just a couple um what why would so we uh we we pass a budget in june correct you adopt a budget in june um why in july are we looking at um ending fund balances wouldn't we want to do that before the budget it's a question of when we have the inf when we have the information available as i said earlier part of the challenge is we don't have um we're still in you know july and august reconciling uh what's happened during the year we're still booking expenditures and and and tallying numbers so um but are there ways to estimate it i guess the question is are there ways to um estimate both you know both from on a macro scale both both from what the economy is doing so you know we have quarterly estimates coming out from the state and reports from the county quarterly so we should we should have visibility into that and we have spending on a quarterly basis and so we should have some visibility into that and so from a budget standpoint wouldn't we want to have some sort of forecast in terms of a little more visibility in terms of before in terms of the ending balance so i think the the the dilemma the balance that we're trying to strike when it comes to forecasts and estimates is the the earlier we do it the more variability there is and the less comfort we have recommending action fiscal action based on that so the more uncertainty there is about the numbers the less comfortable we are recommending to the superintendent that we spend the money until we until we have some level of certainty about whether we've got it uh and that's the balance and and you know it's it's a judgment call about how soon is too soon and when is the right time right and i will say i mean i i do you know we're doing we're doing more and doing it earlier than we've done it before and i think as as we continue to to do this will will evolve and and get better at it and and have a higher level of confidence in in what we're doing but um we're really trying to balance the reliability with um with timeliness right and then also i mean just to be fair i mean you you do estimate what the ending balance is right right yes that's that's on the record the um uh in terms of going back to the comment you made about um we're we're now in a situation where um the revenues are going up uh and so that this is a relatively new issue from an ending balance but i would be curious to know the last seven eight years just from from your knowledge i mean you don't have to be exact tonight but is is it the same order of magnitude on a relative basis that um they were missing the the ending balance and i i don't i'm not comfortable pulling that out of my head um i think there's a couple of things that there's a compounding factor in terms of what's changed it's not just that revenue is improving it's that the revenue and that we're in a positive space to begin with and when the economy is improving like it is we're not um everything is accelerating in the right direction so whether it's local option whether it's property tax receipts all of those things are moving
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in the right direction and that's creating if you i mean it's positive momentum on top of positive momentum and i think that is that's working to our benefit um and we will continue to sort of you know do our best to evaluate what opportunities that creates for us okay thank you that that would be good if you could get that so i had a quick question about the march 10th date um the big deal for our principals is when the staffing is released to the schools and we did a lot of work in the last teacher contract so that we can actually get out earlier um is that march 10th date earlier than when we released staffing this year yes it is it's a it's a week it's a week earlier and and the one thing i i'm glad you asked me that question because there's one caveat to this calendar that i should have said that i didn't um this year it was march 17th so march 10th is a week a full week earlier than that the caveat is that 2015-16 is the first year of the biennium and unlike this year where we had relative certainty about our state funding we don't have certainty about our state funding for next year so this calendar that we've published here is predicated on the basis that we have some level of assurance about what our state funding is going to look like so that we can you know have have a a degree of comfort with the estimates because the margin of error is greater the first year in the biennium and we have at this point it's way too early to know how soon we're going to get clarity about numbers in terms of state appropriation so if we're able to if we're able to hit this timeline then yeah we will be out we'll be out earlier than we have that's great thank you and actually this year was the first year we did the budget in two parts where we did the staffing plan and released it so we could go out early and then continue to converse about the rest of the budget and could could have enough community process on the rest of the budget but still go early with staffing so that's that was a new thing this year and we're repeating it yeah um i'm glad you threw that caveat out there because i was going my question was going to be if this calendar then forces the legislature to have their decision made by march 10th so that we could that'd be good of course knowing that that wasn't the case um and then our past experience right is that even with the legislature that has been really proactive on state funding for schools it seems to sometimes get caught in the politics that happens down in salem so i just want to point out that i appreciate it i noticed that it was a week earlier and we are trying to push this earlier appreciate director curler's questions about you know how far are we missing is it is it within a similar range appreciate the idea that it can be compounding right you have positive news and then all of a sudden you get more positive news from other pieces and all of a sudden your magnitude increases um and i just um i appreciate i feel like since the time i've been on the board you've been coming back more often with so i think we heard a comment tonight this is the third or fourth time we've heard you come back and i think that's actually indicative of the responsiveness of how quickly we want to get this money into schools and out into staffing so we don't find ourselves behind and i have the fortune in my work to work with other school districts and um all this year one of the most common things i heard is gal darn ups you keep swooping up all the teachers so the fact that we were out earlier it made a big difference to the staff that we were able to hire point taken about now if we're out hiring now at this point we want obviously is hire as much as we can as early as we can but i appreciate the fiscal prudence that this has been being cautious realizing how quickly economies can turn and the fact that we are continuing to accelerate are getting the staffing to school so i'm appreciative of that you know did you have so i just um maybe you could just walk us through so if you were say to be less fiscally prudent or cautious and to say let's let's let's do just hypothetically no i'm just trying to think because if the concern is that that we should have allocated more staff because we should have known that it was going to be okay and that we could have afforded it and the money would be there but if that if one did that and then think the revenue didn't come in can you just walk us through what that what would we do in that situation what would that what would the implications of that be one one piece i think one piece to keep in mind and this is um i think this is unique to pps and to public agency as well is that we have you know we have when we when we appropriate the funds again against our budget we cannot overspend that appropriation by a dollar and we have to underspend so that kind of puts us in a situation and i would
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argue this is a responsible situation where we we tend to be fairly conservative on that so to answer the first part of your question we're gonna we're gonna err on the side because there is so much uncertainty we're trying to predict the future 16 18 months in advance right and we're going to usually err on the side of being cautious on that because we cannot go over but if we were and i'll let david add to this as well but if we were to to move ahead if we were to um to be too aggressive on that and and the important piece when it when it comes to the state school fund it's it's a set amount so even if the tax revenues turn out to be higher the state is going to come back and there's usually a bit of a lag the state's going to come back and adjust their piece of it down on the appropriation so it's going to bring us back to that same amount so if we're if we if we celebrate too soon and we think we have excess funds and we hire uh a number of teachers then it turns out the state makes the adjustment and we actually don't have those dollars that's that's a that's a level of thrash and confusion we would not want to subject the district our schools our principals to so we're going to we're going to be fairly cautious and avoid that situation at all costs thanks and so to that point you recommended taking 5 million and putting in the reserve for that adjustment yeah that's exactly right and so my question on that is um is that pretty slam dunk that that's the state's gonna do we know the formula well enough to know that that's what we're gonna do maybe we should just hold that thought until we get to that part of the presentation but unless you wanna just go ahead no can we hold that until we get we'll we'll speak to that but to to uh coach your atkins to your question you know what if we were fiscally not as prudent as we want to be um there's a i guess three things i'd say one is bear in mind we added 180 teachers in the budget this year so we added a lot already we in part did that by spending down reserves by 13.7 million dollars if we had done both of those things and added another some more teachers thinking that something was going to happen which then did not happen we have to find that money from somewhere because as ryan said we cannot we cannot you know appropriate more we have to stay within our appropriation so we would have to find the money from somewhere else we'd either cut it from somewhere else or we would draw down reserves even further below the three percent that below the below the 3.9 that we'd already gone down to or the three percent that we have to hold ourselves or at risk of the policy and then the other thing about spending down reserves and we'll talk more about this in a little bit too is you know it's okay the first year to use the reserves but the next year in order to maintain those services that money has to come from somewhere and you you can only spend reserves down once unless they rebuild you can't keep doing it because at some point there's nothing left so part of what we're balancing unless it's a one-time dispatcher unless it's a one-time thing but adding you know more teachers is not usually a one-time thing so that's part of the balance as well is when you're spending down reserves it's balancing the imperative to get things out into schools and at the same time addressing the issue and again we're going to talk about this a little bit more in a moment addressing the issue of what does that mean for the subsequent year and so on and so forth so i just i'll just one more thing before you move on i just really appreciate your bringing the historical perspective of what happened when we were in the cut cut cut years was that there yes there wasn't any front balance and i appreciate that we'll find out what that was but there was an amount that just went in to try to help rebuild the cuts so it just it just it just happened in that less visible way so anyway let's move on so thanks okay so i'll i'll start um i'll talk to you briefly about the state school fund and i spoke about this earlier that it is it's a combination of two different funding sources and one is the is the permanent rate of property taxes plus the state appropriation and to give you some context for you know how meaningful this is for the district this makes up about 75 percent of our general fund it was about 500 million dollars um and as i mentioned before the important thing is that it there's a balancing that goes on at the state to make sure that's continuing balance but the um but the subtlety is there's always a timing it's if we realize that tax revenues are going to be higher there's a bit of a timing in terms of when the state adjusts the other side of the equation the other piece that uh and to kind of uh pull us up to a little bit higher level when you think about the budget um we are um it's a multi-year timeline any given year uh spans a multi-year timeline the beginning pieces we're making assumptions and doing our best work to think about the both the revenue side and the expense uh the needs for expenses in the in the upcoming year we're making adjustments uh and uh reforecasting the budget the current year and then afterwards all the adjustments we're making as we work through the audit process and as the state works through any of the revenue adjustments so it could it could lead to if you look at the graphic on the screen
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if we just focus on the on the payment piece alone if you look at 2014 15 as an example we're receiving payments in some cases up to a full year after after that year is closed so you can imagine the the adjustments that that takes along the way so one of the things that we thought was also important as we think about um uh 2014 2015 is the um is the context for the budget and we'll go into this a little more detail but for the most part when we think about how how the budget is allocated uh across the state and how we think about it across pps it's it's multiple factors it's fairly complex but for the most part it's based upon a weighted student count and also for 2014 2015 we do we do our best work to estimate what those individual line items are but there are certain pieces in the budget that you know i can tell you today we'll move some will move it for us and some will move against us in the budget and there are a couple that we know about that we're keeping a close eye on and one as a particular example are the actual teacher salaries so we knew we were hiring a lot of new teachers this year we put before we know who the teachers are and what kind of salaries we're going to pay we put some assumptions in terms of what those are going to be as we start to hire those teachers we're able to start to understand and kind of plug in by name what those teacher salaries are that's going to create a little bit of a delta could be a plus could be a minus as we roll for the year other pieces that i think will probably resonate any kind of pers adjustments and purrs uncertainty and then any of the local option taxes as well on the revenue side so also if we think back on on 2014 2015 i think um uh you know we really made a really strong commitment to invest in the schools and the vast majority of our resources went to resources in the schools as they should uh we we did this in part by spending down our reserves and more specifically we spent on our reserves by 13.7 million dollars some of that was one-time spending so 4.7 million of that was was one-time one-time investments doesn't necessarily commit uh the district ongoing expenses but the balance of it um the nine million dollars that's an amount um as we think about 2015 2016 we either have to make sure that that nine million dollars makes its way into the budget so we can continue to provide that same level of services or we have to make some trade-offs to make sure that we can live within our means so basically what that what that means is money we have to find to keep doing the things we're doing as we move from this year to the next year this all these changes pulled our our reserves down to 3.9 3.9 percent or 19.6 million and as i think was referenced before uh board policy is three percent and then we have an aspirational goal of five percent so there are a couple things we think we think forward to the future 2015-2016 because i think it's easy to get to get caught up in the in the 12 months of the current fiscal year but those are all commitments that we're making for future years so when we think about 15 16 there are certain things that we already know are going to impact our budget that aren't in our current run rate one is the fact on the expense side that we would expect that uh inflation will continue at a three percent nice round assumption with three percent clip our budget is large enough that that translates into real dollars and that's 15 million dollars for our budget we also know that we need to fund a full day kindergarten which is another 11 million dollars and then the nine million dollars that i referenced on the pages before for ongoing services that's another nine million so if we just kind of think of it in broad brushstrokes we can pretty easily identify 35 million dollars um that we'll need uh for our 2015-2016 budget so that's that's kind of the expense side of the ledger um uh this is before i want to point out that this is before we add anything new so this is just to kind of maintain our current level of activity or current level of support and when we when we get to the point we start to talk about how we want to deploy that's not quite true with full kindergarten or is it yeah it is okay so full day kindergarten this next year is going to be the same it is this year so this year we're funding kindergarten half of it is funded in the general fund the other half is funded either by title one dollars or parents paying tuition we cannot next year we cannot charge tuition so our option our only option is to have full-day kindergarten our only realistic option is to have full-day kindergarten funded by the general fund so we have to find 11 million dollars that's going to cost us 11 million dollars we're going to need 11 million dollars of additional
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money over and above what we get this year in order to have that second half day more parents are going to have access to to full day kindergarten next year than they are this year i think currently 90 somewhere in the high 90 percent of families are in full they can gotten existing we'll see a slight increase but most of our families are either benefiting from title one or paying tuition okay so the other piece is as we think about um the ending fund balance and any kind of uh ongoing you'll see in our recommendations we're definitely recommending some um you know some ongoing investments but that that'll add to this that'll add to this potential in terms of what we need to fund in 2015 2016. just a point to keep in mind okay so that's that's clearly the expense side so on the revenue side and we we do it we would expect expects that we'd get um higher revenue and um uh you know legislature may and likely would increase funding we get about eight percent of the state school fund but at this point it's it's too early to tell exactly what that'll mean we continue to believe that our permanent rate property taxes will increase by about three percent uh the local option will increase as values go up as well and as compression unwinds and then lastly the local option renewal if it passes could add about four million dollars to our budget so there's some there is some relief from that point of view okay so at this point um we'll stop for any any questions about 2014 15 in context for 15 16. before we go into because the next piece we want to talk about is kind of the explanations of of uh kind of why the ending fund balance is larger than what we expected questions first mine's not a so much question as it is just a reminder to um to our families that um while there's a state mandate for full day kindergarten this next year um i think that many oregonians assume that means the state legislature will step up and fund that i mean i've heard from at least two legislative individuals who are working really hard to convince me that i should not assume that that is true and so i just want to let folks know that if if you think well wow they mandated of course they would step up um that it's really important that we hold them to um funding that mandate because it's really important for our families and even what i would consider funding a simple thing as as full day kindergarten isn't something we can assume from the legislature thank you for making that point good point and so i'm just i want to get a teeny bit more clarity on the kindergarten thing um so next year we will not be able to use title one any federal money to do full day kindergarten so the only way we could use title one money to pay for kindergarten would be if we did not offer full-day kindergarten in non-title one schools because you cannot pay for something with title one dollars if you're paying for it anywhere else with general fund dollars and we cannot charge tuition for tuition for kindergarten starting next year so we can't charge tuition and we can't use general fund money to pay in non-title one schools and title one dollars in title one schools so we only we have i believe two choices we pay for it all through the general fund or we only offer full day kindergarten in title one schools and pay for it using title one dollars and to all families in non-title one schools we say sorry full day kindergarten isn't available wearing another half day that's that's a fiscal option i'm not sure it's a practical political option or even an educational outcome that we would choose the good news is that the four and a half million dollars that was title one dollars that were being used for full day kindergarten is going to be shifted back to title one to support high poverty programs right um as we're developing the budget for 2015-16 for next year we have an opportunity to identify things that we can do in those title one schools with that money that has currently been servicing been supporting for the kindergarten and that's great that's a great opportunity that's what i was trying to get at so then the so of that 11 million um how much is title one and how much is tuition four four and a half million is title one and the remainder is tuition so from just from this budget discussion that uh because that's what i call a backfill maybe i'm being too loose about that but um for the budget discussion it's it's not 11. it's it would be uh 11 minus 4.5 essentially well in the general fund it's 11.
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because title one's not part of the general fund tail one is not a general fight i get that so in the general fund we've got to find that 11 million dollars and we have an opportunity to do some new stuff in the general fund but we can't take just so we're clear we can't take something that we're doing in the general fund this year and shift it to the title one budget and pay for it with title one dollars we can't do that i understand it would be it would be a logical sort of budget move but it's illegal right but if we backfill the general fund with 11 million we do have another four and a half in title one right absolutely right which is an exciting opportunity so that is exciting right yeah other comments or questions on this piece okay okay so let's move on to the next piece let's talk about the how we got here so um i want to talk a little about the the reconciliation for the for the ending fund balance so the largest piece um as you as you read in your board materials the largest piece of what drove our ending fund balance uh to be 18.4 million dollars higher than our budget was the fact that revenues came in higher than budget and more specifically uh we saw 9.5 million dollars of um you know i'll call it good news largely because of the higher property tax collections which were 9.7 million dollars as a next level detailer a couple things underneath this first of all we recognized about 5 million dollars of additional tax revenue and these are numbers that we share with the state the tax revenues come directly to the district we share that number with the state the state makes adjustments on the direct side so we shared that number with the state we expected that to be mostly offset by these lower uh state school fund payments in the current year that wasn't the case mostly because we also received an adjustment from 2012-13 to the tune of three million dollars plus that increased that amount so we expected that to wash out to zero it turned out to be a close to a positive five million dollar number so that was one of our surprises uh because so part of it was from an a um a priory adjustment for 2012 2013. you mean an adjustment from the state from the state that's correct the state's catching up and adjusting and changing things i mean we've had years where we've had to draw down reserves mid-year and make cuts you know because the state has changed so that's just the concept and in this case it turned out that it was it was in and you'll see you'll see the trend here every single thing that moved in the budget it moved in our favor contributed to this to this you know to hire them which is a good thing yeah this is a situation of you know giving us more resources um the other piece so so even beyond that point property taxes can property tax collections continue to be to be strong throughout the year so at this point we believe we have about a five million dollar uh this explains also another five million dollar of our of our of the increase over our ending fund balance on this on the second 5 million dollar piece we fully expect that the state will will make an adjustment and take that piece of it back the uncertainty is that we won't know that until spring of 2015. so you'll see when we get to our recommendations we're going to recommend that we put that in reserves also we hold that back to cover i don't have a question i just want to highlight that again the state has a mechanism that if we realize more revenue than anticipated in our tax revenue the state has a correcting factor that winds up correcting for that and readjusting that that's correct that's correct taking it back taking the money back it's correct to correct or in 1213 it sounds like it went it grew in favor that they want they also collected more and they continued to push it up but there is a self-correcting factor that we have some guests at but can you talk a little bit about sure how we how would we predict that and before and i'll i will let david answer that question the important piece too is that um it it sometimes spans over years which makes it more difficult you you hit on a really important part so just to quickly go back to the talk about the state school fund two sources of revenue local property permanent rate tax collections from every district and the state appropriation conceptually they go into one bucket state uses that formula mostly around weighted student numbers with some adjustments to allocate that out to the districts physically the property tax collections comes directly to the district and the state sends money to top up what you've received directly to the number that they've determined that you should get and they revise that estimate more times than you'd care to know starting before the year starts all the way through the year and their final reconciliation of that state school fund number for a particular year is about nine months after the year ends
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so they finally determine what the state school fund number for 2012-13 is in about april of 2014 by which time we're already into the next year so they make a final adjustment in the subsequent year and that that plays out in in how we try and estimate you know what's happening here and you know the allocation formula is complicated as well because it's it's based as i said primarily on weighted student numbers not on enrollment but on admw which is average daily membership so on any particular day we know we've got this many kids enrolled but the actual formula is based on how many kids attend school each day through the course of the year which is partly why it takes them a while to figure out what the actual calculation is because they have to have the attendance data for the whole year and then they have to reconcile that for the whole state if our student numbers are higher than we thought they were going to be that's a positive sign but not a guarantee of more money because if our student numbers go up and everybody else's go up if everybody else is go up more than hours go up as a percentage we're actually going to lose money against our forecast so to the to the question so i mean i get a bunch of complicated formulas based upon students and enrollment and taxes and taxes in the economy but nonetheless they are formulas and one can backcast and forecast so what i'm hearing you guys say is is your best forecast based upon these formulas and what is getting spit out of the econometric models is his work is we should put five million in reserve to cover an adjustment that we fully expect will happen from the state that's correct okay that's correct yes at this time yeah but i would also say that having been on the board for 12 years we have never before had the opportunity or the inclination to have a six percent reserve and given the urgency to increase student achievement i would question that so i appreciate that you as our financial peace people would like us to do that um that doesn't mean that we need to go along with it no no and that to me those that's a difference that's a question wanted to make sure that that but different that 5 million is a number that you're you're relatively confident today as we sit here based upon that we're going to get gained in the future yeah yeah why don't we get back to the let you get back to the presentation then we'll get we can have a full discussion about it and you ask and answer that question do you really believe that we're going to get dinged five million dollars or are you just saying it could happen i thought it was that i mean thank you for clarifying that are you saying it could it could happen and that puts us back in the situation of you know with with some confidence how much how how far extended do we want to get based on something that could happen and as a as you know knowing my role of being you know the conservative financial manager i have a hard time recommending that we we spend something we don't know about that and that makes sense yeah okay so let's talk about um a bit about the expenditure piece on the expenses also they were below budget and uh there are a couple main pieces that were pretty easy to excuse me to understand what this was the first piece is that health care and benefits were lower than budget by about 6.2 million dollars and this is this has been a pretty consistent trend across um across the country thankfully and across a lot there a lot of other entities and public companies um this is against a line item that's about 150 million dollars for us um the important piece of this is 2.1 million of that 6.2 uh was for teachers health care benefits and we actually offset that by higher higher salary so we saved 6.2 but of that 6.2 we saved 2.1 went back to the teachers in the form of higher salaries the other piece was that overall all of our other expenditures were lower by about four million and i say other because it's it's it's scattered across a variety of different categories across the district but just for context of four million dollars is a very large number but four million dollars in the context of our general fund of 500 million dollars is less than one percent so uh back to my under a comment of knowing that we can't overspend by a dime we're always going to err on the side of of underspending by a slight amount and you know being able to rein that number in to to less than one percent is a pretty good it's a pretty good outcome the other piece uh if if you recall um we had set aside a transfer we were concerned about our cash flow our ability to generate enough cash flow to make our first bond fund payment so uh in one of the amended budgets we
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transferred a million dollars to make this this bond payment it turned out we didn't need that we had the cash flow to generate that so that was another million dollars that we didn't need to to spend that contributed to an ending fund balance that was larger than what we budgeted so that's that leads you to the 18.4 million dollar for ending fund balance we had budgeted a difference the ending funding ending fund balance doesn't always tie as non-intuitive as it sounds to the beginning fund balance so we had budgeted that there would be a delta between the two of 1.6 million so that leads us to a beginning fund balance of 16.8 good so just quickly on um school staffing update as i think you all know we include in the allocation for school staffing a number of positions we call it the set-aside which is a number of positions that are not allocated specifically to schools they're held centrally and then allocated um on a case-by-case basis this year there was a total of 37 fte in that set-aside pool used for core program support to respond to higher student enrollment in very specific schools for high school scheduling support and for teacher student loads as of september 5th all 37 fte have been allocated out two to kindergarten 18 to k-8s 13 to high schools and four other situations most of which had to do with multiple locations where we had an extra administrator or some other miscellaneous things so we are in a position where you know we believe that with none left and continuing to to see further examples of these kind of things we know that we need more of these can i ask a quick question um we had a million dollars set aside in the teacher administrative work group is that part of the 37 or so separate and have they been allocated that was a million dollars is equivalent to about 10 10 or 11 teachers it was a million dollars it's separate it has not been used yet at all no because they're developing the process by which um problems get identified and it will be after we've actually gone through this process and there'll be more individual situations that they're then appealing to the workload committee to resolve but they've also been tasked with identifying things that actually are systemic that we need to come up with bigger solutions to but they've just developed the process by which somebody would identify it and we want to do this before we start doing that yeah it's good that's good okay but and we'll talk more about about the um about the resource more we'd like to invest but as we as we mentioned as well we thought that the first recommendation is to build our reserves and our uncommitted contingency um to prepare for the uncertainty we talked about for 2015 2016. so uh that gets us to a target of five percent and just the math would put our reserves at 25.6 million dollars we'd also recommend that we hold back these the funds the five million dollar funds that we were talking about um to cover the possible year-end adjustment that we'd put that in reserves as well and it's about five million dollars per point of uh contingency for us so that would bring our contingency up to six percent and put 30.6 million dollars in our reserves so that leaves us with a balance of 5.8 million dollars which is the piece that we we would recommend um go to ongoing and one-time investments so first of all um just to paint the the picture on the on the process our senior directors are busy working with the principals to identify and prioritize different needs across our schools so that's been really a focus for us at this point and it's it's early in the process um but at this point uh we would think that about eight to nine ftes would be targeted at uh k through eight and the remainder would go to the high schools and mainly this would help the high schools respond to a couple of different needs first would be the higher student enrollment the second would be students scheduling needs and the third would be to make sure that we could balance teacher student loads so the caveat here is today uh today literally was the second physical count so our data is new and fresh we'll have more details in the next next few days to come and pulling so uh as a result if i pull it back up to the 5.8 million dollars at the top of this page um next week when we have the board meeting there's a there's a small chance that when we talk about balancing between uh 2 million for fte and 3.8 for the three priorities that there may be some small um adjustments between those two the the total amount will still be 5.8 but it could be 2.1 versus 3.7 or something like that just to kind of set the set the context because we're still working through that but the important piece is really that the the first action the first priority is more ftes to schools um and the second piece is to uh focus on the three
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priorities that were identified in may so this is after the budget was adopted um to the tune of about 3.8 million dollars and those three are to make sure that we're ensuring that all students are reading a benchmark by the end of third grade that we're able to improve high school graduation and completion rates and then lastly that we're able to uh make steps towards eliminating disproportionality and out-of-school discipline between white students and students of color and then to reducing overall out-of-school discipline by 50 and finally um just wanted to clarify in the context of the budget calendar i mentioned that in november we would be coming with an additional budget update for the current school year there will be additional information available november through january we'll be bringing a budget amendment for you in january 2015 by then we will have completed our analysis of school staffing costs we'll have better knowledge about uh healthcare renewal particularly for teachers we'll have better knowledge about property taxes and the local option renewal will be close to a final audit outcome and generally a better understanding so at that point it's possible that we will be able to identify additional resources our focus now in these recommendations is on dollars that directly affect student outcomes and it you know it's possible that we will have the ability to to make other recommendations i know for example mr porter talked about kellogg and capital needs and things like that um it's our belief that that they're you know we're hopeful that there'll be an opportunity in the late fall early winter when we look at these numbers to identify some additional resources that may or may not be appropriately diverted but appropriately applied to capital needs and infrastructure but collectively we felt that you know this time of the year it's really important to focus additional dollars to the extent that we feel comfortable um spending additional money that we focus those on uh things that directly affect students as i said okay then just just to wrap up you know our our recommendations i'll just kind of roll through these these quickly um you know so the the the questions are do you agree with the recommendation to increase uncommitted contingency to five percent of total expenditures to strengthen the district's overall financial position and provide additional resources to offset the uncertainty for fiscal year 2015 2016 and given the need to maintain current service levels the uncertainty of funding full-day kindergarten in the general fund and the unknown state appropriation for the coming biennium the second question is do you agree with the recommendation to increase uh reserves and uncommitted contingency by another one percent or five million dollars to cover the eventuality that these funds might be a reduction in our state school fund receipts when the fiscal year 2013-14 prior year adjustment is calculated the third is do you support the idea of increasing school staffing set-aside allocation by about two million dollars and the fourth is do you support the additional allocation of about 3.8 million dollars for third grade reading high school graduation and reduction of disproportionate discipline so i would suggest that we ask clarifying questions first and then what did we do before we um adjourn tonight i want to make sure we get a sense of where folks stand on this and we'll be sure to reach out to the folks who weren't able to then board members who weren't able to be here tonight to have them win because we'll be voting on a resolution next week do you want to go through what we would be voting on next week we wouldn't be necessarily specifically just go through a level of specificity of what we'd do so next the resolution would actually um direct us to go ahead and allocate immediately the school the resources for school staffing but it you would direct me to go back and ask for specific budgets on the three priorities so that i would go back and ask staff who are the leads on those to say here are the specific things so we'd still have more conversation about what that would be and people have um been asked already to say what are things that are could be implemented immediately and to identify what the just make a distinction between what would be ongoing and what would be one-time costs but really specifically since these were the three priorities that we committed to in may in the evaluation what are things that could we believe would move and get significant movement if we made those investments now so that's what people have been tasked with so that's the next meeting so clarifying questions before we move into sharing staff feedback on where we're at so um carol this is a question in terms of the 2 million that number just didn't come out of the air no we're we've been so like we're in the process with of senior directors and principals really working on um final levels of what do you need because you've got increased numbers because you've got kids who still need classes that we're we're not quite there yet or
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kindergarten being the other big one that we're still um but it's really getting ourselves fully staffed and it is we're down to the final part of that so these are based on real numbers but again last physical account was today so we will know something more specific even by tomorrow that we'll have numbers where that number could go up to saying as ryan just said 2. you know 2.1 2.2 million that we need to go there and we reduce the three amount we put to the three priorities and in terms of um the high schools does this cover um fully staffed high schools for kids who want to take a pulse so what we've been doing with high schools is the same thing we've been talking about is doing the um saying kids should be able to take eight classes in their high schools or have the parent permission sign saying that they're choosing to do something other than that um and so the big things that the high schools are balancing are both student load the eight classes and the additional numbers so those are the factors in high school that are being balanced at this point and usually one of those would be the relief valve for the other we don't have a relief valve our relief valve is additional investment so that's where we're coming back and looking to do all of those so that fully in in your view fully funds the high school that's what we believe we're doing yeah other questions so is there a reason on the recommendation that it doesn't say add 5.8 million dollars for school staffing to include the three priorities because the three priorities could be things other than it could be a variety of things so for instance um where we've got where we're adding capacity to do restorative justice in a number of schools that are put the pilots on our discipline goal we could say we're going to double the number of pilots but that's actually work with resolutions northwest to do capacity building in the school so it's not directly school staffing it could be that it's an investment in early literacy textbooks it could be that it's an investment in a professional development opportunity we've had a suggestion that we're you know we build the capacity to address dyslexia we had some testimony last um last board meeting that that's a strategy we could say here's the core of people that we want to send to go get this particular professional so the 3.8 million it will all be directed specifically at those three strategies and into schools but it will be um it could be a variety of other things so or it could be you know literacy specialists or librarians or i mean it could be a number of different things so it could be school staff or it could be supports yeah and just for clarifying questions i mean so we're in in the budget we we understand that um so let's just take these three things third grade meeting and the high schools uh and the disproportionate discipline those were goals going into the budget they were goals that we were we had going into the budget yeah and we've we've funded some things yeah above you know we've pr we've already prioritized just to be clear on these things um funding some things for those yes yeah okay yeah so for instance the third grade one we've had a number of camp uh campaign out we've had elements of it or we've done pilots that again this could give us the capacity to like both the third grade reading we've got pilot sites that were accelerating that we could you know add more uh and the disproportionate discipline and then we had strategies around the high school graduation and completion rate goal that theoretically we can either accelerate those strategies do them in more sites so if we don't spend all 5.8 we'll just go back to the reserves if we don't spend all this money if we did not commit it it would go into reserves right or identified other other commitments that the board was interested in i mean you heard some like we could do kellogg or i mean there's numbers think the admin table or the schoolwide support table we've got we actually identified during the last budget cycle um a list of things that did not make it into the budget but were our list of priorities that we would come back and revisit also so like that's and it's a significant list so i think an important piece here is that you were talking about things that were ready to go that already right not starting brand new initiatives or correct yeah i had a question just could you um just refresh us around i'm very concerned about purrs and the uncertainty around um the judgment on that and what can you talk a little bit about that talking to one particular legislator who said
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you know reminded us to be very cautious about this and that's been a concern okay so not satisfied with the complexity of state school fund you now want to explore first well not to go down the full explanation but just to give us a level of the what the risks we're facing if you have any sense of that and what the remedy might be sure so the most significant risk long term with pers medium term with pers is that the reforms that the legislature passed a year or so ago which which resulted in lower increases than we would otherwise have got rates still went up but not as much as they would have done those changes are being challenged in the courts right if the courts find if those changes get thrown out then that will put upward pressure significant upward pressure on purse rates slightly mitigating that risk is the question of what happens with investment returns and and fortunately those have been reasonably robust the last couple of years but the risk is um that yeah the reforms get get overturned and we're looking at sizeable increases in pers rates um and i can't remember if that's starting in 1516 or 1617 but it's it's it's soon but you know again at this point we don't know what the timeline is on that but that is a risk right and that just seemed to me to be another piece that we need to be mindful of and plan ahead for knowing that we have so many different um things we also want to invest in can i ask a follow-up to that question do you remember off the top of your head what savings we realized by those changes i don't remember the dollar amount but it was it was big money um that's a complex sophisticated financial term it was it was it was like 8 12 million i mean it was it was a lot of money i mean it wasn't it wasn't half a million or a couple hundred thousand it was millions of dollars a year because our the pers rate is as a percentage of payroll and you know if you've if you're if you've got 200 300 million dollars of salaries one percent of that is two or three million dollars so the purse rate goes up three percentage points now you're talking serious money we should also remember that this is not a portland public school issue this is a issue that's going to impact every single district state every city every county every municipality police i mean it's going to impact everybody and i mean we're all toast so i'm i'm not sure that we right you know we should spend too much time writing about it because there's going to have to be another solution that comes to the forefront so i'll yeah but we also don't want to just i know yeah yeah you're right it's a balance um in terms of the recommendation uh the in in terms of of going from 3.9 to 5 contingency six percent no what no there's there's two there's two different ones there's two different players start with that one and uh the risk factors being kindergarten and um funding ahead of us from the new buying we correct me if i'm wrong the question is those are risk factors we were well aware of when we adopted a budget at 3.9 uh contingency now and so at that point we were we're okay with that the staff was okay with that um now that we have more money same risk factors um but you're suggesting that we put more money in the reserve to cover those same risk factors that we already thought 3.9 was okay to cover so two things one was the recommendation to spend down the reserves was a balanced one from a financial point of view uh i think i was very clear in presentations to the board that there was a risk involved in doing this and so you know would comfortable recommending that but recognize that there was a risk it's not the same now because we're actually recommending spending another 5.8 million dollars so that slide where we showed 35 million dollars if you do what we are recommending here that number is now 40.8 million dollars because we've got 5.8 million now some of that could be
01h 25m 00s
one-time money right let's say that 1.8 of it is one-time money and four million is ongoing that number's now 39 million dollars so we're digging the whole deeper every dollar every million dollars that you don't put in reserves and you spend with an ongoing commitment to need to fund it next year makes this number bigger and bigger and that risk equation gets more or more out of balance so it's a balance so we are we're recommending a combination of things we're recommending i mean it's almost three parts it's one part goes into reserves to help deal with all of this uncertainty one part gets spent uh on additional programs services and teachers now and then the third part is the most anomalous because it is that uncertainty factor about you know how much of that additional tax revenue could we see disappear you know later in the year and and you know i want to be absolutely clear that i'm i'm you know completely transparent your question director curl was do we think it's likely do we expect all of it to get pulled out we're not saying at this point we expect all of it that is possible and so until we have better clarity about it we're not comfortable recognizing yourself i don't i don't have the best yet i'm not i'm not prepared it's it's that would be nice to be prepared for that because it's too much it's too uncertain there's too many things that we do not know about because it's not just about portland public schools numbers it's about it's about numbers from all across the state we had a conversation with ode to to ask them you know what's the range of possibility and they're certainly not prepared to go on the record with us about what the range of possibility is it's it's it's possible it could be all of it it's possible it could be substantially less but at this point i i'm i would i feel it would be irresponsible of me to speculate on how much that is given everything else that we're doing here i mean the other thing too is i wasn't hearing that the full day k you're just saying this is what we anticipate that we know is going to be happening in 2015-16 the reserves is another piece so it's not that they're saying oh now we suddenly need to go to reserves to pay for full decay they're saying that knowing that we have this coming up and if we're going to talk about spending more from from this ending fund balance we just need to be aware that there's this coming and we'll add to this ongoing that was all that's that's what i heard essentially what this means this right here means that if the state appropriation is less than 7.25 billion we don't get enough money from the state to maintain current service level that's translating this 35 into the big state number and and we're now going beyond this if if you agree with the recommendations that the superintendent has made because we're talking about spending almost another 6 million so the concern i had when i saw this proposal this recommendation is i'm not seeing the urgency around student achievement what we need to be doing right now i mean we have a 67 graduation rate um we're barely meeting minimal instructional hours at our high schools we just got reports from the oregonian and on state you know results where achievement is basically stagnant not just in portland public schools but across the state and i guess i want to see more urgency here when i think about our reserves when i want to have the highest reserve when it looks like the economy is tanking or it looks like you know tax revenues are going to tumble for whatever reason there's some huge big things that are you know monstrously scary out there that we really need to plan for and as far as i'm concerned we're in as good a shape as we've been in the last decade going into the next legislative session the economy has begun i mean the economy is rebounding the legislature is moving toward reinvesting more in k-12 education um i mean there's a lot of things that are going our way aren't our enrollment is up that always helps with our uh budget so um as i look at it if if things were going in the complete opposite direction i would say yeah you know what we need to put some more money in our reserves and we need to be ready but i'm not i don't think that that's what's happening right now and i would be disinclined to to look at six percent i'm even disinclined to look at five percent five percent is an aspirational goal and again it's to prepare for you know big big difficult hard times coming which doesn't seem
01h 30m 00s
to be the case at this point in time um so i'm open to putting a little bit more in the reserves if we have some concerns that are bigger than what we had a couple of months ago when we approved the budget but outside of that i'd like us to put the money out into into our schools and to try to have an impact on student achievement the one thing that we that we talked about during the budget cycle as a concern is um and i'll add to this here is uh for example our high school administrating staffing tables the schoolwide support table the support tables um so we have uh you know last year this year we added 180 new teachers um and that and we actually hired more like 500 new teachers when you take into consideration retirements and stuff the year before or i don't know if it was the year before that we had about 50 teachers at the elementary level related to the arts tax if we're successful in passing our school levy renewing it early we're going to be looking at adding another 45 teachers next year what i'm concerned about is whether or not we're giving our principals the support they need to be instructional leaders in their schools and to be doing you know we just had this huge um presentation last week on teacher evaluations and you know how how well our teacher evaluation work group is going and what we're trying to accomplish but the fact of the matter is if the teacher if our principals don't have enough administrative support in the buildings to do their jobs they're not going to be in the classrooms being instructional leaders and so my biggest priority and i brought it up during the budget cycle and we decided that we didn't have the funds to do that but we also sort of indicated that if funds became available that would be one of the first places we'd look so i would really like us to have that conversation first and foremost and i think the biggest concern is in our comprehensive high schools where you have physicians and somebody mentioned this a little bit earlier in terms of i think it might have been scott i'm not sure in terms of our public testimony you know in terms of a career coordinator we have a career coordinator you know serving 500 you know 700 kids at one school and a career coordinator you know serving 1600 in another school that doesn't make sense um you have things like you know a half-time bookkeeper in a school or accountant somebody referred to it as an accountant at one school you know for 700 kids and another school 1600 the same level of support study hall monitor monitors i.t staff support i don't know what the situation is on campus monitors i couldn't pull that out of the budget because i think it was pulled into a different table you know there's been some suggestions that we should be looking at attendance monitors in our high schools to really you know help go out and do home visits and bring kids back um we've talked about social worker care team kind of personnel so i guess when i look at what our needs are um i think they're they're pretty strong and that would be an area um i'm sorry can i i just want to make sure good we're back to the side so i just want to make sure since we're about 10 minutes over our time could you so you i just want to make sure we're clear so you aren't uh in agreement with increasing to five percent definitely not the six percent and i'm hearing on the school staffing the high school support table as you're where you'd want to see the money go or is that three points you would spend more yeah i mean we're basically talking about increasing reserves by about 10 million dollars and if you look at that in teaching positions it's about 100 positions if you look at it in terms of classified positions you could be talking about 200 positions obviously that is we're not talking about those numbers because we can't sustain those i mean anytime you're adding positions we got to be able to afford those year after year after year but i am suggesting that if we want our teachers to perform at optimum level they need to have instructional leaders in their school who can actually help them and be there to support them so i'm suggesting that we have other places that we could look at spending money other than i'd like for you to come back and maybe talk to us about some of these other areas you talked about some of the areas in the budget we didn't get to that we wished we would have gotten to i'd like to have that as part of the conversation so we can decide do we want to do those or do we want to add 10 million dollars to the resources so i think there's enough urgency that we need to have that conversation okay but in terms of the third bullet to add two million year in agreement with that if we need two million dollars for uh current teaching staff yes of course and then the 3.8 are you still one in here around the three priorities or more the larger all all other other parties as well or i think the investing in the three priorities makes sense i'd like to have a little bit more
01h 35m 00s
information on what you're talking about um but um i'm talking about the 10 million dollars that we're talking about putting into reserves right now when we passed a budget a couple of months ago where we felt relatively comfortable 3.9 again i'm comfortable increasing the reserves a little bit if we for some reason feel that that's important right now but i would like to see us figuring out how to have an impact on what's happening in our buildings okay so can i do what i'm taking away from this so and one of the things that we'd identified during the budget process is the staffing team this year was going to tackle the schoolwide support table um and because this year um we actually had put said all the staff you get goes to teaching right and so and which was great but you don't get to pull it off to meet other needs um and but that we are going to look at and some of that's become visible in staffing this year okay so what i'm taking away is that you would like a plan that spends more of this these dollars now reduces the outward holding in reserve i don't know what how far of a spending plan that you'd like to see but you'd like to see more of a spending plan that includes looking at the schoolwide support tables now so accelerate that probably these same two things but really lean in on the put it into schools now and we can come back with a plan that does that's the overall budget in terms of what were the things that we would have done so there's things like some one-time expenses like we can do them textbook adoptions or technology purchases in all these new teachers do they have technology to support their work i have no idea but those would be more of one time expenses so i'd love to get a little bit more information on that so we're not just deciding let's put 10 million in reserve we're deciding we're going to put 10 million instead of this okay if you all have an interest in that and seeing us spend more we can bring back both what were the priorities coming out of the last budget process and um exactly so thank you let's go let's hear from everyone quickly and then we'll also be sure to pull those who weren't here so great so i'll jump in um i'm not too far off from what director regan is suggesting that i'm actually really fiscally conservative and if i think it was as easy as saying that if we were headed for an economy slump let's just put more money away if it was that easy we would have figured that out last time and unfortunately the economy and the predictions don't work that way um that being said i do think that um i'd be willing to air a little bit more on the less cautious side to say i'm more interested in finding ways to spend rather than go to six percent um i'm comfortable with staying at five percent that i think it's never easy to hold money back and put in reserves but i think that's been our fiscal prudence is that we've been able to slowly build that back i could also probably be as low as four and a half percent again we don't have to do it all in one fell swoop we can build this back we know that our schools are still not back to whole and so to your point director reagan and two years superintendent smith that i would love to see what what our other next priorities were in that list to begin to do that i do remember a discussion about staffing table i also know that there are some elementary schools that still feel really full and i know that um and that being said i appreciate what i think i hear our board saying is we also really intentionally in the adoption of the current year's budget um did not just push it out all of the funding back out to fte generally just to generally lower it by point something that we wanted to make strategic investments and so i really would like to see as you begin to build that planner as we look back what are the strategic investments that we can really move the dial forward especially our underserved whether that's special special education whether that's and i know that's tricky because there are federal dollars with that it does maintenance of effort there are a lot of things there but special education um are obviously our students of color the disproportionality rate we have an opportunity to actually change the trajectory for those students and i would love for us to find a way or to look what our options are so that's where i'm right so that gets you what you need direct directions i think that's great thanks so other folks yeah i agree with what's being said i'd like to see some more money getting spent just because i'm in the building and i see that we do need more support staff especially like in the book room we need people there and just like having new textbooks like if we use do one time things that just makes such a big improvement in a class like a class gets so greatly improved by just having that textbook and i think there's a lot of investments that we could make without like having them be super in the future just like spending that once but it really does make a big difference for every student um so i i was comfortable at 3.9
01h 40m 00s
uh contingency when we all passed the budget and we all passed that budget um and i i actually was willing to i thought three is what the policy was and i think maybe going down to three was appropriate so i don't see any reason um to change that so personally that's where i'm that's where i'm at i think that when you do get a infusion like this that it's probably prudent to really review the one-time expenditure possibilities um and because it's it's not money that you know it's money we didn't anticipate we anticipated ongoing expenditures now we have we we have such a backlog of one-time expenditures that we can do we should take a hard look uh to look at that and you know david porter talked about a five-year plan for immersion i mean that would be great to have a five-year plan what's our five-year plan for it what's you know we need to really on on be we need to plan ahead and as we make those plans then um decisions like this become easier because we have a roadmap so yeah so that's where my where my head's at it's been a great presentation i appreciate that and and by the way i mean i think you know getting one i think one percent is a very reasonable margin error on it so i but i share i share bobby's um and i think we all do it but uh but then we gotta put put our our dollars where our mouth is i mean there there is an urgency we're nowhere near we where we need to be um and uh it's now is not the time to be increasing our contingencies great so i think i come down a little more in the middle ground here i do feel that would be very prudent to increase our reserves um i'm not sure about the six percent i think i'm more where greg was in the 4.5 to 5 um i feel there are enough uncertainties and given past performance of some of our partners and other entities that we're dealing with and lots of uncertainties out there i would love to see the legislature continue to expand investment in k-12 and fully fund full-day k we haven't talked about the pe requirements yet you know i i i remain cautious and concerned so i do feel that we need to increase our reserves using this um as and i i think tom's point is a really well taken one in terms of the one-time piece give i mean that there are so many needs in every building at lower grades we've paid a lot of attention to high schools it was much needed but lower grades also need a lot of attention every level does so given that we're just about to start that new cycle or go right into the next year's budget i'm a little concerned about us pausing and sort of reopening last year's budget for a whole i think we need to i like the idea of finding where there could be some i mean in addition to getting out the fte that we need to for the most urgent issues in the schools if you have some really specific here's an expansion of a priority where we feel like you know adding more sites to a proven program is something that's really going to be strategically important that would be great to hear but i like the idea given that we have had years and years of not enough um you know textbooks and technology and everything that's that's the truth pardon not enough anything but given i'm concerned about us saying let's let's fund this and staff that and then knowing that it's going to go into ongoing commitments and then we would have to pull those back again if we had to um if if things didn't work out as well as we thought so yes absolutely the urgency but i really want to i'm hoping we can find sort of a cautious middle ground here um would be my would be my input i think you've given good what you just have done we can build some options at different thresholds where you can weigh the reserve and one time and ongoing commitments because it's a balance of all of those that right and we've got material from our budgeting process that gives us things to bring back to you right and then we'll work with staff to for um on the board members who aren't able to be here tonight um that of course they've gotten this information that we can work with and i think we can
01h 45m 00s
still separate here or the fte we want to be able to release and authorize next at the board meeting and here are the things that you still want to weigh as you know you want to have field have more discussion about so like two parts we want to be able to release the fte immediately so yeah right okay we all agree on that yeah just jump in um i just want to um somebody mentioned the the levy that's that's coming up and i don't know if folks have noticed but in the last two or three years between the legislature and the decisions the board's been making there's been a momentum building in the positive direction and i guess i just want to highlight that i one i was surprised that our local media described the 16.8 as a windfall that's not how i would have phrased it but then i remind myself that they have a political agenda um it's a conservative paper um they're looking for a tax break that's what their editorial was for and so it made sense as to me why the headline writers at least described it that way but i also just want to encourage folks to not be afraid to ride this momentum to actually begin to invest i think families have been here for a long time waiting for this moment and i understand the trepidation the caution that is this going to be exactly what we want and i think what i'm hearing from my colleagues and i'm appreciative of that is that we want to actually invest it as quickly as we can in schools in smart and strategic ways not in the ways it's always been done but in a way that continues to build a momentum so that we can break the stagnation so that we don't find ourselves that we continue to outperform the state and that we raise that graduation rate so i just want to put that in context that we have an opportunity to lean in and really make a difference for a whole new generation of kids who are in our schools today and tomorrow and i wanted to put a little plug in on a one-time expense that maybe wasn't a big part of the conversation last year because i don't know that we were ready for it last year which has to do with arts funding so in the last budget we put a fair amount of money into pe and into sports in particular and it was just such an exciting lift and then we added to that by um basically completing all of our turf fields and tracks um so the thing that i want to talk about is the fact that we are we have an artstosa we are attempting to build a k-12 arts continuum curriculum um the city of portland whether you love it or hate it we have an arts text that is supporting art teachers at the k5 level and the question is then what and one of the areas that i think that we we know supports our athletic program and we know supports school spirit is banned and one of the things that happens when you try to start a band program is you have a huge expense because of the instruments um so it would be wonderful to try to figure out slowly but surely how we start a band program starting in middle school or sixth grade for the k-8s and at least kids getting some basic understanding of band um and at the high school level really expand that program so i'm not sure that that would have hit and we also just know all of the reasons why music supports math education and you know all of those wonderful relationships so it wasn't in there i haven't we haven't gotten a any any information of late from our artstosa and what the arts toast is working on in terms of the k-12 curriculum but i just want to put that out there as if you're talking about something that would light up our community i think that could be something that would be really exciting as a former music teacher anyway i mean i i appreciate you bringing it up um because i do think that it's one of those things that we have pockets and so if somebody has it in elementary they go to a middle school where then they don't have a program or it switches to choir it switches to band um or then it goes to high school and so i get really excited about that and at the same time i want to make sure that our strategic investments might again are are moving student achievement and i do think music is one of those and so i'd be interested in that um but i do admit that there's a little bit of selfish bias but selfish hopefully in the service of kids well and there are i mean again there are so many needs there are so many worthy ways we can invest i know i know so with that we're going to cut that off for now on ongoing discussion so thank you staff so much for all your hard work i really appreciate it um and i think we're done for this evening the next meeting of the board will be held on tuesday september 23rd this meeting is adjourned

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)

2014-09-16 PPS School Board Work Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Work Session - September 16, 2014

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