2014-09-23 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2014-09-23
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

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

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there we are okay good evening everyone this formal meeting of the board of education for september 23 2014 is called to order i'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers any item that we voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our pps tv services website tonight we have the honor of honoring our some of our outstanding partners i'd like to invite lolenzo poe the chief equity officer to the staff table thank you madam co-chair board member smith lolinda po chief equity officer tonight is our annual partner recognition opportunity where we get to have the opportunity to recognize one of our outstanding partners as you know the district is blessed to have numbers of partners and volunteers who give so much time energy resources both human and financial to the district in support of our instructional mission tonight we will recognize one such partner and with that let me turn it over to superintendent smith who will introduce and say a few words about our partners who we are recognizing this evening superintendent smith thanks alenzo so as many of you know last year we held our first city-wide children's book harvest and it was totally awesome the book harvest is one of the key strategies in our third grade reading priority so ensuring that all of our students read at grade level by the time they exit third grade the book harvest is about improving access to books for all of our students and for three weeks in november last year folks donated books at 29 portland public schools where ptas held drives and pta is one of one of our key partners in actually organizing the drives at a school level new seasons market stores and river market credit union served as drop up drop off sites iron mountain donated boxes and us bank provided hundreds of volunteers to clean the books we also had a number of our employees and students go be part of the book cleaning the book harvest surpassed the goal of 25 000 books and brought in nearly 30 000 books and the children's book bank stored all those books and organized the cleaning and the distribution so just before school let out last year every student at our five pilot schools in our third grade reading initiative chose eight books and they got to select the books that they wanted because part of it was really getting to have students see things that were things they were really interested in and getting to pick the books not just have a bad backpack that was pre-sorted for them but they got to go through the selection and those and start to build their own home library so we're going to show you a little video from the book drive last year my name is sammy figueroa and this is our school at james john elementary school today it's been fun because we got free books and i can give most of them to my brother now i have a this one and this is for my brother i get books from our brother like whenever there's something free i get it for my brother and then if i if there's anything else i want to get my brother into knowing all about the president so i give him these books too the only reason i get this one is because i like dogs a lot and uh just it had dogs in it so i got this one because i really like dogs uh preschool i've been really good since i was four i started at three reading and i became really good and i've been actually reading more books not like chapter books like these but i've been reading like bigger books um so tonight and um before we gear up for this year's book harvest which we are going to do again this year we wanted to do a special moment of appreciation for the children's book bank and we have a plaque and we're going to ask danny smoke the executive director of the children's book bank and members of the board and come on up but we're going to ask you before we keep going come on and have a seat because you'll get to say a few words you will but we'll then come up and do a photo with you and the plaque says presented to the children's book bank in recognition and appreciation of your contributions to the students and staff of portland public schools um and a plaque to take home i will just say this has been a really just awesome partnership i was really moving to go and see the books being cleaned and see how many people were engaged and actually having that
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happen and sorting them so that you really had interest and chapter books and the kind of books that students were going to be drawn to it was really it was wonderful and kids were so excited to get them to do that so when we do that i'm going to let danny say a few words but then we're going to ask if any of our partners from portland council pta new seasons river mark iron mountain or u.s bank when we do our photo will you come on up with us and pose for the photo with us because this has been an all hands on deck kind of partnership and we're really excited to launch it again this year so if you'd like to say a few words we'd love that too thank you so first i just want to say thank you to all of the schools and other community partners who gathered books because we wouldn't have done that done it without all of our all of those book gatherers and that was you know really led by the leadership of superintendent smith and identifying and calling out that third grade reading is so important and that it's a challenge that the whole community can get behind and we're just happy to be part of rallying the forces on the streets to solve this one little piece of the puzzle which is just access to books so thank you for your partnership thank you for raising awareness about our organization through this and we look forward to exceeding uh 30 thousand bucks this year and and also really appreciate having the space over at marshall high school where we can store and bring our bring our partners to clean the books so thank you very much and we'll do it again this year thank you i will say we heard lots of we heard lots of stories this engages families across the entire district because families get engaged with their kids at figuring out what books they're ready to hand on to someone else and so like i just heard great stories throughout the book drive of what was going on at home as people were figuring out what ones they were ready to donate so i'm looking forward to similar excitement this year so come on up and let's do a photography come on up really great hey bobby we need to take it what's that well thank you again to all of you who participated in the book drive and it's wonderful for the wonderful video to start off the meeting that was great um so next on our agenda is the superintendent's report superintendent smith would you like to go ahead and present your report i would so um it's been a really uplifting start to the school year and i shared some of what my first week was which was just a blast being out in schools and feeling the enthusiasm as the school year
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started one of the things was we that we got to do was open the clarendon regional early learning academy and our partners director regan and i and a three-year-old named eva monk joined in the bright orange ribbon cutting on september 10th in front of the remodeled clarendon school ushering in a new era in pre-k education in pps the new early learning academy brings together head start several culturally specific preschool programs and resources for parents the holistic approach to providing a strong start to school for children will be contributing to all of our goals so we really believe in getting a strong start being the key to every one of our individual students having a successful career in portland public schools the academy will serve us children ages 15 months to five years and their families there are 110 students who are currently enrolled at clarendon with only 14 slots left and i'm going to say the neighborhood came out in droves for this opening and we're are totally excited just to see what's happening in the school that's now been closed for seven years so they were so excited just to see the kind of what will be going on there and just having it open again pbs intends to open similar academies across the district over time i want to thank our outstanding partners in this effort albina early head start oregon community foundation the indian education program of pro-public schools neighborhood house and pbs teen parent program it's a really exciting moment for our families our kids and our community so the next photo you'll see um i is just a recognition of our roosevelt students and the new roosevelt principal philly parishtech and the multnomah county youth commission who organized a really powerful opportunity for students to share their perspectives and feelings after an incident involving police and a roosevelt student earlier this month that was circulated widely on social media so roosevelt students contacted the multnomah youth commission after the incident with the police and students initially wanted to organize a protest downtown but collaborated with the commission and decided instead to hold a listening circle and to invite mayor charlie hales and police commissioner mike reese who's also a roosevelt alumni both assistant superintendent antonio lopez and myself attended so that we could hear students perspectives and charlene williams was a chief organizer supporting students putting this together students spoke really powerfully about their experiences with police they respect expressed respect but also challenges and i will say that students conducted themselves incredibly well we had one outside in person who came and started that was shockingly not not respectful and students were quick to clarify that this was not a member of their student community and that they were conducting themselves with respect which was actually very impressive they spoke both about understanding the difficulty of the jobs that the police do but also just shared stories of walking home from athletic practice and being stopped by police and just the the challenge of of that experience and really wanting the police chief and the mayor to understand that and really take that into account as they're doing training for officers we had a number of officers that came to the event both our sros and police officers and i it was a i was i was impressed with the students i was impressed with the multnomah county youth commission and want to thank them for helping organize it and just say rough riders you did a great job at just representing and also sharing and telling your truth so thank you and thank you charlene for that so again this year we did the reconnect youth uh campaign which part of what this is we had 50 volunteers out on the streets about two weeks ago to invite students who've left school to return and this is like a door knocking campaign our district's reconnection services department organizes this event called reconnect to your future and volunteers gathered at six school sites cleveland franklin grant madison jefferson and roosevelt they fan out in pairs and they knock on doors and ask students who are not enrolled in school to come on back to school this was the fourth year of this campaign and it's a way for us to both reach out and wrap our arms around students to help them get back to school either into a comprehensive or an alternative high school but it's really helping them students find the right spot and have them really feel the personal invitation and welcome to come on back and it's been successful at having
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students come back and and stay so it's been a powerful and important tool for us and i want to thank the volunteers who show up to do that with us our 10 great field projects a couple weeks ago we spoke about the madison dedication of the the great field this last friday we had the wilson field dedication and again as we described this is the completion of a 10-year project to re-turf our fields and and do new tracks this event at wilson we honored again former board member julie brim edwards who's now at nike and also marcia randall who made a generous donation to help fund the completion of the wilson field specifically um this is i will say this is just huge community building and the the number of people who come out for this inaugural dedication of the field it's really impressive it's all about rebuilding community um the dedication of the jefferson field will be held on october 3rd so stay tuned come on out to jefferson to celebrate the new one and we're almost done with all 10. okay theodora also a member of super sac but we recognized you at up um at the last board meeting and we're recognizing and you've got tons of gotten tons of media attention that you've handled incredibly gracefully i will say it's extremely rare for a student to get a perfect score on the s.a.t or the act and one of our students theodora from lincoln high school did that on both she got theodore mott's got perfect scores on both the sat and the act tons of media attention she's been really awesome at just being so graceful at being interviewed and and and talking about just what goes beyond test scores so she loves learning for learning sake is fluent in mandarin has wide ranging interests including music and student government she's been on super sac and pole vaulting has done incredible community service and volunteer work that's a lot about what she talks about that has meaning to her and theodore we just want to give you a moment to come on up and say a few words but this is also the first time this has happened in the state of oregon so you just have to get this is a huge huge honor for theodora so thank you superintendent smith and fellow board members i would like to clarify though they don't know for sure that i'm the first because you don't have to report your scores so they don't know i'm recording that you're the first but i would just like to thank my teachers at lincoln i've had truly outstanding teachers that have helped me along this high school career and i would especially like to also thank my teachers at access academy which is the magnet program part of pps i think that programs like that are truly invaluable they're so wonderful and it was the best academic opportunity i've ever had and thank you for that opportunity and thank you for everything thank you very much congratulations so we had 60 kindergarten and first grade students who kicked off our king elementary and mandarin immersion program this this year it's a half day model where students learn in mandarin for half of the day in english for the other half the program got off to a great start 50 students enrolled in mandarin camp in august to prepare for the beginning of the year and king principal ehrenberg has reported that students are already speaking mandarin at home and overall and the reception has been terrific we now have immersion programs in six languages at 28 schools in the district with more than 4 000 students participating i'm just going to say i'm looking at dave porter up there our champion more more um our dual language immersion programs are part of our overall strategy to close achievement gaps and data has shown that african american students students on free and reduced lunch those with behavior challenges and students with disabilities perform better academically in dual language immersion programs than in an english only program so this is a key strategy i want to recognize albino head start and executive director ronnie herndon albin head start piloted a mandarin program and it went so well it prompted pbs to start one at king elementary to continue serving students who had started alabama head start so thank you to ron then thanks to our dual language immersion department the teachers principals at king and everyone involved in making this program such a great success right out of the shoot we're excited about this so um pps just received word on monday of an 8.4 million dollar award from the us department of education for a new gear up grant this is outstanding news given
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the high level of competition only 12 other school districts in the country receive it and our earlier good fortune of meriting a 2011 gear up award the new gear up grant supports a cohort of 1 500 students in 6th 7th 6th and 7th grade at 14 k-8 schools one middle school and then follows them for seven years as they complete high school in their freshman year in college respectively the schools are all within three clusters roosevelt madison and jefferson as well as their feeder schools astor cesar chavez george peninsula harrison park lee scott vestal beach voice elliott ugly green fabian king vernon and woodlawn and the primary goal of the new gear up grant mobilizing for college is aligned to our district initiatives and specifically increasing high school success and increasing our graduation and completion rate uh and we're really excited about this these are hugely competitive grants uh and so just i'm going to call it a tribute specifically to susan jordan our grant writer who has championed us doing as well as we have competitively nationally so and my final is just a recognition antonio lopez was recognized recently at the latino network's bella noche awards dinner or yeah like he received it was such a wonderful wonderful tribute to antonio our assistant superintendent and he gave a very moving very personal very heartfelt acceptance of this award that the only moment in the entire evening that the whole room was silent was listening to him and truly it was just really passionate about just what it means for him to be leading here in portland public schools so i just want to say antonio he's off in atlanta georgia right now at a at a conference and so is not here to hear us recognize him but please join me in recognizing him because it was wonderful to see him get this recognition in the community great thank you very much superintendent smith at this time we will uh take student testimony miss houston i see there are some students signed up which is great we have a group from roosevelt high school who have requested three minutes as a group okay so go ahead and introduce yourselves so let me go ahead and let me read the public comment part so you understand how we do it and then yes introduce yourselves okay thank you for taking the time to attend this meeting and provide your comments to the school board we value public input and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns our responsibility as a board is to actively listen and reflect on your comments the board will not respond to any comments or questions during public comment we have asked our board manager rosanne powell who is sitting over here on the side to follow up on any issues raised in public testimony roseanne is available after your testimony guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration of others complaints about individual employees should be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter you have a total of three minutes to share your comments please begin by stating your name and spelling your last name and why don't you guys all do that at once before we start the three minutes so we don't take your time doing that um during the first two minutes you'll see the green light and uh when you have one minute left you'll see a yellow light going in front of you and when your time is up you'll see the red light go on and a buzzer will sound and we ask that you try and wrap it up right after that okay so again thank you very much for being here tonight we're always excited when students come to testify all right so we are the roosevelt high school library employment reform committee i am student by president hayden burnell from roosevelt high school i am max brunel and i speak for the freshman of roosevelt i'm amanda ryan here to represent the sophomore class and i'm taya hartley and i am asb vice president great thank you for being here thank you all right so the uh we came here to ask for the superintendent the school direct board directors and the student representative to consider using a reasonable portion of the newly found 16 point million dollars to make roosevelt high school's librarian miss thai full-time librarian as soon as possible the reason for that being is is that my peers would utilize a full-time library too often do we hear when we ask when's the library open do we have one can we have access to books and computers and can i use a parameter and oftentimes the answer is no our current library conditions at roosevelt are holding the student body
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back roosevelt has many students at home that don't have internet access printer access or computer access not every student at roosevelt has the financial capability to purchase an ipad from the school and not all students have books that they need at home for the school as a freshman of roosevelt high school i speak on behalf of the freshmen most of us come from a school that had a fully functional library but when i came it here it was only two-fifths of the time i beg that you fund for our library to become full-time please and uh according to the uh portland public schools high school assist uh system design uh your distributed attendance revised action plan on page 10 point number two it says a fully operational media center tool for the 21st century is required with in all high schools and the students at roosevelt feel that we are getting unfair treatment because we don't have a fully operational media center um as of september 16th uh 2014 our library is now open five days a week yet we consider is resolved library not a fully operational media center if we can only check out books on tuesdays and wednesdays all students and that includes students from oslo high school deserve to be able to check out a book when they please every student should have access to 21st century technology please use a reasonable portion of the newly found 16.8 million dollars to fund a full-time librarian at roosevelt high school it's what miss tai our current librarian deserves and it's what the students deserve and it's what the community deserves but by finding a full-time librarian you are fulfilling that the promised fully operational media center that our school deserves you are giving students that needed access to books at all times you are giving the students the technology that needs that students need to strive at school in which some students feel limited at home and giving us a full-time librarian would give us a unlimited access during school hours which is what the students need also not to mention upperclassmen would like to utilize the library for college and scholarships applications as well if you do this you i believe that you will improve pbs as a whole please take a request under consideration thank you thank you again for um coming in i appreciate your request okay at this time we'll have a public comment miss houston i know we have people signed up for public comment as well we have six speakers our first two jess thompson and lisa lyon greetings superintendent smith board directors um and our latest uh student representative i'm here today to give you encouragement for the work you will embark upon this year soon you will be voting on policy changes that will have long lasting impact on the most historically marginalized students in our district pps has a culture of school choice and rugged individualism run amok in no particular order here are some of the problems you have the opportunity to solve we suffer from antiquated gerrymandered boundaries and no regular routine system for more frequent and equitable review of boundaries and changes we suffer from too many independent alternative high schools where we send students with little accountability instead of implementing systems to meet the needs of our most at-risk youth we push them out to alternative schools that might be a quote-unquote better fit our unacceptably low graduation rates speak to the efficacy of this process we suffer from an identity crisis in our middle grades programming there is little to no vision for what middle grade students in kh should have access to as a result too many of our k-8s limp along in the middle grades we lose too many sixth seventh and eighth graders at least in jefferson cluster to charter private home school focus and alternative options this in turn creates low enrollment and puts our schools especially in the jefferson cluster at risk for closure a transfer and petition process that promotes a winners and losers culture at pps on a micro and a macro level school choice in and of itself is not bad it is the breadth and depth of the school
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choice culture that has undermined our neighborhood schools in portland that is the problem currently i believe we spend far too much financial personal and political capital on issues of enrollment balancing a process that has not at least in my 17 years in jefferson cluster actually balanced enrollment or closed a very real and severe racial achievement gap there's much work we have to do work we're not doing now because there's no sane efficient feeder system at least on the east side of the river additionally instead of pouring money and time and personnel into enrollment balancing we need to invest properly not in a shallow way in educational behavioral intervention systems that lead to equitable outcomes for our students i've seen instructional behavioral intervention systems at work in other large districts systems that take years to implement with fidelity but that lead to positive outcomes for our students let us commit to that i believe there had been a fear in the past of losing wealthier white primarily white families if we reigned in the rabid school choice culture to begin investing in all of our students please do not let fear dictate your decisions if you take brave visionary actions this year it can lead to investment in school-wide and theatre-wide instructional and behavioral intervention systems that are designed to close our racial and socioeconomic achievement gap if you take the right actions this year it will stabilize enrollment and prevent future school closure and educational displacement of legions of our most historically marginalized students may vision courage and a racial educational equity policy lead you as you make the difficult decisions necessary to create a school district that creates equitable outcomes for all of our children thank you just as a reminder would you please state your last name and spell it for the record thank you good evening chairs members of the board and superintendent smith my name is lisa lyon l-y-o-n i believe everyone agrees on the importance of getting children to read at grade level by the end of third grade i was heartened to hear that there may be professional development money for teachers regarding dyslexia as decisions about possible trainings are considered i implore you to consult with qualified knowledgeable dyslexia specialists to make these recommendations please do not allow professionals who have denied past services to those with dyslexia to purchase programming for teacher education good program programming costs the same as bad programming my colleagues and i are excited for the possibility of teacher education about dyslexia and we want it to succeed to succeed there must be a well-crafted strategic vision which would most certainly need to include input from teachers far away from the setting of the elementary school i would like to share the story of a student named jacob when jacob came from california to live with his extended family he was 14. he had already experienced a life full of complicated family dynamics and challenges jacob had spent most of his educational career in special ed through a series of very fortunate events jacob at age 15 began tutoring with a retired special ed teacher during the course of my dyslexia immersion i have learned that some of the most knowledgeable people regarding effective instruction for those with dyslexia and similar brain differences are retired special ed teachers jacob's tutor used the orton gillingham method when he began tutoring he was reading at the first grade level after a few sessions jacob could see that this method was working for him one of the first things he said to his tutor was why didn't anyone teach me this way before connections were being made he could see progress jacob was motivated he wanted more tutoring he made time for it in addition to hanging out with his friends playing video games and wrestling he wanted more he asked his tutor if she could increase their weekly sessions from twice a week to three times in exchange for the additional tutoring jacob bartered he did yard work and painting within two years he was almost reading at a fifth grade level kids want to learn teachers want to teach i share this story because i want to bring attention to the high school dropout rate why would kids keep coming to school day after day year after year if they were unable to learn in the one way that teachers were teaching what would be the what would the behavior and self-esteem look like in a 10th grader who was reading at the first grade level it would not surprise me to think there would be behavioral issues and absenteeism what if instead of the problem being dyslexia it is actually the answer i suggest there is value in trying to find out how many truant and low achieving kids in high school have dyslexia to change the output the graduation rate the input must be changed one key part of the definition of dyslexia is the unexpected gap between intelligence and performance when we hear someone speak who is highly articulate our brains cannot imagine that he or she could have such difficulty with reading and writing this disconnect causes many to challenge a student's motivation it's
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the only thing that can make sense to so many if a kid seems bright or even average and performance is poor often time teachers even parents think the behavior must be due to a lack of motivation effort or bad attitude but what if it's dyslexia and you need to wrap up okay it is understood that the nature of one-on-one tutoring for all with dyslexia is cost prohibitive but there are other successful approaches which are orton gillingham based and geared for the entire class which means cheaper the famous yale university researcher sally shaywitz has said we do not have a knowledge gap in dyslexia we have an action gap thank you for considering this call to action thank you very much our next two speakers are emery roberts and gloria harrison uh hello superintendent smith members of the education um there the school board my name is emery roberts rob rts and i am the president of the dyslexic student union at lincoln and i'm a dyslexic the writing sample i've given you is an example of both my writing and what my writing is like unedited it really shows the gap between what i'm capable of doing and what my first draft looks like the story that i tell is a lot about how my teachers did not understand this gap and to this day i've had many teachers that do not understand why i am different and why there is that gap i've had teachers say that i am not motivated i have had teachers say that you might not just get the material i've had teachers say that dyslexia just doesn't exist and the fact is these were good teachers and to many of my classmates who weren't dyslexic they were wonderful teachers and the issue wasn't that they were didn't care it was that they didn't understand and they didn't have knowledge so with the dsu at lincoln that's the dyslexic student union and with help with the help of jim hanson and peyton chapman we are putting on a simulation and information for all of the teachers at a staff meeting and this is something that can change the teacher's outlook on their students instantaneously it's information i love information i love to learn that's something i say in this letter to my english teacher i love to learn and i think that this information is very powerful and to keep it from teachers is kind of it is it's very important to get that information to teachers and it's something we could do in every single school this year um as the dyslexic student union at lincoln we would love to do this at all the schools in the lincoln cluster or to other schools outside of the lincoln cluster we would love to go to as many schools as possible to really share the information about dyslexia because it really is powerful information um i've noticed this year since i've gone and talked to all my teachers and explained dyslexia fully to them they have been not only much more helpful with me but also more helpful with students that i suspect of being dyslexic i've seen students around me um who didn't know they were dyslexic and we i don't know but they could have been and i seen that i've seen them struggle and i knew that if the teachers had had more understanding maybe their issues could have been resolved in an easier way through understanding between them and their teachers thank you thank you superintendent smith and school board members my name is gloria harrison h-a-r-r-i-s-o-n and i am a parent of students in the mid-level at creative science school it has come to the attention of the parent community at creative science school that the district is taking away one of our para educators karen hadley this wednesday 9 24. i come to you as a parent representative of css who not only has two children in the mid-level who will be affected by this decision but also as the parent who began a school-based support group for parents of behaviorally atypical children in march of 2012. i represent the parents of the 63 students at creative science school who now have ieps of those there are 33 ieps for academic social school skills with four more in the process of being evaluated our numbers are expected to increase as the year and years go on especially since css core teaching philosophy is an ideal fit for many atypically functioning children if karen is moved tomorrow wednesday this is some of what will happen only three students with adult supervision will receive it when this change is made these students are potential flight risks and will require full-time support because the one para will be required the one pair left will be required to
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spend the entire day with the younger students 10 older students including my two boys will with adult super adult support on their ieps will no longer receive paraeducator support at all furthermore the school administration is being told that the paris support is only being provided for safety concerns however the pps website lists the major duties of the pera educator job with multiple and various other duties including support on sunday 9 21 mary pearson emailed a form letter to parents who emailed about this crisis and stated when we staff our buildings for special education we take several factors into consideration i would like to point out that these para educators do not help buildings they help children individuals like my sons and the children of 60 plus other parents at the school who have been identified through their the district's iep process as having a need for the type of one-on-one services that these para educators provide a june 2014 email from carol smith says we have set ambitious goals to the low to lower the number of students who are expelled or suspended from school my question is how is removing paris support from a school where kids have behavior issues if they're not supported in line with this goal how is this supportive of our teachers the students in need and the other students a september 17 email from the district revealed a 16.8 million dollar budget surplus my question is why not put some of that money into supporting some of our most vulnerable students a note from steve buell to the parents of our school dated today states i understand this is a move which meets a more pressing need at another school tending to the needs of high needs children is a collaboration between home and school your decision to understaff css impedes the school's ability to keep up their end of that collaboration it becomes not case management but crisis management which affects everyone involved in the school community and while i understand that the decision to move karen is based on even higher needs at another school maybe the answer isn't finding a way to put out a forest fire with only one bucket of water perhaps the answer is to allocate resources so that all fires stop burning and so that the care of our high needs students is more case management than crisis management please reconsider your decision to remove karen hadley from css please reconsider your metrics by which you gauge how many para educators are essential to each school and then put some of our wonderful surplus toward adequately staffing not only css but all schools that desperately need these services thank you for your time and consideration thank you our last two speakers maura finnegan and greg burl good evening chair knowles superintendent smith and members of the school board my name is moira finnegan my last name is spelled f-i-n-n-e-g-a-n and i am a speech language pathologist at chief joseph oxley green school i'd like you to tell i would like to tell you a story about how i became passionate about addressing the needs of students with dyslexia three years ago during my first year on the job i had a fifth grade student who transferred to ockley green from the pioneer program at my first meeting with him he said to me can i tell you a secret and i said nope i just met you you can tell me your secret next time it turns out that his secret was i can't read he was a fifth grader but he was reading and writing at the kindergarten level he had behavior issues which may well have developed as a way to divert attention from the fact that he couldn't read but he had shown the courage to tell his secret in the hopes that someone would finally teach him how to read i was shocked and perplexed as to how the student had made it all the way from kindergarten to fifth grade and yet no one had ever taught him how to read i said to him this is your lucky year i'm going to teach you how to read i was i quickly realized i was in way over my head this student could read simple words such as top but when i added an s to create the word stop the student was completely lost and could not read the word i did not know how to teach him to read because i did not understand why he couldn't learn to read but i had a suspicion that the student may have dyslexia i sought out specialized training on dyslexia and my suspicions were confirmed the student was suffering from severe dyslexia that had remained undiagnosed and untreated all these years how was it possible that not a single educator in gen ed or special ed who had worked with this student over the years had missed the clear signs of dyslexia i came to realize there is a gaping hole in knowledge and services within our school system and hundreds of kids like this student are suffering because of it the gaping hole is simply the lack of knowledge that there is a neurological condition called dyslexia and it causes significant challenges for 10 to 15 percent of students in learning to read the gaping hole is also a lack of knowledge regarding the type of reading instruction that works best for kids with dyslexia it is important for these students to be taught using a sequenced systematic and explicit method that involves several
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senses hearing seeing touching all at the same time when given this type of reading instruction students with dyslexia can learn to read i want to say in the strongest possible terms that dyslexia is an equity issue most of the families i work with at chief joseph ockley-green will never be able to afford private evaluations or tutoring that some families are able to obtain for their children many families trust the public school school system will do right by their children that educators have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach all children how to read in reality we educators are not given the tools we need in our teacher training programs or in offerings on the pps learning campus to recognize and treat dyslexia in our students the unfortunate result is hundreds of students like my fifth grader who could not read and perhaps never will i urge you to fund dyslexia training for all teachers including general education teachers special education teachers and reading specialists so that we can help all students learn to read thank you thank you good evening my name is greg burrell b-u-r-r-i-l-l superintendent smith chair knowles and board members and the television audience it's great that i got to be last this time because listening to the concerns of kids who don't have a library open five days a week a lot about dyslexia and so forth my focus this year is going to be putting more resources into the classroom and taking them away from what i consider to be a bloated bureaucracy it seems to be happening everywhere not just a pps and not just at schools it's no accident that organizations of every type are creating more supervisory positions and treating these people as vital while lowering pay and benefits for those lower in the hierarchy the fact that teachers are indispensable and bureaucrats are not is nowhere more true than in education so here's another story for the first time in my life i need medical care and i'm seeing the same thing in doctors offices people trying to follow silly rules mandated by overpaid people who don't know anything about the job they're making the rules for last week in my testimony i suggested that there should be no i.t people at besc they should all be tech teachers they can teach some classes and operate the system there could be low-level people who do jobs that students shouldn't touch for safety reasons the teachers can do the jobs that the students can't do for security and confidentiality reasons graduating college and career ready students means that some administrative assistants custodians and even cafeteria personnel can be certified teachers who supervise adult staff and students finally i want to see an end to tosas and curriculum specialists in the central office i want textbooks adopted in curriculum designed by the teachers who will go back to the classroom and use the materials they created or adopted the idea that teachers should be paid more for not teaching than for teaching is an insult to those who struggle to educate our kids in baltimore teachers designed a curriculum for me that was outdated i'm sure it resembled the textbooks of their era but it didn't align with the best practices of mine the same thing is true of administrators we have no need for central office administrators put more principals vice principals student management special specialists in schools and have them form committees that will align practices so that they can work at both the schools with the challenges of ocala green and the challenges of east and west sylvan i'm noticing as i write this that most of the middle schools that were closed in the past decade are in the lower socioeconomic strata but anyway my point is that all year i am going to be looking for ways to put people into school buildings and take them out of this building thank you very much again thank you everyone for your comments uh please feel free again to contact our board manager roseanne who's sitting over here on the side if you have any questions or if you want to provide additional information for us so um our next agenda item is the workload committee quarterly updates are heard on the workload committee and tonight we'll hear the first of those updates superintendent smith would you like to introduce this item i would so sean murray who's our chief human resources officer and brock logan director of labor relations will be sharing this report with us and suzanne cohen vice president of portland association of teachers and chilean joseph who so this is a joint committee that was established during negotiations and they're going to talk to you about it but we were real and this is great we're going to do try and do joint presentations about the
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progress on this committee so sean i'll let you lead off all right good evening board members and superintendent smith sean murray chief human resources officer with me this evening to present the district and the portland association of teachers workload committee update is brock logan our chief or excuse me our director of employee labor relations suzanne cohen and also still and joseph as you're aware the workload committee was established in the 2013 collective bargaining agreement between the district and the pat the committee is authorized to review and consider options for eliminating and considering aspects of current workload for professional educators and make recommendations to the chief academic officer for workload relief the contract calls for 10 members to be appointed by the district and 5 by the union although not contractually required it was suggested to the workload committee and the board that quarterly updates be provided to the board as a beneficial way of updating the board and the community on the progress that the committee is making as well as the type of workload issues the committee is reviewing and the recommendations being made since the establishment of the workload committee there's been a need to codify several changes to a memorandum of understanding with the union the first change is going from 10 to 12 committee members this was done to provide a broader perspective of voting members and the second change is changing the reference of chief academic officer within the contract due to a reorganization within the district the chief academic officer position was reclassified to assistant superintendent office of school performance at this time i will turn it over to the workload committee members to provide you with the update good evening uh so joining me on the workload committee for the district are the per stick the principal at roosevelt high school carol campbell the principal of grant high school gina roletto the assistant principal at cesar chavez ed krankowski assistant director of special education and sasha parents senior director office of school performance for the association it's marty pavlick unicef consultant suzanne cohen the vice president shalyn joseph school psychologist at james john and skyline steve lancaster a teacher at lincoln high school and lisa orca kane a teacher at abernathy and they've got one more position that they will be adding soon the committee to date has met four times may 1st and 22nd june 9th and september 11th we had a meeting scheduled in august but it had to be rescheduled do some critical safety training that itself had to be rescheduled because of the incident at reynolds we will be meeting now twice a month for the rest of the year generally on the first wednesday of the month and on the third thursday of the month and our next meeting is october 1st so far the committee has developed a form that staff can use to submit requests for review of their workload issues and we're currently working with it to put that online have it something that can be filled out and submitted online we're developing the process for review we've got some ideas but part of that may depend on how many of these forms we get in and we've identified a practice problem to conduct a dry run and refine our process in addition to the quarterly updates uh we do anticipate giving a a more uh formal presentation of the board at some time later in the year after we've done some more of our work and also we just recently discussed a request that if we have information that comes through the committee that could impact the budget that we get that to you early in the budgeting process it's not really clear how much of that work will have done this budging in in advance of the current budgeting process or the next budgeting process but would certainly something we'll keep in mind and as things come up we'll get that information to you so we're on thursday we have a joint contract training with pps and pat and that is when we'll be explaining to administrators and educators about the workload committee and showing the fillable form and so the intent is that it's good to go starting after they leave on thursday i just want to add on to what brock logan said about the format that we have spent some time on developing for getting the information from teachers on specific workload issues uh we're not dreaming that we'll just have a few that will trickle in we really think there might be a landslide of um requests coming in for uh issues to be addressed and we're anticipating that we will have to that a lot of these issues will not be able to be addressed by our workload
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committee and the one million dollars that we have to fund one off type of circumstances but that will be routing this the the budget item issues to you and so we're hoping that we'll be able to make this a an efficient process that will give you the information that you'll need as well and that will also take off our plates the the items that we can't address in our committee at this time are there any questions for the workload committee matt go ahead hi thank you for coming and and letting us know sort of the status and how things look moving forward one of our meetings that we had recently we talked about a decision that was made or we were informed of a decision that was made to uh use a consensus-based process and i i'm interested in uh what led to that decision and what do you think some of the outcomes are going to be of using consensus-based decision decision-making uh in your process you go first um i don't know if i can specifically answer the question but i guess what i can say is in the meetings we've had so far one it's it's really been actually fun and and very productive meeting so i think that it's a very open dialogue and it sets up a process by which we can make sure we've got lots of perspective and buy-in from both sides when we're making recommendations of what to move forward and i i would say that i don't think the um consensus decision process um you know originally we we wanted to get trained and we wanted to use a specific model and have everyone trained and that didn't happen but what we did do is just kind of work through a process of you know do you have to be present to vote can you send a proxy what would you know is it a simple majority or what would it take um to make a decision um and and then i do feel that i mean it's hard to i think as a committee we are on track with what we want to be able to accomplish we don't have a lot of money or a lot of authority right away to do anything with that so so it just remains to be seen what kind of issues we get it would be interesting to look at specific groups of people i mean i think you've heard from the testimony tonight you can already imagine the kinds of things that we'll be getting workload issues definitely around special education teachers and special programs um so that that'll be interesting to see how that goes it also depends on what happens with the budget decisions today i mean if we the workload committee was ready to go um two weeks ago i think we would have been inundated with huge class sizes so i'm hoping that whatever takes place tonight does a lot to mitigate some of those concerns um if not it we will be dealing with large class sizes as a big workload issue and um you know the other things that you've heard it doesn't have to be about just you know educators in the class but resources for students that make it manageable director buehl thank you for coming this evening i'm i'm confused about the timeline my understanding of the workload committee was it was set up to take care of workload issues this year not next year but this year and the faster you would do that i would think the better chance you would have the better job you would do so i'm curious about the timeline for when we will actually have changes being made based on the workload committee's results what do we have an estimate of what that is i i realize that the first the the first of october we do all these changes but okay by the 15th october we're going to be whacking things out here so people have a chance to have the workload change for the whole year or last meeting two meetings ago when i was here somebody said something about june i mean can you give me some help on where that's going so there isn't a specific timeline or a specific date to produce a product so part of the way the committee's set up is as the committee identifies things there's several pieces in there we we specifically call it the ability to make a recommendation to the superintendent at any time and have action taken on that so so i'm not i'm not familiar with i'm not sure where you got the idea that there's a specific timeline for you i got the idea that you might be creating a time i mean we can sit around here all year and talk about what workload things need to be taken care of but basically i would think that we want to take care of them as quickly as we possibly could that was the whole point of the committee and i was just wondering what the committee projects as their timeline not that
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there was a timeline well so that was why we're really interested in getting this form finalized which we were able to do our last meeting and get it online so that people can start sending those in so we're hearing from the rank and file members these are the workload issues that are affecting their ability in the classroom and that we can start to identify those and work on them okay so what you're saying if i'm a teacher now i can send in i could send in a complaint or a workload issue that i had and you would deal with that now are you up and running you can do that thursday what day thursday so every teacher district should understand that that's the day so go and then okay so direct review thursday will be the joint training session with the district and pat part of that joint training will include information on the process for workload committee so that information will be disseminated out so teachers will have that information to be able to start the process for addressing workload issues part of the first step of dealing with workload issues is to have a discussion with their building principle on the issue if it can't be resolved at that level then they complete the form and the process goes to the committee for review you have to go through your principle basically that's the first step before you can complain about the workload well we want to make sure that there's good communication between the teacher and the principal to try to address the workload issue so we want to give the building administrator the ability to take a look at the issue to see if it can be corrected before it actually goes to the workload military teacher tonight you want to go talk to your principal tomorrow and let them know what the workload issue you have is so that when you're turned down you can be ready to go so so that's the process for individual teachers or educators who believe that they've got an inequitable workload the committee will also look at all other issues such as trying to identify whether systemic systemic issues around workload all that so that's one source of input so is that does that include does that include anybody else other than teacher professionals in other words for instance are you planning on looking at the testing overload workload i mean is that what is some teacher should start complaining about the testing in order to have you look at that is that so some teachers should start tomorrow and just get those forms and start saying guess what you're running the map test here in the middle school and we shouldn't be doing that and then that would be they should be getting that in right now today basically as soon as your form comes out which is coming out on thursday well director veal i think it's premature to try to anticipate what type of workload issues will be coming to the committee you know essentially we're going to be putting the process out and having them go through the process to bring it to the committee and so it's very difficult for us to go ahead and try to yeah yeah of course um thank you so thanks so much i'm just really pleased to see you here and i just i love that we're doing these joint presentations as and that you're reporting back on this collaborative and what appears to be very productive start to this work so thrilled about that knowing that building or rebuilding a relationship the pit is one of our top priorities so excited to see that thanks so much for your work um so yeah i mean it does seem like i mean as i recall the two kind of pieces of this committee are both the individual um concerns about workload in the classroom as well as the systemic piece so you're it sounds like you've kind of got that challenge of balancing both of those um and um i totally agree that you're going to i assume that one million dollars you know we i'm encouraged to hear that you're going to be talking about kind of taking a look at what comes in and then bringing that forward to us as part of the budget process so that's great that there's going to be that alignment is it going to be kind of a rolling opportunity throughout the year or is there sort of a time limited um if you have a workload issue now is the time to kind of raise it or is it do you not know yet or do you it will be the form will be out there and available so if something comes out okay again the form the form is one process around you know that's around saying as an individual educator i feel like my workload isn't equitable or there's this particular issue right there's certainly the ability to raise through either through the principal or through the representatives on the committee from both sides say well i think this is an issue that the committee should look at um and it's not just about how do we divide up a million dollars to put some kind of resource here it's also can we identify things that educators are having to do that impacts their workload and gets in the way of educating kids that shouldn't be happening that doesn't need to happen so if we can say you know what we've looked at it and we've got x going on and x doesn't serve kids and gets in the way let's stop doing x then we'll come forward with recommendations to stop doing x great thank you so much dr reagan
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i think i shared director buell's maybe surprise that we're not trying to push money out a little bit sooner so i wanted to ask especially the comment about you're expecting somehow a landslide of requests coming in around workload so i mean as i look at it we've we have 45 additional new teachers in k5 who are who are art teachers thanks to the arts tax we we hired 180 new teachers this year you had to set aside of 30 something teachers that we've pushed out we're going to be doing more tonight so it feels to me at least that things are a little bit better out in the field than in previous years at this time and i guess i'm trying to get a better handle on where you think this landslide of requests are will come from it sounded maybe like special ed but i know we specifically did an increase in special ed teachers as well so i'd be curious to hear a little bit more i think i miss i didn't mean to say that i am expecting a landslide of requests i think what i what i was saying is um we we have i think you have addressed what the intent and the spirit of the contract was was to you know hire more teachers and reduce class size i mean good for pps we've got this increase of students but so what we have been hearing um and you have too is that there i mean there's many many schools out there with still really big class sizes so what i meant to say is had the form been ready to go the first day of school i think you know we would have had a lot of people talking about class size as a as a workload and so what i'm hoping with further allocation of teachers and maybe even more or whatever supports are needed in the classroom that when this form goes live that won't be the biggest flood or biggest issues and obviously that would be one of the the bigger systemic things that we'd have to then you know come here for and definitely we'd want the forum to be rolling because there i mean there's systemic big picture workload issues that we need to look at programs and supports there's also things that just occur for whatever reason throughout the year that are um you know maybe a short-term problem that needs a short-term solution whether it's around testing and you know i think it happens with a special education teachers where then they have to stop delivering services for quite a time to administer the test and looking at things like that to um you know an increase maybe you know five new kids move to the school or something like that for whatever reason right you know you just need a little help short term so we definitely want it rolling we want to address the needs um and i didn't i mean we don't know what kinds of things will come in and i didn't mean to say that i'm expecting now a landslide but um i don't have i haven't seen the numbers of all the class sizes but i just know the reports that we have been getting and i don't know how these resources will get allocated or what resources will get allocated so depending on how that goes i think we would then see if those workload issues that we know are existing right now get resolved and you know before we need to do anything as a committee about it well i'm excited about your work and i think that whether you get a landslide or you don't get a landslide i think it's going to be very informative to all of us especially if you can report back before we really get into the budget process next year because i think everybody understands that you know workload issues have an impact on student achievement so i appreciate you being here i appreciate you giving the report it's it's uh it's important so thanks and thank you for that explanation that helps mr black thank you for being here um just one question one well one comment which you've probably already thought of to your point about saying if this had been live day one um the workload issues probably would be different now that you're getting a month month and a half in and as you guys begin to look at your year you might want to consider that because there's an enrollment balancing process right an fte process that the district usually holds back and pushes in so i could imagine next year when you are live and fully functional that you might see at the beginning of flood and maybe that's a good checks and balance system or maybe it'll just inundate you and i don't i don't know but as you guys begin your thought process behind that um the second piece is as you guys had mentioned about how depending on what funding and what comes up you guys will pass along to us and i just want to remind you that we will be relying on you guys to prioritize for us to help us prioritize where does it fall in in the priority from yours from your point of view um so that we can make a best informed decision rather than just saying here's a whole bunch of issues we couldn't fix them we fixed these right so try to try to help us prioritize them so we understand the weight from both both points of view but thank you dr buehl yeah i didn't want my negative questions to be thought that i was negative towards this committee this
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is the best about the best thing that's happened in the last year is working together to deal with the district's problems i think it's wonderful and i hope you really the fa the faster the better okay anybody else great i'll add my uh congratulations to getting the committee up and running and moving ahead and looking forward to the next report so thank you very much for all being here today thank you okay our next item on the agenda is excuse me our discussion of the um ending fund balance in the beginning fund balance and the budget calendar this item was first heard at the september 16th meeting which i have only seen the video of but it looked like a really good meeting a lot of wonderful discussion um the board so let's get this on the table first and then we'll go ahead and see about questions and that kind of stuff so board will now consider resolution for 4961 additional investment schools and the fiscal year 2014-15 budget for school district number one j multnomah county oregon do i have a motion second director belial moves and director atkins seconds the motion to adopt resolution four nine six one miss houston do we have citizen comment yes we do we have three speakers nicole leggett and dunya jennings markham so same comments be sure and state your last name and spell it for the record for us thank you thank you my name is nicole leggett l-e-g-g-e-t i feel like the process for spending the surplus lacks the public input and accountability of the regular budgeting season the timetable is two weeks without any listening sessions where answers can be found i'm sure it's easy to spend 3.5 million dollars on staffing the schools are telling you just where it's needed yet i know that amount will still leave us fighting for scraps of fte what i don't know is what are the standards that we judge by pps has not set a class size cap pps has policies in place to guide school leadership yet you will issue waivers to schools that don't follow your policy is 3.5 million enough to keep class sizes under 30 or to enforce your wellness policy the money needs to be spent to ensure certain operating capacity at schools are equivalent programs offered elective case loads at all levels should be compared it's time for transparency in the way that extra staffing is allocated i love the three priorities we've been talking about them for years i don't think we should throw three million dollars at them without knowing our game plan what is working here in pps what works nationally internationally what makes private school graduation rates so much higher i don't see any specific recommendations on how to accomplish any of these three as far as one-time investments i think safety first then i think what about the bond measure wasn't that supposed to resolve these issues then i remember last year there was a whole different list of possible one-time investments where did those go so here we are about to vote 16.8 million dollars and the public will still have questions i don't believe we should write a multi-million dollar blank check to the district with loose requirements to check in we deserve to know how we get why i'd rather see the reserves increase than not know how it's benefiting my children i'd rather put the money to resolve the complex issues of staying with them the law and ensuring that ieps can be enforced my request is that you pass this resolution to immediately spend the 3.5 million dollars on increased staffing and school supports and separate the other money from it to actually have a spending plan that we know has school level input and support so that the public can hear read and process it thank you for your consideration thank you my name is dunya markham it's spelled m-a-r-c-u-m um and i am a pps parent i have two children my testimony tonight is in regards to advoca advocating for two million dollars to be set aside for music for the purpose of finally establishing equity and access to music education throughout the district um superintendent smith's vision is to use funds some of these funds for ensuring all students read a grade level by the end of third grade reduce out of school
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discipline and accelerate our graduation and completion rate music education is a very important and vital key and well-supported and well-funded music programs k-12 can go far in achieving these goals the data and the evidence is available with just a few clicks to anyone unfamiliar with the real benefits of music education portland's own right brain initiative has just recently released data from a large study that shows a rise in test scores especially among our english language learners when when having art based education the arts tax levy which passed in 2012 was created in response to the horrifying disparity among schools in the district and throughout portland years of lowered enrollment shrinking tax base mandated curriculum and lack of oversight and admin support for comprehensive music education has not gone away and has not been countered with the passing of the levy the levy was never intended to end the lack of equity in something so vital to the well-being of a child right now we have students throughout the district that are receiving for the first time in years or ever arts education and those are only the k5 students middle schools are being denied all over the district but what is also happening is we are maintaining the lack of equity throughout the district by allowing the arts tax to provide the sole or majority source of funding for music education in our elementary schools principals through no fault of their own must address the need for more reading specialists for example or for new books and in turn must shift funds that had already been available pre-levy for arts away and only use those our tax fundings to hire those teachers grades six through eight in k-8 schools received no arts funding at all into two men in too many schools you have k-5 students but not six through eight receiving any kind of arts education we see 480 student k-5 title 1 schools now having a 0.5 fte allocated for music we think of that as a success we don't see the teacher that has no instruments and only sees students once a week and has a full-time workload with an fte of 0.5 pay i feel like the two i believe the 2 million should be distributed in such a way to provide equality and a balanced distribution throughout the district a committee consisting of parents and community members with advice from teachers can discuss disbursement and actual disbursement of funds decided on by a majority vote of the parent community member committee let us look to how we recently restructured athletics and pil one major goal was to use the restructuring to increase graduation rates and strengthen high schools striving towards equality among those schools this was done through disbursements of funds for each cluster so that each cluster could use the funds where it was needed thank you thank you and lastly we have monique mclean good evening board members and superintendent smith my name is monique mclean m-c-c-l-e-a-n i'm a grant high school parent speaking on behalf of the parents coalition it's great news that pps has discovered additional resources in excess of 16 million dollars you have an extraordinary opportunity to make a big difference in the lives of pps students please take this windfall and correct the injustice of four years ago use it to invest in the students of the city and break the tradition of part-time high school last week parents coalition representative mike rosen encouraged you to meet your basic responsibilities to students with this newfound money we've spent the last year including many times this summer asking you and pps administrators to staff our high schools with enough teachers so that all kids could take a full day of classes we headed into late summer without enough teachers to staff our high schools our principals worked overtime to stretch the fte in dollars that they were given to try to provide students with relevant courses and full schedules this was extremely challenging because they lacked the teachers needed to fulfill the classes and sections requested by students it's disheartening and disappointing that this windfall news comes after school has started the least disruptive time to add teachers is of course before school starts it is also the time when the greatest number of teachers are available for hire sadly the issues with our high schools extend beyond the classroom last spring we worked with directors regan curler and buell to provide the neighborhood comprehensive high schools with more support so that students and teachers could have access to basic levels of support from librarians it managers bookkeepers and ibm ap coordinators unfortunately that was voted down by the board but you will soon have another opportunity to do the right thing for students across the city given that you have a local option levy on the ballot it will be easier to make the case to voters that you need the additional 4 million from the urban renewal carved out if you support real school needs now versus just locking up most of the money in reserves we've already communicated in a letter that asks you to prioritize student focused investments our top priorities
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are staff high schools so students who want or need a full full school day have one provide additional support staff librarians and i.t fixes for high schools as was requested last spring offer classroom materials supplies and current textbooks for all teachers but especially new teachers they have nothing when they are hired and principals do not have money in their general funds to allocate funds for curriculum or equipment set aside funds to add three more days to the 215-16 school year now is the time to make this forward-looking commitment we're 47th in the nation for graduation for graduating students in four years students at all levels are being shortchanged and it's time to make the investment in a longer school year thank you for your consideration please provide support now when we need it not at a distant point in the future and i'd like to submit the parents coalition letter to the board for the record please thank you very much to miss you center to roseanne thank you does the staff have an actual presentation for this i do okay because we do and actually i'm going to ask ryan dutcher our interim chief financial officer and david wind our deputy cfo to come on up and part of what tonight's presentation we're going to do a brief um context but also respond to some of the questions we got last um in the last board discussion because people ask some specific questions that will provide you that information and then secondly i after these guys do the context i'm going to walk you through five scenarios because what you are going to be and i'm going to let you go ahead and go to the first slide here um because part of what tonight you're going to be looking at is an actual decision that we're going to ask you to release the 3.5 million both for school staffing and i'll walk you through the specifics of this but secondly adding to that in addition for this school-wide support table and i'll walk you through the specific but that one's an actual decision secondly it's establishing um that what we your best thinking on how much you want to hold in reserve and how much you're willing to spend but you would be then giving that back to us to come back to you with spending plans on the three priorities and on the one-time investment so the decision before you tonight is just what what amount you want to hold in reserve and what amount you feel comfortable spending okay so we're not asking you to do the specific we will be coming back to you with here are the here's the spending plan and the strategies and so i'll walk you through that so you'll get so those are the two things in front of you tonight we're going to start with walking you through the context thank you good evening chair knowles members of the board and superintendent smith uh in consideration of tonight's decision we're here to uh present an update from last week's work session and specifically we're going to walk through a couple different things and some of this is going to be review so we won't go into quite as much detail as we did last week but we're going to david's going to give a quick oral update on the budget calendar we're going to talk a little about the ending and the beginning fund balance that's really the heart of the discussion today so we'll talk i think some people probably be interested in hearing again uh kind of the root causes behind why our ending fund balances is uh is 17 million almost 17 million dollars higher than what we traditionally anticipated we'll give a little bit of context uh mainly as it relates to this year and then we look forward to next year a little bit of context into what we're seeing on the horizon a little bit of history on some of our school staffing updates as superintendent smith mentioned we'll spend most of our time tonight on our scenarios and our revised proposals uh talking about high school support and then we'll get into the the next steps in terms of what the next steps that that staff is recommending um in terms of check-ins and when you'd expect some more information from us so real quickly on the budget calendar as we indicated to you last week today is when we'll be publishing that calendar for the coming 12 months it's a more detailed budget calendar than we've produced in the past and one of the key features of that is there's activity related to three different years interwoven throughout this year so there's some activity around closing out last year there's updates on the current year budget and there's development activity for the coming year the 2015-16 budget so all of that is interwoven throughout the year and so most of the discussion tonight is going to focus on the state school fund so our state school fund for context is about 75 percent of our of our general fund is as david mentioned it's it's it's developed over a multi-year timeline the initial assumptions that go into building the budget start well in advance of the fiscal year and we're building uh we're projecting the future working on our assumptions around how we think the year is going to come together as we work through the year not
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surprisingly we we learn more and as we learn more we make adjustments and uh and tweaks to the budget as we need to the state once we get through um the end of the year the state then has a process to recapture an even amount of spending and it's one of the important things to keep in mind is that the state school fund is a set amount and it's really it's comprised of two different revenue streams one is the income tax piece of it and one is the appropriation directly from the state so at any time if the income tax revenue is higher than the uh than the amount the state at some point in it and it's usually a delayed manner the state will make some adjustments to bring us back into alignment the the difficulty is around the timing the state can come back as much as 12 months after the year has ended to make those adjustments the all those adjustments uh we we do our very best to uh to estimate those it's an allocation formula you should keep in mind it's largely a lot of complexities a lot of adjustments but for the most part it's based on a student count as we think about this year there are a number of things and in you know in the interests of transparency there are a number of things in our budget that we have an idea will probably change as one example that i think is probably pretty pretty relevant uh with all of our additional hiring for teachers we're forced to put an assumption in our budget around uh initial salaries that as is almost always the case those salaries turn out to be something higher or lower than what we've initially assumed that'll put some kind of a dealt into our budget a couple other things on the horizon that we're keeping eye on local option taxes and then our health care renewal will be coming up soon and we'll see how close we're on that one as well okay so as we as we thought about our 2014 2015 budget our primary focus was to invest in schools and we pulled down our reserves in the process we we pulled down reserves by 13.7 million a piece of that was one-time spending so spending that didn't necessarily commit the district ongoing service levels but the balance of that if you think about things you know additional teacher hiring adding additional programs that can that starts to create um a commitment from the district to fund those year-over-year if we're going to maintain the current level of spending uh that those activities and really pulling that uh reserve down pulled our our reserve as a percentage of the general fund down to three point nine percent and uh for context uh the board approved level four reserves is three percent with an aspirational goal of five percent so looking forward to 2015 2016 a few things we know are going to impact our budget create some spending um some spending tension uh one is if we build in a pretty simplistic inflation adjustment of three percent that's a that's a 15 million average for our budget if we fund full day kindergarten out of our general fund it's 11 million and then on the on the previous page i mentioned the the spend on reserves if we're able to or if we choose to uh support that same level of service in 2015 2016 that's a nine million dollar uh commitment that we need to make sure we have room for on the budget so this is before we add anything new and this is also before when you think about the context of this discussion around the ending fund balance and we have a page further in the presentation that goes into more depth uh before we start to think about other kind of ongoing commitments that would add to our to our spending needs in 2015 2016. so refresh on our uh ending fund balance um so you know the main you know in relatively simple terms two different drivers here one our revenues were higher than what we expected the biggest reason why was that our property tax collections were 9.7 million dollars higher one important piece to note on the property tax piece i mentioned uh the fact that there's an adjustment uh process that takes place so there's a there's a chance that uh of this 9.7 million five million dollars could be recaptured by the state and could be as late as spring of 2015 so that's just something we have to keep in mind um our expenditures were also below budget so moved in the same direction the main driver behind this was that our healthcare expenses were lower by 6.2 million this was offset some by some increases in teacher salaries and then across the district we were also lower by about 4 million in a variety of different places we had a transfer in our budget for to make our first uh bond payment that we didn't need to make so when we do the simple math we end up with a change in the ending fund balance of 18.4 and then for a beginning fund balance that converts into 16.8 so the number we've been talking about quickly on school staffing the budget that you adopted in june included 37 teacher equipment fde which were held back in a set-aside pool to be available to be used for core program support in schools to respond to situations of higher student enrollment for high school scheduling support and teacher student loads as of september 5th all of those 37 fde were allocated two to kindergarten 18 to k-8 programs 13 to high schools and four to some other situations uh in response to other situations like
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dual campuses and things like that so that was clearly a situation where we knew we would continue to need additional staffing the other thing i wanted to mention we had a question last time about the history of our beginning fund balance and we shared some information with you you know over the last 10 years most apart from the last couple of years the the overarching story of our budget has been we've need to make cuts we've partially offset the cuts that we needed made by drawing down our budget um and in most of the uh those years our ending fund balance and therefore our following year beginning fund balance ended up stronger than we had thought um and the data that we showed you was that over the last 10 years that beginning fund balance uh as a percentage of our budget range from 3.6 to 13 2.2 it averaged about 8 which is a higher level than you would think listening to our budget discussions as we were proposing the budget each year when we were spending down reserves okay so in your packet you saw an outline of five different scenarios and so superintendent smith is going to go through those scenarios a little more detail okay and the first one you're looking at here is the one we brought you to the last meeting that four of you had the opportunity to look at right out of the shoot and that included have putting holding six percent in reserve putting two million immediately into school staffing to continue addressing uh enrollment schedules and teacher teacher student workloads and used doing 3.8 million investment in three priorities which would have been spending a total of 5.8 million what we heard at the last board meeting was an interest in a willingness to spend reserves down further and to put money directly in and then some conversation about what becomes then one time investment rather than ongoing spending commitment so then we have scenario two so so i just have a question if this doesn't throw you off your gamer um but i don't think there's anybody here that's interested in a six percent reserve yeah or if we're not point six percent reserve or so you're gonna get i think we're looking at 4.5 and below so i'm going to take you through this we'll just move on through i'm going to take you through the five only because they build on one another and you're going to get what your decision points are so and we knew the first one is and i'm just giving you all the context of how did we get there because the second scenario we added in to the the school staffing both school staffing and support because we heard the interest in accelerating additions to the school-wide support table so what we've done is say spend 3.5 million on school staffing and support um and do that immediately and then increase for the three priorities to four million okay i'm going to walk you through a little bit about what squad support means just so you get a context so schoolwide support right there when we're doing our staffing formula there is where school-wide support fits we get you first have the fte assigned by size then the equity allocation then the school-wide support um and then non-formula fte that gets you your the total allocation to a school the school-wide support includes the principal vice principal a secretarial allocation counselor allocation career coordinator i.t staff bookkeeper campus monitor study hall support athletic director and discretionary support the discretionary support allows the individual principal to then determine where they're actually like where they have need for the for the school but many of these are allocated by school size it's when we're going to address high schools specifically with this allocation yes tonight what we heard about the scholoid support for high schools um and this was so we we had our team meet specifically with the high school principals to talk about if we were to do some kind of an additional allocation um now how would we want to do it but what this allows us to do is allocate more resources based upon student enrollment to address needs outside of the classroom continue to support the effort to ensure that all of our students are prepared for college and career upon high school graduation and because of where we are in the year so what we've said we're going to do in this next staffing cycle is look at the actual allocations on the table what principles preferred if we do this now is to put in the discretionary column because some people have done more maybe they added a testing coordinator maybe they added a career count i mean people have done different decisions they want the ability to then add it where they need it given the mom where we are in time but just outside the classroom but it's outside the classroom it's the school-wide support table yes different topic altogether so consolidated budget is the is the budget
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the dollars that a principal has control over this is adding additional staffing and part of what we're recommending here so i'm going to just do is to do two things one is to add to bring our counselor ratio in all of our high schools down to one to three hundred so that we're doing that specifically like this was a goal we set during high school system design we that during the actual budgeting process we went from one to four hundred down to one to three fifty we're saying right now in terms of the thing we'd wanna do across all all high schools bring it down to one to 300 so it meets the goal that we had set for ourselves during high school system design it's the kind of support we need in terms of being able to really provide students with the guidance they need for the kind of um college and career aspirations that we're trying to provide support to our students for but then the second allocation would be based on student number so the actual amount of ft would be based on the number of students in your high school but the principal would have control over how they use it so it may be in one school it goes to it support in another like roosevelt perhaps it's to get to a full-time librarian perhaps and i mean so you get to use that how you need it in your individual school so one would be counselor second would be discretionary in the discretionary column on that table does that make sense okay so here we go so the recommendation improved high school counseling from 350 to one to 300 to one supports our milestone of students graduating and aligns with high school system design the number of positions that would be added 4.5 second increase the school-wide support based on enrollment and allow schools the discretion in how they use the fte so it lets us account for individual schools unique needs and account for the fact that some schools have higher enrollment and may have different administrative needs and we've heard this articulated by board members and then the third point there is just again restating what we have said before that this is the focus of our district staffing team in the next budget cycle so again we'll continue to look at what we learn about the needs of schools and our ability to add support this would be an additional 8.35 fte in this category if you are you see the size schools up at the top there so 400 to 499 or 500 to 599 600 to 699 so there's your size of school then you see the kind of allocation you get for each type of staff person in the school and the the total down at the bottom depending on what size school you are so the impact of the changes we're recommending here would be we would be adding to the counselor category and adding to the discretionary support category and improving those ratios okay uh the impact here is the school to school impact of the additional fte allocation so 12.85 overall but there it is spread across each one of the individual schools okay scenario three assumes that we do those first two things so the 3.5 million that we would dedicate immediately to school staffing the 4 million that we would say is going to be dedicated to the three priorities but that we're coming back to you with the spending plans and then dedicating three million to the one-time strategic investments and i'll go through a list of what those could potentially be three million leaves you with five percent in reserve if it's 5.5 million you do for the one-time strategic investments it leaves you with 4.5 in reserve so the difference between these last three proposals is just what you are willing to do in your one-time strategic investments and the last one if you spend eight million in your one-time strategic investments it leaves you with four percent in reserve so those are your three um one time and then the first two categories are exactly the same the kinds of things on the one-time investment list and they're consistent with things you've heard in testimony so right now our current budget we were planning for the pre-k-12 thinking around what goes into the in english language arts curriculum adoption but we only budgeted to implement the first half so the 612 is currently included in the current budget what we're proposing is that we would do the pre-k-12 so we'd add pre-k five into another as a one-time investment new teacher orientation so continuing to provide professional development for our new teachers making progress on deferred maintenance backlogs so focus on life safety these are total dollar amounts so this is not assuming we would do all of any of these the the total dollar amount i'm going to give you is way bigger than what you're going to be able to do but it's some combination of these that depending on how much you want to spend we would prioritize and bring back to you a plan so if we were completely doing the lead
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pain abatement six million dollars if we are completely refurbishing the stage rigging that's been a safety issue seven million dollars we've got additional space or building modifications to address overcrowding issues and if we were tackling that for example three modular units would cost us 1.2 million dollars we are have heard a lot about tech investments so if we were doing an asset inventory of rit current i.t around the district 120 k if we're extending tech bundles to all of our additional school staff three hundred thousand if we were adding additional mobile computing labs a million dollars musical instruments we don't have a dollar amount on that but we've got a wide range of if you are doing musical instruments for the existing programs if you're doing them district wide if you're i mean so there's bunches of scenarios if that was one that you're choosing to do then we would need to go put dollar amounts dollar figures okay so of all if we're if we are charged with going back and doing um the four million for this the three priorities and the strategic investments what we would do is come back to you with a spending plan on the four priorities there are existing work teams that have been established to develop the strategies for the four priorities and those work groups would then be vetting and are some are already scheduled to vet the strategies with these standing groups so the pat pps instructional practices committee is going to have the conversation about the strategies and on those three priorities on september 26th we'll take the ideas to super sac so we'll vet that with super sac mean it coalition of communities of color is scheduled for a conversation on again on september 26th these will also go to the achievement compact advisory committee and the some of the priorities and our goals set on these priorities have also been discussions at the achievement compact committee so an appropriate committee to actually be vetting the strategies and then the diploma and college and career team will vet the ones that are about high school graduation and high school completion so we've got really specific how are we making sure um the teams that have been working on these strategies that what things would be in the spending plans again back to re-anchor you on what your decisions are tonight it's looking at the release of the 3.5 million immediately for school staffing and support and then figuring out where you feel comfortable about what you hold in reserve and what you spend and so before we turn you back to your discussion i'm going to just ask david and ryan to give you a little more context about what the impact of the proposed spending is on how you think about what you hold in reserve okay thank you yeah so to come back to um uh our 2015-2016 budget so this was the page we showed earlier in terms of how we have we have inflation full day kindergarten and the spend on reserves that we already know about so just as an example when we think about uh the 7.5 so the proposal uh the proposed spending on the table for 7.5 million that could be um that could add as much to 7.5 to our commitment for 2015 2016. if that creates a commitment for ongoing services for the district so it's it's just it's um it's just meant to keep that in context this is uh this will you know creates a liability for us or a commitment to us in the future so um just to wrap this up two more pages um uh the first piece is just to remind us of what the next steps are uh meetings with the work groups are either scheduled or soon to be scheduled um we're gonna build spending plans uh more specific spending plans they'll cover both the three priorities and the one-time investments and then we'll provide updates for all of you and for the public at board meetings and work sessions so the decisions uh on the table once again are to authorize the immediate release of 3.5 million for school staffing and support and then to establish desired reserve and spending thresholds and specifically making decisions on the reserve level the free priorities and the level of funding for the strategic one-time investments and with that we can open up the questions okay thank you very much thank you um for questions director buell is on the budget development calendar last year on the budget the school board had eight had scheduled for school board discussion eight seconds for every million dollars okay and is there more this year how much time do we have per million dollars this year do we have any idea so um director buell on the um
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there's two places there are throughout the course of the year september through march we anticipate that there will be presentations from staff on uh programs and services which will have budget implications for the coming year david i'm sorry i'm just trying to interrupt you but yeah i'm not counting that i'm only counting from uh thank you matt i'm only counting from when the budget gets to us and we discuss the budget to make changes that we think right and that was the second item i was gonna yeah i figured you were getting there but i just wanted to make it clear to everybody in the audience um and so the last line item on that first page is um a couple of is is board meetings and work sessions in april and may after the superintendent has proposed the budget on the 15th so that's the scheduling issue for the board there will be listening sessions in the second half of march for the superintendent and board with a variety of folks and then there's the public hearings and then the board meeting and work sessions so that's that's a matter for the board to choose how many of those meetings and discussions that you want okay thank you very much you just kind of threw a ballpark deal out there and said do what you want there the nature of the budget process is that that we can follow it's staff work until the superintendent proposes the budget and after then then it's the the board is in the hands of the budget committee and actually part of the com the point of the conversations with the board prior to the budget proposal is for me to listen to the things you are interested in having show up in my budget proposal so that it should be reflecting our best thinking at that point in time so i mean part of the effort during those earlier ones and why we count them even though you don't steve is um because i'm listening to you and trying to reflect the things i'm hearing from you in my budget proposal that's why i kind of don't count them because i'm still down at numbers i know i hear you but that's but that's probably out of the five people order them up so i don't count those ruth just a brief um add-on to that and i think you know pam and i've been very clear in talking with staff that the intention for all those work sessions and discussions throughout the year is both that we are aware you're listening and that we also ask that staff be very as explicit as possible knowing that that's harder earlier in the year but it's explicitly possible in terms of what the specific budget impact is what the return on investment has been the effectiveness of the programs i mean that's what we've been looking for so we're mindful of that and we're going to continue to emphasize that throughout the year so that those sessions do become meaningful budget-related discussions okay other questions from board members or dr regan so at our last board meeting we had a really good discussion about all of this there were only four board members here and as we went it seemed like two of us landed on reserves at about four and a half percent and two of us landed at reserves of 3.9 to 4 so i was kind of curious that the staff landed at the 4.5 i have a specific amendment that i would like to offer that would consider the 3.9 percent on reserves instead i'm curious to know when we should when i should be offering that yeah i think uh carol let me know if this isn't what you had in mind but i think what we have talked about is tonight we're simply looking at trying to determine how much we're going to have in reserves and then superintend will be coming back with the other pieces right so really all we need tonight is uh what we're thinking up for the reserve but in answer to bob your question about how do we land on the 4.5 and we gave you all five scenarios thinking you can pick and choose and plug it in so that's really the and we gave you the framework of the resolution but the 4.5 is really specific to the last slide you saw that if in fact we're adding another seven million to our spending that you're then accounting for a little bit more in terms of what you want in reserve for ongoing so we just did 4.5 rather than four could you take it to four you could take it to four so that that is your conversation tonight is really where's your comfort level um given what our spending commitments are so i had let me see what other people want to say so i had indicated um last week that in general when i look at reserves um i think that it's important for us to be building reserves if we believe the economy is starting to go in the wrong direction if we believe the legislature might be heading in the wrong direction and there's a variety of factors at this point we literally three months ago tonight approved a budget at with a 3.9 percent reserve i haven't heard any board members since that time express concern or alarm the things are going in the wrong direction and we should think about something different instead i think things are moving relatively positively for us anyway i mean we've had 10 years
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of budget cuts we were stable last year and we're finally beginning to build back so i feel like we have just enormous needs out in our schools i understand that the majority of any funds that we put out we probably want to put out as as one time because we don't have the ability necessarily to sustain that funding a long time so i totally get that piece so i am still wanting to if you look at the resolution in our board book i am interested in offering an amendment that would have us keep our reserves at 3.9 percent i can read the specific language of where the resolution would change um so i'd like to make that motion uh is it okay with you if we go ahead and do our whole discussion and then we can talk about uh changes to resolution so everybody gets a chance and you'll have a chance to hear what everybody else thinks too michelle others okay tom i guess there's a question so the uh the four i get that the four um is that assuming that that's not one time because it could be one time oh the four million for the strategic yeah so that we've asked people to identify what can be on what's ongoing and what's strategic so it could be a combination it could be it could be a combination and i think the strategies and we don't know yet we don't know yet because we've actually vetted the strategy we've asked the teams to put together budgets and it will most likely be a combination of um ongoing in one time like some yeah so the 7.5 is not really going to be 7.5 it's going to be something less than that a little bit less we can count it probably being a little bit less but i don't know the real answer to that yet because i haven't gotten the budgets back from people yeah the kindergarten number isn't that high either yeah we determined last week yeah yeah because we have the title one dollars that are now paying for full day that we know are going to go back into title one so that should support us give us some support it doesn't change the funding need in the general fund we're gonna have to find 11 million dollars in the general fund the fact that we we will have some title one dollars available to do something else with but that's what we do with those dollars is not going to relieve the general fund of anything that we're doing this year so in order to make in order to maintain our current service level of what we're doing this year and to add full-day kindergarten and to cover inflation and to backfill the 9 million and however much of the 7.5 whether it's five or six that's all money we're going to have to find in the general fund all we can do with that title one money i say all i don't want to belittle the opportunity it's a huge opportunity but we can only do something with that that we're not currently doing so we are going to have to find that 11 million dollars for the general fund and we can't we can't take anything out that we're doing this year and now in the general fund and fund it with those title one dollars because that's supplanting and we will get into trouble we we can't do it we won't do it okay this particular resolution is unbelievable that we would come forward again with this same type of resolution that we did last year i go talk to the financial people and they're wonderful david and i had this discussion for an hour over an hour easily hour and a half probably and we went through the whole thing and i got these straight answers and i knew exactly where the money was i understood the whole thing when i was done it was marvelous and then i come in here and get this resolution which is go spend the money we don't have i don't have any idea where we're spending the money and not only that this says well you'll find out at future board meetings steve and then it says oh you'll find out in january where we're spending the money well i care where we're spending the money in the school district we're spending several million dollars i want to know where we're spending it when we vote for it in fact we're just voting we're not even voting on spending the money in a certain place we're just saying go spend this money and that doesn't that's not right that's not how a public body is supposed to work we're supposed to say here's where we're spending the money so a resolution that i would see would have the superintendent come back next week and say okay you authorize me to spend this much money this is where we're going to spend the money exactly where we're going to spend the money we're going to spend a hundred thousand dollars without it out at uh uh that's the intent that is the intent that's what we're doing next week it says inheritance next week it says this says and i don't mean to be rude but it says as expected it says will be funded by beginningfund.up
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update on proposals for the investment in the three priorities and the one-time future settlements at future board meetings and then at the bottom it says the board direct superintendent to include the full details of these changes in the first budget amendment to the 2014 which is likely to be presented to the board for approval in january 2015. because that's the formal one so you've got the you've got a couple things happening so one is that we would come back with the spending plan on the priorities that i'm going to come back with you at the spending plan that i don't have now because i'm asking other people to put them together and they may it may not be the next board meeting it may be two board meetings away two of them may come early and then one may come a little later because of them being developed so they're they're coming back to you before we say go forth and do it uh and then on the one-time spending same thing we'll put together a spend a spending plan and bring it back but you we i need to know from you how how much that is hang on one second let me finish answering and then the actual formal amendment happens after we've actually got the audit complete and then we come back in your first formal um budget amendment happens after we've completed the audit and you've approved the kafir which doesn't happen till january so part of why we're do well part of why we're doing this by resolution is that you're all agreeing to go to go forward and do this so we're doing it with resolution your formal budget amendment which is a formal process happens in january which is the first opportunity to do that am i correct in the description describing that yeah that may be that may be correct but it's incorrect the it's an incorrect way to spend the money if we could if we should outline how where we're going to spend the money and then i mean we should outline it within a week or two at the most and we're going to spend the money at the on for these particular things and then we come back and then you agree to spend the money at that and then we can come back and officialize it if we want and i made that word up officialize it what you're doing right now is directing me to go build spending plans on the other two parts that's not what i'm directing you to do as i vote for this that i see i'm directing you to come back in january with a spending plan can i can i steve can i can i intercept i had i had actually the same question as you and i think it's the wording of number four i actually had considered a a recommended amendment here um but i struggle to it says the board directs the superintendent to provide updates on proposal for the investment of three priorities what i think it we were trying to say i hope this is right the board directs the superintendent to provide recommendations on the other monies the three priorities and the one-time funds and i added language that says that the board will have the opportunity to review and approve those recommendations with a date in there bobby not i don't have a date specific but what i what i was concerned about here when i read four is it looked like we were saying yeah do they do the three priorities and do the one-time investments and let us know how it goes and that's not the way we budget typically you come back to us with some specific recommendations and we go through it and then we have a chance to say yeah that sounds great so i did have an amendment that i think will address some of what you did and i think it was the intention but the way it was written it wasn't clear okay but it's not the intention that i see last time we did this and we had the money and we we ended up with 68 eas that were never authorized by the board of education until after they were all hired they were authorized in january again i think january mr win so last last year in october we came to you with some with an outline of a plan for how to use uh additional funds and you didn't pass a resolution and i think what we heard from at that point was that there was no resolution so this year there's a resolution and and and item number one on the resolution specifically the only thing that we would be doing immediately is the 3.5 million school staffing and support and we are being i believe very explicit about what that is that is additional fte in schools the majority of which is uh classroom teachers or the equivalent and which is essentially creating additional set-aside to do the same things that we've done already and the second part is additional high school support and we're being very explicit about what that is all the way down to what schools that's being allocated i mean you have the whole plan for those number two number two says the board directs the superintendent that up to four million investment in the three priorities well maybe we don't want the three priorities these are our three priorities well we need to discuss that and we need to vote as that is a separate thing to see whether and and what are you going to do
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with the three projects number four tells her to come back i have amendments then i'll just put forth amendments on what to do with the money when you go out would that be okay would that be fine with the superintendent then in other words i'll suggest where to spend this four million to meet these three priorities is that okay yeah that's good when you get back okay good then i'll just make those amendments as we go along when we're all done i have about six eight ten amendments okay sure thank you the um i'm i'm feeling a little bit uh well inarticulate on this issue because uh so now i'm i'm mumbling a little bit but the um everybody wants these three priorities uh everybody wants a great school district um there there's so many things that we need to do so i guess um and i'll just say it and i'll leave it i'm not gonna add in a minute but i feel this the the way it's framed is somewhat contrived uh and where where i as a board member what i would like is to you know so last week it was 2 million for these priorities um it was 3.8 for the priorities it was 2 million for the staffing and then what we did was add your support table investment in so it's two for the staffing and 1.5 for the school support table and then we took the 3.8 up to four because you're indicating a willingness to invest more yeah and so i mean i i want to invest more um i just think that we have to look at the whole at the whole district when when we're investing and it may be at the end of the day that okay the way it's laid out is is is the best but um i think it's it might be missing things i guess director atkins so um i support the resolution i appreciate um the work that's gone into all this i mean i think my from my perspective um what we're doing tonight is setting that direction i mean any one of us in this room could come up with a list that would be a really valid and important list of things that we need in this district but where we need to have that larger discussion is in our actual budgeting process for 1516. this is extremely welcome thanks to the great financial work stewardship of our staff and our good fortune and the important economy so it's awesome um but it's actually a relatively small amount of money and it's not going to solve obviously any one you know it's just a small piece so to me it's not the best use of our time as a board to be debating i mean we could again we could debate all year how to spend this money to me let's give the superintendent direction and get that money that immediate staffing out into the schools you'll have you'll review with your groups with the staff come back as quickly as possible with a plan and we'll approve that meanwhile we've got in october november we've got on our agenda i think principal evaluation district-wide boundary review cte strategic plan for the district and and on and on based on the priorities that we have so again to me the best use of our time is not to delve down into the details on this particular welcome but relatively small pot of money but really to give that high level direction to the superintendent and then we'll hear back in terms of the reserves i am comfortable with the 4.5 i think that's the right thing to do given both that we're looking at and including some ongoing and that we have the other challenges ahead of us i was i think for me the 3.9 and this current year's budget reflected sort of a cautious optimism or willingness to go there based on again the huge pent-up needs in every school and across the district and i'm thrilled to see i mean the type of investment we're talking about finally getting our council ratios on and on is fantastic so i think for me given that staff started with a very carefully considered recommendation of six percent by of the 4.5 as written in the resolution is a very uncomfortable landing and again you know we heard tonight about music librarians just training for teachers around dyslexia we've heard about books and technology pair educators you could add to this outdoor school i mean a number of pieces so these are all valid all valid and important investments we could make but i would like to i want us to be able to focus our work as a board on moving into next year's budget discussion and having that full discussion there throughout the year so that's my that's my two cents on it thank you dr blau i have a couple of questions before i
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talk a little bit about what proposal i'm doing um one i've heard a couple of mentions that some of the support that we're looking to invest in is support with synergy um part of synergy um which is the new student information system um that we many adopted in the past couple of years and everybody's been struggling with um and so i'm just curious what some of those issues still are and why some schools seem to still need that support but yet other schools don't because and i don't know if we so um as part of the update on the plan for the three priorities there will be some component of that which is about synergy and data support because we believe that um having those systems better supported will allow us to address those third grade reading high school graduation and completion goals so part of the when you hear from staff what the plans are let's say it's four million dollars just so i can say i can hear in sentence when you hear the plans for the four million dollars for three priorities you will hear something about um synergy and data support okay so that's in the strategic investments that's in the that's part of the three priorities might be related to an early warning system if we can't get data exactly thank you yeah so part of the high school graduation completion is um further work on on that another question i had is um and i think suzanne mentioned this earlier i mean i've heard a couple folks up here we've received a number of emails from various schools this class size is too high and it's really common throughout the system to have anomalies and i'm just curious there are a couple of schools that aren't on our list here that you provided about getting extra fte and i was just wondering if we know we got some data in one of these pages that talked about how many how many classrooms will still have 30 how many classrooms will still have 29 and i'm not sure if we if we're resolving all of the issues or if we can say then that every k-8 classroom is under 30. and sasha to come up and do this because they've been here they've been the ones deeply in working with principals on this so here it is there were 20 classrooms in grade first through third grade that will be at 29 10 classrooms at 39 at 31 and one at 32. having had a kid with 34 in his class several times that's actually an improvement over the past years i had 35 all our trend lines are improvements but so sarah who system planning and performance and sasha senior director pre-k-12 have been the ones deeply involved in doing the staffing work with principals so we'll let you guys respond to that so some of the uh 3.5 million in staffing that has been brought to you is to address some of those class size issues so that's the the first point that the second point is they're still going to be some places that have high class sizes what we have left is a tiny buffer in that especially for the the k-8s to address emergent needs as you know we're still finalizing our physical uh counts to get more info information we actually still have some students still coming into the system um so we did leave a little bit of wiggle room in there a little bit minuscule to address some of the emergent needs that aren't haven't been addressed so so far i just really appreciate this additional information that you provided about the work you're doing to work with the lower grades as well as the high schools to meet their needs and i think you also provided the information that with the next infusion of school staffing there will be no kindergarten classes with more than 25 students unless the class has been allocated an educational assistant so that's great because that's our our standard or is offering dual language immersion because i know there's some a couple exceptions there um and we also read there are no class sizes above 32 within grades one two three but again as everyone said you know and to me i guess this flag's just this merits attention in the again in the upcoming budget um 1516 what is that systemic look what are we and i think this has also been flagged in the district wide boundary review process as well like what are we offering let's be really clear and strategic and systemic about what we're offering and what we can offer and the different configurations and make those decisions counselors at k-8 again i'm thrilled we're talking about finally fulfilling the high school
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system design ratio but right now it's on the lower grades it's this we have at least a half-time counselor not sure about librarians but we again it's that systemic piece that when we're talking when we have a holistic discussion about the entire budget coming up that's something i'd like to flag and raise for the future but again for me for this moving forward um i want to get the staffing out into the schools as quickly as possible and hear back from you about some additional investments but again i really appreciate you providing this information connect sorry that's going to finish that's okay um thank you for the additional information that's it's what i was looking for um i and i um a little bit what you were saying director atkins um i know to compare k8 um or even k5 especially to high school is a really challenging thing because our our k5 model right i mean we have full classrooms of 28 29 all day long in high school they might teach one one class where they have 23 in this class and then they have 41 in the next class because it's more elective and selective in some or you might have 41 people in your freshman english class but only 17 in your japanese immersion program and so it's it's a real funny balancing system so i don't like comparing the two because i often hear people say well we need to fund more of this or more of that because if if we had class sizes they're just they're hard to balance the same way because they're different models if we said we would fund high schools for example at the same rate that we do elementary schools then we would have to make sure every class that's offered had 28 or 29 kids and every one of those classes before we offer and that's a crazy way especially as we're sending kids off so i just wanted to highlight that as far as scenarios i appreciate i've heard some folks um i guess director reagan you had mentioned something about three months ago we passed a budget with 3.9 and that was with the data that we had they're trying to balance in my opinion we're trying to balance spending versus what we were comfortable in reserves and i feel like i am not confident that the state is going to fund full-day kindergarten i think there are some additional contingencies so for example if not this year we know the next year the next year there's going to be additional pe requirements and we don't know exactly what that's going to look like or how we're going to do that so i appreciate coming back with dropping by one and a half percent what you had originally proposed for reserves um i'm comfortable with this four and a half percent reserves and i think a community member tonight said you know it's tough to go out to the levy and say um with four and a half in reserves that you need more money and i've heard i've heard actual equal weighting that if you're not going to save some of it you're just going to keep spending it as soon as we send it to you and then i've heard some people say well you have to you have to make our schools whole so that we know that you're responsibly spending it so it's kind of six and one half dozen of the other from what i hear from community input and cases are made to both and i think that since my time on the board what i've seen is us be really thoughtful about what we put that number at so that actually as we saw beaverton and we saw a couple other school districts have to make really significant cuts we weren't we didn't have to do that and it was because of the foresight that i think some of my colleagues prior to my being here had done to build those reserves up one time i guess my biggest priority and what i look forward to hearing with the three priorities coming back and the strategic one-time investments is we are failing our historically underserved populations and i could be convinced to go even deeper in reserves if we thought um that we could make a real impact on those numbers um i don't want us to go back three and a half million i'm comfortable with going to staffing but i would really i'm really interested in trying to design something that targets interventions that we know are going to impact those students because for too long it's been been something that's kind of been an afterthought or we've tried to achieve something more and um i'll just leave it at that that as as you guys consider the the three priorities and the one-time strategic investments please look whether it's the equity lens but also who are our families and who are our students that have traditionally not done well and what do we need to do to support them director morton i want to piggyback on greg's comment regarding the racial educational equity lens i think or policy i don't see clearly how we're incorporating that yet but i think the expectation is still there that we do i think it's it's particularly important because we uh
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we do already have an equity set aside that from my standpoint doesn't clearly offer us yet at least doesn't clearly offer us um outcomes that that are positively affecting our and historically underserved populations so uh any sort of investment in that i think needs to needs to go through that lens and i think that that answers a lot of questions for me in terms of our tasks tonight and determining reserve i think i've been fairly consistent in less reserve is fine by me if we have uh smarter investments that can move the dial with our students so i'm probably closer to the four than the 4.5 but uh and you know to bobby's comments earlier about when we approved a uh a budget a few months ago we were comfortable with a 3.9 but i think those those investments i think would have to be clear uh i understand that makes it a difficult task uh given the timing of the decision tonight regarding reserves and when we'll see what those investments might be but i wanted to at least say that i think this evening i am i would lean towards the majority of the board in terms of the set aside for reserve um and and hopefully that collective thought will uh at the end of the day give us a a good idea of what we're what we need to spend on in those in these three priority areas plus um i think very importantly releasing resources for student staffing which i think is you know time is of the essence and in my opinion so long story short i want to see how uh when we do see investments in the three priority areas i want to see how the racial equity lens has been used and i want to see specifically how this district is beginning to invest those dollars that serve kids that have been historically underserved mina did you have anything that you wanted to add yeah i think that we should go with the four percent just because it is important to keep money reserves um like um greg was saying just in case like we don't have the funding for full day kindergarten because that's so important for our students but at the same time making a lot of one-time investments just because there are lots of things that need to be done for example we just got a new like tech center at my school and it's amazing like you can print things from your phone like every high school should have that it just makes things so much more convenient and it's just an awesome thing i think we should really put some money into just investing in that things that make education so much more convenient easier for students at every school i uh totally agree with greg and with matt in terms of the investments that we need to support our kids that we're not reaching now and to me that's that's the four million dollar investment in particular in the three priorities i mean i think that's completely targeted to support kids that need extra support so i'm really happy to see that we're going to do that and obviously want more details as we go as well the one thing that hasn't come up yet that i'm curious about is and this is not a one-time but i'm curious if the discussion has come up around adding days to our calendar going forward and i know that that's becomes a contract issue the expense is of course paying teachers to work more days and we've made some progress this year but when you look at instructional time for kids being so critical and having more time with great teachers and you look at the struggle we've had particularly at the high school level with meeting our minimum instructional hours i'm curious to know if any conversations have started with pat and whether we could think about that as a scenario before we open up our next contract in two years because that's honestly where i would want to put money and i just don't know if those conversations they've even been had but i would certainly ask us to think about it i'm curious to hear what others say so i'll say the conversation about instructional time in this context for this one we've had it as a suggestion from um that we've heard from people saying we'd like to see this happen we haven't done it given the timeline we're working on with trying to get this out yes it involves a contract conversation with pat so it's probably
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not in this time frame the bigger conversation has been with cosa and as we're talking about this next legislative session and what are we doing as a whole state when you look at instructional time in oregon in order to get us even to the middle of the pack nationally you would have to add the equivalent of 15 days to get us to the middle of the pack nationally so that's much more that if we're doing something as a state to say how do we increase instructional time how do we have that conversation so i've been in that in that one um but yeah in our neighbors budget cycle could we put that one to you that one up to have more conversation with pit well i don't know that my colleagues agree but i would certainly love for us to be you got to start sometime initiating that well and as we did we added two days this year and we did some differential for focus on priority schools to not be losing time for the extra professional development so we did make progress this this year but a long way to go that would be a really yeah keen interest so um i guess i i do want to come back to if people feel like they've had go ahead is it okay if i speak to okay um and i i will definitely get back to your amendment bobby because i think one of the things that i would say is that um although i don't agree with the first two on the numbers um i do think that this is unclear about what's actually happening and i think that uh we do need to add the language that says that this is a these are recommendations and you're coming back to the board because it's just not i can do that i totally understand the intent and the conversations that we've had but it's just not clear so i think it needs to be clarified um on reserves i'm more uh i think i think we should have 4.5 for our reserves and there are a number of reasons for that i vividly remember not too many years ago when we had a 40 million budget hole and our reserves really helped us at that time and you know it wasn't like all of a sudden it wasn't a slow gradual decline into a recession it was boom and we were in recession and i i don't have any confidence that that couldn't happen to us again and so um i i think it's important for us to establish a reserve and i'm much more comfortable being closer to the five-point aspirational goal uh than i am to being to the the 3.1 um and i was thinking about this today and the thing that came to my mind was when i used to get a gift from somebody or get my allowance from my parents or whatever but always part of that was setting aside some for saving for a rainy day or for whatever so even though we have tremendous needs and as a child i have tremendous needs for candy and whatever but even though we have tremendous needs in our schools i think it's also our responsibility to act fiscally responsible and make sure that we have savings for that rainy day that we may have and and my colleagues have all listed any number of things that could happen in addition to a recession that would cause us to maybe have to dip into those again and so the more we have in those reserves to me the better the better off will be um that said i i think that's it that's where i am on reserves and um i would be more than happy to um hang on a second i'd be more than happy to entertain your emotions bobby if you want to start and i think steve has some too um i knew well i have some emotions but i also have a response to director atkins comments okay yes go ahead first of all i see it as my job to delve into the details i don't believe that as a public official we that i should be spending money that i have no idea where it's going i think that that's my job is to watch that money like the taxpayers elected me to do that to pay attention to where that money goes and to know where it's basically going to be spent maybe not in every little bitty detail but certainly if we're going to spend what director actually calls a small amount of money 16.8 million dollars i have a i don't see that as a small amount of money i see that as a large amount of money and that's my responsibility and and i also don't agree with the idea that well we have all these needs so we can't really meet any of these needs that's an argument that happens all the time i'm willing to grab what you can do and do it as opposed to just let it go out someplace and there's a and all last year i sat and listened to we will discuss this in the budget session we will this is something for the budget session and when we got the discussion for the budget session we had eight seconds per million dollars to discuss it and so we it wasn't discussed in the budget session so i reject that whole idea i'm sorry i don't trust us to sit down and spend the time and energy in the budget session that we really should take also reject the idea of return on investments return on investment is something that oeib
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talks about all the time i want to spend the money where we know children benefit directly from it i don't want to invest it out here someplace and hope down in the future or someplace over here in the ether that some kid's going to benefit i want to spend that money where children benefit uh when bobby's done and we've discussed hers i have some specific suggestions for where to do that for those responses just to clarify really quickly i probably didn't express myself well at all i wasn't indicating that nothing could be done about anything i'm indicating that to me it's the appropriate procedures to have the superintendent come back having worked very carefully on what the strategic priorities are we talked about a lot of those last year we weren't able to fund them all god knows so she's going to come back to us with a very specific list about where she sees the most effective investments and that's what i'm looking forward to seeing and we certainly know that there were many many things in our budget that we wanted to fund that were um definitely things that could help the children or help our students that we weren't able to fund and so this gives us an opportunity to move forward on things that we already know about not new things things that we already know help kids so director chris just yeah so i i i'm going to support bobby's amendment for the 3.9 and uh and i actually think it's given our track record um from a budget standpoint of the balance of going forward that it's that it's a fiscally prudent uh move and that we can use the money too to your point matt and greg and everybody on the board in terms of our underserved um there's one strategy out there that we absolutely know works which is a career technical education we know that works for the population our underserved population and going from 4.5 to 3.9 uh could add 2.5 million dollars to that program and could impact kids today and i think it would be worth it so i'm going to support your amendment fund okay any other general comments are you ready great okay so um i think i'll offer the amendment that it looks like there's pretty strong support for first if i could which is number four and all this is doing is clarifying that what the superintendent is going to do in terms of three priorities and the one-time strategic investments is instead of coming back to us and providing an update she would actually come back and provide a recommendation and then we would add that the board will have the opportunity to review and approve those recommendations and so it just makes it clear what the process is i think it was again when i read it it wasn't clear so if i could just read the new number four would say the board directs the superintendent to provide recommendations on proposals for the investment in the three priorities and the one-time investments at future board meetings including a more detailed accounting of how the funds are to be used comma and the board will have the opportunity to review and approve these recommendations so the last clause it's the last clause and it's changing the word uh the superintendent would provide updates to the superintendent would provide recommendations so it's just being very clear that's uh that's what i'm moving um so that's a motion that's a motion uh do we have a second second second okay let's have some discussion then if anybody has a quick dragon's so question supportive of this i'm hearing the superintendent that's what was her intent but i just want to be clear again to me it's important that we move through this quickly quickly so we're not going to come back the recommendation we give you input then you go away and we do it in new scenarios there's urgency here if there's urgency correct okay so we're reviewing it but we're not having an extended correct okay just want to make it we want it to move this year so we want to be able to get the other people's hands and let it this is really really happy news we don't sound like we're happy i know i know this is awesome so let's get some money out there and this these are all recommendations that you have vetted through this group that we already saw multiple different kinds of those are on priorities that you said many of what already have strategies in motion that this will be expanding on those strategies going deeper on those strategies right right correct exactly so okay any other discussion about commercial dr bill this is i i can't support the motion without a date because the history in the past and what we've done we've done and we've done it all since i've been on this board we throw something to the superintendent superintendent comes back but all the things have actually taken place so you really can't change them because they've all taken place and so without a date
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there's no way that i could vote for that because we're just repeating the same mistakes that we keep making over and over i just come back put a date on it and i'm you know willing to i guess i would challenge it it's a mistake to authorize this pretended to do our job it's it's not a matter we're doing the job it's a matter of us doing our job the superintendent always does her job she does a great job at it it's us who doesn't do our who don't do our job let's move let's let's go ahead and move forward so i think i think there's a there's you have stated for the record that you find that there's urgency in coming back to us quickly on these three i do believe you on that so i i i don't know that i want to change the amendment but i i think that it is on the record that there is great urgency about this i hope i hope steve that you will support this okay so let's if there's no more discussion let's go ahead and all those in favor of amendment to resolution 4961 uh sub paragraph resolutions on paragraph four say aye aye opposed no no you're not opposed or no you secure enough no here or no okay um so that amendment passes uh six to one okay student okay other so i have a second amendment okay this has to do with the level of reserves going forward it would actually change the current resolution number three a number would change and number five a number uh which of the last sentence would basically change so basically what i would uh be doing is asking that we set the reserve level where it is today and where we were unanimously comfortable with it three months ago at 3.9 percent so number three would say the board directs the superintendent to add up to and i'm told that the number from director wind would be 8.5 million dollars in one-time investments that support the improvement of outcomes for portland public school students and effective operations and that would also change number five then to say the board acknowledges that it adopted its budget for 2014-15 on june 23rd 2014 with the reserve level 3.9 percent the sentence that would be added what and that uncommitted contingency will remain at 3.9 percent so i move i make that motion so are you you're moving both of these at the same time uh yeah okay well i think you have to because they're connected yeah they're connected i'll second now okay um discussion then on uh the two resolutions one on step three and one on step five so if i could just explain go ahead um what we would be looking at doing here is expressing a sense of urgency um given that we've had 10 years of disinvestment in education and disinvestment in our students and that last year was sort of flat this is the first year that we're we're back and able to do things this is a relatively small amount of money in the scope of things but by doing this amendment we would be adding about three million dollars in one time um ability to provide new technology supports for the teachers that we just added maybe some professional development just giving you examples of some things technology perhaps for students or for schools supplies for career technical education music instruments textbook adoptions which i think we've named pretty clearly you've named some of these already one of the other ones is that we have begun many new immersion programs i have no idea whether our libraries support the books being in native languages and the rest so supporting our emerging bilingual students through either textbooks supplies or library supplies and i do think that there is a need perhaps for modulars and and other ability for us to be looking at you know adding space in schools where we know we have some really significant issues so i think that there's an urgency and i'm really pleased that we're down to four and a half percent i think if we take it down a little bit more and settle at 3.9 it'll just give us an ability to really make some of those one-time investments that we've been wanting to make for a long time so that's there's comments dr bill when i talk to mr wind about this he said that there was a five thousand dollar poll that came up since the 3.9 percent and i'm concerned about five million
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dollars five million dollars more which is the difference between five and three proposal five and three and i'm concerned if we actually have five million dollars that we're not covering based on the fact that we had the 3.9 and now we're at 3.9 still when there's an extra 5 million dollars so actually the 3.9 which we all agreed upon at the time basically i think i might even voted for that did we vote for that stuff but we just get into the back rooms is brand new and so really if we kept the reserves at the same level we wouldn't actually be at the 3.9 we'd actually be at the five so i kind of yeah yeah would you could you explain that to them sure i'm just not sure that they understand it so it has to do it's the the fact is that when we when you adopted the budget with the reserve level of 3.9 million dollars that was with a certain level of spending and and and the the 35 million dollars challenge for next year was with the level of spending in the adopted budget and 3.9 of reserves the way that things are not the same after we do this is that we are spending more money some of which is um you know we're going to need to replace and in order to sustain so and director curtis said earlier not all of the 7.5 is going to be sustained but if you if just hypothetically if if half of it is then we're looking at over 40 million dollars that we have to be able to sustain so i don't think you know 3.9 in the adopted 3.9 reserve for the adopted budget and 3.9 if we do now is not exactly the same thing because the the challenge for next year is greater after you make the choices so that that's one way in which 3.9 going forward is not the same as 3.9 when you adopted the budget that that was the conversation that i had with director buell can i pick you back on that because i think it relates i think it relates to the question i had is when we talk about 3.9 in reserves are we talking about the 3.9 of the new funding level that we're setting or 3.9 which is the same dollar amount on our adopted budget so we took about 3.9 at the new funding level but that's only 800 000 more and and that the ongoing the potential challenge is you know 40 to 42 million dollars as opposed to 35. another seven million dollars yeah it's another five to seven million dollars depending on how much of the four million for the three priorities is ongoing or not can i ask a clarifying question sure in almost any of our budgets we have one-time expenses um and wouldn't it be true that if we use some of our money now for one-time expenses and we get ourselves into a little bit of a crunch next year that we could decide to hold off on some of the one-time expenses the following year so for example if we do a textbook adoption or a technology now we could hold off on doing that one-time expense next year so just yeah we have some wouldn't be able to in our budget for the current year we identified 4.7 million dollars of one-time expenses those are not in this going forward thing we've already backed out the 4.7 of one time that we have in this year's budget and said you know assume that we're not doing that when we when we put these numbers up there right so we've done that we've done exactly what you said which is the stuff that we specifically identified in the current year as being one time we haven't included that in this uh you know compilation right but presumably next year in the following year we would have some one-time expenses in our budget i mean we typically have some one-time expenses in our budget if we have room over and above this stuff yeah it depends on it and so if we get into a crunch next year we may not do as many one time because we may not do anything this number here assumes that we don't do any other questions dr black i don't know a question director people the problem that i have going to 3.9 isn't totally around the 5 million extra i think that's important i'm willing to cut that in half but the problem i have is where are we going to spend the money that we don't have if we go to 3.9 where are we going to spend that money i don't have any idea where we're going to spend
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it and so i want to take reserves and put it in a place where i don't have any idea where i want to spend it or where we're going to spend it i mean i i don't think i can really vote on a reserve number until i understand where we're going to spend the money to see if that makes sense because saving money is a pretty important thing as director noel said and i'm kind of fiscally responsible try to be i think we all are but if we're going to put money in savings i'd rather put money in savings than i'd spend it on things that i don't think are necessarily where we should be spending them so i'm kind of i'm closer to 4.5 than i am to 3.9 because of that okay those are two things anything else i could just maybe start just very quickly i mean i think um i've already said i'm supporting the 4.5 so i'm not supporting the amendment but if it passes i just i really appreciate that you identified it as on uh one time oh absolutely yeah so that's i appreciate that because i still remain very concerned about future years and i have already expressed my concern about being a 3.9 rather than 4.5 so i will not do that again um and unless there's additional conversation yes does if someone a person who could bring back a resolution to rebound on can only be a person that votes nowhere could they be a person who doesn't vote yes bring it back like for instance if we pass a resolution you can ask to have a re you know you can have to have the revolution if you if you vote yeah who's do you have to vote yes in order to bring it back that's correct right i have to vote yes in order to bring it back right okay thank you yes okay um let's go ahead and can we get a ruling on that from jolly i mean is charlie here because it sounds like we're being told otherwise here she comes charlotte we have a point of order that we need your help with you can the only people who can ask to reconsider emotion the people who vote yes correct the only people we're currently looking at a resolution there's an amendment right for that resolution we're about to vote on it and director beale wants to know if he votes yes or no if he can bring it back he can ask to bring it back in the past i believe when the board has had specific points of order the agreement had been that we would take a brief recess to okay look at that because i do not know absolutely there's another opportunity if say i think you did do you just have to be in the majority i think you have to be in the majority in order to reconsider that would make sense i'd be willing to accept that in other words if four people voted no i could we're going to take a very brief recess and if you would look that up for us that'd be just great thank you thank you everybody gets a chance here hello maybe there's a major leak here comes may have changed their mind or voted no it was in the majority which may have changed is
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is he okay yeah i know i'm getting there too it's okay you and me okay so um thank you very much for everyone for taking that short break uh and we did um look at the point of order concerning uh asking for to reconsider a prior vote and the rule on that is that you must have voted on the prevailing side in order to make the motion to reconsider so it's not whether you vote yes or no it's whether you voted on the prevailing side so any other questions okay in that case we will now vote on the amendment to resolution 4961 amending subsection 3 and 5 of the resolution all those in favor of this amendment please say aye calling pardon me uh miss houston can we have a roll call on it please yes no director regan yes director atkins no director morton yes director fuels i'm abstaining director curler yes and chair knows no three things doesn't pass okay um does anybody else have an amendment student representative oh and i did it again sorry student representative no okay others any other amendments to this resolution okay um in that case the vote the board will now um vote on resolution 4961 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes right yes yes yes all sorts of amendments well we've already 20 we're already voting yeah and i asked three times if anybody else no you didn't you just zoomed through i have all sorts of things to discuss so all those imposed opposed to what to vote to this amendment to this resolution because we already have voted i already asked for the eyes now we're asking for the nays you said i can make the motions that i have i told you this evening that i had all sorts of motions on this resolution right i mean i spelled them out and they said i have tons of emotions are you are you a no are you an abstention which one would you like to be are you talking about my amendment no we're done with you on what we're talking about we're talking about the whole overall amendment which i have the whole overall resolution which i have several amendments to and we just went zip even i know i said to reagan doesn't even know you have it there yeah i mean he had been clear that he wanted to i know that that's why i paused and i asked again that was the quickest pause i've ever seen i'd like to have pause of all time i'll ask the board would the board like to reopen this and have further discussion with uh on this resolution i think i think that's just a yes or no yeah i think yes uh director bill was expected that he had one or two yes okay fine yes i will too um okay direct reveal uh your amendments like that move that the four million dollar that the four million dollars that is set aside for investment in the three priorities include librarians and reading teachers as the ninety percent as ninety percent of the four million dollars should be spent on
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librarians and reading teachers and reading teachers um okay uh is there a second to that the motion uh fails for lack of a second okay next you have another motion yeah these are these are amendments right amendment to the resolution that's correct i'd like to move that to five million dollars set aside as single as one time only did we come out at three at five point four we came out at four on our on the resolution we still have four and a half percent four and a half that's where it is right now okay i'd like to move that to five that the five million dollars five million five hundred thousand dollars set aside for one-time amendments would include two million dollars to middle grades athletics music and other electives one million dollars to the to high schools state to high school staffing 1 million dollars to social service coordinators in in high school 1 million dollars to the counselors and a half a million dollars to reading teachers and i'd like to speak to that motion dependent on the second one is there a second motion fails for lack of a second okay thank you here we go in the next one i might i might add that uh director bill these are all things that i think it's very appropriate for you to direct the superintendent because she's the one who's going to be bringing these things back to us at the next meeting or i think within the next couple of weeks you might want to suggest them to her because you have some very good suggestions i'd like to move that no more than one million dollars is spent on discipline disparities is there a second motion fails for lack of a second okay i'd like to amend the motion to read that the that the um instead of 4.5 set aside for reserves that we put in 4.0 percent discussion and these other issues you brought up steve um are yet to be determined um and so the superintendent gets to come back and give us a plan that then we get to amend or not it would have been nice to be able to talk to them though well i think we will be able to do that when they come up yeah these won't come up so other discussion about this motion okay director bules move to change the reserve to 4.0 all those in favor say aye wouldn't there have to be an adjustment of the other pieces for the director yes they would okay sorry sorry okay i mean i think already on here okay sorry okay that can be a second okay sorry all those in favor miss houston would you call a roll for us please director belial no director yes director atkins no director morton i abstain director fuel yes director curler yes chair knowles no the motion fails for lack of a majority oh excuse me student representative jazwa no no thank you have any more emotions yes okay
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i'd like to move that the four million dollars that was the three priorities be spent that we let's put it this way maybe i get something that will work i'd like to move that one of the that one of the plans brought forth by the superintendent in response to this resolution includes four million dollars spent on librarians and reading teachers and counselors and let's just i'll just stop there is there a second motion fails for lack of a second others i'd like to move that we put one ea out at creative science school out of this money and then it'd be nice to talk to this one is there a second motion fails for lack of a second i'd like another motion i'd like to move that we use this money to make sure we have librarians in every high school who are there full-time again um this this is all stuff that the superintendent will be bringing back to us and there's a timeline for the discussion is there a second to this motion point of order yes can i get clarification about um when you say direct reveal all of this money i don't understand which which money or i i said that did i sell this man i meant some of this money would be which that some of that would be spent to make sure that some of the superintendents plan a me to restate it with that meal cap premium stated paranormal i think i think it's fine where you have it okay all right okay go with it there's a second okay the motion fails for lack of a second yeah let's let's do one more move that some of this money be spent on the could you be specific about which no piece of the money you want it has to go in one of these numbers directly you have to be amending something that's already in the resolution so which but to be a little more specific for us okay take a moment would you like to use mike no okay oh let's do out of the 5 million one time only okay 5.5 million one time only move that that uh some other that the superintendent's proposal include having a full-time librarian at roosevelt high school i thought we did that one no we didn't do that one we did all the high schools we did all the high schools roosevelt high schools okay motion fails for lack of a second i think that that's probably pretty much yeah that's pretty much it yeah okay excuse me i'm not on record on voting against any of those things i'm on record in asking our superintendent to come back to us with a plan that we will vote on thank you i would agree with that yeah i think we all do i think we all we all said that there was a they were all i mean there were many good ideas in there and as i tried to explain to director buell that we have a process that we're going through here and that's the and that's the process we're going to move forward with so don't be laughing and getting them back on anybody's terms okay at this time we're going to go ahead and now vote on resolution 4961 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes please this is a voice vote all opposed please indicate by saying no roll call i'm sorry you'll do a roll call vote miss houston on resolution 4961. director belial yes director regan yes director atkins yes director morton yes director fuel no director curler yes chair known yes and student representative yes great thank you we're so glad that we have a surplus and we look forward to hearing the superintendent's plan in a couple of weeks thank you very much everybody i know that was long director knows can i just clarify that it's not a surplus it's not a surplus surplus
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excuse me for calling us surplus okay uh now let's move on to our first reading of the complaint policy again the board first received the report on this item at their september 16th meeting the proposed policy will be posted on the board website and the public comment period is 21 days with the last day of comment being october 14 2014 contact contact information for the public comment will be posted with the policy and the board will hold a second reading of the policy on october 30th 2014. superintendent smith would you like to introduce uh this item um yes the jolly patterson general counsel and judy martin our district ombudsman will be uh presenting this item and actually available to respond to questions so uh good evening board members jolly patterson general counsel and uh this is following up from the work session that we had um where it was a very helpful um discussion regarding the complaint policy and administrative directive that's being presented for a first reading this evening so i just wanted to go through briefly and let you know what changes i had made to the drafts following that work session and some additional public input and then ms martin was going to talk a little bit about her experience thus far in her ombudsman roles so um so in the policy we included a reference to the ombudsman as you asked we clarified that complaintants are encouraged to contact staff and or supervisors so that it's very clear that that is again encouraged but not required at the informal problem solving stage we reduced the amount of material that is required when complainants file a written complaint so it had a fairly long list we did leave in a sentence encouraging complaints to give additional information that would facilitate in the resolution process but are not requiring that we clarify that the senior director of schools or the supervisor will generally be responsible for investigations at stage one we clarified that if new claims are added at step two which is the superintendent level of review that it's just the new claims that will be referred back to step one and that the the existing claims that had already gone through step one will proceed for the board stage of appeals we changed the reference to timelines it had been the number of meetings so the board actually would happen within two meetings we can move that to days we clarified that the board members will have access to the full written record of the complaint and we clarified that if the board decides to accept a an appeal that the complainant can submit additional written information or sign up and sign up for public comment um but that there won't be a sort of hearing starting from the the um starting to fresh at that point we clarified uh that the one year time period for bringing complaints does not bar earlier evidence so if there had been a pattern of problematic behavior certainly that could be brought forward we included a reference to processes in the collective bargaining agreements that may be applicable to certain employees so it's just very clear that the the administrative directive recognizes you know is intended to recognize and honor those policies and finally we added a definition of retaliation uh that is already included in our anti-harassment um administrative directive so all of those were changes that we made following the work session and again appreciate the board's input and the public input um that has improved this this draft our next steps the board will have the first reviews tonight and then the second reading and adoption is currently scheduled for the first meeting in november after that the policy and the administrative directive will be submitted to the oregon department of education in which is part of our corrective action plan and then staff will also report back on the implementation of the policy within a year so with that and maybe before we take questions on the policy itself for discussion on the policy itself um i thought judy couldn't talk about i would say hello so i'm judy martin the your new district ombudsman
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and i just want to share that it's been an absolute privilege and a lot of fun to be here i am really enjoying the work so far it's been a big learning experience i am learning a lot it's exciting i have had a lot of calls already and it is a huge variety and it's funny just even hearing jolly talk about that because in practice it those are a lot of words but the people who call really want to be heard and they want to matter they want to have somebody care about what their issue is and it the the biggest privilege is being able to find the person that they need to talk to to resolve their concern and i've seen it happen quickly i've seen it happen not as quickly as i want a lot of things have happened and it's only been a month so that i've really been in the throes of the new year and then there's a lot of things that we can't resolve at all that have nothing to do with portland public schools you know one one example is bike lanes there's not a lot i can do about the bike lanes i can find the person in the city of portland to talk to i can find their their ombudsman i can find the person who painted the stripes and they can talk to them you know and we can do those things and that's also a privilege just to get to help people sort through that so um it's been it's been really exciting and fun and i enjoy doing this okay okay so do we have uh any comments regarding the complaint policy so i i had a general question which occurred to me as i was going through this if you look at the actual complaint policy it's it's a page and a half and it's really general it's really the administrative directive where we get into how it will all happen and so when we put this forward tonight for public comment normally it's public comment on the policy what i want to make sure i understand is that we're asking for public comment on the policy and the administrative directive so that people can really understand how this works is that a fair statement absolutely so i think i think technically it's the policy that's going forward for the first reading and also we should note the revocation of this that outdated citizen complaint policy but as through this whole process um we are absolutely taking and considering comments on the the implementation of the of the complaint policy too because i think that that's really that is where people's experience is and so we want to um we want to get that that right okay and so if we have specific comments or questions is now on what we have in front of us is now the time that you want to hear that or yes yes yes so um i i had a couple of questions that i wanted to ask um and this one hadn't occurred to me when we discussed last time but if there is a time when a complaint comes in and it's clear that we need to rush a resolution of that complaint you know there's huge urgency around it how does that how would that work within this policy so i would so these are maximum time frames if we get a complaint that has something to do urgently with student safety or emergency preparedness or something like that those are always expedited through our a process it's not so so these are um and and we do have to to weigh as judy described the you know calls she takes in and and that others of us get feedback what are the ones that are how do you prioritize some of those so but these are absolutely intended as maximum and there is language that says a goal is always to answer a complaint and resolve a complaint as quickly as possible i just didn't know if there should be any language in here around a situation that clearly needs to move i mean it's it's common sense at some level but it think about that right i mean again it wouldn't get to a formal complaint there was something really urgent that that we'd be moving on that right away before it became a formal complaint if it's at the point that it's a formal complaint i would absolutely hope that it had really been looked at already and that the reason they're filing a formal complaint is because they didn't like what the resolution was and want more investigation again i'm not sure that there needs to be something in here but it occurred to me that you know obviously common sense tells you that there's going to be certain things that come up that need immediate response so um one of the uh things i wanted to suggest under school and department based problem solving um so this is on page one it it talks about
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the complaint and his urge to talk to the principal of the school staff and then it says that the person's not um happy with the responsive principle shall inform the complainant of the complaint process i thought we could add something in there that says the process will also be spelled out online which i think it will be just to make it really clear that there's kind of multiple places where people can understand what the process is um one of the um where are you so that was at the bottom of page one administrative director and the administrative director the principal shall inform the complainant of the complaint process i mean clearly we're going to have this complaint process i believe online somewhere so anybody can look it up and see what it is so i just wanted to sort of make sure that was pretty obvious um one of the things that we did not include in here is at the very end that the ombudsman is required to keep track of all complaints and to report back to the school board annually or you know at a certain amount of time but i think that was an expectation that we typically have that we would hear back on how things are going um so can i respond to that is my understanding was that that was going to be in the resolution so as opposed to so that so and that's part of when i say next steps okay that helps and i think the big issue i have um at this point uh in particular is the is still the board level appeal and the two-step process for the board level appeal that just doesn't make sense to me and by the way ends up being almost 50 days which seems completely unreasonable to somebody who's wanting to get a complaint resolved so it sounds to me the way i understand it is that we would get all of the records of the complaint and we would be asked step one to decide are we going to take the complaint are we not going to take the complaint and i cannot figure out for life me why we need to do that step why if we have all the material don't we just look at it so can you help me through that i brought that up the last time it still doesn't make sense sure so i think that um uh and again this is this part of the process is up to the board but generally i think there are there are some complaints that are going to be operational in nature so when you think about the school district the board is responsible for policy level issues and high level issues and the superintendent is generally responsible for the implementation of the day-to-day operations and so um a couple of the examples we used last time were a was a family who was concerned about the nature and quality of their students homework we also talked about the whether grass was being cut appropriately i think that this two-step process envisions the board being able to determine is this the type of thing that the board's going to that it is the appropriate board's role to weigh in on does the board make determinations about whether homework is appropriate or not or is that is that something that should essentially stop at the superintendent's level so my recom so that's why the recommended policy has that two-step process um i we i uh we worked to make it more clear to the public it is a two-step process um and we would have materials that explained it in probably more user-friendly ways than a than a formal policy or a.d would so that's the that's the rationale behind that but again this is a board this is this is something that's up to the board so maybe just you know some thoughts on that i mean i think again the umbrella for all of this is that we're going to come back within a year to see how this is working and this is one of the key pieces to see i mean certainly the hope and expectation would be that very rarely would it need to escalate beyond the superintendent's final decision to abort appeal or and or to the to ode but i feel it's essential um that as we move in forward with this that we retain that ability to be able to say you know what this isn't actually something that's appropriate for the board to hear an appeal on and to be able to have that and then if we decide that it is then we'll be able to review the record and then make a decision again i appreciate your clarification that while certainly folks could you know submit additional pieces to us if we were hearing that appeal or come in the beginning of the meeting for public comment it's not a full re-hearing it's not a formal hearing it's simply us reviewing them reviewing the record and voting up or down so just that's important to be really clear so folks this expectation of what that process
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involves but to me we've landed i appreciate all your hard work and the multiple revisions and careful thinking i know we've talked about it quite a bit as well and then so i'm very comfortable this is our first reading we'll go out see if there's any additional comments there's been quite a bit of outreach already which i appreciate folks who have weighed in and then again we'll see how this goes during the first year both in terms of judy's you know the bigger piece is the fabulous work that judy is doing to be that voice and that connecting human that person but also in terms of the the process that we're laying out here so i think we're on the right path and i'm excited other comments i had a quick question about something you said last week which threw me off which it sounded to me like you said that the oregon department of education had sort of already approved what we had and that didn't make sense to me and i'm i'm sorry that that was um if that was misleading i got another question about that so i have i took the i did review the policy and the administrative directive with the oregon department of education informally so i wanted to give them a draft to see if they had any major red flags it was it was definitely not the formal approval in advance of the board that's voting so if i'm so i'm sorry if i misused the word approval i think that they but they did indicate that at that informal review it did meet the requirements of the law but they but that's not a that isn't their formal decision so i'm sorry if i misused that word and then if i could just ask one clarification we have gotten some communications from people like kim sortal and others who have been you know very engaged in this whole process and i wanted to make sure that even though they got this to us prior then this 30-day window that that would be included in the record of people responding to this first reading right absolutely okay good because i think there's a couple of points in here that we need to be looking at so okay thank you others reagan was just talking about says the complainant may submit additional written information the board and may provide testimony during public comment what do you what does during public comment mean is that the three-minute thing that's yes that refers to that so a person comes to the board with uh comes to the board and would like to address the board and we give them three minutes springfield they come in an open board session that's what this says yes and again so so this part of the process is absolutely up to the board this is not a staff decision this is a board decision about how you want to handle this i think what that was intended to describe is what would be available to the public at that point and that it's not that the board isn't reinvestigating and re-hearing from from the start the entire matter but this is this is a decision for the board to make about that it doesn't say it doesn't say that here though it says the complainant may submit additional written information to the board okay fine and may provide testimony during public comment right i mean it's not up to the board whether they want to hear the people or not i mean this is out this outlines that stuff yeah but they made the opposite of may is not yeah so we got three minutes so during public comment we have a three minute thing that we normally go with i would think we would give them 15 minutes or 20 minutes or something instead of cutting them down while you get to the board but we'll give you three minutes that doesn't make much sense to me and how do you explain how difficult uh situation in three minutes i mean if we don't want to hear them fine don't hear them we don't care if you come to the board that's okay that's fine if that's what we want to do that's not what i want to do i want to have a call i want to have a public process than a complaint process that that is has fidelity to it that you come through and when you're all done you felt you were treated fairly and if you get three minutes in the middle of a public meeting you're not going to feel that you're treated fairly that's so i would like to i'd love to see that change but i don't know what other people think i have several other things in here that i'm going to comment okay one i the work the working days of which they talk about in here it becomes a problem if you say you file your complaint on the friday before christmas vacation then that principal has 10 days 10 calendar days to get it back so he needs to work with that and draw people together on christmas vacation and stuff to meet the timeline so i would i suggest that we change calendar days to working days that would be one of my suggestions
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back in this section you want her to respond to you oh did she want to respond okay so i'm happy to i think that there was there you can either interpret these days as calendar days throughout or business days throughout i think it would be confusing to have somebody business days and some be calendar days the i did talk to the oregon department of education about this because it's not prescribed clearly in the rules they used calendar days and we chose calendar days because that allows the process to move more expeditiously if you change these timelines into into business days um that does extend the process fairly significantly so it's okay if we have so we're going to ask our principals to work during christmas vacation to get this done in 10 calendar days if we're going to actually meet what it says so i think so so i think that if we had a situation like that that we would we would try and work with the complainant to and that's also in step one which is or i'm sorry that's in the informal process which is less mandated but you're right i should probably add language in there that if the if that if it's around a um holiday or extended you know extended period closure that we would amend those days so that's coming in july 1st and suggest that they have a great place yeah and the principles in the caribbean yeah the timelines will be extended if that's around back here okay uh so that needs to be clarified i think personally i just want to be clear on whether we're are we still proceeding with our first reading tonight the idea is that we'll go ahead and go ahead with the first meet uh reading and add in the amended amended pieces to that okay so like this this is one that i thought we'd already heard some feedback saying it should be so so what i'm understanding the board or at least director buell saying now is that we should use you we should use calendar days but we should include a provision that if the if the complaint the complaint is filed around an extended period of school closure that this the timelines may be modified i don't think that's the kind of substantial change that would require us to not move forward with the with the first reading tonight i definitely want to keep this moving forward okay right continue on yes go ahead thank you oh yeah and then additional provisions number two it talks about two years of the answer i mean it talks about one year of the incident i really still believe it should be two years for what i stated last time we talked about this you have things that take place right and you want to add on right so we can respond to that director atkins well i think john are both saying we talked about this i mean i think that was the attempt in the latest round of revisions it makes it pretty clear i think that if it refers to an earlier incident you may do i mean i'm sorry joel you should you should you'll say it better than i do well no it's fine i think there's two things so initially we had had language that the complainant needed to bring their written complaint within 90 days of the incident or of learning of the incident understanding that sometimes parents don't learn about things right away based on board's good feedback and public feedback which is absolutely right we extended that 90 days to a year and taking into mind that sometimes when families are in the middle of a school year they don't want to complain within that school year so this would give them into the next school year to raise a complaint it's my opinion that two years is is would be too long it gets very difficult to both investigate things after it's been after two years has passed and very difficult to rectify things after two years so um so i would i'd recommend sticking with a year step three on the step three in the first paragraph says any new concerns or substantive information not previously submitted will be referred back to step one i suggest we eliminate substantive information because hey information that has to do with it should be considered there's i mean i don't see why it would make new concerns yeah you go back to step one but if you just have you you find out for instance as i talked about the teacher slapped your kid and then you're then you find out that the teacher slapped another kid that should be in here if that were saying oh go back and start over if you find out
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that your teachers that your kid's teacher slapped somebody else um so a couple of thoughts first of all if the complaint really is about a teacher slapping a child which does not happen um i'm going to give you a different example and give you guys i think that yeah it could be good i don't want to use that again be identical if it was that example then to directly we would not be walking through this process we would be addressing that extremely rapidly um i think that the point of having so if it's substantial information that wasn't taken into account the first time around in in step one then i don't think you had the opportunity to do substantial problem solving at that stage in some ways i wouldn't say that just a repeated so what you described is just a repeat of the same behavior um i don't know that that would be considered substantial new information because it's just reinforcing what you know but or what has been said before but if it's such substantial information that um for instance judy would say oh if we had known that it would have changed how we addressed this or the senior director would have said oh if i had known that i would have could have rendered a different decision let's go back to step one and do the problem solving there as opposed to having at the superintendent's level a whole new opening of the investigation so that's the that was the intent behind um that language but if you go back you're not necessarily going to settle any differently than they did in the first place so having having to go back having to go back is a great way to uh to stonewall the whole situation well we'll send you back again sorry so i'm sorry i'm just trying to get to the point where people can feel they can trust this i'm reading the same document here because i'm hearing these issues addressed maybe and i apologize because i may have the wrong red line but on the bottom are we looking at the bottom of page five where c is in red if significant new evidence is introduced at step two the complainant will be referred back to step one so as to ensure there is an opportunity for meaningful dispute resolution and investigation that includes new evidence significant new evidence is evidence that could have changed the outcome or investigation at step one the next one is if a new additional concern is raised at step two the new concern will be referred back to step one the concerns that were already addressed as step one will continue to proceed through the appeal process right so i have three i'm in step three though you're in step three oh my process and step three it's not exactly this you know it's different process that what you were saying was very acceptable why would you it's the step three one is different so i'm sorry director bewell um step three has the same language as step one so if any new concerns or substantive information not previously any new new concerns or substantive information not previously submitted that's the one that's the spot that i think that but i think the name changes the same language that director atkins just read would apply here now i can i can repeat that language again so we use that language at step two and we use that language at step three if it would be clear for the public to repeat it i'm happy to do that we also got feedback that there was redundancy so we tried to also reduce the redundancy so well i did can't please everybody can feedback for me was that we have all sorts of language in here that i marked out that really we didn't need the just complicated things so i did have that feedback here not necessarily redundant yes exactly here here's i had five five things and we've already addressed the first one and i added on this later there there doesn't appear to be any recourse for parents if the deadlines are not met that seems to me like uh there's plenty of recall if the parents don't meet their deadlines we say sorry you didn't meet your deadline if we have that decision but what's the recourse for our parents to make it equal if if our deadlines are not met do we have do we if the deadline are not met does the supervisor of that person write a uh uh give them a written reprimand for not meeting the deadline i mean what what do we do we didn't meet the deadline too bad that doesn't seem fair and and so if i'm looking at this i'm going yeah they don't have any deadlines but i do that's that i'm concerned about that you want to answer that or not i don't whatever i'm just commenting i'm happy to answer all your questions um well there wasn't so much questions but go ahead so if if the district fails to meet deadlines that would be then the complaint can go right to ode with the failure to meet those deadlines does it say that in here someplace
03h 30m 00s
it's just so so it it doesn't just outline um it doesn't outline every possible potential failure in here i have no i've not said that at each stage if there's a if if there's failure what what addresses that failure so um i think that nothing now right in this if if the school district fails to meet the deadline there's nothing in here that addresses that we're out of compliance you're out of compliance with your policy and administrative director i mean not everyone so in our social media we put in a line that says if we fail to meet the deadline it will automatically go it could the person can automatically be referred and still be in compliance i don't know why exactly what it is it's just i don't i it's not something i can do off the top of my head be glad to discuss it with somebody now number three uh it's still not clear that i talked about last two weeks ago that when it goes to the hr department and when it is a complaint procedure it still i can't i can't get it clear because the complaint procedure if it has to do with the if it has to do with the person which is what i explained last time then it goes to the hr department but what complaint procedures don't have to do with people they all do and and but there's nothing in here that addresses that i still think we need something you don't have to comment on it it's just my comment so i'd like to comment on it because i think it's a it's a it's a really good question and we did talk about it last time and i don't think that there's language that i can include here um that will make that crystal clear every time because i think it's a case-by-case basis so one of the confusions that our our current policy creates for people is whether it is the venue to to address employee misconduct kind of allegations and so because of our our obligations as an employer both under the law and our collective bargaining agreements it's it's important to clarify here that that concerns about employee misconduct and wrongdoing need to be handled through hr processes that can be frustratingly confidential to the public but they are confidential so the example i gave last time i think is is hopefully helpful again going back to the the student where there's a concern about the homework if through that investigation we determine that the teacher is being is refusing to give appropriate homework refusing to follow directions bullying the parents or the teacher or the or the the student those performance and misconduct allegations need to be addressed through a human resources process that doesn't mean that the concern about the homework will just go away but we we will in some ways have to you know bifurcate those into two separate processes there isn't and it is a case-by-case determination when something is um of such significant if concerns are raised of such significance about an employee that it needs to go to hr so but there's nothing in here that explains that or deals with it in any manner well the the provision that i have is um i think tries to clarify that but there's not a way to to promise or guarantee an outcome in any one case because it it just is case by case so it's just trying to clarify that um if they are about employing misconduct those those don't go through a general complaint process would the supervisor the principal or whoever or judy for that matter would they have the ability to explain that to the complainant as they absolutely express their complaint that the best process for them would be through hr and the reason is similar to the one you just gave right we often have concerns in the district where um because of interactions between either other students or with employees people get frustrated that they can't know the outcome of processes so that kid hit my kid and then that kid was back in school two days later what was his discipline and why didn't he get more and you know what we can't share information about that student with you just like we wouldn't share information about your student with other families we know that's frustrating i can imagine as a mother that being really frustrating but those are confidentiality laws that we have to respect it's the same thing with our employees people can't always know the outcome of our disciplinary
03h 35m 00s
processes or our performance management processes with our employees it's frustrating but it's the law and it's right it should be the law so maybe we should have a little section that talks to that may be in this so people enter the complaint process with that fully in mind that would be my suggestion right then what does practices mean under additional provisions in section one the word practices oh just district so things that are district-wide um policies or practices so for instance how often we mow the grass is not in a formal board policy but there's district-wide practices or guidelines about that yeah okay now and the last question i have is it appears to be missing where we had aren't we directed to have a response that that does these three things under the law clearly establishes the legal basis of for the decision findings of fact conclusions of law are we are we does the law say we have to have that because i don't see that so thank you for that question um so the oregon the the administrative rules that are generated by the department of education do have that provision when i looked at that that didn't make sense in terms of what kind of complaints come through school districts especially the the legal conclusions and conclusions of law because for instance again taking the complaint about the homework right there's no law that applies to that there's not there's not an analysis of case law that's going to happen and there's and you're not going to have a senior director or a supervisor making conclusions of law around homework or grass or things that things that generate up out of school districts so i called the oregon department of education to ask about this and um and they are looking into it um uh so what i the language that i and when you think about you know other school districts that are consistently smaller school districts that don't have attorneys on staff that are responding to complaints i can't imagine that they're drafting conclusions of law that language um i believe probably comes out of the administrative procedures act which applies to administrative law judges who who handle things where there is a body of case law around it so um so i appreciate the department looking into that what i've included in here to make sure to you're concerned director buell that we're not just saying yes or no to your to somebody's complaint is that we will have a we will explain the rationale so of the decision so i think um to director atkins point this is something that we may be able to look at you know in a year after the if the department makes changes we're going to get a response from the ode to you're asking them about it right and then that response will be shared with the board and it actually says the written decision shall include findings of fact and explain the rationale exactly exactly which i think is a really good landing spot and again all of this we'll see we'll see how it goes this first year it's a good landing spot if it's within the law it's not within the law then it's not a good landing spot okay anybody else so could i ask one more question this is this is the like the third draft of this that we're looking at yes and did you have the parent coalition which originally filed the complaint or look at this and get your feedback on this one yet this has been shared with the parents coalition yes they've sent us emails yeah i didn't know if this draft had been shared with them i knew that they've gotten us feedback i didn't know if this draft had been shared um i mean i so i can i i know that it was i can i i will double check on that i know we've gotten feedback from thank you very much as i said uh the policy be posted on the board website public comment period is 21 days last day of comment is october 14th and you can contact contact immigration public comment will be posted with the policy so okay so now the business agenda the board will now consider the remainder of its business agenda having already voted on resolution four nine six one miss houston are there any changes do i have a motion and a second second what's that matt does that match uh director atkins moves and director morton seconds the adoption of the business agenda miss houston is there any public comment there is not okay is there any board discussion on the
03h 40m 00s
business agenda director buell i have a question on the new contracts with the superintendent it provides science programming to all schools from a catalog of available services what does that catalogue available services referred to i'm sorry i didn't get this to you earlier i have two questions so it's on the omsi on the omsi master contract so what this is is what used to be individual schools would contract with omsi we now have a one district contract that each school can pick what services they want and the last question i have is provides after school tutoring and mentorship where are you looking at uh i'm at camp fire columbia council at the very bottom now so is this correct that what we're doing is paying the campfire council to do tutoring for us and after school programming mentorship and mentorship not through the county nothing to do with the sun program this one specifically services with campfire we just pay to get campfire 365 000 to mentor and do programs okay thank you can i ask one quick question i didn't know dr reagan uh under amendments to existing revenue contracts and i apologize i first it's rand corporation district-wide research services on the effective dual language immersion and student achievement year three of three so my first question is that a revenue contract or is that an expense contract and my second one is um i'd be anxious to hear the results of that and do you know when we'll get that um we will and it is a revenue contract it's one that we're one of the districts they're studying and they're making the investment in us and yes we will get the results when they're done we've done this one a couple times but yes we will hear the results when they're completely complete so it's gonna be the end of this year i don't know specifically we'll get back to you that's great thank you okay the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions the business agenda is approved by voters seven to zero with student representative joss while voting okay we have one more um thing we have to do tonight and that is we have a nomination um we need to nominate our representative for osba bobby has been faithfully serving in that position for a long time and um so i'm open to hearing nominations what's the remove okay is there a second second second okay so director buell moves and director atkins seconds uh bobby regan as our candidate for the oregon school boards association board of direction board of directors as a regional member all those in favor aye aye any opposed student representative yes thank you very much for your service bobby and we are 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)

2014-09-23 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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

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