2015-01-06 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2015-01-06
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - January 6, 2015

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good evening everybody and happy new year this study session of the board of education for january 6 2015 is called to order and i'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers while our study sessions are generally limited to our receipt of information from staff and discussion of that information and review of resolutions prior to a vote at times we conduct votes during our study sessions any item that has been voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our pps tv services website so the first thing on our agenda is public comment this pal do we have any people sign up for public comment uh brenda stamper and saskia um lippy okay so while you are coming forward i'll go ahead and read our um instructions for public comment thank you for ta first of all thank you for taking the time to come to the board and provide us with your comments 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 but we've asked board manager roseanne powell who today is over here to follow up with issues raised during public testimony guidelines for public comment 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 for the first two minutes there's a green light that will go on right there in front of you when you have one minute left a yellow light will come on and when your time is up a red light will come on and a buzzer will stand and we ask that you wrap up your comments at that time so we sincerely appreciate your input and thank you very much for being here tonight so either one of you can go ahead good evening board members my name is brendan stamper i'm the parent of calvin stamper who's a kindergartner at the odyssey program at hayhurst elementary on the focus option programs thanks for the opportunity to speak in front of you today on behalf of odyssey and during the december board meetings a representative from our program presented our support for the proposed changes to the lottery system and the goals behind them this time i'd like to shift the focus a little bit to our unique and effective education model for this platform and to do this i'd like to provide with a personal example last year when my family was surveying the uh many options for kindergarten in the portland area we discovered odyssey but wondered how a focus option program could focus on history and after spending six months in the program i realized that history is not the focus but rather the lens and odyssey's focus is delivering education in a way that immerses students in an integrated thematic curriculum that enables them to achieve their fullest educational and personal potential in a multi-age cooperative learning community this approach inspires students to think independently critically and creatively while engaging them with their community so here's my example this year's thematic lens is the history of portland so my son has been assigned to do a report on rodney gleeson one of the city's founding members he's thinking creatively by drawing pictures of gleason and his life experiences he's thinking critically by assembling a chronological timeline of his life his learning is integrated because his classes are incorporating other aspects of portland history and culture he sings songs about stumptown in class he builds popsicle stick bridges to relate to the to the scenery uh he even engages his community by we went and visited gleason street went to our local cemetery where rodney gleason happened to be buried and you know he's speaking with the staff there so um through this historical lens my son got out into his community was asked to think critically creatively and collaboratively now i can see how this type of learning and community engagement in kindergarten will shape his whole experience in the odyssey program i see middle school kids in this program well-spoken and engaging in the hallways and at informational nights the literacy and speaking skills students learn throughout their tenure at odyssey is preparing them well for high school even more exciting is the fact that we believe this educational model works well for any student from any background team teaching differential instruction theme-based interactive learning and the execution of an open-ended curriculum are well suited to diverse classrooms and diverse student populations as educated teachers and parents we welcome diversity and want to ensure that odyssey program is available and appealing to all pps families going forward our understanding is that you're going to be observing and assessing focus option programs more closely in the future and we're looking forward to this we encourage you to visit our classrooms sit down with our teachers students and parents to see the integrated and
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collaborative learning that's taking place we encourage you to reach out to our alumni and their high school teachers to ask about their abilities and the character of our students thanks thank you hello members of the board and superintendent smith my name is sasuke hostetler-lippi and i'm here tonight as a concerned parent and community member of ainsworth elementary school specifically i'm here because i'm concerned about how quickly the sacket process has moved forward i applaud your efforts towards equality in our classrooms and i support them wholeheartedly but what i've studied as i've studied what's in front of you to vote on next week i'm really concerned because i have a lot more questions specifically i've seen almost nothing written about how the recommendations are going to be implemented and in what time frame they're expected to be achieved most notably in my reading of the extensive materials there's also no mention of transportation or of more support in the classrooms as a non-native speaker of spanish i've been volunteering weekly in my daughter's classroom for the past four years and i'm currently doing so for my son who's also who just started kindergarten this past september i can tell you firsthand from watching these children acquire spanish how difficult it is for young students especially even those who have extensive home support as mine do my daughter who's now in the third grade spent six months crying daily about not wanting to go to school at one point she chased me out of school on to southwest vista avenue and i had to escort her back into the building it was about six months before she spoke one word of spanish to me on the first day of school this year my son who's four years younger than her marched into the building and never looked back and already at this point in the year i can have a full conversation with him in spanish and he both understands me and responds to me so my take on that is that it's because of sibling preference and because our family has invested a lot in becoming a bilingually culturally competent family and i'm a big proponent of keeping families together not just families who have already committed to the program but future families i'm concerned that by making such radical change to focus option schools without clear implementation plans in place including more support for lower ses students that as a school district we're not setting them up to succeed and these focus options schools do require extra from the families attending as and we'd like to help you do this and i'd like you tonight to consider slowing the process down we need an implementation plan that's really clear and thoughtful and that includes more focus option feedback and representation together we can do this thank you very much thank you very much natalie wiles and paula moretto you can go ahead okay um thank you for your time i'll move quickly um i moved here recently from los angeles probably like many other people who don't want to admit that my daughter attends ainsworth she's actually in the community side in first grade i'm a native speaker of spanish came from a 90 10 immersion model and i was unable to get her into the program because it's so popular i have been following the sackett process since before my husband even got a job offer here i believe deeply in education i previously lived in the crenshaw area of los angeles one of the poorest areas of los angeles and having no safe school to send my children to myself and other community members opened a charter school i stood in front of lausd fighting for our charter so this is very familiar to me we have a constructivist program at our school in los angeles 9010 immersion our goal was 50 free and reduced lunch students this was a very big goal for us because we wanted to serve the community not like most other charter schools in la that like to just be really exclusive um and we didn't think it would be that hard we didn't put our application online i was head of uh recruiting spanish language parents the district itself is 30 free introduced lunch the area we ran to 75 percent um i've never worked so hard for anything in my life i stood in front of grocery stores at head start i said about our application we made sure that you know we were really careful about who heard about our school and we had a barely percent 30 or rather barely 30 percent students who were free and reduced lunch and this really affected our program um when we moved to oregon we chose pps specifically because we felt that it was a really it was really possible to get really good quality education and it was important for us to live very close to downtown with as much diversity as possible
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and having opened the school and been through this process i know how difficult this is and these sacrament soccer recommendations appear to be very grandiose to me we have wonderful robust programs that really serve the students well and with so many questions from week to week i only see the recommendations implemented in their current form as hurting these programs and hurting these students it's alarming that there was no community from what i can tell very little community involvement in the creation of the recommendations especially because there was no recommendation from the families that were that were in these schools i urge you i implore you to please just wait there's no rush i understand that there's been so much time and investment and that you want to make a decision next week but there is no rush you don't have to do it next week you can wait you can take more time you can listen to the parents who want to help you um and we are very eager to help you um thank you so much for your time thank you for your testimony and thank you to everybody else uh please feel free to connect with we have two more i'm sorry i'm sorry i thought you said before okay i'm sorry irene taylor broski and mark feldman well welcome thanks for the opportunity to speak tonight my name is irene taylor brodsky and i've often joked with other parents at ainsworth elementary that i'm a lifer i've been driving my sons to and from ainsworth for the last four years and i'll keep doing so for the next eight it's not a lifetime but it is about four thousand two hundred and twenty trips uh like all other families though who lotteried into the ainsworth spanish immersion program from out of the neighborhood putting my kids on a school bus is not an option we knew those rules from the get-go and that's what we signed up for and we've never looked back let me tell you what else we signed up for diving head first with our intellects ready our pencil sharpened into a language not one of us knew before we started this program like my boys i too have been learning spanish every year that they have my oldest son jonas he's been the trailblazer among his siblings and at school too he's brought to the immersion program another kind of diversity one no less important than skin color class or native language jonas is deaf and thanks to years of hard work and auditory training and the support of the staff at the school he's the most adept spanish speaker in our family he loves school and school loves him back we've gone all the way with jonas knowing the foundation and the language skills we were building would carry on and pay off with our two younger kids and all those car trips when you're all in you just go and you don't look back our school is full of families who are committed just like mine without a doubt our school culture has benefited from the historic priority you have placed on sibling preference i'm here tonight to praise you superintendent smith for amending your previous position and making sibling co-enrollment again a top priority i also thank the board several of whom wrote me personal notes of response who recognized the fear and anxiety so many of us have been experiencing over this i urge you not to water down your amendment with any grandfather clauses or backdoor loopholes after the lottery has closed sibling enrollment preference should be maintained for current and all future families my family lives and supports diversity and the best welcome mat we can put out for future students at ainsworth is one rooted in strong student communities and parents who aren't afraid to go all in for their kids thank you hi my name is mark feldman feldman and i'm chair of pbs's tag talent and gifted parent advisory council i'd like to provide some input on the climate survey that's on the agenda tonight i can't speak for the whole tag advisory council because all the pps departments and many community groups were consulted we were not so these are my comments the 2012 tag parent survey had over 1200 responses which was a rate of for families of over 20 percent except for access academy as many of you know the results were pretty dismal across schools eighty percent of parents with an opinion disagreed that pps's tag services provide appropriate learning opportunities and challenge for the
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children eighty percent disagreed that pps provides opportunities for the children to work with similar ability peers 83 percent disagreed that pps has improved their children's academic achievement i believe that the climate survey as it exists now does not have questions that will show whether supports for these learning issues have improved the parent climate survey asks about tag identification but confuses it with taking honors and ap classes the student survey doesn't even ask about tag identification so it will be impossible to break out out results these must be corrected otherwise the results are useless with respect to tag services there are various questions about bullying or teasing because of race sexual preference etc well bright board students may retreat into their book during classroom or social times and they often feel alone because of a lack of similar ability and interest peers these issues can make tag students targets for teasing social isolation and bullying this can have an especially detrimental effect on young girls as we found out with my daughter talented and gifted students deserve to be able to report about their social and emotional security issues also the overall tone of the survey seems to be dealing with academic struggle but many tag students suffer because they are not challenged enough i don't think that current questions will show whether tag students need more learning support because they are not challenged enough in several cases this survey asks parents and students to respond about all or other students although not specific to tag students i think this this is unreliable to ask about the abilities or expectations of others so i believe this is important to correct as well this survey will be used for years into the future so i respectfully request that you ask the authors of this survey to get and use input from the tag advisory council so they can correct these issues before conducting the survey thank you thank you both that's it great thank you to everyone who took the time to come and testify we really appreciate your comments again if you have any questions or uh additional information feel free to speak with uh roseanne the next thing on our agenda is an update on special education uh superintendent smith would you like to go ahead and introduce this item i would like to introduce mary pearson who is our senior director in charge of special education for the district um and mary along with her team will be presenting to us their their vision and strategic plan for the next six years so we're really excited to hear this good evening board members student representative and superintendent smith thank you very much for inviting us tonight to share our department's vision with you um i have not had the opportunity to present to you since i have been was hired as the senior director in 2012 so we're really excited to give you this update tonight the special education department touches young children students and fans and their families from the ages of birth to 21. our department is rooted in the in the notion of teaming and so to start i would like to introduce our team tonight i'll let them introduce themselves good evening ed krankowski assistant director michelle markle program administrator of our community transition program i'm barbara cantwell program administrator supervising several district-wide programs including early childhood okay um as you see here this is our special education vision statement this vision station statement builds on the accomplishments that we have made in our department over the past several years foundational to our vision is our this mission statement um i'm sorry the lights just um the development of this state of this mission statement started actually with robert ford our previous director and has been narrowed and down to the statement that you see here through a vetting process i'm going to start by reading it pps is committed to reversing the trend of isolation and segregation of students with disabilities by ensuring all students have access to high quality instruction responsive to their needs and delivered by effective and culturally responsive educators within the least restrictive environment and the next part of the statement is our primary focus is to build on the capacity to build the capacity and to support staff
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members district-wide to ensure the effective instruction is the predictor of student outcomes and that last statement is really um what we're kind of focusing on in our six-year strategic vision is really about building capacity that we know that if we are going to actually really make changes in the way that we serve students and student outcomes we have to build the capacity of all staff to serve a wide range of learners recently i nearly collided with a black vw jetta that stopped abruptly at a yellow light i noticed the baby on board signage in the back window at first it irked me why does this parent have this sign up as though their precious treasure chumps mine then it became apparent this person has something to protect some little being he or she holds dear it like many things got me to thinking excuse me got me to thinking about special education inclusive education and our pps families we serve approximately 6 900 precious treasures other people's babies on board our school bus please use the pen and paper provided at your desk and take a moment to jot down the top five people you are closest to you have maybe 15 seconds remaining i know you're done when i see your eyes we serve families with innumerable things going on this exercise does not dare to pretend to capture the myriad of experiences our families live please take a deep breath glance down at your list now look closely at number one who you wrote down for number one imagine you can only have one hour of supervised visits per week with who you wrote down for number one look at number two number two loves to jiggle dance hum and wiggle number two invades other people's space harmless in fact perhaps number two is extraordinary but not embraced in the school setting number three imagine the person you wrote here was moved to a more restrictive environment and then expelled from school for number four your number four cannot read nor toilet themselves and is over twelve years old number five is unemployed and searching for a job for the last four years last i ask you to please close your eyes for a moment picture the people in your life that you cherish the ones you wrote down on your one through five list really envision these people your love may not change for those on your list but how you juggle your life just might thank you for closing your eyes you can open them this activity reflects the experience of some of our families okay thank you esther so who are we um few things that are unique about the special education department is that we not only provide direct support to school staff principals and to families but we also directly supervise staff that are out in buildings most of our around 900 staff are supervised by their building administrators in which they are assigned but i think it's important to know that the center the seven program administrators in our central office also directly supervise about 170 staff and that's motor staff feeding team assistive technology autism team uh ptosis autism i said autism early childhood and then we directly supervise all special ed staff that are in charter buildings we also in addition to services in our school buildings we have four special programs so we have an early childhood team which robert cantwell will go into more detail about we have our pioneer program so there's the k-8 program and the high school
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program and then we have our 18 to 21 year old program that serves um students um in the community transition program and as esther said we serve approximately 6 900 students that's about 14 a little over 14 at this point we are up this year 150 about 150 students from last year and we support uh in 81 schools in our community-based options charter schools private schools and in our special schools so why do we feel the need to change um what is what is so what is the urgent need we can no longer really continue to do what has not worked in the past our this data that you will review is evident of our need our absolute need to make a change in the way that we serve our students as i go through this i want you to understand that these are benchmarks that all school districts are measured against all special education departments in the state and the state target that you see in parentheses is set by an average of all of our neighboring districts in the state so 53 percent of third graders with disabilities um are not meeting benchmark in english language arts the state target is 69 black students are five times more likely to be excluded from school for more than 10 days as you are all well and aware of that issue because i presented earlier this year about the significant disproportionality and our corrective action around that in our last year we reviewed data on the number that what were the demographics that were coming to our advisory team around wanting to look at more restrictive settings and 71 percent of the students that were presented to that team were students of color 25 of the students in our behavior classrooms are african-american that african-american students make up 10.7 of our population so you can see the the significant disproportionality there less than six percent of students actually exit our behavior classrooms and we're digging a little bit deeper into this data and after talking to some of the actual talking to the buildings and the staff i do believe that some of the recommendations being made around the enrollment and transfer changes for students who are in focused classrooms will change this data because what i'm hearing from staff is that they tended to hold on to students in those behavior classrooms that maybe could have been exited because they the families didn't want to go back to their neighbor they wanted to be able to stay in that building where they were successful most the time we want to serve students in their neighborhood schools but in some cases where they haven't been successful and they've been moved to a new community where they now have been very successful and have become a part of that community this is an exception where we want to give parents an option a four-year graduation rate for students with disabilities at 31 percent the state target is 67 five year is a little bit higher 36 percent the state target is 72 percent i think it's important that to understand that there are misconceptions about students with disabilities and their ability to access core instruction out of the 6 900 students it's 3.6 of those students actually have an intellectual disability the majority of the students that we serve in special education have communication disorders learning disabilities other health impairments such as attention deficit disorder and other so what we're saying is that all students when given the correct accommodations and supports in a general education setting can be successful um there are several socio-political factors that are aligning right now to uh really shape the work that's happening here in pps first i'd like to point out at the federal level just this last summer our secretary of education arne duncan pointed out a new ruling that is shifting the focus in special education from compliance where it has been typically to student achievement this is a big shift so it's not saying that we will no longer be compliant with federal laws but we in addition to being compliant our our funding will actually be tied to student outcomes and student achievement so that's a big shift
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at the state level i'm going to show you a video of ron saxon from a fall cosa conference where he's talking about the future of education in peop in oregon i want to talk a little bit about the challenge one of the two challenges that i believe or maybe it's three that i have written down here today and the challenge is to say to you that we all need to understand that there is not a special education system and a regular education system this is an education system and it is a system for all kids and with that comes a two-way responsibility i'm glad you clapped because you might not like the second part and with that comes a responsibility and it's a two-way responsibility it is the responsibility the regular education classroom teacher to make sure that they do a great job of including students who need additional supports in an effective way in their classroom and that they deliver such high quality instruction that it's clear for us who needs additional support and who does not and it is incumbent upon you this is one of the challenges to ensure that the instruction that takes place in that classroom is of high quality it is not going to be acceptable for it to be of secondary quality and for us then to identify students as having a learning disability when they do not and it requires an insistence on all of our parts about excellence in the least restrictive environment second challenge and i'm just about done i said it was a tasky speech right second challenge i want to challenge you today that every child that shows up at school that the very first placement that they get the very first placement that they get is enrollment in a regular classroom that will not be a challenge for some of you that will be a huge challenge for others and i just want to say it very clearly enrollment in a regular classroom whether that's a k-5 classroom or it's a home room at the middle school or high school or it's a science class at the high school first placement regular classroom principle um there were often times when i thought well that can't really happen but when somebody just acted like it was going to happen and just said no this is this this is this is not a debate this is what's going to happen um it did so i want to challenge you to just say no this is just what's going to happen when you start thinking about these placements and when you start thinking about what's possible okay so as you can see there's a paradigm shift happening across the nation and what we're attempting to do with our vision and our strategic framework is to make that a reality in pps special education students are general education students first all students including those eligible for special education account towards are are counted towards all of our accountability measures such as graduation rates achievement just the data that you had seen earlier we are one system in this presentation we will walk you through our vision and how and as it aligns to the fundamentals of the successful schools framework we are calling this six-year strategic plan reach 2020. you will see that equity is at the center of all that we do in the special special education department and we will start our presentation with early childhood and end with our 18 to 21 year old program good evening superintendent smith school board members it's a pleasure to be here tonight i think the portland trailblazers must have listened to rob saxton's speech because every game they seem to somehow find a way to win and they must plan that before they get on the court but say it's going to happen and we're doing the same thing in special education department as well we're trying to find ways to win and be successful with every child and every family that comes through our doors our special education department is aligning its early childhood special
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education work with the district's three priority initiatives as well as the successful schools framework early childhood is the entry point for portland families and the beginning of this critical investment in early learning i'd like to share with you a powerful data point that i received just last friday from the early childhood technical assistance center the ecta center is a program of the frank porter graham child development institute out of the university of north carolina at chapel hill funded through a cooperative agreement from the office of special education programs the u.s department of ed they put out a document called the economics of early childhood investments it's a 43-page document the gist of which they just put this out on december 10th last month by the way white house council of economic advisors released this document analyzing the research on economic returns to investments in early childhood education and so this document cites research suggesting that expanding early learning initiatives would provide benefits to society of roughly eight dollars and sixty cents for every one dollar spent about half of which comes from increased earnings for children when they grow up other benefits include increased parental earnings and employment reduced need for remedial education and later public school expenditures increased educational attainment improved health and decreased involvement with the criminal justice system in short it pays to invest early i would now like to highlight three aspects of the work in which we are currently engaged as a district our district completes developmental assessments for all children from birth to age five who have or are suspected of having a developmental disability requiring specially designed instruction our team of 12 early childhood evaluators completes approximately 1200 evaluations per year at our evaluation center at the holiday annex also at remote sites as well as in families homes our focus is on the family unit we are instituting now a culturally and linguistically diverse approach to our assessments this year after attending trainings by dr julius barza-brown of portland state university and collaborating with our esl department staff secondly we also have an early childhood transition team we look at this team as providing a bridge between early childhood special education and kindergarten this year we added back a team of six core early childhood specialists to provide targeted supports to incoming kindergarten students with disabilities these supports also included coaching consultation to these children's families kindergarten teachers educational assistants building administrators and other school support staff for the first time that we are aware we instituted an all hands on deck approach for the first six weeks of school this this past fall supporting over 400 incoming kindergarten students with disabilities 20 early childhood special education staff special education ptosis coaches consultants special ed program administrators the director and the assistant director of our department as well as special education para educators were either on call or physically present in school buildings in kindergarten classrooms to ensure successful transitions for all kindergarteners the early childhood transition team is a district funded team why did we add this back we needed to relieve workload issues for our learning center teachers and it is the right thing to do for our children and families with this who have children with disabilities our transition team members are integrated into our regional data-driven special education teams which you will hear more about later so how did it go very well overall a higher percentage of incoming kindergartners with disabilities started their formal educational career in their neighborhood kindergarten class with their peers a higher percentage of those kindergartners with disabilities continue to thrive in their neighborhood kindergartners what did we learn we sent out a survey to over 400 pps staff members to seek feedback on the supports our early childhood transition team provided we wanted kindergarten teachers school special education staff and building administrators to have their voices heard we learned that we need to increase and improve communication to school teams we learned that kindergarten teachers need training support and information before kindergarteners arrive in the fall we learn that children with disabilities will succeed if given the supports they need at the outset we also learned that we still have a lot
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of work to do what will we change for next year among other things we will start communicating with school teams early this spring we have drafted a proposal for a summer institute for targeted school staff the early childhood transition team is now completing a series of ode trainings this year on effective coaching and consultation services we will have a more structured plan for coordinating with our regional special ed teams to provide targeted and tiered support to our next group of 400 plus kindergartners with disabilities finally we will seek feedback from parents and caregivers regarding how successful they felt the transition was our early childhood transition team is now focused on getting to know next year's group of income in incoming kindergarteners and they are a lively bunch our staff are observing them in their current learning environments meeting with their families completing school age evaluations and scheduling spring transition meetings we are diligently working toward a seamless transition process from early childhood special education to kindergarten and we are focusing on child and family strengths and assets including cultures languages and other abilities we can't wait to see what contributions these children and their families will make to our school school communities to my knowledge we are the only district with a team like this doing this extensive work between early childhood and kindergarten our innovations have drawn the attention of at least two neighboring districts who are interested in learning more about our model the last point i'd like to highlight is that we are actively collaborating and partnering with dr harriet adair and the portland public schools preschool to third grade early learning committee as part of the district's investment and expansion in early learning children with disabilities are in our head start programs and they will be in our kindergarten programs in fact 14 to 19 percent of all portland head start children are eligible for special education services it is critical that we support their inclusion in our school communities and ensure that all families are valued governor kitzk kitzhaber is prioritizing early learning as well in his proposed budget his priorities align nicely with the budget work and the vision that this district's preschool to third grade early learning committee wants to put into place your support is deeply appreciated i am the board vice president of the oregon chapter of the division for early childhood and i am also a regular attendee of state and county level early learning committees and councils there's a lot going on in oregon right now as you know from my perspective portland public schools is emerging as a leader in effective data-driven outcomes-based early childhood programs as i stated earlier research shows that if we invest intelligently during the early years of a child's development the more successful our children and their families will be academically economically physically and socially i am proud to say that portland public schools is headed in the right direction and it is an honor to serve this community thank you for your time good evening superintendent smith board members thanks again for this opportunity it's real pleasure um i want to start off by just going back to what rob saxton said in his video clip and and what he said was one of the challenges was the implementation of one system and what i got from that was a tiered system of support commonly referred to as response intervention rti or multi-tiered systems of support which is really kind of the new moniker for a tiered system and that support is is there and implemented for all students with fidelity the exciting thing is that portland public schools is is is gaining momentum in this area around the culturally responsive positive behavior intervention supports and as mary had mentioned earlier in the presentation we're going to walk through the fundamentals of the successful school framework and talk about how special ed can help in the implementation of these fundamentals so starting with our school psychologists which have been a pleasure to work with in this area we're looking at a shift in service delivery model the model that the school psychs are going to be using is endorsed by the national association of school psychologists so it's their national organization that has come up with a model that is has a lot of symmetry to what you would expect in a culturally responsive positive behavior intervention support system and by that i mean
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prevention is the key focus levels of support match to the need of the student is of a primary concern monitoring student outcomes is also a huge part of the nasp service delivery model and it's known as the comprehensive and integrated service delivery model the nice thing about this piece is that school sites are changing from just looking at individual student data for eligibility purposes and moving towards also understanding data from a systematic level so they're looking at both individual data and systems data and how does that system support the student not what is going on with the student that the student isn't responding to the system so it's a real shift in thinking the one thing i wanted to highlight was that on that last slide was that the national publication for the national association of school psychologists has acknowledged the great work that portland public schools is doing in this area specifically our school sykes for looking at how to operationalize this model how do you take a model that's in broad terms and make sure that it's adaptable to the local context not every building in portland public school is the same not every building is they're striving to implement with fidelity but not every building is there so how do we support our school psychologists in helping buildings implement with fidelity now this slide is really a depiction of some of the challenges in shifting this model and i have the two models that are up there these are the models right now nationally that school psychs are using some more of a hybrid the first model is the medical model this is the traditional model that is more deficit-based student shows signs that he or she is having a challenge team recognizes that team refers to special ed students place assessed by a team of special educators school psych is typically involved in that that is analyzed to see if student needs more support so where is the support prior to that that process now as you see here policy is mentioned because there's a collision of policy and this is kind of pre-rti post rti pre-rti most most were operating in a medical model now rti says prevention prevention prevention but yet there are still compliance demands that are out there for our school psychologists and this is a real challenge and so the question is how do we invest in them to support the movement toward primarily a model of prevention thank you and so these are some of the things that we've done facilitated administration so removing those barriers that get in the way of implementation so we increase the number of school psychologists by 10 percent which is which is our effort to say let's get you in buildings let's increase that fte so that there is more time for you to devote to preventative practice and that alone would not will not do it and we recognize that systems have to be in place in order for school sites to support those systems another piece that we looked at and we open our communication lines with them around what are some of the inefficiencies that we might be able to control what are the conditions we can control to help support you you can see that that big number right there 200 000 invested since last spring into test kits as well as scoring protocols computer scoring software this is huge because a lot of our school psychs were driving from building to building to share test kits or monthly at their professional learning community or discipline meeting they would share kids then but often you need the kit right away so you drive you spend time in the car we want our school sites to spend time in their buildings supporting staff as well as supporting students and the scoring software piece too we wanted to make sure that they had access to the software they were driving for some of uh their their scoring needs to this the central office to score um their assessments and so the ones that they do with more frequency we made sure that they now have those on their on their personal devices um the other piece that and this is this is i think one of the most important and and this is the school psych work session so that this effort is not concocted in in some dark room in the
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district office this is really about how we do things top down bottom up how do we get their input and what they do on the ground level and how do we remove those barriers so we had a work session with them that really took things from the arne duncan statement around achievement all the way to what's going on in your building and then we came back up to say what's our mission statement look like uh for portland public schools and then lastly um this is uh an event that's that's coming up soon um actually next week um we'll be away for the duck game unfortunately um but mary uh susie harris our legal counsel and myself are going back to dc or going to dc to meet with the council of great city schools special ed administrators as well as the office of special programs us department of ed to really discuss and our focus is is going to be how do we have policy that is informed or practice that informs policy and then of course uh policy-enabled practice to to get rid of some of these maybe antiquated or obsolete compliance demands that aren't necessarily leading to student achievement and so we're really excited about that about that trip and and being able to collaborate with our colleagues across the country and in the biggest school districts in the nation and so i think lastly um we have a testimonial um from a school psychologist annette clappel who is here yes and she wants to share how her experience has been thus far her first year at pps hi thank you for your time today i appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and my name is annette kleppel and i am a school psychologist hired in the fall of 2014 so i'm new still um i believe i was hired based on my previous work experience working deeply within the comprehensive and integrated services model that the national association of school psych endorses i have seen the amount of effort and work it takes to develop a well-coordinated comprehensive and culturally competent service models in school settings it takes all players involved from the district level administrators to the building administrators to the teachers specialists and support personnel without complete buy-in efforts to fully include and support all children will fail previously i worked as a dual role school psychologist counselor i was assigned one building to manage both the counseling piece and the school psychologist job and in that model i worked closely with my principal and team to develop tier one research-based supports to target social emotional growth in all students we kept monthly data looking at both emotional and behavioral skills as well as trained teachers to use data in teams to guide their daily teaching targets the district provided us with both an rti coordinator and a pbis coach both positions were dedicated to the building at 0.5 fte we developed a school-wide schedule building in dedicated academic intervention time and at the end of a four-year period my special education case load dropped significantly my initial evaluations were at seven per year students were no longer being referred for academic or emotional evaluations because needs were being addressed in the classroom and or with building wide level two and three interventions and as a counselor i was able to deliver weekly guidance lessons to the entire school i knew every student by name making meetings with parents and teachers more meaningful we also focused on effective mental health services at the school setting the district opened a community center at the school and employed a full-time coordinator and a part-time mental health specialist to break down barriers to their learning we had weekly meetings discussing ways to support our students by assisting their families we partnered with the local esd to provide early intervention services and preschool experiences we met monthly with the juvenile justice system to focus on special challenges to our population we also used our behavioral and emotional data to create tier two mental health groups and services utilizing myself and the therapists the coordinator was able to make business partnerships providing lunch buddies for students as well as financial support and donations the community and school personnel were working with the same families so it was important to bridge communication and build shared plans together rather than continue the fragmented approach i was able to deliver more services to children and families if i was not teaching guidance lessons i was running
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social skills group leadership teams meeting with individuals providing sensory breaks conducting functional behavioral assessments observing students connecting families to services running school-wide universal wellness activities such as screen free week conducting universal screening measures identifying students who were not responding to tier three interventions and working closely with all specialists involved in supporting our school it sounds bright and shiny but i realize it was a lot of work and sometimes it was messy but the one constant was full and unconditional support from the district and principals we had barriers such as time and money but those are constant other barriers such as adequate staff ots speech and language pathologists counselors psychologists educational assistants rti coordinators pbis coaches behavioral specialists paid trainings materials needed such as curriculum and sensory diet needs proper space and transparent communication were provided and never needed to become barriers in the struggle to balance tight school budgets the decision was made to value resources for students and learning supports i am pleased and excited that pps is moving towards the nas comprehensive service delivery model and at this time we need to start providing tier 1 supports in all buildings we also need to start building capacity of all players to make database decisions for both academics and behavior we need to start creating meaningful and relevant tier 2 services for all students we also need to address the high intensity tier 3 supports that our most fragile or disengaged or severe students require i have seen the comprehensive model work and i have seen it benefit a community the reality is that schools are confronted daily with multiple interrelated problems that require multiple interrelated solutions interrelated solutions require various forms of collaboration and the weaving together of resources schools are an important protective factor for all kids and for some it is their only protective factor we can no longer marginalize student and learning supports in school improvement practices we can start at the systems level with promoting school-wide practices to promote learning providing preventative services and collaborating with families and communities we can also start at the student level by developing interventions and instructional supports to develop academic and social skills and by by providing mental health services to students and families thank you for your time me again um so the last uh aspect that we wanted to highlight is is what we're doing with school culture as it relates to our students who have the most complex and challenging behavioral needs in the district and let me begin just by setting the context and talking about the federal law so federal law requires that we provide instruction to our students in the least restrictive environment with a placement continuum of services and so that's the key piece because often students who have the most challenging needs when we think about our students who are at pioneer in their special schools they're with they're with students who predominantly are eligible for special ed we do have some students who are there for vow stabilization so that's just a more appropriate placement for them to get an evaluation before going to special ed and we also serve some students who've been expelled there as well but when we think about the the continuum of services it starts with the general ed classroom and we have push and support and then of course we can go to pull out support for that student in their neighborhood school and so they're predominantly with their gen ed peers who who are not disabled and then we go to a special class which may or may not be in their neighborhood school chances are probably not and then we go to the special school and we've talked about the pioneer program earlier but serves k-12 and we have um our site on division the holiday annex and we also have right now tubman is where we're we're housing our 9 through 12 program i want to be clear that we are meeting compliance with our special schools program but in our minds we're a district that seeks continuous improvement so what can we do to accelerate achievement for our students and so the big piece here is how do we come up with a design that brings
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support to our schools and helps our schools support our students prior to having them place in a special school program and and i want to highlight an example of this that happened this year we had our pioneer staff work with a student who was in early childhood had some challenges behaviorally and the team initially was going to place a student at our in our special schools program and what we did was we came up with a plan to support this student in in the this dual immersion program and lo and behold the student is still at that school without that pioneer support so it's a real example of what can be done when resources are allocated appropriately and so that is all i have thank you again great thank you ed so in the area of quality instruction we are aligning our supports to support students in a general education setting so we we know that for students not to receive a disjointed education so being pulled out for special education services oftentimes in the past those services haven't been aligned to what is actually happening in the core instruction and so you take a special education student and maybe as a english language learner who is also special ed identified and now they're being pulled from you know they're getting core instruction they're being pulled over here they're getting something completely different than pulled over here and getting something even completely different from that so what we're we've we've chosen two high-level strategies that we're focused on focusing on that will help us align special ed services to core instruction so that we can get synergy in the way we're supporting students the first is being we're in the second year of training for our ieps being aligned to the common core and so we're expecting 100 compliance by reach 2020 that all ieps will be aligned to common core so that we can get that synergy with other inclusive practices that the iep goals and objectives that students are working on are the same are building on what's what's happening in core instruction in general education the second is is just moving towards more inclusive practices co-teaching is one strategy that we have that we are focusing on currently national research shows that when co-teaching is done effectively it's highly effective not only for students who receive special education services but also for general education services and a lot of philosophy around that but essentially you have more than one professional that are working to support a group of students you you tend to get a lot more um creative interventions and different perspectives coming together to support a wide range of learners so we're focusing on our learning specialists and our speech-language pathologists speech and language pathologists are highly underutilized i feel like they are experts on language development and literacy and so we're wanting them to to actually be co-teaching with general education especially at the k2 level when when they're working with students that have language goals we want those aligned to the common core literacy and they they line up perfectly so we're focusing on two ends of the spectrum the the k2 grades because we want to make sure that kids get a strong foundation at the k2 levels and then of course at high school because we know that if if students are not getting core instruction at high school they don't earn a standard diploma this is a picture from a training that we had in early october where we trained all of the ptosis and administrators in the office of teaching and learning and they are engaged in a co-teaching training here and i think this picture really illustrates the potential because co-teaching brings with it a lot of creative strategies the use of technology and differentiation and as you can see they're very engaged and so we hope to see this in general education classrooms next i would like to introduce katie lee she's a speech-language pathologist at irvington and she has been
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i think this is her second year of doing co-teaching as a speech-language pathologist so our school has been a part of swift grant and i've also been on our leadership team for the last couple of years and so i've been really inspired to take a look at my practice to figure out how i can use my skill set to reach the most to kids and co-teachings one way that i've tried to do that a couple of things that i've been trying out over the last couple of years so a few things that i've been doing um for co-teaching the last couple of years i've been doing some whole class socials okay sorry it's my voice yeah my voice is soft-spoken yeah sorry um so i've been teaching uh whole class social skills lessons to help build a community around a common language i'm doing that right now in first second and fourth grades i'm doing whole class language lessons during writing workshop in a second grade classroom and small station teaching and a third grade class during literacy and also this year i'm starting i've started a whole class articulation phenology lessons in kindergarten to help build awareness for the kindergartners around their speech machines and overall sound awareness i hope ultimately that will help with their literacy and maybe prevent some articulation problems down the road and i know some other things are happening with other speech paths throughout the district those are just some things that i'm doing so far i've seen a lot of benefits of co-teaching firstly there are many different models that you can use so you can as a classroom and teachers you can choose which one suits you your class and your students i'm not having to pull as many students out of their gen ed classroom with co-planning and differentiation i'm able to target specific language goals during those curriculum activities which i think leads to greater generalization of those goals and allows the kids to practice certain strategies in the moment in the classroom when planning with the gen ed teachers i'm able to gain better mastery of the grade level curriculum and at the same time the teachers learning from me and getting more understanding understanding of particular student needs and different ways of incorporating language into their established lessons and i'm hopeful that that will help all students also i think inclusion of all students into one classroom community can help improve social outcomes for both typical learners and kids with learning disabilities there are lots of benefits but i've come across some challenges um the first of course is finding the time to co plan the second is because i work at a k-8 school i have nine grade levels and it's hard to um learn all of those curriculums for all the grade levels also when you're working with students with really significant disabilities and then you have all students all the way up to tag adequate differentiation is tricky and then lastly the last challenge is that some teachers aren't yet ready to give up their autonomy and allow another adult to come in and help them plan and teach lessons but i'm really excited about co-teaching it's fun it's way more fun to plan with another teacher than just alone so thank you thank you katie um and in this model obviously leadership is huge so i wanted to let you know that we are starting this week actually with january leadership we will be giving a high level overview for principles around inclusive practices and co-teaching as a possible strategy with the with plans for future leadership to have breakout sessions for principals that really are ready to go deep into it we know that if if a building wants to do co-teaching at any level for next year they have to start planning now because as katie said the schedule is really important i want to point out to you some staff investments that have been made in the special education department in addition to the school psychs increase that ed had talked about through the negotiation process last year there was 30 certified fte added to the special ed department that allowed us to do several things lowered learning center ratios so you
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can see here our learning center ratios at the k-8 were twenty 1-28 they're now one to twenty five um six eight they were one to thirty they're now one to twenty eight high school one to thirty five and they're now one to twenty five and i know that does not seem like a lot but we we allocate fte in .5 increments so it actually really did make a huge difference for a lot of schools and it um it made a difference for some of our k-8 schools that maybe only had one learning center teacher for a k-8 building so just even lowering two or three students it allowed with the staffing ratio for many schools experienced increase and our speech language pathologists we were able to lower their ratio from a 1 to 25 to a 1 to 50 and then we also added a a bumping what we call a bumping for medicaid billing so for any speech pathologists that engage in medicaid billing for eligible students they they five medicaid eligible students counts towards one more student on their caseload so allowing building in that time for them to do that work um okay uh we know that um without the perspective and support of our families um and community partners uh we are not able to fully um honor the the the diversity of the student population that is um in our classrooms today we are targeting three strategies around family and community engagement that um that we will go into more depth in one is how we train staff literally how we train staff our staff around the iep process and we know that the iep process has a family component in it however we want to make that um a very strong and meaningful family component so we are um actually partnering with one of our parent organizations or first who will be jointly training our staff along with our esther harris our um our family and community liaison and so we're really shifting our trainings towards a more student strength family focused um training actually from the start the second is that we are working on concrete partnerships with communities around to increase our career and technical opportunities for high school students and for our community transition students so michelle markle is going to talk more about some of the totally exciting things that we have we're starting that is totally is in line with the 40 40 20. and then the last is just really it's been a huge um priority and effort for our department to really authentically reach out to our parent populations that have been historically difficult to reach and and to really build partners strong partnerships and empower them with knowledge so i can't tell you how many times i've gone to meetings or i've heard from parents particularly parents who speak a different language that they really did not feel like they truly understood what they were signing that someone just kind of pushed a paper across the table and said this is how your student will your son or daughter will get help and so to quote a former secretary of education there is no more powerful advocate than a parent armed with information and options so we want our parents to know what they're really what they're signing what their options are and to what what questions they are entitled to and should ask when they're asked to come to a school meeting um around special education hi again you guys look ready to esther-size like that first one right so let's if you will go with me to a foreign country now please take a moment to share and to picture in your mind a time when you travel to a foreign country imagine that you are in a place where your dominant language is not spoken now recall a moment when you could not communicate to get your needs met were you frustrated frightened amused in need of a restroom were you lost celebratory of your linguistic challenge recall the opening activity that i gave you guys and your list of loved ones these two exercises capture a teeny glimpse of the experiences some of our families have uh do you want to do that thank you sure i have been asked to address racial tension between the district and our families in terms of cultural competence of course we would
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all like the students and their families to change and appreciate our honest efforts on their behalf more thank you cards would be a wonderful start but a general rule in resolving conflict situations is that we can only control our own behavior based on my participation in and observations of pps special education process and individualized education plans ieps in particular as part of my duties to liaison between special education and the community that we serve i would like to suggest the following additional guidelines to mediate cultural differences we must believe that special education students are capable of being more productive rather than being merely difficult challenging shutdown resistant to staff if we don't believe it students and parents will not believe our good intentions and will reflect the negativity back at staff we must resist negative language about students if students are described in negative terms when they are not present or in paperwork it will affect how they are treated in person we have too often fallen into a default adversarial position from the beginning instead we must communicate that our mindset is to help students see their own strengths and use them first make a personal connection by listening and repeating the parents positions so they feel that they have been heard and then brainstorm how we can meet our shared concerns for the student and what that school and the school team and the parents and what this and what the entire team can do so the student is able to be successful hope is a key component of behavior change the iep process is an opportunity for us to discover where students and families get their hope and strength support it and work up from there going into the iep process with the intent however well intended to dictate the predetermined plan to students and families fosters negativity and opposition you might end up with the same plan but how you get there will affect family involvement and success moving day reach 2020 inclusive education unpacking special education what a pain we are comfortable in our familiar dwellings and it's time for us to reach 2020 and move into an inclusive home where every student is welcome and where families are an integral part of our team to unpack a new mindset on how we educate in order to reach super smith's top priorities reading by third grade reduced exclusionary discipline practices increase high school graduation rates we must embrace our families so that our students are wholly supported we've all been trained on equity and courage and now it's time that we live it thank you thank you esther now i want to like to include introduce michelle markle and michelle runs our 18 to 21 year old program hello um thanks for having us here tonight thank you for listening to all of this information um before i talk about community transition program i'm going to talk about what the special education department has been doing with the professional learning communities quadrant of the successful schools framework this year our department made a real commitment to getting into and supporting schools earlier and we're using a plc model to change the way that we do business as a special education department and this is no small feat plcs are a collaborative process of driving change in practice based on data and evidence plcs ask four essential questions so whether the plc is focusing on improving student achievement or team achievement school achievement district achievement the questions are the same and those are what is the target what is the progress toward the target what will we do when the target is being met and what will we do when the target is not being met so it's pretty simple when we applied that to our model in as a special education department the questions that we answered we answered the questions this way so what is the target well we want more of our students to receive services in the least restrictive environment and in their neighborhood schools that's our big target and our big focus what is the progress toward that target we are going to be using a consistent set of data student data that is available on the dashboard to measure this and to look for signs of risk so what we do is we review student attendance grades discipline incidents
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test scores etc by cluster monthly and based on that data we determine progress of school teams toward meeting our our target of more students staying in the least restrictive environment in their neighborhood schools so what are we going to do when that target is met we're going to celebrate we want to learn from those schools that are doing it well and help to scale that to other schools throughout the district and what are we going to do when the target is not being met we're going to send support staff in to provide modeling coaching and feedback to school teams as well as an opportunity for reflection and we will have the pas be a partner in leading school teams to stay with a student in the least restrictive environment while they're still learning through the systematic use of data we are modeling what school-level screening teams can do by using data to make decisions about intervention planning we call these our 3d meetings and 3d stands for data driven decisions i have an example of how this is working just one of many the high school 3d team was meeting and a 10th grade black female was flagged for three days of suspension in reviewing her case we learned that she had a 3.5 gpa she had a great history of attendance and no other behavior concerns in fact she had a personal goal to become a lawyer when we spoke to the school team they were not worried about this rock star they were like this person's got it no problem what they didn't realize was that since the suspension had taken place the students attendance rate had dropped to just 65 and her grades were declining this process of paying attention to early warning signals and not waiting for crisis to happen allowed us to get help immediately to that school team and help them recognize that the student also needed immediate help in order to stay on track so as you can see what we're trying to do is get in earlier and support school teams and helping students stay on track before the crisis happens again this is just one example of the good news and there are many to choose from so again plc is a collaborative process that drives change in practice and we're working and learning together to build capacity of adults to support the students in our schools and now i'm going to talk about ctp okay community transition program is portland public's program that serves students who are 18 to 21 years old are eligible for special education services and have graduated with any document except a regular diploma we have about 175 students across three different campuses but we're also highly community based tonight while we have our whole program improvement plan is also aligns with the successful schools framework i'm going to highlight the partnerships one because that's some of the most fun and exciting stuff that we're doing and at ctp because we're community-based because it's the bridge out of school just like robert's program in early childhood is the bridge into school this is the last couple of years that we have with students for the bridge out we rely heavily on our community partners for authentic learning experiences for our students so it's no longer good enough to just spend all of our time in a classroom we've got to get out into the real settings and apply what we're learning provide coaching and feedback to students and monitor that they're learning in those natural settings um some of the wonderful partnerships and just a few here that i wanted to highlight are first and foremost portland state university they've been a partner with our program for 20 years now they provide free classroom space to our program and have for 20 years our program becomes a lab classroom for their students who are studying to be teachers and special education teachers so it's mutually beneficial in addition we have an mou with their program sorry their recreational program and so students psu students who are studying to become adaptive or pe teachers design units of study for our students who then participate in the unit of study and our teachers are working with psu teachers there's a picture up here on the slide of students in wheelchairs doing a wheelchair basketball unit and these are not students who are typically in wheelchairs so there's lots of just fun integration and learning happening and it's one example of a great partnership that we have second new seasons we love new seasons and they're a fantastic partner not only have they hired several of our students this year they are providing a six-week cooking curriculum to our program at no cost to our program or to our students so somebody's coming in from new seasons once a week for six weeks they're providing a recipe they're modeling how to cook it sending every single student home with the ingredients and the recipe so they can recreate it at home so that's another fun example of just how we partner with folks in the community and how thankful we are and reliant we are on their generosity
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walgreens pizza roma the red cross good samaritan hospital cable radio station and our own portland public schools are just a few of the partners who provide internships to our students so across many many settings we have students in unpaid internships as learning experiences and they also do job shadows informational interviews things like that i want to give a particular shout out to tony magliano and his team here within pps we have created eight new internships work sites just this school year we have students in every single one of his departments and he's really led the way in supporting our students in our program and even hired one of our students in the it department so that's exciting wonderful news uh finally we also get a ton of donations every year to our program and i want to highlight one for you which was building wheelchair accessible garden beds at our green thumb campus we have pictures of them right up there and the rebuilding center donated all of the wood for the project american machine and gear donated the use of their flatbed truck for hauling the wood i thought we could just put it in the van like that's what i had pictured in my i didn't realize how big the wood was so but we had to find a way to get the wood there and we got a donation for that and then we had a small group of staff and their partners who donated the rest of materials and labor and and built them over a weekend so now we have wheelchair accessible garden beds and we're growing nutritious wonderful food on-site that we're using for our cooking curriculum and another fun part of this an extension of this is that students at the franklin high school construction program are going to be building us a mobile farm stand and that's a protocol for it up there so it's a wonderful partnership with franklin where then we'll be able to create another student-run business like our coffee carts out here if you've ever seen that and bring fresh vegetables hopefully to be esc and to other different locations so we have a lot of fun in the ctp um some of the future partnerships that are currently under development are first with our own pps high schools beginning next school year we're hoping to expand career exploration options for our high school students via ta positions for credit within our ctp programs this is one small but critical step toward growing our own next cadre of pps special education teachers and educators which are positions that we have a really hard time filling we're going to work closely side by side with folks in the curriculum department to assure that the courses are rigorous that they are aligned to standards and that they meet the new instructional hours requirements that are being set forth by the state next school year uh second in addition to ta positions alongside with our learning garden lab partners over the green thumb campus which is one of our campuses we are also very interested in building stem related opportunities urban farming environmental sciences greenhouse mathematics these things used to exist on the green thumb campus and then they went away well we would love to open those doors again i know having worked in high schools that high schoolers are desperate for fun and authentic and hands-on opportunities and we want our campus to be more integrated if you've not been to the green thumb campus i invite you to come visit anytime it's 12 acres of garden space with five greenhouses we share the space with portland parks and rec osu extension services master gardeners program portland state university's urban farming program these are all partners who are on board with trying to find a way to do dual enrollment for our high school students where they can get high school credit and college credit oh i'm so excited about that and that will benefit everybody not just special education right okay let's see no okay sorry i have two more future partnerships okay third i'm working with a small but mighty group of pps parents to expand local college-based opportunities for adults experiencing intellectual disability through potential partnerships with psu pcc and concordia there are 238 programs like this throughout the nation we only have one in oregon and we want more college options for our students with id and we're going to continue to look for college partners who want to work with us to make that happen pps is the perfect size and influence of a district that can really work with college partners to make this happen for our students with id finally we want to hone in on that twenty percent of governor kittoper's 40 40 20 challenge to us and continue to develop and facilitate paid competitive employment opportunities for our pps students who opt not to go to college we talk about college all of the time in schools but even within 40 40 20 there's 20 percent of students are going to go right into work and keep learning on the job and we want to honor that build pipelines toward that next slide okay i do want to talk about just a couple of challenges at cetp we have mainly good challenges and one sort of scary challenge and
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one of our good challenges is that attendance at ctp is up just a few short years ago all of the ctp students were half time and then as a result of house bill 2283 we were required to provide the option of full-time services to all students where many families in the past used to opt out because they needed full-time services for their adult students now they're opting in because just for supervision reasons it makes sense and we also provide wonderful services my opinion um and we have about eighty percent of all of our students attending full-time now so that was a big jump in students accessing our program another good challenge to have is that we predict another increase in attendance due to the modified diploma rulings so now that modified diploma will both count towards graduation rate legitimately and opens up access to fafsa financial aid we predict that more students are going to access the choice of modified diploma and our services so just from an investment perspective and watching and monitoring that that's something we're going to pay attention to um a third good challenge is that the way that we're doing business is currently being shaped by a recent legal action against oregon by the federal department of justice the whole entire state is shifting the way that it provides transition services and without going into too much detail the end result of the employment first initiative for us as schools is an increased expectation to get students with intellectual disabilities into paid competitive employment while they are still receiving school services or immediately upon exit it's a big shift in how we do things and what we expect it's also very exciting and very good it is a challenge because it's challenging to provide full-time services which often looks like large group or classroom and also highly individualized services like job carving and supports on jobs for students that have a significant level of support need but it's fun work and we all love doing it and look forward to it the one scary challenge for us i'm scared about it at least uh is regarding our hunt for space next year and for about five years following while the graduate school of education at psu is being rebuilt we're going to lose those classroom spaces that we've had for 20 years at psu so i'm scared that we're going to lose that partnership and i'm scared that we're not going to have a couple of classrooms for our students and it's something that i'm working with folks within pps about but space is just such a a commodity that it's something that i wanted to bring up here and let you know that we are in need of space and while we're growing our current locations are at capacity so it's not something we can just absorb into our other locations and i think that while we continue to grow and capture back even more of the students that we used to send to mesd i think it's a good time to really think about space differently for our program long term and mary and i are working on that so all in all we are looking good the consistent growth that we see and are anticipating will require monitoring and continued investment and i thank you so much for all the support that you give our program we are almost done so just a few things that i want to let you know so who's helping us reach reach 2020 who's helping us advisory groups we are have built on our existing advisory groups that are helping inform this process so essentially we have set the vision and now we're at the communicating the vision and taking stakeholder input that's the stage that we're at right now we have a parent advisory committee that we have had for many years that we are talking about all of these things like how do we get from where we are and where we want to be we've started a new state a new sped advisory committee that meets monthly that is cross departmentally so it's teachers speech pathologists motor staff school psychologists we also have a school psychologist group that meets on their own and we also just started a principal advisory committee so i'm really excited about that so we're really we're talking about all of these issues and vetting all of these ideas through that committee the second thing that we're doing is we have ed krankowski serves on the workload committee so just having that experience and hearing sort of what's happening out in schools and where the hot spots and concerns are are also helping to inform our process the challenges that we and and possible budget implications one thing i'd like to highlight is probably the number one thing for us and that is just ptosis over the years as funding has declined the special ed department has cut from their special ed central department as and and tried to keep the cuts away from schools so literally when i started in this district we had 15 ptosis
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and we added ptosis last year now we're up to actually six three behavior ptosis and three academic ptosis that are out really supporting all of this work that we want to see happen so um the 3d processes we're talking about the regional support teams are really our ptosis are out doing that work they're also out doing the coaching and training for everything but the coaching and training for our co-teaching initiatives so they're a phenomenal group of people and we really we want to add to that so that each region and you have in your board packet sort of our region so that each region has their own teams right now many of them support two different regions so they might have up to 15 to 16 schools on top of all the professional development they provide and other responsibilities paraeducators are at an all-time high um there's lots of reasons for this one i think that we are shifting towards more inclusive practices the other is that we have a strong parent community who's very informed about what they their rights and what they want to see for their child and so more kids are going into a general education setting in kindergarten which we agree with and want to support the other is that our students are changing so you know again just in the time that i've been in pps which is my eighth year we're getting very different students than we got eight years ago um and so the way that we are trying to meet the needs of this wide range of students needs to shift and so what we've done in pps them simplifying this is that if you don't kind of fall in this middle sort of band then you're you're kind of referred to special education and and as i had said we're at 14 which is is getting higher and higher um our national average is 11 percent so as we as we shift to more multi-tiered systems of support the naf service delivery model for school psychologists and prevention we're hoping to be able to provide support to schools not always jumping to a special education eligibility the next i'd like to focus on is just really lack of consistency in buildings with practice so when our ptosis go out they're going out they're dealing with tier two and tier three behavior and academic situations and they get to a building and they're trying to support and what they find is there's no there's not a solid foundation there's not a solid tier one system in place so we're literally trying to keep the lid on something that is not stable at all and that is not obtainable for the special education department student intervention teams having a consistent way that we talk about student behavior and academics in a way that is that is a a problem-solving way and not a pathologizing way if that makes sense um and so really looking at data and having that drive you're having really functional teams that have a really strong process the second is culturally responsive pbis teams those are not consistent across our buildings either so we're trying to support tier two and tier three behavior that oftentimes would be wouldn't even be there if we had a strong tier one and then i think this was also mentioned too but lack of just access to staff for professional development and that's both special education staff and general education staff in order to really build this we'll have to figure out a professional development model and a way that we can access all staff and then just what's next we've had community forums we've scheduled three this year one was in october we have another one this month and another one in april they're here in the board room so i'd love to invite you all to come that's a it's really uh the presentation that's in your board packet is the one that we go through and then we open up to question and answer the first one was pretty well received or well attended and we had great conversations so it was really nice and that's it thank you for sitting for a long time i stood for a little bit so thank you very much i was that's a tremendous amount of information i know i know it's information that uh i've wanted to hear for quite a while
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and my colleagues i feel uh feel the same way so we really do appreciate it mary and ed and the whole crew here so with that i guess we'll go ahead and uh ask the board if you have questions and for mary or any of the other staff i'm assuming are willing to come up and take questions of course of course they yeah okay tell me okay um i have four things written down first of all thank you this is information that i know i've been excited to to be updated on um especially since our last director robert ford was here and i know set a really good direction i know you've carried on with your team and i know that we've been doing a lot of work with pacific educational group to figure out our disproportionality and how do we support all kids so thank you all for this um and it's great to have teacher voice and classroom voice here as well my first question is you would somebody had referenced in the presentation about some of the schools weren't exiting students from special education services because they realized that if they did they would transition back to their neighborhood school and so they were holding them holding them there and you referenced a change that we're about potentially going to make to our enrollment policy a corollary to that or a question i had in about our policy that we're about to do if a student is currently receiving transportation to said school and then they're exited as appropriate would they continue to receive special education transportation because that could be another barrier yes we're committed to continuing that otherwise i mean students were moved out of their neighborhood school not really by their choice so it's not really fair for us to then say okay now you have to transport so we would continue to provide transportation thank you another question i had um should i just go through all my we'll just do a couple okay happy to do that um another question i had was we didn't get any data on the disproportionality of ell students i know that sometimes they're incorrectly identified as having a special ed need instead of perhaps a language issue can i hear a little bit more about what we're doing to address that and how um how we're helping our what we're doing to our assessments or what we're doing to help mitigate that issue yes um some of that is increased awareness and i think robert referred to julie esparza brown who is from portland state we've contracted with her this year and she's providing some professional development um around sort of that though that student and and the pre-referral process which i hate to say pre-referral because that we're trying to get rid of that language it's it's not really a a pre-referral process it's about actually providing what students need and and going through the proper supports but that's that's one strategy we've done a lot of really looking at where those eligibilities take place and which often times are in early childhood and so we've provided a lot of professional development robert can talk more about that too around our early childhood evaluation team both around understanding cultural and linguistic differences but also providing professional development to our early childhood programs not just our head start but other community partnerships another process that we're working on in collaboration with esl and um hopefully the rest of the office of teaching and learning and ed might even be able to talk more about this is that we're we're working on that for lack of a better word that pre-referral um process and about building a body of evidence um and having a system that really walks uh um folks through how to tease out the cultural and linguistic difference and i actually have an example of this i just spoke with one of our ptosis who's esl special education tosa and she you the process isn't live yet but she used this process to go out um to work with a student who was new to this country who came to a school and was really experiencing a difficult time and they wanted to refer to special education right away and she was able to go out and walk them through the the cultural and linguistic part of that and it just she said she could just see their they just kind of took a deep breath because after speaking with the family and getting all this information they realized so many cultural things that were triggering this student and reasons why he was behaving the way he was
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so i thought that was that's phenomenal and we we are really and ed um has done a lot of work in the past i'm working with veronica also in es director of esl um around making this a formal process that's actually part of synergy that is more like a body of evidence that or a body of information about a student and based on certain things that you trigger in that system it might open up another document or another thing to explore if you want to know more about that i think he can talk about it i would just summarize saying how we gather cultural and linguistic information of students immediately upon enrollment and making that instruction and intervention relevant to what they need education would be somebody else over here we have just veronica wanted me to mention we have two tosas that are um sped and esl uh that we share as well is it robert yes it is yeah and just just to answer questions really quickly okay in early childhood we have one evaluator right now yeah you want to come on up to the mic because otherwise it doesn't uh doesn't work for us we have one evaluator on staff right now who graduated from portland state's speech therapy program with culturally and linguistically diverse approach methodology and so what we're trying to do now in the early childhood program a typical evaluation is one session about two hours long and an evaluation looking at the possibility of eligibility in autism is two sessions and um in working with veronica's staff ellie baumgartner is one of the tosas in her department has been very good about partnering with us and and sharing that you know it takes a little bit longer to get that information and we have to spend some time with families to get at some of those cultural and linguistic background components and so what we're trying to do is change the structure of evaluations for those children from birth to five so starting at the very beginning trying to make sure that we are truly getting an accurate picture of a child within the family constellation so that's just one other piece that we're doing in the district so the other thing that i would add is with the opportunity to hire more staff the selection process is so critical and so embedding a lot of questions and scenarios around how we're able to determine learning difference versus a disability and that was a huge piece we were able to hire a lot of staff that actually can even provide more professional development for us so okay so anybody else my older sister was a special ed teacher for years and years and years on the east coast and retired this last year one of the things she did about 10 years ago she chose not to be a special ed teacher but instead be an aide in the classroom because she just felt overwhelmed by all of the paperwork nights weekends and the rest and uh didn't feel like she was having the quality time she wanted to have with her students you didn't talk at all about paperwork and about what kind of supports your special ed teachers have so that they can do the quality instruction and again just to uh echo my colleague steve fuel you know whether the the testing parts are overwhelming also i don't know but could you just talk a little bit you didn't kind of mention either of those things yeah i actually think that that's one of the things ed mentioned that we're going to washington dc that's one thing i would love to talk about like if we're really wanting to move to a more inclusive model where general education and special ed are working in a partnership we have to find a way to streamline the paperwork part but there are federal regulations that we have to follow what i can tell you is that we allow for through the contract negotiations we increased their they they get up to four days a year um well they should have time to work on paperwork within their weekly schedule that's they they have to have that but in addition to that they have up to four days a year to work on paperwork and caught up and stuff like that we also approve on a case-by-case basis you know additional days if if staff need that one of the things that i think will i hope will help this too is as we move towards synergy next year so we've we've rolled out synergy as a district but we haven't adopted the the student information system for ieps in synergy yet because it was huge to just roll out
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synergies so we're doing it in phases so synergy will roll out uh for the iep portion in the fall of next this coming fall and that process actually um it's it's very different than what they're used to um but it does it guides them more through a process and it will actually take care of a lot of the paperwork issues that we have around compliance i'm hoping it will be more effective and you know kind of cut down on some of that but i think to to some of the points that ed has talked about too with school sykes we're really looking at trying to look at what what do we really need to do like how much for our evaluation reports how much information do you need to do for every eval and do you need to do a full evaluation for every eval can we streamline some things so we've been looking at those things there are times when when policy is is somewhat perceived as i'm sorry when procedures over time people think their policy but so they keep doing them and in that fashion it becomes kind of a mythical policy so really kind of uncovering what do we have to do versus what can we do in a more efficient way and the other thing i'd like to to add to that is the standards-based iep piece i think that the iep document because it's been so compliance driven has lost its power as an instructional guide and so how do we bring that back and how do we achieve instructional congruence curriculum congruence throughout the core the targeted and supplemental instruction so that by the end of the year the iep is unrecognizable because it's just torn and dirty and and it was used on a daily basis steve you have something i want to make it clear that i'm not a special education expert in any shape sensor form and so i'm not going to ask questions that directly concern that but i do have some things that i'm pretty good at that i have questions that kind of relate to what you've been talking about here and one is that specific standards based the common one in the reading that i've done in the common core which is pretty extensive uh one of the one of the big criticisms is that they have a lot of their standards are not developmentally appropriate are you taking care of that in your in this in the iep approach i mean because it just it's a lot of the things that you talked about in 19 to 21 year olds that we should be doing with younger kids too you don't get that in the in the common core stuff no no so then i'll go to the next one i think that's a great question and i think it's a question that a lot of people have around when we say standards-based ieps or ieps aligned to common core that if i'm understanding your question correctly it doesn't mean that that their goals will be at grade level because they are honest that means it'll be within the common core it means that it will be aligned to the strand of whatever they are they're they're working on it at that grade level so let's say if you're working on comprehension at third grade they're not going to be at third grade necessarily but we know what skills build on on comprehension to get kids where they need to be so anytime i mean ieps are roadmaps to get students where they need to go so they're if they're not at grade level we have to figure out what are the steps that are going to get them there and that's really what it means is so that we're building on the skills that are actually being taught at the at the at the core that they're exposed to every single day all right the our teachers are i mean have you made that clear to principals who have a tendency often in our school district to go out and look over everybody's shoulder to make sure you're doing common core common core common core common car we have provided um we're we're in the actually just in the second year of providing the professional development we haven't really even started into the testing yeah we we've laid the groundwork for our staff by actually the last couple of years requiring that they attend the common core uh trainings that are happening at their building so that they have a knowledge of it at a basic knowledge of it and now this year in our joint training with our community partners we're incorporating you know a standard standards-based ieps and really diving into that many of our
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staff are doing it and have been doing it it's not it's really not a new thing to special education when i was a special ed teacher i always wrote my iep's line to the to the state standards so um but it's but it's we kind of lost our way and we're trying to get back what is the what is your feeling in the our special ed department which we have here tonight basically about the s back testing which comes up with the big at the end of the sbac testing which is incredibly difficult and huge numbers of our children are going to fail and a big sign comes up at that time that says you failed and so we have this testing which will give children who need the positive reinforcement that they're strong good kids failure failure failure failure and well are we taking that into account in some way i mean how how we how are we going to mess with that i mean because that's really uh you know how how often can you tell the kid they're a failure over and over and over again and have them still hang in there and want to and really care about it because we're really pushing on that s back is really important out in our schools this is important we're telling children it's important we're telling parents it's important we're telling everybody it's important and then guess what you fail fail fail fail with a big sign that says you failed and i don't i don't i don't know the crosswalk necessarily and how that's going to transfer for students who will be taking us back i know i know that the extended assessment the state hasn't adopted or we don't really know exactly what the extended assessment will be for special education students yet it's not it's not changed for this year so it will continue to be the extended assessment um that they've taken in the past and we know that oregon is a part of a larger consortium that's looking at those things and looking at what that assessment the extended assessment will be um i don't i don't i can't i don't know that students who are taking the smarter balanced the standard to test with um accommodations that are on that are sp they're receiving special education services um now they talk to you about what accommodations that you that are going to be available for the s back yeah do they have language accommodations yeah i mean a lot of the accommodations i mean i could send you some information around what those accommodations look like and how it's changed um but we've been providing training to staff on that and so that they understand what the changes are um can they make it tough i'm not going to make a prediction that that it's going to be a big failure for students on that receive special education services because i don't necessarily know that that's true but i think we'll have to see all across the country that's what's happened though yeah go go go go ahead and i'll come back to me thanks so much this has been really wonderful and as others have said we're just really excited to hear about all the partnerships and just the culture shift and the shift to an assets based approach overall and no longer accepting the the status quo so i guess my question is really more at kind of a higher level in addition to cheering on all that you're doing and i'm looking forward to seeing specific budget requests as we weigh all our prioritizations and the tough choices that we always have each year but just really around your plan and how we're going to make sure that that's integrated into our overall you know strategic plans and priorities for the district and the board going forward so that we can really make sure that what you're committing to the changes you're making the um hopefully there's going to be specific benchmarks and and metrics and goals along the way so that we can both you know support you and help make it more visible and also be accountable to um our community and just so whatever role we can play as the board and at the leadership level of the district to make sure that that that's elevated so for one example just hearing with it about when principles are ready i feel like principals need to be ready right so wanting to make sure that we can do whatever we can in our role to support moving this along and having it happen and being accountable to our families so i'm really excited to see it and i want it i want this has been a wonderful presentation and i want to keep this integrated into what we're doing and the visibility of of achieving as you said achieving our priorities our key parties for this district it's essential that we include all our students so just i just want to see um i don't want you to go away and then we don't hear from you we don't see this visible on our website or in our work going forward so that's that's that's my main input but just really excited about all the all the details you brought to us tonight and i'm just want to cheer you on so thanks so much thank you i i would like to say that um the office of teaching and learning so my peers have been extremely supportive
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we work very closely together this is not just a special ed initiative in there and we we we work in partnership that way and so that's been office just awesome to have that support carol's also been extremely supportive that's the only way that this can happen is that we come out as an office of teaching and learning and say this is the way we educate all kids and we work together to figure that out and then we're really modeling what we want to see in schools right right so thank you so much so i would just i'll just tag on ruth right now with both her comments about the work that you're doing and how we can be supportive and then the other piece which just struck me well i think it was ed that was talking about the budget implications and challenges or maybe it was you mary especially the part around lack of consistent practice in all buildings cultural cultural relevance pbis response to intervention all those things when we're thinking about the budget those are really important things i'm so glad that you you said something about that because those are really important things for us and programs that it's very important for us to expand throughout the district and i want to make sure that those are in all of our schools at a level where they can be of assistance to you because otherwise what you're trying to do just isn't going to work exactly we don't want to serve kids on the on the top end we want to serve them down here exactly thank you exactly so thanks so much for including that specific information in this presentation others matt thank you first um i gotta i get a few things but the first thing is uh in terms of community partners there's an organization in town called fame academy and i'm not sure if you've partnered with them i know they start at 17 years old and then go to much much older i you don't need you're shaking your head so i'm glad i'm i'm not surprised uh that you're familiar but um really has been an organization for a while now that's done a wonderful job in incorporating art the visual arts and performance art into the lives of individuals adults with disabilities so please something to to consider uh so i i want to speak very generally i guess about some of the things that were running through my head and uh and i was as has already been said encouraged with um what i would probably consider sort of a version 2.0 uh sort of how how do we get ourselves out of where we've been um to where we need to be and uh and i think that became clear with your um with one of your first slides when you talked about the status quo isn't good enough um and i i started writing down some of the things that i've heard over the last few years that isn't good enough uh and i want to i want to be explicit about those but i don't want to be the negative nelly and and bring the party down but i want us to understand that these are these are the challenges that we're facing right now the challenges that all of you are facing and the expectations that i think we have as a board i'm really troubled with the disproportionality of students within our special education program and the relationship that often has to students who are being disciplined we have a pretty massive challenge within our district a lack of understanding a lack of cultural relevancy or lack of cultural responsiveness that leads to this kind of disproportionality i'm also uh really concerned and and um challenged when i hear from families about the poor services poor response that they get from our educational services district when people aren't being called back when they're not being responded to and they don't feel like their kids are being served those are problems and that's a big partner of ours there's been talk in the last year or so about isolation rooms and seclu isolation booths and seclusion rooms these are these are big important things that you know people fall on both sides but we need to be very clear as as a an organization why we use things when we use them and we want to be we want to be public about that you know robert ford when he presented to the board she's a few years ago now um my jaw was a gape when he mentioned uh that teachers were calling for paraprofessionals to come to their classes before students arrived and i don't know if that is something that's still happening
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but that is absolutely shocking to me still when i say it out loud that that's something that could be happening before a teacher meets a student they get on the phone and they ask for someone to come and help them in that in that classroom so i and and whether or not that's still happening i don't know um you know very personally a student who the organization i've worked for was working with i think this falls into the category of sort of a lack of cultural awareness or responsiveness a counselor to a parent of of a child i referred to them as having swiss cheese brain and nothing ever happened in that case there wasn't a behavioral issue pursued or a professional issue pursued but there was damage that was done to that relationship significant damage that was done to that relationship um and i think that you know that i mentioned that speaks to the sort of lack of cultural responsiveness i think it speaks to in this case just a lack of common decency um the reason i'm bringing these up i think um isn't to you know dredge things but really is to talk about the necessity that we have of addressing the trauma addressing the challenges that parents have experienced in this district in this department for a long long time decades their entire kids academic career that's the burden that we have right now and it's very important and it's very serious um but it also i think makes makes me that much more hopeful for what was presented today the only the last thing i would add is i think i need to look at a need for me to see the where we're at in terms of our status quo i've heard a lot about the path we want to take to get there but what is that goal what is that goal to a reduction of disproportionate number of kids of color in special education what is that goal of how many of our students right now are going to be in classrooms how many how many schools are we going to be launching this at uh where there are co-teacher opportunities which sound really exciting uh and uh and how similar to what we've heard in terms of our uh in terms of our um uh language immersion dual language immersion what's the projection how do we get there when do we get there by and that's the kind of thing that i would really like to hear because that's something that we can budget for right something we can plan out so that's all i have yeah thank you that's exactly where we need to go um i think we're we we have to get there through the stakeholder process so we're having um you know meetings with all of our different stakeholders and and having these conversations because i think they all need to be at the table and involved with making the decisions on how how we get to where we want to go we we we want to move towards more inclusive practices and what does that look like and and um is for example are our behavior classrooms the best way to serve students with social and emotional and behavioral challenges is there a better way to serve those kids that is maybe even more cost effective but has better outcomes that's the number one thing that we're looking at right now because that's that's the one that's very glaring great thank you i appreciate it others steve uh first question i think was we you talked about teachers i'm trying to stick to things i know here you uh you talked about teachers on your committees do you have a committee that's made up of teachers on the ground in the schools that you run things through in other words you sit down with a certain number of teachers sent to you by the teachers union who you run stuff and say we're thinking about this what do you what is your uh uh what is your feeling about this type of change how what what problems do you see from your perspective i mean now do you actually have a regular committee that you meet with regularly that someone could say okay we're going to meet at this date that it does what i'm talking about yes right now our committee is about 17 to 18 people and kind of growing it's teachers speech pathologists motor staff all people that are on boots on the ground out in the buildings
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katie lee is on our committee and we're um we are waiting for um p-a-t to recommend staff so i've reached how many people are they going to send you i don't know i mean i've reached on your committee if they sent you 20 would you take 20 well i don't think we have the bandwidth to take 20 because we pay them to attend it's after the contract day but we could take probably probably five more you know that are that pat recommends okay great on that the second question i had has to do with the sackett recommendations one of the concerns that is a really super concern that i've heard from people is that my child is in a special ed class in this building one year and then next building the next year and so forth and you kind of alluded to that how did the how did the saca recommendations of neighborhood schools help that or hinder that problem i mean is that problem still a pretty strong pretty strong problem i mean how does how does that work i know a lot of people are interested yeah several several years ago when joanne mabet was here there was a big change to have continuums of special education classrooms in a building so that you could cut so for students whose iep indicated that they needed like some special kind of a focused classroom that we would have you know several of those classrooms in different grade configurations so like a k2 and a 3 5 in one classroom or in one building so that it would cut down on transitions for students we have better continuums now than we ever have had meaning that most of them most of our buildings who have a special classroom have at least have two so they have like a k2 and a three five or they have a three five and a six eight if they're a k8 building to cut down on those transitions um but that creates other issues as well yeah no i'm sure it does i mean it still is is still is moving students away from their neighborhood school in order to receive their services and so there's questions about is that the best way to serve kids um with busing and all of those things but the other thing that it does is it creates different demographics for build for certain buildings so you know you might have a building that has you know three communication behavior classrooms that serve students that experience autism and then so you might have 25 to 30 students on the autism spectrum in one building so that changes that building just like for the big example i always uses roseway heights they have a k2 a 3 5 and a 6 8 behavior classroom so they have about 50 students that other buildings have said they can't serve because of social emotional and behavioral challenges and they they have them in their building and so my my question is that is that the best way to do that those are the things that we're um exploring in our committees and we'll be continuing to explore the good thing about this being a six-year plan is we don't want to make we don't want to make um quick decisions and make the wrong decisions we're setting the vision and we're figuring out the best way to get there what what role does this space play in that let me see that again what role does this the space in the buildings play in that than those decisions um they've played in in where they're located they they play a big role um so the facilities has looked at they look at where the students are coming from they look at buildings and space and they determine you know where those classrooms will go based on that and future projections do we have a uh basically we don't do we have a oh well i'll use this uh what i think is a stupid term anyhow best practices do we have a best practice idea of what we want to do around that yeah in other words if you said okay we have spay all the space you want there's no space problems whatsoever what would be the what what do you have a best practice that you say okay we would have special ed best practice would be that all kids can receive services in their neighborhood school and that we have the expertise and the services that come to them and it's just so that's a huge leap to get us there and so um my people are back here whispering in my ear but and not to go
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down a big rabbit hole but i'm sure you're familiar with the swift project and so i i was going to bring some data around that but that's a whole other presentation and maybe something we can talk about but the data and outcomes from that are around inclusive practices and it's not only that students with disabilities achieve at a higher rate but also general education students do when we include students with disabilities everybody's instructional level is sort of increased and that's one of the things that co-teaching does as well and that's what data shows that's what national data shows um i would just let my colleagues know that we are now a half an hour over the time that we set for this particular topic just to let everybody know i only have one more question and we can um uh we can ask as many more questions as you would like but i think we need to move along um steve you have one more others along here yeah one more if i don't do the discipline disparity question which i'd like to see us speed that up on that disciplined disparity i think we would all like to do that dyslexic dyslexia dyslexic students in our uh i've talked to i've had a lot of parents raise that issue with me it's not necessarily directly a special ed issue i mean who in this who in the district is responsible for that and i had a person tell me sunday night we can't even say the word in our district basically and that was my experience when i was up in uh teaching in evergreen you weren't allowed to say the word dyslexia well i think that i think that is changing um and i think that the history of that is that dyslexia is a medical term and so education is happening yeah i know that you don't make medical diagnoses you have to do it correct but that is changing we acknowledge dyslexia as a learning disability we can say the word we haven't exactly we have a lot more training to do around this quite frankly um i i again i think this has to do with reading instruction and foundationally the way we teach reading um when like one in five students experience dyslexia i think it might be more related to how we teach reading so i i think that that um the conversations are around that are developing in the office of teaching and learning it's it's i've been resistance to make it resistant to make it a special ed issue because actually quite frankly a lot of kids that experience dyslexia do not qualify for special education services um and so that's kind of where we are with that so it's uh so it it's into that there's a problem it's into that it's into the teacher teaching and learning people is that what you're saying to deal with it in the school district we're having we're having conversations in the office of teaching and learning about our future reading adoption and really how we're teaching reading so i think we we have some folks from uh dyslexia oregon that are going to be on our adoption committee that will kind of be helping us drive this work that's that's good yeah i mean having had a son with a learning disability related to reading that's that's wonderful to hear yeah uh you i think you were gone when i said that we are cutting off but go ahead i just had one um budget related thing that i just wanted to um be asking about how we allocate school psychologists i don't know much more could you just remind me how that happens is that through special ed is it through the administrative tables at schools is there any minimum that each school gets yeah do you want to talk about the formula it is through special ed and we have a very complicated formula that the school psychs actually helped us develop sure um i guess it was two years ago school a group of school psychologists came together to discuss what are the variables that should be used in this formula and one of the one of if i had to pick a theme of the discussion they too were on board with well how do we get to um how do we get to incentivize preventative practice and and how do we include that as a variable because when you're including the number of students who have disabilities as a variable it's almost counter to what our vision is in terms of making sure we're providing high quality instruction for all students across tiers and so that was a huge part of the discussion and we also um like every department in the district used a racial lens to make sure that we weren't taking
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school psychological services from some of our buildings that were losing population and so there are other variables mixed in there we did end up including i believe some eligibility in there because we couldn't just completely change the entire formula that was being used because it would cause way too much disruption and in fact it ended up causing disruption and we had more movement due to this formula and the way it yielded fte which was a learning experience for us and also was a blessing in disguise because there was an mou written after the contract negotiations that school psychs and our department agreed on keeping school psychologists in their pos in their buildings for three years so a three year commitment with openers if there's a retirement and then we you know there's a process for putting them in there the relationship peaks right yeah exactly but i'm not sure that answered the question but maybe during the budget cycle maybe you could that's a bunch of pieces let's look at it the piece of the question you were really going for is that part of the schoolwide support table or is it special ed and the answer was that special edge does the allocation it's not part of the schoolwide support table and and i don't know if this was part of your question that's part of the question but um not every building has a full-time school psychologist was that where you were going yeah that's trying to get an understanding of that yeah directory i can get you the formula that's used with the variables to give you an idea because i i don't really think i did a good job at remembering what all of them were but there are probably about 10 i'd say that that go into the formula and then shoot out that ft right great um greg i know you had at least one more so you still have another question i do okay it's two and because uh we're over time i'll shorten my one question from a long form answer to a short form answer you talk about you and the office of teaching and learning working together yes um and talking about um i heard rob saxton talk about the the challenge right is making sure that quality instruction is happening in every classroom um so as a yes or no are you working with um our senior directors to ensure that they understand what they're looking for and how they're evaluating and supporting these students yes um yes short answer yeah sure you can see why it would have been no longer answered but thank you um and my last question is actually related to the investments i remember visiting a couple of schools i think it was last year and they were really appreciative of the move towards inclusion and they were very clear that if we didn't support it financially that it may or may not be a more economically efficient model that it might actually require additional investment to do it well and to do it right what i heard from you is the additional investments that we made whether through contract negotiations or through additional staffing have made a difference have really allowed us to do this well and so i'll i'll even go a step further than saying you know help us figure out what the budget pieces are but i would really like to see detailed out what investments we'd have to make to continue this momentum because i don't think in the end that this will help us just with our special education students i think it will help us with all of our students exactly with a variety of issues and so with that i'll just highlight the fact that i want to acknowledge that as we continue this movement towards really educating all students whether it's special ed or tag as we heard earlier that's a really wide level of differentiation and i don't know that there's a limit to how to differentiate but it sure is difficult for one person an individual classroom to hit all of those marks so i appreciated the testimony about that the power of having multiple people in the classroom working with multiple kids i think it's a really strong educational model yes i just i just want to say too that i i don't believe that we can move to a full inclusion model and maintain all these focused classrooms so we have to kind of decide you don't want to put that much money in the special education budget to do those things you'd be better off to put it on the gen ed side do you know what i'm saying so we have to figure out how to shift okay mary thank you very much ed thank you michelle robert um thank you for your presentations and for your taking our questions we look forward to seeing you again especially around budget time thank you guys that was great okay okay gonna make up some time maybe a break yes three minutes
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okay the next item on our agenda is our school climate survey our successful schools climate survey i should say uh superintendent smith would you want to go ahead and introduce this item um yes and i'll introduce john isaacs who's in charge of the office of community involvement in public affairs and the school climate survey was actually identified as part of our board work plan last summer and then voted on as something we were committed to developing and figuring out and implementing this year and this is the update on the work that our work group has been doing so john okay great um i want to just give everyone an opportunity to introduce ourselves again i'm john isaacs chief of communications and public affairs um elise christensen senior evaluator portland public schools i'm april arevalo i'm an evaluator here at portland public schools so this has been a great collaboration between the office of community involvement public affairs and our system planning and performance and research and evaluation team obviously when you're doing a survey like this we have to collaborate between the two departments because the success of it depends on the involvement of the community and having all of the target stakeholders take the survey and having a really strong survey that gives us the results back that we want so just to add a little bit of background to the background that superintendent smith gave the so this is based on the board action plan that you adopted directing us to develop and implement a district-wide school climate survey for students parents guardians and staff if you also recall in our board presentation last year where we discussed our plans for surveys this year this will be the first of two surveys that we partner with uh oregon's kitchen table out of the psu center for public service the first is the climate survey it will be followed by our equity values and growth survey which will help drive the district-wide boundary review discussion so we presented that timeline to you last year where we presented our plans to launch the climate survey at the end of january have it open from the end of january through the month of february close that survey take a two or three week break and then open the growth and equity survey which will get into district-wide questions whereas this is focused on specific school climate questions and have that open from the end of march or the end of april so that was the timeline we presented to you last year so what we're going to do is take just give you a background on school climate what it is how you measure it the background on how we selected the california healthy kids survey is our base survey that we have been adapting to make our own and then talk about the outreach plan we have that we've already begun to implement to raise awareness in the community encourage participation in the survey okay so first of all we just want to show how this is connected to the successful schools framework um both school culture and school and family partnership are are quadrants of the successful schools framework and this is a big school culture and school climate obviously are a big part of that so this the school climate survey is directly connected to our successful schools framework let's turn it over to my research colleagues okay so first so what is school climate so school climate is a broad multi-faceted concept that involves many aspects of a student's educational experience the national school climate center talks about school climate as being the quality and character of school life and also a sustainable positive school climate fosters youth development and learning necessary for productive contributing and satisfying life in a democratic role and so research has shown that a positive school climate is related to school success it can improve attendance achievement retention and even graduation rates so after consulting with experts research and guidance from pps staff who will be using the results from the survey we decided to use the california healthy kids survey as a starting point this survey has been adopted statewide in california west virginia louisiana among other smaller school districts and other states it's been used in reducing exclusionary discipline improving graduation rates and improving health outcomes so the survey is valid and reliable so this this slide shows the four essential dimensions of school climate and it really mirrors the successful schools framework because school climate does fit into our portland public schools successful schools frameworks so a positive school climate is the product of of these four dimensions the first of which is safety which is the school's attention to fostering safety the second is teaching and learning which is a supportive academic and disciplinary environment the third
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is institutional environment which is a positive physical environment and school connectedness and engagement and the fourth is interpersonal relationships which are respectful trusting and caring relationships throughout the school community so combined with the test scores attendance records and graduation rates the results from a school climate like this can give a comprehensive view of what contributes to a school successes and its challenges so the first thing we did in work with the school climate committee which has been great working with directors buell martin and atkins was we developed a purpose statement before we announced the climate survey of the community and this is the statement we came up with in collaboration with the committee to provide pps administrators principals and teachers with transparent comprehensive data that measures the differential experience and perceptions of pbs students parents guardians and staff of all races and backgrounds in all pps schools this measurable specific feedback will provide pps with an actionable framework for the continuous improvement of schools and service to children and families so that's the first work we did with the climate committee and then we got into the work of adapting the california healthy kids survey to make it our own which we're now calling the pps successful school survey and you saw some of the initial marketing materials that we've already released to the community posters we have up in schools emails we've done to the community at the last board meeting so i don't have any of that today because we showed it to you last time so before we get into our engagement goals i want to just describe the process that was in the memo provided to you for adapting the survey that we've undergone to this point we're not done we'll be done with it by the end of the month when we're ready to launch the survey first we worked with the client or with the school climate committee to review the survey we went through it in detail took a lot of feedback updated the survey we took that updated version and we provided it to stakeholder groups representing parent advocates and asked for gave them three weeks to review the survey provide us feedback on it we presented you with the list of those groups and we did meet with some of them we offered the willingness to meet with them to review the survey in person we did do that and we adapted all of that feedback into the most recent survey that we reviewed with the school climate committee yesterday um and then we made some more additional changes at the climate committee meeting yesterday which were provided to you redlined in the version you got today um that version will now be reviewed by all of our staff stakeholder groups so pabsa representing our principals and we'll be working with all of our staff unions especially working on the staff survey and then we have one final climate committee meeting at the end of the month to review those final surveys that will then go into the field to be taken by our various stakeholders so um we haven't seen yet correct the climate committee asked that we bring the final version of the staff survey after our staff unions had had a chance to weigh in and provide their edits so we're going to do that at the last committee meeting of this month that was what the client we were asked to do by the climate committee yesterday obviously we had a bit of a challenge of doing this work over the holidays so our last meeting was just before the holidays then we met yesterday and we scheduled one more meeting yesterday so that's where we are on with the surveys the surveys you did receive for students and parents are very close to final so we're going to do a final review with those groups and get those into the field especially the parent survey because we're already in the process of translating that into six languages that involves translating it for online all of the directions online the various forms that we'll be asking participants to fill out online so it's a lot of work so we've already begun our engagement so i think you've seen the marketing materials we've done multiple e-blasts this week we have a postcard that's been mailed to the home of every pps family letting them know about the survey why it's important encouraging them to take it when it launches at the end of the month these are the participation goals that we presented to you last year when we reviewed the surveys that we're going to be doing this year but i want to just go through them again and give you an idea of what it means very specifically in terms of numbers because they are ambitious stretch goals if we are able to hit these levels of engagement we will have achieved a very high level of participation in the survey it's going to be a lot of work it's going to be the work of a lot of staff members from both the community involvement public affairs department as well as our family engagement team led by richard gilliam i do want to mention that our manager for community relations kim fox middleton who's here has been doing an amazing job coordinating all this work we've completed surveys for nearly all of our schools in terms of who are the parent leaders at your schools both formal and informal what are the key communities we need to be working with because we know at the end of this work we're going to be down at that level in specific schools where we know we need to get participation as you know we're partnering with the psu center for public service on this the key thing about using oregon's
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kitchen table as our survey partner is we're going to be able to track participation on a daily basis by school so we're going to know which schools have just gotten jumped in and their parents are filling out the survey and which schools we're lagging behind and where we're going to have to implement some of the strategies i'm going to talk to you about now so we're going for 40 participation district-wide we also want that to be an average per school so we don't want to hit 40 percent but all of that comes from three clusters where we have three other clusters where we have low levels so we're going to be going for equity and participation across the district we're also going where our goal is to have 50 participation from our under identified demographic groups and underrepresented communities to give you an idea of what we're talking about here overall we're looking for approximately 19 700 surveys to be filled out total that would get us to 40 percent within our identified underrepresented groups our goal is for 1890 asian families to to participate 2496 african american families 3 925 hispanic latino families 218 native american families 194 pacific islander families and 1 938 multi-ethnic families so that's that's the level of detail in which we're going to be tracking these numbers as we start to get results coming in and we're able to track them on a daily basis and we'll have strategies that we hone and make more specific as we are able to see where we're having success in which communities we need to get more down in the grassroots working with to try to to build participation okay so the key message for our families is that your voice can improve your school the objectives are that all voices matter the responses are confidential um the results will be shared with the community later this year and that the results will guide the improvement of schools and that's going to be driven in every piece of communication we put out to the community so the timeline again is for the student and family gardening surveys to launch january 20th and be open till february 28th every school be conducting their student survey at a time that works for them during that time that's going to be done easier in schools we're keeping the family survey open for a full month so we have that whole six weeks to drive participation we'll launch the school staff survey february 2nd and have it open for the month of february that's going to start a little bit later so we have time to work with all of our staff unions to get all of their edits to it before we put it into the field and then we're targeting the week of may 20 end of may approximately may 22nd to have results shared with the community this will give us time to conduct this survey gear up again do the equity sur equity and growth survey for the district-wide boundary review process and then get into analyzing results so we need to get all of that work done before we start releasing results to the community so you've seen some of the marketing materials we've already done this is the part that's launched already so we have posters up in every school if you walk into a pps school today you'll see successful school survey posters around the school we've mailed postcards that hit this week at every pps family's mailbox letting them know about the survey we have yard signs that are being distributed this week that will be put up around the schools in our six languages again we're trying to build a wraparound sort of marketing campaign around school so that any parent that's out of school sees the lawn sign they're in the school they see the they see the poster they get the postcard at home and it's all building that repetition we need to encourage people to participate and then we will be doing some some limited social media and limited paid advertising targeting mobile phones especially for our communities of color because we know that that's a great way for us to reach communities of pillars on mobile devices so we will be doing some limited social media advertising to raise awareness among communities of color so um just to review the kind of four levels of engagement we'll be going through during this um first we're going to be working at our kind of general things that we do we'll be working with our principals our office staff our school secretaries and counselors to encourage participation also our community agents led by our team school and family engagement richard williams team they've been doing a great job already that will give us that first base indicator of okay which schools have really gotten involved which schools are we getting a lot of parent involvement and which goals do we need to start focusing our resources on so after two to three weeks and we have that preliminary info this is where we'll begin our peer-to-peer ass where we'll be asking parents to take a lead role in encouraging other parents to get involved with the survey we've also will be working through our community partners the same organizations who weighed in and helped us improve the survey we'll be asking to encourage their members to get involved and take the survey we will be doing events in schools targeted at the schools where we have lower levels of participation encouraging parents to take it we'll
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have opportunities to take the survey actually in the school through laptops and and tablets and then we'll be we'll have staff actively in those schools working with parents at times we know parents are in the school or at school events or at community events that we've identified in those communities where we'll have high numbers of parents to take it so again we'll be tracking participation on a daily basis once we get down to that third level we'll be working with specific communities we'll have you know we're going to be able to track these numbers by race by school by neighborhood so that will let us know which community partners we need to get to go to to ask for special help to get to specific communities so we'll be going to specific community partners to ask for that level of help and again we'll be active in those schools and then our fourth level is and if we have to keep the survey open in a few schools past february to get hit these goals we will will be to go door-to-door and start using our auto dialer system at some point we'll say okay we've done as much as we can and we'll close the survey but we do plan on at a handful of schools actually doing door-to-door work to try to get the surveys taken so we're going to go down to the grassroots all the way to try to get to that 40 goal okay so um you have the surveys today that's the present that's the full presentation and we're happy to answer any questions i also want to let you know we have wendy willis from oregon's kitchen table here who you've heard from before with our boundary review if you have any questions about oregon's table that she can answer as well i think the auto dialer uh particularly like an early morning one is a sufficient enough threat to encourage families we can tell yeah um i will say it did remind me of one thing when you were reviewing the draft surveys you probably saw in there that we mentioned that uh by taking the survey so this is for the parent survey you'll be entered into a drawing we asked our friends at oregon's kitchen table hey what's one thing that's worked as they've been doing this work with partners over a number of years and they've achieved very high levels of success in surveys some places up to 80 percent of their target audience taking surveys what's the one thing that always works and they said if you can enter people in a drawing for something it always works so we contacted our friends of the portland timbers and said hey we're going to be doing this high-level publicity here's why it's really important and they said hey great we want to partner with you on it so we'll we'll be we're we'll be informing parents from day one that they'll be entered into a survey to win portland thorns tickets uh to win a soccer ball signed by the entire portland timbers um and then we're going to be working to try to add some things like that incentives as we go along great okay cool awesome maybe some non-sports things too yeah we know who the timbers fans are here okay so uh questions from board members comments sure um just uh very exciting and great great work and yeah you're right it is ambitious but uh the value of this i think for all of us to remember is not necessarily i mean this year is going to be valuable but it's it's an every year thing and so it's it's a continuum uh so we can see see trends change or not uh so i'm really excited appreciate all the work that everybody's put into it um what's the budget for this so uh the budget we so the budget for this has come out of community involvement in public affairs we did the board did approve a supplemental budget that provided us some support particularly for our additional contract with oregon's kitchen table which is about a hundred thousand dollars for partnering with them on the two surveys and the work they're also doing staffing and providing facilitation for the district-wide boundary review the budget for the marketing for this is about twelve thousand dollars and then the rest of it's coming out of staff time i mean we're this is the work that we need i seem to remember a fifty thousand 000 number for a staff person or something like that wasn't there um we're all chipping in a little bit for any data entry support that we need so we know we're gonna have we're gonna have updated i mean i think in the supplemental there was a there was a half-time person or something like that or three-quarter time or something yeah i don't not for this particular project um but i can look into we can reconcile that memory with what it is i mean we all we are we're sharing the cost in our department with um system planning and performance to provide some added support for them for data entry particularly around the written responses that we're gonna get so those won't be able to be scanned we're
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gonna have to type them in well i'm sure you'll come up with solid numbers before budget yeah yeah others bobby so first of all i'm just so thrilled that we're doing this i think it's something that we've talked about for quite a while and it's i think just the fact that we're doing this we'll tell our community our parents our kids that we care about them we want to get input so i mean there's just so many great reasons for this the information we get is also going to be you know wildly helpful to us on a whole variety of different levels but um so there's a couple of questions i had for you one is oh and the first thing is on the parent survey so it sounds like you're going to do a separate staff survey so i'm happy to hear that um on the parent survey you're going to run that past some of our staff groups uh fafsa or pit just to kind of make sure that we've hit all the right questions from their perspective when you have an opportunity okay good yes we will um and so i had a couple of things one is you asked a variety of questions around bullying and that sort of thing what i didn't see in here was any um notion around um uh texting or bullying internet bullying facebook bullying texting sexting yeah um is one that i don't know which grade level reference pull that out but i just want to make sure that that's covered because i think it's a real issue and if it's only in the high school one i would encourage us to take it down to at least the middle school if not so that's just one you don't need to give me an answer on this just i just want to give you a couple of comments the middle school and high school versions and it has facebook myspace twitter vine um on the safety questions around the school um i don't know why we have those all as separate questions i don't know why you wouldn't just say i feel safe in the and then just write always just no blah blah blah i mean it just seems like it's it's taking up an enormous amount of space the way it's written so it's it's uh anyway um and i would also ask if you feel safe in your classroom uh we ask about them feeling safe in a whole variety of places but where kids spend probably most times in their own classroom one of the questions especially in middle school and high school is maybe about depression or do you ever feel depressed and is there someone in the building that you could go to um with that so i'm you know just trying to get to some of the issues that we know kids experience and again maybe it's in there and i missed it but um that would be probably worthwhile i wondered whether we had an opportunity to ask some open-ended questions that would just give us some really good information from parents so two questions i came up with just as an example and i don't know whether we would add these next year or not but things like um if portland public school were able to make a deeper investment in our schools would your would you prefer that we you know lower class sizes slightly increase instructional time add days or add enriched more enriched programs i mean to me it would just be helpful to kind of hear what our parents think or what our students think even um i think that one would be more relevant for parents because i'm not sure the kids would say they want more constructive days or whatever but um but you know just sort of an open-ended question that might just give us a a sense of where our our parents are at the other one i thought about for parents because we've talked so much and we're making such an investment in immersion programs what it would be something to be effective if if your child had the opportunity to begin learning a world language in kindergarten would that be something you'd be interested in you know just some of those things that we're thinking about and we haven't had the opportunity to invest in could we are there a couple of open-ended questions that would really kind of make us go okay you know eighty percent of parents said yes or or parents really don't care about that you know but it might be helpful to have some questions i think there's awesome questions they sound kind of more like for the other survey though that's more about district-wide issues than actually that could be more of a district-wide question well that's that is what i would like to say okay yeah so i was going to say that the same way they have the opportunity to ask questions like that that would be more district-wide district-wide questions some experiences in the second survey and one thing so the exciting thing about working with psu and oregon's kitchen table on this is it not only
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so we want to hit these levels of participation because we want this to be that type of survey right where it galvanizes our community and we get such high levels that we can really use this data for years but the other piece of it is that every parent that we get to register on oregon's kitchen table and take the survey for that second survey we'll be able they'll just simply get an email from something they've already done saying hey we want to ask your opinion about thanks for participating in the school climate survey we now want to ask your opinion about these important district-wide questions so we aren't going to have to put that same effort in the second time district-wide we'll be able to really focus on the schools that we know we're going to have to work and then we'll be able to use that infrastructure for years to come so this gets to your question director curler i just want you know we really developed the survey both the words and the way we're implementing it especially around outreach with that long term in mind that if we put the work in now we get participation going we get the accounts created then we can we're going to have that ability when we want to ask a question of our community to do it again on an easier level and get the high level response okay well i love the the idea of us doing the district-wide questions i would yeah i was got ahead of myself um there was a couple of places where i thought you could um potentially streamline a little bit just on the your student ones the first one is we're giving this to fifth graders seventh graders and tenth graders and the first question you ask is what grade are you in we should know that right we're only giving it to fifth graders seventh graders and tenth graders so it's a way to warm up the student to the format of a survey just to kind of get them in the mindset before you start asking and what i'm more concerned about is how much time the survey takes because after a while when it i know when i do telephone surveys when they get too long i just go forget it i can't do anything so the other one is sixth seventh and eighth questions um the schoolyard and buildings are clean and in good condition then there's a question about my school it's usually clean and tidy and then there's a question about the school grounds are kept clean is there a reason we just don't already maybe you did yeah yeah that was one of the edits the committee made last night yeah yeah thank you we did we still have the three but it's clarified we did eliminate one round okay so i think and then there was just one more thing that i wanted to ask about which we have a whole variety of questions where the answers are no never yes some of the time yes most of the time yes all the time is the reason we do the no never first why don't we why wouldn't we do the yes some of the time yes most of the time yes all the time no never it just seems very negative focused i don't know um i didn't know if there's a reason that that happens but at least maybe we can think about it thank you definitely the way the the california healthy kids survey was formatted so if that's a large concern that's definitely something we can flip we have flipped it on other questions so there's enough of a consensus that that is something that you're interested in making a change in then i would say but i might want to check with people who actually do services i forgot this i think we talked about it then i forgot to ask about it yesterday do we have a do are we going to have a uh extended question at the end what do you where you can fill in write what you want is that on all of them or just on the parent one or it's out on all of them okay that's that's one question the other question another question really is for the hr department which i talked to amanda about asking a specific question about that because one of the things that we talked about was the principal situation and i was very curious that we could get some sort of definitive thing if that's okay with the superintendent yes what's the question so why don't you go ahead and ask the question what's the question steve because kind of just being letting sean sit down we talked about putting specific questions about the principles in this survey like does the principal welcome you do you feel welcomed by the principal in the building similar type of questions which were directed specifically at one person whereas most of the survey is directed at the school so it's generalized and uh argument that we put forward was kind of uh the you'll get that because the principle is really responsible in the end so all the things reflect a little bit on the principle but nothing directly and in one of the things that i mean how does that work with the hr department in terms of we ask a question about a principle then we put it out in a general public so to speak and i mean kind of an evaluative question is there what's the
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what are the boundaries of that because that's going to be a really interesting question particularly in the next the teacher survey where you want to ask for sure about the principle but then do you take that out and put that out in the public how does that all what what how does that work uh good evening uh board members and superintendent smith i'm sean murray chief human resources officer to provide clarification regarding your question um are you asking using the results of the survey would you use that as part of the evaluation process for the administration i'm not asking okay we could ask that question that's a legitimate question but the question i'm really asking is it appropriate to put that information out in the public specific information about a principle from a survey or is that kind of not appropriate if i can if i can just add to it um one of the concerns i think one of the the pieces of information that we thought would be um valuable would be sort of explicitly asking questions about the role of the principal within the within the school climate um but the concern was raised that if we did that does that narrow the narrows to that particular principle in that particular building and this is information that's going to be public in may uh that it said it feels like that would put us in a in a situation where uh we would be you know not not we would be publicly evaluating one of our per one of our staff which obviously isn't something that's actually all about that that we want to do um so i think one of the things i mean that i don't know i i'm putting words in your mouth no but you're right no you're exactly correct that was the right word but isn't that what the word intel survey did yeah but they're not the employer of those principles and the second part of that is when you get to the teachers can you then make those public those teachers survey publics i i don't think we have any problem with what we have here making it public but now about the teacher surveys where you want to for sure ask specific questions about the attitudes and actions of the principles in order to get an idea for the survey those are two questions i mean the first part is i mean you could make that information public however it would be problematic because it would be focusing in on potentially focusing in on an performance and the concern around that is how do you really control the environment of the survey and so what i mean by that is in terms of the number of variables you can't control so for example um is the survey completed correctly by the person what's been their experience with the administrator is it a one-time experience or is it multiple experience do they have inherent biases that come into play as well so you know in reviewing that information it could be problematic but you could have it in the evaluation so there's an appropriate tool for a climate survey and there's an appropriate tool that can be used for 360 360 evaluation for an employee yes definitely a climate survey is not a 360 tool right 360 tool you would want to have a more controlled environment where you wouldn't be facing some of the issues that i just brought up what about the releasing of the parent survey without those specific questions which seems to be fine with the public releasing of those specific questions in the teacher survey where you weaken the teacher survey tremendously without having those questions in there it's a public record i don't know if i really have an answer for that one in terms of whether or not one survey would have more merit over the other not so much merit as being appropriate to public record yeah it becomes i mean it would be a matter of public record and people would be able to access it it would be a matter of public record and um individuals would be able to access that information greg thank you so thank you for the presentation um i have two questions one is just a follow-up on what i just heard i think this has been always the challenge about a 360 evaluation is that if we're going to ask about principles i'd be also just as curious to hear about teachers families experience with teachers i'd be just as curious about the secretary the custodial staff all those are folks that interact with our public every day and our students and it'd be important that we have high quality and the challenge of when you have personally identifying information with open feedback as a public employer as the employer how do you that would that might be excuse me that might be available for um public how do you do it
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in a professional and appropriate manner um so i appreciate bringing up the questions about how do you get authentic information that isn't so watered down and so bland that you can't do much with it but still trying to get at how do we do that um my question john you had mentioned some target numbers for specific segments of our population can you talk to me about how those were derived where did we get those and does that also then break down per school so thank you for those questions so yes these are district-wide so this is looking at our latest enrollment numbers and doing simple you know looking at the 50 target for our underrepresented communities and that 40 target district wide we're going to have a goal for every school broken down by race okay so every school will have a goal for that school's total enrollment so you know again we're going for a 40 average so we'll have a goal hitting 40 for every school 15 percent 50 percent for the historically underserved communities in those schools and we've we've got those numbers i didn't right i could i could send that to board so you could see the goal for every school we're going to be able to track our progress towards that number in every school by every day once we launch the survey what i found myself wondering is if there was any element of proportionality so for example we set an average of 40 respondents per school but that mean we could have gotten an 80 percent um i don't know latino feedback and 5 african-american and i'm really curious to know different people's experience in that school because it might feel one way to a certain population it might feel entirely different to another so do we have proportionality mixed in there yes and that that is a great thank you for making that point that's exactly what we're going to track so we want to be able to look at the total per school right i mean that's going to be our baseline but absolutely if we see a school where all of the participations come from one one group of parents then yeah we're not going to say okay well we hit 40 at that school so we're done i mean we we're going to we're going to try to go for that that the equity and participation all the way down to the school level um you know we'll this will be our first year doing this this has been one of our themes as we've been developing especially the outreach plan has been okay this is our first year like let's let's be ambitious let's really have a great plan let's implement it um but let's also remind ourselves this is going to be our first year of doing this many years so we'll learn from what we do well this year and what we don't do and then we'll try to make improvements next year but that is exactly what we plan to do okay my next question is related to a question that director regan was bringing up about can we switch this or can we do this and not being a professional surveyor or poll taker somebody had mentioned that the survey had been validated but it sounded like it was a health department validation and i'm just curious has it been validated for education and um how much leeway do we have with messing with order and questions and still keeping it reliable and valid okay yeah and i can i can definitely speak to that so the survey has been validated it's called the california healthy kids survey but it is a school climate survey it has core modules for different things but we're only using the core and the the climate model and so this survey has been validated in different research projects and some of them have been held some of them have been academics some of them have been attendants so it does reach into the educational validation as well as you know some people have california has a lot of questions that are just around health and to really address the obesity issues in their in their student population so that that's definitely and so when we're talking about the order and the the answer options these are def definitely ordered in specific banks so if you take a look at it they're they're all about you know question 23 2 through 27 is is about the the facilities and so as long as we keep those that looking the same then that's fine but if we start shoving other subjects in the middle of that subject that's when we start testing the waters with reliability so that's definitely something we have kept in mind in our format can i can i just give you a couple of examples where we've we've made an edit that will make it specific to us and then we've followed the research and evaluation team elise and april's advice on how to do it so if you go to the parent survey these are questions that we have added they were not in the one we got from california so the first is 49 does your child get enough physical activity at school including physical education and recess so this was a suggestion from a group of parents and they this is how they recommended we do it followed by that is a ad we made from the climate school climate committee
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yesterday 50 how much emphasis does this school placed on standardized testing too little about the right amount too much so again most of the feedback we've gotten hasn't been add this specific question it's we think you need to have a question about this thing or there's this is missing and then our team has done a great job of figuring out a way to do it without with keeping the validity of the survey intact quite a public comment about tag and i'm wondering is that something we're waiting for the district-wide thing for us were you here yes i was so i'll share my thoughts that i had um based on that um uh gentleman's comments um we have resisted any um attempts to change the surveys that really get into catering to the needs of one specific parent group this is about although there are questions that you could see especially in the parent survey that's that do ask about services for special needs and things like that but we're asking for the perception of all parents so we have resisted those types of suggestions where you're really asking about services for a very specific group however if we were interested in knowing specifically how parents of tags tags tag identified students responded to this we could add it as a self-identifier in the demographic question so you could add um you know my child is is identified as talented and gifted yes or you know they could check a box and then that would be a you know that would be a way we could disaggregate the data in responses to the questions if we wanted to do that i also do think we'll have opportunities to ask the bigger questions about providing tax services those kinds of things in the district white survey as well but those were my thoughts based on that so the answer is you're looking to put it in the district-wide survey rather than the specific school surveys well i think you can disaggregate based on i don't i know the numbers have changed because of the rules it's already in there so sir it's in there as an identifier along with an identifier for the focus option schools but i didn't see specific questions about tag but it is disaggregator is one thing okay but you can because it's i think the one question though maybe might be it's combined is tell is your child or children in any of these programs and one of the options including english language learner special edge special education is talent in a gifted program or takes honors advanced placement i think i'm the gentleman a testified earlier question whether those should be separated out i'm thinking maybe by grade level you would be able to see that but right it could be either way but when it when it says that you could use the data you would be able to um crosstab it so you'd be able to see the results with that sub group right my question more had to do with is there a specific question in here and i didn't see it but i you know i was but i had to go through and just is there a specific just a second is there a specific question in here about are you satisfied with the tag services your child receives so are you are you satisfied with the specific services that your child receives in any special program or something like that so we have question 17 which reads provides quality activities i mean my child's children's my child's children's interests and talents such as in a few examples so again we could that question and then you can we will be able to go look and at the disaggregated data you can add tag parents responsibilities talented and gifted we have yeah sports clubs music don't really but i think they're talented we talked a little bit later in the survey about there's the motivate students to learn which was the old number 43 has a supportive learning environment i mean i def and there was also about enjoys my student enjoys learning so i definitely appreciate it and agree with the input that we want to make sure that we're measuring you know our students having um their needs being managed i don't know that it would necessarily be calling out specific programs so much as making sure that when we have these dimensions of students experience in school that we're crosstaling and against what their group is and learning from that result right so that that was fine in that case tags should be separated from my kid takes ap or ibm that would that would just step back out that would be easier it's easier to recombine than to have them combined so separate the two yeah so we can tell better we can do that yeah steve do you have a question yeah you know what i think one of the things that mark raised was um if we're going to ask the questions about you're being bullied or teased because of this or because of this he he made a legitimate thing that a lot of kids do get used from bullied because they do well in class which is the tag orientation and i think if that would have come up in the committee we would have figured out a way to add that in
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to make sense i don't know i do think that i'm hoping that when you go talk to the teachers that the teachers will take a look at the concern that i had around do you really want to ask children this specific things and i'd appreciate if you guys would raise that with the teachers when they talked to it and said you know steve had talked about this what do you think so i appreciate that i think we'll figure out a place to put the tag sense and it wasn't i agree we never really sat down and thought in terms of and shouldn't have are you this program for in this program in this program this isn't trying to figure out if the programs are there we know if they're there and it's not really set up to see if the program works hey we know the tag program doesn't work where they're wet already but the uh but we should be asking tag pro tag parents that if we really are serious about it because this won't do that and it's not set up to do that that's why you know again this survey is we can't do it we've resisted anything it was for a specific group of parents because their child is in a specific program or identified a specific way for only them to answer i mean this is meant to measure the collective view of the community at a school so actually those are the only types of edits we present we do it tag survey in the district um that we do yes he testified about it did it was done once in 2012 to my knowledge there are no specific plans to do it again and i don't know anything more than that so like well maybe we want to look at that could be that we want to make a plan to do it and so i under i understand what you're saying and that makes sense to me and um i'm not sure about i i'm not sure about steve your comment about bullying because you could say i don't know what about bullying i mean i wouldn't pull out just tag for that because kids could get things on that right we had a list of things in there and that would be uh that would go within the list but there's also an open-ended option if you're bullied for any other reason and then you explain what the reason is so this is a pilot and we can see if we need to tweak i'm sure we'll need to make tweaks to the questionnaire as we go yeah so thank you so much you guys i really appreciate it bobby um two quick things one is um there's a part here where you ask parents for about the psu oregon kitchen sign up survey um i'm assuming that's optional for parents can you make sure that that's stated that it's optional because i think if somebody feels like they have to fill this and they may not be as honest in the other part so i just didn't see anywhere it says optional and then the one thing was one other question i had thought about that i saw is do you look forward to coming to school just a real simple question for students that might give us some indication of their satisfaction or feeling safe all of that thanks okay thank you very much thank you very much thank you okay our next agenda item has to do with our cash management policy is my colleagues will all remember following import input from the board on the first reading on december 2nd two technical changes were made the policy on page 10. staff clarified that the cfo or superintendent's designee are the only people with the authority to direct a bank to be open bank account to be open or closed these are technical changes and don't necessitate a another first reading so after 21 days of being open for public comment the board is ready to vote on the proposed amendments um we'll now consider resolution 5007 resolution to adopt revised cash cash management policy 8.20.010-p do i have a motion second director belial moves director morton seconds the motion to adopt resolution 5007. uh ms powell do we have any public comment no we don't no we don't is there any board any further board discussion on this great the board will now vote on resolution 5007 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed any abstentions resolution five zero zero seven is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative jazz while voting yes yes great thank you very much you guys okay we'll now have the first reading of the revised cafeteria plan superintendent smith would you like to go ahead and introduce this item um i would so terry burton who's our pbs benefits director is here to give you a
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brief summary of the amendments to the cafeteria plan board policy and these changes are essentially housekeeping items accompanied by sean murray our chief human resources officer thank you so much for your patience and waiting for us getting through everything else not a problem good evening board members superintendent smith i'm sean murray chief human resources officer with me is terry burton our director of benefits within the hr department before the board for consideration are amendments to the district's cafeteria plan and board policy now the primary purpose of the amendments is to align the policy and plan with the new health care reform irs rules as well as make housekeeping rule changes the amendments were recommended and prepared by outside counsel and would be effective uh effective february 1st 2015. at this time i'll turn it over to terry to provide additional information and answer any questions that you may have good evening um so these are you guys have been through this some of you before it happens about every year or two that we have to update because the irs wants to change things constantly so um basically what we're doing is we're adding a mid-year election and this is for aca and what it is is if we have employees who have their hours cut and it's mid-year and it's not open enrollment that the open enrollment for the aca exchanges is doesn't align with ours then this allows them because the our irs rules hadn't up until now to go out and go to the exchanges to get a plan for their family so we wanted we had a choice to do this but we thought this was something that was pretty important to add to the to the um policy and the rules um then there's just the normal cost of living adjustments for the amount that folks can put in the flexible spending account and the hsa plans and so we just updated that information and contribution limits have changed we're fixing that and there was one thing that miller nash wanted us to add and is that they wanted to add language to specify that if a claimant if someone had a problem that they wanted them to exhaust the claims procedure and they wanted it special especially um called out go through the claims procedure process before they decided they wanted to you know file suit or do something like that about a difference with money that maybe they couldn't access in the fsa because of the fact that they were past the limit or something like that and that they couldn't um i think they added that there was a one-year limitation for filing a suit so they had a year and they had to do the it was you know a normal uh legal uh protection that they wanted us to add to the policy and really um that's that's really the gist of it if you have any questions or concerns happy to answer any questions colleagues steve and the union rep for these people is where they're not in them are there excuses union rep here from from this group that's covered no that's not peach there's the one from okay so the cafeteria yeah so the the cafeteria plan actually covers um the flexible spending account which is no i think i'm sorry to interrupt you but my uh line didn't mean to interrupt you but my questions about have we run this through their union and their agreement the union of the people who this affects have we talked to the union representation that this particular plan has an effect on and are they here tonight or have they made a statement which way they go i mean this affects some employees correct it influx it actually affects all employees okay so if we talk to the unions on all this some of this really isn't uh like a choice most of this information is is because of the law changing and we run this through the union people themselves to explain this to them how this works and how the law changes so they know what it is and they're saying oh okay i see what you say and yes i think um every year we actually uh put out uh an announcement through the payroll um stuffer and then also through an email and some other ways to inform employees about changes that have happened because of the law and um what their limits are and how they can access the plans and all of
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that so we we're inclusive you said that uh that the the legal department not the department here but our our legal representation right said they thought we should do a certain other thing to something we know i don't understand all this right but when they from somebody downtown tells us we should be doing this and this is what we should be doing that isn't within it isn't necessarily something that we're forced to do following the law i would think we would run that through the various different union people to see what they had to say about that and his answer and it sounds to me like the answer is no we haven't done that or the answer is maybe that we don't need to do that so we're not going to bother to do it or we're not getting their their input in it or i mean i'm just trying to see how this all filters out all these changes are really positive changes for employees there isn't really anything negative positive so that they're able to put more money in their fsa they're able to access the health care exchange if their family income goes down because of cuts and pay and so really most of these are just helping them have better access and better benefits this isn't to hurt hurt the employees but i mean there's nothing yeah if you went out everybody would say yes that's wonderful thank you thank you pam this is also a first reading this is also a first reading so we have 30 days right i mean essentially this does not adversely affect employees we'll we will be notifying them of the changes but essentially we have to make these changes based on the laws so the miller and ash people told us to change that our own people had missed we now have to make it based on their telling us based on their recommendations but that's their recommendation it doesn't have anything to do with the law necessarily or was it their recommendation that the legal aspects of this need to be made that way and are and it wasn't our our legal department missed that or the last exam yeah excuse me and the laws have changed and so they they have recommended to us because the laws have changed that we needed to update our policy and we missed that in our own legal department okay no we don't do it for we don't have an employee benefits lawyer on staff right i mean these changes were also made in conjunction with our inside legal counsel as well so i mean miller nas provided us the advice based on the changes with the law but that was in conjunction with our in-house legal counsel so you're guaranteeing that nobody will dislike these changes in any of these the whole place that's right well i would say you know with 6 900 employees probably there will be someone somewhere that has i meant the the union leaders oh well no i don't know and as director reagan has pointed out this is the first reading and there are 30 days and now everybody has notice right so there's pretty much that's okay i appreciate that yep 21 days what did i say 31 21 whatever 21. i'll tell you what it is right now there you go anything else anybody else just wanted to take the opportunity to wish director bill happy birthday and also thank you for taking interest uh mr beale because you know it is this is usually pretty boring stuff that you're listening and you are paying attention so the proposed policy will be posted on the board website and public comment period is 21 days so anyone who is unhappy with these changes can post their comment the last day of comment will be january 27 2015. contact information for public comment will be posted along with the policy and the board will hold the second reading on january 27th thank you both i appreciate that um and division 22 is no okay our final uh agenda item is our business agenda so the board will now consider the remaining item on his business agenda having already voted on resolution five zero zero seven miss fowler are there any changes do we ha uh do i have a motion in a second to adopt the business agenda it's removed second director atkins moves in director regan seconds the adoption of the business agenda spouse there any uh public comment no there is not is there any board discussion on the business agenda excellent
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uh the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed any abstentions the business agenda is approved by a vote of 7-0 with student representative joshua voting yes the next meeting of the board will be held on tuesday january 13th but before we adjourn we all want to wish director buell a happy birthday today a very important birthday and we hope that you will all come down to the diocese and join us because we have a birthday cake so this meeting is

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)

2015-01-06 PPS School Board Study Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - January 6, 2015

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