2015-01-27 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2015-01-27
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - January 27, 2015

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good evening everybody this formal meeting of the board of education for january 27 2015 is called to order i'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this may 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 student representative jazwal is absent this evening before we start uh talking about our agenda items i'd like to take a moment just to thank the portland public schools staff for the presentation they provided last week at our board retreat on wednesday night we spent that time looking over the board's work plan for the next year and it was just amazing i think to most of us how much work we had gotten through this year that's on our work plan we still have a lot to do but how much we we've gotten through and um we just wouldn't be able to get that work accomplished in the time that we've been able to accomplish it without the support of our wonderful staff here at portland public schools they do a really phenomenal job for us so i just want to thank them so i also want to uh provide a very sincere thank you to the members of the students advisory committee on enrollment and transfer we didn't get a chance to do that last week and they just did tremendous work for us and a very tough job and sometimes thankless but we really appreciated that they provided us with excellent recommendations okay and i don't know how many of their second members out there in the audience i think i saw rita over here others thank you very much we also had a debrief superintendent had a debrief with them last week and again we just can't we can't do this work just as a board without the support of community and members of commit people who come forth to be on our committees to help us with that work so we really do appreciate it thank you now our first agenda item uh superintendent smith would you like to present your report i would um and again i'll also thank zac it was a good um just honoring of a 18 months of work that had been done by a citizen committee that was really outstanding so again my appreciation to second first thing i'd like to talk about is our successful school survey which launched on january 20th and you can see the materials up on the screen the survey asks questions in four areas that's really measuring perceptions of school climate in our schools it looks at the sense of security the teaching and learning the interpersonal relationships and the institutional environment in all of our schools we're working really hard to get 40 participation among our parent community we're asking staff and fifth seventh and tenth grade students to take the survey that's tailored to to seek their perspective starting next week the survey is important for many reasons including that it assists us with all three of our top priorities by understanding the climate in our schools we have the opportunity to improve the learning environment and student sense of belonging that assists with learning to read avoiding out of school discipline and graduating on time and we appreciate the work of our survey partner portland state university's policy consensus center and the non-profit oregon's kitchen table which offers survey tools that will allow for a high level of analysis of our results for the betterment of our schools and we intend to have this be a regular thing that we do every year going forward so we'll also be able to measure trends over time which we're really excited about so thank you to everybody please pay attention schools will be offering multiple ways if you don't want to do it online they'll also have hard copy surveys that you are able to take martin luther king service and tributes i want to congratulate our students staff families and schools who participated in tributes to dr martin luther king jr a number of schools held days of service and cleanup days and did service projects in the community we also had a number of our schools who turned out to do perform both music and dance at the martin luther king celebration at the highland center i attended the celebration was truly proud of our students and our music and dance directors they are like a huge part of the fabric of that celebration and it is a wonderful day-long celebration a highlight of the event was when harriet adair received a lifetime achievement award from the world arts foundation harriet is our assistant superintendent for the office of early learners student family and school support and the world arts foundation honored her ongoing commitment to the education of young people in our
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community and i wanted to just do a huge call out to harriet congratulations it was really a moving tribute and honor a lot of things have continued to emerge with our third grade reading initiative and partners have been part of helping us celebrate this lou ferrigno who is a bodybuilder trainer and the actor who played the incredible hulk in the cb cbs tv series in the early 80s visited vernon school to take part in the district's effort to ensure all students read well by the end of third grade he was in town for the national comic book convention and as a child mr frigno was teased by other children because of his hearing loss and speech impediment and reading especially comic books became an escape for him he loved characters like the incredible hulk because they were strong and powerful and did not get teased so he look he he enjoys meeting with kids and telling the story he became a bodybuilder by age 20 and the youngest ever mr universe that led to his acting career and then to his role as the hulk and it all began he told the vernon students with reading so kids really enjoyed this visit and actually i saw clips of the hulk on featured on the news that were a hoot just special effects have come a long way since they had one scene of him um wrestling with a bear in the water that actually looked kind of real in the water except the green of him was coming off on the bear and then when he goes to throw the bear he goes like this and it's like a little floppy stuffed bear it was like it was really funny anyway kids loved kids loved getting to do this with him and it's being really fun having people participate and come to schools and do assemblies and talk about reading with our kids and our families people are loving it and it really gets it really is getting students enthused so um coaching boys to men so our um pil portland interscholastic league dedic is dedicated the coaching boys to men program that works to make our sports teams avenues for engagement commitment and positive behavior in our schools we had a successful pilot program last year at franklin high school and this year will extend coaching boys to men to all of our high schools and it's a program that aims to prevent domestic violence and sexual assault the national coaching boys and to men program relies on the roles of coaches as mentors to help young men manage emotions in a positive manner the expansion of the program to all pps high schools is a partnership between the pil raphael house of portland and the multnomah county defending childhood initiative i attended the announcement of this program expansion during the pil boys basketball show case this month along with mayor hales county commissioner judy shiprak and our athletic director marshall haskins marshall's quote on this sports don't teach character coaches do coaching boys in demand maximizes the ability of our coaches to use teachable moments to assist in the growth of young student athletes we look forward to promoting a similar program for our young women in the very near future really exciting and i'm just going to say people are also so enthused about just rebuilding the pil this was a saturday event had tons of people over at marshall high school watching the games all day long for young women that's what marshall said we're getting ready that's yeah young women i'm also pleased to tell you about our middle middle grades work to end bullying and promote kindness 22 of our k-8s and middle schools participated last week in the national no name calling week our schools held a number of activities many were led by the school counselors and by student leaders those activities are part of a larger effort to create healthy school environments that are inclusive of all students roseway heights created this beautiful kindness garden that you see fifth graders at skyline taught second and third graders how to combat bullying at jackson the entire school is involved in three weeks of lessons and assemblies and tonight you have before you a resolution supporting the work of middle grade students participating in the no one eats alone day to end social isolation which will be on february 13th so we're just really excited to see the work of our student leaders promoting positive student culture in our schools and in our middle grades in particular i want to just put out an alert to mark your calendars for february 19th at 6 00 pm we are doing our first ever arts showcase the newmark theater downtown will be the special location highlighting the visual arts and performances of our schools that have come about because of the support of the arts tax the showcase called the heart of portland with emphasis on the art in heart is an appreciation event for portlanders who are helping the arts to blossom once again in our schools the event is free but tickets are required a
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space is limited and i really do encourage folks to attend this will be a really great celebration of the arts in all of the ways they're showing up in our schools after returning to the restored building after marysville had been destroyed by fire and they've the school has been back in their building for the last two years marysville has become a place of calm through mindfulness so principal lana pendley has led the staff and students through a mindfulness program that reaches every grade and the results are remarkable from a healthy school climate to a reduction in discipline referrals the program's so impressive we sent out a video team to document what's happening there and we'd like to show it to you and this is also something that a number of our other schools are learning from and potentially working to implement in their schools so here's here's the clip and we saw some of the kids were showing up frankly sad and it began to look at schools like school should not be a place of sadness i've never seen anything like this have such an impact it took all the negativity out of my head and i was able to write more gratitude a brain break is a big part of our day at marysville so we're really going to find out who can follow our brain break and ignore our distractions and you want to try to keep your body still if our bodies are still our minds can really focus on our breath our eyes are soft we're looking down what we know about mindfulness is that it assists us in our ability to self-regulate to manage our emotions soft eyes it's a nice tool that i can use to kind of gather in the children once again to a calm place where we can learn i think that's the huge benefit for me it's it's a way to quickly dispel the conflict it like helps you with like tests and like focus and just kind of helps you get the job done and it's pretty easy it's a welcome addition to life and education thank you for being mindful today everything has improved at our school teaching these mindful practice is a huge piece of that if a classroom is joyful and optimistic and has a compassionate way about it we see less reactive student to student interaction there's more respect that's in the classroom overall and the last thing i wanted to just recognize is king elementary school we just got a report from the u.s department of education and american for arts about our turnaround arts grant and the board received copies of this report tonight and it was king was named one of eight schools to receive a turnaround arts grant three years ago and this is report on the the success of the programs that were part of this and i just wanted to call out some of the things that were noted in the report the independent study reveals substantial gains in student achievement at martin luther king school in portland oregon the mlk reading proficiency rate experienced a gain of 41.03 between 2011 and 24 2014. martin luther king school also noticeably improved attendance rates increasing from 94.7 percent in 2011 to 98.6 in 2014 98.6 that's great they also reduced both in and out of school suspensions by 70 percent between 2011 and 2014. math scores had were less successful and that's been featured in the oregonian but the positive gains were pretty tremendous did not show up in the article so i thought i would make them available to you the other thing that the study called out is that 87 percent of our non-arts teachers implemented the arts into their curriculum and it made special mention of our critical partnership with the right brain initiative which is a really awesome partnership that we have here in portland that really helps to build arts uh into across the curriculum in a number of our schools so i just wanted to call out and say congratulations to king for the acknowledgement in this report and being called out for bringing the arts to kids at king thank you very much superintendent smith great news some some really great news there okay at this time i would like to move on to student testimony ms powell are
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there any students sign up for student testimony okay as you are coming up i will go ahead come on up have a seat and then i'll just read the uh instructions for public comments so you'll know what you're doing there thank you for taking the time to attend this meeting and provide your comments to the board we value public input and we look forward to hearing your thoughts and 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 our board manager rosa and powell to follow up on issues raised during testimony roseanne today is located over here at the desk guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration of others complaints about individual employees should be directed to the superintendent's office you have a total of three minutes for the first two minutes the green light right there in front of you will come on when you have one minute left the yellow light will come on and when your time is up uh the red light will come on and a buzzer will sound and we ask that you try and wrap up your testimony at that time again i just want to thank you for being here tonight we we appreciate your input you can go ahead one of my favorite qualities of my support i just want to interrupt you for just a second would you go ahead and tell us your name and spell your last name for the record thank you my name is delaney alvard a-l-v-o-r-d and i'm from beaumont middle school one of my favorite qualities of my school is that at fermat we don't separate by race or gender but by interests and common topics that we all talk about in a unified group but there are still people who sit alone at the lunch tables i've talked to these excluded students and there's no and they're no different from the other kids i don't think it feels good to sit alone so i'm glad that beaumont participates and no one and no one sits alone day at beaumont the unity leadership club puts on a no one sits alone day along with an assembly about peacemakers in february i love this club and i personally wish it could go on all year hi i'm sarah bader b-a-d-e-r i'm from beaumont middle school and one of the clubs at beaumont middle school is unity 7th and 8th graders can be a part of it and what i like about unity is it is a welcoming community and it brings out awareness to everybody's differences and diversity and allows me to meet new people every year unity puts on a mix-up day at lunch this doesn't seem to be all middle schoolers favorite but it's a day where everyone is a bit of an outcast and has to feel a little awkward in order to meet new people and step out of their comfort zone thank you thank you thank you both for coming we also have claire lyons and stella severborne great welcome thank you um i'm claire lyons l-y-o-n-s oh and i'm stella fearborn f-e-u-e-r-b-o-r-n and we are a part of a group called soar at our school it stands for students organizing for awareness and respect and we've been working hard to really educate our school and spread awareness about kindness and respect in the community and roseway heights is working hard to be inclusive with all students because it's our belief that an inclusive community is a stronger community so on february 13th um we have chosen to help by start participating in national no one eats alone day we have decided to theme tables for this day and just with the fact in mind that everybody has a place where they fit in and people will always fit in somewhere and uh-huh and we will also be visiting classrooms throughout our um middle school hallways spending oh okay spreading you can go ahead about the event and we'll have cookies at each table with dietary needs in mind just to make the event more fun so thank you thank you thank you both that's it we have bracelets right i love that you guys thank you so much so uh having students is always one of the best best parts so thank you very much for
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joining us today and for telling us about knowing it's alone and can i read the bracelet yeah sure so bracelet says dedicated to ending so social isolation beyond difference differences thank you you guys really nice okay at this time um we will hear from our uh portland association of teachers rep as part of our agreement with pat we provide time on our agenda for at regular board meetings for brief comments so i'd like to welcome pat vice president suzanne cohen welcome thank you um i am here representing over 4 000 teachers that are fighting for the schools portland students deserve i'm suzanne cohen vice president of the portland association of teachers inviting you to join us in doing the right thing for students it is absurd to stockpile funds at the seven percent contingency level when our schools and students have immediate needs that you can meet i'm aware of an amendment to come up with a plan to spend some of the money which of course we favor but please keep that money close to the students and close to the classroom don't outsource to a third party because you can't outsource core values to people who aren't invested in the system like your employees so i know that i serve on the workload committee which is a joint task force with administrators and educators and they have made several recommendations and i urge you to read through the workload committee's recommendations you haven't gotten them i haven't seen it yet okay please i'll get that to you but i would like you to see the workloads committee recommendations for ways to spend some of the additional funds and then i wanted to present a few ideas that we have so one is special education in previous budgets special education has had some set aside money that could then be spent later in the year as things arised this year there's no extra funds for special education so as educators have case loads that are too high nothing can be done about it as students needs arise and maybe need some para educational support there is no money to fund that now this is terrible and abhorrent on its own but at a time where you're launching a special education redesign and trying to change the program you need to be investing more resources and more opportunities to help it be successful this is a problem you could solve right now right away another idea is educational assistance currently there are no substitutes for educational assistance these are people that are providing direct service to our students especially in some of our primary grades like kindergarten head start and pre-k these people directly providing service to our students have no one in their place when they are not there this is another problem you could solve right away finally another idea for the money would be to give it to the principals for their contingency to spend how they see best fit at their schools there are many schools that are running out of paper or already been rationing their paper supply we have many new teachers who needed computers textbooks classroom supplies that we could be providing principals could also be using this money for release time for collaboration for pd to help accomplish the goals that we have set but aren't properly funding these are just a few ideas we have so yes i support an amendment to come up with a plan but i urge you to make sure that that plan has your stakeholders involved i would have a meeting with all your representative employees as well as bring them all together so that we can work together to create the schools our students deserve thank you thank you very much okay at this time we're going to go ahead we're going to go ahead and have a public comment misspell do we have i know we have people sign up for public comments martin lindenmeier and i haven't seen ephraim makin i'm martin okay bethany thomas come on down sure yep you guys heard the instructions for public comment when i gave him earlier okay great thank you hi my name is martin lindenmeier my last name is spelled l-i-n-d-e-n-m-e-y-e-r first of all i wanted to wish you wish the board a good evening i'm here to deliver a testimony on behalf of outdoor school with the hope that it will be restored to a full week for portland public school students see over the last 15 years i have been a sixth grader high school student leader
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specific needs of a college specific needs volunteer and an adult staff member with mesds outdoor school needless to say i believe in the power of the program and it is my hope that i might use these next few minutes to first of all say thank you for what you've done already for the program keeping it going even in its limited capacity and second of all to remind you the power of this program has on the many residents of portland oregon when i was in sixth grade outdoor school provided me with a sense of self-worth it gave me faith in people and tell me that under certain conditions you can trust complete strangers to lend a help a helping hand or say a kind word when it's most needed when i got to high school outdoor school taught me work ethic it challenged me and forced me to care and be responsible for other human beings it compelled me to perform for my cabin and for my kids and it overwhelmed me overwhelmed me with emotion when i allowed time for reflection when i got to college outdoor school told me to be humble to be flexible to be inclusive it shifted the tension away from me and showed me what it meant to step back and work behind the scenes with no expectation of recognition it taught me the experience of outdoor school is designed to be shared and it belongs to everyone no matter your race class gender identity economic status physical or mental ability or popularity at indoor school at outdoor school you're equal in my adult life outdoor school has made me ask how can i help what's the best way to do things what do we want our kids young oregonians to understand appreciate and love it taught me that seeking to understand the natural world is the first step in its preservation and in that same vein outdoor school pushed me to inspire during my time as a staff member i heard many hey wow this is the first time i've ever seen a deer the first time i've ever identified a tree or been on a hike and each and every aha moment put a grin on my face and provided me a deeply honest satisfaction because i've been i have been convinced that the work i've done is meaningful and powerful and i couldn't count the number of times that i've seen surprise on a teacher's face when i tell them how well one of their most difficult students did on field study how they were engaged and excited and were using their energy to draw in their friends and look for clues in the forest because at outdoor school success is not measured by the scores of a scant scantron test or by who can sit in their seat the longest without making a sound success is measured by the community that we create and the connection to nature that we all have but are sometimes barely aware of outdoor school is one of the last wholesome places left in education it provides an umbrella for a sometimes disturbing reality it allows for students to succeed outside the conventional setting for learning and it exchanges the material for the natural and teaches fast and exchanges a fascination of video games and pop culture for a fascination of a fascination of nature and it teaches love and acceptance that isn't exclusive to outdoor school and sometimes as students return home those values quietly permeate our communities and fill us with pride to be from portland oregon the future deserves a week of outdoor school thank you thank you hi my name is bethany thomas t-h-o-m-a-s um and i'd like to just say that i support everything that martin just said very much also thank you for allowing me the chance to speak with you guys tonight um i'm also here to speak about how important outdoor school is for people of all abilities my name is bethany thomas and in 2005 i co-founded a non-profit that aims to connect students to the natural world the nonprofit is eco which is an acronym for ecology in classrooms and outdoors and in order to meet our mission of connecting students to the natural world we bring a series of hands-on ecology lessons into elementary schools in the portland metro area so we're in four pps schools right now this this year actually and all those lessons are aligned with standards next generation even the reason that i do the work that i do and the reason that i started eco is because of my experiences with outdoor school and before i tell you more about those experiences i just wanted to mention that since eco was founded in 2005 we've brought experiential ecology lessons to over 14 000 students and worked closely with 450 teachers which in itself is quite a ripple effect and speaks to what outdoor school can do so i attended outdoor school as an 11 year old i was a student leader five times during high school and while in college i volunteered four weeks as a snead a snead is an adult volunteer who spends his or her time working specifically with one student who is at outdoor school and has special needs hence needs these special needs students span the gamut from physical to social to behavioral difficulties and they just need an extra hand to be successful during their week at outdoor school i wanted to just share a brief and very typical story about a sixth grade girl with special needs that i worked with years ago her name was shaniqua she was well liked by her peers so often had difficulty controlling her emotions
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and maintaining appropriate behavior in school and learning situations and just to back up something that martin said there are so many opportunities where kids who don't thrive in that school environment do so well in the outdoor environment um so this this particular instance with shaniqua we were walking to a water resource station at camp howard and a fellow classmate said something that kind of rubbed her the wrong way i think it was about a hair brush but at any rate it upset shiniqua and her response began to derail the group but because i was there as a snead i was able to take her aside walk a different path to get to the water resource station and this allowed her time to calm down and be able to regroup and be a positive contributor it allowed her group to refocus back on what the student leader's instruction was just while she was re-centering are similar situations to this that occurred throughout the week it is really just kind of your typical story but all in all it helped shaniqua to have a successful experience at outdoor school and i would just like to let you all know that sneeds make it possible for students of all kinds of abilities to really thrive and have successful times at outdoor school great thank you very much is it possible to bring this do you want to give us something yeah can i do that thank you uh patrick manigan and scott poggity rick till you can go ahead thank you good evening my name is scott fogerty f-o-g-a-r-t-y i am currently the executive director with friends of trees and i also serve on a committee that is looking for statewide funding for outdoor school i'd like to say that i'm personally very fortunate to have had parents who when i was at a very young age took me out in the woods and taught me what nature was about i gained a very spiritual connection to nature at a very young age and i feel very fortunate for that but unfortunately that doesn't obviously happen with a lot of families and a lot of people not just in the portland metro area but throughout the state of oregon and unfortunately in the united states and i believe the outdoor school program has huge social and educational benefits that can and cannot be quantified per student or compared to tests as our previous uh testimonial mentioned i am not from oregon and like martin and bethany i did not have the opportunity to go through outdoor school but again i feel fortunate that my parents were able to give me that opportunity my last job i was the executive director at the opal creek ancient forest center and while there we brought in it groups from all over the country to look at what an ancient forest looks like which if you know there are not many left in the united states and in or in the northwest and we were fortunate to have a jane goodall environmental middle school program in salem that brought up a group from inner city oakland california and you can imagine the makeup of the students 90 of whom parents were either incarcerated addicted or not living anymore and they showed up at the gate in a forest that they had never had an opportunity to see before and you know were not really engaged with what they were doing we hiked into the education center and they spent five days there and there was a sea change after about the third day with no electronics with no connection to the outside world with the ability to see what a true natural system looked like and what it meant to not just them but the entire planet um and i'm happy to say that on the way out they were rapping about uh trivols and uh douglas firs and other things so they were using their skills that they already had integrating skills being outdoors in an environment that they had never been exposed to previously uh and and having a lifelong i think change i like to think that we never followed up but i like to think that you know jane goodall inspires a lot of people and that had an effect bringing it back to here in the portland metro area i think that that is true at a grassroots level across the board in our education system in this area and i've had the opportunity to visit some of the outdoor school centers such as the collins school out in the sandy river and there's just great things that are going
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on there's restoration opportunities there within an hour from here there are opportunities to see what a true natural system looks like which i believe helps inspire children to become greater individuals to our society because they learn about what a system like that is and that which we've lost a lot of but they can gain a lot of interpersonal and spiritual connections to that so i'm here on behalf of our committee to ask you to fund a full week-long program i would say two weeks but i know that's not there but uh five days minimum for kids to go out and experience these kinds of things that we have right here on our back door that we don't have to go that far for and it doesn't really cost that much so we're going to be working on behalf of kids at the state level and i would encourage you to be leaders to help those legislators who are not in the portland metro area understand the value of these type of opportunities so thank you all very much for your time thank you any do you want to call the ones who did not come down just to make sure that they didn't arrive late yeah manigan and rick till ephraim macon okay great lobby um no not directly i think they just yeah just the distance legislative yeah right we could certainly talk about it we could certainly bring it up and talk about it sure okay again thank you everybody if there's anything that you need to speak further with us about uh please speak to roseanne right over here or you can contact us through a board email or telephone so now we're going to move forward with re the resolution for no one eats alone day i think our students were here to talk to us about that a little bit earlier the board is proposing that we declare february 13th as the official no one eats alone day by making this declaration pps will become the largest school district in the nation to have all of its k-8 and middle schools participate in this national campaign led by the non-profit organization beyond differences this student-led lunchtime initiative is a stand-alone event that takes place during lunch time at school during no one eats loan events students make a difference at their own school by making sure that everyone is included at lunch and students sit with new friends and classmates superintendent smith you have anything further you want to say about this um no just to thank our student the students who came and spoke on behalf of this that was wonderful to have student testimony and like student leadership making this happen in our school so thank you to our students great thank you okay the board will now zero consider resolution national no one needs a loan day do i have a motion second director belial moves and director morton seconds the motion to adopt resolution five zero one one miss powell is there any citizen comment on this there is not of course we already heard from our students which is great um any board discussion director belial i'm just really excited that we're we're doing this this is a great statement at our level to to talk about the the challenging issues that schools and students in schools are challenging and a great way to identify social isolation that bullying is a problem and people are becoming aware of it and finding tools but just also a great reminder of that social isolation is as the students said you know it's easy to see students who are alone in the in the cafeteria and it's a really challenge it's really challenging skill set for students to come forth and to break that barrier and to talk with students is as the one student mentioned that the students are just like everybody else we're all looking for connection and so i'm excited to support this and i am i just appreciate the students taking it on themselves to to play their part in this group yeah the student-led piece is great others no okay i'll just personally thank the students that were here and the other students who are involved in this um this effort because it's it's great okay the board will now vote on resolution 5011 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no any abstentions no resolution 5011 is approved by a vote of seven to zero and i'm sure our student representative would be voting in favor as well which if she were here so our next agenda item is an update on supplemental transportation plan superintendent smith would you like to go ahead and introduce this um i would and i'll introduce tony magliano who's our chief operating officer and justin
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fallon dollard who is our project manager who will present you with the supplemental transportation plan tony good evening superintendent smith chair knowles board of directors my name is tony magliano chief operating officer tonight i'm here to introduce an informational item to the board on work we've been doing to update our 1991 supplemental transportation plan we're required to have an oregon department of education approved plan in order to receive reimbursement for transportation associated expenses the update to this plan is a three-year effort we're about halfway through it it's in collaboration with portland bureau of transportation safe route to schools program in doing this work we've developed a geographic information system data model which is helps us inform but it's all that model also can be used to support other district-wide decision-making processes i want to introduce justin fallon dallard who works in our facilities department who is the subject matter expert in this area who will take the board from you know what we've been doing what the plan is and what the step ahead is for us so justin great good evening members of the board and superintendent smith i'm going to kind of walk you through supplemental transportation within the district and why we're doing an update and then we'll drill down to the exciting details of gis what is supplemental transportation it's non-mandated bus service within student walk areas so if you're in a k-5 or k-8 school site that's a one-mile walking radius if there's hazards present and we don't expect you to walk to school we'll provide bus service if you're in a six eight or nine to twelve school site it's a one and a half mile walking radius so the state of oregon oda expects students living within those walk radiuses to be walking to school unless there is a physical hazard or student has a health issue in order to provide the bus service and be expected to be reimbursed the plan supplemental transportation needs to be approved through a plan we receive 70 reimbursement of that cost so let's kind of walk through how that works so this is the riki school site you'll see it right here next to wilson this is the enrollment boundary for reiki so again there's the enrollment boundary and the kind of the pinkish salmon color that's the one mile walking radius that serves reekie on the right hand side you'll see a slightly shaded out area here that's the area that's been identified by pps student transportation as being an area that has walking hazards so students living within that area are eligible to receive supplemental transportation and there are the students in that area so you know almost half of the students living within the walking radius of reiki could be eligible to receive supplemental transportation based on hazardous conditions why do we need a plan update well our current plan dates to 1991 and no one can find it so that's kind of an issue wow there's been numerous infrastructure changes since that time demographic changes and certainly neighborhood changes so it's time to update the plan well we'll get to that when we get drilled down at the gis it turns out not everyone uses it mostly because of infrastructure changes but also some cultural barriers to walking so we had some project goals which is to develop existing conditions mapping across the entire district we really want to understand what's going on those walk areas we want to identify where supplemental transportation is actually required so currently we're providing transportation supplemental transportation where it might no longer be required because there's been changes to infrastructure sidewalks have been put in or other means to make for safe routes to school we want to identify potential infrastructure equity concerns we know that not all households are adequately served by city resources including access to sidewalk networks in the city so we want to identify where that's happening and we also want to develop equity-based plan support with people safe routes to schools it's targeted resource allocation through the city called plan support so that's aligning resources from the city to where it's most needed within the district however currently city policy doesn't necessarily align with our equity policy we'll talk more about that in just a minute yes could you uh tell us what the last sentence means sure equity-based plans support yeah so equity based plan support is working
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with the city to identify where resources should be targeted based on our equity policy our district equity policy which says that students historically underserved students could be receiving additional resources to create a better learning environment for them or looking at student walk areas a better student walking environment for them so that when they're coming to school they're not encountering barriers to walking and they're walking to school promotes community health so as we get in the presentation a bit longer we'll get into the detail of that so how will students benefit from this update we're going to have healthier kids who are ready to learn because they're walking to school exercising their bodies and their minds safer neighborhood streets for all residents we want to have thriving neighborhoods that foster community you can walk around and get to different places that you need to do run errands meet your neighbors go to school meetings an opportunity for physical activity for kids who need it the most fundamentally what we want are safer routes to school for all children so children who could be otherwise walking into school within a one mile or one and a half mile walking radius or doing so more kids walking means less bus service less bus service means more money going back to school sites rather than to operations so we came up with a project approach the first is a quantitative data model of existing conditions so we're using geographic information system and engineering analysis why are we doing this because the city does not have a gis data model that can support our needs as a school district they can't tell you what's going on in the walk areas across the city because it's not maintained even though the data is available they haven't had the resources or initiative to actually construct a gis data model additionally they don't know where our students are located we know that the city also does not have a complete engineering analysis of pps pps student walk areas so this is a big subject of discussion right now at the city is the fact that there's all these areas that lack sidewalk or proper infrastructure or crosswalks presumably there might be some resources available through city policy but no one's quite sure where the money should go beyond looking at maybe east portland should receive it because it came into the city later when it was annexed so one of the things we look at on creating a quali a quantitative data model are known barriers that can actually be mapped they're identified this includes no sidewalks high-speed traffic truck routes students having to cross four lanes without a proper um flag intersection or crosswalk freeways and then rail both max and max rail as well as freight so one of the things we always have to look at is that any quantitative data model really needs to approach some level of accuracy because i think we can easily get confused by math or presume that there's a magic to math that gives us the right answer and we know that there's lots of ways to approach the environment that's around us yes sure so you're saying that the city of portland doesn't have a gis system that can answer map those things not comprehensively and comprehensively you mean what that means we actually take all those factors together and weigh it to where students are located and where the school site is to identify safe routes to school so they don't have the student overlay but they do have one would assume that they would have that they have the data but they also don't have the analysis methodology to arrive at where those safe routes might be we've actually been building that and do they have it for i mean do they use something like this for their own citizens of which most of us are they don't okay i'll refrain from we'll we'll get you there hang on okay so one of the things we look at is the data collection what's available here in portland so we're drawing from multnomah county washington county metro and city of portland data we stack that all up to make sure that it's there's actually some alignment between what we know to be out there what's the quality of the data that required actually a fair amount of doing field checking at a number of demonstration project sites what's the detail of the data how recent is it what can it tell us about the conditions what kind of analysis can be supported by it what are we going to do with the data and then fundamentally what is our methodology or approach as you all know methodology or approach can influence outcomes for better for worse then we want to combine that with a qualitative data model of existing conditions that's actually asking people how they walk what their perceptions of their walking environment how do they get to school we want to do that through a combination
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of surveys open houses with the community targeted community walks as well as crowdsourcing so we really want people to tell us how do you get to school what do you think about when your kid walks to school this is important for a couple reasons there are cultural barriers for walking this includes necessity or custom walking to school doesn't work for the family it could be an economic issue it could be a faith issue there is a fear perception my student lives in a high crime area i don't want them walking to school we also actually encountered recently in north portland with the city in georgia community there was a fear of deportation my son or daughter could be picked up held for potential deportation or lead to my family and members of my family could be deported there's also the perception that walking to school is unsafe which is something we encounter a lot but there's also the perception that walking to school is socially unacceptable just recently about two weeks ago in silver spring maryland a family lost custody of their children temporarily because they let their ten-year-old son and his six-year-old sister walk one mile from school to their house they were the police picked them up interrogated the parents filed a report with children's services in maryland and then went through a long process the parents went the long process of being accused of by the state of maryland of neglecting the children the sad irony is that one of the parents is a climate scientist for the federal government who focuses on climate change and reducing greenhouse gases so the qualitative data must be inclusive stakeholders should be empowered when providing data to update the plan so when we're reaching out to the community we want them to feel like they're actually informing decision making decision making both made by the district and by the city it needs to be culturally culturally relevant and language specific so we're going to be engaging across multiple ethnic communities based on language five major language groups that the district engages with targeted outreach needs to reach to historically underserved students and their families i think most of you are familiar with this but let's present the definition anyways that's used by the district the state labels these groups as disadvantaged students here at pps we describe them as historically underserved and that includes economically disadvantaged english language learners students with disabilities black hispanic american indian alaska native and pacific islander students so those are the historically underserved students and their families that we especially want to make outreach to often underrepresented community processing so part of the next part of the project approach is to achieve consensus with the community at large so we want to identify those infrastructure gaps right tell us where it's difficult for your son or daughter to walk whether it's physical or cultural perception equity concerns so we can actually help channel funds towards overcoming those and then align our city policy on capital funding with pps equity policy so it's going to go back to the plan support when to talk about this we want to make sure also that all schools are included when we have this discussion about planned support so this is currently the city of portland's model for planned support equity is weighted at 40 percent past expenditures at 30 percent and safety at 30 percent so capital funding decisions made by portland public support portland and peabot safe wrestle schools is equity weighted not too dissimilar to what we do as a district when looking at directing resources to needs currently only 21 schools are included in that decision matrix is equity weighted so that's an issue no middle schools are included no high schools are included so these are our project phases an intergovernmental agreement which the board had considered in june of last year gis and engineering stakeholder engagement which taken together with the quantitative model will give us a complete model of all the walking areas we'll come up with a supplemental transportation plan and plan support with pbot as partners present that to the board upon approval then that goes to ode for approval that directs how we provide supplemental transportation so we'll talk about where we're at right now an intergovernmental agreement was entered into with the city back in june which you all approved it aligns city policy and capital funding with pps equity policy it prioritizes safe routes to schools especially for a bond program and promotes greater resource sharing
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those resources right now are looking at a coordinated effort between pps and pps pbot safe routes to school that's an error on my part that should say pivot safe routes to school for coordinated analysis of existing conditions so we're really working together as partners to understand what's happening out there on the street now comes the fun part gis data model so our data model is looking at school enrollment and boundary and populations which i showed to you a little bit earlier we're looking at transportation related infrastructure student walk area conditions hazard bus service which we noted earlier at wiki potentially 50 of the students living within the walking area could be eligible for bus service and then the locations of underserved student students when we get to the issue of or question around resource allocation based on equity concerns so we built this data model and we really wanted to make sure that it was robust that it could be tested across different walking conditions so we looked at reiki which is in the wilson cluster which is basically hilly conditions some unpaved streets it has barbara boulevard bertha boulevard southwest vermont capitol highway forest park which is actually in the county newer development in the county boise elliott humboldt which has i-5 has the max crossings to take into consideration as well as fremont williams corridor and alberta and killingsworth and then the lent homeschool which we get out to areas with foster powell i-205 max rail as well so tonight i'm just going to go through reiki because it was one that really captures everything we're looking for so riki as i mentioned before there's high volume high speed traffic on a number of different streets that are of an issue there's limited connectivity with the network which restricts routing we have sloped and right windy roads that can reduce visibility most sidewalks most sidewalks only occur on one side of the street and there are on pre unpaved streets so we have two methodologies that we're using one is a network analysis which basically looks at how does a student get from point a to point b and what are the impedances what slows the student down or prevents a student from arriving at point b so network analysis allows us to be comprehensive we're just looking at point a to point b it's dynamic if the route changes between point a point and point b we can account for it it's repeatable we can use it across the entire district ideally it's robust it can be occur be applied to all walking conditions and scalable so one example was reiki which we actually based the model on and then scaled across the entire district we also look at what's called a stream order where we're filtering out routes that do not support walking to school we capture the routes that serve the most students because those potentially could be safe routes that are identified and resources allocated to and then we basically create what's called a downstream order to the school site think of it as a watershed you're just directing a flow of students down to a pond or a lake so this is a little wonky we this is your network and this is your stream order they build off of each other in yellow we've just said these are the areas you should avoid red means that all costs never go into those areas this is i-5 this is portions of capital highway and then the other areas are acceptable for potential walking conditions but then we actually want to figure out how we can best student to get students there so we start to order it and the green shows the routes that would get students the most students to reiki school so we're going to drill this down how that actually looks like when you do it in gis okay now i think this is the really fun part because it's graphics and not just me talking to a powerpoint slide okay back to reiki all the students here are captured either captured by blue dots or yellow dots blue dots are historically underserved students so riki it's around just short of 20 i think it's around 28 of the students would qualify as historically underserved within that entire category that i read off to you this is looking at crime conditions what we did is we actually got 10-year 10 years worth of crime analysis from the portland police bureau and we did a heat map so what we're looking at is a heat map of crimes likely to occur when a student is either walking to school in the morning or returning from school in the afternoon and late evening the likelihood of a crime to happen well if it happened ten years ago versus three years ago does that matter because these this shows you a trend so this is basically a trendline analysis shown as a heat map so this big red dot up there that's oregon health science university most of the crimes up there actually are breaking into cars this kind of orangey here that's near wilson that's the wilson parking lot
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same deal breaking into cars so if you get away from the breaking of the cars ricky's actually pretty good most the entire walk area is actually pretty good we can provide greater details of the different crime categories but reheat compared to a lot of other school sites is doing pretty good in terms of walking to school safely based on crime on trend lines and crime now the question comes down to what is it like to walk in riki well as we said before we notice that around the edges in this area in the walk area there's not a lot of sidewalks present and sidewalks are clustered here in the center because this is newer development from the 60s and 70s most everything else around it is predominantly from the 30s 40s and 50s and it was also not incorporated into the city at the time so sidewalks weren't required we have plenty of bike racks that serve reeky so students could potentially from some areas be biking safely into school now we look at some of our concerns around transportation in terms of vehicles so there's i-5 and the big red line there this is capital highway this is vermont and bertha when we see a capital highway is we have issues of high speed as well as vehicle crashes we have high speed enough coming across on vermont right in front of ricky even though there are speed bumps hopefully they're all getting tickets this is all by the way from odot and pbot monitoring data and so we know that there's areas of concern at these particular intersections where high-speed traffic volume comes through where students have to make crossings and then the other issues where this might not be sufficient sidewalks for students this translates then into our area that's shaded here as a hazardous zone and students that could receive busing the yellow dots show you that those are the students who are actually choosing to take hazard busing this is significantly less than the number of dots i showed earlier so a lot of students are choosing not to take the buses either they're being driven in by their parents or what we observed on when doing field verification is they're walking because there have been changes to the infrastructure improvements in sidewalk area so again the blue shows a sidewalk on both sides of the street yellow is showing us on one side these areas in brown are where there's actually no sidewalk present at all let's overlay that where we look at again here is your hazard area and then going to our stream order we can identify collector routes that without too much intervention on the part of the city can be directing students safely to reiki potentially we could be taking out almost all of the hazard or bus service to reiki except for maybe this little corner up here because it would be difficult to route them unless we're willing to have them cross and walk down that still gets you within a one mile walking radius and in a timely manner so this is something we can present to the city in terms of resource allocation and making decisions not every s not every street needs to have sidewalks on both sides in a limited resource environment we can create better walking conditions and crossings if we're targeting the resources so again side by side here are the students that are choosing to take the bus in the hazard area these students many of them could be walking on collector routes next steps so we need to narrow or eliminate data gaps in hazard bus service areas most of the hazard bus service areas identified by pps student transportation are just kept on scraps of paper that are actually not mapped so we need to go dig through that and go out in the field and try to map it better so we have a gap in our data with that when we bring an intern in to help intern to help us with that and then safe routes to school we'll be doing that as well in the field we want to do a final refinement of the gis analysis methodology to include what's called sinuocity that's just basically how kirby the road is the university of mass university of wisconsin at madison has a civil engineering department that's very interested in doing a study with us to see if we can make a correspondence between sinuosity of the road and pedestrian safety so actually we're in a research study with university of wisconsin right now we want to map the remainder of the district student walk areas we're pretty close to having that finished and then we want to develop a civic reporting tool which basically allows us to crowdsource what's going on out in the field on the from the perspective of parents students in the community at large and they can actually report back to pbs and pbot and we can actually then bring that reporting back into our gis model that's combining the qualitative with the quantitative ideally we'll be able to do that in multiple languages we want to develop a community mapping web application so parents and families
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understand what's called their mode share so they can actually map out for themselves either on the computer or if they don't have access to computer at school or during an open house on paper to understand what their entire commuting route is a lot of families actually don't understand their entire community costs and often how kids get to school as part of the entire family commute it is for my family we split it up between a combination of walking mass transit and a car finally we want to make sure that we have stakeholder engagement that is inclusive that will occur this fall so we can get a complete understanding of how everyone thinks of their walking conditions and build a complete model that combines the quantitative and the qualitative thank you so the plan itself is pretty innovative in what what it offers i don't think any other district has thought about it in this way identifying those gaps and working with the city so that the city can apply resources to help meet our students needs collaborate the collaboration it's received a lot of favorable attention in a variety of fronts so we're pretty excited about this we got a year and a half left um and there's so there's still a lot of work to do but we wanted to keep you up to date on where we are and what we're doing and this is not being done with any of the other districts that are within portland no we're the only district approaching this and it turns out our j our gis data model which may be the only such model actually in the nation ours developed by us that's correct that we're going to sell to other people well it's proprietary but our iga does make it available for peabot safe for us to school so that other districts can utilize it we don't want to be the big dog that eats all the bones sure like you very much tom it is being tracked uh contracted out versus in in-house uh so the the initial methodology was contracted out we hired a gis consultant to help us develop the methodology under parameters that i developed um at that point there was a handoff when we hired a gi specialist a very talented one and i'll call her out even though she's not here her name is christine rooten and she's pretty awesome and then we had that handoff she's then taken it a couple of steps further looking at deepening and adding complexity that the analyst wasn't the contracting analyst wasn't able to solve for us and she did she's a pps employer she is a pps employee dr buell how how many of our schools now are in the same position as this ricky as ricky that we just saw on the map in other words how many do you have to map you've got an awful lot of done stuff done for reiki how many of our what are we 80 how many schools do we have that's good so we have so we have 84 school sites 79 of them though are actually the ones that we are mapping because there are those so we're not focus option schools are not included in it uh within that or any charter schools or things like that so we're looking at you know basically school sites that are regular k5k eight six eight or nine twelve so because like for example benson doesn't serve a cluster there's no school sites that would be included when we would look at mapping benson so we're doing it by high school cluster and then my account gets us to 79 school sites that would fall under the cluster analysis by high school cluster we've actually have existing conditions mapping completed for all the entire district the gap is the hazard bus service we don't we don't have that fully nailed down because we're still working down through the records that pps student transportation has and since they're that hazard bus service was done on a on by an individual basis out in the field and then routes adjusted accordingly it hasn't been mapped it's actually not put to on to a street level data that we're doing right now so that's what we're working through next before we can say x number of routes are valid or receiving by service that translates into x number of students so we're still working that down now in terms of our budget dividing it up in the end do we have enough will we have enough money do you think again well are we going to make a proposal that that meets all the criteria for all the children so to speak yes in other words everybody who's in our spot that's we deem as hazardous would have a possible bus route is that are we getting to the overall everybody included or making decisions on it and i was curious on how if we are making decisions how the decisions being made so that this will help us tremendously in informing us in how we make decisions on um
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where it's safe to walk or not safe to walk i was talking about on who gets the hazards on who i mean who gets to have the bus service so we make a decision on who gets the bus service part of it's on right now part of it's on uh how unsafe or safe it is do we are we quali are we uh quantifying the how unsafe yeah it's a lot you know and we are do we have i mean how do they end up if everybody doesn't get that how do we end up deciding who does that's the question i noticed i don't think we're to that level that we know how many more buses we need or how many less buses we need um buses flow through all these routes it's possible that with existing transportation we're able to adjust routes to provide to provide it for our students of course there's always the alternative that we could identify many areas where we should be providing transportation that we're not and it could cause us cause an increase in transportation costs but i don't think we're at a point now where we can say you're not there yet but some place you're going to have to make that decision exactly though so the other question that i have the third one is this is incredible stuff from my point of view i'm really safety oriented on things and i really care about safety and child safety and stuff and i was just curious if we're making a a commitment in our schools to go along with this we can have a safe bus route all we want or not and we can figure it out but if a kid walks in the wrong side of the street and he's going to get run over maybe and we're not i mean i go all the time making turn downtown say to make a turn and the person isn't paying any attention uh i go all i'm writing down and we're all doing that you go down and people are walk kids or kids or people walking on the wrong side of the road i mean we used to get taught which side of the road to walk on we used to get taught to look both ways i would think are we going are we going to make an effort now to also have a health unit that teaches same with bike riding you see kids bike ride across uh the the crosswalk which is a against lawn being incredibly dangerous i mean are we doing something in health you guys may not know that i'm kind of aggressive so we actually superintendent yeah the safe routes to school program for which we're partners with actually provides pedestrian and bike safety education and in the past we actually uh pps secured a substantive grant from the oregon department of transportation for safety education and we actually employed both safe routes to school and the bicycle transportation alliance to provide that education across three 13 different school sites but that's that's built on on prior efforts at other school sites and it's an ongoing thing so under the iga all school sites now will be included in safe routes to school in the past it was only k5 k8 and 6-8 but most the time it was only k-5 that was participating and it was actually at the option of the principle to whether or not to participate we've now made a commitment as a district that there's full participation in the program which then will include pedestrian and bicycle education at the school site level so that's built into the planned support which i talked about before when we start getting into these questions of what school sites would benefit from additional resources so removing cultural and physical barriers requires a large part education as well as actually making changes to our street network so are you saying that all of our children are going to get at some point in their health curriculum safety on how to transport well not necessarily i can't speak to actually programming i can only speak to what our actual policy is with pivot safe routes to school so they'll get the training steed but it won't be part of their health curriculum is what right so there might be some sort of training that deals with this with going from could i get some information on that and see that we're hitting all of our children and what grades and so forth yeah i can provide our work to date on that would be great it's pretty comprehensive and it's also available from the city of portland they publish surveys as well as prior efforts i can send that along thank you other questions dr belial first i just want to say this is really exciting i can remember um three or four years ago actually when i first started um hoping that we could do more gis mapping because there's so much data and it's so rich and it can help us and i appreciate hearing or hearing articulated the challenges that here's what we know now we have to go out and see if conditions have changed then we have to go see whether or not students are actually walking that route or if they're making like there are a lot of levels to get some kind of accuracy so that you can
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actually make a decision so one i just want to say i'm really excited and i'm glad to hear that you're working with the city and i one of the questions i wanted to ask was we had an agreement when we passed our bond for safe routes to school to do some kind of work when you're talking about the 21 schools is that part of that agreement that's correct so the active transportation iga that's the very agreement you're referencing so that brings in all of our schools into consideration for the capital funding decision matrix that pibot uses great thank you um and then it you you are you explained why you chose the schools that you did which i appreciated um but as i was just sitting here thinking about all the schools that have so many transportation challenges many of them along the 82nd avenue corridor um we've heard in the past couple of years people having challenges of getting crossing that and being worried and i really appreciate that you brought up some of the faith issues or safety or cultural concerns because i know that we have schools that are located in the heart of a school this or excuse me of a neighborhood but because of cultural reasons they aren't comfortable with their elementary school student walking home after dark and so they miss opportunities perhaps to stay after school and participate in activities and it's a really real issue that i don't know like a map or standing out on the corner you wouldn't see unless you actually engage people so i'm excited to hear that so thank you for going through that effort thank you others dr reagan hi thank you for the presentation when i um first saw the um agenda item for supplemental transportation update i was expecting that we were going to hear about our focus schools and some of our alternative schools where we offer transportation and kind of where we're at what our current budget is what we're thinking about how we're going to address equity issues related to our focus school so and obviously that wasn't part of this discussion what is your what is our current non-mandated bus transportation budget so the budget i don't know off the top of my head bobby but we do have a working group that we started that's looking at our non-mandated transportation and coming out with some recommendations for carol with regard to how we support the focus schools the immersion programs that are coming online dli so we've begun that work um i could send you what our current costs are right you may have seen it before there was a spreadsheet created by transportation that outlined all those non-mandated um costs that we had i know it's been a subject that we've looked at you know over many many many years on especially as we were budget cutting on and we have cut out some um non-mandated transportation and clearly this looks like in terms of the proposal tonight you're proposing that we would increase supplemental transportation for safety reasons and that is good and wise and appropriate but i'm just trying to figure out when we're going to hear a discussion about supplemental transportation related to focus options and some of those equity concerns as well um because that seems like the other half of the discussion right yeah it seems like every year we get into a discussion with the community over what buses services and so that's why that's why we put this working group together to look at that and come up with some recommendations so that when equity in mind and you know making sure students that need transportation are getting transportation so in terms of the work group when are they reporting back so i we've only had like four meetings so far so we were re meeting monthly i asked terry to actually bump that up so that we my goal was to actually have it done by the start of this year but we didn't make that timeline so we're going to continue existing bus services through this upcoming year and hopefully by the start of next school year we have a plan to move forward with i do want to tie back in the the gis data model that we've created is can be used to support that working group that uh and i'm actually serving on that group as well so when we talk about a comprehensive model it is comprehensive what we're looking at is focused on what we talked about for more of our quote unquote regular school operation sites we can actually model any school site or any program based on the student data it's pretty
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simple to do within the model to plug that in and actually make an analysis great thanks so thank you for the information about the work group i'm really happy to hear that you guys are ahead of that that's great news director atkins thanks so much this is so exciting to see this huge leap forward for safe routes to schools i mean we we've enjoyed a wonderful program for years you know participated in the walking bus special days and uh know that it's been a great program but just to see this hugely both in terms of covering all our schools but obviously what you're doing with the gis and i love the app and the crowd sourcing and everything else so super exciting and i just can't wait to see this unfold thanks a lot mr blob sorry i just remembered a thought i had during your presentation and i appreciate us wanting to share with local districts but i also think that there might be an opportunity here for us to earn some income from the work that you guys have done if this is something really that's ahead for districts across the country i would imagine that folks rather than take the investment that we just made would appreciate actually purchasing something so if there's that opportunity i'd sure support that revenue generation i like that dr beale you have a large note you have a large number of uh community forums that were listed what what are what are those about are we just showing people are we actually looking for some specific information sure that's a good question thank you for raising that so working we'll have eight open houses by high school cluster high school cluster and then three targeted community outreach open house walking opportunities that will we haven't decided what what where that's going to occur and we'll work with pps community involvement on that so what we're going to be doing is just sharing what we know not with the presumption that we know those conditions absolutely and we want folks to tell us what they know about how they walk to school and what those conditions are like so by high school cluster that means if you went to jefferson for the open house then there would be areas for each school site represented within the cluster to look at a really big map as well as have smaller maps available for folks to actually draw and write on and tell us what's going on we want to try to capture that in a way that we can actually scan it and bring it into our gis model but it's our opportunity to hear from the community to say hey this area is an area of concern for us whether it's a street crossing it's an air issue with crime or it's an issue where sidewalks are in poor condition that we didn't capture and i fully expect to hear quite a bit of that to inform how we think about these walking conditions once that's taken in together across the district we can actually then marry all of that into the quantitative model did a comprehensive view of those walking conditions so it's just base marrying together straightforward data it's report as it's reported out to us from public agencies and then data that's reported back to us from our community at large and various stakeholder groups dr martin two quick things one to piggyback on bobby's comment i think when when pbot representatives came and spoke with us about the iga um they did say that any any pps activities educational activities that were happening in pps buildings or outside of pps buildings were included within that within that iga so i think that's may not be in this particular phase but i think i think that needs to be phased in to give a broad picture of the safety and and the safety of our routes to students routes to schools um that being said i think one thing that the city's efforts around the streets tax has shown is um really pulled the the curtain back on areas within the city you had mentioned uh you know late incorporation i mean we i can't i don't know how many decades we'll be using that excuse for neighborhoods like coley to actually get streets and sidewalks but but we also know that frankly this city doesn't have the resources it needs to both build streets and sidewalks that are needed and also maintain the ones that currently exist so perhaps this is an opportunity for us to to play a role in really defining those priority areas and i think this iga is one step but uh it may behoove us to to play a role in how do we how do we create safety from the ground up starting with our youth and the routes to schools on an everyday basis and then and then plan
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from that from that point so i pre i think the timing is great and uh and certainly your relationship too and participation in uh the work with the city i think is is critical so thank you for the for the information and presentation tonight colors tom no what's that great thank you both thank you appreciate it thank you okay our next agenda item is the second reading for our amended cafeteria i'm going to add benefits plan so everybody knows what that is at our january 6 board meeting a first reading was held on the amended cafeteria plan after 21 days of being open for public comment the board is ready to vote on the proposed amendments which of course we know from our last meeting where are required because of changes to the federal law so the board will now consider resolution 5012 adoption of amended board policy on cafeteria plan policy 5.10.090 dash p cafeteria plan do i have a motion so moved and a second director atkins moves in director curler seconds the motion to adopt resolution five zero one two miss powell is there any public comment there is not is there any board discussion on the resolution the board will now vote on resolution five zero one two all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes any opposed please indicate by saying no no abstentions resolution five zero one two is approved by a vote of six to zero thank you the fastest vote ever okay now our next agenda item is our 2014-15 budget amendment number two so i will now recess the board and open the public hearing for amendment number two on the 2014-15 budget the board first heard this item at our last meeting this pal do we have public comment on this we do not okay i'll now close the public hearing and recommend the board back into its regular session the bar will now consider resolution 5013 amendment number two to the 2014-15 budget for school district number one j multnomah county oregon do i have a motion so moved in a second second director belial moves and director atkins seconds the motion to adopt resolution five zero one three is their board discussion sure i'll go ahead um somebody which one director curler yeah i'd like to make an amendment dr move in amendment i'd like to move an amendment stop the dpm sure you want me to get rid of it sure this is sort of a joint effort and i think these copies are in the yellow folder tom so if you want to read instead feel free you want to read it go ahead okay so this is an amendment to amend number two of the 2014-15 budget um anton had indicated in the last meeting that he was going to bring this forward and then we ended up working on it together on september 23rd 2014 the school board passed resolution 4961 acknowledging a positive upward revision to the beginning fund balance for 2000 fiscal year 2014-15 the board directed the superintendent to increase school staffing immediately to invest in the school district's three priorities third grade reading out of school discipline and high school graduation to make needed one-time investments that support improvement of outcomes for portland public school students and effective operations and to increase portland public schools uncommitted contingency from 3.9 to 4.5 percent so again that was four months ago amendment number two uh which is what we're looking at tonight to the 2014-15 budget shows uncommitted contingency at seven percent rather than at four point five percent board policy requires three percent and we have an aspirational goal of five percent in keeping with resolution 4961 and given the severe and ongoing needs in our schools the board directs the superintendent to bring the board a plan by february 10th that assesses the immediate urgent unfunded needs in our schools and commits the surplus contingency necessary to support school programs this spring and summer the board anticipates that funds dedicated at this time would be for one-time expenses to directly support teaching and learning and could possibly include increases to principals consolidated budgets fte support for overcrowded classes
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professional development summer programs for struggling students grades six through eight enrichment supports including theater sports programs library and or curriculum materials technology for students and or teachers curriculum and or music musical instruments to support a k-12 music articulation investments in career technical education curriculum or supplies or other similarly appropriate investments urgently needed to support student success as part of the assessment and expenditure plan the board further requests the superintendent to communicate with principals and teachers soliciting their ideas on how to make the most difference for student achievement outcomes this year with the surplus so tom moved and i was second so we just have to hang out just a second is that sort of a technical question so this is an amendment to to resolution five zero one three yes okay so it's just are you saying this would be a new set of recitals at the end or for some reason no it basically is saying that the um it basically is saying that the reserve would remain at 4.5 not 7 percent right but i'm just asking would the the text here be some of it would be a recital and some would be a result i'm just trying to understand where it fits into resolution is there is there a place in the resolution that has that specifically calls out that seven percent i can't remember that says 4.5 no um so at this point i think it isn't the point here that that directors regan and curler are asking the superintendent to go back and find or determine where this uh extra surplus this surplus money could be spent and report back to the board on that before we no or as we vote on this is that right right so we're voting on this tonight and you're asking that this that that a section be included in here directing the superintendent to go back and spend 3.5 or what is that 2.5 percent is that it basically we passed a resolution on september 23rd directing the superintendent to have a 4.5 uh contingency um nothing has changed since that time to indicate that there should be a seven percent contingency and in fact um on september 23rd the superintendent and staff actually asked the board at that time to increase the contingency to six percent we had a budget work session on september 16th about this issue about the ending fund balance we had about a two-hour discussion there were four board members there on september 23rd we had another maybe two hour discussion about the ending fund balance again there was an amendment to keep it at 3.9 it went down three to three there was an amendment to keep it at four that went down three to three then there was an amendment to uh increase it to 4.5 so as far as i knew that's what our ending fund balance our beginning fund balance would be so what we're saying is we'd like to continue there we had four hours of discussion on this and we all came to that so i understand all that directory but what i'm asking is isn't the point that we you want a section in here saying that you're directing the superintendent to go back and find what you're doing february 10th thank you yeah that's all yeah so i remember all that very well thank you for letting us uh know again though correct so it's i mean the bottom line is if we pass this resolution um this language here that says having held a public hearing the board here by men's budget expenditure program what are you looking at under the resolution the resolution okay thank you so it's going to replace this result and did did i just hear a no out in the audience it's not it's not going to be included in the recital it's just part of it i'm just trying to get the the actual amendment that we would vote on we're just going to clarify what the wording is that you're looking for here that's it's not because we can't discuss it until we have an actual amendment so can we just have the amendment first the language that we would actually you want to get clarification from the finance staff yeah sure i'm happy to do that yeah come on up for now i could can i get a copy of the
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so i apologize director curler for interrupting with uh no that it's helpful thank you it's it's important that if you that you if you're voting on this resolution today it's important for a number of reasons that the the resolved part in here being where in in your existing in the in the final one in the resolution in your packet it's important that you vote on that and that we amend the budget today because we've got a whole bunch of things that you've put in motion i think if i could venture to suggest i think what you want to do is to add a second resolved clause that says starts with the board directs the superintendent yes so a resolution two correct right and i'm sorry i'm reading this i i hope this doesn't add confusion but i i would think an easier way to do it would be actually to approve the amendment as is um and then to make a motion with this being its own resolution for it to come back but i don't know like that you mean to approve resolution 5013 as a standalone as a stand-alone and then have the proposed amendment from honor and time via standalone i don't think it really matters that doesn't matter i mean that works for me if it works i think it would be easier than trying to meld the wording together given that you've got a specifically crafted resolution here and then we could have a separate discussion about the either way i don't think it makes any difference i mean this is not all going to be included it's the it's what we actually want the amendments the one paragraph the in keeping um with resolution 4961 and given the sphere and ongoing needs the board directs the superintendent to bring the board a plan by february 10th that assesses the immunity i mean i think it's that paragraph that's the action you're directing and the last paragraph two as well okay so then the two so that it's like a resolution that's those those are the part two where's the actual language about seven percent though well it says the surplus contingency so we can say 4.5 versus seven percent so i think i think what you could do is uh i think i heard this suggested you could pass resolute i don't know what number this resolution your actual resolution is because i've got x's on zero three five one zero three five zero one so you could deliver you could vote on five zero one zero one three and have a second motion that had um you've got the first paragraph on this would be a the second paragraph would be b the third paragraph would be c in terms of recitals and then what is currently the third paragraph in keeping with would be resolved one and then the as part of would be resolved to and that would i think accomplish what you are looking to accomplish and and and why don't we just do it as as one what's the reason not to do it just as one resolution and that so they're amending it isn't there a section in this resolution and i don't know what it is this specifically calls out the seven percent no the resolution and it wasn't called out of the meeting yet uh last week until director curler brought it up william was on a powerpoint no it wasn't there was never the seven percent was not in the powerpoint yes it is i one of the slides had a picture of the contingency um that said uncommitted contingency 35.5 million seven percent of total expenditures so might i suggest that we look at this and put i think what is it the second paragraph the third paragraph and the fifth paragraph and find a way to just make those either recitals or the resolution i think that's i think that makes sense to make it part of the red word so could i withdraw my amendment and do this again well as long as you're a person who's second in it you started it would you like to withdraw we'll start tonight yeah go ahead i think it was yeah tom's amendment so uh here's what the amendment would say now and uh under
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resolution number two would say in keeping with resolution 4961 and given the severe and ongoing needs in our schools the board directs the superintendent to bring the board a plan by february 10th that assesses the immediate urgent unfunded needs in our schools and commits a surplus contingency so that was seven percent versus four and a half percent a two and a half percent piece necessary to support school programs this spring and summer as part of the assessment and expenditure plan the board further requests the superintendent to communicate with principals and teachers listening their ideas on how to make the most difference for student achievement outcomes this year with the surplus that's your proposed amendment yes so uh does it have a second second that is second now we can discuss it so i have a clarifying still and so make sure i'm understanding so so our on 5013 we have two new resolves number two which is the former paragraph three and number three which is the former final paragraph yes got it okay thanks um those are resolves or those are recycling okay okay so um a couple questions um so the it says this spring and summer i guess i think my fundamental issue with this is not with the notion of wanting to find ways to invest this additional resource there's for me it's a balance of that plus the many uncertainties that we're facing in terms of going into an eye but new biennium um pers case funding one day excuse me full day kindergarten um and all the rest so i think the staff sent us a minimum understanding those different uncertainties so there's that there's the uncertainty piece and that's why we have um contingencies or reserves but there's also the piece of the fact that we're going into very soon right now we should be going into our budget process for this coming year so when it says spring and summer summer would be the next fiscal year so i guess yeah this summer is two weeks so i i i meant you know i certainly would be willing to support some of the um two and a half percent to go into some immediate short term um but the whole amount given the uncertainties we're facing and the fact that we are just heading right into the budget season when we would be looking at that um available funds and figuring out what we want to do with it that's what makes sense more sense to me the other piece is this question of one time and ongoing as well we've got a mix of one time and ongoing that we already uh this laid out here that we already committed to this past fall and it's a question i think we were going to bring up during the budget 1516 budget process whether those one time would continue or not and so that's part of what we have potentially committed to already that those emergency funds would go to so then this would be a new set of potentially another mix of some new one time and new ongoing term or that's yeah that's what i said a mix of one time new one time or new ongoing but it's sort of adding a like a a new mini spring budgeting process onto our existing this year's budget and next year's budget process so i guess you know this i'm not in support of spending down this far i'm certainly in support of looking at some if there are some things we're already doing that we have just run out of money for if schools are out of paper things like that absolutely but to me um yeah i don't support this this extreme approach that's that's where i'm at with it okay others uh dr morton um so i i i think i can kind of uh echo ruth's concerns i maybe we we separate a little bit i think the time frame for me is there going to be some investments that i don't want to may not be just appropriate for this year or this spring and summer but in fact depending on the way the investment right looks or is it could it could actually go into the fall or go into a time time later i don't know you know i don't have a scenario but i can imagine that there would be a scenario where that kind of investment would be needed and would get to the things that that are addressed in the other pieces i would be comfortable with the language primarily because we talk about we want to see something from the superintendent on february 10th we want to see an assessment and a plan um uh with those in with the intentions of communication and and gaining evidence from from our stakeholders with that i would be okay with with crossing out in this
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the first one of the new resolves the last two words spring i would just say to support school programs period um and then in the last line of this then second proposed resolve i i would just say different let's see ideas on how to make the most difference for student achievement and outcomes you could say with the surplus but i would i would probably cross out this year again because i i i don't want to anticipate that it's only a short-term investment if we have an opportunity for this this investment to go from tomorrow to to next holiday so just just to simplify you know the the bottom line for me is is this is we we've had a budget we um there's an aspirational goal of five percent contingency we spent a lot of time on the 4.5 and now and now there's new revenue so what this does is it calls the question saying um what are and and on our last budget when we kept 4.5 and we fought you know we did not invest in a lot of things that were needed uh and so this calls a question saying what is needed that now that we have some extra revenues we can fund uh and of course it's always going to be in the context of this year's budget and next year's budget as well but i think it's really important that um that we take the time because there are things that we can do today that will matter a lot and i'm i am a total proponent of prudent reserves absolutely 100 percent and but i also think there's something called imprudent reserves and that is if if we have some money and we have some needs that we can address right away that aren't getting met it's a lot like uh um the climate change debate where a uh a ton of co2 that we reduce today is a lot worth a lot more than if we reduce it two years from now same thing with our kids in education so if we have the resources which clearly now all of a sudden we have more than than we had in our last budget we ought to be taking a very hard look at what what's really needed and so that's this is calling the question and then asking the superintendent who's got her pulse on it to come back and say okay this is what i think we should do it's asking you to make sure which you would do anyway but it's just putting in writing to check with the principals and the teachers i'd like to see an email go out to all the teachers because i think we might actually get some ideas and maybe urgent needs that we wouldn't necessarily know um so that's that's what this resolution this amendment does so so um so thanks for that um so another question just in terms of the kind of outreach and communication and solicitation process so you know with anything it's always that balance of how quickly can you move since there are urgent needs and we and i'm hearing you originally want to get this money out the door versus wanting to take the time to hear from the teachers and the community and the parents and the students about how they think it should happen while at the same time engaging those same folks in a discussion about our 15 16 budget and it really would be almost at the same time or sort of a parallel so i guess that's a question for you all i mean what's your comfort level because send an email out to all the teachers asking them and uh carol knows how to communicate with their principals really easily so connection we're already in the process of communicating about next year's budget we're not talking about a series of forums and no no this is quick yes we're going to get i'm going to be quick we're going to get quick ideas we heard some from 10 million dollars 10 million i'm talking about 10 million we're not talking about an entire budget process of 550 million dollars we're talking about 10 million dollars we're talking about one-time kind of things like some impacts what we did when we had 16 million we had a lot of we did a lot of community outreach for 16 million so and you know what wayne and you know again this is where the superintendent gets so the superintendent is going to pause the 15 16 budget process for a couple of weeks okay just i'm just yeah characters something called parallel tracking which could happen she's got a lot of parallel tracks so we're adding a new one so she can multitask i do but i'll keep we i'll keep going on our long line and some of this connects i mean some of the things
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that are we're talking about that could be happening earlier we'll i'll be able to put something together for you so then then there's still i guess i still have a concern about the one-time piece versus ongoing there there definitely could be things in here that could be one time you know the paper as in the obvious example but or the musical instruments or the books but if it were a staffing piece or a program pardon me if it were a staffing piece or a program piece then again that gets into that complexity of we we bring it in and then are we going to stop it or are we adding that into the long list of things that we're saying that we've already committed to that are going to be charged against these goods we know that we are going to have to draw down these contingencies and the 1516 budget because there's already a list of those things so i just so for what it's worth in the original amendment and i think i would continue this it says the board anticipates the funds dedicated this time would be for one-time expenses so we're not trying to add to any ongoing expenses here we're just looking at some one time but then but you include fte on the list which then implies would be one time short-term temporary people well i think when we were talking about fte support for overcrowded classrooms that's for this spring and not necessarily i mean so not ongoing meaning higher temporary people that are here for okay right and so then we also heard from suzanne our pit partner about her suggestions were around um special ed set-aside dollars um eas the educational assistant assistants um having substituted and um your teacher supports how that works yeah and professional development for teachers so so again that the superintendent would look at what is ongoing and what is one time and the expectation would be that these would be one-time expenses that we'd be talking about generally and we can structure the list in such a way that you still have the ability to accept some things not other things i mean yeah we'll bring in a way that you can see what would be ongoing and what's one time so but we're locked in i mean again given the uncertainties that we're going into a biennium and we are not yet we have no idea yet whether we're going to be even at current service level from the legislature paying for full-day kindergarten potentially having to refund the state based on the complexities of when they come back later and ask us i don't know i mean that's hopefully the kicker won't kick but if god forbid it did um it's going to that would be i think 23 million and get just covered i'm just being my yeah yeah so just a couple uh statement and a question um first of all if the kicker kicks that's not the end of the world it's kicking because revenues are up okay let's just put that aside for a second and then secondly is when um when you are uh i wasn't here when the budget resolution we talked about a pro an aspirational goal of five percent uh when the board did that so i'm assuming you were on the board when we did that what what was the reason how did we get there yeah bobby i think that was really from bobby and david's day back when this well i think and i would also say that when we we we came up with a board policy a requirement of a three percent and i think there were some years where we didn't even get there but our aspirational goal at that time of five percent almost felt pie in the sky like a dreamland for us so yeah that's right about seven percent is so go ahead yeah we we um in 2003 i think was when we passed this policy and uh director regan and i um came onto the board at that point we had virtually nothing in reserves so three percent as a policy and five percent as an aspirational goal was it was just it was was way down the road in the future so yeah it was it was a you know it was a starting point with 10 years of cuts we actually the the intention at the time was we know we're in really rough times when you really need a reserve is when you think things have a possibility of really tanking and we need to even in rough times be building up that reserve to a reasonable level we're in such a completely different place now with the economy pretty strong by most folks estimates and um uh you know we are not in the middle of any kind of teacher contract or other contract negotiations so we know that we have some stability going into next year around that i mean there's just a whole variety of ways that we're in a better place our local option revenues are stronger um i mean we know that we're getting another five million dollars next year out of local options there's so many different ways that our position right now is in a much better shape than we've had i mean when you when you want to be
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building onto the reserve is when you're expecting things to tank and we know that we have a really a strong economy we know the legislature is starting to reinvest in in public education and in k-12 the co-chairs have come forward with a really reasonable starting point in terms of the state budget we know it needs to be higher but i mean we're in better shape than we've been in years and years and years in terms of you know the state wanting to and talking about reinvesting in education with the 40 40 20 and the governor's commitment all of that so when you you know we were at a different place in 2003 than we are today and today we're in a pretty positive place in general and to be able to hit our aspirational goal or something close to that is just awesome but we also have just incredible needs out in our schools and with our students and when we have the opportunity to address them we should so i would say once when staff came to us back in september and said we want you to you know raise the reserve to six percent it's their job of our financial folks to be conservative and to ask for a really high reserve it's our job to look at the whole picture and say yes we want a really strong reserve and we want to get money out to the field to make a difference in terms of student achievement so i mean that's our job and i respect the fact that you all want a big reserve you should you're our financial folks it's our job to balance that and to say you know yes we need a strong reserve and yes as we look to the future we also know that we have these incredible needs for our kids and we can address some of that going forward and we put in the superintendent's hands to come back to us with that plan so so some of this conversation reminds me of the same conversation that we have when we go to the legislature and that is when times are good we should be putting aside for that rainy day fund it's not when we think times are going to be bad that we put away because there isn't anything to put away at that particular time when times are good i know we did we scraped for that right but now we have this larger amount and i am happy that some of my colleagues feel so confident of the legislature i don't feel that confidence i saw that you know anyone who saw the governor's budget would just wonder what the governor was thinking because that budget would require all of us to cut and the co-chairs budget doesn't do that much better especially if all of a sudden we have mandates that we have to meet which we'll take out of our funding i mean i've been through those times in my six years on the board when we needed a 10 million dollar amount it wasn't that many years ago that we needed 40 million to make us whole and we had to make cuts those are huge cuts for us and so i i hear the concern i feel the urgency but i also feel the urgency of making sure that we are being fiscally prudent so that come the fall or come the end of may or june when we know what's coming from the legislature we'll have a better idea of what our budget's going to be i'm sorry those things don't line up well that would be the best of all worlds but they just don't and i'm also very concerned about the kicker because if it kicks that 300 million dollars will come out of the ending fund balance for this year which will affect the beginning balance for next year which means that the legislature will have to make that money up and that could come from schools so there are a lot of uncertainties out there that just make me really nervous about spending down even to the 4.5 i because i understand the urgency and i think about some of our classrooms are overcrowded the fact that some of our schools are running out of paper is just unconscionable um i'm interested in seeing what the superintendent has to say about where we could use some of this reserve but i don't think i could support something that took us all the way back down to 4.5 when we have these uncertainties coming when we voted on the budget in the fall i knew or last year i knew that we had the full year with because we were in the second half of a biennium so we knew how much money we were going to get we don't know this time and until we do i'm just really not
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comfortable spending way down i i'd like to find something where we could bolster where we need we have emergency situations and then put the rest away in case we do have that uh more cuts kicker kicking legislature not coming through for us lots of different uncertainties that i i think that we should just be more aware of and think about a little more so tom yeah and i i appreciate it i mean i appreciate that i think that's what this this amendment says let's look at the urgent needs come back and then on february 10th we can make the hard choice and uh agree what the right uh right reserve is but but for now we we do have we know we have some resources and we know we've got a lot of needs so let's have our superintendent come back and i'm fine with that as long as we're not saying that we want the superintendent to come back automatically with drawing the reserves down to 4. we're going to vote on that at the february test if you're not specific in your resolution about how far like i can come back with you're giving me i'd like to come back with a as if here's a menu that could take us to that but you are you haven't decided that's the level you're asking for until we look at the list on the 10th yes that's correct i can support that and you know certainly work my intent is is to to do that but and you you might come back and and have a perfectly good argument that's going to change my mind so what i'm hearing is commit and the new resolved number two which is the former third paragraph commits the surplus contingency necessary a plan that assesses the immediate urgent unfunded needs in our schools and commits to surplus contingency necessary to support school programs period so let's ruth let's just stop right there for a second uh that was a i think a friend may be friendly maybe unfriendly i'm told there's no such thing as i've always been told that there's no such thing as a friendly amendment i do think you could ask to amend the amendment so my question go ahead and do that do you want to do that do you want to go ahead and do that all right i would like to ask you i'm going to okay great and i would accept that friendly or not yes okay that's the word seems friendly enough for me but i'm told there is no such thing as reality okay is there and so my understanding of that if i could reiterate your friendly amendment your um is in the first paragraph we would take out the words the spring and summer sorry and i want to make sure you got this and then in the last paragraph we would take out the words this year correct okay can i ask another point of clarification so you're requesting for a plan to come back on february 10th is that then for discussion on february 10th then to be voted on at a subsequent night i think it's voting on unless we absolutely need to i think it's voting on that that particular day when you bring it back i'm not crazy about your um your your amendment because um for me the point is making a difference this year we're going to have a budget process that talks about next year i want to know what we can do this year that makes a difference and we continue to have a prudent reserve so how about can i make an unfriendly friendly amendment about it says to support school programs this school year yes that's sure does that work yeah where is that so i haven't i i i don't know exactly what wording we're voting on at this point which cause we'll go through that before we vote it calls to me the question about getting a written amendment the day of which i thought we were trying to avoid that i had spoken individually with individuals about saying what kind of level would you um appreciate but um i i'm not clear where you actually had this yesterday so i will um already through it wasn't the day of well i'm seeing it right now just so you know yeah i'm just just for did you not see it yesterday i did not see it yeah it was on your email so um i guess my other question is around where it says um this is in uh the number two in keeping with paragraph it says commits the surplus contingency necessary i guess that's all right i was a little worried about it would make it sound like it was all the way up to seven percent but if it's just necessary that's fine so are we are so is it correct then the intent of this is that the superintendent is going to bring back a menu bring the board back a plan by february 10th but that we're not necessarily what i'm hearing tom says we're not necessarily committing by voting for this that we
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would invest all of the 2.5 percent this year we get to vote on that february 10th okay but the plan that you come back will have a menu of options you may pick part of the plan and not all of the plan you may yeah i mean your discussion about how much you want to commit and how much you want to hold okay and it's still to be had on the 10th as part of the menu so we don't have the the um text about the one time do we want to make sure that this is if this doesn't go right but do we want to put that back in where their wording is so that it's clarified that it is one time or not not for me so then it's something that might then just sort of fold over into the next year's budget process and be carried over into that okay so if i directed morgan um i want to you know i really respect the the urgency the need that exists but um i i mean from my perspective i i would um i would move towards strategy versus urgency any part of any opportunity i get so tom to your point of wanting to see sort of the immediate benefit um which is a strategy certainly it could be a strategy unless you're making urgent urgent decisions but perhaps that's a strategy too i i think also one of the things we know is that uh there are a select few investments that um in the short term demonstrate evidence of of gain but without sustaining those over the long term that gain is lost uh if there's an opportunity and this is you know to to my earlier point of if there is an investment that can that we can make right now that is something that is sustainable with the current resource i would like to to look at that that could provide both a um a short-term sort of urgent gain it could also provide a longer term opportunity for us to uh to sustain that so that would be um my intention and i again i don't necessarily have that what that investment might be sure but i i can anticipate something like that happening um i don't mind at all the urgency of identifying here are the things that need to be done in a short period by the end of this year and i would anticipate the superintendent um presenting those information you know that information and those opportunities in that frame uh but i don't want to say that's the only time frame i'm concerned about if this is something that goes on it goes beyond that let's let's talk let's talk about that as well okay yeah fair dr blah so i'm not sure where these comments go anywhere because i'm pretty sure that we have um the original proposed amendment that we were the resolution five zero one three we have a second amendment on the table um and we have a third amendment on the table uh two amendments i'm not seeing that but you don't there was a friendly amendment to the second amendment and everybody kind of what we have we have an amendment that was proposed by tom and bobby that was then taken off the table and then we have another amendment that does the one we're discussing now that has these certain paragraphs and then there was there was a second uh amendment friendly amendment to that um which is the second which we probably have the third amendment that i'm talking about so that that's why which hasn't been seconded and i'm not i mean here's the point i think technically we can't have two amendments sitting we can have a motion but i don't want to get bogged down i think we all understand the intent if somebody wants to call that point of order they can but i'm not planning to um so i'm just going to make my comments about the whole process and it can fit where it wants to um so i find myself agreeing with director knowles that i am less sure of where things are going to land and i disagree about the kicker in the terms that i think it will cause real harm now and in our next budget cycle i always i also think that we keep talking about this additional revenue or this extra surplus or something you know i believe that jurisdictions across the the metro area are in a similar situation revenues increasing in ways that they didn't expect i've heard some figures that are in the double digits across the metro area about their contingencies uncommitted contingencies but what they don't have meaning those other organizations or jurisdictions is they don't have a mechanism
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that we do which is the state anytime there's quote unquote extra revenue so when i hear that we're going to take an additional 5 million from our local option levy which is fantastic that voters did there is a reclaiming mechanism by the state saying oh well we said you were going to give you this much and we don't find that out until january or february of next year whether or not we've whether or not that's taken so i don't want to say i'll just say that i'm i'm cautious i didn't expect us to be at seven percent and i totally agree that there are needs in our schools right now but what resonated with me is director morton's comment about i will choose strategy over urgency any day and i worry that in our haste to move this out as you heard tonight our pat partners came up with some great solutions and i think i heard languages something that these are just some of our ideas i have a list of ideas in my head we heard public comment about other ideas there's an infinite number of ideas and i heard somebody comment about saying that we have an opportunity to impact student achievement i don't know how many one-time investments are going to really impact student achievement and so i question our process with this it feels a little bit to me like government just trying to spend the money so it doesn't look like i have too much instead of being really thoughtful and strategic with it i'm not accusing any of you of that this is just how i'm processing information about what we're doing i did director curler look at my email i received it at 4 48 yesterday so then when i went to a town hall i probably didn't get to it last night so my apologies for thinking that i just got it today but i did get i got a little bit over 24 hours notice about the amendment i'm not sure that our community had an opportunity to come in and weigh in but again that doesn't seem to be the big concern here because we did go through a budget process last year that identified those needs so i guess that's just where i'm sitting is that i'm not excited about sitting at seven percent if if the superintendent if folks want the superintendent to come back with identified needs that perhaps we can start this year and carry into next year not knowing what next year's budget i'd be interested in hearing those but i don't want to spend just because there's an urgency and that we have money to spend it and that's what it feels a little bit like to me well i mean i'm glad it feels that way because that's the way it is it we have urgent needs and we have money that we can spend on those urgent needs and that is what if if if you want to vote against this amendment then that's fine and what you're saying is we have urgent needs and we're going to keep our money at seven percent and this amendment says we have urgent needs and we're going to take a look at those and um make a decision on february 10th what are the highest priorities and at the end of the day what is a prudent reserve in my view a 4.5 reserve given everything on the table is prudent i heard you say that yeah okay so thank you to director belial for bringing up the process questions or the parliamentary issues and we can have an amendment to an amendment but only one so matt you're going to have to wait until we vote on this one and then you can bring your amendment um for that okay so why don't i go ahead and read what uh we're currently voting on just to make sure that everybody is are you did you have anything else steve no i don't okay just commenting steve are you not gonna say anything okay so we are worried about a sandbag we are amending the resolution section of resolution five zero one three to add uh as number two amendment number two to the 2014-15 budget shows uncommitted contingencies at seven percent rather than four point five percent board policy requires three percent with an aspirational goal of five percent for number three in keeping with resolution 4961 and given the severe and ongoing needs in our schools the board directs the superintendent to bring the board a plan by february 10 that assesses the immediate urgent unfunded needs in our schools and commits the surplus contingency necessary to support school programs this spring and summer and for as part of the assessment and expenditure plan the board further requests the superintendent to communicate with principals and teachers soliciting their ideas on how to make the most difference for the achievement outcomes this year with the surplus
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is that clear to everybody yeah okay so all those in favor of the amendment please um well let's we'll do it after all those who are in favor please say aye aye all those opposed wait are we voting on the amendment on the amendment on the amendment no no no no i'm gonna be a no okay um let me go one two three are you yes or no i mean yes here yes okay so the amendment and and we will do that in just a second hang on no i yes we will hang on so um the motion the motion to uh for the amendment passes of a vote of four to three um ms powell would you go ahead and call a roll call vote for us yes director no director reagan yes director atkins no director buell yes director martin yes director curler yes all right that was for the vote that we had just taken right yep and chad knowles no did you want to amend this i would like to make an amendment propose an amendment to the amendment um to the amendment in the resolve uh titled in keeping with resolution 4961 the last three words of the uh of the resolve the limit are actually last four words eliminating this spring and summer and then part two to the school year where you just wanted to say to support school programs period all right and then second part same amendment part two would be last line reading for student achievement and outcomes with the surplus removing the words this year okay is there a second a second okay any uh discussion on that i think we pretty much cover it up steve yeah director buell you removed the words spring and summer but was that where is that was that clarifying only spring and summer some place that assesses immediate urgent opening needs our schools and commits this necessary to support school programs this spring and summer what i was concerned we're saying just saying school programs so so are you saying is your intent that you could do a summer program out of this money if you wanted yeah my intention my intent with this i just want to get a check sure that we don't say oh that's a that's a follow-up right yeah okay we can't do that that's my only intent thank you director so i have mixed feelings on this because there was the piece of the urgency um at the same time i can see the superintendent coming back and saying you know what we really want to make sure that we have um career technical education programs um next year in our schools and i think if roosevelt is one that now doesn't have a cte program that's state certified i think lincoln only has one i can see her saying you know what i want to purchase curriculum materials and supplies or whatever it's going to take to be able to do that in the next year and i can do that now or she could say in terms of 6th through 8th grade band programs if we really want to get that started we could make an investment today in musical instruments and then as we're staffing we can look forward to blah blah so i guess i'm i'm fine with that because i again i i see this sort of tied to setting us up for next year and we have some opportunity here to have some impact so i guess i'm okay with it okay i think you're intense other comments so director blood sorry this isn't really about director commitment it's not about director morgan's money it's about director regan's comments but no comment all right um in that case no more discussion we will go ahead and vote on the amendment which um out of this is number two this is number three paragraph three of the resolution removes the last four words the spring and summer and in number paragraph number four removes from the last sentence this year okay all those in favor of the amendments please say aye aye aye all those opposed okay the amendment passes uh with a vote of seven to zero now shall we go ahead and vote on the resolution sure okay any other discussion i want to close it shut anybody down here director atkins yeah i appreciate the um
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discussion on this and and the changes and certainly the spirit of wanting to support our schools but i think for me i'm still and i certainly want the original it's just a little confusing that this resolution happens to be called an amendment but i certainly want to make sure that the original amendment number two to our 2014 budget is passed but seeing the support that's here for that i'm still going to be a no vote because i'm concerned that we're creating sort of an additional parallel mini budget process that does not feel to me strategic and i feel like we need to be proceeding in a manner that both respects that process and that um respects the fact that we are and a period of a lot of uncertainty all that said i'm looking forward you know if we if this passes which i'm guessing it will um certainly if the superintendent can quickly without having to prolong a process is able to come back with some suggestions for some immediate investments that's great the down to 4.5 percent is still too far for me given what surprises some of us have already said okay other comments okay the board will now vote on resolution 5013 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no no no abstentions resolution five zero resolution five zero one three is approved of a by a vote of six to one um ms powell we've had a request for a roll call can you go ahead and call that for us of course director belial director belial votes in the affirmative yes director regan yes director atkins no director yes director morton yes director curler yes chair knowles yes thank you everybody i thought that was a i thought that was a really uh helpful discussion and well done so now um our next agenda item is an update on our inner district transfers superintendent smith would you like to go ahead and introduce this item i would and this is something that we do every year and i'll introduce judy brennan director of enrollment transfer to come and present this item to you i'm getting closer good evening um and i think we've got powerpoint that is ready to go too and as i set this up i would like to take a moment to i would like to take to take a moment to thank you for the dedication that you have invested in enrollment and transfer issues you have many many critical topics to discuss you've spent an enormous amount of time around enrollment and transfer issues particularly in the last two months and yet here i am again tonight is a very brief update and the issues that you'll be hearing from me over the next few weeks don't don't have the big scale that some of the things you've been looking at so i appreciate your time doing this as well so um as the superintendent said every year the districts have to make a decision about open enrollment which is one aspect of enrollment and transfer so i'm going to talk very briefly about that and then you'll see that come before you for a vote in the coming weeks and then we have our routine inter-district process that will be kicking off later in the spring we'll probably come back to you in march with an update on that so the big picture is that about two percent of students who attend portland public schools live in other districts and that two percent has been consistent for at least five years so as our enrollment has grown our numbers of non-resident students has grown with it and a fair amount of those students attend charters alternative and special schools and they're able to enroll through different mechanisms if they live in other districts but what i'll be talking about tonight is mostly the access points for students who attend our mainstream schools our neighborhood schools focus options as as you are probably well aware we've got recent state laws that continue to change the procedures available for students and that's an ongoing process that we'll be updating you on over the course of this year one thing that we have to do every year is ask you to decide whether our district will be open to a process that the state calls open enrollment it's a law that was approved in 2011 and is facing sunset in a couple of years um you have to declare by march first that if you choose to participate it what what it basically means is that we
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can accept non-resident students through a lottery procedure without needing to obtain permission from their resident districts pbs has opted out of an open enrollment to date and to put it in a nutshell we found that the mechanisms that open enrollment requires have been largely incongruous with our high school system design and our overall transfer goals particularly now the transfer policy decisions that you made just last week having said that there are students from pbs who have enrolled in other districts through open enrollment um over the last three years it's been a total of 340 they've transferred out and they have the right to stay in other districts to the highest grade through 12th grade and pbs doesn't have any say on whether they come back or not because we don't have a lot of data on our open enrollment students who live there who leave there's a couple of points that i still don't have thorough answers to that you may be interested in for example what's the cumulative effect all the students who left are they still in those districts have they moved on have they gone to other places and all of those students who left what we know is that a number of them were not attending pbs in the first place so they were in private school they were paying tuition to attend other districts and then they opted in through open enrollment so it's a little difficult to quantify what the actual impact of the students are i mean we could magnify it and say all those students every year is the same as losing 300 you know more than 300 students per year but a number of them probably wouldn't have attended pbs in the first place and a number of them may not be attending those districts anymore so it's a little unfinished and i apologize for that because i know you like firm answers when i sit here but that's where we are in terms of the effect of students who have left pbs through open enrollment our recommendation to you which you've seen in an information report is that pbs continue to opt out of open enrollment in 2015 knowing that that still means that we will follow the standard inter-district transfer procedure that procedure that keeps two percent of our enrollment for kids coming in from other districts and i'd like to talk to you about that uh briefly next um but i just wanted to make it clear that we do have that recommendation before you you'll be seeing that as a resolution um at the next meeting where you're carrying out votes so about the standard intradistrict procedure so it's standard today is very different than what it was um four years ago for example or even three years ago a couple of the things that are the same so in the standard procedure that thing that we do outside of the open enrollment period so for 11 months out of the year both districts have to consent in order for a transfer to be approved so with open enrollment only the receiving district has to say yes with the standard process both districts have to say yes the new rules under the new legislation is that the non-resident district the receiving district gets to decide how long an agreement lasts in the old days agreements were always for one year and had to be renewed every year now they can last for a period of time under your direction when we implemented last year we implemented new agreements that last for through the highest grade of the school the student attends so if a student came in through kindergarten was attending a k5 they now have an inter-district transfer that can unlast with them through fifth grade they don't have to receive permission every year furthermore their resident district wherever it may be doesn't have permission to say no to them through the 12th grade so if they asked to come back into pbs say for sixth grade or again for ninth grade and we say yes their resident district doesn't have the right to say no that's what's different largely from what the old inter-district laws were additionally and i think that we've really seen that this is a real benefit for families is that students who move during the year do not need to receive permission at the time that they move in order to stay and finish the year they do have to get permission by the end of the year from both districts in order to come back into a non-resident district but they don't have to get that paperwork in the middle of the school year any longer okay another thing that's different is in the old days we could look at individual requests people would give us information about their students why they wanted to be in pbs we could gather more information if we wanted to and then make a decision we no longer have the opportunity to do that all decisions need to be made through a blind lottery where we only have the students name and grade level we can't look at their academic history their student characteristics we can't even look at where they live we can prioritize siblings um which is consistent with other uh transfer decisions that we make and we can prioritize current students so if there were two students asking to come into a certain school we could prioritize the space for a student who was already attending someone who had lived there before and moved away than someone who was brand uh one thing that we heard a lot over
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the implementation of this procedure through the summer in particular is a lot of confusion and frustration families had to learn the new rules not just for the district they wanted to attend but the district that they were coming from and there were cases where a family could be told well our district isn't going to give you permission now you have to go get permission from the other district first and then they would get that permission come back and be told now it's too late to ask because we've closed our procedure so it was a difficult confusing time and it was particularly challenging for our families who moved after the information the initial information came out so it was a complete surprise to them and really difficult for our families who are english language learners this is a difficult bureaucracy in the best of times but for a family unfamiliar with the procedures or the language in which it's being discussed um it was very very difficult so i wanted to tell you briefly what we're trying to do to improve that in order to make our next cycle even more family-friendly efficient timely accurate everything that we always want all of our transfer decisions to be we're doing a couple of things right now first of all david williams on behalf of pps is participating in a multi-district working group that's looking at the statewide process statewide process improvements and we believe that the legislature is going to take this up yet again in another session and but we also think that any rules that come out of this session won't take effect until 2016 so we'll actually have more than two months to figure out how to implement um and he's taken a lot of lessons learned from our experience here into that work group and we hope that it's going to be helpful i'm working with colleagues at neighboring districts in order to survey them and try and align our timelines and our procedures so that we don't wind up inadvertently trapping families sort of in between our islands of um of different procedures where they're just stuck in between and don't know what to do and in response to all of that we'll continue to refine our forms and our outreach in order to meet the needs of families better and consult with those who are trying to help us do outreach so that families know what to expect i'll be coming back to you in march probably with an update on where we are for the process and there may be some decisions that we need you to make regarding how many slots will open up this year and the timeline to follow so that is my update for you this evening and um if there's anything in particular you want to make sure i'm working on on this over the next few weeks this would be a great time for you to let me know comments questions dr beal you as a discussion with me is so memorable i'm sure you remember the discussion we had about a year ago and you and i discussed it at some length is there changes in this from where we were back then this is the same thing because i was very satisfied at the end of our discussion that we were doing the right thing thank you for remembering that a satisfactory thank you and i do remember it very well remember something about it uh they i remember the satisfaction at the end now uh what's that will you explain that two percent because we've gone through all this transfer to what how does the two percent work so if i have 600 if i have 600 kids in a school is it by school by district see what i'm saying well 600 kids my school 2 is 12 kids sort of 12 kids allowed in that school or how does it all fit together so the two percent is not a quota it just happens to be what the net effect of all of our decisions have been and this is the number of students attending portland public schools who have an address in another district as of october 2015. and then i went sorry october 2014 and then i went back and i checked so what was it in 2013 well what about 2011 what about 2008 and that two percent has been consistent it is uneven across different types of schools and certainly at different schools so you can go out to kelly a k5 school in outer southeast that houses our russian immersion program and you'll see a much higher rate of non-residents attending because that program is particularly of interest to um russian to families of russian and ukrainian heritage who no longer live in portland public schools however 60 kids 960 kids no no no no um but so so the two percent is i think it's about 1150 students in portland public schools this year who have addresses and other residents 11 50 i was guessing the 960s in charter schools it's 12 of their enrollment so in charter schools you can enroll non-resident students without needing permission from any district and 12 percent of the charter schools that are located in portland and are part of portland public schools
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12 percent of their enrollment is students from other districts the total like there's an enrollment report that comes out every year the big enrollment book there's a table there that shows you non-resident enrollment by school and by type and i can forward that to you if you'd be interested okay thank you thanks rodriguez hi i had two questions for you the first one on this two percent um what percentage of the two percent of students who reside in other districts but attend school here pay tuition and what percent have the state school funding follow them so i assume the charter school kids the state school funding follows them more or less yes to my knowledge you can't pay tuition in a charter school but i'm not positive on that i can tell you that in a non-charter school like how many of these kids pay tuition or do that so to my knowledge it's about eight um eight students correct we have a very small number of tuition paying students in portland public schools but i'm not sure that that covers all of our um tuition exchange agreements that might be in place for special schools so students receiving unique special services have contracts between districts and they may be counted in these numbers okay so um i can tell you for that for the really standard tuition agreements that we manage within our office it's a very small number um it less than 10 in any given year okay and that makes sense when you talked about the contract so i had another question on the memo that you sent to us you talked about david williams our director of government relations and you kind of uh working in the legislature one of the statements you said is we hope to align our practices for the coming year with the longer term goals of the legislature so can you um describe what the longer term goals of the legislature are um i'm going to i'm going to have david shadow from case so in general david has been able to provide um information that shows that the state is interested in all districts following for example a common set of timelines for all inner district transfer decisions they're interested in us having different proportions of students that come and go that are that are equal so that districts would have no more students coming in through inter-district transfer than going out and so those are the kinds of things that he's been able to make me aware of some of the working documents of this group and now that we're aware that that's likely to be what the state's looking for us to do in the future it gives us incentive to go ahead and see if what we can do now that seeds good practice that will make sense in the future um that's pretty vague some of the direction that's coming is still in a pretty vague state but i would imagine by march when we come back if this has been in committee we'll have a better sense of what those new laws are going to be your comments dr adkins thanks so much um judy so if i recall correctly i think it was last year's in last year's process we talked about for the kelly brought up kelly in particular we talked about not wanting to ease the transition we heard from a lot of parents who were concerned about the new law and that so to ease the transition we made an exception i'm not recalling the details exactly is that correct uh we were unable to make any such exceptions and laws don't allow it but i thought that we were able we still have a lot i guess i'm confused about what the current state is because we have a lot of students who are in kelly who do not reside in the district so for the first year that we're implementing these new laws we had to um every student had to go through the agreement process okay many of so all of the students who were in kelly last year who were able to receive permission from their resident districts also got permission from us to remain and so they'll be in the program and can stay without needing additional agreements um through 12th grade however there are some students who wanted to enter the program for the first time or even students who moved after the period of time when the information went out who had been in the program who didn't follow all of the rules with their resident districts and meet the timelines or all of the spaces had been given out to other kids by then and so we did see a number of students who wanted to come in and were unable to okay but we are now in a situation where once the students have been allowed into that process and remained to the highest grade that we have severe overcrowding at that school and as i understand it our head start
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program is in danger of having to move out as a result so i think just the question and the concern about whether there can be some kind of agreement with other districts or even that we would start a charter school or something to be able to be able to serve those families and have this awesome program but also be able to serve our own district residents and particularly our head start families so i just raised that again as a as an issue of concern absolutely very important the russian immersion program is a two sections for grade level program and so the spaces available for non-resident students are available after all resident students have been able to apply and access it if it was filled with resident students then we would of course not have space for non-residents so long as there is space and so long as the purpose of that space is to support a strong program then um it makes good sense to to have the doors open um the question of the long-term location of the program whether it can be housed at kelly in the long term whether given the interest from non-resident families these mechanisms are the best way to go if we if there's a better mechanism there's a better way to operate the program so that families have freer access to it regardless of which side of the boundary line they're on then we we continue to work um towards those goals and i would imagine as we get towards the district-wide boundary review and some of those long-term decisions that are coming forward this will be um one of the issues that comes in it just seems to me that it's tailor-made for that's what the charter one one good use of the charter school law to be able to have that flexibility so anyway thank you thank you very much again i think as uh judy said we'll be voting on a resolution around this on our february 24th okay next on our agenda board leadership election um leadership roles are voted on twice annually the state of oregon requires the board to have a chair and a vice chair so that's how the resolutions read however our board currently operates on a co-chair model so our first leadership role is for board chair do i have any nominations for chair i'd like to nominate director atkins okay we will now consider resolution 405014 election afford chairperson with director atkins nominated for this position do i have a motion in a second so i have the motion do i have a second second director morton seconds director uh belial moves and director martin seconds the motion to adopt resolutions 5014 is there any board discussion dr beal about 1969 when i was teaching at woodburn middle school actually junior high school then i was teaching math and we got into a deal about chess we started playing chess all over the place the teachers did the teachers kind of did with the kids after school chess was really a big deal and they redesigned the chessboard which is kind of interesting thing to do we had all sorts of different we would play on that and they got so interested in chess that they decided they wanted to play the games faster and so they shifted to what they used to call speed chess and i don't know if people still play that maybe they do but we moved about you moved as fast as you could just as quick and fast as you could with speed chess and and the game was you got the game over with but it was a different game it was one where you didn't think you think through what it was you didn't you just kind of the whole idea was to get through and uh really chess is best played when the professionals plan when you play you set a time limit a reasonable time limit to stay with between you don't just let anything go because you can be in a chat i mean there are people who play chess over the mail and it goes on for for years basically almost a game and i don't want to go to speed chess and that's my concern about voting for director adkins because everything that we do in her not her as a person but her behavior is to speed it up hurry it up let's get this done let's go go go we got to get this done and we don't take the time that i've seen when she's pushing things like that to really stop and think we have tremendous responsibility on this board i've gone through it over and over we've got about a billion dollars of tax money that we mess with we've got almost 50 000 kids we've got over probably 100 properties we've we've got a tremendous amount of responsibility here and i don't want to go zoom zoom zoom so i'm hoping that if director atkins gets everybody else's vote but mine or
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however it comes down because i'm not going to vote for speed chess that she'll take that into consideration and not be afraid to allow people to talk when they want to talk a little bit even so you can at least get the in between the best chess game not the worst so i'll be voting no on this dr belial i like your analogy i used to like chess when i was in middle school people still do play um chess and it's through the mail it's we expect don't we have a couple good chess clubs in the district no we haven't done quite well speed chess develops a different set of skills but i i understand your point i think and um the irony isn't lost on me that tonight director atkins votes to actually involve more process for our budget amendment on the same time you're saying it goes too fast but thanks okay okay the board will now vote on resolution 5014 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no no uh resolution 5014. i i'm sorry dr reagan i didn't hear your vote i was trying to decide well now's the time not to rush you roll call please um i had uh i'm yeah um i'll vote uh yes because i okay resolution 5014 is approved by a vote of uh six to one thank you um no no not excuse me nominations uh for vice chair wasn't there a welcome request or did you ask for a roll call yes i did okay um miss pal will you go ahead and do a roll call no director morton yes dr curler yes chair knowles yes okay all right um next for the position of board vice chair uh resolution oh do i have a nomination for vice chair dr mark i'd like to nominate director knowles for vice chair thank you uh we'll now consider resolution 501.5 election of board vice chair with director knowles nominated for this position do we have a motion and a second i have a motion from director uh morton do we have a second second okay director morton moves and director atkins seconds the motion to adopt resolution five zero one five board discussion more chess director fuel this might be a little more direct in the chess analogy some time ago i don't know maybe three quarters of a year i asked for i went through all the procedures that are listed in our policy book asking that we could that i could make a motion at the meeting and the procedure is to go through the superintendent and the superintendent make to uh write it up and so forth there are procedures that are in policy and i have complained about that never taking place and that motion was surround centered around being able to put something on the agenda at a meeting here and director knowles supports not being able to put things on the agenda in that manner because otherwise we'd have on them we would have had that uh perfectly legal and correctly done motion come forward i am very concerned and have been and spoke for a long time about us doing everything in the back room and i think that that's kind of how we go about it it's backroom stuff for instance i would i'd like to make an emotion tonight i have all these people out here with the signs up and it's amazing that you can hold that sign up for that long i guess especially most of you are fairly young uh so i don't it was terrific and last time last time you were here we threw you out and the time before director this is on the topic this is what this is the reason that i'm not voting for you it's hard to figure at all i'm right on it i'm going to keep going as long as i'm on the topic and if you want to have a vote to shut me up you might be there you might be able to figure out how to do that but you're otherwise it's not getting me to finish and so the time before
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direct uh we shut down the meeting and walked out some of us including the chairperson i think there's a lot better way to handle that type of thing one of the better ways for instance we could invite the don't shoot people to make a presentation at our next meeting and say what is the problem here and give them some time and allow them to make a presentation these are not radical crazy people someplace these are bright people who have believed that they have a serious grievance but i'm not allowed to make that motion because we do it all in the back rooms and not out here in the board and so i'd much rather do it in the board and since chairman knowles doesn't like to do it that way evidently i'm not planning to vote for her and at least now no one will reach over and put their hand in front of me to shut me up so there you go thank you very much i think that was all on topic you know steve i've never put my hand in front of you i did no such thing i try and treat my colleagues with respect there are a there is a process for bringing stuff forward to the board you've never agreed to follow the process when you do it will come forward just like all the rest of us so director belial i just want to mention that i guess i'm a little confused by director buell's comments but sometimes that happens because i hear sometimes a real strong desire to follow board policy and board policy that talks about the process and where agendas are setting set was established well before i was on the board well before i think even director knowles i don't know of director regan if it was before he were on the board but they they were born out of a desire to actually move things forward in the process for for how things are discussed very similar to other elected bodies in how it's and at one point we were discussing whether or not when you were claiming back rooms you're you stated an issue that you felt it was inappropriate for the superintendent and the co-chairs to be in the back room because the policy says the chair as director knowles points out what the state requires for us to do that basically the co-chair was included in that that felt like a back room deal to you so i'm not sure whether you want us to follow policy or if you are actually against a co-chair model which would be an interesting discussion that we could have at our at our board retreat i know that there are a couple of people here whom i disagree with um because i'm actually in favor of a strong chair um who gets to sit with the superintendent and do that but there are others who do not um so i guess i'm just a little bit surprised but before i lose the floor i just want to thank director knowles for all the effort because while there's much direction pointed in in your way to move things similar to speaker of the house or other leadership positions um your obligation to this body to all seven of us is to keep us in line with policy in line with procedure and it is often a thankless job so i just want to thank you for your time thank you director buell oh my complaint on the back backroom stuff was not that that the vice chairman was there but that she in this case is she or he whomever is part of the decision making process and that's that was the problem i you can't follow everything perfectly but you can certainly allow people to have way more of a say than we've had since i've been on this board i mean there's a lot of you can go find a lot of school boards where people they have time where people can just speak to what they want or maybe even make some sort of a motion that's not a big deal that's the type of thing it's an openness that i'm in a transparency that i'm always have been worried about and i continue to worry about it which is why i won't be going for director noel's as nice a woman and she is other comments i just want to echo the thanks i know having the gavel is not an easy thing to do at all and oftentimes it's high pressure and things come at you and you don't know they're coming at you so with this vote you're stepping down and handing it over to so i just thank you for your efforts thank you here thank you and i also uh would say i am not a co-chair kind of person i like the chair vice chair but i could not have done this role without the assistance and the support of my co-chair ruth atkins she did an absolutely fabulous job of helping me as you guys all know because you've talked to her on occasions when we're trying to move things helping us get the work done so i'm very excited that she's going to be
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our presiding co-chair in the future director regan so i'm going to be voting no and um part of the reason is i believe that we should be sharing leadership among the seven board members and i think that um while i appreciate your leadership i also believe that it's time for us to be sharing a little bit more um i think in all of the years that ruth's been on the board this may be the first time that you're actually the chair chair is that true or not for that in german yeah and so um i'm glad you're having that opportunity um at last so um okay anybody else no okay um the board will now uh vote on resolution 5015. all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes opposed please indicate by saying no no uh resolution 501.5 is approved by a vote of five to two uh miss powell i think uh director beal would wanted a roll call vote on this one as well sure yes director regan no director adkins yes director buell no dr yes thank you everybody um our last i think our last agenda item is our business agenda uh having already uh the board and i'll consider the remainder of its business agenda having already voted on resolutions 501 and 501.5 ms powell are there any changes to the business agenda no there isn't okay do i have a motion in a second so moved second director morton moves in director atkins seconds the adoption of the business agenda any public comment no any board discussion on business agenda nope and i lost my last page a meeting cannot end the board will now vote on business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no any abstentions the board agenda is approved by a vote of seven to zero um before i adjourn the meeting i'd like to remind everyone that uh to take the successful school survey um i also would note for the television public and others that we have a quite a crowd here tonight with signs and i want to personally thank each one of you for expressing your concerns and comments to us in respectful manner so that we can continue the board better work and the work of the district so thank you very much for being here tonight to let us know your thoughts and uh i would tell some of you that it's got to be below your chin or the people behind you can't see you you can't see us or anything else so appreciate you trying to do that um the next meeting i don't want to invite them right dude the next meeting of the board will be on tuesday february 3rd and will begin at 7 and this meeting

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)

2015-01-27 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - January 27, 2015

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