2015-02-03 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2015-02-03
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - February 3, 2015

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good evening this study session of the board of education for february 3rd 2015 is called to order i'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers well our study sessions are generally limited to receipt of information from staff and discussion of that information review of resolutions prior to vote at times we do conduct votes during study sessions any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our pps tv services website um directors regan and curler are absent this evening director regan is with a delegation in washington dc with the oregon school boards association lobbying for improved federal funding and policy so go bobby and oregon school boards association all right so um this time they will kick off with public comment miss houston do we have any anyone signed up we do we have a total of five great and our first two speakers are fair hutchins and jennifer starkey okay so while those folks are coming forward i'll just read the instructions thank you so much for taking the time to attend the meeting tonight and provide your comments to the board we value your input and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns we're going to actively listen and reflect in your comments but we're not going to respond or to comments or questions during public comment we have asked board board manager roseanne powell to follow up on issues that are raised so she's available there after if you have questions afterward about how the board or staff might respond guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration for others complaints about individual employees should be directed to the superintendent's office uso you have a total of three minutes to share your comments please begin by stating your name and spelling your last name for the record during the first two minutes there'll be a green light when you have one minute remaining the yellow light will come on and then when the time is up a red light comes on and we respectfully ask that you wrap up at that time so thanks again for taking the time to be here and you may begin thanks hi my name is feyer hutchins h-u-t-c-h-i-n-s and uh good evening appreciate the opportunity to share and join this conversation about our children in our schools uh i am a concerned community member i used to be a social worker with pps and i worked for a program called the attendance initiative which was a culturally specific program with sei erco and impact northwest slavic it's been a couple of years since i've worked with the school systems as all discouraged after working with that program but i am coming back as a volunteer in the spanish immersion program at beach so i'm really excited to come back so the program i worked for was quickly defunded after about two years even though it did directly address attendance which is one of pps's equity research outlined as a central indicator for success lou frederick last week or a couple weeks ago he was speaking at the equity town hall at boise and he shared that racial equity issues have not changed much since the 80s and uh that the issues are actually well understood but the solutions are not being funded so i agree with him i think he's correct and we do know what the problems are and we know that pps's respectable commitment to research has definitely defined what the solutions are but we're not funding them or in my case we fund a solution temporarily but not long enough for it to have an impact so i would like to share tonight two ways that i see that institutional racism is active in these failures i share not as an attack but as a cry for dialogue firstly the inconsistency of committed resources to equity is to blame for the failure of these programs the defunding of a solution-based program like mine before it could get its feet under it is actually a form of racism please hear me out i know that funding is a very complicated issue but programs that serve communities of color they stay in this experimental phase and then their funding comes and goes and usually the programs that serve communities of color will be given up before they actually have that chance to thrive the same way that black families at my schools were falling through the cracks when i was working two of my favorite students were a black kindergartner and first grader it's really sad and the principal told me not to work with them that i should give up and that was really frustrating but i didn't give up kept doing that but what i did see is that the school really uh you know let me see if i can get back on track here a little emotional the evidence of the school-to-prison pipeline in this and just how we don't fund things that actually work is part of that racism trying to watch my yellow light and then
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secondly along with the inconsistent resources for equity we have failed outcomes because black and brown people are not invited and pursued to be at the table to develop and fund programs that they need so i would just really like to encourage all of you to ask for direct community involvement in the budget process here and really get people at the table because people know what they need the black community knows what they need and we need to be able to ask them and actually get there engage them thank you thank you very much go ahead hi my name is jennifer starkey s-t-a-r-k-e-y um i'm here at the bequest of a parent at the school i teach at after school i was a staff member at mesd outdoor school for four years between 2007 and 2011 and during that time the program went through a huge shrinkage it was all the budgets in the region well they they just lost their funding and um so it went all the districts either had to cut their time in half or just eliminate it completely um i wrote some things down we were faced with the task of making a three-day program as effective and meaningful as possible something outdoor school excels at is structure it is a finely tuned 45 plus your structure that is highly intentional in every detail and what happens to sixth graders in that structure is that they have a predictable schedule a place to sleep meals to eat and people around them and predictability allows students to relax and learn more outdoor school also pushes so many students out of their comfort zones and pushes them to grow the combination of exposure to new people a new place new routines new ways of learning and even being away from home and being in the outdoors is a big opportunity for growth for so many students the structure and new experiences are beneficial for students at any length so i don't want to diminish this three-day program in any way however isn't it isn't just a math issue when it comes to the benefits of increased time at outdoor school uh three days to 60 days is not just twice as much field study or twice as many meals or twice as many campfires it is an exponential result sixth grade is something i've noticed it's this magic time where identity really starts to take hold and i've watched countless students do things on friday that they never would have done on sunday when they got off the bus homesick kids don't want to leave the kid that fails in the classroom is outstanding on field study and finds out that they're smart and the kid who can't make friends at school makes a ton of friends from other schools and today so i work now uh you may be familiar with the kaiser on interstate by overlook park um i work i make coffee there i've done it for over a year and um today i was i was talking to some regulars and i was like hillary hilary did you go to outdoor school and she was like yeah yeah it was the best week of my life and i said why she said oh i had no friends before i went to outdoor school and then i went and i met all these people and then i was like wow i can make friends this one was like the friendliest person in the whole place so anyway go figure um anyway thanks for your time thank you very much our next two speakers rick till and maria da silva i get to hold my sign for three minutes more sure atkins board members uh i'm rick till i'm on the board for east multnomah swollen water conservation district if you're not familiar with east multnomah we're a special district with a elected publicly elected board of directors that has a small tax space to spend money on helping people care for their land and water in addition to that for the last three years we've been providing support for outdoor school three years ago it was on an emergency basis to keep the current program from being completely cut since then we've been providing uh funding just to keep the program maintained as the community works to restore it to a full week we've also paid for a planning program
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through the intertwined alliance to develop a strategy for restoring the program for a full week even with that work it's a long shot to get that done in the near future you guys have an opportunity to to possibly do that this year that would make a huge difference for me i don't know it's been a struggle to get the money out of the east multnomah each year not everybody's in agreement that we should be contributing the amount we are makes my case substantially easier if i'm using that money to leverage a full week versus just the three days and that would make a huge difference that that would give me that the basis to even try and get that same level of funding for another two or three years until some of the bigger strategies can come in and help make that a perpetual program also in addition to helping me get more money to the program i think providing that stability would also afford us as any more money comes available to the east multnomah to explore ways to enhance the program provide more opportunities for student leaders i'd like to see more student leaders placed in internship positions throughout the city and with natural resource groups and non-profits to learn more and cultivate the next generation of conservation leaders we can't it's hard to explore those additional opportunities if we're just barely keeping our our heads above water the existing program so i encourage you to restore the full program uh for the next year thank you very much thank you thank you so much for your support of outdoor school we really appreciate it thanks for being here yes hi thank you this is it feels very good the energy today is the first time um this beautiful lady karen hudson let me sign up without asking me to arrange it ahead of time so let me introduce you this is maya she goes to regular elementary school first grade and meshi is a special needs child he's going to be going to pps public schools uh hopefully you know um he'll have a good opportunity um i know board of director i went off the board of directors of the regular pta as you know me and i've been coming here to a lot of your meetings too you know to ask you to demand to ask you to listen lately i've been coming with don't shoot to protest and to shut down your meetings because i don't know what else to do my kids are here and you are responsible for their success as well as i am i've done everything as a parent to providing as much opportunity equal access and equal opportunity for them to succeed now you have to do your job and you have to do your share it's very sad for me today i met with our principal sara garandia and with the pta for a recap leadership meeting and her goals everywhere unrealistic she has a lot of hope and a lot of good positive energy to meet our goals 30 to 45 percent of our students in third fourth fifth grade are failing you know actually it's more than that only 35 to 45 percent you know are underachieved they are not getting to benchmark and one of her goals was to bring 50 of our minority kids to reading level and benchmark which means half of the latina women that were there in the meeting will get their kids to a benchmark by the end of the year but half of us we won't and that's very sad i guess the other thing is that you did gave us a little bit more for two eas let me tell you we had five years we didn't have that many it helped that we protested out of those five years four quit they're gone because you didn't help us to fund those student management black community liaison and result justice person in part i'm not going to say that that's the reason why they fall but in part they knew what was coming without them at regular elementary school so they are gone and we have two new ueas we're gonna have couple more who have no idea of how to do their job and hopefully you will bring us help my job is i am an ea and my job is to bring kids to benchmark who are really low to benchmark in two months in one month but with effective you know teachers who are supported and listened by their board of directors to finish i just want to tell you that it just breaks my heart because every time i come with my kids they see me crying and i shouldn't be going through these but you cannot expect us to do to bring the kids to benchmark if you are not funding us a librarian at least a full-time nurse another teacher another reading specialist we have the same budget than last year except that we have two new eas and those two new eas you know that are working with kindergartners they're not gonna be working with third fourth fifth graders to bring them to benchmark thank you thank you very much
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our last speaker is james lopez erickson welcome hello hello um i just wanted to first share a quote excuse me could you share your name and spell your last name for the record thanks my name is james lopez erickson my last name is spelled erickson is e-r-i-c-k-s-e-n i first wanted to share a quote someone shared with me today she's african-american a mother whose children go in are at the school district and the reason i wanted to share this quote is because i acknowledge how many parents of color don't or can't make it to medians like tonight and she said that the system isn't broken because it's working exactly how it's supposed to for who it's supposed to work for it isn't for us people of color we got to create our own and something my wife shared who's latina said first people of color aren't invited then we're blamed for not participating so don't blame me when i decide to do things my own way and so i acknowledge every family of color who doesn't make it to menis like tonight and who do not make up the administration of the portland public schools the first thing i would like to ask for is an immediate proposal and a vote for a change to the three-minute testimony when a non-english speaking person testifies i ask that the policy states the timer stops during translation and then continues again when the person continues their testimony the second thing i would like to do is again acknowledge every parent and student of color who is not here tonight i've been to so many rallies around immigration around injustices in regards to racism and so many families of color don't come and the thing that my wife says to me at the end of the day is i can't and she'll say that even if the security of our children are at stake because the stressors of her life get to be to a point where she becomes literally debilitated where her physical ability to do things anymore just comes to an end and so i'm here tonight as a white person advocating for my wife and every family of color who has not been able to participate in the very system that it wasn't set up to work for um and so there are two stories i like to share one was and these were both right after ferguson at a school where family and african-american family attends their son is black he was asked to step outside of the classroom and while he was asked to step outside of the classroom the teacher was trying to do i don't know what she was trying to do a cultural awareness training or something with her students for an elementary age explaining to them that her the black kids in her class might be extremely upset because of the verdict that happened in ferguson and i think this was a very inappropriate example of how a teacher tried to implement something in regards to racial equity the second example was a black student who is in elementary age was asked to stand in the middle of the classroom the teacher then proceeded to ask the students in the classroom what's different about this child well at that age you're getting responses like their shoelaces the color of their coat those types of things until the teacher insisted that the students acknowledge that the kids skin color is what's different about them both of these examples show the lack of experience and training need for a cultural competency within our teachers thank you very much you might want to check with our board manager too because i think she can clarify one of about one of your points that we're already okay as part of our policy thank you very much to everyone who testified tonight so so our contract with the portland federation of school professionals allows time on the board agenda for comments so i'd like to welcome belinda reagan president of pfsp to come on down and provide some comments at this time welcome good evening i'm belinda regan i'm the president of pfsp the portland federation of school professionals before i begin my pre-written dialogue i do want to stand in support of our mother from wrigler um and her comments about the ea the need for eas in the third and fourth grade levels to to maintain
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the progress that we hope to achieve in reading really very essential so good evening to all of you um several weeks ago i received the district's budget prioritizing exercise which i promptly sat down and attended to and in doing so i realized with certainty that i really would not wish these decision-making duties on anyone even you folks had i the ability and the point allowances i would have fully touched each one of the proposed budget items but i didn't as background to my plea this evening to you as school board members i hope that you'll indulge me for a few moments as i explain the reasoning behind my support of one budget focus option in particular i am a child of portland having attended the first kindergarten class ever enrolled at joseph meek elementary in the mid 50s in 1959 i left meek when my family moved across town and i became a became a part of a small school district called the sylvan school district which soon merged into portland public schools providing two new west side schools little sylvan and west sylvan wes sylvan of course became a feeder for lincoln high school which was my alma mater as i grew up in portland schools i spent my fair share of time in the school office i'm certain an explanation of the why isn't necessary for those of you who know me well as an office regular i grew to adore the i grew to adore the secretaries with whom i visited regularly women whose warmth and compassion was felt by all students parents and staff they were always busy but never too much so to take a few minutes to chat and act truly interested in my probably boring life never do i recall there being a just one secretary in my school there were always two or three answering phones attending to student and family needs working with the principal and so much more that i simply wasn't aware of today in portland our schools serve an incredibly different student and family population than it was there there was present in the days that i attended school as portland has grown we've welcomed a wonderfully diverse community enriching our student bodies with special needs kids children from other cultures and from varying socio economic backgrounds we've also experienced a tremendous change in how we manage our schools as classroom sizes have increased technology has burst forth into our lives and students face new challenges each year both in educationally and socially throughout all of these enormous changes the school office continues to remain the hub of every building in this district in the past 25 years since measure 5 was foolishly passed we've been forced to stand by and watch the demands and responsibilities of the office staff increased 20-fold while our secretarial numbers continue to shrink in an effort to maintain a balanced budget the school that once housed three secretaries serving in different capacities now has an office managed by just one person stretched to their limit and yet the duties continue to pile on these hard-working dedicated employees seldom do secretaries take breaks too often when i walk into a school office i see the sole secretary eating a sandwich at their desk as they type answer phones and tend to sick children more often than the district will acknowledge secretaries work beyond their eight-hour shift without pay simply in order to finish their tasks only to return the next day to feel overwhelmed all over again happily for the first time in years some schools receive part-time funding for additional clerical workers this year while this added fte helped tremendously in many cases it affected far too few of our schools excuse me and our secretaries continue to be overworked overloaded and overwhelmed with their everyday jobs add to that the constant changes to district software programs practices and policies and the transference of duties once handled by district-based departments the women and men who are truly the backbone of every school can hardly function any longer we are losing increasing numbers of secretaries each year as they reach their highest level of tolerance to the ever mounting duties assigned to them my message to you tonight is this a happy school requires a happy secretary one who is able to complete their assignments while answering those phones and attending to those sick children dealing with angry parents and sometimes
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demanding staff all within the eight-hour day that they're actually paid for i do not believe that this goal can be achieved without the addition of at least one full-time secretary to every school in this district as you ponder how best to fund our educational processes in the years ahead please keep this in mind portland public schools simply cannot provide an excellent education to every child in portland without the warmth and compassion that i experienced as a child from the secretaries who keep these systems fine-tuned while i am certain that warmth and compassion remain a priority for all of our wonderful school office workers i'm left wondering how they can continue to face each new day with a smile for the students the parents and the staff when they are so incredibly beleaguered by their ever increasing workloads please consider an increase of clerical workers to our schools as you make your difficult budget decisions thank you very much ms regan thank you for being here thank you for letting me have a moment thank you thank you all right so now uh student representative jeff well they have a report to share with us first of all i'd like to start there congratulating all the teams to participate in last month's we the people competitions having been part of this program i know the tremendous work that goes into preparation and immense knowledge to gain i'd like to recognize madison high school which this was their first year having a constitution team who won a unit award at the district uh competition which means that they had the highest score for a single unit of all the teams there which is just really awesome considering it's their first year and i'm excited to see where they go and then i very high hope i have very high hopes for grant who's continuing to national competition in late april secondly secondly i like to highlight the importance of having learning opportunities outside the classroom a couple weeks ago i had the opportunity with my ib biology class to go watch a body get dissected and getting to see the human anatomy inches away from where i stood was just an expansion of what i've learned in the classroom so from that as i move forward in the budgeting season i think i'm so important that students do have access to these opportunities and career-related learning opportunities as a lot of students my class took this as an opportunity to explore healthcare fields so members of supersac are looking forward to volunteering at glencoe elementary school next friday where they'll be helping out with a valentine's day party this month super sac students will also be heading to salem to lobby for a budget that supports academic achievement and for a full week of outdoor school lastly supersac also looks forward to providing input into the high school schedules for next year so if you all have time i encourage you to go to promise of oregon's website and look at the web or video that was published today about roosevelt high school junior tory eagle staff it really just highlights the importance of transformative education and the reason that we need to keep pushing for a budget that really supports our students thank you all thank you so much mina so before we have three um very important and meaty topics tonight so just a word to my colleagues beforehand knowing that our presenters staff have i have long presentations for us with a lot of information if you could just hold you know make a note of your comments and questions and hold those till the end if at all possible so that we can make sure they can get through their presentation and then we'll have a full discussion so just if you can just make notes as you go we would really appreciate that and with that we'll get started on the first major topic which is the 2015-16 budget informational update on high school graduation rates and high school action teams update so superintendent smith would you like to introduce this item um i would and i'll ask antonio lopez who is assistant superintendent for school performance to come on up and lead this presentation we'll also have jay james who's the senior director of college and career readiness sarah singer senior director of system planning and performance and jocelyn begaye salter director of our early warning systems who will bring us up to date on our graduation rates and early warning system thank you roseanne oh yeah good evening co-chairs atkins and knowles
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directors student representatives superintendent my name is antonio lopez i'm the assistant superintendent for the office of school performance and the presentation that you're gonna hear today we're gonna touch on several topics and with your permission what uh what i would like to do is to go over the presentation and then at the end we will open and will entertain any of your questions so um we're gonna have sarah singer senior director of system planning and performance who's going to go over the our graduation and completion data and we're going to have shea james senior director of college and career readiness along with joseline director of early warning systems and they will update progress on early warning systems defining what an early warning system is and the next steps in developing an implementation on the early warning systems and then at the end i will give you our overall presentation of the other systems that we work in in terms of aligning our high school great so hi my name is sarah singer senior director of system planning and performance and i am going to present to you the data on completion and graduation rates before i do that i just want to make sure that we're all kind of consistent in our definitions and our understanding so this year the state made a change on who counts as graduates so one change is that modified diplomas are now now count as part of the four-year cohort graduation rate in the past those students would have been in our completer rate which i'll get to in a minute just to be clear to be eligible for modified diplomas a student has to have a documented history of an inability to maintain grade level achievement due to significant learning and instructional barriers or a documented history of a medical condition that creates a barrier to achievement so students just to recap students who have modified diplomas are now part of what counts as a graduate we're also going to talk we hear a lot about the four-year cohort graduation rate um tonight we're also going to hear about the completion rate so i just want to make sure people are aware of what the difference is between those two so included in completer in the completed rate are students who have graduated who have earned a ged or have earned what we call an extended or adult high school diploma it should also be noted that in 2014 the ged was revamped to be more rigorous and to align with the common core state standards other changes to note are included as graduates are students who met the requirements to graduate but decided to stay a fifth year in school so this is not going to be particularly pertinent to portland public schools because we don't have students in this category but other other districts around the state have exercised this option those students typically go on to higher education for a year um while they're while they're well they're still technically in the um paid for by kind of the district funds okay so to get to the data um what we have here is um our four-year cohort graduation rate over time and um starting with our 2008 9 number which was really the first year that we collected cohort graduation rates and we were at 53 percent that year and we are what we reported to the state this year was 70 graduation rate that particular figure includes the modified diplomas if you were to exclude the modified diploma so that you have more of an apples to apples comparison our graduation rate would have been 69 so it impacted us by a percent those changes so overall that's a 16 to 17 percent grad rate depending on how you want to calculate it and so if we look at four-year completion and five-year completion rates which you're going to also see in comparison to graduation rates you're going to see that over time our four-year completion rate has um trended upwards slightly over the last several years and you're also going to see that our five-year completion rate has trended upwards so basically we can say with confidence that our four-year graduation our four-year completion and our
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five-year completion rate have been moving in the right direction we have been making improvements over time in comparison to the state of oregon and other schools the oregon graduation rate is 72 percent in 2009 they were at 66. and pps in 2009 we were at 54 and then we've made a lot of growth over time and we are now at 70. so we are two percentage points behind the state but we are growing more rapidly our completion rate in comparison to oregon is um we're both at 80 82 percent and we have also shown significant growth in comparison to the state on completion rate when we break out the four-year cohort by race and ethnicity over the last several years here's what you'll find so our american indian and alaskan native graduation rate is at 47 percent this is the lowest of our racial and ethnic groups um this year our asian students are at 82 percent and you see steady growth since 2010-11. our black students are at 60 this year so this is we what we experienced with our black graduation rate for about three years was stagnation so it was at 55 in 2010 in 11 and 12 we were around 53 percent so we were just kind of it's stagnant so this year we jumped to 60 percent so that is um a bigger jump for that for that group our hispanic graduation rate is at 56 percent so while we've shown growth over time over a four year period for hispanic for the hispanic rate it is it unfortunately dropped a percentage point in comparison to last year our pacific islander population we had a significant increase in their graduation rate and then our white population we've seen steady growth over time so if we um we think it's important to look at the the data disaggregated by both gender and race so that's what this picture will show so our asian females have an 88 graduation rate um and so what you'll see is data um by gender and race so white male is 71 um african-american female is 65 percent hispanic latino female is 63 native hawaiian pacific islander male 1 63 multi-racial male 62 um black african-american males 55 so you'll you'll see a gap between black african-american females and black african-american males of 10 percentage points because 55 for american indian alaska native females 51 for hispanic latino males and then finally 38 for american indian alaska native males four-year cohort graduation rates by school so we used growth since 2009-10 so what you'll see is since that point in time all of our comprehensive and or focus options schools have experienced growth madison has grown 20 percentage points over that period of time franklin is another success story at 14 percentage points um so you'll see just that and the total is for the comprehensives right now our comprehensive and focus option grad rate is at 82 percent and that's a 12 increase 12 percentage point increase since 2009 10. other notable highlights mlc increased their graduation rate by 23 percentage points from the previous year summer scholars which is a summer school located at benson graduated 37 students this past summer and that we know increased our graduation rate by one percentage point the black white achievement gap closed at jefferson franklin and roosevelt
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specifically i think franklin had a 91 graduation rate for its african-american students and the black white achievement gap nearly closed at benson and madison within two percentage points um roosevelt high school's graduation rate um fell 11 11 points and it should say 253 percent not from 53 the rate still is up 11 points over over the from the past five years um interesting um thing about roosevelt is that they have a um much higher five-year graduation rate or five yeah five-year graduation rate so a lot of their students don't necessarily make it in four years but they they do go on to enroll in a fifth year and so that's sort of um just something to note here so when i look at other when we compare the four-year grad rate and the five-year grad rate and remember these are different sets of kids because they're different cohorts so just keep that in mind but what you do see is for roosevelt in particular a pretty large difference that fifth year really makes a difference for roosevelt it makes a pretty big difference for jefferson and alliance as well this is just something we've seen a lot with our schools that serve that have higher poverty concentrations or serve more historically underserved students we tend to see that that fifth year really makes a big difference we see it in our alternative system as well our cbo's other notable graduation rates for our economically disadvantaged our graduation rate was 61 percent that's up six percentage points um from the past four years our limited english proficiency or we like to call our emerging bilingual population it has a graduation rate of 49 percent that is up 11 percentage points um from from four years from 2009 10. special education at 50 percent and there that's up 18 percentage points this modified diploma um being included is especially going to impact the special education graduation rate um tag is a 91 graduation rate and then we see if our female at 75 percent and our male is at 66 percentage points so we do see a gender gap in our graduation rate and then one other important point to note is that for those students who join pps in the ninth grade cohort they have a 77 percent graduation rate we we get students who join us in 10th grade 11th grade and 12th grade and they're um we might call late entrance and their graduation rate is significantly lower as you can see 48 41 and 34 respectively we also have a group of students who've actually never enrolled at pps that are still part of our cohort and those students live in pps boundaries um but they go to for example an mesd run school like helens view so there's not a lot of them but they are there is you know they do count in our cohort so when you add up all the students who um joined in 10th grade or sort of after or never enrolled that's about that was 18 of our cohort this year last year it was it was about the same it was about 20 so this is kind of a consistent figure for us and so um with that i am going to hand it over to shay james senior director of our office of a college and career readiness and she's going to talk about one of our critical strategies on how we're addressing graduation and completion rates thank you good evening board of directors and superintendent smith as assistant superintendent lopez mentioned tonight we are providing you an update of where we are on the implementation of our early warning system we want to highlight the prior work which functioned as a catalyst for moving towards implementing systemic approach let me actually turn that on thank you which functioned as as a let me start over which functioned as a catalyst for moving towards implementing a systemic approach focusing on intervening early and often using personalization strategies and emphasizes a continuum of services for six through twelve the early warning system is incorporating successful strategies from our high school graduation project the high school graduation initiative project is a five-year federal grant awarded in 2010 providing 11 schools with outreach coordinators as well as additional supports for partners such as campfire step up and additional alternative school slots the grants the grants sunset september 2015 however we are dedicated to
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systematically adopting some of its most promising practices through the work of the high school action team which involved year-long work teams that included teachers parents students principals central office administrators community and board members an early warning system was defined as one that works to retain students in their local school to decrease the need for alternative options for youth who are younger and on track without compromising services to all students across the continuum the continuum we are referring to provides supports to all youth through prevention intervention and re-engagement a point to note in this definition is that we are also addressing the recommendations put forth from the segmentation analysis you have all previously received which builds capacity in our schools so that we are not just decreasing the need for all options for younger students but working towards serving students at their home school an external evaluation was conducted to evaluate the impact of the hsgi project one key finding that we have not been able to measure in the past is students who participate in after school programming such as camp fire step up or sun schools begin to make academic improvements after receiving 750 hours of service joseline beguy salter who has led the hsgi work under multiple pathways to graduation is going to highlight some of the other areas where hsgi has made an impact on accelerating graduation rates while this finding is exciting we do want to note that this is a very intensive model with 750 hours equally equaling 94 days of participation for each student good evening board of directors and superintendent smith as i highlight some of the areas of impact i want to mention the success of the hsgi project was not possible without without cross-department collaboration building level engagement and a collective teaming approach from all tonight we are highlighting a few of our high-profile strategies that significantly impacted graduation efforts hsgi had significant impact beginning with the staffing team strategy we worked very closely with building personnel to establish staffing teams that parallel student intervention or care teams staffing teams included key building personnel such as counselors administrators partners like sun or and step up campfire attendance coordinators and outreach coordinators these teams met weekly record and coordinate intervention efforts for students by name another area of impact was examining and refining the academic priority list for accuracy it is a tool we use to bring students at risk to the surface students are identified using the following indicators attendance grades and at the time the oak scores we improve the report in collaboration with research and evaluation as well as by using the mary beth cilio of portland public schools cohort study done a few years back this is one of the initial efforts to identify students earlier and in a more useful way assisting rising 9th graders in their transition into high school as sarah pointed out is a huge piece of the work as well this is another area where hsgi has been able to been of effective through these efforts we have warmly handed off 656 students to high school staff partners and other outreach coordinators recent credit recovery efforts are yet another area of hsgi impact for students by name in our first full year of service hsgi served seniors who were close to graduating but it needed additional supports we impacted 21 of those 331 students and helped them to graduate the subsequent year due to more intentional collaboration we served 321 seniors that were close to graduation and 88 percent were able to graduate the majority of which were students of color based on this success as a district we are now investing more intentionally in providing school site credit recovery options this past june for example we were able to provide credit recovery options at every one of our high schools
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as well as do away with any financial barriers seniors might have had that would keep them from graduating by providing summer scholars tuition or tuition reimbursement the efforts at fourth in june assisted an additional 42 seniors in graduating doubling our summer graduation rate so shane mentioned she referred to a continuum when we talk about a continuum of services this is essentially what we're talking about services that really address all subsets of the population in order to meet the goal of building a systemic school level approach we must function within a continuum where all subsets of the population grade 6 through 12 have access to supports and are provided excuse me an entry point for either staying on track a focus on the prevention side of the spectrum or getting back on track this calls for building an infrastructure in our schools that allows families and students to access support services such as sun school or step up or instructional opportunities like credit recovery cte advanced scholars or reconnection center services it also provides teachers counselors and administrators with a menu of support services to better serve all of our students using the criteria from the high school action team developed this is what a continuum of services would begin to look like it is an early warning system comprised of tangible engagement opportunities such as credit recovery learning and credit options cte middle school youth supports participation in partner programming and effective student progress communication to families it also has more functioning elements such as school intervention and early warning system advisory teams as well as a system level early warning monitoring and reporting tools to provide you with examples of the work we will highlight one of the new progress reporting tools that families will receive so the notice of progress to our graduation report will be mailed out to families twice a year it will provide families with a more reader-friendly student's progress toward graduation report if you if you you'll see here where families will now receive this letter and it will clearly indicate whether their student is off track or on track it provides them with a list of subjects shows the required credits for graduation the credits earned by the students and their essential skills and personalized learning progress sarah single will now speak a little bit about the new dashboard monitoring tool thanks jocelyne so we have something that's called the data dashboard it provides real-time data to administrators and counselors and select other school-based staff so one of the pieces of work that my department has done in collaboration with the office of college and career readiness i.t and some school-based staff is to improve this dashboard tool and specifically to align it around the superintendent's three priorities one of which is to accelerate the graduation and completion rate so one of the products from this effort is a new dash report report that tracks this is just an example we've actually created a couple of these reports but this one attracts attendance and tardies by period for every student so in the past and this is really going to be more relevant for sixth grade and up but this before we didn't have the ability to actually say is a student missing one period more than another and so now we have a real-time data source for administrators counselors and other select school staff to do that we also have a report for school-based personnel administrators um that tells whether or not students are actually on track to graduate based on credits and their essential skills again that was not something we had in the past some of the latest budget investments have allowed enabled us to be able to produce this type of thing in order to create the report what we did is we had what we called a data action team so in that team was some school-based personnel i.t people from office of school office of college and career readiness and we designed the report and then we went out and did several focus groups one with counselors to say hey does this work for you what doesn't work for you
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and we also did another focus group with administrators to do the same sort of thing and so that's how this design process has worked so you heard our student represented representative mentioned cte tonight and as we work towards building the early warning system we are intentionally examining all potential engagement and re-engagement opportunities district-wide especially for our males cte has surfaced as an example and an opportunity of this according to the national research center of career and technical education earning three or more cte credits within a focused pathway was second only to ninth grade students grade point average as the strongest viable affecting the strongest variable affecting high school survival for boys as you can see there there is a lot of good work that is going on and uh we're very excited about the gains on high school graduation but we know that we still have a lot of work to do so uh part of the work is how do we build this continuum how do we build a strong elementary schools how do we make sure that our kids are reading by third grade and how do we make sure that at the middle schools we engage our students because if they're not successful in third grade we're going to start seeing in middle grades where they start disengaging from the system and that contributes to the to uh drop out or students not been successful in high school so you heard about the early response system i want to just give you a brief presentation about the other systems that we're working we're putting a lot of emphasis in the middle school like i say because that is an area where we need to make sure that those kids that are disengaged how do we engage them so we're exploring outdoor school to make it a week long the way it was because we know that these are the events in the students lives that it's a hook and it's something that they're looking forward we also looking at the seventh grade level how do we get students to experiential learning looking at maker space in other areas in which they get to show their talents in which they also engage our teachers and how they can work with students in different modalities and where students can show again what they're capable like you know they can do projects in 3d printers and things like that the other one that is also very important is how do we expose our kids to college because we know that this is an area that the early we do it the better and part of that also so in eighth grade we will have college visits uh we also want to work with our students and our families and uh director bill send me an email because we have a lot of students in oracle that are not taking that are not applying for some of the money that is available for college so how do we make sure that our pps students are applying for those so how do we engage the families and how do we get the students because knowing how to access those grants it's important and in terms of the city how do we create this continuum of awareness exploration and preparation the awareness that in the sixth seventh and eighth graders we want students to find out what they're interested what field are they're interested on and this is an area that you know when you ask our middle school students what are you interested they might not be able to tell you so how do we expose them to what is out there the different fields that is the awareness aspect the exploration aspect is what a student goes deeper and we expose that we take them to the different companies that are that are here like caterpillar or daimler or
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to the hospital so they can explore it in terms of their their interest and the preparation is where students they gonna be able to have a program study this is where they're really committed this is what i want to do this is where students can do job shadowing they can do internships this is where students can take dual credit classes this is where students can learn an apprenticeship or they can earn a credential that will help them later on whatever choice they decide if a career the other one that where we know it is important is to develop our athletics at the middle grades because that's another system that that makes a difference for our kids so as you can see these are the different systems that we're trying to build and how do we create this continuum so our goal is a hundred percent of our kids to be successful for post-secondary education lastly these are the areas that we're working currently working on in terms of increased graduation rates you heard about the earlier ordering system also how do we develop better data systems and you heard about how how we're gonna let parents know if the student is on track to graduation how do we engage the families early on and also how do we improve attendance and lastly alternative learning opportunities that can include creative recovery saturday school virtual scholars all those opportunities for the kids will have to make up for in areas that they're struggling in terms of college and career preparation this year we're planning to have a three to five year strategic plan and actually we're working with some of you to help us develop that plan how do we expand how do we expand accelerated and dual credit opportunities how to build on the existing career related learning cte plans and how do we standardize yearly guidance and curriculum plans and lastly in terms of aligning existing high school systems work we were able to create the office of college and career readiness and they're looking at college and career readiness strategic role map dual credit credit recovery career learning and we're working with bonnie hopson in how do we increase our avid schools and europe so that's the end of our presentation and we'll be more than happy to entertain any of your questions on high school or early learning systems or just that overall continue great thank you so much and thank you to my colleagues for your patience and accumulating questions and letting this wonderful team finish their presentation so now i know i'm sure there are questions comments who would like to begin maybe director knowles since usually you have to wait till the very end just just an offer it's just an offer actually while you guys are coming up with questions can we acknowledge the high school principals who are here with us in the audience and just ask you guys to wave because we've got a number of our high school principals thank you director martin oh you're ready to go i got one oh sorry okay director nils so um this is i think this is for sarah i'm just trying to get the completion rate straight in my head um so can you just i just don't i don't understand the difference between um what's there between a fifth year and a complete or completer rate is it or so um okay so you can complete in either four or five years just like you can graduate in either four or five years so um the a completer what's different about a completer versus a graph somebody who's just a graduate i'm going to start there um is that a completer um is somebody who is who either graduated and or they got their g they basically got their ged
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i mean that's so where it says here graduated on this slide it really is someone who didn't like graduate i i guess why does it say graduated is when i where i got confused um so it's the grand total of everyone who graduated plus had the ged right so a completer is always going to be a completion rate so it's going to be higher than the four-year cohort rate because it's going to include everyone who graduated plus everyone who got a ged so i guess that's what it says yeah okay so we had 1350 kids who graduated from all of our high schools and then we had 112 who got their geds yeah actually and that that um that number right there it should actually be 175 the guy ged that's that's just the white population that's on there i was just noticing that that's why i kind of scooted through that but yeah so we had about um we had in our cohort we had three thousand three hundred and eighteen students and a hundred and seventy-five of those got their ged okay all right thanks i just because it's a great i just got confused yeah that's easy and then i had a question about um the five-year issue that we've been talking about where students can actually graduate can graduate but stay on for another do we have anything in our current policies that prohibits students from doing that from staying for a fifth we don't we don't have anything currently in the policy and we are doing research on that right now currently and have a meeting coming up shortly and we'll be able to report back to you all do we know if we have information sorry do we know if we have very many students who are doing that we don't have any who we don't have currently okay in pps and something you have to proactively decide to do because once somebody's awarded a diploma you keep paying their tuition right and that's something that some of the smaller districts have done intentionally as a program and there's been concern if the larger districts did it right that you're breaking the state school fund and we're looking at either like going forward and doing it and encouraging the state to come up with some kind of an uh category of funding that addresses that in between right uh community college and uh but we don't have anything in our policies right now our students shouldn't do it now right okay right and it's being hailed as a really innovative wonderful thing to do which yes but it's also coming out of k-12 funding so i think it's it cuts yeah it cuts down the amount of money we all have for the for the 12 years or 13. so i'm just going to kind of work through this just a little bit um i do want to um say i was so happy to see our graduation rates go up again so thank you to everybody the principals all of our staff everybody that was such fantastic news um i know it's just going up a little bit each year but you know i've been on the board for six years and now it's like 12 points or 17. 17 points when i started wow so um slow and steady i guess but you know much as i would love to see it all jump up to a 100 percent right now the slow and steady we're getting there and i i just have to say thank you to everybody who's worked so hard on all of that and then my other question was around summer scholars you um mentioned that there was a the summer scholars program last year was free for some did when is that free because that was one of the concerns i had earlier a couple of weeks ago when we had a presentation and it indicated summer scholars we charged students for that and i was hoping that we could fix that so the june effort was very intentional for seniors in summer scholars and what we did was we offered the school so this was it was it was a coupling of funding right so schools were offered credit recovery dollars to provide credit recovery options specif providing a priority right so seniors that were two credits from graduating were the priority before august 31st if seniors were already because we did it in june some seniors and their families had already decided that they're going to do summer scholars so while we were if they paid for it we actually reimbursed them this past fall if they if they had a barrier counselors often know about that and so that money also went toward providing them with tuition so in addition to that we also provided transportation so bus tickets for summer scholars so that was all a part of that effort to eliminate barriers to either graduating or getting back on track okay and then i had a question about avid and where are we with avid in the middle schools i saw there's a grant possibility so i'm addressing i'm thinking um actually we're going to bring some yes we have an opportunity from two partners um one is to expand our avid at the high school level and it's something that we
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would get dollars from the partner to do a number of aspects of the training and build the libraries and um and we would need to put up some money so you're going to see this come forward in the budget ask that would where we need to pay for people's time to actually participate in the training then we have a second funding source that is interested in supporting us expanding avid in our middle school so we currently have avid and two of our middle schools and three of our high schools this would allow us to expand across all of our middle schools and all of our high schools if all of the principals are interested in doing it and we're in that process right now and that includes uh the elementary model it's gonna say six eight okay although i will say the the middle school one does all the middle schools and we would pilot one k-8 and then we're general fund funding the elementary general fund and or title so okay i'll stop there so that other people can get a turn other folks would like to go next director morton so i i don't know if i have any questions maybe some general comments um and i i have to say i i kind of struggled with the flow of tonight's presentation um with a summary of our graduation rates which i appreciate that that summary and the transition into uh some of the tools that that we're using currently early warning system some tracking tools and i think i i've been particularly around when i can see such such drastic differences and for your cohort graduation rates across particularly communities of color um i i wonder uh where our sort of our human contact is in this and uh and you know this the meaning that uh a you know and notice the progress towards graduation a dashboard these are really important tools for us to be able to track for us to be able to record hopefully for us to be able to create an early warning system that allows us to understand i mean i think i mentioned this last year when we talked about it or before the budget process that ninth grade is not an early warning system uh that's a pretty late warning system but uh but i really am left thinking gosh where what do we what do we do when we have you know four to five hundred kids per counselor um is the dashboard going to help us with those students probably not but we might be able to track them as they drop out the um i also you know was kind of struck at you know national research center for career and technical education says cte is a strong predictor for boys staying in high school another really strong indicator i think is authentic relationships with teachers and counselors and adults and peers in the classrooms and in the building and i would really love to hear how are we building relationships with our students because particularly across our students of color i know within the native community we have a generational um relationship that has been broken and one that i don't see specific efforts in uh repairing that relationship and that's what i'm that's what i'm really curious about if we're going if we're serious about increasing beyond an incremental bump uh to me uh you know a 44 graduation rate for native students versus a 47 graduation for native students i can be i can be thankful that it rose by three percent but less than half the kids in my community are graduating uh so i'm really interested in hearing how we uh how we take this information and how we take these tools and what do we use how do we use these to really uh supplement the personal relationship building work that's happening with our kids in our schools so that's that was kind of my really just unvarnished struggle with uh with this and perhaps this presentation isn't the presentation to talk about that but it's really something for future reference that i'm interested in hearing about so that wasn't the question that was just uh well just to let you know that when we think of other early learning systems really goes all the way to elementary
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school i mean to the primary grades right one of the things that we're proposing in this budget is to look at the counselor ratio for middle schools so we're going to come with some some ideas you know and and like i said this will be up for discussion in terms of the budget but that's why we're looking figure out ways in which we can engage our families early on how do we work with our cbo's with community-based organizations so they can help us reach our communities of color not only underrepresented but also in terms of the linguistical so director martin i so appreciate that reflection um i do so i do want to address a bit of what you spoke to the relationship piece is critical and i started my segment with acknowledgement to the collaboration that takes place and i do and i also agree with you i don't think it was captured uh in this presentation maybe in the way that we could have captured it but some of the pieces that are taking place are very relationship based so working with you know the office of equity and partnership dunya minou and sun school step up a plethora of other individuals like the new attendance coordinators outreach coordinators counselors a lot of the impact that's taken place has has very little we do monitor we do analyze we do track right but it has a lot more to do with the relationship of a charles mckenney who's at franklin as an outreach coordinator and the relationship of amber mcgill or the relationship of sylvia or the relationship of holly the counselor with those students and the relationship of those students with all of those individuals simultaneously so there is a lot taking place at the ground level that is unfortunately we i wasn't able i would say i wasn't able to capture very well because you know we're trying to provide an update and i think that there is opportunity to tell those stories as well because handing 656 students warmly to counselors and vps vice principals and other outreach coordinators is is not just here's a name it's i did a house visit i made phone calls i got to know the family you know the family is now meeting with their new vice principal their new principal or their new counselor we're sending we're making phone calls during the summer the high school staff are to the rising ninth graders so so there's a lot that does take place that is very relationship based because our communities the latino community as well has has a lot of stake in the ground and we owe our communities that access so so there is a lot of a lot taking place and i'm sorry that that wasn't captured here and i think there's opportunity to to do that and i i really appreciate you offering offering that clarity and i think that as we're moving closer sort of inching into budget time i think it's really important for us to as as a board and as executive staff who will be presenting a budget is that we're looking for that what is that human element what is that relationship relational um piece that that we can build upon and we can invest in because that's going to be the difference maker it's the tip of the spear for what we do as as a district and it makes all the difference in the world so i appreciate you bringing that night um yeah i appreciate it great thanks no thank you how about folks director belial well first i just want to say uh director martin that your unvarnished is better than my um polished but thank you for providing that frame because i found myself with a public testimony earlier today hearing about an attendance initiative that then lost its funding here we get high school graduation knowing that they're building connections with students and buildings and now it's being defunded and so i just wanted to highlight that i hope we're continuing that as we begin to look in our budget and when i hear director morton talk about early warning systems really one of the earliest warning systems that we have in our k-12 system is attendance in kindergarten i mean there's a clear pattern of
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students whose attendance is not very good in kindergarten as we've tracked them through our our schools and so i hope that we're really looking at that and investing because i do think that it involves that human relationship how do we transition students into school and so um we've been spending a lot of time in other parts of my life looking at attendance and what are practices that really make the difference and it really is about teachers engaging it's really about the school system engaging person to person so i was really glad to hear you talk about teachers how do we how do we free up or make available those opportunities to allow our educators reach out to the students to build those relationships before or after we have folks in our in our audience who are still holding up signs saying please hear us and it's about going to our community not expecting them to always come to us so i just want to really highlight that as we look into our as we look at our budget i also was surprised that i didn't hear much about teaching practices because once we get the students here right how are we making whatever we're doing yes cte yes but those have been in schools before and we've we've consistently had a disparate outcome so what are we doing does anybody can somebody talk to me about how are we evaluating our educators or how are we supporting our educators to make sure that what they're teaching is engaging them in a way that feels relevant and responsive i think what i could share and offer is that we have done a lot of cross-collaboration work between the departments and in the next two presentations you're going to hear some of those deeper dives of where we're going you know kind of in that human way right with kids and with teachers and what are some of the strategies that we're utilizing for our students of color our males of color pledge and with office of teaching and learning so i i think you're going to get some of that as we go further into the presentations this evening great thank you i also want to highlight something that i had mentioned uh maybe now a month or a month or two ago when i after i went to the courageous conversations conference about how for native american youth especially cultural identity actually not investing in more tutoring investing in more tutoring didn't actually get the outcomes we were hoping for but it was about cultural identity how do we provide them a sense of belonging and sense of positive self and history about what systems they're working in navigating so again as we look at budgets i'd be really curious about how do we invest to be intentional about that and then my last question is uh the is about the slide that talks about the late entrance the folks who come to us in 10th grade 11th grade 12th grade or never enroll i'm curious how that seems like a pretty sizable 20 of our cohort um i'm curious do we have any statistics on how that compares with other districts in our area or in the state you know i don't right off the top of my head but i think that would be something important to look at because i've heard other districts i know in our area talk about how if if we have them at ninth grade there's a really good chance and i'm just not sure what yet our numbers look like compared thanks great director roosevelt 53 what are we doing now that we weren't doing then anything or we can look at 53 next year and the next year i mean are we doing something at roosevelt to uh to turn around a 53 graduation rate that's specific to roosevelt that we're doing now that we weren't doing that yeah so i know that there's been an attendance initiative with coordinators some attendance coordinators that are specific for the roosevelt cluster and i'm hoping that you'll hear a little bit more about that in the presentation that's going to come after us as well we're also looking at some of the programming that's happening there so cte programming um are you know they've also adopted advanced scholars and also just you know core how are we moving through moving students through that um and you know looking at stem and steam uh george and roosevelt were recipients of a sizeable ode grant in order to implement some really specific strategies around there so so we're moving in the right direction with roosevelt and um charlene is spearheading for the cluster she she was previously the principal there and is now the senior director of the cluster and is also working so so we're doing an attendance initiative of some
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sort are we adding any people like we had cut the uh we had cut the social service coordinator out of there we putting her back or somebody back in that position that was i mean we had a big drop after she left are we putting somebody back in that position so i'm going to do a couple things in here just because roosevelt the point that we were when we were talking about people who enter after ninth grade roosevelt's cohort that we were just looking at 208 students 40 of them entered after ninth grade 28 of those are still with us this year in their fifth year um and as you saw like for roosevelt that was a situation that was really pronounced at roosevelt where you had a large number and part of our effort at roosevelt has been to bring kids back to roosevelt and we've been success so we've increased enrollment we've successfully brought kids back to roosevelt and some of them are coming back after ninth grade and i think some of our effort now is what are the kind of supports we need to build if they're coming back and they're not on track if they're coming we them they're coming back we're gonna go looking deeper now where did they come from and what are the kind of supports we need to be adding specifically that support them if they're coming back and entering because we know even a single transition in your high school time creates a a challenge for you in terms of being on track so that's one thing two one of the things we're doing in this budget cycle as you know is looking at our school-wide support table which is looking at people like counseling ratios social workers any other kind of supports that are that we're putting in buildings and that's one of the efforts of the district staffing team is taking a look at people like nora the kind of role that nora provided at roosevelt the attendance coordinators that you're seeing that we're doing in a cluster as opposed to school specific but it's adding other support um people and really looking at what are the ones that um that are ones that are going to be most high leverage in terms of kind of impacts we're looking for so those would be two things so we have attendance coordinators that are going to be new next year to roosevelt or they're new this year we've got some that are new this year yeah so what and what role do they play supporting kids and families and going to homes and attendance yeah they act as counselors so to speak so they're working alongside the counselors so it's a so if you think of it as the building the infrastructure they are part of the puzzle that wraps around the student and so the counselor as we know has 400 students on their caseload they can't they don't have the capacity to go to do home visits so the attendance right so the attendance coordinator and an outreach coordinator have they are specific for that so they're not just tracking attendance and making calls to the house but they're actually making home visits they're inviting the family in they are literally sometimes picking up the student or picking up the family for a visit um to the school so they provide they build capacity in a way that the counselors i know want to do but don't don't have the time to do that and so again it's about building an infrastructure where that where we're wrapping students around putting a puzzle together so that so that we build the capacity to wrap the student up with the right supports that are specific for them so not every student not every student will have an attendance coordinator but that student may may have an outreach coordinator so we're trying to figure out very intentionally how to personalize services for their needs and so that's the job of an attendance coordinator or an outreach coordinator so there's two people this year that they didn't have last year so currently so that's a question that that so currently there's an outreach coordinator under the hsgi grant so that coordinator has always been has been at roosevelt for the last roosevelt cluster for the last three and a half years and we added an attendance coordinator so that he added one person i'm not sure what the number is not either yeah we can find out exactly how many attendance coordinators for the roosevelt cluster i mean there are many schools let's keep going with your list but i can name it bellow says that there were three people at it this year and that may very well be true okay we so my function is i collaborate with the person who oversees the attendance coordinators with who's doing yaminu and we have a great collaborating relationship and and but i don't know exactly there were there were a number of folks hired um to help with this effort and so i'm not exactly sure how many are at the roosevelt but it it sounds three sounds right but i can't confirm so that could be followed between me and we keep going with your listeners
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and a couple were just tired like a minute ago like they literally were just added so yeah uh the cte will be online next year at roosevelt yes so we are currently working we've identified um five areas that roosevelt will be five pathways that roosevelt will be implementing implementing over the next few years so they will have starting with engineering for next year and then there are four other pathways that they will be adding as well so next year there's going to be five classes of cte that they didn't have this year no so so five pathways that roosevelt will be implementing over the next couple of years and when i say pathways uh state certified cte programs and pathways so they'll be starting with engineering and then we've identified the others that will be implemented and currently working on the timeline teacher certification and all of the components that come with that so what's our best guess how many new classes of cte will there be a roosevelt this coming year that weren't there this year right so part of that will depend on student numbers forecasting i can't give you an exact number but the opportunity will be presented for students that want to take that so we will make you know if we need to make five classes of that we'll make you know one pathway we will if we need to make three we will and go from there are you talking about classes or course courses pathways well i'm talking i'm saying courses and classes is the same thing they're not no no they're not well i'm saying them i'm using them that's the same in other words if i'm a kid at roosevelt high school next year i i get my i get what i can sign up for correct how many cte classes are on there that i can sign up for that are new right so we're working on that right now we will have a few entry-level classes in cte programs that won't maybe yet be state certified there's a whole process that we have to go through with that and we're working on that we have a few teachers in place there they've been philippe and sue brent and a few others have been working very hard on that so what i can tell you is that there will be cte courses offered at roosevelt next year and we will be developing the five certified pathways over the next few years and i think in a pretty short period of time we'll be able to give you a timeline and nail down the specifics how many care teams do they have at around the school another how many how many kids have care teams that are working within the sick team is correct let's take madison madison how many how many kids actually went through a care team process that we had set up in some way to work with a particular child at madison last year approximately i mean was it 190 or was it three yeah or was it none i don't know are you talking about care teams or sit teams i'm using i'm interchanging the two because they keep getting interchanged as as they keep getting interchanged in the discussions or are they different they're different no so we have the equity care teams and then we also reference the care teams that are that were used in hillsborough um so that's why so what do we have we have we what are we specifically calling at madison high school sit teams sit teams that's right so how many how many kids last year or this year at madison high school in the first half of the year approximately did our sit teams actually you want to use the word service service would be fine so we can get you the answer to that currently we are implementing through the early warning system in collaboration with the office of equity and partnership rick kirshman we are implementing sit teams in three of our clusters franklin jefferson and roosevelt madison well madison has a function of a sid team we are currently however in a more formal fashion implementing sid teams in those three clusters it's because of a grant that we received out of out of the state but are we implementing sit teams in madison next year without the grant i mean this seems to be like this seems to be such like a such a critical thing but but the answer to my first question is none we didn't have no that's not that's not the that's not the answer the answer is they have a form of a sit team and we are also formally doing them in three other clusters the the objective is to create sid teams throughout all of our clusters okay that's that's that's the ultimate goal have we created the
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first half of this year had we created any sit teams in those in those in any of our schools yes okay in madison are we creating any the first half of this year i will get you the answer to that okay next question and actually i'm just going to remind people when we use acronyms to say what they stand for so other people understand what we're talking about yeah okay so that's fine they were fine stands for student intervention team so how many kids do we if we take this i'm i was confused when we talked about the 750 hours on the section under the high school graduation initiative project that's the that's the grants that we've got that's yes that's the federal grant that's no that's the oh that's the grant that was awarded in 2010 it's a federal grant out of the united states department of education and the new rent is under it's an early warning system grant to implement an early warning system out of the state it was awarded this past year right and we like and it's wonderful that we're doing that by the way but what's the 760 hours over a year or after school participation what it takes to improve grades and attendance what's up 760 50 hours of the kid or 750 hours no of participation in of participation so we have an external evaluator that evaluated elements of the hsgi program or project grant and one of the findings is that 750 hours of participation by a student per year is what it takes to actually improve significantly attendance and and their academics 750 hours for participation in what in after school programming sunday school step up right campfire after school programming includes doesn't does that include athletics well and that's a great ques that is a great point so part of as we noted that's an intensive model it's 90 almost 94 days of participation for a student so part of the work in the early warning system is how do we honor that finding knowing that it's an intensive after-school model but perhaps use it as a tiered system and so we use things like maybe it's the the athletics the middle school pro athletics maybe it's coupled with some other sort of support service during the day so step up provides support services during the day as well not just after school so maybe it's some saturday school so we're trying to be creative about that 750 hours because we know that it's an intensive model and not all programs it's also expensive for programs like sun school or step-up to be able to hit that goal and so how do we do it in collaboration with them but using and leveraging the existing support pieces that can add up to that so that we're impacting students so just to note that we do have two more lengthy and important presentations tonight maybe but you might also maybe can highlight the survey pick these pick the questions that are most important to you and maybe some of them kind of stuff here i have the ones marcus stars that are the most fabulous okay uh the period by period i i think that i have teacher friends again would like to have me ask this question the period by period attendance we're going to put on the dashboard that means we're taking attendance every period including tardies and we're recording them some way they're doing it on the computer right to just pop it on there and it all comes in automatically right okay uh you said that we had a focus group that had counselors and administrators on it no teachers yeah so here's the deal with that our unfortunately our data dashboard right now is not accessible to teachers one of the and this is something we're working on it's a really top priority for us working with it on this the tool um has the personally identifiable information for 47 000 of our students literally their home phone number all the way to who they live with and we need a way to be able to limit which data various folks see and so it's a very very high priority for us to get the data dashboard into the hands of teachers but we have and actually our community partners for that matter like step up like some of these partners but we need to be able to ensure the privacy of that information and we're not able to do that yet so that and and that's um we're working on that literally right now um in hopes that we'll have something up next year so that's why we don't have that for teachers this was
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literally just a view for administrators and ours and like i said select school staff cte and middle school do we have any do we have any plans that are actually planned plans not just thinking about it down the line looking at it but actually are we in do we have anything in planning that we're looking at around cte and middle school yeah so for this year jeanne yorkovic who has led cte for quite some time has really been doing a lot of intensive research to see if we can get experiential learning opportunities for our youth our middle grade programs this year we're running into a few roadblocks with capacity issues so we're creating a you know kind of a menu of options that students would that would be able to present to our school students would be able to access so it might not look the same across every school for capacity but we're going to be working on that for future but we are working on that for this year so next year you might see some cte in some middle schools that we don't have now i think that our we'll see some opportunities this year and yes you will also see additional um ct opportunities equipment and some other components for next year the uh okay i'm moving down the line here thank you what do you have one of the things that people thought of was culturally relevant curriculum particularly history and so forth mr morton referenced that and do we have any plans for that kind of an improvement culturally relevant curriculum particularly around let's say history in the in elementary grades first eighth grade so i know the iot always looking on the adoption of the language arts in my right and so we have a team that is looking at what is out there and how it's uh how is addressing the cultural relevancy that we need our curriculum to have that's no okay last question maybe oh sure and i also want to make sure our student representative gets a chance to win sure um just maybe not necessarily something you have to answer tonight but how can we link um 8th grade reports of attendance especially using our system two high schools so the student comes in not like right there they're targeted rather than the month goes by and then the attendance pops up yeah so we um we actually have some dashboard reports that do allow our high school principals to view incoming information about the students that they serve actually currently in the dashboard i think the biggest challenges is making sure that people know that they exist and that they know how to navigate and get to them and so we're working on creating kind of a some more training around that thank you yep franklin's new system they were pretty upset a lot of teachers seem to be about the having difficulty with the relationships with the students with the new system it just you know and yeah we say that that's our critical the critical almost the critical thing for keeping kids in school is that relationship with the teachers and staff and so forth and i just thought i'd kind of reference that i don't know i hope we do some real good work around that next year frankly which new system are you talking about which system well where you put they moved they they moved teachers out of the classrooms during the day and so forth up into the offices and that type of stuff where i know they tried to make as much effort as they could to kind of make it work but the whole idea you know we kind of bought into that model of redesigning that school so i don't know going to do okay whatever i just was referencing it so we'll look into it thank you very much i have an answer about the coordinators we confirmed it is three okay thank you very much three tennis coordinators so thank you so much thank you thank you so thanks everybody for your good questions and discussion i'll just say um briefly for my part um i really appreciate the disaggregation not just by race but by gender and that you shine the light on that it's really important like everybody i want to just applaud the great work of the entire staff and all parts of the district and these gains that we're seeing closing the gaps
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obviously there's still unacceptable disparities as you said as we all know and that we have tons of more work to do but just to pause a moment and and thank you um so much for the gains that we are seeing um so with that i think we need to move on to our next um topic but thank you all very much thanks thanks also to all the principals for being here and all that you do so the next all right so the next agenda item is an update on talented and gifted superintendent smith would like to introduce this um yes melissa goff who's our assistant director of teaching i mean our assistant superintendent of teaching and learning will be presenting this report thank you and i'm i'm inviting uh mark feldman who is the chair of our talented and gifted student advisory council to join me uh along with johanna colgrove who also serves on tag um well hi and you just keep growing um so what i wanted to do and thank you for giving us this opportunity to talk a little bit about talented and gifted services i am going to try and pull up our presentation here perhaps perhaps i could have someone help me pull this up oh there oh there we go magic i don't have to touch anything um so thank you very much for the time to address the board tonight i am having technical difficulties slideshow up top all right to get us started what i would really like to do is start from the macro in this room and move down to the micro of the presentation so to begin if i could just ask if you are a parent or a family member or you yourself are a talented and gifted student could you please just raise your hand please so i thought it was important for for all of us to know that that talented and gifted students are well represented here tonight and well represented within our district as well i also thought it was important to have us focus on the fact that not only do we have very strong families who are advocating for talented and gifted education within our district we also have strong staff investment as well so i did want to introduce three staff members who are here with me tonight one is a new hire to pps i'm very proud that we've actually been able to hire a program director full-time for talented and gifted i've been in my i've worked here in pbs for five years and during my tenure we have not had a full-time person on talented and gifted so it's a very exciting addition i'd like to uh welcome andrew johnson who's seated in the front row here and since andrew just started last week i'm going to let him sit in the front just this time i just said you let him do the whole presentation and then i also wanted to uh introduce two of our teachers on special assignment who've been working to support teacher professional development and that is tesla schulte and and kathy daly so tonight what we will be sharing with you is a brief data review and policy review looking at the current school board policies that we have then we will have time for the talent and gifted parent advisory representatives to share specific information uh regarding recommendations that that that what we lovingly refer to as the tag act committee has arrived at and actually shared with this board in writing um i believe at least twice we've we've we've had that shared with you but actually having our families be able to speak to that and then we'll share a little bit about the alignment where we are aligned currently where our next steps are as well so we're beginning with background information and i thought it was important for us to stay rooted within the board policy so first with our racial educational equity policy stating that the district shall remedy the practices including assessment that lead to the over-representation of students of color in areas such as special education and discipline and the under-representation in programs such as talented and gift gifted and advanced
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placement and it's important for us to be looking at data as we are measuring our ability to be effective in meeting the demands of that policy so i'm going to explain this complicated graph so this graph is tag identification by race and on the far left for those uh in the who are seated behind me who may not be able to read we start with the ethnic groups moving from left to right asian black african american hispanic latino multiple races native american or alaskan native native hawaiian or other pacific islander and the final group is white so i want to explain what the what this graph means this reflects the over or under representation of students who have been identified as talented and gifted and looks at that by race so to read the graph as an example 71 of our talented and gifted students identify as white 56 of pps students identify as white so what you do is you take the first number subtract the second number and that gives you a result that indicates if it's a positive number an over representation and if it's a negative number an under representation within the graph so the visual here you can see reflects that particularly black and latino students are under represent underrepresented in our talented and gifted identification and by the same note our white students are over identified when you look at the the numbers so then the policy that we have existing around talented and gifted education and this is an area where we will concur there is there is room for improvement in the work that we're doing around policy and administrative directives the talented and gifted education policy we have states that the district is committed to an educational program that recognizes the unique value needs and talents of the individual student curriculum and instruction should be designed to meet the level and rate of learning of talent and gifted students and be an integral part of this commitment so when we're looking at the effectiveness of our educational program there are a few data points that i wanted to share with you that um that aligned with the priorities of uh the district and where the superintendent has us focusing right now so the first is looking at third grade reading meets or exceeds so when you look from left to right it's the last three time uh the last three years in time frame and we have between 97 99 of our talented and gifted students who are meeting or exceeding um their reading benchmarks and that's as indicated by the state assessment system then the next graph is taking a look at the same data that was shared with you in the former presentation but broken out more specifically to reflect talented and gifted specifics for the four-year cohort graduation rate the four-year cohort completion rate the five-year cohort grad rate and the five-year cohort completion rate and 2011 performances on the left and the most recent data that we have is to the right so you can see that our four-year cohort graduation rate for our talented gifted students is at 91 and our five-year cohort completion rate for our talented and gifted students stands at 97 percent so with that i'm going to hand the mic over for the next 15 minutes to our talent and gifted advisory council and then we'll come back and cover a few more things thank you uh good evening and i also want to thank you for this opportunity to address you tonight i also i want to let everybody else who may not have seen the recommendations know that they are available on the tag department website i also want to point out that the tag act has not had any high school members so the recommendations that we've produced mostly apply to elementary schools and about grades k-8 i'd like to start by thanking all the current and former tag members who reviewed our draft recommendations month after month could tag members i think we have most of them here raise their hand brenda ray scott our 2012 chair made really sure that the tagged parent survey happened terese bushnell joanna colgrove and
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others drove developing these recommendations diana ortiz-garcia is the chair of our equity committee which is ramping up this year shelley mcfarland and nicole ero hero zillardo co-chair our communications committee numerous parents came for a few meetings over the past few years to give us input and we greatly benefited from discussions with several teachers along the way as well i know that our members are very encouraged by the recent investment in hiring a full-time tag administrator with a strong tag background so thank you superintendent smith for letting that happen and to melissa for making that happen during the void we really appreciated uh tony hunter's honesty and responsiveness as our interim tag administrator we also appreciate melissa goff's openness to discussing our recommendations even though we know we don't see eye to eye on all of them i think we have two things that we want to persuade you of tonight that there are serious ongoing issues and that our recommendations are reasonable the former may come across somewhat negatively at times but i want to assure you that we do aspire to be a team oriented advisory to have a team oriented advisory relationship and we do want to constructively support our school district when we started putting together this presentation we thought it was really important to speak to what our values were in what we wanted and looking at what strong tag services meant but also that not just tagster students because clearly there's problems with identification but all students deserve challenging education we need equity where all kids get what they need without requiring heroic parental involvement it should not be dependent on parents to advocate for their kids to get them the challenges that they need and we want to simplify the system for the benefit of teachers the school district and mostly the students and the parents some of our considerations when we thought about what would be plausible realistic um we wanted to make it as budget neutral as possible i'm sorry i can't actually read with my classes on if we're getting students if students are being regularly assessed we should be using those assessments to place them appropriately not just know oh yeah they're smart then what um we have some great teachers in pps we need to make it easier for them to do their jobs not require heroic effort from them to differentiate for 30 students heroic effort is not a sustainable model for anyone it leads to burnout for both teachers and parents and the district we also don't want pull outs we don't think pullouts are education they're a special one-off it's like dessert it's not the meal and the other thing is there's some relevant oregon law pps policy driving this that students should be met at their rate and level they should be served well and we really want to see this happen i'm going to head back to mark okay yes if you want this is your slide oh okay i have to say it was really uh hard sitting here through the previous presentations hearing about the you know the stellar graduation rates of tag students and how well they're doing on the test scores knowing that i was going to have to come here and present this slide which basically says the district is failing tag students but the goals that that we're trying to see matt are those set by the board and they're also set by state lawmakers so i think the expectation of meeting them is is reasonable it's probably worth additional discussion at some point as to how these two situations can legitimately uh coexist at the same time but the results of our of the 2012 parent tag survey did show widespread dissatisfaction and therefore we think evidence that the goals are not being met of course there were differences among schools but the only real exception was the alternative education program access academy access's survey responses were reversed across the board let me read two of the issues that were highlighted in the survey 85 percent of district parents with an opinion disagreed and 58 of access parents agreed that the level of tag services their child receives is
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consistent and does not depend on who their teacher is 83 percent of district parents disagreed and 89 percent of access parents agreed that tag services have improved their children's academic achievement the results really scream out that district-wide tag students don't feel they're being supported well at least their parents don't we believe that access offers an important example what of what pps could become by adopting some of the practices there district wide one of the only things we can point out as a kind of a real kind of tag service is single subject acceleration this is when a student who has mastered the grade level curriculum goes on to a higher grade level to study that subject every day we believe that a small number of students do this every year although we can't get in a real count of how many but even ssa is not serving students well because documentation about how it works has historically been unavailable and recently has been on and off depending on who the tag administrator was parents who have tried it report the principles and others deny or strongly discourage it we also believe that its 99 test requirement can put a valuable practice out of reach of many students who can benefit lake oswego school district for example supports acceleration of students achieving 80 percent grade level a mastery of grade level material as an unintended consequence of written level not being met one unintended consequent may consequence may be that tag families disproportionately use the lottery and petition process to search for better instruction or something to replace it a second analysis concluded that only 11 of k8 lottery applications were tag identified but focus and immersion schools admit by lottery in kindergarten that's before the district-wide tag testing in second grade if instead you look at only middle school lottery applications after tag identification you see 22 percent are tagged compared with 18 tag students at all middle schools it's possible the difference is even greater for elementary schools where three times as many students are using the lottery than at middle schools also pointed out that above and beyond the lottery even more tag students use the petition process and then of course there's accesses wait list which is 100 tag students searching for services these patterns suggest that our recommendations could help retain tag students in neighborhood schools in fact since almost nothing we are suggesting depends on tag identification they could be a concrete way to strengthen academic programs in general as we understand it pps's solution for meeting rate and level is that all teachers should differentiate for all students in all subjects but our survey said that 63 disagreed that the child's teacher makes adjustments to instruction and assignments this was even though 55 percent agreed the classroom teacher understands the needs of gifted students that was kind of strange in person people in person parents kept telling us that despite good intentions and tag plans differentiation just wasn't working in math and often in reading the articles in the meeting materials show there was quite a debate among education educators about whether differentiation actually works both sides do seem to agree that differentiation is really hard we came to believe that the range of achievement levels in classrooms is just too wide to allow consistent differentiation we're not saying it can't work but we do believe that it needs to be combined with other practices that narrow or distribute the range of achievement levels while maintaining a heterogeneous classroom i urge you to read about the pitney branch elementary school in the altogether now article it tells how the principle there used differentiation successfully even while balancing academic growth and high diversity the secret they used additional practices some very similar to those that we're recommending we think that our recommendations describe a set of suitable tools that will give teachers a fighting chance to successfully differentiate so tag is well aware of the under identification of gifted students
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of color and generally at schools serving lower income communities i've personally gone through data on this school by school and it's pretty clear that something's wrong our recommendations request additional statistics related to this i hope a year from now our equity committee will have additional recommendations addressing these issues but some things are obvious now consider this comment from the survey giving additional homework fails to appreciate how excruciatingly hard the easy work seems to a tag student answering the same easy questions over and over feels like torture i can tell you from personal experience that a board student can quickly become a misbehaving student using rate and level to eliminate the boredom is the solution but it can be many referrals and many stressed parent meetings before it's clear that boredom is the cause or a cause single subject acceleration may look like a solution but confrontational meetings about this can go on for a year and parents must provide transportation to middle school in fifth grade i just can't imagine how a family without a stay-at-home parent could manage anywhere near this kind of heroic advocacy another issue is that when access stops growing in 2016 about one in five openings will be available before district-wide tag testing these slots will only be available to in the no parents who realize the need to ask for testing in kindergarten or can afford to have it done have outside testing done finally margaret delasi has examined year-to-year academic gains of tag students compared to district averages she's found that much she's found a much bigger difference for low-income hispanic and african-american students among the students that exceed than among low-scoring students we don't understand this well yet but we want to continue to track it i get to talk about the positive stuff so um some themes for the improvements that we looked at we wanted concrete effective tag services for all neighborhood schools my son goes to a neighborhood school he has for his entire career he's now in seventh grade this will be too late for him really but it still is very important we need to adopt some best practices we need to um if differentiation requires heroic effort on the part of the teacher or the part of parents it's not sustainable so we need something else to be very clear these recommendations are just a starting point they are not the final answer but hopefully they can make things better and reduce the amount of heroism required transparency is a big first start of making things better easing equity concerns if we have clear policies guiding what we do then it's available to everybody as opposed to just those parents who know the right person who knows the right person we need to keep looking for better methodology pps goals are good but the methods need more work i think um and we want to make differentiation possible by not insisting on the widest possible range in a classroom grouping kids solely by chronological age we long ago gave up on one room school rooms which would be the widest possible range they're not an effective way of educating our students so we want to make sure the classroom stay heterogeneous the research is good but there can be fewer levels we don't have to have the absolute widest span we need to find solutions that don't require tracking because everybody runs away from that notion and for many good reasons but we need to have answers that are driven by the student achievement not by parents advocating for them so here are our recommendations boiled down we want to place elementary and middle school students in the appropriate level math and reading classes but i'm going to go into more of these in more detail as we go we want to reform the screening for single subject acceleration this year as far as we can tell from district 30 students were evaluated one student was accelerated the amount of resources that took for 30 students doesn't really multiply well for 48 000 students in terms of figuring out there's got to be a better way to tell what students need to be accelerated and it shouldn't be so scary to accelerate a student by a single year if they take fourth grade math as a third grader and they don't do well they can take fourth grade math as a fourth grader and be fine it shouldn't be so scary um we need to use flexible grouping to narrow the range in classes
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there are a whole variety of models out there that are showing a lot of success we need to be looking at those and finding better ways to do what we do eliminate and repurpose the peg budget i'm not going to talk about too much the district is working on this already we should be providing centralized resources we're not talking about pullouts it hasn't been used effectively across the district it's not equitable there's got to be better ways to use that money and we shouldn't be pi fighting over pennies access academy i'm going to touch on this only briefly the access academy serves some tag students but last year there were 200 qualified students on the waitlist it should be able to be big enough to accept all qualified students or maybe a second school and the last recommendation we've talked a lot about already that we meet we need better data we need to understand if we accelerate students are they being successful is that working long term for them is it not working for them what can we what programs can we be using to help these kids and all kids be successful and not just reach their benchmarks but excel it's like it's great that high school students are meeting benchmarks tag students are meeting benchmarks but they should be way ahead and we don't even know how far they are ahead or whether we're getting them where they need to be okay so here is our proposed model of measures one through three these work together so it's important to sort of understand what we're doing here so i'm going to try and make it clear like wave at me if i'm not making sense um currently my understanding is that all students are evaluated at the beginning of the year to see where they are and then the teachers are supposed to use that in the classroom so we think that particularly in math and reading those evaluations should be used to place the kids appropriately in the right level of math and reading class so if they are in fourth grade and they can manage all of the fourth grade curriculum already in august and they've got it mastered they shouldn't have to do fourth grade math again they should get to move on we think an 80 score is reasonable i've had some people be like really 80 that seems really high or really low but if you think about what's a passing grade 80 is still well above passing for the end of a year assessment so it's not such an unreasonable number and we really think that that single if it's one grade acceleration that needs to stay in the school the school should be able to manage that without the district evaluation because otherwise it just becomes too much of a burden for the district and if it's a burden for the district then it's a burden for the school and it slows everything down and then beyond that for kids who test at 99 percentile then you do some more evaluation to see whether they're really tagged and you look at whether or not access is the right option for them so once you get that assessment particularly for math and reading you place them in the right classrooms so that's the start we're meeting their level of nerd learning okay all with me so students study at their level the benefits acceleration are well documented there is a lot of research out there sorry i lost my place there for a second and we want to emphasize really that this model is driven by student achievement not by parental advocacy it should be based on what the students are achieving in the classroom so that the students who are achieving regardless of gender regardless of skin color regardless of cultural background if they have this content mastered they should be moving on this slide was we had all sorts of problems um i had a slide of text that went with this and somehow electronic transport back and forth it disappeared into the vortex so this is an example of flexible ability grouping there are several different kinds of grouping that different schools are doing there are things called cluster grouping there's flexible ability grouping so i'm going to try and get the commonalities of that and the idea is that you get much more intentional about how you assign students into classrooms you don't go for the widest spread so for example in this model that we have here this could be used for a classroom grade level so we have two classes in third grade
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and we take that whole student population and the current model is that you would take that whole range of abilities and you would try to divide it as evenly as possible between those school those teachers so if you have four kids at the top of the range you can put two in each classroom and if you have four kids at the bottom you put two in each classroom so that every teacher has the maximum range the ability group classroom is still keeping that idea that you want a range but instead if you divided it into six buckets you take one teacher gets buckets one three and five and one gets two four and six and suddenly you have a classroom that's a little bit narrower it's a little bit more focused you have tag students who are grouped together so there's some synergy there you have students who are at the bottom who are grouped together who are not i'm not the only person who doesn't get this you have students in your second group who are now maybe the smartest people and it's not always the tag kids who are dominating it just there's some really good research out there there's an article that we included in the packet explaining this more in detail but it really serves the needs of the students of more focused teacher time it simplifies the life of the teacher i've been talking to a bunch of teachers about this and they're like that makes total sense it would make my life easier and if we make the teachers lives easier they can teach better and apol apologies for interrupting but just to point out we we are over time for this entire presentation so maybe we could okay i am actually almost done because i think that's yes that's my last slide so mark's gonna make the okay and this is this is the the last our request slide is the last slide we know that some of our recommendations clearly need to be reviewed carefully by pps educators but i think single subject acceleration is an exception in 2010 the tag administrator created an administrative directive discussing a framework for the for math that would be available to any qualified student the chief academic officer at the time carla randall signed the framework acceleration is already a de facto policy it's been used successfully odyssey for many years it was used access academy accelerates over 75 percent of its students one or more grades in math and students are already occasionally accelerated at neighborhood elementary and middle schools despite all this parents continue to have problems requesting just requesting an evaluation for this and we were recently told by the tag department this is not a policy so we would like to request that you adopt a policy it should be formalized it's happening it's de facto we're just asking for what everybody pretty much expects should already be there the tank survey the uh apparent tag parent survey clearly showed that something special was happening at access academy yet their growth will soon be limited much smaller than an average k8 we'd like to request that you ask drock to find a permanent location where access can expand to admit all qualified students finally we greatly desire the opportunity to further promote the grouping models that johanna has discussed with educators here at besc and in schools we look forward to continuing the conversation about implementing our recommendations thank you very much for your time all right so i want to acknowledge what mr feldman said about this being a really healthy advisory and advocacy relationship uh the tagac team has been deeply engaged and respectfully engaged and has already their advocacy has already led to some changes within the system and as he also said we still share we have some differences still in how to best serve our students and and we're continuing conversations in those areas so i did want to share a few things with you one is the system improvements that we've made this year so one i introduced mr johnson earlier who's our full-time tag program manager and our teachers on special assignment who are here tonight as well as was mentioned by johanna we do have we have uh centralized our talented and gifted budgets because it was brought to our attention that there was really concerning underspending at some points and what we've seen is
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that schools have been better accessing talented and gifted funds since we've centralized the dollars we've also shifted our professional development approach to address the pieces that you heard tonight which is every student every classroom needs to be meeting the needs of our talented and gifted students and in order to do that teachers need professional development around both creating a rigorous classroom and a relevant classroom so we've embedded that across all of the professional development that we provide from pps staff and then we also have been reviewing the identification system through our equity lens where we are in english language arts we currently have a literacy assessment committee that's taking a look at the current assessments that that we're using and the efficacy of those assessments in identifying student strengths and opportunities for improvement and also informing teachers as to appropriate next steps to support students we have a pk through 12 literacy adoption process currently underway the board partially funded that last year and those dollars are are still in process this year and then we also are looking at how we improve our literacy reporting for teacher use which was one of the pieces that you also heard our our students and families and teachers need to better understand where our students are performing in their literacy skills and we've been providing professional development specifically in flexible grouping in the area of mathematics we've been budgeting for the purchase of extension materials aligned to elementary standards and bridges curriculum so you will see that coming forth in the budget that will be for the 1516 school year we also have compacted math pathways to create multiple entry points for accelerated rate of learning at the middle school level i i would also say that we do have in place single subject acceleration and one of our shared areas of concern is lack of understanding within the system and with our families on how to access that component for next steps we want to review tag identification processes and acceleration board policies and the administrative directives through an equity lens one of the areas that we have room for improvement in is making sure that those things that we believe are most important in serving our talented and gifted students get reflected in our administrative directives we also are preparing to review and procure digital learning resources to support differences in rate and level of learning so that we can differentiate within the classroom for students and help relieve some of the tension that a large range of student learning paces creates for teachers who are still learning themselves how to differentiate within that model and then we're working with systems planning and performance around the current reporting of talented and gifted data and potential improvements and that those reports range from reports that go to families but also reports that would be residing on the school websites and so i know that we are over time tonight but we we are happy to together answer questions that you may have great thank you so much board members questions comments dr bill do you want to start this time i see just one one line on your notepad but i didn't write down one of the questions the first words if we've got three classrooms at school a in the fourth grade so do we have anything new that we're actually going to do with the teachers or with the situation or anything in the with those three teachers in those classrooms that is going to allow them or going to get them to do a better job around working with tagged children in their classes because one of the things that i see is you never talk to a teacher that wouldn't want to do that but you know but you can talk to 10 000 teachers who say i mean i'm exhausted i mean we've got them so pushed down that's very hard to do and i'm not making excuse i'm just saying are we addressing that in any way or what do we got going next year by my kids now and he was in the third grade didn't get much now his fourth grade what do i got in that fourth grade classes that he going to get now that he did or she so what i would say the biggest shift has been is in our professional development approach over
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the course of the last year so we have really shifted as a system to look at the national framework around providing rigor and relevance to the classroom and the rigor component really is helping teachers see what kinds of questions move move to a depth of complexity so that students are challenged within the classroom and that professional development we've embedded in whatever professional development we're offering so for our math professional development or science professional development that's embedded now in those pd pieces are you speaking of the common core we're going to use the can we talk about the new we've got professional development about increasing questioning but i i don't i don't know about anybody else out here but i if i had a tag student it'd be nice if he questioned i want to know what what curricular things that child would be getting more questioning from the teacher doing a better job doesn't really get it wouldn't really get it done for me i guess i mean it's like are we talking common core and that's supposed to help the tag situation it seems to me like maybe the con i don't know what you're saying melissa because it seems to me like the common core is making it harder to differentiate not easier because we're pushing that pushing that pushing that and it's creating some problems for tag kids as well as for kids who are struggling trying to learn to read and all those types of things so as you know the common core the adopted state standards in only literacy which is english language arts and mathematics so across the entire spectrum of courses and subjects that are taught to students we are expecting teachers to develop the skill set of being able to have varying levels of rigor within the classroom and we're training them around how to do that so the questioning i'm not referring to a questioning technique from the standards i'm talking about the approach yeah good luck with that thank you so can i add something really quickly i think um but one of our points is with all due respect that the research says that no matter how much professional development you give teachers on how to do differentiation it's still too hard when the range is that wide there's a limited teacher has a limited amount of prep time to prepare for each of the groups right you've got fewer groups with more kids in each group she can he or she can do a better job differentiating for each group right so director below first i want to say thank you for this presentation i for as long as i've been in pps i've heard of disappointment in tag services again we oftentimes attribute it to funding and there are still things we can be doing to be getting better services to students so i appreciate that and i do appreciate originally your recommendation was to re reapportion or repurpose school budgets for tag and i appreciate the centralization beginning to be systematic with that about how do we use that investment because i heard everything from you know we fund a field trip to some place to oh whoops there it went forgot we were supposed to spend it right um so i appreciate um your efforts um there are a couple of things and you don't need to answer these or we don't need a back and forth but i just offer these as food for thought because these were processes that went through my head and these will feel a little bit more not antagonistic but challenging to some of the ideas like when i hear things like if a student is accelerated to fourth grade math and then they don't succeed in fourth grade math they have fourth grade then when they're there to figure it out that's true unless the reason they didn't success and succeed in fourth grade math is that they missed a third grade skill set and they missed it because so now you have a fourth grade teacher who needs to go back and teach that fourth grade or third grade do you see what i mean that it sounds reasonable until we get into some of the details the second the second one that stuck out to me like that was the recommendation to assign students they assess at the beginning of the year assign students to the classes that means students come in and that's not really going to be their class then we do a big shuffle say in october to get them in the right classes which is a transition and if i begin to look at my equity lens about the instability that creates my guess is certain students will fare well with that system and students students certain students may not fare well with starting school in september and then entirely shifting or shifting classes once once they get assigned to their proper proper level so it could be just an easy switch to spring um but i believe my understanding when as my kids are going through teachers do sit around the table and they say okay where does this make sense and that brings me to the other point is that this is really focused on academics and the experience i've had and i've
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really appreciated about all the teachers that i've experienced is that they're multi they're balancing multiple factors it's not just academics but it's behavior it's about what social aspects it's about maturity it's about a number of different things so i just i caution us as we again just look at assessment and student achievement data and that goes along with that the reducing it to 80 again is if i look through with an equity lens my worry is that our current form of identifying students is disproportionate using that same identification and just dropping it down to 80 percent i bet will even perhaps increase our disproportionality if not um it it definitely won't accommodate for it i'll stop there in case somebody wants to reply so i don't just ramble on a short reply to that is that in our actual recommendation about doing this we say that there's really no tag identification necessary right the teacher they're evaluated at the beginning of the year students just like they would normally be and teachers can use that result they can use their judgment about whether the child works hard and didn't quite make it or whether they have other issues even though they've achieved you know 99 and they shouldn't so it just it creates a shifting at the beginning of the year whether it's tag or not yeah and that finally on that one is the talking about buckets one through six it kind of implies that that students are in this bucket for all all right because of the amount of time we had and i appreciate that i just say that we can see how complex it begets really yes they're moving for this class they're moving for that class and as the state's looking at instructional hours how do you do that effectively so i'm not dismissing the idea but um just wanted to acknowledge that it feels but i would like to answer your first point of worrying about this disruption of getting moved as opposed to the dissatisfaction boredom from kids who aren't moved sure that's an unacceptable option i'm just saying that i'm not sure that solution gets to it right so now to you miss goff um some questions and i know miss director atkins were low on time um i just you had brought up um you had brought up middle school compacted math and i've heard a lot of folks talk about there's new math in middle school common core or our adoption does not spiral like it used to so you can't go back and revisit or reteach as much as you could perhaps it does in some cases how are we addressing that and i don't think i understand middle school because i i really have heard parents say well my student can't learn like they've already mastered this level they want to they want to move on but we're told we only we can only teach this or that i'm told that they can only teach sixth grade concepts or eighth grade comp you know what i mean they can't move ahead to their next level yes so a great question and i actually asked the assistant director of instruction curriculum and assessment julie ryerson to be here specifically if we had a compact math question bingo bingo i have a kid doing it right now i mean you do it's for kids who learn at a faster level so a greater rate so they're doing seventh and eighth grade i'm not disagreeing with it i've just heard parents say that they've been instructed from staff that they can't move ahead to a seventh or an eighth grade level if they're at sixth grade or vice versa and i'm i'm wondering why is that perception in our staff and thank you for being here look i asked the wrong question to keep you here until 9 30. so um to begin with i think i'll start with the the sixth grade so we when we a couple years ago made this shift as we were transitioning with common core we took a look at what research was saying around heterogeneous math instruction and recommendations were to actually hold off to the end of seventh grade before making that decision and so we wrestled with that as a district and we also worked across the state with other regional tosas and with um specialists from ode to address that question of when is the best time to start doing that acceleration so we landed on in many districts and across the state landed on sixth grade let's keep that heterogeneous let's really work with our teachers around differentiation so that we're working on depth and complexity and building deep conceptual understanding because that is a critical point in terms of introducing variable introducing ratio
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you know ratio and proportional reasoning um and and we know that down the road how important those were going to be so the compacted math then came in for a seventh and eighth grade option so still wanting to provide an opportunity for students to accelerate in middle school and so students are then placed based on three data points into either a compacted math pathway or into math seven and math eight which as you know with common core in the transition almost 50 percent of what was in high school now sat in six well actually fourth grade through eighth grade but mostly in sixth seventh and eighth grade so students even in math seven and math 8 we're getting a much more rigorous math curriculum so our students in compacted that identify for compacted they actually complete so someone mentioned the spiraling of the curriculum because the common core does not spiral it's really critical for students to not skip standards which is what our past practice was in this district so students had severe gaps and what we saw and what our data told us is that students were not completing advanced math in their senior year even if they were accelerated to middle school 46 percent of them by 12th grade were not taking advanced math courses anymore which is concerning because we know when they don't take a math course in 12th grade what that means um so back to compacted so students in a compacted seventh and eighth grade course cover three full years of standards in two years so they cover all of the seventh grade standards all of the eighth grade standards all of the algebra standards they earn they can earn high school credit for algebra and then move on into high school which is where we offer our other opportunities for acceleration in mathematics so i'm going to ask that we thank you very much for that but i am asked that we move on do we have other questions or comments about this presentation that's all right mina did you have anything um i guess the only thing was looking at these um graphs that you guys had where you would split students into different classrooms just think about who would be in these different parts of the graphs and just looking at like equity in that way who exactly is represented in the middle graph and who's on the outside graphs and just yeah that's like my only concern i had looking at this okay um director buell we have i think we need to move on because speedchest tonight pardon speed chest tonight um no it's quarter to ten and i'd like to make sure that we have sufficient time to cover our third and final uh you had a follow-up question about that maybe you could do that by email i'd also like to have a make a comment okay but i'm i really really take umbrage to the fact that i have a question that i can't ask to a presentation that they bring forward on it's something like just ask it very quickly and then we can wrap up i'll just go ahead okay we've already made your initiative okay great great thank you great i just i just offered you if you wanted to ask it okay one kid was accelerated that was what you had said mark that's what we know of one kid in the whole school system yep in all of portland public schools new acceleration was what one new acceleration where they hadn't been accelerated in previous this last just last year this last year's current year and connect i would add to that that that must be single subject acceleration because the compacted math pathway is a form of acceleration okay absolutely yeah right what about was that was it literacy you were talking about reading i believe it was in math but i don't i don't know previous to the seventh acceleration from the seventh to the eighth grade there was only one that was okay thank you as far as we know just elementary but i think it's also an issue of nobody is keeping really records of this so i'm not sure how accurate even this one is we've been told they just don't know yeah i would actually like to speak to that and to second what mark said uh in following up on that data the teacher who had provided that information simply had had her hands on a single student and that was her reference point is the single student she had herself worked with when we look to see where can we find the data around single subject acceleration what we discovered is we are not housing that centrally and we need to start to start keeping that centrally so can you just send an email out to every principal and have them send back how many kids were accelerated this year in your mouth in your school and math i mean they'd take about what they'd have to walk down and ask somebody or ask oh they'd have to ask questions at the faculty meeting couldn't we just do it that way and find out there are many ways we can do that so i think i'm just going to wrap up and say that i would appreciate thank you very much for your presentation um i think i think we heard some of sort of the
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crosswalk melissa from what you're doing to the tag recommendations but i think for me it'd be helpful maybe in a written follow-up just to make sure we're what your response is to each one of them specifically so we can know where you are it sounds like you are doing some some maybe you have a different view of how to go about them so for me it would be helpful just to kind of have that follow-up i'd appreciate that very much um so that things like what is our poli when are we going to do that policy review so that we are clear across the district and we are coming back to you in the fall for a staff report around talented and gifted the focus for tonight was really to make sure that the tag act recommendations great uh so dr so she has one quick question and that has to do with because we're considering all this uh i'm assuming there are some budget ramifications and some of these suggestions and we're going to see something along that line the budget issues here well i think we've tried not to suggest anything that clearly uh costs you know that cost large huge amounts of money but you know we are asking that for example uh all schools are able to support one grade acceleration above their maximum grade and clearly that's that's not free but we're hoping that that could be done with the itinerant teachers or uh right you know additional help by teachers there i was i was looking more at the potential for a lot of professional development for our teachers to do some of this work yeah that's what i was looking for you'll see budget issues around the elsi budget uh issues coming forth with the super attendance great thank you very much thank you very much thank you thank you guys so i'm not calling a recess but i do suggest we have a seventh inning stretch so we can give this next topic it's due with a little more energy let's do a stand up and stretch yeah is that what it was called go noodle so we have one more important topic on our agenda tonight and that is an update on our equity implementation plan it's important but it's not an informational update all right so can the equity team come on down yeah that was just a quick stretch so with our revitalized blood flow here and energy we are very pleased to have as our final major topic tonight an update on our equity implementation plan um this topic is listed on the board's priority work plan for semi-annual updates to the board and this is our second update this year so we're really pleased to see you back superintendent smith would you like to introduce the item and can folks out in the hallway please keep your voices down so we can move on to the next topic thank you so much yes as uh as chair atkins just described this is our semi-annual update and lolenzo poe who is our chief equity and diversity officer and director of partnerships uh and janine fukuda who is assistant director of the same department will be presenting our report this evening thank you good evening uh lolenzo po chief equity and diversity officer and director partnerships board member superintendent smith let me do two things uh one and the spirits are helping all of us catch up on time and have a significant amount of time for questions and answers because that seems to be really critical and because part of our presentation that we have a teacher and we wanted to make sure that we had enough time for her to be a part of presentation and get out to get back home to get rest to be in class tomorrow so let me do this quickly and say that this is the update of our annual ratio equity plan it is the plan that contains the critical strategies the metrics and the accountability models by which we're looking at how we're in fact moving and progressing with uh implementation of your racial equity plan we also want to spend a few minutes tonight to talk about the key performance indicators those are the high level indicators and strategies that we have identified that will serve as that flash point for us to see from a large a high level as if we're moving toward the direction of closing the gap as we've described in it and lastly we want to bring before you
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the collaborative action research for equity group our cares model and allow them to talk to you about in some detail in the briefing about what we're doing and cares work because one of the things that i'm constantly asked is how are we moving the work into the classroom where is this work touching teachers and impacting their work and it is through the cares model so we did want to make sure we give them opportunity to brief you and you become familiar with that so with that let me turn it over to janine and let her walk you through our equity plan our key performance indicators and then we'll bring up our cares team thank you thanks good evening um janine assistant director in the office of equity and partnerships as superintendent smith mentioned in june 2011 we passed our racial educational equity policy this policy directs the superintendent to develop annual equity plans with clear accountability and metrics and to provide semi-annual updates to the board i'm going to briefly just go over the information in your packets before turning it over to my colleagues in your packet you will find two planned documents the first is the 2013-2014 annual equity plan year and progress report which summarizes some of the district's key equity goals for the year and our progress towards those goals also in your packet is the 2014-2015 that's this school year annual equity plan which documents key equity work that's currently underway you will notice that this year's equity plan includes a focus on the superintendent's three priorities so we are in the process of integrating the superintendent's three priority work along with our male of color pledge work into the equity plan and so in future iterations you'll start to see that integration more clearly also in your packets are equity key performance indicators or kpis while our milestones are the ultimate measure of success of our equity work the kpis measure system level progress towards closing racial opportunity gaps which contribute to disparities in student achievement and thank you melissa goffer earlier in the evening sort of walking us through what those how those kpis are calculated so you'll see that the kpis are generally trending in a positive direction i just wanted to point out some key highlights the october 2014 special education data is still being compiled however preliminarily preliminary results indicate that the overall number of black students who qualify for special education services dropped from 1043 to 975 this year black students who qualify under emotional disturbance decreased in number from 120 to 111 and black students who qualify under intellectual disability decreased in number from 56 to 48. with our apib dual credit kpi in 2013-14 year-over-year there was a 40 increase in the number of black students enrolled in ap ib or dual credit courses where 98 more black students were enrolled what percentage i'm sorry 40 4-0 40 increase year over year sorry i don't have slides but i can keep going you're doing great for hispanic latino students there was a 17 increase with 71 more students enrolled and for our native american alaskan native students there was an increase of 13 with four more students enrolled this was due to intentional outreach efforts and an expansion of the academic scholars program at franklin to roosevelt our teacher diversity numbers continue to improve as well for the 2014-15 school year of the 501 new teachers hired 21 were teachers of color over the past five years the percentage of teachers of color in the district has increased from 13 to 18 so we will not be walking through all of the documents that are in your packet tonight the equity work has become embedded in all the work that we do and so a lot of the work in the plan should be familiar to you and you'll be seeing more of it in all of the presentations that come forward for example tonight you heard about the tag work and the high school graduation work next week we'll be doing a much deeper dive on the exclusionary discipline work with that quick overview i'm going to hand this over to our colleagues who are going to now talk about the care work and we'll take questions at the end great just just a quick point of clarification the data are in the board packet that's been posted online so folks want to see the data you've been referencing it's online yes in the packet for tonight's meeting great thank you and it should there should be paper classes up there as well sorry for the interruption
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good evening good evening directors good evening good evening my name is regina zackrider and i'm program director for equity care and my name is cynthia mccloud and i'm the assistant director of equity professional development and tonight we're going to talk about care which is the instructional component of the district's equity work and care stands for collaborative action research for equity and before we begin our presentation what we'd like to do is introduce misty koenig who is a teacher from madison high school and she's going to talk about how the care process has impacted her work as a teacher and for students of color in her classroom thank you hi hi my name is misty koenig and i work at madison high school so this is my fifth year of teaching at madison high school and my second year being a member of the care team in that time i have been at madison i've taken part in multiple forms of professional development and i believe that care has been the most important one in tackling the issues of closing the achievement gap with students of color i can honestly say that care has opened my eyes when it comes to my daily lesson plans i look at my classes and my students specifically my students of color with a very different lens most of the time lesson planning involves thinking strictly about content and very rarely do we think about a student's perspective when we plan and through my work with care i've learned to create lessons for my students instead of fitting my students into the lessons that i've already created and what i've discovered is that when i focus on one or two students of color and their specific needs the end result benefits the entire class had it not been for my work through this program i never would have looked at creating lessons through this specific lens of diversity care has also given me the opportunity to collaborate with a small group of colleagues in regards to students of color and their learning and within that group we tackle issues that all of us have but don't know how to necessarily deal with we focus on what we as teachers need to change in order to really help our students of color instead of thinking about how our students need to change to fit into our model that we already have while this has been extremely challenging at times it has been something that has altered my way of thinking as an educator too often we focus on the external issues within our classrooms rather than turning the mirror inward through care i've been challenged to do this often i am challenged to look at myself to look at my planning to look at all things that i might have dismissed before all with the hopes of benefiting the students within my classroom additionally i'm able to observe and be observed by other teachers and get intentional feedback on engaging and interacting with students of color without care i know i wouldn't be making changes to better my practice like i am now simply because i wouldn't have the voices and the eyes in my classroom pushing me to do so um which is such a rare commodity in our profession right now i'm not sure what other districts have teachers observing each other for the sole purpose of equity and i feel privileged to be uh given that opportunity to do so and finally if we're i think if we're ever going to be able to manage this issue of equity within our schools we have to be intentional with our actions we have to back up our desire to tackle this topic with our solid with solid professional development we can't just simply say we want to change and not implement anything that's going to promote that change and care is an integral part of closing the achievement gap and i'm honored to be a part of it and i only hope i can continue to grow as a professional by being pushed in ways that wouldn't have happened had it not been for this program thank you so much thank you do you have it do you have any questions at this time okay board members for misti wants to go home yeah misty has to go to school earlier what subject what subject did you say i teach math geometry specifically yeah well thank you so great to have you here your comments so director bellow first i just want to say if you haven't seen the madison video go check it out go mad because it's awesome and thank you for being here and i appreciate one of my colleagues often categorizes teachers into three buckets and i won't go into those three buckets but
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they're quite commonly in many professions there are certain people who are really interested in and have the capacity to take critical feedback and improve their profession and there are other folks who take it as a criticism and they shy away from that so can you talk about especially in a profession that has traditionally been the expert in the room can you talk a little bit about what you're doing at madison to to open up to because it's scary having somebody else come in and give you critical feedback saying you're not doing this or you are doing this you might be more receptive to it but i'm sure that we have some folks who maybe aren't as receptive or open to that so can you talk about one how do you set that tone and then two and i don't know if it's you crew or if it's through our other other academic staff how do we follow up with with teachers who aren't making the progress that we need them to to connect with all their students sure first i think that the most important thing is getting teachers who are willing and wanting to be a part of this work to be a part of it and not pushing everyone to be a part of it when you're not ready because then you get that defensive attitude if you will um and it's it's very hard to take that that criticism and that critique so one you have to be willing i think two you have to be a part of a program that's really going to wrap around you and work with you and i think that's one of the wonderful things about care and then the professional development that comes with it trainings that we you know are a part of i went to new orleans with a training that they encouraged me to go to with beyond diversity and um and it was fantastic and i came back just supercharged and then when i talked about it and we were allowed to bring two more people on they were you know the people were like oh my gosh i want to be a part of that because it's um it exudes out of you when when you have the professional development that is wonderful and i mean there are plenty of stories we can give you about professional development that is not wonderful so um when you're a part of a program that is so dedicated and so excited about it it's easy to also become excited and then because the group is so small to start you feel very comfortable and willing to accept the critique and it's a very vulnerable situation to be in but because it's so small and because everybody is with you wanting to be there it just seems like the place to be and you're willing to accept it because you want to and you know it's important rather than being forced into it did that answer your question you did okay and maybe when the other folks answer the second part of that question they can talk about we don't always have the luxury to say well if you want to connect with all your kids go ahead and if you don't well you're just not ready like we have to move our system to connect with all kids so how do we do how do we move that right that actually is is a part of our presentation where we're going to talk about the protocols that we use around the care work so okay we'll just tuck that in there thank you so much um it's wonderful to be here this you need to not maybe not this late but it is wonderful we're hanging in there too to talk about uh something that has uh brought some as misty was talking about some wonderful progress to our schools let's see let's take a look the first slide you see is is an overall structure for that courageous conversations about race that is in it that is a part of each of our schools the equity team forms the foundation for both the care and the past work the equity team all the schools now have equity teams and that's where the professional development around deepening their racial consciousness occurs the care team and care is the classroom part of this work and so the there's the professional growth part and the personal growth part but then the next step moves it into the classroom which is what care does and then the final of those three parts of the courageous conversations about race has to do with past which is partnerships for academically successful students and that's the parent piece of it so i'd like to talk a little bit more about the care process and what it's about so care is a piece of our equity transformation process that we have here at the district so if you'll see the words up there in bold they really encompass the cycle of
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inquiry and that's a collaborative classroom level action equity in action so first off we have discover and what discovering looks like is teachers ask themselves how am i connecting to my students of color through what i teach and how i teach part of that process is asking teachers to identify a focal student of color and really getting to know that student and we call that above and below the line information so above the line information would be information that you would get from synergy from the student information system from a file below the line information would be that information that you might receive from talking to the student talking from family members getting to know who that student is where they come from what their culture looks like their language etc so that's really important to get you know important piece of getting to know who your student is then we look at documenting developing and delivering and what this looks like is is really what misty talked about and that is planning and delivering a lesson with your focal student in mind the last piece is disseminating and disseminating is about the all-important observation process and i'm going to talk more about that later where students where teachers receive feedback and then they consider and integrate that feedback into the next lesson that they'll teach with their focal student in mind and then the cycle begins again okay now i'd like to talk about the four r's which is a cornerstone of the care work so the first are rigor and rigor is really having high expectations for all of your students realness realness is about knowing who you are what your culture is and knowing about your culture and your race and when i say knowing who you are and knowing who you are as a teacher and knowing who you are and what you bring to the classroom in terms of your culture and race it's important that teachers bring their real selves to the classroom in order for the classroom to be welcoming and comfortable for students of color to bring their real selves relevance asking yourself is the content of what i'm teaching and the style of my instruction meaningful and engaging for my students of color so i'll give you an example a traditional classroom where students are sitting quietly everyone's well behaved and they're raising their hands when they have a question that works for some of our students for us some for some of our students a model where there may be some call and response where there are opportunities for shout outs that can also be an engaged well-behaved classroom so it's really looking at is the content and how i'm teaching meeting the needs of my students all of my students and then we look at relationship and relationship is about authentic connections between teachers and students so knowing what our students need for and relationships look different for different students it may be a hello when a student walks into your classroom it may be intentionally checking in with the student once they've sat down at their desk just checking in how's your morning been do you have the supplies that you need you're ready to go so it's all about knowing what that student need as needs and meeting them where they're at so so what does care look like in our schools currently well as you can see we have our schools are in a variety of places in 2015-16 we will have 35 schools that will implement care school-wide and then in the year 2016-17 all our schools will implement or be in the process of implementing care school-wide and the the staggering occurs because our schools entered the courageous conversations about race in a staggered manner and so that's that's why that is happening one of the most important parts of the care work of course is the teacher and the principal's selection of teachers for the for beginning the care work in their school is integral to its success principals select teacher leaders who are open to learning about culturally relevant teaching they select teachers who are reflective
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practitioners and they also select teachers that are cross-section of the teachers in their building there are three major themes in the care work the first theme or purpose for the seminar work that our teachers do is to build cultural and racial proficiency a second theme in our professional development for our care teachers is how to use action research to improve their instruction instructional practice and the third theme that is in our care seminar professional development work is that it focuses on culturally relevant and responsive instruction so i'd like to talk a little bit about the professional development model so teachers will receive care teachers will receive training from developed and facilitated by our team of six equity ptosis or teachers on special assignment so what the care team looks like is there are two to four teachers and a building administrator with the goal of that care team bringing the care work school-wide i also want to emphasize the importance of administrator involvement and having been a care teacher myself i know how important it is to have the support of my administrator i can be enthusiastic i can engage my students of color and it will be meaningful to my work into my students work with administrator support that's really meaningful in terms of bringing the work school wide so what we have is we have four seminar modules over two years and the seminars are day-long seminars and after we have our first seminar then we'll do a half day visit or we'll conduct a half day visit with the care team and during that half day visit the ptosis and the care teams will discuss what was discussed during the seminar for clarification and for anchoring their learning then they will have a meeting where they will have site observations and classroom observations and i'll talk about more about that in the next slide so now we're looking at the protocol for the care observation and this is so important to the process because as misty said earlier it's about being vulnerable it's about examining your practice and it's about going deeper in the racial equity work and in your practice so the first thing we do is we have pre-observation and the pre-observation during that time we ground ourselves using the protocols and really talk about how we are going to be fully present as we know it's it's not always easy as a teacher to be fully present because you have 50 things going on at once so it's this is a really important step in order for teachers to feel present and ready to go with observation process then the teachers will share information about their focal students and what they would like what questions they have about their lesson or what engagement looks like for their focal student and any wonderings that they have at that point the team then visits each teacher's classroom who's going to be observed for 20 minutes so that teacher teaches a lesson their peers observe and during that time they take notes thinking about you know what they're seeing and what they're seeing and what it makes them wonder and they spend about 20 minutes in each classroom then we have the all-important post observation debrief once again grounding is so important and really honoring the fact that teachers are in a place and they need to be in a place of disequilibrium and what that what that looks like is that teachers are thinking about reflecting on and questioning their instructional practices during that time the teacher who's been observed will talk about how the lesson went regarding their focal student
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after they've talked about the lesson then the observe the teachers who are observing will share their feedback in terms of what they saw and what it made them wonder and this is the time when they have the opportunity to affirm and challenge and then after that there's that there's a process of dialogue and that is the teacher who has been observed really shares what resonated most with them from the feedback that they received and the final slide um shows our team the tosa team and the three names that have an asterisk behind them are new members to our team and the additional of the addition of the uh the addition of the staff for this year made it possible for us to move the care work district wide and so that was that was a real that was a huge uh move forward for both the work in the district as well as for our team and then of course regina also was new to our team and her focus now is totally on the care work so that i can do both i can be a part of that but i can also work with our our principals and in their buildings so that ends our presentation thank you thank you thank you so much for that deep dive into this piece as well as for the previous overall update so board members questions or comments either about the care piece or the overall equity implementation update i'm going to look at this direction i just had a curtain i have a couple of questions um uh first of all i i guess for is it is it misty is that right whoops don't escape you're the star oh you should've left when you had the chance um it's always best to hear from the teachers so um tell me about the focus student how do you pick that focused student and is it just one student you have or um and you ask the student if you can use them as a focus or just how does that all work so generally um no i do not ask them um they love to be the focal student because they're the focal you know focus of all the time so they know they're the focal student um sometimes like generally i like last year it was our first year at care or being a member of care and so um i did not tell my focal students that they were focal students um i had a lot of conversations with them but they didn't really no no just i just let that go but this year i have said hey you're my focal student and of course the world revolves around them at 15. so they love that but the way i pick them is generally they they're students of color and they're students that i feel need some more attention or i feel i'm not serving them well and so if i'm not serving them well something is missing and so i need to figure out what i need to do to better serve them so it's not necessarily oh i have this behavior child it's i'm not connecting well with this student or i'm not doing everything that i need to do to help them succeed and so that's those one or two students are going to be my focal students and so you've been in this program for two years correct so what what's the difference you're seeing not only in yourself you kind of talked a little bit about that but what kind of a difference is it making in your classroom with your students the difference is phenomenal um i it's hard for me to even describe how impactful it's been um because it's it's so subtle uh yet so huge and so for me i feel like because i'm um specifically focusing on certain students and creating lessons as much as i can around them they don't even realize that they're engaging more but then they walk out and there and like today for instance uh one of my students who's my focal student walked out and he was saying as he walked out man that was a lesson just for me and i was like yes he was yes it was but he doesn't you know he didn't necessarily know that i'm thinking at night like how can i get him to you know to be engaged what does he need um so it's little things like that that they just walk out and you know man i totally had you all day today and or for that 94 minutes of time and that was wonderful um and and the academic you know like it shows in their assessments as well so when i have them
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in class and i'm doing what i need to do for them um it shows up when when i give them any sort of assessment um and and i think what's most important is that it just doesn't show up for my students for my focal students it shows up across the board because those little things that i'm doing for you know those two students are what 18 other students need as well it's just i'm just highlighting those those two that i'm focusing on thank you okay anything else director morton thank you um and thank you for the presentation and everything i think the the information that we were provided is is pretty comprehensive i think it's the equity work across the district is probably some of the uh if not the most important work that we can be doing right now particularly given again the indicators like graduation rates achievement gaps things like that that we see that that continue to be in need of work uh i think the the the care care in schools is is also really important um i think what's also important in addition to that is improving our process and increasing our hiring for teachers of color we have the minority teacher act which although the legislature went past passing this 10 plus years ago didn't give it any teeth actually i created some targets that i think our district needs to be needs to be moving towards at the very least we should be we should have a teacher workforce and an administrative work administrative workforce that reflects the students in our classrooms so i know that's not necessarily all of your jobs but it is certainly all of our responsibility and and finding and bringing successful teachers of color and administrators of color into our district um so a couple of just real quick things on top of that one is the uh the selection criteria and um the first three items i can't imagine a teacher of quality that wouldn't fit any of these so and to reiterate it's open to an interest in equity anti-racism work in the school open to learning how to use culturally relevant teaching practices to improve achievement of students of color and willing to share what they have learned with their colleagues so i'm interested because i'm certain once these are asked every teacher in our building is raising their hand saying i fit this and i want to i want to be a part of this how do we how do we choose them across schools specifically or are there are there other i would imagine there are other criteria i would hope there are actually there are other criteria but we just summarized it to these main four okay so i don't know i mean if you if you had other i'd be willing to hear it if you'd if if i had other criteria criteria right uh for example um uh teachers who have had show or who have shown some success with students of color might be a teacher that would be interested in becoming being a part of the care team and the care team is just the very beginning of the work and that starts with the two or four teachers that come to the initial training but then those teachers the following year then work with other teachers at their grade level in their school to to broaden that scope so while they may start out with just the two they very quickly move out of that two and that two becomes four or six or 10. okay so the uh you laid out some of the professional development model the seminars i'm curious about who is who or the the content experts in these seminars who's presenting them the content experts would be our six equity caretosas okay okay they develop and facilitate so they have complete ownership and they are the experts okay and they are the peers of our teachers i think that's very important to note so the um and i guess experts based on what criteria because i can i can look at so whatever is our national award winner i can look at our graduation rates particularly across our communities of color and say no one should be calling themselves an expert i think part of what it is matt is also that you have within the context of cares and around courageous conversation
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that expertise doesn't preclude the availability to bring other expertise into our schools this is a part of that strategy but it's not the whole of the strategy who's in the school who supports it working our community partners about doing curriculum that brings it into the classroom so it is multifaceted so this is one slice of it because until unless we close gaps all across this country i submit no one's really an expert i agree with you but how do you keep moving how you look at it and bring all the resources that we can is really how we believe we are okay close together i appreciate that and and when i um use the word expert i'm an expert about the care process and i think i use the vertex when they're disseminating the information about care and training teachers about care yeah thank you for the clarification and i sure and i think i um i ask these questions not because i i feel like this is a something that should not be happening but i think we need to continue to uh question our assumptions about the quality of education that we're providing absolutely not for any other reason then again when we see the evidence the evidence demonstrates something very different than maybe what we think is happening so um and i think that continuous improvement asking those questions is a part of that continuous improvement so i appreciate those questions continuing to be asked i do want to add one thing you brought up the issue of the minority teachers act and not to preempt when we come back to talk about affirmative action and those kind of things but as we look preliminary at our data the state has set a 10 goal for 2015 we have exceeded that goal so just to give you a preemption that we've exceeded it nowhere close to where we're going to be and you know hr and all of us are working very hard to identify recruit grow our workforce but we are on a a project treaty that is rather relatively encouraging at this moment and i appreciate you bringing that up and hopefully we're setting a we're setting an expectation on this board that that's that's the trajectory that we want other folks director so my understanding is what we're trying to do is to teach our teachers to do a better job with all their children regardless of their backgrounds is that a summary of what we're trying to do here the care that's that's the that's what specifically you're that we're trying to do this is which is great which is it's nice for getting to that i really appreciate it uh i the uh there's a couple other things that and it has not really to do with this it has to do with the whole equity program because i think we it's great that we're teaching our teachers how to deal with children in their class or how to teach better with all their children but we're we're awful short in some areas it seems to me that we shouldn't be short in reading teachers to teach children to read librarians to get them going uh counselors to work with them i would think that would be should be part of our equity plan and i don't see it in these equity plan things at all i don't see that and for me that's a major part of our equity plan i just like to make that it should be should be teaching children to read we're really talking about equitable education to a huge degree for all children regardless of where they come from or where they come from period their different backgrounds or approaches or whatever that is whatever that represents what we're trying to do is get an educational equity and for us to do that i think we've got to start sticking some resources into the classrooms some places that we're not and one is teaching everybody to read the second thing is i have not seen yet and i don't i haven't been investigating what we're really doing around the curriculum particularly in the lower grades so we have culturally relevant curriculum particularly in history and those and similar type subjects and i haven't seen that i think if we're going to really say okay we're doing an equity program those are two things that we really need to look at and begin work on both those things in my opinion uh the third the third question i had is more of a personal one people who know me would know there's a lot of stuff out there about how racist the common core is that it's really not a system
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that is without bias are we looking at that and saying hmm i wonder how we can if we're going to do all this common core stuff are we going to look at the bias have we looked at that i mean is anybody in our district saying oh maybe this is i mean what is it how can we make adjustments so we don't get caught up in those particular problems concerning the aspect testing the testing the common core there's a lot of i mean there's two sides to that issue i know there's two sides to it because i read about it all the time one side says oh no this is great the other side says no this is horribly inequitable and and creates this horrible bias around him and we're coming down on the side that says no this is going to be good otherwise we might not be doing it without the balancing of it which we're not doing it doesn't appear to me that we're not balancing it but i think if we're going to really talk about equity too we may want to look at what we're now pushing out for every student in our entire school system and make sure that that doesn't have these built-in biases that we're not making things worse by doing that and and guard and we need to be guarding against that you don't have to answer that i just wanted to make those statements because i think they're they really ring true to me so there you go okay any questions i'm gonna come back misty i just want to say thank you for being here i know that you're gonna be up early tomorrow and you're gonna have um kids and i i just want to say thank you for being willing to show that learning is lifelong for being one of those people that understands that the results that are happening in the classroom are a direct result of the adult in front of the classroom not a fault of the students that show up in the classroom so thank you for that and i want to say thank you to the equity team the folks that are doing the work cynthia i'm going to call a special shout out to you i have consistently heard throughout the district how much people have felt supported by you and how much they really appreciate your working with them to deal with this i'm going to return back to my original question about what are the things when we have teachers principals who are not ready to do this work how do we help them find that a different place how do we provide them the support or what tools do we have to say thank you but your services are no longer needed because as director morton points out we're moving in the right direction but these are unacceptable outcomes and we don't have the time to say well if you want that'd be great let me do this again because often in my role i have to bring us back to a point that part of my office's job is to coordinate work with discuss provide professional development to the district a lot of the specific issues around curriculum and management of personnel and teachers are not a part of our plan our domain which is why when janine said part of what you will see in here will come to you from other presentations we will highlight that we will show it to you but a lot of that comes in those presentations now we may have an opinion but part of that is to share with the superintendent and the senior team about what we think and how we see that happening yes they are critically important but unfortunately unfortunately depending on how you sit on it that is not part of our primary job so i just offer that as a cameo i i appreciate that and i i wasn't asking you necessarily or any one of you specifically but just to drive the point home that unless we have levers and with um assistant superintendent lopez in the room i just want to highlight that unless we have levers to make that happen this is a lot of feel good talk yes absolutely actually if i could just offer a couple of things one of the very important parts of our work is to work very closely with and this is part of my job this worked very closely with um the with antonio and with the senior senior directors to make sure that they are are very clear on what what their schools and what the principles in their schools are doing and also that we're there to support both the principal and the senior directors so we do work i work very closely with them so that's one of the ways that we can have some influence or some um some sway in that whole process of of performance to be sure that our principles are very clear on what support is there for them and what is being what is expected of of them as far as being equity leaders in their school and then for this the senior directors to know that we're also our office is
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there to support the schools and the administrators and the teachers in any way that we can thank you one last comment i doubt very much if we have teachers out there who are principals even who are not ready for this work i think the way we do some of the mistakes we made along created some of the problem that we underwent and it got misaligned with some other idea of what was causing that but that's here now there this program goes out and says to teachers look here's some things we can use to help you with all the children in your classroom i don't think you'll have anywhere near the back push that you had for the a lot of the other work that and the way that we went about it and i and i think one of the problems that we have is by pointing those fingers and saying we have these people that are not ready for this work and we should be firing them that's not the approach that i think makes sense the approach that makes sense is we know you're all ready for this work and we're going to bring you together and we're going to and give you this work and it's going to be so good you're going to embrace it and i think there's a lot of difference between how you approach that and i think one one of the problems that we had on our early approach to some of this work was that we were pointing the fingers you are the bad guy you are the person you and all that finger finger-pointing and a lot of people responding negatively who taught in our buildings for years and years and years responded negatively to that i don't think it was necessarily around that they're not ready for equity work i i think they're ready plenty ready for it it was kind of a little bit how we went about it and it sounds to me like the way that we're going about it now makes a lot of sense here's some things you can use in your classroom because that's what we're really about is teaching children and so i'm real glad to see that this is the direction that we're going so great on that note of unanimity and agreement that we're headed in the right direction um i just thank you so much thank you so much misty for being here at the slate hour really really really valuable to have your direct voice from the classroom so thank you so much thanks to all the staff even though we didn't go through selfie cell i know we all reviewed this cell by cell it's available to the public to look at appreciate to um appreciate all the work of the staff and just that feeling of cumulative momentum and um as the work gains strength and throughout the district so in every part of the district so thank you so much for all of that thank you thank you okay so at this late hour the board will now consider a very small uh business agenda mrs are there any changes to the business agenda there are not all right do i have a motion and a second to adopt for business agenda so move second director knowles moves very quickly and director blind quickly seconds the adoption of the business agenda is there any public comment no there is none any more discussion no okay the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying aye any abstentions okay the business agenda is approved by a vote of five to zero with student representative jazwa voting yes yes all right before i adjourn just want to remind our parents out there if you haven't already done so either check your email to take the successful school survey or if you prefer to do it by paper you can go check at your school and folks there will help you fill out that survey so do please fill it out we are looking for a very high completion rate at every single school so thank you for taking the successful school survey the next meeting of the board will be held on tuesday february 10th and we are

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)

2015-02-03 PPS School Board Study Session

Documents / Media

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - February 3, 2015

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