2015-02-10 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2015-02-10
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - February 10, 2015

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good evening this study session of the board of education for february 10th 2015 is called order like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers while our study sessions are generally limited to receipt of information from staff and discussion of that information as well as review of resolutions prior to a vote at times like tonight 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 and it's also being streamed live on our pbs tv services website um so in just a note i'm very glad to have folks from the public here tonight of course but just a note that as always our policy on holding up the signs is you need to be sure you're not blocking the folks behind you so we appreciate your cooperation in that um as well as we want to make sure out of respect for the folks who are presenting that the audience tries to keep us keep your comments if you need to have a conversation maybe to go out into the foyer and have them there so that we can be sure the folks who are up here providing testimony or information can be heard and and can have a respectful moment for their what they're providing so thank you for that very much so with that we will start out with public comment tonight miss houston can you uh start out with the first two names yes that would be ann and amelia witt great so thank you so much for being here tonight and providing your comments we are really looking forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns we're going to actively listen and reflect on them but not respond directly at this time we do have our board manager roseanne powell over there in the audience so if you have questions afterward you can follow up with her so guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration of others complaints about individual employees should be directed to the superintendent's office won't be heard in this forum so you have a total of three minutes um please begin by stating your name and spelling your last name for the record during the first two minutes a green light will be appear when the yellow light comes on you have one minute left and then when the red light comes on we respectfully ask that you wrap up your comments so thanks again for being here we really appreciate it and you may begin all right my name is amelia witt witt and i am a sophomore at cleveland high school and we are writing an english paper about how we feel about school and i point out that kids are sitting in desks day after day and often the learning feels very morphed and insignificant and sometimes it's hard to remember but when learning is associated with something like outdoor school learning feels it feels very powerful and it feels uh very important and the kids can connect the learning to amazing memories that they have at outdoor school outdoor school gives amazing teaching in science as well as things like people skills kids learn amazing teamwork communication and how bonded they can be to a group of people like the people in their cabin for example and i just think that half a week is not enough time for these kids to learn all that they can and to form those very strong bonds with their cabin and their camp i was fortunate enough to go for a full week of outdoor school and it was one of the most amazing experiences i've had and i'm never going to forget it i was one of the kids that was sobbing on the bus ride home it really fueled a passion for science for me and i've actually been considering that as a career and i think that it's very important to open these kids eyes to science as a possible career for them as well so i i just think that it's truly unfair that these kids won't get the experience that i did and i think that that should be changed thank you my name is ann witt w-i-t-t i'm the mom of amelia witt 10th grader at cleveland high school and also the mom of a sixth grader aaron at hosford middle school as you heard amelia was fortunate enough to go for a full week and aaron went this fall for a half week but to be honest i'm not really here to speak for my kids my kids are really fortunate they have many wonderful outdoor experiences and they have and will have for the rest of their lives i'm here to speak about and for other for other children who don't have those experiences and my most favorite job that i've ever had was as an outdoor school teacher on the chesapeake bay in baltimore or outside of baltimore and the students that i remember most from that year and a half experience were kids from inner city baltimore who had never stepped foot out of their
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neighborhood some of those 12 year olds were already parents and they were exuberant and ecstatic at our outdoor school it was just a remarkable experience for them and to have had a full week of that experience was life-changing for them to see the possibilities outside of their neighborhood i now am a portland public school speech pathologist so i work across the district for special needs students and again the student i remember the most was a statuesque sixth grade native american boy who was living in his car at the time i knew him and was really stuck in just a terrible situation and the fact that he got to leave that and see the possibilities and go to outdoor school for for a week at that time i hope and i think was transformative for him so that's why i'm here i think kids will be fine with the short week but i think the long week as my daughter has stated really solidifies the experience and lets kids know that there's life beyond the neighborhood the car the the toddler or whatever they're dealing with in their lives in the city so thank you for your time and i'm very excited to be here with my daughter as you can tell this is a very important passion of both of ours thank you so much thank you for both of you our last two speakers scott bailey and sue shattuck go ahead scott hopefully we'll join good evening my name is scott bailey and i'm here tonight representing the board of directors of community and parents for public schools uh thank you in advance for listening the theme of what i'm going to say tonight is unfinished business but before i get into that i've got to finish some other business you're going to be hearing from the bond accountability committee tonight um ted wolfe who's the cpps vice president testified at their recent public meeting and wanted me to forward a brief summary of his comments ted made two important points first when it comes to the design advisory groups that are part of the process of rebuilding our schools the composition these groups has has been overrepresented by pps staff as opposed to members of the public and they haven't done a very good job really of being representatives in terms of communicating with the public so there's some work to be done there second the bac needs to expand its work to fulfill its mission the bacu was charged by you the school board to track the alignment of the bond program with the goals and principles of the long-range facilities plan while the committee's work so far has closely tracked the program's adherence to the principle of fiscal prudence through the balanced scorecard in other reports it has not included any systematic look at the program's adherence the principles of sustainability inclusivity and with the exception of concordia partnerships so there's more work to be done there i'm serving on the what does dbrack stand for district-wide boundary review advisory committee it's a daunting task to redraw boundaries for the entire district especially given the tight timeline if the goal is to implement new boundaries by the fall of 2016. it's even more challenging given the number of unresolved issues in portland public schools including some that sackett had to deal with in in its work that made that more complex great configuration the lack of any kind of a plan that matches the educational programs with actual facility layout and size the lack of clarity on the role and location of focus focus option programs the lack of a long-term plan for expanding immersion programs while we're supportive of immersion programs dual language immersion expanding there's seems to be very little coordination with facilities planning on that the location of special education programs which seem to be moved around willy-nilly
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access which also is a nomad where will it end up next there are other unresolved issues as well but i'm going to round it out of time at bottom though once again i'm going to i'll get down on my hands and knees if you want to ask you to please start a process of bringing this district an educational vision and a strategic plan every time our committees grapple with these issues there are pieces that come together that need to be coordinated and we need those values to drive that to bring us together to make progress and i'm out of time so i'll stop there thank you very much um you want to call the other person's name one more time was sue shattuck sue shattuck not with us okay all right then thank you all very much for sharing your views with us tonight we appreciate it so tonight uh we're gonna get our quarterly update from the bond accountability committee so wanted to invite down kevin spellman and luis fontenot to the speaker's table to present your report thanks so much for being here good evening um co-chair atkins members of the board superintendent smith um your bond accountability committee um met january 21st for our quarterly meeting at grant high school and we were pleased to be joined by three directors thank you for attending director belial director kola director buell before we get into the report i want to thank you as a board for reappointing two of our members two of our valuable members tom peterson and willie paul both had two year terms when we started this and they agreed to put themselves forward for reappointment and you um granted that and we really appreciate that they they're valuable uh folks at the meeting we received updates from staff that included the balanced scorecard we looked at each of the bond projects in individually we looked at where we sit with the recommendations from the performance audit from last year and we touched on bond work that related to historic significance and capital partnerships and we'll talk a little more about that the large projects that are out there roosevelt and franklin high schools are at a critical point um negotiations continue to with the cmgcs to reach get the guaranteed maximum price and that's at a point where there's a significant shift of risk from the district to the contractor the the scope of the projects really gets tied down and the price risk at least to a large extent start moves over to the contractor so we're anxious for that to happen and i'm sure you are too grant high school project is starting to get underway and sense that a project director has been appointed and will be moving promptly now into selection of a design team and master planning will start mid-year fabian pka school replacement is underway again after taking a little bit of a hiatus while concordia did their fundraising exercise ip14 is coming to a close there was the work that was scheduled for the summer as as you recall was completed on time and on budget but each of those three of those schools i think had elevator work still to be done and that's getting concluded right now planning for ip15 is underway the designs are on schedule for earlier notices to proceed then than last year with any luck because if you recall we had some lessons to learn there about the ramp up time that's needed between bid and starting work following the meeting we were given access to the district's financial audit which includes the bond program and we won't dwell on that because we were pleased to see no questions raised about how the bond is being handled so the key issues for us really are the same as last time we were here um that's not to say nothing's happened but the the key the focus on these issues remain scheduled particularly roosevelt and franklin remain a concern
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that both of those schools are behind the baseline schedule there is a plan to bring them back but at this point it's a plan it's not in place yet so we're we're continuing to watch them um construction documents on both of those projects has been is being phased or will be phased as will the building permits and that's a common um approach to these kinds of projects but it's not without some risk so again we'll be watching how that process goes and as i said the guaranteed maximum price will also be a key issue planning for ip15 we looked at uh keenly because this summer we only have 65 calendar days to do this work and there are going to be seven construction contracts and um sometimes then the number of comp the size of contracts doesn't matter quite as much in managing them quite as much as the site as the number of them so seven construction contracts over the summer is a significant management task and so we'll be watching that um budget is always an issue of course the program budget is now 522 million dollars including the 15 from concordia the the biggest concern other than the guaranteed maximum prices which i won't dwell on anymore uh relates to market conditions we have a lot of concern about the effect of market conditions on pricing as these projects are bid out we've had some struggles with ip14 if you remember and so we're concerned about ip15 and indeed the bidding out of the high schools once the ip projects were bid the work came in under budget and we didn't use all our contingencies and that's a good thing so that pays back some of that overage in the first place but that is a concern about equity continues to be a focus about student participation remains encouraging there's been a change if you recall on how we're conducting that and how we're measuring that so we'll continue to watch that going forward the first exercise of the workforce hiring program through the summer exceeded expectations the number of apprentices employed on those projects inc exceeded the goal so that's a good thing mwesb's minority women owned businesses and emerging small businesses continues to be a challenge it hasn't changed significantly since we were here before not much work has been done but on the plus side 3.7 million dollars has been paid to those firms which is nine percent of total payments we i remain optimistic about how the high schools will perform in that area uh consultants are meeting in some meeting the 18 goal which is pretty incredible but that's partly because some of the ip architectural firms qualify so that those entire contracts are counted towards that goal and some of the other projects are falling a little short so we don't think that they should those other projects should get off just because someone else exceeded their goals so we're going to continue pressure there stakeholder perspective generally the feedback as you'll see in the balanced scorecard when jim presents it is generally very positive with the exception of roosevelt design advisory group which shows as yellow we i we heard obviously scott bailey's comments uh reporting on ted's um report for their organization and ted did speak to us not this time time before and and and we agreed that we should learn lessons from how the design advisory groups have been successful and not so successful and going forward onto grind grant high school we should certainly incorporate those and we understand that there are adjustments in the the charter for the grant high school dags and we think that's appropriate
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including having fewer pps staff members and more of community members we also uh listened to uh our credit ted with this we we did listen to his comments at our prior meeting when he reminded us that we're supposed to be looking at things other than just budget and schedule and equity and those kinds of things so we have put on our agenda at least a kind of checklist of trying to look at those other metrics some of them are really hard to measure other than in um in a holistic way and but this time we looked at uh historic buildings and what the bond program has done in terms of his historic structures and capital partnerships and it's clear obviously that the concordia piece has has kind of overwhelmed that but there are a number of other partnerships out there and we should continue focusing on those just like the mwesb just because we do really well here doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying elsewhere summary our next meeting i think will be very instructive because i believe the gmps will be solidified and will know exactly where we are in those high schools and we can be moving forward um i wouldn't want to finish without saying once again that we remain impressed with the teams that you have both employed and hired as outside consultants and contractors and we think you have a pretty good team going then lewis want to add anything no um from from my perspective everything is going very smoothly now we are concerned with uh with schedule and as as kevin said earlier and of course uh participation with the mwesb's but it it looks like um we'll know more about all of those in the in the coming months and hopefully um we will get some more some better visibility especially with the with schedule but well with all three of those and so we'll see what happens um next quarter great thank you so much the board members comments or questions steve thank you again for your great work uh did you learn any lessons do you think around the teacher involvement the teacher involvement was they're pretty critical of that the way they were involved in the roosevelt and franklin uh design process i mean do we have stuff where we're going to do better and grant or is that a lesson that isn't laid out or i don't know you know you're kind of looking like well what are you talking about no no i understand what you're talking about thank you um it's it's we haven't focused on that director buell uh my understanding is that staff teacher staff non-teacher staff at the schools have been given opportunities to become involved and and i i saw some and i know some of you have seen some of that that certainly at franklin and even at roosevelt there were teachers involved in the dag and and going forward they won't be involved in the dag so there's got to be other forums for them made available absolutely well yeah so to some degree i think that the problem was built around the way they were involved could be they didn't feel like they were truly involved many of the teachers that they were kind of the same whole halfway involved and now we can say they're involved but not really involved so i don't know i just think it'd be nice if we look at that and grant okay i know that's not your job but i was putting that out there directory i actually had a similar question i don't know if this was your decision or if it was somebody else's decision but you have a paragraph in her about stakeholder perspective uh which talks about lessons learned and especially from the roosevelt design team in lessons learned in terms of implementation for grant high school there would be a clear statement of purpose pps staff members other than the school principal will be excluded and so that actually concerns me so is there anybody who can explain to us what is going on here one of the things that i actually heard the most from the roosevelt process is that in fact we should have had a teacher with career technical education experience on the design committee to kind of advise the rest so i'm i'm confused about this whole stakeholder paragraph so
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jim owens is raising his hand in the back as we're willing to come on up and talk about because we've done a number of lessons learned um on the on this first round but i'll let jim might have been sure okay i mean i think there's lots of room for improvement um but i'm not understanding where this is going so as does i understand the question um around the teacher involvement in the design advisory groups these were charted groups that are intended to be comprised of community members who provide input to the design team the committees report directly to our to our osm project directors for the projects and they're intended to provide broad input in terms of the work their advisory in nature we don't seek consensus among them we collect input the opportunity to get input from teachers runs on a parallel track so the project teams the design teams actually engage teachers at multiple levels at the building and they work very collaboratively with them to ensure that input is is received we actually feel that process that is in place to get input is is very sound the reason we're planning to change the configuration of the charter for grant is to primarily have the principle of grant high school be present to have students represented to have community represented and then to continue on engaging teachers in a parallel fashion in terms of what what i've seen i i feel we've had a great deal of teacher input and as we speak the collaboration that is going on at franklin and roosevelt is resulting in a plan that's going to be very very deliberately crafted and is going to result in our ability to complete these projects so that when the construction is completed the teachers are going to know what to expect and they'll be involved not only during the master planning and the design phase but also during construction phase so when we get the work completed and we need that complete usable facility those teachers will be will be fully on board i hope that fully responds to your question but it's a it's the way we've approached the dag process steve um mr owen did anybody sit down and talk with teacher representatives that friend from your office sit down and talk with teacher representatives from franklin and roosevelt to see what they thought of the process and if they had any suggestions did you actually sit down with the people and ask them those questions i i personally have participated in a number of sessions with teachers our osm project directors have had far more engagement with them and we have a very detailed record of all the feedback that's been provided in addition to teachers our operations staff have been very actively integrated into the design work that's it nutrition services maintenance and operations security it's a very holistic approach to ensure that all of the district participants who operate and maintain and teach out of these out of these facilities are are engaged so my confidence level and roosevelt and franklin as we have had extensive involvement so the answer is no to my question the answer is yes you have actually sat down with the representatives the head reps in both buildings and sat down with them and asked them specifically what was what they needed what you needed to fix about the roof and it continues it's not a it hasn't ended the teachers have been involved through the design phases as we move into our third phase for construction documents they're involved as they move through construction they'll be involved so there's no there's no end to that involvement there's a continual engagement process that's that's designed into this other comments questions direct block i just want to thank you both and your colleagues for taking the time and making the effort to to sit on our accountability committee um i know that every time i sit in on those meetings i learn a great deal and i really appreciate what you were saying at least about concern about the mwesb efforts and proposing solutions it's not just why isn't this but here are some ways that you can do it and i know i would imagine staff are appreciating that because i know everybody is working extremely hard and quickly but want to also be really thoughtful about how we move forward so thank you both for your time and i just i just want to say how exciting this is again i know that sometimes what i see about input process and i appreciate mr ruins what you're saying is it's one of those things that i think at franklin at least my experience was the teachers that were on the dag did a great job of going back to their their colleagues and sharing that they saw themselves as true representatives
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to as with a responsibility at the same time even though that was true there was a part in the process where all of a sudden people who were paying attention for whatever reason we all live busy lives realized there were some decisions that had been made and they got really frustrated because they weren't aware of those decisions and so continuing how do we loop that it's kind of it reminds me of a spiraling of curriculum how do we loop back and how do we come back for and at the same time i think that's a nature of public processes a little bit that until something resonates with somebody um they don't engage until they realize that it was important to them so thank you for your efforts and thank you for being here dr martin thank you both um i think my my only quick comment is regarding mwesb's and the need for us to do better i mean i think we're there are some goals that are i think being met but and as you say in your your summary uh there's a need for us to uh to either do more engagement of mwesb's or very likely at least that the feedback i've received is that the process by which we go out is one that is in fact limiting to smaller and emerging businesses so i don't know how much uh flexibility we have i wouldn't be surprised if we had small business owners and and other contractors come and present to the board on the same issue during public testimony but i i would highly encourage us taking a deeper look into how our process is right now and how in that process we're able to uh we're able to maximize um partnership with mw esps yeah director morton we agree with that and there are limitations because of the fact that the district hasn't had a disparity study so you can't set goals that's just the legal fact and so when you um go out to bid work as on the ip work it's there is no mandate so in some senses you could say achieving nine percent on that work is pretty good now the goal though is 18 so it's not good enough um once we get into the cmgc work there is more flexibility on the part of those cmgcs in working with smaller businesses minority women-owned esbs so and we've seen greater success in cmgc work than in bid work so we're hopeful that we know both of the contractors well and they have good histories with that community so and they understand it's important to us and important right to you that's great tonight just as a quick follow-up oh yeah i think mr fontenot apologize yes we're we hope that we do indeed see that um but the the one of the tough things is that as long as it remains a goal it's aspirational you know we hit it okay you know you are a contractor a consultant you're going for work and when it's a requirement you meet the requirement or you don't get the work right as long as it's a goal it's aspirational so you'll do your very best especially explaining why you did not achieve the goal if you don't achieve it and you get the work and you go on to the next one so it would help as you all know if it one day it does indeed become a requirement instead of a goal because i think it'll that'll help nudge some people towards that that finish line of of ultimately being more inclusive with these contracts so is that an action that we can take as a board um my understanding is that it's a it's illegal there's a legal prohibition for the board taking that action absent a disparity study i'm not a lawyer in that area but that's what i've observed elsewhere this will be a surprise i'm not either um i will say um well two more things one is that i i will probably not be one of the people suggesting that nine percent is a good um a good number um and there's also one piece that for from my perspective i have sort of a philosophical leaning and that philosophical leaning is that for uh decades uh public entities have invested uh billions of dollars in our community here in building the capacity in the infrastructure of organizations of
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contractors to the point where they can do things like when 80 percent of the of the bids that they put out for the city because they have that capacity and and everyone knows they do what i think we can do as an organization is say that we're going to we're going to find a way to build capacity of others as well not that we have to forget or or push aside other contractors but that in fact we have 482 million dollars that can be invested in building the infrastructure of mwesb's and that's good for portland it's good for oregon it's good for the the catchment area of portland public schools so that's sort of my philosophical and i'm not saying that that's any different than anyone else's but that's my my philosophy and i think they're to some extent i think we have that same obligation of building infrastructure within our our community to uh to hire and to um to do the work that that will make us more competitive in the future so thank you well said other groups so i had one other quick question on the front page you say we are pleased to hear the state has awarded a 1.3 million dollar seismic rehabilitation grant to franklin to augment the planned seismic improvements and that some will be added to the project budget so my question was how did that come about who should we be and what will that allow us to do that we weren't able to do before jim i'm going to take that i get the second question while you are up here pps has participated in the seismic reputation grant program initiatives for the last several years you may recall early in the bond programs i believe i'm saying that but in 2013 we had an srgp grant 1.5 million for alameda what it allows us to do is to increase the level of seismic improvement to a higher standard than we might otherwise accomplish so we compete competitively with other school districts and public agencies for this work this round of srgp we actually submitted four applications and the one that was successful based on a number of active factors least of which we have an active bond and we can leverage our dollars more effectively but we were able to demonstrate that the franklin project because of the character of the historic main facility would benefit from doing a full seismic rehabilitation so we took advantage of that um frankly and have been able to use that to to our advantage okay so it's a great opportunity the state does are the people to thank for it and it used to be office of emergency management now it's a different group but they they run these and they'll continue so pps will continue to uh participate in the process that's great thank you so i'll just chime in maybe with a follow-up on that so in terms of our other buildings though roosevelt in particular will have parity in terms of what we can provide in terms of seismic improvements so the this this bond program has us doing incremental seismic improvements at a number of our schools and as we do our roof tear-offs and replacements we're doing seismic improvement right now we're not able to do it at the same level that these srgp srgp grants allow us to do and because we weren't successful at the others we're using this at we're using this at franklin but we would uh we'll continue with our plan to do the seismic improvements uh per the bond measure well i mean i meant in particular at the other high schools i mean where we're doing the full modernization versus just the roof we're doing the full seismic rehabilitation with or without the grants i think folks listening to this might think that franklin was going to get a higher level of safety in terms of seismic upgrades okay that's a great clarification though different level of safety we're taking advantage of a program that allowed us to to augment our budget okay other schools though they're being fully modernized we'll have the full seismic rehabilitation system all right thanks for clarifying and congratulations on getting that spending i mean i guess i just would weigh in in terms of the dag composition piece i mean i get i totally get that we have many other avenues for teachers to weigh in but i guess from my perspective it would make sense to have at least one teacher on the dag i don't know why we wouldn't so just putting that out there is my two cents it just seems like it just stirs up questions of why isn't there a representative for teachers if there are from other folks as well so that makes sense to me and then in terms of the testimony we heard earlier i mean i appreciate very much that you're listening to that and looking at expanding somewhat your scope but i guess from my perspective what i recall is that this committee was specifically charged around the composition was made up in terms of your expertise as industry experts and professionals in the field so that you really whenever this group was never intended to be a broad community stakeholder group as i
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recall it was really oversight from that fiscal construction expertise perspective i just wanted to confirm my recollection of what kind of what your charge was well i think co-chair atkins i think you are generally correct that's and that has been our focus schedule budget scope have been really the key elements and as you kick off a program like this it kind of has to be but i think the charter did list um i think ted's right they did list other items from the long-range facility plan and so we we do feel obliged to look at those and to see and to make sure they're not forgotten in the um as the bond moves forward yeah i know that's terrific yeah no that's all i had okay other than thanking you as always for all your work and dedication we really appreciate it i just wanted to highlight that i know one of those is the sustainability of the materials and i know that we're too early in that process as we're getting maximum price right now but after all that value engineering i'll be really curious to hear your because i know one of our plans was to say let's not save early and then spend later in the in the long term of our systems let's get quality materials as much as we can and i know that it's always a balance as you try to get the price within within the budget but so i will be interested in that so i just t that is something that i'd appreciate that's that's on our list yeah absolutely all right thank you very much accountability committee thanks for being here tonight so jim gets to stay here because we're now going to segue into the quarterly update on our capital improvement bond from jim owens and others and friends thank you co-chair atkins and thank you again for the opportunity to present osm's quarterly update on our bond program i would like to begin by also thanking the bond accountability committee for their report tonight we work very closely with the team and we have seven community volunteers who participate and they do bring to the table expertise in public finance construction and a really broad perspective that really helps to provide that level of community oversight and that community perspective into their work so we're really pleased to have such a such a wonderful team there i think the report is also an excellent reflection of the program status will allow me to avoid going into the details of the balance scorecard because they really hit the high points i'm going to hit a few as well before we get into the main theme tonight on makerspace but also i think that the material that we provide on a regular basis is very much aligned with their review very much consistent with a charter and as you know as a board appointed committee they are reporting to you based on those those charter components that they have i also think that it continues to be the proper level of community oversight our design advisory groups by contrast or committees that are intended to provide specific input to specific projects so there's a different character of the groups and i know sometimes there's a tendency to think that the one accountability committee and the design advisor groups are have similar charge but but they don't they're very very different charge in your board packages tonight is the january update of the balanced scorecard and again not going to go through that in detail but it certainly provides a good summary of where we are as of the end of january and we'll continue to report to you across the different perspectives of budget schedule stakeholder and equity many of the comments that were made by the bac certainly resonate with staff and we're working very diligently on addressing those i failed to mention that i'm joined tonight by john wilhelmi who is our office of school modernization education liaison and he's going to be presenting a topic that's very important to us on makerspace so really want to reserve the time for john to go through that but what i'd like to do is highlight the next page highlight the really some of the main items i'd like to leave you with tonight certainly echoing the vac's report kevin and lewis's summary program is in the green we remain on time on budget and visible to the community those are three metric areas that we're paying a lot of attention to and the visible to the community is manifested in many ways at least of which is our our very excellent bond website but also a number of community engagements that occur a number of forums where we spend time conveying to the public what these what these dollars are producing for us as a as a school district
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the high schools as has been mentioned are rapidly moving through the completion of design phase and believe it or not we're planning uh groundbreaking ceremonies for early may so work there is about to get started there are a lot of major activities that staff is working on to be ready for that uh certainly the uh negotiation of the guaranteed maximum price for both the franklin and roosevelt project is commanding a huge amount of time from the teams right now but very confident that we're going to land on a gmp value that is consistent with our budget expectations provides adequate contingency as we begin construction phase and will allow us to complete these very complex historic rehabilitation projects on time and on budget we also provided in your packet a detailed construction phasing plan for roosevelt high school i know there's a lot of interest in terms of how we're going to move a thousand kids from building to building over a two-year period and i'm not planning to go into that in detail tonight but if there are questions about it it was primarily intended to lay out some of the expectations we have and for the building level leadership to be able to plan around how their how they're phasing the work so that the teaching and learning activities continue with minimal disruption and i would be the first to point out that in doing work of this magnitude there will be some but we're working very hard to to minimize that and it's a real credit to the to the full team including our consultants and our builders to ensure that that happens our summer work continues to proceed again the work for this summer we've got seven major construction solicitations that are about to go out and that's going to represent another significant undertaking we've got 28 schools that we're planning to make improvements at this summer which is very significant and we are very optimistic that that will go well the completion of the elevators at the three schools james john osford and beech are very much on track and we're planning a celebration of sorts at james john in early march to reflect uh our ability to complete this work and to be able to turn that over to uh to the school for four years it's really providing opportunities for for kids to have access to spaces and programs that they haven't previously had the same access to and then lastly would like to highlight that we have begun work on ip16 our summer 2016 improvement work we're about to go out we actually have just issued a request for proposal for one or two architects to take on the design of that work and as part of our lesson starting this summer work as early as possible really benefits it benefits us in your packets i think you received earlier the selection criteria that was used for ip16 and it was very similar to the same criteria that we use for for ip15 around ruth condition around seismic and around combined underserved so it's very much in line with the way we've been approaching selection of the school sites to improve over the summer and then the last comment i'd like to make is the construction market continues to evolve as we come further out of recession we're seeing construction costs increasing and so we're anxious to see as a result of these seven bid contracts to see where we're going to land on that so we're paying attention to that we have a number of other school districts that are now actively engaged in their own bond programs and so it's really putting a strain on the on the contractor community so it's an area that we'll continue to monitor and we'll be sharing some of our perspective with you on that so at this time i'd like to turn it over to john who will highlight a really important topic around the maker space then we'd like to close with a short video around franklin high school which i think you'll enjoy that will highlight the work that's been done that we're planning to do there and at the completion of that we'd like to invite any questions you might have good job great thank you thank you jim uh co-chair is this on i've got my i'm at the mercy of my soft voice here i guess we all are uh i'll try and be loud so co-chairs atkins and noel superintendent smith directors and student representative good evening again i'm john wilhelmi education liaison and i've been asked to provide you with an update of our maker spaces as a prelude i want to remind the board of the many new learning spaces in our modernized schools gone is the notion of the central hallway flanked by classrooms on both sides and new to the modernized schools will be greater common spaces and what we are
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calling flex spaces brain bars as well as maker spaces so think of our modernized schools as now having the option and flexibility to extend the classroom learning experience to throughout the entire school allowing for learning that is more applied hands-on project-based learning by doing on the screen is a photograph of a commons area at razbeck aviation high school in seattle rayzbek was designed by bassetti architects the same firm working on roosevelt as you can see soft seating allows this common space to be a learning area where students can gather and collaborate throughout the day our modernized schools including franklin roosevelt grant and fabian will have commons areas another learning space we're calling flexspace flexspace as seen here at high tech high international school in san diego allows for learning immediately outside the classroom transparency seen in the form of glass windows and low-lying walls allows for both supervision of the flex space and to help inspire students as to the learning opportunities and goings-on throughout the school both inside and outside the traditional classroom here's a flex space at raisvac high note the right hand wall is a dry erase board there's a classroom in the distance as well as another classroom traditional classroom behind where this photograph was taken a brain bar also seen here at ray's back is a counter with stools or not and ample connectivity and charging stations for students myriad electronic devices we're seeing this kind of thing this concept implemented in many of our nation's airports so to make your spaces what is makerspace uh this photograph is of adx in portland a large makerspace which is open to the public it charges adx charges a usage fee on their website they state adx is a collaborative maker space where individuals and organizations make and learn by sharing tools knowledge and experience in the following few slides you will see that maker spaces take many forms it's important to note that maker spaces vary in many ways including the size of the space the amount type sophistication of equipment the types of things that can be made in the space portability and flexibility of the space that is are the furniture fixtures and equipment movable or not maker spaces vary on availability uh when and who can use the space and and they vary by uh supervision who's ensuring safety of the space and they can vary by budget personnel equipment maintenance and materials but first a quick little bit of history if there's a founder to the current makerspace movement it's probably dale doherty pictured in the upper left he's the founder of make magazine which was founded in january of 2005 about 10 years old and you can see the make brand with the black red and light blue lettering besides make magazine dougherty produces maker faire and maker shed a maker faire was held at the white house last year last september a mini maker faire was held outside omsi in portland here's a maker space in new york just some tables set out at the new york hall of science with some materials available for people to tinker with common in my research are maker spaces on maker spaces of the number of libraries cordoning off space as maker space as seen here in at the library in detroit also in detroit these students are taking things apart reverse engineering is a key component to design and learning how things are made this maker space in san francisco is more equipment intensive as is the atx co-op hacker space in austin texas lots of stuff maker spaces are international
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note the spaciousness of this maker space in chile maker spaces can combine workspace with soft seating to encourage collaboration as seen here in france here's an outdoor makerspace in togo with just a couple tables and these women at this maker space in cairo are learning how to solder the next few slides will help illustrate the many uses of maker space maker spaces can have a heavy emphasis on a particular area of focus such as woods or metals or maker spaces can accommodate many areas of focus such as textiles electronic circuits robotics or science on the left is an arduino computer with instrumentation to measure the soil and on the right is a protein structure made with a 3d printer another possible field of focus in a makerspace is engineering and as far as equipment some of the more high-end equipment in maker spaces include 3d printers laser cutters or cnc cutters allowing for both additive and reductive projects so makerspaces in schools here is a before floor plan of is in a series of photographs of the woods and auto shop complex at eugene's churchill high school churchill modernized this complex into a stem facility in the spring of 2013 seen in this slide so we went from auto shop wood shop to environmental studio stem studio workshop and conference room this is a photograph of the stem workshop area seen in the middle of this slide right here the workshop area if we zoom down this is what we're looking at note the lack of equipment and high degree of portability note the lifting door sound mitigation panels on the wall the students are using the space not only to build but to conduct experiments the students are moving catapults in this picture where they'll test what they've learned about force and trajectory in their physics class another another note that churchill has adopted for a spacious highly flexible stem workshop where both making an experimentation can take place depending on need most of the furnishings are on wheels permanent fixtures such as counters are minimal and set to the side secure storage rooms occupy the corner of the workshop and as for usage this workshop sits between the two stem studios so on my visit this past fall the studio is comprised of physics class on one side and a math class on the other most of the usage of the workshop or this makerspace was by students enrolled in the adjacent classes so the current plan for pps maker spaces is to actually promote a wider usage than than the churchill usage the otl vision is to pilot maker spaces at our modernized high schools that are available to all students all day across the entire school either in the form of whole classes using the space small groups using the space or individual students using the space so like media centers or computer labs of today maker spaces will be on available on a sign up basis so no courses will be scheduled into the maker spaces per se during the school day they're not going to be encumbered with courses envision are students working on projects from many disciplines from stem courses to language arts social studies to world language and arts and beyond so we're really talking about wide usage of the maker space to encourage maximum usage otl will be proposing that our maker spaces be staffed
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full time in addition otl will work to offer pd to teachers of all disciplines on ways to use the makerspace otl is currently working with project directors in the procurement of fixtures furniture and equipment of our maker spaces and the maker spaces will be a minimum where they've set a minimum of 1200 square feet for the maker spaces i'm hitting the wrong button here in just a second there were oops and johnny's interrupt otl stands for office of teaching and learning otl office of teaching and learning i'm sorry and so the the current vision for the maker spaces is as stated on the screen and with that i'm going to turn it over to jim and i believe that we have a video coming up okay thank you john and what we'd like to do is key up the video of franklin and it's just a short five minute videos it's possibly i think the best high school experience i could have gotten because it really pushes you like it doesn't just let you settle for whatever like it's a school that brings you in and says if you really want to try and do something with your education here's your chance we have lots of classes we have multiple art classes which is very nice and the electives the electives are my favorite best part about franklin is just the sense of community like i've i came in here with one friend and we my idea was i'm just going to play football get my grades get a scholarship and just leave but within like a couple weeks i made some friends by like halfway through the year i had like a family it's really sort of beautiful when a building and a site tell a story and this building and franklin high school has told an amazing story for the past hundred years and um we feel incredibly fortunate to to help begin to craft that story for the next hundred years the whole idea of the openness of the building and the welcomingness of the building and for people to walk into this new facility and to be able to see the teachers doing the great things that they do to see the kids engaged and enjoying their education that's what's really exciting is that we're honoring what has been but we're showing people what can be one of the things that's really great about these projects is it engages the community in really sort of meaningful conversations about what they want from their community and for their community being a student voice was really cool because we got to talk to different kinds of students and see like what what is actually important to you and what do you not care about we did a workshop where you got different like little pieces of a room and you designed the entire inside of the building and it was like i think that one that we made was relatively close and i remember like they all ended up at our table and they were like wow and we were like yeah it made sense because we're the students we're the ones who are in the building they were listening to what our community wanted and what people wanted to have in this new building and they would discuss it and tell them what was probable what wasn't so they'd go back sketch it bring it back for a next meeting and they really tried to accommodate people and i i really feel they did i think they did a beautiful job one of the key features of the site design actually is to turn the field 90 degrees what that also allowed us to do is to locate the athletics and biomedical facility directly adjacent to the fields i like the arts center on the corner i like the way in which it will welcome people into the school from that direction there really is kind of that that beacon to the community that speaks to both the fine and performing arts that starts to act as the portal for the community to come into the school that's actually one of the pieces that i think i'm most excited about we're actually keeping the shell of the space including all of the interior detailing and converting it into essentially a two-story media center library space still keeping the proscenium opening and we have a law constitution classroom and a digital media and journalism classroom that will occupy those spaces to kind of still put that work on display we're building an environment that will make a day at school a
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pleasure and to have that that kind of energy that kind of happiness that kind of daylight in your daily experience i think it's going to make a remarkable difference and i think the new school like the whole school door is open like kids are just going to be coming in there knowing that they're going to step in and find someone who can help them with what they need and i think that's just such a good message to get across it's extremely exciting when you know you've got one of the best staffs in the world and then to turn around and give them all the tools they need and then to know that you've got the best kids in the world and to see those teachers and kids put it together and how far they're going to go that's what's exciting and if a community a community of educators a community of students of parents can walk in and say this is what we talked about this is better than what we talked about then we know we got it right it will finally have like the resources to back all the amazing things we can do and with like what we have now what do we have now we're already doing so much i can i can hardly imagine what we can do with more we're not even started building but i already feel gratified in knowing that we have gotten past like so many steps and we only have a few more to go and they're going to be some of the hardest but they're also going to be really really rewarding all right hey at this time i'd like to entertain any questions that the board may have thanks so much questions comments yeah a couple of quick comments one is the in the in the photos of the maker space and i appreciate that because i put some um i was gonna say put some parameters around things but in fact it actually expands those quite a bit and what that what that means and what it possibly can mean uh so one of the things that i noticed the most about which is exciting is the light and the use of natural light in space and how important that is and how that wasn't necessarily there wasn't necessarily the same understanding of the importance of that natural light in 1911 as perhaps we have right now the second thing and and i think some of your comments begin to address this in terms of uh education and training and professional development but when i look at um space particularly maker space i think about what it takes to deliver a curriculum manage a class manage the actual space that isn't a x feet by x feet box and wonder how prepared uh our educators need to be as that new space is created so you know i don't know if this is a question for you all or if it's a question for the superintendent or others how we're going to prepare our our faculty our teachers to actually um provide the the kind of education that's needed for these spaces right i teed this up a little bit because office of teaching and learning is actually addressing these very issues because we want this to be a success we want wide usage and we really want students to be inspired and a lot of that is staff being inspired in the space as well i was for many years a teacher and so as i put this slide show together i couldn't help but wonder how would i as a former social studies teacher by the way two of my former students are in this in this auditorium right now i couldn't help but wonder how as a social studies teacher would i use a maker space and the more i did this the more i got to got pretty charged about it would be really cool either you know i'm not just so sure the entire class but sending groups down to a maker space to actually uh construct a project that's parallel with something that we're studying in in world cultures would be just a phenomenal experience and so i would need to feel empowered to be able to do that i would need to know what the equipment is i need to know the usage of the equipment what kinds of projects avail themselves to my discipline and i just envision this sort of like cooking over time we've assembled myriad ways to cook and cookbooks and recipes we will do the same with projects in all disciplines in maker spaces i think the i just think the opportunity is like you said uh earlier director morton is just wide open and we would be remiss if we didn't recognize we have a number of educator leaders in the audience who have been
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very very actively involved in collaborating with our teams and configuring these spaces and looking at all the possibilities so we're really pleased office school performance office of teaching and learning office of college and career readiness they've all been playing a very active role in this work and it's been a great effort others director so there was one comment that was made that just keeps sticking in my mind and i'm trying to wrap my head around it which is that maker space maker spaces won't be scheduled for actual classes and that seems like a really broad statement to make at this point and i'm i'm having trouble getting my head around that why wouldn't we schedule actual classes in the maker space we're looking at maker spaces like we look at computer labs or a library or media center certainly a class can be there but i'm not denied access to a library because a course is in there all fourth period for the entire semester so what we're trying to do is we're trying to we're certainly going to have cte space in our schools we'll have dynamic courses in those spaces but the maker set space itself we want on a sign up basis is does that make so you're looking at maker space separate from cte space um sort of correct what you're saying is it'll be dedicated cte classrooms but the makerspace okay so back to churchill uh if you think of churchill on each side of that space that we saw in the photographs classrooms were classrooms and they could be considered cte or think of a cte classroom going on either side of it and it might be that the cte class is fully appropriate that they sign up to use the space for part of the time but what we're also saying is we want that space available to other disciplines throughout throughout the entire day for the entire semester okay dr buell so you're saying that the cte class would have their own classroom correct and then in their classroom they'd have their ct would they have the same ct materials in their classroom machines and so forth right so director viewers i mean they would have them in their own class right so franklin is uh franklin has a metal shop in a wood shop in the new design and then there's 1200 square feet adjacent to that that would be the maker space at the franklin side so the cte courses would be in the other two spaces that third independent maker space would be on a sign up basis what kind of ct courses are we envisioning in those classrooms that would have activities within those classrooms appropriate to the cte meaning that they have access to the machine the machines and so forth what kind of what would be an example of some ct classrooms that would or programs that would be in those classrooms that would uh then how would you then you would then move into the makerspace for certain parts of your thing because they have more carry more materials are you balancing the uh materials in the uh lack of a better word machinery i mean i i'm having trouble getting my head around it too i i'm also having trouble getting around to maker space social studies being a social studies teacher right did you ever come up with anything that you thought were you know you know that well you could use the makerspace for your social studies stuff can you come up with a you know and give you an example yeah why did you come up with that man let's let mr wilhelmy answer how about that so let me uh let me um let me read you this so one of the photographs uh that we showed you was high tech high high tech high international school in san diego so consider a recent ninth grade assignment on the rise and fall of populations humanities teachers mike strong and physics and engineering teacher scott swayley told a group of 50 freshmen to build a six-foot diameter geared wheel out of wood and come up with come up with a theory about why and how civilizations rise and fall based on their readings and research on the mains romans and greeks
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why and how civilizations rise and fall based on the readings of the mans the romans and the greeks and so their project was to come up with this wheel and they and they built it in their in their uh their shop space at international here at the high tech high so the makerspace would have the materials in there and uh machine reading right machinery and materials correct any other questions or comments all right thank you very much look forward to future updates as we go it's very exciting thank you thank you yay all right so at our january 27th meeting the board voted to approve amendment number two to the 2014-15 budget as part of that approval we asked the superintendent to develop a plan for additional investment to improve outcomes for our students so i'd like to ask superintendent smith to introduce this item i will and i'm going to wait for just a second to get teed up you guys received materials over the weekend and the powerpoint is really more for me to be able to tell the story to the audience of the detail you have in your packets and as director yeah i have the clicker and as director atkins just said um uh i'm gonna do a bit of a background um at two two board meetings ago or you approved amendment number two to the 2014-15 budget back in september when we reviewed the beginning fund balance we added school staff we did spending plans in support of the three priorities so third grade reading reducing exclusionary discipline and reducing the disproportionality in exclusionary discipline and increasing our graduation rate we also made some one-time investments and there was a lot of discussion on the board about what level of unassigned contingency you felt comfortable with and at that point it was you wanted to retain an unassigned contingency of 4.5 percent and i bring you back to that because that's the moment you established that's the level that you felt comfortable with earlier this month when we did our fall balancing we reviewed that we had higher local option revenue we had lower expenditures and it increased our unassigned contingency to seven percent at that point the board directed me to come back with optional spending plans um to address immediate needs in our schools um with the idea that you were still comfortable with holding 4.5 in reserve and one of with that was the check the charge um and the uh with also the idea that you wanted a survey of school-based staff to understand what they considered to be immediate need so that was the charge uh and then along with a number of ideas that board members had about what those potential investments could be the survey and we surveyed roughly 5 000 people we had a 40 response rate which is really amazing on that short turnaround yep the three highest rated things identified by our school-based staff technology upgrades and we had a number of different categories of technology upgrades school safety improvements and increasing schools discretionary budgets we also had summer programming library books and musical instruments and we continued professional development was one of the ones that was listed and actually a pretty narrow range between all of the ones that people identified and then we had a long list of like in my dream world these are the other things i'd want the things we did not do so we had people made suggestions for things that were ongoing expenses like increasing in staff we specifically did not do those those would be things we'll consider as part of the next year's budget so we were looking for one-time investments in this particular survey okay so i'm going to walk you through through two different spending plans and then show you the relationship to contingency and then i'll leave you on a slide that shows you both um uh and just you're kind of evaluating the level of spending and the level of contingency that you feel comfortable with so spending plan a had us investing 4.2 million dollars in technology support for teachers and students 770 000 in school safety improvements 750 000 in credit recovery and summer school for students for this summer and i'm going to remind you that we did this this past year where we supported high schools identifying students who are close to graduate close to graduating that would benefit from us being able to say we'll support you
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doing your summer school credit recovery and we had a number of students who were able to graduate this year specifically because of that investment so a good one 1.3 in library books musical instruments and pe equipment and specifically in the library works we were looking at both weeding and culling and then investing in cultural specific collections musical instruments in and hang on i'm going to tell you the number of schools because it's 49 schools a number of training and professional development opportunities that include avid training and i'm going to say avid in our middle schools we have avid currently in two of our middle schools this would add it to all of our middle schools and we have avid in three high schools it would add another three high schools um and it would allow us to leverage private investments from two private investors who would support the training so this is a a whole package that lets us expand what's been a successful practice it also adds a dyslexia training for elementary school teachers that during the summer and beyond diversity training for new teachers who have been on the waiting list and that we could offer it to during the summer and then finally the last item here is a significant one it's 3.7 million dollars that would be earmarked over the next three years to specifically add intensive staff support in our focus and priority schools so this recommendation as a teacher and an educational assistant in four focus and priority schools this year and five additional focus and priority schools in year two and then all of them in year three um that would add support additional just intensive work on early literacy but it's it's staff added to the schools in the schools in order to get them out of focus and priority status so that's what what the last one is for so the total used in this particular spending plan 12.1 million dollars which leaves you with 4.5 still held in reserves okay i'm gonna walk you through all of this before we do questions just so you get the whole framework that we're looking at here if you want to open the door for that great i'm just thinking let me get all the way through and then let's do it yeah spending plan b is still the technology support for teachers and students although at a little lower level so you see we've cut that back a bit the school safety improvements at 770 000 credit recovery and summer school the library books musical instruments and pe equipment training and professional development same package the cte expansion oops i don't think i did that one month so the ct expansion also is cut in half on um on plan two cte expansion is high school specific it's allowing high schools to continue last year we we added a staff person and forty thousand dollars per high school to invest in equipment to be building another program of study this would be a contin continued investment in high schools being able to build their cte offerings which could be used for equipment it could be used for training we've had schools like madison that did project lead the way which is a training for a curriculum and being part of a national curriculum but you send your teacher for two weeks of intensive training where they literally go through the whole program in two weeks over the summer but it's very lab intensive equipment intensive it would allow it could potentially allow a school to do that with anyway numbers the different high schools would have discretion over how they used it total unspending plan b 7.2 million dollars which would leave you 5.5 in contingency so those are your two um two levels of potential investment the risks that are that you know but the ones that you would be holding contingency to potentially mitigate um the first one it would be the risk of the not reaching the current service level budget in the state budgeting process which we've identified as 7.5 billion for the biennium uh the state um the co-chairs budget right at this point is 7.235 billion if in fact we do not move beyond that that gap so the potential gap there 10.4 million dollars we're including um the cost of full decay and if the per if the kicker kicks as being part of that same risk factor so we didn't add in new dollar amounts but any one of those
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things could be a part of why we don't get to the 7.5 billion and in which case we would want to still offer full decay so we wouldn't want to be in the position we can't do full decay and we'd want to hold current service level so you'd want to be able to mitigate the second potential risk is the 1314 state school fund reconciliation so looking backwards where they'll reconcile for property taxes actually collected and our estimate of what our dollar amount could be there is 3.5 million dollars so your total risk factors of which all may happen of which none may happen so again you're trying to weigh what's your sweet spot of investment now and what do you hold for contingency but the total there is 13.9 okay so if you do a little summary to help you think about this your all of your green boxes there would be split spending plan a so it gives you your technology your school safety credit recovery summer school library instruments pe professional development ct expansion folk and the focus and priority school investment and then you go on over into the uncommitted unassigned contingency column and you see it also includes holding 4.5 in reserve your other plan would be the blue boxes which is lists all your investments there in spending plan b and then you go left over into the you would that lets you hold 5.5 in reserve now the critical factors here if in fact you have to go on spending plan a you are then mitigating for that full menu of risk factors and unfortunately that's hard to read the black there but it takes you down to 1.8 left in reserve once you've mitigated for those risk factors which is below what your goal is so we've it's the three percent is the board's goal for what you hold in reserve this is what you hold a reserve for so you you would need to test your own willingness to if in fact we invest that deeply right now are you also going to feel comfortable taking us down to 1.8 in reserve spending plan b has you investing all the blue squares and then going down into the whatever color that is maroony light maroon whatever it is but it would take you down to 2.7 and reserve if you invested yeah if you held yourself at the 5.5 and then all those factors actually occurred you'd be down at the 2.7 so your conversation tonight is largely identifying where is that where's your comfort zone of immediate i think we got great feedback from teachers and and principals and school staff and we did do all school-based staff in terms of what people felt were priorities and i think you've got some good potential spending plans and you're really identifying what your comfort level of what happens right now thank you okay so before we get into our questions and discussions when i get this on the table at first we need to ask ms houston is there any public comment on the resolution related to this i have one margie brown okay great welcome come on down margie i know you've been here before so i don't need to repeat the the guidelines thanks so much for being here and as always for sitting through every single meeting all those who do that are very welcome okay co-chairs at kensin knowles and superintendent smith and board members i was interested to see what your choices are and so you have to recognize i wrote this before i saw what the plan was but i think it still pertains with the opportunity for additional resources to support portland public schools there are many good ideas on how to spend those dollars this past year you were able to add significant number of teachers and i hope you can continue to increase teaching staff and their support in order to lower class sizes my concern is that the stable state funding is not yet guaranteed and there is still the possibility of the kicker kicking additional funding may come with some strings attached as well it would be wise to put the kicker receipts in a rainy day fund and i hope you will maintain a sufficient contingency fund for our district i appreciate that the superintendent's plan for additional expenditures is focused on improved outcomes for students i hope you will consider keeping to limited significant one-time expenditures that will not impact future budget choices
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thank you thank you very much all right so the board will now consider resolution 5018 plans for additional expenditures and the 2014-15 budget for school district number 1j multnomah county oregon do i have a motion so moved director regan moves and second second and director morton seconds the motion to adopt resolution number five zero and eight any board discussion on this resolution can i add one more detail yes ma'am um so one of the things that was listed that we that board never suggested and that got response from school-based staff was adding to the consolidated budgets or the discretionary funds of each school that also came as a recommendation from the workload committee and they gave us an allocation methodology that we're still working on but it's been approved that we would actually increase um that's like a three hundred thousand dollar dollar amount that would go to increasing consolidated budgets for individual schools so clarifying would that be part of your spending plan that is not part of this because we had it over it because it came through the workload committee so okay by this proposal so like you could amend that but that's what this proposal is i just wanted you to know that we it was also got surfaced so are we adding 300 000 to each one of these coming out of the million dollars already allocated that the workload committee makes recommendations to and that we then are proving and that just to say approved great okay so director curley yes claire plank question yeah which is uh when i look at the resolution essentially what we're doing tonight is figuring out what contingency that the board is exactly and yeah and we'll have a lot of questions i'm sure about potential spending plans but their potential we're not voting on them yeah i think help thank you for that qualification archipelago set up friend we are you excited exactly right we are voting tonight on the contingency level and then the superintendent this is her plan that she's presented to us but she is going to go forth and implement that so i'm sure she'll be glad to hear various if you know people have different thoughts or opinions but really she's we're going to direct her with this um how much to spend and she is going to go forth and make the decision of how specifically to spend it that's my understanding okay i'm telling you the plan right here what you asked me to do is come back with a plan right and we actually had this conversation because i asked this question of was i bringing you back a plan and then were we waiting to vote on it or did you want to vote on that same moment and the what i got at the last meeting was you wanted to be able to do it immediately so you could release funds immediately into schools but so that was how we came back with it but clearly right so again the decision before us is on the resolution and the wording of the resolution in terms of the 4.5 versus 5.5 exactly okay and again if board members have other suggestions they want to share with the superintendent that's great in addition to the feedback she's gotten but that's not what we're looking for okay director knowles question yes um carol the i'm looking at the k three literacy rti support for focus for the private school that's the 3.7 uh million and my question for that is that is that all in this year between now june or july it would be earmarking that total amount to be spent over three years so it basically encumbers it now since we have it as a block a block amount but it says what we're going to do is we're going to provide a wholly different level so our focus and priority schools have gotten different levels of investment from the state that's declined as time has gone on this allows us to give a level of intensity that we're essentially saying these schools need to get out of focus and priority status with the focus on early literacy but it's putting instructional support at the school and eas so and earmarking it to be spent over three years well so my question and that is um our question to go along with that is how much would we actually be spending in this year and isn't the balance of that something that we should have a discussion about or at least we could agree that we're going to do this but that money comes out of the next budget not out of this money well that's my question so the proposal is yes you could reduce so we have in this one picking four schools that we do between here and the end of this year um and then building it up to the full number of schools next year so you could decide to do it end of this year and just next year and reduce that amount what we're basically proposing is encumbering it now as an ongoing expense that you now are restricting the dollars so pre-committing pre-committee yeah but so yes but could you structure it in the way you're suggesting yes you can or or alternatively we could not do this now but you have this as sort of a placeholder for discussion and in the coming budget yes you could except that if you did that you wouldn't do the four schools then we wouldn't do the four
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schools right now so you could just do the four schools right now director one could you come up and do that david weinstein i'm not trying to assistant cfo i'm just curious about it yeah it's not that's calculated the the cost in to do what we were talking about for this year is four hundred thousand and then the remaining money was the cost to keep that going next year in the year after and to add additional schools next year and the year thereafter okay thank you other questions comments uh director regan so just to quickly follow up on that my concern on that line item is that what we really wanted to be looking at is one-time funding and this clearly isn't and if my colleagues are interested in having more of a reserve than 4.5 i'm not sure why we would want to have those funds encumbered so i'm generally uncomfortable i love the idea of us providing more support but what our goal was was to be using one-time funds and so i'm a little bit concerned with that one i wanted to ask a question about the consolidated budgets because first of all i'm just so thrilled that our staff responded in such a big way to this and i think that's a great message for us to go out and do those kind of questions in the future and it would also be fun at some point to be able to do that with students and ask them because it would be interesting to see where they come out on some of these versus others but one of the areas certainly that we heard you know great support for was principals consolidated budgets and increasing debt so um the 300 000 or so i believe is what we're talking about from the teacher workload committee is that the amount it was 300 000 for the work from the workload committee what i'm trying to understand what that means on a per principal or per school level generally speaking is that a 10 increase in their current consolidated budget is that a 50 percent increase is it a nothing i'm going to let david come on up and answer can you we've been we've been working on how would we like how do you do this as an allocation methodology so it's a six and a half percent increase over the base funding in consolidated budgets this year which at a small k5 school that increases about two thousand dollars and at a large high school it's about eleven thousand dollars so my question would be is that meaningful to a principal because it doesn't feel like that's very much money and when we got this kind of a response there were three principles on the workload committee who when the email went out proposing this we're very excited that's three and actually i mean maybe that's wonderful could i do a piggyback on that maybe just in terms of the concluding the context of what the total amount is in general as well as are we sure that my understanding there might be some variability in terms of what gets spent i was going to say a spending plan and spending patterns right so the total amount the total base funding for schools consolidated budgets this year is about 4.5 million dollars spread across all of the schools um and that so the smallest schools get about 30 000 and the largest schools get about 160 000. um two-thirds of the schools do not spend every single dollar and carry over money into the following year now some of them get pretty close and don't carry over a huge amount and some of them intentionally save the money for a specific project so they will not spend money one year because they they need a certain larger amount for a particular project so it does vary across schools in terms of how much of that money they spend so it seemed there would be a little bit of a challenge then in terms of providing more whether it's across the board whether or not you've already used it or based on some other formula so here's the um this one no matter what amount of money we put in people are going to be excited about it and it carries over so um and i'm also getting there there was another proposal or hope that the workload committee would do this investment and that we would match it i didn't understand this hope at the point we were putting together the proposal but i'm understanding the hope now by looking in my audience there was a hope that's actually where i was sort of going yeah well and it could be like is that still an option like yes and the dollars would carry over so like if it's in the consolidated budget it's the thing that gives a building discretion to do stuff exactly and and it lets you pay extended responsibility for something or you know buy your teachers time to have planning and collaborating i mean it lets you do things that have discretion so it's not
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use it or lose it and uh it's not lose it or use it or lose it so you can use it uh so it's a particular the 300 000 could come out of the million dollars that we allocated so here's what i'll say at the point we were putting this plan together my understanding was we had the proposal coming forward from the workload committee and that's where that one was handling so it went off of this list the hope that i'm getting is the um that we would do the workload committee investment and that we would also match it out of this pot so like any of those like there's there's moving pieces and any amount we put here will be like really utilized and and felt in in terms of school life it changes what you have control over so yeah yeah okay okay uh director weekend oh i have a bunch of um so these numbers here uh when we spend down and we have uh the worst case scenarios happen and we're at one point eight or i can't believe it there's one point i know yeah yeah um but we're at the worst um that assumes that we wouldn't be finding any other revenue so this last year we found 28 close to 30 million um so is does that assume that we that we wouldn't be having anything above any revenue it's it's it is let me phrase it differently it's is it assuming that the worst case scenarios happen in terms of shortfalls but that no up case scenarios happen in terms of increased revenue that is correct okay director bill i think you had your hand up earlier did you have a comment question i have a uh facebook page that's entitled steve you'll come a portland school board member i think i'm going to go home and change it to be titled the old fool once again we've done something exactly opposite of what i assumed we were going to do which was to sit down and figure out uh come in with suggestions of money to spend and we were going to choose between those suggestions so obviously that's not the case so i have some questions on the things that we have in the list okay what are your questions uh the technology bundles that are now out of date that we bought in 2010 to 2012. those are out of date now and what in a year two years what are we talking about i'm going to ask josh it says it says for students and i mean i don't it makes a lot are we buying now i'm sorry director billy referring to which chart or which just referring to the technology bundles i'm working off the comments from the superintendent on page on these also include more uh mobile computer labs so to speak so the um that's josh klein chief information officer the the technology owned a proposal for 2.9 million dollars is to replace presentation stations basically that teachers use in their classrooms and those that equipment is out of date and needs to be replaced at those 34 sites so that's the 2010-2012 equipment is now out of date what does it mean to be out of date are they broken down you can't use them they don't go on the internet anymore i don't know so it's it's a projector and a document camera and um a cart and a set of speakers effectively um and then some of those have a computer on them as well and the expected like those systems is about four to five years so are they breaking how many of them what percentage of them broke down this are broken down now that we haven't placed it there are fairly large percentage of them or what um i i would say it's a fairly large percentage i don't have an exact you know percentage to give you at this point are we buying ones for teachers would this include ones for teachers that don't have any now do we still have teachers that don't have any so that's a really good question so we're the the tech bundles that we rolled out during that time frame in 2010 went out to about 34 schools and then we waited several years because we didn't have the budget to roll out to the rest of the schools those tech funds are going out this year right now to the rest of the schools and this proposal would have us going
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back and refreshing those old bundles so at the end of next school year basically everybody would have a brand new bundle every classroom the uh what is it that needs to be refreshed with them i'm still kind of lost on that so so projectors break down um the bulbs don't last particularly long um often times it's it's almost as expensive to replace the bulb um to replace the projector as it is to replace the bulb um document cameras break um that the parts just aren't they're just not made to last you know forever and so the equipment does break down it gets damaged and it needs to be replaced and we came up in this number by doing a survey throughout our schools no this this number was generated based on the cost of replacing the cards at those sites replacing the tech bundles at those locations even if they're not even if they're not broken correct and then the tech bundles that we reclaim from those sites we would refurbish and repurpose for other uses i'm not trying to be rude here but i'm still having trouble if i've got a tech bundle and it's working and it's got a camera basically the tech bundles my understanding is you have a computer that you can pull things up and you can then put them through and the document camera up on the screen for kids to see that's the tech bundle is there some other portion of that that i'm missing yeah so if if mine's not broken and it's working along we're gonna take it back and give you a new one give me a new one anyway so i i mean we could probably have a pretty lengthy discussion about you know the best way to maintain the technology but in my opinion um it's better to keep all of the technology to the extent possible updated all at one time and have it all standardized and the same and we are much more able to support that if we go in and we're having to investigate every single classroom to determine what needs to be replaced in that classroom that's a monumental effort to visit every classroom and evaluate the condition of the equipment and then we also end up with different ages of equipment in different places so the approach here is to replace all that equipment bring everything back throw away what's bad keep what's usable and then repurpose that over time what do we do with the repurposing because that won't be that won't be up to date with the new stuff purposing when do we sell it or do we put that back out and you've got a repurposed one instead of the new one that you got if everybody has a new one what would we do with the repurposing ones so the stock that we would maintain of refurbished equipment could be used as newer equipment breaks down so over the next five year expected lifespan of that equipment as things break down prematurely we can come put that refurbished equipment into those classrooms we can also put it into new spaces as we you know open up new classrooms if we don't put a new tech bundle into those rooms we can use refurbished equipment there we there's a variety of things we can do with it thank you very much appreciate you taking the time great other questions just on the technology i'll just i want to make a comment which is um we really need it in a big way that was evidence in survey right of the teachers and the principals yes and i i see it in my kids schools so it's it is a real big yeah and it's standard practice in large organizations exactly what you're how you're managing it so i appreciate that um so summer so there's a couple things that that i was hoping that would be up here that's not up here one is the the summer program is related to high school but then there's this whole other i'm thinking of something like the pdx summer school you know we received a letter from tim but there's a whole set of programs that are geared toward younger kids and uh just did did that get overlooked or is it it's where in your mind we're fine with it and we'll get funded in the next budget are there things that we can do now that would help this next summer so no we're not fine with it so we could be doing a whole lot more summer programming than we currently do at across the entire like age span and what we prioritized for this purpose was um high school and getting kids to graduation so we did not do like could we we could do the whole budget this entire thing of saying what we'd like to do with it is just fund summer programming for kids across k-12 and have really robust stuff that we can do and we've got programming that we're doing and some sites and stuff that we're doing with partners but it's very um well it scattered its patch together so
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and we do our best to patch together things that kids need to get them the support they need um particularly key transition points but it's patched it's very patched together it's something we'd love to continue to build and um and in this list i prioritized high school so but you could you could again spend this entire dollar amount and just do summer programming and still not hit what you want to be able to hit in terms of numbers of kids who need it yeah this is also where we rely on some of our partnership with like sun and parks and right other folks we haven't heard from yet any comments questions i just want to say thanks for the list and helped kind of um assemble it in my mind i still um with all those on unknowns and i don't believe all those unknowns will like i don't believe we'll find ourselves with the worst case scenario um at the same time um i don't believe there are certain things i believe will happen that will be part of that worst case scenario and so i guess i'm landing at a comfort level at 5.5 that feels both operational that feels both that it meets our aspirational goal and still will keep us pretty close to board policy of three percent if worst-case scenarios happened i found myself similar to director regan saying i don't want to invest just because of the encumbrance on other anything other than one time at the same time if there is a way for us to hold back some of this reserves and be really thoughtful to support focus and priority schools that actually pulled me out that that said you know for that priority rather than this mad scramble of let's hurry up and spend 12 million dollars in the next six months or four months let's be intentional with what we're doing and spending it on um so i just i offer that as as a possibility or something that i'd be willing to but again i would trust um you're in staff's judgment about how that how that goes rather than looking saying you know i'm going to take this piece but not that piece and this piece and that piece um so i'll just so so that's actually super helpful i think for just kind of moving toward resolution of this discussion so i'm hearing from director belial a comfort of 5.5 versus the 4.5 that's in the current version of the resolution i'll just say i'm i'm there as well for some of the same reasons so i don't know if other folks if we get a sense of yeah director knowles so i um i think i talked about this last week but um i'm also at 5.5 for almost exactly the same reasons that greg mentioned um i think we have to balance the uncertainty that we or at least i feel with our urgency and i think that the superintendent has done a really great job of providing us with some examples of how she would spend this money and i would would not be opposed to tweaks with that given what you're hearing from us and i guess i am really concerned about the uncertainties because i'm not certain about the co-chairs budget i'm not sure we'll get there and even if we get to that i'm not sure that that i'm not sure that'll be enough for us because right now it's not we're not quite there yet um and then i'm also very concerned about the kicker and whether it kicks that's 300 million dollars and the legislature's going to have to come up with that money someplace and some of that will be with schools and from what i'm hearing from people who are in salem they're thinking yes that it's going to kick because our economy is continuing to grow so those are the things that i'm most concerned about i just i keep thinking back to those years when we were doing all those cuts and all our programs being decimated and so many teachers being lost and all those horrible things that happened when we were having to make all those cuts and i would like to minimize the amount of cuts we would have to make the next time around if in fact all of these terrible things happen which who knows they may not but then again as tom was talking you asked david about what about the upside and we were surprised last year by the upside uh it would be wonderful to be surprised again this year but that's another thing that we just don't know about and i'm not going to rely on that for me so that's why i'm i'm at 5.5 as well actually i'm at seven but i'm gonna fight yeah these are then so i'm a little bit confused why we're having the whole discussion about 4.5 versus 5.5 because i thought last week we asked the superintendent to come back with a budget that reflected 4.5 and we as far as i recall voted on that so
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i'm confused why we're having this discussion again um so i wanted to mention a couple of things or have a couple of questions one is musical instruments when i look at providing 242 musical instruments at 49 schools um that comes out to something like five musical instruments per school so i'm trying to understand how we got there what that what that means what that will do for us whether it will have any impact feel free um our arts tosa has been dying for this question i'm just going to say she's in the weighing already talk to me about musical instruments and how we can get band programs started in middle school so can i just say back in the fall when we had the moment where we were getting to do some ads the one person i got a full budget from like immediately our arts toast so go for it yes thank you for having me up here i appreciate being here um so i'm i you know i i want to talk to your question about the the amount of instruments um i'm sorry can you tell us your name i'm sorry thank you so much i'm not i've never been up here kristen brayson i'm the arts dosa welcome thank you um so within that amount we have to look at the cost per instrument the lowest instrument cost is a flute that's 362 per per flute a medium cost of instrument is a base clarinet that's two thousand dollars and then the high cost is a baritone sax at four thousand three hundred and sixty dollars so that adds up very quickly um when you're looking at it it's a lot of flute players yes so um the the schools that we're talking about presently we have students that don't have instruments in their hands um and in in class so we are trying to fill where our gaps are with this and that's what the investment would be about at this point um talking to direct reagan talking to your point about what we're going to do about an articulation um i am going to be presenting march 3rd and we'll really dive a little deeper into those details to try to figure out what that picture looks like for you guys okay i guess i'm looking at one time um clearly for next year we might be looking at adding music teachers i mean we've got the arts text that's helping us k5 we could be looking at the 612 articulation which is what i assume you're talking about but you know obviously musical instruments are expensive and it's one of the areas that you know at some point we have to bite the bullet and make the investment if we're going to really attempt to offer our kids this so um i'm feeling like 242 instruments is a pretty minuscule request in general um so moving on from there um another question i wanted to ask is i had uh sent a uh email to the board and and to oh i'm sorry you want to talk music stuff go ahead um i was curious is is there a used market is that a viable option i couldn't hear you i'm sorry is there a used market for instruments and is that a viable option it can be very tricky our music shop person we have one for the entire district and um so their time is spent a lot of times on our we our stock right now is super old and we're going to need to look at replenishing whether or not we tear that out over a couple of years but trying to work on instruments that need replacement is sometimes takes more time than actually getting a brand new instrument that you're not going to have to spend all that labor cost on so um you know there's there's different ways to weigh out your investment options with that i mean i'm a hack musician but i've never bought a new instrument um and the ones i buy work great so i just because it is expensive four thousand bucks for sax sorry just yeah you might want to look into it yeah and and certainly you know down the road as we're looking at stuff we can um look at those options too and provide you with some more data that would make sense for you so just a time time check colleagues for about 15 minutes over so let's um other questions comments so i was still wanting to ask another question so i had sent a note to the board before
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the last board meeting again asking about the notion of trying to give each of our juniors the opportunity to take the pcc math test which is sort of the gateway course at pcc we end up having something like 70 80 percent of students have to take remedial math when they go to pcc where they have to pay for it themselves and they don't get any credit for it so as part of our effort to be college and career ready i have asked whether or not we have an option of potentially offering that test to our juniors and then offering the pcc remedial math class the following year to um and you know what as i'm asking this i'm realizing this is really more of a budget question for next year yes i think this isn't a question for now okay thank you but that's a good heads up thank you so director we're prepared to talk about it yes be prepared please we are definitely going to keep coming back budget process as soon as we get through this thank you so uh not tonight but very soon director martin thank you um so let's sort of looking through a lens of uh using our um using our milestones uh our achievement um agreement as sort of their the litmus test and what are the things that are gonna that are going to move the dial uh and you know in um at risk of sounding like a luddite i'm technology isn't as big of a deal for me right now uh except for uh support specifically around the virtual scholars program which offers alternative to for students who may or may not be able to to access curriculum in another form if i were to still use that same litmus test you know i'm always a big fan of safety improvements i'm you know i think our summer school and credit recovery is something we absolutely need to invest in i i love the you know antonio's recommendation around and in fact when i made the comment last week was kind of just last week i said you know let's not put a time limit on this let's figure out you know maybe there's a way to invest and i didn't know what that was at the time but but to me this literacy effort looks like a multi-year strategy to minimize even if there was a school went off as a focused priority option school lost some of that additional ode resource we would be able to maintain that still continue to build that investment in those schools so that that looks like it's a way for us to create a deeper investment and then you know the those those strategies that are particularly important to in reaching out and improving training of teachers in areas of equity and diversity and so those are the things that i'm looking not to nitpick one or the other uh but those are the things that that mean the most and i'm glad to see them in there i think they're you know if i had a list of all my i would like to's um it might add a couple of other things second to last item is i really appreciate looking at this um this information and uh and hearing the survey the survey thank you and hearing back from so many different people you know overwhelmingly it uh you know as a if i use my executive director hat i think what programmatically can i do to to move the dial and push push achievement forward if i'm looking at staff uh i'm or you know staff input yeah it's probably going to be about what's going to help me deliver my deliver something in the classroom so i really appreciate that perspective all in all i'm and given that the information tonight i would be leaning more towards um something in the middle uh can i ask a clarifying question director morton in terms of the 3.7 million that's in spending plan a yeah um i guess what i'm hearing and from my perspective that's more because that would be an ongoing over three years
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right i'm i guess my preference and i think director regan got at this as well that and when we move into our budgeting processes that would be on the table for as part of the discussions versus having it be part of a one-time this spring spending yeah that's where i'm at i think we could do that but i'm uh when you look at this as a one time in the stability that this would create i think it's an attractive an attractive option and um if we all pinky swear that we're going to be seriously considering that within the um within the budget process i uh i would be much more inclined to say let's let's find another way to create that investment but i do i do really like the uh the stability that an investment like this would make over a multi-year period so moving toward actually um voting on this resolution i'll just say um i was a no vote on going into this and so i would still be a no vote on as currently written at 5.5 percent um to me i would be a no vote on it as 5 45 yeah so um i could you know i could live with the 4.5 that is currently written i would be a no vote i appreciate all the work that's gone into and i really appreciate the rapid turnaround and the staff input um but i like director knowles given that we during the course of the year got became got into a better financial position to is a really good thing given all the uncertainties ahead last fall we were in this school year right now we're looking ahead to the future the new biennium and a lot of uncertainty so um so that's where that's where i'm at certainly excited about all this potential and this direct as uh superintendent smith said we could each come up with lots of different spending plans and much much much more it's not to say that all of these aren't really valuable and important pieces so so can i ask for clarity on what you just did so you're not supporting it if it's at 4.5 no i'm not supporting it as currently written at 4.5 i'm sorry okay i was saying it completely backward you're right yeah someone marked up my page here sorry sorry completely adult uh yeah what i was trying to say was the spending down to 4.5 percent i continue not to support yeah thank you for so i uh director viewer i think smith was going to say something i didn't want to interrupt her no i was just i said the thing i got to say i was going for clarity from ruth about what she was working on coherence always a lofty goal for me okay okay go onward with my questions can you explain virtual scholars exactly how that works because i don't understand it exactly how it works i can't again i'm going to ask shea james who is um virtual scholars summer scholars and portland evening scholars students who need 12 mobile computer labs i don't know and antonio both you guys can both come up and do these well i might be able to do part of it um virtual scholars is under multiple pathways and so um antonio can speak to the equipment and maybe i can speak to the programming questions just very briefly we just want a quick answer and maybe there could be additional follow-up as this plan rolls out with details on what it's going to point the vote tonight how are they going to do we're voting on whether on what level of spending the submission is going to do this would have a lot of influence we do need to move on to influence proportionate discipline so what we're looking into oh so antonio lopez assistant superintendent for the office school performance so what we're looking is looking for those options which provide students the opportunity to make up on credits if they're for if they for example if they get an ad right what are the ways in which the options that we can provide our students so they can make that credit as soon as possible so there are some investments in terms of that that we ask in terms of technology because uh for some of them the chromebooks will not work they need an actual computer enabled to see downline if it is online so there are some asks for technology to upgrade the capacity and also how do we offer more more to more students that need those types of credit makeups don't think what i can't understand is that the need for a whole set for them don't they meet in a school does that school have
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technology and so forth that they can use now i mean aren't they aren't the virtual scholars using technology in the school now why would they yes and we want to make more available to them and currently we have outdated technology in many of our schools and we've been replacing with chromebooks and operating systems that virtual scholars can't use and so we do need the technology in order to be able to offer these services to students and we're particularly we'll be targeting for the first time with virtual scholars as well uh seniors who are six to ten credits behind and so that will also be another component that we'll be looking okay next question uh i would like to wrap this up because we're now half an hour behind the agenda i have a couple questions well let's if you can make them very quick please because we do i don't know how quick to answer you i make questions quick well we're really not we're not going into the detail on the superintendent's plan because she can come back to us with further detail on that but we need to decide upon tonight is the spending level that we're authorizing our end vote on this resolution well the spending level is contingent upon what we're buying with it and i'm asking questions about what we're buying but why wouldn't we allow that i mean are we back at speed check quickly ask your question and then director knowles also as well about four or five more uh library books we're talking about reflecting the cultural diversity of our students what my concern is that that does not become the singular i mean i think all of our librarians know to do that but that that's not where i would suggest that you want to spend all your library finding ones to get those good books that are new that we don't have in the libraries are set so this but this is written in your comments like it was reflecting just that see what it says there it says and i just wanted to make sure it wasn't really it says an update library collection is closed with books reflecting the cultural diversity of our students but not all of the books necessarily are reflecting the culture that we're updating some of them would just be updating regular books that don't reflect any cultural thing that kids like to read everything reflects cultural specificity of some sort and so it's really looking at how do we have library collections that are going to appeal to all of our kids so including um like wide array of novels that are going to really appeal to all sorts of kids so i mean it's really just saying update our collections and i think the superintendent is acting in line with our racial educational equity policy which is pretty clear on this and again i just i guess with respect the super we're delegating to the superintendent the authority to carry this out we're not mike steve on this one if you have some specific thoughts on it contact me and give me the specific thoughts in terms of if you're wanting to look at specific things we purchase okay so just keep going here you want to let somebody else ask somebody else you can have people vote to stop my questions but you can't stop them yourself why don't you go ahead and ask your questions okay uh on the physical education equipment does the national pe teacher association standards why would we have that as a standard on pe equipment when we have what that each building needs maybe they don't need something on the national pe teacher association standards but they need more soccer balls i don't understand how that works so i will um ask our office of teaching and learning to respond to you specifically about what that includes what the standards include and what the equipment is that they recommend to us and we'll hold purchasing that i'll keep purchasing that item until i'm able to give you that answer that question well i just was more curious about why we would be why we would put that restriction in there instead of letting people get what they needed to get okay going to k3 literacy i've got terrific problems here i think in that i'm a mind that we shouldn't do it over a three year period because i think it needs more thought than we have here we've got we've got support planning professional development progress monitoring support differentiation of instruction implementation the rti model what i i personally think what we need to do is be hiring teachers who work directly with children and this isn't it and it's a lot of money and i think we need to as a board sit down and look through and see what we're doing here as opposed to there are some people in here there's four focused schools or some people but it's not even guaranteed that those people work directly with children what i would think if we had four schools and we put people in we would put in reading teachers who work directly with teeth with children not somebody who was
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planning the rti model here i think we could do that in a different way all right that's my comment on that so i i really wouldn't support money at that so that puts me down in the 4.5 is that right because that's on the other hand it puts you at 5.5 and um same thing on the career technical education expansion it's got support for curriculum development and is that for actually developing curriculum for specific courses in specific schools or is that for a more generalized it's giving an allocation to each high school and it's for like whatever that high school needs to keep moving the um building their cte offerings so it could include equipment it could include curriculum development could include professional development like i described about project lead the way where you're actually taking a curriculum that's already basically developed but it has lab intensive kind of equipment that you need to purchase so like it's really giving we've had some schools that every school added a new strand of cte this last year and numbers of them have now identified additional equipment needs in order to fully offer it so we're continuing to invest and allow them to keep crafting the cte offerings that that they've begun crafting so but it's the discretion of the school with that range of things possible to invest in and my last question yep thank you uh and i'm not going to comment on the workload committee doing the consolidated budget stuff but i have a lot of questions around that one too are the avid training why do we need i mean i'm i like the dyslexia training stuff of course it's excellent but the avid training i'm not sure how the how much money are we talking about and that for the avid because you've got the avid just replaces other classes in your school it's not on top of other classes in your school it replaces something because they have a period for avid in my correct you have a period for avid and so you have a period for abbott so now you have avid instead of where you had an elective normally you wouldn't have stopped to take it yet yeah it takes a place of an elective so i think we have a lot more work to do on avid before we go nuts on it so here's what we personally what we have done is we have so madison's actually been doing avid for a number of years george george and cleveland and roosevelt and what we did this last year in the general fund was start building back into the feeder patterns for those high schools of teaching those study skills back in middle school and actually in elementary school so we've been really doing what you're building is a common language about how you study and um and a discipline but it's common language about the kids and the adults and it's been highly successful it's a highly successful national model what we are do proposing here is that we're building across all of our middle schools and then three of our high schools three more of our high schools are ready to sit and want to add it i see here it says funds pay for teacher time at summer training and site team meetings tutors family nights and professional development yeah i'm just saying so what this would be for us is we've got other partners who would be paying for the actual training and for the library building your avid library what we would be paying for is the time um because it's during the summer so we'd be paying for teacher and staff time to go to the trainings i'm yeah i'm just saying i think that the avid we need to take a look and see exactly if it's if it's doing what we want to do i i don't have any question that it's not that it's a highly successful national model but so is music so is our arts are highly successful nationals so are librarians they are highly successful national model backed up by research so are all these other things that we are replacing by doing the habit possibly i don't know i just think i i'd rather look at it so okay thank you thank you director thank you um i'd like to propose an amendment to the resolution uh under the section on resolution i would change uh in paragraph one the amount to 7.2 million and in paragraph two the contingency at 5.5 okay so a motion to amend resolution 5018 is on the table to amend resolve number one uh change 12.125 to 7.2 million resolve number two change four point five percent to five percent is there a second well second okay so director knowles moved and director belial seconds the amendment any discussion on the amendment i would just reiterate the things that i already said which is that i think that
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we're in a time of uncertainty we're at the beginning of a biennium not at the middle of the biennium we're unsure where the legislature is moving we don't know if the kicker is going to kick i think the superintendent has put together a tremendous outline for us on where this money could be spent and um i think that 5.5 is a um is a good place for us to be based on um all the uncertainty that we have to face thank you and let me also say we're in the middle of a budget yes in the middle of budgeting for the coming year so we're really only talking about what we're doing for the next four months so i i really think that we need to to keep it at 5.5 and if the legislature comes back and gives us all the money that we need then there's always time for another conversation so director regan yeah i'm i'm opposed and i'm so confused why we're even having this discussion again because a couple of weeks ago we we had this vote we instructed the superintendent to come back and give us some budget ideas on how to spend some one-time funds and where we would land at 4.5 our board policy says our reserve should be at three percent our aspirational goal is five percent i'm so glad that we're not talking about seven percent now we have urgent needs out in our classrooms today um so i don't understand why we're going past our aspirational goal i understand that there are some uncertainties but when i look at where we are today compared to the last 12 years that i've been on the board we're in better shape than we've ever been in and yes there are uncertainties and that's the reason you have a reserve but i don't see any reason for us to go past our aspirational goals when we have such urgent needs in the classroom today so i will be a no vote on the amendment other comments on the amendment director filler sure i mean i i'm i guess i'd reiterate what bobby said it's just uh we we have voted on this these unknowns were known to us when we first voted on it they're still they're still out there this is um there's a there's a whole upside that we're that we're not taking into consideration i do agree also with what pam said earlier about tweaks um so i would vote for 4.5 i would like to see some tweaks given our discussion like you to consider potentially the huge gap in the summer programs for the younger kids um if we could do something right but just in terms of this amendment your comment is that you would not support the amendment said would it that's correct i would move for 4.5 other comments on this amendment um i'll just add for me the um i would support this amendment and um again given that we are now going into our budget process for this coming year the contingency will be part of the discussion for that process going to the sierra and over the next few months as we have our town halls we hear from the community things become clear in the legislature we'll have much that money will still be on the table for consideration very much so but i don't want to tie us down at this very moment for short-term spending this spring as valuable and as needed and as wonderful as all these proposals are to get us down that low going in at this point in the year so that's that's where i'm at supporting the amendment director bill did you have something you wanted to say on the amendment uh no i don't think so i'm kind of supporting matt's proposal so i have an amendment after okay so first let's vote on the amendment that's currently on the table if everyone has said what they want to say okay all those in favor of the amendment please say i i so that was four i think all those opposed please say no no any abstentions okay and student representative hi chess wallace pudding yes okay so that was uh the amendment carries by vote of four to two with director buell abstaining and student representative voting yes okay so what we now have is 5018 as amended um karen do you have the amendments was that clear what the amendment was okay all right so now we're going to um are we ready to vote on resolution 5018 as amended so um is this an opportunity to offer an amendment okay so i would like to uh make an amendment to an amendment that would increase the amount of money that we're spending by 300 000 which would match what the teacher workload committee is putting into the consolidated budget and that
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will give our principals some immediate flexibility um out in the field okay okay this is our second second okay so bobby moves and tom seconds an amendment to 5018 that would increase the amount spent by 300 000 to match the workload committee and give principals flexibility etc that's close enough yes um okay so there's been moved in second and then amendment any discussion director below i just um both appreciate the the needs that are happening at the school whether it's paper or any number of issues that our schools do and i'm just using this opportunity while it's on the table to mention that as i get to work with districts throughout the county i'm sometimes surprised at how much flexibility we give our principals and so whether or not it's the most effective for us to let them have for example 160 000 at their discretion it's something that i guess i'd be interested in considering whether or not that's the best strategy for us to do other comments i'll just say i mean i appreciate the spirit behind this but i think i would leave it to the superintendent i'm hearing that there's sort of a separate conversation about this and i think i would just prefer to keep for me i would prefer to keep it the resolution as amended and she's heard our input and and thoughts on this and other topics and she can go forth and and work that work that out in uh would it be possible to ask the superintendent if she's supportive of this amendment so do you want the answer to that sure yeah so yes and here's what i would say like what if it if it doesn't pass as the amendment i'll look with how to do it within the spending plan too so just to say the spirit of the amendment yes yeah yeah i guess for me it also it's for me it's we give our input on the different perspectives and i want the superintendent to make the decisions to go out and implement it that's i guess the spirit of it yes yes okay so let's go ahead and vote on the second amendment to resolution five zero one eight um all those in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes so wait one two three four all those opposed please indicate by saying no no so that's three so the amendment carries by vote of four to three with student representative voting yes yes okay so now we have a resolution that's been amended to so i guess um you know i'm sorry directory i didn't clarify did you mean to just increase the 7.2 million by another 300 000 or do you want a separate thing that's okay do we need to put in the rest of the verbage about what that is for and where if so where would that go well instead of 7.2 it looks like it would be 7.5 right right and then whatever that corresponding percentage we would now be at five something and i i don't know if i can calculate it that quickly in your head come on david okay so looking at our board council are we okay with this you you have been clear the intent of what the amendment says okay and did um did you need i'm sorry i should have asked this before we voted but do you need to have the specific wording about what that additional money would be for or you we've everyone expected okay great just checking okay so now are we ready to vote on resolution five zero one eight as twice the minute of director buell i'm an amendment all right what's your amendment i like to move that we spend that we take an extra million dollars which is basically where we lost three three million seven hundred thousand in the support for focus and priority schools and put it in one of two places either people who work directly with children in focus and priority schools around reading or in athletics engage which engage children in after-school athletics and supporting what we're doing around the athletic work in the middle schools okay so if i understand you write the amendment the superintendent do with it as she would like okay so amendments from director buell is to spend an additional 1 million dollars above the 7.5 with the indication that should be spent on people working directly with children in focus and priority schools on reading or athletics athletics at focus and priority schools just athletics athletics in general particularly in the middle schools or just in middle school athletics or athletics and musical grades would be better in middle grades okay is there a second second so director curler's seconds um any discussion on this amendment
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director i just um again all the ideas that i hear um i actually um are good ideas as were all the ideas that we saw in the list of input from from various surveys um and really we know that we are two billion on the state budget away from um from what's the quality education model which is something that we'd want and my my concern with these amendment after amendment after amendment is that there's a lack of strategic thought behind what we're trying to do it feels piecemeal and this is a this is a pattern that has happened before in the board and i've seen it diminish and so i'm i'm concerned as it's rearing rearing its tendency again it's well within our authority to do i don't don't question that we can go line by line 10 by 10 but this does not seem to be the wisest use of investment in fact it feels like we are trying to spend money fast and furious rather than focusing on trying to get the best outcomes for our kids and i i just want to see that director do you want to speak sure thank you um because i think everything that uh we're doing and that we've talked about actually is strategic um and i think the most strategic thing that we can do uh is help our kids right now um and uh every time that an opportunity goes by and we can't help somebody to read or every time that we miss an opportunity to engage somebody we pay for it fivefold down the road so it's highly strategic to spend resources that we have now on our kids now so i just appreciate your what you're saying but i just really disagree with it director knows um i'm going to be a no on the amendment mainly because it's not that i don't appreciate our sports programs and want them to be stronger and uh literacy but my understanding is that most of the literacy money that was in their proposal is money in the out years about 400 000 in the in years and my hope is that as you're adjusting these there's going to font you're going to find and we will find within the budget this coming year this 400 000 and then the next year however much we need in each following year so part of the complexity of these is when we're adding people for four months right but we're not in we can't say we want you then also going on into next year finding the people we need with the skills that we need to work with somebody perform so like i wouldn't out of the 3.2 million dollars take the 400 000 and just fund it right now for four months for the income here at the end of the year because i can't tell that person i need you for three you know for three years right to dive in and go deep um so even anyway so just that's the complexity we don't tell any of our employees no about them for three years we don't no but you do do that but you know what i'm saying you don't say this is a four-month job but we want somebody who's highly talented and can teach reading and i will only want you for four months yeah that's right at the same time we've all as i think it was you said pinkie sweared uh that we all you like the that we strategically are very supportive of the strategy and right i'm just concerned about uh as uh chair atkinson has stated just these one-offs coming through and i i liked the proposal that you put forward for all of us and i'd like to i'm with director belisle and i believe that we empower you with the ability to do that and and we should leave it there yeah i'll just say again to hire people right now does not make sense to talk about hiring people this coming year great and to have some of these one time particularly it's material investments that will go directly to help kids whether it's the library books or the instruments or the athletic equipment that's that's great but i wouldn't support an amendment to spend on people for a short term um especially considering the amount of time it would take staff to ramp up a mid-year hiring process in the short term i'd rather they were out looking for awesome teachers for this coming year um okay other comments on this amendment director buehl yeah the strategic area around we're very strategic around our sports programs that we're trying to put in so to suggest that that's not strategic i mean we're strategic around it this i think that that any teachers we hired now as reading teachers and we let we laid off tons of reading teachers in our town i mean tons of reading pieces we're
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going to put them back we're going to put them back so if we hired them now and we got good ones i'm not for hiring poor ones but we hire good ones now they're going to be around they're going to be around they're going to figure out we could tell them hey you're probably and we can put them in this next budget and make sure they're there and get started on helping children to read it just seemed we had people hired on this and you said well it's a three-year commitment maybe but i don't see why we couldn't tell people hey look they're looking there's a lot of teachers out there maybe who are looking for reading jobs who are pretty darn good all right let's go ahead and i think it's very i think it's very strategic because hiring people that teach children to read is the best strategy that we have for a third grade reading which is our main goal and so doing that is about as strategic as you could possibly get i guess from my perspective i wouldn't question whether it's strategic to hire great reading teachers it's just the timing of doing so in february through from job that would be from february to june but let's go ahead and vote on this amendment all those in favor of the amendment um from director beale please indicate by saying aye aye all right so i'm sorry that was uh three all uh those opposed to using can't be saying no no so the amendment um fails with four opposed three in favor and student representative jesus voting no no okay all right so we're back to now ready to vote i hope on resolution 5018 as amended um any clarification needed by staff or any members on what we're voting on at this point you got it awesome okay let's now go to resolution five zero one eight as amended all those in favor please indicate by saying aye aye aye all opposed please think anybody saying no all right the motion passes unanimously seven to zero excuse me the resolution passes down to zero with student representative jazz while voting yes yes okay thank you all very much superintendent smith thank you so much for bringing forth this plan and for listening to all the input and we look forward to hearing um the results and how these this rolls out and i know again appreciation to all the staff who weighed in quickly on that survey which really made a big difference and we're looking forward to hearing how he's short-term small we know not enough but hopefully very welcome investments will make a difference and i'll say this at the end again as well but just for folks who are thinking in terms of the upcoming budget i know soon word's going to go out we're gonna have a number of town halls around the budget so be looking for those so as we move into the full budget process for this coming year we want to hear from everybody okay so with that we will now move on to an update on eliminating disproportionate discipline the disproportionate discipline rate which is one of the top priorities of this district um superintendent smith would you like to introduce this item um i would and i'll introduce lolenzo poe who's our chief equity and diversity officer and director of partnerships sarah singer who's the senior director of system planning and performance rick kirshman who's the program director of supportive school discipline kevin bacon our principal at boyce elliott humboldt as the primary presenters and they'll introduce others and kevin i think kevin bacon i think you're up at the table here too i think you're up the table too there's another chair right over there thank you all so much for being here thank you for your patience and waiting for this item to come up we really appreciate you being here thank you lolenzo poe over to you good evening uh madam co-chairs board member superintendent smith lolenzo poe uh and it is a great pleasure to be before you again to bring you some information on the updating of our exclusionary discipline to remind you that our commitment as a district is to reduce exclusionary discipline and increase instructional time for all students the superintendent has set out as one of her three priorities a goal around exclusionary discipline and the closing of disparities around exclusionary discipline and its disparities there's a fish she calls for a 50 reduction in overall exclusionary discipline and a 50 reduction in disproportionality in exclusionary discipline in two years in addition to that she has made an agreement to participate in a broad based community dialogue and discussion led by portland parents union to determine a set of recommendations that could be formed as a basis of a moratorium or ways to look at how to further eliminate exclusions is a part of what the district does so tonight we want to talk to you about some of the data we're going to talk to you about some of the strategies and programs that we're putting in place and the kinds of
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things we believe it takes to address this issue and so with that let me turn it over to sarah singer who will walk you through some of the key data elements then we'll have an opportunity here from rick kirschner who is the manager for our climate department and also then have an opportunity for you to hear from a school that is actively involved in the work and beginning to make strides towards closing uh eliminating the disparities in exclusion and then we'll answer questions so with that sarah all right thanks a lot um before i begin um just i think it's important to note that when i talk about exclusionary discipline in the context of this presentation and when i present data i'm talking about when a student is either expelled or suspended from school and so what i'm going to show you is our percent of students who have been excluded at least once over over at um a time period from 2007 to 2014 13 14. and so what we note is that for our overall population 7.1 percent of our students had been excluded at least once in 2007 and 8. that number is now 3.3 percent for the 2013-14 year so that's a reduction really of it's really been cut in half basically in contrast you can look at our african-american or black population and what we see is that in 2007 eight approximately 18 percent of um black students had been excluded at least once in 2013-14 it had dropped to 10.5 however when you compare that to our white population what you'll see is that over time our white population has also decreased in terms of the amount of exclusions that they experience in in 2013-14 it was 2.3 percent of our white population who had experienced an exclusion so what you you can note is that um if you look at our um our black population at 10.5 percent um being excluded for 2013-14 versus our white population um at 2.3 percent that's about 4.5 times the rate um so we call that the relative rate and that has been not it's not been growing over time but it's also not been shrinking over time and so this is why we have an exclusionary goal that's explicitly targeting the disproportionality of exclusion not just the amount of exclusion overall the other critical group that i think sometimes gets overlooked is our native american population this group is been our second most excluded group for at least the last three years that i've looked at this data so i think it's safe to say that that is a trend so i'm going to present this next set of data is on our four-year graduation rate and and by presence or absence of exclusion during high school and so i'm just going to caveat that this is 2012-13 graduation rate data we're working on updating it for the 1314 grad rate data but i believe the trends will still be similar so students who have never been excluded from high school have a 68 graduation rate they've been excluded at least once it drops to 43 percent excluded between two and five times it drops to 34 percent and finally if you've been excluded between 5 and 10 times we see those students graduating 20 at 20 within four years um at portland public schools we are actively seeking to disaggregate all of the data that we present um by both race and gender so we've done that here percent of students excluded at least once by gender and race for the 13-14 school year and so what you'll see is our our black males our native males and our black females are the groups sort of excluded most frequently and you also note that it then goes pacific islander male 1 males who identify as multiple races hispanic males and white males so there's definitely a gender component to exclusion and then it you'll see the remainder of our groups all the way down to our asian female population which is excluded one percent of the time and compare that to our black male population who's excluded 15 15 of them have been excluded this data this pattern interestingly if
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you look at black male native male and black female for the last three years we've seen the data look very similar to this in terms of order so you'll see black males kind of on top both for 13 14 but also we saw it for 12 13 followed by native male followed by black female so we've seen several years now of that exact same order so this is percent of students excluded at least once by grade level as well as race so what we'll see here is um in pre-k through third grade um if you look at who's excluded the most and i'm just going to oh i hit the wrong button okay um what you're going to see right here is that red triangle and then that um that line right there that represents our native population that represents our our african-american population so from the get-go what we know is that our native and our black populations are excluded um more frequently and disproportionately starting literally in kindergarten and then what we see over time is that almost for almost all of the racial and ethnic groups students as they get older are more likely to be excluded but what you see specifically with our black population is an enormous jump starting in grades four and then culminating in grades six through eight so i'm referring to this pinnacle right here can we can you remind me how old are children and fourth and fifth grade um yeah nine and ten so if we see a significant jump in black black male children and who are nine and ten years old correct and i would just yes black male children and black females as well actually right yeah i just want yeah for me it's an important um it's an important thing to recognize that these are these are children yes so we're talking about nine and ten years old it's ridiculous director morning i think it's important to note that that pattern starts interesting enough as early as kindergarten and beers yeah so we see it at four five and six but can i can i also point out on that graph that it also appears that um for for many of our kids the exclusionary discipline peaks at middle school middle school grades is that fair enough yep that is true that is i think one of the reasons that we've been talking about needing to make some more investments in middle grades in the middle grades so as we look at the data we present the data in a way and try to center on a couple of things as a district as we are seeing reduction in exclusionary discipline and they're also seeing reductions in the disproportionality of kids of color the issue of a persistent disparity is a place that you really have to begin to attack and approach as well as looking at what is the total culture of our district that gets us the kind of results that we can continue to bring down exclusionary practice for us as we look at across the district as we look across the country one of the things that we really recognize that the foundation of our pbis work our positive behavioral intervention and support work that is creating a school climate that engages every student and family comfort with this issue of restorative justice how do you resolve conflicts by strengthening relationships instead of punitive measures becomes the centerpiece of a climate and a culture we want in all schools and what we also found that when you look at that where you bring in a deeper connection with the cares work or collaborative action research for equity where you begin to work with schools and teachers and principals who begin to look at their practice begin to focus on how they're utilizing their practices their tools with an eye toward racial equity we find that we begin to make certain kinds of gains that leads us to believe that the more we accelerate that the more we build that kind of climate and culture throughout the district we can in fact continue to drive the numbers down so that is an important backstop because that is the kind of climate that we want to build throughout the district in every school but we also recognize that
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there's some key actions that also has to correspond with that and add to one is also providing racial equity training for all our new teachers courageous conversations become the foundational piece for the district for us to begin to everyone examine their racial consciousness and how race in fact may be a collaborator and how people address their pedagogy and how they interact with students and staff we also look at the revision excuse me of the student discipline and conduct document so that it lines up with what we talk about in a restorative system for a district and how in fact we're addressing discipline and exclusionary practices across the board and particularly what our students are calling we want to partner with families as we develop school climate plans particularly families of students of color to engage them in the planning of the climate having to support our schools having them support our principals and support their children are a critical element of making sure that we as a district we as a community really in place to support the kind of climate the kind of schools we want to see so that we're no longer having the kind of levels of disparities around exclusion that we've seen again i want to keep focusing on this and sometimes it's one of those things where i don't want to sound like a cheerleader but i also have to be reminding that we are moving forward we just have to accelerate the other piece is as we talk about the climate in our schools it is important that that climate is ground with everyone who comes into the building that they're a part of the climate and culture so we're training our partners we're starting with our sun system who contains many multiple partners from our community partnerships to other business partners who come into the buildings who interact with our staff who interact with our students we want to make sure that they are also trained in a restorative nature because it is about building maintaining relationships and when they're have some disrepair how do you restore that how do you do it in a way that brings honor and to both the student the teacher and the community and lastly as i said as we look across this the the continuous disparity in exclusion is ground in the issue of race and culture in our case as we look at the data it is in our native american community and is in our african-american community so we have to understand that from that standpoint there are cultural strategies that we have to bring to bear and we have to bring our cultural partners from our communities and providers to participate with us and i'm proud to say that we have some of those in the audience with us this evening but working very hard with us we understand that this problem is one that is not just the districts to resolve but it takes communities takes others who understand what it does but it needs to happen to help address the issue of disparities in our schools so we're also hiring recognize that in the schools the bridge the connection between staff teachers communities we have had a model that has worked well with our student assistant coordinators and we have decided have placed in six strategic locations where we have high numbers of students of color excuse me we have one student assistant coordinator that is focusing on an african-american caseload we have one student assistant coordinator that is focusing on a native american caseload and one that's looking at latino population because it is critical again to understand that in the context of what we're doing to close the disparity gap we have to in fact understand and address the issue of culture and what that means and how we work that school we're also looking at expanding our co-specific partners and mentoring again how do you bring mentors into the building if you're african-american male in our school system chances are you will go through most of your career seeing very few if any black men so how do you bring that into the school and help support the climate and culture that we're trying to build how do we bring leadership development to young people who in fact some are our most potential about bringing leadership to support the schools how do we bring that out in a culturally appropriate way and recognize that part of restoring is healing how do we bring and incorporate and we're looking at having healing circles at a number of our schools to help heal what becomes the dramatic things that happen when you're expelling and suspending particularly young kids that is a traumatic experience for families so how do we heal that how do we have that conversation so that you can move forward and lastly one of the things we hear a lot about is the issue of trauma and what happens to both particularly the students and the families so how you're providing what we talk about is mental health services in a more culturally appropriate way how we're doing that how we make assessments how we're making sure we're not only partnering with the county but our own cultural providers who understand that oftentimes it is not the labeling of is
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mental health but they're calling the council that will get families and kids to the table so that is in essence the significant strategies the directions we're moving as we continue to move toward raining down the rate of exclusions and cloak reagan down and then ultimately closing the disparities look at that let me turn it over to recursion so he can talk about some of the progress we're making to give you some more in depth around the models that we're building our foundational piece for rick thank you good evening pleasure to be here tonight so we've started uh our pbis rj and care trainings are underway i think almost happening daily we're engaging and working with all kinds of schools our culturally specific supports are in place the ones that lenso just referenced those have started are online in our buildings we continue to work with resolutions northwest in providing rj support at six of our schools and all six or five of those are two of the 12 schools that we're focusing on this year to go a little deeper uh we've just rolled out uh last week our slightly updated 214-15 student discipline handbook and that was in cooperation with p.a.t the small changes there our principals are now receiving approval prior to suspending for more than two cumulative days and we're exploring a moratorium with portland perry union that continues to be a monthly uh progress we go to the next one what it looks like i don't want to take too long here because we have kevin and jeff from boise elliot but you know when i look at this lulenzo touched on it but what's exciting here and exciting for me uh in my work and for our district here is what this represents i believe is a combination of both the heart and the mind right the the technical and adaptive are words we've used here so when we look at what is positive behavioral supports when we flip to that next slide or well first we touch on the care right asking teachers to lead with their heart examine their instruction through the lens of their students you know our black and brown students specifically and incorporating these practices in that so and then we connect that with the next slide um our pbis where we're asking people to understand what pbis really is is it's an implementation framework right that allows us in a very technical way to help schools address the elements that we know have been proven to help create those both academic and socially engaging environments and leading with the family voice right and then finally we look at the last one and again leading with our hearts again here right so instead of suspension and exclusion we now work with staff to repair relationships uh build community instead of sending kids home or pushing them away that also extends to both families as well so it's a very big systemic and philosophical shift in the way that we look at discipline in our buildings and then now we're going to ask kevin and jeff to come and talk to us about so mr poe is well principal bacon is coming up i don't know if you're planning to introduce some any of the community partners or just recognize them the folks that are here or you know this would be a good time for that or you can do it later why do i do this why not just ask them to stand okay if you would stand for it those of you who are part of a partnership network so this on behalf of the board thank you for your support and partnership and this really crucial work and thank you for being here tonight so with that principal bacon good evening i'm kevin bacon i'm the principal of boise elliot humboldt school k-8 school pre-k a school i um i want to thank you for uh for for for having us here tonight i also want to uh acknowledge the gentlemen that were just recognized but for many of them i would i would not be here where i'm where i'm at today and i'm very grateful very grateful to them um a little bit about me i'll have 30 years next year which seems to have flown by very fast i've worked at worked at all three levels k-5 middle school high school i worked in nearly all the quadrants of the city i worked at whitaker middle school in northeast back in the mid to late 80s early 90s george middle school in north portland jefferson high school left district for about six years i was out in southwest
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tigard school district came back to portland southeast portland hoxford middle school and now back in inner north portland at boise l.a humble a little bit about our school we uh my my team did a presentation last year about being a what it is to be a steam school a stem school we're our school in george middle school we're part of we're kind of official stem schools we're part of the the portland area metro stem consortium and we showed a video that talked about being a stem school but also if you really paid attention remember that video it also highlighted how it is a goal of ours to integrate pbis the care work restorative justice into steam so it all integrates and it works as seamlessly as as possible the other thing i wanted to to definitely make mention of boise ali humble is i'm not sure the numbers for this year but for the last three years running boise elliott humboldt has had the most african-american american students in the state at any level high school middle school or otherwise and so that puts us at the front line of the data you just saw and we could not do the work we do without the district support without the community support and the ongoing support of our parents and teachers like mr waters here and so when we were asked to to talk about and kind of encapsulate what what this work has been like as we've entered you know into those three concentric circles this year's work we found it important to bring a teacher and have a teacher talk from his perspective about what that's looked like this year and um i want you to know we didn't we talked a little bit but in no way did i you know rehearse him or vet him in any kind of way and so i'm uh i know some of his themes but um you know hey i want him to to talk from his heart and it's important for you to hear from that teacher perspective what what it's been like mr waters sure uh first of all just thank you for for having me here and i would encourage you to continue to include student and teacher voices and and all aspects of district management uh mr bacon one of my first memories of him i walked into his his office and he had this quote on the wall it's not up there this year and i'm gonna mess the quote up really bad but it says something along the lines of the mark of good leadership is taking those who you lead and lifting them up as brothers and that's uh that's really kind of a theme of what i'd like to talk to you guys about um you know all honesty this this work is is a struggle at times because we are working against a very deeply entrenched paradigm in american public education um i've been at boise now for three years i was originally hired by miss molly chun excellent principal now at ockley green chief joe and then mr bacon came and i met with him over summer and he says he says to me he says i notice here that you have an enrichment course what are you teaching and i wasn't really teaching anything yet because i'd just been given an enrichment course without really any guidance as to what that should be and so i just had leadership and he said oh good and i immediately wasn't quite sure what i was doing and reached out to a good friend of mine who's the activities director at sprague high school and said hey i need a lot of help how do you do this and i've seen a crazy transformation in our kids in two years just by including student voice so much so that at this point sometimes they're kind of running it and i'm kind of running to keep up with them and so it started as just like a general leadership focus in a newspaper class and it's evolved into student council with elections and fundraisers and dances and constitution we just had our first amendment to our constitution today because there was something that students didn't like and didn't think was fair and what i noticed is that as students as student voice was included students began to feel more comfortable with with talking back and i don't mean it in a bad way i mean talking back to to systems that they felt were unfair for example our uniform policy in the middle grades there was a period of time where our heaters didn't quite work right this year and they'd come into the classroom and one classroom would be like 90 degrees and another classroom would be like 50 degrees and the students in our dress code policy they were not allowed to wear their their their jackets in the classrooms and the students that was creating a lot of conflict between teachers and teachers are just saying hey we're just enforcing the policy and the leadership class of student council said hey why don't we
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actually try to do something about this and so a group of students organized a petition they organized a referendum they wrote a letter to mr bacon and to just see the entire middle school kind of mobilize around this this theme that they felt was relevant to their lives in social justice was really awesome like to be honest in my my short two and a half year career uh it really has been the highlight um let's see now what what what that what that's taught me is that none of the things in that packet and in this in this powerpoint really really matter without student voice without student buy-in pbis restorative justice pta any sort of school institution without student buy-in student voice it's not going to work and i think that as we move forward with this work we need to continue to encourage students to come to sit and to listen and we we also need to make these sorts of institutions accessible to students because it's late and i'm tired and so are they now all of that said all of that said it hasn't been all roses i mean there's like i said at the beginning of this we really are working to kind of transition a paradigm and a lot of the a lot of the systems and the procedures have have been evolving as we've as we've kind of worked through it um everybody in the building everybody's heart is in the right place but sometimes the way that resources are allocated or the way that staffing is allocated oftentimes it feels to to teachers i mean it feels like all of us are a little bit of an activity director and all of us are a little bit of a student management specialist and all of us are a little bit of an ap and an rj coordinator and in addition to lesson planning grading meetings observations actually teaching seven hours a day that that puts an immense amount of stress on teachers and what i would encourage the district to do is to to to really invest in a position that is like that that's their sole purpose especially in the priority schools that the sole purpose is to to help develop these systems and these procedures and to support teachers and students in the work thank you thank you very much thank you mean not not much to add to that i think that everywhere i've tried to go i've tried to encourage student voice parent voice teacher voice um you know the things that were presented on that powerpoint are all about making really some significant culture changes you know in the way we've been doing things you think about the history of public schools you know there was a move away from corporal punishment to and that was replaced by exclusionary discipline and i just think now we're being we're being asked to evolve when i was a student management specialist in the uh the 90s you know under the direction of some very caring caring principles you got in a fight your first fight you were one day out your second fight you were three days out your third fight you were five days out your fourth fight you were sitting in an expulsion hearing and that's kind of just the way it was and i think i think our thought with that was that you got to send a message right you got to send the message if somebody gets in a fight then i gotta i got to come down hard so that it sends a message so that nobody else will get in a fight or if you as a student you get angry at me and you cuss me out well i gotta send a message you know um to suspend you so that no other student will take a chance on cussing out the principle and so so it's not just teachers we're asking to make this paradigm shift it's not just it's administrators too and i had i had a situation right i had a situation and it was on the playground and i came up on two girls who looked like they were escalating and they were arguing back and forth other kids were kind of starting to circle around this group and i got in the middle and um the first one i approached and was kind of asking her to come with me refused to come with me and kind of turn that anger toward me i shifted my my attention to the other young lady she decided to kind of walk away with me and we we just went to my office right
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with the other girl and then i sent for thee for the other young lady now there might have been a piece of me in the past that might because the one that was left as i was walking away she had some she had some words for me and she had some words for for the other young lady too right and there might have been a day where you know she would have had to go home come back with your mom and dad let's sit down and let's figure this out um but i got the rj coordinator and i said you know what we're gonna sit in a circle so that that's one paradigm shift is i gotta be willing to sit equally with a student in the circle okay now i'm gonna digress and tell you about a culture that i read about in west africa when a kid acts out in this village they put the kid in the center of the village they surround him with him or her with all the adults and for one week they say nothing but positive things about this person who made this bad choice okay so here i am in a circle with this young lady and i'm a little bit mad she's a little bit mad but we got the rj coordinator there but all right i'm going to do this because you know we got to reduce our numbers we got to reduce our numbers and and i haven't even shared this with my staff and that's kind of coming up on this next late opening because right now i got staffed in lots of different places with what we're doing some are some are with us and they kind of see where we're going some are like you know we're not being tough enough around here and the kids are all going crazy and so we got to calibrate ourselves all right so here i am right so i'm here and by the way dr dare always reminds me that i dressed up nicely to get this job all right so and interviewed and everything right so here i am all right and and the other paradigm shift is okay first we got to be able to sit in a circle as an equal the second thing we got to be able to do is negotiate with kids all right that doesn't mean in my therapist he told me negotiating isn't compromise negotiating is how can we both get what we want out of this experience right so that was the conversation that we had in the circle that me and the young lady had how can we get what we both need out of this experience and i said to her well what i need out of this experience is if i see you starting to escalate you know i need for it to start to de-escalate how can i get that experience and what she said was you know mr bacon you came at me you know first and it made it seem like to everybody else around that i was the one that was to blame and then she had a story about how actually you know it was something totally that i was kind of misreading it a little bit and and so we talked about well if i see you like in that situation again how can i come up where you get what you need and i get what i need and we were able to come through that without anybody going home nobody has tried me so to speak out on the playground nobody's come up to me and started getting angry and cussing me out and so the the the the whole sending the message you know but i still get caught up in that because i do sometimes you know i do want to you know i mean that's how i raise my own kids right you know if i let if i let my youngest daughter talk back then my oldest daughter down the road is going to try to talk about it and so there's some shifting there's some shifting that we're doing and and it's messy this is this is not a straight line it's a zig it's a zag and but most places i've been it's been the struggle that has produced the results most places i've been the suspension rate has gone down not because of a mandate per se but because you change the culture of the school you give people voice you know and if you give people voice in what's happening then in my experience um they don't have to use that power in in other ways so i guess that's how it's going is there any questions we could answer thank you so much to all of you uh questions comments from the board director morton thank you both very much and and the presenters mr poe and others who presented so i'm really curious one of the things that that we hear particularly around reductions in exclusionary discipline is that okay you've taken mostly from teachers and that you've taken that tool from me like that pushing you know
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removing the child from the classroom from the you know trying to minimize the disruption what is the tool that replaces it and uh versus the uh uh you know the kids just sent back to class where there's this yeah you know unaddressed issue we we have we there is an addiction to suspension you know it really is and and and if you're gonna if you're gonna wean somebody off of something you do got to replace it with something and what we what we've seen more of this year with the circles with the circles putting kids in circles putting kids in circles you know um a fight breaks out and a student um is not responding to the adults that are on the scene we want to put not only does the student who he was in the fight with he or she have to circle up with that student but but any of the kids that were around right are part of that circle so for the first time the kids who were not directly but indirectly and maybe even once removed they get to sit in a circle and say how they were how that impacted them hey look that that scared me you know i was trying to go to class and i almost got knocked down or if it was to maybe happen in the classroom they get to say those students who were indirectly once removed get to say you know i was trying to learn you know i was on my way to my doing my best test and we all had to stop taking the test and and so and then the teachers get to talk about how they were impacted look i was really scared i i was this was happening to me this is what was going on so see those conversations didn't happen in the days of just straight up suspension we tried to create that most principals tried to in the re-admit conference tried to set that scenario but you couldn't we weren't going into the classroom where the disrespect happened you know i'll move away from a fight but where a conversation got turned into an elevated argument between two students you know even that becomes a circle and talking about impact how was i impacted how my choice is impacted and when students are saying it to each other you know when students are saying it to each other as opposed to us telling us how they impacted everybody else and interrupted learning if i can get a student to say you know what you interrupted learning today and there are kids who given the opportunity will say that to their peers but i think that we haven't allowed that voice to come through you know in the traditional public school setting now i know in other places other other schools some charter schools sei they have those conversations those conversations take place and and the payoff you get down the road is way more than just this you see what happens yeah huge life skill huge huge huge life skill other comments questions can we have is this who we're asking questions over the lanzo coming back i think you can ask questions whoever you like i have questions and comments go ahead can i just make a could i make a comment to kevin before he leaves i don't think he's leaving i'm sorry yeah i hope not anywhere yeah with the whole team here i had the opportunity a couple of years ago to meet kevin in a really significant way which is when you were over at hofsford and you were working with your somali population and there was a documentary made of your work and it was called lessons of war and basketball and if nobody's seen that i would ask us to make it available to every portland public school employee because it is so powerful and the story that you just told reminds me of your ability to lean in rather than to back away and i just want to thank you thank you thank you if i may add there was another video you made called the khaki dance and i'm wondering if that affects some credibility uh with the students there are on youtube yeah what's happening it's on youtube i know it's on youtube yeah director beal you have a question and i'm really uh opposed to suspensions uh right down the line always have been really i've never figured out why we were helping kids by sending him home to watch television or do pornography on the internet or whatever they're doing at home what i'm going to say has to do with kindergarten through eighth grade not high school
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but we have three key strategies that are outlined in the material that we have from the administration here first is the pbis cultural response pbs which is a great program i'm a 100 poor we need to really sometimes we don't do it as well as we could we kind of hold back a little on it but that's a different matter restorative justice i'm a huge supporter i think it's wonderful the restorative justice program that we're doing and the new care teams i'm going to sit down with lenzo and we're going to talk a little bit about how we do that but that idea is is a terrific idea but there's some other things that the 40 years of teaching that i had says are important and one of them is that we have an overall disciplinary plan a foundation in each school so it's clear what we're doing and consequences are to some degree part of that plan and and if we forget they end up they're going to end up one way or the other and so thinking that through and making sure that plan works that we already have in each school and i found i've been in schools where they had it and i've been in schools where they haven't had it makes a heck of a difference if you do have you know because you have to have that foundation at the school to build on top of if you don't build on top of that foundation then you can do all these other things but they don't work nearly as well because you don't have the foundation that of how the school's set up and one of the things that's critically important in that is to have the principals and the teachers working together and getting them as you said kevin online with you and working together we have a lot of conflict out there in our schools we've had incredible conflict in the past look at the tail survey going back to that again and look at how that all works we've got to get rid of that dynamic in our schools we have to have everybody working together in each of our schools another is we need to have counselors we need to have people who can take the time to sit down with kids who are skilled at that and work with specific children and help them with their behavior that needs to take place we're still short of those uh we need to have that parent connection as linzo said where you where we're really connecting the parents in well into our schools uh we have some real incredible struggles and we work our tail off maybe to do that but we've got schools i talked to a principal that has 200 kids two or more grade levels behind and they can't feel enough people in that school to have a pta well that's going to make that makes that tough it makes a tough go in that situation we also need to have good solid wrap-around services that we need to put together better than we have so we know where to go and how to get that that group of people who can support the the family of the chill of the children in our school the families and help children make those transitions we need to have engaging activities and things that tie kids into school i taught in woodburn for five years years and years ago and woodburn runs woodburn which has 90 percent hispanic kids and they're not it's not a very well to do community they're running ninety percent approximately graduation rate and they had an article on in on in uh in oregonian here the last week and they asked the pro the superintendent what are the things you're doing boom boom boom boom i have a friend who taught 30 years in woodburn and he's a terrific teacher and he went and asked one of the people who works there what how come you're doing how come what are you doing in woodburn that's getting 90 i mean gee money it's off the charts and he said we're trying really really hard to involve kids in athletics and activities and things that tie them into the school and get them going well we charge kids 200 bucks to play a sport in this school system we don't have any athletics in hardly at all we're starting to do it but we need to really do it and get and say this is an important part of the of this idea where we're going to get the disparities down we're going to increase our children doing a better job in school we need to do our hiring practice i've keep i've talked for years actually since 1981 about a hiring practice that would help us with our hiring of hiring more teachers of color and i still can't get us to really get serious about we doing our own thing but it's not quick enough early enough or hard enough
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we've got the we need those teams to put together like hillsborough has and we're doing that's more high school we need to think about it particularly in the middle school where we put teams together to work with individual kids and support them and get and work with them in that manner more than we are and the last thing we need to teach kids to read early on and in order to do that we need more reading teachers we need librarians and we need all those things and my concern is in in the board book we've got three things that we're doing and they're all culturally relevant they're all good things but it's not going to do it if that's all we do we have to do these other things too if we're and we will do them if we're genuinely serious about getting this disparity is disciplinary disparity the school the prison pipeline if we don't do those things too we're not going to get there this other stuff will really really help but it doesn't it's not going to get us there and if we're serious about it we'll put all this stuff together and we won't do it in 14 schools these things i'm talking about we can do in all schools we could do them in all schools tomorrow to some degree and that's my feeling about it and people can say well too bad you don't know anything but yeah i spent a long time in school and i and i've thought a tremendous amount about this and these other things are also critically important to do not just what we're doing around the culturally relevant stuff but these other things that support it that allow it to be successful because it's not going to be successful solely by itself it's only going to be successful if you have the cauldron that you can put it in and it will go throughout the whole system so that's what i think about it thank you very much for allowing me to talk about it first i just want to say thanks for the presentation um and i can't help but say i appreciate the progress we're making and we saw only seven years worth of data and i bet that if we looked back at 1970 or 80 something when some of the members who are either presenting or still on the board or back on the board the numbers haven't changed significantly that this is still a disparity it is a it is a different way you pointed out mr bacon right used to be corporal punishment now it's expulsion what will we come up next um so i appreciate that and while there are three outlines um three three things in the memo that we talked about restorative justice culturally responsive pbis and the care teams restorative justice first of all somebody i really respect one time said be careful about programs because programs come and go but what i like about restorative justice and or restorative practices right is it works on the relationship it works how do we store restore that relationship and so my worry when i read the the memo a little bit is it feels a little clinical which as i as i read it reflects a culture i'm very familiar with but may actually be adding to the disparity which i feel like is much more relationship based so i was really glad to hear you mr poe talk about mentorship i know that i also heard you talk about the student assistant coordinators and i think we have a couple over here and i think about how important it is and mr bacon you just gave an example mr waters you just gave an example about how important it is that we have staff that are building those relationships every single whether it's the secretary when you come in or it's those teachers and that takes a lot of personal work the leadership that i just heard you talk about mr bacon i've heard some folks even on our board talk about well we have to have the authority figure and there has to be a base from which to go and what you just demonstrated is that you can be an authority by being vulnerable and expressing and being open to hearing the feedback from a student's perspective of what they've experienced or a parent's perspective and just how important that is and that is similar to what i remember um what i imagine i wasn't around in the 50s so i imagine 50s classrooms right kids are all in desks they're quiet teachers imparting their knowledge on it on them and if you walk into a classroom today it's very different it's noisy kids are engaged they're going from station to station they're moving teachers are not always direct instructing they're setting up opportunities to for kids to learn and what i just heard you describe is is a is a an entire culture shift and so i just want to focus and say thank you for highlighting that and that was relationship-based that it was important that um you just set an addiction to expulsion which i really find fascinating because i i think there's a corollary and addiction to power with that that i need to send that as i who are you to challenge me
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and what i want to ask um the professionals whether it's you um to or whether it's again some of our folks in the audience that are working with our staff um not everybody is ready for that shift not everybody might even be capable to make that shift how do we help support those or do what tools can we offer you to make sure that that shift happens because i don't want to come back in seven years and see now that we're down to something and somehow we still have disparities so what i would say about that is we we approach the adults who aren't ready in the same way that we approach children who aren't ready to be in the classroom appropriately with love and understanding and by being honest and vulnerable i mean if adults don't feel safe and this is this is where mr bacon is um i mean i've got a great deal of respect for him and the way that he leads is through vulnerability and we can't set up a system where adults are afraid to be honest i mean and that's what i would say just the same way that we're treating the kids i just want to add this part of and i'll go back to the central place of the whole purpose of what we're doing around equity is to create that kind of culture one that respects and understands the perspectives of all cultures to build an inclusive district so therefore you start to build the kind of cultures that take for people to be vulnerable but also understands what that looks like amongst in between different cultures so that's the important piece of work you have to scaffold this up now everything that this district will do that will impact on discipline is done here it's what we do in third grade reading because if we get kids to read we have less need for them to have the issues that they have in school so often kids are acting out in school because they can't read or follow the work that's in front of them and if they can't read and after not being suspended then we surely can't get them to graduation so you have to scout so that's a part of all this and you won't see it in one singular place but it is the work that we're trying to do to bring it all together and working with all the folks who see it those who don't see it those who resist it but i will say this most of the folks that i encounter have the same goal they want the best for the kids we just have to as the teacher said with love and understanding bring everybody to the point that we're working on this collectively and we have a chance bringing it down now we're accelerating i think we can get there i mean that's not being too pollyannaish but it is an experienced viewpoint so i just thank you are there comments questions just some directionals just short thank you um and thank you all i'll echo everybody else thank you all for your presentation really appreciate that um and i was actually in and visited with valencia a little bit yesterday because i had gone through my board packet and um i have a um i'm very supportive of pbis and restorative justice and the work that you guys are doing and it's so nice to hear you really put it out there for us to how hear how it's actually working in your school that's uh it's very helpful for us as board members to hear the practical side of it what's really happening but i will go back to the same questions i was asking alenzo yesterday and that is we're not in all of our schools with pbis we're not in all of our schools with restorative justice if we really believe that these programs are the kinds of programs that will help our students be successful i think we should be investing in them at the same level that we're investing in our other work like our equity work to make sure that that they are in all of our schools um and so i will come back to the superintendent i know this isn't your budget hearing today but i will be looking for the numbers that it takes for us to have these programs in all of our schools not just in our priority and focus schools because i can see from what you guys are saying and what we're seeing in the numbers that we have in our charts so i can see where the successes are and these programs are resulting in success for our students so let's stop messing around with other things and let's move forward and do this all right what else did rodriguez um i had a question about the student support coordinators because we've talked here about trying to add social workers to our schools trying to decrease the student to counselor ratio in our schools and now we have student support coordinators so what qualities or experience do you look for when you're hiring a student support
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coordinator and if we have some here i'd love to understand as we're going into our budget i'd love to hear from you what you need from us if any of you are um good evening my name is dunya minou with the office of equity and partnerships and so i want to make sure that i answer the question as i heard it so what the their title is student assistance coordinators okay so i just want to make sure that we're clear on that um and so their job really is to be assisting students so what are we looking for um we are looking for the qualities and attributes that um our students need so um we've got two here this evening we have theodore um and then we also have maurice um that are both in the audience today working in four of our schools so um it's pretty obvious one of the things both of them are african-american gentlemen so we are really being focused in terms of a culturally responsive lens so that they also have the attributes of working with students before mentoring leadership being able to walk alongside both teachers and students and being able to mediate and lead groups and facilitate different both individual work with students that have been overrepresented in suspensions and expulsions but also group leadership because we know leadership and voice matters so that's really what we're looking for within our student assistance coordinators some questions so um mr waters a teacher who was here earlier yes um mentioned that he thought they needed another person in each school would these would this position be similar to what he sounds very similar to what he was talking about i would want to ask more questions before i would say a definitive yes but i think that a lot of what the student assistance coordinators do can be very helpful because the idea is to improve both individual students relationship and how they view education as well as then working on school climate issues so again the leadership type pieces so it's both individual and stu school focused and in some of our schools we have student assistant coordinators we have restorative justice coordinators we have a range of support personnel that provide that kind of linkage between schools administration students and families uh also again part of the skill and the notion that you to do wrap-arounds our partnerships with our sun system and other partners to bring that together to couple all these folks together to give the kind of support that students needs and their families need the times it is critically important to make that happen so we're doing a variety of things including our community partners to make that available and make sure that those wrap around services are there so just if i could give the latest of the hour maybe i would propose that i'm hearing a request that as part of our budget process we do have additional detail on what expansion or um strengthening that system and coordination would look like i think that could do that uh director what did you say to us yeah just real quick um you know sometimes from uh i come from a perspective because i you know my day job is is working with some of our students within pps but also pillow within uh uh within other districts around the four county area that um have often times the deepest disparities are the kids that have been kicked out or the kids that um have been left behind and uh so i you know i think of you know as as director buell mentioned i think of recommendations of we need another reading teacher or we need a librarian and and that recommendation isn't from my frame of reference going to bring the kid to school who has been dropped out or kicked out but but i bring that up as an example of what you're describing as scaffolding and how that is a critical component of the overall success of this student but i think we really have to understand and i i want to draw attention to how closely related this is to our equity policy our racial educational equity policy and our equity work there are expectations that need to be met and there are resources that need to be spent on students in a different way who have a in as i understand um at least in the native community um a damaged multi-general generational relationship with education
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and i know um that that's not very different from the the communities who experience similar disproportionate discipline rates and and so on so um so not to mention the importance of creating some sort of relevance and in in their education and that i will continue to sort of beat that drum of that relevance exists when students come to school and see and build relationships with individuals who look like them and who understand uh the the experience that they come to the school so i want to thank you for that and that scaffolding comment i think made a it you know switched a light on for me so i appreciate that um and i appreciate the work that that's happening certainly although you stole one of my staff so i'm not very happy we're really excited about it though yeah you would know this i think carol what was the name of that we used to have a person whose job in the school was this was back before you were born greg we we used to have a person in the school whose job was to work on the educational culture of the school what did we call them we had them they would sit down kevin you you remember what what did we call the people we had we had like 30 schools had those uh you think about the immigration coordinators no it was bad it was back when basically the job of the of the of the that person was to sit down and work with kids on liaison no it was actually a person well we maybe we may we may not resolve this question tonight if someone thinks we had them in 30 or 35 schools you remember the lens of what i'm talking about but i can't say the name i might have a specific name of them and we had them all over the place yeah and they and the the point is they worked they did what people were talking about which we had with the the principal uh the teachers that i've talked about a wriggler the person that they took out of wrigler worked it was really helping the culture of the school and having and helping children do better and get along better behave better all that comes together and that was really working we used to have a program district-wide that did that out at elementary school well hopefully we can build back to that yeah it would be a nice thing it's all i i think that's a good place to to look so good place to build back thank you so much to the entire team i'll just add my thanks and comment briefly that um especially hearing principal voice teacher voice speaking your truth is really really valuable and so thank you for arranging that and for all the community partners who are here um and you know it was comment was made at the beginning of the meeting in public comment that we lack a vision i feel like mr poe and the entire team articulated the vision for the district really well so maybe we just need to write up your comments and put them on the front page of our website um but this that's it right and so thank you okay we have one more piece of business to wrap up the evening um first a second reading of our anti-harassment policy so a first reading was held in the amended anti-harassment policy on january 20th 2014. after 21 days of being open for public comment the board is now ready to vote on proposed amendments and jolly patterson our general counsel is here if anyone were to have any questions so let's now consider resolution 5019 resolution to adopt revised anti-harassment policy 4.30.060-p do i have a motion second director belial moves and director knowles seconds the motion to adopt resolution 5019. miss houston is there any citizen comment there's not there is not any board discussion director buell i have two questions on under section 5 procedures and the reason i kind of have this question is that i had a person i know whose daughter was getting harassed at school and and was uh getting harassed online on facebook and so forth and so forth and he went up to the school and this was not a portland school he went up to the school and said look my daughter's being harassed and bullied at school including some physical bullying and so forth and he couldn't get in to talk to the principal at the school couldn't get in the vice principal just washed them off the counselor was miserable so this is not about portland school could you just i'm sorry could you just ask the question really quick i'm sorry no it's statement oh i think you'll be able to get the bill i thought you had a question
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yeah i'm talking to the resolution okay you know you said comments or questions there's a comment okay i'm sorry i thought it was no that's perfectly okay and so the uh so the the the parent goes up and but the parent doesn't want something down the line he wants it stopped right now he wants the school to do something right now period that's that's he wants two days one day he wants to be called back and he wants and that's what you want as a parent and when i now when i look at this anti-harassment policy in that light this isn't it doesn't it's not quick enough we talk in section two it says we shall assure it is promptly investigated but we don't say what promptly means can is probably two weeks or three weeks or is it a day we don't know and then down below complain that's not satisfied with the decision the school level may request a review of the decision by following the appropriate step in the complaint procedure and our complaint procedure takes up to 120 days so if if my friend whose daughter was being harassed this week she's a senior she's going to be out of school in 120 days so it doesn't really respond itself to the problem the only thing that will respond to the problem is if the superintendent will explain to her principles what promptly means and actually what happens if nothing is done is it 120 days this this person has to wait well this person's got their lawyer going tomorrow if they don't hear back and they're going to win the lawsuit no sweat because they're not doing anything for these days so and this doesn't i'm just saying we need to think about that and and look at it and make sure that this policy actually responds to that type of a situation which is the 90 of the situations who sends her kid to school is being bullied and says oh i'll wait a couple months and maybe you'll have it figured out by then nobody does that so thank you for that comment any other discussion all right the board will now vote on resolution number 5019 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no any abstentions okay resolution five zero one nine so food by vote of six to zero with student representative jazz while voting yes yes all right and i don't know if um director regan is still with us i think she wanted to share a brief report from her trip to washington dc but if maybe we can hear that at a future date um i'll say while we're waiting for director reagan to rejoin us um just a reminder to everyone if you haven't already taken the school school improvement survey either online or on paper at your school please do so we still have time for that and we want to hear from everybody i know staff is poised to do outreach to lots of folks please mark your calendars for friday april 3rd for portland public schools parent advocacy day in salem and we continue to remind folks the importance of that thank you dr ball for pointing that out to me so for folks who are still in the audience at home watching this please look for opportunities to go to salem and advocate for schools and finally and following up on the recent series of extensive series of town halls which folks have been calling us for we actually just had a series of eight of them throughout the district they were very successful so we're going to have another series of town halls with the community around our budget so look for information on that so um any other business bobby i believe you wanted to briefly share a report from dc i know i know it's wonderful news but just because we're all i was actually going to give a pretty full report but i think we're all pretty exhausted so stand up for public schools is a button i brought back from washington d.c i was just at the national school boards association advocacy trip we there was eight school board members from the oregon school board association who went back and we do this every year meeting up with 800 school board members from around the country to lobby on a variety of issues and what i love about the trip is when you talk about the equity work that we do the federal budget is only about seven percent of our budget but the federal budget is supporting our poorest and most disadvantaged students so if you think about our title programs for high poverty students our ells students are supported through federal dollars special ed students head start students you know kids wanting college loans um you know that's what we are back there those are the students that were back there trying to support and so we ended up talking with the oregon delegation
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we had breakfast with both of our senators which was amazing suzanne bonamici was a keynote speaker at the entire nsba conference and got a standing ovation she by the way is introduced a bill called smart which is support making assessments reliable and timely so it's a bill where she would actually offer they would offer grants to states to do an assessment of their assessments and to see if there's redundancy and to see if there are some tests that you can get rid of anyway we did our usual lobbying around the individuals with disabilities act trying to get more funding for that the reauthorization of the esea the elementary secondary education act as well as the healthy healthy hungry free kids act and the final one is around uh secure rural schools and timber payments and the fact that our rural communities are just suffering so much because the timber payments have dried up so without going into more detail it was a it was a really good trip again thank you so much to you and the others oregon school board members for making that trip and for speaking out for our students thank you so much all right so with that the next meeting of the board will be held on tuesday february 17th and this

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)

2015-02-10 PPS School Board Study Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - February 10, 2015

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