2015-03-03 PPS School Board Study Session

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

Documents / Media

Transcripts

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

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third 2015 is called to order I'd like to send 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 and review of resolutions prior to a vote at times we conduct votes during study sessions and any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law so the meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the Board website for replay times the meeting is also being streamed live in our PPS TV services website director Morton is ill and absent this evening so this time we'll go ahead and have public comment do we have anyone signed up great so why don't you go ahead and read the first couple names and I'll read the instructions for Testimony Marcy ownby and Tanya Shafer thanks so much for being here tonight taking the time to come out and provide your comments we value your input and look forward to hearing your thoughts Reflections and concerns are those folks out there oh come on up sorry go ahead and have a seat I'm just reading through our standard instructions before testimony so we'll be actively listening and reflecting but not um responding to any comments or questions during public comment but board mayor Roseanne Powell is out in the audience if you want to check in with her afterward for any information um complaints about individual employees should be directed to the superintendent's office as a person L matter and won't be heard in this forum so you have a total of three minutes to share your comments please Begin by stating your name for the record and spelling your last name during the first two minutes a green light is on and then when you have one minute remaining a yellow light will go on and then when the red light comes on after three minutes we respectfully ask that you wrap up your comments so thanks again for taking the time to be welcome hi I'm marcionby and that's o-w-n-v-y I'm a mother to five PPS students in kindergarten through seventh grade my children attend our neighborhood school as well as access Academy they're also generally happy to go to school and this was not always the case I went to speak today about the need for improvement in Tag Services in PPS I am aware of the district policy that each classroom teacher should differentiate in the classroom to provide Tag Services um so just using two of my children who are currently access students now as examples for what this looked like I'm going to draw a little picture for you of what these Services look like but first I want to tell you Bella is one of the girls I'll be talking about one of the children she's a perfect fit for school eager to learn but limited in what she can learn her class because the busy teacher is simply grateful not to worry about her Benjamin was not a perfect fit for school he inspired me to read books like the dyslexic Advantage a mind at a time and square peg um so at conferences my daughter Bella we for her we heard lovely things like she exceeds expectations she's a joy to have in class insightful kind helpful pleasure to teach her first grade teacher allowed her to go to the art station and draw when her work was finished finished and she often came home with 20 to 30 new pictures a day the following year she was asked to tutor other students or read quietly when she finished her work she read a lot of books while she was eager to learn she was not eager to go to school Benjamin in spite of being curious young scientists in a backyard Bridge engineer by fourth grade had a painful history of struggling to fit in in school both academically and socially in fourth grade his teacher called him well said he was lazy and I took him for academic taste testing and learned that he was both extremely gifted and in need of special education for dyslexia and dysgraphia my son's frustration with school his depression and tearful exclamations such as I hate school I'm the dumbest kid in my class began to make sense our neighborhood school did its best to accommodate his needs with special ed help well his giftedness simply could not be addressed in the classroom the teacher did offer challenge homework which the first and only week it came home included a large word find and a 574 Point dot to dot neither of which was appropriate or interesting to my son thanks to our desperation for help for Benjamin our family found a link to access online we applied Benjamin two years in a row and were waitlisted both times we're grateful that today he has been accepted in Access Academy as well as his younger sister this is the only functional program that PPS has for gifted students um transferring Benjamin to access made a world of difference for him his depression Has Lifted he is eager to go to school he has made friends he is engaged in his classes um and my daughter while she readily admits that she doesn't like her homework taking more than 20 minutes now a week school is a better fit for her I
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want to encourage the district to prioritize and expand the access program it should be available to all who qualify and ask for it as well as taking action to implement tagx well-researched suggestions to improve each neighborhood School access to differentiated education Tanya Shafer s-c-h-a-e-f-e-r I'm the parent of a second grader at Lewellen Elementary and I'm here to tell you about our family's experiences with Tag Services my son accompanied me today and he fervently believes that if he can speak with you personally superintendent Smith you will help him and his peers as he told me kids have power his enthusiasm and optimism are why I'm here tonight so I will start by reading his words as a tag student I don't feel like I'm challenged Enough by Bridges assignments and other math worksheets it would be great if you could spend more money on tag than you are now I would like to learn things I don't know as well such as Division and square roots we have had a lot of kids join the harder math group which is a group that advocates for harder math and math acceleration if we get harder math we will learn more and know more when we are 29 please listen to us exclamation point in our family's experience the district is failing to adequately serve tag identified children especially at the elementary school level differentiated instruction is a laudable goal but it cannot work without systemic instructional and curricular support for teachers for example the district's policy to serve all tag students in the classroom is entirely teacher dependent the decentralization of responsibility for developing curriculum extensions to each individual teacher guarantees that the resulting education of tag students will be wildly uneven in a single school let alone across the district large class sizes prevent teachers from realistically being able to address the rate and level of learning of all students with 31 students in my son's first grade class last year he only received different math homework not different math instruction during the day especially in math the district's policy is not working for my son nor many other students at Llewellyn whereas parent help and reading is encouraged and requested in writing conferences are done individually with students this model is not followed in math which leaves students who are ready for new material above grade level spending weeks on topics they have already mastered who Among Us likes to go to meetings or trainings when we already know the material being presented it's not very motivating is it the district's purported options for students who need curriculum extension beyond what individual teachers are able to provide single subject solar acceleration is shrouded in secrecy neither the current policy nor process is available on the tag website it took our principal and I three weeks to obtain an acceleration form from the tag office the tag office would not tell me what the process was even when I told them the principal asked me to call them now that we have the form we still aren't clear on the process or standards used by the tag office to test and evaluate my our son I could provide many more examples if time permitted but for now I ask that you take seriously the needs of this group of children provide curriculum extensions to all teachers in every grade level across the district improve the culture of the tag office so it is a true resource for schools and families rather than a roadblock truly teach to each child's rate and level thank you great thank you very much our next two speakers Marisol Cruiser and Aubry packin's Decker welcome buenas noches and Marisol kreutzer k r e u c as in zebra ER teacher and special assignment for dual language programs I believe Portland Public School efforts are to create a cultural transformation that will care and successfully educate the students of color if students of colors that we are currently failing my heart shrinks to the side of a pebble when I see that only 47 percent of Native Americans 56 Latinos and 60 African-American students graduate from high school I'm here to advocate for additional care collaborative action research for Equity funding this krpd supports teachers in the recognition of individual students needs and their learning on how to not be colorblind while at the same time feeling safe in their discussions on Grace when teachers recognize the students race as part of who they are
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it helps them analyze their teaching methods and what the students needs beyond the curriculum and standardized tests in a previous board meeting it was my interpretation the couple of you were demanding district-wide krpd for all teachers I must ask is demanding care for all realistic I don't think so it will take away from the value that collaborative action and research have on teachers personal practices the urgency is closing the treatment Gap should now be rushed it should be funded supported and intentionally spread in all of the schools and in our system the rush should be reflected on our budget priorities care work should be part of DLI math Ela School Improvement specialist mentors ESL exped all toasters and all teachers working with teachers in order to transform the society and the system we need to intentionally provide care while it's threatening the practice of individual teachers the district is turned into a more reflective practice for educators krpd needs to run its course it means I meet you where you are and I will support you to change the students of colors outcomes there is a need for care across departments to support us closing the racial achievement Gap I share the resilient and commitment PPS has to the cultural transformation as I stated on PPS framework it is my goal every student succeeds regardless of race or class at the present time I feel that our system is not supporting teachers or tosas who want to align with care PD should not be demanded but it should be available for everyone train all trainers so all of us support this work please continue prioritizing our Equity work to close the racial achievement Gap Muchos Gracias for attention thank you good evening my name is Aubry paganstecker I teach kindergarten at Woodland Pre-K 8. I'm here to speak on behalf of kindergarten teachers across PPS who are struggling to ensure the safety of their students and the quality of their learning environments I'm also here to give a voice to students across our district both in general and special education who are struggling to learn in school environments that are not equipped to meet their needs I'm a gen ed teacher but this was the first time in 10 years that it was necessary for me to learn how to safely restrain a student should he or she become a danger to themselves or others a situation I've experienced firsthand on a number of occasions this is training that was traditionally reserved for educators working in our District's most restrictive environments but has now become so commonplace that trainings are often full Educators across this District have been pleading for help for months on behalf of their students with little or no results they continue to work in unsafe conditions where they regularly are battered by students who are inappropriately placed who are not receiving sufficient supports our students throw classroom materials toss chairs throw trash cans and flip tables it's not only the safety of Educators that if that is of concern however but of our students as well of course peers and Kinder classrooms are routinely screamed at spit on scratched shoved kicked and punched by their classmates scissors are being used in our classrooms as weapons and brought out only under strict supervision rather than being made accessible as a tool for creativity and fine motor development pencils are used as weapons that students use to stab one another rather than as tools for writing and drawing the students that I'm describing are not having their social emotional mental health or academic needs adequately addressed many of them are demonstrating little to no growth academic or otherwise in their general education placements and as a educator it's heartbreaking to see the expectations for our students lowered because even simple requests leave to lead to severe blowouts that myself and my colleagues are not capable or prepared to respond to a number of students have run from our buildings and yet we are advised not to put our hands on children this creates a lose-lose situation for educators whose primary objective is to ensure safety it feels like we're putting our students and ourselves in Jeopardy regardless of how we respond in situations that I've described these are not just a handful of isolated incidents but rather a growing Trend in kindergarten classrooms across PBS schools don't know how to operate within the new special education framework because it was not rolled out properly and no one at school sites seems to understand the process to obtain necessary student supports the measures messages we're hearing are keep the students in your room and use the people you have in your building but in many cases the building teams do not have the capacity to provide the necessary accommodations and supports as outlined in individual student plans Learning Center teachers are stretched too thin by large case loads with high numbers of students with severe needs School staff of every stripe are regularly pulled from their work to respond to students in crisis diminishing the overall health and vitality and effectiveness of the school in order for a redesign of our sped program to be successful School staff must be provided with necessary training and clear processes for
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supporting all students educator voice and experience must be at the Forefront of that work thank you thank you very much thank you our final speaker is Maria McClay welcome hi my name is Maria McClay and I am a special education teacher at Pioneer special program a placement at Pioneer is considered a restrictive placement because we do not serve typically developing students and we are not a neighborhood school we serve students on IEPs or individual education plans who have behaviors severe enough to impede their own progress or the progress of others in a neighborhood School setting we also serve as a temporary placement for students who need to be stabilized or have their placement evaluated since the district got rid of the option of behavior classrooms for students with special education services there are more students coming into us than we have the capacity to teach in the past we would receive students throughout the year and students who had met their safety goals at Pioneer would move back to Neighborhood schools throughout the year as well keeping some sort of balance um this year we received so many students at once that we quickly reached to capacity and now we hear that there are many other students who need our services but we don't have room for them um this also means that we're building classes with a group of students who may be new to school if they're in kindergarten or have many many unsafe behaviors that need to be smoothed out before we have a positive classroom environment to bring other students into this can be difficult with a lot of students at once when we have a placement meeting for our evaluation and stabilization students to determine whether they should stay at pioneer as their permanent placement we are being told there is nowhere else for them to go except general education so of course they end up staying at Pioneer because they need they need Services they need individualized support and the structure a small classroom can provide these are the students that would have gone to behavior rooms in the past and when they stay with us we don't have the capacity to take on other more needy students who are waiting for services the behavior coaches at Pioneer also provide the non-violence Crisis Intervention training which is crucial when dealing with students with unsafe behaviors all trainings have been at capacity and yet there are many teachers in general education who haven't been able to get into a training despite the fact that they have students with unsafe behaviors in their classrooms engaging in those behaviors as special Educators we have a lot of knowledge about the students we teach and about best practices for serving them safely in the least restrictive environment possible we must have a decisive voice in the structuring OR restructuring of placements and programs that serve our students thank you thank you very much all right um thank you all for coming tonight really appreciate hearing your input um so comments from the Portland Association of teachers Annex are a contract with the pat I'll have some time when requested on our agenda for brief comments so we're welcoming down Suzanne Cohen who's vice president of Pat to the table hi Suzanne hello good evening I'd like to talk about two things the testimony that you've heard from two Pat teachers about sped services in PBS right now and then about the S back resolution I want to start by saying that we fully support a more inclusive model I taught in a communication Behavior classroom for two years and fought hard for inclusion uh and in my medium length career of 12 Years uh we have tried twice before and not succeeded in moving towards a more inclusive model and so because we want it to succeed and I believe that you want it to succeed too I'm going to ask you to do a review of how this rollout is happening so that we can resolve some of the unsafe situations and the lack of teacher-led support so that we can really move towards a more inclusive model unsafe situations like Aubry described are numerous we actually wanted more kindergarten teachers to come speak to you but the slots were filled we have tried to work with special education director Mary Pearson um and and have her address these situations immediately but they have been very slow or nothing has been resolved um these situations are not safe for anybody and they need immediate attention
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um there's a couple of there's a trifecta of change some initiated by PPS and some by the state that is is kind of leading to this storm so uh one is the reduction in exclusionary discipline and again that is something that we fully support and would like to be partners in and have it be teacher-led with proper support and I think Marisol spoke to that and and the outcry that we are having for how can we do this right um the the second thing that has happened is a change in state law around the restraint policy um and then the third is the there's special education redesign so um for the restraint policy Pat knew about this this summer this was the law by the state we could have been Partners in fighting against this law or changing it to make it better but we repeatedly asked in every Forum to let's talk about how are we going to do this within PPS we asked over and over again for what the training plan was how would we inform members and now it got rolled out without our input and now the classes for restraint are often full um and so people need them luckily Aubry was able to do it teachers are at risk like Aubrey perfectly described your choices restrain the student and put your own licensure at risk or let them run and we're talking about five-year-olds running out into the street um so because we really want to see this work and we want it to work right we need to have a long-term plan that addresses these unsafe situations immediately because that cannot go on for the rest of this year and then a long-term plan for how we can actually do inclusion and have the students both gen Ed and special ed and all our teachers both gen Ed and special ed feel successful about a change we'd like to see but not with these unsafe conditions when I spoke about the budget surplus I did mention that we are trying to enact a new thing a special ed redesign and in the process of change perhaps funds are necessary in terms of more support and more training and yet no funds were allocated and special education does not have a set aside to provide supports in these unsafe conditions and the workload committee has been stepping in to offer support so again what I'm asking is that you conduct your own independent review of these situations and work immediately to promptly correct these most unsafe situations the next thing I want to talk about is um the svac the smarter balance assessment resolution uh last year you took some bold steps and were leaders in the state um and to to really fight for what our students deserve and what quality assessment should look like we have a collaborative team with Pat and PPS our assessment committee that also is working with the state to really find a better way for Oregon and a better form of assessment so I appreciate all your work on that and I realize that this is a draft and you'll have more time to work on it I know that our president Gwen Sullivan reached out and we talked about some things that are missing from this resolution that were in the first including making sure that we don't give a test that isn't free from culturally or linguistic or socioeconomic biases um so there's a couple of things here though that that concern me and one is that we're advocating that the state at this point give enough resources to fund the smarter balance assessment but before we advocate for that I have gone enough for everyone I want to promote this event that's happening next Saturday a symposium on a better path because before we decide that we want to properly fund this assessment maybe we actually want to find an assessment that's right for students there's also a piece about holding off on using it to evaluate teachers but this test was never meant to evaluate teachers so let's be strong bold leaders like you were last year and really talk about what is the right forms of some of this assessment and what are their purposes and what are they intended and if you're not familiar with Rick stickens and the work that our own district is doing around assessment I encourage you because I think if we could align this more to that work it would be great um and so the other part that concerns me is I guess letter N where we talk about um a more challenging test will not harm our students as long as we convey to the students that it's a learning opportunity rather than a punitive or a demeaning experience and again I just want to go back to Rick stiggins and there's just so much research out there that uh when you give students a test where they're designed to fail there's no way that it won't have damaging effects on their self-esteem or their sense of self-efficacy and if you think of any of the goals that you have tried
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to accomplish weight loss fitness goals Personal Achievement goals feeling successful breeds more success and I am very concerned that the idea to mitigate the damaging effects of this test would lie on adults to be like oh don't worry about the fact that you've just been labeled a failure so I appreciate all the work you're doing with this but I encourage you to come to the Symposium read Rick sticken's book work with the assessment team and have this resolution be more in alignment with the work that we're doing thank you for your time great thank you very much thank you it's an ode directive or is it a state law the new restraint and stuff you know let's hold that off until we get to the closing this down until we get to work yeah let's we're going to be talking about this later than this evening so let's go back to we're going to talk about the special lab that's what I'm referring oh we're not going to be talking about that tonight how about if we just get a quick clarification from the superintendent we're gonna we'll we'll ask Roseanne is on my list of things I'm going to ask her to follow up on for tonight's testimony okay so now we're going to move on to our update on the Arts which is I will be following up with staff thank you so we are excited to receive an update on Portland Public Schools Arts education for this year superintendent Smith would you like to introduce this item um I would and I'm going to introduce Melissa Goff who's our assistant superintendent of teaching and learning and Kristen Brayson who is our arts tosa and Marna stalkov from right brain initiative who are going to talk this is our second year of implementation of the dollars that we've received from the Arts tax and so this is a really an update on what's happening in PPS and it's really exciting so welcome to all three of you thank you I'm gonna get our slide up I'm not sure there good evening yeah being board chairs and um uh superintendent Smith and board of directors we are very pleased to be able to share with you tonight the progress that we've been able to make in just in less than a year of uh Kristen Brayson being in her role as the Arts tosa and our uh distinct investment in arts resources as a district which is such a wonderful place for us to be in which we haven't had the opportunity to be in in recent years so I'd like to introduce Kristen Brayson who's a teacher on special assignment and Marna stalcup who partners with us from the regional arts and culture Council and through bright brain initiative good evening superintendent Smith and directors my name is Kristen Brayson and I began my work as PPS arts tosa in May of 2014. last week you heard from superintendent Smith about a district-wide Arts event for the first time in the history of the district we were able to host a large celebration of the Newmark theater called the heart of Portland a PPS K-12 art showcase that highlighted Elementary Middle High School Visual Art dance music and theater to Express gratitude to the Portland taxpayers of the city arts tax the show's goal was to build a strong visible cohesive presence for the district's Arts education programs as a platform the performance was an Avenue to educate and Galvanize Galvanize our City's students parents teachers administrators and community members as a highlight of that evening we would like an opportunity to bring a small slice of that joy to you tonight um won't you build a baby
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won't you please come home please lunches please come on thank you to the Cleveland dares and music teacher Diana Rowe they're impeccable Artistry thank you so much oh we have so many more in another song yeah we won't be here so in an overview of tonight's presentation we'll be covering Arts integration as a high leverage strategy to positively impact Student Success across all content areas we're going to go over current support of Arts education and PPS and our long-term vision of a fully articulated K-12 Arts education we'll also be going over one of our partner stories with Marna so you can see how that works in our schools and in the end we'll have time for questions to give you a little background on me I'm a product of a PPS Arts education as a Jefferson dancer in the late 80s I was able to benefit from the rich experiences provided by Arts Specialists and I have lasting memories that help shape who I am today as Arts toasted for Portland Public Schools I looped back to Jefferson as an adult and began my 22-year teaching career as a dance specialist for the district through the years I've had the privilege to teach at Whitaker Tubman Oakley green Hosford and Beach the last 18 years of my teaching career were spent developing directing the dance department at Da Vinci Arts Middle School where I grew a dance program from two dance classes per day serving 40 students to 12 dance classes per day serving over 300. I'm continually thankful for the public school Arts education PPS afforded me and I'm an example of how the investment comes full circle not only did I benefit but also thousands of musicians dancers visual artists and actors who have immersed themselves as adults in the professional world of Art Kira Brinkley who you see on the screen is a remarkable young woman whose passion and determination catapulted her PPS Dance Training into a professional career she's an example of the power of our investments as a part of the heart of Portland show Kira was a featured alumna performer and this video clip that we're going to show captures a moment of her performance that night and shows her dedication through the beauty of movement thank you foreign foreign
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there's a documentary that was filmed about her and woven in that is the experience of Portland Public Schools even her going back into the schools she's done some choreography at Jefferson and DaVinci so again full circle today thanks to the city of Portland Arts tax we are receiving an unprecedented amount of exposure and support for arts and arts education in our city the timing couldn't be better as we challenge ourselves to educate students for the 21st century Forbes Magazine States the top 10 jobs in 2010 didn't exist in 2004 so how do we prepare students for a future we can't see the Arts by way of Arts integration are a portal to the Future inherent in a structure in its structure the Arts provides a gold mine of underutilized classroom strategies to unlock deeper connections and engagement in student learning the workforce of the future will rely on students who have been taught to think critically solve problems creatively communicate effectively and collaborate enthusiastically through application art asks students to rehearse redo remix try again practice tweak and then finally perform as you look at the pictures of last Thursday's Newmark theater performance notice the final stages of the student work they've reached a Pinnacle Point in their journey through through learning feedback and practice and performance these students have arrived at a Transcendent place where their sense of self is underscored by the confidence in their delivery how can we superimpose the focus determination and drive required to attain this level of performance to other content areas how will these skills ultimately translate to our district goals of all students reading at grade level by the end of third grade improved graduation rates and reduced discipline disparities tonight we will share some opportunities that we've discovered are a catalyst for reaching these goals as Arts tosa I'm charged with three key areas of support the focus on Arts integration Arts specialist support and partnership collaborations with our City's major Arts organizations primary to the district's initiatives Arts integration is a Surefire Avenue to reach our goal of Student Success and inclusion Arts integration is a bridge specifically allows opportunities for students to see themselves in their work by fostering self-efficacy math science language arts and social studies through an Arts integration lens can now have multiple answers to one problem and action-oriented activities that get students out of their seats and engaged in the learning Arts integration makes Vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers can exhaust what we know the limits of our language do not Define the limits of our cognition Arts integration provides a pathway of access to academic content for every student no matter where they are in their learning but especially for our emergent bilinguals students of color and those who are traditionally disenfranchised so what does Arts integration look like in an average classroom Arts Specialists use the skills unique to the Arts to work with generalist teachers collaborating collaborating on specific units of study to Aid students in making deeper connections to the work for example a dance specialist might work with a science teacher on teaching the water cycle through this the dance teacher will apply the same principles of performances in the dance classroom to the science units so kids are learning determination perseverance grit and how to turn perceived failures into new ideas and Concepts over time students begin to learn that creative thinking can be applied to all learning and that mistakes can be part of the patchwork often breaking the mold for problem solving one of our main Partners the right brain initiative is leading the nation in arts integration we'll hear about their Pro program in a moment however it's worth noting they are a model for moving this work forward systematically in our district -wide Arts integration will only be possible with the help of our Arts Specialists with that I've gathered data to assess the needs of our Arts Specialists so they can effectively teach their content area and also provide their expertise in the area of Arts integration in May of 2014 I administrated I administered a survey of all 171 Arts teachers in each discipline this included Music Theater dance and visual
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and media art the list of questions is in your packet but we boiled the results down for you to focus on some fundamental challenges and successes as well as suggestions for better serving the needs of Arts teachers some main challenges for teachers are that site-specific Master schedules don't allow enough instructional minutes or frequency of contact time for a genuine art experience a second concern is budgetary support for supplies and material costs such as Visual Arts supplies and a music curriculum adoption successfully Arts teachers feel like the culture of their respective schools supports a vibrant Arts education and 71 percent of our teachers identify Arts education as a high leverage strategy for addressing goals of racial equity additionally Arts teachers identified specific areas they wanted to focus on for their professional development development needs the top four were curriculum development and a study of our new National Court standards utilizing guest X guest expert speakers within their respective disciplines working on a district-wide Arts articulation and culturally relevant teaching practices armed with the data I set out to create professional development opportunities for Arts teachers that would set our sales for Success first I established art teacher leads for all four disciplines throughout thoughtful planning the teacher leads and I crafted job alikes for the 1415 school year that would meet the specific needs of each Arts discipline through this year of Joba likes we've toggled back and forth between providing large group work sessions that address the needs of the greater systems such as K-12 articulation with small group sessions that provide Workshop style forums that Foster growth in teaching in the interim of meetings I loop back around to individual teachers to provide one-on-one instructional coaching curriculum development Arts integration ideas and support with procuring supplies and materials for the classroom the work of arts Specialists is enhanced by the Partnerships we've created with the major Arts organizations in the city recently at a visual art job alike we were able to have the Portland Art Museum as a guest in their visit the museum talked with teachers about what kinds of programs the museum could offer that would be useful to a teacher's classroom instruction the museum also took the opportunity to educate teachers on how best to utilize the Museum's many avenues for Rich student learning school districts Across the Nation with robust Arts programs rely on Partnerships with city arts organizations to provide enriching opportunities to schools Portland Public Schools is no different we currently have over 24 Arts organizations in the city of Portland that provide services to our students through school residencies and or School performances in my role as Arts tosa I've met with nearly all our partnership organizations and I'm working with the regional arts and culture Council on creating a mapping tool that will help us spread these Services out across the district with an equity and access lens my final tier of toaster responsibility lies in additional support throughout the district for principals in the way of Arts programming Master schedules a recruiting qualified Arts Specialists and arts residencies and I'm also communicating with facilities and maintenance around issues with music instruments stages Kilns and dance floors communication is essential in these exchanges between central office teachers administrators and our community stakeholders so it's with great excitement that I share with you the figures of our growth due to the city of Portland Arts tax in the intergovernmental agreement with the city of Portland districts around our region have been encouraged to in-kind match the city's efforts in capitalizing on these resources thanks to the board implementing a PPS Arts tosa as an initial strategy was perfectly timed to support the plethora of new teachers in our system since the city's Arts tax we've gained 47.41 Arts FTE now here's where we roll up our sleeves over time we will need to consider consider our role in slowly rebuilding infrastructure and support our long-term Vision includes capitalizing on the Arts tax exploring ways to strengthen our K-12 Arts offerings through intentional programming and deepening our Partnerships next steps in realizing our vision includes strengthening Arts offerings in our k-8s for our sixth through 8th grade students and supporting cluster Arts articulation as well as providing supplies materials and curriculum to support Arts education collaborating with facilities on future School rebuilds and upgrades to
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accommodate Arts programs and establishing an Arts advisory Council the Arts advisory Council would be a group of principals teachers Arts community members and parents to help examine data further our vision and address issues specific to PPS Arts as well as make recommendations to the board based on their findings now we'd like to illustrate an example of one of our blooming Partnerships Melissa Goff and I as she said asked marnostalcup who's the director of Arts education for the regional arts and culture Council and founding program manager of the right brain initiative to be here to share some of the amazing Services the right brain initiative is providing our students kind of and to highlight some of their nationally recognized data regarding English language learners thank you Kristen chairs superintendent and members of the board it's my greatest pleasure to be here today to be part of this update on the State of Affairs of Arts education in Portland Public Schools the regional arts and culture council is honored to have such an exemplary partnership as the one we have with PPS in the past year that relationship has steadily grown in large part because of Kristen's work your commitment to reinstate in the Arts tosa position is commendable and will go miles towards serving your teachers and your students at Rack we think of Arts education as the proverbial three-legged stool we Define a complete Arts education as one that serves all students with sequential Arts instruction provided by Art specialists in specific Arts disciplines also Arts experiences that would be accessing the community's rich resources through field trips and assemblies and also Arts integration which is the right brain model of finding the elegant fit between learning and the Arts and other core content areas so as you can see this perfectly aligns with the support provided by the Arts tosa position a shared delivery model is key to the success of this approach art Specialists classroom teachers and teaching artists each have a role and through right brain their impact multiplies when given the opportunity to collaborate with one another with the right brain initiative our vision is to transform learning for all students through the Arts creativity Innovation and whole brain thinking right brain began as an equity initiative committed to high quality Arts learning opportunities for all students also Central to our work is the notion of whole brain thinking where the left and the right sides of the brain work together to engage and motivate learners right brain is also designed to develop students 21st century skills also known as the four C's these include critical thinking creative and Innovative thinking collaboration and multiple modes of communication but knowing that the Arts can also develop compassion Civic mindedness and a sense of community we've added our very own fifth C a program of the regional arts and culture Council right brain is therefore a regional initiative and partners with school districts in racks Tri-County service area specifically working with K5 k6 and K-8 schools we began in the fall of the 2008 reaching 9 000 students in 20 schools in four of the largest school districts in the region you see here PPS and purple Hillsborough is in yellow Gresham Barlow in pink and the North Clackamas District in green we've grown each and every year and are now now serving 20 000 students in 59 schools across seven school districts having added Corbett Oregon Trail and Estacada the 6321 students in 18 Portland Public Schools account for 32 percent of all right brain students including all Jefferson feeder schools rack has taken the lead in the Arts community in address addressing the issue of equity and inclusion we are committed to ensuring that everyone in our region including the youngest in our community has equal access to the Arts credit goes to our local school district's PPS especially and their Equity work on informing us with Equity also being one of right brain's guiding principles the highest needs schools are a priority 11 of the 18 or 61 percent of PPS right brain schools are designated as Title One reflecting a reflective of right brain's partnership model is our 50 50 public-private funding structure extensive Public Funding including school districts shown F on this pie chart the upper right wedge of That Pie has been significant in leveraging matching private support beginning in a school's second year of involvement the district contributes fifteen dollars per student annually which provides the funds for artists to work in classrooms in collaboration with teachers but the magic doesn't just happen because an artist walks into the room one essential component of right brain
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is a three-year professional development sequence where teachers principals art Specialists and teaching artists learn together participants gain a common understanding of Arts integration they learn that it is an approach to teaching where students engage in a creative process which connects an art form and another subject area while honoring the learning objectives in both a survey of classroom teachers who attended right brain professional development shows that 75 percent reported that they use arts-based instructional strategies on a regular basis effectively making right brain part of their teaching toolkit another thing we've discovered in our research and evaluation is that as more and more teachers adopt this approach that translates into whole school investment in the Arts an analysis of school Arts maps that track grade level Arts learning shows that as schools become more engaged in right brain nearly 90 percent provide additional Arts experiences at every grade level and in many cases the amount doubles we'd like to think of right brain as an ignition switch of sorts it's no surprise that learning in and through the Arts promotes both creative and critical thinking and as a result students become agents of and take charge of their own learning their problem solvers who take on tough questions with persistence and determination coded classroom observations and one-on-one interviews with students after an artist's residency revealed that 90 percent describe themselves as active thinkers they say such things as I wondered I tried I imagined rather than my teacher told me to or I just followed the steps in addition to these indicators of success many of our stakeholders were interested in seeing the impact of right brain on student achievement specifically on test scores with support from Portland State University Center for Student Success our evaluator analyzed Oak scores of students before their schools entered right brain and the same students after their schools joined the program the sample size was really significant with 19 000 Student Records examined from the 2007-8 school year which was the year prior to right brain's launch through the 2012-13 school year the results were released in the report published in September 2014 and I'd like to share them with you now so if we first look at reading scores the average annual pre-right-bring increase was two points after the first year of right brain scores on average increased an additional 4.8 points which suggests that the increase was linked to involvement with right brain there it is but this was not just a one-time phenomenon as schools continued their involvement scores climbed again and again and again of course we can't claim causality but the correlation is evident similar increases exist in math scores before right brain there was a 2.4 Point annual average increase after the first year and in each subsequent year scores grew well beyond the average annual increase even more dramatic is the impact on English Learners as they are learning the language the Arts allow them to access content and demonstrate understanding through non-linguistic means here average annual English language proficiency assessment increases of 1.3 points jumped 10 times after joining right brain again scores climbed continued to rise indicating continued impact over time perhaps the most telling and Powerful evidence comes from students themselves last spring I had the great pleasure of interviewing Iman a seventh grader at beach K-8 during a right-brain residency with a media artist in her language arts social studies class the essential question for the year was who are my people to close I invite you to listen to this one and a half minute excerpt as she shares her insight and reflects on her learning process one thing I did notice that a lot of the questions weren't necessarily about me but kind of like about the people around me and one of my questions was um like you know they have the who are you who are your people questioned but I also asked who are you because that's a very important part of who your people are because as individuals we can choose who our people are like we can like well we can't choose what we can claim who our people are and to understand what we're claiming we have to first know who we are
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I think it's really interesting like we are using three ways to express who we are and who our people are we are expressing it first with our own words then we are expressing it in writing and then we are expressing it in art and pictures my flag it's gonna be kind of like a zipper flag because it's gonna have some things that maybe people think about me or it looks like on the outside and like my like my soul or like my insight is all family and that's something I know there's one final slide all this is really to say that learning in the Arts is both Hands-On and Minds on thank you so we're gonna have a time for questions but before we do I wanted to make sure and acknowledge the board for approving the 925 000 music instrument purchase to fill the gaps and programs that were existing without your investment is is putting us one step closer to fully funding Arts programming so thank you awesome thank you so much all right I'm sure there are comments questions from my colleagues director Buell on this orange theft in grade six from eight a bunch of them is it all of the running on here is all the money that's on here come from the Portland Public Schools I mean out of this one school I don't understand how one school has zero and another school has two another school as one how does that come about do we think what's happening there it's it's all PPS FTE it just means that in a K-8 school um if it says zero that the sixth through eighth graders in that school are not receiving any Arts offerings any F to eat off Arts offerings right I understand that but how did this come about that we have some with some arts and others with no Arts is that out um and you know it is there there are certain principles that are they're making some hard decisions um about what priorities are in their schools for instance Boise Elliott Humboldt um goes without uh an RJ a full-time RJ coordinator or reading specialist that they could use so those are those are some examples of what they take away to have arts in their programs class size I'm not I couldn't speak to class size you up your class sizes and that allows you to have an art person which kind of would kind of would uh which kind of would kind of uh play towards uh more economically advantaged neighborhoods to have art people because if you up your class size then you can have more FD left over if you lower your class sizes you have less fde so that would be one way you could approach it is I understand it so I haven't seen that plane out in the scheduling of our schools as the reason to not have Arts instruction at the middle no I mean it's a reason to have Arts instruction not to not have but if you keep your class size down then you don't get Arts instruction if you keep your class sizes higher you can get Arts instruction and you can keep your class size higher in certain schools much easier than you can in other schools so it's kind of a inequity I think that comes about okay thank you excuse me I I haven't seen that as a strategy to increase Arts instruction at our schools I I have not seen increase in class size in order to increase ours so maybe I maybe I could just do a follow-up just a question about what the strategy or plan will be to address I mean you definitely pulled that out as one of your key issues and concerns so where we have zero Arts instruction particularly for sixth or eighth graders can you talk about that a little bit I think that because of the Arts tax is so new um and and my position is so new that's why it's going to be really important for us to have a council of people that come together so we can really look at the data and see how we can be moving forward we're making slow progress and it's going to take some time so those answers aren't necessarily there yet but we will be moving toward that as we establish some Arts advisory Council work and so the place for those Investments are through the district Staffing team and the Investments that we make at the secondary level allow for for further elective offerings for for students at those grade levels Dr Knowles
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I'd like to just um start by saying thank you very much I had the pleasure of being at the Arts presentation last last week it was phenomenal I was blown away by our students and I just I can't say enough about how wonderful it is and I hope that everybody at some time has an opportunity to see how talented our students are everything from Visual Arts that was in the lobby there I know I know a superintendent who or no I know Eloise Dam Rush the executive director from Iraq was trying to buy a painting off of a fourth grader who refused to give it to her so um so everything from Visual Arts to dance to music to drama I was just I was just blown away and I also want to say as one of the members of the rack board at the time that we started the right brain initiative I'm so happy to see where it is today what what phenomenal growth and what a great opportunity for our schools and what another yet another great opportunity for Portland Public Schools to show how we can be a great partner to others in the community to help our students so my thanks to Rack in addition to my thanks to the voters for passing the Arts tax that allows us to have these teachers in our schools so that an Arts Specialists and and Kristen so that we can begin to build back the Arts in our schools and I'm particularly interested in how we are working on articulation across which is one of the reasons that I get concerned about the Gap in six eight when our students would just be kind of probably starting instruments if they didn't have them in elementary school and if they had them in elementary school then they don't have them when they're at six eight so there are a lot of different things that I think we need to be very careful about as we we develop an articulation and for that reason I'm very excited that you've been talking about an Arts Advisory Group I think that will be a benefit to the district to have some professionals both in the community and outside to to help us do that I did have a couple of questions I do one question there's a chart in here that the rainbow chart yes yeah that um one of the one of the areas that is in every one of the categories and pretty high up in all of them but didn't you didn't mention in your discussion was generating revenue for the program so I mean I think that's a great thing but I'm curious about is that something that we are doing at Portland Public I know there are many foundations that support Arts education and so I'm not sure if that's the intent or are we going to start charging people to come see our performances um what what's what's the generate revenue for programs all about I I think a lot of um Arts teachers myself included when I was in the classroom needs some support that doesn't necessarily come with the package the FTE package and so we end up trying to find ways to to fill in and sometimes that would happen through US providing a performance where we would charge for tickets and and then that Revenue we'd put back into our program to make investments for kids but that was all that that's not district-wide it happens in pockets and every every school is different with how they function with it some some ptas are able to help bridge the gaps and subsidize some stuff and some aren't so it's really a mishmash but I think that comes out a lot in not having an Arts Dosa for about eight years well four years I think people are really struggling to find out find find ways to support their work and not knowing an Avenue to reach out to do that so this is just sort of beginning conversation that was the first thing on the list so uh Kristen in your job do you help teachers find sources of revenue or you have been to identify grant opportunities or others in the community who provide those kinds of funds for our schools so what's been helpful thus far is that we have some Superstar Arts teachers in the district that have figured out something that works really well and so we've used them in some of these smaller workshops to teach others how how to help you know support the infrastructure of their individual programs well again thank you very much and I also um since I didn't mention it yet would reinforce your comments about how important Arts education is to the whole child and to their ability to learn in so many other ways I saw it happen with my own children I've seen it happen with children across the district and so again I just want to say thank you and thank you Marna for being here tonight to talk about right brain thank you
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director Regan hi thanks for being here um I love the fact that we're celebrating the Arts and it was Cleveland students who were here absolutely amazing to watch their performance and thank you for that the what I wanted to ask about what I thought this presentation was going to be about was more of a budget-focused presentation on what we're looking forward to for next year because for a while I think we've been asking about okay we've got the K5 Arts tax how are we kind of moving it into six through eight um so maybe I misunderstood what this presentation was going to be are we also going to be doing another Arts presentation during the budget process to better understand what we're looking at going forward or is this it no so this was really an update on what's going on with our Arts programming and what we're going to do is the things that actually come forward in the budget proposal will then do more in depth what are those things that you're wanting to learn more about that come forward in the budget proposal because we kind of flipped it this year so you're really learning and there people have made their asks of what things they'd like included in the budget but you're really hearing what's the state of the program tonight so I want to make sure I understand what you just said are we going to be getting another presentation specifically during the budget process around the Arts articulation no not unless unless you ask for it okay so you're asking for it so okay so so you could ask for it what I'm what I'm trying to understand is we have the K5 uh we had um in IGA with the city with the when we accepted the only for the Arts tax the expectation was that we were going to be doing a K-12 articulation and we were also going to be looking at a cluster articulation and um what I want to understand in terms of the budget next year is where are we at on that what are the monies that are going to be needed because I have some real concerns when I see charts like this which talks about you know Arts FTE in grade six through eight yes you see 12 schools that have zero arts and you see some that have up to five but when you look at our amount that we allocate in each of those schools for example on a per student basis it isn't to me this isn't a funding decision it's more of a decision at the school level on whether we're going to put the money in the Arts or not and so I get concerned when I see statements like there are 12k8 schools that do not have any Arts offerings for the sixth or eighth grade students the attached documentation gives a full view of which schools live in the Gap and need additional Arts FTE support because I'm not sure that's what that is showing it's just more showing the decisions that are being made at the local level so for example in the last budget cycle we as a board made a decision that every K5 school would have a minimum of a half-time counselor in every school and we funded that what I want to know is what is it that we should be doing going forward in terms of our six through eight articulation that would be similar so that we make sure that we are providing Arts to every sixth or eighth grade student and what's it going to take and I don't know if that's going to look look different in each cluster or not depending on what the high school might want to offer but so I'm this is a great presentation I'm thrilled to see all the Community Partnerships I'm I'm thrilled to see the celebration but I want more specifics on where we're going from here to build the program from K5 which the taxpayers helped us with on through six through eight and what it is that you need from us um in the budget to make it happen or what it is you need in terms of um more directives to our principles on what will be offered to our students so that's what I'm that's what I'm looking for okay so I appreciate the presentation it's not quite what I'm needing yet in terms of the budget so a couple things I'll just throw in here about Bobby because Kristen has been actually doing a visual mapping of what we actually it's color coded by cluster that shows what Arts are exist in each cluster so you can see where we have articulation and where we have gaps I mean so she has been putting something together like that and what you're describing is both a function of what's the guidance we give principles about what are the minimum program offerings you will do with the staff you get and I think we're just and some part of what you see here is also a function of the size of the K the Middle grades in the k-8s that you're looking at and what amount of Staffing you get and what amount you're willing to then um perhaps give more in order to have more electives I mean this is part of our K-8
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middle school because you see the middle middle schools that have like very rich elective offerings which is what we've known because this is the thing that people call out about this is what you get when you have a middle school and less of that when you've got a small sediment of number of students in the Middle grades at a K-8 so and yes we will be looking at some of this during the budget I do share tonight the cluster map you have that awesome great so other questions and actually I'm going to just say Chris may want to do a little explanation about this once it's passed out first it's coming around yes did you save one for yourself I did so if you look at the yo go ahead I was just gonna say I know some of the in some of the Clusters they've been very intentional about talking about what they're actually building through the cluster and being intentional about articulation and others are the intentional is coming now yeah yeah the conversation is just starting so what what you see in fragmentation in our district is just because we haven't been together to have the conversation and so good news is is that we we've got a lot of data to move forward if you look at the Cleveland map um just to explain it Cleveland's at the bottom and then you grow out from there in a feeder pattern it tells you broken down by a color how it moves forward so you can kind of see it a little better it's a lot of information to look at but one example is the Cleveland Choir that you just saw Sellwood Middle School doesn't offer choir nor does Hosford nor does Lane so in terms of a pattern that you can get there it kind of gets it it's disjointed so that's an example but it also works that way in terms of our band programming too so um you know music takes on many different faces and so how can we be intentional about in this cluster we want to have a strong choir representation or band or strings you know whatever whatever we're looking at but those are all questions that many people coming together will need to decide and and then make recommendations okay so when I'm looking at this and it says beach has one Visual Arts 0.5 in music 0.7 and this says it's got zero talk to me about what that would what what does that mean so because that's in the K5 is getting that but not the Builder not the middle okay yeah so what about Beverly Cleary because I know they've got a great jazz band because we heard them last week right uh that's Beaumont was it Beaumont yeah that was Beaumont yeah oh you're right I remember I hate to ask my question following those two yeah this has to do a lot with what I've talked a lot about which is having a foundational what is a good education so let's just pick one of these schools down here uh Irvington has no six eight FD in the arcs why is that better and is that because their principal decided that they needed something else or because they uh they couldn't figure out how to do it and also do all their reading teachers or I mean how does that come about we're not saying you need to have any arts in the in the K in the six eight so how does a school end up with none what does what's that decision-making process that gets there I'm going to draw you back to this picture right here which is where we were with the k5s before we had the Arts tax which was very little right so you're seeing partly this is the Boost of the Arts tax right yes and where you've anyway you like we're in the process of building we're the first year of an arts tosa and so this is exactly what it is we're at the front end of that Steve in terms of how are we intentionally starting to build back but yeah but that's why I asked my question too is if we're going to be intentional about it we we need the roadmap and we know next year with our Levy tax being renewed that we have another 45 teachers coming in I mean how how is it that we're going to employ them in a situation like this I mean irmington could be uh what's the map Irvington could be Arts could be the fifth choice of that principle out there I don't you know I don't know they're they're getting left out we don't have a basic we don't believe that every kid in the six through eight should have them Arts evidently otherwise we would have we do that's why we're talking about but I mean but we don't have it in how many
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schools one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve so but it's because we're making other choices it's not just from you have a 40 million dollar cut it makes a difference well yes it does but this year we didn't have that point but I think that we have to build back from that and also but we didn't have that cut this year that's what I'm asking about we did have 14 million dollars worth of Consultants for general education of course but we didn't have any arts in any of these schools so it is our idea that we in the next budget we will have arts in these schools or are we still going to leave it up and maybe it's the fifth line down I'm just I'm just confused about the whole situation actually I don't understand how it works how they end up with nothing in the Arts and we say well it's a principal's choice but there's got to be more to it than the principal decides we don't want to have arts in our school and then the principal up here decides we want to have arts in our school there's got to be more play here than what appears I think it's going forward and I'm kind of asking the people here I think not somebody else's they've already articulated that I'm asking them I'm not really asking you Ruth well I mean if they want to say that they've already articulated it's fine but I don't really want you answering their question for them so I do believe we answered that earlier so that's fine if you want to say that so great so I am it's any other comment sector and I'm going to just do a little bit more to Bobby's point is part of what was so on March 9th part of what I will bring forward is a staffing plan or a proposed Staffing plan which will include the things that I've gotten from all of the various departments um and from the district Staffing team which is making a recommendation about how we actually do our school-based staffing so you're hearing ingredients we're not putting forward giant budget proposals because everybody would like I'm going to come forward with a budget proposal that includes the things I've heard from all these departments what you're getting tonight is the content of um of it so yes you will get a purple and this is really more to director Regan's comments so when the budget proposal we'll have art in these schools we'll have um you will have elements of the things that I've I'm putting forward to you about how I would prioritize given the amount of staff we have to work with and what the needs are that I've heard come forward from the Department so I'm not that'll be on the ninth so so director so stay tuned yeah it's not complete yet so this is why I'm not I'm not I just I'm more that's what I'm working on to bring you on the ninth and I'm hearing from all of the Departments including these guys about what the needs are and what how I would prioritize that you'll get to weigh in on great well it just doesn't seem that it doesn't seem that uh if we're leaving it up to the principals and they're choosing to not have it it wouldn't make any difference well you prioritized would it well it could though that's what I'm wondering and that's part of so Steve part of what we do do each year is we we publish guidance to the principles of here's your Staffing and here is what we're saying you hear the core things that we need you to offer the level of funding has been below the ability to offer everything um in every so we have like done okay you have to have at least x amount of PE or x amount of uh your library open x amount of time this amount of so like we've done very specific here are all the things you need to cover with your Staffing allocation it could be that we're also saying so we could add guidance for principles if we're adding staff additional staff that we're also at saying You must have an Arts offering so that those are the kinds of things that we do when we're in the budget so essentially we didn't say this last year that you needed to have an Arts offering we just passed on it because we said that you couldn't afford it even though they could have affordable no and I hear you're concerned it's a concern for all of us that would be a concern for all this thank you Steve so director Belial um so first I want to say thank you for the presentation and I'm so sorry that I wasn't able to make it down to the new Mark and I see the wonderful performances but I've heard great things about it so thank you for putting that together I also want to Echo the thanks to the right brain initiative not only I know is it a national model but at a time when we were making those millions of dollars of cuts you were the thing that literally kept any semblance of Arts in our schools for the most part so thank you thank you thank you for that and thank you for continuing as I go around and I hear about teachers using arts in their classroom at Arts integration it's such an important part and now for the downside it's been long been my frustration that we've relied on rights for an initiative to do the Arts that Arts integration is not enough and I would contend that we'd be really really careful of asking Arts specialists in our classroom or in our schools to also have a double duty of them being forced
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to be the people to integrate Arts into the General Ed classroom not that it shouldn't be a natural um symbiotic relationship but Arts For Art's Sake it will do all these things it will do you know it will do all these things but Arts For Art's Sake is enough and it will have payoff in benefits so I just want to reiterate that um and before I get into my um main points and main questions I I see that we have a couple of PTA leaders in the in the back of our room and I just want to mention you somebody had said that ptas sometimes can contribute or some can support and some can't and I would really like to work with our partners at the PTA to find out ways that our ptas can support all schools not just the places where they can is there a way that we can bring more Equity to that I know that the PTA is very interested or I imagine they would be because they're always looking for all students and all voices but I would just like to extend an offer to our PTA leadership that we that we look for ways of of doing that across our system um with that I just want to um say thank you for giving us the articulation it feels like it's really in the early stages which after only one year I totally get it and I think what I hear from my colleagues and they can correct me without more details but that there is some interest in looking at being more directive with our Arts instruction and that's very exciting to me I think of some of our neighbor neighborhood districts who even through the budget cuts did in fact wind up raising increasing class sizes but they kept their band Orchestra choir and every kid whether they wanted it or not participated and they're seeing and and they've seen fantastic results as a result of it it's because their students are engaged they are using both sides of their brain and it does all these great things that are um stalled as benefits but it's just it's an important piece and so I just want to say whatever support I can provide for that and again I just want to remind that I think I'm hearing interest in saying how do we what what do we need in a in a five-year plan or a two-year plan or this year to begin to begin to build that intentionally so that and it's again I I have confidence I've met enough of our principals and some of them are here in the audience they're making really hard choices and great choices and some of them even though the FTE might not be here they might have had another partner that came in for a while before or after school so it's not always that they're absent it might not always tell the right picture at the same time we have to find I'd like us to find some sort of core that we begin to hold on to and build to so thank you all right so we're going to move on now thank you so much very much no I'm sorry we're going to move on thank you more about this and through the budget process you guys thank you so thank you so thank you thank you pent-up urgency and excitement for the board so thanks so much for all your great work so 2015 standard interdistrict transfer procedures perhaps not quite as um exciting for us but a very important issue accompanying you that's all sorry sorry Judy you can do it it's awesome okay superintendent Smith would you like to introduce this great next item on our agenda I would so Judy Brandon who's the director of enrollment and transfer is going to present um a proposal for the 2015 standard inter-district transfer procedures which we are required to do every year um and the the vote on this comes at the next meeting so you're really just learning the um proposed response thank you so much welcome Judy thank you and that is a tough act to follow I will try and be brief and let you move on and let you continue to savor um what you heard in that can you sing a presentation I'm sorry can you sing your presentation I will not be happy okay so uh recently I was here with you discussing the other way that inner District transfers get done the Open Enrollment which we opt out of um this is the discussion about the standard there's a couple of things uh there are a couple of actions that you as a board um need to commit to that's part of the new laws that came in in 2014 prior to 2014 boards weren't required every year to decide whether to engage in the process and to announce whether you were open closed or putting limits on it you need to do that now and we would like you to do that in March so that we can begin the process of contacting families and making sure they know what they have to do so that they can remain here in our schools and participate in great Arts programs like you just heard about um okay so a little bit of information
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and context um there's a map that you all have and here's a visual on the screen that's just a reminder that we have students who live in other districts attending Portland schools everywhere um and the size of the dot equals the proportion of students that the number of students most of the students who attend Portland Public Schools but reside in other districts started here as residents have moved to other places and have chosen to try and finish what they started perhaps because of the wonderful Arts opportunities like those that you just heard of and a notable exception is Kelly which houses our Russian immersion program which serves a population that 63 percent of the students in that program are from other districts that has a lot to do with how the population is moved and as a reminder to us to work with those other districts to find the best possible solution so that students aren't subjected to really difficult procedures for having to enroll in the program and that we have appropriate space for the program okay so there's here's a little bit more about what we did last year in the new process both with the students that we approved the incoming students and the students that we release those are the outgoing students so here's our approvals um as you saw in the chart or on the uh what the map that you just saw equals 846 enrolled students who reside in other districts um because they they are attending PBS we have demographic information about them and 74 of those students qualify as combined underserved that list includes 579 students who receive permission last year from us as PBS and from their resident district and so don't have to participate in that approval process in the future um so last year we had to get approval for all of the kids who wanted to stay we went through that most of them don't need to do it again however there are also about 300 students I think it's 200 and 270 who started the year as residence have moved and now do have to go through the process so that's a little staggering but it's an indication of the mobility that we see within our district about on average 50 students moving across District Lines every month so that's what we have to factor for in coming up with the process for this year in terms of the students that we released out of PBS unlike the students coming in our job last year was only to release the students who needed it for the first time so any students who have been released in Prior years or who had been approved through that open enrollment process we didn't have to go through an approval process for them again but we did have new students who asked to be released a total of 106 applied we released 40 to other districts um in that we gave priority to students who were already attending the requested school so who already had a relationship with that school or who had a sibling attending and I want to remind you again that when we talk about releases and these numbers it doesn't include the students who were approved through that open enrollment so in some here's here's the chart that really doesn't look as good as all the lovely Arts pictures that you saw a moment ago but um I didn't have time to fix it um I've I've sorted out I I've just shared this with you uh tonight it's the interaction that we have through inner districts with the top 10 districts um and I've sorted it by the rate of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch in those districts um just to give you and the reason that I did that is we can't ask questions about all of our applicants who's coming and who's going but we do know the districts that they're coming from now a student isn't a district so I'm not indicating that these only these students either qualified or didn't qualify for free reduced meals but just to give you that sense of where kids are coming from and where they're going to through this process so the first is that the first thing that you can note is we as you know we share a large part of our border with David Douglas a large District on the East that's where we have the most transactions through interdistrict transfers 271 of their students applied in last year 205 wound up actually attending so this um final count Ed column um so that's the third column over there we go gives you the count of who actually showed up and one of our learnings from this year is that there's a lot of
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difference between the people who apply who might even get approved and those that actually show up because families are constantly in motion and making other decisions um so I think you can see from this that we have mostly students from the East from the south who are coming in relatively High rates not very many students going out to those districts requesting to go out we don't have very many students coming in from Western districts and we have a higher number of students applying out to the districts that are west and southwest of us these are the totals who came in through our process last year from those 10 districts which you can see is the majority of all of the students that wound up coming in this year at the start of the school year who live in other districts and those that went out um I did add the Open Enrollment column here so that you can see what the sort of total impact of students leaving PPS was for the year I know that this number compared to this number looks very small but it does change when you add in the effect of open enrollment out so Judy can you remind us how the money flows That Money Follows the kid or what happens yeah State funds follow the students so in every case in every case if both districts agree what we've agreed to is to transfer State School funds so that's the technical name of the document that follows the students so now that we are completely in the left part of our brain um I'd like to briefly describe what we propose for the coming year and this is a very quantitative proposal because that's essentially the decision that you have to make I've got a little bit more about some of the qualitative elements that go with this um we would we do recommend that Portland Public Schools be open to standard interdistrict transfers for the coming year and that we release up to 50 PBS residents to other districts and accept up to 300 non-resident students into PBS that 300 is our best guess at the total number of currently attending students who would need a transfer to come back next year plus some room for new students in places where we believe we would have them if there are more applicants than space we would ask that we continue to prioritize students who are either currently enrolled in a school or who have a co-enrolled sibling at that school and then we would use a random Lottery as tiebreakers if necessary so a little bit about what we learned from last year and what we think it means for process this year a big lesson learned is that we need to work with families to get releases from their resident District before we give them approval to attend PPS because that turned out to be a false promise for a number of families and they did the work of getting our you know they worked with us they got our approval and then they relaxed but unfortunately sometimes that meant they missed the deadline or they didn't make it in their resident District's Lottery and then it was even greater disappointment even later than it had to be so we want to start earlier that's why we're asking you to give us permission earlier and um we intend to know what families need which means knowing a lot about what's going on in Residence in their resident District not just here we have to know about what's over there Health families navigate that communicate in their native language when necessary and do what we can to walk them through that process once they get that release we pledge to make our end of it as simple as possible particularly for those families that we already know because they're in our schools um the other big lesson learned is that the numbers are going to move all the time and so we need to be able to be adaptable along the way we kept waiting for a moment last summer when we had our numbers and we were done but the minute we thought we were done new families would would go and a new family with needs would come and we needed to open the doors again so we even though this is a much more State controlled process now and it seems much more tight in the box of limitations we've had to find ways to build in some flexibility for that to be adaptable to families um so what that might mean is that we have to come back to you at some point to adjust the numbers because you have to set those numbers but hopefully we're going to get them right and whatever you approve next week will be what our families need I also want to mention that we've got some ongoing efforts at the state level there is a working group of staff and District superintendents and they're trying to align and improve a process
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that brings open enrollment and standard inter-districts together so that means that there will be additional legislation on this we don't know if it's going to be um if the if the legislature will actually take it up this year it likely wouldn't be implemented until 2016. so we have a year off without new legislation but there's probably more changes coming um in the meantime our biggest efforts are local and that means improving our common practices across the Metro region unfortunately our superintendent um participates in a county-wide group that where this these issues come up and get discussed um we right now have a survey a Google survey out there with our colleagues from other districts um and that and so we are trying to figure out what those dates are and who's participating and what I also regrettably have to say that some of the things that we pledge to have done by now are not done so I'm just going to be really transparent about that we have not yet changed the policy and administrative directive it's important to do that and we want to bring that to you hopefully by the end of this school year um and we've got some other things that are just some loose ends so this is a constant work in progress and it doesn't affect that many families but the families that it would affect it's so important that we really have to know what we're talking about when it's time to talk about it so um I just want you to know that we are committed to all the loose ends even though there's still some of them out there and then finally I was hoping um to hear from you as part of your comments uh what you think about the notion of parity in students coming and going from districts and the reason I bring this up is that it's pretty clear in that state level working group they're recommending one of their Prime recommendations is that districts would have equal numbers of students who were able to come and leave a district as part of inter-district transfers in the future um and so that means the same amount of slots in as out now there's no mandate to do this yet and it may never happen if it does happen it wouldn't happen for at least a year however I wanted you to be aware of it and provide some guidance on whether you think it's a way that we should start moving in the short term what it would mean essentially is that we would be releasing more students and based on what you saw in the numbers that means more of those students would be going to schools likely in the west and southwest or we would be accepting fewer students which means we would likely be taking in fewer students who come to us from the East and the southeast so I'll flip back quickly to my very pretty slide here reminding you where the students are coming from now not all of them are getting in um but this year we expect that we'll need about 300 slots for the incoming and you if if the applicant pool looks similar to last year you can get a sense of where those kids would be coming from if we take less than 300 we're likely to be affecting students who may who may be more likely to well I'll remind you that 74 percent of the kids that we're serving now qualify as combined underserved so students that we would normally want to prioritize for Equitable access to programs students leaving would be a higher proportion of students most likely going to schools west and southwest Lake Oswego Riverdale um are striking in the number of applicants out given that we have very few transactions with kids coming in by the way the schools that I know of that are open again for open enrollment this year David Douglas North Clackamas and Lake Oswego are confirmed to be open again for open enrollment so so that's my parity question um should we begin moving closer to parity which would mean tightening up those numbers now or is this a good enough to maintain where we are what's your recommendation I'll hear from you come back with a resolution that hopefully you'll be able to vote on and we'll get started thank you thank you so much questions and comments in response to the specific requester input around the parity question below hi I liked your presentation it was very nice so a couple of thoughts to your question about what you're looking for input about incoming and outgoing to me to set them on parity reminds me of a little bit of a technical bureaucratic fix like a school district saying we need to be able to count on enrollment numbers we don't want to lose money and we want to try to keep the same amount of money we have and so therefore the same number going out should come in
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um which seems if I interpret the spirit of what I thought open enrollment originally was about trying to find the right fit for a student and giving them giving families a place to go from one District to another when it made sense for the family that doesn't feel like the right solution but it's not uncommon for state-wide decisions to not make a lot of sense at the local level it's it's tough across that many districts um I'll just stop director Knowles thank you Judy that wasn't that's it's interesting it's also confusing to me sometimes so appreciate your your presentation around the parity question my understanding is that the reason that we let students come in or leave is that especially those coming in is that they have been students here at PPS in the past they move out they want to continue at the school where they have been is that the majority or is that everybody or is that the case with most of the the students that are coming in for Portland Public Schools that's absolutely mostly the case okay I would say that may not be the case for many other districts who are participating okay well I guess then I would be saying the same thing as director Boyle and I believe that if we have students who have been here and there are students and they want to continue to go to school with us then we should be so happy to have them enjoying their experience here at Portland Public Schools and wanting to continue that's a clarifying question I'm is the parody between individual districts the same number go in and out is it's overall yeah you can just I'm having we're not allowed to set slots by District right um it's it has to be a general number so they're saying is that every District would have the same I I'm just having my I'm my right so the latest draft that I saw said that if a district chooses to limit the number of students then there would be a a cap on that limit and that the cap would be the same for all districts and that cap as in the latest draft and this is only a draft would be three percent of total enrollment well in our case that would be 1500 students so I'm not sure that you know that's something that we've David Williams and I have had a lot of conversations about and I know he's trying to help watch very closely the progress of that but in the absence of such a you know sort of arbitrary and and large number then the alternative would just be that you just can't have any more slots in than you have slots out so if you say you're open to 300 students coming in then you have to be willing to say you're also open to 300 students going out uh do I mean it sure um so for that question I think it's important to look at who's transferring in and out if you look at the students transferring in um they're mostly students who have found support at the school that they want to stay at and they found something that makes them want to go to school and they might not have a lot of resources at home so if they really like the school we should allow them to say because that's a huge success and for the students who are transferring out a lot of them are to Lake Oswego and Riverdale so I think that they have their other reasons very different from the families transferring in and I don't think we should force anybody out of the pool transferring in nor should we trans or Force anybody to transfer out so I think that we should just stay with the populations who do want to come into our schools being a lot higher and then allow whoever wants to attend other schools to as well just to really think about the families and make sure we're having being Equitable in our decisions abuel thank you for allowing me to ask a question I appreciate it did uh what did the restrictions on people of kids transferring in what restrictions do we have do you is it are you restricted from what school you can go to are you restricted based on the for instance I've got a kid out there in David Douglas and I want to go to Alameda can I transfer that kid to alamina no we get to decide so technically the transfer is into the district and then we decide where we have space by school here's where we have space for you like um yes although uh since most of our slots will go to current students what we want to do is assure that a current student can remain where they are even if it's Alameda which would normally be closed to transfers so it isn't we probably won't produce a big chart saying exactly where every
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space is we would approve students we allow families to tell us where they'd like to go and then we match that with where we have space by working with the principal well my question has to do with the neighborhood and Emirate transfer we can no longer allow children to decide where they want to go and transfer neighborhood to Neighborhood without specific going through a specific process but can you can you Sidetrack that process by coming into the district from outside in other words are we offering things to people outside and offering them oh yes you're living in David Douglas now and you get to go to school a but I'm sorry over here you're living down in school C but you don't get to go to school a do we have any is that up is that a anything that we're thought about or looked about looked at or director appeal we've absolutely thought about that it's a little ironic that at the same time that Portland Public Schools is moving to a neighborhood transfer system where people you know should have a reason and we need to be thoughtful about those at the same time the state is giving us guidance to make transfers more blind and less based on students actual reasons or needs what we know from our last experience with this is that there were very few applications into PBS to Neighborhood schools for new students so we saw applications for specialized programs like immersion but to just uh standard neighborhood schools for students who had not attended there and didn't have a sibling there were very few of those transfers what percentage of the 836 or whatever um I'm going to say five percent so 40. approximately okay and and of those we would look to see if it was a school where we had I mean here's what I think we will do in that case we would look to see if it was a school where we had been able to place PPS neighborhood to Neighborhood transfers that qualified and if the school had been open to those meaning they had had space for that we may contact to see if they have additional space for non-resident students I think there will be a few of those and I think that that's how we're likely to handle it unfortunately we won't be able to ask questions about why a student would want to go there and whether a different type of school might meet their needs okay thank you thank you so I'm not I'm not remembering that we have been put in this place before where we've had to set kind of a cap is this completely utterly new or uh it was completely utterly new for you in May 2014. Which is less than a year ago were saying to me that you were saying to us that you might have to come back to us is there a possibility to set up a range you set the upper limit I had to come back in September and squeeze in a vote from you to up the range for outgoing students um so if you feel like these numbers might be too small now would be the time to let me know and I and I recognize that that's a difficult place to put you in because you haven't spent the time that I have trying to look at who's applying and and what it means by school and so I'm happy to provide additional information in the meantime but um the law does require that that you decide whether you're going to limit and if you limit what are you limiting it to so you're proposing 50 slots out and 300 in correct okay that's on top of for this coming year for so those would be new um decisions on top of all the decisions that have already been made 800 pardon 800 in some uh the 500 and some so incoming yeah about 580 already made we'll probably need to make about 300 more for students who are in our buildings now or um I just want to thank Mina for pointing out a question that I had had earlier too right when I see the applicants out and I think of our own experience with neighborhood to Neighborhood transfers and the inequities that it wound up breeding I would hope that in our discussions and I'll put this as a note to myself to discuss with our legislators when we go down but we we saw a pattern of who was using the the inter-district transfer and I was appreciative to here that the folks that were letting come back in are a majority of historically underserved and I just want to highlight that while we said that districts are no longer able to consider the individual needs of students that that was actually
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the best again at the state level our state legislature could do because we had some neighboring districts who were being very selective in who they were screening and again as far as when we think about Equity they were not considering Equity at all in fact they were looking at their ability to pay so while it comes across is a negative right now because we can't work with our individual families that we want to make sure that we provide stability to again when you're legislating for a whole state there were some actual benefits to that because again some districts were discriminating on reasons that I would not be okay with that okay so um does that give you enough guidance any further thoughts from other board members on there you are in the we've heard from a few of you not all of you yeah um You release this out of Portland Public Schools the proposed lottery date is April 15th approvals in is a month later on May 15th why why a month in between so I did provide um Target dates in there we'll fine-tune those dates based on what other districts are doing because we don't I just wanted to clarify that I didn't put a slide up now for people who are observing and waiting for those dates and we get calls every day um just because we we've still got uh to refine them but um we want to make sure that we've given people enough time to get through the application process right and um since you need your release before you can apply in we need to give plenty of time for people to get those releases in other districts we also want to provide the release as quickly as possible so people can go and do what they need to do elsewhere so the releases have out happened before the approvals but that's why I was asking why why they wouldn't more or less happen at the same time because you have to get one before you can do the other um no so so we can so we did them around the same time last year right but what what the problem was is that we were saying our approvals we were saying yes to students in before they had been released out so by saying this is release time like by trying to enforce or develop a pattern of this is when you release for the first month You released for the second month you catch it's like Catch and Release only backwards so this isn't just Portland Public Schools is this like all the districts around us are kind of on the same schedule well I'm getting there so it's another one of the things right yeah it's another one of the recommendations that's coming out of that working group is that we have set time frames by the way they think we should be doing all of this in February um and we'll see if that makes good sense but in the meantime just the notion of spend this time helping families release everybody who's released now gets accepted if you didn't get released there's no point implying applying to be accepted and ideally this is one form that starts with a family in one place gets a district approval moves to the other District electronically that it's not the family that has to walk it through which has been the case the forms available in multiple languages by the way the sample form that they've submitted I I asked today I asked the state I asked osba do you have it translated and of course the answer was no so we'll be we'll be doing that great thank you so much well I I support your recommendations and other I haven't heard anyone saying they're not comfortable with your recommendations so thank you very much for that thank you all right appreciate that so now we're going to move on to an important update around the work that's being done as well as bedroom implications around our information technology strategic plan I know we've been excited to hear about this for quite some time we got a fabulous huge information in our package I know we're going to hear a more streamlined version of that tonight but just so folks know at home who are following along in the board materials you'll see additional information and it's it's great information so sorry I'm jumping the gun on you Carol go ahead and that's okay introduce the item as Ruth just introduced to present that material will be Josh Klein who's our chief information officer and Ryan Morales who is our director of technical operations and they're going to present our strategic plan for information technology welcome I'm really glad to have you here that would be ironic if the PowerPoint didn't work but I know it's going to call tech support yeah that's right all right well good evening superintendent Smith board of directors Josh Klein Chief Information officer it's my pleasure to present the
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information technology strategic plan I'm here with Ryan Whitten Morales go ahead and get started so we'll talk with you do a quick uh introduction of the I.T Department we have most of our I.T leadership team here so we'll introduce them quickly we'll do a technology investment history it's a brief history and then a current state review that's going to include a peer review of Council of Granite City Schools metrics look at that and then a short video it's a three minute video that I think you'll enjoy and then we'll review a new Asset Management program that we've launched this year which includes the results of our recent asset inventory technology asset inventory and then we'll finish with Ryan presenting a sustainable investment plan for your consideration so um if the it leadership team could stand up just for a moment here I'd like to introduce them quickly so we have um Marita inglesby and Catherine rossen from our client services division we have Ryan is here Ryan Morales and we have Stacy Parton or Stacy young now actually recently married from our technical Operations Division and niku Shriner is holding down the fort in our systems development integration division as our program director position is currently vacant thank you so much for all being here so we'll go ahead and jump right into our um to our investment history review so it really started uh information technology in the district really began in 1995 with a capital Bond investment of about 49 million dollars it was a large investment at the time part of a much larger Bond I mean this was about a quarter or a fifth of the bond was used to fund information technology in the district what we did with that money is we ran power and data infrastructure to all of our schools we have historical buildings old infrastructure we didn't have enough power we had no networking or data cabling at that time so we ran that infrastructure out to the district schools during this period of time we got all the schools internet access and we installed computer labs in every school two in many schools high schools and middle schools and we um brought computers into every classroom three to four computers per classroom a few years later or kind of during that same time but a couple years later we had a certificates a participation initiative where 32 million dollars was brought to Tech not brought into technology mostly this was a software initiative not a hardware initiative so we brought in the esys student information system and the PeopleSoft system at that time um our more recent investment our most recent investment was a capital borrowing program in 2009 15 million dollars you can see the breakout here of how those funds were intended to be used as far as 85 for classroom technology and we did a lot of good things um there was like 17 projects in this portfolio but the main things are we brought the voice over IP phones to the district so a new phone system we upgraded computer labs in 12 schools I think they were all kids at the time we brought a wireless infrastructure into the district which did not previously exist an important part a point of this is that the wireless infrastructure at that time was only sized for about 10 devices per classroom so the access points are all in the hallways not in the classroom so it's it's um it needs to be updated we brought in Tech bundles sort of for the first time in an organized way to about half of our schools and we modernized our Data Center for Energy Efficiency um cutter number of servers by a factor of by down to 25 of what they previously were so all that work um created a maintenance obligation so we brought in a lot of Technology we need to maintain that um modern and keep it working the final report of the bond initiative which was the the largest investment um recommended the need or identify the need for a three to five year refresh cycle on School Technology that three to five million dollar investment was recommended for a three to five year refresh period unfortunately at that time we only had about a million and a half dollars to invest toward that toward that recommendation and you'll see how that investment has sort of trended over time but it stayed basically flat another a couple things were highlighted in that report on the need for expanded internet access of course to provide voice stream media and other services and then also sort of a prediction that internet bandwidth demand would increase or double every year and I think we've pretty much seen that so the um during this this kind of period of time this this ending period after the borrow we and after we had this three and a half million dollar recommendation we did make a million and a half dollar investment per year and that became called the it refresh program um and so for the first seven years of the refresh program um the money that we had which was about a million dollars on the school side half a million dollars on the central data center side
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um the million dollars was allocated to schools based strictly on their student enrollment so there was no equity waiting there was no other factor used it was a strength of the number of kids um there was building level discretion on how those funds were spent principals did need to buy off our Central menu through it purchasing so there were some standards but principals could basically decide you know how to invest those technology funds over the last two years we've changed this approach a little bit or pretty significantly actually and we're now have launched what's called an innovation and modernization fund which is a centrally managed fund so we're not Distributing funds out to the schools we're centrally managing the funds with an equity focus and aligning that with our district priorities and because of that we're able to realize some significant volume purchasing discounts and other efficiencies related to buying large volumes of stuff at one time instead of having you know a little bit bought here a little bit bought here a few weeks later 20 Chromebooks here 10 laptops here we're buying thousands of devices at once um and we've also put around this district-wide asset management into place so we can track these devices much more effectively than we've done in the past it allows us to Target our strategic Investments and it's also all been done on the guidance of the pafsa it steering committee the Portland Association of public school administrators we have a steering committee we work with closely there around information technology and they help us design this program um I don't spend much time here but this does show you the trending um of the 1.5 million dollars a little bit over a million at the school allocation level and you can see that it it as the economy dropped out it went all the way down to a hundred thousand dollars at the school level and it's now just for the first year come back up to that that 1.5 million dollar level and of course this is all still well below the three and a half million that was originally envisioned so now we'll just just jump right into um the current state of Technology so I've got three charts here to share with you these are all from the Council of great City Schools which as you know is the 67 largest districts in the country these are our peers this first chart these are all from their act Point kpi management system um this first chart shows you the percent of spending of the total District budget on information technology and what you see is Portland you know trending up above the median there for a couple of years up to 2.6 percent and in the last couple years falling down to about two percent which is pretty much the median nationally leading districts are up above three percent investment in I.T of their total budget the next chart is I.T spending for student so again you know we see a trending here this this is basically the amount per kid enrolled in the district um how much do we spend per student on technology so it's a slightly different way of looking at it um what you see here is Portland leading um pretty significantly other districts for a number of years and then over the last couple years again it falling off and then us returning to the median at about the 185 per student level um the the Investments here um you know the other point I wanted to make was that the national Trend really is increasing even during a time of you know weak budgets and and poor finances the national Trend still found a way to increase here just because of the world that we live in and how important technology is in our lives and the last chart is average computer age um this is possibly the most disturbing Trend and you can see a real big drop off it pretty much correlates with the time when we removed that funding and now the computers are managing the district or an average of 4.6 years old and the the national average is under four years you do see a national Trend increasing here and that's because the quality of computer equipment has increased it can last longer in many cases than it could years ago but we're still um concerningly above the average here as far as the age of our equipment two takeaways um one is that our technology spending in the district has not kept pace with our student enrollment increases so as we've had increases in student enrollment we haven't made necessarily corresponding increases for those kids and we're also not keeping Pace with national Trends to spend more on technology than was was spent previously the other important point is that using equipment Beyond its useful life so when equipment gets really old it creates significant sump costs to replace that equipment through a big periodic investment which is a large disruptive process to come in and replace all this stuff it's expensive it's risky um none of that's probably surprising so now we do have a quick video to show you and then we'll kind of you know a little more upbeat here
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digital literacy is no longer a nice to have but absolutely necessary for students to be successful in today's world we know that we have not been able to invest in so many elements of what makes a school successful and that includes technology we visited Madison High School we looked at both of the computer labs that have computers that are more than 10 years old and watched a student try to log in and sat and watched and watched so there's a lot of things that you can do with technology so my biggest fear coming over here was if they had access if teachers have had access to give kids that opportunity other things here um technology certainly that we have right here I cannot ask it would be really challenging for some of our teachers to set up a time to come into the computer lab and be able to access that right away finally it was our job at Portland Public Schools to make sure that we have the technology available for our students starting at the very lowest grade level possible the school board's allocation this year allowed us to address the most critical technology needs and we were able to place a Chromebook cart in almost every Elementary K-8 and Middle School we've been operating on a basis of trying to get technology into our classrooms any way possible so we do have some Pockets where we have some great teachers doing wonderful things and their students are able to take advantage of this it's been phenomenal I mean using the technology especially with the Hands-On learning that we have through Project Lead the Way and through our biomedical Science Program going all the way down I won't imagine how much more the learning could happen in terms of the meaningful learning experiences and just the more like student-centered activities that can happen in each of the classrooms here would benefit from having art before we could put together a new funding model we needed to know exactly what technology was in all of our schools so for the very first time this year we did a complete inventory of every piece of technology in every single Portland Public School the lack of investment and the outdated technology in many of our schools now places our students at risk for not meeting today's digital literacy demands there's a lot more to be done before all PBS students have access to the technology they need to succeed and to compete in today's Global Society we're bringing forward a new Equitable and sustainable plan and funding model to achieve this our students future truly depends on it all right so that is kind of the transition into what we're working on this year and some of the the good work and the modernization that's happening so this slide is something that we've developed in concert with papsa it which I mentioned earlier which we've been working with them for a couple of years now to try to Define some of our priorities and spin this Central fund that we have these are the five priorities that we develop with Pasa in this order replacing projector bulbs replacing loss and stolen equipment maintaining a Chromebook for every teacher and administrator and then moving down into student technology so an eight to one ratio of student technology of students to devices in each school and then down to a five to one ratio once we hit that eight to one goal and the five to one ratio would be achieved or focused on priority schools academic priority schools first so the asset inventory going to give you some results here we recently as you know ran a district-wide wall-to-wall asset inventory tkw was our partner tkw Talbot corvola Warwick is also the organization that we use for our financial audit the scope of the inventory was 103 physical sites and there's a list of the equipment here that was inventory the types of equipment I won't read that to you and as was mentioned in the video this is the first time that in the history of the district that we've had a complete inventory come while we were doing that inventory we had a strike force an I.T strike force that came in behind the staff that were doing the inventory from tkw and they were certifying devices for the smarter balanced assessment so in addition to counting and labeling every device Our IT team came in talked with the principal and a point of contact at the school about which technology specifically was going to be used for testing which Labs which exact pieces of equipment we then tested every one of those pieces of equipment to make sure
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it was functional and would work for the test and that and then we counted them and then that count was used to establish a certified device count which lets us do a lot of really powerful analysis between the total total technology in the school technology available for student assessment um and you'll see that on the coming slide here the School Technology governance team with nit had oversight of this of this operation the Strikeforce operation and they've also developed we've developed remediation and E-Waste plans for each School based on what we found so where we found damaged or broken technology we're either going to E-Waste that or we're going to upgrade that so it can be useful and those plans will be rolling out here in the next couple of weeks to principles so the Strikeforce results what you see here and this is much much more detail in your packet which you receive there's additional charts and data but what you see here is a huge discrepancy in the district that we found um as far as the amount of Technology available for student assessment in the school so some schools being below a one-to-one student for device ratio some schools being you know above 11 to 1 and then everywhere in between the yellow schools in this are the high schools you'll also see two horizontal lines a yellow line which is the the five to one aspirational ratio and then the red line is the eight to one you know initial goal that we had on some of the schools that have more computers is that because ptas have paid for them or I mean do we know are these are these just PPS purchased what why don't we hold off on questions if we could too it's a great question and there's a variety of reasons and we can we can wait till the end okay we're getting there um so with this information with all of this information we decide we used this um in real time to decide how to roll out the Chromebook cards that we had from the million dollar investment so we ended up um having 68 schools involved involved in our phase one Chromebook rollout project 68 total schools all k5k middle schools and mlc of those 68 schools 56 of them received the Chromebook cart one Chromebook card four schools received two Chromebook cards eight schools we determined already had sufficient technology and we did not deploy our Chromebook cart to those sites um phase two um we received a 900 000 allocation in February um thank you and we're going to be rebuilding labs and libraries at our high schools so we haven't yet done the work in the high schools that's coming up very quickly here so here's the after graph you saw the before what was this one here's the after so you can see um and with the exception of the high schools which are the yellow and we have not addressed those yet we now have every School site below a five to one ratio for the purposes of student assessment and of course that also improves their overall device ratio in the school so we were really happy that with this investment we were able to get down you know not only to the eight to one ratio but down to the five to one aspirational ratio as well so that's the end of what I have to share um well you can move on to the next section we'll do questions let's finish your whole presentation and want to know about lots of great questions yeah I think we have we have some components that'll address some of those questions as we go forward I think if we go back to that I'm sorry um if there's something we can take away from this particular slide it is the size of that word sustainability that'll be a pretty consistent thread to the rest of this presentation so what are we really talking about here we have an I.T infrastructure that is is very sizable and it should be thought of as an ecosystem we have devices in the hands of kids we have all of that equipment from that wireless network all the way out to The Wider internet that we're considering in terms of maintenance that infrastructure really needs to rapidly grow and be really well maintained we're getting more and more devices in every classroom some classrooms going fully to one to one we have engaging new curriculum you know barely a couple of years ago YouTube and Khan Academy were not tools in the classroom and now they're Tools in almost every classroom we also have a reality that for our most historically underserved and at-risk kids the school is potentially their primary access to technology and the internet so we're actually supporting their their ability to engage in the 21st century we have some very large upcoming investment needs uh VoIP the voice over IP phone environment that we created is now reaching end of life end of service we've depended on that system for communication we also depend on it for lockdown emergency drills fire earthquake so it's very important that that piece of our infrastructure remain well maintained we also had a team this summer walk almost literally the four corners of
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every classroom in the district with devices that test Wireless signal strength we found significant number of areas that didn't have any wireless coverage at all at all as Josh educated we built that network with the supposition in front of classroom instruction and about 10 devices per classroom now we're talking 30 60 devices the bandwidth in our classrooms has doubled as was predicted year over year over year we are at capacity and in all honesty exceeding capacity in most of our sites as you've seen in some of these prayer slides we also need a very sustainable plan for managing these staff and teaching tools and then student tools going forward so we've been able to do some of this work before as you saw in Prior slides we've had bonds we've had Capital borrowing we feel that there's a bit of an issue with that funding model um primarily as you you know to your your uh question director Reagan we perpetuated a digital divide we have schools that depending on which school you go to as a student you have a vastly different experience in terms of access we also you know I think recognize that this technology refresh is periodic itself but it kind of needs to happen when it needs to happen you can't ask a firewall or a piece of networking technology just to keep working for the kids so at the end of the day if we continue forward with periodic funding models like bonds Etc if we're unable to pass those bonds or these the cost of funds for a capital borrow are too significant we run into a very significant problem being able to provide that Baseline infrastructure we also have found that bonds grants and capital borrowing packages create significant future obligations for maintenance and refresh you know we do that one-to-one program at a high school those iPads only last so long we need more internet access at this so there's really a holistic perspective here that we need to bring to the table what we're proposing we're basically calling a stable operating model and there are three really key points to this we need to use Simple industry Standard Supply strategies we need to create a predictable and supported spend for all of you so that when we look at budgeting you understand and can predict what's coming out of it we also need to use operating ratios to plan for our capacity passing so as we move grow and change as a district we also need to fund that process in order to support that stable operating model we're proposing a technology leasing portfolio it's a bit of a scary number but we have about 30 million dollars worth of infrastructure work to do we also under this portfolio plan to operationalize Information Technology again we'll know what our predicted spend is it'll be aligned directly to the operation of the district directly aligned to the implementation of programs and devices and needs in kids hands this also is something that you'll see is is kind of an industry best practice and in terms of Industry here I'm speaking both to I.T and to education one of the primary drivers is that it lowers total cost of funds you need large planful refresh strategies have significant volume purchasing opportunities behind them we can get devices almost at cost and the cost of funds itself because of the the way the taxable leases work is is significantly reduced over other funding vehicles at the end of the day how does this really support a school well what we'd like to see this do is create a commitment to a healthy predictable scalable technology platform at schools we have modern curriculum rolling out that has significant digital components to it we have the Khan Academy thing we have folks really using these tools every day and instruction that needs to be treated like a platform that they can build upon and the district's dollar is going to go further at the end of the day you have Consolidated budgets that are buying laptops and student equipment for teachers one-offs you know five laptops here if we're planful if we're predictable in the way that we're doing this work that dollar goes significantly further we also have an opportunity here to become partners with the schools between central office and those schools we have large adoptions on the the Forefront we needed some strong Asset Management life cycle that's part of what we've already worked we've already done and work with it will continue into this model there's also an important bullet there around changes in FTE and enrollment this last fall we added well over 300 or so positions out in schools in various capacities the unfortunate reality is no funding was provided to give that staff member a device so a piece of technology or those new classrooms that were being opened again for the first time any presentation equipment whatsoever part of what this model addresses is being predictable about those sorts of changes and being able to partner with that principle so instead of pulling those
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funds out of their Consolidated budget that may have gone let's say art supplies we can provide the tools that they need day one so when I said this was an industry-aligned approach you'll see some peers that we have up there in the educational space both K-12 and universities including Tucson Unified School District who have already moved to this type of a model surpingly enough we Portland Public Schools have already moved to this model with our Rico copier Fleet so that is a very large multi-million dollar equipment Fleet that is managed on a five-year cycle lease and was actually refreshed I think about two years ago so what we're asking as a to drive this portfolio forward is an initial two million dollar ongoing commitment and this is in the the fiscal budget that we have proposed this would serve us an initial 10 million dollars worth of work in that portfolio we're going to be focusing we would propose to focus the majority of that work in remediation of our Network and connectivity issues as well as some of the the biggest pain points in student and staff devices we would be looking to increase that portfolio in a ramp over five years to approximately 30 million you'll notice that aligns very clearly with the overall infrastructure portfolio that's an important concept to kind of have as we would scale that portfolio to match the total cost of ownership to the district so as we add programs as we add staff as we deploy more one-to-one initiatives we'll need to consider where that ceiling really is the service of that full 30 million dollar portfolio is looks like about six million dollars in an ongoing year-over-year commitment you understand that these are very rough numbers not factoring in total cost of funds things of that we've been building this strategy out with a strong partnership with the office of the CFO I'm Joseph Awad formerly of Tucson Unified School District who has already implemented a program very similar to this for staff and student devices so we have a graph here representing time from left to right indicating periodic investment so you'll see we we passed a bond very significant investment in technology there was some time it passed we went to those certificates of participation some more time passes we begin to start trying to refresh some of that technology we put a little Capital into the game and then we move back down to just that that refresh level that was about 1.5 of the the suggested 3.5 that dashed line represents next year so if we are successful in moving forward the budget proposal that we've made the next 10 years would look like what you see to the right of that line a very stable sustainable and predictable model in terms of cost of funds and in terms of the equipment that's in our district so the next steps this is our last slide so we're going to continue with coordination with the with Yosef and the CFO in portfolio design and procurement still investigating that we'll be finalizing our Master lease agreement terms and preparing to move forward with that looking for approval of the ongoing investment and our Innovation and modernization budget beginning with next school year Ryan mentioned that we had you know requested two million dollars hopefully we'll get Summer all of that and continuing with the development of a refresh calendar which basically starts to lay out and there's actually a kind of an early version of this in your board packet which starts to lay out you know when different equipment needs to be refreshed and when we might expect to be leasing that equipment so that is the end of our presentation and we'd be happy to take questions fantastic thank you so much all right colleagues how can we get to the well that before when we're so out of kilter have you guys been around long enough to understand how that how we got there in one slide I noticed that I think it was Cleveland Wilson Lincoln and Grant all were up at the top with with technology and Madison actually there's the other the higher the bar the worse it is right more kids higher the bar the worse yeah on the same on the strike force results that's true yeah you want more devices are at the top that's good what so how do we get out of kilter then you know I wasn't here but anecdotally um I think there's a lot of reasons you know some of it is based on the community the school is in and the donations they can receive from their PTA and other local groups um it has to do with donations they can receive through donors shoes and other sources grants they might receive School
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Improvement Grants sometimes we're used to fund technology Equity Funds that that come through um you know all hands raised I think principals have had discretion on how those funds are used and some principals have used those for technology where others haven't so I think in addition to us you know moving kids around and reconfiguring schools and equipment moving with it I think just the variety of different things that have happened without anybody really counting these pieces of equipment and paying attention to it just all contributed to this situation as you have pointed out a huge part of that is the lack of economy of scale if the principle is buying one or two you know I think back to you know PTA raising for a smart board single smart board versus having a strategic overall plan for the district but yeah again just to emphasize for folks who are looking at we're looking at that chart the higher bar is is you're worse off if you're a higher bar there because you have more kids sharing the devices but what you're showing is that huge just the variability yes what are we making decisions on to buy new technology what are the decisions what are the factors we're making decisions on in other words how do we decide who gets the new technology now going forward so this the program buy new technology and as it comes in how do we decide where it goes though factors that we're making that decision on it's a the question it's a great question it's a complex answer um we've begun to develop what we call technology refresh bands and you kind of saw them in the the document that's in your your packet so we have different bands of equipment that we're looking at as discrete and each one of those we would consider individually um so it'd be great if we could get to a place where we replace an entire band all at once through the district so um when when administrators get to their point in time where their Chromebooks are no longer useful we give everybody a new Chromebook at the same time when teachers when their Chromebooks become no longer useful we give everybody one at the same time student technology is a little more complicated and you saw the model we used this year where we actually looked at the testing ratio it's going to kind of vary by band and we'll be looking to perhaps the I.T to help to partner with us and other stakeholder groups to partner with us to decide the best way to approach each of those bands is there a difference are you taking into account the difference for Education versus testing on devices I mean how was it how are we adjusting that and it can give a lot of testing devices out there but you may not be the best decision educationally absolutely I don't how do we how are we factoring that in yeah it's not the best way to measure it certainly and and mostly because of this being the first year of smarter balance is why we ended up in that situation but um one limitation of what we've done so far is we don't know who the devices are assigned to and we don't know the age of each device there's a lot there's more work we need to do to calculate that stuff and to record that into an inventory management system so I um so one of the charts that's in your packet is the total amount of technology in a school compared to the total number of kids in the school but we don't know of that technology which pieces are assigned to staff which are available for student use which are located in a classroom that's only used for one specific biomedical course so there's a lot more work we have to do to understand the differences between these graphs and why some schools have a huge amount of Technology but can only make a small amount of it available for testing and in fact that may be a very good thing because that means they're integrating the technology into their instruction in a very powerful in such a powerful way that they can't be without it for testing so there's there's a lot of work just to do around in other words are we asking are we getting actual information from principles that are saying yeah this is what we feel we need and then we're taking that into account or this move to centralize not taking that into account any longer how does that play out we um it's so the the we're working with Pepsi which is a representative group of all the principals on some of the Strategic pieces as far as working with individual principles on what they need an example of that is on this this High School initiative that you recently funded um we're going to be working with each individual principal at the high school to determine what they think they need at their school at the high school each and each of those high schools because each one has different programming Middle School l entry schools are we working with those individual principals it's it's important to recognize our RIT Strike Team that we had out in the field working with the the whole that okay middle band was working directly with the principal of the principal's
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designee to identify all devices for instruction and assessment so the data that we brought back had all the instructional Labs all the assessment labs and then as we rolled out those Chromebook cards those are also available for instruction so there's really been kind of this this focus on you know as Josh is pointing out there there is there's an interesting piece of data here around the technology density in the school and what that means in the classroom versus group instruction versus items that are like a general use Computing lab the other thing I would I would add to that is the um I think this is going to deepen our partnership with the schools is going to deepen it with the principles of the schools is going to get deeper as the years coming and going that questions I'm asked are a little down the line maybe yeah you're it is this is going to take many years to get a real program in place to do this but I mean this year you know year and a half they didn't even actually believe that we were going to deliver this equipment I mean so there's been the trust has been broken to such a large degree that they didn't actually believe we would follow through with this so this is just kind of the very beginning of reestablishing this working relationship I have more questions but go ahead yeah thank you I appreciate that any director curler thank you so um is what what are the downsides of the lease framework the largest downside is that you would establish an ongoing budget for information technology which means you'd be committing and then we would enter into lease agreements that were long agreements so you'd be committing future boards to maintaining that level of funding for technology see those are the outside just like when we opened a school we commit boards to maintain those schools over the years this is another maintenance issue exactly right it's operationalizing yet and Facilities has an ongoing maintenance budget it's not adequate obviously but they do have an ongoing maintenance we're basically asking for first so director Knowles so I'm not a numbers person you guys so just bear with me here for a minute so um when I'm looking at the funding proposal page it's in our packet beginning in 1516 request of 2 million annually creating a portfolio of the first 10 million that's that's for the lease correct right so if we assume we'd lease the stuff for five years that's how you get from two to ten okay and then an additional six and when would that come in the next year in 1617 you want to answer that sure essentially what we're planning is a ramp approach it it would be very difficult for us to do 30 million dollars worth of work in a single year so the idea being let's get some of the big ticket items out of the way initially and you might see budgetary ask increasing by a million in the next fiscal year and then a million five ongoing thereafter that's part of the idea of crafting this in coordination with the office of the CFO to really understand you know what we can kind of tolerate in terms of ramping that up as all of our other programs are also recovering but to really have an eye on putting our entire infrastructure portfolio into this model so that you've got a really clear alignment between the total cost of ownership and how we're funding it it sounds similar to our bonds where we're talking about layering the bonds one on the top of the other as we go forward is that a pretty good I think that's a fair yes all right so in the end not this year but not in 1516 but in 1617 we'd be you'd be looking at 8 million you'd be looking at so 16 17 you're looking at maybe three which could probably support about another five I think what they mean is we're going to start with two starting with two and we're starting the year after next year they would eventually on top of that to six in future years immediately gradually increased up to six I remember they had the little charts going up and then stabilized yeah I saw that but at this point we're not thinking we need more than six you know if 30 million dollars is our total valuation of stuff we're not thinking we need more than six to maintain that equipment forever right and ever until we grow if we grow more then we need more right right exactly and as a district as we shrink you know if there are situations where you know equipment's becoming cheaper or there are significant changes in technology or our program shift and change it gives us a little bit of flexibility as we with some of those devices you're not really talking about a five-year you're talking more about a like a three-year obligation I guess that would I have follow-up to director curlers then so we're not getting ourselves locked into a technology that might become obsolete it would still be so okay so we're not going to be getting into that so just generally I would say I'm so happy to see uh you guys come forward with this because it's been pretty apparent over the years I think my kids started school in 91. so I've watched this including the bond in 1995 where you know where I first met Bobby when we worked on that bond together but so
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and it's never had any kind of organization to what we've rolled out and so I'm just really happy to see that you're thinking about how we're rolling this out but also that you're thinking about the maintenance side of it because that's so important so thank you very much for the presentation tonight I I like what you're doing you're very welcome thank you director belau thank you for the presentation and thank you for setting us or offering us a path to be sustainable and thoughtful in this I'm just going to note to our earlier discussion about Hearts I I would hope that we would have a similar type plan a path of here's how you would move through it I know it took a lot of investment on our part on this front end to inventory all all of our materials and um when we talk about our inventory so now we have a set inventory there's still things we don't know about some of our machines or devices um we'll get to that hopefully um but there's still going to be this outstanding right teachers are really creative in what they use and what they need and as a big institution it's not always we're not able to be as Nimble probably because of our limited investment so they're going to go to donors choose they're going to go to ptas or great Partners they're going to go to a lot of folks and say Hey you know I have this really great idea for this project can can somebody fund this have we talked at all about how do we onboard those devices or how do we make sure they're standard and or again I'll point out that some of the disparity what I heard was described as some of the reasons is because some ptas could fund it some couldn't and I know I can remember when I visited Forest Park they have a great partner they have a parent there who has a connection to technology and every couple of years they get a refresh of some sort or every every year they get in refresh of a certain amount and some of our communities don't have that access and so again how do we bring parity to that piece probably better for you to speak to and I guess what I where I would start is the um we have some procedures when when there is a donation that we ask schools to follow to make us aware of that equipment we it hasn't been well enforced or well communicated so as part of our new Asset Management program we're going to be partnering with schools in a different way to make sure that these things happen and we understand and we can help support that equipment and refresh it onboarded certainly I I don't think we would ever plan to be you know adversarial of that process I think that's a really it's an incredible expression of the commitment that the communities have into their schools uh we can be a part in that though part of the way that we've already exercised that is having some conversations with ptas and with interested parents uh wanted varietal miles leaves me voicemails quite frequently to talk about how they can be a part of making this investment so what is your purchasing standard what's the right thing to buy can we buy off your contracts another example with around donors choose niku Shriner who we mentioned earlier has reached out to that organization to start building a partnership with them to help them understand what we're trying to achieve so potentially as donors choose moves forward they're a part of this process we also know there's just a reality that things are going to come into the building that didn't come in through these channels so as part of our asset management program we've created uh essentially policy that no building will go without an asset inventory for greater than three years so we did this one initial Big Shot you know 103 sites we plan at least a third of the district and we're kind of still working on the the numbers there gets an audit refresh every three years so we'll go out there we'll take a look we'll find those new pieces of equipment we'll bring them into the fold not necessarily in terms of you know controlling them but if that PTA is donating that Chromebook partner we want to be able to help make sure that that stays a viable tool in the schools so we'd like to be able to replace those broken screens or if they're not able to donate that Chromebook cart in the future and it is reaching that end of life maybe we're coming in and ensuring that that device ratio stays stable that's kind of the big picture of how we respond to that great thank you and as I again heard you talk about I appreciate looking at equity and it seems in some of those slides that we've done a pretty good job of trying to offset again some of the some of the schools that had the higher bars which means the lower a worse ratio to device where some of our more affluent schools some of our higher socioeconomic schools at the same time I know that some of those schools that I talk to families get really frustrated because as we go through our refresh by the time we get to the end of our refresh or we never get to the end of our refresh before the beginning needs to be refreshed again and so those schools again I think of schools who have just made it a priority right so if I'm a building and I prioritize technology I'm going to keep investing in technology and then some school that doesn't keeps
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getting refreshed by the district because their stuff keeps going in and out how do we it's similar to an Arts question before right if I don't fund Arts well well eventually the district early man just tell me I have to find arts and give me additional money for it so the way a um the way we envision these leasing schedules working is there's a master schedule and there's multiple individual schedules underneath it and then we would be responsible for managing these schedules as they fall off and on so when we buy a fleet of Chromebooks for a set of schools at the end of that three-year period which we determine as the life cycle of a Chromebook then all of those Chromebooks just get replaced so there's it's just built into the process they all get reclaimed they get given they're given back to the organization we purchased them from and then they do something with them they have a way of making some money off of those that old technology in a way that we don't um which is why we can get such a good deal on these things but the one of the core pieces of this sustainable plan is that at the end you just get new stuff and it's guaranteed because it's built into the the contractual relationship as part of the lease yeah yeah I know we're about a half hour behind so we do want to wrap up with our remaining questions the first the first question is when you gave us the five to run ratio for certified devices for testing you were only using the population in that school that would be tested is that correct so and a K5 you're only looking for grades three five populations is that correct that's true so that the numerator was the number of students in testing grades and the denominator was the number of devices that were certified for testing which my school looking at that might feel like there's a disconnect but it's not because it's their whole population it was certified for testing all right final question or actually an offer as we look for sustainable funding I was just reading that there is new legislation going through the state legislature to work with possibly new technology companies for data centers and fiber optics and high-speed internet they're looking to give them tax breaks which of course could reduce the revenue coming into the to the state Force funding for education I just wonder if there's an opportunity to work with those same companies to see if there couldn't be some sort of utility rate that does actually provide this refresh perhaps Statewide or at least in certain metropolitan areas just a thought interesting director so one of the things I want to mention I was at the Lincoln auction recently and it was kind of remarkable some students came up to the podium and basically did a paddle raise but it was around the fact that they had been watching many of the higher poverty kids at the school were doing all of their papers they noticed on on phones because they had no computer technology and so what they actually did was a panel race to buy Chromebooks for individual students so that they would when they come in as so the money raised this year would be for kids coming in freshman year high poverty kids would be given a Chromebook with the understanding that it would be theirs for four years and then by then it would probably be out of date but it would just be given to the students which is different I think than what you're talking about in terms of this here where the where you're purchasing computers for this school specifically for school-based work right so that's an that to me it was a really creative thing I actually said to them as we're going through the budget process it would be great for you to share that with um with us if other communities had any capacity to be doing that and I even suggested they talk with you about it also and you're probably pretty familiar with it but um that was a really creative way that students were stepping up to help other students so it was kind of exciting um I had a question I think following up on Direct Knowles about what your actual budget request is for last year for next year for our budget cycle so it sounds to me like you're requesting you're going to be requesting two million dollars during the budget cycle and is that in addition to what you your current budget is or when you are requesting this are there some economies that we'll be gaining by leasing for example when you when you lease a car you they typically take care of the maintenance so what is your actual ask so the um in this current school year we had one million dollars available for School Technology in our Innovation and modernization program that million dollars was provided to IIT as a one-time investment so our ask is actually two million dollars and not just because it was a one-time
02h 45m 00s
investment and not ongoing we had to ask for a full 2 million which is what we need instead of asking for just a million on top of what we had okay but the 2 million is uh 2 million more than what your current budget is this is It's only one million more than our current budget because it would be two million ongoing yes yes okay correct and so my my question was in terms of a lease rather than purchase um my assumption is that the whoever releasing in Prem would be doing more of the maintenance of the computers and will we see any cost efficiencies there I think we'll definitely see some efficiencies there's a lot of work to still do around those terms but what I would probably do is relate it to our copier Arrangement where when when there's an issue with a copier the school secretary or the staff at the school can contact the provider directly instead of contact contacting it so I think that's the type of arrangement you know we'd be looking to enter into where there's a warranty that is provided us for the full life of the lease the device is warrantied so if it fails it's just a phone call a new one gets shipped out it's not even necessarily involved and it's all just tracked in the system there's some significant economies there around not maintaining five to seven year old technology right and we've had technicians out spending hundreds of hours just doing CPR on this equipment trying to keep it up and running you saw that 11 hour that 11 minute boot up time that was kind of the best we can do with quite a few computers and we touched all those computers adding enough RAM just to get them onto Windows 7 this summer so you think about we get to a point where our technology is healthy and sustainable you're not spending all that time being reactive right there was a reason Bill Gates spent 200 million dollars for a common core since we're buying all this technology all the way across the country millions and millions way over 200 million I guess computer what about the kind are we taking into account that computer labs and classes and stuff and for instance Wilson has a computer science class I'm the only one in the district maybe computer science four years solid stuff they need new equipment for that or is there something that takes that into account or I was at a school that didn't have that had two computer labs in another school that had no computer lab are we building that in some way educationally the educational provisions yeah so that was definitely taken into account we have some ratios we ran that were total devices regardless of their use or availability and then we had this other ratio that was just devices available for testing so if there was a room a classroom full of computers where those computers were used every period of the day for instruction then the principal would have told us the this room is not available for testing because we need this for instruction and we did not include that in the ratio and then to your question about that just kind of the scope of this uh we yes the CTE programs really any technology that's District owned that's in a school is going to be in a refresh band and we'll be under one of those leasing schedules we'll be refreshed as appropriate so you know you have some of those programs that require a little bit higher and you know Chromebook isn't necessarily going to going to support you know pure science instruction so there's pieces of that that in cooperation with paps and I think we're gonna we're going to learn a lot as we do the refresh of the high school labs around what what those spaces look like and what their needs are long term so principal has actually said we need this computer lab and you can't have it for testing and then we send them new stuff I would have thought every principal would have done that with computer lab because all the computer labs are used for instruction but not for computer lab classes maybe I don't know anyhow that's beside the point the last question I have is uh are we just still just blowing off this concerns about Wireless and and kindergarten kids and first graders are we still not looking at that last one you were here you said we weren't looking at that we're just I mean this now worldwide concern about this we're not we're thinking and we're minimizing the wireless or anything with small kids or are we doing anything around that we're not doing anything around that at this time thank you appreciate it thank you thank you so much so before we wrap up I just want to say thank you to the superintendent for leadership and to our staff and to our partners I mean tonight we've seen two amazing reports and that's really a transformation in our district for two key areas arts and I.T that it's been needed and coming for a long time so
02h 50m 00s
it's just so I think I just can't tell how exciting it is as I kind of head to into the sunset here um just to see this the district turning itself around on these pieces and heading toward a sustainable future and a plan and yes we're urgent like where's you know how are we going to do this and we're at the gaps and let's fill the gaps and and I'm you know confident that my colleagues here and future colleagues will keep you know making sure that we're looking at those Equity pieces and that um the sustainability um but I I'm just thrilled and I just really want to thank you superintendent Smith and thank the legislature because again it's when you have an increased amount of funding that we're able to begin to build back and we are at the beginning stages you guys I know are working your tails off as as arts tosa and her folks so you know again this is you know if there are any legislators listening this is what we can begin to do if we start to reinvest in our school so I know you're working really hard and I just I've been I've been looking for this for a long time and I'm just I'm just thrilled so thank you so much keep up the great work and let's let's keep going thank you thank you thank you thank you all right so next item on the agenda is a discussion around authorization for Bond issuance superintendent Smith use this item yes so David weiner our Deputy Chief Financial Officer will provide the report on authorization for our next Bond issuance coach rodkins board members superintendent Smith I feel very inadequate I have no singers I have no PowerPoint I have no video I tried to recruit some senior staff to sing acapella but you'll be glad to know that they said no bill has indeed come home I see him right there in the back that's not bill yeah Bill's brother so um and I'm not asking for money I'm actually offering to find some for you so in November 2012 our voters gave us authorization to issue up to 482 million dollars of capital bonds and we're very grateful to the community for their support that campaign included a Target tax rate of no more than a dollar per thousand of assessed value in May 2013 we actually issued our first bonds almost 145 million dollars face value of bonds and we've started to repay those I'm happy to report that in the first two years the tax rate on those bonds was just it was less than a dollar nine per thousand so we have lived up to that campaign commitment it's time for us to issue some more bonds um we are proposing to issue up to 275 million dollars of bonds the numbers that you saw in your packet have a target of about 245 million dollars the exact amount and the exact terms will be determined um at sale which is targeted towards the end of April if you authorize it there's really three criteria we use to figure out how much to issue this time we're limited to 482 million dollars internal we're limited to that Target interest that Target tax rates of no more than a dollar ten thousand then the third constraint is that we have to have a reasonable expectation of spending 85 percent of the money within three years so when we ran those numbers and work with our financial advisors we came up with the the numbers that you saw in your packet all right thank you very much questions comments all right thank you very much appreciate it all right so next on the agenda is a discussion around a draft resolution that I brought forward around the smarter balance assessment and again this is very much a draft so we're going to vote on this I hope at our next meeting on March 9th but wanted to take some time in tonight's agenda um to have board members just kind of give some high level feedback I've already gotten some I also had a great conversation with Ben Sullivan for the court Association of teachers this afternoon got some great input from her we heard Princess Anne Cohen certainly anyone listening tonight who wishes to to weigh in quickly I mean I think the time is important for us to to act on this and I'm bringing this forward because as we know we did a resolution last July around the smarter balanced as we were sort of heading in toward the first year of implementation and now as the state is poised to roll it out across the state um I felt it was important for us to support and the largest District in the state to weigh in again again this is very much a draft totally open to input and changes to this but some of the pieces I fellow is important for us to talk about in this resolution and give some direction and feedback both the staff and to the state and the federal government is at this moment we've gotten the a we're about to roll it out B it's important to update I think just sort of memorialize the work that has been done because we called out concerns last year about technology
02h 55m 00s
availability and so forth the work that has been done to prepare for this we've heard a number of concerns and testimony and other input around the opting out piece so where's the board on that it's important to weigh in um really want to weigh in as we have the state work group that we heard about I think last week who has a vision around reducing the role of standardized testing not using the first year of results for any punitive labeling which is exactly what we asked for last summer so I felt it's important that we recognize that and support that Vision that's in the draft state right now it's a time for us to weigh in on that um as well as the work of our assessment work group here at the district that we heard from last week this is important moment for us to support and encourage them and I also just heard from Glenn Sullivan this afternoon some exciting possibilities around at the federal level of also de-emphasizing standardized testing and so that would be another way that we could support that through this resolution as well as as you know direct staff to get the word out to parents about that so they can share with their Congressional Delegation there so those were kind of the pieces that are in here and tonight we're not going to you know spend a ton of time we're not going to help anytime it's super detailed we're smithing but I would definitely want to hear just kind of high level what's missing what couldn't you know what do you support what don't you support and I'm going to ask the staff just kind of help me I'm going to take notes as best I can if you all can take notes of the input that you hear and then we'll work with work with coachar Knowles and staff to kind of collate what we heard tonight come back with a final version for your consideration next week okay that's basically um so I'd love to hear from each of you any thoughts kind of where you're at on this maybe start with director curler uh well as I understood when we listened to the assessment the other day they weren't taking on this Statewide test and I don't quite understand why that was that's right why why wouldn't we have our group of haters we were looking at assessment feel would that give us recommendations so the assessment committee the charge of the assessment committee was really to look at the district overall and do an inventory of all of you said so this would be one of them but part of what we wanted to separate is we didn't want the we've asked them to develop a philosophy about how we use assessment how much we assess what do we get from each assessment and working with Rick stiggins on how we do that in a way that we're getting the that the value the educational value from the assessing Smart Balance would be one of those what we didn't want to do last time is have the whole dialogue revert to Smarter Balance we wanted to deal with that unto itself and then let the assessment committee do their broader but so they are addressing it'll be one of the things they're looking at it's because it's one of the assessments we do yeah so because it's not their sole Focus yeah I think that's a helpful clarification so we could put something in there to clarify I think I think there's something in here about looking forward to thanking them and looking forward to the report we could be more specific that we're interested in we don't want to hear back about the whole we didn't want that committee to end up having their sole Focus be smarter balanced it would suck them into one thing and lose the overall perspective yeah and then I thought I heard Rick's Diggins say at this meeting the other day here um that this the S back test has a long long way to go before it it passes his his muster for a decent test um and so then so then I I guess where my head is is we've hired or an expert to tell us what to do and he's saying this test isn't all that great so it's like okay and and I think the state gets it too but so why don't we just have the experts work on it until it's until it's till it passes its test and until then let's not even screw around with it that's where my head's at okay so you're suggesting that the district should should refuse to participate at all until it's been oh and I should just point out I think Dr siggins is a volunteer both he's a volunteer he's a volunteer yeah but anyway or there might like for instance other countries do um sampling you know there's there's I think that's what Gwen was saying actually the federal government is looking at potentially moving toward a sampling approach so that's why I'd like to incorporate that's not in this draft I'd like to incorporate the federal piece in here too and our support for that or something you know moving in that direction Okay so great Pam any thoughts
03h 00m 00s
so um I've just worked with you all along on this and I think that it's fine just the way it is so that's mmm yeah and I I hope I made it clear that it wasn't this isn't just my work it's you know many beautiful work yeah thank you very much let me ask let me also say thank you very much for because this is a lot of your work and also to staff for that they did yeah because it was I had an outline in there maybe um just some quick thoughts um I I don't necessarily think eight hours is too long for a cumulative assessment um I I think that um some of the information we asked from our staff about costs and validity and reliability and all that um are really the responsibility of either the state we should be asking the state for it or our Statewide Association so wait I thought we were asking the state for that did resolved One D says provide a report but that's called them a state of Oregon sorry yeah okay yeah yeah I definitely don't want to create additional work for our staff and the state's responsibility because it's their test and I think that we could also ask our state associations they should be able to go across multiple districts okay um again I don't I my big advocacy is to remove the high stakes around it right I think that any test when it rolls out there time of adjustment and period and understanding of what it is and I appreciate director Beulah I think I saw in a communication of yours that by definition these are testing whether or not you know the Common Core State Standards and so if you're actually teaching the test you're teaching them Core State Standards and I think that match up for the first time in the state is actually a good thing that they're actually testing for what they're setting the standards so I don't think it's necessary I understand your problems with it um and I guess part of what I guess I'm looking at is that it is really about a shift and it's we're testing how people are thinking and interacting with the work rather than what I would say the lower level skills of necessarily reading and not lower level and that they're foundational but those assessments are typically administered by teachers in the classroom or districts and so it seems like the right level for the state state level so those are just my comments um I am discovering that I left behind all of my notes at home on this because I had looked at um not 10 later tonight and tomorrow director Gill's information and I looked at your information that we had been um looking at but I guess one of the things that I was um thinking as I went along reading this at home was that um it felt like this uh much of this resolution kind of reiterated um what we had already done in July which was a really good positive resolution and so I was wondering if we could take this down to kind of the core things we're trying to communicate right now rather than having it be kind of the reiteration because because again we we did that it was powerful and so if you look at you know what are the core messages that we want to get across at this time um it might be worthwhile for us to have that discussion what are the the top three things that we want to do I mean one thing I think we want want to do is acknowledge and thank the state right for the position they've taken since our resolution which is we're not going to be you know using this in any kind of punitive way it's a recommendation yeah and I think there's no reason to step in right now yeah and the vision is just a draft so we really want to I think it's that to me is to me that's like the most important thing that we can say but I guess I've worried that with a resolution this long that would get lost yeah fair enough so I would almost rather have a short resolution that's really to the point of yeah I'm thinking maybe we removed the bullets that kind of recap like you're saying and just because we do want to have the history for folks initial resolution is a follow-up but I like the idea of shortening where we can so we'll look at that yeah I mean I would just refer them back to that so um and I think that you know we we could go through this and kind of figure out what are the two or three core messages that we want to really deliver at this point in time for the state both not using it for um lease I think the recognition is only around the first year but that's the start I guess yes but then the bigger piece is that Vision around reducing the role of standardized testing yes and I think um I think that there is some recognition that you know seven eight eight and a half hours of testing is an unreasonable amount of time um so I think reiterating that again that conversation is happening
03h 05m 00s
unreasonable amount of time um so that might be you know an area for us to kind of zero in um I know that we had included something in here about families who are looking at opting out right and um I don't know if we could put something in here um saying that you know we this is basically an apparent decision to opt out I mean we we really don't encourage or not you know discourage I mean it's it's really more of a parent decision um but at the same time our schools end up getting sanctioned more or less so I don't know if there's something we can be saying about that doesn't seem right well I think that's in um there's right so I'm just saying if you're looking at the top two or three things that might be one where we should address you know families have legitimate reasons for opting out and um you know is there a way for the state to be kind of figuring out how that doesn't necessarily penalize in schools or you know again if they're not going to be using sanctions in the first year maybe it's not as big an issue but I think it is yeah yeah I think it is too so anyway I was just um that would that would be my kind of broader um recommendation it's just a streamlining a bit so that it's a little bit more powerful in terms of the two or three things we're really trying to get across yeah fair enough and I think also just in terms of how we would use this in terms of advocating I mean I would definitely have this be an attachment to a short letter that summarizes what our asks are to the state or our feedback to this day that could be another approach too so and would you agree though that this adding in the federal piece is important if their feds are truly looking at reducing the role oh yeah yeah okay that's something I I would be interested in adding back okay so good feedback and I appreciate all the work you do know I guess I'm just trying to make sure it's it's no absolutely gets across yeah I know I appreciate that Dr Buell I I think this would be I agree with what Bobby has to say about being very specific about shorter things I think we'd be better off leaving uh some of our value statements because I don't find them correct as a matter of fact for instance it says we also understand that we need a measurement of how our schools and students are learning I don't know how many yes and no but really we need a measurement of three things and one of which you can't major and the other two and one of them the best back doesn't measure and the other one it kind of measures so that that whole value the value statements we will uh we will use scores to inform future instruction and if there were students and schools need additional support we've already agreed that that isn't happening or won't happen with the S back they're not going to use it you can you can't use it for instructional support for students so we shouldn't say that it should there's some things like that that I have made a point about this week or next week or send you an email on it which would you like great some hearings okay all right then then uh you see him wearing red line well we need someone desperately to look into how our school district is interfacing with the common core and with SBA tests we need to look at that and we need to have somebody and that should be their job to see how we did and how we can improve things it's having this huge huge impact on our school district we've got conflicts all over the community on it we have at least one school evidently that has at least 70 kids now opted out of their school alone we've got tens of kids opting out we've got angry parents who come to the meeting and we need to have we need to be on top of how this is all working working out and we need to have a system which is a real system not all the the Common Core so far we've push push push the Common Core last meeting or was it the meeting before last night showed what we were sending home to parents and it was pretty bad and it's still out there I went around to a lot of schools that's still out there so we I think we need to do that I did a I did yes I'm not sure this is the way to go but it was a suggestion we need to have something some plan in place where we have somebody in this District who's going to evaluate and look at what takes place surrounding the common core and its assessment so that we end up at the end of this cycle knowing what we need to change for the next cycle now I don't care how we do that necessarily except I want them I'd set this up so it's going to be unbiased because I was giving the instructions to the people to do it so I
03h 10m 00s
knew it was going to be unbiased So when you say this you're referring this is a suggestion so one thing um I'm concerned about that and uh I'm the opting out situation is we should be in some cases we have children that we should be free we should be asking their parents to help them out you got kids who shouldn't be taking this test that's pretty evident I mean that's pretty clear you've got kids way too fragile to be slapped on a computer for eight hours of failure and frustration we got kids who can't speak any English and we're going to set them down for eight hours on a test in English I mean we should almost be we should have some sort of thinking around our children not just around our system but around our children and we we should have the uh be thinking about that I don't know if it has anything to do with this but it certainly has to do with what we're talking about the Common Core can I go back to your um you have a thing about creating a whole monitoring system what about um instead since we have our district our collaborative work group that we have looking at the assessment having there could be some language in here about making sure that they're they don't have that they don't have the they don't have the time and energy to do what needs to be we need to have people out visiting school we need to have at least somebody on full-time doing this going out to schools seeing what's happened seeing what kids are seeing how it works all the way down through the testing system in my opinion why would that be different from asking our our teaching office to teach and learning to do that because the teaching office and learning is the same people who put out the glowing report of how wonderful the Common Core was so you're not going to probably get an unbiased I want to get 360 hiring a consultant that we should bring inside I think they should free up a free I don't I don't think you need to spend money I think we could free somebody up to do that okay so I'll take that advisement okay and I got a couple more things here okay great wants to chime in with thoughts or reactions it's helped to help your other folks folks as suggestions come out what other folks feel about them so if not tonight then I'll follow through yeah I I think by saying that the Oaks was bad and this is good I think we're making a that's a place we're making a value judgment The Oaks was only bad if you don't want to get a generalized idea of kind of how your kids are doing and reading this doesn't give you that it doesn't give you reading and it doesn't give you writing so it doesn't kind of give us anything really we really want to do all we do is spend money and stress everybody out and then we get nothing for it we're not even going to get I mean you don't even get the whole Common Core Curriculum that we're trying to say that we're testing is Way Beyond what you can even teach in a year so you're only going to get parts of it anyhow sometimes just in that alone the validity of the test is not any good and and that's one of the things we need to look at as we go what parts do we what parts fit our educational program I want to balance the testing and I always talk about people the guy you're in I guess well am I dumb the whole thing but really I want to balance it out because we're stuck with it so how is it balanced we don't know and I think that's exactly where unless we have somebody out there looking at it in an unbiased way we're never going to know how to do that but I think that's exactly the purpose of that assessment work group that we're working on with the Union to be able to say what are we doing now how should it be different but they're not actually doing what what I'm talking about what they've got they're doing the assessment versus assessment versus assessment what is this assessing and what what I want to go out and look and say is should all the kids be taking the test how are we dealing with it we're shutting down these Labs is there other ways to do it and and look at the overall I heard that's what they're overall that's what they're doing yeah it's different than what they're talking about and let me see I had one thing well you're looking Maybe sure um so what I'm concerned about is the results um a couple weeks ago when we had a presentation I asked if students would get the males um also because they end on June 5th that would imply that the students would get them over the summer was just thinking about it if 60 to 70 percent of our students are getting a letter this Summer that says they failed it's not a great way to go back to school so I was just thinking about what we could do to minimize the effects of the results um I was informed that we had to like directly report to each student but if we could possibly be maybe make it a little softer or wait till September
03h 15m 00s
when there's a teacher and other support systems to really guide the students and their families through what exactly these tests actually mean so that's what I'm really concerned about because these tests are going to happen next week so so that might be part of what we call on the state too we've got a list of things we want the state to do and that maybe we could fold that in there okay but I was wondering if we like some staff could talk about this if we had an ability to draft the letter and then actually decide when it went out right I did when you brought that up to me which I think was a great suggestion made me think of the PSAT and where you would go in and see what questions you missed and then you would figure out how to answer them correctly then oh yeah what learn from the results actually which is actually a valuable experience so thank you just one last comment I think and then the rest of it is we talk about the eight and a half hours but there's all these other things and that's the other reason that I want to get somebody out there for instance this test in many many people suggest this test is culturally biased and racist so we need somebody out there to look and take that into account is it being used in our district in a racist manner is it being used in our district in a way that's discriminatory in a way that's inequitable we those are questions we need to be asked we need to ask the questions that people are asking and also ask the questions of the implementation It's a combination of the two things that's why we need somebody out there that's why the assessment committee they can't do that they can't get out you need to go out the buildings and talk see what's taking place and have somebody that be their job and tell them we want an unbiased assessment back here like I said yeah and I'm thinking again a recommendation for something like that or other strategies would come from that work group when they take that holistic look they may make that kind of a recommendation but that's where it should come from is from them doing the holistic rather than us saying well let's also do this while they're doing that other work that's that's my should come from us so thank you all very much so appreciate it I've got my scribblings and I'll work with staff and everybody and we'll come back with um a revised version next week for your consideration so thank you very much for that okay so now we'll wrap up by considering our business agenda we do have two revised resolutions which are resolutions 5036 and 5037 there are copies of them are in your yellow folders and they're also on the bookshelf at the back of the auditorium um are there any additional changes to the business agenda okay do I have a motion in a second agenda oh sure yeah you bet so 5036 uh looks like around 5037 they're just two sheets in here they say revise it's different different people looks like yeah okay do yeah do I have a motion in a second to adapt director Mills moves second and director vile seconds the adoption of the distance agenda any public comment no there's not any more discussion seeing none the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes any opposition any abstentions no the business agenda is approved by a vote of six to zero with student Representatives as well voting yes yes all right we're done the next meeting of this board will be held on Monday March

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)

2015-03-03 PPS School Board Study Session

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

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