2015-04-20 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2015-04-20
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - April 20, 2015

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good evening so the study session for the board of education for april 20th 2015 is called to order like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers while our study sessions are generally limited to receipt of information from staff and discussion of that information and review of resolutions prior to vote at times we do conduct votes during study sessions any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times and the board meeting is also being streamed live on our pps tv services website student representative js wall is absent this evening so we're going to start out with public comment and miss houston could you call up the first two folks sure scott bailey and angela jarvis holland if scott hasn't joined us yet maybe call the next person stephanie hunter great and you all have been here before so you know the you know the um routine and it's the three minutes and um when the red light goes off we respectfully ask you wrap up your comments in but we really appreciate you being here and look forward to hearing from you thank you so much well good evening and my name is angela jarvis holland i am the executive director of the northwest down syndrome association and the all born in movement but i'm also a parent of two children one who's gone through portland public schools and is it now at pcc and my son daniel who is a benson and also wants to go to pcc so i just had been thinking about this um somebody that's british that's to blame for the word for the word normal um we didn't even have the idea of a norm until a machine was invented that created a bell curve and i think that um if we start adding up the children we have in special education the children on 504 plans the ell children the tag kids those with mental health needs children of color then teaching for the middle of that bell curve we know really doesn't make sense or produce good results all our children have the same dreams and these are this girl here is a good friend of daniels and attends grant high school and she wants to go to portland community college so i'm here representing the idea that every child deserves the same opportunities and that i think we are making a mistake if we start querying and put in special education on the line to justify and explain and move towards best practices that work the movement that i've been part of for 10 years consistently brings examples and folks to this city who are doing work that really produce good results and that we need to learn from we've had many good teachers amongst the mix with daniel we've had we have an incredible partnership growing with portland public schools but my biggest request is that we stop asking special ed to explain the moral human and civil rights of children to be educated properly and equitably in our systems and all get busy on the hard work that that requires and i would like to offer that i'm a resource and there are many other good resources and people that really want to partner and that's the only way you will have the capacity to do the work in partnership and we're ready and we need you to be ready with us thank you thank you very much thank you hello i'm superintendent smith and um board directors my name is stephanie hunter i have to spell it still a-2-n-t-e-r i got those instructions i'm a parent of a sixth grader on the ockley green campus of cjog the president of the special education pta and a member of the portland parent union i'm also going to speak for my knowledge base as a positive behavior support specialist i support the special education department's reach 2020 plan i want to speak specifically about kindergarten inclusion and closing the behavior classrooms kindergarten inclusion with support is the right thing to do and rooted in common sense and best practices most of us would also agree that putting a child in a place called the behavior classroom is a path that does not usually lead to graduation or returning to mainstream classes the path is more likely to lead to further isolation loneliness unemployment in contact with the justice system in an audit done of pps special education the auditor richard tracy wrote recent studies demonstrate that more involvement of special education students in the general education environments can help improve their achievement and control the growth of
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costly separate self-contained classrooms while we know it is the right and most cost effective path it is also true that some students may need significant support the issue most likely to impact a child's success in the general education environment is challenging behavior positive behavior interventions and support or pbis is the key here but it has an image problem i've talked to way too many educators and administrators that have no faith in pbis and see it only as a system of reward and punishment school-wide pbis for the largest percentage of the triangles working great those kids learn the rules they earn the rewards and understand the first time they are in trouble not to do it again for the students in the middle and the top of the triangle enhanced supports are needed to learn the same skills these enhanced supports may include assistive technology universal design structure and visual supports trauma informed support and co-teaching to name a few another support that should be provided is called a functional behavioral assessment or fba and behavior support plan or bsp the fba is an assessment tool that identifies the big picture of the challenging behavior what reinforces it and what skill the child and educators can learn to replace the behavior with a skill the bsp is then the individualized instruction manual for how to teach these new skills and includes a safety plan historically if an fba is done at all it is too late and at the point that a child is already being placed into a restrictive classroom placement the wonderful tool that an fba could ultimately be becomes a weapon to remove a child from a setting i have talked to the fantastic staff in pps with knowledge of fba and bsp figure out what the barriers are and let them do their good work a student with behavior challenges should not have to wait years to get an fba almost done a teacher needs these tools proactively and not in crisis pbis and restorative justice implemented in tandem is my personal dream come true and is in fact currently being piloted in lane county pbis brings the science and values of increasing skills and quality of life and rj brings the focus on strong relationships community and healing through understanding and accountability you have the people partners and parents right now to get this done the kids are in crisis right now and cannot wait for whatever mess the adults have going on getting in the way thank you thank you very much our next two speakers whitney howell and jenna austrian welcome thanks so neither one of us have ever been here before um we're aware we've got three minutes right and just go ahead and start by stating your name and spelling your last name for the record okay and then yeah the yellow light goes on when you've got one minute left and when the red light goes off that's the three minutes of me necessity wrap up as soon as possible okay cool thanks so much um i'm jenna ostrand um o-s-t-r-a-n-d um i'm new to portland public schools i have a son who is in kindergarten at wrigler elementary um he is in the only english-speaking class at the school and i believe that has probably a little bit of why i'm here because there is only one english speaking class in the classroom there are extremely unsafe behaviors going on amongst out of 25 children between 10 and 12 children have some sort of mental needs um behavioral needs and there's nobody in there to assist them there's one teacher with these 25 kids with um a lot of them that have a lot of different issues there's kids being chased around the classroom with scissors on a regular basis there's children getting bloody nose from things being thrown around in the classroom whether it's a pair or it's a chair they've had to go have emergency recesses on a few different occasions because the teacher has called up to the office to ask for assistance because children are running around they're throwing things screaming whatever it may be they call up to the office they say they send somebody down it takes 20 minutes nobody's down they call again nobody comes down so they've had to go outside and what is one teacher to do with 25 kids when three kids are running around doing this and nobody's coming down to help the teacher there's been children that have exposed their private parts to other children in the midst of the class and just the time frame that it takes from somebody to come down to assist the children makes me nervous to leave my child at school as a result of all of this their teacher has decided as of a week ago to take um basically a two-month leave of absence leaving 25 kindergarten students without the only
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thing that's regular to them in their classroom so now for me to take my son and leave him at school i feel nervous i don't feel like he's safe i don't know who's there to advocate for him this new person that's coming in they just hired a new person to be there regularly if they decide to stick with the position i've had to pull my kid out of class because i don't feel safe with him being at school i'm a parent i'm not anything but that i don't know what the solution is but the solution for me right now as a parent is to take my kid out of school until i feel like he's safe thank you once again that's all go ahead were you done yeah i was just going to say one thing i didn't say in the introduction is that make sure you connect with rosanne powell our board manager over there for any any follow-up she can so connect with her after evening thank you very much go ahead okay my name is whitney howell h-o-w-e-l-l um my main i'll tell you my main concern here and it is to have a second class for the english only in every grade of the immersion program um our sons are in the same classroom we're with matt furro um three weeks ago we have i had one of the students in my son's classroom come over to my house and he's actually one of our neighbors but he is exposed to a lot of things that my my children are not and he convinced my son to put his penis in his mouth and when i brought this up to the administration at his school they wrote up a safety plan and i would emphasize on this because it was they need to move to a different table from each other they will stand one will stand in the front of the line the other will stand in the back of the line and they won't go to the bathroom with each other and that was the only safety plan for my son dhs has been involved with the situation um i was informed that it's probably best for my son to go into counseling because of what has happened because of the traumatization and the other families being investigated um i just don't feel like that is something that could that is really saving my son i mean what if they were outside and they went into the bush and the kid decided to try and get my son to do that again would that be make you guys feel comfortable with your children i don't think so i have now transferred my son out of the school because they have not provided any kind of protection for my child and i feel like it would if there was a second english-only class that could really alleviate a lot of problems um there is a cousin and there's two cousins in math in matt's class mr matt's class they should not be in a classroom together at all whatsoever they are two of the most disruptive children in that classroom and if there was a second option where they could be separated they would that would alleviate one problem out of the money that matt has to go through every single day um i'm going to give an example of something real fast um friday afternoon i was there from 12 to 2 15. within this this hour and 45 minutes there was four children that were being insanely disruptive in just in that amount of time one student was screaming and yelling and wouldn't do anything he was um judy scott who takes over for the principal there when she's gone came down assisted for a second he calmed down she left after she left he decided that he was going to take pencils and start swinging them in the air like this while children were walking around um i ended up taking the pencils out of his hand putting them in the pencil box he threatened to take all of the pencils out of the pencil box and start swinging them at the other children so i grabbed all of the pencil boxes took him away he ended up bombarding himself in the corner of the classroom with a play kitchen and taking a shelf out of the bookshelf to keep himself from there he said that he was going to start pulling out the staples out of the wall and poking children with it um that's one example of the out afternoon another example is there's a child who just transferred in sorry please please wrap it up and then i would encourage you to follow they transferred in a child i think i don't know exactly where somali had no english the only english he did know was oh and no that was repeated daily all day long in the classroom of my children for my child and he stands on top of the tables he stands on top of the chairs he stands on the wet countertop and runs around and throws chairs and knocks people's stuff off um that is one of the most extreme that we have the other two that are very very disruptive and these are just a list of from what she has they is these two girls sorry if you could just wrap up you could also build a sentence i've got some writing and then also follow up with our board manager please okay that's fine you guys got a good gist of what's going on and this is daily and i'm there every day from 12 30 to 2 15. there needs to be more support and there needs to be a second english only class thank you very much appreciate you coming in for the next two yes our last speaker is marty pavlick and then i don't know if scott bailey has arrived who was on the list for earlier okay
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good evening good evening hello my name is marty pavlick p-a-v-l-i-k i live in the wilson cluster and i'm also a staff person for pat and i'd like to talk to you about safety right now we are seeing a dramatic increase in assaults and battery upon staff members i believe the reason is a perfect storm of events including special ed redesign the superintendent's priority to reduce exclusionary discipline and a change in state law around restraining students tonight we have heard from two regular parents who spoke to you about safety concerns in their child's kindergarten classroom unfortunately this problem is widespread and is a direct result of changes made by the special ed department woodlawn kindergarten teacher aubry pagenstecker spoke to you over this issue several weeks ago several other special ed teachers have shared that the continuum of special ed services is seriously eroded students are being placed in general-led classrooms without training of the general ed teachers in advance and with pr without providing sufficient resources to keep all the students safe after these presentations district administration offered intervene pat gave the district the two most serious cases that we were aware of the kindergarten teachers class at wrigler and another class at vernon unfortunately no significant interventions were enacted both teachers filed workload requests asking for safety plans etc and more support in the classrooms and no support was provided the regular teacher is now on stress-related leave and the vernon teacher has suffered a concussion after once again being assaulted by students students hitting kicking biting shoving and spitting upon teachers is sadly becoming commonplace at our level at pat we see a concentration of cases in k3 settings and most are concentrated in north and northeast portland the pat pps contract and the board approved policy and student rights and responsibility include specific procedures and consequences for students who assault and abandon teachers these policies and agreements are being systematically ignored why i believe this is a direct result of pressure on principles to reduce exclusionary discipline to comply with the superintendent's priority this is now included in the administrator's evaluation the simplest solution referrals have been lost ignored or rejected members have reported from buildings all over the district that they were told not to refer kids anymore some members have reported that referrals entered into synergy were removed others have been told by an administrator that he could not accept any more referrals because he has met his quota for the month in short disciplinary referrals may be down but this does not mean that discipline has improved or is being handled through other effective strategies in more and more classrooms and in more and more schools teachers and kids are unsafe thank you thank you very much so in addition to time and public comment we uh haven't through our contract with the portland association of teachers um uh manager yes somebody who wanted to testify but said they were all filled up i noticed we only had five and we scott bailey was on the list and i called twice and i didn't see him here so i was just about to call down suzanne so okay well so can we have the person who came to fill that spot um there is another person waiting to testify i don't have one she's in the audience right there um you know what i i'd like to just keep going with the agenda here because we've got suzanne cohen waiting and we need to stick with how we have it all right so maybe she could do it afterwards i mean just we have six spots and the person said that they couldn't testify because we're full and we're not full so i'd like to give that opportunity great let's go let's go ahead and we asked and we're told if you didn't put that request in and get a name down and know somebody wasn't speaking that you couldn't speak so daniel was going to speak and i didn't prepare to speak we need to go with the sign ups in advance and if someone doesn't show up that's unfortunate there's an opportunity the next time okay let's let's move along now so contract with the portland association of teachers allows some time on our agenda so we're welcoming suzanne cohen who's vice president of pat down to the table to offer some comments welcome suzanne thank you very much i want to be absolutely clear and the portland association of teachers is completely supportive of more inclusion for students with special needs but you cannot take away past supports like
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para educators placement settings such as behavior classrooms without first implementing training and staffing for new models the safety issues in kindergarten classrooms were perfectly predictable and when we brought this up to administration in the fall we were told that the district was going to go ahead and be sued no matter what and that many students would ultimately succeed in a gen ed setting the district essentially chose to ignore the safety problems as a part of a moral imperative this can and should be implemented in a more thoughtful way the portland association of teachers is also supportive of strategies to reduce exclusionary discipline including strategies to reduce disproportionate discipline for students of colors color boys and special education students systems like restorative justice and pbis take significant training and work to educate staff students and parents on how to successfully use these strategies and this work should be done before dismantling discipline policies currently in place so the portland association of teachers is asking you the elected school board to direct the superintendent to do the following things one promptly intervene when safety risks are noted especially in kindergarten classrooms two review the kindergarten transition process this school year and develop a proactive solutions not to repeat the problems next year three review what's really happening with discipline referrals four stop violating our own pps board policy in the students rights and responsibilities handbook our own joint contract by allowing teachers to be assaulted and or battered without following the procedures identified and the consequences outlined in those documents five please work with pat building principals and parents to implement training and support to help students succeed in the general ed classrooms before closing other placement options and finally six work with us the portland association of teachers other staff unions principals and parents to make sure that every staff person and every student can safely go to school thank you thank you very much okay so first item on the agenda following comment from public and partners is our employee service award so we have an amazing list of folks um who have served long years in the district so superintendent smith would you like to introduce this item um i would so tonight's board book contains our 214-15 list of 849 pps of my is this echoey yeah that's equity 849 pbs employees who are celebrating a five-year incremental service milestone this year the full list is available on the pps benefit website the average years of pps service in this group is 13 years of service with a whopping 11 250 total years of service from this group of folks there are 14 35-year service award recipients this year they are bus driver douglas fleming teachers cynthia wojack darrell moore carrie locke lisa los richard ryer and laura jackson human resources director frank scotto principals john walden and pam joyner para educator joy rosie custodians edward bourne and lonnie fleming and community agent john poon so so we send out a congratulation congratulations to each one of those folks as well as they get a year of a service pin that honors the five-year incremental years of service and it's every year it it is wonderful to see how many people are with portland public schools throughout their entire career and again please join me in just congratulating and thanking this group of people for their years of service wonderful thank you so much so next on her agenda is a presentation around the foster side agreement with naya but before we hear this item um i'd like to give director morton the opportunity to bless you to say a few words about this thank you chair um so i wanted to say a few words uh regarding uh my relationship to the native american youth and family center in my service on the board of directors here at uh pps the um and i'm going to do that in reading a memo that i provided each of the last three years to as board chairs revolve as well as to the
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chair and board of the neo family center the first one was dated november 14 2012. dear co-chairs as you are aware i recently accepted the position of executive director for the native american youth and family center herna in portland oregon naya is a 50501c3 organization and has served self-identified native american youth and families in the portland area for nearly 40 years we work very hard to enrich the lives of our youth and families through education community involvement and culturally specific programming educational services cultural arts programming and direct support to reduce poverty are among the programs we offer you are also aware that in may 2012 the city of portland pps and naia entered into discussions regarding the development of a multi-generational housing and early learning education program at the former foster elementary site at 5205 southeast 86th avenue the aim of this project is to give native children particularly those in the foster cift system stable housing and a solid successful start in school as a director of the board of education for portland public schools and the former deputy executive director of the neya family center i have taken extensive precautions to avoid any real or perceived conflicts of interest for example i have consistently recused myself from business agenda votes that would directly impact and or benefit neha however with my new role at naia and the inevitable progress of the joint partnership i described above i feel it's critical for me to further distance myself from this project i have discussed this with the board of directors at naia and i believe the following actions will create an appropriate and needed separation one as previously stated i will recuse myself from any votes that directly impact nan two i have requested that all emails and other correspondence regarding this project are not sent to me either as a naia staff person or a pps board member three under the authority of the neha board of directors joe delaney board chair will assume the decision-making responsibility of this project and ray espana director of community development at naia will be the staff point of contact and will be directly supervised by chair delaney for any issues and our performance related to this project excuse me i am honored to serve our community in multiple capacities and i take that responsibility very seriously although i cannot be a part of this project i feel it may have the potential of serving as an example of how non-profit organizations and public entities can work together to ensure high impact on persistent community need if you have any questions or recommendations of other steps i should take to separate myself from this project please don't hesitate to contact either myself or chair delaney who is cc to this email respectfully matt morton cece joe delaney and ray espana thank you great thank you very much so now superintendent smith would you like to introduce this item i would um and as as you have heard over the last three years pbs has been developing an exciting partnership with neia around the development of generations on the foster site the development will consist of intergenerational housing a regional early learning academy and the generations longhouse tonight we're moving forward with some of the next steps and i'm going to ask sarah king who's our director of planning and asset management and ray espana who's the deputy director of naia as well as joe delaney the maya board chair to make our presentation tonight so over to you sarah unfortunately is this on okay thank you unfortunately uh mr delaney will not be able to join us this evening he was called away unexpectedly good evening board of education and superintendent smith we're presenting information this evening regarding facilities related actions necessary to continue the progress on the neo generations intergenerational housing and the adjacent regional early learning academy and longhouse community center we will we will have three actions before you on april 28 2015 the first two actions are necessary to allow the affordable intergenerational housing to move forward the second is necessary to move the regional early learning academy and longhouse community center into the pre-development excuse me the pre-design phase of the school facility the three actions are a ground lease amendment an amendment to the ground lease that was signed in april of 2013 2013. property dedication and a local improvement district petition approval to develop required public street improvements on the site and a pre-development agreement with naya i would like to now turn it over to mr
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espana to talk about the genesis of the project and the status as well as the synergy between the intergenerational housing and the early learning academy in longhouse thank you chair atkins uh directors superintendent smith it's a it's always a blessing to be in front of you and tonight is no exception so i'm really pleased to be here and to can i give you a status report kind of give you some background information and as sarah outlined move us along the process of the next steps as mr morton outlined we've been very careful with his situation as being a sitting board member uh as the deputy executive director i was the leader on the project reporting directly to joe on on the issues of development of the intergenerational housing as we move forward with the early learning academy i was directly involved in 2012 and negotiating the original mou with bob alexander between the city nea and pbs at that time and that's that emotion uh back then how we would come together and move the project along and so it's always a as i say a pleasure to be here as outlined it's this project is kind of a a master plan development of the former foster elementary site there's essentially two specific uh phases to the project the first is an intergenerational housing component uh the intergenerational housing is 40 units of housing 30 of which of those units will be primarily or designated for seniors or elders in the community who act as mentors to the children the other 10 units are classified as family development units and they're specifically provided to individuals who would like to have permanent adoption adoption of children out of the foster care system just a little bit of some background on let's say the state of of native children in foster care in multnomah county native children more than one in five 21 percent make up the population of foster care children additionally native children are over represented in foster care child welfare since across the nation but not none more than multnomah county directly native children experienced at a rate of 137 percent stays in foster care of over four years compared compared to white children a second group with significant numbers of children participating disproportionately in the foster care system is the african-american uh children and together we make up of over 42 percent of children in foster care in multnomah county i give you this context of why this project is so important to the native community and to naya specifically we've long advocated for reform and change in the child welfare system the foster care specifically the the rate of our children showing up in foster care is disproportionately disproportionately high compared to our rate in the general population you know seven eight how many ten times how many percentage do you want me to dictate all i'm trying to say is there's been a concern in our community around this situation and therefore this project offers hope it offers a a way a path a good path for children to exit foster care to find parents individuals who are willing to adopt and create permanency for these children and therefore that alone is it's a valuable project to not only the to our community and to the children that will benefit but we hope to demonstrate to the state officials and anyone else that would like to see i believe an effort on behalf of our community in partnership with portland public schools to demonstrate a successful project that can mean meaningful success for our children which is all our our primary goals as well as providing opportunities for our elders in the community to find some you know meaningful purpose late in life and we've we've patterned our project after the the very very positive bridge meadows program in north portland and so i do want to recognize their contribution i think we would become i believe the third or fourth site in the nation kind of promoting the same intergenerational uh housing project and i we we owe a lot to derenda and the folks at bridge meadows uh phase one is the housing portion some of the actions that will be taking place uh tonight or in the next few few weeks
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will allow us to move forward with the the housing phase one of the project we would like to break ground or start construction at the end of summer to get there we need to put a number of things in place once before maybe a year maybe a couple years now we came before you with a lease on a portion of the property to develop the housing in meeting with community members and further planning suggested that it would probably have the project work better if we kind of flip the school or the learning academy with the housing therefore it would require a technical adjustment to flip-flop the location of the housing placement in relation to the existing facility so that's one of one of the matters that are before you the city of portland which was another signer to that agreement uh has taken action to approve the technical adjustment uh in that phase so we're now getting ready to then we have the sites flip-flopped we will be providing information that would support the demolition of the existing facility as a part of this action and as i mentioned earlier to break ground start construction on the housing phase late summer august early september we project approximately 11 months construction period and so we would be leasing up and having families in residence a year after construction starts phase two of the project is what is being referenced as the regional early learning academy and longhouse and this i i want to say and commend the board superintendent smith harriet and all the staff who have worked with us to kind of develop the idea and i think it's a very unique partnership between a community organization here's mrs harriet just mentioned you i want to thank personally harriet and the staff to who have demonstrated nothing but goodwill and coming together in advancing a very unique partnership with with portland public schools and that is to dedicate and to look at this site as a is a learning community where we'll focus on indigenous learning ways of learning our vision our values our cultural knowledge of learning our practices will be integrated into that site and we're very excited about working with harriet and staff to to bring this to fruition it's going to be unique as we implement that project we're we're anticipating phase two to to occur uh the end early fall of 2017 16 i'm sorry uh that's when we think we would break ground and there's a lot of work to do like raise money and and get that started but that's the schedule phase one end of summer phase two the early learning about a year 11 12 months after that early fall of 2016. we think that it's tough to say right now with the state of construction but we think 11 or 12 months period would be sufficient to get the project done as you may know the construction industry is very alive and electric a lot of stuff going on to their credit um i'll just say that another important feature to the project was our involvement pps is involved in the generation project as it was designated an organ solutions project by the former governor kitzhaber we went we went through a approximately six month process of engagement of a broad community engagement to to introduce the project to the community had many up at many of uh interested stakeholders in attendance to that process and that culminated with a signing event that occurred at the foster elementary school in a hot summer day it was beautiful last i believe was july and i think we had over 25 signatories to that to that agreement and that agreement while not not binding non-binding really demonstrate good will to support in a collaborative way the the completion and implementation and hopefully the operation of the programs at the site and so we we look forward to continuing our good work being led by by pps ourselves and other other stakeholders as we begin to look at the next phase and that is the programming phase of the of the school of the cultural center we will have kind of a complete wraparound social services to support the adults or parents of the children who live there as well as the community in a lot of what i would call self-sufficiency financial literacy jobs uh training programs things of that nature there may be interest in micro enterprise so a
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complete wraparound of relevant community economic development services uh we've also secured an agreement in principle with with our sister organization nara to provide health access services at that site and and what i envision what we envision there is a health access site a very small operation that will i guess launch a very good start to children's uh medical health histories and we think that we can do that and get them ready for school and then have that and follow i think we're doing a a good service for the children as well as the parents i've committed to harriet to to sustain our social services at least until the third grade for all the children they go through the through the uh the site there uh as as you as we see the the site has uh eight classrooms of two of which are a daycare extended early toddler we call it chison at our at our uh organization but it's very toddler parent like parent active uh activity with their child we have three classes dedicated to head start and three kindergarten classes designated in in that location the longhouse is the it's the gateway to the site that is the front door if you will and that is going to be where it will be a community center a meeting center a a kitchen an operational kitchen and have our health access on the i guess it's the mezzanine or second level second floor of the building and our social services will be out of that location as well the very center circle there is the center and the heart of the of the project it will be used to gather we're envisioning maybe somewhat of an amphitheater but it's going to be from a design point of view a gathering and meeting place for the community as well as those that like to seek the the access to the site um what else can i tell you we're we're right now on phase one looking at a construction budget but i think we're getting very close to uh to uh looking at whether we can certainly afford this we raise over 10 million dollars to launch this phase of the project and so we feel very very comfortable we're at that though design and value engineering phase of that project the housing yes phase one um what else can i tell you we've had two or three meetings with the community to listen to their concerns the primary concern that a number of local residents and neighbors i can point to where they live has been the fact that this uh site is going to be coming to life it has been really relatively dormant for a number of years and so they had no traffic come through their neighborhood when they they heard of this project they envisioned lots of traffic and um and that has been the primary concern of the uh the neighbors once they had a chance to in in our community meetings understand what we're going to do there they many of them can become very supportive and advocates and took advantage of visiting bridge meadows to see it in operation and so we feel we were very comfortable with with the general community sentiment uh towards neta and specifically in the implementation phase of this project i think we'll will demonstrate uh broad support i'm i'm relatively sure though that those who would like to see no traffic and no cars or buses in the neighborhood would still have a concern but what we were able to do is on our northern border which is towards the top of the screen we committed to build a street uh for the for the site to provide the connectivity the the pass-through uh around our site that connectivity allows us then to bring the buses in in one way and have a drop-off without that connectivity that northwest corner we could not do that with the buses so from a standpoint of picking up and delivering children we needed to to build the street and we're committed to doing that and that is part of the the lid process we'll be responsible for not for as well as building the street but also along the eastern border finishing the street it goes down to inslee uh there too there will be no car thoroughfares except for that parking lot but we'll be able to pedestrian bikes to kind of go through that that egress area there um we just a matter of fact the the housing phase of the project could be cited by right there are no land use or planning issues with that activity but the developmental re-engagement of a school would require a conditional use permit process and what we decided to do is to take this project and do a level three planning and use conditional use process extensive uh review uh because we want the project to be understood as
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it is an integrated project involving the phase two and phase one housing and education together and we've decided that we'll be filing our application the first week of may for the conditional use hearing um i think i'll just stop unless you have any particular issues sarah you want me to cover and i'll be happy to answer any questions on the project great thank you both very much so question excuse me sorry can i yeah let me finish a few more items i'm sorry i wanted to um specifically talk about the actions that are before you and mr espana mentioned the street that's this right here and this here as you see from as you know from your staff report that this is a required public improvement that is required for for the housing that's going in on the site it's also required for the new development of the early learning academy and uh actually that's the grease public street improvement we've talked about the ground lease so we're required to dedicate dedicate property for this street we're required also to build the street but we have decided jointly to work with a city on a creation of a local improvement district that will take your permission to petition that formally petition the city for the local improvement district local improvement districts is a way is one way to build and finance public uh improvements in this case instead of having neia or the city of excuse me the portland public schools build this build the street and pay for it as the housing is going and the local improvement district actually allows a mechanism for whereby the city builds the street and then when the city is done building the street they will go ahead and bill in this case they'll build portland public assess portland public schools because we own the greater tract and we have the option of paying that upfront or paying that in installments over or financing it over 20 years we have a cost-sharing agreement that's part of the pre-development agreement with nea that shares in the cost of of improving these street improvements that's because nea's site housing site here takes up about 55 percent of this site the early learning academy is 45 percent of the site so we'll have a cost sharing agreement for the street improvements that we will be assessed through this local improvement district and also the cost of that local improvement district is will be decided by the city council in may we are also also part of this we are one of the there we go when you're one of the parties to this local improvement district there's a neighboring um property that is party to this as well and the city council will make the final determination about the cost allocation between the two parties and lastly i wanted to update or talk about a few things in the pre-development agreement i want to emphasize that these agreements are really about facilities not about program we've talked a little bit about program there's still some more work to do about program in general we think we're going to be able to serve about 120 to 150 kids at the early learning regional early learning academy but i want to emphasize that the agreements before you are really about building the facilities necessary for that program and the pre-development agreement is a binding agreement it's really about pre-development even though we've talked here about preliminary construction costs how much we think this facility will cost that's not what's going to be before you what is before you is the pre-development agreement with which talks about who's going to own the building who's going to manage what portions of the building what is the general program going to be how are we sharing the design costs we've gone through a conceptual design process right now there's a lot more design that needs to do and with the approval of the pre-development agreement we will then enter into an agree enter into a contract with an architect to belie to begin design in earnest we have a cost-sharing agreement as part of this development agreement with neya to share the cost of that design work uh one thing i'd like to offer to you is as we go through these design phases and we do prelim and we continue to do cost estimates on this building we will bring that information back to you probably in written information or we can come make a presentation but i think it's important as we go through the design to let you know where we are in terms of cost estimating for this building and then later on in the year we will come before you with a development agreement similar to what we approved just two months ago with fabian that we'll talk specifically about the cost of the building how the costs will be shared and more formal agreements about the actual construction of the project
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i think i'll leave it at that and we'll see if you've got questions all right questions from board members director beale it seems to me that we uh could you explain what it is sir what's our relationship to nehe with the school district we're we're giving you a good deal of money to some we're getting some things out of it but when i've tried to work with nay i've been shut down entirely in trying to get neha to suggest and help us working with our native american kids in in in our school system and and i i so i'm kind of confused is there a two-way thing going or is this just a one-way will we just give you the money is that for me i guess okay we'll certainly take the money but that's not why i'm here i think our relationship with pps is long-standing we have existing contracts we have staff that visit 40 to 50 schools currently to work with native children i'm sure we can always do more but you and i have not really talked about this and i'd be happy to discuss this with you if you feel there's a need for us to be more active or there are certain schools that we need to get to maybe you could send me information about what you're actually doing in the schools oh sure sure that would be that would be helpful i'd like to see that because i haven't seen much of that i'm just not i'm just not aware of what's taking place and i know when i've made overtures they've just been shut down they just know you know for various different reasons i guess i've never understood it okay well i'd be happy to address that with you uh let me let me just say that that may has over 40 years in this community and you're a wonderful organization i don't well i i just want to get i just want to let you know what we're doing with children specifically and that is the parents and the community folks that originally wanted to organize in the community on a volunteer basis did that to promote cultural awareness cultural preservation and doing well in school and staying out of trouble that was the original organizing philosophy for over 20 years it remains a voluntary organization there was no staff there was no organization and to this day we still operate our sports program on a completely voluntary basis so we've established rapport with our community we've worked with children it was in 1995 that we decided through uh a concern that we that neha needed to do more for our children and our families and that's when we filed for our incorporation and became a 501-3 or a typical non-profit organization and received our first contract our first contract was then back at a student attendance initiative that was promoted by the county and pps and that is to to make contact with students who are not showing up in school or not doing well so our original first contract was to promote success in schools our all our youth development work is promoting success in schools academic support tutoring and we have a library so we continue that today we've been able with with having the district be receptive to our cultural specificity our approach to warrant contracts that put us into a number of schools and on your behalf we have a complete youth development component that has our advocates visiting schools and working with teachers or counselors or whoever and the student on site working with the parents off-site or the children we also trans transport children from their homes school site to naya as required to take advantage of our of our uh computer lab or our our library or things of that nature and those activities continue to this day so i'd be happy to give you more information about what schools specifically where we're located in our schedule and if we can do more we we will do that for you yeah i'd appreciate that okay and actually you say a little more about the early college academy too oh yes um thank you thank you superintendent um it's no um it's not a secret that our community has had some concerns about the relative success of native children making it through portland public schools and uh i think we've been long advocates for reforms and many of the concerns you've heard from parents or folks about how difficult challenges that young people have well native children uh for the long longest time we're graduating at a 20 percent graduation rate if you look at the the cohort from 9th grade to 12th grade and children are just not making it through this system in significant numbers and so
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actually about 12 years ago that's when i started with naya um i uh nico maher was our director at the time and we started talking about neha looking at education from going into the business of education alternative education or community education and so we developed an agreement with joe mcferrin with poic to to study this and to to uh to operate a classroom um at naia a single classroom i was a principal and discipline and a part-time teacher there at may at the time i say that because that led us to kind of think that we could be effective in this way we had a little classroom we had five or six kids we had our first native graduate that summer and at that time there was a lot of interest in the district at small schools small high schools and we were then of that kind of mode of thinking well maybe we could as neah play a greater role in the business of education for our children and decided to pursue that i was fortunate enough to get the support of the superintendents along this to endorse our are pursuing this and that translated into a contract which established the naya early college academy as a community school i think you call it now but originally was an alternative school we we provide on-site uh support for 9th to 12th graders and we have an enrollment approximately 105 or so maybe a little lower right now i haven't checked but it allowed us to then demonstrate that we could find qualified teachers that we could build a a a student body and to provide opportunity for children to succeed and i think that our our delivery on quality education has paid off i think we've demonstrated our ability to graduate students we're going to have our first graduate this year on time from a ninth grade to the 12th they're on time and for us that's a big deal and for our children so that's how we got into the business of education i was fortunate to to be there to to get this thing started and to just do the planning grant and then i found a school that was not in service called whitaker lakeside i think at that time and i when i went to look at it then i could hop the fence and it was out of service and i wanted to see what the backyard was and so i jumped the fence and walked down to the black backyard toward the slough and i had been writing about an ecological school and i used to refer to it as the e-school and people thought that was espana right it was my ecological view and that was tying land to the classroom so very simply a school that that honored its land it tied to the to the to the animals that lived there just it was that ecological broad view and i wanted to tie then the salute what was our backyard then to the classroom and so that seemed like a perfect location for the school to to be cited and at so i approached portland public schools to secure a long-term lease we were very good with the terms we had tremendous support by the northwest area foundation to allow us to rehab the school and that turned into us approaching the district and going through your process of identifying surplus schools which this was a surplus school at the time we i think brought a lot of sweat equity and a couple million bucks to the deal and suddenly the it became a facility of uh the building became alive and i i know many of you have been there and i think that you see a lot of living a lot of life and a lot of energy uh from the children that go there from our elders and the staff that that do the best that they can in managing some some very difficult situations so that's kind of been our kind of volley into education i think we have not regretted it in any manner whatsoever it is challenging uh and we have a long way to go to kind of live up to the standards that you expect and we expect uh there's nothing greater in our community is our accountability to our children and to the parents and to our elders we seek their guidance we support their engagement they're there if we have a situation we invite them in or they invite themselves in there are ever present and it's a very important dimension to our programs that that is a safe facility uh the children know it's safe there and it's a challenge every day as any other place but i would welcome anybody visiting and would like to see that more closely up up close and personal um we we offer as good a program we provide the meals and support services and the gatherings as need be we still do a lot of cultural
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classes activities at night but we continue our sports so i'll get off my soapbox for now but that's good thank you superintendent did uh what what's the philosophy behind three quarters of the people which is what i heard being elderly as opposed to children i mean theoretically here we are working on a site that's with an organization that's around children not really around the elderly i mean there's plenty organizations around the opening about what three-quarters of the people living are elderly and only ten there'd be only ten children in that size sure so elders play a very important role in the intergenerational housing community and in this particular case we decided to have a three to one ratio so three elders to one family unit and as a as a condition of tenancy if you would like to kind of live there we invite you to take a look at this situation this opportunity the hot housing we offer but the expectation that with your tenancy that you offer an hour to or some time being given back to the children who are there and so you actually commit to not just living there and paying your rent but also volunteering with children and provide them as a quasi grandparent or a mentor to the family as they try to challenge you know take on the challenge of family development that's the reason for the three to one so we we don't want to place too much on one element to to over volunteer so that's why it's a three to one what uh what's the restrictions and what's the rules for who gets to live there let's say let's say it like that looks like a nice place to live to me well we hope yeah we are going to certainly know who how do you decide who gets us yeah there's something now what's the qualifications and so forth yeah that's still in formation we'll probably pattern much of what we do similar to what ridge meadows does and so there's a whole description of living at their site and what would be living at at this site if you have an interest in making an application i think it is going to be affordable so it's going to be geared to i think 60 percent of mfi i can't quote the that's the the market rate in the area in the lens area um it will not so it'll be kind of affordable housing but kind of geared to the community the community standard around that location we'll try to specify the type of volunteerism that will that we invite you to participate in and that could be classes or one-to-one with a child working with a parent at bridge meadows they have activities among the residents there the elders to support themselves they also invite parents or family members to join them they work directly with children they provide tutoring to them and so there's a number of activities and that would be outlined so there'll be no surprises for you so well i just want to take advantage of location are those with all children or just uh 10 children that are in in the housing let's say 10 i'm busy yes you have 10 families and they each had one and became yeah so maybe someone would have two yeah no at rich meadows it's probably more than one child and so uh we don't differentiate different initiate between that so children that live there they'll be looking at the the grand quasi grandparents and offer support and that's what we found the experience and and direnda is much more much more articulate in terms of the impact it has on the elder community themselves in terms of purpose to living and improving their health and their longevity and so that's all good um the behaviors that we'd like to see the volunteerism is specified so there's no hidden surprises uh it's not for everybody but they have had very little turnover and they've had people really improve their their health and well-being as a result of the interaction engagement with children so it's kind of a proverbial win-win for many of the folks that think that that is the right place for them and i'm just going to do a quick time check that we have five more minutes allotted for the sun on the agenda so i wanted to give other board members who had any comments or questions and opportunity director regan so thank you for your presentation and thank you for your passion um this is a project that i've been very excited about for a long time uh the intergenerational nature and the support for the native community the support for foster kids um at the same time i have some specific questions about the amount of money that we're talking about and i need to know how where i get the answers to those questions do we have somebody here who can address those questions to ask in public okay i can give it a shot okay so in terms of the portland public school contribution we're talking about um four and a half million dollars and then a land contribution of 780 000 and then now we have street improvements that we will be paying i think 55
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of 700 could be as much as um which adds up to about 5 million seven hundred thousand or so and what we're ending up doing with that is basically having room for six classrooms three pre-k and three kindergarten classrooms which seems like incredibly expensive classroom space so i'm trying to understand how i'm trying to understand the math of how you can have six classrooms cost that much and um and i'm trying to understand where in the portland public school budget those funds would come from so if you could help me out there yeah i'll take the second question first as we look at certainly the reason for starting to talk about these numbers is again the cost of the construction is not before you but we need to be thinking about that of course down the road as we as we move forward the we've identified two sources that we think that we would utilize to pay for that first is a by selling a piece of property that we own the last piece of property that we own at the washington high school site that portland public schools has an option on that property and so when we are ready to sell that property we would offer them the opportunity to purchase it from them that's one source and then whatever that does not pay for we would are looking right now at making up uh the difference with the construction excise tax construction excise tax okay so and both of those sources of funds could obviously be used for something else so the bigger question is how do we end up it looks like these classrooms i mean if i if i just take it looks like these are fantastically expensive classrooms yeah so i need to understand what that's about sure and i uh what i can tell you right now is that that's a that's a that cost estimate right now includes again it's a cost per square foot and the cost per square foot which i don't have in front of me but i can get to you right now we're looking at a cost per square foot that's kind of similar to what fabian is doing using that as a most recent um building for which we have cost estimates um certainly there are i'm sorry so how much is that per square foot oh i would like to let me okay yeah oh there you are what are we looking at square foot 250 250 dollars a square foot and i believe that that includes certainly contingency uh that includes soft con is that hard cost is that just soft so that's hard class um and we have got um this is ross cornelius he's a project consultant helping us with the project so some of that is the cost of construction uh it's permit fees it's soft costs as well um the whole 12 and a half million do you want to elaborate a little bit on that cost structure can i just ask you yeah and then i mean if i'm dividing five million seven hundred thousand dollars by 250 dollars a square foot i'm getting 23 000 square feet and i'm not good at math so maybe that's right well so how big are these classrooms the class typically we would look at a thousand square feet or so yeah let's go back to the see if we can see from the from the plan here and it's not on there let me i've got a cost here the other thing is the cost of land is a sunk cost that's not we've got we show it as a cost in part because that's value of property that we're putting into the project but that's a not certainly anything we have to take out of pocket could you go over that again because because i i was confused about the land crossings yeah they did at least 99 years the land cost so the land cost that we have in is excuse me is the value of this property that we have here that is going towards that is going towards or being used for the um for the early learning academy we we already own the property so it's not more property out of pocket yep we're only leasing half the property yep that's again i'll figure out how to use this yeah releasing that portion so the 780 is the rough estimated value of that property and that's just in as a placeholder that's not additional out of pocket money excuse me i'm going to see if i can't answer your question about the square footage there's also a typical classroom is 900 to a thousand square feet say that again a typical classroom is 900 to 1000 square feet right but perhaps another comparison might be to the club the clarendon early
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learning academy and there might be you know as follow-up since we're not voting on this tonight that would be an additional team looking at here is early learning classrooms with wrap-around services and other space we do definitely there's uh there's office space of course there's uh there's there's there's bathrooms there's um additional space that's yet to be programmed some of this we're still in conceptual design and that's also the also the cost for fees and the cost of bringing utilities so it's a it's the cost of a new building but we're happy to break that down in something that's a little bit more demonstrative for you i just want to get back i just need to put you on notice that i'm not comfortable with how the numbers are are working here so i'm i'm not there yet you need to i need a really a much clearer understanding of this because right now this seems like we're spending an awful lot of money on six classrooms so and we're selling washington school to do it a couple questions could you um it could be helpful for to people to understand the 60 40 split in terms of the cost sharing yeah can you kind of detail that a little bit out yeah happy to do that so the 60 40 cost share is is looking at the cost of this building we're looking at this as a development partnership with naya again we did something similar with the cocoonia university on the on the fabian side so this is a model that we've used before the 60 40 split looks at the total number of square footage in this building which is roughly 33 000 square feet and we have looked at how much of it will be controlled by naia when i say controlled by nea through a long-term lease they will kind of control and program the two-story longhouse where the wraparound services will be where the kitchen will be and the communal space right there and they will also control two classrooms pps will control these three classrooms all this space but we will get to use some of this space as well through a reciprocal agreement so when we looked at um in the in the partnership how do we divide up the cost of the partnership and who's going to pay what percentage of this building we looked squarely at at square footage so of the roughly 33 000 square foot feet roughly there's about 12 000 there and another 2 000 here and that makes up roughly about 6 40 percent of this building pps is controlling roughly 60 percent of that building so as we go through the design that 60 40 number may float a little bit once we get further on in the design but for right now that looks like what the cost share split will be based on the square footage is that is that clear so um when you ask us to vote on this next week uh we're voting on a formula not the actual number that's right that's a formula and that formula will be we will come to you with a pre-development excuse me a development agreement later on in this year similar to what we just took to you for fabian and that will outline uh more detailed costs because we'll be much farther down the road in the design process we'll talk about who how much the actual cost is and what that share is and we'll probably have actual numbers about how much each will contribute and we'll talk about other resources will we have other resources from new market tax credits or from other public agencies much as again as fabian did or the earl boyles project at david douglas school so we're looking at a variety of funding sources that will lay out all those funding sources costs and a more definitive cost share but you're absolutely right it's a it's a formula for right now okay and then um my last question i think is my last was the um uh how did it get determined that the demolition would be cost here because that's where that mm-hmm so the housing is going so you think well that's the the reason we agreed to that is because we again are looking at this we're looking at this frankly as as a joint project when we first when we first looked at this the housing was going to be on this side the early learning academy was going to be here in response to neighborhood concerns about traffic traffic dispersion we made the determination with neo jointly that it made sense to flip the site we also knew as staff that the foster school was really in not great shape and not very conducive for the kind of use that we're looking at so we jointly agreed that this kind of scenario this kind of site plan was really the best site plan for the site and since we jointly made that decision we considered the demolition of the school a joint cost okay thank you again looking at this as a partnership
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thank you for the presentation i just want to say that um when the city council or um counselor members approached us with this idea i found it really exciting they invoked the bridge meadows which has been very very successful i know that in talking with the lentz community they've been very disappointed with our letting this property sit vacant for so long without much to do and so i know i remember early in my board term we talked about what what are some options could we make it into an early learning center and because of the work that needed to be done it would be cost prohibitive um so we looked at i i asked just about a number of different things what would that look like and it really just sat there because there wasn't anything else and then the city came to us with this idea which again is really innovative um and i guess i'm concerned that it's getting framed as six million for six classrooms because i look at it as a 12 million dollar project for that facility that we're paying half of um i i get why we look at it both ways and i think it's important to have the dialogue but i worry that that gets lost i also want to say that we have talked a lot about the disparities faced in our in our communities and native americans if you look at our graduation rate and if you look at even their access to programs like head start they are well underserved and being poorly served at best if this is gives us a shot to serve those families better then i think we have to look at new ways maybe that's more money maybe that's not again i'm not saying it is not but i can respect somebody's different opinion about that but the excitement i've heard while i know that there are neighbors concerned about traffic which in every rebuild or every modernization i've seen that we've done even franklin they're concerned about changing traffic patterns which is understandable the lens community is very excited that we're taking action on this again this is just the feedback i've heard taking action and very very very happy with the partnership between pps and nia it's been spearheaded by a big community process to really engage and so i'm looking forward and i guess i i find myself one really excited that what i think i just heard nia saying we're committing services through third grade that is extraordinary that is true early education at its finest pre-pre-birth or birth all the way to third grade that is something that we wouldn't be getting if we weren't doing something like this and i guess i wasn't here on the board when we developed ramona ramona or the romano place but this seems the similar innovation except adding housing with intergenerational piece and i i'm curious whether or not it went under the same type of scrutiny and again i don't i don't know but um i'm just very excited about this and i think for the presentation i think okay director knowles thank you very much for the presentation and thank you ray for being here love to hear that history it was i appreciate the long relationship that we've had with nao um and i just um i want to say i'm very also like director of very supportive of this um project i would had the opportunity to be at the groundbreaking last summer it was a very hot day but it was really wonderful to see our 15 other partners from across the state and the governor and everybody there to just celebrate this great opportunity that we had and i think about how we talk all the time about finding really fantastic projects and then replicating those and here we have this wonderful opportunity to replicate what we did at rosa parks what we're going to do at fabian and now here at the foster site so to me this is a really great opportunity for that and i also would echo director belial in the discussion his discussion about the cost of this particular i also look at it like it's over 12 million dollar project and we're getting it for six so to me this seems like a really wonderful opportunity even financially for portland public schools and then you add on to that the fact that we have such an abysmal graduation rate for our native american students i want to do everything we possibly can to turn that around and having a culturally specific early learning center i think is going to to help us with that and the interaction between elders and children of all the children in the school not just the children who uh reside and the um the housing is is a what a what a great opportunity i mean when i used to chair the child care commission we talked all the time the state child care commission we talked all the time about placing daycare and pre-k in and housing that was mostly elder housing and
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it was a great idea to have those uh older people have the opportunity to be active in their life and to influence children so i mean i just i think this is a great project and i'm really looking forward to us moving forward with it thank you go ahead thank you i have a question a couple questions about this in general it's looks like a great project ne is a great organization but i have a responsibility as a school board member in portland to make sure that we're doing things that benefit the school district clearly and to make sure we look at those things and so i'm curious about why we would move our kindergarten we would have a kindergarten away from all of the aspects that you can have if you place it in a school you've got what are we going to get here librarian pe art what do we have that is kindergarten aren't they away from a school and now and the head start is a head start we've got head start but that's covered with head start money and i'd be curious how that head start money figures in here also also i'm curious about the the city put in a certain amount of money we put in a certain amount of money and they're backing this program are they still doing as much as we're doing that's a concern i've got oh i've got a lot of little concerns hanging around here that just keep hanging out there that i'd like to tie up before we vote for this so and i'd i'd like to ask harriet um adair who has been our champion of early learning in the district for a very long time and this is i'll let you address that which brings me to the first question about the early learning itself early learning preschool we've been moving into that into that sphere but we don't get any money from the state in that sphere have we moved in any place where we're spending k12 money on early learning because if we're doing that that's a cool i have questions around that too because it's given to us for k-12 not for pre-k okay so i'll be very happy to talk to you about that and as you know because of our relationship is not the first time you and i i've sat in front of you to talk about early learning so i'm pleased to return there as we've done that in the past director buehl we do have state money that goes to support early learning that is more than beyond a pre-k when it was dseg money on your first watch on the board it supported what we called early learning um early childhood education centers which were for pre-k and k and the money that we have now which is a combination of state money which is opk dollars federal head start dollars city of portland shift dollars and title one dollars is also supporting pre-k and kindergarten as well and so early learners now has expanded beyond just what people typically think of as head starts so we have braided funding that is supporting the education of children that are four or five and moving into as we've now formed these partnerships we're trying to find more partnerships that begin to provide the wraparound supports for families and children that move up through third grade because we recognize that the the good things that happened and head start were cutting off at four they'd entered into kindergarten it was like cu so now we're working the way so that we can provide these supports up to third grade because we believe that the populations that once we get the men that we have historically underserved and are now moving to serve more uh in a more integrated fashion with more different kinds of supports built around them than we've had in the past definitely cannot be all financed through portland public schools they need to be financed through partnerships and we are formulating strong partnerships across the board so each early learner center has different groups supporting them but every early learner center has those four funding sources flowing in through them the wraparound services that are and i'll use clarendon which is in your region and invite you to come and see us at clarendon is basically supporting um all the populations because we have mixed populations in the classrooms each demographic so if you entered that center you would not be able to tell which child was title 1 which child was city funded which child was opk and which child was federal head start they're getting the same kinds of supports the same kinds of strong programming and it's built upon what i truly believe was the foundation that was established early on 50 years ago when we first got head start in the 80s through the dseg integration program where the whole program was where the board drove us to
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begin looking at how do you provide stronger programming for those populations at an early age and we're just building on that and expanding on that it's very positive so let me go back to my original question okay which one was that which is the clarendon let's take clarendon okay do we spend any k-12 money for clarendon any k-12 any money that we get from the on from the state for k-12 which is what the money we're not given any money for anything outside of case we do not have we do not have we do get money from the state we get opk dollars from the state right but i'm talking about do we spend any of the k-12 money that we get from the state in the state school fund which is given to kindergarten through 12th grade do we take any of that money and do we take any of that money and spend it on pre-kindergarten classes at all if i'm understanding your your question correctly the answer would be no because we don't have any kindergarten classrooms at clarendon so good question the question i mean so the five million dollars that we're giving out here the 4.5 million dollars that we're using on spending out here we're saying that's on kindergarten not on not on the daycare or something so there's no money there's none of our k-12 money that is spent for any pre-k children at clarendon let me be very clear to you again okay we have opk dollars which are state money that comes to us and we are using it at clarendon right for and it's come specifically for pre-kindergarten yes okay yes we are not using any kindergarten money because we're not getting we don't serve as kindergarteners at clarendon so if i could just enjoy for a moment because it is 7 30 we've got a lot of folks and partners in the audience who are waiting for their time on the agenda so if we could just maybe wrap up specifically about this project versus sort of the large it sounds like getting into a larger discussion about early childhood so are you saying to quit discussing this because if you are then let's make a motion and stop the discussion i'd like to wrap up the discussion on this no problem with anything yeah i know what you would like to do but i'm kind of not ready to wrap it up i have i'm trying to make sure i'm solid here i'd be happy to have a conversation with you um so what i'm hearing so far is wanting more information about um costs from director regan and maybe more information about the the programming or how it relates in terms of if if any of the money that we're spending on pre-k is for k-12 money that we get in our k-12 budget for this week we can get you that number yeah you get that we'll get that and we'll have a little bit and we'll have a little public report on that next well we're going to be just having another discussion vote next week other information okay right any other information that board members need from staff anyone else okay i'll just then thank you for the sharing your concerns or thoughts and i'll just wrap up quickly to say again i just really appreciate the presentation i'm thrilled about this this project it's innovative it's clearly needed it's based on a proven model i have the opportunity to participate in that organ solutions many months long process with all kinds of stakeholders and experts and elected officials and everybody else and it was that was a really exciting process to kind of really dive into how this intergenerational model works what the need is and how it could function at this site so i'm thrilled by the opportunity to invest in this whether it's differentiating you know it's differentiating resources it's finding new resources it's being creative i would never want portland public schools to step away from an opportunity to innovate to leverage funds both public and private from different levels of government and to better serve our children so i'm just thrilled and i know we can get additional information from staff because this has been in the works with a lot of smart folks for a long time so i'm just really excited to see this moving forward sure atkins are we also going to get my other question of the superintendent answered next week which is the other question was why we would put kindergarten away from the building away from them so additional information about the thinking why would we take kindergarten and build this section over here instead of building on to another oh and i forgot dad one thank you for bringing that up so we'll have that on the list i forgot another reason to support this is because of the overcrowding we have in southeast and the need to have all along that all along that 92nd corridor yeah so really exciting to be able to and to no longer have an eyesore in the neighborhood but actually have a beautiful community serving building so thank you very much thank you thank you guys okay so next on our agenda is sharepoint yes we'll we'll get that so next on our agenda is charter school renewals and so director curler and myself and director morton served on a charter committee we had a hearing with the schools and a follow-up
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meeting discussion and opportunity time with both folks from the schools and staff so we'll be kind of chiming in when we get to the discussion part of it now but for the first um first part we're going to invite kristen miles our charter school manager um down to the staff table just to give us a quick timeline update and kind of where we are in the process and then we're going to be able to hear brief presentations from each of the schools and then we'll have a discussion so welcome kristen good evening thank you for the opportunity to speak to you a little about our two charter schools in renewal and our one request for contract extension so i'll just give a brief timeline of each and just a little little blurb about each school and then they i will let them speak for themselves so emerson is up for a uh extension of contract emerson school is a k-5 project approach charter school in the park blocks that currently enrolls 144 students it is a national model for the positive discipline behavior approach and over the past several years has engaged deeply in race equity work led by a parent group called guide they can tell you what that stands for which advocates for institutional changes that promote inclusion diversity and equity since guide was founded emerson has also seen its student demographics shift from nineteen percent students of color in two thousand eight nine to forty nine percent students of color in this school year emerson is currently a level five school and has received the highest rating on the state report card every year since it has been rated emerson opened in 2003 and is currently operating under a five-year flexible agreement which terminates on june 30th 2015 because this is the sixth year of the contract staff must make a recommendation to extend the contract by one year or to initiate a full renewal process so i'll describe what the flexible term agreement is during the and this is what it states in their contract during the fifth year of the contract we determine whether a renewal process is deemed necessary based on emerson's ability to meet academic performance standards its fiscal stability its adherence with all applicable state laws and its compliance to the terms of the contract if it is determined that a renewal process is not necessary then the contract would be extended by one year with board approval both the district and the school have the authority to initiate a full renewal process in any year of the contract up until the 10th year at which time the renewal process would be mandated by statute emerson has requested that its contract be extended by one year as for this agreement we reviewed emerson's organizational financial and academic performance and recommended to the superintendent that the contract be extended by one year which also reflects the superintendent's recommendation so i can go through all schools and take questions or if there are any questions in between um i think we should go through them all and then we'll go back great the next school up for renewal is sei academy sei academy is a six through eight full service charter middle school in north portland that enrolls 128 students currently and provides a comprehensive middle school program along with wraparound supports for the past two years it has been designated a model school and has won numerous awards for its achievement including the 2014 national excellence and urban education silver award and the designation as a title one distinguished school for its achievements in student performance and closing the achievement gap it opened in 2003 and is currently operating operating under a five-year agreement which terminates on june 30th this year also we made a formal visit to sei on february 4th and the board subcommittee on charter schools held the required hearing on march 9. staff reviewed sei's organizational financial and academic performance within the framework of the statutory criteria that the board must use to determine whether or not it will renew the school as per statute every subsequent renewal of a charter school after the first renewal period must be for no fewer than five years and no more than ten staff recommended to the superintendent and superintendent also recommends that the contract with sei be renewed for a five-year flexible term as i just described with emerson and the next school up for a renewal is lamont immersion le monde french immersion public school public charter school is currently a k-3 full immersion charter school in downtown portland that will eventually grow to be a k-8 it opened in 2012 and is currently opera operating under a three-year agreement which terminates on june 30th le mans currently has 171 enrolled students we made a formal visit to le mans on february 17th and the board subcommittee on charter schools held the required public hearing on march 9th we reviewed lamont's organizational financial and academic performance again within the framework of the statutory criteria now the charter school statute for a first-term charter school states that the first renewal of a charter school will be for the same time period as the
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initial contract so therefore we are recommending that the contract with the lawn be renewed for a three-year term great and superintendent smith do you have any comments on the recommendations um no just these are really valued partners who each play a really unique and valued role within our system and i think are kind of exemplify what it is that you would want in charter partners so i'm just pleased to have all of them up to make the recommendation for renewals well we're going to get yeah what we're going to do is um have each charter school partner come up and do a brief five-minute presentation about their school and then we were going to have questions and comments will that work okay okay uh great okay so let's just begin so each school is going to do a five-minute presentation and those of us on the charter committee i had the opportunity to to hear about them it was great so i know we'll enjoy this so let's start with le mans french immersion public charter school and please come on down and would love to hear from you welcome bienvenue merci to that good evening uh all of you thank you for letting us present to you today my name is shuka resvani um r-e-z-v-a-n-i and i am the president of the board of lebanon version which operates le mans french immersion public charter school we are excited about what we have achieved at le bond and created in our first few years and we wanted to give you a very very brief glimpse into what it looked daily life looks like at le mans and accordingly accordingly we asked a parent volunteer to create this short video that i hope will give you a little bit of le mans flavor it includes photos taken from our annual annual yearbooks which is a project also taken on by parent volunteers and we were told to sort of try to keep these really really brief so we're happy to elaborate if you want but otherwise we'll probably keep our comments extremely brave is show say foreign is um i'd like i'd now like to just briefly introduce you to our head of school dr chantal de formattel um dr dufour martel holds a bachelor's degree in cultural anthropology a master's degree in educational leadership a doctoral degree in special ed from the university of oregon and she has 20 years experience teaching in canadian and american public schools in partial and full immersion programs i feel like i should even list everything because we feel like we have this amazing gem who has arrived and is an expert in immersion education in bilingual education and early literacy he's really turned our school around and
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really gotten us to where we need to be so without further ado dr duke well thank you very much and it's a pleasure to be speaking with you this evening my name is chanted for martel and i'll spell that last name d-u-f-o-u-r-m-a-r-t-l um i to be very honest with you i did not prepare an extended you know notes here this evening uh i feel that we have presented we've written up we've analyzed the data we've presented it and so i've had a busy day let me just make a content do resume for you what my overall sense is in as far as just looking at the data of our school and how our children have performed so um we are meeting our student performance goals and agreements as specified in our charter we are in our third year of operation as shuka uh mentioned and this will be our first year where our first grade are this will be the first year where our third grade students will take the state test our own internal testing data from previous school years indicate that students are making on average stronger than expected annual academic growth and growth in both reading and in math our french language data indicates that students are making exceeded gains in reading accuracy and oral reading fluency and we have the met we have the tools to measure that which is really awesome so over time students um of underserved races and economically disadvantaged students are also making gains at in comparison or compare comparable gains to uh their peers i i'm happy to answer any question you may have at this time i don't have anything more that i really need to say that's great thank you so much i think what we're going to do is have each school give their five-minute presentation and then we'll go through and do our any questions so you'll be on hand right great thank you fabulous thank you so much so um next if we could have representatives from the sei academy public charter school come on down for a brief presentation welcome thank you for being here okay good evening good evening uh superintendent smith um board co-chairs knowles and atkins and award winners i'm linda harris i'm um an administrative coach at the sei academy and to my right is timothy rogers he's the principal of the sei academy since october 20th good evening good evening hey um we prepared um a powerpoint presentation that was that you the board subcommittee saw on march the 6th and we have copies of those for anyone who'd like to see those i could leave them with karen basically i'd like to start just with a testimony and then timothy might want to make some comments tony hopson senior is here he may want to make some comments as well so okay um i know that mr hopson and mr rogers join me in thanking the charter school staff kristin miles and jenny brayton who's not here tonight for their continuous support we appreciate an open invitation from superintendent smith to attend the monthly leadership academy meetings we also appreciate the support and assistance from pps departments are research and assessment department human resources instructional technology curriculum and funded programs i have worked with the sei academy for the past 11 years and my belief is that the charter school is stronger than ever the school is committed to excellence and we do not give up on children we are proud of what we have accomplished as a charter school our students have matriculated to high schools where they are achieving success and many of them have are currently attending college so we employ highly trained professionals committed educators who are united by a common purpose so despite the challenges that we face this year it is only strengthen our resolve to move forward with an even deeper sense of purpose and commitment we are currently seeing high interest on the part of many parents to become more involved in the school and we will build upon this momentum and increase our students chances of success the academy benefits each day from our unique position with the sei agency under the leadership of tony hopson
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senior we have operational and programmatic support so we will continue to promote the beliefs practices and procedures that earned us a level five on our state report cards for two consecutive years so we are committed to our vision of creating a premier middle school in northeast portland where graduating eighth graders will enter high school prepared for success mr rogers yes i just like to add to uh miss hairs testimony as to why our charter school should continue i just want to focus on our academic achievement on the 2013-2014 report card state report card sei met 71.4 in reading 65 combined in math as far as our just just to highlight some of our academic growth barriers we uh combined we had a combined medium growth percentile of 69 percent in math we had a combined median and growth uh target rate of 34 percent in math as well and as miss harris stated sei has also received the level 5 rating two years in a row which is a level five some of our exit goals for our students are to prepare students to meet or exceed the state's eighth grade benchmark and to prepare all participating students for success in high school we also want to prepare our students who will be able to think problem solved in school in a variety of situations they encounter in life some of some of our other extra goals are to prepare students to develop their abilities to become self-sufficient individuals and to prepare students who will be responsible positive contributing citizens of this community great thank you very much all right so last but not least if representatives from emerson public charter school could come on down for your presentation good evening i feel very alone up here i'm tara o'neal from the emerson charter school thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight to talk about extending the terms of our charter for one more year i'm going to apologize because mostly i'm reading i just didn't memorize any of this emerson's in its 12th year of operation as a charter school in the portland public school district in our 12 years we've established a record of academic achievement community involvement and commitment to service that has been consistent and unwavering our unique program includes using the project approach which is a very structured framework for project-based learning which encourages real world problem solving making connections between content areas and personal experience collaborative learning environments and creating engaging final work in addition we use a social emotional approach grounded in positive discipline acknowledging children as active participants in their communities whose actions and behaviors have consequences for the whole the class meeting is at the center of every classroom community students learn the language of appreciation conflict resolution asking for and accepting accepting help from their peers compromise empathy and kindness through practice at class meetings intentionally the skills learned through this clear social emotional focus are the same skills that create successful learning conditions for project work project work requires collaboration approaching appreciating others contributions to the whole advocating for your ideas compromising well recognizing everyone's individual strengths and accommodating difference all of these are skills we all need to work well in the world and ones we teach explicitly at emerson project work allows for deep exploration of topics through which children apply the literacy and math concepts learned during instruction time they present data using statistics they read for information they amass vocabulary lists and they write in project journals they learn scientific inquiry how to pose meaningful questions where to look for answers and how to present their results they don't just learn the answer to the question but how to go about answering any question our program is successful as measured by the oregon report card receiving the highest rating every year that we've
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been rated and as measured by the district's positive annual evaluations and as measured by parent interest in the program year after year this year we have about 350 applications for 13 spots next fall our commitment to self-reflection and improvement is reflected in our ongoing equity work begun with intent about five years ago partnering with two very brave parents and continuing still where we're showing a sustained shift that kristen miles talked about earlier this year being our first year at least starting with 50 percent of our students being white and 50 being of color this year and a tiny shift changes when you're a small school so now it's 49 and 51. this is probably the fourth or maybe fifth time i've been before the school board to ask for continued support or sponsorship for our school's charter and each time i do this i look for new ways to convince you of our school's value to the district whether it's through showing test scores or parent survey data or by talking about our commitment to equity and sustaining a welcoming community for families and students of color or about our phenomenal teachers who mentor student teachers and who sometimes move on to teach at district schools or to teach at universities where they teach teachers who will come to district schools we add value to the district through all these things though we do it on a very small scale with only 144 students and six teachers we already provide opportunities for interested district teachers to observe our classrooms we've offered other professional development opportunities for educators and we provide technical assistance and ongoing support to other district charter schools we stand at the ready to help make programs like emerson's available to more than just our small population of lottery winning students though we're happy to remain a small effective lab school for the district either way we look forward to another year of the district's support and i'm happy to answer any questions thank you for your time thank you so much tara all right so colleagues what i would propose just to be sort of an organized discussion so we just discuss one school at a time and cover any questions or comments there we have the partners here right so we could start with emerson since tara's already down here um and i would invite members of the charter committee if you know if you want to weigh in first maybe because we had the additional time spent on at the hearing and the follow-up meeting and thank you again to the partners for mult coming to multiple hearings and meetings and sessions and doing a presentation multiple times we really appreciate it as we kind of move through this this state mandated process so director curler director morton any thoughts around let's just start with emerson yeah sure thank you very much and uh it's always a pleasure to hear about emerson and the work that you're doing and specifically i think the thing that that struck me um not just the the evidence that um that is you're positively serving students in portal public schools uh but the uh the work of your guide group which i i felt was a was a charter but a majority culture organization or structure response to the need for equity and the need for diversity within your school your academic setting that really was inspiring and in fact when we were in the in the committee meeting i felt like it became almost a conversation with the other charters is how do we not bottle that but how do we create an opportunity where emerson has a chance to provide technical assistance to other charter schools where we know this has been a really significant gap i think equally the sei academy can offer a great deal of assistance in providing technical assistance to not just charter schools but other schools as they demonstrate their ability to to work specifically with a community that has been historically underserved but they are getting fantastic achievement results out of so uh that's the kind of stuff that i love to i love to think about and i think emerson has brings that brings that in spade so thank you for the work that was all of all of my commentary though director curling um yeah i mean i actually just want to lump mine together so which is on all three of these schools i i agree with the superintendent's recommendation it was a pleasure to hear the presentations and to look at the materials and then our work as a board in the district is not only to proven these applications but also continue to see how
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we can incorporate some of the successes so look forward to kind of like where you said that i'll just add in really quickly i appreciate it very much and i know i have been critical of emerson and some of our other charters for that lack of diversity so i personally appreciate the hard work that you and your parents have put in and the progress that you've made and your leadership um on this so look forward again even though i won't be on the board anymore just to seeing that potential for you to again to share um you and your parents to share with us and with other charter schools so really and i support the superintendent's recommendation as well and appreciate your long service to the children of this district any other comments or questions about emerson director buehl really for christine i think uh emerson were renewing for one year in sdi renewing for five there must be a reason about that but i don't know thank you for that question so uh when emerson renewed two years ago we came up with um an innovative model for renewing in that they're a very strong school and have always been and so the the um the statute says that the renewal period after the first renewal can be for no less than five and no more than ten years so what we implemented into their contract at the time was that at the fifth year when they would normally go through renewal we would do our official site visit in the fall and make a recommendation or a determination at that point whether we would we see the need to put them through the full renewal process and if that was the case then we could go ahead and do that if it if they were performing well in a strong organization and were financially had no we had no concerns that we could still do our annual evaluation like we always do but then just extend the contract by one year which would give us the option to do that up until the 10th year at which point they would have to go through renewal per statute also in at any point during that five to ten year period we can unilaterally say we're going to do a full renewal process they could also request a full renewal process and we've offered this to to several schools that have had multiple strong renewals and strong annual evaluations and that question for emerson school do you uh how are you dealing with becoming smarter balance and the common core and do you find that that's helpful for your school or is it not helpful what do you i'm trying to think of the great quote that one of my teachers had about this it was just spot on and it politically works out up here um i will say we're prepared we're prepared i think that the district has been extraordinarily helpful in terms of allowing us to participate in training and in a lot of other things around this and certainly i feel like project approach learning lends itself well to common core standards and so in that way we feel prepared i think smarter balanced is a we'll see how it goes with everything this year so but we're not um avoiding it for sure we're prepared thank you director chris nice to follow up on the process and extensions versus renewal so um when you do an extension you still have to go in every year and look at the school correct yes okay so when you do it i'm sorry go ahead you're not in an extension year there is a requirement by the district to go in and do an evaluation of every charter school every year every charter school every year even if they're not for renewal okay that answers my other question thank you any other director black i just wanted to chime in and say thank you for your focus on equity i know that the last time i sat on the charter renewal we were trying to figure out how do we engage in the state if we're going to be able to have charter schools as an option how can we enlist you as help to help narrow the achievement gap that we're all trying to work toward um so i appreciate your intentionality and with that i'm just going to highlight another challenge and hold you hopefully to task with it there's only one that we're approving one application tonight that we're approving whose free and reduced lunch exceeds portland publix and so if i look at your free and reduced lunch and i don't just look at demographics you're only at five percent um or about five percent so i i would hope that we would find additional ways to engage um our families in poverty as well i'm glad you brought that out because i would i would love to comment for a second on that um there are two factors at i think the core and one is accessibility to charter schools is very much a barrier and trying to bridge that is part of the process that we're in of course so
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not having school buses or that easy sort of neighborhood connection we're in the middle of downtown purposefully not in someone's neighborhood and in retrospect perhaps that wasn't the best choice so it's difficult for people to get to us but the other factor in our case is we don't compel people to fill out paperwork and at the same time we also leave payments on things like fees or school trips on an honor system so there's especially with hopefully full day-funded kindergarten next year very little incentive at our school to fill out the paperwork because there's no requirement to have that to be able to pay what you can for a fee and so there's a balancing there as well if you i think about 15 of our kids order our school lunch so if you're not ordering the school lunch other than that there's not a reason and we don't compel but that being said you're absolutely right and that's our next hurdle all right let me just ask you a general question um portland public schools just went through a process of um kind of reforming our enrollment and transfer lottery system and in that process we give a preference or you know higher weight to low-income kids your as a charter school sponsored by us you don't fall under that lottery though you fall under the state's rules um are you or other charter schools trying to work with the state to change that very actively um there's there's actually a senate bill this should be voted out of committee tomorrow that will allow charter schools specifically by state law to wait based on i forget what they finally worded it uh underserved historically underserved populations which will include students with disabilities will include race will include socioeconomic status and various other so that we we will be able to do that and it will not be required it's going to say may i think in the law that's interesting okay we'll add that to a future legislative update then yeah no that's great and i assume that we're very supportive of that yes same side okay thank you so much all right so let's uh move on to any questions or comments about sei and i don't know if committee members had any additional um yeah director martin um again i want to reiterate uh the work of uh the sei academy is exceptional um i don't think there's any way around it one of the things during our uh our presentation uh uh tony hobson uh made a comment about we never intended this to go on forever and uh and that was a uh i found that to be a really a really thoughtful question or thoughtful statement i think we have to as a district step up to the plate and say what would it take for sei to not need to have this go on forever and it would mean a significant change in the way we serve african american students in this district so i really incredibly appreciate the work that you all do and particularly during transition moments that we know happen every day within the lifestyle life cycle of schools and other organizations and i really appreciate the partnership with portland public schools i could just chime in and ditto to all that and i would say even more specifically i would be interested i mean we had the conversation about really um formalizing having a way for the district and sci to figure out a road map toward that not you're doing an amazing job and not that we want to put you out of business but we do in the sense that we need to be able to serve african-american students in all our schools as well as you are at sei so i would love to see even memorialized in the resolution as we move forward in this partnership how can we really start getting serious about how we figure out what what are the conditions that would be required what would that look like and how can we knowing that you are of course doing the day-to-day work of running a successful school and that's hugely time consuming but is there a way that we can car you know create a
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process together to look at that that's what i would love to see that was i thought coming out of it so other director buell yeah yes yeah a wonderful place i i was curious so when we were doing the discipline disparity report early in the year you guys were pretty high you're like 17 exclusionary discipline and you come down from 29 23 to 17 and i was just curious of what how that comes about because we have a lot of schools that are less than that of course but i mean what can you kind of talk to that why what is it i mean i don't know it just caught my eye i went that's pretty high exclusionary discipline rates um mr beale where did you get that 17 from um from our report from uh from our our exclusionary discipline report stuff on our on our district district district district it was on the district papers that we got around exclusionary discipline for charter schools so they they get the wrong information they get the wrong information did they have the wrong stuff i don't know that just caught my eye two years ago 29 percent that's really high exclusionary discipline that runs right up there with it that highest pay and it is coming down and i don't believe right now if it's 17 17 that would have been last year certainly not this year 17.9 or something last year this year yeah what is it about this year has it come down you think do you have any idea probably about twelve percent yeah but still that which is still fairly high but what do you have anything that you could share with us about you know what what you've tried what hasn't worked what i mean because we really and we rightly so get clobbered on that and rightly so that we're way too high and we're trying to work at it and we had a presentation from the teachers tonight saying well what you're trying to do didn't necessarily it wasn't working either so i mean you're always thought of as a kind of a model for working with with uh children of color so i'm sorry should i just show you a clarifying question director bill are you referring to the number of suspensions no i'm not referring to this chart i was referring to the old chart that we had which is the number of exclusionary discipline percentages suspensions so the number of do you have any explosions no no no okay so suspensions were running about 17 last year and it's about 12 this year okay i mean i'm okay i will um i didn't as i said i could make a couple of comments on that and maybe mr rogers would want to make some some additions at the beginning of this year um the staff was very interested in restorative justice but only a few of our staff members had been trained in that that approach to discipline and so there was uneven implementation so our plan is to train our teachers this summer and then move forward in the fall with that program but what we do now we are really focused on you know the restorative part versus punitive and we are looking very closely in monitoring and tracking children and what we do in response to uh consequences for infractions yeah well thank you for just coming i just got my eye and i thought i'm gonna ask about it sure now one thing i would like to comment on is that kind of sets sei apart is that the fact that each one of our grade levels has a coordinator and the coordinator plays particularly three roles in the student life which is the parent the mentor and the teacher and so a lot of times when we have situations where let's say students are in trouble or they do something that breaks a rule or under fraction a lot of times the students is talking with their coordinators coming up with a solution understanding where they went wrong and how they can own that problem and how they can fix it and how they can move on even before they come to the principal office and so i believe that intervention right there is really setting sdi apart and it allows our students to focus on as ms harris said be more restorative versus being more punitive and so our coordinators they do a fantastic job working with our students helping them understand where they went wrong and how they could fix it even before it reaches the so you have a coordinator at each grade level yes that's correct on so yeah like if how many grades how many fifth grades i mean not four we have uh six seven eight which is how many of them how many students per grade level one grade level yeah let's see um sixth grader we have approximately 48 uh seventh grade we have approximately when i say 42 8th grade about 40. two classes per grade level or the end no just each quarter just has one class
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for a grade level no but i mean for each grade level has two yes two classes and then you have a coordinator and anybody like seventh grade you have a coordinator and then two classes no the sixth grader has one coordinator the seventh grade has more important and at each grade level has one year one coordinator two classroom teachers then yes so you got three people on your seventh grade actually the way we worked it out is that we have in order to have smaller class sizes we have three sections for each grade level so how big are your class sizes 13 13 or so 13 yeah okay it's good maybe you can give that to us since we're always looking for you guys for some help then you go 13 kids per class across the district yeah that's a good idea we like it so let me just add a couple things to this this question of suspensions realistically in my opinion this has a lot to do with resources and over the past few years we've been cutting back in our overall sei and we don't see our charter school as separate from the rest of the services that we provide so when you end up with in a small situation where kids who do step out of line sometimes we have found that it's much easier to send them home because there's not the resources within the school setting to take care of them now realistically and even though that's been the case in the past we've been having a lot of conversations because sending kids home is not the answer i mean that's not even the fci way and as we talk about restorative justice restorative justice in my opinion is the relationship model we've been doing restorative justice from the onset of sei we've been doing that for 30 years it's all about attitude relationships and you know treating kids and dealing with punishment out of love as opposed to punishing the kid you know all of that so that that's secret yeah that's the foundation of what we do that's what we've always done but sometimes in terms of if you're trying to keep kids safe if you try to give teachers the opportunity to teach and you don't have enough resources to have bodies because if you if you move a kid out of a class they got to go somewhere and in some cases over the past few years with cutbacks we didn't have enough staff there trying to beef that back up but even in spite of some of that i mean we you know they've shared with you some of the outcomes that we've actually gotten with kids so but that's really more of the reason why and that's not a not a stat that we're proud of so i don't want to run run from that that's real that that's my real i'm just curious because it came up and i went yeah that's it's not so it's that it's so high it's just that i'm going to better ask about that so i get it so i get some idea great thank you appreciate you guys coming tonight any other questions or comments for the sei team director belial i just wanted to thank you for being here thank you for the work that you do every day i appreciate that sentiment that you do not want to be doing this not because you don't love the kids and not because you don't want to be involved but you want the system to be able to serve all kids as well as they're serving some kids so thank you and i would be interested and i hope my colleagues would agree that there's obviously an expertise here that our our current school system outside of charter schools does not seem to have and i know that sei has been gracious enough to take some contracts with other school districts to do some work about how do we help our staff how do we set up our systems to make sure that we're serving all of our students well and so i would be curious to see if we could work on some some arrangement like that and i also just wanted to ask while i've got you here i noticed that um the number um i think it's a percentage the percentage of african-american students that you're serving is is declining in the past three or four years i'm just wondering if that's a change in demographics that you're seeing families move to different parts of town i think one of the things we're seeing is that because there is the biracial column technology in the past usually african-american right i would like to say per your other question with regards to portland public schools how do we look at how we can be more helpful we're certainly open to that and i suggested that you know we don't want to do the charter school but some of you have been around for a while remember that what was called the jefferson cluster was the guinea pig for ka so there's not middle schools right in that cluster so we became the middle school for that cluster so if we want to talk about uh how do we work together to where maybe we don't need our charter school we need to be talking about a middle school in that cluster i mean again i know it's jefferson is a focused school doesn't really have its own neighborhood anymore but there's we need more middle schools back in that area and we would love to work with the district in fact with the district in fact me and superintendent had a conversation about this some time ago
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uh with regards to to occle green and the possibilities of that so we are certainly open for that conversation because our best work is to help you serve our kids better most of the kids in america do not go to charter schools they go to regular public schools when we do charter schools it's a nice opportunity for us to show you how it can be done differently but in long term it is much more beneficial for you all to be able to do this at a high level so that we don't have to chase money to do it ourselves and that's the work that we would prefer to do thank you exactly thank you no thank you for that tony that was exactly on point um and my only comment is thank you very much again just like uh director blah thank you for the work you do and i also wanted to say congratulations on your two years as a model school and your very high test scores and how you're doing clearly a wonderful example for us not only at sei and your charter school but also the work you're doing with us at jefferson and with our other high school students really do appreciate that work and the success that you're having getting those kids to graduation so thanks thank you very much thank you thank you directory i just had one quick question sorry um linda when you were doing your testimony you you made a comment about the challenges we faced this year and was that specifically around some of the financial some financial issues or was it something else that wasn't one of the issues one of the issues had to do with us trying to find a math teacher and that was yeah that was a huge problem because they're in short supply okay and so we finally did you know hire someone who's excellent okay but that wasn't the biggest prophecy she won't tell the whole jump look we had we had after two very successful years we had a very successful principal decide to leave in august in august the second week and then he took uh our basically our second in command for our charter school uh then went with them they both went to park roles i mean they got paid more money they went to the public schools says we're not mad at them for that but i mean imagine you're late in august and you got you know you're trying to get the school open in september that posed some very very serious problems for us this year first of all finding replacements in that way kind of keeping our arms around the structure within the school with those kind of high-level folks not being there so that was the biggest challenge that's helpful yeah i just i didn't know what was behind that so that's really helpful and thank you all right thank you all so much thank you thank you okay so now le monde any um again i'll be a broken record and think uh lamont for their uh their work and uh the uh particularly the their perseverance through i think was a demonstration of how difficult it is to um build a school and build a charter and create support for that uh and i think they they've emerged out of that much stronger and and uh very committed i was really impressed during our process in their their focus on on academics their focus on uh service to the youth service to the families uh i think there are really very sincere attempts to reach out to uh to more diverse communities and i think it's that there's been that recognition which is that first step and they've made they've made progress in in doing that not that that is ever progress that is you can always you know that it's just a box to check it takes time to develop but i appreciate that effort moving moving forward all in all i'm in support of their renewal and uh and definitely wish them wish them the best of luck moving forward thank you great thanks i mean i i would just add i mean i think part of our discussion i'm concerned i continue to have though i'm really excited by the new head of school and the direction you're taking the progress that you've made but do continue to have concerns about the lack of diversity and who you're serving and also that fundraising piece which does seem although i know you've made some changes to make it less of a perceived or actual barrier for families but that again i'd be looking to see you know continued outreach greater diversity and real assurance for families that everyone is welcome and part of the community whether or not they can make that significant fundraising contribution but other than that um certainly it's um you're doing really well and it's exciting to see i'm having
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such a strong we know having such a strong leader is so key for any school so congratulations for securing such a wonderful leader other questions comments from board members scott lamond director regan let me just say that i um i oftentimes talk with great pride about the number of language immersion strands we have in portland public schools and it's fun now to say that we have six when we add french in the mix and this is something i don't think we probably would have done on our own um so it's it's a nice add um to our mix so thank you thanks director below i just want to echo it's not going to be a surprise but again looking at ways you can reach out to help us address the achievement gap i know that we have a number of immigrant families who actually come from for example african countries who already know french so it would be a natural a natural partnership so um it's good to hear that that came up in part of the renewal process and that you're paying attention to it i appreciate that and i also want to mention um i appreciate you calling out the the financial the donations or the contributions the fundraising but i also want to say how nice it is so congratulations to all three applicants that this is the first renewal that i've sat through where there wasn't a question about their financial viability that somehow all three schools and that does not come easy it is not easy on school districts reimbursement and when you get a percentage of reimbursement from us that is not easy i know that's a lot of personal sweat and equity and tears that go into that to make it happen so congratulations and thank you all three for for being such a strong part of our system and please join us continue to join us in how do we serve our most vulnerable families great thank you so much i mean i just want to wrap up by thanking our staff both kristin and also the folks at great point director of lyle that we all three applicants are on strong financial footing and we haven't seen that in the past with all our charter schools i know are both kristen and our financial staff work really hard with our charter schools to help with the challenges of that um but really appreciate everybody's work to make sure that we are not having putting students in the position of um having a school on shaky footing that you're all on solid footing so with that um thanks to all the teams for your time and sharing your thoughts and your successes and challenges with us at this meeting and many previous meetings we are going to vote on the three charter renewal applications at our next meeting on april 28th so one more step in the process but thank you all so much everybody sci emerson and lamont for being here thank you ruth can i ask a quick question yeah we do have a charter school lep leak that is going to be closing this year um are we going to be getting a presentation and an upcoming board meeting on what that process is going to look like kristen do you want to say something about that right now because obviously we want to make sure we land those students in a really healthy way yes we'd i'd be happy to update you at a future meeting and also we're looking into um into what action the board will have to take to to end the contract officially after they are closed so we'll we'll update you with that we'll make a note to put that on an agenda setting if it isn't all ready for our list perfect yeah that's that's what i wanted to make sure yeah perfect thank you very much thank you thanks and also i just want to thank the the board members who served on this committee it's a lot of time it's a lot of work and kristin you're a rock star as always so thank you for your for your support right all right thank you thanks kristen thank you okay so next on our agenda is discussion around the step 3 complaint so as background on march 30th 2015 the board voted to consider a step 3 complaint so tonight we're discussing it so that staff can prepare a resolution for us to vote on at the april 28 2015 meeting and first i know it's been a long evening and i see i think a lot of athletes and maybe parents and coaches out there so do you all want to stand who are here around this issue or athletes from our high schools i see franklin basketball trojan yeah thank you for being here so i appreciate you taking the time out to sit through the rest of the meeting to get to this issue so all right so prior to the march 30th meeting board members received the full record of this complaint including the written appeals and the step one and step two reports and then in our information for tonight's discussion we received a memo from staff with an overview of the process um oh excuse me a member from the district ombudsman with an overview of the process as well as a memo from the district athletics director with the proposed basketball schedule for the 2015-16 school year um so before we begin board discussion i wanted to invite allison horn down to
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the table to share her comments thank you so much for your patience and waiting to get to this agenda item and this discussion tonight so miss horn we'll have the lights on for the three minutes just to give you a guideline just to kind of give you the sense but we really appreciate you being here and thanks so much all right thank you um thank you for voting on march 30 to consider the appeal my complaint and your acceptance of this appeal has led the administration to finally review its scheduling practices and to propose a preliminary set of recommendations for the 2015-16 basketball season those proposed changes are to recognize that there was a disproportionate loss of instructional time for jv girls and to propose to eliminate that loss by eliminating four-game stack nights also for any stacked games there will be an equal number of 7 30 p.m start times for boys and girls varsity teams unfortunately the administration is proposing this change not to ensure equal playing time for girls in the prime time spot but to address the late start time for boys varsity games it should be recognized this change is being proposed not only to prevent the late start times for boys as the administration has stated but also for all of the reasons previously raised specifically equality for girls and title ix compliance neither of which are stated in the memo it is important to emphasize that the administration's proposal is not final and this board's decision still has an impact on the future schedule when the administration presents its final 2015-16 basketball schedule recommendation to the board it must comply with title ix by eliminating inequities in the loss of instructional time for boys and girls ensuring an equal number of 7 30 pm start time for boys and girls varsity teams ensuring that boys and girls will participate in all future pil showcase type events the mission statement of portland public schools athletic department is pretty clear to build community character and academic excellence through equitable athletic programming however throughout this lengthy and arduous process that finally brought the title nine issues to the board's attention every administrator along the way ignored its own mission and failed to appropriately recognize and take sufficient steps to remedy the title ix issues created by the administration's own scheduling practices at every step along the way the administration chose to sit back circle the wagons and hope that no one would notice the inequities in their discriminatory scheduling practices that coaches would soon be too busy with the start of the season and become laser focused on their teams that parents would get tired of the bureaucracy and drop the complaint that is until the board's vote on march 30th to consider the appeal given that 139 days will have passed between the formal complaint and the board's expected vote on the appeal i urge the board to initiate through the audit committee a broader review of the overall athletics program to ensure compliance and support of all student athletes across all of the pil athletic programs after all the essence and strength of equality is the lasting effect of title ix and compliance not complaints should be the measure of success so once again thank you for your time attention and action great thank you very much for being here tonight and thanks again to all the students we're going to have a discussion with the board right now question number one we're not doing this is a hearing it's uh miss horn is providing comments and then we're gonna have discussions there's a hearing we're following the way we're following the complaint policy that we voted on and this is the process laid out you can ask questions no actually in the policy it states the complainant can offer public comment which you know right would like to see that so in the meantime um thank you so much mr for being here so now we're going to open it up for discussions please don't we we're going to have questions for you i don't know um we're not doing that no we don't do that this part where all we're doing is um so i don't know if jolly is here and wanted to answer and um thank you very much so she's up here okay great so what we're going to be doing and we'd have a resolution to vote on at the next meeting depending on our discussion of whether our findings around this would be of all that mrs patterson i'm hearing you ask questions that's what a hearing is it calls it a hearing doesn't it sorry i'm gonna have to pull up the um a d here but it does say in the hearing it says that the complainant this is what the board um discussed when we passed the complaint policy and administrative directive and it says that the that the complainant can testify at public during the public comment so we actually because you didn't do it yeah i'm just pulling it up i'm sorry and you know i'll just add while you're pulling that up we had a number of the slots were filled during the regular public comment so we asked miss horn to we pull that out a lot of public comment for her related to this issue and the other thing too i would point out remember when we voted on this new policy um that this was going to be a new process and that there's going to be
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an opportunity i believe it's built into the resolution um approving the policy that we would review it so if we're finding that the way that we set this up is not satisfactory this is the first time we've had a step three this isn't how we set it up so it was the problem it's my understanding that it is so maybe the way we set it up we set it up to have a hearing you can ask people questions when they come in the hearing they ask they give you anything asking questions not always that's what a hearing is not necessarily a not in this case so hearing is different in this case than it is what i'm hearing is that you are disagreeing with the way we set this up so 4.50.031 the complaint resolution process says that if the board votes to consider the appeal the board will vote on the substance of the appeal within 30 days of the board's decision to consider the appeal the board will have the full written record of the appeal the complainant may submit additional written information to the board and may provide testimony during public comment so we're not cross-examining and we're not having a hearing yeah so at this point what i'd like i'd ask my colleagues thoughts around what we want to do in terms of a resolution in terms of this the step three complaint and what we want direct what direction we want to do and what our findings should be right so director knowles um the one thing that i think that is the most important around this is to make sure that we have and i actually have sent a memo after our last meeting about this to the members of the audit committee and to the board members that we have a full audit of our athletic department and what we're doing with all of our athletic programs across the district not just what we're doing in basketball but what we're doing in every other sport that we have and it was interesting after uh our last meeting to talk about this i spoke with some of the uh young women who were here um and there were complaints not only about the the basketball and and uh i think that there was another young woman there who was a track athlete but also just around how we treat young girls or women young women when they're athletes do they receive the same kind of promotion in their schools when there's an athletic event are there signs up in the hallway uh is there a notice over the intercom in the morning about the fact that young women are having a game that night and you know just what are the other things that we're doing to help draw a crowd for these young women who are working so hard so when we do our audit i'd like to see it be not only of the athletic programs but also a piece about how we're actually promoting and marketing these events in our schools in addition to just the fact that we're making sure that these young women have an equal opportunity to perform so i suggest that we make it a little bit broader than just to be much more broad than just a solution to basketball so i'm hearing um to put in the resolution of our finding on this that we would direct um an audit along those lines do i have other folks interested in that yes that we would have in a resolution on our findings around this complaint that we'd add a direction to the superintendent well actually really more directing yourself yeah for the audit committee to come back i mean i don't know that we would specifically put a direction in there to the audit committee to do this audit but it could be a recommendation to interest consider it because whether it's an audit or a review i mean we can figure that out as we go but yeah okay okay the audit committee doesn't do reviews the audit committee only does not resolution which is a resolution why don't we make a separate resolution and have the superintendent come back with what we want to do well i mean it's okay if you want to do it i guess but yeah we could do it as a separate resolution i'm just thinking just to because it's all on the same topic i mean we want the audit committee to come back we've already are asking the audit committee to come back with you know a number a list of different topics when they hire the new person so we can figure but i'm here in the interest of having the audit having that recommendation and hearing that interest okay so that's that's good and then we have the new sort of like preliminary recommendations from the coaches and athletic directors around equal number of early and later start times around addressing getting proportionality in or addressing the disproportionality around early dismissal and loss of instruction time i am very interested in that i like the direction that the um the new memo is going for preliminary recommendations so i was thinking something along the lines of um you know saying we support that direction proceed
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with that work maybe report back when you've landed on something that's where i was that was my reaction to i don't know where other folks were around that i'm fine with that but again i'm more interested in the in all of the different athletic athletic events that we have our teams that we have not just basketball so to me that's just taking a small section out and um i'm fine with that but maybe when we do our audit we'll find that there's something else that we need to do but right it sounds like a good direction to start with okay other thoughts director below yeah i i appreciated the um the suggestions so far that we've gotten from staff the recommendations and i i would hope that sports are really important but so is seat time or so is time in class and so i appreciate being really proactive so that none of our students are missing um if at all possible i mean that should be the advantage coming back to the pil is we don't have far-flung games usually there might be some other districts something but we should be able to schedule that so um and i just want to share a little bit of my thinking in both accepting this this appeal and i just want to say alice and thank you for having the fortitude to continue through this process process um just so folks understand kind of the thing to me whether or not it attracts people isn't isn't the measure for compliance it's whether we're offering the same opportunity and so it might make some of our teams feel bad if they have smaller smaller um attendance but that shouldn't be the reason i can remember i could imagine i wasn't around or too too aware when title nine was passed right that could have been the same same thought process behind why even include title ix who wants to go see girls play sport anyway and i think that's just a real disservice and obviously we've come so far and i just want to re-emphasize and put some emphasis actually on looking at all the other pieces i don't know i know some of us are on our devices and are able to see email but we got some written testimony from somebody here that wasn't able to to testify but just talked about how do our bands support our teams how to cheer team support our teams i mean there's a whole host of how are we setting this up to make sure that that the young ladies that are performing and that are working their tails off to be the best selves get the same support from us from us as a district so i appreciate this coming back back and i appreciate staffs um working to make this work and as i began thinking about this trying to remember my own high school schedule about how this was in four teams and they're going to be traveling all over but i understand it's complex but um again i appreciate the effort so far but i i would be very supportive and quite emphatic that we that we do a larger reviewer audit of how we're doing this and i um would say that compliance isn't actually my bar um we want we want kids to thrive in this are the comments director curler sure um i would just i would echo everything i think it needs to be larger um and the and i want to also emphasize the uh with allison's point as well is um that in the resolution we recognize that that this that we're making changes um because of the complaint and because of our uh frankly lack of compliance and that we we're not going to do that in the basketball and we're not going to do it in these other sports as well director reading i wanted to give a huge shout out to allison and to her daughter for bringing this to our attention in such a strong way and i guess the question i would have is are we doing any reflection internally as to why it took coming all the way to the board before we started to address this issue i mean title ix is out there we know what it means it means equal treatment and um so i'm i am deeply concerned about our complaint process that there wasn't somewhere along the way that somebody said you know what this is a really good point and we need to be looking at it so i'm glad that we decided that we needed to take a another look but it it should have happened sooner and so i'm i'm curious about what kind of reflection process there's going to be internally uh with the staff around this because we should have caught it earlier it sounds like it's been a pretty god-awful process for um this family and it shouldn't have been
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um so um i'm i'm very supportive of us doing a much more full review of title ix compliance this may just be one little piece of a much bigger issue and it would be helpful for us to hear from you know do a survey of students of parents of coaches and understand what all the issues are and address them already i mean we we now know that we were out of compliance we're i think all agreeing that and we need to address it in a more comprehensive way and actually a couple things i would say to this because and i'll also appreciate allison for hanging in through this whole long process and we've got a couple things happening here that are new one of which we're at the beginning of rebuilding the pil and expanding athletics so it's actually a great time to be doing the comprehensive look so i'm really actually excited to take the opportunity to do that and you're the first person to go all the way through our complaint process but i'm just going to say like part of what we're trying to do is have a complaint process that's responsive that gets looked at at different points and actually to have taken something all the way through that got looked at it different by different um people at the intervals that were established in the i mean you this literally is how long it takes to work a complaint through because it was fun we used the process and the board served its function so truly this was the successful use of the complaint process and it was grueling to get all the way through it so just to say though both really important things to be doing at this moment in time because we're trying to do again rebuild the pil and really rebuild we're back doing middle school athletics for the first time in forever we've expanded girls sport so there's a bunch of celebratory stuff in here too and right time to be making sure we're doing it the right way and we're also trying to have a responsive complaint process and you like really persevered and making your way through it so on something really important um so thank you for doing that one and yeah we'll be looking at all of it okay so i had one more director i also wanted to um suggest that i had the exact same impression that director buell had that we were actually going to have a hearing and we were going to be able to have a dialogue uh with the complainant so it to me this is more of a review than a hearing when we voted to have the board hold a hearing that's that i had a completely different expectation of what that was going to be so i do believe that we need to take a look i mean again we're new in the complaint process but i think we need to take a look at it because if i were allison i would be pretty dissatisfied with going 139 days and then being given three minutes nobody can answer the board so we need to rethink that process part of the complaint process we we built in at the end of this with that we would review it and look at art whether we were how we were feeling about it so like this was great to have something we went all the way through and used all the timelines and did all the formal things because we've got something real to now look at and say did it do what we wanted to do first time through director morton uh i think just three really quick comments one is uh we should never allow um logistics to get in the way of us serving students and uh well i guess two and the other one is that this is 2015. we should not be having this conversation right now uh we need to make it very clear to not just our community but the staff here uh at the district that it is not okay for us to uh to be having a conversation at this level in 2015 that puts into question the fact that we're treating students differently because of their gender it's not okay so i i think i agree with director regan that this is a this is a moment for us to be introspective for us to hold ourselves accountable and say okay this process is new we've learned some things we did some things but we really need to take a deep look and say what is it about our culture here that allows us to treat students differently in a way that is not appropriate just isn't so that was great okay so thanks everybody i really appreciate the discussion and again appreciation to allison and her daughter and everyone else for sticking out through this first time going through this process to this level so um staff is going to put together a resolution for our consideration next week um i'm clearly hearing we're going to be recommending the the larger more comprehensive look um but that we're also i think generally supportive that the staff has been
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working out some preliminary recommendations that would get at um the equity and start times and in making sure that we have um just avoid this disproportionate loss of instructional time and tackle those two issues that are part of the really the substance of the fighting here yes um so and then adding in the piece of the strong the recommendation and direction from the board around wanting to have that larger look i think those are the main pieces but obviously we'll have a draft resolution we'll circulate it and we can make you know disgusted and move forward and then i think you know dooley noted the concern about um not expecting this format and wanting to look at that when we do the review of the new process as well as the larger piece of just for this particular topic that the reflection that it should have come sooner rather than needing to come all the way to us having this discussion so appreciate everybody um involved in this and we look forward to having a good resolution to move this forward and make some good progress next week so thank you all very much okay so next on our agenda is it is a proposed resolution in support of safe routes to school and really this is not us doing anything new or different you'll recall we had an update around safe routes to school and the great work that's happening in our district several weeks ago several meetings ago really this comes from a request to us as one of the leading partners around safer to school to join in but sort of a regional advocacy effort to secure increased funding for this great program so staff prepared a background memo for us and we have this draft resolution which we would just just per our protocol discuss tonight to see if there's any concerns and then we would vote on it next week um justin fallow dollard who's the project manager is available to answer any questions we don't have a formal presentation we just wanted to bring this forward and and um for your consideration carol did you have any comments just because this has been a great partnership and um i think important that we're showing up as a board supporting the what the effort that's occurring yeah great thanks so any comments or questions about this resolution stating our support for safe routes to school yeah i think i have one question that um under our one resolved for the resolution it talks about supporting metro to develop funded safety projects programs that engage walking biking and transit use to get to k-12 schools throughout the greater tri-county metropolitan region and i just want to highlight that because what i think that is saying is that we have been fortunate to have the support of both our local transit agency and our city to allow our high school students primarily to use trimet and i know some of the surrounding districts have had struggled with that and what that looks like is this um resolution us highlighting the fact that we support trimet and the other jurisdictions and metro to continue to look at that as a solution for other districts that's correct so you're supporting a regional look that's beneficial to all the districts served by metro and then all the multiple modes of transportation that don't involve driving a car right great great and so that's exactly what we're doing thank you that's what i thought i just wanted to highlight it colleagues any comments or questions about this director real quick the only other thing and i know it doesn't need to be in this at all but i want to mention when we last talked about safe routes um it was my understanding and i think this is correct that it includes all buildings where um that include portland public schools academic or school function yeah so whether the pps owns that building right so it's an important distinction to make between um so what we would call um i guess regular for lack of a better word pps programming offered in the district which i think is about 46 000 students and then another 2000 plus that are receiving either charter school education community-based programs or sped et cetera right so we entered into an iga with the city to expand access to safe routes to school resources and those are available to any school site so if sci wanted to receive support from pbot safe routes to school staff members including myself would be made available to support sci sei by the way going into transportation is an awesome example of using trimet so i live in north portland actually not too far from sci and i see middle school kids using trimet to get to and from aci from various access to the city or going using the same bus system to get to additional resources so that would be a great example of resources available to uh one of our charter school partners yeah great thank
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you appreciate that clarification okay anything else hearing none okay thanks everybody i think i'm really excited we'll be able to put in our support for this great program thank you all right appreciate it thank you justin all right so now we have our legislative update and david williams our director of government relations has came from salem to the staff table to provide this report thank you david thank you very much chair atkins members of the board david williams director of government relations for the district um i want to cover a couple of key topics for you about what's going on in the legislature and then of course any questions you might have so we'll talk about the budget and then sort of the two biggest policy areas i think um so far we've seen in the session that being s back slash common core and then the oeib conversation uh so the budget as you no doubt are aware was approved by the legislature and signed into law by the governor at a 7.255 billion uh dollar number um for our listeners at home and those in the audience it's important while 7.255 feels like a really really big number because 7.255 billion is a really big number uh it is in the scheme of funding education in the state of oregon is simply not enough to maintain current program also while expanding to full-day kindergarten and this is the story we are trying to tell to our legislators and to legislators from around the state and it becomes a challenged nuanced conversation as every district undergoing budgeting right now has very different unique and individual circumstances just as we do here in portland uh that that is a tenfold all over the state in different districts so that is a story we continue to push the positive news of course is that when the legislature debated this bill and voted on it and by the way it was a straight party-line vote all democrats voting for it and all republicans voting against it almost all of them democrat and republicans said they want to see more money added to this budget before the end of the session so i think that there's a positive that everybody frame this as the floor with which the legislature will seek to enhance the budget going forward the key there really is going to be the may revenue forecast to see how much revenues are up for this coming biennium and therefore how much we would be able to add to that budget the education coalition is pushing for a roughly enhancement of 250 million dollars to that budget i think it's likely we will see something south of that number but north of the approved number two key pieces included in that budget that i do want to call out specifically um is a new 12.5 million dollar enhancement in targeted services to ell students a small portion of it i believe two and a half million is for funding for the statewide ell a plan which was written up and approved a couple of years ago but never funded and then 10 million dollars of that will be used as the legislature is going to be creating a new for lack of a better term a focus and priority model around ell programs in the state and targeting resources to low performing schools to help our students who are at risk in their those ell populations with a system of sort of progressive interventions but that notion of bringing funding to the table in a progressive intervention system i think we see as a real positive to help try to change the change the formula there next steps with the budget of course as we said there's the revenue forecast the coalition begins continues to advocate hard for enhancements to that budget and i think as we know many twists and turns left in this legislative session around the k-12 budget uh the next thing to talk about is the smarter balance in common core obviously this has been a big conversation you all have adopted two resolutions around that nothing significant on common core there were a number of pieces of legislation that were introduced excuse me let me back up a minute a key deadline is happening tomorrow at five when it comes to policy bills so if a bill is not worked and moved out of the committee of its chamber of origin so senate bill in the senate house bill in the house uh is essentially for all intents and purposes dead as of five o'clock tomorrow if it is not in rules revenue or ways of means those those committees don't have that deadline so for us it narrows the scope of all of the policy work the legislature is going to be doing when we get to wednesday morning we say okay what bills are in these other committees and us still alive we don't anticipate there'll really be anything specifically around common core there were a number of bills that were directing the department of ed to review that or roll it back etc none of those were really able to gain any traction however there is significant policy discussion and bills moving forward around the smarter balanced assessment i think really strongly aligned with the positions you all have taken uh three in in particular uh the first one house bill 2680 is a one year moratorium on
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the use of the results of the smarter balance for both teacher accountability and school accountability so we think that's a real strong part that bill came out of the house on a strong bipartisan vote is headed to the senate where we would expect it will receive favorable review i think there is a push to maybe expand that to a two-year moratorium instead of a one-year so there may be some minor changes but it will be within that one or two years so they're reading our resolutions uh that i take it in and read it to them if they're not able to the next is house bill 2655 which is sort of termed the student bill of rights bill this was a main emphasis of the oregon education association this legislative session and others it contains some key provisions and it came out of the house again on a fairly strong bipartisan boat it contains what we call a clean opt-out so this would allow students to opt out of taking the smarter balanced assessment for any reason not for simply religious or disability um we see this is a really strong statement that it's not incumbent on us as a district to determine whether or not your religion is valid for you to be opted out of a test provides that clean opt-out it does however put a six-year sunset on that provision so i think there'll be more debate about that going forward requires annual notification by school districts to parents about the um the smarter balanced or summative assessment testing window and when they'll be taking place and a parent's right or student's right to opt out of that test by the way both the op dot form and this notification will be defined and produced by the department of education and then lastly gives the department some authority to do rule making around student data and student records specifically as they relate to these uh summative assessments going forward and then the last piece is a bill directing the secretary of state to do a performance audit of summative assessment and its use in the state of oregon and report back i believe september 2016 hence intense in anticipation of the 2017 full legislative session so that's really i think what we'll see is the scope of the legislation around smarter balanced assessment this session then lastly the oregon education investment board as you know this was a signature piece of form of governor kitzheimer's education reform in the state this has had a session long conversation it will be in the end contained in a bill senate bill 215 215 but that bill was moved to the rules committee without amendments being added so you remember i said there's a deadline tomorrow but it doesn't apply to rules revenue and ways and means essentially they're still trying to figure out exactly what they want that policy to look like so uh i have a sense and i'm going to give you what my sense is today of course that changes as we go forward as the winds shift i believe what that will do is to eliminate the actual board itself they will retain the chief education officer who will then house a apologize for the redundancy the office of the chief education officer i think they'll come up with a better title which will maintain the sort of bureaucracy of the oeib although the scope of that bureaucracy is better defined by the budget bill itself and where the legislature wants to go but they will retain that base basically as an advisory position to the governor and to operate i think the authority they're essentially giving the chief education officer would be to then convene the high red coordinating commission in the state board event as sort of a joint body for sort of agenda setting broadly but without the oversight authority that we saw in the previous oeib um and then lastly i believe that will likely eliminate the achievement compacts from that as well again more to come on that i suspect as those conversations are still going they have a very broad work group that continues to work and we understand we'll continue to work throughout the interim as well more broadly on the notion of education governance because what we did of course is we took we created the a very linear approach governor chief at officer state soup or deputy soup and then school districts you create this very linear model which might have had some strengths but certainly highlighted some flaws and i think that that that conversation is something that they're going through um throughout the interim on that conversation so we'll see more to come on that uh if there are other policy bills that you know of or have questions on obviously there are any number of about 150 we think we'll still be alive after tomorrow at five running the gamut of issues i think we see a lot of really strong supports the legislature is trying to put forward whether it be from career and technical ed on down to other programs i think the legislature is really looking to put money behind the initiatives they want to put forward and we see that as a really positive sign as well we don't see necessarily the number of uh you know the pejorative of course unfunded mandates we don't see nearly
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the number that we have seen in past legislative sessions so i think we see a fairly strong policy framework or of course we think our remaining challenge really is that budget conversation which will continue to push significant great thanks so much comments or questions director morton thanks um so i'm interested in sb 214 as the early literacy strategies outlined in that and i think it's a allocating resources to kindergarten through grade three reading initiative account where do you see that and how how do you think that's moving forward will it yeah no thank you i do think that some form of 214 will move forward i think the new governor brown has emphasized that early learning really is the priority she wants to see continued from the former governor's administration i think that was where she wanted to put her emphasis i think it's likely to be more early learning pre-k work as well i think that there is still work to be done in that bill especially around how we fund any of the k-3 any of the the parts that are inside the k-12 initiative whether that's from state school fund funding whether that be outside sources whether that involves cbos or not involved cbos i think that's still a conversation that is amorphous at this point and to a great degree really tied into the conversation around the oeib because obviously they had a big emphasis there but if you don't have the oeib then there are components in that bill that simply don't work anymore because there was heavy instance in the oab so i think it's it's a little bit of the oeib conversation has to be solved then they can move on to some of that deeper work on that literacy program i would suspect it will survive in some form and hopefully with some additional resources provided whether they're to us or to cbo's um really it's about providing that additional resource for literacy so i i guess my other question is i mean you bring up a really good point is how how willing do you feel the legislature is or even perhaps the the major the major education special interests within salem how do you feel these organizations are in terms of their support for thinking outside of the box particularly when it applies to educating children early to prepare for those pretty rigorous standards in third grade that's a that's an interesting question i i've never known them to be afraid of thinking outside the box i think of course the challenge is that most of our education advocacy partners are grounded in the operation of an existing system and which is the definition of not being out of the box though well no not necessarily um i think they're open to i think that the what we see coming out of the ell working group i think shows a very much a willingness to thinking outside the box a strong support for progressive interventions that in the end if a district completely ignored ignores them results in the department of ed basically coming in and taking control of a of a district's ell program so i don't think they're necessarily afraid of that i think the challenge if i could express it for how they might express it i think the challenge would be in a system where for most districts in the state they're going to see reductions under a 7.2 billion dollar budget it's hard to focus on areas outside the box i think that's the challenge right i'm not saying it's the right way or the wrong way i think that's just the challenge that they they approach with right understandable when they should be focusing on the best outcomes for kids yeah director regan could you talk to us a little bit more uh about the ramifications of eliminating the achievement compact so the possibility of limiting those what happens in terms of no child left behind or do we go back to our milestones or i mean what's the discussion my uh thank you director reagan my understanding is there's not implications for the waiver or the waiver specifically the achievement compacts were simply a reporting mechanism for specific data points the waiver doesn't we don't eliminate the need to report on specific data points it's just the function of the achievement complex themselves which maybe just didn't get off the ground the way where they were envisioned so for us we would be using our minds we go back to our milestones and i i've purchased we never really went away from anywhere we didn't we tried to morph over to use the achievement compact which was way more complicated than what they originally intended to be and i think nancy's thinking on this has really been like it it helped us establish statewide milestone framework and we'll continue to use that as the you know for goal setting but not do the kind that elaborate reporting because they never figured out how to use that everything they got yeah okay so good yeah that's helpful but and that's not a done deal
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yet this is just the conversation at this point is that that's presumed that that will go away we're still under the state report card yeah we still have the state report right exactly one thing exactly right good written next to that one yes so i guess following along that i have one serious question one snarky one my serious one is i was really encouraged around nancy golden's in the preliminary recommendation around moving away from summative assessments and high stakes to more formative and so that was sort of a policy recommendation from staff and partners so how does that relate to this potential bill i mean how i'm i'm not sure where that is moving forward that's fair i i don't think you're going to see much of a move away from summative assessments first of all i think that that any move to um to allow districts to test less than 100 by state statute i think would be viewed very unfavorably by the feds um and i think that that is what is putting a lot of people in the position of saying okay well let's test them all but not use the data for any purpose i'm not saying it again i'm not placing a value there i'm just saying i think that's the that's the dynamic you see so well i think that a lot of people really believe the value of the formative model and maybe question what is the utility of a summative assessment of a 100 testing model i think that's still for like burnt that's in its formative stages too but you're certainly not seeing a move away from that i don't think in any of the legislation we have going forward allows for something less than 100 assessment of course except for the opt-out right i mean i think i was if i recall the the recommendations it wasn't around not doing it but it was around moving away from the sanctions and the labeling of schools as a result and it feel it felt like a really good philosophical direction based on of course what we've really did in our resolution right um and i was really encouraged to see nancy golden bring that up but it doesn't sound like the bill i guess we'll see how the bills shake out and then we'll just need to keep adding our voices well of course the the sanctioning and labeling is federally mandated that's not that's not a state metric the state expanded to beyond the title one schools but the the fact that that it exists in its origin is based on nochella behind and then subsequently the waiver which on a side note um big news out of the feds this week the senate um is moving forward and likely to vote on um in early may a senate uh version of your child left behind or elementary and secondary education act and i think um obviously been very consumed in salem reading the updates from the council of grace city schools i think they're looking on that senate reauthorization as a fairly strong reauthorization and one that they would support the question of course will be can they reconcile their differences with the house i just want to get to my snarky questions yeah it's just around the amount of time and effort by staff and volunteers parents everybody around this achievement compact process in our district and across the state so will we be seeing refunds from the state for that time i'll take that to the ways and means committee yeah seriously but four or five points an appropriation maybe about 250 million dollars yeah that's incredibly frustrating i'm in all seriousness i mean that was a huge lift for districts around the state we had our milestones and we went through and then we had a committee of folks we had a great committee of folks actually we had a fantastic committee yeah we had staff putting and that was just one district across you know and those across the state who had anyway i'll just leave it at that um dr knowles well after i told you i had a question david just answered my question which was where were we on and i sent him an email earlier today about where are we on the esea which is now known as the every child achieves act of 2015. so there you go and um so i uh hope that as we go along david you'll just keep filling us in because a lot of the things that we've talked about here are directly affected by this legislation and it's as you know as we've gone to the council meetings it's very interesting to see what happens at the federal level and the gridlock there and how that affects all of this so i'm i'm very pleased that they've moved something i may not be pleased as they keep going yeah well and just very briefly on the federal level i think that we we have an interesting there's a pluses and minus of the current congress moving anything uh the pluses is i think we have a receptive congressional audience to the notion of lightening the the testing burden the heavy sanctioning the heavy accountability model that we saw in nochella behind but i think we also have a challenge when it comes to some of the funding provisions like title one and others where you have a congress that may be looking to change that formula to distribute those monies elsewhere which is why we were happy in the senate version that is now in florida it does not contain those funding provisions but of course the house version did so
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we'll see how that will shake so go fix congress okay just one quick question what's the there's the is that charter bill still around the one that moves from 80 to 95 yes uh thank you director bill there was a bill senate bill 819 which was heard in the senate education committee and it would do as you say um change for all charter schools the adm reimbursement rate would be 95 percent as well as require pass-through of other additional funds that the district receives that are not passed through currently bill had a fairly significant hearing it is up for a work session tomorrow in senate education's final hearing on how on senate bills i would anticipate that the bill is going to be moved to its next committee which is the revenue committee uh for further consideration what else would we be asked to pass through do you have yeah i mean the language still needs some um interpretation but essentially any funds that are received on a roughly per student grant type basis will be passed through any local revenues that we receive that are not currently passed through would be required to be passed through just about every piece you know other than say bond proceeds or specific grants like cte revitalization grants or some of those but any formulaic per student funds that we receive will be required to pass through and any local options like the local option levy will be required to piece the best pass through thank you all right well thank you oh i'm sorry directors around um two questions one is uh kicker kicker reform um what number are we hoping for um for the may revenue production to come in and i don't know if we're hoping for the kicker to kick because that mean revenue is up and they'll find the money or are we hoping that it comes in just under the kicker kicking so that they have the money they thought they can allocate it to us so the kicker will kick okay i don't think there's really any question at this point that there's it's been an interesting conversation because we changed the kicker a couple of years ago to where you don't actually receive a check anymore if there is a kick it's simply a rebate on your tax reform uh next year now what that does is a couple of things the biggest being that when the legislature that they they do the revenue forecast and they predict how much money they have to spend well the kicker is of course for the 1315 biennium is when the kicker takes place it's based on that revenue but as we budget for the 1517 biennium the revenue projections include that potential kicker right so um all of the conversation to date so the 7.255 etc that's none of that is at risk if there is a kicker because the kicker's already built in you're getting a little bit tautological here but the kicker's already built into that forecast right so if the revenues are up for the 1315 biennium it means that kicker is going to be a little bit bigger but conversely it also means that the 1517 biennium revenue will be up by at least an equal amount if not more i mean i guess there is one flukey piece and that would be if the revenue for the last two months of the biennium is really up and revenues for the next biennium are actually down that's when you would get stuck in a spot where we're actually going to lose money we did have that once but it happened but much earlier in the biennium i mean what was it 2001 i think when we had the big 1.2 billion dollar kicker but that was in december when that was hit not in you know we're in such a narrow frame left in the biennium that you're not going to have that kind of fiscal impact on the next budget so i think any up is a victory and that's what we're looking for is any up in that that revenue forecast thank you and then um i've i've heard some folks posit the fact that the that some legislators might decide to ask voters to repurpose the kicker if it was going to kick rather than put it as a rebate on your next tax that perhaps i could use it towards education whether or not that i'm not going to ask you to talk about that what i want to know is is there are there any bills that are serious about looking at kicker reform that are currently alive i would say we haven't seen a really significant conversation but i i think that will come after that next revenue forecast when the revenue forecast happens we know the scope of the kicker then the conversation will happen both around what to do with that kicker if there's any move to bring it back which by the way the legislature can do by a vote of the body however it takes a ultra super majority a two-thirds vote bigger than a three-fifth so it takes 40 house members which is a really significant lift or a constitutional referral um excuse me they could retain that kicker with that vote they can't put that out to the voters that's the only option there but then that will also generate the conversation around kicker reform for the future you know obviously we did reform the
03h 15m 00s
corporate kicker to where that is retained so i think that that provides the the the road map if you will although a heavier lift but the road map is there for looking at some method to retain those funds my final question which isn't real i don't think it's a question i thought i heard that the fifth year program bill that was going to end the ability for school districts to retain students who have met the graduation requirements to continue on for a fifth year and enroll in some sort of post-secondary and be paid for that my understanding is that bill died it is not moving forward and so i believe that this board or the next board should begin to seriously investigate whether or not portland public is interested in starting a fifth year program and call the question yep yeah it's time to call the question then thank you your feather districts are doing it might as well yeah i mean to hear the testimony i'm sorry yeah but to hear the testimony from family they were talking about how strong of a transition a program you get to hold them they have established relationships it was fantastic as a transition for success which to me made sense because it models after similar to what we're doing at jefferson middle college that to bridge that gap with people so i don't want to make it sound like i'm not in favor it's just the fact that um it forces that takes the k it's the opposite end of director buehl's earlier question of using pre-k or using k-12 dollars for pre-k it does the opposite it uses k-12 dollars to fund post post-secondary all right thank you so much david appreciate all your great work in salem um as always uh i try to get out timely updates if you have questions just shoot me an email uh happy to answer them great thank you so much all right so finally tonight we will consider uh the board's business agenda miss houston are there any changes no no and do i have a motion and i ask for us to pull resolution 5064 separately just one second so we have director knowles and director belial uh moved to adopt the business agenda and okay miss houston is there any public comment on the business agenda there is not okay so i'm sorry director reagan you wanted something i'm going to make a motion for us to pull resolution uh number 5064 on audit committee members and do that separately second okay so um all right so we are going to have hold on a second let's see if people are going to do that yeah all right so wait a minute i'm sorry so the next step all right so who uh so director regan has moved into our ball island second pulling resolution five zero six four from the business agenda any discussion of that so would we do that discussion now and do that vote separately first i would like to give some explanation of who the two community members are and then i have a clarification that i want to make so okay so all in favor of pulling resolution 5064 from the business agenda please indicate by saying aye aye the opposed okay so why don't we go ahead and have that discussion now on five zero six four okay i think we need to finish this one oh i'm sorry you're right you're right it's getting really late i'm getting very tired okay so let's go back to the original business agenda as now amended and go ahead and have a vote on that agenda all in favor of discussion oh did we have any other discussion i just want to can i yeah i just wanted to highlight there are some really exciting things moving forward with our summer work on our bonds that we're doing science classrooms and ada upgrades at astor george peninsula skyline da vinci irvington lee meek gray markham and wes sylvan and additional science classrooms and ada upgrades at mount tabor roseway heights bridger harrison park richmond lent and holiday center and i just want to say kudos to our office of school modernization because we are on track to meet exactly what we said to the voters not only our modernizations but to touch all 63 schools with the work that we promised so this is really really exciting and i'm looking forward voting yes awesome all right so the board will now vote on the business agenda as amended all in favor please indicate by saying aye aye any opposed okay so the amended business agenda is approved by a vote of seven to zero and our student representative is not here tonight okay so now we will go back to 5064 and have a discussion on that so thank you so thank you so as chair of the audit committee i just wanted to let the community know
03h 20m 00s
that we have identified two community members who are going to be joining the board's audit committee they are kari guy kari has worked for the audit services division of the city of portland's auditor office for about eight or nine years she also worked for 10 years as a budget and policy analyst at in the washington state senate she has led audits on a whole variety of topics at the city she has a masters of public administration from university of washington bachelor's degree from stanford and is a certified government auditing professional professional member of the institute of internal auditors and the association of local government auditors so she is a professional performance auditor and so she'll be able to be advising us in this role pedro nunez um is a graduate of linfield college and has a bs in accounting he's also a certified public accountant cpa so he is much more of an uh financial auditor he's worked for paulie rogers and company and he's currently with mcdonald jacobs performing financial statement audits primarily for non-profits and a couple of charter schools actually so those are our two new members of the audit committee and there's been a little bit of confusion so i want to clarify that as we bring these two board members two new board members on that they would be serving in an ex-officio role committee members committee members they would be serving in an ex-official role so they are advisors to the board committee so i just want to be clear on that one thank you great i have a comment comment um i'm excited about these two people that we're bringing on board i think they're going to be great but i also want to be very clear that in order for us to have these two board members be or these two committee members to be ex officio you would have to have that in the committee policy and that does not appear here these committee members these public members who are taking time out of their day to serve on our committee are full voting members just like the three board members who are on the committee there is nothing in the policy anywhere in the policy that sets these two people aside different from any committee members all the way through the policy it talks about committee members committee members committee members it doesn't talk about board members and ex-officio members it talks about committee members and frankly i'm just really surprised that director regan would want to make these public members non-voting members of this committee if it is true that the audit committee has advisory to the board and for that reason nothing comes out of the audit committee that the board as a whole does not consider so if two of the audit committee members just took a position with one board member it wouldn't matter unless all of the board agreed with that decision so again i'm just i can't imagine asking these public members to be ex-officio and legally they are not ex-officio they are full members under this current policy so under the current policy it's actually silent on that we have no precedent of board committees with voting public members they would be advisory index officio so we have a lot of citizen committees in portland public schools and clearly they have voting authority but this is a board committee it's a board committee made up of three board members and the community members would be advisory so that's the clarification i wanted to make dr beale it's a ford committee and as a board committee that the board members are that's it now if they that was the way it was appointed you know there's a million things where we haven't called policy since i've been here it's fine but this was appointed as a board committee it really wasn't appointed as this audit committee that they're talking about anyway it's a board committee if you want to reappoint it as the audit committee then we need to go back and start over and reappoint it with four votes as the audit committee because this is that committee was not if you read the you know it's not put forth by the board it was put this is the committee that was put forth by the chair you know herself who appoints the people to the committees and then we that's so this is not this is not the audit committee this is the chair this is the board
03h 25m 00s
committee that has an audit function totally different and it's be great if it was the audit committee but you're gonna have to go back and start over because this was a chair committee appointed just like the they're very similar to the uh charter committee ue appointed board committees and everybody said fine there's the committee everybody said fine but if you want to do an audit committee and follow this particular part of the policy i mean we we've fudged on all them then we need to go back and appoint a board committee and then still then make it clear we need to change the policy and the resolution that allows you to specify there's voting then we need to go back and make the committee we've got all these steps we need to do i'd say it's crazy you have a board committee you have three members of the committee and they vote on the board committee same as the charter committee they didn't include anybody in the charter well we would have to go back and change our existing work yes we'd have to go back and start over but we haven't changed that and so i just want to clarify so actually uh director viewel if you just look at the policy 1.60.040 it does establish the audit committee and it does establish the process for appointing members to that committee and excuse me i'm not finished speaking we did follow it um and these people and and there is um i mean it's a legal precedent that uh if it's not if the wording isn't included in the legislation of the statute it you can't add a word to a statute you can't add a word it's a board it's a board you cannot add a word to a policy every board committee has three board members well you're correct that it's not but that's not what we did we appointed a board committee which is the audit committee not the audit committee which has five members and you can look at it to begin with because if you were going to appoint it as an audit committee with five members you would have appointed bobby reagan me you and two more people so you had the five members which is exactly what we're talking about no no you would have done that at the start we've been waiting for it all year with the two people to be put forward as the committee it's it's a it's not a it's not the policy the board chairs uh appointed director regan as the chair of this committee in september and you and i on the committee exactly um we've been waiting for since september to get the rest of this committee together right which we're right exactly which we're doing right here tonight and that's not but that's not the committee that this that's referred to in the policy this is uh this no it's not the committee that's referred to you guys do you need to do a legal opinion here on this one no no we already did you get one opinion for a while so i i'm i looked back at um there's board policy 1.60.040 which director knowles references and i i haven't taken time off my screen to go look at that one yes but i looked at policy 1.20.014 as you all were discussing this in paragraph 7 of that it says a board committee may appoint subject to a board approval advisory members from the student body or community to further obtain internal and external stakeholder input at the time of appointment the board will determine the length of term or sunset point of the committee additional membership qualifications or makeup and meetup schedule advisory members will be instructed in the committee's roles functions and reporting relationships in communication with the board administration and staff these members may not be included in considering whether a quorum of the board or excuse me of the committee is present nor may they vote on recommendations to be made to the board however either an advisory member or an ex-official member may present a written report minority report to the board a board committee may request that the superintendent appoint staff to participate as non-voting committee members so nice going that's good okay so there is that yeah so my understanding thank you okay notwithstanding that is that i thought the audit had had a special status as the audit committee under the mcdonald's under that policy that you decided that it was a special case however the main point that we want to accomplish tonight is welcoming and appointing these two good folks as volunteers to this committee so um you know whether or not either way whatever recommendations or votes or reports or anything comes from this committee which i really hope we will see very soon it's the full board that has the authority to decide on what the topics are eventually yes yes so i mean absolutely it looks like we need to go back and get clarification and folks moving forward and we're about to queen we're almost at the end of the school year at this point some clarification um we did have clarification from um ms patterson our general counsel who said the same thing that i just said yeah that's not consistent with but because it's a special policy around the audit committee because my recollection in years past is the audit committee was always unique among board committees and having these community members so
03h 30m 00s
i think i'm sorry go ahead dr martin uh you can finish your thoughts bobby um we used to have a board finance audit and operations committee and the audit committee was a part of that so it was the it was the board members so but no they're outside right they weren't voting it was the board audit it was the three board members who were the voting members so clearly this is a topic we're going to need to keep discussing but for right now let's go ahead and vote on resolution five zero six four which is helpful to know what whether or not they're gonna be voting or not so i mean i could do an amendment and just add them in there as ex officios so so why don't i do that um so i would like to offer an amendment that would indicate that the two public members would be serving as ex-officios amend the policy without going through the public process this isn't this is just i'll i'll second well you can't change the policy without going through okay so it's not being changed so director regan has moved and director curler has seconded an amendment to five resolution 5064 that would be so there's two places it would be in the second sentence it says the audit committee will be comprised of three members of the school board and two ex-officio public members and then in b it would say the audit committee recommends the board appoint kari guy and pedro nunez as ex-official members okay so discussion and actually it would be under resolution one but that is consistent with the policy um discussion i think it i guess the reason i second it is because the issue needs clarity and this gives its clarity um and it certainly uh defines the role of the of the members the public members on that board committee which is to advise and get input so i think it's i think it makes sense director morton so first i i guess i have two statements the first one is i'm not i'm not right now clear enough to be able to to vote in the affirmative on an issue um and this is you know perhaps i'll i'll take ownership of what i've heard or a couple of conflicting things particularly what i'm concerned about is downgrading the uh the voice of community members who volunteer for committees um i'm i'm concerned about that without the clarity of saying here's here's the uh the position you know i listened to what greg read i've listened to what pam has read um i still feel like there's some a lack of clarity for me to be able to say well sure this is definitive we should have policies that create a definitive opportunity uh so so that's that's the first thing the second thing to me is as a board member who will be voting uh on recommendations brought forward to the full board um from the audit committee uh i'll put this expectation out there right now that i'm i'm looking for consensus from from the audit committee i'm looking for an audit committee that says we were thoughtful we were intentional we brought up topics that were important we feel like are important to this district and we're we're recommending these to the board again can we can we achieve consensus in this process if we have a power differential between board members and and community members i'm not entirely sure that's possible finally all of it's coming back to the board anyway so i don't know i don't know about i don't know why there would be a need to to create that uh that downgrade or that power differential within the committee um if that's where the policy sits then i would say okay the policy sits that we're bound by that policy but again i don't have the clarity that offers us offers us that ability right now so i'm i'm kind of uncomfortable right now with that uh with that vote and uh and again i'll take ownership of not being clear about my own um my own understanding of the the the at least the couple of policies and parameters that have been read tonight too i mean that there are two things that i can make sense of but i would appreciate clarity and understanding both past practice and um a little bit of clarity so i don't i'm not sure that we all make our best decisions at 9 30 after full day so i at this point i feel like i would have to vote no on any of this just until i have that clarity because i wouldn't want to move forward one way or another that being said i and it doesn't have to be seconded but
03h 35m 00s
i would like to move to table this until next week um so that we can work on the clarity that we need so hold on one sec just a process question in terms of i mean we have been waiting since september for this committee to do its work so uh can that committee begin to meet if we haven't officially voted on the resolution we actually have been meeting already with the new members we have been meeting with the new members and so at this point they wouldn't be voting members but i mean ultimately it's just voting on at this point it's it would be voting on a recommendation to the board who would actually have the authority to vote on what the topics are going to be so the audit committee is not going to be voting on it's just it's just forwarding a recommendation so i don't think it's i mean i um to me part of the function and the value of having those external experts serve on the committee is sort of supplementary to having hiring an independent performance auditor that you have that external voice and am i clearly you know thrilled to have them on board right so i think without having really helpful as long as we're not delaying any further the work of this committee and bringing forth actually getting some audits done i'm i would be okay with waiting until we get the clarity my understanding and again i'll take ownership too that maybe i was unclear on it or misinterpreting it my understanding was always that those folks that we would be seeking out last fall would be full voting full voting members but again the authority rests ultimately with the board um any any board committee in a sense is just advisory to the full board they're bringing they're standing in depth and bringing it forward so anyway are you calling this a board committee because if it's a board committee i don't want other people voting who haven't been elected on a committee that i'm an elected body member of 1980 in 1980 they tried to run the school board with a person from the community as the chairperson and i refuse to come because we are the elected members of the school board if this is a committee set together that's a board committee then those are the only people that has a responsibility to vote which is a which that i don't even think we need this personally that's just the way it is i don't want those people so that's whatever there's some that's covered under the board committee policy the director of blah blah right the policy around the district performance auditor is a different policy and a different community than we need to make of what i'm saying is then we need to redo it and make a different commit make it a different committee and i certainly would not be a member of a committee where i'm an equal voting member it's that's a board committee that i meant that someone else who hasn't been elected is an equal voting member with me i'm sorry i'm just not it's not a downgrade or an upgrade it's uh basically almost an illegal grade you don't you don't bring people in and set them on the school board and say okay what i'm hearing from you is that given that we have this separate policy in existence that names an audit committee is exactly what you're saying is in your view you would prefer to clarify that but that's a separate process versus moving forward this committee but director no one that's not exactly what i'm saying which what i'm saying is that that committee is not read the one that they're talking about if you're going to say it doesn't say they're voting members on there it says they're members of the committee right but if you're going to make it a board committee with board members and it's a board committee those people are not elected members of the board they don't have a vote so it doesn't take director regan's change it takes in order to fix that it takes a change by us to vote separately in which case i would then resign from the audit committee because that's not how this just like if we had uh superintendent smith vote with us as the board now we have eight voting members so director what i'm saying in response is that we do have this existing policy under the district performance auditor policy that names specific it outlines the functioning of an audit committee it doesn't say they vote he doesn't say they vote it just says there are members it does say they vote because it says committee members vote where does it say and i want to director buehle i would suggest that you read the policy because the things that you're saying are not true and they're not true that we have this the audit committee is the audit committee it is not a board committee it's the audit committee it's made up of three board members and two public members with regard to the policy that director belial read i'd say you just have to look at subsection one where it says special board committees this is the audit committee is not a special board committee it's the audit committee that's especially committed i'm not i'm confused on what it is and so that's why i call it question so we're voting on the amendment to resolution five zero six four which would add ex-officio in front of the
03h 40m 00s
public members under a uh b and res and resolved that's not the table no no we we voted the table no we didn't well what's on the table right now is excuse me we didn't vote but uh right director that's what's up that's what's on the floor at the moment i made it okay so wait a minute so we need to vote on your number yeah we've already we already had director regan so let's go ahead and vote director reagan's and then we can vote first i don't think so you have to vote a table first yeah go to time i don't think you can have two uh motions on the floor at the same time that's my recollection about to table would always be the second motion on the floor you remember that yes and i think there are one or two that um allow for two of them to happen and one of them would be to take but i'm not positive of that so okay well once we go ahead and so the motion to table the resolution has been moved and seconded any discussion on that or we just call in the question and taking the votes i guess i would ask i i still am not clear from staff i just want to make or the committee to make sure that this committee can continue to do its work if we were to table this resolution yes as long as we don't have you know right now they're voting members right they'll continue to be voting members until the language they're not voting members because we haven't we haven't appointed them yeah well that's what i'm saying we won't be able to have any votes because they haven't we have three of us we can committee yet we have we have three would you just bring a recommendation to us without voting on it and then we can avoid this whole issue the point is we need to move forward to doing some progress right so okay september and we actually have a meeting on thursday so that's great okay so let's go ahead and vote on tabling this resolution all in favor please indicate by saying aye aye aye aye all right all opposed please engage with saying no no no okay so the res uh the resolution excuse me the motion to table the resolution passes so the resolution is tabled and that was a vote of five to two okay and just to be clear we are thrilled to have two new advisory board members and we're thrilled that they have the advisory and we are thrilled that they have a professional auditing background it's going to be a huge boost to us as a board and as a committee so all we're looking at is a clarification on whether they're voting members or non-voting members but either way they're awesome they're going to be awesome additions too i look forward to hearing the recommendations from the full audit committee and moving forward so thank you all right so okay so just a couple reminders before we wrap up that we still have two town hall meetings for the public to share budget priorities with the board so tomorrow night april 21st 6 o'clock at franklin high school and then on monday april 27th 6 o'clock at roosevelt and the meeting at roosevelt on the 27th spanish will be the primary language and other than that we'll now wrap up after having noted that the next meeting of the board will be held on tuesday

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)

2015-04-20 PPS School Board Study Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - April 20, 2015

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