2015-04-28 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2015-04-28
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - April 28, 2015

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this formal meeting of the board of education for April 28th 2015 is called to order I'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the Board website for replay times and the meeting is also being streamed live on the PPS TV services website directors nolles and curler are absent this evening so tonight we get to begin by honoring three of our outstanding career learning Partners um so I'd like to invite up Andre Jackson our partner devel development senior manager um to talk about the recognition in event tonight and I'm not seeing Andre oh here comes lenzo po thank you Mr Po thank you you madam chair board members superintendent Smith lenzo po again tonight is one of our quarterly opportunities to recognize several of the many outstanding partners of volunteers who contribute so much time energy resources to the educational mission of our district uh so tonight uh it is that opportunity for us to truly recognize a partner and a partnership that has done much for the district so with that let me introduce bring up our assistant superintendent for school performance Mr Antonio Lopez who will introduce to you uh the partners who we're recognizing this evening thank you thank you very much thank you good evening my name is Antonio Lopez uh assistant superintendent for the office school performance uh chair Atkins director the student representative and superintendent um this year we have seen the continued growth of state approved City programs to stud in our schools by the end of the this year every campus will have at least one state approved City program we will have added 15 additional state approved City programs bringing the total number of state approved City programs to 44 as context two years ago we had 19 state approved City programs we have more than double our big city offering so we're very proud of that we know that we still have a lot of more work to do collaboration with Industries and professionals is a core component of this career learning City programs of study these Partnerships serve as a resource offer guidance advice and support and most importantly help PBS to provide tangible real world career exploration and CTO opportunities for our students done well they can be a winning experience for everyone tonight we recognize three three exemplary organizations that do this work very very well through their efforts over the past 10 years thousands of BPS students have experienced career awareness exploration and preparation and benefited from the time talent and expertise of hundreds of industry and Community Partners we are pleased to publicly recognize and thank them for all they have done to support CTE and career learning in Portland Public Schools it is now my pleasure to introduce uh Jenny jovic senior manager K pway and CTE she will introduce today's honor thank you Antonio so good evening board and um superintendent Smith I am very excited to be here tonight to uh recognize three of our key Partners in career learning and CTE um we start with the Portland workforce alliance we have been partnering with pwa for over the past 10 years um they've been with us since the beginning um from career day events guest speakers there's a youth apprenticeship program they work with teachers they work with our central office um to develop uh Innovative and engaging activities and then there's their signature ADV the Northwest Youth careers Expo pwa has positively impacted the development and expansion of career learning in CTE and PPS um tonight I'd like to acknowledge first the work of executive director Kevin Jean scale and his amazing staff um Susan neelson and Christen kohashi and um Susan and Kevin are in the room um Central to the success is the volunteer board of directors um they bring passion experience technical skills and a
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willingness to make the ask of any one to support um our efforts and by the way they all have day jobs so this is in addition to what they what they actually do and we have quite a few um members of the board in attendance and I just would like for them to stand and be acknowledged tonight so pwa board so with that I would like you to hear a little bit about pwa from their president-elect um Scott Kleiner from wh and Kennedy and Scott will come down and and join us here hi thanks Genie thanks good evening Bard and superintendent Carol um I am Scott Kleiner this was a great introduction covered half of my presentation which is a good thing tonight um I'm Scott CL I work at widen Kennedy I am the incoming president for the Portland workforce alliance um the Portland workforce alliance mission is to kind of create enduring Partnerships between schools uh and local businesses um and create a little more relevance for students education um I wanted to start make sure my buttons work uh to thank you first instead of thanking you at the end we'll thank you first for um the continued support around Career Technical education um we get pretty excited about this and the reason we want to thank you is we get comments like this from students all the time um so this career day has given me more hope this from a student that went to a Nike career day um you probably know a little bit about us already and we're going to start with that um we're kind of known as the Expo people so we put on this sort of our signature event is an expo that we do every year this year we served close to 6,000 students uh there were 70 schools in attendance half of those schools were Portland Public Schools um we have over 130 exhibitors at um that um present at the Expo um we had a large chunk from Healthcare and Technology those segments are growing this year um and we also have really great involvement from construction manufacturing emergency services and arts and design um we also at our Expo do close to 1,000 or this year we did close to 1,000 mock interviews students get a practice interviewing um as well as getting some feedback that's through a close partnership with uh Portland HR Association Firma um and it's a tremendous very well-run machine to get students in and out um and get some experience Real World experience for what an interview would look like what you might not know about us um in the Portland workforce alliance this year is we help Ser your students year round um we're able to do that because we are connected to the Region's top employers we have great amount of folks that are on our board that represent this um and it's through um a lot of our staff and the board close relationships that were allowed to make Partnerships with um you know the companies that are listed up here um we're also connected to the CTE revitalization um ongoings that are happening right now um we've had examples where we've had teachers come and do learn about engineering and Healthcare and get figure out ways to bring back the industry into their classroom so it's real world experience for the staff as well um and because of the volunteer um we're a small sort of nimble organization that has just three staff um but those staff add on 20 board members and if you add on the 770 volunteers it brings quite an overwhelming amount of um folks that can help kind of support our mission and how do we serve students um because of all this volunteer time we are allowed to do quite a lot of good work on a pretty small budget um we do have a contract with Portland Public Schools and we do get office space and I appreciate um that um consistent relationship that we've had um today we've got tons of business partners that come back so we've been doing this partnership between Portland Public and pwa has been like Genie said about 10 years um and our partners stick with it so we have a lot of partners that come back and do um experience for students year after year uh we also have lots of new people joining in so eBay and Microsoft have moved into the Portland area Elemental Technologies um zebus or and a lot of these are in sort of the growing um sectors of healthcare uh and technology which is great kind of leads to the question so what motivates all these companies to get involved and why do people on the pwa and our our Board of 20 people in the time that they put into it like what motivates that it all comes to your students um so it's students like this that we want to focus on we try and collect you know as many experiences as we can for your students we do have a focus on students that don't have as many opportunities or have a economic status that doesn't um isn't their great greatest setup and don't they don't have the easiest access to businesses and transportation so we have a focus like that that mirrors the district um and we have great stories um this is a story of Skyler Williams who is planning to attend a 4-year University um and he has
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outrightly said that the experiences he's had with Portland workforce alliance uh which include the pwa summer construction camp and a few career days helped him figure out what his College Plan was um we're also really motivated by what students say around our career days so just a couple quick quotes um very informative and engaging it showed me how many paths you can take in college these are kind of things that we collect at the end of our career days we get more and more positive affirmation on what students say after every career day showing that it does make an impact uh students are really hungry for experiences like that um another again another quote when you go off campus and see things it's a totally different experience so they go back to the classroom with a more clear Sense on what they're learning in class and how that relates to future work um we have again stories upon stories students upon students that have this uh We've partnered with a lot of the career coordinators Raquel here um is here tonight um in support of our mission on how do we help create these relationships and those uh again connected and personal Rel relationships that we have in the buildings um help create better experiences for students uh so clearly the work is growing there's a lot of effort and um money and time put behind it at the district so pwa is growing you can see that our Expo has a ton of support from Portland Public School students um our career days and sort of our in-depth experiences are focused on a lot of Portland Public School students um we've had great conversations this year with jeie and Shay um around how can we create more in-depth experiences for Portland Public Schools so that the relevance is even closer um we're looking forward to planning more with them and we want to make sure that we keep it going so I just want to again thank you for your commitment and time and energy behind this and we uh stand ready to help and keep moving forward thank you go I believe we have um do you want to go ahead and do we have a plaque we do Partners yeah so let's go ahead um yes okay super smith if you could read the plaque thank you so much for that presentation and then we'll do a little photo op with you and the plaque would be great and actually I'll just add one more thing is we have consistently said we've been in partnership with the workforce alliance since it was small and since we were really unable to do a lot of the experiences that workforce alliance has allowed us to do for our students and we've been building the capacity to be a partner by adding career coordinators in all of our schools you guys have just grown exponentially in terms of what you make available to our students that's just been phenomenal um so I just want to say really a heartfelt thanks to all of you who spend your time and energy growing these opportunities for our kids it's been remarkable so this plaque presented to the Portland workforce alliance and recognition and appreciation of your contributions to the students and staff of Portland Public Schools April 28th 201 5 and we're going to ask you to come on up for a photograph as that we're doing these as we go here you know U director Morton was just suggesting we could do sort of the photographs all one after the other get so we'll hold that thought and we've got two more awesome Partners you will get your plaque go and your photo promise you which we know yeah good idea thank you so much next awesome partner all right so the next um partner to be recognized is the Ace Mentor program so what I'm going to tell you is that about nine years ago the founding chair um Ed Dean came to Benson High School where our offices were we met with Kevin Jean scale and myself and talked about this idea this program that he had um seen nationally focused on architecture construction management and engineering and I have to tell you that I was skeptical he talked about a 12-week after school program uh and I thought well we don't really have classes at that time we didn't have our career coordinators I just thought well okay but let's try it so the first year um I think our Target was 30 students from Portland Public School schools I think we ended up with somewhere in the 20 ear 2021 kids um what I'll tell you is that I was wrong and um this year we had over 160 applications and I believe they took about 150 students um primarily from Portland Public Schools but also from across the region um the mentoring um in the Ace Program there are about 70 plus mentors so the ratio is two students to One Mentor it's amazing um they raise funds for scholarships and um it's the model is an exemplary model this whole idea of providing students an opportunity after school to do something that we may not be able to offer during the school day and so we have replicated that several times we early on we did it um with Mercy core we are currently doing a a program called Pace um which is really with um the construction um electrical and um sheet metal workers and we're using our facilities
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downstairs in the carpentry shop to make that happen um so it's win-win uh all the way around so uh again I want to acknowledge the work of um their executive director Kevin Jean scale and his staff Christen kohashi and Susan neelen they are a small But Mighty team that do a lot of work both with the Portland workforce alliance and the ace Mentor program um we also um need to talk about again this they have another amazing um volunteer board of directors who also bring their passion and their technical skills um they make the ask they um are fundraising and and um I'm not do we have board members in attendance from Ace so if the board members from Ace would stand and be recognized that would be great so now I'd like to invite board chair Michelle schules from um gbd Architects and student Antonio ker from Franklin to forward and talk a little bit about these Mentor programs welcome thank you thank you Jeanie for the introduction and thank you to the board um and uh superintendent Smith for allowing us to speak to you today um so uh as Jeanie said my name is Michelle Schultz I work with gbd Architects um I'm an architect but I'm also the board chair for the ace mentorship program so obviously I'm here today to chat with you a little bit about our program um jeie gave you a little bit of an oversight which was great um we have been at this for the last nine years um we are wrapping up our eighth year with students here um in the end of May um so I'll talk to you a little bit about how that system works um as jeie said it was a little bit of a trial by eror the you know first year we were out but we definitely have figured it out so um the one big thing that we've learned is that um as pwa talked about the opportunity of students to be able to actually get out there and see the environment where we work um is just such an great experience for them um many of the students are first year it actually never been in professional offices so um our program the way that it's built is it's as jeie indicated it's 12 weeks so it's two hours a session over the course of about 24 weeks it's kind of every other week um they set up in they're set up in teams um they're assigned mentors to those teams and as Jeanie indicated it's typically two mentors two to three mentors per student um and they actually go physically to different offices so they may meet at kpfs Structural Engineers one week and the next week they're at glumac engineering and then they're at gbds offices so they're actually able to see different environments um so it gives them a chance to see different um different ways that people work um it also allows them the ability to work as teams um and that's really something that I think our industry is very big on and so trying to help them see that uh the way the sessions are set up is that they really actually take a design project just like we would from start to finish the first session they meet out at a site they evaluate the site the context just like any professional would do and then they take it through the process from the infancy of design they're given a program they work with each other to try and collaborate and come up with a design for a building as a team and these are students from various high schools we try to mix up the high school so they're not with their buddy that you know they're with every single day of the week these are strangers to them um it's really exciting to see that these students are very very quiet the first couple weeks and then all of a sudden by the third and fourth week they're best buddies and look at what I did this week it's so great you know they they just get to know each other so it's been a great collaborative environment for them uh it also gives them a chance to present in front of people so we've created a midterm presentation where they have to present to their peers um so they have to tell people how they've gotten to the design that they've got to um how they're going to progress their design um the different ideas that they taken this year's project uh there's four different projects for them to choose from they're designing a community pool an electrical um car dealership a movie theater and a neighborhood market so they're able to talk to each other about kind of different ideas of why the site is better for different types of buildings um it's really created an interactive environment for them to be able to discuss present um at the end of everything when they're wrapping up
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their final designs and putting together these boards and renderings they also have to get up in front of their parents their teachers all of the ace community and they present their final design so in a kind of intimidating Amphitheater environment with PowerPoint and everything they're up there presenting so it kind of takes them full circle to get the experience of all of the aspects of what we do um so they really get to learn what does a structural engineer do every day of the week what does an architect do every day of the week and apply wow you know math is really important um I better study and uh jeie talked about the growth of the program yes so we started with 27 students um that first year I started as a mentor we were one of 28 mentors and like I said we kind of weren't really sure how this whole thing was going to work but we were going to make it work and uh apparently we did we have 148 students currently enrolled in the program 102 mentors tours um this year so it's been a great success um and PPS has been a huge partner in that um the career coordinator positions have helped us grow exponentially um Outreach to students is our biggest challenge um we just it's hard to get into schools and actually talk about our program and it's our goal that any student that is interested in these professions has the ability to learn about them um but we just have to be able to tell them what we do um and so you guys have been strategic and really helping us have that opportunity um so almost 50% of our students this year are from Portland Public Schools and one of the things that we've really targeted in the last couple years in in some of our discussions actually um with your team is how do we target those students that are more in need than others um and so we've made a concerted effort to try to find um the higher poverty schools and really make concerted effort to have Outreach so we are sending our board members our mentors our previous Ace students out to the schools early in the year to talk to them about Ace and make sure that all of the schools know that this is a program and an opportunity we've um taken away roadblocks we've talked to them about their we provide pizza at all of their sessions so they get food you know which is for some students actually a motivator um we provide bus passes for those students to make sure that they can come into those sessions so we do what we can to make sure that that opportunity is available to all students um and we've had great success we actually have uh 60% of our students are of color um currently and as we talked about it it takes it takes a large community to create programs like this this is a list of our board members and I won't go through every everybody here but we have a lot of large uh firms in the aec industry um that are part of our board and Beyond this we have a huge list of Mentor support for uh firms that also provide volunteer support to the Ace mentorship Program um Jeanie yurkovich uh is also a member of our board so she didn't I don't think stand up when she recognized she should definitely be recognized for her support of the Ace Program um and uh another big piece that jeie mentioned is our ability to help take those students and and um help them get into college so we have a big piece of what we do is a fundraiser we actually just had our lunch in last week uh raised over $100,000 for scholarships for students so um over the years we've given $248,000 in scholarships we hope to give um probably over $56,000 this year in scholarships um so that's been a big big piece of why Ace was founded it's not only teaching them about the programs but helping them get there um one of our board members um Jim hook from um PSU who's in the audience today some of our Partnerships with the college institutions has been strategic as well in helping us be able to um go to the take the students to those colleges they've had tours of the program so they're able to actually walk through the architecture program walk through the engineering program and see what it's really like to be in college in those programs so um a big shout out to Jim for his help and um like I just talked about a lot of our funding is actually from private funding so it's that ability to have the fundraising lunch in um and a golf tournament that we've created to be able to have support for the programs most of what we do is based on that support um we have 5% grant funding we really appreciate those grants but we don't rely on those grants we rely on our community so it's all of our volunteers and our fundraising efforts that's support the
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program and um one thing that's been very exciting for me um kind of watching the program come full circle so now that we've had eight years of a students we obviously have students that have successfully graduated from high school have gone on to college and are now graduating from college and coming back into the community so Abby kidin is a perfect example um I actually interviewed with her in my office three weeks ago um she graduates this June and she's out looking for a job so it's pretty exciting to see these students grow from coming into the program not knowing what a scale was to having these amazing portfolios and experience um to actually come in and join our Workforce so and that's why as our uh board Partners that's why we do what we do is to help motivate students to do what we do and and join us so she's been a great example of that and Antonio is uh going to be the star of the show because he's actually been um an ace student and this is his third year in the program um so he's going to talk to you a little bit about his experience um Antonio is actually going to be going to PSU and studying architecture here in the fall he will be a first generation college student so um yeah so this is Antonio corsier from Franklin High School hello good evening board and uh superintendent Carol Smith my name is Antonio crocher and yes I go to Franklin High School and I'm in the 12th grade um I've been doing this program for three years and I feel that it's actually a very valuable program for or thing in part of my life I should say because um when I was in high school we had it was during a lot of time or budget cuts so I didn't really to take that many electives and I feel that Ace kind of filled that that void of you know what do I want to do with my education because it was you know when you're in school all you get really is your core classes and you know um what I feel that ASA did for me is that provided me with that insight to what I could be doing in the future and so um I would say that overall I keep coming back every single year because I always learned something new the first year I was really learning how to work with others and also how to work actually professionally I could say because I'm used to I was used to being alone my whole life and so I feel that over the years I've also developed better social skills I've also developed better a public speaking skills and I've also developed um actually a great deal of working off of everybody's Minds basically I I've been able to use especially this year I've been able to use a lot of my peers to build a greater project and to help develop better ideas that we could use we could apply to our or designing a pool this year so to our our public pool and so yeah and um in the fall I do plan on tending the PSU study architecture and um I feel that that's also another door that Ace opened for me was that it show showed me that college isn't actually that far away that showed me that it was pretty close around the corners I had to really start focusing on school and start challenging myself which I actually did my Junior and Senior year which I think in six safety classes so far so I feel that overall Ace really did help me become a better student and a better worker not only for school but for my entire life so so a big thank you for Antonio for getting up here and talking it's a little intimidating uh in front of everybody um a thank you to you guys for supporting the career coordinator program and supporting and thus supporting our program uh we really appreciate all that you've done I'd like to also a quick thank you to Raquel Le because she is the career coordinator that encouraged Antonio to get started in the program um and made obviously a huge difference in his life and has made a huge difference on the Ace Program as having him as a student so thank you to everybody for listening and thank you wonderful thank you so much okay one more uh so tonight we're also going to recognize work systems um we partner uh with work systems in a variety of ways um I they partner quite a bit with multiple pth ways but tonight I'm going to focus a little bit more on the work that they do with us in terms of career learning and CTE um there are multiple things that they do with us um we have bizconnect which is our employer database tool that it's kind of I call it a Rolodex of warm leads these are people that who have volunteered to work with students in our schools um next year we are transitioning to a new system called Oregon connections and they are connected to the um Portland metro stem
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um partnership so I see this as um becoming an even more viable tool for us um we um work with work systems to focus on specific areas and So currently um I'm partnering with them in the area of manufacturing uh manufacturing day was held last summer and I I someone from this District I don't think it was you Carol who uh participated and went and visited different manufacturing um companies um we also partnered last summer with work systems on the summer Works program which is paid jobs paid internships for our students last year 220 Portland Public School students um were summer Works interns across the city and the county of those 25 were um interns here at the BC both in our operations and education um departments um and that's the first time we've done that here we are in the process of recruiting now for summer works next year and um we're on track right now we have at least 32 interns who will be here in the building uh and we're hoping that we'll have a few more in addition to the opportunities that are available to our students across the city so it's a win-win it's a first paid job for many of our students um there are wraparound supports that work systems provides in terms of work Readiness training um financial literacy and the opportunity to network with employers and so with that I'd like to invite Andrew mcgoff who's the executive director and Heather Fick the director of Youth Workforce Services to come forward and say a few words uh thank you Genie good evening uh board members uh superintendent Smith nice to see everyone this evening uh I'm Andrew mcgoff I'm the executive director of work systems we the Workforce Development board for the city of Portland Washington Moma counties um and what we do really is pursue and invest resources to improve the quality of the work Workforce in the region so um we obviously have a very deep interest in the emergent working or the emergent Workforce and as such um since the beginning of our um history which is 1998 we've invested about aund million in Youth Development Services which helped to uh serve about 20,000 kids both reconnecting to school um graduating from high School obtaining a GED uh transitioning to college um apprenticeship or onto postsecondary education so we've been in this uh business for a long time uh I remember when Carol was the executive director at open metto and we did a lot of work there that has traditionally kind of been our space where we have worked uh in partnership with Portland Public Schools and the alternative school networks um we do that for a couple reasons um uh first uh it's a smart investment because you all are helping to re-engage these kids and provide Educational Services uh because it wasn't uh working for them in the Traditional School model and by uh co-investing in that model it allows us to provide a broader array of services to those kids who really need it the most and um as a result I think we're showing some tremendous outcomes uh with the students we're touching and working on together in uh in the alternative school network um but increasingly we are um getting more and more interested in this world of Career and Technical education and um you know I don't know if these other guys didn't get the memo but I got the memo and we only were afforded three minutes for a presentation so I was like trying to cut this down and now I'm like well I might as well just go for it um uh but uh and now I completely lost my train train thought but our our goal really has been we want uh we know that there's a lot of people that are interested in educational reform and that have an opinion about that I actually have a 37 member board of directors and if I were to ask them you know how can we fix the public education system everyone would have a different opinion um so rather than trying to engage uh in that debate we would much rather figure out ways to work together and partner on solutions that we know we can scale and work for uh our kids and to achieve those Collective goals so we want you to think of us as a resource um as a partner that's willing to roll up our sleeves and figure out ways to really get kids connected to uh opportunities that we know are going to help them transition into the economy be successful in the labor market and earn the the kinds of uh wages that they need
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to support themselves and their families so that's sort of our our event this this afternoon and I think um uh we have found a few places where we think that we can um add some value for you and I'm going to turn it over to Heather who is really the whole reason that we're sitting here to sort of go over what are some of those specific areas that we've been working on in partnership with Genie with pwa and other organizations that are trying to improve uh in this area so Heather well I'm going to stick to my script and keep it brief so um thanks Andrew and really jeie and Andrew framed it really well um our our goal I'm going to skip this one because this is really about preparing the emergent Workforce this is what drives all of our work at our organization but I want to talk about the Continuum um that has been referenced earlier as well from career exposure to really career attachment and that's what we're about and so um jeie mentioned earlier that currently we manage a system called bis connect and it is a a Rolodex of warm handoffs and what we are moving to is in partnership with both the Portland metro stem collaborative and the South Metro stem collaborative we've developed um we've identified an existing data system through nepris that is really a national best practice around um being able to virtually and in person connect um and do those career related learning experiences that are valuable to young people and we're beta testing it now several of the career counselors um at PPS are beta testing it and we're getting really good response so far our backend system of bizconnect was really not working as well as we wanted it to so we believe this will be an improvement and really will create more opportunity for young people to get exposed to careers that run the gamut and they're actually through the virtual component can connect with different um business professionals across the entire country so it it's not even limited to our region so career um exploration really is what Jeanie was talking about in our summer Works program so 220 Portland Public School students were put to work last summer through our organization and 25 of those positions were co-funded by Portland Public Schools it is a public private partnership we fund raise nearly 700,000 a year um to add to our federal resources to make this possible 40% of the young people that we served overall in the program last summer were Portland Public School students and 76% of those kids are kids of color and 85% are low income we believe that they don't have the same access low-income young people as young people from family of means who can Network and find an opportunity for their for their son or daughter so these are uh some of the examples these are some of our private sector Partners uh Boeing is up here as is tret then in the career preparation area we we really have three areas of focus so we in programming we have a business services Focus where we need to meet the bar where businesses are so so what what is your need where is your pain Point private sector and where you need employees then we have the Adult Services that are through Work Source Portland metro and then a youth system and in our youth services we're really looking to address the emergent pipeline needs and and Manufacturing is one area that we've really made tremendous strides so across the labor shed which includes our partner whbs both to the North and um Clackamus what is that West I'm not sure South so um that we developed a plan together with manufacturers in the area there were more than 160 industry partners that informed this plan and their number one Workforce issue was a lack of um young people coming up through the pipeline that is their number one concern and they're ready to really do something about it not that they haven't been but there's a huge need there and so what they've achieved is really focusing on a plan that uh as a result was the successes from last year were really manufacturing day where across the region we put 600 kids on buses and got them out to manufacturing sites uh several of you um I think I saw a couple of board members at different at different events there has also been some legislation some policy policy
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framework that's been Advanced through this group that will help CTE coursework and create more um opportunity it's patterned after a Washington state policy that that they found very effective in helping to create more effective CTE programming and then really identified and made recommendations around a set of standards that really all manufacturing program should meet in order to really prepare young people to be ready to go into the workforce and take those m manufacturing jobs so um jeie has been a part of that as has Kevin through the workforce alliance he sits on that and then career attachment so we've been working with Portland Public on implementing the national career Readiness certificate this is a industry recognized skill verification specifically focused on Applied Mathematics reading for information and locating information and depending on how well the young person scores on this testing it it opens up the door for qualifying in for certain levels of different kinds of positions so it's it's an industry recognized certification that can help really launch young people toward a career and then the area where we actually co-fund um programming is in the alternative school area through multiple Pathways where these motivated resilient young people are re-engaging in their education and we have found over the years that the young people that are co-enrolled in our services as well as Portland Public School Services graduate at a higher rate and persist and go on to postsecondary so that is that wonderful thanks for your time thank you so much thank you so stick around we're why don't we have you folks go do the first we're going to have a plaque for each of the groups so work systems sorry we do our photo give you our photo so board members let's go up in front and and I'll read it while you guys are assembling present it to work systems in recognition and appreciation of your contributions to the students and staff of Portland Public Schools thank you so much coming right around ready thank you you come on aor program recog and appreciation of your contrib to students thank you and last but not least Alliance presented toce Alliance thanks Michelle thanks a lot can we retake do another one okay all right okay everybody ready thank you open your all right everybody ready good thank you
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thank you Susan all right thank you so much thank youan to all this wonderful partners and now next item on our agenda is is to acknowledge our teachers in celebration of national Teachers Appreciation week so U National Teachers Appreciation week is May 4th through 8th so tonight we're taking the opportunity to celebrate our teachers um we are incredibly fortunate in this District to have a wealth of amazingly talented and dedic D at teachers and so just on behalf of the board uh want to thank them for the incredibly hard work that they do each and every day in our classrooms so superintendent Smith you like to provide some comments and I would actually like to um I'll turn it over to sha Murray who's our chief Human Resources officer but I also just want to thank the teachers who were nominated by their peers to represent them and are here with us tonight um uh to represent all of the teachers in this district and we do have an outstanding um group of teachers in public schools so Sean thank you superintendent Smith and School Board good morning good evening everyone I'm Shan Murray Chief Human Resources officer and I have the pleasure of introducing 10 PPS teachers honores who were selected by their peers to be honored here tonight we received almost 80 nominations this year selections involved our Union partners and was very difficult given the many outstanding and deserving teacher nominees tonight each Honore will receive a crystal paper weight inscribed with the PPS logo in the words outstanding achievement copies of all nominations forms submitted on their behalf by and a copy of tonight's board resolution recognizing teacher appreciation week which runs from May 4th through May 8th at this time I would like to individually call up each Honore to receive their gift from superintendent Smith and school board members honores please make sure to pause pause a moment for your photos all right let us we're going to get up and yeah reposition all right all right our first Honore is Hannah Flynn who is a first grade teacher Jason Lee school oh pause for your photo than thank you our next honory is Rebecca Gregor kindergarten teacher peninsula School our next honor is Todd Haywood special education teacher peninsul School our next honor is Jess Jess Hutchinson third grade teacher ABY
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Elementary our next Honore is Janice ingersol sixth grade language art social studies teacher hoser Middle School take our next Honore is Andrew kulak language arts teacher Jefferson High School our next honor is Michelle lackington 8th grade language arts social studies teacher West silven Middle School our next honory is chrysanthus lean Mentor teacher K8 conat in our last honor present tonight is Shelley Simonson who is a kindergarten teacher at Chief Joseph aqu hold on one second unfortunately we had one Honore who was unable to attend this evening so I would like to announce her name as well it is Frankie Dennison who is the second and third grade teacher at arita school so I'm just so at this time if all the honores and the board the superintendent will come forward for to posee for a picture okay ready got and if the audience could join me and if the audience could join me in thanking uh our teacher appreciation honores for this marvelous work that they do each and every day for the children and families for Portland Public School thank you and before you head out we do have a resolution we'd like to um vote on superintendent Smith could you read the resolution first to happily so this is resolution number five 72 the resolution to celebrate National Teacher
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Appreciation Week May 4th through May 8th 2015 approximately 3,000 Portland Public School teachers and professional Educators through their expertise and passion prepare the 48,000 students in Portland Public Schools to succeed in College and Career and to become responsible members of our community the Board of Education acknowledges the daily work of our teachers in head start preschool elementary middle and high school special education English is a second language and alternative education as well as our curriculum coordinators coaches Librarians instructional Specialists counselors psychologists and teachers on special assignment for their commitment to Excellence and education for all students of Portland Public Schools every day PPS teachers challenge students through engaging in rigorous curriculum and instruction that is relevant to their lives Sparks their interests and helps them to reach their potential every day teachers build relationships with students and families to develop teamwork and collaboration that supports active engaged Learners in school and at home every day teachers connect with colleagues and administrators to review and sharpen their practice and to find solutions that meet the needs of all students and learning challenges every day teachers reach outside the classroom to build relationships with Community Partners that create vibrant and productive learning environments resolution the Portland Board of Education declares May 4th through 8th 2015 Teacher Appreciation Week in recognition and appreciation of our teachers dedicated efforts to ensure the success of all students in Portland Public Schools thank you to all of our teachers thank you so much so the board will now vote on resolution number 5072 resolution to celebrate National Teacher Appreciation Week May 4th through 8th 2015 do I have a motion so moved second so director U Morton moves and director Regan seconds the motion to adopt resolution 5072 is there any citizen comment there's not any board discussion see go ahead I just want to reemphasize that you know um I know we've all talked about how many great teachers we have but literally every day I um my kids get to go to school and they have fabulous teachers and have had fabulous teachers um through my time and my service on the board I've gotten to visit many many classrooms and there are extraordinary Educators working every day in the classroom rooms under what is often constrained budgets um really making the world come alive for our students and I just want to just add my voice again to a really specific thank you um for understanding what education is really about and for making it come alive for our students thank you you're here thank you so the board will now vote on resolution 5072 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes no opposed any extensions no resolution 50 5072 is approved by a vote of 5 to Z with student representative jazell voting yes wonderful thank you so much our Wonder great all right next on our agenda is the superintendent report so superintendent Smith over to you so I'm going to start with news people may have already heard but I wanted and we actually are fortunate to have Grant principal Carol Campbell here in the audience but the Grant High School Constitution team just won the national We the People Championship Carol will you just stand and let us recognize you so tonight the team will be coming home uh via Portland uh airport and we generally have large groups of people who go to greet them as they return from uh their championship this is a big deal for the general who won two years ago and it's incredible for Portland Public Schools this is our fourth consecutive year that Portland Public Schools has won the national championship and it's our seventh National Title overall so um congratulations to the generals and we look forward to welcoming the team and honoring them in person we were also really fortunate to have had Nobel laurri at rabar to menu um visit PPS on April 16th um she won a 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her civil rights work on behalf of indigenous Guatemalans she's become an international symbol for social justice and I'm just going to say this was an amazing amazing event um with support from the Guatemalan Consulate in Portland Dr menu accepted our invitation to visit Portland Public Schools while in Oregon for the peace Jam conference Miss Dr menu Delights in the opportunity to meet with young people who she views as the catalysts for a more just world she met with more than two dozen of our Guatemalan students from Roosevelt
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Jefferson and Pisa in a private reception at Jefferson before her speech then she delivered a powerful speech in the Jefferson Auditorium to more than 1500 PPS students families and staff as well as community members from Oregon and Southwest Washington followed by a small reception she smoke spoke in Spanish with simultaneous translation in English and American Sign Language and you can see from some of the photos of her visit um it was a really moving one wonderful visit and students got the chance to ask really personal questions that she responded to EXT with really candidly and um heartfelt um so we have a short video I wanted to share with you uh and before it actually pops on I just want to say thank you to the PPS staff who put this event together it was a pretty um it was a large scale organizational effort to provide a really intimate opportunity to meet with somebody who has just tremendous presence and impact in the world so um here is r Berta and if we want happiness to be in the world we have to start by being happy ourselves if I'm happy maybe I can inject a little bit of happiness in the rest of the people this was such just an amazing opportunity for our kids to be able to hear somebody that that has made such a huge difference not only for the people of Guatemala but as a symbol of the world what one person can do to make this world a better place we're so happy to have you here so I I really look forward to you being great leaders some things I could get into to help assist the country or like ways I could go back and just do things personally inside the country to help she has made a change not only in guala but all in Central America and in other countries by having peace and giving hope to the people that there could be a change she's an amazing woman she has an amazing amount of Courage I I must say so myself for the personally like put that amount of activism again for like the right group of people in that country were so under oppressed during the Civil War and everything it was a living history lesson and and uh students were able to ask questions and she was just so inspirational and and just to be able to be close to her there is an aura in terms of her personality in terms of how she shows herself with a lot of humility from a woman's perspective I know that wom's can do lots of things and not only mans can make a change thank you 400 times thank you it was really a wonderful experience I'm just going to say uh and you can tell you could feel it just by that little clip I'm going to just one of my favorite questions that a student asked during the small conversation and he was um to really moved listening to rera and then he said how as a young person do I work for peace um is it through my education do like do we become activists is it just what happens in our minds are we just finding peace in our minds anyway I was like okay I love this question and she was so heartfelt in how she um discussed this with students so anyway I just wanted to add that because it was one of the moments that really moved me okay um we have another wonderful opportunity which is um this year um we had our third annual um Innovation Challenge in partnership with Portland's um Portland State's School of Engineering and it's a a fabulous challenge to our high schools um so the theme of the competition this year was smart cities making our urban communities safer healthier and happier um and part of what happens is the teams are challenged to identify a current problem and design a solution that will make Portland a safer healthier or happier place to live using science technology engineering and math or stem learning um the projects this year were so impressive that we have one of the teams who is going to actually demonstrate their project for you um it was at Grant High School's team and they designed a bike parking finder app and one in which one in three categories the best presentation the best best technology focus and the audience favorite uh the strongest concept
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category win went to Lincoln High School with the team's vlock a more secure bike Locking System to prevent theft the best team Venture award went to Metropolitan Learning Center for its gray water purification system Madison High School won for the most impactful on society with a design for converting shipping containers into housing for the homeless and Franklin Jefferson and Wilson also made great presentations Grant's presentation was so well received that I invited members of the team team to come and give us a demonstration of their bike parking finder app and here today we have Corey Kohler Alex Taylor and Sarah Sinclair and I'm going to invite you to come on up and tell us about your presentation and um and do a little demonstration for us and I'd also like to while they're getting settled Jim hook is here with us and he's part of actually helping Host this at PSU with the School of Engineering so he was here for a previous presentation CU he's also on the board of workforce alliance so thank you for sticking around for this so I just want to say thank you for inviting us uh so PSU Innovation Challenge has been going for about three years now and as uh M Smith said um it's the theme this year was smarter cities and um we decided that we were going to do a bike parking app which led to more like a prototype and a website s but um yeah so we decided to do that and it basically just uh finds you a biking Park spot and uh we just wanted since Transportation has become more of an issue with also climate change as well as urbanization urbanization yeah so um yeah so we decide that this was a pretty big issue and this was our way to solve it soy hey I'm Alex and I worked on the app uh which is a mobile app for for smartphones but also a web app for uh you can just visit it in your browser um so uh I worked on that and I worked on that along with Richard who worked on our prototype here which is the actual physical Hardware piece um fortunately you could be here today but uh I'll we're going to give a quick demonstration you want to do that know yeah um so Richard built something he likes to call the Logic box which is down here I don't think um the cameras can see it all that well um pretty much a black box with a Raspberry Pi computer in it as well as some other objects of technological interest that I'm not about um but it hooks up to a main server um that works with the website and the app that transmits real-time data about whether or not a bike is parked in locations around the city and it hooks up at each location through this um prototype here this would eventually be made of more resilient materials um that's also waterproof um but if we set it down here um when a bike rolls up to it it will push down on it since it's a pressure sensor connecting the circuit which if we switch to the computer screen we'll show um that the um in a covered parking space a bike is currently parked in this location and when the tire rolls away it says there is no bike currently parked in this location um for if we wanted to bring this to the whole city there would only need to be one these black boxes in each parking location with um a pressure sensor in each separate slot um yeah yeah which connects to the Logic box but yeah we are actually planning to continue this project into the summer with help from PSU students who are just took a transportation class and created a entire database of their paring locations throughout the PSU campus um um so we're hoping to make the website even bigger um yeah I want to add that uh the components inside this Logic box are relatively uh inexpensive I think the Raspberry Pi is about $15 and the um the Arduino is like $10 is um the only component we don't have is a is a cellular cell your like connection uh dongle um so unfortunately we can't actually connect it to the internet
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right now but um other than that it's uh it's working so yeah yeah a and then um so what we didn't get to show you um is once the the bike is put on that spot it sends some info to our server um which is then accessed by the app and so people can see oh hey there's a bike at this parking location um so yeah thank you you guys thank you so much thank you so much and actually I'd like to just recognize Eric Mason who's their adviser at gr High School in the Back le just way for us Y and again principal Carol Campbell and was this the third year that Grant participated in the Innovation Challenge too every year and again next year up next year yay that's great you guys really great project that was wonderful thank you for demonstrating and actually will you come on up and I'm going to give you a little takeaway than you and Jim thank you for staying for that and and for being part of making that happen every year you know what there's still a poster here too if they oh you guys your poster is up in front your big display board your poster board yeah pardon yeah for the other CH yes but there's one that that was saved for somebody Waits oh get one more right there but not the one with the purple on it thank you sorry you got it okay and next I have three outstanding students to tell you about tonight who are part of our tag program um on Friday we've learned that Sean gim a Wilson High School sophomore has won second place in a national essay contest sponsored by the American Society of human genetics based in Maryland she identified and then wrote about a phenomenon that expands on the traditional definition of a gene she participates in O osu's partnership for scientific inquiry through high school and she wrote the contest essay as part of her homework KGW came out on Friday to report on her big award $600 for her and $600 for her teacher to invest in genetics materials for the classroom uh congratulations to Sean her chemistry teacher Mike Dua Pressley and the student teacher Richard topping her OSU teachers and Sean's family so this is pretty cool recognition another outstanding student is Clemen Deng and Clemen you want to just stand up while I'm talking about you I know this is kind of torture Clemen is a Clemen is a junior at Lincoln High School his efforts to develop a faster and more accurate data mining data mining method won him first place at the Intel State science fair in the computer science and Robotics category in addition to winning the top prize in the computer science and Robotics category he won four additional Awards Lewis and Clark College faculty scholarship valued at $15,000 OSU scholarship award the American statistical Association Tom Owen award for excellence and statistics the Intel excellence and computer science award Clemen will compete at the Intel international science and engineering fair in Pittsburg in a few weeks he will also present a paper on his data mining method to the international electrical and electronics Engineers International Symposium on Multi multiple valued Logic on May 19th at the University of waterl in Canada his study of data mining could have wide ranging impact on a number of fields and I want to recognize him for his outstanding work Clement and now finally a fifth grader Augustine Montes tuuba who has been chosen as the Oregon Association of talented and gifteds young scholar for this school year Augustine come on up so August might have missed out on tag had it not been for his second grade teacher who immediately recognized his
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gifts now he attends access Academy where he's known as a math standout and a leader who tutors other children in Spanish and English Augustin receives a $500 scholarship to a summer enrichment program which will allow him to attend camp for the first time Augustine is here with his family and will his family please stand and let us recognize them and congrat ulations on this wonderful recognition from your school and from you're representing PPS beautifully so wear your T-shirt PPS pride and we're all proud of you okay I also wanted to let you know about a group of Hosford students who are involved in the Hosford engaged and active teens or heat after school program 15 of these students most of them tag students traveled to New York for the international model un conference the students attended the opening ceremonies and got to sit in the seats of actual un Representatives before going to New York they stopped in Washington DC and met with Senator wien and Congressman Earl blumauer um and we just wanted to let you know about this because it was a very cool thing for these students awesome Jefferson High School Rose Festival princess kahija Burley takes down stereotypes as a varsity wrestler she wrestles at 120 pounds competes in volleyball and track is the captain of the Jefferson cheerleaders and is active in student government and the black student union a a junior in Jefferson's Health Science and biotech program she plans to attend a four-year university university and study marketing she's among 15 outstanding young women from Portland metro area high schools who serve on the Rose Festival Court promoting our city getting mentored by top female Executives and earning a 3,500 college scholarship she ended her first wrestling season this year with seven wins okay I wanted to share a quick update on our third grade reading priority in addition to the great work of our teachers in the classroom every day our read together partner organizations are busy helping us ensure that all students read by the third grade reading results and smart volunteers are tutoring struggling readers the Timbers and Thorns are visiting our schools and reading to students in English and Spanish we're all Distributing books almost monthly to help build home libraries for all of our students you as a board set aside funding for culturally specific books and we're in the process of getting that generous batch of books out to schools and we have a video of a new pilot project last month we distributed iPads to 80 families at Harrison Park lent Markham and Whitman these iPads are loaded with literacy skill building apps and will help us Bridge the the digital divide while helping parents work with their students you can see the excitement around the this project in the video I'm Andy wheeler I'm the senior project manager in the office of teaching and learning we're here at Whitman Elementary today to distribute iPads to 20 kids here you go thank you well they spend time already in like uh phones or TV and this one is going to be like something interesting for them it works just like uh just like a library uh just like a library book kids are checking out iPads they're they're equipped with 4G internet access and they're able to use a series of apps that we've installed at home it's cool for some some kids that can't read as well as other kids it gives them the confidence because could play some math games and there's some apps when you read uh it's kind of like a new world in your mind so being able to point and click on things uh and just pictures and objects is a much more powerful way for a student to to use a device family also will get some brief training tonight uh and then they're going to come back two more times this year for additional training and uh and additional activities to help parents and kids work on student literacy together great background music yeah okay I'm just going to tell you we have really cool stuff going on our schools which is why I'm telling you this much and this time of year a lot of students are completing projects or being recognized for things so we have lots of good news and we just wanted to
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tell this tell it to you so aby's Garden was recognized Yesterday by Congressman Earl Blumenau at his women's leadership luncheon um abery School kitchen Garden program provides kids with Comprehensive food based education Garden space a working kitchen with a chef and fresh produce eaten at meals that imp and a program that improves student learning and instills lifelong habits of Health this one who was honored at the luncheon were the group of mother who were really the driver behind getting this started um back in 2000 and um now 500 student lunches are supplemented by food from the garden and it was an honor to be at the lunchin and have Abernathy recognized there's great Community energy around this Garden as well a lot of learning good eating lifelong habits and Community Building bont bont eighth graders are tackling a college level project with state-of-the-art technology and preserving a crucial part of our state and City's history in the process as they collect the oral histories of Vanport residents students created their own video documentaries with guidance from Concordia University graduate student Matthew Blanchard and US history and language arts teacher Kristen parrot Blanchard has combined students photos and videos with GIS data and photos and created an augmented reality using an app called juneo when anyone with the Jano app points a phone or tablet toward Vanport old snapshots of the community will pop up as well videos and information about the buildings and the residents the project has been covered by The Oregonian and OPB and students have been invited to speak at conferences and more Vanport residents have stepped forward to tell their story so a really actually important part of documenting history in our community it is really great it's very cool vers landia one of my favorite events of the year um except this year it happened during a board meeting so we were all here together rather than watching so we brought you clips from versia so 20 students from 11 schools competed in the Citywide High School poetry slam vers landia sponsored by literary Arts Cleveland's Gwen Frost took first place this year wowing the crowd of hundreds at the new Mark theater Bella Trent of Madison who was last year's winner took second Sakai Edwards of Jefferson placed third Quinton Dixon of Roosevelt placed fourth and Ty for fifth were Wilson's Fiona Murphy and Roosevelt's Alexis Canard congratul congratulations to these Brave and entertaining poets and let's watch a clip of the Poetry from the Slam in rotation are when prices are down at the gas station heart rate up like inflation as I wait in anticipation I'm only three struts away from my mini vacation and Clark Kent to Superman give me a moment to jump into my disguise hopefully I brought the right supplies pull my hair out my face puff up my chest and stretch my neck to the skies I should figure out I'm going to greet this beautiful creature I think to myself that would be wise then it hits me like lightning and after all the internal fighting I man up and say hey how you doing you'll watch the house implode on itself from a safe place and then you'll keep running even if you always did kind of love the smell of campfire but if you're not smart I don't know what to tell you maybe you like the way the Flames lick a little too close to your skin maybe when the smoke is scratching at the inside of your lungs you feel refreshed because at least you and the smoke are both trapped and misery always loves company even if it is just for one night you see but I I'm taking a stand standing up to these Shadows these Silhouettes this devilish other part of me that I can't escape from I don't want this Dark Passenger anymore I don't want to wear some facade every single day all because I have to be just like him or just like her or just like everyone else I am a cultural connection to our past oppression I am the future and the past I object to the idea that Yin is bad and black is evil cuz I mean come on people let's look at history I am black like the Ocean's Greatest Secret and the Lion's greatest man I am black I am black I am black so this right here is for everybody that loves to ask me so what are you it was wonderful to see the Rosa Parks Bravo Youth Orchestra playing alongside the Oregon Symphony during a concert in Gayla on April 16th 24 of the school's third and fourth graders played LaBella kubano with amazing professional
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musicians on the stage of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall we applaud the symphony for including our students it was an amazing evening and they did each one of the students got to sit by their counterpart in the Oregon Symphony and play um and they were magnificent they were magnificent another shout out to Amanda Alonzo who's a history teacher at Madison High School in December she won the 20145 Civic educator of the Year from the classroom law project and last week she was recognized again at classroom law project as the legal citizen of the Year here is a photo of her at the dinner she works with Madison's Constitution team and is doing a terrific job so I just wanted to comment her again because she was again recognized this past week so congratulations Amanda so Lila a pop singer supervised by students surprise students at Kelly school last week after learning of their anti-bullying video video um that they created with her permission to use her hit song the students were unveiling their video in the school gym when the singer who is a grant high school graduate made a special appearance here's a part of the video that the kids made to help stop bullying and they made a real connection with uh Lila who was gracious and kind with her little fans here's what a video I'm really really excited about the event that we have planned today so please pay attention to the video fun initially showcase a bullying awareness video wow did you see that look in the background did you see those two kids I think one of them is bullying the other we have a song at the end called wake up that is by a Portland recording artist Lila I think we did a video about bullying without even noticing it the school doesn't know in particular that she will be um coming out from behind the curtain W it's pretty amazing to have a star 5T away from you yeah it was sweet it almost made me cry like I had to hold back to tears I showed my mother last night too and she's like I'm going to cry cuz um it was a compliment but more so a compliment just that children get the message it's not an everyday thing at our school to have a star and on our stage when you see somebody picking on someone else instead of just walking by and ignoring it you do something about it bullying itself is a big problem but there will be people like me graduating going into middle school and high school and things will get tough and you need to know that you will prevail through whatever you have gone through they're the future they're you the youth they're going to build our world in the future and so to be able to reach them is really a it's a big deal for me hug hugs for everyone I know give a hand to our filmmakers Kelly a couple more things one I just REM want to remind people to take our um Portland Public Schools 2025 survey this is a survey that's a chance for our entire Community to help shame uh shape the change as we grow in enrollment over the coming decade um it is on the website www. organs kitchent table.org you can also download it at www.ps net um or get it at any of our schools and turn it in at any PPS School office so please take the survey we're trying to get hear from as many members of our community as we can and then finally an update on our band instruments so this fall PPS band teachers will finally get to put 750 new District owned band instruments in the hands of Buddy musicians thanks to the school board's decision to invest $925,000 toward rebuilding a program that has been eroded by years of budget cuts the money is part of um the the investment the board set aside in
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February for strategic one-time Investments after higher local option property tax colle Collections and uh we have long loaned instruments to students at little or no cost on the principle that money shouldn't block a student from experiencing creativity collaboration and perseverance taught through music education so we're really excited about this and there's um great excitement in uh in the student who are getting to use these instruments and we have a short video on this one too and then we're then it's a wrap this one still sounds fine we would have to put these back on and get that glue to something Sellwood Middle School student Henry Rice shows us his 40-year-old baritone horn and it's all dented up and stuff eighth grader Nick schalberg remembers struggling with his first trombone and because of that experience he had thoughts of giving up music I chose the trombone cuz I thought it would be fun to play and then I got one and I thought I thought it was me and not the instrument Henry and Nick's wishes are now coming true thanks to superintendent Carol Smith's vision and the people PS board which has approved $925,000 to purchase new band instruments the economy is improving and our local tax revenues were greater than we anticipated after 12 years on the board I cannot tell you how excited I am that we are going to be able to offer our students new musical instruments you know it probably either dropped sideways Jenny Johnson has hundred hundreds of instruments too damaged or simply worn out for future use as the district's only repair technician she says the last time the district bought new band instruments Ronald Reagan was still president on most days Jenny is able to repair three to four instruments she hopes to purchase up to 750 new clarinets flutes and saxophones plus other instruments so desperately needed for Band program she says quality instruments are not cheap probably what we'll be purchasing the most of will be flutes and clarinets probably about $450 to $600 if we're going to purchase a new berry Sachs uh that is probably about five or six grand um a new set of tempies probably more like 10 grand so as these eighth graders at cwood Middle School prepare for their next concert nearly half are playing on instruments older than their parents some students in the district have had to share their flutes and horns and although they don't mind they are looking forward to becoming better musicians with the help of bright and shiny new instruments doe in schools this fall man and I'm excited as a music teacher in Portland Public Schools and been doing this for a while that um yeah it's like the Arts are coming back y woohoo all right thank you so much for all that wonderful news so next on our agenda is student testimony so students I think we have some students sign up tonight M we have three and our first two speakers Sid Reed and Chris nine so while you're coming down thank you so much for your patience and waiting for your turn to speak we've have quite a full agenda tonight um thank you so much for being here we're really glad to hear from you and um we have uh three minutes to speak and if you begin by stating your name for the record and spelling your last name and then um when the yellow light comes on you have one minute left and when the red light comes on we respectfully asked that you wrap up then but thanks so much for being here um my name is Sid Reed s r e d and uh I'm Chris nine inan um hello my name is Sid I'm a sophomore at Lin in high school recently my US history teacher gave us an assignment on Race ethnicity um belief system gender expression and sexuality and how well is represented in the curriculum that we study overall my impression is is that PPS does a phenomenal job with covering just about everything but I still do detect a trifling amount of things that
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are less fixated on than others one of these Les or lesser fixated on subjects than others would have to be the history of Pacific Islanders I can't speak for the rest of the semester or for my forthcoming history classes but from the history classes that I have endured I don't exactly recall much on Pacific Islanders categorically Hawaii the United States overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom on January 7 17th 1893 the ultimate goal of the revolutionaries was the annexation of the islands to the United States which was of eventually accomplished in 1898 I frankly think that there should at least be a meager unit on Pacific Islanders at some point in our studies we recently finished studying The Cho movement of the 1960s a unit on slavery and the Civil War and before that we did a unit on the history of Native Americans the history of Pacific Islanders could have accompanied all these units fantastically and I think they went through a lot just like everybody else and that is what I see under repesent the culum that we study um I'm also in SIDS US history class with the same teacher and I was pleasantly surprised this year with the new curriculum that our school had developed for US history I didn't necessarily think much about us history um before it I just kind of like I knew I knew a general amount about it but I didn't really think in depth about it and how it affected things today and as Sid said I think it did bring some great light on especially um me being obviously a white male in the society full of powerful white men um bring a light on the problems that that brings up in society and how that's a barrier that we have to overcome but going on from this I think that in our schools there needs to be a bigger conversation on current events that are happening around the world because even in the these past four days or past yeah this week um starting on Monday especially with the Baltimore riots I haven't heard a word about it from any of my teachers and barely any students talking about it and I think that that's an issue because as much as all of the things can help learning from the past it doesn't really do anything if we don't talk about what's happening right now and those problems and how we can try to solve those issues thank you thank you very much and next we have Brad subramanian welcome Brad thanks for coming thank you so today I I have um bronchiolitis so it'll be a little hard for me to speak but I'm not going to be complaining to you guys like my friends did about something that could be fixed I think there's a lot of good things that we can do that we have done with our educational system and that's what I'll be talking to you about and so I'm also a history student in Mr Bane's class and I'm here to talk to you also because I'm going to get a few extra credit points in my US history class wait a second that's why I'm here I'll have an A regardless of this because I work hard for that but there's three things that I'm going to talk about to with you today is that critical thinking is encouraged by teachers is that every student has an equal chance in our education and that education needs to start in the families so let's go on to my first point of critical thinking my dad was raised in India and he went to a classic Commonwealth School where critical thinking was not supported in fact it was suppressed by corporal punishment one of my friends from health class who's from Holland told me that US schools are very bad and I quite oppose this statement it's a known fact and it's commonly thrown around that Asian and Nordic countries score very high in test scores um and we're mugging up as is the most important thing in in the part of studying my my history teacher Mr ban my Mr Bay and I stand quite often in opposition and sometimes lock horns I could have had a d or a failing grade in my class many times and I'm sure he was unhappy be because of that but I have the utmost respect for him now and he still encourages me to speak my point of view and even though we might not have the same agreements if you had put Einstein in an Asian language class we might have not had the theory of relativity and with these words we shouldn't be focusing on bumping up our nation's test scores while this isn't necessarily bad we should be creating a learning environment where kids can think for themselves and I think that critical thinking is very important and should be encouraged in schools all throughout port Portland Public Schools so I'm going to go on to my second point now and that's equal opportunity for all the second part of my story is my mom she's from Eastern Europe where if you have a disability you do not have the options like you have in this country I just attended the state speech and debate tournament and last weekend where there was a girl in a wheelchair who had significant uh physical and speech
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impairment I would see her zooming through the rooms onto her next speech round and because of the iPad software that she had she was able not only to communic to communicate but to compete in the tournament and she will be representing Oregon in the National speech and debate tournament in Texas something that even I couldn't do and this is something we rarely see in any other country my third and final point is that education needs to start in the families I call upon my friends and everyone I know in my schools to regularly attend classes instead of ditching and roaming through empty hallways If Only They listen to the teacher they would get passing grades it's as simple as that more importantly I call upon parents and Guardians to shut off their TVs and games during the week and insist on homework and moning their and monitoring their kids it would make us the most educated nation in the world not only in numbers and test scores and so with these words we're not saying we shouldn't be improving our educational system but there's many things to be proud of and many things to work on thank you thank you so much outstanding student testimony tonight thank you all so much for coming and also congrats getting that extra credit points so next on our agenda we have our student Representatives report awesome so first of all join super saac you guys should all message me and join super sack um but then I'd like to talk about how last month Sierra Jose and I she's a member of suac and a senior at Franklin High School had the opportunity to attend the Council of great City Schools legislative meeting in DC so we got to attend this conference which brings educational leaders from Across the Nation together to learn about huge um issues that the country faces and educating our children and then Solutions as well so it's really awesome getting to hear from so many leaders across the country about what they're facing in their districts and their Creative Solutions to solving these problems um some issues that we're facing here too that were brought up a lot were funding and um high stake standardized testing so it's a nice perspective to gain what other students across the country are facing as well and um some other solutions that people have found and then Sierra and I were also able to Lobby in Congress um which was awesome getting to talk to our elected officials about huge important issues uh something that was brought up a lot was how title one1 dollars were allocated because there's a proposal in Congress to change it in which PPS would lose um a lot of title $1 so Sierra and I spoke up a lot about that just because we know how important title $1 are in your district and what uh Services they provide to children so overall it was just a really great experience getting to be informed and then getting to take action alongside a friend of mine and hopefully bring about some positive change and secondly I'd like to congratulate Grant again just because it's a huge achievement for them uh these students have put in tremendous amounts of work especially during their second part of their senior year when others their um other students may not be working as hard these students have really fought for it and they deserve um to be the best in nation so overall thank you for your time join super saac thank you so much Mina right next we have public comment Miss Houston who do we have signed up yes we have three our first two speakers Dave Porter and Jamal Dar well Mr Porter has been here very often so I'll just briefly say please state your name for the record and as always you have three minutes and the yellow light goes on after two minutes thank you so much for being here Dave Porter p o r t r uh chair Atkins superintendent Smith members of the board and members of the public tonight I want step outside the educational Silo and place additional du language immersion programs in the context of Portland's economic future Portland's best economic future is to sell more goods and services abroad especially in the growing markets in Asia and around the Pacific Rim consider the chart Global competition is fierce with growing with growth shifting away from the US I think you have my written testimony Portland's challenge is to adap to this developing economic reality and become more of an internationally oriented City key to this adaptation is to develop a more multilingual Workforce with experiences in the important growing markets abroad I am not alone in seeing a more International future for Portland I am Distributing to each of you I think you have copies uh of greater Portland Global recently developed by greater Portland in the Portland development commission the Brooking institution JP Morgan Chase and others the report Begins the imperative to go global global engagement is not
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optional if Portland is to realize widely shared economic growth and prosperity it is imperative increased access to global markets and foreign investment is the most direct path for greater Portland to create and maintain a sufficient number of quality jobs to support the Region's growing population the need to embrace International markets is urgent 95% of the world's consumers live outside of the United States and 79% of global growth is projected to occur outside the US over the next 5 years at this early stage greater Global Link has not yet involved K5 school districts in this effort when they do they will want the development of a multilingual Workforce through the expansion of dual language immersion program greater Portland Inc is also in the midst of what they call a ground baking groundbreaking seven County two-state Economic Development partnership called greater Portland 2020 so I urge Portland Public Schools to become a part of their effort and to show what it can add thank you thank you very much superintendent Smith board member thank you for having me my name is Jamal Dar I'm executive director of nonprofit col Echo African Youth and Community organization um helping the Immigrant and refugees especially the Somali population as everyone knows here uh the emerging language were introduced last year we were working very hard with did with the um Michael beon and his Department um we have achieved and learned from one another very hugely not only individually but also with the community members with that said um we still have many gaps that we need to be achieved so if I want to share with you a little bit of his story about the organization what we've been doing it we noticed that our children children are facing so many challenge first time coming to the United States they they're not here to die in the streets to become gangs or to recruit by Al shab or extremist or Isis but they're here to have a life but they need a visioners someone who can help the mentor so we put together in a program that we were educa more not only for the Immigrant to Refugee but also the teachers couple of years ago at Jon Middle School we put together about 50 teachers including principal as and counselors with the 15 years old MTAR who's from Somalia he had two letters and he speak one was written in Somali one was written in English so he turned in front of the 50 uh Educators and he started speaking in Somali 5 minutes later he sat down everybody was kind of wandering around and you can hear the the noise of the womb and he stood up and he said obviously you guys don't understand you want me to explain that in English everybody was yes please those are the difficult that before he interpreted he said these are the difficulty that we Face coming to the your classrooms and I think that that was a one message that we want to send it to the teachers nevertheless the parents from back home they never seen any some sort of Education that parents are responsible it's always been teacher respons responsibility so we form education task force um task force and the council from within the somala community over more than 25 members and these are nine education task force who will be working very closely with the school district including the the board and have their proposals and their name is probably submitted by by upcoming week um but but then at the same time there's a two position that will identify for the Somali uh Community to support the program manager and then curriculum design we definitely want to encourage you not only to to make that decision but also to make that decision together and collectively with the community especially with those task force we appreciate and excited excited about the uh connection that we finally made together and again this is the new generation for last 20 years coming to the United States but we're learning in our way please be patient with us and definitely I want to recognize uh Melissa super attendance assistance and also at the same time uh Michel beon who is working very closely with us thank you for your time tonight wonderful thank you so much for your partnership and our last speaker is Greg Burl welcome Mr Burl oh good evening everybody good to be back my name is Greg Burl b r r i l l and I guess what I'd like to say first of all I feel honored to be part of such an uplifting program to um see some of the things that we're doing are uh heartwarming and this is good because
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today I came here just to thank you you know a lot of times I say critical things this is all about thanking you today I am assuming that we are all behaving with the best of intentions for our children at every level from custodian and secretary to senior advisors and our superintendent we are all doing the very best we can give and our resources this is the same as me saying to my students this is the first day of class you all have an a right now I thank you for doing the best you can with what you have been given the school board campaign can be contentious so I want each one of you listening including you at home to meditate on the fact that no one in our organization has the intention to harm our precious children be grateful for every good action and forgive every harmful action I believe that no one has bad intentions so today is not a day for me to speak about any problems in Portland Public Schools today I want to to share my vision for the future today I speak the intention that we are creating an organization capable of healing and forgiving uh each other and ourselves we are creating an organization that's capable of healing the perception of a toxic relationship between District staff and School staff the written material I'm sending you gives you um details about the process I'm thinking about but remember after the teacher's contract was settled I spoke about forgiveness it's really time to get serious about forgiving ourselves and each others forgiveness isn't easy though um if you need inspiration take it from those who forgive their children's murderers right I believe that without forgiveness there's not going to be progress I do a daily meditation and I affirm every day that I will act positively non-violently and inclusively I intend to be a demonstration of the principles that I live by I'm pledging to do what's mine to do in order to elect a new school board that will create a vision for PPS that will make it one of the best public school systems in the country I intend to continue to be a listener for two years I've listened to lots of people students parents teachers other education professionals but not all of them many people in our community do not feel heard by board and staff look around this room and think about those who are absent there almost no people here from Mexico Guatemala the Philippines Russia Ukraine Somalia Haiti or Pacific Islands almost no Asians no African-Americans and very few staff whose presence isn't required by our meeting agenda so I'm asking you now to put aside anything in your heart that gets in the way of the birth of the schools that our children deserve peace thank you very much so in that Spirit um in accordance with our contract with Portland Association of teachers um when requested we're very happy to welcome them to come and speak on our agenda so suzan Cohen vice president of p is going to join us now for some brief comments good evening Suzanne thank you good evening uh so tonight I'd like to talk a little bit about uh the high school schedule and I'm um As You Are probably aware uh we just uh want a grievance and one of the things that the arbitrator said is that our current high school schedule um is out of compliance and needs to be changed and if you need any background information I'd be happy to fill anyone in on this afterwards so P brought together groups of teachers and District representatives to develop schedules that would comply with the arbitrator's decision and also make teaching and learning better because is everyone agrees the current high school schedule um needs Improvement so in this subgroup there uh was a group for a five of seven team to look at that kind a modified five of seven block and another work group working on getting our current six of eight of schedule in compliance with the arbitrator's decision um just so you know a majority of teachers did prefer a modified five of seven block and it would meet um three other needs that I spoke about at a previous board meeting the first being our impending budget crisis with our Glide path and in becoming in compliance with the 1011 um school year also better would meet the state's requirements for having 80% of students um in compliance and also the teachers liked a modified five of seven because um they could see their students at least four times a week this way but a what we found out um was that we would get a six of8 schedule um and we found that out uh first from high school counselors who informed us that
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they had been told to uh schedule students for a six of eight schedule and then on April 2nd Brock Logan informed us that there would be a six of eight schedule and we heard some positive rumors but at this point they are rumors there won't be a skinny Monday there'll be more tutorial time um but what we also heard is that this work was going to be done without meaningful input input from Educators we were told that people not teachers were going to work on a draft schedule and that P could be one of several groups that would then be provided an opportunity to give feedback on this draft schedule um and that's basically the day our input has ended almost a month ago um we've been waiting since then to see a draft schedule and there's a lot of decisions that need to be made um contract exceptions part-time schedules if people want to reduce their um ft we have principles contacting us right now asking us about information so people just don't know what's going on teachers principls so um a first priority would be to please involve the people who know the schedule the best and will be most impacted by living it on a daily basis if that can't happen and a schedule is just going to be designed and imposed then go ahead and do that so at least we know what the schedule is and we can start planning um I don't think it's too late to collaborate with us and have input if that's what you'd like to do we that is our first choice um but either way I think at this point we need to know uh the schedule for next year so thank you for your time thank you very much all right so next on our agenda we have uh our vote on three Charter School renewals we've previously received information and discussed these items at our last meeting had presentations from the school so tonight we're purely voting on it unless there's any additional discussion from the board so the board will now consider resolution number 5073 resolution approving the request for the extension of the charter agreement with the Emerson Public Charter School do I have a motion so move director bile moves and director Regan seconds the motion to adopt resolution 5073 Miss Houston is there any CI citizen comment there is not and any board discussion all right all right so the board will now vote on resolution 5073 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes we oppose no and so great resolution 5073 is approved by vote of 5 to Zer with student representative Jaz wall voting yes wonderful congratulations Emerson next we're going to consider resolution number 574 which is a resolution approving renewal of the charter agreement with lemand imersion for the operation of Leman French immersion public charter school and do I again have a motion second all right director B moves and director Morton seconds the motion to adopt resolution 5074 any citizen comment none any board discussion all right hearing none the board will now vote on resolution 5074 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes and opposed so this resolution 5074 is also approved by vote of five to Z with student representative JZ voting yes wonderful congratulations to leand and then finally the board will consider resolution number 5075 which is a resolution approving renewal of the charter agreement with SEI for the operation of SEI Academy Public Charter School do I have a motion move director B moves second and director Regan seconds the motion to adopt resolution 5075 there's in comment none discussion none all right so now we'll vote on resolution 575 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes resolution 5075 is approved by vote of 5 to zero with student representative jzw voting yes all right congratulations seci well thank you again to Christen miles our our Charter Schools manager for all her great work and to all our charter schools for all their excellent work with our students so thank you all for your patience and hard work throughout this process we're excited to see this come to a conclusion for this year congratulations okay so next on agenda we have um step three complaint voting on a resolution so on March 30th 2015 the board voted to consider a step through complaint and then at our last meeting on April um 20th the board discussed the complaint so we do have a resol resolution that is based on the discussion but first I wanted um superintendent Smith to have the opportunity for any comments and I'm actually going to take the opportunity
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to walk us through the steps at our the discussion in our last um board meeting um suggested the confusion around what steps had actually occurred earlier in the complaint so I'm just going to walk through the the um entire complaint this is the first time and I acknowledge um miss horm last meeting she's the first person to actually take a complaint all the way through our new complaint process um and so I think just valuable for all of us to understand what happened all the way through um uh and then tonight where we're voting on The Resolution that is the board's resolution to um address the complaint so um again wanted to thank Miss Horn for working through the complaint process from start to finish and for your perseverance and hanging with us as we did this um uh so as I mentioned last week it's our first step three complaint with the new policy and administrative directive so on December 10th 2014 um the complt complainant filed her formal complaint under the complaint policy and Greg wallik the district's Title 9 coordinator was assigned to review that complaint the complaint at the time was about the different start times for boys and girls varsity games the complaint alleged that the 6:30 time slot when the girls played was not prime time and that the 8:00 time slot that the boys had was Prime Time the complaint alleged that this was a clear violation of Title 9 on January 13th 2015 U Mr wallik issued his report within a mutually agreed upon extension due to winter break so part of our complaint policy really has very established timelines at each um that everything occurs within so if we're going to be you know off by any amount of time then we mutually agree to the adjustment in the time frame days pardon as part of his in investigation Mr wallik reached out to the Oregon School Activities Association was told that any games after 6:00 are considered Prime Time In addition the OSAA title n guidance acknowledges that when determining compliance a district-wide program assessment is needed including opportunity to participate attracting media coverage playing in front of Spectators and developing a strong overall program because he found that the 6:30 game time did constitute Prime Time play and because of concerns regarding Spectators Mr wallik recommended that game times remain the same and that spectator attendants be counted and track to inform the 20156 scheduled development then on January 22nd the complaintant requested a review and writing by the superintendent pursuant to step two of the complaint resolution process I then designated Rudy Rudolph as the superintendant design for purposes of reviewing the step two request for review the complaintant raised a new concern regarding loss of instructional time for JV girls because of transportation and early starts while our process would normally require this additional concern to be addressed at step one so it would have to have started over and gone through the process I asked Miss rudol to go ahead and investigate the loss of instructional time as part of the complaint on February 20th I issued my response to the step two request for review as part of her review Mrs Miss Rudolph had again reached out to OSAA and other athletic directors from across the state and Washington again miss Rudolph determined that the 6:30 start times did constitute prime time she recommended that for the 20156 season the district pilot a different schedule of girls varsity playing the later time slot for two games and keeping track of attendance she also recommended that high schools needed to ensure that their bus schedules did not disproportionately require any early dismissal of any team ikenberg concurred with both of those recommendations on March 9th the complaintant then requested an appeal by the board uh of Education in addition to the issues of prime time slots and loss of instructional time the complaintant also raised concerns regarding the pil showcase which this past year was only open to boy teams this last issue was not investigated as part of the complaint the board determined that they would accept the appeal of accept the appeal on March 30th um of the superintendent's decision and then on April 20th the board discussed the substance of the appeal at that meeting in the meantime the basketball coaches and athletic directors have been meeting to finalize the schedule for next year there were four major concerns that they were trying to address some of those that were raised as part of the complaint and some that were not number one having games scheduled on Tuesday Thursday and Friday instead of traditional Tuesday and Friday caused confusion for coaches and parents number two four game stack nights one game after another were problematic with the boys varsity Starting Games very late because of number three because of three game weeks students missed instructional time this disproportionately affected the JV girls basketball teams and number four low attendance for the girls games the proposed recommendations for the 201516 schedule are the following number one Tuesday nights single gender games where each gender plays together as a program and both varsity teams play at 7:30 at opposite sites two Friday nights will be the same
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thing except that for four games per season we will have a three stack schedule with two late boys varsity games and two late girl Varsity games per site number three bus schedules will be developed in collaboration with the athletics department to ensure that there's not a disproportionate loss of instructional time number four we already planning for showcase events for both girls and boys basketball teams and beginning in 20156 every pil Varsity Sport will have a Showcase Event so again address went ahead and address the concern the schedule both addresses the concerns raised in the complaint as well as by the coaches and athletic departments so I think mostly what I wanted to demonstrate there is just the complexity of um attention to the complaint all the complaint process all the way through and people engaging to to work to address the substance of the complaint over to you thank you so much so the board will now consider resolution number 576 a resolution in response to step three complaint do I have a motion move second okay director Morton Mo and director bile seconds the motion to adopt resolution 5076 Miss Houston do you have any public comment we do have one Allison horn welcome Miss Horn come on down you were here earlier for the three-minute piece and you've been here before so welcome back glad you're here okay uh thanks for letting me be here again as I sit here tonight on day 139 and reflect Back to December when I filed the complaint I thought it was a pretty simple question would the participants in both the boys and girls basketball programs accept as fair and Equitable the overall program of the other in other words would it be okay for the JV boys team to play all of its stacked games at 3:45 or 4 would it be okay for the JV boys to miss a disproportionate amount of instructional time because of when their games were scheduled would it be okay for the boys varsity team to play all of their stacked games at 5:45 or 6:30 and would it be okay for the boys to be excluded from the pil showcase when the answers were so clearly no as it was with the 201415 schedule I thought it would be a no-brainer I expected that the administration would review the schedule see the obvious issues that it created then take prompt and effective steps to eliminate the Discrimination prevent from reoccurring and as appropriate remedy its effects and with almost one month prior to the start of the regular season in January I actually thought that change would happen in the 20145 season fast forward 4 months and 18 days later despite stonewalling all the way through the complaint process that there wasn't a problem wasn't an issue and even after being directed by the board to implement an equitable schedule in 20156 the administration is still trying to spin the facts in the April 24th memo the administration submits that they are thrilled with their progress that they are now looking into practice schedules that they are already planning to incorporate pil showcase events for boys and girls since this was the first year of the reestablished P there was no longstanding practice or history to contend with it was a clean slate the administration had every opportunity to create an equitable schedule from the start instead the administration created the 20145 schedule ignored repeated concerns and complaints refused to knowledge the issues that were repeatedly brought to their attention and systematically refused to take any action to remedy the situation until the Board of Education directed them to do so up to that point throughout the entire complaint process administrator after administrator failed to acknowledge the schedule as the issue as a result the steps proposed by the tit on line coordinator investigator superintendent to address the issue were simply insufficient it's not about counting the number of Spectators it's not about a two- game pilot schedule it's not about evaluating the bus schedules the issue is about creating a schedule that provides equal opportunities for all student athletes and of course since Athletics is another part of the education system the issues are broader and more complex than just the basketball schedule which is why I am so grateful that the board has directed an audit for the entire Athletics program and so on day 139 I am grateful to the board of education for taking action to ensure that all students will have equal opportunities to benefit from Sports thank you thank you very much all right all right so is there any board discussion on resolution 5076 um I will just point out that we have a revised version and Rosanne is there is this version available up in the back for folks okay great so um the revised version has on the resolved number one at the very beginning um I'll just read what's the addition it's um resolve number one the complainant raised concerns under Title Nine the board takes the obligations under Title Nine extremely seriously and agrees with the concerns raised by the complainant the board therefore directs the superintendent and it goes on from there with the original version so the
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direction is to implement the schedule that's been created by the athletics department for the 20156 year as described by superintendent Smith earlier um and addressing the um not having the disproportionately requireed early dismiss or only loss of instructional time and then the third res resolved is that the board directs the um audit committee to include an audit of Athletics as part of the work plan for the performance auditor so I'll so any discussion or comments before we vote uh director Regan so I am uh very grateful uh Miss Horn for you bringing this forward and I'm grateful to the board for responding the way we have um I'm looking at the Board of Education directs the audit committee to include an audit and I'm trying to figure out exactly where that came from um because I believe that we typically ask the audit committee to consider an audit and as as part of a broader conversation so if we want to direct this I want to make sure that we have funding to do a potential fourth audit so I just want to be clear that that might be a possibility so typically with the audit committee when we're looking at audit suggestions we get recommendations from all of the board members and some staff principes teachers whoever it might be and we come forward with a whole list of potential um audit recommendations for the year so what I'm a little bit concerned about is US locking in one when we haven't even had the discussion yet um so as long as we understand that if we are directing an audit of Athletics as part of this that it might be a forth AIT I'm happy with it so I just want to make that I guess from my perspective it wouldn't predetermine the number I think it's been pretty clear that everyone on the board wanted this audit to be included in that so I don't think we can predetermine the final number but well we have a budget for the audit committee I want to make sure that the budget would accommodate a four but thank you for pointing out that that's that's a potential trade-off with other topics but to me it was so I just want to make sure that we all understand that we may be doing a fourth audit so or we may not be able to depending on the budget I think well that's a decision we'll have to make so thank you for pointing out that there's a potential off here I I don't know what the list is going to be or when it's when we're going to see it well it's it's unusual for the board to direct an audit without a little bit more discussion I think just this reflects your discussion at the last meeting you can either include it or not include it I thought it was going to be a recommendation that we look at this in in that context so you could revise it to reflect it differently if you would like to well I think we want to ask the audit committee to consider it as part of our audit schedule next year it may be Again part of part of what we do when we look at audits is we we come up with ideas and then we narrow those down as a board is typically what we do and then when we have the auditor with us the auditor will come through and we say oh my God that audit's so big it's going to chew up the entire budget or that audit's something that we could really handle with a review instead or an expedited process or something so all I want to do is just make sure that we understand that there's some flexibility built in here and the possibility that if there are other uh audits that come up as higher um in terms of you know educational vision for the district or something that um that we would include this but understand that it might be in addition to some of the other things so that's all and I'd say fair enough I I just again ultimately the board is the one to decides what the audit topics are going to be and we've made it pretty clear we want this to be one so I mean appreciate having the audit committee come back to us with a full list but well and I have to say I'm not sure what a audit of the athletic AIT of Athletics even means I mean I guess I had figured that we would look at an audit of our Title 9 compliance so as part of this complaint it would make more sense to me to look at Title 9 so it's just the way it's written um I have some concerns it's not that I don't want to be moving forward with this discussion I just have some concerns the way it's written I don't know what an audit Athletics means I this was a title n complaint I think that's what the audit committee would come back to us with the detail on all we're giving here is the ction that this is something that we would like to have the audit committee I mean yeah I mean I I think we're all agreeing on the flexibility and that we're going to the audit commit is going to examine this once we have the performance auditor on board and figure out the parameters and scope and come back so um director yeah no yeah I know Steve sorry direct bu go ahead um I like having an AIT the athletic department but I also like having included in that same audit very likely an audit of other programs that we have to make sure we have Equity with
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males and females within the school district I'm not we're doing GTE and so forth coming forward we've got various other things that I think we need to look at with that so I think that this it be great to send this to the audit committee and then have them bring it back to the board with a with their suggestion better than doing here I have to agree with Bobby about the audit of Athletics I'm not sure exactly what that is we could shake that out I guess but I I'd like to see it broader than that and I'd like to also thank Miss Horn for coming forward on this and and even though we wouldn't allow anybody ask questions of her last week which I felt was an abomination of was actually in courance with our policy but I know you I know an abomination of a of uh our uh process here at the school board but I've been through those before it's just another one but I I'd certainly like to see an amendment on this that would Senate the audit committee say yeah let's audit Athletics but do we want to include anything else in an audit I think rather than we need to discuss it someplace I'm willing to discuss this in link tonight more than happy to so what I would suggest colleagues is that ra that we just replace the word include with explore and that that allows us to have the process that um director is chair of committee descries will that work for everybody okay thank you all right so with that um the board will now vote any for I'm sorry any further discussion or yeah director Val I'll just say I um I was trying to be clear at the last meeting that I do think it includes Athletics it might also include something like um Athletics to me also incl includes how they are with cheer support or so there might be other things so I don't want I just want to be clear that my saying yes to the amended resolution doesn't mean that in any way I'm backing off like good I actually don't mind you could come to a list of 20 fantastic audits this is going to be one that I consistently vote for so however comes up yeah I think it's a good one okay okay so okay so now the board will vote on resolution 5076 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes no opposed all right resolution 5076 is approved by vote of 5 to zero with student representative jazal voting yes all right thank you very much to everybody and look forward to moving forward and making some progress on this issue and thank you to all our awesome athletes especially the young women who are here and waited all through a long evening we have a few more hours to go if you'd like to hang out but thank you so much go do your homework you're right and rest up for your next game thank you so much all right okay so next on the agenda we have a quarterly update from our workload committee this is just one of the many topics on the board's annual work plan so superintendent Smith would you like to introduce this item would so Sean Murray who's our chief Human Resources officer Brock Logan director of Labor Relations and Suzanne Cohen vice president of the Portland Association of teachers will give us an update on the workload committee good evening superintendent Smith board members of sham Murray Chief Human Resources officer as part of the 2013 2016 collective bargaining agreement between the district and the pp Pat a workload committee has been established to consider options for eliminating aspects of current workload for professional Educators the workload committee is comprised of P members and District administrators that meet and review workload concerns and for recommendations to assistant superintendent of school performance for consideration this is the first fourth quarterly update provided to the board this year the meetings uh the committee meetings take place twice a month generally the first Wednesday of each month from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and the third Thursday of each month from 400 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. the next workload committee meeting is scheduled for May 6 2015 at this time I will turn it over to two of our workload committee members Brock Logan who is our director of Labor Relations and Suzanne Cohen who is a vice president for Pat oh excuse me and also Carol Campbell who as the uh principal for Grant High School is here also as a member of the workload committee just so just quickly add um other than what's in the memo that came with it we have um I just wanted to give an up to
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date uh we have the uh request for review form that individual Educators can fill out to have their workload requests concerned or considered and to date we've had approximately 50 of those and I say approximately we've had 47 of them that have been submitted on our online form but while we're getting that up and running we had I can't remember now if it was some in the neighborhood of three to six that had come in on paper that we've considered um and so two of those are new since the last uh committee meeting and we're still working on them I'm sorry and is is that for fiscal year ending 15 it's not looking forward for next year yet is that correct that's just for current F those are the requests that have come in since the committee got up and running total yes right so I would say that might uh be the first uh issue the workload committee is having is a little bit of a workload we have our own um some of it is that just managing the data base and we there could be some changes in that we also don't have any sort of um Administrative Assistant um services and so the the process from receiving a form making sure we're communicating back tracking our recommendation where it is is it um happening um is definitely been a little problematic and difficult especially as more of more of these come in because sometimes you know we we try one thing or we're investigating and then we have to revisit so we could definitely use some support in um that department um uh our committee had basically like two charges um in our contract and I think we're doing a really good job of one of them but we need to work on the other one so one is reviewing workload requests from Individual members and I think we've um that's exactly what we've been spending our time doing um the other is looking more at Big Picture issues and considering options for eliminating current workload and offsetting new workload created by um new mandates and we really haven't gotten to do a lot of uh big picture stuff uh most of our individual workload requests um are from kindergarten teachers either uh students with special needs or safety issues a lot of special ed case load issues class size uh Synergy support um and then one um problem we've had is a little lapse in um implementation with some of our decisions especially around educational assistance so our committee will recommend um a hiring of an EA that gets approved and then I think due to a couple different problems that EA um maybe still doesn't exist um one of those Pro one of it might be in terms of communication and and streamlining that process so the administrator understands that you know they need to hire from the pool I think there's also been a shortage in Avil availability to hire educational assistance um so in many of the cases where we've recommended none actually got hired or they're still trying now um next year we we do um have a recommendation to start the year off with a a pool of six educational assistants to kind of offset this so that we could place them in our most dire workload situation needs and we have a subcommittee that's kind of looking at like what would be the best place to start this off so when we removed them for where workload issues came up um it was done with the least disruption in in a way that's fair um we've also dealt with some issues that really have um not a solution that the workload committee can take on um one of the biggest ones has been a workload issue from Lincoln High School due to overcrowding I think our committee completely agreed that it was a workload issue because the teachers don't have a space to go to to do their prep work um so we kind of did try to explore some options like renting a space across the building or what but it it that's just the problem that our committee is not ready to take on also just we've had um the lack of subs for educational assistance or teachers or anything has not been really an issue that the workload committee has set up to take on we've also had some um budget implementation issues when we voted and you matched to um fund uh principal Consolidated funds that was a way to reach and alleviate workload for many of our members but there's certain groups that we still have not figured out a way to give any workload relief um money to um special ed special programs special schools Head Start um so I think in the the future moving forward it would be good to look at more big system stuff and and make recommendations in that department and we haven't we have some new cases that we haven't really been looked at around um new mandates from the state and what can we do to offset those workload like it's been uh a good experience working in partnership with P so Suzanne and I have had the opportunity to work
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together which is which has been great so I've appreciated that and hearing um hearing about problems in the elementary schools um with overcrowding and the workload issue that some of the kindergarten first grade teachers are experiencing was really eye openening as well so I appreciated the opportunity any questions questions for minutes director bu how much of the million dollars have you spent so far I would assume I don't know that we can answer that because the problem hiring the EAS which has probably been the biggest expense is while it was funded in some cases quite some time ago we haven't hired anybody so we haven't spent that money and I know that we have I think at least two of the E that are in place now um I know we had situation where one where the job was offered to somebody and they declined it so that was the problem in filling it so I can't tell you to the dollar what we spent so far the the difficulty that I'm having with the workload committee is the timeline I mean it's almost may I would assume that the workload committee would have gotten workload help out there in uh the end October versus November at the latest I I don't know what's causing that hold up I I mean uh I I I know you had to organize so next year do you think the timeline will move up to the 1st of November when we can get I mean it it doesn't do much good to help somebody with the workload when they've had it all year and we're now in domain and we're still trying to figure out how to hire uh EAS which don't take a EAS don't take a certificate or anything do they they do require um to be highly qualified so you have to to be an EA you have to have what what do you have to have I believe it's two years of college or or an associates degree or there's a test I believe you can pass and we can't find people with two years of college or can pass a test I mean I I don't it just seems to me like the timelines and I realized it was brand new this year and it was great I mean I it was one of the things that I looked at coming out of the contract CU this is wonderful uh this is great we're going to get some help out there with our teachers and we still got a lot of problems and it's and we're looking at more things coming in and it's almost may I for me it just doesn't seem like yeah it's been a nice thing to do but G timeline wise it just didn't maybe we should have met every day or something or I don't know I mean can you help me with with that somebody I don't know what I can say director bu is that to par phrasee Suzanne it's a it's the workload committee it's not the workload Department we don't have a staff we don't have everybody who comes to that committee has their job that they do is in the HR department in charge of helping the workload committee I mean isn't that to staff we got a workload committee we got all these people coming together and we have nobody who's assigned to help them isn't wouldn't that be the HR department assigned to help that workload committee or so director buau yes the HR department is helping the staff the workload committee however in regards to the timing of getting positions filled and so forth you know first the workload committee had to start up in terms of how they were going to address workload issues I figur that's a Slowdown this year right that won't be next year right additionally in terms of dealing with the pool of EAS I mean essentially EAS were hired for the year the workload committee came with recommendations later on I mean essentially we were already in a process of starting to look at hiring teachers I mean essentially so next year the workload committee has recommended a pool of EAS which we'll be prepared to address did they have how much money have we spent out of the million dollars this year does the HR department know that I don't have the figure off the top of my head as Brock indicated earlier we have we have positions that have been allocated uh but we haven't been able to fill some of those positions but we can get those numbers to you uh next week you got a guess I don't like guessing director B I can provide that information to you and give you factual information can we have that in the board meeting provided at the board meeting next week we can get a written report to the board okay that would be good I appreciate that I'm not I'm not trying to be real negative because this is a wonderful thing but it is almost May and we have all these teacher we I mean the the major complaint by the Portland Association that teachers down the line from my point of view when we spent 10 months arguing with them and and so forth and so forth and barking the major complaint was was workload problems and so it's May can I offer two two things one was I've been at almost all of the workload committee meetings and there
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you they're you know they're three-hour meetings and in the beginning we didn't have a lot of workload requests because people didn't know about the process and we were you know getting the forms together and and kind of figuring out what what it would look like for this committee to make a decision around placing someone additionally in a classroom or in a building um so there there's that piece it took us it took once we got P did some reach out to members and uh sent the link to the forms and then all of a sudden we're inundated with a lot a workload request and each request it's not simply we discuss it and make a decision some require some investigation and research and data so if a teacher asks for support then we sometimes have to go back and in between that meeting and our next meeting and people in the committee take on the responsibility of getting the data so is this is this um is this typical for a first grade classroom for the teacher to have this many students and one EA and this many specialed students and some of them are really super specific like this teacher has three students that haven't been di or haven't been tested yet and they require some additional support and we have to go back and find out well are they are they going to be tested or is this in the work so a lot of that stuff took I think next year will be more streamlined definitely but the process is process just lends itself to sometimes it does take a little time so maybe they need to take and hire use some of that million dollars to hire a person to go out and help with the investigation and to help with putting it all together I well I agree with suzan some clerical that make that would make us that would make some sense to me you know pay somebody 50,000 70,000 to that million to go out there and and answer those questions you want the first dollars out of this to be spent on Administration that's intended evidently that appears to me to be what almost we need to be doing maybe a consultant sometimes when you have sometimes administrators are pretty good we have a guy who runs the the all the uh finance and we have a superintendent maybe we need an administrator in this case sometimes maybe you don't need them but in this case maybe maybe we need somebody great thank you any other comments director m i so I I do actually agree with a a bunch of what director bule is say um I've the I think I don't know if this is our third is this our third presentation from fourth presentation um and each time I'm I'm kind of left hoping that there was more and a part of it was uh and I don't want to you know I'm not casting this versions I'm not um suggesting that this is not a a challenge certainly um but I am I I similarly felt like this was an option opportunity for us as a district to work closely with our um with our teachers union to discuss clearly and and create definitions around how to how to address workload concerns within our schools and uh and I know it takes time um but I'm also impatient about that um and uh and hoping that we can um you know perhaps I don't know what we can do to light a fire and to say we need to we need to expedite this a little bit more we need to put either some more effort to it or find um I don't I don't know what the Optics would be to uh to identify um someone to to work for the workload committee uh I I'm not sure that's the message we want to deliver but we got to we got to do something um and I think I think May is too late I really do I think we should have been been addressing these issues earlier in the year and I don't need an explanation I just wanted to to share that as a as a comment I guess I I just want to say that uh there is a lot to highlight that the workload committee has accomplished that's been really wonderful um despite the individual cases and I think had we been able to hire EAS I mean when the teachers first got the call many many months ago that they were getting one it seemed like a great workload relief I think in our funds um report there should probably be two like what we intended to spend and what we've actually spent um but there are many things to highlight and I would also say we did approach some system problems that seem to be getting resolved in the future budget and that was maybe one of the bigger systems things I mean having someone from the special education department when so money workload forms were around sped and they were able to investigate or maybe deal with them right away before it even needed to come to the committee and then I think resolving that need for set aside money for this bed Department next year so that that didn't have to come out of the workload um committee I think all of those were worthwhile I I know we're scoffing at the idea that the workload committee might need to hire someone but I don't think it's someone that needs to work full-time but we're a committee of 10
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that all have a fulltime and then some jobs and I'm familiar with committees like that yeah and um but I mean there's um a system of note taking and correspondence and filing and and we've taken on a lot of that ourselves in data and recordkeeping and I mean it's started slow when we were creating systems and it worked out but as we started getting 10 to 20 cases to review you know at a meeting it really um it the the clerical part be is becoming overwhelming and I imagine that'll keep going not all our cases are resolved many are still investigation so we've added new columns but I you know I just don't want to make light of the fact that we are um struggling with that piece thank you and I would also point you know in the memo it does talk about two kind of bigger so one was talked about is the pool of 68 also um we had made the committee had come up with a recommendation for addressing substitutes for campus monitors and educational assistance and that is being addressed in the budget you also heard um some conversation about Synergy support you may remember that a previous report we suggested that the board require whenever anybody comes forward with a new whether it's a technology upgrade or anything like that that a part of that project include what is the training what is the plan for training and addressing the work both of immediate implementation and then also ongoing because obviously you know the workload implications of learning a new system the first year are greater than they are carrying out that system over time but that those be addressed as part of the project so that it doesn't come up as this afterthought of okay great we got this brand new system in and it's working it's great except people still have to work out the bugs and figure out how to in the case of synergy put grades in different and some some several other things so there are some of the big picture items um and I would just add that what doesn't maybe come out in these reports and can't necessarily is that these committee meetings are of and actually I would call them fun believe it or not um and and I would say the meetings are productive we have really good discussion and we are working really well together so there is this piece of you know once we make a decision let's do this figuring out how do we make this happen um and we're still working through those bugs and we may need some help but uh this is a good committee we're doing good work and having great conversations great director Reagan so I had two questions I wanted to ask about um the first is as the committee made the recommendation the district hold to pool a six centrally allocated FTE that's for the go forward budget right and we have that in there yes so those funds will not come out of the $1 million allocated for this committee next year so to me that's a really big deal that this committee accomplished is I understanding I think there's two different things so um in the the PPS uh general or forget which budget um there's the The Substitute pool of five EAS which we may argue um is not enough right but then from the workload committee we are making a recommendation that um we have six EAS hired with workload funds that we can use to provide like roving support and kind of um it's our attempt to troubleshoot the issue we've had this year where we wanted to hire six EAS and and have two at this point but you go ahead and hire them at the GetGo and we hold the pool so that we're to be responsive when issues come up so those would be an addition to the five ande budget then and then we would so out of the million that you'll have for next year you'll be hiring we'll be hiring six six EAS right at E from that from the get so that's great okay so that was one of the things um so that I mean to me seems like huge progress I mean from what I can tell um so the other thing is um a few months ago you all recommended uh or you put out into the field 600 uh 300,00 ,000 uh to increase Consolidated budgets for principles and we matched that so that was 600,000 that went out into the field for Consolidated budget so again that was another big a big deal for schools my question is in your current budget go forward is that 600,000 still in that so have we increased the Consolidated budget for principles by that amount going forward or it's in the so we had the budget proposal in two parts actually in three parts so um and it uh that is in the part three so if in fact the state goes to 7.5 billion then the um doing the the same level of increase to the Consolidated budgets is included in in in the budget I'm hopeful that we'll actually get there so okay okay any other director B I just want to say thank you for your work um and I appre appreciate the dialogue even here tonight because often times we hear of complaints of this workload why can't somebody fix it somebody just address it and you've been wrestling with all the data that needs to be collected about figuring out
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whether it's an anomaly is this something that's normal is this something systemwide should we be looking at that there are a lot of challenges to go into trying to figure out whether or not that's a workload issue so I appreciate the difficult discussion I too would love to and it sounds like you all would love to have more people in the field already um and the challenges that come with that the fact of the matter is is I get to work with districts across the county um and there is a hiring shortage that people are looking for qualified teachers and educational assistance that um people for whatever reason um probably because of the recession earlier um found other jobs so there aren't a lot of folks just sitting out there looking for education jobs so I appreciate the discussion I appreciate the work I'm glad to hear that you're feeling it's a positive and that you're surfacing the issues that need to be brought because I do think that that was the intent or the hope for for this group so that we wouldn't wind up um hearing about them some some other time and being surprised by them so thanks director bu I just hope that what money we don't spend this year will carry over to this group next year right so next year could be 1.2 million if they only spend 800,000 it actually doesn't so we don't do the the things that carry over from one budget you're the next are primarily capital projects or like purchases that you that aren't specific to a year like where would the money go there if they we had a mill we had a million dollars budgeted for them this year here's what I'll tell you everybody would want to carry over any money they don't spend from one year to the next so like we're really clear about what we have clear guidelines about what things carry over they have a million dollars again budgeted for next year so where is that 200,000 that they it goes into our ending fund balance goes where into our ending fund balance so essentially into our beginning fund balance for next year so next year we could move it then at the start of the Year 200,000 back in here to continue the to because they should have $2 million other two years not a not a million not 1.8 million I mean that was our agreement there are many people who would love us to apply that logic to their budgets and let us carry about their other budget but but I'm applying yes could you bring it up next year and say you want to add additional money to it I'm applying that logic to the to the contract that we did with the teachers I'm not applying it to somebody up here in this building or somebody out in a school district but I'm applying it to the contract we did which is totally different than any other budgeting thing we would do that I can see I don't know why it wouldn't carry over it would seem to me to carry over for sure pie is not addressed in the collective parking agreement the million dollars is so if they didn't spend a million this year they still had the money to spend on workload that's why I look at it and so you got to million you go a million million how three-year contract million million million was the contract so if you go a million then you don't spend it part of that should go million the next year then you should spend that because you got $3 million under the contract that so two one is there's nothing in the contract that addresses funding for the workload committee that was a budget issue not a collective bargaining issue and even if we we're in the third we're we're going to be entering the the third year so because when we got the contract done this year was the second year of the three-year agreement but uh don't isn't that isn't the million dollar in there contractually isn't it written into the contract million dollars a year isn't that written in no actually negotiations the p uh rejected that concept so so there was no money set aside in the contract for this committee correct so where did they get the million dollars we just out of kindness gave it to them we bud kind of gave them to him because we thought it was a good idea so next year we could give them none is that how we're interpreting the contract saying it's in the budget this is to totally confusing to me I'm I'm totally confused so we put a we did put a million dollars in the budget for the workload committee okay but that wasn't contractual it was not so we just did out of the goodness of our hearts yeah yeah wasn't an agreement with the teachers the agreement was the workload I I only brought the second page of the workload contract that highlighted our charges so I can't respond to this right now I don't know so I just thank you and I yeah I don't know specifically either we'll we'll get you the workload language and it seems like just to to wrap up I mean a Lessons Learned and step you know looking forward would be would be great I just want to say how much I appreciate and how um just inspiring it is to see this group be so um collegial and collaborative if that was the intent and to see it even though there's may be CH challenges along the way but just to see that happening in spirit of the group and what you've accomplished and and what you're doing together is really great so that's was one of the great things that came out of the contract settlement and I'm looking
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forward to seeing the good work continue so thank you so much I just add to like I think part of the concept we had coming out of bargaining was that this was going to be about being able to be responsive quickly which is the million dooll um idea um but it was also about doing problem solving when things came up that didn't necessarily have a monetary thing like could we could collectively come up with other ideas about how you solve issues and be more responsive and make recommendations to the budget which you have and which are now reflected in the budget so in terms of um and where you did come up with things like the add to the Consolidated budgets which allow at a building level for the building to be more responsive to things that are occurring individually in in buildings that also leveraged an investment from the board I mean those are all I think significant different kinds of ability to be responsive to issues we identifying the schools in a way that we were not doing prior to having the committee so I just want to appreciate you for the multifaceted ways you've come out the work so thank you thanks working all that so I'd also um appreciate it superintendent if you would survey the principles on the $600,000 that uh was allocated in terms of additional uh consolidated funds because the impression I had was that that made a huge difference um in individual buildings and specifically around workload issues at individual buildings and so if that's not in the go forward budget um I think we might want to consider that so I guess I I would like to understand how those funds were used at the individual building level you know at I'm not asking for you know but globally how are those funds used and uh should we be looking at uh increasing that General amount in term because it it seems like this committee is trying to address you know onz twz issues you haven't really gotten to the broader questions but at the building level it seemed like that gave our principles a real opportunity to address some of the issues quickly um and so it may be that over time you know that's the direction we move in I don't know um but I I would like to have more information on how the funds were used kind of globally and that's a good teup for our budget discussions over the next couple meetings so great so I was gonna say I would appreciate that because that was something that I always meant to do was follow up and just kind of make sure the funds were being used to relieve uh workload and I didn't get around to doing that um so I've definitely heard some great stories and real collaboration and then we've also gotten a few concerns um like you know was this how to use the money to leave workload so but I mean I didn't have any official dat data to follow up with that and see the effectiveness of that well thank you all some than you all so much for your work and for all those hours of meetings we really appreciate it on top of all the work that you already do every day in your day jobs thank you so much thank you so next we have a pretty I think quick and straightforward item we had um discussed last week a resolution just stating our support of the safe routes to school program which we is one of our great partners and and they're advocating for additional funding and we wanted to support that effort so the board will now consider resolution number 5077 resolution in support of safe routes to schools program do I have a motion director Borton moves and director uh bule second the motion to adopt resolution 5077 any public comment no any discussion hearing none the board will now vote on resolution 5077 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes no opposed or exstension so resolution 5077 is approved by vote of 5 to0 with student representative JZ well voting yes all right thank you and yay safe routes to schools okay so next on our agenda we have a long agenda tonight but we are moving along we have um on page 18 of our business agenda we have resolution 5078 which has been submitted by the um audit committee it's a audit of administrative compensation and before we consider the resolution I wanted to give superintendent Smith the opportunity to offer her comments which I would love to do so um and this has been a topic of conversation um both amongst the board and some of the broader community and part of the campaign dialogue so um I wanted to weigh in before the resolution so I believe that third party performance review or performance audit of our compensation procedures and practices would be of value at this particular moment in time I am particularly interested in having a third party provide guidance regarding
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the aspects of job classification and compensation processes that are part of the ongoing management responsibility of the superintendent and her staff and the aspects that should be part of the governance and oversight responsibility of the board in my role as superintendent I'm charged with management of the district I believe that in individual compensation offers compensation adjustments and job reclassifications are part of the ongoing management of the district and are as such the responsibility of the superintendent and the human resources staff I welcome the guidance of a third party on this matter since conducting a third-party performance review or performance audit will take some time to complete I also wanted to provide my perspective as well as let you know what documents are and have been available online regarding this issue two years ago as we were preparing to hire a new chief Human Resources officer we conducted a thirdparty review of our human resources functions to inform our onboarding of the new Chief Human Resources officer and provide him with a foundation for building a strategic plan for the Department one of the areas identified in that review as needing immediate attention was Employee classification and compensation 18 months ago we hired a classification and compensation specialist she has been charged with bringing internal alignment to our compensation system as well as improving the market comparability for our position positions during the recession our constrained budget have had a differential impact on each of our employee groups exacerbating the issues in our compensation structure we have collective bargaining agreements with six different employee groups as well as a group of non-represented employees we have posted on our website the salary adjustments for all of our represented employee groups District leadership and non-represented employees dating back to the 20089 fiscal year over this 7-year period period some of our represented groups received either steps cost of living increases or both steps and colas throughout this time during the same time period our non-represented employees and District leaders received far more conservative salary adjustments as opportunity allowed and up to 10 Furlow days during this time while we were cutting our budget and laying off staff I prioritized students and teachers I made a decision as superintendent to not accept salary increases I also froze the salary of my executive team in a year with our most dramatic budget reductions our building administrators central office staff and executive team all took between 3 to 10 Furlow days and the corresponding 1.3 to 3.85% reduction in compensation in order to prioritize Direct Services to students the board was well aware of this it was publicly visible in the budget as well as highly publicized I'm proud of this decision not a single student lost a day of instruction not a single teacher lost a day of salary and budget after budget as we made significant reductions to current service levels the superintendent and the board expressed appreciation and gratitude to the groups of employees who sacrificed to maintain services to students and reduce the need for layoffs of our staff we are one of the only districts in the state of Oregon that was able to maintain a full school year for students during this period it was not the intention of the superintendent nor do I believe that it was in intention of the board that these employees would continue to be undercompensated on an ongoing basis as the economy began to recover as local unemployment rate has fallen and the economy has improved the disparities between our salaries and those of our Market competitors have only exacerbated our challenges to attract and retain a highquality Workforce we've lost top talent to surrounding private companies for example Nike cambia Health Northwest education Associates to nonprofits to government for example the O Oregon Department of Education in Mal County and to other school districts most notably Vancouver Washington who are able to offer attractively higher compensation for similar positions we've offered positions to candidates that require them to take a significant pay cut in order to accept a position with PPS for example tret in the city of Portland some of them some of them have been able to take the cut and say Yes others were unable to do so and we've lost the opportunity to add top talent to our organization we've also had posted positions remain open for long periods of time due to compensation that is too low to attract the skill level and experience necessary for the position as you know we are also experiencing compression in the compensation system with salary ranges for job classifications that should be aligned for supervisory and career path purposes colliding in some cases accepting a promotion with more responsibility would result in only a minimal increase reducing our ability to create a pipeline for agressive leadership opportunity within our own system over the past two years and represented in the last two budgets were changes to the building Administrator salary structure that began to improve our market comparability and address the
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compression issues with teacher compensation due to the fact that teachers received steps and colas during a period that administrators did not the salary proposal for license administrators included in this year's budget would bring our licensed administrators up to the 75th percen of our comparison Market these are included in the superintendent's budget me budget proposal which is posted online as adjustments were made to licensed administrator positions we needed to address the compression for senior directors who supervise principles this is a progressive leadership position with an increased scope of responsibility that we want our building leaders to Aspire to the compensation needs to reflect that executive level positions that have been frozen for most of the recession were adjusted this past year to regain internal alignment all of these adjustments have been within established ranges for those job classifications which are posted online and within the compensation rollup costs identified in the budget one new hire was offered compensation outside the established range for the job classification finally the key to the success of any organization is in the people who are part of it at Portland Public Schools we are fortunate to have extraordinary staff who work in all parts of our organization both in our schools and supporting our schools our compensation must value both of those groups we have people who have been extremely loyal in their service to our students and our district through thick and thin throughout their professional careers I want to again Express gratitude and appreciation to our staff who through years of budget reductions sacrificed to maintain our services to students maintain a full school year and reduce layoffs we still have significant work ahead of us to establish a compensation system that does what we need it to do attract and retain high quality staff in all parts of our district I welcome a third-party performance review or performance audit as one of the tools that helps to direct our efforts as well is to bring Clarity to the governance role of the board and the management role of the superintendent and her staff in this area thank you thank you very much superintendent Smith All right so um the board will now consider resolution number 5078 audit of administrative compensation do I have a motion um so moved director Regan moves and is there a second second and director bu seconds the motion what page are we on 18 18 uh Miss houon is there any public comment there is not so board discussion so um director kler uh so first of all I appreciate your comment and I've been uh letting my board colleagues know that you have been wanting to have an audit done so I appreciate all of your comments it's great and I think that this amendment is brought forward in that same vein so um director kler uh a couple of weeks ago brought forward a audit recommendation a resolution for an audit um and what this board basically said was it would make more sense for audit recommendation to come from the audit committee um and so we took that back to the audit committee and had a a very long discussion um last week um so that's what this is reflecting here so the audit Committee of the board um includes three board members at this point it's Pam nolles uh Steve and myself um and two community members um right now the two community members have not yet been voted on but they're both full-time Auditors uh one is a performance auditor one is more of a financial auditor um so Carrie guy and Pedro nunz um so we looked at the uh the uh suggested draft um that had been passed by um some public Auditors um just to make sure it was in line with what we should be doing um had a deep discussion we removed uh many many recital that were in here to just make it pretty straightforward and um so we're bringing this forward uh as a recommendation of the audit committee um as I've been talking about um this with uh uh director um Atkins we are I think uh you had a possible other recommendation and I believe what we were looking at is potentially tabling this until next week when we had the full board here and I believe you had a substitute that you also wanted to look at so I think at this point what we wanted to do was to uh table this for this week and bring it back next week is what I understood that we had come up with um but we wanted to
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kind of get this out in the record and I didn't know if you were also going to put yours on the record as well no I think with um thank you I think with director kler and director n's um absent tonight that it did make sense to table it and then we can just put it back on and then we can see um in light of the superintendent's comments and once they're back in town if they I what I what I put out was an early draft and what I basically was looking at is not I don't support um resolution 5078 I appreciate the audit committee making that recommendation but what I would the only thing I would be able to support around this given that the work that's already been done is a much um shorter briefer um minimal uh recommendation to do the review uh along the lines that the superintendent described so I'd want something along that but along those lines but I I appreciate the idea to table it until we have director kurl and director nolles back for the full discussion especially with director NES being on the audit committee I think it would make sense and be a little bit more respectful in the fact that director kler had brought the original uh resolution forward um I think it would make sense at this point um I don't know if you were going to put your resolution I'd rather work on it a little bit more and then we that we'll post that along with this unless you want to you know we'll we'll get reposted whatever we're going to consider one or both of them for next week okay that makes sense Dr be yeah i' just like to appreciate the superintendent's comments concerning this and make sure that people understand that this is a this particular whole situation in a way is a has a great deal to do with the response of the public coming forward and saying many we don't understand this and you're not being uh you're not doing a good job of being accountable and I think one of the things that I want to do is to have an audit to show that we are accountable if we are being accountable and if we're not I mean that's the whole that's the whole point of it and I think uh superintendent Smith's uh comments and welcoming an audit is is are very good and I appreciate them a good deal but this is something we need to do just uh because people have come forward and say hey a hey you're not doing and you know you're not doing the job well are we or not let's do it and find out it is an important thing I think thank you and I think the piece of particularly of clarifying the management versus government role is really important I think that's been a challenge frankly in number of areas for this board so I would like to I would welcome that in this on this topic and other areas as well so um I'm suddenly questioning since this is on the table whether we need to do a separate vote to table it I think I think I would ask to table it until next week and think we need a second on that second the table all in favor of tbling resolution 5078 until the next meeting please say yes yes yes representative yes okay that was oh excuse me I'm sorry so we have didn't voting rais his fingers okay so I apologize director BL so four yes and one no and student representative yes so we are tbling this until our next meeting okay so thanks again superintendent Smith thanks everybody to be continued um we now uh have our business agenda we have the remainder of our business agenda having already voted on resolutions 5072 through 5077 and um Miss Houston are there any changes to the business agenda no no do I have a motion in a second to adopt IT director B move M have a second thank you it's getting late director Morton second the adoption of the business agenda miss you s any public comment no um board discussion now I just will say we have a motion 5079 that had been tabled last week and uh that was in relation to a uh appointing the members of the audit committee so um what we would need to do um well director Regan you and I talked about this a little bit I think that we had a question around wanting staff to come back to the board with suggestions to clarify the policy on the audit committee there was a couple of things that had come up in the audit committee where we needed to be looking at some changes to the uh res to the current policy and uh so we thought that we would take the opportunity to do that and at the same time we could then clarify whether the audit committee members MERS the community members will be ex officio or voting members because um as I talked with our general councel there seems to be some ambiguity there and when there's ambiguity it's better to do nothing than to do something um
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and so the nothing would be to hold for a second uh while we have an opportunity to look at the policy and to make some uh clarifications there um the so going forward what we would be doing is asking our two committee members to community members to continue on the audit committee with us um and as we clarify that and they seem open to that um it's been great having their voice them on exactly we're just I mean we're we're still looking at the same to go forward um but we want to just put a hold until we clarify exactly what their voting uh Position will be so clarify not put a hold on the work of the committee and it's and it's moving forward but put a hold on resolution 5079 and that okay and that piece so um so what the procedure would need to follow since we had previously taed resolution 509 until tonight's meeting I first would need a motion and a second and a vote to remove it up from the agenda so I would I would uh move that we uh is it 5079 5079 that we move uh that we remove uh resolution number 5079 from the board agenda and look to table it um indefinitely I mean it would just be another probably a month or two to to a date uncertain I think it's the exact to a date UNC and director Morton seconds it any discussion in oh director be yeah I just I just want to be on record at saying that this resolution doesn't it says that we need to have a revised policy but the policy already is clear that they're not voting members and so in your opinion but that's what we could revise that yeah that's we're resolving differ already there in your opinion yep okay so all those in favor um please by saying yes yes yes you opposed okay um that motion is approved 5 to zero with student representative JZ well voting yes yes for to zero you didn't vote I didn't vote you I abstained I'm sorry no it's fine I'm sorry make it clear so four to zero with uh represent director bule excuse me AB me thank you okay all right so now um having tabled to a date uncertain resolution 5079 we will um continue considering the remainder of the business agenda is there any board discussion on the remainder of the agenda director B I just want to again Express how excited I am um to see a couple of contracts for our summer work included um through the bond so I know that uh director Atkins and I um spent a little time out at lellan a year or two ago um where they had many questions about Staffing but also came up um some question about whether or not they were going to actually see their um seismic retrofitting um as part of the bond and I just want to say that here we are approving a contract so it's very exciting um to be moving forward as we said they would um and then Buckman and saving schools so I just want to again highlight the work that we continue um this this summer is going to be our biggest amount of work yet um and when I say our biggest amount of work it's been great to see how many schools have enjoyed um while we've had a great winter for weatherwise um dry dry insides and it's been really prolonging um the life people people have been really pleased with it as well as the accessibility in the um science lab so it's been great wonderful all right pardon me the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes any opposed or extensions all right the business agenda is approved by vote of 5 to zero with student representative jazal voting yes all right so the next meeting of the board will be held on Tuesday May 5th at 6 o' thank you all so much this meeting is adjourned okay you

Event 2: Superintendent's Report, PPS Board of Education 4/28/15

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so I'm going to start with news people may have already heard but I want it and we actually are fortunate to have a grant principal Carroll Campbell here in the audience but the Grant High School Constitution team just won the National We the People Carol you just stand and let us recognize you so tonight the team will be coming home via portland airport and we generally have large groups of people who go to greet them as they return from their championship this is a big deal for the generals who won two years ago and it's incredible for pro in public schools this is our fourth consecutive year that Portland Public Schools has won the national championship and it's our seventh national title overall so congratulations to the generals and we look forward to welcoming a team an honoree mental person we were also really fortunate to have had Nobel laureate Rigoberta menchú visit PBS on April sixteenth she won in 1992 nobel peace prize for her civil rights work on behalf of indigenous Guatemalans she's become an international symbol for social justice and I'm just going to say this was an amazing amazing event with support from the Guatemalan consulate in Portland dr. mint you accepted our invitation to visit portland public schools while in oregon for the Peace Jam conference miss dr. Manchu delights in the opportunity to meet with young people who she views as the catalysts for a more just world she met with more than two dozen of our Guatemalan students from Roosevelt Jefferson and Pisa and a private reception at Jefferson before her speech then she delivered a powerful speech in the Jefferson auditorium to more than 1,500 PBS students families and staff as well as community members from oregon and southwest washington followed by a small reception she smoked it spoke in spanish with simultaneous translation in english and american sign language and you can see from some of the photos of her visit it was a really moving wonderful visit and students got the chance to ask really personal questions that she responded to in with really candidly and heartfelt so we have a short video I wanted to share with you and before it actually pops on I just want to say thank you to the PBS staff who put this event together it was a pretty it was a large-scale organizational effort to provide a really intimate opportunity to meet with somebody who has just tremendous presence and impact in the world so here's rigoberta y si queremos que la felicidad el mundo dos uno tiene que pasar por ser feliz and if we want happiness to be in the world we have to start by being happy ourselves see us by Feliz toll of the masts canvas lesson yet to poquito de policía if I'm happy maybe I can inject a little bit of happiness in the rest of the people this was just an amazing opportunity for our kids to be able to hear somebody that would be that has made such a huge difference not only for the people of Guatemala but as a symbol of the world what one person can do to make this a better place entonces yo espero que usted Sangu knows grandes de dientes so I I really look forward to you being great leaders some things I could get into to help this is sketchy or like ways I could go back and just do things personally inside the country no she has made a change not only what AM L about only in Central America and in other countries by having peace and giving hope to the people that there could be a change she's an amazing woman she has amazing amount of courage I must say so myself heard personally like put that amount of act ism again for like the right group of people in that country were so under oppressed in the Civil War and everything it was a living history lesson and students were able to ask questions and she was just so inspirational and and just to be able to be close to her there is an aura in terms of her personality in terms of horse sháá how she shows herself with a lot of humility from a woman's perspective I know the ones can do lots of things and that only means can change
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it was really a wonderful experience I'm just going to say and you can tell you could feel it just by that little clip I'm going to just one of my favorite questions that a student asked during the small conversation and he was really moved listening to rigor Berta and then he said how as a young person do I work for peace is it through my education dude like do we become activists is it just what happens in our minds are we just finding peace in our minds anyway I was like okay I love this question and she was so heartfelt in how she discussed this with students so anyway I just wanted to add that because it was one of the moments that really moved me okay we have another wonderful opportunity which is this year we had that our third annual innovation challenge in partnership with Portland's Portland State School of Engineering and it's a fabulous challenge to our high schools so the theme of the competition this year with smart cities making our urban community safer healthier and happier and part of what happens is the teams are challenged to identify a current problem and design a solution that will make Portland a safer healthier or happier place to live using science technology engineering and math or stem learning the projects this year were so impressive that we have one of the teams who is going to actually demonstrate their project for you it was at Grant High School's team and they designed a bike parking finder app and one in which one in three categories the best presentation the best technology focus and the audience favorite the strongest concept category win went to Lincoln High School with the team's vlok a more secure bike locking system to prevent theft the best team venture award went to metropolitan learning center for its gray water purification system Madison High School one for the most impactful on society with a design for converting shipping containers into housing for the homeless and Franklin Jefferson and wilson also made great presentations grants presentation was so well received that I invited members of the to come and give us a demonstration of their bike parking finder app and here today we have Corey Koehler alex taylor and sarah sinclair and i'm going to invite you to come on up and tell us about your presentation and and do a little demonstration for us i'd also like to while they're getting settled Jim hook is here with us and he's part of actually helping host this at PSU with the School of Engineering so he was here for a previous presentation because he's also on the board of workforce alliance so thank you for sticking around for this so I just want to say thank you for inviting us so psu innovation challenge has been going for about three years now and as a Smith said it's the theme this year was smarter cities and we decided that we were going to do a bike parking app which led to more like a prototype and a website but um yeah so we decided to that and it basically just finds you a biking park spot and we just wanted since transportation has become more of an issue with also climate change as well as organization urbanization yeah so yeah so we decided that this was a pretty big issue and this was our way to solve it so hey I'm Alex and I worked on the app which is a mobile app for smartphones but also a web app for you can just visit in your browser so I worked on that and I worked on that along with Richard who worked on our prototype here which is the actual physical hardware piece fortunately you can be here today but I'll we're going to give a quick demonstration because do that yeah um so Richard built something he likes to call the project box which is down here i don't think the cameras could see it all pretty much a black box with a raspberry pi computer in it as well as some other objects of difficult interests it up to a main server that works with the website and the app that transmits real-time data about whether or not a bike is parked in locations around the city and it hooks up at each location through this prototype here this would eventually be made of more
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resilient materials that's also waterproof but if we set it down here went if I corals up to it it will push down on it since it's a pressure sensor connecting the circuit which if we switch to the computer screen will show that the in a covered parking space above is currently parked in this location and when the tire rolls away it says there is no currently parked in this location for if we wanted to bring this to the whole city they would only need to be one of these black boxes in each parking location with a pressure sensor in each separate slot yeah yeah which connects to the logic box yeah we are actually planning to continue this project into the summer with help from PSU students who just took a transportation class and created a entire database of their king locations throughout the psu campus so we're hoping to make the website even bigger yeah I want to have that the components inside this logic box are relatively inexpensive I think the guys Perry pi is about fifteen dollars and the Arduinos like ten dollars ish the only component we don't have is a is a cellular cellular like connection dongle so unfortunately we can't actually connect it to the internet right now but other than that it's it's working so yeah yeah and then so what we didn't get to show you is once the the bike is put on that spot it sends some info to our server which is then accessed by the app and so people can see oh hey there's a bike at this parking location so yeah thank you guys thank you so much thank you so much and actually I'd like to just recognize Eric Mason who's their advisor at Grant High School in the back we just wait for us and again craigsville Carroll Campbell and was this the third year that Grant participated in the innovation challenge to every year and again next year up next year yay that's great you guys really great project that was wonderful thank you for demonstrating and actually what you come on up and I'm going to give you a little take away and Jim thank you for staying for that and add for being part of making that happen every year you know what there's still a poster here to your thing oh you guys your poster is up in front your big splitboard your poster board yeah pardon you're the editor yes there's one minute I was saved for somebody spit Oh get one mark right there but not the one with the purple on it thank you sorry got it okay I next I have three outstanding students to tell you about tonight who are part of our tag program on Friday we've learned that seguin Jim a wilson high school sophomore has won second place in a national essay contest sponsored by the American Society of Human Genetics based in Maryland she identified in the road about a phenomenon that expands on the traditional definition of a gene she participates in OHS used partnership for scientific inquiry through Wilson High School and she wrote the contest essay as part of her homework KGW came out on Friday to report on her big award six hundred dollars for her and six hundred dollars for her teacher to invest in genetics cereals for the classroom congratulations to staying in her chemistry teacher Mike de chao Presley and the student teacher Richard topping her ohsu teachers and Sagan's family so this is pretty cool recognition another outstanding student is Clemence dang and Clemence you want to just stand up while I'm talking about you I know this is gonna kind of torture Clement is a lemon is a junior at Lincoln High School his efforts to develop a faster and more accurate data mining data mining method when in first place at the Intel state science fair in the computer science and robotics category in addition to winning
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the top prize in the computer science and robotics category he won four additional Awards Lewis and Clark College faculty scholarship valued at $15,000 OSU's scholarship award the american statistical association tom owen award for excellence in statistics the Intel excellence in computer science award common will compete at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Pittsburgh in a few weeks he will also present a paper on his data mining method to the International Electrical and Electronics Engineers international symposium on multi multiple valued logic on May nineteenth at the University of Waterloo in Canada his study of data mining could have wide-ranging impact on a number of fields and I want to recognize him for his outstanding work clémence and now finally a 5th grader August and Montez tacuba who has been chosen as the Oregon association of talented and gifted young scholar for this school year Agustin come on up so Augustine might have missed out on tagged had it not been for his second-grade teacher who immediately recognized his gifts now he attends access Academy where he's known as a math standout and a leader who tutors other children in Spanish in English Augustine receives a five-hundred-dollar scholarship to a summer enrichment program which will allow him to attend camp for the first time Augustine is here with his family and will his family please stand and let us recognize and congratulations on this wonderful recognition from your school and from representing PPS beautifully so wear your t shirt PPS pride and we're all proud of here okay I also wanted to let you know about a group of hospira students who are involved in the hospital in active teens or heat after school program 15 of these students most of them tag students travel to New York for the international model un conference the students attended the opening ceremonies and got to sit in the seats of actual un representatives before going to New York they stuffed in Washington DC and met with Senator Wyden and Congressman Earl bloom an hour and we just wanted to let you know about this because it was a very cool thing for these students Jefferson High School Rose Festival princess okay hey Jeb burly takes down stereotypes as a varsity wrestler she wrestles at 120 pounds competes at volleyball and track is the captain of the Jefferson cheerleaders and is active in student government and the Black Student Union a junior in Jefferson's health science and biotech program she plans to attend a four-year university university and study marketing she's among 15 outstanding young women from Portland metro area high schools who serve on the rose festival court promoting our city getting mentored by top female executives and earning a 3,500 college scholarship she ended her first wrestling season this year with seven wins okay I wanted to share a quick update on our 3rd grade reading priority and addition to the great work of our teachers in the classroom every day our read together partner organizations are busy helping us ensure that all students read by the 3rd grade reading results and smart volunteers are tutoring struggling readers the timbers and thorns are visiting our schools and reading the students in English and Spanish we're all distributing books almost monthly to help build home libraries for all of our students you as a board set aside funding for culturally specific books and we're in the process of getting that generous batch of books out to schools and we have a video of a new pilot project last month we distributed iPads to 80 families at harrison park lent markham and whitman these iPads are loaded with literacy skill building apps and will help us bridge the digital divide while helping parents work with their students you can see the excitement around this project in the video I'm Andy wheeler i'm a senior project manager in the office of teaching learning we're here at Whitman
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elementary today to distribute iPads to 20 kids again well they spent time already and like phones or TV and this one is gonna be like something interesting for them it works just like just like a library just like a library book kids are checking out iPads there they're equipped with 4g internet access and they're able to use a series of apps that we've installed at home it's cool for some kids that can't read as well as other kids it gives them the confidence because the place some math games and there's some acts when you read it's kind of like a new world in your mind so being able to point and click on things and just pictures and objects is a much more powerful way for a student to to use a device family also get some brief training tonight and then they're going to come back two more times this year for additional training and in additional activities to help parents and kids work on student literacy together great background music yeah okay I'm just going to tell you we have really cool stuff going on our schools which is why I'm telling you this much and this time of year a lot of students are completing projects are being recognized for things so we have lots of good news and we just wanted to tell this tell it to you so Abernathy's garden was recognized yesterday by congressman Earl bloom an hour at his women's leadership luncheon Abernathy school kitchen garden program provides kids with comprehensive food based education garden space a working kitchen with a chef and fresh produce eaten at meals that in a program that improves student learning and instills lifelong habits of health this one who was honored at the luncheon where the group of mothers who were really the driver behind getting this started back in two thousand and now five hundred student lunches are supplemented by food from the garden and it was an honor to be at the luncheon and have Abernathy recognized there's great community energy around this garden as well a lot of learning good evening lifelong habits and community building by month Beaumont eighth graders are tackling a college-level project with state-of-the-art technology and preserving a crucial part of our state and city's history in the process as they collect the oral histories of man port residents students created their own video documentaries with guidance from Concordia University graduate student Matthew Blanchard and US history and language arts teacher Kristin parrot Blanchard has combined students photos and videos with GIS data and photos and created an augmented reality using an app called genao when anyone with the genao app points a phone or tablet toward vanport old snapshots of the community will pop up as well videos and information about the buildings and the residents the project has been covered by the oregonian and OPB and students have been invited to speak at conferences and more vanport residents have stepped forward to tell their story so a really actually important part of documenting history in our commune it is really great that's very cool verse landia one of my favorite events of the year except this year it happened during a board meeting so we were all here together rather than watching so we brought you clips from verse landia so 20 students from 11 schools competed in the citywide high school poetry slam verse landia sponsored by literary arts Cleveland's Gwen frost took first place this year Wow in the crowd of hundreds at the newmark theatre bella trent of madison who is last year's winner took second sakai edwards of jefferson placed third Quinton Dixon of Roosevelt placed fourth and tying for fifth were Wilson's Fiona Murphy and Roosevelt's Alexis canard congratulate congratulations these brave and entertaining poets and let's watch a clip of the poetry from the slam in rotation or when prices are down at the gas station heart rate up like inflation as I wait in anticipation I'm only three struts away from my mini vacation in Clark Kent to Superman give me a moment to jump into my disguise hopefully I brought the right supplies pull my hair out my face puff up my chest and stretch my next to the skies should forgot magritte this beautiful creature I think to myself that would be wise then it hits me like lightning and after all the internal fighting I man up and say hey how you doing does your watch the house implode on itself from a
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safe place and then you'll keep running even if you always did kind of love the smell of campfire but if you are not smart I don't know what to tell you maybe you like the way the flames lick a little too close to your skin maybe when the smoke is scratching at the inside of your lungs you feel refreshed because at least you in the smoke are both trapped and misery always loves company even if it is just for one night see I I'm taking a stand standing up to these shadows these silhouettes this devilish other part of me that I can't escape from I don't want this Dark Passenger anymore I don't want to wear some facade every single day because I have to be just like him or just like her or just like everyone else I am a cultural connection to our past oppression I am the future and the past I object to the idea that Yin is bad and black is evil because I mean come on people let's look at history I am black like the ocean's greatest secret and the Lions greatest main I am black I am black I am black so this right here is for everybody that loves to ask me so what are you it was wonderful to see the Rosa Parks Bravo youth orchestra playing alongside the oregon symphony during a concert in gala on April sixteenth 24 of the school's third and fourth graders played LaBella Cubano with amazing professional musicians on the stage of the arlene schnitzer concert hall we applied the symphony for including our students it was an amazing evening and they did each one of the students got to sit by their counterpart in the oregon symphony and play and they were magnificent they were magnificent another shout-out to Amanda Alonso who's a history teacher at Madison High School in December she won the 2014-15 Civic educator of the year from the classroom law project and last week she was recognized again a classroom law project as the legal citizen of the year here is a photo of her at the dinner she works with Madison's Constitution team and is doing a terrific job so i just wanted to commend her again because she was again recognized this past week so congratulations man back so lilla a pop singer supervised by students surprised students at kelley school last week after learning of their anti-bullying video video that they created with her permission to use her hit song the students were unveiling their video in the school gym when the singer who is a grant high school graduate made a special appearance here's a part of the video that the kids made help stop bullying and they made a real connection with Lola who was gracious and kind with her little fans here's what the video I'm really really excited about the event that we have planned today so please pay attention to the video initially showcase at bullying awareness video wow did you see that look in the background did you see those two kids I think one of them is bullying the other we have a song at the end called wake up that is by a portland recording artist lilla i think we did a video about bullying without even noticing it the school doesn't know in particular that she will be coming out from behind it's pretty amazing have a star five feet away from you yeah it was sweet it almost made me cry like I had to hold back the tears I showed my mother last night too and she's like huh I'm gonna cry cuz um it was a compliment but more so a compliment just that children get the message it's not everyday thing at our school to have a star and honor spillage when you see somebody picking on someone else instead of just walking by and ignoring it you do something about ok bullying itself is a big problem but
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there will be people like me graduating going into middle school and high school and things will get tough and you need to know that you will prevail through whatever you have gone through the air the future there the youth they're going to build our world in the future and so to be able to reach them is really a big deal for me I know give a hand to our filmmakers compelling a couple more things one I just want to remind people to take our ProPublica schools 2025 survey this is a survey that's a chance for our entire community to help shame shape the change as we grow in enrollment over the coming decade it is on the website WWE against kitchen table org you can also download it at www please take the survey we're trying to get here from as many members of our community as we can and then finally an update on our band instruments so this fall PBS beyond teachers will finally get to put 750 new district own band instruments in the hands of budding musicians thanks to the school board's decision to invest nine hundred twenty-five thousand dollars toward rebuilding a program that has been eroded by years of budget cuts the money is part of the investment the board set aside in February for strategic one-time investments after hire local option property tax collections and we have long loaned instruments to students at little or no cost on the principle that money shouldn't block a student from experiencing creativity collaboration and perseverance taught through music education so we're really excited about this and there's great excitement then the students who are getting to use these instruments and we have a short video on this one too and then we're then it's a wrap this one still sounds fine we would have to put these back on and get that glue to something sellwood middle school students Henry rice shows us he is 40 year old baritone horn it's all dented up and stuff eighth-grader nicks Kohlberg remembers struggling with his first trombone and because of that experience he had thoughts of giving up music I chose the trombone cuz I thought it would be fun to play and then I got one and I thought I thought it was me and not the instrument Henry and Nick's wishes are now coming true thanks to superintendent Carol Smith's vision and the PPS board which has approved nine hundred and twenty five thousand dollars to purchase new band instruments the economy is improving and our local tax revenues were greater than we anticipated after 12 years on the board I cannot tell you how excited I am that we are going to be able to offer our students new musical instruments you know it probably either dropped sideways Jenny Johnson has hundreds of instruments to damaged or simply worn out for future use as the district's only repair technician she says the last time the district bought new band instruments Ronald Reagan was still president on most days jenny is able to repair three to four instruments she hopes to purchase up to 750 new clarinets flutes and saxophones plus other instruments so desperately needed for band programs she says quality instruments are not cheap probably what will be purchasing the most of will be flutes and clarinets probably about 450 to six hundred dollars if we're going to purchase a new bari sax that is probably about five or six grand a new set of tampines probably more like 10 grand as these 8th graders at sellwood middle school prepare for their next concert nearly half are playing on instruments older than their parents some students in the district have had to share their flutes and horns and although they don't mind they are looking forward to becoming better musicians with the help of bright and shiny new instruments do in schools this
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fall and I'm excited as a music teacher important in public schools and been doing this for a while that yeah it's like the arts are coming back

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)

2015-04-28 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

Materials

Minutes

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Regular Meeting - April 28, 2015

Event 2: Superintendent's Report, PPS Board of Education 4/28/15

Sources