2015-05-05 PPS School Board Study Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2015-05-05
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	study
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - May 5, 2015

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evening this study session of the board of education for may 5th 2015 is called for order i'd like to send a warm welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers while our study sessions are generally limited to receipt of information from staff and discussion of that information and review of resolutions prior to a vote at times we do conduct votes during study sessions any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our pps tv services website director buell is absent this evening so we'll begin our agenda tonight with public comment miss houston who do we have signed up tonight we have a total of four and our first two speakers paul carlson and maria da silva so welcome come on down as always we ask you read your state your last name for the record and spell it and uh you have three a total of three minutes the green light goes on at the beginning the yellow light when you have one minute left and when the red light comes on we respectfully ask that you wrap up your comments at that time um we greatly appreciate you being here and we are gonna be looking forward to hearing your comments thank you thank you and my name is paul carson c-a-r-s-o-n and i would like to thank you all for the message of inclusion that my family and i have received sent from portland public schools since we first began planning for our son to go to kindergarten nearly two years ago as parents of a child with down syndrome we'd been told to expect the worst that schools would try to segregate our boy and they you'd have to fight tooth and nail to get him included in mainstream kindergarten that has not been even remotely our experience as soon as we began working with the district's transition coordinator that we were assigned to work with we were greeted with compassion and a strong sense of partnership and unified goals as well as the belief that inclusion for all students in the classroom community can improve social outcomes for both typical students and those with disabilities the largest study of educational outcomes of 11 000 students with disabilities the national longitudinal transition study showed that when students with disabilities spend more time in the general education classroom they were more likely to score higher on standardized tests of reading and math have fewer absences from school experience fewer referrals for disruptive behavior and achieve more positive post-school outcomes such as a paying job not living in segregated housing and with having a broad and supportive social network these results were true regardless of students disability severity of disability gender or socio economic status if you have a child with disability you probably know this and spend a lot of time explaining it to others but what's just as important to emphasize is that the typical students benefit too they grow up knowing a friend who faces challenges and who may be different and they support them and learn together and try to figure things out they learn compassion and diversity and to value everyone and that's how they'll go about shaping their future and the future of their community a future where everyone has a place and a chance to belong that people with disabilities have a place in mainstream society classrooms are crowded and teachers are over taxed and what we've seen be incredibly effective in our son's kindergarten is a unified partnership between the classroom para educator and the teacher the parent educator isn't bobby's helper mary's helper but works with all the students helping provide supports for all the kids who need them but beyond that supporting a teacher is a powerful resource makes the entire class that much stronger that partnership shameless plug for roseway heights that partnership works we're thrilled to hold up pps as an example of how inclusion and acceptance are some of the strongest things we can ever help teach our children you are definitely headed in the right direction and i'm so proud our son is part of that future thank you so much i wanted to bring you guys a treat happy cinco de mayo you might need an interpreter so i don't know if you have an interpreter um i don't know if you know cinco de mayo it's about victory of people of color marginalized by the imperialist french so this song is for you uh your staff just called the police on me last week it's on video it's in youtube it's an opt-out enrollment education so please do not call the police on parents especially latino parents that we're trying to educate so
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i'm looking for answers hopefully you'll get some answers for me excuse me could you state your name for the record please bye is is sorry sounds really terrible in english while going to spanish oh project is is me and the next our next speakers greg burl and dave porter welcome gentlemen gotta sing for us too dave superintendent smith board directors pbs employees ladies and gentlemen i testified at the last board meeting about forgiveness and you know some of my friends and colleagues warned me that i'd be seen as naive for even mentioning the subject much less insisting that there will be little or no real change without it if there's any question in my mind it should be are school district issues important enough to exit to insist on forgiveness forgiveness for cutting budgets for eliminating programs for creating harms to children teachers parents and communities or are they so minor in the scheme of things that we can just move forward to fix them see forgiveness is only the release of a hope for a better past says that as we move forward we're not going to harbor anger and bitterness about things that have already happened unfortunately the future is likely to resemble the past unless we act with all deliberate speed to change the system from the bottom up see the failure of policy making at pps is apparent uh to me from watching the
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number of problems created by having high school students take an eight class schedule versus the number of problems we've solved and we spent millions of dollars per year to pay for good men and women to create policy then watches policy created by those without the ability to immediately spot and correct errors creates chaos in the lives of students and their teachers it takes 24 credits to graduate so why insist that students be free to take 32 even if more likely to fail there aren't enough teachers to provide the electives that make this option meaningful and upper class students often spend a quarter of their day without a class i'm going to make a bold proposal here if implemented i think this proposal will reverberate through public school systems nationally for years or decades i want pps to implement a system in which teachers at each building choose any administrator to be their principal including those who have been promoted to supervisory positions beginning with the 2016-17 school year i can think of no better way to empower teachers the job of a great principle is to serve the needs of students parents the community and teachers by having teachers choose their leaders we make this model explicit and of course beyond that returning to the school board subcommittee system will ensure that school board members are fully informed on the policies they approve and we can repurpose the salaries of the report writers for more building administrators teachers and other educators many of the programs in my opinion at the district level are less important than the jobs teachers do and i'm looking forward to a system that truly prioritizes student needs instead of paying people to think about student needs create policy about student needs and communicate to the public about how students needs are being met so i don't want to i don't want to take too long so i just wanted to make sure that i said this before the election so that everyone who follows my words knows why i'm supporting the candidates who have my support thank you very much chair atkins superintendent smith members of the board members of the public my name is dave porter p-o-r-t-e-r tonight i speak in opposition to resolution number 5083 for the developing a regional early learning academy and longhouse community center at the foster school site i'm going to only hit some high points in my longer written comments that you have i have the following concerns one the 4.5 million in funding from whatever sources could be better used for other higher priority facility refurbishing and expansion projects a noted need for additional space for additional dual language immersion programs in particular the estimate for refurbishing kellogg is in the two to three million dollar range like the foster site kellogg is also in the southeast southeast region where additional classroom space is needed foster no this reads wrong kellog contains 39 classrooms two full-size gymnasiums one with bleachers and a formal stage two science labs a full separate cafeteria and industrial art rooms would not that be a better use of portland public schools funds and spending 4.5 million plus on a new facility with only six pps classrooms two the addition actual replacement of six pps classrooms at the fossil site does not fit in any configuration of the pps system of elementary schools in southeast portland that i can envision an educational facility with only eight classrooms is too small to be used as a school it has little general educational utility and can be used only for a small set of purposes like child care and pre-k over time as needs change pps needs facilities with more flexible uses pps already has too many facilities that are too small it does not need another b it would be better to build and locate additional pre-k classrooms at existing schools so pre-k can be a part of an elementary school there is no cost advantage in building these eight classrooms at the foster site c which school would have its three kindergarten classes split off from the rest of the school to be placed at the foster site where would the kindergarten students then go for first grade d would kindergarten at the foster site be a dual language immersion program e4 pps needs to 4.5 million to convert some k-8 to middle schools and to reopen kellogg i do not think pps can successfully reset the boundaries of all
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its schools without going to an all middle school system there is just no way to have cost-effective k-8s if they get extra funds to offer a selection of electives comparable to middle schools nor do a k-8s have sufficient numbers of middle-grade students to pride to provide group classes like bands that require a minimum of our students to be successful thank you thank you very much all right thank you everyone for your comments and your songs um now we're going to move on to our bound excuse me our bond accountability committee quarterly report um so i'd like to invite kevin spellman down to the table to present the report from the committee welcome good evening co-chair atkins co-chair knowles board members superintendent smith i'm joined today uh by willie paul an invaluable member of our committee willie is the executive director in his day job executive director of uh capital projects for kaiser permanente so he brings a lot of really valuable experience to the committee um the bac met on april 15 at tubman school which will be the new home of uh at least temporary home for fabian students and directors belial buell and curler joined us and we appreciate that whenever you can make that it's really helpful there is an extraordinary amount of activity going on under the bond program right now and i'm guessing that it's the the most active time ever in design and construction for pps at this time your staff is managing the following closing out work at marshall high school to prepare for franklin students close out of work and improvement project 2014 which involves six contracts and 12 schools bidding an award of ip15 four construction contracts eight schools bidding an award of ip 2015 science projects two contracts 18 schools bidding an award of ip2015 maplewood one contract one score bidding an award of tubman campus improvements to prepare for fabian selection of a design team for ip2006 which will involve 11 schools completion of design and startup construction at roosevelt high school and several of you were at the groundbreaking on saturday and had the opportunity to see the um the tent structure that will be the new gym we have to keep remember to add structure that to that term tent doesn't really do it justice um completion of design for franklin high school and groundbreaking at franklin high school will take place may 16th and apparently there are some flyers back there completion of design for fabian pk school selection of design team for grant high school and preparation for master planning for benson lincoln and madison high schools i think under any circumstances that's an incredible amount of activity going on under this bond program um they challenge the immediate challenge for the summer work ip15 that involves 27 schools is that the the window of opportunity keeps getting smaller apparently i i guess that's a good thing because that means school's starting a little earlier in the fall but 65 calendar days to do all this work and that's a real challenge projects at roosevelt and franklin have reached major milestones with the agreement on their guaranteed maximum prices and we'll talk a little more about that the demolition at fabian will be is just on the horizon i guess we'll wait for the students to leave but in the fall we expect demolition to start there your performance auditors are almost complete with their second report and i believe they're coming before you um towards the end of may and uh our committee will be getting a briefing on that of on may 21st so current issues uh that the bac has been paying attention to the program budget has now increased to 525 million dollars
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um and primarily the two big pieces there there's multiple small additions but the big pieces of course are the 15 million from concordia and the bond premium from the first bond sale the second bond sale has now completed and there will be additional bond premium coming out of that sale which is good news for everybody and at this point the board reserve the remaining board reserve of 10 million dollars remains intact the uh project budgets are a cause for concern the the committee spent quite a lot of time talking about market pressures on construction and as i listed we're in starting and getting involved in considerable amount of construction work there's competition from the private sector the good news of course is the economy is picking up but there's a lot of competition in the private sector as well as the public sector and your sister district in beaverton is a prime competitor at this point and we're not advocating moving away from any of the social goals that are involved in this construction process but i think we do need to understand that some of the competitors don't have those goals and that can in a busy time lead to a reduction in competition so that's something to be paying attention to the guaranteed maximum prices have been agreed at franklin and roosevelt that's uh over 150 million dollars the during the meeting we had a lively discussion about the reconciliation process and how the design development stage of design the estimates came in over budget and so the designers and the contractors along with your staff had to work really hard to bring the scope back within within budget and there have been some in the community who've expressed concern about that process and our view of of that is that this is almost an inevitable process that is just part of the cmgc construction design sequence of events there is an inevitable tension between the design and the budget and that will always if anyone's ever remodeled their kitchen they know that these projects are a little more substantial than that and i think as we engage in future public outreach i think we need to pay real attention to an education piece of that process so that people at the beginning understand what's laying ahead of them there was a sense from some people in the public that they'd been promised some aspects of the projects and some of those quote promises had to go away and that's unfortunate um but i think it's important that if to the extent we continue the public process and i'm sure we will we need to have an understanding of what's laying ahead the other thing that really comes out of that is it really reinforces the decision you made some time ago to exempt those projects from the low bid process and to engage in cmgc because if we had designed and then bid and had these projects come in millions of dollars over budget that would have been a serious serious problem um schedules uh we talked i talked about the 35 65 calendar days for ip15 that's a challenge uh both roosevelt and franklin in the in the balance scorecard show that they are behind the baseline schedule we've talked about that i think every quarter that we've been here but now we're into the construction sequence and um at least the contractors the cmgcs are confident that they can bring these projects in on on schedule so we'll be tracking that pretty carefully the land use approvals were an issue that we were concerned about but they've been resolved they're completed and now the pressure is on at uh the city in getting
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building permits and i know the staff is working very closely with the with the city on the equity side we talk about this most quarters as well the mwesb involvement continues to lag on the construction side but now as we've said every quarter we're expecting that to change now that cmgc comes into play the challenge there in observing that will be that staff measures mwesb participation when payments are made and there's this good reason for that being the measure but what we've asked off to give us a report on the contracts that are written to mwesb's so that we have a good sense of what that percentage really is going to be rather than wait till it's all done and then find out what it was so it's been an intense quarter for your bond program staff and if they thought that one was busy the next quarter is going to be even crazier we remain impressed by the quality and professionalism of your staff and the design teams and the construction teams that you've selected willie i don't have anything to add other than to concur with everything that kevin has said i think it's a very good representation of the uh oversight committee's uh position on the information that's been presented to us today as kevin said there's a tremendous amount of work we had good debate at the last meeting about budgets about cost forecasts about scope and the the evolution is is one that we deal with and struggle with every day frankly as market pressures continue to change as costs continue to drive up and as we try to manage against finite budgets hard choices have to be made throughout that process but admirably the the program management and the project management teams have done a terrific job they're keeping their eye on the ball and i'm confident that today everything's being managed very well thank you both very much any comments or questions from the board i had a couple of questions dr reagan thank you very much and i have to agree that it's amazing to think about the amount of work that is happening and that is going to happen this summer in the school district and the fact that we're managing it pretty well is pretty exciting so i had a couple of questions um one is on the beginning of the memo that we got there was a comment that ted wolf from community and parents of public schools asked the school district for a lessons learned report on the design process of franklin roosevelt and fabian projects to date which i really like that idea especially before we move full full boar into grant high school and the next bond um is that going to happen yes and actually i had a meeting last week with um cpbs about this very idea and we've already are look we're going to have a third party who does a series of focus groups and a survey um and uh of the part multiples to collect multiple perspectives on um on the projects we've just completed with the idea that it's really informing to go forward so yes we're working on be really helpful i had another question on under project budgets you said all of the escalation reserve has been distributed to the project so there is no remaining pot to draw from in the event of increased prices so what is the impact of that on grant high school um my recollection uh director regan is that that an allocation has been made to grant high school from the escalation and a further allocation i believe was made from the bond premium so the intent at least the intent that's been expressed to us is that grant high school will not be shortchanged as a result of this okay the general way it was i couldn't tell and the challenge when you allocate the escalation to a project is to frankly not have the designers designed to that new baseline right rather than use that to take care of the escalation so but that's the nature of all of these situations we were fearful right from the beginning that the escalation amounted it was 40 or 45 million dollars
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which sounds like an awful lot we were fearful it was not enough and fortunately the bond premium and some other sources have helped out great and i had another question the last bullet on the second page talks about preparation for master planning of benson lincoln and madison high schools and it feels like that is late at this point especially if we're going to be trying to bring in major partners whether those are business and trade partners or psu or whoever it might be so do we have a sense of when these when this piece is going to be taking place um you know again that the november 2016 bond is going to be absolutely cluttered with um different initiatives so we're going to want to get started early so do we have a can you can you talk to one of you talk to me about the preparation for master planning and i'm asking cj sylvester who's um our chief of school modernization to come on up and walk you through that good evening board cj sylvester chief school modernization um the work that we're doing to date on uh the resolution that the board passed in late november which was that we go ahead and proceed with master planning for benson lincoln and madison for a potential november 2016 bond is this at lincoln we are currently in the process of doing two things um we have echo northwest doing a development analysis so that ultimately by the end of this fiscal year the board can make a decision about whether or not we're going to move forward with any mixed use on that site or whether it's strictly going to be you know educational purposes the other thing we're doing is currently negotiating a memorandum of understanding with psu for some potential co-location of their facilities on the lincoln site at benson we have people in both in curriculum and in performance working on what the curriculum should be at benson as we start moving forward the benson project's going to be a little bit different next school year as we move into it because in addition to doing a master plan the first thing we need to do is an education specification because the education specification that we've done to date on high schools is for a comprehensive high school not for a technical focus option so the benson work will essentially last the entire year because we're looking at probably doing the educational specification work in the fall followed by the master planning work in the winter and spring whereas at madison and lincoln we have you know kind of the latitude of the luxury of doing that master planning work anytime between about september and june of next year the intention is to have all three master plans complete by june of 2016. what we'll probably be doing in terms of the ballot measure is starting to have conversations with the board in january or february of 2016 as regards the nature and extent of what current assessed value is looking like what different tax rates would look like how all of that stacking up against the potential for three high schools on the november 16 ballot anything else i'm dr morton thank you very much for the presentation as as always um and as always i take it upon myself to ask at least a question about uh our mwesb work and we have tended to lag behind our aspirational goal and for those of you in the audience that's minority women in the emerging small businesses those those businesses that have not always had an opportunity to grow infrastructure like many um non-indo-uesb businesses have white-owned businesses um i'm interested in what we're doing specifically i understand that the cmgcs are going to be sort of taking taking more work in the subcontract subcontractor arena but i also know those are smaller smaller bids that are happening um what are we doing specifically though to increase that so we're not lagging behind the next time you come and report out um director modern um what we're doing on the ip work is the same as we've done on the ip work and there's as you know there are legal restrictions for doing more than the good faith effort process so there's no reason to expect i don't think any change in the performance in the bid work the from the beginning we've said that the cmgc process allows for greater outreach and a more successful
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process i have not seen the cmgc firms procedures that they're engaged in but i i do know that they're both well-regarded firms and they have a long history of working with mwesbs and they've reinforced more than once that the aspirational goal is their intent at a minimum now quite whether that will happen or not i will we'll see um i'd be happy to get uh copies of their programs if you like and i could give you a separate briefing if you'd like anything know all right well thank you to all the great volunteers experts on this committee we really appreciate your continued service um it's invaluable and thank you to staff for all your hard work and we're just as always thrilled to see the bond work continuing on time on budget and moving forward thank you so much thank you all right so now we'll shift gears from our informational updates to an action item around the foster site agreement with naia board previously heard and discussed this item at our april 20th meeting and of course our partnership and work on this with naya dates back to 2012. um before we consider the resolution carol uh superintendent smith did you want to offer any comments up front i did and they're brief but i wanted to just say a few things about why we were excited about the generations project to begin with um and people in this audience are well aware that the district has been less effective in serving our native kids and really looking for strategies that are meeting the needs of our native students we currently our native students have a 47 graduation rate in this district which is the lowest graduation rate of any student group our native students are the second highest and disproportionately being suspended or expelled from school and we're very aware that 22 percent of our native students in multnomah county are living in foster care so that the kind of stable home situation that you would want to support success in school is often needing additional support so one of the things for us about generations that was really exciting was the idea that it's addressing stable home situation intergenerational uh community of support that's wrapping around students and helping them helping support their success in school starting with early learning which allows pps to do what we do and support kids to be get the foundation they need to be successful in school but also that with naya we would end up having wraparound supports that follow them into their elementary schools into third grade so we were like really excited about what the opportunities to really leverage a partnership and do a much more holistic kind of a service model uh to support our native students what kind of promise that holds for us in 2012 in an agreement with the city of portland that was part of the city contributing to our general fund budget during a time of a huge budget deficit we had the opportunity to have a property arrangement that was part of them contributing to our general fund so back in 2012 began this partnership in july of 2014 we had an incredible celebration that was part of oregon solutions declaration of cooperation that was signed by 17 contributing partners including pps nea the city of portland oregon housing and community services the oregon governor's office oregon department of human services oregon child development coalition amongst many others and it was a day of i think just great intent to have something that will be unique nationally and really just a model program that lets us do business differently and really look at how we're able to support our native students so before we get into the technical conversation as we're moving through partnership agreement i just wanted to signal the excitement that has been around this project for all of us so and just a welcome to everyone who's here in the audience today and bear with us as we're working on the technical parts of this deal thank you so much superintendent smith all right so the board will now consider resolution number 5083 authorization to enter into agreements with the city of portland and the native american youth and family center nia for developing a regional early learning academy and longhouse community center at the foster school site do i have a motion so moved second director knowles moose and director of lyle seconds the motion to adopt resolution five zero eight three miss houston i believe we have um wonderful
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linebackers we have six speakers tonight and our first two joe delaney and hannah morrison welcome come on down hello my name is hannah morrison m-o-r-r-i-s-o-n i am from the ojibwa tribe and i graduated from naia early college academy in 2010. i came to naia to get involved with the independent living program which helps foster youth like me and transitioned from foster care into independence i wanted to go to naia for these services because as a foster youth i was placed in homes away from my community and my culture i always felt like there was something missing in my life by attending the eca and receiving foster care services through neya i got to learn where about where i came from and encouraged me to be a leader in my community because of my work with naya as a youth i was given the opportunity to work for the agency and now i am an early childhood childhood support specialist in our tucson playgroup tucson is an early childhood play and learn program supporting children zero to five and their parents just as naia helped support me as a youth i feel that it is important to have our youngest children supported by our early learning programs so they have every opportunity to excel in their education i would like to share with you an example of the power of our early learning program in chison play group i worked with a family who came to us because of involvement with child welfare throughout the support of our programs mom was able to regain custody of her children and our program was able to provide services to the services to support their transition the family continues their involvement in the program with their oldest attending our head start classroom where she is thriving and engaged and their youngest is register for our head start classroom this fall by supporting neo generation early learning program will allow us to continue our impact our important work in this community and support families to guide their children so that like me they feel they and they feel empowered to become the next generations of leaders thank you very much thank you very much good evening my name is joe delaney i'm karuk a community member a father and the chair of the neha family center board of directors i've been a member of the board for the past four years i originally joined naya after getting to see all the amazing things that they accomplished and the improvements they make in the lives of our community neia provides critical services to the most vulnerable families in our region its holistic services reach thousands of self-identified natives and non-natives last year our educational program served more than one thousand youth through mentoring and tutoring family engagement activities summer programming cultural arts college and career services recreational sports plus dozens of other services to ensure successful educational outcomes of our youth through our collaborative partnership with pps we've been able to increase the graduation rate for native american students attending portland public schools while this is cause for celebration the unfortunate reality is that the district graduation rate for native american youth remains below 50 demonstrating the need to do more according to the coalition of communities of color report an unsettling profile of native americans in multnomah county one in five native children are placed in foster care the report also states that very few eligible native children access early childhood education programs such as head start more than 50 percent of native children under the age of five currently live in poverty and yet less than 10 of eligible native students access head start native americans are deeply concerned about their children's progress through school we understand to be on pathway out of poverty and to the improvement of health and well-being as well as towards expanding choices and opportunities we have a young community that is rapidly growing but our opportunities are not keeping up our children and families continue to face educational and housing barriers and remain largely unemployed or underemployed i know that each one of you and the district wants to help change this and the generations project will move us in the right direction this is the commitment our organizations have made to improve the lives of our children in the community we've been working on this project together for about three years there's been a substantial investment of time and work committed to this project by the city the district and especially neon we finalized the plan for phase one and secured funding for housing portion of the project with your support tonight we can continue moving forward with phase two and keep this project going we have many partners committed to this project our partners in philanthropy are
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ready to support us private donors are ready they all believe in strengthening our community through this innovative project naya's board of directors is supporting generations and we encourage your board to enjoy it join us in making a smart investment in equity and early learning if you're committed to closing the achievement gap you won't delay this project and allow it to move forward we have a chance to do something very special together tonight a project like generations is an innovative model to create change and change lives for our community and our children on behalf of the board of directors at naia i'm asking for your support so that we can change the trajectory of kids who very much need our help thank you thank you next we have keith thomason and cary green welcome thank you thank you hi my name is carrie green and i'm a member of the klamath tribes i am the family advocate for the applegate head start operating a culturally specific classroom for native american youth in partnership with portland public schools the immense benefit that early education provides a youth are not reaching our native children we know that an investment in education early in a child's life makes a lasting difference in his or her ability to graduate and to obtain a job later in life the addition of new head start classrooms at generations will begin to meet the demand that our community experiences and addresses the low community and will address the low community graduation and employment rates in the long term less than half of native families who qualify for head start and early head start are enrolled a combination of factors make this challenge difficult to resolve our community has a general distrust of mainstream service providers particularly when dealing with our youth who face high incidence of removal many of our low-income families can't place a child in half day head start because of transportation or employment hurdles many in our communities simply don't know these services are available to them a partnership with naya can help portland public schools to advance their commitment to equity nea is a trusted community institution making outsized impact among local native americans nehe's advocacy for full day head start at applegate has enabled many families to enroll a child in the program for the first time though we don't have nearly enough slots to meet our demands nea as a cultural hub within the local native community is uniquely placed to help raise awareness about these services as the number of classrooms expand i encourage the board not to delay the generation project please continue our partnership in serving our native american youth in early learning classrooms i have countless stories to share time not permitting i would like to leave you with this every child and every family that walks through arnea early learning programs every child and every family is a success story thank you thank you very much good evening i am keith thomason president and ceo of united way thanks for the opportunity to offer encouragement and endorsement of neya and the generations partnership last year united way made a 10-year commitment to work to break the cycle of childhood poverty in our region at that time our board gave us explicit direction to invest strategically in areas of greatest disparity because data affirms this holds the greatest potential for the fastest and deepest benefit to our community likewise i know pps to be a leader in our region in both your commitment and actions to address many of these same disparities your strategic plan calls out a commitment to equity and a focus on closing the gaps between white students and historically understood underserved students of color at united way we admire the explicit commitment in that same pps plan to quote provide resources to prevent students from falling behind and to intervene with those that do get back on that do to get them back on track the generations project represents the fulfillment of that commitment from where we stand at united way generations is an example of modern
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collaboration with an equity lens it's a blueprint for how school districts government philanthropy and community-based organizations can partner to effectively rewrite the script for kids of color further it makes a smart investment in areas that data tells us deliver exponential returns early learning and housing neha and an array of high quality culturally specific organizations are proudly at the center of united way's cohort working on child and family poverty our investment in neya is one of our largest because they have a demonstrated track record of getting exceptional educational outcomes for kids yet we also believe an organization like neya plays a critical role in helping our region learn how to crack the larger code of equity and disparity that for too long we have struggled with the generations partnership mirrors this approach and that it offers pps an upstream solution for a population that has not been effectively supported and will also offer replicable learnings for other districts non-profits and communities that neha and a wide array of partners are willing and eager to pay for half of this project only underscores its merits and importance as a parent and as a taxpayer i will applaud pps's investment in the generations partnership as a smart and forward-thinking investments in kids families and communities in close i know you folks have a lot of hard decisions i appreciate your thoughtfulness around this important one thank you thank you very much our last two speakers nakomi levine and alyssa kenny guyer welcome thank you hello my name is nakomi levine l-e-v-i-n-e i am cascade chinook i currently work for dhs as an indian child welfare caseworker and spent several years working for neha as a domestic violence advocate and working with teenage foster youth transitioning out of foster care i was watching these teens bounce from home to home homeless shelters being trafficked addicted to drugs and alcohol and often ending up pregnant it seemed as though the most important factor in determining the outcome for these youth was the number of homes they lived in cultural connections and whether they had supportive adults in their lives i think it was at that time that i decided to become a foster parent hoping to provide stability to a young person soon after i got a phone call that they had two baby girls sisters they were going to be separated so i took them in after they moved in they started attending nehe's chiefs on playgroup where they were able to have visits with their four-year-old sister were surrounded by community and got to experience an amazing early learning program about a month after they moved in i got a call that their sister's relative placement was not working out so i decided to take her as well so i went from being a single mom of one to suddenly having four girls i struggled every day to make it work getting the girls to therapy medical appointments dental appointments all while trying to maintain a full-time job i immediately enrolled jasmine in this applegate's head start program where every day i spent my lunch hour taking her home i watched this little girl flourish on so many levels it was the first time she was exposed to structured learning environment and she absolutely loved to learn she felt a sense of connectedness to the teachers and the other children in the classroom she has brought those social and academic skills with her to grade school where she continues to thrive these three little girls have become my daughters and i would do it all again for them but i can't imagine how much easier life would have been had we had the opportunity to be part of generations having the community in our own backyard with access to medical services the early learning center and cultural events not to mention having other foster and
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adoptive parents and elders to support each other thank you thank you very much hello chair atkins members of the school board and superintendent smith thank you for allowing me the chance to express my support for neo generations my name is alyssa kenny guyer a-l-i-s-s-a k-e-n-y hyphen g-u-y-e-r i'm the state representative for house district 46 which includes parts of southeast and northeast portland as the state representative for the district that includes the neo generation project and as a longtime advocate for closing disparities through early childhood education and culturally specific programming i was honored to serve as the oregon solutions co-convener of the neo generations project my co-convener was oregon child development coalition executive director dinalda dotson who couldn't be here today but who submitted a letter of support donald is part native and has a long history in public health and early childhood education including head start and early head start for migrant and native children as you may know organ solutions solves challenging community problems by bringing together public and private stakeholders on innovative projects that have the potential to be truly transformational generations aims to transform the former foster school from a derelict site that is currently a depository for drug needles and trash into a thriving community one in five native american youth in multnomah county is in child welfare as joe delaney mentioned generations will provide a stable community and permanent family for youth who experience frequent destabilizing transitions this project meets the priorities of our state to provide housing and services to foster youth particularly to native youth with the goal of helping them thrive socially and academically building on the lessons from bridge meadows in north portland the project will construct 40 units of housing for foster families and for elders willing to assist these families in the spirit of it takes a village to raise a child building on lessons from the gladstone center for children and families generations will have an early learning academy for youth from infancy to kindergarten a community center styled after a native american longhouse and health economic and social services this will be the first intentional culturally specific energy intergenerational community in the country many across the country will be watching to see how this approach can break through the intractable academic and social challenges that have dogged us for decades multifaceted community problems require the commitment of multiple levels of leadership this is a hugely collaborative effort that has been and will continue to be informed by native youth families and elders as well as the surrounding lentz community and many institutional partners who signed a declaration of cooperation last summer superintendent smith mentioned some of these but i want to repeat and add public partners include besides portland public schools the city of portland portland development commission multnomah county the governor's regional solutions centers oregon department of human services oregon housing community services business partners include capital pacific bank carlton heart architecture guardian real estate services lmc construction and non-profit partners in addition to neia include the oregon child development coalition bridge meadows legacy health social venture partners united way and and the lens neighborhood association partners met regularly for a year to hammer out the details of our roles and to strengthen our commitment to helping children and families in this community thrive lentz neighborhood association chair jesse cornett who couldn't be here tonight said that he and the neighborhood are quote thrilled to see this abandoned site come back to life i enthusiastically support this project and urge you to provide the policies and funding funding needed to keep the early learning academy and this transformational project on track thank you thank you very much all right thank you so much to all the folks who came and testified as well as everyone who turned out tonight we really appreciate it so board discussion on resolution five zero eight three no director below i'll just say i thank you to all the people that spoke and the superintendent smith for framing this i think the need and the intent and the justification for this project is well established i often hear people say think out of the box be bold take leadership affect the
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disparities and then i often times see a squibble about tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars when it's a 12 million dollar project and so i'm excited to support this project this evening and i hope that our three in four years of developing this together doesn't get delayed or pulled back because of what in the end are small amounts and i that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be thoughtfully looked at or discussed and figured out critically about whether or not this is the right investment and how it's how it's playing out but um we're still the building owners to this institution aside from the housing place and so it makes sense that we would have a majority stake in in the investment regardless of how the operating developments are are written out we will still be the leaseholders and that means that our partners will always be tenants and so again it makes sense as as the land owners and the property owners that we have a majority of the investment so i guess i'll just say i'm excited to our discussion tonight and i i hope my colleagues can invest this because um clearly what we're doing to affect the disparities is not enough um we have to go at this in a different way and for all the reasons people have just talked about foster care our native families and the partnerships that are lined up across this we talk about all the partnerships we have great non-profit partners in the in the in the audience we have business partnerships we have the city we have the county this is an extraordinary partnership the state so i'll say thank you to representative alisa kenny guyer for her shepherding through this because it has been a year year and a half i got to sit in on a meeting out of lentz about working with the community to make sure that this is a valued project and make sure it was done with all the stakeholders in consideration so thank you for your support of this and efforts to make it happen um first of all i want to thank all the uh people who testified on behalf of naya tonight your testimony was incredible i really appreciate that um including representative melissa kenny guyer and the mom with the three and the four girls there you are i'm amazed so thank you very much for your work too i'm very happy to be in support of this project it's been a long partnership since 2012 i believe a lot of people involved we talk a lot portland public schools about our partners and how we want to be good partners and this is us being a good partner moving this project forward we've had a lot of consideration of it over the years and and i think it's time to move uh move forward on this one the other piece a couple of other pieces that other people have commented on but that really stand out for me is our abysmal graduation rate for native americans and my hope is that through this project we will be able to steadily increase that graduation rate and i think it gives us a great opportunity to walk our talk we talk about equity a lot in this district we walk in a lot but this is a big step and i think that this is one that we really need to take if we are truly going to say that we are working for equity in this district uh providing for those people who providing a little bit more for those who need more in order to be successful so um it's with great pride that i am totally in support of this project other comments on the resolution uh sure director curler so i too are very much in support of this project and appreciate the innovation that this represents the new model truly different model uh and so so i'm very very supportive um i'm i'm not supported this particular resolution um and i i won't vote for it i have an alternative resolution um that i would uh would move uh but i want to say i want to say why uh the alternative resolution that is as we embark upon these innovative projects and as education and social service lines become more blurred um for good reason um it's imperative that uh that we go forward in collaboration and in partnership uh with with three things that i actually think are going to strengthen anything that we do it
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not only in this project but as we go forward with other life projects um one is clarity because we have to be really really clear on on the lines we need to be transparent and we need to be fiscally responsible and so it's with that framework that i that i'm proposing a slight alteration to to the resolution that essentially puts the design work uh keeps the lid as as is on the 45 55 shares the cost of the design work um on a 50 split because we are real partners um and right now we're 50 partners in it and and then basically cancels out any current formula because i think it's too early that we don't even know exactly what the design is going to be like staff has said well it could be 60 40 it could be 50 50. so i'd like to just to take that out of the resolution and acknowledge that as the design comes back we will be negotiating a final development agreement and also realizing that this this we need to continue to build on the collaboration that exists and all the partners that exist and i think it's going to take more partners to make that happen and we're acknowledging that as a board we're going to make that happen very excited about about about it and so at the appropriate time chair i'd like to to offer this alternative okay any other discussion sure dr um i have been very supportive of this project from the beginning as well um for all of the reasons that have been stated so far it really wasn't until these memos came forward that we started to understand what the costs of the project were going to be as i look at the cost of the project i'm they're not making a lot of sense to me and we're basically talking about six classrooms and a cost of about five million dollars clearly those classes would have some community space associated with them but even so the numbers aren't making any sense to me when you look at the regional early learning academy and the longhouse together you're talking about 33 000 square feet at this point what we're being told is that neo would control 14 thousand of that so suddenly the project has gone from six or seven thousand square feet to something closer to nineteen thousand square feet that i guess we're in charge processing so i'm trying to understand uh what exactly the numbers are too fuzzy to me and um i'm not sure that we are being fiscally responsible in the current state so i am supportive of looking at the resolution that director curler is bringing forward i'd like us to continue moving forward um but we need to be doing a lot more work around these numbers and hopefully bringing more partners to the table who can help get the portland public school share down to a more reasonable amount so senior representatives as well in the comments yeah well i'm in full support of this also because the people here tonight are the ones who would benefit from this your community and if you're saying that this is what's correct for you i see that as me needing to take the responsibility to vote yes and move forward in this so you guys can benefit from it so i'll just weigh in last and say i too and fully support not just this project but this resolution has been worked out i think it is fiscally responsible i think it's clear and i think it's transparent and i think we should all support it as we have been back to 2012 with a whole array of partners i had the opportunity to participate in the regional solutions project that representative kenny guyer co-convened to see the array of partners hard at work on figuring out how this innovative model would work going through the process of securing funding for the housing piece and i just would be appalled to think that we would in any way hold up this project not only is it an innovative creative and fiscally responsible project i would
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again you know remind my colleagues that according to our racial educational equity policy we explicitly call for differentiation of resources and prioritization when it matters to us as a district we find the money we make it a priority and this project as has been laid out here through many many months of collaboration and hard work by our professional staff is the right move to make on behalf of our students who have been most grossly underserved by this district and who will be well served by this innovative project so so with that the board will now vote on resolution 5083. no we're going to go ahead and vote on this resolution okay we have a roll call vote please yes uh so we're gonna have a roll call please uh miss houston okay your point of order uh if this goes down then am i able to offer my yes you are okay me director curler no director morton abstain director goals yes director belial yes director reagan no and chair atkins yes all right um the resolution 5083 does not receive enough votes to be approved with a vote of three yeses two no's one abstention and student representative jesuit voting yes okay so this the motion uh the resolution does not care okay so i would like to move uh a resolution um that's in everybody's packets um and uh the only thing that i change that's in the packet is to this these parts here just okay why don't we go ahead and get it on the table first so this would be resolution i believe number five zero eight six okay so director curler moves um resolution number five is there a second is there a second yes that's the second and director regan seconds okay so this is um has the same title as the previous one and it has some changes so maybe director curler now you could now that it's on the floor certainly so um just after the preliminary building estimation of 12.5 million everything gets crossed out uh it is just deleted excuse me are you talking about an exhibit b yes i am okay so you so i'm sorry say that again uh preliminary building and cost estimate at 12.5 million it's understanding that all those bullet points are not binding in any way but are purely estimates you still want to remove them correct yes and then and then that's it okay and then maybe we can point out um some of the other changes are they also under the design cost sharing piece of exhibit b uh yes they are can you sure so site master planning split at 50 50. um lid will be split at 55.45 uh building design costs split 50 50. um so that's a change from the previous version and i think you also wanted under demolition to that maya would cover the entire cost of the demolition um it says here to be demolished during the housing phase by neo right but does that i'm sorry let me look at the previous one this one this is this shares the cost so director curler i'm confused we have a we have a new resolution in front of us so you're working off of this one i'm working off the new resolution it has resolution number blank at the front it was in your yellow packet yeah i think it's the exhibit bead we'll look at it thank you so what i'm just pointing out is just to clarify for the record so the changes so there are are there any changes to the recitals or the resolution in your other than the one that we're going off of this resolution so okay i'm just clarifying because this is now technically a separate resolution is there anything different in the recitals or the resolves piece from the original five series um i don't know the answer to that question i assume uh yes and is amanda here one thing i think um if i may offer a suggestion i think that looks as if there's a number six a resolved number six which simply clarifies the fact that we are going to continue to actively pursue fundraising and partnerships to support
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development of the regional early learning academy in order to create costs in district command which is the way it was before but this simply makes that explicit so that's an addition um looking at it quickly i um didn't have a chance to look at this before the meeting but i think that's the change so we're so again we're back at exhibit b changes yep um so just a comparison with the original version under the regional early learning academy longhouse design cost sharing section of exhibit b which is one two three four four kind of section um so rather than a 55 45 split between a and pps what you're wanting is a 50 50. is that correct no the lid stays the same no the lid stays there site master planning sorry sitemaster planning rather than 50 50 55 45 would now be 50 50. um led 5545 just what it was before right and then you want the building cost design split 50 50 rather than 60 40 between pps and nan yeah to continue the design work okay and then what's the cost difference that we're talking about between your version and the original version it depends what it costs i mean i don't know what they're told but from my point of view this is back to my clear transparent fiscally responsible at this point in time we we are working on this project together as full partners it ought to be 50 50. but if we're being clear and transparent shouldn't we have hard shouldn't we compare the savings on this version versus the savings from the other version um no because i mean if you want to and you probably have already but for me it's about a percentage at this point in time okay so the one i do know is that the building or my understanding is that the building design cost is seven hundred thousand so that changes you i hope hopefully it would be less right but say let's just use that as a working figure just if we're talking percentages here so changing it from a 60 40 split to a 50 50 split would mean a difference of 70 000 that you're not willing for pps to pay just to clarify okay yeah okay and then in terms of the um excuse me the site master planning i don't know if we have a number on that i don't imagine that that either is a very large amount that we're talking about here in terms of needing to have uh maya pay more and pps pay less in this in order for this agreement to move forward i don't know if anyone has that number yeah questions and discussions do we also have the number for what it's going to cost for us to uh start pursuing fundraising for now are we going to hire a development director for neon what are we going to do i would assume partners will come to the table if this project is that important well but we want this to be clear right so director curly you could just withdraw this and um and the thing will just go down so that would be another option i mean i think you were trying to be trying to be helpful in a way that uh people want to be that continues our collective support for the project and honoring the partnership that we have so i'm pretty very clear about it any other comments discussions i'll just say this despite all the the back and forth about this um i i appreciate wanting to come to the table with 50 50 as equal partners the fact of the matter is we're not equal partners we're going to be occupying more of the building we're going to have more capacity so if we're looking at true partnership to me it's really contributing to each their own what parts are we what we're going to you don't have to disagree with me i know you already disagree which is why you brought forward the resolution and the fact that we're arguing over again 70 000 or under 100 000 just on the principle it it to me epitomizes bad bad faith bargaining bad partnership so i just um i i think it's unfortunate i i heard everybody at this dios say that they
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support this project um and then when it comes down to a 70 000 difference i hear people saying just pull it and kill it and i think that's unfortunate i think that's reactive and bad policy making and what i'm reacting to is the fact that we are talking about building three pre-k classes and three kindergarten classes at a cost of more than five million dollars and that's it's just not fiscally responsible we need to have more partners come into this with us without it i hope that that can happen what i don't understand is both the a you're discounting the wrap around service pieces and the community pieces this and the shared space in this model we're not just talking about isolated classrooms and b you're discounting again the fact that we have an obligation to differentiate our resources and make this a priority and that's what's fiscally responsible to me and so it's fiscally irresponsible to continue to fail such a large segment and such an important segment of our population so i mean we are going to be able to serve students and families better and have better outcomes i am confident as a result of this project so um you know in the interest because of the three-year investment of time not just by portland public schools and nab but by a whole array of community partners i would i will reluctantly support this i think it's wrong to nickel and dime a valued partner when we are a much larger entity and one that's fully capable of finding the money to be able to put these initial planning costs into place but if that's where it needs to be in order to move forward without further delay given that we all say we support this project and i believe that we all sincerely do then that's when i'm willing to to support this i am very frustrated but i want to keep this project moving forward without any further delay because i just mentioned when i hear people talk about fiscally irresponsible the the foster regional early learning academy longhouse is estimated to be 328 per square foot in this building um keep in mind that this is a 12 million project and we're investing about 5 million that if i had the chance to invest 5 million and earn 12 million back that is a very wise investment so the cost of this is 328 per square foot our new fabian school which will have more classrooms as director reagan points out is going to be cost at or built to a cost of about 338 so that's more expensive the modular just a modular that we're putting at sitting to exp to deal with overcrowding is going to cost us 257 square foot per square foot and the clarendon regional early learning academy cost us 267 redeveloping an existing building to bring it back up to code so we can frame it as five classrooms five million dollars lots of money or we can actually divide it out and look at the actual cost and see that it's well within reasonable costs so i'm not going to be supporting this read this um new resolution have you last comments before we move to a vote on resolution five zero yeah just just just to be you know to reiterate want the project to go forward i want to be able to justify it to anybody who i talk to want these kind of projects us to do these projects in the future um and uh and i wanted to be clear transparent and fiscally responsible all those things can happen and and that that's why i've offered this so so with respect director cooler who are you speaking to that has any questions about the value of this project i'd say anybody i speak to so right now i'm speaking to you okay okay and and i and um and i think it's the best approach is uh and greg called it nickel and diming i'm just saying let's let's just be clear from the beginning we have a long process to come forward um and i actually think it will strengthen our partnership director knowles i i would disagree on
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the strengthening of partnerships we've been at this for three years with neha i think this last minute bad faith uh wait a second this is not last minute excuse me this is last minute this has just happened to jesus just came to the board in an executive session thank you yeah can i continue now yes thank you i think this is a bad faith uh on part of the my colleagues on the board who have known about this project as long as we've all been looking at it together um and i also uh believe that uh the numbers at least for me and i'm not a numbers person the numbers for me are very clear and i think it's a reasonable division of the costs both based on as director atkins said our equity policy and just our usage of the building and and as director belial pointed out through this expense getting a 12 million dollar building we are going to own this building so all right so let's go ahead and do a vote in resolution uh number 5086 let's do a roll call again in this one please director curler yes director morton abstain director no director belial no director regan no and chair adkins yes uh so this resolution also does not pass as for a lack of um yes both student directors it has two yes three no's one extension with student representative jazz while voting yes yes all right so given that neither of these resolutions um has garnered enough votes tonight um what i'm going to ask staff to do with all paste possible is to meet immediately with our partners at naia and work with them and then come back to leadership and then we'll bring this back to the board as quickly as possible so that we can find a landing place and move this forward because i know we don't want to delay any further so unfortunately we have not reached a resolution on this our action on this tonight but i have every hope and expectation that we will after three years of work on this project and i've given the demonstrated value and need so it's going to be a very high priority for me as chair to make sure we bring this back as quickly as possible and find on the solution that will work thank you again for everyone who came tonight we appreciate your support okay we're now going to actually shift back to the topic of the bond uh with a quarterly update actual operon or capital improvement bond from jim owens we'll just take a moment for folks to head out and then we'll continue jim why don't you go ahead and come on down and if i could just ask the folks in back if you could just move closer to the front doors as you exit just because we need to be able to continue our meeting and we can hear thank you very much so jim why don't you go ahead and get started okay good evening jim owens senior director of office of school modernization i'm here tonight to present a quarterly update on the status of our 2012 capital construction bond measure and i'd like to begin as i have previously to thank the bond accountability committee specifically kevin spellman and willie paul tonight for their report one of the objectives in briefing the bond accountability committee is to ensure that they're getting information that allows them to make an independent assessment of the program and to be able to highlight some of the challenges that staff is is is working with i think the report from the committee continues to reinforce that the program is aligned with the material that's presented to
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the committee i also think it conveys an appropriate level of continued community oversight on the program i also want to thank directors belial director curler and director buell who attended the april 15 bond accountability committee meeting and particularly for the robust conversation we had around the value engineering concepts that's a fairly nuanced but very important topic and certainly is something that's connected to our to our high schools in your board package tonight is the april update of the balanced scorecard and as i've done previously i won't go into detail around it i'm happy to answer questions however as we get to the end of the presentation but i would like to deviate and instead try to highlight some of the principal challenges that we face it's going to be hard to do justice after kevin spellman just presented the information that he did but what i would like to leave you with is a sense of the challenges that we're facing in an abbreviated format and then try to highlight the next uh the next six months that we have ahead of us and then finally close out with a short five minute video at our lida k-8 school around around students who had a chance to observe the improvements that were made in our elita last summer in terms of our overall perspective i think it's fair to say that pps is facing an unprecedented uh challenge this summer the amount of new construction starts that we have is larger than the entire eight year program and probably over the last 50 years for pps so it's really significant and certainly not something to be minimized uh in particular we have three challenges that i'd like to highlight that i think reinforce where we're where we're currently focused the work that we're doing at tubman and marshall is very key work that connects to being able to get students and staff in place and this is occurring over the summer and although we've had a lot of work done at marshall over the past year the efforts that need to still take place to get furniture fixtures and equipment and all the items that are needed so that the 1500 students at franklin are ready to start school before labor day is in place so it's certainly a very key effort that our project team is very focused on similarly at tubman you recently approved an award recommendation to do a number of improvements that will reflect how we will support the students from fabian in their temporary home for two years that work is just getting started and will be another significant effort to ensure not only that the school is configured for fabian as a k-8 but also that it will continue support for the entire two-year period and that students and staff when they get to tubman will feel a a smooth transition quite a bit of effort is going into that we only have 65 calendar days to complete the work after students leave on june 11th and so since students are returning prior to labor day this is a very compressed period significantly less than what we've had over the last two summers so we've intentionally as we bid our work we have compressed schedules that have contractors working six day weeks a significant amount of overtime and that was all included in the in the bid packages the second major area that i wanted to focus on are the high schools this is an opportunity for pps to step out and do two high schools con currently all the preparation work that's gone into this effort has is really starting to pay off having our guaranteed maximum prices in place is has set the stage for us to continue to move forward and i think important to highlight the fact that at the groundbreaking on saturday that both superintendent smith and the mayor highlighted the pivotal moment for the saint john's community and for roosevelt rising and emphasize that the investment that we're making in this school is extremely important and will serve students for many many decades to come the work at roosevelt actually began well before the groundbreaking and it was an effort that started with identifying the phasing that is a fairly complex arrangement to ensure that not the 800 students that we initially thought would be needed to phase there are now 1 000 and
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the planning that had to go into the number of temporary facilities and the move plans and so forth is extremely complicated and so i think being able to get that set in place to get temporary facilities placed over spring break to move students into temporary classrooms has really paid off and it will set the stage for being able to start the heavy work uh that begins when students leave in june so we're really pleased that we're off to a good start there and the groundbreaking event i think really established really established that moment for pps the franklin project is next we have a groundbreaking scheduled for may 16th and i think it will be another opportunity to highlight for the franklin community that the investment in that school is going to really really be a key investment to allow that school to be fully modernized and to continue to serve students there for many decades to come the work at franklin is slightly behind roosevelt we have our guaranteed maximum price in place and we will be mobilizing our contractor our builder team in mid-june so that they can begin work unlike roosevelt they won't need to phase the students as they will be in place over at marshall but the contractor is significantly challenged given the size of that site and the work that needs to take place the contractor the builder at franklin as well as the builder at roosevelt are all confident in terms of being able to deliver both on time and on budget which are important messages and then the third area is the continuation of our summer program this summer we're trying to make improvements at 27 schools i have 28 in my notes because that includes the work at tubman but the 27 schools represent another significant increase in the amount of effort that will be taking place this summer over the past several weeks you've approved a number of award recommendations that we've made tonight on the consent agenda is the last one for the roof tear off and seismic improvements at maplewood and so with that work we have seven large construction contracts to work with again over that short 65 day period this summer so a lot of work going on a lot of compressed schedules a lot of a lot of staff effort on it so with those three primary challenges i wanted to leave you with a sense that from from a staff perspective we feel confident that we'll be able to deliver this work and that we have the right resources in place we've empowered people to do the work and we're really anxious to see this come together and i think it'll be another significant milestone in our eight year program that that will continue to showcase i won't go through these in details but this highlights much of what kevin spellman presented around what to expect in the in the coming months certainly as we're getting started this summer we need to end it and being able to get these schools opening on time with minimum disruption is is a key objective something that we've accomplished twice before so we want to make this a hat trick they work at the high schools is significant even though we have our guaranteed maximum prices in place we have to go through the bidding process for the trades and so the buyout process that determines where we land relative to those gmps as they're called will take several months before we know fully where we stand we're cautiously optimistic given the contingencies that we have in the project that we will be able to stay stay in line with our gmp but we'll be watching that very closely as we did the work the phasing of roosevelt is extremely complicated with the additional students we need to be very mindful that we're minimizing disruption to the teaching and learning activities and we have a have a good plan but as we know plans are often need to change and we have to adjust and the team is very much prepared to do that and working very closely with building level leadership to ensure that that happens uh fabian unless we forget is on a similar track as the two high schools with an expectation to complete the uh the new uh fabian uh by the fall of 2017. uh certainly on track but as we move through design and get a sense of the the cost of that work and we move into the demolition phase for the school and then start construction this all is important work that will be occurring over the next six months grant high school is quickly coming up as our third major full modernization project and the master planning will actually begin there over the summer we're currently going through the process to select the design team and we'll be bringing that forward to you in june with our award recommendation again another significant effort to
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ensure that our grant high school will be fully modernized along the same lines as franklin and roosevelt fully aligned with our educational program as described in our in our head spec summer 2016 is just around the corner and we've already begun the work to finalize the fee with the architect on that project we've got 11 schools in the summer of 2016 and so another significant effort and then finally the master planning that was mentioned around madison lincoln and benson polytechnic is another component so that's to expect over the next uh over the next six months before i show the video at arlita i do want to take a moment to publicly acknowledge acknowledge some osm project team members who have been pivotal on the roosevelt project michelle platter osm project director and assisted by sarah oakes as her capital project coordinator were pivotal to get us to a point to be able to have that groundbreaking to have those temporary facilities in place the countless hours that they've put into orchestrating that team getting all the plans in place negotiating the gmp has just been a huge task and i just can't say enough i can't extend enough tribute to them for the work that they and their team have done to get roosevelt to where the place is and i think michelle platter is in the back of the of the auditorium so a great uh tribute to them and i wanted to want to thank thank them for that for that work okay at this time i'd like to show the short darlita video we need something to change an educational voice when i get back i want more ideas more watchbooks our leda school is now safer drier and better thanks to the voter approved pbs school building improvement bond our leader k-8 is one of 12 schools that were successfully upgraded this summer all the work was completed on time and on budget hi my name is anna what is your name my name is michelle sheraton an estimate how much money did this cost this specific site um is our leda and we spent about two million dollars on the site did you have to go to all the schools to see which ones set of consultants went out to the sites did a review of the roofs and if the roofs were in need of seismic upgrades as well as a new roof we put them together and they went on the bond and they have a priority so because you guys needed a new roof and seismic work here at carlita you came to the top of the list we work on your school in 66 days the contractor comes in the day you leave and they leave the day you come back the pbs school district has about 437 million dollars of budget did you use any of that money yes we use a portion of that two million dollars came out of that budget in the summer of 2014 our lady k-38 received building level session strengthening we also received science classes improvements new overhead electrical outlets accessible sinks eyewash stations and cabinets what's your name hi jeremy i'm mr sancho i'm the middle school science teacher here at the leo school what are some of the improvements from oh well we had an upgrade in one of our walls in case of earthquakes called a seismic upgrade we have an eye wash station in case of a spill of something into someone's eye and then we have retractable extension cords which are great for when we have microscopes or warming plates or things that kids need more plugs for and we got a bright new floor as well thank you for your time you bet jeremy thanks for talking with me the bond project is really cool and i think we are all happy that the schools got worked out because they didn't even they
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did beer that was michelle sheridan featured who was the project manager for the summer work last summer and she's now our project director for the grant high school modernization so with that short video i'd like to entertain any questions that board may have thank you so much colleagues i have no questions we kind of yeah i just have one question it's about tubman um can you talk a little bit about what what changes are happening there or what what we're having to do there for the work because it seems anyway sure happy too tubman improvements are fairly minor primarily tenant improvements relating to ada american disability act improvements around the railings we're doing some roof improvements where we've had some leakage issues in the past some minor adjustments to electrical plumbing systems we have some classroom configuration changes because of the k8 model that's there so we're doing some partition work in the spaces about a half a million dollars worth of worth of construction that that needs to take place we also have tenants that are currently in the school that are being relocated out to other locations and so that work is ongoing so the dynamics of the improvements have to work around the groups as they are are moving out of the space so jim how many students in tubman how many students can fit into tubby how many students can fit in terms of student capacity i'm not i'd have to get back to you on what that number is i think it's probably in the 750 range but i need to check that yeah like a middle school okay thank you director reagan so jim you mentioned in your presentation and it was also mentioned in the bond accountability committee report that both roosevelt and franklin designs are still behind the baseline schedule and so at what point uh during the process will we be cut up again what's your expectation that's a great question director regan the balanced score card format has us evaluating performance through each of the each of the phases of the project and we had a specific parameter a measure around a design period we are measuring against our original baseline schedules that provided a certain amount of time for master planning and for design and construction given all the variables that have taken place at those high schools we've exceeded the time for the design so we're expecting to make the top during construction phase so currently where we are and we're not actually through with design currently we still have to complete our construction documents for both franklin and roosevelt we'll be completing those shortly but we're still in excess of four weeks over our original timeline so that's why we're showing it as a red cell but very confident that we'll make that time up during construction and that's part of what we have in in terms of our overall schedules okay that's what i wanted to hear very confident that we're going to make the time up that's great and then i had a question that i was asked to make by someone from community parents for public schools and i sort of think i can figure out the answer to this myself but the question was around roosevelt high school and an expectation that as we build this new facility that more and more students and families might take a look and come back to their neighborhood school which would be wonderful i think that's what we're all hoping and dreaming and the question is what happens if that occurs in the next two or three years and all of a sudden we're out of space great great question we have a number of operational protocols i think available to us in terms of directing students there the current plan of course is to construct the improvements such that we have a 1350 student capacity with a core capacity of 1700 if we had additional students that went above that like many of our current schools we would need to make adjustments to accommodate addition additional students we haven't actually studied how we would do that the projections do not have a succeeding 1350 currently over the next several years certainly when when the school opens in the fall of 2017 but certainly something we'll be we'll be monitoring i would think the same question would apply to franklin and
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grant as well who were you know we're going to be constructed for a capacity of 1700. okay thanks anything else stretch your blood i just um in the spirit that the bond accountability committee talked about how difficult it is about messaging and keeping realistic i just wanted to point out that what i thought i heard and i'm asking you to check my understanding is that we're confident that we're on schedule that we can make up the schedule for both franklin and roosevelt but roosevelt will extend longer than we had thought and anticipated but we believe it will be work that students can do while still on site that we aren't actually expecting to be done up and out of roosevelt by the time students come out that because of our delay and what we were going to do with it we actually delayed it beyond what we can make up right but you have figured out a way to phase it so that it won't affect students is that correct correct right and and the complexity of schedule is difficult to address in a forum such as this but it's certainly fair to say as i think as you characterize that we will have that school ready for all of the students in the fall of 2017. the phase three work as it's termed which would go beyond that into november is site work that doesn't directly affect the students and it would be done on a way that would not interfere with with student teaching and learning activities so that's very much the plan and again the team is confident being able to deliver that right all right thank you so much and thank you for the video that was great yeah awesome video that was great visuals are always best and having our students makes it even better all right so next on our agenda we have an update on our english language arts adoption superintendent smith would like to introduce this item um yes we have melissa goff who's the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning you and brawley senior director of instruction curriculum assessment susan payne assistant director of curriculum assessment um and von trong executive director of teaching and learning who are going to give an update on our english language arts and english language development 612 and pre-k5 curriculum materials adoption advisory committee's work so take it away melissa while you're getting ready i want to be the first to publicly acknowledge and say congratulations on your new position as the superintendent of philomath congratulations thank you i appreciate that um oh what'd you say you said some wrong place right some other place it's okay some other place um so thank you thank you board chairs and uh school board members and uh superintendent smith we're very pleased to be here tonight to share with you an update on how we are uh supporting our students in the important charge of making sure that every student is a reader and every student is reading to learn that we're preparing students for their 13th year so we're going to share with you a little bit of information around the work we've done to date and where we're headed moving forward i do want to note first of all it was great to see their lead of video and it does make me want to grab my microphone and do the rock star into it being a former middle school principal so that's the kind of joy that we want to see at our middle schools in our language arts classes as well um and as we're talking about a language arts adoption and as we're talking about a language development adoption we're looking at things a little bit differently than we have in years past so to to go forward first we need to go back so we wanted to share with you a chronology of of how we got to where we are this school year and then i'll hand off to you and into susan to share more information with you but um in 2006 2007 an adoption occurred in pps for english language arts and english as a second language and that adoption was implemented beginning in 2007.08 at that time period there were a number of adoptions that took place um 13 to be exact 13 adoptions because pps had fallen so far behind in keeping up with adoptions over time so a large number of adoptions took place and uh with that large number of adoption of adoptions the challenge of providing teachers the instructional and professional development support that they needed to have a successful implementation across 13 adoptions at one time by 2009 2010 we had completed an audit where we had taken a look at a number of things influencing instructional time and one of the pieces of feedback from the audit was how can we how can we maximize instructional time by perhaps converting
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professional development days so we did make that decision in 2009-10 and we converted at that point in time we had five per year five full professional development days a year and we reduced to one professional development day a year in order to create instructional time and then we uh also looked at using our time differently so we added eight two hour late opening days to add site-based professional development opportunities for staff so in 2013 14 the school board approved a 6th through 12th grade language arts language development investment for 2014-15 school year so what's important to note about that is just the change in language itself so back when we approved the 2006-7 materials we were looking at english language arts and english as a second language as we move forward now we are looking at language arts and developing strong literacy skill sets and whatever your native language is in addition to english and looking at language development in your native language and in english as well so how we're approaching the adoption itself has changed somewhat in 1415 the school year we're in right now this is the school year where statewide uh districts are implementing their k-12 language arts adoptions so we're a little behind in that implementation timeline due to fiscal restraints that have kept us from being able to purchase into this to this important central part of our focus um we do have this year a pk 12 language arts language development committee work that has begun that that my colleagues will share more information with you about and we have a number of one-time investments that you will remember making at two different time periods this school year specifically focusing on that our commitment to uh third grade literacy and examples of that include a 350 000 investment in libraries we've worked with our communities of color partners around identifying culturally specific authors and titles that we can put into our libraries and those books are currently being ordered we also you also learned about the ipad parent student initiative that we've rolled out and part of our cost savings with those one-time investments were realized with the timing of hiring our library and media our library media specialists and our reading specials through those dollars and with with that cost savings we are able to uh support 250 staff in june where we will be paying them for three days of professional learning specific to pk3 literacy and that investment to go back to those five full professional development days that we used to have allows us to invest in some some longer periods of time where where we can go a little bit further in depth with our teachers we've also included in that group our education assistants so our classroom teachers our specialists and our education assistants i also want to say that one of the areas that we have really been looking at across our system is how do we engage with our partners around the around the superintendent's three priorities so in my realm as the functional lead for our third grade literacy priority one of the opportunities that i've had is to not only partner with our communities of color but to also partner with reading partners who have focused around a select group of schools in looking at how can we network together to make a change for all students in a given school and to look at funding partners who have been long-term allies with us such as mount hood cable regulatory commission and look at how can we leverage those funds to actually transform teaching and learning within our school district and well prepare students not only for literacy in a paper pencil mode but oh it's time to go to bed um but also digital literacy which is such a key component to our students success so with that i'd like to introduce you to a video and before i start it i'd just like to say that here in pbs here's what we hold dear that every student succeeds regardless of race or class it's the collective imperative it is what keeps us coming to the conversations though they be hard and though they be tiring it is it is what holds us together is that commitment to every single student we do have a video we want you to watch to set the context for that commitment that will help put in place how we've approached this adoption differently than in years past okay now you're going to have to adjust
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please welcome to the tedx sonoma county stage todd rose it's 1952 and the air force has a problem they've got good pilots flying better planes but they're getting worse results and they don't know why and for a while they blame the pilots they even blame the technology they eventually got around to blaming the flight instructors but it turned out that the problem was actually with the cockpit let me explain imagine you're a fighter pilot you're operating a machine that in some cases can travel faster than the speed of sound and where issues between success and failure sometimes life and death can be measured in split seconds if you're a fighter pilot you know that your performance depends fundamentally on the fit between you and your cockpit because after all what good is the best technology in the world if you can't reach the critical instruments when you need them the most but this presents a challenge for the air force because obviously pilots are not the same size so the issue is how do you design one cockpit that can fit the most individuals for a long time it was assumed that you could do this by designing for the average pilot that almost seems intuitively right if you design something that fit for the average sized person wouldn't it fit most people it seems right but it's actually wrong and 60 years ago an air force researcher gilbert daniels proved to the world just how wrong this really is and what it was costing us here's how he did it he studied over 4 000 pilots and he measured them on 10 dimensions of size and he asked a very simple question how many of these pilots are average on all 10 dimensions the assumption was that most of them would be do you know how many really were zero gilbert daniels proved there was no such thing as an average pilot instead what he found was that every single pilot had what we call a jagged size profile right means not it means means you're not no one's at the same on every dimension and this makes sense just because you're the tallest person doesn't mean you're the heaviest doesn't mean you have the broadest shoulders or the longest torso but this is tricky because if every pilot has a jacket size profile and you design a cockpit on average you've literally designed it for nobody so the air force realized they had a problem and their response was bold they banned the average meaning that moving forward they refused to buy fighter jets where the cockpit was designed for an average sized pilot instead they demanded that the companies who built these planes designed them to the edges of dimensions of size meaning that rather than design for say the average height they wanted a cockpit that could accommodate as close to the shortest pilot and the tallest pilot as the technology would allow now the companies that made these planes as you could imagine weren't happy right they argued and lobbied and they said it's going to be impossible or at least impossibly expensive to build a flexible cockpit but once they realized that the air force wasn't going to budge suddenly it was possible and it turned out it wasn't that expensive and in fact they made great strides leveraging simple solutions that we all take for granted in our everyday lives like adjustable seats and as a result the air force not only improved the performance of the pilots that they
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already had but they dramatically expanded their talent pool today we have the most diverse pool of fighter pilots ever but here's the thing many of our top pilots would have never fit in a cockpit designed on average so most of us have never sat in the cockpit of a 150 million dollar fighter jet right but we've all sat in the classroom so the video is poignant in that it really speaks to the work that we do every day in education there are a few pieces to know one that was todd rose he's a current harvard professor who was a high school dropout the video you can just google ted talk and uh ban the average and you'll be able to pull up the other 15 minutes that he shares in his ted talk definitely worth seeing so the challenge for us in pps is to ban the average and it is the challenge that these committees have embraced in looking at what are the resources we provide to our students it changes fundamentally how we interact with our funders how we interact with our vendors what our expectations are for our for a universal design for learning to be a part an integral part of the adoption process from the beginning it means that we are taking into account through these processes the assets of our students the cultures of our students the first language of these student of our students and the different learning styles and when you take all of those into account you know that there's there's no real option for us except to ban the average because you can't take all of those into account and have the same fix for every student thanks melissa so what we want to do with the next portion of the presentation is to update you on two sort of important batches of work that have been going on um through the part the department of instruction curriculum and assessment and specifically two committees that have been really working on this idea of coming up with a more specified and individualized approach to instruction for literacy and language arts the the first let me go back for a second the first with with pre-k through five we've had a literacy advisory committee that has been uh representative of teachers and programs from across across the district um the members of that committee are in your board packet and that group has really been engaged in a conversation and the conversation has really been about as melissa spoke of figuring out a vision and an instructional design that are that's going to meet the needs of all of our kids here in pbs it's it's a very important piece of work because it's foundational to significant investments that we would make in the corp program before we invest in the core program we have to understand what design what instructional design we want our resources to be able to support we have to we have to be clear about what is the professional development that is going to support that design so that when teachers receive new resources and materials everything makes sense and everything works together and and finally we want to be able to as melissa talked about in the video talks about have a suite of resources that meet the needs of all kids and every kid not not the average and not even the median but but everyone the other group that susan's going to talk to you about in a minute is is actually a resource adoption committee and that is for sixth through twelfth grade language arts and that group is actually looking at identifying specific sets of resources to actually make a recommendation for purchase so what we have the bigger context here is an evolving um process the the the paradigm for adoptions the old paradigm has really been textbooks it's really been about you know print resources and we are in in the process of of making that transition as a district to a different paradigm and that different paradigm is really fundamental to how we organize ourselves in curriculum instruction and assess assessment because it looks completely different really what we're transitioning towards
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and our extended vision is really a one that is more about content curation so in other words identifying resources that may come from a variety of different sources it could be print resources digital resources open educational resources and curating them tagging them identifying them in such a way that we can deploy them out to teachers in a way that makes sense to meet those students individualized needs so it's it's really a pretty fun foundational shift that we're in the middle of as we do this work and it will allow us at the end of the road to sort of approach instruction in a completely different way in a much more individualized way in a much more differentiated way and use technology in a way that really supports that because what we see as our vision for the for the role of technology in the district is is specifically what can it do to provide individualized supports to students technology shows great promise in providing feedback that's quick that can be really really tailored and targeted to individual students part of our resource identification and deployment has to really take into consideration that shift the other thing technology can do is really bring authentic real world content and real world circumstances into the classroom that wouldn't be possible without the use of technology um and and and and finally you know it's it makes things really individualized for kids so technology can can respond to student input in a way in a classroom with 30 students in in a much more targeted way than a teacher can alone with those 30 students so part of our work here is really around deploying identifying deploying resources that make sense in that larger world of technology and digital resources that are becoming available to us so as i mentioned already this pre-k through five literacy advisory committee really um is is about having that conversation about a vision and an instructional design we want to draw on the vast amount of experience and expertise that we have within the district to be able to have that conversation knowing that as an organization we can adopt any kind of an instructional design but it's individual teachers and classrooms that actually implement that design and that's been a really part big part of our thinking even in the genesis of the idea of this committee we want to support students individualized needs we want to support the needs of our emerging bilingual students we want to support multi-sensory approaches to instruction that again technology can can can really help us with and so the idea of this committee is to really come up with a vision and sort of set of guiding principles that will inform the later work of an actual resource materials resource adoption committee with that um i have another short shorter video this time to share with you that i think really speaks to our current context and the importance of this work because there's really two things that that we want to move forward this this allocation of resources is about identifying resources and materials that are important for teachers but it's also about building the capacity of our teachers to deliver that solid core program this video features dr louisa moats and she's been an advisor on literacy to the u.s department of education and she's an expert in neuropsychiatry as well teachers not programs teach students to read well it would seem kind of simplistic to say that but here's the evidence we can put good programs in the hands of teachers who don't understand what to do with them and really get no results to speak of we can take teachers who are not equipped with programs to speak of other than very basic things and we can teach them a lot about how to teach reading and about the language content that they need to teach and show that we can get big improvements in student achievement we can also show that there's a relationship between what teachers know and what students learn although it's kind of complex because we also have to show that teachers are
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actually teaching and doing and implementing good practices the best combination though of course is a knowledgeable teacher with a really well-designed program who receives enough mentoring and support to implement that program with fidelity and with flexibility so that individual student needs are met if i were in a classroom again if i could relive my 20s when i was teaching i i would have begged for a really good program because i didn't know enough and it it's also true that teachers who receive enough professional development can learn a lot from a well-designed program but the the fundamental variable here is the teacher and the teacher's knowledge skill and dedication to the implementation of the instruction it's really hard work it takes time it takes energy takes know-how it takes support and it takes good tools so our investments in materials and resources for teachers make sense if we can put them in the context of solid instructional design and um really that's the work that we've been doing this year with the with the pre-k letters means language essentials so because language has a lot to say on the subject so um so as i was saying it it makes sense to make those investments in the in the context of of a strong and clear design you know clarity precedes competence so that's really what we're we're trying to do um with this with this committee and we we have a group of folks that have a lot of weight with their colleagues in this space and so what we see this uh this group doing going forward is forming the nucleus for a cmaq and forming a nucleus for a coalition so that we have a lot of unity and some more uniformity about how we approach early literacy instruction in the district so with that and what you see up here in front of you now is is a word cloud and this is is what the group came up with at one of our earlier meetings in terms of brainstorming ideas around a vision and what are the what are the fundamental values ideas and considerations we want to have included in that vision so that it is specific to our needs here in in pps so with that i'm going to turn this um we're going to transition and talk about the 612 language arts materials advisory committee and i'm going to turn it over to susan payne thank you um so i have been helping to lead the work at the secondary level um can you hear me okay and i don't know if you all are familiar with the uh acronym cmac it was a new one to me when i joined pps but um it stands for the curriculum materials adoption advisory committee so i'm going to start by by just uh telling you a little bit about how we started the work and then give you an overview of what we've done this year and then talk about some uh next steps uh and and i and i just want to reiterate some of the things that um both melissa and euan have said about how exciting this work is in terms of it being really a new approach to an adoption and the teachers who we are working with on the committee are very excited about it and about the fact that it is a cross-departmental collaboration so we started recruiting for our committee in the fall and we asked teachers to submit a letter of interest we wanted to make sure that we had representation from a variety of obviously areas in the city we have all clusters represented on the committee and we also wanted a range of representation in terms of types of schools so we have teachers from k-8s from middle schools every high school has a representative and then we also have alternative programs represented on the committee in addition we wanted to have a range of roles so we have while we have teachers from each of the different departments we have language arts teachers we have english as a second language teachers and we also have teachers from our dual language programs
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we also have teachers who have experience in special ed and in tag programs and we included librarians on our committee as well as an administrator from both the middle level and the high school level and we also included some partners from higher education so we have over 40 people on our team including some folks from the central level we have seven tosas including an equity tosa and myself and then one of our esl assistant directors so in terms of the the work i'm just going to highlight a few of the key things that we've been um working on this year first thing that we did is to survey all of our 612 language arts and uh esl teachers about their needs so both in terms of material needs and also professional development needs and then we also asked for specific input from them around materials that they want specific materials that they wanted us to take a look at so that was uh in january and we have just over the last month we put out a second survey to get even more input from them we we did get significant response but we want to be sure that we give everybody the opportunity to give their input so we're continuing to to gather that information um we designed a two-year plan in order to maximize that input both from our teachers and also from our community members and family families we wanted it obviously to be a thorough and a thoughtful process and we also wanted to have enough time to include a pilot and then we needed to set some context up front before we actually started looking at materials so we spent some time earlier this year prioritizing the 612 language arts standards and as a team we also drafted a mission and a vision statement for teaching language arts as well as a beliefs document about curriculum and instruction in language arts and we do have a website i think the url is at the end of our presentation and you have uh screenshots of it in your board packet uh so a lot of these documents are available there if you if you care to take a look at them um and that so finally the the thing that we've been involved in over the last uh three months is actually examining and evaluating materials using specific criteria so in terms of those materials we as again as ewan mentioned and melissa as well we're looking at a variety of different resources this is not a one-size-fits-all curriculum that we're looking at we're looking at both print and digital resources and we've been using the metaphor of a puzzle representing the idea that there will be a variety of different materials and pd that will kind of fit into an interlocking puzzle in order to meet all of these different skills that we need students to master in order to be college and career ready so again going back to the survey that we um and the input that we got from teachers they confirmed that they needed materials that would help students be college and career ready some of the things they told us that they needed were more complex texts so both literary and non-fiction texts that they want to source for informational text that is up-to-date and and includes engaging texts and also the resources to support the teaching of writing and then of course we're also very aware that we need to be looking at resources that support all of our students including our emerging bilinguals our students of color and culturally and linguistic linguistically diverse students so on that point i just want to mention that the criteria that we're using to evaluate the materials is based on the ode criteria but we added a section on equity and cultural relevance that was not included in that criteria and there's also a section on instructional supports that we're looking at very closely in terms of how the materials support those students so um this is just kind of a timeline of the work that i just described so you can see how that played out over the course of this year and tomorrow we will have our last round of vendor presentations at our meeting tomorrow with the committee and then moving forward in turn um in our our next steps this so this month the month of may is going to be a very busy month for us we have two open houses planned uh one is this week one next where we're um seeking again input from our teachers from uh
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parents and families and the community the first one will be held at jackson middle school on thursday afternoon and then we'll have another one next week here at the besc where those um anyone can come in and view the materials and give us input and we also this month we'll have our second of two parent uh committee meetings um we have a group a small about 10 parents who are getting a deeper kind of a deeper dive in terms of looking at materials and we're also getting input from them and next week we'll also be having a student meeting we've been recruiting students again 6 12 and we'll be um having a little pizza party and they'll get to look at the materials and again tell us what they think about them uh so then at the end of this month or towards the beginning of june will be um we're our committee will be making a final uh recommendation to us about what materials they would like to pilot in the fall and then in february of next year we will be making our recommendation to the board for purchase and then finally in spring of next year we'll be distributing those materials and beginning pd with our teachers so just to to finish up one of the great pieces of information that you have tonight is how far down the road we have come around our 612 adoption process and it has been very thoughtful and with deep teacher engagement that has shaped the direction that that we've taken that adoption process that was made possible through the board investment in adoptive resources uh materials and that purchase will actually happen next fiscal year so we're also looking at how do we look across all of our grade levels and at not only all our grade levels but all of our content areas in the adoption process so that we can shorten the cycle of adoption and not do what is the practice of the state at this point in time and every seven year update on materials when you wait seven years to update materials you have waited too long especially in this digital information age so as we look at resources we want to look how can we fund pk5 and invest in resources that are as responsive for pre-k through fifth grade students as we're looking at for six through twelve and then how do we look across all of the content areas as well so that we have an adaptive learning environment i would just add the the adoption process and timeline itself gets reinvented as you change as you transfer from making single point in time investments of textbook type resources to curating content which is more of a constant and ongoing process so that's something that you know we're working together with with several partner districts and also the state is i know taking a lot of interest in as well and now we welcome any questions wonderful thank you very much colleagues i'll just dr curler thank you yeah very very exciting and um just throw out two cents i'm sure you guys are thinking about this but the the teachers i've spoken with who are actively using technology and want to do more of it um the thing that they are where they want to go with it is is an ability to really um design their own programs and so it's not necessarily just a content delivered via that but but really interactive and an ability to and so that those are the kind of things you guys are looking at yeah absolutely and again you know as we get towards more personalized kinds of learning environments and curriculum the transition goes from a more lockstep approach which is inherent to hard books and box type programs to something that's much more responsive to individualized students needs so students there's you know an input and sort of a a cycle of of um feedback that actually you know tailors the program to individual students needs i would say this this summer yeah so this last summer we hosted a content curation and creation curriculum camp exact specifically for that purpose that really led to a surge of teacher interest and advocacy for how do we continue to drive this work forward so we recently started a blended learning steering committee we have 40 teachers on that committee with a waiting list of teachers who want to be on the committee so very much pursuing that yeah great director thanks for the presentation um a couple
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of questions um one i appreciate your um categorizing miss goff that we were we're a little bit behind um with our adoption because of fiscal restraints i think is the term you used and really it was our reluctance to invest in these um for a variety of reasons but i can remember our discussions and we kept saying but can't we put this off a little bit longer and i just highlight that for us as a board because every time we do that we get farther behind and i'm beginning to see a pattern whether it's with our construction projects or our curriculum projects we seem to be a little bit behind and i don't think it needs to be that way the second part is i just want to highlight and it's not news to you but the challenge of deploying these resources where there are needs and for teachers to understand how to get them what they are and to be familiar with them right i mean that the advantage is that teachers who know their curriculum and their their go-to to affect that issue it's a constantly changing world now and if a teacher is constantly changing they're having to review and update on the newest and that is a professional development struggle and we struggle now i think sometimes of getting effective professional development to the right person at the right time making that match is going to be exorbitantly challenging so i just hope that the committee will spend a lot of time on figuring out how how to do that absolutely and you know in pre-k five certainly and i'm sure in 612 um the work has really centered around professional development and implementation you know as you saw from the videos resources only support teachers and resources in the absence of that support are make poor investments and in fact can be counterproductive um so that's really central to our design i appreciate it the video that you showed that where she was explicit that really what matters still is the teacher and how effective they are that all the curriculum adoption you can have the best tools but without that teacher being effective it's just not going to be so we have to figure out the supports to make sure that the teachers feel effective or can be effective i just want to highlight an issue of privacy as we talk about curating right i get to visit many school districts across the county and i see people doing moby macs and i see them doing ixl and i see them doing a whole bunch of different pieces but each one of those a student is entering an identifiable something so that it can be tailored to him or her and i'm just not convinced in ed tech yet and the securities that are in place so just something that i hope that we're working with our tech folks about the right policies and the right protocols to put into place to keep that as protected as possible can i hear just i'll mention one thing and then a real question that i'll actually let you respond to i just want to highlight that we're coming up on an election it won't surprise you but at least three people on this board will turn over you said that you're going to come back to the board in february 2016 just a reminder that the board may need an update because there will be three people who will be unaware although i see one can two candidates in the back that may be already up to speed but i don't want this habit of changing course mid direction so i just highlight that as something that you'll probably want to come in front of the new board again to remind folks because it seems to be short-lived memories up here the question i have that i'm hoping to hear is to hear how are you deciding whether a curriculum or a tool or a device is culturally responsive or culturally appropriate like are we reaching out for input into that or how are we doing that great question um so um one way that we're doing it is um really engaging pretty tightly with um teachers one but specifically you know our equity department and our equity ptosis who are represented on both the committees that that you're hearing about tonight then there are some specific a few specific tools um that are available to us to help that help us susan susan mentioned that we had to sort of redesign or really augment the evaluation tool since the 612 resources are we're actually at the place where we're getting towards procurement there so i'll let her speak to that a bit um in pre-k5 we're sort of more in the design phase but in 612 they're actually looking at evaluating resources so there we have um specific criteria um
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in terms of when we're looking at let's say text resources in terms of um authors um the kinds of characters that are that are represented in the so wanting to see a range of cultures and races represented in the literature um and the text as well as um the the um graphics and the visuals in text um one of the uh terms that we that we are looking to to stay away from is a sidebar approach that's like one of the criteria is we don't want a sidebar approach um so off the top of my head i can't remember there's about eight specific criteria and i'd be happy to share them with you and then on top of that our staff esl staff and do language our staff is also involved in the process and we also our administrators and our support staff also has attended dr walkey training on culturally and linguistically on literacy and so we have trainer staff and we include all the community members because we'll be also sharing with the community members as well and then i i just have to add two more things so i mentioned at the beginning of the presentation that it's changed our vendor relationships through partnership with the it department and our procurement lead lynette engstrom we have completely rewritten the curriculum intake process so we've developed what what is called what we call iris lovingly our instructional resource intake survey and it requires that vendors who are asking for us to use their materials to purchase from them that they go in and enter a bunch of information regarding the effectiveness of their materials with students of various populations we have them to segregate data by race we have them be very specific about what languages their materials are available in we talk about cultural responsiveness within that intake survey so they're thinking about that from the outset and we have received an incredible amount of feedback from vendors saying that that has been helpful to them lynette has also then presented through the council of great city schools collaborative within procurement and now we're reaching out to the council of great city schools to find out what other districts within the council group have some procurement intake process options as well so right now iris looks at the output it takes a look at what our student results and are our school districts using your materials narrowing the opportunity gaps for students we're interested in looking at a similar process as our equity in public purchasing and contracting policy to the input how do we ascertain whether or not those authors who are contributing to the development of these texts have a culturally responsive lens represent our communities of color that our students are a part of and that's that's a new question that the council is going to take on together so so evidence content and then the approaches to instruction themselves are you know sort of three buckets and three lenses at which to look at the materials just quickly i want to also thank you for your presentation just say how thrilled i am about the differentiation of the curriculum and the presentation um having a son who uh struggled mightily when we were doing whole language everybody was doing home language and that was all you were doing um so he wasn't a reader until after third grade only because we had the capacity to have a tutor for him i'm so happy that now all of our students will have an opportunity to have the kinds of both curriculum and and processes in place that that you can differentiate that the fact that we have computers ipads all of the different things hands-on kind of work that students could do that my son did with his tutor but definitely not in his classroom i'm just really excited and i'll tell you he's in his middle 20s now so that was a long time ago but very excited to see that this is being much more specialized for each student so thank you very much for your hard work of that dr reagan um i remember early on in my career boss saying to me that he would never worry about me because i know how to write and a while ago writing was one of our you know key measurements that we were using i believe in seventh grade as whether or not you're going to be successful later on so could you talk to us a little bit in terms of this language arts adoption what about the focus on on
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writing and what new tools or resources would come into play so um in terms of the pre-k work one of the things that we are talking about is the role of writing within that literacy instructional block we do have a separate curriculum the the common core writing binders that we have developed through a partnership with the oregon writing project that we anticipate that we're going to continue to use so it's within the literacy block you know working out obviously writing is a really important role has it has a huge role in reading and the truth the two feed off each other so you know one of the things as we talk about instructional design is within that design what is the work on writing and work on writing is integral to every design that that we talk about so um you know it's it's it's core to what we're going to be doing even outside of the of the working in writing binders that's that's just how kids show what they know and how they develop their their sense of print um at 6 12 you know susan you want to comment on sure yeah the materials that we're looking at um take an integrated approach um in terms of you know both not only reading and writing but also speaking and listening um and uh teaching grammar in the context of writing so um and and also that backwards design piece where uh at the end you know you would start with the performance task what the which is going to be a writing task typically um for that for the end of the unit um tied to the standards and then uh building the instruction up to that you know that final task so there's we're looking at um at materials and also at developing some of our own units and all of them would be integrated and have writing as a central piece all right thank you very much i really appreciate it and carry on the great work thank you thank you all right so next on our agenda is a 2015-16 budget discussion so i will now recess the board from his regular meeting and convene us as the budget committee so just as a reminder the superintendent um held four town hall meetings on the budget between march 4th and march 16th the board held three town hall meetings on the proposed budget between april 13th and 27th and the april 21st and 27th the town halls also served as technically as our budget hearings um so we've had multiple discussions formal and informal as well as the town halls all of which i believe we see reflected and the superintendents proposed budget we also had staffing that as you recall began on march 10th earlier than usual and a really important step forward for us to make sure we do have the best teacher in front of every child so that's very exciting but in terms of the remainder of the process for our budget development for next year's budget we're going to be discussing the budget tonight as well as at our may 12th meeting and then voting to approve the budget on may 26th so what i'd like to do tonight colleagues to help organize our additional input to the budget we've had lots of input to date you know through those different previous meetings and town halls and so forth but tonight what i'd like to do is quickly kind of go through the key aspects of the superintendent's proposed budget just to get kind of a quick informal affirmation about where there's support amongst the board as well as any changes that you would make to the proposal and then after we go through the key pieces of the superintendent's proposed framework then give you each of you the opportunity to share any additional changes or suggestions that you would make and in particular coming out of tonight what i really want to make sure we do is clarify where specifically we need any additional information from staff so that they can bring that back to us for our discussion on may 12th at our next meeting so i know staff are out there taking notes to help me with this as we go through to capture all of this one example of an area of additional information that i would like to see back for example is the impact of the recent pers decision so that would just be an example of where we would have a quick update from staff for information so so um so again on may 12th through further discussion i'm hoping we can reach clarity on any changes to the proposed budget that the majority of the board supports so that we can have the staff has time to incorporate those changes before our approval vote on the 26th okay any questions about that process before we launch into it everybody got water energized okay so yeah we could stand up and stretch from it um okay so i'm just going to kind of just go through the the bulleted list of the superintendents kind of key pieces and i'm just looking for an informal affirmation of support thumbs up however you want to do that and then any um you know comments or additions you would make to that so under the
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superintendent's priority around third grade reading the first one would be adding to educational assistance in every kindergarten class at 29 schools with a high number of historically underserved students so do we comment on it also well if you have something different i prefer not to have like as more just if there's something that you would want to do differently than what's being proposed so i um certainly support this my concern is that we're still only about 75 percent of students reading at benchmark and so are there other strategies that are incorporated in your budget that you think are going to boost that that's all i was wanting to ask okay so do you want to and superintendent smith do you want to just sort of gather the comments but yeah let's do the commentary and get all the way through and then i mean i love this idea i just don't know if it's enough okay and no it's not enough yeah and of course the the preface to all of this and answer that part no it's not enough yeah the preface to all this is that we're not going to get everything we want obviously and of course we're still waiting on the legislature to do their part and fully fund our educational system but here's what we have as our proposal right now so the next one i saw i heard general support for that wanted to hear more clarity on on what other strategies there are next one is paying for full day kindergarten in all schools we know that's a shift to our general fund but i'm not seeing any objection to that one everyone supports that one next one is adding a teacher in eight schools to help improve students reading and that's a classroom teacher just to clarify that's lowering class size versus can you comment on that one so it's also literacy support in those schools so some it'll be direct work with students and some it's working with staff but it's literacy support in eight schools so response to intervention literacy support okay and again with highest needs okay so just affirming that any comments additions changes okay the next one is ensuring that every school library is staffed full-time director field isn't here tonight but i know that's something we all support libraries i know they did something so staffing just to clarify could be either a media specialist or a library assistant so i'm going to say there's even a little more complexity in this one we're looking at the combination of yes certified library media specialists library media assistants and we're shooting for at least full day of library services available in each school so if in fact you already have that staffed this fte could also be applied to reading specialists for instance so bobby your answer is going to unfold over the course of this conversation so we're trying to be flexible the other thing is the actual pool of library media specialists that are available at this moment given that that's a position that has been cut over many many years at this point there's not a ready pool um looking to be hired so we've also got to be working on building the pool back as we are building the you know capacity to hire people back so but i'm hearing and funding this though is that every school library will be full day of library services yes okay yes any comments on that i just i guess i found myself i absolutely support library but that clarification what you just gave about who it is because i also think that it's really important if they're available to have a certificated library person rather than assistance which has kind of been our or how we get to have some services in our libraries so far and i'd be curious i i could be open to the possibility i'm not sure that keeping libraries open it's a great strategy but i'm not sure it's our highest leverage strategy and so i could be open to investing those same same pieces in in a higher leverage strategy but if if principals have that flexibility if they're already able to do it it might there's been a school by school and people are regional administrators or senior directors are going through school by school and really looking at individual school circumstances because it's very different what capacity library capacity we have in every school um so yeah but the targeted staffing is around literacy library media um capacity and reading specialist capacity so that's what that block of fte is so what i was hearing from director of lyle though is that you could let go of the staffing every library full-time if we were able to have additional reading supports elsewhere in the building other any other comments or thoughts on that i i think in general i would want as a parent to know that my library is going to be open full-time going forward that's that's a big deal so um i think we should keep that as a goal okay any other comments no okay um the next one under third or the last one under major one under third grade reading is
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adding an early learning center in southeast portland and that's that's lame it's moving yeah it's moving the head start early learning classrooms from css to lane and this is the dollars it takes us to actually set up those classrooms in another building okay any comments on that one or concerns seeing support so non-hearing anything i'm assuming we're supporting these proposals okay under the priority around high school graduation and completion some of the key pieces are adding teachers to all high schools to decrease class size and provide additional courses so superintendent smith i asked during the staffing period of our budget i asked whether this budget and these 20 extra teachers would provide any high school student who wants to or needs to take a full high school um load they have the ability to take eight period and at the time you said you weren't sure i said this moves us closer in that direction it is not like budgeted for every single student to take a full day so it doesn't take us all the way there it does take i think we do will have the capacity for students who want to that will have the ability to address that so but we're we're certainly further down i mean further down the road than we were last year and significantly further than two years ago so and do you know what it would take to get there i can get you that number it would take to get there i can get you that number okay i'd like to know well there i mean there are two different things right i mean so which one are you looking at i just want to make sure that any student who wants to take eight periods has the capacity to take eight periods right which is different which is different than budgeting for every single student to have eight periods what i'm saying like i think we are at what you're saying i think we're where you are like this year this is our time to clarify so i'm clarifying yeah don't be impatient with me but they're trying to make sure that any student who wants to take your periods next year can take eight periods well and even this year where we had um you had to have your parents sign off if you were you're not choosing to take eight periods and and we were responding to places where we had demand that um the school wasn't able to meet so um adding an additional 20 i think puts us even in better shape than we were this year but okay and as one of those parents who did not want my child taking eight periods played classes and who does believe she has a full day given what she does in all parts of her life um i would not want us to be i want to make sure that we're providing sufficient resources to other aspects of our budget we put huge resources into our high schools so i appreciate this one but in no way shape or form you know again this notion of the full day is for me that doesn't have to be eight periods so to say that again for the record and i wasn't what i was asking was whether if a student wants to take eight periods next year will they have the capacity to do that and it sounds to me like your answer is yes and i believe yes thank you yes but that's not distinguishing that from budgeting for every single student to have aid yes yes okay so the next one is under high school graduation and completion is adding college and career readiness programs in all high schools obviously that's responsive to number of board members who have raised that over a long period of time so i'm not uh next is ensuring all students in grades k through eight have access to arts classes and i understanding is that specifically around grades six through eight yes where our gap was was in grades six through eight and we have um had some schools who still did not have art in those grades so we and with the addition of this fte we said prioritize art if you don't have it yes right and particularly in the k-8s yes because of the number of challenges correct okay so that was another one that we had talked about and we're seeing it showing up here so that's great making all high school athletic directors full time part of our building back or athletic program any comments on that one does that have to do is that related to is that related to uh increasing athletics within uh middle schools or is that something different yes so we both add a um a middle school athletic director bring that person to full-time we're building programming back into the middle grades and part of what we are asking of the high school athletic directors is to assume some responsibility for the articulation of athletics within their cluster no okay and then the last highlight one is continuing support for students at risk of not graduating and if i recall this is the piece of when as grants are expiring building this into our budget so that we don't go off a cliff correct so we had a number of grants that would provide wrap-around services to specific
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groups of students both attendance support wrap around support and we part of how do we hold continuity of services is we're looking to not have cliffs at the end of those grants when they were successful strategies and these were successful strategies okay okay moving on then to the third priority of reducing suspensions and excuse me expulsions so the first bullet is ensuring every k-5 k-8 and middle school has at least a full-time counselor again that's one we've talked about quite a bit so seeing nods for that one very exciting yes the next one is supporting mental health programs and efforts to improve student attendance these were the ones that are being leveraged with support from multnomah county right so we're matching and leveraging dollars yes okay could you just explain that a little bit i mean i get the matching but so these are who who do these people work for so the mental health staff would be hired by multnomah county so in that situation we're giving money to multnomah county and those but those staff are serving our students but they're supervising the mental health professionals in the case of the attendance they're being supervised by the county and in the case of the attendance case workers that money comes to us and we um from the county and we're hiring the attendance caseworkers both leverage more than what either one of us would be doing individually yeah and how is it determined where the mental health workers will be placed or are these social workers they're mental health qualified mental health professionals and they're specifically targeting um students of color and particularly males of color okay and i don't think i know more specifically than that at this moment so they won't necessarily be school-based they're more district-wide support you know i don't know the specific answer to that we're looking at like they're trying to gauge what capacity they're going to have overall and then we'll build the service plan with them with county is that something where there could be a little more information next week we can get yes we can get you more information so i'm hoping i don't know if there is more information yet but we can get you out what there is but i'm sorry what's the what's the budget amount for that i mean is it is it two people is it ten people do we have a sense no we're talking like four people four people thank you and for us it's 177 000. great thanks okay great so the next one is supporting staff training around equity is that continuing work that we've been doing or is there something different in this piece so we're talking about the school climate restorative practices and beyond diversity so it's a combination of i see there's an error in my there's a bullet action there's a comma right so support staff training around equity school climate and restorative practices to provide a safe and supportive teaching and learning environment excuse me so it's building on what we've had as pilots so it's continuing with our new staff that they everybody's getting the beyond diversity training as they come on new with us it's building the positive behavior intervention and support and restorative practices training for all of our staff and again we've had pilots and this is trying to expand it to being distributed which again is something we've been asking for so it's here so that's great yeah my only comment on that is that we need more yeah so if we find uh if we find money i would definitely keep going until we really are district-wide because we really are not putting it in very many schools yet and we really exactly yeah yes absolutely yeah and that's a good footnote right there yeah okay then additionally the budget puts at least two secretaries in every school we've talked about that one being um really important support just across the entire building including for teachers so so one of the questions i had a while ago on that was what kind of professional development or orientation can we provide to all these new folks coming on because i've just heard that from the classified folks that we need better and more uh mentoring for new folks coming on so whether it's secretaries whether it's bookkeepers and so i don't know if you have something budgeted to so i mean we're obviously having a hopefully a significant increase in folks here so um so i'm going to just take that one as when we come back to you with too like we do joint training with pfsp we used to do a way more intentional training for school secretaries and we had a person whose job was to do the training and support for school secretaries and you can feel that as a a gap right now it's a position that was eliminated in a previous budget cut it's a definite need i mean we would benefit greatly by having a position like that back again and what we've been doing is much more um pulling in retired secretaries to come work next to somebody who's new for a period you know those kinds of strategies but we would benefit from intentional training so maybe some information back just at a high you know what that would
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cost or what that would look like so we could perfect that into our trade-off factors here as we move forward um the other one is adding educational assistance substitutes and full-time paraeducators substitute to support schools this is another one we've discussed and heard about from our partners um i think this is another one where we wish we had more but any other comments or any questions on that one more still i don't understand how it works so we would add more i mean so could you maybe even do it later but i still i don't i don't have an explaining level understanding of how our subpool will work other than in terms of dollars other than we don't have enough so we're just putting these are higher no these are hiring full-time people who are a pool who we can use a sub we have a constant demand for substitutes and these this allows us to have a pool of people who are trained to do these jobs that we can utilize as subs that still won't be enough in terms of sub capacity it's full-time people right we hire them full-time but we utilize them as subs right so we've hired this many people beyond but they're almost rubing kind of they're rovers almost sorry again yes right now okay did that answer your question or do you need more additional information next week no no i mean that's i can't ask it later but yet no we can we can give you more yeah yeah i'm just this is the time if we want to have it's just we want to make sure we have the information in this particular category this is what this is i mean is there a pool of folks that we're not paying except when we call them up so let me have our substitute office come and give you a whole rundown on the however different categories come in here no we're going to do a we'll do it today just let's just do a written we'll give you a written answer yeah we're not doing presentations about each of these things um and let's see adding transportation services to allow more students to attend dual language immersion programs so this is one that i know sackett our superintendent's advisory committee enrollment and transfer highlighted as an issue in terms of access and equity so and i'm not remembering off the top of my head amount for this but i see i think this is one we generally agreed we had an issue this was one that you guys identified as wanting it when we were in the enrollment and transfer process yes and what is the amount of money we're looking at on that one 99 000. that's right yeah so is that centralized transportation i mean it's like point to point not not picking up at people's homes i'll get you more data yeah this details will come back with more info okay more info as part of that i'd be curious i know that there was a group that was looking at transportation and i i'd be curious to understand how this so that we don't have fits and starts that this feeds into a consistent plan okay and then last but not least restoring a full week of outdoor school any comments on that one so i had one question which is um when we used to have a full week of outdoor school we still had a parent pay component is that going away or is that remaining so hang on multiple keep our super hand questions here so this did you hear my question i did hear your question and and i'm gonna have to get back to you on this one so what we did do i don't know if we adjusted anything in the current package because this has been a patch together ability to even do the three days that included funds from metro funds from mount i mean from multnomah county esd parent pay that goes through them um and then we were adding additional resolution dollars to fill out the week i don't know if we then backfilled any of the other patched together sources but we'll find out great thank you and bobby what was your question because i did something my question was when we used to have a full week of outdoor school there was a parent pay component to it if kids couldn't pay they they could still go we we figured it out but there was always a parent pay component so my question was whether that goes away and this is just part of our curriculum okay we'll get you what the full package of how the funding i think it's all resolution dollars but we'll find out do you know how much it is seven hundred thousand dollars it's an addition of 700 000 to get us to the from three days to five days so that's this is one area i guess so it'll be interesting discussion this is another area where i'm not sure outdoor school is a really important cultural institution for for our community and i know people have strong emotional ties to it there's leadership development it helps both
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middle school and high school and i'm not sure that it is the most effective investment of our dollars to to both graduation or to reduce our achievement gap so i'm just inkling to to my colleagues that it'd be an area that i i would be willing to to re-look at to see if there's another investment that might be a wiser investment for achievement and i'll tell you the only thing i will say on this one is the thinking here was the hands-on experience and it was a really powerful one in the sixth grade both in the community building the school culture and the hands-on learning and then we were then actually trying to do a similar thing in seventh grade by adding the seventh grade hands-on experience a cte kind of experience so that was the thinking and this is really a specific funding source so the resolution dollars through mesd which we then have a set menu of what else you can purchase with that so you're then restricted a little bit and what else you can do yeah okay well what were we using that money for before or is it we're just getting 700 000 more extra dollars resolution we've shifted some of our dollars in there and if we if you want me to look exactly at where we've pulled it from i can do that yeah i don't need it right now and i'm just thinking that even and it'd just be an interesting place i think it could be we actually go through a whole process the numbers of departments utilize the resolution dollars for alternative ed slots for nursing for some curriculum support um so there we have a menu each year we go through and select the things we want and we put priority on outdoor school this year pause staff have you captured where we need additional information and okay so now i just thank you for bearing with me through that i just wanted to make sure we kind of got through those basic pieces and superintendents i'm going to give you a couple like one other one that is um with the conversation with the county is this last year we had um made a decision as a group of sun school um count the sun school council that we were going deeper rather than broader and expanding however the county then did fund additional sites in three other districts so i went back and said hey i thought we agreed not to do this but if other people are adding we would be interested in adding a couple other sites and that the opportunity is still open to us it costs us thirty five thousand there's a ninety thousand dollar investment it costs us thirty five thousand dollars and the county would pay the balance our next two sites and we have this as a um a poverty rating so schools come up as the next one that would be up and our next two would be astor and hosford so i would just put that in front of you as something that the schools all we want everybody wants to be a sun school so like the opportunity is there but it's another thing that is we have the opportunity to still say to the county we're interested in this so that would be a seventy thousand dollars seventy thousand dad two more sun schools not much money okay thank you so um now i just want to open it up to my colleagues for in addition to this other suggestions thoughts again of course we all know that this we have limited resources and we all want much more everything for our children that they deserve but with that obvious caveat anything else other folks have to suggest i have a bunch of questions that i want to ask sure to put on the table there's a lot of discussion about whether or not we may be going to a k-8 middle school conversion whether we may move back to more middle schools going forward and i'm curious about the the timing of whatever the public process will be around that and what costs might be involved with that as well as the transitional costs if we start moving in that direction and whether that would impact next year's budget in any way or whether it would probably be the following year so i just wanted to understand that a little bit better so and i'll tell you we're we're doing some modeling right now and like i would probably want to come back to you with an answer to that one if we're really looking at what would a pro what would processes cost and what kind of time frame would we be talking in terms of actual implementation so we'll bring we'll bring something back to you okay and good question i had a question about whether i mean at some point i'd like to understand the cost of having a social worker in each of our high schools which i think was our um sort of the hillsborough care team model that included that so i'd be curious about that um the school-wide support tables i had a few questions um on page 28 the k5k middle schools each have a halftime classified position
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allocated what is that so hang on where are you what page 28 of what it's just in the school-wide support tables i'm noticing the k-5k middle schools each have a half-time classified position and i was curious what that is or how that's used i don't know we'll find out okay and part of the reason i was curious is it seemed that whether you had 300 or whether you had 900 in a school you got the exact same allocation so that may make sense depending on what it is or how it's used but if you could just give me something back on that um and i'm visualizing kind of a memo here that goes through that where you answer all these questions i agree with you yeah um i had a question about the high school discretionary support and if we know generally speaking how that is currently being used by different high schools we had added 600 000 this year and my understanding is that we haven't incorporated that going forward so i'm i'm just trying to get a better sense of how high schools use their discretionary fund and whether it's sufficient or not they would always want more in that category in the discretionary one and two things you've got the additional dollars that we added to consolidated funds we have in the the layer of the budget that would kick in if we ended up at the 7.5 billion dollar number then we we go ahead and move forward with adding that um and yeah repeating what we did this year the addition to the consolidated funds and yes if we were adding more to um the schoolwide support tables would principals want more in the discretionary you bet because then they can they have discretion over how they use it and you'll note that the thing that we did add was he we added another threshold in the larger high schools of adding vps do you know this so we added 1600 as a threshold at which you get another vp at a high school yeah yes but that was responsive to an earlier board conversation great um i had asked a question a while back about the um the fte for an ib coordinator at lincoln in cleveland and i think i was told that it's in here but i i don't know where i find that so could you clarify that so we added um hang on a second we added the college and career readiness both a 0.5 coordination support and a 1.0 teacher to each high school to be used as either avid ap ib i mean so there were it was ad for doing college and career readiness kinds of support in each high school so it was 13 and a half fte that we're going towards college and career readiness in the high schools i have one crazy question just because it's come up recently which is the i think the city and the county have recently this is uh not necessarily a next year budget question but a curiosity question which could impact us soon um the city and the county have recently um i think enacted a 15 minimum wage and i was curious how many of our employees would fall under that category and what kind of a budget item that would be if we at some point wanted to move in that direction as well so it's uh just a general question thanks thanks dr morton so i i'm particularly curious about one of the um really one of the milestone areas one of the the priority areas the disproportionate discipline and uh and it feels like the if we're looking at maybe pbis and restorative justice the investments that we're currently putting it now uh director knowles mentioned we need to double down on that effort or we need to increase it um i'm not sure entirely that is that is going to get us even doubling is going to get us to the place where we need to be and where we're overall lowering um discipline and also minimizing that uh that disparity uh so i'm wondering if there's a if if there's something else we can do and i you know i initially think about some of the commentary that i've heard around uh the need for tools uh when when educators are ill-equipped to to manage
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their their classroom what tools are we providing them if our goal is to lower the amount of kids that they're kicking out of those classrooms are we looking in any way to to find to find so to answer that call for more tools more training more opportunity for them to just not kick out more kids of color so i think the two things that we are adding and we've added two layers of it in the budget were additional training on positive behavior intervention support which is professional development training which is developing the capacity to have responses other than asking people a kid to leave your classroom and the restorative practices which is broad in terms of what that means and some of this will be the addition of people some of it is the addition of professional development training but really building the capacity of our staff but we've got um some significant investment to try and broaden it beyond as as was earlier discussed it's it lives in a small number of schools and in a pilot number of schools this year this is really the attempt to take it district-wide so focusing that effort on schools that are ready are schools that are uh habitual um uh habitually kicking out kids of color from that so this year we focused on schools with high numbers of historically underserved students ones that had um issues but also that had the capacity to build so that we knew we could demonstrate success and then that's what we're trying to build from so yeah i mean i'd also say the addition of counselors and a baseline counseling capacity is um is also a significant one i also think we've got some other strategies like mind up that's going on at um in a number of our schools that we've got more schools trying like using the mind up curriculum which is really about teaching responsibility and um and self uh mindfulness about your behavior and about how you impact others um we've got play works that i think it is continuing to be an effective strategy at the elementary level so the reason i bring it up is that i think we're we're already behind the eight ball on this and if we're not increasing investments at least to meet the needs of the the increase of the number of kids of color particularly in our and underserved well kids of color underserved populations in our district uh we're not going to keep we're going to go farther and farther behind we're not going to be able to keep up with those increasing numbers because that those are the numbers that are increasing across our district so are there other things you'd like to see more investment more dollar signs more zeros what you've got right now so i'll tell you what you've got right now you've got two different ones one that was 400 000 for the school climate and restorative practice um sorry 700 000 that came it was based on our february assumption we added another 400 when we got the march assumptions to the same category so that's your investment so far and then the full-time counselors i would say is the other big one that's an impactor yeah keep going i think that i and i think a focus on uh the schools that have habitual challenges with um pulling kids of color out of classrooms is is going to be an important focus for us so matt would you have any specific like informational or costing pieces do you want or just stating that priority for you i think that i mean i i would look at and maybe this is a an investment if the number comes back different from the state but uh that would look at that is something that we add more good that's good that's helpful other uh ads subtractions i'm instructor blab um there there are just two things i want to mention i i think the budget um has been really responsive so i appreciate all the listening that you've done to our conversations and what the priorities are while i may not agree with them all they are clearly a reflective of the discussions that i feel we as board have had um recently i just um family engagement as an academic strategy seems like something that's really important that we i don't want to say we miss but i don't think we're as effective at it as we could be and it feels like it's fallen off i know that when i started probably four years ago it was something that was rising up but we were cutting budgets and so we really struggled with what to do with that so i'd just be really curious about and i know that we've tried to move our equity work out into families and communities but what what is it and i think that this could even be something that we try to investigate with our pat partners about how do we engage families differently
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how do we how do we release our teachers to do home visits how do we engage communities that historically have now we can't just always expect them to come back so i um i don't have a solution to that but i i'm i would like to see some sort of investment or some some effort toward toward moving that direction and then the second one is this one i've been consistent and this one was really motivated by my time with courageous conversations when we were there and i i got to listen into the work that some schools i think it was osseo in in minnesota about title vii education again what what they had said is you know we had been traditionally doing more academic support providing them extra time extra tutors but what they found is that when they actually invested in teaching culture so they actually took them on took them away from school they didn't do the academic they really instilled a sense of pride and i think that many of our students who come from other cultures often don't don't see the pride in their culture or they have been intentionally removed from it and so i these are some of the places i guess when i think of when i mention places where i look at money i wonder if we could invest slightly different i haven't jumped into the title seven budget but i'd be really curious of how do we move in that direction how do we how do we explicitly instruct culture or work with partners to instruct culture because i don't think it's just an academic piece i think there's something else that's missing so yep may it was a good example of that that we had earlier this evening so just to say and generations reflects exactly that yes it did um any other suggestions comments i guess i would add um when we as you're putting together the information responses can you be sure to fold in um director buell isn't isn't well i hope he gets well soon so he's in here tonight so now he would bring this up and we'll probably and we'll talk about it in our next discussion on the 12th but in terms of the contracts that the district has i think staff has put together information on what we have in terms of multi-year contracts this year 12.75 million of not all spent in this year but they include things such as our restorative justice contract classroom supplies albino head start services at roosevelt the act providing that to all our students supplemental services and title one the middle college program and so on and so forth so i just want to make sure that that information is part of the record in terms of the contracts that we have so that we can have that full context as we look at the full picture for our budget yes um we've provided this a while back and i just asked so that's why massive staff to provide it with the responses that we're going to get next week so again um next week we will have um a follow-up discussion we're going to have information mostly written i think any you know i'll leave it to you how you want to bring that but hopefully mostly written um in our packets um that will address these questions and suggestions and then we'll kind of see where where we land there um and in the meantime if you have you know other thoughts or suggestions just shoot them to pam and myself and we will work with staff on that actually i'm gonna go back and just correct one thing i said earlier because i said that the um the dollars for the consolidated budgets didn't happen until the 7.5 they actually were the middle layer so the one that we got to add as of march it's in the layer two so it's it is in the proposal that would be going under this 7.255 number that we're at right now bobby i'm saying this to you so the extending um and the add to the consolidated budgets that we did as a district so it's our half of the 600 000 the 300 000 is included in the this budget the 7.255 level yes okay that's great and your differentiation is that it's not the workload committee's not the workload companies have it's our happening let's see you remember i did the budget in three layers what we knew in february what we knew in march that's great this is part of the what we knew in march so my last comment will just be to say once again as always we are depending on our legislators in salem to make the right choices and to fund our public education system we are seeing a decline in the share of the budget statewide that goes to education we need to get that back up knowing they have a lot of hard choices but this is when they they absolutely need to make that investment so that we can do all this and more that our students deserve okay so thanks to everybody i'm now going to recess the board as the budget committee and reconvene the last segments of our regular meeting
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so moving along the next item on our agenda is the audit committee recommendation so as you will recall colleagues last week we had a resolution that was submitted by the audit committee but we had direct both directors curler and knowles were absent so we tabled that to be heard tonight i think we also have an alternative resolution from director knowles that we will potentially be hearing as well but right now what we have we'll now consider resolution number 5084 in the business agenda audit of administrative compensation do i have a motion so moved director regan moves and director curler seconds the motion to adopt resolution five zero eight four miss houston any students in common yeah okay any board discussion sure if i could explain what this is so as chair of the audit committee i just want to go through what this is before us today so this is uh resolution number 5084. so more than a month ago reports surfaced that showed an increase in central office staff positions earning over 70 000 annually as well as raises for some central office staff that were considerably higher than general cost of living raises um some were in the 10 to 15 percent range so the actions were taken by the superintendent without the input of board members and have raised issues of trust with support members and with the community so with nearly every other employee group the board actively weighs in looks at comparables and sets general parameters around the raises or cost of living increases that the superintendent is authorized to negotiate in the case of central office administrators it appears that comparables are being developed for various positions but there was no attempt to share that with board members and to have board members weigh in with parameters for potential raises so in our board oversight role that's a concern staff compensation is easily the largest expense of the district our primary responsibility in our override oversight role is to ensure that funds are getting to the classroom in particular to pay for teachers librarians and others who are directly supporting student learning so central office administrators play a critical role and definitely need to be fairly compensated there is at the same time though is a support role to what's happening in our classrooms in our schools and so our community expects the board to manage central office expenses and to ensure a lean organizational support structure so in an earlier board meeting director curler had brought forward a reasonable resolution seeking approval of an audit of administrative compensation and this was voted down by some on the board it was then suggested that the audit committee come forward instead with another resolution for board consideration and as such the board's audit committee which is made up of three board members and that would be director buehl co-chairs knowles and myself and two community members who are both professional auditors so we're bringing forward a comprehensive audit of administrative compensation and that's what you have in front of you so the resolution was approved by the audit committee by a two-to-one vote of the audit committee board members and with agreement from the two community auditors who are serving on the committee and it requests that the board approval for the performance audit to be completed by an independent auditor it would be looking at transactions approvals justifications of all relevant materials and communications related to the new central office positions over earning over 70 000 per year or any raise of more than three percent um and to inventory the year over year change in new senior administrators um so in addition um the audit would review the effectiveness and of the current processes and procedures for setting compensation for administrators here at besc so it's the expectation that this would be the very first audit performed by the new independent performance auditor and just so you know that auditor is expected to be hopefully hired in the next month or two we are we have a informal rfp out now for that request proposal out for that position i think that closes may 7th and so hopefully we'll have some good prospects and we can um hopefully be sorting through those and making a higher decision in the next month or so so again this is a resolution that's being brought forward by the board audit committee and i'm excited about it so thank you any other comments discussion will you vote director black um this is for both resolutions if we get to the second one if this one doesn't pass our our job is fiscal oversight
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and so i don't have a problem with that i remember conversations with this group with the superintendent to ask her to hire somebody to do comp compensation and to do that in a methodical manner similar to what we had done in negotiations where we actually looked at a 14 metro we looked across multiple places so it's not that i'm shirking or i believe that we don't have the fiduciary responsibility to double check this it's i don't believe that we've been kept in the dark i don't believe it was done nefariously i don't even believe i have no reason to believe that there is something out of ordinary and i believe with our limited time and investments that this is redundancy it's something where we are looking over the shoulder where i i don't believe we will find anything so i'm going to vote no on both of these and again so it just when when i when i hear about it being framed as folks over seventy thousand dollars um we were clear as a board that we wanted better principal accountability so we said hire additional administrator there are some folks over so we give direction and then somehow we don't make the connection back to that you superintendent smith just increased people to make over that amount but we in fact gave you that direction and so it seems that we give you perhaps sometimes an impossible task to accomplish what we say but then we claim that we don't know how you did it or that you did it in a way that was blind to us so i'm just saying i won't support this not because we don't have the responsibility or the right to but it's because it is i believe a waste of our resources any other comments director curler you have a question which is when the last time we discussed this or when i was here there was a there's the whole notion of our principals who are clearly underpaid uh in my view um and just you know looking at a uh some sort of a payment structure and the relativity between between that and central office and so the notion is that you know you've got to have people above you getting paid more and all that is more of a complete uh is that going to be part of this audit looking at that or touching on that at all is that the issue of compression really sort of yeah yeah i mean that's what's in here okay it's different than compression compression is when do we have people running into um another another group or another organization what i thought i heard you advocating for which is a fine discussion but it's a different discussion is is it right that the people farthest away from the student automatically make more i thought i heard you saying maybe principals and teachers should make the most and do we want to incentivize by making more money a move to central office so looking at that structure that's part of i would think that would be harder but they're kind of intertwined there but you're right but compression would be what if we have principles running into the superintendent like that compression is the the flattening of one group running into what i hear you saying is is the cost structures the the pay structure right to have people automatically that are supervising or have more responsibility making more is that an automatic which is different than compression it might well but both of those questions are relevant and good questions any other comments director yeah i think a couple i think the first one is um as this this conversation i think has emerged over the last several weeks uh we've heard information from our human resources we've heard um information that that the superintendent shared last meeting and i'm i guess i'm struck with i think my first question is what do we what do we intend to find out at the end of this audit isn't that what an audit would tell us yeah what we what do you intend to find at the end well i would i i mean we've outlined it in this memo have we greatly expanded the number of uh central office employees year over year have we greatly expanded the number who are making 70 000 or more um what are those positions are they
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market sensitive or not um i mean there's a whole variety of questions that are remaining unanswered at this point so again so those we we can answer though right i mean those we can say here are the positions that we've we've brought on that are 70 000 or more here these positions that we have that have received a three percent increase or more we can see that but i'm wondering what that tells us as a board if we're if we're spending spending the resource what does that tell us at the end of the day does that tell us something different than we already know i i think that's my my challenge what i'm kind of amazed at in terms of my colleagues is that for every other group of employees we look at comparables and we set parameters for the superintendent why is this group of of employees any different i i don't understand why there's not a a uh some parameters in place we do have salary ranges for this group of employees that we're operating within when you're when you're looking at the kinds of increases in the number of staff people that are being brought on i mean we we should be curious about that in the end we want to be putting our resources into ourselves i don't think it's i mean from at least from my perspective it's not a lack of curiosity by any means it's a i feel like they're the information is already available right that's my i'm and i'm not sure what else this will uh this will garner and and i should then it should be fairly quick and inexpensive about it it should be an easy audit and the superintendent has indicated that she's open to it and it's a matter of public trust at this point i mean as i'm out in the community i'm hearing people talking about this a lot and when i say hey we're going to be doing an audit on it there's a sense of relief good let's get to the bottom of it and find out what's going on i'm not hearing that but um can i yeah director of nulls um i am not hearing anything from the public about these administrative raises i've got one single email on them nothing nothing nothing nothing what i see is an article in the newspaper and i see candidates using it for political reasons so um i'm kind of uh that's it's an interesting question matt i like that's an interesting way to approach it um because what's included in this um resolution that came from the audit committee is far more than just what we just said about do we have procedures in place and are we following them our role as a governing board is to make sure that we have the right procedures in place and that they're being followed and that's our role our role is not to look at individuals and it's not to look at small groups of people and i i guess i'm when i say your question is interesting uh it is because i think what well what do we do once we have all that information what are we going to do with it it's the superintendent's responsibility to hire and fire her staff and to set their salaries within the policies and procedures that we've set up so i'm i can't figure out what the purpose of this is um i'm i was a no vote in the committee on this because not only that i think it goes way beyond just asking to see if we have the right policies and procedures in place and so i'm i'm definitely a no on this resolution so let's go ahead and move it i'll just i'll just add i agree with director knowles and i also would just to me there's pieces in this that are that way over step um they're inappropriate in that they what a response would be tonata before we've even had the audit um but again i think the superintendent made it very clear in her comments last week the work that's been going on the rationale for that and how that's part of her her job as the manager of the district so um i know i would be willing to do a limited scope audit uh you know potentially we'll be looking at another way of approaching this just to be able to set the record straight for those who feel that need as director morton pointed out this information is all publicly available so good luck it will be very quick audit and i think superintendent smith also mentioned the issue of wanting that third party to be able to weigh in in terms of this question around what is the appropriate oversight and what is the appropriate role for the board i think we could use that that insight right now okay so the board will now vote on resolution 5084 all in favor please indicate paying yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no no and um any abstentions okay and student representative jaswal
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yes is a yes so um the resolution does not pass by a vote of what four to two with student representative voting yes vote four knows two yes two yeses yes okay anything further on this topic i you know i think i um i voted no on on this resolution and i think i i guess i just want to go still continue to make sure it's at least on record that i don't feel like my my question has been answered in terms of what more um we're going to learn from an audit that we've already gathered the information we've we've instructed our superintendent to to do the due diligence and for her staff to do the due diligence necessary to create market rate positions in that it feels um i i guess i'll just say it i mean a part of this feels like a little bit of a bully tactic to me and it feels like if this is a an over-extension of of authority or even a an encroachment on what we've charged the superintendent to do and uh and i and i have to say i none of this you know an audit is not something to be scared of and audit is not something to to shy away from um but there's a it seems as though there's a there's information that we have information that's available information that we've asked for and received and to go beyond that at this moment it feels as though it's it's exercising a degree of power beyond what what i think i'm comfortable with so i wanted to i wanted to share that director yeah i would um so i first want to read from a memo from our superintendent i believe that a third party performance review or performance audit of our compensation procedures and practices would be of value i would agree with that fully in our oversight role one of our responsibilities is to ensure that we are getting our resources into the classroom the more folks we hire at the central office and the more we pay them the less we're going to have resources that are going into the classroom and there needs to be a balance there we need central office support staff who are paid fairly and and who can support our folks out in the schools but there needs to be a really clear understanding that they are support and that we're not going to end up in a situation where we've got too many or more than we need it should be a lean mean central office machine and at this point i don't know that that's what we have and i want to know that really clearly so yeah and i think we should be a lean happy machine not mean but i know what you mean the uh yeah you know i think it's it's it's it is you useful information how how do we stack up against other districts and you know how do we compare it's just we handle that we have been improving well then then it'll be really quick for the audit to do yep but we already voted on it but that's so we're done yeah so and and i guess one last piece would be whether there's any you know we can talk south whether um information including in that memo back about budget information whether there's you know pieces about the work that you already did if they've landed on those on those salaries and pieces we can incorporate that just for the records i'm going to say the the salary proposals coming in this year's budget we've been extremely transparent about just giving people the desire to see the information and i think like in the statement that i read last week i addressed part of i think the the situation of the last eight years of during a recession what groups have employed we have really differential impact on different groups of employees during this period of time and some of whom gut steps and colas every year some of whom actually got steps or colas and some of whom actually took furlough days in order to preserve the jobs of other people and took zero or frozen and the people who were frozen bored through office staff in order to hold a full school year and and keep services to kids at the highest priority and part of what's hard bobby for me to listen to you now characterize it as if it's prioritizing central office staff that is the group who we held we held frozen and actually took up to a 3.8 percent decrease in order to hold a full school year
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and hold that value as our highest value during a recession and so part of what we're doing at this point is really we've like two years ago started working on bringing our building administrators up because they they were held frozen during that period while we prioritize teachers this year you're seeing us really working to get building principles into market you've got the people who supervise principals who we want our principals to aspire to be we want our best principals supervising other principles and really helping build that craft they need to when they take on a larger scope of responsibility earn a salary that reflects that so that's part of the compression issue it's not come into central office and earn more money it is we want you to aspire to a leadership role and so that's part of how the compression rolls out but i look back and actually i will bring you a graph that shows you raises over the last eight years for different employee groups you've got the group in central office who are all the ones that go below the line significantly in order to retain our school-based staff so part of what i feel just in the tone of how this is being presented doesn't honor what what our staff have done in order to preserve services to kids as our highest priority during really lean budget times and that's the thing i feel compelled to just have is a message that people understand and in order to compete to get the best talent in this district we have to be competitive and i'm going to say i'm recruiting for a position right now that a person from a smaller district who has a parallel position will take an 18 thousand dollar cut to come to pps same title same position a third the kids small district will i be able to attract them and an audit might bring all of that out it doesn't i'm not looking at this it's a punitive thing an audit is information it's information for the community what we're do this is what we're doing with our class and comp person is the comparables i mean that's exactly what you guys directed uh that we hired somebody to do 18 months ago and all of the adjustments that have been made have been in within established ranges so like we've not gone outside established ranges in terms of salary adjustment so i i'm sorry i just feel compelled to have that message of what our central office staff have done on behalf of kids and our teaching staff over a prolonged period of time not sustainable so just to wrap up thank you superintendent smith and thank you everybody i'd like to wrap this up today thank you carol thank you what i'm hearing uh is that we'll have as part of our information for next week's budget discussion um you know providing that information that is in the public record already okay so uh the board will now consider the remaining items on his business agenda having already voted on resolutions five zero eight three and five zero eight four miss houston are there any changes uh do i have a motion in a second to adopt the business agenda director knowles moves second and director morton thank you seconds the adoption of the business agenda miss houston any public comment and any board discussion director just want to highlight and um jim owens from office of school modernization highlighted this earlier but i just want to highlight that a large contract for the improvement of the roof re-roofing of maplewoods is part of this again continuing our effort for the bond to remain consistent to give voters approved to reach up to 63 schools which looks like we're going to be able to do um it's just exciting when i think of all the efforts that teachers and staff have to go through as their building is leaking principles how it affects our students i'm just really excited that we get to address this one great all right thank you so the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes um be opposed any abstentions all right the business agenda is approved by vote of six to zero with student representatives while voting okay so the next meeting of the board will be held on tuesday may 12th and this

Sources

PPS Board of Education, Archive 2014-2015, https://www.pps.net/Page/1893 (accessed: 2022-03-24T00:57:53.371200Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)

2015-05-05 PPS School Board Study Session

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Event 1: Board of Education - Study Session - May 5, 2015

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