2017-08-15 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2017-08-15
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Board of Education-Regular Meeting-August 15, 2017

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you being of the Board of Education for August 15th 2017 is called to order welcome to everyone present and to our television viewers any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our PBS TV Services website the civil might notice director Esparza Brown is absent this evening in addition so is interim superintendent Awad and third in place of the PPS ombudsman this evening we have we're going to have senior board manager Roseann Powell here available as she always is to assist any member of the public who may need additional assistance we also have interpreters with us this evening and I'd like them to come forward at this time introduce themselves in the language that we'll be interpreting and inform the audience where they will be located in the auditorium should anyone should someone need assistance hello my name is Lucia Cabrera's I'm the Spanish interpreter mean embrace vehicle a host on interpreting expand your voice - Talia's phone Haley home was in : Juanita cattleman panic watch while Makoto you could have c-13 one more feature within every becomes object will give it names to give e v AO vivo children I think I'm a groovy hello my name is bulla Aki I interpret for soma Somali thank you and welcome to our board meeting oh sorry about Melissa adults keep eating what pose all somebody keeps coming a spicy bow thank you welcome to our board meeting before we begin our public comment period I'd like to review our guidelines for public comments the board thanks the community for taking the time to attend this meeting and provide comments to the board we value public input as it informs our work and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns our responsibility as a board is to actively listen with our electronic devices turned off board members will not respond to comments or question during public comment but our board manager Rosanna Powell will follow up on the issues raised during public testimony guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration of others complaints about individual employees should be directed to superintendent's office as a personnel matter you have a total of three minutes to share your comments please begin by stating your name and spelling your last name for the record during the first two minutes of your testimony a green light will appear when you have one minute remaining a yellow light will go on and when your time is up that red light will go on and a buzzer will sound we respectfully ask that you conclude your comments at that time we appreciate your input and thank you for cooperation and now I'd like to ask miss Hewson whether anyone has signed up for public comment we have three and our first two speakers are Marty Stockton and Elizabeth Israel Davis good evening indeed means do I need to state my name or okay Marty Stockton you can just go ahead oh thank you good evening board members I'm a parent to an incoming Beaumont middle school sixth grader with dyslexia in an Alameda elementary school fourth grader I'm a co-founder of the Alameda dyslexia community please see the attached event flyer representing 16 families in an ambassador to the decoding dyslexia Oregon I want to express deep appreciation to Portland Public Schools for coordinating on Senate bills six one two training opportunities in the teachers that have made up these training cohorts this summer related I am providing public comment on four time-sensitive calls to action before PPS this school year in February 2017 I learned from the office of teaching and learning that there was a implementation plan for Senate bill six one two since then I have asked the office if the implementation plan was developed through a public process and whether the implementation plan was approved by the school board I have not
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received clarification on these two questions for seven months now nor do I believe that the implementation plan is a thorough equitable or clear on how to serve students with dyslexia furthermore this posted implementation plan is now out of date with a 2017 adoption of Senate bills 2003 the first call to action is for Portland Public Schools to establish a public process to review and develop a PPS dyslexia legislation implementation plan in response to both Senate bills and to be approved by the Portland Public Schools Board the second call to action is for PPS to address policy gaps and inequities in the online version of the current Senate bill implementation plan for PPS as well as customized a publicly vetted implementation plan that reflects PPS characteristics needs and values moving on to the k5 language arts equity based balanced literacy this year PPS budget approved another phase of only ten edition schools to incorporate the adopted curriculum for the school for this school year this means a total of 20 out of 50-plus schools will be using the new equity based balanced literacy my concerns are as follows the phasing is already a year behind schedule for the 30 plus remaining K 5 or K 8 schools clarity is needed on whether project read the curriculum identified as the tier 2 intervention pilot is part of the formal literacy adoption transparency is needed on web project read if it is the adopted tier 2 intervention is not being phased to all k5 and k-8 schools immediately to support all schools or all students of dyslexia call-to-action number 3 PBS to ensure the provision of free and appropriate public education by supporting teachers in providing instruction that a systemic explicit evidence-based to meet the educational needs of students with dyslexia through district actions and procedures required by state and federal law given the your time is up can you sort of summarize and I think you've submitted you did then public testimony as well one more health action ok PPS board to recognize October as dyslexia Awareness Month by an adopted ceremonial resolution Los Angeles the largest School District in California has recently also adopted such last year and I just think that acknowledgement right now for the dyslexia community is really critical thank you thank you and thank you for submitting written testimony it's very helpful go ahead hello my name is Elizabeth Israel Davis the last name is is our AEL - Davis good evening board members I'm a PPS teacher and parent I'm also a member of OD es Oregon dyslexia advisory council Oro DAC that's an advisory body that was assembled by Odie's state dyslexia specialist Carrie Thomas Beck to help develop policy around the implementation of the requirements of SB 612 it's my involvement in this kid Weiser II council that initially led me to inquire about our dish Jaques plan to implement the requirements of SB 612 in March of 2016 I began to communicate with that with staff and office of teaching and learning about who is in charge of implementation and if there was a timeline already developed in March of 2017 I had my first meeting with office of teaching and learning staff to discuss the timeline I've attached the timeline of all my communications with OTL staff my main concern was initially the implementation of the teacher training requirement the requirement is that at least one teacher in every case I've and k-8 school must receive training from the Odie's list of approved dyslexia related training of opportunities fortunately the deadline for teachers who have received this training has been extended from January 1st 2018 to July 1st 2018 part of the reason for this extension is that it took longer than expected - that the trainings which were submitted this meant that the first list of approved trainings wasn't published until late May early June of 2017 and the most up-to-date list was published last week and I attached it provided it for you but the main reason I've come to speak to you today is because I think this is a moment for us to show that when we come together we can do amazing things our district could lead the state not just in a smooth implementation of the rare bones requirements of SB 612 but in truly providing excellence both in identifying and appropriately serving students with dyslexia I'm asking that PPS establish a public process to build policy and procedures for students with dyslexia and their families I'm asking that students families and teachers be
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given a say in this process and I'm asking that the board be involved in overseeing this process and I'm asking this on behalf of K a student going into the 8th grade who is reading at a second grade level at the end of last year I'm asking on behalf of E and W who will be going into third grade this year sorry and almost have all their letter sounds because they are rockstars and they worked so hard last year and I'm asking on behalf of all the students whose families cannot pay the thousand dollar private assessment fee and 100 to 200 dollars per week for private tutoring we owe them a free and appropriate education which is not dependent on zip code thank you thank you both for your testimony I'm going to ask Roseanne to make sure that director Esparza Brown the chair of teaching learning committee receives the testimony and that we follow up through the committee process thank you both for coming and for your advocacy for kids thank you and I'd also like to ask the chair to consider putting on our next agenda a resolution to declare October dyslexia Awareness Month for PPS we can do that I'm a teacher Peter Stephen Goldberg my name is Steven Goldberg Kold be ERG both of my children attended on Irvington school in the 1980s was a wonderful experience a critical part of that experience was the school's racial diversity which at that time was close to 50% that has changed in Irvington and in Portland as our city has become less and less racially and economically diverse the causes for this are generally beyond your powers as school board members to deal with you know you are concerned with our racial diversity in Portland schools and in its workforce and that you've evidence that in terms of the higher of our new superintendent so it was aligning to me to read about the verdict against the district last May finding the Portland Public Schools allowed a racially hostile work environment but I hope was that your response would be to accept that verdict to learn from it and to focus on changing the conditions which allowed the repeated racial insults and taunts suffered by the two maintenance department employees to continue for several years instead you have chosen to fight this judgment even if there was a good legal basis for the appeal which I doubt given the integrity and experience of the trial judge you appear to be ignoring and undermining any lessons to be learned from that judgment I urge you to drop the appeal of this verdict and to clearly and unequivocally signal to the community that supports you particularly people of color and to those who work for the school district that racially discriminatory conduct within the district will no longer be tolerated in these political times in this time of Charlotte so it is that kind of clarity which is so desperately called for again I urge you to drop the appeal of that verdict thank you thank you thank you for your comments to be honest okay so the next report is the superintendent recruitment so I think that picture says it all and we can turn up the lights back after but 42 days that's the number of days since this new board was installed at the time we announced our new superintendent last Friday the board is very pleased to announce that we hired Guadalupe Grove serve as our next superintendent 1 Lupe comes to us from San Francisco or he most recently served as a deputy superintendent I want to thank the board for all the work they did that was 42 days and a little bit before of hard work and really intense work of every member of this board I also want to thank the community for the work they performed as part of the superintendent recruitment going back over a year ago with the prior board several hundred community members participate in that
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process sharing their priorities for a new leader and a half a dozen public meetings including a targeted meetings with historically underserved populations in our community in addition hundreds more offered their thoughts through an online survey we believe that Guadalupe is the right leader at the right time for our city and our schools and our kids and we're looking forward to his arrival as you can see from the photo he's signed a contract and he was notified by TSTC that his reciprocal administrator license has been issued so great great now yes how about that for quick action by the FCC so we're fortunate to have someone of his talent and conviction leading PBS and in the weeks ahead we want to ask the community to join us in welcoming him to our both our school community and the broader community so hopefully this would be the last superintendent recruitment report for quite a while okay so any other board members want to make any sort of comments before we move on to the next item yeah we the next next on our agenda is the previous board had a first reading of the revised anti-harassment policy in April of 2017 since the first reading occurred before many of us were serving in the board we'd like to consider stepping back and receiving an update from the senior legal counsel Stephanie Harper dr. Harper seen you in there Michael I'm not sure your mics on good evening there we go thank you for the time this evening on the agenda so I'm here to provide an update to the board and I think we have some GSS yeah just I'm providing an update to the board so one of our prior staff attorneys had come to the board previously and we were in the process of updating both the board policies around title 9 and specifically the prior discussion really was more focused around sexual harassment sexual violence and those pieces of title 9 which prevents discrimination based on sex in our educational entities and our existing your existing board policy covers and protects both staff and students from sex harassment and sex discrimination in our environment school district environment one the first recommendation was actually to pull apart the existing board policy and separate it into two pieces so that we have one piece of focuses on students and another board policy that focuses on staff just because sometimes things get a little a meshed and we wanted to really in the board really prior board wanted to focus on the protection of students in the educational environment since that time we've done some more work internally on the process and what I'm recommending it actually is that we go back to whatever the appropriate board committee is so that we can discuss some of the policy choices that need to be made not as part of the board policy necessarily but there was interest expressed by the board at the time to actually a really good vibrant discussion around the administrative directive that has to do with how do we actually prevent and stop harassment from occurring in our school environments and sexual violence and how do we cover all the topics that are related to title 9 which also include providing opportunities to all students and not making distinctions based on gender so for example within the science technology engineering in those kinds of fields of stem or steam programs making sure opportunities are equally available to students of all genders and as well as how do we do part and how do we protect our students who are transgender or gender non-conforming we've actually done some work through a policy group around developing an administrative directive that focuses solely on how to provide support to our students who are transgendered and/or
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gender non-conforming and we have you know a policy that's actually prepared and ready to roll out that relates just to protecting our students and so we've been sort of combining a number of pieces and want to come back to the board and go through the subcommittee and have a little bit more discussion around those pieces as well as we have actually established in our in the process of posting for a position for a title 9 coordinator that position has not yet been posted or hired yet as we've been focusing on other positions we just got budget Authority for that position effective July 1st and there are some pieces of the administrative directive and the administrative investigative protocols that really should involve the title 9 coordinator and the new person who was hired in helping frame and decide how those investigative processes work I will note that the board policy that was that came out previously after the first reading there were normal no formal comments that came in to the board we did have some discussion and comments from prior board members we had some additional review by our legal counsels office outside legal counsel and I've done some additional research and then worked with folks internally I wanted to let you know we have established and identified the news director for high school programs as being our title 9 coordinator until we do have somebody actually hired in that position or in the process of setting up for the new school year a title 9 PPS email address so that we are clear and clearly communicating through our handbooks to both our staff and our students but there's a place and you know this is the place to go to raise concerns in addition to administrators within your school sites so we are taking those steps to make sure that that information there's a title 9 coordinator you can go to OCR but those pieces of information are widely disseminated so around the student policy really the four parts that we have been working on enhancing have to do with prevention recognizing discrimination and/or retaliation and then the investigation process findings tracking and then how do we respond when something surfaces so in terms of the prevention component where to go for help so I mentioned the title 9 coordinator we've designated on an interim basis for high school program director PPS student services you have some new team members down there in student services and we actually have a meeting scheduled this Friday to have it we need a sort of multidisciplinary team approach to these kinds of situations when they do arise and we're actually working on establishing a contract with a provider a zero dollar contract with a provider that's a grant funded having to do with how to provide support to victims of sexual violence and sexual assault so that they get the support that they that they need in those situations so and then another key component of prevention is of course education to the community our families staff and students as I mentioned you know as and I think you probably have heard a little bit around the school climate work that's being conducted and also the PPF supports for transgender and gender non-conforming students we do have a draft administrative directive that we you know certainly can would like to talk through with with the whatever the subcommittee I don't know I'm sorry I'm not up to date on all of the subcommittees that you have for the board and in addition there's a state law or s3t six point zero five nine that requires school districts to provide child sexual abuse prevention and instructional programs for students that are age-appropriate for K to 12 and we're working on just trying to pull all these various pieces of information together the second part recognizing discrimination and/or retaliation and I separated these out because it's really important as just part of the educational process there doesn't need to be a finding of sexual harassment or sexual violence in order for retaliation to have occurred and it's really critical in what we know from so what I know at least from my experience and training in workplace harassment sex harassment cases that are employment related people don't come forward with concerns or complaints because they don't really want to be subjected to retaliation they don't want to have their business be made public they don't want to be drawn into huge some huge situation and so it's really important that we assure people that in order for them to but we don't want to have a chilling effect on students who come forward with complaints or concerns and that they have the opportunity to
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participate in a process and be free from retaliation in their educational environment and then as mentioned before I do think we need to expand your policy a little bit to cover not just the sexual harassment sexual violence sexual assault but also to cover opportunities in education as well as athletics and these are not things that we you know we from from the work that I've been able to do so far and checking with people everything is happening as it should be happening I guess in terms of making sure that those opportunities are equal but I do think your policy should be expanded to cover all those pieces of tied not just the harassment sexual violence okay any questions on sort of that policy piece and policy recommendations director Anthony yes thank you very much uh particularly regarding this what kind of timeline would you be expecting so on the policy part of things yes how long before we have something in place so I might depend on our action end yes and and in my one question is you know what is to what extent do you really want you want a full administrative directive to be ready for you at the same time you're adopting the policy or would you rather have you know the policy pieces adopt and go through and adopt those pieces with the administrative directive you know understanding that there needs to be some additional work done in that regard I guess is the question that's part of what I've been struggling was on the timeline okay so yes if I may um she's alluded twice to the title nine position that's on my desk and that's on my desk and I'm drafting that we focused on hiring two attorneys and a paralegal first and I hope to have this done in the next week as far as the Job Description great so one thing just on the policy since we were originally scheduled to have this via second reading just in terms of the timing director Anthony I think what I'm going to do unless director constan ejects is sending the policy to your legislative and intergovernmental Committee for further policy work and assuming we can have a couple meetings and get it moved along I don't see that it sounds like there's a lot of work done so far so that we should be able to move it out and then the ad will follow administrative directors will follow that you're except I gladly and I have questions so and going through here and all these pieces that will feed into the administrative directive and you really acknowledge how important it is to put the meat on the bone so to speak with that administrative directive because one of the issues that has arisen is that our school-based staff just didn't have the tools and didn't have a uniform set of guidelines that would help them respond responsibly and as comprehensively as they could in terms of especially in terms of protecting students who come forward with concerns so is there anything in the absence of having finished the administrative directive and adopted this revision to policy is there any training that is going on or that we're able to do to provide a little more guidance to our principals this year given that we've done all this work thus far yes yes it's just a matter of yes I'm happy to do that and put that together and I already feel like we have all the components it's just a matter of figuring out the right timing for that given that but so our main concern was to get out to our students the title nine information who to contact when you have concerns and have our interim title nine coordinator get the information she needs so that she can be prepared to track as soon as school gets started with any complaints that come into her and handle any investigation processes so that's where I was going to focus first and then and we've had those conversations like I say this week so I'll focus towards the end of just up to Camille by the end of this week around the other pieces of what should we be getting out to our administrators yeah and teachers yeah that's great okay so so and this actually leads into them the investigation process findings and tracking so there will be some feedback to the board committee director konstandin for your discussion they're around so for example one of the questions raised and has come up is if what if a complaint was looming back up so for example DHHS when they get reports of child abuse there they have three different category is founded unfounded or unable to determine so they have a tracking system
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and a categorization kind of system in place and part of what we need to actually decide is how do we want to set up this tracking system that the title 9 coordinator is going to have and so because there are times when complaints are not substantiate ador sexual conduct is not found and then the question becomes though and this is something that the prior senior legal counsel had talked about what the board was how do we identify patterns over the course of time should there be some so that needs to be worked into the process along with the administrative directive I also think what would need to happen within the administrative directive is the board or the administrative directive news in the committee needs to talk about what standard is going to apply there are there's a state law in place that defines what is sexual conduct t SPC has a definition for what is sexual harassment and what is sexual conduct but what we also have and what you had looked at for your first reading on the board policy was using the term grooming or professional boundaries and I've done some more research collected some materials through some national resources that really talk about and help define and this is the part director constant that I think would be part of the education and helping our administrators being able to recognize what are some of the things uh you know I have a number of items but the categories are you know where there's undue interest in a particular student poor judgment in relation to a student or becoming involved in the students private life and there's a number of factors that are looked at and can be considered but we need to define that for our staff so that they know they know what they are looking at when they you have to recognize those kinds of things that may be red flags then we need to check in to further that may not necessarily be or rise to the level of being sexual conduct under the state law and then of course the other challenge as a government entity school district and employer is to meet both Asians that respect the rights of all of the impacted persons in these kinds of situations so before you go to the next stage director village you have something on desk not a question but just to make a note that a few months ago there was a discussion at Grant High School around rape culture and when teachers are saying this doesn't exist and female students current and former coming out of the woodwork pointing out what was going on in the halls of Grant High School and after-hours dating situations and so on that's a really pervasive culture and it's not just grant of course so I just want to kind of plant a marker there in terms of our part in our schools of working to challenge that culture and again that's it that's the this is all part of that that that cultural piece that school climate piece is to me the key yes the key piece that we can take on right because that's that students realize what they are faced with every day yes and I want to point out too that we have already had good student put on the drafting of this policy yes and I do think I'd like to do with a new student representative on the board Moses I was hoping that we could expand our circle of team members either you or others who you recommend be be part of that discussion as we drill down even further to make this a very vibrant policy and process okay then the next big component then of these policies is really how do we respond when something comes to our attention and I sort of broke these out into and this has more to do with again how we're going to how I'm sort of outlining what kind of training and discussion we're going to have with administrators what are the interim measures that need to be taken when something first comes up because you know you get the initial report and you need to take some steps immediately but you aren't making your final decision of course how effective are those measures and we have to decide the record being form and look at the retention schedules for that final measures they're going to be case specific of course we always want to keep open lines of communications both with the complainant and respondent and final measures I added into their recites case specific systemic write so there's going to be if needs to be a feedback loop that's built into this about what are the pieces that need to happen systemically so that we can learn from each each instance that occurs and work you know come up with better practices and to prevent it from happening again and then the effectiveness of those final measures meaning there's always needs to be follow up with people how is it don't you know we've done this we're
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providing you you know we've moved this person or whatever those measures are that we've taken you which want to be following up with the impacted people to find out you know are you getting still what you need are you getting what you need educationally speaking are you feeling comfortable in your environment we want to be doing that kind of follow-up and monitoring and then defining the record-keeping what the form looks like and what the retention schedule needs to be around that so next steps as I guess I should have started with the slide so the first thing to focus on for me is where to go for help with resources into our student and staff handbooks those are in the process of being finalized this week we've I've taken steps identified our PPS cross departmental work team get our stakeholder input you'll be hearing more about the complaint process lighthouse safe Oregon tip line we have a number of new school safety measures that are going to be or mechanisms that are going to be implemented this upcoming school year we want to make sure we're incorporating those contact information and phone numbers in with with this as well our interim title 9 coordinator the director of high school programs will will have her set up and ready to go for the first couple of months until we have a timeline coordinator hired of course include her feedback and then we'll come back with a revised first reading draft administrative directives and of course the hiring of the coordinator any other questions or input that you'd like me to take into account take back to our work team so just to clarify we're still we are still moving forward with the policy that was presented for the first reading this is just an update for all of us and then we'll work on the administrative directive and have the second reading on the policy has written correct what technically this was supposed to be was the second reading but we felt since we had a reconstituted board that would make sense to have another first reading and it's great that we have got one another first reading but we did a move yet to the second reading until we have a briefing of the board it'll also have to provide an opportunity to incorporate some new items so looking forward to you bring it back expeditiously yes I will move that expeditiously my brains in it now so it's like I'm just on the student input size on the previous one a limo is still our representative we determined that this would be one of the areas that we want to prioritize that Superstock would deal with so we are working on coming together with committee to finalize our key points that we want in this particular area okay so you can connect offline about when and how we get together how we're going to meet you okay good thank you very much thank you yeah thank you I think so for all of your work on that working forward to getting it implemented in out in schools it would be great for our students this next item I'm going to ask dr. Laura Parker chief strategic officer to provide an update on the middle school plan and I thought it might be worthwhile before we begin the discussion to just sort of outline a little bit about the direction that's needed from the board so and correct me if dr. Parker if I'm interactive ATAR you want to share a nuance that I've might have missed so there's a budget amendment so most immediately there's a 10.5 million requests that needs to be an amendment to the FY 2018 budget by the 29th there needs to be an affirmation of the scope of this project plan there also and I can talk more about that but we're going to make sure that we've got the right scope and then committees as you'll see from the presentation there are essentially two primary committees that this will need that you will need to do work on this or review this the teaching and learning committee plans for focus option programming with these two catchments both current programming and anticipated and these plans should include at a minimum current a future planning for DLI and access Academy they this may call attention to a need for teaching learning to make recommendations at a later date around tag and DLI program plans in the years to come at a systems level and then after the middle school framework committees complete the design work which is slated for the completion at the end of December and/or in December of 2017 teaching learning committee will
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probably want to get detailed a more detailed briefing on the final design of the novel framework in a later date how that relates to the future middle school openings such as the new Kellogg facilities that's teaching and learning committee than enrollment in forecasting so teaching learning is director of sparse or Browns and the the enrollment forecasting committee which is director Bailey you should be prepared to recommend implementation plan for the feeder patterns inclusive of boundary change recommendations and in addition working with staff on critical decisions that are outlined the presentation one confirming the feeder pattern proposal and two recommending the enrollment balancing plan for implementation of feeder patterns to Harriet Tubman and Rosalie Heights so it's a big body of work and I'm sure we're going to see from the presentation it's complex and has many many interrelated impacts on other schools and even outside of so if your child's in the school other than the proposed Harriet Tubman and Rose Way Heights you shouldn't ignore this discussion because there will be very broad impacts potentially across our across our school system so with that dr. Parker please thank you and thank you for your time this evening the primary goal of tonight's presentation is really to build some shared understanding about the major work streams that exist with not only the opening of two new middle schools but the conversion of a series of k-8 schools and into k5 and the continuity of services and programming within all of those effective schools and really the broader area in our system the second critical piece for this evening is to get a sense of what those key timelines and decisions are to again understand how this work flows we're really excited about this opportunity to open these two schools and about the opportunity to implement for the first time a new middle school framework that's been designed with the leadership inside PPS and you might say well we already have middle schools well we do have middle schools and very successful middle schools but we didn't have a guiding framework for middle school design that really captures visionary experience for those middle years and the reason why that was important to develop was not only should we be setting some expectations of learning experiences for all of our students in the middle years but what those student supports are how we invest resources strategically so that there's consistency scalability sustainability and how we not only call attention to but take action in eradicating inequities that are known in our district so establishing that middle school framework with research-based guiding principles was critical in building the foundation for success instructionally and with the student experience in our schools that work will be implemented for the first time within these two schools we're going to be going through an overview of a master project plan that actually references 472 different line items inside our master plan and of course all of those projects of the series of tasks underneath each of them the original plan was developed last year by the middle school implementation team again that leadership team that was largely in the direct direction of former assistant superintendent Chris Russo in the office of teaching and learning that again laid the groundwork for what a visionary middle years program would be over the summer revisions to that plan were made and a new project team was established and so that new project team includes Brenda Fox as the original planning principal and architect of much of this visionary programming Rudy Rudolph as our lead project manager and myself as the executive sponsor the three of us are working to coordinate all of those departments however within each department there are significant investments in regular attention to implementation of this plan and following the respective tasks and major work streams within each department so this is a large coordinated effort that touches nearly every department in PPS the implementation project plan identifies those work streams deliverables key decision points associated I will be talking towards the end of the presentation about key milestones so that you can just get yourselves oriented around what happens
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when we go from planning to design to procurement to really operationalizing all the pieces and infrastructure moves and there is a complete budget request of just over ten and a half million dollars that again I would expect to come back to the board with more details a couple of critical decisions that we wanted to make sure we called out this evening so that we could identify the appropriate workflow to get to these critical decisions and make sure that we stay on target first board approval of naming actual middle school feeder schools that would flow into Harriet Tubman and Rose Way Heights second board approval of the feeder pattern implementation plan so those two critical decisions are connected but making sure that we are clear about which schools feed into these two middle schools and what the implementation plan would be in converting k-8 to k5 and which cohorts start to move in what years we're calling for decision on both of those by October 3rd and the identification of financial resources needed to execute yes the preferences August 20 29th to be able to identify those allocated resources through a budget amendment as we understand that process but if it needs to go to more critical detail through the appropriate committee structure then we can take until September 12 to get to that place so that there's a clarity in that there is broad recognition that the feeder pattern and implementation plan really needs to be determined by October 2017 in order to successfully open these schools by the 2018 2019 school year and again as we go through the work streams and the key milestones I hope to build an understanding of why that is as we've worked with coordinating all of the operational departments that we'll be pulling this task off its broad we recognize that October 17th is the latest possible date for board approval of the feeder patterns in order to pull this off I believe that we can do this we are focused we are energized we are coordinated and connected we are working every single week through not only our project teams at a system level but inside each of the departments and regular updates to interim superintendent a lot on a weekly basis and I believe that we can do this and we're excited about this opportunity if you want to lay out some understanding of the compressed work that's taking place in order to meet these targets and some of the risks that we do we do have some concerns about and just want to again build awareness of so overall if we try to change the project scope we'll have very difficult times identifying financial or operational capacity to institute additional work streams or decision points so involving more schools broadening the scope adding a piece to it can delay all of the decisions and workflow that flow from one another within some of the specific areas again wanted to build your awareness here facilities has already been engaged in a number of scoping exercises and planning activities and design activities with the two schools as well as the the two schools of rose way heights and Harriet Tubman and preparing them to be middle schools but without that final approval of budget allocated resources and the different programs that were schools that would flow into the schools they're not able to really plan and execute on any of those designs so they're very very very anxious to know what the final decision is that they can start executing on some of those needed facilities upgrades to make the middle schools achieve the ED specs designed in our new middle school framework envisioned within budget and staffing so our technical infrastructure around budget and staffing is already pretty lean and we have to convert all of our systems and the staff the school codes the budget codes that line up with
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current entities to the new entities and again carry out a series of complex technical configurations as we reconstitute the entities and implement new school codes and so all of that is already a bit compressed teaching and learning so much of office of teaching and learnings work is dependent on the selection of feeder patterns because what will happen this fall is teaching and learning will lead the work of completing the framework design with specifications to each of the schools there's a lot of intense committee work that broadens participation amongst our educators that will take place all the way through December of 2017 and each school involved would have representation on those various committees so as to localize the framework to the specific school and yet we're looking for again those assignments and that verification of which schools and then of course community engagement there's a series of activities and tools and community engagement processes that CIPA has laid out that would not only prepare but celebrate with our school communities these changes and make that preparation for our parents and students again localized and owned and they want to start executing on that but are looking for that feeder pattern and the feeder pattern plan to be approved so those are some of the compressed work streams that again we believe we can execute on but wanted to make sure that we highlighted the need to arrive at a decision of feeder patterns by October so just the commentary before we get the key work streams I look at how compressed that work is I would hope that tomorrow the board chairs that the committee's are working with staff going to have meetings scheduled I find it but I'm a little bit troubled that there's already a warning about delay in feeder school decisions when we don't even have anything in front of us yet to make decisions on so just the for the board to be able to do its work I would suggest we try and get dates scheduled now so that we don't you know so we try and still hit those days but we're that's really aggressive so Lauren I have a meeting set up for tomorrow afternoon great and I haven't seen anything and you have decided not to share anything with the board at this point so in terms of our reaction to it we're we're waiting and I do want to point out the portions of the plan I've already been leaked public so well we're looking forward to working through the appropriate you know board committees and getting into the details again built collective ownership and understanding of you know the right decisions and yes and we're moving rapidly moving rapidly but I believe what we can do this because we are really focused go ahead Victor custom we called out there is making sure that there's coordination with the office of school modernization on the development of the ED specs for Kellogg because that work is isn't going on at the same time I'm glad you called that out so another key a key goal of the implementation of this plan is to loop back to our system-wide designs for facility ed specs for middle schools and again those role you know defined through this visionary work of identifying middle school framework and how that influences the aspects and actually when we get into some of the budget numbers you'll see how facilities would like to be investing dollars around their area of science labs for example that meet those ed specs that have been designed and are connected to the Kellogg planning so that's one area but because it's a chicken and egg thing there because those are just in development so they need that you know wisdom that's coming out of that programmatic vision with the same urgency that yep you are correct one more question you said that these two middle schools would be the first ones with the implementation of the middle school framework what about aqua green aqua green was opened before the middle school framework was finished on and they're still hurt in her motion in a center and
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perper the board chairs common about what teaching and learning might expect I would anticipate that through the teaching and learning committee structure there would be an understanding of what the framework is once the design is finished in December and then later how that would influence future middle-school design such as Kellogg or those that already exist such as awfully so to expect that to come through teaching and learning if I'm understanding that correctly ones is the design get applied to existing middle schools as was my question and I'm not not sure it's that you said it would be for future middle schools but I believe that understanding what that plan is for applying to future and existing but middle schools would happen inside the teaching and learning committee structure okay leadership here yeah I think it's a good expectation did you happen well and the other piece of that Scott is that it's not just middle schools but middle grades we want to make sure that we're taking a lot of the learning and the recommendations from this middle school plan and implementing as much as we can in our K eights that we'll be around for a while and some of those things are some of those recommendations are cost neutral in terms of programmatic recommendations so the sooner we can get those things that we know our best practices out to our kids the better director more all right yeah I'm afraid I'm going to be a little impatient here you've been very clear with us about the deadlines that for us for our to be concluded I would like to know when we can expect to see something that we can work with I would love an opportunity to present that right now so the first key work stream is around the feeder pattern planning and so the big areas are planning feeders boundary changes program placement for the Tubman catchment so that includes finalizing the feeder schools developing enrollment transfer implementation plans engagement of administrators and key community stakeholders followed by roadway Heights and the workaround feeders boundaries program placement and influence implementation plan engagement with administrators development of what that plan looks like earlier this year former interim superintendent McKean called for a group of PPS administrators to work through the summer in developing additional iterations of this plan we received valuable feedback some community stakeholders including the Debrett Committee on the iteration of this plan or currently finalizing all those details and I would expect something with enrollment transfer and transfer certainly by the 1st of September / director Bailey and eyes ability to formulate those agendas and schedule all those right pieces and it's always a little bit daunting to try to schedule something right at the beginning of the school year but that's where we stand her are you expecting a release at tender are you expecting the boundaries of the surrounding area of the cluster schools to remain the same I expect that we have we have put together and I expect again that we'd be working with the appropriate enrollment forecasting committee to finalize an enrollment balancing plan that would require boundary changes enrollment balancing that would seek to achieve enrollment parity among our case eyes that are part of this plan which was something that was in valuable feedback again brought forth by multiple stakeholders sometimes so that's within the clusters so so let's you know pick roadway Heights and yeah whatever whatever schools yes I do I I do believe that there are potential boundary changes in the neighboring schools neighboring to those catchment areas so will there be outside of the catchment areas yes in order to achieve enrollment parity so we're gonna see a whole lot of
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boundary changes rippling across and again would like to work with the appropriate enrollment committee on their final details and what your guidance recommendation so I'm just confused did you say that it wasn't a B till September first that we would get it is that the day because just from based on my experience having been on the board when we consolidated closed and made lots of different changes in school configurations is a month is not enough time to have sort of work through with the commute at the community on you know some pretty significant changes I mean I just we'd only be able to have we'd have two from September first you know the most two board meetings and I mean unless the committee is going to be meeting every day and the community I mean I would move it up as much as possible to even try and hit this date that September 1 is going to be too late now in order to actually have any sort of a sentient conversation with communities yep and I'd like to ask another question I have not seen anywhere in this PowerPoint a mention of deep breath so what's the plan for deep breath does it exist does it not exist is it going to be involved in this is it not going to be involved in this what's the plan so within the feeder pattern planning again one of the big work streams is engagement with community stakeholders what was less communicated with the D brac committee which is a superintendent committee the less communication from in setting expectations for work from former interim superintendent McKean was that they would be receiving an opportunity in September to review and provide the valuable critical feedback that that committee does so well it of the latest iteration of the plan as developed by PPS administrators through the summer so we're still on target to deliver in September that information and would absolutely welcome and invite feedback so I want to get into something we talked about earlier today which is D Brack had a charge of taking on the whole east side is it your understanding that that charge has been rescinded or does that still exist as part of their charge again I believe that that is a superintendent committee when I joined the district in March I was not aware of that charge from the super former interim superintendent so I think that's a good question to be so free person yeah director Bailey given that interim superintendent Awad is not here I think it's an excellent question I think we should ask him what he since I know he's been involved in the discussions we should ask so I just think it's important to point out that there's been a group of people that has spent a lot of time and hour jangling they're out there not knowing they have a Jason you can correct me if I'm wrong if there has been no official communication with the community committee about where what its status is four months Jason is nodding his head and that's not very respectful and I'm not just I'll leave it there and we'll go on so I'm going to ask Rosanna Powell to make a note that director Bailey would like an answer from the interim superintendent whether that charge has been rescinded or modified you can add meet and it replaced too so another thank you additional scopes within development of a feeder pattern plan an implementation plan also include the opening of Rose City Park as a neighborhood school and again what that means in terms of boundary and Ruhlman changes the potential relocation of the access program to Humboldt and again these are all things that we've just been preparing for and doing all the analysis that we can and then next phase planning
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of what some future phase work might be recognizing that these are two middle schools we know certainly that we have Kellogg down the road that would be coming and we want to make sure that we start to articulate how we get to the plan for fear pattern proposals there so that wraps up the feeder pattern planning the facilities and IT infrastructure upgrades they're significant upgrades that facilities would like to execute on with the Tubman facility Rose way height facility some minor upgrades with recipie Park and humbled as well I'd like to call out that with facilities and IT infrastructure upgrades at the middle school level a lot of this work is in response to defining what the ED specs are for a visionary middle years program making sure that we have the classrooms outfit in a way that supports the student experience supports that I gave an example earlier of science or steam learning supports the work of project-based learning such as potential maker spaces experiences supports of all of the needs from a technology perspective so looking at new instructional technology inside the classroom for both teachers and students that would support some additional instructional work that's happening around quality student feedback students learning development of student agency and engagement so all of these infrastructure upgrades are really again meant to fulfill the vision of a high quality middle years program and student experiences around transportation and nutrition services transportation needs to plan for new wealth and all of the investments that are needed fair nutrition services on bringing online to additional schools and the impacts that might occur there with changes in demographics again we're just preparing for all those potentials so that it's captured finance and human resources already reference this to some extent there's a major investment that's needed around our data system updates so that once we identify what students are assigned in which school and what the enrollment is not only for 1718 but down the road excuse me 18 19 but down the road we update all of our AARP systems we identify a staffing timeline so determine the allocation of that staffing again that's another area of work that loops back to a district priority of moving up staff staffs models and potential allocations ERP stands for our ERP systems are basically our PeopleSoft system so we use our for Finance and for Human Resources what those major technical systems are for enterprise resource we have to do school conversions from a budget perspective so again we have these entities and now we have new entities and moving all those chartfields and budgets to the right places so that some of the major work around finance and human resources that has to take place and again knowing not only which students are assigned to which buildings but which staffs will be assigned to which buildings are for thank you around communications and community engagement so this is another area that's exciting because this is an opportunity to really celebrate a visionary program for our communities we want to make sure that we've determined the right messaging and the tools to communicate that messaging for the schools that are involved in this implementation we want to make sure that we've engaged with our culturally specific partners and again all of this has been planning a lot of this has happened but once we have an official plan in place we want to lead and work with our communities in that conversion and then preparing for the change and for the 1899 school year working through the development of a theater cutter and proposal for broad adoption so obviously there's a lot of content as has already been raised around the need to understand the middle school vision of content around our focus option programming and what to expect in terms of programs for articulation development
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of the implementation plan so that it's not just so a simple task of identifying the numbers of students in each year in each school but actually developing the narrative around us so there's a large investment that again has already been planned for and it's already in the works so that we can communicate what the theater powder proposal might be highlighting the work that has already been done in community engagement as this that new we've been working on this for a while and there is a pretty well-documented engagement activities in listening to our community so we want to make sure that we recognize that and continue it making sure that we engage with school site councils and staff in school communities around the the feeder schools and limitation plant adoption making sure that we've supported messaging with school staff and again that they're all part of the process so again these are just major work streams and has to be completed teaching and learning there's a huge body of work this is really where it all started so the teaching and learning work streams include completing the development of the framework through a series of middle school programs committees really putting kind of the meat on the bones if you will in terms of the course offerings the scope and sequence what middle school schedules might exist in the two new schools determining the appropriate student support supporting site Council so developing what developing a plan for site councils and executing on that plan identifying the key community partners within each school that would support and participate on the on those site councils determining the curriculum materials and the whole process of transferring those materials procurement of them determines snaffle so after all this design work is done around localizing the framework to the to schools what are the staff roles that are needed to implement the instructional plan within the two schools and determining program placement and articulation and again confirming the classroom set-aside that is needed for specific programs what the facilities and IT needs are for specific programs as well articulation for DL I and IV is already even well highlighted and making sure that we finish that planning as well so those are some of the large scope of work for teaching and learning question for program director more yeah I have a question about the teaching learning items on the back there there we go so we we have established you have said that we need to lock down feeder pattern decision by October 3rd in order to do staffing and all the rest of it and my understanding is that we're looking at a very aggressive budget schedule this coming year I have I have heard a desire to have the budget adopted by December which means that staffing is going to have to be done yeah early so can you supply has anybody established deadlines for all this work and teaching and learning yes and invite this isn't superintendent to speak to that but specific to staffing so a lot of the same analysts who support all this work are also working very diligently on a new staffing model to support that change in the budget process so I you know ok those work strings are synced up from an allocation so the staff model allocation would be done earlier to support that earlier budget process then once the committee work for teaching and learning is completed in terms of a design perspective then we have a sense as to what unique staffing roles might be necessary for the to know I get that an idea I mean I get the sequencing of the work but it's um what I'm trying to convey here is it's I'm feeling uncomfortable because I don't have a sense of timeline the only thing I have a timeline on is when I have to vote but I don't have a timeline on when I'm going to get some info that will allow me to vote and not just on the feeder pattern but on everything
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else as well so so I'm curious and I'm eager to hear and before you start let me just say I'm also going to want to hear not only about the new middle schools that are opening but I also want to know if if you're factoring in the middle grades in the remaining Cades to ensure that those students are going to get something approaching a real middle school experience so very quickly to your first question on timelines the master project plan literally has 472 projects and tasks in within our project management software that we use every week when the project team meets we identify where we are what risks we have and then we coordinating throughout the departments and each department lead is also doing the same work of monitoring where we are in terms of timelines and making sure that those are updated and I appreciate all that and I know it's a nightmare and better using me that's all I have today but some ballpark dates would be helpful yes opposite do you want to identify yourself please my name is Ron and I'm the interim assistant superintendent for ditching us and teaching office position you're learning so since I started in beginning of July I have worked closely with the team to identify timelines and we actually can submit this to you tomorrow or tonight and it has timeline for each month what are the planning principles supposed to do to get to December and then all the side council meetings is also give you to see right now then we also also have another master timeline that's actually aligned with the work with IT and everybody else and actually the cost and the cost aligned to the work so we do have a timeline because we've been working closely with Miss Brenda from fox who is naturally in this work and she been doing the work from last year so I can actually give it to you so you can have a view of what we have and all the departments have that and in the next section I'm going to talk about milestones but if you want more specific timelines on any abuse pieces we can certainly provide and what particular beauty is what we really want to consider is all the electives and all the key success program models that are out there to really give our students successful education in made a great level but since we're opening this to school this would be our first I don't want to say pilot because it is a rural school is not a pilot but actually a process for us to making sure that we open the school day one to be successful with the implementation of the framework assertion framework so that's why we really key not is to be successful to support our students the first day of school so let me give this to Karen or would you like to see it thank you okay so just again to highlight a couple of key milestones and if there's more detail around the timelines that you're interested in for any of these please just let me know we can provide that so in the fall so first of all we want to make sure that we've hired the planning principles which we have executed on and I believe a formal announcement you'll be made within the context of the events surrounding administrators coming back to school so we have our planning principles on board which is really critical to beginning all that site Council and engagement work as well as finishing the framework plan and September and October we're focused as you know on development and adoption of the middle school theater proposal implementation plan and all energies are focused there once that's formalized in October we would create the site councils we would then determine and allocate staffing again per the major work stream of staffing that is also occurring in November we would finalize all the details around the relocation of programs and services most of this we already know most of this we've already planned most of this we've started to communicate but just putting the final dot dotted i's and cross t's so to speak on that in winter in december the middle school framework committees would complete their design work again this is key to completing that phase of having staff and community involvement in localizing the framework design and triggering the needed staff roles and job descriptions that we would then
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start executing on when staff recruitment began in January enrollment projections as well from the finalization of the implementation plan that starts to trigger operational work like transportation route planning and nutrition services in February the facility design works so you're content to your earlier point in going back to the ed spec work that is happening this lines up with these two middle schools in February these are the classroom design and ed specs for middle schools as well as the student technology plans that were excited about developing and designing these yzi the instructional guidance and towards the end of that month with facilities and IT figures out all the different moving plans that have to occur and we get the project management teams expect and ready for that in the spring we finalize full schedules on in terms of the course offerings in March we complete the procurement activities for curriculum materials is when stuff starts to show up so we have all of this design work community and staff engagement work and planning work and then we start to execute on the operational pieces we get all the IT items procured we finished the phase one of the facility upgrades and we complete the site Council work visa Lee the leadership of the planning principles can I just have you um what it definitely is this site Council what kind of consistent I mean I I've been on site councils you know it's a variable experience I mean it would be it's no experience at all yeah and and oh by the way many of our schools many of our existing schools don't have site councils by the way so I mean what are you envisioning in terms of a site Council work especially the for these schools even open so the site councils are are established for the two new middle schools and include representation from the community and staff to help determine some of the localization of student supports that would be unique to that school programming and then we would be bringing a lot of student data like who's coming into the school defeat of patterns and the data that Ashley Sai council would be able to support us in determining the process you know like how do you do different activities and for me as when I was a principal Sai council is really about data-driven and making decision community and partners and teachers have the whole pictures of what it looks like it's going to be in school and then be able to give input feedback and so that's kind of what we perceive Sai council to be because there's going to be a lot of pieces moving forward even including building relationship making sure that teachers are on board and our parents understand what are going to be happening in the school year and they would have some input in in in decision-making along the process and that's what we are seeking for foresight council members and we be forming sai councils for these schools in the process itself one was just to clarify I'm a big fan site Council so this is good - yes and I think no no that's a good question because I think that councils are not consistent across they're kind of different Avella school so maybe when we ask when we establish a site council we're going to have guidance on really specifically what are we looking for and what our next steps so that is consistent because we would like the instructional framework to be successful as well we can't just be you know just throw out there and we we decide what to do but actually have a framework have discussion and what are we moving forward on because this a team decision you may not be aware that in 2001 a committee of parents teachers classified staff principals and administrators developed a site council training package that was piloted at several schools and I remember visiting Mount Tabor and doing a bit of training I served on that site Council it's the person who's sitting at the diet right now she was my second zone member and I actually think most of it is still pretty relevant it just never got implemented by PBS obviously since we're still hearing that some schools don't have site councils there's very little accountability around site councils I
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just want to offer that as a resource going forward so I'm technolon that and make sure that we also provide self can source of training at the noise thank you and yes we provide those trainings at Monteiro so I can know exactly with PTI PES it be 80 presidents and P P FCC council members to them and so then we get the summer and obviously this is when all the moves moves occur of moving staff moving equipment IT tear down setups we finished the facility upgrades we finished hiring staff professional development as largely during the summer time as folks are aware and of course we do all the activities that are normal to our start a school process and opening the doors so those are again to some of the key milestones from a seasonal basis but we can certainly provide more intricate detail as to specific work streams or tasks or coordination if the requested all right so the departments that are involved in this put together budget requests in order to consolidate overall budget needs for this endeavor and the big request that you might have to Cepeda is really coming from facilities office of school modernization around the upgrades to the building's for Tubman and grizzly Heights some upgrades to Humboldt again a lot of that is to invest in delivering on the Ed's BEC needs for the classroom science labs in particular are a very big expense here some new route planning for transportation just some anticipation of work around nutrition services for teaching and learning in Connecticut questions on facilities so are we expecting that any of this work would be bond funded because several of the items are priority items on the 2017 bond routes and security so but you haven't broken that down in terms of okay thanks sorry this is very good question within teaching and learning finishing the framework development the first phases of that development involved more than 200 educators across our system but now we have to finish that out and there's some expenses around that certainly expenses around supports for special special education and making sure that we deliver on that continuum of services that's been designed by special education curriculum materials for the new school library makerspace experiences the ivy program development site Council and engagement activities and of course a strong investment in professional development activities as well with NIT a lot of this corresponds with IT infrastructure upgrades tear down and set up enterprise system configurations as we mentioned earlier a new classroom technology bundles and student devices to support the learning experience as designed and some substantial infrastructure a lot around physical security needs for roadway Heights Tubman and humbles as well and for communications and community engagement so there's some investment around extended communication support working through this intense period of time to complete and communicate feeder patterns proposal and implementation plan community engagement events that occur throughout the year as well as just some direct mail communication so those are some of the items for the budget request but as was stated earlier by the board chair I believe that we would expect to come back with the details around that and how we would break apart the different funding sources for some of us now those figures inclusive of translations given an excellent question so I have just been asked an overall question mm-hmm so I'm fully supportive of all the expenditures they look like they're a pretty continent comprehensive list of what's needed in order to get
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the schools started and operating as fully functioning successful middle schools which is how we want to set them up for success I'm concerned that when I had a conversation with superintendent Yusuf's that he described that part of this potentially at the 10 million would be paid for with debt and I'm curious if you can tell me what the split of the 10 million is but or what the plan is I cannot tell you what that potential split is but again would expect to come back with him so I'd like to make a request that given that this we're being asked to approve it by August 29 by August my nights I like an answer tomorrow because it seems like it's already been contemplated I'm going to be concerned if there's a debt component we had 482 million dollar bond in 2012 a 790 million dollar bond earlier this year that we've known these two schools are going to be we're going to be opened that we should have budgeted so I be concerned I'd like to know tomorrow just given the timeline I'm just that was kind of my question as well worse worse than that absolutely just a finer point on how much would be bond funded or bond eligible as well right and the bonds that have already been passed which is versus future bonds it's like I wanna find points I know in the past the district has Bart when they didn't have bonds Bart did advance borrowing so if this is going to be bond funded the expectation would be that it would be like bonds absolutely understood and you know we've certainly been having those conversations already and just means you the final look back and great liver appreciated right way glad the questions of director Anthony yes thank you dr. Parker I'm sorry I have a more fundamental question how was this budget put together so last year during the work of the middle school implementation team under the directions direction of the former assistant superintendent former interim superintendent project teams put together budgets at that time to scope out the vision and the ED specs and the needs that were anticipated over the summer we refined those so I can certainly speak from my area of departmental leadership within IT we looked at what was needed with those buildings to deliver on that specs for excuse me that the specs for physical security so a lot of our upgrades are there network infrastructure to support increased use of devices in those buildings so that's an example of how we put them together but really deferring to what are we carrying out in other schools and now we're onboarding to brand new schools with larger enrollments in a sense what what would it take to deliver on a no school experience thank you I appreciate it I'm afraid I have an obligation to point out on the first three items operations of speaking and learning Nike the items that you list there do not add up to the totals and it makes a difference in the grand total of over $230,000 we identified the under of I've identified the large with the large buckets with anticipation that we would come back with the refinement from each of the departments and a recommendation for how that's allocated thank you dance yeah first of all I want to thank you for all the work you put into this and trying to come up with a very well crafted plan that's timely that's deliverable and I don't want to lose sight of that and there's a famous old cartoon that's been around probably since the stone Age's where it says plan ahead except for by the time the person got over here they didn't have enough
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room for the a and the D and it gets all kind of crunched in we're and let me set the context back in 2010 members of the superintendent's Advisory Committee on enrollment and transfer we're looking at the impact of eliminating the lottery transfers from one neighborhood school to another because we thought was creating inequities what we discovered instead is that if we eliminated those kind of transfers that some overcrowded schools would become even more overcrowded because the transfer system was actually dropping their enrollment and that some under enrolled schools would become even more under enrolled and I think Harrison Parkin King where are two examples because they are actually having a net trip in a transference coming in and that positive and what we realized instead was the problem wasn't transfers per se although that wasn't helping it was that boundaries needed to be adjusted in many schools across the district and we and superintendent power director Moore and I thought I did it congratulations in your promotion well I'd like to check but I wouldn't like to job director more and I around that committee and we put together a presentation and advocated for district walk for wide redrawing of boundaries the district instead chose to said they didn't have enough capacity and so they were taking out going to take on boundary hotspots one at a time the first one was went relatively smoothly the next one was explosive in fact the middle of it there was a delay for a year to let people cool down and then it was resolved and the third one was the Jefferson cluster which completely blew up we had hundreds of community members and teachers testify against a piecemeal process and testify for district wide enrollment balancing the district and at that point the district was going to go ahead with its initial proposal that's when an ad hoc group of the community members parents and teachers came together and put together known as the Jefferson critical friends came together with an alternative proposal superintendent Smith took seven our recommendations ported them to the board and they were adopted in a resolution and one of those had to do with forging ahead with district wide balancing of enrollment the district then engaged Portland State University to essentially come up with a master plan for the price we took on the transfer process first so Sackett was kind of reinstated reinvigorated addressed some of the issues around transfers but not all of them there's a list of at least half a dozen more ready to be taken on and then the de brac committee was created to do district-wide rebalancing and here we are three years after that committee was created and there is no work plan for how we would do that on the east side instead staff has come back again and again with piecemeal processes of a piecemeal process one bite at a time and this is where we end up with the plan ahead what happens to the boundaries that you're going to redraw within these clusters when we look at Peninsula which does not have a right size boundary what happens when should we decide that aster becomes a k5 and we may we may not in order to increase Georgia's enrollment so that it has a ripple robust program and there's has to be a boundary adjustment there which will impact surrounding schools what's the feeder pattern going to be for Madison to ensure that it has a robust enrollment because it's still below the enrollment target enrollment from high school redesigned back in 2010 is there going to be a second middle school which one will that be what kind of rebalancing all we have to do around that what happens if we then sip up these two clusters and come back in a year or so and go oh guess what we
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have to change boundaries again and maybe even theater patterns again in order make the whole east side work so I want to make it clear that I met with interim superintendent a lot and June and made these points clear that I thought you were going about this in the wrong direction that it needed to be the entire east side I think I don't want to speak for D Brack but I think it's pretty clear where their sentiments lie I made that clear I came up with a list of the data that I thought we would need in order to get that that job done and getting that data out has not been a priority and we still don't have a work plan I feel no assurance that we're doing the best we can here is going to get us anywhere near a stable enrollment pattern where all of our schools on the east side have a robust enrollment so I don't know what to do because I feel like by staff ignoring my advice and really D Brax advice not only last year and we had super dent McCain and Chris reso come to us in May had in hand with it looking pretty sorry saying we basically paraphrasing we screwed up because we realized we needed to get started on this middle school stuff earlier and we haven't had d brac meeting for months when we could have to work on this and now here we are again a couple months over the summer where I think we could have gotten work done and maybe at least gotten the big pieces together to show that yes the pattern that you're going to propose to us may work for the entire east side but maybe it won't and we don't know that so what you've done and I not not you personally as I thank you director Vuitton and we've talked about it this isn't at you personally at all you know the you're late to this party what staff have done is put us between a rock and a hard space because if we do anything to hold up this Trainor then it looks like we're the bad guys in holding up the middle schools opening up a year from September and yet the other alternative is for you to go ahead and come up with quite a risk I think of setting up a system that then needs to be made he may be radically changed in order to work for the entire east side I don't know what to do I don't know what to do so we know with interim super cannon superintendents McKeen's proposal last June had Vernon hanging out there as a k-8 that wasn't by design that was just they're not part of where we're looking at and yet there was no solution then it was it was sort of an outlier hanging out there with nowhere to go that's the kind of thing we could end up with and that's just not going to cut the mustard so I'm extremely frustrated anybody else not I want to recognize can it's an old joke among the brass but I feel like you gave us the data and a computer and a map and a weekend we could get this thing we could come up with a very rough map and purposes for each school and we could we could say looks good or while this isn't going to work and here's why that D Brack has asked for data I've asked for data and it has been forthcoming it has been probably organized we've been blown off bread okay I don't want to pile on but I'm going to boil on actually actually I would ask not to pile on so I just want to note that I really recognize director Bailey I really recognize your your frustration but I do want to note
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there's been as you noted that this is not directed at any of the staff that are sitting here before us that there's been a lot of different players we've had three different superintendents and so certainly since July but I want to just make sure that we're not it's not not saying there's one group of people that this has been a collective non-response and got a watch or train wreck I just want to recognize that because I think I'm not a favor Laura and I talked about this today and I'm it knows Laura this is a person ologist yeah I know and it's we're clear on the I hope we're clear on I'd love to have the resources needed to do all the wonderful things that this boarding community wants us to do so my heart's in it too okay and again this isn't your responsibility but with somebody's D brac has been supposedly a priority for this district for several years why wasn't there a work plan with a budget that would have been part of the budget to make this happen um I totally agree with what Scott saying and I just want to highlight one thing one that I think there is a crying need for and as we you know move headlong into this middle school implementation we need to get information about the focus option plan and that has apparently been apparently it's out there but nobody's seen it so whatever the log jam is on the information flow somebody needs to get rid of those log jams and I mean I'm just going to put it out there I am desperate for these new middle schools to work I'm desperate I am desperate for the k-8 to work for kids I want I want to vote yes but it's got to be doable for me and still be able to look at myself in a mirror so uncle'd if you have information share it if you have a plan for you know this is this is very high level and you know people will be able people will people will understand a lot of people have been dealing with with the boundary kerfuffle and the reconfiguration and all the rest of it for years and years and years what they wanted to plan what they want to some hope they want to know that this is going to be doable that this is going to be fixed and and they want to know that there's a they want ballpark dates you know tell me when tell me when and many of us have been asking for for much more detailed information forever so what you're hearing is intense frustration born of years of PPS not coming through and I want this to be you know we're all up here we're getting a new superintendent I want this to be you know we're turning a new leaf things are going to things are going to happen I need more than this to make me feel like it it is going to thank you director konstandin sound good director sparse run welcome thank you for coming straight from the airport and I'm going to ask that this be the last comment since I was bumping up against our deadline so you get the last word so in reference to you know things that your source term or with just talking about focus options at all I mean they're listed out here so that does many things that are part of this other person and learning and now when I back in town is when is for me to meet with them as you really develop this plan with a timeline so
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I know that I think we have something on the books for maybe next week or so that we will start sitting down and have addressing the issues and purse them out students and learning process on this as well as the belt literacy frameworks but there's a lot to do with the instructional piece that we were great and we started the presentation an hour ago by talking about sort of what the board needed to do and the two big pieces from the board committees one was then enrollment forecasting and the other was the teaching and learning so we're glad you have you've arrived just in time to take that piece so thank you very much both of you for the presentation and I think you can sense our eagerness and the urgency with which we are looking forward to the work absolutely thank you thank you managers address one thing because that think that as staff I also want to share that our heart is really into serving a lot kids and as a person of color and whom I gone through the experience and schools that's what our goals as well so we will work collaborative or thin with everybody to make sure that it happens so it's just want to share that and also we have ot of time and I share that we'll be sharing with you as well dr. Brown thank you thank you so the next agenda item is a discussion of services to families of community address complaint policy and process I'm going to ask Sharon Reese the interim chief of Human Resources to come forward thank you sure but before you start a couple things I want to frame up on this particular agenda item first I want to note that this is not an our discussion that was it that was a mistake so it will be shorter than that and I want to note that this is a discussion item it's not a first reading of a policy we did very deliberate in how we approach this what so we're not taking action we're having a first reading there has been a suggestion that we pull the agenda item as much work needs to be done both in terms of content and process however I think it's important for the board to begin its work on this policy and I know that many other people up here in the diocese activists have in some form of another participate in the complaint process with the school district so we've as parents I think know firsthand that having a functioning complaint process is really important to the health of the district we want a streamlined process that results in being in complaints being resolved in a timely way versus just basically having people give up at a certain point because they get frustrated so a streamlined process where you get some resolution it may not always be what parents and community want the resolution but that they and things are resolved and addressed and also something that complies with state law before we just start the discussion if I'm going to give all the caveat hopefully there's a couple clear clarifications the board received some materials and I think it's really important there's some nomenclature issues of what we have in the book that I just want to clarify so tab six is the current complaint policy and note at this time no change has been recommended so just to be clear so no change have been recommend in the current policy tab 7 is a brand new administrative directive and that's really the way in which the complaint policy is implemented at a set more detailed staff level tab 8 there's a document called a complaint hotline policy it's not actually a board policy it's more a protocol or process so I think we should be clear that that's not any sort of policy that's being recommended it's just maybe miss names and then tab 9 is a complimentary materials and not part of the policy either I want to let the board know that I'm going to be appointing a board the task force tonight that will review and make recommendations on this and other board operational policy so for example we have a number of governance policies that have been recommended I'm going to chair the task force and director Rosen and Moore will serve on it and then the process we're going to follow just so everybody understands again I think
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there in the past some things came to the board and if you weren't paying attention and one night something got adopted and the next day it got rolled out and that's not going to be the case with this board in terms of policies so just so everybody's clear what the process is going to be there's going to be a discussion tonight this is an opportunity for people to raise questions and I know people have already submitted a fair number of questions about the policies and the administrators it's a chance to sort of surface issues that's we're going to refer the policy and the draft ad to the task force that we work the task force level there'll be engagement with a task force with community members who hopefully will tap a lot of people who have had experience with the current complaint process you know what worked what didn't then that there quickly will be incorporated into the policy and the ad and we'll look to legal counsel to make sure that if something is has a first reading that it complies with the current state law so we were not going to not going to have a first reading anything that doesn't comply with state law after that there'll be an extended period for public comment and then if the board is ready to adopt it a second reading and implementation so I just want to share that process and I think if this board can high risk superintendent in 42 days we certainly should be able to improve our complaint process so I think we're looking forward to the work and know this is something that for a lot of members in the community and myself included in director condemn and director rosin we were part of an issue with the district that spurred the initial change in the complaint process so there's a lot of people sitting up here who as parents have been interested in seeing it improved so we're eager to engage in the work so with that I'm going to ask you to present what you have okay great or start the discussions I will start the discussion thanks for the set up there the complaint policy and procedures are understandably and rightly a significant interest to student I'm sorry key both introduce yourself just oh yeah it was so long ago that I called you up [Laughter] my name is Sharon Reese I am serving as an interim chief human resources officer to the Harris general counsel okay so I've significant interests understandably rightly so it should be student to student to family to staff to the community and of course to the board I'm also a mother as well as the interim CHR oh I have two kids at Portland Public Schools and I care deeply about this process and about how Portland Public School shows up and the community it shows up to its students and to its staff we best serve those without saying but I'll say it anyway we say we best serve the interests of the students of the staff of the community by having an effective a reliable a thorough and responsive complaint intake process investigative process and resolution process those are all the components that are critical to doing this well the alternative to effective reliable thorough and responses responsive is not good issues don't get resolved I know I'm preaching to the choir here but students and staff were just empowered to speak up we lose public trust and we suppose the district to liability I think those are preventable failures I don't think that the results of investigations and the resolution will always be accepted by all parties right or well received by all parties but that shouldn't be because of a lack of process or high quality standards or excellence in the intake the investigation and the resolution I'm in addition as you have identified a director broom Edwards as the in addition to serving staff serving students serving our communities we have legal obligations contractual statutory regulatory and must it whatever our processes and our policies must meet those obligations I would identify those as the floor right this is the framework below which we cannot fall a layered on
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top of that must be high quality and effective processes that can't necessarily be reduced to paper or to writing right sitting on top of that framework must be high quality judgment and collaborative processes collaboration between departments and collaboration with a and right now district staff with the representatives across different functions are engaged in ongoing work to review and approve our complaint process we want you to be invited in and work closely with you and the task force that you had have already identified to improve and who will have a high level of scrutiny and public accountability for what processes and I know you received a packet of materials I will tell you that I received it's very much in draft form I think all of the caveats the director of room edwards identified emphasize that this is in draft form and an iterative process in fact I received this pack of materials after you did I'm still going through Human Resources review as well and one example of the work that is ongoing is the adoption of light house as the outside vendor Stephanie Harper referenced this earlier this is the opportunity to improve our intake right of an intake investigation and resolution the opportunity to prove our intake process through an outside vendor who can accept complaints in any number of ways in 140 languages or more great 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year that's one of many steps that we are that has been adopted in one of many steps that we are considering I know that Jim Harris is working with OTE on identifying what are our baseline obligations and I know if you want to speak to that yes I did contact the OD I was new to this process and I wanted to know what their feedback was what their view of our current process is and I was surprised to learn that they have not accepted an appeal from Portland Public Schools since November of 2014 when we adopted the current policy now they have ruled on some complaints since then but those were filed prior to the new policy some of the items that we've looked at that doesn't mean that our ad is up to speed just means that our overall policy is accepted currently by the OTE some of the things that they that we looked at and as she's already pointed out was the first thing was we wanted to do 24/7 that anybody could file a complaint so this will allow us to take a phone call a you can file a complaint by web page or by fax one of the OD e requirements in January of 2018 will be that each school district that has a website have the complaint on the first page or one of the first pages and we've talked to our IT department and we're not satisfied without what we're trying to do and what they were trying to do right now is has the ability to make the complaint from any PPS webpage the second thing is it will be available in over 140 languages we have already translated about three to five complaint forms in the same languages that are represented here tonight the one advantage to this is that when a caller or web site files a complaint we will get a verbatim statement as to what that complaint is that's extremely important there's no he said she said the complaint will be read back to the party filing the complaint if it's by phone and they will confirm that that is exactly what they said there will be a log available of each complaint so that we can go back and immediately for very fast obtain a listing of what the complaints had been and the OD e updates
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are included in some cases those have been put in verbatim from the OD e particularly in the formal complaint process the Ombudsman role has been clarified one of the problems that we currently have as the Ombudsman role is not fully articulated and arm budzma is independent confidential and suffered from the complaint part of the formal complaint process we sort of have our Ombudsman embedded in the formal complaint process that's usually not how it's done so we have a coordinator that's available that will Shepherd the caught the complaints through the formal process and all of those items with the exception of the webpage are available now that is apparently although which is to say there's a lot of work to be done there's important input from this board as well as other interested stakeholders this is a cross-functional across many different departments as well and we want to move quickly on it as well so we're looking for your guidance input we want to open the dialogue and collaborate on this the processes and the policy discussion questions dr. Rosen so I just wanted to to say thank you for the the package being put together because I think it represents the baseline of where the staff is but I'm really looking forward to the task force taking a really deep dive into this which in my mind means everything's on the table was this has been kind of a thorn in our side for several years now and I think there's a great opportunity here I think we've kind of in four years probably heard everything and this is a great opportunity to straighten this out and maybe even on something starting from scratch like the policy before we even write an administrative directives so I just wanted to say thanks but also put on the table that I think we are going to be doing a really deep dive into this and I hope it's going to be an expeditious process so I appreciate that and I think everything is on the table it should be on the table I'd like to make a point in discussion jenna jameson who is one of our teachers at benson tech marvelous marvelous teacher she has a tagline that she says to all the students and I think it's multiple times today never accept no from anyone who never had the authority to tell you yes in the first place and as the complaint policy is laid out now it appears to me that it pretty much deliberately directs people away from staff who would have the authority to say yes to something and I'm very concerned about that and as I see it playing out this really tends to impact our low socio-economic and our communities of color very severely so thank you it's Reggie hood could easily get lost and looking at you know how do we make sure that we have a good barrel process in place is that the first step is always school-based resolution and that is you know the person who has a authority to resolve hopefully most concerns but what we rightfully are focusing on here is those times when that's not possible that doesn't work we need to make sure that there is recourse for people that they know what it is that it's easy to navigate but still not lose sight of that school-based community-based resolution really being ideal for for all concerned when it's possible I think the what I would respond to that is that the complaint process is a formal way of offering of a channel where you speak truth to power
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right because the people in with the authority to make the decisions are not the ones against whom you have to make but they are now the ones complaining because they're making the decisions it's about having a channel to address decisions that you disagree whether impact that you were anticipating or misconduct or all of that so it's important that it's accessible and to those who have the hardest time accessing sources of authority so just just to build on that I mean you know ideally we meet and we create the policy that's streamlined and effective that meet state law but that would be rarely used and you know I think one of the things that the task force will look at is what kinds of things can we do upstream so that we don't have our community feeling that that's the only way to get a resolution or an answer that you have to file a complaint because it's actually quite unsatisfactory I think for most people to have to go into the complaint process really looking at how we can communicate on the front end and both at the school base and at the district level of other ways in which people can get their either you know communicate what they need what they what they feel like they want to communicate or get you know basic questions answered or basic policies thing you know conflict resolved often conflicts that are just inherent in our own processes so that that's what I think is sort of the bigger prize here is going upstream and trying to resolve things and that's that's not a reason we're not going to fix the complaint process because we we are going to get it fixed and make it functional but really ideally it wouldn't have to be used that often a great component of resolution is what's the feedback to leadership right what lessons can we learn as a district as as leaders and hopefully we hopefully that's continuous learning and improvement and I think that's a really important point in something that has been missing which is that everything is a lot of things do get satisfactorily resolved for people through the Ombudsman or whatever but we don't have a process by which we're able to learn from the clustering of those concerns and those experiences everything is just handled as a one-off and you know what we need is to be able to see that certain like types of complaints are arising or maybe there certain types of complaints are arising in the same places and then really be able to elevate that to figure out what what does this tell us about our system that we need to fix on a broader level and that's exactly you know what I'm thinking about that so many of the problems that have occurred are really kind of the lack of systems so we do understand that this is the time that we'll be digging deep to look at you know what systems we put in place that are need to be different how we streamline and organize and how we create visions for these systems we have a complaint review team that meets weekly at this point and one of the items on our agenda is to debrief lessons learned from particularly difficult investigations that's all those pictures rehearse I don't think I quite understood your answer on the OD e compliance so we have a policy in the packet that's the 2014 policy have we actually asked either in internal or external counsel with expertise in the current state law to look at it and recommend specific changes to the policy or were you saying that the fault the current policy in your judgment is compliant with current state law do I called the OD e and asked them about our current policy they stated that our current policy was acceptable as it was that they had not accepted a an appeal since it was adopted in 2014 so I didn't go further than that with the current policy however we did talk at length about our ad and one of the things which I didn't mention earlier is there appears to be some confusion on some specific type of complaints regarding personnel and with
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regard to this the complaint can actually be split what part of it being handled as a formal complaint and part of it being handled by our personnel department and I was advised of that by the OD e and that is one thing that we've tried to build into this draft that I don't think was clear before and I think that gave rise to some of the issues that you were seeing can you tell me where in the draft that would where we find that particular issue if you look at the bottom of the informal complaint process and at the bottom of the Ombudsman's process we refer to what can and can't be appealed or what can and can't be split appealed self the right word split and those are the items that I'm told that part of it can go to an HR function and part of it to a formal complaint process so you can actually be running two processes on the same complaint at the same time so what you said is that Eau de inflikted art our policy and there's and it's compliant with current day law I didn't ask them specifically that question I asked them about our current policy and if they had issues with it and their response was no but we can certainly give it to somebody else to take a look at okay I just want to make sure that we're starting with a policy and compliant whatever whatever the changes have been made would you like me to do that I can do that we I think that'd be a great starting starting point where we do director more yeah I had a great many questions and concerns um wait what's a taskforce which I will I'll defer to you know I'm looking forward to the taskforce getting into getting its hand on this and I I just wanted to I think the complaint policy is an opportunity for us to demonstrate that that we really are going to do business differently and I often say that 80 percent of any policy is the implementation so while we may have a policy that passes legal muster if the actual processes that are associated with that policy don't embody kind of basic principles that I think we would like to that I think we would like to have underpinning PPS it transparency simplicity equity and injustice I mean it that's what we ought to be striving for so the the workflow although the school was it workflow no flow flowcharts flow charters are so the flowchart that was included in the materials is certainly to my mind doesn't satisfy the simplicity goal and I think there are well I'll leave it as a task force but you know I think we need to rethink this all together so I'm looking forward to us think guarantees into this but I think we have an opportunity here to demonstrate to people that you know we're going to we're going to be we haven't found the right word for it consumer oriented client or I don't know something but you know we're going to be approaching complain from a very different perspective if this is an opportunity to learn and to improve and and I'm going to be looking for a process that would lead to that and Maori rate I think everything is and should be on the table and it ought to withstand extraordinary scrutiny it should right it should be that good so I welcome the scrutiny the input the collaboration the challenges and I certainly welcome your interest if I agree that there is and when we get it wrong it goes very badly when we get it
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right we have an opportunity to build trust with the community and to set the tool to live values that we want to demonstrate to the community and to our students no one else not thank you and we're looking forward to the work ahead and to do it expeditiously and with the student and family focus thank you thank you so next up we have two agenda items the committee work plans and board committee and conference reports and I'm just going to combine them and based on earlier communication with the board as to directors who have committee reports who have had committee meeting so I'm going to ask either director Bailey or director more to kick it off five minutes no more or instead of five very quickly of the enrollment and forecasting board committee had its first ever meeting little for a week ago most of our first meeting was figuring out what we're about because we haven't had any previous work we also had a short report from director more on her and director of spars of rounds meeting with community members that's the right return but basically the the committee items that came up had to do with enrollment and D Brax work transfer policy with things that I mentioned already looking at student assignment in general and particularly pursuing as the board has already been on record a couple of years ago at wanting to take a look at the soft neighborhood model models like that for alternative ways of doing student assignment looking at a role of trends in general to keep up with but you know making sure all our schools have robust enrollments and are capable of providing a good if not great program for all our kids we also touched on a number of issues that will overlap into other committee work for example middle schools that we're seeing already tonight have an overlap with teaching and learning we want to look at working much more closely with the city around land-use plan planning and housing because that affects enrollment coming up and affects where what our schools need to be prepared to adjust to and that's ties in with intergovernmental relations course everything ties in with budget I'm not going to go through all the gory details but to give you a flavor of we're heading minutes should be of that meeting should be posted fairly soon you also piloted the new template for the committee's we're going to send that template that I haven't quite filled out yet okay that one yeah so for the rest of the community chairs there's going to be a template that everybody has that should give visibility to sort of on a monthly basis but also on an annual basis sort of what the committee's priorities are and what's going to be working on let's dig that out yes we were waiting for feedback from the guinea pig committee which is director Ellie's I'm looks pretty basic just pretty simple information giving guidance to what we're about we'll be good to have that uniform oh yeah so dr. Parker was going to send it out at the revised version so every every committee chair should get about it so it should give you the ability and all the should give the committee chairs and the staff leads both like a common template but it should be a template across the board that everybody begins and I think it's the community visibility of what the work is and you know when the meetings are and just provide a lot of consistency much more consistency across the board maybe Rosanna do you think you could work with dr. Parker to get out the slightly revised work plan template to the full board so for all the committee Cheers thanks Scott I wanted to add one thing for your consideration have you did you talk at all about enrollment verification and address fraud I know we have a couple of pilots going on right now in the district and this is
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significant issue yeah Judy Brenna I didn't realize that was going on of course Jason's in the back of the room nodding his head he knows everything before anybody knows anything that there is an enrollment verification pilot going on that sure having schools it is it's two schools yes sell it in Lincoln yes that's going on now that didn't realize so that's certainly part of certainly in our wheelhouse yeah that'd be great thanks for that yeah thanks for bringing that up so the FAO committee also met fa o stands for finance audit and operations committee so it's also really exciting juicy stuff and we have four members on the committee I in the chair and the other board members are Paul Anthony Amy Cohn Stan and Mike Rosen we met on August 9th and talked about four agenda items and I'm going to try to go through these fairly quickly first was the public records policy and we had been asked to provide some overall guidance to those who are developing to the staff who are developing a public records policy and process and we had a good discussion and I think where we landed was essentially that the default position should be to release records unless there are statutory or human resources reasons not to so the default position should be towards transparency and that will be coming back to us in September or October as the staff work on refining the the current policy and and coming up with a new process did you have any I was just going to add that in that discussion where we were talking about really the depart default being Transparency it was in the context of releasing things went there were legitimate exception that would legally allow us not releasing things unless there were no when there were exceptions that could be employed to keep them our default position is was which was the will of the members in the conversation the default position is to release as much as possible even when those mechanisms are available allowing that there's no there are no legal or otherwise good reasons right not right essentially a bias towards exactly yeah okay the second issue was the community eligibility provision which is often referred to as a CEP program it's from Nutrition Services and this is the this is the system that allows for provision of free lunches to an entire school and it became it became public knowledge widely reported about probably about a month ago now that a number of schools 12 schools that had been that had been using a CEP program to provide lunch to all students regardless of their socioeconomic status we're going to lose that designation and we got a presentation from Nutrition Services in fact the change in their status happened a year ago but it was not widely publicized for the last year PPS has been ordering during the 2016-17 school year PPS actually used general fund money to provide free lunches for everybody but for this coming school year that 12 schools are going to revert to the kind of standard system of families being asked to fill out forms asking for free and reduced lunch status based on their income levels the can I just say from the enrollment and forecasting committees point of view we dis subject has never come up with D Brack that by changing boundaries and
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configuration that it would trigger changes in how CP CEP is formulated so that's that adds a whole new level of complexity to work yeah and I think going forward we're going to have to be really cognizant of the the impacts kind of the widespread impacts of changes or on boundaries and reconfiguration which means it if we do boundaries piecemeal we're continually annually changing having to go back and recalculate the formula for CEP and that does not work in favor of our kids what is the plant for so I realize early many families I believe who will not want to complete paperwork that might put them at risk or families that you know may not quite qualify what's the plan for and I think it's going to be a significant amount of students so so the basic plan is to try to blanket schools and communicate over communicate with families about filling out the forms and one of the things that the Nutrition Services clarified was that the information that is provided on these free and reduced lunch forms is not shared with any other government entity it does not leave this building so theoretically at least immigration status should not be a barrier now that's right I think it's still going to be a barrier and then my might the second part of that remember I think that there'll be some family to may not quite qualify you know for food well may still be an issue for them in the cost of food so do we have an alternative way of covering meals for many of our students or their we probably need to get I mean if you really want details we'll probably need to get nutrition services back but I think we're going to enjoy Tanner I think the short answer is we are dependent we are now for these schools we are now dependent on these forms which is what happens in all of our schools with the exception of the 13 other schools that are still covered by the CEP program and I I a long discussion with nutrition services even before the committee meeting and they were they were very clear that they are really working overtime to try to get as many families as humanly possible to sign up will they will they get a hundred percent of the families no and are they going to capture everybody who really could use a food assistance no and I could go into a long rant about the federal policies and how low the federal poverty level is right but I think it is probably not fiscally possible for us to supplement to provide additional funding out of general fund monies at this point to to continue on with the whole school model for these twelve schools but they did work up numbers and it's a pretty staggering amount of money you know I'm saying that I think that we need to continue to brainstorm and address the issue the reality is we can you know we can throw up our hands if they don't register if they don't fill out the form they can't have food but we can't educate children that haven't gotten their basic needs map to so I'm wondering about looking at partnerships and grants I mean I think we really have to look broad and wide to figure out how to write so they are they're going to be coming back to the committee in a couple of months the deadline for the deadline for applying is October 11th and so for the first until October 11th every student who shows up is going to get food so without question so we're trying to get as many families to sign up as possible because that means we get federal assistance right but truth be told there is a new there's a new state statute saying that no child can be denied food great it's at them by the way figuring out a plan however comma work I mean the board is going to have
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to pay attention to this because there are going to be fiscal impacts right and we don't yet know what those will be so in terms of reaching out to the communities for the forms however we worked with our community based culturally specific community based organizations to help with that my understanding is to some degree yes they are translating everything yeah they are now going to be doing not only emails but they're also going to start to text yeah I would definitely reach out to those organizations yeah help us yeah they indicate the world with again they are doing that and we're relying on they're relying on a several third parties to spread the message so it's not just coming directly from the district the county is helping on that and the other thing I wanted to say was as part of our discussion Nutrition Services was going to make it much more prominent in their communication to families that this information is totally confidential it was either not included before maybe a little footnote but to really put it front and center it's on the form that it's very small so it would be great for the committee to ask for as we head into the fall just sort of continue to get trending information because for a lot of families but it's gonna be a whole new thing like they don't have to in the past salt to form so I think getting trending so that we can address it if we're singing just really low rates much lower than we would expect they've got a really impressive communication plan I have to say and they get you know they were talking about they get daily updates on sign-up rates so it's I I walked out of my meeting with them and the committee meeting and I I'm I'm pretty impressed with the communication plan I'm thinking I can also make suggestions of certain radio programs and things that also will really help get the news out bilingually and to other communities okay okay and kids do get breakfast yet our free breakfast is still available that isn't that's a separate program it's not proud of CEP that will still be going on so it's at least something the other two things really quick we got an update on transportation and we got a presentation about a month ago I think to the full board about transportation and this was a status update on a lot of the changes that are happening and it sounds like there has been a lot of progress in streamlining the operations for transportation and we're hoping everybody's hoping that with the changes that have taken place that there are more bus drivers more buses more routes so the hope is that parents and students should see some significant improvement in reliability of bus service with the new school year and more responsiveness in terms of communication so one of the big things is that there is now going to be there they're going to be telephones available with people actually actual people actually manning these telephones so that if something comes up and a parent needs to talk to somebody there's going to be a human person on the other side and I should probably say it's not going to be perfect there are going to be glitches but it sounds like they've made a lot of progress since last year and then just on that topic did they build in some performance metrics into the contracts or these every still made contract and these are just yes so we are still mid contract but the contract will be up but let me put this way the country the life of the contract will be ending at the end of the school year so there are there are negotiations already happening about future contracts and some changes that we might want to put into a new contract in terms of expectations for performance and and they have already seen some some changes and some additional resources put out by first student in response to the concerns about not just concerns around the students but concerns around contract non-compliance so there they have responded it's a little more carrot and stick I think but it's made a difference so far that's it and then the last item on the agenda was talking about future work and we have a
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lot of it so FAO is going to be the primary committee it's going to be dealing with the budget process so that's going to be that's going to take up quite a lot a lot of time especially given the really aggressive timeline so many meetings I'm guessing during the fall are going to be devoted to budget process in addition to that we're going to be looking at the bond work maintenance issues we're going to continue to look at transportation and nutrition services we're going to have the FAO is going to be doing the audit function as well and then a whole bunch of other things on top of that so we're going to have a it's going to be a busy year any other committees they need report or Moses do have a can't wait to the start of the school year report [Music] later working on developing us to protect system structure because in the past few years to my understanding it's been kind of lost last year to my knowledge we we didn't meet with the superintendent formally sometimes you would just stop by and you know we have a discussion but there wasn't any you know monthly meeting so a structure there and so well I've just kind of asking and wondering is like what is like the purpose of the board was a visioning um when they implemented super sacks because for like the budget review committee or like do you back like they have stuff that they work with and super stock last year we didn't have really anything to work with so we didn't know what you guys learn like you guys wanted to just be like the discussion we sit down and ask questions to superintendent and he enters them we're like we complained like it's a complaint to him like every month so we I just want to know like where the envision of super sacks is and so that I can build that structure with my members or systems so that we can effectively communicate well with the superintendent the advice to be giving and then we've just been working on the PPS student union because on the webpage there is something in regard to the Zuni but there's nothing in policy about this to the Union so right now I've just been reaching out to the ASB president from all the nine high schools in we haven't formally met yet but hopefully at the musical year I'll be able to set up a meeting with everyone I mean meet with them and hopefully get middle school level involved somewhere in that and then we're just working on clarifying priorities that we want to accomplish our voice did an opinion on us for this week thank you so so how might we as a board surface some juicy issues that we would want to toss your way I hear you I hear you kind of asked hanging give us give us something to chew on yeah so what I had initially thought I did I wasn't informed with the board and wanted to project issues or have us review issues but that's something that like we want to look into am i changing it from like superintendent select the board and superintendent review council we certainly can what I was envisioning or looking for at the media every month that the board likes up I like a packet or like topics that he wants us to review and then at the end of the month that we have have a formulated presentation to present him and then he gives us another topic or packet of information on and then between those because we have break up into committees in the me to formulate that presentation up and then present that to him and of course there's urgent matters that happen in the district so any urgent matters are like he wanted us to review with it I was envisioning I would directly go to the Executive Board within super sacks which is me and then Anakin's that you guys met last week and then Nick Taylor who's from Cleveland which I don't believe you guys have met but has not super snack for two years now I'm sorry but I'm still developing and formulating that structure to hopefully propose to you guys at some point I'm sure Tom seems to me it should go all three ways you know you guys should have things that you originated that you want to work on and that we can help you push forward and then we have things that we bring to you everybody keeps that in mind in their committee work and then also the superintendent has things that he will bring to you and he I know has had a lot of opportunity to work with students on developing policy and yoga rooms in the past oh that would be a great place for you to start to ask him what structures he
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views to really integrate students in decision-making yes and I know you will be an active member of teaching and learning you're on that committee as well so we'll we'll keep you busy and that'll be part of the process too of keeping super sacks and from your perspectives on those as well giving us guidance yes you know excited yes anybody else okay so we're now going to consider the business agenda and since it says we're going to do that at eight o'clock yes so the board has the revised resolution 5498 before them it has been posted online initially there was an indication that there may be some items hold from the business do you have a that director oh stars around and Felicia we have this vibe but I want to thank staff for some timely answering of several questions that board members had so there's not we're going to consider the full the full business agenda and so thank you to staff for quick turnaround on some answers that board members had and I'm also going to just flag that there's some interest in some of the contracts have belts and performance metrics and board members may ask for those after we approve because expert and improving but but some people there may be some contracts where we want to see performance metrics miss Houston are there any changes to the business agenda do I have a motion and second to adopt the business agenda solo director Anthony moves and director struggles Haley second is driven smart okay and director Rossum seconds the adoption of the business agenda I'm miss Houston is there any public comment on the business agenda yeah no public comment is there any board discussion on the business agenda director more just just one comment that yes the staff response to questions was great and I much appreciated I just feel like it would be helpful if if we got these contracts earlier on these are coming right before the start of school and they're really time-sensitive so I think if we could try to us either space them out or do them earlier I think that would be helpful and the this agenda includes 25 different contracts took a while to get through them all but I will say I it was much appreciated that there was a link to all the contracts on the website right underneath the board materials so that was great thank you I was a couple questions director stars around I think they would be for director Krong she judged their yard so could you make to be willing to come up on an answer a question right one of them if on the Greenwood Publishing Group it says k5 literacy adoption resources and professional development my question there is also so special class exemption what does that mean just on page 5 of the business agenda yes and sorry we don't we don't I don't have to copy a page 5 I have the front page but we will look it up right now so sorry yeah why don't you come forward direct material yes could you add I'm sorry could you identify yourself emily court mr. Ector
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purchasing a contract over it thank you so special class procurements are listed in our public contracting rules their board approved class exemptions from our normal our standard procurement requirements set out in the rules and so the one that is applicable here it's called copyrighted material and creative works and that applies to copyrighted materials and creative works that are available from only one source so a lot of these sort of curriculum type materials are available from one source they usually come with a sole source letter verifying if that's true and so that exemption applies okay yeah the list of class exemptions that the board has approved over time and have been incorporated in our public contracting rules thank you so that means you don't have to go through an RFP process just something like that that's right if not for a quote process or whatever kind other kind of procurement process that would normally apply you can directly negotiate those contracts okay great thank you then my next question is the ester date the contract which is for the Dual Immersion programs I'm wondering how that interfaces with the literacy the k-12 are the k55 literacy adoption so is there a completely separate strand of materials and dual language classrooms I guess I'm I'm still not even clear of of the balanced literacy adoption and its impact on dual language programs or so that we have really a long discussion on this and this is also why we moved to this book source a publisher because they are able to provide us with more Spanish version in other languages and I'm going to ask dr. Locker to dresses because kids worked closely with also on Debbie on the adoption good evening so this was a 3-2 asking about that yeah so when we look at the dip that the approach to both the k5 so what you probably recognize me from the 612 Language Arts adoption as well so when we look at the partnership between the English language arts adoption and we look at the dual language immersion so this is the when we think about the components of the English language side of it we're trying to be very responsive and intentional about making sure that we also have the dual language side of it as well so that's what that is yeah providing because they're quite two completely different kind of methodologies instructional approaches so I still I think this could be a really good topic to go into more in depth and I'm a little concerned about expenditure at this point without really understanding how it fits in with the philosophy of the balanced literacy but again it would be helpful to have them earlier sure that we could have more thoroughly discussed how the pieces fit together sure and we're and we're happy to provide a detailed response that would explain that in a way that makes sense and looks at the partnership between the both the partner languages and yeah because I'm very familiar with that program but again I think that the methodology is really different than what you're doing at the English side we can definitely provide you in response to that question any other questions thank you for coming up thank you and answering the questions Thank You Emily use them thank you so we've got emotions and seconded the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all those visit eight by saying no are there any abstentions is it just a Genda is approved by hi I was just going to wrap it up the visit is a bit thank you the business agenda is approved by a six to zero vote with the student rep voting yet yes so this meeting event I think we're 7n 207 excuse me behalf seven start at six okay I'm going to correct the record that the business agenda is approved by vote of seven to zero with the student rep voting yes the meeting is now going to be adjourned and the board will now move to the ulema conference room for an executive session is a continuation we went into we continue eight the continuation of the executive session that we started before

Sources

PPS Board of Education, Archive 2017-2018, https://www.pps.net/Page/12568 (accessed: 2022-03-24T00:57:51.006202Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)

2017-08-15 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: Board of Education-Regular Meeting-August 15, 2017

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