2019-04-15 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2019-04-15
Time	missing
Venue	missing
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Regular Meeting of the Board of Education - April 15, 2019

00h 00m 00s
thank you [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] [Music] be [Music] hey [Music] [Applause]
00h 05m 00s
[Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] so that was the roosevelt high school jazz band and their instructor jason margolis and thank you all that was that was amazing and we're going to be meeting again next tuesday so you know if you have a free night perhaps we could do it again um i i wish we could open every meeting like this and i i think we probably could so um roseanne get on that um thank you all for for um coming tonight um and it i think this is a demonstration of what our students are capable of doing if we give them the opportunities and that's what we're supposed to be doing here so thank you again okay and now we're going to move on to the relatively more boring portion of the festivities this evening [Music] so um for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on this evening has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being televised live and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the board website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our pps tv services website as a reminder we now have our pps ombudsman judy martin attending all regular board meetings judy will be here to listen to the public comments and if appropriate provide additional support to families who need or want it judy can be reached at 503-916-3045 or ombudsman.ombudsman at pps.net we also have interpreters with this this evening and i'd like to ask them to come forward at this time introduce themselves in the language into which they'll be interpreting and inform the audience where they'll be located in the auditorium should someone need their assistance [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] money foreign okay thank you um [Music] and um student representative nick paisler is absent this evening he is attending the university of redlands reception for the class of 2023 tonight so um we will miss him but i think it's in a good cause um so once again thank you to the roosevelt high school jazz band and uh jason margolis and we'll be hearing more about
00h 10m 00s
the um the arts in pps um relatively shortly okay uh board members are there any items in the business agenda that you have questions about this does not include individual action items listed on tonight's agenda anybody want to pull anything no okay all right we'll move into student and public comment i'd like to review the guidelines for public comment the board thanks the community for taking the time to attend this meeting and provide your 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 without distraction from electronic devices or papers board members and the superintendent will not respond to comments or questions during public comment if you want to follow up from the board office please contact ms houston or roseanne powell the board manager guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration of others complaints about individual employees should be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter if you have additional materials or items you'd like to provide to the border superintendent we ask that you give them to ms houston to distribute to us requests to make public comment should be made ahead of time by contacting the board office or checking with ms houston prior to the start of the board meeting to see if there are still spots available once the board meeting has started we can no longer accept new requests for public comment okay miss houston do we have anyone signed up for student or public comment we do we have a total of twelve six of those we'll start with students alana grazes and will laken shelley okay before you start i want to go over the um rules of the road you'll 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 the 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 your cooperation take it away good evening superintendent guerrero school board members and pps community my name is will lakenchelli that's l-a-k-i-n-s-h-e i'm a pcc gateway to college graduate originally from cleveland high school community-based schools are vital for students who don't succeed for one reason or another in a traditional high school i'm one of these students although no one would have thought of me as a student needing an alternative school let me just start by saying this pcc's gateway to college program saved my life i suffered from severe depression when i was of high school age i highly value my high school experience and it was a very informative social environment however due to my at times severe depressive episodes i didn't always enjoy going to class or making an active commitment to learn not only did i not enjoy it i felt i couldn't do it i'm a very extroverted person and therefore when i'm suffering i tend to actually engage more this made it hard for others to notice my depression the social engagement would mostly come out for me in the form of skipping class in order to hang out with friends i had one friend in particular i would often skip class with he also suffered from depression which was far more severe than mine when i found out in may of 2015 my senior year that i would not be graduating my counselor suggested pcc's gateway to college program as an alternative option i and my parents are so grateful that he did my friend's counselor when he found out didn't suggest the same thing he ended up taking his own life in july of 2015. i know the impact that dropping out of high school has had on me and there are many studies that point to a higher risk of depression and suicide in high school dropouts my point is this i wasn't a bad kid or a problem in class but high school just didn't work out for me once i was accepted into pcc's gateway to college program i flourished i was able to set my own schedule so i could just go part-time and really focus on my learning the entire community of students wanted to be there they wanted to succeed this environment pushed me and helped me become successful i went from a time where i was imagining never graduating high school to taking 16 credits a term getting all a's while earning college credit to boot i'm grateful to pps for supporting community-based schools having these resources has made a huge difference for me on my educational journey i will be receiving my transfer degree from pcc at the end of the summer and i'll be transferring to psu to study marketing and business analytics so
00h 15m 00s
perhaps i misspoke before pcc's gateway to college didn't just save my life it also gave me a future thank you congratulations [Applause] hello and thank you for having me here today my name is alana graves and that is g-r-a-v-e-s [Music] i am 18 years old and as of 10 months ago i am an electrical apprentice i started out attending a traditional high school with that being said i was a student who went into high school knowing exactly what i wanted to have wanted for myself and wanted for a career i had a very hard time connecting and applying myself in high school because most of my high school classes were preparing me for college which i knew i didn't want to take that road since i was very little i knew that i wanted to go into the trades i expressed that every chance i got to every teacher i ever had my teachers never looked down upon it but it made it very clear that they felt that i could do better and that i could have bigger dreams after realizing that most of my teachers intentions were to persuade me into going into college i stopped attending classes and shortly fell behind once i found out that i may not be able to graduate on time i remember that that was not a part of the plan and that was not an option for me but with even the constant work i was putting in i struggled with getting the actual one-on-one help that i really needed with the feeling of confusion and frustration it often became an everyday thing until my mom took me to portland youth builders the moment i walked in i instantly felt noticed my goals put right back together and i knew i was on my way to becoming a part of an industry that would set me up for my entire future throughout my time at pyb i was challenged to the point where not only was i accomplishing my small goals but the goals that seemed more unreachable became smaller and right within hand's reach i graduated from portland youth builders a year ago but still have the luxury of meeting with my career coach danny and my counselors rana marcella confronting them with current issues that i am facing and always getting their response what can we do to help it is very easy to place portland youth builders in the alternative school category but for me it was far from the school it became a home not only for me but many others that i still stay in contact with today meeting those people have only pushed me to make them proud and make my family proud i truly feel that without pyb support i would not have jumped right out of high school and into the amazing ibew electrical training union alternative schools are all over our given young adults who learn differently the support that we need to be successful so there's nothing else to say but besides thank you [Applause] next we have miles hess and catriona johnston can you read the names again miles hess and catriona johnston can they join me up here sure thank you superintendent guerrero chairperson moore school board members and community members thank you for hearing our testimony tonight my name is katriana johnston that's j-o-h-n-s-t-o-n and i play trombone in the madison high school wind ensemble and jazz band with me tonight our student musician representatives from several pps high schools including jefferson who does not currently have a music program we are here to ask you to make our music programs equitably accessible to all portland public school students regardless of the labels we are given by our adult counterparts such as our race ethnicity sexual orientation gender identity or socioeconomic status we should all have the opportunity to express ourselves connect with people and develop our global perspective through music i enjoy being in the madison music department but because of the lack of music program funding and the pe mandate in madison cluster schools the mad music program is lacking the money and the numbers we need in order to truly thrive in lots of middle schools the pe mandate makes it hard for students especially
00h 20m 00s
those who are in immersion or world language programs to be in music classes this is why it would be extremely beneficial to have seven period days in middle schools adding one more period to school days could mean that any student who wants to pursue to pursue music would have the freedom to do so you have recently heard student voices from every high school during the guiding coalition visioning process during which core values were developed one of those core values was creativity and innovation music fits the this core value perfectly it allows students to be creative while working with a team it embodies the majority of the characteristics that the graduate portrait wants us to obtain students live a variety of creative lives and it is the school district's responsibility to provide resources to allow equitable access to sequential music programs so students can explore express and thrive through music without having to choose between music and world language how are students supposed to obtain these characteristics when many do not even have access to these programs how are students supposed to grow and express their creativity when they are not even given a chance for equitable access for instance middle schools are struggling to offer equitable access to world languages and music due to the unfunded pe mandate and the pe mandate is not even halfway implemented how are students going to access significant robust learning experiences when they don't have access to music at all or only get music for a quarter how are the high school programs going to look in the first year of the pe mandate several schools cut music thank you [Applause] okay hello my name is tabi andre thomas t-h-o-m my uncle went to jefferson and was a state champion clarinetist and went to paris playing the clarinet that was 27 years ago michael gross is a jefferson grad and now and is now the tuba professor at the university of oregon jeff has gone from a robust music program to non-music classes at all arkly green students want who want to continue in band at high school have to go somewhere else this is an equitable i know people who want to go to jeff but also want to say in band but they can't do that if they go to jeff so now they have to pick between taking college courses and staying in band it hurts the it hurts that kids that jeff aren't given the chance to experience music like at say roosevelt lincoln grant madison wilson cleveland or franklin my music experience has been nothing but good the music what music has done to my life has given me an outlet to be creative and it has given me somewhere i feel like i belong i know that i can go into the music room into the band room and that i am welcome and it's somewhat and it's somewhere i can get all that i am feeling and put it into song and that and it's a way to express myself in a way that nothing else can help me do i love jefferson high school but i miss playing music so much that i am seriously considering transferring to roosevelt where they have an amazing band program thank you [Applause] um superintendent guerrero and school board members thank you again for hearing us tonight my name is isabelle hernandez that's h-e-r-n-a-n-d-e-z i play tenor saxophone in the jazz ensemble at grant high school i was lucky enough to attend beaumont middle school which has a very strong band program my experience in middle school is what sparked my love for music and without it i don't know if i would have pursued music in high school unfortunately the pe mandate along with a six period schedule is already hurting middle school students chances to participate in music and have the positive experience that i did mount tabor and beaumont have both seen a decrease in participation in music immediately after the pe mandate was
00h 25m 00s
implemented and laura hearst cut their program completely being a member of the band community has been one of the most meaningful aspects of my high school experience and it disappoints me that some students feel that they can't be a part of it because of the lack of resources at their middle school band has given me a chance to express myself artistically improve my work ethic work with a team and meet some of my closest friends although i don't plan on pursuing a career in music being in band has enhanced my love for learning and allowed me to excel in other subjects all students should have access to this kind of experience bella bravo plays trumpet in the lincoln high school band lincoln's band is strong but it seems as if that might not be the case for long the pe mandate isn't even halfway implemented and it's already hurting or killing banned programs because students are left with a difficult academic choice band or world language why do students have to make that choice ockley green tubman and george middle schools have a seven period day and are very successful with offering equitable access to programs why do schools refuse refuse to go to the seven period day when it better provides students the opportunity to play music in closing we would like to thank you again for listening and give each of you a copy of the declaration on equity and music for city students for your reference thank you for your time [Applause] that's great our next two speakers are seamus linski and laura moulton he and i are gonna share three minutes talking on the same topic and my name is edgar navas navas uh and i have a junior at roosevelt high school and a sixth grader at george middle school um and three minutes isn't a lot of time so we're going to cut to the chase here edgar and i are here today because the board has yet to make good on its promise to provide adequate equitable project-based learning space at roosevelt also known as phase four just a quick timeline to bring everybody up to speed early in the design process the community raised concerned about inadequate space when the final design was presented and the space was still inadequate we filed a civil rights complaint in response the board passed a resolution to provide the equitable space and then nothing happened then last year in february the board came and presented designs for phase four to the roosevelt community uh and then uh nothing so um that's why we're here today well as you may know roosevelt has a 79 undercell underserved enrollment it is the most diverse and underserved school in the district we hear a lot of talk pps talks about equity and inclusion and as we know you know from the budget we spend about 8.3 millions per year talking about equity inclusion programs 8.3 million uh on the ma but when it comes to spending 5 million that we're already allocated in the past year's budget to the most underserved kids in the district superintendent guerrero said last year in february of 2018 if we don't cut here we'll have to cut from somewhere else well that sounds like pps is balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable underserved and racially diverse kids in the district to fully fund other schools such as grant which coincidentally is one of the more affluent schools in the district it was also disheartening at the february 2018 board meeting to hear many of you up there saying that roosevelt is not fully utilizing the current space we're not sure where you got that impression but it's way off the mark it was at capacity then and it's over capacity now there's a two week waiting list for the makerspace and roosevelt had to turn away two whole classes of kids who wanted intro to carpentry for next year because there just isn't the space for it and it's only going to get worse because enrollment is on the incline and we're projected to have 1200 to 1400 students in the next couple of years so let's be clear this isn't an add-on this isn't supplemental this is the bare minimum and it was promised and allocated so there's no need to wait for
00h 30m 00s
a district-wide stem plan there's already a successful program in place and that would grow into this additional space so last year again superintendent guerrero came to visit us it's a circle yeah yeah it's a conclusion so so here we are please listen it's time to keep the promise roosevelt can be a success story and you we can show the voters that pps makes good on its promises and delivers to students and the taxpayers you can finish phase four the promise and let our kids go from making birdhouses to making tiny houses give them an opportunity don't short short change them we can be going into the next uh 20 20 phase with a story of misallocation of funds empty talking points and broken promises for the most vulnerable of the kids in this into this district one way or another the rhs community will be very vocal and again you know in the words of just our board member more imagine what you just heard if we were just fully funding these kids with 150 dollars mr margolis is creating miracles 150 a year and you just heard it so again i want to give him a round of applause thank you for listening and please you know do good to your kids thank you thank you thank you [Applause] laura moulton and cliff fenning all right all right thank you all for allowing me to do some speaking here my name is cliff fenning that's p-f-e-n-n-i-n-g a parent at benson high school of two students and alum from 1986. i'm here to talk to you about the benson girls soccer team um i emailed this to you guys this morning i don't know how many of you got it or were able to actually look through it it's an extremely passionate issue to me because it's soccer and i love soccer a lot timbers and thorns and the u.s national team even the women's team that's right now um in trouble with the nation trying to get its fair share of funding um but the the team i'm here about is the benson girls soccer team which uh recently got promoted to being a varsity team and it's now the uh every team at benson is a varsity team only this team is getting promoted next year not this upcoming year simply because the district athletic director has looked at it and said you're just not good enough so a little background my daughter started into back into soccer after taking her freshman year off at benson just to get acclimated to the school and started in as a sophomore and when that happened the school only had one soccer team but their idea was that her and her classmates that if they played and were able to get enough players to start a second team the following year which did happen then they'd have enough players to separate the the better players from the players which is how you get a varsity team so they played as a junior varsity 2 team then they played as a jb team because they did have enough players to separate into two teams in this upcoming year the idea was that they would move to the varsity level but that's not going to happen because when they did play this past year as two teams they only they had to share one schedule because that's it's such a difficult thing to make a schedule in fall because you have to get other schools to separate their jv teams from their varsity teams and if you go back and read through this that's some pretty good background on that so the thing that that i'm here and i and i don't want to be here challenging or questioning the district athletic director's decision but his decision is focused more on being ready to win than it is being ready to be a varsity athlete which is being the best at your school and you become better ready for the state by doing things in the off season by getting yourself better that way but to be a varsity athlete at your school means you're the best of your of you the players in your school and it's a very important thing for my daughter um i keep asking her whether or not she wants to be be a varsity athlete is it a big deal and it is she continually tells me i want to be a varsity athlete so
00h 35m 00s
what i'm hoping you'll do is take a look at this issue and direct it to the athletic director and say we'd like more information on this and if possible can you move them up this upcoming fall thank you [Applause] next we have virginia warfield and jessica burback now um hello my name is virginia warfield and i teach english at grand high school i'm here tonight to advocate for keeping mindful studies classes in pps schools oh my last name is w-a-r-f-i-e-l-d um so i'm here to advocate for keeping mindful studies classes in pps schools i became involved with peace in schools the organization that runs this class a few years ago when i took workshops on mindfulness for educators this year i'm one of the co-teachers of the mindful studies course at grant high school my own training and experience with mindfulness has improved my ability to cope with the ever increasing stresses and demands placed on me as an english teacher i bring up my excuse me i bring up my own practice and ex and experience with mindfulness in order to illustrate the fact that it is increa incredibly helpful and healthy tool for managing the demands that come with my profession but more importantly i want to speak to the importance of providing students with the tools that mindfulness offers i've been a teacher for 30 years and i'm in my 20th year at teach of teaching at grant high school in recent years the number of students experiencing debilitating anxiety and depression has increased to align to alarming rates my colleagues across the board have reported the same observations about increased mental health impacts on their students in their classrooms counselors and mental health providers at my school also agree that the numbers of students who suffer from various mental health issues has dramatically increased in recent years i have never had so many students who suffer from anxiety and depression anxiety and depression along with other mental health issues impacts students abilities to learn and practice crucial academic and social skills mindful studies exist to teach students tools for handling stress stress which results from a variety of things including school demands bullying family life and the constant bombardment from social media i know that the students who are in mindful studies this year have become healthier and happier because of this course in mindful studies they learn techniques that help them to calm their minds and navigate negative emotions and thoughts in a healthy way they learn breathing and movement techniques that can be practiced in moments of anxiety or stress they learn about how the brain responds to triggers or stressors and then they learn how to work with their emotions in a way that allows them to reduce their stress levels they also work in community to support each other they develop healthy and supportive peer relationships in fact students have reported that they now have a system of peer support outside of class that they turn to for help this year we have close to 75 students enrolled in mindful studies and 90 students have forecast for it for next year these numbers speak to the interest in and need for this class schools all over this country and world are adopting mindfulness and mindful studies classes because they recognize the very serious needs of our students if we are truly interested in providing students with the academic social emotional and mental skills that they need to be healthy and successful then i believe mindful studies should continue to be an option for our students please continue to support peace in schools and mindful studies classes in pps thank you [Applause] school board directors and superintendent guerrero my name is jessica burback b-u-r-b-a-c-h and i'm proud to say that i've worked at portland youth builders for the last 10 years nine of those as a math teacher and currently as the education manager portland youth builders or pyb is one of the contracted community-based organizations or cbo's serving portland public school students and you heard from our student alana earlier in my years working at pyb i've learned the importance of having a variety of quality educational options because the path to completing high school does not always look the same for every young person and the supports that work for one student may not work for another student for this reason i am grateful to pps for investing in partnerships with cbo's such as pyb which are re-engaging young
00h 40m 00s
people who are struggling with their education cbo's are smaller unique and innovative schools and programs that often serve the district's most vulnerable students these schools work with youth who have been out of school for months or years and who may be far from completing their graduation requirements thus cbo's are helping to re-engage previously disengaged youth to reconnect to the district and to graduate thanks to the partnership of pps cbos provide programming which includes small class sizes individualized academic supports a focus on building strong relationship-based communities culturally specific instruction and resources and mental health counseling it is not uncommon for young people attending cbo's to remark about their sense of belonging to the school and that is a place where their voice is valued investment in cbo's truly adds to the breadth of services and quality educational opportunities for young people in pps each cbo is unique which means that pps students have a diversity of options for re-engaging with the district for example at pyb students receive hands-on vocational training in construction and technology leading to industry valued credentials and as you heard from alana the opportunity for preferential status into apprenticeship programs for every dollar pbs invests in each student through our extensive fundraising efforts every student receives an additional three dollars of investment which translates into our very small class sizes highly individualized counseling and career development services and multiple years of post-high school support as you heard from alana each student is assigned a career coach who continues to work extensively with students for potentially years after they graduate and follow their steps towards building their career one of the highlights of cbo's is their college and career planning support for students and has been an honor watching alana enter her apprenticeship fulfilling her passion and starting a pathway to financial stability in closing cbo's are student-centered supportive environments where young people can rewrite their educational stories and ultimately find success and graduate thank you to the school board and to the district for supporting our schools and understanding that for every student to succeed it will take a collective approach with multiple pathways schools and programs [Applause] lastly we have jeff lapp good evening school board members and superintendent guerrero my name is jeff laff l-a-f-f and i am the interim director of link's high school programs at portland community college we serve pbs students in our gateway to college and yes to college programs first i would like to humbly acknowledge that as an educational director of a community-based school i am part of a long-standing tradition the coalition of metro area community-based schools or c-max has worked in concert with pps for the better part of three decades portland public schools has been recognized as a national leader in alternative education for developing this network and the district should be commended for its ongoing commitment to students who need to reengage with their education part of understanding this history is to know that our network was developed into and serves as a district safety net this is a vital component of the district services even with an improved graduation rate nearing 80 percent two of every ten students need something different our network works with this twenty percent we do it proudly and we do it with less resources than in district schools we achieve results that raise the district graduation rates and lower the dropout rate when pps says every student succeeding this includes the 20 percent our network is an eclectic group of innovative schools and programs that provide an array of options to meet students where they are get them back on track and help them succeed the current narrative around our network doesn't frame an accurate picture this narrative tries to account for our schools with the same lens it does for in-district schools by measuring us with metrics that misunderstand the 20 percent these students have left or are leaving the system and most are not going back to traditional schools examples from our yes to college program illustrate this point last year we served no ninth grade students our students come to us after being out of school for an average of five months way behind in credits and 52 percent of last year's students were beyond the four-year 12th grade mark why would we be measured against finishing within a four-year time frame last year 90 pps students earned a ged with us
00h 45m 00s
this school year 60 pps students are taking post-secondary coursework after earning a ged and succeeding in measure 98 desired outcomes is our graduation rate a meaningful measure of this success no it isn't we need a new narrative i respectfully ask that the district not only continues but strengthens its commitment to serving the 20 percent who need this network of options who need an opportunity to re-engage with their educational path these students are part of every student succeeding together we can continue our partnership to the betterment of our in-district schools every student and our communities thank you [Applause] okay uh thanks again to everybody for your comments um please feel free to connect with the board manager roseanne powell if you have something specifically you want to follow up with um with the board or board office next item superintendents report superintendent guerrero would like to give you a report good evening directors i'm very much looking forward to the next item on our agenda tonight which is a report on the state of the arts in pps my thanks also an appreciation for our student musicians from roosevelt high school and i'm going to have a little more to say about that in a moment but i did want to address one other item first as you might be aware may 8th has been identified as a statewide day of action by educators in support of better state funding for our public schools uh to the level of funding that would allow us to provide opportunities for our students to participate in the very activities that we're talking about tonight and that we've heard testimony for staff are in close communication with our labor partners to determine how many teachers may be participating and not available for work uh we're also in contact with superintendents from around the region and state uh if we do determine that it would not be prudent or safe to open our schools on that day we will be notifying families and stakeholders as quickly as possible likely by the end of this week and make a determination about those lost student instructional hours and how they'll be made up so i plan to continue to update the board as we move forward on i'm going to keep the rest of my report actually dedicated to providing a lead in to the presentation by kristen brayson and carolyn drake our dynamic duo of a visual and performing arts department who along with so many arts educators bring creativity and expression to our students which is also made possible by the generosity of portlanders and the dedicated arts tax as many of you know i will always be a big champion for access to arts education i consider access to rich and robust arts offerings in public schools as part of an essential whole education our students benefit from mastering the attention to detail gaining an appreciation of beauty and form learning to express themselves whether through still life interpretive dance or a violin etude i myself as you know was engaged in the performing arts from a young age and had the opportunity to participate in instrumental music in public schools and went on to be a former music education major in college if you take a look at the art that's exhibited in and around even this building you'll notice a few pieces from the superintendent's art gallery here it gives me a lift every time i walk the halls to my office you'll see how gifted our students are and we must find ways to nourish and support those talents as part of a rich and well-rounded education for all of our students i join everyone in advocating for more funding in oregon for public education so that we can prioritize and ambitiously move forward with important areas of work like middle school redesign efforts that will ensure through time and resources access to visual and performing arts for every student in the middle grades resources that will enable us to offer complete arts pathways in all disciplines from pre-k to 12 for every student that we get beyond the limitations of a six period day in middle school to more creative inclusive programming we'll remain hopeful that we can make substantive forward-thinking progress in the near future and intend to continue engaging our arts advocates and
00h 50m 00s
refreshing the master arts education plan for pps on the topic of forward thinking it was referenced earlier creativity is a skill and disposition for our students it's a theme that's emerged as part of our visioning initiative and discussions how do the visual and performing arts help round out our graduate portrait and what are the system shifts we need to work at accomplishing to make that happen we are narrowing in on our north star vision document and the community will have one more chance to weigh in next month uh commercial plug here saturday may 11th pps will host the community installation at omsi from 10 a.m to 4 p.m this will be an opportunity for the community to see the draft vision elements and give any final feedback no one will have to buy a museum entrance to be able to engage with a vision but omsi is offering a reduced price entry to anyone who is with pps students families or staff this will include entry to the temporary pixar exhibit that's there the district will also be offering additional support for travel and entry to pps students and families from identified school communities hope to see all of you there and we expect a considerable public turnout for this event and i want to wrap up with a short video that will that should help to set the stage for our next agenda item and uh the annual showcase uh that will occur tomorrow night so it's like a violin just bigger it's called pizzicato [Music] and instead of playing it you would just pull it tomorrow night marks our fifth annual heart of portland student showcase it's an incredible event that our whole district looks forward to every year this is the heart of portland art poster i think it's just a an amazing event for us to kind of bring to light the need for the arts in our city and how much it does to benefit our community i just felt really proud to like represent black rights represent miss huber represent markham school each year we select one student artwork to feature on the poster and gabriella's piece was chosen because it so reflected the themes that this year's show was focusing on one two three one two three they've been really excited about it and you can tell they've practiced it's made them practice so i like that [Music] the message is that the arts in portland have never been more robust and that's reflected in our student experience makes me feel amazing i mean i've never really been in a big thing like that that concludes my report we look forward to seeing everybody at the heart of portland as we celebrate our talented students here in pps okay thank you um and in case anyone is wondering um we rescheduled tonight's meeting so that everybody who was planning to attend the board meeting on a tuesday night could now go to visit the heart of portland so we encourage you there and yeah so we encourage everybody to go um okay so the next item is the pps state of the arts well we're really excited and hope that this becomes an annual tradition coinciding with our city-wide showcase so speaking of which we have coming up to the podium kristen brasen our visual and performing arts program administrator and new addition to the team which is now doubled carolyn drake visual performing arts tosa i hope this is just the start of a nucleus of a much expanded vapa department and they're going to be presenting this evening thank you thank you superintendent guerrero we'd like to acknowledge as well to be redundant and say thank you so much for the roosevelt jazz band under the direction of jason margolis for being here it takes a lot for yes thank you [Applause] we see the sparkle but there's a lot of work that goes into that so we really want to appreciate them good evening board chairmoor board directors and superintendent guerrero we are so delighted to be here with you this evening to present the pps 2019 state of the arts report my name is kristen brayson i am the program administrator for visual performing arts i come to this position with 22 years of experience in pps as a performing arts
00h 55m 00s
teacher in may of 2014 i joined central office as a tosa for arts education and to support a system-wide implementation of the arts tax i'm a product to pps and launched into my own performing arts career after robust quality arts education training at jefferson high school tonight we have a lot in store and are excited to share with you a picture of our current state of arts education as well as some bold thoughts to imagine our desired future state but before we begin i'd like to introduce my central office partner in the work carolyn hazeldrake good evening board chairmoor board directors and superintendent my name is carolyn hazel drake and i'm the visual and performing arts tosa for pps i'm new this year but i'm a long time public educator in oregon schools having taught over a decade high school visual arts art history and language arts i'm also a practicing artist and a third generation oregonian i am so proud to serve the arts educators and students in the city as i know firsthand the profound impact the arts have on the lives of our students so this evening our report will include an overview of our department structure and priorities an account of our work in phase one of the launching of the pps master arts education plan key metrics from the arts tax and a vision for a future program of study that leverages our city's arts partnerships and ensures that the students in all of our school communities have access to a high quality and equitable arts education we anticipate you'll have many questions throughout our report and respectfully ask you to save them until the end for our q a our research this year has included close study of many urban arts programs around the us we discovered several common themes that as a framework create a compelling and connected experience for students in their learning and experience that is a catalyst for student success within these themes students have voice and agency in their unique human story they deepen their understanding of culture and community and they engage in rigorous study and technical skill building there's much to acknowledge here that speaks to the unique and transformative nature of the arts in the human and student experience this unique and transformative journey provides key points that undergird why an arts education lays the path for grounding students for instance it exercises the ability and willingness for students to use predictions to cast a wide net of experiments and to be ready to anticipate for the myriad of choices they will encounter in this journey student voice does not need complex oral translation but requires keen strategy to communicate intricate ideas within a certain scope of work and it employs creative thinking seeing the future through one's mind's eye and unearthing that imagination to bear fruit in real time elia eisner one of our greatest thinkers articulates the value of arts education as preparing students for a future they may not yet be able to see the art teaches skills and traits that set a solid foundation despite these unknowns elliot's thinking continues to have striking implications for how we nurture our pps students the creators of tomorrow will need us to develop pathways of learning based on these skills and traits as educators we all strive to create learning environments where students leave our schools feeling academically fulfilled emotionally intelligent civically engaged and culturally aware imagine using the arts to wrap around our children as the agent for this purpose often it is through an art exhibit or student performance that a child learns how to collaborate communicate craft their voice and critique their experience next we'd like to show you how the arts at pps has changed over time this interesting little bar shows you that from 1990s until 2009 there was a dedicated artstosa providing central office support before this time visual arts materials were centralized and housed at the warehouse for teachers to access at a reduced cost the gradual fallout of measure five meant the loss of this resource and between 2009 and 13 the artstosa position was eliminated in 2013 the arts education and access fund or arts tax passed and pps reestablished the tosa position as part of a renewed effort to support the now much larger number of arts teachers in our system this year superintendent guerrero doubled our arts support by establishing a program administrator and keeping the arts tosa role in place with the creation of a dedicated administrator for the first time in its history pps has a visual and performing arts department in most urban settings
01h 00m 00s
this type of department is referred to as the vapa department arts teachers are part of all schools in our system the vapa department supports 200 educators teaching courses in dance music theater and visual arts we serve over 40 000 students through these four disciplines which comprises 78 of our district's student population exhibiting and performing work is a central part of the arts learning process and our students have demonstrated their skill and creativity in over 300 events in their schools and out in the community like this evening during the 2018-19 school year as a small but mighty team of two we focus our work on five key priorities we provide two days of targeted teacher pd for each arts discipline with breakout sessions by grade band in the fall for instance our theater teachers spent a day in partnership with artists repertory theater learning new techniques for integrating student play writing as a culturally relevant and responsive practice they also modeled peer-to-peer learning around a problem of practice with the helping trio's protocol it is of supreme importance that our department create pd that is designed to support deep content-specific learning as well as a dynamic pedagogy advocacy our advocacy is wide-ranging one recent example is peer-to-peer learning pairing a teacher struggling to support the social social emotional needs of her students with the peer who's seasoned in just doing that another example is partnering with rack to host informal opportunities for teacher collaboration and community building this year we began phase one of our master age education plan we call it the mape for short we are excited to share more about this work later in our report for partnerships portland has a dynamic and wide-ranging arts culture and we in our department manage 22 active partnerships with arts organizations to bring opportunities to our teachers and our students our role in the arts tax is our final priority has involvement at many levels of its structured committees and governances such as participating in the regional arts and culture council arts education committee as required by the tax we also listen in on the citizens arts tax oversight committee and our senior director sarah davis of steem joins curriculum directors in five other districts who receive arts tax funding as part of an arts school district cadre finally we analyze and assess student data from the arts tax and report out our findings to the relevant stakeholders with recommendations for next steps as we mentioned we've been tasked with engaging in a three-phase master arts education planning process and we could not be more excited to partner with our teachers in schools to for the first time build a vision for pps arts that reflects the needs and hopes of our communities a master arts education plan is absolutely essential for an urban district of our size and by doing this work now we have a unique opportunity to be in response to and in tandem with the larger visioning work that pps is engaged in we'd like to walk you through our process very early in our planning process we committed to a strategic arts education planning framework with a three-year timeline to take us from visioning into implementation we knew it would be vital that we establish a process with multiple opportunities for stakeholder investment but that would also keep us focused and moving forward through phase one this year we've illuminated shared beliefs begun to build a shared mission and vision and identified assets and limitations as critical issues that impact how our system serves our students and teachers twenty of our arts educators embarked with us on phase one of this plan this is our key teacher stakeholder group we eventually came to refer to them as the mapers this group consists of folks from all four arts disciplines k-12 grade bands all clusters a diverse demographic and a wide range of tenure we also sought out teachers who are established school site leaders and who are rooted in equity work by the end of may we will have shared five full day sessions with these teachers days of blood sweat and tears and a lot of laughter it is unprecedented for our stakeholders to share art specific cross-discipline professional learning and the impact of this time cannot be overstated our goals for this group have been three-fold first to build knowledge and shared understanding around the best practices in arts education as explicated by current research second to learn to analyze and talk about student data and to draft recommendations based on our findings and third to act as ambassadors in phase 2 when we will bring many more voices from the community to the table
01h 05m 00s
we began our strategic art strategic arts education planning framework with beliefs we asked our stakeholder group what are your underlining beliefs about arts education and what ultimately are the purposes of arts education next we grounded our group's beliefs and purposes in the most current research qualities of quality excellence in arts education coming out of harvard's graduate school of education is a multi-faceted study of what constitutes excellence in the arts classroom this 150-page tome maps out seven key purposes and four lenses through which arts education arts education our experience with student learning at the center this text provides provided our stakeholders with a common language for talking about what we are most passionate about students continue learning in and through the arts our second key text is the national core standards framework published in 2014 it designed its design begins as 14 anchor standards that cross over all disciplines before dialing down into artistic processes and cornerstone assessments finally we return to action resource re research our stakeholders studied several urban master arts education plans and we designed a matrix to identify key look-fors we use this tool to begin to evaluate both the scope and content of each plan as well as how effective the organization of the plan communicated the work that needed to be done our next piece of action research illuminated some of the assets and limitations in our current system for this we tapped into a data source we've had access to since 2013 student data from the arts tax we'd like to turn now to talk more about how the arts tax intersects with our work on the master arts education plan one of the recommendations to our district from the citizens arts tax oversight committee is to hold annual state of the arts reports for the school board and the superintendent to review what's going well and discuss ways we can move the needle to implementation to implement the arts tax with more fidelity we've already begun to see impact and there's no better way to showcase that impact than to witness it with the students themselves tonight we're thrilled to have george middle school in the house the students before you out here in the lobby are a combination of seventh and eighth graders led by their diligent director emmett mccutcheon it's of note that these young musicians were in second and third grade when the arts tax was established and thus benefited from music classes taught by certified music teachers at their elementary schools when they arrived at george for sixth grade we realized we needed to re-establish an instructional music program to can you continue their program of study a music program at george hasn't been in existence in full capacity in 20 years now these artists will have a chance to enter roosevelt high school on a continuous path of study and be part of that amazing jazz band you heard earlier tonight without the help of the arts tax these dreams may not have come to fruition and these students would not have realized their talents please join me in welcoming george middle school string students under the direction of emmett mccutchen [Applause] yeah go for it foreign [Music] foreign
01h 10m 00s
[Music] [Applause] that's it thank you emmett [Applause] thank you emmett and students we so appreciate the effort it took to get here and play for us tonight is we'd also like to thank the taxpayers for their continued support of the arts tax happy tax day everyone i don't know why you guys are applauding we have seen how vulnerable our system can be to budget shortfalls so having stable funding for arts education k5 is a huge gift to our students we have a few slides to show some key metrics and impact of the arts tax as a reminder the arts tax only serves rk-5 population and the funds can only be used towards certified visual and performing arts teachers the fund does not provide for curriculum supplies or infrastructure an important thing to remember as we continue so here is a glimpse of k-5 arts teacher fte by year from the inception of the arts tax through the current year keep in mind that fte is disbursed as either .5 or 1.0 based solely on student enrollment you'll notice in the baseline year of 2012-13 we only had 15 fte for arts teachers serving all 57 elementary schools district-wide the first year the arts tax in 2013-14 transformed access to the arts by adding 50 50 fte in the years to follow we observed that fte continued to climb we saw that several schools receiving fte that first year may have only been allocated 0.5 from the tax but once a program was established some schools chose to match the arts tax fte to increase a position to full time we infer from this that many buildings saw the power of arts classes from their students and that and that created a desire to increase its impact in a school here's an overview broken out by arts discipline our total fte again k-5 is 63.1 across 57 elementary schools the circle with the icons indicates the arts discipline schools chose as their program most of our schools chose visual arts or music a small number of schools selected dance or theater and in some cases schools chose to split their arts text fte across two arts discipline to have two smaller programs as we look forward to the future we want to prioritize courses of study that align k-12 so that as often as possible students have a continuous learning experience currently our system has varying degrees of continuity but a big big victory for pps is that 44 of our entire k-12 system receives access to arts education that's nearly half our population that is guaranteed to have classes in one of the four disciplines and possibly even two the investment of the arts tax is a huge contributor to this picture we receive approximately 4.5 million dollars a year to help make this access a reality in addition our average
01h 15m 00s
student-to-teacher ratio is 375-1 meaning that the average k-5 arts teacher sees 375 students per week in most of our schools pre-arts tax in 2012-13 that ratio was 1 528 students to one our district responsibilities regarding the arts tax and our iga with the city include building k-12 sequential pathways of study the city wants to ensure that we as a district are investing in 612 arts education to build on its investment of k5 arts through the tax for example how are we ensuring that a student who has access to music k5 continues to deepen their learning through access to band choir or orchestra in the 6th to 8th grade and on into high school we also will highlight our baseline data on the 5th grade minutes of instruction in music and visual arts classes this has been a perennial topic with citizens arts tax oversight committee and we hope to continue to collect data to ensure our system is creating equity across the district but first we'll start with an example of our cluster pathways data every neighborhood cluster in our district offers a certain number of pathways a student might take from k through 12. in an effort to get really clear about our pathways data we look we took the lincoln cluster as an example and notice that there are five possible pathways a student can take so if i start at ainsworth i go to west sylvan and then lincoln if i'm a bridal mile i go through west sylvan lincoln chapman west sullivan lincoln and forest park same thing and then you have skyline to lincoln so that equals those pathways we've animated the slide so you can follow along with student access to the arts in each of these pathways for instance watch the screen as a student moves in visual art instruction from ainsworth to west sylvan to lincoln high school in this example you'll see that the students that start at ainsworth have full access to visual arts all the way through the pathway to 12th grade there are no other complete pathways for visual art in the lincoln cluster now we'll move to watch the student experience in music as you see all k5 students in the lincoln cluster have access to music k through 12. now we'll take a look at the jefferson cluster we didn't animate these slides to save time tonight but we wanted you to take a moment to observe the pathways k12 by color the light orange indicates music the pink indicates dance and the green indicates visual arts you'll see that jefferson high school offers one class of theater but there's no sequential path for students leading up to that high school experience also because there's no music program happening at jefferson high school the pathways further down the system ceased at the middle school level our final point of data for the arts tax is the minutes of instructure for k5 students we are only in the nascent stages of collecting this data but it's worth sharing some highlights our stakeholder mapers discovered like most departments in our system we could share with you a laundry list of challenges and obstacles we continue to face but we also want to take time to call out some bright spots from our analysis of the pathways and minutes of instruction data these bright spots equal real winds experienced by our students every day in our schools building on the pathways data from the lincoln and jefferson clusters you saw earlier when we look system-wide there are 58 possible pathways for a student in kindergarten to embark on as part of our neighborhood cluster system out of those 58 pathways there are a total of 32 continuous k-12 music pathways and there are 34 continuous visual arts pathways seven out of eight of our clusters have at least one continuous pathway in music and all of our clusters have at least one continuous pathway in visual arts this slide also notes clusters that have a significant proportion of complete music or visual arts pathways in terms of minutes of instruction in k5 schools where there is music programming ninety percent of fifth graders receive instruction all year and ninety percent meet at least weekly 77 of students receiving sped services have access to music class 100 of the time and 90 of students receiving ell services have access to music class 100 of the time as we look at the same data for visual arts 63 percent of all of our k5 schools have a visual arts program and 78 of
01h 20m 00s
these programs offer weekly access 71 of students receiving special education services have access to visual arts 100 of the time and 93 receiving ell services have access to music class 100 of the time we have yet to collect the data for dance in theater but that will be completed and recorded before the end of the school year we also plan to study 612 data to provide you with disaggregation of students enrolled in arts classes by race socioeconomic status and ethnicity we see a few areas to target where an investment of resource resources can have a major impact first how could we establish materials and supplies as centrally supported instructional resources we see how the arts tax has led to equitable experiences for our k-5 students in their access to a licensed arts educator but when funds for materials and resources are set by individual buildings the results often create new inequities second how can we establish curricular and instructional supports for equitable student access we know that deep sequential arts learning is best practice establishing an articulated scope and sequence for dance music theater and visual arts connected to our core our national core arts standards will be a priority for ensuring that all students receive standards-based instruction with common assessments for system-wide calibration and success and then lastly how can we ensure centrally defined k-12 pathways for all students the investment that we make in building k-12 sequential arts learning must include maintaining and supporting programs already in place establishing a clear process for how and when programs change changes occur from one arts discipline to another will help define our articulated pathways of study next we are going to look ahead to a glimpse of what phase two and three will entail with the momentum of phase one of the master arts education plan we are enthusiastically awaiting flight on phase two starting july 1st of 2019. in phase two we will bring our internal process and the gained expertise from our first stakeholder group out to external stakeholders we will draw on our partnerships with arts organizations and community-based organizations to hold external stakeholder meetings to build a shared understanding of quality arts education furthermore we will gain feedback on our mission and vision and provide listening sessions with the community at large through neighborhood region meetings our plans do also include a few site visits to other urban districts engaged in implementing their own master arts education plans so that we can study their successes and learn from their challenges we view these processes as circles of influence beginning in phase one that extend radially from our teacher base to progressively engage more audiences as we move to phase two the circles of influences provide an image of these working progressions phase one here indicates that we are engaging with our key stakeholder teacher group at the center building on the themes we mentioned at the beginning of our slideshow in the next two months we'll be moving to the next ring of influence which is the larger group of pps arts educators we will be holding several regional cluster meetings between now and the end of the year to involve the entire system of vapa teachers in our phase one mape and to glean insight from their perspectives the next ring of influence from there will be the beginning of phase two where we will use some members of our original key stakeholder teacher group to hold joint meetings with arts organizations cbo's and students and families from neighborhood schools once we reach phase three the implementation phase the structure of our work will shift into continuous cycles of improvement and evaluation of the mape we can only make predictions of the outcomes at this stage but we want to ensure that we have a system in place that continues to keep our key teacher stakeholder groups art partners and communities at the table this will most likely take take the shape of a pps arts education advisory council that would meet monthly to analyze monitor and assess the fidelity of the mape phase 3 implementation now we'd like you we'd like to dream a little bit with you and here are some traits we see in our desired future state our future desired state features avapa program of study that would offer meaningful learning both exploratory and skill building in the four disciplines of dance music theater and visual art we also imagined bringing little literal lip literary arts into our portfolio of programs portland has a rich culture of literary arts and including this in our district programming dovetails with the arts integration model we currently have in place in some of our k-5 schools with the right brain initiative
01h 25m 00s
here you see some of the themes we call called out earlier the anchor arts learning across our disciplines scholarship technical skill creative process social emotional learning career and technical education and social justice and citizenry we set a goal of consistent k-12 pathways in at least two disciplines in every cluster meaning all students k5 would be taught two arts disciplines we'd also like to research the possibility of pairing dance and theater on a rotating schedule at each elementary school to tie performing arts learning to mind body practices social emotional learning and early literacy interventions we aim to add a summer arts academy to provide access for students who don't have outside opportunities to further their arts mastery as well as adding some after-school opportunities to enrich the in-school certified arts instruction for targeted populations again these types of strategies will deepen arts learning and provide a level playing field for students who can't access private instruction finally we see a powerful opportunity to create unique grade band specific learning experiences in each dart discipline as being a new way to engage with our large larger city arts partners in the future for instance every second grader might visit the portland art museum to view an exhibit on contemporary northwest art where every fifth grader might experience a live performance with esperanza spalding at the schnitzer through our partnership with pdx jazz in the schools this approach to learning is teaming with opportunities to de-silo academic subject matters and integrate and activate cross-curricular connections this is a strategy that is most helpful in promoting metacognition in students in this program of study our students would surpass simply being an audience member eventually students could pair with arts organizations through our cte program to have internships at portland five center for the arts and shadow the experience of union stageham stand stagehands as one example we imagine a future where every pps student can speak to their engagement in this program of study and arts education from the arts classroom to the citywide educational performance and partnership we'd like to thank the otl team including senior director of steam education sarah davis roosevelt high school jazz band students and director jason margulis and george middle school string students and director emmett mccutcheon and finally thank you for the arts teachers and arts partners in attendance today and thank you and thank you to the superintendent and board for the pleasure presenting you to here tonight we appreciate your time and dedication at this point we'd like to open up the floor for questions from the board thank you so good question um so i thought it was great when you got to the slide where you talked about what percentage of fifth grade students in special education or english language learners um were taking arts classes because um as we all know having a pathway doesn't mean that everyone is able to take advantage of the opportunity absolutely so i hope that we continue to look at it through that lens yes is there anything you want to say about that that's just that's a piece of data that we knew we wanted to find and we were honestly a little bit nervous about what the data would tell us and we were it was so great to have that metric as an indicator that we are moving forward and really making sure that our most vulnerable students have access to their full academic opportunities so we were very heartened by that it's great to see i hope it's representative um but i did have a follow-on which is that how is it that even under the arts tax and k through five still only 44 of our percent of our students are have access to arts programming that's the k-12 metric oh that's the k-12 so that makes sense yeah okay so as to follow on along with that so it is great looking at particularly special ed and how you disaggregated that data but do we so obviously the next question would be what does that look like in middle school and in high school yes um is that hard to find could we get that no we we will be able to do that and that's our hope in phase two is that we really drilled down deeper into the data we really needed to have a starting point and it made obvious sense that the arts tax and the metrics that they need as a part of our reporting to the city was going to be a great place for us to dig deep yes and to continue looking at you know all of the clusters and see where those gaps are yes and then thinking about the what are the barriers now and it's sounding like our schedule yeah thank you and i'm curious what you found about
01h 30m 00s
access in our for middle grade students in our k-8 schools obviously they don't have the economy of scale to have more than one discipline probably even though we see some middle schools that don't either really um what's the state of things there yeah that's um you know with our with our system transitioning quite a bit where we've already seen some of our k-8s go to k-5 we've been able to sort of shore that up a little bit but the k-8 schools that are going to remain k-8 schools we want to make sure that in phase 2 we're looking at how we're going to solve that problem of the economy of scale because we don't want students to miss out on those same experiences that their peers in another neighborhood would have so we're going to have to be really intentional about what we use as a formula for funding those schools and their arts education couple comments and questions thank you for the presentation thank you i had arts squashed out of me at an early age so i got into pe but i appreciate that for many students this is what brings them to school every day so thanks for the work that you do on behalf of all those students and everybody else um on the page around department priorities um the only thing i would say is it seems like it would be great to have equity in there because i think that is probably the huge driving issue um or variability across the district a lack of equity um yeah there's there's five items listed in yes thank you thank you for mentioning that um chair i'm sorry director brim edwards um i i know that we um definitely in our approach superimpose that over all of these but your point is well taken that when we show this graphic we need to be showing the the very specific ways in which we're being intentional about that as as as we superimpose that over the top of these yeah just there there have been times where we have wanted to call that out as a line item but our fear with doing that is that it becomes then separate from part of integrated practice in all of the areas that we focus on and so how do we show that absolutely it is the lens through which we're doing our work but how does it show up visually in our accounting get one of your visual artists maybe i'll help you with that i'm the wrong person to ask um so we recognize that that the onus is on us to find a way to do that so and then i'm going to the pages around the lincoln cluster in the jefferson cluster so i think it would be a really interesting exercise to have this for all the clusters because i then think this the fine point on equity would really be drawn um and i guess sort of another click down layer is we have how many ftes and i'd be interested in what i can't are these these aren't just our taxis are everything yes correct it's everything so i think it would be illustrative and i think especially during our budget cycle to see which ones are the art techs which ones are foundation funded i mean i guess in the lincoln cluster there's a fair number that are foundation funded yes um what's you know general funded but to to see that data because i um and then just to drill down on the point that director constant brought up about the middle grades or under-enrolled um well under old kate's been under enrolled middle schools that have just a small um population of smaller populations of students um when i think about this okay i try and use like use my sports analogy because that's that's what kept me going but if most um students don't in high school all of a sudden decide to take up something for the first time so if we don't if you have missing boxes in the elementary or the middle grades you're not going to get those rich high school programs where you've got just a large cohort of talented artists and musicians and so really thinking about those boxes how they become the feeder program i know for example at the in the sports world the pil at the high school level there was wide variability in the high school sports teams and then there was a district-wide initiative for that every middle grades whether it's a k-8 or a middle school to have this feeder program and what that did to sort of supercharge the whole system so you have kids at an early age having success
01h 35m 00s
finding their passion versus them getting to high school and like i didn't have that in middle school or my k-8 so i'm not gonna try or that's not for that's not for me um so i think it would be really an interesting exercise to look look through that and where the inequities are so i don't know if you have that but yes we actually do we only showed two because of time but we do have the rest of the clusters that we will pass out to you so you have it and we actually use it as a tool and we're going to continue to use it as a tool with all of the groups that we'll work in in those circles of influence because we want people to look at the data and make those connections so we have people draw out the maps and figure out where these things are it really helps to ground people's understanding around equity so we will provide those for you so that you can see what those look like in terms of our vision we were really looking at solving this problem because we do want to have a program of study in the arts k-12 where access is not you know shut because of some particular zip code so when we dream of the future and we're looking at phase two we're going to really come back to you a year from now with a plan to say here's how we want to solve these gaps and hopefully with everybody on the same page we'll be able to make that happen we do struggle with school communities being able to choose their art form and so it does create a little jagged picture um and so we'll have to be creative about how we step back a little bit and look at what that programming looks like and and let's take the let's take the guesswork out of the equation and and make sure we're providing a full access to all of our students k-12 i think that's what uh i appreciate about bringing transparency to all the pathways because those gaps become obvious and our ambitious goal is to eliminate any zeros for any of our clusters having a discipline lacking for for our students and i think when we see the cluster picture like this to kristen's point it's not unusual in the history of pps that we operate in idiosyncratic school specific ways and even though some schools have a greater than average allocation of arts fdes they've chosen to concentrate their course of study in certain disciplines over others but i think it's important for us to have a systemic conversation around what that means when our students can't realize a sequential arts pathway and that's what we want to tighten the loop on and this is great timing to get underway with our arts education master planning because we are hopeful that the biennium will allow us the resources to fill in all of these gaps and it is really important because you know a lot of times whatever the art form is that a school has had access to or has invested in is one of the signature aspects of that school something school communities are most proud of and you know in in most cases many if not most it's because of a particular adult's dedication or talents or perseverance that have kept it alive but doesn't necessarily feed into a pathway that those kids can continue and you know has can be a beautiful thing in and of itself but i think we have had a history of a lot of anomalies based on sort of adult decisions and placement and talent yeah and i think we want to take an additive approach here when we look at the future of this because we don't want to be telling people you need to change your art forms we want to actually provide a really strong base so that each each school is whole in and of themselves can i just follow up to that so ultimately is the goal to have i mean given that we live in a world of constraints um are we are we imagining that every school or every cluster will have um you know a full pathway in one discipline or multiple yeah as our for our initial you know dream setting we're hoping for two pathways complete pathways in every cluster in every school every every pathway is complete in two arts disciplines as a starting point we know that our our if you look at our dance and theater numbers that those reflect the nationwide trends also and so what we're hoping with our dance and theater programs we hope to both strengthen those programs that already exist at the high school level connect those up with stronger programs at the middle level and then as we said potentially be offering dance and theater to our k5
01h 40m 00s
students as part of a larger socio-emotional um and mind mindfulness part of their educational experience because we don't even we don't have the the teacher base in those two disciplines to just correct that we need to build the hunger for it and the capacity for it where we have our programs now which are mostly at the upper levels but at the state level do they accept dance as pe yes can we get a twofer those are exactly the kind of creative solutions that we need to look at in our middle grades redesign because i i i would like us to be a little more utopian i think two is an ambitious next goal but i would love to see complete pathways in all the disciplines let's get there here oh sorry go ahead so i and i'm not sure this is a question for you but more um sort of an overarching question so we're in the second year of hearing about the six versus seven um periods in the middle in the middle schools and i'm wondering like how that's going to be landed in terms of having a district-wide point of view and just a timeline as i know that there's a variability across the district creates what may be in equities for different students we're as motivated as anyone to arrive at a solution i do think we can be innovative and creative about creating an equitable experience for a middle grader no matter what school you're in there are ways to do it we can dream about an eight-course week we can but i think we need to bring together a task force to see how do we meet the requirements we have that are obligated to us while at the same time not stifling the experience for for our students i think there's got to be a solution uh i have faith that we will arrive at it and i think it's going to require our educators and leaders to come around so it doesn't depend on which school you go to that we make a guarantee available to our students and the same way that we continue to talk about what is a signature practice look like in all of the content areas you heard some examples of what that might look like in arts in the same way we've talked about it in other ways so i do think we can be creative i look forward to everyone's continued advocacy for funding for a whole education i think that category will allow us if the state proceeds in that direction to make a major investment in this area and kill two birds with one stone resolve our middle grades redesign work along with completing our arts pathways um can you talk a little bit about our artists in residence program and if it's still are we still doing run for the arts um and is can you talk a little bit about how that might be equitably distributed or how whether the funds stay in the schools in which they're raised and just how much of that is going on and also do the schools uh do we have a stable of artists that we deploy out that way or do the schools link up with the artists that they want there's a couple different combinations that happen in our district um i'll talk about young audience young audiences first we have we have several schools that participate in young audiences district wide and then we have some schools that opt to do their own arts run for their own school fund and those those funds that are raised live in an account for that school that's housed at young audiences schools are then able to take those monies and hire artists in residence performances any kind of enrichment that might be a part of it that supplies can be a part of that but it is uh it is up to the the power of the economic machine of the school to raise that money so some of some of our schools have accounts that are 75 000 dollars and other schools and other neighbors neighborhoods have accounts that are less than a thousand um so we really see an inequity um in in that and we would hope that there's a way that we could be creative about that but we want to make sure that we do that in partnership with young audiences and look at that as we think dynamically about how we're better serving our students through that model we don't have residents and artists ourselves each school each school site might bring artists in on their own dime um and may infuse those kind of experiences where they may have a musical or things like that where they're hiring choreographers but it's
01h 45m 00s
it's it's pretty site-based thank you um so i want to come back to our middle school issue uh because i was just at a joint scott wrigler meeting came up laura moulton was going to testify tonight on that issue she wasn't here uh what's i know the i understand the initial plan was to try to add a period to middle schools that needed it to give students more opportunities and we don't have the money to do that for this coming year we've known that for a while is there a plan b and is is the issue that um and this is for our students in dual language immersion is the issue that we're not going to let go of requiring x number of classes be in um the language of the immersion program um is this is this a discussion that's going to go on for another year or where are we at in that there's impatience out there and i think that's it's that's valid in patience i think i think we share the impatience and there are real constraints and there are a whole slew of competing priorities the board is also aware of and these have been a bridge year or two until better days many of the solutions have been band-aids for the moment to try to create some sections of access uh to to our students and so you know i'll be interested in learning a little bit more about the wrigler situation and i know our teaching and learning team is preparing a summary sort of update on this topic as well and we also set our own constraints including the way we deploy language programming in the district and so there are many ways to offer rich target language development and you know we can we can insist on doing it in a particular model or we can perhaps afford uh our students that opportunity in particular core classes while still not constraining them from taking an elective so more more to come on this i i don't want to see us go much longer in our district without having a solution that is a win-win for all communities i think we all want to see the same thing happen i think what you see is that we're up against we're rubbing two sticks together here so to make this happen is is next year baked i think people want to know is there anything we can do for that this administration is willing to do have received foreign site allocations they've had to forecast scheduling for our students i am hopeful that there are some may revisions that permit us to you know perhaps do some add-backs on some prioritized investments in our schools certainly where there are some gaps in a number of areas not just arts that we can begin to backfill some of those areas until we're in a new budget cycle so this is one of those areas okay yeah well i'm um some i'm not sure i understood your answer because if if we're in a limited number of courses that a student can take and the dli is saying thou must take this many and there's no room for music or theater or whatever the alternative is i mean is that's to me i'm what i understand again please tell me if i'm wrong that that's where push has come to shove right and so families might appreciate the option of perhaps you know not the entire day being structured around dli but perhaps a core base of classes to free up that elective for them they may want to prioritize the balance of classes versus one program or the other so so i think having more information from this we would need more information and particularly that specific school and we would have to do the analysis otherwise awesome to see a plan i mean uh when my kids started in 1994 i don't think we've ever had an arts plan
01h 50m 00s
much less one that's that's ambitious and forward-looking so this is tremendously exciting and in my dream build-out you know i played trombone for three years in middle school and i was [Applause] that was awesome well-played yeah but i was not but i learned how to read music so when i thought playing a guitar would be cool in high school and i picked up a guitar i could at least teach myself chords and notes but i was pretty terrible but in college when i took piano lessons starting from the beginning what i think with a lot of future elementary teachers i knew how to read music and chords and i actually became not a half bad piano player over time and into my adult life so having the the opera my dream is that you kind of have the opportunity to have a second go of it within the quite k-12 because right right now if if you want to try something else in high school yeah you know that's not going to happen but to have sort of the some 101 music or theater or or something in high school would be would be great as well so for a brown girl in southern california the same thing music really was my key and loved every bit of pretty strong program that we have there and my bachelor's is in music therapy which i would love to come back to sunday so i love this be there with bells on my feet tomorrow night too looking forward to it and if the only thing i had for a strand was visual arts i was going to die [Laughter] i think with our eight class schedule in high school i think and we really hear um from students about uh how important it is to have a hands-on class and a class that really speaks to the heart and you know i've known a lot of students who have dabbled you know it's not just about the pathway that they were introduced to in elementary school or middle school but they may be full ib students who say i'm going to pick up the guitar for the first time in my life when i'm 16 and it is a refuge in their day absolutely okay i think i think i have the solution bienvenido our music musica yeah we should begin to think about what we mean by literacy music literacy computer coding literacy uh i think there's a lot of ways we can give our students an experience like that okay so i'm debating whether to give you my story of my kid in pps and art it is not a happy one he was he did preschool kindergarten and first grade in romania every single kid did recorder every day by the end of first grade he was composing we moved back to the states he started second grade in 2002. he never got another music class ever ever ever well that's melbourne needless to say he's not composing um so i mean it's a lost opportunity things can happen if kids have opportunities yes um [Applause] one one thing i'll mention that that piggybacks on that is that our arts educators are our artists themselves so oftentimes they teach during the day and then they gig at night and what better way to be a compelling teacher than to walk into class the next day and be able to have that center of arts right at right at the right right at the get-go with kids and to be able to inform them of that experience and so we we continue to see the expertise of our teachers and how they continue to work on their craft and that totally informs their instruction and if i could just add to that that deep expertise is paired with that continual learning that you are having direct learning yourself as as a professional in your field and that means your expertise gap doesn't become it doesn't alienate you from your students you are also still learning in your arts discipline and therefore it is
01h 55m 00s
easier for you to be empathetic with the students that are learning alongside you i think that's one of the reasons why we see arts teachers so often have such a powerful connection with their students in addition to that there is a mountain of research yes showing the impact of arts education on kids academic achievement yeah so if if we're all about achievement yeah i mean we ought to be doing something yeah i mean the other i i guess my last riddle micro rant is um i think when you when you look at what's happening in salem with the legislature and the proposals that are being talked about i think it is notable that they are now talking in terms of a well-rounded education this is huge we're no longer you know fixated on reading writing and arithmetic and i think there's a growing recognition that we need to have well-rounded education to produce well-rounded human beings and and that's when we're going to get the outcomes that we all say we want so i'm going to make a little pitch everybody who showed up tonight in support of the arts in pps um i'm going to ask you to contact your legislator you know get those cards and letters going we need to push the legislature to to provide enough funding so that we can actually do what we've been talking about because if we don't have some cash all of this is going to be pretty pictures on a powerpoint okay i'll leave it there fingers crossed there are more resources i feel like we'll be able to really go into our community with a solid plan for how we're going to have equitable arts and music programs across all our grades and i think that'll be key because if we get the resources and there's no plan or there's no foundation um i think the public will lack confidence and and we probably won't do it well so i think this is we're primed for yeah this is why we're doing our homework now in this law so that we have sequential arts education so we have sequential cte pathways so we have workforce development and career lattices and pps i mean i go down the list so our students have access to quality material and librarians and tech and you know there's no shortage of wish list items but thank you kristin and company for carolyn for your work here i'm excited about this growing movement of the arts and pps we're ready to go yeah okay thank you thank you thank you we hope to see you all tomorrow night yes please please come tomorrow night for our show we've got some some great performances and and oodles of visual art to show you and it's going to be exciting so we hope to see you there thank you and the gallery will be out there for how long two weeks until the 27th and uh just a short plug for april 27th is the uh concluding day of the show and it's also the miller family free day so it's a day of free and open access to the entire museum we'll be having pop up performing arts pieces in the galleries in the museum on the hour every hour as well as hands-on art making for anybody who wants to come in great thank you okay um so the next item is the 2017 bond budget development performance audit so um superintendent guerrero would you yeah we did yeah we have our chief operating officer dan young who always comes not unaccompanied so i'm sure they will introduce themselves good evening um as you know i'm scott parlow i'm the interim senior director for the office of school modernization tonight we wanted to bring the findings from sober evan shake consulting they
02h 00m 00s
are the auditors that we brought on board through an rfp process to conduct the performance audits uh for office school modernization and so they looked into the resolution that the board passed in regards to looking into the documentation that we had for the budget funding gap so a little bit of the background i mean um kathryn brady is a principal um with scc and lynn liu right right um is one of the senior auditors and so i'll let them introduce themselves and walk through the scope of work and how we've moved that forward good evening chair moore members of the board and superintendent guerrero my name is kathy brady and this is leanne liu and i apologize moving from performing arts to audits because obviously i didn't take enough courses when i went to school because our powerpoint presentations are not as visually appealing as those other ones our firm was hired by pps in october 2018 after a competitive procurement process to conduct the first performance audit for the 2017 bond over the next four years there will be an audit once every year conducted annually with you'll receive an audit report and for this first cycle though this first audit cycle we're doing it in two phases that i'll describe a little bit in a moment because it's our first time presenting in front of you what we wanted to do is just give a brief introduction about our firm shoburg avashin consulting it's a mouthful it was founded by the former state california auditor kurt schoberg and his deputy marianne evashank and that office i worked there with them we performed audits similar to your secretary of state in oregon so we conducted the state's financial statement audit and we also did performance audits of a variety of school districts and departments of education and a variety of other transportation entities that really centered around a lot of capital construction which we're looking here today at your bond as well as a lot of other government sectors when we started cherbourg evershank 20 years ago almost 20 years ago we've expanded on that construction experience and we have done a lot of these similar bond works or sometimes are funded by sales tax to do capital construction at school districts or airports transportation entities so we've really expanded on that on that body of work that we developed with the state auditor's office in california we're located in northern california in sacramento and we specialize in performance audits and consulting for public sector only throughout the western united states the other thing i wanted to talk about was audit standards we follow what's called generally accepted government auditing standards it's known as a yellow book because it's a yellow book so it's aptly named but they really provide a framework for a quality audit work because they require certain provisions that we must follow related to competency integrity objective objectivity and independence so they provide a foundation for the public to have assurance in the work that we do because we have to follow some rigorous standards and then we have to employ sort of a structured process when we do an audit there's many requirements to follow in the yellow book there's three main categories general field work and reporting those general standards really speak to the characteristics of us auditors that we have to follow so they guide us on factors such as independence in mind and appearance so we have to be objective and exercise our professional skepticism they talk about the competency of the auditors that do the work we have to get continuing education and training and we also have to apply quality control of our own process we have auditors come in and audit our work as well to make sure that we follow those standards the yellow book fieldwork standards relate to several areas as well about properly planning and supervised audit but i think the most important one from an oddities perspective relates to evidence and it requires that we have sufficient and appropriate evidence so sufficient that we have enough in quantity to support our findings and appropriateness is that it's relevant valid and reliable evidence is the data that documents observations analyses that we either gather or we conduct ourselves the final yellow book main area is about reporting standards they require some things like specific language we have to put in our report to say that we followed those standards but i think the thing that's most important from an oddities perspective is that we have to go to the people that we are auditing in the subject matter to get that perspective and put that and incorporate that into our audit report
02h 05m 00s
that can be done through written response but our firm also does that throughout the audit where we get their perspective and make sure we have try to have recommendations or meaningful for them so these standards are a little bit different than the other performance audits that were done in the past that followed some aicpa consulting standards a lot of the same similarities about due professional care planning and supervising services and providing sufficient relevant data but the yellow book standards have a certain level of rigor and they cover more areas and are very specific and things that we must follow specifically related to independence and quality control evidence audit documentation supervision reporting and peer reviews for this first performance audit of the 2017 bond we were asked to conduct the audit in two phases to give you some information tonight and then to finish our typical audit cycle some of it is relates to the phase one relates to the development of the 790 million dollar bond estimate and one thing we have to realize is this first year's audit cycle is extremely compressed typically it's a july through june audit about a year um reports get done in march at least they have have in the past so we started a little bit behind the eight ball um started at the end of october of 2018 and had a work plan that was due in december 2018 about mid-december with the report requested it was we were supposed to be here in march so we're close um in april didn't leave much time for field work so while the phase one audit has gone on and that's what we're here to talk to you about today there is a phase two in process that covers some of the areas you see here on the slide the plan is to come before you later this year to present the results of that phase two effort and then for future years hopefully we go back to this one reporting cycle we have a little bit more time to get the work done now let's get into the results of the phase one audit because we were tasked at looking at the development of the 790 million dollar bond um audit efforts was focused on the practices models assumptions and cost factors used and in place at the office of school modernization at the time the bond estimates were developed in late 2016 and early 2017. we looked at the three main cost categories the 580 million for the school modernization the 150 million for health and safety projects and 60 million for the bond program costs although it has been less than two years since the bond passed much has changed at pps within osm and in the construction industry as well that we addressed partly in this phase one audit report and we'll audit more and more depth in phase two or future audit cycles with that in mind we found that while there wasn't a formal replicable methodology osm employed a consistent process to arrive at baseline bond estimates they ran several cost estimate drills with varying assumptions and options as would be expected and we analyzed the most recent model data january 19 2017 which had most complete detail behind the assumptions used before the estimated estimates were presented to the board on january 24 2017 as shown on this slide we looked first at estimates for the four school modernizations as those costs comprise the majority of the bond internal osm documents from january 19 2017 estimated total costs for the four schools at 678 million of which approximately 407 million or 70 percent of total project costs the blue shaded portion of the bar chart was supported by data from a pps hired independent cost estimator for that january 19 estimate we found that the cost factors and assumptions used by osm operational staff to calculate total project costs were aligned with industry practices and market conditions at that time but within days that staff estimate was lowered by approximately 100 million without a documented explanation and became 580 million when it was presented to the board for approval we could not locate records or evidence that would bridge the gap between internal osm budget development documents from january 19 to the january
02h 10m 00s
24 information presented to the board even after ppsit ran searches of employee computer drives for us because the amounts presented to the board were much lower than the january 19 model and had incomplete information supporting cost factors implied the estimates provided by osm executive leadership to the board were inconsistent with market conditions at that time leading industry practices the prior 2012 pps bond or comparable school districts as shown on the next slide as you probably know it takes more than just nuts and bolts to build these goals there are several cost factors that need to be estimated and calculated to arrive at total project costs one large component are the heart costs provided by the professional cost estimator but there are additional costs such as escalation soft cost contingencies that need to be estimated as well and evaluated as shown as in orange on the previous slide if these factors or percentages are set too low impacts could be felt as projects progress through the various stages of planning and design with osm being challenged to meet those bond budget bond budgets also because these percentages are applied against hard cost figures small changes in assumptions can have larger impacts on budgets for instance as shown on this chart osm executive leadership estimated construction costs to increase at four percent when it developed a bond but the market at that time was closer to five percent and is now in the high six percent range another challenge with escalation was that osm executive leadership reduced the number of expected construction years that did not track with construction schedule duration osm executive leadership also used lower than market or industry guidelines for soft cost thus using a lower market end escalation factor shortening the number of construction years to calculate escalation and using low soft cost assumptions had a role with the budget issues experienced after the bond passed as shown on the next slide we found there were concerns raised by osm operational staff and external consultants although there was no evidence of how those concerns were addressed or considered when cost factors and total estimates were reduced for instance for escalation there were several concerns raised about needing estimates to tie in with project schedules or soft costs of 13 being on the lower end of an acceptable range of 13 to 15 percent that could cause problems but there was no discussion or documentation on decisions behind the rationale as is suggested by industry leading practices for the 150 million health and safety program we found 30 percent or 45 million were supported by professional cost estimates although there appears to be to be more independent data that was available at some point there were early assessments prepared by internal external consultants that identified needs to repair water quality fire safety asbestos lead paint roofs ada radon and security systems in preparation for the 2017 bond pps commissioned updates to those estimates which were completed around december 2016 however not all external consultant estimator reports could be located for our audit in addition for this to the school capital projects and the health and safety program there are costs that need to be set aside for those activities related to the overall delivery of the program or that are not yet specifically attributed to a specific project or component for the 2017 bond those program level costs were estimated at 60 million for program contingency and program management what we found was there was no documented methodology that would allow for a replication of how that amount was calculated again internal osm staff and external consultants raised concerns that the amount was low although there is no market factor to be used or considered for these overall program costs thus assumptions often rely on historical practice or comparables for perspective the beaverton school district's 680 million dollar bond calculated 65 million for program management and contingency compared to pps lower 60 million for its larger 790 million dollar bond
02h 15m 00s
in terms of data that was presented to the board we found that additional cost information could have helped decision making and transparency as discussed in section 2 of the report as shown on this slide at the board's january 24 2017 working session osm executive leadership presented four options that ranged from 745 million to 867 million leadership shared various documents such as master planning committee guiding principles due diligence reports existing design graphics and modernization options but aside from the graphics shown on this slide there was no data presented describing how the four different amounts were developed and the board did not have many questions on budgets or cost estimates as most questions were design related yet the level of the information provided was similar to other districts we reviewed nevertheless while format and content of board approval documentation was similar to peers we believe additional data could be provided in the future such as comparisons of cost estimates with current market condition industry standards or other school districts to better inform decision makers section three of the report brings us to where we are today as shown on this slide the estimated cost to complete the four schools only as of december 2018 was nearly 800 million 37 percent more than the 500 million estimate when the bond passed but despite all the challenges with how the bond budget was set in 2017 it is it is important to remember that fluctuations in cost estimates are typical during early planning and design phases as scopes become more defined needs are changing or available funding becomes a challenge project costs also need to be adjusted in this case the gap between the 2017 bond baseline estimate and current cost estimates could have had many contributing factors such as 2017 cost assumptions being too low as discussed earlier but also other factors such as scope additions schedule changing pricing of specific materials shortest shortage of skilled labor or update to ad specs that could impact cost estimates comprehensively identifying these factors requires significant effort reconciling line items to bid amounts reviewing detailed specs and other activities requiring specific knowledge and project familiarity now osm has been working on containing costs by commissioning updated master planning documents and exploring cost saving options through various value engineering efforts however bridging the gap may also require eliminating scope or deferring projects to future bond measures since our scope was focused on the 790 million dollar bond on how the 790 million dollar bond was developed conclusions drawn and recommendations were made based on practices in place during the bond development phase in december 2016 and january 2017. we understand that since then much has changed at pps and osm and we are informed that many processes and practices we recommended in this report are already in place while we did not validate those assertions made by osm and pps executive leadership as part of this phase one audit future artists will verify those statements as well as review current protocols not only for cost estimating but all projects of the bond program to determine whether they are in line with internal standard operating procedures as well as leading practices before we take any questions we would like to thank pps and its external external consultants who have greatly assisted us during this compressed time frame for the audit everyone was very forthcoming with our information requests and tried their best to gather data for us with that we would like to open it up for questions thank you any questions i guess my first question is um when you on your graphic with the bars with the orange and the blue and which is the heart of the question about what looks like an arbitrary reduction in costs before they were presented to the citizen committee so it looks like the hard costs were held harmless pretty much and that there was an inexplicable reduction to the soft costs
02h 20m 00s
is that right or it all it's hard to tell because it all just came out as an aggregate number is that a question for us yes um absolutely that's what that evidence showed that's we had problems with the gap between there finding out exactly what happened the the 407 number is based on the professional estimate earlier estimates on hard costs yes yes that came from the external estimator yeah thank you can i okay so if i understood your question well i guess the heart of my question was trying to uh determine whether the original estimates for hard costs were off or whether which it looks like they weren't really but that the they were out the arbitrary reduction was really in the program costs contingencies soft costs so when we were looking at the january 19 2017 model the hard cost amount in there for the 407 million tied to independent professional cost estimate numbers when that amount was presented to the board it was reduced by 33 million and was 374 million we could not find a connection between how that 407 million was reduced to 374 million thank you i'm going to start with just a couple of macro just questions and i don't know if these are for you dan or but i'm going to get i'll quickly pick up the audits so the measure that was passed was 710 million the current if you take and i know there's value in engineering and everything happening but the current approved budgets of the four schools the 150 and the program costs what's that number nine more than that is that 950 plus 60 million i think i saw 800 million for the schools only now then 150 for the health and safety and then there's more for program costs i don't have that offhand but i think that's generally in the ballpark if that's so is it 950 is it 950 plus 60 million for program costs based on what information i'm not sure if i'm following so i thought on the slide it said we're essentially the schools the four schools are at 800 million that's what i thought i saw and then i'm adding 150 million for the health and safety that's 9.50 and then i'm wondering if on top of that is the program costs so our overall budget now based on what's been approved i think that's accurate looking at the chart here yes absolutely program costs are on top of that correct there's no problem so we're at like 1.1 billion approximately yes okay so the gap is about 220 million yes approximately so the board resolution that we adopted um was to look at the provide findings and recommendations related to the causes of the budget gap and looking at this presentation what i think i'm seeing is half of it or maybe you can tell me where there's more so half would be attributed to the hundred million um of change without documentation is that this is a question for the auditors yeah i i don't know if i would phrase it that way tell me how to phrase it we're trying to figure out what we tell the community of what's the gap yeah and i think some of the gap was caused by the um the assumptions that went into the 790 were low on the market end so um if if escalation's at four percent and now it's currently this comparison shows it probably was better at five percent but now it's showing up at six percent that one percent has huge repercussions on a budget because you're multiplying it on as it goes up and up so yes that is part of the reason because those initial whatever went into that 790 were too low insufficiently conservative so i guess not conservative enough so maybe you could share um if you were telling the person on the street or the parent on the street when they said like this was a big conversation in the community about the difference in the number from 1 billion to 790. how would you explain it based on your looks like a pretty thorough review of data of why why is the difference like by by chunks or by different
02h 25m 00s
i think some of it depends on what you can control right there's certain things within pps's control and their control is to come up with a good estimation model based on good assumptions that are reasonable it can there's not a right or wrong industry has standards generally factors you should consider to put in there and it should be in line with market so that's what's what's in your control so they developed what came to you was a model that didn't have those assumptions that related to the market conditions at the time so you're going to be sort of behind already because they were too conservative or not conservative enough so that'd be part of it so how much would that be approximately based on your analysis well we haven't calculated a number for that a specific what that difference would be because you have to play into the model so i think what's tricky here is and i'll i'll refer back to a document that we reviewed a year ago and i realize everyone doesn't have that uh and what that did and and to kathy's point about what is within the spanish control is an estimating model that uses a range that's within professional expertise if you will and so what we reviewed a year ago was basically that range what we considered would be an acceptable range a high end and a low end and the comparison that's in the audit is really a comparison against a document that is at that low end at the high risk and so if you were to ask my my personal professional opinion you would we would want to be at least in the middle of that range which would be you know 900 plus million dollars if we want to be more conservative less risk that that end of the range with this scope of work was over a billion dollars so that's i think why it's hard to get to your specific question about a number because there was there was no specific starting point within that range what they did is they they analyzed it against a document that they had available to them but again that was a high risk low end of the range document if that makes sense so so what we have is the worst of both worlds we had cost estimates that weren't conservative enough and then we landed in one of the hottest escalation markets in the country at the highest end so even if even if the estimates had been in the middle of the range we would still be struggling certainly even if we were in the middle of the range going back to that specific document yes we would still be having some challenges but obviously not to the same extent i'm still not this was an audit of about the budget gap you have 790 we have something we have 790 and so there's a variance from the 790 and did um i guess the auditors did you all not look at the the variance between what that final document was and where we are now and what would that was each segment of that what that was attributed to we were tasked with looking at the development of the 790 budget so that's what we focused on and as part of our phase two we also want to look at what's going on current typically that's how we would approach an audit we look back a little bit but we try to see what's in place now so we have started to do that but there it changes all the time it's not it's not um atypical for that to happen as things get more refined when you're doing the 790 bond it's at a global level and you narrow it down so if you analyze each time the budget might change it's a lot of work involved with each thing with at each step so there's a lot of factors to go in there partly it's because the estimates were too low the after the fact what it requires is looking at specific material pricing coming in line item bids coming in comparing scope from what was what it went before you at 790 and each period of the subsequent to that whether your design or schematic design or construction design all it's going to change get refined along the way and that budget gap or the unfunded piece will change along the way too so in other words if you were looking at the 790 million that was passed if you're looking at the cost to complete those projects maybe at the end of 2017 it might have been less than what we're looking at now and it might be different than we're looking at that in two months so it's really if you're talking about the budget gap that can change as projects progress from planning design to construction so that number can always
02h 30m 00s
change okay let me try it maybe different ways so there's on page 11 there's a headline osm executive leadership lowered cap school capital project estimates by approximately 100 million but no explanation or rationale existed to support the reduction so you this is the i think you said at one point that within a few days between january 19th and 24th the number was lowered by 100 million so does that mean that when you looked at the reams of documents that you went through it looks like um that at one point it was 8.90 and then five days later it was 790 or something else what does that headline mean yes the model that we looked at because they do a series of budget drills coming up to an estimate and using different assumption factors do they want to use a three percent or four percent so we selected the january 19th because it was the closest to the uh january 24th that was presented to you that had explanation behind those assumptions and factors used there were other models ran there was nothing that said this is the final one there was just drills on there so that was the closest that we felt to that um january 24th to analyze to dig down and see what was going on with that so it was one of several yes in these internal documents and then the next thing we know the citizen committee was presented with 790. the board was the boardwalk bullet board nose to the citizen committee was the first place that those four scenarios came forward with the with the amounts on them and that's where those discussions took place and then there was recommendation that came out of there to the board but what you're saying is there's no connection between those internal variety of internal estimates and then those four scenarios that were brought forth publicly is that is that accurate dan the the dates they're talking about are specific about information that came to the board in january i know what you're talking about the the citizen group i don't recall specifically what information off hand went to that group uh or what detailed budget information i know that had the different scenarios and included the different numbers for the health and safety uh i don't recall if it had specific numbers for the modernization project it had the force yeah the four scenarios which is what was recommended to the board they made a recommendation to the board we have to look exactly i think we need to look exactly what went to that group different than the board yeah so you're saying there was a january 24th board meeting where it was 100 million dollars lowered then one of the the closest proximity run to that board meeting was something that was 100 million dollars more that had supporting documentation that was more in line with what we would expect at industry practices at that time and prior pps 2012 bond experiences the data that the board osm internal staff received from the professional cost estimates came in around mid-january 2017 so that was really close to when all that information was presented to the board so i'm not sure if there was any information provided to a citizen oversight committee prior to that or any citizen committee it was a very compressed time frame between when they got the hard cost estimates the 403 million m7 million from the independent cost estimator to when the information was presented to the board so one thing i'd like to add um in reference to the 100 million dollar number um through the course of the audit the yellow book requires evidentiary findings to support the numbers and so when they're talking about the 100 million differential that's specific to the four large capital projects only there were other elements that through the course of the audit they found things where there were items such as um we were a little too conservative in the program management costs for staff we were a little too conservative with contingencies at a bond level for the for the district so those now complicated and compounded on top of the 100 million and so um i don't have those numbers exactly in front of me but so there's a there's a element in addition to the 100 that is um so it's you know 110 120 where these other soft costs that are associated with either health and safety or program-wide costs um that are additive to it does that make sense and they're sort of multiplicative
02h 35m 00s
rather than just simply additive yes um so the and and i think um then the baseline numbers like be the before numbers were the initial master plan estimates correct those who have a hard cost only that did not include soft costs such as contingency escalation okay they were internally calculated by that was my my question as to how much so then so tracing the history of madison which is what i'm most familiar with the initial estimate was i think 176 million for the master plan that did was that including soft cost or hard on the report on page 11 the hard cost from the cost estimator was 104.9 million for madison okay so but that's just hard cost construction hard costs okay so and and that's that was supported yeah that's that's one of the ongoing issues i think four board members and the public is trying to when we hear a number on a school what exactly is included in that number so that we're always apples to apples in that so i think the in the initial total cost i hope that's the right term for madison was about 176 and then miraculously it showed up as 148 in the bond and now we're at a the budget that we voted on was 199.999 um so we we can sort of gauge how different just to get a ballpark figure on some of those different factors so i now i'm not sure if that 176 or whatever that first number was was that a reasonable estimate in terms of the soft costs and the escalation factors if you're looking at exhibit nine of the report on page 13 it actually breaks down the heart and soft cost between the january 19 and the 20 january 24th board presentation for the four schools so if you're looking at madison if we're looking just at the january 19 estimates the 106 million those were the hard costs developed by the independent cost estimator osm calculated approximately 65 million in soft cost for 171 million what was presented to the board ultimately on january 24th was 146 million for madison cost was that 65 million in initial in soft costs was that in your opinion reasonable based on the market and history so the 106 million out of the 171 million was from your professional independent cost estimator and national reputable firm the 65 million that we saw from that january 19 bond development worksheet was based on assumptions that were more in line with market conditions at that time and passed pps history 2012 bond history performance and i believe in your presentation you said contingency overall contingency costs were reasonable or close to reasonable or program contingency um well there's two parts there's project as well as program contingency for the project contingency for using madison as an example the 65 million did consider a reasonable contingency factor percentage as well as considered the years of construction so i don't have it on top of my head but it was like four years and that would be you know reasonable when we were going to the january 24th presentation where i went down to 51 million it was no longer four years of construction that you can calculated contingency on so it was a lowered amount as well but can you explain that a little bit that's a little unclear to me the fewer years for projecting escalation because we actually the proposal was for longer terms of construction so how does that work so if you're going to page 14 of the report we did the
02h 40m 00s
there's a discussion on escalation and how those should be calculated and we were just doing a quick example using it's a small footnote on page 13 but if you're calculating escalation at a rate of four percent and six percent assuming a two-year construction period then that's that alone is a difference of um 21.2 million so that is just by using different escalation factors four or six percent and when you're using um lesser years in calculating escalation then that will have a greater difference as well and is that as the years and is that the years out from the current year that you're so for i um you know we had two years of planning followed by two years of construction so that's right four years out from the bond if you're looking at the exhibit 11 on page 16 we were showing you the years for which escalation was calculated so for like madison it was initially at four years but when it went um to the board it was three and a half years or more dramatically for kellogg was four years reduced to two years so um just in calculating those costs so why would some why would that be done what what would the normal practice of why something would be changed from four years to two years well sometimes you when you look at it if depending on the project specifics if you can accelerate the costs especially depending on what your escalation factors are if your savings in general conditions is greater than the escalation cost then it's advantageous to to accelerate the projects um you know but that comes with a price tag as you're adding additional staff you're adding um considering we didn't even have a plan for kellogg well how can you do it in two years um two years is probably a um extremely conservative all right more liberal schedule of two years would be almost in a design build scenario and so two years start to finish would be extremely challenging why it would be used for a budget model i'm not exactly sure so um one last question uh you pointed out that um the information that that time the board received was comparable to what other districts receive um so clearly other districts might have ended up in the same vote that we did unless they had a set of questions unless they got better information and had a set of questions to ask um is there any way we can in terms of our duel diligence going forward what are the right questions um and i i i don't want to look backwards and say those should have been asked but again let's let's move forward from here um what if if uh if this something like this came up next week what should we be asking and and would we know what to ask or would he would we have need more information in order to go wait wait what tell me about this yes to answer your question there is and if you need to do some more thinking to get a fuller answer absolutely the way we sort of um look at it if there because there's no standard there's no exactly what a board needs to do it's about your oversight in your specific area a lot of what we focus on is what um the oddity should bring forward to you the types of information to help you make those good decisions so work is challenging from an audit perspective is that we have to maintain this independence and we have to maintain threats it actually talks about threats to independence and some of it is if we go too far into performing a management function so we have to be careful the types of recommendations that we give we want we we want them to be useful and meaningful but we have to be careful not to be so prescriptive to say you need to do these things because sometimes then we come back and audit them and then we've blown the whole independent structure so i hear what you're saying and we tried to get to that in our recommendations on the type of information that pps could provide to you definitely ongoing as cost
02h 45m 00s
actuals come in differently than budgets which is typical but um yes i believe that we could provide some more detailed recommendations of the type of information the board should receive to help when you're dealing with cost um estimates and and such whether it's for a bond or just on an ongoing basis i i mean it seems to me and you get to this in your narrative and in your recommendations that aside from specific questions is about insisting upon greater transparency in the methodologies themselves because there really that really wasn't there it was fairly minimal other than the references to generally the same practices as 2012. well that doesn't turn out to be the case and 2012 looking at it from that vantage point was being delivered on time and on budget um so seemed like a reasonable framework to continue but it doesn't appear that it was continued i mean is that is that true well i'll i'll submit that something it's probably a longer answer than you know a couple minutes but uh as the board i submit that you're probably looking for is a process that is very clear and very transparent you're looking for data that is very clear very transparent and that has been vetted so i think what you will see coming forward what i would propose is similar to the information you see now when you see the master plans and the project updates usually even in the presentation materials for the high level you'll still get an overview of the cost estimate summary from the professional cost estimator that's broken down by system and gives specific data even square footage data that any markup that's added to that whether that be contingency escalation insurance whatever it is we show exactly what that amount is and what the percentage or what the assumption is and what that allows you or anyone else to take a look at is say okay does a 10 assumption seem logical here is that within the range of what is professionally acceptable and that's the same type of data that would go through whatever the process is so whatever committee that might go through however professionals should take a look at that about that information be that same level of detail so you can clearly see what the assumptions are what the data is and be able to ask those specific questions so i think that's the kind of information and detail of information you're going to want with also having the full data available if we have a professional cost estimate that entire cost estimate will be made available as well and isn't that what's pretty much going on right now with the 2017 projects and the value engineering exercises very seeing that for each category yeah that's that's the that is typically what we bring forward even at this level and then of course we have data behind that so if there's ever any questions we can go and have a more detailed conversation which we do on the regular we had one uh two months ago at the bac specific to talk about benson where we made the design team the engineers the architects the cost estimators we made them all available to the bond accountability committee for them to ask questions and go through that level of review one of the other things that we've been working into the process the methodology is one key element is that it's also in addition to everything that dannon said was that it's um we can basically repeat it in that through the documentation itself an auditor could sit down and take the documents and be able to go through and work through that process and see you know the same steps understand what was done and then be able to basically replicate the same answer in the same process which then creates that justification the double check um you know post process of okay it it circles back and and everything lines up and ties out go ahead i just if you're i thought you're gonna wrap up so no i'm go and ask go ahead i'd like this one okay i just wanted i mean i want to end up where you were going which is how do we make sure this never ever ever ever happens ever again um because i'm really angry about this um okay but let me let me see if i understand you know a few basic things that this was my understanding of your audit findings okay first osm never produced an actual recommendation to be considered by anybody right you guys were you guys were still using work product right you're you were still working on a spreadsheet and adding numbers and putting us you know based on assumptions and and and you never actually produced
02h 50m 00s
a formal recommendation based on your calculations is that correct the nuance there is osm operational staff was not asked to do that we provided information okay you you were never asked to to create a recommendation and therefore you didn't correct okay i didn't mean to suggest that you were stonewalling that's that's not where i was going with that okay so you had you had work product you had a spreadsheet you had a bunch of spreadsheets using different assumptions about stuff right and then at some point somebody made a decision about a number and if i understand your audit findings we don't know who we don't know why we don't know how right this was the correct okay we have no evidence that provides any of that information we have no idea what happened okay so i mean this is this is the ultimate bureaucratic black box only unlike most black boxes you know i mean people talk when they talk about policy making there's always a black box in there somewhere okay in this particular case we have no idea who inhabited that black box never mind what they were thinking right okay you made a very clear distinction in your audit findings between osm staff operational staff and executive leadership correct okay i think that's an important distinction to make and i think because we're not talking about you guys that's where i'm going with that um the guys who are currently running osm were the guys who were raising the red flags who nobody paid attention to right okay um dan's much too diplomatic in play okay so i'm going to say it i mean the people who are making decisions are not sitting in those chairs they're not the ones i'm glaring at those are the ones i want to glare at but they're not here okay [Music] so okay so whatever happened in this black box basically as far as i can tell in terms of the school projects every single component of something that would go into an estimate was lowballed right hard cost not so much they lowballed on the the hard cost they low-balled on the soft cost they low-balled on escalation costs they low-balled everything right except contingency they were reduced from the like the hard costs were reduced from the professional estimators right so they were reduced without any document without any documentation okay so um and we came up with a number that magically added up to 790 million those were the options presented yes [Music] and as far as anybody can tell there was at that point it was going to be extremely difficult to complete the projects within that number right okay and that's what the red flag that staff was making right to leadership even though sorry to interrupt your opinion but i think extremely difficult is that i'm trying to i'm trying to be reasonable here um okay so okay so there we are all right and this is the this is what i i am so now i'm going to try to morph into okay that was then this is now so how we're going to make sure this doesn't happen again and this is my concern in your audit you were saying that the board and other everybody else got um information that was not out of line with what other what was produced for the boards in other districts okay i find that a little terrifying okay because here's my concern um so i was i was thinking back and it seems to me that and i was a an observer at this point
02h 55m 00s
so but if if memory serves we had what one two three four i think roughly six identifiable groups that should have been providing oversight on this we had a board bond committee we had a separate bond development committee we had a bond stakeholders advisory committee we had a bond accountability committee and then finally we had the full board can i comment on that so um the board capital bond committee um didn't meet in the development stages of the bond package because we wanted to do that as a whole board so that was all activities of the whole board and then you said two others that i think are actually the same thing the bond development it's really it was the bond stakeholders advisory committee okay um and then that was one and then the bond accountability committee is a big miss that we can talk about later which is an external entity that should have been engaged in the vetting of the cost estimates but that wasn't part of their charter at the time so they weren't there one of our lessons moving forward nothing in the charter that precluded that okay so um as far as i can tell um there was no oversight on the on the single most important question in order to i mean there there had been a decision made about the bond package what projects were going to be included okay lots of discussion about well some discussion about that okay there was no discussion about how much is it actually going to cost and there was no visibility on how that number was arrived at correct as far as the information yes it was very limited okay and i would say that what was presented was cost per square foot information for the proposed projects relative to what the cost per square foot had been to the 2012 projects without a lot of discussion or justification for the different climate that we might be operating in and what should the soft cost be and all that it was just this is what it cost to deliver franklin and roosevelt on a cost per square foot basis this is how we're extrapolating this next phase and that was clearly inadequate so okay so you know here's a 64 thousand dollar question what processes need to be in place to ensure when we when we talk about planning for the 2020 bond what processes need to be in place to ensure that decisions are based on reliable cost of estimations and the bond package is actually feasible and how should the board structure its role in bond development to perform appropriate oversight and ensure good policymaking that's that's the question that's the bottom line how do we make sure this doesn't happen again because what you're saying is that this board or that board the board at the time got the same kind of information that other boards get that is not comforting to me so how do we make sure this doesn't happen again well it starts with having the the right model in place that they are considering to have all those inputs and that they're based on something they're based on a professional cost estimate they're based on historic practice could be based on comparables because there's not one number that's going to work and then they should provide that information to you with some detail not just a cost per square foot or not just a one item that's going to cost you know 100 million dollars and then you as a board if you get that information might say i need more detail what are the components that that make that up okay here's the reality i don't know about construction costs you know i mean that's not what i do you know i i need i need some process you know i need to figure out how how can i perform due diligence when i am not an expert in this i i submit what you might want is to break it down into pieces you just mentioned i think the right word for the first word what's the process so first have staff identify recommend a process and then also identify who the people you think are who can help make those decisions if it's the bond accountability committee or otherwise do one take a look at the process is that logical okay that's step one now let's take a look at what that
03h 00m 00s
estimating model or template might look like okay that's step two then once you've cleared those hurdles you're now down into the details you're further down the line so when that information comes you know you're getting it that's been vetted you know you're getting the right amount of detail and you understand that that the template format the model that it's in is the appropriate model so i think by breaking it down into those pieces might give you that level of confidence that you need that you're getting the right information when it comes to you and it sounds like we have major pieces of that in place at least to get the first master plan estimates which were reasonable ballparks [Music] and i don't know if the board got the break got a presentation on those with some detail and it sounds like no they just got a no just a total number per school there was some information provided on maybe that some of the design elements but the numbers were just constructed hard costs like you have in their total yeah yeah so i almost forgot my question sorry that's theater tonight um so i want to go back and for a second i'm going to correct um that director anthony occurred to me it's the one it's 1.01 billion not 1.1 billion so just be correct although it's still a very big differential um so i think every one of us wants to be able to tell the community this will never ever happen again but i don't think that we yet have the data because i don't have a clear understanding from this and um maybe that's the limitation of the scope of the audit but i don't have a clear understanding of how i would tell my mom or my next door neighbor what this difference is the the components of it so if it's if it's not 180 million dollars in cost estimation differences then what is it and how are we going to get to that and i guess this question i talked to claire about this earlier i don't know i posed first question to claire um i talked to clara the other day at the audit committee to ask that question is so if this is just one piece what are the other pieces because i don't think we can tell the community this is never going to happen again if we still can't explain the delta between 790 and 1.01 okay so can i ask i guess i want to like how do we get how do we get to that answer do we need to like phase two of the audit because i thought this was what we were going to get tonight but i'm still not finding the answer to tell my mom my next-door neighbor we might need to put some thought into that but because i think there's more than one way to tackle that question because it's very nuanced it seems very simple but it's actually very known so i'll go back let's let's say we talk about the document that we saw of april of last year that had that range and if you're going to measure against something that's pre-bond you need to pick a number in there if you will so let's say for this just for the sake of argument we picked the high end of the range which is the most conservative that's over a billion dollars that'd be your answer right there done it was estimating but that's not really yeah you probably would pick something in the middle so if we pick the middle and one to measure against that it would be some it would be cost estimating some would be additional scope some would be just more escalation than anyone really anticipated at that point in time and some other factors that are all they're not mutually exclusive so there would have to be some assumptions in there no matter which way you took a look at it i think it's going to be very difficult to go out for the next bond unless we can explain it and sometimes a very complex project needs to be distilled down into something that voters can understand because that is the question we're going to be asked and i say if if this just tells part of the story then we need to figure out how we get the other story and then to take that complex answer and make it understandable because otherwise i i think there will be the continuing question of why is there that the difference between 1.01 billion and seven and what the voters approved and i do think the board did the right thing by um not reducing the ed specs and making them less of what we told the community but i also think we need to i mean but we told the community they're going to get those schools which is the important thing that i think we're delivering but we're delivering them for a lot more money and that question hasn't been answered um so i
03h 05m 00s
going forward i think we need to answer that in order to be able to get to director moore's um how do we have this never happen again because if there's all these components we need to tease out them disaggregate the components and tackle them one by one i can can i just piggyback on that for one second i'm almost done and then um just two questions did you interview any former osm staff it looks like it's just current no we did not have access to them okay and then um there's a statement in here that said and this is one of the components but that we 70 of the school capital project costs were supported by underlining independent professional estimates what would be best practice i mean what should we as a board expect to director moore's question is like is 85 percent like about what you get or is it should 100 you know 100 of it should be documented we got 70. what what should we what what going forward what should we insist upon as the standard well if you're the 70 percent relates to the hard cost of a project so if you're talking about a project you would go out for a professional cost estimator and so you would expect that full amount to be supported so 100 sure for your 150 million for capital projects for the improvement you would want all of that supported and there looks like there was data there it wasn't available all available to us during during our audit for the program-wide costs those aren't going to have a professional estimator can't come in and say this is the number because it's a range how how you're staffing it for your specific project what do you expect contingency to be there might be some market you could do on that but for the program wide cost is a little bit different so you wouldn't have a professional cost estimator come in and and say 100 of those costs are accurate um so part of what i wanted to pay you back on with you julia is just the um wanting to dig deeper into those other discrete elements of cost overruns and i think i think this is work that's in the works because i've i've made this request a couple of times but so i appreciate dan what you're saying about we can't put an exact number on you know the double whammy of insufficiently conservative estimates and extraordinarily high escalation we can i mean is it 100 million or what but those other elements are things that are actually we probably can put a number on and we still have the ability to control to some degree so scope additions schedule changes you know how we do our contracting relative to conditions of the labor market changes to the ed specs design and permitting requirements i mean some of those things we still have an opportunity to influence so i would like to see how do each each of those things line up in terms of all of those other additional costs because because we are going to have to make a pitch for subsequent bonds i mean my commitment as a parent volunteer is we have 30 years of investment to make in our schools and i believe the reason that this community passed the 2017 bond is because the 2012 bond was delivered on time and on budget with strong management and that's the only way we're going to be able to do it is if we earn and maintain the voters stress so we're in the hole here but the more we can show that we're establishing best practices and that we have figured out what all the constituent parts are of this problem um that's how we move forward and i i'm not convinced that we have done everything we can do to figure out where all these costs are and that we can't keep improving on on chipping away at them yeah i think that's fair and and osm is is still in the process of doing a lot of things the osm spends a lot of time making sure that the designs are very efficient doing uh structured value engineering exercises getting pee reviews from other engineers also having third party contractors come take a look at the work that's going on by our design teams and our contractors that are already on board a number of different things and we also have a professional cost estimate right now taking a look comparing our costs to other local district costs our costs to the market in a whole and actually comparing some of our current projects to our recent projects just so it can give us more data on where are these cost increases and whether what are they attributed to no matter what there will be some assumptions in there and i think it's just going to be clear that you
03h 10m 00s
know there are assumptions because we can't tease out everything to that level of detail but i think we can work it and say this is what is reasonable that that caused these changes in our opinion yeah thank you so um this happens to me in my job where i say well here's some data you can say x but you really can't say why because of in my case it's a lot because you know there's a survey data and there's a plus or minus so you can't say that something significantly changed even though the number is different so i tell people you know it's not valid to say that they get the numbers they're going to say whatever they need to to get the grant money i mean right and in your case we're asking questions and you're going to say well we can't say that and there's really good reasons why you can't say that as professionals as as a non-professional i'm going to look and say well roughly 100 million of the gap is because it got low bald for no good reason no there no rationale for that and we can speculate about what the reasons might have been but it's pure speculation and we don't know specifically who was engaged in that except to save previous leadership uh we can say a number of things that director moore spelled out in terms of three different groups looked at it and did not ask the questions and yet that isn't really unfortunately it seems to be comparable to what the process that other districts go go through and then we can say well beyond that 100 million the the escalation was it's crazy right now um we've valued engineered like crazy and it's still costing more than those in those initial estimates that that were actually you know re reasonably good estimates in terms of of following what was going on um so i you know i think we can roughly split the difference that way and say it's complicated a lot of that extra 100 million or so is due to escalation some of it may be to some increases in the ed specs but i i would guess that that's a fairly small portion of it but some of it is a change in um requirements from the city probably not a huge amount but yeah you know not in millionaire millionaire pretty soon you're talking really yeah and some of it is you actually dig into a project and you go the void under the madison gym or whatever you find stuff and there's no way you can reasonably anticipate it because it's very site-specific so i mean i think that's as close as we can get to the story and it's it explains much but it also there's going to be some questions that aren't going to be answered i think it's a story that needs to be linked or anchored to yeah the audit recommend the audit findings yes as much as possible whether this is just phase one the other piece as well because um i think that's an important piece of independent credibility i i think you had a good narrative going there it just needs yeah needs to be linked back to so that narrative plus data um all the processes we're doing now that dan alluded to a number of them and a number of them are in your report and step three is your next phase confirmation that we're actually doing those and they are making a difference because you have a continuing audit function yes yeah so we didn't were we not having an auditing function during this time span no it wasn't performed what was it yes yes yeah they followed different standards the consulting services standards but um yes for the you had four other audits for the 2012 bond so i don't i don't know they're all their scopes as far as i know there was no auditing function related
03h 15m 00s
to the development of the 2017 there was no independent outside voice that looked at those numbers and said yay or nay or um okay no none that i know of and that's where we come back around to the bac right now it's not the bac i'm gonna i'm gonna thank um so so i'm a little calmer now than i was 10 minutes ago so sorry um um i i take a little i mean for whatever it's worth i take a little personal comfort in the fact that a lot of the people who raised the red flags way back when that were not paid attention to are now running the show so thank you for your service um anyway um okay so thank you thank you for the audit um and uh i'm sure we'll be talking more okay thank you thank you thank you thank you okay um next item enter district transfers last week the board received a report on inter-district transfers and now ready to vote the board will now consider resolution number 5869 2019-20 standard inter-district student transfers do i have a motion and a second on resolution number five eight six seconds director bailey moves director constance seconds deduction of resolution 5869 ms houston is running public comments okay is there any board discussion so i would just note that um we all received a public comment in our email um so i did at um it just got sent through but it came through at 1052 from natalie hello okay yes um so just want to flag that is there um i i did not see that is there anything that we ought to be concerned about and any anything that uh would you like me just to summarize thank you um it relates to um somebody else see this so they can summarize it sorry it's longer okay unless pps is going to offer gifted programming for students to rate and level least they can do is allow them to escape it's bad enough that access is now capped but there's no gifted high school options in portland rather than expand opportunity that there's obstacles and the request is for pps to open the inner district transfer options did i summarize i i that and basically the opinion that we're going backwards in terms of math and science um by in terms of the requirements for say freshman science feels like a do-over rather than students being able to work at their rate and level i'm saying that's what's expressed so this is a comment asking for the ability to do inter-district transfer yeah transferring for talented and gifted because of the lack of rate and level okay options i do have what i just asked one question that i didn't ask last week and that this is judy but what how do we define as as space is available is that a like 90 of building utilization because i see um that is being potentially a subjective but maybe it's not maybe it's a good evening it is a subjective measure certainly not as scientific as we'd like it to be one of the reasons that we do inner district transfer processes after we handle all of our pps lottery and the majority of our pps petitions is we know whether we've been able to through working with principals accommodate pps students before we can know if there's going to be space
03h 20m 00s
for non-resident students but essentially we work with principals by grade level to see if there's space in that grade level for additional students so for example we wouldn't allow students into franklin which is over 1900 or lincoln that's full i mean is that the case i mean when they're over their capacity the answer is no if we're not allowing um resident students to transfer in we're definitely not allowing non-resident students to transfer it thanks that's not that subjective okay any other discussion the board will now vote on resolution number five eight six nine all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes i'll oppose say no any abstentions resolution number five eight six nine is approved by a vote of seven to zero uh with uh yeah okay seven to zero um okay next item um second reading and adoption compulsory enrollment age and grade level at entrance um the board held a first reading of the proposed policy revision at the february 26 2019 meeting i'd like to ask director brim edwards chair of the policy and governance committee to provide a brief background on the subject thank you chairmoore this is a policy revision that was brought to us at the crest at the request of the enrollment and transfer department the objective of changing the policy is to be able to provide greater clarity and guidance to schools and to have more consistency consistent practice across our schools in relation to age at grade level entrance and this is something that we set calendar the calendar day for admission for preschool pre-kindergarten and kindergarten the date is september 1st and we had a several committee meetings about this i want to thank director anthony he um there was a community discussion i think and some input and questions about the policy relating to this most of them um revolved around the age of industry of kindergarten because apparently um that is the topic of the discussion of whether we're getting too many kids who are starting early as four-year-olds um or the number of students that are being held back and actually um we got i have some very useful data and i think this is probably on the district website about what age our students start kindergarten and actually the vast majority 94.6 percent start sort of right right on track i think the assumption was a lot of kids are starting early or being held back but the reality is the vast majority are starting right when they should so um that was i think good information to dispel i think what might have been some community sort of myth building about what's happening we recommended that out of committee on a 4-0 vote and hope that the board will approve it this evening so that the enrollment transfer office can start using it immediately so when we do get a built out systems department maybe that's a question that we can ask is early kindergarten enrollees what's their success moving forward if that's a that's a concern it's interesting there's only 22 of them out of um almost 4 000. let's start at four okay so that's so you said 90 because um the there's 188 that start at six oh okay so most most of the kids are overs versus enders totally breaks down on socioeconomic lines if you look at those schools you don't have any child care you're going to send your kid to kindergarten right you want to keep them right it still may be worth it okay and there is a gender difference by the way okay um okay the board will now consider resolution number 5870 amendment amendment of age at entrance policy 4.10.020 and rescission of early school entrance policy zero point zero three two do i have a motion and a second on
03h 25m 00s
resolution number five eight seven zero second um director of sponsor brown moves director bailey seconds the adoption of resolution five eight seven is there any public comment okay is there any board discussion okay the board will now vote on resolution 5870 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed say no any abstentions resolution 5870 is approved by a vote of seven to zero okay uh first readings and information um i'd like to ask director brim edwards uh chair of the board's policy and governance committee to introduce the first readings of or the first reading of the revised public contracting rules i know this is the one that everybody's been waiting for all night actually this started in policy and governance and then moved to the audit committee and essentially um in your board packets there is a very detailed redline document that relates to the public contracting rules and it seems somewhat odd that we'd be approving this but the pul but we treat them like policy so there'll be a first first and second reading and i'm going to ask emily courtney come and give just a very brief summary um these have been in the works since 2018 and some of the changes are to align with uh statutory changes and right maybe just the highlights sure so um our last revision of the public contracting rules was in march 2016 and we do need to revise them periodically in part to keep up with our state statutes and them and the attorney general model rules of which our our rules are based on so there have been a number of changes since then including the requirement that when we spend federal money we adhere to the federal procurement rules we've been doing that since we were required to on july 1st of 2018 but those rules are not reflected in our public contracting manual so that's one of the big things that we need to do we also have some new additional model rule changes that we're incorporating and then we're doing some cleanup because there's always some errors or last time we removed a rule there's a cross reference in there that we didn't catch so a few things like that and then we're doing a couple of new substantive things some amendments to the personal services direct negotiation rules that would allow direct negotiation in a few unique circumstances one is with interim staff or temporary staffing services just because those are usually urgent staffing scenarios where we can't afford the time for a competitive process if we could we could probably do a competitive hiring in the same time period and oftentimes there's a need for individuals to fill that role with a very specific skill set another is provision of therapeutic placements for students on ieps those are also very unique to the students needs and not well suited to competition and then as well contracts for legal services legal services often need immediate attention and there require lawyers with a very specific skill set and specific expertise so those are the new personal service rules that we're recommending we are also recommending some modifications to the special class procurements those are rules that allow us to procure directly certain services instead of using a standard competitive process so one of one of the new roles we're recommending is for specialized assistive equipment for students usually that's purchased through columbia regional but we're talking about orthopedic equipment equipment for students who are hearing or vision impaired and those are again very specific needs often customized not well suited to a competitive process and then finally service repair or maintenance services for products under warranty usually if you don't go with a service provider you're going to breach your warranty and then other times there's a proprietary system where you really have to use the authorized dealer or manufacturer so those are kind of variations on a sole source scenario but by creating specific special class procurements we avoid the sole source paperwork and justification process finally we're well there's two more things we're recommending removal of the informal rfp process for division 48 that's architecture engineering and related services the informal rfp is so much like a formal rfp that we're suggesting we just
03h 30m 00s
go with formal so any work over a hundred thousand will just do a formal rfp and then we are recommending removal of an amendment cap that we imposed in 2016 and that is fairly unique to pps that cap provided that unless certain circumstances were met we couldn't amend above 125 of cumulative contract value i'm recommending that we remove that for our services construction architecture engineering and related services largely because of our old buildings there are so many unforeseen circumstances that so often our contracts do need to be amended above 125 what we're suggesting and this was a audit committee suggestion is that we include a reporting requirement to the board not an approval process but a reporting requirement where when we go above that 125 threshold we will immediately report at the next meeting the list of the contracts that did that and then again if they go above 150 percent of original value so that is the very quick and dirty summary of these changes i i admit i haven't read the proposed changes but thank you for sending that out but now i have some areas i can at least drill down into so and one of the things i would ask myself as i would look at the personal service contract changes for say legal services are there some hoops to jump through to you have to you have to meet these three conditions before you can skip the competitive process for those so with legal services those are already directly procured without a competitive process in almost every case and we rely on a more general direct negotiation exception that requires um the hoop and processes requires a short write-up about justifying why it fits as this unique and specialized services service that is not conducive to competition so what we're doing here is just making an exception that recognizes our reality and and reduces some of that paperwork it's not going to change the way that we are currently procuring legal services so i'm thinking back to when we had the same main service provider for legal for a long time and that never really got audited in that sense i'm just is are the uh is this piece of things subject to some kind of audit so maybe i can and try for an answer on that um one of the things these are really the procurement rules and i think um there's a separate body of work and that's around sort of oversight and approval so this is really sort of the inputs and i think we've got a really good pro a strong process um that when it's been looked at that the sort of input process is very strong is where um we tend to have sort of inconsistencies is either board oversight or the contract manager not creating strong metrics or you know the board not um asking questions or it so it's not on the front end which these are is am i getting this right yeah that's right these rules are concerned with the procurement process and not how contracts are managed so we're really looking at with legal services contracts that doing an rfp when you have an urgent legal issue is not really a viable way to procure those services so the real issue with legal services is then how do we manage those contracts and make sure that they're performing as required and i know liz has done a lot of work on that and i if she were here tonight i know she would speak in support of this change as she has in committees as well so i guess what i'm looking at i'm gonna give a silly example of if we kept buying these from the same provider for years through some kind of clause that didn't allow for a com or allowed us to not to use a competitive bid and and after 15 years of doing that the well office depot hires you as their you know we want to avoid that kind of thing happening so that's that's what i'm asking about
03h 35m 00s
that really gets again to the management piece i mean um well but it's also who decides that we're buying these right i'm sorry i didn't mean to implicate office depot um wonderful company i go there all the time um how we that's more on the front end of deciding who we go with and we want to make sure that there's no opportunity for any kind of coziness i know in the last two years that liz has definitely uh diversified our legal services a great deal by reaching out to a number of different providers can i speak in the microphone in more fitting um to help to help diversify our legal team outside the hill team we'll have 21 days after you read through it and if you have additional i mean if you have additional questions definitely let's put them in because those are good questions we want to answer i mean it's a very technical document but those are great questions you have 21 days it is actually a very clean red line and quite readable and do not be dismayed by the apparent volume it's it's pretty slim set of changes it came out of committee with a three to zero recommendation to prove it for a first read okay thank you thank you thank you uh the proposed policy uh amendments will be posted on the board website and the public comment period is 21 days with the last day to comment being may 6 2019. the board will hold the second reading of the policy at the may 14th meeting okay next item quarterly report whitehurst implementation plan i'm going to ask um stephanie soden chief of staff to provide the report good evening i was just trying to pull up my notes stephanie soden chief of staff i'm here today before you along with members of the implementation team to provide our fourth quarterly update to the board this is our progress on the implementation of the recommendations around student safety resulting from the whitehurst investigation so as you know last may you received that report and we've been working as a cross-functional team on a variety of strategies to achieve the 16 recommendations outlined in that report that you received last may and in general they're categorized into four groups around training for staff contractors volunteers anyone who's around our students incident tracking reporting and response protocols investigatory practices and outcomes and then strengthen laws and policies so today so we go through in our report that's posted we go through each of the 16 recommendations and where we are not yet finished but we have a timeline we have shared with you progress where we are as of today so i just wanted to briefly touch on a few areas and then open it up for questions if you have any um so training like i mentioned is a huge priority and it's since this came about it's been our number one priority so i just want to remind you that while you have a training matrix that explains different employee groups and the type and depth of training i just want to remind you all that all employees at pbs have to go through child abuse and sexual misconduct training every year so that's i don't know if that's indicated on that chart but we all go through really good training it's online it's required and it tells us not not only how to recognize and identify problem behavior but what to do who to report it to so you have a detailed matrix of different employee groups who have received the protocol training and incident
03h 40m 00s
incident response so that's the sexual incident response coordination and the adult sexual misconduct response asmr um and so right now you see certain groups haven't gone through that that's because we are not going to ask some groups to actually even go through that protocol training we know that every school building for example you'll see on there it doesn't have teachers going through there and chairmoor asked me about this today we don't expect teachers to go through that protocol training but we expect them to go to the training everyone goes through and know how to recognize and identify problem behavior and then report it to their school compliance officer which is most likely the principal or administrative staff at the building what's really enhanced our training i'm sorry do you have a question i just want to make sure i so the the training that we're talking about on this on the uh on this matrix yes um this is um this is focused on like administrative procedures to deal with any any reported or potential incidents you'll see there's full circ and asmr sorry to speak in acronyms and limited trainings for both of those and yes it's you received full training in both of those the entire board and senior leadership team did in december um that's more than we um then we've identified some employee groups to have to go through what they need to know is what to recognize how to identify it right and where it goes and then there's a lot of responsibility on who they send it to to follow up so this is the training for who they send it to yes okay but but everybody in the district who has direct contact with students in any capacity is going to get full training in what you're not supposed to do sexual arousal right yes um so we expect employees to go through that every year is that correct will we get it the online training yes yes we're going to be developing that okay um so adding to our capacity around training i just i don't know i think since the last time we were before you we have welcomed alex call he is our sexual incident response coordinator or circ coordinator which is kind of repetitive he reports to the office of student support services team and works directly with the threat assessment and rapid response teams under chief of school support services student support services brenda martinek so he is also building out the training they've also done some evaluations of how training have gone and they'll continue to revise how those get rolled out and we are currently working on training for contractors and volunteers so the next big item is incident tracking and reporting we put together in response to the recommendations an interim process but we have now selected origami risk software to be our ven our third party vendor to track and report all incidents so it'll be legal cases it will be cases that fall under this area liz large and mary kane are the leads on that we anticipate that to be online by the end of the fiscal year by june 30th and then training to follow that we are also related to software as we we're also talking to several vendors jonathan garcia and a chief technology officer don wolf are leading a team that's looking at software for to better link up our volunteer volunteer database in schools to our security team and other teams here so we've we've got an initial presentation on that we'll have more information for you at our next meeting on that our next briefing and then i would um say probably the last most prominent category we've been reporting on and working on is legislation in the at the state level um you got a pretty recent update on friday from courtney wessling our director of government relations in essence there were three bills there they've been combined into one senate bill 155 and it manages um it addresses the sexual conduct definition shorter ts pc timelines
03h 45m 00s
in alignment with every student succeeds act among other technical changes that are necessary and she is here if you have any questions about that or if you have questions about any other area just that there's an issue on here uh relative to the contract and those negotiations and discussions um get underway through interest-based bargaining week after next yes thank you yep or i guess next week no week after next yeah the 29. i do want to point out i'm sorry uh you have uh a different hard copy version we noticed this morning there was an error i'm sorry i've meant to mention this at the top on recommendation number 14 the administrative director directive okay it's been a long day administered the aed has been revised and and implemented so i think this is old language that we didn't catch when it hadn't yet been finished and completed great making progress so go ahead oh okay thank you i think mine is pretty quick i i did want to relay a concern i heard from a constituent today about issue number 15 requiring employees to check with the hr department before giving a reference for another employee it might be good to look at how other organizations handle that issue i don't know if we've done that or not i certainly understand the history and the need but will a negative answer stigmatize employees if we are in some sense outing past history to their colleagues if we have a so your question is does it stigmatize employees if you so if the hr department says no and it's to colleagues other teacher colleagues in the district as opposed to say a principle as a single point of contact right especially given the climate in which we are making these recommendations right this is a really challenging recommendation because there are multiple scenarios that we have to make a determination about what what position does the district want to take so we are working through a series of recommendations and thinking through what are the the uh intentions and the unintended consequences that might result uh from a policy um decision or approach that is applied in right one one approach is not necessarily going to apply to every single situation so do we restrict uh other teachers for example from uh speaking about colleagues or former colleagues and can we do that versus can we restrict references or other discussions or opinions by leaders in the district like principals this is something that other organizations do struggle with um mutual reference policies for example is something that the private sector and the public sector both struggle with yeah so we're we are looking at uh a series of options about how do we wrestle those questions to the ground great good thank you i think it does need probably need a nuanced approach yes but i agree that's a couple questions thanks for the update i assume on number two that new admins administrators when they join in august are just like there's some now cycle where as people join they automatically get the training so that if you weren't hurt when the training first started you you get it is there some process for that so my understanding is the the in-depth pro training that they administrators received this year will be ongoing at the um prior to school starting the administrative leadership week-long training that's the plan is to always have a part of that before school every
03h 50m 00s
administrator us just as a matter of practice this among other you know whole laundry list of things that every administrator needs to review and show evidence of completion for in addition we bring back our new principals and school leaders back a day early during the leadership institute week so they get a dedicated day to review some of these same expectations the training is also designed not to have a single point of failure in any building right so we have a school compliance officer as well as administrators trained so hopefully there's more than one human being in each building who understands this so that it is not um entirely reliant on the training there's some carryover with personnel carry over but in general sounds like when school starts a new administrator will have gone through this um then on number nine i think maybe i either have a trailing copy but it's talking about the improved sexual conduct prevention and identification training provided to pbs students and it says that contract is currently under negotiation for student-to-student training in all schools through the 2018-19 school year is that that's is that under brenda martinex that was brenda martinez yes so do we do we have a contract for the school year no so that's in it i apologize i don't have the specific information about that contract negotiation my understanding it was paused and i don't have information now as to why that it was paused but i can we can we can get back to you with that information right it'd just be good because it looks like it's either old data or right it needs to be updated thank you let us ask brenda and get back to you all on that thank you then one of the timeline or two timeline questions on number eight um maybe you covered this and i missed it but um why did the deadline uh for um sexual conduct prevention identification training for volunteers and contractors slip um was originally supposed to be completed by 12 31 18 now it's 8 28. so we we created the um we have in place now of a volunteer training program that's on the website and i think we've talked about that before the it were what we didn't recognize was how difficult it would be to capture the number of contractors and whether and how they are if they are interacting with students so we have i think when we we asked that to collate the data it was 15 000 contracts and so from that we've been trying to work with security services um to to help us identify if we can figure out who what persons are working under those contracts and it's proved proven more difficult than we had anticipated we're still on it and we are looking for that contractor side versus if you're like a volunteer going into like a smart reader currently currently the volunteers we have on the volunteer website uh the on the the trainings um what we would love to do is flesh that out and i think in in terms of developing something more robust but that's what we have for them now we have all volunteers sign um when they are when they're coming in to to volunteer and they have to go through the the um security services for a background check they have to fill out this paper that says yes i have i'm sorry yes i have um i have gone through the training i have you know they've that they sign off that they have done so we'd like something a little bit more um in the future but we are not there yet so the slippage isn't necessarily volunteers this is other piece of contractors it's the contracting piece and we are we are identifying that and we are you know but we have to get it's more difficult as i said than than we had anticipated at first because uh contracts identify whether or not somebody's going to be working with students or not that's very clear in our contracts we uh probably unwisely made some assumptions about how easy it would be to pull that information uh and therefore be able to distinguish which contractors we needed to um take on the requirement for training which contracts we didn't we didn't understand that the numbers were in the tens of thousands and then my last question um this is maybe a carol question or just sharon you can answer it it relates to the professional conduct policy yes
03h 55m 00s
so that is um now part of the ibb correct and looking at the schedule that you know starts and is over looks like it goes through june we have dates beginning in april 29th and i think our last schedule date right now is june 4th and we're looking for additional dates in the month of may as well so just something to think about in different there's the there's the contract provisions and then the policy um which while they relate to some similar concepts they're different things that to front load maybe the policy because i'm just thinking um there's a lot of history with this board and that um if it doesn't come out whatever the recommendations or potential policies for the for the board to consider doesn't come out of committee till mid-june then we potentially will have a whole new board and it seems like um to think through how to make sure that those at least that gets fronts loaded in the process so they can come to the board and be considered by the board that probably has the most expertise just instead of having it go into july and then all of a sudden you have a whole new group of well not a whole new group but you know new people on the board who haven't had that whole history right so you're identifying uh whether we can move some of that on faster in the ivb process uh than waiting until uh june so that it is front in front of the well-informed current school board yes and we can certainly um uh bring that to our negotiating team absolutely i mean technically um it's not like what come may come out our suggestions for the board since the purview of policy changes a board um prerogative i have to change it but just seems like if you have those then you can get it into our policy process and our 21 days and every you know if there are substance substantial changes that we might have to do this 21 days and again we don't want to lose all the collective wisdom that we have at the board yes the adoption process and the authority is different for those two different items that is correct yes offers different opportunities any other questions okay thank you thank you oh my god you're right on time okay next item is the business agenda the board will now vote on the remainder of its business agenda having already voted on resolutions five eight six nine and five eight seven zero miss houston are there any changes okay do i have a motion and a second to adopt the business agenda so moved uh director constant moons moves and director especially around seconds the adoption the business agenda is there any public comment okay is there any board discussion okay the board will now vote on the business agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes i'll oppose say no any abstentions the business agenda is approved by a vote of seven to zero um and the next item is board committee and conference reports do we have any me we have you want to do a brief synopsis of the legislative and governance committee basically was just a recap of uh legislative priorities including what they we just referred to in the context of whitehurst and also um discussions around you know just really updates on the revenue right stuff right things are moving very fast lots of lots of movement and we're now in the second half of the legislative session so things are going to be speeding up so i can provide a maybe an update on the the revenue package for schools it was going to be up they rolled out a first version last thursday this is the student success committee revenue committee and um they have a board meeting tomorrow night and then or a committee meeting tomorrow night and then then on thursday they're expecting testimony and shortly thereafter it will roll out to the um respective floors so it should be moving relatively quickly and it'll be a billion dollar a year plus a year
04h 00m 00s
package or two billion dollars and will be married with the investments that the committee on student success has recommended so all bundled up okay is there any other business we are ending a tiny bit early um i think it's time to talk about stuff for at least another 20 20 minutes you know we got we got at least 12 minutes more before we're supposed to adjourn i just have a quick staff announcement for those that didn't get the early announcement uh staff you're excused we're canceling our leadership team meeting in the morning i appreciate your endurance on this yet another 14-hour day and working through the weekend the critical mass of exhaustion was pretty apparent in the room okay good night okay the next meeting in the board will be a work session on april 23 2019 this meeting is adjourned

Sources

PPS Board of Education, Archive 2018-2019, https://www.pps.net/Page/14001 (accessed: 2022-03-24T00:57:50.174924Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)

2019-04-15 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

Materials

Minutes

Transcripts

Event 1: Regular Meeting of the Board of Education - April 15, 2019

Sources