2020-04-21 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2020-04-21
Time	18:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Regular Meeting of Board of Education - April 21, 2020

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Haitian report meeting of the Board of Education I mean first 2020 it's all to order for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted as required by state law this meeting is being streamed live on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website or replay times this meeting it's also being streamed live on our PPS TV services website welcome to our viewing audience we're happy that we found a way to go match video with audio tonight we're also glad that we have a way to incorporate real-time public testimony this evening we will just be addressing now our business agenda and receiving a second briefing on the work underway in response to the Cova 19 pandemic thank you very much at this time the board will book the business agenda board members are there any items you would like to pull for discussion miss Bradshaw are there any changes to the business agenda no madam chair yes sorry I was on mute is there an item to pull from the business agenda no but I just have a question but if I could just ask it now if then we could just do it all together okay why don't we have a motion and put it on the table and then we'll have discussion so moved [Music] director Bailey moves and second I think director bream Edwards seconds the adoption of his agenda is there any board discussion ah Julia so I just had a question on the Roosevelts of Windows its vibration and it hurts or maybe Dan yeah today I don't know it uh looks like danceOn hi hi Dan I thought the infamous Julie I had a question about that as well and I didn't see the staff response so just before our meeting shortly before a meeting otherwise I would have forward it to everyone but damn that was really useful information and you provide the general background and Julie I see if you have additional questions I can just ask my question because I thought I the memo was really clear thank you for providing that Dan so my only question is on something like this where we are doing an advanced authorization it looks like based on the materials that the low bidder was determined to be responsive if in a situation like this it turns out that you're not if you have advanced authorization and we don't we aren't able to reach an agreement with them on a contract do you come back to the board or is this general yeah good question I believe yes he would come back to the board if that was the scenario that's pretty rare of course that that case but I think in this particular instance yes that's exactly what we would need to do is practice okay great thank you and appreciate the background information and looks like the district's gonna be able to get some work done in advance yeah this this is great to see because I know those temperature issues were really a huge huge for our Roosevelt staff and students and that this is coming from the Roosevelt project budget and we're able to still get that done is good news correct all right the board will now vote on resolution six zero nine 5 through 6 zero what excuse me six one zero zero and the business agenda all in favor please indicate my yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no any abstentions the business agenda is approved by a vote of 7 to 0 with student representative lateral voting yes all right before we begin public comment I would like to review our guidelines for public comment the board thanks the community for taking the time to virtually attend our 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
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reflections and concerns our responsibility as a board is to actively listen or remember it board members in the superintendent will not respond to comments or questions during public comment but our board office will follow up on board related issues raised during public testimony guidelines for public input emphasize respect and consideration of others we request that complaints about individual employees be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter if you have additional materials or items you would like to provide to the board or superintendent we ask that you email them if you're watching the board meeting via the live stream while waiting please make sure that you mute prior to your turn to speak if you leave it on it will create feedback and you will be muted by the meeting administrator and then we'll come back to you please make sure when you begin your comments that you clearly state your name and spell your last name for the record you have three minutes to speak you will hear a sound after three minutes which means it's time to conclude your comments we appreciate your input and thank you for your cooperation miss Bradshaw do we have anyone signed up for public comment yes we have Andersen and the voice all right I am your lawyer now open to speak I thank you this is Anderson Dubois spelled a nd er Fon and Dubois GU Appleby y su I'm the youth read Services Manager for week I am a five year staff member of alumni student of reap as well and now I have the pleasure of partnering up with the PBS district working with Lisa Hawking's Beach Elementary I'm just a little bit about our organization a non-profit start in 2001 you guys might be familiar with it already we currently only serve Beach Elementary in the programs that we might arise on disciplinary issues within the school to provide any support that the school might need and that the students might need in order to the stronger community of leaders and we're all about youth voice and that's also why we have solutions as a program in many of our schools that we serve which is all day support service where we check in with students and then after school class curriculum where we partner with some of the stun schools that we run with so specifically a beach we partner with sei at beach we have 2.5 FTE 3 staff members that are there two full-time that support the students checking in and providing advocacy for the students and what is great as a community partner being there full-time they're able to provide a special I as we have unique relationships with students and with teachers as we see everything that goes you can help bring in suggestions and ideas from the community and from the voices of students to provide support for the school and I'm sure Lisa will be able to speak a little bit more on that but being able to have some of these unique conversations and the scope of work that we do in terms of providing supports back discipline in our reflections program it allows some of the staff to be freed up especially at Boise to be able to focus in on the roles that they have so for example I actually was just talking to the PE teacher I got a video from him of the testimony stating that he's able to focus less on discipline within his class and out in the hallways she gets pulled out to sort of handle some of those things as I staff rebut come in and hearing as well as other staff a focus on the role of more which allows
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us to bring even more structure more supports for the teachers and their students were able to come alongside any tables that we behave music and next Lisa can speak girls of Warren towards our experience would by Andersen I think that noise that we're all unfamiliar with just indicated that you're three minutes for testimony are up but I want to thank you very much the role that replays awesome thank you thank you so much take care yeah do we have any further comment yes we have Lisa Hawkins good evening my name is Lisa Hawking my last name is spelled H a w ki ng I'm appreciative of this opportunity to provide public comment about our partnership this week a quick that may thank you to area assistant superintendent Keeley Simpson I'm extremely grateful for our vision and advocacy for wreaths to begin working with a frustrating because the benefits to so many of our other grade students especially our students with more complex views and also many of our students of color are great the positive impacts from our experiences ranged from the individual child level classroom level individual families and families overall individual staff our whole staff and also to our larger school community while there are so many important stories I'll share about one boy who represents all levels he's gone from someone who despite many best efforts was demonstrating compliance at best and disruptive and unsafe unsafe behavior often to someone who giggles who is willing to distract himself from his own frustration by doing a relevant job until he can regulate himself who now has a face for crafting which he loves he feel safe sharing his enjoyment of crafting appears this is a child who was regularly shut down in anger and frustration for several months ago his family was defensive and avoiding support through trust and relationship building collaboration with the classroom teacher and specialist that included a week-long whole classroom culture reset at reap staff and our beach counselor school climate coach and teachers orchestrated together program elements such as elevate which is an in-school alternative suspension collaboration with parents problem-solving with other students reap and each staff together are helping this child find his ability to advocate for himself positive friendship and to project a different story into a larger school community they feel more successful and to be ready to learn and go at school and his parents are partners while his teachers including myself continue to learn a lot we also helps us grow as a larger staff in addition to individual level meetings we meet regularly as a leap school leadership team to discuss what's working what's not and ways to bring more culturally responsive practices forward to our larger staff a few words from our teacher of thirty-one fourth graders read offers our student support that is both gentle and firm this also helps my students work on social-emotional skills that suddenly help with academics by copying a poem that talks about self-love reaps community support gives our students an opportunity to build a positive relationship with our school any really grateful intentional way have fewer issues with attendance especially given the way the schools are in this year we know that our students new staff would really benefit from reap support as we begin next August it would be incredible if a contract renewal were possible this spring we'd be able to plan and strategize together for next year and start the school year I think I can say with certainty stronger than ever so with that thank you for hearing my testimony thank you thank you so much miss Hawking Miss Bradshaw do we have any other public comment Mathison okay thank you so much thank you and for those who are wondering mr. reasoner we can see you on the screen and I think the public can't delete a mobile website at www.allaboutdoors.com
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you're helpful smiling presents they're ok Maxine's our student representative would you like to provide a brief report tonight definitely wasn't aware that I was providing a report but I can sure talk for a few minutes about just like what's going on I I think even if you just want to share about your experience as a student and in virtual learning land it would be we'd all be anxious to hear about it yeah sure so as for DSD stuff we're shifting our focus obviously because we can't do our in-person meetings or summit or any of that stuff so we're shifting to virtual recruiting and focusing our efforts on just meeting with students virtually to support their you know questions about kovat we had a great meeting with Craig and some other people last was that last week I don't know the day is just I don't know what they are anymore so it's kind of hard and that was really great asked for like being a student and virtual learning land I think my experience is a little bit different because I'm a senior so I did not have as many classes this year and a lot of my classes were more in-person stuff like ceramics and weight training so like I'm sad I don't get to do those things anymore but my teachers have been really great and providing workouts for us to do for weight training and being able to like still do research on ceramic pottery stuff which is fun and I'm still going to class although it is at 9:00 a.m. which is kind of hard for me to wake up that early and like actually get out of bed but I'm still doing it and I'm still trying to be involved in doing all of my district work then still going to a lot of meetings and you know talking to people I had a really great opportunity to be a part of the postcards from the next series that OPP is doing with Elizabeth Miller and that air today which was really cool I hadn't been on the radio before and now I have been so that was cool as for just like other student stuff obviously I'm still sad that like all this is going on but and it's weird that it's been a month that we've been out of school but I'm just still glad that FaceTime exists and that I'm able to still like you know talk my friends on the phone and then everyone is staying connected but I miss everyone a lot and it's weird that concludes my report thank you so much and we'll send out a link to it we'll make sure everybody gets a link to that post cards from the pandemic on OPB because you were really amazing and it's it's a really beautiful little series and little piece that you were in so you were great vaccine thanks Amy all right superintendent Guerrero welcome actually can I ask maxine a question horse I do it hey do we have a is there a new representative for next year that's been selected that is still being worked out we're still still in the process of that stuff all right soon all right thank you yeah all right super good evening directors staff and audience because really the main entree tonight is a shame to the whole board by the administration so we're looking forward to letting you know now for our last conversation as a whole board and I appreciate that directors have many of you set aside some time for some ongoing briefings as well say a few things before we jumped into that content the first is you know public school districts don't operate in the back we definitely want to appreciate our appreciation for all of those frontline workers at this time we see here some community pictures wanting to call out the commendable work of the heroes that are doctors nurses EMTs firefighters police officers etc we're gonna do a virtual pots and pans at 7:00 p.m. but
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since we're here in this meeting wanted to make sure you let them know that in this Portland ecosystem of the way they're serving our community is something that is very impactful and we we appreciate as we coming up doing the work that you know you're responsible for - so thank you to all of our frontline workers for your dedication during this time I also want to appreciate our board manager is a pal or technology department or multimedia services Thank You Terry all of us are having to make adjustments in our way of work so thank you board for leading the way in experimenting with new technology platforms our attempt is to try to continually find ways to make the business of the district accessible to the public and look forward to your feedback at the end of the meeting about how this platform is working for us so you're going to hear this evening our cabinet members and leaders sort of cycle through a variety of topics and work strands that they have worked very diligently and purposefully to stay on top of and I just want to call that upfront that there's a few guiding principles with which we've been trying to observe in this process one of course to make sure that we're providing those essential services to students and families that we in fact maintain continuous learning opportunities for our students we're going to hear a lot more about that tonight and then as importantly and they appreciated student representative laterals comment the importance of doing our best to encourage and maintain connections between students their teachers and other school personnel while the campuses are closed we don't want to lose that notion of school community and if you've been following some of the social media there's many examples of how our educators our Canyon kids awful ways of maintenance of school community so thank you to all those folks for that work and then I want to mention something that a little bit disconnected or directly unrelated to this pandemic it's a reminder that there is still this other work occurring in the school district and I'm referring to things like our school modernization efforts so even as construction and the workers take their own precautions we we maintain steadfast our mission to stay on track with those projects a not unrelated board members heard recently that and thank you to our deputy superintendent claire hertz and her finance team and counsel we had some bumps analysts recently and as we carefully monitor those sales we actually found a really critical time window that proved economically advantageous and I think just another example of how the voters and our supportive public is continuing to visibly see the construction but also us work diligently to be good public stewards of resources and in fact find opportunities to leverage additional funds so we're pleased with that we know that those dollars will continue to support capital improvements I want to remind people it's not just about these fabulous high schools it's about the health safety and school security upgrades across so many of our campuses much of that now due to some deferred maintenance over the years that were able to pay attention to during this closure and so that work continues so I just wanted to sort of put a plug in there too commercial because we have some hard-working staff and construction companies we're doing work and our schools in a way that maybe isn't visible in some of the other work that I'm going to talk about so and then finally I'll just mention before we jump into to our briefing that we're not operating in a vacuum here we're continuing to stay in constant contact not just with our own essential services staff or staff providing many of those supports our kovat task force to TVs to me on a daily basis and often through the weekends we are continuing to
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collaborate with our neighboring school districts here in Multnomah kna and we're staying in close contact with our peers around the state as well as the Department of Education and member districts of the council great city schools what's clear is that many of the themes that we're going to be talking about tonight are similar challenges and opportunities some would say that other large urban school districts are also facing so it's awful to know that we're not alone in this effort and that everybody is trying to find a thoughtful path forward so I'll pause there because I think we're gonna focus most of most of tonight's agenda on providing the board with a second briefing thank you who's up next well I am that's the pause and I'm just going to do an intro here because the directors are going to experience or two our last whole board meeting is a cast of characters providing a high level of summary information and description we're going to ask to get through the presentation there's a lot of detail and certainly will be interested in all of your questions if you want some clarification of course don't hesitate to stop us but we're also prepared to take your questions the end as well so just to review where we are we prepared a slide deck we shared with board members in advance our cabinet members have some other notes too that they're gonna want to cover just to lay some context for where we are especially cream from or less meeting if you recall March was an interesting month started with March 8th Governor Brown declared her emergency order that there was a public health threat by this novell infectious coronavirus a few days later on March 12th Governor Brown or all schools to close we thought at the time temporarily in an effort to continue to stop the spread of the virus and then on March 17th Governor Brown issued an executive one 20-0 ate it physically close all public school campuses through April 28 and it asks districts to think about how to continue providing a supplemental level of education but as you know things have have continued to progress beyond the initial direction to consider operation of essential services including nutrition services for instance the executive order also laid out some requirements that eliezer school districts would need to observe in order to continue to receive their ongoing state funding things like making sure that our employees already open sated and then that brings us to some of the dates on this slide that was what we did then and now we're coming back to the board and there's a few other milestones that we've reached I think to review through the public on April 8th Governor Brown announced that our students wouldn't be returning to campus this academic school year and with that came a bunch of guidance speaking to a move or an evolution and beyond supplemental educational services knowing that our campuses were now going to be closed to shift to reimagine and retool to a distance learning for all well and so our teaching and learning and many of our staff in collaboration with labor partners got to work about how Portland Public Schools would implement this guidance of distance learning for all which we've named PPS HD and you're going to hear about that in more detail and more importantly however launch has as has gone initially on that same date we also received guidance in an area that has a lot of our seniors understandably anxious as well as our educators who want to make sure post-secondary plans can proceed undisrupted and that's graduation pathways on a 2020 let me stop here for a second because I want staff to start to insert themselves
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into this conversation deputy superintendent dr. Cuellar and a regional suit for high schools Joe la Fontaine I'd like them to give you sort of the highlights of that graduation pathways 2020 guidance because it's absolutely critical to understand that because it shapes how we are now implementing supports for 12th graders so great Thank You superintendent and good eating board it's great to see all of you and just to I wanted to just backtrack a little bit I thought having a conversation with Maxine was was timely because Maxine is experiencing what all almost all of our students are experiencing during this time especially our seniors um one of the things before we actually get into the details of the graduation pathways 2020 which is released by the Eau de several weeks ago is specific to around our our focus on our seniors specific to the wraparound supports that we are that we have to make sure that we are providing them at all points in time it's really important that even in the guidance the OD e has stated and also our our own stance here in PPS is you know making sure that we are you know mitigating all the negative consequences that have come you know from this time of lost learning and how we are focusing our attention and supporting all of our students especially our seniors this is a very very important year for our 12th graders I had an opportunity to talk with a lot of our seniors last week and I empathize with them because a culminating year that's supposed to be filled with recognition and celebration really has shifted significantly due to this pandemic but knowing that we're going to continue to do our very best to make sure that we're supporting our seniors and I think that is always going to be our focus first and foremost but I will go ahead and turn it over to mr. la Fontaine our regional superintendent of high schools who's going to walk us through some of the graduation requirements and the modified requirements based off of the coated 19 shift and then Joe will also walk us through some of the work that he and his teams as well as the OTL Department and a lot of other departments have been doing to make sure that we're making this experience as smoothly as possible for our seniors and staff so Joe yep all right sorry yeah when we first saw TV okay now this weekend can you hear me yes we can okay so it was we first saw the guy just go to distance learning we immediately began retooling the high schools for that or that type of approach and one of the approaches we took was basically taking our staff and asking them to divide the student body amongst the staff and try to reduce the number of student contacts the smallest possible denominator so that we could so that we could actually reach as many students as possible we did it a couple of different ways of different size but basically just started right out of the gate trying to make contacts with as many students as we could develop relationships and find out who we were able to reach and who he could not reach and that work began actually a week of April eighth and so we've been working very diligently on trying to build those contacts and reporting each week on what the contacts look like so just so that you know right now we're we are in contact with 94% of our seniors right now on a very regular basis in 92% of our 9th through 11th grade students we feel very good about that number and that number is down considerably from last week and we're going to continue to press on and build on those relationships and still have some connectedness that we need to do but that's something that we're working toward very diligently is making sure that our students have contact with our teachers the students want the teachers want and we're working very hard to make sure that exists and we're sustaining it to the specifics inside the graduation pathways I know that you've seen the document but let me just speak briefly to the differences between the guidance and what PPS has for diplomas and so PBS is actually has a higher bar of rigor
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than the Oregon diploma I'm sure you're well aware of that in some of the ways in which that it does differ is in regards to the amount of the amount of PE credit that we take ours is very specific this particular import less says that you can blend PE and health for that for the credit similarly it works that way for social studies they say that can be any three credits ours are very specific credit so our students to have and some of those changes such as that have made it such that there's more flexibility in the credits that students have earned that we have been retooling to address so working with systems planning and performance we have taken our our mainframe that we use for tracking all student graduation and dr. Brown and his department has retooled it to the new Oregon standards so that we can sort and understand which students have made progress and which ones have not and just to give you an idea about that that process in our normal here usually takes us a couple of months actually to vet our seniors and identify all seniors who maybe there's something you failed at it or something in the system and some I mean it just takes a long time to battle most people we're looking at trying to get it done in three weeks so they have been working just insanely hard to try to understand which see which students are aware that graduation pathways to 2020 states clearly that we are to award second semester credit to suits to students I'm going to speak just about seniors because there's guidance for 911 to seniors who had passing performance work as of March 13th we are not to grade any work that would have been delivered in the instruction after that date though we want to continue to engage students in that word much like Maxine is doing we have great relationships with our students and we want to keep them engaged but we're not permitted to actually use that toward a grade and the only grade that were permitted to issue for the second semester is a pass or an incomplete and that's because of the obvious reasons that that the quality of what we can do and how it can change from from that short window of time over the course of the semester is interminable about when students are engaged or not engaged in the work and as I said we still have some students we've been even unable to reach so in fairness and inequity we're trying to keep it at a level and the state of Oregon's guidance that comes out in that pathway document states explicitly how were to look how were to identify the work you move the work forward and engage the students I can tell you that if the teachers are speaking with students on a very very regular basis and and I know I started the parent of a freshman today who sat through that 80 80 contacts from her school today and so so sometimes maybe a little bit more than they want but I guess what I want you to also know that we are we are supposed to be able to report our graduating senior status by the end of April and so we're now working on those letters to communicate that to families with the credit report for what their actual credit status is so there will be some letters going up saying you're your student is as shy a few credits right now at this point we know that we are on a we have 70 percent of our senior class right now that could graduate today by these standards we also know that another third of the remainder is a half a credit away from graduating so we're we're in a very good place for for good graduation rates and we are working every day to vet and track those students and provide them opportunities um I can go into greater detail about what those opportunities look like but there's a lot in this presentation that she wants a little about I think one of the things that you would like to know about is that the ceremonies that we have for our students we're still trying to plan some things for them our seniors we want to celebrate our senior class and so we're doing some things we're trying to identify some things that they would find fun and still try to keep the traditional graduation in place maybe just a few more weeks down the road than original plan with that I'll pass it off to my colleagues and give you an opportunity to leave a book or deeply at grades 9 through 11 thank you James so no sooner had the Department of Education issued it's very much anticipated graduation pathways data the next subsequent predictable question from school districts was what's your guidance for other high school grade levels 9 through 11 so Sean do you want to say a couple
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sentences here about in what ways the the guidance for grades 9 and 11 is similar to what we had received to our seniors with a week before sure so it's actually a good evening board directors shot by Chief of Schools it's actually quite similar to 12th grade guidance and that it would be passed or incomplete the difference is is that students will continue to receive prioritized standard instruction for the remainder of the school year so we've worked with p80 and and we've sent messages out to staff members today we also sent communications to family members say that by May first our teachers that teach students in grades 9 through 11 will finalize their quarter 3 grades and that will be their pass or incomplete and beyond that we want them to deepen the work that they've done with students this year on those priority standards and then continue what are the most we're asking them to find the most essential skills that kids need to move on to the next grade level and be successful understanding that not every student has the same kind of access or the same quiet place in their house to learn and you know there's our lots of variables that we can't control for us we could in a in a school building but we do want teachers to prioritize those stairs that are most important and then understand that in the new year will be developing plans to meet students where they are assess if they're what their gaps in knowledge are gets them moving on but the grades situation is the same for 9 through 11 is is for seniors pass or incomplete thank you dr. Byrd so as the board can see this is a different way of conducting business or requirements of expectation for for high school-age students so the State Board of Education actually had to convene two those temporary rules specifically where they touch upon division 22 regulations and so the State Board met 16th it made those adjustments in a number of related areas including what does it mean for students who were do a seal of biliteracy for instance what does this mean for accounting what about free and appropriate education for students with disability and those temporary rules have were all passed by the State Board on the 15th the 16th that is the following day on the 17th this past Friday superintendents were able to receive a preview from the director of the Department of Education regarding the rest of the grade levels K through 8 that hasn't been issued officially and I we don't expect it to change substantively from the draft that we saw which will likely and essentially maintain sort of that continuity across all grades where students won't be penalized for any any work after the school closure so it's it will call out that those efforts for continuity of learning via the distance learning for all guidance that is not intended to academically harm or penalize our students so we're waiting for that guidance to be officially posted but essentially you'll see the experience looking somewhat similar K through 12th so why don't we go on to the next slide and since the meat of it is this in fact this distance learning plan board members got an initial sort of sense of how we were thinking about this and had talked about how how we were what what the elements of our Homebase distance learning plan recalling that distance learning doesn't mean only virtual or only technology-based but rather encouraging learning to and while students are off-campus and I want to turn it over to dr. Cuellar dr. Valentino we're going to talk about how these distance learning components look how they've begun to launch how they're starting to materialize in the experience that our students are having across the school district Thank You superintendent Cuellar deputy superintendents we're going to go ahead and go into an overview hopefully be able to provide you some good information in terms of all the different pieces that go into building our PPS HD platform I do want to make sure that we preface everything that the launch of the PPS HD is directly aligned to the four guiding principles as outlined by the Oregon Department of Ed which is a focusing on ensuring safety and wellness cultivating connection and
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relationship centering all of our decision-making and efforts especially on our academic expectations around equity and efficacy and then of course learning through a platform of innovation and so the team has worked extremely hard on putting together a virtual learning platform that aims at making at making critical connection with students but also keeping the academic and enrichment you know moving forward for kids the team has the team has started working on this actually on the onset of the closure and one of the things that the super-intense stated at the last board meeting was that we didn't necessarily have to wait on the guidance from OD e um the team around the clock and a lot of different task forces and workgroups have actually been putting together this effort on week 1 of this effort it was truly aimed at at reconnecting and re engaging with our students and we're using a platform that Don will talk about a little bit later called the remind platform that's really one of all the main tools that this team has been using to engage and connect with students during this time and with that being said I know there's a lot that goes into this and I definitely don't want to steal the show from our chief academic officer dr. Valentino so I'll go ahead and turn it over to Luis who will lead us in into the body of this work Luis you're on mute Luiz dr. Valentino yes hello there you go you're on oh I'm okay now okay apologies so this has been a process as was shared with you previously and early this evening this has been a phase in process because as we launched this there was a lot that we did not know yet or understood about how to take the learning online and do it remotely and so for all of us there was a lot of newness and so part of that learning was not only what were the components that we're going to use to support teachers and students in the in the work but also what did what were we going to need to do differently to ensure that they had both the tools they needed but also the supports along along the way and so over the over the course of the past five weeks in that learning there's been an evolution in how we approached the work such that we've landed on home based distance learning in a very comprehensive and sophisticated way and it's required the the intense work of not only the deputies to pretend but the Chiefs but the staffs the teams have been incredible as has been noted already but part of that has been how do we ensure that teachers have the necessary understanding to begin to work in this kind of environment and so the platforms that we used are really allowed for that to happen and providing them with the time and the space learn how to use the tools that would allow them to connect with students and actually begin to teach remotely and so that has evolved to say that we're moving from the initial support and guidance and the troubleshooting they're now thinking more midterm and long-term around what is the learning that teachers me to continue to engage in and what is that as well as site administrators and not centrally to continue to move this this work this work forward in both the academic side of the house but also in the social emotional learning side of the house under and Linda Martin can speak more to this because we there is really a clique the clarity here that when we return we're not going to land in the same place we were before we actually left and so what will that mean for us and so we are now thinking about a professional development plan that really looks at our teacher is going to ensure that each child whether they're English language learner students special needs etc that their needs are being met along the way we started by setting the foundation right that we were going to focus on language arts math and we're beginning to add additional subjects as we go as the comfort level expands in teachers but more importantly how are we ensuring that whatever we're providing is actually being accessed by every student and that is where we have moved to now to start thinking more discretely about how are we helping teachers to give students who even before they went online needed additional supports how are we ensuring that those reports are
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in place and so that has been our work at the same time we're beginning to build out with the mindset that we could become a more digital district and following the superintendent's vision on what it would mean to do that what is the learning that we now need to put in place so that we can begin to leverage what we learn about the uses of technology today that we could then begin to use it in the future as part of a blended learning environment as part of a more personalized experience for students that actually needs more more discrete needs for for each one of our students and so the the guidance from Odie I think we've been a little bit more I don't say aggressive but a little bit more comprehensive in how we've been looking at the student experience whether they have a device or whether they have a broadband or not that if that's not the case what are we going to provide in the nutrition hubs so that it parallels what students are learning online that a parent can go to one of the nutrition hubs and pick up a packet of material that will help him or her to continue learning so that they don't fall too far behind and so there are a lot of components that have been informing the whole bit of the home-based distance learning model that in the academic side of house but also in the social emotional side of the house so I once read over to Brenda Martin to speak to that aspect of it because I think it's a really important piece that will help us as we address how we are returned to better access the needs of the students Thank You Louise good evening hi can you hear me yes yes yes okay thank you so as we started our initial rollout with our distance learning plan we knew that what we needed to do was first talk to staff about the trauma they're currently experiencing and and talk to them about their own emotional wellness and then how to not only take care of themselves but then also help take care of the students that they were going to be virtually working with and so the first thing we did is we provided professional development with Elena Aguilar and that's kind of what set the stage it was actually a mandatory training for all of our administrators and our teachers and then we have eight subsequent sessions that are optional so that if staff need that additional support or if they want to learn more about that then they will but this was a an amazing opportunity for us to be able to take this extremely unfortunate circumstance and turn it into something that teachers could benefit from in regards to their own wellness and then also help to educate our children and help them to learn pro-social skills and also be able to take care of themselves and build that resilience additionally we also developed 20-minute SEL lessons or staff it's 20 minutes a week it's now on Atlas and it is for our k-8 students and then we also created wellness resources for staff that is on our teacher portal and they have access to to all of those resources I'm gonna turn it back over to Craig because I'll talk more about special ed and counselors and mental health down towards the presentation a little bit farther I think it's like slide 15 or something so thank you perfect thank you so much Brenda I really appreciate it and your team has been working so hard to make sure that that we are absolutely on the front lines providing those wraparound social-emotional supports for children so thank you to you and your team at smart neck I also wanted to make sure that we allowed the opportunity for mr. Wolfe Don Wolfe our chief technology officer to talk really quickly with an overview of some of the tools that we are using for our PBS HD platform so mr. Wolfe good evening board of directors thank you dr. Cuellar Don wolf chief technology officer from the outset and I will try and be brief here but I'm excited about the work that has taken place is in shifting an entire district from an in-person instructional delivery
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where you can call people up and get access to tools to shifting it all on there's a very clear need of how we're going to centralize that how are we going to make that easy and available for teachers and for students and their families to be able to find so along with folks in the office of teaching and learning the learning technologies teams have taken two existing student portal and teacher portal which were a collection of six or seven links on each one of them and really built them out into be a resource portal for where staff and student can go to find the key and the primary tools that they're going to use during this closure we have settled on seesaw as a k2 for our younger students for for their learning management system but we haven't licensed or because of the Coburg closure a licensure extends all the way up to grades k-8 and we're finding some usage there we as well in in that particular learning management system just this last week alone there have been a hundred thousand posts from students and from from teachers of sharing their work what they're doing and how they're engaging in that work so that is the primary platform for for the lower grades cade grades 3-12 we're using Google classroom they are the usage of that has exploded there's been a large push in there for staff and teachers we've got 60,000 assignments that have been shared and responded to from staff and student throughout that as well I don't know if we want to talk about one of the primary tools that we've implemented during this time in a response to moving from a place where all of our teachers had access to a phone to reach out to their to their families and to their students and not not having that when they go home not wanting to necessarily expose their home cellphone number or their private numbers we implemented a program called remind which allows teachers to engage in mass with a large classroom with an entire school as a principal from a district level and to be able to have those direct one-on-one communications we were able to stand that up pretty we get teachers trained we're refining some of the rough spots but at this point last week there were over four hundred and thirty-eight thousand messages communicated to our families and to our students directly through the use of that platform so keeping our folks engaged and knowing that we're here with them that were part of the solution for them and making sure that they know somebody is going to reach out to them and they have that communication back to the schools has been a big part of where we're trying to go with this dr. Cuellar is that that is perfect Don thank you so much for the overview on that can I just ask a clarifying question it's Julia for med words I just wanted to make sure I had those Nevers was the the hundred thousand host was that was elementary on sis is that young people and then the sixty thousand was I what platform when we're going to be classroom okay and the 480 which was wrong what four to thirty eight thousand one that's remind okay great thank you mmm-hmm so I'd like to ensure you could decide if you'd like to take an intermission before we go into the second half of the presentation heard sort of an overview of the Eau de guidance elements of the distance learning plan and some of the technology efforts to provide access to devices and connectivity and then want to talk a little bit about in this closure we know communication is critical we go back a slide here could I ask our communications department Lee David David Roy could you speak a little bit about within I think pretty broad efforts at all levels of the organization as we've made this shift communication of expectations has been an ongoing after David yeah Thank You superintendent and good evening everyone I know we will talk in a few moments about sort of overall communications efforts since the beginning of the closure but regarding PBS HD and you know moving at the speed that the district had to move it's been really important to make sure that we are regularly and robustly informing families about kind of the what's
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in-house of PBS HD so I'll mention a few of those efforts in support of my colleagues who have just spoken about this the centralized resource for families is on our website so PBS dotnet /hd we started that immediately as we rolled this program out it is a centralized resource we planned branded rolled it out on April 2nd one of the first things on that part of the website is a big downloadable QA document for families in we have learning tools on there for all of the things Don was just talking about reminding Google me the classroom seesaw canvas we have quick guides that are language access team helped us with working with our IT folks to have kind of one sheeters for all of the different platforms that students and families might use and what has been nice about that is that's one of the many things that we've also printed and had available at our meal sites our meal hubs we have tech support info letting families and students know how to access that notice team with the superintendent's video introducing the program and the platform and information about access to district computers it yeah already about served from an expectation standpoint right now besides that QA we have a few things we're shifting more to that mode as we get more guidance and we are a couple of weeks in to this if you just let go got an infographic and one pager that we're gonna send out tomorrow about hours per week expectations by activity type and gradable for families and hopefully provide a little more clarity they information about what teacher land activity is against student-led activity and we think some helpful advice and are really easy to read format we we messaged about high school senior guidance on April 10th grades 9 through 11 guidance today we expect from OU de qué Caray got is this week we've also updated students and Families about assessments including map AP IB and this week we just got more informational resources for students regarding that we are working this week to push more parent and family facing messaging on how to's we are supporting dr. Valentino as he regularly updates and sends messages to teachers and then the same thing for dr. Byrd with principals and so I you know a lot going on virtually everything if not everything that I've just mentioned that is family facing has been translated into all of our supported languages so these student and family facing messages and updates are going out in six languages and then the last thing I'll mention from a multimedia services standpoint Terri who pressed the button to make this meeting start officially to tonight has been working with dr. Davis and maestro Amparo on some of the videos that they're making in OTL and we are looking now and hopefully we can do something in the very near future of using Comcast tell the station 28 where we scream these meetings to get content on there and then also take that and put it on our YouTube channel to where you don't have to have Kate you know to be able to act working with our instructional partners on that so more to come thank you David check constant would you like to pause here before we go into the second half of the presentation I think helpful thank you to see if anybody has questions about what we've learned so far I know I have one question maybe I'll take it off back to jokah Fontaine's and dr. kwai ours presentation so are we able to provide any intensive supports for our seniors who are not considered on track to graduate so that they can actually accelerate their credit attainment or at least you know the bare minimum keep up with the pace that they were on before yes as a matter of fact we have a couple of different things in place because of the decision to cut grades off as a March 13th we have evening scholars as well as virtual scholars that we're retooling to support seniors in credit recovery that way we
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also are working with Daniel er desmos partners in the community because they have many contacts as well to actually find some of the students who are having trouble making contacts with so we're taking there's a lot of different things at play right now and trying to find students and provide them what supports they need today dr. Valentino and I were also discussing another pilot project for credit recovery projects that are project-based projects okay that students could do and to recover a half a credit there's some really interesting guidance that came out from OD in regards to proficiency based approaches but we don't employ selection our grading processes as well as we probably could and so we're gonna try and optimize some of those to reach reach our seniors so they can demonstrate proficiency so we can award them the credit that they should get for being able to do the work that we expect them to do to be able to do thank you Joe I think that's a great question chair con stamp we also have on deck dr. Russ Brown and Daniel ledesma we're going to talk a little further our shared goal of making sure we're identifying and case managing every single senior to get across even if it's virtual graduation stage so we're gonna talk a little bit more about that but Joe gave you the initial highlight there but question to superintendent before we move forward I think you can go ahead I just wasn't sure if I was I didn't mean to talk over you um so thank you I have that same question about how we're working with seniors who aren't on track and glad to hear that we're reaching out and being proactive about that that I have another question about how we're tracking online attendance and what the expectations are for the teachers are teachers tracking online attendance for the younger kids are we maintaining contact with students and parents in this time and does that burden fall on the parents or are there other staffs such as community onion family engagement staff or or social workers in the building that are doing that contact doctor why are do you want to review the expectation that we've received in the guidance rent attendance or recording of contact with students thank you sure so we are not teachers not taking a tennis like they would in a regular classroom however with the remind app they're able to track the contexts that they're making with students so the remind F has an archive feature so if you send a text message in archives if you send email archives so we are able to keep track of how many kids we've been able to get ahold of hundred families of divisional Jolla and then we can have our principals have done an excellent job and teachers have done excellent job of tracking down things that they've not been able to get ahold of there is a document that was produced - that we share with teachers to indicate the expectations and it's different for grade levels but basically there's an expectation for contact every week with your students in the secondary level it's I it can be a synchronous or it can be synchronous or asynchronous context of teachers role online have you know a class and teach the class or they could record something I put it online for students to do and then they have office hours where the students can just come and check in and get additional help for other things the same is true for elementary school there's a there's weekly contact expectation sort of ramping up over time so it started out with just it start out as a twenty minutes contact to really check in with kids to make sure they're okay and then now it's ramping up as the week's go on but the the reason that we implemented the remind apple app was so that we could track the contact that we're making with families and make sure that that we are that it's not only for academic contact would also make sure they have what they need and I would say need assistance or other social services that we can put them in contact our counselors have been working to do that as well so we're trying to you know provide as much wraparound services we can for families at this time that's fantastic I guess I was wondering if we had a way not only to just track that but to notice trends for instance if you have you know twenty eight kids in your class and there are four kids that regularly don't show up do we have a do it do we have a way to contact those families or those kids but by the way thank you everybody for happening so quickly to do this and work in such a different way but yeah concerned about if we're able to notice trends and who's not showing up not that we're taking a strict attendance purposes but so we're able to track who we're not reaching so yes we do and our principals and teachers are maintaining those information and have you know they are working with with us if there are people that they can't get ahold of we
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know we've been there working with a counselor counseling office and other offices in the district to try to help track people down and make sure that they're aware in some cases it's been a matter of getting the technology to students who haven't had it yet so we've distributed I think over 12,000 devices over the last several weeks so in some cases it's just a matter of giving people online but even for those children who don't who are not able to be present in the class they have had contact the first goal was to make contact with students and that's that's an ongoing goal is to contact make sure children are okay and make sure that their families have what they need so teachers have that information it has not funneled up to two central level yeah at this point I have not seen the statistics cool but that is something we can gather because teachers teachers and principals are collecting that thank you dr. Pollard and you know we responsible for tracking and monitoring our contacts so thank you for for all of our educators doing that you're going to hear a little later in the presentation how we're also engaging our community partners to make sure we're many of our students fall through the cracks during this crisis because these disparities they only get amplified during a time like now so stay tuned to hear just a little bit more about that questions before we move on I'd have a question and this is it's for the high school acini about the high school seniors but also I think it applies to sophomores and juniors any students who were an AP Advanced Placement IB or International Baccalaureate or dual credit classes so given that that is a really important way for a lot of our students to earn college credit and you know assuming they take the exams and get a passing grade that a college accepts as equivalent to a college credit for many students that's a way to substantially pay for almost a year of college or or provide them with a year of community college credit and so my question is I know that there's sounds like a AP is still a lot going to have the test in which students could earn credit it sounds like that may be the case for IB as well my question is like my sense is that maybe you'd have fewer students taking those tests fully and therefore missing out on sort of this free college credit is there are we looking at how many things are taking it and whether there's an opportunity for a summer and I don't know if either ap or IB would allow for this but for summer testing so that students would head into especially high school or high school seniors heading to college could could get that credit well I'll answer better and then off to Jo so we have a couple of scenarios we have of students are enrolled in dual credit courses they are still continuing their courses and they will their college grade they'll get a letter grade for that course if they finished that validates their high school credits so they can make a B in the college class get the credit and every transcript on high school on our college transcript rather and they get a P passing on the high school transcript the AP students are allowed to take the exam they are but the testing window has not changed for the exam there are many teachers I know whose I've heard from many of them are reviewing for students for their AP exam I don't know I don't have information on how many students have elected not to take the exam I'll throw it to Joan for that part bud and I don't believe that ap is considering offering it an alternate testing window right now the drug do you know any more about that yeah dr. Byrd I think that's pretty pretty much it those programs we would have to hear from those programs to move those timelines back those are really things we have much flexibility in determining ourselves I do not know any answer directively members in regards to students who may have moved out or opted not to participate that's a really good question that's one of our primary goals that we have in the high school and I've actually I can only answer that question myself so I'll look into that and responding offline yeah I just I'm curious because so just having had students in three two students who were in IB is that that
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getting that content for those you know two months before you have your exams was really critical and so I'm just given this is not just obviously in in Portland but all across the country whether there's some other way that students if they don't get the cut you know don't get the content or don't have the confidence that they're going to be ready for the test another mechanism that we could provide them just this is their so the last chance to get that free credit the one thing that will say is the IB program has a very strict a scope and sequence to it that is actually international it's not something that we determine and so those assessments are aligned to that scope and sequence so if we're not the only school districts gonna that's going to be in the same situation so they need to be responsive to what the student needs are as well and so I would imagine that there's anything coming it'll be broadcast quite widely but I will look into what the numbers are that's a really compelling question I'm concerned that to see what those numbers might be myself I have not heard any concern from any principal and I'm in daily contact with them about students who are walking away from those more challenging coursework yeah this is Rita um I had a couple of questions um the first is are we going to be hearing more about special education yes we actually have for the second half this presentation we're going to focus on a few things we're gonna sort of mid-play talk about some of the budget context that I think everyone on the state is finding themselves in and then we're to come back to some other operational updates like nutrition services we want to talk about some of our vulnerable populations like special education services continuity during this time as well as some community engagement that's playing a role in during this time as well so so we have on deck for staff to speak to next okay I'll hold off my questions in thanks alright let's let's proceed alright let's do that directors you know we're in the middle of a health crisis but there's another crisis on their horizon and that's what we anticipate to be an economic impact not a favorable one in the state of Oregon that trickles its way down into k-12 and as the largest school district in the state we have to be prudent in beginning to understand the context knowing that we don't have clarity that clarity doesn't exist yet necessarily at the state level and there's a lot of variables here how federal stimulus dollars will trickle down to us with decisions the legislature will make what the may advice includes etc so we thought it'd be important to spend some time by having our deputy superintendent for business and ops care Hertz walk us through sort of the scenario that we're finding ourselves in because it's going to lay an important context for how we proceed Claire good evening board of directors superintendent girl I would like to start with this is a slide from the state economist office blog and they are calling this recovery a square root recovery from Cova 19 you can see how we initially dropped within to a severe recession overnight and so there's a sudden halt from the economy right and as we all stay at home and so one of the things that we know is the economy has gone down as the health of the populace has gone down and as we see improvement in our health situation you can see that the we see an initial bounce back with with the opening of some of the restrictions beginning to lift in and then it starts to flatten out a little bit as things open up and then people are starting to get back to work and then there could be there's multiple scenarios that could be a pretty moderate development of growth where you see a quicker bounce back and then if it's a slower growth you can see that it would take longer over a longer period of time so the state economist is calling this a square-root recovery as
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you think of the math symbol but it is definitely tied the speed of the growth depends on our overall health so as good health returns our economy will return can I ask just a clarifying question on this thing um yes is is there any timeframe associated with this service it's just a kind of visual help it's is to give you a sense that we fell down quickly will have an as it opens up will have an immediate balance back as restaurants and hotels and all of the things start to open up and then it's unknown how long it will take its recovery they're a cover and they're saying the health will help will determine that time period okay next slide so as we look at budget forecasting there are many unknowns at this point but this is what we know this is the things that we are looking for is how we work to develop our budget budget for 2021 so we know that we're going to have a state revenue shortfall we're hearing that from the economists we will receive forecasts on May 20th so we're looking forward to hearing that and then what we're also looking for what our SAS will be at the student investment account from the Student Success act funding we're also expecting to receive federal stimulus dollars we heard I heard this morning that on Thursday the feds will release the allocation by state level and then it has to go to our state and they have 30 days to give us our application and guidelines on how to apply to receive our funding I understand we'd receive 90% of that funding in 10% would stay at the state level we also need to know how much our state has in terms of reserves I'll share that with you and then but how much of that they're going to use towards education in one first year multiple years there'll be some questions on how much they'll use we also are looking at how much we need to make in general fund reductions at Portland Public and then we also have Portland Public Schools reserves and questions on how much of those we'll use and over at what time period so that if you'd go on to the next slide please so if you look at the state revenue shortfall you'll see that the state general fund and lottery fund is twenty three point six seven billion dollars for the biennium and the k-12 budget is nine billion dollars or thirty eight percent of that budget so whenever we lose 1 billion in state revenue out of that twenty three point six million six seven billion whenever we lose 1 billion in state revenue that equates to losing thirty million dollars in Portland Public Schools so in our state school fund revenue we also have in question our si a funding that it was at 39 million and we're being told to budget at ten increments because we're not sure what level we will actually receive that funding so we could receive 0 10 20 30 39 million hey and the governor has also told us to hold off on hiring physicians in the SI a funding so we not only done a hiring freeze for this year 1920 we're also holding off on posting at this point or 2021 if you could go on to the next slide please right can I ask a quick question this is reader is there any discussion of postponing or suspending the imposition of the temps or the Student Success act so the governor we keep your supportive of Si a and what the legislative process will determine what priorities will come forward with funding so there's three types of funding in question state
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school fund si a and then also measure 98 dollars so those are all three things that we're looking or are a special session of our legislature or once they have the may economic forecast how they will be allocating each one of those resources to school districts so maybe just a comment on that director Moore is there are some who are advocating that the implementation then be delayed but I think there is a pretty strong support to move ahead and the fact that there hasn't been a special session to date means the tax is actually being implemented I think the one probably bigger threat to the funding from the commercial activities tax is that as you can imagine because it's based on gross receipts there's been a pretty dramatic drop in Earth's receipts and the first quarter unless you're a grocery store or liquor store or one of the other essential businesses that still allowed so that that the forecasted number it was a billion plus a year I probably will be substantially lower but the reality is the tax because action hasn't been taken it can delay it is in fact moving into implementation okay thank you so on slide eight federal stimulus I we have a carries act and we have a distribution coming based on title one funding formula that we expect about seven million dollars in this first round of funding and it's to be distributed to k12 between now and September thirties 2021 is when we need to spend it so over the next year my understanding is there will be a lot of flexibility on how that money can be spent is that additional money than more than we would have expected through the Carrows Act this is the money that we're expecting from the cares Act is a it's an estimate right now of seven million dollars but what I can tell you is that we don't have the US Department of Education allocation yet so this is all based on estimations that were receiving at the national level and then applying that to our state title funding and then our ninety percent of what we would have in that title one allocation for our district so again this is a very preliminary estimate number but it is additional funding seven million about what we would have had from federal funding prior to the Kerr's act right thank you just to be clear or to clarify clear that title one funding is the entirety of the federal disbursement and it's not just intended for our title one schools it's just that every districts entire allotment is determined based on the percentage of title one students that right so it's they're using the title one formula and and process to allocate to States and for States to allocate to districts however we're not restricted and spending it in the title one manner we're able to there's a lot of flexibility for instance and distance learning when we need additional resources to implement distance learning or when we're paying a premium or custodial staff there's there's things that were allowed to spend on that are not part of our normal title one funding it's not restricted to that grant restrictions it's just being allocated through that framework from the feds if that helps to clarify I think you can go on uh-huh let's go on to slide nine please can I just make one editorial comment I don't have the numbers in front of me but in comparison to the stimulus package that was issued by the feds in response to the 2008 crash compared to this cares funding the amount of money that's being
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allocated to education is pretty much a pittance in comparison reading the council's statistica's it's one-half of one percent and I think what they were saying about the recession support for public education 2008-2009 was closer to like 10 or 12 percent lead package there is going to be a fourth package and early May that potentially could be another opportunity so the passage of or the work this week on sort of the package is going to be subsequently like really either early or mid mid-may going to be put together so another opportunity for local districts to engage with the delegations and the house in the Senate I think that's a reporter quite reader just to put it in perspective the American Recovery Act you know the level thus far hitting public it doesn't measure up we're thankful that the council and I think we've shared with directors if not will is being pretty aggressive about making sure subsequent federal stimulus has a more robust dedicated stimulus dollars coming our way so we'll say on top of her superintendent you just signed on to a letter with other superintendents from large districts around the country advocating strongly for greater support in the fourth bill and they're certainly role for for our whole community and and advocacy too and this is Andrew I guess I just want to jump in on this I agree with everything everyone said it's part of the cares Act money going to the state overall and going to local governments you know portions of it and city of Portland received a hundred and fourteen million dollars yesterday from the feds and which is an incredibly rapid turnaround time given their applications last week I don't think that money is is necessarily designated but I don't I don't and so I this is maybe both a question and a comment I don't think it's prohibited from the state and and these local governments for spending that money on education as part of the coding response so I think there's work we can do there as well in terms of getting in that queue and talking to both the city of Portland and then also the state about some of that money because 1.6 billion dollars is going to the state of which this 140 million is a piece of that well no accounting we'll also get a chunk as well Washington we encourage our elected Board of Directors to remain engaged in advocating resources for our district hammer down let's like continue to go through the various factors that it will impact our budget building for this next year this one of the pieces that we want to consider is how much the state will use of its reserves as we are looking to shore up from the revenue shortfall with the economic decline so looking at this chart this comes for again from the state economist Saul blog and what we have here is their education stability fund and rainy day fund if you look off to the right you'll see in a column of January 2020 that they have in the application stability fund six hundred and seventy eight million dollars and the rainy day fund six hundred and seventy five million dollars and then they also had a funding available an ending fund balance at the state level of 1.15 billion dollars so they had about eleven point seven percent in reserves for their general fund they were projecting that to continue to grow through the end of 2021 but as you can imagine the end of the biennium numbers are no longer valid numbers so if you look at the chart to the left you can see over a period of time over by enniaa they what has been the in reserves so we right now in 1719 and 1921 we have historically larger reserves and we've had in the past especially when you compare to the 2009 eleven biennium and the 2007 nine biennium you can see when that economic time hip there were very small reserves so the question is how much of these reserves will the state choose to use as they balance the budget the
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legislature so again the education stability fund is meant or education and the rainy day fund is meant for the overall state budget so maybe before you move from that slide I think cuz there's you know a corollary of PBS's moving from 2001 when they had no reserves it just really worth pointing out the sort of financial management and stewardship of both the state and the district of putting money in reserves because the 2001 three recession when I was on the board before when there what there was no reserves it made cuts were made that you know had a lot of long-term pain and I think really credit to the district and the state to have built reserves because we're in a much better position than we were you know whether it was a decade ago thank you so and if you look up with this red line this just shows the percentage of fund balance over over time okay moving on to the next line now turning to the PPS general fund for this year you can see that 33 percent of our budget is in teaching and license salaries and we have 8 percent of our budget in classified salaries and in the green we have 4 percent and non rep staff in the purple we have another 4% in administrators and then the turquoise is another other salaries things like substitutes and coaches so all of that together plus the orange color 27% is all of our payroll costs Social Security health care benefits all of our payroll taxes and benefits first staff and so overall the salaries and benefits equate to 80 percent of our budget okay so that leaves 20% for everything else you go on to the next slide sign 11 you'll see again this is a representation of the nineteen twenty adopted budget and then you can see the FTE by type of employee you can see that licensed staff of 3124 and we have classified at 1400 and this is all in general fund and so you can see a couple years history and actuals and then also last year's budget as well as this year's budget so overall we have about fifty one hundred members both FTE in our general fund budget so that just gives you a sense of as we're looking at how we're going to balance our budget where we're spending our dollars the multi so most of our budget by the time you pay for all of our staff there's very by the time you pay for insurer insurance coverage and and utilities and fuel for the buses there's not a lot left so when you are making reductions it's clear it needs to come from staff okay moving on to the next slide slide 12 just like the state has reserves the Portland Public Schools has reserves and as of the end of last year we had about forty million or over six percent in our general fund and we also have a pers rate stabilization fund that has eighteen million or about 3% of our general fund so both of those well the one is definitely available to us as we try to work to balance out over the next few years and then while we wouldn't qualify necessarily as pers rates are expected to go down even though we anticipate the future liability to go up we had the same thing happen in 2008 9 and it just because of the way they value the fun pers fund through actuarial valuation it just takes time for them to change rates and to give all the public entities
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notice as rates changing for per biennium it just it seems difficult to be receiving a lower rates right now because of the change in laws when we know in the next biennium we're going to have to increase even more so just a question in my mind I don't know if there's anything to be done by that about that but it's something that I watched happened last time and it's sure hard to watch it happen again so lots of moving parts still in terms of how we're going to develop our budget in balance but we are again working on tiers of reductions so let's go ahead and go to the next slide 13 and we have because of kovat we've been tracking our expenditures we've had additional purchases we've spent about $100,000 on curriculum I know there'll be more expenditures for that we have about $80,000 we've done for cleaning supplies face covers and cell phones the biggest bulk of that is the you know all the disinfecting materials needed for all of our schools we've also invested in Chromebooks and software and Wi-Fi hotspots in the messaging and for our staff so all of these things are additional expenses to general fund we're still working on forecasting what that the impact of Colwood will have we have some savings but we also have additional costs and so we are working right now to project those figures for you in the future financial update so but the forecasts that all the pieces that I've shared with you and how we're going to develop our budget we will be bringing a budget Calendar forward to you at the May 5th meeting that will move our proposed budget to the end of the month after the May economic forecast and we bring forward a 9.0 billion dollar budget proposed budget which is the funding level for the biennium before COBIT and we'll we will include the SI a funding at 39 million and the measure 98 funding at funding and then we'll have we will are identifying tiers of reductions because we won't really know when what our budget needs to be until after the legislative special session I can remember in the mid-2000s there was a year that we didn't get approval from the legislature until the third week in July I can imagine it will be difficult for our state level leaders to balance the budget so while we are receiving an economic forecast on May 20th so we haven't at least some ideas of numbers to consider knowing what kind of funding will come through and at what level it's quite possible that we will need to adopt not only propose but approve and adopt a budget before we truly know the funding level from the state if that's the case we will go forward and with every two weeks we'll have to move from a proposed to an approved and then we'll have the hearing with the TSE C Tech supervision and Conservation Commission all those things are required by law that we finish that budget adoption and appropriate funds and impose taxes by June 30th so we will meet that deadline even if it's not clear of our financial path at that point but what we will do is once the path is clear most likely coming back in August to update the board and amend the budget based on what the final solution was now we will be working with the CB RC or community budget review committee we met with their leadership today and they are aware of this pending no knowing that we may not have a full budget process Wow I want before they have to submit their report we most
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likely will not know the funding level that we are focusing on our system shifts that we brought forward in February and really using that tool while we were using it to add resources now we're using it also to make sure what resources we keep in place as we're looking to trim our budget so we will be bringing more to you on that May 26th meeting of that work in our strategic plan focus it probably it will mean that we'll it won't be a three year strategic plan but a more extended time period and based on the slower start due to lack of resources in the first year so as we this year we are continuing to do cost saving measures we get we've done a hiring freeze in a purchasing freeze the hiring freeze we have done for 1920 but also holding off on 20 20 women until we have more information that about staffing levels so and then also the staffing in order to have to be ready to open school in August in whatever form were holding school next year we will need at some point to make a decision on how we're going to stop schools and even if the legislature is not done where we need it you know a good over a month probably six weeks to staff schools in order to have going going through reduction in force process or whatever staffing process we need to complete so just knowing there's still a lot of unknowns but we are beginning to line out all the timelines of when we need to make decisions and meeting all of the legal requirements that we have and then also just being ready for students to return to school in the fall yes can I ask just a question about the Student Success act and I know that when it was created they divided it into these different funds and the SAA account was really the ones that was indirectly to just schools and we spent a lot of time last year thinking through how that money would could be spent to benefit our students and I'm curious if there is a less resources coming in from the commercial activity tax because of every session and the decrease in business activity whether there might be a shifting or there's been any weather you know if there's any conversations about shifting the money between some of those funds so that if there is say a shortfall in the amount of resources that are would be going directly to school districts that there would be a sort of a rebalancing so that individual school districts will be facing pretty large probably budget challenges that will be flowing through versus being held back for the other programs so student success I actually had my mana to balance the state school fund it had money going towards high casa bill disability it had money going towards our nutrition services program there were so there's they're definitely the overlap with each other to begin with and there was money needed for fully funding measure 98 so when you look at the funds state school fund has the least restrictions on a school district the measure 98 is something that's already been implemented across in 1819 excuse me in 1922 full funding and then you move to si a and that has a whole series of processes and is limited to certain areas of spending there I am hearing some advocacy at the state level not not at formally but there are some districts across the state that are advocating for more funding for the state school fund that provides the most flexibility rather than to the SI a funding so just know that that conversation is being held and that we
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are of four PPS we're really aligning to our district goals that have been adopted by our board and our strategic system shifts in our strategic plan those are what guy are guiding our we end those actually fit in all three of those lots of funds so will happily accept any funding in any form because we have a lot of excellent processes in it a lot of excellent initiatives in our district in improvement processes in supporting our students and their families in the community and we will gladly spend all types of funding in supporting their especially our racial equity and social justice components as a core of our work so does that answer your question it does thank you thank you okay I'm gonna move on and that's kind of the end of the fiscal presentation I just want to pause in case there are any questions before we move on to operational updates I just want to say that you know that their square root curve the pace of recovery completely depends on the federal government and whether are they going to let a lot of small businesses fall apart or are they going to support them are they going to see rad negative impacts from layoffs or in public schools and local governments and state government or are they going to step in and support us shave that perspective that director Bailey any other questions or comments I'm gonna go ahead and move on to operational updates ends or the next slide okay so I can say that we are operating differently than when you used to every day as we are at our feeding our kids making sure they have connectivity we have a new way of going to work each day for every staff member who's working on-site we have created a health and safety protocol school nutrition service workers have been recognized on the cover of Time magazine as frontline staff staff wear gloves and masks for everyone's protection of their own and and others our Emergency Operations Center has been open daily and finally took the weekend off this past weekend just started and believe me we all needed it there has been a need for ongoing logistics operational supports and communications daily and at this point I'd like to turn it over to cheap out chief operations officer Danny young who'd like to give it some update on our custodial and maintenance staff Thank You Claire good evening superintendent and directors this is Dan young CIO and I'm just going to give a very brief update and please let me know if you have any questions as Claire know that all operations departments have developed coded safety plans are making progress on critical work our maintenance and custodial teams continue to support the child care and few discluded distribution sites as well as responding to high-priority recorders in our buildings our transportation team is busy preparing for distribution of materials via our fleet vehicles as well as updating transportation plans and bus routing at this time as noted earlier by the superintendent and project management and osm teams are continuing continuing work on dozens of projects and they have established project specific site safety plans for all of our on-site workers and lastly our planning and real estate departments have previously moved all virtual and continuing efforts such as lease agreements IG negotiations capital planting and much more and with that brief update I will turn it back over to cards thank you Dan and just yeah in just a little more on our nutrition services in the past 19 days since March 9 17th our team has served over 200,000 meals
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at 15 school sites in addition to direct deliveries to 13 low-income housing locations and mobile home parks and door - delivers individual residences the our meals have been served Monday through Friday and on Fridays we give them enough meals for Saturday and Sunday to take with them the meals are free to all PBS students and all children in our community ages 1 to 18 years old this is all being accomplished by a team of 61 SEIU snap and DC staff drivers and warehouse Teamsters an 18 central office staff managers and supply team members the team has also been processing and receiving notifications of increases in direct certification for meal benefits through snaps reaching 690 students just in April and when you compare it we only had last year only 22 students in a very significant shift and our family's needs this month Wow additionally the department or me clear I just wanted to note aside from the fact that we should just take a little pause there and bang our own pots and pans and hoot and holler out the window about everything that we're doing in terms of food support for our families because it's really incredible but one other item is that I think we've had pretty strong coordination with our Sun programs to also do food distribution directly to our families so not just the meals that are coming from our nutrition services departments but using our distribution networks to get groceries to our families from the Sun program through the community yes we've also we submitted grants to Gen News and just receive notice that we were awarded 10 grants of $2,000 each for our kitchen our food hubs to support purchase of new equipment and supplies that allow us to serve fresh fruits and vegetables like grapes and strawberries and jicama sticks and such in in our typical lunches so the funds will also support all the purchases of boxes and bags for weekend meals and deliveries to the apartment complexes etc so we are and I think if we were gonna bang our pots and pans we should be banging them for our drivers we have bus drivers that are ballin that are coming back to work to deliver hot spots and curriculum materials we have security staff who are helping with guiding traffic through and in meal service and just supporting our our cooks we have custodial and maintenance workers that just come in and check our buildings and make sure that everything's in good repair and continual continue to clean as as they're being used really we truly have an IT staff that has been working night and day to get devices and they have hands of kids when you look at all of our support staff that have been working for weeks to help keeping everything running even when school was closed they were all in the background keeping getting things ready or getting things out to kids and then supporting our teachers and principals and getting ready to actually reopen in a new environment of school of a virtual school so at this point that's ends the operational support report operational update and at this time I'd like to turn it over to chief E Student Support Services Brenda martynuk Thank You Claire our know--this Brenda martynuk chief of student support services and so I'm going to talk to you a little bit tonight about the social emotional supports I give you a little bit more detail in regards to our counselors and our mental health supports I talked earlier about the social-emotional learning and the supports that we've been providing so far and then I also wanted to talk a little bit about special ed and then I'll turn the time
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over to Luis Valentino our chief of teaching and learning and he'll be able to talk about the last bullet with our emergent bilingual migrant and Indian Head supports and services so first I wanted to talk about what we're doing to help support students we have been providing a framework for our counselors who are working diligently to make sure that students are engaged that we're finding students I and that we are making sure that they have the supports that they need that they're set up for digital learning and that they're connected to their teachers we've also set up 504 guidance for distance learning that has been in collaboration with OTE and in fact we have another webinar tomorrow so we'll get any further clarifications or guidance in how to implement our 504 plans we also have set up tella support guidelines for groups or our LGBTQ ia community so there are some supports in place for those students I in regards to mental health we have already provided guidance on a one-on-one and small group wellness supports for students we have readjusted our suicide screening our threats screening and our sexual incident response into a virtual learning environment so that we can support staff and students and Families we've also provided our mental health providers that we've been contracting with they have continued to provide tella teletherapy excuse me and about 70% of their clients are choosing to stay involved there's about 20% who are less engaged but they're staying involved just less frequently and then 10% of their population not being able to engage with and so we're still working on different ways to try and engage with that 10% of our population all of our mental health therapists are working in collaboration with our schools our school teams our social workers if because we have a few in the district and our counselors we're also in the final stages of a youth youth resource and so that will provide music in public schools an app that's easy to use and is updated with supports information and resources in response to COBIT and also where they can either talk or text through lines for life and then we are still planning for our mental health month which which is in May so you'll hear a little bit more about that in regards to special ed we have it's it's been challenging to provide services to students in a digital environment I it provides us with an additional challenge when it is a student with special needs and sometimes the distance learning and the the virtual environment isn't as conducive for students who need things that are a little more hands-on a little more visual or more auditory so we are finding our way and we are going to continue to do that the things that we're currently doing right now is we're using what's called a digital learning decision tree so which means that our case managers for students with special needs are first to look first looking to see if they can implement the IEP as it is if it is then they're meeting with families they're talking with their students and they're just moving forward I if they believe that they can't then they are working in collaboration with the family to develop what's called a digital learning plan or a DLP this is all dependent on what the IEP team decides in collaboration with the family we continue to engage with our students and our families and we're tracking the
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services that we provide and we're also using a contact lock all of our SLPs are OTS and our PT so slps are speech and language pathologists OTS which are occupational therapists and pts which are physical therapists they are all adopting a telepractice we last year provider last year seems like last year last week we provided a training from dr. Megan McGill from PSU on telepractice all of our SLPs attended that training and we have continued to contract with dr. McGill to provide ongoing supports to provide office hours for SLP OTS and pts and then be able to problem-solve in the moment with our itinerant staff and we've actually received a lot of positive feedback in regards to that we have also delivered over 300 assistive technology devices out to students and that is in partnership with with our lift program that Jonathan Garcia has been supporting and then I just wanted to do a shout out to Jeremy low he is our program administrator in special ed and he personally took this on as a project and has worked with our assistive technology team and and was able to get 300 devices into the hands of students who aren't necessarily able to communicate any other way except through their assistive technology device our 80 or our assistive technology staff continue to provide consultation and support to families our Learning Center teachers are working with our gen ed teachers we're also offering office hours for our special ed program administrators and toeses we're having a ton of virtual meetings and teaming and trying to strategize different ways in which we can provide digital learning and accommodations and modifications for students the concern right now that we have is transition planning for incoming Kinder's that is over 400 students that we are trying to figure out how to plan her for them to come in for kindergarten so that is kind of like our big big rock that we have to move right now steps we are meeting with PAE either the end of this week or next week the meetings getting scheduled so that we can talk about the ongoing work in collaboration with p80 and how we can set reasonable expectations in working collaboration with our PT partners in making sure that we get services to some of our most marginalized students and students who aren't really able to use the technology and devices in in the ways in which many of us are able to use them and so with that I will turn it over to dr. Valentino actually mr. martinet could you hang on one second this is director Lowry and I had a question and I can't jumped on my keyboard at one point there during your presentation so I missed something so you may have already said this but and I have heard that some are like speech therapists are not able to provide services right now because of restrictions around telehealth and that they have to get another certification to be able to do their work remotely and did you already address that and I'm sorry if you did and what what are the plans to kind of help those students who are not getting speech therapy and other things in this moment right so we have been working with our SLP group we have worked with them through OTE they also presented to Asha and Asha gamer SLPs similar guidance and so at this point in time there are no barriers to our slps in order to provide tella telepractice services so we are expecting that they are providing service to our students thank you I will follow up with that constituent Thanks
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anything else before I turn it over to Luis so this is Julia not sure if this is your slide but it's about a student support issue that I guess if we wait till the budget it's probably too late and so I'm I'm wondering and this question for the superintendent or someone else we had plans for summer supports for Rosa Parks and the schools with that we're getting the CSI designated schools where we get students needing additional supports and I'm wondering how we're thinking about that because I know often the planning has to be done now in order for there to be anything to be to be offered and again sorry Brenda this isn't quite in here but I'm not sure quite where it fits and I'm so I'm wondering how we're thinking about that just because it wouldn't necessarily be part of the normal next year's budget process right that isn't entirely in in my area but it is something that the EEOC has brought up as something that we do have to start planning around is extended school year so esy services for students with special needs any compensatory and then some are schooling so all of that summer schooling that happens we do need to put together a plan for that and so I'm only one piece of that puzzle and I know dr. Byrd has a big role in that as well and then of course the superintendent and ELT so I don't know that we have answers I think we have about as many questions right now so but it is it is a an issue that we need to tackle and we need to tackle it soon so maybe a question for the superintendent who would be on point for though for that the summer programming whether it's continued distance learning or something else I think it's unlikely that there would be actually school and school buildings but are we thinking about that might be an option so it's a question director bloom Edwards and many of us are talking about it all the time you were especially sensitive to the fact that many of our kids who were already challenged with saying a great level expectation or falling further behind I was gonna conclude tonight's presentation talking about not knowing whether we can switch up our delivery service to bring in kids if not a June maybe as a head start in August before school starts for some services or for a range of other summer program we had on Jack we wanted to continue to expand our arts academy we had plans for stem summer camps in many of our clusters we know that some schools have are almost slightly different one of them I'm psyched if your calendar there's we have a lot of the same questions and we know that they take some planning and so we don't have any firm answers tonight yet on that but we're definitely thinking about it so I would just say stay tuned for now all right thank you I'm glad you're thinking about it makes me kind of heartsick to think about all the work that's gone into the plans and how you did it is so dr. Valentino do you want to say something quickly about some of our vulnerable student populations yes so in addition to the classroom supports that are both directed by the eld teacher and supplemental supports being provided for emergent bilinguals and yes there are also support via our ESL toeses available for our migrant education and indian education student supports one of the things that we beginning to focus on is making connections with the families and so our work with our armed bilingual aides as well as those are our migrant that in Indian ed are beginning to make contact with the parents who work closely with them our supplemental support instructional supports who are also being put together as supplies and kits that are going to be distributed along side the other instructional materials at our instructional hubs to make sure that both the academic as well as social emotional supports are made available for both our bilingual students our migrant ed students in our Indian education students and so that is work in progress that we are focusing on right now um I'd like to hand over to
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our chief of staff Stephanie Soudan at this point Thank You Louis good evening board directors I just wanted to introduce the next topic you heard briefly from our senior director of communications an overview of some of the efforts his team has been working on I just want you to know they've been working tirelessly since before this began or closure we've and some of the things we've worked on as there's a comprehensive website and online tools we branded our district arts our distance learning effort we've had focused and regular ongoing communications toward a variety of audiences our Community Engagement Team they've been connecting with students during this time where some of them are more isolated than ever they're reaching communities that are not necessarily online and other hard to reach communities our strategic partnership team it's been raising money securing important donations identifying new ways to partner with businesses and all of these efforts have been closely aligned with our racial equity and social justice focus so I'll turn it over to our chief engagement officer Jonathan Garcia our senior advisor on racial equity Daniel Yani Ledezma and David Roy to share more information Thank You Stephanie good evening everyone i'm jonathan garcia chief engagement officer we're so grateful to so many of you our general of our more partners including doordash and lyft who have gone above and beyond to make sure our families who need meals delivered or transportation to central locations get it some of these partners are big names like Comcast's ileft Amazon Web Services or AWS and many others our names you have probably have never heard of some have been major gifts some have been generous gifts from community members wedding wanting to lend a hand all in all our community is really inspiring me and really inspiring all of us to to rally together for our families in fact I to take this point and privilege to read a quick message from a PBS parent I receive recently I I get I get these type of messages quite often and I hope like you like me you appreciate the ways our business and philanthropic partners are showing up and making a difference in our community so let me read this really quick quote thank you for all you're doing for the students and families the recent fund that you provided to PBS families with lip really impacted my family and helped us tremendously I was able to use it to help my get my mother to pick up my daughter and bring my daughter home with her as I needed to go to the hospital and be treated for kovat 19 as right now there are only allowing patients in the ER they wouldn't allow my daughter to be here with me so thank you for establishing this and getting the funds to support this kind of outreach it really helped us so again on behalf of our on behalf of PBS I just want to thank our business and our broader community for leaning in to support our PBS families and students during this time so I'm happy to also report that our community has contributed well over a hundred and ten thousand dollars to the fund for PBS to help get $100 gift cards for groceries and other essential household supplies for families as of this morning we have received close to 200 requests for assistance in in the form of these grocery gift cards in keeping with real-time need on the ground we're working with our school administrators our school counselors or social workers our attendants coaches our community specialists our community agents to help identify students and families in need so if you know of any family who might be in need of this type of support I ask that you communicate or have that family communicate directly with their school principal their counselor or their social worker or their community agent or their attendance coach who will help them get your family's name in the pipeline we are going to begin distributing these funds next week and we're working directly with our school-based staff to make this process easy and safe for all of our families what I can tell you is this our school-based staff truly know the issues our families are facing of the 200 requests that have come in to date over 80% of families have had a parent or a guardian either laid off or their work hours have been reduced due to the coronaviruses pandemic and over 98% of the families requesting assistance already qualified for free
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and reduced lunch so as you can expect we're prioritizing our families with the most need and families facing multiple barriers - during this crisis and so finally for those in our listening audience who would like to donate to our coronavirus Relief Fund you can ask you can do so by visiting our website fund four pbs.org again you'll be able to make a donation there on behalf of our students and their families during this time so again thank you and uh I'll turn it over to Dani Ledesma hi good evening everyone I'll look if you just like a quick overview of some of the work that we're doing in racial equity and social justice with community partners who are either culturally specific organizations or multiracial organizations currently PBS contracts with several community hopefully specific and multiracial organizations in four main strategy areas the first is in culturally specific family engagement these efforts are really aimed at connecting parents and families to the school system working and working that sort of building parents knowledge and understanding of the school system school priorities and and content of what their students are learning to improve their student success when we partner with organizations like our Konya Family Center Latino Network sei and black parent initiative at several schools throughout the districts and we have been doing this for quite some time another strategy that we work on is wraparound services and those wraparound services are really meant to provide a deep level of case management and support not only for students academic success but also to ensure that their social-emotional learning is being supported on that parent and family needs are being taken care of in a really holistic way I've done through with supportive partners and currently we partner with open schools step up sei and Latino network in the Escalera program our third strategy is mentoring and leadership development and we've partnered with quite a few organizations who provide positive role modelling positive intervention and a lot of really care and concern for our students of color we partner with organizations like I am Academy Latino Network coalition of black men nothing but quality and Michael Grice Reap who you heard from earlier today and horizons called counseling who works on the youth empowerment program our fourth strategy is extended day and we work with the urban lake and just for success they provide extended learning and enrichment activities for students to supplement a lot of the work that's done in the after-school program through the Sun program these were strategies we've been working on these with our partners for quite some time and as a result of the corona virus and our response we're in the process of amending our contracts with our partners to ensure that they that we're really tracking that they're provide continuing to provide a high level of service to our students and their families but turning it remotely so we've been I've been coordinating with all of our different contractors we ask them to submit a revised scope of work proposed even changes to their reporting or the way that they are looking at you know changed outcomes and our partners in the way that they work with us all the time have really stepped up to the challenge we've had a lot of really good interactions and examples of our partners really digging deep to continue the connection although virtually with Blaz we have one one provider who's organized a series of online resources for families not just for the school that he currently serves but for the african-american community north and northeast Portland and the the next I think it's the next couple days is when the second sort of like virtual community will be happening where folks are really looking at what our online resources help helping to mystify some of those resources we also have some partners who've been working on retooling with our budget so where they once had funding for field trips or transportation they're now trying to make sure that they're providing direct direct services to parents and need helping with things like food or transportation similar to a lot of the work that we're racing through for the fund and then Joe LaFontaine mentioned earlier about an example of our
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wraparound services providers who work primarily with high school students and last week we were really excited to see the level of coordination all of our providers that provide wraparound service have a caseload of students we track who those students are and so we were able to provide all of the caseload information about each of these providers by school to mister to Russ's Department so that when we're looking at that sort of like high school credit attainment analysis that there is also a really clear field about who which students were already connected to an advocate either through Latino network or sei or step-up making part of part of that team that really wraps around students make sure that they're on on track for graduation and so we're really excited about that and so you know I think one of the challenges our providers are facing like like everyone they're looking at the budget outlook and thinking about sort of like what that will mean for their ability for their organizations to be able to continue to provide services and as Jonathan mentioned the philanthropic community has been really supportive especially to our partners and wanting to make sure that they're continuing to get funding and so we're starting to think about planning for next year and so right now we've been as a result of some of the work that we did in the past year we continue to look at our strategies all of them developed a very clear investment strategy document and have been working on that with our partners and have for the first time in quite some time putting these set of contracts out to bid through a formal art P process and that RFP process was opened on April 1st and will close soon and our partners will sort of be given the opportunity to think about how to really align not only with this with our districts priorities and their upcoming realignment around serving our priority schools but also in alignment with these strategies that we that we've worked really hard to outline that have been proven to have a lot of success for our students of color um they're really excited about that we'll keep you updated I sent you all this sort of one pager that gives you the sort of current current day what is and I'll provide some more information with you as were you as we find out more about these so I'll stop there and turn it over to David Roy who's our new director of communications Thank You Danny and hello again everyone was so we talked about communication support for PS HD and just wanted to give a brief update on just overall all communicants efforts since the you know sort of all this in mid-march you all know we start we immediately started a dedicated page on the website Carano virus we we update that literally every day that sort of our essential resource webpage for families and students there's information about meals mental health and safety health care access child care information and a lot of other resources including some of the ones Danny was just talking about we have messages to families to families teachers other key audiences I think we have sent their school messenger through email social text or email robo calls and texts combined about 300 messages in the last six weeks so it has been busy but there's been a lot of things things have changed and evolved so keeping everyone informed and up-to-date and included has been really important for us have done a lot to support the great work that is happening by all of my colleagues your speakings and i including some of the work chief Garcia just mentioned and starting this week we'll be sending robo calls in tax daily to families who will be receiving a home delivery of curriculum materials and those will be translated and speaking of that our language access team has just been remarkable we have we're well over 100 translation projects for the last month that's messages to families that's educational materials and guides and killer we have translated math science arts P activities and social learning
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curricula in all of our supported languages we also have I think a lot of people don't know this but we have telephonic critters available but at our meal sites we work with an organization called Lion bridge and that's on-demand telephonic translation interpretation services and goes well beyond our supported languages and supports over one so when you think about the diversity of our families in our district and how that diversity is reflected in our meal sites we think that's a really nice thing for us to have their families can contact our language access team to ask just about anything and they will get an answer from them whether that's something tech related or anything else we're providing video interpretation for I EPS using Google applications and for Jonathan's work on Comcast translating the robo calls that are going to those families Chiefs Odin and I and our CHR s Sharon Ries Sharon and I have worked together in the past on employee engagement and we before all of this started we had been talking about some sort of district-wide employee engage you in fact it started some of that work what we are still looking at what we can do to sort of lift and buoy our caught our colleagues and build some of that engagement and one of the things that we've done in the immediate term is even though school days look a lot different now with the return of school days we have resumed the one which as you all know is a you know daily snapshot of our district and so over the last few weeks we've been spotlighting some of our best and brightest and and and our folks nutrition services or custodians our warehouse staff or teachers building administrators students who are really really stepping up and going above and beyond you know despite the challenges that are in front of us right now so we get a lot of feedback from the one and so we feel like that was a nice thing to sort of return a bit of normalcy back to our school days and then finally as far as media goes of course you know you have likely all seen media coverage of PBS over the last few weeks most of the helots have been actually very in amplifying our messages especially with regard to computers meals they've just been really great both in there reporting in on their social media and help get the word out I would also like to give thanks to the mayor's office in the counties chairs office who have done that as well on a regular basis we have been shooting a video getting b-roll for television outlets in order to give them something to use and their stories without having to go to schools and and threaten you know what we're working really hard on a social distancing and other safety protocols at the meal sites and so we're working with them they're like I said it been a big help to us for the most part and we'll continue to do that we do hold back every once in a while we do remind outlets that you know we're going to answer to our families and our students our employees first so that may mean that you get something a day or two later but we're gonna tell our own folks first but things have gone fairly well with that and they've been understanding so that's kind of an update from a couple of when we last talked a couple of weeks ago about what is going on with communications thank you David Danny and Jonathan for your ongoing efforts directors were rounding the last corner here to bring it to the close as you might imagine and this continues to be a theme that we're sensitive to will continue to bring up and attend to that surely this is having an impact in different ways with our students and you'll probably hear a substantiate that a little bit more in the future but I wanted to give Russ dr. Russell brown a moment to talk a little bit about what we might anticipate this school closure may have on student learning this here yep I'm here took a second to the unmuted Mike this is about the fourth platform now that we're operating in so in terms of anticipating impact on student learning our partners at NWA have done some research around that and not surprisingly you know we would expect that there's going to be some loss of learning
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that accompanies this that appears at least when they looked at the data and they base that on looking at the trends of you know what tip students typically might lose across the summer sometimes known as summer melt and then extending that for the extended period of time that the students have been away from full-time instruction time on task those losses are anticipated to be greater in the lower grades and greater in terms of mathematics that being said and without you know going into lots and lots of detail on this you know this is an unprecedented event and one that will require us to be thoughtful about looking at our continuous improvement efforts and effective way establishing a new baseline as we move forward and think about learning thank you so so either see it's tough to do systems performance when there's a disruption to our typical assessment cycles our cycles of continuous improvement and all other measures that I know that our board assited is wanting to give important so stay tuned for more on that and then I just wanted to come close to concluding here by hearing from our inner corner intergovernmental relations lead Courtney Wesley there were some questions for board members around what's going on in the way of advocacy and how might we get involved Courtney are you there yeah I'm here can you can you hear me yes okay yes thank you we can hear you oh good okay I haven't used WebEx so thanks for giving me the thumbs up yeah so hi everybody from my bedroom bunker I so yeah there's a lot going on federally as was mentioned earlier with the cares Act and the potential you know Karis 2.0 coming down the pike at some point in the next few weeks a lot of advocacy coming around from the council for great city schools and elsewhere about the need to support local government in school districts in this in this time and a lot of comparison to the you know the investments back during the 2008-2009 recession so there was a letter that was alluded to earlier that quarterly bate that the superintendent has signed on to along with a lot of other urban school district leaders that will be going out later this week to the hill they were waiting to distribute it until after this small business relief package passed today so that's that's on the way I've also shared that letter with our congressional staff to make sure that they know it's coming it's a really good letter and it has a lot of specifics about what you know what this is you know if this is bleak and they need to know what it looks like for districts that and every level because we're all in the same boat so that's going to continue I'm in regular touch with the congressional staff locally here to share information about kind of our needs they want to know what you know what's happening what are we doing a lot of it is pretty it been pretty consistent for the last five weeks but it's really helpful for them to understand just the big pivot that districts like ours are having to to make right now and so a lot of just getting creative and people are working really hard so um owes to everybody for everything you're doing at the state level there's a lot of uncertainty right now the emergency board which is a group of legislators a committee that we'll meet tomorrow for the first time virtually that there's nothing related to education that was being discussed in that committee but it does pave the way to have some conversations about other needs that are of course related to our families and students related to housing small business relief a whole host of other items that I've shared with you yesterday in an email and I'll follow up with specifics as they roll out so that will happen tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. and then after that it's kind of a dance to the to the special session which is I think a foregone conclusion but no date has been set it seems that and I'm sure others know this as well but it seems that the that we're waiting on the revenue forecast that's the big thing everybody's waiting on right now is to see what what what are we really looking at what are we what are we going to have to work with next year so as information comes out I'll be sharing it and just continuing
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to connect with my other district partners and the other associations that we work with at the state state and local level to make sure that we're aligned and we're all you know we're in the room or we're on the calls the virtual room I should say so it does feel like we're connected and that the right people are hearing from us but anything else you think that we should be doing please let me know thanks Courtney so I'll conclude our second briefing to the board tonight thank you for your patience we always try to balance a director's desire to hear how managing through this crisis so you might heard more details than maybe you wanted insight into but we also know it's a benefit to our public when they hear what's going on behind the scenes that may not always be visible but please know that staff is really doing their best to meet needs as they come up already directors brought up a lot of questions this evening that sort of fall into the next steps category many of these are sort of unknowns at this point but not necessarily uncharted sort of on our parking lot of ongoing questions for instance you know we'll get the official k8 guidance and we'll make sure our educators are aware of the Department of EDS expectations for the continuity of learning at those grade levels also you heard about the expected budget implications this may have on our school system and we'll continue to sort of stay in contact with getting you know the best possible information to the board as well and we've done the sending or an eclair we are keeping our labor partner leaders also in the loop and are having ongoing conversations with them in a very transparent fashion in the way that you're hearing tonight about what we understand to be our fiscal contact context and you know it's it's it's not a difficult stretch to wonder what the implications might be for our staffing which is very sobering to us because we're in a very different place just a few weeks ago in our hiring timeline so this is our reality questions around how do we support our students during the summer months of course a lot of a lot of this will depend on a phased reopening approach as the governor shares our plan and what's permitted on campus so we'll need to continue to be creative about how we continue to do what we can to engage students who really are going to need that additional learning time hopefully we'll be able to do something mid to late summer on a limited basis in certain clusters and very much on our mind and I mentioned this last time definitely want to make sure to recognize our graduating seniors so we've been doing a lot of brainstorming and we'll probably be reaching out to many of our student leaders next Maxine will your input on what does that look like if we can't have a traditional in-person graduation at the end of May or first week in June what might it look like we're we're hoping that there's some slim possibility to postpone ceremonies you know traditional ceremonies maybe later into the summer but if that's not possible what are some other ways that we can think about that so are we talking about virtual ceremonies are the other ways that we want to make sure to acknowledge our graduates for their time in PPS so that's very much on our minds you heard some of our leaders talk about what does the tree country plan actually start to look like it's a conversation we're engaging our role alike peers and other school districts this situation has caused us to move faster than maybe we would have in incorporating blended learning approaches and so how do we sort of leverage the fact that and this is a historical you know kind of awesome thing as a byproduct we will for all intents and purposes you'll wonder one student to device ratio district I'm not so sure we would have gotten there this fast it took this crisis to get there but now that we have devices in our kids hands what does that look like that certain grade levels to just maintain that issued device to our students so that our teachers and students can continue to leverage digital content and their learning platform even after we've reopened brick-and-mortar campuses so those are questions that were we're also exploring and then of course sort of the big task that we would be engaged in
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during spring right now is our budget development informed by strategic planning so again this morning our cabinet team was engaged in the conversation around how do we stay true to our vision to the system shifts that we prioritized we're not going to pick different ones but out of realistic or be prepared to stretch out the sequence and the ambition of what gets implemented in this coming school year so as the picture clear hopefully there's you know continued prioritization on k12 in Oregon we know that many of our most vulnerable students are really going to rely on a lot of those wraparound supports that the SI called for we're hoping that we can maintain a level of those as soon as there's some notion that that's going to be a green light will circle back with those social workers and additional counselors and others that we knew we're going to be part of our game plan so and then the business other business of the district continues in earnest that includes leadership appointments we invite the public and directors we've shared the announcements with you there are some school leadership transitions and today we announced another new principal at Robert gray so congratulations there stay tuned we're gonna we're going to continue to engage the community even if it's virtually to be a part of that interview process so stay tuned for more leadership appointments there so and then next slide there Roseanne I'll just end with thank you so many people in this organization and out in the community deserve a high five and and gratitude from us thank you Jonathan for modeling it there we thought that was an appropriate picture thank you everyone for for stepping up for our students we do recognize that there's also a level of patience that we're asking from our parents and our students as we try to be thoughtful and figure things out or not get ahead of ourselves before we receive guidance our principals have been great about noting many of the questions that we need to come up with resolutions for so thank you directors and we'll end it with the last slide there just a couple snapshots Roseanne you see at the top there that's a staff meeting for Benson High School the Curtis shared with us and then down below you see snapshots of our pictures engage our students engaged in distance learning in the home that have been shared with us so everybody we may not have them in front of us physically but we've got a whole community engaged teaching and learning in the business of the district so our student superintendent there is virtual learning that is that that is the infamous Rudy from Lynch school and so very much pain engaged in learning that's a picture posted by his mother on social media so we appreciate that he's not skipping a beat and I know that many of our students and educators are either so that concludes our second briefing to the board a little bit of comprehensive hopefully a third briefing will be a little grief room a brief and answer some of the questions that are emerging for us right now sure thank you so much really phenomenal teamwork everyone and it's we really appreciate the deep dive into what each work stream looks like right now in these in these unfathomable times so we will adjourn and the next meeting of the Board of Education is May 5th and we'll see you virtually then this meeting is adjourned thank you everyone so much this big thank you to Uribe
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[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Oh

Sources

PPS Board of Education, Archive 2019-2020, https://www.pps.net/Page/15694 (accessed: 2022-03-24T00:57:49.341831Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)

2020-04-21 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: Regular Meeting of Board of Education - April 21, 2020

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