2020-07-09 PPS School Board Work Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2020-07-09
Time	18:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	work
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Work Session - July 9, 2020

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members good evening and welcome to tonight's board work session on the development of the 2020 bond this meeting is being audio streamed live on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website for replay times this meeting is also being streamed live on our pps tv services website audio only this november voters may be asked to consider a 2020 school bond renewal that would maintain the current tax rate and continue our investments in our schools the pps board of education has proposed three options for a 2020 bond renewal the current tax rate and for the past several weeks we have received input from the community through surveys focus groups polling and a virtual town hall prior to our discussion tonight we will begin with public comment um roseanne i'm missing my um excuse me let me review our um some of our guidelines for public comment and if any of those who are present to provide testimony if you have additional materials you'd like to give the board of the superintendent please email them to publiccomment pps.net if you're watching this 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 creates feedback and you'll be muted by the meeting administrator and we will come back to you please make sure when you begin your comments that you clearly state your name and spell your last name you'll have two minutes to speak you'll hear a sound when it's time to conclude your remarks we appreciate your input very much and thank you for your cooperation ms bradshaw do we have anyone signed up for public comment tonight yes we do sorry we have winter johannes welcome do we see miss jonas i do it looks like she's unmuted yes good evening everyone can you hear me we can welcome thank you so good evening portland public schools board and everyone tuning in thank you for the opportunity to provide a few brief comments tonight for the record my name is winte johannes i serve as the managing director of the albino vision trust so as many of you know we're putting forth a concept for the center for black excellence which we hope will be integrated into your consideration of a potential bond measure we've given the presentation before so i won't go into the details but we'll say briefly tonight that embedded in the work of albino vision is the idea that the built environment is never neutral and so in a nation grappling so deeply with its legacy with the legacy of its founding it's no surprise then that the built environment is actually very often harmful but we believe that albino vision it doesn't have to be that way that we can design the built environment to transform the reality and design neighborhoods environments and cities that not only reflect the needs and aspirations of all its people but that also reflects a love for black people we cannot do this work alone and we know that portland public schools is a part of our love story and so in this period of really accelerated social change um this time has been so emotional and heavy for us it's also been electrifying at times and so we've been so energized by the conversations we've been having with all of you and the opportunity to look at this moment and say this is when we decided that we were not going to make a difference but we're going to make the difference that we're going to look at the whole life of children in this city and especially black kids and consider how all of our investments can be coordinated not a separate initiatives not as separate jurisdictions but as a whole investment because we love the black kids in the city and we want them to look back at this time and know that we were considering their whole life their whole personhood which includes their families and the communities and the cities they belong to so thank you for the opportunity to offer just a few brief comments i look forward to continuing to work with all of you thank you thank you thank you cali lad welcome hello
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um can everybody hear me yes okay so i for the record uh good evening uh board members um i for the record my name is kelly thornlad and i'm here also to speak about uh what albino trust has presented kairos has been a partner in that artwork um i'm reminded of this time i some of you may have watched the musical hamilton over the weekend i i did with my children and there is a theme throughout the musical where they talk about history has its eyes on you and the idea that the world is upside down and we have an opportunity to write a new narrative i believe that is the time we're in now as as well and that all of us have an opportunity to write a new narrative and that i think history will have its eyes on us and what happens and what we do in this space right now will be something that our children and our grandchildren will read about and and hear about and so i just want to also emphasize my support for centering black excellence as we think about this school bond i know that all of you believe in the ability of black children to thrive and now we have an opportunity to center decision making around the built environment as well as i would say program and programming and curriculum to ensure that black children thrive and not just thrive academically but socially emotionally and culturally and so i'm very excited that this conversation is at the forefront that all of you have an opportunity to write this narrative in history kairos sei poic albina head start many organizations are at the ready to serve the children in this community and to work with the district and partner with the district to ensure that our children do thrive and so i encourage you to make this decision and know that the community will be behind you alongside you to ensure that we can be successful i think that this is an opportunity for this to be a light not just for the state of oregon but maybe the nation um we need to see this work and we need to see it be successful thank you for your time tonight thank you so much for joining us that concludes we have signed up okay thank you so much superintendent guerrero would you like to introduce our topic for this evening yes thank you chair constance really appreciate tonight's public comments uh as you mentioned for the last several weeks uh we've all been engaging the community to gather feedback and input on proposed bonds and renewal scenarios so tonight we're going to share with you all poll results data from our survey that went out to staff and families consolidated feedback from targeted focus groups and feedback on what we heard during our june 25th virtual town hall so the goal this evening is for the board to continue having the opportunity to iterate and further zero in on a favored option to refer to voters on july 28th so taking the lead for staff this evening uh miss courtney wesleyan our director of government relations she's going to get us started hello everybody good evening can you hear me good evening we can't yes i always like to check because this is all new right we're always doing this from our bedrooms or basements um so i'm going to actually start by kicking it over to luke martin with alg research to go through the polling results that we are um that we just became aware of and so he's going to go through a slide deck and roseanne's going to share the slides and then luke will let roseanne know when he wants to move on to the next slide sounds great thanks courtney um are we sharing the slideshow there we go perfect yeah i don't know if you can go to the slide show and full screen it just so people can see a little easier uh okay thanks courtney again my name is luke martin i'm a senior associate with alg research i am currently actually just a few miles north of the other portland over here in maine um but still love portland oregon nonetheless um so as courtney said you know we've been doing some research and have done research in the past with portland public schools um you know we did some research back in december when the sort of early conversations about the bond were starting to happen and yet we were asked to sort of come back in and reassess what the environment looks like now obviously all a lot has changed since december um but you know still sort of an interesting contrast point to look back to
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uh you know with this fresh data uh if you want to go to the next slide so just to give a brief overview of what we did here we did a 600 sample uh phone survey of likely voters here in portland oregon um the data is very fresh uh you know we went in the field june 29th and finished on july 6th and so it took a little break there in the fourth of july fourth of july weekend um but you know we've just you know just started going through the data and you know just kind of wrapped up our analysis um so these are very fresh numbers um overall 67 percent of interviews conducted by phone via cell phone excuse me and the margin of error for example of the size is four percent uh you can actually skip like two slides ahead i'll skip over these subtitle slides perfect um so again you know part of the goal with this poll was really to evaluate the impact virus uh has had and how it would affect support for the bond um so you know to start doing that you know one of the things we did was really asked uh you know as the crisis continues you know do you expect your family's financial situation will get better uh stay the same or get worse and what we found in portland is that you know about one in three voters do expect their financial situation will get worse um conversely about two and three uh think that'll at least stay the same a very small percent i think that'll actually get better in general uh you know these tend to be uh you know people under 50 younger people that think their financial situation will get worse uh non-college grads and renters these are groups that typically support bond measures at a higher threshold um so you know one of the things we were initially very interested in this data with um was you know seeing how this specifically would kind of affect their support so i mean the good thing is right away that i'll just kind of you know like you know i won't bear the lead here is you know we do see most of these groups because they typically you know support bonds at such a high level um they pretty much keep their support you know basically where we would expect to normally see them um so we're not really seeing you know an artificially depressed amount of support for the bond because of how covet is affecting their finance so initially right off the bat i think that's a very good sign for things here um you can skip to the next slide um so the next uh sort of metric we tracked and you know we've asked us every time we have seen like a very slight decrease in the overall education quality or the perception of overall education quality among voters but still doing very well here i mean you know typically this is a pretty harsh metric for schools you know everything has everybody has you know something bad to say unfortunately as i'm sure you all know um but you know we're getting basically even or an even rating here from voters um the one sort of you know stark difference there is people with children giving a negative rating while those that have no children um you know giving a positive rating but really you know it's more that they just don't know um there's a couple things about this uh you know conversely you know one of the other metrics we looked to um was we also asked this question as a split um so half the sample heard the overall education quality half the sample heard you know basically you know how would you rate the quality of education uh provided by portland public schools during the coronavirus pandemic um so the good news here is that you know while those children are giving a negative rating overall they're actually giving a positive rating when it comes to how pps has responded during coronavirus um so i think that's a really good opportunity and then you'll see that sort of don't know uh you know the percentage of people without children who aren't able to give any rating at all you know really kind of doubling compared to the overall rating so i think there's really an opportunity here to uh you know educate and reinforce voters uh you know with the job that pps has done and i think this all kind of plays into you know what the narrative uh with the bond you know essentially will end up being uh and you can go to the next slide um the other sort of key metric that we normally track in these instances uh is the satisfaction with how portland public schools spends the tax dollars it receives uh the very good news here is that this number has stayed very stable so we went from a plus six
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rating in december of 2019 um so 44 sort of saying they were satisfied with the rating uh and again a plus six rating uh in our current data um you know we haven't lost any uh support really you know the number has gone down three points but really you know what's happening here is that the number of people who basically can't give a rating has essentially gone up um so still sort of maintaining the same net rating here so again a very sort of good early indication in this data um we do also i will note uh receive net positive ratings from some sort of groups that normally skew more tax sensitive and so that normally you're sort of uh you know more prone to be less supportive of these kind of bond measures um so most of those subgroups giving a net positive rating here as well uh and you can skip ahead two sides uh so getting into the bond support uh you know again this is the sort of the one of many pieces of good news in here um so we asked you know basically a general support question um you know this is how you know the bow language might actually appear on the ballot um because there is no rate increase um but basically asking shop portland public schools repair modernize replace technology and update curriculum by issuing bonds estimated to maintain the current tax rate uh when we ask that uh you know we easily sort of clear the viability threshold that we normally look for um so normally in you know yes campaigns or you know funding campaigns we look for a sort of minimum viability threshold of 60 overall support with strong support somewhere in the mid to high 30s um so sort of easily clearing both those metrics here 40 strong support 66 overall support and you're really sort of muted opposition that's the other thing really good signal here um you know if this came back and you know opposition was somewhere in like the mid to high 30s um you know i think this would be a little less optimistic um but you know only really getting 22 percent of voters overall you know expressing any real opposition to the bond you can go to that next slide and for some reason these are black out here but um these numbers do the boxes there do sort of line up with uh colors um i think i can kind of figure out what's going on there um so getting into the different fronting levels again we did sort of test three different options here and you know initially what you see obviously is that a majority of voters uh strongly favor actually not even just favor but strongly favor uh the 1.1 billion dollar bond proposal so very good news there uh we actually see an increase of support from the general ballot question um so going from 66 overall uh support to 75 overall support and i think you know that's a really good sort of indication that there's very little sticker shock uh you know as we clear that one billion dollar threshold um and just sort of give a kind of a brief overview of how this question worked so every respondent heard the funding amounts in order of highest to lowest and this is really done to sort of replicate the reality of this conversation um and it's usually done that way to sort of find where the floor of support here uh is uh the interesting here is basically without any sort of uh increase in the tax rate we actually find decreased support uh for these smaller bond amounts that do less i will to say you know obviously you know in writing this poll and analyzing this data you know we're also cognizant of the fact that uh you know portland public schools was you know pretty public with their earlier bond conversations about the 1.4 billion dollar bond uh i think it's also probably likely that there's some criticism that these smaller bond amounts don't do more and that's probably likely reflected in the in the lack of support for the smaller bond amount and you can skip ahead two slides so getting into the individual priorities for this bond um you know the top priorities here and really i think what this what the theme of this data says to me uh is that you know what voters are really interested in is increasing education opportunity um here you know that is through uh you know updated modern current curriculum uh you know which is getting you know sort of the most intensity behind the support for that priority uh so 29 that's you know one of the most important priorities uh 74 overall saying it's at least a very important priority um making sure with students with disabilities have the same access as their peers um so 28 thing you know one of the most important 73 overall uh in that you know again this one sort of always tests
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fairly highly um but you know remains a very important priority here um you know that critical maintenance projects don't really become a hindrance to students education and that means you know obviously you know fixing leaking steering roofs replacing replacing outdated and failing heating and cooling systems so that one getting 25 percent uh you know intensity and then 72 overall support and you can skip to the next slide uh so you know as we get into sort of the next tier of priorities here uh you know i will say you know all of these are busy with the exception of one which you'll see in the next slide you're receiving very high uh levels of support generally uh you know typically anything kind of above 50 is you know where we kind of draw the line is like yeah this is probably something that's going to motivate people um but you know really here you know voters were pretty widespread with you know what they were willing to support um so again i think that you know that as a whole is a good indication but it also means sort of you know the things that we're able to talk about um you know the things that we're able to highlight that this money will do um you know we have a lot of options there which makes things you know just sort of easier in general um so all of these ones you know this is sort of next here you know rating very highly um including accountability um you know the modernization of jefferson you know especially with an emphasis uh on that center for black student excellence you have that rated higher than you know uh another question which we split tested which was about the modernization of jefferson but you know was more focused on you know the actual uh you know age of the building itself um so you know that diversity component uh you know the equity component of that in the center of my student excellence uh you know really you know driving higher support generally um which was great to see uh so that one getting 21 saying you know one of the most important and then 62 overall and then finally the last one on here is you know increased technology access you know again something especially in light of coronavirus you know i found very important in a number of these school funding scenarios um so all sort of these top six you know all rated very highly you know all very important motivators um you know i think all sort of safe ground for us to talk about and you know really kind of promote as part of this package uh and you can go to the next slide uh so finally you know here we've got uh seismic upgrades you know improvements to special education um and then again the other sort of split test of that jefferson question which dealt more with the sort of condition of the school rather than diversity components and you know all of those still you know again you know being rated very highly above 50 and you'll see that second jefferson question to you know getting a fairly high percent of you know intensity there so 23 i'm still saying you know addressing you know the condition of jefferson is you know one of the most important things um the last thing on here you know strengthening school security uh you know the way this question is set up you know it's not really an indication that this is something that's bad or is going to turn off voters or you know going to like actively work against us um it's more just an indication that it's not something that people are motivated by um so not that it's about the table but again you know not going to be something that people are going to see and be sort of actively enthusiastic about uh you can go to the next slide uh so we did test some uh positive messaging in this poll um so we tested three messages overall uh you know again really kind of great to see here but basically all of them you know testing above 40 uh total very convincing uh that is sort of the key marker we look for on communications so basically anything above 40 very convincing uh you know we typically consider that a good message or a motivating message anything below that is something that you know isn't likely to sort of motivate voters but all three messages here you're really pretty well above that mark uh the equity message we tested uh you know received sort of the most support or resonated the most among these voters um but you know health and safety repairs technology updates you know both testing well in the more in the mid 40s and you'll see the soft voters category on here as well so that is anybody in the initial sort of general support question who was either undecided or was just somewhat in favor or opposed so these are people that haven't totally made up their minds yet two good things here you know the soft voters you know really kind of responding similarly to voters overall uh you know indication indicating you know similar levels of enthusiasm for these uh messages uh the other good thing is you know a lot of times what we'll see with these
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softwares is sometimes these messages will actively you know sort of turn them off essentially um so you'll see very low levels of people reporting and messages very convincing just because they're sort of not interested in the conversation that is not something we're seeing seeing here with any of these messages um so again all very good indication and you can go to the next slide so uh you know after hearing more about the bond and you know at this point you know they've heard the three different uh funding levels and the sort of different components that are hurt that are part of those funding levels uh you know they've heard about their priorities that could be included in the bond and they've heard that positive messaging um so what we see is actually an increase in support which is always good but there's some sort of subtlety in this support increase that i think is important to notice uh the first good thing that you'll notice is that we actually see a decrease in opposition um so a lot of times in these funding uh you know ballot questions what you'll see here is you know essentially a lot of don't know vote basically being converted to support but you'll also see some of that don't know vote you know as people learn more you know going to the opposition essentially so here we actually see the opposite we see basically both undecided voters and opposition voters you know increasing and going to support once they learn more about the bond so i think that's a really good indication you know indicates some pliability in in the opposition vote especially which i think is kind of a key here you know i think if you saw you know that opposition vote really firm up um you know that would sort of tell me that you know there was a little more uh you know opposition kind of brewing or had the ability to have the opposition if i have the ability to grow a little bit more um you know we're here we're just seeing it really weakening and you know i think a lot of that probably goes to the fact that you know we're not talking about a rate increase um so there's not much for sort of opposition voters to latch onto this so again really great great signs here just very positive overall in general and you can skip ahead two slides um so i think i kind of covered most of this here but you know just to reiterate you know the sort of you know the fine points um so you know essentially what we found in this data is you have two and three portland voters support a new bond um you know just general support uh while three and four actually support a 1.1 billion dollar package um so you know that specific funding amount you know where they can learn within it and yeah that includes a realized community vision at the jefferson high school campus for the center of black student excellence um expanding educational opportunity i think is kind of the you know the narrative for the top priority for voters here um you know really what that means is you know increased equity uh you know health and safety and technology uh you know i think essentially the the route that that kind of takes is you know it starts with the modernization of jefferson high school that's kind of like the focal point um but you know it really applies district wide and i think it's important to emphasize you know like the you know the benefits district-wide of increasing opportunity you know through things like you know a modern curriculum and increase accessibility um and i think you know just again to sort of reiterate and you know put up sort of an exclamation point you know i think it's a really good sign that we're able to demonstrate the positive movement throughout this poll uh you know that is not always the case um you know as voters really do learn more about the specific components of the bonds and hear positive messaging um you know we see a good consolidation among you know people that are already existing you know so we're seeing you know higher numbers of support from groups that are already supporters and then you have positive movement from groups that are undecided or in this case again even opposed so all very good indication so that is all i've got for you um you can i think there's actually one more slide here that i'll kind of leave up that's just a vote summary um and this just is again you know kind of a quick summary of you know the current vote to the general vote uh that informed vote which was the you know the last one i showed and then the one all the way on the right is the 1.1 billion dollar bond vote um so i figured that would be kind of handy to leave up um while we take questions yeah so we're going to open the floor for questions um because it's late where luke is and we want to make sure he can sign off at some point so take it away whoever wants to ask a question of luke while he's with us
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so this is uh director from edwards um thanks for the presentation um as somebody who's been involved in a lot of campaigns it's very heartening to see when a package that i think is a real win for the community um also um and does the things that we really think need to set us up for the future also does really well with voters so it's heartening to see my question is around just the environment over the next uh four months obviously um it's summertime there's a lot of volatility given the pandemic the pandemic and the economic recession and um also our national reckoning with racial inequality and social justice and that my question would be sort of and i know this has never sort of been in um this exact environment in which you have this external environment that is fairly unpredictable in a sense of this coming fall just so you're you're thinking about um the whether um we would see a change in attitudes um or perceptions um based on you know what happens this fall and um sort of you know how how solid you think that the base numbers are and or looking at the crosstabs yeah that's a hard question i'm just it's we're a long ways the numbers look great and i say i think it's saying that they match um i think it's a strong package um and voters recognize that well i mean i guess you know my uh my the easy answer there as a pollster is you know the way to figure that out is to do more research which you know we're always happy to do for you guys um but i think there are a couple good indications in this data that there is at least some resiliency in this you know again we are seeing very high sort of levels of firmness in the support so even in that general bond question you have 40 percent for you know strong support uh in the initial ask about the 1.1 billion dollar bond uh you know 50 you know so a majority of voters already saying yeah they're strongly in favor of that and again you know i guess i would go back to that sort of education quality question um you know it really stuck out to me that you know while those with children you know would give a negative overall rating which you know is fairly common especially with with school districts um it really struck me that you know they would give a negative rating overall but then also give a pause a positive rating uh for you know how the district has handled everything during coronavirus so i mean i think there you know there's you kind of see the opportunity there you know especially even among those who don't have children you know to really sort of reinforce and you know drive that you know that rating up i think you know kind of as that uh covert rating increases you know if we can keep that high and you know keep informing voters of the job for public schools is doing you know i think you know the more you can do that you know the more you can kind of build resiliency into the support here okay thanks this is director bailey i want to thank you for a nice clear explanation and i always love bar graphs um so i just want to say one one this is maybe the most positive poll i've seen in my history of pbs uh and particularly around this bond this this uh there's nothing we have to downplay there's uh every good reason we know we have for going out for a bond find support in these results so that's that's a real great way to build a campaign um and uh just another issue that may uh that we can build into our campaign message is this is a jobs bond um [Music] and if if the economy is still in pretty tough shape in november which none of us would be surprised by that uh this is a way to put dollars to work to put people back to work as just one of the side benefits um so i'm i'm real happy that we can build a campaign around doing good things for kids around addressing issues of social justice and racial equity
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this is great yeah and i mean you know one thing i'll say real quick about that too is you know done a couple you know school funding you know yes campaigns recently and i do think you know in general you know going into the midwest and down on the east coast as well you know i think we've seen you know if anything kind of a support for more education funding i think everybody you know in this environment is kind of looking for some way to give back and i do think there's some degree to which voters kind of see this as their way to kind of contribute and make things a little bit better for everybody in this environment so that's kind of my like mushy take on a little bit of this but you know one i think it's still kind of relevant um luke i want to thank you for your presentation too um you know we got a briefing on the numbers but it's um one thing to to hear the numbers and another thing to see them like this um those 602 likely voters um spoke for the larger community and um i think what this is is a great example of democracy at work we've had people out marching in the streets um not just recently but for decades and uh it's it this is a great example of you know the district leading on listening to those voices and operationalizing equity in a way that i don't think i've seen um demonstrated in my lifetime so um this is very exciting um happy to move forward yeah i mean i don't think you get these numbers without you know the work the district has done i think that kind of goes with that thing thank you do you have any other questions about the poll this is uh director brehm edwards again um i don't know if you want to speak to any of these sort of um elements other than the modernizations and the testing and sort of what you see maybe beneath the numbers whether it's related to um the health and safety portion or the technology pieces the curriculum um it looks like from my perspective that we have a whole host of um elements to the bond that strongly resonate with our community but i'm just curious about your thinking about the different components that um might be part of the package sure um yes i mean i guess the first thing you know i think with a priority specifically you know we've obviously taken a pretty thorough look at the crosstabs here uh you know parents you know those who have children in public schools you know really you know emphasize the priority of the curriculum um you know we found a much higher degree to which you know they reported sort of higher intensity for that one specifically we've also taken a lot of look through this data for people of color as well um you know they really it's interesting you know they reported somewhat higher levels of being financially affected uh by coronavirus initially and their support initially is somewhat lower overall but you know they really demonstrated the most ability of any subgroup to move throughout this data and they really seem to key in especially on those equity messages so i think those are kind of both really good uh signals at least at first um you know happy to sort of elaborate on that more too as we continue to dig through this great thanks one last comment is um i think uh this is an opportunity to link some kind of uh unsexy things like hvac to covid in terms of um improving airflow in our buildings besides you know preventing systems from failing and i think there's a number of opportunities in here to link the bond to responding to the pandemic i think that um hvac systems you always say they're not sexy but they actually are particularly in a pandemic environment where you know the rate of air exchange is going to become increasingly important um you know depending on how many kids are in in buildings well it's it's a it's a special small subset of us that [Laughter] goes back
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luke thank you very much for joining us and for your work it's great to get those insights from the community and it's also just great to get the really really positive um positive look at voters perceptions and i think it is partly a reflection of being able to see the investments that have already been made in this community and and how much more we have to do um so without any further questions on the polling i will send it back to courtney great thanks again luke have a great night um so roseanne would you present the next slideshow great thank you among your many talents um okay so i am going to let's see i'm getting some feedback are you guys hearing feedback okay then i'll just ignore it um roseanne can you go to the next guide okay so um where we are now we went through the poll we're going to have dr brown talk about the survey results and then we're going to turn it over to jonathan to walk us through the town hall the virtual town hall and then i believe he's going to kick it to shanice to talk about the focus group so i am going to have um roseanne click to the next slide and i'm going to ask dr brown to join us to talk about the survey good evening um can you all hear me you can welcome thank you um pleasure to be with you this evening um thank you for the opportunity to present um i think you're gonna hear a very similar message we had a survey that we put out of the community between june 23rd and july 3rd so similar window of time we had 2058 respondents of those about 80 percent were white uh the vast majority of the respondents um report on resonance about 70 percent of the respondents were parents in the system and we had about 17.3 percent of our educators that participated in in the survey as well next slide please we had a couple blocks of questions that ask about investment priorities and ask folks to look at certain dimensions you know curriculum technology special education classrooms and additional instructional investments and rate them in terms of either being extremely valuable all the way to not valuable at all and you can see that much like in in the polling uh curriculum and technology and special education classrooms all were uh considered to be you know quite valuable or extremely valuable by you know 75 plus of our community um and the additional instructional investments a little bit more ambiguous had only 64 again curriculum was most valued um a category of the want but technology was a close second and again you see the special ed classroom is not very far behind on that as well we also ask next slide please about health and safety investment priorities and much like we heard before um in general the respondents did not see as much compelling value in security systems as they did in the others the other items all clustered pretty closely uh you know in the high 70s to low 80s looking at roofs ada accessibility seismic improvements and mechanical systems all were considered relatively valuable by the respondents the survey next slide please next slide please there were a couple open-ended questions as well one asked about you know modern modernization and it again was an open-ended question you see the word cloud there and at the center of that word cloud you see jefferson and we look through the the responses to the open-ended questions and pulled out a couple of exemplars the one that you see here um is typical jefferson modernization should absolutely be prioritized as the historically black high school and pps and in the state of oregon and the home of indian education program pps needs to stand by their mission to prioritize black and native american
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students families and staff we also ask open-ended questions in terms of the bond proposal you know what else should the board be considering as they think about the bond proposal again you see jefferson at the center of that and a rather pointed comment eps loves to put black students from jefferson and their slideshows and websites but will not prioritize modernization saying the word equity and prioritizing black and native american students and actually doing something that benefits black and native american communities are very different things stop talking and do that being said when we ask the the community and the respondents to tell us of of the uh bond priorities which one do you favor not surprisingly and again very similar to what we heard from polling the one billion dollar bond proposal that had a very clear pathway forward for jefferson was preferred by the largest group of of the respondents with 38.6 percent of the respondents favoring it so i think what you hear in this data is something very similar to what you heard from the polling data the two i think give a very similar picture of the interest in the community to move forward and to support jefferson as we move forward um with that that sort of covers uh the content from the the survey and i'll be handing off to jonathan garcia now thank you dr brown uh next slide please uh so a few weeks ago as you recall we hosted a town hall and we wanted to provide you again very similar uh messaging from the poll and from the survey that we heard from folks that attended our session uh overall as uh we had about 167 rsvps uh we've probably had close to 100 120 folks show up as you recall we had we structured the town hall into breakout rooms and so we had different conversations uh you should have received an email from uh director wesley a summary or a overview of these key takeaways but wanted to highlight that again similar uh you know there's uh general support for investments in educational infrastructures with the strong desire uh for additional spent classrooms uh obviously increasing our efforts in health and safety and similarly to uh to other speakers before me jefferson continues to be an area that uh the community really has articulated as an area for us to invest and so collectively you know in all rooms especially in the room around bond options uh you know modernizing and providing the full funding uh for jefferson uh was a priority and then during these conversations uh as you all know aboard the center for black excellence emerged as an idea that the school board should consider including in the bond reveal so those were the some of the key takeaways from the town hall now i'm going to turn it over to our director of community engagement shins clark to share a few uh thoughts on our focus groups that we just completed yesterday greetings uh superintendent cheer constantly directors if we move on to the next slide i can talk a little bit about our focus groups in which many of you were able to participate in but we wanted to continue this effort of focusing uh opportunities for our black and native and other families of color to uh specifically voice their uh priorities when we're reflecting on this bond package and we were able to work in relationship with our racial equity and social justice department to think through what small groups of students and families would look like in over the course of this week and so you'll see here some highlights that are also reflected in that larger overview that you've received that our student council nea self-enhancement incorporated latino network open school and the coalition of black men were able to work with us as thought partners as we uh got feedback from from them from them our students and family so i'd like to talk more about that if we move to the next slide so uh across all of our focus groups uh we definitely heard similar themes that are in alignment with what what has been raised
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already tonight but we uh absolutely especially uh during a time of coronavirus and distance learning um had a lot of reflection across all of our focus groups uh a black and native focus groups and spanish-speaking focus groups uh of uh the heightened priority of educational investments uh and what that means for them uh as as this essential tool um in their day-to-day lives and uh the this the second theme that is definitely a priority is uh calling out the the third bond option as it's uh you know it's closely represents this opportunity to comprehensively fund jefferson and lots of discussion around what this investment this overdue investment in those students at this historically black school would really mean uh in addition to the center for black excellence um and really hearing enthusiastic support um and and folks really uh feeling uh affirmed and relieved almost that this is a discussion and that will that will really be coming to life so i think uh those are themes two themes but uh across uh the four focus groups you'll see some more details um in that overview and i'll pass it on thanks shanice so i'll just yeah i'm just going to wrap up and tell you that that concludes the presentation um and we wanted to leave quite a bit of time for board discussion so i think now is that time and we have i know that you know with these kinds of things we can talk all night but we have a good hour and six minutes i'd just like to say with regard to the engagement um i think at the beginning of this pandemic um it seemed so hard for us to wrap our heads around how we were going to be able to communicate with our community in this time and it's so critically important for this task at hand building this bond package that we really hear from people and i just want to commend you shanice and jonathan and your whole team for really figuring out new ways to um bring in lots of different viewpoints and in a pretty meaningful way you know not just um not just wrote or answer a few questions the focus group conversations were really deep and meaningful and thank you dr brown for your team's work on the survey which is really important because it reaches a broader cross-section of people so um i just want to say thank you it's so important for us to have this information available and just like everything else had to figure out a new way to do it any other discussion around um just what we've learned from these different means of engaging with the public i just wanted to also i wanted to thank um shanice i was involved in a couple of your focus groups and jonathan your work and reaching people uh that we don't engage with um well sometimes um was really impactful i know the conversations that i've had with um different community leaders over the last 10 days or two weeks have followed that same bell curve that we're hearing from the larger community in wanting to see an investment in black students um and and i just i'm i'm feeling very positive about the way that we've gone around this uh this product this product and we have so much evidence now um and direction for which way to go with this i think it's fantastic but particularly your work in working with these um these focus groups has been really great high quality much appreciation directors and um as our teams are building uh these systems uh i know in relationship with our systems planning and performance will will start to really carve out a strategy that will be defined that we can continue and i think bringing these voices um and thinking about our targeted universalism uh philosophy through engagement is something um that and definitely during a time of an uprising but for our students um in the context of what they deserve um i think makes a lot of sense and is getting positive feedback uh from from our black and native folks that we're continuing these feedback loops um and so um yes uh it's so it's a lot of work um but i
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appreciate you all for investing in it and being present so one comment i wanted to have is around the high school modernizations and um i think i appreciate that we had an opportunity here in a variety of different forums um students really speaking from the heart and specialists and and staff about what um an improvement in the learning environment would mean to them and what it would mean to um the message that it would send from the community that they are valued and i say we heard this especially from the jefferson students and staff that the current condition of the facility really sends a negative message about their value and the value of their education and that um they said it in a way though that was hopeful that things were about ready to change um so i really appreciate the way that um the feedback sessions were set up so that we could hear that hear directly from students and i appreciate that they were direct and and honest in their assessment of where we we are and where we need to go um i also um and that this comment came out on sort of the drama survey and also emails we got i want to just say to the um cleveland and wilson community that i'm you know we reached a point in time and where one high school needed to go before the other and i think two critical things happened that cleveland and wilson communities um said that yes jefferson needed to go first and so you know thank you to those communities for recognizing the right thing to do but also i want to shout out to this the facilities staff and osm for also coming up with the way in which we could um also communicate with the cleveland and wilson communities that um we still are prioritizing the modernization of their high schools and that's that's going to happen and that they're making a tangent potentially if we go with option number three we'll be making a tangible investment in in those communities so just really all around a good process that got us i think um through a challenging potentially issue to i think a good outcome so thank the team staff who helped get us to that point thank you julia i think that's a good segue so to move our conversation on to um looking at the options before us and looking at how option three has evolved and um as we all know this decision about uh defining pretty specifically what's going to be in this package and referring it to the to the voters is bearing down on us before the end of this month so i'm guessing that this next starring role goes to dan young is that correct do we have a do we have a option slide to to put forward so you all have a discussion draft and if that's what you'd like him to talk through that that would be the better way to do it you mean just from our email we don't have a final option to present since you guys are going to discuss where you want to go next so the document that was shared before the meeting has a draft of a um of a option option three plus basically um based on what the feedback that came out of the uh community engagement okay so you're just referring to our email not uh anything you're gonna put forward right yep yeah okay i'm sorry is that the um the email we got at 553 yes yes it is okay and i'm sorry that it was so late no that's okay i just want to make sure you're looking at the right thing yeah yeah so it's a it's the title of the document is draft for board discussion and that got a lot got line items that you've seen before and i know um we talked about posting it so roseanne um knows that that's in the hopper i'm not sure if it's been posted but that's what we are working on for this next sort of part of the discussion and again sorry that this came late it's um this is a fast process guys courtney is it possible for you to share that as a slide
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bond renewal option at 1.1 billion uh also is it possible for um someone on staff to post it um with our meeting materials that if it hasn't already been posted yeah i'm not sure if i know how to share on webex so i'm going to ask roseanne who has the document if she could if she could share it and i'm sorry for the question the answer is yes to both great yeah look at them and and really um for the purposes of discussion this um there are no changes to this proposed bond renewal option from our previous option three other than a line item for the center for black student excellence planning design and pre-construction is that correct courtney nothing else the only um the only other change was based on feedback from you all to increase the fed classroom number to see what that total was so the sped classroom number on this option um draft is the larger number from the two earlier op the two other options so in option one and two from before bed classrooms were at 22.3 and in option three from before it was 4.5 there was an interest from the board to go bigger and so that's what's reflected here so that's the only other change got it thank you very much so apologies i'm pulling it up can somebody talk me through the 60 million of design dollars for the center black excellence that's 50 more than designing for two high schools so like uh dan do you want to start and then i can uh weigh in here sure yeah um so sure i mean i'll just i'll mention quickly i think so the 60 million dollars i think with that what that looks to represent is a significant investment in the center for black student excellence and that will go towards as noted they're planning and design uh of what that future project and scope looks like a lot of that is is will need to be defined through that planning process um but the intention is to show a significant investment in the jonathan phillips yes uh i think that's right uh so i would add that uh from uh from the line item perspective we're looking at uh you know some of the work around uh you know concept or conceptual planning um as as as dan uh suggested it also will include uh as we know this is gonna be atypical from the from the typical experiences we have around modernizing our schools and our school communities and so engagement uh with the black community will be very central and in identifying uh key ways to to do that uh so so there be uh some investment for meaningful uh uh engagement around uh how how do we build out the goals and the the objectives of the center for black student excellence uh and then uh even as we think about uh you know this work we want to show a commitment that we're not only uh doing conceptual planning but that we're actually actually also uh beginning to design some of that work right because as we what has been clear uh you know from our community into the feedback is that uh you know we just like many institutions in oregon and across this country uh uh plan a lot of things but then i put those on the shelf so we want to show that in this spawn we're committed to both the conceptual planning meaningful engagement of our community of our black community our community in the the jefferson cluster and uh and then some actual meet behind that uh you know with with our architectural design jonathan just to cut you off sorry amy but i think i think to both jonathan and dan i i think the 60 million dollars it says plan and design pre-construction i think that also includes some construction so there's there are capital costs involved in there and so i think we should we should make sure we're really clear uh on this and also with the public that it's um it's not just planning design and pre-construction there's actually funding in there that would be involved for actual capital costs and you know scott back back to your your question i think in terms of what i think this is the exact point we are not saying exactly what that 60 million is going to go for
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because one of the most important parts of this process is is co-creation with the community and and i think that this is this is you know you all heard me raise a few weeks ago some concerns about do we know what the vision is have we talked to the community have we heard from them i will tell you what i heard loud and clear over the last few weeks from the community is the need to move forward and the need not to wait but also the need to continue to engage and so to be really clear we know the 320 million dollars is for is a you know it's rough estimate but it's a pretty good estimate of what we think it's going to do cost to modernize jefferson 60 million dollars is less defined intentionally because we're going to be talking to the community about exactly what that center for black student excellence will look like going through all of that planning and design and then actually having some money for construction as well director scott and if i can if i can just ask that i think what what's what's important is that we as we think about the center for black student excellence let's remember that we uh you know part of the the vision or the guide is that that we are going to be talking uh you know pre-pre-k to 212 so that includes potentially multiple sites that includes uh multiple uh opportunities to think about uh the black community and the schools that represent uh the black community like uh uh boise elliot as an example what does that look like to think about some support there so it includes sites multiple sites is a really critical point here and also back to your point andrew um around the way this is described here um it absolutely is hard money for capital investments including as jonathan i mean on the table for community discussion facilities improvements in our jefferson feeder schools and just say a center for a center for black excellence absolutely needs to be um envisioned and created from the black community and and so i think extra attention to uh engagement is is critical to the success and including the people that are most impacted by by any project such as this the best practices um inform us that we should have them be part of the conversation rather than doing something for the community and um and these things cost money and time and i think that that's that that number represents both of those things money and time yeah well so let me be clear i'm wearing coming from and seeing 60 million dollars again how this red and this is the first time i've seen it with no product uh cost me some heartburn so it's good to hear that there's some product in there um i'm i'm all for a really grounded visionary community process uh but 60 million is a lot to pay for that [Music] um 60 million is 2k fives are pretty close to that or at least a really good middle school so um i i want to see more definition of what that's included a better maybe a better definition um yeah just to your your point um maybe dan um could provide just just to give us a ballpark because i think kellogg and the multiple pathways to graduation buildings are about 60 million so and i think this is an excellent point discussion about now so that we actually capture what we could be getting for 60 million and dan am i roughly correct that's the cost of both kellogg separately and the mpg buildings yeah you're very good they're both very near 60 million dollars well done which is how many square feet approximately both okay kellogg is about a hundred thousand square feet i'm going to not recall multiple pathways off hand but somewhere in the ballpark and both of those included planning processes maybe not as thorough of what we're as we're talking about with this center but i i i want us to have good process and i want us to focus on results which is you know actual buildings well right so as we think about the fact that you know in you know in our conversations uh with my conversations with dan uh director bailey uh you know it's it's clear that some of the planning for
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some of the general programs is anywhere in the ballpark of you know uh eight million to to nine million correct me if i'm wrong uh again that includes some of the planning and uh conceptual development right and so that's just for one single site so again as we think about uh some of the ideas that have been generated around the center for black student excellence uh you know it is important to think about this uh you know looking at multiple sites uh and so as we as as we initiated some initial strap uh to director scott's point you know uh we can't you know this is the fine balance of wanting to provide something that is you know tangible uh but also that you know we allow our community uh to shape what that looks like in the future right so so this money is meant to be to provide that opportunity for us as a school district to do this differently than we have typically done it we have invested in master planning before it's not dissimilar to the process that we've had for our high schools and that's why we are where we are with jefferson today we have a cost estimate we have a community-led process that has you know gotten us to the point of what what jefferson itself might look like so um a master planning process for these other elements could could look a little similar so i also just want to remind us all that um you know people are out demonstrating every night because carrying on business as usual has not worked for many communities and so i know in my day job we're being very intentional about um not going with our first our gut instincts because that's that that represents business as usual and this um i'm calling a bubbling of a dollar figure allows us the time to envision alongside and collectively with the community um and get their buy-in and and and co-create this you know the center for black excellence excellence i'm happy to know that we're being um we're being very intentional about um the approach to this project rather than um rather than conducting it business as usual so one thing i'm curious about when i'm looking at option three which is um has been and is my preferred option is the question around security versus ada and ada accessibility and i'm going to ask the question that i've asked a number of times over the years about ada accessibility and does the since our our broader community based on polling and that's just one snapshot scored security lower um than almost every other thing in the package and ada accessibility was ranked relatively high here's does 11 million get us to um one of us a standard that we had asked um have discussed over the years which is like every cluster has a fully accessible elementary school middle school and high schools so that students with diverse needs can attend their a school if not their neighborhood school a school in their high school cluster does that amount that 11 million gets get us to that yeah good question um i i will start by saying that we are in the process right now of based upon the feedback that we've received recently from the bac and from others and also going through and sharpening our pencil and some other requests for estimates uh we're going to be sending out early next week an update to all the numbers there won't be major shifts but there will be some shifts in the numbers and some will go up and some will go down i just want to preface with that uh on the ada number there uh the when we presented the ada options we gave three options i'm pretty sure this is right the 11 million was the lowest number and what that did was provide was an estimate for one fully accessible k5 middle school and high school per cluster there was a second option that had multiple configurations uh in each cluster and then i believe the largest was second floor accessible i've been first floor accessible sorry throughout the district um i'll resend out the document that's
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got more of those details that's going a little bit off of memory but in short yes that is that is the one configuration per cluster option dan i know our bond accountability committee really took a deep dive with all of this last week so can you tell us um specifically what other areas you guys are um re-estimating i know we're looking at um the costs the projected costs for jefferson and back to what those costs might be if it was a new building for example or what were some of the other um ideas that came up through the bac yeah some of the ones we're looking at is as we've reached out to our cost estimator to get a conceptual number for uh that jefferson model that you just mentioned uh we've also talked to three cost estimators to look at uh construction cost escalation what that forecast is update our forecaster see if we need to update our forecast for that and that's something that trickles through most all these scopes of work because we're looking to use a uniform uh uh cost estimate or forecasting estimate uh the staffing plan is another one we've used the generic five percent because we've looked at lots of different options so having a percentage was uh easy to do because staffing obviously depends on what that scope of work is we're looking more specifically at the staffing uh and it's going to be most likely somewhere in that five to six percent that's what we've been running pretty regularly but to get a more precise number on that and and um internally staff we've been going over these scopes of work as well for the last several weeks and there's a couple areas where you know we're sharpening our pencil we've we've found a little bit of uh duplicating some work and so we've we've sharpened the first all right let's hope that those just all come out on the right side yeah they're all down that's where we love that so just i guess i would flag i'd be curious about um and this is i think a relatively minor in a 1.1 billion dollar potential package shifting money some money from security to ada accessibility depending on what so it sounds like um dan that the 11 million gets you the one the 1k5 one middle school and one high school high school cluster um and i guess i'd just be interested like what's what's the next increment um you know just so we we can continue our forward motion um to make our district as accessible as possible yeah i think that's absolutely a fair comment and something that we should look at um i would also um note that we're one of the other uh factors here cost factors is the program contingency so we're looking to hold the 10 contingency uh in all of the models that we've had that uh and if this is a four year bond for example if we're a couple years into that and we're not looking to need that contingency for a specific purpose uh that would be a good time to make for the board to go through some decision making about how they might allocate those funds to other scopes but just looking from the base of increasing that ada cost a scope is a good idea but but dan that security number actually reflects um being able to do the scope of work that we've identified as needed in all of our buildings right it's not an incremental approach the correct the security scope that's in that number includes classroom tour locks throughout the district uh it's in updates to our security uh system throughout the district where that's needed and adding cameras throughout the district i guess my only comment would be um i mean they're all worthy investments is we just have a long way to go on accessibility and um my my preference would be to try and make more progress if we could and um while some of the security pieces are it's like the locks having changing the locks or having classroom locks on all the doors is something that's district-wide others are incremental and we're making trade-offs all over the you know all over the place with um our facility needs so i say i don't view it as a big a big line item but if we can continue to really make progress i know this has been a pretty substantial issue for lots of parent lots of parents and and students of not having access to neighborhood schools or even the neighborhoods even a school in their
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cluster high school cluster yeah absolutely something worth worth looking at in more detail so um and not to disagree with your point i think looking at at some kind of shift there would be good to look at i just want to say with uh school being closed school shootings have not been in the headlines as soon as they are i think the poll results on security would change um because you know that's the kind of culture we live in is what's right in front of us is what's important um so i just just want to put that out as kind of a caution or something to think about um when it comes to the security piece i think another thing to note too is that the investments in our special education classrooms um many of those are accessibility and you know facilities changes yeah they're just earmarked specifically for our um special education focused classrooms right my other question is we are potentially looking at uh converting another middle school uh in the short term are there any funds in this package that would make the necessary changes building changes would those be funded anywhere in this package this option as presented uh does not include that the the categories of work that we've been using in the different models uh include a capacity and enrollment category where some of the options have had funds there in the past to date from the enrollment review and capacity review that has been going on there hasn't been any specific capital need or capital project identified that said we are aware that we're go we're reviewing enrollment um and there could be some capital needs in the near future in the next year or in the next couple years those just have not been identified yet so setting some funds aside to support those needs when identified might be a smart decision yeah sir we know reno from roseway heights um i believe well tupman certainly and awkway we we have an idea of the rough amount of what those funds might be um again this isn't a certainty we haven't we haven't decided that yet but it's certainly a strong possibility um and those when that if if that happens the money has to come from somewhere and and i think to put a fine point on it i mean the board has been fairly clear in saying that we want harrison park to be considered in in the same process as the enrollment um balancing conversation for kellogg since they're adjacent and i think there's generally been consensus that harrison park would be the next um middle school conversion that we haven't voted on it so it is just a question of whether that those improvements would be absorbed by the general fund yeah thank you director constant for [Music] raising it in that framework because i believe within the next year as we move to designate the boundaries of kellogg the very real question of what about the other under-enrolled k-8s in outer southeast or the last concentration of them in the district um will will be definitely an issue that comes up and i think we all don't want to be in the position of how come we didn't allocate any money for that when we knew that that needed to happen so i really appreciate um that director bailey raised it and supporting comments for direct from director constand because we know it's going to be needed so we should plan for it um and i say i think it's been a long time coming they're going to be the last ones and we don't want to say we can't do it because we didn't plan for it even though we discussed it repeatedly can i ask uh this is rita um can i ask a question about the um
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the um how do i put this uh how solid are these cost estimates um do we have any indication yet um what kind of impact we may be seeing in the short term or the medium term around cost escalation yeah that's a great question these are all definitely estimates and something that we know about estimates is they're going to be wrong one way or the other uh the way that we look to manage that is you know we've got some different risk management strategies contingencies that are built within projects and scopes of work and also program contingencies are a couple of those we have we've always carried cost escalation in our projects as well we had been carrying assuming for these projects the five percent for the first year and four percent for the remaining years uh we're getting some updated information or we've got some updated information about that or we're putting together what a revised recommendation would look like uh there's clearly no consensus some of our estimators anticipate that their rates will increase in coming years others anticipate it will decrease in coming years from from what it is now um that said from what what we've seen come in so far it isn't no one's anticipating anything dramatically different than what we had been anticipating even six months ago but it is a big variable um people don't know what it's going to look like three six or months from now or you know a couple years from now and that's an argument for having a relatively healthy program contingency that can i can help augment those interesting conditions i i think dan the bac had a really deep conversation about this and i think it's fair to say that the program contingencies and the project contingencies that we see here are are very conservative is that fair to say yeah i think they're conservative our our projects um are pretty uniform uh for new construction we usually have 10 uh and for renovation we hold 15 and that's that's just a project contingency the 10 program contingency is is pretty healthy it's certainly more than what we've had in the past we've seen significant scope increases after the 2012 bond pass and the 2017 bond pass so i i certainly think it's appropriate to have a healthy program contingency even though it's a big dollar amount when you see it percentage-wise it's not no question and then with the other with the categories for the health and safety projects um it to the extent that you know there's more left over it just means you can hit more school sites absolutely when it comes to bonds zero sum games so if you if you estimate too conservatively that means that you have more funds for projects versus the other way then you're eliminating projects or eliminating scope and the only other point i'd make is we haven't talked a lot of details about bond language but when we do and we'll do that here this month uh it'll be important to have flexibility in there again these are estimates uh so many of our scopes are our ranges that we're looking to hit when you look at our roofs and we look at our mechanical systems and having the flexibility to respond to the needs as we learn more as the the program goes forward i think will be important so can i go back to um if i heard you right your your estimates for cost escalation of five percent in the first year and four percent in years thereafter right that's what we had been using for these numbers and what we've got some updated information so we might see some a small change to that that we would when we put out the new information next week because wasn't four percent annual cost escalation the assumption that was embedded in the estimates for the 2017 projects and that proved to be overly optimistic the the 2017 i don't think was that clear i don't think used a consistent number um and then the other component to escalation is its rate by number of years uh and so it just wasn't as clear and transparent of how of how that worked but we're really trying to these are estimates we know that the numbers are going to be wrong what we really want to convey is here are the assumptions that are going into these numbers and here's why we think they are reasonable now in the future if we're wrong um and and you know of course you can be wrong um we want to be able to look back and
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say well this is what we assumed and at that time it was reasonable and we were very transparent and clear about it so i think it's you know we should plan conservatively and um you know kind of keep well it's in a weird way um i mean what we're hearing now in construction is that there's still things in the projects in the pipeline but not for long um so uh in a weird way to it if that benefits us in terms of costs going forward in the next couple of years that that's a great thing even though it means that the economy is not doing well it's not such a good thing um so if this works out that we can get more benefit uh for our bond dollars um that's a silver lining right um i i just think as a general rule we should uh be pessimistic in these kinds of estimates rather than um hoping you know hope for the best prepare for the worst well i think um we also have the benefit not just of our external estimators that dan was referring to but of the expertise of the bond accountability committee who is really really scrutinizing the assumptions in the estimates the last thing i will ask for and i've asked for this before but i'm going to keep asking for it is that currently our enrollment projections for high school students or the at least through 2034 i think is the most recent one we have and we'll have another one in the coming months are for overall flat enrollment we know we've had a 10 decline in kindergarten and enrollment over the last five or six years we know we have record low fertility rates uh we know on balance we have more families with kids moving out of the district and moving in uh jefferson currently has 600 plus students if we build a jefferson to 1700 capacity how does that work district-wide in terms of what's that work after you and i'm very glad that director de pass has asked the city to help us as the city has plans to expand housing but it depends upon in terms of child-friendly housing it depends upon how many of those units are subsidized and multiple room um otherwise we'll get we'll see what's happening in other cities where we've had a lot of housing capacity added but it's not added to the population of students so um i would we we need that analysis going forward um director bailey i just again um requested that today and right after i requested that um recognize that a report came across uh through email that's from the center for population studies i believe at portland state i have not read it i have it on one of my open tabs on my computer one of my 50 tabs that's open um close it because then i'll forget it um and i've said it before but the reason um jefferson's low enrollment reflects a lack of investment for decades and decades in in that community addresses including mine have an option to send your kids anywhere but there and and so people do people that have moved in and gentrified this area have chosen to send their kids in other place to other schools and i know you're a system thinker so i'm that's that's what i'm asking for is houses that impact your system sure and we have both publicly subsidized housing going in at a great quite quite readily in the interstate urban renewal area specifically and we also have private um residential building happening due to the residential infill project recently passed in the last week i believe through city council so we have a we have a lot of investment in the interstate urban renewal area in the
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jefferson catchment area which is a doubling of densities on on on urban lots and quite a bit of family-sized subsidized housing in that corridor i'll get the numbers for you again i just um i just requested that but we also have a report in our inbox that talks um it's it's specifically around school enrollment data that i think might be instructive and also i guess i'm under the impression that we need to build for a hundred years and um we know in a hundred years our city's gonna look quite differently it might look like manhattan at some point over time yeah so so i get that 100 years but i'm also building for the next 20 years and if it makes uh makes sense that we can do more with our dollars in the short term in the jefferson cluster uh then that provides an immediate benefit rather than a hundred hundred year out benefit or a fifty year old benefit that's all that's all i'm i'm saying i'm trying to make the biggest impact of our dollars in that cluster and and i'm saying that this is now the time to invest in in in our black children we can't say that we only have a few in a building as a reason to not invest in that community i also believe that's also what i'm that's what i'm saying too and i don't know to be supportive of the the vision moving forward is the beauty of the investment in the center for black student excellence is a a cluster and a community wide investment and that um to michelle's to director to pass this point about the lack of investment and the option for um neighborhood families to choose a different school unlike anywhere else but that also if we make investments in the k through eight portion of the of the cluster and in in the neighborhood and the community that that long term i think has a a benefit to ultimately to jefferson high school and the students we can't just build a brand new modern jefferson and not also critically examine our enrollment policies what's happening in those middle in the middle schools and then ultimately also in the in the k5 so i i think the beauty of this proposal is it will get after this broad will comprehend it'll be a broader comprehensive approach and i think should address some of the issues you direct you're raising director bailey um i want to use the time left to make sure that everybody all of our board members surface questions and information requests that we may have um before the next time we get together um this is our preferred option before of us we are going to get a little more um fine-tuned information based on the um estimating processes that dan young referred to so we might see some some slight changes there but um please raise any issues you have about um what you see what you don't see what you need to know to be supportive um any questions you've raised before that remain unanswered can i make just a um a request and and i feel a little guilty making this request but um i've been trying to lay my hands on some of the previous uh data that we got some of some of the previous scenarios um that we received over the last few months um and and i can't lay my hands on them right away um so i guess my request is it would be helpful at least for me to see kind of the evolution of these numbers over time and so for example you know on the curriculum is is the 29.2 million uh in this package for curriculum was that the high number the low number the medium number in previous iterations you know and um you know the same for the ada accessibility and
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so it would just be helpful to be able to see these things kind of all at once and um if i had a better record-keeping system i could pull them up instantly but i directed more um the all the numbers on this version you're looking at are the high numbers and the lower iterations or the different iterations are on the bond renewal website they're right there if you want me to send you the link i can do that just so it's easily accessible um well i i think you guys are getting a lot of paper so i pulled up i pulled up the website and i'm not seeing it right away but okay that's helpful if these are all the the high numbers because that's what i want to see all the high numbers so that answered the ada accessibility was the low number it it seems like the uh for example the original estimate we have technology as a wish list was closer to 200 million i thought i have that got pared down um and for example and i and i know the roofs and mechanical also got pared down over time i believe uh dan could you uh correct me if i'm wrong yeah sure um that that's correct when we were looking back when uh a eight-year bond option there were more options uh in there so i have a document that i can share after this meeting with the board and what it does is it has links to it has labeled links to previous documents that were shared at either previous four meetings board work sessions or the bond subcommittee and you can walk through the different holistic options that were shown when we were looking at eight year options or even the smaller uh resiliency bond options and also you can see the iterations of the educational facility improvements uh dating back since i think february or march and we we'd sort of have to do a translation of versus eight years right so i so one of the i i think i remember the email you were talking about david um which was very good email um and i do think yeah we need to keep in mind when we look at those numbers um for example the rubes we only have a certain capacity to do x number of roofs per year so it was a much bigger number when we were contemplating an eight-year bond than a four-year bond so anyway thank you that would be helpful um just to just to kind of solidify where we landed yeah no problem let me add a couple more uh of the updated information and i'll get it out to everyone thank you also superintendent um i know that there has continued to be discussion around these technology proposals and curriculum proposals do you want to speak to that and um what's represented by these numbers here and how it aligns with your your vision for what our kids need thank you chair i was holding on to my talking chip very patiently and i wanted to use it at just the right moment so uh if i can rewind for just a moment to say um i think it's laudable and it shows a rather respectable vote of confidence from given the poll around how the community is feeling about us investing in our in our students so i'm very thankful that folks are feeling that way and growing in their confidence um i was and i have to speak as sort of the alleged instructional leader for pps it couldn't help but observe that whether it was the campaign poll or whether it was the survey to staff and families or our town hall results all of them rated at the top or near the top curriculum and so which goes to our core mission and maybe it sounded like a broken record but i've been bringing it up early on about the importance of leveraging this opportunity to make up for the curriculum debt or perhaps leapfrog ourselves into making sure that our students everywhere have access to high quality materials um we have our cto and our cao here in this virtual meeting who can detail or remind us you know what were some of the key elements here but let me speak about dr elise valentino because i've known him for i think over 10 years and he's always been a modest individual and i think he was a little anemic in
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his ass to be honest um uh he his ask was to support the district uh complying with having a base curriculum across contemporaries to get us back on an adoption cycle um and that would be a good thing that would be a good place to be um but i would argue that we should be a bit more ambitious than that and that the board should consider increasing increasing that by a couple of notches perhaps because what we really want to be is more state-of-the-art uh some of the leading edge emerging work uh things that really accompany nicely many of the other elements of this bond package i can rattle off a few but what would it look like if every high school was supported to offer african american studies courses what would it look like to implement our climate change and justice curriculum not just in the high school level or across all grade levels in a developmentally appropriate way just a couple of examples but i won't take away any of his thought process but dr valentino would you mind sharing what could you do with a little more hi thank you good evening um we're president superintendent uh board members uh well first i want to thank the people of portland for their support because even given the the context of where we are right now to be to to know that we are supported in this way it is really heartwarming um one of the things that i've always felt that it's not the what you purchase but who is at the work and i've been very fortunate here in portland to have an amazing group of senior directors and leaders and and partners to work with uh and so we i relied a lot on sweat equity to be honest with you because we're always looking for the least expensive that then requires us to make adjustments to tweak to to to fix right to make it in usable form for us uh in pps and primarily because we don't want to um be wasteful uh in the resources that we do get so we do count our pennies very well um and and so the request was really to as the superintendent indicated to do a couple of things one to continue to establish a foundation that has been missing in the system for a very very long time and two to put us back on the cycle of adoption that allows for us not to be thinking about the program year over year but that we are consistent in how we adopt our curriculum as it gets improved upon and how we develop greater capacity to implement by having additional resources one of the things that it will do it will allow us to be more uh innovative in a lot of the work that we're actually doing as well because we're we've been focusing for example as the superintendent indicated climate justice at one level but it would be amazing if we could actually create a pk 12 continuum around climate justice a pk 12 continuum around ethnic studies um but the problem with that is not only is it a heavy lift to put that in place but also in its implementation it does require professional development it does require resources right and we're in the middle of a crisis that is also asking us to revisit and look at the curriculum we do have so if we're going to talk about ethnic studies we really don't have the resources the materials that are necessary to implement a quality ethnic studies program and so the ask was simply to look at the high school but it would be incredible if you had additional resources to expand that so you know we we've targeted where we're going to move our agenda and what the resources additional resources would do it would allow us to be more innovative to think more broadly and not to limit the thinking around well we can't move any further than this because these are the resources that that we do have so if the consideration is there i would be very grateful and very happy if additional resources were made available thank you for the opportunity to share that super totally and a recommendation of a modification that you would like to put on the table i i can suggest several um make one uh and if there's anything that planning for this reentry is teaching us is how much we should not be cheap about making sure the right content and digital resources and technology backbone is in place um and so uh if if we were to uh raise a notch the curricular investment
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and i don't want to put our cto here on the spot whether we would be willing to trim a little bit from there knowing that much of the work that we're envisioning in evolving into a digital district um um we would have to sequence over time anyways um so and i know it's not his entire original ask either but perhaps some of that future work could come in a future bond referral as well so i'm just concerned about the instructional material need now which i'll remind the board is the only compliance area that pps uh is not meeting with division 22 in our annual ode report we've made great progress uh in the last couple of years satisfying all the areas of deficiency and i don't want to steal our deputies thunder from an upcoming meeting but i'm feeling that urgency so the one thing um it seems like it would be worthwhile as we look at some of the things that aren't in here that we um think about uh and maybe doesn't have to happen before the referral but you know how if we do have um you know money from contingencies you know how or the money from the construction excise tax how we go about allocating that um because there's going to there's going to be some very worthy needs and trade-offs of everything that doesn't get into this and so i'm having some sort of prioritized lists and a listen that's somewhat sequenced by time um because there may be some things that um it may be a high priority but it's like three years down the road and we can sequence in a different way so it seems like um cataloging some of these things um whether or not we make that change in the underlying package but if even if we don't this and some other things that were raised tonight of how we might continue to make progress um as we as we can so uh chair constant i have a general question of um and i don't know if this is for deputy men it hurts um about the actual language in the package um and when i look at this list uh i can't do the math really quick but you have um say 198 in health and safety 179 education improvements and then um the modernization and i know last time in the 2017 bond when most most of us weren't part of that but there was a um a very clear language in the um in the referral and what voters approved that at least 150 million be spent on health and safety projects and um that did protect a corpus of money for particular things and i'm wondering in this particular referral like the specificity by which we would sort of bucket up major um subsets of projects so that um we don't end up with some sort of cost overrun in some area then resulting in something that we told voters were going to happen doesn't happen so yeah and actually before staff jump in because i think um uh director matters you're raising a really important point um the one i think that is is really sort of a board conversation about what that language should look like and this came up at a committee meeting it was either committee meeting or a work session on this and i i really would strongly advocate for um relatively flexible language i think we need to be really clear and transparent with voters about what the plan is and i think we need to be really clear and transparent with voters about how we're spending the money but artificially uh uh including constraints legal constraints in in any sort of ballot language that a year two years three years from now um might prove to be unwieldy i think would be a mistake in hamstering the district so i think it's a great question i would love to actually hear from other board members as well for me in 1.1 million dollar bond we've got a plan um and i think it's a really good plan um and i think and i think that's what we need to be transparent about and as that plan or if that plan evolves or changes
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we need to be really clear with voters how it has um but again staying within you know these larger categories as would be my preference yeah and that's right can i answer the discussion and how it happens because i i think this was an issue last time of you know the benson community feeling you know they were promised something the health and safety like the campaign said something about health and safety and again not wanting to be i think the only um line that was very clearly drawn was around health and safety generally so it was just one light item and so i think i think it's just worth the discussion and then also to be very deliberate during the campaign so the campaign's not saying something else that we ultimately um don't deliver on can i weigh in on that um i i think the environment in 2017 was very different and um one of the things that i i think came through loud and clear in the poll and the survey and the discussions um was that uh there was a very broad support for kind of the full meal deal that most of the components that have that were specified got a very high support and and very close support i mean it was it was pretty even across the board a couple of outliers but um but generally speaking i think the message was that all of these things are worthy so i my recollection of the 2017 um polling that was happening in the middle of the lead in the water crisis so it was a very different environment and there was a a very clear um felt need for um health and safety investments taking priority um i i don't think we're in the same situation now um and i think what we've done in the with past bonds is to to make sure that we've built it enough flexibility so that you know everything has been couched in up to you know we're gonna do up to x number of rubes and that sort of thing um and and i tend to agree with um andrew that um we want to be careful in um i think specificity is good um but too much specificity can actually be um problematic over you know a four to six year building projects agreed yeah i i agree as well um andrew sorry um i agree with what's been said already that it's important to promise to deliver on what the voters vote for and it's important to have some flexibility so we don't aren't hamstringed by exact language um i'd like to go back to what superintendent guerrero was talking about with the um educational investments um [Music] so uh superintendent guerrero you mentioned both curriculum and technology as um potentially uh bringing forward some new um new asks new estimates about what could usefully be invested in those categories um and and i just wanted to i just wanted to say that um i i don't think now is the time to uh to be to penny pinch um i i want we need to be good stewards of taxpayer funds but i think the message that we've gotten over the last few months is that um we're in a world historical moment right now and what everybody wants is for pps to do what it needs to do in order to provide the best possible educational experiences for our students and in particular our students of color and they are willing to go for a very big number um during an economic crisis on the strength of some degree of faith in pps that we'll we'll do right by kids and
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we'll use the money wisely and um i would i would suggest that um you come up with some numbers that reflect your best you know your professional um estimate about what you need in order to provide that kind of educational experience for students um because i don't want us to you know if we're going to do this let's do this let's do it right um so now is the moment and it's going to be much more difficult a year from now to say you know you know we really could use another i don't know five million dollars for x and have everybody turn around and say but didn't we just give you a whole pile of money for precisely that last year so i would like to hear about those needs and desires sooner rather than later before we refer i'd like to see what those numbers are because um is right thank you dr moore i i appreciate that um um and it's it's the same line of thinking um that's going through my head as well um i we've been listening very carefully to the youth stand up and say there's some areas where we want to see education reimagined in eps community has been showing up saying this is the kind of schooling experience we want our students of color to have and we do have an opportunity here and we do want to be prudent stewards of public resources but i can't think of a better investment and so absolutely we should have safe and modern buildings and every child deserves to be in an optimal teaching and learning environment but what happens inside matters also and so having a base curriculum is is foundational and necessary and we've had many late night conversations on tuesdays about how could we be the national leader in a number of areas and so we've made great strides in cte we've made great strides in arts education and and then there's a number of other areas where portland has gotten some recognition for the advocacy on behalf of our students for example and i would really love to be able to deliver on that uh in a big way and so um we owe the board a little bit more detailed estimate than maybe you've seen and um i would want an opportunity to get our instructional team together um i think perhaps there's some overlaps with when you talk about technology and teaching and learning obviously about how we support one another and there may be a few other areas where maybe we can we might be able to shave a little bit of resource to make a few more initiatives uh be well implemented and maybe we preserve our general fund monies into the professional learning and the professional capacity building that would need to come with bond resource materials so um i'll appreciate the chance to be able to do that with the team um yeah i think this is uh a chance to stretch toward our vision uh where we bring together i think superintendent guerrero under your leadership and under your team we've done a really good job on making progress of and it's still a work in progress of uh one having a vision and building a foundation towards that vision um and breaking down silos we've still got more and i think this a center for black student excellence brings together facilities and what's putting in the classroom uh in alignment so as we think about planning the facilities in some ways i i feel like our high schools are still in the a very sophisticated but still not quite visionary design you know we've opened them up to have more flexible learning spaces and so on but i'm not sure that's matching yet our vision of what we want education to look like uh in this city um we had glimpses of that during the visioning process and certainly um our facilitators of that process threw in some really futuristic um scenarios for us to contemplate and i
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think we're still lagging behind that and comfortable in well this is a bright new shiny building but it's kind of still the same kind of buildings that we've had um so i think this is a chance for us to really stretch well director bailey i think the directors and the broader community uh the guiding coalition um did a great job on developing the collective vision i i don't know that i would classify it as we're lagging i would say we're right on track um we're this fall kicking off the second and third phase of our multi-year strategic plan development which focuses squarely on our students and developing that continuum quick page 12 for the graduate portrait and we have a whole another engagement cycle scheduled with our educators so that they have time to really think about what does the educator essentials look like so that we get to that experience that you're describing that we want our students to have we really need our educators and our students to do those next two pieces so we're looking forward to that you'll recognize the facilitators who will be coming to board uh to help us with that work and you know it's our goal that by the late fall there's a very clear road roadmap for the next number of years that will show and demonstrate substantive progress towards that vision so let me clarify that's not where i think we're lagging it's it's marrying that with building design um that to me is is the piece that we haven't integrated yet um i'm i'm real happy with the progress that we're making around the strategic plan um right and maybe we can look at the end specs and crosswalks into our vision at some point so i just haven't played it sooner rather than later so i have a process point um just question to ask so um superintendent guerrero i wasn't sure if you're going to come back with just a reallocation you're not going to come back with a larger overall knocker no man that's a question that just i wasn't that was a question not an invitation right i just i just wanted to clarify um because i guess i i would be interested to hear that but i also think that i mean from from my i'll just my perspective is i think this package um does woefully little uh on the ada progress and i also um and really concerned about the lack of allocation of money for a school on outer middle school and out of southeast so if if we if there are additional resources um i don't think we should go over 1.1 just given the overall environment we're in um but if i think i'd be interested to have a a conversation if there's dollars being out reallocated in other areas um of how we might meet the other needs that we know also exist i think we were all listening intently to the earlier discussion on ada uh look there's just something inherently inequitable about a child not being able to go to their neighborhood school because there's a ramp there or that their parent in a wheelchair or grandma who uses who needs an accommodation also can't see their performance so uh and yet we have a long road ahead of us in making sure all of our facilities are accessible in that way so um again this is another iterative conversation tonight um we heard where directors are focusing in on and i'm i'm sensing that overall that we're feeling uh positive about the overall package and i think we're fine-tuning at this point uh we're really pushing ourselves to see if we're doing everything we can in a bond referral that um isn't exorbitant that is reasonable where our voters can feel like uh they're absolutely the right wise investments for us at this time so um we're going to take another fine tooth comb too i think that was our commitment before this meeting thank you superintendent for that synopsis i want to wrap things up but um nathaniel i wanted to just ask you if you had some thoughts uh yeah i do thank you uh can you hear me yeah great well um overall i think that this um package is looking very good i'm glad that we are um still considering the 320 for jefferson
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i think that is um critical um i have one question about um the health and safety allocations um there was some discussion about um increasing ada possibly um from um security i was wondering if it might be worth also discussing increasing seismic maybe from us from the same source i don't know because i mean 15 million seems like an awfully small amount when we have such great need right that's a great question and i think we do have some um dan as as long as you're digging up old emails we do have some background information about how we arrived at that number what level of seismic work is also included in the roof work that we see in another category can we maybe um can someone get with nathaniel um in the next week to sort of walk through um what that includes and how we arrived at that yeah absolutely happy to do that i'll reach out to nathaniel great thank you good nathaniel so all right everyone's everyone's disappearing from my screen but i know you're not really disappearing um any further um thoughts for the good of the order we've got some some questions that we put out to staff that um we'll be working on in the next in the next week or so and then we reconvene at um we have another bond discussion at next week's um board meeting as we get closer to refining things yes i um and this something i brought up before and i know we probably don't have an answer to it yet but we have a new um for lack of a better term subway tile projection that we received and by that i mean looking at um the impact of this bond going forward and if we come back in 2028 uh 24 or the next bond which presumably would include the construction money for cleveland and wilson among other things [Music] and how much of that tax space this bond will take the next bond looks to be an estimate of 900 million over eight years while this one is 1.1 over four years and of course that's that spending doesn't exactly happen in that four-year time span but what it looks like to me and this is just my amateur glance is that we're taking up a bit more of that space going forward so that future bond or two would be smaller bonds over a longer period at least the next one and i'm concerned and this relates to in part to nathaniel's question the the real need for seismic is to get uh get all of our buildings up to that uh safety level three where we know everybody can walk out safely and and that's that's rebuilding all of our schools so i believe deputy superintendent hertz has said and i'm assuming this plan this process is still in the works is looking at that long term of when will when we get to that point where all our buildings will be up to that that level uh so i i just want to remind my fellow directors that um you know this is what we do now has long-term can have long-term consequences um i'm very interested in doing what we can to preserve that timeline going forward so uh it's tonight's probably not the night to do that but at our next meeting i'd like to see some discussion of that all right all right thank you everyone good good discussion um we will get we will revisit this topic at our board meeting next tuesday the 14th with that um this work session of the board of education of portland public schools

Sources

PPS Board of Education, BoardBook Public View, https://meetings.boardbook.org/Public/Organization/915 (accessed: 2023-01-25T21:27:49.720701Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)
PPS Communications, "PPS Board of Education Meetings" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbZtlBHJZmkdC_tt72iEiQXsgBxAQRwtM (accessed: 2023-10-14T01:02:33.351363Z)
PPS Board of Education, PPS Board of Education - Full Board Meetings (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk0IYRijyKDW0GVGkV4xIiOAc-j4KVdFh (accessed: 2023-10-11T05:43:28.081119Z)

2020-07-09 PPS School Board Work Session

Documents / Media

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Minutes

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Work Session - July 9, 2020

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