2020-12-14 PPS School Board Public Hearing
| District | Portland Public Schools |
|---|---|
| Date | 2020-12-14 |
| Time | 18:00:00 |
| Venue | Virtual/Online |
| Meeting Type | town-hall |
| Directors Present | missing |
Documents / Media
Notices/Agendas
Materials
None
Minutes
None
Transcripts
00h 00m 00s
great
thank you um chair lowry and um yeah
welcome everybody um tonight i'm andrew
scott i'm a portland public schools
board member um and i want to welcome
the rest of the pps board and the
broader community to this discussion
about schools and covid
over the last nine months or so of this
global pandemic
i think what we've come to understand
even more than what we knew already
is how essential schools are to the
bedrock of our overall community
i mean at an obvious level we know that
schools educate the next generation of
uh the you know our children in the next
generation but
at a less obvious level that's become
very obvious over the last you know
nine months is that our schools allow
people to work they provide
social and emotional support for our
students they provide meals and safe
spaces and a supportive environment
and really are just a key to that to the
overall well-functioning
of our community last spring when we
were hit by this
pandemic schools around the world world
closed um
and at that point little was known about
this dangerous new virus
and we switched over as did did almost
all schools
to distance learning after that somewhat
chaotic
early period pps staff and leadership
spent all summer of 2020
in multiple work groups planning for a
potential reopening in the fall
and the district was prepared to launch
a hybrid learning model
um you know come come fall come last
september
given case rates at the time given that
a lot was still
unknown about the virus um we did start
the year in full distance learning
and we've remained there ever since over
time
we've learned a lot more about the virus
and there's also been
it's a really unfortunate natural
experiment but a natural experiment
that's been happening throughout the
world as some schools have reopened
some schools have stayed hybrid and some
stayed completely in distance learning
i think one thing we know for sure is
that there is no clear and simple
solution for schools
what we're going to hear tonight is from
public health experts
who are going to talk about what we've
learned in the last year we've learned
in the last few months
about the actual versus perceived risk
of having children in schools
about the impact of distance learning on
our children and their education
and about the very real toll that this
virus is taking on people's lives in our
community
one of our core values at pbs is honesty
and integrity
and our belief that transparency is
necessary whenever we deliberate and
make decisions
so as the board of directors we want to
hear multiple perspectives from
students from teachers from parents from
partners of the district
we want to know the most up-to-date and
trusted information from public health
and medical professionals
and tonight's our opportunity to share
that information at the same time we're
hearing it
with the broader community about what
we're hearing and what we're learning
and our hope is that tonight will be one
of many opportunities to bring about
this shared understanding of what we
know about the risks and challenges to
reopening
so that we can chart a course forward um
i know i'm really looking forward
to this discussion tonight i know my
colleagues are as well
and so with that intro i'm going to turn
it over to dr russ brown
who's the chief of systems performance
for pbs and has been leading our
reopening plans
for the superintendent dr brown
all right i'm not sure if dr brown is in
as a panelist
oh there he is doctor brandon on his way
perfect
it's really great that dr brown's
picture on the
slideshow also matches dr brown's
picture in
the participant list so there's a good
level of coordination there
we're continuing to wait uh there we go
technology it just takes a minute
sometimes welcome dr brown
thank you um as director scott mentioned
one of our goals
for tonight's session is to continue to
develop a shared community understanding
of our path forward to reopen schools
um at the outset of the pandemic next
slide please
oh uh yes uh
obviously this evening we have uh
interpretation and
um interpretation services available for
our
for uh community uh at the outset of
this pandemic
and uh throughout the this window our
planning has been
uh driven by four core principles uh as
with everything that we've been doing in
tps
we first center racial equity and social
justice in any of our decision making
00h 05m 00s
and work processes
then obviously in the midst of a
pandemic
we really focus on ensuring the health
and wellness of our staff students and
community larger community
beyond that you've heard us talk a lot
about leaning into cultivating and
building supportive relationships
through this very difficult time
and finally strengthening and innovating
our instructional core as we move this
through this obviously covid and
comprehensive distance learning have
required
tremendous amount of innovation in
education over a very very short window
of time
these principles along with continued
focus on data analysis are what we
will share with you this evening so that
we're attending to our primary goal of
education while also trying to mitigate
the
health risk of the pandemic next slide
please
so it's always been about balancing
education and health
as we've moved through this and from the
state
there have always been two primary
metrics that we focus on
uh case rates and testing positivity
rates and
for multnomah county and for portland
public schools in particular case rates
have been
have been and continue to be the primary
driver for our decision making as we
move forward
next slide
so as we balance those things as we move
forward
again case rates have obligated us from
the beginning to be
to open and comprehensive distance
learning
and as we move through the fall semester
and we had
additional data we had opportunities to
start considering how we could
expand our comprehensive distance
learning services and afford
some focused opportunities for students
and for that we focused
uh specifically on limited in-person
options
for early childhood transition grades
and credit recovery
each reflects a priority student
population for whom we're concerned
about their vulnerability to lost
learning opportunities
planning for limited in-person captures
really does capture that tension
that exists between the concerns of
learning loss and providing for the
safety of
students family and staff
you know to say the least
planning has been and remains incredibly
complex
so you know some some of the things that
we work through
are our space requirements for our
buildings uh for each student we
are each actually each person we need to
figure for 35 square feet per person in
each classroom this is
really a substantial reduction in school
capacity
and in some cases it becomes quite a
challenge to
even figure out how to fit half a cohort
of students in a building
as we move forward in addition
we've spent a lot of time looking at
building modifications for safety
signage personal protective equipment
cleaning relocation and furniture
classroom moves to take
advantage of space uh having designated
rooms for students who arrive with
with symptoms and beyond that and
it should be obvious we had to spend a
great deal time about think about
staffing
you know health concerns for for staff
health concerns for our students and
their families and
you know all of these things are changes
in working conditions many of which
require
leaning into collective bargaining to
accomplish the additional
and in addition to to maintain
adequate space between students it
really requires
rethinking staff and and perhaps even
more staff to be able to accommodate
safe physical distances for students
throughout the day from entry
the entry process and screening to
transitions throughout the day bathrooms
etc
next slide please
so in late october the the metrics
evolved yet again
uh and they evolved with the science and
these shifts aligned very well with our
early childhood focus
and again supporting ongoing planning
for the limited in-person activities for
transition grades
and credit recovery the promise of
hybrid for
early childhood is very appealing but
all the challenges of planning
actually increase so all those
challenges i talked about for
for a limited in-person which is only
two hours a day
expand exponentially when you talk about
a a school day
and uh we find that
it gets difficult that that planning
becomes even more challenging
as you increase the number of grades
that you include in a building as you
move forward
in addition to that we know that the
number of our staff and students will
not likely return to
due to legitimate health concerns so
while we think about hybrid planning
while we're planning for return of
students at school
it also necessitates that we plan for
those students and and those
families who are not willing to to come
back into the school environment
00h 10m 00s
until the vaccines are distributed and
therefore we have to plan for both
hybrid as well as remote
opportunities for every building in our
system at the same time
so again returning to our guiding
principles
of centering on racial equity and
framing the remaining the conversation
for this evening
there is a clear tension between
concerns for learning loss
and the health and safety of our
students of color this board is
unambiguously focused and set goals to
address the opportunity gaps that
existed and continue to persist for our
students governor
there's a share concern amongst
educators and of of the adverse impacts
covert will have
and that those impacts will be in terms
of education will be born
disproportionately
by student scholar on
on the other hand our health research
and health research around the country
has shown that these same communities
are being disproportionately impacted by
covet
covett infections hospitalizations and
deaths
so today we will open with a discussion
of
some early research on student
achievement and growth changes
in a coveted environment and then we'll
transition to a discussion with our
health advisory panel
we'll then hear from multiple
perspectives of student a teacher
parent and culturally specific partner
both panels will be moderated by
pps leaders with an opportunity for
board members to ask questions
if during the course of this evening you
have a question that wasn't covered
uh this evening we invite you to go to
pps.net
which is our homepage and you'll find a
link to our covered question and comment
form
and we'll put together an faq to address
those questions that arise during this
evening
next slide please
so we're pleased this evening to to be
joined by chris minnick
who will provide a discussion on student
achievement and growth chris
menek is the ceo of nwa a research-based
nonprofit organization that supports
students and educators worldwide
by creating assessment solutions that
precisely measure growth and proficiency
they provide insights help tailor
instruction throughout his
career chris has worked collaboratively
with school districts school districts
state systems uh to upgrade assessments
and to transform educator prep programs
chris we're really fortunate to have him
here this evening
uh he's a recognized leader national
leader in our backyard he's
garnered national attention of policy
and decision makers
and as a specifically in oregon as a
part of this pandemic response he's been
asked to serve as
one of governor kate brown's school
reopening task force members
i will now turn things over to chris
minnick to go through some
preliminary research his team's done
around student achievement and growth
great everybody hear me yes thumbs up
somebody yes good okay
thank you appreciate it uh thanks for
the introduction production russ
and uh it's good to be with uh with you
in
my hometown and obviously our
organization works with
like 7 500 school districts across the
country
and pps is one of them but we
we've been doing research on how
students have been transitioning back
into the environment of schooling
whether it be remote
or in person and we have some early data
that we wanted to share with you
i'm going to be very brief because i
think you have important people coming
after me so i don't want to
i don't want to spend too much time but
i thought i would share the academic
data that we're seeing
in various places across the across the
country so
next slide i just have four slides that
i'd like to go through here
so when we looked at our initial
academic data and these again are based
on assessments as students come back to
school this year
right and so this is uh this is in the
september october time frame so this is
not
after the teaching and learning that
took place in the fall so i think it's
really important to note that as well
what we saw on average was a much bigger
drop in mathematics than we saw
in reading and that was not
necessarily something that we were
expecting as part of the process we did
think
that there would be drops in both
subjects but
on the reading side it appears that
we've been able to
to to stunt that decline a little bit
because
of the way teachers and and parents have
been
interacting around uh making sure kids
are in text it's a little easier to
probably
give a kid a book or or read with your
student so those types of things
have allowed us in reading to hang on a
little bit more than in mathematics you
see the drops in various grades in
mathematics
the i will also note about these
findings these are not
as large a drops as we had predicted
based on
uh our research so i think the teachers
across the country deserve a ton of
credit
for how they've rallied and helped
students especially early in this school
00h 15m 00s
year
again we'll look at the data again in
the in the winter and again in the
spring
and we'll see where we are but i don't
believe this is a point
where um where no learning is taken
place because that
would have been the other projections we
had but there's definitely some learning
happening and it's just not up to the
same level as we've seen
in previous years and i think the data
back set up here on this graph
let me just go ahead and step forward to
the next slide please
this shows the same same slide but we we
put
one year on top of the other so you'll
see the patterns
in math which are the group below so
from grades three
to grades four you'll see that the
winner score
the winner to fall growth was much lower
than
the in 2020 than in 2019
but you'll notice in the reading section
here
those patterns are pretty much on top of
each other with a little bit of
uh decrease so we saw weakness in the
academic achievement in mathematics more
directly than we saw
with reading next slide please
i think there are a couple takeaways
from our analysis and again we can go
deeper because
again we i have a 25 slide deck that
goes really into this data so if you
have specific questions i'm happy to
answer them
but i think there are big big concerns
about
mathematics for sure at the earlier
grades that we
we need to continue our gains in reading
we need to highlight that in mathematics
the unfinished learning that may be
taking place
across the country and that's pretty
common across most school districts so
we're seeing that pretty consistently
and then it also raises equity concerns
one of the things that we did find in
our sample was about one in four
students that we had in the previous
year
was not showing up in our sample this
year and i think that's a
that's a big concern for our students of
that it tends
to reflect underserved communities as
well
and we can tell based on the
socioeconomic status of
certain schools that those schools have
been disproportionately affected
by the turnover of students so i think
that's a that's a concern that we have
and would would think that we need to
care a lot about those students who have
disappeared and then we'll be coming
back to their education whenever we come
back into school
i think that's a set of students that we
we don't necessarily have data on their
academic performance as of yet
there'll be an opportunity for us to as
we roll this out we wanted to share it
with portland public schools but we'll
also be sharing it nationally
and there's other opportunities for us
to do continued research
so next slide please
i wanted to just put this is my last
slide and i just wanted to recommend to
the board
that you take a look at a couple of
these things first
i would just point to that you need
information on how your students are
doing systematically and on your
academic side to make sure that you can
then
intervene especially in mathematics
where we are seeing
a bit of weakness in terms of growth i
think that's that's really essential
i would also just say the transparency
and portland has been a leader on
transparency
in terms of making sure that the data is
available and that people can see how
our students are doing here in portland
i think is very important as we move
forward i would also just point
education and policy makers
to the fact that enrollment might be an
issue in
a lot of communities so and i know in
oregon our funding formulas are driven
by the number of students
and if we have a fewer number of
students this year
the funding issue will become pretty
clear as we enter next year
and so what we would recommend from our
side is that
policymakers are not necessarily using
enrollments from this year to drive
funding conversations for next year
we think that there will be an uptick in
students coming back to education
as we get out of the pandemic so funding
formulas are an important thing to
consider as we're
continuing into the next year and you'll
notice that i
that in the mathematics piece it's
really important that we help teachers
understand what students might not
have known from the previous grade
you'll see in grades three and grades
four especially
there are some prerequisites in
mathematics that are very important
and uh current grade teachers may not
have the expertise or the
um or the knowledge to go back and
immediately teach those types of things
or maybe
not even know that student didn't even
get that instruction
so i think what we're seeing in
mathematics because it is so sequential
that there needs to be a focus on that
as we come back and i would also just
say
dr brown and i have had this
conversation um
because reading is less sequential we
gotta also
00h 20m 00s
be careful that even though the drop
isn't as large
that it's really important that as we
come back to school we're focused on
on reading essentials and those types of
things as well
so we have a lot of data to back up this
conversation but i don't want to take
any more of the board's time and i would
turn it back to dr brown or whoever's
next for
uh to continue the conversation thanks
for your time
director lowry or chair lowry can i ask
mr minnick a question um i think
let's uh dr brown are you facilitating
this next section
i'm introducing uh our next panelist
okay and dr bird is facilitating
okay so we're gonna have a few more
panelists it looks like and then we'll
come back
to questions correct sharon
yes that's accurate okay thank you chris
minnick and good evening directors and
panelists
i'm sharon reece your chief of human
resources
i'm pleased to introduce you to our
health advisory
panel and the esteemed members of that
panel who will be presenting next
the health advisory panel was formed
this summer to infuse all
of the cova decision making at pbs with
bluntly people who knew what they were
talking about in a pandemic
being tasked with operating schools
safely
in first time or at least first time in
our lifetimes conditions
gps of course recognized that safe
operations in the middle
of a pandemic was both the most
important and also the most difficult
factor to achieve to achieve it we
needed
and need subject matter expertise in the
medical field
regarding this brand new novel virus
it was also painfully obvious that the
vagaries of politics
and the questionable sources of
mainstream and social media were
dramatically
and continue to dramatically influence
decision-making and public opinion
we decided we needed inoculation and yes
that plan is intended
inoculation from politics and from this
information coming out of headlines
tweets facebook posts in other words we
needed our own dr fauci
we needed and still need that expertise
applied directly to the conditions the
decision making the operations on the
ground
at portland public schools so we can
safeguard our students
our community and our staff from covet
19 when we reopen
and in our current working conditions
and looking for
our own dr fauci in the form of a health
advisory panel
we looked for deep expertise in public
health
practitioners in epidemiology
in pediatrics in culturally responsive
practices
to bring a racial equity lens and health
subject matter expertise to this
important
and challenging work all while tying
that expertise
to conditions in oregon and in multnomah
county
since its formation in august we have
been running safety questions
concerns protocols and so on by this
panel and keeping up to date on the
latest info about covid
and health authority guidance in oregon
tonight we have four of our panel
members presenting
a couple logistics before i introduced
them as you said earlier achara lowry
they will be doing their presentations
uh dr byrd our chief of schools will be
moderating
and at the end the panels will take
questions from
our school board so without further ado
i'd like to introduce you to dr peter
peter graven
who is an assistant professor in the
ohsu psu school
of public health dr graymond's primary
position
is as a health economist working in
advanced analytics
and data science as a data scientist
dr graven builds and deploys predictive
and
forecasting models so as an example dr
graven
conducted the ohsu capacity for casting
for cobia 19 preparations
how many beds how many ventilators that
kind of thing
our next panelist heather godsey is a
registered nurse who works
on the lead nurse team at multnomah
education service
district more fondly known as mesd as
the nurse consultant for school health
services
and she serves on kate brown's healthy
schools reopening
council the main function of ms godsey's
role as nurse consultant is to serve as
the communicable disease
liaison between mesd's eight
public school districts and local health
departments
viscosity works collaboratively
collaboratively with the multnomah
county health department's
communicable disease team
to create protocols communications
trainings
etcetera miss godzilla is a member of
the oregon department of education
00h 25m 00s
school nurse advisory
group dr simpson
dr joelle simpson our next panelist is
the associate professor of pediatrics
and emergency medicine
at george washington university school
of medicine
she's the interim chief of emergency
medicine and the medical director for
emergency preparedness at children's
national hospital
in washington dc where she provides
strategic leadership for disaster
preparedness and community outreach
efforts
she leads the incident command
operations for the hospital's
covenanting response and recovery plan
she is also appointed to the executive
committee
on of the american academy of pediatrics
council
on children and disasters
our final panelist dr tress goodwin
is also from children's hospital in dc
she is an emergency medicine physician
with expertise in disaster medicine
she serves as the assistant director for
emergency preparedness and the assistant
incident commander for the coveted
response in the emergency department at
children's national
in dc children's hospital excuse me in
d.c
she's also an assistant professor of
pediatrics and emergency medicine at
george washington
university school of medicine and health
sciences she served as the u.s navy
medical corps
for five years including a combat
diploma to afghanistan
i realized that that review may have
seemed exhausted but i can
assure you that i've only scratched the
service of the oppressive credentials of
this
panel very pleased to have them share
their time and expertise with us this
evening
so with no further ado i will ask our
chief of school
dr sean byrd to move us into the panel
presentation
thank you sharon and i'm going to turn
it up straight over to dr graven who
is going to begin with a short
presentation dr graven
excellent happy to be here welcome um
everyone um as as was introduced um
you know i'm i'm i do lead i'm the lead
data scientist at ohsu i also teach in
the school of public health
i i'm looking at data all day long and
in fact for uh
for the covid time i spend over half my
week
staring at the data directly having my
team work on it and and try to
produce a weekly forecast which every
week
we're trying to invent we're
understanding new things about how covet
is operating so
um i can say if there's data out there
i've usually seen it
and i try to look at it as often as
possible i'm going to show you some of
those because they i think they're going
to be good contacts for some of our
discussion items it's good to have kind
of
a base reference of some of the things
that i know i'm looking at every day
so you can be there as well and then
we'll go ahead and talk about some of
the issues that
that it introduces uh next slide
so we we talked about the case rates
being a big part of why
pps um you know that's the official kind
of trigger for opening
and and while that's important and
that's the key for the
uh from the state perspective when i
think about the
pandemic in oregon i actually look at
hospitalized patients and so
i'm showing you here a graph of the
number of hospitalized
the the census as we would say across
all
hospitals in in oregon and why is that
important well
the reality is is when you look at
people who are in the hospital
it doesn't really depend on testing or
patterns that are going on there
if you're testing a new group of people
that have a very low probability or high
probability
instead you're looking at if people get
coveted if they get sick enough they're
going to come to the hospital
if they come to the hospital we're going
to test them and so what i'm showing you
is the three distinct waves that we've
had
uh you can see the first wave uh where
it began going up quickly we had the
stay home campaign that brought it down
then we went on the second wave when we
started opening up our businesses again
for
um around a little after memorial day
and that was mostly kind of
uh that surge was stopped mostly by
wearing masks as it turns out
um the summer weather actually helped
because a lot of people were able to be
outside
and then the third wave and and this
one's really distinct
we you know everyone knew we were going
to have a fall surge
uh but it it's a lot more a lot steeper
than we had expected
and when you look at the data which i'll
show you a little bit later this is
essentially driven by people doing a lot
of the same things they just went
indoors
and it was right when the weather
changed and it's it's it's almost as
simple as that now
the the um so where we are are at now
the reason why hospitalization is big is
it's a real physical constraint on the
system
so you're going to see policy happen
when the census gets too high because we
run out of space that means
a procedures can't happen or b we don't
have room for
people who have emergencies as well so
this is
um the one of the the um data points i
look at every day
00h 30m 00s
and as you can see we had a recent peak
um at 580 on
on december 9th or uh on
october 30th or november 30th and
that essentially represents the impact
of the freeze and i'll show you more
about that in a second next slide
regionally you can look at trends um i i
like to do this as well
the oregon as a state doesn't matter as
much as your local area of course for
portland public we'd look at region one
that's the portland area although it
goes all the way out to the coast and up
to astoria
but you can see in the recent surge all
the regions have been having a surge
um here in the fall period so this is
something that
was um you know the statewide policy was
it
was quite um uh appropriate when when so
many regions were experiencing the same
thing
next slide
so the way i think about forecasting and
i'm going to show you a forecast so that
you get a little sense of at least a
two-month version of what
we look at um and the way i think about
it is how effective is our policy at
reducing this thing from
from spreading at the rate it would
absent any mitigation efforts and so
the you can see waves over time of how
effective we've been and those have
matched to our
that data i saw you about i showed you
about the census
a couple interesting points is one
thanksgiving looks like it's turning out
to not be a big
um a big increase of the uh
virus rate and and most mostly that's
because
when you look at mobility data you'll
see that people mostly stayed home
and that's actually what we wanted they
weren't at work even and they weren't
even in
shopping or doing other things now we
were very worried about meals
and it looks like people took at least
in oregon enough precautions to keep
that from being coming a big issue here
um unfortunately that one of the
patterns you also see is that
fatigue sets in every time so um every
time we do a policy people are going to
start
you know we can only withstand sustain
it for so long and so i'm showing in the
red dot some forecast points into the
future
and what those represent is the policy
that we have the freeze being somewhat
effective but then
um then gradually kind of waning away
and so we i would expect that over the
next um
uh the next month and so that will
transpire to increase
more more infection and more more uh
census next slide
so unfortunately um the forecast that we
have
looks something like this which is we
will see a slide here
um and we believe the census would come
down a fair bit
but um as people become um
as fatigue sets in um it's it's all it's
understandable that people are going to
start taking chances again and this is
what we've seen before so
um whether or not that wave will really
go that much above where we are not
now or not um is is not as certain but
the odds that we're going to have some
people um looking to engage in
activities again is pretty quite likely
and because we're still in this winter
season where any indoor activity is is
really a recipe for
for trouble um you know you would expect
the infections to go up again
next slide
i do have some cool data i'd love to
talk to you guys about but it's
um a whole bunch of data that measures
mobility so before we get the virus we
see people moving around
and so this most of that data comes from
cell phones
it's all anonymized but there's
different ways of measuring it how
how much are you literally moving around
physically there's a device exposure
index which measures
how many people are in a facility that
we know the square footage of so we can
tell how close together people might be
uh there's people there's metrics that
look at whether or not you're going to
stores if you're going to work in just
social and distance index in general
all these things are are pointing to
some some clear waves as i talked about
before
the red line here is the thing we're
trying to predict which is transmission
rate
and as you can see here many of these
things in the last couple data points
went downward that's what we want these
are reductions in mobility and they and
they're
part of why the uh the freeze has been
so effective uh but we we're going to
see some rebound as is natural
and so this is part we're concerned
about next slide
uh there's other places that are
experiencing the uh similar restrictions
to us you can see israel belgium
slovenia have all had big increases
they implemented various versions of
lockdowns um
and then um and then came down germany
actually turns out to be more similar to
us they had a
pretty good increase they had locked
down but it was light version
um oh and actually they're having to
kind of redouble on that right now but
they did not get it to come back down
and
in oregon maybe dealing with that
situation where we were able to stop the
surge but
it's going to take a while before it
comes back down next slide
00h 35m 00s
indeed if you look at our mobility
metrics oregon is similar to germany in
terms of how much we've responded to the
recent restrictions
israel and belgium both had stronger
effects and that
and that was evident in their case rates
next slide
um this was a little bit of a
speculative thing that i wanted to show
you about the idea of
the vaccine which you're going to hear a
little bit more about i do believe of
course the vaccine is good news and
great to have that
news today here i'm showing you some
ideas about how
the age groups that are going to get the
vaccine
and while these are hypothetical the
idea is that
if as the vaccine is distributed these
are
expected to impact both the transmission
rate as well as the severity if you're
giving it to the older age groups that
have
higher rates of death and
hospitalization we expect that to
have a an impact on the on the
charts i was showing you and then i have
one more
slide which is essentially the why
giving it out by age group is really
important because the higher age groups
are
so much more likely to use the hospital
and also
end up dying from the disease you can
see 80 plus has a 30
high hospitalization rate per case
that's extremely high
compared to the younger age group so if
you're vaccinating the older groups
first
you have the biggest impact on the
hospitalization rates if you believe
that hypothetical a
vaccine distribution schedule you would
get reductions in hospitalization that
look like this
and why is this important because i
believe that
this is an important metric it's going
to affect policy and whether or not
we're going to be able to
either change the metrics that we use to
evaluate
opening or to to be a signal that it's
time to
time to open those are the things i
wanted to talk about and i'm happy to
take questions
after my panel members go thank you dr
grievin and now we're going to turn over
to dr simpson and dr
goodwin for their brief presentation
great thank you so much as sharon
introduced
my colleague dr joelle simpson and i are
on the pps
health advisory panel and it has truly
been an honor
to be a part of this panel and honestly
i think we are learning just as much as
we are contributing
so we meet every week to discuss
relevant topics
we review policies and updates on the
status of covid
19 in the u.s oregon and multnomah
county
we were brought on to the panel with the
main goals of providing medical
expertise
and also specifically addressing how
coven 19
impacts the core pps core value of
promoting racial equity
and social justice so as we were
introduced dr simpson and i
are both emergency physicians in
washington dc
and we have both adult and pediatric
experience we are both part of our
hospital's coven 19 response team
and we've been working with pps to
translate our lessons learned at the
hospital to your school district
we've also helped with ongoing review of
your school policies
in addition to the regular weekly
meetings the health advisory panel has
held several webinars
with pps and just last month we did a
walkthrough at a beta site at the
woodmere elementary school
those of us on the east coast we did
this virtually of course
next slide please so
delving into some of the data a big
question has been why
focus on trying to get younger students
back to school
and this graph shows that the younger
children are much less likely to be
hospitalized
and we know that even broken down more
the 12 and older age range
has an even higher risk than the 5 to 12
age range
in terms of being becoming infected as
well as infecting others
the older age range that is greater than
12 has been shown to be very similar to
adults
we still aren't sure why younger kids
seem to become less ill
and thankfully we have seen a very low
number of pediatric deaths
in this pandemic but we continue to
learn and apply those lessons
from the health data to community
practices
next slide
now we know that the impact of coven 19
on minority populations has been
particularly devastating
the levels of infections
hospitalizations and deaths
have had an outside impact outsized
impact
on native american latinx and black
communities and we saw this in stark
details in adults
and we have seen the same scenario play
out in children
next slide and as you can see
in multnomah county the same disparities
exist
that the in this slide is excellent it
represents
um the percent of coven 19 cases and it
puts it right uh
juxtaposed to the percent of the
population as you can see the
00h 40m 00s
hispanic population of your county has a
very outsized proportion of the cases of
coven 19.
next slide please so when we talk about
health uh it's more than just medical
history allergies your
past surgeries um we always as
physicians we think about the concept of
social determinants of health
health and this helps us understand the
outside influences that impact health
so i don't know if you've heard of the
social determinants of health
but um i thought i would define it for
you so the cdc defines
the social determinants of health are
the conditions in which people are born
grow live work and age as well as
the complex interrelated social
structures
and economic systems that shape these
conditions
social determinants of health include
the social environment
such as discrimination income education
level
marital status the physical environment
such as
place of residence crowding conditions
built environment and health services
such as access to and quality of health
care and insurance status
so all of these components of the social
determinants of health
have come into stark reality in coven
19. we see how these are playing out in
the health world and we know and imagine
this is also playing out very
strongly in the education system we talk
about the er
as a component of the safety net of
healthcare it's where people can come no
matter what
they don't have insurance they weren't
able to see their doctor they can come
to the er and it's also when people
get extremely ill that's where they turn
to well schools serve as the safety net
for so many children
you're much more than education schools
are where kids get
food they get their mental health care
screening for child
abuse and interpersonal issues to be
honest
i never really thought about how
intertwined children's health care
and elementary and high school education
truly is so both of my parents are
actually retired public elementary
school teachers
and my brother is a public high school
teacher so i felt like i was a bit of a
black sheep
doing something totally different by
coming becoming an er doctor
but in fact there's an extensive amount
of overlap that i never really
appreciated until now
next slide so when we talk about
um how can we best mitigate coven 19
this
swiss cheese model serves as a great
analogy
no one layer is perfect each has its
holes and when the holes align the risk
of infection increases
but when you combine the several layers
so social distancing
masks good hand hygiene
adequate testing good contact tracing
your in your structures have good
ventilation
you have clear and consistent and
truthful messaging
these all together can significantly
reduce the overall
overall risk and again through that lens
of equity
it's important to realize how again
these social determinants of health
impact these layers of cheese especially
on the shared
uh responsibility portion to the right
so one's ability to quarantine and
isolate
is significantly impacted by the type of
job that you have
your financial situation your need to go
to work
as well as your jet living situation
such as living in a multi-generational
home
so all of these factors need to be
acknowledged and worked for at a
community level
and um also i'd like you to see on the
about the fifth or sixth
slice of cheese there there's a little
mouse and that's the misinformation
mouse
and as we all know so well and this
pandemic misinformation has been
something we've had to to encounter and
it this mouse this misinformation mouse
is making those holes
even bigger um on a positive note when
we look at that
uh last slice of cheese that vaccine
slice
um while it's not a panacea and as you
can see it only adds one more layer of
protection
it is as of today here in the u.s a very
very exciting next step
and so my colleague dr joelle simpson
will take you through some more
information on vaccines
thank you dr goodwin um we can move to
the next slide
as an er doc we tend to work with the
punches and i'm afraid my video decided
not to function but i trust
that i am smiling behind the camera and
very excited to be a part of this panel
um so i want to go through a very brief
review of the covet 19 vaccine and
specifically the mrna vaccine
that was recently approved under
emergency use authorization
next slide
so this is a very sciency slide but i
certainly am going to walk you through
the different steps about the science of
00h 45m 00s
the mrna vaccine
looking in the top left hand corner
that's the molecule of the coronavirus
you see the corona or the crown of the
red spikes which are the
um specific spike proteins that are part
of the coronavirus
well the mrna or the squiggly line in
this in the on the inside is extracted
to make the vaccine which is the purple
circle that's at the top that mrna
is injected into a vaccinated cell so
when you get a shot in your muscle
um the mrna is put into the cell and
it's then translated
using the cell machinery to develop
spike proteins those spike proteins are
then expressed
on that vaccinated cell and your immune
system which is the gray green cell
in the middle is able to find that spike
protein
and generate antibodies or build the
immune system to respond to those spike
proteins
it's not the full virus itself but it is
a part of the virus that's important for
your immune system to be triggered so
that it can protect itself
think of it as training your army or
your infantry
so that when the real virus comes
through your immune cell is prepared and
at least knows how to start identifying
what it needs to attack and so you see
the last smaller slide where there is a
coronavirus
molecule there are antibodies that have
been developed in someone who has been
primed with the vaccine
in order to protect themselves against
the the
more severe impact of the corvid virus
it doesn't mean that it's 100
pure but it certainly is there to give
your body the fighting chance of having
recognized part of the virus so that it
can attack more efficiently
next slide
so there have been many questions in the
public about the vaccine effectiveness
and when we think about the history of
vaccines in this country we've certainly
actually had quite a few successes
in mitigating the impact of very severe
diseases
um most commonly we know that kids have
been
usually are required to take the
chickenpox vaccine
or measles or polio those tend to be
within a 90
or higher effectiveness range we're
fortunate in two of the vaccines that
have come forth which are the pfizer and
the modern vaccines in
the u.s have shown to be 94 to 95
percent effective
in the preliminary studies that have um
that have been performed
um and that for us is quite promising
many of the
scientists and then physicians and so
forth that have been evaluating
the expectations of these vaccines that
were being proposed
um really did not expect that you know
we were aiming for at least
60 so 94 to 95 is actually quite
promising
um in terms of its potential impact next
slide
the um specific physical 19 vaccine that
has recently been approved and is
actually
being delivered to health care systems
across the country
was tested in about 38 000 patients and
what's really important to know as we
spoke about the sort of
uh health disparities that we see there
was a lot of intention put behind
making sure that certain uh various
groups of the population uh various uh
racial minorities
um and and tribal uh uh citizens who
were tr uh from tribal
nations were represented in the studies
to the best that they were able and
there was a lot of recruitment for
for those populations so that we could
analyze the impact of the vaccine
um as i mentioned the vaccine is 95
effective and it has been reported
um to have some side effects um but has
been in about four to five percent of
those that have been in the studies so
far
that have shown some degree of the side
effects which include
milder versions of what have been
reported in
the usual covin 19 infection
next slide
some of the summarizing evidence and
recommendations that we have
as healthcare providers is especially as
pediatricians
is to note that we are just as excited
about one day reopening school systems
we know that there's been a lot in the
media and in the scientific press that
children
have been at fortunately a much lower
risk of severe disease
from covet 19 but that risk is not zero
they're still prevalent in numbers
across the communities
but the concern in reopening schools is
really to be mindful of the fact that
kids exist in our communities right and
they
they exist under the care of our
teachers the staff
and caregivers who can be at higher risk
for symptomatic and severe infection
so reopening schools absolutely has to
take so those factors into consideration
um in moving forward in addition what dr
goodwin mentioned in terms of health
equity social determinants of health
and any of the barriers that might exist
for why people may not get the vaccine
or may be at higher risk for getting the
infection in their communities
all of those need to be taken into
account when uh planning for reopening
of schools
reduction in community rates and by that
really adult behaviors are going to be
00h 50m 00s
key to reopening
we know that the techniques of masking
distancing
and hand washing and those hygiene
practices are
extremely important to protect ourselves
we see time and time again even in our
hospital system
where we have multiple patients with
covert 19 that will be able we've been
able to keep our staff safe because of
strict adherence to those measures in
addition
the misinformation epidemic alongside
the coven-19 pandemic
has been one that has been critically
important and um
we are quite excited to see that the uh
the pps school system has been uh really
harping on us to be sure to bring forth
the evidence in a fair um
and and um really critical way
we've been using the cdc uh the oregon
county health websites
and really the professionals in the
panel that we mentioned in order to
truly be as vigilant as possible in
providing accurate information to guide
the
future reopening of schools um or even
mitigation strategies
as we do hybrid learning or other
measures
so that's the last of my slides i thank
you very much for allowing us to share
this with you today and i would be happy
to introduce the next panelist
okay thank you uh dr simpson and just as
a reminder to the board members we also
have heather gatsy
the nurse from the mesd here joining us
and now we're going to spend a period of
time for your questions to the
our uh doctors who have joined us today
so i'm going to moderate
this part of the session so i'm going to
start with uh chair lowry
if you would like to ask questions we're
going to continue the questions to the
medical part of the presentation at this
time there'll be time to ask uh
uh the academic questions of chris
minnick at the end of the
presentation tonight so chair lowry
thank you dr bird
um i had a question for um
dr graven about the you said that the
fall surge was bigger than you had
initially expected
and i was wondering what factors you
think might have played a role in why
the false surge was larger than had
sort of originally been forecast yeah
i mean i think the the big issue here
was um the the impact of weather
um and it's um i think we all knew that
was gonna be a factor
but people really you can see it people
went indoors and
were we'd gotten used to all these
social encounters that we were able to
do outside
it happened in every country in the
northern hemisphere um so
like you're you're gonna see it it
predicted
why the midwest was getting hit harder
than us
it predicted why it wasn't so bad in the
south so you would think something as
simple as the weather
we should have been able to predict it a
little better but we had gotten really
used to this idea of being
able to do eating out even dining
we were able to do that outside pretty
easily and suddenly um
it really likes to be indoors the you
know we talked about this one meeting
the air changes per hour
in a inside of a structure are going to
be like 4 to 20 air changes per hour
if you're outside you're in the hundreds
and thousands right so it's a
really big difference if you can be
outside and that's what we lost
okay thank you vice chair bailey
um yes i wondered um if you could
clarify
uh the 90-plus percent effectiveness
uh in the early trials of the vaccines
about what exactly that means because
when i i first read it i thought oh did
they
give somebody a vaccine and expose them
to
coronavirus and see who got it and i
understand that it's different
and i i think that you know i i'm a
little worried that we get the vaccine
and
people go oh for we can do whatever we
want now
um and that has to do with school
reopenings
obviously so if you could clarify
kind of what what exactly how the
effectiveness was measured
and what that means for behaviors going
forward in the the long transition
period before we get
and we might have a substantial amount
of the population
um that doesn't that chooses not to get
vaccinated
and what that means going forward as
well
sorry that's kind of a couple of
questions embedded in there but
uh we'll throw that to dr simpson
yeah no problem so um the percent of
effectiveness is sort of a
test of the percent of patients that
were in the trials that were able to
show
that they were had minimal symptoms or
reactivity to the virus
or mounted an immune response to the
virus over a sustained period of time
so certainly those numbers tend to be
more robust with more time that goes on
um but for the at least two to three
months out from the vaccine they've been
00h 55m 00s
able to show that
there has been an immune response
mounted to
the exposure of the vaccine in some
sorry of the um
immune response to the virus and we test
that by antibodies which we have been
able to measure
um their different types of antibodies
which are the immune cells that we
generate
um to show that we're able to elicit
those in our
in our body um from from the vaccine
so that's one sort of sort of simplified
way of explaining the effectiveness
it is still important though that um
recall that
we all have different types of armies in
our bodies so
what may be minimal symptoms for one in
exposure after being vaccinated could
still be
a more significant illness for another
person so it is still important to use
the mitigation measures that we've
talked
before in order to protect the general
population from future spread
and we see that in time and time again
even with the flu shot it's not 100
guarantee you won't get the flu
but hopefully it does minimize the
symptoms and the effect and therefore
the ability for you to transmit it to
others
um as well as decreasing things like
mortality hospitalization those sort of
factors
that have been a big burden to our
society does that answer your question
and i think i also add um just building
on that that um
what we don't know is if that 95
so 95 um
of the the people that were vaccinated
um so of the people that became ill
naturally
in this trial um they only
five percent were the ones that were
that received the vaccine and 95
were the ones that received the uh
placebo
so that's how they measured it but what
dr simpson was talking about is
we don't know if there were some that
actually were infected that were
asymptomatic from it
so that's really important to understand
is that even if you get the vaccine we
haven't shown
that you don't actually become infected
and can infect others
so that's why again emphasizing that we
have to keep up all of those mitigation
strategies
is it there's a chance that somebody had
the vaccine
is then gets infected is able to shed it
without knowing and how this trial was
conducted
they only tested if you showed symptoms
thank you thanks that that helps
director deposit
um i don't have any questions at this
time i mean i have a million questions
but i'll pass for now thank you director
uh dr moore
um well i i have
quite a few but i'll try to limit it to
um
kind of building on the the previous
question
um how normal will normal be
once we get the
you know uh you know a fairly robust
rule but
rollout of vaccines so by
let's assume for the moment that we get
um
vaccinations for educators
so teachers bus bus drivers
nutrition all that um
what kinds of um
what kinds of measures will teachers and
students
still have to take even after
um we get vaccinations we still going to
have to use
masks and do all the cleaning protocols
and all the rest of it
it's just that there'll be less risk
yes um i think until we know that we've
reached a critical level and
the number you've probably heard talked
about is 70 percent
and that's when we reach herd immunity
and that that number is not going to be
reached anytime soon and um
we at this point we don't know enough i
think i can't fully answer because we
don't fully know but
that until we have a lot more data um
we're gonna have to keep doing all of
the
all of the things um that we already
know works which are the
the distancing the masking once we
are able to really target not only the
educators but then the family members of
those students
who are at higher risk and a lot of
adults
then that that transition to reaching
herd immunity and especially
targeting those people that are high
risk for for um
severe disease that will definitely move
us in the right direction
but to come back to any level of normal
what we knew of a year ago
um that that is a much longer um
uh goal post
thank you dr uh
01h 00m 00s
director constance
dr bird i think i have kind of a
two-part question
i'm not sure who to direct the first
part to um but i'm interested
in um thoughts about the the national or
international data about
rate of transmission in school settings
relative
to rate of transmission in those schools
community communities um and and dr
graven we don't have a lot of data on
that in oregon but the second
part of my question is just your
um take on the governor's current
metrics which i think are some of the
most stringent
um in the nation right now in terms of
metrics for reopening
and the sort of how universal they are
for all oregon school districts
yeah i can respond at first to that um
you know i think a couple things
um the it's difficult to
to know really well about all the
transmissions in schools so we
we don't have the data set we'd always
like to have for that
um so that's been an issue from an
analytic perspective
i will say you know i've done some
looking and there's been papers that
have been similar that have looked at
you know areas that opened in person
versus places that opened remote
you definitely saw higher rates of cases
in the community now
was that related to the schools directly
or the other behaviors that are going on
that's
always been a very difficult point to
distinguish
because of course you could be open for
school and the kids could be pretty safe
but then after you drop them off what do
you go do and what does everybody else
go do
um and so i think um disentangling that
has been hard i will say
you know the i think the recent news
that germany's planning
closer schools is is probably um
uh a sign that even places that i've
been very serious about it when the
rates get high enough it just becomes
it's difficult so um that
that's what i've seen so far um there
there are some
i think there will be some more papers
that will be coming out about uh
impacts of school um and and whether or
not it affects the
or in the rates
you dr griffin director scott
great thank you i actually i had it i
had a similar question to
to director constand but but i'm kind of
curious about um
peter's last comment so maybe i'll try
and tie them together so
i think one of the hardest public policy
things from a school perspective right
which is what we're facing is this
public health trade-off and i'm curious
from this panel and first of all i
should have thanked you all for your
time this is an amazing panel and i just
i really appreciate your time that
you're
willing to dedicate to the school
district and to helping us make really
good decisions moving forward
um you know the public health trade-off
is this issue of covet and we're in the
middle of a pandemic
um and that's a short to medium term
trade-off and then there's the trade-off
that we know happens with lost learning
which is is the medium to long-term
trade-off right and
and and we know that you know um from
just you know
lost learning results in in lower um you
know income
in in mental health disorders increased
you know suicide ideation and even
shorter life spans
but often those things are happening two
five ten even 20 years
down the road what we're dealing with
covet and the pandemic is happening
right now
i'm sort of curious from a public health
perspective um
how do we or how should we be thinking
about those trade-offs right and i
appreciate the nuanced um
data and information you've been giving
us because one of the things is a
as a board member i get a lot of emails
from people saying um
you have to reopen right away um the
data is showing
right that that transmission in schools
is lower than transmission in the
community and you're really
you're damaging our children if you
don't reopen and i'm getting a lot of
emails fewer but a lot of emails from
people that says
i can't believe you're even talking
about reopening i will never send my
child back
until there is you know full vaccination
rates and and the entire
you know communities is safe again um
and i just
to me that challenge of how do we gauge
short-term risks and costs against
long-term risks and costs
from that public health perspective is
is really challenging so i'll just i'll
stop and throw that out to you all to
respond to
that's a big that's a big question so i
don't think i'm gonna be able to give
you the
satisfying answer you want but what i
can say is
you know you can think of it as a
trade-off um the reality is
i think i think everybody is on the same
side which is they want to open schools
and it's just a matter of trying to
figure out how to do it
um and if you can take the precautions
you can do to ensure that people feel
safe there then you can do it and i
and i i it just seems to be that um
that so far we've um that that those
are been pretty hard to do and
from either a tactical or feasibility
perspective
01h 05m 00s
and also from a community perspective it
is definitely the case that
having schools open a bunch of
activities going on is going to generate
more community rate
infection so i i think that you you know
i think
there's only one side which is you want
to do it if you can
but finding a way to guarantee that
people are safe both the
the staff families and and to the extent
possible the kids um i think you know to
trust this point and others
um you know kids rates are a bit lower
but i'm gonna i'll pause and see who
else can jump in here
um yeah i was gonna say that one of the
highlights of my experience with pps has
been the tour of
the real life or at least i could say
virtual tour of
the school system i cannot tell you how
much i realized that planning for our
hospital system
paled in comparison to what you have to
deal with in trying to keep schools safe
for kids
um the space constraints in order to
maintain
safe distancing the ventilation
requirements
the amount of adults to care for a kid
that may turn out to be sick
and care for them while their parent is
coming waiting to come in to get them
um and and also just mitigating the
anxiety among students
in finding out that their friend became
sick right next to them and is out of
school
um all of those elements are extremely
challenging and i
you know i think a lot of school systems
are you know that that marriage of
education need and public health yes
it's being tormented by this pandemic
but
um i think from at least our lens in the
in the health world and dealing with a
lot now in the emergency department in
terms of that mental health
impact of the pandemic as well i worry
about
the idea of opening a school system that
may not have
the space or staffing to really support
our students
and then have to close down after
opening and going through that
sort of experience and the impact that
could have on schools when we do our
disaster planning we think about space
staff supply
bottlenecks in being able to execute a
safe strategy
and if you don't have the space to get
the distancing the staffing to support
the kids
or the um and by that meaning staffing
limited by the
impact in community spread so adults who
are affected and can't come into work
and then supplies being the vaccines
then it really is very risky to
anticipate opening a school system
before those things are in place
thank you uh director bram edwards
thank you and i want to thank the
panelists for your contribution
to pbs and our students during some
pretty unprecedented times for
us some of my questions have already
been asked
but i have sort of a two-part question
one are there other
countries or jurisdictions in which you
would point to
as models for pps to look to
in terms of how to effectively
reopen and operate school systems that's
part one
and then second just um
[Music]
connecting to this last discussion
around
the model school i think you said it was
woodmere and i know wilson
has been set up as well um as sort of
these are model schools where you'd
build in all the restrictions um
i'm wondering if you can state on what
you felt the
the um the state of readiness
was for those model schools and then a
question maybe for
um dr byrd is where are we
in the process with all the other
schools
so actually three-part question
so i can answer the model
question um the very first one and
unfortunately there really aren't any
um that that i'm aware of i think you
know we we say well europe did it
um well a they had a very different
approach that they prioritized their
education and their
kids they closed down bars they they put
a lot of restrictions on
um on you know public um openings that
we haven't done here
to be able to open the schools but then
now we've seen that they've had to close
and germany really
was one of that kind of that great
example and they're now
it's in a severe lockdown so i think all
of those
you know we have to continually
reevaluate and right now
i think we're all kind of in the same
boat
and if i could briefly weigh in um the
model school did an
amazing job of really looking through uh
ready school safe learner's guidance and
trying to implement what does this
actually look like how do we make this
happen in the school
setting um the difficulty of course
becomes
as dr graven pointed out people tend to
sort of
lay off a little bit right and get tired
01h 10m 00s
of being in a pandemic
and they're looking for that magical
thing like hoping that the vaccine is
going to be
the key right to returning where i
really feel like
we need to continue to focus both our
staff
and our student families and our general
communities on helping
each other understand and hold each
other accountable as well
to continually practicing those
preventive
methods that we know work right
following what public health is sending
out
not gathering in enclosed spaces that
don't have good ventilation
making sure they're wearing facial
coverings and the social distancing
seems to be a continued message that we
need to continue
sharing with our families and staff
because of all the positive case
investigations that i've done so far
not only for pps but all of the other
mesd component districts
we're really seeing that people don't
understand that spacing
right of even if people you are hanging
out with do not appear ill
maintaining that at least six foot
distance is imperative
not only for your own um mitigation of
risk right but also to
make it so that you don't end up being a
close contact to that positive
individual and having to quarantine
and we've already seen situations in the
work setting where we end up
identifying close contacts and having to
quarantine an entire
you know staff group whether it's
nutrition custodial things like that
and if we're dealing with that already
while we're not having students on site
we can already see that that type of
communication is going to be essential
and repeated communication
right around those um preventive methods
balancing that against the fatigue that
everybody is dealing with right the
pandemic fatigue the notification
fatigue so pps will continue to work
behind the scenes on
how do we provide good trainings not
only for staff but for our families
and balance that out with not creating
more fatigue with families that are
already dealing with trauma
and then director bremer answered the
question about the school's readiness
our facilities team has been working for
the last several months to uh
to to do what they did in the model
school sites
at all of our schools and we'll be
taking our principles in the month of
january
uh to visit those sites but now we have
uh sites across the district that are
ready to go once we have the uh once
it's
safe to to do that so principals also
participated in that process with
facilities but really a big shout out to
dan jung and the facilities team for uh
going to all of our facilities across
the district to do that
just to clarify when you say that you'll
have facilities across the district does
that mean
that all schools will be at a certain
point ready
in gen in january or february they're uh
finishing up the final schools yeah
they're they're all
i think they're within two weeks of uh
completing their they've been working
for several months though it's been a
long long
process for them thank you and i don't
want to leave out we have a couple
minutes before we have to transition but
i want to make sure that we uh
ask uh student representative shu if he
has any questions for the
medical panel uh yeah
thank you um so as i understand it
we have yet to see large-scale trials of
the code with 19
vaccines among children and particularly
younger children
um i wonder what kind of trials we need
to see take place before we can feel
safe administering any kind of vaccine
to children
and how long that will take to complete
and as an extension of that
very roughly when can we expect for a
considerable
portion of our student body to have
access to a vaccine
and that's an excellent question and as
a pediatrician we get asked that all the
time
it's not uncommon for kids to be con
sort of put into trials after it's been
tested in adults
kids have very different immune systems
they're often
challenged very differently their immune
systems are a lot more naive
so there is a push for children to be
included in the trials
um in this upcoming year certainly
and they've already started enrolling
kids and doing outreach and communities
to get kids enrolled into the studies as
well as pregnant women by the way
um so certainly we're hoping to have
some data
um i i would guess i would hazard a
guess
by the um sort of mid to late
summer uh that would be insufficient
volume
in order to make some statements about
the safety of the vaccine
in uh in children and possibly even
earlier than that but
latest possible guess would be summer to
late summer
all right thank you dr simpson thank you
to all of our doctors and to nurse
gutsy for your uh presentation tonight i
want to turn it over now to david roy
and communications who's going to take
us to our
next panel david
01h 15m 00s
thank you dr byrd and good evening
everyone i'm david roy i'm the
senior director of communications uh
for the district and as a communications
person i would
reiterate what uh dr brown said earlier
and that is
if anyone is watching on our youtube
stream has any comments
or if you have a question that doesn't
get addressed tonight please go to
pps.net
you'll see a big banner at the top of
the screen of our home page
there you'll have a link where you can
leave us a question or comment we will
definitely see
all of those so we invite you to do that
it is my pleasure
uh to kick off the next part of the
evening which is a panel discussion with
folks representing some of our most
important stakeholder groups
including students parents educators and
our community based
partner organizations our moderator will
be jonathan garcia our chief engagement
officer
at portland public schools and our first
panelist
is lana parise lana is a senior
at cleveland high school we've gotten to
know her as a student activist
leading portland and portland public
schools efforts to elevate climate
justice and climate change
education and lana is mere days
as we speak from knowing where she will
be attending college
next year so everyone have a good
thought for lana not just for the news
that she's gonna get but for her nerves
right now i'm si i'm sure i'm sure she
could use the uh the moral support
uh so thanks to her for joining us
during a really busy time
our second panelist is uh uh angela
bognia
an instructional coach at scott
elementary an educator for five years
angela has been at scott for two years
and when she's not on canvas as their
teachers
are with the youngers right now teaching
virtually
she keeps herself busy with a number of
things including working on a really
exciting project
uh around a virtual tabletop
role-playing game
she told us a bit about that uh today
our third panelist
is dr catherine rodella mother to rudy
a fourth grader at lent k-8 an educator
herself
when she's not golfing with rudy
katherine is a tenured professor at
washington state university
and our final panelist is tamara hickok
the director of youth services
for self-enhancement inc many of you
know that sei provides culturally
specific
services at many of our schools in
portland i employ a whole school model
of programming and something about
tamara is she's a proud jefferson
graduate
and she still cheers for the demos in a
household full of grand
generals so she's got a house divided
but all
put her arms around her fellow pps high
school so many thanks to all of our
panelists
this evening for taking the time to be
with us and i will now
hand it over to chief garcia jonathan
thank you david uh and then we can take
off the uh
screen uh and just go to uh screen or
the all tv there we go i see lana i see
dr rodella i see uh
miss bonilla and i think i'm looking for
cameraman
awesome i see camera all right so let's
get started hi everybody
again jonathan garcia chief engagement
officer good to be with all of you
uh this evening um so we're gonna get
started off with lana
uh we'll start with our student here so
first of all
uh you know so for everybody uh what
wasn't in her resume
is that or in her bio was that she's
also a student intern in my office so
really really really jazzed that she she
lends her voice in many ways here at the
district so lana how are you
first of all i'm good hi how are you
um i think yeah i'm doing well today a
little anxiously i think this might have
been mentioned
but a lot of college decisions are
coming out this week so that's
definitely nerve-wracking
um so so
just yeah you know can you tell us a
little bit about your school experience
uh and then you know we you just heard
from a bunch of doctors and nurses about
uh you know uh information and all this
data so what do you
and your friends hear about covid and
where do you get your most trusted
information
and share a little bit about where you
get that information and what is the
info
that you see tell you about reopening
for sure so my school experience this
year has definitely been
difficult i think it began with there
was very little streamlining i'd say
of the way the teachers were told to do
things and take attendance and give work
and all that
and i think asynchronous led to or like
lack of synchronous time may have led to
over compensation with homework
so that was difficult to adjust to um i
know my friends and i specifically we
get our news a lot from apple news which
is just an app you can get on your phone
and it generally gives notifications
from major news sources i prefer the
washington post myself
01h 20m 00s
and my friends actually my friend group
particularly um there's a popular
reporter on tick tock which is a very
famous
our new social media platform his name
is marcus c paula so
he he posts things around two to three
times a day and
a lot of our covenant information
actually comes from him but um
yeah so with that information we've
actually been kind of guiding ourselves
along the way
so this summer my friends and i had a
pod which was my
and just those households um i think it
was easy to do along the summer as the
um as the medical professionals said we
could spend time outside and
you know generally be okay with just
sunshine and having good times together
especially when school isn't a thing
um but as cases began rising recently we
decided to close our households off once
more and we made that decision based off
the knowledge that cases had been higher
than ever
and i personally have had the experience
of having a family member with pre
um with a health condition
especially had kova 19 at the beginning
of the pandemic
and this kind of ensured that i was
pretty careful about the precautions i
took about it
so in the end i think we've all pretty
much reached a consensus that
if schools were to be open i'm sure we
would all
choose to stay virtual just with the
knowledge that cases are pretty high we
all have
pretty high risk family members and as
long as student lives and teacher lives
and all the families and other care
workers
are at risk partaking in hybrid
schooling just to me and my friends at
least would
seem kind of an irresponsible choice on
our part especially with the knowledge
that the pandemic does have the
potential and does actually affect by
poc and lower income communities the
most and as somebody who identifies as
by poc
and lives in a lower income neighborhood
this is pretty important to me
so i hope that answers your question
that was a wonderful
uh answer i really appreciate you uh
getting us started
um so i'm gonna turn it over to uh uh
miss bonilla
uh one of our uh incredible educators
here um
so how are you following the latest data
um are you looking at multnomah county
are you the state of oregon uh the cdc
um
and then does the change in trajectory
here in early november
cause you any concern that you might not
have had before
yeah well i first want to thank uh all
of y'all for starting with
a panel on the data because i think
that's one of the biggest
uh stumbling blocks we have a lot of
those little misinformation mice going
around and so i really appreciate that
being
put at the forefront um i get a lot of
my information
from uh kovadec now i get emails
um from the new york times uh
we also talk a lot as teachers about the
data that we're hearing from multiple
sources
and sharing with each other because
there's always that concern
are we going to have to go back are we
going to have to make a decision about
whether we have to expose our children
our family members
um and will we have enough notice to
make a choice
so i think uh the change in the
trajectory of the numbers has really
affected
that sense of insecurity where
uh educators want to make sure to give
their students consistency
and the idea of possibly going back
and what if you know numbers surge and
then we have to go back to digital
online cdl learning
um is is still very much at the
forefront
of people's minds so i think
personally you know there's always that
pull that want
of i want to be in front of the kids i
want to be able to give them the kind of
education they deserve
you know but we also don't want to send
kids home
so that they can injure their own
families so they can expose their own
families so it's it's definitely a tight
rope but
the new data is really making us worry
about that january 28th
deadline yeah i appreciate uh you
sharing that miss bania and
and uh dr rodella and i spent a little
bit of time
uh chatting this morning and i think uh
i think uh dr rodella has a little bit
of insight here as well
so uh dr rodella you know i know parents
like teachers and students very much
want our schools to
to reopen uh do you have any
reservations
uh do you have yeah do you have any
reservations and then kind of what data
are you looking
to help guide your household decision
making yeah
thank you mr garcia and everybody and i
really also want to reiterate i
appreciate hearing from the medical
experts who have been looking at data
um i guess for me one of the first
things i actually
appreciate that the district's using
case numbers um but for me
uh particularly as a latina mother
and raising a multi-racial black white
and latino
young man who goes to lent school which
is over 50 percent latinx students and
majority students of color
over i think about 36 percent uh
01h 25m 00s
teachers of color i think a lot about
the case numbers by race and ethnicity
and the disproportionate impacts on the
latinx population
um i think for me as a parent the
question
it's not really a data but it's almost
my my urging to this to the board and
decision makers
at portland public schools is about this
question of you know whose voices will
drive decision making right obviously
data is really important but
which parent and youth voices matter the
most and so we had a board member
director mentioning getting these emails
and i always think about
which parents have feel comfortable
sending an email
in english and feel entitled to do so
and i think about the parents that
my son goes to school with who often
feel like their voices don't matter and
and
they're also the ones often most
impacted by covet so
i know people i have people in my family
who have got covet who have also
been um you know people my family who've
been hospitalized i know people who have
died and so
to me that is something that i tend to
see some of my
um you know and i'm a professor i have
all these other privileges i've been
well educated
um and some of my wealthier white
friends who don't know anybody who has
had covet and i'm trying to say please
please like
once you know and have this personal
impact it really changes your life
uh another piece of information i think
would be really helpful in my decision
making
as a parent is not just like okay what
are you going to do to make sure that
schools are safe but also how are we
going to protect
and think about educators particularly
educators of color so i'm a professor of
education at washington state university
on our vancouver campus
a lot of my students are actually
educators and administrators across the
state of washington
and several of them are in districts
where their school boards basically said
we're not going to listen to our county
governments we're going in our public
health officials we're going to open
schools regardless and
what we've seen is or we're going to do
hybrid models despite growing case rates
and that's been in more conservative and
rural districts
and what we see are the teachers are
completely strapped i have students on
my classes educators who are crying
who are overwhelmed who are trying to
juggle hybrid models without support and
so
every time i talk about how my son goes
to portland public and we decide you
know poorly public right away decided
this is the date we're gonna go to
january that it allows this ease for
educators to prepare
right and so i think that i think about
as a parent even
because i want my son's teachers to be
supported too
and so those are the pieces i think
about i also think about how
yeah i'm worried about him falling
behind but i'm more concerned about the
stress
around him feeling like he's gonna get
sick or that other kids could get sick
or family members like his grandparents
could get sick
um so i think about the the human side
of it too
and what's best for him and his
well-being and welfare as well as other
students of course
thank you so much dr rodella and miss
tamra you're gonna
uh close out this panel uh time for one
and then we'll turn it over to the board
if they have any questions for any of
the four
of you but uh miss miss tamra tell us
how sei uh who is one of our
greatest partners here at the district
is gathering data and information about
student and
family service needs to inform your
organization's approach to reopening
all right good afternoon this is evening
time everyone almost dinner
well if you're in our house during covet
dinners like around 10 30 because we're
all confused
so good to see you guys and i'm honored
to be on this panel
um a little bit i mean uh hearing so
much today
has just really been eye-opening as i
just received i don't know if you can
see me on my phone i apologize for just
received notice that my daughter's
roommate
just tested positive and she's a college
athlete
in utah where that one point they were
at testing over a hundred cases a day
i mean excuse me a thousand cases a day
in utah
and so that's what my daughter is and
was just like okay that just you know
and listening to this information kind
of really shocks you into reality if you
haven't already been
um a little bit about sci what we're
doing right now in order to gather
information around our students you know
in one word we use relationships but in
order to
kind of quantify that we look at how we
can spend the time with our kids
during this moment and still make sure
we're getting
satisfying their needs and getting to
what they need so strangely enough the
data that we use some of the data that
we use
was actually pre-covet data and that
pre-covet data say for instance at
um one of our studies at jefferson high
school showed us that many of our
students were going to school
at the same rate attendance wise as
as their counterparts yet they weren't
performing as well academically
showing us just how important social
engagement was for our students
and so one of the things we looked at
quickly as we're able to pivot into this
moment
is how do we keep our kids socially
engaged
in a way that we don't lose them
emotionally
so what sei did was we took our
relationship
model and we looked at five specific
things as we used our
had our coordinators check in with 10
students every single day 10 of their
01h 30m 00s
students every day
by the end of the week you talk to every
one of them and the things we look into
were
home safety food security emotional
wellness
academic resources and objectives and
then lastly
their individual success plans using
that information that data was fairly i
guess you would say would be raw data
because we're actually having them track
this information
while talking to students and
immediately acting upon that information
we were able to pivot pretty quickly and
instead of not being in the building as
we're used to
we're able to pivot and do our stuff
virtually and that include most
importantly
our online classes our online groups
presenting them with still leadership
classes gender groups and all those
things that our kids
had become accustomed to and felt like
it was quickly separated from them
and so we would use that same
information based on the data knowing
that
social engagement was so important we
were able to keep our kids engaged
one of the things i wanted to also
mention was we use the comparison data
using comparison data of engagement of
some of our pps students
that are not in sei versus some versus
our students
and showing that our students are
performing at a rate are engaging at a
rate much higher simply because
in their classroom uh pps has allowed us
with synergy access and our rois
to be in the classroom with the students
and they're partaking and the teachers
are allowing us to participate as well
and i think some of the teachers have
actually been like
thank you for being here giving me a
second to take a deep breath because we
can tell this weight is heavy on
everyone
one thing that you know i just wanted to
say was
we often think about the weight of the
virtual learning on the student while
they're in the classroom
but one thing that we've been focusing
on as well and how we service our
families
is the weight of the virtual learning on
the family
so if you have one or more students who
are on the laptops all day
that means that's an hour three hours
four hours where the rest of the family
might have to be quiet because i don't
have a separate place
to sit in my home for you to be able to
be on your laptop and i can be over here
oftentimes um that time also is time
that our students are separated from
their families
and so one of the things that we've
learned is
trying to get students not to see their
laptop and classroom time
as the enemy to pull them away from
families because i'm on my laptop i can
hear you guys over here laughing having
a good time do i have to choose
so a lot of our work has been around
making sure especially socially
emotionally that our kids are intact
our kids are whole but most importantly
that our families
have what they need in order to not have
to worry about
i have to worry about if i'm not here
then
something else is going to be missed and
so a lot of the data that we've been
using is
participation of our kids um
participation
in our social events participation in
attendance in classrooms participation
while in the classroom as well as making
sure that our kids are attending
the uh after the social activities that
we provide for them
in the afternoon and sometimes on the
weekends just doing our best to keep
them as engaged
without trying to burn them out as well
as
over-inundating the family with all this
technology in their house
all the time because we also got to
remember with all this
their bills increase right that's an
easy data we've we
have the numbers on how many families
we've had to provide
with energy assistance how many families
we have to provide
with uh food services because we're used
to kids getting two meals a day
at school now they're getting three
meals three four meals a day at home and
if you have student athletes and
football players
they're getting eight meals a day at
home because the refrigerator never
cooks
so we just know that there's just
day-to-day things
that when you talk about data day-to-day
things that have changed
just the daily existence of many of our
families
absolutely thank you uh miss tamra uh
actually before i turn it over to the
board for any questions of our panelists
i do have one question for
for both miss bania and uh and lana
which is you know and you heard this
from our uh our doctor panel
earlier we are going to come back to
school at some point right um
uh so what are you most looking forward
to
when schools do reopen and lana maybe we
start with you
um i i don't
know if i would have my last day of
school or not as a senior
but on the off chance we do go back or
should i say lucky um on the chance that
we do go back
i really look forward to seeing my
favorite history teacher and sitting in
her classroom again
that
that's awesome thank you for sharing
that espana
yeah i think what i miss
is the physical proximity and body
language you get from working with kids
01h 35m 00s
and i you know i miss
the like little routines and the little
side conversations you have
when kids are walking in line and
something comes up and they gotta tell
you
i miss um so i'm looking forward to
hearing that like
oh sound again
as opposed to it being asynchronous
online
by themselves at home so i'm just
looking forward to seeing the kids again
thank you for sharing that uh directors
i think we have time
maybe for a few questions and maybe i'll
start off with
uh director to pass i see you you're me
unmuted so maybe you want to start first
yeah i did
um i wanted to thank the panelists um it
was really great to hear from you
your perspectives um dr rodella i
um echo and in fact earlier during this
conversation um made a comment i was
concerned about the
the families that we are not hearing
from having worked with the
um portland housing bureau i know that
we have immigrant families
and refugee families that are looking
for apartments that can sleep you know
nine people
11 people and um i know that our
that we have families that are crowded
in in crowding working conditions and
the language barrier is is difficult you
need to be
comfortable um writing in another
language in english if
it's not your native tongue i wonder
like of all of us on the call here
tonight who would be comfortable
writing a letter in spanish or chinese
or russian um and and how you would do
that if you were living um
in in those places um to ms bonilla
and alana and miss tamara i just
i really thank you for being here i do
worry about our communities of color we
don't hear from them
we don't get the emails from them i
worry about the transmission rates the
proximity in in rental apartments
um and it's a big concern um i i know
there's a
loss in social emotional learning in
academic learning
i just feel like we can overcome some of
those things
but we can't overcome those things if if
your grandparents aren't alive
you know if your parents aren't alive
and it's a really big concern of mine
um thank you so much for joining us i
really appreciate you all
thank your director to pass does anybody
want to share any comments
to what director depass shared
um
when we came back in august we
did a professional development session
where we read an article that was
actually sent
through pps about how
the pandemic is awful as it is is
offering us an opportunity
it's opera it's offering us an
opportunity to see the world
through a new lens all the things that
seemed impossible before
we made happen right like kids who
weren't getting um who wouldn't have
gotten fed are
you know programs like sei are
supporting them you have teachers
dropping materials off
at kids homes schools organizing drives
to ensure that every kid has what they
need
at home and so
i think work the concern about going
back
is that we're going to try to go back to
a normal that
can no longer be acceptable so
this pandemic has really shown us that
schools are those community centers
they're those community hubs where a lot
of services outside of just
just education and instruction happen
and so what is our society going to say
and and and do once we do come back are
we going to get the resources and
support
and and things that we need to continue
to provide those services at that level
or are we going to pull back and say
well now that everyone's in school
we can go back to work everything's fine
so i
agree um uh with uh
the previous speaker i think we need to
as a district
as a state really take the time when
we're considering going back
and thinking about what systems have
been
created by all these innovative
innovative educators and administrators
and students and families that we need
to hold on to
and put our our you know money and power
and time behind
jonathan this is director constant i
just want to
chime in miss bonilla just everything
you just said is absolutely pure gold
you know we really need to challenge
ourselves to figure out
how to hang on to the best of what has
come forward in this
time and miss hickok to hear you going
through
like all the activities that sei is
doing with individual students
and really taking the temperature of
each individual family and figuring out
what their needs are and how we
you know in the broadest sense we can
01h 40m 00s
can make sure
they get met um i really think it is an
invitation for us to
up our game as a community to um
figure out how to collaborate on all the
supports that
that our families need and um you know
our old mercy corps
motto is in crisis lies opportunity so i
think what you both have highlighted
here
are incredible opportunities for us and
also you know lon i just want to say for
the kids i mean
i know a lot of kids have experienced
some aspects of remote
learning that are you know kind of okay
in a lot of ways and for some kids even
better
um but still i just want to acknowledge
you know just
the loss all the loss and sadness and
isolation
and missing your friends and missing the
rituals that you associated with your
senior year
in high school and i think because
we're all in it together you know our
students have just showed
amazing resilience and just positive
attitude and perseverance but still
it's just a lot of heartache and loss
and i just want to
send that out to you and and all your
friends on those
tough days you know we feel ya
appreciate it uh director constance
uh any board members uh we're actually
gonna go to 755 so if you have
any questions any insight that you want
to hear that you have that you haven't
heard from
the all the emails that you get or all
the facebook groups that you're a part
of
what are the things that you're not
hearing that you want to hear from we
have
four amazing panelists here uh love to
to have you share ask any questions
get any additional insight
i have a question first thanks to all
the panelists um
and this is for sei and i'm just went
wondering
um whether among the community-based
organizations whether there's any um
sharing of sort of
best practices or what's working we're
all in sort of unprecedented times
and the normal strategies that we
use don't necessarily um translate and
so
it sounds like they're you've sei has
adopted some that really
are engaging students and the data's
demonstrating greater engagement so i'm
curious what sort of
collaboration or sharing of new
practices is
occurring that's a great question
so one of the things that we do that we
did quickly is um sei's know one of the
things we're known for
our six week robust summer program well
this year since it was done
virtually we're absolutely able to open
our summer program up to our entire
community
people not not necessarily close in
that would normally not have access to
our programming and so we
had summer programming this year for six
weeks with over 100 classes
grades um from elementary all the way up
to
senior in high school that kids
participated in we had students from
wrigler and i'm trying to think of some
of the schools right off the dome that
that aren't sei
schools that had access to our classes
some of the ways that we collaborated
with other cbo's is
um we work with a lot of the other
programs latino network
mfs near in doing some of
our food banks um we collaborated on
those
we know at king for instance king
elementary school that
excuse me martin luther king elementary
school the first week we served around
150 students at the food
giving away food boxes within the third
week that number was over 300
so we know that as we continue to
partner and send that information out to
other agencies
we were able to partner and collaborate
and keep everyone safe we figured you
know the smaller
um the more we would combine our
services
that'd be fewer places for families to
go fewer places in the community
for people to try to go around to get
other services and we could provide them
in one stop
uh when we continue to do that we're
also collaborating with other agencies
just showing
how to connect with students and use
instagram
how to record phone calls some i mean
video calls
some weren't aware of the google meets
and how to use it
um definitely training other managers on
how to use smart sheets and just
different things that we're working with
other people to use
um just anything that can help you get
to kids more quickly more efficiently
most importantly how to connect with
parents one big thing that we use was a
lot of people
hadn't worked on their um um
application process we're still trying
to figure out how to get those out
and we were one of the first to start
with the docuhub
and showing people that you can still
get signatures and it can still be
you know legal as opposed to having
someone sign it for you you know we were
you to get your rois done
so we kind of shared a lot of those
practices with other agencies
thank you thank you any other board
01h 45m 00s
members with
a question i see dr moore looking to
ask a question um
thank you um thank you to everybody
who's
who's been here tonight it's been really
a great session
um i do have a question um i've heard
some
stories from various families um
about kids who are actually
um maybe not thriving in the current
distance learning environment but but
actually doing better
um and it you know it's often kids for
whom
usually high school students and uh you
know they're
not doing especially well in in the
comprehensive high school
and they're really doing uh they're
really finding this distance learning
works for them um are you seeing that
um i don't know how prevalent this is
but
there might be something we want to
there might be some practices in there
that we want to continue
in the after times how about dr rodella
maybe do you want to start
as a parent and then love to hear from
uh lana or edu or
our educator and then we'll finish off
with tamara i think that's a good
question uh
to round out this session dr rodella
yeah i mean i i think about i guess to
me i want to credit i feel like my son
is a little bit like that
um in some ways that he's really um
he's enjoyed it but there's also this
cost of like he really misses being
around other kid little kids
i know it because he tries to tell us
all about his lego ninjago and i
i really can't handle listening to any
more about that like i'm losing it but
you know just i think about the social
aspects and how that that can be so it's
amazing to hear about sci's work in
terms of that
and creating those social aspects but i
also think about the joy he has every
morning they do
a quick meet with his his wonderful
teacher maestro
kevin sapetha from lent who i'm going to
give a shout out to
who i mean they did something like after
they all did well on some assignment
they got to have a movie day which is
like
they're already in front of a screen so
part of me was like that seems silly but
but that was really helpful
but i do think there's this tension
around um
how like i guess i i i don't really ha i
do know that for some families
it's just much more burdensome but the
number of children
and the amount of assignments so even my
child who's the child of a professor of
education
apparently had missed 15 assignments and
i was horrified because i couldn't keep
track of it because i had on my job
and so it's just like those things but i
also know that his teachers have been
really understanding
and there's no high stakes but he's also
at
fourth grade level so i guess that's
kind of my perspective as a parent
and i think um i have heard from
colleagues who work with black families
who talk about their children feeling uh
who might be in more white dominant
spaces feeling like
they don't have the same
microaggressions all the time and they
feel better at home and safer at home
so some of the narrative that comes out
of educational research which is my
field
about how all these kids are failing and
doing terrible is like
maybe not for particular groups of
students who are no longer in these
places that have been
actually really aggressive for them and
that also i've seen people have talked
about from a research
standpoint for lgbtq students too maybe
not having to hear some of the same kind
of offensive language and types of
bullying
so thank you that's a good question lana
so i think i can't really talk um for
other people's experiences
so much as my own so i think i'll just
go with my own my own experience as a
student is that
it's been a lot harder with virtual
learning just because i know that
um huge portions of my grades in a
normal year actually do come from my
interactions with my teachers
and it doesn't seem like they would like
from the actual like percentages of
grading things will come from
assignments tests things like that
but when it comes down to it the just
the being able to talk to my teachers
face to face and like choose to go see
them when i choose to go see them
it greatly affects my grade every year
and it's been a lot harder this year to
keep my grades up and i'm a 4.0 student
so
i would say in past years just being
able to like keep that and keep my grade
average up has been from being able to
go talk to students
i talk to students talk to teachers and
develop a relationship with them it's
just so much easier when um it's more at
my control
if that makes more sense virtual
learning just lacks that kind of
control it's very regimented in that
sense you know
appreciate that senora
you're on mute sorry thanks didn't fully
click
um there are some students that are
doing well uh but as an instructional
coach
i observe a lot of different classes
different grade levels and talk with a
lot of different teachers
and the common thread is that those
students who have support at home are
the ones doing well
even from my experience last year i had
01h 50m 00s
students who struggled in the classroom
with attention
lagging lagging skills and their
attention and other things that as soon
as we were online they were in
every session and doing every assignment
because there was someone
at home who was able to give them that
one-on-one attention that
we couldn't provide in the building um
at all times
so i think you know it's it's
definitely a certain demographic of
folks
with with specific privileges that are
benefiting
and and still doing well um and you know
some of these practices are things that
we know can work like
flipped classrooms where you give kids a
video to watch and then you can spend
the time actually working with
students at their level so they can go
at their pace
those are things that's something i did
when i worked with a sixth grade
self-contained class those things are
possible
when we get back into the building so we
don't have to necessarily
lose that benefit from kids that kids
were receiving
but i also know that kids that i didn't
see all spring after reaching out after
dropping off chromebooks at their home
i didn't see them all spring and they
weren't here in the fall
it took a lot of work a lot of home
visits a lot of phone calls a lot of
just just effort and energy from the
school from the teacher from the
administrators from
our climate specialists to get those
kids back online so
and those and that's one student i'm
thinking of
was also you know receiving special ed
services was also receiving
english language uh development services
so
all those pieces are still falling to
the wayside for a lot of our kiddos
um and i think the other piece that
uh i think uh dr rodella talked about
is that affinity that that kids get to
build with each other and with the
adults in the building and lana
also talked about i'm usually for a
while i'd be like
the black teacher at schools so black
students would find me that i
had no idea where they came from which
class which grade but they'd find me
and they'd look at me and they're like
whoa who are you and i introduced myself
and so
there's an affinity that was created
where those kiddos would see me in the
hallway and we'd see each other and we
had that kind of connection that's
gone and now that i'm not in the
classroom then i'm um
you know an instructional coach usually
my role would be walking around the
building
supporting students and teachers walking
into classrooms doing observations so i
would have been able to
to hopefully connect with even more
students
and that's not the case um so i think
there are students who are doing well
but i think we need to remember that
um institutionalized barriers still
exist
and as the educators and the board
members and the administrators
we are the institutions so we can decide
how we're going to amend these practices
in order to benefit those who have been
historically underserved by these
institutions
um so that's you know those are my two
cents on
student uh achievement during this time
awesome really appreciate it miss
tamrite
yes i i can't even imagine what i could
add that has already been so eloquently
said
um other than i would just say that you
know as much as i want to believe in my
whole heart how many kids are doing so
so well at school i mean doing so well
at home now because they're not in
school and i can't help but think of
the other side of self enhancement that
deals with how many kids in the uptick
in domestic violence that kids are
experiencing in their homes
and the uptick of you know being at home
and
then the stresses they used to get away
from to go to school
um they they're there front and center
so one of the
one of the wonderful partnerships that i
think that um sei
and pps has is that wraparound of a kid
so normally where they would be at home
um and now this is a stressful time once
their school learning is done we're able
to have those conversations with their
coordinators
sometimes it's late into the evening
until i can go to sleep you know just
staying busy where they would normally
be at the center and some places away
from home staying busy
until they had to go home um to deal
with whatever is there
so i i guess for me i agree with all the
pluses and why kids are doing well
but i'm also you know we're also ever
mindful
of the stresses that kids continue to
have that are kind of
jumping right in front of their laptops
they they're there right
as they open their eyes that stress is
there and sometimes you know it's
magnified
excuse me magnified some of our families
you know their living situations change
and so we now have
two families two whole families living
in the house and we're all trying to get
our homework done
we don't have enough internet services
to quite support
everybody that's trying to do their
school work we have two laptops
four students and so not that i'm glass
half empty by any means i'm
i'm always on the plus but just being
01h 55m 00s
mindful that
yes there's some kids doing well but
those that aren't struggle is absolutely
real and is right in their faces as soon
as they wake up
well with that thank you to our
incredible
panelists uh i'll just repeat what
someone just messaged me
uh seriously amazing humans so
thank you thank you thank you for all
you do who you are
you're your whole self so thank you for
joining us this
evening i'm going to turn it over to
director scott who i believe will close
us out
i was going to i did want to just ask i
know that director berm edwards had a
had a question
uh for chris minnick and and i wondered
if we wanted to get that in really
quickly
i do i do um and thank you um is
chris still with us yep here thank you
okay
great um i also submitted took advantage
of david roy's suggestion to submit
um about 10 questions that the community
had submitted into the pbs.net
comment page so everybody who's texting
me questions right now
submit your questions there but um my
question for chris is
um you had a lot of uh data in that deck
about four million students
um and i was surprised that the learning
loss uh wasn't greater i think
it just surprised me um i think like a
cautionary note was that
none of the data reflect pps students um
and that there's a missing
20 and in your presentation it indicated
that
um those were more likely those missing
students were more likely to be
ethnically
and racially diverse and students with
lower achievement in fall of 2019
so my two questions um one is for chris
and one is for staff the one for chris
would be how would you suggest
that pps assess the effectiveness since
they're not part of the data set you
presented tonight
how would you suggest that pps assess
the effectiveness of comprehensive
distance learning
and the second for pps staff um
do you have any disaggregated data on
how cdl uh their comprehensive just is
learning how effective it is
um and what learnings would you take
going forward
if we're seeing learning loss
great uh that's a big question and
probably more than
uh one minute but i'll just be real
quick i mean i think the first thing is
you need it you need to do some set of
assessments uh
to understand where kids are but you
don't need to do
massive amounts of testing so like i
just feel like there's a sweet spot
that we haven't quite hit in our local
community here about getting enough data
to know
what's going on with kids and if we we
you know we obviously have the map
assessment we think that's important but
um but there are ways to gather data so
whether it be in the winter or in the
spring
um there's ways to make sure we're doing
just the right amount of assessment not
too much
not where we're testing kids all the
time but there does need to be some set
of assessments that show us
some set of data and i think i would uh
you know on comprehensive distance
learning we'd actually be very happy to
partner with the district uh
if there was an ongoing conversation
about how we might look at that so
uh superintendent you know if we want to
have a follow-up conversation about that
we'd be happy
to do that thank you thank you chris
that does pps staff have a
no that's dr bird
or dr brown
one of the doctors
go ahead i think mr medic
stated very well that we certainly see
and share
share the the need for some assessment
data to be able to anchor this
conversation
and then um you know with
i think a census assessment window at
some point in this spring to to
be able to help us anchor and understand
the impacts of cdl
and where it's worked and where it
hasn't
i think would be very very helpful and
of course we'd be uh
more than more than happy to tap into
the expertise of the research team of
nwa
to extend the capacity of our work to be
able to to lead into that
thank you thanks i think dr brown that's
such a critical point that you just made
about you know
and and mr minnick as well about what is
the sweet spot
for getting just some information about
where our kids are because we're
struggling now
at the beginning of our budget process
with knowing how we're going to allocate
resources for next year
and knowing that we're going to have to
do things differently we're going to
have to respond
to the learning loss that we know has
occurred we know it's greater than what
you presented to us because that was
just from last spring
none of that takes into account any of
the learning loss from
uh distance learning this whole fall and
so it puts us in a really difficult
position
in terms of um creating our district
budget because
um you know we need to we know we need
02h 00m 00s
to double down on interventions
for our kids who have fallen far behind
um but we have to have some way to gauge
you know
how how extreme is that loss and and
what are the interventions that we're
going to have to put in place and how
much are they going to cost
great so um i'll just go ahead and wrap
up we're a few minutes over but it was
such a valuable
conversation um i just i just want to
thank say thanks to the amazing
panelists um
we heard from public health
professionals i have to say that data
presentation on kovid was one of the
clearest i've seen
and i've been reading a lot of data on
kovid but it was just it was very clear
and
and great um we heard from teachers and
parents
and from students and community partners
we heard about the impact on learning
um and which as you know was just
mentioned by a couple directors i mean
well it may not be as bad as the worst
case we know it's having a negative
impact and it is exacerbating the
achievement gap and so keeping our eye
on that
is going to be really important we heard
about the health impacts that covet is
having on our community that it has been
having and continues to have as it sort
of ravages through and
the numbers go up um we heard about
specific experiences and challenges that
that
students and parents and teachers are
having um
and we heard most importantly about the
need to make sure we are hearing
from everyone and and especially the
black and brown families and
students in our district um who we know
are just
proportionately impacted by covid and we
know we're not hearing from
in the same proportion as others and and
just making sure we're doubling down
on that is really important um and
finally we heard about the need to make
sure we come out of this pandemic and
this crisis
with with more equitable structures in
place so we don't return to the old ways
that
that weren't working and i think that's
one of the most of all these valuable
points that's one of the most valuable
ones
um of the entire night and finally i
think something someone said earlier
um in the first panel that we can all
agree on is that everyone wants to get
schools open again as soon as it's safe
to do so
and really the hard question is finding
that balance so um there's gonna be a
lot more discussion to come on this
topic
um which is really the most important
thing facing schools right now and um
i just appreciate all the panelists and
folks listening and and i know that
we as a board will continue the
conversation as will the community and
in fact on that note i will just put in
a pitch
i believe there is a session um
ohsu public health portland style if you
are are jonesing in the subject as much
as the rest of us are
there's going to be a panel on wednesday
balancing risks and benefits of school
closures and reopenings during coven 19.
our very own director constance is one
of the panelists along with colt gill
from the oregon department of education
and other people as well so
um continue conversation um on wednesday
as well and you can register for that
event free
on the web so um with that i think we'll
close it out share larry anything else
i think that's everything i want to
thank again all of the panelists for
your time especially our panelists who
are on the east coast i know it's very
late for you
um and uh once again every time we do
this i am so
impressed with the teachers we have in
pbs the parents our community partners
like sei
and of course our student leaders so um
we have a
long road ahead of us and a lot of work
to do but we have amazing partners and
amazing voices and we are very very
fortunate to
have students like lana and all of the
experts and the adults
um working together to do what is best
for all of our students
so thank you all very much and to our
amazing staff who pulled this together
especially our board
uh manager roseanne powell who took the
board's request for something like this
and
worked with the team to make it happen
thank you so much and as always thanks
to terry
for um broadcasting us and for our two
asl
interpreters tonight that helped make
sure that um
there was some additional access to this
meeting thanks everyone
good night so much everybody good night
everybody thank you all back at the
board meeting tomorrow
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)
