2020-12-15 PPS School Board Study Session

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District Portland Public Schools
Date 2020-12-15
Time 21:10:00
Venue Virtual/Online
Meeting Type study
Directors Present missing
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Event 1: study session dec 15 2020

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appropriate as we talk about health um folks who will be leading us tonight yes well welcome to tonight's study session it is a teaching and learning topic so we have our chief academic officer who will serve as master of ceremonies and i know he has a bunch of his talented staff here excited to work with you this evening so dr valentino he was here he came up as guadalupe and now he's gone i added him to the panelist link and so now he's here all right thank you care well good evening chair lowry again dr valentino where are you i i'm in portland i'm at your background your background looks like oh yes when i'm in portland i use a waterfall and when i'm in palm springs i use a desert scene perfect yeah so um uh superintendent guerrero um directors uh thank you for the opportunity this evening um the conversation tonight could be no more timely um as we discussed as we discussed earlier this evening regarding the board policy on student suicide prevention tonight's topic on student mental health and wellness will hopefully complement and enrich the goals of that policy and so this evening dr sarah davis and dr jenny with the comb will be engaging with you in this important topic so i'd like to turn it over to dr davis sarah great hi everyone thank you so much dr whithcomb do you want to launch the slideshow while i am introducing um thank you dr valentino good evening board chair lowry directors and superintendent guerrero we're so grateful to be here to share an experience of the work that we are doing for students in pps um and let's see how are we doing on screen sharing i'm not allowed to screen share at this moment it says i need permission i can assign that to you too thank you here thank you for all you do to get us all launched [Laughter] appreciate you here we go you should now have permission for that all right so we are going to start with a middle school health lesson we'll translate to an update on the important work happening in health and pps and finish by leaving time for questions and discussions and before i turn it over i would actually like to introduce dr jenny with a comb who started in pps in 2016 as the health and physical education tosa dr whitcomb came to pps from the university of colorado at boulder where she was a faculty member in the ethnic studies department her research focus is critical sports studies with an emphasis on the lived experience of bipoc athletes and lgbtq athletes since joining pps dr whitacomb has worked passionately to create health and physical education programs that engage all students in equitable inclusive skills-based health and physical education so they may thrive in a global community with the arrival of superintendent guerrero and his vision for standards aligned and supported instruction in the district dr withicom was selected to become the program administrator for health and physical education and has expanded the program with k-12 health scope and sequences that are consistently taught k-12 and supported with professional development next slide jenny graduates of portland public schools will be compassionate critical thinkers able to collaborate and solve problems and be prepared to lead a more socially just world and i'll turn it over to jenny to lead you in a lesson that demonstrates the ways in which health supports this vision thank you all for this opportunity thank you all for being here and and for participating as students in our health education uh lesson i'm going to go over just some basics around health education and how the the system has shift shifted over the last several years and then we'll jump right into our lesson so some of the things that i wanted to
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share with you is that um we have recently made a shift in about 2016 from a content-based approach to health education to a skills-based approach so on the right hand side where you see the triangle you see our national health education standards which is what we've adopted in oregon as well and you can see that core concepts that's really the the the level of health education that we used to really focus on a lot of facts and and that is a great base for us but what we're really focusing on is uh encouraging students to build the skills that they need to engage in healthy practices so what we found what research shows us is that we can tell students that all the the terrible things that are in cigarettes but that doesn't necessarily stop them from smoking right but if we can empower them with the skills to access that information on their own to navigate conversations with peers and deal with peer pressure to set goals to make healthy decisions and to you know to stick with those goals and to advocate for peers and others to make healthy decisions we can have a much longer lasting effect so what you'll see is that the focus is really on skill and engagement and activity you know all of us can google concepts and so we want to give them the tools to to google safely and then to put those uh what they learn into into effect so you're gonna see a big shift in in what we're doing the other thing that i wanted to share with you is i know that especially during uh comprehensive distance learning we we're really focusing on social emotional learning and making sure that we're connecting with our students uh that is essentially a poignant given the topics we're covering tonight but as you can see health education and the castle competencies are well matched and there's a lot of overlap in what we do in health education and social emotional learning so what we have is a really complementary approach and that's something that we really like to support and work with the office of student support services to ensure that we're providing the the most robust and well-rounded program for our students so just wanted to highlight some of those those shifts so what we do in health education is that there's there's essentially there's more standards in health education than we could possibly cover um in in any given year there's just so much we could spend all day every day talking about health um and so we have to really pare down okay what where do we want to focus our efforts so that we make sure that it's as applicable as possible to our students and so you were sent uh two reports which are based on the youth risk behavior survey that our students in grades nine through 12 participated in in the fall of 2019 so pre-code it i know that if you've gotten a chance to dig into this report a little bit it definitely can can generate lots of questions and wonderings um and in in the um in the fullness of time i absolutely am happy to stay and answer questions meet again and answer questions but for the sake of the the lesson we're going to focus on just one data point and we're going to save some time at the end if you have questions about additional data points this is the first time that oregon has successfully completed what we call the yrbs survey it was a representative sample of our students across our comprehensive high schools so it is considered representative of health behaviors for students 9 through 12. one thing i want to point out is that the lesson we're going to be doing is actually a 7th grade lesson you might be wondering why i'm sharing high school data for doing a 7th grade lesson and that's because in the prevention world what we know is that when we see a spike we want to be targeting you know the behaviors and the skills that the student need before we see the spike and so if we see a spike in the behavior in ninth grade 10th grade we want to make sure that we're we're starting and laying that groundwork early on we want to be laying it in you know late elementary and definitely in middle school so that's how we that's just one way that we can use this data to really inform a really thoughtful scope and sequence for health education so the data point that i want to share and is connected to the topics of this evening is that in the fall of 2019 up to a third of our high school students report navigating depression and suicidal ideation with a significantly higher risk among our female students and our lgb students i will point out that transgender students were not a subcategory this in the 2019 yrbs but will be for the 2021 yrps 34 of our students reported feeling sad or hopeless for an extended period of time and 17 percent of our students seriously considered attempting suicide we know that this data is is staggering and we know that it's pre-coveted data and we want to
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use this data to say okay what are the different pieces that we need to put into place to make sure that our students have the skills they need to to deal with these feelings and to make sure that they know where the resources are available to turn to so this is data that we use to inform our curriculum but also to share with the many other departments in portland public schools to make sure everyone knows how to create a well-rounded support system for our students so what we want to point out of course is that suicide prevention is not just curriculum it's it's you know it's a lot of things it's it's not just the lessons that we teach in the classroom but it's ensuring that our students have food security and affordable housing and that we're destigmatizing mental health and that we're making sure that our students know where mental health services are available to them both within the schools and in the communities that we're making sure we have race-based student group access and there's there's acceptance of those students who identify as lgbtqia plus that we have positive climate for our students and that our students feel safe and supported and cared for and connected and this of course is also directly related to addie's act senate bill 52 which is is coming into place so these are things of course we don't tackle all of this through our prevention curriculum but we're able to start the path for a lot of these different pieces and that's that's where we'll go today and one thing i do i do want to point out this this is from the cdc slide we won't read through all of it but um on the cdc's website that you know this is what they say schools can do to protect adolescent mental health and i crossed out schools can because pps is already doing a lot of these things i put check marks by all the things that we're doing because we are we are engaging in a lot of work around prevention and intervention and support to create safe and supportive environments for our students and we're already seeing those those shifts being made and so although this this data is distressing and we realize that in it being pre-covered data we might anticipate that the numbers might even be worse right now but we're already doing a lot of the ground work that we need to be doing and that's a good that's a good thing for us so we know that we're already making these steps forward so um although it is hard data to see we can say we've got a nice foundation to build on so as i mentioned we're going to do a 7th grade unit and although i don't have time to go into the full k12 scope and sequence and how we lay everything out just a basic overview and it is provided as an addendum in the powerpoint is that what we do is we teach four units every single year k through 12 and every unit has a skill and a content pairing so for example for our seventh grade unit the skill is interpersonal communication and then the content is mental health specifically targeting suicide prevention so up in the corner of the slide you'll see the three main skills of interpersonal communication for sixth through eighth grade and then you'll see what our unit progression is so we start with just a foundation of communication and then we build on that skill connecting it to mental health and eventually to suicide prevention and so on the far right you'll see that the two lessons where i'm going to be pulling one of our activities from is a lesson on avoiding stereotypes and then the influence of microaggressions on mental health because again we want to be looking at the data you know specifically that says our lgbtq students are overrepresented with regards to suicidal ideation and we know that that is also true for many of our bypass students as well so that's where we're going to kind of pull in so the students will have had quite a bit of setup coming up to this point and then there'll be you know some follow-up as we move through but that's where we'll be in this unit and then this is how the lesson itself progresses because again we don't have a lot of time so we're gonna we're gonna put focus on one activity so the lesson itself would start with an understanding of stereotypes and microaggressions where we're going to jump in is how we connect microaggressions and mental health and what impact that can have on mental health and what we can do about that to support each other and to support our students okay so into the lesson so microaggressions we've already kind of talked about how stereotypes and buying into stereotypes whether consciously or unconsciously can turn into what we call microaggressions or can turn into behaviors called microaggressions and these are everyday verbal nonverbal environmental slights snubs insults
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they might be intentional they might be unintentional but they communicate a hostile environment they say you're not welcome and in and of themselves a lot of times when people uh see them or or hear them or discuss them as you can see the some examples of them up on the on the slide we think ah it shouldn't be that big a deal it was what i didn't mean it that way it's not a big thing and yet the piece about microaggression especially when we say micro we act like it's a small thing it shouldn't have that big of an impact but think of it as death by a thousand cuts right because although individually any one microaggression might not be um you know deafening it's the repeated every day multiple times a day in every space that adds up so much over time and can and can lead to um and can lead to some of the the mental health challenges that we were going to be talking about so when we think about microaggressions we need to think of them as a whole picture and the impact that they can have so we're going to start by doing an activity and so i'm going to have everybody click on the survey here and actually everybody who is watching and it has hung with the board all the evening um you can actually participate as well so anybody can go to this bitly and i would love it if our if our watchers at home would participate as well but you're gonna go to this survey i'm gonna give you six minutes to complete a survey and it's totally anonymous and it's gonna share with you ten different microaggressions that students have reported hearing are experiencing in schools and and it's gonna have you share your own experiences whether you've experienced them or not and then we'll go through some of the results together are there any questions before we jump to the survey and we would also love for everyone from pps who's logged in on the phone call to take the survey with us as well that would be wonderful thank you okay what am i missing i can't like work the link i think you have to type it in julia you can't just click it from this so you have to type in i was like really trying to click in it there yeah you have to type this i did you just you have to copy the bit dot li pps help into your browser and the the capitalization matters because i did it first without capitalization and it didn't work so it's b i t dot l y slash capital p p s dash capital h health is the link you need to type into your browser you can also click on the survey in our um in our handout in board book that's a live link okay so i will give you another one getting a ddl pollution there so i'll give you all six minutes to work on your survey comment please
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as it did that but it must be excellent we should have about one more minute all right could you give me a hand up if anybody who i can see on screen at least needs more time okay all right so while we're while we're talking you can still be finishing up the survey for those of you folks at home but um something that you might have noticed about this survey is that it touches on a lot of different topics and when we've when we've kind of you know started our early conversations about stereotypes over the last several days we realized that like stereotypes microaggressions you know they may be based on socioeconomic status or disability or gender identity or race or religion you know there's there's any number of identity characteristics that might um might be selected out and and used uh in in this way in this negative way and again although um you know there are many types of differences that exist among us and we've talked about that there are certain aspects of difference that have been selected out and have been assigned a lot more meaning in our society than others and so when we experience microaggressions with regards to our identity characteristics like race or sexual orientation or gender you know the again the impact that it can have that daily repetitive impact impact can be really severe um and these are things all of these survey responses are things that many students report hearing in the schools and classrooms so what i want to ask is which ones really stood out to you before we click on and we take a look at the results were there any of the 10 statements that really stood out that elicited some feelings that surprised you before we move forward i think for me it was interesting in that it actually highlighted for me some of my privilege because um i'm from scotland i have a funky first name and people often know they've met my mom that i'm not from here and so people will say things to me some like when i was growing up oh you speak such good english and it's like yeah that's my first language um that all that stuff was more funny because i was white because i came from a wealthier well you know like a middle class family and so that those kinds of things get said to people in other spaces as well and that it's not so funny um it's a good reminder that even though i have experienced some of those microaggressions i still experience in them them sitting in a place of a lot of privilege thank you thank you so much for sharing would anyone else like to share um i noticed the uh focus on microaggressions um how about macro mm-hmm um in middle middle grades i was bullied the whole year not physically but emotionally humiliated um and at least one teacher knew about it but you know it was gym class so boys will be boys get tough kind of a thing um so that that's a whole that i i'm i'm sure others many of our students experience that as something similar to that so you raise a really important point which is that while microaggressions are often kind of um they they often slip under the radar of many of maybe many of the observers not not the person who's experiencing them but the observers there's also a lot of macroaggressions that we can see and we talk about that when we talk about especially very explicit bullying
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and microaggressions can easily turn into macro aggressions and even as far as assault you know so there's a whole range and so it you bring up a really good point you also bring up the point i think in statement number eight which talked about having educators overhear microaggressions and ignore them and that and that added impact that that might have on us or our peers when someone that we that we trust doesn't step in thank you for sharing yeah the other thing that struck me is just how they could be perceived as just like offhand comments like oh you're just being sensitive um like that's not what i meant but they land completely differently to the recipient yes and this goes back to our the classroom agreements that we have in our health class which is that we need to focus on impact over intent so you know that's something that we agreed to do as a class because it is so important regardless of what our intent was if the words that we use have an impact we we need to make amends and that is how we move forward and we grow as a community so i'm so glad that you called that out thank you any final comments before we look at the results okay let's take a look we're gonna hope we can do this all right [Music] can you see the the survey results okay this just shows that 23 people participated so i'm so glad that we got some folks at home to participate with us as well as well so again i wish that we had enough time here to go through each of these statements and really unpack each of them but let's take a look at the results uh and then we'll go back through and we can unpack a couple that you are most interested in looking at um so we can see about when we're looking at mispronouncing a name after already being corrected about 50 50 experiencing that if we look at a teacher not expecting you to do well because of maybe coming from a specific neighborhood 30-70 being singled out because of your background and or one of your more one or more of your identities um overwhelmingly well over half of folks have experienced that having your experiences questioned because they didn't represent the majority of your classmates experiences again over 50 percent of students experiencing that having incorrect pronouns attributed to you even after you've indicated your preferred pronouns um so most people had not experienced that but a few folks had as well right and as we're going through i think what's really critical is that each one we're thinking what do we notice about this what is this experience if we've had this experience or one of our our classmates has had this experience what impact might that have and how again when we tie it all back to mental health how might that impact somebody's mental health have you ever been expected to purchase additional materials for a class project or assignment so overwhelmingly folks have had this experience were you ever complimented on how good your english is so some some people yes most had said no have you ever had a teacher or school official ignore a microaggression they witnessed and which came from another student and or teacher overwhelmingly 91 have had that experience and this ties back to some of the data that we looked at earlier in the unit where we were looking at the experiences of our lgbtq students in the state of oregon so we pulled the glsen data remember and we looked and we we noticed that a significant proportion of students who reported to faculty and staff that they had been bullied whether you know subtly or overtly due to their suspected or real lgbtq status um that the teacher ended up doing nothing and we talked about a lot that it's it's not always that you know that that a teacher is doing it maliciously or that they don't want to help a lot of times we don't know how to step in and that's part of why we as students want to have these conversations now and
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we want to know how we can stand up for ourselves and for each other and create a safe and supportive environment and how we can encourage that community throughout our entire school were you mostly read and or taught stories written by white authors and or featuring only white main characters so again overwhelmingly that has been most people's experience and have you ever experienced microaggressions in schools based on your identities but that were not listed in this survey so again almost 50 50. so there are a number of identities that we didn't touch on in just these 10 statements that people have experienced microaggressions so i know that was very quick um but are there any that you want to you want to look at again and maybe comment on unpack have more wonderings or thoughts on the outcomes all right well i really appreciate everybody's participation in this i know this is a pretty difficult topic to talk about but i think it's just so important when we think about how to make sure that we understand the impact that a person's identity can have on their lived experience so let's return to our presentation and we'll we'll connect it now to the larger topic of mental health which we've been talking about for this entire unit okay so this whole unit has really been focused on mental health and so if we think about you know the the experience of having microaggressions or as director bailey mentioned macro aggressions on a repeated and recurrent basis it can lead to to feeling invisible thinking about again that statement of of you know having your name mispronounced over and over again um being uh you know asking to have someone use a different set of pronouns than maybe they would expect to use over and over and over again and that that that feeling of invisibility that can come with that um it can lead us to lower self-esteem you know if someone constantly has low expectations for us how do we how do we you know build our resiliency to have high expectations for ourselves when the you know someone has constantly low expectations for us it can lead to high anxiety not knowing what's going to happen or when it's going to happen or how often it's going to happen it can decrease trust as we talk about you know we want to we want our schools to be safe environments so how do we make sure that we can create a safe environment in our classroom community and in our building and in our district it can lead to higher levels of depression and feelings of powerlessness and especially when we talk about again you know as you know when you're experiencing that as a student or as a young person if that feeling is coming from a teacher um you know how do you how can you talk to a teacher and explain what's going on uh especially when we have that that power differential right and so how do we work together as a team and as a community so that we can hopefully start to create you know a bolster or barrier against some of this impact so what we want to you know what we're going to kind of conclude with this this lesson is we want to think about two really important things and we've been talking about these kind of throughout the quarter but we really want to touch on them again so one is unconscious bias so we want to make sure that we are taking the time to learn more about what we think and how we think and why we think about all the different and many wonderful identities that are that exist out there unconscious bias remember we've talked about is is biases that we have that are ingrained from all different places all around us they come from the media they come from our communities they come from parents peers and and unconsciously we absorb them and so you know we have to be able to to take time to say what are some of the biases that i might have um where do they surface when do thoughts pop into my head where i'm like whoa where did that come from um and and you know how do we understand them and unpack them and make make better sense of them and then that allows us to move forward if we say oh no i'm not biased i don't have any biases well we all have biases because that's the whole point of the unconscious bias so it's a better place to start to say okay what are my biases where do they come from and how do i
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make sense of them so i can create a safe community for for my peers the other piece you know is is thinking about what can we do to create a more safe and supportive environment in a more equitable space so what do we do when a peer makes a joke about somebody's identity you know do we stand up are we a bystander do we stay quiet you know what can we do um can we take a look at what our school policies are around protecting different identities what our district policies are what kinds of groups do we have on campus to support students of different identities what can you do to be an ally if you have privilege in one of the one or more of those identity categories so thinking about ways that we can expand that that safety uh for all and that community for all and there's a lot of different ways that we can do this and we're going to look at that as we move into some of our later advocacy projects in health education and your homework tonight should you choose to do homework uh we'll set us up for our lesson tomorrow uh same same that time same bat station right um is is to create your just because poem and you're just because poem is to give you a chance to reflect on times when you've experienced uh microaggressions when you've been stereotyped this is actually from a former pps student and what you'll have is this will link you to your prompts and so the just because and you get to fill in the your identity and the mistakes that people have made about your identity and so this is just an example for you and this is what will bring with us tomorrow to tomorrow's class to set up the next level of our discussion so i'm so grateful for your participation in the lesson does anyone have any questions before we close our lesson i have a question but not as a student but i'm wondering how do you assess like whether students have like changed their behavior because of it or yeah so what we would do is we the the assessment that we would really want to focus on would be a communication uh assessment so we might set up a either a series of role plays or a kind of a what would you do and we would do one early on in the in the before before the unit started kind of how would you walk through this scenario and then we would do it again uh with you know kind of a similar but different scenario towards the end to see if we're seeing a behavior change but of course it's a long-term project because we know that [Laughter] well i wanted to share with you just a little bit more about health education and pps and then we'll we'll have some time for questions um so just i wanted to share with you some of our celebrations i i can't read through all of it because there's too many wonderful things i would love to share with you um we have really accomplished a lot in health education i'm just really proud of all the work that we've done uh with the support that we've had from uh from the district and central office everyone has just been wonderful we are a part of some amazing coalitions nationwide we have our health guaranteed and viable curriculum k-12 we've got healthy teen advocates we have a number of policy collaborations that we've participated in both that have originated in otl but have also originated in the office of student supports we've we trained counselors as well as teachers in our health scope and sequence and we actually have 97 of all pps middle and high school teachers trained in sex ed basics and violence prevention we are a large district and i consider that a huge win um we've also brought in over 4 million dollars of grant funding to support health education since 2017 and that's allowed us to do even more and to to really be a model across the state and across the nation honestly this is just a quick list and again i won't go through all of it but this is a quick list of those grants that we've brought in um many of them focused on comprehensive sexuality education creating safe and supportive environments particularly for our lgbtq identified students
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mental health supports at a both local and national level and just to highlight a few of our really amazing projects one of the grants that we're just finishing up is our health for k-5 grant it allowed us to provide skills-based health education training both within our district and across the state and so these stars represent the many districts that participated in our skills-based health education so the first year we actually went out and we went to many of these districts and provided training and then this year we did it all online but that actually had allowed allowed a lot more districts to participate so it's it has been an unintended um benefit of of covid thank goodness for some things right recovered really is i suppose um and so we're really proud that um that school districts were able to provide that support to other school districts who don't have a health education team that can help provide this training we also our comprehensive sexuality education lessons and our universal opt-out lessons that were created in pps are being used by a number of districts in the council of great city schools across the united states during comprehensive distance learning many school districts were not sure they would even teach sex ed because they weren't sure they could get it just quite right in a distance learning environment and when we presented our lessons to them they were over the moon and so many of these districts are using them now and so we're really excited to be able to provide that and also universal opt-outs which is that comprehensive sexuality education lessons a student can be opted out of those and typically what happens then is the teacher is left with i need to find something for the student to do for two weeks um and you know we just were like that's that's just no way we we can't have that we can't put that on our teachers so we designed lessons that are connected to our state standards and align with the standards uh and the um the skill that we're focusing on for that unit but use different content to achieve the same the same skill ends so that's something that we're really we're really really proud of and we're working for our ka teachers to roll out as well and then as i said we participated in the youth risk behavior survey so as you can see portland oregon is the only district in oregon that participated all of those red dots are other large urban districts and what's really exciting for us is that because the yrbs is nationwide we are able to compare all of our data to all of these large urban districts as well which is nice for us because again we're able to better compare similarly sized districts with similar demographics sometimes when you're the biggest in the state and you're trying to compare against smaller districts it doesn't always scale the same way so we're very excited for that and i'm going to turn it over to dr davis to finish it up so empathy curiosity respect and interest in other points of view we hope our presentation tonight is given insight into how our health curriculum supports these critical attributes of a pps graduate and we would love to engage with you guys in any questions that you might have and again thank you so much for for taking the time tonight to find out about the work that jenny and her team are are leading we're really proud to be here thank you thank you so much thank you is there anything else from any board members any questions or comments i have a question i know it's late i feel like i should know more about what's happening with sex ed what grades the curriculum is aimed at if it's in all schools they're just some um can you speak to that and yes for a great presentation by the way oh you're welcome i just don't know i mean i don't know where this is happening and and with who which buildings wonderful questions so um we do as i mentioned we do four units at every grade level and so um comprehensive sex ed is one of the units that's taught every single year and actually i think uh so this is this is our k12 our well this is the k5 part but i can show you k12 so um you can see in this is our k5 scope and sequence so on the far right our unit 4 is growth and development and violence prevention so it is taught every single year starting in kindergarten all the way through eighth grade and then it's taught twice in high school because high school requires two semesters of health education and so what we do is we match it with a different skill kind of as we go through so you can see
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that it's happening in k5 and then in 612 you can you see it comes back around it's required by law that we teach it every single year so we do have it have it being taught and then it's taught by the classroom teacher in the elementary school it's taught by a health teacher at the secondary schools so 6 through 12. and it should be happening district-wide everybody should be teaching it information is focused to be age-appropriate and you'll also notice um the the team and and we worked with teachers across pps to put these together they intentionally put the human growth and development toward the end of the year so that interpersonal relationships would be developed um so that it it brought more comfort um and and it was a safer a safer environment for for delving into a really critically important topic yeah um yeah i have a question first thank you this is really um informative and particularly the microaggressions lesson i really appreciate it i mean this is something that i can tell you adults are not very good at being aware of and it's something we do a lot of training in the workplace on um with somewhat limited success and i would say that most employers it's one of their biggest issues is sort of dealing with it so i really look forward to hiring graduates of pps who are going to have a better understanding a more comprehensive understanding of microaggressions and why they matter so that was exciting this question is weird and it's not very well formed um it feels to me like in health um curriculum right it needs to to both be based in in science and facts and also reflect the values of the local community and achieving that balance is what we're going to be looking for right and i think when when you think about healthcare and it and it you know what i'm seeing here feels like it is reflective very much of of our local community here in portland when you think about developing the curriculum how do you balance between pushing far enough right that again you are being reflective of the community's values and you know portland were very you know progressive community and and i think tolerant of a lot of things that that frankly other communities in the united states might not be um while still making sure that we're not politicizing health curriculum in a way that we do see in other places and i'm just curious as a professional developing the curriculum do you think about that and how do you find that how do you find that balance it's a wonderful question and is one of the the most challenging things that we face in health education so um we kind of take a four four prong approach when we're looking at developing lessons and kind of deciding where we're going to focus our efforts um you know one one is that we look at what are what are our state laws and mandates so you know we have a state law that says we're going to teach comprehensive sexuality education every year uh it's a it's a pretty robust law it it needs to be medically accurate developmentally appropriate lgbtq inclusive trauma informed so there's a lot of guidance that comes from that that's one piece of it then we have our state standards right and our performance indicators under that which you know really unpack for us even more what does this skill look like in comprehensive sexuality or in nutrition or in drugs and alcohol prevention education so we can look at that piece as well then we look at you know what are the best practices right now with regards to health education so you know when we look when we look not just nationally but globally you know how is health education taught because health education is is taught very differently in countries outside the united states so it's it's really great for us to look at all of the different models that are out there and what's working best in terms of not just the absence of disease but you know creating a a healthy individual across the lifespan so we look at those pieces and those are always changing so like all of these things are things we have to do you know every year and then that fourth piece is really the data and the data we we try to use that from multiple perspectives so we use data like the yrbs or other data that might be gathered at the the county level like i can say by zip code the unintended teen pregnancy rate in multnomah county by zip code right um and that's one piece of data but it's it's it's absent as you mentioned like all of the the nuances of that right community values and um experiences and and and things like that so we take data points like that and then we also match them with what are our teachers you know um talking to us about what are students experiencing uh what are the counselors and social workers you know what are the issues that are rising for them what are our students telling us that's coming up for them we try to hold a um like a student feedback session and forum with middle and high school students in particular every year
00h 50m 00s
so that we're getting feedback on the health curriculum and we're saying you know what's working what's not what you know what do we still have in there that is just not relevant for you all anymore um and then we also you know we we think about what are the the calls that we get you know what you know for schools needing help and so we try to let that be the biggest guide for the for the base and then it knows to your point we really try to you know our job is not to say you must believe this or you must believe that but to refer to a range of healthy behaviors right so there is no one um diet and by diet i don't mean like dieting but i mean like nutritional diet that is the way there are many diets and then that's that there's a lot that goes into what we decide um you know it has nutritional value for us and so we want to refer to that range and so what we want to do is we want to give our students those skills and say you will be faced with making these decisions here's the whole spectrum of decisions that might be made and you're going to have to make the decisions that make the best sense for you and hopefully that leads you to a healthy path and so we really are trying to present kind of that range of values so that we're not particularly landing on any one value and saying this is the way to to be a healthy individual there are many ways to help that's really great thank you sure thank you so much everyone um really appreciate your time tonight and know that um we appreciate all that you're doing um with the health curriculum and i know it's been it's been a long and difficult road and i walk through some of the middle school drama around health and i know that it's just so vitally important especially for those middle schoolers like you said to be having access to this so that um we're not seeing in those high school students those survey results like you you mentioned so thank you for advocating for health and you know all the ways it connects to student well-being i appreciate that very much is there anything else before we close out our time together tonight four people last session yeah awesome session welcome all right superintendent guerrero anything else before we close out our evening i'm glad that we had this on uh as a topic this evening it's uh pretty relevant these times so thank you sarah and jenny for for uh bringing us up to speed thank you you're welcome uh ravan has sent out a reminder that agenda studying is tomorrow at 11 a.m so if you are a board member and you have items for agenda setting please make sure you email those to us before 11am so we can have them um ready for our meeting and then our next board meeting we have a special meeting on january 5th to talk about making a final decision on our budget items that we reviewed tonight in our work session and then our next regularly scheduled meeting will be january 12th so um i know that many of our staff are exhausted many of our staff haven't really had a break since last winter when um you know last december december of 2019 before kovid many of them did not take breaks in the summer and so i know that lots of folks are starting um break this some this week many next week and so we as a board are taking a little pause as well to allow our staff to to really have the time they need after um what is it ten months nine months of incredibly intense work to have that break time so thank you all for for understanding and respecting the staff's time during this break and i know it's probably not long enough to recover from the crazy year we've all had but um i i wish all of our staff well and um i'm thankful that you have some time off um and may you have a peaceful and restful rest of the year all right good night everyone telling me we have three weeks off haley i am telling you we have three weeks off andrea happy holidays


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