2021-01-12 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2021-01-12
Time	18:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Regular Meeting - 1/12/21

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education for january 12 2021 is called to order for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted on the pbs website under the board and meeting tabs this meeting is being live streamed on pbs tv services website and on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website for replay times as we open our meeting tonight i know that many of us are thinking about the families and community that call the clara vista apartment complex home we've received word tonight that there has been a fire at that complex so far we have no reports of any injuries but we know that a large number of our students do reside there and so our thoughts are with those first responders who are there helping keep people safe and all the families who are dealing with the impact of a fire tonight we begin our work um with our hearts a little heavy as we consider those families um but focused on our board consent agenda um board members if there are any items you would like to pull we will set those aside for discussion and vote at the end of the meeting ms bradshaw are there any changes to the consent agenda no great um board members are there any items you would like to pull from the consent agenda all right do i have a motion and a second to adopt the consent agenda so moved second great director scott let's see if i can get this correct director scott moves and director bailey seconds the adoption the consent agenda is there any board discussion on the consent agenda mrs bradshaw is there any public comment no all right the board will now vote on resolution 6223 and 6224 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no any abstentions all right the consent agenda is passed by a vote of six to zero with representative voting yes all right thank you we turn now to student and public comment before we begin i'd like to review our guidelines for comment we really do as a board thank you for taking the time to attend this meeting and to share your thoughts and comments public info sorry public input informs our work and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections concerns and celebrations our responsibility as a board is to actively listen our board office may follow up on board related issues raised during your testimony we do request that any complaints about individual employees be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter if you have additional materials or items you would like to provide to the board or superintendent we ask that you email them to publiccomment pps.net again that's all one word publiccomment pps.net please make sure when you begin your comment tonight that you should clearly state your name and spell your last name you will have three minutes to speak and you will hear a sound after three minutes which means that it is time to conclude your comments ms bradshaw do we have anyone signed up for student or public comment this evening yes we do um we'll start with scott mason who's speaking on behalf of brooke mason should be on his way over there he is either can you hear me my name is scott mason my daughter's name is brook mason our last name is spelled m-a-s-o-n my pronouns are he her she couldn't be with us tonight because she's attending a dance rehearsal um but she wrote an email earlier this week after some discussion at our house about schools reopening to in-person learning around the state and around the country she sent this email to dr keely simpson the regional superintendent in our area and copied the school board as well as a principal so i'll read that to you now for two sixth grade she wrote this also i should say with her friend and peer elise crandall we're two sixth grade students at west sylvan middle school we're aware the decisions will be made soon about whether we will return to in-person schooling this year we wanted to give our opinion about the choice we think that going back to in-person school was the best decision
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for both students and teachers in the pbs district here are reasons why first online school is really difficult for students teachers and parents online school is very stressful from new assignments popping up to tech up to technical difficulties many times we turn to our parents for help because we don't have immediate help from a teacher most kids have working parents or have multiple siblings that need help parents don't always know the answer to our questions though often teachers don't end up responding to emails we send with questions students are spending much more time than we need to on assignments for reasons like confusion technical difficulties or trouble communicating with teachers and our peers online school is also hard for teachers with bad internet connection causing techno technical difficulties some teachers are constantly dropping in and out of meetings which results in kids being so distracted they aren't learning anything even teachers with good internet connections uh have problems like kids not being able to access assignments plus when most students have their cameras off we can only imagine how hard it would be to teach teachers never know if students are working hard on assignment or even participating at all in the classroom teachers would not be experiencing this problem kids wouldn't have well a paper bag over their heads hiding their faces we're also missing a big part of school the social part we're all missing friends that we don't get to see anymore we just started middle school and we haven't even met most of our teachers and classmates as you can see online school is very difficult for everyone involved last year we graduated from forest park elementary as fifth grade students for five long years we always remember talking about how we wanted to do the things fifth graders got to do when that year finally came a few weeks before the fun was supposed to start online learning came along almost everything we hoped to do in those five years was canceled we were devastated teachers tried their hardest to make up for the things we missed but it wasn't the same this year a fifth eighth and twelfth graders have the same experience we did many kids will be left feeling terrible last of all we completely agree that safety is the top priority right now that being said there are many solutions to this problem masks social distancing new paths to get around hallways spacing out desks or having dividers and sanitizing will all help teachers are supposed to get the kovid 19 vaccine very soon to limit the amount of people at school we would even be um okay with the hybrid model with morning and afternoon cohorts all of these would lower capacity in the building at all times and would lead to more productive learning online school can be a choice as well if families don't feel comfortable in conclusion there are so many reasons in school in person school is the best decision online learning is really difficult for students parents and teachers kids are missing out on celebrating academic accomplishments and safety can still be addressed in an effective way we hope you take this message into consideration we appreciate all the things you're doing to keep us safe and helping us learn thank you sincerely elise crandall and brooke mason thank you for uh reading that for your student and uh please pass on our appreciation to her and her uh colleague for that letter um i don't know if you saw we were talking before the meeting started that the governor tweeted this evening that um school staff will hopefully start to receive the vaccine january 23rd so yeah that's great that very soon has now a date attached so thank you so much mr mason megan kelly thank you my name is megan kelly k-e-l-l-e-y my pronouns are she her hers and i want to start by thanking the pps board for this opportunity to comment on the enrollment balancing scenario that's being presented to you today i currently have a child in second grade at creston and i am currently also serving as the creston pta president just wanted to share that the majority of our families in our creston community are pretty concerned about the inequities that are inherent in this proposal especially since there is room for our middle school students to feed into kellogg without displacing any other programs the proposal that's presented to you today has creston remaining a k-8 for the 2021-2022 school year with no indication of where creston students will go after that it's unacceptable to our families that creston has been singled out as not deserving the same opportunities as other students arguments we hear for this proposal are that the other schools have a higher percentage of historically underserved students while this is true for some this is not true for all other neighborhoods in addition this argument just serves to further erase and ignore the students and families that we do have who identify as bipac who live at a lower socioeconomic status and who are learning english as a second language in fact the 2019-2020 school report shows that 55 percent of creston students are considered in that underserved category in addition nine percent of our students are limited english proficient and we currently provide weekly food and other supports to approximately 50 families in our community in addition our school is not designed to be a k-8
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and is unable to provide some of the social emotional growth that's needed in middle school we do not have lockers our students transition to classes outside in the rain because they are sharing hallways with elementary classrooms our middle school population is small therefore we can't support multiple class configurations and classrooms and so our kids do not learn how to navigate those social and academic transitions this alone makes the transition directly into a high school so much more challenging and if creston students are the only ones feeding into a high school in this manner then they automatically start at a distinct disadvantage in comparison to their peers finally our community is concerned about the creation and process of the coalition itself it has been clear throughout the process that many voices have not been heard and that there has not been an adequate and balanced representation of all schools and programs throughout this process all of our children deserve to have equal representation on a coalition that's deciding their academic and social emotional futures the voices of neighborhood schools should be equally hurt in this process and it doesn't feel as though that has been the case for these reasons and more the creston community respectfully requests that the pps board return this proposal to the southeast guiding coalition specifically directing the group to transition creston from a k-8 to k-5 starting fall of 2021 without displacing any other established programs thank you for your time thank you thank you we have sarah morehead so you should be able to unmute now okay camera if you'd like can you hear me or see me okay hear you but i don't your video is not on oh video's not on okay there we go hello hi i am sarah moorhead bauer morehead is spelled m o e and i'm the mother of a creston fifth grader and thank you for this opportunity to make a public comment um i am here to express my concerns as well regarding the southeast guiding coalition recommendation that prevents creston from feeding to kellogg or any middle school for the 2021 academic year the proposal leaves our middle school students at a distinct disadvantage compared to students at a standalone middle school creston students deserve access to an equitable and robust middle school experience just as much as the rest of the pps middle school students i feel that the southeast guiding coalition is not the correct group or wasn't correctly represented to make such a significant decision about the lives and education of the creston students and children i would like to re request that pps board of education return the proposal to southeast guiding coalition with directions to modify the plan so that preston does convert to a k-5 in fall of 2021 alongside and not instead of our neighboring school community so we can all go into k5 mode at the same time and i'd like to also state that there's no amount of additional resources that can be given to creston to help supplement keeping the fifth through eighth graders in a school that's meant to be just for elementary school students my daughter is so or has been so excited to see the library in kellogg and to utilize that facility and to learn that we may not have access to it is just heartbreaking my last point is a request is please open kellogg at as full of capacity as you possibly can not at 70 please maximize the attendance and opportunity every single year of middle school is critical and and please don't let one year pass for the creston students and even from our family we were even willing to depart with our beloved creston cohort if it and splitting them if it means getting into a dedicated middle school for fall of 2021 and preston's a diversified community and we'd like you to please consider these things because i don't feel our voices were heard in the southeast coalition guiding group that's all i have to say and thank you for the opportunity again thank you thank you you see eric happel
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hello thank you uh eric happel h-a-p-p-e-l i am here to also uh like brooke and elise advocate on behalf of having schools opened as quickly as possible for an in-school choice for the students i've written several letters as some of you may have seen and also spoken before on this subject so i think the information has continued to become more and more clear i'll hit sort of five key quick points on it number one our governor who has put safety above all else has has actually advocated now on opening schools and that alone speaks volumes number two there is overwhelming data that opening schools is safe the data is around the country and around the world latest study in north carolina that that followed students for a couple of months found that there were zero transmissions from students to the teachers oregon data there's an average of 2.1 cases in the schools that are open already that have been open some of them since september that number is so low it indicates either none or very low transmission within the school with very simple safeguards like masks distancing i'm not so simple but i know masks distancing hand washing it's proven that we can keep transmission close to zero within schools third kids are suffering you heard that very clearly from brooklyn elise and anyone that doesn't understand this and thinks that online school comes anywhere near close to in person is really just being dishonest about it i know teachers are trying but it's just not the right way for people to learn and we've also got increased suicidal thoughts increased suicides depression and inequity as well and hunger and and kids who only the only caring adult that they may see in a day they're not seeing so child abuse cases going unreported four uh women have been set back by this as well if you saw the job report on friday 156 000 jobs were lost by women in december while men gained 16 000 and this is disproportionately being felt by both black and and latino women who are making choices to stay home with their kids who are being educated and not go to the job so so that is just going to continue to set us back for years to come that's not going to be easy to get back five cases in multnomah county are actually very low when you look across the country and you use any measuring stick other than the measuring stick we've used in oregon at times we will see that the cases are low here our hospitalizations are low school districts around the country are opening with much higher numbers and with success and very low transmission and when i see things like people sending notes to the governor saying kova is spreading uncontrollably in multnomah county and building cases on that on that that's being dishonest and we can't just accept that as information and not question it because our cases here are low and they and they've been going down since the beginning of december so in summary governors have opened the schools data shows we can open schools safely kids are suffering women particularly black and latino women are being set back cases in multnomah counties show that are actually on the decline and it's safe here never been in the red zone uh so what are we doing i'm having trouble understanding justification for not taking steps immediately to start moving forward in opening schools so that's uh really all i have to say uh and so thank you for your time i know this is a hard thing and it's a lot of work to figure out but it just has to be done thank you thank you we have next meredith viennese i wish that that the actual pronunciation was so lovely um it is meredith the lines b is in i-l-l-i-n-e-s pronouns are she and her um good evening thank you for having me i am the parent of a fourth grader at lent elementary and i am here to speak about concerns regarding the reopening of schools um beginning uh as soon as as early as february um and i as i reflected on what i wanted to say i tried to tease out the concerns i have
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for my own daughter her health and well-being um and her safety with the concerns that i have for the larger lent ka community and what i realized as i reflected is that the two are not mutually exclusive and that um what impacts the community impacts my daughter my daughter is a very sensitive and empathic young girl and she receives 504 services for regulation and attention at lent elementary and so by no means has uh learning from a distance been easy for her however i do believe the greater concerns of the community and the that involves her at lent should be prioritized lent elementary as you know is one of the more diverse schools in pps with over 50 percent of students identifying as latin latino or hispanic and more than 33 percent of teachers identifying as bypoc so i would say to you that when we look at the statistics and we're thinking about reopening we have to prioritize um the needs of this population as mr happle noted um several the the numbers and data we see for latino families um are higher um they're experiencing higher rate of covid19 and they are um the the quote he mentioned about women leaving the the workplace is is actually very relevant however i would say that that's part of um my learning and and my daughter's learning being a part of this rich community is that we are what what is good for one is is good for the other and so i implore you to really think and be careful about reopening and ensuring that all of these educators ha and family members in this community have access to vaccinations before reopening and that you know is for other communities as well i would just like to end with a poem that is central to our community at lent in la cac and it is by a famous chicano educator i do harm to myself if i love and respect you i love and respect myself i think if pps is true to their um equity lens prioritizing uh communities of color and really being sensitive to their needs and faxes is going to be a win for all of us despite some other comments thank you for allowing me to speak thank you next we have kim mcgare hi my name is kim mcgare my last name is mc capital g-a-i-r my pronouns are she-hers i have a 9th grader at grant i'm here to speak about school reopening we sit here in mid-january with portland schools having been closed for 10 months we have seniors at risk of losing their entire year kindergarteners who haven't set foot in their classroom or met their peers elementary kids with documented educational and sel loss as the oregonian editorial board said yesterday everyone who has a qualified opinion on this issue public health experts pediatricians mental health experts educational experts they all say schools should be open particularly in places with low spread like oregon we are consistently the second or third lowest in the nation well there is much data on the safety of schools and we've sent a lot of it to you i want to highlight a study that came out last week which was the duke study of north carolina schools they contact traced every case and importantly they while they had 723 cases associated with schools they had zero zero child to adult transmission and where there was student to transmission or student transmission it was one or two cases schools have been open for four or five months all over the country there have been no super spreader events or large outbreaks i understand that schools but not posing a risk of harm is
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counterintuitive but we are now making decisions with lifelong impact on students on their lives and we're making them based on fear not science i beg you to make science-based decisions the students in this district depend on you to make science-based decisions the harms of keeping close schools closed are dramatic and increasing and as other districts and private schools open and they will the educational disparities so many pps children already face are going to grow exponentially pps rightly brings an equity lens to its decisions with all due respect this is the greatest equity challenge this board or district has ever faced those suffering the worst harms of cdl are the students who can least afford it they are low income they are historically underserved they are students with mental and physical disabilities and health issues and they are esl learners equity demands that you begin to open our schools with these students first in the door but with all kids and all grades and all schools eventually being in person while getting teachers vaccinated early is a laudable goal we cannot make opening our schools contingent upon it you have no control over when that will happen the governor's tweet says that students are eligible she then goes on to say don't call your doctor's office we have no idea when we're going to get actual vaccines you can't trigger this to something you have no control over and more importantly schools are open safely without vaccines vaccines are an added layer of protection but they cannot be a precondition finally i want to recommend to you john canzano's column today hope is a dangerous thing in it he talks about another school board considering the same issues you are and he rightly points out that the most dangerous thing is not hope but the absence of it we are close we are close to our children losing hope losing hope in the adults in their lives losing hope in the institutions of the state and this cis city they know that schools are open all over the country safely they know that they um sorry and that when we can't provide a science-based answer to them as to why they are not allowed to go to school while kids all over the country are safely going to school and to be candid we cannot provide a science-based answer to that question as we sit here today after four months of data it is fair for them to lose hope please don't let that happen thank you for your time and your attention i really appreciate it i know this is a tough decision but we've got to have a can-do attitude about it and we've got to start opening the doors thank you thank you oliver yannick hello oh there i am uh my name is melissa oliver janiak that's o l i v e r hyphen j a n i a k and my pronouns are she her hers and uh mr happily and miss mcgare have stolen a bit of my thunder but i'm gonna i'm gonna persevere anyway i am also a pps parent i have two elementary age children and for months now i've understood that oregon would not be quick to reopen public schools to in-person instruction we would be cautious however as we've learned about coronavirus as schools have steadily reopened elsewhere and significant research has been conducted regarding covet transmission in a variety of settings several findings should provide reassurance about the safety of reopening at this stage number one we all know kids especially young ones acquire and transmit coronavirus at lower rates than adults two the key to reopening a school safely is the same key to reopening any other communal space or place of work implementing a number of practical and relatively inexpensive safety measures like distancing masking opening windows and while we may all desire state-of-the-art school buildings we don't need any building upgrades to reduce the risk of coveted transmission three to those in our district who thinks such safety measures can't work safely in our school settings the evidence of what has actually occurred when schools open believe that we've already had a couple references to this new study out of north carolina was published in the journal of pediatrics which is the kind of the world premier journal for pediatric medicine they tracked 90 000 students in north carolina in public school receiving in-person instruction during this pandemic there were no cases of child to adult transmission in schools as kim mcgarr just said and that study was designed before schools open and involved thorough contracting of the cases contact tracing of the cases so they do know you know what was transmitted and what wasn't and in research conducted by the national center for research on education access and choice epidemiologists looked at the effects of school reopenings on covet spread by analyzing coveted hospitalization rates prior to and after schools opened they found in counties with fewer than 36 to 44 hospitalizations per 100 000 people prior to opening coven 19 hospitalizations did not increase when schools opened fully in person or with a hybrid model based on oregon health authority data multnomah county's hospital admission rates have
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consistently been lower than the range at which this research showed no observable effect on hospitalizations the vast majority of a majority of epidemiologists the experts in this space encourage prioritizing reopening of schools because of these facts the risks associated with reopening with safety measures are low and on the other hand the risks from continuing to provide remote only instruction are high indeed on the flip side right now pps children are suffering under remote learning i doubt i need to go through any data regarding the increase in rates of depression or the myriad of other reasons behind the recommendation of the american academy of pediatrics to prioritize in-person instruction you've all seen and heard that information the governor's relaxation of restrictions to open schools was a needed step i'm glad teachers and school staff are being prioritized for vaccination as well but vaccinating these groups should not be a prerequisite to returning to school buildings by january 19th revised advisory opening reopening metrics will be issued by oha and ode but from other districts around the country you already know what the possible reopening models are and what measures should be implemented to reopen schools safely the district has had since last spring to plan in its january 5th letter pps committed to a comprehensive update by the end of the school term on january 28th we and by we i mean parents students this community expect that update will include concrete details of a reopening plan that will return the majority if not all pps kids to classrooms by february 15th in a meaningful way keep children at the center of decision-making and honor their right to an adequate public education thank you thank you that concludes our public comment thank you so much for everyone who spoke tonight i got to um film a little video at creston last year about like a day in the life of a student and um got to spend time with a middle schooler at creston um go to pe which i was not prepared for i was wearing high heels which are not required footwear for pe i know julia i know i didn't even think about that i would go to pe we went to english which i was prepared for we talked about the constitution i was good and then we went to pe but i did manage i claim i beat him in the relay during pe but of course there's video footage that might say otherwise um but having been at preston and gotten to spend that time with um a middle school student i know how much that community really cares and works together and i really appreciate you all taking the time to speak tonight and i know that all of us are trying to find the best pathway forward for our students as we navigate the pandemic and so appreciate everyone sharing their experiences in their communities about what they're feeling and hearing so that we can together make the best decision possible uh we turn now to further um information from students which is always the the heart of what we do and so nathaniel invite you to make your student representative report at this time all right thank you um as of last friday i have submitted my final college application and accordingly i've had a bit more free time than usual and i apologize in advance because as such this this report is going to be a bit longer than usual um i'd like to begin by updating everyone else two shifts in membership most unfortunately we have uh lost one of our reps uh rep hussein of roosevelt one of our two roosevelt reps has resigned citing family responsibilities um however we do have a new rep rep i'm i'm pronouncing that wrong i'm so sorry um from mlc bringing our total number of representative schools up to 10. um so could i get the slide up now i am searching right now one moment all right um well well we wait for that i guess i'll continue um so additionally i'd like to provide an update on student opinion regarding reopening as you might have heard the dsc and i are currently in the process of distributing a survey among high schoolers intended to gauge student opinion on reopening and comprehensive distance learning i plan to present the results of the survey at our next meeting on the 26th as of now we have approximately 600 responses or about 5 of our total high school population of course we could certainly use more responses so if anyone watching
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is or knows a pps student who would like to fill out would like to fill out the survey including non-high schoolers i very much encourage you to do so um the link will be available um there's a shortened uol on the slide once it's up um as well as a qr code or you can just go to the dsc's um webpage on the on pps.net it's pbs.net slash page slash 1796 if i recall correctly i'll click the link to the google drive and then there's a pdf with the link um i wonder if the slides working nathaniel i feel like this is a good entree into like adulthood meetings and particularly in a zoom era as you sit there awkwardly trying to make by the time as your as your presentation comes up hey there we go okay so the tiny ul is the um quick link to the survey um then you can i guess or scan the um qr code or take the steps i listed out previously um all right i think that should be good thank you um and now um finally i have twice before felt compelled to disregard the generally limited port view of these reports and address larger societal happenings both times it was the sheer enormity of the events in question and the direct implications they had on our students that made it seem as though it would be a disservice to my constituency not to mention them here unfortunately with the attempted insurrection of last wednesday i feel as though i must do so for a third time tonight after all it is us who will inherit this nation and its problems i don't know about all of you but i in spite of my many looming deadlines and assignments was glued to my screen for most of the day i was watching when senators were first rushed off the floor of their chamber i was watching when the insurrectionists reached the senate floor and when they waved the confederate battle flag in the halls of our capital for the first time in history i was watching when after the mob finally cleared congress countered the final electoral votes following the objections of far too many as the day progressed it began to dawn on me that we were witnessing an act of pure political violence that would likely come to rival some of history's most memorable and terrible in particular i'm thinking of the roman grockey brothers being killed by the mob of later mob enraged at caesar's murder burning the senate chamber and seeking out those to murder themselves of the reichstag in flames and i'm thinking two of the tyrants who not long thereafter seized control of their respective states in such the respective states in which such violence took place augustus of rome and hitler of germany some even now say that these fears are overblown that our republic is far too robust and resilient to meet such a fate i say that the corpses of a public past are scattered across history and that in each one its citizens said the same thing if there's one thing that we should take away from the events of wednesday it is that our republic our democracy remains in true danger and that that danger is in large part perpetuated by those who would vote to overturn a free and fair election let me be perfectly clear i condemn such actions as well as wednesday's attempted insurrection in general unequivocally the dsc joins me in that regard furthermore it is worth noting that this violence well a horrifying spectacle is that while this violence is a horrifying spectacle it is the larger threat of encroaching autocracy that we must truly guard against even in its subtle and apparently peaceful forms and the welder is far far more that can should be said on this issue i'll conclude tonight by reiterating that it is this week in republic that you as the adults of america are to bequeath onto us and that it is us and that it is we who will truly feel truly feel the effects of wednesday and the countless events that led up to it for many decades to come we must all remain vigilant and we must all be active in protecting our democracy lest it meet the same fate as the fallen republics of history and lest we meet the same fate as their citizens thank you
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nathaniel i'd like to thank you for your remarks your really really eloquent remarks it's very difficult to be lumped into the large group of adults that bear responsibility um but you're absolutely right to do so and um you know it's heartbreaking to think about the world that we are bequeathing to all of you but um it's it's it's very promising in your hands and thank you for speaking out and i hope you always feel like you have this platform to share whatever you need to say about the state of things but thank you so much and nathaniel i want to share also just thank you for offering three different ways to engage the qr code and the little tiny url is awesome and putting it on a website um i think that's fantastic um i also want to share i i've been asked i asked for permission to speak earlier and i've been put off and punted off until later in the agenda and as i'm hearing my colleagues and nathaniel speak i just want to put that out there that i i would also like an opportunity to speak to everybody that's here as well so i'm putting it out there i've been told it'll happen i don't know what time that's going to happen but that we have guests waiting but i also understand that all of us here you know we're all free to speak right i just want to put that out there i did make a request earlier um so i'm going to speak to that director depos you made a request to move an agenda item from the around board leadership from the end of the meeting to right after the superintendent's report and i ask that we go ahead and move it forward but to after our guest so we'll have superintendent guerrero's report and then we have um we're talking about addie's act tonight and so we have the the father of our deceased student here with us tonight and so i wanted to honor his time and the fact that he's here to discuss her the way we can honor her life um and invite you to to speak to that board leadership question um after we have those guests but of course you know um you are a board member um and if you want and you know changing the agenda um in the middle of the meeting we as a board can choose to do that but i i would respectfully ask that we wait until after the superintendent does his report and after um lawn is able to speak about addie okay and i just in this moment want to use this moment as an opportunity as a learning opportunity in you know whose comfort are we prioritizing and yes as a board member i would appreciate the consideration you know as a peer as an equal contributor to the work um and as we're all talking now and all having the ability to talk um i don't want to be hushed um so put that out there leave it out to the group but um i i did put that request out and i've been put back behind people so that's yeah and i would say myself my comfort and what i have to say is just as important as everyone else's yes it is and i do say you know we do have agenda setting we do ask people to um email us sorry the cat is falling off my lap i'm taking that and that that i understand that and sometimes things come up in the moment that we need to to make time for yes and i and i don't have an schedule this week i i've been responsive to shift the item that you want to speak to aboard leadership from the very end of the meeting to the middle of the meeting but again i want to honor addie's family and our guests from ohsu um so how is the rest of the board feeling are we ready to move forward with superintendent guru's report and then hearing from addie's family um what is what is your will as a board i would like uh to have director de pass have an opportunity to speak as a just personal courtesy since she's made the request we hardly ever have those um just as if another board member had a special request that was not a regular thing that happened i would be supportive um any other thoughts here and i'm also happy to wait but again in this moment i want to and i want us all to understand that my comfort and my position and ality is not being prioritized well i just want to put that out i'm happy to wait but i want us to understand how we're operating i think this is a bigger conversation for us about how we how we do things and when we have an agenda you know roseanne and i and scott and other leadership work very thoughtfully to think about the agenda and i try to be very responsive to you know you all have said we want more time to discuss things we really want um to be able to engage with topics we've had to get a couple of conversations short because we have had guests waiting and so it's it's when we look at the
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agenda at agenda setting we're really trying to balance all of those pieces um and so you know the the board leadership agenda item you and i had already discussed and it was at the end of the meeting we said we'd move it forward for when we have the vote if we do decide to delay it to the 26th um and so i don't i'm i think i just have i think we as a board need to have a conversation maybe at our retreat on the 23rd about how we do things and if there is you know a desire to change the agenda or move things forward for a specific reason that we work together to do that um but i also think we need to be clear about when and how we do that so i'm going to go ahead and invite superintendent guerrero to do his his thing i'm going to then have us move on to the um reading of our suicide prevention policy and then we will go ahead and have you speak director to boss superintendent chair lowry this is director constance i'd just like to ask director deposit question michelle are you um are you making a point about saying that you have something that you wanted to share similar to nathan sharing a broader point or are you referring to the agenda that was moved to later in the meeting it's unclear to me what you want to speak about yeah i want to speak about our board leadership and how we come about that i want to speak to white supremacy and how it shows up in our work and i wanted to make some comments about the events that happened last week they're interrelated comments um and we've already spent more time talking about it than my comment my statement is so that's just to say that this is an important discussion for me i'll take the responsibility and um it's really important that i get my feelings out and my thoughts out to my colleagues um it's really important to me and i made a request that was not within a timeline in the cadence of which we do this work and i realized that also the way that the caden it doesn't work for me the schedule didn't work for me to get put on the agenda uh earlier than this um so let's go ahead with your plan and and um director constance thank you for asking that superintendent guerrero good evening directors i'll i'll proceed at your direction chair um i i there's lots to talk about and a lot of information uh to impart and i know that we all have a lot of thoughts uh to lots of heavy events i do have a slide deck here just to keep me organized so good evening again um uh for this our first regular meeting of 2021 um roseanne can we put my superintendent's report slide deck on the screen please this is for a later agenda item what i wanted to start off by saying is uh thank you chair lowry for for acknowledging i also want to add a word about the reported fire this evening in the culling neighborhood my thoughts are with also with those families impacted by the fire this evening in northeast portland we know that this has impacted many of our scott and we're learning elementary as well as probably madison high school students so i've had a chance to speak to some family members already uh in this past hour um as well as leadership from hacienda development which manages uh the complex there and uh everybody understandably is uh rather shaken up so to our community out there estamos penstand estamos pensando esta tarde in westeros estamos disponibles como so extension of our support to students and families there and whatever means what we're able to to support so next slide uh i i want to thank our our student representative uh thank you nathaniel for for acknowledging uh what i'm sure all of us uh have thoughts on i'd be remiss if i didn't address the deadly attack on the capitol last week also i think directors in the broader community saw my posted message on this this it was traumatic to see uh the violence and to witness that and that our students have had to process already so much trauma and chaos over this past year but as i said last week and my message i have to remain optimistic about our students future and our countries i believe as strongly as ever and the power of democracy in our role as educators and
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supporting it because i do think public education is the bedrock of democracy so educators have a fortuitous opportunity to support our students understanding of our democracy to encourage their critical thinking to help them obtain the objective knowledge of current events and the outcomes of elections and last week we had a number of resources made available to school staff to to help them in engaging our students on the aftermath of the events in washington dc you might also recall the election toolkit that we made available to staff and families leading up to november 3rd we shared the toolkit again last week we're revising it again uh just to make sure we've supplemented that with uh up-to-date uh resources uh particularly as we approach uh inauguration day on january 20th so we believe this guide has been useful uh tool uh and hopefully helps our system build resilience and our students and teachers a sense of empowerment uh and just want to ensure everyone has access to this updated version uh so although the start to 2021 after an already challenging 2020 uh we haven't quite transitioned it seems from some of this negativity i believe uh we will get through this together and emerge from these trials and obstacles stronger because of our community and care for one another so uh if we want to champion positive transformative change we have to fight the misinformation with education and support the principles of a just democracy so that's my slide and thoughts on the events of this past week so speaking of the optimism and positive outlook for portland public schools it's my great pleasure to welcome alberto delgadillo to portland public schools as our new chief financial officer alberto comes to us from the tulsa public schools where he served since 2017 as their chief financial officer and actually gained quite a bit of notoriety and national attention for his emphasis on outreach engagement strategic thinking and ultimately success in helping that district align its resources to support instructional outcomes for students particularly with an emphasis on black and latino students even in the midst of significant overall cost cutting a little bit more about alberto prior to joining tulsa and alberto served as the chief operations officer at the la promise fund and before that at greendot public schools before that he spent over 12 years in the healthcare sector alberto is a southern california native with degrees from usc we won't hold it against him and loyola marymount earning both an mba and a master's degree in educational leadership his career has included a great deal of work and supporting black and brown students something that's very important to him i know as the son of immigrant parents i have no doubt that you all get to know alberto soon especially as we dive into our own budget development cycle in the meantime i invite you if you uh to visit education week's website where you can find uh this february 2020 profile of him if you could go to the next slide uh roseanne thank you i'm excited i'm extremely excited for chief delgadillo to join our senior leadership team at pps and commend deputy superintendent hertz on on her hire so please join me in welcoming alberto lilly who is herself an educator and their school age sons diego and sergio to our great city and to the portland public schools and i like to make this a tradition as you know alberto is here with us in person this evening and so as is the case when we announce new senior leaders uh he's here to share a few words directly with you directors thank you superintendent guerrero chair laurie and distinguished members of the board i'm really excited to be joining the portland public schools team and community um i'll you know as superintendent gabriel shared about uh my a little bit about my my growing up i'll share that my parents came to the u.s from mexico in the 1970s and having grown up in compton california i just understand the importance of not just having a good public education but also the importance of community and nourishing the whole child so i really look forward to supporting our efforts on resource equity so that every student has the best access and greatest opportunity to succeed super enthusiasm of portland my family and i look forward to getting to know portland and
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everything else that oregon has to offer thank you we're excited to have you join the team he has already started transitioning virtually uh and has been here from our first budget development meeting as a as a broader team so uh we're glad to have you and back to the deck because i also think it's important to acknowledge another set of people uh during this month of january uh january marks a number of important milestones celebrations and commemorations uh roseanne where's my slide including school board recognition month the oregon school boards association has set aside the month of january to honor the elected volunteers who serve as organs 197 local school boards our 19 education service district boards and 17 community college boards so as i mentioned a few minutes ago you know if we believe public education is the bedrock of democracy uh then i'm really grateful to have our board of directors doing the work that you do uh you're invaluable to our educational mission uh and i know i speak for my entire leadership team in thanking our directors who give an incredible amount of time energy focus and priority in the role that they play as as volunteers so you not only believe in public education but you work continuously tirelessly as leadership advocates for it so our district and community are better off for your many efforts thank you very much another light topic later this evening we're going to hear about our phase one recommendations for the enrollment balancing initiative that our board of directors put in motion uh in february of last year as you know our southeast guiding coalition which is comprised of parents guardians principal students and teachers was established to create a recommendation for the outlined phase one process focusing on the opening of kellogg middle school this fall which will be momentous the guiding coalition was set to convene in mid-march 2020 but stay-at-home orders delayed to start till early september and transition to a virtual meeting platform uh despite this the coalition as a whole met 12 times in fall 2020 gaining shared understanding of district-wide enrollment and program data and as well as racial equity and social justice tools and before launching into an iterative review of more than a dozen boundary change and program relocation scenarios the southeast guiding coalition considered feedback from hundreds of community stakeholders gathered through surveys focus groups and individual submissions and hosted a virtual open house attended by more than 800 community members thank you for your participation also directors so i want to share my deep gratitude for all that the community has provided to this process particularly during such a a unique and intense time i would like to especially thank the dozens of guiding coalition members who volunteered their time not just during these 12 meetings but over countless hours in between so your insights perspectives and critical thinking have made this process exponentially better and finally thanks to the numerous district staff members both central office and school administrators and staff who i know also contributed many hours to planning facilitating processing and reporting so uh i look forward to hearing more in in just a bit thank you sorry i thought you were done superintendent guerrero there's more ah yay but wait there's more um and i know that this is an important topic and we're going to talk about it a little bit more during the agenda but i do want to offer some more information in the way of details and i'll start off by saying uh hello to two of our viewers from home tonight which include multnomah county chair kofori and her chief of staff kimberly melton who are watching this evening thank you for joining us and for your partnership your continued partnership and especially now as we navigate this pandemic and some important next steps uh here locally uh in a few moments dr russell brown will give a covet school reopenings update we have some special guests here this evening that he'll be joined by which includes public health expert from ohsu leaders from multnomah county department of health as well as marcus mundy offering his perspective as executive director of the coalition of communities of color so as i shared with families and staff last week and a quick update after the break senior staff and i continue meeting with staff county and local leaders and
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public health experts again today that was the case meeting with governor staff with local and regional leaders to hear more updates and to continue gathering information to inform our evolving plans for the launch of limited in-person instruction opportunities for students as a next step there remain questions in a few key areas that impact the plans we have modeled to provide opportunities for students to be on campus so to the earlier testimony and reflecting on a wide spectrum of expressed opinions by both families and employees i understand and i acknowledge that distance learning has been difficult there are many elements and conditions required however to fully reopen our schools i want to assure families that all those variables that is the school system we don't necessarily control and manage all of them but they do include health and safety measures and protocols that we stand ready to institute we've spent months um uh articulating those and stand ready with them so we also look look forward to announcing uh given recent labor agreements to commence limited in-person learning for increasing numbers of students however there are also a number of variables that we don't control which we have to continue advocating and attempt to be a part of the solution moving forward as district leaders so again today like just about every day lately i've been in planning meetings and we know that we're going to need to continue collaborating with local county and state level partners to to address some of these variables this includes uh gaining clarity regarding vaccine access for school staff which bps stands ready to partner along with our esd uh to partner on the logistics of administering to thousands of employees we have 8 500 plus employees again started my work day in conversation with members of the governor's team to receive up-to-date details as you heard tonight you're starting to hear some of those announcements coming from her office those are the ones that we've been discussing the general public is starting to hear about those uh indicating that group 1b which includes school staff and educators and other student-facing staff will begin to have those doses made available probably in the last week of january maybe the first week of february uh we're still getting some exact uh timeline on that but what remains is a concrete plan for administering those doses once they're available so we're working out in discussion and collaboration with our regional partners now so uh also important is having a plan for frequent frequent and free covent testing for students and staff so we anticipate that that's going to be an important need requirement and capacity that we need to have to make available on on campus so we're continuing to work out those details with with state leaders as well so let's also be clear that while the governor has determined decisions to to be held at the local level given our context it hasn't eliminated the required guidelines that school systems have to observe so understand what if any understanding what revisions may be made to previously published safety guidelines from the oregon department of education which ones remain required for schools to adhere to when contemplating returning students to school and understanding the context is different for us in metro districts in the larger i5 corridor versus perhaps other parts of the state i want to note that pps along with other larger districts have submitted suggested changes and revisions to those guidelines ode expects to publish any updates to its guidelines not until january 19 and we eagerly await how those might permit us greater flexibility to bring more students back to schools in greater numbers so as an example social distancing according to current guidelines is makes it rather difficult logistically to plan for the numbers of students we can expect to have in our classrooms and in our school buildings as you heard earlier many of those are generations old and you know don't always afford the square footage that we'd like to have so understanding also the full extent of resources that will be made available to districts to invest in some of the additional staff and the staff time to meet some of these required guidelines uh and and prevent and be on the lookout for these transmissions are also going to be an important part of the equation so since the onset of this pandemic we've committed to centering our decision making on prioritizing student and employee health and safety while maintaining a continuity of learning our entire leadership group continues to work furiously to expand the number of students who can access in-person learning in ways that are safe
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for them and for school staff so this is a continually evolving situation we find ourselves in we are operating in real time we are thankful to have collaborative partners here locally and in the county um and as we've pledged we intend to share more concrete details with families staff and with the broader community before the close of the semester in the meantime we'll continue to update our plans based on the mandates and up-to-date guideline guidance from both the governor's office ode oha and multnomah county but look forward to sharing with families details for which there's been no shortage i assure you of creative ideas and models about our plans for the second semester i'll pause there because we're going to pick up this thread a little later in the agenda but since there's a lot of questions and i can't keep up with the hundreds of emails i thought i'd better spend a minute on it um so i also want to provide the board a little bit of an update as a last item here on the renaming processes for wilson and madison high schools we won't be hearing from them here tonight on their proposed final recommendation because they've requested just a little more additional time to continue engaging students and community i hear that they're close and to dialogue so that they can reach the consensus that they feel good about so both schools are engaged in a robust planning process to develop a recommended name change with the support of shanice clark our director of community engagement and her team both schools have stood up renaming committees and been engaged in this work since last fall madison commenced its committee in october wilson convened its committee in september uh which which is probably explains why they're just on the precipice of forwarding a recommendation most of the both of these committees are student-centered with membership consisting of student staff families and alumni both schools have engaged heavily with communities and critical stakeholder groups beyond their committee membership for example both schools have consulted with tribal entities and organizations for guidance neither school has a proposed final recommendation for your consideration in time for tonight's meeting but both schools have narrowed their options and i anticipate that an upcoming meeting uh that you will be hearing um their final recommendation so committees uh are taking this time to continue their process uh they're showing progress uh and their commitment to student voice and resj so i just to make sure that our culture doesn't prioritize the urgency over the quality dialogue and the student voice that they they are very much have encouraged so because of the potential long-term impact of the renaming i applaud our school principals and their committees for the care and consideration that their committees are taking uh and and offer our continued support and encouragement to them as they embark on this final stage of their process so once they have that final recommendation uh forwarded to the superintendent uh we'll ensure we'll we will ensure that the board is updated and prepared for uh a vote which hopefully um is is coming up uh to to the next regular meeting uh okay chair lowry that concludes my remarks for this evening thank you thank you superintendent guerrero director de pass our staff and guests have let me know that they want to make space for your comments and so um we'll go ahead and do that at this time i want to apologize uh for not getting things right in the midst of meeting sometimes in the chaos of all of that my only hope is that as we go forward i continue to learn and to get better so director so thank you um for making that happen chair lowry uh but i would be remiss if i didn't share with all of you on the call how deeply offensive that was to be silenced i've missed one meeting since july of 2019. i've identified i've diversified rather our bond accountability committee recently adding african american members three women three people under 40 a technology expert and a disability rights expert to address the work of our bond um i've just recently completed an extensive performance evaluation for our internal auditor and of course i haven't done any of that alone i just say that as a as a peer and as your colleague um i i'm very very offended at how that went down that you prioritized chair the comfort of others instead of your peer and i appreciate your paul your apology what i want to talk about tonight is our the way that we elect our board chair i'm going to propose tonight that we move the agenda item that's the very bottom of the agenda which is the vote on board leadership from the bottom of the agenda to the top of agenda since we are going to be i will be recommending that we
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delay that vote that we were supposed to have tonight until after we've had a chance to collectively contribute to the discussion about board leadership at our upcoming retreat this should be a group process and a group decision and it should be transparent to the community at that discussion we should talk about how to make important group decisions how to come to consensus around how we organize ourselves and what we are looking for in terms of key competencies of the role of the board chair and the vice chair and the value of distributive leadership which applies to all board members this this isn't a popularity contest or about excluding any board member rather it's about how we elevate the strengths of each board member to serve the board collectively and serve the community collectively we should identify the upcoming important discussions that will be happening at the community level and we should build our board work plan and discuss who's best seated to lead the work overall and look at the portfolios of our board work we should take turns in leadership and bring our best selves to the work as we talk about leadership in our roles in the public square we should also have the conversation and the vote in the public square at a time that is convenient to the viewing public and to our stakeholders our last four votes for board leadership have happened in july at 12 15 in the morning in january it was at 10 30 at night i couldn't find the exact time but it was after 10. and in july of 2019 it was at 11 30 p.m this is just way too late to have a vote um into something that is so important and i just would recommend that we uh move that conversation up i'd like to challenge all of us here to be hard on systems and soft on people because this work is important it matters to all of us my role here is really in speaking the truth and to say the hard thing that needs to be said tonight i'm asking us tonight not to divorce ourselves from the social political moment that we are in a moment where white supremacy is on blatant display and all that is happening and marry that truth to the work that we do within the context of a deeply troubling and deeply racist and unjust education system that we find ourselves working in today i want to bring us back to portland and remind us of the big charge we have in front of us to dismantle systems of oppression and remind us how we carry out our work matters how we govern ourselves matters we are no different than the hundreds of americans who stormed the capitol building last week they are us and i want us to demonstrate that black lives matter that it's more than a slogan it's more than a trend and just encourage us collectively to do better in our leadership discussion i'd like to us to ask ourselves if we are supporting progress towards an anti-racist system or continuing to use outdated systems and practices and listening to the same old voices are we upholding systems of oppression of white supremacy are we doing everything in our power we can do to dismantle it i'd like us to challenge us to be hard on systems and soft on people one of the ways that we can show up on the right side of justice is to challenge the way we elect the board chair and the vice chair and examine how we create pathways to create a more inclusive board and board leadership to understand how i work internally as a board will result in a more inclusive environment for our students you know we have to do our work first internally will it be fun and comfortable i probably not but change management is not comfortable and we need to build our muscle around being uncomfortable if we want to aim for transformative change um i again appreciate the the audience and want the audience to know that i absolutely this is absolutely our work that we need to do um the way the systems that we use the robert's rules of order are very disenfranchising to communities of color we need to really rethink each structure and each way that we are showing up to work for this community that elected us to do their good work thank you thank you director depos and i know that um we're gonna have that conversation on the 23rd and i know that from our conversations that you've got some really great things to talk through examples from other districts of ways we can really begin to make this a more equitable process and as you and i spoke the other day it's not just about the board that's here now but it's the board that we're envisioning for the future um and that we want to create you know cultural change so that we you know i think one of the burdens is that you are the only person of color on the board and um you know not not being able to um that means like that's a huge burden on you to be a voice for um lots of communities and so encourage and hope that folks will run
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i'm not running again my term ends in 2023 and i will not be running um so i really hope that someone especially out in the lentz neighborhood would consider running for my seat um i'm wanting to help and offer support as someone considers running for school board because i do think we um like i sometimes jokingly say we don't need another middle-aged white lady on the board we got a lot of them um and so where can we find um leaders that are already serving our communities and empower them to serve on the board so if you have ever thought about serving on school board if it's something or you know someone in your community that you think is a voice we need to hear from uh go ahead and contour contact dr depos i know she'd be delighted and to help you or contact me um and i think we have a long way to go to create the board that we really know pbs needs and thank you for your work in helping us to do that thank you and and also just to reiterate thank you for that director lowry that it's not some future board and it's not work that needs to happen next year next next five years it's it's work that we absolutely need to do now today with us starting with us recognizing that it's not other people's you know it's not not a future board it's the current board right yeah we want to change it now to make that board a reality too yeah all right director moore we're gonna turn over to you as we look at our um suicide prevention policy and uh the amazing work that's happened uh with that with our policy committee so thank you director moore for your work leading us in the policy committee thank you um so we are putting for a uh before the board for a second reading the suicide prevention policy um and senate bill 52 also known as addie's act requires school districts to adopt a student's suicide prevention policy section 36 of the student success act also requires establishing supports for suicide prevention through the development of a new statewide school safety and prevention system coordinated through the oregon department of education office of unity diversity and inclusion i'd like to thank amy rona and milo rodriguez adair both from student success and health department who work closely with the policy committee in the department of community engagement to develop this policy and incorporate a great deal of student and family feedback they are here tonight to talk about this policy after amy and mili speak we are very pleased to have with us tonight abby's father uh lon staub the architect and advocate for this policy to also talk about its importance to students staff and families so i'd like to invite amy and mila did you take it from here um yes thank you so much dr rita moore my name is mila rodriguez and i use she her pronouns and i identify as latinx and i'm also an unapologetically identified person who is hard on systems and also hard on people and i have been working very closely with my colleague amy rona and our policy committee to implement a very important policy and i feel very very privileged to even be in front of all of you today to talk about um addie addy's father and the advocacy that addie's father and family have been implementing thus far i also wanted to just take a brief moment to acknowledge the director michelle de pass and i as a woman of color often know the feeling of getting silence and being pushed to the side and i know how harmful that must feel and how hard that is on us especially when you're the only person of color um being having a seat at the table so just know that i see you i feel you and i hear you and know that i'm with you in community and um and know that everything that you have upheld and and have named are things that i continue to name within our own school district within my own department and know that i carry so many positionalities and privileges that many others do not just know that i stand in solidarity with you and um will continue to push within my own individual work and the work that we need to continue to push forward i also wanted to name the fact that um we have this policy because some public schools recognizes that suicide is a leading cause of death among youth and that even more youth considered attempted suicide the possibility of suicide and suicide ideation requires vigil and attention from all pps staff this policy is required by oregon law which was passed in 2019 in response to the advocacy of the family of a former pps student as you have heard adi who identif who is um was identified as transgender and died by suicide in 2017. i also have to name that we definitely have a black youth
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suicide crisis and we as a department are committed to also doing as much as we can to support on those efforts as well amy would you like to go next thank you mila uh i like to say a future board member i hope i would like to echo what what mila said uh director de pass i so appreciate your leadership and your voice and also stand with you my name is amy ronai you see her pronouns i identify as white um i work in the student success and health department with mila good evening board superintendent representative shu um and all the community that's watching i want to start by thanking mila for her incredible commitment to this policy she's put her heart and soul into it and it's been a real honor to work alongside you throughout this process thank you i also want to additionally thank a number of pps students in particular who shared their time and their energy and giving feedback regarding this policy some of whom are here and watching tonight um i want to name that in addition to the staubs who we will hear from next that we grieve with all of our pps families and staff who have lost a loved one to suicide we really work to honor them through this policy in an effort to prevent more suffering because the responsibility of suicide prevention doesn't lie within a specific job group this policy really encompasses culturally responsive suicide prevention training for all staff and mental wellness education for students and families the policy has a focus on elevating and celebrating student identity a known suicide prevention strategy and this means continuing to grow and support student groups like gay straight alliances queer straight alliances black student unions metro groups native wellness groups just to name a few and in centering the feedback of mr staub in particular this policy includes accountability measures to assure that we are deeply engaged in the work and not just checking a legislatively mandated box at this time you'll and i expressed deep gratitude for the staub family this policy exists because of your advocacy after the devastating loss of addie a remarkable human by all accounts and so we would like to share the rest of our time with you to be able to speak your truth thank you thank you amy and emila um yeah my name is lonstab my pronouns are he and him and i am joined this evening with by my wife chris who who's phoned in not sure if her videos on but uh we're social distancing in different rooms um tonight um thanks for inviting me today my plan was to just give a real brief background on our story and uh make a few supporting comments about the policy and the path that lies ahead if that works for for everyone uh and i'll keep it brief because i suspect we're buying schedule on the agenda but as as background uh for those of you who don't know after addie's death chris found a homework assignment multiple assignments actually in which addie expressed suicidal ideation and she also learned that the teacher did not escalate uh or intervene with us or or any others within the school system so uh we scheduled a meeting with pps administration shortly thereafter with really just one simple objective we did not hold the school responsible for our daughter's death but we wanted to discuss whether or not policies and procedures could be implemented or improved to to avoid a similar tragedy and you know i would just say that in the spirit of moving forward it was a disappointing a very disappointing meeting and in the parking lot that day we just we concluded that legislative action was really the only way that we were going to compel any kind of meaningful change and uh it's been roughly three years since that meeting and i am i'm happy to report that i feel hopeful and optimistic i believe that
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this policy uh is what was intended is what we intended uh when we fought so hard to get this legislation passed it sets very clear and appropriate expectations for staff and student training suicide screening procedures other really important prevention measures i believe it will help at-risk students like my daughter addie and show that we genuinely care about about their mental health but equally important i have seen the personal care and commitment of those that are engaged in this effort within pps but also across the state uh mila and amy have demonstrated uh the type of culture collaboration and and compassion the kind of the the buy-in in their hearts and minds that must be in place at the school at the district and the schools you know as i said i'm uh genuinely hopeful but uh but i'm cautiously optimistic that the policy is just a piece of paper if it's not effectively implemented okay um so as final comments i want to raise up going forward three primary concerns that i that i'd love us all to ponder you know as we as we implement this going forward and i want to say that i'm a grieving parent um but i'm also the former head of an internal audit department at a function 200 fortune 200 company with 100 000 employees so my concerns that i raise tonight are based on personal pain but also decades of professional experience in evaluating the effectiveness of organizational policies okay the first is around culture so what i see at the perspective that mila and amy brown must be reflected in the district and school leadership school plans these things will consistently will fail if they're not consistently prioritized and sustained by leadership uh the second concern is around ownership and that's every we i think we might use different words around this but every policy requirement or or the the resulting administrative directive must be clearly assigned to personnel and i think i believe at a very specific level we should not expect that procedures will be performed if they're not assigned to a very specific leader principal teacher counselor and we should expect failure if the entire policy is just assigned to a single person a coordinator a counselor because i think that suggests that we're not embracing suicide prevention as a cultural imperative because we're just farming it out for one person to do we're not integrating into the culture of a district or school and my last concern is around monitoring compliance with the policy and directives needs to be monitored for effectiveness we should not assume that all of these great measures that are outlined in this in this policy uh suicide screening training that they're going to get completed consistently and effectively without some kind of periodic uh about verification review and right now this policy doesn't specify any monitoring requirement but i think we should work to design an effective protocol for monitoring so i'm super optimistic i'm super happy with the work that's been done and people that with whom i've worked um have concerns and and i just want to thank you uh board members for your time and the invitation to be here to honor the great work that's been done and also to to acknowledge and encourage the work that remains ahead of us mr staub first of all i want to um you know i just say i i don't even know what to say about such an incredible loss so i um appreciate the time that you've put into you know sharing sharing that with us and improving our processes as a member of the audit committee my ears perked up when you said you're an internal auditor um because we're always looking for volunteers and because of your suggestion to put some evaluation and some metrics in place or evaluation protocols i think is really really fantastic um we do work collaboratively as a board with our internal auditor to come up with topics to audit and i would um
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just assure you as long as i'm on the board that i will see that that gets added to her list of other functions and operations functions that she's uh auditing any other questions or comments uh go ahead well i just want to thank you and your family for um leading this effort at a statewide level um i can't even imagine how the grief that you're feeling and it's um enormously impressive that you converted that into the the energy to to actually get legislation passed in by legislative terms is probably lightning speed um and i think it's it's going to make all of the school districts in this state better and all of our students safer and i want to thank you for all the work that you put into it thank you you know i want to make one one more comment you know one of the horrible tragedies of suicide is all the you know the second guessing that gets done and uh about what you could have done differently um and as a parent you know we spend a lot of sleepless nights agonizing over what we could have done differently and uh part of this um and we take great i i find great peace in the things that i know i did right to support my daughter during this that very hard time and uh part of what this is about is is putting measures in place um that we can all feel good about and knowing that we did our very best so when if we do lose somebody that every teacher that no teacher has to has to sit with that i have sympathy for um the teacher who who didn't elevate this due to time demands uncertainty around what to do with it um all of those things and um these tragedies have far-reaching implications and we want to save every person from that kind of deep regret about not having done enough and uh and i hope that that this will do that this is director constant i also want to extend my gratitude to both of you for the work that you've done at the statewide level but also um just the deep work that you've done with pps and um amy can you please remind me what the figure was in our own pps survey of how many of our students have contemplated reported that they have contemplated suicide it's about 32 percent but with our our lgbtqia plus youth was about 32 yeah and then just generally it was about like 19 or something right so you know the prevalence is something that we really don't think about and hear about very much but this is um meaningful for so many of our students and you have honored your daughter's legacy in a very profound way by making this institutional change um so i i thank you both so much for that i want to say thank you and um real briefly to agree with you the proof is in the pudding um and we talked a lot about that at the policy committee meeting of making sure the systems were put into place the supportive training for every employee and i think uh director depass had a great suggestion about uh at the appropriate time uh auditing the this process um to make sure that those systems were happening that the training was happening with fidelity um to make to uh to prevent as much as we can suicides in the future but thank you again chair lowry i also want to extend my appreciation to the stop family it shows incredible courage and
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generosity to help us become a better stronger school system so that we might be more supportive to other students and i'm sorry for your loss and if my board colleagues haven't had a chance to read addy's story you can google her name and find it on the website and it's an inspiring and beautiful story and so i do want to extend my my thanks to chris and talon for the compassion and grace you've shown in the midst of heartbreaking loss and i know that that you truly will make a difference in student lives and i'm sorry that that we didn't have these things in place for addie um and for mila and amy again um the incredible work you've done not only with bringing this policy forward but also helping the policy committee to think about how we do our work and just as director depos was talking earlier how we look at our processes and policies and you know it can be quite intimidating to come before the board and so how do we work collaboratively together because that's what we all want is is to do the best for our students so thank you both for the incredible amount of work you've done on this policy but more importantly the day-to-day work you do for our students it's incredible um we as a board are now i'm gonna take our vote on resolution 62-25 i'll need this is the resolution to approve the student suicide prevention policy 4.30.050 i need a motion and a second to adopt the resolution so moved second all right i heard director brim edward move and on my audio i heard director depos just speed out director constant for that second of resolution 62-25 is there any board discussion on this matter i'm just going to say that i um this policy really demonstrates the power of when you have committed passionate staff working with our community and parents that we can make a meaningful change for our students um and without one or the other um it wouldn't be the same so i just want to thank our staff um and um the contribution the stops have made to the this policy so thank you thank you both because it wouldn't have it wouldn't have been the same with without the marriage and the implementation really will be staff driving that through um and hopefully um with a level of accountability behind it um but we're going to count on staff to um fully implement it and bring it to fruition and what we what we want it to be all right um ms bradshaw is there any public comment on this resolution the board will now vote on resolution 6225 resolution to approve the student suicide prevention policy 4.30.050 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 6225 is approved by a vote of six to zero with student representative shu voting yes all right thank you nathaniel we are going to go ahead and take a break um we'll take a 12 minute break until 8 o'clock so go ahead and stretch your legs take a deep breath this has been a um a lot that we've gone through as we think about um the loss of the student as we think about how white supremacy shows up in our work as we think about all the work we're doing to try to make pps a place for all students and so let's take that break and be back at eight o'clock to talk about coping thank you everyone seven zero i apparently can't count tonight so um again resolution passed seven to zero with student representative shoe voting yes so to correct about that i was like six six to zero i think is what you said yeah i just i don't know there you go yourself i guess i didn't say yes but i didn't count myself so thanks for those who who offered that correction uh director broome edwards let me know during the break that she would like to make a statement herself tonight so invite director medwards to go ahead so thank you chair lowry for the courtesy um i thought we were going to have a motion and a vote earlier after director de pass's comments so i was waiting for the motion and then we moved to the next item so i apologize that it got disjointed from
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um the the comments that director depass made and i i didn't want to let her comments go without acknowledging them and addressing them and i want to thank you director de pass for speaking up for your courage and your bravery to challenge us to do our work differently and to tell us what it feels like from a different perspective so that so that we can hold on to that as we do our work so that we understand how our they land on the impact also that we should be hard on systems and soft on people because our systems need to be broken down and rebuilt so that we can do our work differently um and we're gonna need to be soft on people because as um we all noted the people is us and for us to be able to uh do the work i think we need to extend each other grace um and respect um so that we can change how we do our work so i also want to just thank chair lowry for your commitment to have the conversation about how we do their work i think we all we're a learning organization we can learn and get better and so thank you chair lowry and also dr de pass for i'm using your voice to make us think about how we do our work and do it better thanks thank you for the courtesy mr lowry and we will be bringing forth the um agenda item to postpone the leadership vote it's in our policy that we voted our first regular board meeting and as director depos has brought up um we have a retreat on the 23rd where we're going to be looking at our leadership systems and how we choose leadership so we're going to vote at that time to delay we're going to make a motion to delay the vote so we can do it on the 26th after we've had that conversation at our retreat but that'll come at the end of the meeting um and we can have more conversation at that time around this topic all right um we have some additional guests with us tonight and so i'm going to um invite superintendent guerrero to introduce this next agenda item thank you chair lowry directors earlier in my soups report i mentioned how especially important our ongoing partnership and ongoing collaboration is going to be particularly with local public health and jurisdictional partners as we see clarity and as we develop plans together in confronting this pandemic so in the interest of continuing to build shared understandings and clarity tonight we want to make sure we continue to update you not just on the status of current health metrics and trends but that we also have the opportunity to receive some up-to-date information from our partners at multnomah county health department about their response on the ground and and developing plans there's also been an expressed desire that we ensure input from communities of color and culturally specific organizations as you know throughout the district uh we're engaged in ongoing planning and evaluation so that we're poised to to respond and make some sound rational decisions uh our goal is to ground those decisions uh in our guiding principles while also uh being responsive to uh the best information we have available by our experts this does not come without some challenges and and complexities my hope is that tonight the board and the broader pps community has a chance to hear some updates directly from those partners that whose expertise were also relying on and with these perspectives together we do build those shared understandings and a path forward uh so that we can offer safe options for in-person learning so as i mentioned earlier uh we're looking forward to uh our next announcements beginning to describe what those limited in-person uh possibilities look like so that we start welcoming students uh back to campus um i'll stop here in the way of an intro uh since this is typically the staff lead that we've designated to help us coordinate many of our efforts so kicking us off on this agenda item will be dr russ brown our chief of systems performance who continues to lead our planning and implementation efforts along with other senior staff so russ good evening uh superintendent guerrero members of the board in the community pleased to be joining you again this evening um wait as we wait for the slide deck to come up certainly appreciate the feedback and that we've heard from from our community this evening and yeah if there's an overall overarching theme today's discussion it
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really is the idea of of trying to to balance uh complex issues as we move forward this is um certainly a very challenging time for all of us i think it often gets framed as an either or that either we're looking at at the health physical health of our our staff and students or their their mental health and learning losses and and i i would suggest instead it's really a both hand and that we have to look at those things in conjunction with one another and we are all excited about the possibility of of having our students return to buildings as quickly as possible next slide please speaking of guiding principles throughout this process and and the members of the community board have heard us reiterate these a number of times i think it's worth speaking about them again as we begin to think about transition into the next window here uh again we have to center racial equity and social justice in in all our conversations as we we move forward uh we've heard that dialogue this evening and again it's an anchor point for everything that we do we have throughout this window uh continue to focus on the uh ensuring the health and wellness of our staff and students and our broader community and looking forward to hearing from dr graven later as as we talk about you know health in the community and health resources in the community and anticipating what that looks like we have talked a lot about cultivating connection and relationship with our students and the importance of of that again this is not an either or it's a it's a both and and uh we have uh while we would i think all agree that uh in you know comprehensive distance learning is not a substitution uh for in-person learning uh it has afforded us an opportunity to to strengthen and innovate and how we provide instruction and i think we're all looking forward to how how we can incorporate some of those things as we move forward next slide please so at each of the board meetings i i have presented this slide and updated it over time this reflects again the the current state of covid case rates in the county at this point we're sitting at slightly over 300 cases over the last two weeks it has declined from early december it is um however still within the red zone it is well above the the current threshold uh in ode's guidance for comprehensive distance learning and it's well above the numbers that we saw in the fall and while a number of folks mentioned studies tied to to covet safety in schools one has to realize that studies aren't published overnight it takes some time to get those done and most of those actually were published based on research that was done in the fall when when cover numbers were actually much lower this is actually a point of discussion our health advisory committee and our health advisory committee members are often updating us on a regular basis about research as it's emerging and as we move forward so we are still well above the current cdl threshold next slide please so yeah not surprisingly to us following the the winter break we expected cova cases race to remain high as i mentioned they're still in the the category that would require distance learning based on the current metrics and the current cdl guidance they are over double the rate that we observed in the fall when we had only 140 cases over a two-week window of time so really an apples to oranges comparison and test positivity rates unfortunately in this last two week period have gone up a bit as well so again just as a little bit of context and we know that it's likely that these thresholds will be adjusted and as they're adjusted then i will report the data according to the new thresholds as they come forward next slide please again you know it's a complex path uh to our return and we're really interested in considering multiple perspectives regarding opening we often hear from our community really divergent and we heard it tonight divergent opinions about opening uh where some folks really very strongly believe we should have opened and be in place uh you know in a full-time capacity a while ago and others very reticent to return to buildings because of concerns for their family and and members in their community and i think unfortunately the governor's announcement has been heard in a way that maybe is a little a little simple in that while the the governor made the the metrics component optional for communities all the other uh components of ready school safe learners remain in effect and are mandatory and
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and those are some significant constraints for us so you know as the superintendent mentioned earlier that means that we have to allocate 35 square feet per student and as he indicated older buildings tend to have smaller classrooms and in fact when we look at our elementary classrooms as we've been planning and looking at how many people could actually fit in our classrooms the average classroom in our setting can hold about 12 people according to 35 square feet per person that that translates to about 10 students and two adults and that's something we would be obligated to do in our k3 if we were to begin hybrid also there's a requirement around cohorting and to try to minimize the interaction between different cohorts of students and there is a hard requirement currently that that a student can only interact with in terms of cohorts a total of 100 students in a week that is really challenging when you start thinking about departmentalized scheduling in middle and high school and how to make that happen again we have old buildings and old buildings there's quite a lot of variability in terms of the the air quality and how air quality can be managed in those buildings our team has been working very hard around that but it is still a challenge we also uh again while right now the the case positivity rates have been declining there is some anticipation of a post post holiday wave and concern about additional variants of the virus that appear to be more infectious and and have higher rates and we see those in other communities and and some concern about how that will will play out here and some of the resources that were mentioned in the duke study as well as things that we would look forward to to facilitating reopening robust contact tracing robust testing programs for not just symptomatic but also asymptomatic students to help identify cases early so that they could be quarantined and that we could continue to to remain open as well as vaccination timelines have all been part of of what we need to be able to successfully open in a safe manner and finally there is also a component here that requires renegotiations you know as we've seen in some of our other communities around this area one can plan but at the same time one's workforce has to agree with with moving forward as well so without further ado uh really pleased this evening to be um able to welcome back to our our board and our community dr peter graven who's a member of our pps advisory health advisory committee and he's also an affiliate assistant professor of ohsu psu school of public health and he's also a pps parent of an after student and so we welcome dr graven back and we look forward to hearing what he has to say this evening thank you dr raven yeah can you hear me all right good um yeah well it's my pleasure to be back um and um i have some news to or some updated data to report i want to say you know i am a pps parent um and you know i was asked to be here at 705 and i want to say that you know as a white man that uses he him pronouns i can say it's about time i waited behind discussions of you know systemic racism mental health and the needs of the lgbtq community so um i'm you know happy to take my time i appreciate listening to all the stories i heard today um and now i'm going to talk about some code data and um and so kind of get you guys up to speed as quickly as i can i'd love to take time for questions if we have them but let's go ahead to the next slide and one more so as you saw before um you know i like to think about um how we're doing in the epidemic with our our census and so here you can see that the three distinct waves we've seen so far um and as you can see we've we've come down a little bit there's been a couple more days where it's come our hospital senses statewide has come down a little bit further but we've had three distinct waves and um and i'm gonna tell you about a fourth one um so as we look at this we have survived that the main surge that came here in the fall and it's been coming down um slowly but you can see we have not come down anywhere close to where we had been before next slide this is a kind of complex graph and you can maybe start it later but what what what's essentially trying to show you is how effective we've been at slowing the virus from spreading and the orange line you can see starts off really low we weren't very effective at all and then goes up and then it comes down it goes up comes down and what i'm trying to show
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you is there's a cycle here and the cycle is that we we get there's some fear that takes hold we get we we take a lot of action and then fatigue sets in and and that's that's operated on roughly uh eight week cycles eight weeks of fear and eight weeks of fatigue and so if we project that behavior forward you can see the red line and that's going all the way through the end of august and so this is you know something you should never do and this is a good way to be wrong but um i want to i wanted to know what what our full experience with this is going to be so rather than just projecting out a few weeks let's think about now that we have a vaccine now that we know some of the patterns that we've had with this virus already in terms of our policy and our behavior how far can we really project and and can that give other people the information they need to make a decision so um go ahead and show the next slide uh like i said we we have a vaccine um and and it's being distributed uh maybe not as fast as we like but um you know essentially have goals of maybe 10 000 or 12 000 a day those could go up as more vaccines come along and all the different people what i'm showing you here is the the a proposed set of um the percent of the population by age group that's getting vaccinated you can see the um the first one there is the uh the 80 year olds they um hopefully we're going to be able to get to them real soon as they really impact our hospital census uh we've been focusing of course more on health care workers uh but if you start imagining these vaccine schedules coming into play and more and more people are going to have some protection not complete against the virus then we should start seeing an impact over time so if you if you took this as a as the potential vaccine schedule you can start understanding how we might start seeing the end of the of the current pandemic next slide so if you combine that that that fear and fatigue cycle that i showed you first and you and you lay over the vaccine schedule which we know is going to have an impact um unfortunately you see um that while you see the rest of the pandemic where it really comes back down to to uh not much of a problem by the end of summer but in the meantime you have that giant wave and um it's you might think how could you forecast a wave like that and the reality is we are doing our darndest right now to keep this thing down and it it's still here um and it's quite prevalent and and i don't it's it's unclear our fatigue cycle is about to kick in essentially so you you probably feel it uh your neighbors might feel it as well um and and worse if that fatigue cycle doesn't kick in which it's you know i'm expecting it to here in the next couple weeks um we also have the variant on the and you might have heard um you know of course the virus is constantly uh modifying but the b.1.1.7 that's the variant that's in the uk and that's been expanded to some countries i'll show you and when that gets hold here we are going to see a real spike and and that's probably in the next you know four to eight weeks um so if the fatigue doesn't hit us but that this variant is and and we're we're going to have to take some pretty drastic action as is the anticipation here so um this is i'm sure a very concerning slide i know it is for me when i look at it and and think about trying to get back to normal um it appears that we have we have one more one more battle ahead um next slide um as i mentioned the variant um it's in several countries that have all tried many actions to slow it down um and you can't see the names here but in the upper left is the uk to the next one to the right is israel lower left is ireland and portugal and what you're all you need to see is that giant steep slope up these are countries that were prepared have been doing things and it still knocked them out and unfortunately we have very low rates right now in the us which is which is good but it really only takes four to eight weeks or six to eight weeks really for it to take form and it's probably here somewhere and as it gets going um it's much more transmissible the good news is it does not appear to be more deadly um have additional um you know health consequences and for kids particularly as well but it is much it spreads much easier and it's gonna be much more difficult actually probably for some of the uh productive measures of the schools that dr braun was mentioning uh next slide um i'm not going to go through the um long-term model but this is to tell you that there's a lot of assumptions built into that and each one of those can be argued i try to update them um and and unfortunately you have to make them if you're going to look into the future like this so um you know i would like to be wrong about number of these but you know these are my best guesses right now and i'm trying to do my best to get you guys information that can help you guys make decisions
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um so the next slide is is some more uh limitations uh mostly saying there's a lot of assumptions and i and i wish we i wish we knew and i wish we'd been here before and hopefully we won't be back but go ahead and take a pause if you have questions or if you're going to move on to the next topic i'm here i just had a question about that last slide if you don't mind um that it was just the effectiveness did is it 94 after the second shot or is there a delay after this from the second shot on before you get that sorry it went so fast um so the 95 percent yeah 24 days after the second dose um no assuming you get the dose at 24 days then you get two weeks until you get your um your protection so in theory you get the first the first shot 24 days and then and then you but 12 and two weeks after the first dose you get 54 protection and so that's reflected in the curve so you get some protection there and then you get the second dose and you got to wait a little bit longer before you're fully vaccinated well 95 and then in theory we change that based on whatever vaccines we're giving out at the time right now maduro and visor pretty high rates um you know some of the other ones might be a little bit lower but if those are the quantities that are going out we have to adjust for that um how close are we to the vaccine schedule i've heard we're behind and do you see steps taken in place that uh our steps are are we heading for hitting the schedule yeah we um so the goal and and the schedule i built and showed you there was a 10 000 a day and we did indeed reach 10 000 finally just a couple days ago in a day um so it's certainly possible that we can maintain that i know the new goal is 12 000 a day um my i expect us to to get there it may not be every day um weekends may be different but i think we're going to be on track um so i would say the startup is slower than we liked um but you know i don't have i wouldn't say i'm making wildly optimistic expectations about 10 000 a day here uh dr graven i had a couple questions um so one is on slide 12 and there was a there was a day count and a week count one was ten thousand one was twelve thousand um um i think it might be the slide thirteen or eleven it was uh i think it was eleven my apologies yes so we have been 10 000 per week in the first versus 12 000 per day uh actually you notice the typo it's 10 000 it's 10 000 per day it's a day count that's that's right but i wanted to double check that the other thing was um the assumptions that go into that model modeling um are those can you talk a little bit about the assumptions like um you know are those best guesses are those you know data informed and then my final question was how will the families we have a fairly high rate in portland of people that that are um not into vaccinating and so how do how do those i think it's around 25 28 if i recall correctly how do those um families um or those children knowing that the transmission rate between children isn't super super high how does that impact the community however yeah yeah no okay um they leave the school buildings yup great questions um yeah so i i like it that somebody wants to go dig into the assumptions first of all so if you can go ahead a couple more slides um these are you know these are kind of our best guesses of what's going on they're not just my guests um these uh there should be uh literature sites that are available uh in some cases this is declarations that have been made by things uh by the state in terms of how fast they're going to do things i'm sorry can we could we go ahead a slide or two there to the assumptions um and then back one there we go yeah so and so here you can see i the 10 000 per day uh was what the original was yeah vaccine acceptance rate i have it 75 percent um you know you can kind of do the mental change if you'd like uh to figure out what it'd be if it was higher um and so if you or if you're worried that it could be lower then everything gets um doesn't get as better it doesn't get better quite as fast um the the lag two weeks i think that's pretty well known based on the vaccines that are in play same as the efficacy so you can get those from the the documents um that came out about the vaccines uh fear and fatigue cycle i'll be honest that is something i invented
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um and it's based on looking at that pattern you don't have to believe it i and sometimes i i share a version that doesn't have that built in but um i think most people can recognize that human behavior is is got that tendency um and then the ascertainment rate that one's a pretty um that one doesn't actually affect much of what you see except for to say that it really it implies that there's a lot more true people who have been infected than our cases that we've detected um and that helps us get to hurt immunity as it turns out so that's actually a good thing in this in this in this situation and if i if i could interject uh for a moment uh dr raven um i have noticed that that you tend to be pretty humble about your model uh but i would ask maybe that we take a peek back because the model does a i think an extraordinary job of explaining what has happened so far and and if we could lean into that just for a moment i think that would be helpful for folks yeah thank you and i mean it does show a real trend line and it i mean that that's where i assume that you got that particular assumption from that it does it does show a cycle and you're relating it to you know fatigue and fear yeah and and policy it's really both the policy and behavior complex that we have which is you know people start feeling fatigue they go to their policy makers and express it and policy makers say um we can make okay yeah maybe we can do some things and then people start really behavior many times will lead the policy people start seeing cases go up and even before policy is changed sometimes those those will happen first and you can see that some of the mobility data so i i consider them kind of intertwined and in that pattern that you see here in oregon is unique to us um it depends you know it's how responsive we are to our people and how and how how uh how nervous we might be about these things um so it really is trying to capture a real social dynamic i would say all right i think i know that it looks like director scott director constant director depos all have questions so let's go in that order constant scott or sorry content scott and more sorry thanks i think scott jumped in before me but i'll make it quick andrew um dr graven back you're one of your first or second slides that uh showed the hospitalization rate can you tell us what that is um relative to the recent study that talked about um safety of reopening if you're under 40 per 100 000 um in your population so can you just go back to that slide and convert it to our multnomah county population yeah um let's see if you go back i think it um we can go to i think it'd be like slide two yeah oh we can go back one slide one maybe yeah there we go there we go um yeah so that rate uh you know that's a census count and if you converted that into what you're thinking of is probably the number of admits per day which was referenced in that article um and i in i think 40 is roughly about where they say their study kind of says you know we don't know anymore um we're we're about at that so um it's 40 it's really 40 admits per um i believe it's per 100 000 and so um when you when you um when you convert it we're at the upper end of that um i'd i'd have to do a more precise check this is just from from my memory here um but i would say you know we're probably just outside the bounds of where where that applies um i have looked pretty closely at that study i think there's a lot of good things in it um in terms of trying to look comprehensive they did a lot of a lot of work on it um it hasn't been fully peer reviewed yet um and you know and it's got actually pretty sophisticated methods that have potential for some problems so i um you know all these things you know unfortunately you got to take with a little grain of salt in general i would say you know do school openings increase hospitalizations you know when you're at high rates it's you don't have a lot of cushion there so thank you so thank you so i actually want to that's that's a great segue because i want to follow up on that a little bit um and i guess my maybe my first question is is oregon's case rate and our hospitalization rate in general rate of community spread low compared to the rest of the country that is something that we hear from a lot of folks it is we are in fact as of today we have the second lowest number of new cases per day and i've heard some people say that maybe oregon's case rate is low because we have been strict in keeping schools closed um but i heard a lot of other people say that that causality is wrong there and that there really is no evidence of that from from your perspective do you think
02h 10m 00s
there's any any uh causality in that direction um certainly there was causality um there's been papers that were in the original shutdown period um we know that school closing sent out a big signal was correlated with a lot of the lower rates that we saw um and there's and i think i presented that actually to you last time i was here i showed a study that kind of looked at a lot of the different policies and school closures is was one of the ones that was was shown to be effective now like i said you you have a new study that comes out that shows maybe it's not that related um and so i think you know uh it's it's uh you know it's maybe somewhere in between those two um because i guess i wanted to sort of i mean really get your thoughts because i it seems to me from from what i read and certainly from what i get said that a vast majority of doctors and public health professionals are advocating for reopening schools i just got a link to a med page today uh article which i'm sure you're more familiar with mid page today than i am um you know um saying that school should almost always be open so i guess maybe my first question is do do you agree that the vast majority of doctors and public health professionals do think that schools should be reopened even in places that have much higher rates of coca-transmission hospitalization than oregon does and if if that's the case why do you think that that is sort of the dominant perspective given the data that you're sharing well i don't know if i don't know if i can help i don't know if i can help on that completely um so what i what i what i can say is that you know the the the census right now in oregon is extremely high um organism is in a unique position because we have the lowest beds per capita and so you know as andrew may have mentioned you know i'm affiliated with the school of public health but i'm also the director of advanced analytics for my hospital system and so a big thing we are worried about and are having to deal with all the time is not having enough room uh for people and that's that's been a you know we've we kind of came out of a crisis but that's a very real story there and so to the extent that you know you have room for cases um you know you can you can probably you can probably handle um higher amounts of disease um you know it doesn't appear we do have much more room um and so you know you at that point um any changes in your policy that are sending any signals that things are normal and that people go about their activities can lead to those kind of increasing diseases so just parse that a little bit because i want to what i hear you saying because again every pretty much everything i've read says that schools don't contribute to community spread i hear you saying possibly opening schools could send a social signal that even though the schools themselves wouldn't contribute to spread it could contribute to more risky behavior among the general population is that am i hearing you right um well i mean that that's a conjecture about why that you know when schools were closed um and previously that they they did bring down the disease level significantly so you can see that in the you know one of the biggest policies we had back there in april uh or in march was to to close the schools but we also closed down a whole bunch of other stuff so it's disentangling those two those two items is hard um but yeah i would say so far you know there there is not a blockbuster study that can can i think make everyone feel really comfortable um that they know exactly what will happen in each community and um i don't know if i can provide a whole lot more guidance there so that you you're going to get a whole bunch of emails in response to that comment but that's a good thing because frankly i would rather that you engage on whether the studies are robust than me since i have no background in this at all um i am going to ask you in just a second whether as as both a public health professional someone with a child in school you would advocate for reopening in person um in february but i'll give you just a second to decide whether you want to answer that or not i think one of the things and it's kind of going back to dr brown a little bit of what you said one of the things that that i do think is missing from these conversations are the metrics about our students and the impact and i know we talk about that in every presentation we have we have given i don't want to call it lip service because i know people care a lot about it but we have a lot of data and dashboards about covid and very scary numbers and very scary charts we don't have data and dashboards about the impact on our students and we have conjecture and we have thoughts about what might be happening and we think what's happening but when we think about the mental and emotional health of the students and the learning loss um and all the things go with it what makes this impossible to really from a public policy perspective um to really make the decision is is there is a trade-off and i you know just to be really blunt i kind of just disagree with you dr brown about the idea that it is it is a both and i i'm always looking for both ends but i actually think in this situation there's a huge trade-off um and our decision is having an impact on children that might be the right decision one of the things i've said all along to both sides and i'm getting emails you
02h 15m 00s
know on on from from advocates and uh and opponents of reopening but is that there is no right answer right the the answer we have to sort of make a lot of assumptions and sort of decide what's best but it is really really hard to do that without that student data and i know you're a data guy and and that's something you would love to see as well but i i kind of feel like we need a dashboard um you know not only talking about learning loss for our students but talking about social and emotional well-being and mental health and suicide ideation and you know all the other things that are are really having a negative impact because you know the public health risks whether they're real or not um you know have to be weighed and and there is that there is a trade off there and i don't think we can get a win-win i think we have to figure out where those lines cross and the values of our community and make a decision as a result but i'll go back to you dr graven um you can decide if you want to answer should we reopen schools um given what you know in february yeah unfortunately i'm not going to be able to give you the clear answer there what i what i'm here to share with you is the the where i think we are in the pandemic as i showed i i do expect us to have another wave here that we're dealing with and and that's that's a huge i think that's going to end up being a huge priority that i've seen in other places now do i think that there are ways that we can deliver more education to more kids in person in other ways i think i would definitely encourage people to try to do that um and if in and i don't see this as an all or nothing my actual training is an economist i would find you know i tend to think of it as a you know fi find the the most benefit for the least cost so um i would look for those opportunities in particular in the areas that you mentioned um and and but i the idea of you know if we're staring at a giant panda uh wave um i think if their schools were open fully it would be one of the things that we'd be thinking about turning off and so um i would just be prepared for that and think about is there the in-between options that you can find where you can deliver the services to provide the uh the most amount of services you can thank you for being here and for your help with the district through this crisis really appreciate it while we're hovering still on this slide of hospitalized patients somebody just texted me the oha um admittance rates which are apparently 45 per week in oregon great so seven ish a day thank you for adding that i just uh i was gonna i wanted to make sure director morgan had a chance to ask her questions as well so director moore did you have some questions to ask yes thank you um so i guess the first thing that struck me was um i would have expected to see um a post christmas new year's spike and it looks like if i'm reading your graph correctly it looks like we haven't really had that kind of spike and i guess my question is um were oregonians should argonians be congratulated for actually following the guidelines or do you think this is a leg and reporting um both um i would say oregonian should be congratulated we're compared to other states both thanksgiving and the holiday season i think our metrics look like we um we are doing better than most other states however we are still going we our cases are are still all marching upwards actually um in a two-week or if you take a week-long case uh week average and so we are still going to see case increases right now um and and those will show up later in this census so i would say both your both your points are right okay there is a way and we are doing better than other states okay well i i i know we're doing better but that's not saying i can add one other point to that which is you know holidays have the opportunity to be a good way to deal with the virus if you can avoid the social interactions that go go with them people staying at home and avoiding a lot of the places where they get the disease it can is actually one of the things you do so it's it's not impossible to imagine holidays working out in a positive way i'm sorry i have more questions sorry um so the the data on the hospitalizations and infection rates and all of that um do those data disaggregate by race and ethnicity i i mean overall we know that there's a disproportionate impact communities of color um are those are those disproportionate impacts for reflected in in these numbers not in the hospitalized census is not broken down that way uh but the case cases are okay yeah so you can that would be the way that you can pick it up and
02h 20m 00s
you know um it's been pretty consistent throughout that you know his the hispanic population in particular has been much harder hit than other populations in our state and um i am i am personally terrified by this variant um and um i guess i've got lots of questions about it but um do does oregon do genomic um testing so that would allow us to know whether the variant has hit oregon yet we do we don't sample very many of all the cases we don't sample very many nationally we sample 0.3 percent of all cases that we actually do the genetic sequencing on you can go to next strain.org and look at all the results in oregon so far none of those samples have turned up the variant when i last looked um but they they are they make up two percent in the u.s um right now so um it is most likely here you've heard the states that it's already in california colorado or near um and and so it is most likely here i think most people admit and and it you know it can get unlucky in how fast it grows but eventually it looks like it it becomes a dominant one pretty quickly right and and then the graphs that you're showing us um do not factor in the the greater transmissibility of nuvarian right it does not and we you know we're working on that i will say you know um i i think i mentioned this before you know kind of if the fatigue doesn't get us the variant will um a second wave is another winter wave is going to happen one of those two arrays and so we do we need to be ready for that i consider this a race to vaccination so you know we have eight weeks and we're going to want to get as many vaccines in people's arms as we can right now because that that is a pretty serious issue coming up right and my fear is we're going to get both the fatigue and the variant which um that will um the fatigue could happen first once a variant hits there will be fear but but will we know if we're not if we're not doing the right kind of testing we won't know until true uh yeah i see um we will know but we will know when that when the case counts go up very quickly that's when it will happen right okay um so there it is i i appreciate um the sense of urgency and the interest and and dr graven um we do have other guests that are here from multnomah county as well as uh our coalition of communities of color um and we do have a q a opportunity at the end um so i i just want to speak cognizant of that as we move forward here yeah and and i would i would say that you know i think the county may may have better or more accurate answers on some of these things regarding the variant as well so i feel you know happily defer on some of those questions you know like i said you know we're having to make a lot of assumptions i'd like to give you the best information i can thank you dr graven we really appreciate your expertise and your willingness to answer questions and i think it'd be good to move on to the further part of the presentation but would love to have you stick around so that when we do some more q a at the end we can um ask you all sorts of questions uh again so uh again uh really thankful that dr uh griffin could uh join us today and really um appreciate him being willing to hang around and maybe answer some additional questions later really pleased that uh going to be joined by our partners at multnomah county we work with them very closely around reopening decisions including you know throughout the fall those places where we had limited in person instruction where we opened health clinics etc we work with them very closely throughout this process so i'm thrilled to be able to introduce them we're fortunate to have with us tonight director guernsey who's the director of multnomah county public health i'm dr ann lofler the deputy health officer please join me in thanking them for their service to multnomah county over what's been an extremely challenging time and for sharing their expertise and experience with us today welcome director guernsey and dr lofler hi everybody can you hear me okay and and dr loffler were you able to unmute okay she might be having some trouble with her sound i don't know it looks like
02h 25m 00s
she's still muted there okay [Music] um ann are you speaking it looks like ann is unmuted but we're not able to hear her okay i'll text her in a minute um well we'll get started you all can hear me okay right yes all right well uh again my name is um jessica guernsey i'm the public health director of multnomah county health department i use uh she her pronouns and i'm really pleased to be with you all tonight i too am a um portland public school parent i have two adult children that graduated from franklin and i have a 16 year old who is a junior at franklin lorenzo and um he loves franklin we love franklin and not not to dismiss the other schools don't get me wrong um but i obviously have a have a preference for the school my my children have gone to are going you've got a cleveland parent and uh a current wilson parent on the call with you so we we may have all these cheers or something and then each school board member is going to want to represent their school so they're all good thank you all so much everybody here um the board um anyone and everybody who works in the school district um superintendent um everyone i can't thank you enough for your work every day um just as a parent in portland public schools and um raising kids and in the community your work is um tremendous in you know raising critical thinkers and uh just really want to appreciate you all through this really difficult time that we're all going through it's unprecedented um it's exhausting um and um it's very scary as we've you know heard through talking about um all of the things that are going on right now in in our environment um and before i get started with the actual slides um uh just a few things that i want to say about our public health response um first of all you're seeing my face and anne's face um we are part of a small but mighty team that has been working day and night for a year and i would be remiss and not deeply appreciating them many of them are parents in portland public schools and other school districts and i couldn't be prouder of a team in public health that has really worked higher us tirelessly day and night for a full year in in a very very scary situation we take the health of the entire community quite seriously that's our job our job is to protect the health of the entire population of multnomah county and i will share with you all much like the values that you all have shared in your um really thoughtful deliver deliberations about how to approach uh you know reconvening students and classes um we also have taken a racial equity approach to our response so i just want to note a few things um that i didn't create a slide on but just wanted to talk through a few um pieces of work that um hopefully you all are aware of um in in your work through the schools but also through the families that we all serve um as uh dr graven um noted and folks asked about disaggregated data from multnomah county by race ethnicity we have absolutely seen covet 19 impact our bipod communities much harder than our white communities and our response has been in step with that um one thing i want to mention i don't see a chat box on here and i can't do two things at once on zoom anyway so i don't want to touch anything um but we at multnomah county one of the things that we did quite early on uh was create a dashboard on our multnomah county website where you can see uh live data of what we're seeing in the community both in terms of test positivity bi-race ethnicity and hospitalization so i encourage you to go to our website to look at that that's a very important guide for us in our work um in addition to that some of the other things that we did very early on and honestly we were doing anyway because this is what public health does is um we're working with communities the communities that we served in what we call make meaning of that data you know it's not enough to be looking at numbers what you really have to be doing is be in dialogue with community to understand what is going on a lot of times uh even measures are are coming from sort of a dominant system model um so often what we're looking at is not even the right thing so you really really have to unpack a lot of these um paradigms if you will that you're working from we know that systemic race and racism exists in in medicine it really exists in public
02h 30m 00s
health so um we have done our best to take a careful approach um to being a dialogue with community around what does this actually mean and what do we need to do so in addition to that just um some of the more obvious things that we've um been doing that hopefully you all have seen is we've been partnering very actively with our culturally specific community-based agencies that are funded both through the county and the state to do a couple things we have a very robust system of wrap-around care with community health workers across the community that provides support for people who test positive for covid19 and or contacts so obviously you all know that one of the things we really try to support is for people to be um in isolation or quarantine um not everybody can do that like you can think very practically why people can't do that i'm making a choice not to go to work or living in a household where it's very difficult as someone was noting before about creating distance and small spaces all of these things are things we wrangled with for months and have really created a robust system to get people access to things like an alternative place to stay like a hotel food for groceries food to pay for utilities payments for mortgages or rent so that people don't lose their homes so all of these things are part of a system of care that we've created in a matter of weeks honestly to make sure that people had access to those things some of the other things that we're doing that you all have heard about the contact tracing although that has pivoted since we've been in what we call a surge the state's guidance around that has changed but we do continue to do um very specific outbreak investigation where we have high-risk scenarios for example long-term care and we do some limited contact tracing more in those high-risk situations additionally a big part of the work is really around communications being a liaison in the community that is a huge part of local public health we have a very robust liaison system a very strong connection with the schools we have wonderful liaisons to the schools um to keep the channels open you know find out what's needed be in dialogue about how to make things work and then of course we have our testing sites and our testing sites have been strong partnerships um with different culturally specific community-based agencies again much of this work needs to happen in partnership with trusted leaders in the community we know not everybody is going to go to a mass testing site at a hospital um so we really um try to express those values through all of the work that we're doing so that wasn't even part of my slide deck i just wanted to mention a few things um and why don't you go to the next slide so um we're going to talk a little bit i'm sorry did someone say something pardon me i just coughed oh okay um i am just going to trust that ann might jump in here um but we'll keep going this is cara i she called in on a phone and i enabled that can we see if she's able to speak now i'm here can you all hear me from my phone oh yeah yeah yeah okay all right thank you [Music] good to know you're there anne okay so we were gonna do uh an update um on uh the vaccination work that we've been doing and then also talk a little bit more about um our role as local public health with the schools um next slide so um our goals around the vaccine distribution um include several different um key areas we have a role in ensuring that the vaccine is safe and effective this is across all levels of government uh the vaccine um one of our goals is to reduce transmission morbidity and mortality um as we were just talking about with dr graven this is a extremely important element and how we're going to be addressing the pandemic going forward another goal is to minimize disruption to society and the economy including maintaining a health care capacity that's part of the reason there's been a front-end focus on that 1a group in the vaccination phases to immunize people in healthcare settings which is a very very broadly defined setting and then ensure equity of access and uh this is a principle that we used in the standing up of our testing sites that we've always planned on replicating with community-based partners in our vaccination efforts next slide
02h 35m 00s
so um a little bit about phase one a and i just want to acknowledge that today um we got some very unexpected late breaking news from the federal government regarding the release of additional vaccine and an expansion of the eligible groups to receive vaccines so some of you may have seen the governor sent out a press release today regarding this event and we are still figuring out exactly what this means for oregon and for local jurisdictions that are responsible for assuring vaccine access but basically the state announced that the expansion will include individuals all individuals age 65 and older and the federal government announced that it would be releasing its full reserve of vaccines available to states um previously they had uh decided to hold some of the vaccine uh inventory back so we are still um figuring out exactly what this means for the on-the-ground immunization plans and i'll talk a little bit about that in a second so currently the groups that are in uh phase 1a which we are still uh vaccinating now are these four groups you see on the screen that include like i said a very broad definition of hospital and health care workers it includes long-term care facilities many of those long-term care facilities are associated with a federal pharmacy contract um to go out to these facilities and vaccinate staff and um and uh people living in the facilities um group two also includes congregate care mobile crisis care individuals working in correctional settings group three includes outpatient settings surveying high-risk groups in-home day treatment services non-emergency medical transport and then group four is health care providers and outpatient public health early learning settings and death care workers this this is a very very very large group of people the state at one point estimated that it was uh between 300 and 400 000 people statewide i think that's probably an underestimate and i would hazard to say that a large portion of those people live in the metro area so this is the focus area that we have been working on thus far and today we announced a really exciting partnership with our metro county partners and the hospitals to stand up very very large vaccine pods megapods if you will that allow large groups of people to come through and get vaccinated whether it's a drive-through vaccination or a parking lot large area where people can physically distance so we are in the in the process of standing up these very very large vaccination sites over the next two weeks to move as quickly as we can through this group 1a as a few folks pointed out um you know the the unprecedented effort to roll this vaccine out we've never done something of this scale so i'd like to remind people that yes it's been um slow to start and and difficult and convoluted by politics and all sorts of things um but we are moving very quickly and working day and night to stand up the access to um these resources and we're very excited about this partnership that's launched um with the hospitals and our sister counties to start to roll this work out and we expect to as um dr graven referred to um just based on the numbers and talking to the hospitals and our partners today we fully expect to be hitting those numbers that the governor has set as a goal um as we stand uh these vaccine clinics up next slide so this is a little snapshot of um what is um what is uh it's a sort of a live live stream if you will on a state website of how many vaccinations by county um there's a statewide dashboard that you can look up if you um just google uh covid19 oregon vaccine this will give you a live shot of how much vaccine we're getting out proportionate to the population we expect this like i said before to move um much more much more quickly uh in the coming weeks as we stand up these vaccination sites so this is just an this is just a dashboard that you can look at to get a snapshot of what's happening next slide
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i think ann i think you're doing this one yeah so thank you for having us very much i'm ann lochler i'm a little bit new in my role but i'm not new to portland i'm a pediatric infectious doctor and i've been in practice in portland for 17 years mostly at randall children's hospital but in public health my whole career through my role in tuberculosis care and other important public health issues including school-based health i wanted to assure you that the goal of our whole public health team is to partner with you and to advocate for the developmental physical and mental health of our learners i think this is this is a community this is a village and this is everything that we're uh sharing with you today kind of off the topic of this slide i just wanted to talk about some of the things that we plan to collaborate with you in the coming weeks and months as we move forward i think many of you know the sort of process that the state ode has put in place in terms of submitting reopening plans we will continue to give you feedback on your reopening plans we'll look at those things from both safety of students and staff and community as well as using an equity lens to make sure that the most vulnerable students and community have the best outcomes possible using all the tools that public health has to offer and we'll continue to be a bridge between the school and community in terms of doing contact tracings where we can but some of that is going to really entail staying ahead of things by helping you develop your cohorts and limit transmission by those safety plans that come through the reopening process so i just wanted to assure you that all those things are our goal we are completely partners in this so in terms of the slide here this is the current governor's advisory metric i think probably earlier in the meeting you talked about the fact that on january 19th we're expecting a lot of things to change as the governor and ode make new guidance perhaps around the metrics perhaps around the use of antigen testing in schools and we are all eagerly awaiting what that will look like and how we can all work work on that together so those are the basic things that i wanted to share with you next slide um i i understood earlier that um your medical advisory committee has talked to you about some of the research and some of the resources that are available in the literature this has been a big few weeks in terms of publication of studies and i do want to acknowledge that the studies that have been recently published definitely got their data earlier in the pandemic but i also have had the opportunity to be on a couple of different national meetings through the course of the pandemic one in the pediatric infections community and one in the big cities public health community and i have been able to hear some of the resources that have been developed over time and also some of the ongoing data that has not yet been published so we are cautiously optimistic as you start to explore the idea of some more limited in-person instructions and what that might look like and how you might do it safely these resources i'm sure are well known to you on the top one someone alluded earlier to the duke study that was published last week but the abc collaborative is a new north carolina wide project 56 districts have worked together in an all share all learn capacity of transparency and dashboards and including parents and including community and learning from each other as they go what has worked what hasn't worked what needs to be tweaked along the way how to plan do study act and um i think that we can all be grateful for that collaboration i figure if duke and unc can work together i think that's a good sign and then finally last week the american academy of pediatrics published their updated resources and their clinical guidance as well as a bibliography and these things are encouraging that by going very slowly and learning as you go and seeing uh what works in individual communities and make sure the priorities prioritize an equity lens that you will you will get there you know your kids are not gonna stay home forever how quickly or how slowly you pace it is is i think up to you as a board and uh as a superintendent and we look
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forward to partnering with you and being your resources every step of the way so uh with that um i'm not sure what the rest of the agenda looks like but i'll definitely stay on for for questions whenever it's appropriate hey dr brown are we ready for our next series yeah um given uh the weightness of the the hour i would would recommend that maybe we proceed and bring in our last speaker and then hold the questions to the end again really pleased to be joined this evening um you know by dr guernsey and dr buffler uh again we're looking forward to continuing to partner working together support our county residents district staff students families and our and our community partners that work with our students i'm now really pleased to introduce marcus mundy the executive director of the coalition of communities of color please join me in thanking marcus and his member organizations for all their service to our students and families of color especially during this year uh welcome mr monday uh thank you dr brown for a second i thought you said you're not pleased he said i'm now pleased i'm like wow that's pretty mean okay no i wouldn't lead that way all right well good evening chair lowry uh vice chair bailey directors and superintendent guerrero my name is marcus mundy and i'm the executive director of the coalition of communities of color my pronouns are he him and his and let me just start off by saying with apologies to dr graven and say as a black man scheduled to speak at 705 i would finally love to move to the front of the line and start to start off the agenda for two reasons one because i think uh what you just heard from uh dr graven and dr luffler and and and director guernsey was the fact they were talking about covet i think that's the most important thing anybody can do right now including the school board and then the second reason you know that i wouldn't mind being to the front of the line is that i believe in the prioritization of the equity frame in every single instance and if we do that if we get used to starting with the equity frame at the beginning of meetings and conversations and deliberations and budgets we're going to solve a whole lot more problems so i just wanted to lay that out there and uh and just uh thank you all for being elected and tonight's meeting has definitely let me know that i will it's not likely i'll ever run for office but god bless all of you who do as many of you know the coalition is an alliance of culturally specific community-based organizations who work here in portland but actually throughout oregon and sometimes in vancouver our mission is to address the socio-economic disparities institutional racism and inequity of services experienced by our families children and communities this alliance representing the racial and ethnic diversity of our community organizes our community for collective action resulting in social change to obtain self-determination wellness justice and prosperity now you've heard that from me before but it bears repeating and there's no greater need for our work than right now for over 10 years at least our members have stood shoulder to shoulder with pps to provide culturally specific services to students and families there our cbo's are instrumental in implementing racial justice strategies so that our bypoc students of color have access to culturally specific fairly family engagement wrap-around services leadership mentoring positive cultural identity development and extended learning opportunities six long months ago i came before you to testify about the consideration of the budget at that time i implored you to join our table to sit with us to call us to tap into the deep expertise and experience of our members who can help your overwhelmingly white staff build real relationships with black and brown students and their families i i i wrote i am happy to be back here but i think i'm happy to be back here again to provide you with even more perspective as we move deeper into winter with an eye towards spring six months ago you were contemplating budget implications amidst a justified uprising and protest demanding racial justice we were three months into a global pandemic facing uncertainty and a racial reckoning and today we are we are all still reeling from the traitorous attacks on our capital and country the result of our election and the american democracy and our compromise leadership we're fighting all of these things right now but as you can imagine the ccc member organizations and the families we serve
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continue to be at the epicenter of this continuing crisis and that's what i wanted to talk to you about today i want to share an update on the perspective of our member organizations and the bypoc families of color we serve in portland as we both watch and speak to decision makers about the pandemic we're keenly aware of its disproportionate impact on communities of color people get wearing about hearing about disproportionate impact on communities of color well i have news for you i get wary of talking about it but i'm not going to stop until we are no longer more likely to contract covet or health outcomes that show that we are more likely to have underlying conditions that increase the morbidity of this virus our member organizations employ thousands of people of color right here in oregon many of whom work alongside pps administrators and teachers and their safety is a chief concern for member organizations when the pandemic hit our organizations immediately hit the ground began safety planning adopting uh protocols to protect our employees and and the employees at pps that we interact with and our members are working remotely and adapting to meeting by zoom like like like all of us at the same time our members were quick to respond to the increasing need by our communities they're providing services remotely making the necessary adaptations so that the kids and the families have access to their basic needs which means they're providing resource navigation and doing direct service with infected people sometimes and people at risk many other times right in clients homes driving to them putting themselves in the direct line for risk of transmission this is dangerous for the our employees and for pps employees so more often it means they are on the phone or receiving texts with excruciating regularity hearing about the needs challenges and even the heartbreaks of our community members too many of our members have had to console staff families and children about the loss of loved ones the hunger the fear the isolation anxiety and depression are exacerbated by the requirements of physical distancing several of you have spoken about the social emotional and behavioral health impacts of covert this is a very real thing and and you talk about exacerbations it is exacerbated in communities that were already under stress before coving began so um i mentioned many are unable to say goodbye to loved ones to support hug and comfort uh other loved ones and what this means for us in particular is that in order to stay safe we have to do the opposite of what is culturally responsive in our communities and that has taken that toll particularly as our community continues to reel from the foundations of racism that rear their ugliness and violence disproportion disproportionality and minimized hope i know i'm talking fast but i'm trying to honor people's time so i'll get through it i'm i'm winding up um our communities are very worried and fearful about the projections for what is to come this month and next you know this last mile before we get all these new vaccines there and it's difficult to fathom fathom even more of an impact but as i heard from dr graven that may be possible so we we have to be vigilant our member organizations are working with our county health department we love multnomah county just like we love pps to provide information education and ensure our community has the facts so they can make informed decisions about staffing and services and as we hopefully look to vaccine distribution january 23rd god bless everybody there our members are eager to ensure that included in prioritization and you've heard this several times tonight too is a racialized equity lens to ensure that impacted communities are receiving their fair share of vaccines this we a lot of us live in pharmacy deserts i know that's one possibility for getting out of the vaccine but that doesn't help all of us some of us live in food deserts and whatever that all matters so so this means we're advocating that not only frontline healthcare professions receive vaccines and i know there's a schedule but that service workers such as custodians or kitchen workers or caretakers at these facilities they too get the vaccine in in sequence order we appreciate the approach that partner a partnership that pps has taken in advocating that all students facing staff and partners be prioritized in this 1b way finally ish i would be remiss if i didn't also mention that there's still work to do in our communities of color to build trust and understanding about vaccinations we have good reason for our apprehension and reluctance in our communities
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with the history of eugenics and lack of access and racist beliefs about our pain thresholds these are just a few reasons for skepticism my own dad was born three years before the tuskegee project started in tuskegee and uh he lived there for 30 of the 40 years of that project so there but for the grace of god though my dad or my granddad i think my grandfather was too old and my dad was too young to be part of that pool but he very well could have been part of it and uh that awareness in our community is that goes without saying so um our member organizations are committed to providing credible information and working to build trust um in the community because the threat of this pandemic has wreaked havoc so we're proud to partner with multnomah county and pps in a town hall coming up where we have medical experts that reflect our diverse community and they're gonna we're gonna speak to the importance of vaccines so we can support efforts to build trust like pps we understand the importance of returning children back to in-person person school but i cannot offer testimony tonight that says one way or the other we've heard contrasting bits of testimony tonight but uh one way or the other where all of our members and communities of color opinions are in consensus we're not all in consensus we have a lot of members and some want their kids right back in school and some have a lot of questions about the teachers and some want the pandemic problem to be solved before they even go near that situation i've even done a little outreach on my own it's only anecdotal but it's from an ivy league chair of pediatrics who who i know and i called when i heard some of the early things on this call and and her advice was to uh that is i think one of the slides said it's a complex path to return but the recommendation was that the schools go cautiously opening because they don't she didn't recommend they put teachers at risk one one uh fellow with the american college of physicians opinion a pediatrics opinion but still an opinion so across our member organizations the implications of returning back to school for staff parents grandparents it is significant in our homes and communities of color we tend to have more compromised multi-generational homes more people living on top of each other in smaller spaces in the space context was mentioned earlier so all that said learning loss is significant that's come up and i know you all are cognizant of that the pernicious opportunity gap that plagues our community's great greatest hopes is always on our mind and our member organizations and we're all anxious to provide those services we know improve outcomes for students of color all of our communities are diverse and within each community there is a range of opinion we will keep pps highly appraised apprised of all the information coming from the community we have open conduits of communication with pps and we appreciate that so to conclude finally i want to applaud the superintendent and the district leaders for not rushing the judgment and continuing to seek our advice and input and i ask that we continue to work together in service of of the black native and students of color at pps and their families sadly for you all i had a whole lot more but that's it but i really appreciate you taking the time to listen and i really encourage all of you to continue to consider that equity lens in every frame of everything you do so thank you for the opportunity to speak today and um certainly we thank you mr monday uh both for for your contribution this evening and your patience uh with with that uh we have a window of opportunity here for for questions i want to thank all our our guest panelists this evening for for coming and again turn this over to the board now for for whatever questions you may have for for our panelists and or staff admitted um i had a quick question about the one of the slides that might have been slide 20 um talking about i think it was the phased you know phase 1a and wondering how i didn't see like a prioritization based on race in that in that list and how are we squaring you know the governor's phased approach and how are we including communities of color in that in that in that those how are we plugging communities of color in i would expect them to be pretty high on the list depending on their um occupations just due to what we already know and what's already been said on the call yeah in in oregon um uh the way that that has been expressed an application of a racial equity length within phase 1a is a very large
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definition of people that work within uh all of those settings so that's that's why i was saying earlier that you know i've heard estimates of 300 to 400 000 people statewide within that phase 1a which i suspect is actually much larger because when you include everyone um so that would include anyone you know in a hospital setting for example folks that are working in the in the kitchen folks that are providing cleaning services when you define it all the way out to anyone that's in that you know grouping of folks that is associated with the hospital it's a much much larger group not not all jurisdictions have done that so you know i can't i can't speak for other jurisdictions but in oregon i know the folks that that worked on that phase 1a that is where they did their best to integrate a racial equity lens in um uh making that those concentric circles very large um this is rita uh i guess i don't have a i mean i have many questions but i'll spare you it's getting late um i think i have a request um as everybody has said this is an incredibly complex issue that is also incredibly important for everybody um for our students our families staff and also for the larger community um so i i have a great interest in trying to get right um and um these days i have a lot of time on my hands and i'm not leaving my living room ever so i'm doing a lot of reading on my own but i am a layperson and i am seeing um i'm seeing some difference of opinion depending on um you know which authority i i look at you know what paper i read what what newspaper article you know who i talk to um it would be very helpful um at least for me if um if we on the board could get some kind of summary document that written by people who actually know stuff to tell us what is the current state of science because i think we all have we all know whatever science we know and most of us are not really qualified um i'm certainly not although i have views um it would be very helpful i i think at this point i think it's essential that we get some kind of um white paper that summarizes the state of the science so that we can get a uh we can really ground our decision making and our advocacy in um you know an accurate understanding of what the science is telling us so that's my request um i have a question for for doctors guernsey and loffler and it's a question i asked our health panel about a month ago um and it's not whether you would reopen schools i only asked dr graham in that um the um um but i asked the question of how how do we from a public health perspective how do you i'm not a public health person um you know how how but how do we create a framework or a rubric for making this um um for weighing these these these costs and benefits right i mean you're very focused right now on kobit but you're also very focused on on you know kids generally right and public health generally and i'll be honest one of my huge fears is that five years from now when we see the impact on this generation of children from the lost learning social emotional impacts you know the mental health impacts the consensus five years from now will be where were the adults at the moment to sort of speak up on behalf of those kids and the impact on them um but i think it's really really hard in any equation and as human beings right we always look at short-term cost versus long-term costs and it's hard to weigh those things so from a public health profession when you get together with other people how do you how do you look at that framework and and is there something there that we can use as a school board and the superintendent his team can use to know when that moment is and i appreciate what you've said about reopening slowly um and carefully but but even even under that we still have to be weighing those costs and benefits to make that decision um well i'll say a few words and then dr lafleur um chime in first of all i'm not a doctor i i just i love hearing dr guernsey but i'm actually not
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a doctor you sound way smarter than than than i do so i swear okay well yeah i have a master's in public health and my family would say well she thinks she's a doctor but anyway that's another story um you know that's a great question public health is an art and a science um there's a lot of things that we could talk about in terms of data and literature and academic assessments but but ultimately um it comes down to a conversation of looking at all of these different factors that you all are talking about and we certainly we see our role to assist in in some of those conversations but you know what you all are pointing out is that this is very much a decision that involves um community values family decisions um other other important uh factors and data points um that we don't have a clear picture on right now this the situation is very frustrating because um you know some of the things we can't fully see right now and understand what the trade-offs are we talk a lot about trade-offs in this situation because of exactly what you're asking so um we certainly see ourselves as being a partner and helping to think that through but i think it really comes down to a conversation the conversation that you all are having right now which is um looking at those variables and being comfortable making decisions in the absence of um you know some some information that might be fairly important which is really really scary um and that's kind of how we approach some of the public health work is really taking a careful approach to that um taking one step into it understanding what's happening and like ann was saying you know doing that plan do study act cycle to really understand what the implications are so we we definitely can be a partner in helping to ask some of those questions but ultimately it's a it's a pretty large community dialogue dr loeffler would you add any yeah i would i would just say that um when when we learned that some of the states that um ultimately wound up having a lot of cases of covid made the choice that kids were going back to school come hell or high water uh people in places like oregon and some of the other people on the pediatric disease groups that i'm on said well at least we'll learn from their experience and i think that that you know that really has afforded us a lot of information that can help us take three steps ahead you know when we dip those toes in the water so um again we just have the luxury of seeing what worked what didn't work um what things can be prioritized what kind of math kids actually can keep on quite well how you can teach them to weight the six feet um how you can build your cohorts and um and that's allowed us as a public health team to be able to say you know let's get our ducks in a row so that when the schools say they're ready we are here to support them and um you know we could talk a lot more about the use of the antigen test which i think the state's going to tell us a lot more about on the 19th is something we've been studying in our in our population um in the unstably house population with good success so i think there's a lot to talk about and whenever you're ready we're here to partner with you uh mr mundi i just wanted to thank you for being here tonight and i appreciate your statements about moving you to the beginning of our um list of guests and you know we we are continuing to try to live into our express values and some nights we do it better than others um tonight's not been a great night um and so it's what do we learn from tonight that we can move forward um but i wanted to ask you a question about um the sort of this sense of um who's getting whose voices are getting heard and um it feels like one of the things i keep hearing is we're not hearing from families who [Music] um are um struggling already with some of what you named like living in multiple houses being front-line workers um so what what sense um can you give us about how we can be better at listening to those we might not be hearing i mean obviously having you here is great but what other things as a board can we be doing right now as we discuss reopening to make sure we're hearing from all of our community um you know clearly well i'm not we're not a direct service provider half of our members already work with you as partners so go to go to the cbo's you're already working with who are talking to these people working with these families i was pleased to hear at the beginning
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that one of the groups we work with just had a tragedy just had a fire at one of their uh complexes hacienda and i was glad to hear that you all were aware of it knew it were reaching out to help them but you know multiply that you know 50 times over and just talk to the cbo's they know what your students are going through and they know what your families are going through and when a lot of people again mention the socio emotional needs of these students if you talk to your cbo's they can help you begin to solve some of these problems far more quickly than you know you just the i'm sure you have wonderful resource offer officers and social workers and whatever but these people touch the community every day so i would start there and in there that's excellent thank you and i would like to say that it was really impressive to hear just very quickly after the news of the fire that the scott pta was on scene as was the principal of that elementary school and so that idea of that school is not just what happened sort of in the classroom but it is this the community and how we show up for one another in difficult times like this and i know that hacienda is raising funds to help support families that have been displaced so um if you want to help the kali families displaced from the vista clarifier you can google hacienda fire and and find ways to donate sorry director depos yeah thank you i just want to thank mr mundy as well for showing up and also um just for us not to rely on you know the sole communities of color but rather that you know we have a list of people that we contract with of um cbo's that we should be um reaching out like actively engaging with them and asking them um what they're hearing i think i mean you you're the membership organization the coalition of is it 150 organizations i i we will get there no it's uh 19 but we're we'll be growing in 2021 but beyond that you know we have 19 members but we also have lots of relationships some of which are with the organizations you're speaking of we work with a lot of groups that are not our groups but we partner with everybody who who is good for communities of color so whether that's reap or bpi or you know there's groups all across the spectrum we've helped a latino health coalition any group that is for the advancement of our our children and families we we will have partnered with at some time and some actively just just following on that question um the superintendent whether in our sort of overall vaccination plans whether our community partners are an integrated part of that knowing that our students often leave our schools and then are going to community partner programs or community partner programs are coming into schools are they integrated into our planning yeah that's a great question actually yesterday we just had a conversation with a couple of our key partners and we're on the same page because they raised the same point and we we acknowledge it they're student-facing staff and they're connecting with families all the time so as now that we know it's you know really going to be up to us partnering with our county and esd uh partners that we we include um our culturally specific organization staff when we talk about uh the group 1b uh which which is coming up next so now that 1a has expanded to include 65 and older and from what i'm hearing we're about thirty percent um accomplished in that one a group getting full full offer of vaccination uh we'll be ready in our plans depending on the doses made available to us uh to distribute some sequence of of student-facing adults and you know for instance if we're going to prioritize younger kids maybe we want to focus on early educators uh but we're we're still working out a lot of those details it's a little premature today but every day that goes by we're getting a little bit more clear and i'm looking forward to our ongoing meetings and later this week with with the chair of the county uh and our public health officials as we develop those vaccine timelines with our internal team great thank you so much i know we have more to discuss here um i would draw our attention to the time and our agenda so i just wanted to ask if um we wanted to continue further discussion at this point or if we were ready to move on um how are you excuse me um i have a couple questions um we may be able to handle this over email but i was hoping for a little more specificity about our plans for limited in-person instruction and to see a timeline on what we expect to go forward i mean we've seen generally four groups prioritized but superintendent i know you said you're going to be coming out with a more comprehensive timeline before the end of
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the semester but when can we expect to get a little bit more detail on lippy and another sort of sub question i had was if we uh the status of any survey of our families so that we can gauge um what percentage of our of all of our families would be ready to come back to school and then what percentage of our subgroups of families that might be invited back for the ever initial limited in person instruction will be willing to come back first to school sure i'd love to give you the details but part of our models depend on what we learn on january 19th regarding the guidelines but i know that staff has been working with our labor partners around a rolling return at least from a limited instruction point of view that prioritizes our youngest students and some transition grades but uh i don't want to steal sort of some of the the thunder here uh sean among other staff has been working through so we've put them on screen here so maybe he can give you a little bit of a preview of coming attractions but depending on our vaccine rollout and the capacity required for on-site testing which we're also deliberating uh then that'll help sort of determine along with cohorting and social distancing requirements and some flexibility there how much and how many uh we anticipate to start bringing back uh in the coming weeks but dr berg all right good evening board members so yeah we yes we have been working on our limited instruction uh plans and we're going to start with our with 16 elementary schools which are the 10 sites that have child care on them already plus our six csi elementary schools and we'll also have two high schools that are ready to go uh for credit recovery and we are working with middle school principals as well so it's uh grades k through three uh sixth in middle school nine eleven and twelve in high school so high school you can imagine is uh focusing mostly on credit recovery for our 11th and 12th graders who are uh in need of credit in order to graduate and then those ninth graders and sixth graders it's really about the children who have uh not uh performed well in quarter one so we're using data to uh see those those children who need more assistance so we'll bring start bringing groups of them in in k through three it is uh you know the schools that were chosen are our most uh our highest need schools so our csi schools the next tier once we get them in and started the next tier would be our tsi and title schools and then we'll uh actually add the rest of the schools in so eventually you'll see limited in-person offerings across the school district but we're going to start relatively small because we have to work out some operational uh matters like transportation uh to see if that's needed we also have to work out as you might remember us uh limited in person cannot replace um conference of distance learning it has to supplement it so we have teachers that are teaching you know in the morning and then they'll be volunt volunteering to add for this additional service of course they'll be compensated for but it's in addition to their regular duties so we have to survey our staff at each school to see you know which uh what people are available we've just reached an agreement recently with the horton association of teachers and i believe we have reached a center of agreement with pfsp because we'll have those staff members that are also um uh contributing to our efforts here so we uh have principles right now working on plans uh they're surveying their staff to see volunteers and then they're submitting those plans to us for review uh remember we remember that we had uh work groups a few a couple of months ago before the spike in the virus started so we had some things already in the works this is not just like we're just starting right now we've had things in the works for several months we've been planning so uh we're hoping we are aiming for a start of around the 25th of january and that's because uh partially because we are orienting all of our principles to our buildings with the remove furniture that for physical distance that has to be required and our principals also have to work to create plans for entrance and exit from the building for symptom spaces in their schools so they have to do some logistical work that they've been working on but our operations team has uh been through all of our campuses it's it's a tremendous amount of work uh for the facilities that we have to remove that furniture set this classrooms up correctly so that's taken uh some time now our principles will go in and uh you know kind of solidify their plans because they're individual just as a reminder too for the limited in person uh parameters there can be it's two hours a day up to two hours a day and cohorts of up to 20 people but given the size of most of our schools our cohorts are really can be about you know 13 to 15 people given the give or take uh depending on the school
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so there's a lot of factors at play here and we want to serve the highest number of students that we can but we also want to make sure we're doing it safely and we want to do it very intentionally so you'll hear more information once we get this first group in then we'll start i mean planning is happening for all of our principals they're all working on plans right now but we're going to roll out over time so for a little bit of a preview at a high level here of what the team has been working on and for being a little more forthcoming about details that i know you're still working out with each site administrator around what that looks like in their specific building context so hopefully what you're getting a sense of is a slow roll slow return to cdl plus lippy activity in the afternoons with groupings of schools as we build our muscle uh on the site and we test out all our safety protocols that we've been planning for months so uh stay tuned this is some of you'll hear some of the the community will hear more of these details in in the coming days as we prepare our communication thank you superintendent guerrero um are we ready to move on to our next topics okay thank you all so much for coming and um for speaking tonight we really appreciate you and uh your guidance and support as we try to make these policy decisions thank you everyone um so i've had a couple of requests board members to change the agenda there has been some sense that we've got members of the public who are very interested in the southeast guiding coalition report and so there's been some requests to move that forward and so wanted to check in with you it would mean um that would come next and then we would do the professional we would do the board committee reports and then the policies after that um what is your sense i support the shift yeah i think that's a good idea okay well let's take a break until 9 50 and we'll come back at 9 50 with the southeast guiding coalition recommendations thanks everyone lieutenant guerrero if he's back um to go ahead and introduce this moved up item the um let's see i have to find it on my script the um enrollment balancing final phase one scenario for southeast superintendent guerrero thank you chair lowry sorry even with a large size monitor i am lost in my windows and tabs um uh but i'm glad that uh another important topic uh this evening june 2019 in fact the board adopted uh not just our ambitious vision for the school districts long long term it's it's north star art identified some core values a direction to guide our ongoing transformation and so while pps continues to engage in all these multi-pronged efforts at improving student opportunities and outcomes uh through through a whole a whole program of strategies and uh efforts aimed at students healthy social emotional support there's also been a number of system related issues um some of them revolve around our physical environments and uh and how those impact on student success so thankfully voters understood this as well with the bond campaign but over time school systems find themselves often out of balance in how they utilize their building so uh to address those issues here in pps we we launched an enrollment and program balancing uh process uh long overdue and recognized by especially many of our board members who even before they were on the board uh have been involved in these issues so this led to the convening um well contracting first of all with flow analytics to help us with sort of the data end of things some analysis and modeling um as well as uh staff internally helping to uh really think about how to best engage uh and converge uh many different school communities uh and perspectives so this led to the convening of the southeast guiding coalition composed of parents guardians principal students teachers to arrive at pretty close to consensus we know that there are still some outstanding issues and i'm sure directors will probably illuminate a few of those uh arriving however at a general recommendation for this phase one process so uh director bailey appreciate has been one of the identified board liaisons to this work and um probably he and i can think of a couple of others who have a lot of
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history in this area uh would be helpful as i listened every week to to the discussion uh i know that he was he was there as well uh if you wouldn't mind sharing your experience about the process and the arrival at this final recommendation uh thank you superintendent guerrero first of all i want to start off by saying a big thank you to the members of the guiding coalition and thanks to our staff and our contractor flo for working through a very challenging complex process remember fellow board members we charged the guiding coalition with a couple of objectives we wanted to transition to middle schools kellogg in particular we started with a second unnamed one but i think it became apparent to all very quickly that the only suitable building was harrison park which had been a middle school in the past as the second choice uh we wanted to balance enrollment not only at elementary and middle school but also at the high school level to optimally use our buildings we wanted to minimize co-location of programs and in particular to eliminate single-strand neighborhood programs at the elementary level and finally we wanted to create a clear coherent pathway for students receiving special education all the way from k-12 that they could stay with their cohort uh that's a lot to take on and it's it's challenging to do public process anyway but to do it in the age of kovid is ten times as as difficult um and it also didn't help that the process was uh the timeline was truncated because we were set to start right when covet came out and so the start of the process was delayed i think despite all that committee members went to work they dove in again this is complex because on the one hand there's there's huge uh values we're trying to inject uh racial equity into the entire process and there's a lot of data issues as well and it's hard to know from a public process what decisions should be made by a citizen group and which decisions should be made by educators because that's why we pay them the big bucks they're the experts on it so there was attention there as well um the process wasn't perfect and we've all received letters uh with some criticisms of the process uh and i think we're we're going to learn from that and get better as we go forward on that um i want to credit staff with pivoting halfway through because they listen very clearly to feedback uh feedback that this is too much too fast and so a piece of the what was supposed to be a phase one decision got pushed into a later phase for this spring and that really seemed to work that that simplification gave the right bite-size uh decision that the crew group could coalesce around um it wasn't a total consensus um and we heard earlier from a couple of creston parents um that that is uh kind of one of the outstanding issues um i would say that community uh and you heard it stated very clearly but i heard it in a zoo meeting with them they are pretty distraught and really want as soon as possible um some uh just to see their kids be in a middle school like now next year um so i i think that's one thing we'll be talking about tonight um i do want to say that this is uh so complex um and the guiding coalition i think did a great job of creating a framework that addresses the objectives that we set out for them
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and that in later phases still leaves a lot open to be decided we were worried that if a decision was made in phase one it would cut off uh some options for phase two um that doesn't seem to have happened they i i think again this is very delicate i don't think as a board we want to mess with that framework very much because of unintended consequences um and i think the committee has worked very hard to assess sess those out so i i i think i'll stop there and just say uh how appreciative i am um we're a learning organization we're learning through this process as we go forward and i saw that learning take place both uh at the staff level and with coalition members as well so i'll stop there um and just say thanks again and there's a couple of members of the guiding coalition um and i i guess that's the final thing the uh the this proposal was put together by coalition members and um i i watched one meeting where it opened up with staff coming in and saying hey we took uh two of your scenarios and combined the best of them into this great scenario what do you think and it was panned it was almost immediately trashed and the coalition you know said no we want to go in this direction and as a staff member i could only think on the one hand saying oh wow did we misread things but oh great this is the committee acting as they should and making this their own product um so kudos to staff for work hanging in there through that as well and and kudos to the committee members for um forging ahead thank you director bailey um for helping the shepherd through this process and and i also want to give my appreciation to school community reps that made up the guiding coalition well without further ado why don't we talk concrete about the recommendation deputy superintendent claire hertz uh you're on deck good evening thank you for having us here tonight i will say i'm going to keep my comments very brief since it is late into the evening so i will say that we have three community members here representing some of the their parent guardians of children in the southeast guiding coalition and coming from several schools and then we also have some staff members here available to answer questions but i'll if when they speak i'll ask them to introduce themselves but first i'd like to introduce to you uh we have three parent reps um one is uh andy jacobs second is d ready and the third is beth kavanagh and the three of them have were helped to write and present the recommendation to the guiding coalition they had others too but those are the three that represent us tonight so with that i'm going to ask andy jacobs to speak to share the southeast guiding coalition recommendation for phase one these are changes that will be implemented in the fall of 2021 with the opening of kellogg and with that i'll turn it over to andy thanks claire um and andy i know we weren't sure whether you're going to be here so i i had planned to do this but please please jump in as as uh as i go along and i'll also try to first of all i mean good evening everyone um i'm andy i'm a parent of two second graders in the bridger neighborhood program also member of the southeast guiding coalition um i will also try to keep my comments relatively brief because i know it's really late um claire i don't know if it's possible to put even just like the graphic of the feeder pattern up on talking if not it's fine but that might yes roseanne if you would bring up the bottom of page one that's totally fine yeah that's great um so uh i wanted to um i mean i appreciate the opportunity to kind of give an overview of our recommendation here um which it did it as director bailey mentioned it didn't earn unanimous consensus but it did ultimately get consensus from more than 90 of the coalition which for any of you who've been following any of these meetings um no that's that's sort of no small feat given the the wide range of opinions across across the group and i think it got that level of consensus not because it's perfect by any means i think we quickly realized starting out this work that given all the
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priorities we're trying to balance here there's no such thing as a as a perfect solution um here um and that's especially true because of the considerations director bailey mentioned about um you know saving like there are some decisions we're just not gonna take up until phase two which means this this is just one piece of the larger puzzle and it's gonna feel incomplete until we have that full solution but i think a lot of coalition members do feel this is an important this would be an important step toward achieving some of the really worthy goals that the board has laid out for this process especially around program equity at the at the middle school level so um i wanted to just give a quick overview of what's and i know you all have access to the full proposal i wanted i thought it might be helpful to just give an overview of what's what's in this proposal um before that though i thought it also might be helpful just to share um and director bailey got this at a high level but sort of how we applied some of the the guiding principles or goals that you gave us for this process kind of how we more specifically thought about that in creating the feeder pattern for for kellogg middle school the proposed feeder pattern for galaga middle school this fall um because we were trying to accomplish a few very specific uh things um first and foremost um we were trying to convert as many k-day schools as possible to k-5 schools as soon as possible in the fall um in line with the district's vision for for comprehensive middle schools and then within that we were trying to make sure we emphasized uh the district's racial equity and social justice lens and to us that meant prioritizing k-day schools to feed the kellogg that served the most black students latinx students and students from low-income families so that was priority number one number two we wanted to make sure that um that kellogg did not start off overcrowded um and so there's some there's some documents in your packet that talk about how 85 percent is sort of a in general is it would be considered full 85 utilization rate um we we based on advice from you know district experts wanted to even air a little more conservatively than that and aim for a projected 80 utilization target for kellogg which i believe is about 640 students and we want to do that for a couple of reasons one and i think there's some stuff on this also in your materials but we heard from several principals on the guiding coalition who have experience opening new schools that a lot of times our projections in these cases are a little bit low right like because there might be students who are in the attendance boundary who currently attend non-pps schools but will be excited about coming back potentially to to attend a new school and those aren't accounted for in these projections um so that's one factor that could kind of drive enrollment up even past what we're projecting and then two i mean we mentioned this these decisions do made in phase two we know that those will have some impact on kellogg's enrollment we're not sure what that would be but in case both of those things sort of point towards slightly higher than projected enrollment at kellogg we just wanted to make sure there's enough of a cushion there that even if there's a little more than we expect the school's still positioned to get off to a strong start during what's likely to be a you know a very challenging year under the circumstances and that we're not as part of a process that where one of the goals is to reduce overcrowding where there's pockets of overcrowding across southeast that we're not opening a new middle school that's going to be overcrowded right off the bat so that was that was another priority um third there's an immediate space shortage at bridger as the k as the middle school as the spanish dual language immersion program continues expanding um through eighth grade there even with all the portable classrooms there even with the kindergarten already off cited in annex the school is going to be one classroom short for next year and so we needed to make sure that whatever solution we propose here addresses that problem so that students who are assigned a bridger next year have enough classrooms pretty pretty straightforward um and then lastly was one that director bailey mentioned which is just making sure we leave ourselves in a flexibility to consider you know the range of solutions you might want to consider in phase two when it comes to assigning schools to harrison park middle school which is going to open in fall 2022 um to address overcrowding at franklin and all these other decisions and just making sure that you know we don't lock ourselves into to or lock ourselves out of solutions that we might want to consider or find ourselves in a situation where we might feed one school to kellogg in the short term but then have to reconsider it down the road we didn't think that would that would be um really fair to those school communities so that's what we were going for um you see where we landed here in this proposal um and what would what would happen in fall 2021 under this proposal is arlita marysville and lent would convert from k to eight to k to five schools their neighborhood um programs would feed to kellogg and students who would be in those middle schools would transfer to kellogg in the fall the same would be true of the spanish the the middle school spanish dli programs at lent bridger and at mount tabor middle school so those programs are transferred to kellogg that that's that program at mount tabor middle school is the one that atkinson's spanish cli program currently feeds to so current fifth graders in the atkinson
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spanish cli program next year would attend kellogg along with current sixth and seventh graders in the spanish dli program at mount haber middle school and that's the that's the extent of what we're proposing um it's also it might be helpful to just name sort of what wouldn't change under this proposal so director bailey mentioned creston which doesn't have we're not proposing a middle school assignment for creston um in this proposal um barring another solution that that um that you all come up with um you know the assumption is that it would convert in fall 2022 and we'd decide on their long-term feeder path in phase two of the process um atkinson's neighborhood program would continue feeding to mount tabor middle school under this proposal and you know for next year um uh all k to five um dli um locations and configurations would remain unchanged for next year as would all pay to five attendance boundaries now all those things could potentially be up for conversation in phase two but but nothing would change for fall 2021 if we decided to recommend those changes and you approve them those would take take effect in fall 2022. so that's the that's the proposal um if uh if you if i i know it's late but i thought it would be helpful just in just a couple more minutes to address a couple of the um specific pieces of feedback sort of we've heard since this proposal has been out in the world it might help kind of ground the ground the conversation and give and for people who are watching might just um you know who may agree or disagree with where we landed on some of these things it might be helpful to hear sort of the thought process because we really did grapple with some of the challenges we know that are in this proposal so one is um you know this this proposal would consolidate all of the middle school spanish dual language immersion programs in southeast at kellogg and i think we've heard some questions about you know were we prioritizing that over neighborhood programs or something like that and and the answer is it wasn't a top priority for us to create that consolidated program at kellogg but we kind of got there naturally from some of our top priorities so for example if you go back to one of our guiding principles of prioritizing the k-8 schools that serve the highest number of bypass students students from low-income families we zeroed in really early on lent and marysville as the two that stood out in that regard and really early on kind of penciled them in to feed to kellogg but since lent has a spanish dli program you pretty quickly get into this chain reaction right so if you're going to feed lint's neighborhood program to kellogg you can't have just a spanish gli be the extent of lentz middle school so you need to feed the spanish dli as well um just from a program equity staffing standpoint but then you have the flip side of that situation at kellogg right so if you you can't really have a strong spanish gli program in middle school at kellogg with just lent strand being there so the question is okay what else comes next so bridger's spanish cla strands middle school dli strands became the next priority because that helps address the space shortage that i mentioned earlier there but then you have one more question right which so then if you have three of these strands um at kellogg uh you have the one sort of isolated strand sitting there on mount tabor middle school and the question becomes well do you leave that there or do you create this sort of consolidated program and we consider this as a coalition specifically and um we decided to recommend having all the strands feed to kellogg partly on the advice of some of the dual language experts that talked to the coalition and and said that the consolidated program would probably be a better experience for students than just sort of the isolated strand at least for the students at mount tabor partly because it's not the main consideration but mount tabor middle school is overcrowded if there's a reason for other reasons to to transfer that strand that can help address that problem and then also we saw a positive case for it right i mean i think there's some obvious benefits to pool kind of pooling the um middle school spanish dual language resources um you know for students for teachers um in one place and it happens to be sort of all the middle schools the most centrally central location to the highest concentration of native spanish speakers in southeast which which you know as director bailey mentioned was one of the one of the things you asked us to prioritize so for all those reasons even though it wasn't the main priority we kind of were led pretty far there from some of our other priorities and that's why we thought it was a good idea um two more quick things and and then i because i want to be respectful of people's time um bridger's neighborhood program so we are not recommending this proposal um a long-term feeder path for bridger's neighborhood program where we're assuming that's going to be part of a phase two conversation however if you if you adopt this proposal and transfer the uh bridger's middle school spanish gli strands to kellogg bridger would also have to convert from a kda to a k5 right away because again it you can't really sustain a middle school with just a small neighborhood strand so those students who would would have attended bridger's neighborhood middle school program next year would need a school assignment
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even as we figure out even as we wait to figure out the long-term feeder path and no obvious options would be harrison park k-8 or kellogg or some combination of the two what we recommend here is that pps staff work with the bridger neighborhood middle school families to find the best solution there and then lastly as director bailey mentioned and i know you've you've heard from as of we um creston which doesn't have a middle school assignment in this proposal and i can tell you that nobody in the coalition was um felt good about that um what we were running up against um was was frankly some math so we considered for example like why don't we just add preston to this feeder path that you that you see here and and the problem with that is that then that that takes the projected enrollment at kellogg up to about 720 kids which is about 90 utilization and that's even before you account for any the fact that this might be on the low end right you know 90 already is is pretty high and i think the coalition was worried that um that's really running the risk of setting kellogg up to be overcrowded right off the bat or you're putting yourself in a position there where you'd have to just have another transition year for a school like unfeed one of these schools down the line right after we've we've sort of sorted this out and we didn't feel good about that another option we considered was to not feed the one spanish dual language strand at mount tabor so that we could feed creston instead um again the problem there is that only works if you're comfortable with that mount tabor strand staying there forever right and you know for the reasons i mentioned we thought the consolidated spanish dual language program was a better idea under the circumstances but either way it's not a viable short-term solution is i think the key thing to consider right because unless you're going to keep that mount tabor strand there forever you're going to have to account for that extra enrollment eventually and you're going to be right back at that situation i described where you're at 99 you know 90 plus utilization and kellogg which is probably probably not gonna work um [Music] i'll sorry i'll stop there i know i've probably taken too much time i hope that it's helpful again you know for folks watching especially whether you agree or disagree with where um we landed here um every member of the coalition that i worked with and talked to i think really grappled with some of these trade-offs and tried to keep in mind that we know we're not just talking about moving things around on a map we're talking about you know decisions that are going to affect students that are going to affect teachers they're going to affect communities and we really tried to come up with a proposal that gets to the best and the most equitable result for as many as many students as possible i'm sure we didn't get everything right i look forward to hearing um you know about the ideas for how we can improve on this but um i think i'll stop there beth d is there anything that i that i missed that you want to add i think you covered it so thank you thank you andy for um sharing of the southeast guiding coalition's recommendation and with that i would open it to questions from the board i know we're getting a lot of questions from creston families and we had some public testimony tonight um so uh just kind of um a helpful refresher on what we're thinking about creston long term but also what it would look like for this next year if i think you know i was one of the many who just assumed preston would go to kellogg aha doesn't that you know sitting here not going to southeast guiding coalition meetings that makes sense in my living room um so kind of could you help us understand some of the thought process around that decision and and what creston folks can expect for the future so uh this uh later this week um i will ask dr o esther to um please join in we are meeting with osp and principals at osp staff and the principals from both creston and bridger in order to talk about the process to work with the community in order to address the outstanding concerns for these two middle school programs and dr oh i don't know if you have um something that you'd like to add to that about where we're headed with our with our communities you're on mute dr o sorry i've been on mute all evening so i didn't even remember which i mean myself but here i am so i said it is important for us to realize that um the crescent family's desire to go to keller that said though it's also very important for us to realize that the school when it opens will probably need some cushion for additional students that may be enrolling on the back side so when we do meet with the crescent families
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we're going to try to find them some compromise some happy medium that would be workable and acceptable to them i already heard that some of the families are okay with not going to kellogg right now but we don't know if that's the consensus of the community so during that conversation we're hoping that they will table their concerns and we'll be able to address them dr oh this is director constant if i can just jump in right on that question um can you talk about the capacity for hosford to absorb creston students and would it be possible to give them that kind of assurance or are we just avoiding that since our directive for this first phase of decision making was to really only focus on populating kellogg well the first the first phase was to decide on populating kellogg what i think i did not anticipate was how strongly the creston community was going to be insistent upon going to kellogg but there were other as we looked at all the priorities and we cascaded them down the crescent piece did not surface for us as a compelling reason amongst all the other priorities in the beginning but now that that continues to come up and it seems to be um or threatening to be an achilles heel yes when we negotiate with them we'll offer other options and hopefully those other options might be um acceptable to them even if it means some kids will go to hospital and some will go together but we'll see how that pans out so um director comstam i would like to share with you that hosford is at 93 percent capacity right now so julie can i follow up for one second with claire um is hosford do uh do buckman students have any priority into hospit um judy brennan would you um please share what you know about that buckman neighborhood is part of the hosford feeder pattern um students who transfer into buckman for the arts program who don't live in hosford um don't come to hofsford they go back to their neighborhood school but buckman is a hosford feeder thanks judy so um i wanted to just address the creston issue i should start first by thanking all of the staff and parents and community members who participate in the process i um tuned in usually thursday nights you know because i've got tuesday nights full why not fill out thursday so thank you for all the time that was spent um so i don't want to so i wanted to acknowledge that um and there's a reason why this hasn't been done before because it's complicated and um so i appreciate the hard work that went into it um so please don't take my comments as um the majority of the work that was done i'm very appreciative and i think it's um the right work so i'm guessing i'm gonna focus on the places where i think um and this is the role a role partly of the board is to sort of ask the questions where there are um maybe uh where there's still outstanding questions for school communities and i would say that um like i'm not at all surprised that creston is surprised to have been left out um having served before i was a board member i served on the um bond stakeholder advisory group and one of the big issues the group the group the community group wrestled with was um should the uh 2017 bond include kellogg because the question was should we just move back to the high schools or should we also do kellogg and um one of the strongest advocacy groups for including kellogg in the 2017 bond was the creston community i mean they're on powell there is an adjacency with the middle school there had been a sense when they um when kellogg was closed that the creston community had lost their neighborhood middle school so to me i think it's it's not at all surprising um given the history and the neighborhood and as a school that um the southeast is full of focused programs dli um as a neighborhood school often their voice wasn't um heard and so um i feel in some ways this feels somewhat like a continuation that um they they are once again left without a middle
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school without a path and i think um there's good intentions that to um find them a place um but it's sort of like with musical chairs when the music stops and they all of a sudden are the ones without the without the chair and so i um really would encourage um the staff to go back and look at what options there there are because i do feel um it's just another year that those students will have um well all the students that are still in the under enrolled k8's an equity inequitable experience um so i hope that um between now and next week we can um look at what some options are for them um an overarching and then another piece that i'm interested in hearing a little bit more from staff about two uh two pieces um is that we have in most of our schools non um sort of transfers in and the thinking about the priorities of those students over say taking a neighborhood cohort like creston and having them be in a school and i know we're going to have to wrestle with this when we look at other middle schools or high schools there's just a very high number of in many cases non-neighborhood schools and pushing the the um the capacity of the school so that's the one thing um and then second and this is going for looking forward to well i guess what do we do in the next year um and there was a fair amount of conversation i think in the group about those schools that still have underenrolled schools because i think the vessel principal said it best that you can you can flood a bunch of staff in but that still doesn't actually create a lot more programming so i'm interested in how the district for those schools that are in sort of still in limbo next year how we create an equitable experience for those students um so stop stop there and then at the very end before we close out i have a process question for phase two but i'd be interested in sort of a staff um sort of between now and when this comes to us um how we're going to approach sort of the the the the last pieces that aren't aren't quite fitting nicely into the rest of the larger plan thank you very much director julia vermeer woods for your questions um to look what um question question that you raised that is a plan we'll be going back to the drawing board to look at possible options so that when we meet with the community we'll be in a good place to at least come up with some possible solutions that might meet their needs it is possible that some of their students might not mind going to a school like class board and others would want to go to kellogg in that case we have a split um group but we wouldn't know until we meet with the community to see what they really would like to do after we offer present our options so yeah so that's a plan for the question piece now for the um schools that are under enrolled i think i'm going to volley the ball to miss judy bremed what um miss julie brennan i just gotta ask the questions i don't have to answer right right but miss would you well we'll be bringing responses back is part of our um uh board packet for our next um meeting on this but um please um judy brennan if you have something else to add but aren't we voting on it next next time we're going to see we are currently scheduled for the next board meeting and we're seeing how much um suggested changes there are from the board before we finalize that timeline so um you've noticed i i think um all of the coalition has shared numerous concerns about the next steps and what the impact would be on those k5 schools especially those that wind up being very small i think we can anticipate a significant amount of considerations for boundary changes in a way that we really haven't done in the past few years where we've done mostly sort of wholesale changes like grade level reconfiguration or program move i think we're going to be looking at a lot of smaller changes relying heavily on our technical analytics partner flow analytics i'm not saying the boundary changes will resolve everything but i think that you can
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see that coming into play um in a way to try and address underenrollment you mentioned transfers n and uh i will say that we calculate that right now in the cohorts of arlita marysville and the lent neighborhood program so not the spanish immersion but the neighborhood kellogg components right now in those cohorts it includes 67 students who wouldn't live in the kellogg boundary they're in the recommendation at this time and of course we're open to your feedback regarding keeping those kids in they're in in part because when we've opened middle schools this will be the fourth in five years we followed that pattern of allowing kids who are in a cohort who had made a commitment to be with that cohort through eighth grade to stay with that cohort but as you have acknowledged that does have an impact we're looking in a school that may be crowded and you may want to make other decisions to open the door to other students but these are kids who are part of those school communities now in a virtual community and probably are expecting to be with their community next year but that is um really something that if you feel strongly that you'd like to see differently we could revise are there additional um comments or questions from the board nathan daniel had something oh i'm sorry yeah um i've got some um and i might just cut out at any moment my connection's been problematic lately um so i've got got to process this question this in the past but i'm extremely concerned about the level of student input in the process and i was wondering what engagement has taken place since we last discussed this um has there been any additional outreach and do we have a concrete plan for increasing it in phase two so i'd like to ask our director of community engagement shanice clark to join in the conversation thank you nathaniel for your question um so i think there's definitely concrete actions we are employing to get increased student feedback and i know we're grappling with doing multiple ways of doing that and recognizing that having dedicated space for students um in addition to recruiting more uh intentionally for phase two um will be really important uh so uh and the the answer is yes and i do see that uh phase two really being a place where we launch uh or relaunch uh efforts that are more intentional especially as we include more schools that are that are impacted but um uh thank you for your question and absolutely um i think after meeting with members of the district student council uh recently uh we were able to really um adapt some of these steps moving forward in addition nathan we've also spent some time looking at what the responsibilities of our school leaders should be in this process and i think we've been able to shape what those responsibilities would be going forward that would also be helpful in addition to what i'm shanice and her team are working on i think i want to pick up on what director ben edward said about the paul the process question and that it's you know we're getting this now and the expectation is to vote at our next meeting um but you've all have met us and um i'm not sure we're gonna be ready for that but you know just context clues from tonight um so i think one of the things we'll do tomorrow at agenda setting is talk about again like we did with the budget maybe doing a special meeting um and we'll raise that tomorrow with the group because i know that this is a big thing to do this enrollment balancing and we want to make sure that um we have enough time to really make sure that uh we have all the options before us so we'll we'll discuss that tomorrow at agenda setting director bran edwards yeah so a process piece of it um and maybe this doesn't have to be resolved before we vote on this but um there's been a lot of talk about phase two and actually the board resolution that we adopted just accepts the goals for phase one um so i think one process piece is to go back
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and look at phase two and what um what what the goals are for example there's been talk about high school enrollment balancing and that's not really in one of the outcome goals um that we adopted on february 25th so i would be interested in having a conversation about scope because this is another reason why i was a little bit surprised about creston is when i look at the outcome goals it was really driven by the sort of the fixing this middle grades issue and so to have crestons still sitting out there like say they were a driver and very adjacent to the programming just surprises me so i'm hoping we can resolve that but again i think the board needs to have a discussion about phase two before we um before the group jumps into it because the resolution just dealt with phase one um another um i guess um issue that i'd like to have us wrestle with a little bit about process is um you know how we have an equitable treatment because if you get to hey 95 90 of the people agreed but it was the 90 that ended up in a place um and those that didn't um were the dissenters to me um it it could be they have been the right result um but it doesn't necessarily tell me that that was an equitable versus they just maybe got out voted um again i'm trying to figure out how creston sort of at the end of the day ended up without a without a middle s without a middle school um in this whole thing so i think it's worth thinking through sort of how we do the weighted and um you know if the if it's the majority but the the minority vote are the ones that actually aren't having their issues addressed um maybe that is something we should um have to work through versus um it's like the majority is what consensus is what we're going with so those are more process questions for the next phase um and again it's not at all as a commentary on any of you know bad intent or anything it's just i think the nature of large group decision making and very complex uh problems can i um i don't have a question but i do have a comment um and um i i'm going to hop back to my experience in previous um efforts around enrollment balancing um and in my experience it is an incredibly complicated question and whenever you dig into it i think i think everybody's experience is that you suddenly realize that everything is connected to everything so if you move one thing um if you look hot enough you're going to see that it's you know it has huge impact for schools over so i would um i want to thank the guiding coalition for all of the work they did um i didn't attend every meeting but i attended most and it was an impressive display of kind of mental agility and persistence there was an enormous amount of data that um what was about 45 people had to not only not only look at but really absorb um and over the course of four months the group looked at literally dozens of scenarios dozens with varying levels of intensity um certainly it was at least 12 scenarios that were that that had a full workup trying to figure out you know how it would play out um so the guiding coalition spent four months grappling with this extraordinarily complex issue and they did it all virtually i mean it was it was impressive um and maybe what was most impressive about the whole thing was that they actually came up with a scenario that
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had overwhelming consensus overwhelming is it perfect no but there isn't a scenario that it no scenario is going to be perfect um this is it's complicated it's it's not you know and the the guiding coalition members um had numerous you know endless discussions about the equity implications throughout their discussions um i think i also want to shout out to um danny ledesma and chinese clark um i think they did an excellent job navigating some really complicated and sometimes difficult conversations to come up with a process that worked and came and resulted in um i think a really solid proposal um and while it's unfortunate that the proposal doesn't include at this point um you know clearly definitive solutions for creston and bridger um that's coming in phase two so it's not like it's not like the crescent students are not going to have middle school they are we just don't know today what it will be and i think it's entirely possible that given given the the layout of the creston catchment area i think it's entirely possible that you may end up having a split feeder which would actually work for families because some of them some of the families are you know across the street from kellogg while other families are across the street from hosford so i would i guess i would caution my colleagues against fiddling around with a a um resolution to a really difficult question that many people spent a very long time grappling with um i would be very uncomfortable at this point um kind of nitpicking and and trying to solve you know pieces of it because this is it's a very delicately balanced solution and it you know it can work or it can fall apart and so that's that's my comment okay anything else before we move on this will be back before us um and like i said we'll talk about the process next well i i would like to clarify that the high school enrollment is actually part of this process and the phase one and phase two is really the original phase one um because with uh our um we'll be balancing middle schools um in phase two in the southeast region region and um we had to split phase one into phase one and phase two because of covid in the delayed start and the need to open kellogg but it did include the second middle school in phase one as well as um we need to finish the boundary adjustments for k pre-k12 well k12 will have boundary adjustments but pre-k is included and we're also looking at balancing our special ed programs across the region so there are if you look in the phase 2 steps to come portion of the recommendation or the report from this guiding coalition i just wanted to clarify that before we got too far down the line with um that uh that thinking yeah well i'd like to have a larger longer discussion about that obviously not tonight because just when i read through this and i harken back to it um the the focus was really on the the middle grades um and when i look through the document that's not what i'm seeing and i think it's also has has broader implications than just southeast um so i'd like to have a i say the parking lot that for the time but i would interpret the board's direction differently than from that or based on the february 25th i think if you look at that original uh memo and resolution um there are board outcomes i think
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that are listed but there's also another section that has essentially board outcomes it's not all integrated into one list yeah what exactly we should have a discussion about that i think it has implications for for the work but yeah tonight but i also don't want to just like yeah we already agreed to that so you know onward we'll revisit this issue and bring it back up i know we there's a lot more here and we will have a chance um we do have the king community waiting um wanting to vote on their mascot next but nathaniel did you have something you wanted to add i do too okay great go nathaniel and then director yeah i just wanted to ask a quick clarifying question on my previous one um i was wondering if there is um without any concrete plans uh what you have to increase student engagement in um in phase two that you could share tonight so nathaniel i think that when i have met with you and several other students and at this point we have not designed the student engagement component for phase two but you know that we will be reaching out to the students that were involved in phase one to look we had that initial conversation about expanding the student voice and the current method um was not engaging a large amount of student voice so we're looking at um creating new methods in order to accomplish that i i had just a couple quick questions and a comment first thanks to the southeast guiding coalition and staff that have been working on this and and director bailey um this is just a it's a tough problem and process to go through um what have we learned from the criticism that we can use the next time we go through this conversation as our population our k-12 population swells and contracts and then um my other question please let it come back um what was there anyone out from the creston community on the southeast southeast guiding coalition um was there a representation there wasn't you can read their descent director to pass in the it's in the documents that we got like page 90 or something like that but there is a there is a representation of the point of view from the question representative so yes there were crescent um parents involved in the southeast guiding coalition two of them and the print and the principal as well any other questions okay thank you there's nothing further all right we again we're gonna do some agenda mambo here and um invite the king team to come up uh superintendent aguero i believe you're introducing this item as well um and then we'll move on to committee reports and policies after we we hear from our king community okay onward to another topic thank you chair and i heard and i mentioned in my soups report we're coming close to arriving at recommendations for our two high schools renaming but our process also outlines some steps for school communities to engage in with staff support for any time they're talking about a potential change in their identity or mascot which is the case and interest expressed by the dr martin luther king jr school community so uh shanice clark our director for community engagement has has been helping shepherd uh a facilitated process there and and they're here to share with you what that process has been like and their recommendation for the board's consideration so shanice good evening superintendent guerrero chair lowry and board directors i'm shanice clark i use she in her and hers pronouns and i am the director of community engagement here before you all with uh principal jill sage of dr martin luther king elementary school um and we'll ask jill to introduce herself in just a moment uh we are pleased to review this item uh to rename uh the school's mascot which will really enact an effort uh to help the process of actualizing racial equity and social justice that positively transforms places of student learning so the process of formally correcting the school name actually really reinforced students and
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parents leading a lot of advocacy and engagement at the school community to inquire about the culture and climate and how that would best align with the mascot so dating back from from 2015 there's really been rich and continuous efforts led really from our families and students concluding up until our last academic year in relationship with central office staff as they worked through with a mascot naming committee um in accordance with our administrative directive uh so in addition uh it's september 2019 uh the board of education adopted a resolution that permitted a correction to the school's name to be officially dr martin luther king jr elementary school that that really reinitiated uh this naming mascot process in in collaboration with us so now the the mascot is the lions and they formally wish to name a mascot to the dream uh and efforts to create an intentional and transformative brand for the school community and so following our administrative directive we had the opportunity to hear from a variety of students voices visited classes held many activities in a series of meetings and discussions with a committee comprised of parents staff and many other stakeholders within the state student or within the school community so the mascot uh naming committee really has articulated that the dream uh being recommended to the board of education really illustrates uh reverend dr martin luther king's speech from the march on washington for jobs and freedom in 1963 really calling for liberation and freedom and hope leadership and transformation which are really ideals important to the school community and students weaving through the fabric of their everyday and so before the vote for the resolution 6226 to rename dr martin luther king's junior's mascot to the dream i'd love to invite principal sage to say a few words especially about how the mascot titled the dream has really risen as a critical priority within uh the school community so principal sage thank you shanice and thank you directors and principal superintendent guerrero for he listening to our request for this change this has been an ongoing process primarily like shawnee spoke to started with our students identifying that while the student play the school is known by you know shortly by the term king that it became pretty evident to uh to them that we've had drifted from really the true intention of honoring dr king and his work shortly after his assassination in an attempt to really create a safe space for our african-american students and in their experience and over time we've drifted from that and in the community that is ever gentrifying we find that some folks are disconnected from the intentionality of the naming of the school in the history and the importance of that of of that connection and so in reestablishing the name to the full title and honoring his legacy we also began to examine some of the other symbols in our school and what they meant and how they perpetuated his values and the value of the movement and in that we realized that lions actually served to complicate that disengagement with the term king and um and and move us further away from our values and so we launched a process of um talking with students and parents about what it is they want us to focus on how when they leave our school doors at the end of fifth grade what are those values that we want them to be demonstrating and working towards throughout and we gathered several different ideas and ultimately landed on dream but it also represents our core pbis values so d for determined r for respectful e for empathetic a for accepting and n for making a difference and i and those are the values that we work towards when we work with students um and and
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it's short it's become a dynamic of when students maybe aren't showing up and as their best we simply remind them to be the dream and that simple reminder um it serves as a really positive redirection back to the things that we are working to implement so um with that uh we definitely spent some time working with kids and families about kind of the abstractness of the term dream and you know often people move directly to well what does that look like and and in the in that process being able to come back to really examining what could it look like symbols mean things words are impactful and and this has given us pause to come back and really examine as a school community one that's changing when it's evolving who we are and and how we invite the voices into the space so i'm really excited you know we've been delayed obviously with um the very impactful events of the pandemic and and the racial reckoning that has kind of delayed this but i think it's also brought into the importance of us really taking time to think about what are those values that we're putting forward um in our in our school and the symbols that we use to to describe those thank you so much and thank you for staying up late with us tonight you know you could have been doing anything tonight and you're here um and i just i thank you for your leadership and i love especially as um you know we celebrate uh dr king's birthday this uh coming monday that this is a perfect time to be doing this and to be reminded of the values that he espoused the way he challenged poverty the systems that we talked about tonight the systems of oppression that um keep people from fulfilling their dream and so really love what you're doing at king and the work there um we're gonna go ahead i nee um and bring this motion before us do i have a motion and a second to adopt resolution 62-26 resolution to change the dr martin luther king jr school identity and mascot i have a motion on second second second okay i heard director abram edwards move and director constance second the adoption of resolution 62-26 i heard director depos there as well but i think i gave it to director depos last time so i'm giving it to director godstam this time uh is there any board discussion i thought i saw michelle that you had unmuted i just wanted to you know my grandmother taught highland and retired from from king as did my mom and so um i spent some of my toddler years actually in the building and um just really happy to hear about this it's great thank you for your work on this and and and shanice also um thanks so much yeah thank you and um in the staff report i saw a dream with periods after each letter uh so jill thanks for explaining that the double meaning of dream and how you're using that so that's a great story just another reminder that names mean something i i was just thinking how sorry i am that your kids can't all be together to celebrate i can i've attended some of your assemblies before where you have so much energy especially your assembly around dr king's um i guess you don't do it at his birthday but when you celebrate um a whole year week of dr king so i look forward to when your kids can all be together and really celebrate the dream it's fantastic thank you all right is there any further board discussion on resolution 62-26 ms bradshaw is there any public comment no there's not all right the board will now vote on resolution 6226 resolution to change the dr martin luther king jr uh school identity and mascot all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 62-26 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes all right thank you nathaniel and thanks everyone for your work on this thank you so much i deeply appreciate it on behalf of my community thank you all right we have our um board and committee reports we have two policies that need to come before us for first reading we have the internal audit and we have the tabling of the leadership vote to next week so we have those four items um do we want to take a break right now for five minutes and then come back or do we want to power through if you want to break um thumbs up if you want to power
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through thumb sideways so break all right it looks like michelle um please feel free to run and take a break uh while we uh do the committee reports it looks like we got a power through team here okay we're going to start with committee reports um and if i'd like i'm forgetting something from the agenda please let me know um okay committee reports we're going to go in alphabetical order as has become our practice so we'll start with the audit committee um okay so i had everything but why don't you go to the next one let's see hold on um okay so we have a we actually have an audit committee meeting tomorrow um and the most important thing i want to flag for everybody is that we are going to be getting the presentation on the ach or the electronic funds transfer audit that's been done um we had a um our previous meeting in december the result of it was um and this i'll actually consolidate this and what we're going to do in a moment with the um approving the other audit of the plan at the last audit committee meeting we had a suggestion a recommendation from the auditors about a facilities related audit two board members recommended two different topics um so i want to thank director constand director bailey for both recommendation topics the committee considered all three of the topics potentially to add as the last remaining audit for this next year's audit plan and um they the committee end up ended up recommending a audit on hardship transfers and we'll be voting on that a little bit later this evening and also we had a discussion about the esl audit that that is a great topic that director constant recommended um because of a variety of changes that's happening in the in the department right now and the fact that we can always consider in the future we're going to take it as a recommendation and hold it um as a potential future uh audit topic uh and then the only other thing is we also set some goals for the office of the internal performance auditor just to get on a cadence of having uh kpis for that function all right thanks julia i think next is the bond committee director depos yeah um nothing to i gave a more extensive report last week um we are we have four new members joining us this month we're scheduling um an orientation to the work uh we haven't settled on a date between um well the 23rd in the afternoon and the 30th so we're finalizing those details and agenda um and just welcome welcoming them getting them to work starting in our february meeting hey cbrc uh doctor thank you um cbsc met in december on december 16th [Music] the january meeting was going to be held on this coming thursday but we've postponed it so that i can meet with the co-chairs and um and help to clarify kind of what the board what the brief is from the board and how the board and cblc can interact more consistently and more comprehensively that's it all right director constant charter and alternative program uh we have not met since i last reported back but we are meeting again um we're agenda planning later this weekend meeting next week and remind me which schools are up for um extensions and renewals do you do you know off the top of your head okay um opal and just one second uh i don't remember the time because i've been getting because i was on the charter committee last time i still get all their like school emails i think it's arthritic apple and arthur is the other one yeah okay great all right intergovernmental director scott yes thank you we have a meeting coming up this thursday um two agenda items we're going to talk
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about um one uh around reopening and any intergovernmental um sort of issues there you know particularly around potentially testing or vaccinations or anything that we may need to be working with other governments on that the board might be able to help with um and then the second issue is board elections and chair lowry with you and the rest of the board do you mind if i i know it's an agenda item later i'll go ahead and give my update now because it's late and i will try and go quickly but i do we've put this off a couple of meetings so i just want to give a little bit of a preview nothing for the board to decide or even discuss tonight but i want to give a little bit of an outline of what we will be looking at um over the next um year frankly um so and and also this is also for the public i want to be really transparent sort of and i think all of us want to be really transparent about this this conversation so one of the things um that you know when i decided to run for board that i you know find out is that you know you have to live in your zone but you have to run district wide um and as i did that i remember thinking well that's a little bit odd and then i talked to other candidates that were also running and they also thought it was odd and then i talked to board members who were already on the board and they thought it was odd as well and so um i also knew from some work i had done um with portland city club to look at election reform in city government that that type of structure where all of your officials all of your elected officials are are elected at large um can serve to disenfranchise um voters of color and other disenfranchised groups within your your overall community and that's particularly true in in large majority white cities such as portland and if you think about it it makes sense a candidate who might have really strong support from their local school or their local cluster um could struggle to run a district-wide campaign in a city like portland and so as we've sort of had informal conversations over the last year and a half i think the board shares a pretty common objective which is that and it came up earlier tonight um you know director deposits comments and and other comments tonight about you know we want to increase access um to more candidates for the portland public schools board and one potential way we can do that is by sort of looking at our own election system and potentially making changes that would make it more accessible one you know a relatively straightforward way to do that would be to limit voting to define zones within the district so you know same thing you would have to be you know in your zone to run but you would run in your zone rather than running at large um so that's sort of the general um framework we've been having this conversation lucky for us in 2019 the state legislature enacted organ revised statute 255 dot 400 or house bill 3310 and this is a law that prohibits school districts from conducting elections in a manner that impairs members of a protected class from having equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice or equal opportunity to influence outcome of elections or results in the dilution or abridgement of their rights and to be really blunt it's kind of focused towards systems like ours where everyone gets elected at large it also provides for residents of of of the district to affirmatively challenge a district system of elections and a process for districts to remedy any potential violations that might be found and they think might be there so this is actually very consistent i think with our values and sort of the conversations we've been having and you know it really sets up a framework um that we can use if we want to in terms of making some of these changes so so there is something i think that that as a board we're interested in looking at and there's a potential roadmap for doing it um and and some potential ways to do this proactively um and i think you know again the overall objectives of of this or really to you know have smaller voting areas that would level the playing field because candidates need to only reach you know a fraction of the voters at a lower campaign cost and then also hopefully in the long run or maybe even the short run that results in board members that better reflect the children and families that that the district serves and would diversify the backgrounds and voices on the board so there are some timing and issues around this um one of the things we found right away is that we would not be able to make changes for this upcoming election in 2021 mostly because the changes um that would need to be made uh we'd have to partner with multnomah county elections on that and they pretty much flatly said you're way beyond any deadlines we would have to make changes for the 2021 election um so then a couple other things that come into play here is that um we are also required to redraw our boundaries because of the 2020 census and so this is something that obviously i think most of you know every 10 years we get census data and you know the law the state law requires us to redraw our boundaries to make sure that they stay balanced depending on on that census data we expect that census data at the second half of 2021 there still are some potential issues around that being delayed if it is challenged depending on what the trump administration does in their last week um but if if it goes according to schedule we'll get that data in the second half of 2021. so that also dovetails nicely with this
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effort to the extent we're changing the way we get elected we can do it at the same time that we're making any adjustments that need to be made um you know in in in our zones because we're going to be redrawing those in any case um so there's a whole bunch of decisions we're going to need to make as we go through this process and one specific thing for board members to be thinking about in terms of timing the new state law that i was referring to if we use the official process that's put in place um there's a there's a delay in terms of when that could take effect so if we were to um use that process we that the new zones or the new election process wouldn't take effect until the 2025 election however there's also a potential option that we'll need to discuss as a full board we could also follow the steps of that process without formally following that and implement the changes sooner in may of 2023 we wouldn't get the official protection from challenges that that law you know if you follow that official process gives but it does have the advantage of not having to wait four years to make changes that we think would potentially increase equity within the district and andrew i just want to say my understanding of why that is is the idea is they don't want us to change the election in a way that would benefit us as incumbents so it's trying to protect the integrity of the election system um but in this case sort of has this unintended consequence of delaying maybe our ability to create an equitable system yeah and i think it's something when you discuss i think that is the intent behind it i would point out that even with a a a skip election people who just get elected would still be voting on a change to their election you know when it's coming back up again so there really is no way to avoid that and the one interesting thing about school districts is we as a board do get to set the election rules unlike for a lot of other home rule um you know jurisdictions there's charter involved and voters need to approve it um so you know we have that that authority and frankly that responsibility to do it but i think i think your point is a good one it's one of the reasons we want to be really transparent it's one of the reasons i wish we weren't having this conversation at 11 o'clock at night but i want to make sure we're coming back repeatedly um and very publicly and being very transparent about this process because anyone who is interested in potentially running needs to be very aware of what we're doing so um so along that line great segue into sort of next steps um we're going to begin this conversation we've already staff have already done some background research which is what i just relate to to you in terms of what they've some of the research they found out we're going to start the conversation in the intergovernmental committee but i want to be really clear i see the intergovernmental committee as just helping to sort of move the issue along but this has to be a full board discussion throughout the entire process and not only a full board discussion but a full community discussion as well we want to develop a project plan that would sort of uh look at it would include a project team that would have staff board members and community partners we're going to need to hire consultants to come in and we do this all the time with the census data but you can help us on on the other process as well on data analysis and and consult with people who understand electoral system structures and pros and cons we're going to do work with county election officials on guidance and timing because it is a big change for them um in terms of of anything that we want to do we need to make sure we build in plenty of lead time for multnomah county and i actually should say clackamas county and washington county as well because there are small pieces of our of our district that fall in there so all three counties would have to make these changes um and then we'll need to talk about timelines i i would love to bring something back for board approval by november of 2021 that might be a little ambitious depending on the census data and and some of the other issues but as part of this process we'll discuss what a timeline is um and then and then really just sort of lay out what those next steps are going to be and what it's going to look like so i'm sorry i know it's late that was a little bit um lengthy but um just wanted to give that overview for board members so you know what we're gonna start talking about and then know that we'll be coming back repeatedly um as we go through this process um any questions director scott i think it would be great to sort of summarize what you just said and start circulating among our community partners so people have awareness that the conversation's happening um i think it's really good information and i think the more transparent um we are about it the the more trusting the community will have in in the process and the changes uh but i thought it was an excellent report and think we should try and get it disseminated more widely beyond the 11 o'clock crowd great suggestion thank you yeah thank you so much for that um director scott that was a great update i'm really excited i was wondering if you could repeat the rrs number in the house bill numbers so i could look them up on my own time and then um the other thing is yeah who are we listening to who are we engaging and should we engage them earlier rather than later um and there's there's a lot of um i'm i'm starting to see we're starting to see um for this upcoming election
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various stakeholder groups um you know community-based organizations that are either doing some type of seminars it'd be great to get them involved you know early as early as we can and the last comment was what doesn't metro have a data center that would help us would they be able to cooperate with us on that census data once it's published yeah call me tomorrow morning 9am we can have that conversation yeah it was um um uh oregon revised statute 255-400 and i think it was house bill 3310 or soliz tells me so hey director scott one tangential thing that i'd like the intergovernmental committee to just keep in mind while having these broad conversations is um conversation around um multnomah county contribution limits we wouldn't be subject to them formally but i think it's worth discussing whether or not we want to implement that ourselves or at least have a conversation to create an expectation because um if we're gonna walk our talk on trying to uh bring forth diverse candidates to me that's a huge issue given what we've seen in in recent elections and how what a barrier that is so there are two um potential issues i'm going to call them tangential i don't mean that um derisively at all but one of them was i think is the campaign finance and whether whether we also want to take that on the other one that was brought forward by student representative shu is the idea of voting age um and i will tell you that i am very interested in this issue um and and what it would take to lower the voting age for school board elections perhaps to 16. um i think it takes a lot i think it takes state law change i think it takes you know a lot of other sort of groundwork but i think that's something really interesting to look at i think both as a committee and as a board we want to talk about um about these issues are related for sure but they don't necessarily have to move forward together and what i i want to make sure is that we don't we don't hold we don't delay i think some of the important electoral changes that we might want to make while pushing for some other things but i think we should absolutely have those conversations at the same time because we'll have all the right people at the table and i could even potentially see sort of a process that laid out where we you know make some electoral changes uh you know look at some campaign finance limitations and then um be really groundbreaking and innovative and allow our um 16 year olds to vote in our and 17 year olds to vote in our elections all right um policy committee director moore uh okay um my report is going to be much less than what we just heard um so the policy committee met on january 4th recommended forwarding two policies to the full board for adoption which we'll be hearing about shortly we also received a presentation on the national context for school districts responses to climate change and we're going to be looking at kind of model policies from other districts and how other districts are handling operate policies around operations and and other issues uh to inform our work on uh developing the new policy um the climate policy will continue to come back to the the committee for work over the next few months um and our next meeting is january 25th great thanks anything any updates on rose quarter hope we have a meeting next week okay uh anything from southeast guiding coalition other than what we've already heard tonight scott or rita anything from southeast okay anything else any other committee or conference reports great okay uh first reading of the anti-racist and anti-oppression learning community policy director moore as chair of the policy committee would you like to introduce this next item okay i'm going to talk fast um this policy is responsive to a rule passed by the state board of education in september 2020 requiring school districts to enact policies and practices to create safe and inclusive school climates where all who participate in school communities feel welcome it's grounded in the conviction that student well-being and safety are cornerstones of education and that all students are entitled to a high quality educational experience that is free from discrimination or harassment based on perceived race
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color religion gender identity sexual orientation disability or natural national origin and without fear of hatred racism or violence likewise educators and staff are entitled to work in environments that are free from discrimination or harassment and families and visitors should be able to participate in school activities without fear for their safety this policy full fully aligns with the pps vision and our long-held commitment to equity and the policy committee unanimously recommends adoption that's it all right the proposed policy will be posted on the board website and the public comment period is 21 days contact information for public comment will be posted with the policy the board will hold a second reading at our meeting on february 9th all right director moore would you like to introduce the next item read it you're muted i know you can talk fast but we still have to worry um do you really want to um so this is amendments to the professional conduct policy and these amendments are fairly technical updates to the policy language in two areas uh first recognizing new technology and practices that have emerged during comprehensive distance learning and second focusing professional conduct training for contractors on those who have direct contact with students and again the committee unanimously recommends adoption and again the proposed policy amendments will be posted on the board website and the public comment period is 21 days contact information for public comment will be posted with the policy the board will hold a second reading at our meeting on february 9th all right we move on now um to our i think what is our final agenda item um oh no sorry i'm getting ahead of myself director broome edwards would you like to introduce the internal performance audit plan phase two i already covered this somewhat in the audit committee um coverage but we have um we already approved phase one of the 2021 audit plan and um we previously approved the student body activity funds audit and the health and safety checks audit and this would be adding um a the hardship transfer audit to the 2021 audit plan and it comes unanimously recommended by the audit committee which is both board and community members and student reps all right thank you do i have a motion and second to adopt resolution 62-27 resolution approving phase two of the internal performance audit plan the mood second all right uh director brian edwards moves and director bailey seconds the adoption of resolution 62-27 is there any board discussion ms bradshaw is there any public comment all right the board will now vote on resolution 6227 resolution approving phase 2 of the internal performance audit plan all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 6227 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes all right thank you we now come to our final agenda item uh board policy 1.20.00 pv 1a states that the board shall elect one of its members as board chair and one of its members as board vice chair at such times and for such periods as follows at the first regular meeting in january for the period from such election until the election of the succeeding charitable voice chair as the case may be at the first regular meeting in the succeeding july uh director de paz has requested we postpone this vote until january 26th which will be following our board retreat where we can further discuss leadership on january and 23rd do i hear any objections to postponing the vote great then we will go ahead and move very well do we need a formal motion this text to me we can just do it this way we don't need to do a formal motion but thank you scott for making sure we're on the side of the angels tonight okay and i wanted to share that um i've received 38 comments just after i spoke so um and and it's one of the reasons i asked to go earlier knowing that
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while it said 9 20 was the time i had a feeling it'd be later it's 11 23. um it's really important for us to carry out our work in the light of day um as elected officials so anyway i i want to have a discussion so we could move it up um i appreciate the uniminity i can't say the word but the unanimousness and look forward to the discussion at a retreat on the 23rd great then we'll go ahead and move those two resolutions to the january 26th um are there any other items or other business that we need to um discuss before we adjourn all right the next regular meeting of the board will be held on january 26th this meeting is adjourned we originally were going to have a real estate executive session after this meeting but those of you who read your email closely know that that has been canceled uh so uh we are done for the night uh at 11 24. so some people guess we'd be done at 11 some people guess we'd be at midnight so whoever had 11 or midnight wins because we're

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)

2021-01-12 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: PPS Board of Education Regular Meeting - 1/12/21

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