2021-02-02 PPS School Board Charter Schools and Alternative Programs Committee Meeting

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District Portland Public Schools
Date 2021-02-02
Time 16:30:00
Venue Virtual/Online
Meeting Type committee
Directors Present missing
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Event 1: PPS Charter and Alternative Programs Committee 2 02 21 1

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joining us this afternoon we are looking forward to spending a little time digging into the work of our teams at the arthur academy and opal school and i'll say at the outset that it's um it's absolutely a pleasure to really spend some time looking at your school performance since i think it's safe to say that you're all serving our students very well and creatively and we like to think that our charter schools are um able to inform our broader work with some of your innovative strategies and different ways of looking at things so it's um it's always a joy to dig into it and we're going to talk i don't know tara if you want to give a little bit of an overview of the process but um there's really not that much to say this is our board opportunity to really go over your renewal applications and the school data and performance framework and then we will have the hearing the week next week that is week of february 8th and then um we will come to the board of education um march 9th so that is the course that we are on and i think we still hope that um there might be some opportunity to jump into some of your visual virtual classrooms um here in the next couple of weeks and is there anything anybody wants to add to that tara anything about process that i missed i think you covered the process part um uh unless there was anything new to add to that karina but i think we covered i'm good okay and this isn't about process but i just want to ask you um either tara or karina um one of the things that wasn't specifically addressed in the staff report but of course is a big consideration in this process this year is just the coveted overlay the lack of assessment data from last year so if you want to just talk about that in the context of the broader renewal process and the years of data that we do have because it wasn't explicitly addressed but things look things look different in our evaluation process than they usually do absolutely and i will also let you know that we'll uh will kind of take a trip to those pages in the framework that show the past year's uh overall information so you can see a little bit of that um with that i will i will ask you to please just begin walking us through the renewal application for arthur academy all right so uh i did want to ensure that the board committee has access to the document about the charter renewal criteria that was also part of the package so that would have been uh document three um in the agenda and i just want to ensure if there are any questions around criteria that you know that you have access to that particular document so you know and we have everything uploaded for them in their board book so board members are able to follow along great awesome i'm gonna read kind of the general that will give overviews and so tara and i will do our tag team um so i'll start by giving the overview of the school and then i'll then tara will follow up with the individual specific school information all right so we'll start with portland arthur academy so portland arthur academy charter school is a k-5 charter school in southeast portland housed on ascension catholic church campus enrolling 175 students the school uses a research-based direct instruction model that focuses students through a highly organized incremental curriculum and ensures that they master each skill before moving to the on to the next portland arthur academy is one of six arthur academies in the greater portland area which share a common curriculum a single board of directors and a central administrative office portland arthur academy opened in 2005 and is in its 16th year of operation it successfully applied for a charter renewal in 2008 and in 2011. the school is currently operating under a five to ten year flexible agreement which has been extended annually to reach the statutory 10 and 10th year limit which will terminate june 30th 2021. portland arthur academy has formally
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submitted an application for renewal of its charter with the district per ors 338.0654c this term this renewal term shall quote shall be for a minimum of five years but may not exceed 10 years portland arthur academy has requested a 10-year renewal of its charter and with that i'll hand it over to tara to talk more specifically about the school data great thank you so uh some highlights of this renewal term for portland ruther academy include that students do consistently meet or exceed district averages and state targets as whole population and also as disaggregated student groups on the state assessments additionally after a focus on the third grade math instruction the 2018 and 19 which is the last year that we do have state assessment data the average achievement score for math on state assessments increased by an average of 30 points from the previous year for the paa a third grade student so pretty a good highlight there additionally the annual parent satisfaction survey results consistently show that families have chosen uh highly satisfied or satisfied between 96 and 100 of the time over the term of this contract at portland arthur academy some unique considerations for portland arthur academy many of the economies of scale available to the school are due to the ability to have the central office function that is shared by six schools and that structure is unique among the portland charter schools some requests from portland arthur academy for consideration in their renewal contract the portland author academy has requested an increase in the pass-through percentage of state school funds from 80 percent to 90 percent uh the justification justification for that request is in the renewal application on pages 20 and 21. charter schools as schools of choice continue to work to attract a student population that's reflective of the district's population portland arthur academy's enrollment reflects this trend though the school has some success in this work uh six and a half percent of its students are english language learners that compares to uh 11 of the district population in the same grades uh 28 are economically disadvantaged and that compares to 32 percent of the district same population and uh 23 are his from historically underserved races and ethnicities and that compares to about a 32 percent to the district and 56 and a half percent are white which compares to about a 57 percent district uh same with same uh student grades portland arthur academy has posted translated enrollment information as well as made hard copy brochures available in all the district supported languages to broaden its outreach to english language learners and the school does continue to focus on outreach in historically underserved communities in the academic financial and organizational performance domains the charter school's office found no areas of concern regarding statutory compliance the charter schools up pps charter schools office has submitted the 2019-20 oregon school profile which is what was presented this year because there is no oregon report card because there were no state assessments in addition to the performance framework 2019 and 20 performance framework as well as a copy of the charter school's renewal application and those documents are all part of your board book so as previously alluded to i would um like to uh review a little bit on the performance framework that um portland arthur academy has for this year 2019 and 20 and specifically uh to what director constance mentioned earlier there was no state assessment data from last year though last year was the ninth year in a 10-year span of contract so we have lots of data from previous years for portland arthur academy and what we are able to do by looking at the very last pages of the performance framework so looking at pages 34 and 35 of the performance framework is see a three-year trend or three-year chart of where the school has met exceeded or did not meet the uh the targets for that particular year and in looking at the past three years that we do have
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academic data so that would be 1819 and then the prior two years to 1819. um we can see that for one second can you be a little more specific and uh remind us exactly where that chart is with the three-year graph absolutely so you're looking at document number six in your board book which is the portland arthur academy performance framework and then you're going to go to pages 34 and 35. perfect thank you very much sure so you can see the individual metrics that we look at with each school whether they are meeting student achievement in reading and math whether special populations are meeting targets in reading and math and whether they are meeting academic growth targets in reading and math and so each of those things is outlined on a separate line item and you can see that portland arthur academy in all three years of previous data shows either exceeding or meeting in every single one of those categories and then looking uh further at the financial picture which is a little further down in that same chart uh portland arthur academy meets nearly all and in the uh category debt service coverage ratio we use a metric that is recommended by naxa the national association of charter school authorizers and that particular metric is really suited to charter school management organizations as opposed to individual small community charter schools so our own finance team within pps reviews the data and uh and assures that when they do not meet that particular metric and they have no debt it's not an issue and our charter schools do not carry debt and then on the final page page 35 you can see the organizational metrics which generally relate to how the school protects civil rights of students and employment rights of employees in addition to following statute and health and safety laws etc and in all three years the portland arthur academy has met all of those metrics thank you may i ask a quick question um tara hytera about that framework is this um the the metrics that we're looking at on page 34 and 35 or the summary of different um like whether it meets or exceeds are these done by the school or are they done by third party are they done by the district who's who's compiling those yeah that's a great question those are uh compiled by the district by the charter school's office and we use as our sources of data for the most part ode organ report card data and our state assessment data but tara the framework our framework for evaluation in terms of the the creation of those categories comes from ode that framework actually ode is the is the via it really comes from the national association of charter school authorizers so this is recommended by naxa and ode sort of targeted the framework itself to suit oregon's specific measures and you know now that you're saying nexa i think that you did reference naxa up in the in the introductory narrative thank you many of our templates yeah many of our templates and frameworks that we use originate through naxa because they do this work nationally to help districts and sponsors of charter schools i was just going to say that's a great question are there other questions um i had a question about when you were talking about in the application um just financial considerations and that your lease will be ending at some time soon just talk a little bit about that when is your lease up what are what are you looking at in terms of relocation what are your financial constraints there and then i do want to follow that up with a specific question about your request to change the pass-through that has to do with your purse expenses but my first one is about your facility itself can you guys hear me yes okay this is jill domini i'm the
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business director for the arthur academies um so we are currently in a lease renewal uh with uh with ascension i don't foresee any issues they love having us there they're dependent on having us there so and i don't anticipate any large lease increases i i anticipate just a basic lease agreement another five-year lease agreement we don't have any plans on moving however if something were to come available we would um we would love to look at that uh because it is a kind of a weird space that we're in where the classrooms are great they're large and everything we have a very very small playground and very uh minimal room to conduct pe so we're always looking and if something were to pop up we do have some reserves that's that we have we have reserved for that very purpose and then can you just explain um this is something we've talked about in the past but um director de pass is new to our committee um can you explain the situation that charters find themselves in relative to their per with their purse expenses relative to um the different status for pps as a whole um i can um actually maybe tara might want to question more about there you go and you can tell us what that impact is on you and specifically how much of an increase in your rates you've seen in the last several years sure i can talk a little bit about the purse so charter schools pay the highest rates in the state as each is considered just school districts they don't have a uh um they're not associated with their host district right they're each considered separately so charter schools pay the highest rate uh within the last two years they were offered an opportunity to do a um i want to use the word buy down that's not the right word but to put some money in if they happen to have it that would bring their pers rate down a tiny amount and some of the schools were able to take advantage of that and some were not but that was the first time charter schools had been offered that opportunity that was part of that new legislation that new pers reform so charter schools now are paying depending on if they have any tier 2 employees or just observe employees paying between i think 27 and 32 over and above salary into pers that does not that doesn't speak to the six percent that comes out of employee pay that's that's just what they pay into purse so compared to district which i believe is somewhere between three and seven percent depending on where um the calculations fall i think i'm not as up to that but the the rate for the district is much much lower because there's been years of the ability to make those um offset accounts so it's a massive impact on the charter school budgets and to change that would take a legislative correction correct i don't know if either if uh if jill or stephanie had something else to add about that no you nailed it but suffice to say it's very meaningful and onerous on your budgets does anybody else have any questions director bailey or director to pass i don't have any at this time uh no i'm good i i can still remember visiting last year that's stayed stayed with me and hopefully we'll be able to do that again because that really uh really makes a difference in terms of um seeing what's happening in the classroom being able to talk to students was great uh so now i'm just happy that uh you're following state law and uh not in debt over your uh over your skis and uh yeah that that does depth debt service ratio measure is kind of funny when you don't have any debt right
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um i want to know what your strategies were that led to such a great improvement in your math achievement uh did you say that in the third grade improvement yes i want to hear about the strategies so uh i don't have great connection right now you guys so tara miller may have to jump in for me but tara miller is our principal now and last and this is her 15th year or so with arthur academy she was our vice principal intervention specialist last year so a lot of it honestly had to do with her and the work that she did with kids in math so it's kind of fun to have her on here and be able to say that but strategies uh that we used were we used our direct instruction curriculum and then we didn't change anything we used it and then we just kids got more instruction in math in smaller groups targeted with that same uh curriculum so we didn't go find anything else we didn't do anything different we used it just some kids need to hear things twice and some kids need to hear things seventeen thousand times and so those are those kids that needed this here at 17 000 times and miller down there did it with them that many times and i know that's kind of funny the way i say that but it's just repetition and sticking to our direct instruction and working really hard and targeting those specific kids who needed that specific help and when you say here at arthur academy you really mean here right because you do so much like call and response type oral repetitive instruction that looks and feels a little different than most classrooms right that's yep yep i appreciate that i was curious about that too because a 30-point uh jump is really large as you know and you're making it sound really easy like oh we just you know we just continue what we are already doing but i think what i got out of your response there was that we're going to be operating in very constricted con you know budget environments for a few years and you didn't grab anything new you changed the way you were doing work to suit the kids that you were that you knew that needed to hear things 17 000 times raised a child like that so i think that's really great i like that i like that there was there were no resources additional resources spent to get that freedom and and also to add to that to be fair us charter schools and i think anybody on this call will agree that 30-point swing can happen either way really quickly because we have such a small amount of kids right so it what uh the percentages and all that can increase and decrease just so quick uh because of the small amount that's those are third graders we only have 28 of them right and so it could have just been five kids who were just big time just targeted those kids which at arthur academy we believe and no no child left behind no child left uh falls through the cracks if we even have one kid under mastery in a class we're concerned and worried and disappointed in what's happening with that class and with that group and with that kid and that's what our intervention specialist is there for is to take that kid and say okay we're going to use the same type of instruction but we're going to teach you just more you just need more so i just think there are any lessons there that we can extrapolate for the larger system because 30 points is i mean i know you have a small population but still it's it's significant i think it's interesting that uh both of the charter applications we're reviewing today referenced uh working on math instruction um and with very different approaches um you know i i think we're we're kind of at each end of the spectrum in some ways uh although i don't know if a spectrum is the right way to think about this um and i saw joe doing the uh doing some cheerleading there in the background um cheerleading on the more more and more for those who need it yep uh so and maybe we can kind of return to this afterwards and and have a little more dialogue on different approaches that work for kids um and appreciate that it's not necessarily there's only one path to success i i think one of the things i would just add really quickly just to follow up on what stephanie said and others have said is as you and you said director bailey is as you do school classroom observations one of the things you realize in a
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direct instruction model is if i'm that student who needs it 12 times because that's the way my brain works and or maybe do because of the day or what for whatever reason the the fact that they do that in a whole school model is so normalized that different students on different skills are going to need that and so that's one of the things that i really appreciate about portland arthur academy is it may look like karina's just not getting it and that may very well be true but tomorrow it might be some other student and then they're they're they're going to have the same intervention regardless of what student or what content so it is one of the things that's really unique about arthur academy there's no stigmatizing or yeah that's a really good point um while we have you stephanie i'm interested just to hear more about your enrollment trends and your outreach i know that you guys have been making significant efforts to diversify your student population and just tell us a little bit about how you see that landscape tara i don't know if you want to mrs miller there's so many taras on this call i don't know if you want to jump in um at all because i know you helped with mrs spread bro do some of this outreach with different uh different churches and different communities in the area do you uh do you want me to talk about or do you want to talk about it ms miller she wants me to do it so we i need that's okay this is mrs miller's first year as principal and this is like a super hard time to become a principal right and she's doing an amazing job but again she's been with the arthur academies for 15 14 years so she knows what she's doing when it comes to direct instruction right so so that's super helpful um but we were able to use pps's services to get stuff translated that was super helpful for us and then we basically just kind of went to different local areas there our churches some i don't i don't know if we went to head starts or not i can't remember now um but different pre-k programs and we also had families we asked our families hey can you take some of our information to your churches to to your community and i think that helped a lot so and again i'm sorry about my uh internet i keep saying it's unstable so i hope you guys are hearing everything that i'm saying okay good thanks beth good good thank you i would also add a little bit that um arthur's a little unique among the charter school population in its larger student numbers within the english language learners population and so i think that that is also one of the areas where their outreach going from family to family is increasing the population within the school and uh the direct instruction model and that uh slow incremental you move forward when you've mastered the previous uh skill appears to be very successful with those students and stephanie you can talk a little bit about that yeah i i think that we we like to say that direct instruction works for 99.9 of students uh we might be uh that might be a little high but we think so however the the kids that are they do come in with english as a second language we use so many different ways for them to interact with the curriculum they're correlated responding they're seeing vocabulary pictures vocabulary is hard for all kids right especially english language learners and so we use a lot of a lot of different methods even though a lot of people think oh it's direct instruction the teacher's just talking nope not at all we're having kids are correlated responding just a ridiculous amount of times per minute are there quarterly responding so they're engaged the entire time they're seeing pictures they're writing stuff they're talking looking at pictures again so the the way that we interact with english language learners i think is super helpful for them so are your um are are most or all of your english language learners uh spanish speakers or do you have several languages in your student population that's a miller question we have several we have russian um ethiopian uh vietnamese uh spanish so we have quite a few um families uh that speak um other languages and it is about networking they they a lot of them a lot of families have networks to other um families within the community it's been our families really networking with those brochures and things yeah the portland arthur academy out of our six arthur academies is between portland arthur academy and
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david douglas arthur academy they're the most diverse uh both in outer southeast portland um like our wood burner author academy has a high spanish and russian speaking but that's it so not as diverse as say portland arthur academy is so the eternal question we raise with charters is what can we as a district learn from you um and i'm i'm guessing still that there isn't the kind of interaction um that might you know really uh address that question uh and and look at implementing what works um and i don't see portland public schools becoming an arthur academy district anytime soon on the one hand uh but on the other end i think it's really interesting um that you're having perhaps more success with ell kids and i don't i don't have a comparison but if that's true whether that's a niche within pps where we might really look at a specific teaching method because i know outside of dli dual language immersion programs our work with ell students isn't up to snuff i'll tell you something else that is a hidden gem with arthur academy in most most charter schools um is that we're small probably on accident right we didn't intend to only have this little teeny school but when i talked to charles arthur who was the uh who's the founder of the arthur academies he always says you know we did that on accident but we're lucky we did that because having that what i call quality control and that's maybe not the best use term to use but i'm always talking about quality control and where where i can go to mrs miller and she and i can look at in a two-hour time frame every single kid's data in the whole entire school once a week we look at data the two of us together and she's looking at all the time right her and her intervention specialist but we can look at everything and say okay these kids were not at 90 or above in math why was that what can we do oh i know we can do some intervention with those kids this week or for two weeks or three weeks or one day it could just be one little skill and so the fact that we have such a small 175 kids we can easily look at their data very carefully every single week so but scott that's just a really good point about the ell instruction and how maybe we can pull out that piece and really try to try to build some more bridges to the rest of our instructional leadership you know to see because uh even though it's not disaggregated exactly in the data we have we know that the student population is so small that if it wasn't working it would show up in the aggregate data and also that it's not um there's no designation of need for targeted or you know tsi improvements and and if the english language learners um weren't performing well there there would be so um i think that that's a great conversation for us to to remember to have you know is there any way that we could i agree that we should look at you know what are we you know what arthur academy is doing well and if we can pull that into our larger system i was curious about how students got into the school whether it was an application process and also wondering about the opportunity or the potential to do a study on this topic and and find out you know what are the variables that are that are creating success at the arthur academy that we're not doing like for instance is it is it could we look at the teachers um expectations of kids could we look at um some of these other variables that that are leading to this success i think i'd be really interested in knowing doing a comparative kind of a study to find out what's why wouldn't we want to know what's working and and use that district-wide especially for the english language learners also for the math the increase in math scores um there's something that arthur academy is doing well and we should learn from it i would hope a third party um would would do that
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that study i'm sorry uh director to pass tara i was just going to ask you do you want to share a little bit about the lottery process and how statute um dictates kind of enrollment process yeah sure so uh oregon charter school law statute does dictate how the how the charter school lottery works and it is a blind lottery with preference really for very specific only these specific things which would be a sibling of a currently enrolled child and students who reside within the district boundaries as opposed to outside the district boundaries so those students have preference for a few years there was legislation that allowed a weighted lottery so students schools could double weight triple weight or quadruple weight whatever they wanted certain out of the state seven criteria they could choose any or all but it had to be a minimum of two of those criteria if the student met those two they could be double weighted or triple weighted that loss sunsetted so at this time if charter schools want to do any sort of a weight in their lottery they need to apply for a waiver from the state and we do have charter schools that have done that and we have charter schools who have chosen very specifically not to do that or who started doing it and realize it made no difference at all so it's an interesting statistical thing about the lotteries for all of our charter schools the blind lottery process uh usually means there may be up to 10 or 15 applications for every one spot so it's very hard to get a representative statistical pool of who applies in your in your pulling of those uh sort of lottery winners when you draw the lottery so thank you that was helpful um is there anything the arthur's staff is there anything that you want to ask of us or highlight from your renewal application or bring forward in this conversation i just thank you very much for the consideration and uh and for meeting with us today and i think tara did a really good job with our highlights so i don't think there's anything to add unless tara miller or the other tara has anything to add otherwise just thank you i was going to say you added two new teachers this year is that true or am i right that it well i'm trying to think because mrs spread burl she you know she quit on us in the middle of the year and so i actually maybe it's three maybe okay okay um i uh you know you when we visited last year you kind of covered the onboarding ate that word but um and that might be something uh useful for uh director to pass to learn as well um because your your instruction is substantially different from what uh teachers don't get that when they go to the school of education at psu uh so it might be helpful to share and and remind me as well because it's been a year um how that works yeah so i i can summarize our training pretty quickly because we've been doing it the same way for a while uh for our for our brand new teachers we have um two weeks in august where normally we meet in person at portland arthur academy for all six of our arthur academies get together there because they have the biggest space and we do two weeks of training and four of those days are dedicated to just brand new teachers to our program to to learn about the direct instruction reading math language practicing it understanding it really understanding direct instruction first and then practicing that and it's exhausting but awesome to do those four days and then we have um the other days where we bring everyone back and we go over safety training and all the other trainings that we need to do so we do two full weeks um before school starts for brand new for everybody but especially brand new teachers um this time we all had to learn how to do direct instruction over the computer together and we we've done it pretty well but we had to learn this way not in person how to do di over the computer uh so my sympathies for all of us right everybody's stretching all right well um tara or karina
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anything else specific to arthur's uh renewal process here there we go uh nothing else yeah i would say that uh you guys have made it very easy um continue to do great work with our kids and we look forward to checking in on one of your virtual classrooms here soon and then we have a hearing next week so we look forward to potentially hearing from some of your families as well thank you thank you all all right tara o'neal do you want to move us on and introduce um opal and their good work sure i'm going to let karina do that yeah great so now we'll shift to another our second k5 charter school that we're speaking of um today which is another long-standing um charter school and yeah um can i just do an introduction before we get going sure absolutely so one of the people on the call is jenny iverson who is the new interim executive director at portland children's museum and i just wanted you folks to know that she was joining us we also have tara papandrew who is part of the leadership team with opal school so i just wanted you to know that there's a couple folks here who you might not have seen before and um why they're here and welcome them thanks folks thank you beth very important thank you and i just have to say how awesome is it to for me to be on a zoom call with two other terrors we have a statistically significant cohort of terrorists never in my life has have i experienced never i've never been tara m there you go uh well welcome we're glad you're here thank you beth for um for introducing the other people that our support um around opal charter school so i'll just again start us off with some of the background so opal charter school is a k-5 charter school in southwest portland housed in the portland children's museum building and it enrolls enrolling 88 to 90 students every year the school's instructional program is guided by the work of early childhood educators in reggio emilia italy neuroscience research and constructivist practices the opel school through its association with the museum center for learning operates as a research lab and professional development hub for educators nationwide who take part in opal's summer symposium and visitation days during the school year opal opened in 2001 and is in its 20th year of operation it successfully applied for charter renewals in 2006 and 2011. the school is currently operating under a 5-10 year flexible agreement which has been extended annually to reach the statutory 10th year limit and their current contract will terminate on june 30th 2021. opel charter school has formally submitted an application for renewal of its charter with this with portland public schools per ors 338.0654c this renewal term quote shall be a minimum of five years but may not exceed 10 years opal has requested a 10-year renewal of its charter and with that i'll turn it over to tara o'neill to talk about some of the specifics of opal that's pretty great to have to have to use my last name i love it so uh some highlights from this renewal term for opal charter school uh the school's research has been presented to an estimated 10 000 educators worldwide since the school opened in 2001 touching the lives of maybe up to 1 million students from portland to dubai this has been international training opal has also partnered with woodlawn school to expand the use of arts as languages for thinking and learning and with vestal school to deepen teachers understanding of and alignment with their newly adopted social justice mission as well as with kairos pdx to collaborate on professional development opal charter school has worked with teaching preschool partners and that's beaverton gladstone and park rose to expand inquiry-based approaches in pre-k through fifth grade in addition students regularly meet or exceed district averages and state targets on state assessments and we'll take a spin to that in a little bit in their performance framework as well some considerations uh for opal opel charter school does not have an economy of scale with 88 to 90 students
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to operate independently from the portland children's museum at its at its current enrollment the student population at opal reflects a lower representation of students of historically underserved races and ethnicities and economically disadvantaged students than the district as a whole and in addition due to small those small student numbers it's difficult to disaggregate the achievement data for all student groups with statistical significance uh stephanie walker alluded to that earlier there may be a group of two students one year one student the next or five students one year so that data is very difficult to uh to use in trends first this is statistical analysis not to mention is sometimes personally identifiable correct absolutely yeah so some requests for opal for consideration in the renewal contract opal has requested an increase in its enrollment capacity from 92 students to 250 students to allow the school flexibility in future searches for facilities to potentially expand from four classrooms to six or ten classrooms and gain some benefit from economy of scale you can see their discussion of that request on in their renewal application on page 23 if needed this proposed increase in enrollment would occur over a number of years within the 10-year contract term charter schools again as schools of choice work to attract a student population that is reflective of the district's population and opal's enrollment reflects significantly less racial diversity than the district averages about two percent of its students are english learners compared to about 11 percent uh in the same grades with the district about five and a half percent are economically disadvantaged as compared to 32 percent in the district's same grades and about 70 percent are sorry 17 are historically underserved races and ethnicities which compares to about 32 percent of the district's k5 about 80 percent of the students are white compared to 57 percent of the district within k5 opel has also posted translated enrollment information as well as made hard copy brochures available in all the districts supported languages and can its continued work is to broaden its outreach to historically underserved communities resulting in a more diverse student population and i know beth will have more to say about that when when we have time for that in their academic financial and organizational performance the charter school's office found no areas of concern regarding statutory compliance the unique relationship opal charter school shares as a component program of the portland children's museum complicates both organizational and financial analysis for example the museum's board is the governing body for the opal school which is only one part of the board's responsibilities additionally many typically central office functions are managed by museum staff for which opal charter school is charged administrative fees by the portland children's museum so clearly defining the organizational and financial relationship between those two entities has been ongoing work during this current and also prior charter terms and again the pps charter schools office has submitted the 1920 performance framework as well as the charter school application and the oregon school profile from 19 and 20 as documents related so as i previously mentioned if we can go to document 10 which is opal's performance framework and go to that same chart that we looked at as portland arthur academy so document 10 and the chart is on pages 34 and 35. okay and i'm going to look and see if it looks like everybody found where we were okay director bailey's there i'm using that okay just to clarify um these aren't documents that we actually have just the board members are looking at them i just want to make sure that i'm not supposed to be yes they're they're actually posted on the agenda okay thank you yes so if you go to the agenda you'll see each document item posted and you can click on that document number 10. sorry i missed that detail thank you yeah that's okay i
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could have explained that better i'm so sorry okay so we're on page 34 of opal's performance framework where you can see again the chart of academic achievement is the first section and you can see already some of the asterisks under the special populations which is directly because of those small student populations there's not enough information to statistically report on data from those populations and you can see in the course of the three years there are um very few places where they have not met or exceeded and i will also note in 1819 the one criteria that was not met special populations in math was referring to students with disabilities um no i'm sorry students in one grade only not students with disabilities it was related to students in one grade only in a particular special population that brought an entire average because it was using a three-year average so it was a statistically questionable but it was a does not meet just so that i can explain that a little bit for the most part opal school regularly meets or exceeds the uh academic achievement standards uh and then um looking further down into the financial section uh there are a few of the um specific financial criteria that were not met however and the response is provided by opal school to those particular criteria there was an explanation particular to the uh receiving of the museum's receiving of the ppp grant loan slash grant so it was a loan when the audit was performed it turned into a grant after that so a number of the measures financial measures when looking after the fact would actually come out even whereas previously it appeared to be a deficit if that makes sense to a financial person and beth i might ask you to step in and explain that if you need if anyone needs further explanation in a minute and then additionally looking on to the organizational section again those are related to compliance with specific elements of federal state law and charter law as well as health and safety requirements and the school consistently meets all of those requirements any questions around the and i i did want to also note that all of these metrics are backed up by specific data but you just don't see the academic data in this framework because we didn't have it last year so particular to director de pass who hasn't seen these particular performance frameworks in the past prior years would show each individual data point in the detailed pages earlier as far as academic achievement is concerned it's just that last year we didn't have the data from the state because of coded so there we go any questions related to the framework results i i guess my my big question which is kind of peripherally related to the framework is that you have such a collaborative and project-based curriculum um tell us what that looks like in virtual learning and how it's going i'm gonna bring mary gage into the conversation because this is her area um and we're gonna hope that my internet works and if it doesn't it will be indicative of everything that's happened thus far this year so um i will say that we've had a very steep learning curve as you might imagine trying to translate our values and our approaches to teaching and learning into the digital environment and i will say that we have landed in a place that um feels really good to us and i think good to families um it took us a while to find our way and um we have in the most recent iteration of our schedules and i work with kids we are prioritizing live meeting time and so the majority of our day is spent with students in different kinds of configurations we have very little time that is whole classes and our primary grades which are k through two they don't come together as a whole group except for once a week in a community gathering because we found that um it doesn't work very well for them to all be on a screen at the same time to collaborate and to share ideas um our grades three through five come
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together a couple of times a week all together and then we do lots of small group work we found that we're able to meet the needs of individual students in new and different ways right now we have intervention groups that run all afternoon long and so kids might be an intervention um for a specific content area where is not another we have all hands on deck i'm in the classrooms all day with different grades and different kids all of the adults that work within the school are supporting the students in the classroom we're playing with how we can translate our work with materials in a variety of languages into distance learning we are finding that we're having lots of opportunity to think about big ideas and to pursue our project work which is the heart of our work and that was something that we had a lot of concerns about um at the end of last year um as all of this was so new i feel like we have the technology under our belts a little bit now and so that's really freed us up in a lot of ways to focus on supporting learning and growth for our students and growing these big ideas together and pursuing the essential questions that we've identified that we want to pursue and want to learn alongside children with so i will say that we are in a very different place right now with distance learning than we were last spring and even than we were at the beginning of the school year and i guess i should have asked this of arthur academy too or maybe it's our district staff that wants to to weigh in but um are either of of you either of these schools preparing for limited in-person instruction or hybrid learning and tell us where you are with that because you're you're certainly at an advantage over most of our schools in terms of the size of your cohorts yes and i would say that some of the constraints that we face are probably similar um to the district one thing that feels particularly unique is our size we have five classrooms and we have five teachers and so within the current guidance if we have families that request comprehensive distance learning we would be required to provide that at the same time that we provide learning on site if we were to go with a hybrid model we would need to both provide instruction on site and distance learning at the same time so for us the capacity of our staff is a huge factor trying to problem solve there we just sent out communication to our families last week to talk a little bit about what we're calling a bit of a complex decision matrix one of our next steps will be a survey that goes out to families um to better understand what their hopes and intentions are for on-site versus distance learning and at this time we don't have answers and we're trying to do the best we can to collect information from families from our own staff and to follow the guidance of the state i wanted to also speak to this idea around cohorts we are small schools but we still have classrooms of 20 plus students and we're required to meet all of the distancing guidelines if and when we bring them back on campus and so um we can't fit them all in the existing classrooms we um hired an additional teacher so we split into five groups this year rather than four and then trying to find space for those folks on site is perhaps not impossible but certainly not obvious or easy yeah challenges challenges of different sorts yeah a lot of our schools have classrooms that are too small to divide in half so even though we're a lot bigger it's same same issues and i know you're having been in your building it's interesting to get around and try to keep the distance and i think amy your question about you know how is distance learning um going right now how's the learning going um it is a real consideration to think that if we do shift to in person that the kind of learning that happens will be centered around hand washing and physical distancing and how to be safe and routines and procedures so in that way it really does shift some of the learning that we are able to do together and so that's just another consideration as we're thinking about how to move forward and best meeting everyone's needs yeah complicated days and the city is basically gonna kick you and the museum out in
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10 years or yeah so the um the museum entered into a 30-year lease back in 2001 when we opened um and we learned i'm thinking two years ago that in the master plan for washington park that the building disappears and so our landlord parks and rec has notified us that they do not intend to uh renew our lease so there has been a 10-year timeline for trying to identify other another location and to move out of that building and covid of course threw a big wrench in all of those ideas and there's a lot of uncertainty all around and um in looking at your requests to potentially um increase your enrollment depending on what a change what a different facility might look like um are you are gianni and beth are you guys committed to staying in partnership between the school and the museum or would consider different paths or what what is that what are the considerations there so i think everything is on the table and in even pre-covid as we were asking the question does it make sense to be co-located does it make sense to be in partnership with other community organizations either for the museum or for the school the school is not just the charter school it is also a pre-k program and our professional development for educators so there's a lot of moving parts and i'll let jenny chime in here but i think there are no decisions that have been made yeah as you can imagine kobe kind of put a little wrench into one of the big revenue generators for the museum once you shut things down that's been the primary source of income so i started after ruth's retirement in december so i'm working with the board to really assess where we are and what the possibilities are but from the board's perspective there's deep commitments to the school to professional development into figuring out what's going to be the best pathway forward whatever that might look like and so everyone's kind of rolling up their sleeves and taking a look at what the possibilities are there's another round of funding for shuttered venues that could be a possibility so we're trying to exploit everything that's available and also continuing to be consistent with the support for the school program as well so my older son harrison started opal when he was three and a half years old and he continued through the through the third grade there and so i was in that building every day and i wasn't even thinking about putting them in preschool but i hadn't had my second child and i was like what am i going to do with these two kids at home at the same time so anyway he started there about three and a half i believe and it was a part day program and it was not enough of a break every morning but it was it was good enough so harrison was in the same grade as my younger child also that's right that's right yeah and actually there's one student that they went through just ben bj but benji they went to middle school i mean their lockers they shared a locker in high school their lockers were next to each other so yeah that's sweet all the way through and he turned out really nicely by the way as did harrison uh one of the things i did not mention that i did want to also put in there since director de pascha just talked about the preschool is that one of the things in the application from from the opal school is a mention of the intent to operate a public preschool as part of the preschool for all potentially beginning in 2022 so i just wanted to also say that's part of their application information it's uh currently a private preschool that's really exciting that is exciting and so that's the the only you know my only comment about the um you know the request to increase capacity is having been involved with the school for so long i know that um diversity has been a challenge but i would strongly urge um the board and the leadership of the school to actively um to rethink how the outreach is going and do a better job of having those students that are in the school reflect um 2021 portland um it's really important and uh to for for for our kids too not to have exclusive spaces um and so anyway i would just i would i'm absolutely in favor of um the request and would just urge that there is a
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rethinking of of the engagement um how how who we're serving at this school it's it's really important not just to me but it's important to our future uh our students if you had your druthers and maybe maybe you don't have an idea where what what part of portland would you end up in well we know we know that we wouldn't end up on the west side in a place that nobody can get to during rush hour hey you've got a perfectly great train right there and the number of families who managed to get to school on the train with their children in the morning coming from all the other quadrants it just doesn't happen so it seems like it would be a good thing and it in practice um i can probably count on my hands how many families have consistently done that so the location is a really big deal and i don't want to take any emphasis away from the things that director de pass said because they are all real i'd like to try and frame the school and where it sits in this idea that we've had 200 graduates and touched perhaps a million students i think that's a low estimate so many of the educators who come and spend time with us work in communities and with students who reflect the populations that we wish we were working with and so it is definitely a loss to our school we have made some attempts not successfully and i think some of where we are um right now i remember being influenced in the fall i would listen to a couple panels so i can't tell you which one i would like to be able to attribute this but um i heard some folks say you know i'm sort of bored with the words diversity equity inclusion because they're tactics and the goal is justice and liberation and um so asking the question like how do we as a school that is predominantly white educators um serving predominantly white students what is our role in furthering that work and there is plenty of work for white people to be doing with other white people and we take that pretty seriously and we believe that our pedagogy lends itself really well to growing the kinds of citizens that we need and that doesn't mean that we shouldn't or won't be doing the other work it's just that right now with our teeny tiny budget and our teeny tiny resources and really i mean tara o'neill can speak to this pps every year looks at our financials and sort of says how do they do it we've been pretty focused on the survival of the school to be honest and we've recognized now partly because of covid and partly because of all of the other things that we really do have to be slightly larger because there is no economy of scale and no possibility of reaching beyond just what is right in front of us so i think that's sort of a both and i don't know if i addressed your question i don't want to minimize the request because it is a loss to all of our students it's a loss that white students don't have black educators it's a loss to all of us i want to acknowledge that and i i do want to say that there's a lot of work um that that we believe is getting us closer to some of the goals that we all want that's terrific yeah i think um focus on justice and liberation versus diversity but if we look at like a biomimicry or a biology diversity is um builds resistance in systems and for instance um i'm up against this in some other realms a lack of bypoc leadership is preventing these entities from getting funding so as a strategy for resilience because you're small it would make a business sense to diversify at you know at all levels um to build that resistance into the you know into your programming and your system thank you i i think it's um it's great to hear about the plans for the public preschool i think that that is a particular tactic that could be helpful in terms of just broadening your reach as a community but also i want to appreciate um seeing the work that you've been doing with a couple of our other pps schools with woodlawn and vestal because we've talked about that for a few years just the irony of these educators coming from all over the world to learn from you and that we as a system um were not engaged in the same way and so i was really happy to see that those partnerships are
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are growing um and also the teaching preschool partners and also on the on the location front i will tell you that as a district we have been peripherally engaged in some discussions around and some dreaming around the notion of a children's zone with the albino vision and janie i know you've been part of those discussions in terms of anchoring a children's museum and with all other child-oriented some other child-oriented services so that's really that's all really exciting and would be great to see any other questions anybody of opal in particular i did just want to mention one more thing about opal school's renewal application if you did not notice that on page 12 there is a link to a video that was produced that mainly is opal alumni talking about uh their view on life and how opal influenced and it's great it's 11 and a half minutes so i didn't put it in for us to watch all together here but i highly recommend going in and looking at that video it's a it's a great production and it's really good to kind of see a little bit more on the heart that comes out of the school oh yeah i want to come back and how did you address math i think that it's a first of all you're all frozen so i can't tell if you can hear me you are coming through but you're a little bit uh a little bit um un clear very gage sometimes if you turn your video off it makes your connection generally stronger so we'll miss seeing your face but it might make our connection a little more reliable okay we'll see if this helps i am i am using my pps hotspot because my home internet is not working so i'm glad we were able to do that for you i hope that it will help me um so i think that the question about math is is multifaceted as every question is i think that part of it is about math instruction i think parts of it are also connected to other pieces including um our students familiarity with the computers um that we don't have computers before distance learning in our classrooms until third grade at the earliest and um it was really um testing that that initially brought computers into our classrooms even in third grade because we didn't have a need or use for them within the context of our curriculum and so trying to build in really intentional ways to build children's computer literacy um to build in even the most basics of how to use a keyboard how to type into a computer and so i think there's there's that piece um and then in terms of the mathematics piece itself we have been working um with a math curriculum that comes out of new york city that is from math and the city it's context for learning and so the idea is that children are learning within context which are stories in which their math has real work to do in the world within these stories and through these stories they're building um different models um they're building big ideas for mathematics and strategies to solve problems and so part of what we have done is support our own teachers understanding of this curriculum and how this curriculum aligns with standards i would say that in general our approach to mathematic is more depth than breadth and so trying to think about um how do we make adjustments in our view of a school year to think about what are the children's rights in terms of their experiences with mathematics and the opportunities to construct a variety of these strategies strategies models and big ideas we focused a portion of our professional development on that and so teachers come together we analyze student work together we look at the scope of mathematics across the year at opal school and we think about you know where the places that we have gaps that we can recognize and then what kinds of materials might support that we're also working in new ways with intervention groups that we hadn't in the past and distance learning has provided us even more opportunities to do that in ways that are unique that i think we can take some of the learning from distance learning and intervention groups into the classroom when we move back in person and that feels really exciting i think
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also really focusing on our own internal assessment and together analyzing student work and as we look at a child's work being able to think about what can we see that this child can do right now what's the evidence of that thinking together about what might be next steps for this individual child and then using that projection of possibilities to move into the actual curriculum in the classroom and so i think um you know it it's definitely about working with individual children also about the professional development of our teachers and really focusing our efforts on increasing our understanding of mathematics and our ability to support children's understanding of mathematics any other questions just just a follow-up question um you know back in the day we learned our times tables that wasn't a in-depth understanding of mathematical concepts but you know basically you learn five times seven is 35. it's a nice thing to know um how how do you connect those you know very practical skills that aren't depth with that process-based learning and depth through a project how do you bridge that and is that or is that the crux of of what you're trying to deal with sorry directive really i didn't mean to speak over you um no i think that that's a great question and it's fascinating even about the simple idea of five times seven because i can imagine the way that you think about five times seven might look or feel really different than how the kids do as they start to make a mental model in their mind um kids may be making a mental model of an open array and they may already be thinking well i know 5 times 5 that's 25 and i just need to add you know this to it and so it's helping kids to build a bridge between those mental models of mathematics and these computation strategies and so we build a lot of computation skills that would happen in the mini lesson section of mathematics so that might be the beginning of math and we do a number of number strings which is a series of related problems so we might have five times five five times seven five times ten and we're helping kids to think about um how we're going to use one problem to support you to solve another problem how might this string of problems support you to develop a particular multiplication strategy that's going to support you no matter what multiplication problem you're solving and so there's a lot of encouragement to put numbers together to take numbers apart to put them together in new ways and looking um for patterns and building strategies in those ways because yes um you have to have computation skills in order to be able to solve problems and so it's it's a yes and that both of those things are happening so thanks for asking that question because i left that out i wanted to add maybe a couple of words so one of them is automaticity so like being able to get to the answer quickly versus memorization so one of them is you build the understanding so that then students have the auto automaticity and the other one is you memorize tables and what sometimes happens is then when you make a mistake you don't know how to fix it because you don't recognize that it was wrong and if you've built your understanding of the numbers from the inside out then you're going to look at the answer and say that doesn't make sense and you're going to dig back in again it's it's being able to think about like what's reasonable in the moment that you're doing something just because you've memorized it then um you lose that reasoning or there's the potential to lose that reasoning and so we're really trying to build the capacity for that it's interesting that notion of automaticity have you seen some of those things going around on social media that say that ask people how do you how do you add um 47 and 61 and then you'll get like eight different answers in terms of what are the the mental gymnastics that different people go through and i mean as far as i know it's not necessarily right or wrong it's just the different um adaptations that that people have have come up with um but that's about building meaning you know that's about knowing like i know that if i do this x it will get me to y now i'm i'm particularly interested in math because i'm not teaching this year but the last 10 years previous i taught mostly high school students in
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a community college setting and i had to teach basic percentages it's like you know ten percent um how to calculate that and would see students regularly on tests get ridiculous answers and not know wow okay i made a mistake somewhere i need to go through it they just would get to a answer put it down and move on and so some and this over in vancouver which has you know really good schools quote unquote but these are supposedly independent high learning high school kids and drove me crazy so part of what we hear anecdotally is that when students move on to middle school that um they sometimes basically say oh that's the e that's the shorthand like long division or like other things where there's like this mechanics of how we were we most of us probably learned how to do math and they've built this understanding of numbers and how to put them together and take them apart and then they're given the shortcut later when they already understand what's underneath it and then they're like oh my gosh that's easy but if you start there then you are trying to build like how to carry the one like what are you doing and it doesn't make it the sense so we we anecdotally hear back that the transition that many of them are worried about like what happens when you go out into the world they find that oh that's just another overlay to what i already understand and i think that was maybe a little bit of what mary gage was speaking to earlier and that is that the timing of when our students have certain easily testable skills like the automaticity that that that timing doesn't always line up with the expectations in the state testing maybe mary gage might say that differently than i do but that's just a piece of what's challenging i i think many of us would love to shoot this state test and get get something better but that's another story um but yeah there's there's something that happens because i hear about a lot about especially in early grades about going for that deep understanding multiple solutions and then something seems to happen between then and high school that i don't know if the scaffolding just doesn't work that there isn't you know some repetition of those skills to keep them fresh i don't know um but some something is not working very well i think in our whole system so thanks for involving mary gage go ahead i just wanted to add um one more thing um just in terms of the perspective of the teacher that um this approach to mathematics i think is just as intellectually engaging for the teacher as it is for the students as we come together and i um you know have been in many a fifth grade math class that feels almost like a college course in terms of children delivering proofs to each other um asking questions and diving in deeply trying to understand each other's thinking and what's happening there and so um i just wanted to speak from that perspective because i think that's also important and it's really reflective of what our pedagogy is and our approaches to teaching and learning not just for students but for adults too and what i wanted to add to that we tried to speak to it a little bit in our renewal is this idea that this playful inquiry which is you know the our approach to learning that one of the places where we see its strength is in our upper elementary grades where sometimes students start to turn away from a desire for rigor and engagement and the way that we bring questions to children that are engaging for adults as well i think um sets them up to be lifelong learners and when we saw the graduate portrait that pps developed like thinking about how the work that we do with our children you know that graduate portrait doesn't just happen like overnight at the end so what does that mean to be working with three-year-olds or six-year-olds in service to that kind of citizen that we hope they become and we see that in our upper elementary students that there's an engagement and a joy in the deep problem solving that we hope means they're not the students who you're encountering in high school and college who are like i don't care i don't know where that happened thank you very much thank you for all your work and thank you for today we have a few more minutes i don't know
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roseanne or kara do we have anyone here um to provide public testimony no okay um i'm sorry i i um if we had a couple of minutes i would love to have you folks look at one of the pages in our renewal i don't know if you can pull that up so our renewal application and then page 15. i know that stephanie walker talked about purrs and i i did a slightly different exercise investing that's document 11 document 11 in the list if you're looking there we go to page 15. sorry go ahead beth yep thanks um i tried to take sort of this conversation that is what does it mean that there's 27 pers rate for charter schools versus whatever and i did what i called a budget approximation and i pulled out just a couple pieces so that you folks could see the scale of what this means for in this case this teeny tiny school but um other people have done this analysis and and determined that there's even less of the money that flows to charters but i just i picked local options state school fund this student investment account and the pdx arts tax and what you can see is that we receive less than 70 percent of that funding and then we pay over 400 percent more in pers and you can see what happens in the compression around what we're able to pay our teachers and the kinds of support that we can provide to them and so i just wanted to make sure that you folks had seen this and give you an opportunity to ask questions if what i put here doesn't make sense but just to give you an idea of what the impact of the 80 funding and then the zero on local option like what does that mean to us in combination with this significantly higher purrs i appreciate that the way you have laid that out and beth i was curious um is there much activity among charter schools or through your statewide organization around lobbying on this issue i know we've brought it up before but i just never hear it as part of legislative agendas right i think part of what happens is that um i'm trying to think of how i can say this the teachers union and charter schools are not the best um bedfellows or best of friends yeah and so um our teeny tiny charter you know community in oregon is very small and up against sophisticated lobbyists and we don't generally prevail so there was an attempt to have the charter purse rate be tied to its sponsoring district um which would make a huge difference and i don't know where that went and i don't know what happened with it and that's actually more than norm uh nationwide isn't it yes well i think i think the answer is yes pers is sort of its unique animal for oregon the way that some of that has panned out here so i don't know how to do apples to apples comparisons with other with other states but i just it was important to me that you folks like really see in numbers the impact when we wave our hands and say pers is really high it it just really affects our ability to to retain teachers partly and and everybody knows that if you're starting with relatively inexperienced teachers regularly that it's a different lift and and all of this just speaks to you know the resources or lack thereof that we have to be working beyond like what is right in front of our noses so again this is this is part of our story to say we're not really sustainable at 90 students in our in you know the west side where our demographics match some of the schools around us um but aren't what we want um so this i just i think is a important part of the story it's a and it's a huge uh the retention issue is huge too in terms of just your school school communities yeah so we didn't formally ask for a higher percent than the 80 i wasn't as smart as stephanie walker i sort of assumed that was off the table but um it's obviously an appeal that we make to you folks all the time so it's it's still it's still on the table and maybe this helps understand you know puts the numbers around what it might
01h 30m 00s
mean appreciate that um okay we need to wrap up here pretty quick but on that note i have a quick question of karina ortera i have never thought about this in terms of our local option is this is this a district decision that local option dollars don't flow to our charters or that's state statute i mean it where does that come from that is state statute as far as i'm aware unless something has changed and i can i can verify that okay i was going to say the same thing we can double check that um and share that back with the board committee okay and then just before we go i wanted to ask of director bailey and director depass if you have any questions or discussion on the specific requests in these two applications so the um opel request to increase enrollment and the arthur request for the additional funding to narrow the the pass-through rate or any requests of staff any more information that you need as you consider those requests thanks for asking that i didn't have any questions until you asked and it might be and i would love to know what the impacts are look for for both of those requests um intended impacts and unintended i don't know if staff can follow up with me later um but that's that was my only question on reading the requests reading the applications rather so um i'm gonna talk about the [Music] increase in enrollment requests specifically that's a tough one without knowing where you are or where you might end up um because we know charters and similarly focus options schools in the other part of our system tend to draw from surrounding neighborhoods primarily and we've seen the impact of that in southeast they tend to pull from the neighboring schools which has put a monkey wrench in boundaries uh and enrollment balancing and so if you had more employment and landed plunk somewhere east side or west side wherever that would uh really impact i think the the neighborhood schools surrounding you that's that's kind of been the history and uh we're trying to to deal with that in southeast right now and we'll move to north northeast going forward and that's um i totally understand you know it's uh your request is perfectly valid um and i just think i have to think about the whole system and how that plays out and the difficult thing is that um you know theoretically you could make that request in our annual review period for that modification to your contract but it's unlikely that that would ever align with the urgency of decision making around a facility that you're actually looking at so you're wise to look to put that flexibility in the bank now even though you might not you know want or need to exercise it for a while yeah so what's interesting is there's this tension of course between wanting efforts to diversify the student population and if we're drawing from our neighborhood schools then our neighborhood schools right now probably our neighborhood probably reflects our demographics so there's a little tension between a couple of these goals and we know we draw from all over the city we have a very broad reach and we know that it's a big deal to transport your child for six multiple children many more years across the city every single day to be to school on time we think our parents are amazing for doing that when they show up and they're on time it's like a yes so if we go to another neighborhood we anticipate that we will continue to draw from all over the city because we believe that that's the way the school is seen and the attraction but obviously it will impact the neighborhood but i also think we sort of want it to draw from that neighborhood otherwise why move um and so all of those things happen and they're a little in conflict in tension with each other
01h 35m 00s
yeah and that's in order to acknowledge that i'm sorry i did a quick analysis of sort of charter schools collectively in pps and the demographics are not significantly different than pps they're of course very uniformly distributed across the charter schools but i think there is also for this committee and for for us in general just asking the question whether or not we're trying to respond to demand that exists or whether or not we're trying to drive demand to charter schools and there's another tension i just want to make a um a comment about climate um climate impacts because you know distant driving across town and i'm i was guilty as the rest of them 22 years ago or i'd say 19 years ago to get from my home in inner northeast portland to the children's museum was about seven minutes during rush hour so that's how long ago it was because you can't even get out of the driveway for that for that amount of time you're not that old come on i just wonder about the climate impacts um and i think about this in in terms of the entire system that if we have strong you know neighborhood schools and kind of located in places where people can get to them and and then also in portland and many cities you know we have this racially segregated housing in neighborhoods um where can you be where could you be the most impactful and where would it where could you locate where where impacted marginalized communities could walk or or bike um i don't know it's just those questions and then you know the climate impacts for such a green city um it's amazing what we'll do when we have a kid that needs to go to school across town you'll you will drive them and and you'll have to drive because even with me without a job at the time stay-at-home mom i i had to drive so anyway climate impacts if if that was a decision-making criteria it might be an interesting study as well so in the renewal i pointed out that we had actually worked out a transportation route with portland public school transportation where we had identified three locations where we could have bus stops and also aftercare so it was serving our community in a number of ways and unfortunately the way that the state law is written around transportation dollars they have to flow through to charter schools through the district and because of the nationwide shortage of bus drivers even though we worked out how to pay for it we worked out where the where the stops would be um pbs transportation had to say we can't serve you because we can't hire enough bus drivers for the routes that we are required to run and so we can't take on any more so there are some ideas and solutions that we would love to implement and we don't they're not they're not under our purview thank you um thank you all thank you to our fine staff for preparing all these thorough materials for our consideration and we will see everybody again next week for our hearing which is really just an opportunity to hear from the community um and is there anything else tara that you want to add i don't have anything else karina no i'm good i just appreciate everyone's time and review of review by the board committee and i appreciate all the staff time but also thank you to all of our school leaders for showing and showing up and sharing about the wonderful services you're providing to our students i want i want to say hi to nathaniel to our student representative who i think came on just a little bit late and nathaniel i don't know if you had any questions or anything that you you wanted to add or ask or yeah i'm sorry i only joined like 10 minutes ago it the meeting was scheduled i don't talk about pre-scheduled dsc meeting so it wasn't quite all right quite all right if you uh if you want to go through the materials that we have in board book and if you have any questions of um our friends from arthur academy or opal school i'm sure they would be happy to respond or let me know or let tara know and we'll see y'all next week okay have a nice evening everyone have a


Sources

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