2021-02-17 PPS School Board Policy Committee Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2021-02-17
Time	16:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	committee
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education's Policy Committee - 2/17/21

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um so welcome to the uh board policy committee for february 17 2021 um we have um three board members here um should i do two student representatives jackson weinberg and this in his shoe um as well as many many staff you also have jillian here yeah oh and jillian as well okay so uh three students are here um so why don't we why don't we stop right in with and i'm gonna try to manage my cat sorry um so we have another very very full agenda um so i'm going to try to move us along um as efficiently and effectively as we can um we're talking about an uh a number of policies today um let's start with the climate crisis response and we're going to hear today from uh aaron pressberg who's going to give us an update on um what they have um they are on the data points that they have currently available you know what we what pps currently tracks and what other organizations track um and what the implications are for how we think about this policy so aaron you want to take it away sorry about that um so can everyone see my screen yes okay um so my name is aaron pressberg i'm the senior program manager for energy and sustainability with pps um i work in the facilities department um so my goal today is to not dive into the details of how we should try to reduce our carbon emissions but kind of take one step back and figure out how do we track it what is involved in looking at certain operations um and what we should track and i'll share some examples on industry standards as well as others districts in the city of portland as well so first off just quick overview on greenhouse gases so scientific evidence has shown us that over the last 150 years that most of the greenhouse gases that have been emitted into the atmosphere have been from human activities mostly centered around burning fossil fuels so you know a couple examples of greenhouse gases that we'll be looking at are carbon dioxide and methane um those are mostly from burning fossil fuels such as coal natural gas and transportation fuels like gasoline and diesel methane is another big one uh the other two that i have listed on here are more more centered around agricultural and industrial processes um so really carbon dioxide and methane are are the two main ones um that are gonna be from district operations as far as our our greenhouse gas overview looks there's going to be a lot of information here so feel free to jump in with any questions too so industry standards and these are these are specified by the us epa um there's three different scopes we can look at uh scope one is centered around what the district directly burns as a fossil fuel so this means all the natural gas we consume and all the vehicle transportation um that is that is used through you know district fleet and school buses so this is really just looking at what are we directly burning what fossil fuels are the district responsible for burning now scope 2 takes it one step further and brings in electricity generation so we look at the kilowatt hours that we use as a district and then we would you know work with the utilities to look at how that electricity is generated on average so is it coming from fossil fuels like natural gas and coal or is it coming from renewables like solar and wind and you know any any of those renewables would have a zero carbon factor and
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you know the fossil fuels would um have have an impact on our carbon footprint so that scope one and two scope three gets into the more the indirect emissions that we emit so this is looking at both upstream and downstream of direct district operations so while it also includes scope one and two uh we throw in things like waste disposal that'd be an example of a downstream impact from the district so things that are going to landfill recycling things like that but then we're also looking at production and transportation of commodities that we purchase such as food and building construction materials we're looking at employee and staff commutes student commutes any air travel that's related to district operations and waste water treatment so once you get into scope 3 there's a lot of things that happen before the district after the district um and there are a lot of things that are become increasingly difficult to measure um but you know it depends on where we want to how far we want to take it and in the next few slides i'll kind of describe what that means for pps end use so this is just a chart explaining those you know same scopes i just went over but how they relate to pps so scope looking at scope one you know we're using natural gas for space heating water heating kitchen and cooking so just to give you guys an idea of kind of how we use that as an emissions source for transportation in scope one we're only looking at district official vehicles school buses maintenance vehicles nutrition services any official district fleet um and then for electricity like i i described you know we would look at the emission source of that electricity but as far as the end use goes and we're using that for lighting cooling plug loads ventilation some space heating depending on the site um the last column is just a quick overview of like where does that data come from you know most of what i just described is already good data because we're getting it right from the utilities or we're getting it from departments that operate these vehicles where we can look at a miles per gallon miles driven and what the fuel source is so as far as the first two scopes go it's the data is really really available and it's pretty simple to to track that aaron what what's a plug load what good is anything you're plugging in so computers cell phone chargers appliances um yeah thanks for asking um so scope three i have two slides to describe this um so looking at waste disposal you know this data isn't perfect uh we would have to work with our haulers to figure out kind of an industry average um so even if we were to source this data it wouldn't be as exact as our utility our transportation data because basically you know we're assuming that every time we lift a dumpster that it's completely full or as we know sometimes it's not um so the data is not perfect there it's it's obtainable um but i just wanted to be upfront that it's never going to be quite exact um wastewater treatment um erin before we leave the waste disposal um so when you say it would be industry average um does that mean that um we would have i mean industry average wouldn't wouldn't be terribly useful i would think for us to monitor our own usage or track any any decreases so are you saying that we would have to um develop specific protocols with the vendors we use in order to accurately track our own usage so some some trucks have scales on them um and that's really the best way to do it because we can track it by weight but when i say industry average um they're they typically you know the industry is not quite there yet in actual tracking for weights um because you know they're just going from site to site picking up dumpster after all different customers so basically they say okay an average you know five cubic yard dumpster recycling you know is going to emit this amount of carbon and an average five cubic yard dumpster of landfill bound garbage emits this amount of carbon so it's just an industry average calculation um unfortunately the best the industry has right now we're not going to get exact weights um anytime in the near future unless we decided to uh put scales on our dumpsters which would be something we could look into but um there's all sorts of you know
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issues and on implementation accuracy with that as well okay thanks so for waste water treatment um this would include the energy and emissions associated with treating domestic water so anything that goes into the sewer goes to the treatment plant um there's a bunch of chemicals they use um you know it's a big methane emitter which is a greenhouse gas so we have good data available obviously through our utility bills on the water that we use so we know what water is going into the sewer system um but we don't know what we'd have to work with the city on is to figure out how exactly they treat the water and what kind of emissions factors into that calculation so that's pretty obtainable data now the next one is transportation field that's non-district fleet this is probably the hardest one to track because you're relying on survey data that you have to send out to staff and students and families um you know you'd have to get any employees that are using their personal vehicles for any kind of district um you know going from besc to a school for instance in their personal vehicle um they would have to you know keep a log of that and you know we have some means of tracking that in some ways but it's not it's it's going to be pretty resource intensive to continue to accurately track all of that so i'd say as far as the data goes in scope 3 that's one of the hardest ones and the last two three last two scope 3 emissions would be commodities and i'm using two examples here that would that would apply to pps food and building construction materials um so like i said we're looking at the upstream production and transportation of that so take school cafeteria food we would need to work with our manufacturers our food growers and our distributors i'm looking at how is that food produced where is it coming from how is it getting transported from um you know the farm to the district and that kind of thing same with building construction materials this is a probably even tougher because we're dealing with you know commodities that are coming from other countries we're looking at concrete and steel as we continue to pass bonds this is an important piece of our carbon footprint if we decide we want to do scope 3 but it's not exactly something we can control under direct district operation so it would same thing with food we'd have to work with manufacturers and distributors to figure out how that material is getting sourced and how it's getting to the district so along with the the non-district transportation this is i would say this is a pretty hard data to source so two two questions um on the scope three do we have a sense of magnitude comparing any of those to scope one and two yeah i'll get to that in the next slide so perfect transition scott thank you um so i have three examples of some organizations two school districts in the city of portland um so san francisco unified school district has been tracking their carbon for a couple years now they landed on just a straight scope too so they're not including anything in scope three and this is their breakdown between energy use and fleets so you know three quarters of that is coming from our district energy use whereas a quarter is coming from their school buses and other district fleet and just as a side note they have a carbon neutral gold by 2040. so that's 10 years more aggressive than the current one that's written into our policy um i will say that they have the advantage of having an 100 renewable electricity grid because they have a lot of hydropower so basically um anything anything they use throughout their electricity is already carbon neutral so when they're looking at facility energy that's really just their their natural gas use whereas for us there are fossil fuel mix into our electricity grid so that's going to look different depending on who your utility is um this is a district called atoms 12 five star schools in north denver they have about 50 schools they decided to track all of scope 3. so as you can see you know this big section here is still two-thirds of their entire scope when they include scope 3 and that is district energy use the second biggest portion is what they're calling consumption-based resources which would be equivalent to how i describe the food and building construction materials and this for their sake they
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decided to draw the line at just food and paper use um so if if they included construction that would be a much bigger portion of this chart um i did want to mention that waste is only one percent here when you look at the entire picture uh whereas wastewater treatment is eight percent so it's significantly bigger um they added a couple more things in here like refrigerant use um tnt losses stands for transmission and distribution and that's just you know as you're trans energy transporting electricity from the utility to your building you're going to get some efficiency losses there so they're tracking that as well interestingly enough they do not have a carbon reduction goal but they are doing a great job tracking all their of their uh carbon emissions um with one exception they the one thing in scope 3 they decided not to include was the employee and student commutes so as far as transportation goes they are only doing district fleet um and they they took out that one because and when i asked them why they said you know it was just really hard to track and they the district didn't have direct control over it so they decided to leave it out um so that gives you a good breakdown of what the difference between scope 2 and scope 3 looks like for a for a school district either way um your just your energy use is going to be a large portion of that of that chart do you think that this uh um if you go back do you think that that sort of distribution of um components more or less aligns with what we would probably get if we were tracking yeah it depends on the utility some already factor that in um so like some utilities will give you their carbon factors depending on what the source of the emissions are coming from electricity and they also will give you kind of a standard i think two percent is kind of the standard but some um some utilities will say like on their website exactly what their typical you know transmission losses would be um and i'm not sure exactly what it is for pge or pacific power but um if we decided to track that then yeah we would look into that yeah i i thought tnd was a lot higher and that's why they're playing around trying to do some super conductor kind of stuff a couple of years ago a lot of talk about that in the grid um but i noticed that uh it looks like vehicle fleet compared to energy use is a lot different uh for denver than for san francisco is that that correct seems like the previous slide yeah vehicles was like 25 compared to it's like a three to one and this is more like a ten to one mm-hmm yeah and uh you know it depends on what your fuel sources are you know i believe that you know san francisco is a pretty small area as far as an urban school district goes so you know they're not driving as many miles um you know so just there's a lot of factors that are involved in that um sorry this looks like looks like san francisco they're driving more than in north denver oh right yeah i'm not so part of that is because they have more included in their chart here um but i i don't know the details on how they broke that down there's just a lot of factors that go into transportation such as miles driven and fuel source um but yeah we can dig into that um as we get further in this process i think the other thing to think about is which of these um is easiest to manage downward um like like i don't know that wastewater we can do a whole lot about that but maybe i'm wrong there right and i'll get to that at the end of the presentation we have like some criteria that we're looking at when we're going to make this decision [Music] so i know rita you you asked about the city of portland so i wanted to throw this in here um they are somewhere in between these two districts so they're tracking scope 2 plus waste and their reasoning is they wanted just as you said scott they wanted to keep it within their operational control so they're looking at things that are directly controlled by
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uh by city operations which is you know building energy use transportation and waste so it's very very much within their scope they have a goal of reducing their carbon 50 by 2030 and as you can see here they split those out a little bit differently because they did it by fuel source but most of this actually all of this is scoped too except for the one percent of waste so waste um and they're only tracking their landfill waste too they're not they're not tracking their recycling impact so um you know organizations are going to do it a little bit differently from here and there but i think the general theme between these three is that building energy use is going to be the bulk of our emissions which isn't very surprising and and waste while it is you know a piece of it it's pretty small we've seen it at one percent for both of these um and you know there's more effort in tracking that for not as you know not as much opportunity to reduce as far as our total carbon picture goes but you know i just want to make sure that everybody is aware that it's it's a factor it's a very visible thing when we're talking about carbon and sustainability but it's not going to be as big as transportation or or energy use which brings me to my last slide and this is our official recommendation my goal was to give you guys kind of an overview of all this data and how it works and how it's tracked um but i wanted to give an official recommendation from my my team um so we we would like the district to track scope 2 plus waste and water treatment and this isn't you know we can discuss the pros and cons to all of this but um basically the four criteria we used is we wanted to make sure that what we're tracking accounts for a substantial percentage of our emissions we want to make sure that the data is readily available and you know somewhat feasible to be tracking on an annual basis we want to be able to actually make improvements towards these emissions reductions so we don't want to just track a bunch of things and not be able to do much about it so that was a big a big criteria we were looking at and then the last one is you know we want it to be visible we want it to have an educational component we want people to understand that impact and scott to answer your question about the wastewater treatment it's you know you're right we can't really do much about how that how the water is treated but we can reduce our water use you know which in you know which we have some impact over that so that one's kind of in the middle um and you know because it's a scope three item same with waste you know there's pros and cons there um but this is our recommendation and um we can discuss if you guys have any more questions [Music] um i have a question about the wastewater um so i i seem to remember that a while back pps did a big push to get low-flow toilets um do you have any idea how many how many toilets were replaced well let me put it another way um how far along are we in that what's the status is is that something that would yield that a focus on it would yield a big change or have we already kind of gotten whatever reductions we're going to get yeah so basically we did two major water conservation projects and and you know the bulk of our domestic water use is from toilet flushing so that that's our biggest opportunity um the two big projects where we we put in dual flush valves in every toilet that's already been completed um the problem is you know it's the push down for two push pull up for one so most people are just gonna push it down regardless in our new you know bond projects we're putting in low flow um toilet valve so it's just gonna flush out you know 1.2 gallons as opposed to 1.6 um and then the other thing we did is um i don't know how many of you have been in in our our men's or boys restrooms around the district with the florida you know floor mounted urinals that are just one bank across the entire entire thing that we're on a continuous flush and that's how they were designed you know back when these schools were built so they basically flush um you know every 15 minutes 24 7. so we went in and put in occupancy sensors on those so that they wouldn't be flushing over nights and on weekends so they still flush every 15 minutes if the sensors tripped but
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the idea is if nobody's walking in there they they won't continuously flush so those were the two big projects we did recently so do we have a sense of the um the savings from from that we do i don't have the numbers on the top of my head but yeah yeah um well first of all i think this um it's great work really helpful to see um and i do think like there's a lot of myths about um things like including the urinals there's been this uh sort of ongoing conversation about them but a lot of other things and i think it would be good if we can quantify where we have made steps to be able to show um sort of the larger community of things that pps is doing and then how we've quantified them because otherwise people get stuck in the narrative like the last time i was in the you know boys bathroom and the schools they were doing accidents like what hasn't been like that for five years or ten years or whatever so i think there's some like some storytelling um that we can do around things that we've done um but from a larger point i one of the questions i would have is um so i really appreciate the recommendation here um as a starting point one of the things i'm wondering about and uh i don't know who this question is directed to but um and a lot of the other sustainability work that we've done so that the low-hanging fruit is of high impact and those items that you can control but to get to that sort of the next crunch of things you don't control um often it requires sort of negotiation with the person or the entity that has control or the um or some sort of uh coalition that has some um sort of negotiating power authority with the entity that has control and i'm wondering if we've thought about that it is a step harder but i'm wondering if that's something that we've considered or yeah i mean we can take so scope 2 for instance if we're looking at electricity use we can control that right we can control and use how much electricity we use but we can't control how that electricity is generated by the utility but we know that our utilities in oregon have goals to become renewable uh by a certain date so we know eventually that if we you know can get to that date which i think is either 2040 or 2050 depending on the utility um we know if we can get to that date that any electricity we use is eventually going to be carbon neutral if it's 100 renewable regardless of the amount of electricity that we use [Music] so we know that by setting that goal you know we're going to be pushed along by the utilities efforts towards our carbon reduction goal um but yeah you're right about that's that's what's problematic about scope 3 in a lot of ways is it's very much out of our control um there are a lot of things that we have to rely on our contractors and vendors you know to make sure that we get you know accurate data for one and two that they are you know aligned with our goals to help us reach those um these those carbon neutral goals so it's just you know it's a matter of how how much do we want to lean into that on scope 3 and how much do we want to just take on the responsibility of scope 2. um the good news is we can we can fall somewhere in between if we decide we can't we're not just bound by scope two and three we could you know decide to pick and choose um like the city did can i ask a question about electricity um for residential customers now i'm pge i don't know about i don't know whether this is available in the other one but um for residential customers you can pay a bit extra and um and to get um electricity from renewable sources only um do you know if that is even available for commercial customers it is yeah so they have that program for commercial as well so that that gets into the conversation of is our carbon reduction going to be including offsets that we purchase because that's technically an offset um or are we actually tracking
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and focusing on district operations um and you know a lot of corporate entities will take that route while they're you know amazon for instance will you know purchase carbon offsets as part of their goals to offset their impact is that something that is that a public entity or school district should do i don't know if i can answer that question but it's just something to think about it's definitely a strategy it could be part of part of our strategy but um i think that's something we would want to discuss during our community engagement process so i want to i wanna throw out an idea it may be a bad idea um but if there's another um piece of this that we can measure that students can somehow participate in um and so there's a sort of student or school behavior piece to this where so that's students can see their contribution towards lessening uh greenhouse gas emission by something that happens at the school that takes it one step beyond the visible and educational component into a um we're part of the solution kind of component i don't know if that's practical or if that is again is a good idea yeah i mean behavioral energy conservation is you know a strategy it as part of saving energy which then you know reduces our our carbon emissions from the energy use um but it's not exactly something you could attribute specifically right if we see a reduction on our energy bill and we know that there's all these other factors involved it might be hard to you know actually quantify that um [Music] if that answers your question i mean it's definitely a part of the the entire equation and we want to support that but i don't know if we could actually track right so it it may not be trackable in the sense of carbon um but it might be tractable in terms of i don't know maybe a waste reduction goal at every school or something like that um right that that students could be part of and staff as well um yeah like if we know that a school implemented a food waste program where they're diverting you know cafeteria food waste from the landfill we can then quantify that and say okay like we know that we diverted x amount and then we can convert that into you know you'd have to weigh it um which i know that some some schools do they do weigh the food waste so they can track it um then you can convert it into co2 equivalent so we're kind of getting into the weeds here but yeah i was just looking for a piece of that that would be a direct student engagement around taking action um anyway thanks this is really uh great stuff um yeah for the work you've done i'm happy to answer any other questions um i mean i want this this powerpoint you know it's wordy enough so that you guys can go back and look at it and read through it and hopefully it'll still make sense um and then we also developed as part of the the board materials we developed a more detailed um pdf that has you know more just more information about all of this as well okay i had a question can i go first read it is that okay yeah go ahead so i you said that there were you know pros and cons and so i just wondered like what of this doing phase two with or step two with wastewater what would you see as the biggest drawbacks to to going with that option yeah i would say anything in scope 3 um which includes wastewater the biggest cons would be it takes extra effort to track it which you know up front would probably be more work but once we get it going on an annual basis it would you know be more streamlined um and the other con would be it's it's not completely in the district's control to limit the emission source yeah so what i what i was asking is what do you see as any drawbacks to the plan you're recommending which is the um phase two stage two um scope two plus waste and waste
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waste water treatment you mean or just scope 2. [Music] um so for scope 2 there's really no no drawbacks we can control all that we know and like i said we know that the electricity grid is going to continue to become more renewable um so that works in our favor as well and all that data is extremely easy to source as of now so i would say scope 2 by itself there's really no drawbacks it's really once we get into the scope 3 items that that it's you know a little bit more out of our control and harder to track i hope that answers your question yes it does thank you so very much i'm in the car so that's why my camera is off uh i am not driving however so and i am i am in a hybrid so i feel you know at least if i'm driving around while we're talking about environmental things i'm not using as much gas can i ask a question about um construction yes um so i get that um finding a way to track construction materials would be difficult um but and i make no claims to expertise in this but um i have read that concrete is um a major contributor globally to um to greenhouse gases um is it if we can't actually track um the the impact and i'm i'm going to throw something out that may be completely crazy but would it be would it be even possible to include in our egg sex or future construction that um non-concrete non-plastic materials should be considered when possible yeah yeah i mean the industry is moving in that direction it's definitely not quite there um i know that the uh multiple pathways building that's going in at the benson campus right now is looking at alternatives to concrete as kind of a pilot so there's definitely opportunities there um and i don't know if the district would want to make the decision to you know exclude concrete from our design standards i don't think that's quite possible just yet um but we could definitely you know look at limiting it um that's for sure and you're right about concrete being a big carbon factor um it's definitely um one of the biggest in the industrial sector so recognizing that we might not be able to measure that is it's still worthwhile to um factor that into our yeah so you know the carbon picture is kind of split into two things like there's your operational carbon right um which is mostly what we directly admit um through building energy use and transportation and things like that um but then there's you what you call embodied carbon which is you know the carbon you're using to build structures and you know it's a it's a really big impact but you know the reason that these scope one two and three um definitions exist is because you know these scope three missions for concrete is scope three to us but to the concrete manufacturing company it's their scope one you know it's there it's part of their industrial process of their of their building so you know it's being tracked at some level from some organization it's just a matter of do we want to include that in our overall carbon footprint and that's where that's where we decide okay how far are we taking it scope one two or three or somewhere in between two and three um it's not that it's impossible to track it's just a lot more difficult and the the the data's not going to be as as perfect as like our utility data will be yeah so so i guess what i'm saying is instead of tracking the carbon emitted by whatever concrete we use in future construction processes uh we just set a
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and set a goal for reducing concrete use in new schools by 10 off of whatever our standard has been uh so far in the bond program and again i'm just i'm making stuff up here um yeah it's certainly a good a good sustainability goal to have something like that yeah and so we i i wanna you know we tend to track what's measured and change our behavior based on what's measured um and if there's an important factor that we don't have that direct carbon measurement for that doesn't mean it might not be part of our policy so it's not something we measure in terms of carbon footprint but it's something that we look to change our behavior on um knowing we're not going to know what exactly that impact is but we know it's an impact yeah and and we could even ballpark some average knowing knowing that that number is wrong but um but to say well we at least got a 10 reduction and it's significant we don't know exactly how significant because it's hard to measure but it's a piece of a piece of our strategy yeah the city does something similar to that okay could you um could we ask you to look at that and see if you could come up with some some kind of recommendation uh around that um that we might incorporate somewhere in the policy or or or in other mechanisms that um like in the specs or something um could we ask you to do that yeah so you mean keeping it keeping it separate from the the scope emissions that we track but having some sort of separate goal around reducing concrete in our buildings yeah or or even i mean again i i this is received wisdom um interpreted by me um it i gather that there are efforts underway to make um lower carbon concrete um so maybe i don't know if we could find some way to come up with language that would accommodate technological change you know in the foreseeable future yeah definitely okay that would be great um any other questions from anybody yeah i guess what we're asking for is non-measured uh in terms of carbon impact but uh likely contributors where we could have um you know we're looking at what's what's the biggest bang for the buck or what's what's the best way to make to have the biggest impact on our carbon footprint measured or not uh to see some of those we can't directly measure it but we know it has an impact kind of things concrete being one plastics um maybe being another um so again we might not have that same kind of numerical greenhouse gas measure but some other kind of measure in terms of usage i don't know yeah that makes sense okay um this is great thank you aaron this is going to be very helpful when we get down to actually you know writing the policy um i wanted to give a little update on community engagement planning for this policy um several of us uh the committee subcommittee um and staff met with the um climate justice group um to talk about to learn from them what kinds of community engagement efforts they have done to date and talk about how we can coordinate community engagement efforts going forward we are still developing that plan and
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in light of what is happening at the school level for students and and parents and principals and and teachers around preparing for reopening um it was suggested that the our community engagement efforts around this policy will likely have to be postponed um until probably at the earliest sometime in april um and from where i sit that's i i i mean i i think it's understandable and and we have to we we have to be aware of the burden that's being placed on many fronts on um parents and community members around engagement stuff on many levels but in addition to that that will give us more time to work on the policy itself and you know get further along in the in crafting the language so i just wanted to kind of give an update that that's sort of where we stand um i want to just check in with shanice did i get all that right chinese anything you want to add i finally got michael mute no i think that's that sounds about right and that will okay i'm wondering if it's possible and i um if somehow in some sort of visualization tool or document we could share like where things are with a broader community it's just it's super hard for people right now to track where where things are if you don't happen to um because there's no like running into people at schools um or anywhere um so i'm wondering if there's some way for example if we've got a policy like let's just take today's agenda it's like they're all kind of in different stages in the policy and we have that grid kind of here's what we're thinking but if if there is a distinct like community engagement period that we somehow mark that so people would know like hey this is the point in time when we're expecting to engage communities or key stakeholders um because otherwise it's i mean i'm having a hard time tracking where we are in the process and this isn't this is more of a function of the sort of pandemic and more the isolation that comes with it than anything anything else or any anything like we're doing things differently it's just we have a big agenda and it's it's hard for me to keep track of like did we do the community engagement at the front end who is it with or are we doing it during the 21 days or is it something after the 21 days um i'm sorry i'm just having a hard time tracking where where we are and whether there's some sort of tool to or even sort of market on the larger grid of like here was the community engagement julia i agree i'm having a hard time tracking the community engagement piece as well and again it's not a criticism in any way it's more i'm sitting at home with like seven policies and i'm kind of like hey and some of them you know we've had in committee for you know a year and a half or you know a longer period of time and it's just like when's that happening so really would it be helpful or to all the committee members would it be helpful if on the the web page for the policy committee there is these are the policies currently under uh review so not just not contemplated but actually have been before and aren't yet to first reading with some sort of very summary status i i don't think there's a cookie cutter approach because community engagement comes at various stages and it varies by policy and subject matter but we could we could certainly in a summary fashion highlight what's happened and what we know is coming and keep it as current as possible i'm trying to figure out how we get to that and liz i think that that's one of the strengths of our community engagement is that it's not cookie cutter that we're being really intentional about how to do it it's just i i'm forgetful and i get confused about where we are where so i think having some sort of tracking or graph or chart would help me greatly yeah like maybe a google form like saying what it is
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uh what stage we're at and like a brief summary of what the policy is about sort of thing and when we're next going to be talking about it um in our agenda that would be really helpful so liz i would say yes and some of these suggest suggestions and always like you know here's a link if you want to provide you know some feedback so it's not just like hey if you [Music] so i i think um yeah some kind of almost not a timeline but a process flow that might have uh initial drafting as one step uh there might be an initial community engagement before a final drafting final community engagement first reading kind of a flow to it that it at least has some some steps even even though we know that community engagement is messier than that and drafting is messier than that too though i mean i hesitate to put final or descriptors that implies a repeatable process that has quite a bit of variability i think drafting or consideration i want to not be misleading to folks about where we are and what it means and that's what makes me a little uncomfortable about um that but i we can absolutely get something that i think will work i'm giving you my i'm probably shooting from the hip in ways that aren't helpful for this conversation right now but but my observation of the process and maybe just my impression is that there's kind of an initial phase where we're playing around with a lot of stuff and then a more honing in phase uh where we're we've got some fairly well defined pieces that were we may we may continue to alter and hone in but we're we're kind of more there finish line in sight of a final draft um and i don't know maybe maybe that's my impression and i don't know if that's how and that's why i kind of broke it down like that um so maybe we should i don't know um take this offline and talk about it and think about a way to um what does staff box something up for you all to react to and see if that hits the mark that would be great um be happy to do that yeah yeah i think it is a lot of moving parts so helping people have visibility to that is a great recommendation yeah if i may our user guide for writing policies i think can be a helpful tool and i think as we're trying to build some coherency and clarity um around all of these processes um and finding a way to map it back there that ultimately begins with that racial equity work and so um there could be a way that we articulate um what that means and i'm happy to work with you all okay thank you um so liz do you think do you think you might have something um that we'll be able to look at at the next policy meeting in three weeks okay okay it'll be great thank you okay um so i think we're going to stop there with the climate crisis response policy um i am anticipating that um this policy will probably not be on the agenda for the next couple of meetings probably um there's a lot of uh drafting that has to happen um to to bring in all the different pieces the all the information that we've um assembled um so um i i just want to let people know that um the fact that it does not on it does not appear on an agenda does not mean that work is not happening it means the work is being being done by uh staff and the subcommittee um and you know where we're trying to bring the next time that this appears on the agenda i think will be able to bring forth um a draft that we'll be able to actually kind of chew
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on as a committee um so anyway nathaniel did you hear the question oh sorry um speaking of the subcommittee uh i was wondering if it has been meeting because i believe i was supposed to be on the subcommittee for this policy and i have not got any invites okay um i would say we have not been meeting uh formally we did have a we did have one meeting with the climate justice group um but i think that's really the only i think that's the only time that the subcommittee has has met at all um but we'll make sure to include you on any um any meetings going forward okay okay had a question um if i thought these were just like informal work groups calling them a subcommittee means that they're like if that's the formal name then don't we have to publicly notice those and everything i mean i don't know i'm actually asking i'm actually actually liz because if the the intent is not to create a formal governance structure they are an informal working group so like to this extent lowercase s subcommittee is being used it is not intended to signal anything more formal than that in fact it's it's to help the work move along um so that we there's more work done to present to the formal committee at each meeting yeah i guess i would just be careful if i was using that because if you're the public watching the meeting and you don't hear what the subcommittee is like oh there's a subcommittee like where are the subcommittees it just okay we need to be careful okay so i will i will not use that term going forward i will try to remember to call it work group um if i slip at some point somebody please stop regretting okay um we are at 503 that means we've been um meeting for about an hour we had an agreement that since this is a three-hour meeting once an hour we would stop and have a break um i'm inclined to do that right now so uh if we could meet back here in five minutes so 508 and give it time to tank up on coffee again okay online um the next policy we're going to talk about is the student assignment policy um and this is going to be um i think we're going to step back and have a discussion about some concepts to guide our approach to this policy we've only got about 30 minutes allocated to it and i'm going to ask scott to kind of lead this portion of the festivities um if you could walk us through the elements of the document that you sent out or that roseanne sent out a little while ago um and this is just a um a series of questions really um to help us think through what the um the purpose of the policy should be and kind of the different approaches that we could take so scott you want to take it away unfortunately before scott before you start i don't know what document you're referencing rita is there is there something that wasn't with the board i mean i just printed out the committee materials was there something and i could have missed it in the blackout uh no this was just sent out probably an hour and a half ago maybe two hours ago maybe uh by roseanne and it's just something that i worked up this weekend so again this is enough uh formal thing but just something to get us oriented towards um i think the questions the kind of the big picture questions we want to look at when we're going through the policy and someone sent it to me because roseanne didn't oh i'm so sorry i forgot to send that to you i'll send it out to you guys or how about uh how about putting it up on the screen just because i'm not going to be able to
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yeah i'm happy to to do that i've got it right here um if i can do i have the power to yes share screen um okay is that work yes okay um so first thing is what why are we dealing with this policy now um and number one we've you know we've been dealing with boundary issues for over over 10 to 15 years now where we have a number of schools that are overcrowded in a number that are under enrolled and i'm going to skip down here because i um just listed out now i got to figure out how i can do this okay i get it okay sorry i'm trying to figure out how to okay there we go so at the very end the these are schools that are well over capacity and these are the official capacity utilization numbers um and again if we if we talk to our principals uh a hundred percent it's like every room is used and really closer to 85 percent is what we should shoot for to allow some flexibility long term and to allow for the inevitable ups and downs in enrollment um that are just part of the future of things uh but you can see there's a lot of schools and grant is actually i believe it even though nobody's there it's over 1900 now or something like that yeah it is because that's what the um the report that we got recently in the weekly um so as you can see there's a lot of schools and this is all the schools at over 85 percent um and then on the other hand we've got some schools that are really underused um of course jefferson is under construction uh or will be and will be part of a broader community engagement about where we go with jefferson but um a lot of schools are underenrolled i have a question about scott about the um so the over-enrolled and the under-enrolled in which the district actually controls enrollment so like on the under enrolled like how da vinci could be underenrolled when unless things have changed they used to always have a waiting list and then how schools can be over enrolled like odyssey and i don't know if you went back there was another one that was like we could totally control i mean because it's all by lottery but or like sunny side how maybe somebody say i can see this as a neighborhood boundary but like how could odyssey be over enrolled because that there's no neighborhood boundary so that's all students that we lent let in yeah yeah odyssey it may be because they moved from one building to another and that affected their actual facility space uh i think just two years ago because they were at um heyhurst um but yes all of this is under control our control um and it's it's been out of balance for a long time i mean i i uh with judy brannon's help prepared slides 10 years ago to show the school board members and he had the same same kind of thing happening okay go ahead yeah yeah so um yeah this is all under our control we just haven't been exercising control um so both and of course both states are not good for students they affect how resources are allocated we know that economies of scale affect uh resources you know our funding formula over the years for example is at thresholds around
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getting an extra you know getting an assisted principal at the elementary level or uh how many counselors he got how many office staff you got library staff etc so this stuff really matters uh secondly we're running the process in southeast and we'll continue into northeast and north in the coming years and uh this policy directly impacts how students where they end up and jackson's nodding yeah total totally get that and we ran into that in our discussion of southeast at the board level in terms of who gets into kellogg and who isn't um and so the current policy and again it's uh what do we say 2006 or 2008 i can't remember um it has some values and choices baked in that i think it's time we looked at those and either affirmed them uh or change them and in some cases they need clarification even if we agree to what we think the policy says um there may be some gaps and i don't think any kind of equity analysis uh racial equity was was done and again we saw that play out in the discussion on creston where uh a number of students we decided to send back to their neighborhood school most of those students were students of color low-income students um and i i i would say whether whether that decision was correct or not i don't think we did any kind of equity analysis around that we just said here's what the rules are finally there's a gap between what we need to do in the short term and what makes sense for policy in the long term um if we were balanced now um then i think we need a policy that on a regular basis examines boundaries and enrollments makes fairly minimal changes to keep that balance going would have very little impact on students we probably wouldn't be moving students um from one school to another in the middle of their school career for example um and you know ideally we'd say okay next year's kindergarten class there's going to be a slight adjustment in terms of where where you end up going to school i don't know if that actually can happen in the real world considering how things change but i i think that's that's where we want to end up um but short term we need to move a lot of students in order to balance um if we did just did the minimal it would take us years to get into balance and again if you look at some of the schools um on that uh over under list there's some of our uh uh with high numbers of low-income and students of color in them so there's some real equity issues here um and and when i was on deebrack and we'll see we looked at some of the factors listed in this policy and talked about them and realized a lot of those factors were out the window because we needed to make such large changes in order to rebalance the system okay i'm i'm going to plunge on ahead and stop me if you have questions so uh scott what are you attempt what are you attempting to do here you're just explaining to us what's here or do you want to have a discussion or what what's the what's your pleasure in terms of how we're going to interact with this um so what i'd like to do is what i've i've gone through and restated in shortened form what's in the policy and then listed what i think uh and and rita helped with this uh what we think are the central questions that we need to answer and when we answer them will get to the right policy or at least the right draft to take out to get public feedback on um so that's the the purpose here is to bring everybody up to speed on what's in the current policy and then what are the questions that we want to consider either and against those values and choices that are baked into the current
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policy what we may or may not want to change going forward or clarify um so not to uh debate anything but to raise questions and so if going through here uh yeah join in if you think there's a question missing or if you think there's an additional question um does that make sense yeah i guess just and made i'm not sure this was in the document you sent but just a statement you made that like you know those are things we have all this within our control i think there's some things that we have more control over than others because of our na you know because we have the right to attend your neighborhood school we really you know we we have said that you know if you live in a neighborhood catchment area you can go to that school because the question i was asking about is some of the schools i'm looking at there have programs that aren't like affiliated with a neighborhood and so the district actually should have the district staff an enrollment transfer should have control over that i'm just kind of wondering so maybe your example of odyssey they have a new building but like what about da vinci or is that the same thing with sunnyside or these other you know places where we have programs like ainsworth has i noticed angels was on that list they have a spanish immersion program but they also have a neighborhood program so are they over capacity because of the neighborhood program or because they've built a spanish immersion program that has put it over capacity yeah those i mean those those are all good questions to ask in terms of a school by school basis but i would say the answer to a lot of it is we haven't changed boundaries i mean martin luther king jr has been under enrolled for two decades and we have that community has come to come to the school board numerous times saying when are you going to fix this um so a lot of these are boundary issues that we haven't addressed and we have no ongoing process again we need up we need a long-term process that keeps us in balance uh short term we need some substantial boundary adjustments that are going to be moving a lot of students around scott can i interject here um in reference to julia's question um well welcome to our superintendent um so there are this is one of three policies that govern um student enrollment so there's also an enrollment transfer policy and focus option policy so some of some of the programs that you're talking about would be governed by one or the other potentially or probably both of those other policies um the student assignment policy is um currently limited to governing neighborhood schools so i don't know if that dr moore if i mean i have my virtual hand raised um so adding to that uh director moore there might be interrelated policies and i appreciate the questions you're posing here director bailey this is one of those policies that also has more than one ad connected to it if you read ad 410.049 student assignment review and school boundary changes it's not an ap i don't recognize it it actually reads as an additional policy liz and mary if you could look at it it's it's not written as an administrative directive it's actually written as a policy and it speaks to assignment review and boundary changes so as long as we're sort of you know talking about sort of where where are we clear in sort of the board's uh policy direction i just invite you to also look at that one i think it's mistitled i know that as we refresh an update i think this one doesn't have the right header yeah and um thanks for saying that and i i make reference to one of the ads because um so when a student moves out of their current neighborhood
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uh the policy doesn't say anything about what happens to them the ad says that students who students can stay in their current school to the highest grade if they move out of their catchment area so this is in the ad but not in the policy and that's that's one of those areas maybe that you're talking about that um is this policy or not what's what what do we want to determine uh how we what are the choices that families have uh is that something we want to affirm or not it is again one of the questions i would raise can i can i mention um so the policy does say students have the right to attend their neighborhood schools through the highest grade um which has been interpreted as once you once you are part of a school you have the right to stay there through the highest grade of that school even if you move um so it's this is one of those areas where i think the policy is ambiguous and the a.d has stepped in but yeah i agree we need to clarify what we actually mean or in the case that i'm raising it states it has statements like the stup the superintendent shall have like that's not an operational a.d yeah so um what we have is a as a system where we have a substantial number of students every year who opt out of their neighborhood school through either through a lottery process or through a hardship petition um or they move uh but continue going to their old school and uh again in the bigger picture as we look at this whole package of policies it's raising questions about where do we want to how's this working and where do we go from here scott one thing we might want to put in somewhere here or consider if we're so stepping back from is we um one of the first board meetings in july i think the first board meeting in july of 2017 we were asked by community members to adopt a right to return to albina which we subsequently did by um nature of a of a resolution and i don't know if again sort of uh making decisions by a resolution that aren't connected to a policy or that could potentially be in conflict with the policy i don't know if that's something that we um want to anchor um anchor into the formal policy or not but just something for consideration because that's that's another thing that you know we're talking about um uh martin luther king jr elementary school that may be another thing because i know we were looking at that school on boise elliott humboldt woodlawn yeah yeah chapman yeah that's a great point so what the policy says um you know it starts up with a purpose which we probably want to uh look at and perhaps uh change uh provide some definitions which i think the way that we're doing policy now is we've been moving definitions to the end um and then it has a basic statement saying you know you're assigned to your neighborhood school based on where you live uh and then as uh rita pointed out you have the right to stay there through your highest grade the exceptions are if you're receiving special education services or ell services or you're assigned to an alternative program um and then i raise a bunch of sorry can i just put on can i just put an asterisk on that statement you just made please i would like to know um you know what about our current thinking and our current facilities especially for example if all of our facilities are going to be ada compliant in theory we should be able to we do a better job now at providing services in all schools and like instead of just having a sort of general hey this you can go to your neighborhood
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except school except for maybe these people are exempted out is i'm not super comfortable with that being just this large exemption like we may or may not be able to find a place in your neighborhood school for you if you fit into these categories and i think if if somebody's not being able to go to their neighborhood school if they're an english language learner or special ed there better be a pretty good reason why not versus just hey we can move them around where we have space um so i'd i'd like to have a longer discussion about that current exemption can i suggest that we not have a longer discussion because many of us have been talking about this in 2008 um so i i'd like a actually a shorter discussion but yes actually okay let's uh i meant not today is what i meant yeah i've noted that julia um there you go thanks um [Music] right okay um so again the policy doesn't say what to do if students move out of their catchment area that's treated in an a.d so we should weigh in on if we want to put that into policy i think there's pros and cons for keeping the current at least what's in the aed for example on a number of students are forced to move because of financial hardship of their family we know that for those students having to shift school particularly in mid-year um is not helpful to their education so maybe this is something we want an idea we want to keep in policy at least in how we work things but there's again probably pros and cons to that that we should suss out um at a later date um uh and then things get complicated uh with boundary changes um so again the current policy is if there's a boundary change students can stay in their current school which means the impact of a boundary change will be very gradual over three four five six years uh again pros and cons to that uh and again there's there's long term if we were more balanced and we were making smaller changes maybe that makes sense uh short term a lot of people have weighed in to say that's that's not workable um and then things get more complicated if we throw in great configurations reconfigurations um so i posed a question for students who live in the old catchment area of a feeder school but now live outside the new catchment area and are integrated that is being shifted to a different school do they get to follow their cohort or not and again there's pros and cons to that but that's a question we need to specifically address that's not in current policy i'm the answer to that what i have the answer to that yeah i bet you do my answer would be if it's at a natural delineation between schools like between fifth and sixth grade they don't get to stay with their cohort but if it's in a place where it's not a natural delineation between schools like seventh and eighth grade then they get to stay with their cohort but you know maybe other people have a different answer yeah and that's that's one answer we might land on um so i uh again wanna make sure we get the right questions up there and then we can do a pros cons um and figure out how to go um there's also an issue for younger siblings um particularly in our transfer policy uh there's uh younger siblings get to follow along with their older siblings as long as they're in the same school and again that means if we want if we want to if we need bigger fixes they're going to take longer
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and then there if you're attending a feeder school and you live outside the schools catchment area either you moved or you're transferred and you're in a grade that's being shifted do you get to follow you know there's it gets really complex the different situations that our students are in when there's both a reconfiguration and boundary change and we need to sess out each of those potential states and state what the rule is so that there's some consistency and again the board can make exceptions at any time but we should communicate in general what the expectation is and why that's in policy uh going forward uh and if if they're if we don't know what the rule is for a particular group of students that's that's not a good thing we should have that sessed out before a decision is made um part c of that section says that if you're not attending your neighborhood school do for whatever reason you have the right to return to your neighborhood school and i'm not sure if you actually have to file a transfer petition that is then automatically approved or not i need to check with judy you don't i transferred last year and you do not have to put out a transfer paper you just automatically can get in okay because the opposite happened way back when when my son was mistakenly assigned to a neighborhood his neighborhood middle school when he had rights to go to a different middle school and all of a sudden we got a class list from that other school and we had to fill out paperwork and tour to get him into the school but that's good to know but we should we should clarify that so that our families know what they need to do so that there are no surprises okay uh section four covers managing the system part a says there'll be a regular review of enrollment trends um that hasn't been happening the last couple of years and in the last 10 years we've had two overcrowding train wrecks at beverly cleary and at bridger we want to avoid that uh part b's outlines what happens when they're an adjustment in boundaries as needed due to under enrollment or overcrowding um and it lists that the superintendent is going to get you know feedback from everybody involved come up with a plan and it lists six factors to be taken into consideration recognizing that they may be in conflict with each other but they should be part of the decision-making process and again when dbrak looked at this when we were considering big boundary changes five years ago um we said yeah a couple of these are just out the window we're gonna have to impact a ton of kids um in order to get to optimal use of facilities um in part c says boundary changes need to be in the hopper by january of the calendar year to take effect in the next school year um so in my editorial opinion again if we were in relatively good balance we could probably get on a program of doing regular minor adjustments that only affected a small number of students and families and keep our system in balance we haven't done that so some big big adjustments are necessary so for that reason i think we should separate out this long-term policy that operates in in our or better world to come i think the full board should adopt a short term meaning two to three year when we finish out the enrollment balancing process up here's the operating rules in the short term
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that could be quite different and some particulars from what the long-term policy is uh and i think we need to do that fairly soon to inform the southeast discussion going forward and then north and northeast as well um and part five covers that student assignment following boundary changes and uh it says you can stay at that current at your current school through the highest grade again not really clear [Music] i think we can clarify that to if we agree with it we can clarify that a bit and clean it up or we can look at whether we want to change that again short term long term might have different answers uh okay let's see director before you yes i just want to make sure i urge you right that you think some of this work needs to be done and clarified before we commence our face to southeast work yes there's um i mean we saw the board making a decision about some students on the fly basically um with what's come to me known as the constant amendment um and i think we you know especially in terms of uh estimating what the numbers are going to be at schools in the event of a boundary change the rules need to be really clear up front um for our staff and consultants to success that out i also want to point out that foreign in a number of areas we don't have good data we don't know if a student is living outside of a catchment area we don't know if they're there because of a transfer they're there because they moved we don't know if it was in some cases whether it was a lottery or a hardship transfer and it would be great to i actually asked don wolf to do an estimate on what it would take to keep track of that within our student information system so when might this committee what does it believe it could refresh i'm sorry say that again i'm sorry i lost power for a moment there i'm just trying to estimate uh director bailey when um when this important policy work uh might be completed so that there's clarity as we commence a phase two process um because i know that this takes a lot of deliberation so i don't know if that's a month six months a year um so the thought i have is um first my recollection is the constant amendment was actually designed to that the recommendation we got from staff was a violation of our policy or not consistent with our policy and the constant amendment was moving them back in us back into policy into compliance with policy um and then the second thing is um i would want to think more about having a short term set of rules um for one geography because we just in the last couple of years made a number of changes and recon you know opened two middle schools changed feeder patterns and we did it with one set of rules and you know a number of exceptions and then if we're like okay but first now for southeast we're going to come up with a different set of rules and then when we're done the southeast we're going to create another set of rules um i'm i haven't unfortunately a bad feeling about where that's going to land the current set of schools and vis-a-vis the schools that already went and the schools that are going to come after that that's um one thing about the i'm not sure that
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that's i'm sure i agree to that approach um and then second just a broader um i guess um point i'd like to make um around there's a focus on southeast and then the mention of high schools and maybe it will include northeast um but i i the biggest inequity in our enrollment policies is the fact that jefferson doesn't have a neighborhood boundary and i can't see how we you know shave what 80 students off of or however many al franklin and and we and we don't like address the big elephant in the room which is that jefferson doesn't have a neighborhood boundary and it seems like the high school question should go all altogether um it should be you know if you've got you know lincoln's overcrowded grants overcrowded franklin's overcrowded and jefferson doesn't have a neighborhood boundary instead of saying we're just going to take southeast and we're gonna have one set of rules and then we're gonna create a set of rules for everything else to me that just the i don't see the logic thread through that um so that just when i think of like how we're going to create an umbrella set a room that are that are treats students in a similar situation equitably and that's aligned with our racial equity and social justice policy um how you know what's the best way way to do that and to me it's like taking all the high schools together versus and having the same set of rules because um you know withdrawing the sibling preference for just for you know franklin and madison um you know i think that has real consequences as a parent who's had kids in more than one school i've it's it's harder and i think you know that's going to be a point we want to have a conversation with our broader community because if we're going to apply that to southeast it's going to need to be as you said scott this is going to be like across the district you know what what do our families think about that just the challenges of picking kids up after school or different bus routes being in different schools i i think there's a lot of implications for our families and i don't want to have one set of rules just apply to southeast well i i'm confused why you're saying that because we're talking about rules that would apply to southeast north and northeast as we go across with enrollment balancing well then i i guess why would they well if if it's not looking at all the high schools then it seems like then we just have a set of rules for so it's so for example let's just take lincoln's over you know overcrowded and i'm sure it's going to get more so when it opens and um are we just going to apply say for example the the current draft has maybe that's not the the draft that's going to be used has that there's no siblings following if you change the boundaries um so would that just apply to franklin and northeast or is it going to apply to to lincoln as as well and the other thing is um when i look at the current draft with the height you stay in your same high school like how how does that apply to um to jefferson okay so if you say hey they're gonna have a neighborhood we're getting rid of the you can choose where you wanna where you wanna go to school but jefferson's gonna have a neighborhood boundary and we and we have the and you can stay in your high school like then that you're in then you're not gonna have anybody potentially move um so i think we have to think through how this is how we're going to have us a set of rules that apply to everybody and it's done equitably what that's not equitably it's done in a way that follows our racial equity and social justice um rules and the some of the lowest income zip codes in the district are in outer southeast but that's exactly what i'm saying we agree on that i feel like you you seem to think that there's a special set of rules that are going to apply to southeast and nowhere else and that's exactly what i'm not saying okay then i'm confused by what you're saying because you said we might need to adopt
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a short-term set of rules and then over the next yes over the next three years or so as we do enrollment balancing across the entire east side so i'm saying what whatever we adopt short term for southeast would apply also to northeast and north um as we move across what about the west side um so the west side um i'm sure there will be ongoing boundary adjustments there but that was the one part of debrac that got done for better for worse the the the biggest imbalances there were addressed will there be future imbalances probably they're going to have over 1700 students at lincoln that's not the that's not the forecast at all just saying so rita i think you're trying to interject and i am too julia i as someone who also resides in southeast i appreciate your mindfulness of how southeast is represented in all of this and i i feel like the point of all of this is to create clear transparent cohesive rules so that people know what to expect they know how this how some things work and to make it so that you know there isn't a set of rules for the west side and the east side um but what i heard scott say is we may as we like our goal would be to cause the least amount of disruption temporarily as we're fixing the system for a few years we may need to to take one look at things and then in the future when we have a more stable system we can revisit rules but i didn't hear him say we're going to have special rules for the east side and not for the west but i i can hear your concern about feeling like i know that historically you felt like southeast got you know kind of um the experiment or the least protection um and i think you know you and i are both going to advocate for um for that to not be the case um but but i hear that concern in in [Music] i can hear how what scott said triggered that for you um but i heard it slightly differently and i know you're gonna jump in there sorry and i'm open to that thank you yeah and i don't live in southeast but i feel the same way about southeast these are my kids too so so i just wanted to um kind of clarify um scott and i had a conversation over the weekend about this and um i i think when as we were talking it through um i think what became really clear to the two of us um is that the policy we we need to have um a policy that will create a system that will allow for regular you know periodic um assessment of um enrollment any enrollment issues that are out there and and have a mechanism to make um incremental boundary changes to respond to um changing you know demographic flows um so that's that's long term that's the big picture and and we do not currently have that um so when we're talking about the policy um we since policies are supposed to not be time-bound necessarily um we need to look at the policy differently than the way we need to look at the acute situation that we're currently facing so um we probably need to have kind of two buckets of work that we um that we focus on for this spring the the policy work is is longer term kind of systemic uh but then we have several acute situations where um incremental change is not going to accomplish the immediate goal of right-sizing school enrollment to match the capacity of building so we um
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what we were thinking was that if we think about it that way then we can come up with some um common agreements some rules around how to um how to manage the acute situation in a way that is transparent and applicable universally over the next few years as we try to resolve the the huge imbalances that are out there and then the second bucket would be the longer term systemic policy so that's i think that's what we're talking about um and having said all of that um we are clearly not going to resolve really any of these questions today this was kind of uh an intro um but i i think scott and i wanted to get a sense from the committee members do you think this is a fruitful approach to the task ahead of us can i ask a question dr moore so i i'm hearing you by for kate short term long term this coming monday the board has a work session for example to try to land on some clear objectives and i'm just wondering where there's discrepancy or lack of clarity or policy doesn't exist in the way that the board wants it to or intends to are we going to get caught in that cobweb on monday as we try to arrive at some clarity for staff around phase 2 objectives and what the bumper rails are or we're going to find ourselves in an untenuous position as staff so i think go ahead go ahead no go ahead go ahead um so i i think we need to get clarity so that we know ahead of time uh what we're actually saying and if if we have a policy that hasn't been looked at from an equity standpoint in the short term we need to take a pretty hard look at that otherwise and again i voted against yanking students out of who we thought were headed to kellogg or were recommended by the guiding coalition to go to kellogg who were largely students of color low income and sent them back to their neighborhood school [Music] without without considering the equity of that again right or wrong whether we would have agreed to that or not but just to say that's current practice or policy and i'm not even sure it's current policy [Music] or whether it's in the a.d or or what but we should be clear on that up front so that the southeast guiding coalition knows what the expectations are so parents know what the expectations are um and and it's not something that that comes in at the last second that's all i'm requesting is that we all be on the same page exactly so part of part of this exercise was to kind of trying to come up with the key questions that we need to answer as a board to have clarity going forward i guess i would add then does it make sense i mean the question i would have is like does it make sense to and is it equitable to begin the the high school process in one quadrant in one of the most diverse high schools or does it make more sense to have the um the enrollment balancing um exercise b by in this case by you know second secondary be a second be a separate discussion so so julia go ahead sorry finish i didn't mean to interrupt yeah and i was to say and then my other question and i appreciate hearing some of the backgrounds obviously i wasn't part of your weekend discussions um is um you know how do we because i think that the natural um i think position i'll just say i'm only going to speak for myself because i can't speak for everybody in southeast um but is like hey we got this before and are the rules going to change so how
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do we build like confidence and transparency in we're not going to have one set of rules uh like that whatever our our overarching principles are is there overarching principles they're not like because we're trying to solve a specific a specific problem and then they're going to change because i think then it's it's hard because if you're sitting in outer southeast you've had seven you know under-enrolled k-8s they're the remainder of the big experiment and it's hard not to think of like hey are these like if i'm giving this up is everybody else going to be as well so how do we make like what are our overarching principles and we're going to stick to those and those are the ones going to be the same but it's not situational like because we're trying to solve a different problem i do think it's a little bit damaging you know i think i'd love us to get to a place where we think about pps as a cohesive whole district i know that you know there's east side west side north south and and some of that is historic and some of that is about um racial equity pieces um but i i think i love what you're saying julia about what are our values and that i mean i think the rules are an articulation of our values and and so that it's not so much about what is the rule and is the rule the same for everybody but you know our value is to provide equitable excellent educational experiences for all students and how we do that you know the enrollment as guadalupe has said lots of times our key strategy around excellent education is not necessarily enrollment and balancing it's it's a factor as far as like um resource allotment but it's not the key factor so i also think like we need to keep in mind where enrollment balancing falls in our priorities i think julia what you're saying is we want to have something where groups of people aren't feeling like they're being marginalized or like you said you know the k-8 situation that they're kind of left to languish but that we want to do this well and i do think we need to look at high schools in southeast and we do want to talk about overcrowding and um how we are looking at our diverse schools and there's some of it is values change over time i think about you know we've got an elementary school that goes to lane but then those students go to cleveland and they're the only cohort that leaves lane to go to cleveland and that was a decision made by a passport to try to increase the diversity of cleveland which is great and is that really what's best for those students to to split the cohort after being in middle school um and so i think sometimes we the decisions are complex and we're trying to make good decisions based on a lot of factors um and so i think it's hard to say the rules have to be the same all the time and that's the only thing that looks like justice we obviously want to be consistent and fair and transparent but we also want to have our values be the premier thing and so i think we get into this place of like territorialness or defensiveness sometimes because we want to protect people that we know have been marginalized and we also we want to make it fair but how do we how do we really look at what is just what is right for kids to have the most excellent educational opportunity possible um and so i think we sometimes it's how do we have that conversation in healthy ways but i totally hear you julia on that the concern about doing the high schools this way the concern about southeast um and i think that you know it's important for us to have these conversations and i'm really hoping that the work session will be a fruitful place where we can really dive into what is what is the value what is the thing that's most important to us next okay so um we have gone way over time on this uh topic and and we've got a bunch of other things that um we have on the agenda um obviously this is going to require more discussion and i think some of this discussion is going to bleed over into monday um but i think it's um i think it's important that we um kind of raise the issue of short-term versus long-term and policy versus resolution um and um we will continue to talk about this unless we have a since we're not going to resolve any of this tonight unless there's a strong objection i'm inclined to um stop us here and move on to the next piece is that okay okay all right so um
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so i'm gonna i'm gonna actually ask for some direction from staff here um so we have uh three policies left on the agenda uh now 608 we're obviously not going to get to all three by 7 pm so i want to get some sense of relative urgency on these three policies we've got comprehensive sexuality education formal public complaints and computer use i think that the comprehensive sex education should be a priority over the other two uh given some of the changes i think okay the other two are important and the the the update on the community the family engagement on the formal complaint policy is i think a very brief piece um that so that might be the the second we i know you want to have room to talk about the real estate policy as well so we could we could bump one or two to the next oh right right i can contact dr packy right now to if if we wanted to there's no urgency to the computer use policy it's okay it's out of date but it's but i think they can wait for the next hearing okay that's me good to know i that was actually the one that i was wondering if there was some urgency to it but okay if we can postpone that so let's let's postpone it um and then so let's leap into the comprehensive sexuality education um and um we originally allocated 30 minutes to it um we've talked about this a little bit before so we could shave a little bit of time off that would be good um but i also want to make sure that we give it an appropriate level of focus so um who's gonna i'm gonna take a lead on this one so jenny with the comb will take the lead but i think she needs to come in there she is okay hello all right well uh thank you everyone for um taking the time to review our comprehensive sexuality education uh policy um would you like me to to go ahead and dive in yes please okay so um we presented the comprehensive sexuality education policy um a few meetings ago because we wanted to get feedback on whether we should continue to have a comprehensive sexuality education policy as a standalone or moved to having a comprehensive health education policy which included our comprehensive sexuality education policy as a piece of it and the overwhelming feedback was that a comprehensive health education policy made the most sense and would be a great way to codify the many laws mandates and best practices in health education so what we've presented to you with feedback from a couple of the directors is the comprehensive health education policy with uh um you know specifically calling out comprehensive sexuality education as well as a number of other health education components so in your packet you have a lot of information um i'm happy to to answer questions about it but what i what i can tell you in kind of in brief is that the comprehensive sexuality education policy that we had passed several years ago was created in a very robust way so it included community partners parents students staff school administrators and was was given a lot of uh feedback uh when it was first passed so there is a document that actually outlines the process that we went through before passing the first comprehensive sexuality education policy and i just want to have have that for you as as kind of some background in context within that report which was conducted by the oregon health authority there are also a number of recommendations because as of as of kind of the the process we we had oregon health authority do an evaluation of the process that we went through uh which was prior to us doing our scope and sequence so there are also a number of recommendations uh in that report for kind of your next time you do a policy revision and a a comprehensive sexuality education implementation plan which will be the next step
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in our process once we have our policy approved so do know that a number of the recommendations that are in there have to do with reviewing data again speaking with community partners revising the gbc and making amendments to kind of the the structure of how health education specifically comprehensive sex ed is taught across the district k-12 so that's kind of our next step but i wanted to have that report in there for you in addition i included our 2019 youth risk behavior survey reports which as health behavior outcome data from our 9th through 12th graders in pps it's all pre-covered data but it's also what we will use to revise our scope and sequence in gbc as we move forward and it will help us inform kind of that next iteration of implementation for comprehensive sexuality education specifically but of course health education more globally and then the final report that we included in there is as part of our centers for disease control grant on comprehensive sexuality education safe and supportive environments and school health services we have been conducting research on how the implementation of our programs is going and so all of those results from um teachers and administrators and this spring will be collecting data from students will also inform the creation of the implementation plan slash administrative directive for this policy so i just wanted to have all of that available to you so you can kind of see what will be guiding some of our work as well as our new processes around creating administrative directives with community with our community engagement teams and our restorative justice practices so that's all there i know it's a ton of information um but with regards to the policy um what we've done is like i said we've kind of given our some background information around comprehensive health education and then as an endnote included all of the laws and mandates that are required by organ and through pps to be included in health education in grades k through 12 and again we're doing that to elevate the learning around health education and help you know whether it's district staff parents community members students know what are the many things that are guiding our work both philosophically and legally and i'm happy to answer any questions just want to say i'm appreciative of the work and especially in that uh which never occurred to me in terms of health education giving students the tools to be a knowledgeable consumer for lack of a better word of health services is um i mean it's mind boggling in our crazy health care system right now um just say that so and any tools we can give to our students to try to evaluate how to get good care and of course it's a huge racial equity issue as well we we know um i was just reading the other day the um infant mortality rate the saddest statistic in the world um is three times as high for african-american children as white children in the u.s but uh only quote unquote one and a half times as high if the delivering doctor is african-american and that just is incredibly sad that's that's just one piece of what our students will have are dealing with and will have to deal with um in our health care system so and anything we can do around that to help our students better better figure out this system is great thank you and i think scott it goes deeper than that it's not just helping our students figure out the system but it's creating the next generation of doctors who understand that they need to publish them to their black patients you know you know that there is a what studies have found is there's a dismissal of black pain or black symptoms and so i think doing this
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comprehensive um health education can can shift that narrative as well that people are believed in health settings um so we're training not just the future patients but the future doctors as well and i think if we start early and make it i think i love what it says about the um you know the comprehensive sex education being inclusive of lgbtq folks because i think that also speaks to the future doctors who will already be able to um have some understanding of trans patients and some of what what those folks may need so we're creating not just consumers but also practitioners so thank you for your work jenny this policy i think really is is part of the whole child work that we do at pbs that that we also you know see children as as full people that um we're i think about the graduate portrait and the and that person that that graduates from our system sort of fully realized as a leader and as someone with empathy and someone who's um advocating for racial justice this policy i think contributes to that development of that graduate portrait incredibly thank you i have a couple questions um first of all who is on the work group on the work group for this policy yeah sorry this is just like the easy one i hope it was uh we didn't uh it was jenny and i uh oh right we had um because of the short the short turnaround time and this was completely my fault um uh ali and scott were on the the the work group however i we we met at a time that neither was available to me so it was okay so that wasn't that wasn't a true question it was just i was wondering who had input already on it um so a couple questions um i think it's remarkable that the legal citations are almost one-third of the length of the policy um so uh these are are you guys getting an echo okay um about midway through that first long paragraph it references research shows that school health programs and policies do you mean health education i mean we have sometimes we're talking about health education health programs because then when health program i'm thinking about like the school-based clinics and other things like that do we mean health education in that reference sorry director edwards you're working upside down a paragraph i'm sorry can you repeat that i either i came across this garbled i don't know if it's just me or sure um i hear in the paragraph um the piece that you mentioned sorry it's the second paragraph of the policy and it's like the 12th line down it's the sense it says research supports that health programs and policy may be one of the most efficient ways so school health programs i i think you bring up a good point it actually is kind of a broad kind of like that whole child perspective so that would be inclusive of the health education curriculum even like counseling services as well as school-based health centers or anyone that would uh support health at the school level so like even things include like dental vans or vision screenings or things like that so the definition of school health program is pretty pretty all-encompassing and so this is maybe a philosophical question is is this a the title is comprehensive health education policy the title is [Music] or is it actually a comprehensive school help educate programs and policy and then because most of this is about health education which to me seems appropriate but it's narrower and it's like if it is a more whole child approach like should there be sections on the you know sections on the other pieces because most of this is health education which i think is which i think is great so i'm just trying to fight figure out what we're trying to accomplish here is it primarily to be focused on health education um so that's just a bigger question and
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then a smaller item is at the very end it references the gvc and i'm just wondering for to make the policy more timeless if we just it should just say should be aligned with the pps you know whatever central curriculum but there's another word for whatever our general curriculum is but i i just things change over time what we call them sure i think that makes a sense so i think instead of gbc probably scope and sequence is the more timeless um language because that that applies to how the standards themselves are organized across the year and is independent of like guaranteed viable curriculum is a more of a philosophical stance curriculum is more often thought of often times as a the materials that we use so i think your right scope and sequence is probably a better phrase to use there and that can be easily adapted and i definitely understand your point about school health programs um because you're right in this policy what we're really really targeting is health education and a more holistic um school health system does encompass a number of other departments and things that are outside the scope of health education um that is something that i you know very much would love for us to create and substantiate and get written into into policy but i think you're right at this point what we're really focusing on is the health education piece which is what i have um you know domain over versus the much broader picture of coordinated school health which is lots of different departments my comment on this is a comprehensive health education policy is it's quite good i don't see very many places i'd change like i said we're asking the question just like what are we what are we trying to achieve but if this is a comprehensive health education policy to me i think it sort of provides the right overarching references and sort of what our value our values are i guess i would ask if that is we do update the policies every two years and i i would ask if if that is something that the board um is interested in is creating a more of a coordinated to your point a coordinated school health policy where we would work with the many different departments that that touch on these various aspects maybe for this next iteration that is the kind of the groundwork that we could lay over the next two years to get to a place where we are creating that more coordinated school health vision i am very interested in that if that's something the board is interested in um i actually had a question about the section that you're referencing i think um this is the review of policy and comprehensive sexuality education plan that section um so this seems to call out the um sexuality education from the rest of health education and i'm wondering if that is um is this responding to statutes like is it it is is it a particular requirement that the sexual education plan and policy has to be reviewed every two years it is yes it is okay okay so so then your question jenny was do we want to make it more global is that was that your question did we lose jimmy i think what jenny was i think what she was suggesting is like this is the health education policy but if the board were so inclined to develop something that is broader that talks about school health generally that has all these other components besides just the education curriculum is that i don't know if jenny's come back yeah i i think i hopefully her volume i think she froze oh there she is okay are you back jenny i'm back i'm sorry i'm i'm back southeast electricity and is still quite
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okay so i i'm having difficulty hearing lenny yeah you're breaking up a lot so um sarah can you pick this up and so what jenny was saying that if we're going to review this in another two years um that would be a nice arc of time that if as a district we wanted to start thinking about having a comprehensive health policy that would be more inclusive because you know like that hits on student nutrition and our counselors and the health centers at different schools and and really kind of like that that more overarching health policy um jenny was saying that that's something that she's very passionate about and that if that was an interest of the board that as we worked up to the next review two years from now like this would if if we're given that um as an interest then the two-year arc would be a reasonable period to to kind of to explore that and be able to to report back on that for the next update i'm going to um uh i'm going to say uh i think that probably would be an interest in two years um i don't think we can say definitively at this point because a lot can happen in two years um and you know there would be another board um that would be making that call but i think it's probably a reasonable thing for you guys to be thinking about over the next two years does that sound reasonable definitely okay um and i had i had one other question which is very minor it's at the very end related policy um i'm wondering if we should also include and i i'm not sure i've got the name of the policy right but i think it's safe and substance-free learning environments i don't know why you wouldn't remember the name we only spent uh several months talking about it i know i know but i know i know there's substance free learning environments i remember that but anyway um can we should we include that on this list it's not a big item but is that a crazy thing to do because it just looks crazy okay we can add it okay thank you um and i think but that's all i had um does anybody else have any questions or comments okay so do we feel comfortable moving this on to a first reading one i'm sorry i have one question is there no i should have called it sorry go ahead okay well you know i i said it was well written um but i had a question about um teacher certification um and this has been an issue um with like pe and some other subjects of like hey when we do staffing we're like not we're going to get you know we've got to make some reductions so we're going to um unassign a teacher who has been say the health teacher and for some reason i think there has been more in like health and pe over the years and i'm wondering um if this health education whether we're indicating that health education should be taught generally by um those who have training in health education and so that is um it is our recommendation that that happen and for some of our schools it is somebody who has a licensure in health and that definitively at the high schools is what happens at k5 it is part of the core curriculum that our our general ed teachers teach and and we've done significant professional development on that um
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and then uh because of some of the amazing grant writing work that dr whitacum has done we've actually done extensive professional development at the middle school level and so even in our middle schools where it has been a teacher assigned as like 10 percent outside of their field of expertise jenny's team has then been able to do extensive pd with them and so we have avoided putting that specifically in the policy because we don't we while it is it is what we would prefer we don't want to put a school in a bind if um if it doesn't fully work out with with other things that are happening in the school or the size of enrollment um or or that sort of thing and so it's not it is it's what we recommend in the staffing guide um but it was not included um in this in this policy and is that true for other subject areas at those levels i mean does that generally track other subjects for i'm assuming it doesn't element juice generally so um i mean again in general you want a teacher teaching with a specific endorsement or licensure but oregon law allows for a teacher to teach 10 percent outside of their endorsement and so across our schools we do have um you know like maybe it's an elective here or maybe because of enrollment there's one extra science class and um you know and so somebody has a lot of knowledge but doesn't have the endorsement yet or or those sorts of things and so it is it's not the norm um but but it is a flexibility because you don't always have the exact number of kids taking a class as as perfectly matches up with a full fte yeah so uh director moore to answer your question i don't have an issue with i'm supportive of moving it to a first reading if that's what you were about ready to call the question i do want to explore this a little bit more because i feel like through my kids experience and my time in pps is that this was often a place where hey we got to assign somebody to teach health and it became [Music] one of the places where i think there was less um alignment and i'd say this is all anecdotal less alignment with what people's endorsements or licensure was than like you don't have a somebody teaching music who's not got a music endorsement um so i i think maybe i want to circle back between the first and second reading and just um do a click down on that not that it would change the policy but i'm just curious about that because i do think to deliver this excellent health education most often you want somebody who that's their endorsement or licensure and and i would just anecdotally share that i was listening into a cleveland high school health class the other day um where my child may be a student and i was impressed by the content of the class and the things they were exploring in relationship to health so i do think julia you're right that there is this incredible standard and i know that um you know the vast majority of our teachers who are health teachers uh reach that standard and i know that sometimes i remember when when health came into sellwood you know we had the art teacher and she was like okay now i have to teach sex ed to sixth grade and eighth grade students in the same classroom and i'm not sure i'm prepared for that and luckily you know doctor would've come and ever others provided a great amount of professional development and resourcing to to make that happen but i know that um that could be a difficult subject for teachers and so when we do have people who have that licensure and that passion for that work um it is what's best for students that a lot of our traditional middle schools are um are moving in that direction have moved in that direction over the last couple years of hiring an endorsed health educator and i i will add that's a i know you all have been talking deep breath a lot but the dbra process actually helps us in many ways and health education get an indoor person in there because uh you can hire a 1.0 educator and they will have their schedule full of health education at a traditional middle school where um that creates a much harder uh it's a much harder process so um we've definitely been leaning that direction we've also been trying to just before coped we were starting to collaborate with some of the local colleges because we have a number of
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teachers who um were teaching a section of health and have just really developed a passion for it and want to add that endorsement and training so we want to help them do that so that's definitely something we wanted to pick back up are you tied everything together today in our committee meeting thank you another data point uh rita we've last year [Music] sorry um i'm going to call the question um for board members all in favor of um passing this along to the full board for consideration of adoption for first reading um okay i saw three thumbs up i'm a thumbs up so okay so we will move this on to first reading um dr moore just to set expectations about timing and make sure we're aligned the board packet for the 223 meeting goes out tomorrow so uh the preparation of a staff report and all those pieces would likely kick this to the march 9 meeting that's okay with everybody all right okay good reminder thank you um okay so um next on the agenda is the formal public complaint um and we had allocated 15 minutes for this uh alexis burnett was going to walk us through the um family surveys that we've done um is oh is alexis here i don't see her she is oh yeah he's there okay okay um so um alexis i'm going to um i'm going to do the unforgivable and ask if you could um shorten your presentation a bit um i want to make sure that we have enough time to actually um hear hear what you have to say but we're we're bumping up against the deadline so i also just wanted to look i wanted to let everyone know i have to dip at 6 50 i have to leave at 6 50 for a work commitment um so i may leave in the middle of something and my apologies and chair more can i ask the question we are still going to get to the uh property yes it's going to be a very brief um thing uh but i i think we we will almost certainly not get to computer news today so anybody who's hanging on for that tune in next time okay alexis hi thank you all for your time i will speak fast but not too fast and i have results from the formal complaint process survey we conducted in january it surveyed 233 complaints in the past eight years and of all of those complaints we heard from 63 for a total response rate of 27. for surveys at pps we find that is pretty typical without any targeted outreach and this survey was only administered with an initial reminder and reminders for a couple days afterwards due to the timeline and getting a report to the staff working on this um and generally we have an idea of how the experience of the formal com complaint process is a lot of it um is what i expected based on what i've heard from staff um highlights are that about a third of complainants felt that they were given an opportunity to share their side of the story and another third agreed that staff were professional and courteous and that's a little bit in contradiction with where we heard the most areas for improvement we heard that complainants didn't feel hurt spoken feedback is ready two two two and um fairness of the complaint process as well as the length of time
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it takes to go through it uh was another main point and so my understanding coming to this meeting is that the next step is revising the policy language and i highly cannot recommend a survey you will get the same amount or less disengagement because the language is essentially a block of text and for surveys you want to avoid that appearance of a giant chunk of text as much as possible something we did get that's very valuable in this survey are folks that the complainants interacted with leading up to filing a complaint and these are pps employees or community members who can really speak to some of the lived experiences in terms of implementation of the policy as well as maybe some familiarity familiarity with the language and so i just um wanted to present that quick summary i hope that's enough to answer any questions and alexis thank you i want to thank alexis because she's been a really helpful partner in devising the survey uh and stephanie soden and lydia started this work before they each moved on into their new rules um but i i'll tell you all my interactions with alexis have just been she just makes us smarter and more thoughtful i want to bridge a little bit what she said about going back out to families at the last policy committee meeting there was a request from the committee that we send a copy of the draft policy or the draft policy changes to those families who responded to this survey and when we talked about that with alexis her feedback as she just repeated was um that that is not that actually undermines the i've been heard feeling because we're sending them an email with a document in it and that if we want to do further family engagement there are other ways to do that and so we have talked as a staff team about how to get additional feedback on the process which the policy is part of the process but it is far from the entire experience of what it's like to go through that as we've talked about several times and we think that some additional conversations and perhaps focus groups um with building administrators um and some families would you know would be helpful again to the the experience and the process but that realistically that can't that can't and and candidly shouldn't be done before the end of the school year as we uh are prioritizing where building administrators and folks are spending their time so those are the i just want to give you a flavor of the conversations we've had since the last committee meeting when that request was made um we we think there are opportunities to move the policy forward with work to be done on all the pieces that support the implementation of the policy continuing but that's a decision for the committee to make i don't want to presume that that's the path but i think that's the fuller context for alexis's statements about that can you tell me how many people responded to this survey that that are in the results shown in table yes uh out of the 233 in the last eight years there were 63 responses and that's 27 altogether okay those aren't pretty numbers just to state the obvious um and not not to take anything away from those folks experience which was by and large majority negative um we don't know if these were the unhappy people who really responded um but it's that's clearly a metric we would want to work on um yeah so thanks thanks for compiling that door happy to help inform conversations with data always yeah i had a quick question about like so it's from the past six years right we're the majority from the past three years like where did most of the respondents fall in i have that in a table somewhere but not prepared um it will take me a little bit to get with the plates i'm juggling but if you're interested i can get it by summer um which is when i would recommend these conversations start happening so that some of the other giant warriors
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are off of folks plates um yeah any other questions okay so i think i have i have a question i mean um were there no open-ended questions there were it's been a while since i've looked at this [Music] there might have been but nothing that was there's a fuller report that i sent to the staff group um i can summarize those better when i'm not working off of my slides yeah i guess i'd like to see the like just all the feedback we got um i'm in the camp that you know whenever this kick kick this gets kicked out of committee and it's got a staff report and we have the policy with the draft changes that we that's fine but i don't know why okay julia we lost you for a minute okay that once the committee sends it out to the board for first reading and we have a staff report that outlines the changes i mean we have everybody's email address i don't know why we wouldn't just send it like here's the policies here's the change you know thank you for participating the survey or we surveyed you earlier here's you know where we landed um you know do you have any comment um it just seems like the most basic i mean it doesn't seem you know people can like hey i don't want to read that all you know i'm not going to respond um when i look at some of these numbers i mean they're a little bit troubling um in sort of people's interaction with you know and i guess i'd like to see more just i'm always into disaggregated data um you know like the the comment about the staff is that um was that school staff was that central office staff um you know there's been a lot of discussion about um just the process i guess to me this gives me broad strokes but doesn't necessarily tell me what it means for like how how we should adjust the policy but it does tell me that people think like there should be some changes in the in the process yeah the second table with the questions on it are as written those were close-ended and in order to get at the lived experiences we don't have that detail in the survey um i can see the value in an email going out to the original respondents to get open-ended comments but i can't guarantee that those will answer the questions you want about language changes it's in my experience with community engagement there's um [Music] when there isn't a guarantee of if these folks are already engaged they've had kids out of school for several years they are liable to ignore an email from the district from my latest experience and especially with the folks who have gone through the formal complaint process there is a level of disengagement in this data set that suggests that we need to approach them more thoughtfully or do data collection in a much um a much more careful way okay so i am um thank you for that and um i i'm mindful of the time um we are rapidly running out of time so um i think um i i think the the question at hand is um based on what you've heard do you feel comfortable you committee members do you feel comfortable moving ahead with the current language um the alternative i think is if we want to wait for any additional feedback
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um given what is given what everybody is facing over the next few months um i think realistically we would not get any additional feedback until probably late summer at best [Music] yes you look like you want to say something well i i just want to just tweak a little bit i think what the i think the current language there's still it's been a while it's been several months since the committee has looked at it and so i would not if there's a decision to go forward with the policy revisions without um further engagement then i think the committee members could have the next meeting cycle to review and see if there's anything else and based on what they've seen so far in this data and come back and consider that final language in the next meeting not necessarily tonight at 6 50 before right i was i was not yeah i i didn't mean to suggest that we were going to vote it out of the committee tonight it was just like are you comfortable um continuing to work on it now or putting it on a back burner pending more feedback there are upsides and downsides to everything um there is a certain upside to um memorializing some changes that were especially the ones that were highlighted by staff as um based on their experience of working with the process so and and regardless staff will continue to work on the process and the experience um because we know there's a lot of work to do and that's on right that's getting more feedback that's also enhancing some of the training that's a bunch of pieces about what that family experience is like going through that but we'll do that either way right and and it's probably more likely than not that a lot of a lot of the issues that have emerged are around implementation rather than the policy itself um so okay so i'm because i haven't heard anything i'm going to assume that we're okay continuing to work on the policy um and it will it will appear again on the next probably on the next committee agenda yeah can we have that data sent sent out just so we can get the background and the other thing i guess i would be interested in is if you look at the on this survey number the two lowest ones are pps staff were knowledgeable and pbs staff were professional and courteous is what we think and the policy changes how do we crosswalk policy changes to that feedback okay so we will send out we will send out the full report i was just texting with roseanne to see if stephanie had done that and i will just we'll send it again if it's been done and if it's not been done i'll apologize and we will apologize and we will yeah if it's been done my apologies for asking i probably has i trust your memory more than mine on this julius so we will sort that out and get that out asap okay okay so um let's uh let's stop that here and um i want to make sure that we have um we still have a public comment um kara do we have anybody signed up for public comment yes how many three how many people three three people okay all right well um we're gonna go over time we're gonna go beyond seven o'clock so probably not long over hopefully not long over but i want to make sure that we get some clarification of some questions that have um arisen over the proposed preservation maintenance and disposition of district real property um revisions so uh um liz could you um could you walk us through the um some of the issues that have emerged and the response um yes i think there were um as it relates to the policy language itself or the drafted language itself a question emerged and we talked about this to some extent at the last um policy committee meeting and i think at the board meeting but questions continue to emerge about whether a long-term lease as defined as at least five years in that policy in the draft language um in section d i think it is and because i have no power in someone else's house i don't have a printed copy of anything in front of me today and i apologize for that but mary will keep me honest on my references here we'll have dueling
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screens um the uh that the at least the definition of a long-term lease as being at least five years is not intended to in any way constrain the district um from entering into leases that are longer than that and the the reference in that same paragraph to the termination rights um is a reflection of i think the policies um one of the significant thrusts of the policy which is the district needs to be able to utilize its building over the long term and to have access to buildings as its needs change but it is not it is i think as i understand the committee's intent intentionally drafted to provide quite a bit of flexibility to be negotiated with each tenant depending on the length of the lease the purpose of the building um and any number of factors so i i do not think the policy language it says it needs to be contemplated but it doesn't say how by how much how little um so i think there's quite a bit of i think the the five-year issue is not at all a constraint and i think the termination rights has it as drafted has a lot of flexibility to be customized for a particular building for a particular tenant in a particular negotiation and lease drafting but those are the questions i have fielded since um the last the board meeting when this was first read okay so um given given that um i guess i um i'm going to ask the committee members um do you anticipate um wanting to make suggestions for any additional revisions to the policy i do would you like me to give you a high level what they are um can you do it in one sentence well i need to tell you where the sentence is going to be so this is this is just um conceptual uh on page two the d it's going to be a one sentence sale of reproperty of real property third paragraph second sentence adding in language whenever possible any district property sale should be should be to a public entity or an entity that advances equity and the district's racial equity and social justice policy that intends to actively use a property for a public for public purposes or advances racial equity and then that we have similar something a construct in the in the lease section that's similar as well so that there is this guiding principle i mean we talk about in our racial equity and social justice um policy and lens about um utilizing our resources in fact we quote to achieve educational equity pps will provide additional and i'm going to ask you we don't need the um we don't need the full exposition right now um so you have some suggestions okay can you can you send them to liz and mary and um committee members and we can talk about them at the next policy committee meeting okay um we're not having another policy committee meeting before our second reading though well we're gonna have to post on the second meeting well we are i think i think the second reading is march 9th and the next policy committee meeting is march 8th okay i'll bring it to them but i don't want to delay but i don't think we should have to delay that this is related i can bring it to the full board i mean when we have a second reading or i'll share with the full board um um i i think it would be good to have a discussion at the committee level so that the committee would be able to respond at the at the full board level i mean when it goes before the full board um we can work out the details i'm i'm looking at the clock we're running out of time um so um so we will we'll add that to the agenda for the next policy committee meeting um and um okay
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so i want to take public comment um and so we'll probably be running about 10 minutes late for everybody who's watching um kara uh can you can you invite the people who have signed up for public comments yes some of them are on their way um we'll start with justin godoy hello i am here good evening are we good yup go ahead thank you um my name is justin godoy g-o-d-o-y my pronouns are he him his and i am a fifth grade teacher at wrigler elementary school in northeast portland in the beautiful coley neighborhood regular student population is approximately 69 percent latin x percent black and 47 of the students qualify for free and release reduced lunch by direct certification um first i'd like to thank superintendent guerrero for helping me write tonight's testimony i thought his words in a february 2020 interview with kgw were perfect for this foundation discussion when answering a question regarding critics views that undocumented students could be a financial strain on pps guerrero stated i think every dollar we invest in children and youth pays dividends in our ability to be a strong community be a strong state be a strong country when not all students are afforded an equitable high quality educational opportunity we see the effects of that this statement from the leader of pps is completely at odds with the current structure of the foundation system at pbs a child or regular does not have the same high quality educational opportunities as a student from a school that fundraises enough money to purchase more teachers period some may argue that title 1 schools technically receive more money per student but this cannot be a justification for foundations a child at a title 1 school has a world of other barriers and obstacles that are not offset by the district's allocation of funds to these schools regular has foundations we have never had a foundation we receive a fluctuating donation based on the overall pps parent fund pool for the year we received thirty twenty and twenty six thousand dollars the last three years this unpredictable donation does not come even close to meeting the needs of our students and yet our community has no backup financial security financially wrigler does not have the privilege and wealth of these large foundation schools but we are also strained for the most precious resource of the privileged time time for our communities to leave their homes or jobs and support the large undertakings required for massive foundations this should not be the burden of any parent who wishes the best for their children as we all do we have all seen the often circulated cartoon to explain equity right with three people looking over a wall and the boxes they are standing on are all different sizes they've been circulated in a thousand emails everyone gets what they need right on the surface this is the peps foundation system everyone puts in it gets distributed according to need but if we actually look closest the smallest box is a sturdy strong foundation sorry i had to get that pun in um filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars and extra teachers and the biggest box given to those with the greatest need the regular kids the title ones is barely holding itself together and therefore it can't be a surprise when it collapses and our most vulnerable students fall i will leave you once again with the wise words of our superintendent when we don't make investments in all our students in every student we pay the price later so i understand that we are afraid of pps that we if we will lose revenue if you end the ability for school for local school foundations to privately fund teaching positions at our public schools i'm here to tell you today that wrigler is not afraid we are ready for you to fix the system pps students today and pbs students of the future need you to fix the system now thank you very much thank you glasses are amazing by the way sorry i have two winners i had to get that out kara husky my name is kara haskey h-a-s-k-e-y my pronouns are she her i am here tonight to request apology policy change related to fundraising while there is much to be applauded in the educational experience my two daughters have had thus far at alameda elementary i am now profoundly aware that it has come at a cost alameda has a robust local school foundation that raises in excess of a hundred thousand dollars year after year within weeks of our arrival the pitches began most were delivered with a palpable feeling of urgency
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we were invited to house parties where we were asked to write checks we were solicited for auction items encouraged to host sign up parties and ask to pull students from class to create art projects to be sold at auction i shrugged off my ill feelings about privately raising funds for public employees and told myself it was okay to do these things because it was the only way to deal with our overcrowded classrooms that it was a community building endeavor that not only helped our school but also supported the needs of others i know now that was wrong i will not deny their unmet needs at alameda there are unmet needs at every school in our district due to decades of underfunding that continues today but private fundraising is not meeting those needs nor is it the way to solve the problem i've borne witness to the damage this type of fundraising causes volunteers pushed to emotional breaking points kids denied access to teacher-led activities because it was only available to a limited number at auction and adults who have felt excluded unnoticed or guilty for not participating or contributing financially connecting with fellow parents and educators across our district has taught me that this story is not unique to alameda and there is a greater harm inflicted on our district data clearly demonstrates that the current system overwhelmingly benefits predominantly white and wealthy school communities like alameda just as it has for the past 20 years it is a small number of families that are benefiting from preserving this status quo and it is not in alignment with our shared vision of a school system where every student has what they need to evolve into a compassionate critical thinker fully prepared to lead a more socially just world we must acknowledge our current system as broken and unjust and work together to create a better portland for all all staffing and the basics of what we as a community consider an appropriate and equitable education should be paid for with public funding now is the time to put an end to the scarcity mindset that upholds structural racism and instead align our actions and distribution of resources with our collective values our policies should be a statement of those values so i'm calling for you to make the necessary policy changes to put an end to private funding of pps fte or equivalence thank you thank you thank you thank you megan mermis hi my name is megan mermis m-e-r-m-i-s and my pronouns are she her i'm the parent of a fourth grader at laurelhurst one of the top 10 fundraising schools in the district i'd like to speak on the practical and moral concerns i have with how local school foundation fundraising exacerbates rather than alleviates inequity and the board's role in supporting the system i cannot see how allowing schools to fundraise for their own benefit contributes to pps's stated vision of advancing racial equity and social justice public schools exist for the public good i'd like to cite the work of rob rich an expert on the role of philanthropy and civil society who has written specifically about private fundraising in public schools he argues that the question we should consider is whether public policy should not merely permit but provide incentives for parents to give money to public schools so that their children can receive a better education than they otherwise would in the case of pps those incentives are more teachers and aides to benefit the fundraising school we're all aware of how woefully underfunded our schools are those schools who are most in need suffer the most from these fundraising shortfalls funding shortfalls but our solution has been to allow schools to buy their way out of the public funding structure further increasing already tragic inequities we've condoned a system that allows a very small number of wealthier wider schools to raise large sums of money to primarily benefit themselves while donating a small percentage to be shared across dozens of other schools and calling that equity it is a feel-good measure that allows us to tell ourselves that we are doing good for others while we do good for ourselves it is illusory a cover for wealthy schools adding abundance to privilege and there is another side effect of the local school foundation model and perhaps this is the most damaging to the future of our public school system not only does it mean more funding for already better off schools this model distracts and absolves us parents administrators and leadership of our true responsibility to advocate for the state to fully fund public schools there are many things we need to do to fix school funding both to ensure robust funding and to make it equitable the central question we need to ask is for the benefit of who if pps is committed to equity we need to rethink private fundraising at public schools and that begins with re-examining the board's policy that allows local school foundations to use private money to buy teachers of their schools thank you for your time thank that concludes you have
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okay all right um since uh since we've run along i'm i'm going to i'm gonna stop us here um thanks everybody for uh another busy meeting um see you again in three weeks uh with the board meeting in between and um thank you for everything director moore and i look forward to our my budget proposal coming to the board on march 9th so just a calendar reminder uh given that we're an administration that values the equitable distribution of resources it's another opportunity where you can transparently see how we make sure to pay attention to our underserved schools so a school like wrigler benefits from additional positions and an average of 8 800 per pupil versus a school like alameda that functions with 6 000 per people so um i'm looking for the opportunity to tell that narrative a little bit more comprehensively to our community okay thank you all right um we are adjourned thank you again

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 - Committee Meetings" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk0IYRijyKDVmokTZiuGv_HR3Qv7kkmJU (accessed: 2023-10-14T00:59:52.903034Z)

2021-02-17 PPS School Board Policy Committee Meeting

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Event 1: PPS Board of Education's Policy Committee - 2/17/21

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