2021-02-20 PPS School Board Retreat

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2021-02-20
Time	11:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	retreat
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Retreat - 2/20/2021

00h 00m 00s
retreat thanks for finding a time that this would work um our first order of business this morning was to look at the guardrails um and rita messaged me last night she sent me an email that she is at the um council great city schools governance coaching training and they actually covered guardrails yesterday um so i'm going to read you the email she sent me last night um about what she's learned about guardrails and um she is happy for us to proceed with this uh if we want to but if we decide we would like to wait until she's back to share with us some of her additional learnings she'd be happy to lead us in that in the future but i think we're also okay to go ahead if we want to so reader writes guardrails are intended and i'll forward this to all of you as well guard rails are intended to be value statements the form of thou shalt not this means that they are not to be directives or prescriptions but constraints that the superintendent has to deal with but the way to deal with those constraints is his or her call they deal with the what not the how and the time frame on guard rails is three to five years the guard rails unlike goals which are only student focused can talk about adult-related stuff but they are supposed to be aligned with and logically linked to the student-focused outcome goals so far so good and she says what was brand new for me today was the idea that there are supposed to be annual interim rails attached to the guardrail themselves these are supposed to be smart specific measurable achievable results oriented and time limited and relate to the how the interim guardrails are chosen by the superintendent and adopted as is by the board she says this took me a while to sort out i ended up thinking that the interim guardrails will end up functionally being additional goals for which the superintendent will be evaluated but they are chosen by the superintendent not the board and the time frame on the annual interim guide rails is one to three years with an annual refresh she said i added a couple of new stickies on the jamboards as illustration so an example would be the board would set a guardrail the superintendent shall not allow the percent of bypoc educators to decrease now the superintendent's exam interim guardrail for that guardrail may be the superintendent will increase the present of bypoc educators from x percent in 2021 to y percent in 2024 another example would be the superintendent may not allow students to experience disconnectedness from their school community and the interim guardrail may be the president of students experiencing a sense of belonging as measured by the panorama survey will increase from x percent in may 2021 to y percent in may 2023 so i'll go ahead and forward that on um to the group and just ask you um what is your will this morning around our guard rail conversation well ali my question would be what is our goal is our goal to in this session actually come up with guardrails that we then would adopt or we're just having a conversation about the utility of guardrails our so everything uh that except for the leadership conversation are things that we identified in our august retreat in our self-evaluation findings as things we wanted to work on that we didn't have guard rails and that we wanted to work on having them we brought them up at the last retreat and discussed them and said that we would all write four guard rails and bring them you know one to four guard rails and bring them to this meeting um i don't uh i don't know that anyone did that rita sent out a reminder a few weeks ago um i know everyone's busy so there is a jamboard um that has a bunch of examples from other council of great city schools and the two that rita had suggested plus rita did put her um ideas on there so this is all stuff from that harvard self-evaluation that we did in august that says school boards should have guard rails this is best practices and it's up to us to decide you know at the time we said this is something we want to do but we can always change that and say we do not want to have guard rails this is not something we're interested in at this time or we can have a conversation today review the guard rails that are on that jamboard and pick a few that we we want to further work on yeah i um i did not do the homework i did not come i came with zero guard rails but i do like the idea of putting guard rails in i guess my question is what are we um how is this feathering into the evaluation process it it seems it seems late that are we doing this for the next year and then uh the other thing i just want to note that i'm not able to connect to the jamboard for some reason it's not it's not loading for me um okay let me see so um just on the technical issue sorry
00h 05m 00s
yeah i can't i can't seem to get to jamboard through board book either but i was able to get there a couple days ago through the email so i was going to go check that now whether it was so did you say andrew through the email i was a couple days ago let me let me let me try again could somebody drop it in the do we have a chat now you do not have a chat um but i yeah you can get there through the email i'll just email everybody the link um really quickly so it's the topic in your email to the jamboard i don't i don't know how to control board books so i don't know um so michelle to your question about the evaluation piece uh we as a board agreed to evaluate ourselves once a year so our next evaluation will be like in august um so we're working on things that we found in our august evaluation last year to say things we wanted to put in place by our august evaluation so we evaluated ourselves in august of 20. our next evaluation will be august of 21. so we're working on the things that we found in our august of 20 self-eval that we want we said we wanted to you know show improvement by our 21 eval all right thank you for that really just a housekeeping go ahead scott no no that's okay go ahead i was just gonna say just a housekeeping thing um coming out of the last retreat we also had like there were two work groups one was on like how we respond to public comment and i can't remember what the other one was but um are we getting deal with that at some other time or yes or does that just like we can do it through email like here's what the proposal is and people react to it or so the other the other group were the comms protocols which we'll deal with later today in this agenda um and then the student comment group didn't have time to meet and so we pushed that off to our um april retreat okay so i think i guess wasn't there also um the advisory board advisory groups i think that was that didn't come from our um evaluate self-evaluation that was something that jonathan had asked a group of folks to work on as part of our um boardworking structure so um just for everybody i still don't have my internet and i'm awkward being off a hot spot so i don't know if i'm gonna be able to actually be in the meeting and then open another line and be on a jam board um i'm gonna try but just um sure lowry i'm gonna present the jamboard great so that's visible to everybody and the text is ridiculously small because um the guardrails are long and a bunch of these guardrails came from some work amy did with aj to get guardrails from other council schools so um all the guardrails that are yellow are um the aurora public school system green is dallas fort worth blue is houston and then pink and orange are ones that did not have um a dedicated um they didn't have an assigned school district and you'll see that on two of the orange ones on the bottom left corner i wrote rita's name because those were the ones that she had sent out to the whole group hey before we dive into specifics um i i just philosophically i wouldn't mind having a little more conversation with the board about this i what you provided from rita was helpful to me i think i'm still a little confused because everything council of great city schools talks about and what we learned at our harvard retreat and through that is you know focusing on these you know student outcomes and that is where the board should be these guardrails seem to move away from that and i guess what i'm trying to get a sense of is whether and and even explicitly right it sounded like what rita said is these don't have to be student centered they can deal with adult concerns just to be really blunt i'm wondering if this is just sort of a way that the council of great city schools was getting resistance i mean i'm kind of speculating here right resistance from boards that still wanted to be involved in in some of these more adult-centered things and so kind of came up with these guard rails as a way of modifying without making them goals and you know make them guard rails and again i'm speculating that's just sort of suspicion but i'm trying to in my mind mesh and and i want to be clear i actually some of them make sense to me so for instance um when we set a student achievement goal and then a guardrail is that um we want and this is one i think might really apply to us um and it's one we've already talked about that a guardrail may be we don't want to see we want to see improvement across all demographic groups right so so our goal is in the aggregate and i think there was very good reason why we selected an aggregated goal we as a board said we wanted to see disaggregated data
00h 10m 00s
it feels like a natural corollary to that would be a guardrail that says we also want to see improvement in each demographic group that seems very connected to that goal some of the others and actually i can't quite see these but i'll try and zoom in on my own computer you know to read these but i know others and we talked about it before seemed more operationally focused they seemed you know sort of sort of less attached to the goal so i i'm kind of curious from other board members if you've had similar thoughts or maybe andrew i can take a maybe i could take a swing about at this and this isn't like i don't i'm i think you raise a good point and i'm i'm trying to maybe answer your question like why would you do this so i'm thinking about you know how we did our evaluation process after we adopted the goals it's like oh it's the first year or there's a lot of other things going on that the superintendent should get credit for be you know because of x y and z these are going to be long-term goals or for example this year we're like hey you know we're suspending that and our evaluation is going to be these other 10 competencies um which seem more like connected to these these things um so maybe it's an attempt that if you put constraints and then the superintendent has to make interim constraints that are more like actually uh framed in the positive that these are like some of those other competencies um that you're like hey it's not it's it's student achievement and these other things that we're expecting you to do so it's not just student achievement because you know some of those maybe you know take three years to move the dial and that doesn't mean you have an average superintendent because the dial hasn't moved it just takes a long period of time so it's like hey in the three years you're you've done x y and z and your you know um work against the interim guard rails um so maybe that's that's why this came about because the other one is a measurement in which it's hard to do an annual evaluation against also just yeah so i i think that's um one thing scott just to let people know i am taking each color and putting it on the next page of a jam board in a bigger font so if you scroll through you'll see all the orange ones bigger and then i'm doing the yellow ones right now so scott go ahead uh first julie i think that's good good speculation um and it certainly has applied to us in some ways uh and andrew i want to agree with what you said that i'm i'm trying to figure out where this fits in in the grand scheme of things and like an end around on having the student-focused goals so i i guess i um i'm having trouble seeing where these fit in in the grand scheme of things i agree i'm sorry scott were you done yeah go ahead um i agree like i'm not for me i'm not immediately seeing the utility of uh coming up with guard rolls guard rails in terms of addressing some void that we have that is hurting us in some way um the way that it makes sense the only way that it makes sense to me back to andrew's point is if they are very directly connected to our student achievement goals and um i could see that being helpful that there might be a few a few things there where uh it's helpful for us to keep in mind what not to do but otherwise to be perfectly honest for me um i don't i don't see our self-governance suffering without them i think there are probably some other ways we could focus on improving our governance i think that you know these guard rails maybe are helpful for districts that don't have those osba leadership guidelines like we've put in the evaluation that these are some of those piece get to some of those pieces of what the superintendent is doing and i would lift up you know something michelle raised when we were talking about the evaluation was the the percentage of um bypoc educators and that if that's you know if a school board is just evaluating their superintendent on their four board goals these add some depth and some more um areas that are crucially important to evaluate a superintendent on we may decide we don't need those because we are using the osba leadership guidelines in addition to the board goals for evaluation i i'd like to add um thank you for that ali so the superintendent shall not allow the percent of bipol staff to decrease i think is really key we know that even having the benefit of even
00h 15m 00s
having a janitorial staff of color the building does for student outcomes and so you know that's i i think i see i see both sides i guess i see that the guard rails are important and some of them are definitely student focused and some of them are operational i like i just like the idea of having them in place i feel like to name to name this for instance uh not allowing the d not allowing a decrease in staff of color is important to to put in black and white um and there's some other ones here that look awesome too and some of them aren't you know don't don't seem as student focused i think it sounds like we're still sort of wrestling with guardrails and how they fit in for us so what i'd like to propose is that we postpone this conversation and that we um since rita has just had this refreshed or not refreshed but deep dive training on guardrails yesterday that we have her um maybe do some work with us at our april retreat around this and that these this jamboard will i'll take all of them and make them bigger on each of the subsequent pages and so this will be there for our review as preparation for our april retreat what do you all think about that yeah yeah so i think it'll be helpful um to get rita's input a little more but also maybe um do a short zoom a couple of us or all of us with somebody from the council just to say wait a minute we're doing this like you said and then this stuff comes up um help us help us suss this out so that we know we that we've got a coherent um system going forward um and it's not about the particulars of this of any of these which some of them are crucially important um that we have to do in order to reach our student achievement goals um but you know we're at the same time we're getting this guidance saying focus on the outcomes is how we get there as a board so uh that's my suggestion [Music] from a timing perspective i i've been making an assumption but now i'm realizing i probably should make sure that ever that that it's consistent with everyone else i'm assuming that the guardrails conversation we're having right now is for the next year since we're already you know so many months into this year and in terms of the evaluation i want to make sure my fellow board members are on the same page with that assumption yeah i mean i don't think it's really fair to say to guadalupe we put this card railing in april and now we're going to evaluate it on on your success of completing it in may or whenever we do his eval so yeah i just think we should be my question go ahead julia no go ahead michelle i was gonna say that was my question about the evaluation looking at the timing of this and thinking wondering what the expectation was whether it was for this year for the following year um and then another question are so we'll table this until april but is the goal to identify some of these guard rails that we would um formally adopt yeah or or or so i think i was confused michelle i'm sorry between our board self-evaluation and the superintendent's evaluation right right the the content of the retreat is around our board self-evaluation but what we put in the guard rails would affect guadalupe's evaluation for the next year yes yes thanks for that clarity i okay no worries so for me it's two things it's getting a clear uh definition of what the role of guard rails could be in our system and if we get agreement on that then we can get down to the particulars um and it might be two or three it might be uh how many are up there 20 just kidding um but that you know i want to i want to see the big picture first most districts seem to have three or four guard rails well so i mean if you look at i think the green ones are aurora so they have one two three they have six and so aurora has seven fort worth has six houston has five um can i make a request that um we just get these like sent out as a document but with the color color key so uh we can have those for the next conversation and also know where they came from um so i was about ready to say something similar to andrew about the assuming it's for next year because we couldn't do it for this it seems like it'd be hard to do it this year anyway since we have um since we're linking the evaluation
00h 20m 00s
to the osba competencies versus the outcomes but what i would suggest just so we're also ready for next year is that along with this conversation we talk about how we're going to re you know you know what what the how we're going to land on the new baseline um just so there's all agreement on where we're starting because i think we all you know it sounded like lots of more discussion about the baseline being reset and i think we should just be clear about that versus waiting until july 1 and then you know hey what are we what are we doing with the the goals because really his constraints are totally connected to the the goals and so i don't want to miss like the fact that we're sort of disconnected from the goals a little bit right now at least from the evaluation yeah that's a good point so um the ones i'm going to send out the email from aj that he sent to amy to everybody um and amy thanks for pulling those together yeah thank you so much and that it has the identifying information for the schools districts that are identified and then like i said some of them are not identified so i'll send that out okay um thank you all we'll we'll bring this back up in april and and hopefully have some more um uh clarity and i think all of these questions are good ones as we think about you know this really important work of holding our superintendent accountable to what we as a board in our um diverse backgrounds and experiences you know is best for our students all right michelle are you ready to lead us in a conversation about board leadership i'm as ready as i'm gonna get um and so i i don't have anything to present but do want to share some information i've gathered and also want to share what i think is of a problem statement and maybe some goals around our conversation today so um first of all just so you know there's the conversation about board leadership and how we have created or maybe not created a clear path for leadership um i i talked to several other neighboring school districts i talked with park rose um beaverton david douglas and hillsborough all who have quite a bit more cultural diversity on their boards and in some cases have diverse chair and vice chairs and what i found from talking to all of those neighboring districts was that there's all kinds of different ways that they're self-organized and so there's no one standard best practice or best way to elect a chair and a vice chair i also talked to the oregon school boards association which confirmed that there is no right way to do this um but i what i did learn there are two people that are very intensely this is their jam they're really interested in in outcomes they're um they're they're all in the weeds about you know what processes to use etc and so um just from my own observation i i've been looking i've been on the board for two years now and really curious how we collectively uh create a pathway for uh for leadership um i've talked with some of you about um and people in the community and well former as well as former um board leaders about using a rotational model not everybody's on board with that but i'd like to open um so anyway i guess the problem statement is that we don't really have a process and when we don't have a process especially during this time of transformational change we um we lock out diverse voices if we don't have a clear process that everyone understands um so as we work to diversify the board and i hope that that happens and that also we allow space for those diverse voices to emerge and lead um i think that it's going to be important that we talk about who gets to be the chair and who doesn't so as a goal as a goal just for a conversation today i'd like to decide um collectively like how are we deciding this i'd like to um talk about how we elect a chair and a vice chair in a way that's transparent and fair i'd like to talk about um the the terms of the chair um i think right now we have a vote twice a year i'd like us to look at maybe a once a year some of the neighboring districts have uh one-year terms for the chair and vice chair and then i'd like to just talk collectively with you my teammates about how we ensure fairness and and transparency in the process um some of the questions i've come up with which the one is should we use a rotational model and why or why not um [Music] so i'd just like to open it up to to have conversation about that i'm i'm in favor of a rotational model because i i feel like it assures the people that want to serve in that
00h 25m 00s
leadership role have a position to rotate through that i feel like it develops it's a great training ground for leadership development skills development and also recognizing that we all bring strength to the work and weaknesses um and and since there's no job description necessarily um yeah i just like to talk i'd like to get people's feelings on the rotational model um so just let's just open it up um why would we why would we want to do that why wouldn't we want to do it i think michelle maybe to take a step we can take a step back i'm interested in your comment that there's no job description i'm kind of interested in talking about i mean the the role of the chair as it's currently described in our policy is you're right there's no job description it's very minimal um in terms of how the chair's role is differentiated from the rest of the board and i think that's by design and that's how it should be where there are very few few responsibilities and circumstances where the the chair's role is differentiated but i think in terms of having a conversation about leadership i'd like to see us step back and talk about um what what qualities and attributes um are helpful and are useful in that role and and um i don't know that's my second question so what core competencies are needed for the position um and actually like who gets to decide that is a really important question what what can happen is if that's not clear that there can be there can be gatekeeping at the top and my reason for even broaching this subject is to see if we can you know decide as a team um not to give power to one person over another but to decide as a team how we're going to move forward um we're team you know we're not we're seven individuals but we're our work really is as a team so what are the core competencies that are needed for the position and really who gets to decide it's us that gets to decide so i mean just for instance one of the core competencies may be um ability to um to have uh to to address race and to have difficult conversations around race and to be comfortable with that so you know to the extent that we have this very minimal job description that that differentiates the chair from every other board member you know is that a core competency that we need you know do we need someone that is great at spreadsheets you know i mean if we look at this as a as a job um maybe as a team we should list out what core competencies are needed for the position and just so everyone had it i pulled the um board the policy from the website with the uh board member duties so it's got the chair duties the vice chair duties and the board member duties just so we we know what we already have out there that's great um and ailee where did you did you just email that or we don't have a chat yeah i just emailed it to everybody but it's available on the pps website under board policies it's like the third one down yes yes but i just thought so everybody had it in front of them if they wanted to refer to it that's great so anyway yeah so so what are are their core competencies that are required for the position what i'm trying to get at is when we're doing racial equity work we want to be really specific about behaviors and um about skills and about competencies um and that removes this it it can remove implicit bias if we're if we're intentional about um talking about those core competencies it can remove it can remove our bias around who we think of as leaders and who we don't think of as leaders and that's what i'm trying to get at um the other conversa question i have is what kind of what key conversations initiatives and upcoming work planning you know around our community um and how do we match those skills that we lay out and experience to the work that needs to be done up ahead that's assuming we have a work plan an annual work plan as a board and that we um take a look at that out into the future and decide um who what what skills and what competencies are needed there and then again when we should when we decide um i would i would i would say that we suggest that we decide every two years we potentially have a new board and at that time we have a discussion whether we use a rotational model or not and so i'd like to you know open it up to why wouldn't we use a rotational model why wouldn't we give everyone that's been elected an opportunity to serve if that's what they want okay i'm gonna i'm gonna take a stab at answering your question about the rotational model or just provide a perspective so i think um just based on the current job
00h 30m 00s
description which i um i think it's the right one because because we don't have voters elect the the chair i think the expectation is that every board member has equal um infra is equally enf to work so i i think the current job description is of the chair and you know maybe i'd have some discussion about the vice chair how it's phrased because it's it's awfully minimized when i where i think the way we work is actually the vice chair is a critical piece of the leadership team um but so assuming that we leave the same model because again the voters don't approve a chair the board does and keep us all equal i think i think it has done a pretty good job the policy itself does a pretty good job of that and i think the rotational model could work um if we had some foundational things um in place and that would be you know at the beginning of whatever the term is whether it's the current current six months or a year if it's changed to a year that we agree on what is it that what is the work that the board's going to do this coming year and if we all agree on the work plan really what the chair is doing is help facilitating the board doing the work it's all agreed to do and and and i see in this i'm going to go back to the vice chair in a moment that if you had actually explicit in policy which is to follow our practice that someone in the vice chair role really has an opportunity to um be part of agenda setting and all the things that are involved with being the chair and the really key difference then is you know who has the gavel at the at the meeting um [Music] so to me it seems like we you know part of our role in the professional development is you know training everybody to be to be the chair we're all leaders i mean we we all ran for the board because we're leaders in different um in different communities or in different places and so to me it's like i come with the the thinking that you know everybody is um capable of being chair and how how do we support people doing that and and part of the way to make it easy i think not easier but i think a better practice is what's the work you want to do and have an agreement on that so i i could see that potentially working i mean we should have a work plan even if we don't have a rotational model but yeah i agree but i also so looking at the vice chair um i think that we could also improve our governance by you know the vice chair is serving the absence or disability of the chair and you know i mean we're talking about 21st century here you guys this is distributed leadership we're talking about people of color um you know shifting power letting people of color lead letting people color that we might not consider as leaders lead um valuing everybody and what they bring strengths and weaknesses and and so i'm i'm interested in this conversation because you know i'm a short black portlander middle aged past middle age and nobody would look at me and see a leader people have underestimated me and i i don't want to ever be in a position to do that to someone else and i also i really believe in the potential of all of us here i believe all of us could do this job um and and to to varying degrees of success and by the way you know ailee i think you've done a great job in so many ways and um but we can all do great in so many ways it's not just there's no um there's no special sauce for this job and so i would say that you know if if we use a rotational model we give people the opportunity to stretch their um their their leadership wings and to learn and grow um who we are today is not who we're going to be tomorrow you know we all have a capacity to learn so um i just wanted to add two things into this conversation one is that you know for me the the work plan of this year was the self-evaluation that that that was you know when i came on as chair it was how are we going to live into this this commitment we've made to this council of great city schools model and so that our our folk the focus for me as chair has been on our board culture and how we shift and adjust and really live into this commitment and i know that that's not been in alignment with what everybody else wants but that's why we get to rotate chairs right that i think michelle is exactly right
00h 35m 00s
all of us have leadership capabilities and you know i'll do one thing and then the next person will build on that and make us better and i do want to be really clear michelle that you did not want to run last year that that you know the way it shook out is you weren't quite able because of other things to be chair at that point um and so i think some of my question is um a lot of this feels like i mean i think it's that question of if you had run if you had wanted to run would you have been elected and i think you would have so i think one of my questions is as we really thoughtfully consider how do we make leadership feel like a space that anyone can inhabit um how do we make sure that you know we're we're creating this culture that we do affirm your gifts and say you know this is not about um that you wanted to run and didn't weren't chosen by your colleagues but this is you thinking more broadly about how do we do this well now and also create a culture shift so that it's transparent and clear for everyone so that as we continue to build up new leaders that there's a pathway absolutely and and and you mentioned board culture board culture is really important and i appreciate our focus on governance i think that that's something we can always improve and yet yeah you're correct um i i want it to be known that i that i want to be the chair i'd like to run for the chair at some point and i also want to affirm each one of you on the call that you know that that you have what it takes to be in leadership we're like we're all in leadership as julia mentioned so is there some reason why we wouldn't do a rotational model that we can see right now go ahead andrew andrew yeah no i i i think this is a really it's a great conversation um and actually i think my reasons for concern around our rotational model are actually very tied into one of the things you said right up front about about core competencies i have a cat that's moving my my camera um so apologies um and you know it's this it's this issue of of wanting someone in leadership um who is going to who's going to you know use our resuge lens right who's going to be focused on issues of social justice and racial equity um who's going to bring that you know that work and and i agree with you michelle i think everyone on the board currently can do that but i think when we think about our rules going forward and we think about what sort of policies we're putting in place i'm not sure that's always going to be the case right and i would like to say the voters would always that that's something that our voters value but i think it's very possible we would have a board member who maybe wouldn't think that that's a higher priority or wouldn't want to focus on that as much and and i worry a little bit about the rotational model in terms of of having someone who who sort of automatically rotates in who a majority of the board actually doesn't agree with sort of the values or direction of where that chair wants to take because the chair does have a lot of power and i i you know i mean this is it's good to sort of go back and look at the description but you know in terms of agenda setting you know i mean the chair does a lot i i do want to note um just as a side note i i have not uh provision eight in this i don't think i've received my personalized um um correspondence uh stationary yet so um at some point i i assume i'm kidding actually please do not print me any personalized stationery andrew i have my i have my ream from my earlier service still left over it just made me laugh because it does feel a little out of date right and i think so i think you're right it's worth to come back but i'm so that's one thing is is is you know do we want to automatically rotate everyone even if they're really not consistent with the values the other thing i would say is we before you do your second point can i just add that um from my personal experience serving on the board i i can absolutely validate what you just said because i have served with individuals who did not share those values and um it would have been very difficult to have had at the helm for a number of reasons also also ethics personal ethics so the the hypothetical scenario that you just put forward has been very real in the recent past yeah the other side of it um for me is that so so there may be people who don't have those core competencies we think are important and then the other side is there may be people who don't want to serve in that role and michelle you acknowledge that right that you sort of said people who want to but i think if we're not doing a straight rotation across all board members only board members opting in we're actually kind of getting back to closer to the system we already have and one of the things you raised uh when you first raised this conversation you know months ago um that i thought just has really resonated with me and and i think all of us new board members from two years ago had this the same thought you know i kind of assumed there was more of a formalized process right we get elected we come on i sort of thought
00h 40m 00s
oh there's there's you know i'm sure the board's had conversations there's a process there's a structure and i think we all very quickly realized there wasn't right and even even just you know a week out from that very first you know meeting where we're gonna have to do board leadership and we're brand new board members they're just the uncertainty and and what was happening just it seemed very odd to me so i loved your idea of how do we bring some more structure and formality to this process and for me i think updating our policy to include some core competencies i think would be great and being really explicit that in a board chair we want someone who can use our res j lens we want someone who includes diverse voices we want someone who does all those things is really important but then also how do we just sort of make this a little bit more and i hate to say it's like a student government election but it kind of maybe is that you know at one of our meetings in advance of the actual election people who are interested in being chair get to get to declare i'm interested in being chair i'm interested in vice chair and then they get to talk about how they would bring those values to the work what they view as the important work plan for the next year and it's something that we can all consider in a public open forum and then we come back you know in two or four weeks whenever it is to sort of to sort of make our decision as a board um and i think that was your idea and i just it's really stuck with me as something that might work but how about making posters absolutely and by the way i want my stationery i want my template i want my template and raise your hand if you have a pps lapel pin i have one okay everybody has one okay i didn't i didn't get a copy yes i had to i had to like uh beg to get it and uh complain but i got it okay but if there's an umbrella a notepad a branded something i want it did you get that we got the cool face masks from kara and uh rosanne yeah you got face masks they don't fit balls they don't fit all size heads i'll just yeah can we get bigger ones next time [Music] if there's any merch let's get make sure everyone on the board has the merch the same merch um i was just gonna ask you do any of the districts that you talk to use a rotational model or it sounds like they all have different processes but were there was there some process was there another district that had a process that you thought had um characteristics of a process that would be worthwhile for us to consider um that's a great question and no um and that i know of none of the what none of the four that i spoke to had a root um actually park rose i think does a rotational model um david douglas they just they're you know they're a district that serves a lot of poverty a kid students in poverty and immigrants and refugees and they the board members are pretty much in alignment on on who they serve and um they have one year terms and they sort of all just coalesce they they use a consensus model um to decide um but yeah none of the ones i talked to had like a process that was written out um i asked one of the questions i asked was you know how do you get to have a diverse um chair and they were like well you know we all kind of just agreed that that was something that we um that's one of our it's one of our goals as a district it's one of our the things that we value we we value this you know the diversity and that's how we got to that so there was no you know voting process or whatever but um i mean we we could look at like school elections we could look at a voting process we could also um i suggested that every two years as we have potentially a new board at that point we could decide whether we're going to use a rotational model or not that's not my idea that's one of our colleagues ideas and that would be just for that reason amy that you mentioned that um maybe um there's someone in that position that that we don't agree would be um good to have at the helm um but i feel like when you decide uh determine and write a policy around the bad character that it it usually it has outcomes that you don't expect so i'd rather lean into you know valuing everybody and what they bring and then having a fallback um you know having a fallback or a way to handle either the conflict or you know if the rotational i guess what i'm trying to say is if if at that two year every other year mark when there's a potentially new board you decide whether you'll use with the current board the rotational model or not and if you're not going to use it you'd have to have we'd have to have a justification in place for why we wouldn't and that again there's a core competency
00h 45m 00s
of having a difficult conversation with a colleague which i think is a really important skill so for what it's worth that when i queried um council great city schools specifically on this i received a pretty firm uh reply that it is um it is to the extent that boards had it it is falling out of favor very few still have it council councils against it when i asked why the response was because you want to have a process that has the you know best chance of yielding um the most effective outcome um for what it's worth for what what but then wouldn't you want to know what an effective outcome i mean so when we're using this very big language in portland um i i feel like we need to be very clear in our language in portland because of the racial our racial history here and because of our outcomes here and what i'm trying to suggest is that we as a as a team build our muscle up around these conversations build our competency up it doesn't have to be me but i i i truly want for all of us as a team to build our muscle up around this um so yeah what what outcomes are we actually looking for so michelle when we've talked about rotational model you've said i'm all for it everybody's wonderful except if somebody has these attributes so it's not really a rotational model unless we commit to it for a couple of cycles because uh and especially um and the other thing i want to say and again you know mr spreadsheet so i guess i should be chair for life that was a joke um if we if we have one-year terms uh a rotational model doesn't work we we can't fit everybody in um mathematically yeah so so maybe um oh sorry didn't um so i mean that's that's two different things but it's it's not a rotational model if you're evaluating it every two years or if you have exceptions and we might have difficult private conversations with fellow board members but to say oh god andrew is next in the rotation we better kill the rotational model because he doesn't floss regularly um is going to be pretty publicly apparent um and i don't think that's an appropriate way to run things i do i think the idea of publicly declaring interest a month before elections or something like that um i mean if you're looking to make it a bit more transparent um i i think that's something we could try uh i do think that decision-making process that we go through privately i i i don't see any way to replace that so here's a thought a little bit of a hybrid um and don't tie it to any other hybrid you know um is that word a possibility could be um a a rotational model in the vice chair role um because i actually think i think it's a really good experience for every board member to move through leadership because you see you know very different things and scott you know i know it's like this has probably been a different year from you from you know past years and um you know when i was chair and i had rita and julia's the co-vice chairs like there wasn't any email i sent or decision i made that was a major decision that wasn't they weren't copied on the email they weren't consulted and kind of like yeah on the big stuff we all have to be together on where we're heading and so while i'm trying to think um they never actually fulfilled the role that stated in policy because i wasn't gone for any of the meetings they were a really critical part of leadership and then when it transitioned to rita rita had already been in a year's worth of she never had held the gavel but she'd been in a
00h 50m 00s
year's worth of the conversations and the decisions in this um agenda setting so it really primed you know i think it's an opportunity to prime somebody up to to move into that spot so if the board says like hey you know for whatever reason we don't want to do the rotational model maybe it's a rotation through the vice chairs um role as an opportunity because i i think it makes um you know in some ways if you've been chair or been in leadership and then you're not you have a much better understanding of the challenges that the chair has and like what's all entailed in getting ready for a board meeting or managing to move things through and you know and ways that you can contribute in sort of non-leadership ways or other things so i i just think it's a it makes for better board members to have had that experience it also makes you more understanding of like oh man that that never seen that before and like i'm glad i'm not holding the gavel now but like you've been in that situation so you can be empathetic to what a chair is going through um so maybe that's a you know another another way that we give people the opportunity and not the chairs roll but this to rotate through the vice chair and um you know to your point scott of the not everybody could do it if you move to a year models so um i think it's fine to leave it every every six months it's a good check-in point it used to be no it's always been well it's been 20 for 20 years at least every six months is there any consideration in terms of um staff and having you know it can take a good six months to form a high functioning team once you form then you storm then you norm then you perform um you know to get rocking and rolling with a team it can take it can take six months um so i just want to throw that out there i do like the idea of distributed leadership um where the vice chair isn't just you know in case the chair falls down the stairs but rather you know is actually you know involved in the machinations and decision making i feel like hierarchy is a very kind of a white way of operating and please don't get offended by that that's that's to say that we could improve our governance structure by being more inclusive by being maybe a little bit more circular i mean this is one of the ways in the hierarchy that we could challenge the way that we've always done it before and improve on you know lift everybody up give people the opportunity to lead um give people to you know um impact outcomes for students which is why we're all here on saturday well i would say to the district's credit michelle is that well that's what the policy said that's that has not definitely been the practice for the last 20 years um the vice chair has always been that i've been aware of um since 2000 always been a critical part of the leadership team and part of agenda setting and i know roseanne is i think somewhere maybe she's just watching but um practice it's it's been a it's been a distributive leader like clearly the chair at the meeting has the gavel um but the consultation the set the agenda setting um it traditionally has been with board leadership which is the chair of the vice chair and michelle i was going to just say one thing that um i um i think scott had a really brilliant idea the other day which was to invite the folks that are on the board who have not served in the leadership team to attend an agenda setting meeting as an observer um because you know scott and i went to our first agenda setting meaning never having been to one so i was like i had to say who's in charge of this meeting and roseanne's like you are like great so you know things you learn um but since i think everybody's been in leadership except for michelle and andrew so to have you guys you know we can't have both of you at one time but come and sit down on a meeting and just see what it's like and do that practice with all the new board members because it demystifies what agenda setting is i think that's a brilliant idea from scott about how do we do this work of um thinking about how we we all are on the same team and we kind of know what leadership is doing and are prepared for it the other thing is i think as in any institution sort of things aggregate to the chair and so in the there while there are a lot of traditions of distributive leadership there's also been some like staff defaults to contacting the chair
00h 55m 00s
when there's a media request so i asked amy to be that person for us this year because i don't need to do that right and amy's better with the press than i am so it's but i think again michelle to your point we have some practices that when the people are in the place julia like you said that that we've had the practice of of using the vice chair more and having a more collaborative relationship that's not what actually the policy says and so i think our traditions in some ways have been healthy but i think what michelle is saying is we need to have some clarity around those traditions and and maybe codify them and say like we do value collaboration and i i think that you know there's this tension with the board chair because technically it's not that much power but in lots of institutional ways it is so how do we ensure that that power is distributive if we did elect or you know did a rotational model and we ended up finding out that the person who then became chair is someone who doesn't share power in the ways that we traditionally have so i think i think that's julie i think you're 100 right that's been the tradition in lots of good ways and i think what i'm hearing michelle say is we need to ensure that that tradition stays the same and improves if that makes sense yeah i'm going to take a bio break i'll be right back i can hear you from the other room so keep talking hopefully we can't hear you please no you can't i will mute the um no i just wanted to comment on a few things that have been said because i i really um i like the comments michelle you made about stability i think that's um i think there is a lot of importance there and and i actually i'm gonna combine these these two thoughts um around chair and vice chair i think there is some value in in going to one year terms um because for two reasons one a one year term is not set in stone right so there's nothing that prevents a board uh and even just like our six months you know terms are not set in stone there's nothing that prevents a board from changing its mind if there are issues or problems um that's in the current model under six months it would be under a year as well so to the extent there were issues we could address those but i think that stability from a district staff perspective of having the same leadership and having them get up to speed makes sense but i love the idea of rotating vice chairs and i'm going to kind of marry that with the stability idea of you know if we sort of default to year-long chair roles but a rotational model among vice chairs that provide stability at the chair position but getting lots of people with with leadership experience and just exposure right experience and exposure on the vice chair and then that led me to this other thought that i hadn't occurred to me before but but another concern i would have about a rotational model is that it might reduce diversity in in our leadership roles so i i think we'd all hope that you know in the future we end up like the city of portland with all of a sudden a very very diverse council i think that's possible and we're going to be looking at election law changes over the next year and a half to potentially help get there but if i think about you know where we are right now and where we may be you know for the next five or ten years you know if if you know we have one person of color on this board if you serve a year as chair and then we're in a rotational model it means you don't come back for six or seven years versus we might find that it is so successful and either with you or any other member um applying these these you know these values and moving forward that we actually want to keep someone as chair for longer than a year right we want to sort of re-elect for a second year so i worry there would be an unintentional actual like reduction in in our diversity of leadership if if we have a very small number of diverse people on the board so there's a chicken and egg thing there right in terms of of how we get our sport and how we put them in leadership but but i think that could be an unintentional thing but i am wondering about whether this sort of rotational model on vice chair but still selecting our chair might might get to some both good things on from both both sides of the argument and i kind of like a hybrid hybrid and again i also use that word very tentatively um where the vice chairs could cycle in every six months and and the chair for a year um i mean that's a potential really there's so many potentials but yeah i think that i guess when i think about the future of the of the school board i think out six or eight years i think how do we get the person how do we get the the retiree or almost retiree and the single mom you know who's working on a you know or just finished a degree and is got years of experience and how how do we get those people you know in leadership and on our board and how do we support um really our how do we how do we support non-typical atypical school board members and how do we do that as a team here how do we set those conditions up for making sure that people um that we have a wide range of voices that we're hearing from that we have good representation and and so this conversation is literally i'm just really valuing everybody in the moment
01h 00m 00s
right now for what you bring and um the you know the positives and the negatives input has been really good um i guess we just need to actually decide and if the policy is not reflective of the rules then perhaps we need to change those policies also um i'm not involved in the policy committee at all um but if the vice chair is indeed an active part of governance or leadership leadership that should that should be changed in our documentation i i will say back to the point about rotational model for the vice chair it's it's very common probably most common for the vice chair role to ascend to the chair role within other districts um so that's a hybrid we could think about too i also think that you know the how we rotate the vice chair um i i just know that scott and i have had an incredible relationship and that scott and i are very different in lots of ways and so it's been incredibly strong for us to work together and like balance each other and he does things that i can't do um and so i think about like when we're talking about increasing the role of the vice chair um it's really important that the chair and the vice chair do have a good solid trusting relationship and i know that you know we are seven adults who have different perspectives who have had conflicts and disagreements and times of collaboration and cohesion so that would be my one piece of as we're trying to strategically think about team and building up strengths if we have a chair and a vice chair who don't work well together and don't have a trusting relationship um how are we how do we navigate that in supporting both the chair and the vice chair in that leadership moment yeah i think it's really important um so yeah i agree with you about the team um really bringing two diverse people is the best way to to develop a high functioning team you you don't want to you want you want people that can play off each other's strengths and um accommodate each other's weaknesses and you get better outcomes from that that's like data shows us that we get better and more and more more financial more more fiscal fiscally sound and um and more innovation when you put those opposites together like that um that being said i think it's important also to talk about how conflicts are handled because that's where you get to the point where if you don't have a path to working through conflicts then it's it's difficult so that might be for the two people to decide um put them in a cage together and let them figure it out so i think we should i think we should be careful about um thinking about well hey that doesn't work or they're different or they have different styles because i think back of sort of 30 years of sort of leadership experience and probably my most successful time as a leader was when i co-chaired the board with lolenzo who um you know i didn't know before before i got on the board i didn't i didn't know him um we grew up in portland but we say we we actually grew up in the two different portlands um and when i would be talking about like my portland experience like he would share his portland experience anyway it was a it's a long story about how it came about but it it was it was not by either one of our choices that we ended up being co-chairs um but that is what worked and it actually turned out to for me it was probably that a time of my my great great growth as a leader and getting insights that i never would have had and if i'd said like hey i want to pick the person i'm comfortable with or that i like feel i could best be a team with he wouldn't he wouldn't have been the person i picked i mean just i didn't know him it wasn't anything personal but like that wouldn't have been you know i think if you go through the unconscious bias training there's the you pick somebody like you um and i probably would have said you know it would be you know somebody would be more likely me who i picked so i just you know i think there's um we should be careful not to be like um hey this is going to work or not because you know alie and scott like i didn't have opinion like it wouldn't work um but i'm glad to see you guys have like found where you have compliments complementary skills and styles and it works good as a team and i think most times that that's what happens and also like frankly we should give people professional development if they're gonna if they haven't been in cheering or vice chairman before not just like here here it is um and that's something that we for sure could do yeah and that makes me really happy to hear that you and scott have um like gotten to work closely together and it's worked out nicely that you've
01h 05m 00s
um discovered how to work together and that's really promising and just another example is on the bond accountability team we could not find a chair nobody stepped up of the members of that team and we made a couple phone calls and we ended up with you know a retired white male who's i don't know probably late 60s that does not want to do a chair full time and then an african immigrant you know with three-year-old twins that also doesn't want to work full-time as a chair and so we're putting them together as co-chairs and i'm really excited to see because of the diversity that they each bring um to this realm that i'm just really excited to see what they come up with i think it's going to be a fabulous team because they are so different um the only thing they have in common is they both don't want to do this full time and i think it's going to be really really wonderful in terms of like in on all ways of um marking success all metrics um we'll see in six months how this has it goes but so far it looks really promising um i guess time wise i want to do a time check yeah um i was going to offer to try to do a summary of where we've i don't know that we've reached consensus on anything but we're sort of leaning into some ways to at least explore or think about further um but i i just wanted to do are we interested in having a co-chair model as opposed to a chair and vice chair uh or is that even legal um [Music] there's something that says that school boards have to have a ch one chair only and yeah we just need to change our policy and it's actually pps has done it before even though it is counter to the way our policy is written now but it's it's a viable path and if we wanted to adhere to the letter of the law we just would need to change our policy bit so and i scott i could speak to that just because when lolenzo and i became chair debbie and menashe and carla who were two lawyers who were on the board were like we thought about doing that but then we looked at the statue and it says you have to like vote for a chair and a vice chair we're like oh we're going to follow the statue we'll vote for a chair and a vice chair but how we're going to show up is co-chairs and you know there's no legal reason that you have to say like you're the chair it's like you have to follow the statutes so we never you know change the policy or this or the statute obviously um but how we showed up is and what we told staff is here here's how we're going to work and lolenzo had a body of work that he um he had and i had a and you know together it covered all the responsibilities and then we just switched the the gavel but it never was changing the policy or the statute and you could you know we we ran it by i think we were we ran it by whoever somebody from miller nash um at the time to make sure that was okay and they're like yeah that's fine to do and i'll just say from my experience um i thought it was a great a great model and the district then continued that model after lolenzo and i i think for another five or six years um to use that and then i think when pam became the chair they dropped the the co-chair and just she was the chair for four years or something i mean you could maybe speak to that but they did it for a long period of time afterwards so that's that's great history um i think we could write into our policy having that as a an informal option you know having it as a designation while still following the statute of having an official chair and official vice chair um we could build that into policy so that you know that might be a that might work in some situations and not work in others but it would give us some flexibility i i did hear us leaning towards [Music] preferring a chair for a year but a six-month check-in is not a bad idea just to re re-up and and viewing that more as a uh i think informally as a sort of a confirmation um or in my my viewpoint if if i was chair for six months and after three months i said this isn't working for me for whatever reason it's a graceful way to say um you know what um so i think leaving a graceful out uh at six months uh leaving that in policy would be a good idea uh yeah thank you and thank you for
01h 10m 00s
wrapping up too by the way um yes and also you know anytime we can build some flexibility around you know i mean following the statute absolutely but allowing for some flexibility within the policy so we can decide you know the team's gonna look different every two years potentially and to allow the the new team to decide how they want to organize and michelle i think it's uh just second andrew just want to finish this thought um the other piece is we've got bits and pieces of a clear pathway to leadership um i think we can codify that certainly serving on diver on a number of different committees uh gives us all knowledge much deeper knowledge in different areas uh chairing a committee certainly gives is a big leadership role um during his vice chair again as as preparation uh some of the we could codify some of the designated roles that ailey talked about like um you know dealing with the media is uh is a definite skill um so we we could we have a lot of that informally and uh we could codify that again not as a policy but as a um one of our protocols i guess uh what we haven't quite gotten to is those qualities and attributes uh skills that would bring some debt more definition to the role of the chair um and we talked a little bit about transparency um but i don't think we got very scott that that was actually what i wanted to come back to for me i think all this is great and i'm glad we're making progress on it for me one of the most important things is that transparency around it and i'm just curious to get a temperature check from from my colleagues i would i would make it a requirement that if you are interested in running for chair you must declare your interest at a meeting prior to the election and if you have not declared your interest you you cannot be elected chair at that meeting um and the reason i think that surfaces that transparency um not just to other fellow board members but to the public as well and i think it prevents that you know for lack of a better term sort of the back room you know sort of sort of deal making where all of a sudden you know something pops up at the last minute but i think i think as part of that process getting your question about the qualities i think if we if we can come up with some qualities that's great part of that i want to be chair should be and and here here's what i bring to it right so that it allows the chair allows the rest of the board to sort of consider what that person brings to it and and make that decision so for me for me that would be a reform i'd like to see i i agree with that and we could build it into our process and build it into our long-range agenda setting that we have that conversation publicly um before the leadership vote i totally agree i agree with that too it's a good point so i want to just go back to scott i'm not sure uh how i feel about the moving to one year so i just to be transparent just share that i want to mull over a little bit more about that yeah i think the one year um [Music] it is not an official one-year term i i think we stick i would favor sticking with a six-month term but with the understanding that uh again for that working relationship with staff that a a one-year term would be kind of the the expectation um but but again leaving a graceful out at six months if for whatever reason yeah so it to me it look a little bit depends on what we do with the vice chair role because so when you've seen somebody in a vice chair role agreeing to a year-long service is one thing but if you have no experience with seeing somebody in leadership and to say like yes i'm going to sign up for a year even if it's informally i say i don't i want to think through that i'm not sure i'm prepared to like because that seems like a commitment i might not be able to keep um just depending on if i have if i don't have any sort of track record of like having been on a committee with them or seen them as part of the leadership
01h 15m 00s
seeing them in in the leadership role just but julia i think you make a good point about um if we adopted a model of ascendancy for lack of a better word for the vice chair um and we start with that and then you know after that first time move to a year roll um i think that's an important component because then then from that point forward you have had the opportunity to see that person in a leadership role okay i'm confused amy are you saying that we'd have a rotational role of the vice chair and then the vice chair would ascend to the chair yeah i do then we do have a rotational chair model i mean you technically have a rotational chair model except for the fact that you're choosing the vice chair and then the vice chair serves for a period of time six months or whatever and then ascends to the chair role actually that's not what i heard though what i heard is i i thought i heard several people say they liked the rotational model of the vice chair i'm just saying something different but i mean either way i like the idea of um having people having had the opportunity for leadership in the vice chair role before serving in the chair role whether it's by ascending through a rotational model or whether it's by election so i i don't know that we're ready to do the sort of chair elect device chairs the chair elect model um but i think if if we do move to that rotational vice chair then we get a fair number of people who have had that experience before they would run for the chair position if they were interested and so is that a question do we have to have seen someone in leadership before they get to the chair which hasn't been the process do we have to have seen their capabilities if they're showing up on time what they offer i don't want to put that in the rules i i think that we could have you know we could have someone that's elected in may that's a brand new person that we all are like hot damn this person should be chair right like we that i i would hate for us to put restrictions in place that the the chair has to have served as vice chair the church the chair has to have chaired a committee or i think that that limits us i think that that those are best practices that that allow us to know each other more fully but i don't i would be against putting a whole list of restrictions on how what someone has to do within the board before they're eligible to service chair because i think that actually you've been saying michelle that is not best practices for building inclusive spaces and and it's putting all kinds of rules and restrictions and the rules move all the time and there's no you know the target moves well and since the chair the one that's why i wanted to talk about this is because i i want to make sure there's a clear target the clear path to target but i think because the chair assigns the committees and the committee chairs the chair could if they so desired restrict people from meeting those goals if we codify any of them right so yes you could say i don't want you know scott to ever be in leadership so i'm never gonna make him a committee chair and i'm never to let him be vice chair the chair would have that power and so i think we don't want to put people must do this before they're able to be chair because there could be shenanigans yeah it sounds like we may be wrapping up this conversation but i i think i want to throw in just another thought for us to think about since um just longer term because they say their definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome and i look back and i think the last time we had a black not full chair well the lens of what like by statute was 20 years ago and why is that and i want to be careful that we're not making just changes around the edges that um you know i don't know all the circumstances but like you know why a recently um board member that recently cycled off the board who was a vice chair but never became the chair like why was that and i heard a lot of different reasons like not enough time but like i didn't hear that from actually the individual um involved so i think we should all think it's like are have we are we making enough changes or are these like just the ones we're comfortable with are we making enough
01h 20m 00s
changes that we will get you know potentially different um different outcomes on how we we do our process because having a declaring a month earlier still sounds like the same process except for people know who might be chair and i think most of the time people know anyway who might want to be chair um so i just i just throw that out there because i and it may be like yes we've done enough but i'm trying to sort through my head whether we actually are making a big enough sort of shift that we get something different yeah i i just i want us to be really conscious we are one of the least diverse boards um in in our in our region and to be very aware of that and if we do in fact support our res jay policies and our goals that we do need to show up differently we need to show up knowing who we are and allowing for new voices to come through and not putting up barriers um so so and and these barriers don't just happen organically they happen because of who we've got on the board making making those decisions michelle i just i want to put a plug in there for work that i know andrew is is working on on the intergovernmental committee but i think a huge piece of that is around how we conduct board how we conduct our elections our city-wide elections not our leadership elections and around campaign finance limits whether it's mandatory or um strongly encouraged because i think that that is really the key to a lot of our barriers that we currently have um so i do think that's relevant to this conversation and i think it is on us to fix that because it's not gonna gonna happen by itself and when i talk to people and try to encourage people to run i mean that's a huge part of it if they know that they can run against somebody who you know can put thousands of dollars of their own money into the campaign or you know other sources of that that they they don't want to do it um so it's really on us to to figure out what are all those barriers and what's within our control to dismantle them absolutely and i mean part of being a good leadership and a good leader in 2021 is having that self-reflection about like am i the right person in the seat at the right time to ask yourself that like you know that's a hard conversation to have with yourself but um are you you know the voice that's needed to change outcomes for students of you know of color who have disproportionate outcomes um to white kids in our district and so like it's just it's a question that we should all and i'm saying this to myself too by the way um i'm asking myself when i wake up in the morning if i'm if i'm the right person to so but being a good leadership is recognizing where you're strong and where you're weak and like if you're the right voice at the right time um are you right-sized um in the position and so yeah so thanks for offering that um that that campaign and election uh reform will really help um but we can also work on our own at the board level here to make it a place for diversity on our on our board itself so the question liz and roseanne are going to ask me after this meeting is are we going to hold elections on at our meeting on tuesday or not do we want to postpone them longer what sort of i'm not clear on what our next steps are and i just know that that i made that promise to them that i would clarify so i just want to see where we are i'm fine having a a vote on tuesday yep as in mine go ahead okay and what next steps do we want to take as a board i know that scott's written down some notes um sort of what do we wanna i i think there's some really important things about um codifying some of the um distributive leadership model um and thinking about how we do that so michelle and scott what are you all thinking about how we can best support sort of making this process more transparent and more equitable i would actually love to step up and and take a look at that policy
01h 25m 00s
but i don't want to do it by myself because i i think better with you know in the in a team working with someone so i'd be happy to help michelle that would be great i i'd love that to serve something up for the board to for our next retreat maybe the three of us can uh if you don't mind um yeah uh and we can kind of do it into bite-sized chunks of some specific decisions uh going forward um [Music] and work through i mean michelle you did a great job of of outlining like four or five specific dimensions of this and i think we can work through those some are going to take a little longer or won't be a formal vote or anything but that might be more of a jam board to say hey here's the qualities and skills that we are looking for and aboard chair would be more of a um you know collaborative brainstorm that then gets refined down so a couple couple of way different ways to get to where we want to be and actually is that like we all have different the three of us have different have had different experiences um and of course yeah we're gonna um i'm i'm feeling like we have a really strong team i'm excited um to see what we can come up with the three of us um i think it'll be great we'll just i guess what we could promise for our april retreat is that we give our colleagues something to um to review and right it's not written in stone [Music] all right michelle ellis are we ready to move on to the next agenda item or is there anything else on this piece no i think we're done thank you all thanks very much so what i love michelle is you originally told me that you needed an hour for this conversation and then later on you said better make it an hour 15. that was exactly an hour so you were right the first time you you've got the timing down excellent um we had scheduled a break to start at 12 45. by the way every meeting that i have facilitated has ended at or under time or on time just perfect i thought that was my thing but michelle is like showing me up every meeting she's just boom boom we're done i can see her her plank her campaign plank um so we had a half an hour break scheduled kind of a lunch break um from 12 45 to 1 15. do we want to take that now and come back at one or do we want to squeeze in 15 minutes of something else before we go to lunch it looks like our next uh item which is an hour item are the communications protocols so i prefer to take a break now okay rather than dive into that for 15 minutes and then take a break you actually have the citizens budget review committee is a little 15 minute thing rita wanted us it was originally on the agenda i took it off because she wasn't going to be here and then she said i actually do need some help with that so could you ask the question but let's take our break now and we'll squeeze in cbrc at the end what what is the question uh it is let me see i have to find your text um we have a lot of text about ash wednesday because it was ash wednesday during the um it was ash wednesday and i had to leave the policy committee meeting early to go to church so um she she wants some guidance about how cbrc can give us specific requests or advice so um please ask the group if they have any suggestions for specific requests or advice from cbrc during the budget process so if there are specific things we want from cbrc or specific things we'd like them to look at during the budget process so let's have that question before us let's go take our break and then we'll discuss that at the end of our meeting time or let me let's discuss that right after lunch and then we'll jump into our um i'd like to suggest that we do that at the end because i have to leave early and i can just provide some input on that question by email perfect do you guys want to still take a half an hour break or would you like the break to be shorter because i know amy has to leave early i would love it to be shorter but whatever everybody needs is 20 minutes okay or do people want 30 20 20 sounds good yeah that's fine okay we'll be back at uh 12 53.
01h 30m 00s
so we if you look at the agenda um it i have pulled from the board self-evaluation reference on unity and trust the language that it says in the self-evaluation this is for the next bar up from nothing it says the board has adopted a policy requiring that information provided by the superintendent to one board member is provided to all board members so that's um all it says about the the policy that we have to have um we had lifted this up as a you know it feeds into some of our governance policies about directing staff how do we engage and we started with um communications protocols and sort of board protocols that the school board in the past had come up with but never voted on apparently um and so those were the protocols one and protocols two i split them into two groups because um the way stuff shook out last time i completely left julia off of any work group um and so that was not okay and um so we split those protocols into two so there would be one work group that was scott rita and i and one word group that was scott julia and i on those comms protocols so that's why there's two of them because we couldn't have a quorum um so those are linked there and what we're going to do is read them go through um kind of um create a sense of direction i'll take notes on the document um and then we will kind of have a sense of direction in some of our edits and we will create it get a team together um which julia will be on so although she's on the leadership team i don't know if she wants to be on this team but i don't want to neglect any person who wants to have a role on one of these teams i'm so sorry for doing that in the past um but we didn't take it personally as i could it wasn't it wasn't personal it was just like in the chaos of the moment but i just felt really badly that i neglected to to include you because you're you offer so much especially when we're looking at language and and thinking through all the fallouts of what we may or may not intend but anyway i took a personal idealia thank you scott paul i should have called you you yes call scott and he'll say ailee you're you're screwing up again here's what we need to do um so anyway we'll have a team work on the final draft and then we'll submit the final draft to the slt to see how it would work on the staff side and get their feedback and then we'll um send out a draft to the board for more comment and then we'll eventually we may decide to review this again at our april meeting and then eventually the goal is to have the board vote on adopting these protocols um so let's start with protocol number one um which is listed as comms protocols and um it's funny because this actually starts on um oh roman numerals number four whereas the other protocol start on number one so this is the section i pulled out of the middle um so let's actually let's start on protocols two since that's the beginning of the actual former policy um you're confusing me i'm confusing everybody including myself so we're starting with protocol 2 which at the top says portland public school board and superintendent staff expectations and operating protocols okay and on the michelle i see you on the google doc on the google doc it's just listed as protocols not comms protocols if that is clear okay yeah i'm in i think we're in the same we're in the same document and then you said roman numeral four node roman numeral four is the other one we're starting with roman numeral one on protocol two as listed in the agenda okay so i'm sorry but i want to make sure that i'm at the right place i of course i in my classic fashion printed printed out printed it out so i printed out what was in board books so i have like the first page is the agenda and the second page is is headed with portland public schools board and superintendent staff expectations and operating protocols you're right where you need to be okay okay um okay so we're gonna just run through this and i'm gonna make notes and kara's gonna make notes and we're gonna uh cara i don't know if we need to share the document for the public to see or how that needs to work i'll let you take care of that end of things um so uh what as we look through this what edits what changes do we want to in the rules of make sorry is it is sorry is it possible to actually go through them i mean i i know we've all read through them and thought about them but i actually think it's important for us in this moment um to just sort of be very clear and maybe and then people can
01h 35m 00s
comment on each one as we go through so i'll read that too thank you i'll read through a section and then we can discuss it so um roman numeral one rules and responsibilities as elected members of the board of education for portland public schools our roles and responsibilities are outlined in board policies these expectations and protocols do not replace or override board policy or oregon law and laws and administrative directions are you looking for a thumbs up yeah i just if what if anyone has any changes to that section so i'm can i just ask a um sorry a process question did somebody go through and look to see whether everything that's proposed here is not in conflict with board policy in oregon law i mean can we just take that off the table as like we have to worry about that yeah um well i can um so this is not the redline version this is the this is the original version i guess julia your question is whether any of these protocols conflict with state right like i'm just wondering if we're landing on something that like actually conflicts because um it's sort of like if we're passing something we're saying yeah we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna this is what we're gonna do but then it like it actually is in conflict of board policy it'd just be good to know it's if this is like a more of a technical like when we get all maybe get all done or it's just one of the bananas in advance like nothing we're proposing here is actually in conflict with law or other board policy i have not done that work i think the next step when we have something is to submit it to liz for that review okay so that is the policy is to submit it to slt for their review yeah just to know i would like that specific thing done just because i want to know if we're yeah proposing something that's yes so we will submit these once we kind of work through this today we'll submit them to liz and get her two cents and an slt's two cents on them ask if we're in conflict with any laws or other provisions um okay all right are we ready to move on to the next section yes okay i'm gonna split screen so i can see you all while i read okay hang on one technology yay okay um highlights of board responsibilities include a establishing an overarching educational vision for the district and setting actionable district goals and priorities to equitably provide the highest quality educational experience for each ppf student b providing financial oversight and direction for the district including reviewing and adopting a student-focused annual budget establishing general financial goals issuing bonds and exercising tax authority c hiring sorry sorry i'm trying to get off mute um should that be authorizing bonds and not issuing it's a minor point but we don't actually yeah yeah let's authorizing okay now that may be a case where we're violating the law all right see hiring setting goals for and evaluating the superintendent annually maintaining a mutually supportive relationship with the superintendent in pursuit of established district goals should there be an end there i don't know julia talk to me about that semicolon i'm not your semicolon person dean i am a semicolon person all right tell me michelle um it's a semicolon separates two separate ideas um i would remove i'm i i would remove the semicolon and put a comma and i mean okay all right i hate i hate to be the one who could raises this but we might be operating off slightly different versions um i'm using the one in board book right now which does not have a semicolon just has a comma so i just want to make sure it is i'll make sure we're all looking at the same version i'm using the version that was sent out in the agenda they're also using the board andrew that's so weird andrew because i printed this one from the board books and mine has a semicolon it does have it in board books after
01h 40m 00s
annually see after annually has a semicolon oh yes i'm sorry i thought you were saying semicolon to the end of c gosh i this is we are so this conversation has already taken too long sorry i will say on on d there shouldn't be a period there should be a comma my husband just walked through the room right at that second which is really kind of embarrassing like our work is slightly more substantive than that snippet right there semicolons all right are we ready to move on to d focusing on policy making goal setting monitoring and evaluation to further the goals and priorities should there not be something after priorities like of the district um focusing policy making goal setting monitoring evaluation yes i think you're right oh i almost put a period there e acting as an ambassador of the community comma both sharing district in district information with the public comma including ensuring that students in the community are aware of the goals and priorities and communicating public thought to the district this is minor but just all the lawyers always work with it's like don't use the word insuring because um it's it's too concrete like there's no way we can ensure that all the students and community um you know working through just something other than the word insuring because it implies that like we can guarantee that we're going to do that and aiming for or let's see no i don't feel strongly about what word it is it just shouldn't be something that implies a guarantee that something obviously we can't guarantee working to make students in the community aware of the goals and priorities sure okay great we finished the first section people uh as board members do this work responsibly they commit to should that be they are we because we say our rules earlier on i think we okay a utilizing the racial equity lens tool in decision making with the goal of closing the achievement and opportunity gap for our students of color and historically underserved students b respecting the role of the superintendent as the manager of the district which includes sole authority over directing employees in district and school matters i see an error with a comma there at c i'll fix that making decisions as a whole board only at public meetings and i'll capitalize individual individual members have no authority to take standalone action in policy or in district and school administrative matters or to speak on behalf of the board without expressed delegation of authority d complying with board policies understanding our fiduciary responsibilities and being aware that our actions at all times reflect on the integrity reputation and functionality of pps should that be the district because everywhere else is the district sure this is like a minor thing but to me the district sounds so bureaucratic i'd rather say the school district just it's a personal okay i'll make a note to change i that just throughout it it's just it sounds impersonal it's like we're more than like a jurisdiction we we actually are i mean yeah oh i'll um i just put that in the middle of the document and i'll italicize it and i'll go back and change that encouraging and modeling constructive public discourse in board decision making honoring student voice is fe is encouraging and modeling constructive public discourse and board decision making f is honoring student voice all right practices of the board of education area 2 priority setting and board and student evaluation a priority setting the board will align their work with the district vision theory of action strategic plan goals and budget process i think it actually should say approved budget okay uh if we're gonna i agree with the change but it should be adopted okay you're right stop the budget approved and adopted approved and adopted or just adopted
01h 45m 00s
adopted adopted is good the approved budget is a temporary weigh station on the way to the adopted great the board will co-create with the superintendent a strategic strategic plan and establish at a public meeting goals in alignment with the district's vision and strategic plan sorry and will regularly monitor the district's progress in meeting these goals i thought we had decided that we weren't going to be co-creating the strategic plan that the superintendent was going to be producing with staff going to be producing this strategic plan so should we take out the strategic plan and just say the board will establish at public meeting goals in alignment with the district's vision and strategic plan um the goals actually inform the strategic plan well it's in alignment with the vision yeah i think it goes vision goals strategic plan in terms of yeah okay i will just take remove all references to strategic plan in that one so it'll say the board will establish at a public meeting goals in alignment with the district's vision and will regularly monitor the district's progress in meeting these goals perfect that sounds good board leadership will meet regularly with the superintendent and key staff to evaluate past board meetings and determine the agenda for upcoming board meetings the board leadership will solicit input from board members what does evaluate past board meetings mean exactly so at the beginning of agenda setting we say how did the last board meeting go and we'll say okay we took a really long time on this part so that means the next time we have a coveted leadership update we need to add an hour to that conversation or you know it was really hard that the king community had to wait for their um acceptance of their dreamers thing so let's remember to move student-centered decisions like that about school name changes to the front of the meeting that's what we do at agenda setting that's fantastic to hear and i just on that note want to raise uh this idea of people waiting on our calls it's completely unrelated to the document we're talking about but if we have important people on our calls i'd i'd really love to see us invite them you know by text or something 20 minutes beforehand so they don't have to sit in on our i don't know if we're already doing that but yeah so you know yeah important people are here on the call and they've been waiting for two hours rather let's call them you know text 20 minutes ahead of time let them know their agenda items coming up that's what we do at the city council level or we can just keep to our agenda and then they know what time they're coming on yeah yeah roseanne does offer that to folks if they would like to you know she tells them what time that the agenda item's gonna be and she does text and communicate with people but some people choose to come and watch the board meeting and wait um but even if someone's not at the board i don't know about you all but even if someone's not at the board meeting they're still kind of on hold as if we're taking too long waiting till their time yeah so it you know puts you in sort of this heightened state i think um but we but we do evaluate the board meeting that's the first thing we do is say how was the meeting last night what did we learn from it what do we need to shift and adjust what went well what didn't go well why and how can we make the next meeting better um so number four board leadership will regularly check in with the full board regarding the board meeting structure and progress on board priorities all right this is great so i'm sorry sorry i have a question about that um so what does board priorities mean it's a good question right so so for example um you know is it it's not the it's not the goals because we already talked about that but like we have just some sort of sort of informal work plan or whatever it is like hey we got to prove these charter schools we got to move through the budget with a superintendent's evaluation i mean it's i'm assuming those are like prioritize you know we have to open a middle school or you know approve the bond are those the board priorities i i you know i wonder can i make a suggestion if it said progress on board member priorities because what i thought this was about was board leadership is going to regularly check in with the entire board both on the structure how's the meeting how are they going for you but also progress on board member priorities that doesn't necessarily lock board leadership into following through on those priorities but it's it's routinely
01h 50m 00s
coming to the entire board and saying hey what are your priorities are we you know are we making progress which we get a little bit of that out of the emails but but just making sure that's uh codified i don't i don't disagree with what you said andrew but the way that i read that i was thinking we should insert monitoring of board priorities like it was referring to our adopted priorities because monitoring is actually a a structural um assignment that board leadership is responsible for you know how are we how are we making sure that this shows up on our agendas kind of a mechanic but that's what i thought that was kind of talking about i have to step away for just two or three minutes but i think it's the whole board priorities is what i was thinking it was okay so what do we think we want to put there how do we want to articulate this we could do both find out a way to find a way to articulate both the full board priorities and board member priorities so i thought you said we don't know what football priorities are i mean we don't we haven't i think yeah i think board goals uh should be instead of uh well board goals because we've all adopted those and we know what those are and i like the board member priorities um because because that makes it a little less informal we all have monitoring board goals and addressing individual board member priorities good that's good all right i'm going to take out one of the ends there so we don't have all the ands and add some commas i would give i mean i think a great example of this is michelle your work around addre this priority of making our leadership process more equitable right that that's a priority that you've had that you know leadership is is you know um trying to make sure that we're addressing that and creating space for that right like that as people elevate things that they notice and think we need to work on that there's space to have that be addressed absolutely yes and school reopening is right we adopted that as a formal priority but it's a priority yeah making sure we get good information flow around that yes i'm excited for tuesday when we get the um middle school hybrid update so everyone who's watching now watch on tuesday for that good news all right b board professional development and evaluation one the board will self-assess its performance at least annually board leadership will regularly evaluate board meetings and work sessions all board members are encouraged to provide feedback to the board leadership to improve the board's performance the board leadership will annually set expectations and priorities for board professional development board leadership will annually review the board office budget to ensure that there are sufficient funds to support the board's professional development okay c superintendent's evaluation one the board will establish annual goals and metrics for the superintendent's performance and engage in a process that provides for thoughtful and deliberative assessment of the superintendent's work based on those goals at least annually two the board will check in with the superintendent at the mid-year point to collaboratively assess progress towards achieving district goals identify any barriers to success and make course corrections as necessary that is not something we have done this year yeah i was just wondering about that too um and one of the things that we added into the evaluation this year was this um we we lined out that we would like to see an increase in teachers of color and and it would be great to get an update on the activities i know it's such a weird year to ask for anything extra but i think we keep our values our values but i think i i'm guessing last year that was in the superintendent's preface to the budget and um i i think if it's not addressed there then we should find another venue to address it but i'm guessing it gets it shows up there yeah i'd like to make sure we get an update on it though so we actually you know we've we've already stated that it's an important goal and then and now we need to kind of know where we are at progress against a goal you know which i imagine would just be a a very you know brief update on the activities to date that have happened around that goal
01h 55m 00s
all right i will ask that superintendent guerrero submit something on this for the march 9th meeting haley i'm you know i'm okay with this one as a concept i do think we as a board need to recognize if we're going to do this it we we should do it formally i mean we should do this in a work session or you know at a meeting and it is time i mean we have enough we have a hard time getting the evaluation done um i also don't want to put i want to make sure anything we're asking the superintendent to do has added value um and you know a lot of this i feel like already comes up in the superintendent's um you know reports to us at our board meetings in terms of progress against a lot of these things so i think if the will of the board is to do this i'm okay with that but i think we should then we should do it but i also kind of want to put on the table whether we think this is necessary given we generally establish goals by the end of you know august and do his evaluation in june it's and it's been a moot point in the past because we were so late in the evaluation cycle that we couldn't do it but now we could so is this something we want to take off of our protocols so i think in an informal way to do it uh would be we we each have individual check-ins on a regular basis with the superintendent and we should keep keep the board goals in mind when we're having those discussions do you mind putting it back in i think that um you know you're right we do get really thorough you know i really appreciate the updates that we get every other week however i'm just wondering how is this going to impact we say you know we put this goal of increasing the number of teachers of color but if there's no if nobody cares if we get updated on it that's kind of saying like we don't really care i i feel like that wouldn't necessarily come up in an update the updates are very um kind of what's happened in the two weeks prior and not on these larger goals and i think if we take out this number two we're particularly for increasing students and administrators of color we're saying you know we don't really care about that we don't care if you update us on that and i think that i do i do and i think probably others i think this goes back to the piece we were talking about before where we inserted progress monitoring on our board goals because that actually shows up in our board goals and so we need to be it's on us to be building our agendas around progress monitoring of the items in our board goals and and we do you know we've done a decent job of the ones that are more student achievement focused but there are some other ones that we need to be extracting and checking in on best practice would be on a quarterly basis and maybe that doesn't mean necessarily a presentation in a board meeting but it means some communication from staff as part of a routine progress monitoring process and this would be really great when we when we talk about an annual work plan because then we're able to during the creation of that plan plug that in every quarter or twice a year or whatever that that recording it could be an agenda update in you know february and august or something um so what i'll do is i i would like to kind of hear some some of guadalupe's sort of where we are on some of this stuff that maybe hasn't been top of mind because of all the focus on reopening so i think what i'll do is i'll ask um that we include this on the march 9th agenda obviously we can't include this on tuesday's agenda um but just to kind of get to have a conversation as a board because it does say collaboratively to talk with the superintendent about where we are on on the goals and and on the pieces of the self-evaluation um where are you guys by the way sorry we are on c2 so roman numerals mostly moved by the way when you were gone we almost it disappeared for a moment yeah we removed it and then we put it back so i think it's good to have i i think it's good to have it as a way to to hold less and the superintendent accountable to focusing on our goals so and and i'll go ahead and ask that we do that for the march 9th meeting and does that does that give him enough time or i mean i feel like it's important that it happened but i don't want to make sure he's not overburdened with one more you know piece of busy work but this is i think an important update i'd like to hear i think i think we can make this happen uh and if he raises or roseanne raises massive concerns about it getting it done by the ninth we can do it at the um meeting on the 23rd or the whatever the march meeting is the second birthday i think it's the 30th so we'll do it sometime at one of the march meetings have a check-in you know it's not as
02h 00m 00s
formal i says it's a check-in to collaboratively assess so i think it's a conversation about our district goals yeah absolutely i just a progress against the goal right kind of a point in time i want to go back to amy's point that uh quarterly is best practice and this uh this point two i mean this year is a weird year again um but what's our regular practice that we want and if that's a if quarterly is best practice then this should say quarterly well the problem is if you don't do it quarterly then you just have a mid-year and then the end of the year which is which is summative and it seemed better to have formatives and it's also an opportunity i think for you know the superintendent to raise issues it's not just us like raising the issue as the superintendent but like at a much more regular check-in and i find if you have the check-in like if if everything's fine it's a short check-in if you know they're on one side of the other requires a bigger discussion you've got it you've got a placeholder you know on the calendar but if if this is addressing how are we doing on board goals which is a collaborative effort between the board and the superintendent and quarterly is best practice then should this say mid-year should this say quarterly or is is the first quarter we re-up the goals although um you know our with if covet hadn't hit we would be in what year two of the three year goals so we'd already have that in place um that we would have we'd be on a cycle then to do that kind of quarterly best practice uh examination of the goals i think we should put quarterly in there because i think if we're serious about our goals being our guiding uh sort of light that we need to to be talking about them regularly and intentionally so i'm just gonna say again i i'm actually fine with that but this is a significant time commitment i mean now now we're talking quarterly so we're going to adopt you know i'd love to say we adopt the goals by august or september we haven't generally but let's say we do you know we're coming back in november december we're coming back in february march we're coming back in april or may we're doing the super nin's evaluation i think that's fine i think it's a a big focus on our goals it will keep us focused as a board i think that's a council of great city schools practice other things on our board agenda are going to need to drop off so i think thinking about it in terms of that this is work for the superintendent work for his staff and and again it's not it's not bad they're already doing the work themselves to achieve the goals now we're asking them to update us on the work that they're doing but i think we need to be really realistic about the fact that that's you know four board meetings a year i know this board we're gonna we're gonna ask questions we're gonna have follow-up we're gonna want additional data we're gonna ask about disaggregation we're gonna ask about other things so that's an hour to an hour and a half long discussion you know four times a year plus with follow-up so it's a significant time commitment and again i'm in favor of it but we need to be realistic about something else that's gonna that's gonna go by the wayside in terms of what we're getting briefed on from the district and i would also like to just remind us that our process is we are gonna take this to the superintendent and his team and have them give us feedback on the feasibility so they may say to us we are not ready to do quarterly updates it it's too much with covid it's so we would like it to just be mid-year so we will i mean i think we want to be clear that we do want to be collaborative and we do know that our staff has been stretched very thin this year so this is this is um aspirational at this point and i think we need to have that conversation with the superintendent and he with his staff to say is this realistic for where we are right now and maybe in a year when we review these comms protocols again we're ready to change it to quarterly but let's put quarterly in for now and then have that conversation with the superintendent and his staff and see where we land does that sound fair i think that's reasonable yeah and also um the hour hour and a half um maybe we can put some boundaries around that so it's not this deep dive into the weeds rather it's a high level update of activities that have happened progress against the goal that we set um you know we can maybe manage that so it's not a huge lift for the staff like you said they're already doing the work we're just asking and we're not even asking for hard metrics we're asking for a list of activities and a list of outcomes perhaps as a result of those activities well so actually i think a couple of
02h 05m 00s
those are going to be what's happening with map so we're going to be looking at uh and the the staff is already doing it anyway it's just going to be sharing a high level look at what are the map results as we go through the year um to indicate what kind of progress we're making along those and a couple of our goals we won't really have data on until the last quarter anyway like the um a lot of the high school metrics that we're using we won't really know until the latter part of the school year anyway i'm going to have us unless there's anything about this specific item in this protocol that we want to talk through i'm going to have us move on to meetings was there anything else about the specific language in the protocol that we wanted to discuss so i just want to make a suggestion that one of the ways to make it easier is just agree in advance on a scorecard and they're just reporting into a scorecard so you're not debating the score you're not debating like the scorecard or the format every single time once you get that agreement it's just dropping you know data that you've got in it and talking about the data versus like the scorecard or what's being reported or what more we need that's that's fantastic yeah all right moving on to roman numeral three meetings a board members will be prepared for each meeting by reviewing materials in advance and agree to attend regularly scheduled board meetings unless a situation occurs that makes attendance impossible board members will cooperate in scheduling special meetings and or work sessions for planning and training purposes so this is like maybe a tone issue but like we'll cooperate it makes it sound like people are being uncooperative i i don't know it just it sounds a little bit like treating us not like you know professionals um how about collaborate is that a better word yeah i mean i actually i'm not even quite sure why we need it you know the the argument sorry the argument i would make for it is is in case you had a board meeting that said a report member who said um no i can come to regular meetings but i'm i can't i can't be available for any special special meetings and i think this is saying that's that's not part of the job is the special meetings and and making reasonable accommodations for it and i also it's the other side andrew of like if the chair was just like this is the meeting y'all come it that's not fair either it needs to be a collaborative or cooperative process where everyone can say this works for my schedule or this doesn't work for my schedule yeah well it's accommodating the person that has a full-time job or maybe a life outside of portland public schools and i think that's good yeah actually maybe my issue is um because it it does sound a little bit collaborative is because we don't have like a master calendar it's just like we get requests and this isn't anything negative was like hey we need to have a meeting it's like oh i wouldn't have agreed to that meeting if i would have known we were going to have like two others um so and maybe this is just a logistics thing but and i don't want to seem like hey uncooperative but it's just because i don't have vis visibility just like the bigger calendar um i say i don't want to see me uncooperative but also sometimes it's just like hey i already booked three meetings this week and i can't add another evening meeting and i think it's okay to say no i i'm not available any of those times i mean i think that's your piece i like collaborative like working collaborative maybe it's like board members and and board office staff will collaborate on scheduling special meetings and work sessions for planning because that's what happens i mean that's i think that's a good way to say it i like that too okay and they are super collaborative they're amazing okay and can we can we add uh we promise not to make uh roseanne and carrie's life hell yeah i'm gonna yeah that would be a1 i'm concerned about that too yeah and i took out the planning and training because sometimes it's an executive session sometimes it's a complaint so i just put special meetings and or work sessions okay like any meeting of the board i mean we should be collaboratively trying to make it work yeah um b the times allotted at board meetings for each agenda item are estimates and are and are to be used as a guideline by the chair in managing the
02h 10m 00s
meeting however there are not specific end times why is that necessary i don't love that one i don't understand why that's in there really we can delete it i actually think it's a good thing because like community members might look at it or board members like hey this was supposed to happen at like eight like it says right here it's gonna happen at eight o'clock and it you know happened at nine or i mean i i think that's for ourselves which is what this is i mean these protocols are sort of our agreement of how we're gonna show up and we're gonna we're gonna try to stick to time but as we i mean we've had several substantive discussions that needed more time than what what and you know the agenda is just roseanne and i doing our best guess of how long we think something's going to take and we get it wrong more than we get it right because you know it's it's trying to balance all the things so i think i like having that in there just because it's very clear that the agenda is the guide but it's not we're not inflexible around those those times can i throw this thinking about something i can tell no go ahead no julia had a thought as well i was just to say having been a board chair i think it's really important because it just like sets expectations like hey we're gonna try but but there's sometimes good reasons why we don't stick to this the schedule and then it it's sort of like then people don't like file a complaint or board members like it said right here it's going to be this time and i think we'll um we'll prioritize a time over getting something right or or allowing representation or voice to something that maybe maybe alien roseanne hadn't anticipated so julia you're arguing to keep it in right yeah i would keep it in yeah i'm fine this is a related and we don't need to discuss it but a tool we could talk about incorporating would be time certains for certain agenda items that's something the city of portland uses somewhat well um and and what that generally means in that context is that the item won't happen before that time right but you can also use it in a way that says look if we've got key items that we know a lot of community interest is that's a time cert in our agenda and whether we are finished with the other items before or not we're going to pause those other items move to that time certain to that time certain you generally don't want to have more than one of those because then you can run up against two different time certains but it is a way if we're doing you know talking about you know rosa parks scheduling or other really important things that the community cares about you give that certainty so so people aren't waiting for two hours while we finish a different conversation so i'll just throw that out as a potential future idea yeah the legislature does that as well on big bills i love that idea and i'll i'll bring that up at agenda setting that's great that is great years ago i showed up for public comment at like eight o'clock when it was scheduled to find out they'd done it at seven yeah that's not cool i was denied the opportunity which i believe is illegal but uh there you go it's also how to file a complaint scott it's not just illegal it's like crazy making yeah so we can take care of the yeah let's i like keeping it in thanks i talked to the board co-chair but julia would not all right board members agree to strive to start and end meetings on time i was less experienced than scott it was not you see board members agree to strive to start and end meetings on time i have a track record in this area yes that's good you do uh you're setting the standard there michelle uh d board members agreed to uphold the legal requirement for confidentiality on all matters arriving from arising from board executive sessions and any other confidential communications or information i feel like that maybe needs to be higher up on the meaning thing maybe that needs to be b because that seems pretty important more important than starting the meeting on time does that make sense yeah and i think what's unspoken about this um this whole process that we're engaged in is it's our tool for holding one another accountable and i think the reason that we're doing this is because we haven't had that before and we have had significant breaches and yet no ability to hold one another accountable not not necessarily this constellation of board members but yeah so there's that kind of like i also find this as a board a brand new board member this would have been super helpful i know have handed to me to say this is kind of some of the cultures some of the things to be prepared for and it may very well have been handed to me there was a lot of information but i think if we can help as board members return to this like i
02h 15m 00s
the whole we're supposed to check in with the superintendent um semi-annually i miss that as board chair so i think if we're all referring to this kind of regularly it helps us be better and be clear um so i i like it for not just the holding one another accountable but also learning how to be a good board member myself the only reason i wouldn't the only reason i wouldn't move this one up any is because i actually i think the the vast majority of our work is transparent and public and is intentionally that way this is really referring to a very narrow strip i don't want to highlight this for the public to be like wait what's all this confidential stuff that they're hiding the reality is almost everything we do is fully transparent open public record there are a very small number of things uh legal issues you know around real estate or you know disciplinary actions or student records that we do have to hold in confidence and and by law and so i just think i would i would i think it's important to have in there i would probably keep it where it is i think that's a fair point okay i will move it back okay um or delete it totally e board members agree to communicate with a focus on problem solving board members will seek to clarify issues by soliciting each other's points of view does this mean communicate with one another yes is that clear to everyone that that's implied that these are our commitments just within the board so i thought it was like with every like everybody i mean it's fine with the board but it seems like is it what section is this under this is the this is under meetings three um uh letter e e and and i understand you about other board members too sorry michelle do we uh does this bump us up against um the serial meetings in public meetings yeah so this is yeah the question is and it's a good one michelle is is this are we talking about uh uh public meeting behavior here or this is our protocol in general yeah it's under the meetings under the meeting section so i think this is about how we behave in meetings yeah i i think that we could take that first line board members agree to communicate with a focus on problem solving and just add it to f which is below which says board members agree to listen carefully and with courtesy when other people are speaking during board meetings discussion between board members will serve as a model for acceptable public dialogue i agree just stick that other first line in there yeah i guess sometimes like we're not trying to solve a problem i mean so that's okay that's true i mean sometimes we're just communicating i mean or it's not about a problem or we may just have two different points of view and um so we see that maybe we just take e out julia i think f kind of kept what i think what he's trying to say is we're going to be respectful to one another and i think f does that yeah i mean i do like the seek to clarify issues by soliciting each other's points of view because to me the richest part of our board meetings are when we have a good discussion of and i hear other people's experiences or expertise or points of view um on an issue so i i i actually like that i mean one of the things it does take longer you don't just blow through something um that's a complex issue without that so could we move that second sentence to f yeah and delete e yeah okay so f becomes e now do we want to get any more in the weeds i mean we always say in our script that we will listen without paying attention to our devices and that is just routinely violated i took that out i don't say that anymore so we're fine with i mean because it speaks exactly to these points which is that it's it's very often apparent that people aren't really listening to people speaking whether it's another board member or whether it's people giving public testimony i mean it's apparent to me so do we want to address that directly i think that comes under our the work we're going to do around the public comment period i just all i say during the public comment is board members agree to be active listeners in the when i introduce public comment so i think we you know that that team andrew michelle and amy can can decide what that looks like i mean it's interesting because i um i am looking forward to at some point having this conversation about public
02h 20m 00s
comment because in our first year when we were doing a lot of the stuff around pioneer and access and guadalupe a lot of times takes notes during public comment i do as well or i'm looking something up related to what they're saying but a lot of times just you know writing writing notes about what's happening or just a reminder for me to check on something that comes up in public comment and i i know that guadalupe they um there was some criticism like you're not paying attention but he was like writing notes and it's at one point part of the you know his response was i'm taking notes um like i'm not going to provide a response here but i'm noting what the concerns are so and so part of it may be like everybody actively listens in a different way um again i'm like so paper and like you know things in writing i put it in my files um but i do think you know it's hard for when the public's looking at this blank you know the the dice or a screen of like hey they all look differently of how they're listening and so that's why i'm interested about like how we're gonna acknowledge people's comments because we listen in different ways and we use the information in different ways um and i i want to add to that too there's um i know that i have processing errors i know that knitting like the waldorf school gives kids a little ball of clay to just you know do this all day with and some people doodle some people have these tactile ways of of getting through information processing it and to respect some people pep their cats you know um so yeah i feel like julia that's really important to acknowledge that we we do we we do need to be actively listening i also know like working for instance in the somali community i i thought that no one was listening to me at a public meeting that i was presenting at in person back in the olden days and i learned that actually you're not going to get anybody looking up at you because that would be considered rude but they're all the information is being taken in while they're doing other things with their hands um handwork embroidery etc so so if we're trying to be more cultural in our understanding and we i think that this is a really important point i'm back to how we're listening it is rude to be on the phone um texting when people are testifying um i i'm seeing it both ways i feel like we can't tell people how to listen we can ask that people actively listen listen the best they how they listen best so i would i would say no devices during public comment uh but taking notes and seeing that up front that some of us are taking you know that kind of thing i think is really useful i'm glad you brought that up and i'll refer this back to that group to to look at when we you know we agreed that we'd have a small group talk about public comment and right now i've just stripped down everything i say so that it is more expansive and open-ended i don't say that we don't respond i don't say we don't use devices i just say actively listening and and ask people to be respectful i would say that i do use my device during public comment often because like i remember one time it was a specific school was talking about their location and stuff happening with their location and i had no idea where that school was located and like south north east west like i had never heard of the school before so i was googling like where is it located and sometimes like during the creston conversation and some of that public testimony i was googling boundaries and stuff so i do use my device to help me better understand what people are talking about sometimes when i don't know something so i do think that that group i mean i think we've got amy andrew and michelle with different perspectives on this that can help us really think about that piece of of how we as a board show up in meetings around public comment i mean it's interesting because i think we're one of the few public entities that hasn't moved to like people just having their laptops open in front of them um and you know now that we've moved to uh the board book are we all just going to have laptops and you know i'd be interested in like how the city and the legislature and everybody else the public officials who have well i guess legislators have public comment but like the city does county commissions do and they all have laptops and kind of what's the protocol yeah i think that's a really really important conversation to have around public comment especially um because we don't necessarily need to have board books open during public comment but sometimes people have submitted written comment and like with our our um student the other night when it was hard to hear them having if they had had written comment up we could have read that and followed along so i think it's gonna be nuanced how we how we do that with public comment are
02h 25m 00s
we ready to move on to have you know board book i'm sorry one note or a note taking app open so you can you know it looks like you're texting or typing and you're actually taking notes yeah so i think having some kind of announcement ahead of time on that would just clarify that um we're not watching the blazers no oh my god andrew michelle and amy do you have what you need from us around that sort of piece of public comment instructions um well on this part i guess there i don't want to take too much longer but haley we did talk if it came i wasn't going to bring it up now but if there was i mean i think the the key thing around that issue was um do we want to allow any time to either respond or ask questions and you know i i will tell you i'm a very mixed minds on this um council great securities council of great city schools says best practices that you do engage that high functioning boards engage with people who come and testify um and you know and that that's that's a symbol of success i i i think there's that opens up a whole pandora's box right of of what if someone testifies and you don't engage with them that mean you didn't care and you engage with somebody else and why would you do that and also again i won't ascribe to anybody here but i have seen you know elected officials use those moments for you know self-aggrandizement for make political points right to sort of go down that road so i think we open up a dangerous box when we go down that road on the other hand sitting there stoically and silently while people testify is horrible it is just so anti-human nature to just you know someone's testifying something that's very emotional or impactful to them and we just sit there and they finish and we sit there quietly because we're required to is just absurd so i i'm hoping we can find a middle ground we've started to do much more thank yous which i think is good i think that's something the board should regularly do i think individual board members should should feel free to thank people verbally i i might take an additional step which is that if people had a clarifying question of the person testifying um you know to potentially allow that but again i want to make sure we were somewhat careful about what those questions are that that we're not starting a dialogue because that could take a lot of time but you know if there was some sort of clarifying question is there a way to go down that road so those are the thoughts in my mind yeah yeah what i'm gonna ask is that um you and michelle and amy find some time to kind of think through that talk through that and bring um some ideas and and bring this conversation to our april meeting so that we can kind of have this robust discussion so i we i want to make sure we have time for our ethics statement and i know that amy has to leave so i'd like us to get through we've only got a few more protocols on this page and then we have a whole nother page of protocols um so i just i would really love for us to be able to get through this today um and then get to our ethics statement if we can if we can turn public comment over to you three to have some ideas ready for our next meeting we'll do some work on this and be ready for our next retreat great thank you it's really you know i think you know all of us are busy and so you know it's um it's hard to get to everything before each retreat all right we'll move on to g board members are expected to cast a vote on all matters except when a conflict of interest arises um obviously an abstention can happen right i think we need to take this out because extensions are still those i think actually it's important because it's saying you have to vote even if you're going to abstain you have to vote okay yeah i agree that's a pretty basic although i'm a little bit surprised that an ascension counts as a vote because in the legislature you can't abstain so i'm curious um andrew is in the city is an abstention allowed is that counted as a vote no i you know i believe so now i i i'm not sure i i know i at metro is well you know what i would have to i would have to double check i i find it i will tell you i find it strange that they don't allow legislators to abstain i think that's a very bizarre practice i think an abstention is an important moment you're still voting you're still you're still but you're you're not weighing in yes or no you're abstaining and there are lots of reasons why you might want to do that but i think it should still count yeah um and i think we saw people effectively do that at the board leadership vote last time and use those abstentions to you know do what they needed to do i'm gonna put in italics questions about abstentions do they count as a vote for liz this seems like a place we need to have some confirmation from her because for what it's worth they used to not and i know 20 years have passed but they it used to be you like the legal ruling was you had you had to vote if you were present you had to vote and that's that's how people in the legislature they get executed if they're like not wanting to vote on something they get in like an excused absence um or just show up as unexcused and are off the floor but if you're on the floor you have to vote okay well i'll ask liz about that and i think i do too agree abstentions are important and i think we need to be able to have that option so we may need to rewrite this one to reflect that all right h if they miss a meeting board
02h 30m 00s
members and leadership team staff agree to review the video of that meeting to remain current on the board and districts work i all board meetings will be videotaped re-broadcast and archived on the pps website that's not really i don't know that that's a board agreement do we need to have that or is that just an understanding to know that things are public yeah it's not a board agreement yeah i don't think we need that don't have anything to do with that okay so we've got committee protocols and then we'll take a little break and then we'll come back for comms protocols okay i'm gonna i'm in the wrong place i think so this is uh what section are we on this is the portland public schools school board retreat this is page the this is page three of the portland public schools board and superintendent staff expectations and operating protocols so this is the very last section on that above it is a notebook it's the third page of the google doc but we're moving into section four is that right looking into section four okay yes it really should really be section five because section four was removed or this is actually section six not section four because section four and five were removed so second six i should have put the sections back together before i sent these out to you i apologize committee protocols at the beginning of each academic year board leadership determines the committee structure and appoints membership and leadership of each committee committees act on behalf of the full board and are intended to provide a mechanism for deeper monitoring and analysis of complicated issues committees are expected to keep the full board apprised of important issues under their purview and produce recommendations for action to be considered for adoption yeah so the only thing i would say and i think we should take this one offline just to keep moving is when you have a committee and there's only one that has community members on which is the audit committee um and if something something's coming as a recommendation to the board how we how we want to handle community members engagement i don't think we should discuss it now because it's one committee and it's not a it's not a major issue but i just think we should talk about that because also this language is in conflict with board policy because board leadership does not determine committee structure the board as a whole does board leadership only has the authority to appoint members to committees and we've tripped up on that before okay so let's let's um at the beginning of the age economic your board leadership appoints membership and leadership of each committee yes okay so i guess we can choose to include or not include something here that says that you know annually the board um reevaluates its committee structure um yeah some i mean we don't have to i'm not following amy are you are you saying what what is it that the board leadership does and doesn't have authority to do does not have the authority to create a committee structure but only has the authority to appoint members to committees the board as a whole determines how to organize the work and what committees to have so the board determines which committees exist and board leadership appoints the chair and members of those committees correct thank you yeah so i guess one of the things is if we have something in policy do we need to have it here um is kind of a it's a question i would have i mean we certainly shouldn't have something that's in policy that's in conflict with this but do we need things that are already in polis i mean to ailey to your point when you first sat down as a board member like you get here are the policies relating to the board probably and the superintendent which are the most important ones to start with and then here are you know the operating protocols that the previous board you know has approved that you're going to be asked to support um but the question is do we need to duplicate things that are in the policy in here i think it's helpful to have this especially around committees in here because i think it's a place of um we like amy said that it's not the chair that does it or the board leadership so i've changed this to say at the beginning of each academic year the full board determines the committee structure board leadership appoints membership and leadership of each committee so i've just changed that so it's in line with our policy but i think it's important to have it it's i think it's okay to have something a couple places as long as it's consistent because you may not remember it from the policy but you might remember it from
02h 35m 00s
the committee protocol it's a really important aspect here you know how do we organize ourselves for the work i think it's good to include so um maybe we can um in the protocols if there is a relation to policy we should reference that um and that would just help with that cross-check because actually our policy said the board chair determines the com that points the membership and the leadership not the board leadership just i think it's better i think it's better to have board leadership but it actually the policy actually says yeah i did it with scott because you know we just talked through i think it's always better to have a thought partner when you're doing something like that yeah no i think that's the practice that's been the practice but the policy says something different well let's look for leadership and then the chair could pull rank but uh this would be our our agreement are we ready to move on to be or do we want to work some more on a all right i'm going to move on to b the annual agenda and meeting agendas for committee and task force meetings are co-developed by the committee chair and staff leads committee meeting materials will be provided at least 48 hours in advance of the meeting committee meetings will be publicly noticed 48 hours ahead of time and agendas will be posted prior to the meeting recommendations coming this is c not b recommendations coming from a committee are referenced in staff or committee chair reports for discussion items and resolution for action items before the full board d the committee chair will review all minutes before they are sent to the rest of the committee and posted on the committee web page e all committee meetings will be audio recorded for record-keeping purposes and are available upon request okay let's take a five-minute break and then we'll move on to the second set of protocols which is section four and five yeah hey are we losing amy we're losing amy at 2 30. oh half hour can we take a five minute break though i need a break let's take a five minute break we'll be back at 210 and then do we want to move on to the ethics statement and then come back to these calm protocols andrew is that what you're suggesting hey you guys i'm sorry i've been in and out i really apologize but i just got my internet back working so i had to it's been fun to watch you walking with your background it's hilarious all right roman numeral 4 communication do we want me to continue reading through or do we want as a board to just read this document and come back with any notes what's what's your druthers about what seems most effective hearing no input we could just say okay everybody read part a okay sorry i was um on mute so i had julia i was giving you lots of input um thank you i appreciate it now just to clarify we're on request for information or decision making no we're on communication okay number four communication yeah okay everybody let's just um let's have i was trying to read them so that they were public um so it just takes up a lot of time for me to read them and then us to discuss each one what do you all want to do cara they are posted on board for the public to reference great so let's just have us read a and then discuss you so um my my comment here sort of on the last one i mean i guess it's probably fine because it's somewhat aspirational but or the last part of a um recognizing the board members at full-time and actually i'm not even sure i mean i i'm not sure you need that part because i think board members are busy whether they're you know working or not can be
02h 40m 00s
um staff will take into account the board members need adequate time to review materials before board meeting work session executive session that material should not arrive or be changed late in the process i mean i think that's something we should strive for i think there will be times when things change late in the process so it's sort of for me it's a and i guess i would say it should be aspirational that it should happen but often the reason it changes is because of some board comments or board influence right which so so our we play a significant role in that and the other thing i would say is we don't we don't adequately staff our central office in order to to meet the demands of the board and the timelines we put on them so there's a little bit of a you know we're unwilling to dedicate the resources or at least we historically have been unwilling to dedicate the resources boards have been and yet we're requiring this you know this this very high level of you know nothing's going to change at the last minute so i don't have a fix for it i just it kind of it kind of bugged me a little bit yeah so i would say um i would ask the staff like what is it they would need because i don't i don't know that um like we've made a decision we're gonna short stuff um people so that we don't have the information i guess what i'm what i'm concerned about is we get something at two o'clock in the afternoon and if you have an afternoon full of meetings and you open it up and you know trying to track where there's been changes and you know not just board members also but community members who may want to comment especially for voting on something and it's not apparent that it's changed um so andrew i'm with you that like some it's aspirations that it does sometimes happen and happen for a good reason um but i think it should be we should aspire to not have changes and if we do have changes like what's the mechanism that you know do we get you know an email or a text that says note agenda change or wording change or something same thing with and then you know get it posted right away be because it becomes uh only though you know unless you're paying attention like sitting in your computer just watching for it you potentially can be unprepared for the meeting or community members may miss the opportunity to you know weigh in on something like this i think we've had this conversation a number of times as we've discussed this that the need for materials in a timely fashion julia i think that's that's really important and you've made that point multiple times i would say andrew that should is not shall so should is aspirational if we said and that material shall not arrive or be changed late that's you know more this is how it has to be but should is what we best hope for so that's why i like that i do want to say i made two changes to this section i changed the end of the second paragraph to not end in the word in so i changed it to a public meaning in which the board is participating and i deleted the extra there was an extra period so i just made a couple of scrivener's changes in there how do people in this last paragraph feel about removing everything before um board member about halfway through so removing recognizing more members have full-time professional responsibilities in addition to their board service staff will take into account that taking all that out so what it says is board members need adequate time to review materials before board meeting work session or executive session and and you can take out that as well and materials should not arrive or be changed late in the process agree i agree because we don't need to make excuses for why and that way for me it also doesn't it i think you're right sure is aspirational i'm fine with that i agree with julia 100 nothing is worse than getting the stuff late on on a tuesday what i what i like is taking out sort of the staff reference because again in my mind over the last year and a half the majority of late changes have been board driven changes that people are still finagling something at the last minute so this way it sort of applies to everybody you should try and avoid this as much as possible hey just offline um this or this is a not to be in here but maybe we could think of some way that like we get the mechanism of something that's going to be changed like we just get a text and it starts with a change in agenda item whatever so that when they do inevitably you know stuff happens because it does happen that we just have a way of knowing it not like we have to go through so because sometimes we have like you know 100 emails that came in and then finding the one that's relevant to something we're voting on so maybe there's some mechanism we can figure out with cara and roseanne when that happens it's a memo you there's like a memo function in board books we could use and then everyone knows to so i think that's a good i think that's a good conversation of the next step is i think we can talk to roseanne i know she's watching and i know kara is here about when there is a change what's our mechanism for communicating that change we'll ask them to to work with that on us are we ready to move on to b okay i'm so i'm fine with this whole page
02h 45m 00s
with the exception of a and i'm not going to go i'm happy to have a conversation with board leadership and the general counsel but i have a privilege reason for wanting to change um a and i would change it to board members are encouraged to communicate directly and then board members should or you know are encouraged to copy the superintendent and i'm happy to share that reasoning offline okay well that's a that's a pretty big change though yeah and i'm sure i want to be respectful of because obviously it's something that yeah you don't want to discuss here but and i'm happy to also share it with you off offline um in any whatever format i just can't i can't do it in a public meeting okay we are going to have to come back in that's fine and i'll think of a way i'll i'll check with council on a way to how to do it appropriately so i i just so board members agree to communicate directly with the superintendent and or members of the superintendent's leadership team when a question arises or when a serious concern is voiced by a staff member so julia what you're saying is you you're in a situation where you cannot communicate with the superintendent or any of the senior leadership team about something i'm happy to discuss in more detail later because i think it's it's you know there's lots of other people beside the superintendent that can be communicated with so i'm i'm not understanding why there wouldn't be at least one person in that constellation that the communication could go through i'm happy to give you an example in a privileged setting this is a pretty fundamental tenet as far as i've been through a whole host of legal proceedings in which i want to be very careful about what i what we agree to and again i'm happy to talk to any board member offline or right and would it julia would it be sufficient to um to delete the part about copying the superintendent and just copy the board manager on emails to the superintendent's leadership team um you guys oh i'm sorry that that that should that should be um although there may be cases again where that's not i mean like personally i copy roseanne on almost everything except for something related to the super like oversight of the superintendent um so that should be okay but i and i have a very specific issue that i have a concern about but so tentatively put brackets around that and that probably works i agree with amy that this for me is pretty fundamental that as board members we we directly communicate with you know the folks we're we're working with the on the leadership team i think you know i know that when i was on cbrc i would sometimes directly communicate with cbrc folks staff that were staffing cbrc about something that was coming up and not cc guadalupe on that um so i think you know but i think the the majority of our questions and communication should be with senior leadership and not with other staff unless we're working with them on committees i mean i think that's that's kind of the fundamental piece of this policy is amy is that what you were saying because you said this was kind of a fundamental tenet of communications you're muted amy all right yes i agree with what you said but also just that this is a fundamental tenet of this whole um piece of work that we're talking about adopting and so if we're not able to discuss potential changes in a public meeting um i don't know you know that totally undermines the foundation of the work that we're trying to do here it doesn't undermine it and i don't think any staff people would say that there's um they don't hear from me um julia what would you like to you had a proposed language change for this what was that i said board members are encouraged to communicate directly with the superintendent and remembers the students leadership team when a question arises or when a serious concern is voiced by a staff member student parent or other community member so it's just changing agreed to to our encouraged to and then you know board members may copy the superintendent and board manager on their emails the superintendent's leadership and staff will do the same in replies so i'll just be honest without any additional context in my view that guts this provision um from the intent that behind it than what i saw in it so i don't know i just got a text from roseanne that we're not streaming so we are not live so we need to stop having this conversation because it's not a public meeting currently so i will um are they working on that oh she says now it's okay so never mind
02h 50m 00s
now we're back okay um yeah i think i mean i think this needs to be board members agree to communicate directly with the superintendent or members of the student superintendent's leadership want a question so this is when a question arises or when there's a serious concern um so i guess i would say i i have a question this is this has come up for like two years now and it's it's getting kind of a little bit turfish and so i'm wondering um i was gonna say julia i would be um i would be interested in a one-on-one conversation and hearing um what you have to say about this and what your rationale is and this doesn't work guys we can't suggest one-on-one conversations about something fundamental because that's a serial public meeting that's right it's not it's not leading to decision making okay i can i can well i can tell you what my point of view is and and for people to understand it and we don't have to have a dialogue about it or we can have liz tell we can have liz say tell me how i can communicate it if people are interested why don't we do that and then why don't we do that um you know some of us feel like it's a real foundational thing and i'm just like going off of the there's a lot of emotion around it this is not the first time we've talked about it um and we do need to kind of get through it and the words are important um i what i'm not seeing in that very first paragraph is um and it might be good to have a safeguard what what if there is like board members agree to communicate directly with the superintendent what if it's about the superintendent i'm feeling like um or i'm trying to reference cases where uh just the positionality to power and if someone in power um if you're not safe going to the person in power there's that there's a there's a second path forward i think that's why it says members of the leadership team so that would be liz or roseanne or the chief of staff or claire or craig or you know any of those senior leaders to say there's a problem here and we need we need to talk about this or there's a question about you know the superintendent's behavior in this way i think that's concerned yeah or you know we can raise it with another board with board leadership too to say we've received this substantive concern you know how should we as a board proceed and so we can talk to each other but like not as a full meeting but you know one other person and then say this is the staff person we could go to together to say this has been a a substantive concern by the community just for the record i don't i don't have any issue at all with the staff we'll do the same in the replies okay so do you want to take out board member she'll copper copy the superintendent and board office manager on their emails to the superintendent and leadership team and just copy roseanne that that works as well like i say that's generally my practice and if it's something that guadalupe seems like he'd want to know about i copy him okay so or it's not a supervisory or it's not a supervisory issue i'll just i don't really understand the path forward here because this is more opportunity to discuss this and if our next step is adopting it and if we don't have i mean everybody doesn't have to agree we can we we can move language forward and then if somebody chooses to vote against it when we publicly vote that's fine but i just want to make sure that we have a path forward here for this whole process yeah for what it's for what it is worth i did what i did weigh in on this when we had it and the change didn't it uh so it's not the first time i'm raising it yeah so i did not i did so i did not accept those changes to this which is which i'm okay with yeah i mean but i just wanted like it's not like i'm just raising it now and that redline version was available to people to look at who made what changes but um can i make a suggestion that i think if there are if there are issues that we can't we can have an executive session if there are issues around you know legal issues or privilege issues that will involve the board you know uh it's sort of how we adopt this policy so i think it's worth going back and talking to liz i i think we should avoid having sort of one-on-one conversations about this um because to get to the outcome um because i think we need to we need to either have that discussion here or have that discussion in an allowed executive session that's allowed under state law so um and i'm happy to do that i don't want to shut down sort of important conversations if they need to happen
02h 55m 00s
so let's do this let's table or let's not table let's postpone the rest of this communications protocol conversation we'll set up an executive session and discuss the matters before us because i do think that this part is fundamental to the rest of how the communication stuff flows yeah well let's let's do that because i know we're also at 2 30 and we need to get to our ethics um and conflict of interest statement so so does that sound good we've we've done the first half of the protocols we'll do the rest in an executive session we'll bring it back to a public meeting and then we'll go from there does that sound like yeah you guys can you guys could approve it i i would not agree to that language yeah and alien i'm sorry i didn't i don't actually don't think we can take the all of it into executive session i i was saying if there are specific reasons for this language change you know that have to do with something privileged we can have that conversation executive i think we need to have the rest of the conversation publicly so either today or or in the future um in the future so we'll we'll have that executive session and then we'll bring the rest of this back for conversation um and we can move on now to our ethics i did you know one thing though and i don't know if we're gonna lose amy or not um but she brought up a point earlier that i thought it is useful to talk about which is what what what are the what are the consequences of board members violating this and you know i i have a lot of sort of mixed feelings about this right because i think as elected officials you know are we are we're responsible to the voters right and um and so you know and that's um you know with the exception of certain state laws right there are certain state laws that if we violate there's there's other provisions in there um but outside of that what we're really operating off of our agreements right with with with our with our colleagues um and you know so i i'm not sure amy if you had anything in mind when you sort of raised that um earlier but you know we are coming to sort of agreements we'd like to have everyone on board but we are all individual board members accountable to the electorate so it presents a challenge situation i have a thought but i maybe i'll open it up first i mean i think we all are accountable to electorate i mean i look at this and in some ways just the a it's like you know i'm an independently elected official and it's like i don't think the rest of the board should be telling other members like who they have to communicate with especially if it's you know the person that you supervise and i just think i i've seen a lot of instances where what i don't want to be is like hey you violated the policy and it's like or a proto a protocol or an agreement and there was a there was you know a reason for for doing it i think this goes to some of the the res day work around that we're clear on communication and how we communicate because i think some of us have more access to systems and more connections to power and so we can navigate the system differently and having this agreement about here's how we're all gonna try to work in this environment actually makes it clear and tries to do to to level the playing field or maybe do do some work around the privilege some of us have of having dual relationships or um some of those experiences of having served longer or having worked with specific people so that's part of why i really value this is is because it does make it like this is how we all access the levers of the district as governance officials so then i then i would ask like okay because this relates to email like i know a lot of our members just pick up the phone and call or text and like we're not setting a whole set of rules around that either i mean i think we should treat each other like we're professionals and if somebody needs to see something that we can copy them i mean you know i never i never see i never see anybody else's email so i don't know if that means that nobody's emailing or staff's not copying me back on emails or like you know yeah julia for me what's important about that because i think this gets to the fundamental reason why are we even talking about this right and and i think it gets back to you know how how do we become a high functioning board um and again picking up off of best practices from council great city schools and others like like this is how high functioning boards operate um i think you know because i have thought a little bit about this and and unfortunately it doesn't apply to anyone here so it you know i i think i think you're right that to the extent everyone is operating you know professionally and sort of within the bounds maybe maybe we don't need it but the reality is that doesn't always happen right and so i i can imagine a board member who decides that their job is to contact teachers and principals at facilities individually to address issues and and they just keep doing that and no matter how many times the superintendent or other board members say look that's actually not appropriate that's that's not your job you're getting involved in
03h 00m 00s
operational issues and you're actually making things really really bad by doing that that board member can say i was elected by the voters and i have the right to do that and i think the reality is that person is elected by the voters and does have that sort of when we say right there's no way for us to stop them what i think the consequences of this are is that the board and leadership will say to that board member you will not have a leadership role if that's the the role you're going to play so for instance if we had a board member who was violating protocols that are adopted by the other six members i would advocate that they not have any committee chairmanships or vice chairmanships that they not head up any task forces then i had any work groups because they're showing a lack of willingness to work with their colleagues on these issues i don't think that person deserves to have a leadership role outside of that i'm not sure there is a whole lot we can do and so i think what we're trying to get here this almost by definition has to be consensus and if it's not and one board member says i don't agree and i'm going to do what i want there's very little we can do except say to that board member well you're not going to be in a leadership role then if that's the way you're going to act but beyond that i'm not sure what we have to do what we can do and andrew just just to add to what you said i would kind of frame that in a positive way which is to say that i think the reason we wanted to do this is so that we can make a united statement about the values that we want to hold ourselves to as as a high-functioning team i mean if we want to give up and say we don't aspire to be a high-functioning team and everybody is you know gonna just do whatever they want then we're gonna we're gonna reap the results of that but i think there's a positive way to look at it which is that no we aspire to hold ourselves accountable to these high standards and values and ethics and protocols because we know that that's what is optimal for the work yeah i also think interesting conversation because if we're going to hold ourselves to a high standard that means we have to hold ourselves in everything to a high standard that would include not micro aggressing you know that would include like it would include a lot of ways of operating that we're not there yet you know so i mean i think the f-bomb in public i mean absolutely so i'm just saying like yeah we should absolutely there have been times when i've been the most adult i have ever been in my life in the last couple of years you know and and and that's okay i'm okay with that finally you know 60 years old like i don't have to act like a teenager anymore most of the time but um but and i hold myself to a very high standard so this is one aspect of our work that we should absolutely but we have so many other things like are we going to socially engineer you know this positionality to power and if we're going to talk about that we're going to talk about like white women's proximity to white male power and you know we're going to go down that road um [Music] so do we want to go down that road you know as a team i don't think it's all or nothing though i mean i i agree with what you said but i think i think i think it's okay for us to say that you know we we aspire to operating effectively and like a high functioning team with certain certain stated values so as long as those values are shared and they're co-created and my voice is in there as a black person i'm cool with it that's what we're talking about right now so hopefully so the other thing you know with you all today i have several examples that i also won't put in the in into the you know i don't necessarily need to be on the record but just that if we are going to indeed hold ourselves to a very high standard i'm going to be having conversations with everybody about like how i feel like that hasn't happened and it is a both and it is we both we all do need to you know we do need to show up um you know accountable and and transparent and with our highest selves for this work um so anyway i think that the the what's on the table now is that we move a to the executive an executive session so we can work it out there yeah actually i'd like to propose just that i think i should raise this with liz about whether the executive session is the best way uh to proceed and she can consult with scott naley and
03h 05m 00s
it's not that i don't want to share with everybody else but i just i don't know that's the best way to do it which is why i offered at the first to do it with board leadership um and it's nothing i don't want to share with everybody else but i don't i don't know that executive session is the best way to do it so why don't we get guidance i'm fine with that i mean i and and also like i'm fine with that i was hoping to get some additional contacts but i'm fine with whatever we decide in terms of moving forward whether it's an executive session or some other way that's above board okay so that sounds like a good path forward julia we'll consult with liz and liz will talk with scott and i and we'll figure out if executive session is the right path forward for this moment and then we'll bring back this pizza comms protocol to the to the board uh in another either retreat in april or work session before then depending on uh what other things we have before us um i want to be crystal clear that i'm fine i don't have any issues with you know if i make some information requests about a contract or something an agenda and there's information provided to me or an email provided me like i s that to me that's a good that's a good operating protocol okay um so andrew do you want to go ahead and we have 20 minutes left is that enough time for us to consider the ethics thing or is this a moment of like we need to stop and bring that forward at another time what are your thoughts out here no i think it's it's time to to start the conversation because we weren't going to finish it anyway and i actually think this is an important conversation for us to have at a high level and and sort of with the framing um to sort of go back to to why we're doing this so let me let me let me sort of start there and and and i it was so so um so what what what were what we're going to talk about is sort of this ethics and conflict of interest statement i i will admit freely this surprised me a little bit um and so i looked back around to alien i i've heard from some other board members a similar reaction so my understanding is this came out of our self-evaluation this is something that the council of great cities schools in terms of high functioning boards talks about board should have a you know an ethics and conflict of interest policy i think we as a board agreed and our self-evaluation yep yep yep that's something we should do and then we kind of sat there for a little while um ailee asked liz to put together something right to sort of do a little research i think she she sort of went around and and tried to see if other boards had this and what existed she pulled a few different pieces together um and and put it into a draft which is what which is what you have before you i i think the draft that's one sec so this one that's in board books now is the is the uh correct one it's the most recent one let me check board books yeah it is january of 2021 because we got we got a significant change yeah so yes so sorry this was a draft that was moving forward and then and then and then i i made some edits to it as well and i know i know rita had some suggested edits and and then in a conversation with julia she had some suggestions so what i actually wanted to do was was again take this step back and and sort of sort of talk about this overall and get a sense from the word of what direction we want to go on this um we so one of the things liz found is that um she could not find another oregon school board that had something separately you know adopted um she did find some examples from other places we are in oregon already um you know have pretty strong ethics um state laws that govern us as school boards that we have to abide by so i think the the overall question is is really getting back to what are we trying to accomplish with this with an ethics and conflict of interest policy the other thing in terms of the draft that came together it included a lot of repeats of the protocols that we were just talking about right and when i sort of first took a look through it i thought well wait these aren't really ethics issues or even conflict issues they're more like board protocol issues and and i think they're already you know taken care of so i started to make edits along those lines um but but again i think there there's more there that can be done and then you know julia suggested in a conversation you know late yesterday which i thought was a really good suggestion maybe maybe we're getting too far in the weeds and maybe what we need is something that's just a little bit higher level that restates you know that we will of course abide by you know state law we'll disclose you know um conflicts of interests um you know we'll follow ethics law you know um etc and and and she sort of sort of put together a much shorter sort of five paragraph you know sort of thing um that that and that has not been shared yet so um um that i think gets us to sort of potentially the same place but i guess before we can get into that i wanted to
03h 10m 00s
take a step back and see if anyone else had notes from that first meeting or reminder about what are we trying to accomplish here with this policy i think so we didn't we didn't have it and it was one of those things if you want to move from one column to the next column like you have one and um when we look went and looked and you know frankly the policy committee this we did a um a rewrite of the um what is it when you hire a relative um nepotism nepotism so we did a rewrite of the well we created a nepotism policy because there wasn't one there was an ad that wasn't connected to no policy and then we said and then we're gonna do like a conflict of interest ones for contractors and board members and that just that hasn't happened that doesn't mean there's not already in state state law but i think it was like we don't have anything and sort of maybe a standard practice i have for almost all the boards i serve on is once a year you attest to you've had the training on the state law you've had the training on the conflict of interest and what how you have to declare it at you know at a board meeting and then you sign it that you're going to a group you know that you've been trained and you've had agreement if you had any questions you had them answered and so that's what that's what i that's what i was thinking when we said hey we we should have something um i mean we could we could also develop a policy but that's a much uh obviously a longer process and not something not something you sign every year in the agenda i linked to what it says in the board self-evaluation for each of the sections we were working on today so if you look in the agenda under the ethic statement it has from the board self-evaluation from those columns it says the board has adopted an ethics and conflict of interest statement and all board members have signed it during their current term the board has included language in its ethics and conflict of interest statement requiring that board members do not give operational advice or instruction to staff members the board has included language in its statement requiring that board members are responsible for the outcomes of all students not just students in their region of the district and the board has included in its statement language requiring that board members fully recuse themselves from matters involving individuals or organizations to make campaign contributions to them or who appointed them that's from the self-evaluation from the council of great city schools yeah and so immediately just a couple of of problems i have with that um the issue about giving operational advice to the superintendent is not an ethics or conflict of interest issue it's a it's a protocol issue right and and it's something we're already we're just talking about in our board protocols um take into consideration all the students of the district again similarly that i totally agree that's something we should be doing but it's not a it's not an ethics issue or a conflict of interest issue it's a it's a it's an operating protocol issue and then the last one i i it frankly it's written by someone who doesn't understand our system of american democracy very well i mean we can have a we can have a philosophical discussion about you know campaign finance and the rest of that but i mean the reality is is that that language is so absolutist none of us would be able to vote on a boundary decision if if anyone if any parent who who whose kid attends that school had donated 10 to our campaign none of us would be able to vote on a on a contract issue if we had talked you know gotten any solicitations from anyone in those unions i mean it essentially none of us would be able to take a vote on anything we'd be abstaining so you know and which is why i struck that language because it's sort of it's sort of ridiculous um i you know i do think there's there's issues we can talk around about transparency around you know but but again oregon already has those systems right um in place so i i i found the council of great city schools stuff pretty problematic but it's also like part of the reason you know we live in a bowl where it's a small community i mean i i agree with you andrew we couldn't even do our job if we adhered to that rule yeah you know can i what one of the things that i don't want to um i don't want to send it around because it hasn't been posted but um i think verbally we can talk about it and then and then after this meeting i think we can because we're in again we're not going to adopt this today but it's good to get a sense of where everyone is so we have a direction where to go you know julia's suggestion and julie do you want to go through do you want me to i'm happy that i'm happy to read through your stuff but it was actually your suggestion so if you want yeah i don't have it in front of me so i don't have in front of me so go ahead okay you know it's um it's essentially five and i'll i'll go pretty quickly but you know it's um you know it's just some some draft language five different sort of sort of paragraphs you know members of the board and and there is a conversation here about are we just applying this to the board or do we want to also have the supply to senior staff and i think that's a conversation we can have a lot of organizations you know do it for senior staff as well but you know members of the board and senior staff you know public officials and are required to disclose conflicts
03h 15m 00s
of interest um under the state revised statute um it sort of defines you know when you have a conflict of interest in terms and this is something we learned in our in our training just a couple weeks ago or were refreshed in our training um about taking an official action that could result in financial benefit or avoidance of detriment so it sort of defines what that conflict of interest is it says that you know um public officials need to follow oregon ethics law and observe the oregon government ethics commission you know guide for public officials it says that school board members and senior staff will annually engage in the training related to ethics and public meetings laws and public records which we're already doing prior to voting or taking action on an issue before the board um board members must disclose any conflict of interest which again already part of state law so we're restating that um and then and then um if we include staff staff members must disclose conflicts to their supervisor if they're taking any action where there's a conflict and then annually board members will sign an ethics and conflict statement attesting to participating in the training and pledging you adhere to the organ statutory requirements so you know as i read this what it really is is a public restatement that the law we are already bound by um that we we acknowledge it and we're gonna follow it um and then and then i think we can the second part of this is a conflict of interest statement um which was included in the attached policy and i think there's some real value to that um in terms of of you know um of going through and noting yes i have this relationship with you know this company that does business with the school district um that's a good thing to publicly declare so um go ahead i was just gonna say i've said this before it's the only board i've ever served on where i didn't have to sign something like that and yet the consequences of the decisions that we're making are you know i don't sit on another board with a billion dollar budget so they're pretty big so the other thing though i um so this thing statement that we're going to follow the oregon law i don't support um the just all the disclosure because i believe it the state already looked at whether it should apply to school boards and it and they made a decision it's very similar to an sei statement but it's actually um it it doesn't quite track the sei which is statement of economic interest and this applies to most elected officials seniors staff in like statewide officials offices legislators um a whole host of other bodies but when the legislature adopted it they did not um include school boards so to me i i do it through another um i file an sei from a because i'm on a different different board and it's a very significant um it can be an exercise to go through every year because essentially what you need to do it would need to do is get all the contracts for the district you know in an excel spreadsheet and look at whether there's any overlapping in any of your like retirement accounts or anything and then declare that and you know as i say i think the state already looked at it and made the decision that for us you know this were volunteers not in paid positions and made the decision not to have us do that so i i wouldn't be supportive of having it's it's a huge frankly um exercise to go through and file every year yeah and julia you're just talking about just the financial disclosure around ownership interest is that right yeah they check the box i mean because there's well it's it's an annual discussion on other boards i have on because just the the exercise you go through and like you know frankly like none of us are involved in like who gets recommended for a contract um before us i mean if we did we'd have to disclose you know the conflict if we did something but you know they they appear on our agenda so if i were to go through this exercise i would be like yeah it'd be way more important for staff who are recommending the contracts to be disclosing all that versus the board which you know well i don't know about you guys but i don't think i've ever said to staff person like how about giving it to this contract to this person um so it seems like an exercise that's not going to disclose anything of note and actually the way it's worded probably omit where you could potentially have um you know conflicts and it's all disclosed anyway so i mean that's that's the thing i have a proposed path forward but i
03h 20m 00s
wanted to see if there are other comments haley do you want me to go through that so so um so yeah i think i so i think i think if we t if we take this back and and and um again i really liked that the simpler language julia brought forward that sort of you know publicly stated look we're going to abide by these rules they're important and and you know we agree to abide by them which we would have to anyway but we're sort of acknowledging that and then developing a conflict of interest form and and i think that is one we can we can pull from some other you know governments um that is a little bit you know again sort of applies to school board members in our role um you know i mean because you know that that that sort of notes you know if there are you know inherent conflicts of interest we would sort of note that um um and and and getting that ready for the april um session to come back uh and and again review again with everybody um whether that's sort of a scaled-down version of this makes sense and maybe just one other thing that people may look like yeah that's not signing very much but actually one of the big reasons people point to you know why they violated an ethics rule conflicts is they said like i didn't know about it and so by signing something to say like you've had training you had the opportunity to ask questions about it it totally eliminates the i think the most frequent defense of ethical lapses yep no i would totally agree with that we you know and as an example you know uh uh officials at metro sign conflict of interest forms every year um and you know even this last year it was you know my my wife works at ohsu metro has very little relationship with oh too except now with the vaccines right like now we're into these contracts and so it is really useful to then it sort of caused that question of like oh wait a minute is this something i need to be aware of what's the role i was able to go to our attorneys and get it clarified so i would just i would second that it makes you think about those relationships and then ensure that there is in fact no overlapper conflict so it can be really helpful going through this on an annual basis you definitely don't want to be a headline on the newspaper metro employees given free vaccines i wish no trust me that is not happening all right well i um appreciate all of the work that uh we've been able to get through today and um you know this this work of our self-evaluation i think is really important because it's really easy to say we want to to do things differently and shift our culture but to actually do the underpinning work of it i think a lot of time and energy and i appreciate everyone showing up and being willing to do that and um sounds like andrew's gonna kind of run with the next steps forward on this julia is gonna run with the next steps forward on our comms protocols piece michelle andrew and amy are going to run with the public comment piece and then there was another team and my brain is tired oh uh scott julia and michelle are going to run with the board leadership piece and then yes it's gonna come back to us with more on guardrails so um we got a lot it feels like we have a lot more on our to-do list than when we started uh this board meeting or this retreat but i do feel like we've gotten through a lot of really substantive conversations yeah julia yet okay was i out during the critical moment when we talked about requests for information we didn't get to that part okay i was like maybe that was when i was making sure that my internet worked i did not do anything on that that section section uh four and five we did nothing on we just did sections one two three and six okay i'll save my comments for later yeah we'll we'll come back to that after we've um dealt with that uh section a okay any other things that we need to say or uh discuss to to feel complete no except that you're and you're in four minutes early awesome i just say i appreciate all my bored colleagues and thank you for the time today i think these are really helpful conversations just to hear from everybody so thanks everybody for showing up good work very nice but thank you terry

Sources

PPS Board of Education, BoardBook Public View, https://meetings.boardbook.org/Public/Organization/915 (accessed: 2023-01-25T21:27:49.720701Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)
PPS Communications, "PPS Board of Education Meetings" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbZtlBHJZmkdC_tt72iEiQXsgBxAQRwtM (accessed: 2023-10-14T01:02:33.351363Z)
PPS Board of Education, PPS Board of Education - Full Board Meetings (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk0IYRijyKDW0GVGkV4xIiOAc-j4KVdFh (accessed: 2023-10-11T05:43:28.081119Z)

2021-02-20 PPS School Board Retreat

Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

Materials

Minutes

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Retreat - 2/20/2021

Sources