2021-02-22 PPS School Board Work Session

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2021-02-22
Time	18:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	work
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Work Session - 2/22/2021

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board of education for february 21st 2021 is called to order this meeting is being streamed live on pps tv services website welcome everyone to the work session on enrollment and program balancing on january 23rd the board voted to approve a feeder pattern into kellogg for the 20 the 2021-22 school year this was the first phase of work by the southeast guiding coalition after several months of work to bring forward a recommendation to staff following that meeting it was requested by several board members that we come together to answer some key questions prior to the onset of phase two before we get started i want to give you an overview of tonight's work session agenda we will begin by identifying the most crucial issues we believe are the most important to address in the next 12 months we will then need to identify the policies that require clarification so the staff and the southeast guiding coalition can effectively and clearly complete phase two next it is critical that we along with senior leadership clarify what we believe are the most important strategic focus areas in the next 12 months finally we need to identify what we would like to see as ways to engage students families and school communities during this next critical phase so we've got those three jobs looking at the critical issues and looking at the policies that we need to work on there um looking at the strategic focus and then looking at engagement next i'd like to introduce our chief engagement officer jonathan garcia to lead us into this session chief christian lowry thank you joe lowry um so thank you for the opportunity to to be with you tonight uh so my role tonight will be to facilitate uh your conversation as a as a collective uh really i have five specific uh uh roles tonight uh one is to guide the conversation to your desired outcomes uh bridge builder to consensus really wanting to make sure we we reach consensus uh by the end of this session uh and then you know i'm gonna be the task master so i'm gonna hopefully keep session on track and so we've allocated a certain amount of time for each section so hopefully we can keep within that i'm also going to be the motivator i'm going to keep the dialogue and the conversation going i may ask follow-up questions i may ask may probe a little bit more to get more clarity and then lastly i'm going to be an active listener so uh i just wanted i'm going to be listening attentively to what you all collectively and individually have to say as well as my colleagues some additional notes here before we get started megan salvador is joining us from our deputy superintendent's office she will be in the background taking detailed notes of today's conversation uh and in fact these notes will be shared on the screen after we we uh which which will be carried live for folks to to see uh her notes in in real time uh joining uh joining me tonight from the staff will be uh superintendent guerrero uh deputy superintendent hertz uh our racial equity advisor danny ledesma uh our enrollment uh uh director judy brennan uh our area superintendent dr esther oh uh and our general counsel was large i don't think i missed anybody but if i oh and sorry roseanne powell our board manager um are all joining us uh tonight uh each of us will be here to be mostly active listeners but um we'll be encouraged to add to the conversations throughout the discussion uh this evening so today's agenda and conversation is yours collectively um but i want to highlight a few items in your agenda which is shared with the public the first thing that you'll notice in each section is a time allotted to each section uh the second thing you'll notice is the title that will be uh what uh chair lowry just went over reviewed uh as the focus of each of the sections uh followed by in each section there's a desired outcome this is what we hope we you can accomplish in the set amount of time that we've allocated for the agenda we also included some resources so links to documents policies or information that is useful for uh for the conversation and then lastly uh we included a set of guiding questions to each of the sections these set of guiding questions might help you collectively accomplish uh the desired outcome um outlined in the agenda so a few ground rules before we get started and i i promise i'm gonna take uh turn it over to you now uh a few ground rules that um that we've
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learned in our cei training uh uh in in many other spaces stay engaged uh and i know that all of us will continue to stay engaged speak their truth responsibly listen to understand and to believe be willing to do things differently and experience discomfort and expect and accept that non-closure so let's get started with an icebreaker activity to get us started and each director will have two minutes to share so our icebreaker is six of our eight board of directors in the student representative are or will be pps graduates seven are or were pps parents can each of you reflect on what it was like to change or transition from schools about a classmate that moved joined your class or the experiences of transitioning during your k-12 experience anybody would like to go first i'll go first this is director to pass i had a really unique um elementary experience partly in pps partly outside of pps in mexico and in venezuela and um and partly in catholic schools and but i had the most amazing high school experience i did graduate from high school in portland i attended two high schools i attended jefferson because it had a really robust dance program and i graduated from mlc which had an uh agreement uh that you could do a dual enrollment um which was really great um i had an alternative high school education i feel that served me really well um it uh provided a you know a a petri dish of like education learning experiential learning that was really um important having coming come from a strict catholic school background prior to that um and the transitions um something that sticks out to me so my graduating class was 32 students who i'm in contact with almost every week i'll never forget having meeting um a vietnamese student for the first time and you know just someone that had come you know to this country um having experienced trauma um having been in refugee camps and just welcoming welcoming him into our little tiny you know small close-knit community and how incredible it was to start to open up my eyes around that experience i think transitions are good for people i feel like um it's it's one thing to have gone to you know been in a community and gone to a school all your life and it's a whole other set of things that you develop from having to be the new kid and from having to be resilient i feel like i've i've i've grown my resilient muscles from these experiences it did not kill me it exposed me to different languages and different ways of knowing and you know looking back you know i used to always wish that we just stayed in the same neighborhood and went to the same school and you know it didn't work out that way and i think it's okay i'm really finding the having built resilience around transition valuable it's a skill that we should i mean we're going to have to be resilient around climate change and this is a skill that we're going to need to our students are going to need to be resilient they're going to need to learn how to manage change and that's just a 21st century maybe even 22nd century skill that we need to build i feel like i have a little bit of a head start on that so thank you for um indulging me tonight thank you director to pass who would like to go next i know i um i sometimes talk longer than that so um so i grew up in salem kaiser public schools and when i was um in uh seventh grade we are yeah seventh grade the summer after seventh grade we moved and i moved from um the sort of like uh i don't know poorer side of salem to the wealthier side and like i didn't have an esprit bag or you know jordas jeans um and so there were parts of eighth grade that were really hard because i just you know middle school is such a time of finding your peer group and i felt like i didn't fit in um but when i went to i started hanging out with the band kids that were in high school and i found my tribe in eighth grade with those kids and then when i my uh middle school was attached to the high school so we did things collaboratively between the music departments and then by the time i was in high school you know i had this group of
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of um band nerds that i got to hang out with um so i think one of the things is when you do make a change like that it's finding your people and whether they're folks like director deposits willing to listen to that vietnamese student or if it's you know other kids with the same passion um that's really important and then my daughter moved between we moved from venita oregon to portland uh between second and third grade for her and so you know she was kind of the new kid in school and as a parent we had a popsicle social where they posted the teachers you know that everybody had that year and i was new so i happen to hear some of the other moms on the field eating popsicles talking about one of the third grade teachers and i just i'm like hi i'm haley i'm new tell me about third grade and now they're my friends um so i think as a as a seventh grader i didn't have that skill set of just like introducing myself and and insinuating myself into people's groups but then as an adult i did and so had some things to help navigate um an anxious child starting a new school because of that um to your support group once again so it's i think for me it's always been in times of transition finding finding people who are willing to hang out with you and guide you through the new experience and and be your buddies appreciate it that was great right on on time we would like to go next i can go next um so i grew up in you know the same house from when i was born until sixth grade and then we moved and i was the youngest of four kids we moved and we only moved about a mile and a half away but it meant changing elementary schools everything was k-8 at that time it meant changing elementary schools and then going to a different high school than my siblings had gone to which really doesn't seem very traumatizing living in basically the same neighborhood but that experience of changing schools and i think particularly in adolescence is can be earth shattering and i remember that summer um knowing who a few of the girls were that were going to be in my in my grade at my new school and i would kind of like see him around town and i was like an anthropologist you know i was just kind of like watching them and seeing kind of how they interacted and what they wore and what was different about how things were at my old school and all of that and you know i guess my big takeaway is that things that can seem so so relatively easy and minor from an adult's eye view um are are really a huge deal and in the end um you know i totally agree with michelle's point that um those are the life skills that we all need and none of our lives in any way are ever going to be on a predictable path or a controllable path um so those are the skills we need but in my in my little tiny world at that time um it was a big deal thank you director constance who would like to go next go ahead scott no no no you've you've got the better name scott it's all you andrew the grant alum versus the wells barnett well the wilson alum well this is uh how about hp um and this is a story actually involves the school formerly known as wilson i grew up in northeast portland was halfway through grant high school when we moved to the west side and uh what now is uh wells barnett high school would have been my school and i chose not to make that transition uh so i kept going to grant and which meant that my junior year my parents would drop me off on the corner of barbara and terwilliger i'd walk across the freeway to the freeway entrance and a grant teacher would pick me up every morning and going home at night after cross country or track practice was catching a bus sometimes at 5 30 and getting home sometimes at you know 7. uh but i got my homework reading done in any case i do still remember the morning that i was waiting at that pre-way entrance with snow and ice coming down not
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knowing that school had been canceled and my ride was not going to be there so uh good times um and i'm i'm glad uh you know it was kind of a mixed bag making that choice um but junior year was when i found uh as haley put it my tribe and that was the cross country distance runners so that was a hugely important thing for me socially as somebody who didn't have [Music] a peer group that was working until then and not to mention coach mark cotton my two minutes victor bailey thanks guy director scott um i actually have two experiences one as a student and one as a parent um so i started middle school at markham middle school back when i was in middle school and i went there in sixth and seventh grade and then my eighth grade year um they uh there's a high school that had been shut down and empty for a while so um um you know so the entire middle school 678 went over to jackson and actually my experience with that was was very positive um because jackson was a great school it was in really good condition um you know relatively new and it was huge because it had been built as a high school um and so you know having his middle school worked i think the lesson i take from that though is is i think one of the reasons it was so smooth is because we were the same cohort right so the entire middle school six seven and eight moved as one so the building changed but the people we went to school with didn't teachers didn't change principle didn't change et cetera and so um the importance of that cohort i think was really driven home as a student because it's kind of a non-event in my life i don't even really think about it except when someone asks i'm like oh yeah that's right we switched middle schools um my experience as a parent um was a few years back uh you know both my kids were in in the odyssey focus option program and doing the southwest boundary changes um you know obviously had been at hayhurst which is walking distance from our house um and you know one of the reasons why we looked into that school and was was moving somewhere and there was uncertainty during that process um ended up going up to west sylvan which is not walking distance to anywhere um but um um what you know it was interesting the the the overall experience at the end you know it it it worked out well both for heyhurst as a neighborhood school which needed the the room and it worked out for odyssey um which got its own building um i think the lessons i took from that though as you were asking this question i was thinking back one of those is the toxicity of social media um and you know these school communities in southwest were relatively tight-knit and during that process were torn apart and torn apart frankly due to social media and i i blame facebook almost 100 for that um for reasonable people becoming unhinged um over rumors over things they've heard um over just you know um um the inability to sort of talk to someone face to face which of course we're getting better now in kovid reading body language through a computer screen but um you know sniping remarks it really became very toxic very quickly and it became toxic within schools it became toxic between schools um and and and really i think what became very healthy was the ability to walk away from that right is to say i'm not actually even going to get my information there i'm not going to go there it's not healthy it also really highlighted for me the importance of district communication and the need for that really factual objective very clear and very constant and frequent communication to to school communities throughout the process we um in the midst of the uncertainty about where we were going to go had someone come to the school to harris at the time and sit in the cafeteria with us and i wish i knew who that was because i think it's probably someone who's still employed by the district and spent an hour hour and a half with angry parents answering every question answering the questions they knew answering the question and saying areas where we didn't know and getting back and then followed up with information afterwards and that took the temperature down so many notches um and it was so helpful to sort of get that information directly um and it's just it's it's driven home for me as we go through this process that that need and i know that's something that came up in the first round and i know we're going to be talking about today um as well moving forward how we get that that communication so sorry that was more than two minutes but those are my my two takeaways appreciate it director scott we have three two directors in the student representative rita do you want to go yeah i can go um so um i switched schools yeah um so when i was going to school it was elementary junior high in high school so i switched schools for fifth and
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sixth grade so went out of my neighborhood and then um and then for junior high in high school i went to um in all city school um and so my experience was from the fifth grade on um i essentially lost connection with my neighborhood um and educationally i think it was probably beneficial um i got to take six years of that and so there's that um but but there was a cost um i i really had no connection with uh people in my immediate area so you know it was fine during school hours but um evenings and weekends i was pretty much on my own um so that's that's a turned out to be a real cost um it was great being able to you know the benefit was you know i got a good education and i actually did meet people from all over boston um but but there was some cost so that's it so um i grew up in portland i live in the house i i grew up in um it was when they still had k-8s um and so i for nine years walked with pretty much the same group of friends and my siblings down belmont a mile to glencoe um so it was very much a cocoon everybody from the neighborhood i mean very the transfer policy at the time was and there wasn't a lot of focus programs or or anything so you pretty much went to your neighborhood elementary school uh so it was there for nine years and then uh when it came time to go to high school um the neighborhood high school at the time was washington high school which didn't have um for for a whole host of reasons a lot of kids in the neighborhood didn't choose it so it had a very low capture rate variety reasons i mean one it was a horrible facility um just in terms i mean especially when you compared it at the brand new jackson um so there were no home athletic events i mean but it was an old building but a lot of people didn't go there and then in addition um at the time there was um mandatory busing and so there were there were kids also at washington who um not by choice but who were bus there um so it was an interesting group of people who showed up and it was probably two-thirds one-third uh girls to boys um so because a lot of boys who could went to benson because that was sort of the opt-out um if he didn't want to go to washington um what i found is for me it was especially my freshman to junior years just a great really affirming community it was a smaller school so about a thousand less than a thousand students and um everybody had an opportunity to be a leader in something and it was super diverse so you had an opportunity to meet people that you wouldn't have met in your neighborhood and then my senior year in high school the district the school board at the time decided that monroe which was girls polytech that was used to be in the da vinci building was too small they were going to close it so they just merged with my high school and i and didn't do a i was going to say like didn't do a very good job because there was just this sort of two clashing cultures in your senior year it was a hard senior year because the district really didn't bring the two school communities together and so very much we had like a graduating class of the monroe seniors and then the washington seniors um so i've kind of seen what um happens when you don't knit those knit cultures together or make an attempt to knit cultures together and kind of what it can do to a school community um so i was the first graduating class of washington monroe the bruins for whatever reason we became and i think that leaves us with nathaniel right right um so you all might be surprised to hear this but i'm actually not done with my k-12 education at pps um
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during my time here i've been at three of our schools ainsworth portland village charter and jefferson um i haven't had the transition between schools too often and when i did it's been at uh been at more traditional stop points i entered ainsworth in kindergarten i moved between ainsworth and portland village at the end of fifth grade and between portland village and jefferson at the end of eighth in general i think the transitions were beneficial for mo many of the reasons that director de pass mentioned um didn't have any significant trouble in any of these transitions although they weren't perfectly seamless um moving between ainsworth and um portland village was probably the most daunting of these uh for the most part at that as that school was a k-8 and well it still is a k-8 i was entering a pre-established class with pre-existing social dynamics in which i only knew one person which was of course challenging both for that year and many years following um i haven't experienced too much turnover in my classes at ainsworth very few of my class left or joined the cohort at portland village most of those who moved were those who left after sixth grade and at jefferson most movement has been out of the school not into it although that has been a relatively minor portion of the class um i think that's about it uh before we steve garcia before we move on i just want to say that um during my comments i used the word tribe to describe kind of a community and people that i found and it's a word i'm actually trying to delete from my vocabulary because i know that for some native folks using it that way can um be really offensive and and is appropriating um a native life way so i want to apologize for using that and i think for all of us we're on an anti-racist journey we make mistakes and there are times when even though we know better when we're just in the flow of talking a word comes out that's part of our lexicon that is something that so i just wanted to draw attention to that word and that it's something i'm trying not to use and and admit the mistake of having used it in this uh conversation um i i want to just say appreciate you for recognizing that and yes i mean we also use the word chief and tribe and native and um so just if we're if we're conscious i think that's that's great i appreciate you recognizing and interrupting yourself in the moment yeah yeah alien i both both did a kind of a head smack there so apologies really appreciate it and i really appreciate all we all appreciate um you all sharing you know two minutes of your life not even your life story but two minutes of your story and it was really powerful at least for me as a facilitator and as someone who's gotten to know many of you for the years you know i heard the this you know how how might we build resilience right as as students uh as we're navigating change um talked about how we all need to find our people right and many of you talked about finding our people uh talked about how um you know questioned about how can we truly be student centered and really think about the the the student gaze if you will um and how do we approach our our work through that student perspective uh we talked about living into our core values around relationship right relational trust uh there was conversations around that um and the importance of relational trust with leaders in in the district and and having clear communications uh that was loud and clear um there was also top topics around the importance of of our neighborhoods in our community and the importance of our of our uh next door neighbors in in in shaping who we become right and at the end at the end of the day i think one of the most powerful things that i heard was you know at the end of the day it's the experiences and the outcomes that happen in the classroom and in the hallways of our schools right um those experiences those opportunities are are are are instrumental so i really appreciate again you all sharing your uh and and being part of this ice breaker so with that um we are um now running 15 minutes behind schedule but we'll catch up uh by going to the next topic which is uh the priorities prioritization on pps enrollment and program balancing so uh i'm gonna read the uh the desire outcome uh and then the two getting questions and then really i'm gonna open it up
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for someone to kick us off so uh really during this 30-minute section uh board we really would love for you to help identify the critical issues you believe are the most important to address in the next uh 12 months and so in your agenda we identified or we included five uh identified enrollment and balancing related focus areas that folks or the conversations have been had over the course of the last year um there might be additional i'll leave it to you to play to have that conversation the two guiding questions that we'll be focused on today is what is the board the what is the most important issue to address in the next 12 months for us as a pps school board and why in other words uh if we refine that question chronologically which do you recommend as the first step in why so i'll really let you kind of think about that question and then secondly are we looking to address more than one of these issues and if so why so with that who would like to get us started jonathan kind of before we dive in i just want to acknowledge the email that we received from the um i think it's the vast majority of the members on the southeast guiding coalition with some items of clarification that they are really expecting from us and i for one think those were all fantastic questions and i fully agree that if we're going to ask them in their volunteer role to help us do this hard work um we owe it to them to have um to provide guidance on the questions that they put to us so i'm just putting that out there now because i don't know when we want to specifically um revisit those those questions that they asked of us yeah so i'll i'll jump in to get the ball rolling um so one i think ultimately all five of those uh priorities are important um and worthy goals of as we go forward um we have committed to um converting k-8s to uh k-5 middle schools uh that's you know a big piece of what we're doing in southeast and as a result of that there's no way around it that we have to adjust boundaries uh even apart from that um and this is part of some information that i shared uh with the policy committee is that we have a lot of schools that are either over enrolled or under enrolled and that has impacts on students and staff it has impacts on we we have certain thresholds around funding of ancillary position not ancillary positions there are key positions in the schools around for example library services counselors that depend in part are our office staff that depend apart on enrollment so there's all sorts of issues around that besides just the physical feeling of being in an overcrowded building um so those are all important um features of our current um imbalances and there's huge equity issues around all of those so uh you know and so those two off the top but but as part and parcel of that is also having a stable um continual uh enrollment pattern for our students receiving special education services we've you know over the years i think we've all talked with parents who had their kids follow a zigzag pattern it was impossible for them to keep part of the peer group all the way up through high school and we really need to address that so i again i think all five of these are important and they're interwoven the high school piece um i think we can probably delay a bit um because we
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we have an important conversation coming up with the jefferson community about um you know what's what's jefferson going to look like in the coming years and that's i i think we need to have that discussion and come to some decisions to see how it affects the rest of the system in terms of uh balancing high school enrollment so i'll just lay that out there and um let's see who's really yeah let's listen to directly rocker bailey that was a good overview i think uh really situated all the different uh issues um if i if i may as you think about those those issues those five issues um you know the question here is what do you think is the most i mean so i think you what you outlined was middle school reconfiguration number one boundaries to three sped and then long term high school can you can you think about as you think about the next 12 months what what can we accomplish or what what is the most prior top priority for you well to me it's all part of the same process and i didn't mention um the co-location around dual language immersion programs uh and again around in terms of equity if you look at native speakers enrolled in dual language immersion programs in southeast with some exceptions most of them do not live in the neighborhood catchment area of the school they attend um and that that to me is an issue when we talk about the importance for example of walkability um in terms of serving students uh we're we're essentially uh bussing kids in bussing uh lower income kids of color for the for the most part out of their neighborhood into a different neighborhood for them to get the services that are so important to their school success so all these issues if we're going to continue to work on that middle school conversion of necessity we run into boundary issues so it's not a one two it's it's uh it's in it's all integrated got it i you know i think i want to pick up on what scott said for a second i i you know this is gonna when you're asking sort of the question what's the most important when i look at these five right i i think they're all they're all important and and ideally the charge um you know to the southeast county coalition the charge to us as a board is to come up with a solution that maximizes all five and jonathan what i hear you saying and it's important is okay but what about those situations where we can't right because obviously there's a solution that hits all five that's the solution we're going to go with that's easy it gets really hard if there's a solution that that hits one or two but doesn't hit the other three but i think my question becomes do we know that or can we know that for all circumstances ahead of time right and and what you know what i hear you saying this is going to sound a little like a dodge and i don't mean it to sound like a dodge because i think it is our our job as a board to give the guidance in terms of which of these to prioritize but i'm wondering if as we go through this and we're looking at different schools in different situations if in fact we might end up prioritizing different things for different situations um that i'm not sure we can take a blanket and sort of say in all situations these three are the top priority and these two are lower there may be situations where we sort of reverse that and say you know what we actually are going to change that now as i'm saying that it's daily i i think what we're doing in this exercise is saying what do we want the southeast guiding coalition to focus on the next 12 months how do we want them to focus their work right and what i'm what i'm actually saying is i don't think in my mind we can give them a blanket scenario that that and say that in all circumstances these are the one two or three things we want you to prioritize above these others what i'm wondering if there's not a process that allows for some iterative conversation right so one of the things that became really clear in this last process right is that there were certain things you know uh direction that we as a board had given the coalition that they they came to an impasse right and they sort of said well you know when it's a conflict between converting a ka or overcrowding what direction do we go they were left at a loss because we didn't hadn't given them direction i hear what you're saying and i think
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it's really valuable so i'm not trying to get away from the priorities if we all say okay kk8 is always going to take precedence over overcrowding well that's really clear guidance what i'm saying is i'm not sure we should be doing that at this point given all the unknowns and all the variables i'm wondering if there's not a way that when when those points are reached they will be that there's not some iterative conversations where the coalition comes back to the board and says we're at an impasse because you've sold us to focus on k through eight you've told us to focus on overcrowding we have to pick one of the other if that's not a moment for the board to then weigh in and say okay in this situation we would prioritize x over y which is actually what we just did with creston because it was a conflict of our stated guiding values my example was not completely drawn out of thin air that's true yeah i i think uh another dimension to this uh and we haven't talked specifically about lessons learned from the phase one process i think the questions that the southeast gutting coalition have posed to us are a big part of that lessons learned and a piece of that where the phase one initially kind of came to a head was around dual language immersion programs and i think they have rightly said we're not professional educators you guys are meeting staff not the board uh we need you to make the call here this is not our call i and i i think there's a couple of other nuances to that of what's what do we ask for guidance on from a citizen group versus what are the things that staff as professional educators need to say hey our experience is that this is the best way to provide these services and and make the call there i see this a little differently i see that this is a this is something the board is asking to do this is not something that our educational team has come to us and said this is the thing that will help us be the most strategic towards the outcomes you have asked us to move towards right so this enrollment and balancing is more of a board-directed process and so i think you know to for us to say we want you to do this process we're not gonna prioritize i mean i'm hearing what all of you are saying that these are all interrelated but for me if i was to say okay in the next 12 months the priority would be um for me it would be finishing the the middle school piece and then working on the elementary boundaries related to that middle school balancing and then my third would be the special education piece right and i don't know if we can get to that within a year and i know that when we make some choices you know it is all interrelated so if we make some choices around middle school and elementary that will have an impact on the on the special education feeder pattern but that's why i think we need to prioritize and say oh where we are in the work and and the scope of where we're going next we need to finish middle schools we need to look at balancing those elementary schools so they support the middle school population in a in a thoughtful way and then do special education because we'll continue to do this process so so i think we really do need to give the coalition some guidance because i think i think from what i've heard from coalition people is it feels a little bit like they're kind of unmoored and trying to discern what the board wants in this process because again it is our process um so that's how i look at it in this moment of of what those priorities are um chair lowry i i think i'll just build off of what you just said and get super pragmatic um which is we have to constitute harrison park as a middle school that's priority number one and then we have to figure out how to balance enrollment at the k-8s that we just sent to kellogg and that we're going to send to harrison park so for me in terms of very pragmatic priorities um that's those are the two things that we know that we have to do i regarding the special education classrooms i want us to be continually thinking about who they serve how many students they serve and why they serve them and to what extent can we improve the services that we provide for our special education students in every single one of our neighborhood
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schools i don't want us to just assume that we have a fixed number of behavior classrooms and that they're in these fixed locations now i want us to be continually revisiting that question with an eye toward delivering equitable education available to all in every one of our neighborhood schools and look at it also in parallel with the investments that we're making under this bond and with the timeline for those investments in terms of physical accessibility issues so that we don't continue to have a segregated lens for a certain group of our special education students thank you director constance so we are uh about halfway through this conversation i just wanna yes i will i just wanted to make sure we're a halfway point uh there is kind of a conversation happening here around a prioritization around uh finnish height middle schools and the elementary school boundary uh and then there was a specific even more targeted from uh director khan stem but uh go ahead director brim edwards yeah so um i'm gonna be well just be provocative you know i think um we're going to be almost at capacity from a staff and a board and just coming out of the pandemic you know surrounding our our students and our school communities with a big warm embrace and bringing them back in and you know returning to you know the world they knew um a year and a half ago so i i don't know that we have a lot of capacity to i say it's not that these are not the right things to do but i i think it's going to be very hard because i think some of some of these things are going to be um i'll just take like the co-locations of neighborhood and dli programs i mean that's going to require a lot of community engagement or remove boundaries and engaging the community in the middle of a pandemic is awfully hard so i just want to put that on the table i want to be cognizant that i think we staff and our our school staff have some really hard work and important work to do to help our students return to a normal school a normal school experience and you know heal from what we've all been through so i just put that to start with um you know i i would say absolutely critical um so i would narrow the scope of what we would need to do it's absolutely critical to open in harrison park um the fact that we had a whole host of k k-8s where kids got an inequitable middle grades experience and outer southeast um you know that that needs to that needs to end um so that that would be my priority um and we also have and we've some chronically under enrolled schools because of um actions by the district and whether it's the martin luther king jr elementary school or schools in outer southeast that don't have enough students to offer a really robust programming that most other schools have that have higher enrollments i mean that would be um sort of my secondary priority or it should be done at the same time and then um i think that the rebalancing the high school enrollments is not a southeast guiding coalition responsibility because that implies that you can balance the high schools um in one quadrant and the reality is the biggest inequity among our high schools is you know that jefferson um high school doesn't have a neighborhood boundary um and so i don't think there's any way to have that conversation in one quadrant um so i would say that's that's a you know as we roll out the new high schools and um we look at it from a city-wide perspective but i certainly don't think that that's a southeast guiding coalition responsibility um and i on the special ed i think i'm going to agree with director constand that i i view that as an ongoing process versus that we should have a a district-wide approach and that it's not a um again i wouldn't say it's a southeast guiding coalition like we need you to to make recommendations in the space i would hope the district staff um the educators who are familiar with best practices and
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know what families want is that we're continuously looking at those feeder feeder patterns but it's not like hey we can only change that when we're in a quadrant and when we're doing work um so that's i have a lot of thoughts about and i didn't see this on the agenda but i have a lot of thoughts about the phase one process um and i hope we're going to have a discussion not tonight because there's more priorities but about the process and how we do that because i we're going to put a tremendous stress on staff and school communities if we have a really intensive broad broadly scope process in the midst of a pandemic so uh director broome edwards you started off by kind of saying that you're going to be provocative um is it did anybody take uh that comment about we're doing this in the middle of a pandemic as a provocative statement and if so can you speak a little bit to that well can i just before i why it's provocative is like you know i have a whole host of meeting invites that go till november and i'm thinking you know if i wanted to be engaged that and and the pandemic's not going to be over the midst of that is i just think um i can't imagine that we could even do even a portion of this work in the and have any sort of real authentic community engagement in the midst of a pandemic can i can i just ask a question on that i hear that a lot here in the district i hear it in other local governments i also personally have experienced some really effective engagement and and i i want to caveat all of this with its you know their access issues right and they're very real and we need to be aware of those um but i also feel like turnout at community meetings has been higher the zoom format allows for breakout rooms allows for conversations i mean the meeting we had hundreds of of people in different breakout rooms you know that we were able to attend i i i don't disagree with you director medwards that it is challenging i i guess i also have been through so many engagement processes outside of a pandemic that no one ever pays attention to or people can't make it to because it's a six o'clock meeting and they have to drive there and they've got other things to do and i just i think there are tools that we can take advantage of in this moment that actually can lead to effective engagement absolutely we'll talk we'll get an engagement um towards the end of the agenda today uh and we can have that discussion but i want to go back because we have about eight minutes left so where we are so what i'm hearing and again i i want to welcome folks to with a different opinion here but what i'm hearing is a focus on uh converting k uh harrison park into a k-8 uh and then any potential um uh about and balancing uh that we have to do at the elementary no we're not here i'm not hearing that we're just hearing a focus on k-8s harrison park to uh what i was not shaking my head at is harrison park to a middle school and then elementary balancing i thought you said switching harrison park to a k-8 and i was like nope that's backwards maybe i probably misheard you sorry jonathan i'm very expressive so just normally thoughts thoughts on that please dr moore um yeah so i i think um i think we have an emerging consensus that the primary focus should be on um establishing the new middle schools um in southeast um and and i agree with that um i would say my second i think maybe the second priority within that is addressing the issues that have um frequently been present using the current dli model um it sounds like based on what i've heard during those southeast guiding coalition meetings um it it sounds like in some of the dli programs in southeast um the co-location has not been as tense in southeast as it may have maybe elsewhere in the district um but i still think we need to be looking at the dli model we use and to the extent we are going to
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continue to have co-locations um i think we need to be we as a district need to be really attentive about how we're implementing that um i think it becomes especially important at the middle school level because um having a dli program in a middle school dramatically complicates scheduling i would say i tend to agree that we're probably not going to be able to rebalance the high schools in this process mostly because i think i i agree it really can't be handled quadrant by quadrant um for special education um again i would like us to look at the the model we're using for special education services um my concern the the enrollment issue is that um because the current policy uh pretty much exempts special education services from um from any um linkage to enrollment in the policy um what has happened historically is that special education programs tend to be the the thing that is used it's it's the mechanism that is used to relieve overcrowding um so the kids who most need predictability and stability are the ones who tend to be the ones experiencing the the least predictability and um and security um and stability um then finally around boundaries um so i'm going to be a little provocative here um i've spent a lot of time talking about boundaries and the problem of over-enrollment and under-enrollment and and the consequences flowing from that for students educational experience um so what i'm about to say is is going to be uh it's not going to be consistent with what i've said all along um i would say it if we're not if we is board and a district are not willing to stand by any decisions that are made around boundaries um then we might want to abandon the idea at this point um so based on um scott director bailey last week produced a listing of schools that were over capacity and under capacity it's 50 schools out of 82. that's a 61 uh rate of enrollment and balance mismatch between enrollment and building capacity um which we've had for years and years and years generally and in phase one we made a and there was an effort to address potential over enrollment over capacity at kellogg and and board action unraveled that so i would say if we're not willing to if we're not willing to have a process that tries you know does its best to come up with a good faith effort to balance enrollments across buildings and if we're unless we are willing to stand by that in the face of i would say inevitable unhappiness from some school communities maybe even all school communities um then then i i question
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why we're even gonna make the attempt i cannot express to you how uncomfortable it makes me to even say these things um but i think we need to be really honest with ourselves and with our families and with the southeast guiding coalition if they're going to make very difficult decisions if we're not willing to stand by those decisions then then what are we doing so i hope you don't feel uncomfortable because i think this is exactly the conversation we need to have so thank you director moore for bringing it up directly um it kind of i'm going to take it back though to what i said at the very beginning and let's go back and use that as an example the southeast guiding coalition prioritized the the boundary changes around crowding over the conversion of k-8 that was a very reasonable legitimate outcome of their process um in the end though a majority of the board not unanimous for sure said that conversion of k-8 was more important and giving the middle school experience was more important than the overcrowding i still have questions about the overcrowding technical ones we can get into whether it really changed it that much but but that was that was the priority issue what i'm concerned about by this process is we are saying at the very beginning of phase two here are the priorities we're going to stick with these throughout the entire process and i will tell you i'm uncomfortable with that because to me of these five i want to see them all but some will inevitably come into conflict and i honestly don't know enough about the variables of the specific schools and situations to say in all cases you know numbers one three and five will trump numbers two and four what i think is a better process and what i think would have worked better in phase one is for the guiding coalition to come back to us and said guess what overcrowding k to conversion in conflict um we want to flag that for you board because before we go any further in this process um we need some clear guidance and i think the board at that time could have said you know yes focus on the the conversion or yes focus on the overcrowding and and i think the the coalition would have felt better about that they would have had clear direction and the board and the end process would have felt better i i am not troubled by a board changing the decision of a coalition as long as we're clear about our reasons and rationale and and i think though that what i don't want is that coalition to be frustrated by that which is why i think these again figuring out these check-ins what i wrote down back back then when we considered this was phase two we need to be willing to make adjustments to the coalition's charge as these issues arise and and i think that's going to be really important because i think i think we're kidding ourselves if we think we can set a framework that will apply in every situation um for the next you know however long this process is is going to take so uh director scott if i may uh to push back uh so i hear i hear what you're saying about you know uh the opportunity to make adjustments to the charge but isn't that just moving the goal post how so because i think i think uh when folks when when the co so when i think about project management uh and i think about the the desired outcome i think uh you know folks are are driving towards a north star i think the the road map will change um as things progress but i think what what's what's clear is that having a vision or a north star uh is gonna be really critical for folks um and so without a clear guidance on that north star uh we might not get to that destination that you ultimately want to get to you know i think if if we could agree on one north star then you're right if if we and you know maybe and director i don't want to put words in your mouth i think i just heard you put some some real focus on on the enrollment you know um uh the boundaries and enrollment balancing part i think i think jonathan you're right if if if seven board members say or frankly just majority board members say that is the overriding goal of this process and we will as a result if we need to hopefully we won't but if we need to we'll throw out the k-8 school reconfiguration maybe we'll leave a k-8 program we're not going to worry about special education feeder patterns we're not going to worry about dli programs we're not going to worry about high school enrollments whenever they come into conflict with that then i think you're right then we've got a north star but i'm personally not willing to say that because i have five north stars or maybe there's a northeast star in a
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northwest star and you know like i want to drive towards all five of these and and i think we need to acknowledge the challenges here it's not simple right we know that our coalition members certainly know that diving into it there are so many variables in each one of these schools and boundaries and all these decisions and and it was i mean as a relatively new school board member still can i say that up to my two year mark is that can i do it can i get away with that no um no okay i think you can actually all right as a sophomore school board member um you know i was frankly like every time i i dove into this shocked at just another layer of variables another layer of details another layer oh then there's this school and then there's this program and oh wait you can't forget about this cohort and you can't forget about this issue so what that makes me think is setting rules from the very beginning that will be consistent throughout is probably unrealistic but setting and i'm not opposed to setting some goal posts and maybe jonathan that's what you're coming back to that that um i'm overstating what we're trying to do here so if if if what i'm hearing is let's set some priorities now but recognize those priorities can change as we go through the process then i'm more comfortable with that what i thought i was hearing is let's set some priorities that we agree to stick with come hell or high water as we go through dr moore uh i'm gonna push back um because i think if we don't establish some pretty clear criteria um given all of the complexity that you mentioned i mean every you know every school is different there are lots of layers to all of this given all of that um i think if the southeast guiding coalition doesn't have some clear criteria to guide their work i don't think they're going to be able to make any decisions about anything and even if they do if we're going to be willing to re you know recalibrate the criteria as time goes on i i fear that we are not going to be able to look back on the process as being in alignment with our racial equity and social justice framework because i can tell you what's going to happen is that some commute some school communities may be made unhappy by a decision or a proposal um and and the schools that have the most resources are going to be the ones that will be most effective at advocating for their position and the schools that have schools with families with fewer resources are are not going to have the same capabilities they're not going to have the same chance of advocating effectively for what's best for their kids um so i i think i think we really do need to come up with some um maybe maybe they can't be ironclad um criteria because you know they there are going to be inevitable conflicts of um among them um but if i were a member of the guiding i mean i i have been a member of similar community groups that were being asked to to wrestle with some really um vexing issues in the district um i don't know that i would be able or willing to tackle something of this magnitude if the board is not willing to set some pretty clear criteria at the beginning and then and then agree to abide by them so i before i uh i think director bailey had his hand up but before we do that it is 7 15 7 13. uh the next agenda item talking about layers of complexity is uh our the school board policies uh and so uh we do schedule we did schedule 40 minutes uh for that section uh so if we can so by 7 50 uh if we can cover this conversation and the uh policies uh then we'll take a ten minute break uh and start the second half at eight o'clock so um uh jonathan garcia i also have one question for the board but i'll wait my turn please go ahead director bailey uh first of all um i've weighed in a couple of times so if there's any board members who haven't weighed in um i would uh let them go first if not i'll plunge ahead appreciate that bailey uh director bailey and as you're doing that i'm actually going to ask megan um to
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stop sharing uh the screen just so we can make sure everybody's watching each other i think that there's our recommendations so thank you uh the notes are being taken and we will share those with all of you uh uh as well so go ahead director bailey okay um so i i want to say to uh director scott and director moore um i think you're both right how's that it's a dessert topping and a floor wax um i'm dating myself there um but i think in this case we have some very specific asks from the coalition that need to happen before they can really proceed and so that's one thing a second thing is uh we had co-location of dual language immersion on the priority list for the guiding coalition i think we should take it off of that list and ask staff to come up with a direction and i think once uh staff puts that out then i'm i'm comfortable with the guiding coalition going from there and having not hard and fast priorities from the board but i think guidance and again if we have a little more time to do this process than the rush we were in this last year time for the guiding coalition to check in with us at major decision points to say okay we're we're here we could go this way we could go that way you guys want to give us some guidance and now's the time it is a way forward and i also want to say on the capacity overcrowding issue uh we got caught crosswise because the the guiding coalition asks staff guidance for targets around capacity utilization and they stuck to those targets um and one i'm i'm glad staff gave that direction i think that was entirely appropriate um and two we didn't really go into those uh and ask the questions we needed to before we push those aside um you know a hundred percent is not a hundred percent eighty-five percent is a hundred percent and so on but we we didn't get into that and we should have so um you know we got crosswise with our staff on that and that's on that's on us and staff working that out and that's that's a lesson learned that we need to correct going forward appreciate that director bailey uh claire so i have a question about there we we have uh quite a few k-8s that have now become k-5s and we have some middle schools um that are you know losing um half their program going to um another building and one that's coming together and being formed so they're underenrolled and so especially with the k-8s becoming k-5s there's quite a few of them all together for us to increase the enrollment and all of those k-5s we would most likely have to change boundaries all the way from the river to the east side of the district to accomplish enough students moving to get that accomplished so it's i think um when i look at the capacity of all the communities changing their boundaries together to accomplish that it's significant in this region so at the same time another way to look at under enrollment and something the district has done in the past is consolidated some schools together um that are on the small side and where there's enough capacity for them to fit in the neighboring school so what i'm wanting to hear a little from board on because both of these are would be very difficult for the community but they're the solutions that we have available to us to help with the uh under enrollment that you're i'm asking us to address so i just wanted to hear um some thinking about um moving um from west to the river to the east end of the district moving all the boundaries to get to where you need the enrollment
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on the very eastern edge versus consolidating some schools that are small and close together director brim edwards you have your hand up i don't know if you want to answer this or well i'm going to go back to just sort of fundamentally the work of the district and we only have a limited amount of capacity and i want the superintendent and senior staff and the school staff to be focusing on our school community healing and getting back on back on track um so i think there's the what what is urgent and needs to be done and what would be what can be done in a sequenced way because i i don't i don't see all these things happening and it's the same group of people and um i say i i think it's and we really haven't talked about the priorities on the next page because but i look at that and so i i get down to what what's critical to have happen and where's like a unit of our deputy superintendent for business operations of here or making sure are all our buildings are healthy and safe and keeping our bond program sort of on track and all the other things so i'm just really resistant to um do everything right now and i you know i go back to we when we started this project obviously we weren't in the middle of a pandemic and the landscape was was different i mean i think it would have been challenging because like frankly since you know the summer of 2017 this has been a rebuild um so again i'm going to anchor it back to we've had kids in 15 for 15 years in inequitable middle grades and you know at a minimum we need to fix that and there are um complementary things that come that are related to that that also need to happen at the same time but i don't see a you know from the from the willamette river to the easternmost boundary of that that happening in the next at the same time we're trying to you know and frankly we have a lot of students um have left the district or who aren't actively engaged and we need to re-engage them and get them you know back surrounded by their their teachers and their classmates and back on track we should appreciate it director constantly have your hands up uh and then i actually do want to start transitioning us over to the policy conversation i i think um what i'm hearing is that uh general consensus and please correct me if i'm wrong is that the urgent need is to convert harrison park and then the the boundary work can really let's let's think about where where that lands in in terms of a sequence um understanding that when we do harrison k8 uh conversion there might be some you know hanging chads that we have to address is that is that what i heard director broome edwards yeah well i don't i don't want to call call a school community a hanging chad um because some of those some of those schools have been waiting you know a long time and been under enrolled or they've had you know vestal with programs coming in and out um and bridger um so uh so yes but with a um i would say that they're these have been impacted communities as we've moved you know in an unprecedented way in outer southeast into the k-8 model and then back again and then all the focus programs moving around got it parker constant yeah i just wanted to respond directly to deputy superintendent hertz because um i think what you raised claire is the a bit of an elephant in the room and that we haven't specifically talked about consolidation and i appreciate you bringing that up so directly to try to get some feedback from us i think it is apparent that that is likely going to need to take place in order to create the right size schools that we need that as a as a byproduct of this reconfiguration i think that you know back to the question of enrollment imbalances all across our district i mean when you talk about going from the willamette river east to the extent that we have school communities that have relatively right-sized
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um enrollment now you know we should we should leave well enough alone and but to the extent that we have adjacent communities that already have issues that need to be solved we should use this process to to take care of that um so i think we should be judicious about it um but those we know that we have some schools that are significantly under or significantly over that maybe aren't directly implicated by um you know constituting the school community for harrison park and right sizing the elementaries that have fed into harrison park and kellogg but that um it's it wouldn't make sense for us to leave those out of this process so i i just wanted to say that i heard you speaking specifically about consolidation it's something that um school boards often don't have the appetite for because it's never fun it's always painful to lose your neighborhood school because we all feel so strongly and passionately about it but um you know you're right it's on the table and i think we need to be explicit about that so before we move on to the next item i i want to anchor us back to our desired outcome of this session the pps board of education will identify the critical issue issues it believes are the most important to address in the next 12 months and what i heard is again a desire for the board to focus on the middle school conversions period is that am i pausing and addressing the impacting what director ben meyer would bring edward said impacting the other communities that are are are uh impacted by that decision that fair con is that a fair um consensus here i i didn't understand what you said jonathan are you talking about doing the middle schools and then their feeder elementaries boundary shifts is that so i'm hearing the boundary um would require river to east side boundary director or uh claire can you so there are um there are quite a few underenrolled k-5s on the east side of the district and so um we can work with a smaller set of communities it's just there um it's questionable if there's enough students to make them right size that's that's the concern and but well i'm hearing um what i needed to hear so i appreciate what i've heard so far thank you so i'm thinking we're talking about like harrison park and the communities that feed into harrison park looking at the boundaries for creston and some of the people that feed into kellogg and you know that that's what i'm understanding when i hear us talk about middle school and feeder elementaries is the boundaries for those specific schools and but i'm hearing claire that that sort of starts a cascade of of crazy and i don't think we want to get into the level of complexity of that river to east side but i i what i would prioritize is those middle schools and those um feeders into them as much as we can knowing that again it as director scott has said multiple times this is an incredibly complex issues with lots of variables and we will find places where the guiding coalition might need to come back to the board and say we're trying we're looking at consolidating this school is that something you have an appetite for or you know this is this is something where we're thinking about in this work you've charged us with how are you responding to that so i'm going to call the question on this because what that means is that on the if you look at the demographics the west side of southeast which is much more prosperous and relatively less diverse with some some exceptions has pretty robust and enrollment verging above 100 at some schools we're gonna not touch those and instead in the outer southeast where generally demographics are more diverse and lower income and we're going to create a bunch of schools that are half filled on the on the order of and direct brand members refer to martin luther king jr school earlier with you know with the same kind of half-filled capacity the same kind of issues that we've heard from the king community for years we're going to be okay with doing that
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because that's what we're saying we're leaving or we're going to close a school again in a lower income neighborhood that's how we're going to balance enrollment um talk to me about using the equity lens um director bailey i really appreciate that i've been sitting here listening to everybody really carefully partially because i talked to someone that um from a from a different cultural community that said they don't speak unless they've heard all sides and so i've been listening really carefully i've been wondering about the root causes for these under enrollments and over enrollments and i think we need to address root causes there's a reason why people don't send their kids to the neighborhood school and i'm also king is my neighborhood elementary and i've been involved with that school for a very long time my grandmother retired from there as did my mother and i'm also very concerned about how we're talking about racial equity and how we're planning on implementing it and this is a perfect example of and actually the southeast guiding coalition i've just reread their letter asking for that coalition the guiding coalition to be increased they they know that you know with the group that they have they could make better decisions if they have more more members and more diverse members i'm really concerned about pushing um putting the burden on people of lower income and of darker skinned people and putting the burden of rebalancing on those communities i'm very concerned about that i'd like to see a completely different outcome i would like to elevate those voices i'd like to elevate those kids that need um they need us as adults to prioritize them and their educations those are the kids that we need to worry about low income kids of color english language learners i'd like to see us as a as a group of adults um prioritize those children and their families i think the question for me director depos is kind of going back to what some of what director medward said around our priority as a district in the next 12 months really is on reopening and on welcoming our students back to the classroom well and especially our students our black and native students who we know have struggled during the pandemic and who we were failing you know we had an opportunity at before and so for me the question is we do need to open harrison park as part of our long-term plan so what do we ask the district to additionally take on in the next 12 months and i think we need to have um we do need to have a conversation about the root causes of under enrollment and we need to look at you know the wealthier western western southeast neighborhoods and rebalance all of that my question is what can we do well in the next 12 months and maybe it does need to be a river to east side total rebalancing of elementary schools um but that's that i'm trying to sit and the tension of what's the next right step for our district to take since we can't do all the things so what do you think well attention the reopening so we are asked to kind of rank or talk about our top three focus areas and one of those top three reopening isn't on that list you know we're talking about whether you know to prioritize middle school enrollment um the boundary the co-location of neighborhood dli programs you know opening of course that's important conversation but that's not on our agenda tonight um we are asked to like pick our top three identify these three identified and what we work on i like what director scott said about um i think you said director scott you you said we need to figure out what we can do well in the in the next 12 months and then what do we phase and i think that these five you know bulleted point you know identified focus areas fit fit that bill we're not going to be able to do all five of these um well and what is the you know it should be what is the top priority i guess so i want to i want to invite the board um to the next section of the agenda which is actually a potential good segue here uh board policy um i have an understanding that there are uh some revisions to the board policy that were um maybe spoken about uh i wasn't at the board policy committee um but maybe we could start there so uh the next item really our outcome is to identify the policies that requires clarification so that pps school district staff and by extension the southeast guiding coalition can effectively and clearly complete phase two of its work and so we attached uh links to the policies and our guiding questions for this topic which of the school board policies are relevant in providing clarity and guidance to staff and the southeast guiding coalition in
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phase two again um do our school board policy that's currently articulated provide clear direction about our priorities and parameters to the staff the coalition and school communities who will contribute to constructing a recommendation in phase two and the last question is if our school board policies as currently articulated are not sufficiently clear then what are our next steps to bring clarity to these policies i i'm just say because i've been on the policy committee since it was formed in 2017 and this issue has been sitting in committee for about two years and i don't i wouldn't i think it's a misnomer to call it clarity because it's actually just um change it's a changing of the rules i mean so that's not really clarity it's just we're making yeah there's some uh changes are being um proposed that would um you know if you were one way to describe it is it it could make enrollment balancing easier but it is a it is a change in policy and i frankly i think it's unfair to in the middle of a process that we're getting ready to change things to say oh and by the way we're also at the same time gonna now change the rules for your community and um i'll i'll speak as a parent of more than one child um like getting rid of the sibling co-enrollment i think makes things super challenging and it makes things super challenging not necessarily for um families that have you know two parents with a lot of flexibility in their professional um jobs to be able to pick up drop off do you know after school activities go to school conferences um so you know i i i don't think um i think that changing those policies will have a huge impact on families and um i just don't think it's fair to be like oh we're now we need to i mean we should have done this we didn't you know a year ago before the process started but now we're mid-process and it's like oh and now we're going to change the rules and i don't see how we change our policy say we have a legitimate an authentic community engagement around the policy change like we're required to do and then um change the policy and then so that we can um have it apply to you know out to southeast frankly um and there was a suggestion the other day that um maybe there would be sort of a set of rules or a set of temporary rules for this piece and then longer term we'd make these other changes and to me that strikes me as fundamentally unfair as well that we're going to have different sets of rules because you know i i think you know what's what's good for students in and families and um you know southeast northeast west portland i don't think it's it's that different and i'm i don't think it's fair to change the rules in the middle of right before we're getting ready to impact students and in the middle of a pandemic i i think that you know my understanding that director of edwards is if we change the rules then those apply to everybody going forward so if we end sibling to the same school that applies to everybody going forward if we say you know once you age out of your zone your school you need to go to the school in your zone that would apply to everyone that we would end some of those legacy things for everyone um and if other arrangements were made in the past with the grant community or other communities i think i think we do need to have an equitable visa for everyone going forward because i've heard this from you multiple times this concern that southeast is sort of a place where rules get made that other people in other areas kind of have negotiated out of so i i'm not okay with us passing rules that don't don't um kind of apply to everyone and then the second piece for me is you know what the reason we're talking about changing these is because what we have seen through the data is that the legacies and the sibling thing mean that when we're trying to balance enrollment it's such a lag right because you know i have a friend whose oldest child and her youngest child are like 15 years apart maybe it's not that many maybe it is so but if they had moved her daughter her youngest daughter would have been
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still be able to be in that school based on you know the middle child because they have a middle child and so you know if we have the sibling piece and that middle child was still going to school so it's you know some of that is is part of the problem and i know that those aren't most of the cases that we're talking about but it's i know we saw it at lewellyn lived experience when the boundary change happened that that some kids went to dunaway it took a long time to show up in the school as far as overcrowding because of those legacy and sibling things and it's hard because my kid was friends with all those kids and we're glad they were at our school on an individual level but i saw the impact it had on the building and how hard that was so i do think we need to be talking about it we have the data to show that the sibling thing and the legacy do impact our boundary work so we need to be really clear about knowing that and saying what is it these policies are for like what is the intent look at them through a racial equity lens and then try to make them better um and knowing what the data is around the impact on enrollment and balancing can i ask a quick question i just want to make sure is this a conversation that's been happening in the policy committee or did i miss something along the way for two and a half years but it's still sitting in commit okay the only reason i bring it up is i i'm feeling a little i actually have no idea what you all are talking about and so i i just if i missed something let me know right if there's an email that i missed or a briefing that i missed but it feels like we're having a very insider conversation about something that at least for me has not been surfaced yet as something that's coming forward and i also don't attend those meetings so i'm um i'm i'm trying to follow along so i think to be fair it was brought up two years ago i don't know exactly when i wasn't on the committee and and it's i wasn't on the board so that's okay yeah and it's re-emerged uh just in the last couple of weeks so there was some preliminary drafting work done it got set aside because of other priorities and now it's back so i'll give an example of one piece of it the current policy says if there's a boundary change students can continue going to their current school to the highest grade um they have that option as opposed to shifting to the new school in sa let's say third grade now we suspended that policy when we were making changes around uh beverly cleary because of overcrowding for a number of grades they were just moved uh with a new boundary um but that's what's on the books for policy and i think in looking at the policy if pretend you know 20 years from now and we actually get to a relatively good balance in terms of enrollment sorry that was a little sarcasm um if we when we get to that place where we're relatively balanced then i think there's a lot of the current policy that makes perfect sense we want to have a minimal impact on families when we change boundaries ideally it would be okay we're going to adjust the boundary because this school enrollment is going up they're starting to get look at overcrowding adjacent schools not so much so we can do a boundary shift and it will start with next year's kindergarten so no student would be current student would be impacted and and you know we can get into the sibling question in a minute but that's one piece uh the big piece of the current policy that and and director lowry referred to it as that's a six year wait that's a long phase in if you're overcrowded or underenrolled so the same would be true for example of we've talked about martin luther king jr school earlier um they're at i don't know i can't remember 50 capacity roughly uh it would be a long six-year wait before they would be at you know some kind of optimal enrollment if we change the boundaries tomorrow and we just have a number of schools in that situation and so if we stick to current policy um it's good it's going to be a long time coming before we get to a balance so that's uh that's one of the issue and that's why i would i would suggest that it's one thing to look at the long-term policy
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and quite another to say we are so far out of whack now in so many situations um what do we need to what kind of rules do we need to operate on in the short term um that we can hopefully just do in the short term and then get to a much shall i say kindler gentler long-term policy uh but we're in again we're going to look at next year having really low enrollment at um arlita lent creston um marysville we're going to look at lane once access moves out being underenrolled whitman is underenrolled a lot of schools and if we don't address that there you go i think there's can be some inequities in services provided to those schools based on how we do and you know our staffing by enrollment that either it costs us money and we add staff there or do we address it through enrollment balancing so that's that's one piece of the policy that the add-on to it is is the sibling clause which says so in the case of um director lowry talked about llewellyn and dunaway a student could let's see llewellyn was overcrowded and so a student could stay at llewellyn until the fifth grade but if they had a sibling that entered that school before they left that sibling could also stay at lewellyn again delaying the adjustment do we want to keep that or not and i i and again in the short term and in the long term that's a question i would raise and clearly there's it's um there are multiple sides to that question but it's something that we haven't looked at this um policy in quite a while uh we should take a look and uh in particular i don't think we've really applied the equity lens in looking at these policies you can have um kids on the same little league team and in the same school and life is beautiful and then all of the sudden one goes to another school or goes to a different little league team and it ruins your life but guess what you you get over it you you just as a parent you have to you have to adjust to these things this is like the idea about being a parent as you're adjusting to new data coming in and new requirements and things you have to do differently than before and you just buck up and do them differently than before i feel like you know if i was the running things i would want to see that the policy is set first you set that with a racial equity lens you do that so the most um marginalized folks aren't impacted and then you make your decisions when the once those policies in place the the moving target thing is very portland it's like everybody wins um but at some point i feel like we need to you know we're we're getting we we still have people moving to portland our population is still increasing and i i feel like you developed the policy first and set that and then you could then you have a north star by which to make those difficult decisions about boundaries well i i'm not going to disagree with you i what's happened is we haven't i mean you can look in our policy and see that we've been you know there's supposed to be an annual report on where we are with uh enrollment and where there are crises um there's supposed to be a number of reports if you look at this uh the student transfer policy um that we as a district have not acted on and so it's uh it's sort of like the why are we having a forest fire well if you haven't cleared out the undergrowth for 50 years once you get a spark then it's a it's a big fire we haven't taken the steps of having that ongoing regular process to adjust enrollment so now we've got these big imbalances that again if if we want to address them slowly and phase them in over six years then that's let's call that but let's call it what it is so director director bailey uh what i'm hearing a conversation about a couple things two one is there's a lot of conversation around policy
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4.10.045 assignment to neighborhood schools it seems like there needs to be some clarity uh or sorry i think i agree with director brenton edwards there needs to be a look at this policy and what i'm hearing from a number of you is this the desire to really look at this policy through a racial equity and social justice lens um and so are there as we think about the other policies um are there others that that that come to mind as needing to be addressed again in the next 12 months jonathan this is not regarding other policies but i just wanted to jump in and say there's also um an execution and administration piece of this as we saw with creston where um we haven't had fidelity to a lot of our policies and particularly around you know moving on um to the uh you know like from grade school to middle school or a high school assignment so we need to be really clear that we are equally applying our policies as written because that has a big influence on on where our population ends up settling i i agree and um that's a great point director constance and i'm glad you brought that up during our discussion decision making on creston um that that is you know that policy on the books though again we haven't looked at the through an equity lens uh we might end up in the same place but i'm i i think it's worth talking about and particularly that decision we ended up the majority of students that were impacted by the that decision were students of color and lower income students um so again we at least need to look at that clearly and decide whether that's the way we want to continue going forward please please danny um and just trying to understand sort of how to support the board i'm hearing a lot of folks wanting to sort of like look at the policy through an equity lens and i'm wondering um is it uh is it that you want to look at the policy through an equity lens or that you also want to look at sort of actual data um some of the so i think what i'm hearing is that that maybe there are some some indicators uh either demographic or student indicators that you're wanting to look at in relationship to the policy or is it that you want to kind of have more time as a collective to be able to go through the questions and really sort of get get real about sort of like what are assumptions going in what are you know outlining barriers you know that are within the policy um or or maybe it's both okay i would love us in the policy committee to look at this policy going through the racial equity lens questions and really i know we've done it once already with this policy but i'd love for us to do it again and then i think we have a lot of narrative around the legacy policy and the student um sibling policy but i would love for us to have some data around i know it's really hard judy we talked about this before that we don't always have that information but but maybe we can collect some because i think we don't want to make a decision that negatively impacts black and native students and so i think we want we want some information about who's using this policy how is it being used so that we don't do something that we think is right with some unintended harmful impacts that's what i would like at least can can i um can i quibble a bit with um a few things that director bailey said um please go ahead mostly the idea that um we haven't talked about this policies or in fact the whole suite of policies around enrollment stuff um i would beg to differ we've been talking about this as a district since at least 2008 and there's a reason why these policies have not changed because any change is going to require that the district and the board make some difficult decisions that are going inevitably to make some school communities unhappy potentially every school
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community unhappy there's a reason why we have not done this for decades and i for one am sick of talking about these things if we're not actually going to do anything about them if we are not willing to make the difficult decisions and stand by them then let's just say that out loud and stop pretending and come up with some other way to respond to inevitable inequities that are going to be present in schools that have vastly different enrollment profiles and i'm just talking about you know sheer numbers um i would love to be able to tackle some of these things i think i think this has bedeviled the district for at least 20 years um but i am sufficiently cynical at this point that i'm i'm tired of having this conversation over and over and over again if we are not going to be willing to do the hard work and can i just point out while it's true that we have not explicitly looked at these policies um to the extent we we need to in terms of the the current racial equity social justice lens i will remind you all that the district has had a racial educational equity policy in place since 2011. and every discussion that i have participated in and there have been legion um every single time we have talked about all of these policies we have in fact talked about it in terms of racial equity and then we don't follow through so uh director moore um we are at 7 55 uh 756 757 things feels like my minutes are changing uh on me uh so uh i think um what i'm hearing from this conversation is that there is a general consensus or maybe not consistent there's a general desire to uh to double to look at the policies there is a conversation around what it looks like to to commit to a racial equity lens of these policies so in order so i want to i do want to take a break so take a ten minute break and so one of the things that i um um chair lowry um and chair moore as the policy committee chair um how would you two and director bailey as the vice chair how would you three collectively um do you wanna so one of the things that i have a question about i guess is like you know timeline and commitment and what does that look like and so uh i think there there is a you know i also heard you know that not all of our board members have a deep deep understanding of uh or understanding of our policies and so how do we even begin to take to peel that layer so i just kind of want to raise those issues and maybe give director moore and director lowry um a say before we go on to go to a break where is the enrollment balancing stuff on our calendar rita has it completely dropped off at this point no not at all we're we're just about to ramp it up again yeah so i think you know we have it scheduled to come up correct in the i can we have a so policy committee has a calendar with all of the policies when they'll come forward when we hope they'll be ready for a first reading um and these are on there i i don't have the calendar to hand so we had um i don't either um i can tell you that we had the so we started to look at these policies the the suite of policies last year um we were really kind of just getting going when kovit hit and and we ended up tabling um we just started to kind of re restart the conversation um at the last committee meeting um we we were um the topic at hand was a student enrollment
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in uh you know the student assignment um to neighborhood schools policy and um director bailey and i um offered some um kind of framing questions for the discussion so we didn't get into details um i don't know does that help so i'm gonna but in i i just want to reiterate i think changing the policy to get uh to either reaffirm what's on the books or make some changes i think we can take time to do that i think what's needed in the short term with the current imbalances that we have and the size of them is to decide and i think it's um and if you if the if the board as a whole wants a subcommittee of us to work on that uh to come up with some proposed short-term operating rules or we're going to suspend this policy as we go through the southeast process and the north and northeast process um and here's why so so i'm just going to speak up because we have a committee and i don't think we need another subcommittee we have a committee it's been sitting there and i am going to really object to a set of short-term rules that apply to one quadrant and then everybody else gets a full policy process to weigh in julia did you listen to what i said i did you said a set of rules for the short term and then the the longer term policy discussion okay i did not say one quadrant that's your term you've been using it incorrectly incorrectly specifically to what i've said several times now so but aren't we talking about the southeast guiding coalition i mean i get so i'm confused then because i thought this discussion was primarily about what sort of direction we're giving the southeast guiding coalition and some so if i'm if i'm wrong if this is a the entire the entire district we're giving direction and we're going to open it up to other things that's different but i i'm sorry because that that's what i very clearly thought this meeting was about phase two uh yeah i just want to would appreciate it if you would acknowledge i also said north and northeast if you could just acknowledge that then find we can move along no no harm no foul um i'd like to see what that looks like because i don't see if that's the case then um that's a bigger conversation that we're doing stuff in north and northeast as well what do we what are we doing in north and northeast sorry maybe this is a side discussion but i thought this was the southeast guiding yeah so i think so i think what i'm what i'm hearing i think i think um in order for us to move forward uh on there was a conversation around needing to revise these policies um it's currently these policies cur some of these policies current currently sit in the policy committee of the board of ed um dr moore is saying that there is going to be an opportunity for us to or for the board to to look at those policies and um but do we have a timeline on that uh dr moore imminently i i i i would like um if we're going to look at these policies and make some meaningful changes um [Music] i need to have some i personally i'm just going to speak for myself um i need to have some faith that um there that we're actually going to make some meaningful changes to these policies that would create a system a some systemic uh processes that would allow the district to have a regular mechanism to respond to enrollment um fluctuations over time um and i think i mean to speak to julia's point um when scott and i talk about short-term versus long-term the reality is that um the situ you know i gave you some numbers 61
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percent of our schools have some substantial level of mismatch mismatch between building capacity and current enrollment that did not happen overnight that's an accretion of changes that have happened over 20 years or more precisely because the district does not have a mechanism to respond in any kind of timely fashion to population shifts across the district so it seems to me that we can have a policy framework that would allow that to happen the reality though is that right now we have dramatic enrollment issues um across the district if we want to make any um immediate or even foreseeable changes in those enrollment issues um then we're probably not going to be able to use the kind of you know long-term systemic gradual incremental mechanism that that i at least envision would be helpful longer term for the district so that's i mean that's the difference between long term and short term we're not talking about you know targeting southeast for some special treatment if if we end up having um the the will and the courage to uh make some significant changes in the enrollment um situation across the district um then it would have to apply to um at minimum the entire east side as claire hertz mentioned earlier um great well uh thank you with that uh with that uh i think we're gonna take a ten minute break um uh stretch relax uh i think we're gonna go off live um and we'll be back in that break um i needed it to stretch my legs uh so we're gonna move on to the next agenda item uh uh of our conversation which is to talk about prioritization uh around uh focus areas here for the district um i'm gonna invite staff to participate uh uh senior leadership to participate in the conversation um and but before i and i'm actually gonna turn it over to the superintendent to walk us over through uh the top air focus areas for pps here in the next 12 months uh share a little bit about that uh but before i do that uh deputy superintendent hertz uh we just came back from a break uh where we had two big conversations about prioritization uh regarding enrollment and program balancing um both from a policy standpoint and from a directional standpoint uh did you get what you needed have you begun to get what you needed do you need any clarifications before we move forward so i don't need clarifications but i've heard a narrowing of some of the focus which is helpful especially with staff capacity and then i've also heard that the policy is continuing and so the question i have of course in my mind is with the policy continuing might we delay the southeast guiding coalition until that policy work is done and so that that's a question my mind doesn't have to be answered now but certainly the next conversation about prioritization of our focus areas over the next 12 months will be helpful in guiding that um response as so well i'm sorry i have to i feel like i'm not being heard so at least go ahead and acknowledge me and then disagree with me that's fine but the long-term policy work is different in my opinion from what we need right now in the next several years or however long it's going to take of uh how we rebalance and again it's i'm fine with people disagreeing with that but i'm saying going to the policy committee and saying we need to work through the long-term policy before southeast can go forward in my view is incorrect because i don't think those long-term policies are what we need in the short term i'll just stop there thank you for listening and let's proceed well maybe scott and i i do want to understand because i i'm not understanding because are are you saying like we have if it's our policy isn't are you saying we just like suspend the policy or i i'm not quite sure what a what a short-term policy is because like the policy is the policy and i don't know other ways to do things i mean like
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how you get how you get a short-term policy versus a long-term policy just like we suspended um some of these policies when we were dealing with beverly cleary overcrowding where we said no you don't get to attend your school to the highest grade you're overcrowded we're going to move you now so we need to consider things like that otherwise we're going to have substantially under enrolled schools for a long time so that's that's yes so i'm talking about a suspension of current policy uh in the short term as we go through this whole rebalancing process that we've talked about for southeast north and northeast thank you for clarifying good okay thank you thanks thank you i don't agree with you but thank you for i do understand now jonathan director bailey and i go ahead uh before director scott i guess there was one clarification where uh so understanding that clarification director bailey is that conversation where does that conversation take place and paul's we're i i i'm just really curious that a policy conversation policy committee so here's here's where i think we are i mean i think this is a good conversation we're having tonight in terms of you know what are the priorities where are we going forward um and there's a number of very specific instructions that the southeast guiding coalition has asked us for that we will need to do as a board and or as staff depending on on the particular topic that we need to do before they can really dig into their work i mean they can do some orientation stuff but you know we need to make some decisions collectively before then and so i i don't think it's a policy committee per se i think what we need to do in the short term in terms of the rules and engagement is really very specific to and i think the issues in southeast are going to come up in north and northeast as well it's going to be the same kind of issues as we reconfigure as we rebalance we need to um look at the particulars and have that inform us of how we're going to proceed uh because because if nothing else you know if if they make some boundary proposals and flow runs the numbers flow being our consultant with uh that has the big database we need to be clear on what the rules are because if if it's you stay in your current school till the highest grade um or if it's we're going to move you now that makes a difference in enrollment and how the boundaries get drawn and so on so um again i don't think it's a policy it's an it i don't think it's policy committee i think it's um it can be a subset of us if it's a task force or it can be the group as a whole but we're going to have to have another one of these where we make some very serious decisions going forward about how how we deal with boundary changes and what we're going to do with creative science i mean that's director scott you had a big issue hanging out there yeah i know you're trying to move this on so i'll just put this out as a question um for for for later i i i hear the the the um um sort of the statements around narrowing and i agree with that i think i think the focus on staff capacity and community capacity that director medwards brought up are really valuable and something we need to really focus on what i guess i don't want to lose sight of those when i heard this sort of you know in order to do balancing right we need to do it from the river you know to the outer boundary i didn't take that as a as a um oh we'll never be able to do that i took as maybe maybe this year's not the year we do it but i think that's exactly the work we should be doing so i i didn't hear from my colleagues whether they agree with that whether this was sort of a put it off to never do it or just put it off until there's a little bit more capacity but for me that's exactly how you address boundary changes through an equity lens as you look at the entire thing you make the adjustments that are needed um to sort of bring that and and also beginning a process of how do we start doing this every ten years right or even every five years because in migration within the city is very very rapid and i will just make a random analogy the urban growth boundary is on a regular schedule because we know that changes happen all the time and so
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we always have to come back and be looking are we looking ahead five or ten years do we have enough land and and i think part of the problem with with pbs is since we're not on a regular schedule it feels abnormal but this is the normal work of a school board and and every set period of time whether it's five or ten years we need to be redrawing some boundaries because people are going to move but schools don't we all know that um so i i don't want to shy away from the big stuff although i think the point about our short term capacity and medium to capacity is really important i appreciate that so uh uh superintendent guerrero do you want to give us a quick uh overview of the resource that's in this agenda item so again for this topic uh board our desired outcome is for the board and pps senior leadership to clarify what it believes to be the most important uh focus areas in the next 12 months in the next year so superintendent guerrero good evening directors it's tough to just stand back and really just listen but i think that's part of the exercise here is i appreciate directors making the time tonight to really dive into this important set of related topics because it's complex and i haven't heard directors disagree about the list of goals that talk about k-8 reconfiguration or addressing school boundaries or how do we feel about co-locations and language pathways how do we feel about a continuum of sped programming that we should be offering how important it is to rebalance high schools all of those are laudable goals um and so i debate around do you prioritize uh do you do you get to all of them over time do some trump others at certain periods um i think that it's an important conversation um but what i'm hearing is we want to be that more equitable school system you shared stories about uh your own experiences with school transitions some of you have heard me give a keynote remark around all of my transitions and those weren't exactly positive for me um and so you know going into this next phase of work with eyes wide open and i think some consensus agreement uh in fairness to not just staff but really the southeast guiding coalition who i think has posed some thoughtful questions um they've been immersed in it and i think legitimately they're raising here's some here's some guidance or range of flexibility we may have available that it would be helpful to sort of have clarity around so we can proceed with a next body of work and how wide and how narrow that body of work is in this next phase um i guess my point uh in this next section is um this work requires a lot of dedicated time and effort not just by staff not just by community representatives but board members too um uh in in the midst of the context that we find ourselves in um and we have quite a list of equally important priorities that we have to balance uh our capacity uh with so in this next part of the agenda just and i don't think we have to take a lot of time on this but to acknowledge there's some other key focus areas that preoccupy uh oftentimes the same set of people um and so and for me uh and i know from my colleagues the number one thing we're consumed by right now is getting our students back to school and sort of giving them the meaningful continuity of learning that uh we we know that you know we're anxious to provide and doing that in a healthy safe way it meets guidelines that uh protects our employees and everyone else who's on campus so uh and that's a source of a lot of back and forth conversation right now and a lot of creative thinking uh about how we do that and how do we do that thoughtfully in consultation with experts uh who can guide those conversations so i'd say uh that should be the preeminent priority for for all of us uh right now and we'll get a another update uh tomorrow night uh and so you've seen since last march uh we've had to sort of really change up our service delivery to to one that's uh distance learning um we saw the metrics scarily uh really peak and go up and and really impact the community and they still are we have begun each week to add in limited in person opportunities for some of our more impacted students with with volunteer teachers and we're in the midst of working through plans for elementary middle and high school hybrid
02h 15m 00s
plans with our labor partners which requires a lot of careful negotiation uh to make sure everyone's concerns are addressed there so there's the getting back to to in person school that that uh is is preoccupying staff capacity simultaneously the business of the district uh is decision uh we set out to engage in a multi in the development of a multi-year road map a strategic plan for this district that is that is supposed to serve as the accompaniment to the vision we spent a year on the vision we heard from the community we have a beautiful product but it's only a glossy document if you don't actually have a blueprint for how you're going to make it true and so our goal has been to create those operational steps required so that over time you see more and more of those elements uh be observable and so staff was making some headway there then the pandemic hit and so we've fallen a few months behind in that work but we've actually continued coming together to continue sort of articulating uh what hopefully will be a draft strategic plan that we can begin to sort of present and and wrestle and speak to you about so that work is is going on and even as emerging themes of that multi-year strategic plan emerged we've been trying to keep those in mind as we develop a budget for the coming school year so some of what i'm going to talk about shouldn't be surprised to you is a preview of the priorities you're going to hear that there's a focus on with our our budget proposal because we know when we get to a good place with this a multi-year strategic plan will drive resource management and allocation and it's been a bit upside down for a number of years where the budget is actually sort of uh driving the work so this this this body of work around strategic planning and resource alignment is also another sort of heavy task that again a lot of the same senior staff are engaged in right now we have a budget calendar we're trying to observe we've tried to brief board members a little bit along the way as as some things become clear and we have a cbrc and other mechanisms that we want to sort of respectfully observe but our goal is to bring forth a budget proposal that in it embeds some of the things you'll see eventually in the strategic plan and uh and we want to be able to and we look forward to all of that conversation now strategic planning just isn't around um you know those elements of our vision there'll be some prioritized system shifts some work that focus groups of teachers have identified in our educator elements focus groups of students who have talked about what the graduate portrait should look like when you backward map it to middle school to early ad and there's some excitement that's happening there we're looking forward to sharing with you there's also some other long-range planning there's long-range facilities planning uh and from here we're grateful for uh the school modernization bond once again being passed at the rate that it was um the 2020 school modernization bond that's another heavy lift um and it's not just a facilities exercise to say well the folks down on l1 in the building can take care of that we'll focus on the rest we know that this bond package has instructional implications primarily the curriculum adoptions which our team is super excited about finally after decades to really bring teachers together to identify what are those high quality instructional materials that our students need access to and so and there's a process we have to observe there and we have to be very sort of sequential and methodical about how we make those decisions for some pretty major uh investments uh so there's the 2020 school bond i'll go back up on the agenda there's middle school redesign all of this conversation about reconfiguring ik aids is is with the with the goal of getting them into comprehensive middle schools well unless you're doing something different with your middle schools you're gonna you're racing to get them back into sort of these traditional models and we we've done sort of a load of initial thinking some of you joined us in some district visits uh we know that one of the first steps in really embarking on this middle school redesign work is to really do these empathy tours with our students what is it in that what is it in these in the middle grades experience that you would hope to be exposed to and we know that it's going to not look like your typical sixth period traditional middle school it'll probably be something a lot more interdisciplinary something much more project based something that pays attention to youth development
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in middle school what a great time to really do that during those awkward years when kids are trying to figure out their identity and what they want to stand for and what their interests might be and what a great time to explore um what the possibilities out there so through exposure through you know expanded elective wheels or or testing out pathways they may want to choose to pursue when they arrive at high school but the notion being that they will leave the eighth grade with some kind of a capstone which we've talked about before and we have not forgotten this we are still very much on that track to be able to reflect on how far they've come as an individual the graduate portrait talks about certain skills and dispositions well by the eighth grade they should be somewhere along the continuum with each of those skills and dispositions and how wonderful for a student to have the sense of self-reflection and agency to say here's where i am in being that kind of a global steward that the graduate portrait comes from or here are some of the empathy skills that i think i've i'm demonstrating or that i want to work on it's that kind of more authentic assessment that we've talked about on many board nights um that isn't just driven by a high stakes test but it's actually something much more holistic and so it's that middle school redesign work that we're excited to kick off in the next couple of days i think you're going to be observing an announcement for a new middle school redesign director which you won't be surprised to hear is one of our current school leaders who's excited to leave this work uh alongside also uh a new we have a new collab principal we have a cohort of middle school principals who have been meeting all year actually to begin to talk about some of the themes that and strands of work that come with middle school redesign the combination of some central staff capacity work the cohort of comprehensive middle schools as well as some technical assistance and what our students in a student-centered process are going to lead the way in the way that we in portland public schools design middle schools of the future i think is exciting because then then we're reconfiguring schools for something new innovative that better meets the needs of our students and we know that in designing those experiences that's going to require a lot of educator input to think and do differently than the way we've played middle school in the past so there's middle school redesign in the initial couple of phases uh that we'll be embarking on concurrently with everything else going on and so and then i'll mention the third and this is an exhaustive list our bond also had this element of a center for black student excellence and if you want to talk about community engagement i mean this one in particular uh is really going to need to bring in all of our stakeholders when we talk about how and this is i think you know a first of its kind thing in the country if we get it right how do you take an entire sort of nucleus of a city a neighborhood albina in this case and talk about all sectors the the educational institutions as a slice uh the housing opportunities the job opportunities the you know all aspects of thinking of that cradle to college continue on um how do we have some indicators about what success would look like if we had an actual children youth and families agenda for a part of town that hopefully we could scale over time across the city but if we start in a underserved community that has a lot of brilliance and assets within it and we start to focus an effort in a set of schools that has an opportunity to modernize and build that's best suited and revolves around the students that we serve there what kind of a counter exciting counter narrative could be created and so this notion of a center for black student excellence is yes it's going to require a lot of internal work a lot of future conversations with directors that we look forward to and and primarily a lot of conversations with our community stakeholders because this is their effort and so when you look at strategic plan and budget development 2020 school bond modernization middle school redesign center for black student excellence and the day-to-day work of school and district improvement and what our staff is out in schools now even as we observe programming and limited in-person staff we want to be really clear about communicating what the priorities are and if it's something else besides the ones i've just described um then it's going to be important to know what what conscious trade-off we're making but if these are the right
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sort of key initiatives for for the immediate term um to what degree how deep do we want to go in this enrollment balancing work that seems necessary uh in the next six months in the next 12 months but i just want to delay in the context of a lot of the same staff also being tasked on these other very key initiatives that also uh are trying to provide uh opportunities for for our students so i think that's hopefully what you were looking for jonathan is is to just lay a little context here off the cuff um so that so that okay absolutely appreciate it super ken guerrero so um for this this agenda item what i love to do is actually uh have every board member kind of react to and reflect on what the superintendent just shared and how does that sit within uh your own priorities and your own uh collective efforts moving forward i love to go around and hear from every single one uh and then we'll move transition over to the next item which is around community engagement um which i know we're really excited to to to talk about uh and then i do want to note that i i'm going to try to really get us out of the door 9 15 maybe 9 20 knowing that we all have a board meeting tomorrow that's probably going to go longer than three hours um and so i want to be just conscious of everybody else's all of our time so with that who would like to kick us off in this agenda item i feel like i've spoken a lot but in the interest of time i'll kick it off um i really i really appreciate um this tremendously and i think it loops back to again what director medward said earlier about you know what what should be our main focus and um i i actually almost feel like we should have we should have led off with this because it is so um encompassing of the work that's going on in the district um yeah i mean my reaction is that this is exactly where our our our focus needs to be um and you know obviously in terms of of reopening and getting our students back you know towards in-person school absolutely important and then you know that strategic planning and resource realignment this is the this is the urgent but but i'm sorry it's the important but less urgent work that often goes by the wayside and so by by focusing on it and making sure it's happening i think it's it's really important and then yeah i think the key strategic initiatives around middle school redesign and getting that center for black student excellence could be so transformative um for our students and our entire district for all of our students in the district um and then obviously the the public trust that comes with the school bond so um everything here i'm in agreement with and for me it gets back to highlight that that issue of how do we stage these things moving forward boundary issues are really important and there are some things that have to be done and i've appreciated you know hearing we you know we you know we have to do harrison park but and a couple other things but but i think having a really uh you know a genuine conversation we set the the south we set the the boundary coalition work not just for southeast but for the the district before the pandemic so it doesn't have to continue on the same timeline and i think we have been sort of going down that road but we don't we don't have to and i am very open not to taking it off the table as i said just a few minutes ago i think we need to to plan it out but but it doesn't have to be this year it doesn't have to be in 20 you know a year we in 2021 it could be in 2022 or or 2023 um and and i think that that recognizing where people are not just in terms of staff capacity but also just mental capacity right and and you know 2020 was a dramatic year and um there are a lot of people hitting walls and whether they're community members or staff members or board members um i think you know it's it's worth taking all that into account so um this is hugely important and and and i put this more important than the boundary work we're talking about um with the exception of some of the things that are mandatory we have to get done thank you director who would like to go next um i'll go next director to pass as i looked over these um three things i thought which two would i prioritize which which one would would drop off my plate i thought it was interesting that under bullet point three the key strategic initiatives that the middle school redesign and the center for black excellence are are kind of in that same bucket i do know of some instances where either public organizations in some cases non-profits have taken strategic planning off the table um in in lieu of the in lieu of you know just continuing on with the work lessening
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the um the staff you know requirements of staff time the city of portland for instance has been um very you know has a lot of parents that are juggling um you know cdl and and their jobs and so we've you know put some temporary uh policies in place that lessens the burden on staff um i think that that's really important right now um i think director scott said people are hitting walls and that's true um if if it were me i would prioritize number one and that's the path toward in-person learning i think is really important and appreciate the work that's already gone into that um and then the key strategic initiatives um i think are also important the middle school redesign and the development of the center for black student excellence although i i think i agree with director scott that the middle school redesign um i i feel like that could happen it could happen later we've gotten through phase one and maybe we take a pause in between phase one and phase two wrap up what we've learned from phase one improve on the process and pick it up in in 12 months thank you director to pass who would like to go next i would agree with what andrew said about um i'm just i'm tired and apparently not able to focus i i agreed with what andrew said don't remember what it was at this point so that's how my brain is working tonight um okay so i really think that you know that i am really deeply concerned about our capacity what we are asking our staff to do um and i think all of it is super important and i think you know one of the really hard things of this place and time where we are is i think we were on an amazing trajectory with fundamental um organizational transformation transformational change that was happening and then the pandemic hit and our staff has continued on that trajectory and dealt with you know what does it mean to do pandemic life well and start to look to reopening and so now we're trying to figure out how do we get back to some semblance of abnormal like i think shutting down an organization like ours is easier than restarting one slowly and safely um so so that's my biggest concern is i think we i really think um you know the piece about harrison park needs to happen but i do agree with you know i remember what i agreed with you about andrew is i would like us to do river to just past 205 however far we go east um and plan to do that maybe in 2022 i don't want that work i think director deposit you spoke to you know who's who's not benefiting from these things and who continually i think director measures you said continually are the people who who get the short end of the stick in the way the district does things so i'd like us to have a long-term plan but i'd like us to really focus on maybe just doing the harrison park piece this next year and then when when things get back to normal uh whatever that looks like we can do that broader work of really fundamentally looking at what does equity look like in our district and and i think andrew your comment about we need to do this on a schedule every five years um every 10 years whatever and just have this this adjustment we are so fundamentally out of alignment this is huge work but this should be a you know going forward from this place of change should be just minor adjustments but we can't take on that huge massive adjustment right in this moment with everything else our staff is being tasked with so that's that's where i am thank you chair i can weigh in because i don't think it's going to be that long i started out this conversation with a i think we have a lot on our plate um and i look at where where we need to devote our focus and i mean ev every single school is going to require um support from the central office the full support from um the staff that work there so we're going to be tapped out it's not just like hey this is something that's happening over in one part of the district i think that's um so clearly um i mean that that has to be the num the number one thing um and you know i i look at um and i don't know if enough about the strategic planning process whether there's some external facing piece to it or whether it's more of an internal so if it's more of an internal i think um that's for staff to gauge um
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the capacity on that um i will say you know for me we middle school redesign and i consider that as sort of part and parcel if i don't want there to be a um we can't wait to start the work because frankly we opened three tuna middle schools um three years ago and we're still waiting for um that vision to be infused and the center for black student excellence so i i find little on here that i would um substitute for a broader enrollment balancing effort so to me that's why i land on the like we absolutely have to do these things um on that are the three focus areas so to me that tells me how do we scope down or sequence out the enrollment balancing work but harrison park has to happen i'm just i'm not going to lose sight of that i've been saying it for four years i can go um superintendent i really appreciate you um putting these priorities explicitly in this conversation to remind us what is the what of everything that we're working on right now um i agree that we should um be as narrow in our focus with the second phase of this work as is practical and when i say practical um i i would be open to postponing um harrison park however what i what i can't do is leave these schools that are dramatically underenrolled because we've just lopped off their middle grades or we're planning to lop off their middle grades leave them hanging for a few years and harrison park is just inextricably linked with the school communities that are feeding to catalog which is why i think that is work that should be considered sooner rather than later um but otherwise um you know i agree that we are in an unprecedented moment where we really need to focus our efforts on some other significant things and importantly on the middle school redesign because superintendent you have always reminded us when we talk about this enrollment balancing work that it really doesn't matter if you're in a k-8 or a uh you know k5 and a middle school what matters is what's going on in that building and part of why we're doing this wasn't just reconfiguring for reconfiguring sake it was because the program for the middle grade students in our k-8s was not the program that they needed and they deserved so it wasn't about just creating middle schools um so that that to me is the important work that we need to keep our eye on so um i hope that's helpful um and i appreciate you you framing this exercise in terms of all of our broader most important work i think you're under constant senior representative director bailey dr moore i think that covers everybody it's it's weird because i'm sort of looking at nathaniel trying to make eye contact but that doesn't exactly work through zoom say nathaniel did you want to jump in or well i've got a bit of a question um i'm i'm confused as to why we're talking about these uh wider questions and wider broader goals in the context of this work session um i'm sorry if i missed that but i don't really understand the purpose of this activity yeah so this activity uh was meant to as we think about um as you think about in our outcome was for the board and the pps leadership to clarify the top focus areas over the next year um around all of the things that we're doing as a system so uh we're trying to get students back to school we're uh trying to finalize our strategic planning and resource alignment and then we have some key strategy initiatives and so how did those sit within the conversation that we were
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having about enrollment balancing and uh program program balancing so so what kind of feedback are you looking for i'm i'm i'm sorry but yeah uh i mean so as you think about the what what we as a central office and as a board should prioritize right these areas or and or enrollment balancing what are your reflections or what are your thoughts on how we should proceed as a collective well i think it's obviously important to um do the enrollment balancing work for all of the reasons that we have discussed um just looking at the document um i think it's incredibly important that we also uh work to implement the 2020 bond as well as especially the center for black student excellence um i would i mean we really cannot put that off anymore now that we have passed the bond it is absolutely critical that we begin that process as soon as possible um i think that's really all of the initial thoughts i have jonathan can i take a crack because i think nathaniel asked a good question i haven't heard anybody disagree that we have some really important uh enrollment and program balancing work to do the only question is how ambitious how aggressive do we want to be about the scope of that work in the coming year when we have these other important district priorities is it more important than those priorities that we should go you know go really deep on the enrollment work and we're okay with that trade-off or do we do we want to find sort of what the right balance is because we're talking about a finite capacity that all of us have and we want to do a quality job we could do it all but it won't turn out very well i think director lowry chair lowry had a really good point and human resources and staff burnout are very real i know many of the staff here have not taken a vacation for instance in over a year and that's concerning um to me as a community member and as a board member that cares about people that um no one's been able to take advantage of you know i mean even the restorative a couple of days off without having a phone on you is is very very important right now i mean it's not just kids mental health it's the adults in the system and you make better decisions when you're refreshed and so i'm really concerned about you know just doing things i'd rather do fewer things well and slower then i mean i think we're looking at these three priority areas and you know like i already said the opening schools is is safely is a is a huge priority and it's those other two that i think we need to discuss um how how how much do we want to do are we going to prioritize quantity over quality i would i would i would vote for quality and a slower process um personally i just want to appreciate you saying that director depos there's a reason you only see that very few staff here tonight and part of that is because i issued a really clear directive earlier today to say you don't need to be here with everything we have on our plate right now and it's not because they took the night off they're in another space between other planning and work right now to be ready frankly for tomorrow's board meeting and other things on their agenda for this week so uh i'm trying to be conscious of that too but i just want to make that that's why you don't see the full cabinet on the screen right now is there's no other way right now that we're trying to to get through these these times without sharing some leadership and distributing our energy thank you dr moore or director bailey um so i just want to say for the record i know deputy superintendent hertz had at least an entire weekend off over christmas break so that's that that is a that is a joke um yeah and i i hope i've been pretty clear to all of our staff that these are incredibly stressful times and even before before this i thought people were working at a
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burnout rate um so i'm um i appreciate the question and i appreciate the the priorities posed and you know our agreement that yeah they're all important um i what i can't judge um because i don't have the information is just how how much you know that sort of gradation of how much we can pull off um i'm also left with some contradictions um that this board was in such a hurry uh to get uh creston students into middle school and i totally get that and we've had parents at cesar chavez who three years ago begged us to get their kids into a middle school and so it's okay to put that off but we couldn't put off creston um i just have to point that out again not saying there's a right or wrong here but this is some of the things that we're dealing with on the on the ground level it's very tough choices that we've had to make all along in terms of as i as a board member have watched our superintendent and and staff leadership rebuild this district from the foundation up again with a lot of collaboration from our educators from our principals from all our staff and doing that so i don't know that i can say what i think the priorities are because i don't have that sense of the weight of or the range of weights for each of those pieces of work i um i i really thought it was interesting what director de pass said about well maybe we put some of this strategic planning work on the back burner for right now because we've got so much stuff that's right here i'd love to hear staff reaction to that as we go forward to me yes reopening is priority number one and doing that well and secondly the center for black student excellence i think is rises to my second priority if you had to ask that's just such a crucial process and again this board has has made it very clear in our goals that the achievement of black and native students is our our number one charge so that to me is a hugely important process to me the 2020 bond work outside of that um the pure physical planning and rebuilding of schools we get the staff to do that that's going to happen that's funded uh so that's that's going to happen i don't worry about that i think the the adoption curriculum adoption process is as proposed was really aggressive and while it's really important maybe we slowed down a bit on that um again looking you know just just looking at the whole workload that was that was going to be a crush already and maybe we slow it down and by slowing it down are you able to get more collaboration again with our educators as part of that process it makes it easier when the process is a bit slower and nothing you know that's that's a real area that we can build that collaboration and trust in that adoption just makes it makes the adoption go that much better um and ensures that we get the right right materials that teachers are going to say yeah i want a piece of that i can see where i can use that um so i think that's a great topic to start start talking about but um again superintendent gerardo you're you're the guy we hired to help make some of those judgments because you of all people know that workload know the strain know the level of burnout i mean i know it's it's there but i don't know how deep that is and how much we need to scale back in that sense so that's that's a judgment call that i don't have that
02h 50m 00s
um it's really up to you and your staff to talk that through um again you know we're working on this uh basically a climate sustainability policy right now and human sustainability uh to me is really important in terms of how we do this work going forward so psy um there we go i don't know if that's any help but that's that's top ahead that's great i really appreciate it uh dr moore i'm director bailey i i work in sustainability and so i i think that's another another reason i'm concerned about it because that human resources are also finite so dr moore so um you know i'm looking at this piece of paper i i i don't see a single thing that i think we can afford to put on the back burner um so i think all of these are critical um i think the um i would be a little concerned actually if if we slow down on the strategic planning process because i think that's going to help [Music] around it's going to help provide framework for budget building going forward and um you know it may not end up being as finished polished as you might want it to be at this stage um and that may be one of the things that has to give way but i think keeping keeping the strategic planning um process alive i i think is important so in terms of um how this relates to the phase two in southeast um um i do think that we need to go forward with harrison park um we have made promises i i don't like making promises that we can't keep so um i do think we need to prioritize that um but i would say beyond that um given realities i i would probably reluctantly be okay with the minimalist brief for the southeast guiding coalition at this point um i think there's you know as i've said many times everything is connected to everything and if you if you try to do just a little piece of the the larger boundary work at this point um i think it's going to end up uh you're not going to be able to contain that and come up with a you know a solution that is going to be both um satisfying and meaningful in terms of correcting the imbalances um [Music] so and it pains me to say this let me just say that again um but i do think we need to be realistic um along the same lines um at this point i wonder about the policy work even around the enrollment policies um having been down this road before i can tell you that policy changes are almost as controversial as actually changing boundaries i have i have been in those discussions and i can tell you that school communities i mean it may be different now because people are people are maxed out and you know i have to say i admit to being maxed out my own self so i'm sympathetic um but if if we are going to tackle policy revisions um [Music] as chair of the policy committee i i want to have some assurance
02h 55m 00s
that um the policy committee will be able to to do that work with um with real fidelity to the the kinds of um commitments to equity uh that that we talk about all the time um which may mean um proposing or potentially adopting policy changes that would not that could provoke a negative reaction so and and that's going to be that's board work primarily although staff are clearly going to be involved um but it would be helpful to me um if if my fellow board members could um give give me some sense of how much time effort energy and pushback they're going to be willing to endure in order to make really meaningful changes in policy um and again we're talking about setting of uh creating a foundation for um a system that would allow pps to make regular adjustments um so we're talking about setting up like a systemic foundation for for enrollment balancing in perpetuity um anyway so there you go um i i think we need to be very clear with the southeast guiding coalition about what we collectively consider to be um indispensable work necessary essential work that they need to complete um [Music] and and also some sense of you know our collective commitment to um to allow them to work with fidelity so i appreciate it dr moore uh superintendent guru any anything that you would like to reflect on uh or share uh with the board based on what you heard from all eight of them i i appreciated hearing uh each director [Music] and i guess what it makes me think of is um the trade-off doesn't have to be all or nothing in in one area so if you put each priority or initiative on a dial of ten uh something might be a nine something might be a six something might be a four for the coming school year but we we maintain a level of progress because it is important work and it's something foundational so i think part of the work that's going to be important for us to reflect on post this conversation is how do we do that i think director bailey gave a good example the curriculum adoption is for every content area at every grade level so maybe we're too ambitious to think in 12 months we're going to do that but maybe we take math is underway but maybe we start with one or two and we really learn from that process and how we engage our teachers and so it's been it's been many years since they've had any new materials so people are going to be thankful to uh finally get some refreshed curriculum so so i think we just have to do a little calibrating and and then be maybe we we come back for a follow-up conversation or in the course of our continued conversations about uh where where we bed high and where we sort of keep the work simmering and maybe what needs to wait until our schools are open and underway and we can pick that back up again and what i'm hearing uh most of all is is a consensus around narrowing the enrollment and program balancing work for this next phase it sounds like uh harrison park sounds like it's critical and so i think that already sets us on a road where we can start to really dive into sort of then what are the parameters what are the flexibilities and bumper rails and how do we think about the questions and the feedback the guiding coalition has presented around um you know what's available to them in the way of iteration and how do we also pay really mindful attention to the really important community engagement that that will need to take place and so i think that's probably uh if that makes sense a good next level of work
03h 00m 00s
uh so i appreciate sort of the investment of time and thinking here because i think it will help to set the stage for this enrollment phase two as well as our own staff's sort of calibration of uh where we put our time and effort in the next 12 months absolutely thank you superintendent so uh the next agenda item or next topic is around community engagement but given what uh you know there's a finite scope of work around harrison park i think you know i'll propose this and if folks want to continue for another 30 minutes around engagement but what i would propose is holding an engaged conversation around holding the conversation now stopping the conversation recalibrating connecting with claire to really scope out this work based on our conversation and then come back to you all around a conversation about successes and opportunities related to engagement i want to put that on the table knowing that it is 9 15 9 17 i said that we would try to get out of here by 9 20. but also this is your board meeting and i want to respect that this is your your time to engage i'm going to vote for um wrapping up now we've got a long night tomorrow work day tomorrow um to me we've hit a logical we've covered a lot of territory and i don't i think we can have the next conversation in after a reasonable increment of time without having any degradation in um the quality of the the conversation and the feedback to the community do i hear any opposition to that i mean that's a weird question to ask is anybody i think this is good adoption by acclimation great well i just want to thank everybody for allowing me to facilitate uh you all i hope i didn't uh yeah it was a great time i we got a lot accomplished i so really appreciate that uh i see nathaniel's hand up so i will representative shu thank you um if we're not doing the engagement conversation tonight i really feel that it is essential that we have this conversation at some point soon we cannot put it off too long at all absolutely i just had to get that off my chest absolutely nice job tonight jonathan agreed thank you chair lowry i'll turn it over to you i think all i have left to do is officially adjourn us and see you all back here uh 6 p.m tomorrow night remember our 5 p.m session got cancelled so you you gained an hour of your life oh my god what are we going to do with that time i i think we can all read policies on uh balance and enrollment with our time prepare for my 6 a.m call

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)

2021-02-22 PPS School Board Work Session

Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

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Event 1: PPS Board of Education Work Session - 2/22/2021

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