2021-03-04 PPS School Board School Improvement Bond Committee Meeting

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District Portland Public Schools
Date 2021-03-04
Time 16:30:00
Venue Virtual/Online
Meeting Type committee
Directors Present missing
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Event 1: PPS Board of Education's School Improvement Bond Committee - 3/04/21

00h 00m 00s
okay do you want to introduce yourselves just say your name and your your affiliation okay um i'm tay i am a student representative thank you who do you want to pass it to tay and i will pass it to [Music] andrew scott cool thanks tay um i'm andrew scott i'm a school board member and i will pass it to craig thanks andrew hello everybody craig cuellar deputy superintendent for instruction in school communities and gonna go ahead and pass that to the square below me luis valentino uh good afternoon everyone luis valentino chief academic officer and i will pass it on to marina creswell i've already gone but i'll go that's it to uh steve aphros thank you for the toss hi i'm uh steve a senior project manager uh in osm uh over the kellogg project but i'm also helping on the roosevelt phase four project i'll pass it on to let's see travis hi i'm travis parkey i'm a senior director in the office of technology and i will pass that to don wolfe good afternoon everyone don wolf i am the chief technology officer for the school district and i think mary you have not gone yet i have not mary weiner manager of instructional resource adoption and my audio wasn't quite working so if anybody can volunteer who hasn't introduced themselves that would be great i can volunteer this is amy constance director and member of this committee multitasking then i'll join you on camera in a couple minutes i will pass it to nathaniel shu i'm nathaniel student representative to the board and current senior at jefferson high school ah let's see uh superintendent guerrero have you gone i have not thank you nathaniel good evening everybody guadalupe guerrero superintendent now this is a test claire have you gone i see one person that hasn't gone that i don't know i apologize raquel oh that's me um i'm rolando akilazon i'm a project manager with the osm and uh working on the kellogg project as well and the uh the roosevelt edition and emily i think you have gone i'm emily courtney's director of purchasing and contracting i think we've got everybody i think that's it um i'll give it a moment has everybody had a chance to say your name and your affiliation um cara is there any public comment tonight no okay um i just want to acknowledge um the previous meeting minutes were sent out um and i wanted to um for amy constance benefit just let you know that we you'd ask to add the contracting practices um and processes and we've added that to the work plan so we made that edit and added that to um april's agenda and there was also a request to more frequently share or have discussion regarding educational specification and we're uh we've responsive to that by adding that in tonight um so i think the first thing on our agenda is that we're going to do a technology scope overview and don is that is that you i almost started talking without unmuting myself yes that is me and uh dr travis pacquiao are gonna both we're gonna team up on that fantastic now not normally presenting in these roseanne i'm not sure are you is somebody else running the presentation or am i sharing i'm sorry i thought you were sharing but i'm happy to do it for you i can totally do that as well i gotta let you know um don that we love seeing the technology chief um struggling with technology so not struggling questioning donna let you run it okay um just need to make sure that there we go
00h 05m 00s
i'm gonna give you this one let me get that and hit share and then hit present nope i i watched that happen so many times that people hit share and not present rather than so there we are you all can see everything effectively yes yes we can okay so i will start um without that um what we're seeing here is just on this first slide is the overview of a very high level of what the voters approved for us to move forward in a technology bond uh as part of the 2020 bond effort so um it's 128 million dollars um that that will be dedicated for for technology i'm going to hand it over for the next couple of slides for for travis to work through some of the details but the larger buckets are infrastructure and security the device refresh and replacement for students and for staff classroom modernization and then the erp replacement and then we've got that fund down there at the bottom called program administration which um from the initial work that we've done with all of our estimates with contingency and whatnot that has grown from the initial plan we've we've moved all of the contingency out of the individual budgets and into the program administration fund and that's also where we'll be trying um running our contractors and whatnot through so travis um hello everyone um so just kind of wanted to walk through the the pieces of these larger um pillars of projects so the first one is infrastructure and security and um it is the largest uh of the projects um but it's also the the most unseen and there's a laundry list of of technical debt that we're really addressing in here um one of the projects that we're we're doing here is replacing switches in the data center and in our schools and these are typically solid state devices uh that ensure that network traffic reaches its destination inside the building but because they're solid state they really don't have a failure rate or failure mode where they kind of degrade over time they either work or they don't work and recently we've seen a lot of these start to not work and when they don't work they take out lots of things connected to them they take out our wireless infrastructure they take out our phones in the classrooms they're they're pretty severe so when they go out we we really end up being highly impacted by that so the last times that that these were replaced in volume was 2010 and we want to get through and go through all the switches in the buildings and the switches in our data center in addition to that we're replacing the wireless up or the wireless access points that were installed in 2010. these were mounted in the hallways and since then there's been a lot of frequency improvements a lot of a lot of bandwidth improvements to them and there's also been improvements to the standards the the communications protocols that they communicate by and and a big chunk of that was when when we did put these in we we kind of had this mindset of having a few carts of of machines in the classrooms and those would be moved from classroom to classroom as those classes had activities that would call upon those devices and now we're trying to support hundreds of devices with a single one of those access points and they just simply can't keep up so um we do need to replace those those are at the end of their lives um also past the end of life is our phone handsets and we'll be replacing all of those within the district that's a fairly large project and a few words for a lot of work we're also installing what's called fiber interconnects and this will help us to take advantage of redundant fiber connections between each of our schools so higher bandwidth much higher reliability we're also adding new and additional firewalls so this is going to give us more security capabilities but also help us deal with the increased bandwidth that we're now using because of all the additional devices on our network one of the big pieces that this is going to focus on though is a security project as well now this is going to focus on our security and privacy posture and that's going to look at a in-depth assessment of the current state of security for pps but also an identification of systems for replacement and all of that activity is going to culminate in a security dashboard for our technical team members to be able to actively manage security issues and be able to address them so just recently on this project we've completed a invitation to bid for the wiring and switches that happened today and we will be procuring that security assessment very shortly uh moving forward we have a device refresh
00h 10m 00s
and this is travis can i ask a quick question please sure hockey hi this is director stem i don't think we've met nice to meet you um i have a question about all of those projects under infrastructure and security um which ones there or how many of those would you say are giving us a significantly improved capacity or rel versus uh replacement of obsolete and worn out you know former functions um how much of an upgrade really are we getting within this category it's difficult to to separate some of those out so when we do something like replace the wireless access point that is a replacement of a device that is end of life and nearing its failure point but in addition to doing that it's not replacing it with a like a like kind device we can't even purchase those anymore so it's actually upgrading with a new device that can instead of say that the previous device that was capable of about 120 connections support about 450. so so from uh from a teacher's eye view or even a kid's eye view within our buildings um they won't just have things that work where there once were things that didn't work they'll actually have things that work a lot better correct thank you thank you i also have a couple of questions that was one of my questions was uh that you just asked um amy i'm also wondering if when we look at the phone system upgrade in the handsets are we talking about state-of-the-art telephone systems and are these replacing just the old you know phones that no one's gonna know what they look like the old phones look like that sit on your desk um i was curious about that i know that's getting a little bit into the weeds but it was along the same questioning that um director constant had regarding if we're just replacing things are we actually increasing capacity and um bringing our equipment and capability up into the 21st century you know that that's a that's a great question and kind of the kind of a similar answer so we can't we can't just replace the the older systems that we have today and be able to go out to market and buy the same the same things in a newer model or a current model we're actually we are improving that that phone system we are buying a newer model of that system and we are incr improving the back end systems that support that phone so because that phone is used for our intercom in the event of an emergency um we are we are making sure that that is the best that we can possibly buy the newest that we can possibly buy there thank you and that was part of my i was curious if these were phones just to talk on or if there were other systems connected through the phones and you answered that as well thank you are there any other questions before we go on thank you please go ahead okay um so one of the the next major project that we're working on is device replacement and kind of a sterile term for for something that's got a lot of excitement behind it so one of the big pieces of this is getting our teacher devices refreshed so that is a project that was already underway and it will actually be distributing the last few hundred of those tomorrow so this is a very powerful uh chromebook called a pixel book um it's one of the most powerful devices out there um it's it's gotten a lot of really good reception so far um we're also focusing on the purchase of student devices and there is an invitation to bid now open for chromebooks and the associated services that go with that sorry let me find my notes here again um after that we're also going to be focusing on the pre-k through two devices and that works going to beginning b beginning in the next couple of weeks and then we're going to move on to admin and support staff that we'll get to select between a few pre-selected models and then finally the license staff now the classroom modernization project is also a very large project we expect this work to take us through the next few years and that is installing a wireless access point not just in the hallway like we were talking about a few minutes ago for the infrastructure and security project but actually in the classroom itself this also includes um i'm sorry i'm sorry that was a that was a awkward interjection finish finish your thought and then okay all right sure um so that's a wireless access point in the classroom a mounted projector in the classroom a teaching workstation voice amplification and wireless connectivity to access that projector as well as a projection surface uh projection whiteboard or screen depends on the the environment that we're going to be in we've already worked through some of the pilot activity in this space done i'll talk about that a little bit later and we're going to begin the procurement
00h 15m 00s
cycles for this work a little a little later this summer one of the things if you don't mind me interjecting here travis um that this will also be covering it fits under part of the infrastructure process when you notice a wireless access point in the classroom and in the teaching spaces is that 44 of our buildings only have hallway wireless and so they don't have instructional wireless throughout the building this this will will will change that environment for the remainder of our buildings so to this point it's been our modernized schools and our tech smart schools that have gotten instructional wireless this will bridge that gap so that every one of our campuses when you walk into a building wherever you go to teach you will have um connectivity for whatever devices you need and whatever your activities will will be in that room i have a question either for you don or maybe luis this is for you but back to device refreshment and replacement post covid are we assuming that these are devices that students will have access to take home their their one-on-one devices or their devices that will live in the classroom i i'm i'm going to say at this point we haven't we haven't nailed down the final details on that but i think we're beyond the point where we can say the device only stays in the school we want to be able to support anytime anywhere learning and that doesn't mean it just happens in the classroom it would be tough to to step back and say we're gonna go do one to one but we're only going to do it part way there's there's insurance there's some other things some considerations that we have to put in place but i don't know how we move forward um and expecting our students to learn wherever wherever it's relevant for them if they don't have a device with them and and uh even in the when we're having the conversation around hybrid and and how in person the in-person aspect of it well even then we're looking at how the technology will be used inside of that space because we really want to leverage what both students and teachers have learned around the technology and its value and so we're working with kevin crotchet in don don's team to actually integrate uh the technology into our curriculum for both in-person and virtual i have um a quick question about i'm seeing the numbers of devices here and i wondering just curious what we do with these devices once they reach the end of their useful life um are we working with partners like free gree free geek that would take the devices and wipe them clean and um use them as training and is there an opportunity for career technical um education to um you know to do something similar to what free geek does which is you know refurbish and put um open open source um software on and we'll jump into that one travis it's mostly about recycling like this is a lot of um it's a lot of hardware to recycle it is so current one of the ways i'll answer that is anything that we do that we um we call it e-waste is make sure we we work with a responsible partner that does that as as environmentally friendly as as as possible um part of the pandemic has raised questions and i've been in communication with free free geek on how they can leverage our um pps's inventory of devices that are no longer livable in our environment in our schools and we're trying to figure out what that can mean for chromebooks because chromebooks are not um outside of the chrome os it's not as easily re-platformed as an old macbook pro or an old windows machine it's really easy to get linux on those um it's a bit more of a a different slot so we're still continuing to have conversations and see where we can land on that we'll have four or five years to kind of figure that out for this thank you right um if there's no other questions there um on the erp replacement um so the the current system peoplesoft is about 20 years old and you know it was built during a time where the focus and the locus of control for business process change was nit and that meant an i.t person had to become an expert in the process that they were trying to help evolve um as business evolved over that time frame it it began to tech embrace technology more and newer systems have been written that move that configuration control into the hands of the subject matter experts in groups like finance and hr so moving that authority uh makes the business process process updates a lot more agile and responsive to needs what we want to get is one of those
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systems either a newer version of what we have or a different system altogether so this is a large project of business process analysis efforts that will look at our current state perform a gap analysis and at the end of that that will create an rfp for the systems replacement can you remind us what the estimate is for this piece of the work that enterprise enterprise replacement the current budget for for the scope of work is 11 million dollars over the course of the the four years to get there um it was estimated somewhere in the 36 to 40 million dollars overall to get to a final replacement but we've broken this up into two elements because of it the um the shortened bond term on this on this bond so what do you get in that first phase that's the that's the analysis that's the business process decomposition and the gap the gap analysis so basically where are we now and where do we want to be and then please tell us what systems support that functionality and map us the process to get from here to there so what we're looking at right now is a lot of older systems that were built a lot around a lot of pps customizations and unfortunately that means you can't go out to market directly and find a system that's going to support that customization it's not going to speak very well so there's a lot of translation effort that's going to have to take place to get from where we are to that newer system but we will actually be doing the hard replacement under this bond as well or just the analysis piece no this this runs us up this this times um the timing of this will coincide with the last element of this will be the development of that rfp and that rfp will be ready to be released at the next bond effort so that we can utilize funds from the next bond effort to actually do the replacement process the procurement of uh the newer system and the the work to make that happen so the diagnosis costs 11 million dollars that is my question too i'm sorry don i didn't yes yes it's it's gonna take three three to four years of of having those experts in house and travis can speak to this a little bit better he's been through an erp replacement before um having them in-house working with our folks on a daily basis to understand how the business processes are working how they're set up documenting those um travis you can jump in and clarify where i'm what the key points that i'm missing yeah one one of the bigger aspects that we are missing as an organization is a lot of um decision guides so you get to a fork in the road on creating a business process and you can go left you can go right or you know back in the olden day you would say or you can customize and do it your own way and a lot of that in pps terms wasn't it wasn't very well documented but it was also the go your own way so there's not a there's not a whole lot of hard documentation or even industry knowledge that could say why we've got something in the position that it's in and a lot of this is going to be not just a erp migration but also a business transformation we're going to move to more standard processes we're going to move to more industry standard functions so that we we're not dealing with customization so much we're not dealing with projects and processes that are causing us to to break with norms and require custom custom code and custom knowledge to be able to understand why this happened um i just want to kind of continue on this path for a minute because um i mean i think what you're saying is that what this process is about is really developing the rfp so that we know exactly what we need not so much what my first understanding was from your description which is more of an autopsy of what we had i mean i would like to think that we know that what we have is insufficient and obsolete so we don't want to spend a lot of time and money on doing that autopsy um i'm just trying to have a little bit of a deeper understanding because an 11 million dollar investment without getting to the point of any functional improvement is a little tough to swallow and it's not so much an autopsy as it is an analysis so the current system isn't dead the current system is operating and it is operating our business it is just operating our business with a lot of maintenance and support required um it's also very uh rigid when we want to institute a process we're looking at you know a couple of hundred thousand dollars to license the
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module and then we're looking at six to nine months worth of work and five hundred thousand dollars worth of contract labor just to do something new um versus on one of the more modern platforms you can just start paying an extra two dollars per license per month in order to start using it and it's up and running so this is not just going to going to put us in a position where we can better consume those future services but we also need to understand what we're doing in the current system so that we can move them to that new service because realistically it will be another like six years until we see implementation of any new platform i would say once once we have completed that rfp process at the end of this we will be purchasing and starting that new platform immediately will we be cut over in six years that's probably that would probably be the extreme end of where this project goes may i i've got some additional questions too that i believe could be answered offline and in the interest of time and maintaining my reputation for um keeping these meetings um on time may suggest that we move on to the next topic or for you to finish mr pocky i'm sorry not to cut you off no that's that's quite all right i was i was done with this slide um don if you would mind going to the next one thank you thank you so one of the pieces here we're looking at is our bond project team so from the the office of technology we have don wolf our cto we have myself and we have mark lancaster our manager of network network and telecom uh from the osm side we have eric nays and he's functioning as our liaison for our technology projects um from nis uh we have a couple of project managers there and they are a contracted contracted group that focuses on large-scale low-voltage work in public sector environments kind of a rare find to begin with but they're also extraordinarily good at what they do jennifer clark has joined us for some of our device deployments and she has previous education technology experience as an account manager with both apple and ctl with a lot of experience on large scale deployments like this also we're going to be managing or adding additional project managers and technical staff as these projects continue to ramp up and we should be seeing some of those within the next month or two and we meet weekly with otis nis osm and sam to plan these projects and go over our progress on them so switching back to here why why is this investment needed um we have the pps vision document and that document contains nine critical elements that create the graduate portrait of a student attending portal public schools one-third of those graduate portrait elements specifically identify technology as a key component of that of that portrait um so and there are other underlying assumptions all across the other the remaining six elements within the graduate portrait that says technology is going to be important for their future for their vision for what they do once once they leave portland public schools we live in a digital world and when our students leave pbs as graduates they will need to have the skills and the understanding of what it means to be successful in their lives beyond portland public schools so in order to make those skills and opportunities accessible to our students we need to have a robust resilient technical foundation from which to support students opportunities for creation and communication exploration growth and learning and about functioning and thriving in a digital world additionally the world of curriculum and content has changed dramatically since any of us have attended a k-12 school um resources for teaching and learning as i'm certainly going to hear from dr valentino here shortly are very much digitally offered if not exclusively then key components are are only available as digital resources and if we're going to have our teaching on learning based on a curriculum that is delivered in in digital platforms we've got to have robust systems and devices available for our students and our teachers to be able to access that content finally i would argue and i'm excited about all of this work incredibly is that pps is a really large enterprise and a requirement for running a large enterprise in the 21st century is having reliable computers networks and enterprise applications
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to and connectivity to complete the work required to successfully run a k-12 school district our primary and overarching goal of this bond effort is the development of a modernized reliable resilient and secure infrastructure that meets the needs of both the classroom and of the business processes required to be a highly functional operation so to do this our technical technical infrastructure requires not just the care and maintenance that our otis staff puts in on a daily basis but it requires continual investments and the hardware and the software to remain updated to stay reliable secure and functional so it is one of the areas that um hasn't had a constant um minding of the store to make sure that we've remained current and up-to-date so that we can some we can support the the educational opportunities we want to for our students to kick this off as we're moving through these um and getting ready to to move through all those four big buckets of work we're starting a pilot process right now at two of our elementary or two of our schools one's a k-8 and one's elementary it's cesar chavez and boyce elliot humboldt these two schools are are going to pilot the full classroom modernization and at the same time the full infrastructure improvements we want to do that in a pilot structure we pick these two schools because of their challenging construction in their buildings they're both older buildings there's potential for asbestos there's potential for hard ways to get wiring through there so that we can use them as lessons learned so how do we how do we deploy this in 75 plus other schools as we move forward through this construction effort we wanted to make sure that we we could get all of our keys and all of our t's crossed and all of our eyes dotted so we know we're walking into so we can be much more efficient and we want to make sure that we can structure this in our upcoming schedule in a way that we touch a school once with these these invasive processes we don't want to have to interrupt and disrupt the school process more than one time with these so the full schedule as we roll those out which were were based on how this pilot project goes we will develop then a full schedule that will be in alignment with our theory of action in portland public schools we will we we know we have a couple of other obligations george middle school and lane middle school are recent verizon innovative learning schools editions so they have a need to have that full instructional wireless in place when they start school in the fall so while those both both of those schools align to our theory of action they also have a need that we know that once we're ready to go and apply our lessons learned they will be the next two schools that will be at the front of the line as we move forward we're our intent is to have by this summer kind of a more full schedule so we know which schools were hitting approximately at what time that we can present and provide updates on so going back to um each of the categories that travis went through um how disruptive are these activities like are these things that could be managed when school is in session and sequenced when school's in session they are they they can be pretty invasive if a school doesn't have the wire lean when we talk about replacing the fiber interconnects in a building that's getting into the ceilings or that's actually adding additional contour conduit along the walls or along the ceilings depending on the construction of the building it can be we will work to look at after hours we're going to have to complete there's no way we can we can finalize both of these projects in the four to five years if we're only focusing on summer work so finding ways that we can work after hours or in some of the schools that um in conjunction with facilities and maintenance where they have construction efforts where parts of the building are unavailable we'll try and piggyback on on that but what we don't want to do is interrupt the classroom processes so i wanted to make you aware of some upcoming investments that the board will start be seeing around the bond um this first one has a big asterisk on it it's um so these are some of the immediate spins that we're going to see starting to come out of the technology budget around the bond um didn't want to catch anybody off surprise we have a couple under the infrastructure security travis had mentioned earlier that we've got a um we just closed the invitation to bid today we should know tomorrow where um that award is going to go so that 17 million dollars represents the worst possible scenario that's based on consumer resell pricing and um it should be much less than that our security assessment's going to kick off pretty soon we've already purchased some teacher laptops um that are
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the finalized order will be this week we've just ordered some student devices that will help these will ultimately end up supporting our pk 2 efforts as well as some of our assistive technology efforts but we also need to have them we needed to get them moving quicker than than the larger order for the one-to-one effort so we ordered them now so we could help support the hybrid re-entry process and as we go back to teaching we know we're going to need some additional devices we have some classroom teaching cameras to help support some of those efforts and we'll be utilizing those throughout the district as we continue to make use of things like google meets and zoom throughout the district so we can limit the travel and then we're getting ready to launch late winter early spring some of the business readiness assessments which is probably a 75 000 investment so just wanted to make people aware as as things are starting to come in what what where the money is going no note to david roy in particular we should be mindful how we refer to these security investments because we also have significant investments in physical security improvements on the modernization side of the bond so we should be really clear with the public um what we're getting where yeah we do want to make a clear distinction between the the physical security and the cyber security efforts i think we've talked about all of these if there's questions there please let me know but these projects are currently moving and then wanted to give you an overall timeline it's it's tough to give a complete timeline right now i will call out i want to call out the infrastructure and security the classroom modernization and the erp replacement those are all going to be extent of this lifetime they of this bond they're potentially going to end in the fall of 25 that's that's our expected timeline right now the only one that's kind of a quick hit will be the device refresh and replacement efforts for our students and our staff we're anticipating having that one closed out about this time next year that's all the official slides we have if there's other ones that we haven't addressed would love to take those yeah and my apology i had to step away for a call for a few minutes um so i if you already said this i apologize on the the last side you talked about a kickoff with multnomah county on the erp replacement planning were we doing something jointly with multnomah county project what i referenced there is we had multnomah county come in they've been gracious partners and they shared their journey through their adoption and how they went about staging their their inception their their released rfp and then they're cut over to process they came and spoke to the technology group the finance group the hr group we we had about 15 people we met with them tuesday just to hear their journey just to kind of set the stage and set some some guidelines for what this work could look like and does look like and use them as a resource so we did that kickoff with them just out of uh because they're great partners great and then um on the and i'm sorry i should know this and i'm sure you said it earlier in the presentation the the funding in the bond is it just for the erp replacement planning or is there total funding in the bond for for the planning and replacement of the year it's just for the it's just for the planning and get to and having a fully vetted rfp created okay okay but you would not have implementation funding until a future bond or some other decision okay getting back to amy's point that i caught sort of the the talented question i do think it's going to be important to talk about what we're getting from that and and i know i know the system's planning and business planning process around these is significant and and i also know it can be beneficial right as you do that business process mapping um you actually identify a lot of things that you can fix even without a new erp but i think as we move forward we're going to really want to know that um and i may um ask i've done i'm probably going to ask for a separate a little bit of separate time to dive in this a little more absolutely i'd be happy to share my city of portland erp experience which is not a model you want to follow would you those are those are good lessons to learn too thanks does anyone have any other questions before we move on i don't see any hands raised i guess thank you um i think i have one question which is probably to uh the superintendent and dr valentino and don wolfe um are we am are we envisioning changing anything especially well anything in this whole bucket um based on our experience in remote learning um i mean our our bond language gives us a fair bit of leeway in terms of defining what we're gonna do
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with these projects um is there anything that we realize like wow we really kind of were we're almost on the wrong path there and we're gonna do it a little differently i'll start but a couple of the obvious places you heard don refer to you know more capable devices for for our educators and certainly a refresh for for our students uh given you know we have tens of thousands of our devices out already uh in the homes and hands of our students and then you're going to hear from dr valentino uh how bond monies will be put to use but certainly the implication for learning platform and digital resources you're going to hear some of that uh so there's a good question and a little bit of preview about how these two areas uh intersect but but don or luis do you want to add more so certainly one of the things that you will that you will hear from mary and for me is how we are reimagining the experience for student learning and the fact that what we've learned is student access uh can be 24 7 on any device not just in the classroom or the book they take home and so part of how our curriculum adoption will play out as you will hear really is about being mindful to that fact um about being more student-centered and providing students more access to content um as they navigate they're they're learning back in the classroom that it doesn't end there that it goes beyond the walls of that that is that is one um the other one is just that the what what the teacher has learned right and how they approach the learning so that there is an opportunity to use the technology in the classroom a little bit differently than they had in the past because prior to march of last year we were maybe a decade away from what we thought we were going to accomplish and all of a sudden the velocities took us to places where we didn't think we were going to be able to get to and we have and so that's exciting so how do we leverage that so your question really is asking us how are we thinking differently about how teaching and learning is going to happen into the future and it is and it one of the elements is how we procure resources that allow us to do that and you'll hear a little bit more about that this evening um and thank you and that might be a great segue if there are no other questions i'll allow um a few seconds if anybody has a few but a nice segue um dr valentino to the topic that you'll be presenting on which is the curriculum scope overview so don did you want to add anything or should i just go ahead the only piece i was going to add is the things that we're doing functionally within this bond for technology are are foundational to get us to a point where we can have a robust network on our sites the one the one thing that we do have our eye on that we knew was an issue was how do we how do we extend the wireless capabilities outside of our building so as we can do that that that is part of our planning process to see what we can do to to extend beyond our walls but not not a lot of other functional changes that we need here other than we know we need more classrooms that have access so luis maybe while you're pulling up your deck maybe i can maybe i can put in student-friendly terms an example clearly this pandemic and this opportunity with bond investments has accelerated our ability to be more one-to-one in our use of technology so you know somebody asked the curious question the other day since all of our students now have devices and all of our teachers have gotten really good at remote or distance learning what happens in the future when there's a snow day do we need to cancel school or did we just switch our our delivery uh to distance learning now that we know how to do that so it's these kinds of questions now that we get to ponder how do we exploit this really important resource that our students will use not just after this pandemic is over as just another means to access the learnings i think that's fabulous i also you know it's an important uh tool to have in our tool belt for resilience um i mean and and that requires you know maybe these conversations that are happening around municipal broadband and who is still left out of the you know the digital divide who who that's impacting still um there are kids that probably don't still don't have internet access um anywhere near their home so great that this is happening and um i think i'm going to move us on if that's okay director pass i just used that as an example i don't want to be known as the snow day grinch we also are expecting an earthquake though so um i think that you know resilience in the face of any natural or man-made disaster um is a way to deliver education to our students is great yeah it's a good investment um moving ahead um i'd like to introduce
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or um invite you to go ahead i'm dr valentino thank you thank you mr pass mary can you can you share the screen please yes thank you so as you can imagine we are excited and elated for the opportunity being afforded to us with the bond resources to more effectively address issues of equitable access to learning for all of our students but in particular our bypass student populations the use of the bond dollars for curriculum is unique to pps and it's certainly its benefits are certainly not lost on us um in our brief presentation today mary weiner who is our our manager for the the bond project and i will provide you with some context on our curriculum adoptions describing our process and sharing the scope and sequence within our adoption cycle including our timelines and our budget distributions over the next uh few years the bond dollars have provided us incredible leverage to offer comprehensive rigorous and supported curriculums across all subject areas pk 12 within the next three to four years and as you will hear from mary this is incredible and remarkable because we're talking about being able to fund across more than 12 subject areas and some that have not been adopted in over 20 years and so what that means looking at curriculum differently and in the more comprehensive way to serve students not only in the classroom but anywhere they are 24 7 on on any device and as as you were asking earlier this is a critical piece of our curriculum adoption process next slide mary so the curriculum is a critical factor in our students academic progress and success it supports bringing internal coherence and alignment in the implementation of standards-based instruction facilitating the distribution and use of resources to schools and classrooms and so what you will see is a short narrative describing those points which are really critical for describing the why curriculum matters in the work that we're trying to do in pps in creating a transformative environment for teaching and learning next slide mary so the curriculum is one of three key elements of our instructional program and is situated alongside teacher practices and student experiences combined these three elements make up what we call the instructional core this instructional core is nested inside the integrated diagram from our vision plan and it helps to articulate the transformative curriculum and pedagogy that that all students need to access because because it becomes the through line to actualizing our graduate portrait and so as you will see from in this particular slide on the left you will see the components of the vision plan that require those those tangible shifts and that includes how curriculum is incorporated into the teaching and learning experience and on the right side that circle really reflects the curriculums in the various components it brings including digital resources and supplemental materials so our curriculum is extremely comprehensive and it is designed to work both now in a digital environment and an analog environment and so in our conversations with our publishers including some today we're asking the question of not only how does it provide access to to our english language learners are students with disabilities our students in dual language programs our african american students our agents so how does it incorporate how are they themselves thinking about the new environment that we're moving into to lend that support and so that it also works in a digital place when the student is at home on the weekend doing some additional work that they have the same kind of access to the material than they do in the classroom and so mary will share our specific process with you um as it reflects what what we're what we're talking about right now mary great thank you so much dr valentino would you take a moment to introduce mary a little bit more uh oh you're on me so mary weiner fell from heaven um she was actually working with tara with sarah davis and so when we started this initiative uh one of the things that marina and dan recommended was that we had
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someone who could manage this because it was a heavy lift and it was hannah and i trying to do it and then hannah went on maternity leave so it was myra my assistant and i and we were like overwhelmed and so sarah davis volunteered mary to work with us and so mary was gracious enough to do two jobs for a few months and then we were given the opportunity to post for this position or to offer this position and mary actually just took a lateral she said i would love to continue to do this work so she's not working directly with us and she brings great experience to this work so we're excited to have her thank you thank you so much dr valentino your staff before the board i think it's important to acknowledge the talent in the organization and gary has stepped up to really take on what's really going to be a multi-year project a significant investment for us and making sure our curriculum adoption moves smoothly sorry for the interjection thank you i appreciate it thank you for asking for that superintendent awesome well uh thank you so much for having me tonight uh to talk about the adoption process it's really been a heavy lift since i actually hannah and i were two ships passing in the night i came back from maternity leave the day that she went on maternity leave so um but it was great to come back to this and i am very excited to work on the adoption process and so i kind of wanted to start out giving you an overview of not only the process but also what adoption is and so for us as a district we are not only going through these adoptions we're also formalizing an adoption process that hasn't been in place before and so an adoption process is really the process in which a district engages with curriculum and develops curriculum to be implemented throughout the district and for us in this adoption process that we're developing it really includes four cycles which are define select implement and evaluate and i'll talk about that in a later slide um but the reasons of why we're going through this adoption process and developing the adoptions um is one like i said we haven't had a formalized adoption process there's never been a cyclical adoption process that our district has gone through a lot of it has been on demand of district priorities funding availability and content needs and i'll talk a little bit later about how long it's been since we've adopted some of the the curriculum that we're currently using um also it's important as we develop this adoption process um to examine everything very clearly through the refj lens and i'll talk about how we're doing that from the moment we start thinking about adoption to the adoption never really ends you know you're always evaluating you're always implementing so how we're doing that throughout um also a shift in uh prioritized educational standards and adoption of standards so common core standards and gss a lot of the curriculum that we're currently using is not reflective of those standards so um it it's involving a lot of teacher adaptation in order to make it function within the classroom which isn't how it should be um provide up-to-date and culturally relevant materials so really um some of our curriculum is from before most of our students were born um so it's really important that we have that and like we talked about earlier the increased availability of digital resources which not only means students can access that information everywhere it's also updated more frequently and we're able to kind of keep up to date with the curriculum that we're using also increased availability to um instructional resources that allow for differentiated differentiated instructions so both for you know tag students as well as fed students and how teachers can use this to differentiate their instruction within the classroom for their students and those materials are are much more readily available than they were a decade ago so it's important that we include that in the process um also availability of authentic and translated materials for our newcomers our dli our esl students making sure that we have those as part of our adoption process and are including those in this so next i'm going to dive more into kind of this process so like i said we're cauterizing this adoption process so um we're still in in in that work right now but we've really been able to delineate kind of four major buckets um so most of our programs are up here in the left-hand corner which is the define so defining is really project scoping
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the timeline and budgets um creating an adoption committee and the material evaluation and rubric or material evaluation rubric so talking about that resj lens and so really it's from the moment we're talking about it adoption committee so right now as as we're forming this process we're thinking about how do we have equity in our adoption committee and we're putting in standards and recommendations about what percentage of schools and teachers you have to have from historically are from uh schools with historically underserved students at a certain percentile we're still working out that percentile so not equality in making sure that we have every school represented but really equity in how our schools are represented and that we have a good percentage of those teachers coming from those historically underserved schools with historically underserved populations um and so in addition the material evaluation rubric which is really something that we use with vendors to evaluate our curriculum from right off the bat we have an evaluation which is a bias evaluation that our programs and content areas are using when they engage with vendors to uh screen for bias within that so really focusing on that from the moment we begin throughout the entire process is is really important for us um mary can i can i ask a question here i think yeah maybe you buried the lead because what i'm understanding is this is not this does not sound like a curriculum refreshment which is sort of what we talked about with a bond proposal saying that our general fund can't sustain the type of investments that we need to make on an annual basis so we're going to do it in the bond what you're really talking about is a completely foundational investment in curriculum materials of all sorts and starting from like a zero sum position in terms of evaluating what our students need do i have that right yeah because that's that's kind of a big deal director constance it is a timeline in a moment that's going to make that point very clear okay sorry about that you know we're blessed with this funding and we are going to make it work every single dollar work for our students and so if we're able to do it we're going to do it we want to make sure what we have works the best for our students across the district um so going back to the adoption process so the selection is really when we work with vendors we interview vendors we field test materials with uh teachers um and and engage the community and parents and students within the process and engage them with the materials and then that collection process ends up with a vendor selection and i'll in the next slide i'm going to go into how our k-5 math adoption uh is working so i can talk a little bit more about those details um and then after selection is obviously the implementation which is the bulk of the work so we've purchased the materials which is what the bond can cover and then we go to the hard hard work which is implementing those materials and providing professional development for teachers ongoing support and making sure that this curriculum is working for our teachers and our students um and the last phase and i should say the implement phase i i i don't really i might have to rework that it's because the implement phase really goes for the life of the curriculum you're always going to have new teachers come on board you're always going to need to provide extra support so if the implementation phase does not end and then evaluation begins it really kind of continues through that and then evaluation which is key to my heart and key to all of our work is how do we evaluate and make sure that our curriculum is really you know doing our students justice and that it's doing what it's supposed to do and really helping our students um advance their education and so that will be a huge part of our work and we're going to rely a lot upon spp to help us with this work but um this hasn't traditionally been done in the past and it's sometimes hard to measure and definitely there's a lag in measuring you know curriculum implementation and how it affects students but that's something that we are going to focus on a lot within this adoption process so next slide so again um specifically on k through five math so they are the furthest along right now so i wanted to set an example um they've gone through this
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defined process and i put it down for fall winter 2021 but really they began the process earlier in recruiting for that adoption committee and project scoping and timeline um and they were actually the ones driving the the uh the vendor bias or the curriculum bias evaluation that all of our programs are now going to be using as they evaluate curriculum they're in their select phase right now so uh in the beginning of december they interviewed four vendors for math curriculum k through five and they narrowed that down to two and those two vendors are now being or those two uh curricular now being implemented through the field test so subset of teachers is now outside implementing that and through that we're doing observations of those teachers and classrooms and community engagement is going to be shortly happening where we engage the community with that curriculum engage students engage parents engage stakeholders um and so a thorough evaluation so it's not just being evaluated by teachers we're putting that out there so we get feedback and input from from all different parties and then after that we'll select a vendor hopefully in the next couple of months and then procure those instructional resources and again uh this summer is when the bulk of everything happens that's really the start of the implementation phase where we do lots of professional development with teachers um embedding pd within um the school year and just in time support and again this is something that's continual throughout the life of the curricula um but and i'll talk a little bit about the figures and the numbers related to this in the budget slide at the end but obviously with uh pd with um all k through five teachers when the district it is it is quite a lot of funding that will be needed for those that professional development for teachers um and then the evaluation phase obviously continuing with that uh making sure that we are are working through that and i i should say that we've also you know in that defined process i didn't add the line item but also what was done beforehand was really looking at the curriculum that we had and evaluating that so making sure that we're we're we're seeing what went wrong i i don't i don't want to say a gap analysis but but really evaluating our current curriculum and making sure that those factors go into the curriculum that we choose whether we like it or not so this is that that adoption history slide that we were talking about and um as you can see it's been a long time since we've adopted and i like to think that 2010 was just yesterday but really it was a decade ago and a lot has changed in the past decade um and some of our major major subject areas haven't been adopted in 20-plus years and then health um so i put 1995 in for health but rumor has it we haven't adopted health curriculum since the aids crisis uh of the early 80s so obviously completely out of date um and we like i said we are so gracious for the voters and and you as board members for supporting this work through the bond because things like that need to change and we need to have new and updated curriculum for our teachers to use so this is that adoption chart for those of you that are quickly counting there are 14 adoptions actually on this chart and don't let it scare you too much so we have spent a lot of time scaffolding this work so that we're not putting too much pressure on teachers in schools everything from you know when when the full adoption is going to happen to how we're selecting field test teachers how we're selecting committee members to make sure that we are not overwhelming and it's quality over quantity right so we're making sure that what we're doing is quality and then if we have to end up pushing things back because we don't feel like we're ready for full adoptions we will do that this is this is that overall scope and so k through five you can see how we've been able to scaffold it um and and we'll continue to do that and we'll continue to evaluate we'll continue to listen to our teachers and our students and our schools about this process but we are so excited that we are able to do this oh you take that photo and then this is the funding picture so this i apologize stand it sorry about that oh no worries well you'll you'll have it that picture to keep um so this is the funding picture so uh the bond funding the 53 million dollars is just amazing amazing um and like i said in addition
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to that there are items that we know are not compensable under the bond um and unfortunately that is a lot of the the it's the nature of the bond and it's a lot of our work so professional development extended hours for teachers to participate in that professional development field test materials supplies any sort of consumables for students are all things that aren't compensable under the bond that we will need to leverage general funds for sia funds for and so we put together estimates of what that would look like over the next four years don't worry this is that this is about 18 million dollars for one year um and then you can see in the bottom right corner um the school years and the non-bond funded needed we've been able to spread it out a bit but it is a lot of funding but it is so essential to have quality professional development for our teachers that is really where that turning point is and so we don't want to sacrifice that because it's too expensive we want to make sure that the curriculum that we are adopting is effective within the classroom and that starts with the teacher so that is the picture and then any questions it's great to see that it doesn't seem to have skipped a beat in remote learning that we're still able to do all of our field testing so that we can keep things on schedule so thank you all for that are there no other questions i think i heard um uh director constance say uh no this is exciting those are a few really powerful slides there and a historical long overdue investment so i'm glad that we're starting to paint the picture and how things are starting uh which will set sort of a pattern of what we'll expect to see across grade levels and content areas and especially in areas that maybe you don't think of right away it's not just math and reading it's social emotional it's arts they all have content that curriculum that we want our students to have access to high quality materials too so director to pass i don't think we've ever done a virtual stadium wave you know on the screen this might be one of those will we try it i'll start thank you very much uh mary and dr valentino thank you my only question it's just a brief one was around the community engagement aspect of the work and like who the identified stakeholders are and um there's been some community members that have been working on curriculum for years several decades probably and just wondering if they were going to be engaged or their student or teachers were going to be engaged students so we're still shaping that out so yes um and and a lot of this work is kind of in the nature of the bond was we're kind of building the plane while we're flying it so we are working on that we're making sure that we have all the stakeholders engaged so so yes and i will be sure that i i get that information and it's not just me i should say we're working with a large team of program administrators and teachers on developing this adoption process so so we'll be sure to make sure that all stakeholders are included in that but i want as much feedback as possible so yeah you might and it also might end up with a you're a stronger um deliverable in the very end so thank you very much for this i'm excited to see um what you you and your team um end up with so director de pat so one of director of the past one of the things that we've done is we've changed the way that the cmec process works and primarily because it never really has worked because and the cmec process is the state process for how we adopt curriculum but it was fairly limited and since we are it did it it couldn't stand up to the scrutiny of the work that pps has been doing and so we needed to expand on that so i think mary it would be great to share with our directors how the process has been expanding to the point of it's a larger community of people that is multi-stakeholders cross-functional because i think you will you will see the the the thinking that has gone on that will give you um a better sense of how we're making decisions about our curriculum including how we meet with our publishers and the fact it's really interesting the fact that we have 53 million dollars which what they talk to us differently because they take us more seriously uh where the conversations today with
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a couple of our publishers in met with the math has to do with how are you going to show up to help us with the translation because i will tell you we spend a couple of million dollars each year just on the translation but they're not going to help us with the translation now and pay for because we haven't done that for adoption but if we're doing a full adoption they're going to be more more amenable to working with us in taking taking uh carrying some of the load around the the translation for our resources in in spanish vietnamese chinese russian etc and so it does make a difference and so the committee is becoming much more thoughtful in how we're going to interact with our publishers and our other partners so we'll share that information yeah definitely and we can have it yeah and even from the start we have worked on a very comprehensive survey that we're sending to all vendors no matter what curriculum or materials they are producing that really screens them for um what languages they're producing or what languages they're they're coming out in so esl dli fed um sel um tag all had influence into this survey so that we're able to cover all departments or or all departments of this curriculum will touch and all students that this curriculum will touch from the moment we engage a vendor that's fabulous and i have uh one question too about the languages so are the languages for the textbooks then translated into our safe harbor languages no that's part of the issue now that we don't have that so we have to pay for our own translations and so and that comes out of our general fund allocation and that's not naturally helpful so we're trying to work with them on the number of things so that as they see that we are going to be comprehensive in our purchases that they will that they will absorb some of the cost for a number of things including professional development so that it's built into the adoption and then we don't have to pay for it out of general fund so it we have some leverage now that we've never had before so that i think that's an urgent effect of having resources thank you so much for your presentation and um it's great to learn something about the system today we're going to move ahead um now to our discussion around the bond accountability committee charter and um dan jung do you want to kick us off yeah i will do that and i'll do uh the abbreviated version of this topic because really it's an introduction of the topic and then we'll be looking at a deliverable at our next meeting so i think i can go through this pretty quickly i was going to put up a real short presentation but i'll skip that too for the sake of time uh we're going to be updating the bac charter to include the 2020 bond scope of work of course uh but it's also an opportunity to make other needed changes since we're going to be going through the process and adopting an updated charter as it stands now the charter as expected you know highlights the roles and responsibilities of the bond accountability committee their three primary objectives are really monitoring the bond progress against the voter approved bond language uh providing regular updates on the progress to the board uh and providing advice to the board on the whole range of topics that are outlined in the charter at the january bac retreat we discussed some other potential i guess i'd say tweaks or improvements to the charter and really those are around aligning their role with what they do and how they do it and also strengthening the coordination the communication between the the triad relationship we have between the bac the board of education and staff so no major overhauls are proposed uh or anticipated at least at this time we've got a very preliminary draft update that what we want to do is share that with the sibc members get any feedback that you might have and then bring back a draft uh update at the next committee meeting so that's really where we are right now i want to just introduce that and let you know that that's going to be coming uh we can share a copy of uh whole share a copy of the draft language changes that we have now uh and the charter is on our website for anyone to go take a look at that so that's where we are and michelle i didn't know if you wanted to add anything there i know you had a chance to take just a quick look yeah i think you summarized it really well i wanted to add that just for committee members um for your benefit that we also in it's somewhat tangential but have talked about how we'll um create a structure for providing input into our agendas going forward and so we've settled on um staff and i meeting shortly after these meetings that we're in today we'll send out a notice that you'll be able to input and so we'll have like a structured way much much like the way our board agenda
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settings um meetings are scheduled at a regular cadence and um so you'll have opportunity to um be apprised of any materials or anything that you need to provide provide input to does that make sense so we're trying to make it easier for people to know when to expect when they can bring up a topic when they can add it to the following agenda and when it'll be too late and it'll have to be that your your issue will have to be moved to a later meeting if that makes sense trying to streamline processes um and that's all i have to add any comments on that concerns yes we are adding another meeting it's going to be a 30 minute meeting um i'm we're gonna move now to the roosevelt phase four procurement and you should have all received the attachments that came um the member to the school board dated december 18th 2020. the staff report to the board that's dated june i believe um june of 2020 and then the draft findings um for roosevelt phase four may of 2020 and i'm not sure who's kicking this off is this oh i'll take that one as well um yeah hey dan yes this is amy i just want to say before you get started since i requested this item um you know i i for me i don't think we need to spend a lot of time going back over this particular recruitment process but my hope with this conversation was that we used this experience to look more generally at our contracting processes understand when we're doing um low-bed uh contracts when we're doing cmgc um and just look at some of the the issues and questions that arose um in the context of this particular contract to see you know are there some places where we're not quite aligned with best practices where we have made a change or we're considering making a change um you know rather than at least for me just completely going back over these decisions that were made because i'm sufficiently convinced that we didn't violate any of our own existing policies but i do still have remaining questions about whether or not we need to make any changes [Music] so um your um director constant you're asking for not to necessarily regurgitate the procurement process contracting process on roosevelt but rather moving forward understanding how we determine which bidding process to use clarification on whether we're using best practices right sizing the bidding procurement process to the project yeah and some of that is included in the staff memo um kind of in direct response to some of the questions that were raised um so i'm just saying for me that's that's the broader conversation that i think is useful here and i think that the heart of it is um you know what is the level of of subjectivity or how much room for a perception of subjectivity is there in a bidding process like this sorry sorry to interrupt dan as you were getting going but as far as i'm concerned we don't need to like do a full reef rehash of this particular contract yeah that's not a problem at all and i think you know at a you know at a high level to respond to some of the questions about alternative procurement i think the roosevelt even though it's a smaller project uh it's similar in a lot of ways to cmgcs it's just it's scaled up uh what roosevelt was was an rfp process which is considered alternative procurement for construction services by our contracting rules and by the state ors that finds that cmgc is the exact same it's also an alternative procurement all alternative procurements are approved by the board prior to us advertising and procuring those services they the justification for them the approval criteria is the same and that is set forth by ors as well the justification will be a little bit different depending on the project and depending on what uh the i guess the scope of that work is for roosevelt that was an alternative procurement it was looking at because it's an occupied site we wanted to make sure that it wasn't just purely a low bid project we wanted to see some qualifications of that general contractor
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that they understood safety they understood phasing they understood how to work around a site that is has students on site when we look at cmgc it's it can include that as well we've done some large projects that have students on site but also it's really around the complexity in what that project is when you have a historic structure for example we'll want to see some recent relevant experience that the contractor knows how to deal with historic materials how to do pre-construction services uh and then it's just the overall complexity and size especially when you do a modernization uh our modernization projects our bensons and our madisons are very very large you do not see that type of renovation work hard bid low bid at all it is all some level of alternative procurement so uh in and so that's a kind of a high level we can look at every individual one and we can look at the approval criteria and the findings because those all are created and all of those do all go to the board before we procure them so i don't know that fully answers your question and we have marina and emily here as well if there's anything that they want to add to that process i want to ask i i want to i want to dial down so i've been out of construction area for a long time and so with these alternative procurements is there some shift of um response the owner takes more responsibility than the cut than the general contractor does in one method or the other and the other thing is i think everybody knows you know i would love to see our mwesb i'd like to see you know with this bond an opportunity to create wealth building opportunities for people who've been shut out of the economy and um this bond could potentially provide you know jobs for for people that have a harder time getting in on public projects in portland um and so i'm curious if these alternative procurements the rfp and the cmgc are do do they are do they provide fewer barriers for people to participate or do they make it more difficult because of insurance requirements size of projects the way projects are chunked up you know um i'm just curious about all that i'd like to like envision a world where we have you know a 40 minority contractor um participation rate that's in my mind that's when we know we're successful and so i'm just curious about the ways in which we procure what to what extent do those invite people in versus keep people out you know as a public agency and stewards of public funds i'm it's a big concern of mine you know has been for a very long time 30 years or more yeah since i was seven that is a great question what the alternative procurement was the alternative procurement is alternative to traditional low bid low bid is is purely objective it is taking the lowest responsive responsible contractors basically taking the lowest dollar amount uh well alternative procurements whether it be via rfp which was done on roosevelt and also in our cmgc's allows us to create our own criteria including our objectives even in examples our objectives around certified business so we evaluate the contractors on the criteria that we set including their certified business plan and then we require them to submit a plan with their proposal and then they're evaluated on that and so that's just one example safety is another one that we often look at when we're looking on this large complex projects so the alternative procurements are what allows us to inject some of our uh our goals into the project into that procurement process that wouldn't be there so dan i'm gonna play devil's advocate if i can't i'm sorry emily do you have something you want to add going yeah i was just gonna add that we consistently hear from our equity and contracting advisory committee and other minority and small contracting partners that um they don't love the low bid methodology they feel that small small businesses and minority businesses are at a disadvantage um just because they can't compete at the same scale and they're they do push for the the best value um type solicitations now of course oregon law requires the low bid method unless we get an exception and there's some a lot of work that goes into uh getting that exception but that's that's what we're hearing is that the rfp the best value is where they want to see us go more often i appreciate that emily and i think um i think the rub here is that it's not
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just an either or question because you know back to your question michelle about are there some barriers here to our certified businesses and dan back to your description that we set the qualifications when we have an alternative procurement process like an rfp we set the qualifications and criteria including for example relevant experience and so a lot of times what that looks like which many people in the community will tell you is a functional barrier for our certified businesses is that you are not considered qualified to bid on a particular job unless you've basically done the exact same job before which you know something of the exact same size or something that meets the same conditions that this particular job is being conducted under um and that to me is is counter to our stated values of having an interest in cultivating and nurturing smaller certified businesses and so there are a lot of people in the community who will say that they're it's very difficult to grow a business under those conditions so i'm wondering you know what are what are we doing to both be sure that we're going to end up with with contractors that that indeed have the capability to perform the work well even if they haven't quite done a job that size or a job under the similar conditions before while at the same time nurturing the ability for some of these businesses to grow yeah good good questions i think there's two i think i have two comments of that and i might invite emily or marina to jump in as well one i think when there's there's obviously lots of different types of contracting methods and without having the data in front of me i think i can still say pretty confidently if you look at the contracting methods where staff has the more ability to influence the selection you will see a higher number of certified firms on those type of procurements where we have less opportunity to influence this election low bid being kind of the standard for that you will see lower percentages so our ability to have criteria and use alternate procurements i think by and large is a big benefit to our certified business goals there there's also minimum thresholds for our certain types of procurements and this is where maybe marine and emily uh will have some more detail than me i'm pretty sure our minimum requirements are pretty low uh i don't i don't think offhand you know if we're looking at a high school project it's going to say you have to have done high school you have done high school this size you know we're looking for contractors who have experience in this type of work but i think the minimum thresholds are generally pretty low but i'll well let me ask emily or marina if they have any more rearing is raising our hands thank you dan um i did want to weigh in because i think it's important to understand that um we have actually been really pushing on that experience requirement with our rfps and with this one in particular um the the project team can attest that they initially started out looking for more general experience with high school construction and what i really pushed them to do was to identify where there was unique components of the work that might really benefit from a from a financial and schedule risk standpoint from a requirement for experience in that area so for example the push on this one was to change the experience requirement to specifically stem and see you just muted yourself accidentally i i realized i think it got muted accidentally yes so um it was important for us to have coordination of traits unique to stem and cte spaces and that was the expertise that we looked for very specifically on this one there are also some things that are related to bonding capacity for our construction contractors so that if they do not have the the capacity to take on projects this size they will not be bonded to do so and so we're not typically um setting really strict requirements on um
01h 30m 00s
project size that that comes from their financial uh bonding capacity that really sets that limit so just a couple things i wanted to note and i i did really want to reiterate we don't we are definitely trying to open up our experience requirements to look more broadly at what experience they can bring and and very specifically identify the types of things that they need to have experience in order to limit the risk to the district yeah thank you for that i mean nobody wants you know someone to come up first time you know and build a high school as a first project but having been involved in these conversations since 1990 91 um and knowing that there are barriers to bonding and knowing that there's you know institutional racism and all kinds of other factors that go into um making this a very difficult environment for um communities communities of color owned contractors to do the work i'm just wondering there's a family joke that we call um how to write an rfp and it's like yeah you'll get the job but one of the requirements is that you must speak dutch like can you speak dutch oh you can't okay well i can so i get you know i get the i get the thing so i think that staff has um some agency over you know helping bring people along versus providing a barrier even you know even even though we're publicly funded we're public agency but i would really like to see us do everything in our power you know under the oregon revised statutes that govern procurement to just being good stewards to being you know caring community members that want to see um envision a world in which you know um bipoc construction companies can grow um is what i'd like us to aim for um i i know that there's bonding and you know you don't want anybody practicing building a brick wall on your project but you know to the extent that we can i'd really like us to be as creative as possible as as welcoming as possible to um to meet some of these broader goals particularly because we've got these projects coming up on our agenda actually for i believe for may um uh the jefferson high school modernization center for black student excellence and starting the master planning process for ida b wells in cleveland you know we have projects coming up in which i think it'd be great to see our values reflected on the job sites and i'll stop talking but but to your point michelle um dana marina have we ever had any outside review of our you know how we're using our alternative procurement practices is this something that i think we talked about having our our bond external auditor maybe take a look at our certified business contracting and or alternative procurement process um is that happening or have we ever had any other outside source look at sort of our track record here and our way of doing business relative to best practices i'll say that the our performance otters often look at procurement uh as part of their work plan and even noted in the memo uh one of the the article made a reference to one of the processes and uh the memo highlights that this was actually a recommendation from our auditors we changed through this process because that is what the recommendation is uh and they continue to look at different practices that we have and marina do you want to talk about uh for the work plan for this year specifically what they're looking at certainly they are indeed looking at our business equity practices they have been looking through many different aspects of those and um you know i just want to note that we are of course doing that internally as well and i thought um it might be useful if if emily is willing to talk a little bit about some of the things that we have been discussing for changing criteria on our rfps for a e and cmgc sure yes we've been um and i will just reiterate my team is working very carefully with the bond uh auditors uh performance auditors in fact we just had an hour and a half meeting another one today so business equity is very much on their agenda and we've been feeding them all kinds of information um we so for the past few months we've been working on getting together a revision of our rfp language our evaluation language and
01h 35m 00s
criteria we've been sort of continuously evolving that language um since the equity in purchasing policy started back in 2012 and for instance a few years ago we started emphasizing um bringing partners to the table so that those smaller gcs for example could get that kind of experience that they that they could grow um and so there's points um that can be awarded when you bring a certified firm to the table with you as a partner but we are working on strengthening that language and intend to have new draft criteria and clear scoring breakout for the equity business equity criteria before our next big rfp for a e or cmgc and that's the collaborative process between me and marina and dan and marina's had some of her staff weigh in on this language so we want to make it as strong as we possibly can based on the feedback we have from our equity and contracting committee and looking at what some other local agencies like metro have done with their language trying to just get a little stronger um emily i think you're talking about the language in your specifically in your rfps but do you anticipate that we could make things easier or better by improving the language of our policy itself do we as a board have work to do there you know that's a good question and i um the policy is pretty broad um i i don't know about that and i i it's possible from what i heard from the um bond auditors today on some of their initial thoughts that they may have some suggestions there with regard to policy um they i know that one thing we're hearing from both um both auditors and our community members is it's it's not just the number you hit it's not just that 18 or 16 or whatever because you could you can potentially hit that number by just having one big uh minority-owned firm partner on the project but it's the number it's also the number of firms you benefit and the number of uh small firms that you help grow by bringing to the project and our policy really just focuses on that number uh that percentage right and doesn't um turn our emphasis towards how many firms are we really bringing on to projects and they could be little tiny ones but we're helping them grow by bringing them on so and we've talked about um dan and marina and claire and i have a group that meets monthly uh to talk about this work and we've talked about um in our reporting at least we're emphasizing the number of firms that are benefiting um because you could have you know you can have a hundred tiny firms on a cmgc and maybe that only gets you to two percent but you're also helping 100 firms so we so i don't know if that needs to if the policy needs to change but we want to uh you know broaden our orientation a little bit and on what we see as a success in the eppc policy i think that's great um i know of some um examples of public partnerships that have been done on um with a larger gc and a smaller gc when we talk about growth the hotel metro hotel is one of them pcc cascade campus partnered i think it was walsh construction and pacific mark grew pacific mark so pacific park is now capable of doing larger you know has the experience and i'm also curious if there's ever been an economic impact analysis done and that would be you know so right now we're looking at solely the percent and that's one number but what are those other numbers what are the what is the with what is our 1.2 billion dollars that voters voted in for us in november how does that translate in minority communities you know for each dollar spent has that how many jobs has that created you know have people been able to buy homes that were not that were renters before you know some of these like longer term impacts um i don't i don't know who's who would do that but i i think that that might be an important also metric to know whether we're being successful with any of these policies that we're talking about tonight where are the dollars going are the dollars benefiting communities of color [Music] i'm not aware that any such um investigation has been done so far it would be like a you know a third party consulting firm would probably take on that type of work but um
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um we've already gone over this is 13 minutes past time i think this is a really important discussion i really appreciate everyone's attention and i'm keeping everyone from doing dinner or or a glass of wine and i if there are any more comments um or next steps that we need to discuss before we adjourn amy are you done with questioning or i appreciate your um your attention to these these things are topics are very important to me as well andrew did you have anything anyone no i appreciated the memo as well just on that specific contract and i took some time to pull together but it was very helpful to walk through at a detailed level given the article so thanks for that thank you thank you all for your time tonight this is good work and see you next time the next time will be um april 15th thanks everybody thank you exciting night


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