2021-03-09 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2021-03-09
Time	18:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Regular Meeting 3 09 21

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for march 9th 2021 is called the order for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted on the pps website uh and under the board meet and meetings tabs this meeting is being live streamed on pbs tv services website and on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website for those replay times welcome to our meeting tonight i wanted to take the luxury of making just a quick statement um because this week marks the anniversary of the week schools were closed to in-person learning last year when we were all working our hardest now to live into the details of the governor's executive order and the changes we know are coming to the ready schools safe learners guidance and this is a week when we are all affected by the acts of violence that occurred at besc over this past weekend we're coming together tonight to continue the vital work of service to our students i want to take some time to thank our nutrition service workers who switched up their shifts this week rearranged their lives to share trucks and to make sure our children could be fed without disruption after the loss of vehicles to arson i want to thank all of our staff who over a year ago with grace creativity and tenacity drove over dove into the incredible challenge of caring for and educating our students in the face of a deadly global pandemic and i want to thank all of you the students the parents the teachers the janitorial staff the secretaries the mental health staff the principals our administrators and everybody else for the input you are giving as we navigate together what is next and for your continued flexibility patience and growth i hope that all of you are able to take spring break as a time of rest and renewal after this daunting year i know many of you have had no vacation no respite it is important that all staff try to find ways to ready themselves for reopening by taking a break these are trying times for all of us and it is together listening to one another and having students as our focus that we will once again rise to the challenge before us and serve our community well one of the key pieces of our success in serving our community well is our social workers i think i grammatically should say are our social workers social workers are a vital source of support and part of our educational team they work together with educational administrators teachers counselors psychologists nurses speech and language pathologists and other staff their unique training enables them to understand and interpret the influences of the school home and community on our students and this year we have been able to increase the number of school social workers due to the additional investments available to schools from the student investment account this week is school social work week and we would like to start this evening by reading a resolution to recognize this work superintendent thank you chair and i'm going to turn it over to our chief of student support services our social workers work under the umbrella of this department so brenda martinek would you like to do the honors i'd be happy to good evening superintendent chair lowry school board student rep shoe and our community tonight we are so excited to have this resolution before you this past year the student success and health department was able to lead the development of a district-wide school worker cohort increasing our social workers from last year of 11 fte to this year of 42 fte with the support from our superintendent and the district's priorities through our sia funds our social workers this year within the first six months have made almost 6 000 contacts with students and families the social worker lens is one of racial equity and social justice and focuses on uplifting students and families voices to identify and support students and families holistically while decreasing barriers to learning as a result of a systemic racism poverty and violence perpetuated against historically marginalized communities i want to personally thank all of our school social workers for all of the vital work that they do each and every day serving our pps students and families so thank you and um i'm very excited about this resolution
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director bailey you are muted dr bailey is going to read our resolution for us um as we celebrate our social workers if he can find his mute button there we go yay uh computer issues okay um school social workers in portland public schools serve as vital members of the educational team playing a central role in creating a positive environment at schools school social workers have a lens focusing on racial equity and social justice which includes uplifting student and family voice and identity and decreasing barriers to learning created as a result of systemic racism poverty inadequate health care and violence perpetrated against historically marginalized communities school districts and local educational agencies should continue to work with school social workers to address students social emotional physical mental health and environmental needs so that as the pps vision identifies students may be compassionate critical thinkers collaborative problem solvers and be prepared to lead a more socially just world the board of education of portland public schools extends greetings and best wishes to all observing march 8th through 12th 2021 as school social work week and i would just like to add that in these trying times i am incredibly grateful for the work that our social workers do and incredibly grateful that we've had such a large expansion of your numbers and your services and your ability to help our students again in these trying times thank you director bailey do i have a motion and a second to adopt resolution 6268 resolution to recognize march 8th through 12th 2021 as the school social work week so moved second director from edwards moves and director to pass seconds the adoption of resolution 6268 is there any board discussion just just like so many of our employees it's amazing how they have reinvented themselves and their roles um this year and been able to still be there for our students so i love to picture those sidewalk conversations and porch visits and all those zoom conversations um so uh brenda please express our gratitude to that team i certainly will thank you yeah and we know if our experience is the same as other school districts who have opened up in person we will see an influx of students coming in with huge needs that we haven't identified before because they haven't been on the grid so to speak yes we will and we are prepared for that mrs bradshaw is there any public comment on resolution 6268 no all right the board will now vote on resolution 6268 resolution to recognize march 8th through 12th 2021 as school social work week all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 6268 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes it's funny my script says voting yes for you not just voting question mark so i'm glad you voted yes because it was in the script no i know that nathaniel you especially know the value of those folks that work in schools all right we begin with the board consent agenda board members if there are any items you would like to pool we will set those aside for discussion and vote not at the end of the meeting but right after the consent agenda after last week uh we evaluated an agenda setting and made that change um does anyone have anything they'd like oh let's ask my first question miss bradshaw are there any changes to the consent agenda no board members are there any items you would like to pull from the consent agenda okay hearing none do i have a motion and a second to adopt the consent agenda removed director scott moves and director constance seconds the adoption
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of the consent agenda is there any board discussion on the consent agenda just note with appreciation that we're approving lots of contracts for our teachers and administrators this evening and it's been an extremely challenging year and just thank everybody for their service all right ms bradshaw is there any public comment no board will now vote on resolutions 6252-6264 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions the consent agenda passes by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes excellent that one was blank on the uh script just fyi nathaniel all right we turn now to one of the most important parts of our meetings student and public comment before we begin i'd like to review our guidelines for comment as a board we thank you for taking the time to attend this meeting and provide your comments we know that it's not always an easy thing to do and we really appreciate you taking the time and energy to be here public input informs our work and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns and our responsibility as a board is to actively listen our board office may follow up on board-related issues raised during public testimony we request that complaints about individual employees be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter if you have additional materials or items you would like to provide to the board or superintendent we ask that you email them to public comment pps.net again that's public comment at pps.net and if you would like to sign up to give public comment at a future meeting you can also use that email address publiccomment pps.net to sign up please make sure when you begin your comments tonight that you clearly state your name and spell your last name you'll have three minutes to speak and you will hear a sound at the end of three minutes which means it is time to conclude your comments miss bradshaw do we have anyone signed up for student or public comment tonight yes we have student and public comment um normally our student would go first but he is going to be a little bit late so i totally put him at the end so we'll start with the public comment that's okay um and we have thomas hanron welcome am i on yes you are we can hear and see you good evening my name is actually thomas hanrahan good evening board members and superintendent guerrero and my fellow partlanders my pronouns are he and him my wife and i kelly have two children in the portland public school system one's a sophomore at franklin the other a sixth grader at sunnyside environmental school if you had met our sons before the shutdown you would describe them as full of life it's hard to it would be hard to see them sitting still that's no longer the case both of our sons have suffered due to the isolation and frustration caused by remote learning and this really keeps keeps us up at night it's made us realize that coveted risk is only one aspect of the health and safety of the students who attend portland public schools and we believe as a family that the governor recognized this when she announced her executive order earlier this week i had asked to speak to the board back in january regarding the need to open classrooms since january pps has pulled the data on the significant drop in attendance for students particularly in middle and high schools during remote learning and also has surveyed k-5 families with an 80 response rate and majority of families including ours want the children to return to school as quickly as possible oregon health has already has also consistently shown that there are low numbers of confirmed and presumptive cases for coveted in multnomah county and i believe as early as or as late as last week and the total case numbers were simply 11. the ode oha metrics our children should be in class by those metrics our children should be in hybrid classes right now we see this as a failure of our community to prioritize children in education those metrics are now actually dated when you consider that teachers have been vaccinated and along with teachers the elderly and healthcare workers have been vaccinated so we're in a very different place from we were a year ago or even six months
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ago studies out of states where there have been children returning to schools specifically massachusetts ohio and wisconsin show that the three-foot role of social distancing is as safe as a six-foot rule and we want pps to follow the science and stop making decisions about when to return children based solely upon other factors and fear our school district has an obligation to see past the fear and follow the science for our children the governor has ordered the oda and oha to revise the metrics to address our current risks these new metrics should be followed and not the outdated study requested by the portland association of teachers we need to reopen the middle schools and high schools to the fullest extent as soon as possible metrics may allow for fully reopening within the next five days and we wonder if pps is ready to do that we would ask that pps provide a strong framework on the instruction to promote a true opportunity to learn in class and not allow the instruction of core classes to be shifted to see the cdl only during parent-teacher conferences we were reminded about how much our sophomore son has lost in each of his classes and there is no path for him to recover any of the instructions he has lost whether it's debating with his classmates or actually reading and discussing interesting subjects like shakespearean plays or actually painting in a studio he's lost those experiences forever our children should not burden should not shoulder the burden of our community's fear and should we should follow the science and as a school board i am asking you to put an end to this now coveted risk is only one aspect of the health and safety of the students who attend pps our children do not have a union advocating for their health and safety needs which require an immediate return to classroom without a delay for middle high school students as well we only have one chance to get this right we've had a year to prepare for it and we'd ask that you do it as soon as possible thank you thank you thank you we have amy silva i believe i removed the correct amy over all right i don't know how to make my camera go okay that's okay thanks oh there you are amy um my name is amy sylvia it's s i l v i a and my pronouns are she and her good evening superintendent guerrero and school board members my name is amy sylvia and i'm a lead in the nutrition services department currently working at markham elementary school i worked in nutrition services for over eight years for the last six weeks our union seiu 503 local 140 has been negotiating with management around issues related to covid19 nutrition services is a predominantly female group the lowest paid group and the only employee group at pps that has had their hours and pay reduced when school resumed in the fall unawares to us the workshare program became available january 1st 2021 and it would not have been difficult to re-enroll us instead we're struggling to pay our bills only now at our request is action being taken to reactivate us management dropped the ball big time on this one nutrition services employees have been the face of pps during the pandemic it's shameful that we're being treated this way throughout the course of the pandemic both custodial and nutrition services employees have asked for the necessary ppe to do our jobs each time we've asked the district to supply us with face masks face masks we've been met with excuses an mesd mesd nurse invited to our bargaining table confirmed that having everyone wear the cdc recommended mask is critical to protecting health and safety in our schools we're asking you to provide those masks as directed by osha we also need enough custodial staff to clean and disinfect buildings pps's current moderately dingy standard is not good enough to make sure the schools are ready for when the students return since mid-march 2020 members of seiu 503 local 140 have been in the schools cleaning them meeting with contractors and trades people preparing meals loading buses for meal delivery and delivering meals either by bus or at a school site we put ourselves and our loved ones at risk of copin 19 exposure because we believe in what we do to keep feeding students when they need it the most in recognition of this risk we proposed hazard pay for our members what we received was an insult with blatant union busting language we're asking you to find a way to protect our health and pay us for the essential work we do feeding our community and getting our schools ready for students to return our union coalition is working together to ensure the district prioritizes
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the health and safety of students and their hard-working staff so the return to in-person introduction will be successful thank you thank you thank you amy anna barr hello um everybody thank you for allowing uh some public testimony uh my name is dr anna barr i signed up to testify here a couple of months ago when it was unclear about school's opening and i want to give you my support i am a huge believer and advocate for public schools when i moved to this country i learned to speak english from public school i attended public school all throughout and graduated from a public university and then nyu school of medicine in 2001. i went back to new york this year in the fall and spent some time with my medical school friends who were caring for over five thousand covet patients across the hospital system in march and april and guess who were the very first ones to send their kids back to in-person school as soon as it opened in september in new york all of my doctor friends and all of my doctor friends all over the country have their kids in school all year my kids have attended public school here in portland up until this week when i had to transfer them to a private school that's going in person they started on monday you may have received our letter that was written and signed by over 70 doctors including leading infectious disease doctors at providence and ohsu in support of opening public schools if this is not enough you can look at the usa today article written by a leading ucsf infectious disease doctor dr gandhi it was published today in usa today who advocates for opening schools i personally have been working since day one of this pandemic i do mainly skin cancer surgery on people's faces i'm inches away from their face for half an hour to an hour at a time as they cough on me breathe on me sneeze on me they're not wearing masks because i'm mainly operating on their nose and mouth but i am wearing a mask and my nurses are wearing a mask and guess what there has not been a single case of covet in my unit masks work none of the people in the school are going to be as close to unmasked people as i am for the last 2500 surgeries that i've done this year my sister in new york has a kindergartner who has been going to public school and wearing a mask the entire time kindergartners we find wear masks better than adults or so she says so the number one argument of kids cannot do this or kids cannot do that has been proven wrong time and time again in many other school districts so that leads me to why i have been puzzled why other places have been able to figure this out and innovate and it really has not happened in portland quite yet although i know that everyone is working very hard on it first we talked about the hvac and the school buildings but i could see that nobody here has ever entered a school building in new york city they were all built in the 1800s they're overcrowded and there's nothing special about them except for that they've been open almost all year elementary has been open all year in new york middle school has already gone back and high school is going back everyone has the option which i think is wonderful if they want to go back or do remote and that has cut down on the number of kids in the school we should give our portland kids the same option the proposed two hours a day a few days a week does not work this is how you should do it group a and group b group a goes to school in person group b does remote they flip flop every day and they stay all day long a full day of school they can eat lunch outside or spaced out in the classroom after a month of this everyone will feel comfortable going back to school and we can work our way up to five days of school we can utilize our outdoor spaces we can utilize our outdoor spaces we can be innovative just like in the article in the usa today the marching band in texas was still able to perform spaced out and they made homemade covers for their tubas so that there would be no aerosols i refuse to believe that new that oregon is not as innovative as texas and new york i refuse to believe that the limiting factors of opening our schools today are the 100 person cohort which is an entirely made-up number with no relevance at all and the
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six-foot distancing is also based on the projectile distance of a sneeze for two unmasked adults we are talking about kids who will all be wearing masks three feet has been shown in many school districts to be just as successful as six feet in preventing coveted spread opening schools and getting our kids back to school is an important duty and we so so appreciate you working on it as a school board it is i take my duty as a doctor very seriously and i know that you all take your duty as school board members very seriously too and this is uh so important to hundreds of thousands of kids and families in oregon so thank you for your hard work and please keep it up you have my full support thank you very much thank you and thank you for your letter thank you and and thank you for providing healthcare in oregon thank you for all you do miss bradshaw do we have further public comment yes grace groom hello thank you for taking my comments sorry let me undo my dot camera from teaching today i think that will work now um thank you superintendent guerrero and school board members for hearing my testimony tonight my name is grace groom i'm the mother of two portland public school students and have the honor of serving as a second grade teacher at markham elementary direct service staff are the front line of support for students and families always have been and even more so now during this crisis teachers and direct service staff support are addressing the learning gaps due to covet closures making sure families are connected to wrap around services and supporting social emotional well-being of our students every day i support the efforts made by our equity-minded leadership and staff to maintain direct service staffing levels for the 2021 or 21 22 school year this is a good first step but to truly center the needs of students and families most impacted by the pandemic we need to do more than holding staffing levels steady i'm testifying tonight to ask that as the budget process for 2021 moves forward you all hold in your minds and your hearts the reality of our school communities students are hurting families are hurting staff are hurting we need help and support keeping direct staff service staff at the same level as this year for next school year will not support the necessary healing for us to move forward towards more equitable outcomes for our students schools serving the highest percentages of historically and currently underserved students qualify for additional funding for direct service staff through the district's equity formula as i understand it these funds are slightly decreased going into the next school year and this is at a time when more schools are qualifying for those limited that limited resource of funds what this means is although the need for more direct service support has increased the resources to support them are going down i also understand that the district has decided to invest direct service staff for tsi and csi schools to be able to provide between 1.0 and 1.5 fte for instructional specialists to work directly with students on targeted learning needs again i applaud this effort it's an important first step towards equity hiring more social workers is also a critical component of giving students and families what they need so thank you we need additional teachers educational paraprofessionals nutritional and custodial staff now and in the next school year the ship that is our portland public schools is taking on water and frankly some days feels completely underwater as it is overwhelmed by the rush of needs brought on by the pandemic we need all hands on deck we need more hands on deck working directly with students and families and schools to right this ship and you are the ones who can make the difference and determine who sinks and who is saved so please realign your budget priorities for next school year to meet the needs that we are facing if an item is included that does not directly support students and families scrutinize it intensely if we get extra money question why is that money not being spent on staff even if it is temporary so is our need let's right the ship and get more direct support to our students now thank you thank you
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thank you we have donald oliver hello uh thank you for having me um my name is donald oliver i have two kids in the pps system they are at laurelhurst k8 one third grader and one fifth grader um my comments are probably a little different from what um you're generally hearing uh on these uh calls because it's um i think it has more to do with like where we are kind of where we have to sort of exist in this space right now with our relationship with uh one another rather than i think you've heard many many speeches and comments with facts and figures on both sides of the case but with that i'll just jump right in um to be honest i struggle with uh how to with what to say in this sort of uh context so i didn't write a really long speech because it's uncomfortable uh it requires an amount of effort and vulnerability that to be honest in this time right now the pandemic the schools everything i'm just really tired of having to dig into and tired of having to watch other people dig into just for the simple sort of decency of having an honest open conversation where you can have someone listen to what you're saying um tired of you know insults you know insults of teachers of the pat the pps and insults of parents uh to other parents and like i've even we've even had people like insult our kids and it's it's it's just it's enough you know um to share a little anecdote i don't want to waste all my time just uh complaining but uh my wife organized um a neighborhood rally a few weeks ago and it was well attended for his jury a day as it was but it was basically just to send a message to everyone to everybody i mentioned above parents teachers pat the board and it was pretty simple it was to it was to ask for more transparency you know to just you know share a bit of the dialogue that had to have been happening at that time and uh you know to share it with parents or anyone who was willing uh to listen uh about whatever planning that was going on about an eventual reopening in whatever capacity there are several speakers and uh you know to be honest it was good to get out among other parents and just be able to share and even talk like mask to mask we didn't realize um that out of that experience we'd get you know our first like hit piece um apparently there was uh there was an article from one of the there was a report of one of the local um uh newspapers uh and you know if you if you read it you know you'd swear that we hate teachers it's not the case like we we don't we don't it's just trash and it was apparent from reading it you know it had all the the familiar triggers of a hit piece it was like the inaccurate quotes you know the reporter wasn't even there the whole time you know softball setups you know for someone for a teacher to kind of respond to whatever interpretation um suggestions of white privilege and i don't think they caught like like the organizers or everybody that was there um and then the casual suggestions of what black communities would think about the event which i take you know personally because i i've been a part of that community and i'm still a part of that community but needless to say it was hard to read but what i gathered from that were a couple of things that i definitely want to make sure ring true here and i want us to move forward with it's just that simple notion of decency and kindness transparency in what we're doing and sharing with the parents so that we can set expectations with our children with their peers uh so that we know what's going on and we're not blaming each other and fighting each other because we don't know the answers and you know a little bit of trust so that you know we actually here in we can actually work towards these goals together and and finally like the courage to not believe everything that you read and give people the benefit of the doubt um thank you that was it i'm sorry i i know i went over i heard the the beats it was all right important to get that out i gave you a little extra time because i think what you were saying was so vitally important and i think you know what you're calling us too is is to recognize that as um as hard as this year has been and as um emotional we are about doing what's right for kids um how do we still be decent humans to one another
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um and in our our stress and overwhelmedness continue to carry that forward director bailey it looked like you were going to make a comment i just thank you you you said it well um just to especially in these times to extend each other a little grace thank you for having me appreciate it thanks for your testimony thank you thank you and thank you for the courage to say um we can do this a different way together mrs bradshaw is there for their public comment if stephen lindner hello hi stephen oh i'm sorry there we go hello um my name is lintner l-i-n-d-n-e-r my pronouns are he him hiss um i actually prefer the speech i hope it's i speaks a little bit to what the privileged speaker said i'm a father of two pbs children you see the one that we're in the bed uh in the back i'm an economist at oregon health and science university um abuse express you're not my own and not both of uhsu um i i would like us george to work together and to open schools as quickly as we can and with you i mean both this pbs sport of education is like the support and association of teacher i know you all have been working really hard and so you know my remarks are taking very hopefully into account you can open school safely we know this safety standards are established there is lots of evidence from our schools that this can be done we have heard of those from new york and as far as i understand we have those measures in place so can have can have them in place in portland moreover our teachers are vaccinated which makes it safe for them and safer for our students to open schools we also need to open schools as quickly as possible to reduce the harm that we inflict on our children despite our best efforts online comprehensive distance learning does not work well for most students independence rates have been slipping the achievement gap is growing and perhaps most worrisome based on other research that shows that this kind of keeping away students from school can affect long-term harm on them that affect not only our high school students but also our middle middle school students and even our elementary school students we cannot wait five or ten years for this evidence to marry we need to act now this is really important so this brings me to working together ubpbs board of education and the portland association of teachers have a joint responsibility for children for well-being and the future so please come together as partners to make the school reopening a success concretely i think this means first focus on opening school sooner rather than later it's not going to be perfect right you heard this from new york their conditions it's not going to be perfect but we can't tinker for another five years and try to make this work like in the best way possible we have to start somewhere pbs had 50 000 students if i got this correct i got this on wikipedia if he reopens schools for just two hours a day and half his students return to school then that means that to provide 50 000 hours of in-person schooling to students put differently if you delay opening by just one day we deprive students often combine 50 000 hours of in-person instructions those are the costs of delaying these are real we need to recognize them and we need to act accordingly second i think this is what my previous parent also said is transparency and reaching out to parents and communities we don't know what's happening we don't know what's going to happen in a couple of weeks we have our work to do we have our own schedules we're trying to tweak them to make this work reach out to parents and communities informal about safety measures implemented in schools so they feel safe to bring this children back to school work with oha to provide information who can be vaccinated of parents and other adult household members who is eligible and how we can vaccinate it the more parents and other adult household members are vaccinated the more children will return to school this is a win-win situation and we should try to make this work and the last thing i want to say is um we need to be proactive and strive for in-person schooling as soon as possible reopening schools with a limited hybrid schedule can only be the first step the goal needs to be to expand to um full in-person schooling as quickly as we can nicholas kristoff recently wrote an op-ed you might have read this for almost a year now we as a country have failed millions of americans most vulnerable children you must rightly strong so let's work together and get this done thank you
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thank you thank you you have jackson weinberg hi i'm sorry i'm coming from my car um i've had a pretty busy day so kind of in between stuff right now um so hi i'm jackson weinberg last name spelled w-e-i-n-b-e-r-g um good evening student representative shu chair lowry board directors and superintendent i'd like to preface this public comment by stating that is not it is not my intention to hurt anyone's feelings or to place blame on any individual board member i'm also the deputy student rep for the district student council so i would like to clarify that i am not getting public comment on behalf of the dsc or the student representative i come before you tonight to speak about how student representative shu was not included in the last board retreat of february 20th 2021 and to clarify statements made at the preceding board meeting of february 23 2021 i found it interesting how chair lowry named and read off policy 1.20.010-p a minute 51 of the board meeting that i previously mentioned this was in the context of how policy requires board elections to happen twice a year just one page down on that same policy there is a section called student representation for those unfamiliar the policy explicitly states that and i quote the student representative shall be entitled to all rights responsibilities duties and privileges of a board member with the following summarized exceptions of not receiving legal documents not having an official vote and not being attendance at executive sessions without consent of the board with this in mind it makes me wonder why student representative she was not allowed to attend the board retreat chair lowry when confronted on the issue stated that it was a mere oversight since he hadn't been invited previously to other board retreats this was misleading because student representative shu asked to be invited and was subsequently denied also just because the board had been out of compliance with policy previously is no excuse for them to continue to be so this leads me to believe that it was a conscious choice to exclude student representative from the retreat thank you for listening um and thank you for giving me a chance to give public comment thank you so i i just um i feel like this needs to be addressed that i had a comment conversation with both nathaniel and student representative shu and jackson following that board meeting um and i will own that i made the decision when i heard that nathaniel had reached out to our board manager to ask to come to the retreat to say no because it happened on thursday night and i was not able to talk to my board colleagues and run everything through on friday before the retreat on saturday so i made that decision i will own it um and we have made the decision um to allow student representative shu to be at the next board retreat in april so this is a conversation i've had with the dsc i will own the decision i made and the conversations we had subsequent and that we will be ensuring that student representation is part of that april conversation i think we are working on further conversations about the role of student voice and the relationship between the dsc and the board and you know the student representative is not a board member they are a representative student voice and figuring out the best ways we can make sure that nathaniel or whoever the student rep is in the future is consistently included in ways that are productive but also protecting those places where board members do have certain legal and fiduciary responsibilities so i apologize for my error nathaniel in not having you be part of the february retreat or the retreats prior to that and i'm thankful that you will be able to be part of our april retreat and that we will continue to work as board leadership with the dsc to make sure we have clear processes around including student voice miss bradshaw is there any further comment tonight no that concludes public comment right we now get to hear a comment from our portland association of teachers president our contract with pat as one of um our big labor partners allows them time on our agenda to provide brief comments to the board and so i want to welcome pat president elizabeth thiel tonight um to share some some brief comments with us welcome elizabeth hello welcome thanks for having me um and i i do have a few slides that i uh would like to share as part of my speech do i have the ability to do that um were you able to send those into roseanne or to cara ahead of time i did but not ahead during the meeting so i sent their email they have them now but um roseanne and cara is that something we're able to do right now elizabeth you you're able to share them as well oh great thank you yeah great thank you um i will start without them so uh first of all thank you for giving me the time tonight to address the board i wish i could be here under better circumstances but i do want to acknowledge that this has been a very jarring week for educators the governor's
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announcement on friday gave educators and the district only 10 working days to come up with a plan to open our school buildings the governor's announcement has made an already complicated situation monumentally more difficult to navigate and it threatens to up to upend months of work trying to develop in-person opportunities for our students that are centered around our core priorities of safety stability and equity and that's what i want to talk to you tonight plans for the spring and we know that we can't return safely or in a way that doesn't exacerbate long-standing inequities without a plan and we know that no plan will succeed without the input of educators on the ground the governor's announcement does not change the immense amount of work in preparation necessary for a safe and purposeful return to our school buildings and it would be irresponsible to ask students to come into our schools before we have a chance to thoughtfully complete the plans and preparations to receive them and so i hope you are pushing as hard as we are to get the governor to pull back from this ill-advised mandate um but tonight i want to talk to you about what educators believe are the critical elements for any plan to reopen our school buildings this spring we know that this year has been so hard on everyone and it has disproportionately impacted our families of color multi-generational families families who have lost jobs families who have lost housing as well as families who include essential workers and that's why the district's plans for the spring must be centered on safety and equity especially for our most impacted students given the upheaval of the past year it's critical that we remember that many students and families have chosen to remain in comprehensive distance learning this spring these are frequently our most vulnerable students and we can't forget about them we must prioritize stability for students who for many good reasons choose to continue to learning remotely this spring and not disrupt what's currently working for students who do choose to return to school buildings for in-person hybrid instruction during this ongoing pandemic we know that it is not going to be a return to normal we can't offer what's normal we need to have a program that's designed to meet the biggest unmet needs from this past year in comprehensive distance learning and so we know we've known educators have known that simulcast is not the solution to meet those needs and we are relieved that that's come off the table and looking forward to making plans that really are centered on what our students need and so we've been engaged in conversations with educators to determine what is the right answer and how do we move forward positively together about around the goals that we share and believe in so over the last two weeks we have asked pat members in every school building to engage in conversations about spring instruction these conversations have happened after the work day on a volunteer basis facilitated by pat member leaders at each site and on very short notice we have had a huge turnout i want to share those results with you now so let me share my screen okay let's see sorry i've got a small computer hard to find all my buttons oops wrong one uh wrong one sorry about that here we go can you guys see that yes we can president theo okay so um on very short order we have had conversations in 79 of our school buildings 83 different conversations are reported um a total of fifteen hundred seventeen educators uh participated in these and we asked facilitators to record commonalities from these conversations we asked educators four questions what is working in cdl for students that should not be disrupted what are our students greatest needs that are not being met in cdl what would meet those needs and what is your vision for how spring instruction could be designed to safely meet those needs uh there we go and uh what we found is that members had surprisingly consistent answers across grade levels so this chart shows our answers for one of the questions what are students greatest needs and our high school middle school and elementary school
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educators all very universally found that the greatest the firs the greatest need of students was opportunities for social interaction and as you know that is exactly what parents found when we surveyed parent when the district surveyed parents and so overwhelmingly um at every grade level teachers found that social interaction was the greatest need and educators had so many ideas about how we could build a program that focused on meeting students need for social interaction and social emotional wellness educators were excited to think about plans to offer social groups clubs affinity groups art movement hands-on education and activities and extensions music dance gardening and as you can tell from the pictures that i selected a lot of educators were really excited about opportunities this spring in april and may in portland to offer opportunities online i'm sorry outside not online to students who are coming in to our classrooms let's see we also ask students or ask educators to tell us what is going well in comprehensive distance learning that we should be preserving for the kids who are who are going to remain and first and foremost educators reported that the routine the consistency and the structure of comprehensive distance learning was going well and was important to maintain for kids who continue we don't want to disrupt those kids routines of course educators were very uh clear that the safety benefits of cdl are are real and important and we've been in comprehensive distance learning to protect the safety of our students and their families as well as educators and we need to make sure that those those opportunities that are working for kids we also know even from the district's own attendance data there are some kids who are attending better like our lgbtq students and have been attending in live instruction uh sorry here we go i'm sorry multiple i'm multi-screening and it's getting me a little bit confused and we also found striking similarities in our k-5 6-8 and 9-12 educators and what a a program for the spring should look like there was near universal agreement that robust cdl options need to be maintained moving forward that we need to have in-person opportunities that focus on the social emotional health of our students as well as their opportunities to interact with one another and that there are so many opportunities this spring to do that with physical movement groups and so many so many things that educators are excited to offer i'm going to stop screen sharing there we go we know that there are many families who want to remain in comprehensive distance learning i am one of them both of my kids i have a seventh grader and a ninth grader when i've asked them what they would like to do they have told me that they would like to remain in comprehensive distance learning and go back in the fall hopefully to something that is a lot more normal we need to make sure that cdl continues as an option the governor her speech seemed to indicate that that's not necessarily her plan and it is something the district has already promised families and we are hearing as i'm sure you are from many families who are shocked that that would be something that is being threatened to take off the table at this point our strongest path forward together is to build a program around i think what we all believe in which is meeting our students needs and there is so much that we can do that we can be excited to do that is based on what brings us joy what our kids need and what educators are excited to do with kids this this spring which is keep them safe and offer opportunities to to give them what they've not been getting in comprehensive distance learning thank you um i know you've been doing a ton of work and that this has been an incredibly difficult time um as you kind of figure out like we're all trying to figure out what this all means for our students and our teachers and our staff and so really appreciate you taking the time to bring those teacher perspectives to us tonight thanks for giving me the opportunity to and in closing there is a little bit more that i want to say um and that is that we know that this pandemic has really brought forward some of the things that our community most
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values about our public schools um how important our schools are in the social emotional well-being of our students that's always been true we've been talking for years about the needs of our students and how we could be better providing for them in our school buildings and it's clear that for educators our goal is not just to get back to normal this we know we can't get back to normal this spring our goal is not even just to get back to normal this fall oregon schools haven't been meeting our students needs for decades and our goal is to take the opportunity that was thrust upon us in this pandemic this breach in normal and take a breath and think about how we can better focus our schools in the long run uh to meet the needs of our students the social emotional needs of our students have always been paramount and we haven't been doing a good enough job ever in meeting those needs it would be a tragic missed opportunity if in this disruption caused by the pandemic we fail to utilize this pause to focus on what's most important nurturing our our district's children honoring who they are and everything they bring and supporting them and achieving what they believe in and strive for we have an opportunity right now to really put our heads together about the school system that we want to have and to build it better this crisis of covid has demonstrated that there are resources out there when we need them um if we value those things and figuring out how we band together to build a school system based on our values not just now for the spring not just in the fall as the pandemic hopefully wanes but for the long run is what i hope that all of this gives us the opportunity to do so thank you for your commitment to our students safety um and their equity and for remembering the the the need of our students remaining in comprehensive distance learning to also be centered um as we make changes moving forward thank you and i know um i think it's it's not only our hope as well but it's the thing the vision we're working towards together i know that's true if i can speak on behalf of the superintendent and his staff as well as on behalf of the board so thank you so much for taking the time to be with us tonight and i know you have some more fun things to go do this evening so uh enjoy those it is my 13 year old's birthday today so we're gonna go uh have a birthday party i i hear uh i wasn't sure if it was allowed to be public that it was her birthday um but i hear that there's some minecraft and some dancing in your future so uh enjoy very much that tonight thank you i will all right student representative shu um are you ready to share your report with us tonight i am thank you uh so tonight i as it's been a while since i have last done so i would like to provide an update as to a number of the recent activities of the dsc uh first i told you a while back that the dsc had approved its first ever bylaws and that we intended these to be but a first draft of many led by the work of the bylaws subcommittee the dnc has since approved a number of amendments these efforts have accumulated in our bylaws which presently come in at around seven pages being fairly robust and comprehensive with which provides much needed clarity and structure to our operations we anticipate that we will continue to make amendments for the immediately foreseeable future an additional endeavor that has really been ramping up lately is the planning of the third annual pps student summit this policy mandated summit which had to be cancelled last year due to covid aims to quote promote student voice foster connections and promote the work of the council end quote our summit subcommittee has begun meeting recently and we are currently planning to hold the event via zoom in the in mid to late may similar to a plan for last year the summit will break out into a set of four breakout rooms at two different points for a total of eight rooms each dedicated to a specific topic from community organizing to the climate crisis and climate justice also similar to last year we are planning to have an emphasis on affinity groups with a planned effort to both invite them and in several cases have those organizations that are both willing and qualified lead breakout rooms while many more details are forthcoming i can tell you that any student as well as slp elt and the board are invited to attend our working date and time subject to change is 10 am to 2 pm on the 22nd of may the dsc has also recently been
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working to ensure that elections for next year's dsc representative take place at all schools which will hopefully result in the 2021 2022 dsc being representative of all or nearly all students we are still in the early stages of this operation but most signs thus far are optimistic especially at our comprehensive high schools finally on an unrelated note i feel compelled to speak to the acts of vandalism and arson at our central office all i have to say is this anyone who thinks that destroying trucks used to bring food to hungry school children is an acceptable means through which to affect political change a legitimate way to express grievances or a remotely admissible pastime needs to seriously reconsider their worldview thank you thank you so much and i've made a note of that may 22nd date i appreciate you uh inviting us all superintendent guerrero would you like to provide your report to us now good evening directors and buenas tardes to everyone listening in this evening i think we're waiting for the presentation to come up yes yes it's having a problem where you just i don't know if it's that or if superintendent is just you know giving us a dramatic pause before his uh to his uh presentation here the comments might make a little more sense if you have the image that would be good um [Music] so this this has been um a dramatic and challenging last few days for the district uh and the coming weeks will require us to continue to draw on our strengths as as individuals and as an organization um if you can back up the slides roseanne please um thank you chair for your statement at the be at the opening of tonight's meeting and student wrap shoe just now for your remark uh first i want to assure the board and the community that we will remain undeterred by this malicious act of arson and property violence that occurred this last weekend we have cleaned up the destruction and fortunately no one was hurt so i want to commend our staff our security and custodial teams and portland fire and rescue for their commitment to the safety of our schools and students what happened early saturday morning won't stop us from doing our work and from accomplishing our mission so we're going to keep moving forward and i want you to see this image here because you see what the act was but you also see who's there bright and early at sunrise on a monday morning just like every other work day uh ready to go out and do the task and work of delivering meals to our students thank you for your dedication so needing to rise to the occasion has has been a constant theme throughout this pandemic uh in a very difficult year we've never lost sight of what matters including the importance of racial equity and elevating underrepresented voices in our system while recognizing that there has been a cost and an impact to students and families and our community our students need to be seen and heard in person for the sake of their learning and for their social emotional and mental well-being and importantly many of our students require in-person specialized instruction and services and we also know that all of our efforts at virtual learning were always intended to be temporary and now we're being asked to reopen by our governor the details of the governor's executive order which has not been formally issued yet are still forthcoming and how we respond is still taking shape here's what we do know the plan comes in two phases k-5 elementary schools will return the week of that sometime during the week of march 29th grade 6 through 12 will reopen in mid april the governor's new expectations essentially give us a little more than two weeks to finish finalizing our instructional models and all of the detailed operational
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plans necessary to safely welcome students back to school buildings and really if you consider spring break we're really now down to eight business days to land all of this so there's still much to do but we will be ready we know it is safe for us to reopen for in-person or a hybrid of virtual and in-person learning from the beginning of this pandemic we've insisted on basing our decisions on reopening based on objective health metrics for schools the key metric is the 14-day cumulative case rate based on the number of positive tests per 100 000 residents in the community earlier today in an oregon department of education meeting director colt gill reminded everybody that oregon the state of oregon is currently 49th out of 50th and lowest case rate so this is one of those lists you want to be at the bottom of so these rates have shown steady improvement in fact the rates recently fell below the threshold for school hybrid and in-person reopening the public's confidence is clearly rising as case rates drop a healthy majority of our families including our families of color have indicated that they want some form of in-person learning this spring so based on the science based on the results we can move forward and we will do so carefully i want to share how we've been preparing for this moment we want everyone to feel confident that we've taken the necessary steps to welcome back students and staff to our buildings first many of our teachers and other student-facing staff have had the opportunity to be vaccinated and have begun that process vaccination is the surest possible way to avoid contracting or spreading covid19 and it is available to all student-facing employees second we have begun to address ventilation and airflow issues in our buildings wherever possible we've upgraded hvac systems at schools we've increased ventilation opened windows and invested in air purifiers with uv lights for all learning spaces we won't be returning to classrooms set up in the way we've always been used to but we will be returning to safe learning spaces that have been adapted to meet our current needs and requirements third we have already reopened some of our buildings for limited in-person instruction we have more than 85 schools already up and running with at least a portion of students attending during the day with limited class sizes we have opened up school athletics programs which are operating in a safe manner and by the end of this week all of our schools will be operating some forms of limited in-person programming we have learned a great deal from these initial efforts and we have made some changes to classroom configurations and adjusted protocols at the same time we recognize that each school is different and will require unique approaches but the goals are the same ensure a safe learning environment and maintain a continuity of learning that's what our students deserve our teachers need and know how to do and our community continues to support so our reopening measures are still taking shape we don't have all the specific details quite yet but all student-facing staff have access to vaccines we've procured and distributed additional safety equipment we have articulated and implemented health and safety protocols and we have the guidance from health authorities to inform our plans and we're educators we know how to support our students and their success and that's the most important asset that we have fundamentally a thriving school community is about the positive relationships between students educators and families so i thank everyone in advance for your support for your continued flexibility and willingness to adapt to continue meeting the challenge in front of us as we stay student centered and celebrate a return to school for our children and young adults this will be a new kind of first day of school with the kind of natural nervous excitement that comes with being with peers and in new classes and it will be important for all of us i also appreciate what the earlier speaker described that we focus on making this the most positive and welcoming return to school as an experience for our students so staff will be sharing more details and updates related to school opening a little later in the agenda but lastly i also want to alert our audience and community that if you now go to our district's homepage online you'll notice a new banner pps reopens there you will begin to observe a growing level of transparent communications
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and details posted there for all things related to schools reopening thank you thank you very much superintendent and thank you to all of the staff that has been working so hard as we move towards re-entry uh we move now to our committee and conference reports and we begin with the audit uh director edwards do you have anything to report you are muted and i'm sorry um it takes a moment to get off mute yes i do have a report that the audit committee had a meeting on february 24th we had an update on our the current audits that are underway and the audit planning uh people should know the p card or the purchasing card audit is underway um including the field work and as you all might recall when we approved the audit plan this past year we noted that one of the audits that approved was the health and safety plan checks audit and that we indicated we the auditors would undertake that audit when there was in-person instruction occurring in schools and so since we have limited in-person instruction and hybrid models starting up that audit will move into position and the field work will be starting in addition at the meeting we also had a discussion of key performance indicators for the office of the performance auditors and there was a several proposed audits and the refinement of different measures how we measure the audit the audit office's performance that's a best practice they also showcased a oddity survey that they will roll out um in the coming year as they conduct audits to get feedback from the auditees and then um lastly there was a more in-depth presentation on the health and these health and safety building plan checks and um essentially the objective of the audit um since this is now highly rel relevant is whether school buildings uh where students are attending in person in classes are in compliance with the building safety plan that's been put in place on the onset of the coven pandemic and all the schools do have building safety plans and the visits will be starting and i believe audit commitment members and others have been invited to participate in one of those walk throughs it should be important to note that the audit will not determine the adequacy of the building safety plans it will determine whether the the school building is in compliance with the building safety plan so really important um check and that this is designed not as a got you on it but as a way to ensure um and to review uh whether uh not only are we in compliance what are what our schools need to be able to um effectively implement those building safety plans which um is an important thing for our students and staff so more on that i'm sure coming up and if individuals are in more are interested in these walk-throughs please contact the office of the internal performance doctors thank you dr berm edwards director defos texted me and let me know that she'll have a report um next meeting from the school improvement bond committee so we turn now to director morris their report from cbrc um sorry i mean um so the cprc is meeting um together with the school board for work session this thursday on march 11th to discuss the um strategic plan and multi-year business plan and do a preview of the 2021-22 budget and um and talk about the
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budget schedule how we're going to proceed with um you know the timeline for decision making and and milestones and um i think a general preview of um sort of the framework that's being used the strategic framework that's being used to build the budget and the um the next meeting after that is april 15th thank you director constance i'm assuming we can skip the gutter and alternative programs one because we'll be doing that in just a few minutes cool okay uh director scott intergovernmental um yeah the update is that we have decided to cancel thursday's intergovernmental committee meeting we want to make sure that all staff have time to focus on reopening um you will continue to get updates from courtney legislative updates um from the state over the next couple weeks but let me know for the april meeting also if there are agenda items that the board members would like to put on that april item april meeting and i will put them on the agenda thank you dr moore anything from policy committee yes um the community met yesterday we talked about three policies um and the real estate complaint and technology use policies um two policies that the committee has uh considered are on tonight's agenda uh a bit later um [Music] and um sort of following up with what director scott just said um get in the press of other work um especially all of the work related to reopening um it's going to be really challenging and over the next few months and is going to really put a strain on the capacity of both staff and community to engage in in other work the committee is going to have to reassess what we can reasonably expect to accomplish over the remaining three and a half months of this school year um we started off the year with a very ambitious um probably even unrealistic work plan for the year and it's becoming clear that we'll have to scale back and prioritize the work accordingly yesterday's meeting the committee decided to pause work on revisions to the complaint policy pending some additional data analysis and staff engagements and [Music] like the intergovernmental committee we have decided to cancel the next scheduled policy committee meeting which was scheduled for march 29th uh which is i believe the day schools are supposed to reopen um in order to allow staff to focus on um all of the logistical and and planning challenges of rio so the next poll director moore i want to be really clear based on what superintendent guerrero said and that we're really communicating clearly with our teachers and students is that that students will not be back in the classroom on march 29th that is when staff will be back and that the day that students come back is sometime that week but it's tva so just to be i've heard a lot of panic so i just want us to be very clear about that so sorry for you please go ahead no thank you for the question that sorry i misspoke um uh anyway our next policy committee meeting will be april 19th thank you i just um have gotten a couple of those emails of from folks about the 29th all right rose porter do we have any updates from rose porter yes um in the interim between uh the official steer co meetings um courtney wes wesling who's head of government affairs she and i have had some meetings with both legislators and other elected officials on some other potential options on ways that we can um assist in sort of coming up with some other potential approaches to the current plan which seems to be just to continue full steam ahead so more to report later but we're actively meeting with and um working on some options um to bring forward for consideration so would you mind sending us a briefing on those meetings before your next steering committee meeting which i think is is the 22nd or the 23rd because i've had a lot of community members reach out to me with different ideas that are percolating
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and um would be good for us to be informed of the kind of discussions that pps is is having would you mind doing that sure um and i would encourage if people are um contacting you to feed those into director bailey and courtney wesling and myself so we can also get things in the mix thanks are there any other committee reports that we need to have chair if i could just express an appreciation to directors uh thank you for your sensitivity in preserving staff capacity so we can stay focused on all details school reopening related postponing slightly less time sensitive uh work is appreciated thank you thank you and i to just let the board know we um senior leadership and scott and i made the decision to cancel agenda setting for this week um so we will not be doing agenda setting tomorrow so if you do have items that you want for the agenda you can go ahead and email those in and we'll we'll hold them for the meeting on the 30th but we wanted to give staff additional time this week all right um i think is there are there any other i think i already asked that question sorry uh we are going to go ahead and take a five minute break um and take some time before we come back and do our charter school renewals so um we'll see everybody back in five minutes at 7 20 7 33 about um the great work these schools are doing and i really enjoyed my time last year as the chair of this committee and getting to be part of the work um so i'm really excited to hear from chair constance and everybody else about these uh renewals tara comes and meeting chair of that committee um so share content would you like to introduce this next item of our renewals of our two charter schools opal and portland arthur academy sure i'm happy to um yes this is our annual process and this year we have two of our charters that came before us in the full renewal process sponsors of charter schools in the state of oregon like pps are responsible for evaluating charter school performance and determining whether or not to renew the contract of the charter school based on its compliance with the law and the contract and its performance in three domains academic academic financial and organizational we follow the national association of charter school authorizers recommendations that a formal review application be used as part of a fair and transparent process this renewal application ensures that all charter schools entering the renewal process have an equal opportunity to present data and information relevant to their request for contract renewal it also ensures that the renewal decision is based on the renewal criteria specified in ors 33865 and oar 581-026-0400 the board's charter and alternative program committee met to review the staff's recommendation to renew both charter schools at our february 2nd meeting then we held a public hearing on february 11th where there was an opportunity for each school to share an overview of their school community and programs and offer time for public testimony both in support or in opposition of the charter renewal we did not hear any opposition from for either of the schools seeking renewal um the committee unanimously unanimously voted to recommend renewals for both opel school and portland arthur academy um we i hope all of you have had a chance to look at some of the data that we that was brought forward to us as part of this renewal process there was really nothing notable in terms of any areas of concern with either of these schools so it was just a wonderful opportunity for us to check back in with the educators at these two schools that i can i can proudly say are serving their their students and families very well so um superintendent guerrero would you like to introduce staff to um further dig into the details here yes thank you director constance i would like to invite senior director of multiple pathways to graduation karina wolff and director of charter schools tara o'neil to provide an introduction to each school thank you thank you good evening superintendent guerrero chair lowry vice chair bailey and directors opal charter school submitted a written request for charter renewal on january
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2nd 2021 in accordance with the charter school renewal process outlined in ors 338.065 as director constance shared the board charter schools and alternative programs committee met both on february 2nd and then again on february 11th in a public hearing district sponsors of charter schools in oregon are responsible for evaluating charter school performance and determining whether or not to renew the contract of the charter school based on its compliance with the law and the contract with its sponsor as a member district of the national authorized association of charter school authorizers pps requires charter schools to use recommended renewal application to ensure a fair and transparent process evaluation for the renewal included a review of annual performance reports financial audits site visits and any other information jointly agreed upon by the sponsor and the charter school this information is collected in the school's annual performance framework and report within multiple pathways to graduation the pps charter schools office submitted the 2019-20 performance framework and report for opal school in review of its academic performance fiscal management organizational stability adherence with all applicable state laws and compliance with all terms of the charter contract the charter school's office found no areas of statutory or compliance concern in its review opal charter school is a k-5 charter school in southwest portland housed in the portland children's museum building enrolling 88 to 90 students the school's instructional program is guided by the work of early childhood educators in reggio emilia italy neuroscience research and construction constructivist practices the opel school through its association with the museum center for learning operates as a research lab and professional development hub for educators nationwide who take part in opel's summer symposium and visitation days during the school year now i'm going to invite tara director o'neal to share some more specific information thank you good evening old school opened in 2001 and is in its 20th year of operation opel school was the first charter school in the public school district to open it has successfully applied for charter renewal in 2006 and 2011. the school is currently operating under a 5 to 10 year flexible agreement which has been extended annually to reach the statutory 10th year limit and will terminate on june 30th 2021. the board charter schools and alternative programs committee has been provided with copies of the opel school renewal application the oregon school profile and the 2019-20 annual performance framework report which includes analysis of the most recent three years of student achievement data in addition over the course of the last charter term the school has exhibited financial sustainability and consistently meets both financial and organizational standards on its annual performance frameworks this is opal's third charter renewal per oregon revised statute 338.465 this renewal quote shall be for a minimum of five years but may not exceed 10 years end quote opal charter school has requested a 10-year renewal of its charter additionally as part of its renewal application opal charter school has requested an increase in its enrollment cap from 92 students to 250 students to allow flexibility and financial sustainability in future facilities searches if needed over the course of the upcoming charter term thank you thank you all right um do i have a motion and second to adopt resolution 6267 resolution approving renewal of the charter agreement with opal charter school second all right i think i heard director brim edwards and director scott uh and then director constance so we'll do director uh from edwards moves and director scott seconds the adoption of resolution 6267 and director constance can be jazz hands at the end that would be that would be mr bailey to you jim oh was it mr bailey who seconded i just heard the male like you know uh voice so i apologize so we'll do that again director brett edwards moves and director bailey seconds the adoption of resolution 6267 and director constand provides jazz hands at the end of that is there any board discussion yeah i'm just delighted to say that 20 years after
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the first approval of the charter application it's great to see a school community that has i think really demonstrated what we hope for in our charter schools to provide some alternatives for students um that may this different than maybe offered in some of our other schools we look for them to be hubs of innovation to share best practices and and to receive best practices from our other schools and i say it seems like a long time ago that uh opel school was first before us uh but it's uh gratifying to be here 20 years later because when you make that first approval of a charter school it's just given the nature um it's not clear if it's gonna going to be a sustainable model so i'm really pleased to um see that the sort of spirit and vision of the original founders um is still is still strong and it looks like another 10 years and i i can guarantee you i'm not going to be here for the next uh renewal [Music] so you say um i just also want to say i'm really thrilled to be able to um see this charter renewal through my son harrison actually was in the first class in 2001 coincided with mine having a second baby and i was looking for some place to put the older child uh the three-year-old and he ended up at opal and i love the excuse me i love the merging of science and um and art and expression i also um harkens back to my my family background and like the montessori education and and the focus on the kinder we call it in my family the kinder the children and um yeah i'm really happy to support it i um i made this comment during our hearing and i would love to see the opal um school in particular serve more kids of color because i think that the pedagogy and the the learning environment is really uh generative and uh wonderful to see so i'm happy to support um my family benefited by the uh it just worked out really well for a transportation plan for my son's um you know pre-k years and in fact just yesterday i pulled out a little booklet that he had made with a fantastic photograph of him um over breakfast so i'm really glad to see this go through thanks just want to say thank you to opal for your really thorough work and preparing this renewal application and i want to just mention that this is opal is anticipating um a new chapter potentially and moving from their current space and so that is why we have a this renewal includes a pretty significant authorization for expansion of their student body even though um you know that's it's not certain that they would expand enough to meet that total capacity that they're asking for but they want to have the flexibility when they're looking for new spaces um so um i endorse that that's the in the resolution that's before us and we wish you guys well in that that tricky pursuit and also just want to commend you for much greater collaboration with other pps schools in the last couple of years and to commend our pps leadership in using opal as a resource and call in that collaboration because we know we have educators coming from all over the world to learn from your practices and see what's going on so i'm glad our own teachers are benefiting as well and then one last item which is pretty interesting is you know the whole name of the game this past year has been adaptation in terms of adjusting to remote learning and it was a particularly interesting journey for opal school who really used very little technology in their curriculum before it's very much based on hands-on learning and project-based curriculum so to be able to carry those prints same learning principles and styles forward um in remote learning is pretty remarkable so um thank you it's a pleasure to have a window into what you guys do with your kids and families every day thank you miss bradshaw is there any public comment no all right the board will now vote on
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resolution 6267 resolution approving renewal of the charter agreement with opal charter school all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no there any abstentions resolution 6267 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes right um we now turn again to our leadership team our staff to introduce arthur academy thank you we'll do it we'll do the same tag team so portland arthur academy submitted a written request for charter renewal on january 2nd 2021 in accordance with charter school renewal process outlined in ors 338.065 as director constance shared the board charter schools and alternative programs committee met on february 2nd to review arthur's charter school renewal application and supplementary information and then again on february 11th in a public hearing the next step in the renewal process is to determine determine whether or not to approve the school's request for renewal the pps charter school's office submitted the night 2019-20 performance framework and report for portland arthur academy in review of its academic performance fiscal management organizational stability adherence with all applicable state laws and compliance with all terms of the charter contract the charter school's office found no areas of statutory or compliance concern in its review portland arthur academy charter school is a k-5 charter school in southeast portland housed on the ascension catholic church campus and ruling enrolling 175 students the school uses a research-based direct instruction model that focuses students through a highly organized incremental curriculum and ensures they master each skill before moving on to the next portland arthur academy is one of six arthur academies in the greater portland area which share a common curriculum a single board of directors and a central administrative office sorry i took a moment to unmute portland arthur academy opened in 2005 and is in its 16th year of operation it successfully applied for charter renewal in 2008 and 2011. the school is currently operating under the five to ten year flexible agreement which has been extended annually to reach the statutory tenth year limit and will terminate on june 30th 2021. the board charter schools and alternative programs committee has been provided with copies of portland arthur academy's renewal application the oregon school profile and the 2019-20 annual performance framework and report which includes analysis of the most recent three years of student achievement data in addition over the course of the last charter term the school has exhibited financial sustainability and consistently meets both financial and organizational standards in its annual performance frameworks this is portland arthur academy's third charter renewal for oregon revised statute 338 this renewal shall be for a minimum of 5 years but may not exceed 10 years portland arthur academy has requested a 10-year renewal of his tour thank you thank you so much for that all right do i have a motion and second to adopt resolution 6265 resolution approving renewal of the charter agreement with arthur academy charter moved okay all right director constant moves and director to pass seconds the adoption of resolution 6265. is there any board discussion so i said this at the hearing as well but um you'd be hard-pressed to find two different approaches to teaching and learning as you would in the two schools um that we're dealing with tonight and yet both are successful the the original idea behind charter schools was to try something new and if it's proven successful to have that those ideas adopted into the broader public school system right now we have some foundational work still to do before i think we'll be able to do that but it's my hope that in the future that pbs looks more carefully at the charters and starts stealing some good ideas all right um is miss brush how's there any public comment no mr director edwards were you going to
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speak to this i was just going to say this is another charter that was approved in my um tenure on the board from 2001 to 2005. and i say we've had some charters come and go and i while it's a different model as noted by director bailey one that is addressing needs of students and families in pps as well and has stood this test of time all right any further comment from the board the board will now vote on resolution 6265 resolution approving renewal of the charter agreement with arthur academy charter school all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any obsessions resolution 6265 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes all right thank you all for that great work and to the team at arthur i missed my opportunity to just chime in and say we really appreciate your adaptability too and your kids continue to thrive and in remote learning and you've got a recipe and it's working and we appreciate everything you do and i just want to thank all the committee members having served on that committee twice before um you you're you're doing it you do a deep dive for the rest of the of the board um and it's a really important task because it's not like a just short six months or extension that we're doing so thanks to all the committee members and even though everything was very rosy with these two schools tonight that is not pro forma i mean we have a lot of uh categories to examine and i don't want to take for granted that um both of these organizations are really in excellent shape both in terms of financial stewardship and academic achievement thank you and thank you to our staff to karina and tara who just continue to do an excellent job of providing us with data and resources and helping manage this process so incredibly well and the i know the continued relationship and support that you provide to not only our charter schools but also to all of our cdo's so thank you to our staff as well superintendent guerrero would you like to introduce our next agenda item on covid hybrid and lippy thank you lowry yes tonight we will provide another regular update to share with directors and the community regarding current reopening planning we do have a cast of senior staff but i believe dr russ brown our chief assistant performance is going to kick us off and the other cabinet level members will introduce themselves as they uh share their section with you thank you russ good evening superintendent guerrero board chair lowry and other directors of the board and the community please be joined joining me this evening to give an update um i be joined primarily with uh dan young our chief of operations and danny wodesma our racial equity and social justice advisor for this system uh senior senior executive um and i'm waiting for our powerpoint to pop up i've been filling time so uh next slide please so tonight um i'm going to start and i'll go over our latest numbers in terms of covert rates and also an update on our k5 student family preference form we've talked about that previously and just want to give an update our chief operating officer dan young will come and speak about health and safety measures and that will be followed up again by danny woodsman at the end next slide please so yeah we have guiding principles that we've talked about every time i think they overlapped significantly with those that were brought up by the pat president earlier today we have centered racial equity and social justice in our work we have a combined interest i think in trying to make sure that as we plan and work forward that we are centering our black and indigenous students in those conversations health and wellness of our students staff and larger community again is is paramount and is is a sizable chunk of the planning and all the work that the dance team has done throughout the year as well as others uh again we focused on connection and relationship it's important for us and it's an important part of instruction i think
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sometimes we act as if social emotional learning and academics are somehow separate when in fact i i think that they're they're the same thing and finally uh we've talked about strengthening and innovation in terms of the instructional core and clearly we have been required to innovate quite a lot this year next slide please following up on on what the superintendent had said earlier we have good news our case rates continue to go down we're currently sitting at 62.7 cases per 100 000 people over the past two weeks it's a really substantial drop we were done we were at 550 cases over a two week period in the last two weeks in november and today uh looking at the rolling average that we see for today seven seven-day rolling average would put us at or near the the threshold of 50 cases per 100 000 over two weeks at our next update if those patterns continue i have heard brought up a couple times i just want to bring up a little bit of clear clarification if we get down below that threshold if we're in that green zone that's uh belong below 50 i think folks are sometimes under the impression that the rssl guidance somehow becomes irrelevant and unfortunately that's not the case um the ready school safe learners document and and the guidance within it that is mandatory for us for provision of health and safety is in effect until june 30th and even if case rates in the county dip below that 50 per 100 000 over two weeks we are still obligated to follow all the guidance mandatory guidance within rssl doctor brown can i just cut in for just a second because i'm curious about that then is there given that is there really a distinction between the on-site and the on-site and hybrid because again with those rssl guidelines one of the reasons why we sort of have to do the hybrid is because of those limitations on cohort sizes you know class sizes space distance all the rest of that given that is what's the difference between the green and the yellow functionally for us i don't think there is any uh if one were out in a rural setting with a really large modern school with a look under enrolled one could have everyone back under that model um you know the guidance has to be written for the diversity of systems across the state and obviously uh some systems are a little bit different place than we are in terms of their facilities and enrollment um that's why i wanted to bring it up today because i think there's this this impression that if we go below 50 we can throw our doors wide open and and things go back to the way they they used to be um and that's just simply not the case we're obligated to follow the rssl guidance and if you look carefully at it you'll see that you know they talk about uh the need for hybrid if that if it's necessary to maintain small cohorts and and to keep below the having 100 um interactions within a week for a student so next slide please again i just want to give another update on on the parent interests uh talk about the results and how they've changed over time i think we had some speculation the last time we got together how those results might change whether or not we had heard from early adopters and whether or not the pattern would change over time it was something i was really curious about and and i think was very interesting as the data came in so if we could the next five ways we were targeting a 80 response rate um and we achieved roughly 84 response rate and this date is as of today at noon um despite a 24 almost 25 percentage point increase in responses the proportion of parents who want in-person option for their students has remained stable uh if you recall it was at 70 percent it's sitting at 68.9 uh so it's dropped by less than uh two percentage points despite again an increase of nearly 25 percent uh of respondents and you'll see that uh if we look at this and you know again roughly two out of three sixty four percent of our parents one hybrid another five percent uh we'd like to have lithia that were an option uh and if you look below you'll see that the black latino and native families continue to express comparable levels of interest and hybrid instruction there was much less variability in this than maybe i would have thought at the beginning so to dig up under this if you recall last time next slide please um i didn't have the disaggregated data on participation rate by race uh in front of me i mentioned that i did mention that um i thought there was an over-representation of white voices in in the data and in fact there was at that point in time but you can see that you know again we
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went from a 59.3 percentage point uh participation rates it's a near 84 percent and in that we saw substantial increases in the participation rate uh for our black students uh an increase of 41 percent uh we had a we've heard from nearly 75 percent of our latino families which was an increase of 32 percent and we heard the preferences for 58 percent of our native american families which was an increase of nearly 27 percent so we had really i think substantial increases and again the planned activity of of having telephone outreach really increased the representation of black latino and native voices in this data and and did a lot to to decrease the disparity in terms of representation as we move forward next slide please dr brown yes like we back up for a second no we don't need to back up but just shout out to our community engagement team because it this was really important data for us to have and um we weren't satisfied by just waiting to see who responded to the form that was sent it took a lot of strategic engagement to really hear from a greater sampling of our families so really appreciate all that work i know there was a lot i agree i have a quick question as well um or comment um dr brown and that the the response rate first of all 84 is impressive and the numbers of um students of color is also very impressive and the outcomes are almost are very impressive also and so it just makes me you know looking for some i'm looking to be skeptical in the data that we're seeing right now and wondering now i'm wondering like how were the questions asked because i find it it's really unusual to get that high of a um in just the work that i've done statistics wise it's so it's it's hard to get 58 68 on on things um so i'm i'm impressed and i'm also a tiny bit skeptical i'll be honest so just add on to that um not the skepticism necessarily um but the sort of curiosity about that because i know this this was primarily uh sort of a census of who would be going back and i don't know if this is why um danny ledezma is sort of on deck here but i would be interested if we have um maybe more um in in-depth um some feedback from those families not just are you coming back but what are the things you're concerned about and whether that's something we've reached out to our community partners that um are you know working in those communities every day like aside from just the yes or yes or no do you want to come back for in person but um you know what what do you what do you need to hear what do you need to know what sort of supports you need and i'm wondering if we've asked those questions thank you because that that's the other part like we're all getting the same emails and i think you said skepticism might be a little bit strong of a word but are what are we hearing from the opposite percentage what are you know are we what is not being presented here i'm hearing from people that absolutely don't want to go back to school i'm hearing from people that absolutely do want schools to open all the way and so you know i'm trying to do my my duty here by diving in and getting the most accurate whole information that's available if that makes sense so there were a lot of different questions in there and i'm gonna try to take a swing at a couple of those and then i'd like danny to lean in first and foremost i do want to extend a thank you to our community engagement staff the folks in in our support staff who reached out made phone calls building-based teams who who made an effort to reach out and engage our families and and to contact them in terms of the the survey the survey was really very simple and yeah in in this work we have to honor what we're doing in terms of a bargaining right now and that limited the amount of specificity that we could put in in the in the survey because there are things that remain to be bargained the first question and a verbatim please tell us more about any additional needs your student may have please select all that apply help with connectivity issues academic support social emotional or mental health support build educator to student relationships in-person peer-to-peer interaction support ongoing engagement and attendance and family supports and resources so we
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specifically ask folks about those domains we we didn't ask it in an open-ended format because frankly that would be really hard to to aggregate in a meaningful fashion on this timeline uh we did talk about that and i i think ms thiel mentioned that a sizable portion of our parents around 45 said um you know they were really interested in person peer-to-peer interaction for their students another almost 40 percent said no i'm really interested in academic support for my child and those were the two front runners in terms of needs that were identified on that the next question we asked was simply how important is it for your student to be able to remain with their teacher for the rest of the school year uh and we were interested in that because obviously for planning purposes if we can honor that we we certainly wish to and then finally the last sort of main question was i would like my student to be in hybrid instruction as soon as the opportunity is available yes or no it's just simply a yes or no do you want your child to begin hybrid if it's available or not and again constraint one of the limitations and i appreciate your your skepticism uh director depos one of the limitations here was again um the constraints of what was available in terms of the determinations in terms of bargaining now i'm a relatively conservative person around decision making and so without a lot of information i would actually expect folks to be disinclined to pick hybrid because they have to make that leap of faith without a lot of information yet we see roughly two out of three people who said that yeah we're interested in hybrid and that again stayed relatively stable even though there was a substantial increase in participation and and agreed this is a census of the student population obviously the first time i've seen a census here i don't know if this has been done before and again was a real concerted effort to reach out now we had done prior engagement with focus groups in communities of color to try to understand the range of issues and needs and also with linguistically diverse groups and we could come back and talk about that at another time but in terms of the survey the survey was really pretty succinct and um there was one additional question which you know if i answered no to the hybrid we did ask folks well are you interested in limited in person and then finally after after that we asked if folks were interested in transportation if they were eligible for it so it was a really short survey it was very succinct the language was was simple we we had it vetted by a number of folks it was translated it was and again we made a concerted effort to reach out to a large large group of folks and repeatedly reach out to them uh to be able to get more adequate representation i've covered a bunch of ground i don't know if i've i if i captured director brim edward's question or not and if if you could re-articulate it that would be helpful because i think that's the one for danny i think you did because while there weren't open-ended questions i think you mentioned asking what i would say would be the big categories of concerns that i've heard i've heard from parents at some later date it'd be great to see that sort of click click down um so thank you you did answer the question um but i i would i guess if um danny ledesma's um prepared to speak about i don't know if we've engaged um any any focus groups or just to get because there's in place of open-ended questions another way of getting feedback is more more direct communications yeah we have not uh done a formal survey of our partners and their services families that they're serving but we have engaged with our partners in a couple of different ways so uh the superintendent convenes our resj service partners uh quarterly and so last quarter we uh was um i had that date in my mind and i just lost it it was um at the end of uh february uh when we met with all all 16 of our resj partners the superintendent's leadership team uh and our our principals and so we did uh we did quite a bit of presenting um but we also looked at uh some other data and we had some conversation about reopening um the other place where we are getting information um is in those sort of like daily daily calls and i think like you and director de pass our our partners
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are hearing the whole range of um of sort of uh of opinions around uh sort of needs and um apprehensions from from families of color um and so we found that there's uh you know pretty uh pretty similar um pretty similar uh responses in terms of of what we're hearing uh from this survey um in a couple of minutes i'll be talking a little bit more about the sun service system um and we have some data and update about the services that they've provided uh during um comprehensive distance learning and i think that's really instructive of sort of like where the needs are and there's almost like a symbiotic uh relationship between uh the supports and services you saw that in the uh survey we saw in the survey that that wasn't one of the highest needs that families were um were requesting and i think there's a a pretty uh corollary relationship with the sun service system because that's where they have really gone deep in providing direct uh client assistance and and more of that so i think you'll you'll be able to hear in a few moments a little bit more about that great thank you next slide please thank you danny so um and when we look at you know again parental preferences by race um you know again we saw a um some some minor changes here with the exception of uh changes for black and native american populations in both cases as there was an increase in the participation rate of the parents we saw an increase in the interest for hybrid instruction um and you know again with substantial increases in participation in both cases those ticked up our other groups showed relatively minor changes less than two percent drop and again overall a 1.6 percentage point drop overall in interest for hybrid again remarkably stable data given the increase now you know to that point uh director devos and director graham edwards and others um you know i i don't think you're alone getting those emails uh we've all been given lots of emails there's still roughly you know you know three to four out of 10 people who really don't want to go back to hybrid that they want to stay in cdl and they feel pretty strongly about that yeah i think we have a community here where you know six out of ten seven out of ten people would like their children to go back to hybrid and someplace between three and four out of ten people would like their kids to stay in cdl and i think both those things are true and one of the things i think is is very clear in this data when we look at we disagree about race is that you know none of these groups are monolithic folks within these groups have have different opinions about these things and and and different needs and you know as as you're aware from the the data that i gave uh earlier this week around attendance you know there's you know the the burden of of of the loss of attendance has been born predominantly by our black and native students our students of color have warned that that loss of attendance uh both of the middle school but even more predominantly at the high school level so uh you know i think again there are different ways to look at this um but you know again the bottom line is two out of three of our parents would like their students to have the hybrid learning opportunity as we move forward so so dr brown back to your point about cdl and if you want to defer this question because we're going to get into it later in the presentation that's fine but um i think from the perspective of parents responding to these survey questions they are likely assuming that any if they opt into cdl it's going to be the same as the cdl that they're experiencing now and i'm interested to know how true or untrue that may be what exactly what our our vision is for cdl and then also whether there was any nuance around that conversation with families in the survey itself like was there any um recognition that cdl could look quite different [Applause] again the survey question was was pretty straightforward we just asked whether or not folks were interested in the opportunity to pursue hybrid for their student so folks who said no i'm not interested in hybrid again they were asked whether or not they were interested in limited in-person's activity if they said no to that again the assumption was cdl there was no question that asked people to actively endorse that they wanted to stay in cdl the question was whether or not they
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wanted hybrid or whether or not they wanted lippy and then again if not then the option is to remain in cdl so next slide please my question about that is are we sure that the governor is going to allow us to have cdl like do we know i think we do we know the details he had of that we do not um and i'll come back to that in a moment so i do want to clear up a little bit of misinformation i i've heard some misinformation about school participation rates i've heard that in some cases folks thought school participation rates were really low or participation rates by communities of color were very low by school and in fact they weren't we have a 70 percent or better uh response rate in in nine out of ten or our buildings at this point and we have a 70 percent or better response rate for our non-white families and seven out of 10 of our schools again we really made an effort to reach out now at this time none of our schools have a response rate below 60 um and while we didn't reach 100 this was the first time as we talked about before that i'm aware at least during my tenure that we've done a census of our students and while there still is some disparity in terms of response rate our outreach efforts for all the folks that you thanked and even more increased representation of our communities of color so i just wanted to clear that up because again we really did make a concerted effort to reach out and hear from people next slide please finally this should come as no surprise as i mentioned earlier we asked parents whether or not they wanted their student to remain with their teacher overwhelmingly irrespective of whether or not they said they wanted to go to hybrid or stay in distance learning overwhelmingly our parents wanted their student students to be able to remain with their teacher um this is absolutely our preference as well there are however um depending on on the model that's agreed upon there are some challenges to the as we move forward and uh to director lowry's question um you know we've asked our families what they would want uh clearly folks feel strongly on both sides i think you've heard people come and present on both sides i've mentioned before that you know i have three children for two of my three children i would have likely picked to have them go to hybrid for one of my my children he actually completed high school in a remote program an alternative program and i think cdl would have been been a better option for him and i would have likely picked that again i think it's really important to honor parents choices and um you know we know that the governor really wants to reduce the footprint of cdl but we would like to offer cdl to those families who have requested it or stated that that's their preference and we'll continue to do so until we're told we can't uh i think it's important we've asked people what they want and i think it's important to honor that as we move forward dr brown um so since our last meeting um one of the options the sort of simulcast option has been taken off the table as my understanding and so the question i have and that seemed to be an option that you would most likely remain with your teacher or are there other options that um to preserve that valued relationship that parents have or is that um just harder to accommodate with the other options we're actively working through options right now with with the union in terms of that i think everybody knows that that it would be preferable to keep students with their teacher i i don't want to speak at a turn right now because again we're in the process of negotiation and and so i think it'd be inappropriate for me to lean into that a whole lot more i do think there are ways that can be accommodated in without simulcast for many students but i do think that you know again as we move forward there is a not so small probability that some students will be reassigned i think it's unavoidable um i really appreciate the numbers here and looking at these three numbers realizing that we can't both have the all all three of these things can't be true at the same time but it's almost as if you anticipated some of the questions in terms of how the data was disaggregated by race and i feel i'm confident that particularly the engagement team did an outstanding job of
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talking to people in some cases probably not super easy to find people and it shows them the data so thank you staff thank you again next slide please i think we're going to be transitioning now to health and safety with chief operating officer dan young thank you good evening director superintendent and student representative shu next slide please tonight i'd like to talk about progress on health and safety and the work that is many months in the making just last friday we were able to show governor brown the many health and safety measures in place when she toured sydney elementary she learned about ventilation and air quality in our schools took a look at our dedicated symptom rooms and ppe closets and asked a host of questions about process and procedures governor brown told us she was honestly blown away by the safety protocols in place to keep staff and students safe next slide please in recent months our facilities teams have made significant improvements at every school and in all 3 000 classrooms we have removed purchased and rearranged furniture to accommodate physical distancing requirements signage and plexiglas has been installed in every building our custodians have been busy prepping the buildings and putting cleaning protocols in place uh and i should note that thanks to our hard-working recruiting staff currently we only have a handful of custodial vacancies and also i'll talk about staffing i'd like to note that every school will have a school nurse or health assistant present during hybrid to assist with health and safety protocols also noteworthy the building ventilation systems have been inspected to ensure that they are operating properly and have been modified to maximize the amount of fresh air that comes into the building ventilation systems now run longer and continuously throughout the day third-party assessments have been completed and all noted repairs have been made i'd also like to note that we will repeat our third-party ventilation inspections every quarter with the next round beginning on april 1st and out of abundance of caution we've also purchased portable hepa filters for every classroom our health and safety preparations exceed the requirements of the cdc oha and multnomah county public health department and we are ready for staff and students to return next slide please dan can i ask a question about that yeah absolutely um so having had some experience with the return to um just adults in a uh facility it actually required just a whole host of retraining and different different practices from sort of the normal routines and if you go back to slides before the trending topic slides there was a whole host of protocols so i'm um wondering when the training so um i think right now you have you know teachers and school staff you know working like you know basically conducting comprehensive distance learning when is sort of this like the sort of in-building practice training with the school staff going to happen is that can be centrally led is that what say for example at the elementary level is going to happen at the beginning of the week of the 25th because my assumption is we're expecting teachers and school staff to go to um you know to be teaching and supporting our students over the next during school days then we've got spring break and then you come back is when are those practices and that training on all these things which just aren't some of these things that aren't normal school practices um outside of a pandemic yeah that's a great question so here on this list we see a list of some of that layered uh risk reduction strategy approach so most of these are standard operating procedures that are guidance district-wide we have already been creating different trainings or those videos or the software system the pepper training we use where we go through different slides that give information and other ways to train and communicate to the staff so there is a district-wide level training and a lot of that has already happened to staff and will of course need to happen to more uh and then these documents and and this guidance informs the school specific reopening plans and that's where these are both reinforced the information that is in these guidance documents but also additional detail is added so we'll have a stand operating procedure for uh for example how to use the restrooms and so we'll have some documents and some training on on what the expectations are for that and then the school specific reopening plans we'll take that to the next level and say for example certain classrooms might use one bathroom or other classrooms to use another so that training some of it has been
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happening already but we'll also continue over the next couple weeks so that i guess i'm are we giving are we building an extra professional development time or i mean just because during the school day um our assumption that my assumption is that school is happening um so is this happening starting on the 25th when teachers actually and school staff return to the buildings so director brent edwards we recognized that it would be advantageous to make sure we have an opportunity on campus with all staff and faculty reviewing all the health and safety protocols that they be clear what the routine is so they can reinforce and teach those we know it would be advantageous for them to review those with students while they're still in cdl before students show up so that they have also have heard it too we're still in conversations with the teachers union we know that we need to return the week of the 29th i would be surprised if one thing staff lobbies for is that everybody comes back you know sort of on the spot the monday after spring break knowing that it would be good to have some time with with our faculty so i i don't want to get ahead of the staff and and some of our thinking but we know that that makes a lot of sense uh that we take the time that we need to make sure everybody's really clear about those protocols uh i don't know if you want to say something more about this at this point dr byrd yeah i think you covered it pretty well so and there will be a combination of uh trainings we're also offering some open houses for teachers and uh partners to come in and then we'll be announcing those very soon if they would like to come in and just see how things are set up since many of them have not been in uh buildings for a while so they can just familiarize themselves with the uh with the protocols but there will be formal training that we'll offer there'll be some uh pre-service time that we'll offer and we're in as we negotiate that we'll be able to announce more details reading between the lines sounds like that might take place the week of march 29th that's correct yeah okay can i ask a couple questions um i i hope it'll be brief um i'm getting uh some questions about pte the availability of ppe and we had public testimony tonight um can you give us some insight into um how we're doing with with supplies of ppe and kind of what level of ppe we're using yeah absolutely so we have specific guidance for ppe and depending on what that guidance is of how it is obtained but i can say i don't i don't have the numbers in front of me we have well over a million masks for example that are in our warehouse and those have been distributed uh face shields and then other supplies such as sanitizer and disinfecting wipes those have all been distributed to the schools i think there's going to be some effort as some of the schools become more populated of next week to make sure that they get out to all the classrooms but the ppe and the supplies we have a really good amount of it right now we feel good at what our inventory is and those have been distributed to the sites um can you can you give us a status update on the testing what kinds of resources are going to be available to us for testing that's a good question i don't have the details on the testing um let me let me see if i can't get you some details and respond back later okay thanks i appreciate it no problem before we move on from these health and safety measures um i just want to say that we can't communicate enough to our families and to our educators about what we have done and what is in the works because at least from the families that i talk to they really have no idea they have no idea about the the hepa filters they have no idea about any of the protocols that have been put in place and so i hope that we start a real campaign of direct communication with our families about what precautions have been put in place um along those lines can i also um kind of piggyback on that and um i am i am really grateful um and and very pleased at how pps has gone above and beyond for um ventilation um i think it's um the the care that you've given to uh doing the inspections and providing um you know the hepa filters in every
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classroom um and i i know that uh many school districts are don't have the expertise or the resources in order to be able to do that um so i'm really grateful for that and and i think it's it's going to be one of those things that i suspect will will continue beyond this pandemic um i think ventilation has been an issue in a lot of classrooms for a long time so um this is i think this is going to have long-term benefits for students and and staff as well so thank you i i want to also say i the director constance i agree and i think i mentioned the last time we were together and i wasn't being facetious about rolling out a communications campaign knowing it would be a huge lift because i believe that if people under understand that they're vaccinated that the ventilation system is is intact the purification system is top-notch it's quilling those fears and and so i think the communication strategy is going to be yes it's going to be a big lift and ask i think it needs to be done uh we need to assure the people coming into our buildings the entire stakeholders uh teachers students and families that they're they're getting the air flow that's required that the cdc um says is what we need to stem the spread of the virus so i i appreciate the last several comments from directors uh it's clear that as we get a more detailed understanding how much a campaign of communication is going to be important a visual open house tour where you can see that on every school campus for instance there's a stocked closet or identified space where all the mass and the ppe and the sanitizers they're readily available and how we're making sure to replenish it as we go and so that families can feel confidence and and see visually the routine and the arrows and the signage and um what the classrooms look like and and some of those so uh we are sort of uh taking the opportunity in this time given the importance of ramping up our communications um so uh and i know our our head of communications is listening and certainly uh invite him to teleport in here to to describe more fully but you're you're really going to start to see that kind of activity really making sure that any any questions that that we might expect or predict or hear from that that people have clear answers what we don't want them feeling is uh any doubt about the readiness of our schools from from a health and safety uh point of view and um actually the cdc guidelines for schools said nothing about ventilation which was uh severely criticized in a number of quarters uh so we are actually going well above and beyond what the cdc has laid out i think it directors good evening it's david roy and just to follow up on what the superintendent said i think what you will see really beginning tonight and tomorrow is a much more aggressive much more accelerated much more concerted uh campaign of uh talking directly to families and uh to staff a lot of what uh uh um chief young just talked about are things that we have shared uh but doing it in again a more concerted way where you're gonna see every day uh that we are uh communicating to families and staff about all of these details you know the sort of this almost virtual checklist of things that we have done uh the dance team and others have done to get schools ready uh so that we can welcome students and staff back safely you will see that you'll see that on social you'll see that student facing with chief garcia's team uh doing some student directed uh sort of communication and we talked about earlier today we want to be sure that families that students that staff feel informed they feel like they know where to go and so to the superintendent's point we have dedicated a new landing page as we did in the spring for hd as we did over the summer as we did for the fall for back to school now we have a new dedicated landing page for reopening and so anything that has to do with reopening will be there it'll be easy to find and we want we want to allay some of the concerns and anxieties people may have and they can make a decision based on on the facts that we can share with them so
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we will be doing a lot of that over a lot of different channels and again you will see a great acceleration of that uh really immediately can i ask a specific follow-up question on the testing um so i i believe correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that testing capacity and capabilities um are really not within the purview of pps um so we're going to be dependent on system partners the state and the county i believe is there is there something that we can do to to to enhance our capabilities um we're in a very short timeline so um is there anything that we can do to um promote uh a as robust a testing capacity as is possible given the national resources uh all very good questions director moore i don't have the details with me but i will get them very soon and get a response back to you in the entire board thanks thanks david for your uh thorough reply as well thank you okay if there aren't any other questions uh i think i would be transitioning to danny ledesma all right and that's like the most the most dangerous phrase in our collective lexicon if there are any more questions except for he didn't breathe between since there aren't any more questions he's fine there's half a second in there all right well good evening everyone uh i'm excited to give you two brief updates to you uh you know throughout the night you've heard about the resilience the collaboration and the adaptability of our district staff and partners and i'm really inspired by all the talent and commitment people involved in both the planning the implementation and leadership behind these updates so we'll start with uh limited in person on the next slide or libby as you've heard it uh called so as a reminder you know lippy is currently being utilized to target real to really target supports to student groups who are most in need so these are students with educational relational social emotional curricular instructional and assessments uh needs so we want to provide those supports to them and to be able to identify students school leaders reviewed data invited students and families directly to participate and in alignment with the rssl or the ready schools safe learning safe learners guidance pps established parameters for cohort size the number of cohorts in which students participate um and uh today as of today there are 85 sites that are up and operational so this means that every school including some pre-kindergarten and mpg or multiple pathways to graduation sites are in operation um and so what this means is that while the student number may grow slightly the number of sites won't and so as you can see from the slide close to about 1400 students are attending uh at all of the 85 sites and 40 percent of those students who are participating identify as black or latino and so we wanted to let folks know that we'll continue to operate lippy as we transition into the hybrid instructional model and give you this update um let's go ahead and go to the next slide um so the next update is about our partnership with the sun this year we expanded uh this school year we expanded sun school sites by two adding uh partnerships to rosa parks into cairo's pdx both who are being paired with sei or self-enhancement inc and that brings our total up to 45 uh sites where we have community school partnerships many of us associate sun with after-school activities or extended learning or those community school sites but our partnership with sun is really robust and includes extended learning p3 early kindergarten transition youth advocacy and food pantries and from april to july of this year approximately 2 800 students and families on average have been served each month and uh the uh about roughly 59 of the sun community schools
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and p3 participants are students of color um the metric change mid reporting stream so i'm going to give you two two pieces of information from april to july uh our fun our sun food pantries distributed twenty one thousand eight hundred and fifteen mills at uh various pbs sites and from august to november 2020 uh the food pantry provided food to 12 139 households so the metric shifted from the number of meals to the number of households being served so as you can tell by these figures our sun partners have adapted and continued providing services to pbs students and families during cdl sun partners have really tried to shift their focus to meet the pressing needs of students and families and so um what they have focused in uh during cdl has really been around meeting the direct needs of families a lot of families are utilizing services such as rent assistance and or energy assistance uh and families are really seeking more and more support with resource navigation so um since the since the pandemic um multnomah county um have multnomah county in partnership with all of the districts in multnomah county uh commissioned a report from education northwest to surface what are the best practices and recommendations for school-based service delivery during the pandemic and so the folks at northwest uh did a did a sort of comprehensive literature scan looked at what other districts were doing across the country and developed the report and that report really served as the foundation that the county uh used to develop their guidance for sun partners and for districts as we think about in-person services so we are actively engaged in planning for in-person services along with our return to return to schools with our sun service partners and multnomah county staff we anticipate that we'll be able to offer phase services uh with at our school sites pretty soon we met as early as as this as recently as this afternoon to plan that and i think our sun our sun service partners are really uh looking forward to continuing to to partner with pbs and to collaborate with our principals to be able to offer some of those really essential services in person that's all for the two updates and so i think we'll open it up to questions for the group well since nobody else is jumping in um although somebody else can can go since i've asked a number of questions but this is a more general question and it's about the sequencing um it's been really helpful to hear the plans about communication the training the changes and practices that are going to be underway um in order to better serve our to serve our students uh with the most recent um announced change and the change in the case loads um and if i look at the sequencing so that a lot of this has been focused on the k5s which is the students which is the most immediate um i'm wondering if we're going to be surveying um at one point a couple board meetings ago there had been a discussion about a survey of middle school and high school parents and whether we're going to do something similar that we did for elementary school parents or is it a completely different set of questions given just the nature of the change the the difference in the schedules um and what's happened during the school day for those students i can answer that director we are um our high school multiple principals have been working on uh different plans and we are close to having those uh completed to share with uh pat and then we will be also uh reaching out to families it'll be a survey similar to the one that elementary um had but we'll have now that we have more details from uh the governor about what is possible is not possible and uh ready school safe learning is being updated we'll have some more information to uh provide so we'll provide a little more clarity uh hopefully but you know there are challenges with middle school in high school basically the cohort size and the uh physical distancing requirements so that does present different challenges than elementary schools have for reopening yeah although we also have some advantages like for example virtual scholars are just all this year we we have some models of um what comprehensive distance learning or some different models are already at the high school level um is i guess this is the same question
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that was asked by director constand for um middle school and high school students will there be this the option of either the hybrid in person whatever whatever model we come up with or to remain in comprehensive distance learning or is that still um not clear yet from the guidance that we're getting that we that we haven't yet received from the governor i think we're clarifying that guidance but any in-person activities will be you know focused on learning support uh credit recovery for high school students and uh for juniors seniors and other learning activities for middle school students as well as high school thank you student representative did you have any questions uh not at the moment but thanks for asking i know that sometimes we all just jump in and it can be a little daunting to to find your voice in there so i just wanted to make sure we had that space for you um are there any further questions from the board director bailey um yes thanks first of all danny thanks for the update it's um you know you know that's uh again confirming um how important our investment has been with our community partners uh that they have stepped up and changed their role to really serve the fundamental needs of families um has been really important going back to what hybrid is going to look like in recognizing that we're still in discussions we've had the occasional letters saying she instead of you know two hours four days a week for elementary why not a b a b a full day and how that would be an easier arrangement for some parents in terms of child care or their child isn't in school can you briefly uh summarize the pros and cons i i can think of some but sure so yeah there definitely are pros and cons to every model i think the biggest uh barrier for the in person all day is that we have uh then we would have children eating in schools and uh so that presents uh problems in terms of removing the mask supervision um also um you know where do they eat because they can't necessarily sit next to each other in a cafeteria if you're eating in class then who's supervising those students because teachers have a right to duty-free lunch and so there are some logistical issues that make that problem many of our schools don't have cafeterias large enough to to provide the physical disney even for a reduced number of students in the in the school so that um does cause some some issues um so that's why and also there's a there's a value in seeing the children uh four days a week as opposed to just two days a week even though it's a short period of time there's some value in uh getting those kids into routine especially the youngest ones who have not been to school uh you know to brick and mortar school uh getting them in uh frequently even for a short distance of time a short span of time is seen as advantageous by some the and the other reason i was thinking it for those families that with students who rely on us for a meal or two a day having them be there more days than not makes that distribution easier right so we'll be opening up more kitchens across the district to satisfy that thank you go ahead andrew um i think i think we don't know the answer to this but i was uh in terms of changes to the rssl guidance you know my my read of the governor's announcement and letter was that she was asking you know um od and oha to to to essentially revisit some of these guidelines to facilitate this reopening do we have any sense of what some of those changes might be and assuming that the answer to that is no we don't know we're waiting for that executive order and the guidance to come out um are we still going to be ready i mean i guess i guess the question is are we strategizing for an opening under our existing guidelines but then recognizing that maybe even after we open a couple weeks down the road we might pivot as those guidelines change so i can share that this afternoon superintendent statewide had another regular meeting with oregon department of ed director colt gill and members of his team and there are a few items that have been continually surfacing where flexibility in some cases is desired one of those key ones is the social distancing requirement if we're if we're held to a six foot rule then that places a constraint on student bodies in a learning space if it's three to six feet that changes or gives other flexibilities um the other element that continues to come up and came up again today is cohort size that also makes a difference into how many students we can welcome back or what models
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we we can present um so they were vocalized again today uh there wasn't an indication from department of education who's gathering this input and feedback you know which direction or if any adjustments will be made uh in those two areas or others uh in in their newer newest version which we don't expect until early next week at the earliest was what we were told if they don't issue this until close to the end of next week most of the state is going on spring break so if you're changing the guidelines districts aren't going to be able to do too much with a day or two's notice before an expected week of return so we're hoping to hear you know a little bit more definitively uh what that what those new guidelines may be um by monday hopefully andrew can ask a quick follow-up i have a i have a question about that so obviously our focus now is on k5 but are we asking our um middle and high school t principles to devise plans based on the current guidelines are we giving them some space with the assumption that those guidelines are going to change within the next couple of weeks so we're asking them to devise plans based on what we know today uh which which we believe is the most restrictive it's always easier to go less restrictive than it is to dial it back so we're planning for the most restrictive environment if something changes then we can always uh modify that my next thing not a question so much as a statement i just wanted to go back to something dr brown said because i think it's really important about the diversity of opinion and we've talked about this before in our meetings but um the survey data is really really helpful because we are getting a lot of different opinions and so getting a more scientific you know sense of of where folks are in the disaggregated data's really appreciate that but but regardless right even though we're seeing you know significant majorities that want to come back there's also significant minorities that don't and i think it's so important for all of us to remember that you know these are all of our students and all of our families and and it's why i think what you've come up with so far about allowing for the options is so important um the way you do any change management is you know you bring along the early adopters and then you bring along the people on the fence and then the folks who are really resistant are going to see what's going on and and feel more comfortable and confident so i just all along i i think the superintendent you and your team have have thought about that and presented those options and it's going to continue to be really important going forward because you know those those those 30 percent that are reluctant have have really good reasons for being re-elected and we need to show them that we can do this safely and give them the confidence to send their kids back to school so thanks for all that i think that that's really um wise andrew and that's why i asked the question about cdl being an option because i i think it should continue to be but i think we need to be really transparent with our families about what the governor is asking us to do and what those limitations are and and you know encourage advocacy as needed there um and i do think you know the all of all students are our students and so how do we how do we create space for all of them director bailey yeah and and to again communicate repeatedly that um families with medical vulnerabilities um will take care of in a safe way and if if in person isn't going to work for them for some very good reasons that cdl will be available any further comments or questions on this uh item amy director constance you're muted director constance sorry about that um one thing that's still not clear to me superintendent or chief byrd is the degree of autonomy or independence our building level teams have in creating these plans because when we through the negotiation process walked back a little bit on the simulcast plan um the language that i heard was that um buildings could have discretion in determining how they were going to manage cdl and how they were going to manage other aspects of their return to hybrid learning so if somebody could give me an overview of the amount of discretion that individual principals and their teams have that would be helpful i'll let peter berg speak to this but i i'm sure everyone can understand you can't have a one size fits all because every building is a different size different enrollment different configuration different space constraints and so we'll be offering guidance around the general format for the model that we'll be implementing but out of necessity just like just like with liftv we'll need to sort of at the campus level
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rely on our school administrators uh to really work with their faculties and the specifics of their parents wishes and choices you know to make it work but uh dr byrd can can talk further about how how our principal supervisors and support team are working with our school leaders yeah thank you superintendent so you know we're providing a framework we're building a framework with with which people need to conform you know fit in their programs but there will be some individual differences the the goals of the program though are academic uh academic enrichment and intervention so the programs will need to be academic in nature uh and then uh but what they do you know like there are some uh configurations of schools that allow uh teachers to easily keep their students because of the demand uh so that you know half they can teach half their students live in person in the morning and the students who choose to remain home they can teach them in the afternoon that's one option uh there's some uh there's some nuances for our dual immersion programs that we have to address so you know every every school will look a little different but they'll be a framework by which they uh operate under and the same is true for elementary middle school um excuse me for middle school and high school those principals have been working on designing a framework that they can operate under but as you know we have some high schools that are on four by four schedules some are on eighth period schedule so there'll be some differences in uh what the time looks like in this building but the principles will be similar thank you all right anything else i'm going to have us take a break before we come back to policy but is there anything else before we do that i just said um one uh question but maybe it can be a request for a future board meeting but there is last week the governor and legislative leaders announced 250 million dollars in summer learning and child care grants that divided into like a num and then to a number of buckets and i was wondering if that's something that we're going to pursue um and how it would fit with our i know we've there's already been discussions internally at pps about summer learning programs and so i'd i'd be interested in just getting a brief as we think about how this sequence out um on what our what our strategy is on a pretty significant amount of resources that will be available this summer agreed doctor director brim edwards and we did get a breakdown of that overall resource that looks like it will be available to districts on a formula distribution we will of course want to exploit and incorporate that resource and all its buckets uh to support our priorities certainly for learning acceleration and support but there's other components to that resource being made available at the at the state level which i think works really well with our existing partnerships with some of the other elements like child care and enrichments and ways that are going to complement our efforts this summer uh there are a lot of good questions asked earlier this afternoon by superintendents as they think about extended learning for this summer and ways to support our students i was glad to see that you know there's flexibility in there to continue doing social emotional work as well but also an emphasis not just on academic interventions but also enrichments this summer again is another opportunity to to engage our students especially in the arts and and other areas so we're we're definitely keeping a close eye on it and as directions become much more clear we'll be happy to talk with directors at a later date about how we'll be availing ourselves for making sure direct services go out to our students great really appreciate that thanks for asking that question julia and i'd just like to piggyback on it and say when you do get back to us we'd like to hear more about some of the specific carve-outs that showed up in the final version of the federal package as well including some different uses for pre-k money and some different special education funds so um as much as you can tell us about plans for that would be helpful too all right thanks everybody this was a really great and thorough report sorry superintendent were you going to add something i was only going to say all of our budget conversations we'll make sure to start talking about sr3 and a significant sort of relief package that will come to leas and state agencies across the country one feature in there that i'm appreciating seeing is uh looks like an emphasis on boosting idea or special education service monies uh for states and districts which which certainly will be helpful that's just one element there's a lot of other ingredients into that relief package and we'll of course make sure that we account for it and to resource our priorities here at pps all right we are going to take a a break until uh 906 a five minute break
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and uh director moore would you like to introduce this next item yes thank you um this policy uh we're talking about the comprehensive health education policy um and this policy was originally approved in 2018 as the comprehensive sexuality education policy with the understanding that it would be reviewed every two years in conformance with state statutes staff recently recommended that the sexuality education policy be embedded in a larger policy around comprehensive health education to align with current best practices the goal of these revisions to the current comprehensive sexuality education policy is to make the policy inclusive of the many laws mandates and policies that support comprehensive health education staff propose transitioning from a standalone comprehensive sexuality education policy to a comprehensive health education policy which includes a section specific to comprehensive sexuality education the board policy committee approved and recommended moving forward the proposed changes to the board for first reading that was very efficient thank you um all right that's all we have for that one so now we get to move on to the second reading of the preservation maintenance and disposition of real property policy thank you jenny thank you sarah davis yes um just before we leave the previous policy um they did great work they presented us with a um a very polished uh draft that was comprehensive and understandable plain english but but really comprehensive so thank you okay this policy uh the current policy on preservation maintenance disposition and district um and disposition of district real property was last revised in 2018. the proposed amendments are intended to respond to some operational issues that have emerged over the last several years to align the policy more closely with our over overarching racial education racial equity and social justice framework and to clarify the board's intent on management of the district real estate on february 9th the board of education had a first reading of the revised policy in response to feedback we received during the public comment period the board policy committee met yesterday and considered several amendments to the policy draft that was first read at the uh by the board on on the 9th these latest amendments are intended to explicitly embed the principles of racial equity and social justice in our stewardship of district properties in service to our educational mission now and for generations in the future the community approved moving the amendments to the policy forward today for a second reading although uh the latest amendments are clarifications of the board's intent the specific language changes a relatively minor additions or reordering of language that was present in the document first read on february 9th and were the subject of several public meetings of the policy committee therefore the contracted general counsel has advised that the board can elect to move forward tonight with the second greeting and adoption that's it rita you are frozen which is what the policy seemed like for a while a very long time um i've been frozen for most of the evening but did you hear what i said you said i think we heard yes i think we heard most of it i think our um our task now is to decide if we are going to move forward with the second reading and adoption is that correct um is large okay that we move ahead with the second reading um with the amended version let's second that okay so this is uh not moving the policy this is moving the version is that correct and then we'll have amended policy for the policy miss large the resolution is drafted acknowledges and approves moving forward with the amendments that were voted out of the policy committee yesterday so unless there's objection that can be
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done in a single motion and vote okay so we'll do we'll do that director edwards moves and director constant seconds the adoption of resolution 6266 as presented and then we can discuss it great does that work director of edwards and director constant okay so director of edwards moves and director constance seconds the adoption of resolution 6266 is there any board discussion so go ahead director well i just want to say thanks to the policy committee both for all the work from the very beginning on this because this was a pretty hairy rewrite of this policy and it's substantially different both in tone and posture and language and intent really it's a it's very much a different way of valuing our assets and how they serve our overall goals as an organization so this was not easy so i want to commend the policy committee for doing the dirty work and i also want to thank the policy committee for going back and making these minor amendments i had a couple of issues that i had raised that were of concern to me that i feel like have been adequately addressed and i also want to thank the policy committee for being open to the input from some of our trusted partners here i want to thank a good place i want to thank cairo specifically for the letter they wrote to the board at our last board meeting um asking us to re-examine this and to really think thoughtfully and i also want to extend thanks to our staff especially ms large and ms ledezma for um walking through this being thought partners and talking through how could we make this um even more responsive all right i see that director also yes i'm thank you for acknowledging me um i think i cut you off there i i also feel i'm really happy to see the land acknowledgement in there i'm happy that we're following a trend of other institutional partners in portland that are acknowledging not only acknowledging land but um in some cases even giving giving buildings back which i know this policy does not say but i feel like this is a kind policy um for our current students and for future generations um i love the land acknowledgement and love the flexibility that's been built in around here so also thanks to the policy staff for policy committee for just working on the wordsmithing and i think amy you said the tenor and the tone of the of the document is um just feels gentler and more equitable um i appreciate um danny ledesma's work i can see it in this document as well so really oh sorry sorry julia i saw that director bailey had on muted did you have something to add director bailey uh i'll wait until others have spoken director medwards yes i wanted to speak both to the underlying policy changes but also the most recent amendments and the underlying policy changes um having um been involved in the drafting and redrafting of this over almost two decades what i think is really important in the policy is that we recognize that our buildings and our facilities are really substantial assets of the district and that they can either be used in ways that harm or support our communities and that i think the adjustments that have been made in this policy that recognize there may be instances in which um we um we always have a fiduciary responsibility to to the district and to use our assets to their um highest and best use and this policy now acknowledges that there are times that there will be other equally important if not more important aspects and values that we need to consider when either we're leasing a facility or in those rare instances where we may sell a property and i think we've added some flexibility in here that um i hope will in the future address some of the historic wrongs the district has engaged in in terms of you know where it open closed expanded facilities um especially in albina and so that's to the overall
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policy i think it's i'm looking forward to how it gets put into practice and then a second just to the amendments um as i had a question there was a question yesterday in committee i had um two board meetings ago read the letter that kairos had sent um and there wasn't a specific you know we there's this item that needs to be changed but more just a general um reaction to the policy and i want to thank the board and the committee for their openness to look at the amendments and to then have them adopted by the committee and i had run them by kairos and i was asked yesterday or yes yesterday whether they were supported by kairos and i wanted to just provide a response because i didn't i thought i knew the response but i didn't want to speak for them at the at the meeting without um getting assurance that i could do that in public so i i can't today say that the amendments um that were mentioned the last board meeting that were then considered yes that were then considered yesterday that um they are supported by the kairos board and i think if it wasn't nine o'clock at night on a night where there's lots of other things happening we would have a statement of support but i've been assured that i can share that they're supportive of the amendment so i appreciate everybody's work and the receptiveness and the and the discussion the good discussion we had in committee about um our sort of our values and how uh we we want to engage with our community partners so thanks to everybody on the board and i'm looking forward to after seven months in committee seeing this move i i have a couple scott is it okay do you want to go for it this is this is more for for just to help me and i i apologize i was not able to watch the policy committee uh in its entirety so i am you know so some of these things i think were discussed in in policy committee um and i also did not have time to go back to all the different versions so i i am looking at the um the uh the you know i think the final amended one that that's coming to us right the final amendments of march 8th 2021 um but again i'm i'm not sure what was in here necessarily before and what's not i'm just sort of reading the policy in its entirety so with that preface um specifically focusing on these sections around the um presumption of market terms which i think is is where a lot of this discussion has been i'd like to hear from policy committee members so i i believe the language we had discussed earlier although it doesn't really matter the language that's in here which i fully support the direction of this by the way i want to say that up front um so you know right now it says um you know that we can only pursue um you know we're going to pursue maximum you know market value and and current market terms um unless we adopt a resolution that makes an express finding that the transaction you know involving district property lesser market value you know one confers significant benefit to the district and communities it serves um and then including you know application of racial uh equity and social justice policy and then two is with another party that has some official connection with the district and i support all of that it makes total sense to me it's the right way to go am i right that sort of the latest amendments that were added were sub-paragraphs a b and c is that right so there were actually two layers of amendments so the the amendments that were uh discussed at the previous last board meeting and then that were circulated and i'm sorry i didn't circulate them to the non-committee members um did two things that i can outline and then on top of that um director chair moore of the policy committee chair moore um had an additional amendment as well but what what the first set of amendments did was essentially say both in our leases and our sales that they would be more closely connected to our racial equity and social justice goals and also that we'd be using the racial equity and i'm sorry the racial educational equity policy um lens in when we're looking at those transactions um in addition the other thing that the amendment did is there was a provision that a couple months ago had been one of the many criterias that
03h 05m 00s
would be considered in the express findings um and that that specific criteria actually got um moved from one of several criteria up to be a sort of a gatekeeper criteria and that was related to the sort of extraordinary economic or unusual circumstances and what what we did is um the um the committee amendment was move that back down to one of several criteria versus being the gate a gatekeeper criteria and then second and director moore you can speak to this director moore um proposed at the committee sort of a new gatekeeper criteria which is essentially just taking one of the here's one of many my criteria and moving it up elevating it and director moore i don't have it right in front of me but can you reach which one that you elevated to be the gatekeeper not the keeper that's but it's more um the overall right it's kind of threshold criterion um okay first of all can you hear me that's yeah improvement um okay so the uh if you look at the previous document so the document that was first read on february 9th um in this list of criteria to be considered um there was a d which read official connection of the other party to the district for its enrolled students or students expected to enroll in pps with examples um and it occurred to me that that one probably ought to be the threshold criterion that um if we and my example was um theoretically i don't think this is currently the case but theoretically it's possible that pps would uh potentially lease a property to a um a private for prop for-profit company um that might have a business completely disconnected from the pps educational mission um and um it would not it would not advance the cause of our students best interest to um you know to give uh such an entity uh you know a cut rate on a lease yeah um but it's a very different thing if so anyway that that criterion is now embedded in the paragraph that you read okay no that's actually that that explanation is very helpful in terms of understanding the construction and how we ended up because here's my question and it's not so much about substance but it is about construction um and and i really appreciate that because i i do agree with you i think the that connection to the district probably should be a gatekeeper criteria and and i also agree uh director from edwards that the i guess the extraordinary circumstances um should be a factor but not necessarily gay human factor and and i'm not i'm not i'm not going to necessarily offer an amendment to this i just i when i read when i read some paragraph b in this section offering below market terms confers significant benefit of the district or its students and that benefit outweighs the cost that seems very repetitive to me of of of number one up up above that it confers significant benefit of the district in the communities it serves so that that seemed that seemed repetitious as take that into account and then similarly with with c um the community's being served by the other party include substantial portion of underserved students students of color etc you know um seemed very consistent with up above where we talked about you know consistent with the district's racial educational equity policy and so the only one of those three subparagraphs that seem to add to the policy was around the extraordinary circumstances which seemed to be the board saying when we make us express finding there's lots of different ways we can make it but by the way the board really wants to take into consideration this you know express you know the or these um um extraordinary economic circumstances um which is fine the others seemed repetitive again you guys have been through way too much to amend it so i i'm more i kind of wanted to hear a little bit how we got to this point because right now it just it reads a little bit to me the construction ran a little repetitive when i went through that did you did you look at the redlined um policy i when i finally got to that it really helped um clarify for me sort of the just of the rationale for why things were the content was moved around and that extraordinary circumstances you know paragraph was put in there i just
03h 10m 00s
because you were comparing side by side it just it just i think i i all right i think i am in the red line but other two paragraphs are redundant with the above but i would rather err on the side of being really explicit about those values um at the risk of being redundant than to leave anything ambiguous but you're right i think and i think given where we are i agree with you um director constance i think what maybe what the only thing i want to just put on the record in general my preference policies should be policies if we have specific circumstances as we do with kairos i would rather that the board um make a statement uh that you know assuming it's consistent with the you know the policy that we would like to see a change you know we'd like to see um you know cairo is treated this way under under the existing policy rather than write a policy geared towards dealing with the cairo situation um that would be my preference moving forward but again i recognize where we've been through this and and again i fully support the direction of this so so i'm not i'm not going to make an amendment i just i wanted to raise that on the record so can i just add one thing and and this might help explain why we wanted to be a bit more explicit than we might be otherwise um kairos is not the only um only instance of um an entity leasing a pps property and requesting a below market rate leasing terms so in order to in order to make the intent as clear as possible in order to to make it easier to operationalize by staff we i mean that's why we went into some detail about what criteria we wanted staff to consider when negotiating lease terms so the other thing i would add also is that language um you know we started this process um seven months ago or so um so that was like top of mind you had 14 unemployment i mean there were there were lots of things um happening and that was a little bit top of mind and i'll just speak for myself that um you know as we got into it and thinking about is the policy and this having longer lasting impacts and wanting it to stand this test of time that that shouldn't and and thinking about land and our facilities as really assets that we can apply to our mission and the things that are most important to us um that's when that that sort of dropped down for me at least on the list of being the driver in the policy like this isn't a reaction to i mean it was it was initially as a immediate like reaction to this occurrence of economic circumstances but also a real realization that overall we have um you know we're probably the second largest property owner in the city of portland and you know how we use those assets also help us live our values and that that's why we those other factors i think speak to speak to that versus the sort of economic crisis um piece that really was a little bit of the impetus for this yeah so this started out i believe mostly as a response to that and in policy we didn't have any way to say well there's an emergency going on we have tenants who have been you know crushed by circumstances beyond their control uh would there be cases where we would lower their rent uh in order for a short term in order to help them through and so the the whole initial discussion was around what are the circumstances where we might do that um but then the discussion morphed into something longer term so what we have now is not would we offer a short-term subsidy but would we rather perhaps have a long-term subsidy of below market rates for some of our tenants um and we should realize that if we're subsidizing somebody that means we're basically spending money and we're we're bringing less money in and therefore we have to cut money somewhere else so if we're doing that
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kind of subsidy we should do it for a very good reason um and why i will be voting no in the policy even though i agree with a lot of the improvements that we've been made is that we haven't explicitly tied the benefits of the what kind of benefits we would be getting from that kind of subsidy so the last couple of years we have really you know as a board our superintendent and our our senior staff in the community we've really brought a focus to this district through a revision process through our board goals through a lot of the strategies that have been put in place and again we've we've got the framework but not a final strategic plan but we see that and that's a real focus on number one on the achievement of black and indigenous students and part of the work that we've done is that while we've had relationships with community partners we've we've funded them in the past we've changed that relationship so that the contracts that we have with them they're really focused on our goals and aligned with our strategies going forward and i totally support that and we've seen the last couple of years we've really increased our investment in those partners we we're seeing that pay off uh you know we talked about it tonight with the the work that they've been doing supporting our families in this time of great need what we're doing in this policy though is enabling basically supporting a few organizations just the ones that lease with us and giving them a cut rate and not uh and that's a completely different way of going about things compared to a process where we have an rfp request for proposals that's open to all organizations serving or wanting to serve our high priority students where that's tied to our goals and our strategies so that we're on the same page and instead we're having we're we're basically offering and it's again it's monetary it affects what we can do we're doing it in a way where it's not tied directly to that and i think that's if we want to support community organizations serving our high priority students and we do and we're doing it i think we should do it through the framework that we have worked really hard to co-construct with our partners that's really focused it has accountability not only for our partners but for us and how we spend our money that it's focused on the achievement of those students and what we have what's possible here is not something we do short term in emergency but something we might do long term for only a handful and if i were another community organization who wasn't leasing space from us i'd come and say hey will you come pay part of our rent um you know it creates a real uneven ground from that point of view so um i don't i don't think that part of it cuts the mustard i don't think we're really living into our our equity values there which again it's not just a statement but it's very much tied to our focus on raising student achievement for those students you know i'm just finding the use of your language right now um troubling i'm glad you were honest with you know how you felt about it and hopefully you're you're in the minority um but using an equity lens is i mean just the use of like the word enabling and cut rate this policy is not saying we're going to give anything away we are all you know stewards of you know public assets here um we can't just give a cut rate on something i think the policy allows for some flexibility in in um addressing our leases um and and and having the conversation about whether those leases and giving them what you're calling a cut rate and i'm calling a something completely different the uh you know just to see if they're meshing with our with our with our board goals and the outcomes we want for our students
03h 20m 00s
and using an equity lens is actually as is applying more resources to where there's more need it's not equally distributing resources it's it's it's targeting attention to where there's more need director to pass i couldn't agree more with what you just said and i think what this policy does is it elevates our values and our commitments to all of our students especially our historically underserved students over our monetary interests and i think we've done a good job with it and i appreciate your comments michelle thank you i think that the policy is a both and um and it's not coming from a place of scarcity it's not coming from this is a piece of pie and my piece is bigger than yours it's really it is really living into the values and i'm i'm really proud of the work of the policy committee and i'm proud to see another example of the district um putting its money where its mouth is around this equity because giving everybody equal resources is what we have demonstrated now in terms of who's achieving and who isn't that's what equitable distribution looks like and that's that's why we need to do more targeted investment where there's more need well i um apparently i wasn't clear um because you're not understanding what i was saying and be glad to talk to you with you no i think i really did understand though that which is why i was commenting i don't think you did but there we go i i think that for me with this policy when we first when we first received the letter um i think my journey was that we had tried to be really thoughtful about this um and it really began to have me question like what i understand fairness to be um and as we think about you know um i think what what i'm hearing director bailey say is that he wants us to be accountable and make sure we're using our resources wisely um and i i think for me this policy and as i talked i mentioned earlier that miss ms large and miss ledezmo were great thought partners in this work um like what really is fairness and how do we how do we especially as a white woman who's benefited from a system that that seems fair to me right but actually isn't what we would call fair how do we think in new ways and how do we redistribute resources and how do we think about accountability so i sense from director bailey this this longing for us to make sure we're managing our resources well lifting up the accountability work we've done all the vision all the pathways we've taken to really try to make the district transparent and clear and that there's something about this that that bumps up against that um and for me i see that and i also know that that the the ways we act now sort of this moving beyond fairness you know what as a white person i think is fair to this place of how can we really really begin to radically change the systems and paths we've been on and and i feel like this policy is a step um and as michelle you said the other night when we talked about like you know we both need to change now and we also have to be creating the right future we can't just wait but i feel like this policy is a good first step in some of that work of equity of really changing how we prioritize and how we think about when we come to systems like real estate um fairness and equality like what those really mean um and how do we begin to adjust what those long-held patterns have been because the reality i mean as we look at gentrification generational wealth all of those those things that we're aware of um in our community it takes actions like this to really have us begin to live into a new way and and so that's why i'm going to wholeheartedly and with joy support the policy tonight that's right and i want to say just two more things i just want to share um a brief statistics with you so most of you know i was accepted into a fellowship that um works to create anti-racist school boards and we've only met one time you know about 10 days ago you know half day on a friday half day on a saturday and this statistic was shared um so secretary of education have been 92 white superintendents currently 93 white so we're we're we're an exception to the rule principles in our nation's um buildings are 80 white teachers are 82 white professors at the college level um are 81 percent white and school boards are 80 percent white the presidents and leadership of school boards are 96 percent white and our student bodies nationally are about 47 non-white and um you know i come from a big family so i know exactly i'm very well versed in the topic of fairness you know we talked
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about it we didn't have a television so we discussed fairness all the time and as a black you know pps product of pps and as a person that grew up in a big family that talked about fairness i can look around now at this stage of my life and see that what i thought was fair distribution didn't end up in in fair outcomes i also want to mention that um when we're talking about equity work and or change management work um it might feel funny to us at first like we're giving away the store it might feel like other people are getting more and it's unfair and that's i just want to like lean into encourage everybody to lean into that discomfort because that's when we know we're doing the work it's never gonna it's not gonna feel comfortable it's gonna feel like you're giving something away and that's when you know you're doing the equity work you're going to feel it in your body it's going to feel wrong it's going to feel unfair it's going to feel uncomfortable and that's that's what embodied operationalizing this work feels like in the body it's it's a really this is a really great policy i think it is a step in the right direction i'm really proud of the work the committee did and then and we should feel uncomfortable and then when you say we're giving something away what i was thinking about before is that we're actually paying a debt from not two if you look at the history of we don't have to tell i don't have to tell you this our country was built on the um taking of labor and land and we don't know how to not do that we're grappling with that right now in portland in this room the the idea that land was stolen that labor was stolen that created this system of capitalism that benefited white people these people i just read the statistics from and doing this in adopting this policy is doing something different than that which is why i'm really proud of it it's doing something different it does feel different it is different and hopefully we'll have you know we'll have different outcomes more equal equitable hopefully those will show up in test scores down the line yeah one of the things i appreciate about this board is that we can have these conversations um and director deposit thank you for speaking up bringing this forward as we continue to to live into our values um is there any further discussion on uh the resolution that is before us uh yeah okay now go ahead do your nerves understood yeah so it seems to me from what i've been hearing that these revisions are certainly a considerable improvement from the current policy as well as from previous amendments and i do agree with what director debat has said and um i intend we're fine you're muted nathaniel daniel sorry i think my headphones might just be breaking when did you know when did you lose me where did i lose you support director to pass and then support oh yes and i do intend to um vote yes on the policy um but i am a bit concerned about how there has only been a day between when the amendments were finalized and when we are voting to approve and um really doesn't allow me much less the public to truly read through the policy and um make a fully and develop a fully informed opinion um i wasn't at the policy committee meeting yesterday perhaps you already discussed this but i'd be interested in hearing why that process is like that so for what it's uh can i respond to that um and i think that i addressed it in in my remarks um you know at the beginning of this thing uh but i think those were the things that you couldn't hear so let me i'm sorry let me reiterate it okay so um and i don't know when you lost me before um so the the committee approved most of the amendments that you see in the posted document um were present for the february 9th um uh first reading there are a few amendments that were made yesterday um their clarifications of the board's intent and the specific language changes a relatively minor additions or reordering of language that was present in the february 9th document
03h 30m 00s
in addition to that the additions were uh have been publicly discussed in in several policy committee meetings and were also talked about in during the full board meeting on february 9th we just didn't have specific language on february 9th but sort of the the um the concept was talked about on february 9th um so so they they have been available in their um i mean i think they may be significant in impact but they're not significant in the sense of you know having um i think they're going to be more clear for implementation and operationalization but they don't cons constitute um what i would consider to be really substantive uh changes to the figuring the the first red document and um the our um general counsel has has advised us that um we can go forward because they've been talked about and they're not really substantive we can go forward with the um the second reading and the vote to adopt so it doesn't require another first reading yeah nathaniel i had at the february night meeting indicated that i was going to bring the amendments and then actually at the last meeting um the board meeting we discussed it again and um rita mentioned that these were going to come up the day the day before and um and i also in two policy committee not just yesterday but the previous policy committee meeting it was a stated it was an agenda item and i indicated that i was going to be offering these amendments that uh and and the the general subject of them so that was over that was over three weeks ago and so it just turned out and then we talked about how the policy committee was just the day before the board meeting but that sense there had been all these previous discussions about it um and the substance of what was in it and we felt like that there was an ample opportunity if anybody had an objection um there's been four two board meetings and two policy committee meetings where they've been discussed in principle if not in the actual um substance that if people had objections they could have objected or they had concerns and there weren't any raised although we did have a spirited discussion yesterday um about about them um and i say the committee's recommendation was to include them as um amendments to the to the policy yeah i i mean i'm not saying i didn't know this was coming it's it's been out there for a while um i just you know more concerned about the actual language itself not making an appearance until um very recently but i understand um why that was done so thank you okay is there any further discussion before we bring this forward for a vote mrs bradshaw is there any public comment the board will now vote on resolution 6266 resolution to approve the amendments to the preservation um well it's not just the amendments but resolution to approve the amended um preservation maintenance and disposition of district real property 8.70.00 all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no no are there any abstentions resolution 6266 is approved by a vote of six to one student representative voting yes all right is there any other business at this time before we adjourn i just want to say that i think it's pretty cool that we crafted and just passed an anti-racist real estate policy that's those words don't necessarily flow together very easily and i think that's pretty great so good enough michelle has planted a seed that as we think about property disposition um what could be as we we as we are faithful stewards of what we have but also think about um
03h 35m 00s
what is right um there's a whole policy manual and guidance that i am hoping to share with all of us um about how to do this work because we don't really it's only been 66 years since brown versus born so we're not you know we're no one knows how to do this work so um the port of portland another major property owner in the city is also pursuing i think a similar path um and so it's really heartening to see instances that uh have historically um held a lot of the land in public trust are re-evaluating um how that land is used and who benefits from it all right barring anything else the next meeting of the board will be held on march 30th

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)

2021-03-09 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

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Minutes

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Regular Meeting 3 09 21

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