2021-04-27 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2021-04-27
Time	18:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: Portland Public Schools Board of Education's Regular Meeting - 4/27/21 - Meeting starts 33:50

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okay yo this board meeting of the board of education for april 27 2021 is called to order for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted on the pps website under the board and meetings tabs this meeting is being streamed live on ppsp services website and on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website for re replay times thank you all for joining us tonight especially uh board colleagues after quite a lot of work that we did on saturday um director scott has let me know that he is running a little late tonight but he will be joining us shortly and asked us to go ahead and get started without him this evening so he is on his way our first agenda item tonight is a resolution to celebrate teacher and school admin administrator appreciation week which begins may 3rd this week is a favorite custom in schools as students and parents have a chance to show how much they appreciate their teachers and principals no doubt this year will feel especially special as many students and
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families are able to celebrate our teachers and principals in person and i personally have to add that i am very thankful for the cleveland principal joanne watkins who this year has done just a wonderful job of communicating with parents making herself available roseanne's doing the roseanne's got a kid at cleveland too um so she knows just really joanne's done an excellent job of of also kind of forming community as we're distanced um and so thank you very much to joanne watkins and to um mr fayne pages my daughter paige as a sophomore cleveland her chemistry teacher she got to have chemistry on thursday her first day back to in person she was a little nervous um and they got to do some experiments with liquid nitrogen and paige has not stopped talking about it since so being back in the classroom starting right off with a really fun exciting experiment um has been really great to see such a huge change in my daughter's sort of demeanor so thank you to all of those teachers out there and all of those principals who have done an amazing pandemic would any other board members like to share a thank you to a teacher or a principal i would like to share this is director constand i would just like to say that um i'm really missing the usual ritual this week of flooding the front office with homemade cookies and flowers and casseroles and um all those acts of kindness that parents usually do for our our teachers and our staff uh this week i always love that so we'll get you next year yeah i'd like to uh just join uh director clown sam um not being a person who's very skilled in the kitchen though um that was never the way in which i expressed my thanks um it usually was just a heartfelt thanks to the teachers and as somebody who is a product of portland public schools i had 13 years of 100 and my kids three kids in pps for 18 years hundreds of teachers have impacted both my life and my kids lives and there are so many ways in which i see now my kids as adults have been positively impacted by special teachers who took the the time and care to um either teach them new skills or life lessons uh so just a lot of gratitude to um all the teachers of pps um and then since we're both we're also recognizing school administrators um just a shout out to the administrators um in my tenure um it's not applicable for when i was a student but my tenure as a board member um principles have been you know a group of individuals who have really formed my thinking about educational practices the challenges of effectively managing and leading a school been sources of wisdom and inspiration um for me and great thought partners as i as in my work as a board member both in the early 2000s and now so i'm just thanks to the principals and the assistant principals and vice principals throughout pps and the other administrators um who have made me a better board member and i think made our district a better a better place for our students so thanks to everybody i'll go next um i think back to my grandmother who um moved to portland in 1940 with a teaching certificate from xavier university and a photograph that i have that i i look at probably once a week of her teaching her second graders and her second graders are some of them are teenagers and it's taken in in the south outside of uh new orleans in a small town um in the countryside and and also you know both of my parents are teachers and the teachers that have impacted my own kids and the ones that have taken the time to stay after school to talk about said kids just want to share a deep appreciation for teachers and administrators thanks i know that we're all very grateful to our teachers who do amazing things every day and outside of my personal experiences as a parent we also just hear so many wonderful things and encounter them having gotten to go on school visits as we've reopened the last few weeks has been wonderful just seeing people in the classrooms talking with administrators throughout the buildings just the vibrancy and just what you said michelle that's sort of centering of students and and deep care for students that that changes lives that's so thank you all very much and um thank you to the communities that do such a great job of thanking our
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teachers during this appreciation of teacher and administrator week all right um i have to find where i am in my script oh we get to um now make a motion so do i have a motion and second to adopt resolution six two nine two resolution to celebrate teacher and school administrator appreciation week all right i heard director broome edwards move and director bailey second the adoption of resolution 6292 is there any further board discussion do i have to declare a conflict of interest because my wife is a teacher well since we just reviewed our ethics statement this weekend i would say yes um you we you can't thank her but the rest of us will thank her in this uh moment how does that work i thank her every day i was gonna say scott there's no such thing as too much gratitude absolutely and this is uh she's winding up her career this year and it's been a i think of course incredibly challenging year for all of our teachers um it's been a privilege to be in classrooms earlier this year when it was all virtual and just watch our teachers go above and beyond engaging with students um and now um to see on those first days of back in person to see the excitement that uh our teachers had and seeing the kiddos that they knew virtually and uh and now how to get used to saying oh okay now i'm seeing you with a mask i'm seeing your eyes now and uh you know just dealing with once again a whole different communications venue so thank you again to our teachers and our aps and vps and principals director scott um we are doing our um we're about ready to vote on the resolution 6292 teachers to celebrate teacher and school administrator appreciation week and i gave the other directors an opportunity to share any gratitude they had for teachers or administrators and just wanted to give you that opportunity as well yeah thank you and my apologies for for being late i'm trying to to navigate uh single parenting for this week um yeah no thanks and i i'll just i caught a little bit of what director bailey had to say and i would just i would i would echo those and i'm sure i'm echoing the comments of of everyone else i mean i think watching watching what our teachers have been able to accomplish um as as as we switched you know to virtual and and and you know and now back into a hybrid and um you know it has been it's been an extraordinary year um and you know a you know a uh unprecedented which the word is overused but but in this case actually you know is um is accurate um and you know i just think i think i think watching that throughout the year um is has been really sort of inspiring right and and how they they reframed everything they did and then you know the administrators the same thing i mean getting you know that pivot was so fast last spring um and you know to then you know work in a different environment this year and then to get their buildings ready again for a return of students um has has been remarkable to watch so i i think i heard director bailey saying you know these reopening moments to see people in person have been great but it's also just a reminder i mean watching the kids um you know the kindergartners um who it was their first day of school but of course the teachers knew them and they knew them all by name but it was the first time they had men in person um and you know was really uh i think sort of um you know emblematic of of of what the year what the year has been and and i think what it what it you know we'll be moving forward so so yeah thank you and a huge appreciation and shout out to to everyone for what they've done this year thank you director scott ms bradshaw is there any public comment on this resolution no all right the board will now vote on resolution 6292 resolution to celebrate teacher and school administrator appreciation week all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 62-9-2 is approved by a vote of 7-0 with student representative shu voting yes all right thank you directors we turn now to our consent agenda board members if there are any items you'd like to pull from the consent agenda we will set those aside for discussion and vote after we deal with the rest of the consent agenda but first smith bradshaw are there any changes to the consent agenda no all right thank you board members are there any items you would like to pull from the consent agenda so i don't have an item that i want to have a separate vote on
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but i do have some just questions and comments on two of the items so i don't know what your preference is um yeah let's do that during our just our board discussion after we make the motion okay so we can talk about them there more you're muted rita you're muted can you hear me yes okay um i'm on the phone so it gets extra complicated um i'd like to pull out resolution 6291 okay resolution 6291 is the approval of the updated bond accountability committee charter so we will remove that from the consent agenda and um deal with that after we do the rest of the consent agenda any other items to pull from the consent agenda all right do i have a motion and second to adopt the consent agenda still moved second constant moves and no yeah director broome edwards seconds the adoption of the consent agenda is there any board discussion on the consent agenda so yeah thank you um so there were there were a number of really big items in our um consent agenda this this week and a couple that i i [Music] felt merited just pulling pulling out um and one is the middle school science curriculum adoption and materials adoption and i guess going forward i'd love to have this be maybe a separate agenda item or just pulled out because we're getting ready to make some pretty significant investments in our curriculum and this came out of the um the 2020 bond that we had 53 million dollars set aside for uh the adoption of curriculum and instruction materials um so superintendent guerrero do you want me to just uh direct the questions to you or do you i did give staff a preview of what i was going to ask i'm happy to give it a go but i want to make sure that our senior staff gets practiced answering your questions so um look i i think it's important to say at the onset you're right we're so fortunate that voters are supporting long overdue curricular debt and so identifying high quality material is critical to to the educational program we want to provide and so it might be helpful to sort of just give an overview because you're right director brian edwards you're going to start to see these on a regular basis and so this is one content area it's important because you know we want to make sure our students have access to next generation science standards which you know even though they were adopted nationally in 2013 the district here you know hadn't really sort of given our educators sort of opportunities to to have those updated materials so um so and and you'll see how that there's a recurring theme there so this this afternoon had a chance to get an update on how our visual performing arts and music curriculum adoptions are going so i'm excited about what's on deck there but uh we welcome your questions we have deputy superintendent cuellar and our chief academic officer dr valentino here who who can provide all the details awesome thank you that was a good overview um so i guess my my first one and this really is part of the sort of our broader curriculum adoption from the 2020 bond so this is 2.6 million dollars and when we passed the bond it was that um in with the premise that 53 million would be a k-12 um all subjects and i just uh want to make sure as we head into this is 2.6 million for middle grade science that this fits within that scope of we'll be able to do um like the k-12 all subjects um that we we told voters do you want to go first dr claire thank you dr valentino thank you for the question director brim edwards and this is a really good opportunity just to echo the sentiments of the superintendent for us to have an overview to start having this discussion because this is um not going to be the first or the last so this will be an ongoing series of discussions as we continue to embark um on this very important critical work which we are so so fortunate um you know that the members of our community um have um you know have have truly entrusted us in in uh in believing in what our vision is for what we're trying to do um for students and so i wanted to tee up dr valentino who has been our lead um on this uh on
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in this work since he first arrived into pps and we're also joined by susan holbeck um who has been um who has been absolutely a um a fantastic support and leader um in our curriculum department specifically for science she is also our interim steam director um who has been um you know filling in with a with a critical need and and helping support the work from a steam level who also served in this capacity um and and helping push together uh this curriculum endeavor so with that being said i'll tee it up for dr valentino and um for susan to go ahead and be able to answer your question so dr v thank you so good evening president laurie superintendent guerrero um directors the adoption um the science adoption is aligned with the evolving um constructs uh around curriculum adoption we have taken the cmaq process and which is the um the state of oregon's process for the adoption of instructional materials and taking it more broadly and more deeply such that it allows for front loading of the learning for us as as as content teams and also leadership teams to better understand what in the discipline are considered pedagogic sound pedagogical practices um and what is the disciplinary literacy attached to that so the subject matter the subject matter that we're looking to adopt based on that we began to develop a comprehensive handbook on the curriculum adoption process that took this work deeper and in the memo that you received a couple of days ago you should have had a link to that particular document and it might have even been attached to some of the answers to the questions today maybe not but the idea is that we're going to follow a set of guiding principles that informs how we're going to be adopting curriculum regardless of the subject area whether it's preschool whether it's first grade or whether it's for high school language arts and so saying that what you will see consistently in all of our adoptions is a a memo that will actually reflect the thinking behind the adoption of that particular um program based on those guiding principles that i have been describing and at another time be more than happy to take you deeper into that particular document that frames our adoption process but the idea is that we will learn from previous adoptions in terms of cost in terms of expectations at the time that that particular adoption took place now you remember some of those adoptions are very very old like elementary science is 24 years so there's not a lot of documentation left around what happened then but we're trying to learn from the past so that we can create a present that actually leads us to a stronger future in terms of how curriculum is used in our instructional program as we um evolve with our vision plan and our strategic plan and our curriculum frameworks that there is an alignment between the content the teaching practices and the student learning and so this science adoption was based on extensive dialogue with teachers with some site administrators through direct conversation through um survey but also the team internally did a lot of its own learning and reflecting on what they were trying to accomplish based on what we wanted uh in alignment with the next generation science standards that we actually aligned the practices with uh with the right curriculum um that was that would be used for the next seven year cycle which is the goal of the bond to put us back on track with the seven year curricular adoption cycle um and so specifically to that process uh susan holveck can actually speak to that more directly in terms of what she and her team accomplished during this particular adoption cycle to make sure that the recommendation that was brought to you really reflected all of those things that then i was sharing with you um maybe just to be put a fine point on the question about the overall budget i really appreciate understanding what the approach is especially as we go into a pretty significant well very significant investment that there's some sort of overarching budget mechanism that at the end of the day we're not going to say hey we ran out of money for high school social studies or you know elementary art or is there is there sort of an overriding budget process by which we make sure that the 55 million will result in um
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adoptions across grades which is what and subject areas yes director this goes back to last year when the superintendent said guess what giving you the opportunity to include yourself in the bond process and uh after cartwheels i went back to the team and said okay here's a great opportunity one of the things that we have to think about is both not only the instructional aspects of this curriculum but the financial consequences and the the limits to what we actually so that we can come up with a budget that we believe would align with what the what the what our ass would be and so we went back last year and we actually looked at previous adoptions and their costs we work closely with lynette ingstrom um and she who has completed many adoptions and in many contracts worked with us to identify what the estimated cost would be at the same time the team went back to look at the various programs in each of the disciplines and what the estimate costs would be and we incorporated all of that into coming up with some estimates that then became a large complex spreadsheet around our costs for the adoptions and we sort of put our own limits uh per per level and per subject area to make sure that whatever ask would be would definitely be um manageable that we would actually be able to to fund it and then not be which you know would be detrimental to to to our ability to implement instruction if we weren't able to fund uh appropriately and so susan hova can actually speak more directly to that particular question director edwards because she was on the ground doing that before we go to to susan here just for clarity here these particular contracts will ensure our middle grades teachers science teachers each have a kit uh for for each of the the topic areas they're not sharing they don't have to deal with the central warehouse they will have what they need to teach during the course of the scope and sequence of the year but as far as financial oversight and making sure there's accountability to those those resources set aside to handle curriculum instruction uh claire uh can can you assure our directors that they'll be oversight or whatever we don't end up with like no social studies curriculum well that's already the case but claire can you talk about that yeah what we have is we have an office of school modernization that runs our bond programs and in partnership with our team office of teaching and learning and our information technology rit instructional technology as well and our finance team all together we are creating a system of tracking our bond programs everything goes in through the e-builder system which is where we track all of our bond projects it's where we manage the budget and then we reconcile that to our financial system so the office of school modernization is the gatekeeper if you will of tracking all the bond funds and how they're being spent as a whole we've added some finance staff into the office of school modernization to help track these expenditures and also working with the teams so they're working with louise and team louise dr valentino and team with as well as chief wolf's team in it and then also in all the construction so that we have uh oversight in each each area has a budget to work from and then it's there's an over structure between the office of school modernization of tracking all expenditures and then in finance we're also tracking bond sales interest earnings bond premiums all those components and between all the four areas of the organization we have a networked structure to make sure that there is multiple layers of tracking budget and making sure that we're in compliance as well as having staying within the budget that's been allotted from the election by our voters so is it fair to say deputy hurts that um much like we maintain accountability for bond expenditures that you know we we would be looking at more areas looking forward given that there's more facets to bond 2020 and this would be another area and then i would invite directors to actually crosswalk the expenditures with a tracker of the curricular areas across all the grade levels so something that the team you know i'm sure has no shortage of project and gantt charts but since since we uh since we teleported susan holbeck in here i would love it if she gave us a quick commercial around you
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know for the stuff that we're proposing to to purchase uh how's it rigorous to meet you know updated standards uh how is it rigorous uh enough to differentiate for diverse learners and um if you could say a word about you know does this material help to support the focus area on climate uh change and climate justice that would be great hello everybody thank you for letting me speak on this topic the the c pup third edition which is what we're asking for approval tonight for purchase with bond funds is actually the the newest iteration of the cp curriculum that we've been using which was the second edition and in it has many advantages that we can build on we already own some materials that we can use so as far as good stewards or taxpayer money we're able to achieve our goals of a single scope and sequence by having a kit like we have said for every teacher that would not have been really achievable if we had gone to a completely new and different curriculum so by building on the assets that we already have we can build on the climate change climate justice units that we've already begun to create that we were doing this year during distance learning that work can move forward we have already been working on differentiation for our special education students our tag and and our esl students within the cpap curriculum it is a highly rated curriculum from ed reports so it has met the criteria of meeting the standards but it also will help us achieve the pps vision for our graduates at pbs so we're really excited about the curriculum it's student-centered it's issue-based students will be solving real problems in in the world using science we were able to negotiate through the contract three years of professional development for free from our vendor that we will help build a teacher cadre of experts that we can then continue our own professional development moving forward um so i'm just really excited for this opportunity i feel like we really took a lot of information in and made a really good decision that will support our middle school science teachers and they were very excited about the prospect of these materials and um and i'm hoping that you will be too uh thank you miss holbeck um superintendent um one of the one of the things that um is also really important to note is to deputy um hertz's framing of how we're going to make sure that we stay in alignment with the with the bond compliance issues um and ensure that we fund properly is the mat the daily management of it and mary mary weiner um once before um will uh be the project manager for this for our part of the bond to ensure the daily accounts and the accountability is the line uh miss wiener do you want to do you want to mention that a bit yeah definitely so i'm managing the overall adoption process which is now you know we're kind of building the plane as we are flying it's we've got some great adoption starting and rolling so it's that adoption toolkit if you haven't got a chance to take a look at it i would recommend that you dive into that um i'm having a really hard time hearing you um so if you could uh get a little closer or speak just a little more slowly i would appreciate that thank you oh no problem can you hear me better now yes sorry the internet's very spotty in my house um so yes so the adoption toolkit is a great resource so if you haven't gotten a chance to take a look at that i would totally recommend that you dive in it shows kind of the process we're going through uh with each of our adoptions from defining process to execution uh to evaluating and um just to go back to what director broome edwards had talked about in regards to finance um we have been working hard to make sure that we don't have this feast and famine mentality of spending all of our bond funding in the beginning and then in five years wondering where has it all gone how have we not funded all of our curriculum and so i've actually been working hard to combat that mentality with a lot of our program administrators saying we do have funding set aside we are managing day-to-day we are sticking within our budget we're leveraging general funds to help us execute this bond because that is a huge part of the
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work that we are doing uh professional development and other items that are not compensable under the bond so i i'm definitely on top of it and definitely trying to combat that that and making sure that all of our adoption leads and content leads are taking a really strategic approach to this and we don't need to spend all of this money within the first year it's much more important that we define the process evaluate our current programming come up with a really solid plan for our adoption and execute that adoption and evaluate evaluate evaluate the effectiveness so we definitely have a plan for the money we are on schedule so far and if anything i am trying to emphasize to people that it doesn't need to be spent the first year there's been many years where there hasn't been money for curriculum so i can imagine that once now that there is a lot of excitement i mean i know the issue of not having enough kits in our middle schools for science rooms has been an issue that lots of teachers have raised so thank you that answers all my questions and i'm really appreciative of people raising and just as the first one coming through the process uh rita before i go to you i just want to say i'm so excited i'm listening to you all speak about what's coming for our students with the curriculum and all of the incredible work that you all have done to to think so thoughtfully about how can we steward well what we have and still give our students an incredibly rigorous fresh new um approach to this the curriculum and i especially love the the way you're being intentional about adding climate change and thinking about how we make sure we're spending across all of our subject areas so that all of our students have this opportunity uh yeah i i wanna have something to add yes can you hear me can you hear me okay thank you um yeah before we leave this budget question um first i want to um kind of echo my colleagues comments about um all the great work that's going on and how exciting it is um i guess i would like to take a longer view and suggest that um we should not we as a district um should not rely solely on bond money to maintain a an up-to-date curriculum and at some point you know even with good stewardship at some point the bond money is going to run out and the district needs to be in the habit of having an annual budget line to refresh curriculum um i would um we are where we are because the that did not happen in the past and i hope we have collectively learned that lesson so um i i appreciate that you get a strategic plan for the use of the bond funds and that you're you know exercising good stewardship um but i i'm going to be leaving the board sooner than well soon um so i'm going to send these thoughts out to the future boards um that there must be a commitment to annual um budgets for curriculum um we cannot allow this to happen again um so thank you again for all your work read a really important point i don't think it's anyone's intention to dig ourselves back in a fresh new hole um but it's still worth saying director bram edwards do you have any further questions on this matter scott's trying to say something oh sorry my internet is really wonky right now i apologize scott go ahead so my kids were in school during that period where there was a long stretch with no curriculum updates uh in the mid 2000s i actually served on two different curriculum materials committees in the social sciences for high school and middle school so i want to say this this adoption the materials sound great sounds like you got great participation and support from our teachers uh cost effective all that good stuff and uh at least when we were doing curriculum adoption in the 2000s it was a requirement of the state that we do public engagement around the adoption
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was there any public engagement with this adoption there was none for the third edition but there was for the second edition so the third edition is just a refresh of the curriculum to the new standards and at that time there was public engagement and that was a couple of years ago that was that was seven years ago i believe seven and years bailey just to follow up with that the adoption process as a whole has a large engagement section within that process where we do work with community engagement and students and teachers and administrators and community-based organizations so that is actually a large part of the adoption toolkit this was very specific to seapup and the renewal to cpap three so we were able to take advantage of the new materials but um you will probably hear shortly about some of our other adoptions uh some of our math adoptions within the upcoming month or two so we will talk a lot about that engagement process and it is a huge part of our process and it's so important to us that we get feedback from all different parties so uh wait with baited breath because we're going to talk a lot more about that thank you um i think we're ready to move off of this topic unless there's any other burning questions before we okay seeing none um let me know holler if you actually have one um director bram edwards you said you had another question about an item on the consent agenda so i say i mean there's a lot of um things that we're funding and voting for as part of the contracts this evening and one of them there's a series of i think we're except accepting grants um about two million dollars worth of grants for um through the student success act um going to lent ockley green boise elliott kelly peninsula with mere sitton and vestal um and maybe this also i can put a pin in this um because it may or may not be connected to presentations we're having later on this evening um related to the both the budget um and also learning acceleration so my so my just high level question is i understand these are summer program grants through the student success act um are these uh 2021 or 2122 budget items and is this this is state money it's not the federal grant money that's flowing through there's that 250 million dollars um that the state has for summer programming this is separate is that accurate i'm so glad that's the odell has changed there's one thing that leslie and the team as a matter of practice does is maximize all available resources out there state local national philanthropic uh and foundation monies and braiding all of those you know towards our goals and so you know leslie has has the benefit of sort of keeping all those strands straight to support the activities and the investments that we want to make but you want to shed a little light on that leslie i sure will thank you um so so the eight schools that were funded um this was prior this was part of the ssa package and it's about 700 it was originally 750 um thousand and now it's it's actually up um to about 775. each school has having its designation and so this is part of our student success act um funding and and so this is not necessarily related to our covered relief but it is graded within our new efforts and our team is uh keenly aware of the requirements and uh and everything and so again it's it's to supplement uh schools that maybe um haven't had the additional uh resources that uh that they've they might have uh needed and so this was intentional uh this will be for if it's a three-year package it was supposed to be last year but we had a little hiccup called um quarantine and so uh so they have now moved that and so it's this year and next year certainly and then they'll be working on the third year so it's a three-year package it's available for the summer and summer programming exclusively and so this is in in person this is our best efforts um you know this all folds into the summer this is all braided within what ode's
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summer programming guidelines are so our best efforts for in person um absolutely but again um we we really need to listen to the needs of our communities and to to to present a comprehensive offering for all students that we are needing to to serve um to have an opportunity to do that so is there a cdl component of this for comprehensive distance learning for students who if this is all in person is there a company so i'm going to this is where the learning acceleration team gets to see yeah you can tell me we're going to cover this later on in the presentation i just wanted because we're voting on these that i know the district has out the rfp for 10 million dollars for summer programming with our community-based partners as well um so i'm just trying to try to fit all the where all the pieces it it and i appreciate this because it is a puzzle and we have lots of different lots of different streams coming in and we have an amazing team looking at all of the pieces of the puzzle to serve our community and so this is this is going to come into um you will hear more about it with our learning acceleration and director edwards that that's a really good question and that will be covered in the presentation but also um ms nirenberg and dr himmel be prepared to answer that question for you because that's a topic that they're prepared to engage um with the board on um i don't have any other questions other than shout out to i think maybe director constance committee and the rosemary anderson culinary um cte track i don't know if that went through the committee but anyway i was about to see that in the agenda that's all the questions i have thanks okay any other board members have questions about any other item in the consent agenda okay um the board will is there any public comment on the consent agenda ms bradshaw no all right the board will now vote on resolutions 6 2 8 8 um through six i'm trying to remember the number of the one you pulled rita i told myself i should write it down but i didn't um so six two nine one good so we'll vote through 1691 okay so we'll vote on six two eight eight eight those are the four resolutions we're voting on as part of the consent agenda all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions the consent agenda is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes all right thank you um so director moore would you like to go ahead and speak to 6291 which was pulled from the consent agenda uh yeah 1691 is regarding some revisions to the charter for the bond accountability committee and um i had i had a couple of questions which have been answered and i have um suggestions for two changes um which i hope are relatively minor and i think they will simply sort of memorialize current practice um but i think it might be important to um to make sure that they're in the charter for future reference the first one is both of them are on page two of the charter the first one is um the section in the middle of the page um the the section begins additionally the committee may provide feedback and or advice to the board on one or more of the following topics and there's a list and i would suggest adding um annual performance audit work plan to the list and my understanding is that um the bac has been regularly doing that um so this would just be adding um adding this piece to uh to the list to conform with current practice um the second suggestion that i would have um is in the next section uh which talks about uh the bac's role in reviewing future bond planning and it currently reads the committee will also review
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future bond planning processes and materials and provide advice as requested by the board to the board on and then there are two two bullet points there um i would suggest changing that to read the committee will also review future bond planning processes and materials and provide advice to the board prior to the final elaboration of the bond package on and then the bullet points and would that be a proposed bond package because it would be under it yes this is under the future bond planning and i'm i'm open to copy editing of the of that sentence but um i think it's important to the my rationale for making a suggestion is that um i think i think the i think future boards in their planning for future bonds um should definitely take advantage of the expertise in the bonded um accountability committee and um and i would suggest that it the current wording suggests that it's just optional and i think it ought to be um a regular practice yeah um thanks for the amendment i i agree with the um uh the rationale behind it but you say uh before elaboration of the bond i'm just curious what that means um well um i was i was puzzling over the language actually um thinking back to how we how we developed the uh the 2020 bonds um over the course of months there was a kind of constant evolving elaboration of a bond package um and in the final couple of weeks it became you know much more intense and things moved a lot quicker um how about um and i don't know i don't know at what point in that process um the bac would most usefully kind of provide advice i guess let me just let me say i'm just concerned about elaboration feels like an imprecise word so it's not clear but i mean can can we just say be prior to referral of the bond and that's a formal act that the board takes and it would essentially be saying you know we need that we need the bc's advice um obviously some boards may want that advice earlier than that i'm just i'm puzzling a little bit with um you know we have to tie it to some specific action and and i elaboration could be could be any time right so could it be yeah okay so consideration um the first version i wrote for myself of this revision said before referral of the bond um i take it to the referral um as i was thinking about it it occurred to me that um once you get to the point of referral it's pretty much a done deal um and i think it would be it's pretty late in the game to be getting advice from uh from the bac um so i i mean i could i could certainly live with um pegging it to the referral um but my thinking i i mean i i went back and forth on the wording director moore director deposit and director scott um i'm wondering if this is something we can um sort of suspend at this meeting and have the three of you do some talking through and working on and return with um some amendments to the charter at our next meeting does that how how would that work as far as a process piece for where we yeah i mean it works for me and and again i really i want to be really clear i fully support this i think this is exactly what the board needs to do i just i'm worried about about and it is hard absent referral which is the formal step it's it's hard to sort of peg it to you know is it when we first have an inkling of a bond you know two years before we do it is it when we start doing community engagement is it when we start talking seriously about it so that's my only concern um and i think if it can wait two weeks i'm happy to put our heads together can we just
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oh yeah i'm fine with that um i guess my only concern would be is there is there some reason why we need to pass this tonight is is there some drop deadline that we're looking at or um not no there there really isn't i mean we this this work has been in process for some time um i think the sooner the better it'd be nice to get this codified but two weeks isn't going to hurt the process that i mean the consideration of the charter um edits has been months in the in the making so two weeks is yeah i'll ask the three of you to work together on that and uh to coordinate with our um board manager uh roland powell to sort of um work on some revisions and get that out to the rest of the board great thank you thank you thank you thank you director moore for bringing that up by completely supportive of those edits yeah can i make one request of of the work group i'm supportive of the language when you come back will you have please run it by the co-chairs of the bac just so that we know that they are agreeing to whatever it is that is being added um it just will make a nice package great um great larry can i ask a point of clarification um the consent agenda you you noted went to run36295 but in our consent agenda and board book it says resolution 6288 26291 i just want to be really clear um what the consent agenda was my consent agenda goes through 6295 okay i'm just i'm reading off the board book it it says uh consent agenda resolutions six two eight eight three six two nine one director scott hit refresh i noted that as we started this conversation and and fixed it so the resolution was included in the sub list but it wasn't listed at the top and so i it should be updated now as soon as i hit refresh there it was thank you but thank you for double checking those those kinds of details are super important so so thank you for drawing that to our attention director scott okay so um we will come back to this matter of the bac um and so that finishes our work with the consent agenda for this meeting and we turn now to our student and public comment before we begin i would like to review our guidelines for comment the board thanks for the community for taking the time to attend this meeting to wait for us to get to this point and to provide your comments 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 and know that many of our board members take notes 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 those to public comment pps.net please make sure when you begin your comment that you clearly state your name and spell your last name you will have three minutes to speak and you will hear a sound after three minutes which means it is time to conclude your comments ms bradshaw do we have anyone signed up for public comment tonight yes we have susie bartley up first hello jealous begin okay just to be clear my name is susan anglada bartley greetings school board superintendent stating facts coveted rates are currently on the rise with more younger people experiencing hospitalization the b-17 variant which is more contagious is now the dominant variant latin american people in oregon have contracted copen at a rate double their population fellow educators and concerned community members have approached pps regarding buildings being unable to meet cdc guidelines especially those in majority non-white schools we have sent correspondence to pps officials and the school board we have rallied outside the district office where students community members and educators from impacted communities who are warned you about concerns community organizations have according to news sources blasted the state for failing to provide vaccines for the latin american community it's on the public record you have been informed mr guerrero why are you refusing to speak up on this matter why do you neglect to directly address the needs of multiple communities why do you spend your time walking from school to school with governor kate brown who we know is also clearly warned but ignores and downplays the danger to this community and the inequities in the buildings school board why do you support
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guadalupe in his mission to ignore the needs and demands of members of this community who continue to speak out on public record i give the rest of my time to community member and prime minister of the oregon brown berets and executive director of fuersa oregon advocacy association carla patricia lengua cruz hi good evening everybody school board superintendent everyone i appreciate this time i just want to say that you know guadalupe this is directly to you just want to say how uh how disappointed we are in the community uh you know the community has spoken and this is school board the community has spoken they have they've mentioned and they've written and the professionals that are here in the community the teachers that are taking care of our kids have spoken the facts are already been listed this virus is something that is very delicate and has already affected a lot of community homes our community as as latinx and as hispanic community we need your protection we need you to to decide the right decisions that we're asking you to do who knows better than the people's who knows better than the parents of the children of the youth that are attending this school i just want to say that if things do not change there is going to be public calling out there will be protests there is going to be a different view than what is we've happening today in other community sections yesterday what happened to the to to in the school district and beaverton there was a protest the community is not going to stand down anymore we need your help we need you to make these decisions to do the right thing for what we're asking this isn't any more decisions that are just going to please the governor and and individuals that are not here living in these communities we will not tolerate any more deaths we don't want to tolerate any more people getting sick and only because and all all i want to say is that if there is no risks and anything why are we all here in the zoo meeting thank you why are we in person dealing with these situations thank you very much for my time thank you miss bradshaw is there further public comment tonight yes we have david ortiz hello everyone my name is david ortiz um o-r-t-i-z i was born and raised in north portland and i'm a graduate from roosevelt high school where i now teach thank you thank you for your time i'm here to share demands uh demands that were written by our asian student group at roosevelt high school the man number one we demand to see an action plan from roosevelt with details of what adults will do in response to different harmful scenarios against asian and asian american students including but not limited to verbal assault physical assault and social interactions or media targeting asian asian american students at our school this includes specific consequences procedures and policy ideas that have been created by the admin a timeline of action steps and implementation needs to be completed and ready to share with asg by the deadline march 31st and ready to actively implement by april 9th demand number two we do not want the students to do your job if you plan to be uh allies to us you have to be the ones who take active and specific steps towards support not passing them back to us and asking us what we want you to do do not try to suggest solutions to our labor and pain and instead do your own work demand 3 we want admin and staff to educate themselves on the model minority myth oppression olympics and belittling of asian american people especially during these times send an all-staff email to faculty at roosevelt to do the same the admin must decide to either create their own page assignment example canvas to google classroom for teachers or pay a trained agent or slash asian american supervisor and community member to create the assignment for all admin and staff to participate in this research and self-educating assignment needs to show evidence of completion to asg by the deadline demand number four we want admin and staff to call out anything immediately instead of being passive and acting as bystanders the policy of safety for students in school are severely lacking in safety itself it needs to be acknowledged that safety is not only physical it is also the
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emotional mental state of the whole community at roosevelt these demands will be shared again and and up next i want to share some context at least for these demands asian and asian american students have been targets of asians of hate and speech and discrimination throughout history of this country these incidents have been on the rise during this pandemic both nationally and in our community the rise of hate in addition to the racism students at roosevelt high school felt in a building free pandemic prompted asians and asian american students and advisors to come together to create the asian student group in an effort to build community and solidarity in the wake of the murderers in atlanta the asg put forth a list of demands to our administrators in an effort to ensure their safety and building and in our in the community next i want to add a little bit as to why i am here along with my community member asg has asked for support and amplifying their demands even further district one we are here to share those demands with you tonight students have always done so much work in advocating for their safety no assurance student need to do this we are amplifying asg voices as a form of direct action and because the words of our students have so much power we need you to hear them and take action thank you for your speaking tonight thank you thank you mr ortiz and thank your students dear lowry can i ask mr ortiz can you um send if you have a written copy of her testimony to um roseanne powell who can get it to the board i would love that as well who was the second person sorry roseanne she'll get it to all of us okay thank you ms bradshaw is there a further public comment tonight yes with kyra hi my name is kira isai my last name is asny my pronouns are she her hers i also work at roosevelt high school and came here in partnership with mr ortiz um i'm going to re-read the demands we will make sure you get a copy i ask that you let them sink in that you hear the voices and the urgency of the individual students who came together collectively to make these demands demand number one we demand to see an action plan from roosevelt with details of what adults will do in response to different harmful scenarios against asian and asian american students including but not limited to verbal assault physical assault and social interactions or media targeting asian and asian american students at our school this includes specific consequences procedures and policy ideas that have been created by the admin a timeline of action steps an implementation needs to be completed and ready to share with asg by the deadline march 31st and ready to actively implement by april 9th demand number two we do not want the students to do your job if you plan to be allies to us you have to be the ones who take active and specific steps towards support not passing it back to us and asking us what we want you to do do not try to suggest solutions to our labor and pain and instead do your own work demand number three we want admin and staff to educate themselves on the model minority myth oppression olympics and belittling of asian and asian american people especially during these times send an all-staff email to faculty at roosevelt to do the same the admin must decide to either create their own page or assignment i.e canvas or google classroom assign assignment for teachers or pay a trained asian or asian american supervisor and community member to create the assignment for all admin staff to participate in this research and self-educating assignment need to show evidence of completion to asg by the deadline demand number four we want admin and staff to call out anything immediately instead of being passive and acting as a bystander the policies of safety for students in school are severely lacking in safety itself and it needs to be acknowledged that safety is not only physical it is also the emotional and mental state of the whole community of roosevelt we have an ask of the district the administrators in our building has have responded to these demands and asg has shared feedback that it has not been enough these demands are the truth of the asg students at roosevelt high school but we can imagine that the feeling of lack of safety for the wider asian and asian american community and pps is also true the district sent out a message of solidarity but this too is not enough how is the district modeling the values of racial equity and social justice every staff member in pps holds a position of power what is the district doing to ensure that its staff are trained to recognize the ways in which systemic racism is inherent within the educational institution of pps to actively dismantle the systems that don't serve students to proactively create structures and systems of safety for students
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and to respond in a culturally competent manner when harm occurs the district needs to do better it is not a matter of lack of clarity its lack of action student safety is community safety when our community is hurting we all hurt and luck thank you thank you thank you we have bae young you thank you can you hear me yes thank you the young you why you he him pbs teacher and parent historically underserved or historically ignored according to public data it is our black and brown schools that have less than 50 percent of its students returning to in-person meanwhile our wealthy white communities have over 75 percent of its students returning to buildings could this be because white portland has better access to covetes vaccinations and health but we all know these things right so i don't say historically underserved i say historically ignored because according to the rssl there are no amount of covet cases within a school that would cause it to shut down we have at least 18 different buildings in pps with a covet outbreak why am i tracking this down from screenshots of administrative emails sent by colleagues across pps why is there no pbs centralized place for communities to track covid other districts are doing this work there are no asymptomatic tests or even adequate symptomatic tests being administered right now we have entire schools that have only one student eligible to take a cova test the district provided rapid tests are performative why are they optional when we take field trips we are required to get permission first why wasn't the same thing done for kovates before returning to buildings we don't even ask families to fill out a pre-entry covet screening before bringing their kids to school and yes other districts are doing this so to the people that say covet does not spread in schools to the leadership that is still meeting virtually while communities are back in person i say look at the variants and all these safety holes in pps board members what we are witnessing right now in history is the normalization of covet in schools even as oregon has the fastest growing rates of covert infection in the nation do not blame it on the rssl do not allow this narrative because if we aren't about changing this then we are all complicit in kovitz white supremacy culture and who are we to tell our communities who have lost loved ones to covet that nothing can be done who are we to tell those with lifelong covert complications that their lives don't matter it's not monolithic there are still black and brown families on both sides of the cdl and in-person camps but if we can't protect them then why are buildings open at all thank you we have teresa batman okay can you hear me yes okay my name is teresa batman t-e-r-e-z-a-b-o-t-t-m-a and pronouns she her i'm an educator and a parent of three pbs students and i'm here because i'm extremely concerned about the alarming rise in covet infections and the lack of safety protocols and transparency regarding coping 19 cases in our schools school building should not be open right now we are conflating lack of testing and contact tracing with lack of spread acting as if schools had a magical dome of immunity surrounding them or the coronavirus stopped at the doors because of its phobia of hand sanitizer and school employees with badges and clipboards this is the classic logical fallacy called appeal to ignorance where absence of evidence is taken to be evidence of absence it is ethically and morally appalling to continue with this hazardous life-threatening operation every day we are hearing through the grapevine of new notifications to families and staff of covet infections in pbs schools we know that the number of infected people who show up in school is proportional to the spread in the community which is rising at the fastest rate in
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the nation here in oregon it is time pps leadership said no to special interests and yes to protecting our students and most vulnerable families by shutting down in person learning in the height of the pandemic effective leadership is not about compliance leaders on the right side of history lead with courage and against the grain because to them there is no such concept as a throwaway person those with privilege have dehumanized the impact of this pandemic to insulate themselves from being implicated and causing human death and suffering by calling those who fall sick cases how many children are you willing to sacrifice to prop up the state's economy the district is operating on truthiness while what students and families deserve is the truth it is time to mandate a full return to cdl and when and only when our numbers are down fall or later we need the following three t's testing temp checks and transparency because according to a canadian study that was published this month 35 of infected children ages 0 to 9 are asymptomatic we need a system of regular mandatory asymptomatic testing for all students just like la unified is doing we need temp checks at the door because fever is the most common uh symptom for children and transparent communication systems such as a dashboard that's updated daily with covet cases per school multilingual and available to the public if we made asymptomatic testing a priority we would likely find the same thing as a study out of omaha nebraska schools where they conducted asymptomatic testing came out this month they found infection rates were six times higher for students and concluded that as many as nine in ten student cases may be missed by by traditional reporting the risk of death is not as high for pediatric patients research shows that a sizable portion end up in hospitals and intensive care we also know that 34 of those who survive covet suffer from long-term neurological and psychiatric disorders increasingly children are becoming long haulers we must say no more and do what's right we move back to cdl now and once we return to schools when it's safer when it's safe at least not earlier than the fall we need testing temp checks and transparency we deserve nothing less from your leadership thank you we have greg myers maybe there we are i'm going to say it too can you hear me yeah very good all right great that must be the catchphrase of the nineteen the 220. uh good evening superintendent guerrero uh good evening board members um thank you for the time my name is greg myers i am a union officer for the seiu local 140. i am also the head of head custodian of jackson middle school i've been a custodian for portland public headquarters for portland public schools for 15 years tonight i'm here to ask you to make an investment to keep our schools safe and clean and to ask you for equity for our nutrition service workers we appreciate that the district agreed to provide a pandemic recognition payment for our nutrition service workers acknowledging their dedication and their central role they play in ensuring a healthy and safe school environment this was an important step in the direction of providing true equity for all pps employees the next step to include nutrition services in the general fund budget so as to prove provide the predominantly female workforce an actual living wage a wage that will attract and retain new employees who would like to make this a career it is a career job it used to be at least it was a career job for for many people true equity often requires structural change by investing general fund dollars pps can lift the standards for uh this historically undervalued group i'm also here to ask the district to invest in the future of our buildings and facilities by providing realistic budgeting to hire and retain more union custodians after years of understaffing we have reached a crossroad where we need to decide do we want to hire and maintain a custodial staff to protect the multi-million dollar trust our community has put on us or do we continue down the path we've been following for the last 15 years and watched these nice new shiny schools become their catchphrase moderately dingy our union coalition is working together to ensure the district prioritizes the health and safety of
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student and the hard-working pps staff so hopefully the return to in-person instruction will be successful which i'm sounding like i'm the only one that's saying that tonight finally i would like to thank every nutrition service and transportation employee who has worked with front lines for pps during this pandemic for the last year these folks have been the face of the portland public schools they have generated goodwill by handing out food to anyone who was in need they did this vaccineless in the rain in the freezing cold and during forest fires that one point caused portland to have the worst air quality in the world and they did it with nothing more than a one-sided pop-up tent a mask and a pair of disposable gloves these are the pps employees who actually risk their lives for the community and they deserve a personal thank you from each and every one of us thank you for your time i appreciate it thanks craig thank you thank you miss testimony tonight no that concludes our testimony i once again want to thank everyone who spoke tonight i know that it's not always easy to come and speak before the board so really appreciate the public input we've received tonight i think that now is a good moment for us to take a brief break as a school board so we are going to be back in five minutes it's 7 20 and we'll resume at 7 25. thanks everyone [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] me [Music] me [Music] do [Music] judge [Applause] kindergarten
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so [Music] oh [Music] huh [Music] huh [Music] blue [Music] we are going to go ahead and get started with our next item which is the um report from our student rep so nathaniel i think is still on break so as soon as nathaniel returns to the screen we will go ahead and begin with our student representatives report can you hear me see me um i it might be my wi-fi go ahead nothing else hello it sounds like the though can you hear me yes we just heard that thank you can you see me and hear me now i think the wi-fi is watching you know okay hopefully this works um if it cuts out then just stop me um i can try again all right um my report tonight will be fairly brief uh to begin with i would like to provide an update on the pps student summit the dsc has continued planning the summit since i spoke of it a handful of meetings ago we have finalized our breakout room offerings as well as begun our general outreach efforts um as i believe i noted in that past meeting we uh we will provide a link to the summit to all members of slt elt and the board once we are closer to the event for any pps students who are interested in attending um i encourage you to go to the qr code displayed on the poster or to the link right below it i'm going to leave this up on the screen for a couple seconds um and a copy of this poster can be found on the uh dsc's google drive that is available on a link on our webpage so i very much encourage all pbs students to attend that um i'm looking forward to it it again is on the 22nd of may uh and it will be virtual over soon where are my notes ah all right and i'd also like to note that uh pps does have an election coming up on may 18th voters will decide who the next board members are from zones five six and no four five and six
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as it so happens today is the voter registration deadline so if you are 18 or older but have not yet registered please do so by going to oregonvotes.gov before midnight tonight and remember to turn on your ballots by the 18th uh personally this is the first election in which i've been allowed to vote something which i'm very much looking forward to uh thank you and that concludes my report thank you nathaniel i'm going to go ahead and tweet out right now that oregonvotes.gov registration link so we can get everybody registered for this election that's coming up on may 18th all right superintendent guerrero i know you have a report for us tonight as well yes madam chair well good evening directors uh buenas tardes uh to everyone out there and today for watching this meeting live stream uh from home um i wanted to start off uh perhaps on a serious somber note here uh i do want to start with an acknowledgement of the events last week in minnesota as i shared with all staff last week this verdict that was handed down in minneapolis brings a number of emotions up that we'll need to keep processing for for some time while i feel some sense of relief for the display of accountability for this case too still yearn for for true justice uh when our systems and communities reflect our values the black lives matter last week also served as another reminder of the active role uh our students and young people across the country play in leading long overdue national reckoning on racial justice supporting our students includes supporting one another we are collectively experiencing so many challenges this year to our black educators administrators staff students families and partners please know that you are seen and appreciated i hope that one day we will look back last year's at last week's verdict uh as another turning point an inflection point in our nation's progress towards justice uh our pps graduate portrait envisions us to support our students to become compassionate critical thinkers who are able to collaborate and solve problems and lead a more socially just world we still have work to do i ask that we all continue to stand shoulder to shoulder and remain committed to dismantling anti-black racism and oppression in our own school system that we collectively continue to fight for racial justice and that together we work every day to create the conditions so that every student particularly our students of color thrive and so much of that work to create the conditions so that every student thrives is carried out every day by our teachers and school administrators and we heard at the top of the meeting from our directors recognizing next week's pps teacher and school administrator appreciation week coming up this past year and i'll add my testimony here provides proof of the incredible commitment and dedication of our educators school and district administrators they've it's been particularly true the statement and we've said it before it's offered challenges and unique circumstances uh there's not a pd for it there's no degree that prepares you for it could have prepared our educators and administrators for uh but time and time again over the last 13 months uh they've come through for our students uh and we've seen the the outcome of that in in the last couple of weeks um initially pivoting to distance learning uh almost overnight it seemed finding a way to maintain connection with our students in a continuity of learning and then planning and preparing for ultimately offering the option and the choice to our families as we reopen to in-person uh instruction uh so uh i too ask that everyone in our community join us in celebrating honoring and thanking our teachers and and school administrators uh please look for stories and spotlight pieces across all our social media platforms uh in the coming week as we celebrate our teachers and administrators so speaking of reopening for hybrid instruction we've now welcomed all in-person cohorts at all grade levels this has been a significant undertaking to say the least as i mentioned a couple of weeks ago
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after we reopened for our youngest scholars things have continued to go remarkably smoothly i also want to thank directors for helping us to welcome students and staff back to their respective schools and for your support and getting us to this point and with hybrid now in full operation across the district you will notice we're switching gears and starting with tonight's regular meeting agenda moving away from reopening updates because now we've reopened and now you're going to start to hear updates about summer programming and you're going to start to get a first a dose of information there and how summer programming plans fit into our overall learning acceleration plans moving forward but i do want to offer a slide here and i'll try to channel dr russ brown a little bit here we continue to track daily and weekly health metrics those are publicly posted and available by oha you can find a listing of every school in the state of oregon and any cases if they're experiencing them we'll we'll make sure that link is on our own website for those that are curious where where those instances are happening happening so ultimately our ability to remain open for hybrid and fully open this fall is of course dependent on our community metrics and guidance from the oregon health authority and oregon department of education uh you can see from the illustration here things things are starting to to pick up again in the way of uh the rate of cases per 100 000 i think everybody's aware of that and has is is watching the news reports uh and and so hopefully uh things uh will start to head the other direction and improve but as we do welcome students back to in-person learning as we plan the summer and look forward to the fall as well as the 21-22 school year calendar which is also on this evening's agenda back to directors for a vote we're getting closer and closer to reestablishing familiarity and and certain routines especially traditions here at pps i say this knowing that as a larger community we're not still done in dealing with uh and remaining healthy and safe in regards to covet 19 but i am pleased that we continue to reintroduce in-person learning environments and gradually other student opportunities as we've seen with athletics and arts one of our most cherished traditions of course is high school graduation so i'm really pleased to share that we plan to host graduations for all comprehensive high schools at providence park this june holding commencement ceremonies outdoors will allow us to welcome graduates and their families to be together for this important day providence park is a historical gem and of course known worldwide for the magic that is the timbers and the thorns uh it's a particularly appropriate location to to celebrate our graduates and helps to support a health and safe uh event our plans of course are dependent on coveted metrics and i should mention that while we will all be together at providence park we'll continue to observe very tightly all those public health best practices including physical distancing within the whole stadium our alternative programs have chosen a more personalized smaller scale ceremony as they as they have uh customarily done that uphold some of their traditions as well uh our high school seniors and their families should expect school specific details coming uh in the coming week uh so please look for that a centralized uh web page uh we'll also go live later this week so we're really excited to see our seniors and their families uh downtown and portland in june celebrating this really important milestone and if anybody's up for a game of foursquare you can find our students out on the school yard so that concludes my report for this evening directors thank you thank you so much superintendent guerrero we turn now to our committee reports um and so we do these in alphabetical order so i'm going to uh start with the audit committee and director brim edwards um we haven't met since the last time we had a board meeting so there's no audit committee update thank you uh school improvement bond uh committee director to pass thank you yeah we met on april the school improvement bond committee met on april 15th and had a full agenda we talked discussed updates on school modernization
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and the long-range facility plan we had an excellent presentation from a team of uh people whose names i i wish i would have um remembered i wish i could remember that talked about uh spatial justice and um was fascinating um we also reviewed the proposed bac charter that we discussed earlier tonight um thank you again to director moore for making those additions that'll strengthen and improve that charter and we meet again on may 27th at 4 30. excellent director moore do you have a report from us from the cbrc yes the cbsd met on april 15th and got a um and the committee kind of got an overview of the budget process and talked about how they're going to approach they're reporting to us about uh their analysis and of the budget that we're looking at um they are meeting on thursday uh to begin discussions that will culminate in the reports that they're going to deliver to us that's it thank you uh next we have i've lost my place so of course don't know what's next alphabetically okay there we are uh director constant charter and alternative programs thank you we met last week uh we had a great update from our uh cbo alternative schools on return to hybrid learning which was great and we also staff informed us about the response to the request for proposals for cbo's for this next contract cycle so there were a lot of interesting ideas and innovations that came forward in that process and for the most part we have our same group of organizations that have been providing those services that want to continue providing those services i think we have one new organization in the mix and then we had just a really important conversation pegged to the budget process about issues that our cbo partners have been raising around equity in our budgeting process so really trying to take a student-centered approach in looking at what do these kids need regardless of the mechanism through which they're being served and i intend to keep talking about this in our budget proposal they have asked for an addition to the pass-through rate that they get on a per-student basis which is currently 80 percent um so not only was that a really important discussion but we had great participation we had um most of the leaders of our contra of our con our community based alternative programs there in the conversation and so they just talked about you know how they do what they do with what they've got and what they actually need and it was really great to hear from them directly and also in that conversation we revisited just the deep concerns that i feel around the trauma that their school communities are experiencing with this epidemic of gun violence and talked a little bit about what what supports are being made available to them and what more we can do and what they're doing on the street to support their kids and families so it is some of the leaders of our contracted alternative schools that are that are leading that conversation in portland right now and speaking up for the youth who are most impacted because they're our kids and there is um some kind of tragedy in these communities on a weekly basis um and it's um i'm grateful for the leadership of of these people but we really need to we really need as an organization to examine what we what more we can do to push others city leadership county leadership and to um dig in their own resources for these kids and families because it's it's a really really traumatic situation that we've got going on in our streets right now so that's what we talked about and we everybody was grateful for the um the venue to have those conversations thank you for the question uh director constance on tonight's consent agenda there was the contract for rosemary anderson for a it's an equity allocation uh for the culinary arts cte project and facility was that part of the conversation about flow through of equity funds or it was that something separate and
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complete from the committee's work in the committee's discussion about equity funding we changed our formula to include cbo's um in to make cbo's eligible for our equity grants um i don't know if karina's on here but i think that was two years ago that we made that switch maybe three years ago and they did speak to how incredibly grateful they are for that i just was talking with someone today at helensville view high school who brought that up out of the blue and said that those equity funds enabled them to buy two vans that they use to take kids to interviews and internships and life experiences through their cte program and jaw and job opportunities connect them with job opportunities so that what you saw julia is a result of our policy decision of a few years back to um include them in our equity uh funds distribution great thank you my other question is was there any discussion about the opel charter um given that um the this school has decided to discontinue in what we do with that charter yep sorry about that uh yeah we just heard from um enrollment and transfer and uh about how we're doing in terms of really amazing customer service for each of those families as they try to situate themselves in a new new school new school community for next year so they uh they held the lottery process open i think about half the families participated in the lottery process others are choosing their neighborhood schools we didn't talk about the charter it's my understanding that we don't need to do anything at the moment regarding their charter we just talked about how are the kids doing and are we taking care of them now that they've had this um abrupt change thank you dr scott what report do we have from the intergovernmental committee uh we have not met since the last um board meeting so i'll just note that we have a governmental committee meeting on may 13th thank you uh director moore uh what do we have from the policy committee policy committee met yesterday um after a little hiatus we talked about a number of policies the responsible use of technology climate crisis response policies uh the complaint policy and we got an introduction to um some changes that we're going to have to be looking at um in kind of a suite of policies um related to um harassment sexual hara especially sexual harassment um that will be responsive to some statutory changes that have been made um and we'll be all of at our next meeting on may 10th will be um i think revisiting all of these above named policies thank you can i ask a really quick question dr moore um is the um foundation school foundation policy still on your committee's agenda for this year um it is in principle um but everything had to be put on hold um a couple of months ago um what i don't know is whether staff are going to have the capacity to prepare anything for the committee's consideration before this this iteration of the policy committee goes out of business as of june 30th um so it's it's theoretically still on the work plan um so it's going to have to be a sort of um we'll see but we'll see if we can if we have time to bring it up okay thanks no and that's completely understandable given everything that's going on i i would i would personally be interested even even if it gets delayed that we still have a plan for when we will revisit that um even if it's after um june 30th in next year's policy committee it's something i i i'd like to make sure it stays on the on the on the boards radar uh in some form absolutely i i agree with that lots of parents that are also very interested in following the the conversation or the maybe the lack of conversation but i'm i'd be very interested in keeping that uh agenda item alive there's actually a great draft that the community has put together that seems ready to at least have a discussion about it please get started well i love the opinion that um
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whatever happens uh between now and june 30th um i think i think there's more than enough work to make the policy committee uh essentially a 12-month operation um so i i would recommend that the a new policy committee take up the work starting in the summer or at least not really planning the next year's work in the summer because it's um takes a long time to go through these policies it's uh it has to be exacting work so it takes a long time so i would highly recommend that the next board [Music] start thinking about the committees as of july 1. thank you director moore for all of your work on the policy committee i know it's a lot i know that we'll keep that enough of us are paying attention to that foundation policy so we'll make sure that if if we're not able to work through it this cycle that we'll we'll have it there um we're going to move on to the rose quarter director bailey and director from edwards what what do you have on the rose quarter for us tonight yeah add one thing to the policy before we move off yeah uh and just to re-emphasize we're doing a lot more public engagement in policy development i think than ever has done before and i'm worried that that's a bit of a bottleneck considering all the other public engagement that we're doing in lots of different areas um i know for example the the climate policy is um we're really close to a really good final draft to take out and it's it's going to be a couple months before we have adequate time to get good public input and support for a final version of that and when we we look at everything else going on um there there's a lot out there so i i think we need to keep that in mind as we go forward in terms of our expectations and our staffing and one of the other things out there for us is that rose quarter um so director from edwards what do you have to share with us about where we are with the rose quarter tonight thank you um there was a meeting of the executive steering executive advisory committee um yesterday that courtney wesley and i participated in i think the biggest probably new development is that odot contacted me and let me know that they have asked their design team to put together an alternative proposal that would not move the um the freeway expansion any closer to harriet tubman middle school and that instead it would be a shift to the west and um so that you know obviously that gives up two potential options that we have so we also reiterated our request that we that the board would like a presentation and have an opportunity to ask questions of odot and the the beauty of now that they have another option on the table is that they discuss both of those options in addition um we flagged for them that to date they haven't provided any sort of um mitigation or plan for if they moved ahead either with um the you know the the plan that moves even closer to harriet tubman or the plan to keep it in place neither of those um potential designs do they yet have any mitigation strategies for during the actual construction for age phase which would be quite disruptive to the school community so stay tuned so they should be coming back to us for that in addition are coming to the board to present on both of those in addition um they there was the presentation on the um sort of different options on the highway covers and for just uh as a refresh this was something that the albino vision trust had asked for not just so like basic highway covers but ones that would support development either housing retail businesses industrial on on top of the covers and there are now a couple options and so
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those are before us they've asked for comment and director bailey and um pps staff will be involved in that one of the one of the proposed covers is quite close to besc so of course you know some impacts um potentially on our administrative building as well and let's see um the last piece is uh the district has attended a timeline to work through the scoping of what it would potentially cost to move the middle school and also we've flagged for the office of community engagement that this will be something that definitely any discussion about whether the school moves or what the mitigation is that there'll need to be a conversation with the harriet tubman um school community so those are all the things that are in in the pipeline anything to add director bailey um so if you could just share with the board uh when we were contacted with a different scenario and how quickly odot asked for our response i'm sorry you're talking about the um the caps [Music] i'm trying to get a clarification of either the caps or the new new design so um the the the freeway covers were unveiled at the meeting yesterday and essentially they um ask all the participants to either provide feedback right there at the meeting the the materials were shared at i think one o'clock in the afternoon for a three o'clock meeting some individuals had feedback at the meeting for those that didn't the request was to get back either with questions or feedback by this friday on the alternative design um that came up last week and um we were asked to that they wanted to present that to the committee yesterday and so that was presented as this will be an option there's obviously no design yet um but they're just providing notice that they're asking the team but to potentially provide an alternative to um design so i don't have a timeline yet when that would with that alternative design then there'll be impacts on businesses that are on the west side of the freeway so terry tubman's on the east side so if they don't move it closer to harriet tubman and they move it west that would have impacts um on clearly that you know the businesses and property owners on the west side um so that's just at the very initial stage and i think even the expansion of the freeway will increase the amount of pollution that our students are exposed to so i think this continues to be a very worrisome development yeah um that is a great point um that and is under dispute because odot claims that the the um after the expansion that actually the air quality be better but won't guarantee that the air quality will be um of a health in a healthy range thank you for that director which has never happened before in other words it's really bad now and it won't get worse it's really bad now and it's unhealthy now that's worse is um less worse well and that's i think a subject of continued conversation as we talk about um freeway impacts and just uh just to be in a public process and ask for immediate feedback or feedback within a few days to a major plan just just to me as one more example of um oda not listening well to um the community at large there were a lot of individuals at that meeting who echoed those sentiments director bailey well thank you all for that work and i know the board will continue to be vigilant um and to continue to advocate both for the impacts on climate change of this proposal and also the direct impacts on our students um we move now to a very exciting agenda topic um oh first of all i need to double check are there any other reports or things that board members need to share at this moment i'll just briefly share that um call everyone's attention to uh an email that we sent earlier this week that our
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draft guidelines from the council of great city schools uh forced districts on prioritization of the of the new latest tranche of federal funds superintendent guerrero has participated with a group of superintendents i've been participating with a group of school board members so hopefully we'll have that'll be something that we'll actually use and refer to in our budget process and superintendent i don't know if you want to add anything on that only that um larger urban districts realize very quickly with the substantive new resources um you know there's there's an interest in uh spending them wisely of course uh and there's deadlines there and so why not get everybody together to share their best thinking and sort of provide some some guidelines around uh ways to make some well-rounded investments to support our students so it's very helpful to to be in those conversations and and i would say from the board perspective uh one of our main focuses was just on the accountability aspect and communication with our with our communities about um how we're prioritizing these funds and i would say that we did have a board retreat this last um saturday and we were able to um sort of come up with some consensus around a new board leadership election process and do some work on our coms protocols which will join our other protocols and look at our ethics statement as well as get some robust training on guardrails so many of those items will be ahead of us for voting in the next month but thanks again to all the my board colleagues for doing this work on our board self evaluation and um trying to adjust and shift our board culture to align with the best practices as outlined by the council of great city schools all right now we get to the exciting part which is um going to be awesome uh superintendent guerrero would you please introduce um this uh item of identifying a new mascot for the iwells barnett high school community well here we are on on january 26th if you recall directors unanimously approve resolution 6235 to change the name of wilson high school to ida b wells barnett high school similar to the process for selecting a new name for ida b wells barnetta committee was formed to identify a mascot that includes students alumni community members and staff and an engagement process led by our students with support from our office of community engagement on march 30th ida b wells barnett high school renaming committee submitted a name recommendation for the school mascot after completing the second phase of the student and equity center design process school board discussion surfaced questions about evergreens as a proposed school mascot for ida b wells barnett high school and whether this symbol might conjure up painful memories of our country's troubling history so following the board of education meeting the ida b wells barnett mascot renaming committee revisited uh the mascot recommendation and decided to move in another direction by moving on to the next strongest mascot recommendation after further engagement including with the leaders of portland's african-american community and the family of ida b wells barnett they've now concluded their process so tonight we are recommending you approve the school community's choice of the guardians as the new mascot for ida b wells barnett high school so uh once again i'd i'd like to uh introduce to the screen camille and our esteemed principal philippe thank you so much superintendent guerrero esteemed board members thank you for the opportunity i will just need a moment to get my screen sharing up and going and i'm hoping that at this point you can see my screen please let me know if you if you can't um so again my name is philly priestic i'm the proud principal of ida b wells high school thank you for the opportunity this evening to share with you our recommendation of the guardians as the principal hurstich i just want to you know we can actually uh see your notes uh oh well we don't want to get this guys there you go okay i wouldn't want to give away anything before you say it i i appreciate i appreciate that director scott thank you so i'm here this evening to make a formal request that we changed the name of our school mascot from ida b wells trojans to ida b wells
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guardians and as you all know our committee consists of remarkable student leaders as well as committed alumni staff community representatives our committee members share a broad range of perspectives and experiences and every major decision that we've made since last summer actually our committee made as a team that includes the recommendations that a few of our committee members will be presenting to you this evening this evening we will share with you about the process that we followed to identify our new school mascot the guiding principles that framed our work we will share with you in particular why we decided that guardians was a much better choice for our school than the evergreens we'll give you a small taste of some of the visual elements that we've developed so far to represent this new mascot and finally i'll just give you a bit of a preview of the work that lies ahead for us as a school after this evening when we hopefully finalize not just the renaming process and the rebranding process but actually embark on the school culture building process so without further ado please join me in welcoming mr martin osborne thank you felipe and good evening everyone my name is martin osborne and i am a committee community representative of idb wells barnett high school renaming committee at the very beginning of the high school renaming process our committee established a set of principles to guide both how we operated as a committee and the process by which we were to select the name to that end we've been striving to work to sen to ensure we center the voices and the perspectives of historically marginalized communities creating an environment of equity inclusion we wanted to operate in a manner that provides open communication transparency and this meant maintaining a high level of honesty to ourselves and the community as well as integrity and the fortitude to stick to the process even when it became uncomfortable we are holding ourselves accountable to the community to provide a variety of opportunities for community stakeholders to participate and most importantly ensure that in spite of all the various stakeholders we center the voices of the students and let them volunteer lead co-lead discuss and honor their input throughout the process and just as a side note um our student leaders did have been doing an incredible job as committee members and our success and great measure has been through their energy perspective creativity willingness to question everything in winston um as always we had looked at the renaming process as fitting in with the portland public schools administrative directive for school name changing so we needed to make sure that um the tenants in our guidelines um were they were incorporated in both our guiding principles and our guidelines next slide please uh i i like superintendent guerrero's um uh introduction thank you very much because you covered a lot of the things that this part of the presentation is just going to touch on i don't think i have to repeat much of what you said as noted in your um attachments on this discussion the resolution 6293 gives a lot of detail as well as um principal haristic's april 23rd letter and i invite you to read that for more details so i'm just going to touch on some of the highlights of how we came about and made a change because it's it's a very important lesson i think for all of us and it reflects on the process and integrity of what we've been trying to do all along um we obviously had gone through the process with the community to come up with five finalists we went back to the community with a force-ranked voting process we came up with evergreens we submitted it it created some discussion and i want to thank director de pass with the support of director brim edwards and director scott to just start a discussion about what the potential ramifications of having the evergreens as a musket mascot for the school that prompted a very important discussion for us immediately after we had our meeting if we go to the next slide please we we decided that we would um immediately discuss even though the evergreens was um had a lot to a lot to offer uh we decided that we would um discuss immediately after the meeting what the ramifications of of the discussion in in the board meeting entailed and what that meant to us uh it was a courageous discussion it was uncomfortable but i will say that our student leaders
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and adult leaders on the team we stayed with the guidelines the principles we're looking at social equity we're looking at it's not enough to have good intentions we have to measure our impact in our choices and decisions and even if our initial decision might be readily transparent accessible and obvious to many members of the community if there were issues that this brought up that we needed to address for other members of the community we need to take that on we use our guiding principles and the process that we set out to continue and they continue to serve us well in deciding a course of action honesty integrity transparency accountability including typically unheard or marginalized voices and for our student leaders their voices were heard as well we discussed and continue to learn and understand how the depths of certain symbols no matter how ubiquitous they are to our region which is one reason we chose the evergreens seemingly innocent a stand of trees and innocuous evergreens can have potential for both trauma for people who associate that with other unfortunate symbols that our country has developed over the years and the opportunity for other members of our community to potentially take that symbol in a negative way as well it's truly a lesson a great example of how we must continue to unpack the deep legacy of our country's history to better heal and bring equity to the present and into the future so we were also thinking about the long term we wanted to make sure that future students that would matriculate to idb wells barnett school the staff that would work there the community in which the school resides would always have the opportunity to be in an environment that's inclusive and would aspire to the um the tenants and values of our namesake so we decided that evening even after um even afterwards when our principal contacted a descendant of the family who had no problem with the evergreens we decided that evening that we could not do something that might potentially harm other students we changed we decided we would go in a new direction we would fall back on our process we would fall back on our first ranking system we had in place we would take out the evergreens and we would look again to see which would be the next chosen mascot of our school and from there we would continue to vet it with greater sensitivity to the under current or undisclosed potential issues that that mascot might bring up and luckily because we had a robust system because we had courageous students and we had adults who were willing to to make the change even though it really messed up the time frame for ordering uniforms put us in a bad place with some members of the community who are wondering why we're changing it was the right thing to do and i'd like to say that um for us um we feel really good about the process we feel good about how we handled the information that we received and how we addressed it and how we processed it and how we used it to do the good work that our committee set out to do and with that we made a change to the guardians and now i'd like to turn it over to the next member our committee to continue the discussion thank you thank you martin so uh esteem board members um next you will hear a little bit about how the guardians aligns with our school values and why we think uh this is uh a wonderful way to honor our namesake we'll tell you a little bit more about the extended community engagement that martin alluded to and then we'll give you a little bit of a preview of what guardians mascot how it will be represented so without further ado joining us from sweden one of our esteemed alums narina mcleave believe we can't hear you may need to turn on the original sound for the video let's see [Music] those who are smarter in zoo may know
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there's there's an easy trick to this but i don't actually know what it is if you go down to the shade button at the bottom hello everyone so i'd like to just talk a little bit about why guardians became a finalist for ib wells high school and i think we realized quite quickly um after we arrived at guardians that guardians really aligned with what we were trying to promote what we are trying to promote and especially with who id b wells was this was a woman who devoted her life to promoting and protecting justice truth and human dignity she gave voice to those who were silenced and she defended those that were mistreated she used the power of writing and public speaking to shed light on the ugly truth of racism and at the end of the day she was a true guardian of democracy and social justice and as as ida b wells high school guardians we will work to promote her legacy and to foster her lasting message of determination valor tolerance among students families and staff and guardians will be a facet of that and to put a little more of a concrete definition on guardians um this is someone who protects a person who takes care of one another and it might look like a custodian a steward a caretaker a champion a defender um at the end of the day the guardians is truly a mascot that represents all the ideals we're looking for thank you oops let's go to the next slide uh norma do you want to tell us a little bit about some of these visual representations uh good evening my name is norma hamilton i'm going to talk to you about your um about the visual elements of our mascot this is not the fact not product but the work in progress of our mascot this designs have been based on the surveys comments that the students and the staff made during the mascot selection process as you can see and the first design we have the guardian peaks forming the top of the crest the guardian peaks are the three volcanic mountains that are visible from portland oregon why east mount hood plateau mount adams on luige mount san helens in the middle of the crest we can see an owl owls are native of our region and in some cultures owls are known as guardians and protectors they symbolize wisdom truth and strength the owl within his wings open is a symbol of being ready to protect or defend the weak with the owl we symbolize ida b wells protecting the people that were they were mistreated in the last visual we can observe an owl with his wings close and within his wings we can see the guardian peaks the visual is to try to represent how the owl is protecting the community i will diverse community the one in the middle is just as you can see it's just the peaks the guardian peaks with the name of our beloved high school as i said in the beginning the visual elements are not finalized there are work in progress um the owls are not complete you may be think that are a little bit harsh or they look maybe that are angry but i don't want you to um think of that because there are not there is not the final product just think about what they symbolize for us as in our community thank you norma good evening superintendent guerrero and school board members i'm aisha conning proud vice principal of ida b wells barnett high school we wanted to do our due diligence and receive some additional feedback on our mascot and center our student voices so during the week of april 12th we held five student focus groups our student focus groups were our student athletes our student performing artists our
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student leadership our black student union and our asian desi pacific islander student unit student union we had a conversation with them and asked them to take a look at the draft mascot renditions that norma just shared with you and we asked them to think about what do they connect and disconnect with in regards to the new mascot proposal we heard from ours what we heard from our students really is also informing the design and what the design will ultimately look like we see received tremendous feedback from them and you'll hear some of the quotes from our student focus groups from john l who is a junior at ida b wells barnett high school and also has been a highly engaged member of our renaming committee so i'm going to turn things over to john l hello and good evening everyone my name is john l mondero and today i will be reading some of the quotes stated by some of the student focus groups it seems to represent the values of a bigger group a guardian is a part of the common people not in charge therefore they echo the thoughts and wishes of the people ida b wells was a journalist so she was a guardian of the truth and justice with this message she's like a superhero to us and we want our school and community to be protective of truth and justice as well we want our mascot to be a reflection of us and i to be wells i like the connection to the guardian peaks i think the local connection is really powerful when i heard guardians i think about someone that protects people and someone that does the right things somebody that puts others above themselves all stated um i will students thank you thank you janelle so finally just a little bit about the work that lies ahead for us because after all from the very beginning of this process our committee was clear that changing the name of our school and mascot was just the first two steps of a much more substantive school culture building process even though we're just getting started great things are already happening next week for example dan duster ida b wells's great grandson will meet with both our staff and will participate in a separate community-wide event we would love all of you and anybody else who's watching to join us our local ptas are already supporting this effort and are making sure that our parents and as well as our students have access to books about our namesake through local libraries we're working with a local artist whose name will remain undis uh closed until the mural is completed uh he's working on a 24 foot mural that will be displayed in our main hallway in honor of our namesake our ninth grade teams will be meeting soon to talk about how ida be the queen can become a core text in our ninth grade curriculum one of our students recently designed a t-shirt that is now on sale in our school the motto included on the shirt lifting as we climb reflects both our school-wide commitment to caring for one another as guardians and it honors one of the first national women's associations that ida b wells helped start i could go on and tell you about the social studies teachers who just created a podcast that explores the connection between iwls and and woodrow wilson i can tell you about our journalism class and the new magazine that we will be launching soon and more the point is we are just getting started and really look forward to the work that lies ahead that our new namesake and our mascot are inspiring in all of us so thank you again for the opportunity and we welcome any questions or comments um i have a comment um first of all thank you everyone um i want to thank the students um alums staff community members and uh principal chris kriestich stitch for your willingness to have the difficult conversations while you excuse me examine the impact on the use of the evergreens as a mascot at ida b wells and i'm going to shout out and thank all of us who envisioned a different outcome one that would allow us to live into our values to be a learning moment contribute positively to the culture of ida b wells now and into the future
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our this process and our process is a beautiful example of community engagement and of using information as it is received to create a different outcome one that we didn't know when we started and i want to specifically thank my colleagues who were courageous enough to speak up on march 30th even though the discomfort of talking about even through this discomfort of talking about race talking about lynching and about historical harms against black people you demonstrated what allies ship looks like and and i also want to encourage my white colleagues who did not speak up in the moment to speak up next time to display your courage and um and and do that because we know that silence equals violence and it's also um really up to our it's up to white people to speak up in the moment um when you when you hear something um and and and know that the discomfort is where we're doing the learning especially around race um so it's absolutely up to white people to interrupt racism as it happens and historic and recognize the historic injustices for all people um and for all americans and those especially who are black and indigenous as we acknowledge this painful history of the country and i want us all to do better and lastly i just want to share i love the mascot the guardians um i think it's great i love the owls and i'm really proud in moments like this to be part of the district so i'd like to join director to pass and thanking the community and especially the naming committee and camille the district staff who's working with the naming committee um you know one of the things we operate under is like no surprises a rule of no surprises because as colleagues who are working together on really tough issues um that's sort of the the best way to work with each other and i'm sure what happened on the last board meeting wasn't was this new surprise but it was coming in in real time and i really appreciate um that um let me say i want to just join director pass really proud of the district that uh we demonstrated we're a learning community that we can listen to different voices um just the intricate integrity with which you did your work and re-examined like new information and concerns that were brought up um you know i just want to thank the the committee because i know um that um there were a lot of different voices some very hateful from around the country about the decision to to even go back and look at the name but then others who made judgments about the intentions of the committee on the recommendations in the first in the first place and so i just want to honor and thank the individuals who had the courage and the integrity to go back and i actually um i like the name guardian i think the name it's it's perfect um and it's uh it was an interesting process um and painful in some ways to get here but i i think it is the perfect it's i think we talked last time about these are like hundred year potentially hundred year decisions and i think it's the perfect name and um i'm really excited and i love the the initial look at the branding so um thanks to everybody thank you director edwards director scott i saw that you had your hand up thank you yeah just just adding to those two voices thank you director members and to pass um i i'm also really excited to support this i think guardians is great i love um i love the imagery i love the um the mountain imagery as well and and the guardian peaks um and and i think you know just just just sort of acknowledging that that um connection to our local community is really exciting and then the connection to the iw wells um so i think it's great and and and i'm excited um you know as a wilson graduate and with kids who will graduate from italy wells um really excited for this change i want to sort of second you know what what my colleagues have said about also being really proud of the district in this process and you know the the courage to sort of step back and take another look um that's not easy to do and you know um you know and and this committee really did such a phenomenal job of really listening to that to those voices that raised issues and concerns and going back and i was really honored to be invited to just listen to some of the conversation with our our black community leaders and and just listening to you know um all those voices that you know were really focused on getting this right um was was was really great and and being able to sort of put aside i don't i limit my time on social media um and sometimes that makes me feel like i miss out but sometimes it's a real advantage and this is one of those moments you know that i i know this went national and international and other
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places and i know there were sort of hateful things um and in some ways it doesn't matter because what we did as a community is is what matters and what's important and and the voices of of the selection committee and the high school and and the um the folks we engaged with you know out in the broader community are are what matter to us and this is the right decision and i also want to say i was so surprised and excited to get my copy in the mail of the iwells the queen um book i was just i had no idea and uh the ptas of the peter schools sort of got together to send these out so it was just super exciting to have it show up and and now be you know here for for my family to sort of to sort of browse through and read so just really appreciate everyone's work and excited about yesterday all right well this um portion was for us to ask questions of the committee and it doesn't sound like we have any questions we're actually going to go ahead and have some board discussion in a minute director bailey did you have a question of the committee yes uh could you send us the date of the event um in may i tried to get on my calendar on my phone this slide went by a little too quickly so uh we'll send it out it's may 6th it's next thursday from from 6 to 7. great thanks and then while my mic is on i just want to give a big shout out to camille who has been absolutely uh instrumental in this process uh and uh hasn't said much uh in these meetings but her guidance and support has has been uh invaluable so camille thank you so much this is what more i saw that you would may yeah i just wanted to thank the board as well for giving us the extension um i know we had been originally scheduled to come back to you on the 13th and the extra two weeks really gave us the time to do that further community engagement and to listen to more that people had to say and to really have those conversations and lean into the work so i just appreciate the extension thank you thank you for your consideration and your support thank you so much um and mr osborne i really appreciated your portion of the presentation um just how clear and thorough that was so thank you any other questions for the committee before we formally move this and then have our uh procedural parts thank you again all do i have a motion and a second to adopt resolution 6293 resolution to change the mascot of iw wells burnett high school so moved seconded second thank you michelle director from edwards moves and director to pass seconds the adoption of resolution 6293 is there any further board discussion dear lowry i just uh wanted to thank um especially mr osborne and the rest of the committee and all the student leaders because this process is a great reflection of our a lot of what we have in our vision for the district and especially for our students so to be reflective critical thinkers to be adaptable so i know it was quite a process that led to the first recommendation and for all of you to be so thoughtful and gracious and reflective in starting the process anew and interrogating some of the um assumptions or impressions created by um you know the first proposal of the evergreens is just it's exactly the kind of process that we want to model for our students and it's a little messy and it's a little time consuming sometimes um but i think tonight is a good testament that it can it can end up with uh much better results when you take the time to do that and to do that in community so thanks to all of you for your service and really excited and and happy to support this and i just want to echo miss hamilton i so appreciated um what you said and i'm so thankful for students that are on tonight and students participating from sweden and just the investment from this community in this work and in helping us really get excited and understand this amazing new mascot any other board discussion ms bradshaw is there any public comment no all right the board will now vote on resolution 6293 resolution to change the mascot of ida b wells barnett high school all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 6293 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes all right go guardians yay thank you all so much
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thank you um we now turn to some other exciting business um as we talk about our school calendar um at our last board meeting we had reviewed the proposed 20 20 21 22 school calendar and had an opportunity to ask questions um via email to deputy superintendent craig cuellar superintendent guerrero is there anything else you would like to add before we vote on the calendar before us well i'm glad the directors have had a couple weeks to to review it hopefully you've noticed some of the features that this administration has tried to be consistent about uh trying to keep a student focused family friendly school calendar try to ensure five full instructional days in a typical week wherever possible try to keep uh uninterrupted whole weeks for for instruction uh make sure we build in features like parent teacher conferences um you know account for the the thanksgiving week make sure that our teacher planning days um happen on mondays or fridays so we don't have student breaks in the middle of the week uh so so these are all things that we've been consistent about including uh a start date prior to to labor day uh even for 21 22's proposed calendar uh there's a few additional features we've added in uh additional professional development day being proposed for teachers at csi title one and kellogg feeder schools and two days of extra pd time for new kellogg middle school faculty so that they have the additional time to to come together in addition you know a four-day kindergarten ramp-up window where students would come in in small groups for a day also gives an opportunity for folks to work around some of the religious holidays at that time and also a chance to to complete some some one-on-one assessments which are going to be really important as we open up in the fall to see where our youngest students are and to help provide some of that orientation and connection as they come on campus for the first time we're going to do we're proposing to do the same thing for first grade for for two days so we have half classes in also to orient them and also because some of them are coming in for the first time without that kindergarten experience so you're going to hear these are some of the elements that are that are part of our learning acceleration and recovery uh planning as well but i just wanted to point that out because it is related to the school calendar so uh there you have the proposed calendar and i know that you're considering that to adopt tonight thank you superintendent guerrero do i have a motion and a second to adopt resolution 6294 resolution to approve the 2021 through 22 school district calendar i moved second okay director scott moves and director brim edwards seconds the adoption of resolution 6294 is there any board discussion on the calendar um so this has been an issue that i have always been interested in the last seven or eight years because i will say there has been an evolution to a much more student-focused family-friendly calendar i think this year continues it so i want to thank um i think that the changes that were instituted a number of years ago um continue through and i think families are now adjusting to this this is the the the school calendar that works for us um a question um just i think just in light of this last year um one uh are we still keeping traditional snow days in the calendar or are those days that we just moved to cdl or i'm sorry comprehensive distance learning for the non-acronym people um i know that this has been a topic that continues to keep uh evolving here if i could invite deputy cuellar here who's been engaged in some of those conversations uh i know i know that uh uh we're equipped differently or are experienced differently uh to to keep distance learning continuity going but craig can you answer the question yes director brynn edwards and that's a really good question and and you know i think that as we reflect in the last um 16 months and plus that we have been in a virtual learning format um it has um absolutely equipped us to be more tech savvy and to be able to be you know organizationally centered and managed in in a variety of different ways utilizing some of our tech resources and tools that we've been engaged in specifically even through cdl we do know that there are still a number of considerations that would need to be taken into account if if we were to reimagine what potential inclement weather days look like um you know in some of those
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considerations of course you know we'd have to make sure that we are in in partnership um with our labor partners um because there are you know um a variety of pieces that we would have to make sure that we are um you know that that we are collaborating and we are in agreement on and also ensuring too through our new tech enhanced infrastructure for teaching and learning um you know ensuring 100 that you know you know every single student is afforded a tech device as well as broadband infrastructure to be able to have access um but i will tell you that it's something that you know we are continuing the conversations on um and it is something that i could say that is probably more of a reality today than it was a year ago great thank you and i'm not advocating getting rid of sled time just just to be clear um so my other question um relates to just the expectation that next fall will be back full time in person and um well this looks like a the new traditional calendar i'm wondering if um well first is that that's the assumption it's based on i want to just clarify that and then are there other modifications that you see have that would maybe not be visible to families but maybe have staff impacts of preparing to go back like shift from hybrid to full time in person um i i think you know it's really about you know um ensuring that we are following you know all of the guidance from our local health authority um multnomah county cdc making sure that you know our health metrics do allow us for a full pivot back to a full in-person structure i i i can't say that i foresee anything what i can say is is i do think that we are positioned more so now um to be able to shift into a distance learning environment or format if things were to arise in the need to do so um but i i i think right now director bran red words um i don't i don't foresee anything that would have any type of staff or student impact especially regarding the the new of the new proposed calendar i i think what we all want to see is greater extended learning opportunities and so you're going to get a you know a first sort of description of what that we're proposing that looks like this summer they'll continue to be opportunities throughout the course of the school year one of the things that we're asking the board to consider in our budget proposal are things like saturday school uh and then also what does the fifth quarter look like for the summer a year from now so if you take into account all of that additional instructional time that we're trying to sort of build back and add uh to make up for that time and of course those aren't compulsory for for our labor partners but certainly additional opportunities for our students and our staff to participate along with our community partners well the superintendent was speaking to learning acceleration i i was not speaking to that the director brendan edwards because i know that that we are close to that presentation but the superintendent did hit on you know we are going to have a myriad of opportunities you know for staff partners community students specifically to engage um you know in a myriad of of you know learning acceleration you know such as extended learning and um you know project-based learning opportunities interventions you know tutorials there's going to be a a menu of a variety of access points for for for students um throughout the course of the year and we're going to we're going to get a first glance of what summer programming is going to look like in a little bit and we also hope to re-engage the board throughout the course of the summer in terms of what fall learning acceleration is going to look like as the superintendent alluded um i thank you for that i have just another note about the weather and if you're not from portland one inch and everything shuts down and it's not for school it's for sledding um and snowball fights but we also might consider you know the impacts of wildfires because we've had a very dry year the it seems like uh the trend is that fires are starting earlier and as we noticed last year we had this you know horrendous air quality so you know our weather our weather events might not just happen in the winter time they might we might need to be prepared to keep people indoors um during the late summer and into the fall i think what you're hearing is if uh anticipating that there are many circumstances uh that don't make it preferable to have our students on campus in those cases is you know if we get our kindergartners equipped and assure that every other student is similarly equipped and you know we've worked things out with all of our labor groups as well as our teachers for days like those you know it could be a late start so maybe you get your sledding and your lesson in but i think those are still conversations that we need to work out
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other board discussion just one more item i want to say appreciation of the flexibility of the kindergarten ramp up september 7th and 8th is rosh hashanah and i know mr cogan spoke with the jewish federation many families celebrate the first day only some celebrate both days uh so we may have some parents um have their kindergartners at home that first day of kindergarten um to observe that holiday appreciate the shout out i also want to add a thank you once again to daniel cogan for wrestling with all the requirements and desires that we ask him to build into this puzzle and checking in with all of our stakeholders and coming up with the model that that we're we appreciate thank you daniel all right um ms bracha is there any public comment on the calendar no all right any other board discussion looks like we're good all right the board will now vote on resolution 6294 resolution to approve the through 2021-22 school district calendar all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any extensions resolution 6294 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes all right thank you all so much um i think it is time for us to take another quick five minute break so we will be back in uh five minutes we started welcoming students at 7 45 that moment was a frenzy of a lot of emotions we had a lot of parents drop off their students we had some students ride the bus arrival i think went really well today was exciting as families and students arrived to see them to talk to them families would walk their students to the line and then students would take their place on the dots and families were then able to wait up above the lines and watch their students as they were greeted by their teacher and then waved to their students as their lines went into the building we had quite a few visitors in the building including our superintendent guadalupe guerpero as well as governor kate brown it was great to have community leaders in our building families can see that our leaders are listening kids learn best when they're here in the school in the classroom i'm so excited to see the kids back everybody is happy teacher the principal by principal and mitchell [Music] students seemed very happy in class so we were singing dancing everybody had masks on everyone was following the safety protocols we definitely had some fun on recess might have included some very bad hula hoop competitions it was nice to see just their smile virtually all students were extremely excited you could tell they were nervous but they finally got to see their teacher in person they finally got to see other students from their class working on a coloring sheet working on solving math equations one classroom had students make crowns that they would put on their head and it was just a great way to see kids in action [Music] having kids in the building you have to show students how to walk in the hallway to get to recess or come back from recess and we're realizing that some of those transitions are taking a little bit longer than expected well these are unprecedented times so i think it's hard to say if it went exactly as expected because in the pandemic i feel like it's hard to ever know what to expect but i do think things went really well and overall it was a really great day and kids seemed really excited to be here and excited to come back again tomorrow all in all a great moment a great way to see everybody in one place and i think people were longing for that a feeling of connection that school provides this is the opportunity to be something that can meet the needs of every single student and ensure that all of our students have all the opportunities that they deserve
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and really prepare them for the jobs of the future as we return i just wanted to share that um as many of us know superintendent guerrero was awarded with the oregon music educators association award of excellence for administrators that award actually happened in january but their latest uh magazine newsletter has come out uh celebrating him as an administrator who supports and has a passion for music education so just wanted to once again congratulate superintendent guerrero on the receipt of the ome a award tonight well thank you chair that was unexpected thank you you're welcome well i think we have to celebrate um the amazing work and we all know that i have a heart for my arching band and for all music so of course couldn't let that go unanswered and it's been a while since i've been able to mention marching band at a board meeting so this was a great opportunity for me to do so well you're in the right place here at pps where we're building our arts pathways so we can't wait to give you an update on that that's what i want to say superintendent that your passion and commitment to arts education is uh you have left your mark already on this district and we're grateful for that i'm waiting for the introduction of uh heavy metal into our high school curriculum but uh what what's happening has been great yes those of you who don't know superintendent might have a passion for heavy metal and uh history there uh with that and heavy metal might have been an elective at mlc in the 70s maybe maybe not what i'm waiting for is the superintendent to designate people's walk-on songs before they present to the board yes now we are trying to encourage the superintendent to branch out into some different types of musical and arts um i've been trying to encourage him to do a tick-tock dance but so far he has been hesitant to do so but perhaps um with enough board support we can make that happen maybe principal mccarter can give me some tips there you guys are doing wonder wonders for my sense of self image here um i'd be glad glad to give some dance tips well superintendent i think you would like us to change the subject so uh would you like to do that would you like to introduce the next agenda item which is the measure of academic progress through map i would like to and i appreciate a lot of the board's continued conversations especially in our recent discussion around our interest and really knowing how our students are doing so we did move forward with administration of the mid-year map assessment otherwise known as the nwa measures of academic progress we've started to share those uh results with our parents we know we want to do a lot of future work and really sort of
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understanding those and how they fit in with a broader balanced assessment system but we did commit to coming back to the board once we had all that information and done a little analysis and disaggregation and so under chief russ brown dr brown's uh leadership and his team i know he prepared quite the analysis for you for the listening audience if if you want to dig in uh knock yourself out there there's many pages uh that'll that'll help sort of articulate how our students are doing but uh here to say more uh russ brown and and i have to say um i even though i'm the data guy i would welcome some walk-in music uh we can talk about selections later does that mean you're also interested in perhaps doing a tick-tock to dance i could dance my way in but no tick tocks thank you i'm just keeping it lively here i uh as the the powerpoint's coming up here yeah thank you i'm going to go through this relatively quickly because we're running a little late and we've got some media topics that need to be discussed later as the superintendent mentioned we performed a mid-year map assessment this year next slide please and today i want to go through and and talk you know sort of broadly you know you know what is the map that says when is it typically given when was it given this year and why you know why we bothered to to do this assessment and then i want to spend some time talking about what we learned um in terms of who was tested the reliability of the the data that we receive what it tells us about achievement and what it tells us about growth as well next slide please so you know the the superintendent mentioned a balanced assessment system and and you know the wine share of a balanced assessment system is really formative assessment practices that happen minute to minute in a classroom uh those help guide instruction on a daily basis and then we talk about like unit assessments which follow larger chunks of instruction and then we have interim assessments and purpose of the interim assessment really is to to measure standards and content over larger windows of time so it reflects multiple standards and helps us understand how students are doing uh throughout the course of the year and by their very nature they have to be very reliable and they need to be very predictive of performance on other assessments that they get their validity and the reliability by a the accuracy of the measurement and what they can tell us about how students will perform on other other assessments later the map assessment is unique in that it's computer adaptive and it's computer adaptive and such in a sense that it will personalize itself to an individual student it will go up or down based on what the student has learned and what they're proficient in and will actually adjust across multiple grade levels if need be these are typically this type of is typically given two or three times a year typically at the start of a year as a baseline and at least at mid-year as well and depending on what you have it as the end of your assessment you might use it as well next slide so when we talk about why you know we've spent a lot of time talking about our theory of action and the importance of accelerating learning for our black and indigenous students we want to really close those opportunity gaps for students so that every student as they're going into high school they have that opportunity to take advantage of those curriculum pathways that we're talking about in high school for obtaining some form of post-secondary readiness well that work doesn't start in high school the foundation for that's laid much earlier and so you can't wait until high school to start closing those opportunity gaps you have to ensure that everybody comes into high school with a set of skills that will allow them to take full full opportunity of high school map as a measure provides a very reliable measure of growth and that you know start learning over time and achievement with respect to standards at a point in time along a curriculum map and so that helps us know you know it's sort of like going to the doctor and having your child stand up against the gross chart where are you now and and where are you as you move along over time and you know as i mentioned it's very reliable so again as standing up against a a wall measuring stick you know those measurements tend to be pretty reliable if they're done in a standardized way over time and they tell you something about future growth well in the case of the map assessment it tells us a great deal about how students will do on spac they'll also tell us a great deal about how students will do on the psat and the sat or act for students in upper grades next slide so again as i mentioned um last year we we did an analysis and we showed that uh the correlations between uh the the map assessment and s back were very high they they ranged in the mid point eights
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to the midpoint nines and that allows us to predict whether or not somebody's going to be provisioned on on the state standardized assessment at a 85 to 87 percent accuracy level the you know these assessments have not only a high degree of reliability but predictive validity they tell us something about something we're interested in at the end of the year and it allows us to to make comparisons across the country so let's us know how our students are doing in terms of comparisons in terms of achievement and growth relative to their age related peers across the country and probably the most important thing is you know as teachers use this as a way to encourage self-reflective practices and understand where things are working where they aren't teacher teams are doing that it really can help us identify where we're accelerating learning so that we can build upon those practices as we move forward next slide please so this year this was our our first system-wide uh assessment in the pandemic uh we had tried to do one in the fall but the wildfires were just it was a little bit too much at that point time we chose to pause it the testing window this year was between february 1st to march 12th and it was a voluntary assessment we wanted to provide our parents an opportunity to have a quick checkup on their students and we really worked to minimize the footprint on instructional time and to to again allow parents to have choice in this process and it was a remote assessment we had some comfort in in having a remote assessment done because we had we had piloted one last spring with one of our buildings and there was evidence uh from nwa uh from partner districts across the country that the remote assessments could be equally reliable to in-person assessments and so we felt comfortable that this was a good use of our student time and a good piece of information for our parents to be able to have next slide please so what do we learn next next slide please yeah well let's start with who was tested so this year we saw about 69 percent of our students participate in math it's down about 24 from last year and we saw about 68 of our students participate in reading that was actually an uptick in reading participation this year so about three percent more students participate in reading this year than last year it's worth noting on the front end the participation rates were were um higher for white students than they were for black or indigenous students so that that puts a pause in in the data and then makes you wonder well how else did the students maybe differ in terms of the data next slide so when we look at the students who took the assessment versus the ones who didn't and we looked at how they did last year on map we see that the kids who who tested this year performed better on the map assessment last year than those kids who chose not to participate this year so our our pool of kids who were participating this year were our higher flyers uh compared to last year we have some students last year who would really like to have more information that didn't participate this year so the sample is not completely representative of our population we had to think about that as we move forward and looked at the data next slide so you know a question would be you know again reliability here's a remote administration what does it tell us about our students well for those students who took the test both years the scores were highly correlated to one another so students who took the test last winter tended to score very similar excuse pardon me let me restate that students who had similar scores last december tended to have similar scores this this year in the winter assessment and and when we look across the our our our tested grades and subjects those correlations range between 0.817 and 0.881 so if you look at this scatter scatter plot here every one of those points reflects a student's score i actually score a pair what how they the last year and how they did this year and you can see those scores are pretty tightly clustered along a line there and this is a correlation of 0.876 so when you have high correlations between two tests like this it shows that they're highly related and the only way that can happen is if they're both reliable the reliability of the measure ultimately caps how well this correlation can be and i i would liken it to we talked about dancing a moment ago but you know some of us might get on a scale from time to time and when we get on a scale if the scale is consistent you get you know reliable it's consistent you get on the scale it says the same thing no matter how many times you get on it at my scale i try it several times sometimes to try to get a different number it doesn't really work that way on the other hand if a scale isn't reliable you get very different numbers
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each time and if i go get on another scale that is reliable even if i try to correlate those numbers if one scale's wonky and i try to put it with another one it ultimately caps the the correlation between the two here the scores are highly correlated because both both measures are reliable they tell us something consistently about student performance over time next slide please so what do we know coming into this well prior research from nwa and other tools similar to this had projected reduced achievement both in reading and math and some of that came out last year and and sort of created this uh dialogue around how much learning was occurring or not occurring for students and then the fall when when folks started looking at actually what had happened last year uh folks saw that reading gains were actually stronger than those in math and a lot of the concerns that folks had seen or or had about reading just didn't materialize so when we looked at this data given that that there was missing data and given that the scores are so highly related that allows us then to use information from last year to fill in some of the blanks because we know how like scoring peers did this year and so we used uh data from last year for non-tested students to be able to or students who didn't test years here we use their data from last year as a way to estimate how they would perform this year so what do we observe overall next slide please so in mathematics we saw a 1.7 to 2.9 point drop depending on the grade level so we did see drops in math and that was after accounting for again the students who didn't test last year so in fourth grade where there was a 1.7 point drop that meant the fourth graders accomplished about 83 percent of the warning that we anticipated last year on the other hand in sixth grade um where we saw a 2.9 point drop students only accomplished about 40 percent of the the learning and math that we had expected from the year before so there were word clearly as students were making that progression through mathematics last year they didn't make it as far as we would have liked that being said that sort of mirrors what we've seen around the country as well and maybe isn't so so much of a surprise and in fact these numbers are a little better than what were observed around the country next slide please so uh obviously if students didn't make the achievement that we expected they didn't make the growth either so roughly three and a half percent uh fewer students made the growth that was expected they didn't hit their growth targets and the largest drops in growth were with our asian multi-racial and white students on the other hand you know while the achievement gaps continue to exist for our black and indigenous students we didn't see them widening and we didn't see a substantial difference in growth rates for our black and indigenous students if we go on next to the next slide and start looking at reading the reading achievement was actually much more stable uh we had one grade where we lost about six tenths of a point and on the other hand uh in most grades we saw a little bit of a bump up so in fourth grade again we had a little bit of a uh a downward trend in achievement but again if we look at that it means that students in fourth grade achieved about 93 percent of of their learning that we anticipated this past year grades six through eight actually showed improvements and that was even taking into account and suppressing the scores using the information for the again that group of kids who tested last year who performed a little bit more poorly than those kids who tested this year when we functioned that in still in sixth and eighth grade our students did very well they showed improvements and across grades three through eight our students in reading actually outperformed the national average on achievement next slide so when we talk about growth uh for reading we did have about one and a half percent of our students um who failed to to meet the growth targets this year relative to to last but we did see modest increase in the growth for many students again uh the achievement gaps for black and native students are still there but they did not grow and and that that i think runs counters to some of the expectations this performance was clearly better than what we had anticipated but again in alignment with what we've seen uh nationally that reading reading scores tended to be a little bit more stable than math next slide please so in the big picture on this uh this is meant to be a snapshot of performance it was really meant to to give our parents an opportunity to find out something about
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how our students were doing it was our first systemic look at student performance throughout the pandemic and frankly the the results are are cautiously optimistic that that you know while students didn't make the gains that we would like to see in mathematics they made gains that were better than maybe anticipated and the and certainly the the changes that we saw in reading were very very promising so as we move into this next year um you know it's going to be really important to get a solid assessment of students i think we heard the the superintendent mentioned that at the start of the year we really need to get a solid assessment of our students uh as they're coming in the door so we have a sense of a solid baseline for everyone so that we can plan for learning acceleration as we move forward in the coming year and one of the nice things about having a reliable and consistent assessment through this window is it does give us the opportunity to sort of understand students learning before the pandemic during the pandemic and afterwards using the same ruler all the way through and that is really a nice place to be for a system to be able to have a constant measure that we can look at over that window of time next slide please i think we're around to questions at this point i tried to go through that quickly uh i do really look forward to the introduction introductory dance music try and find a song for you dr brown um just it's a really it's i think it's a really simple question but when you say in reading you know we saw some growth can you just remind me is that is that growth from last year to this year or is it growth in terms of what we expected them to do and they exceeded that growth we actually saw improvements in achievement so in several of the grades we actually saw improvements in achievement from last year to this year so students actually performed a little bit better this year on the test than they did last year and again across uh grade levels in reading our kids were exceeding national averages on this assessment i i may not be asking the question right we would expect um someone the next year to score better right like that would there's a normal growth that we expect when you say they increase their achievement is it is it they beat their growth expectation or they just performed better than they did last year so or am i or am i asking the wrong question yeah well let me um answer it in a couple different ways one uh when we talk about changes in achievement we're talking uh relative to the the achievement expectations at a grade level so yes of course you know if i started in grade five last year i'm i you know the average score grade 5 say 2 15 when i'm thinking about mathematics if i go to grade 6 the average score around the country is 220. so in reading not only did our kids make that move they actually instead of going to 220 they went up a little bit so so they're relative to their grade level standard we saw a cohort to cohort improvement in performance in reading and that's even taking into account that i suppress the scores for the kids who didn't um participate this year so when i included them it it brought those averages down uh because they they perform more poorly last year so many students actually demonstrate a little bit more growth than was what was expected and again the achievement rates actually increased may i ask about that um so i'm losing my question um it's late yeah it is of the people that took the test that showed greater a little bit greater uh than anticipated growth i'm sorry i've lost the question i'll have to come back to it it was a good one i'm sure it was maybe i could jump in thinking about your question if michelle if you don't mind it it just came back i'm sorry it's a function of age um so we know that not everybody took the test and so it's somewhat of a um a select group have we were we have we gained any knowledge about why those games were made is there anything that we can we can take from this extraordinary uh learning year that might help us in the future i mean that's that's getting down into like maybe a different type of assessment but is there anything that that you could see in the data that would um
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show us maybe best practices or you know what what worked for these kids that that we might be able to apply in the future yeah one of the great things about data and having data like this is it raises questions it always raises more questions than it does uh provide answers so when i look at the rate reading data again it's it's promising here kids who took the test both years actually did better this year than would have been expected and even when i include what i think the effect would have been on the average for the the overall by pushing scores down based on how kids did last year who didn't test this year our averages are still higher than the national average so it is really quite promising that brings up a lot of whys in the house how did that happen why did that happen it's somewhat counterintuitive that so so that's why i say it's i'm cautiously optimistic about this data i'm very interested in seeing what what data will look like when students are back in chairs and we're in a standardized environment and we can assess everyone at the same time that's going to be really important do i have some running hypotheses around this i think kids had to read a lot more this year independently and reading is is an iterative activity and you improve it by doing more of it and and kids were in an independent space where they were required to read a lot um and so yeah that's one of my running hypotheses another one is that you know in talking with colleagues who are much closer to schools on a daily basis you know i hear that you know we saw a lot of intentional differentiation well that that would produce this type of result too because you know again we're customizing uh or personalizing education to meet the needs of individual students we will spend years trying to to best understand what worked and what didn't and what we can carry forward out of this well thank you and it's that differentiation that i was wondering that would be my hypothesis as well um what impact that had on i i know teachers that did small breakout rooms regularly and i was just wondering if that if you were seeing the impact of that that small group instruction in the day in the data i i know i've got team members who are very interested in digging in and finding finding out some of the whys behind this and some of the qualitative data about teacher and student experiences in this you know i would be remiss and i i i think it was one of the talking points but i really should mention i think this is a testament to how hard our teachers work this year it's shown up in a bunch of different ways and we've talked about relationships and this is another way that that shows up and and again i i just i'm thankful to our teachers i'm thankful to to the students who worked so hard during this academic year and their building leaders and again all all the folks who leaned in to try to help our students through what has been i think a very challenging time um so yeah i appreciate your cautious optimism and i want to throw out um i think why i'm i i think i think those are pretty good results and i think it was incredibly useful to do the map when we did it because we need to budget around this and this is clearly saying hey we need to ramp up our math much more than our reading we need both but especially the math piece on the big end and that's incredibly useful knowledge to have the the cautious part of me says your i would guess your regression that you used to make up for the students who didn't take the test assumed that in a sense they were participating as much as anybody else and so would have scored when i'm guessing a lot of those students were really not connected um and i'm guessing that was disproportionately so for um african-american students indigenous students other other students of color and so that's that would make the results a little less positive if that's true and that's again why uh i totally support you know as soon as it's optimal in the fall to get that on the ground measure uh to help us really focus in on the students who need the most support director bailey you you have outed my secret it was
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uh within grade within subject regression and it makes that very assumption that that you you said and again that's part of my cautious optimism here we still have just to be clear seven out of ten kids took the test both ears yeah it's you know it's a substantial overlap here so we're filling you know and by suppressing the scores it was an effort to be as transparent as possible about what we think the effect would be had those other kids taking the test they could however have performed much worse than their peers would like scores that that that is yet to be seen so again very important to understand how students actually and answer your point when it's practical at the start of the year uh to to do that you know getting that baseline is going to be really important dr brown um i want to say thank you for this um deep dive and and your uh responsible narrative that you have built around it because there are a lot of nuances here and of course they're you're you're in the business of being able to make reasonable predictions from data that you're familiar with and we're not in that zone right now there are a lot of variables that we've just never dealt with before and you know when i look at this i think there are probably a lot of puts and takes because we need to remember that this data is only from october right no no no this was this was uh in february to march oh february february so halfway through that's right that's right february um you know and i think i think um you know our teachers it measures you know where what was going on with our students last spring when they immediately went into cdl and when our teachers had to pivot on a dime and our central supports had to pivot on a dime to create remote curriculum um and i think everybody got a whole lot better at that game when we went back to school in the fall but then you know we've still had uh essentially well i guess just three you know three to four more months since this marker was taken and even though many of our students have come back in hybrid um it's still you know at least half cdl um even for those students who've come back so it's just so interesting because i appreciate your cautious optimism and it seems it seems warranted doesn't seem irresponsible but we really don't know where we'll be and we don't know we don't know much about who those kids are who really have been pretty disengaged from their learning um but but what you've given us is some some good information from which we can make you know some assumptions in our budgeting process not not that we can make but that those of you who are in this business can make as you make recommendations to us in terms of where we need to put our investments um so i appreciate it and it is i agree with them i agree with you that it's a real testament to our teachers and also to our families you know to our families not i mean even for the bare fact of of doing the test taking the test overseeing their students including little students at home you know but really to our teachers for just figuring out a way to still make the learning happen any further questions for dr brown um i have a couple questions um and there i appreciate the presentation and i think in some ways for me it um it was not what i expected um so it's always good to get data because going on intuition sometimes uh what you think might happen you don't guess right and you don't then you don't make the right decisions because it's based on fault information uh so i appreciate that i also um am concerned um of just like who who who we have data about and who we don't um and what the implications um what what it implies for our ability to make the right decisions in terms of budgets and support academic and social emotional sports um a question about the um the students who weren't um or the
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grades that weren't looked at in this this is the third to eighth grade set of students correct correct what are we what are we going to have um in terms of the snapshot of high school learning and then the sort of k2 i'm not suggesting a test but what how will we have like comparable data sets of where where we should be starting what programs we should be you know doubling down on so you know as we move into next year again i think it's gonna be really important to get a baseline assessment at the start of the year and um you know we we had set aside that the notion that we'd look at grades two through eight at the start of the year uh with the map assessment so we'd have a common sort of benchmark to start from for that you know i i agree wholeheartedly that the missing folks in this data are are important you know i've tried to guess what that would mean for the system as a whole but that doesn't detract from needing to you know engage with our students and understand their needs individually as we move forward and and for those students who didn't test right now we've got an estimate of how they would do but we really need to know where they are so having an assessment at the start of the year i think is going to be incredibly important in in grades two through eight for high school uh we're often looking at credit recovery where what you know what grades are students earning are they accruing credit in a timely fashion um you know we'll we'll be back hopefully in a regular sat cycle as we move forward thankful to our schools who participated in in the sat today uh we we've had uh two sat days this this year to accommodate those students who wanted to participate in that um you know we'll be back into a regular cadence of looking at post-secondary readiness indicators in the early grades you know there's some back and forth you know kindergarten through second grade right now about um what which tools should be used in those grades uh and that's a discussion still moving forward on that but this idea of fairly quickly um weaving assessment as part of the instructional process to understand those students who are going to need additional supports to move forward is clearly part of our plan moving forward across particularly grades k through 8. and in high school it's really then looking at credit credit uh accrual credit recovery and those post-secondary pathways do we do this a deep dive i know we have we have the data of um you know freshmen who have earned six credits and also the rates of d's and f's of students are we looking at that data we we have looked at uh grades periodically during the course of the year i think we have produced one at least one report for the board about changes in grades for our high school students it's absolutely something that we could look look to as we move forward as well then i guess my last question is for superintendent guerrero this is less data but so we have some data and maybe this will lead into the larger budget discussion um but the summer school programming you know now that we have the data around math are we um are we focusing more on math than reading or is it we're still going to do what we you know the sort of a balance more balanced program or what what is what is the data that got presented tonight tell you about what we should be doing in funding this summer and then leading into this fall yeah there is actually a good flow to the agenda order this evening because given these observations and you're going to hear the team's initial thinking around the range of summer programming we want to offer i know that you're seeing that there's uh a gap there with the mathematics that we want to sort of narrow but we also want to remember that the summer is also about engaging our students and you know offering the enrichments and getting them connected back with being on campus and connecting with adults and so but you're going to hear you know the racial equity lens that we're trying to apply not just in how we're targeted in in summer programming but also in how it shapes our budget proposal we still have our theory of action it's still focused on black and native we think if we're targeted universalists that that improves the educational experience
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for for all of our students but uh and and and i'm starting to lead into the intro i'm going to give you in that agenda item around how we continue to lean into our underserved school communities and and students and how we keep differentiating supports to improve the conditions in those schools and of course as we move into a you know a full balanced assessment system you know a fall winter and spring math assessment is going to be one important indicators and there's going to be a lot of others um you know and so we can look at sort of you know the deficit there if you want to call it that that we want to make up for but also you know there's something that worked uh in these cautiously optimistic outcomes uh around reading and literacy and so we're already asking good questions you know a little bit of conjecture about what that is part of it is sort of just that you know the purposeful planning that that comes with um you know having groups of students that you're seeing every day and the connections that you're building uh and maybe some some real deliberateness there but um you know we we can we can keep going on that thread but uh let's maintain this this question around how do we differentiate our our resources time people money uh to attend to to students who are not yet at the grade level expectation that we know they're capable of uh because that's that's which those are exactly that's exactly the lens that we should be applying uh to the conversation so tonight's going to be that first high overview uh you you have a couple really thick budget books uh if you have time and and you have it or you haven't yet i invite you read that front narrative because it tries to paint the story the narrative uh the journey that we're on and why we're sort of trying to address the immediate while we build uh the overall system's capacity to attend to you know perpetually students who who not only need the supports and and and the acceleration but also a fuller high quality educational program with all the enrichments uh in the school district that we talk about in in our vision so and we're excited you know but a lot of that work is underway i know we've been in a pandemic but we're excited to tell you more about our curriculum adoptions about a master arts program about our middle school redesign i mean i could go down the list because uh staff's been working hard even during the school closure on on many of those plans so uh and there's there's been a lot of good work uh underway so we're gonna start to really talk more about those as you raise these questions so uh i'll pause there because i know we're gonna talk some more about this in the budget discussion as well and then the summer learning one next yeah sorry from jenna guerrero this seems like a great moment to kind of move on to some of that summer learning that we're talking about and how we begin to think about those students we either didn't get testing from or those places where we um would like to see continued growth are there any further questions about maps before we move on to our summer learning update no i would just like to get the high school data again at some point when it's available dr brown thank you okay awesome all right superintendent guerra would you like to introduce um summer learning i i would um so many good topics this evening and i just for the record not to point out the time 9 30 but more to say uh the council that uh we're getting tonight from mary kane uh she hasn't had to uh call us out or throw a flag or anything yet so uh are you inviting us to misbehave so that she can work is that what you're asking superintendent i'm just complimenting directors on being you know really on task and uh asking good insightful questions there's a full loan out maybe we can make a motion and not vote on it or something um all right well i i'm excited to uh have the team uh a whole cross-section of staff that uh is is really excited about uh doing something really robust and different and uh you know one one little my antennas went up when we talk about and i hate to think of it this way from a deficit orientation sort of learning loss or where there's a gap uh because i don't want people to immediately equate that with like oh we need remediation like that should be the first thing you know and instead sort of reframe that a bit and i know there's a lot of commentary out there and a lot of articles people are publishing on this on this topic but um even though we've just reopened and you know things are underway and going relatively smoothly and we're already thinking about the closure of the academic year and we talked about graduation briefly earlier and how we're looking forward to that the team has been really busy thinking about the summer because we know we need to provide our students with
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additional opportunities not just for academic acceleration and enrichment but also mentorship and connections that will last beyond the summer and take them in to supporting them uh for the school year so there's quite an array of activities uh that are continuing to grow and build here so i don't even think you're going to get the finite description but i do want to also call out there's an intentional uh understanding that there's a need and a focus to really apply resources to our theory of action around black native american students of color who we know have been disproportionately impacted during this pandemic so and that's right and this planning is is really requiring as i mentioned a lot of collaboration between our departments as well as our community-based partners as we think about reimagining uh what summer programming can look like so tonight we're going to hear from dana nirenberg and her new role uh as director of uh learning acceleration so really uh happy to to have her uh join the the discussions here moving forward um as as well as uh uh aurora uh himmel have i ever gotten your last name straight don't worry our senior director of college and career readiness and as well as senior advisor danny ledesma of course we have a couple dozen staff in the virtual green room ready pop to pop in as we need them um so i'll stop there and let the team take it from here thank you superintendent and as aurora eloquently always lets us know how to pronounce her name uh she says it's um he-man kind of like it's he-mel and that's how i always remember it was just based off the 80s iconic cartoon so uh thank you for uh for for that explanation aurora but good evening directors again um this is the exciting part that i know that um we've all been waiting for um and i know that um for a series of board meetings and just um various meetings and conversations and discussions you know we always keep hearing the theme coming back to you know what is our learning acceleration plan what are we thinking around summer programming what are these options and opportunities look like for students and so we're really excited to kick off this presentation to help contextualize the work and a little bit deeper uh throughout the school year we've begun the process to really consider you know how do we meet the needs of all of our students um specifically for you know our student our our bipart students um you know our students with disabilities are emerging bilingual students as we start to think about what is learning acceleration look like especially as we're entering into the summer space we know that this work it's going to take um it's it's been a heavy collaboration and will continue collaboration with a myriad of stakeholders and partners you know uh meeting with with staff and families and students and our labor partners and making sure that we're working with you know very closely um with our culturally specific you know organizations um which is um part of the work as we're here to present it and we're really excited because as a superintendent um has always stated now is the time for us to be innovative and and now is the time for us to re to really reinvent um how it is that we do school um and and and i'm really really excited uh as we really enter into this next phase um you know of of the work so with that being said um i know that we don't need any introduction for dana nirenberg she was presented at the april 13th board meeting we're really excited to have her on board she has truly hit the ground running as she from day one has immersed herself in this work and i'm really excited to hear dana along with um um dr himel as well as danny ledesma who will present the presentation so with that being said i will go ahead and turn it over to dr himel good evening board thank you so much for having us here tonight and thank you so much for all of your thoughtful questions throughout the evening and hopefully we'll get to all of those we are going to be sharing tonight a high level overview of our planning process and we are still in the planning process uh we are going to present our summer plans um as uh our best thinking for today because as you know um health guidelines are changing consistently we we're lucky enough to get new funding from the state uh so that has really allowed us to open up our thinking and our
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opportunities for students so we feel incredibly fortunate to have this new funding and this new focus on summer programming and we also realize in our planning process that there's still time and communities and stakeholder input that we need to get before we finalize our plans and we are braiding this new funding with existing funding such as the ssa grant that director brim edwards referenced earlier this evening to really think about a holistic approach to our students this summer and so really of course focusing on the academics the math achievement and also their social emotional well-being and and really bringing back uh the joyful love of learning and really being safety con conscious as we transition back into a full in-person learning and making that transition as we prepare for next fall and so um as uh the superintendent uh referenced earlier we really um there's so much more uh to our students than in just their uh math scores and and uh also to our community and the things that are of value to our community and so i'm just going to turn it over for a minute for danny to give us some local context before we dive into our current summer plans thanks dr kimel um so uh uh good evening directors it's nice to be able to to be here with you tonight so so as you know and we've talked about this year has really presented significant challenges for students for families for staff and our community and as we are looking towards the close to another school year and starting to prepare for the summer and fall we wanted to share some of our current thinking um and as you know these challenges have really stretched everyone to their limits amidst a global pandemic local families students and educators and partners have adapted in so many ways and to so many changes while confronting health economic and well-being challenges our country and our community have also had to confront our past and our present and a racial reckoning and now our city of roses is forever changed and our community has recently demonstrated how effective we can be when we work together through collaboration we can make a difference in the lives of our young people who are also facing unprecedented rates of gun violence in our city right now and as you heard from uh director constance this is on the top of a lot of people's minds and so after the year we've all experienced we're focusing on continuing to work in collaboration and deepening those muscles working in partnership to really meet the academic and social needs of our students and families and so we're really trying to take a community-centered approach and developing plans for summer academic and enrichment programs that really engage students in safe fun and creative activities research as well as honor lived experience really tells us that when youth are engaged in these positive safe and enriching activities with caring adults from their school community with educators and with community partners where their cultural identity is affirmed and their potential is really nurtured that they will thrive research also tells us that resilient and safe communities invest in each other we invest in community-based solutions that are implemented by our partners and also culturally specific organizations and for too long investment really hasn't aligned with what we know works and so this summer will be different we are in a really fortunate uh position to be able to invest in what we know works and to bring back some balance so this summer our educators will will continue to partner with organizations like our sun agencies our culturally specific and multi-racial organizations who collectively understand the needs of our students and families and we intend to leverage the state the city and the county support by investing district resources towards academic and enrichment programs this summer with opportunities for youth employment as well and we hope to continue to partner deeply with partners from other jurisdictions such as parliament's part excuse me portland parks and recreation and potentially their park ranger program our community is really focused on wanting to have a summer that's safe for our students and we are really fortunate to live in a community where everyone wants to wrap around and really see success for our students this summer and begin to think about how not only do we do this safely within the context of covet but how we do it in a way that brings back interaction and fun and play in a way that really supports that academic hopes that we have for all of our students so in considering learning
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acceleration we're also making sure that it's aligned with our theory of action and you'll hear us say we are centering black and native american students because we know that if we collectively strengthen our our muscles in order to address the needs of black and native students that will have the skills we'll be able to develop and build the skills to address the learning needs of other diverse student groups including language learners students who experience poverty and houselessness latinx students specific islanders asian students and students experiencing disabilities so we're really thrilled to be able to to be here with you tonight and to be able to present some of our early thoughts and hopes and for the summer and so i'm really thrilled i've had the opportunity to work with dana nirenberg prior to her new role and i'm really thrilled to be able to work with her in her in her role now um and so i'm gonna hand that over and she's um it's it's been really great and so take it away dana thanks danny good evening directors good evening superintendent guerrero if we can move forward a couple of slides please just one more please to the next one thank you so i'm so excited to present our evolving thinking and planning for learning acceleration and i'm thrilled to be in this role because i believe that our learning acceleration work is an amazing opportunity to reimagine and renew our existing commitments and values and learning acceleration is a powerful lever to empower our students to achieve our vision and the elements of the graduate portrait some of our core values really come to the top and thinking about this work specifically students at the center joyful learning and leadership relationships and partnerships and collaboration and these values inform several of our pps priorities of which learning acceleration is a through line look forward to helping integrate the work the key work that our district is focusing on because we know that our system is stronger when there's strong alignment coherence and collaboration across all departments and school sites and this really aligns to some of our strategic work including our strategic planning and system shifts our p3 work our middle school redesign our high school success plan our work with mtss and of course our guaranteed and viable curriculum as well as ongoing professional learning if we can move to the next slide please we and we know that our words matter this graphic comes from our oregon department of education throughout all of our work we want to ensure that our values are explicit and our approach is clear and to that end we are all committed to creating a common lexicon to shift the narrative away from assumed deficits and towards language that is inclusive and affirms the cultural identity lived experience and assets of every student and by reframing this language of learning loss to unfinished learning we pave a path forward by shifting from remediation to the more empowered language of acceleration we are ready to re-spark the love of learning for our students and in considering renewal rather than recovery we're eager to infuse our district's existing work with our racial equity and social justice lens to leverage our partnerships with the community and our educators through the lens of learning acceleration and for summer we're focusing on the frame of create learn and play and this approach to accelerated learning considers the whole child i'm going to go ahead and share a quick retell of a children's book that came out in the past few years written by asian american author dan santat and the title is after the fall and this text is a real inspiration for the notion of learning acceleration it's a retelling of the traditional humpty dumpty story but it picks up after he's had his fall and after he's put together we usually don't hear what happened to him and we usually focus on the negative of his fall um and in this context like i said we learned about what happens afterwards we learned that afterwards we learned why he was on the wall in the first place and that's because he loved watching the birds and connecting to the birds and spending time looking at them after he fell he experienced a lot of anxiety and stress he was so nervous about getting up that he slept on the floor he didn't even want to be on his bed just a few feet off the floor but over time he with determination and resolve and thank you and enthusiasm for his passion around the birds he finally braved and built his stamina up and his confidence up and climb back on the wall and when he got up there he experienced the great joy of being able to watch the birds and most importantly upon pausing there for a moment he hatched and he emerged as a bird and this inspires us to think about how our student about our students and we need to know them as individuals their passions their interests the barriers that make things hard for them and empower them to know their powers aspirations and unlock their potential and through enrichment and empowerment find their aspirations next slide please so with that i present our draft definition our working definition of learning acceleration so learning acceleration in pps is an intentional implementation of a set of strategies
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intended to leverage students assets strengths and gifts in order to accelerate their learning provide access to unfinished learning and move every student towards mastery of key grade level standards and skills next slide please and this definition is inspired by the research and this is not presented in any particular order but here are the emerging priorities it's a collection of strategies that intersect to create accelerated learning for students so first of all every student needs access to grade level learning and relationships matter we really need to make the most of extended learning time thinking about summer after school and weekends and most importantly those learning opportunities need to be of high quality high dosage tutoring there's a lot of emerging research around this strategy as one that can be really powerful for helping students continue to accelerate their learning and of course continuing with our district commitment that danny so thoughtfully described really centering our black and native american students as well as our students who experience disability and are language learners given the disproportionate outcomes for these students and the map data that dr brown just presented that was gathered during the midst of the pandemic reaffirms our need to focus on instructional opportunities for our black and indigenous students and the data collected shows the trends that we've seen nationally and we know that based on that data the progress and reading remained relatively steady and our students didn't make as much progress in math we want to continue to provide opportunities to accelerate learning for our students in these areas and if we're able to close opportunity gaps for our students particularly our black and native american students as they progress towards the vision of a graduate portrait we'll be able to raise the bar for all of our students most importantly it's important most importantly we can think about how we accelerate learning in the moment with that access to grade level learning thinking about the key skills our students need for grade level mastery so when we go back to to the first of all let's go to the next slide and so when we go back to the theory of action uh this summer we are bringing racial justice strategies into the instructional core to promote learning creativity and summer engagement we believe that with an intensive focus this summer we can really catalyze learning for the fall and this summer we'll braid a series of research driven strategies to design student learning professional development opportunities and these strategies show up throughout our programming and design have been proven to be effective in serving students of color and the strategy i'll describe the academic strategies that are part of our learning acceleration plan so far one of which is the summer learning so we're thinking about how we can create expanded and supplemental learning opportunities including summer and saturday programs engaging cross-curricular learning experiences for our students and thinking about how we can integrate our academics into project-based learning through our sun partnerships high dosage tutoring and really thinking about the lessons learned from distance learning continuing to build our educators capacity through professional development in domains such as social emotional learning as well as standards-based instruction and then also continuing to develop culturally responsive curriculum and instruction again thinking about how we can apply the lessons that we all learned this year from distance learning to create even new newer more empowering learning opportunities so when we think about our racial equity and social justice partnership strategies we're thinking about how do we really partner with culturally specific and multi-racial organizations organizations have demonstrated commitment and expertise and specific community accountability to the organ to the communities that they're they're serving uh has been really shown to prove particularly in portland that we can really accelerate learning and accelerate social gains for our students of color we also know that extended learning and enrichment the ability to offer fun and engaging activities that really spark an interest to curiosity getting students interested in specific fields of study and also potential career places at career goals is a way to really accelerate learning as well and we also know that relationships really matter relationships can be really critical and being able to prevent a host of terrible things for our students and so we want to make sure that when we think about a summer of activities a summer that's safe and enriching that we're thinking about how these strategies are specifically proven to be effective for students of color next slide please so now what you all have been waiting for in terms of summer programming we're really excited to launch our learning acceleration work this summer under the umbrella of create learn play and here you'll see by age group the offerings for students across grade levels starting in kindergarten all the way through 12th grade and this focuses on the academic domains so this summer we'll be providing academic opportunities for students through both familiar and new programs so we're continuing with our very successful early kindergarten transition program expanding to include first graders who may never have set foot in our school
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buildings before and we'll be hosting this at 15 sites we're also excited to host for the first time in many years academic programming for rising second through eighth graders with 60 hours of programming posting focusing on social emotional learning literacy mathematics and hands-on learning through project-based steamed programming students will be able to access full days of programming as we partner with sun at each of these 23 sites while our school teams will identify priority students who most need an on-ramp for the fall we're pleased to be able to offer spots to students from each school in the district we're also expanding our successful summer scholars program to provide opportunities at five sites expanding from this typical single site at benson for credit completion for our high school students and we're excited to continue to offer programs including of course extended school year migrant education programs leap into ninth grade and our academic sports program for middle schoolers these academic offerings provide students with opportunities to create and learn and danny will share more about our plans around other elements of summer offerings so the same way that you see that the academic if we can go to the next slide the academic offerings um have elements of uh extended learning and enrichment the uh enrichment and extended learning elements also have academic components the potential for academic components so as we talked about before our community is really facing unprecedented surges in gun violence and we know that particularly our black indigenous and students and families of color are tend to be disproportionately vulnerable to the impact of this violence and leaders are particularly worried about our students during the summer because public safety officials predict that this violence will likely continue to increase during the summer months and so we know that research shows that students who are engaged in positive and positive and safe activities is a powerful way to prevent violence we also want to make sure that not only are we working with our educators but that we're partnering with cultural culturally specific organizations organizations who demonstrated an ability to have culturally relevant act culturally relevant enrichment activities and who can also keep our students safe we want to also encourage youth employment activities and are working with partners to provide resilient community um community this summer to prevent violence so one of the things that we're doing is that we're going to and you've heard about this is that we've released a request for proposals from across from across our community to be able to fill out the other side of programming around enrichment for the summer so we go into the next slide you can see that this will really be a compliment to all of the academic and enrichment activities that are offered in accelerated learning but also that we can offer a full and really robust catalog of activities for students so that we can give students and families options so they can explore and they can find and they can they can sort of dive into their curiosity this summer um we really are in terms of the number of students that we anticipate serving it's still a work in progress in the create and play buckets we hope that there's really a myriad of opportunities for students not only are we going to not only do we anticipate increased sun programming for academics in the morning and enrichment in the afternoon we also anticipate that there will be increased access for child care uh camps through our licensed child care providers and potential and a really a lot of robust uh potential for summer arts um there is a lot of anticipation in the community about what we're what we hope to be able to provide for students and our expectation is that families will see create learn and play really come to life this summer at pbs um we gave you a lot of information um and um we are going to continue to do that um but really we want to um see how we can really support this um in communicating this to our families in the future um and so our we're in the middle of our rfp process so uh proposals are due uh in may and then we hope to be able to turn turn around very quickly and be able to publish our offerings uh very soon for the public so like i said it's a it's a it's a work in progress i'm going to turn it back over to dana who's going to sort of show how it all comes together yeah thank you if we could go to the next slide please so as we close we have exciting plans for the near future through the summer to spark creativity and learning and play throughout the summer as we launch our learning acceleration work and we're very excited to renew and reimagine and learning through this lens catalyzing opportunities for learning in the fall by offering safe and engaging learning opportunities for students across our school system so that's our presentation for you wondering on opening up to questions
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wonderings and feedback thank you can i just say i love that dana the questions wonderings and feedback that's such a beautiful uh framing of our conversation so directors i see director bailey has unmuted himself uh do you have a question wondering or feedback feedback this is great this is something that you know we've been talking about about day two since the superintendent came to do this kind of extended learning and to see such a robust um and deep uh set of offerings is fabulous and just as kind of in my neck of the woods i was just referencing some a study of youth employment programs that basically said the specific program design really doesn't matter they just work and work so positively so i'm very happy to see that be a part of the program uh but the you know you know all the way from that down to the kindergarten transition uh expanding to include first graders um great that's wonderful uh we you know we've seen how effective that program is so i'm just really heartened i'm excited to see all the opportunities for our students and again i love that reframing of instead of thinking about this as learning loss that pause and learning and continued learning um is really great so appreciate that sort of hopeful opportunity for our students to engage in in these programs other questions wonderings or feedback director yeah i had a quick uh comments last question about um what criteria you use i know we um lead with race and we we talk about you know applying the racial equity lens uh to the locations where we'll be offering these extended um learnings and by the way i'm very excited about all of this too i think it's fabulous i i wish that we had saturday school all the time and and some cultures do uh half day um have we partnered so one of the questions is how we applied the racial equity lens and how we would expect to see that in terms of the locations and the other question i have is um about uh if we've engaged with the saturday academy which is an awesome program um but as a single parent i i used it at a time when i wasn't working full-time the program is only a couple of hours a day but they have amazing steam offerings um some wonder if we've partnered with them or looked at their model or even talked to the ed um jackie so as to the locations i i would say that uh part of the part of the selection of the locations was in sort of looking at how we equitably distribute programming across the city um with the constraint that there are some buildings that are going to be under construction and some buildings that will be be utilized for other things this summer so i think you know we definitely did try to apply that lens you know recognizing that there there are there are constraints and to follow up on your quest your question about student selection so of course using the racial equity and social justice lens but also turning it over to our teachers who after their families know our students best in terms of their their learning and so we're um i've been working with our mtss department to create guidance for sip teams and for plcs to engage in some intentional conversation around who are the students who may not have been as engaged in the learning this year or students might already be receiving interventions or students who may have some identified needs both planning to provide opportunity to fill some of those needs but also really provide an exciting on-ramp into the fall and then in terms of the academy i don't know if they've danny i don't know if they've applied for the rfp and so we can certainly look out look to connect with them that's a great suggestion um i i just i had a conversation about two months ago with the ed who's one of the people that started um was literally in my living room planning the first march on science about four years ago and she was at ohsu at the time dean of students and has shifted now to the ed of of saturday academy and are trying to provide more equitable programming and i think it would be great just to have a conversation they do want to serve more kids of color than they're currently serving and they have amazing offerings really great classes in robotics etc and and yeah they would be a great community partner i suppose i suspect any other um questions or comments from board members before we move on tonight can i okay i see that okay the julia amy and then nathaniel so rita go first
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yeah i i wanted to follow up on that question about um who participates um so um am i hearing you right that students are going to be sort of invited to participate and will there be any possibility for someone who isn't invited to participate in any of these programs so in terms of our summer acceleration academy for second through eighth graders along with ekt and our ekt for first graders we are looking to invite students who who met who best match the criteria for need in terms of what the programming is offering we are offering spots for the second through eighth graders for students from every school in our in our district which is a really exciting model but we are using an equity model to allocate those spots for the summer scholars it's a credit credit completion model and so that's the criteria for students to participate that being said if we look at this i guess you guys don't have the slides in front of you anymore but that last slide with all of the myriad of partnerships that we hope to explore through the racial equity and social justice rfp we look to be able to serve over a wide variety of students through those programs as well as there's continued child care camps at many of our campuses that will be continuing as well okay thank you um at the high school level um it looks like this is um well okay let me put this in the form of a question um historically credit recovery programs have been um the the hub has been at benson um and this year it looks like it's distributed more at the neighborhood high schools um are you thinking that this may be the first step in a new model for the credit recovery system have you thought that far ahead or am i jumping the gun uh well dr murray i think that this is a a great incubation summer while we have uh the the funding and the fresh ideas so i don't know that we've that we're ready to commit but we'll definitely get the opportunity to experience the summer scholars across the city this summer and and rita i want to say that at our next charter and alternative programs committee meeting we're going to talk about some of the innovations in multiple pathways to graduation and um get into a little bit more detail on how virtual scholars may maybe maybe evolving um not just to meet this immediate need for this summer but but um over the long term so keep an eye out for that director more just i just i just want to you know just add a little bit to that um you know one of the things that we did start the presentation with is that you know this is really more of an in-depth look at summer but you know as we get into the course of the summer we're going to continue these conversations as the superintendent alluded you know we don't really have to keep having these hybrid conversations as we are back in school and now the conversation and the focus shifts to what we're doing around learning acceleration and and right now the focus is summer but but um i we can we can you know really be sure that throughout the course of the summer we're going to continue to re-engage these conversations and start really looking at what does fall learning acceleration look like and what are we also looking at you know um we're looking at this lens now that it's just for the summer of half but now what does it look like 12 months from now and so that's all going to be part of future conversations and i think you're asking the right question because that's also part of our planning for the fall in terms of how do we expand some of those specific programs that we've seen tremendous value from our students in so that's that's it so stay tuned more more exciting news to be shared okay thank you um and um i'm feeling acutely the the waning days of my tenure on the board so i'm sort of feeling compelled to weigh in while i can and in this sense i will weigh in and say that the credit recovery system um is vastly better than it used to be but it needs a lot of work and and i see this as a step in what i suspect may be the right direction so i would encourage you to um take this as an opportunity to you know pilot some things and and make some real changes for the future um okay and i guess my last thing is um a lot of this uh you know when the presentation started it was framed in terms of um kind of building on the lessons learned from distance learning
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and um this might be a bigger question than you can answer tonight but my ultimate question is what were the lessons that were learned during distance learning um and you might not be able to rattle them off right now but i think it would be very helpful if um if you could compile at least a you know kind of preliminary guess at what we've learned um and you know you can link it with the data that we heard about from the map tests and um and at this stage it might be speculation more than anything else um but i do think it would be helpful to um to lay out it to however you can with as much with whatever degree of confidence you can have about what you think we learned um and then i i think it would be helpful to lay out some hypotheses that um that the district and the board can go back and and talk about as time goes on um i think it would be very helpful to to kind of um uh sort of codify what what happened i mean this was a hell of a year a year and a half actually um and i i would like to think that it was not for not um so it would be helpful if you could kind of memorialize some of the lessons some of the ideas um some of the um some of the examples that you might want to amplify going forward okay that's it thank you thank you all right i think i said julia next uh director brian edwards what are your questions great thank you uh so this is a topic i've been interested in a long time first started as a parent went looking for something to [Music] help a student catch up um and you know basically for 10 years the only thing i can find was at either end of the spectrum either if you were sort of in the kinder program or um in need of high school credit recovery and summer scholars has changed over the years so i'm really glad to see sort of the filling in at the middle which is super important and i love that the world word play is in there even if there's a lot of academics like um you gotta add some plan there otherwise like no kid is gonna want to sign up for something or have their parents sign up for something so i really love that element of it and hope that that is sort of the spark of the kids day and then they also get the things they need um so a couple questions that i have specifically um in the past there has been a fee for summer scholars is that still going to be this the case because that was just like one of the barriers for for some students to take classes and that is one of the elements that i dearly hope we're going to change to that question or someone else i don't believe so i mean i think part of the investment is to to make sure that we can kind of create equitable opportunities for all of our students but we can we can double check and make sure that we're not speaking our turn yeah i'd love to hear it also that's absolutely at the heart of the intention of the esser funds that we'll be receiving so i would think we could say unequivocally that there wouldn't be a fee for credit recovery well somebody somebody could circle back that would be great i will say director remember i'm sorry i didn't want to cut you off but i i do know at least for um the purpose of this conversation for summer learning no fees i mean that is the intention of what we are doing is no fees for the summer for for any of our students um and that's you know we've been very deliberate um and and and doing that now speaking for fall and beyond again there's still a lot more conversation and planning that has to take place specifically what what what ms ledesma has stated you know and we can talk about that but we're talking about specifics just for summer you know that has been our commitment from day one as we started to look at this we started to look at the planning and the work is no fees for summer okay well um we should make that crystal clear like no material fees no textbook fees like that because because that has not been pbs's history in the past and it has been a barrier for a lot of students so i think we should just be clear about that and it was that if you failed a class they're in a high school class you couldn't retake it at your high school and then you had to take it at summer scholars and pay for it um so it was just this bad cycle um so the other question is um how are parents gonna know we've talked
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about it being invitation and so at this point in time um you know word will start to get out what's the mechanism if somebody says hey i've heard that there's gonna be summer programming do we say consult your teacher i mean i'm sorry consult your the principal at your school or where where are we sending uh people and what in what form will the invitation thanks for that question and can i just add one teeny piece about the credit completion we're also really pushing for our summer completion camp which will happen mostly at your local high school very soon after school gets out so mid-june with the hope being that students can get that credit completed as close to finishing that course in their local school maybe even mitigating the need for summer scholars for some of those students at all it's not even doing a complete do-over it's just getting that last bit of work we're really excited about that um in terms of how families will know um working on this this is very much in process so um we're designing an invitation that school teams would extend to families with a registration form we're working to partner that so that the sun registration happens right there so it's a one-stop shop for families of course making it available in paper and online in all of our languages for our families and so those would come not unlike how the lippy invitations went out perhaps from schools um and then also providing schools guidance around how to communicate and message that to families around this part of our summer options our subsequent summer options will be coming out with a menu and a catalog you've brainstormed of course using the internet but even creating a poster so the kids can learn about all of the range of options to really be excited to to engage in those once those have been identified and confirmed and we're working on our family-facing website to add that information as well great i love all those things and then the last question is assuming that we trend in the right direction we have in-person classes um but even with that if say even the external health conditions are all um you know we feel very comfortable having in person um learning well there's always there's probably going to be a covert of families that for for whatever reason um aren't going to be comfortable still this summer um is there going to be a a virtual option i know like at the high school level you probably have virtual scholars but what about the k-8 spectrum so virtual scholars will be operating all summer long as an option we're also exploring uh creating a hub site that would be a distance learning option for students again focusing on students who would most benefit from this resource not opening it up to the to every student across our district but knowing that if we want to welcome families back we also want to honor that there were some families who were not yet comfortable coming back so we're in the planning phase on that it will not be how it is right now where every local school is offering both in-person and distance learning rather it would be a centralized distance learning option for second through eighth grade the early kindergarten transition and the first grade program are really best achieved in that local school kindergarteners learning the hallways learning their way around the playground so that first day of school they own the place um and so that would be a success yeah great those are my questions i really appreciate it i'm super excited because uh this will have a potentially huge impact for for students director constant i think you are next on my list thank you so um ms narenberg you just uh touched on it but um with the ekt program and first grade program so er am i correct that there are no options for our littlest kids who are not in those 15 target schools there will be through child care and also potentially through the rfp many of our child care providers are are leaning into the rfp so there may be additional opportunities available and i get the i get that a big part of that is actually acclimating kids to their own building um which is i guess probably why it's not a hub model like the rest of the grade levels um okay i also had a question um uh danny about the summer enrichment and safety rfp so i can't remember from looking back at that but is there a possibility for athletics programs to be responsive to that rfp because they're we're a little talk about things that are compelling for kids to come back in english and it seems to me we're a little bit light on athletics in this portfolio yeah i think that there's um you know we we're we really asked our
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partners to be as creative as possible to sort of think about kind of like what is what you know what's of interest uh to to them and also what's of interest likely be of interest to students so um we've also really wanted to think about like the time span um so you know when you think about like what's uh what's you know what are what what can you do it you know across six hours um there's gotta be some active part of that some active play so i anticipate that we'll probably have a lot of um sort of like activities that that incorporate both learning enrichment and athletics the arts i i'm pretty excited we had a pretty robust group of folks who came to our first meeting and you know we had a lot of arts organizations there um so i think you know we'll we'll get a pretty diverse group of folks it's really exciting because um you know when we talk about looking at this as incubating things that we may take forward and and that might inform our whole system i mean we're we're really expanding our opportunity for different kinds of partnerships um which is really exciting um okay nuts and bolts question is so will there be transportation to the hubs for the for the two through eight students yes we are in conversation with transportation around the logistics of that and and um our transportation department are just brilliant in terms of all the things they're able to figure out and so we're still trying to figure out the details of that our hope is that we're able to offer transportation of course in the morning and then also an option in midday and an option for after the sun programming to offer families maximum flexibility that's a hope that is not a that is not a firm offer um commitment yet and we would use the same criteria that we use during the home during the school year for the hub sites so that one mile radius and then working with our transportation department on routes one small caveat is that for families we're gonna give them a deadline to commit to to coming to in order to assure transportation you know we can't do a last-minute change um when we've got such a complex system yeah um okay and then superintendent maybe this question is for you but i'm just really curious about how the staffing is going to work like is our capacity for all of these programs the programs we administer not our partner programs dependent upon um how many of our teachers and substitutes opt in to these roles well you know the good thing is you know we have a variety of funding streams and resources we're able to braid together here so i just want to call out what you're noticing that you know when you combine some strategic thinking a little design uh and some imagination you can see what's possible so hopefully this is the case for you know resourcing k-12 to be able to continue to do things like this what one one constraint here you know what you're calling out is sort of there's there's a human capital component to doing all this work and i would say not just for pps staff uh participating in programming but you know our partners also have to ramp up and and have capacity and and be able to provide a quality program that they're interested in providing so i think everybody is sort of uh you know we we want to extend ourselves as much as we can actually provide the programming so we are hoping uh that we'll have educators you know who who are interested in making that commitment the good thing is with the variety of programming you know there's different options depending on on how much time folks want to commit to for the summer but i'll invite the the team if if you want to say anything else about how you're thinking about the staffing for the variety of all this programming sure so we've already begun the hiring process the positions are posted um and we're we're doing interviews i just did one today for a teacher from out of district and a few other positions uh you know we're hoping that our own pbs teachers will be eager to teach their students at the hub sites but we also welcome in guest teachers or teachers from other districts and we are compensating them at their annual regular salary which is different from how summer programming has been compensated in the past in the past teachers have been paid a flat rate and they're now going to be paid at their regular salary which is a nice bump for most of our teachers um and so that's a way of honoring the commitment to come and work um we're also working to make sure that the instructional programming is really good and fun to teach and educative so that they continue to grow their practice as they engage in the teaching and so i had a really terrific conversation today with our humanities team about really how we envision our cross-curricular units and our curriculum integration and these teachers can be pioneers and really leaders in that work and so we might not have an excess of teachers but i'm really feeling hopeful that by encouraging them to apply and principals really promoting it maybe some of our younger teachers or our newer teachers i mean many of our teachers haven't had that full class experience and so they
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may be they you know they might be eager to have that opportunity um so we're really excited and optimistic i'm glad to hear that and i i don't i don't mean to sound like the the devil's advocate here but um ultimately our offerings will expand or contract based on the ability the availability of our teaching force right in terms of the number of students not our offerings in terms of the variety of offerings but in terms of the number of students we're able to serve yes and our teachers are having a terrific time being back in person with our children and and the joy of being a teacher and connecting with students in person is is just that's why our teachers become teachers and so i'll tell you i've got my dli pals um you know as a dli principal they want to offer programming in spanish i said you find the teachers and they are finding the teachers um there are some sites who want to offer more spots to say if you can help find the teachers we will be able to deliver it so i think it's a real collective effort um and and to make that happen but i i'm feeling hopeful that's great that's great okay one last question which is we i saw a little mention to high dosage tutoring and we know that um this is a principal strategy for a lot of other districts around the country um but it wasn't exactly clear to me what that looks like here for us um hi director con sam i think right now we're still working on the full details of that of how that will expand into the school year this summer we are looking at that high dosage tutoring to be through our letters program through our humanities department and and really having our uh the teachers who are going through the letters training to be doing that one-on-one tutoring uh so they're learning the program as they're tutoring the students so that's um one of the things is fantastic because that's a professional development that we can keep with us exactly all of our aspiring readers for years to come so that's our that's one of our summer plans and we're still in the process of fleshing out what that will look like for the school year great thanks everybody what a exciting opportunity to get to do all these things from scratch and to be creative and to have the resources to support our kids who we know need it most and um this is just really really exciting and i know going to be so well received by our grateful community and all those happy kids yeah it's amazing uh all right nathaniel i saw that you had a question as well uh yeah i've got a couple uh first uh for the programs that uh allow those not specifically selected to enter do we expect that we can meet the student demand and if not how will space be allocated so for the programs that are uh you know sort of gone through the rfp i think that we're hoping to meet quite a bit of demand there um and i think that the students the the way that we're envisioning it is that students will be really selecting and opting into those programming so we'll partner with our partners on uh sort of marketing and outreach but it'll be sort of like you know each each organization will have their own enrollment and and you know sort of when it gets filled up they'll let us know and then folks will have to select something else did you have another question nathaniel i thought you said you had two yeah um also i'm concerned that there are a not insignificant number of high schoolers out there who are not in need of credit recovery who did just fine in their classes but still did not get nearly as much out of this year academically as they would have had a pandemic not happened i wonder if we're doing anything to support such students i anticipate that through our rfp that there will be a lot of interest in serving high school students um that's where i anticipate will have a lot of connection to career exploration also the connection to youth employment some of the some of the sort of questions that we had at our rfp meeting were you know sort of could we employ a student to direct a play could we employ a student to be an artist in residence so i think that the our partners are thinking because of the emphasis that we've placed on youth employment our our partners are thinking about sort of how to how to really connect the student enrichment experience to
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employment and to career exploration as well which dr kimel can talk a lot about well i'll just add one more program that we're really working to expand is the summer works program that uh provides paid internships for the summer for students and so we're actually looking at uh tripling uh the uh the amount of interns that um not just our district hosts but the city of portland itself hosts so that's another opportunity for our students that we're really working on that is targeted specifically to our high school students that's fantastic just along the lines i know last summer um that for example at roosevelt they had a combination it was a really cool like middle grades basketball plus intensive math academy it was a very interesting combination but it was great because there was a whole bunch of roosevelt high school students who were like assistant coaches and in the classrooms is that the type of thing you're thinking about yes yeah and we're do we're uh expanding that program as well to also um be at mcdaniel high school this summer so that's a great example of what the student interns through the summer works program do that's right it was great it was the students were super engaged excellent i think we've been seeing some of our summer arts academy during the breaks today um so that's also exciting um to remember the things we have done and know that we're building on and continuing uh to do amazing things any further questions before we thank this team and move on to our last agenda item can i just say something that i should have spotted my comments with um thank you for all of this this sounds great um it is so exciting it sounds it sounds like you have really sort of busted out of a box and you're just trying to think of stuff and it all sounds great so thank you and again once again you know commending our team um especially the three of you for working on such a short timeline um that you know we've known that we wanted to do something in the summer but knowing that we were getting money and what that would look like and some of those ramifications i know um seems to constantly update and change so thank you for the work you've done in a in a quite um moving target sort of environment so thank you all all right well we have one more item left on our agenda item it is very late we are um oh like an hour two hours we're exactly two hours behind schedule so i think what i'm gonna ask um having sort of checked in with some of our staff is that we'll do this budget presentation and we'll ask board members um to um make a list of your questions um staff is tired as well and we want them to be able to answer your questions to the best of their abilities so if we could do those questions in writing after the presentation so that that way we're getting the best most robust answers to our questions i think that would be much appreciated both by board members and by staff and we we will have town halls and other public commentary times and times for board members to ask questions again as well so we'll we'll entertain a couple of questions after the presentation but ask that the majority of them please be in writing so that our staff can answer those um to the fullest of their ability when they not at the end of uh let's see many of you started your work day at seven this morning so we're on hour 15 of your work day so i know that i don't give my best self or my best answers in hour 15. so superintendent i'll turn this over to you now and would you please introduce the budget i i will and thanks for recognizing uh it's it's been a lengthy day it's been a pretty meaty agenda tonight great discussion and we also have an important process here with our budget development so this is just you know the next step and there'll be many additional opportunities and of course want to make sure we we answer all of our directors questions so uh we'll certainly be continuing to gather those and i think it's been customary for us to keep a running q a going um so to tonight we're being joined in pps induction fashion you know folks coming in running uh with our chief financial officer alberto delgadillo uh you know in addition to the long work day uh he has a time zone difference so it's uh getting close to 1am for him and uh danny's also doing triple duty here so she's also a key part of the presentation this evening hopefully what you'll you'll see moving forward is is our attempt to be really mindful of
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our priorities in this budget that they continue to fuel uh movement forward uh towards our our vision uh and and those goals ultimately you know that our board has set aside for for student outcomes and building capacity across the organization so uh i'll try to keep my preambles you know as abridged as possible but hopefully what you start to see a picture being painted is you know organizational capacity building continuing to to move forward that uh the investment and talent and direct services of our students and in our schools uh critical even as we come out of this pandemic that we haven't lost sight of you know keeping our eye on the prize so uh and it's a budget that supports our commitment to racial equity uh so and there's been collaboration you know at different points with stakeholders and community uh keeping um those students in mind and their success so we're gonna transition over to a budget presentation so we do have some slides for you so i'll kick it off initially just to give a little bit of an overview then i will turn it over to to our cfo uh so there's there's kind of two halves here or a little bit of an intro by me uh so the next slide just just sort of the the general approach for for this evening here um and how we're looking at this you just heard me describe a little bit what's different about this budget uh proposal is you know it's being prepared during an unusual chapter in our in our school district's history so you know you have over a year of closed schools a reliance on changing our delivery model to distance learning for the most part because of this pandemic and you know the the gradual reopening of our classrooms so as as we're working our way out of this pandemic and hopefully it does start to turn back downwards and we deal with the impacts but also be forward thinking about the kind of programming and experiences that our kids have we hope that this budget you know you know addresses some of those needs and demands that the pandemics has has brought upon us but also keeps us aligned on that core mission and it's consistent with our values um so and we have an opportunity with some significant new resources uh coming our way so some of these might be one time but how do we leverage those you know in investments that that will sustain uh beyond their their original or their their uh expenditure um so uh so we do we do think that this budget you know supports a lot of those overarching goals um and you might ask as we get into sort of the some of the nuts and bolts uh you know what's in there uh well in addition to some of the investments we've continued to talk about that we're carrying uh forward um i'm glad that folks out there are noticing that you know we've already made commitments to more nurses more counselors more custodians uh we could add to that t-shirt more social workers more instructional specialists more summer programming more enrichment more arts more credit earning opportunities more equity investments in our title one csi and tsi schools and overall if you've had a chance to begin studying volume 2 of the budget book you'll see per pupil expenditures are up significantly in our underserved schools as you look at the site-by-site detailed breakdowns and that's intentional so whether it's additional staffing or other resources so chief delgadillo will walk you through in a bit more detail some of these you know at a high level some of these proposed investments again many of them initially here on the learning acceleration that you just heard described as well as some of those additional supports like uh instructional specialists and also you know the expansion of some of the programming that you just heard describe as well the other thing you heard us uh share with directors because we have to get budgets out to our school leaders is a commitment early on to despite enrollment fluctuations you know and still undetermined you know where or uh we expect that the majority of our students will be returning um anywhere that we did see the enrollment drop mainly in k and one uh we we funded our schools with stability of staff in mind so those those levels for the most part were kept level um and so that that it we didn't want to be disruptive uh to our school so that was uh an initial sort of decision that that was made early and then a lot of our other i'll just say at a high level a lot of our investments truly are going towards those educational system shifts that are described in our vision so we haven't deviated with new ideas we've we've maintained that document right in front of us and said okay what's the work that we're going to need to do
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in the coming year that continues this journey and transformation so that very much has informed a lot of some of the decisions and discretionary proposals that we're putting forward so i'll hand it over to chief delgadillo i'll just say up front as we dive into these more public processes he and his team many others who have worked our budget finance team and many others uh you know have been working really hard this is this is really the season uh it's been a different kind of process to do this um you know not in the office per se uh but they've been able to once again produce some some thoughtful work so i'm optimistic about uh our continued capacity to provide some innovative and reimagined opportunities to support our students so with that um i'll turn the mic over to alberto thank you superintendent guerrero still awake yes i am still awake i'm still ready to go and just like amped up i'm excited to be here uh it's like uh first time so you know it's like ready to go let's do this and uh good evening good morning you know just depending where you are in the world watching this uh so i really want to thank our echo um superintendent guerrero's uh message and thank the budget staff for all the incredible work and getting us here i i've been here just for a few weeks but it's just become apparent to me very quickly the dedication of the team just the countless hours spent and um getting us to this proposed budget so i definitely want to acknowledge the team's efforts and and just you know so for tonight the intention is not to do the deep dive you know there's close to 500 pages out there so we can save that for another night another late night uh but really as as superintendent was sharing to share some key pieces of information build our collective understanding of the current budgeting context highlighting important efforts and it's just been kind of like well sequenced for tonight just the conversations we've been having but really also setting the tone for the conversations in the upcoming years so next slide please and and so really this budget coincides with uh the oregon legislators biennial budget cycle so as as we're putting together the budget we're using the following state funding levels to design it um so 9.3 billion dollar state school fund that's what we're using to budget we're assuming 778 million in the student investment account and 318 million for the high school success fund at the state level and and i'll share a little bit more like what does that all mean uh but from a nuts and bolts putting the budget together it represents about a two billion dollar budget for next fiscal year and on the next slide um although our total budget's approximately two billion these two funds are like the key funds so when we think about what's our basic operating budget so feeding our students transporting our students paying our teachers staffs you know literally the the funding that keeps the lights on it's these two key funds the general fund and the special revenue fund and the other billion dollars is it's is primarily restricted to bond and capital projects workers comp so there's some very specific usages so i just think it's important to just help create some context and understanding around uh some of the key funds that help us meet our goals and and give us the flexibility with what we need to be doing and it's also important to point out that like with the student investment act and the high school success funds are aligned to our budgeting expectations but it should be noted at the state level the current proposal for the biennial education budget is at 9.1 billion and if we go to the next slide um we it just helps to set the tone of the environment in which we're budgeting although there there are additional stimulus funding but it's also important to level set with what we're starting through the state funding and as the legislator convenes and discusses we'll receive more information over the next few weeks and and really when we think about maintaining our current service levels uh the the budget target is 9.7 billion and if if we if we end up committing at the state level to a 9.1 billion dollar budget it really will require us to just reassess some of our short-term versus long-term investments particularly as as as we start thinking
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about the federal funding and federal stimulus dollars so like what does this mean so if we just go to if we go to the next slide it starts to uh help just kind of put it in context that 600 million dollar difference between 9.7 and 9.1 is translated to about 20 22 23 million dollars less for us for next fiscal year so this is like money going into the the general fund and to put it into context that would equate to about six uh about reducing the calendar by about six days or eliminating approximately 214 teaching positions uh that's not what we're planning to do so just to be clear that's not what we're planning to do we're planning to use some of our funding and and uh the term i like and i keep hearing it and i haven't used it before it's braiding it's like how are we breeding our funding sources to support our strategies and really push forward uh the the the plan that we are putting in place so less about the budget driving the strategy but how are we taking the strategy and braiding our funding to support that strategy so as i mentioned earlier we're budgeting at 9.3 billion and if we go to the next slide that 9.3 billion has required us to identify approximately 3 million dollars in savings from the general fund this is primarily non-personnel expenditure so for example reducing uh supply budgets across operations or across a finance team and a variety of other different sources proposing to use approximately 16 million dollars from the fund balance and in addition to transferring approximately 7 million from the general fund to the student investment account so over the years excuse me over the past year we've essentially supported uh between the student investment account and the general fund like each other have support or the funds have supported each other so now as we're trying to level set our expectations with the general fund knowing that we'll have additional student investment dollars it's shifting some of those dollars from the general fund to the student investment account to really help balance the budget at 9.3 and on the next slide as as we think about our contacts we're budgeting with moving variables right there are significant funding sources that uh we're looking to resolve over the next several months and part of it is you know what's going to happen at the state level and then just also as an example of moving variables at some point a few weeks ago our expectation through the federal emergency management agency was that hey we were going to get eligible expenditures reimburse at 75 percent and now it's like hey it's going to be out of 100 that's welcome news um next slide in addition to that this also welcome news was the announcement by the state we we've just finished talking about what we plan to do with our summer investment and working in a design while now the state has released additional guidelines everything from not supplanting these funds that are there to supplement to even more technical guidance around hey this funding should fall in this funding bucket so all of that information is coming out but as an example with moving variables just a few weeks ago a month ago we we weren't sure what this meant and now we have this information so we're making adjustments to the plan in order to we're making adjustments to the funding plan in order to support the strategy on the next slide we then get into this other big component around the esser fundings elementary and secondary emergency relief funding and this is another big piece that is uh really there to support learning acceleration and and ensuring that our our students and community are are are are recover i don't want to use the word recovery because i just if i was paying attention that's not what we're supposed to be using and thinking about all the opportunities that we need to put in place to support our our students and families and over the course of the past year we've seen several rounds we've seen three rounds of funding and this slide's really just kind of like that big picture call out of what's happened at
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the national level what's it meant for oregon and then eventually what's it meant what has that funding uh meant for us in addition to like very specific timelines so being tied to specific timelines we also know that these are one-time funds if we go to the next slide this is an example of moving pieces where we have projected spend in the current year but also anticipating that we may receive additional adjustments from fema we got additional funding from the state for summer programming so as as initial plans were put in place with the cares act to support re-entry expenditures or whether with the s or second round as we continue to focus on safety and then eventually as we're putting this plan together as uh as as not just for the time being but um to the earlier comments regarding how are we thinking about leveraging this fundings um that's you know put together like the guidelines that were put together by the council of great city schools that really is in encouraging us to think about transformative investments that are going to be not just investments in items that are going to not allow us to maintain sustainability or items on that we know will provide value so these are all the type of conversations that are happening around these different funding streams to help support our plans and on the next slide it starts to really put into perspective this different view that we're assessing the lifespan of the esser funds to build a strategic and sustainable plan so we know that we're in this moment in time that we really want to catapult and springboard towards the next few years and so being thoughtful around how this mix of investments is going to support our planning and and this goes back to all the conversations that the team has been having from the strategic budget team meeting in in in january and february as as a variety of cross collaborative stakeholders came together to really start putting the pieces together and identifying key investments it's with that eye towards the next few years and on the next slide although we are budgeting with moving variables and we know there's still funding details we're going to figure out you know one of the we're looking forward to the the rfp with our summer partners and excited to see what sort of feedback and engagement we get from that but we know that there's still of uh variables that are moving but we anticipate to invest in safety stabilizing staff ratios we've talked about learning acceleration supporting the evolution of the strategic plan and knowing that that's also you know something that we're working towards to meeting the board established goes we saw some of the data from the map and like what does that mean as we're putting as we're all coming together and a lot of on the next slide a lot of the are already touched on and it really is to further like double click into an example of areas that we're investing it's not an exhaustive list but it's just really an opportunity to highlight some of the important work that's happening within this budget um because as we look at the budget there's 500 pages almost 500 pages and a lot of these details don't necessarily uh come to the surface and so i just thought it'd be great to highlight some of this if we go to the next slide as well it's also another example of how we're thinking about racial equity and social justice um in our investments and then really on also just like the strategic and operational aspects if we go to the next slide it's also thinking about what would hybrid reversal look like i really couldn't think of another phrase of saying it but if if we think about as we come back to the the likelihood of coming back to in personal learning there's just moving furniture there's just some very basic things that we need to support um in addition to just paying a higher utility bills
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because of ventilation measures so all of these variety of initiatives and actions are are going to continue to inform us in addition to as we continue to get information from our state and federal counterparts and you know especially feedback from our stakeholders team's going to be working hard over the next month to to get us to the finish line and and with that frame of mind around how do we ensure that the budget doesn't drive the strategy but how are we leveraging all of our funds to accomplish our strategy knowing that there's moving pieces there's specific place uh specific goals that we want to accomplish and with that being said i i'd like to turn it over to to senior director ledesma just to share some insights into the ongoing efforts to align um our work through the racial equity and social justice lenses as i think as in the spirit of continuous improvement it's it's how do we take this lens and consider it as a transformative quality improvement tool to the work so i'll turn it over to her on the next slide and she can share a little bit of insight thank you uh hello again uh so you know like uh chief uh delgadillo told us we really believe that our pps racial equity and social justice lens can be a transformative uh tool for us we think that we can it can be used to improve our planning our decision making and resource allocation which will ultimately lead us to a system that we think is more racially equitable and just um our hope is that both through through both frequent application and the documentation of that application our system will really develop a shared analysis and a culture of critical thinking and reflection so to continue to build on our rsj lens work i really i had the opportunity uh the delightful opportunity to work with dr brown who you heard from uh earlier and with uh chief delgadillo and the superintendent and the superintendent to really update our lens um so you're all very familiar with the lens that we've used um what we wanted to do is to think how we can update it to really align refine and add additional questions that are anchored to data and so some of these questions include well so so our chief of systems performance dr brown he he and his team created a dashboard and that dashboard looks at several key indicators around racial equity and so we are asking questions like how does the proposed action specifically close the disparity between student and teacher diversity how does the proposed action specifically address graduation for native students and so how does the how does the proposed action create opportunities to increase student achievement in math and english language arts we wanted to really ask some sharper questions and to really root that to data not only to get to surface answers and innovations around those answers but also to increase our diva literacy as a system so um what we did is that we wanted to um apply the lens to the proposed budget um as it was as we talked about earlier there were many times when we asked elements of these questions we did use this use this dashboard and so what we wanted to do is for the proposed budget itself is to show you the staff copying so i believe in your materials you received a copy of the staff the staff sort of filled out lens where we went through and really sort of reflected on the budget proposal as a whole and answered not only the six six prompts that you're familiar with but also the new prompts that are anchored to data um and so we're really looking forward to uh continue to find opportunities to apply the lens so we'll be working with the cbrc or uh with our community engagement efforts and then we also hope that we can work with you all in future board work sessions to think about how we collectively can use the lens and apply the lens document what we learned from that and continue to to refine our learning and our processes at pbs so some more to come we did want to kind of share that with you and really really excited about continuing this work with you and and now i'll add that as as we're taking the lens and processing it it it starts raising questions around not just the budget and outcomes but really then the granular consideration around what are some of the leading indicators and then the lagging indicators how does those
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then fall into the logic model that we want to eventually invest in to support the work around that and so it's it's it's really when we start thinking about being a data informed and and moving our investments to to support that it's it's forcing us to start addressing and answer those questions and uh definitely it's going to be exciting and and and more to come and i believe that is it um wait um so uh mr delgado i'm not sure what your title is you are chief head director superstar info no no no i haven't seen chief nonverto is perfectly fine if you can roll them ours i'm trying uh could you help us understand the next steps in the timeline as we talk about the budget because i know we do have some questions and we want to talk about when what are the steps going forward so that we are engaging with the public that the board members get their questions asked um if you could give us that sort of schedule that'd be great yeah absolutely uh so then our very next opportunity will be next tuesday we'll have opportunity to engage with the public as well and as a essentially a forum to go through and have a discussion around the budget have an additional in-depth discussion regarding um applying the racial equity and social justice lens and that would also be like really a week from today the next opportunity to continue to flesh out the conversation and then we've only scheduled two hours for that conversation given on you know tonight's board meeting we might want to think about um more than two hours but okay and then after that meeting next week i would like to join you in just saying that i would like to have more time because if next tuesday is more about a community forum i think there's a lot of just bigger questions and discussion that as a board we need we need to have before we dive into a community discussion it's the largest budget you know we've got a 200 million dollar increase in in the budget and it seems like that going straight to a community forum and skipping over any sort of larger board framing um would be premature so i i would hope that we'd have additional time since we're not going to have that tonight to have that discussion great i think that the next meeting is a work session correct is it with members of the public or is it just the board work session the next meeting uh as you the one a week from today yes that is a meeting with the public so it it and then thereafter we have another opportunity to present with the board [Music] okay well it's uh i can certainly we we can certainly follow up with the details of engagement and i think that it's from the perspective of of making sure we have the right conversations i think you know we can be nimble and and uh be able to accommodate and and work towards making sure we get to answers as many questions as as as possible you're right that we do need some time for the board members to be able to ask questions and have a conversation about this now now is not the time because we're all tired staff is tired um so i think what we'll do is get with roseanne and we will make sure that we have time for the board to ask questions ahead of that time with the public on the 27th does that satisfy julia well or um i i mean i agree that um it's actually would be beneficial for the public for us to have had that process before they have an opportunity to weigh in as well because they can hear you know our questions and what the answers have been and all of that rich discretion so i mean i i agree i think we should maybe repurpose that meeting to just a board work session and then reschedule a community town hall and to make sure that we have the chance to have a board work session before the community town hall whether that's changing the date or whether that's um having an additional meeting between now on the 27th and the other reason just i think it's important to front load this conversation is if we're being asked to go have conversations with legislators about increasing the the overall number from 9.1 to 9.3 we better be able to explain why we need more money when we're
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getting 200 million dollars more and then the other thing is when we're out in the community the federal money that has you know as much advertised that's been spent about four or five times over yes so you know being being really clear like how much it is how exactly even i mean we might have to unbraid it temporarily before we re-braid it back in but so that people can see where it is because there's just going to be so much scrutiny on the resources we have especially if we're saying like hey we're going to make three million dollars in cuts i just think we have to be absolutely crystal clear sort of where where all the money is in the different pots and then also how it impacts um like a full reopening next year and all the other topics because i think we can't just skip over that and approve a budget um sorry just jump in on this point but i i just wanted to make sure i was because i i assume we've already noticed the community session was that it was next week right yeah i would be very reluctant to unnotice that i i don't see any problem continuing board conversation in parallel with the community conversation but i think if we've already had had that i think that could be really beneficial to us i don't i don't i don't think there was going to be benefit of us having a conversation prior to that i think there is benefit of us having more conversation as a board but i think it can happen in parallel with the community conversation yeah we'll we'll follow up with board members and make sure that we have ample time to to ask the questions to have the conversation we need to have we'll add additional meetings is there anything further before we move off this in this moment i know the budget again we have a lot of work to do there's a lot of conversations this is the initial introduction of the budget we will meet next week we will add additional meetings we will have more public engagement um anything further before we move on to our um adjournment at this time yeah just really quickly oh i'm sorry sorry um no no i actually just wanted to you know kind of along the lines of what julia just said i actually feel like um uh the superintendent's proposed budget message um is really really clear about um revenues that are coming in and um and roberto i thought your your slides um also like show really really clear where the revenues are coming in and then we have a lot of bullets about great things where we're spending money but it's less easy to crosswalk dollar amounts and again maybe that is the braiding that's happening but sort of i think i'm just seconding what julia was saying i think to the extent we can we can show at a very high level i don't think we need to get into the leads on it but at a very high level um all you know where the money's coming from and then where we're spending it'll be super helpful in those public conversations so i i think we're hearing the the tenor of what um directors are hoping for in in sort of having a concise understanding i know alberto and i exchanged an example earlier today around you know just concretely listing revenue source and and the chunks of proposed investments um but as superintendents have been advocating and we shared with the governor on monday it's like these are restricted funds in many cases like you can't just come in and backfill your gaps and so if the current service level isn't funded at the level it would need to be then how do you have cuts on one hand and then take in hundreds of millions of dollars on the other so that's the quandary here and it is going to be hard for the public to understand that in some cases but we didn't make those rules right and so they're there for an intended purpose and that's exactly why i think um superintendent guerrero we need to have this like really sort of explicit narrative um because it is going to be complicated because i've now been in a couple community meetings where people like hey we can just pay for this with that federal money and you know they're talking about an ongoing program and federal monies one time and i do think also the state legislature and our federal delegation is going to be like hey we delivered this money for you now tell us where where it went um and so i think there's great strategies um and i like all the braiding because it shows that we're integrating and aligning our resources it's just we're gonna have to be very transparent on where that is what works and what doesn't so if because i can't imagine trying to have a conversation right now with the community about like there's gonna be something cut in this budget because they they just won't believe it um this is the tradition in oregon that we have where we get extra money for from something like the student success act or this um cares act and then the legislature cuts the school fund or doesn't increase it and so thinking we have all this extra money but because it's for specific things we actually do end up making cuts and so i'd like to see us in oregon really continue to um fund our schools
05h 40m 00s
fully and and that'll be further conversation um so we will our next meeting is going to be may 4th to discuss the budget we will get with directors as soon as possible to set up some more time for conversation i encourage directors to put their questions in writing to our budget team so that they are well prepared to answer our questions um because this is deep and important work that we're doing is there anything else before we move to adjournment scott quick question uh when will a volume 1 be posted for the public is that that posted i believe it is i i took a quick look at the budget page where it has annual budgets and i couldn't find it um if there's there's a link handy and then and then uh volume two is still not quite ready for prime time is that correct volume 2 should be it is ready uh there is a digital version um and i'll circle back with the team on uh whether or not they got uh posted to the website but they are both available or at least fit the two volumes and superintendent guerrero is this budget that's been proposed is that based on the premise that in august when school starts we'd be opening full time in person that's the assumption that's our goal all right i want to thank everybody for your time tonight i know it's a very late meeting and especially to cfo del gadio thank you so much i know you're working on moving here is what i understand but for now you're still uh on the east coast and so 2 a.m congratulations 2am congratulations i think i just froze there sorry everyone all right is there anything further before we adjourn uh our meeting tonight all right as you have all heard our next gathering will be on may 4th as we do some work on the budget and our next regular school board meeting will be on may 11th please board directors send your items for agenda setting to roseanne by 11am so that we can consider that in our morning agenda setting meeting thank you everyone and good night

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)

2021-04-27 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

Materials

Minutes

Transcripts

Event 1: Portland Public Schools Board of Education's Regular Meeting - 4/27/21 - Meeting starts 33:50

Sources