2021-05-11 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2021-05-11
Time	18:00:00
Venue	Virtual/Online
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: PS Board of Education Regular Meeting - 5/11/2021

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so we were meeting there and ran a little long but this board meeting of the board of education for may 11 2021 is called to order for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted on the pbs website under the board and meetings tabs this meeting is being streamed live on pbs tv services website and on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website for replay time ahead of us tonight on our agenda we have a great deal of work much of it exciting as we look to fall and as we look at our financial health as we celebrate our amazing staff there's a lot going on but we would like to begin with a resolution to recognize may 2021 as national mental health awareness month um superintendent guerrero would you like to introduce this first item thank you chair yes um would be very happy to have chief martineck of student support services and members of our team tell you a little bit about why this is an important month brenda thank you uh directors and superintendent uh in our community that's watching i want to thank you very much for honoring may as mental health awareness month i thought it would be best to hear from james loveland who is our senior director for student success and health department tonight he's really been leading the charge during the pandemic uh around the sia dollars of increasing counselors and social workers and so i will turn uh the next few minutes over to him thank you so much brenda good evening directors superintendent guerrero and the pbs community i want to thank the school board and the superintendent for recognizing me as mental health awareness month as as all educators know every every month is mental health awareness month in particular over the last year as our school district has strived to continuously reimagine and provide services to students and families in innovative ways many departments across bps are engaged in uplifting the mental wellness of our students as the senior director of the department of student success and health i'm honored to share a brief overview of the amazing work that our department in collaboration with many across the district and city do to help support and uplift the overall wellness of students in the district the department of student success and health coordinates and supports a wide range of services that include our critical and valued relationships with community partners supporting the work of the district's amazing counselors social workers and comprehensive school psychologists provision of culturally specific mental health and substance use supports title ix resources and services supporting pps communities with crisis recovery ensuring mental and sharing mental health and substance use resources on numerous platforms for students families and staff including the newly developed youth resource app that's available on apple and android for apple android users you can download it now everyone has experienced the last year differently and many people in our community continue to experience the impact of physical economic mental spiritual and racial stressors it's important for us to acknowledge that our communities of color have been disproportionately negatively impacted by system inequities during the global pandemic and these are often the same communities that are have already been disproportionately impacted by structural violence and systemic oppression we acknowledge that the continuing community violence in portland is disproportionately impacting current and former portland public schools families and students of color in an effort to intentionally respond and provide space for students of color to feel seen heard and valued pps staff host weekly district-wide crisis recovery groups for black students as well as native wellness groups student success and health as well as other departments have established or maintained contracts with culturally specific community-based organizations focused on mental wellness and identity celebration including but not limited to ground girl rise coalition of black men nara and horizon counseling amongst others over the next several weeks we will be sharing resources and information that will highlight partnerships and this course that pps offers for students and families in support of mental illness this will include information about where students and families and staff can find connect to a wide range of mental health and substance use supports an update on the real initiative and links and materials for our educators social workers psychologists and counselors to support and uplift students and families as summer approaches with that i turn it to chair lowry thank you so much mr loveland and chief martin nick directors and do i have a motion and
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second to adopt resolution 63302 resolution to recognize may 2021 as national mental health awareness month so moved second director brim edwards moves and director to pass seconds the adoption of resolution 6302 is there any board discussion just thank you um mr loveland for going through all the specific work that pps has underway right now and just the incredible adaptation in this last year and the great partnerships and um you know we hear wonderful things from our school communities and from our kids about just the accessibility of the supports so um thank you all it's really hard work thank you also for recognizing our epidemic of violence right now and all the ways that you guys have been working with all of our different partners in the community to support our our kids and families who are really suffering and grieving i think this is important work at any time but i think especially during this pandemic we know that um uh mental health awareness is is really very vital dr medwards did you have something to add you know um i think both you and director constance have covered what i was going to say just thank you um to the all the teams in the schools in the central office who are supporting our our kids and our families ms bradshaw is there any public comment no the board will now vote on resolution 6302 resolution to recognize may 2021 as national mental health awareness month all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 6302 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative shu voting yes all right thank you all we turn now to our board consent agenda board members if there are any items you would like to pull we will set those aside for discussion and vote after we vote on the rest of the consent agenda but first of all ms bradshaw are there any changes to the consent agenda no board members are there any items you would like to pull from the consent agenda are you asking just for a separate vote or we can still have a discussion uh let's pull anything we want to have a discussion on if we want to make if it's just a question that's fine but if we want to amend language then we should probably pull the item yeah no no amendment of language okay so you just have a question on something julia no it's a statement okay a request but anyone else want to pull or amend language structure to pass did you want to pull in a min language or are you fine with how things are i'm fine with how things are thanks okay great okay uh all right um so moved do i have a second oh okay so director bailey and director scott were ahead of me here and they uh director bailey moved and director scott seconded the adoption of the consent agenda is there any board discussion on the consent agenda yes go ahead julia um i had a um a couple things first i wanted to thank dr byrd for the responsiveness on a question i had around the uva contract and the updated goals and language that was put into the scope so thank you for that and then i um let's see on the ethics statement um first of all thank you uh chair lowry for being the driving force before getting all these uh items before us it seems um unceremonial to do it in the consent agenda with all the work that happened um so thank you in on the ethics statement that we're going to sign i have a request that when we we have the training so we're going to be having training and then signing an ethics and conflicts of interest form and it references that we're also pledging to adhere to statutory requirements and district policy is that when we do that for uh returning and also new board numbers that we have sort of those policies earmarked so we know what that's
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specifically is referencing and then um i have a just brief statement i'm also going to read and also submit for the record around the communications protocols that's okay so in the the document titled portland public schools board and superintendent staff expectations and operating protocols there's covers a whole host of different topics one of them is communication and there is some expectations and agreements about how we're going to communicate with each other and i just want to the record and again i'll submit this for the record but just say that the board protocols contemplate standard and routine board communications about district operations and decision making there are infrequent instances however when following the guidelines could be contrary to the school district's legal or fiscal interest or contrary to the advice of the district council in my time on the board i've faced these unique situations prior to this prior to this current administration including when a senior staff member for instance asserted legal claims against the district or when serious allegations of misconduct against senior district leader were made in those situations i expect i would not follow these protocols when it is not in the district's legal or fiscal interests thank you director bib edwards um i know that this whole um the entire board has worked very hard to look at our self-evaluation which we did uh last summer and work towards how do we follow best practices how do we shift culture to to be the school board that will help ensure the success of our board goals which center um underserved students and specifically black and native students and so these pieces of adult outcomes of adult business really do impact our students so thank you all for all the time and work you've done with our ethics statement with our board leadership election process and with our protocols director moore did you have some yes um i just wanted to make a brief statement about the ethics statement um i admit to being a little disappointed that the statement we ended up with essentially just reiterates what is in the state statute and um it is disappointing to me because i think the the state ethical statute is by many measures a pretty minimalist standard and i had hoped that we would uh we would aspire to a higher a higher standard than than sort of minimal and um i had offered some language around specific issues that i think are if not common at least not unknown among volunteer boards where most of the members have um professional positions um and there can be some overlap between the volunteer work on this board and a member's professional life and i think i think it would be helpful to have um in writing some uh some expectations around how any potential conflicts or even perceived conflicts could be managed in a way that um you know preserves the integrity of the board process and um and also protects members from any uh any public perception that things might not might be awry so i had hoped that we could include some language in that um i was i was overruled in that so i i am disappointed but um i i fully expect um that um this board will continue to maintain the highest standards of integrity and ethical behavior uh going forward thank you uh since you're not running for re-election uh director moore maybe now in your spare time you can work with the state of oregon to shore up their ethics standards um so that we can all aspire to the the high uh ethical standards which which you would have us govern ourselves i'm sure there's great appetite for that so thank you any further discussion on the consent agenda yeah i had a couple things um one is um really appreciate this work on the communications protocols uh we've been talking about that for a good three years i think we've made
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tremendous strides in our government governance since 2018 so uh and that was something that was really impo important to me um so thank you for carrying on that commitment uh rita and your tenure as chair and haley and really important um one question one i guess comment that i had about the consent agenda was that i was um i was disappointed in the the transportation contract um it's not fair to for me to vote against it because i hadn't really looked at the language of the rfp and it's gone through a very complicated process with the rfp but um i i was looking really closely at the guidelines around the procurement of the buses and i don't think we adequately connected that to our climate justice work and there's there's just one simple clause in there that says that um you know the the pps believes in mitigating the effects of climate change and so if the contractor has some suggestions about substitutions we welcome that well that's very different than stating our values much more clearly in the in the rfp itself and so you know i felt myself for not being on top of that and and trying to have some influence on the development of the rfp and to really talk to staff and leadership about that before um but to the extent that we can influence that um once these were committed to these contracts i'd really like to see it um these are propane powered buses that they'll be procuring with our money which you know they go to great pains to say is a lot better than diesel well diesel's not our standard that we should be comparing it to and we have i think one electric vehicle paid for through um or one electric bus paid for through pge but i'd like to see us get creative and figure out whether we can find more grants or more partnerships that enable us to really change the constitution of that fleet but with the passage of this we lose our leverage on that which i think is unfortunate and i'm disappointed um but i hope that we'll we'll keep looking at it and keep communicating to our contracted partner and partners that this is a value that we we take very seriously and that we care a lot about so i have some misgivings but um i will support this consent agenda with that item um i i want to piggyback on that i appreciate your um you know wanting to align our values with our operational what we're doing operationally and um to the extent that we can we probably won't be looking at this contract for another eight years or ten years i think it is um we try to move to electric as much as possible and also ask the require the contractor to maybe they already do this but to look at routes um that are that are that are gas saving or you know that are more efficient routes to the extent that they can to mitigate climate change i see that some of our staff has teleported in um deputy hurts um or ms wesling did you want to speak to this sure i'd be happy to and i i do hear the board interest and i do recognize that we have um policy that's being um worked through in in our um board uh policy committee and so i will take this back to staff and we'll re-examine what it the possibilities are but i'm hearing general support in looking at alternative energy for our bus fleet so and and really aligning to the policy that we're um working through in the policy committee so i will take that back to staff so thank you for the comment um director constance appreciate that claire all right thank you uh mr is there any public comment on the consent agenda no all right the board will now vote on resolutions 6291 and 6296 through 6300 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 okay i'm gonna do a little happy dance um because when i uh decided to
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uh try to be chair um my goal was to do this work that we just passed and so i feel like um when you set out to do something over the course of the year and you you help make it happen it's worth a dance so if anyone wants to join me in dancing i'm dancing badly michelle would dance well but i'm happy dancing badly all right we turn now to really what is the heart of our work our student and public comment before we begin i would like to review our guidelines for comment we as a board thank the community for taking time to attend this meeting and provide your comments public input informs our work and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns and our role as a and responsibility as a board is to actively listen know that some of our members do take notes while you're speaking our board office may follow up on board related issues raised during public testimony we request that complaints about individual employees be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter if you have additional materials or items you would like to provide to the board or superintendent we ask that you email them to publiccomment pps.net please make sure you begin your comment that 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 does mean that it is time to conclude your comments ms bradshaw who do we have signed up for student and public comment this evening hi we have eric happel hello hi thank you uh my name is eric cappell it's spelled h-a-p-p-e-l i have three daughters in pps 11th grade 9th grade and 6th grade i've been working with many others through ed 300 as an advocate for pbs children's return to school based on data i'm here today to voice my support for five full days of school and co-curricular activities for our pps students as soon as possible and certainly by the opening of fall first i want to thank all of the teachers and administration who have done hard work and done their best through this challenging year this year online only in hype then hybrid has left us with significant learning gaps and mental and physical challenges that will take years to truly understand today given time constraints i'm focused on the learning gaps after watching the last board meeting i was compelled to speak up as i don't want there to be any mistake the map testing data shared indicated massive math learning losses for all ages presented third through eighth grade with sixth grade indicating forty percent of prior learning it indicated reading loss for third to fifth grade relative to prior years there was some hope for sixth to eighth grade may have improved but his doctor as director bailey pointed out this may have been due to statistical choices made and may may or may not actually be the case it troubled me that pps presented this story as optimistic in the discussion that ensued focused exclusively on the one potentially positive reading scenario for a subset of students the math laws for example i did not hear once in the conversation this data is repeated nationwide and similarly for other grades not discussed national data has shown significant learning losses for example reading loss for k through second grade is also quite bad and much worse for those that were already struggling we have no reason to believe that pps would be any different most of this data is already indicating learning loss for students and in a survey shared by u.s secretary of education cardona 97 of teachers surveyed indicated learning loss for students as the hybrid again thank you for the effort but this is not living up to what it can be for middle or high schools in particular i surveyed my daughters and others and in my daughters 42 percent of their class time has been study hall for that they show up they turn on their computer they sit silently at their desk and do work and all three of my daughters have said that attendance has dropped off since week one i don't mean and want to harp on the bad news but as we think about fall we need to be eyes wide open and not bargain with ourselves that the outcome this year with cdl and hybrid are okay they are not again while many teachers did their best cdl and hybrid is stacked against them by fall with all adults and students 12 years and older have had a choice to vaccinate and very clear data that covet affects the youngest learners minimally there's no reason to deliver anything short of five full days of school in person with co-curricular activities thank you and i appreciate your time
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thank you so much thank you thanks we have mark stefan hi my name is mark stefan it's spelled s-t-e-p-h-a-n and my pronouns are he him thank you to the members of the board and to superintendent guerrero for listening to my comments i read the other day there is a risk of full in-person instruction not occurring in the fall this is due to the three-foot distance rssl guidance which would require the district to rent additional space and in particular hire more teachers and these expenses are more than the district can pay for this information left me frustrated and discouraged at first but now i'm resolved to work to keep this from happening all kids should have the opportunity to be back in school my daughter needs to be back in school their mental health depends on it it seems that there are three options first advocate the state the state drop the three-foot rule second find more money third do a combination of both and be creative in finding a solution i have no doubt pps has worked incredibly hard in the last year but thinking creatively of how we get kids back in school for five full days is now in order the kids deserve this again to be clear three options first drop the three foot of distance second find money third do both and think creatively these sort of problems are never as simple either or but the outcome that matters is full-time in-person instruction thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for your time tonight i did just want to say that in in my estimation the uh newspaper article misrepresented some of uh the way the budget is being rolled out and that um later on tonight you'll hear about our full rollout plans for fall and in fact hear a resolution that the board is um going to vote on next board meeting around that full-time reopening so just stay tuned for that but thank you for your comments tonight ms bracha do we have further public comment this evening yes we have iselle watson thank you very much sorry about that it took a while to get off of the uh to move over to a panel my name is watson former employee of portland public schools my name is spelled e z like zebra e l l again echo zulu echo lima lima last name watson whiskey alpha tango sierra oscar november again i am a former public schools employee of about seven and a half years and i am here to make comments and suggest some updates to our vision and some updates to the evaluation metrics that are used for our current superintendent and the administration that he represents i would like to start with a a quote from our superintendent uh whose name we know guadalupe guadalupe the name guadalupe could be translated or mean wolf in the valley we'll come back to that so the quote we cannot remain neutral about racism we are ready to stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with our community in the fight against anti-black racism i want to tie my feedback to the organizational climate culture and communications plan that's outlined in the racial equity and justice social the racial equity and social justice lens and plan that's been communicated and i want to create some contracts so we're going to start with that statement about remaining neutral about racism and standing shoulders shoulder to shoulder with us in the fight against anti-black racism i want to highlight some things from the culture one in the culture standing shoulder to shoulder with us it feels like you're standing with your back to us let me give you a few examples of things that have happened that i've witnessed that to me speak to the culture in which you have created with your administration this is guadalupe and everyone that is represented here in the board because you guys are complicit in this let me go ahead and get to it when you send black men me to the basement and when you send
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another black man uh the the person who proceeded dr russell brown please make sure this enters the public record when you when you send us to the basement that sends a message especially when people are hired to replace us who do not work in the basement let me ask you does this sound like someone who is remaining is not remaining neutral does this sound like someone that is standing shoulder to shoulder with us in the fight against racism anti-black racist have you noticed the number of black staff members who have recently under your tutelage and leadership left the district has there been any outreach to understand why part of your organizational climate culture and communications plan says individuals throughout the organization are self-aware and proactively take personal responsibility to learn grow and adapt to support racial equity and social justice does that sound like the does that sound like being self-aware let me also talk to a cultural problem ali i see you let me talk oh is that the sound that's the sound that uh three minutes have passed so i'm going to ask you to conclude your comments with about 10 seconds um and then we'll move on to our next commenter okay i'll conclude my comments here there have been lots of things that have occurred that the superintendent has been in charge of and you guys have been asleep at the wheel for there have been a mass exodus of black employees and i would like to go ahead and go on record to say that i believe you all are outwardly racist and i think that that needs to be entered into into comment but i would also and i know i know i got to go so i'm going to wrap it i'm going to wrap it up i want to offer solutions there needs to be in the evaluation metric for the superintendent some measure of self-awareness how has he how has he improved and how has he followed the professional development plan relative to anti-black sentiments that everyone has expressed and i apologize i know that i only have three minutes and i believe that i really need to continue this yeah i understand let me finish and also let's that i sent this comment and there's an email that i would like entered into the public record that you receive haley that you're meeting about i want it entered into the public record and i want to enter into public record that jonathan garcia reached out to me today two weeks after sending the message he didn't respond immediately until until i made contact with several board members and i have yet to hear a response from the superintendent that concludes my comment thank you very much and i know it uh mr watson that you have met with several board members and you and i in fact have a meeting uh on the 25th to to talk more and to hear some of them i wanted to wait until the end of june to have yes which i wanted to wait until the end of june to have because uh i'm very busy and i also know that the problems of um that you're addressing are things that have been going on for a long time and continue to persist but thank you for your time tonight director did you have something you wanted to say i just wanted to yeah i i hear you and um my heart is breaking a little bit uh just hearing i did get your your email as well um i think it's serious enough that we need to address it and and we here on this caller the leaders um of of the organization and there is no one else up above us so i i take your concerns really seriously um you've described a culture that's not welcoming and is actually harmful and i just want to thank you for for for for taking the courage to step up and we'll promise you that i i'm very concerned about this and will do what i can to address any cultural changes that we can um implement i appreciate that i'd love to see it in the future we're going to move on to our next public commenter thank you for your time i just want to join michelle in her comments next week i want to excuse me i i want to just use this as a teaching moment for everyone um i'm not going to point any fingers there's nobody we're all we're all in this together this is a teaching moment and that it is very difficult to hear um it's difficult to talk about race um if we're going to make change we have to get really comfortable being uncomfortable um if we want to make change i i personally want to see change but i'm just putting that call out that we need to um build our muscles up around being uncomfortable and having difficult conversations and um
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this is one of those times where we we should not have cut off the commenter um i understand we need to keep an agenda but we do offer a professional courtesy to others um when things are important enough to listen to thanks i think that this is one of those moments where we also this is a in some ways a personnel issue and that um this is part of a larger conversation that while it's very important to have these comments on the public record and we need to be above board this is a larger conversation that will continue to happen um and that this this venue might not be the time to have that in this moment but i know that many of us are going to continue to work with mr watson to speak with the superintendent and and to be uncomfortable as we talk about race and how um we are continuing to focus on the the goals we have for pps to be um the employer of choice an employer that's known for equity the employer that's known for our culture that um values all employees we're going to go ahead excuse me i'm going to interrupt one more time this this actually is not a personnel issue we are barred from addressing personal issues um for many reasons um this is not a personal issue this is not i think a former employee it's a cultural issue so i just want to make that clear chair or general counsel i i heard commentary directed at me i didn't realize we were intending to have a dialogue about this which i welcome um especially if we're going to hear different perspectives all right um i think we're miss mcgarrett is here and ready to speak so um are we ready to pick up her public testimony are we ready to listen fully to her is this something we need to discuss further the only thing i would chime in is to say that we do have a metric in our superintendents evaluation around the diversification of our uh leadership in the central office and we know we've made incredible strides there so um we will take into consideration you know what mr watson what you're bringing forward and the people who have left as well as the people who have come in and examine issues of culture we we have areas of our superintendence evaluation process and template that go to the heart of those really important matters that mr mr watson has raised we will have an opportunity to talk about that i want to make sure that we have an opportunity to talk about it in the context of anti-blackness because i think mr watson was addressing a very specific issue relating to a very specific group of employees and i don't i don't think our metric in the that we have fully captures that it doesn't and i i want to add that um i you know you know i work for the city of portland and there was just a study commissioned that um we're able to hire um black people we're not able to retain black people we've had a 48 loss of black employees in the last three years uh almost 50 in the last three years and we all know that people don't leave great great jobs so i just wanted to put that out there that this is not an uncommon thing i think we're paying more attention to it now all right are we ready to hear from ms mccare turlow before she goes we have one person who i do not see in the attendees who might be in there under a different name so i just wanted to let them know that if they check their name and can either email me and let me know what to look for or to change their name so i know to find them for the next person okay did you want to say your name who we're expecting um david sultan okay so david sultan if you're out there in the ether somewhere let us know um so that we can um get you teleported over uh after miss mcgare speaks sorry for the delay there um i appreciate you sharing your public comment tonight oh thank you it's uh and it's hard to come after such an important topic and turn back to what we were talking about before so i don't need to minimize it it's obviously super important my name is kim mcgare mcgair i'm the parent of a pps 9th grader unsurprisingly to you i'm here to talk about reopening schools in the fall i'm encouraged to see the board resolution on the agenda for a full reopening but i also watched the budget committee meeting last week and i saw the superintendent and senior staff disagree about whether the budget that's being presented to you allows for a full reopening in the fall with all due respect that level of confusion at this point in the pandemic with what our kids have been through isn't acceptable our children have sacrificed 15 months their education
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their social and emotional learning their mental health we have a crisis on our hands we have a potential enrollment crisis if pps doesn't does not deliver full-time school in the fall and confidently message that to families right now because that's when decisions are being made the washington post had an article today about families moving out of state to go to school three of the five families were from portland this is imagine that families feel like they have to move out of state so their kids can go to school pps stumbled badly this spring and offered a reopening that gave our students a small fraction of what students in other districts received i hear a lot of talk about equity in these meetings and that's important but equity extends beyond pps there is nothing equitable about the in-person school offered to pps students as compared to their peers is particularly in the western and southern suburban districts but here we are and all we can do is look forward to fall the budget committee dialogue last week was concerning i understand the state is making this difficult for districts and i truly and deeply sympathize with you and you know that we are working as hard as we can to get rssl changed or eliminated but we are more than a year into this we know the state's going to make things overly complicated and difficult which you cannot do is sit on your hands and blame the state you must plan to open schools in the fall under today's rssl guidance if it gets better in july great but you must start planning for that right now so what classrooms can't do three feet this is a simple math problem since you've already figured it out for six feet do your occupancy multiply by four you have classrooms that can't take all the students start looking for space start looking outside start looking for staff it must be done now lunch is challenging with rssl we get it start looking at alternatives now you have hallways you have auditoriums you have outside restaurants got tents in weeks you have months to work on this and you have a boatload sorry for the phrasing of money and your federal money i know you want to use it for counselors and social workers and that's admirable but the very first thing you have to do is job one and that's get the schools open use the money to do that cdl there's really no public health reason for cdl but i understand you're going to have demands for it figure out how many families that is now if it's not too many there is an existing oregon charter academy and other online options that work better than anything pps can design at this short notice put those kids in that if that doesn't work then start planning for a full pps cdl but it cannot be school by school you can't manage that you don't have bandwidth there are many things that need to be done to get schools open fully in the fall and i'm just imploring you to do them now we this is for 14 months those days are over there are no more excuses to use an analogy you all must land the plane you must land the plane on time there is no room for error thank you thank you thank you thank you and i do not see um david so that concludes who we have signed up um i as we conclude our public comment i want to thank everyone for their time um i know that um as we talk about issues of races director depastas that um you know we we are uncomfortable and that these are difficult conversations we have i think that you know one of the things i've seen happening in pps is a lot of changes as we really do try to center equity and center our black and native students and i i feel a little bit like there was a little bit of um explicitly calling superintendent guerrero racist and i as a white woman i can claim that i am in fact racist that that i live and breathe in a white supremacist society and so that it is innate in me but what i would say about superintendent guerrero is the leadership that he has given the work that i know he has done personally um on his own biases um those comments for me were really painful and i know that that there is a lived experience of mr watson and other black folks in our school district but i i really feel like the work that superintendent has done and the ways that he has showed up for pbs kids i just want to be very clear in naming how much he has done for equity how much he has done for our res j work in this district um to just i feel like that needs to be spoken into this space after hearing those comments and again not to dismiss mr watson's lived experience but i think that this is as we continue to um be a complex organization that is attentive to the ways that white supremacy shows up in all of us not just white people it's a part of our toxic culture that we also um name the work that is being done and the places of growth so i just wanted to add that
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and to thank superintendent guerrero for standing in those places of discomfort regularly um we turn now um to the next piece of our agenda which is our student representatives report um and i know that nathaniel that one of the things the district student council has also been talking about is the ways that white supremacy shows up and how your dsc can be more diverse and more representative of all of our students um so would you like to share your report now at this time uh yes i would thank you so today is one week from the may 18th special election which will decide the composition of our next board to those of you who are permitted to vote please remember to submit your ballots by the 18th recently the district student council has been working to endorse candidates from zones four five and six for this election the dsc conducted interviews with all of the eight filed candidates uh in which they were asked such questions as what is your vision for the role and scope of district-wide student government and how will you advance racial equity and social social justice in bps the district student council ultimately voted to endorse green for zone four gary hollins for zone five and the director julia brim edwards for zone six i'll also note that this is our last meeting prior to the pbs student summit students if you are interested in attending and have not already rsvp'd go to the summit poster in the google form linked in the google folder linked on the dsc's web page which can be found at pps.net page 1796. board members and senior staff please keep an eye out for the zoom link invites which should be coming soon once again the summit is from 10 to 2 on the 22nd finally i would also like to acknowledge that in addition to national mental health awareness month may is asian american and pacific islander heritage month and i extend my good wishes to everyone celebrating it uh thank you and that concludes my reward thank you student representation for your report did you have uh any news you wanted to share with us about next year or is that something you're keeping close to the vest for now um i'm keeping it for now but i should share it yes hopefully so uh celebrate with nathaniel like good news coming for his future and he will share that individually with us all uh superintendent guerrero would you like to provide your report now yes thank you chair good evening directors we have a few slides for you when i started this to those at home listening to us live stream um i appreciate that we've had some uh full agendas uh uh and i'm gonna share some thoughts uh on some of these items as we get to them including on our fall reopening update which is now a regular part of our regular meeting agendas at our last regular board meeting i reiterated our intention to fully open schools for in-person instruction this coming fall and as the district's chief executive when asked if we are ready to do that i want to make sure that we've done the analysis and i take seriously that we've considered all of the variables that we have a viable contingency plan that we're ready to implement so i can confidently affirm yes we're ready to directors so this evening directors you're going to hear about this related work that has been ongoing tonight immediately following this report as we work towards achieving this state of readiness not just for the full array of summer programming that is underway but also for the opening of the new school year on campus this fall in fact you're going to notice a new theme in logo pps together again but first per tradition uh we have a couple new members joining team pps we're excited about that i want to introduce you to unfortunately i'm only going to have one now to introduce you to so i'm excited to welcome kate wilkinson to our legal team as our new assistant general counsel kate will be able to tell you more about her formal legal experience both in and out of k-12 but her dedication to public education including pps was particularly compelling to us for
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instance kate served on the pps audit committee as a volunteer community member until resigning recently so she could serve and support pps in a different way as a leadership level staff member for the district kate also serves as a volunteer on the boards of sei one of our culturally specific partners and classroom law project and is committed to the work that we and our community partners do together to serve our students kate received her bachelor's degree from colorado college and graduated from the university of wisconsin law school so kate is is joining us here this evening and i i'd like to invite her to say a few words kate am i on thank you superintendent good evening directors it's a pleasure to join you and to be celebrating my second week with pps as the superintendent briefly stated i come with 21 years of legal practice i spent 10 years in private practice and then the next 11 in-house including several years in salem with oregon school boards association most recently i was a leader of lawyers at standard insurance company and i'm just thrilled to be back in the education world and look forward to working with all of you so thank you thank you happy birthday welcome welcome welcome although wish you from the audit committee welcome to portland public schools kate we're glad to have you in this important leadership role um for the rest of my report this evening i wanted to mix it up a little bit we've been saying as we've said for many months now that despite being rather preoccupied and consumed by dealing with the disruption of the pandemic and preparing our schools through the transitions and stages of cdl limited in person and then hybrid and now on towards summer planning and a full reopening in the fall even with all of this related work we've been concurrently maintaining a focus on uh many of our key district priorities so just as we continue to bring aboard new and talented leaders uh and a diverse new class of appointed uh school administrators we continue to move towards realizing our vision we continue to keep our eye on the prize so a number of exciting strands of work are ongoing across our organization and i thought our directors and our community would be interested in hearing just a few quick updates on a few of these important work strands so i've invited three of our dynamic leaders to join me for my report this evening first i'd like to welcome dr kimberly mateer who will share with directors a quick update about our professional learning and leadership career pathway work here at the district dr matthir good evening chair lowry and vice chair bailey directors superintendent guerrero and i think representative student representative shu uh good to see all of you this evening um excited to be able to present an update about the work of the career lattice which is really about building uh the capacity of our system to meet on our pps reimagined vision we're really focused on not just the office of professional learning and leadership but we work in tight partnership with human resources and other key departments around designing and enacting several key strategies across a continuum of support along an employee's career pathway we're really focused around uh strategies that we'll get at addressing our persisting disparities disproportionality and predictability and outcome that we see in our system um and so some of those key strategies you'll see listed here our first one that i wanted to talk about or introduce is really leveraging learning priorities across our partnership so we work um we've been working in deep partnership with our pre-service or our higher ed institutions and really looking at redesigning what's happening in pre-service learning before they enter into our system to make sure they have a strong foundation in the knowledge skills and dispositions that we need them to have to meet our pps reimagine goals with our educator essentials um and so we've been doing that
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since 2018 it's been a lot of long hours and we're just very grateful that our partners have dedicated a lot of time and faculty doing that work with us the second strategy that we are focused on is really explicitly naming oftentimes you know people say well i don't know what to do there's no silver bullet but we have actually lots of answers in the research and we have evidence of things that work and so it's about making those strategies explicit and we are doing so in our programs such as our aspiring principal program that we have very um proud of the assistant principals in that program that have implemented change projects within their respective school sites to address issues of disparity disproportionality and predictability and outcomes and so we'll be hearing some presentations from them later on this month about what they're learning and then our third strategy our third key strategy is really about what's um uh defining the knowledge skills and dispositions so that we're really clear so that they'll be visible and measurable we know that in the leadership research through the wallace foundation that when our systems use standards to drive um development for our leaders and our educators that we actually can have the best outcomes or better outcomes in addressing the problems of practice that we face and so we are using standards to really design all of our programming and defining explicitly the success criteria that um will help all of us our leaders meet the goals of our vision as i said earlier and then to make that um more explicit and visible to our stakeholders because i do believe in accountability we are building an adult learning dashboard um so a lot of times we want to focus on what uh what's happening with students but we know that our adults are the largest influencers over student outcomes and so we really want to be looking at where are the gaps in the adult knowledge and the adult skills and then provides targeted supports to build that capacity so that we can begin to work on uh shifting our culture as well as our practices to make sure that our students will all be successful and especially our black and native students so that's a little bit about the work that we're doing in our office in partnership with many departments um regional and state partners thank you thank you dr here there's been a thank you for your dedicated leadership uh you know what we've been dealing with pandemic dr matier and team have been uh very diligent about building out our leadership development uh supporting uh our employees and making sure those career pathways are built in long-term sustainable ways with especially our partners and higher ed institutions across the state so thank you dr matier uh next second mini update i want to welcome dr emily glasgow to share some of the exciting work that's happening in early education uh pictured here is uh a young scholar i met and his father who had the pleasure of meeting on the first day of in-person learning in april at sacajawea head start and like a good early learner the newest pps student figured out his mask and school arrival routine in no time at all and in fact there's a great deal of learning happening with our youngest scholars but here to tell you a little bit more is director emily glasgow thank you superintendent and thank you for having me here tonight to update you a little bit on the work of the early learners department i'm always excited to talk about the work we're doing i couldn't be more proud of the progress we've made over the past couple of years um our p3 advisory council which is now a robust group of over 50 building administrators central office leaders teachers secretaries counselors and community partners has been meeting monthly for almost two years and working really hard to backward map the graduate portrait to a set of early learner core values that we are now trying to operationalize and roll out into the world so i wanted to just share some of the things that that team has been working on um hopefully you've seen some evidence over the last few months and will continue over the next few months to see evidence of our reimagined connect to kindergarten strategies we have totally reworked the way we think about the transition to
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kindergarten we know that it is not always as smooth of a bridge and as warm of a handoff as we want it to be for our families and students so we've been really working with our school teams to make sure that there is a warm connective kind of receiving body in our kindergarten teams all of our kindergarten schools now have kindergarten websites attached to their school websites and they've all created connective and welcoming school videos um and they've also reworked their connect events that they have this spring and this summer to be less of an informational session and more of a relationship building session and community building session um you'll see hopefully around the community in the next couple months that all of our incoming kindergarten students this year will receive an on my way to k kindergarten t-shirt you can see an image on this slide we're really working to build pride in the transition into pps in kindergarten we think it's something that we should be celebrating as we bring new families into our pipeline you'll also see lawn signs and you can see that image here on most of our school grounds as you start to drive around the city and that's to make kindergarten registration easier for our families they can actually just use a qr code to register right from those lawn signs at pretty much any pps school in the city um we are also this summer expanding our early kindergarten transition summer program typically that's a program for incoming kindergarten families this year we're expanding to include first grade families at our target school communities we know that our current kindergarten families may not have had that warm welcome that we want them to have and so we want to make sure they get it this next time around as they transition to first grade um similarly in the fall we're going to have a new ramp up for our kindergarten and first grade families which looks like a staggered start on our calendars thank you for approving that um what that means is that all of our kindergarten families prior to the first day of school next year will get a one-on-one connective conversation with their teacher and all of our kindergarten students will get sort of a practice warm-up day before the real day so they can get acclimated in a smaller group setting to the routines of school and the staff of school before they're expected to do a full day in the larger group and our first grade students will have sort of a modified version of that in the fall as well i also wanted to highlight that we have a a huge push for pre-k enrollment underway uh in addition to our kindergarten registration season right now due to limited enrollment this year because of the pandemic we actually have close to 900 seats in our pps head start and pre-k programs for three and four-year-olds registration is open now um applications are on the early learners department website and the head start website and we want to just make sure the community is really aware we've got a lot of wonderful seats available for three and four-year-olds for full-day pre-k programming and then the last thing i wanted to highlight is that in addition to working on bringing families in in a different way and supporting the kindergarten transition our p3 advisory council in our department is also really leaning into starting to reimagine the kindergarten program itself because we're working on trying to more seamlessly align what happens in pre-k and what happens in kindergarten and make sure that kindergarten is really um an academically rigorous place but also a developmentally and culturally appropriate place for our five and six-year-olds and their families and so we have nine schools that went through an application process that are going to be joining us in a year-long kindergarten innovation cohort we kick off this thursday and they're going to be helping us from the ground up from the classroom really learn how to implement our early learner core values in the classroom setting and reimagine our kindergarten program so that it better serves and meets all the needs of our incoming kindergarten students that's my very quick update there's always more and i'm always happy to talk about it thanks for having us tonight and look for these t-shirts and images around the community we will try to make sure you all get t-shirts as well thank you dr glasgow we've enjoyed visiting the head start programs and thank you to you and your team for being active role in preschool for all efforts that are also coming to the county thank you well directors you've heard about our career pathway work you've heard about how our early learner work is doing and uh because we love the arts i want to make sure that you get an update on visual and performing arts i want to welcome kristen brayson kristen and her talented visual and performing arts team will be presenting their annual state of the arts a pps report to directors uh later this spring but for now she's going to give you a sneak peek at progress with the master arts education plan and some of the emerging summer arts planning as well so welcome kristin well thank you superintendent guerrero it's a delight to be here tonight it's a pleasure to be addressing you board chair lowry and board of directors and student representative shu i know we have tons that we could
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cover so this is just a snackable snack snapshot of our work so far there's a lot of text on the screen so i want to direct your eyes to the left because that is most immediate right now we have gone ahead and moved forward with a sort of pre-implementation if you will of the master arts education plan although the master arts education plan the ink has not dried yet i'll talk about that in a second through some direct investments of the student investment act some really teeming work with guadalupe guerrero and also the all the directors we had decided to go ahead this year and prioritize a pre-phase one and by cluster we've added in schools specifically title 1 csi and tsi schools to make sure that every school in the jefferson roosevelt cluster for this year had music and visual arts for next year we're going to extend that implementation to mcdaniel's cluster franklin and cleveland again serving our title 1 schools it gets better because we knew that we needed to also provide infrastructure support for these schools these are very specialized learning environments and in order to deliver the true experience to students we wanted to provide some seed money to get classrooms set up and by the stuff and things that really deliver a dynamic arts education so that's a real quick snapshot of what we're doing now to address current and immediate needs for arts educations and our goals around pathways if you move to the middle column we have our mape sneak peek we are going to launch in the fall of 2021 you will get a more expansive glimpse at what we're doing as as superintendent guerrero said this late spring but here gives you an a little a little look into our six strategic goals one thing that's really important to see here and call out is that every single goal we have has res j as a cross-cutting theme so we've identified embedded and prioritized that across the entire plan and we'll be able to speak to that really directly as we bring that back to you soon we also wanted to call out some of the system assurances and this is in no particular order it is also not the exhaustive list there's some highlights here around how we want to make sure we have system cohesion and coherency around arts education so that includes district level policies and practices again the pathways completion so we've identified what we're doing this year and next year but what comes next we also want to make sure that we are aligning and supporting the pps graduate portrait we feel like arts education is uniquely positioned to support students sense of self and belonging and that it creates the conditions for artistic and cultural literacy we know all of these things support our students as we're moving toward the graduate portrait and then finally one of the things that's very important to our work is that we're touching base and feeling the work of every single department at central office and understanding the complex nuances and how we might be in service of other plans across the system so that's also included in our work of the master arts education plan and then finally some really great celebrations to have in the right hand column around comprehensive distance learning we have produced 32 weeks of lesson plans for arts education in all four disciplines it's an astounding amount of work they're all thematic for example music lessons for eight weeks in black american music we publish we to today we've published a total of 376 lessons in dance music theater and visual arts all of these lessons reinforced culturally sustaining practices and social emotional learning we have started the pre-adoption process we are really fortunate to be prioritized here at the first string with with having six million dollars for a visual performing arts adoption we have done pre-planning to engage 67 teachers and here is where we want to shift practice for the future and reimagine arts education we want our students to experience arts education as a place that they foundationally understand culture and understand how to express themselves within that so we're really excited to show you the emerging themes of that work and we'll give you an update on that too next time we see you and then finally we get this exciting opportunity of continuing the third year of the summer arts academy we have expanded the programming a little bit with the focus on um very direct focus on specific
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schools for rising sixth through ninth graders um some of the expanding pro expanded programming um that you will see is a tech theater component and we are partnering with portland five to think about ways that we can bring in stage hands to directly work with our students as an example and then finally the summer safety enrichment rfp went out to our arts partners we actively engaged 47 plus arts partners on a consistent basis and we've had a lot of folks submit rfps to be engaged in our summer work so that's a very positive element and then to close before i throw it back we have the heart of portland that's going to be happening june 10th this is a celebration of learning in the arts throughout a really difficult time but we'll be able to really show the joy of student learning and so be on the lookout in your emails for an invitation to that event thank you so much so much for letting me share miss bryson can you send us um in the phase one phase two of the art at art pathways editions i'm interested in what schools next year are going to be have editions made in mcdaniels franklin and cleveland yep absolutely thank you thank you an update of the the map from a couple of years ago that showed all the incomplete links uh an update of that would be pretty sweet um and i i'm guessing that might be part of what you bring back to us uh yeah i can give you a quick comparative analysis though that kind of you know um shows you the ways that we've made some connections and progress here yeah it's just huge steps forward thank you to kristen and our baba team um for all that continued progress and and yes i think when directors see the four end of your report you'll notice that more and more of those pathways are getting completed and aligned speaking of the arts i wanted to end just by sharing a couple photos from last week's visits to schools by musicians from the oregon symphony it was a real treat for students it was a lovely way to show appreciation for our teachers and school administrators last week as well so our thanks to the symphony for live music by professional musicians uh for our students uh and just as the cellists can read and perform music at the same time uh we're continuing to multitask also just to keep the business of the district moving forward so as i mentioned the pandemics created a special kind of focus for us but we're continuing to to do the work of eliminating inequities and you just heard three ways growing and cultivating diverse talent making sure early learners have a strong foundation as well as making sure that we close some of those historic gaps in access to pathways whether it's in career technical education or in this case arts the work has continued uh so that concludes my report for this evening thank you thank you team we thank you to that uh for that amazing presentation and thank you to the whole team for inspiring us with all the ways that pbs is continuing to grow and look to the future um even while we have navigated this pandemic um superintendent guerrero uh i think that the next item is the hot topic of the night that i know we have lots of passionate people interested in and lots of questions um the update on fall reopening so we're gonna get right to that so can what can you tell us about the fall yes uh we're very passionate about it too thank you chair lowry now that hybrid learning and limited in person is underway we have begun planning for our full return to five-day instruction in the fall so as i mentioned previously we're going to keep the regular updates going throughout the spring and summer to keep you informed on all the planning and preparation so that we are ready uh in the fall so i'm going to start off we have a few slides just to cover the information of where we're at uh what's been accomplished questions we're working on some of the variables that we've talked about previously and where we are in that work so uh we have a few slides we're going to put up here so first of all just recognizing speaking of the variables you know that we have been living hold on we can go ahead and go to the second uh slide there uh you know i've shared now a couple of times uh you know our intent to fully reopen and making sure that
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we're prepared to do that um the next slide uh and as we get sort of into the details for fall reopening and an update um i want to reiterate our our guiding principles haven't changed so uh there are a number of variables shifts and changes that are been swirling around us for the last 14 months but uh we're remaining deliberate and sort of what's guiding our decision making so skipping to slide four to really just kind of call out uh what some of those variables are uh because it has been a dynamic reality that we've been working with here so even though there continues to be some significant progress although that's been a fluid situation in the communities fight against govid i'm trying to get the slideshow to advance for me it won't superintendent so give me just a moment sure uh so there's a few things that haven't changed for us of course we remain committed to the health and safety of our students and staff we're going to continue partnering with our community-based partners public health experts our labor partners in the business community to create the conditions for our schools to to open fully so um i just wanted to make sure and call out um a few of those variables i i think they've we've covered them previously but uh setting the stage here we know that the health metrics are one of those key pieces the rate of vaccination which we're glad to see is becoming now more accessible particularly for our secondary age students and and promising that uh the age group might even go down to 12 uh pretty soon and the way that we're making that more accessible for for our students as well can you go ahead and advance roseanne there and i think i've already covered that so if you want to go down to the health metrics i think the broader community and directors are recognizing that there's we've been a little bit of a upward trend here but some signs that maybe that's headed back down again um so we are watching that very carefully and to say a little bit more on sort of an important factor in making sure that continues to to turn downward i want to invite courtney wessling to speak a bit more about this trend and vaccinations did you just call for me yes courtney wesley i missed my name it was adding me thank you sorry for the the uh the late arrival here um so good evening directors i'll run us through a couple slides and i'll hand it over um so on this slide that you can see we're uh we're in looking in like things are starting to stabilize a bit um we're sort of at the tipping point of the fourth surge infections look like they're heading on the you know on a downward trend and hospital rates are stabilizing um you may have heard today that the governor announced vaccination targets to more fully reopen organs economy she's setting a 70 statewide goal to reach oregon oregonian 16 and older with a first dose and that would help to lift risk level restrictions so that's forward momentum that's exciting to hear she's also making a commitment to if you if if a county can hit 65 but offer plans for um closing the equity gap in vaccinations but that would also um get you get you to a lower risk level potentially so a couple of options there next slide okay so vaccinations i just mentioned uh the um the vaccination target that the governor has set forth this afternoon um we obviously are well aware that oregonians age 16 and older are eligible to receive pfizer just pfizer right now that's obviously a two-dose vaccine we've been pushing that information out to our high school communities and have a good partnership going with mesd and all for oregon health partners at the convention center to transport anyone who needs a yellow bus ride and get them signed up and registered to get their vaccine we've had a lot of students interested not as many students interested in the bus but that's secondary we just want them to go get the vaccine and and if they want to take us up on that transportation offer even better um and we have another day tomorrow so we've been kind of streamlining the process last week was good but this week will be better the high school leaders have been awesome and flexible with us to work through the planning so we'll keep that going the convention center's going to stop prime doses after may 26th or 27th i should say so we'll continue getting buses over there through that time and then they'll go back for their second dose three weeks
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later and we'll be messaging that as well um the other exciting and i should also say that where we are with multnomah county vaccinations is 52.3 percent um only 36.8 have had both shots 15.5 um still need that second booster dose um earlier i guess it was yesterday it feels like it feels like a long time ago but yesterday the fda approved the use of pfizer for us children ages 12 to 15. um the cdc cdc still has to approve that and then the western states scientific work group has to approve that and then oha would have to approve it it looks like we could have that approval as soon as friday which is really exciting and then of course we would um add that into our communication to the to sending people to the convention center we are going to be rolling out some more broad communication about the importance of vaccinations you'll see on this slide a little box and that's an example of the social media uh art that you'll see soon enough um so we're excited about that news obviously you know the consent issues are key here 15 and up in oregon can consent without don't need parental consent to get a vaccine so we'll be working through that and um we're going to continue to partner with our public health officials our labor partners and our community-based organizations to help get that message out that vaccinations are important and we need to work together to get that done next slide okay um so obviously the next step is what is the ready school safe learner's guidance going to look like and when is it going to be released um so everybody's looking forward to working through that we are told it will the expected the expected release is mid-july july 19th about 44 days before the start of school we anticipate that those guidelines are going to obviously update us on a few things continued use of school metrics what will that look like the health and safety requirements in our classrooms our transportation um and in athletics uh distance learning requirements and instructional time and with that i'm going to throw it over to dan young i believe uh courtney before you go can i just ask one question um so did i hear you say that the oregon convention center vaccination site is going to close at the end of may they're going to stop um offering first doses at the end of may they're going to close down in i think around june 19th is the day i saw so um what's the plan for vaccine distribution it's not totally clear but director alan oha director pat ellen said today that they are really trying to shift gears to medium level uh vaccine events in communities we are in those conversations everyone is very well aware that we want to be good partners schools are a great place to bring people and offer opportunities for families we need a health partner to do that we are at the table and i think it's it's been it's mostly been a matter of shifting downshifting from big mega events to community-centered events so we know that there have been some of those but they've been really focused the county for example is really focused on their fqhc population which is their medicaid and uninsured population and on by pop communities so we're really um kind of waiting for some guidance from oha and we've been in i've been in a couple meetings around that lately to see how we can best partner and join forces because we need to do this as a community we need to do this together yeah i'm i i am well i've i've uh i've been a vocal advocate of using schools as vaccination sites and um but i'm also aware that there are a great many uh logistical issues in play especially for the um for pfizer and moderna that have very um very strict requirements around refrigeration and all that so um so anything we can do to help please let us know um and um one other question um july 19th for new guidance for next school year um seems seems to be uh a little late um is there any possibility that the guidance could come out sooner than that um there's always a possibility director moore um i'm with you i think um i think they're i'm happy to help push on that and i
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agree with you as am i and it's like as well so do keep us informed about what we can i think if we have time an intergovernmental committee maybe we can talk about this as well what is that the 19th pegged against why the 19th is their deadline right i don't know i haven't heard but i'm happy to i'm happy to get an answer it just seems completely random and i know the expectation will be you need to you need you'll be open in uh late august or early september um but not realizing how cramped that makes our planning yeah we can work on it i'm happy to work with you on on how we um can put a little pressure there so if i guess okay so let me um let me also take this opportunity um do we have any uh information about um oha's response to the federal funding for a robust testing system for asymptomatic cases i have not heard any updates from oha on testing i know the issue but i have not heard any updates because i think that could be a an important element to um not only opening schools for you know all day five days a week but also keeping them open in order to monitor any disease transmission that might be happening among students and staff be before it becomes an actual outbreak so again anything i can do to help there please um thank you and i have my list and i appreciate you raising these issues and i will follow up i would just um on that i would be really interested in our um health panels input on that issue i um dr moore and i have talked about this and i stress doctor to put us in our relative places um in terms of overall knowledge and and i understand her passion and it makes a compelling case you know i have also read um other doctors you know who who have sort of questioned the efficacy of of of of sort of the the blanket testing um you know of all people so i just for me this is one where i always want to go back and and defer to the public health experts and so i would be interested in what our health panel says about um um whether that is um effective in terms of actually catching cases and and um and you know potentially limiting any any spread in schools and director scott i was just going to say the same thing so uh from the health panel um in the sake of full disclosure i i just want to make it clear i i appreciate the honorific but i am not an md so i make no claims okay if there are no more questions on this slide i'm going to kick it over to dan young and thank you all thank you courtney thank you courtney i can assure you actually one can ask one question courtney um i'm just wondering if they're in this or maybe this is superintendent guerrero whether there are any districts in oregon or odes contemplating a vaccine requirement for students of any district that is contemplating that but i haven't seen a survey you know there's i don't know if that information is um i don't know if people are talking very widely about that i'm interested every university now is making that a requirement for the fall return so director from edwards we will we will look at uh we will do an uh a look at uh what's happening across the state and bring that back to the board uh in a further update great julia what age group are you referring to 12 and up so i mean given that the 12 to 15 hasn't been um it's not approved yet is it or i think it's it was approved yesterday i think fda approved but it still has to go through a couple more hoops yeah that's that's we're very close but the prospect of getting all our students vaccinated over the summer
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uh given given where we are with adults um raises questions there's also a difference between uh authorization for an emergency use authorization um and a a full authorization um i think we are um probably as i understand it pfizer has uh requested um full authorization so that process will be going forward over the next few months um i i suspect it will be a considerably longer time for full authorization for vaccination for vaccines for children let me just clarify that is not to imply that there are any safety issues it's um it's a bureaucratic process that the fda fda has established to ensure um you know full vetting and um uh you know uh it includes a substantial component of post-vaccination follow-up so there is of necessity a time lag yeah i just raise it because i know at the university level it was nobody was doing it and then pretty much now everybody's doing it and it seems like we should um engage our health panel early on and i appreciate jonathan garcia saying that we're going to follow up but it it just i know a lot of kids who are engaged in sports who are 16 and older and probably those who have greater access than others are already getting vaccinated so i just think we should dive into the topic um so that we're ready to go knowing that there's you know it's different than adults all right are we ready to move on to dan young because i know we have a lot more to cover tonight all right dan may i remind our chief operating officer turning the microphone on my head thank you it's really embarrassing good evening directors and superintendents i want to let you know that staff are looking at school capacity and space needs for fall we've already run a preliminary capacity model that assumes three-foot distancing it will still be required in fall and that all students will return to in-person learning uh we estimate most classrooms will be able to accommodate full enrollment without much modification however we do anticipate some physical changes will be necessary including replacement of furniture uh some classroom changes potential repurposing of non-traditional classroom spaces or schedule changes our next step in our effort is to model furniture setups in every classroom this is something similar that we did for hybrid uh identify site-specific capacity constraints and then identify resolutions staff will be working closely with school administrators and updating assumptions along the way next slide please dan what is how do you define overwhelming majority is that 60 is that 90 so we our first model we ran we're able to pretty quickly look at about 80 percent of the classrooms in the district uh and i'll say a relatively low percentage of those uh showed capacity issues uh that said you know we need to move on to the next step of modeling those one of the classrooms and continuing to attest what our assumptions are because we are making assumptions about usable space how much space will be needed uh uh space for egress and circulation as well so it's it's a really good start and we feel pretty good that we'll be able to resolve those uh capacity issues but now we need to get more into the detail yeah really promising yeah and just a ground level view i visited three schools today two elementary and middle school and none of the principals thought there would be much of an issue in accommodating other students at that three foot spacing clear clearly there's always some some things around the margin to play with but nothing extraordinary great uh on this slide just one note that we anticipate and look forward to return to a more traditional school day to that end human resources transportation nutrition services and many others are busy making plans and preparations for full opening in fall 2021 and we look forward to writing updates to the board as plans and efforts progress and we aim to frame that information with what we know now uh what we don't know and when we will know more and i think with that if there are any other questions i'll be turning it over to
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jonathan garcia thank you dan can i just say uh going forward um again i'm my baseline assumption is that the classroom issue won't be a big one in terms of the space accommodation and we can flex into some other spaces if necessary the questions i have are more around lunch and transportation so in in the in the near future or when when all in good time when we're ready to have that sussed out um that would be of interest i understood absolutely uh director bailey we will uh and that is our our commitment to this board uh is to provide regular updates uh jonathan garcia chief of staff here at pps uh wanted to share a few of our commitments to uh uh with you and our broader community uh which uh mirror in many ways the resolution that i know this board is considering adopting our commitment is to work closely with the school board our labor partners our community-based organizations to really create the conditions that will allow for a full return full time five days a week in person this fall we also know and we will commit to adhering to federal and state guidance and create the path that appropriately mitigates transmission of combat 19 that is really important for us as one of our guiding principles we also plan to provide a comprehensive virtual learning option for those students and families who are unwilling or unable to return to in-person learning in the fall we will provide an update um soon to this board on those uh on those plans as well we will continue to work with our public health officials and community partners as director moore uh continues to remind us at every board meeting the importance of getting vaccinated uh washing your hands of of taking care of one another and it's really important that that we as a public school system do our part uh in that effort to ensure that that our our students our families are know about vaccine safety and other other other issues related to this topic and then the last thing as i've said and we've we've reiterated we will be providing regular updates to the school board and community as we learn more and as we continue our planning for fall 2021. with that we will open it up for any further questions or or comments from the board let's go i think there might be quite a lot of questions here so let's go in um birth order just for funsies um that means that the time in the year you were born not who's we're not calling out who's oldest um we begin with director de pass who uh is our january baby did you did i miss something did you just say you're not saying that i'm the oldest but i'm close yeah i'm saying we're calling people in order of when in the year their birthday falls not birth order as far as like who's the oldest among us thank you i um i'm really happy to hear that uh we're planning to open full-time five days a week uh with this with the distance with the spacing three foot spacing and i'm curious and that's conditional on i'm assuming that cases continue to go down um i also had a test a question about the testing if we were considering any type of testing i know some districts are doing testing um but yeah i'm i'm i i'm i'm wondering i'm hoping that the assumptions are the cases will go down and in that case we will open and i'm wondering what we do if um that's not the case or if there's another spike and i'm assuming if there's another spike that we um continue with uh distance learning yeah director to pass we will uh we will coordinate and work very closely with our public health officials here in multnomah county and we will take their guidance uh and direction on how we proceed in the in the chance that there is a spike or other variants of cova 19 that populate this is a ever-evolving a public health issue and we will rely on our public health officials to to to to guide us and then one more question um did courtney say that we would consider having test vaccination sites at some of our schools um if that if we could find a partner correct director to pass so courtney is currently and her team sorry courtney you you came back you said go ahead and uh and share thanks um yeah so director to pass we're exploring all of our options um we want to be a
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site if that makes sense with community partners if they want to utilize our spaces um we've made that pretty clear in a lot of different at a lot of different tables so um yes we want to do that and we just need people with vaccines right we can't do that we can offer space and staff support great thank you all right student representative shu you are next in our birth order all right could you come back to me again um yes all right director scott um i'll pass this round i i've had a number of conversations with staff and so i'm happy to go back and talk a little more when we introduce the resolution my question is about as we continue our focus on our res j lens and on equity what are we hearing as far as our partners in communities of color around how we can support getting families access to vaccines and also what those folks are maybe thinking about come fall because i know we've heard a lot from our white parents about really wanting to return to full five days and i know that we continue to hear that there's um a disproportionate effect of covet on our communities of color here in portland director lowry thanks for the question uh uh i will take that back uh and connect with uh our senior advisor on racial equity oh there we go they're bringing candy over so i will uh i forgot that we have a green room so danny hi there i'm sorry i'm having some internet troubles um could you repeat the question yes my question was um how are we are we and maybe courtney can answer those two around the vaccine part how are we helping support um our communities of colors in vaccine access and then also what are we hearing from our culturally responsive partners and um families of color around us what they're thinking for fall um noticing that we've heard from a lot of white parents about this desire to return but also being aware that covid has disproportionately impacted communities of color here in portland yeah so uh primarily i've just had conversations primarily with our sun agencies and our resj partners so a lot of our culturally specific organizations are sort of moving moving slowly back into in person i think that they're continuing to hear quite a bit of reluctance and worry about um about sort of coved given some of the disproportionate impact on their communities and i think the other piece that we're hearing is that there are more and more early early on when the vaccines were being distributed we heard more information about sort of lack of access particularly for uh sort of families but now that there's more um more availability and different phases are open we're hearing that many of our our partners have either sort of gotten the vaccine through eligibility through uh some of the work that their partnership with us as well as other eligibility i think that our partners continue to worry about making sure that multi-generational households where you have older adults along with very young kiddos uh sort of worry about that um about that uh issue um so i think that we're hearing a lot of that we're still hearing quite a bit of reluctance when we did our school tours for some of the reopening a lot of our partners came in almost every agency was represented in our school tours and in talking with different staff um just anecdotally there was about a 50 50 split in terms of kind of where individual staff were in terms of their reluctance or suspicion around the vaccine and you know i think we're continuing to partner with multnomah county and their health department um you you all had the opportunity to hear from one of you know the the health department and the reach program in terms of some of the work that they're doing and multnomah county has been really great in offering uh not only vaccine access for different culturally specific communities in their uh sort of like different locations so organizations like neya family center sei erko have had very specific vaccine drives so i think um we're hearing uh that access is is improving that folks have access um and but that reluctance is still a big issue um and i think that uh we're in in terms of partnering and looking with our working with our partners um the safety is of utmost concern and
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so they've been really great in terms of learning about rssl and some of those uh some of those uh regulations that we're working on and also you know kind of asking a lot of questions so it's it's been really good in that in that way and i think we also hear from parents and from young people uh just really wanting some interaction and so trying to balance those those places so i don't know if that answers the question but that's kind of what we've been hearing lately thank you yes it does all right our next uh one is director moore um i think i've had most of my questions answered one way or another um so i guess i'll take my two minutes to uh thank all the staff for um the extraordinary work that's gone into developing all of these plans um it has been a very very long long uh what 15 months now um and it's not over yet um and anybody who's been paying attention knows i've been pretty conservative um around reopening plans and and wanting to make sure that we're dotting all the eyes and crossing all the t's for for health and safety and and i am for whatever it's worth i am now satisfied that um the district has done everything humanly possible to to make um schools safe learning environments for both students and staff and for their families and um and i i just want to thank everybody for the countless hours endless work the uh the angst and the you know the constant burden of this ever-evolving situation so thank you all and um i'm looking forward to i'm looking forward to the successful conclusion of this school year and um some really fun activities for students over the summer and then a a next school year that will approach normality it won't be it'll be a new normal but i i think with the plans that are happening um i'm confident that that will be able to provide um a school year for students who who are willing and able to attend in person um anyway thank you i i only have a small glimmer of the work that's been done in order to make all of this happen and um i am tired just contemplating the little bit that i know so thank you director bram edwards did you have a question or comment julia you're muted following dan's footsteps i have about a comment and a um question uh just the comment is just thank you to the the staff who've gotten us to where we are um and i was really excited to hear that the preliminary work um and then i wanted i'm gonna go back to the slides that dan had on the screen um and the comments they made um so i just wanted to clarify that 80 and i know this is a rough estimate roughly 80 percent of the classrooms would hold the students even if we had the three foot is that correct even if we had the three foot rule what we did is the model we were able to run or it's a couple different programs that have to match up so that was able to match up eighty percent of the classrooms pretty easily so another twenty percent we haven't looked at yet it's for the three foot standard i mean right right and so so with what we were able to model it was a relatively low percentage that came up with with that would have capacity concerns so on in on an individual classroom basis and that's with assumptions of the three-foot distancing and also making assumptions because sometimes you know not all uh classrooms are the same shape and they're not all the same configuration so we're making assumptions around how much usable space is in there uh what circulation is necessary uh and some assumptions around the fixtures and the furnishings that are in the room but with those assumptions that put in place it was a relatively low percentage of classrooms that we saw capacity issues and now the intention is to take that to the next level start
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looking at those individual rooms and in confirming if we do have issues and what those solutions might be because one of the issues this spring as we talked about it it it was just sort of operationalizing getting kids back in the in the hybrid model so and i know later on this evening we're going to have be talking about the resolution which has sort of continuous updates coming as you look at the the work and i know it's always as you get to the smaller number it actually gets more difficult like the few remaining ones um do you pers do you anticipate that that last 20 percent and then the the spaces that director um bailey referenced which is the more communal type spaces that by you know mid-june we'd we'd have that whether we could operate in sort of the most maybe the most restrictive environment of the three-foot requirements right as we progress and certainly as we get into june i think we're going to have a much better idea of what the constraints will be and we know we're going to have to be creative we were creative with how we put together a hybrid and we're able to make all the schools work and we're gonna have to be creative uh doing this again uh i i can say that we're you know the planning uh we're making decisions and assumptions now and we're going to have to update those assumptions as we go along we've already purchased some furniture with the anticipation of this for coming for fall because furniture has led lead times and so we're going to continue to be doing that and looking at what exactly our overall capacity concerns me thank you and sorry about the phone call my mom was calling me um great thank you um so that's really heartening to hear that there may be a cell from the facilities and then my second question was and i'm just going to ask the i think the superintendent this one it's a more generic question is we're not going to survey parents again we're going about we're just planning we're opening schools in the fall and if people are going to opt in to cd into comprehensive distance learning that would be an opt-in but it's not going to be this what you know which one are you going to pick is that correct well that's one of the assumptions here i think dan just to confirm you're you're looking at our physical spaces assuming 100 of our enrollment returns to campus right so we don't know if that's in fact going to be true so we have our team often offline right now designing our virtual school option we're going to want to offer families a really crisp description of what they could expect if they feel that that's an option or a choice they need to exercise what i don't know and the staff you know we have to figure out is that five percent of our enrollment is that 15 of our enrollment so we're going to have to get an idea of what that is uh and so there we will likely come back and describe what our thinking has been around well how do we register students for a virtual school option if for whatever reason families need to exercise that choice that'll decrease the number of students that we need to accommodate in person and so when you think about that last 20 of spaces look we knew moving from six to three we could make six feet worked and three feet should generally work for a full day but if we have another set of students who aren't even planning to come to campus that might even reconcile or resolve uh the remaining space concern or constraint so this is part of our punch list of next items and variables that we have to sort through um and and that will keep directors updated on yeah and on that note uh uh director prime edwards we will uh come back and provide an update on how we plan to uh to get that type of information from our parent community great thank you okay our uh next person uh director bailey um thanks and julia that was my question as well how are we gonna anticipate um so i'm glad glad that got posed i just want to say in again observing schools today saw kids doing all the the right safety things staying apart wearing masks doing the hand wash i saw a child coming in late who didn't have a mask but knew there was the mask dispensary right there inside the door
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along with the hand sanitizer so um our kids are totally into this i've heard nothing but praise about um when we've had students identified with covid for how that's been handled and communicated and so there's been at least no known cases of any kind of in-school transmission it's all been something out in the community that came in um our teacher leaders have been very very happy with uh our protocols around that so this this seems to be working really well uh so it it sounds like we are really lined up to open up fully whether it's three feet or zero feet um in the fall um unless there's some kind of spike in where the state orders us back into cdl um i think it's pretty clear that's where we're headed that's where all the planning is [Music] so this is really good news going forward all right thank you director bailey director constance i think i've had my questions answered uh i want to thank dan young for putting up with me for the last probably two months with this very question and i just think it's really helpful to have this clarity for the community tonight um and to just be able to build excitement for for going back to school um it's a lot of work that has has built this foundation um but it's just really exciting and and i'm really excited for the summer offerings that are going to be in some cases our test case for how we how we go back to school and also some of our students will be taking part in some of our summer activities i've never been to school before so um it's just exciting thanks for all the underlying work thanks for the research so that we could really clearly answer this question because it needed to be answered so thank you again student representative did you have a question or comment come to you in in this time uh yes thank you uh so we have a number of schools that ordinarily have low vaccine rates which will probably be lower with the copen 19 vaccines so what will we do in the event that in general it is safe to more or less return to school as usual but at the same time there are a number of our sites that have not yet crossed the whole immunity threshold sooner representative shu that's a great question we will take that back to our public our health panel um to inquire and have a a conference or a response to you via email and can you copy everyone on that response i'd be interested um you know we have exclusion for you know not completing certain vaccinations for kids i'd be really interested in hearing the uh your response as well yes director to pass we will uh include an entire board on uh this communication chair lowry uh if i could ask one one question uh again not necessarily the answer tonight but would want to hear the answer at some point uh we we've talked a lot about lessons learned from virtual learning that there's some positive takeaways from that do we have a plan for engaging with our teachers to like fully flesh out that discussion um to have a really inclusive discussion of lessons learned and not only teachers but our eas all our staff in schools and then to formulate that as to how can that be part of our ongoing school improvement plans going forward thank you director bailey for the question uh we will uh uh one of our upcoming uh updates uh i will provide a little bit more about uh our our plans for uh distant learning uh in the fall and i'll i'll make sure that our staff includes [Music] some information on how we're engaging with our educators as we design and plan uh that moving forward and actually what i meant was taking what worked in distance learning that we can do with in-person learning oh understood got it but but actually that's making our our virtual learning better as well is
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is also also good things so uh thank you for expanding expanding my question and doubling your workload excellent all right um we are i'm going to take a brief five-minute break we'll be back at 8 15 um and we will then uh move to our resolution uh to prepare for full-time reopening of in-person learning for the 21-22 school year all right see you back in five minutes everyone [Music] and i've heard others as well so i think it's just important to always come back and recognize um how difficult the situation it is and and yet also you know um how much how many of the successes we we have had my reason for bringing this resolution forward um tonight it's really threefold um you know as as we heard tonight right from the superintendent and staff as the district prepares for full-time in-person reopening this fall i want to say that again for the oregonian we're preparing for full-time in-person reopening this fall um i want to make sure the superintendent has the full support of the board to take the necessary actions that he needs to take to get us back to full-time in-person reopening um you know some of the commentators um commenters you know said earlier tonight um we need to do what it takes to get schools reopen this fall even even if we have to do some under under current health guidelines um and i want to make sure the superintendent has the full support of the board um in taking those actions you know over the next few months the second reason um i think it's important to send a clear signal to the community that we're working hard towards a full reopening um the superintendent said this a few weeks ago i think he was very clear about that um but again those messages get modeled over time and i think it's important for the board and his board members to really amplify that message to the community as well um and then third and i think the most important reason that i'm bringing it forward is really to start a community conversation about what that return is going to look like and
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it will give families time our whole community time to sort of consider um what it's going to look like and whether and how it will work for them um and i think it also allows us as a district to start talking about some of the potential barriers and we began to hear about that tonight right i mean we know district staff know um space limitations but being able to be transparent about that and and sort of elevate and expose those issues of you know what is what does that mean and even if even if 95 of our classrooms can hold students um at three feet well that means five percent of our classrooms can't so so what are we going to be doing you know in those situations you know to accommodate for that i think it's important to be having that um that conversation um and you know i'm i'm really confident that schools are going to be fully open in the fall um but it it still may look different and there are things that may be different about it and i want to make sure we're bringing the community along um in that conversation between now and and september 1. um show our work um listen to feedback and and i think that's the the right way to get to a successful reopening um and i really liked um how uh how the superintendent or you know the slide deck presented it you know let's just keep talking about what do we know and and and what don't we know um and let's be really clear about that as we go forward so all that i won't go through the entire resolution um there are a number of sort of recitals that talk about you know um where we are and how we got there um in terms of the resolved just um just to for a little you know bit of clarity and process this did um you know come up um i've been working on it for a little while unfortunately i didn't get it around until the to the board other board members until um um late on friday um and so uh as a result and and i did get a little bit of feedback and i'm gonna walk through some of those things that are incorporated here but i did ask chair lowry um to go ahead and keep this on the agenda for discussion tonight but then delay a vote for another couple weeks because in addition not getting to the board it wasn't publicly um released until just yesterday i believe so this gives us time to continue to consider it take any um comments we might hear um if any come forward um you know from the community over the next couple weeks and and take the action and i i i think given what we've heard tonight about the reopening plans um you know again i don't think there's i don't think there's an urgent need um to demonstrate to the public that we're moving in that direction because i think that's clear i i think the need really is to demonstrate that the board is fully behind um the superintendent of the district on this so so in terms of the resolved um that's what it says right it says that we commit to partnering with the superintendent to find the solutions that allow for a return to full-time five-day week-in-person instruction um you know safety uh um the pbs's board top priority is to safely reopen and we understand that we also do have to adhere to state and federal guidelines and take any other appropriate steps that are needed to mitigate transmission of of coping 19. um given the uncertainty around that you know the board is directing the superintendent to develop a comprehensive plan for returning to in-person schooling that transitions students back in a safe and equitable manner um and then update us as as he's committed to do uh regularly as as as we go through this given that we may not get that state guidance until july which i will agree is is really absurdly late but it's what we have to live with um regardless of the conditions for returning in person you know i we are directing the superintendent to provide a comprehensive virtual learning option for students and families who are unwilling or unable to return i think there's a really interesting question about how long that continues and i know some members of our community you know have said well why why would we even need to provide that i think given where we are and where we expect to be and given vaccination rates and what they're expected to be i think it's really important that we provide this option um to our families and and what's noted in the resolution is we'll provide a virtual learning option at least until code 19 vaccines um are widely accessible to school-aged children so um you know we could continue to choose to do so longer but but that's sort of the minimum um until the vaccines are widely accessible to school-age children and and that is going to be some time um you know again we just got 12 and up it's gonna be some time to get to get younger kids um this is a new addition and this was actually a suggestion of um director moore and also from um um uh portland association of teachers um the sort of idea about what are we doing around vaccines and and we're already doing this work but i thought it was really important to include it in here um again the the board's sort of sort of seconding what we heard from staff today um you know to facilitate accessibility and uptake of vaccines um especially in our most impacted communities you know we're directing the superintendent to continue as he and his staff are working with oha multnomah county mesd and other community partners to educate students and families about vaccine safety and improve distribution systems including the potential use of schools as vaccination sites there are some hurdles to that but also some some real advantages so um i know it sounds tonight like everyone's pretty interested in in seeing if that's a possibility and then um finally just just you know recognizing um the significant impact that educational disruptions have on student academic social and emotional well-being um you know encouraging the
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governor oha ode to revisit the ready school safe learners guidelines just to make sure they reflect the current state of knowledge about disease transmission they adjust to progress in vaccine intake and they accommodate the complexity of plan and implementation in large urban districts we all want to be safe we all want the you know to to abide by public health guidelines that keep us safe we don't want public health guidelines that that have very limited added value but also make it very very difficult for our kids to be back in person full time um so that's kind of what that last piece is about um so with that i know we already had a long conversation about reopening so i'm not sure how much more there is but i think if anybody has specific comments about the resolution now's the time and then we can also uh make any needed amendments um uh in a couple weeks if if necessary i was gonna have us run through uh alphabetical by first name uh in reverse order that's you know mix it up so oh i don't i thought i was gonna go first geez i was ready to go we're sorry we're gonna start with scott amy you get to be last i'm sorry oh that's a switch yeah the old guy gets to go first not the oldest um the age before beauty yeah and pearls before uh so uh director scott thank you uh for bringing this forward um and and just to kind of repeat what i you know after it took me a while to think this thing through partly in how we engaged around it which was a really i think uh interesting process uh but coming to the point now where it to me we've got two options for september either we're going to be open at three feet or less or you know we're going to have a covet disaster and be back to complete cdl so i see that we are on the path going forward to three feet i want to totally support the work of staff in getting there [Music] seeing both our kids and our teachers today really engaged in learning at the three schools i was at some really great engaging lessons going on kids excited to be there and also seeing hearing from our principals that those kids who and you know roughly a dozen kids at a school who weren't engaged very well in cdl almost all those kids are in person and our families are really responding positively to summer programs which is exactly what we want to hear for those kids who were at least engaged to get them involved now and then into the summer i'm i'm really excited to see this as a pivot point for us going forward and i want to thank the superintendent for his leadership in this and you know everything we've heard tonight we've seen his leadership through his staff leading in racial equity and i just totally appreciate that in our budget in our summer programs music really uh ex and art expanding uh where it's been least offered before and we the kindergarten transition program which again reaches uh usually our our lowest income our uh african-american children native american children other children of color all those things i see that he has led us going forward in so i just want to appreciate all the work of staff and his leadership going forward director moore um i don't think i've much to say about this resolution i think i've already kind of said my piece about reopening um i guess the only thing i would want to underscore is the need for continued collaboration with state and local partners and that includes getting [Music] getting guidelines from the states as as soon as possible in order to um in order to allow maximum time um for you know the kind of really comprehensive planning that is going to be necessary in order to um in order to have a a smooth reopening in in september um so i i i'm thank you director scott for taking a lead on this
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um i think this i think it's a good resolution so thank you all right nathaniel do you have any um comments or questions i do not have any questions about the resolution thank you director depos i wanna excuse me i to thank um director scott for initiating this resolution um i agree with you that it's really important for us to show the superintendent um our our intent and to support him in his efforts um and yeah i think it's great i think also allowing a couple more weeks for it to be fine-tuned is great um as you know there's lots of information coming in things change every day so um by the time we actually do get to vote on this i think it'll be a really nice product director bryn edwards thank you um so um thanks director scott for your leadership on this um i view this as really a statement of the district's leadership together making a commitment to our families of what's going to happen this fall i know lots of families whether it's people returning to work or making child care arrangements or wanting to you know make sure that their child who is most successful in the classroom is going to be returning under school that knowing that there is a united commitment to making this happen i think is really important and um you know last at last week's meeting um the the more in the intent of my question was more to get at um making sure that the budget had whatever staff needed in order to be able to um successfully re reopen and so the the intent was and i hope that i when as i look through this i'm not sure this point's quite captured but that just the commitment that will do what it takes and i know that there's some some scenarios that uh we may not have the resources for um but we want to make sure that um staff has the budget flexibility to do things uh when i was in franklin um recently the uh there were clearly some like walls have been moved and things that have been changed in order to be able to accommodate even the hybrid model um so i think part of what i'm thinking is making sure that there's sort of in addition to the the commitment from the board but also you know what are the resources that the district needs in order to be able to successfully open um so i want to make sure that's captured there i think one thing i want to ask the board to consider is potentially a separate resolution or communication to um to the governor the health authority and the oregon department of education i think the the language is very diplomatic director scott that we're you know encouraging um the the governor and the health authority and the department of education to revisit them as condition changes i think we should be um a little more assertive and communicate what we need as a large district so portland's very different from other other districts just that we're you know most districts in the state of oregon 199 are much smaller and to turn the ship around it takes a lot more and so i would hope that um maybe we could have a communication to the state about um what we need to see from them and again i don't know why they picked the 19th but it it may work for smaller districts but i think it would be very hard for pbs to turn that ship so that would be something else that i would be interested in in the resolution um but i think it accomplishes its purpose of sending the right the right message of um we intend to move move ahead and i think continuing the conversation as you said uh director scott to show our work so that um it's really transparent so parents you know i know because i'm getting lots of questions every day from people of just like how it's going to work because people are trying to figure out their lives um sort of post pandemic or as they're getting vaccinated and i think the more that we can communicate just the better and i think this is a great
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first start and a first start that's aligned with um the superintendent's staff all right amy director com sam thank you um yeah just thank you to andrew for bringing this forward also just generally for your leadership and partnership on this issue for a long time even when the road was very bumpy but i think that in the absence of a strong statement from the board and strong analysis and communication from the district which we heard tonight um a lot of worry and concern and questions kind of started to take root in the community so i think it's really important for us to just be really clear about our intentions and then also to agitate on the factors that are outside of our control but on which we have influence meaning the ready school safe learners guidelines probably and other decisions um coming down or potentially coming down from the state we have an important voice and role and important perspective so i'm glad to hear some of my other board colleagues um recognize that and be willing to be willing to advocate for what we believe is right for our students but um andrew thank you again i look forward to voting on this supporting this and hopefully easing easing a bit of the worrying burden from our families all right uh we will vote on this resolution at the next board meeting on may 25th all right we come now to something that i've had to do a lot of studying on um something uh kind of outside my normal wheelhouse as we turn to some of the financial decisions that we make as a board superintendent de gerar would you like to introduce the next item which is the pers obligation funds well that's a switching gears chair uh and and consistent with the onboarding process here in pps are new uh you don't get really get called new after 30 days but our chief financial officer in alberto delgadillo who's going to talk to us on this topic of limited tax pension bonds and i know we're being joined tonight by as usual our esteemed guest carol samuels and company as well thank you cara for doing the work of teleporting everyone in and the meeting and trying to you know spin all the plates all at once we really appreciate you yeah thank you good evening i was like they're talking about me and i can't interject so but now i'm here good evening chair laurie and directors uh yes definitely switching gears and student representative shu uh for tonight want to engage in a discussion uh regarding pension obligation bonds i think the current low interest rates make it ideal to consider issuing a pension obligation bond but there are also risks to be considered so to help guide our conversation to further understand the benefits and risk i like to do i'd like to introduce three of our guests that are here we have uh gogon agar and i and my apologies gogan if i mispronounce your name i answered anything you can imagine it's like me right i'm alberto so the first name is accurate it's golgan and my last name is turkish and they have silent g so it's ur i totally get the silent g thing because i've got the silent dh on my sisters i studied german for two years so i have this familiarization with the um lots but you know that the the the g was i should have looked that up but uh but yes uh our bond console and uh we also have uh andrew dyke from eco northwest who is part of the team that authored the analysis to assess the risks and rewards of issuing the pension obligation bond and in addition as as superintendent guerrero mentioned earlier we have carol samuels who you all know very well and so for kicking it off i'm going to turn it over to carol to walk us through the risk and rewards conversation in addition we have a
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deck that we want to share so carol take it away great well good evening everybody it's nice to see all of you hopefully next time it will be in person um what i have in front of you here is a very abbreviated version of the deck that you should have in your board packet and my hope is that this will be a quick review but this is a very complicated subject so please feel free to ask any and all questions that come to mind as i go through it and i'll also be asking andrew from echo northwest to go over some key slides that are relevant to this discussion so if we could turn to the first slide believe yeah there we go okay so why are we having this conversation at all well frankly the reason is that the oregon pension system is still substantially underfunded which means that your rates and charges associated with your pension costs are still quite high and pension bonds can be a tool that can help reduce those costs so the concept can get pretty muddy but in fact it's actually fairly straightforward essentially the goal is to borrow at very low interest rates take the money send it to pers pers has an 80 billion dollar portfolio which they invest across the investing spectrum and the goal would be that once those funds are invested the bond proceeds that they would hopefully return a rate that was higher than the borrowing rate so let me say that again because it's actually the simplest concept of all the things we're going to talk about tonight the goal is to borrow at a lower interest rate than the investment returns on those funds would generate that profit or arbitrage would be used to reduce your overall pension costs so there's a lot of lingo here pers has a system of side accounts you may have had a conversation about that last year when there was a proposal that was adopted to submit some cash into a site account a site account is just a fancy name for a savings account whereby pers is retaining it on your behalf and comes up with a draw down or amortization schedule that lasts for 20 years where a certain amount is drawn out each year and is used as an offset to what you otherwise would pay that offset is known as a rate credit unlike with your general obligation bond program since this is not for a capital purpose under federal tax law the only way you can borrow for this is on a taxable basis so your geo bonds can be sold at a tax exempt rate and i see everybody has a cat in this i have one sleeping next to me right now in any case uh because these aren't for buildings and facilities the feds won't let you borrow on a tax-exempt basis which is fine you can borrow on a taxable basis but it makes the interest rate somewhat higher next slide please so hopefully you can see some of these numbers uh if you can't as i said before they are in your packet but portland has had a very successful track record and history of using pension obligation bonds to reduce your costs in the upper box you'll see that the district
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borrowed three times two of which were new money the third was a small refinancing of the 2002 debt where you borrowed approximately half a billion dollars so 500 million dollars at interest rates ranging from 5.6 percent on the 2002s to 5.73 percent on the 2003s and again a small portion was refinanced in 2012. those funds were deposited into a site account you can see the deposit on the lower left and hopefully you can see that it grew steadily over time because your timing could not have been better in the middle you can see the investment returns that were experienced from 2004 through and including 2019 and even though in today's market borrowing at five and a half percent or higher would be considered quite expensive relative to your rate of return you've done remarkably well in the lower right you can see a column labeled pension bond savings and the overall total reduction savings being translated into a reduction in personnel costs is over 280 million dollars in total and on a present value basis about 184 million dollars so all has gone remarkably well for this setup next slide furthermore we've run projections of what is potentially going to happen in the remaining seven years of these bond issues both of which expire in fiscal year 2028 and again if you look at the lower right you'll see that the expectation based upon an assumption that the fund earns you can see in the middle what the pers model assumes which is a 7.2 rate of return each and every year which we know is not going to happen but from our perspective this is as good of a model as we're going to get for now um but assuming you earn something approaching 7.2 percent in the next seven years you stand to save an additional 180 plus million dollars so all things being equal this is a risky thing to do but as i've said to several of you i think we all have jim scherzinger to help to thank because it was on his watch that the district made the decision to move ahead on this basis next slide so why might now be a good time to think about doing this again well i'm sure you've seen in your own personal lives as you refinance your mortgages or take out loans for remodeling or cars or the district's go bonds that interest rates are truly at historic lows this is a graph that looks in the period between 1996 and today and you can see that interest rates you can see this more clearly in the inside box have started to creep up this year based upon some concerns about inflation um but even with that creep up they are still at historic lows and you can kind of see where we were back in 2002 and 2003 relative to where we are now we are currently projecting that for a 20-year bond issue you could borrow at approximately three and a half percent next slide so i think it's super super important that everybody here understand that this is not like any other financing you're ever likely to consider in your capacity as a public official
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in that there is absolutely no guarantee this is going to work out well as i said the sound bite is can you make more on the invested bond proceeds than you're spending on the borrowing and the interest and the answer is if you think you can if returns are going to exceed the borrowing rate then the likelihood is you are going to put yourself in a better situation if returns equal the borrowing rate then at least you have not put yourself further behind but in the case where returns are below the borrowing rate you could put yourself in a worse position than if you had done nothing and i've worked on quite a few pension bonds since 2002 and you know i sleep well at night because i know that most of the folks i've worked with have done really really well portland at the top of the list but there was a group in 2007 who borrowed right before the 2008 crash and they are still in the hole and we don't project they are ever going to climb out of that particular hole if you assume the same model assumption of a 7.2 return with that i'm going to turn it over to andrew at echo northwest because the district did contract with echo northwest to run an analysis beyond my expertise which is on the borrowing side to look at the probability of success on the investing side so andrew are you on i am on thank you carol um so next slide and i will talk which i will talk about so i do want to clarify too carol mentioned that we contracted with pps we actually pps was part of a group of nearly two dozen school districts that participated in and was interested in this particular analysis um and the results obviously don't depend on the group of districts that are funding the report could have been pps by itself but of any other group of districts so there was a large consortium that was interested in this question and that are pursuing an interest in evaluating the risks and rewards of issuing pension obligation bonds i do also want to say that i and eco northwest are independent third party here this analysis is designed to support the decision-making process but we have no no vested interest in the bond sale itself so i just wanted to put that out there there's a lot of words in the slide and a small number of numbers but what you're looking at are high level findings from our analysis we conduct an initial analysis of the potential um rewards and risks of issuing pension obligation bonds in january and the results of that are displayed in the dark blue filled in bars in the chart and we just spent a minute on those so that you understand what you're looking at and then we'll talk about the update um so we're looking at different rates of bond issuance along the bottom 2.5 3.5 4.5 percent and the dark blue bars are the output or one of the outputs of our modeling um where we estimate the risk or the probability of a successful bond issue where the returns are greater than the costs of the bonds and you can see not surprisingly as you move from a low interest rate to a higher interest rate the probability of success declines in our initial analysis for the scenarios we modeled um the probability of success was a high of 95 percent for the rate of 2.5 down to about 80 for that higher rate scenario and that was supposed to be the end of the story um as it turns out in march um some new information was released and specifically uh millerman the first system actuary presented to the pers board some less favorable market uh financial market outlooks um and that that outlook was less favorable suggesting um annual returns of about 0.75 percentage points lower year by year than they miliman had projected in december and lower by a similar magnitude compared to the projections that we rely on our model and what we put into our model is based on treasury projections um and we think that's the best information for this kind of analysis they have the most intimate knowledge of the pers portfolio unfortunately they have not revised their projections we expect they will release new market projections
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in june uh we expect a directional change that's similar that is the mark of outlet will be less optimistic we don't know how less optimistic we'll be we don't know the magnitude of that change but hearing this new information there was understandable interest in getting an update of our analysis we unfortunately cannot do a full update because we do not have the updated treasury outlook and the miliman information is not sufficient to run an update so what we recommended and ultimately implemented and you'll see displayed in the outline bars is an alternative approach that approximates the impact on the probability of success of deteriorated market conditions so specifically what we suggest is suppose you're looking at a rate of bond issue of 4.5 what we did was keep our old market outlook but run a scenario at a higher interest rate specifically 5.5 percent and the results of that scenario modeling should approximate what you would expect to see if you ran a scenario with a model that had been updated with a new set of financial projections at a bond rate of 4.5 percent um and that the um the market projections would be if they're lower for anticipating an annual return that's about one percentage point lower than prior then we're putting a similar kind of squeeze in the potential reward so again based on our initial model if you were anticipating a bond rate of 4.5 percent you would want to look to the results for a bond rate of 5.5 percent to approximate what would happen if market conditions were such that returns were about a percentage point lower than uh previously anticipated um and that's what we're showing in the outline bars we're kind of shifting the results over to the to the left and you can see that the probability of success has declined somewhat at the initial rate of 2.5 percent we're predicting a probability of success of about nine and ten almost ninety percent chance and that declines to about 67 percent or two-thirds probability of success at an interest rate of 4.5 um so so that's the results and i will say a couple more things before turning it back over to carol one is that this is these new results are potentially slightly less optimistic than might be warranted by the information from millman um again their market returns anticipated going forward we're about three quarters of a percentage point lower than initially anticipated we're presenting results that are consistent roughly with returns that are one percentage point lower on average at the same time again we believe that the treasury has the best information and that their projections are going to be the best guy as to the future returns of the portfolio and we don't know where that's going to land we have to wait till june to find that out so with that i will turn it back to carol well before we move further i know there were a lot of questions on the echo northwest's information so let me just pause all right let's run down i'm gonna just run down the list and see who has questions amy do you have any questions about this well chair lowry did everyone on the board have the opportunity to have the individual or small group briefing on the same information yes we all have that opportunity i was not i was not able to take advantage of it but um heard from other board colleagues and got some fill in okay and i wasn't either i jumped on the call today but had over um double booked myself so i haven't also got the benefit of that smaller group learning and we will we are not voting on this tonight so we will have some time before the vote so perhaps michelle there could be a window to have that happen maybe we can check with roseanne okay um mr dyke i appreciate having you here and thank you for that bit of a deeper dive um we had a pretty i had a pretty extensive conversation the other day and um i believe most of my questions were um sufficiently answered so thank you great you're welcome andrew did you have something no just thank you you're welcome oh no i met andrew scott sorry oh i'm sorry i'm sorry i should have said director scott i apologize that was super confusing we often get confused ourselves between andrew scott and scott bailey so it's commonplace around here okay when when carol when carol opened up and she said she was gonna ask andrew to walk
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through some of the slides wait a minute i didn't sign up for that i don't know all right we can although that would turn out a lot better than if she said we're going to have amy walk through these things double scouting when we accidentally email both aunt both andrew scott and scott bailey um when you only mean to email one of you but accidentally email both that's called the double scouting just right i uh no i don't have specific questions i really appreciate it i appreciate the the the the presentation so far and the clarity carol um you bring to the issue uh you know because it is it is unlike almost anything else we'll do i i do have this is maybe more for i don't know if we're gonna keep doing a little bit more presentation but for the resolution there is a an important thing i'd like to talk about with the board in terms of that maximum percentage rate which relates right very directly back to this so so if board members have have seen in our resolution there is a there is a maximum interest rate that we um as a board are authorizing the the bonds to be issued and right now that that is set at four and a half percent i think that's worth having a conversation about particularly given given these findings um i i will just tell you personally i'm far more comfortable at three and a half than at four and a half you know at four out of five um times it turning out well then two out of three um so i think that is that is maybe worth a conversation as important well and andrew i just want to piggyback on that same point um i understand we have a couple of things that we need to to verify in the next few days before we take a vote but i had a lot of concerns about postponing this vote because we know that that interest rate is a moving target and um so the sooner if we are collectively uh inclined to approve this the sooner we do it the better yes and uh you share that with me uh director konstam and we will um we're looking at how quickly we can get those final pieces into place so we can go ahead and move forward with the vote we may end up calling a special meeting uh to do so but but we have to kind of finalize the timeline director broome edwards did you have any questions at this point you have a number of questions and i um so i was part of the uh scherzinger miracle uh that threaded the needle um so it's always great to be part of that um to have a big um a big plot of money that um you took a a i calculated an informed risk on and it had a good outcome for pbs um but i also know that in the last 20 years we've had a fair amount of just volatility and um you know uh there's lots of monday morning quarterbacking uh when it doesn't come out that same way so so i think we should do our full due diligence i don't think that um we we haven't had a had a board session on this before this and i think it's relatively uh a material is substantive issue if you're one of those districts that are still underwater from 2007 you'll know that like the state stakes are high so a couple questions i had unfortunately i um my questions got pegged to the longer slide deck um so there is so i don't i don't know if you have the i assume carol you have a longer slide deck or somebody does um i do so so um maybe i don't actually need one of the slides to ask this question and i'd like to um this can be a combined answer from [Music] andy um andrew and carol um but what is the estimate range so say if we if this if we're at 67 if we catch that 33 percent what's the estimated range of the financial downside in the worst case scenario so i'll jump in and carol can uh fill in if she thinks i've missed anything i don't have those numbers at my fingertips but the broader report that we issued did provide some additional information about the distribution of outcomes um so so the the present value of the benefits to the bonds at different interest rates and the distribution the fifth percent prior value the 95th percentile value so you can get some sense of you know the potential downside at different points in the distribution if that makes sense yeah i'd like to be able to have it captured in a way like i can tell my mom what the risk is like here's potentially what the range is um i mean it's a it's a dense um presentation i've read through the whole thing but it would be useful to understand just in lay person's terms just like we captured the potential upside
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what the potential the range of the downside is so we know what that risk could be and then then following on what that range could be um i'm assuming it depends on how big you decide to go how how big you know if you catch the downside you know how big your downside would be or what the you know potentially how big your upside is yeah i think the the information that in the report is it's not packaged in a way that would allow you to take it right away and give it show it to your mom or whoever obviously but um there is some interpretation that we can add to that average taxpayer yep yep right that turns it into statements that along the lines you're suggesting i think that's that's useful to do yeah i think it allows us then to um to understand the the risk um and [Music] and and how you know how big the swing is um actually yeah i know i just really do mind if i interrupt for just a second because on this on this on this point because actually one of the things that uh in our conversation my conversation with carol um that i found really compelling was and i think you did model out what if we had the same experience as those districts that um issued in 2007 so what if we had a 27 drop next year um and then you know the same sort of returns that you know they've seen over the last 13 years and surprisingly we would still come out ahead although those districts came out behind we would come out ahead and the reason for that is those districts issued at five five and a half percent something along that we're targeting more of a three and a half you know maybe four percent and so and and i don't i'm not saying any of this to say that we're guaranteed a good outcome because we're not right i mean there are still lots of scenarios um well or maybe one out of every you know five stairs where um you know we we we could end up underwater but that for me was really sort of helpful in sort of highlighting why the district's bringing this forward to begin with interest rates where they are right now and i know you know this julia i'm just i'm repeating this more just to get it on the record but yeah i thought that was a really i thought that was a really interesting um analysis in and of itself that that risk that risk uh stress testing and also if everyone didn't have a chance for a briefing if maybe somebody could show that slide i do think that that graph is really compelling well i'd like i'd like to have it be able to be captured in a way that we can explain explain the risk um because i i'm a i'm a risk taker but an informed risk taker and so being able to um look at like here's the potential upside i mean obviously any potential upside has huge impacts for you know our mission but so do potential downsides so if the for the potential downside is actually not such a big downside that uh helps inform the risk so but we need to have people like some but we can't expect somebody to read through this and so be able to translate that into lay language if we want to look at that slide that was actually the next slide in the abbreviated deck all right let's let's um i'd like to see that um do we want to let everybody else have a chance to ask a quick question or do we want to go ahead and move on because we've got michelle nathaniel rita and scott and we can go through the rest of the slides maybe julia and they'll answer some of your questions and then we can do more questions at the end okay i just um yes that totally works um i do want to get my questions answered if we're going to be voting next week yes and i you know and i know that we'll also have time to ask questions offline as we continue to maybe other of us get briefings or um continue on so let's hear quickly from um michelle did you have a question at this moment i i don't right now um my question is i'd like to get us a smaller group um scheduled uh nathaniel did you have any questions or comments at this juncture no um i would also very much like to get a small group leaving scheduled um i was not awkward one and i feel like i'm way out of my league here so i understand that feeling all right rita did you have any questions or comments at this juncture nope scott yes um a couple of questions um and maybe it's on the slide so it looks like historically i'm gonna have a scott i'm gonna have a stick to what we've seen so far if we have questions about that and then we'll finish the rest of the presentation and
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then we come back for more questions does that work can i finish thank you historically um it looks like the the two previous pers bonds have uh most recently saved us over 20 million dollars a year is that a correct interpretation of the far right hand column of the earlier slide yeah the earlier slides showing this historic uh you have you know on average potentially i wouldn't say yeah i would say on average it's probably a little lower than 20 million one of the things you'll notice if you back up to slide three not the far right column but the second one in that shows the absolute savings they vary a lot and that is one other risk factor that i know staff is well aware of but the board as well we need to be prepared to deal with the fact that because this is an arbitrage play where you are basing it on investment returns since investment returns vary your site account benefit is also going to vary so having a reserve is prudent okay yes um my second question is given the current assumptions going forward um let's say we borrow at 3.5 and we get an average rate of return from pers that's on schedule what's our average annual benefit estimated to be in present value terms now see that is a perfect segue to the slide that we were just about to look at because i think that was julia's question as well if i understood it if you want to hold off on that one i have before we go go ahead uh a different question this is uh for alberto is we have an account if you look at our big fat budget book that's our pers account with i think 40 million dollars in its 48 million something like that is that related to any of this it it is in a way but i will turn to claire hertz to add a little bit more detail to it as she has a lot more experience to help us answer that question thank you yes we do have a pers reserve that is intended to help offset um the rates in the case of a downturn in earnings so that there was a resolution passed by the board like and on top of my head i don't remember what year but a long time ago with accumulated funds in order to help offset and balance um in case there was a um you know a bad scenario and that came forth and it does um the resolution has us take a certain small percentage of our property tax revenue each year and move it into that re pers reserve fund okay and i'm seeing it's uh for those of you who have the big budget books page 145 and it's actually projected to hit about 58 million so that's money that is not it's related to pers and pers risk in general but it's actually money that we control it's not in a side account is that correct it it is um in our our bank account it's not at purrs and it is something that is um there is a board resolution from years ago that gives us guidance on when we accumulate and when we use it but it's certainly under the board's control to determine the use of that fund okay could we get a copy of that resolution and uh also your your opinion because
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that i'm not sure how far back that was uh prior to my time for sure yeah as to what our strategy if that's if you agree with that strategy going forward in terms of how to use that fund um or in what conditions we would spend it down i i believe it's grown quite a bit over the last decade i agree certainly we can report back to you on that i'll work with um nobody out to um so that he understands the purpose of the fund and we'll report back to you that would be great um and then a question for andrew dyke you ran a bunch of simulations um with different things go this way or that way or the current way in terms of investment outcomes what were the basis of the different possible outcomes and the odds you placed on each of those or is it how did can you give some insight as to how you constructed that sure yeah absolutely that's a great characterization um so in technical terms what we did was implement a monte carlo simulation which um sort of sounds like rolling the dice and in a high-tech way it kind of is but uh just sort of a quick summary of what that is um as inputs we take um again the market outlook um from the treasury which gives us the expected or average return for each of the portfolio portfolio sorry asset classes in the portfolio as well as a major of risk and specifically the standard deviation of those returns and beyond that we also get um i don't want to get too technical here but we get the correlations across asset classes because you know if you're paying attention to the stock markets often when the u.s stock markets go up the global stock markets will go up and vice versa not one-to-one but there's a relationship there so we take all that information and turn that into sort of mathematical distributions of outcomes um so we can know you know with a certain probability we're likely to see something in the range of the average returns there's also a smaller probability that we'll see a very high or very low return for each asset class and so what we're doing with the monte carlo simulation is basically taking random draws of the year by year returns on the portfolio um consistent with the assumptions of the treasury with the market outlook um and then doing that 20 000 times so it's sort of like an experiment again where we're sort of rolling the dice 20 000 times if you're rolling the dice once you don't want to rely on the results but you do it 20 000 times and the statistics gives you a good understanding of what's likely to happen okay um and you probably can't answer this question but if you had rolled the dice 20 000 times the last time we were set to go out for a purr's bond and had the current results today are we like in line or did we do better than that expectation that sort of central tendency expectation or do you have any ideas on that and right have not done that comparison um and i don't know if we'd be able to go back far enough to to you know get the same input numbers but i think that's certainly a question i would like to look at um i think so we don't have an analysis the performance i think that the reliability of the output is going to be have a similar type of performance as the treasury's projections and they're not perfect um you know again they're going to change every six months but it's the best information we have yeah i will say too though that um right now there's a relatively wide spread between the bond rates that are likely to be seen and average market returns there's still risk but there's a widespread there um and carol can correct me if i'm wrong in characterizing things this way but um it's a wider spread than we've seen um in a long long time if ever and so um correspondingly we were in our simulations we're seeing higher probabilities of success than we've seen in the past and you know we have exp sort of outcomes we've seen most of the pension obligation bonds have proved positive some haven't um so it you know order of magnitude they seem reasonable all right i'm going to ask if we can move along to carol's next slide because we we still have a lot here with this and then we still got like budget i may double back with some questions offline thank you we're not going to be voting on this tonight so we do have some more time to ask questions so just want us to to walk that line of making sure we're
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getting what we need publicly but also respecting everyone's time so carol uh i think we're ready for that anxiously wanting to show us yes julia i just want to make sure before we move to a different topic that i get a chance to at least get to answer that one question and get my other questions on the table yeah so what we're going to do is we are going to allow the folks here to finish this presentation and then if there are still questions at the end of the presentation we'll do a quick run through of everybody and probably take a quick break and then move on to our i think i don't know what's next in the budget but our next item so that hopefully that gives some time to answer those questions and then you can also um submit those questions after this meeting as well i sent them five days ago so great great all right carol we'll turn it over to this next slide and then we'll go from there okay so uh this gets at what several of you referenced we took the information and ran some actual what if scenarios with regard to what if you borrowed in each case at three and a half percent and then had three different investment outcomes so the first case is what i'd call the control case it is exceptionally unlikely to happen but it reflects the pers model which is that the fund earns 7.2 each and every year as i've said to many of you if you borrow it three and a half and earn every year 7.2 we know you're gonna make money and that's what this first column shows so at the very top you'll see that we project if you want to finance the entire amount that it will come to about 390 million dollars we also project that that would two blocks of information down create an average percentage break credit against your current payroll rate of about seven percent which once you take into account the debt as a percentage of payroll would save you roughly 1.7 of payroll each and every year that adds up to total savings of 179 million dollars which on a present value basis meaning what it's worth to you in today's dollars is about 125 million but obviously the notion of earning one rate is ridiculous so we also move to two actual cases the second case being portland's experience where immediately after issuing bonds you earned double digit returns for five years and then the crash of 2008 took place when the fund lost 27 of your of its value and then it has been recovering ever since on that basis this case is even better which shouldn't surprise us because portland is living proof of what happens when that occurs and you save approximately 306 million dollars or 211 on a present value basis and roughly 2.8 of your payroll each and every year then there's case three which i think all of us including me were surprised by when we first saw it because this is what you could call the worst case except it's not the worst case so i want to emphasize this is a worse case but i could definitely construct a scenario that has far worse outcomes but nevertheless this is the real life circumstance that faced the 2007 borrowers where immediately they borrowed in the fall of 2007 within three months the pers fund was down by nearly a third of its value and it recovered from there but
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never enough such that the 2007 issuers have gone into the black yet what this is showing is that even in this scenario you would save money approximately 71 million dollars is that a lot well it's not nothing um but it's obviously not anywhere near as much as the other two scenarios and it would be perfectly legitimate for you to say how is that possible when i have said consistently that those that borrowed in 2007 and had exactly these investment outcomes are still in the red the main difference you can see at the bottom of the slide this is what andrew scott was talking about is that those who borrowed in 2007 borrowed at a overall interest rate of 5.67 and we're talking about a borrowing rate here that's 200 basis points lower and that makes a huge difference so uh let me just go on to the next slide because it's the last one and it shows the timeline we're operating on and then uh happy to answer any questions um so i put this together before i understood that tonight is just considering the concept i think the schedule i've heard is potentially having the board adopt the resolution at your meeting on the 25th if you do that this schedule still works if it's any later than that then we'd have to evaluate the timing overall but this is working towards a bond sale on june 30th which would be it would take place just like all of your general obligation bond sales where the underwriters go through a bidding process and the lowest bid interest rate is the underwriter that is selected subject again as andrew said to meeting your maximum borrowing rate constraint so if you got into the market and the market did not cooperate and the bids came in above the maximum that was set in the resolution then the district would not proceed to complete the sale the goal would be to have a closing in the middle of july send the money to pers and purse actually adjust rates pretty much immediately the first of the month following the receipt of the funds so you would start to see lower payroll rates immediately and that concludes my remarks so carol just to be clear delaying till the 25th does not impact this timeline correct correct that's great to know because that was one of the concerns all right julia do you wanna um uh lift up your questions yeah so um and some of these can be answered in fact most of them could be answered just in writing or later or before the next um well preferably a couple days before the next board meeting and this would be for andrew not andrew scott um so we received a much longer slide presentation uh that sort of goes through all the scenarios the history a lot of the background the assumptions um since you're and i know that you did the sort of monte carlo simulation on the front end for this larger this larger group but since you have um sort of no or you have an independent look at this have you gone through that longer extended deck and are you comfortable with the assumptions that have been made and the scenarios um that those would be ones that reasonable people uh would make yes yes and you know you can say we look at it or the answer is yes yeah assuming it's the the final deck that we've prepared yep yeah it's the it's the big fat one um okay that was my first question and then um
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on page 10 of the the big one versus the small shorter one um there's a list of other risks um that it's as and there are other risks too and then it lists out um a series of um four or five other um scenarios or risks that could be involved and i'm interested in again i don't need to have to have the answer tonight but what what's the size or the the scope of of that risk you know the material um but you're just meant that the but they're just being mentioned so if i could address those because uh that was a slide deck that i put together um and for the benefit of others there is another slide in your board packet that lists other risks that i think fit comfortably under the headline your rate credit is going to vary we have already talked about that briefly but there are a number of reasons why it might vary at the very top of the list is variability in investment rates it is also exactly that's the one i'm referring to right and julia it is hard to quantify the order of magnitude difference because there are so many ingredients that can lead to variance including how quickly your payroll might grow and what happens to the assumed rate so it's not something that i think i can provide a range of outcomes but i do think you can go back and look at your own history and get a sense of how large the variance is from that period including the period of time where you were growing less than what the assumption was in terms of payroll and a period of time where you had strong reinvestment and weak reinvestment yeah i guess i would appreciate that um i would be interested in either staffs or just so that we have the the um assumptions and risks pressure tested um and they may they may come up with the same answer but like to have that answered and then um maybe this is a question for claire on the payroll growth trends do we know what ours are and how those would be impacted i mean is that is that an unknown we know our degree of um payroll growth and certainly with the sia investments and measure 98 investments it had and now the esser dollars it sure is um adding you know variance to that but certainly it's something that um we can make sure that we're using our most up-to-date information about what we know is coming in 21 22 and 22-23 at this point we did do our forecast that we can add the funding that has come in since then um to help determine what's um for at least the next few years what the payroll growth is expected to be and then after that we really have to look at a long-term averaging um based on um state school fund you know based on the legislative allocation to k-12 education in oregon so claire you're not concerned about that just given the change well it's taking a variable so i i think carol said it best that there are multiple variables in this calculation and so what we can do is take the best information that we have and use it to determine the best path forward in order to do the investments in the pay down um you know the debt service and the pay down distribution okay and then um a little bit scarred by 2007 so i'm wondering so that that's the kc worst case scenario um i don't think we're gonna have another pandemic um but i'm
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curious carol you said that there were other scenarios that you could see that that could get us below 71 million or they're worse their worst case scenarios in different ways oh for sure uh you know i i think i was talking to noberto uh this afternoon where i relayed that one client quite a while ago asked us to run what happened in japan in the 90s when the nikkei index went down year after year after year believe me i can come up with numbers that are scary and negative um if you assume that we have multiple years of downturns um so if you'd like to see that you know tell me what you'd like us to run and we can do it our perspective was that 2008 was pretty brutal um and that seemed like a reasonable example to look at but i'm certainly willing to run something scarier if you'd like to see it okay i think can we get get onto our budget item chair lowry yeah i think director of our medwars it seems like that um there may be some more questions and i'd encourage you to continue with those um with i know carol and claire are available for continued question answering um because it seems like you're running down your list there yeah well a lot of these questions we went through in our individual meetings too including the one that we had together so i'm just concerned that we have our entire budget to get through and we're not going to be able to uh you know carol i know you would valiantly try but we are not going to be able to um you know quantify the exact risk but we all are in possession of the variables at play here and need to you know make a a reasoned decision on that and i think protocols we adopted tonight the protocols we adopted tonight is anytime we have a major item that there's an opportunity to have a board meeting or a discussion about it before we actually vote on it so right and i really appreciate you guys being able to answer these questions so i um will follow up and my i'll claire work with you um or roberto um to get them in but i would like to have them answered we do have the questions julian look at the responses to you we appreciate your interest in the in you know how complicated the process is sorry i think my internet is telling me i'm unstable um i i okay very nice of your internet um you know this is a complicated process this is something that's newer to me and so i've appreciated all the questions and all the time i appreciate the additional time so that we can bring this back on the 25th now that we know it won't disrupt the timeline i think we'll save ourselves the headache of trying to schedule an interim meeting um but go and uh roseanne if you could reach out to director depos to see if we can get another briefing and then uh director bram edwards if you can work with um deputy hertz and uh miss samuels and the team uh to get those finalized questions answered so that you feel ready to vote on the 25th deputy hearts did you add i just wanted to thank carol samuels golden oor and andrew dyke for joining us tonight and answering all of our questions we appreciate you being with us to share this um potential opportunity for the district thank you you're welcome welcome thank you all and for the earlier briefings as well and for for really providing a pretty common sense um perspective on some really complex information all right we are going to go ahead and move now to another piece of complex information the work of the board involves all sorts of pieces and one of them is enrollment balancing so we're going to say goodbye to this group of guests and i'm going to turn us over to superintendent guerrero to introduce our next group of guests i think that's right another light topic for the evening so in a three sentence recap for our viewing audience uh as most of you are aware uh last year we launched an enrollment and program balancing process uh receiving technical assistance from flow analytics to help the data analysis and modeling and
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co-develop community engagement strategies and with much help and shared leadership from a guiding coalition of representatives from our various school communities in february 2020 the board adopted resolution 6059 a scope of work for a first phase of the charge which addressed schools in the southeast quadrant of the district due to a high number of small k to eight neighborhood schools as well as really the eminent opening of kellogg middle school which we're excited to cut the ribbon on uh so now it's time to move on to phase two uh so to begin that next phase we would like to be able to provide that coalition a clear charge for its work and so to to get us into that conversation um deputy claire hertz will take it from here hello again another light topic as he said so um i'd like to introduce the staff i have joining us today i have shanice clark director of community engagement judy brennan our director of enrollment and transfer and esther i'm going to try really hard esther a mogbane a regional superintendent and she'll have to correct me on i i've been practicing and i'm still not perfect esther i'll call you dr oh that's the best way for me that was okay um so i would ask roseanne um thank you great and if we could go to the next slide please and so as we are bringing back um a charge for phase two um just wanna share with you um some of our thinking and lessons learned from our um last phase one process and so we have two meetings for the board to first understand um where we're headed for where the staff is recommending for phase two where what our next steps will be and so this is the first discussion evening for our agenda item and then moving for approval in the second um meeting in may and so we're really looking at middle school students having access to equitable programming focusing on specifically harrison park and lane middle schools having resources available to them with a balanced enrollment and really making sure that as they have a balanced enrollment that opens up opportunities where they would have additional human resources available to them and focus on that equity for our bypass students experience in as we balance our southeast portland middle schools so that would be our staff recommendation is at a larger level but i would like to turn it over now to um judy brennan um to talk a little bit about the charge and the scope of work good evening uh next slide please so i'm just going to share um a few of the details of what we see as essential in this next phase of work and of course are here and available if you have more detailed questions so um we assembled our team uh you're meeting the team tonight and we also um consulted with some a small number of segc members we took in some we folded in some feedback that was happening with harrison park community members the principal um was holding listening sessions for those groups so so that all went into the mix now i want to say we did not roll the dice 20 000 times to come up with an appropriate scope of work um but what we kept coming back to again and again based on the feedback that you provided to us on february 22nd was the importance of opening harrison park as a middle school in the 20 to 23 school years you see that as the top line um on this scope of work one thing that we also noticed right away is that unlike phase one of segc where we were largely taking students from k-8 schools reconfiguring them and offering them the new kellogg middle school in this case in order to build enrollment at harrison park to be large enough to really stand out as a middle school as a pure middle school to others in southeast will be needing to reassign areas that
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are currently attached to other middle schools or and or we probably think it's an and or um additional programs like dual language immersion programs so um that's a difference that we just need to contemplate as we begin this phase a couple other things to point out um if you'll recall the kellogg building is physically located in the bridger boundary but bridger is not fully assigned to middle schools at this time part of the area is administratively assigned to kellogg the part closest to the building and the remainder is um those students are now at will be attending harrison park k-8 um next year and then in a moment i'll just um touch on um something that we do want to make sure um you're aware of and that is that we've got some enrollment changes coming that we need to fold into the planning for this phase um while the team was working on what was possible for harrison park we came again and again to the importance of lane middle school so um next slide please this graph may be the quickest way to represent um uh why that's so important for us we thought it was so important to be a part of this scope um so you'll see southeast middle schools represented here with harrison park that's the six eight portion of their current k now what we're showing you is the forecast enrollment about five years from now and the current enrollment is similar but you actually we actually see lower enrollment coming that's because um as you're probably aware declining birth rate continued gentrification we have been seeing lower enrollment across k-5 schools and that will be impacting our middle school enrollment within a few years you can see the schools with the lowest enrollment harrison park the one that isn't yet a middle school that will need to to um grow by moving pieces out of other middle schools but then there's lane middle school um with no change below 400 students in 2526 because of concerns about that chronic low enrollment we'd like lane middle school to also be a priority in phase two and then just one more priority i want to touch on next slide thank you um in order for harrison park to convert we're also going to have to have a new home for the harrison park k5 students um in keeping with centering the bypoc family needs which we've heard from many of our bipod community that are part of harrison park now as well as honoring that value of keeping cohorts together which was a really important part of the final decisions that were made for phase one it's going to be important that we look at returning clark to a neighborhood school serving the harrison park community but that will mean reconfiguring or relocating the creative science school it has 450 students and is located in the clark building now so that means that even though most of the k-5 issues in the area that may have bubbled up in phase one may not be addressed in phase two we will have to have some very serious inquiry and work with a number of schools on a solution that would both serve the harrison park community and find an appropriate location if needed for creative science school that's a really high level um on what the the main desired outcomes of phase two are and i'd love to turn it over to miss clark to talk more about the process that's envisioned good evening we can move to the next slide please uh greetings uh board directors chair lowry superintendent guerrero um i am going to touch a little bit about our southeast guiding coalition and process to support the overall work for phase two um the thought partnership of our students and families and community is is central and thinking about the recommendation that's ultimately developed and we are certainly thinking about racial equity as it informs how we are renorming the southeast guiding coalition and relationship and partnership with the leaders who volunteered and dedicate time to this process but we definitely recognize that
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the solutions that we need to create need to be creative and we are really grappling with complex issues that impact the day-to-day lives of our students and the agreements that the southeast guiding coalition members have amongst each other as well as the dialogue that happens within their meetings is really going to be central and and how we think about uh holding space for those creative solutions so there's a slide here that kind of talks a little bit about the both the mindsets and methods that we want to think about and how uh racial equity informs the both voices and approach uh that we uh value uh essential in this process so um for example empathy interviews are uh going to be applied as we work with students and families to garner further input on what experiences uh the how their lived experiences inform our our next steps uh will will really um help us uh uh be grounded and centered with the storytelling uh of uh the the voices we ultimately want to center but i think the structure uh that we hold will will also uh uh be uh thought about like not meeting uh on a on a weekly cadence uh allowing uh two weeks and a little bit of time for both processing information uh receiving feedback and questions and ensuring that our documents and accessibility of the meetings and spaces are always translated and so i think those those are things that we're wanting to prioritize and make explicit as we move through the process and we can move to the next slide uh so uh i talked about a racial equity center design process and there's gonna be uh different uh levels that that we think about to approach the overall phase two and so really understanding clarifying and learning the charge and the scope of our of our work from the southeastern coalition will be essential and also uh having clarity around the goals uh and garnering space for questions uh and uh and consensus and we will continue to think about racial equity and social justice uh as we ground the work and continue to lift up priorities that are are elevated from from our members as well as gardening specific spaces for for students that that identify their top needs and then those experiences uh with key topics we really want to use those things too uh in the launch and learn uh kind of space uh to begin brainstorming uh brainstorming um solutions and outcomes that are really in line with our theory of action and commitment uh to uh black and native students and students of color and on our next slide uh there uh will just be some further clarity that will help us get to a recommendation and build consensus uh in in the next couple of levels and uh they'll uh will ultimately lead from the spring and to the fall quarter if we can move to the next slide we'll see a little bit about uh just the last tail end of the design process uh where we are holding spaces for collaboration from community and input but in a way that uh will have uh us a second robust effort um and really uh draft and test solutions that we are brainstorming to build on that recommendation and on the next slide uh i want to talk a little bit about methods and the stakeholders and this particularly important as the uh representation of the folks on the southeast guiding coalition is something that is uh important and relevant conversation both students and and people of color uh families of color uh having the capacity and ability to weigh in is something that we want to be creative and flexible about and so uh thinking about increasing that representation on our guiding coalition but uh
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having uh spaces that also elevate voices um uh that uh help us in our decision making as well and so being in that partnership and advisory with our racial equity partners having dedicated student forums those are the things that we want to think about that provide isolated space phase two uh for uh inputs uh in our process along with our open house and our website and surveys um and uh trying text messaging uh so uh these are these are gonna be a combination of continued and new strategies that will help reinforce our rare equity business process with the key and critical stakeholders that are essential in this work and with with that i will pass it on to esther good evening board of directors i'm chair lowry and superintendent guerrero during phase one we heard a lot about um the need to have voice and representation from our instructional experts we do realize that as we redesign our middle schools and we provide opportunities for our students and as we walk towards rolling out phase two of the southeast guiding coalition process it is incredibly important for us to involve the office of school support office of school performance um this is this is important to us because members in the office of school performance are experts in thinking about scheduling and thinking about programs and then thinking about the needs of students we of course work hand in hand with the office of teaching and learning to ensure that our schools have strong instructional programs and in order to do this and to honor the expertise within our ranks the office of school performance will have principles at the table each principal known for their experts expertise in either master scheduling program design student support both at the district level and at the site level as well the district level will of course have the 30 000 foot level view which they will share with our site leaders and then our site leaders of course will take that and actualize it at the schools we also will be looking at how our leaders center our bipark families and provide supports for our students while not losing sight of the day-to-day operation of the school our central office leaders will look at the district's initiatives our long-range vision our short-range plans and our enrollment patterns to determine what programs and kinds of supports that will be ideal for our middle schools as you well know there are some middle schools right now that are overcrowded and there are some that are under enrolled so the goal here is to balance our middle schools while at same time providing equity amongst the programs and adequate supports for adolescent minds the middle school redesign process of course will continue and it's a great thing we're starting with lean and harrison park middle school because that will be part of our launch towards implementing the middle school redesign program further down the road and with that said i would turn over the presentation to claire thank you so the if you would go to the next slide please and then finally we just want to ask the board you've um you've received the you know draft charge from staff in terms of what um we heard you know we we had a work session with you and then in focusing on middle schools in the southeast were wanting you to let us know does this scope in charge deliver what is needed is it um not really looking for wordsmithing tonight we'll have a chance to do that later offline but are any desired outcomes missing or what gives you pause and what else do we need to finalize the charge all right so we're going to ask folks to kind of focus in on that question that's there on your slide oh does this scope and sorry roseanne or whoever you are too fast for me um in charge deliver what is needed does this scope and charge deliver what is needed um so we'll run through the list um director bailey does this scope and charge deliver what is needed for you um i think pretty much um so i want to want to be
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clear on what i really like in it one is that uh in contrast to the first or what we learned in in the first phase is that we want educators our educators to give specific instruction around optimal dual language immersion program configurations and to give guidance around focus options as well particularly creative science that that's our that's the district's role and not the committee's role to do both of those things as well as specifying what we consider an optimal range for uh enrollment in each school to avoid under enrollment and on when they hand in overcrowding on the other hand so i'm i'm happy to see those in the charge i think it's important in when you read in the scope to note that while we're focused on harrison park and on lane that but that other middle schools in the area may come into play as we look at shifting some programs around as well as boundaries to get harrison park up to an optimal uh in that optimal range and again long term considering where we think enrollment is going at the same time easing the overcrowding at the other three middle schools three or four middle schools in the area so um i just want to be very clear it's not just those two middle schools that are called out that may be impacted but others as well thank you director bailey director broome edwards does this um scope and charge work for you i had a couple questions i appreciate staff in advance um asking them i had some governance questions um is this are we doing the same model the last time which is this is a body that's recommending to staff and then staff recommending to the board or is there a change so i'm sorry um could you repeat your question yeah um are we using the same model we did last time which is this is a this is a group that's going to make recommendations to staff and then staff would make recommendations to the board versus their board okay great um the guiding coalition would bring a proposal forward and then i would review it with the superintendent and then i would bring it to the board um for your approval so i just had just some top of mind thoughts just from the last process um i think keeping um well as close as board members want to be engaged but um just making sure there's like lots of communication flow i know especially since well at least for me this is sort of in my in my neighborhood um that just interested in having a high degree of information flow about what's happening so we don't get to the very end of the process and then there be like oh we didn't know what x was happening um i would encourage us to not just give the um group just one tool like here's a hammer versus there may be a variety of things that you could come back and recommend and i um and i specifically when i'm thinking about creative science school you know thinking about the questions that i have of if we're moving away from k-8s here's another k-8 um what what you know why would we be keeping that as a separate as a separate entity as a case as a remaining k-8 k8 or you know are there other models like the sunny side environmental school model that i would hope it's not just like the only way to solve this is a boundary change um the other thing is um and this isn't in the charge but maybe it's in the sort of guardrails the discussion with the community if there is the potential of an outcome that um schools would be consolidated which to most school communities they read that as there is one school that's closed that gets consolidated into another is that we think about how we have that conversation because that's a very traumatic event for a school community and um if if that's contemplated as part of this
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i think we should build in like how how that works um so it's not just the weakest school community or the smallest and you know i think generally uh i like the approach i think as a southeast resident the most obvious question i see and i know i asked the question is like why isn't selwood listed because all the other middle schools are listed and the answer was well this only the elementary school this closest but to me it still impacts the middle school and it just seems strange not to have if we're talking about lane to have an adjacent middle school not be named as like we're all part of this process all the southeast schools so i think i have that as an outstanding question about not explicitly naming so wood and then my final thing and some broken record about this is just um the unique nature of southeast portland and that people can live across the street from a school and it's probably the only place in the city where you can't just go to the neighborhood go to the school that happens to be across the street from you and i hope that we're building strong communities and they don't always have to be neighborhood schools but it would be nice to have some and i i um hear your question about cell with their um director from edwards and i had we had discussed that quite a bit in our briefing on wednesday about um you know selwood being sort of further away and so yes while there may be a middle school change and the feeder pattern itself would it's um it's a little different claire would you like to address that or are you wanting to respond to these questions at a later date how would it be so in in terms of why not sell wood when we talk to some of our instructional leaders um and especially in our phase one when a school was in there were several schools that were in the process and they were gaining students and not losing students and they didn't seem to need um um [Music] they we had a hard time um having purchased you know regular participation from the schools when there wasn't like a big change happening to the school and the current middle school students would continue through the school they're in so it's really the feeder pattern elementary school that is where we want to make sure the parents are aware of their middle school might change because they're the ones that would be impacted and not necessarily this the the families and the students that are in um uh the school that they're current that are currently in the middle school so i so basically you know we certainly could um look at the list of schools that certainly is um not now it's not in the charge um the list of schools but we've just provided the list that we're um working with at this point but this will of course you know will modify it based on what charge comes from what outcome comes from this conversation with the board intellectually i understand that argument it's just the one sort of southeast school that's never had sort of the moving programs around and it has the sort of highest ses i think um so just other people will be like hey how come someone's not party if this is like we're all in it together in southeast how come so what's not in it i think is a question that will need to be answered because it's like they they haven't had any of the programs coming in and out of the school um so i just put that in the table i understand that intellectually you're the rationale of why it's not in there i think we'll get a lot of questions about well we can we can add silva that's not uh we were trying to keep it smaller because um the larger gets the the um we were trying to you know take some of the board's advice from the last work session of simplifying the process but we certainly cannot sell one in i'm opposed to adding cellwood because i think the what i think what director bryn edwards is asking is for an explanation why someone is not included rather than adding solid to the scope of the work so i think if we just need to be clear on this has to do with geography and spacing and placement and not um try to solve a problem by increasing the scope i think we just she's asking for clarity around we need to be able to clearly communicate to the public why this is
03h 55m 00s
it has different adjacent boundary with lane and lanes under enrolled so the obvious thing people would say is like why don't we just move some of the silhouette kiss into lane i mean it that is a question people will ask and so i that's and that is one of the options we're looking at in the schools that are that are currently in sellwood that are closest to lane are included as in the process it's just not named as like the this elementary schools that are changing it's it would be elementary boundaries that would change feeder patterns to other elementary schools would impact solid middle school so i think maybe to name sellwood as part of it because it will have changes but it's different than looking at like a harrison park that's under enrolled and the kinds of changes that will be happening um so maybe for clarity to have cell would add it in would be beneficial okay you can do that let's um i am director depos do you have a question or comment about how the scope and charge is working for you uh yeah thank you i'm i'm happy with the scope uh generally um i also like the conversation we just had about sellwood i think that i come from a big family and it's always this idea of uh when we're talking about equity um that's that might be balancing impacts so i think it's a good question to put on the table i also feel like any school that may be impacted whether that's a net loss or net gain would be really important to engage those families and my question always is around um well i have two questions one's about the guiding coalition is it going to be the same makeup that it was before are we doing anything to um being very attentional i i know as we were last time in terms of hearing from the families of color in southeast and then um just kind of a general question how are we going to know uh when we're successful um i think the language we were talking about was like supporting supporting bipac i i know we talk about it a lot i never have a really clear understanding of what that means in terms of outcomes um so it would i would just love to get some clarity it can be offline or here in the moment about um what it what does it mean what what are we talking about when we're talking about equity um a clarification of the outcomes that we would expect so one of the things about a lower enrollment is you have fewer human you have fewer resources in the building and so right now we have two that are identified and by the demographics of those schools we can see um that are but they're highly representative of you know our bipark students or in these schools that are under enrolled and so then there aren't as many opportunities when you have fewer staff members to support the students so by increasing enrollment in the schools then you also you know the staffing allocations follow and by balancing that out regionally then you have more equitable programs for our bipark students in these schools what is the so i understand harrison parks demographics but what what is the other school is it bridger it's lane it's lane okay and it's under enrolled um as is harrison park yes okay and i don't know on in terms of the engagement if shanice if you'd like to add more about how we engage the the families especially our bipod or our families of color absolutely um i think that's a continued thing that is of value in the process especially um explicitly looking at the characteristics of how uh whiteness can be centered and so a big key part of how we want to measure the value or the quality of uh what this work will look like is uh is doing a set of things but really uh creating space that counter uh these uh dominant inequities or narratives with counter narratives uh that really honor the experiences of of students and the intelligence of our family uh throughout uh the very conversations that uh take place in our uh in their uh decision making around a uh consensus uh and i think that the multiple engagement methods uh are gonna be vital uh especially as
04h 00m 00s
uh we think about the various uh political social uh contexts that our families especially our bipoc families are navigating uh that having these dedicated spaces spaces that have advisory and insight through school focused meetings or partner-focused meetings in specific spaces that that help with these narratives in addition to um leaning on our southeast guiding coalition members to uh continue doing uh that hard work of uh thinking about uh how racial equity and social justice values in our process uh really can help uh uh i think counteract that either or thinking um in that uh right to comfort or thinking there's only one right way to uh the multiple um i think scenarios that will approach so i think it's really complex um and and that uh uh thinking thinking about our racial equity design process is really going to be formative and um creating that structure to grapple with uh what what will be what will be difficult and um i think we want to reframe our the uh the fear of open uh conflicts and and really lean into uh how we have group discussions that center on the priorities that are important to people in our community but explicitly uh uh holds the the structure to lift up voices uh from from our uh black native and families and students of color and so i think there could be more especially insight and perspective that uh the uh uh members of the board uh can and provide us in this process and would be happy to continue dialogue and um uh think that your participation in in ways uh that uh uh yeah that that help be informed of how how the kind of coalition is grappling with with different areas of the work um i think would be really i think beneficial and um um in in more in more ways than one so yes i think hopefully that that addresses it and we can also address more offline yeah thank you i i saw that um text was going to be used and i really love that i love that thank you um what the the app whatsapp um i used that when i worked for the housing bureau on a couple projects that were east of 82nd and it was really effective in terms of reaching people that have family on other continents it's it's like a free app and you can text between continents for no charge and it's a great way to get information out to the community um even here in portland um specifically the immigrant and refugee communities that's cool michelle uh director constant how's the scope and charge for you um good i'm grateful that people still want to continue with this uh with our guiding coalition um and i really appreciated um dr o hi nice to see you miss you miss going to schools um dr o really appreciated your talking about just uh how we are integrating instructional leadership and our building leadership in this process i i think more deeply than we did the last time and i think that made things a little bumpier for us in the first round because we didn't have that kind of input particularly around dli we punted a little bit to our community to make some decisions where they should have had some more information about just the the the pedagogical and the academic approach around our dli programs um director bailey you mentioned the focus option programs there i actually don't see that spelled out in the charge as clearly and obviously creative science is right in the middle of the mix and we're going to have to make decisions there not just about location and configuration and grade bands but also about you know their status as a focus option program and do they do they move to another location intact or do we make a change i don't see that clearly spelled out that there's going to be a focus from our instructional team on really addressing what's best for that school community from an academic standpoint and a community standpoint first before we tackle the nuts and bolts issues of how do we fit them in in the reconfiguration of our southeast schools so i just wanted to highlight that that wasn't clearly spelled out
04h 05m 00s
you know another on the instructional side um i th that another issue that we didn't raise very explicitly was just about the continuity of some of our programs and focus programs to high school and i know we're doing our level best to keep our high schools out of this process but i hope that we um i know we're still going to have to pay some attention to the continuity and matriculation of different programs there and also just i know it's deferred but we've got some work to do on our high school enrollment balancing so to the extent that we impact that with decisions here we need to be mindful about that um if we're not going to get to actually doing that work until a couple years down the road let's try not to make it any worse in the meantime um because we already know we've got some issues there um lastly one other thing that i didn't see mentioned well i saw mentioned a little bit but um i really would like to see um a more robust student engagement and speaking of engagement shanice that um that slide you had was so cool and i want to talk to you later about like where did that come from did you create it you know with the empathy interviewing everything i mean there was so much to that as an actual approach um and i was thinking to myself i have to say this i thought this right here does not look to me like an artifact of a racist organization and i may be saying that in the negative but i'm feeling a little sensitive tonight because our explicitly and radically and well i'll just leave it at explicitly and radically anti-racist superintendent was kind of personally attacked tonight and i think as a board we didn't we didn't respond to that and i'm not i'm not saying anything about the personal experience of the testimony that we heard the anecdotal evidence um but it was a personal attack on our anti-racist leadership of this district and i know that that must be hard for our other staff members of color who are on this call tonight and i'm getting off track um but that to me was an important moment and i'm gonna offer you superintendent my personal apology that you did not in the moment um hear from your board in appreciation for your values and how they infuse the direction and the work that we're doing and we still have a long way to go we still have a long way to go in terms of equitable hiring but i personally i personally miss the opportunity to reinforce to you that we appreciate that leadership and then i'm not making very much sense because it's 10 23 and we haven't even gotten to our budget yet but then to tie that back shanice to that slide that you had which was really quite remarkable and i know it's not just remarkable in the way it lays things out but that it is actually how you approach this work and how we approach talking to our families about making these kind of decisions and that's pretty radical in terms of how we do business we've really come a long way and we still stumble and we still have a long way to go but that's our work that's the work that we're doing and that we're trying to do and i want you to know that i see that and i think a lot of us see that and want to be on board with this anti-racist learning organization um and it's all hard work it's all hard work um but uh superintendent thank you for the staff thank you for the leadership that you show thank you for guiding the way and um i'm going to jump into i appreciate you um direct constant um bringing that up and i also want to um just appreciate you a superintendent in the moment um this has been an incredible an incredible a year just unprecedented you've heard that
04h 10m 00s
word so many times at the same time um shanice i heard you talk bring out some of these elements of um that that document that we've all as a board gone through in our single racial equity training that we've been to together and we give a lot of airspace to self-improvement and self-assessment and evaluation and how we govern but what we don't do is we don't talk about race as a board and we don't talk about um we don't have the hard conversations um about race or social and cultural identities um what norms that we follow and which ones we don't we have a norm you know it was broken tonight and that's like listen to learn not to rebut listen to learn and we have adults in the room that you know we need to hold ourselves accountable for for doing that that that's in portrait of a graduate we want our graduates to be able to do that um so we don't really have a way to assess ourselves in how we're doing and i would say that um it might be incorrect for a white person to say oh we're not anti-racist you know when we look at outcomes that are that are predictable by race still and it's not just i'm not just calling out this institution it's in every institution in in the us and so we're not exceptional that way we're we're very much in line with other public entities and other private entities we have to know that and name it before we address it if we say that we're we're not anti-racist then we might as well go home and let black and native kids fail you know i don't think any of us want that here so um i i feel like we do need to um i we we can also both appreciate the hard work of the superintendent of the staff and be critical of um and supportive of working together to in service of um creating a creating a district that's anti-racist way in the future hopefully sooner rather than later so i want to hold that space that it's okay to see both it's okay to have a both and situation it's not we don't have to have either or thinking here um i also just want to apologize superintendent i didn't say anything in the moment um and i wish i would have also because i know that silence equals violence and i've been in the position you have where um things are being flown or thrown around and no one says anything um so so i apologize i think that nobody uh there's no place for throwing insults and i'm just gonna again ask us to do better as a board when we do our self-assessment we absolutely need to talk about race and we actually probably need to do regular racial trainings on race i mean on race on how we interact how we recognize it how we address it because we don't do that right now it's just it's too uncomfortable um i agree michelle i agree i um i think that michelle you nailed it totally this intention of being a board member is this supporting and championing when we see success and when we see moving the needle and then also holding the district accountable and so that's our our corporate work is both um saying yay and also okay wait a minute um and and it can be a difficult a difficult dance to do especially in the moment when when so much is happening um in a meeting but i do i do want to echo what director compton said and great appreciation for your work shanice on this um and congratulations on uh all that you're doing and i also am thankful that you're in the cat club i saw your your cat was there behind you a little bit uh i do think that this conversation about selwood is really important um because i do think one of the things we we struggled with in the last round of this uh southeast guiding coalition was that schools were surprised that they were impacted so i think if we we need to be really clear about if we're moving elementaries what middle schools are affected and that um we just need to be i think very transparent with the school communities about the kinds of things we're talking about for them and why um and and to make sure if we're leaving someone off a list that that we're clear with that community what that means or if they're on a list what that potentially means because i think you know as we saw with preston there was some surprise with that community about being delayed um and then you know the the kind of rocky road there to get them to the finish line so the more we can be transparent with our communities up front the better but i do like the scope and i do like the charge and i think this focus on these middle schools especially on right-sizing the middle schools is exactly what the southeast guiding coalition needs to be taking on director moore um how is this uh scope and charge for you um i i i think
04h 15m 00s
it's good um i think um i want to especially um echo director bailey's comments at the very beginning um that i think others have also mentioned um i think it will be important and um and very helpful for the southeast guiding coalition to get um concrete guidance from staff about um kind of the parameters and [Music] you know things like location of dli um target enrollments per building um that the southeast coalition should be kind of using as targets um so a lot of the uh i i think this charge has been improved by adding the the component of of uh real um significant guidance from the from staff about certain elements that uh are going to kind of frame the puzzle that is the southeast guidance guiding coalitions work um i i guess the one thing i would say is um i want to speak to my board colleagues um i think the board needs to be very clear um with both staff and the southeast guiding coalition about what we understand to be the charge we are giving them um i i've said this endlessly before but i'm going to so i will try to keep this short but i i want to reiterate that um the kind of work that is going to be happening in this phase 2 process is going to be immensely complicated um far more complicated than the work that was done in phase one um and it is highly likely probably inevitable that um some of the some of the decisions that are going to have to be made um the recommendations that are going to be made will involve changes that will not be universally um applauded um by everyone in the southeast um change is going to be necessary here it it is in the nature of this beast therefore um board members and and you'll be dealing with this after i am i am off the board so um my friendly advice i guess is to um before before we as a board vote on this charge i i would ask that you each think about what you understand this charge to mean and when the time comes to consider the recommendation that is going to be coming from staff or from the southeast guiding coalition sort of via staff [Music] remember that the work that was done in order to produce that recommendation involved an enormous amount of very detailed very complex very um kind of uh what's the words the there's a term for this but it's sort of it's a gordian knot like everything is connected to everything and whatever recommendation comes out of the southeast guiding coalition is going to be a very delicate balance and the board needs to understand that any any kind of change that is made at the board level in the absence of some really intense work by board members to understand the implications of any changes is not going to be in service to our children this is going to be really hard work frankly i'm sorry i'm missing it because this is exactly the kind of hard work i i love to tackle maybe you can apply to be on the southeast guiding coalition i don't live down there so it would be out of place but but i will be paying attention just in case you were wondering um but i i'm just actually out here nada down there i think that it would benefit to have a histo a southeast guiding coalition historian
04h 20m 00s
there we go well uh i think i know we all want to keep rita around because we love her so much but i am going to ask us to move on to director scott unless you have something else to add director moore um no just be be thoughtful careful and respectful of the work that's all director thought uh how is this charge and scope for you fine yeah no i don't think i have any objections i have one quick question um and it's pretty basic one so the statement that sort of most of the other k through five enrollment issues are not going to be addressed i i think is a capacity issue is is that right are those things getting addressed is that like a phase three um what's the plan there it would need to come later i think some of it will happen um just with um with some of the things that we need to do at the middle school level it trickles into the elementary but not all under-enrolled elementary will be resolved we were working um this you know with the conversation um from our last work session and hearing from many of the board about to some simplify the process and that that was we looked at four different phases and we're recommending not phases four different levels of work and we're recommending um level one was do nothing level two was harrison park level three was going to lane um and level four would have been adding the elementary so we stopped at harrison park and lane because we recognize if you um balance harrison park and then you only have lane it's the only middle school that's out of balance and everything else is in balance and when are we how are we going to get it in balance so it needed to happen now okay thank you that is what i assumed but thanks yeah thank you student representative um i have no particular problems with these scope and charged um i have got a number of questions about uh student engagement in particular in phase two um i wonder if now is the ideal time to ask them would you like to have nathaniel direct those questions directly to you via email maybe so you can do some kind of responding to him or would you rather have us entertain those now i i think i i know i'm speaking for chinese but i think the lateness of the hour um um student representatives shu we certainly have um had a couple of conversations about this as well as the um student representatives in the coalition and really listening to your discussion with us it's clear the engagement for students needs to be different than um being necessarily we were not successful in um it was hard work for students to be in that long process in engaging the whole period through um but we're really focusing on other ways to um that is more um meaningful for our students in terms of giving us our their input in engaging them in in the process so i know that shanice has listed it in the presentation and gone through it a little bit but i think that we can follow up um with you outside of this out after tonight's process okay if you want to express that would be great okay if i may hear from shanice and then we'll we'll move on from this topic i'll just share really briefly um i know uh as a result of some rethinking um of how to really have more student input that is present throughout the beginning and end of the process i think that's really informed uh some new methods that are we really want to think about that uh acknowledge the context in which students are sitting in and so in addition to these uh focus groups in typical spaces uh we definitely want to use virtual means to engage with students and have these student focused forums that hope happen and multiple times during during the phase two process um in addition to having a student membership on coalition and i think we're grappling with what does it look like for students to have multiple means to weigh into the process um if uh in in addition right to be the membership on the
04h 25m 00s
coalition that's uh this very extended time commitment um that we've we are not finding is accessible um and so um uh would be looking forward to uh kind of hearing your questions and seeing what uh solutions or uh things that we can add uh to some of these strategies as well um for for the phase two process thank you shanice all right you two connect then i see you've been trying to add something in is it an essential comment on this discussion um i believe so it uh it's responding to um director constance i think indicated that there was around focus option programs where their whether staff would provide guidance or not and i believe the charge says pretty specifically that pps staff will provide guidance on preferred locations and configurations of dli programs special education services focus option programs so i just wanted that to be clarified and make sure i'm correct on that deputy hearts do you have a response to that i think that was straight from the charge so that's accurate what scott just read the question is whether guidance on focus options actually entails sort of a a thorough academic review of those programs where they fit in our constellation and you know what the justification is given that we well i i think it's largely yeah steph has very consistently said that that kind of evaluation is longer term and outside of this process um that it's much more involved than what will happen is that correct superintendent clerido that's what i've heard you say any number of times that is a big question that you're asking director bailey around an evaluation of programming and school impact but uh deputy hurt you look like you were about to respond so i don't want to jump in if we want to include that in the scope of this charge that's a bigger endeavor it it i don't think um the when we look at the time frame that we're trying to do for the fall of 22 i don't believe doing a program evaluation of a program during a pandemic is necessary you know when we're in hybrid learning is necessarily the appropriate time to to do that evaluation anyway i so i don't mean to interrupt you superintendent guru i just um recognize that while there's a good question that was raised tonight about k-5 versus 6-8 [Music] there is in terms of evaluating the program that is there is a whole process um in a board policy that we'd need to follow that certainly isn't within the timeline of what we're trying to accomplish in the southeast region does that clarify the question for you uh director bailey and dr constance yeah what which me it means we're not going to get a full scale evaluation of the program um however i think it's pretty clear there may be some major changes coming in and what that program looks like in the future just because that's that's where we are sorry i didn't you know but i'm just going back full circle because i raised it at the very beginning i um i think there should be some flexibility and that's different from a full program evaluation but i frankly don't see how having gone through the access pioneer the whole like search for a building for a a whole school that there's a place to pick up that school and put it somewhere else and i think we should um ask for not a full program evaluation but you know what are what are some of the options i i guess that's the guidance that i'm expecting staff to provide [Music] and that you know guidance can be uh fairly general guidance can be
04h 30m 00s
pretty specific um but the coalition members from the phase one are pretty clear that's not our decision you you all need to tell us what your decision is on how uh how this rolls forward all right uh i i want to say one one more quick thing which is that uh in the phase one decision um i think we called it the constant amendment uh which which applied our current policy uh to how some students were moved around i i think that raised a number of equity issues and i think this board should be very aware of those issues going forward and decide well ahead of time again i won't be around for this but should decide ahead of time whether it wants to suspend some of its current policies um through the remainder of enrollment balancing for the southeast north and northeast going forward are you talking specifically about kids who are out of district for a school having the right to matriculate to the next yeah that was the amendment that we that you had raised and i supported and just called it by your name because that was easy in the midst of the jumble that night and i'm not i'm not pointing a finger no know but i just want to be sure that it's clear what you're talking about because yeah and it wasn't out of uh out of district it was out of catchment area well right neighborhood yeah students not return it was the we wanted students to return to their neighborhood school as the board policy states um but i think director bailey is causing calling us to look at that with an equity lens and he had not been enforcing our policy right sorry yeah yeah so instead of coming up at the last minute i think we need to anticipate that going i hope that you anticipate that going forward and have more of a discussion of it so we are about two hours we're a little we're more than two hours behind schedule and we have some guests that from the citizens budget review committee that need to give us their report we are going to have a hard stop to this meeting at midnight so that means we have an hour and 15 13 minutes left to do the work of hearing cbrrc and have a conversation about the budget so i just want us all to be mindful of of um our questions and the length of time for which we speak to make sure everybody can get through but we will have a hard stop at midnight just to honor all of us i think many of us have uh that are on the board have jobs rita's retired but everybody else um has things to do in the morning and then we need to be kind and humane to our staff as well so we will have a hard stop at midnight so my question to you now is do you want to take a break now or do you want us to continue on nathaniel has something you'd like to say i'd like to tell you yeah i'd just like to say first um that i feel that we need to have a full board discussion at some point about the student engagement aspect of phase two i know we were going to um at that meeting that we initially decided on the role and scope of the of phase two but it got cut with time um i i think it's a crucial conversation how can we need to schedule it at some point soon okay well we will we will be voting on this charge um this will come back to us so we have more work to do here so that um we'll you know you can report it out to us nathaniel after you talk to shanice what um that that looks like as we have that um vote uh andrew so i know we have guests and obviously we're going to respect that and hear them i do just want to register like i i i'm really troubled by the idea that our budget conversation is happening at 11 o'clock at night i think that not only dishonors our staff but it dishonors the public as well and i i don't know what the solution is at that point in terms of keeping us on schedule but it it is very disturbing to me that that this is where we are so we can make the decision and i i want to say that i agree um it's the same reason i was upset about the way we did our board elections at the end of the meeting at 12 30 at night um even the most dedicated person would have a hard time staying up they had to report to work at eight o'clock tomorrow we have a we as a board have to make some choices so you know we have um agenda and we have items and i try to move us through them um in a timely fashion but also respecting the amount of time that board members need to make speeches and ask questions so um you know we try to finesse that our options right now are we can adjourn the meeting now and ask cbrc to come back
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and do our budget conversation board members would have to be willing to schedule an additional meeting and we'd have to be willing to ask staff to come back whether that's tomorrow night or another time this week we could do that or we can proceed until midnight um but it's it's up to sort of the will of the board at this point um when we would like to engage in this business um i think some of this is our own self-discipline about how we show up with questions and how we engage our time um because if we if we just constantly i'm just encouraging us all to be good self-managers of our time when we're at board meetings um because we have a lot that's before us a lot of work to do and maybe one of the possibilities is that we need to go back to having a board meeting every week if we constantly um need more time with things so that's that's kind of the the question to board members to consider um so what do you guys want to do now do you want to adjourn now and come back to this later do we want to hear from cbrc now because they've been waiting for two and a half hours what's the will of the board haley is the cbrc um just making a presentation to us are they expecting some kind of a conversation they're making their presentation to us i you know i'm going to keep pointing us back to that document about white supremacy and organizations and um it's kind of like a value we need to decide what our values are we value just rushing stuff through or do we value um having a deeper understanding and taking a little bit longer to process it's like we have to kind of define who we are um in this moment then we need to go back to having two meetings there a meeting every week so that we have that time to process um because we have so much work we have a lot of work to get through so the question is how do we best get through that is it to have long meetings every other week or is it to have multiple meetings a week or a mo a week meeting every week or is it to have multiple meetings i mean we as a board do get to decide how we want to structure our time um but right now we're in a decision point so i think what i'm going to ask is that we have cvrc do their presentation and then after that i'll ask the board if you want to continue with the budget discussion or if we want to table that for another meeting um so let's go ahead and have judah and sarah present to us and then we'll go from there if they're still here i think that's a good way to proceed yeah i agree that gives us some time to process what we want to do after we hear from them all right sarah sorry to judah and sarah for keeping you both up so late tonight i know that you were scheduled to present at 8 30 um but uh thanks for hanging out with the glamorous board life we've done this before we had our expectations set i was gonna say a little levity the good news is my young children who often interrupt these types of meetings have been asleep for a few hours so we won't have that joy i'm going to do the formal introduction of you all we're hearing right now from our board's community budget review committee more commonly known as the cvrc with their annual report on the superintendent's proposed budget and presenting tonight we have the fabulous cbrc co-chairs sarah kerr and judy mccoy welcome we'll turn it over to you guys thank you should we just get right into the letter sarah okay uh i presume everyone has the letter in the board materials yes excellent then i'm going to just start into it for the purposes of folks watching live and on the recording i'll start with a brief background and purpose of the cbrc the community budget review committee the cbrc reviews evaluates and makes recommendations to the portland public school board of education regarding the superintendent's proposed budget and any other budgetary issues the cbrc or the board identify the cbs cbrc also monitors and advises the board on the allocation and expenditure of local option levy funds which we completed as a separate document which should also be in the board materials so to kick off for uh this year's review um little context the fiscal year 21 22 budget review process has been as we all recognize uh challenging for both pps finance staff and the cbrc physical distancing requirements related to covet 19 continue to disrupt the usual budget review process and meeting schedule while continual funding stream changes made for a moving target for staff analysis and planning there's significant limitations around our ability to provide a comprehensive report and recommendations to the board the continued uncertainty around how schools will reopen this fall despite the superintendent guerrero's commitment to a full five-day per week in-person return make it very difficult to evaluate whether the
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proposed budget will ultimately be responsive to the new reality we face regardless we feel all parties have worked more diligently and closely together than any year prior and we're optimistic about future collaboration as we welcome chief financial officer roberto de gadillo to the district great so i'm going to move us next into the focus of our review which are the four board goals we did have a good amount of discussion as a committee about how to orient the report and ultimately decided that the four goals still served as a good anchor for a review and so that's how we proceeded in terms of the primary focus of the four goals articulated by the board as a result of a comprehensive visioning process completed in 2019 which all folks here were uh have been a close part of uh those goals being third grade reading fifth grade mathematics eighth grade snapshot of graduate performance and post-secondary readiness uh ready for college and career of the four goals we believe uh after much analysis that the fifth grade math goal is most at risk at this point in time for not being that although we have you know questions and concerns about all four goals and the map testing done this winter shows that math growth is lagging especially for our fifth seventh and eighth graders the bulk of this report will be composed of two parts first observations on the budget and then a set of recommendations voted on and agreed to by the committee first off some observations we believe the budget demonstrates substantial support for the four budget board goals this budget however rests upon several assumptions including a return to full-time in-person attendance and the student population projection at the same levels of 2019-2020 if these assumptions hold then the flat staffing model from the 2019-2020 should provide adequate levels of service that we previously saw increases towards the specified board goals but if those assumptions are incorrect or the limited map testing in the past year did not catch the full extent of declines in academic progress then we may see further regression we further note that we continue to lack direct measures of the goals set for eighth grade snapshot of graduate performance and post-secondary readiness secondly we believe the superintendent and board are deeply committed to racial equity and social justice and the racial equity and social justice lens has improved the district's focus on historically underserved students this year's edition of a critical analysis from staff of budget changes with a specific lens of the res j process makes substantial progress in helping the community understand the intended impact of budget changes we have also seen a concerted effort to reflect the diversity of our community in the makeup of central office staff and we believe that these efforts are critical to implementing the res j lens district wide three we also believe that the board and superintendent have overall crafted a budget that squarely vocals focused on investing in historically underserved students and specifically black and native students in addition to the continued allocation of equity funds and student success act funds the proposal to target federal relief funds to summer acceleration programs focused on the highest needs population is welcome continuing with our observations uh the fourth is the equity allocation of eight percent of the staffing model at targeted schools has held steady since fy 1617 we as a committee continue to support this investment and approach and note that the visibility and note the visibility and appreciate the visibility in the budget book volume 2 which is a valuable tool to demonstrate transparency to the community however only providing school-level staff allocation lacks the transparency into intended uses and accountable outcomes that we wish to see and we're happy to talk more about this we explored this quite a bit as a committee but i'll leave it at that for now um moving to number five we acknowledge that the district faces significant challenges created by the pandemic and its lingering effects on enrollment facilities academic and social emotional needs of students and urge the district um to take a do now build toward approach which we believe can help the district emerge stronger and healthier than it was prior to the pandemic in the do now category we want to underscore the need for one-time federal funds to be immediately used for equity focused activities such as high-dosage tutoring small group instruction extended core instructional time and specific grades and subjects and mentoring and other social emotional supports in the build tour category we urge the district to invest in more learning time the extended days or years inter sessions and ongoing high intensity tutoring smaller class sizes in priority grades and subjects
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where needs are greatest which might be offset by larger class sizes elsewhere integrated learning systems across live and asynchronous platforms and specialized and advanced high school classes offered online to maximize access and free teachers for more individualized instruction in some and that was a lot we urge the board and district to use all resources at its disposal not just to fill holes but to plant seeds for long-term change number six uh we continue to believe cuts now reaching three million at least based on our understanding to central services may be unwise and unsustainable as they may result in essential services and support two schools being carried out poorly or in some cases not at all while we understand and appreciate the emphasis on ensuring ample funding is set aside for schools directly we believe that that the district is under serving or under investing rather in centralized positions designed to ensure schools and students are supported um and i a side note here want to acknowledge we had a good discussion about um to understand that some positions are being repurposed to address immediate needs like summer acceleration which we as a committee really support but do wonder about the staff who are being repurposed for new positions you know what their prior responsibilities what that results in what's not happening or what's being deprioritized or delayed as as a result lastly we appreciate the pps uh maintained the winter administration of the map assessment and strongly encouraged the district to resume administer full administration in the fall we're cautiously optimistic about some of the results particularly in reading however we want to fully acknowledge the limitations of the administration namely lower participation rates especially among bipac students resulting in over-representation of white students we want to further emphasize that map testing measures reading and mathematics and acknowledge the importance of a suite of assessment measures or instruments that help paint a more complete picture of students social emotional and academic well-being to move forward turn it back to you for recommendations judah yes thank you so in our recommendation selection um we have a handful come up with from the committee and they are as follows number one we recommend additional investment in k through third literacy while all students have been affected by limitations distance learning younger students in particular have a more difficult time self-directing reductions in learning progress were not as severe as feared however we are still far from meeting the board adopted goal of having sixty percent of third graders reading proficiently by the end of the 2021-2022 school year targeted investments in one-time federal money may increase progress towards the school this investment must also be paired with a plan to reduce the achievement disparities within historically underserved groups second we recommend that pps continue to advocate for protecting and increasing the k-12 budget for against school districts class sizes even net of student success tactic investments remain unacceptably high and in particular additional state funding could be used to make strategic reductions to class size and certain grades and subjects that demonstrate the greatest need the oregon department of education quality education model recommended funding level has still not been achieved while the student success act was a big step in the right direction the overall investment in oregon students is still not adequate the state legislature's proposal to reduce state funding for education on account of the federal money received by schools and unacceptable disinvestment in our schools and three we recognize that the current budget makes assumptions about the state of school attendance in the fall and beyond including full-time in-person attendance of all students with the opt-outs moving to an online virtual academy disassociated from their neighborhood school given the volatility of the situation we've witnessed over the past year we recommend that the district take a proactive approach and develop contingency plans with public participation the center vulnerable populations such as special education students to to address eventualities this work should happen now rather than toward the middle or an end of the summer which will impact family and students ability to plan for the return to school fourth we recommend increased investment in recruiting supporting and retaining teachers of color even as the district faces budget constraints this echoes a recommendation made last year we cannot afford to lose ground on the early progress we've made to be clear our black and native students will stand to lose the most if we back off our commitments making a deliberate investment in supporting teachers of color who are essential to supporting students and ensuring equity will go a long way toward improving school climate and creating better schools for the future for all students we recognize that there have been some budget allocat there has been some budget allocation movement towards this but we still lack measures of the work being done in this area despite
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multiple requests of the budget staff to help us understand um progress uh to date and whether it is likely therefore we we don't fully understand whether it's likely to achieve the outcomes we desire and whether the investment we're making is adequate we also have concerns about staff burnout and demoralization that may affect the district's ability to address bringing students back up to level and supporting students as we move out of the pandemic fifth we note that the state formula for alternative and community-based organizations um in cbo school servicing some of the district's most historically underserved students provides funding at 80 percent of the funding levels provided to students at other schools we recommended we recommend rather that the board urge the legislature to raise the formula to 100 percent while also increasing the funding by at least 10 percent over state funding in this budget regardless sixth the budget process continues to be opaque to people who are not well-versed in governmental budgeting we recommend continued work on developing summaries and focused explanations of budgetary decisions the intended effects and the accountable outcomes for general audiences and i think we've made this recommendation several years and there has been progress we still see room for opportunity and growth in this area uh seven we recommend targeted federal funds toward partnerships with cbo's community-based organizations to provide a more culturally responsive approach to engaging students closing achievement gaps you should say also opportunity gaps and making up for learning loss partnerships with cbo's can also provide culturally responsive approaches to preparing high schoolers to be successful post high school and transition out of high school into whatever path they choose these investments would represent movement on several of the board's articulated goals number eight we recommend that school improvement plans be made publicly available for each school equity allocations are provided to almost all schools with plans being made to utilize those allocations to achieve desired improvements however those plans and the accountability for tracking outcomes are not consistently shared externally which undermines our stated commitments to being transparent and making data driven decisions we must commit to measuring our progress in quantitative for example map testing and qualitative for example school climate surveys uh both ways and enter into honest direct conversations with school communities about how we will continue to improve for several years now including in the current proposed budget pps invests um a hundred and forty thousand dollars in a contract with panorama to administer school climate surveys the results of which at least for the past four years the current co-chairs have served on cbrc have not been made available until well after the budget is adopted we must we must collect a richer array of information and ensure it is available and used to inform planning and budgeting in a just-in-time way not after the budget is adopted finally custodial grounds and maintenance staff has historically been acknowledged as an area that was inadequately funded the current budget has made targeted investments to improve that however we lack data and standards to understand whether the investments are adequate to support our district in the near term and to protect the substantial work being done to rebuild our aging schools therefore we recommend that the district identify industry standards for staffing and investment needs and establish a plan to achieve a sustainable level of required work thank you and then closing the cbrc is deeply appreciative of superintendent guerrero's leadership and in particular his commitment to ensuring the needs of our district's most historically underserved students are prioritized during this challenging time the fact is we have substantial work to do to meet our goals including work done through decades of inequitable investments and systems that have served to protect white privilege at the expense of black and native students and families we call on the board to adopt a budget that reflects these commitments and keep us on an urgent focused path toward a more equitable and excellent system of schools even in the face of uncertainty or delays to our planned timeline our students cannot afford anything less thank you and we're available for questions as needed all right thank you so much sarah and judah um i was i've been trying to get my step count so i've been standing here listening walking in place as you were talking about so my camera was off trying to you know after let's say we've been meeting since 5 p.m so six hours in trying to move a little bit all right questions for judah and sarah as representatives of cbrc anybody have anything for them tonight that was a great presentation i really appreciate it i like how you laid it out um and give us a good overview and give us some things to think about between now and our our approval and adoption it was almost as good as back in the day when rito and i were on the cbrc
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i just yeah that's the problem with following legends you know what i'm not do i'm not following you onto the school board uh anytime soon leave that up to other people you didn't read the uh fine print on when you signed there's a welcome path so i i do have a question and then michelle will go after you director bailey oh okay um so you know the cuts in uh central office staff uh when i ran the numbers that are in the proposed budget book for general fund and uh the special grants fund and you know the operating budget basically it looked to me like at least as as i defined central office staff and we can go over the gory details that was pretty constant percentage uh of the proposed budget with this past year so uh offline maybe i just want to bring that up and uh we we can explore that further because we may have different definitions that was actually a number from claire at the last meeting and perhaps we had a misunderstanding uh there but um she may be able to clarify yeah well and that may be general fund versus a broader definition i also wanted to appreciate sarah and judah your report made me want to start attending those meetings i was just it was really great to get the distillation of this in that quick 10-minute presentation um i particularly liked um much of the time when we get presented to we get all the great things like it's it's always just like roses and beautiful and it's positive and i think it helps us as board members to hear the challenges and the barriers the difficulties and what we did about them and i think you laid that out really well so thank you so much for your service to the community and and for your help to me tonight understanding this i i have a quick question as well is is the um is your report available online i haven't checked is that available for the public to view your your recommendations it should be with the materials uh with the meeting materials also i should note um i'm not going to read it out loud unless people really want to there is a review of the local option levy and how the money was spent last year so that so that i want to direct people there because there are some updates because it uh encompasses now the renewed levy so it's a different measure and some slightly different assumptions built into it yeah if i may just jump and quickly director to pass and and say that as i rounded out the reading of that report i did and hadn't read it out loud previous i did reflect too that we focused a lot on constructive feedback and i hope um i hope the final remarks that um judah shared you know adequately expressed a lot of the appreciation and a lot of the bright spots we saw in the budget i think as a committee represented you know as representatives of um you know community largely parents of school-age kids now i think we really grounded our review of the budget and our lived experiences as well as the numbers we were seeing and felt um like we wanted to design and orient the report to align with that and also in response to a set of questions that i i believe were compiled um you know by director moore but came from board members and so hopefully that came through as well there were three specific questions that were big questions so we addressed them from a variety of different perspectives but um i think that may also be why um the report feels very grounded and sort of constructive noticings and observations and less the bright spots and and there are many yes thank you it felt very balanced to me thanks i really want to honor judah and sarah for leading the process they've done a phenomenal job this year um really um love shanice's partnership and helping us recruit members and to the committee so we're seeing a more a higher number of um diverse members of our community in in the process and their voice is very validating and supportive of of the especially our racial equity and social justice work and so it was really a nice tenor throughout the process and
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so really judah and sarah a job well done it's a big group with lots of ideas and opinions and your report reflects a well-run process and really caught captured the thinking of the whole team of the whole committee so thank you for your work agreed um i have a quick question um with regard to the the equity funds so sarah i think you spoke to that so there's a comment about how the um the school profiles show what the allocations are by school but that you would have liked to have seen i i think what you're getting at is what you would have liked to have seen is more of a connection to district-wide strategies um or tell me tell me what that that caveat um is really meant to convey sure so we had a lot of conversation about this and it's not the first year we've had this conversation i think we um understand the way that the equity allocation is being delivered to schools and can follow them the dollars that way based on need but don't have a good understanding at the school level of how those dollars are being invested in ways that materially matter to students and the opposite of what i think is you know community we'd love to be able to see more transparently what schools are choosing to spend their allocation on and be able to connect that to impact on student outcomes and as a as a concrete example of that when superintendent guerrero first joined which was a very tumultuous budget year uh you have yet to have a normal year one of these days superintendent guru you're going to get a normal budget year i swear and it will be a good one but there was that's when we started bringing in the uh equity allocation and there was materials uh shared where each of the principals for the equity allocation said this is how we this is what we want to do with it like hiring like reading tutors and on such and bringing on fte to do and immersive things in order to improve say third grade grade rating um you know scores and then being then able we understood at the time that like okay this point there's there is a big thing of saying okay nobody's going to get punished we're all trying these experiments to see how we're going to get better together and then we want to track the outcomes over the years like did that like did your program work the way you hoped it would you know or and if some other school had a program that worked better maybe we should pair you up and share you know and that was the intention behind those um that my understanding in inquiring about those since then has been the internally that sort of work has continued um but that information has not continued to uh be shared and so that's the kind of really good equity-based work that you know we say we want to have data-driven decisions we want to focus on equity and we want to have transparency as a value like that was great and so to see that sort of go away after such a promising start was disappointing to me jude that was a great explanation and that's a really good point and i think we do know that there are more guidelines for building leaders on how those equity funds can be used but we haven't closed the loop we haven't done either the things that you or we haven't seen maybe they've been done but we haven't seen either of the things you mentioned which is both transparency around those strategies and then the the comparisons and the sharing of best practices that's a really really good call out you guys um i think my just my only other comment that i had to make um really really appreciate your report um thank you for picking up on the communication that we've had from our community-based alternative programs and kind of recognizing what i consider to be an inequity in our current funding model there i thank you for for heeding their communication that went directly to you and also appreciate the peace on the custodial standards this was something that has come up in our own discussions and um i think we we have we do have an elevated standard claire would you like to unveil that elevated standard actually in in the response we got from ops is they're actually expanding what they're doing so i really would like um dan young um to come back and and frank lovett to share that with you and because it
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they are actually um um going the next step of evaluating um what uh how the solutions for the issue so so more to come well we will still hang tight on that but we are just not thrilled to emerge from moderately dingy i just want to make sure then each of those sort of similar uh recommendations it's not trying to imply that we're um funding these things inadequately it's just genuinely like we don't know like that we're not sure what the standards are how many like what uh should it be do we have good guidelines for our planning and so really it's not trying to cast any aspersions certainly but it's really more trying to focus in on that data-driven decisions and transparency point um and speaking of transparency i am on the website i don't see a link to the cbrc annual review the five-page document it's absolutely in the board book but i don't see it posted for the public which was maybe i wasn't clear when i asked is it available anywhere for the public to view i think it's in the board materials uh tab correct roseanne well i it is publicly available on the poor materials um i'm not finding it um i'm i'm on the pps the board page um there are links to the meeting themselves with the agendas in two places but i don't see the the documentation what i'm hearing you say michelle is that that i agree with you that it's important that the cbrc letter be public and so can we ask ms powell to follow up and make sure that that document is accessible to the public or share a link um i'm just i've gotten a couple requests now it's typically also posted on the cbsc um page on the pps website and if it's not there now i'm i assume it will be shortly okay thank you but i didn't know i didn't realize so i'll just i'll add my voice my voice of praise um to the work i think it's very clear and i love the concrete recommendations i've been a part of lots of citizen reviews of budgets and and uh often you don't get that level of clarity so thank you for that um and specifically i i i really appreciate that you called out the need um you know to to both hire and retain um teachers of color i would i would add staff to that as well teachers and staff of color and i wanted you know that issues come up tonight already i i want to actually tie that back to to to administrative funding which you also note and i think you probably did tie this you know in your review but the way we do that is by funding administrators who do that work right and and help with the outreach and the recruitment and the retention and the engagement and and so just it's a reminder that all these things is an ecosystem and so often particularly in school funding um it happens everywhere but particularly in schools you know this this central administration gets up gets a bad rap um even in the the oregonian article last you know last week sort of it ends with this weird paragraph about you know oh but this many millions of dollars goes to its central administration and and not recognizing that that is so important to the overall ecosystem of a school and to the extent we underfund that for political reasons we actually are underfunding the success of our students and so i just really appreciate you you calling that out very directly so thanks all right again thank you to our cbrc team and especially to judah and sarah both for the lateness of the hour and for the thoroughness of that report um we have much to consider and uh we'll see folks back from cbrc uh next year when we have a super normal budget year right judah that's what you promised us that that's uh i i think i'm the problem so you know i'll just like take myself out like i'm the bad luck i'm the bad luck charm i've long thought that judah um judah and i went to high school together for those of you that don't know so we've known each other a long time um all right we're gonna say if we're gonna have a normal budget year perhaps we could um encourage the superintendent to take a vacation day yes i actually just approved a couple vacation days for the superintendent which is very exciting um so i i think we've got a strategy for what to do next in this meeting i'm going to turn it over to deputy hertz if that's cool with superintendent guerrero um to just ask a couple questions of the board and get some board response so that we can continue to move forward in our budgeting process does that sound like i captured it correctly claire yes we had a riveting presentation prepared by chief financial officer nebacho delgadillo and um because it is almost well let's see it's 1 30 in the morning for him we've decided that would be a bad time for him to present and truly you have received all the
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materials we were trying to highlight some things from our last meeting that came as questions you've received all the information and we've shared it in you know so there's nothing new that we were going to present but we would look like to open it up for maybe a half an hour discussion with the board to um just close out um you know any lingering questions any additional things that we need before we come back um for an approval at our next board meeting all right so we're gonna just uh popcorn um and we're gonna we have half an hour so if you have any lingering questions about the budget that you need answered in this public forum i'm gonna go ahead and ask you to do those now um cool i'm just gonna start by saying like i'm too tired i'll i'll send them tomorrow so me too julia my brain is me three but i i do still feel like there's some substantive stuff we need to address and i'm gonna just go back to my structural issue that i raised last time which um i did we did get something back that gave us a little more definition around tying the strategies to the esser allocations but it's it's not a narrative and it's not it's not very much detail so we can follow up this week on that i think it's a really really important piece of our budget to to be able to have that up front and to clearly communicate with our communities what we're doing um i still haven't seen that even though i got a little bit of the underlying information there and um and then just also we'll want to follow up on the um alternative um our community based alternative schools i did get a t a uh spreadsheet from mr delgadillo that in the teeniest tiniest of fonts that i believe showed quite a difference in the proposed uh 21 22 allocation there which leads me to believe that someone is considering making a change but i'd like to um revisit that so but yeah let's we're going to have to do this later but i think that was a perfect thing director constant there something that you really need that you wanted to raise up so are there other folks that have similar things they want to put out there that they need for the budget process um our meeting on the 25th will be when we vote on the um uh budget so what we're basically saying is what is there sorry next meeting the we will vote on the budget on june 15th that is the adoption vote um the 20 the budget amendment vote is the 25th and claire what is what does the budget we approved the budget for 2122 on at the next board meeting and we also are approving an amendment to the 2021 budget year and then we have a hearing with a tscc and then we have the uh vote for the adoption sorry i am looking at the board tracker and getting we're all good we're all good so basically this is our um last regularly scheduled meeting to ask questions about the budget um i think that the question is are we um going to need another board discussion or are the questions that we can ask now or email insufficient just my perspective is we should have some time at the next meeting to have a discussion about any remaining issues i mean i'm not good i can come up with my list of questions tonight but i don't think anybody wants to go through that so but so my question is julia the next meeting is when we're voting on the budget so is that sufficient time for you i know you like to have a lot of lead time between well my guess one thing i would say is hopefully we'll have more than 20 minutes on the we had an hour on the agenda for this item but again we that was yeah it's okay i don't want to belabor everybody i'm i'm sure i'll be fine i'll ask my questions um i'm just not gonna do it now i think the tension for me is always that we want to be thoughtful and take sufficient time with items and we have a lot of items to get through and we don't want to be in meetings till midnight so how do we find that sweet spot of getting us what we need but also moving through our agenda in a way that gets the work of the um school district done so that's the
05h 15m 00s
tension i'm feeling as we talk about you know frustration about this being so late and yet trying to allow time for everyone to get their questions out and sit with items and absorb it it's this constant um it's a difficult thing to navigate so what i'm trying to ask is what do we need just the same question claire is what do we as a board need to successfully be able to vote on the budget at the next meeting because that is the timeline we have with our tscc hearing and to be really clear sorry just just to add to be really clear the budget has to be approved on the 25th so unlike other items that we can put off there is no putting that off so i i appreciate your question director lowry or chair lowry i think it's good to make sure that everyone is comfortable coming to that you know meeting prepared to vote all right so what i'm i'm not hearing anyone ask for another meeting so we're going to ask questions tonight we're going to ask questions in emails we're going to have some discussion at the next meeting and then we are going to vote and we are going to limit that discussion to it's not going to be a three-hour discussion on the budget it's going to be 30 minutes to an hour so what do we need tonight between now and the 25th to make sure we're ready for that budget vote that's the point one thing i would ask is if we can please share all the questions and answers among all of us because we have many areas of overlap and our interests and concerns we have been yeah i really appreciated the um table that was sent in the in the board packet last week um just to see the questions and the responses and the links right there was really helpful and we want to um you know the we publish them also for the community so we share them with all of you and we publish them for the community can i make maybe one suggestion for this the the question document um so we've gotten this tonight um maybe if you could um signify somehow new questions that come in after tonight um just to make it a little bit easier to to sort out what you've already answered and what would be new info for those of us reading it maybe the older responses could be somewhat grayed out a bit not not to make it a little illegible but i don't know how easy that would be if you're adding into the table so we'll make sure it's clear for all of you thank you for the suggestion all right anything else before we adjourn tonight i do want to clarify for the approval of the budget it's um so as the questions come out if we're needing to modify the budget we'll need a couple of days to do that so it'll be important that the questions come in quickly and that we respond to them quickly as we're rolling up the budget because um we we if we make try to make changes in the meeting with um and trying to calculate that in the meeting that's not a um that's not something i would recommend i would recommend that we post what we're going to be voting on based on um making sure we get the questions answered and if there's um an error found or something that needs to be corrected then we'll make sure that we get that correction in and and explain that in our documentation and also explain it in the public meeting claire can i also uh and this is a suggestion both for for you but also for chair lowry that if there are amendments that board members feel like they need to bring forward they think about bringing those forward as part of the adopted budget so that's actually a process that that we use at metro and along the county does as well most most of the amendments get consolidated down into the adopted budget there are some limitations if they're really large amendments but um given where we are in terms of this process and and the need to move forward with the approved budget um you know sometimes it's more useful just to ha and that gives more time frankly for other board members of the public to to think about those amendments as well and and we can make those as part of the adopted process sorry claire did you say that we're approving the budget and then we're doing an amendment to this year's budget is that what you said that is correct and what is i mean have we had any information if i missed it or do we have received any information yet but it will come in your next packet there's things that we've gotten funding during the year that we didn't know before the beginning of the year there have been needs and changes that have had to happen because of the pandemic so we need
05h 20m 00s
to true up um there's also the per not the purse bonds the geo bonds and the debt service that we for bonds we sold in december so we just need there's um i i don't have a list in front of me at 11 30 at night but there are things that are um clean up from this year and so we'll make sure that you have plenty of time to review that i guess i would ask since that's a whole new thing that we don't just get it in our thursday packet because we'll have a whole bunch of other things in that thursday packet if it's at all maybe we need to move it to another meeting because i the team is working very hard to do both those items and to get that out earlier just probably is probably not possible need to be done earlier i mean does it need to be done at the next meeting because that may be like the mercy rule for everybody's like if it doesn't have to be done it's just not adding a whole another thing on top of it we could move it to the um first meeting in june i say call the mercy rule and like do it in the first meeting in june just i mean it just seems like on top of i'm sorry do you wanted the first meeting in june the budget amendment so i think i i guess can i just i think the the only thing that's that's a i guess the question there uh is this a standard uh technical spring supplemental budget which is very normal government um you know in terms of karyos over or is there something more substantive going on and yes i i would defer to staff on that if you want to if you want to just defer it into june that's fine but i also think is bored we need to accept that this is a normal part of budgeting i think we do this every year usually these are very technical amendments in the spring that just have to be done um prior to the close of the fiscal year so i would hope we don't get too caught up in that when there are much more important issues going on we will take this up at agenda setting tomorrow and have a further conversation about this which is a reminder that we do have agenda setting tomorrow so please get your agenda items in before 11. anything else before we adjourn tonight yeah my battery's gonna die i move for adjournment do i have a second yes indeed all right anything else we need before adjournment all right then we are adjourned on adjournment now we are on adjournment now we are adjourned uh our next meeting will be uh may 25th at 6pm um thank you to all the staff for weathering this lengthy meeting and thank you to my board colleagues for hanging in there as we did this very very important work tonight

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)

2021-05-11 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: PS Board of Education Regular Meeting - 5/11/2021

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