2021-11-16 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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District Portland Public Schools
Date 2021-11-16
Time 18:00:00
Venue Virtual/Online
Meeting Type regular
Directors Present missing
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Event 1: 11/16/21 PPS Board of Education Regular Meeting

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hello hello hello can you hear us i can how everybody doing today great but wish you were here i know director hollis director green what's good everybody i can't hear director greene very well can you hear me better now this meeting of the board of education for november 16 2021 is called to order for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted on the pps website under the board and meetings tab this meeting is being streamed live on pps tv services website and on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks excuse me please check the district website for replay times good evening everyone i want to welcome the board the superintendent staff families students and guests and i want to take a brief moment to acknowledge the incredible victory of the grant girls soccer team who earned the title of 6a state champions this weekend go generals we look forward to recognizing them at our next board meeting we had some great performances in boys and girls cross country as well second third in the state overall at lincoln go cards sports first business second um so i've asked vice chair scott to chair tonight's meeting and i'm making this small shift tonight and who facilitates our meeting for a couple of reasons one is it models a distributive leadership secondly it recognizes and attempts to interrupt this notion of a pointy hierarchy with a single person at the top and it's low stakes and low calorie i hope it's lastly a recognition that in order to make a difference in student outcomes we will need to practice doing things differently and get comfortable doing things differently applying different inputs to expect different outputs and finally i believe good leaders are self-aware and recognized when they need more time more budget more input or and they actually have the power to seek out those resources including asking for help this team our board is a resource i hope to continue to draw upon i'm asking for those on the ship to help steer the ship and i'm going to need your help i've recently asked some of you to serve with me for uh some some of you who serve with me for help and i hope we can all agree that for the most part we're in this together um i've for instance asked directors hollins and director scott for instance to lead the evaluation of the superintendent in a process that is co-created and that i hope will result in better outcomes for our students and i've asked others of you to help me complete tasks that i recognize are bigger than me take more talent than i have or that require more time than i have and i'm going to tuck my soapbox under my desk now before we get started for certain i'd like to begin tonight's meeting by taking a moment to reflect on native american heritage month and to think about the land that we're sitting on today superintendent guerrero i understand we have a short video we do thank you chair to pass and good evening directors um when i started this to our listening audience out there we do have a special video uh we want to it features uh aisha pearl wright who is a student at neya uh who describes the importance of a land acknowledgement and i want to take the moment to discuss our district's continued work in racial equity social justice to support native american heritage month as you know our district's theory of action in fact specifically calls out calls us to center our work on the experience of our black and native students and a recurring question we continue to receive about well why focus and center on native students for instance when they represent such a quote unquote small portion of our student body and i just want to be clear we're going to continue to embrace our theory of action around black and native students and and the reasoning behind it what we hope that people will understand is uh when we have success with these particular two student groups they're tied to the success of every one of our students so we're going to continue to learn to see our native students their gifts talents and potential and we're going to continue to to live up to the values and aspirations of our racial equity social justice [Music] values so without further ado want to introduce this special video featuring aisha purdle wright thank you at pps we strive to strengthen our relationships with the native community and native nations a symbol of this commitment is a land acknowledgement
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these statements bring visibility to the first peoples of our collective home this statement is meant to provide information in context while also encouraging all of us to reflect of our current day relationship with native peoples and the native experiences we acknowledge that we live work and play on the traditional land of the chinook clackamas kalapu kalapuya muloma klamath tualatin malala people we also know that many other tribes made their homes along the columbia and willamette rivers we honor their history and acknowledge the sacrifices that they made let us also acknowledge the robust present-day federally recognized tribes of this area the granderon celebs and khalid's tribes in addition i would like to acknowledge the chinook nation who has been seeking federal recognization for many years the urban indian community is made up of tribal diversity that originates from around the country representing 400 tribes the urban indian community has a vivid history making up peoples whose journeys have brought them to portland by the ways of forced displacement or seeking more opportunities today these tribes and communities celebrate their heritage showing resilience and tenacity that would be greatly admired by their ancestors within portland public schools today we serve students and families representing more than 150 different tribal nations within our educational system it is our obligation to teach accurate information past and present about the impact of colonization on our students all students today and make invisible the multitude of native families and the many diverse ways native communities and families are living in the present we encourage every person to reflect on their own history understand the history of colonization in genocide and support indigenous sovereignty priorities and actions this acknowledgement is one step that we can take to improve our support of indigenous communities in this area in addition to acknowledging the land and those who have been here since the beginning of time we must also remember our stolen siblings from africa whose labor built the vast wealth of this country these two communities and their atrocities committed against them are naturally intertwined due to our existence while within a white supremacist world everything we have is due to stolen land and stolen labor and every system and this institution that impacts our lives is built upon this legacy it is our job to speak that truth into spaces that we can begin to heal fabulous miss puerto purdlewright thank you if you're listening um thank you as the district moves to incorporate the pps land acknowledgement and anti-oppression statement into gatherings meetings and professional learning as much as possible in alignment with our district core values vision and strategic plan i'd like to support the recommendation to display the statement at board meetings and welcome your thoughts on this i'll turn it over now to vice chair scott and ask that um he let me know before he's going to ring this gavel um so i could move out of the way thank you thanks cheer to pass um and i appreciate the opportunity and happy to happy to help out um tonight so um with that next the board is going to vote on the consent agenda board members if there are any items you would like to pull for discussion we'll set those aside for discussion and vote at the end of the meeting ms bradshaw are there any changes to the consent agenda yes resolution 6406 was updated on the website earlier this afternoon uh 6406. by sheriff scott yes i just when we get to the i wasn't sure if you were asking the question then the flag i'll go ahead and yes are there any items you'd like to pull yeah and um i'm not going to flag it i i had a series of questions about the education elements contract which is relating to the middle school middle of grades and i know it was a busy weekend for many and a busy last couple days if i didn't get answers to that and i'd like to request i'm not opposed to the contract but i'd like to get answers to who it wasn't clear who who the cohorts were they were applying to and i'd just like to get my questions answered so i'm just going to flag that um contract as and the request for responses okay are you looking to get your questions answered during the meeting tonight um you know i'm it's not necessary i'm because again i know people were busy over the weekend and then uh today so i'm happy if i just get a commitment that i'll get a response that that i don't need to ask him enough so you're comfortable moving forward with me i am and i'll share the responses with everybody else when i agree when i get them great thank you um so do i have a motion and a second to adopt a consent agenda so moved second second vice chair scott if if the board would like to hear a quick explanation we do have our middle school redesign and innovation director in the virtual green room can give a quick byline on the contract if you want
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um i'll defer to the board my questions were there's there's a contract in there um and just i know with the attention that we've had on the middle the middle schools there's um a set of cohorts um that are coming through and then um a second cohort and i just had some questions about the work um since it hasn't been elevated to the level so okay if if if you're i guess what i'll say is if you're comfortable waiting for those until afterwards are there any other board members that want to hear that today are we are we okay moving on in the interest of time i'm okay to move on that's an email okay that works for me perfect thank you but i uh appreciate staff being ready i just hadn't got a resume so thank you superintendent um any board discussion any other board discussion on the consent agenda okay mrs bradshaw is there any public comment no okay the board will now vote on resolution six four zero five through six four zero eight uh all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no and are there any abstentions okay the consent agenda is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative weinberg voting yes great okay um we now turn to student and public comment before we begin i'd like to review our guidelines for public comment um first the board thanks you for taking the time to attend this meeting and providing your comments public input informs and improves our work and we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns a responsibility of a board is to actively listen and to that end i would ask each of us to give our full attention to the people in front of us our board office may follow up on board related issues raised during public testimony and we request the complaints about individual employees be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter if you have additional materials or items you'd like to provide to the board of superintendent we ask you you ask you to email them to public comment all one word at pps.net so again public comment at pps.net please make sure you begin your comment um 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'll hear a sound after three minutes which means it's time to go ahead and conclude your comments ms bradshaw do we have anyone signed up for student or public comment yes we will start with catherine dental welcome catherine it's a nice note hello thank you can you hear me yes we can hear you go ahead hi my name is katherine gentle g-e-n-t-l-e and i'm a parent a pps parent i attended the october 26th meeting where a strong opposition to the coven 19 student vaccine mandate was made clear i want to command or commend the board's most recent decision to stop the vote and delay any action for at least six months as well for your commitment to honor non-medical exemptions consistent with the oregon health authority's long-standing guidance as the oregonians november 14th editorial accurately states this is the right call and i concur with many of their points made to quote the district's rush to require students to be vaccinated or face exclusion from school did not make sense neither the state or the county public health agencies are recommending such a requirement the community has a fundamental obligation to provide a quality education to children regardless of neighborhood family beliefs or background it was only the persistent questioning by board members green hollins and brim edwards about the unknown impact and lack of implementation plan that slowed the rush to adopt a requirement for the first place the district should know who would be affected and potentially excluded by such a mandate a key question for a district that values equity pbs should not base long-term decisions off short-term conditions the net rationale for a mandate for children should not depend on case counts are doing at any one point in time in reality the reason to wait is so health officials can better understand the virus and as the editorial concludes the district's delay on a vote rather than dropping the proposal entirely means these same concerns are likely to come up again soon i implore the board to carefully re-examine the necessity to pursue a mandate in the coming months and while there's much to celebrate there's more work to be done the board must recognize natural immunity and include test to stay for the unvaccinated these are viable options for school attendance and reduced absence the current protocol for quarantine of the unvaccinated is discriminatory there's no difference between the ability of the vast and unbacks to catch or spread coded and spread in schools is rare surveillance testing in la schools kept 33 000 children out of school of this subsequent testing revealed a mere one-fifth of one percent tested positive for covid la kept kids home unnecessarily however they learned adapted and implemented tests to stay as did many other states you must consider updating outdated quarantine rules for
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portland public schools i'll end by speaking to parents directly no one supersedes your right to make medical decisions for your children right now state agencies are meeting to decide on permanent covet protocols and school immunization requirements though a vote is delayed now a school mandate can come at any time if you're unsure where to go and what your options are or who to talk to i want to let you know about oregonschoolpods.com this website serves as our point of connection information involving solutions for anyone facing uncertainty whether you're against mandates experiencing undue burden from existing measures looking for education alternatives or want to connect with others of similar need and stay in tune with evolving options the site's for you visit or email today rise now and make your voices heard thank you for your time thank you catherine thank you we have susie anglada bartley great yes i guess my time will start now my name is susan i'm glad of bartley i want to first just thank you for um hosting me and also let you know that i i just got home from work i am a 20 year veteran teacher 19 years in pbs and one year before that in open meadow school which is now part of pbs but i'm here to really describe to you um the level of stress that is in the school environments i do believe that the president of our union did a good job describing it on opb yesterday if you have not heard that yet but there's a dimension that i want to add being a current uh teacher who is is teaching right now in the schools um and like i said just got home so i decided today although i wrote a piece which i'm going to send to you that i really just want to try to speak from my heart the number one thing that you can do right now is to recognize that the level of stress in the schools and the level of stress that students are experiencing is is great and there are deep supports that are needed psychiatric supports mental health everything down to the collapsing of supports for ell students all types of supports because of the depletion of the teaching staff as well as um i'm i was covered in sweat when i got home because it is a workout just to be there and for me to say that alone is ableist because i'm able to do that kind of work right now i'm talking about custodial work and this is no disrespect to our amazing custodians but we're short custodians so i'm sweeping i'm mopping i'm cleaning up bodily fluids i'm talking about blood sweat and tears and everything that you see in the 82nd corridor everything you see going on in this city you need to understand it's reflected in our schools and it's what our community and our schools are going through in that dynamic if you look at the organizational psychology of the dynamic you have administrators who are stressed out teachers who are stressed out huge burdens on those of us who are still there and in that dynamic i think administrators from my observation many are feeling a sense of needing to document the blame where do we place the blame when there's violence in classrooms when there's outbursts when there's all types of services needed that are not there i'm seeing and hearing this is from having friends all across the city who are teachers who work in schools i'm hearing of a dynamic and witnessing it where in some cases evaluations are being used almost as a tool to document teacher blame okay that is what i'm seeing and hearing that is so far from a professional development um philosophy i'm i'm hurt when i see the eyes of puffy eyes of younger teachers than myself with no support who came into the profession with a desire to really do a great job and then having the stress break them down and um then even having the feeling that their administrators are not supporting them i'm not saying this about anyone specific necessarily i'm talking about a cultural dynamic an us against them thing that is originating from the pressure we are under but it's still not acceptable nor is it the path we want to go down you may not have been able to hear that the timer did go off the three minute timer so if you could just finish your last thought secondly in this time you have decisions to make do not break up school communities doing
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so will harm the communities that you say you want to serve okay black indigenous susie people of color i hear you mr scott you're gonna have to cut me off because i'm gonna i'm gonna make sure to make this statement okay thank you thank you thank you for your testimony really appreciate it yeah you'll hurt people thank you thank you for being here levine good evening directors students are scared about getting coveted in school students want a vaccine mandate and they want it now if students don't get vaccinated allow them to get tested as an exemption don't believe me about the opinions of students go see for yourself go into schools listen to the members of the district student council who all support the mandate and pass the resolution in favor of it listen to the data that the student rep will present later tonight that shows what students think multiple of you have already clearly stated you support a mandate and now that cases are dropping you don't support it but cases are not dropping and it's becoming clear that this virus is going nowhere the data presented by staff does not show the full picture the data staff presented shows case rates from all of oregon but pps students don't come from the whole state they come from multnomah county so it's critical you look at data from justice county case rates as of yesterday are as high as they were at the start of this this school year yesterday according to u.s health and human services multnomah county had 302 positive cases when school started september 1st multnomah county had 260 cases speaking of those 302 cases yesterday two of which were students from my school i just learned that they had covered yesterday cases have not dramatically dropped cases are at an all-time high look at the data for yourself delaying this vote or a mandate by six months would mean nothing but backing away from your commitment to center students in your decision making six months is an arbitrary number you really want to wait till the end of may to start talking about this again you want to delay this through cold and flu season and leave it up for discussion at the end of the school year i didn't realize that it was standard practice to delay important decisions but maybe i i need to learn something new that's six months that students have to sit in school wondering if classmates are vaccinated and if they will contract this deadly virus bringing this up for debate again in mid-may with less than a month to school will accomplish nothing in my opinion it's simply a foolish idea and the damage will already have been done by then you need to act now you can't be scared of acting i don't need to sit here and tell you your own rules you don't have to listen to the recommendation of staff to delay this vote instead bring a vote to the floor tonight and vote on this vote yes on a vaccine mandate and show students that you really care about our safety thank you thanks xander nice to see you again what's next yes we have charlie neiman welcome charlie can you hear us i can hear you i just unmuted myself great how are you you can hear me okay we can hear you fine go ahead thanks oh okay um thank you for this opportunity it's my first time at one of your guys meetings and i'm really impressed with what i'm hearing especially with all the acknowledgements and whatnot um i just wanted to i'll make this brief but i wanted to talk about uh commissioner dan ryan's proposal to put a uh safe wrestling village or homeless camp on portland public school property off of northeast 42nd and killingsworth on the former whitaker whitaker middle school property um i'm a i'm a neighbor i live in coley i'm raising my three-year-old son with my wife i work in construction she's a student we're working our tail off to provide a safe place for our son to live and my myself and other neighbors are fully against this proposal that commissioner ryan and other people are talking about i personally support the safe wrestling villages but i don't believe that they should be in the middle of a neighborhood next to a park and since it's on your guys property that's why i'm here i'm talking to you as far as i understand it so i really hope that you guys will hear the voices of the neighborhood and not go through with this proposal um and whatnot and for long lists of reasons but mainly because it's just not safe it's already as many of you guys know i'm sure many of you live in the portland area there's garbage everywhere it's you know there's all these issues going on in town and
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we really don't need a another homeless camp in this in our neighborhood um so and that's not to say i don't think that you know our you know our homeless neighbors don't deserve a dignified place to live it's just that it's just not a good idea it's not right to our children it's not right to the park it's not right to the neighbors so um that's all i had to say and i hope that you guys will uh hear it hear the voices of my fellow neighbors here in coley and concordia and everybody else around here i feel strongly about this issue thank you great thank you thank you give thomas to say thank you hello my name is thomas bussie boy umbrella sam sam edward i'm a resident of your district and forgive me if my comments are a bit angry the vaccine adverse events reporting system currently lists over 18 000 deaths attributed corona shots included in this number is my niece she was murdered last month by the us navy with a mandated pfizer gene therapy fraudulently marketed as a vaccine she was 19 in perfect health a basketball player sorry at no risk for respiratory illness bizarre is conveniently shielded from liability and i was disheartened to learn on november 2nd through the british medical journal that a whistleblower had come forward showing pfizer had falsified data unblinded its clinical trial and covered up reports of serious adverse events worse the fda knew but approved the so-called vaccine anyway the evil doctors of death and racketeers in the pharmaceutical medical mafia who murdered my family did not even have the decency to wait for approval the novovax product which might have a better safety profile maybe we should wait we're told to follow the science based on the currently published data you would have to murder two thousand six hundred twenty-four children to save thirty-one but math is hard so let's go vaccination not that the quirks and cronies care why not follow the science in may 2020 an official government report from the german interior ministry week a blue ribbon panel of europe's top scientists assessed the chrono threat and determined it was a global false alarm a simple cold virus no different than 100 already in circulation what was it willa cather said give them a new name and they'll think they have a new fat we need to dissolve illusions about the nature of our media we have a propaganda corporate media ultimately controlled by military intelligence what is their agenda when i was born it was official policy of this board and this district to refer disabled low-performing and suspected homosexuals for evaluation by the oregon state eugenics board the policy was eagerly pushed by the prostitutes at the oregonian pretending to be journalists how many lives were ruined through electroshock lobotomy sterilization and chemical castration will never be known because the records were conveniently shredded in 2002 just as the oregonian was lying us into war they lied then they are lying now and how will you be viewed in 20 years for going along with a lie with blood on your hands putting bodies into coffins thank you for your testimony kara thank you yes todd rice uh hi good evening can you hear me yes we can go ahead okay yeah hi my name is todd rice last name is spelled r-i-c-e and while i'm not a native oregonian my family proudly choice uh probably chose to make portland oregon home to raise our two children and to open a new small business in downtown we're very actively involved in community organizations that support you through athletics and other activities you know we've all gone through a lot over the course of the pandemic since early 2020 and in most cases our kids have been losing and suffering the most that being said my public comment tonight is to raise awareness and a plea for change in course of operations at the pps civic use of buildings otherwise known as cub last month in october 2021 cubs stopped issuing new permits for the use of pps facilities by community organizations this new rule that comes with no explanation prohibits any and all community organizations from renting pps indoor or outdoor facilities and further provides zero guidance for how long this prohibition will remain in place keep in mind this comes on the heels of community organizations renting pps
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facilities for most of this calendar 2021 during the height of this delta variant without significant issues now as we're moving toward an endemic with ohsu telling us we're going to reach the herd immunity by the end of this year we're again restricting access for our children this failure to issue new cub permits will affect all community organizations that otherwise lack resources to pay for non-pps facilities and our kids are going to suffer as a result further i want to emphasize this cub permitting prohibition will lead to a cancellation of all recreational youth sports this spring 2022 further widening the equity gap across all four quadrants of portland recreational sports such as lacrosse and soccer in the spring are the only option for most of our children given the affordability as compared to club sports which may cost in the thousands to join recreational sports are often 100 percent subsidized at no cost for families in need these expensive club sports will continue as they have the financial means to secure non-pps facilities so without so without access to pps facilities recreational cross soccer and other sports organizations are going to go dormant and once again as in 2020 we will not be able to serve the youth seeking affordable sports this cub policy unfairly punishes those children who lack financial resources to pay for these high cost competitive club sports in conclusion failure to address this cub permitting prohibition right now in a matter of days and weeks not months will result in a shutdown of all volunteer low-cost inclusive youth stock lacrosse programs don't fail to act and please don't fail our kids please reinstate cub permitting please serve our kids by continuing to provide access to pps facilities so lacrosse soccer and all of our community support organizations can give our children the mental health and physical well-being they need in these times thank you thank you thank you marissa bryman hello my name is marissa bryman b-r-y-m-a-n i'm a parent of a harrison park 4th grader and i've also been a representative for harrison park on the southeast guiding coalition since last year i would like to explain why i disagree with the option of delaying the southeast enrollment balancing work harrison park is one of the most diverse schools in pps and in the state and enrollment balancing was intended to provide more equitable educational opportunity to students in schools that have been under-enrolled for many years including lane middle school this work is so long overdue that it really can't be delayed any longer the the educational experts at pps tell us that our kids will receive a superior education in a comprehensive middle school versus a k-8 school and harrison park is currently the only remaining k-8 non-focus option school in all of southeast and we've been waiting patiently for our turn the fact is that by opening kellogg last year i'm sorry this year the decision has already been made to move forward with providing all students in southeast with access to a middle school with optimal enrollment and i'd like to remind the board that last winter the creston community felt so strongly that their kids could not wait one more year to get into a middle school the board made the last minute decision to have preston convert right away to middle to elementary and then feed to kellogg so please remember that these decisions last year were also made during the pandemic and telling harrison park that we need to wait even longer would be shockingly unjust i want you to know that i i do share the concerns of many of my colleagues on the southeast guiding coalition that there hasn't been enough time allotted to working on a scenario that we can recommend to the board for opening harrison park middle school and balancing enrollment it's frustrating to us that pps was aware well in advance that many schools would need to be affected in order to adequately enroll harrison park and lane and surely we knew that phase two would be more complex and far-reaching than phase one but there were fewer southeast guiding coalition meetings scheduled for phase two and the potential scenarios weren't presented until halfway through the process unfortunately there's never going to be a scenario that everyone is happy with and there's never going to be a convenient time to make big change there's no question that we're going to end up with an imperfect scenario but i'm asking you to remember that the purpose of this work was to center the needs of the kids in under-enrolled schools and delaying the work does not serve these kids so please let us complete this work as planned thank you
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great thank you for your testimony that concludes who we have for public comment great thank you kara okay next up um student representative weinberg um we want to move to the students report and i i know you also um you have a student report and also a report on the uh vaccine survey that i think you did and and i think you've requested we go ahead and talk about the vaccine survey as part of that discussion so we'll do the first part of your student report now in the second part when we get there if that works for you yeah so so i think we won't actually be doing this right now later in the agenda exactly okay um good evening everyone um on tuesday november 9th the district student council dsc voted unanimously in favor of a district-wide vaccine mandate for all students 12 and up this includes all students attending in-person school and all other district activities the district student council also supports strongly held religious and medical exemptions from the vaccine requirement we strongly encourage the portland public school board to do the same mandate all students get vaccinated against coven 19. our goal is to ensure students and pps have a full five days of in-person school if our goal is to keep students in school for as much as possible vaccinating kids is a way to reduce the quarantine burn burden on students as learning and families on students learning and also families it also reduces the spread of infection which keeps kids in school longer the district student council's mission is to elevate student voices we believe adding methods of safety such as the vaccine mandate will keep our students and the great greater portland metro community safe the district student council also asked me to share that after the staff report presented in preparation for tonight's discussion we ended up discussing it at length whether we ended up discussing at length whether to issue a response to that report but there wasn't consensus on a response so there will be no statement on that topic secondly the dsc's grant high school rep danny cage sat down with a couple of students and parents i believe two weeks ago to talk about issues affecting middle school students at roseway heights after students had held a student-led walk out to address ongoing student sexual harassment at their school which resulted in physical altercations between students some of the highlighted issues raised were first ongoing sexual harassment among peers mostly directly at girls from male students secondly students felt admin aren't doing enough for students around harassment and were constantly being dismissed third several students of color have said that they have met with they have been met with racist behavior and targeted racist language and has resulted in physical altercation between peers in the past fourth student safety was highlighted by both students and parents some describing the environment in their school as unsafe and finally many students said that they feel staff are overwhelmed and cannot handle fights between students currently i was able to visit roswell heights last week and witness how overwhelmed staff are i heard a teacher ask if there were any training on how to stop fights that were already occurring and the response i heard was that the district training right now focused on prevention strategies and not intervention strategies to implement at the moment to stop a fight lastly i was disheartened to hear over this weekend that the newburgh school board voted to fire their superintendent without cause this comes after the school board voted to ban lgbtq2sia plus and blm flags in schools i wanted to commend directors brandi penner rebecca pieros andes pena for standing up for students the amount of fear i have heard from lgbtq plus and black students from newberg school district breaks my heart i've also heard from students in pbs and other surrounding districts about how easy it seems for districts to backtrack on their commitment to supporting black and lgbtq plus students i'm honored to be a part of a dis a district that holds this commitment to black native and lgbtq plus students close i'm also honored to serve on the state board of education as student advisor where we too hold our commitment to black native and lgbtq plus students close my heart goes out to the students in newburgh school district and any other district where students identities are not being valued and celebrated i hope we can all do better to support and value all of our students thank you okay thank you student representative weinberg okay we're going to move on to board committee and conference reports and we'll just sort of quickly go through these no need to give a report if you don't have one but we'll start off with um uh audit committee director constance no report great uh charter and alternative programs director green uh no report at this time uh intergovernmental committee i know you've got a meeting coming up tomorrow we've actually we only had one item on the agenda so we decided it was the best use of staff and board time to cancel that meeting so the intergovernmental meeting for tomorrow is cancelled and we will be meeting in december breaking news from the diocese thank you
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um policy committee director brim edwards is your microphone on julia it's the first time people had to point that out so first of all we welcomed i want to thank the student rep for appointing um committee members uh we had a first meeting with our new student rep danny cage he's going to be a great addition brought some good questions and perspectives and insights second we spent a fair amount of time walking through the superintendent and staff's feedback on the climate action policy draft and also feedback on the changes by committee members and then third we also reviewed discussed and referred some policies for a first reading that will come before the board tonight shortly great thank you um facilities operations committee director hollins i know you have a meeting tomorrow as well that has not been canceled yeah it has not been canceled yet i'm joking uh yes we have we have no report um and we do have a facilities operation meeting tomorrow and if director director scott can i talk about the conference now do you want me to wait till after everyone's done reporting um yeah go ahead and give your update now that'd be great okay so i had the pleasure of going to naspy um conference which is a national association school black educators um and it was absolutely awesome um we started out today um with the opener from dr george mckenna the third he was a dynamic speaker a board member um and he just talked about everything that boards should be doing could be doing and have not done um and it just was just inspirational motivating um and that was literally the first thing um on the second i mean on the 12th um and that's how the whole conference was from beginning to end um we had a lot of different um breakout sessions that i attended um from how to speak to black boys how to educate black boys talking about access to literacy and really prioritizing that gave great examples as far as access to literacy enables us to participate in a democratic process then we went to the school wellness wheel where they talked about emotional mental health of our students and then we went to a couple other things the last one was a man of iron sessions which was a group of superintendents from around the country awesome group of folks and it was talking about like the needs of superintendents and the support superintendents um look for as well and that was eye-opening and um really inspirational so aside of that it was so much other stuff that happened and breakout sessions um ideas um what other school districts are doing um we had a speaker by the name of dr francisco duran um i believe he's from the association of latino administration and superintendents and the unity that he spoke about um as far as latino and african-americans was just phenomenal um and so that's just kind of the the process i mean the conference in the nutshell but it was just so much more of that um we had a great representation from um pps um we had dr o was there dr proctor was there uh kevin bacon is the principal at um tuckman um and it was just a great time to get together talk and experience something that for me was my first time um and would not be the last um so that's my report from naspy conference thank you thank you director hollins yeah um and just uh to make sure that all the board knows at your facility and operations committee meeting tomorrow um there's a few things on the agenda but one of
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those is this the city will be talking about their proposed um uh use of the whitaker adams property site so i would encourage board members either to attend if you can or watch the video um afterwards okay can i actually ask a question about that um director hollins um is that is it there's three proposed uses um potentially for the whitaker site is it just the city proposal that we're going to be discussing tomorrow correct yeah and i believe because we we talked about the online sports and then we've heard the other two already so we're listening to um the city presentation tomorrow great thank you um next up elections task force just uh to give an update for folks because i know there's a lot of board interest in this so we've been sort of holding off just because of reopening schools and all the other issues um we do have a meeting set up for i think the week after thanksgiving to begin sort of just the conversation and timeline i just want to let everyone know we'll be reporting back very very frequently on this process um in terms of you know there's the issues of redistricting which which by law we have to do um and then and then also potential um discretionary issues the board has in terms of do we want to change the way you know people are elected and make other changes the election process so i know there's a lot of interest in this and um we're just again we would have liked to start a little bit earlier but given other things sort of held off so we'll start that process and be coming back to the board and keeping you updated pretty regularly moving forward great and then southeast guiding coalition will have a present annotation on later on today so with that i think next up on our agenda are some policy issues and first reading the cafeteria policy director brim edwards would you like to introduce this item thank you vice chair scott and i'll just say chair to pass i think it's a great idea um to your your sharing responsibilities turn the mic on i was just thanking chair to pass for her modeling distributive leadership um with the switch at the beginning of the meeting so thank you vice chair scott tonight we have before the board a set of first readings or in laypersons terms trying to like remove it from legislative terms but in laypersons terms essentially we're having the introduction of a set of policies um and those policies could be introductions of new policies revisions of existing policies or rescissions which is also another word for removing something from our policy our virtual policy manual uh so the first policy revision we're considering for this evening is a revision of policy 5.10.090 the cafeteria plan we're not considering it i'm just reading introducing it shortly before the last policy committee meeting there was a request from staff to fast-track changes to this policy so the district could make some amendments to the district's cafeteria plan before year end due to the passage of federal legislation when reviewing the policy which is actually the cafeteria plan in itself at 50-plus pages working with the staff we came up with a revised policy that was brought before the policy committee um superintendent guerrero and hr chief rhys reviewed and supported the language and the committee members and student rep unanimously recommended first reading the policy essentially removes removes the actual detailed plan language from the policy so it um strikes 52 pages i want to get credit for that uh vice chair scott um and it says that and the substitute language really is just um substance there's a sort of introductory paragraph and then there's a second paragraph that just says that legally required compliance changes to the district cafeteria plan be publicly posted 10 days before the plan changes are made and the financial implications will be shared with and may be reviewed by the board and then that changes to the cafeteria plan that are represent new material benefits will be approved by the board the second revision that the policy committee recommended is to policy 5.60.010 administrative employee terms of employment as board members may recall the board passed a resolution on september 28th that suspended two specific portions of this policy relating to the appointment assignment of non-represented employees this revision deletes the two suspended sections that we had suspended in that resolution relating to appointments and replaced it with language um that clarifies that the superintendent
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has the authority to appoint a sign or alter the assignment of non-representative employees with the exception of course of the two auditors that report to the board um this revised language was developed in collaboration with the staff agreed to by the superintendent and recommended unanimously by the by the committee members and the student rep for a first reading or introduction this evening and then the last two policies up for a first reading are a continuation of our work to um prune un unnecessary or duplicative um policies from our virtual policy manuals so that we really have our policy manual as like the heart of our values and most important policies so policy 3.20.011 relating to planning time and policy 5.20.080 relating to the evaluation of teachers are both being recommended by the committee to the board for an introduction tonight um and for rescission these um the reasons for the rescissions are that the planning days are negotiated with our labor partners and part of the school calendars and then the evaluation of teachers uh we don't need a policy because it's governed by the portland association and teachers collective bargaining agreement uh so those are the two rescissions and then the two revised policies that the committee recommended for first reading all of those policies proposed revision or rescission are posted on the board website and the public comment period is a minimum of 21 days contact information public comment will be posted with the draft policy changes and it's a standing agenda item at the policy committee um to review any sort of public comment or proposed revisions uh two items are out for public comment and we have a policy committee in early december and the board is expected um assuming there's not major changes to have a second reading of the policies at its uh december board meeting and i think i would just add if i see chief reese in the room that um you don't need to come up but i was just gonna say that we really need to um move ahead with that adoption so that we can make the plan changes before year end but i guess if people have questions about it they could ask her but um that's something that needs to be done by december 31st and the way the policy is written it would allow the staff to make the changes um and also remove the plan uh permanently from our policies great thank you thank you direction from edwards is it worth noting in a school board context that the cafeteria plan has nothing to do with school lunches oh yes that's an important distinction you know i thought about that because i was reading through it and it was related back to the tax reform act of 1986 which is something i'd worked on and then it was like okay how to explain this so i i do think now that you raised it really thank thank you director scott i was so caught up in explaining what a first reading was that the most obvious thing a cafeteria plan is a menu of benefits that's tied to the tax code and relates to um the sort of before and after tax uh provisions and it's called a cafeteria plan because in theory um employees choose from a series of benefits um and so it's like being at a cafeteria choosing choosing benefits but it's not actually a cafeteria plan we need a whole meeting for that topic i know right exactly okay um thank you very much for those updates is there any board comment or discussion about either the um first readings or of either the the policy changes or the rescissions go in once okay and then just and and director for medford thank you for for clarifying a little bit so um we're going to be taking public comment and then any board member you know if you dive into this a little bit deeper you can bring that to the policy committee coming forward yeah we have a sending agenda item that just you know it gives us an opportunity so the committee that worked on it if something comes in to have an opportunity to talk about it and also we have usually the relevant staff there so i can't remember the date of our next policy committee member i think it's the first week of december okay perfect thank you uh okay for the next agenda item um the future of harry tubman middle school i would also like to um pass this back to director bim edwards who served as our board liaison to the rose quarter advisory committee thank you vice chair scott so as this board knows we passed a we passed several resolutions relating to harriet tubman and the state project that has been proposed relating to i-5 at the rose quarter which would have a very significant potential negative impact on the school and the board has weighed in in terms of asking for an environmental impact statement but we've also passed a resolution that
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calls on the state to if they move ahead with the project to pay for the moving and the rebuild of harriet tubman and so i appreciate the board doing passing that because that sent a very strong statement to the governor and our our partners that we've been at the table with talking to about this project and the uh the governor held a series of meetings there's been a whole series of community meetings with lots of stakeholders involved all of the the outcome of all of those in relation to harriet tubman was there was an agreement that when the original i-5 project happened it had a very negative impact on the school and that the most recent the the recently proposed project would like would as well um and so in those conversations uh we talked to the governor about this being a state responsibility since the state since ifi really is a major transportation corridor uh for goods movement for you know agricultural products coming from the east and um so it's not just a portland road this is a statewide um road of significance and transportation corridor and because of that that the state had an obligation so we've been in conversations with the governor and legislators um with courtney wessling the pps's government affairs lead has arranged a series of meetings with legislative representatives and also that have been joined by lindsay capps in the governor's office and we've had a very positive response to the the recommendation that the state step up and pay for something that is of statewide importance and i think i've mentioned before that that the um it's not going to be easy coming up with 100 to 125 million dollars which is sort of the projected cost but it turns out that while that's a big task maybe the bigger one is going to be um finding a location that fits our criteria and essentially over the last six weeks the reaction from most of the people we've talked to that would have a significant say in this is that without a site um they can't appropriate the the funding they're not going to just hand us a hundred and 125 million dollars and say you know go go build a school somewhere they they want to know specifically what we're going to be doing um so there has been a project team that has been working on the site selection and i think this is the point which i ask dan young his team has been very hard at work over the last uh i don't know six months looking for a site and so this is a critical second piece and we want to make sure that um the board and the community not only have a sense of where we are on the the potential funding but also um on a location because um you know clearly it will have a big impact on the um the harriet tubman school community and so we want to be thoughtful and have set up criteria with that do you want to proceed with discussion directors and superintendent and student representative uh weinberg uh just quick recap what director bird members just noticed uh noted that we quite a long time ago expressed concern about i5 moving closer to harriet tubman middle school and the idea of relocating that school and ultimately they agreed with that and after those conversations we started looking at potential relocation options for harriet tubman so i just want to give a real quick high level summary of what that site review process looks like and then highlight where our current status and next steps so our site analysis process can really be summarized in kind of three general steps step one which is a high level vetting looking at really every property that is in the potential area step two which would be an internal feasibility analysis uh on a limited number of sites where we would look at land use site layout and massing uh circulation neighborhood compatibility and some other aspects as that and then step three which is really a detailed suitability analysis where we bring in third-party uh consultants as well we do environmental analysis traffic studies site plans we engage the community in more depth and then we also start negotiating with the property owner so that's kind of the three-step process that we're trying to go through for our uh step one kind of high-level look at the entire area we use some
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pretty simple criteria to help identify potential properties we're looking for properties that are within the tubman catchment area or at least very close we want generally six to nine acres if possible we did look at sites that were significantly smaller than that but we usually want somewhere about six to nine acres for a middle school uh amenable zoning designation and then the ability to develop the property relatively soon within the next one to two years so we took a look at the entire catchment area uh and what did we find well to probably no surprise too many people here there is no greenfield 10 acre site in albana that is for sale and ready for development [Laughter] in fact albino is is pretty well developed and is pretty urban uh so the search honestly produced really very few viable options and we certainly as we started to look at the criteria and the number of sites you know we knew that we're going to have you know start considering trade-offs and so we really tried to maximize as many sites as we could but there's really just not a lot of options that are out there right now but we are looking at one site in earnest at the moment in part because of the limited purchase options we began to look at the option of utilizing existing pps schools to house the tubman students and to be to be just totally clear this is very preliminary there have been no decisions there are no plans this is just a concept that we have been discussing internally we have just begun to engage stakeholders in the community of is this a viable option we want to explore it if it is ultimately the best option for tubman for the neighborhood and for the entire district so at a very high level that is where we are uh at the moment and so i'll pause there and take questions i imagine there might be some i just i don't think you saw director green's reaction when you were talking about finding land in albina because he literally had his head in his hands i did not so thank you for your work there i'm just curious as to whose idea was it to look for when it comes to my industry because you should have knew from the gate that was enough i think though the latter part of the conversation is a pretty interesting one because we do know that we have declining elementary and middle school enrollment and we're already actively in discussion around potential school consolidation in southeast so we know that there are ideas that we could entertain around in the tubman catchment about possibly repurposing some of our properties there and having some consolidation at the elementary school level i mean that's never an easy conversation but you know it's good that we've already had done somewhat of a deep dive on our enrollment figures of till 2034 or whatever it is that we were just looking at so yeah we do have some enrollment data um and really we're just in that process of information gathering and engaging to see uh to see what the feasibility opportunity is so i want to comment on the availability of land in albina it's true there's nothing we get people look driving up and down the streets just looking for things i just want to make sure that we you know equally share the burdens and the benefits of a move and who's whose kids are being moved and i had another comment but i can't remember at the point at the time i'll come back to it so i i do want to maybe um just touch on uh director lowry's and um uh observation about director greene um because one of the things that the governor did in this process not only has she been working her staff on working to come up with the capital stock but also asked all the um jurisdictions in um that that have land in that um catchment area whether they had any um that might fit the the criteria and uh not only is the space really was really eliminating the acreage but um you know i5 there are a lot of properties near i5 that people suggested that just were no goals because actually we wouldn't be getting a better health and a better environment for our students but i i will say i really appreciate all the other jurisdictions looking to see if they had one and we do have one that we're doing more due diligence on that was the city site the other thing i guess i want to just emphasize just elevate so that um the board has this um sort of sort of front and center is there is urgency about
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this because as director scott would know as you head into the february legislative session you have to get your budget documents in and it's not going to be the week before the february session we submit our request for 125 million but we really have there's a whole process before the session starts where you have to submit a lot of documents about the actual financial request and of course there's a lot of competing interests and so those that are complete and ready to move are the ones that you know get considered first so um there is a sense of urgency we've been asked to have our sort of proposal in by december 1st because that will increase the likelihood of our success so and i actually had a timeline question which you just mostly answered and so i guess that i guess sort of given that timeline i mean and i think this is really important um are we confident that we can get a proposal in by that time that at least i mean it sounds like we've got maybe some options and i'm also thinking about the whole community outreach which is obviously going to have to happen you know in the interim period between then in the special session but this process all along has been a facilities a community engagement um a legal process sorry keep forgetting um but it's been a process where we've incorporated everyone so um yeah absolutely so i can i can give a little bit of details in terms of what we anticipate uh as some next steps so on friday we did communicate with the school communities that would uh you know would be impacted so the community the schools in the tubman uh catchment area that this conversation is happening so many families are probably tuning in uh this evening just to hear this discussion secondly what we are going to be sharing with the community is a series of engagement sessions where we want to hear directly from from families at each of those schools and we plan to do that the week of december uh six um and so uh six seven eight nine i believe i don't have my calendar in front of me but again we'll have more details and the idea is to to set some time to visit each school community uh share a little bit more details of what is being uh discussed and and really hear feedback that we can share back with with our broader community so again we'll have more details to to share um with you obviously because you you definitely want to hear what our communities our families our students want to uh have to say about the the topic i just remembered um my follow-on thought was um so at talking about like there is no land available in albina but there's a publicly owned spaces but just that i thought i saw in our long-range plan that the population for projections out i think it's 25 years show show growth in the jefferson cluster and a loss in other other clusters and so we we know to expect more population even if it isn't there today and then my comment about sharing the benefits and the burdens is that this community in albina has been heavily burdened like my entire life and so just if we could you know take care and concern in who we're moving and you know clearly articulate the benefits of any given moves um to the community that's still like hanging on here um i would i would really appreciate that you know a director to pass that's exactly why in the discussions um that we're not discussing like it's a consolidation because that's not the purpose the purpose is is to provide a high quality equal middle grades experience in a healthy environment for um this the students in the tubman catchment area and so the the the goal would if there was a current pbs property used not it to be like we're going to move everybody around and there's no improvement it like that the standard of what we're going to do has to be that it's an improvement and so it sounds like we're headed towards a parallel process of working with our state legislators and allies in terms of that while doing the community outreach and gathering input and so forth and and the other thing i guess maybe the last thing i would note is this is just another example and this is something that given the timing in the session we really do need to move forward but it's yet another project which is going to suck up significant amounts of staff time and district time and board time as well so just as we're continuing to think about um what we can move forward this year and and what we can i just think this is important to keep this project in mind as well but i'm excited to hear that there might be movement
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down in salem yeah i mean it's very the conversations have been promising but really no sight no funds i think we should just be clear so you've gotta not to put any pressure on great okay any final comments or thoughts on this items all right um next up and i think if i just want to thank staff for doing this groundwork from the first time we talked about it and really said you know we need to get out of the theoretical and into the practical here several months ago so thanks for that legwork to your team dan um so um i was thinking we would go ahead we'll go ahead and go into the vaccine vaccinate discussion of a possible vaccination requirement and then we'll take a break before the southeast guiding coalition if the board's okay with that superintendent guerrero would you please introduce this next item sure thank you vice chair scott so as i think directors know we've tried to be as prudent as possible during this pandemic to implement and adopt every possible health and safety measure as you know pps was the first k-12 school district in the state to announce vaccine requirements for all of its staff as school districts have begun to think about the role of vaccines being encouraged or required to help keep students staff and school communities safe i know that this board along with senior staff also expressed an interest in publicly getting into a dialogue in a discussion about the merits of a possible vaccine requirement for portland students and just to recap we began this discussion with the board on september 28th that evening we heard from public health experts from pediatric doctors on the precedent and consequences of a potential requirement for covid19 vaccinations for students to attend school so grateful for the continued uh careful dialogue that directors have been participating in on this very important and complex topic as you know we've heard from a whole spectrum and variability of perspectives on this topic and i'd like to ask our chief of staff jonathan garcia to share the latest update on what we're hearing from our community members as well as some updated thinking by staff at this time jonathan thank you superintendent uh good evening directors uh so what i'd like to do today is go over the the data or the information that i shared with you before i turn it over to you for your discussion uh so uh when the pps board began your discussion uh on september 28th uh our community was at its highest peak of cover 19 and hospitality hospital capacity was at record lows so here in multnomah county for example the week of september 26th there were 60 cases of folks in hospitals last week the week of the 7th there was 34 according to monoma county the week of the 23rd or sorry the week of the 26th there is 1223 cases compared to last week 880. as a learning organization we continue to review the latest research and information on covid with our independent public and pediatric health experts and on our health advisory panel as well as local public health authorities so that our decisions reflect new knowledge conditions and insights at the last at the last time the last time we had a conversation the school board narrowed the discussion to two possible options either requiring a code vaccine for for students ages 12 and up or not pursuing a requirement at this time there was a question uh or a request from directors around models of forecasting which we've shared here so today more than three and four students ages 12 to 17 here in the county are now vaccinated with younger children now beginning to get vaccinated uh for uh specifically according to oha 78.7 percent of individuals 12 to 17 have been have initiated a vaccine a covet 19 vaccination and have been a release have received at least one dose which is 652 short of 80 percent of the entire population of students ages 12 to 17 in our county as i shared our young children are beginning to get their first vaccine and in fact here in the county uh one in five children in the county have already begun the series of doses in less than two weeks
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again one in five about a little bit under 19 public experts estimate that herd immunity requires about 80 to 90 percent of the population to have cova-19 immunity as of today in multnomah county more than 80 of people ages 18 and over have received at least one dose that's about 82 percent uh overall total population in multnomah county we're at about 79.3 have at least received one dose and 71.7 percent are fully vaccinated we also shared with you uh information from dr peter graven as many of you know dr peter graven uh who works at ohsu sits on our pps health advisory panel who recently shared an updated forecast of cases here in oregon which note a flatter period be uh before a further decline in addition there was a request from directors around current immunization uh rates and so we provided you with the 2020 2021 uh pps vaccination vaccination rates and according to this data about 1005 of the 45 000 students at pps or about 2.2 percent of our student bodies submitted a non-medical exemption for all required vaccines and only 43 students at pps received a medical exemption for a required vaccination to give you an indication of what that looks like and we shared the data broken down by school there are at wrigler one of our csi one of our school csi schools only five students had a have a non-medical exemption of any one vaccine at scott you're looking at 10 students at rosa parks and at king 11 students on the higher end you're looking at uh 144 students at franklin or 107 at grant or 104 at kelly to give you kind of a sense of the data that's there since uh that was a question that was asked directors also asked questions about strategies to bring families along uh as to educate folks around uh clova 19 and so you know we are as a school district leading with action we are creating access and learning opportunities for for a vaccine for our students in our community as you all know we are we've launched a series of coven 19 vaccine clinics for students five to eleven we've held uh three to this date uh actually one is happening today uh with two uh previously uh at fabian we had 145 children get vaccinated with 45 of their parents getting boosters last night at scott we had a little bit over 100 students get vaccinated there as well and i'm excited to hear about the numbers today we're also working with other schools to launch site-specific clinics beyond the ones that we've announced and again we we are just eager to to to support our families in getting that access to the vaccine in addition our teaching and learning led by dr cheryl proctor uh has assembled k5 lessons and resources which i provided a a a snippet of some of those resources that we're we're sharing with educators and in the broader community to to so they can learn about so we can collectively learn about vaccinations and so uh as as folks uh have heard at this point uh staff is recommending uh as a result of all of this what we just shared uh for the board to uh to to pause uh for uh at least in the six months uh so we can really see uh our community has shown up our community has uh has really stepped up in in amazing ways again look at the data look at the folks running to get vaccines you look at the data and it's uh and i think it's an indication that our our community really is taking care of themselves and each other of course uh this conversation this decision is uh up entirely up to the school board and and i'm looking forward to the discussion if the board uh decides to proceed with uh with a in implementation or with a required requirement of a cova 19 vaccination the staff would recommend on the implementation side that you implement a non-medical exemption process that is consistent with the oregon health authorities guidelines that are applied with other immunizations so uh so let me give you a little sense of what the current implementation for requiring vaccinations so in policy we
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exclude students right so uh we say that if you don't have these certain uh vaccines you are excluded from school in practice of course we work with families to make informed decisions which might mean getting vaccinated or also might be submitting for a non-medical exemption right so we as staff work very carefully with our families to make sure that they know you know the steps that they need to take uh informed decisions uh around those vaccine immunization requirements and so we recommend that if the board does proceed with a cova 19 vaccine requirement that you implement the same that uh same process that is consistent with the oregon health authority for a number of reasons one it provides clarity and consistency uh to our broader community to our families uh and again uh and i'll end with this and i just said this earlier but our community health is uh is really driving the portland community and and and that that there's power to be said other there's a uh there's power in that statement right that our community has is really caring for themselves and for each other so with that directors i look forward to the conversation uh and discussion great thanks chief garcia um if uh the board's okay now i'd like to turn to student representative weinberg and i think you have a presentation for us on the student survey good evening perfect so um as i emailed to all of you earlier i the survey only closed friday so by no means is the analysis of the results complete um i'm looking at this as more of a first job at hopefully what the board was looking for job yes and hopefully i'll get a little bit more if you want more information on certain disaggregated data i can hopefully get that to you as soon as possible so first off for the method of how we distributed this survey mostly three things so the dsc worked inside their individual schools to distribute the survey the dsc also contacted affinity clubs at their individual schools to ask them to take the survey as well the survey was also sent out to all high school and middle school administrators through the admin portal and some high school and middle school administrators decided to post that on canvas trivery for high schools and also some sent out emails to families or individual students as well so let's look at the survey questions um so kind of off the top um you can read it but basically it's saying that um the dsc would like to collect information on how um students 12 and up feel about a vaccine mandate and that this survey is completely anonymous so we collected no emails names um or necessarily age i mean a little bit because we gathered grade level but not necessarily so there was no way to tie individual results to students also if they didn't feel comfortable responding to any single question they were not required to so no question was required either so the first two questions where do you attend middle school or high school oh i forgot i should also mention that this survey was closed to only student to only emails that ended in pps.net or at student.pps.net so we only had respondents from students and potentially teachers if they so chose but hopefully did not um the first question do you attend middle school or high school was aimed at um kind of catching maybe some people who decided to take it who weren't students so we had about 18 student 18 respondents who responded as neither so we removed that data as we're not interested currently in data from those who aren't middle school and high school students also we have a question what feeder school do you attend as in what high school you attending or will attend we also asked what identities do you identify as so we had these options and also another box which was well utilized by students um this was also multiplied multiple choice questions so students were allowed to click one two three five as many as they wanted which did leave to lead to some trouble in analyzing data later because it was very hard to disaggregate the data by individual race when students responded with 45 plus different racial categories um also a question on there was are you fully vaccinated yes no partially prefer not to say i didn't include the results in that but it is 88 89 fully vaccinated who responded
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and the final question do you support a vaccine mandate for all eligible students on electric scale one to five and finally an open response where you've got around 1100 students providing free responses some full paragraphs some looked like essays so there was not enough time in my schedule to do that but i did send it to you guys if you want to spend that time so who responded by grade level we had about 25 middle school respondents 75 high school respondents um i feel like this is pretty good especially since we don't have middle school district student council representatives so obviously high school would have more respondents and what feeder school do you attend to um we added this question after about 300 responses so unfortunately about 16 of the respondents um just didn't respond because we did not have that question overall we had super low response rates from jefferson high school and benson polytechnic high school all other high schools were pretty well represented and just as a second graph without the didn't respond this is what it looks like so from who we got responses from franklin and grant had the highest response rate which makes sense as they are the largest high schools um and pretty even distribution across the other ones again besides roosevelt or sorry benson and jefferson high schools and by race this was a bit hard to gather but what this graph represents is take asian for example students who responded with asian or partially asian made up 10 so each section doesn't represent one student but rather the percentage of students who responded as that race or par at least partially that race and what were the results so overall do you support a vaccine mandate for all eligible students 12 and up 78 percent of students fully supported a vaccine mandate with an another 11 percent supporting overall that makes up nearly 90 percent of students supporting a vaccine mandate for eligible students 12 and up with five seven percent of students not supporting it by cluster the data is pretty uniform except for jefferson high school which was below the average of four which could be because of low response rate or that could be representative i don't really know because we did have i think less than 10 respondents from jefferson high school and i meant to add numbers to the top for labels for individ for the numbers but roughly 4.5 was across the board and by grade level exactly the same 4.54 for high school students and middle school students and now by race there are four slides um i did not want to group um certain racial groups or responses so it ended up being a lot of information at the end i tried to bring it all together into a way that the board can digest um so just be forewarned it is a little overwhelming so along the bottom is the um how um students responded so if a student only responded with asian then they would be their data would be um calculated in that if a respondent selected asian and latino they would be in the next column over and you can see how that led to 45 columns of respondents um there's not that much of a difference between the rates there there is not a huge difference yes um for the respondents who were below 3.5 or 3 um all of the number of respondents was 3 or less jackson just an editorial it would be helpful to note the number in each group yep as you go across just to show those differences and whether it's a large group or a small group yeah yes the n equals yep i tried to figure out how to add that to the graph but with some having 200 plus and some having one it was hard to show that i do have a pivot table which i can share with all you guys with that the average response rate and also the standard deviation for each group as well i don't know how long to spend on each one so just let me know you know who has this figured out really well as the census yes the census knows how many boxes you can check under race and i think in 2000 was the first time you could check multiple races yes so we're still learning how to obviously disaggregate the data and i don't have training on how to do that so this is
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um the best thing i could come up with it's i mean it's the alternative would be to not give people the opportunity to reflect their various multi identities so yes in my opinion you aired on the right side or to group certain um respondents which i honestly didn't feel comfortable with it looks great it looks great jackson i'm loving it thus far and i love graphs and i love excel so you're doing amazing keep it up okay we have two more slides for disaggregation by race okay and you guys also do have access to this to look at for your own too great okay do you want to just um add anything else anecdotally about your conversations with the dsc as we roll into discussion here yeah i'm going to do this and then do that um so i tried to bring this all together in some quantitative way to share with you in an easy digestible way so this has the end sizes and also the average response rate for um by race so again this is not strictly only students who responded only as asian but including respondents who responded as with asian or at least partially asian same with white mixed race native hawaiian or pacific islander latino native american and black or african american did you say that it's the response rate or is it the rate of acceptance on that likert scale another it's the average response so the average response on scale one yes okay not the re okay yes just so i understand this are people showing up in two places so if someone said they were asian and black they would actually gain both columns yep so there's double triple quadruple counting depending on how many races you selected so i have a question just overall um and this would be like if i were looking for the crosstab the crosstab i would be looking for like in in a survey is did you ask did you look at like how people responded if they were vaccinated because i'm just wondering the correlation between if you were vaccinated and support for a mandate versus um like to me these numbers um i really really appreciate it because i think it um gives us as you know insights it's like okay the the ones that don't support a vac vaccine mandate are those those are ones who are vaccine hesitant or need more information and you know that's the delta you look at so i'm curious whether that was a data point you you had yes i do um so the average response rate for if the respondent responded as no as not being vaccinated was 3.5 um if they responded as partially vaccinated it was 4.1 if they preferred not to say it was two and if it was yes it was 4.7 great interesting so yeah not exactly what i expected but it was they were all above three which would be basically neutral except for those who preferred not to say gotcha did you have some wrap up thoughts i don't think so no great i left the graph with the the middle schoolers to me said how many kids how many students in high school got their younger siblings to fill the survey out and what did they have to do to get that what do they have to promise so let's go ahead and open up now for broad discussion either questions for jackson or um back to the sort of staff presentation and and recommendation again the recommendation on the table from staff is to delay the conversation um for at least six months and i think we just want to have a board discussion about um people's level of comfort moving forward with that or if there's a different direction that the board wants to go with that i'll open it up i'll go ahead and start um i just double checked your statistic and the number is lower than what you reported because i just refreshed it it's 563 multnomah county residents between the ages of 12 and 17 yet to be yet to be vaccinated to get to the 80 level and the number is rising for um five to eleven-year-olds my question i had was about the six months which seems arbitrary when the virus is
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would we not say let's be responsive to responsive to the virus rather than like ins you know by the clock we're looking at this um and those that's just my question for now where was the six months coming from is that based on um what we hear about the projection expectations the models yeah that's a great question uh chair to pass i would say that i think what we're looking at is the way that our community is showing up to get vaccinated so again what we've seen is that three and four of our students 12 to 17 are vaccinated and the fact that in just 13 days uh you know one in five of our children five to eleven are uh are beginning the process of getting vaccinated so you know i i think our recommendation our belief is that our community is showing up and so what we want to see is you know how many folks will get vaccinated uh you know one of the things that we heard from the director of multnomah public health was that you know the a requirement for a vaccination should be the last resort after uh after public health agencies have really thought about um uh you know have exhausted all uh all all type of engagement with with the broader community and so uh i think you know um i think the the conversation uh you know could be revisited uh before the six months i you know um i think i also want to be clear that the state of oregon um who usually is the uh entity that um or oha specifically that uh provides requirements around school immunizations they are beginning a conversation at the state level around this so you know uh there are parallel conversations happening uh at the statewide uh level uh as i understand it um and so we anticipate and we'll monitor those conversations closely as well excellent and i have one more question i want to just share that i've i've gotten an email uh for a vaccine event focused on serving five to eleven-year-old black afro-caribbean african black immigrants and refugees and other people communities of color happening at the lloyd center that's through multnomah county's reach program it started tonight and had a dj and a kids center and an activity pack and then on thursday the timbers have a vaccine clinic through gate f i believe and that sounds really cool too there's i don't think any restrictions on who um do we have dates and times for our own clinics we do uh if you look at your memo i included the dates in here with the of the first eight schools uh so that's on page four of your memo uh i will also be sharing i'll send an email reminder with with those as well uh just just to make a public note here that you know the the primary focus of those clinics are to uh provide uh or make available these doses to uh the families the students and families of those specific school communities and uh and so while we're having public conversations about you know these upcoming vaccine clinics you know i would urge and uh and ask that our broader community you know really respect um the individual school communities who these uh vaccines are really looking to target uh we know that you know the the the desire is strong which again is an indication of our community as a desire to protect themselves and each other from covet 19. uh and so uh we just asked you know for the broader patients as as you know doses become available here in in in the region thank you thanks i think that real time bump you just saw chair to pass on multnomah county website was from boise elliot humble so let's go they just shut down about a half hour ago director lowry yeah so i you know was uh last time when we discussed this was very supportive of a vaccine mandate and i think for me it's all about going back to what dr vine said from multnomah county which is what is our goal and our goal is to keep kids in school and i think you know with the philosophical and religious exemptions we wouldn't i don't think we'd see a huge bump in vaccines by creating the mandate and it would create a lot of distress in our community without getting us the benefit of lowering the um amount of time children were missing for quarantining another thing so i do think pausing is wise given that sort of political moment that we're in with the um exemptions that we have and our high vaccination rate numbers and i volunteer at grout i do lunch duty on mondays and fridays which is like the best thing the kids are awesome and i was there yesterday and so many
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kids got shots over the weekend and they were all like they still had their band-aids on like as a mark of honor from like thursday and they're all lifting up their sleeves and showing me i got my vaccine you know the littles that were doing it were so excited and i think we're seeing that that um those folks who are able to and want to get the vaccine are doing it um i was really fascinated when we were looking at the memo and the vaccine numbers that you brought forward chief garcia that kelly is our school with our most number of exemptions and i think many of us saw a great number of russian-speaking families in our town halls so i think there's something there with our russian families who have a history with some of the governments that those families were associated with a mistrust and and something very fascinating there and so i think as we have further conversations with kelly and that community about how we keep folks healthy and support those students in school that's a really interesting place to look um and just a fascinating insight that i wasn't aware of until we had those vaccine town halls and had had a great number of russian-speaking families as part of them um so i'm at the point where i do think it's i think it's in the best in interest i hear kids like xander i have a high school student i know kids want to feel safe especially in in the schools and yet for me what we would gain with the mandate is not significant enough to push it forward at this time um i was a little frustrated with the oregonians editorial in some of the like rush to decision making that they uh said four of us took and i really think for me it and i know my colleagues it's been a very thoughtful process with lots of intense listening lots of very thoughtful thinking about what is our goal and how do we best achieve student safety and and to say that you know we're just rushing into this it it's i think it dishonors the work that staff has done i think it dishonors the work that my board colleagues have done both in engaging very much with the materials that have been provided for us but i know all of us have also been engaging and if you would have told me that i would be reading mit papers on different consonants and the rate of aerosol spread from those consonants being spoken with and without a mask i did not sign up for that when i ran for school board but now this is my life so um you know and i've read all the i read the articles that people send me saying this will change your mind and i read them and try to be very aware and thoughtful about this this is a big deal and i think i feel like every time we talk about this someone says we're gonna have blood on our hands for something that we do um but i think all of us are really invested in how do we protect children how do we keep kids in an academic robust joyful academic experience as much as possible and i really do think the staff recommendation to delay is the right one at this time great thanks director lowry um director's green or hollins do you want to add anything yes i uh i'll go before before i miss director greene get your thoughts in there let the two preachers go back to back right you gotta break it between there you know take an offer in something [Laughter] um i just i wanna agree with uh director lowry you know when when you have a discussion on this magnitude you know a lot of decisions on either way either side of it and for me with my colleagues that at the heart of everything was the safety of our kids right and so there there is no you know this this side did this or this these folks did that is everybody was doing and going based on what was the best for our kids what we understood for the best of our kids um and so i i agree with director larry on you know the oregonian editorial piece that you know made it seem like it was it wasn't a rush we've been dealing with this stuff for 18 months it wasn't a rush at all but you know once again everybody's heart and everybody's core value was what's best for the kids um and so with that you know i i you know everybody knows where i stand as far as you know the vaccine piece um i do agree with the district uh with staff of you know pollen for six months um but i just wanted to let everyone know and and the public too that you know everybody on this on this uh board on the staff on the board the staff from everyone down only best interests of the kids there was there is no other arterial motors except for we're looking to do what's best for the kids with the information that we we've received um so i just wanted to make sure that you know the community understands that um and that's all i got to say great thank you thank you i think if i would say anything um it would be that um to echo what we're all saying nobody on this board is getting a check nobody is nobody is getting paid what you mean
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they said we were getting checks i'm looking for mine in the mail bro nobody gets paid to be here we're all volunteering our time we're not lobbying for anything so there are no lobbyists coming to us saying that if you go this way that we're going to give you this or if you go this way we're going to give you that we sit here for hours and hours at a time because we're concerned about the well-being of all of the community and not just some of the community i'm there there are a lot of people that um that feel one way about it and there are a lot of people that feel another way about it and it's and i believe it's my personal opinion that every one of the every one of the individuals that come that are coming to the table and that are coming to the forefront truly believe that they're doing what's what they believe is best and i don't think anyone given the you know passing them to mike is going to say i don't care what kids get hurt just give me this everybody wants what's best for the the kids and the families um that we're serving and in this instance by making this pause we're allowing time for for families to make a choice instead of forcing someone to you're going to do this and you're going to love it people are are given time to to read about it they're given time to do research they're given time to make a decision that fits their family the best and what's going to work within their home with with their medical conditions with their with their family conditions that that's going to work with what they believe to be true um and and real for them and by not forcing them and allowing them to to make the decision on their own i believe that because we all want what's best for our families and for our communities we're going to arrive at a place where we're making healthy decisions and it won't be because someone forced you to do it it won't be because someone told you that you had to do it it'll be because you had the opportunity to look into it to research it and then you did what's best for you so the pause whether it be for six months or whether it be for three we're giving people time we're giving people time to to make a healthy decision for them and their family and that's what we need right now people weren't saying that they were against it they were saying that they wanted to make a choice they wanted to make the choice and they didn't want the school district to make that choice for them because we weren't the medical experts and so we're allowing the families i feel we're giving our families and our communities the opportunity and our students the opportunities to to make a choice choose and if you believe that this is going to work for you then you'll get vaccinated if you don't believe that this is going to work for you then you won't and you'll you'll do something else but either way as a school district our job is to help you um and to educate you and you know get you from where you are to where we know you want to be um educationally it's not we're not medical experts and so we shouldn't be making medical decisions that's my thought on it so but thank you everyone and i i do agree with the staff that a pause is necessary thanks dr green thank you i also want to add that it it was um it was disturbing to wake up and you know read the sunday paper and see your name in there um i think i i know nobody uh knows my mind as well as i do and um i i felt like our discussions were thoughtful that we all got plenty of research um pro and con um it wasn't rushed as uh director holland said we've been in this for a long time we've been responsive for 18 or 19 months and that said i also support a pause i don't know if six months is the right time because i don't know what's going to happen next month so i would like us to be flexible and responsive to the virus um but yeah i i feel like this is really the right decision for for a multitude of reasons and mostly because multnomah county residents and rpps students are already doing the right thing great chief garcia did you have something to add i just wanted to add to director greene speaking of education tomorrow dr paul coakley who is the superintendent of multnomah county esd alongside superintendent guerrero will be hosting a vaccine forum with public health officials uh with uh with a broader school district all the school districts in the region really to promote uh you know the the learning around you know this vaccination and and so we'll have public health officials there uh speaking to some of those those questions those common uh questions that folks have so i just wanted to put a plug in there uh you can find more information on our websites and and we'll promote that tomorrow and tonight through our social media as well great yeah thank you chief garcia beat me to
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the punch on that psa to director green's point on focusing on education uh it is the topic is vaccines for age five to eleven and getting a chance to to hear from public health experts uh the webinar will be live streamed so anybody who has wants to tune in uh we invite you to do that great additional comments yeah i have a few um first of all when we undertook this conversation it was because in our conversation with our health panel they made it clear that mandates can and are an effective way to promote increasing vaccine vaccination and that was that was our goal so i'm really i'm very satisfied with where we are tonight i support this direction and appreciate the work of staff mostly i'm really gratified to see the response of our community and especially the degree of vaccination for our littles in such a short period of time that the vaccine has been available to them so way to go multnomah county way to go pps students and families and guardians and school communities and you know when we had this conversation originally my uh concern or my caveats and supporting a mandate were around what does implementation look like and we really didn't have a lot of information about what uh quarantine and what exclusion might look like and we know that those are those are those have a huge impact on kids whether or not they're able to learn in person you know i still we don't need to address this tonight but i still have a lot of questions around potential implementation scenarios because we know there are school districts all over the place that may not have a mandate per se but they do differentiate in how vaccinated and unvaccinated uh students are treated both in terms of quarantine um guidelines which right now are is not really under our discretion we're pretty much at the at the mercy of our uh oha and and mesd in our case uh in multnomah county guidelines there but also for example areas where we do have more discretion are around participation in extracurricular activities and in athletics and there are all sorts of school districts who are making it making a difference there and how students are treated so i would like to have some more conversation in the future around those nuances in our own district as we begin to you know as our younger kids have an opportunity to be vaccinated and we begin to see these numbers shift but mostly without a mandate we are seeing the results that we want to see for the safety of our kids and our school communities and that's good news so i'm i'm happy with where we are thanks director constance from edwards yeah thank you um so i guess i'll start by saying because i think it's important to note that i support vaccines as safe and effective and i wasn't in support of a vote tonight because i felt like there was there were things that um we could do before we got to what i consider to be a hammer um and i i think it's important to note that whichever whatever we thought whether we should have a vote tonight or not that um the individuals who showed up to sort of bully and create an unsafe environment in our board meeting really i thought created a a bad environment for us to be making that decision because i think it it then created an assumption of motives sort of contrary to the ones that director hollins and dr green talked about because i do think everybody is is coming to this with an open heart wanting to do what's best for students and i don't i don't believe the individuals who showed up um and um you know created an environment that wasn't safe from a health standpoint for people here at the meeting had had that in their heart um so i want to say that i given that i wouldn't start with the hammer i i really want to applaud the district staff for the work that they've done because from what i know is that people are going to get vaccines when they have access and they have information that they trust about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and i think the district is on its way to [Music] both providing access removing barriers and providing information for families who
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aren't sure as director lowry says that we all bring different experiences about our trust about government and what somebody says this is good for you i remember when my mom told me that it didn't always feel good for me um so i i'm glad i applaud the district's staff and leadership for the work they're doing and i think we need to keep doing it and the question of is this how long is um you know should we wait before we consider it i think is as an open question i think we should see you know we're going to have i think with as we saw with adults you know a rush and everybody wanting to get vaccines for those who want it and they'll be willing to wait long lines travel all over the city go different places to get that appointment and then we're going to have a group that needs um something different and as i was talking to chair to pass the day i referenced there was a really interesting new york times piece on like who was the unvaccinated among the adults in the in the country and yes there was a group that was they're not going to get vaccinated regardless but there were also um a big group of for a whole variety of reasons whether it was like the shifts they worked for work with the location of the vaccine clinics um they'd heard somebody some information that you know created questions for them about getting the vaccine they just needed that last bit of information but it wasn't people who are like i'm never going to get vaccinated but so i i do think we will have this first wave which is great and we'll we'll have provided the access and then the second piece is like not those who are like under under circumstance let me get vaccinated but like tell me tell me more you know address this concern i have um provide something in my at my neighborhood school um or during the hours that i can actually get my kids there or when i have child care so i think we're on the right track and i really want to applaud staff's effort for that because i think that is the way in which all of our community will feel sort of loved and supported and that we all really are thinking about their their health i also support the um [Music] the refined position on the exemptions because um i think we offered that to to staff and we have a history of offering it for other vaccines so i think that's the right consistent uh position to to take um and you know if we do raises this issue comes up again because that's what we need to get the last you know segment over over the finish line um you know i think we're gonna need to really think long and hard about um and hear what the plans are for you know what we do if students are excluded it sounds like from chief garcia maybe maybe that isn't a common occurrence at the end of the day but i think it's a fear that we have that we wouldn't be providing that we may be excluding students who really need to be in school um so that's something i want to hear more about but obviously since we're not voting tonight um it's uh something for a future discussion but i think really i think we're landing in the in the right place and um our families are doing the right thing thank you mr university yeah i have a couple thoughts um one i don't i'm gonna agree with chair to pass i don't like um locking us into six months because we could have another surge um in december january february march we honestly don't know what it will look like six months from now even with the best projections we've seen them be wrong so i don't want us to commit to six months and then we'll consider it i think we need to be more nimble than that also from the data that i've seen from students and talking with students i feel like there's a difference between being safe and students feeling safe going to school so while we all think students are safe going to school right now there are students who don't feel safe going to school school and we need to take that seriously so if we're not going forward with this vaccine mandate then we need to go forward with other mitigation strategies as in test to stay kova 19 screening which i see coming through i got the chance to testify in front of the senate education committee on monday and hear from colt gill about the implementation of those and hopefully those are coming soon but i also expressed at that time that students are super stressed about covid still we are still in a pandemic and for students to feel safe then we need to follow the cove 19 mitigation strategies that we have in place more because i've heard from students over and over again that they don't feel like we are following what we say we are following great thank you that's a really excellent point nice chair scott just
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one second i just want to thank um representative weinberg for the student survey and all the work and it's difficult for me to um ever be in a position that is on the other side of the recommendations of our students it's not really some place i've ever been on any major decision as i've sat at this dais and and um but i also um i really appreciate your willingness to pivot in this moment to talk about what can we do short of a mandate that really helps not just just make students feel safe but helps create more safe environments for our students and also you know appreciate the student activism around encouraging their peers to get vaccinated as well that's huge and i think it's probably more influential than just about anything else so um i agree with you that i think it's time for us to start to be a little bit more assertive about um pushing the conversation on tests to stay you know right now it's my impression that the the powers that be around us are saying that they don't have the capacity to support that well it's kind of a chicken and egg thing and i think it's time for us to say this is the right thing to do for our students um so that we can maximize in-person learning and um you know push push everything else out there to enable that to happen um so i'll do whatever i can to help support that that movement and um jackson i just really appreciate your leadership thanks thanks for that um i will not repeat what my colleagues have said i agree with with almost all of it um for me the the biggest uh most compelling thing was the fact that our public health agencies are not recommending a mandate at this time and it's not that i want to punt it over to them but but from the beginning we've said we're going to follow public health guidelines and i think we have done that throughout the pandemic i look forward to hearing more from oha and multnomah county about whether this is the direction they think we should go and i think we need to be ready if it is to pivot very quickly um towards that but i do think they are the public health agencies and and we should we should we should we should you know um let that process play out um i also think it was a really good process and a really good conversation and i'm not embarrassed at all about the fact that my view has has changed somewhat as we've gone through i actually think that's the way public debate and discussion should should work so um i actually take that as a point of pride um the last um last thing i will say though is and this is just more again keeping our focus on it not not setting arbitrary timelines you know um but i read this you know stat which of course makes sense but i hadn't thought about it since july 150 000 americans have died from covid and 50 000 more will die before the end of the year and it took a second for that to sink in because you know we're seeing these numbers at seven hundred thousand since july one a hundred and fifty thousand people have died in america and by the end of the year fifty thousand more will die so all these emails i get from people saying covet's not a big deal it's not very serious why are you guys worried about it that is just flat out wrong and and whether a mandate for our children is the best way to address that or not i don't know i think that's an open conversation but we need to continue doing every single thing we can to mitigate those deaths and and those deaths i want to be really clear are almost all unvaccinated people not exclusively but almost all unvaccinated people so whatever we can do to increase the vaccination rates in our community um are going to go a long ways towards towards um you know towards towards stopping this pandemic and reducing those deaths and the really good news is that our kids are getting vaccinated which was also a compelling um reason for me with that i'm going to bring this discussion to an end and we ate up all the time we had gained at the beginning but that's okay um it's 805. i want to take a five minute break and come back at 8 10 for the southeast guiding coalition discussion which is a big discussion and i would like to try and target to end this meeting by nine so just keep that in mind as we um pivot into that so five minutes we'll be back at 8 10. let's go ahead and uh reconvene directors hollins in green hopefully you're still there to join us um as we set up for the next item director broome edwards did you have something you wanted to add thank you vice chair scott i just want to note for the record that earlier i asked about a contract and i'd ask some questions and i can only attribute it to the google laundry shoot that i i couldn't find them but i do have the answers and i thank dr proctor for providing those and i'll share them with the rest of the board great thank you um for that um so as we as we set up i'm going to turn it over to superintendent guerrero in a second we're here to talk about the southeast guiding coalition um and uh and again a lot of stuff to talk about tonight i just want to focus the board's attention there are going to be as we go through this presentation they're going to be four questions um that we're going to that staff are going to want us to weigh in on um as we finish this one of those questions around is around dli and whether it's consolidated or not another question is around creative sciences being a k through five or k through eight a third question is whether we um delay implementation of
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southeast guiding coalition issues um until fall of 2023 and the final one is whether we put a pause so just as we're listening um to the superintendent and staff just be keeping in mind i will be coming back to you at the end of this process to ask your view quickly on those four items uh as we go through it i'm gonna just interrupt and take a moment to look at our four amazing staff that are here to present and we have four amazing female leaders that our district is so fortunate to have and it's just really exciting to walk in the room and see the four of you before us ready to um just you guys are incredible and i am a big fan of all four of you and i'm so excited and especially three black women who are just killing it uh i'm really excited for this conversation thank you director lowry that is very worth noting so i appreciate that you can see them every thursday if night join the southeast guanine coalition uh it's superintendent guerrero i will turn it over well with that i kind of feel like maybe i shouldn't say a whole lot uh because i agree they're uh very talented leaders that you have before you so we have another critically important topic tonight to discuss i really appreciate director's previous discussion i also want to thank student weinberg and our student leaders for their work thank you for continuing to model and demonstrate the graduate portrait in action i just want to make a note of that but now we're on to this topic and just not to provide too much of a recap but you know in june 2019 this board adopted i think an ambitious vision it continues to set a direction be our north star for the work we're going to continue to focus on for elevating opportunities improving outcomes for our students but we also know that there's these systemic issues that include how we maximize our school building portfolio uh facilities utilization uh programming placement et cetera and so to address some of these issues we did launch into this enrollment and program balancing process as you know phase one of southeast enrollment and program balancing began in fall 2020 that resulted in the conversion of five k to eights new new boundary and program assignments including for our newly opened kellogg middle school which opened this fall which we're excited about and then in may the board gave clear direction adopted a phase two charge that centers on converting harrison park from a k-8 to middle to a middle school and thinking about how we encourage and increase enrollment at lane middle school so uh for those that haven't been paying attention uh that's the two minute recap but i know everybody is and so i also i'm going to turn it over to our deputy superintendent claire hertz and staff who will introduce themselves as well as we hear more about the current conversations and proposals that are emerging from southeast guiding coalition thank you good evening board of directors with me tonight i have dr esther omar bain our regional superintendent and our director of community engagement shanice clark and dr shel proctor our chief academic officer and at this point i will turn it over to dr o to talk about the goals of the process and i'm hoping that the presentation is showing somewhere great if we can go to the next slide please good evening board of directors yes new york good evening board of directors um chair de pass and secretary guerrero and um this evening i'll be speaking with um to you about southeast guiding coalition the overarching goals that brought us to where we currently are and one of the things that we looked at in the second phase that was given to us by um that was a board charge to us was that we needed to just like the superintendent said um turn harrison park middle turn harrison parkade into a middle school which means we have to find a home for the k5 students and also increase the enrollment at lean middle school so we do have to find a way to move some students into lay middle school we also looked at that in the context of redesigning the middle school experience for our students it is essential because the students move through the adolescent years that we provide opportunities for them to actually create their own identity around what they like what they don't like the experiences they have have a lot to do with that because what we end up having to do is giving them exposure well in order to be able to give them exposure around middle school experiences we do need certain minimum numbers at schools to be able to provide the electives and the experiences they need with that the academic office came up with about 500 students minimum for the middle school and 270 students for the elementary school believe it or not the elementary schools can also get too small that their programs are ineffective so those were the baseline numbers that we came up with in trying to then
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go about doing the conversions we realized that we are going to be impacting programs as well so some of our programs are co-located as you know and some of them are single strand dli whole school dli programs so we looked at that and we started shifting numbers around which led to the proposal next slide please which led to the proposals that we created um proposal a and proposal b online they you can see them at the proposal website for enrollment balancing on pps.net if um cara can click on that to maybe you can see some of that as well but in scenario a what would happen is that harrison park will become a regional hub for spanish and chinese cli programs and will boost neighborhood enrollment through attendance area expansion lien also will boost enrollment through attendance expansion the elementary school bridger and lent become regular hubs for chinese and spanish dli respectively clark becomes the neighborhood k5 school for harrison park students attendance area as adjusted to accommodate the dispersal of bridger and lent and boost their enrollment for schools no longer co-located with dli programs the k-8 school for creative science is moved to woodstock and enrollment through the neighborhood the enrollment increased through the neighborhood in scenario b harrison park joins kellogg in hosting spanish dli dli lane becomes the regional hub for the chinese cli both harrison park and lane expand extendance areas to further boost enrollment the elementary schools bridger and woodstock become regional hubs for spanish and chinese cli respectively lent becomes a whole school spanish gli neighborhood program clark becomes the neighborhood k-5 school for harrison park attendance areas are adjusted to accommodate the dispersal of bridger and would stock neighborhood programs and boost enrollment for schools no longer co-located with dli k-8 school creative science is moved to our leader and enrolls through the neighborhood program slide next slide please what surfaced for us as we took a look at southeast in general is that the k-8 enrollment is shrinking the smaller the ke program is the more difficult it is to provide the robust experiences for our middle schoolers especially and that is essential to establish a strong foundation for them going into middle school and forecasting and planning for their own future um so in order to do that we again um came back to the numbers to say what can we consolidate what can we move um as we thought about these experiences we started looking at the programs real closely at some of the schools there's such an imbalance between the neighborhood program and the dli program the numbers aren't equal the as a result of that there's a lot of climate issues and concerns amongst even staff so we started looking at how we needed to make the shifts furthermore we realized that our decisions right now will impact high school overcrowding issues so how do we take that into consideration as we have these conversations next slide please what we model then was based on all the information that we gathered we created two draft proposals with the help of flow analytics they adjust that proposals we presented the proposals shared it with some southeast id south east guided coalition members and members of the community in various forms um they looked at it we talked about the pros and cons we had a saturday session in which people were allowed to just spend that whole time about three hours just analyzing the two proposals from that emerged a lot of questions and that generated a desire to create a third proposal which we're going to get grassroots information from community members and design that that is in the works right now that said next slide please i'll be finished you know this one okay all right so are we holding all questions to the end um it depends a little on the nature of the question it's a quick question a clarifying question about uh the work that's being done to create a scenario c what problem specifically are you trying to solve that's not adequately addressed in scenarios a and b well we'll share that in a few minutes so one of the things we heard in phase one from the harrison park community especially is that they do prioritize workability to school so if we're going to split them up they do want the k5 section of their program to be within close proximity with the 6-8
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part of their program so the students can continue to support one another the other thing that we saw too in looking at the programs is that there we had two dli programs in a building sometimes one was favored over the other and so you had a greater enrollment of course you have have greater enrollment they can provide a little bit more and then the group that does not have enough enrollment doesn't get as much support and in some cases they actually have a revolving door of teachers because you can't get the staff in to support them um so we looked at that also and then we thought about the models that would take future enrollment into consideration well right now the enrollment is on the decline we don't know how long that's going to last hopefully it'll pick back up very soon so that's where we are so for modeling our neighborhood schools we utilize the um factors that are included in board policy and that's um the most of those are included here on slide six and um on this slide we're going to turn it to our director of community engagement good evening chair de pass superintendent directors and student representative weinberg my name is shanice clark and i'm just going to talk a little bit about what we heard we really before these proposals were even developed wanted to start this work with the listening and learning process to really uh with folks who are interested uh understand their priorities and insight and so there are major themes that that came up especially as we worked with communities of color uh in this process that the quality of school and that proximity to to school to someone's home were were not necessarily things that folks wanted to negotiate or have to make a sacrifice between and so that became uh very clear as we connected with our black indigenous and people of color uh in addition to what it looks like to to think about transportation options and access to educators and school programs that are meaningful to them a diversity in schools also came up as a high priority and that is something especially for our bipoc families that feeling safe when there are other folks students families and people in their community who reflect them and look like them that that and also share their language and culture that that is something that came up as a priority and the listening and learning phase and our harrison park k5 community and the event that they are moved really want to move together and so making sure their racial ethnic and cultural diversity is maintained with that shift with the k5 community came up very strongly and that concern that pps will listen to the loudest voices in the process has also been coming up and we want to make sure that folks have an equal access and opportunity to share their perspectives and and feel like they have the space and and safety to do that but we understand that there are uh in december too there will be another effort to reach a robust kind of area of students families and communities especially in the impacted schools in the southeast and we definitely want to have exclusive spaces especially multilingual spaces for and for students that will be coming up in in the future and we can move to the next slide please that would be me director constand this is going to answer your question that you asked a minute ago so the initial staff guard rails for the coalition are in black text on this slide and uh in green text you can see based on feedback from the south east guiding coalition we updated and this specifically we brought in the range of solutions for dli programs including co-locating with neighborhood programs we have instructed flow analytics to develop a third draft proposal that has co-located dli programs and addresses as many of the single-strand issues as possible okay so the third third proposal will move away from the whole school dli model to a co-located dli model
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at this point i will turn it over to dr cheryl proctor so part of um again the questions that were raised is why whole school uh dli as you know or will note that in proposal a and proposal b it includes notations for whole school and the goal of quality dli program is academic achievement and high proficiency in both partner language and societal language which is english in this case the goals are academic achievement bilingualism and by literacy and cultural competency in other cultures other than a student's particular own so in terms of a whole school dli program it allows for a cohesive shared vision and setting of goals that will focus on specific high quality rigorous instruction supporting those those goals that were identified prior in a co-located model there is opportunities to for teachers to develop professionally together and to have a shared collaboration around instruction instructional practice is sometimes limited especially for single-strand schools a co-located model will also you know align and leverage resources better to support students and educators regarding linguistically supportive assessments and evaluation systems the ability to hire and retain bilingual staff and a firm cultural identity for students so that's that's really the core to the response for why a whole school dli and it is to strengthen dli programs here at pps where data suggests there is a need to absolutely strengthen the programs and the outcomes for students within those programs there are also questions about the creative science focus option school and keeping one of our most diverse schools in the southeast at the center of our work we recognize that harrison park k5 students need to walk to a neighborhood school and will be placed in the clark building and that means that creative science k-8 will need to move current proposals include woodstock orlita as locations for creative science and the third proposal could include another elementary school neighborhood schools attending woodstock or leda would be blended into the constructivist approach and community of creative science the number of lottery students will be reduced each year moving creative science to mostly a neighborhood program has been accomplished at sunnyside environmental school the educational options policy says to offer families choices based on student learning needs and educational interests our focus options schools in southeast have a higher percentage of special education families who've selected these k schools for their students some students thrive in a smaller program than a co rather than a comprehensive school this is similar to our multiple pathways to graduation programs for our high school students and any student in a focus options school may opt out and return to their neighborhood school their neighborhood students the neighborhood students attending creative science may move to a comprehensive middle school for grades six or eight um and there are multiple ways how the changes could occur the you as the board will ultimately decide the transition plan and based on policy program changes are usually implemented all at once or at the start of the school year or at the start of the school year and neighborhood programs may have boundary changes and feeder pattern changes for future students only and the board has options to waive rights to transfer based on sibling preference and other hardships to accelerate changes so we will bring uh recommendations to you but it is ultimately that this will be your decision and as we finalize the plan um on this slide this is how we're evaluating for racial equity impact on our proposals you can see that there are three columns um the first actually the second column shows all student data the third column is black and native students and then our english language
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learners on the students all the way to the right and what we do is in the darker colors that's what the proposal brings in terms of our metrics and then the lighter colors are what our current baseline is so for instance when we have a middle school over 500 student enrollment it is beneficial to having a thriving program at a comprehensive middle school and currently we have a baseline of 87.6 percent of our all students are in schools over 500 but when you go to our black and native they have only 75 percent of students and our ell as well are only 75 with this proposal a we would get all three groups to 100 which is optimum so as you go through each one of these characteristics you can we are evaluating how each proposal is measuring up for using a racial equity lens so we have a slide for proposal a and then a slide for proposal b and we will do the same for evaluation for proposal c once it's completed deputy hertz can you speak to one of those characteristics regarding utilization so buildings that would be at greater than 80 percent utilization so at when a school is 100 percent utilized we when we listen to principals and faculty and students it feels very crowded and so at 80 percent um there's more room to breathe and how you know there's just more ability to have a more a thriving program so we really look at trying to keep that lower it also gives you a buffer then as enrollment co you know comes and goes over the years so we're an optimum number is 80 but um and being below you know 60 to 100 is okay but 80 would be optimal so the current number of all students is at 58 percent uh attend a building that's greater than eighty percent uh proposal a would bring that number down to thirty percent right correct and in fact students would have more space in a comprehensive middle school that's correct okay and as i remember that was one of the factors when we talked about kellogg last year and and having creston go to kellogg last year rather than waiting till this year was that we were going to be above that 80 percent utilization then at kellogg but i think it's also something that is different than we anticipated when we embarked on this exercise because our enrollment has declined so precipitously so when we talked about having to reconfigure to middle schools we imagined that our middle schools would be more fully enrolled so and i do think you know created a new problem as we think about our you know increased declining birth rate in oregon like we do continue to have immigration people moving in but those folks tend to be not be families with young children and so you know we do we are seeing a decline and we don't know how that's going to go where our birth rate's been in decline for over six years now so it makes sense that we're seeing declines at middle at elementary school so at this point i would like to open it up for board discussion and i'm going to turn it over to vice chair andrew scott to lead the board through the four questions great thank you and as i mentioned at the beginning um there are four um i have a quick question about it sure we're gonna come process before we get to those fours okay go ahead uh whitman i know that some lewis students would move to whitman and i know whitman students now go to lane but then the whitman students go to cleveland for high school they're kind of like pulled out of lane in a different way which was done to increase diversity at cleveland is that still the plan at this point for those i can't answer that on my spot okay you've used your one question which i was going to give every board member a clarifying opportunity so again just uh so so here's where we are um as board members we're going to answer these four questions um and again it's it's it's what is the board support in terms of dli um you know should creative sciences remain k through 8 or k through 5. um should we complete the process in february of 2022 but implement a year later in fall of 2023 and then should we consider pausing the scgc process before we get to that i did just want to sort of um uh just allow more of a popcorn in terms of are there any clarifying questions of staff again similar to director lowry's question anything along those lines that you need additional information or clarification from staff on um and then but not everyone feels don't feel compelled to ask if you don't have a question along those lines and then we're going to come back and everyone we are going to need to hear from board members about each of these four
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um and again trying to keep this focused on on sort of the decisions that staff really needs from us um or not decisions i should say guidance that staff needs from us today do we get points if we ask a question that staff can actually answer very clear uh director lowry i believe you've used up your questions no more questions i i have two related clarifying questions and they both um pertain to uh you know creation of a new scenario that addresses our dli schools and dr proctor i really appreciated your context and how you framed it because not only are there climate concerns and budget concerns around administering different programs under one roof but the chief concern is we have not been serving our english language learners especially well in this district and so we need to do things differently and that's where our focus needs to be so there are a lot of reasons why people want to hang on to the way we've always done things and the way things have always been configured but i just want to be really blunt and say it's not working especially well so that's why i appreciated hearing from you as the the academic leader of our district on that but my two questions are one deputy superintendent hurts you said scenario a potential third scenario quote addresses single strand dli as much as possible so that doesn't sound like to me that we still have a commitment or a bias toward eliminating single strand programs so we are really focused on especially the neighborhood single strands when you have dli programs that are filling the school in a single strand neighborhood that seems to be the most inequitable um set of circumstances so that's one that we're really avoiding there are certain times for instance i'll give two examples for dli for single strand one is russian at kelly there aren't enough students to fill two strands in our whole district for russian dli so that that has a different question but it's not one that we can address in a boundary process because there are no other native russian speaking students requesting the program the second example i would give is harrison park has a mandarin program that's just emerging and so it needs time to develop and right now it's a single strand and it's where our native speakers live and so that's another one that we are looking to you know we're looking at what possibilities there are to keep it there as well as um [Music] grow it into a give it time to grow into a second strand i'm i'm good i don't have any other questions thank you um it's either on or off apparently um on page two we had the board's charge for the southeast guy and coalition phase two which convert harrison park to middle school locate harrison park k5 and add students to lane middle school and i don't want it all um to set aside the comments about the benefits of addressing the language the dual language immersion programs but i when i look at the charge kind of thinking like this was about getting equitable middle grades and then when i'm hearing people like there's all this like you need to pause everything and i'm like oh we can't pause like the move towards equitable middle schools because we've really been working towards move to that so i'm just curious about the confluence of is this just happened to do it or is it can it be done in the sequenced way or is it the like you have to do it or you can't accomplish the converting harrison park to a middle school relocating paris or really harrison park 2k5 and add students to lane is do you have to do you have to do all the language immersion things in order to get the three things that i think was in the board charge so in order to fill lane middle school we have to move students from other middle schools so that involves schools that have dli programs so yes they are all connected to lane but not all the other ones and i'm not i'm against it i'm just trying to understand the same is true activity the same is true we talked about harrison park k5 being at the center of our proposal and that means then that the creative science focus option school needs to be moved and then it needs to be placed in a new and new school so harrison park k5 needs students and links
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it's a move to help fill up the buildings in addition to the other benefits okay just thank you yeah and this the question i have isn't going to be able to be answered but just kind of like a request for like more information on the benefits of the co-located programs um i'd love to see some data on how this would help i guess i guess i'm a little biased since i've been in a dli program for 13 years i also helped my dli program still i'm on the board of directors for the nonprofit that supports that so i've just seen the benefits of having a co-located program at woodstock so i just kind of want more information on how it's not working or is working at other schools and so and actually if i could just because that was very similar to a question i had and i just really um you laid this out really well in the presentation tonight about about some of those benefits and and i could imagine if i were you know a parent or a student i might say when you when you point to these benefits about professional development of teachers and affirmation of cultural identity the question i might ask is why can't that happen in a co-located problem program um and so i think that would be interesting to hear the staff yeah i think i think it's important to note um that in some of our most successful dli schools and programs just nationally they all exist within a whole school setting within the co-located model what i have found is that there are some inequities that emerge as a result of the co-location both there are some missed opportunities right for the dli program to be fully what it can be and also missed opportunities for the english scholars and what they experience in school and that really impacts according to the data our black our native and our el student population and and you know there is data available but when we look at side by side and look at how students are performing across the 24 schools within our district that have dli programs our white students perform well but what the data points out shockingly knowing the benefits of dli if it's constructed in a way that we can really maximize both the program of dli itself and maximize what we do for our students who happen to just not be in a dli program there's some targeted and really intentional academic programming that we could provide for them that in a co-located model doesn't always happen and you want to be you want to have students in an environment where teachers are able to thrive and collaborate and build um you know lessons and learning that support their students and if you have for example a single strand called a single strand program where there's only one dli teacher per grade level those opportunities don't exist so it really is just based on yes starting with the board's charge for restructuring uh and and balancing the enrollment of these schools but looking at data and and using the data to create an opportunity to build stronger equity and stronger academic programs for all students who are in both dli and students who are not in dli programs also just one last thing just to clarify for like everyone watching and in this meeting that dli is not equivalent to ell and we shouldn't be like interchanging those absolutely and that's such a strong point uh that you make that i think we can definitely do some work around with what we're looking at i really appreciate that response i'm curious in our outreach did any of those arguments resonate with the communities we were talking to because because you know again i understand that the the sense of disruption can be very you know dramatic right um of that but i'm just i'm i'm curious when we sort of lay that out did that did that resonate with our families at all in terms of of even though they might be a little disrupted there's this long-range vision that that is you know could be could be even more successful than what they're currently experiencing
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some of that actually came up in our community conversations especially with our principals because what we realized also is that the people who are most impacted community members who are most impacted are usually the least wants to come to our meetings and to access our information so what we did was we asked our principals to create more um smaller forums and opportunities during principal chats coffee chats community meetings where these individuals can actually voice their own opinion so some of those concerns came up especially around el because with the el students what we realize is they are in the dli program but they're not receiving the academic instruction they need to excel and to acquire language so the dual language approach the intention there is for students like dr proxy said to be bioliterate and bilingual and to also experience cultures but with the el it is more about content access to content work so when you immerse them in a dli program the tendency for them is to get lost in the shuffle um and and it is important to note that that comes up especially with our parents who um come to their schools to have conversations about their staff and they communicate that to us great thank you okay so i don't see any other clarifying questions so i think we're going to jump into the four um so which are still up on the board thank you cara for working that magic on our tv screens um and i'm open for volunteers if anybody wants to go first or i'll just start calling on board members i just what i just heard dr proctor was really compelling for me in terms of what the data says about who's getting served and i also i don't know if anybody else here's gone to school in two different countries actually three if you count the us and um i think i know the difference between being in a school in a second language and getting the academic support i've experienced that versus kind of being warehoused in a school where there's not enough services to provide the academic support as well as you know kids learn language it's not the language that's an issue if you're coming and you don't speak english it's really the other the content and so i would be in favor of the scenarios that that that that focus equity um particularly harrison park where i was a volunteer off and on for years outdoor recreation programs and i know they there's so many languages spoken in that building and i know change is hard for people but i know you can survive going to different schools and again really really in favor of the option that serves our black and brown kids that's that's what i hear over and over again and i think this is just one of those difficult decisions about uh actually implementing that and doing that right thanks jared to pass do you have thoughts on the other three questions as well since you volunteered for number one which i really appreciate um all four yes can i go popcorn style well we were hoping just the board members could go through there they're there for i think in the interest of time that'll be the case my my question on number two you can pass if you want let's have some come back i'll volunteer to go so we can kick this off um well i just i mean i think they need guidance from us and everyone's been here a long time so um i i i actually also find it compelling i think the hardest thing about this first question on dli really is that we have um i mean the families really are feeling that disruption right and we're we're hearing that and and i feel it in i mean it's it's it's you know it's it's real it's you know um and they're concerned about what it means i also really respect um all of you and and what you bring to the table and i don't have the policy background in this or the research and so um i am very much willing to defer um to the experts you know in the room who say look when we look at this nationally this is this is what we achieve in you know in terms of really strong dli programs and so um you know i think to the extent we have the evidence and data to support that um to me i'm supportive as well i do want to i do hope and this is the optimistic side i mean we can continue to engage the community around what those positive aspects could be so even though they might feel a loss they also can see a sense of potential gain now in the future i think would be would be helpful um creative science um i i think the the reason why i would say k through rate is i know there is as you talked a high percentage of special ed kids um in you know in that program and i think there's some value there of of keeping that k through eight um and the implementing of fall 2023 um i i do worry about losing some of the benefits but i also really worry about not being able to staff up for it and so i think that may even though that is a policy question you're asking us it almost makes me wonder even if we could achieve it if you know if we tried to do it sooner given some of the staffing you know challenges and i think with all of that i would i if we're doing that implementation of all 2023 i think we can continue the scgc process as it currently stands
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you're up okay um question number one i um you know we asked our educational experts about dli and i think you know as we look at language acquisition and how we best support um learners i i do hear that it's traumatic for communities to think about this change and i really think if we want to achieve that mission statement of a joyful robust academic experience that um reducing the number of single strand dli's we have is vitally important so i i would really i heard what you said about both kelly and um the chinese is that harrison mandarin amanda in harrison park you know maintaining those for now but really moving away from single strand dli i do think we need to have a long-term conversation about kelly and especially as we've seen the population of folks there move out of the district and as we look at how do we partner to serve those families best with our other mesd partners i think that i'm okay with creative science either way i think that there is a need for a small middle school experience for many of our students and creative science as well as sunnyside can offer that um so i'd be okay with with either there i do i we heard so much from our teacher listening sessions about staff burnout i know that we have issues of like we said hiring and can we step up to this and as teachers think about anxiety of change on top of everything else um so i i would be in favor of implementing in fall 2023 i do it breaks my heart to think about our students who you know we saw those graphs of what the impact would be so i believe it's more student-centered to move ahead and implement in fall 2022 but i also realized like if we don't have teachers and people are exhausted and burned out then we can't serve students so i would be in support of that waiting um and i am not in favor of pausing the process because i think you know we're already in this and we're moving forward and i do think it will help with some of that anxiety for people to know what the plan is because i think part of what we're hearing from folks is that stress of uncertainty thank you director edward thank you so on the first question um i have um i i think i want to elevate sort of two principles and i'm not sure i'll answer at all because i think it's a little bit different at each of the schools but you know really elevate um what the native speakers in the program need that's one thing and and this may seem contradictory but also what um is happening in those buildings in which we have single strand neighborhood programs because what i have seen over and over again over the last 20 years in southeast portland is a co-located program come in come in sometimes it's a language program sometimes it's something else and eventually you get down to one strand to the neighborhood program and then it's like then we close brooklyn which is now window haven or we close um sunnyside element the neighborhood program and it becomes an environmental school so i also am concerned about the neighborhood single strand so keeping that piece so i'm for a solution which elevates native speakers and and what they they need and what you all say is best best for them and those programs and then also paying attention to you know one week if there is a so-called location what about those neighborhood single strands um creative science uh k-8 um so for the record when it became a program it was a k-5 and it was at bridger and um so i i think i have an open mind i'm concerned about if it is co-located or if it's the sunny side model i think works the question i would have is the sunnyside program is more about a curriculum versus a pedagogy i'm out of my lane here but um and so the question is with creative science school is that i think kids can adopt to any curriculum but is it is creative science the right pedagogy for all neighborhood kids um so i want to know the answer to that and also my first interaction with the program at bridger was there was significant issues with the pat contract because that's not a distinguishing um reason so like because the staff say if it was at our leader the staff at our leader whoever has seniority
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has seniority versus um a creative science school teacher so there's like pat issues that i think we would we would need to address yes we need to follow the pha contract and our hr leadership is prepared to do that work with our people my first issue in 2001 was a teacher who was the lowest on the seniority role but was a creative science program teacher and she just want to keep us focused on the questions i just what i'm just curious about how we'd even implement it so the the five versus eight i mean i think there's other issues besides whether it's five versus eight um but i i don't philosophically have an issue with they don't need to all be in the same building i think we have other you can have a smaller program at another middle school so um i'm not sure i'm not sure that's a question that drives the solution uh the third one i would want to see the timeline it seems like last spring we clearly told people we were going to implement next year um so i would want to know why we were changing that because that seems like just just last year we were in a pandemic and everything else so i i'm not sure i understand that and i feel a lot of um there are some communities like hey we didn't get into kellogg but we know you're going to deal with us and help us next year so i want to hold on to that and so of course my answer on number four would be no okay thank you director constant got sure and actually before you go kara it look it seems like uh herman got kicked out are we working on reconnecting and anyway he's trying to get back in i'm not sure exactly where he is but hopefully we can find him so i think generally speaking i i support a whole school dli model and i think it can be successful i'm also flexible where we have two strands of each and it's balanced i am flexible to that kind of co-location i really am gonna push us all to work very hard to eliminate any single strands on any side because we know it's inequitable and it just doesn't work very well i appreciate director lowry bringing up the point about kelly which i think is an anomaly in our district so i don't want us to just look at it in terms of uh being a single strand for a language it is also an anomaly and then it has a high percentage of students from outside of our district so we need to really look at our financial burdens there our operational expenses there and um have a broader view about what what are the right decisions um there because it's it it doesn't it doesn't fit um with the rest of these um and dr johnston i just want to highlight that you and i have talked about kelly a little bit recently and for both of us it's like what is best for those families right if they're having to commute in is it really the best thing for them to have to come into like how do we best serve those students and as kelly that answer so that's a whole separate but i want us to be clear it's not just about money or operations it's really about how does our community as a whole best serve those children absolutely appreciate your saying that and to me our community as a whole there means a conversation with you know three or four neighboring districts to look at the you know russian speaking families in our community writ large and how how do we all serve them um creative science uh you know we've really heard from a lot of families about why they have sought that option for their children and particularly why they don't feel that their children would be best served exclusively in a large middle school and i think a lot of that really makes sense and if we're trying to meet our students where we are i think it's nice to have have that option so i could support that and again it's been said uh i think we should i don't think we should pause the process i do think we should move forward but i think at this point implementation next year is not very realistic for us uh based on our staffing constraints and all of our other constraints so just trying to be pragmatic there and um what was my other thing i was going to mention um oh you know we didn't we haven't really talked about it in depth but but to me when we talk about co-location of dli programs it's a really different discussion for elementary programs
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versus middle school programs because you know in middle school the language is an elective for those students and so it really decreases a lot of the other factors in terms of why students need to be in a larger comprehensive middle school and if they're taking their language and they have one other elective there's no reason they can't be well served in a k-8 and so we need to be open about having some flexibility there and considering our middle grade students in dli programs a little differently than our elementary school programs and i just haven't heard a lot of discussion about that in this process i think the challenge with middle school is having two programs at one school because one happens to thrive and then the other one does not do it as well so that's the challenge with the middle school yeah and and just you know to me one of the most compelling examples of the challenges of co-location is the stories that we hear from from beach now i mean were it not for the for the students coming in from outside the neighborhood catchment for the dla dli program beach would still be a title one school with a lot of additional supports in their building that they don't have now because in aggregate they have all these students coming in that are whiter and more affluent and changing the composition of the school and it it it changes how we operate it and what resources are available so that's a really stark example that um is meaningful to me great thanks jackson yeah i agree single strand historically and currently is not serving students best i do think there are some benefits that weren't outlined around co-location where it is an even strand on neighborhood and dli sides i'd also just like to know more about um kind of like why we think this is best practice again just i'll probably talk to dr proctor about it more offline i guess my main concern with consolidation is kind of like the impact for the rest of the district so we have co-located programs in northeast in north portland as well i'm thinking especially for mandarin chinese mlk junior we would leave that strand open there's no possibility to consolidate that because there is no other mandarin chinese in northeast so we'd be making that decision i guess to leave that as a co-located program um so just kind of thinking about larger district-wide implications of consolidation in southeast and how we could or could not keep doing that in northeast and north portland um as for creative sciences k8 versus k5 i honestly don't really have much of an opinion um i'd kind of defer back to your expertise on that one um and for implementation for fall of 2023 if we are pushing it back then i'd like to see not a pause on the southeast guiding coalition process but scheduling more meetings because i think we're hearing from south east getting collision that they feel like they need more time to discuss it great um may i just weigh in finally on questions three and four i i don't think we should pause the uh southeast guiding coalition i i thought about this long and hard um from just a staff capacity and i think it should go ahead i think we need to if we made a promise we need to keep it um i'm also wondering on question three about implementation in the fall of 23. i guess yes i think if we need more time for staffing processes to do it well then that would be a yes i'm i'm really concerned about fortitude and that's a crazy word to throw out because we're tired and everybody's stressed out but at some point i wonder when we um when we build ourselves up when we how do we develop resilience and fortitude and it's just a question i have lingering about this covet and how we're responding and how i'm responding at some point we need to model fortitude for our students as well in fact going to another school um is a change is difficult and and it's also survivable great thank you director hollins oh man it's a lot a lot to digest um in the process um no i don't have a whole lot of positions on some of these on for a lot of these i'm gonna just defer to the instructional experts on these um [Music] you know as i think they are more adept to deal with these questions than i am i do have a question about the pausing of the process
03h 00m 00s
um you know i realized that this was a a board lead initiative and i'm just curious on how this goes with the board goals and how it lines up with the more goals anybody on the board can answer one thing i would say is that with the opening of kellogg that i think addressed a huge equity issue in the middle grades in outer uh southeast and if you look just historically the last 15 years most of the under-enrolled k-8s were mostly in um on the on the east side and either outer outer southeast or inner northeast and the desire to get more equitable programming is was one of the driving factors between behind phase one and which was completed thanks to staff and done well and phase two was to finish that process so to me it's very much aligned with our middle grades goal and also our focus on equity lowest income zip codes in outer southeast were in some of the lowest enrolled k-8s with the least equitable offerings director hans did you have any any other input on the questions no i'm just trying to look you know from what director uh remember was saying and trying to connect that with the board goals that i'm reading here um as far as the achievement piece for african americans and native american students and i'm still not necessarily seeing that connection and maybe this was because it was a decision that happened you know before i got here or something i just i'm just just worried about that you know we're derailing on our yeah this our our mission um of educating our kids i know this could be a long-term solution um but i just i just wonder if now is the right time to do that just there's a thought thank you great thanks i guess i also would just point out that you know part of this is unfinished business from constituting kellogg and so uh it's i i i don't think a pause is responsible because we had great impacts on lane for example with with uh the configuring of kellogg so there are a lot of inequities that need to be addressed that because we kind of kicked the hornet's nest when we built a beautiful new school okay jackson did you have a question yeah am i just well my quick question was just like in the future with these discussions i want to see more how we're engaging students because really students are the ones that will be living out all of these decisions and parents really won't but all of the engagement that i've seen so far really has focused on parents so just in the future i'd love to see more on that great uh director green did you get the questions i know you're having a hard time seeing them as you're connecting oh can y'all hear me right now we can hear you yep i haven't been muted this whole time i'm glad i was being quiet that is outstanding so i'm i guess i'm a little out of the out of the equation i did meet with um with claire um and we were able to go over um some of this but this is a lot for me this is a lot to take in um i'm not saying to me if a community is or if the people are asking for a pause in in light of everything that's happened i don't see a a reason why we shouldn't be able to pause um but then again like i said i don't know a whole lot um about this and maybe it's because i haven't read um all the documentation um but you know i i just it's hard for me to make a position statement and so i'm glad that we're not voting on anything right now because i would definitely have to i would definitely have to pass or abstain if we were but i do value um i do value the opinion of dr o
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and dr proctor and shanice and and all the and clearing all the work that they're doing but i also want to make sure um that we're we're listening to the community and not just the community that wants it but the community that's going to be impacted by it so that we're we're here in both sides um if this is about if this is truly about equity i want to make sure that as we're looking at this um and we're talking about whether we kick it down the can whether we pause it whether we do it that we that i'm doing that through and through the lens of equity and i want to make sure that i understand what it is that i'm looking at i don't want to see men as trees i want to see men clearly and so um at this point um for me i just have to before i can make a decision before i jump on this before i uh vote uh one way or another i would definitely have to schedule another meeting with claire doctor dr proctor and she needs to really get a clear understanding what it is um that it that we're talking about so great so director and i just want to assure you that we are doing everything that we can within our power to reach out to the communities that are most impacted one of the things that we put in place is opportunities for them to actually attend meetings at their own school there are people who will not come to the district office or will not necessarily speak with us but they will speak with their principals because their children go there and that's a trusted environment for them and our principals are doing a lot to reach out to them they're also reaching out to us for support when they need support in those meetings so we are out there great thank you board i think that was a good conversation i hope staff got enough information for this matter tonight thank you great can i ask a question sorry just it's something i don't understand and maybe i might have a different answer but and i can give an answer but when it says that more time for the staffing processes is that because i guess i don't understand so right now you have staff in the schools and there'd be a lot of moving around but is what is the staffing issue sorry i should ask at the very beginning but when i was listening to my response it was like maybe i don't understand what the staffing issue is because it's like we have staff there are very distinct processes that have to be followed in in the contract for teachers is this like the pat issue i raised yeah yeah okay i got it thank you good thank you very much yes there's a particular process we have to observe that takes time um if you note sort of the timeline here that we're contemplating the time we'll meet on top of that for this process before we can do all of our other typical staffing processes which can't start so there's just a big risk here and sort of in an already sort of staffing shortage that we're facing the ability to staff up the entire district in time so it's a whole other topic but it really is a big we should we need to underline the importance uh of sort of that that issue and what's weighing on me right now is something director holland said around you know how is doing this work getting us to our student achievement outcome goals and you know this is a decades-long issue uh when we don't have um a healthy balance of enrollment across the school portfolio it creates inequitable opportunities i mean it'd be more amplified if we funded all of them exactly the same we don't we can correct for some of that but we know that it creates opportunities for students and the offerings that are available to them i think moving students you know more of our students into comprehensive middle schools opens up opportunities for more of our students particularly in areas of town that haven't had access to it but for me that's just the first part that's just a first step what matters is what happens in those buildings and so that's why you know i'm more excited about our middle school redesign and innovation work because we're not just trying to move them there to do the same stodgy six seven period day and so that middle grades is an excellent opportunity to really rethink how we we're just having this conversation upstairs earlier today to really focus on youth development on a strong sense of social emotional learning we see what's happening in our middle schools right now how do we get kids to really understand ourselves and grow a sense of self-agency and identity how do we get them to go into high school ready with having explored a variety of pathways and opportunities so that they go into high school sort of more prepared with a plan about what they want to pursue when they get there so there's so much work to do there we talked about an 8th grade capstone that would encapsulate their growth and their time in the middle grades that's the work that we're looking forward to doing that's the
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outcome that i know this board has talked about uh on many evenings so i think ultimately that's the work we're trying to get to this is this is a matter of sort of moving students around to try to create some more equitable enrollment balancing and that's the objective here but the ultimate one is better outcomes and experiences for our students great i think that's an excellent way to end this conversation thank you very much to staff thank you superintendent for the conversation tonight we're gonna move on to our last uh substantive item this is the oregon school board association board of directors and legislative policy committee representatives so the board will now provide a provide a voice vote on osb officers and an osba resolution board members there's an official osb ballot in your packet and we will vote on each position and resolution in order as presented on that ballot um with that uh elizabeth durant from park rose is running unopposed for position 17 on osb's legislative policy committee so i'm going to move straight to a vote i don't think we need a motion on this right we can just move straight to a vote um all in favor of elizabeth durant uh please indicate by saying yes yes uh all opposed please indicate by saying no and any all abstentions looks like that's 7-0 um chris hoet um is running on a post for position 18 on the osba board of directors all in favor of chris hoet please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no any abstentions all right and jessica i'm going to abstain okay one abstention and then um jessica are zait from multnomah education service district is running unopposed for position 18 on osb's legislative policy committee thank you all in favor of jessica arzate please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no and any abstentions great and this year there were no candidates seeking position 19 on the osb legislative policy committee it's too bad uh results of tonight's vote will be submitted to osb after this meeting um other business or committee referrals uh is there any other business this time before we adjourn scene none the next regular meeting of the board will be held on december 14th this meeting is adjourned holland and green can we just go back and um if you could indicate your votes for elizabeth durant chris hoet and jessica arzate yes yes yes yes yes yes all good yeah all right thank you very much uh and with that do i finally get a gavelus all right


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