2022-01-11 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2022-01-11
Time	18:00:00
Venue	BESC/Hybrid
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: 1/11/22 Board of Education Regular Meeting

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the board meeting of the board of education for january 11 2022 is called to order for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted on the pps website under the board and meetings tabs this meeting is being streamed live on pps tv services website and on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website for replay times good evening everyone and welcome to everyone here on january 3rd the oregon health authority and oregon department of education released a school health advisory to be in effect from january 3rd through january 31st in order to help with the recent surge of coveted cases do the omacrunt variant these extra mitigation efforts are in place to help reduce the spread of covid so that districts can prioritize in-person learning for students this guidance includes the recommendation that schools hold events such as conferences meetings and fundraisers online rather than in person in order to comply with that recommendation for the month of january all board meetings will be closed to the public we know it's always preferable to be able to meet in person fully but we want to do our part in helping to support the effort to prioritize in-person learning for our students i want to add that my hope in this moment is to focus on solutions that don't pit parents against teachers teachers against administration board members against everyone else and i want to remind us all of the care and concern that i know we're capable of in this community when we work in service of the district's children to shout at each other hasn't proven to be effective but collaborating can be we have a better chance of bailing the water out of the ship if all hands are on deck i want to thank the teachers parents board colleagues the superintendent and his staff and families and community members who show up on playgrounds cafeterias and libraries and those who have been on deck since march of 2020. i'm going to say it and this is hard and this is likely to get harder in the coming days it's going to require patience and grit and what we can do what can we do as individuals and collectively as community members who love our babies so much do in this moment to be part of the solution and i'd like to ground us in being solution oriented tonight so there's multiple perspectives to consider but likely no there's no one way to get this right please join me in trying to solve for the biggest challenge we'll probably ever face together um join me in solutions that work for the most vulnerable students and families in our district and in finding ways forward that while imperfect help us recover and move forward together that's more words than i usually say in two weeks the board will now vote on board leadership would you like a motion um i was just going to get to that i was taking a breath from having talks for so long i wasn't sure if you were waiting for something i was kind of happy to oblige do i have a motion and a second to adopt a resume i'm i i i appreciate we do i did want to make a note that we would like to get through this um considering that staff's been working a long day thank you we have a motion second to adopt resolution 6431 election of the board chairperson director green moves director constant seconds the adoption of resolution six four three one we need a name put in there though yeah um so that would be um madam chair i uh i recommend that we add into resolution michelle de pass as the chair thank you director green made the motion director constant second to the motion of adoption of resolution 6431. um michelle de passes chairperson thank you um is there any board discussion um i am going to be a no on uh the that vote tonight um and the reason for that is that um the there's been a complete failure in the negotiation of the superintendent's contract that um we've been more than six months on trying to get a contract done for superintendent guerrero and i know that every single board member up here has stated that they want to have superintendent guerrero continue leading the district and superintendent guerrero has also stated clearly that he wants to stay and continue the good work that the leadership has begun with the strategic plan and the board goals there's been a complete lack of communication and transparency around the contract and in fact it is not listed in our board policy that it is the role of the chair to do the board contract and so if you are reelected
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tonight i would ask that you pass that responsibility squarely to vice chair scott if he is reelected to that role and have him be the lead on the contract negotiations because we have not been able to move forward on that and it has already started causing massive chaos in our executive leadership team we're seeing that the meeting we just had earlier tonight that vital vital work that we all agree is the heart of our district will be supremely negatively impacted if superintendent guerrero leaves us and right now we don't have a superintendent for next year and we don't have a plan and we don't have a path and so i am deeply concerned about the failure of those contract negotiations and the vital need to have that happen immediately so it's that for that reason i'm not able to vote yes tonight thank you for that is there any additional conversation uh madam chair i um i feel that i need to respond to that um having having been in the the chairs roll several times um and having negotiated the superintendent's contract on behalf of the board with the board and um i i do know that um negotiating the superintendent's contract involves two parties and as i told you privately last week it's hard being chair and i think you have expressed your sincere interest in doing that and i think you have brought in board members into the conversation in a way that i would expect the chair to so i feel the process has been transparent to me but i i don't think it's from my point of view i'm going to be supporting you as to be the chair because um i i know the work is hard but i also know that um the the fact that there is not a contract is not um something that you own 100 at all and i wouldn't support and this isn't any reflection on director scott or the vice chair but i would not support passing it to somebody else because i do believe that this should be the chair's role and i i and and i'm supportive of you continuing to make that effort and as i said it takes two parties to reach an agreement and we all you also have a board in which there are a variety as you know on a whole host of topic a variety of opinions and um you could easily at any meeting put something to vote on the on the agenda but that doesn't mean it would pass or that we have agreement with the superintendent so i don't view this at all as a failure and i'm not supportive of passing the um baton to somebody else and again um please don't take any personal offense director scott because it's not you it's just i believe if we're going to support you as chair director to pass that that is the role that you should play i appreciate that thank you is there any further discussion i support your candidacy for chair and appreciate your willingness to serve and i appreciate all your hard work today and i also appreciate director lowry you raising this issue because it is absolutely critical and one of the difficulties of being chair is that you do hold accountability for um leading the organization for good and for ill and it's hard um but i i that's why i do think it is appropriate to say that even even though this is a challenge it is ultimately the chair's responsibility to make sure that we get that difficult work done i think you and director scott are a great team so um work work work together or pass the baton to director scott if you think that seems appropriate as well but it is critically important that we resolve this and i also want to make it very clear there was a statement made that there are two parties in negotiations yes that's true but that cannot pass as an aspersion on the superintendent uh any lack of willingness on the superintendent's part to re-up with us and to resolve the contract uh quickly so thank you and onward thank you and in the spirit of transparency i appreciate your um your comments there um this is has been a difficult negotiation um when i first got into the chairship position i was somewhat critical of the contract we had in front of us and in order to address um address the contract i entered into contract with legal expertise um from a person from still reeves a lawyer from still reeves who has extensive experience advocating on behalf of school boards to negotiate superintendent contracts i
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felt like that was a decision that i made knowing that i hadn't didn't have the experience negotiating first of all employment contracts but second of all executive employment contracts i think it was best practices for me to resource the expertise that i didn't have so i also feel a sense of urgency about the contract um i also feel that turnabout is fair play because i abstain i abstain from voting on your on your chairship but i i believe that the contract negotiation has been um kept me up at night i've had multiple conversations with all of you um terms have changed over the over the time um i haven't laid out every play by play and to your point about chair scott that's an interesting proposition do you know how many times i've thought i could just call him up and give the give him the job and i've refrained from doing so because i think we do work well together and we've actually been in every single contract conversation together there has not been a single i don't think a conversation where the vice chair has not been present so um i take responsibility for my position in in in holding this up the moving the work forward and want to recognize that it's a difficult position to be in as you should well know um uh managing this process so um we're gonna go if there are there any other further discussions about this or can we please move on this is uncomfortable i believe we have a motion i'm sorry we need to call for the vote so there's board discussion we don't is there any public comment about this issue so the board will now vote on resolution 6431 election of the board chairperson um michelle depass that would be me all in favor and i i should say that um i'm not sure why but i do want the job i'd like to finish it up until june 30th of 2022 and i'm reminded that i skied up hill for 10 hours one time and i signed up for that too so um i have the i'm determined to get this over the finish line and um we'll do so with the help of all of my colleagues here um so the board will now vote on resolution 6431 election of board chairperson all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no no are there any abstentions resolution is proved by approved by a vote of six to one with student representative weinberg unofficially voting yes and i bought him a book so i think thank you i don't think you're supposed to say that that's bribery we're going to now go to the election of the board vice chairperson that's why i wanted to declare it it was under the gift limit though yes it was well under the gift limit um election of the board vice chairperson do i have a motion and a second to adopt resolution six four three two making a motion director green is making a motion again he's going to be in the minutes this year director green moves do i have a second second director hollins this is the first meeting i haven't had to look at you and yeah we need to make sure it says i mean i nominate okay andrew scott to be vice chair do we have a motion a second to adopt resolution 6432 election of vice chairperson andrew scott yes i make the motion to nominate dr andrew scott everybody's a doctor and director holland's seconds thank you is there any board discussion i'll just say thanks for the nomination and i've enjoyed uh working with you over the last six months i'm going to enjoy working future i also appreciate that i had no idea that people were gonna make comments tonight but thank you for those and i'm i'm confident we can we can um get done the things we need to get done over the next six months i appreciate i look forward to working with you too it's been quite a quite a great challenge okay the board will now vote on resolution 6432 election of board vice chairperson andrew scott all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution 6432 is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative weinberg voting yes next the board will vote on the consent agenda board members if there are any items you'd like to pull sorry for discussion we'll set those aside for discussion and vote at the end of the meeting mr i'm sorry
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ms powell do we have any changes are there any changes to the consent agenda no do i have a motion and a second to adopt the consent agenda make a motion director green is making the motion director director green moves director scott seconds the adoption of the consent agenda is there any board discussion on the consent agenda the board will now vote on resolutions six four two four through six four two seven all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions the consent agenda is approved by a vote of seven to zero with student representative weinberg voting yes we'll now move to student and public comment excuse me just a moment miss powell do we have anyone signed up for public testimony yes we have five people let me start by moving in before we begin i'd like to review our guidelines for public comment first the board thanks you for taking the time to attend the meeting virtually and providing comments uh public input informs and improves our work and we look forward to hearing your thoughts your reflections your concerns our responsibility as a board is to listen actively and we can do that by making eye contact and putting our phones down our board office may follow up on board-related issues raised during public testimony we request that any complaints about individual employees please be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter and if you have additional materials or items you'd like to provide to the board or superintendent we ask that you email them to public comment all one word at pps.net publiccomment pps.net please make sure when you begin your comment that you clearly state your name and spell your last name you'll have three minutes to speak and you'll hear a sound after three minutes which means it's time to conclude your comments ms powell um do you want to let the first person in yes we have allison harden here hi there welcome hi um do you hear me yes we do hear you we can hear you thank you my name is alison hardin that's h-a-r-d-i-n i am a parent of two athletes at lincoln high school with kids in athletics i have become extremely aware of the shortage of athletic fields in the city of portland that is why i supported a project presented two years ago a multi-sport field at west sylvan middle school which was proposed as a swing space for our lincoln student athletes displaced from their field during construction our community worked hard to get this approved by the city of beaverton but then the pandemic hit and it seems to have been swept under the rug i am advocating on behalf of our kids and families to bring this project back to life the following is why i believe this is such a critical project to move forward for our community at pps we share a common belief that a thriving academic and athletic program will elevate each other and that athletics is an important opportunity for students in our public high schools safe and accessible places to play are critical to our high school athletics programs however with lincoln being in the middle of a hilly urban area access to fields and courts is a significant challenge even with the new construction lincoln high school's field space will not meet the educational specifications for a high school due to the limited space on our urban campus the west sylvan field would help bridge this gap it is just four miles away from lincoln high school and has already been approved for a multi-use field by the city of beaverton this multi-sport field could provide students access to practice facilities at times that are safe and at locations that a location that is reasonable for lincoln and west sylvan athletes to access after school when there is a home football game for example the other fall sports could practice at west sylvan rather than traveling all over the city like they do now so why now much of the planning has been done and the project is ready to launch beaverton has approved the plan and if started soon it could serve as a swing space during construction of the new lincoln field and then later serve as a
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regular practice space for years to come we have a near to term opportunity to use either swing space funding that was set aside for displaced teams during construction or to use reserve funds from the linking construction either way we believe that the budget is there to complete this project now let's focus on a shared commitment to progress for all students of ppbs we do not want to pit one school against another but rather help build each other up let's find a way to yes to this and other athletic facilities across the district to together we can envision and build a pps where all communities have thriving academic and athletic programs that build on each other and promote progress for all thank you for listening tonight thank you and now i want to um thank you for director broome edwards pointed out that resolution 6427 was included in our consent agenda but um we have staff ready to present on the approval request for the future bill whitla senator field house is there a staff report on this don't we have more public testimony we do but i'd like to interrupt it because we um we wrapped this resolution into our cassette agenda it's actually a separate item and we do have people that want to testify but i thought there was a staff report on this or is there not okay never mind i stand corrected we'll move forward with public testimony thank you madam chair i had one question typically we've put students first during public comment i was just wondering if we switched that we don't have student comment tonight there are no students okay because the email that cara sent said we had four people signed up and yes okay okay i just wanted to check thank you so i just want to repeat that for those at home those students have since withdrawn i don't know that your mic was on roseanne thank you so we've already we have already voted on the approval request for the future bill watala senator field house at mcdaniel high school as it wasn't a separate agenda item sorry that that was duplicated but it got it got posted in our board book as a separate item sorry it did and we need to re resume our public comments then yeah it's it's a little confusing it's the script is off too so um thank you um since it was um listed on our public agenda can there at least be we don't need to have a long discussion but at least just like uh one minute who were honoring who we honored i just want to be clear i mean in my what i see here it's listed on the consent agenda 6427 and it's 6427 is the mcdaniel field house when i read it i assumed it was consent agenda and that we did it when it was originally posted was it a consent so i think what we can do is honor that maybe i know uh share to pass you're interested in time i think um we had a memo from staff there in the consent agenda um and it lovely talks about the gentleman that we're honoring um i remember that he was i'll read it now e coach bill whittala was a social studies teacher coach and athletic director at madison high school which is now named mcdaniel high school he coached the 1963 and 1964 madison baseball teams to state championships after winning the portland interscholastic league title each of those years he then served in the role of athletic director from 1966 to 1988 before moving to the portland interscholastic league district administration office until his retirement in 1991. um and it this is in um alignment with our values around naming buildings um and it says the decision to recommend bill whittle a senator field house is the name for the future structure supports the original naming committee's desire to create a shared history to celebrate what was and will remain a priority of the mcdaniel high school community coach bill woodla represents the mcdaniel high school community values of community respect education equity and diversity and is deserving of this honor thank you for that and yeah he was also a recognized athlete in two sports university of portland alum and and good sport all around it was great to read his bio and i just want to thank director lowry because i think anytime we make a decision like that that is going to something memorializing someone it's good to reckon highlight why they are being honored and i think it's just part of the
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memorialization process so thank you for doing that and i'm glad we approved it yes thank you let's move along now um to complete our public comments um and thank you director lowry that's great when you get a building named after you we'll be sure to talk about your life in positive attributes and characteristics ms powell who do we have um signed up next for public testimony uh next we have david scholten mr scoldin can you hear us good evening i'm a fifth grade teacher at abernathy my son is a first grader at richmond my name is david scolton my last name is spelled s-c-h-o-l-t-e-n yesterday i walked out of my fifth grade classroom into the hallway and saw something that truly touched me our substitute administrator was walking hand in hand speaking gently with one of our most impacted kindergartners this administrator stepped up to care for him when he was unable to function in the classroom immediately i thought this is what leadership looks like this scene in the hallway stands in stark contrast to policies and practices developed by the pps senior leadership team instead of holding the hands of our most vulnerable students pps is plowing forward with in-person learning as if these students and their families are not getting sick right before our very eyes instead of holding the hands of our most vulnerable students pps refuses to put safety measures in place like providing high quality masks and comprehensive on-site testing instead of holding the hands of our most vulnerable students pps continues to ignore the rising levels of educator illness and stress instead vilifying the people who literally hold students hands every day instead of holding the hands of our most vulnerable students pps is holding the hands of the kims and the renees of our community holding the hands of adults acting like selfish children throwing temper tantrums when they don't get what they want adults who should know better than to suddenly throw around terms like equity and black and brown students most impacted when it benefits them without the long-term track record of advocating for these same communities but it makes sense to me that pps leadership without deep ties to the community would mistakenly hold the wrong children's hands i've learned enough in my seven years here at pps not to take that personally i don't blame sean byrd for coming into our system shaking things up proposing simulcast heading up two disastrous curriculum adoptions and leaving less than three years later i don't blame cheryl proctor for following sean byrd into our district and being assigned his position after less than six months here in pps taking on the leading role in curriculum and instruction with no knowledge of the communities she will surely impact i know that the problem is not personal it's systemic and latter climbing admin are just playing the game the problem is this game hurts children i have two suggested solutions tonight the first is for a pause to in-person instruction to keep public education intact and our communities safe while we add additional safety measures like better masks and testing my second please acknowledge that we have a very serious problem of revolving door leadership the health and well-being of our communities requires us to have steady long-term leadership that is in touch with both the schools they serve and the surrounding communities please stop hiring out of state admin who are clearly playing the latter climbing game the revolving door of pps senior leadership guarantees that our most impacted students will walk the halls of our schools with no one to hold their hands thank you thank you miss powell who do we have next we have rachel chang just cute we can't hear you
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my name is rachel chang d-h-a-n-g i'm here today because i made a promise to my son who is very upset and worried about the changing that might occur with enrollment and program balance also because i'm deeply disturbed by four charity past open dismissal asian kids she said and i grow i again really really in favor of the option that serves our black and brown kids apparently when she talk about racial equality it's only for black and brown students and no other and i have concern for many board members that they will just trust the expert on the matter of whole school their is better the research is being presented in such an unbalanced way the data that pps was willing to share last year was almost 20 years old after the community kept pushing to share the actual data pps finally came out with some data last thursday but the data wasn't even about comparing the success of the hospital dlibros is co-located rather pps used co-located doi as a schedule for the lower ses score that need help the solution student treating dlr students as a second class citizen by shutting them around to make the enrollment goal or tearing apart a successful cold front like workstar the fact is usa has a co-located program and the student performance is above average including ell students even dr all amen usga is the most successful co-located program for charity past said let's rip off the bandit kids will survive kids are resilient changing make them stronger but that isn't always the case recently surging general issue a warning a wide spread of used mental health crisis and don't the kids have enough changing already one day they can go to school then they can one day they can hold their best friend's hand the next they have to keep six feet away how many more changing are we going to ask them to endorse before we finally break them chinese family we feel safe welcome and support at rookstock more important than ever with increasing asian hate crime and this community doesn't happen overnight it takes many many years of devoted people to get where we are today ninety-one percent of usda family who took a survey including neighborhood and mip voice they want to stay co-located when it is time to vote i'm asking board member please to listen to what family have to say and please including asian family even if the expert did have the data support the whole school doi which we have not seen those experts won't be there when the parents tell their kids the heartbreaking news they won't be there to dealing with the hardship of commune when the parents need to think how can they keep their job while sending their kids to school on time thank you thank you next is richard donine richard donaine looks like he's muted can we move to the next person can you hear me thank you we can mr donain yes richard donna donan d-o-n-i-n don't in uh hopefully you have a a number of uh emails that i sent in to uh the board secretary and i'm here because i heard on the news that school district
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was hiring uh unqualified uh folks to be substitutes without a college degree and i found that to be appalling so in the documents i hope you have in front of you i sent along my resume i was a portland public schools science teacher for nearly 15 years and so i decided to sign up to be a emergency substitute because after 15 years i think i know how to write a lesson plan and i know how to teach high school science uh the process was delayed slightly and in there i have some information about uh um let me see um professional references back dating back 1981 1982 assistant superintendent schneider and also another one showing that not only was my confidence valued but i had wonderful relationships in the district i also ran a program called the energy studies center raised near over slightly over a half a million dollars for educational programs in the district to where uh students and teachers got trained the hardest part was dealing with your hr people i got a it's in there it's number four hopefully you have it and i will read it i know that you own a company if there is anyone you've worked with and or customer relationships you've built those may be sufficient for you know personal references even though they are supervisors well i don't know what world hr people work in but i've spent 20 years developing a very high relationship and wonderful rep with the music industry which is what i work in so my private company is not about to go to a client whether it be a grammy winner or a local band to ask them to provide a personal reference when i have been a teacher in the district for nearly 15 years so if you are interested in having qualified people with degrees experience and know how to deal with classroom management issues i thought i would be the person you would want to have as an emergency [Music] person to substitute but it appears that that is not the case it appears that the substitute office can't think outside the box even though my sister donates excuse me i don't know if you heard it's a very soft sound but um your three minutes are up i also want to share with you that the board doesn't typically get involved with personnel issues um and but and i also appreciate you coming tonight hopefully things will change well thank you for your input qualified people thank you and our last person tonight is grace groom thank you can you hear us i can hear you can you hear me we can thank you for being here thank you thank you for hearing my testimony tonight my name is grace groom last name spelled g-r-o-o-m i'm the mother of two portland public school students and also have the honor of serving as a second grade teacher at markham elementary i'm testifying tonight to ask that as the budget process for next year moves forward you all hold in your minds and hearts the reality of our school communities students to hurting families are hurting and school staff are hurting we need leaders like you to show you have our backs by increasing funding for direct service school staff this will support the necessary healing for us to move forward towards more equitable outcomes for students direct service school staff are the front line of support for students and families teachers and direct service support staff are addressing learning gaps due to covid making sure families are connected to wrap around services and supporting the social emotional well-being of our students every day
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during the pandemic the needs of my students and their families have been so much greater than any previous year in my career the trauma my students have and are currently dealing with is overwhelming the first step towards healing from trauma is establishing a sense of safety with the pandemic continuing to impact our community we are not able to establish the sense of safety in our schools right now the way to do this is to provide more trained caring adults to serve students directly the wrong way to do this is to continue on the path that you've chosen limiting access to direct service staff while increasing positions in upper administration on the eve of the last bargaining meeting with p-a-t in which your senior leadership recommended taking the last planning day of the year off the end of the year and putting it in march leaving zero paid time for teachers to do end-of-the-year report cards and back-up classrooms that same leadership team posted a new and in my view redundant position on the leadership team the starting salary ninety thousand dollars the number of years of experience required serving students zero the job description for this project manager listed the word project at least 25 times here's a project for you all to consider take a hard look at any additional staffing requests that do not provide direct service to students as our board chair shared with the opening this of this meeting the ship that is our school district is taking on water to right the ship we don't just need all hands on deck we need more hands on deck our students need more caring adults in their lives now more than ever please plan next year's budget to give them what they need and in closing i would like to ask if any of you are willing to to visit my classroom and volunteer in person my doors are open the students are wonderful and please come to my second grade classroom to support their needs thank you thank you so much ms groom and i will take you up on your offer i hope every one of my colleagues does as well i appreciate your testimony thank you and that is ann thank you thank you ms powell i'm going to take this opportunity to move a couple of things around because we have a tight time deadline on guests that are in the room i'm having i'm having a vision problem tonight that is just um literally not seeing what's in front of me um we're going to get an update on school operations during the omicron surge of covet schools transition transitions to temporary distance learning extracurricular arts and athletics criteria for those transitions to remote learning and student and school support dr adams and chief garcia will be introducing this item thank you i gave you my pink glasses in case they help you to see good evening uh directors thank you for for having us to provide you an uh an update on the impact of the omicron surge on school operations joining me here is dr bernard adams uh i had a another cast of characters here that were going to join us so but we were they were called uh elsewhere uh so tonight we're going to share uh two major updates uh one uh as as the school board knows and our broader community knows we've uh transit began to transition schools into temporary distance learning uh and so we wanted to give you an update on how that's going the second thing that we want to update you on is uh some health and safety updates uh joining us tonight is our our folks from multnomah county's public health office dr vines and uh dr guernsley uh and so they'll be here virtually uh so i actually do want to get to to that piece because i'm sure you have questions for our public health officials and i want to get to that so next slide so directors as you know this omacrom variant of cova 19 while less severe is faster transmitting meaning that it's spreading across our community uh pretty rapidly and and our data suggests that uh you know we've been meeting with regularly with the oregon health or ohsu sorry uh who who continues to forecast uh the the way in which this uh this variant is spreading and what we know is that although the code vaccine is helping reduce the serious illness and hospitalization uh it is still very infectious and so but uh unlike delta it uh it is likely less to hospitalize a person who's fully vaccinated and boosted what we've heard from our public health officials and experts is that uh that they're forecasted to see the peak of this omicron variant in and around january 27th as you can see here on the on the right of your screen that is the
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number of uh positive hospitalized patients with cova 19. and again that that looks to peak uh in january on january 27th so what's happening in our broader community uh is having a direct impact on our school communities and so our schools which are just a reflection of our community are seeing the impact so we're seeing a dramatic rise in absences and reported illness by both students and staff next slide and so uh again as as as directors know and as the broader community knows uh we've had to uh make the decision to uh move some schools to temporary distance learning and i think it's important to to note uh that as a school system and with superintendent guerrero's leadership our goal is to keep school buildings open and to main and maintain in-person instruction as much as possible we consider temporary closures as one of our schools of one of our schools to be to activities to be a measure of last resort and i think that needs to be very clear to our broader community we are looking at schools and looking at data because we want we are trying our our effort is to maintain in-person instruction as much as possible and uh temporary closing schools is a measure of last resort and so again just wanted to reiterate what our superintendent has shared previously and so with that i'm going to turn it over to dr adams to kind of walk you through uh give you a little taste of what it goes what it's like to make a decision like this give you a sense of what we look at and kind of uh and what the process is like as well as sharing with you when schools move into temporary distance learning uh what what what should families expect so dr adams thank you thank you jonathan can i have the next slide please so it's been of great interest across the community how we come to the decision and what data points we actually examine when we're making the very difficult choice to transition to temporary distance learning one of the things that has happened immediately is we've set up our emergency operations center it's been activated and this is a group of individuals who serve as a single source of information management and decision making at this time if you've seen tv shows such as ncis or fbi you see their command center rooms it's very much that look and feel we're monitoring multiple data points in real time we're in contact with staff on the ground in buildings and we're taking all of that into consideration as schools rise to the top of our monitoring list we then invite in conversations with the school administration so we can hear more information firsthand about what's going on the ground and so some of the data we meet five times a day beginning at 6 30 in the morning and the group is actually meeting right now that's why jonathan and i had walked away and we came back to have this presentation with all of you the data we monitor include the following we monitor the number of student and staff positive cases of covet 19 we also monitor and are monitoring the number of students and staff that are either in quarantine or isolation we're looking at student attendance on a daily basis we look at staffing vacancies including unfilled positions after substitute educators are in place we're also as you may know we've also been deploying central office certified staff to buildings to help shore up in-person instruction so on a daily basis we're also looking at the number of those staff that are available because covit is again affecting everyone including central office staff members and their availability their availability to support in-person instruction in schools we're also thinking about some of our special programs and whether that might be a factor or consideration into whether we may move a school to temporary distance learning the decision overall is made by the eoc team as a group in consultation with the principles and then a communication protocol begins where we the principal is informed and um collaborated with we let the board know we started letting families and community know and so it's a very dynamic process as we look at these data points and make these very um it's a complex decision making matrix that we're um using at the moment in order to determine whether to go into temporary distance learning if i could have the next slide please that being said i'd like to note that as of our 81 schools only five have transitioned to temporary distance learning this means that 76 of our campuses are still in process of delivering in-person instruction which we know and highly value for the health safety and well-being of our students
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and staff so on the slide before you are the the names of the five schools that have transitioned to temporary distance learning it also um this slide also provides you the planning day that staff has as a part of our agreement when we make a transition to temporary distance learning that first day is a planning day for staff to prepare distance learning instruction for students the chart also gives you the start date of the temporary distance learning for each school and the projected end date of the temporary distance learning for each school i'll give you just a moment a few seconds to be able to look at that and if i could have the next slide please so the other one of the other questions is what do i expect as a parent as a student what is this going to look like and as i mentioned day one after the transition after being notified that we're moving the distance learning the school will be the school facility will be closed families will have access to apps and featured learning content so there will be asynchronous instruction and educators will use this opportunity to begin their transition and do their planning for the following day and then once we're in temporary distance learning on that second school day educators will meet in real time with students during their regularly scheduled class time teachers will continue to provide both whole person whole group excuse me and small group instruction as well as to provide independent work for students and opportunities for students to check in with their teacher for some guided feedback from their educators the school principal and classroom teachers are both contacting families with more information about those daily schedules and those learning activities jonathan great and so uh last uh so uh one of the do you want me to do this yes okay so uh the what we shared with our communities as we're uh closing our schools temporary some of our schools temporarily is that we are going to prioritize some essential services and so uh this includes nutrition services so uh our families will still have access to breakfast and lunch that will be offered to pick up for pickup while students are in temporary distance learning when we announce fabian k8 as an example we we know that a lot of the students that attend fabian live in hayden island and some other areas and so we actually are delivering food to those communities to kind of give you an example of what is happening uh as you all know earlier this year thanks to voters and thanks to your leadership pps instituted a one-to-one chromebook take-home initiative meaning that every student grades three to twelve has access to a computer that they can take home with them and so we have been providing those to to our families uh as well as the families in k2 that have transitioned so fabian in particular uh we've also opened our pps technical support line uh for students and families to access so if you need help accessing your chromebook or turning it on folks can call or email our tech tech support in close partnership with multnomah county as you all know multnomah county helps lift up some health centers across our schools and those remain open for any students in grades k to 12 who live and go to school at pps and this is a little bit of new uh a new update from last week um so last week as you all know when we made the decision to shift to uh distance learning we also made a decision to pause temporarily extracurricular activities to really assess uh our capacity and the safety uh in front of us right again this is a dynamic situation things are moving pretty rapidly and so we we made the decision to pause and after we've considered looked at data looked at our our opportunities and our our preparation we have reinstituted a number of limited in-person activities on school campus camp campuses so i just want to name those two things the first thing that we are going to be sharing a little bit more details about in the coming days our teams are actively working on designing and developing the the plans here again in close partnership with our school administrators to provide temporary in-person supports this is in-person academic supports to those students who need to successfully complete coursework and for students who need in-person counseling resources or other other things so you can imagine opening up our schools uh for students to come in and and work you know if they're part of the robotics team and they have to build out a robot right and it's bringing those students together in supervised ways in in small ways uh to support those in-person activities in addition to
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this these temporary in-person supports we are re-instituting and resuming pil sports and performing arts immediately uh in order to uh to uh to deal with the the growing cases of of of covid uh we are going to be limiting spectators and again more information will be coming uh forward tomorrow uh to our our broader community but again i just want you to repeat that jonathan because we've gotten like 87 000 emails about this so could you we are resuming sports and performing arts at schools that transition to distance learning so even if the school is in distance learning correct extracurriculars will continue with the ode outlined mitigation efforts correct thank you so pil sports our basketball teams our wrestling teams and our swimming teams are whether you're at roosevelt mcdaniel cleveland they can resume practice and games and and i know that there's a big uh game day on friday for for a lot of these pla these teams so we look forward to to to being at the gyms uh cheering on our students as uh they resume pio space i just wanna say thank you i know that that was a lot of work and conversation and once again i think this um really underlines the staff that are leading the fact that our leadership is so responsive to our community that when a decision is made there's always listening and growth and learning and so i so appreciate the fact that i know senior leadership has talked about this and looked at capacity and really again what is best for our students so thank you so much for always adjusting always being willing to learn always willing to have the conversation and to center our students in everything you do appreciate it um chair to pass um so i also also thank thank um the superintendent and the staff who made that happen i know it's super important um to students whatever their extracurricular activity was um to not have that interrupted because the next month is going to be a roller coaster and while it may be um three three high schools right now it may be three different ones next week um so appreciate um that we were able to solve uh have a solve for that uh just a question now that we have a solve for it and as i assume there's the possibility that other high schools may or may not be rolling in and out is that because this was a very clear equity issue at the beginning where some students would are we going to just continue is it going to be continued or will there be also an inflection point if a high school moves into a in the comprehensive distance learning that they'll have a moment in time like the three high schools did that they won't be able to pursue i think we can probably prudently say is we just needed the day or two to round up best thinking with our athletic director marshall haskins and all the school-based coaches around this is a critical time in their season we've been our student athletes and schools communities have been good about their health and safety mitigation efforts we want to continue to reinforce those there were some outstanding questions like our athletes want to have an audience and their parents so we think by putting in a system like you know an allotment of tickets for each student athlete to prioritize audience members because what we know is there's only a percentage of our gymnasium we should be filling up to ensure some level of safety and and social distancing so kind of calculating you know what what's the maximum capacity uh on a game night and then how do we distribute tickets fairly so lots of folks uh who you know we have some exciting games for example you might have to catch the live stream just to make sure our student athletes have an opportunity especially our seniors uh to finish out the season so i think what you're saying is now that we have so now that we have those systems thank you for reminding me to finish my sentence is that you know we'll apply those same guidelines to any high school should they find themselves in a similar circumstance great thank you so much thank you question actually can uh i'm gonna pause on questions because we do have our uh public health officials here that are only here until 7 45 and and they have a really important update to share with our broader community and and so i'll come back to your question around temporary distance learning as well as some health and safety updates so i'm actually going to uh skip some of these slides because again i just want to make sure well let me just go through these really quick so as as as directors know you know from the beginning of this pandemic we what we know is if we put layered health and safety measures at pps you know we can uh mitigate the spread of cobia 19. and you know our data shows research shows that controlled environments where there's universal mask wearing where there's airflow and ventilation as as a reminder we upgraded all of our ventilation to merv 13 standards we have air filters and purifiers in every classroom
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we have cova 19 testing programs like symptomatic uh testing asymptomatic testing as well as an array of other measures that we put in place to protect against cova-19 we also have pop-up clinics that we've been instituting since uh since the beginning of the school year uh we have some upcoming pop-up clinics here at james tron and markham so please mark your calendars for those if you are still needing a booster your first year your first year your first those your second dose we also are last week established a coven 19 staff testing site as we know the tests are really difficult to come by here in the state and across the country and so luckily we were able to establish a testing site for school-based staff who are serving students in person so that that they have a sense of their uh their status and so with that i'm going to turn it over to dr guernsey and dr vines to talk about uh new k-12 isolation and quarantine procedures that the county shared with us this morning we as pps look forward to implementing these uh starting on tuesday the reason why we're waiting until tuesday is because as you can imagine with a big system like ours with 81 different schools there is uh standard operating procedures that need to be updated there's trainings that need to happen to ensure that our community of staff and leaders understand these new shifts in in guidance and so with that uh dr vines and uh dr guernsey uh do you want to give our directors an update here on on these new procedures sure can you hear me okay we can thank you if my audio gets um crackly um jen i might have to turn it over to you sometimes uh on this forum this particular forum my audio gets a little weird um hi everybody my name is jessica guernsey i am the public health director at multnomah county health department i use shearer's uh pronouns and um i i have to own that i'm not a doctor although i do think my uh my alum uh portland state should consider giving me an honorary doctorate after this whole thing is over this has been quite a wild ride i do have a masters in public health and have practiced public health locally for over 20 years um first of all i just want to say thank you to the entire pps community i'm a pbs parent myself and just really it it brings me to tears when i hear and work with you all in all that you're doing to ensure continuity of education and all of the important things that schools do in our community so again as a community member a parent um and someone working with you all through this i just thank you from the bottom of my heart you all are just doing amazing work before we talk about the specifics and the changes um that were just mentioned i just want to um set the stage a little bit um and acknowledge that we're in a pretty massive pivot time right now um uh omicron as a as a variant is very different from the last variant that we had the delta variant we're seeing a very different um pattern of spread and trajectory as as was talked about earlier we're in a very we hope and we have reason to believe that we're in a very compressed epicurve for this particular variant so it is things are moving fast and furious and things are changing and i just want to acknowledge for as was just mentioned for systems as large as pps when um things you know come real time to us and we're trying to make decisions to balance the very important needs of both protecting the health of students and the school community but also really getting to that core goal of keeping schools open for as much in-person education time as possible that is a primary public health goal um just truly understanding again from my own perspective as a parent but also as a public health practitioner that the importance of school cannot be understated so really that is squarely within our vision even as we're moving through a very turbulent time um and we do expect this next month to be um fairly rough but we hope this next piece that um dr mines is going to talk about and she is a doctor by the way um that uh is an important contribution to helping to navigate some of these changes so with that i'll turn it over to dr vines thanks jessica good evening everybody uh for those listening i'm dr jennifer vines i used to her pronouns i am a physician i'm the multnomah county health officer i'm really glad to be here with you tonight to support your efforts um it's not a surprise to me that you have an emergency operations center open i think it's a sign of the very dynamic times that we're in um so very happy to partner with you i would also just echo uh what jessica said about our public health goal of
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keeping schools open in terms of kids immediate and lifelong health and well-being they need to be in school and i think this has been one of the clearest and most difficult lessons of this pandemic so for the parents who've spoken to me emailed me i i absolutely hear you i'm gonna get to what's on this slide which is really a kind of complicated algorithm i'm gonna get to that in just a moment um i want to talk about things like keeping schools open that we can kind of hang our hats on right now that is getting vaccinated so anyone who is eligible for vaccine they have a fantastic safety track record pfizer moderna get vaccinated if it's been at least five months since you got your dose go get a booster and make a plan to get one as soon as possible also i know everybody is sick of masks but we are not done with masks yet so double down on your masking make sure it fits well make sure it's the highest quality that you can get your hands on and then it's comfortable that you can wear it for long periods of time and then the other thing that is not going to change is to stay home if you are sick so that is true if you have tested negative for covid if you are unwell you should be at home that is that is basic uh prevention and similarly if you are sick with copen and test positive uh we're gonna get into some of the other guidance here so again those those are things that we can say with some certainty what has changed about how long you stay home if you're sick or test positive with cobin is that it's been shortened by the centers for disease control and there are really two reasons that the cdc put forward for this change the first is the way that the omicron virus behaves and it's a very it's just a very compressed timeline in terms of how quickly someone goes from having the virus in their nose and throat to having symptoms or showing a test positive and then how long they're infectious that is all compressed so people are probably most infectious in the one or two days before they develop symptoms many people will not have symptoms and so that we consider them infectious one to two days before they test positive and then they stay contagious through about day three four and five and so that's why this new five-day guidance has come about that's not to say that everybody is completely done with being infectious at day five there are there are people who will have a tail end days six seven eight nine and ten that's where you see the guidance for uh returning to activities at day five if you're feeling well because most of that transmission risk has passed but be really really extra good about masking for days 6 through 10 as you go back to your activities and so that's again that's partly virus behavior it's also partly just to lessen the burden of all those days missed days of school potentially missed days of work um and the centers for disease control was was up front about that so that's what to do if you're sick or test positive quarantine in public health lingo is when you are you're well you feel fine but you you understand that you've been exposed to the virus and so this is the notion that you also withdraw and you go home and stay home uh for five days while you wait for symptoms and you uh ideally get tested to see if you in fact have been infected from your exposure um i will just say that quarantine recommendations relies on people being identified as having had an exposure that relies on contact facing which we know is under stress so that that function is under stress because of the volume of cases but as that process plays out and we decide if someone really does need to go home and wait to develop symptoms wait uh to have a test to be cleared back to school you see here that we actually differentiate based on vaccine status so if you are completely up to date if you are eligible for your booster and you've had it you don't need to quarantine after an exposure if you're 5 to 17 years old and you've had your initial first two doses of coping vaccine you're also considered up to date you do not have to go home but you do need to wear a mask because now you've had a known exposure you just want to take that extra care that extra level of precaution by being sure you're really good about masking for those 10 days after the exposure and you do want to go get a test in case you have a mild a mild infection um that might not otherwise show up at symptoms that would prompt you to stay home it gets a bit more complicated as you start to parse people's vaccine status so if you uh have not had a booster if you're 5 to 17 years old have not had the vaccine series or you have only had one of the two um then you want to be at home for those first five days uh and then after that if you're feeling well uh hopefully you're able to get tested uh if you if you can make sure you're negative and then again come back and again pay extra attention to masking the bottom line here is that you see these these shortened periods where people are allowed to go back to their activities there is still some
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risk there and centers for disease control has put forward kind of a model where you you manage that extra risk by just being really good at wearing a well-fitting mask and getting tested if you can to make sure that you shouldn't otherwise be at home waiting until you're less infectious so it's a lot of information um if you have questions i'm sure we'll be talking more in the days to come i do just want to say that the omicron response is going to be difficult it is not going to be perfect and we are in a period of rapid change and having to adapt to the reality of how this virus behaves so again just really appreciate your time and attention tonight thank you for having us thank you so much for those important updates and again i just want to say thank you you guys are amazing and you always present such clear information and thank you it helps us as we make these difficult decisions well directors that is the last uh slide on the presentation here so i do want to turn it over to you particularly if you have any questions for our public health leaders before they leave us for the for the evening i do have a question uh regarding contact tracing so i think it's been your guidance dr vines that we're we've suspended attempts at contact person for adults but i think it is still our practice within pps to try to do that with students can you comment on that or can our staff tell us if our own guidance internally is shifting sure i'll i'll take a first stab at it and then dr vines you can you can maybe add to it so we are in regular communication with our public health officials we actually met this morning and had this exact conversation so we are looking at contact tracing uh at k-12 levels right now it's gonna it's a number of conversations that we're having with state leaders uh local public health leaders uh and we look forward to making a quick decision here in the next few days do you have any guidance you want to share on that as it pertains to our under 18 year olds in our school environments dr vines any i will say things are in flux and again the contact facing function is under stress i think the real prevention benefit is is keeping kids and staff home who are sick home who are test positive the difficulty when the contact tracing piece is stressed is that we're not we're not keeping peace with the virus and our teams are simply unable to get those notifications to people to to stay home and to wait out their period so this is something that we're going to be looking at really closely to figure out what is the best use of the resources that we have that's going to minimize it's we're never going to eliminate the risk of cobit in our schools but what's going to minimize the risk and keep kids in school in-person learning so just a quick opportunity for a public service announcement how do families sign up for the vaccine clinics at our schools that we mentioned in one of the slides uh uh so the school those uh clinics are first and foremost for the school community so we've been actively providing posters are making posters available across the schools if folks go to our website pps.net uh folks can see more information about times there is no sign up it is first come first served okay are we i just want to be clear are we welcoming uh students from throughout the district to those or are we asking families to sort of hold off if it's not actually no at this point anybody i mean the we what we do these clinics are open for three or four hours the first two hours or so are for those that specific school community and it's open to the broader community that's helpful thank you all right i had a quick comment and the good news is that we've kind of done this transitioning before and the bad news is it's not an ideal situation and i had a question about tests you might have mentioned multitasking but what is our district capacity to offer tests at the building level great question so as as you know uh the testing programs across the country are are are straight as well right they're it's difficult to come by uh as an individual for individuals and in indus uh institutions uh luckily we are working closely with our state officials and their local officials uh we do have you know uh tests available for our weekly asymptomatic and symptomatic screening testing program and as well as our staff program that we have here at the besc so last for example last week as part of our screening testing program again in partnership with ohsu and oha uh close to 5 000 students uh came back or got tested on you know as part of the screening program so so we are actively testing students across our our system right through the variety of programs that there are public health officials like oha and ohsu provide dr vines you had mentioned um first of
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all i want to say thank you for um for coming out and sharing um i appreciate it you mentioned in your um in your report just now that if you've been vaccinated and you know you you come into contact with somebody that you don't need to quarantine and different things but down at the bottom of the screen i'm because it gets skipped over so often how do you design because you said if you feel well and then it says if you if you have symptoms so i think we really need to be clear about what those symptoms should be or what those symptoms look like and if you have symptoms does that change your your five-day status or whatever so if we can be clear and clean that up so that um people truly understand i've been vaccinated i've been vaccinated but that didn't stop me from getting coveted and it didn't stop me from getting symptoms and it didn't stop me from feeling weak for about 10 10 to 15 days so can we get real clear on that for those that say i've been vaccinated i don't need to do anything i can i can stay in the building thank you yeah it's a great point that um staying home when sick that is across the board that is regardless of your vaccine status that is regardless of whether you've had a known exposure if you are unwell you should not be around other people we can get you lists of symptoms and again no system is going to be perfect because a lot of the symptoms of covid are going to be common symptoms that people have so we can't again we can't eliminate the risk we have to rely on people to decide for themselves is this am i am i sick um you know do i have something else do i have covid that part will be imperfect but you're absolutely right that people who are vaccinated can and will get sick with omicron and they will need to absolutely stay home even if they say they are vaccinated and boosted and everything again stay home if you're sick do some of those symptoms include um a scratchy throat a cough um nasal congestion body aches so a lot of things that would be uh also coincide with the basic common code because a lot of people are saying i don't have um covet i just got a cold but all the symptoms are similar so can can you unpack that a little bit i really just want to get down to the brass tacks let's get real clear about what it is we're saying because there's a misunderstanding it seems around when i should come to school and when i should stay home or do different things yeah thanks for the chance to clarify these are common symptoms right so coverage and omicron common symptoms headache scratchy throat runny nose cough you may have a fever fatigue so feeling tired body aches muscle aches these are all common symptoms people are going to have to be watching themselves uh to just to determine you know are these new or different symptoms for me am i unwell if the answer is yes they should be home regardless of their status i don't know that we can account for uh every single possible symptom again it's it's going to be imperfect because our biology and our bodies don't always follow the rules but we can really impress on people that if you are unwell you should not be in school until you are feeling well so just to build on um director green's questions because it seems like this is where testing is the key thing so you can have symptoms so we had a mini coven outbreak among our extended family and people had its range they've all been vaccinated so it ranged between like a cold to a flu and so the people who had colds like in two days they were fine um but if if you didn't have access to a test and you felt fine and you thought you had a cold that you really had covid you might be out for three days um you know transmitting it still because you have cova versus a cold and but you never got the test because tests are in short supply i'm wondering um if you have any insights into when the um the flow or the pipeline of tests is going to arrive in states um i know i talked to chief before this morning about um this and i know it's not a county responsibility but and it's really the federal federal government and the state level i'm curious like what where you see that pipeline opening because that does seem like that gives a more definitive answer to people who are not sure whether they have the cold the flu which may be fine for some people but other people it could put them in the hospital if they get transmitted i i can say a few words about what i
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know in terms of the the state ordering of the at home test kits we had updated conversations with the state um yesterday and we expect things to start flowing next week again the pipeline for all of this is unpredictable um so i can't make any promises of of it absolutely happening but that is um what is being expected and what we're planning for so um we hope that that will be a much needed uh tool in our public health toolbox that'll be a little bit more readily available for folks to address the very issues that that you just discussed and i think many folks know that there are quite a few pathways that these tests are coming through directly to education partners healthcare hospitals community-based agencies local public health authorities homeless services there are several different pathways that these tests are going to be distributed i have one quick question i know you guys have to leave um my question is i know a couple people who have taken a rapid test and then take a pcr test but the rapid test came back negative so they were still hanging out with people but then their pcr test came back positive so i was just wondering if you could be briefly described like the difference between the two tests yeah thanks for the question um so a lot of the rapid tests are antigen tests so they're actually looking for pieces of the virus itself inside your nose there they're looking for virus proteins and in general the thinking is that you have to have enough virus in your nose to make that test positive that it's probably that a positive test is probably a good marker that you not only have covid but you can you can probably spread covid the pcr test is very good at picking up even little pieces of virus so this may be virus that can't uh infect anyone else and is just in pieces kind of hanging around still in your nose the pcr test is very good at picking up even those little pieces and so the pcr test can stay positive for a long time after someone is considered no longer infectious in general people tend to think of the antigen test as a good marker not just of infection but also that you can potentially transmit so having said all of that no medical test is perfect so antigen tests will miss some people pcr tests will miss some people so i think my last point would be if you have even a single positive test you don't want to start shopping around tests if you have a positive test you're positive and you should act accordingly even if you're tempted to go and get another test that then is negative you should consider yourself infected i have a question for our own team um sorry before before that uh i do want to let uh our public health officials go because i could tell you that they're working equally as hard as uh many of us so i'm sure they they they want to spend some time with their families so any other questions before we let them go i just had i have one one last one i'm gonna have a similar question for pbs staff but um since you have um in your purview more than more than one district since multnomah county has multiple districts and i know that different districts are you know in different ways having um different experiences with omicron i'm wondering um what you're seeing are there any insights that you want to share like a cross districts um that things that are effective strategies or um things that we should just keep top of mind um just from you're looking at the at multiple districts and what's happening i mean i can give just a brief perspective i you know have the honor and privilege of meeting with many of your staff and other district staff every friday and um people are extremely creative about implementing and maintaining um the swiss cheese model with the layered prevention strategies um i think that where we are right now the common challenge is um just as dr vines mentioned the strain that folks are feeling um in terms of contact tracing and honestly with um implementation of of tests to stay so i think all of this is a balancing act like i said and we work weekly with school districts to try and balance that out based on the science that we're learning which is real time which is i know very stressful that's why i prefaced us being here by just really you know acknowledging that it's very hard to integrate our learnings and pivot especially with systems this large but you know like i said folks are being extremely creative and helping to maintain some of those consistent core prevention strategies that um we know work that dr vines went through
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particularly vaccination masking and staying home when you're sick i mean those are really tried and true so but again want to just acknowledge what a stress it is for a systems pivot but i think i i'm i like i said i have a child who's in pps schools and um i can't believe the level of work that is being done that is you know protecting students staff and the larger community thank you so much for being here i appreciate your time and effort knowing that you're working very long days i imagine thank you very much thanks for your service thank you uh so my question was with the you know the multnomah county guidance that just shifted from uh ten to five days isolation and you're in your preamble you said takes a little while to work with our building leaders to make those kind of changes when will we see that uh shift on the ground yeah on the ground uh we hope to implement that on tuesday so the day after the holiday just to give you a sense of what's going to happen between now and then so again a week from today on thursday we meet with our site administrators uh to discuss and and go over the the new protocols uh between today uh this morning and tomorrow we are updating our standard operating procedures uh to make sure that they're outlined uh and uh and coherent across the system and so after the sops again we will do a meeting with our site administrators uh make sure that they have the the tools and the resources needing to to implement this new transition uh and then you know they have to disseminate that information uh to their staff which will most likely take place you know friday uh for a tuesday implementation so gonna give you a sense of uh what that looks like in real time i have a quick question um i was really struck by the list of schools that are transitioning to temporary distance learning and noted that 100 of those are on the east side of the river most of them and uh the bulk of the ones that are closing are north and northeast portland and i would just request that we i'm wondering if we have a mapping session that can show those schools on a map when it comes time to budget time because those schools reflect kids that have higher poverty rates more languages spoken more free and reduced lunch in other words there are you know our most vulnerable students i would just like to see that visual representation because i think it's stark and um we know that the covet exacerbates um these inequities and so seeing it on a map might give us some direction in terms of where we want to focus our additional resources and i appreciate you chair pointing out what has been really vexing troubling um uh a lot of deep conversations that we've been having as a senior staff even in our emergency operations center even when you saw staff race up there because the data spiked in a few schools and so you're going to see some further communications probably but the conversation has been we know that not all communities have been impacted similarly there's been disproportionate impacts we know vax rates aren't the same across zip codes we know that some of our schools have all of you know many other additional challenges so we're trying to shore up and prioritize not having to have a cluster of schools as much as possible we can certainly map them especially if any additional schools need to be mapped so we're trying to apply that lens and as we apply remedies and strategize how to do this but as you know we're going to have ground to make up and i do hope that we prioritize additional supports and learning time that that really is going to be required as this hopefully we start to see the other side of this pandemic excellent and i also um trust and know in my heart that you um you bring that lens to the work so i know anything i say um is not new news to you i wanted to just put it out on the table um do we have any other comments i do i do but i can wait because i got like three of them listed go for it okay director green and then we'll go director constance i'm trying so the i'm uh i'm a i got them listed so i can just read them out and then i can follow along how we get them done the my first initial question is um what is our benchmark when it comes to
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closing um closing schools and i that's something that i posed to john jonathan earlier because i didn't want to i don't want to just throw him out there but i want to give him the chance to think about it and process it and he may say herman stop we don't have one it's too much but i'm gonna let him say that whatever the my next question is um cause we're doing schools um we're doing athletics and i appreciate us wanting to um allow athletics to go but it also brings about a flurry and letting the litany of questions that i have so with that being said how are we supporting the um the schools where we have teams where the entire team has already been impacted by covet 19. so we're saying we're going to um come back and sports are in play but if you got an entire team where there's no sports how are we supporting that team and exactly and so but then that means their schedule and so i'm i'm just going to keep one down sorry so if they if they're why are they quarantined cobit 19. okay this is so they were in fact every basketball team was infected an entire basketball team every every one of my questions listed is covet 19. okay so if i don't say it it's covet 19. and so the entire basketball team has been infected by covet 19. the entire wrestling team has been infected by covet 19 and so they have to play somebody have are we waiting to forfeit and is that what it's looking like are we saying we don't want to forfeit are we rescheduling how and then my next question follows up with that is how are we communicating with the families of those impacted as well as the other teams and families that they were playing against when we find out that there was a positive case so give you an example if um team a plays team b on friday and then on saturday we find out that somebody from team a was positive for covet 19. that means everybody on that team was now potentially impacted or affected by this the transmission especially given the extremely rapid transmission rate that we know that omarion has and that it it doesn't it moves beyond all the six feet and all of that it can be in the ears it's black people we just give it new names and so but it's it's it's out there and so what are we doing how are we reaching out to that to not just the player but everybody that was on the floor with the player all the teams that were on the bench with the player and then what's the turnaround time on that so because and this is important it's extremely important because if we find out on friday in the days that they were the the height of their transmission possibly if we're not communicating right away then you've got 15 30 players potentially that are outspreading a virus and who was going to tell them that they were and then what does that look like and so that was that and then my last question um i'm gonna just stop because i feel like i was about four i know i said three because i was like i'm looking at that and i said i said three one this one don't get to go all right director green we'll we'll take we'll take those two uh dr adams will take the first one i'll take the second one how about that you asked about a data point or threshold and there really isn't one single threshold we're looking at all of those various data points that i mentioned earlier staff call outs how many of those call outs are unfilled the absence rate of students in the building because what we're seeing is as students are absent then we see staff absences increasing as well and so we're looking at it's not one point or another it's really a matrix of data and if you can imagine um a score card with red green and yellow it's more like we're looking at dozens of data points and they all have a particular color and we're thinking about what they all mean and what those um thresholds say for what's going on in the ground in that school and then we have a conversation with the principal and then we make a decision when we feel like we can no longer offer safely in-person instruction okay and so regarding your second question i think it's an important question uh uh and i think you're hinting at a few things so uh over the over the winter break we did have a number of uh basketball teams who participated in a number of basketball tournaments uh here and across the country uh and what we saw is that during these tournaments uh there uh there were a number of of staff and students that uh contract that got contacted covid and so uh so you know the reality and what we know from public health is that um that you know uh these types of activities uh increase the risk of uh of of kobe 19. i mean that's just a a part of the reality right of folks
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sweating and moving around and all of that so i just wanted to kind of contextualize i think your reference point that that we have seen an increase of of basketball teams in particular uh being a whole team isolated or quarantined i apologize as a result of of of kova 19. as was shared by dr vines contact tracing at this moment today as a result of the omicron surge is becoming very difficult right because you can all but assume that we're all close contacts uh with someone who is positive or uh has been exposed recently to cobia 19 just the way that in in which omicron is spreading and the way that uh the the type of infection uh that it is and so it is making it difficult uh so uh with these in particular uh you know i would say prior to the deltas during the delta surge in the in the fall uh and probably in december you know contact traces that contact tracing has done it has been a taxing exercise for staff so if you can imagine school principals uh coaches teachers uh frontline staff uh uh you know working on over the weekends making calls to parents making calls to students looking at charts getting a sense of of the picture right contact tracing is about like getting a sense of the picture of when this exposure happened you know who was in the who was in the in the proximity how close were they so it's a it's an investigation if you will about what happened again the challenge right now with omicron is that that's becoming difficult when you know just us all being in in in close proximity right uh the chances of of us being close contact is greater and so so i'm giving you an answer that's a non-answer uh because i think the the as dr vines indicated the the public health uh process for contact tracing is becoming very challenging today so my answer today is different from my answer a month ago when i would have told you what i just told you about contact tracing being an investigative process that is led by uh our mesd nurses right in close partnership with our principals and and the like i do hear you and i i respect that answer because i i think i knew going in that we don't really have a solid a solid we're going to be able to get it out my question the reason that i was bringing this up though is because from a perspective of being responsible talking about being responsible and when you said activities like this i'm presuming that you're talking about um our extracurricular activities we're talking about sports you're going to be sweating you're you're running up and down the floor you're touching the same ball you're passing the same ball in wrestling you're you're actually grabbing one another and you're you're in contact with one another and someone someone says that i'm not feeling well at what point is the responsible thing as a coach to say i'm pulling my team without reprimand versus being like well you better find someone to play because the show must go on at some point we have to be responsible and recognize that if we continue to push this then we are propelling the transmission of this of this virus we are causing the spread we are endangering the lives of young people because we're telling them we need you to get out there hustle through it be strong you can make it and it doesn't work the same so i i appreciate your your comment i mean what i would say what i would say to that is you know we all have an individual uh responsibility to uh protect ourselves and each other from uh this pandemic right from this from coven 19. so that is absolutely clear whether you're an adult whether you're a student right it's it's important to wear your mask to inform others to stay home when you're sick right like that those are uh you know very important as on the individual level and at the collective level right like you know last week uh the state of oregon uh oha and a department of of of education released updated guidance and they said look you can pause extracurriculars or you can create uh mitigating uh or layers of mitigation to protect against uh kova 19. and we chose the latter right because or we chose to keep uh extracurriculars because as educators we're trying to balance the reality is that we're trying to balance what we're listening and hearing for public health with with what we're also hearing from public health that students need to
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be in school students need to be activated and engaged in extracurricular activities so you know it it this is what i said earlier to someone i think if you know if society can uh can uh remain open our schools can remain open and uh and our extracurricular activities could remain open and i just also want to remind us that extracurriculars also include things like the robotics team the high school play the band so yes they're sports which is but there are all sorts of other things and i think you know what we've seen is that closure of those extracurricular activities closure of in-person instruction has had a hugely detrimental public health impact on students so i think it's just what chief garcia was saying it's weighing like where can we protect our students where's the line and what are we protecting them from and and that's i think the continued struggle that we're going to have to to take on as a board and as a staff as we try to discern exactly what you know our public health experts said how do we keep our kids safe in all the ranges of what that safety means i guess i have a follow-up question to what director green was asking so if our number one priority is to keep students in five days of school when i heard that we were allowing um extracurriculars to proceed even if schools were closed i guess that kind of seems in contradiction to prioritizing five days of in-person instruction can you say more about that what do you mean yeah so if there's enough community spread teachers that have coveted students that have coveted i guess it would make sense to me that to limit the spread of more covet we would be closing all activities including in person school so if we're keeping activities open are we not like perpetuating the spread of covenant yeah i mean what i'll say to that is public health has not made a decision to close uh supermarkets schools uh bars restaurants public health has not made that decision i think as pub as educators as public school educators what we know is that our students need access to school access to extracurricular access to activities and that's what's driving us that's our our leading driver in these decisions okay so sorry last follow-up what data i guess did you guys rely on to choose to not follow the guidance from od and oha to close extracurriculars i guess choose that's incorrect jackson i just want to say that the ode guidance said you can either close extracurriculars or continue extracurriculars with mitigation efforts so saying it was a sentence additional it was one sentence that had both options in it so i just want to be really clear because i've had this question from other people we are in compliance with odai eode we're just in compliance with the second clause of the first sentence yeah that's correct and i think it's also important to note that you know um the state of oregon is really diverse right in in in thought in an opinion around you know the way that we should mitigate the spread of coven 19. and i and i and i and i and i hear and i feel for our state leaders uh that that that makes it difficult to make you know decisions and so i think i can see the world in which they had to say you know you either pause extracurricular or you create some mitigating uh strategies to protect uh your students luckily here in portland public schools we've mitigated we we've continued to mitigate and provide those health and safety measures all along uh and so when it came down to it you know it was a pretty pretty simple decision that we'll con continue to provide the the rigor of of health and safety measures that we've been providing from day one and and hopefully you know uh that message from the from our state leaders uh is resonating uh you know with uh with our counterparts across the region across the state may i interject here director constant you had a comment director brem edwards had a comment and i'd like to move us ahead in the agenda so we can stay on time so we can recognize everybody's tiredness thank you uh just before we leave the topic of contact tracing i think it's been pretty well established that the our guidance there is is outdated or is just no longer really relevant given the characteristics of omicron and so i want to be explicit about saying it has a really serious effect on our students we have a lot of students excluded from school due to exposure and contact tracing we're in a pickle because we don't have the ability to implement test to stay as an institution because we don't have the supply but um you know i'm hearing here a recognition that that's no longer really a has a rightful spot in our playbook so the sooner we move past that i think the better because we have kids being excluded for you know two weeks of school so director constant i appreciate that i i will say you know we um in our conversations with public health uh uh
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this morning um we did share you know and what's clear is that uh contact tracing at the county level and across the region has all but uh seized right again and and dr vines alluded to that today uh what hasn't shifted is the guidance to k-12 right so i just want to be absolutely clear that that guidance has not been provided to k-12 saying contact tracing needs to stop however like i said earlier our conversations right now give give us some indication that we're moving in that direction but it's going to require a a series of discussions up and down the uh the the with the state with our state leaders our public health leaders here at the local region as well okay so we won't make that decision until we have further external guidance specifically on context correct and our expectation is to get guidance this week thanks for that clarification quick question um kind of going back to the chromebooks piece i know we're giving all the kids the chromebooks do they ask do that come with access to wi-fi as well great question uh so a number of these chromebooks that we purchase as an organization and don correct me if i'm wrong do have enabled wi-fi already in them so that's that's a a bonus what we also know is that as these schools are going into trends into distance learning we have deployed hot spots and again are working very closely with our administrators to determine the number of hot spots that are needed at each particular school to provide those as a resource well so so some of the schools that are participating in the bills program have uh chromebooks that are fully lte enabled the majority of the one-to-one schools that we distributed in october and the ones that are in the pk2 are not we still have almost 3 2600 hot spots out available in students hands from cdl we still have about another 2600 available to deliver to students should we need and we're working with our partners right now to see how quickly we can turn around additional hotspots if it's needed chief wolf just used an acronym bills he was referring to our verizon we were selected on a grant to take many of our schools one to one and those are the devices that came more ably equipped yes verizon innovative learning schools forgive me for thank you superintendent excellent did that answer your question director hollins director burmadworks so i have um just a series but i think most of them would are relatively short questions and this um i think gets mostly into the dashboard and sort of data um earlier we were told that um because just because of the surge mesd was having a hard time keeping getting the backlog of reported cases um uploaded so short question answer needed just are we updated or when when do we expect that to happen our dashboard is lagging because of that backlog and the strain on contact tracing and both getting the data entered um the uh our ms our mesd nurses are also facing staffing shortages so if you can imagine some of the cases get entered by school school-based personnel some of the cases get entered by masd nurses um so i guess mainly i'm not it's not good or bad i'm just so is it going to continue to lag because of those factors so we should just keep that in mind so if somebody's looking at us like hey how come they transition to cdl because it doesn't look that bad but we have a different picture right it will it will continue to lag what we are what we've stood up as a part of eoc emergency operations center is we have um asked building administrators to at least hand enter the count of their backlog so we have more of a feel for what is actually happening in the schoolhouse okay i just think that's an important point because some people are looking at the dashboard thinking like what's what's the issue and it's there's a data lag issue um that's that you all have visibility to that we don't have so then um i have another question i'm confused about um and i think from talking to parents they are too is so when we have staff out it looked like that we don't know whether they're out because of covet or for some other reason and the question is if they're out for covid wouldn't we expected them then be like they're going to be out for five days because of the guidance and if we're moving to cdl so this is a multi question but if we move to cdl then our comprehensive distance learning and they've got covid we're not expecting them to teach and if we have a sub shortage who who is teaching the students in cdl if
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you don't have enough subs and the staff are out which is why we've moved to students the key question we've been asking ourselves i'm just curious because well just like just moving to cdl doesn't comprehension doesn't seem to solve the problem unless we're giving kids less instruction i can answer that on a couple different levels uh what we can predict about why teachers are out right now and need substitutes for in-person versus remote and what we have uh started seeing in those few schools that have moved to temporary distance learning so what we're actually experiencing there so um there are people who are out because they are very ill and they wouldn't be able to teach from any location in any condition because they are too sick to teach and then we have a very assertive uh self-screening symptom checklist um as one of our very important layers of mitigation which means if you have symptoms on that checklist you may not be experiencing a great deal of discomfort but you are excluded from being around other people and from coming onto a school campus there's a large number of people in that category we understand anecdotally we don't have a reporting system that we have that where people say this is the level of my symptom and our information about why peop the basis for people's absences is limited to like illness and the the approved absences that really doesn't get updated uh until uh payroll gets run right so it's just the entry to ask for a substitute teacher that's limited information because we haven't needed to have much more information than that so we know when we just i'm sorry i'm confused about that because if if we did have contract tracing and i know that like we're beyond that but wouldn't if somebody or um any staff person um were calling in sick or student with an absent they would re and they had a positive covid test wasn't the protocol that they reported that they had a positive covent test and then so we can do contact tracing is that that's yes is that just not happening anymore yeah so every time there is a an employee reports a positive cova test that ends up into the process that dr adams referred to in the skiff which generates the that's a form uh the con that i couldn't tell you what the acronym means uh that generates the contact tracing process um so but there are there is a lack of availability for tests and also once you have symptoms uh the testing time periods right aren't necessarily that day uh they're um so um the lack of availability for tests means there are a lot of people with symptoms and we don't know whether or not they are covet positive or they have the flu or cold or allergies uh or other reasons why they may have something i thought we were running a staff like if somebody had a symptom now they can come to besc several times a day and get a test no no uh no that's a miss if uh if you have symptoms you are not allowed to come onto campus or onto any into any of our office buildings if you are exposed if you've had an exposure to covid and you are asymptomatic we are running a testing site here for those um for in those circumstances uh if you are on site and you develop symptoms uh students and staff uh may go and get a a symptomatic rapid test so uh what we know then uh is that uh employees who aren't allowed to come onto campus if they are following the protocols as we request them to do may be well enough and are typically well enough uh to be able to work remotely because they're not exposing anybody and what we've seen in the few schools that have been in in temporary distance learning today and yesterday is uh the teacher that the need for subs has dropped dramatically i believe down to two in one building and one building uh three something along those lines so it's it changes dramatically our ability to staff in remote and i would just say anecdotally my daughter's math teacher even though she was out with covet at the beginning of the the semester she was still making videos for the class so she was taking sick time wasn't actually teaching and was still delivering content so i think there are some teachers who can make a video or do online that wouldn't be able to be in a classroom but that's a great question director brim edwards but i think what you just heard from chief reese is not only does it give
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relieve the strain on the system but the students themselves are getting the benefit of their actual teacher maintaining a continuity of learning there in these temporary circumstances so is that making the case for the continuity of learning in a cdl when you have a high number of staff cases i'm sorry i missed the question i said does that make the case for moving to comprehensive distance learning for if you want to have comprehensive instruction or continuity of instruction to be doing these breaks um so i'm just trying to reconcile the in person with uh with the continuity of instruction so it's to have a short term uh break of in person so that the the people can recover and then shifting back in is that and that that's how the the district's theory of action is that's how we're having continuity of ins of instruction yes versus maybe a building filled with subs who um may or may not be able to deliver sure what we know is that um our typically we have a substitute need around this time of year as we compare it to prior years a couple hundred uh between two you know less than 300 subs at any given day and we're usually able to fill almost every single one of those sub requests and right now that need uh is pushing up to 400 every day and our the availability of subs which is normally over 900 right now is right around 650. so we have particularly diminished capacity excuse me and uh in addition to the diminished capacity what we have also seen is we we know that the trusted relationships that develop between our school staff and our teachers with our students is critically important to making a building run making a classroom run classroom management school climate and replacing a large portion of the staff even with very highly skilled and qualified substitute teachers has a significant impact on student engagement on the climate in a building on classroom and behavioral management and on the ability of a school to run so that is one of the when dr adams and chief garcia are talking about the the matrix that's one of the things that we are looking at um is what who who are strangers in the building and we've heard from principals about that as well so there is there is a complexity of factors to to consider it it'd be nice to just say this is the uniform approach but it just it varies from building to building and the reasons of why why an educator might need to call out and this is why speaking with our building principles has been really invaluable because they'll have those a better insight and help us make those kinds of decisions thank you so much i'm going to move us along now steph i appreciate your your just diligence in working on this and solving for things that we don't even know to solve for yet and so we can move to our our next item i'd also like to ask the board for some grace in wrapping up our meeting after this update and that means we would be um we would be saving our the rest of our agenda for another meeting and that would be our um first reading of the policies and um and our board and conference reports out of um just extreme care for everybody in the room tonight i saw one person nodding i just have a question about one of the policies and whether i don't know this is a question for a student rep weinberg or um [Music] liz large about whether we can because it deals with the elections of the representative whether we need to get the 21 day clock ticking or whether we can wait to the next meeting have the 21 day clock tick and pass it again just want to make sure that we don't run into the spring student elections yeah i'm not sure that i can do that i know the exact dates and can do the precise math i would say as a general proposition if there's any substantive amendment in the middle of that process that then requires an additional 21 days you you so the prudent advice would be to get it moving so that you have time to absorb any amendments that might come in the 21 day period between first and second reading yeah i was going to say the same thing because we're starting to communicate with administration around
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getting elections started because it is a long process to get to the election at individual schools chair to pass maybe i'll suggest um if we take that first reading of the policy which i think we can do quickly and get get the clock started um and then and then i guess i would ask on the the harry tubman middle school is there anything urgent on that or can that wait until the next board meeting you know i would say in the harry time i think everybody's getting briefings um i don't yes i mean everybody's had briefings i think or they could get them um and the the presentation is posted also so my my recommendation was to get this update on harriet tubman relocation and wrap up that uh policy gotcha and and then adjourn if that makes does that make sense so pretty much removing anything that isn't time urgent i do have i can keep my report to three slides but i do have an important uh news flash to share with the board thank you absolutely you can see the staff scrambling there's a reason for it okay absolutely that would be great and then we'll hold off on conference and committee reports could i have one minute to do my report i can keep it to one minute i promise you absolutely we've got we've got one minute plus three minutes we've got four minutes um do you want to go ahead i'm going to be really brief because i've already talked with staff about most of these things but just being conscious of as students are moving back to cdl there was a lot of harm done to students um while they're in cdl losing out on that in-person instruction being isolated we're rehashing all of that in the temporary distance learning also there's a need for guidance around how to conduct instruction during distance learning a lot of teachers have varying lengths of class time and then say okay that's it for today so we have odd 30-minute 25-minute breaks within the day which isn't very conducive to do anything um and also we're just looking for information on finals and in the near future prom and other dances i guess thank you that's noted and feel particularly for seniors this year superintendent and guerrero yes i'll go ahead and jump in because we said three minutes and so um you could have four if you didn't have them we didn't take a moment to say happy new year so feliz ano nuevo directors uh and really i'll just keep it to a couple of appreciations an important news item and i'm glad that we preserved the bulk of the time this evening for uh a school update uh school operations update hopefully uh you heard uh some of those important variables that we're wrestling with right now that we're tracking uh just kudos to our eoc they started early this morning they've met six times throughout the day including during this meeting to really look at these uh factors across the school portfolio i can tell you there's extraordinary measures i'm reading unscripted here so we're going through extraordinary measures to really try to preserve especially our youngest grades and schools open as much as possible but tracking staffing absences it shifts on the hour and so what we noted this evening is a need and the announcement will be go out any minute and families inboxes the need to take jefferson high school to transition them to distance learning there's just an unsustainable core of staff absences there so i wanted to make sure and share that and i want to thank the eoc for their work there's a whole group of staff behind even the senior staff that you saw here this evening uh thank you jonathan for spending your birthday with us tonight uh and then just two more appreciations one you saw my announcement earlier regarding my appointment of our new deputy superintendent please please come on up cheryl very proud to have her in this assignment she comes very well qualified i think you saw my announcement that's been shared broadly with the community uh we're really excited i'm really excited to have her as a partner in this work reactions oh i'm just excited i'm excited to um you know continue to do the work i shared with my team that this gives a great opportunity for me not to step away from my role fully as a chief academic officer although i will but it gives me an opportunity to continue the work in academics and also bridge that work across the office of schools and the office of student support services so that there's one aligned vision goal and practice to
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ensure that we're using one language to support the needs of our children advance our our teaching and learning practices advance our practices around instructional leadership of our leaders within our schools within our cohorts and also looking deeply at our student populations that have unique needs i think i've shared in my first time with you that i'm a special education teacher by nature so i have just worked the full gamut from student support services to supervising schools and principals serving as a deputy a deputy chief of schools and chief academic officer so this is a wonderful opportunity to just bridge the work and continue under the leadership of superintendent guerrero and the vision of the strategic plan thank you very much congratulations thank you and then lastly i know you're in a hurry but for for those folks who are tuned in i want to make sure maybe not everybody's aware the month of january why is my clicker not working terry can you advance me a slide there we go the month of january is actually school board recognition month so i want to make sure we recognize your dedication your hard work as local school board members so thank you for your public service uh you can have five minutes let yourself uh you know for folks that are tuned in you see what our board is up to but you know across the school you know across the country these elected positions they really do play an important role in making sure a school system has a clearly articulated vision that they convey the expectations for for student performance that we have ways to checking on that we talked earlier about our assessments and our ongoing instructional work making sure our resources are lined up to those priorities uh and make sure that we create the conditions the climate the expectations that every one of our students uh uh that we have high expectations and and dreams for that we want to see them have their dreams be realized so so with much appreciation uh for each of you directors thank you for your service and dedication to the students and families of the portland public schools thank you that's my report thank you so much for your your brevity and um and your your sense of humor there thank you congratulations to everybody that's um we're we're service oriented uh unpaid volunteers we're gonna move now to uh for our last i'm sorry not our last item i would do a stuff or the harriet tubman relocation and then the first okay get that moving so we'll here we'll get an update currently uh right now on the harriet tubman middle school relocation um that we can excuse everybody and then uh we'll go on to our final item good evening everyone good evening thank you for taking the time uh we will we will look to be quick and brief um so with this topic tonight uh next slide oh wait i have the clicker don't i nothing it's not like we're in a hurry it's we're trying to be sensitive to staff that's working on their 12th hour i'm happy to stay all night [Music] [Laughter] will do so my name is dan young i'm chief operating officer and i'm joined here tonight with our director of real estate and planning dana white so we are going to run through an overview of the harriet tubman middle school relocation project so we know we don't have a lot of time and this topic can get pretty deep and pretty detailed pretty quickly so our goals tonight are pretty simple we want to provide a high level overview of the topic provide a status update of staff efforts to date answer your questions and we want to get some high level board feedback that will help guide future efforts as we move forward and to note this is just the beginning of an ongoing conversation that we're going to be having with the board uh we're going to get into all the details uh as we go forward and as we of course learn them and including starting with an update at next week's intergovernmental committee meeting so let's start with a quick overview of the problem oda is planning to widen i-5 and move the freeway closer to harriet tubman middle school i presume there's no surprises there this slide illustrates the schedule of
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i-5 construction as it progresses in multiple phases immediately adjacent to harriet tubman in general it starts a little bit to the north and then moves closer to the school the main takeaway from this page is that the biggest impact to the school will be during construction of the elliott viaduct and this this graphic here shows the viaduct a little more clearly you're going to see just how close it gets to the school it's kind of hard to see on that picture but access to that construction site will be both from the the north and uh west of the site and from the south so it's really going to be starting to wrap around the school so building the viaduct it's going to be loud it's going to be dirty it's going to impact the teaching and learning environment of the school and it's planned to take place during normal school hours starting in 2027 so we want to move the dutmo students before then we can think of the decision process in four phases uh we are really somewhere about here partially into discovery and starting and then get into uh criteria development so to be sure uh there's a lot more to come and board's feedback will inform the process okay let's talk about staff efforts today so since roughly last summer staff has been looking into potential options for relocation and we've bifurcated the site evaluation discussion into two categories one we call category a which is purchase of a new site and rebuilding a new school and category b which is relocating utilizing existing pps property both both options have pluses and minuses and this of course is not intended to be an exhaustive list but one of the biggest benefits of category a of purchasing a new site is that will not impact the feeder schools the elementary schools the feature schools or those patterns and the challenge has been options are limited but we'll get into that in just a minute so stats when we first started to look at this uh our effort was to find a new site to purchase and in doing so we identified three simple criteria to filter potential properties not unlike how someone might search the internet when they're looking for a new home criteria number one is location we aim to find a site within the existing tub and catchment area a site within the catchment area would allow the tubman community to stay intact avoid reconfigure reconfiguration of existing school boundaries and hopefully alleviate concerns around access and enrollment changes criterion two was land area between six to nine acres allows adequate site for for sighting buildings providing athletic and outdoor spaces staff and community parking bus circulation and more and and whenever we show this we always get the question of can it be smaller and certainly you can you can put a school on a smaller site uh than six acres you just start to have trade-offs and have to choose between some of those site amenities an example is tubman dublin currently sits on three acres but has virtually no no parking no bus circulation and limited outdoor space other than the park to the north uh and number three is availability though we do not have yet specific timelines and decision milestones we do know the viaduct construction will be impactful to student learning it will start in 2027 as it's reported and properties that will take years to plan and negotiate prior to designing construction which also take years are likely not viable options a couple of quick definitions a viable site is a site that has been thoroughly vetted and we are comfortable developing as a new middle school we don't have any sites that we would call viable sites that will be down the road a potentially viable site is one that appears to me all or some of the criteria and may ultimately ultimately become a viable site and an unlikely viable site is one that doesn't appear to meet the criteria and isn't likely even to meet the criteria even when significant trade-offs are considered so uh here is a sampling of the sum of the sites that we have looked at you can see the criteria across the columns at the top and a listing of the properties down the rows unfortunately you will quickly notice that none of the properties we pulled met our initial criteria and to be and to know we weren't you know really strict and rigid when we were looking at sites we looked at sites that were outside the catchment area if they were close we looked at sites that were smaller than six acres for example but we did not find any sites that seemed to meet those criteria very well so you have this document i'll let you absorb it a little bit and we can come back to it when we get to feedback and questions too maybe just for the sake of what's the ppa acronym for portland police association
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is that the one near the boys and girls club or uh yeah okay okay so status uh for category a is we're still looking uh our first cut didn't produce any clearly viable options which is okay we just know that we need to readjust so next steps include staff's going to be re-reviewing options with a particular focus on some of the smaller sites we're engaging with portland parks and rec about potential use of parks property and we're interested in exploring some other creative solutions that are out there and in a bit we're going to ask the board for some help and some guidance on how we might do that category b so then alternate to buying a new site is of course utilizing existing property pbs owns several parcels in the tubman catchment area including tubman and four elementary schools one potential relocation option is to convert one of the elementary schools into a middle school modernizing that school and improving the other remaining three elementary schools to support the k5 students in that catchment area the opportunities or benefits with category b is increased enrollment at schools with capacity potential expanded programming within those schools needed capital improvements at multiple schools instead of just one and retaining tubman within the catchment area this option however would of course be materially impactful to many students families and communities and that's something that we've heard about in our community engagement meetings so far and something that if jonathan's around i'll talk about here in a little bit uh category b so here's a list of uh own properties within the catchment area a couple of things to draw your eyes to starting at the bottom is a list of school properties that are not elementary schools and we're more than happy to go into details and upcoming discussions about those but for brevity tonight all the schools have impediments to development in the near future and that's why they are lower on the list but that's something we can discuss more for certain the four elementary schools are lit that are listed above and we also included some additional data in this table including current utilization rates and building area uh overall utilization of these four schools hovers around 55 percent and enrollment forecasts do not predict significant increases in the next 10 years so in other words from a space perspective there appears to be enough area to accommodate the k5 students even if one of those schools is converted to a middle school and there's a lot of data here i'm going to keep moving along we can come back to this table uh when we get the questions we also have it in our packets even better uh so current status of this category uh staff is still looking into the feasibility of this option uh it's still under consideration and as the board knows there's been no decision about this option or any other uh and if we are to move forward and there's there's no clear side of which one would be the best the best option we do have or want to ask for some some board feedback tonight and we'll get to that in just a moment i believe courtney wesling is here virtually i'm here can you hear me we can hear you okay good evening everybody um so why we're all here uh is that we have a rare opportunity during february session to potentially access resources to fund a relocation of tubman we have historic revenues in the state we have resources available for a lot of things as a state and so we're in close conversations with the governor's office who has indicated that she wants the school to move um her office has been meeting we've been meeting with her office somewhat regularly to brainstorm what a capital stack would look like capital stack being what are the funding sources that could fund such a relocation we've also been meeting with legislative leaders to share sort of early budget estimates on what it would cost to relocate under these two scenarios that dan outlined and then of course the sessions coming up in a few weeks and we want to have those conversations even more uh you know i think dig a little deeper and and really with the help of the governor's office and key legislators make this happen the trick of course is the timing the timing of the session doesn't necessarily line up with the timing of having to make a decision it's going to be um you know it's going to take more time to have a robust transparent process with our community we've had initial meetings with the various um families from the various schools that dan mentioned the catchment schools and you know we're hearing loud and clear that they you know they don't love the idea of being displaced obviously that would be you know i think any family would have concerns about that so there's just
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there just needs to be a longer dialogue with our families and as dan outlined a deeper dive into some of these additional opportunities sites and just looking further under the hood to see what might be possible so it's unfortunately nothing ever works out with a bow on it where you can the timing of the legislature would would match up with the timing of the other side of the process the the identification of sites but we're doing the best we can and i think um i feel you know good that our legislators are open-minded to this they the conversations we've had so far there's an understanding that this is a school that needs to move um [Music] and so we'll continue that work in the next few weeks as we head into february and then i don't know if jonathan's around but i'm happy to also hit the community engagement slide if that's helpful yep yes please courtney go ahead okay so we as i mentioned briefly and dan also we've done a little bit of engagement in the last month and a half we had a couple of meetings prior to christmas the winter holidays um at two of our schools and then we did four virtual events last week um as well under the circumstances um and like i and attendance was was really good a lot of families came out um principals did a great job of making sure folks knew about the events and um you know it was great to hear from our families um about and they were creative they had some great suggestions of um of locations to further uh investigate i thought it was it's always great to hear you know from people who aren't in it every day and had some some really good suggestions so i know that dan and dana have added some of those to the list of sort of further exploration um but again as i said you know i think option option b at this moment has been uh met with quite a bit of um just disappointment i don't think people like that option from what we're hearing so far um so yeah they've been great well attended people are engaged we'll continue to talk to community we'll continue to share as we move through the site identification and sort of investigation process and um and dan will talk more about what we need from the board to help move things forward uh courtney thank you so much for that uh and uh for that uh update on community engagement the only thing i would just add is uh i wanna appreciate our directors uh you know many of you have participated in in-person sessions or virtually over the last few sessions and so it's it's really really helpful and really powerful actually to have you as the decision makers at that table uh you know to hear directly from our families because ultimately this is your decision as a as a as an elected body and wanting to make sure that that you hear directly from our community so as we continue this discussion uh with the the schools that are impacted you know we we will make sure to work with you to design you know engagement sessions that are meaningful for you as you make the decision obviously meaningful for our families so that they can create that they feel comfortable to share their thoughts and opinions about a a really sensitive issue right a conversation about uh equity came up racial equity in particular and you know it's important to know that this decision has multiple uh pieces to it right there's the cultural piece right there the historical piece there's the impact on our students and their ability and and their students as part particularly students of color who live in that neighborhood et cetera so when we look at equity it's not a one-dimensional look but it's a multi-dimensional look that looks at the history the the context the the decision points through those lenses so i think you know look forward to working with all of you to engage our community in this really meaningful uh uh item uh in front of us thank you i just want to speak to that a little bit um so when i want to make sure that the community understands a few things um one that there's no decision has been made and i want to make sure that we're very clear on that um this with the move is contingent of a couple things that we have no control over one um the state legislation uh legislator has been the state giving us money to do this um another one is we know we have uh land limits you know we we don't have the space to move to everywhere that was suggested and so i want to make sure with us as a community uh that we let in the community know that just because something is an option doesn't necessarily mean it is an option
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and i'm gonna just go on record as saying you know you know folks talk about lloyd center well one lloyd center is not for sale and two we don't have 300 some million dollars if it was for sale to go buy it and retransform it to a middle school and i think that would probably be a little bit big middle school um for that right um so i think we need to make sure that we're realistic um and the the goal for us to do these community engagements is to come together to be collaborative to figure out a way for us to come together and find a solution for one of our schools that is historically historically been african-american school to figure out a way to how do we help those students and that's the bottom line is about our students it's not about our feelings it's not about our political agendas it's not about your personal feelings or if you want to walk to school or not it's about our kids and right now they're in an unsafe place and so our goal when we come into the community is not to say we want to move your school our our goal and our messaging is we want to collaborate and find a solution for our school and so i want to make sure that the community understands that is that when we're coming to you we're coming to you asking for solutions saying hey this is what we got and if you've got other solutions or other ideas we're more than happy to entertain those um so i want to make sure the community is very understanding of our goals and our mission and the reason why we're coming to you god to the community so early on is to be inclusive is to make sure we're being transparent so you you're asking for transparency we're giving it to you so this is the thing that right now we're asking for that collaboration we're asking for those comments we're asking for the inputs to help our school our kids who's in an unsafe environment right now so that's all i have to say about that i think i'd like to add something at some point as well i just want to why don't you go ahead um so i it's imperative that we are that we're transparent and it's imperative the community knows that we're trying to do that but i also i i was taking some notes and putting some stuff down because it's also imperative that we understand where the frustration comes from and and why this is such an issue because the black community around here has been displaced time and time again for the expansion of one thing or another so first it was first it was i-5 then it was the memorial coliseum and then it was emanuel hospital and then each time that that we wanted to make this expansion for the name uh for the sake of making our community better and making it safer and making it more prominent we moved and displaced black families so when they built um the i5 and i was out there for everybody to read in 1960 the lower albino neighborhood had a population of about 3 000 persons about two-thirds of whom were black in 1962 the oregon state highway department carved interstate 5 through the heart of this neighborhood and through north portland and directly demolished more than 300 homes which never got replaced those families are still here today then in 1973 then we say we want to do emanuel hospital which we moved families from tour downs houses and claimed it in imminent domain and then we let it sit for years it set so these families were we're told we're going to build this immaculate hospital and it's set for years but we did this in the name of making the community better and so of the hundred of the 171 households forced out by the city through eminent domain between 1971 and 1973 to pave the way for emmanuel hospital most of those homes most of those families were black so when we come in and we say i just want us to be clear because in order to really understand the gravity of what we're asking and where the frustration is coming from you have to understand the years and years and decades of trauma that the community has has faced and now we're coming back as a school district and saying that our hands are tied we've got to do something which we do but who's being impacted by this black families yeah so i just want us to be clear i'm not i'm not saying that that what you're doing is wrong i love the fact that we're being transparent and that we're talking about this now i just want us to be crystal clear that the reason that we're seeing this push back and the reason that people are irritated and the reason that people are frustrated because once again white america is coming in and telling black families we're going to make things better for you but you got to go well director green i absolutely agree with
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you with that sentiment and the the everything that you've outlined i actually want to make one specific clarity though and i think it's important as we have this discussion as a community that we look at the history and that we actually listen to black families because the folks that are uh you know sending us emails and the ones that are doing this communication those are not the black families that we need to hear back about and that actually are impacted by this history so you know i mean i'm 100 you know director hollins did a masterful job frankly as a fellow as a man of color you know being uh explained being told the black history of albina you know when you grew up in this community and and and how disrespectful that was uh frankly uh and so it so i i hear you and i think it's important that as a community we have that real conversation in a very transparent way and that one that lifts up that actually lifts up the voices of our black community in this community in this city because for a long time whether it's the school district whether it's the city whether it's the state we have not done that and you have our commitment as a staff and i know that this board is committed to lifting up those voices and making the decision that best serves black children i think um director scott i just want to add one very small point to this um which is and getting back to what courtney talked about with the state legislature and i'm i'm so glad that the governor is cooperating in the state legislature i want to make sure that everything you all just said that that the legislature gets pulled into this process as well as as this is something they also need to focus on because there are a lot of timelines that we hear about and i get them and i've been on the side of driving those timelines and you've got to have a site you've got to have this to get in the capital plan but what we absolutely don't want to do is short-circuit our engagement process and short-circuit hearing from the community in order to do this the legislature also is focused on equity or says they are and wants to be moving and i think this is how when we talk about doing business differently than we always have it means that maybe the legislature puts money in the capital plan which they absolutely can i promise you that as a budget person even without a specific site even without a specific and you know and and thing and they can do that if they choose to do that and if we get the local legislators on board with the fact that there is a short session they can still include money in their capital plan and we can still do engagement for as long as we need to to respond to everything you've just said this is going to be a win-win-win for everybody and it'll be a way for the legislature to stand up and say they are also focused on these on writing these historical wrongs so director um scott so those are exactly the conversations that are happening so courtney and myself and lindsay capps the chief education officer of the state have been meeting individually with legislators and also at the governor's office on a pretty regular basis individually to ask them about it and kind of lay out like the cost because as you know they need like a ballpark range to be able to put something in the budget and early on there was definitely a sentiment that we're not going to you can't expect the legislature to give us money without a site and over the last month the conversation has evolved to thinking about including some sort of snapback language that um that we wouldn't actually have a site identified but we'd still have a budget range and we have some you know things that we can work with because we know we obviously just built kellogg so we have some idea of what a middle school built to our ed specs cost um but include in in it so they give the legislature because they have a fiduciary responsibility not just to hand pps money and then nothing ever gets built or you know what whatever so potentially including that in it so that that gives us because we do we do have the the opportunity right now where everything is i think things are very aligned and there is money so we definitely should look at 2022. the risk is without a site how do we how do we demonstrate that we are going to actually use the money as they gave it so um we're working on that but i think it's an excellent point and that we have to keep talking about that and explaining why we don't have a site it's not because we haven't looked um but we do need to have the conversa conversation with the community and the the challenges of finding a site within the historic albina community thank you for that work i appreciate that too and i want to add that um i would add criteria such as the site has cleaner air than the current site and uh access to you know solid transportation infrastructure which most of albina has i'd also really like to see us allocate have the legislature allocate dollars and ask you know and and find a spot that does not displace historically black residents i was also surprised about to hear about the freeway when it was built because it is older than i am
02h 35m 00s
but not by much i guess so um i i my family was impacted by the all of that development work that happened in albina um so yeah i i really want to hear i i've heard very strongly from the community members specifically at saban principal lathan and the community members at irvington i was really impacted by what i heard at those two engagements and it's not lost on me the irony that we'd be making a decision that may impact historically black schools during black history month and um you know king is my neighborhood school but i think mostly i want to make sure that black families are not harmed in this process one more time so if you're looking for feedback i have just on your list of sites um is that you're done right now or is that you looking for the board direction right now yeah i'll just i'll just say i just i just clicked to the last slide and so uh i appreciate everyone's comments and i certainly appreciate the comments about this being a transparent process that's the point we want to be transparent we want to be thorough and it's going to be iterative there's going to be trade-offs there's going to be some tough decisions and we want to make sure that we're being deliberate and we're being very clear about what criteria and what data we're using to make those decisions uh you know staff is going to continue looking at options uh if resources are infinite we'll look at all options simultaneously but we know that's not the case and and resources are are limited so uh feedback and direction from the board will help us uh use our resources wisely so what we put up here is a couple of questions the ones in orange are the ones i think we're most we're engineering all feedback but but these are the ones that will help guide our efforts going forward and so a couple of specific questions are we've only looked to purchase uh property acquire new property within the existing tub and catchment area we've heard from the atomic community they you know would like to stay in in the neighborhood uh there have been a lot of suggestions from others uh not not you know board members or staff but from the outside to look at at sites outside of the catherine area so we're curious to hear feedback on that that potential option and then if there are other specific sites we are interested in being creative and then when as far as the category be utilizing uh our existing properties uh certainly during our engagement uh efforts you know we've heard some pretty strong sentiments about that so we want to make sure that staff is headed down the right path by reviewing this as a potential option if it is not and something needs to be taken off the table then we would like to know that now so we don't spend more effort on that but so those were the main ones but we were happy to take all feedback and questions those are open-ended questions and just in the interest of time i'm just wondering if are there staff recommendations in in terms of these in terms of direction to go that might i mean because because i mean we can all weigh in on that i just we might be here until 10. so yeah and and i'll point out our intention is to create kind of a series of meetings so that we're taking the board along and we're providing updates and so we have this meeting here tonight and we intended this to be high level and you know waiting in the water at a fairly high level uh we're going to do an update at the igc meeting next week and then we're going to be scheduling other meetings as well so right now any feedback that we have that can help guide our efforts uh we're happy to hear what those are and there will be more opportunities so it's not this and then done i can answer them okay first one should staff consider property outside of harriet tubman middle school catchment area i think it would be a hard sell for me unless that property is like 100 the best property we've ever seen like period ever um are there other specific properties staff should evaluate i don't know and should staff continue to investigate category b i would say yes but with a caveat of continuing to work with community members um one positive i do see is we're theoretically going to be um modernizing all of our schools within the next 20 30 years anyways so this might just speed up the process for a couple schools way to do the lightning round jackson i would concur with jackson that i would not want us to consider property outside htms catchment area unless it was like the perfect property um i don't know of any specific uh properties that we should evaluate um i feel like the decision criteria that you all have listed about what is the length of time what is the size is it available like all of that is the appropriate thing category b makes my heart hurt i think for the same things that um director green lifted up about displacement and what director de pass said about what what are we doing to existing communities and you know i i know that we have to to make some changes here to to keep our students safe like director
02h 40m 00s
holland said um i think we know that keeping students at the current heritage site is not in their best interest um so i think one of the key information pieces about category b for me will be about the impacts on that community and then the the notion i wonder is you know i know jefferson's got their property and i know we've talked about building a kairos on the jeff property is there any way to look at the jefferson design and add a tubman there and that may be like completely out of alignment because we need so much land for a high school already that we don't have room for tubman but are there creative ways to to co-locate those two programs um so that no one's displaced and i don't i don't know the answers to those but that would be the question i would ask under sort of if we can't do category a what's the least disruptive category b we could do i would say ditto um to those answers on category on category b i guess what i would say is if we are going to continue to investigate that it would have to be like the only way i'd be comfortable moving forward is if the community agreed so which i i'm actually not i mean i think that could happen if if broad hear me out i think it can happen in the sense of of of if if the rationale for moving harriet tubman to a particular site and and what's going to happen to those families you know if if that is in fact what what we as a district think is the best option and we can convince the community it's the best option then i say go forward with it if it becomes a situation where we think it's the best option and we can't convince the community then i say no so i essentially put that in the hands of the community i'm a little more optimistic and again i don't even know if it is the best option i'm still optimistic that people when you spend enough time with them and really bring them into the process and explain everything you know you can change smiles yeah so i'm i'm gonna go on with uh director larry was saying that um and i'm not gonna answer those questions specifically um but i think if we're looking at doing some kind of combination and i think i mentioned this to i emailed this to dan before if we're looking at being able to do something transformative and doing something um audacious for instance and it doesn't have to be i'm going to make sure i'm clear i'm not pointing out king for any particular reason except for an example um if we for instance tore down king and build like a seven or eight story building where we had elementary on the bottom uh middle on the top or something like that um those are the kind of ideas and thinkings that we could look at trying to implement or do but those are some of the kind of ideas that we're looking for to see if those kind of ideas can work which we're you're not displacing um at least temporarily not displacing you know a whole community you're actually improving the community i mean you're proving the services and things that they can have at that school so that's that so i'm going to be additive on the idea side um because you guys already heard my opinion a lot of times um the question of questions i would have is the multi-parcel sites so here we have some smaller ones but like the boys and girls club i mean they're a partner of ours already but the if that's the portland police site that's right next next to it is there some multi-parcel sites that would be big enough because looks like if you add those two together you're at four which is bigger than the current tubman um and then the other thing is like i'm intrigued by um emmanuel and i know pps in the past has been very reticent to ever use his emma domain but i i do know that suburban district other districts do it and um there is very limited if if we're all going to say we want to keep it in albino there's limited sites that are big enough and to me um that's one i think we should look at and i'm not sure quite sure why the availability is long yeah you know it wouldn't be an easy conversation with emmanuel but there would be some restorative justice piece to it in some ways um they've already sold it that's all that they have a relationship with a organization uh cultural specific organization to develop that land already then why is it on the list a lot of stuff is on the list so i think you should be looking at sites that just dig deeper irvington park um and there's nobody who's just going to hand us a four to five eighth parcel um so to me i think we need to my preference would be to look at some of these sites that we that that have the capability to build a big enough building versus moving outside of albina yeah
02h 45m 00s
but there's no easy site that's clear and if i so i'd much rather do that than uh be in a in a way unless it's some way that like director hollins described in which the community felt that it was an additive um action versus something that's a takeaway i wanted to also um yeah say add to director holland's and director lowry's ideas of co-locating programs i've actually attended [Music] a one building several academy or two academy model and really appreciate the creative thinking that was brought forth and would hope that we would focus on very creative solutions that are reparative and restorative for this historic community and not displacing look explore what we can do without the displacement you know using creative thinking and um have you heard enough has everybody weighed in i don't really have anything else to add other than that uh i i'm with jackson it would have to be the absolute perfect property if it's outside of the catchment area now another thing that we need to keep in mind in this conversation is that we know that our our enrollment is declining and projected to decline for the next two decades particularly at the um elementary level elementary and middle so that should be a consideration when we're looking at some of these other sites because the truth is we may be in a position of consolidation regardless of whether we're looking at any of those buildings for harriet tubman so that's just a fact that i think we need to keep in mind and um there's something else but it's escaping me so thanks for all your work and keep us posted and let us know uh how we can help great uh we very much appreciate the feedback now i'll reflect back a couple of things real quick i think i'm hearing pretty strongly that looking at new property outside the tub and catchment area is not a strong desire but in case we find that perfect site you know we're not going to rule that out we're not going to be absolutists here today about any of these options and then similarly category the a the new parcel is definitely preferred to the category b even if it's being creative uh category b not necessarily being off the table but uh i won't use the words last resort but definitely wouldn't be preferable we want we want to find something new build a new school and we'll look to be creative with those options i'm sorry i just remember the other thing that i wanted to mention which is that i think it's important the timing is a little awkward but it is important for us to connect this process with our um center for black student excellence in those investments and to make sure that wherever we land or whatever path we take in this process is aligned with um what we're looking at and where we might be going with those because it's it's um it's very much connected and the timing is not ideal but i don't want to lose sight of of that thank you for reminding us director constance this cool community is absolutely an integral part of that constellation and initiative thank you so much um for putting your presentation together and um it sounds like you have enough information or feedback to move on to next steps absolutely thank you very much thank you we're going to do a first reading we're going to do a first reading of we're going to we're we're addressing a time sensitive issue um director broome edwards did you want to would you introduce great uh thank you um we have tonight before us a first reading of proposed amendments the student representative in district student council policy one point two zero point is your michael julia oops uh thank you we have before us a recommendation from the policy committee to consider some amendments to the student representative in district student council policy 1.20 0.012 and it came out unanimously recommendation for a first reading and i also have been to the district student council to present the proposed changes
02h 50m 00s
we had a great dialogue they asked a lot of good questions just in its essence is that this the amendments would clarify that representatives um to um for the student representative can be for this district student council they can either be elected or appointed and that whether they're elected or appointed members of the district student council they have equal rights there's also some language around the bylaws and there's also alignment on who is actually eligible to be the student representative because our policy is not we have two policies that are inconsistent so this would make it um anybody who's a sophomore to a senior um would be eligible and then it also makes some changes to the removal to of the student representative and what the process would be to bring some clarity and um we had a great discussion and i made the offer that if they had some changes they wanted to make they could bring them to the committee to date there have not been any um i haven't received anything so with that um i would just say that the this draft policy revision will be posted on the board website the comment period is a minimum of 21 days the contact information public comment will be posted on the policy um the policy committee will consider any proposed changes and then the board will have a second reading if we're ready um in february 8th of 2022 it's february 8th or february 1st for 21 days uh well i think that's the next board meeting after the 21 days okay thank you thank you so we are adjourned thank you

Sources

PPS Board of Education, BoardBook Public View, https://meetings.boardbook.org/Public/Organization/915 (accessed: 2023-01-25T21:27:49.720701Z)
PPS Communications, "Board of Education" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CC942A46270A16E (accessed: 2023-10-10T04:10:04.879786Z)
PPS Communications, "PPS Board of Education Meetings" (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbZtlBHJZmkdC_tt72iEiQXsgBxAQRwtM (accessed: 2023-10-14T01:02:33.351363Z)
PPS Board of Education, PPS Board of Education - Full Board Meetings (YouTube playlist), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk0IYRijyKDW0GVGkV4xIiOAc-j4KVdFh (accessed: 2023-10-11T05:43:28.081119Z)

2022-01-11 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: 1/11/22 Board of Education Regular Meeting

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