2022-05-04 PPS School Board Special Meeting

From SunshinePPS Wiki
District Portland Public Schools
Date 2022-05-04
Time 17:00:00
Venue BESC Mazama Room
Meeting Type special
Directors Present missing
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Event 1: 5/04/22 PPS Board of Education Special Meeting

00h 00m 00s
good evening everyone this special board meeting of the board of education for mid-fourth 2022 is called to order welcome mr macon we understand that you're here tonight on behalf of and at the request of your ex-wife ms rohania ben safia the purpose of tonight's meeting is to consider her complaints number two 2020-09 under board policy 4.50.032 p the district follows certain procedures for resolution of formal complaints by students parents or guardians and people who reside in the district in order to resolve formal complaints in a fair and timely manner we expect that this complaint can be heard in its entirety in this public meeting because we don't understand the complaint to relate to or reveal confidential student records if we need to consider such confidential records we'll move into executive session under ors 332.0611b if that happens following stop for just a moment are we libraries here yes also oh great okay great so we expect that this complaint can be heard in its entirety in this public meeting because we do not understand the complaint to relate to or reveal confidential student records if we need to consider such confidential records we will move into executive session under ors 332 point zero six one one b if that happens following the executive session will return to a public meeting to vote on your complaint you'll have five minutes to provide your comments tonight and then following your comments board members may follow up with questions for you or for staff i will note that we have an additional pending complaint from you and barb macon that will be heard at a different meeting we ask that this meeting be focused solely on the content of ms ben sofia's complaint mr megan would you like to begin can you guys hear me yeah i can thank you oh are you guys waiting on me we're waiting for you to provide your comments oh okay oh i didn't know i thought i was sick you know i'm sorry i couldn't join the party guys i think i either i got a real bad coal or i got covert i'm not sure but uh feels like a real bad coke so you feel better soon yeah yeah so we're uh you've got five minutes to um share your comments with us tonight yeah uh one wanted to i wanted to give you guys a story i was driving down broadway and there was a um there was a guy holding a sign he was spinning the sign you know and um and i told my daughter jokingly i was like boy man i'm glad to see a guy out here working like this because if things get real bad you know i could do this job you know so it's perfect i could spend the sign i could still find a way to make some money you know and she just sighed and she said you know dada jobs like that are not for black men jobs like that are for white people white men a prestigious person like you you have to find a different job and i was like oh okay all right i'm like i could understand that and she went on to say that that process would be embarrassing for our people you know this is some of the things i taught little man low man is down at uh he's he's down at the ducks and i taught him or he knows we don't compete with white people we're better he's down at he's down in eugene he got he he got honors math on the placement test he took a he took a class that i had never heard of and he never heard of it was a senior something i don't i couldn't even pronounce the math class he called me once the class was over and say i got a c in the class you know i was like wow i'm like what did everybody else get he was like well a lot of people dropped out they got f's or d's he later came home and said he was the only one would be in the class he doesn't we don't there's no competition you know what with my kids in a white venue he's in he's so bored down in eugene that he's in finland now taking math classes in one of the fourth best
00h 05m 00s
schools in the world he's acing it to use the kind of language that was on this web page how do you how do you create that kind of philosophy or that doctrine for black kids black kids ben kiefer said the reason why buckets are being played at the school is because it's a part of black people's culture danny ledesma said the reason why the buckets are at vernon elementary school is because it's a part of black peace people culture doctor mr bacon b i just want to remind you we you you have about two and a half minutes left and we need to stay focused on i'm staying focused that's what i'm talking about on that webpage it was white parents according to the superintendent and kaylee simpson she said in my complaint just like every educator that's in that room including the superintendent including you members of the board you guys said it was okay to teach kids buckets on a pps web page now miss brim edwards went far enough and kaylee simpson told him to take the page down ben keefer lied now i want to let everybody know that ben keefer has like my my complaints are going to go straight through the ode because ben keeper has not told the truth he has double talked on every one of my complaints i have evidence of that if you guys want if you guys want me to bring the evidence i could bring the evidence to you now why is being keith alive because he wants doctoring the same mr macon i i really i hate to keep interrupting you but i also we are time limited tonight right i mean i'm telling you what's going on i know what i'm talking about on miss ben sophia's complaint the superintendent and kaylee simpson said it's okay for white people to didact that means to teach black kids buckets on that webpage that's a violation you can't teach a person's culture that's a violation of state law you guys have consistently said this over and over that's why these complaints are in the ode now we can't com we cannot um discuss anything that's already gone to the ode i i didn't discuss it instead we can stay focused on i'm talking about it this morning did you i'll pull out the i'll pull out the paper you want me to pull out the sentence that says the superintendent and kaylee simpson said it's okay to didact that means to teach in an arrogant way right that's on that's on that page that's on my complaint she wrote it now you want me to pull that out for you ma'am to didact that means to teach now you guys are teaching kids buckets and that's why in your mentality is the law says this culturally relevant pedagogy pedagogy means to teach every one of you educators in a room said it was okay to teach and mr makin pockets now the superintendent hired an investigator i'm talking about the complaint i i'm not talking about the car the part of the complaint you want me to talk about tell me what to talk about tell me what to talk about what should i talk about mr macon i i can hear your frustration i'm not booking when we started when when we started we we said you have five minutes i got myself you keep cutting me off so do i got another five minute i'm telling you what i want to talk about now you telling me i need to talk about something else what do you want me to talk about i'll give you another minute and a half how about what would you like me to talk about i'll talk about now i'm telling you it's been a consistent process or of educators saying it's okay to teach culture to my daughter buckets has nothing to do with my daughter buckets has nothing to do with her education i would like to remind you mr pass you also said you voted and said it was okay for black kids to be touched it was a part of our culture horseplay in a complaint that our book now sangusti is in prison for the rest of his life because of horseplay and you said it was a part of black people culture to go behind kids and touch them from the back this is why kids are failing in pps i'm done
00h 10m 00s
thank you um so board members do hello oh yes hello yeah can you hear me i'm getting first airframe i just said i just want to say one sentence i really don't understand how pps board can resolve my complaint in a five minutes uh five minutes you know discussion this is really insulting very insulting because when i go back to my email i have about 100 page back and forth regarding that complaint and you allow mr f maker which represent me because i have surgery five minutes this is absurd and insulting that's all i have to say so i am very frustrated too i understand and i appreciate your comments and you know i don't think you do i don't think you guys do honestly i don't think you guys do how can you address my complaint in five minutes where we have been discriminating and you you i don't even think you read read you know the 80 or 90 page the back and forth and what ephem is talking about he was trying to summarize but this is very insulting to give us five minutes to address our complaint this is ridiculous it means to me that honestly you don't care they don't care let me address my complaint the reason faith is not in school okay um i've i've asked if the board members um thank you for your comments could uh have additional questions but i am very very frustrated right now i can hear that five minutes to address a complaint for pps i just want to remind you that my son went through it with sabine when he was in seventh grade that's when he started you know being discriminated because he didn't have a knowledge of color the kids they didn't care about white black asian the principal taught him that back then and i had to go to the federal government and now here we go again years later and you've given me five minutes to address a racist complaint discriminatory complaint and you give us five minutes but this is how pps work it doesn't surprise me so this is insulting to me and i am done thank you um and i appreciate your comments and i and your frustration as you know we've been um we've heard multiple complaints since i believe the fall of 2020 and so i mean most of us have read through the entirety of the complaint um and the follow-up and we've we've tried to schedule this meeting i think this is the third or fourth attempt so you know we're interested in getting some resolution as well um do i have any any questions that we've got staff here ready to uh ready to respond do any board members have additional questions for mr macon or ms bensafia i've seen portions for staff for staff if but i mean yes it would be yeah go ahead um just uh for the record because this has gone back since 2019 um so just looking back through the materials i thought it was um first one thank the staff for responding to the complaint and for the for the record i guess i want to just i think you have a question but um just state that we did ask the district did ask and i asked that the facebook page changed changed their name so that um it didn't imply that that was a district facebook page and that it's not moderated by the district staff or controlled by it um i did want to ask though because as i was reading through the material today it looked like part of the mater look like part of the back and forth between um jamal macon and some of the parents that they were missing submissions and i was just wanting at the time um we we realized that as well but um and we i believe requested that they provide us all of the the information from the the information that you have before us and that's what they presented
00h 15m 00s
to us it's the same information they provided to the family that you saw that the family provided their initial appeal it's all that we and because the no pps staff is in there governing the page we weren't able to do what we would do if it was a district site where we could you know pull data can i comment on that please sure go ahead uh you guys one of the things you guys did in an investigation you went to the accuser and you asked the accuser for information and guess what the accuser did they erased evidence now i have i i actually knew that you guys was gonna do that so what i did i actually have the more um the vicious comments that they said about my son on that site now uh ben keefer in one of my first complaints the first complaint being kiefer said that he did have control over the page now if you guys need that information i can get that to you and my first complaint now i know you guys are now i'm glad this is on record because i will give this to the ode and what happened when you guys being keeper agreed with the white parents when they changed all of the information on there now i have copies of what the original um doctrine or i'm not familiar with facebook what is facebook the rules or is it rules to facebook is that the right word to use law governed i have the original i have a original snapshot of what the actual rules were and we were following in those guidelines they changed that after you guys so-called investigation and ben kiefer agreed with um with the information that they had changed now i have both snapshots of the original and the present so what you guys did is went to the accuser and asked for evidence that's like going to a drug dealer and saying hey do you have drugs in your car it's like no well go inside the garage take the drugs out and let me see what you got so they didn't give you guys the right information i have the right information if you need it i offered it to you you guys don't seem to want it you guys just want to rubber stamp this thing i know that i have a follow-up question thank you yes so um i do think that we should note that it doesn't appear that we have all the information that was given to us um and it's just if you read from page four to five on the long facebook pages it appears that there's something that's missing so i think we should we have the information that was provided to us by ms bensafia and we followed up with that because we recognized that there was some missing and we weren't able to get it and in the okay so my second point was going to be um that uh mr makin you have you had the um the right to submit additional information so if there was something more you could have done that before this hearing um so just for for what it's worth if you had other information you could have you could have submitted it um i say i i just want to know that it doesn't appear that we would put this on pause and we could just i could we can do it again i could submit to you i didn't know what would come up i would like to say something i could also submit you i could also submit you evidence of being ben kieffer not telling uh falsely reported information i could i could give you several incidents of that now it'll take me a couple of weeks to dig through those old emails but i have a lot of evidence that van keefer has not told the truth on one board me i'm not saying each board meeting has been a different variation of the truth how's that now i have evidence of that now i can submit it to you or i can submit it to the ode um i'd like to write something can you guys hear me yes we can well the information that i submit to you was submitted by it was so long ago that's what they sent me originally uh first of all they didn't want to send me anything because they told me i wasn't a part of the community i lived down the street from japan and school i never got admitted on a facebook page or whatever because they said i was not a part of the community my son went to vernon school for two weeks or three weeks a while back ago that's okay they send me party comment they send me vote and a lot of those comments were missing so i had to reach out for them back and forth back and for others missing coming i never received it so i had to ask for it and after i send it to you guys
00h 20m 00s
you guys are acting you guys are actually a victim all i'm saying is that i had to reach out to the facebook page whatever they you know the group is uh you know to ask them and it was at the time the pta to send me the comment and some of those comments were missing and after i had to send it to to you and it's right good question because we are your time limited tonight and the other thing really quick the other thing that i wanted to add i did reach out to the pta to file a complaint that they receive i never heard from them never never got an email back i got totally ignored never received anything so all the information that you have that's what i have and some of the comments i'm missing being erased i don't know but this is what i have and i pass it on to you but i shouldn't have to do that because you guys should investigate it you should have done your work because i found a complaint you should get all that information that's what i'm frustrated too i just want to talk about ronnie hold on i want to make a quick i also uh submitted a complaint to pps in 2020. uh i finally got the response back uh you're talking about the complaint wait hold on this is consistent this is consistent with the pta not you guys you guys are popular running the hen house mike is consistent with the pta not going through with their own complaint system that's a violation of the law mr macon i'm just saying that it's consistent mr macon we have a limited time together tonight and i'm in problem-solving and i have additional questions and i've also have a question on the table for the board members but we need to be able to appreciate i just wanted to add that this is consistent with the pca not running the investigation okay i have evidence if you need it could we could we take more evidence if if it could be found if it's if it is in fact missing is it is it a possibility of we've had two years that we've been soliciting that evidence right and i think we're here tonight to resolve this result and the reason that we asked for that to be um i think it's in my mind um there's a there's a tiny piece to this right okay it would it would make sense to get the job done right than actually push things through but you know i i work with quality and pps obviously don't so that's why mr megan we have other board members that want to uh ask questions of staff and i heard i appreciate it yeah i'm not i've read the 90 pages we've had two years on this twice we did have another hearing on this exact same complaint when i was share and at that time mr macon asked for more information so we did table this at that point to give him additional information he had requested yeah i would like to remind you guys that was going on a lot of people were suffering from covet it really affected my family i have members die so you know i guess you got you guys not concerned about that let's push it through let's rubber stamp it let's go let's rubber stamp it seven to zero okay we again we're we're trying to problem solve and um we've got i've heard from two board members yeah so i just i'm not done i'm not asking for an extension of time i already can you make your comment that's right yeah that's why i asked if they're ready yeah sorry we're kind of the opposite ends um and i would ask mr macon that you not interrupt sure i'm sorry go for it yeah they could make it a comment um is i i do think it's noteworthy but also our process allows for the person to submit something and the decision was made not to submit something before the hearing so i think we we have the the universe but i do think we should note that um it appears that there's something that wasn't that was missing um just because that's the truth and i think from my perspective when i look through here um i again i agree with the staff's findings
00h 25m 00s
um i do also feel that understand how a student could feel unwelcome um because of the exchanges and because of the history at previously at saban and this isn't at all what happened at um at vernon but just the previous history at saban um and again this is more of um how things land for for students and families is it's like your experience with pps is like your entire experience not necessarily one um isolated incident and i think also the board and staff should think about what our policy is around social media because if we have face if there's facebook pages that have our school names on them that have a majority of staff participating which is i understand 60 to 70 staff members were on it that it leaves the impression that it's an official um page when in fact pps has no control or is not the moderator and i i think it's not an unreasonable impression for families to feel like like this must be the page because it's got the school name and i know that we asked to have the name changed um to better represent what it was versus being the official page but i could see how families could make that case i just informally looked and it looks like lots of other schools have theirs as private pages also so it's not that vernon's um community page is any different but i think it's something we should talk about because if there's a lot of information going back and forth about what's happening around school activities and other things on a facebook page that a family doesn't have access to no it's not an official page it might seem like there's an official page and a feeling of exclusion um so i think it's a good issue just to have for us to have a general conversation about um and i know that um the vernon um leadership has communicates with families in different ways a variety of other ways directly i do know that families go to the facebook page and that's a lot how they get caught up on things they might have missed so i think it's worth not as part of this complaint but as a part of a broader question for uh the board and staff to to talk about can i do a quick add to that i appreciate your comments and that would be my final my final questioning or inquiry would be you know this is why social media specialists are in demand because there's multiple platforms and it'd be great to have some standardization around you know on facebook if it's private that's one thing but if we're connected to it we might want to you know have some some rules around what's on the facebook page versus what's in a telephone alert versus you know the way the different ways people taking information different families and so can i do a quick ad today my question was i'm sorry i'm not a very loud person my question was um if if we had given some thought to how we might um change our like how we show up in community in terms of social media and it's just an open question do we have it can i do a quick add to ms edwards thing just a quick ad sure doing doing covet ben kiefer and teachers were given information on that site and i i didn't have any access to the site and i hadn't i hadn't said anything wrong i had got kicked off the site so while my daughter my daughter the only a lot of the thread of information was like it was timely information coming out of that site and i wasn't able to get to it so during the time of covert when social media was its most important these these villains wouldn't even let me on a page and i hadn't even done anything wrong so my daughter didn't get the same education as other kids in the school because ben kevin was actually putting instructions on that page and i wasn't allowed to get on the page i have evidence of that too thank you i i'm gonna have to wrap us up here um all right i just want to make one comment about mr i want to make there's an emotional i just want to say i kind of gave up on that facebook page and at the time i was pta member on that facebook page facebook page but our innovation building to this day i never been admit on that facebook page and i gave up a long time ago but all i'm saying that vernon page was a school page run by pta members which is statements oh and i got exclude and never get admitted i'm gonna i'm gonna stop you right there we need to move on we have a motion on the table we have a second on the table we're going to take a vote
00h 30m 00s
the board will now vote on complaint number 2020-09 to decide on whether to uphold the superintendent's final decision that the exchange between jamal makin and community members of the vernon ibm the motion was actually just to come to confirm the staff findings at the step two level below so that was a different motion in your script oh so that's a that's it that's an omnibus um it's just trying to guess it just captures everything it's it's less it's it's less detail but it does the same thing i'm holding the decision sorry is the motion is to uphold this the decision just step two this let's just affirm the staff findings in a bad decision is what we're saying right i think that's fine it's not just so are we ready to take a vote yes okay so the board i'm sorry um the board will now vote on um confirming the findings the staff findings thank you upholding the superintendent's decision all in favor oh thank you all in favor saying um so i'm sorry did we hit here one abstention all those opposed okay the board um i'm sorry i'm looking at my script for i've got two different scripts here sorry but we have a vote of six to zero in favor of upholding the staff report um one abstention on on that vote on that on that motion rather i don't know if that is that right the motion is captured it's confirmed the findings of this the staff and uh it upheld the decision okay thank you and we're now adjourned thank you thank you we're going to be again hey i wanted to thank can i thank can i thank you


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