2022-05-24 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

District	Portland Public Schools
Date	2022-05-24
Time	18:00:00
Venue	BESC Auditorium
Meeting Type	regular
Directors Present	missing

Documents / Media

Transcripts

Event 1: 5/24/22 PPS Board of Education Regular Meeting

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was that not loud enough is that is that better all right i know um this uh this board meeting of the board of education for may 24 2022 is called to order hi everybody um for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted on the pps website under the board and meetings tab the meeting is being streamed live on ppstv services website and on channel 28 and will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website for replay times um good evening it's nice to see everyone tonight um tonight i am i'm andrew scott i'm the vice chair of the of the board saying they can't hear all right um i'm andrew scott i'm the vice chair of the board and i'm filling in for chair to pass who is not able to be here tonight um thank you everyone who provided public comment earlier this evening on the plan for southeast enrollment balancing which we are voting on tonight also this evening we're going to be voting to approve the 2022-23 budget and the imposition of property taxes um as well as an improvement agreement with our atu partners given that we have two very major and complex items on tonight's agenda we've pared down tonight's meeting to just those topics as long as well as the consent agenda um before we get started i just want to share a couple of reminders we ask that all members of the public attending this meeting tonight treat each other staff and the board with respect and do not interfere with the ability of the board to conduct its business those wishing to display placard signs or banners should please remain in the auditorium foyer behind the seating area and please don't block any attendees views of the proceedings also please keep walkways clear and aisles clear and in general we would just appreciate it if you can be mindful of others in the room the words you use and be aware of who's watching including our community's children and maybe as a board will do the same thing um i also want to note um because i think it's weighing on on me tonight and i'm guessing it's weighing on many people in our community that that yet another senseless tragedy has taken place today um and i'll be honest i saw these headlines and i haven't really been able to bring myself to read the stories because of of it feels like it happens all the time and we we we know what happened and yet we still have to i think we have to acknowledge i mean a gunman walked into an elementary school involved in texas and and killed 14 children and a teacher i'm sorry yeah it's it's rising um and the enormity of these murders is really unbearable to think about um and i think no one especially children should ever have to fear for their lives when they're in our schools so our thoughts are with the victims family and the entire ulvade community and um superintendent yes thank you vice chair scott just just to add um my a remark here as well and it seems almost insufficient but our hearts and thoughts uh do go out to the families and victims of those impacted by today's senseless tragedy at robb elementary in uvalde texas it's just another disturbing tragedy an unfortunate reminder of the gun violence that grips our country and our communities uh we'll keep these families our colleagues and the valdez consolidated independent school district uh in our hearts and we'll continue to denounce gun violence in those strongest terms so uh unfortunately thanks i'm actually going to ask for just a quick moment of silence thank you i don't think there's any way to effectively do this transition so i'm just going to do it we now need to vote on our consent agenda court members if there are any items you would like to pull for discussion we can set those aside for discussion and vote at the end of the meeting is there anything anyone like to pull you want a motion for the consent agenda um yes please so moved thank you great so uh um director brian edwards moves uh and director holland seconds the adoption of the consent agenda is there any more discussion on the consent agenda student representative weinberg did you have any thoughts on the concentration just want to make sure we have space if you had any i think just uplifting the ela the k5 ela curriculum adoption um we've spent the greater part of this year working on it with teachers and piloting it in our schools um we agreed to put on the consent agenda i just wanted to uplift that we are voting
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on that this evening thank you and ms bradshaw i believe there's some public comment on the consent agenda the person who signed up for public comment actually canceled okay so any additional public comment on the consent agenda not on the consent agenda great the board will now vote on resolution three 6504 five one zero director scott yes right there was a change to the consent agenda the six five zero four was withdrawn it's the index to the approval that indexed the minutes great thank you so now we are voting on resolution six five zero five three six five one zero correct excellent uh all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions great the consent agenda is approved by a vote of six to zero with student representative weinberg voting yes great we now turn to student and public comment um before we begin just a quick review of our guidelines for public comment um the board thanks everyone for taking time to attend this meeting providing your comments the public input that we get informs and improves our work and we really look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections and concerns our responsibility as a board is to actively listen our board office may follow up on board related issues that are raised during public testimony and we also request that complaints about individual employees be directed to the superintendent's office as a personnel matter if you have additional materials or items you would like to provide to the border superintendent we ask that you email them to publiccomment all one word at pps.net again that's publiccomment pps.net please make sure when you begin your comment you clearly state your name and spell your last name you'll have three minutes to speak and you will hear a sound after three minutes which means it's time to conclude your thoughts and with that ms bradshaw do we have anyone signed up for student or public comment i know we do so let's go ahead and dive into student student comment please we have claire schnabel welcome either microphone is fine and state your name and when you start talking your time will begin all right thank you hello my name is claire schnabel s-c-h-n-a-b-e-l my pronouns are they them i am a junior at franklin high school and i would like to request to start the process for a name change at franklin high school as a community we would like our namesake to be a better represent representative of what values we want to instill in our students after looking deeper into the actions and beliefs of benjamin franklin we full-heartedly believe that he does not represent the supportive and respectful environment we hope to achieve at our school his ideas and beliefs surrounding race and gender are a direct contradiction to our uh towards our continuing attempts to create an equitable learning environment that supports the education of the members in it like many figures in united states history problematic parts of their lives have been concealed for the preservation of their legacy in benjamin franklin's case he is well known as a founding father of the united states however he used his power to suppress the voices of minorities and actively advocated against the immigration of non-wasp peoples his white agenda contributed negatively to the racial demographics we can see in our community today let us not forget these aspects of his legacy as we are advancing in society beliefs and ideas are growing and changing at a rapid pace humanity is gaining the knowledge of how to create inclusive spaces including spaces that have traditionally been exclusive towards minorities and many groups of people we aim to create a community for people of all identities regardless of gender race ethnicity socioeconomic standpoint religion sexual orientation and more to aid in this creation we must be represented by someone who models belief in these values who models inclusivity to all members of our community and whose legacy should be honored as helping us achieve this we move to change our namesake to a person who has benefited our community rather than one who has negatively impacted it by means of racist exclusion we ask you the board to approve this request to form a committee to formally start the name change process and support us through this process as you have already done for other pps high schools such as wells barnett high school and leotis mcdaniel high school thank you for your time thank
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you ramona freeman and layla whitehead abel bachmann oh my gosh hi my name is abel bachmann a b e l and i don't want len and i don't want lent to be fully dli because of safety issues kids kids would have to cross busy roads and pass by houseless people that that are unsafe my sister goes to kellogg middle school and buses get cancelled often this would force some kids to have to walk home unsafely at lent i have friends that are in dli and chess club and lent leopard leaders i would miss them if i was at a different school it is important for kids to have friends from all core cultures and that would not happen if we have to change schools teacher ron has taught us about climate and what affects it having extra buses on the road would affect the climate negatively lent has always been a local school that anyone could go to regardless of what culture or language they speak and i don't want that to change thank you for listening danny cage [Music] um um good evening i'm danny cage i am grant high school's district student council representative and tonight i'll be giving testimony uh for pps attended attendance coach and democratic nada mini for oregon state house district uh 48 hua nuen miss duan couldn't attend as she is a school board member for david douglas um but she is here in solidarity and in spirit with us and this is our testimony my name is juan nguyen i'm a school attendance coach and multi-tiered for the multi-tiered systems and support department i have worked in this role for eight years supporting school communities addressing chronic abstinentism i have supported lent's school when it was a k-8 for several years and i want to share my solidarity and support for the students parents and teachers who are advocating to to keep their neighborhood at lent's school during my time at lent school i've worked with lentz supports team to address chronic abstinence and has been one of the biggest challenges to attendance is access to transportation currently i support all schools in pps and i have seen the impact of transportation for lens middle school students transitioning to kellogg and other feeder schools like marysville parents are struggling to get their kids to school on time or even at all we currently do not have enough school bus routes hot passes and for our schools in southeast portland we do not have the safest routes with one of the highest crash fatality rates sometimes we make these big decisions as a district and have huge impacts on our students parents and staff we do not address the basic needs that our families are looking for for success in the classroom the staff at lentz school has a deep connection and relationship with the families i have supported admin and teachers who go above and beyond like assessing home assessing home visits to deliver food boxes for families during my time at lentz i have seen for several years the revolving doors of leadership that has come through lentz not providing the community a clear vision through addressing the cultural needs its students and families deserve the leadership changes but the students and parents remain always fighting for their school community under many barriers i brazil i believe the transition of lent school to the dli program and moving the neighborhood school to marysville will create bigger barriers for our students and families lint's families deserve to have access to their neighborhood school and that's her testimony i just want to say thank you to hua for allowing me to give it to the board thank you
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mcmahon hello everyone my name is barney mcmahon she her pronouns m-c-m-a-h-o-n and i have with me xander levine hello i'm xander l-e-v-i-n-e and we are here to share with you guys today some celebrations of um amazing student achievement at cleveland high school and lincoln high school so to begin with cleveland our boys soccer team took second in the league and went to the quarterfinals at state our girls soccer team took fourth in the league and went to the state playoffs our volleyball team was fourth in the league our pig mice which is our robotics team earned the entrepreneurship award um our jazza ensembly took second place at the clackamas jazz festival in the 6a division and our win symphony won the pil high school band contest our wrestling team defended their pil title for the 11th year in a row with 13 athletes going to state and many of our swim team students went to districts as well our girls basketball went to the state playoffs and our boys basketball won the pil championship for the first time in 60 years [Music] our speech and debate also won overall at state in the 6a division and our cleveland high school dance team tenacity won the metro dance competition this year so those are some awesome things that happened in cleveland byrony you also had a student who won the state championship for girls golf okay well yes we had to know we had a champion golf girl um some highlights worth sharing about lincoln high school over the weekend the men's tennis team won the state title and also won the men's singles title the girls also had a strong showing at the women's state competition boys basketball or boys baseball sorry went from four wins last year to 14 wins this year making solid progress uh lincoln student kyler wong was named a presidential scholar by the department of education in the whole country uh tomorrow marks the majority completion of the new lincoln high school which is very exciting uh amongst in uh student leadership uh with the help of the mccain institute leader student leaders have been creating a project known as ties together through empathic storytelling and you can walk our halls and find over 400 like student written stories that share experiences they're all anonymous and you just you read them and they bring you to tears some of them or make you smile or laugh they're they're pretty great that's inspiring and they might be presenting to washington dc in the summer lincoln's fbla swept many first second and third place awards at state girls golf team and boys golf team got fourth at state and ethics team won the state championship and competed at nationals we came up here today just to say that in a time where lots of hardships are happening that there's always something to celebrate students are amazing and they do amazing things every day and so we wanted to come up here and share some stuff that happened at cleveland lincoln and hopefully see some more students out there who want to share the amazing celebrations that their students have also achieved so thank you for listening to us and remember pbs students do so much and are so excellent in so many ways and we appreciate the work that this board does to ensure that excellence is maintained thank you this was also inspired by jordan cooper just want to put that out there and that was just a little bit of the many great things can we please can we please do this at every meeting no actually yes i thought our lincoln jazz ensemble also won the state championship this weekend too xander is that true okay and for those who don't know byron is going to be our new student representative next year so congratulations by renee next we have chris reiser [Music] [Applause] chris reiser r-i-s-e-r he him the list of harms committed by this administration against students and educators in the last two months are too numerous to mention to say nothing of the last year let alone the last five and with the renewal of the superintendent's contract the board itself became complicit in the harm each and every one of you
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jackson i want to thank you for consistently advocating for students and speaking truth to power even though your truth is dismissed and your vote isn't even counted thank you for your free labor to advocate for your peers and those who are coming up behind you we see you i understand this forum isn't about the board of directors actually learning from below it's about absorbing the time and energies of those targeted from marginalization into a political void while giving that community the illusion of being heard but this is for the record in the consent agenda there were two settlements for eighty five thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars respectively one was for a workers comp claim otherwise we have no idea why you are passing off taxpayer dollars for mistakes that this administration has made we can't know we don't know and there's no accountability for a superintendent because it's not affecting his paycheck he's taking money from taxpayers and paying out improper iep claims folks who aren't getting their service minutes he's paying out folks who should have gotten workers comp which i'm pretty sure that's what that fifty thousand dollars is for or 85. i can't remember which is which now none of that actually impacts any of you in any meaningful way you're taking taxpayer money to pay for the harms that you cause that's wild so how can we possibly hold the folks that sit in these seats accountable when you guys can continue to make mistakes and then you can pay for it off of the backs of the taxpayers that isn't ethical but it's a brilliant system to set up if you want to maintain control or the illusion of control and do whatever it is that you want to do while the community suffers at ockley green we have an excellent certified educator who began the year as a long-term sub that does not have special education certification but she's actually serving 28 of our students on ieps whose minutes range from 45 minutes a week to 180 minutes a week this incredible educator who stepped into this role is paying for the courses required to be certified to teach special education students except when she wins that pps lottery she's paying twenty thousand dollars out of her own pocket to serve our most vulnerable students um my time is already up but i think it's really inappropriate that you guys have systematically the students of harriet tubman middle school they have continually come to your door mr reiser could you finish up your last thought please and um those are our black students that you guys claim to serve and the fact that there is like radio silence with those kids is appalling you guys are not living up to your charge into your paperwork and it's going to come back it's going to come back on you guys and it's not going to be pretty when it does so i just behoove thank you the folks at this table to come to us and not just pop in for 30 seconds amy mr reiser but to actually spend time listening to and learning from the students and educators you can't figure out what's going on in the classroom when you're only there for 30 seconds thank you for your testimony charity fame [Music] [Applause] welcome yeah hi my name is charity fain and that is spelled f-a-i-n i'm a parent at sunnyside environmental school with two children there i'm also the current uh secretary of the pta and a former president of the pta and the first thing i wanted to bring up is i hope you all have seen the letter from 30 ptas that are very much against the cuts and i have to say when i read that letter i was filled with anger
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anger at the impacts this is going to cause when there's no need financially for this you see i have a neurodiverse son whose school has always been hard hard for him and you know he's he's tag identified and he still can't really manage school very well and this last year for us has been hell it has been the hardest thing i've ever had to do with a mother because he said in that classroom coming back in and he would either hide under his desk shut down or he would strike out and hit and kick and have three room sweeps on him because he couldn't manage the physicalness of returning the loudness the voices getting back into a school room was hard but i will say the teachers and staff at sunnyside in us we came up with a plan the vice principal there met with him every morning and every afternoon and most lunches the counselors met with him the specs had met with him the pair has met with him i went to his doctor and got him new meds and we started him in therapy and now he's turned around but that took a team that took all of us for him and i wish i could say my child was an edge case and not the norm but we all know that there are many many children like my son who need the help and the supports and what you're cutting are the teams so when we did as we did an assessment for him this year to get him into special ed and i paid for his therapist to come there and i'm lucky that i have the privilege to afford that right how many families don't and the first thing his pr his therapist said to me was my god that room is small it is small because these are old buildings they weren't designed for 30 kids to sit in a classroom right and you sit here with your budgets that i have looked at and you think you know three or four more kids that classroom doesn't magically grow in size right it's just more kids in a room for a child that has trouble processing and my time is up to and what i want to say you board members are our representatives in this process we have no say as parents we elect you to be our voice you have power in this you can say no you can vote no you set the agenda of the vision the strategy that is your responsibility and that's what we elected you to do so vote no on this until you put teachers who are front line and students first because no kid should have to go through what my son would do thank you sophia ralph drevis good evening my name is sophia drives that spell d-r-e-v-e-s and i go by she her i'm a parent of a native spanish-speaking child at bridger elementary school she's currently in kindergarten we will be directly impacted by the segc recommendation to move bridger spanish dli to lent i have two main statements to make tonight my child has 12 years ahead in her pps education and i want to understand how the dli program at lent will be supported and grown truly grown into a regional hub for dli this is a seismic shift and for it to be successful the investment from pps needs to be there when i asked this question at a recent parent night there was no clear answer from representatives and there was only mention of investment in the gymnasium at lent that's not a path to success for my child's 12 next years of education the program at bridger has existed for many years and the surrounding community and services have grown to be a successful and vibrant place to uproot this and not have an idea of how it will be nurtured and grown is troublesome at least bridger has worked hard to provide
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alternate solutions that were disregarded by the segc and they were pretty creative if you vote yes tonight i want to understand how pps will invest in lent whole school dli program and facilities how is pps going to provide intensive increased support during this bridger to lent transition myself and others need to hear this commitment to trust the decision will be successful and it won't be undone in another few years as you know the bridger community has already sustained 10 major changes in the past 10 years so if you vote yes i urge you to make alongside your vote a public strong commitment tonight to lent as southeast spanish dli flagship and this is more than providing bus routes and a gymnasium putting that aside i want to communicate two things that are very disturbing to me about the proposal the first is watching pps make exceptions to its own stated goals first i've heard and read you've you've said you want to eliminate single strand collect co-located programs and eliminate k-8 schools well both of these will happen if you vote yes allowing atkinson to keep a single strand of spanish dli because their community put up resistance is simply not a fact-based decision and it's not equitable that's what i was told when i asked what's the reason why does that can get atkinson get to keep the single strand oh resistance from the community well what about resistance from my spanish dli community at bridger what about the resistance from the lent community that has a 27 minute walk to marysville crossing 205 92nd and 82nd there has been so much emphasis on socioeconomic brackets and social justice it's appalling to me that this has not been discussed secondly shrinking the bridge or school boundaries and replacing it with a whole school k-8 focus option like creative science and giving guaranteed entry to neighborhood families is espousing gentrification and you know the boundaries would be west of 82nd and north of division to me that's just not equitable and frankly dissonant to the headline of the project which is enrollment balancing my time is up please when you vote tonight keep in mind those families crossing those big avenues and please ask yourselves why that lent neighborhood walk is more palatable to you than the atkinson families crossing division thank you very much thank you for your time and muchisimas gracias espanol just to make that clear nadia coronado welcome thank you good evening my name is nadia coronado c-o-r-o-n-a-d-o i've spoken here before but as a quick review i've been with pps since 1987 first as a student then as a student teacher and now i'm an esl teacher i also have three children who have attended three pps schools over the past nine years i'm deeply invested in the success of public education and i want every pps school to be a safe welcoming and engaging learning environment for every portland child and family i am here like my esl colleagues before to bring attention to the district's new formula for calculating english language learners currently one student counts as one whole student under the new formula four students count as one as you can imagine this will change how many students an esl teacher will be assigned to support i'm here with 16 years experience as a language specialist with bilingual skills with degrees in behavioral science how the brain learns and education i have taught through a combination of push and support pull out small groups co-teaching with content teachers i've instructed whole class with gen ed ell and students with e-ieps i've done it with district approved methods with the science curriculum and later the writing curriculum i've used psyop glad q-tel deutro and letters methods i've taught in hallways in drafty offices located behind gyms and in shared classrooms where i have to daily wheel in a cart with my supplies on it and i'm telling you with all of my experience i will be less successful with my students and their families with this new formula i've had quite a few meetings and personal conversations with various district leaders i have shared that counting a student as less than one full student is disgraceful i have shared that using a single test
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to dictate how much a student is worth is disgraceful i have carefully explained that just because a student can choose the right picture of a man wearing a watch or can tell you the difference three differences between two pictures does not mean that that student can read and write at grade level a student who is counted as one quarter of a student with this new formula will need the same amount of attention and connection love and care and thoughtful expertise to get them the reading intervention support they deserve in the writing practice they need in order to achieve english proficiency in this district students with limited english proficiency have the lowest five-year graduation rate at 66 percent they have the second lowest four-year graduation rate at 65 percent and we can all expect the graduation rate to dip further as the decision is made to provide less support to our students learning english all right leave with two questions the district says that the esl fd has increased by 10 when you look at the budget that's only been an increase for one for the entire district so what's up with that discrepancy and question two the district receives 16 million dollars from the state for esl services and they're only reporting 12 million what happened to the missing 4 million dollars for our esl services for our students thank you thank you melissa mcdonald [Applause] you all received a copy of this yes petition signed by a lot of people supporting us hello my name is melissa mcdonald m-a-c-d-o-n-a-l-d i have been a lead at glencoe elementary since i started working for nutrition services in 2004. i would like to tell you about a few of my co-workers struggles this year roseway heights had to wash and beg 675 servings of fruit or vegetables daily with a two hour assistant who by the way quit to go to a job that paid better the lead had to work two to two and a half hours of overtime daily to achieve her daily tasks wrigler had to work for three months with no assistant feeding 120 for breakfast and 200 to 250 for lunch she also had the supper program and the fruit and vegetable program she has put in her two weeks notice she's had enough she has worked overworked with no support for management these are just a couple of examples of what most of my co-workers have had to deal with this year custodians have been feeling the stress of being short staffed also they are constantly getting pulled from their assigned school to help out at another school who is short staffed teachers are having to clean their own classrooms just so their students can have a clean and sanitary place to learn let's face it we need more employees to achieve that goal you school board members need to make sure that the starting wage for nutrition service workers and custodians is competitive with not only with not only other school districts but also with other jobs similar to what kind of work we do the struggle is real and it is stressful for everyone involved i make about 32 000 a year and that's only if i work the summer program could you live off of 32 000 a year i don't think so do the right thing and make our wages competitive thank you we have greg barrell who is virtual all right you can all hear me i take it oh yes we can thank you okay i'm just gonna start my timer so that i know how i'm doing uh my name is greg burrell b-u-r-r-i-l-l board director superintendent fellow educators parents students and community on the board only julia brim edwards and amy constand remember when i used to come and testify regularly
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to the school board right this is my first time in years because in my 17 years with pps i haven't seen that our voices are listened to but i really decided that i had to comment on what i consider to be the collapse of public education uh a few years ago we were hearing testimony about cover-ups about lead in the water supply now we're hearing cover-ups about um sped minutes right but my colleague chris riser is angry i'm just sad um nadia coronado uh provided details about what really happens and what's really necessary in dli and but here's the thing a careful review of your budget shows that in the past five years you've nearly doubled the number of highly paid administrators many of whom have little idea of what actually happens in schools judging by the misleading and self-serving press releases i've seen right i remember telling you that you could learn a lot from substitute teachers because we work in so many buildings you can now learn from the epidemic of unfilled jobs that only those whose careers require that they work under these conditions are willing to do i'd like to thank danny cage for letting us know about the struggle of canceled buses i'd like to i love the testimony that he gave about children being forced to cross i-205 92nd avenue and 82nd avenue to get to oh and and pass homeless camps to get to their new school the thing that i want to remind you is that kids are amazing learners look at the testimony that you heard from our young people right this is it despite what we failed to do to support children with discipline with food with buses with clean classrooms they learn because that's what kids do and so all i all i can say is i hope that at some point soon you all realize that portland public schools is collapsing and we need to do something i teachers that i sub for are resigning right so um i i don't know i i just i wanted to make sure that i told you just how strongly i feel that portland public schools is falling apart inadequate buses inadequate meals inadequate custodial services and i'll stop here because my time is up thank you so much for listening and please do something thank you i just wanted to call the the students that didn't come up again that's okay um ramona freeman and layla whitehead but that's concludes who have signed up for the general public okay thanks kara thank you to everyone for the testimony next up on our agenda um is the 2022-2025 agreement between amalgamated transit union atu and portland public schools superintendent guerrero would your staff like to provide us with some highlights of the agreement yes thank you vice chair scott i'm pleased to have here tonight genevieve rowe our director of employee and labor relations to share with you highlights of a new agreement with our atu partners i know uh we also have here with us and i want to welcome uh beth bloomklotz and jim jimmy applehanz who are also going to be joining us here tonight to speak on this topic genevieve thank you superintendent good evening director student representative the item before you is the three-year contract between pps and atu the union that represents our very important drivers in student transportation our atu members primarily transport our special needs students they're responsible for approximately one-third of our transportation routes of the district and transportation transporting these students creates access to educational services for these students as you know and everyone knows recruiting and retaining bus drivers has been a significant challenge um to serve to serving students and families this year this contract includes a substantial increase to driver wages we believe that the increased wages along with our benefit package will put pps in a stronger
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position to recruit and retain these skilled and caring drivers which in turn reduces delays and last-minute cancellations for families that have such a disruptive impact on students and our family excuse me um the bargaining teams were able to reach tentative agreement on a three-year contract in only three bargaining sessions which is remarkably fast and that is a testament to the relationship between the two groups and we're happy to have this before you tonight thanks could you um could you you mentioned the significant wage increase could you talk specifically about what that is so we were before you in october um with a three dollar an hour increase to wages and then the wages substantially increased um again this round so july one they will receive another 17.9 percent increase to the wages bringing their wages up to a little over 27 dollars an hour for the starting wage great thank you and do we also did you say do we have some of our our atu partners with us today either beth bloom klotz or jimmy apple hans come on down [Applause] thank you welcome hi jimmy apple hands uh they them pronouns thank you for having a school board uh superintendent guerrero it's been uh quite a year um yeah back in genevieve already mentioned back in october the district came to us with a three-hour increase raise with the promise of starting negotiations as soon as possible in january i want to thank you for following through on that promise it speaks to the mutual respect that has grown between us the uh historically large pay increase has not gone unnoticed as well and has convinced talented and experienced bus drivers to stay with the district through the most challenging year i've seen in my 10 years of service as a bus driver in fact while covering a route last month i was assaulted by a student and honestly more troubling than being physically hit is the thought that that student now has that on their record because we as a district failed to adequately staff our programs and provide for that student the support they needed ask that you consider these things while working with other district workers that we work side by side with every day all the working groups the district and especially the students all benefit from favorable contracts that contain livable wages and support for the students we stand behind our fellow district workers demanding no layoffs we stand behind our custodians and nutrition service workers who need competitive wages now in order to hire enough staff to make our schools safe and healthy places for the children in our community and once again thank you for coming to the table and following through on your promises we really appreciate it and we see it hi i'm beth bloomklotz and like yourselves i'm a volunteer serving to improve the lives of my co-workers your staff and our students and specifically we serve our students in special education and i just really just sitting back here and hearing everyone it reminds me when jimmy and i first started and how we really felt like we had to teach everyone about our value we had to give examples and so forth i really hope that you're hearing our fellow co-workers because when we lose staff when we lose co-workers it costs so much more for the district to hire more and to train and so forth marketing to try to bring some others in our reputation as a school district is not positive in the communities when i listen to parents when i listen to my co-workers and other departments even some of my friends across the country have even heard about you know portland public school district we have some improvements that you know really need to be made and from jimmy
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and my vantage point it can be made and it's hurtful when you have to prove to your employers and the school board who are also volunteers voted in that what we are saying is accurate that what we are saying is true we believe that you do know and we really hope that you listen to the voices that have been shared and the messages that have been shared today in the other days and vote in favor of what's best for your staff so you don't have to hire more and what's most in favor of our students so they can want to come to school and they can learn and not be so stressed out i know i personally have offered to volunteer in another aspect on three different occasions as a cultural and racial to help out with our cultural racial equity and equality here at the district and not one time was my offer taken up however i've been told about how wonderful i am about bringing people together and how i can see different viewpoints and help people hear people but yet i was never called upon and so i just want to bring that to your attention not to put anybody down but just really please when you go to bed at night make sure that you can feel good that what you've done is really meaningful and helpful with our district and with that i thank you also for the time i am retiring as a volunteer i will continue to support jimmy and the other representatives but i feel like that i have done my part and i am ready to uh just be a regular co-worker and attend meetings and not organize and lead and so i thank you so much [Applause] thank you for joining us tonight do i have a motion and a second to adopt resolution six five one one the 2000 yes thank you uh director constant moves and and director holland's seconds the adoption is there any board discussion i just want to thank our drivers for the amazing work they do i know it's not an easy job and i really appreciate the recognition of the way that especially miss miss rowe has shown up and helped facilitate a positive agreement and i also want to say thanks to both district staff and our labor partners for uh having such a smooth process i mean three bargaining sessions means that we come to the table with pretty shared values and i know that's been a long time coming um uh beth wasn't always it wasn't always that way a few years ago so that's that that is a reflection of event an investment in the relationship and um in the district's um expression of value for for what you do for our kids so we've got we've still got more work to do we've still got some other contracts to settle but we see you we see you purple great any other comments i will just add i'm excited to support this contract i think it goes in exactly the right direction and i also think it's a symbol of things to come and i think that as we as we come out of this pandemic the working world has changed and and i think every employer whether it's public or private needs to recognize that um and and i think this contract is a step in that right direction as director constance said i think there's there's more to be coming i do want to say that that there are there are costs and trade-offs and i think those are worth it that's why i'm excited to to you know to vote for this but as i hope everyone sticks around for the budget conversation later um there are trade-offs to these decisions and i think that's something that we want to bring all of the community into as as we struggle with that resources are not um infinite resources are not even plentiful um but this is definitely the right decision and and i look forward to more contracts after this as well that give some of the similar types of increases to our hard working employees who deserve it any other comments great um and with that is there any public comment not public comment the board will now vote on resolution 6511 the 2022-25 agreement between amalgamated transit union and school district number one j multnomah county oregon all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no are there any abstentions resolution six five one one is approved by a vote of six to zero with student representative weinberg voting yes thank you all right next up um southeast enrollment and program [Applause] balancing superintendent guerrero would you like to introduce this next item
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yes thank you vice chair scott as directors know uh phase one of southeast enrollment and program balancing began in fall 2020 at that time it resulted in the conversion of five k to eight schools new boundaries and program assignments into kellogg middle school which opened this past fall in may the board adopted a phase two charge centered on converting harrison park also from a k-8 to a middle school while uh maintaining an objective to increase enrollment at lane middle school as well joining us this evening we have deputy superintendent claire hertz and our director of enrollment and transfer judy brennan our two regional superintendents esther dr o and margaret calvert who along with other district staff and members of the southeast guiding coalition uh made up of representatives from across the different school communities have facilitated and led this process i want to thank them for their efforts in this very complex strand of work but i'm going to turn it over to claire at this point good evening [Music] i'm just going to say good evening yeah andrew handed me the gavel so i think that means i'm technically a chair until he comes back in the room good evening superintendent guerrero board of directors and student representative weinberg we have worked with community representatives and school principals for two years from from 2 with 20 schools in the southeast they have given their time and commitment to find the best possible solution for balancing enrollment in our southeast schools tonight i bring my recommendation for the southeast enrollment and program balancing to you for approval i would also like to thank the three board liaisons for their support in the southeast enrollment and program balancing work director julia brem edwards director ailey lowry and chaired michelle de pass they gave countless hours to attend southeast guiding coalition meetings and community engagement sessions and have listened to the many voices in the southeast school communities we bring tonight an updated resolution with clarifying language for lent and bridge english scholar programs i will ask director of enrollment and transfer judy brennan to speak to this in a moment we have also invited southeast guiding coalition members from the most impacted schools and with the highest number of students of color to speak to you tonight they represent lent elementary harrison park k-8 and bridger elementary now i'm going to turn it over to director brennan to talk through the changes made to the resolution and she will be introducing our coalition members who have come to speak to you tonight good evening we'd like to point out just a few uh resolution adjustments so uh there's an updated resolution in your packet i would call your attention to recital f where we've added a reference to a map thank you for the suggestion of having an attachment so that this is always part of the archive of the geographic changes that are included in the proposal more importantly within the resolution under one d there is revised language and one e has been added the intent of those changes is to make it clearer for any families affected by these um [Music] by the proposal on what their rights are as students who either live in the lent neighborhood or in the bridger neighborhood so those are all of the adjustments to the draft resolution for your review tonight um i'm very pleased to introduce um some of our segc members who we are going to make space for to come and share with you uh a few words and so i'd like to introduce and um please come on down from and and come all at once if you could so from bridger elementary we have a d ready and oscar campos from harrison park we have marissa bryman who's also speaking on behalf of michelle harada who couldn't be here this evening and from lent elementary we have carmen flores marissa bryman is a virtual thank you all hello hello welcome feel free go ahead maybe oh i guess
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hello oh okay sorry about that hi um thank you for having me i'm um commenting can you all hear me yeah i'm commenting on behalf of myself and harrison parks other parent representative michelle harada so the the drivers of this whole process were the opening of two new middle schools one of which will be harrison park and um as well as to give our students a comprehensive middle school experience which hasn't been offered in the k-8 model harrison park's a uniquely multicultural school community within pps and our teachers really care about our students and choose to be here we michelle as a bipart parent enjoys how her kids blend into the rich diversity of the student body our community asks to stay together and not to be split up among existing elementary schools and we're happy that this will be the result of this process we also wanted students to remain geographically close to where they live and the scgc has also been able to achieve this with our k-5 students moving to the clark building mandarin dli programs will be located in the j district at the elementary and middle school levels at the request of our chinese community and harrison park will be undergoing some minor fins this summer next summer which will benefit our students when we transition and as we celebrate these wins we also need to mention some of the challenges in this process so not being allowed to include the inner southeast schools has really hampered our ability to balance enrollment and as harrison park is kind of on the furthest east side of pbs we were limited by geography kellogg will end up over enrolled despite shrinking the neighborhood boundary in phase two and the coalition was informed really late in the process that changing spanish dli feeders to keller to kellogg was not actually on the table which caused we felt a lot of confusion and disagreement in the coalition as we know funding is tied to enrollment numbers so we're concerned that opening harrison park middle school that will not be adequately funded and will be less much less so um than kellogg so even though we have one of the most diverse student populations in the district we we also had a difficult time getting feedback from bipod families at our school we didn't have an appropriate venue to communicate what was happening in meetings and participation in focus groups was really affected by coveted protocols and tech limitations for our families so even though our parents haven't been outspoken like some of the other schools we all really want the best for our kids and believe that our students deserve an equitable positive middle school experience um so going forward we really hope the district will consider temporary base funding that's for schools that might be underenrolled and we expect that our school will provide a comparable middle school experience to other pps middle schools regardless of enrollment numbers we really hope the board understands that removing any of the harrison park feeder schools from the proposal as is would reduce our enrollment even more and there's also a risk of harrison park losing title one funding with more affluent communities joining ours so we hope that temporary minimum funding will prevent us from losing the specialists and supports that our students really count on thank you so much hi there my name is dee and this is oscar we are parents at um we have kids both at bridger and kellogg middle school and just for a little bit of background bridger is currently a three strand school we have two great we have two classes of immersion and one of neighborhood in each of our grades bridger has been very vocal during this process because we are the only community that's been facing the loss of both our building and our and each other with this process began in 2020 we felt picked on and we felt like our value and our strength as a community was being undermined and disregarded by pps and other school communities but we've come to realize over this process that we occupy a very complicated location in pps we are in a narrow half mile swath between southeast 70th and southeast 82nd we have million dollar houses on our western border and we've got car dealerships and affordable housing on our eastern border we are equal parts bipac and non-bipac equal parts privileged and underserved in equal parts everything in between our sdli families value the benefits of a strong two-strand program with a culturally responsive bilingual staff that goes beyond teachers to administration and wrap around services
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and fed services in our students native language but as the neighborhood gentrifies there are almost no native speakers left in our neighborhood catchment our neighborhood families value a centrally located school with good walkability but they suffer the untenable and inequitable logistics of an unbalanced co-location they have no way to maintain healthy class sizes with a single strand of neighborhood and as enrollment naturally ebbs and flows students do not have the chance to experience normal dynamic shifts from year to year with different classmates and the ability to have reprieve from personal conflicts unfortunately we cannot say that our whole community is united on a clear path forward for every sdli family who loves and wants to keep a cohesive and established community of bridger there's a neighborhood family who loves having a strong well-enrolled neighborhood school we have spent decades building a community we love and are proud of but have not been able to overcome the disparity in performance and achievement between our unbalanced strands like so many other pps schools the status quo bridger benefits many but continues to harm our most historically underserved students as a guiding coalition member a bilingual parent and a pps high school counselor i believe that the data shows the most effective way to close the achievement gap for a historically underserved student is to create intentional school communities that contain a diversity of incomes race and ethnicities for a language immersion program this is most effective accomplished through a model that concentrates and optimizes the use of a woefully limited number of bilingual teachers and support staff the spanish dli program is designed to shrink the achievement gap for emergent bilingual students the lent location will provide will prioritize a low transportation burden for native families for these and many more reasons the spanish dli program is a social justice program and unlike its and unlike other immersion programs that provide language enrichment the power of the dli of the spanish dli program at kellogg has come through the intentional community that was built via the concentration of available bilingual teachers and support staff to one location pps did this pps was intentionally prioritizing the needs of our emergent bilingual students because of the hard work of pps it has created a culturally responsive school community where all students benefit from rich racial ethnic and socioeconomic diversity this success needs to be replicated at the k5 level please put our community at ease and tell us how you are going how you are going to be intentional in prioritizing emergent bilinguals at lent while supporting the students that will no longer be outlined this is no perfect there is no perfect perfect solution but this proposal uh disrupts the status quo by evenly distributing the required change across all communities rather than adhering to historically discriminatory practice that of placing all the burden of change on low-income and brown and black communities we cannot continue to expect the same un un underserved least equipped community to always bear the trauma of correcting the natural ebb and flow of demographic changes we hear the outcry about the number of impacted households but ask you to recognize that this is mainly from communities which have historically enjoyed uninterrupted stability and positive outcomes we hear the outcry about the number of impacted households but ask you to recognize that this is mainly from communities which have been yeah intentionally uh editor of disability there is always there is also criticism that communities have not had enough time to consider the changes will there ever be enough time to it will ever be enough time for any of us to come to terms with the perceived loss of our privilege and comfort as an educated latino male with privilege i know that i and my family and my children will be okay i'm not i'm not only here in front of you for me and my family but specifically for the emergent bilingual families that need this program to close the achievement gap we ask that you agree that a no vote today is simply untenable the opening of harrison park has already been delayed too long while those students and our bridger neighborhood students continue to wait beyond their peers to achieve a comprehensive middle school experience we stand in solidarity with the lent community to advocate for a yes and proposal path forward we require and demand a commitment to that community to create a transition plan on their terms and in their best interests we urge pps staff not to forget the need
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for additional educational assistance in the bridger neighborhood classrooms next year to help our students get caught up and ready to join incoming creative science students in 2023. every day that underserved communities continues to stay in limbo is another day that we keep failing our kids who are already falling behind and already falling through the cracks a no vote today leaves our most vulnerable children floundering in a swamp of unknown timelines and outcomes they remain unsupported unconsidered and perpetually less than their peers this proposal engenders systemic support for historically underserved communities by creating intentional and well-enrolled programs at bridger and lent it reaches target enrollment at the most diverse and lowest scs k5 schools and the three outer southeast middle schools it's not perfect and there's a lot of work to be done by district staff to make this proposal work for everybody but it's a great place to start and it's better than the status quo hello everybody my name is carmen flores um i'm a little bit nervous because i've never done this before um i am a parent and i have worked for the lent community for 20 years so my first thing that i want to say after is my first time 20 years of inequities and things that have happened in my community that i have been here to speak to you and the first thing that i would like to say is um enough is enough the inequities that our community has faced over the last 20 years none of you could tell me but i could tell you every single one yet the people that are sitting here making this decision has has no idea on the history of our building and basing it off of just data that they've collected in the last two years so i want to add to your data that is missing the revolving door of admin my daughter is in fourth grade and has had four now going to be five new principals because next year we will have a new principal and yes and she's a fifth to be in fifth grade the the problem with the revolving door the problem of admin being placed by pps at our buildings who are almost ready to go out the door who no longer even work in pps that get placed there because of behavioral issues in their other schools the inequities of having our children sitting on the floor eating on the floor while there is a an apparent rat problem in our building in two years of us having to fight to solve that problem that's all your data that you don't have on your on your sheets and all the things that you're looking at and those are the things that we have been fighting for that i have seen 20 years i grew up in that school i'm only 42 years old but i started at 22 and have been advocating and have learned to be a parent have learned to be an advocate from this community the inequities and the in the the having to make this decision and i've been to every southeast guiding coalition meeting i went to them when i was in a different time zone when i was on vacation i didn't miss a single one yeah i was the only one from my community there present no admin nothing and and just the the issues that are at hand and the lack of of looking for us and i have some other things i was going to say but if you heard me speak before you know that i speak from the heart i don't lie i speak for my community i speak for the people because that this is this ultimately this decision is not gonna affect my child as as they said it i have i have the ability i have the resources you could say whatever but i'm here to speak for everyone who this does affect because this is the school that is the lowest social social economic level yet they're the ones that are going to be the highest impact they're the ones that are here that are advocating to be heard that aren't being heard that haven't been heard for the last 20 years removing the english neighborhood program adversely affects some of the most impacted families in our community who face racism and loss of challenges and trauma the southeast guy leading coalition process did not do adequate outreach to the most impacted communities in lent removing the english language program from the school would hurt the very students that the pps school board and district leaders say they are committed to advance racial equity doing this against the community's wish without their input or involvement is precisely against racial equity despite claims around data and scores on achievement tests for those that you have worked in in education they know you know that it is more than just what's on the data and passing a test our bipot community needs to be heard and this is ridiculous and that is all i can say and if you as parents who can sit here and and say this is not going to affect you of course it's not going to affect you because you guys it doesn't affect you and it's not going to affect me and it's not going to affect everybody that's in this room but it's going to affect the community that has
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been the only constant thing and i'm tired of hearing that the only place students of color can find success is out of their community and that is exactly what you guys are doing you are telling them that their success can only be found outside of their community and that is ridiculous [Applause] [Music] thank you thank you for the testimony for joining us tonight deputy superintendent hurts do you have additional material or should we no you you can go ahead and we're just here to support great thank you um at this point let's get a motion on the table do i have a motion motion there it is i haven't had emotions you adopt resolution six five one three and uh director green um moves and director holland seconds the adoption of resolution 6513 um and i'm going to ask if there's board discussion i know we also do have public comment right kara how many folks do we have signed up two people um does the board want to hear that public comment before our discussion yes i'm seeing some nods great are they ready kara i don't know if they're virtual or here so um yes stephanie ramirez velasquez sorry sorry [Applause] welcome and go ahead and state your name and your time will start when you do hello my name is stephania ramirez velazquez v e l r-a-m-i-r-e-z-v-e-l-a z q u easy i am a dli teacher at lent i have been working at lev for five years now and i'm here today to voice concern about the changes that will happen to let school for many years let has been in constant change and whether it be changing to k8 to a k5 this last school year to having a new administrator almost every year i have been at lent there has been consistent changes in our leadership but something that has always been strong has been the community at lent this community has been through a lot and has been together strong we have stayed strong together and have grown up on lent would not be lent if not for both uh both strands the amount of exposure students get from each other and the amount of language is being spoken to uh spoken to having a diverse staff and community is immense i feel that lent is being left out of the table of what is being done to our school and our community when we finally had a meeting for our community over what was being done we only had one interpreter in spanish when in fact our families speak vietnamese somalian mandarin russian and more i saw families leave leave the meeting to not being provided the languages that they needed to understand what was happening to the community i implore you to follow what i teach my students to follow with their hearts you are my other me if i do harm to you i do harm to myself if i love and respect you i love and respect myself lead by your actions listen to the community keep our eli in our school i know that we have to meet somewhere in the middle we welcome the bridger dli strand to the community but please keep our community together thank you and virtually we have maria valez good evening everyone my name is maria veles e v-e-l-e-z and my pronouns are she her aja greetings pbs board and superintendent guerrero we at latino network are in strong support of spanish dli at kellogg middle school we're lifting up the voices we've been hearing from our community and their interest in continuing the pipeline from lent k5 to kellogg middle school for the spanish dli program and this has been a very challenging year for students and families and for latino network one of tremendous growth and impact latino network has learned and reinforced many key lessons primarily to provide safe space for our community to share to listen to the community and uplift their voice during the pandemic it was critical to listen even more closely and to immediately adapt programs and meet their needs each of us have had to quickly adjust and respond to student needs differently and urgently and here's one of the ways that we've been listening and trying to adapt to this below what we've been hearing are about key equity issues uh from the community that we've been learning at the agency um so for example
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as you've heard already in this this evening is the revolving door of administration at atlant since 2017 lent has had five different principles and only richard smith was the longest lasting principal for uh being at lunch for about three years but now he has already gone to kellogg and while folks are very pleased with nicole berg as principal um and we were hoping she was going to continue to strengthen lent's culture and student outcomes it sounds seems like even tonight that she will be uh leaving again these administrative turnovers harmed children and disrupted the school culture leading to a vacuum of leadership advocacy on behalf of lent school for years the harm in trauma on lent students and community cause historic patterns of pps pps management decisions so for example again at lent and other title one schools with the majority of students of color there's been a repository of problem problematic pps employees so for example um before superintendent guerrero even came to the district in 2017 pps had a pattern of transferring employees with hr or tspc complaints or accusations i.e emotional physical abuse or sexual harassment to different schools this happened with the former principal uh mr candler who had several staff complaints against him from ockley green before being assigned to lent and this also happened most egregiously with former climate coach sam leach who after serious accusations of emotional and physical abuse against children was assigned to lent to oversee the discipline at that school and there are several news reports about this and our lend school parent response from that time and you can check that with pamphlet media or even k2 news also i wanted to highlight here um you know the pbs facilities again that you've kind of heard here the neglect of lent school and the area basically around 2017 we also were hearing about the school with the severe rodent infestation mice and then rats and it was common for the children to see the mice run running in the classroom and they've been reading on the ground during circle time this is on top of three years of students not even being able to drink out of school water fountains because of the lead in the water at the school the school is an older building and only recently has pbs invested in construction and seismic improvements to the buildings and now that lunch students can go to a nice school building it sounds as though they're going to be asked to go to harrison park an older building just like you're not yet prepared for middle school sorry to interrupt you sorry you may not have been able to hear the timer that went off if you could just wrap up your thoughts that would be great i'm almost done thank you so much so basically again we're just writing in full support that we would like to see lent go to kellogg dli spanish programming thank you so much for your time and thank you for listening on behalf of latino network thank you [Applause] there was a student who wanted to read a letter but i didn't catch her name was there a student who wanted to testify on this matter okay if there is go ahead and see kara as we have this conversation um so we did have a motion and a second to adopt this so now we're going to move on to board discussion and staff is here to answer any questions i will open up the floor so i'll jump in um and just to give people a heads up i have an amendment i'm going to offer and hopefully at some point we'll have a written version but i have some comments and i have some questions some for the superintendent and some for staff uh but i had a really hard time first of all i want to thank the parents who just spoke um and spoke their truth for their communities um so i couldn't sleep last night thinking about all the decisions we're making and how it's gonna how it's gonna impact um you know our students in southeast schools the scope was pretty unprecedented 21 schools 12 programs i don't think there's anywhere else in the district that has such a rich and diverse set of programs and the great thing is coming out of this is we are going to correct a um something that happened about 15 years ago which was kids and students in outer southeast didn't get an equitable middle grades experience and by opening kellogg last year and that or is that right the pandemic screwed up my timing is that last year or this year sorry opening of kellogg and the this plan to open harrison park i think will make big strides to provide students in outer southeast with the
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equitable middle grades experience and for the parents who talked about the enrollment issues at harrison park you can be sure while i'm on the board i'll be continuing to look at that as i have in the past uh for students in outer southeast to make sure they get um a similar experience to other students in middle grades that have had equitable robust electives and academic programming i think it's worth noting that what happened in after southeast is also on top of marshall high school closing and also you know the the discussion that happened tonight about just what's happened over the last year and a half and how just the uncertainty for communities has really been hard on parents and students and families and then on top of that they're out of the 21 schools there's 30 fte that are our teachers that are going to be um that have been cut from those schools so there's there's been a lot happening in outer southeast that um i think really has created a lot of trauma for families um but i want to thank the principals and the parents who have put in part of that um as i said the positive impact of this is the opening of harrison park also the enhanced enrollment at lane so an often overlooked middle school and hopefully that will provide their students with again a more equitable middle grades experience i'm also glad to see that the spanish dual language program at kellogg will have strong staff supports and that will continue also that a creative science school has a has a home and um so those are all positive things that i see in the in the program we also provide more stability for um but by changing boundaries and um making enrollment shifts provide some more stability um i do think we're gonna need to keep an eye on the numbers if the enrollment declines um as a previous speaker's speaker spoke however there are also um i think we need to be mindful that 750 kids are going to be bussed in this proposal and it's going to be really important that kids have access to transportation that they it doesn't mean because they're now bused instead of walking that they can't participate in after school activities we need to make sure that there is safe walking um patterns for for schools so um those are all issues that i think there's a lot of positive things in this proposal um but i i do have as i said in the last meeting um some issues some outstanding issues that i want to raise from um participating in or observing the process over the last year and um the questions i asked at the last meeting um there were several directed um to superintendent guerrero i don't think they're they're going to be new but um i um with deputy superintendent hertz um retiring um soon i think the community is going to really need to know that um somebody's has the southeast schools that are going to be over the next um like tonight is just is a milestone it's not the end but um that somebody is going to be caring for and making sure that we have an effective implementation that takes in all the voices including those who haven't been included so far and i know i asked you at the last meeting um superintendent guerrero just about um who that's going to be or how that's going to be structured so that our communities have confidence that they'll be a strong effective implementation it's a good question thank you for recognizing deputy hurts um who we want to recognize for her service the last number of years here this is quite the capstone uh for her and so of course as we identify um her successor we do have continuity in senior leadership you see our two regional superintendents here as you pointed out this involves a whole swath of school communities this is only a particular milestone there is a whole lot of planning that needs to go in to hear all of those specific details around from each of the school
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communities representatives to hear their advocacy around and work with our school leaders around what are the specific supports that would be helpful during this pretty massive transition it's going to be more dramatic for some communities than others we too here very clearly have been hearing since day one uh in front of the lent community you know have heard the stories i mean we heard about the rodents uh that's unacceptable we work to remedy that immediately uh but beyond the physical conditions what are the programmatic supports that we need to make sure are available so there there's a committed team uh that will that will request of the board that we preserve the bandwidth to to do this job uh successfully uh as you know we've i've proposed that we reserve resources so that we have a pool of staffing whatever that needs to be after consulting with our school communities as well as monetary resources we've heard from a number of our communities particularly the lent community what they believe some of those supports could look like uh the same uh very much within the realm of possibility we want to talk those through further but again that's that's sort of the next stage of work here is to develop a support plan and to make sure that the implementation at the time that these changes take place goes as successfully as as possible we've learned from the past effort in converting to middle schools uh you know what some of the important variables are and we're going to be extra mindful of those in this process moving forward great thank you and then just to continue on that theme as we heard tonight the bridger community whether it was actually being the original home to um what was the predecessor of the creative science school and then moving to k-8 having overcrowding issues that kindergarten having to move out and now this most recent change and also having their students um now be split and then having a new school community join them there's been lots of transitions at bridger and there was a meeting i know that deputy superintendent heard she were at um where the community jointly came up had some ask and then they the board also got a a letter that was the yes and letter and there was important really important asks in that and letter to help the bridger community with the transitions um and just to hold them um this next year so that their students as as all these transitions happen because they're they're a highly impacted school um and when i asked the question um the response about the resources they asked for which were relatively modest the answer was that um the district would consider them and i know that there has been um fte set aside and i would ask just um before the end of the school year that any decisions about supports for next year be made and communicated so that um communities kind of leave for the summer knowing um what sort of supports they'll have this this next year if that's possible or i don't know who to ask that to is that at least at least the supports for next year sure we welcome that conversation with the school community we we have a start in in what they've synthesized together uh hopefully they've seen we've been responsive in the past on like the facilities concerns but for this coming year we we want to get that as as correct as possible so uh we can set up a lent specific conversation uh pending the the board's actions tonight uh great and then um the probably the most significantly impacted community and that if you look at the 20 schools that are part of this process um the school with the highest percentage of low-income students is the lent neighborhood program and they also have a at 55 percent and they also have a 69 um black indigenous and students of color um which is uh one of the highest um of all the the the 20 schools um so at the end of at the end of this day in this process i know there were lots of conversations about trying to get all the pieces right and opening harrison park which was a huge lift and i don't want to underestimate that how complicated this was because there's no other part in portland place in portland where there's 12 pro you know 12 special programs also
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collocated with neighborhood schools but the end of the day it was kind of like the musical chairs and lent kind of ended up the neighborhood program without the chair and um i i think it it wasn't a question of bad intent it's just the the impact they got left with um the [Music] you know their their community would be would be bus to a nearby school across a number of busy streets and without having a conversation and i think um carmen spoke really eloquently to the the challenges of um engaging the community it's not just a one conversation and and then we move on and so um i am going to propose an amendment that and i've had a conversation with superintendent guerrero that the lent english neighborhood program have that does that change be deferred for no more than a year so that there's time for the community to have a conversation with our educators about how do we best support um a school community that really didn't have a voice in this process and again not with not because of bad and bad intent um but just at the end of the day they ended up in a place um i think at the end of the process with something that they hadn't had a long conversation about how that could be how the switch could be successful for their students and um you know relent really has a strong feeling of like lent united um and that they're one community i just have two questions about that one is so we're already deferring this actually before you ask that question do you want to go ahead and formally put that amendment on the table so we can have a conversation as a board sure and i don't is the what what's the best way to do this i have a revised amendment um that so if you go ahead and make a motion and and read that and you get a second then we can okay and just and just to be clear this wouldn't impact any of the other changes so all all the other pieces uh would still move because their lent is a big enough school that um the other changes could happen and there'd be time for a community that needs to have a voice in this um can share their perspectives you know what they value about lent i mean they very much feel that um there are reasons why then neighborhood enrollment is low um and carmen spoke to some of them um and how can we create this so this is a win for all of our students um including the lent neighborhood program so in the resolution i would um general counsel large should i just read out the changes or yes you make a motion to amend resolution 65 13 in the following ways and then reference the paragraph numbers and the recitals and the resolution that you're proposing here we go um i moved for resolution number 6513 um to modify it in the following ways that's a long resolution in i that would be deleted in the resolution language this language would be added the board also directs that the proposal to change the neighborhood english scholars program at lent be deferred for no more than a year and the this paragraph would be deleted superintendent designee will work with does it directly develop a transition plan for the english language program to create a plan one d would be deleted yeah sorry i'm looking at something i edited it over but yes so it would replace um a new recital do we have i know you have it in writing do we do we have that writing just for people who visually can see no i've seen i think you've made other changes to paragraph one in the resolution in the you deleted in lent and and the thing you just said a few months ago yeah so the language about i mean and i think we should go print copies and distribute them but i want to make sure we're printing the right and and i want to make sure that we're all clear because for all of these proposed changes implementation is the 20 um 3 24 school year so are we talking about
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concretely delaying implementation or are we talking about just delaying our definitive decision on where the english language program program would go it's um delaying the defendant the definitive decision because there hasn't been an opportunity for the lent community [Music] to really be engaged about a very major change to their to their school so i'd like to have a conversation about this i just want to make sure i think we need to have the motion and a second on the table can you read well well staff are working to get it because i do think it's going to be important just before we vote on to have it printed but yeah we have a conversation can you just can you read again i think what i i think i caught it but um just one more time for clarity it's very simple on the recital delete eye the new c says the board also directs that the proposal to change the neighborhood english scholars program at lent be deferred for no more than a year wait the new d is that one d you're talking about julia 2d 2c okay and then we also have one d that talks about the right to attend marysville for english only programming yeah i'm sorry are we going to connect that no that's that's out too well okay so that would change as well so it would be i mean i think it would be helpful i get i get the spirit of what you're proposing but it would be nice to have i agree and i think i've been struggling for a half an hour to um make that happen but say that again uh director lowry because i i would not support removing um the closets as they have the right to choose to attend marysville starting next year if they if that's their decision i mean i think that's the conversation we have to have what i what i'm hearing from director ben edwards is she'd like a year for the lent community to have some more time to discuss this and so that um a decision on what happens with blunt english would be deferred a year so we could it could be made next year but it wouldn't be implemented until the 20th well i guess we're not talking about implementation so it could be implemented in 23 24 but we're going to give them a year to so i really want to have this conversation no no because you have a motion on the table so we're going to need a second and then in order thank you thank you so we've got a motion we have a second now let's listen and while we do this staff are great thank you my original question was about the size of the building because i know we've heard from some in the bridger community that that delay is not um it wouldn't delay so there's enough room at lent to take the bridger students as well that are in dli lint is also adding two strands of pre-k this year so uh may need more space um and so it it could be really tight we've we've talked about it with the principal um it's doable they would have to use every space including some modular classrooms that they are not using as classrooms now okay so it would have some spatial impacts the amendment so um i went to the lent community meeting and um there were only two neighborhood families what two neighborhood parents there and it was clear like for whatever reason either the word hadn't got to them or you know people have things to do that whether it's you know working or child care but the meeting started with uh this is a this is to talk about the implementation of moving your program and it really it really wasn't a conversation about how can we better support your students or or even listening to i mean i listening to the lent community about what they value about the community and it at least for me what i heard was a pretty united community of wanting to keep the lent community together and um and then we had the meeting and and then things just kept moving on and i i feel like from my perspective you know if we're gonna do something hard like change or close a program or move a program that the and i've done it during my tenure eight times during my three terms on the board having to close or merge programs and every school community deserves an opportunity to talk about what's best for their students the loss you know if if you are going to move ahead with the change and to also have a deep conversation
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about how their students are going to be supported if there is going to be a change and that just hasn't happened yet and so i think it's premature for us to be voting to just say we're going to be moving the program and this is why i had asked superintendent guerrero whether that's something from a from a staffing standpoint we could accommodate um because to me i think it's i think it's the right thing to do um because i say if we look at if if we're going to use our racial equity and social justice lens lent is um the the the school in the outer southeast in addition to harrison park that we should be looking at let's take some questions i just want to say like i um the kids from lent the leadership of that lent leaders group the lent leopard leaders whatever it's called has been amazing the emails they have sent the the activities they've invited us to that i haven't been able to attend but um the students of that community have made their voices heard and have clearly articulated like a desire to have this conversation and i just want to thank all of the adults that have helped create space for those students to be leaders the students created that experience the students created the space thank you jackson but um those students and i know you spent some time with them as well and i know there are some adults here that i see you back there that are um standing in solidarity with the work the students have done but just to really appreciate that and the way they've spoken up um i think director broome edwards it's it's so complex because i think this how do we help people navigate the systems and um i would be in support of um giving the lent community some time i love the signs that say co-create i really and i think that's what we're hearing people ask for is to co-create a future um i would be interested in saying like even if we delayed the decision for a year we could implement that decision in the 23-24 school year and so is that your intention would be to delay the implementation of further year or just delay the decision give us a year to talk through and then at the decision point then make a decision about implementation well i think for this to be authentic we can't say that we've already made the decision and we're just going to talk about it but if we're really going to co-create and look at what the that's that's not what i asked julia okay sorry i said we're going to make a decision like we are not deciding what the decision is but we are going to work with the lens community to co-create a vision would you want to is your intention with the amendment to delay the implementation of that to 2425 or does does it leave the possibility the door open with the help with the collaboration of the lent community to implement in 2324. yeah sorry i misunderstood your question um so from talking to the superintendent guerrero who i think has consulted with um chief reese that there is at some at some point where some decisions need to be made but um that there's there's room for a conversation um okay i think that's right there's a few caveats i i'm i'm hearing that it wouldn't impact on all of the other sort of aspects or elements of this proposal there there's facility concerns you heard we're also kick-starting some new early education classrooms we want to make sure we can accommodate and and what would it mean if space has to be identified there is staffing timelines we want to be respectful of our contractual agreements if there's a decision uh to move in a different direction that that staff have the opportunity to participate in that process so i just want us to be mindful that's all and so it doesn't it may not take a year to really sort of have that meaningful conversation with the school community we might come back sooner than that so we can take all of these variables into account thank you i'd be curious hearing from deputy superintendent hurts or any other staff in terms of this amendment tonight do you do you have any staff concerns do you think it makes some sense after having been through this process for many many months so i we did have in the original resolution for people like our regional superintendents and our area senior directors to work with the principals and the school communities to bring the communities together that we're transitioning to form community communities even before students are beginning to move and so we were leaving the work of the our office of school performance leaders to work with our school communities to find the best transition plan possible so what i'm recognizing here is that um when um we make the decision not to move the lent neighborhood and we're leaving that pending decision then we're going to have a mary's bill that will be under enrolled for quite some
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time so just understanding that making that decision impacts another another school and i would um turn it to director brennan if there's other considerations that that come to mind there's one that comes to mind it's small and it's it's certainly manageable but um in preparing for this change we actually have to work with the city and change how buses access marysville and so the transportation team is trying to like accelerate that work and and and and get it done but it's uh one of those small factors that we do need lean time on and so um maybe we go ahead and do that anyway that's devoting resources that may be fruitful in the future and there are probably other smaller impacts not saying that they couldn't be managed but that's what we'll have to start discussing right away if indeed if i understand correctly you would you would defer the future location for lent neighborhood students and come back to that with the decision in the 24 school year ideally in time to support staffing community building transportation planning and everything else that has to happen if you defer the decision we will have some small details to work out great and then superintendent or we might need to defer the implementations of 24 20. i mean that's i think i have to have that flexibility not really on the table because we've got so many dominoes and a commitment to open harrison park but superintendent i would i think it was fair to ask of you to let us know like when do we need to make that decision by if we choose to defer this decision tonight but i agree that this is something that i've been thinking about and it is a unlike almost every other thread in this very very complex process this doesn't have a lot of impacts on the other parts of the proposal and other things that are happening if we put if we take a little more time and i think one of the benefits of taking a little more time on this particular piece is that we can hear more from families about what kind of choices they would they would be making including incoming families with kindergartners not just next year but the year after that you know would we have english speaking families who would opt into the dli program that right now we're mostly speculating about all of that and about numbers so i think it could give us a little more time to really know what that looks like and what our numbers are and so that's actually one of my questions would we allow i mean so i assume neighborhood kids would be able to go into the dli program next year would they also be kindergartners in the english language program atlanta so would we keep dual tracking including incoming kindergartners if there's no action in place here in the resolution we would have no reason to we can tell them that the families that it's being under discussion and no decision has been made but there isn't something you know concrete to share with them that what the plan is so we just have to tell them it was under discussion so yes so this would be clear we still have incoming kindergartners in the english language program that might if that decision is made move or might stay there um one of the other but then just to also be clear neighborhood students would have um right to access the dli program yes kindergarten can actually first grade have been allowed to enter into dli okay one other question i'm going to direct this to you you may not be the best person to answer but we we you mentioned tonight sort of through this process the uncertainty for the community and we heard that from another people who testified tonight as well it it feels to me like this continues that uncertainty i also know a lot of people here seem in support of this and i'm going to assume they're somewhat representative of the community but have we had that i just want to make sure that we don't make a decision that all of a sudden a lot of families who had already said okay this is going to happen and i just want to be done with it and we can make our decision we'll come back and say wait a minute now we have to have this conversation for a whole another year if those families exist i haven't heard from them okay i mean the lent community meeting it was overwhelming from the spanish dli families and then subsequently the student activisms it's been from both sides and i want to thank jackson for going out to meet with the lent leopard leaders with me and from the teachers that um they'd like to they'd like to stay together but really that conversation never happened and so i i mean if they if they come together and they talk to the um district leadership and they come to the conclusion like we're going to be much better if we just implement and we can move ahead they could come back next
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week were you able to follow up with carmen because i know you and i had that conversation right before the meeting if you had a chance to run it by her and what was her response julia do you want to i did talk to some teachers as well i mean there's a there's a group of um lent teachers here and carmen's here i don't want to speak for you if if anybody wants to were you able to touch base with her before the meeting about this amendment well right after we talked yes okay and she was in support of the amendment is that i'm seeing a nod yes okay thank you and like i said i talked to some teachers as well but i i have the overwhelmingly again i'm going to go back to you know i was part of boards when we had to make super difficult decisions about closing wilcox and edwards and smith and young son and you go down the list um and a really important part of that conversation um and even some that were proposed that didn't happen but really important part of the conversation is for the community to be able to share their perspectives about their communities before something happens to them and that hasn't happened in this in this instance and so it is important for that conversation to have and if they decide you know we collectively um this is this is what we want to do they can you know make their case as a collective community but they ha they haven't even had that opportunity to have that discussion and just kind of i say not not bad intent but the impact is at the end of the day with everything moving around it made sense like we got to move lent and again if you look at the the school community there they are the ones that should be after harrison park at the center of our decision making okay jackson did you have any proposal [Applause] yeah i think it's more just seeing the student advocacy and having multiple times to fight tooth and nail to get heard it's kind of bittersweet for me to see because i'm excited to see students advocating but i also i want to see them being asked their input instead of having to contact the board to get their voices heard at this level so i think i like that we're hearing from them now but i also wish we had started this process from hearing from that community and hearing from those students thank you any other board discussion just before you vote on the amendment and then move on to the proposal okay seeing none i'm going to go ahead and call the question on the amendment and that you we now have in writing in front of us and i'll just again try and summarize it that defers the decision about moving the english language program at lent for a year while we engage with community no more than a year while we engage the community um all those in favor of the amendment say yes yes yes yes yes all those opposed any abstentions then the amendment passes six to zero with student representative weinberg voting yes great um thank you director from edwards um now we're gonna move back to the amended scgc proposal um and i'll just open up and i will just remind the board i want to have enough conversation that people want to have it is 805. we need to move on to the budget relatively soon but let me open it up on the segc i want to start with something that's somewhat related to the conversation we just had which is um that one of the aspects of this proposal that i'm uncomfortable with is kelly's school just hanging out out there without a lot of consideration or attention or without any any changes proposed in this process and i'm not necessarily saying that we should open that back up as we reconsider the lent english language issues in the next go round but it is a school that is adjacent that is at less than half of its building capacity with about half of its students coming in from other districts and losing enrollment so it's not a sustainable situation for their english language you know kids in their neighborhood program and um i i'm not i would tell say that i'm just not sufficiently convinced as to why it wasn't more considered and integrated into this process so if that can be part of a continuing conversation about the children in the neighborhood program at lent which is just adjacent then perhaps we can address two two challenges at the same time and this is something we've also talked about a long time on a different level in terms of coordinating with our adjacent districts who have a lot of students in the russian
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dli program at kelly which is now the majority of the students in that program and about half the students in that school so i would really like to see us take a look at that and then uh oh you know another another issue that that wasn't addressed and and believe me uh i think it was a incredible challenge to narrow this scope to a place where we could arrive at a proposal like this that basically makes the puzzle pieces fit the the bigger the scope the more puzzle pieces there are the harder it is but you know we didn't address anything in terms of our high school feeder patterns which we know need a ton of work we have we have great disparities in enrollment between our high schools which really leads to great inequities and perpetuates great inequities so we need to address that but the way that it is related directly to this process is we have some middle schools with split feeder patterns and sometimes i've been through a boundary process where it was just literally unavoidable based on geography and transportation routes and sometimes that is the case but it's certainly not ideal so the situation that we have with the creston students going to hosp who will then go to cleveland when the rest of or uh yeah who will go to franklin when the rest of their hospital cohort goes to cleveland that's really tough and you have the same situation with whitman and um lane and some of the lewis students that are going to go to lane will now also go to cleveland yeah and woodstock going and woodstock harrison park and then back to cleveland so i'm not suggesting that we muddy the water in this um in this moment but we do have a phase two coming down the pipeline in phase three it's somebody else's turn yeah it's not and um so uh those um not only do we need to consider the high schools but we need to look at our split feeder patterns um from our middle schools because that's just that's a hard situation for kids and to the extent that it's ever avoidable we want to do what we can um [Music] i guess that's probably all i really need to say thank you thanks director constance other comments on the scgc proposal in front of us edwards oh sorry student representative weinberg i was just going to be in continuation with that i was in an advisory group for social emotional learning standards on monday and the topic of conversation was around the need to build relationships in your school community and have that consistent k-12 to have emotional competency because once we have that everything else falls into place so our graduation rates will increase our um i'm blanking on all the other research that was presented but all these indicators that we see for student achievement and success increase and when we are increasing the number of split feeder patterns from just whitman to lane and then separating there to different schools we're adding woodstock dli we're adding woodstock to lane so we're adding another split feeder pattern there and the creston one which i actually wasn't aware of so thank you for bringing that one up we talked in 2020 about how undesirable having split feeder patterns are and then seeing a proposal come back that increases instead of tries to decrease that um is tough for me to see i just want to point out that that research jackson about like school transition always sets students back and and those relationships are so vital some of that was the impetus behind the creation of the kate's in the first place was to try it was an experiment to try to find some stability and some empowerment for students and one of the things we then discovered was that students weren't able to have a robust academic experience there wasn't the sort of diverse community being built and so that's one of those things of weighing um how do you do both well and i think i think you know i've talked to deputy hertz about this and and the plan is with the high school feeder patterns to correct some of these things but it's it's sort of what if we opened up the can of worms of high school with this change then that would bring so many other puzzle pieces into play and so it's trying to do things in a sequential manner but it's really messy and and these are real kids that'll be affected and i think that's part of why there's extra resources i know that there's a it looks like 10 fte in this proposal that will help with some of that stability uh bringing some stability in relationship during limits of change director madrid did you have comments can i to what i had to say one thing i forgot to say which is that just i i i really support working with the
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lin english um then lent neighborhood community this year um to talk about what's best there but i also don't want to lose sight we haven't explicitly talked about the goal that we prioritized in this process of not having co-located programs and of really looking at the academic needs of our english language learners and you know we have one test case which is wrigler now and i think by most or all accounts you know they've had a very successful school year um in terms of stable stabilizing that community and student achievement is improving and so this was something that we we set out to do and you can't you can't just create that out of thin air without also having you know some some repercussions but i didn't want to lose sight of that thank you director ben edwards and i think we can then probably move on to a vote yeah i guess as somebody who participated in all the meetings but in fairness i'm not a parent right now in any of those schools so i didn't feel that sort of the daily anxiety the stress or how is this going to it's going to be good for my student how is it how is it going to impact them so i guess i would just caution that before we launch on more things happening in outer south mid to outer southeast that like let's let's implement these well um that's really important um because it will build trust and credibility in the community for the work ahead but there but between the pandemic the southeast guiding coalition all the changes and the um you know cuts and staff um the community is um really fragile right now and i i think there's some really positive things that are coming out of this but um let's um let's move ahead and implement well and take care of our our kids before we start something additional new and i'm sorry i have one last thing is there was a recommendation from the southeast guiding coalition just about process and you know this was complicated by covid the complexity of the school communities in mid to outer southeast but i really they recommended kind of a debrief session on the process and i think that's really important um you know as a learning institution we can always do things um better and learn from that and i really hope we aren't too tired to do that last debrief because i think it will serve us well for the especially on the implementation and before we move on to our budget conversation i just want to make it clear to the community that the superintendent is proposing in the budget 10 fte to support schools that are impacted in this proposal and it remains to be seen exactly what those positions are whether they're direct teaching positions and to help with the planning and engagement process as well so thank you uh the board will now vote on resolution 3513 southeast enrollment and program balancing phase two uh all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no and are there any abstentions resolution 6513 is approved by a vote of six to zero with student representative weinberg voting i struggled with this vote all day um i'm going to say a hesitant yes um just because i'm very concerned with the we have so many yes ands in this um proposal that i think we are going to be missing out on some of those ands um and those ends are what are going to support our students in this process and i also i can't agree with the split feeder pattern and i hope that gets fixed in the next phase but it's doing a disservice to all these students that are going to experience this for at least the next two years probably um so yeah so yes but with hesitation i guess thank you thank you [Applause] i have a i know we've got a lot of people here for budget i'm i'm gonna have a request to take five or three we're gonna take a very quick three-minute break and we'll be back to start the budget conversation our budget conversation i believe we
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have a quorum thank you everybody well that's why i'm bringing us back so um anyway thank you everyone for that quick break uh we are gonna move on to the budget conversation so i am now um recessing the board from its regular meeting and reconvening as the budget committee the board will now discuss and vote to approve the proposed uh 2022-23 budget and the imposition of property taxes before we begin our discussion superintendent guerrero and our cfo will be reviewing a few important highlights of the recommended budget clarifying some information and highlighting what the budget is focused on and uh and we'll also get a little bit more detail on the proposal for using the additional nine million dollars in that carryover the district recently learned it would have following the state's reconciliation of its school funds that were shared at last week's budget work session superintendent guerrero can i before that could you just take a moment and explain once again for all of us the difference between we're what we're voting on tonight and what will happen and the difference between the budget committee voting and the board voting because i think that's always really happening because it's my favorite thing it's complicated yeah and so just as a reminder under under well under oregon law there's there's three distinct stages to the budget process um the uh the the budget officer which in our case is the superintendent proposes a budget um to to to the to the to the uh budget committee the board in our case serves as the budget committee and it's at this we are the budget committee the same right so hear me out same thing they're one and the same but for this stage of the process we are the budget committee and we approve the budget tonight the budget then goes to the tax supervising and conservation commission which will have 21 days to review it and make its own recommendations it will then come back to the board for approval so tonight the board is the budget committee i'm sorry for adoption tonight the board approves the budget as the budget committee and in three weeks we adopt the budget as the board so and this is we did not make this process up the state of oregon made this process up for us and we are abiding by that and what potential changes can happen between adoption and approval because i think that's always confusing too so at this point and we're gonna have a robust conversation tonight about any potential amendments um after it comes back uh the board can again amend the budget the only restriction is we can't increase any fund by more than 25 percent 10 percent 10 10 um yeah that would be the restriction at the adopted phase of the budget so can we as we've as we yeah can we decrease by any amount yes okay yes um and now i'll tell you from a process perspective because the budget committee you all are the same hopefully like all of that gets straightened out so that when it by the time you get to adopt it you already had a conversation amongst yourselves and then i know from i know from during covid that we actually did some budget amendments because things were very different and so we needed to move some funds around so that also in the once we've approved and adopted a budget we can make budget amendments during the course of a year when if things happen yeah and and that is the way also if we wanted to increase the adopted budget by more than 10 you can come back right after july one and do a budget amendment if need be i just think that's it's a very complicated weird budget process and so that's always just instructive for me and i hope for folks following along at home this this wonky oregon law yeah so um thank you for that and tonight i'm going to i'm going to turn over to superintegra but we are going to have i we need to have a robust conversation about the budget i do hope we can have an efficient conversation about the budget so be thinking if you have ideas or if you have any proposals or changes or areas you want to focus on let's just make sure we get those on the table up front and then we can go through a process if there are any amendments to the budget and then we will approve it and move on superintendent guerrero good evening again uh we'll we'll keep it to reviewing some highlights we've shared a great deal of detail with directors already but just to take us back uh when i first presented 20 22 23 budget to you about a month ago i began by acknowledging the important role our public schools play in our community particularly now the budget you are considering tonight focuses on emerging out of this global pandemic with a deeper more complete school experience for our students that's our goal as superintendent i'm first and foremost an educator with those over 30 years in the classroom leading schools operating in large urban districts i take seriously my charge for ensuring all 43 000 students in pps get what they need to thrive in school and beyond within our means coming out of this pandemic in a very challenging school year we know our students need extended learning opportunities that go beyond the traditional academic school calendar we know they benefit from supportive adults who can address their growing mental and behavioral health needs we know that they need more rich learning
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opportunities that can strengthen motivate bring joy to their learning we know that they need more adults who care and hold a high set of expectations for their individual success we've all felt the consequences of the last year or two and we've been listening we hear the needs our recommended budget tonight considers these needs it makes thoughtful compromises it aims to promote more joyful more powerful learning experiences for our students next school year objectives for tonight first we'll review just a few important highlights of our approximately 1.89 billion recommended budget we'll take the opportunity to clarify some misinformation and refocus on what this budget truly tries to accomplish what it contains second as a follow-up to last week's meeting we'll share our best thinking about uh how to maximize the 9 million dollar in carryover dollars we spoke to the board about this last week to further support our community's priorities and of course very importantly have directors consider and vote tonight to approve the 2022-23 budget and tax rates uh and joining me tonight uh in this quick presentation will be our cofo our cfo and alberto delgadillo so our budget should serve as a statement of our values and our priorities so i want to be really clear next year's budget directs all available dollars to address student unfinished learning and prioritizes direct services and supports to students it provides more opportunities to strengthen enrich and bring joy to the student learning experience our budget provides more adults who can support the growing behavioral and mental health needs of our students it elevates opportunities for staff to grow as professional educators and it makes progress to improve the supportive conditions within our schools especially in light of this challenging school year of course for to make our guiding priorities impactful we remain focused on narrowing gaps that continue to limit opportunities for students of color in particular to succeed in our schools as a result we are resourcing staffing schools more equitably we are putting more resources in schools with higher needs we are spending more dollars per student at schools in underserved communities over the last month there's been a distortion of what our recommended budget represents despite the pressures of declining student enrollment and higher costs to operate we've made thoughtful decisions to direct the bulk of all of our available resources to serve the holistic needs of our students so what are the facts pps is expecting an enrollment decline of about 3 400 students that's about 8 percent of our total enrollment that means that in the immediate we will see a slight increase in per student funding from the state school funding for state school fund while we're seeing a slight increase in per student funding revenue is not keeping pace with the cost to operate schools this is driven primarily by increasing salary and benefit costs that is why we've proposed using 49 million dollars or half of our rather healthy fund balance of which we've built up over the last few years we're grateful to the board for your support and lowering the fund balance and allowing us to make more direct investments to students and schools at this time i think these points are very important i've heard a lot of rhetoric that pps is flush with dollars what that omits however is the cost to operate schools also continue to grow and what that omits is much of these new dollars are one time which means that when these funds run out they will not be replaced and what is often left out of the conversation is that this budget does use all available resources to limit the overall reduction of school staff for the coming year it increases direct services to students including more mental and behavioral health supports it adds more learning opportunities including a robust summer program and we are doing this through an equity lens meaning that our schools with higher needs are staffed more generously this means that class sizes in those schools are more optimal this means that the adult to student ratios are much lower because these schools have more support staff this means that overall we are spending more dollars per student in schools classified as csi tsi and title one and before i turn it over to our cfo i want to emphasize three points one we're making significant investments that retain a higher level of teacher
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fte across the system while we've reduced positions by less than three percent no classroom educator nor any other licensed educator is experiencing a layoff and despite a reduction in positions we've used one-time dollars to continue to lower class sizes as evidenced by our overall reduction of class size maximums two we are supporting students focused on delivering services that support the needs of the whole child in fact our budget reflects that schools host an array of professionals including social workers counselors school principals added assistant principals etc and each of these educators directly support the needs of our students they augment what happens in the classrooms and help enrich the school environment and its conditions three we're aggressively using one-time dollars to support student needs many of the investments we'll make for next year are supported by one-time dollars it's important to be up front and transparent with our community that barring any new sources of significant revenue next year's budget conversation will be much different i'm going to turn it over to our cfo to walk you through further budget details and clarify a few additional points this evening thank you superintendent guerrero as a reminder the total budget consists of five major funds with the general fund and the special revenue funds being key to supporting our district operations the following slide contains our updated budget numbers when we go from our proposed budget which was about a month ago april 26 to what we'd be recommending to the budget committee to approve the biggest updates are attributed to the general fund and special revenue fund the general fund increased by about 9 million dollars to 804 million dollars due to our updated financial forecasts the special revenue fund which is comprised of several restrictive programs increased by about 6 million to account for the anticipated hb 4030 funding and i should note that we are in the process of applying for the hb 4030 funds there's no proposed plan but we are in the process of developing one the special revenue fund now totals approximately 311 million dollars all of these fines combined make up the total of about 1.89 billion make the total of our 1.89 million billion dollar budget next slide also if you recall at our april 26 presentation we shared a high-level overview of our general funds team's breakdown by service because the term central office can be misleadingly simple categorizing our teams from the perspective of how they support our staff and students helps to highlight how they contribute to our district these percents taken take into account both the general fund and the special revenue funds which include funds like sia measure 98 esser and title funds because the term central office can be misleadingly simple it assumes a fixed location or a specific job type so for additional clarity we offer a more dynamic view summarized in four categories to help clarify and reaffirm the investment in people closest to our students next slide and directors you saw a version of this slide last week however the primary difference is that it now contemplates spending an additional 9 million dollars which takes our projected beginning fund balance of 100 million dollars down to approximately 51 million dollars we're still at the school can i ask a question about that yes so the nine the nine million dollars um the reconciliation the after the reconciliation we got 12 and the last meeting it went from 12 to nine it was described as offset what specifically um the three million dollar offset right yeah so i'm sorry if you want to finish your question i was ready to go you're ready for this one um yeah because i i send it before the meeting and um so it's my understanding is from the state they sent us 12 million dollars and then about what we had to utilize then was just nine and so the offset is went to one so from our expenditure side so right we're like at the end of the day and i know you're very well aware this was just for the general conversation topic we have our revenues so revenues come in there's a reconciliation that occurred and hey here's your 12 million dollars other side of the equation we have expenses so every quarter we
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forecast out to where we'll be june 30th and based on our expense rate we made an adjustment we were spending at about three million dollars more than where we were the previous quarter so within our budget but just spending a little faster than what we were anticipating and when we say spending this is everything from supplies to additional trips field trips or whatever the case may be it's just like when we were at the end of december compared to where we were at the end of march we're like oh spending's picked up so we're now anticipating an additional three million dollars so that's where that nets out yeah if i could just add um an additional question and i did i did go in for whatever teacher was just that recommended i have the small group instruction with the um the deputy superintendent uh hurts on the indian fund balance i did do that um but the question i have then is originally when we got the budget there was seven millions in savings and part of it was described as like either unfilled positions or like decisions not to do things is that the three million is that actually was that part of the savings or was there actually 10 million in savings and or i'm just trying to figure if that if we now have fewer savings um that were anticipated because more money was spent no because those savings we like carved we swept we swept them so this is on top of that based on our trend rate that's the new data point so the 7 million had already been saved and then you had the budget sitting there and then there was an additional 3 million of spend which means that can't go into the [Music] beginning fund balance correct yes yeah and and and we'll when we continue to monitor it's it's it's as the year as the months progress we have some trend data to look back to be able to provide educated guesses but they are our estimates at this point in time so the 3 million is in overspend of what we expected this quarter basically at this point yes and do you know what that overspend like what areas that was in and it was spread across so from supplies to a variety of other uh expenditures so it wasn't necessarily like one specific transaction okay technology that's what the superintendent just said was technology was a good one that's another area yep superintendent you did say something at the end of your presentation and you said that next year's budget conversation will be different than this one um and i my my little heart was like oh we won't have any cuts and it'll be lovely but i think what you were trying to say is that um next year's budget conversation will actually be more painful than this one because we won't have that s or money and so some of the things we're doing this year won't be around next year and so we'll be back here with more signs hold that thought a budget is always a matter of choices and trade-offs my last slide is going to speak to this question and the the last thing i'll add to this slide um is that using that 49 million dollars it it's using one-time funds so it is using one-time finance to balance our budget for next year uh next slide please in overall the the recommended budget for approval pro still prioritizes over more than 133 million dollars to make next year more powerful learning experience for every pps student's educator and staff so with this in mind i will turn it back to superintendent thanks alberto well as i've shared with directors from the beginning you know the development of our budget is always iterative especially as we receive updated revenue projections we just saw that recently and we fine-tune cost estimates so for example last week we came to you our ending fund balance was revised to be nine million more than than we projected and as we discussed last week we heard support to earmark those dollars to support further support students and school communities and in thinking about how to best use these dollars and the input we've received it was important to hear from you and our community what what is the top priorities we heard a number of these priorities to include the need to support the increasing number of students slated to receive special education services next year we heard a desire to further improve adult to student ratios there's an expectation to support southeast portland schools impacted by the changes we just discussed resulting
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from enrollment and program balancing there was a desire to establish a centralized student activities fund to support student trip experiences more equitably so in response here's our attempt to thoughtfully distribute nine million dollars across an array of these same priorities in your board material you have a lot more details about each of these line items but i want to highlight sort of the top the top ones as you can see we've updated numbers we expect to fully restore 18 fte positions in special education to serve the growing need there that's 18 fte positions restored to special education hearing directly from our union partners and members of our community we've allocated 12 additional positions that's a combination of counselors social workers mental health professionals for example to support high need schools such as title 1 schools and schools in need of targeted or comprehensive improvement in total these additional 74 positions will continue our effort to increase learning opportunities for students grow access to mental behavioral health and wrap around professionals and continue to make progress on our community's top priorities good job and these 9 million are just a fraction of the more than 133 million that are going directly to support student success i started off my opening remarks by acknowledging that our budget serves as a statement of our values and priorities so this in front of you is our statement of our values and priorities 37.5 million to address unfinished learning 35 million to increase learning opportunities for students 17 million to provide more high quality emotional mental health and wraparound supports 16 million to create more time for professional educators to plan collaborate and prepare and more than 13 million dollars to make meaningful progress on our community's top priorities all of these dollars all 133 million are again going directly to support student success why aren't we clapping i don't know why we're not clapping so we're we're clear on what students need now our students need rigorous and engaging instruction our students need extended learning opportunities they need access to additional adults who can support and address their behavioral and mental health needs and they need us to all come together to demonstrate that we care that we hold high expectations for their individual success our 2223 budget balances all of these needs to strengthen the service delivery to our students it makes deep investments now to directly support students and staff emerging from this pandemic it balances the use of one-time dollars to directly support students learning and strengthen the capacity of our educators across the school system it leverages all available resources towards students now i also want to recognize the importance of looking ahead and thinking about the very likely scenario we will be facing next year we agree with everyone here that we must make all available resources available to students which we are doing now and we should continue to note as our directors have pointed out in earlier conversations that next year's budget conversation will require difficult trade-offs that could create significant disruptions next year when we don't have access to large amounts of one-time money we of course must continue to advocate for the full funding of oregon's public schools together including the full funding of oregon's quality education model it'll take all of us together to ensure we have the stable and elevated level of investment necessary to serve our students so i'll stop there with our highlights thank you thank you superintendent um we're going to do a couple things here before we get into board conversation um uh the portland association of teachers has asked for some time tonight on the board agenda and so i'd like to invite pat vice president gwen sullivan and president-elect angela bonilla to provide a few comments and then um i'll ask the board again we do have three people signed up for testimony would we like to hear them at the beginning of our conversation yes i would agree with that so please welcome [Applause] hello nice to see you all thanks for allowing us to speak tonight i'm gwen sullivan vice president of portland association of teachers sitting with my comrade angela bonilla
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our uh president elect um board directors uh and student weinberg uh director pleasure to see you and superintendent guerrero a pleasure tonight i'm going to try to make sure that i stay on on target to really talk about number one the importance of what we care about as educators and you know how we're moving through this budget so i'll start by saying it's really important to educators that we want a school district that we can be really proud of and we want a school district that um we can happily encourage folks to work here that they it's a great district we want them to be here and we want our students to actually see themselves as future educators working in this district and i do think you all want some of the same things so knowing this i'll start by saying thank you for adding back some of the fte cuts we started off with a lot more and we have some of the cuts to elementary we saw some of those come back we also saw even tonight the special education cuts being restored or mostly restored and that as you talked about tonight the 10 fte for the enrollment balancing that's a positive and some more fde for mental health supports in our middle schools so thank you um to you know restoring some of the cuts and our schools need a lot more and so when we're looking at prioritizing we really want to look at all the areas in the budget where we can make sure we're making a huge different difference for the kids who need it most and so with that i will start by saying some of the greatest needs and you guys have heard it are our middle schools um there was a segment last night about it and i just think that this is an area that we definitely need to have more supports for our middle school um our our kids definitely need a lot more we need i know that we brought in middle school teachers we did a survey and i mean everybody said that they would like a forward-facing rj person a restorative justice person in the schools to work on all of the huge issues that are happening the other thing they need more time everybody you know definitely needs more time and later tonight you're going to hear from some middle school educators that came together and really in a short amount of time got a lot of feedback from their colleagues in other areas so you know moving forward we really want to make sure that we address huge issues around that their need for safety for stability as we talked about um the importance of relationships the stability is really important and the school based supports that it's at the school that it's not someone coming in for a day or two so um with that i will um turn it over to uh angela thanks gwen hi um so i just wanted to talk a little bit about what i've noticed um in the kind of dance we've been doing as a district with our educators and parents and students and this board around the budget um so in february we had that we heard that initial plan to cut 180 positions and um and then the proposal we saw on march 9th brought that down to 110 middle and elementary school positions and i saw a lot of community feedback coming back and pressuring you all and you made the changes you added student-facing positions so again thank you and then on may 4th we learned that there were several positions that were maintained but we were still going to have 99 less adults in the building with students under the proposal and that's also when we learned that when the school board asked those tough questions
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the majority of the 6.7 million reported as savings from central office was unfilled positions and the majority of those positions were in special ed positions and custodial positions elizabeth and i came here and spoke educators and their students spoke parents spoke and pps once again found the money to use to maintain multiple student-facing positions again thank you i appreciate the responsiveness of this body i also want to make sure that i pause for a second to clarify something about our last presentation i was reading through the frequently asked questions thank you for all the board materials and for putting that stuff up and i know that there was a question that stated we misrepresented data around administrators and so that data that we used came from pps's own budget books um and then when we want to talk about positions in central office that is a very vague term and so i want to make sure to clarify that we had a freedom of information act request to ask for the numbers of central office staff that are making or excuse me pbs staff that are making over 110 000 um which would be primarily administration when we remove student-facing building-based administrators the data shows that the number of academic program administrators academic program associates assistant administrators of special programs assistant directors of academic programs have increased from 39 positions in 1617 to 57 positions in 2122 so i understand that the table you saw earlier was talking about different positions and it wasn't as clearly parsed out so i wanted to make sure to give that information um specifically about positions that are not student-facing but i do want to continue to you know make sure that we are mirroring that feedback response right we heard i saw it i heard it i want to make sure to give you that data um because we know that we're not here to intentionally mislead the public we're here to serve our kids we're here to do the best by by our students in our communities um so i also want to make sure to applaud our community for coming out in force and really making sure that we all hear the changes they want to be when they want made so most recently we heard about the 12 million due to the may state school adjustment that happens every year and we already saw that 3 million of it has been spent and what i've noticed is that every time there are questions and concerns pps is able to find a way to make to find a way to prioritize what the community prioritizes with their money and this proves to me what you know we all know to be true that priorities shift when communities speak up so thank you for being that responsive board and we're also listening to your concerns and trying to find a way forward our position is this we don't need to spend more we need to spend differently we don't need to use one-time funds or tap into reserves to give students what they deserve every dollar of that 12 million we found in those you know district couch cushions wherever they came from should directly go to support students and i also know that through hb 4030 the district is poised to receive an additional 5.8 million dollars from the state um and this funding was made available through a grant during the search short session when we heard about it at pat we made sure to call pps's labor relations folks and in hr so that we could remind them to apply for that and make sure that we get those funds because we are all here for the same thing we want our kids to have the best experience they can in their schools and that appropriation was added by the state in order to recruit and retain educators and support personnel and so in those budget materials i saw that we are going to be pulling some money from the general fund in order to give bonuses to our para professionals which they rightly deserve and then some but we also have this 40 30 money which is one time and so this is an another example of thinking about how we can be creative with the funds we have in front of us in order to ensure that we're providing the best support for our students on the ground in their buildings and so i you know i think we are sharing we share that opportunity with pbs because we know that collaboration is not just sharing these empty platitudes it's listening to the concerns we all bring and believing each other you know believing that when they're even though there are more um funds available there is also more spending we believe that we hear you and we are also asking that you all believe us when we say that our students have
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specific needs and we're on the ground knowing what those needs are and are asking you for those specific things and so we have to have that mutual belief in trust in order to move forward together [Laughter] so what we are asking here is that the board pass an amended budget that ensures that that adjustment goes to school-based student-facing positions for our middle schools and doing that by taking the following steps so the first is to amend the budget to increase staff and hold class sizes of no more than 30 in our tsi and title middle schools specifically our tsi and title middle schools those are the middle schools we've heard having the disproportionate impact of the pandemic that way staff can provide more opportunities for students to connect with each other during those you know lunch periods where you'll hold affinity groups the more staff that are available to hold those groups the more staff that are available to do duty at lunch and ensure kids are safe we also want the board to amend the budget to provide a full-time fte building-based restorative justice coordinator at every middle school and making sure to prioritize that fte for our title and tsi middle schools and these positions need to be staffed by you know trained restorative justice coordinators certified counselors or social workers or teachers and these positions will ensure that we're having that preventative approach we're building that community within our schools because what we're hearing um is that the schools that are having the highest need are getting folks who kind of fly by support in the moment of crisis and then have to go back to their regular jobs which is doing something else they're supporting the other buildings that are also in crisis and so that is why we're asking for a specific allocation of fte for restorative justice coordinators being building and site-based those rj coordinators will be able to provide students with the caring and consistent adults they need when i started working in education i worked with infants and toddlers and um yeah early childhood and um one of the things i learned about adverse childhood experiences is that the biggest ways to counter those adverse childhood experiences is by having one consistent caring adult relationship as an educator i went into the classroom and decided that i will be that one consistent caring relationship for every one of my students every year thanks i know that our educators are thinking very similarly they want to be that person for their kids and if we can provide folks to to give those opportunities we will ensure that they can we can have as many caring consistent relationships for our students and our middle schools as possible um i think it's really important to remember um renee anderson said in her presentation from the crbc report that there's a hole in the roof and we're going to lose the house if we don't put our resources into fixing it we need these site-based rjade coordinators we need smaller class sizes in our middle schools specifically especially our tsi and title schools we know that we can only find a solution to these problems if we believe each other's truths if we move forward together if we decide to prioritize this very important specific time in our students lives that early adolescence where they need intensive instruction around how to build community how to solve problems how to empathize and how to repair harm that has been caused so thank you for your time and for listening thank you ms bonilla yes before you go i have a clarifying question yes so i think i heard you suggest that the in our current conversation which is a mutual conversation between the district and pat around that hb 3040 money we're we're figuring out what our proposal is in terms of what we want to use those funds for what i think i heard you suggest is the opportunity to take the amount of money that is proposed in this budget for the retention bonuses for our paraprofessionals and include that in the proposal for those earmarked dollars under 30 40 which would then free up 1.5 addition 1.5 million additional dollars in this budget one point one point thanks director yes okay i just wanted to be clear that's what you are suggesting and btw it's a great idea my understanding is we don't we actually haven't received those funds yet so we're applying for them and we make i mean it's conceivable we could not get them highly unlikely that we highly
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unlikely it's not a competitive grant i think what the expectation in the short timeline is that we collaborate with our labor partners and look i fully support the idea of doing what we can to support our middle grades and we want to take care of our pfsp partners too so you know i i think we're all hearing the suggestion here sort of the next cushion to look under and i know that the um one of the things that was on the list of priorities we had was our labor costs right and making sure you know we had our friends in purple here tonight from seiu and and really being intentional about we do want to we know this has been a hellish year for a lot of people and we do want to um support our labor partners and so this is another hopeful resource we can do to to do that which is not one of the items we've added except for that um para ad bonus great so thank you so much for your testimony and i hope you stick around in case we have additional questions for you as we go through tonight i think at this point cara if we can invite up the people testimony and then and then we'll go back to board and i would just ask board members again if you've got specific uh proposals either either for amendments or just clarifying questions of staff let's just make sure we we can put those at the front right after we hear from testimony so directed by my words well i was just gonna ask something because um i thought i asked this question in the budget questions because there was a request for restorative justice coordinators at each school and i thought the answer back was i'm pretty sure that was that um they're actually already in there i don't know they're not it there's the proposal okay i'm gonna actually let's that's a great clarifying question and the staff are now ready to answer it after we hear from your testimony okay that'd be great allison ellsworth welcome thanks hello my name is allison ellsworth e-l-l-s-w-o-r-t-h i teach students math at mount tabor middle school where i'm also a pat rep and i'm the parent of a future middle schooler who is currently at llewellyn elementary school i'd like to begin by asking each of you to bring yourself back to your own middle school time remember being 12 or 13 or 14. probably you felt awkward and out of place a lot of time along with a deep need to figure out where your place was you probably surprised yourself and likely the adults in your life by making extremely ill-advised decisions and then instantly regretting them you probably also surprised yourself by making positive choices based on newly but deeply held beliefs you were in constant state of trying to figure out who you were and who you wanted to be if you were lucky you were surrounded by caring adults who had deep empathy for your struggles who knew how and when to set boundaries to keep you and your peers safe if you were lucky you were surrounded by peers who are making similar mistakes to your own but who are also held in a safe community to grow and find themselves now i ask you to put yourself in the shoes of our current middle schoolers they were in the middle of fourth or fifth or sixth grade when the covid pandemic started they have spent the time that you spent trying out your fluid identities in community on their own at home many losing family and community members their lives upended by the lost of most or all of the structures upon which they depended this fall they returned to school lacking so many of the skills that our students usually come with both academic and social and the result has been a huge increase in violent and emotionally dysregulated behavior by students across the city a response to the trauma that they have experienced lastly i ask you to put yourself in the shoes of our current middle school teachers we are in our jobs because we love supporting students as they become themselves but this year so many of us are considering leaving our profession we still love our students and our colleagues and our communities but as i talk to my colleagues across all of our middle schools i hear that we do not feel supported by our district we lack the time to do the restorative work and relationship building that our students need we lack the staff at our schools to support our students fully or when we have the staffing those adults do not have the adequate training or time or supportive systems to support our students and communities this is why i'm here tonight you have the power to help us make the changes that we need in our middle schools through the decisions that you make about the budget for next year we need smaller classes so that we can attend to the needs of each of our individual students we need full-time restorative justice coordinators to support our school communities to be safe welcoming spaces where students treat each other well these changes along with others in the call for a safe and stable school from pps middle school communities will let us begin next school year with
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the stability that this year has lacked and be able to support our students take care of each other and ourselves and stay working with middle schoolers for years to come thank you thank you colin hawkins [Applause] hi my name is colin hawkins um it's nice to see you all again um i'm here on behalf of the middle school reps for the p.a.t we've met and as many of us could in the time we had to discuss some of the bigger problems we're facing and some of the solutions we think we might have for next year and we're hoping that we can get your help on it um this is from 13 different middle schools and it's signed by 49 of the reps in those middle schools and i know we're going to be increasing the number of middle schools here pretty soon so there's even more of these issues are going to come up and especially with new schools that are being founded and trying to start fresh like mine which has only been around for a few years and most of those years have been during the pandemic so they're not they don't really count as a start so i'll go and read this i'm gonna read the highlights for the most part because i think that it's important for me to stay on point here this is a call for a safe and stable school from pps middle school communities this year the majority of our middle schools have been plagued with violence amongst our students and staff and students are subjected to disruptions and in the learning environment physical injuries emotional harm from student on student harassment including fighting bullying and abuse our school communities are left reeling we need support to restore the harms that have been done despite our building administrators efforts to provide supports to students educators and families the district has not supplied the resources to create safe school environments and address these violent challenges the unilateral changes made by pps central office staff have resulted in a systemic breakdown in the disciplinary practices laid out in article 9 of the pat pps contract and the students rights and responsibilities handbook a lack of consistent systems allows for more room for disproportionate discipline not less boundaries for middle school children set forth in the student handbook are necessary for the safety and benefits and are beneficial to all students in addition to failing to support the creation of systems in our schools and successfully operationalize districts owned policies on multi-tiered systems of support and school climate including fundamental student safety district leadership has also failed to provide wrap-around services to our students so desperately needed to address the deep trauma underlying much of our students behavioral issues these unresolved needs have led to an unstable and unsafe school environment i'd like to highlight some of the things that are writing this letter i'm sure you can read over them yourselves um and i hesitate to read something aloud to somebody who can read it themselves but the the main points here is that we would really like to have a first day for sixth graders where they are not with seventh and eighth graders give them a chance to actually get acclimated to the school talk about behavior all the pieces that are there so they're not terrified four foot tall kids going to a school with six foot eight eighth graders and it's scary um we want to amid the budget to provide a full-time building-based restorative justice coordinator for each of those schools and that means it needs to be somebody who is in that school it needs to not be somebody who's from the district who is up to their eyeballs in water and cannot even see the students let alone help us with our problems uh we need to provide educators with sufficient time in their schedules that's the paid schedule not after school or before school to actually um engage in the restorative justice work with students and families uh and i heard the district say on the news last night that we're doing circles and if that's the extent that they think that restorative justice is actually finished they don't understand the process either we would like to have been the budget to increase staff to hold class sizes to more than 30 students i know ms bennett already said that i definitely second that we want to establish common expectations for all community organizations working within middle schools to collaborate with staff around how the school building should be working and how they should interact with students during the school day to help prevent confusion and if you'll let me i'll go for the last two of these things and i'll be i'll be done we want to provide support to educators in community with fam communicating with families we need to be able to text our families we need to be able to use social media we need to do it in a legal fashion not using my personal phone the district has the ability to give all these messages to families and quite frankly they've lied on several occasions and i'm i'm tired of seeing that our families are tired of seeing that we'd like to be able to communicate with what's going on in the classroom what's going on in the school so we need
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to be able to text and if that means buying phones for those teachers that can actually have texting capability fine whatever it's going to take we just need to have that ability with respect to fighting and behavioral problems this year the most difficult times are at lunch we have a three and a half hour window of lunch at my school where we can't get a hold of anybody for help and the district shows up often in the morning often in the afternoon they show up at lunch but they never free up any of our personnel so there's nobody to do those restorative justice restorative justice processes and we're seeing a lot of violence during lunch and especially after lunch during the day after kids are already escalated not a lot of learning is happening fifth and sixth period i'll be honest guarantees that students will be held accountable for acts and threats of violence given the current state of affairs that safety piece is really critically important uh we're looking at a lot of gun violence in this country and people are quite frankly terrified and it was really scary to go to school today um so we really need to actually guarantee that we're going consistent and we're being consistent in holding kids accountable for any threats of violence any acts of violence any bullying any sexual harassment and harassment of any kind both to students and to educators and to paraprofessionals and to our cafeteria sport and our custodial sport in a transparent manner we'd like to communicate to all middle school staff what concrete supports are being put in place to help administrators establish improve on and effectively communicate with our community on school-wide expectations and the mechanisms of how those things will actually be enforced when we ask for things in writing we don't get writing we get platitudes we get verbal conversations in the hallway what might be happening we have programs that exist because they're an idea they're unstaffed i still don't have another ap in my building i still don't have a restorative justice person in my building i still don't have anybody running the study hall as promised at the beginning of the year we're still suffering so we really do need extra help thank you very much for the letter with the clear um [Applause] i have a quick question yeah can you unpack for me when you said um there's not a lot of learning done in the fifth and sixth period i'm i'm i'm implying that after our lunchtime drama that happens in the school that has very little support uh there's usually two adults um for extended periods of time in the lunchroom there's a few adults out on the field during our recess time which is about 10-15 minutes so there's a lot of stress that happens during that time but it's because of things that happen over the course of the last year or things that are happening that day and so when kids come back from lunch they come back hot and oftentimes there's kids who can't go back to class or won't go back to class they wander the halls creating a whole bunch of issues for teachers trying to educate their students when we've asked for consistent discipline to be given to those students or a place for them to actually receive help or to have restorative justice being done with those students we've got none of those things so when i say that there's very little learning being done in fifth and sixth period i mean that for a lot of our students fifth and sixth period aren't happening it's not 90 of the students a lot of the students are in the classroom but if i have an eighth grader push into my seventh grade classroom four different times during sixth period to interrupt my class talk to a student come in and buy a gatorade harass somebody do anything else am i doing a lot of teaching that day no so no not a lot of learning is being done fifth and sixth period fourth period after lunch is really hard and i'm not saying that because teachers have given up we're still working hard but this is hard thank you thank you melissa appleyard one more time charis melissa apple yarn going once okay thank you for the testimony um now let's go ahead and transition into our conversation and i know we're gonna have some questions for the superintendent and staff um i think i already heard um one of them and i'm totally blanking on what it was because you're in the place on the restorative justice because there was a question and an answer um but i'm not sure i'm not sure the answer was that there was going to be restorative justice coordinators in each school so and i noticed that there's 12 physicians for mental health professionals for middle school and k-8s and then four for campus safety associates at middle school and high school so i wanted to ask the question of do those meet any of the needs of restorative justice folks or what what are those positions and how will they help support what we heard tonight which is that middle schools definitely need some more and i would like to get some clarification um i mean i don't know who i would who i would be asking it to when we start talking about resj before before i would feel comfortable talking about whether or not we should put it in every school i think i'd like to talk a little bit about the
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process and the system itself because as as much as i love every teacher in this room i love you all i support y'all resj has to be a system-wide approach and i've been in schools where teachers refuse to be a part of the healing circle and they walk away saying that they need their um their union rep because they don't want to be a part of that that situation and we can't act like that doesn't happen because if we start talking about restorative justice that means that everybody in the circle recognizes that they played a part in the harm that was caused which includes possibly the teacher and when it's time for the teacher to apologize to a child because they were actually the one that caused the wrong then they have often stepped out of the classroom refusing to do so so before i would ever sign off on a an rasj person being in every school i would like to make sure that we have a again it's a system-wide approach that has to happen from the top down if the entire school doesn't believe in it then it doesn't work and teachers get to walk away again i'm not trying to say that teachers are bad people here that's not that's not what this is about but this is about understanding that if you're going to say we need to put resj into schools then we have to make sure that resj works for everybody in the schools that's all i'm saying amanda the district doesn't have a punitive approach to teachers when they cause an unintentional harm that's right so that's the problem dr proctor hi good evening um right am i right acting chair scott and directors superintendent and student representative weinberg good to see you all uh just really briefly i heard the question emerge about the fte the additional fte and we do have 12 that we have identified primarily for our middle years we noted it as middle school and k-8 but the focus is going to be on the middle year specifically within 6 8 and those 12 could be restorative justice staff it could be a combination of social workers counselors mental health professionals what we will do is engage our schools in a process where they can give input based on um some of the climate data that they're seeing this year what the leader indicates as needs what the school community indicates as needs and then allow some input before a final decision is made but it could look like a restorative justice it could be again some of these other support staff based on the school's need and how they determined that need i had a follow-up question to that because under the general fund we're seeing a decrease of 5 fte for guidance services which includes counseling services a deuce and 5 fte for psych services which includes school psychologists and a decrease in 5 fte for speech pathologists or audiology services so this 12 would that fulfill the decrease that we are seeing that's right that's right so we're looking at how we could be very school-facing and very school-specific and identifying staff that would be housed at the school so i think the issue that i would like to address here is just the level of discretion by the um because what i'm hearing dr proctor say is that it would be similar to how it is now our principals have a lot of discretion on how they're going to deploy certain resources so some of our schools have full-time um restorative justice specialists um that they have used their equity funds to um to pay for or that they've just made they've made trade-offs at the building level um to determine what they want so i think the conversation for us to have i think we heard very clear from pat that they want to see this as a designated position for each of our schools so that it can't get swapped out for whatever else a building leader might might need um so i just want to frame that that that's the conversation i think we should have around that right and that's exactly what i was saying to director green is this question about how does rj show up in in different schools that that's part of the the culture and the climate kind of going to his comment and questions so that i was just like oh yeah that's that answers that a little bit but i think that's different than what we're hearing from pat about a carve out for that specific thing so that's the tension of so in addition building autonomy yeah in addition to those 12 fte we've also allocated 750 000 to support middle schools in site specific plans so we heard clearly the need to make a serious investment in the middle schools and including uh the middle school wraparound supports um and so we wanted to note that we are recommending and and have added to the budget 750 000
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to augment uh middle schools with additional supports as well yeah so to to to provide you know tonight's the nine million dollars includes the twelve mental health professionals uh as uh dr brochter alluded to previously when we came back and we came to you on april 26 our budget already included 750 000 of one-time esser dollars to provide middle school supports i want to be clear we haven't made a decision on what those fte positions are because right now our deputy our our deputy superintendent and our regional superintendents are working with the school schools to develop site-specific plans that would most likely than not provide restorative uh specialists and climate climate specialists etc etc but again those are being worked on as we speak um with with school principles yeah just really quickly on that point will we have more clarity in three weeks when we adopt the budget market yeah yeah let me invite um regional superintendent margaret capper to come you'll find several line items that really aim to provide additional resources but we haven't been prescriptive about a particular strategy we've said school communities school leaders you have a school improvement plan what what is it that you need we don't want to make assumptions about that and maybe it's a social worker maybe we did add seven counselors continued investment et cetera uh but margaret maybe you can talk about the process and and when you anticipate having a a good idea of of what what their suggested uh asks are yes thanks thanks so much for the the question good evening um chair deputy chair scott andrews direct acting chair so all the above so um and uh members and jackson uh student representative weinberg um so we're in the process on friday we will um there will be the initial draft of school improvement plans will be completed and submitted that'll be part of the process of saying what are the pieces that schools are going to be looking for in the upcoming year we'll use that as part of the the basis for the discussion we also spent time this past week doing an initial request sort of out to um middle school administrators what we're going to see and what we have at least initially is that there is an overlap and a nexus with what you're hearing from our pat colleagues that there is an interest in uh restorative justice along with some other pieces and so i think the question will be how does that get prioritized based on the site and that we see that as a collaborative process that should be happening um both with at the school side with the instructional leadership teams as they build out their school improvement plans but then also with us as a district and working not only in osp with but also with our partners in oss who um support both the mental health supports but also uh the rj specialists thanks director hollins yeah let's have a quick question so lee if i heard um correctly those 750 000 that we advocated allocated for that with one time dollars yes so they're from so what happens a year 23-24 you know it's going to be a part of that budget conversation where we look at what's working and uh benefits and then have some discussions about uh trade-offs so that we can maintain uh those programs and those um you know positions if you will that are really most supportive to students so it would be a part of the trade-off conversation for next year i have a question and maybe for chief delegatio but um the 5.8 million for hb 4030 has that been i i don't i noticed it's in our it's in our budget as an ad um has that been allocated out or because we're still in conversation with our labor partners is it sort of being held it has not been allocated out we have it as a placeholder in our actual updated uh amendment um so we we're anticipating it but it's not you've created an appropriation authority for it but we have i wasn't sure if anyone would understand that it's okay but at least he will geek out with you all day long um and and we don't want to get ahead of that i guess i'm i'm struggling a little we don't want to get ahead of that process because the my understanding the legislation specifically asks us to collaborate with our labor partners and co-create which is what we want to do i'm also hearing from our labor partners you know we could use some of that money as we look at ways to you know to to make potential changes to this budget how do we how do we bridge that in this time frame where we are i think that's mine yeah yeah uh good question so i
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believe the um application process opened up a couple weeks ago maybe three weeks ago and the application is due next week so it was a very short timeline to turn around the collaboration uh create the grant application itself and turn it in by next week we are in conversations with our labor partners about the use of those funds as we are required to do we also are engaging our principals uh in a principal group in how those functions be used as well so it's it's a process that has not yet uh coalesced around a uh recommendation but that's uh coming shortly and if we if we had agreement to use some of that for our our para retention bonuses that that would free up 1.2 million of general fund that could be allocated somewhere else well sure everything is a trade-off right oh this is your question or to the fund balance yes sure well that's no fun but it's his job yeah okay so some of the uses of hb 4030 would have to be negotiated and some of the uses would be at the district's discretion all of it has to be approved in the grant application process um are there additional clarify actually i'd like to move on as a board to potential like yeah thoughts uh amendments i don't want to i don't want to invite amendments if there aren't any but if there are let's get them on the table i have a couple of thoughts and questions uh do you look like you do as well it was more just a comment on director greene's um comment i guess commenting on his comment about um restorative justice professionals because i've seen a lot of additional harm done by through rj in our schools because it hasn't been implemented with fidelity or done well i've seen students forced into circles and that is not a key tenet of restorative justice there needs to be agreement from all sides to participate wholeheartedly in this and if we are going to fund restorative justice professionals in every single middle school then it needs to be a system-wide approach that starts at the district by looking at our policies that are sometimes punitive and contribute to disproportional outcomes in students so i say this just because i've been invested in this work i was a part of the restorative justice coalition of oregon and they have tremendous resources around how to implement um restorative justice as a system-wide approach i don't think we've done that yet and i think if we are making this investment there's other investments that need to go with it it can't just be the restorative justice professionals that we're pushing into schools thank you and actually as we go into this conversation let's go ahead and get the motion on the table so do i have a motion and second to adopt resolutions thank you second all right motion was made by director green and seconded by director constance um let's jump into board discussion so uh i don't know if it's a motion or what whatever but so i'm looking at the oh sorry so i'm looking at the budget piece and i guess i'm just really wary of using the one-time funds for positions um so this is just kind of a thought um that i'm having if the 750 000 that we're using for uh support services will come out of that nine million uh because and if we use that 1.2 million that we could potentially have from the 40 30 we could supplement that 750 from that and then that 750 liter can go we can look at it going back to the general fund or back to our savings i'm just really nervous about the budget that we have that it hasn't really been talked about as far as the next year's budget that we're going to have and we're i understand that it's a need right now but it's going to be a need the next year as well and the year after that the deed is not going to go away just if we put all the money in this year um and so as i look at some of this budget stuff as far as prioritizing some of the things i think we need to make sure that we're prioritizing our kids for the 2023-24 school year as well um and not just kind of blowing a lot right now um so i don't know if this is an amendment or not but if i see that 750 that we were talking about that came out of the 9 million and then if we hold off from the 1.2 million because that could potentially come out of the 40 30 we can we can slide that 750 and you know out of that one point i'm not sure where the seven is coming is s or money right for the middle school supports right so i think if we right so that means that we can those
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efforts well that's the phones i would like to move that out of the nightmare and get those positions but we have to spend it we have to spend the s okay i i'm not following so the 750 that's for middle school is not in this it's in the budget in s or money and you want to move it out of esser but we have to spend the us serve by the 24 school year right correct yeah well gotcha so no i'm just happy i'm i'm just looking if we move that 750 out of the s of dollars right and put that out of the one point out of the nine million we replaced the 1.2 million that we're potentially going to get from the 4030 then we can use part of that 9 million for the 750 the 1.2 million would be reduced and then we could have another 750 for the effort for us to go for something else that we could maybe roll over for next year or however we need to trade some stuff out that we can pay for now okay i'm trying i'm with you now i got it thank you gotcha so that's just kind of some thoughts that i'm having as i'm reading some of this stuff and i'll write i'm gonna write it out for me so it'll be a little bit more okay you're gonna understand i'm gonna write it i want to amplify what you're saying though because i think it's an important part of this conversation and i'm glad folks are here for this i i think one of the things at least in the in the emails that i'm getting and some of the conversations i'm having with people it's getting lost how much one-time money we already are spending and and you know i'm gonna be blunt when i read the pta letter that says you know we need we need more resources in the classroom it's sort of ignoring the the trade-off that we already are making and and you know the superintendent's budget and what we have in front of us now uses uh i forgot the number 50 40 million 49 million of of one-time funding to do a lot of the things that the community is asking what i'm hearing is but we we you know we want even more we want every single you know um teaching position to be retained despite losing you know eight percent of our students and and i want to be clear that is something we can do we can take money from our rainy day fund and and keep every one of those positions we will have massive layoffs next year as a result and i've gotten some really thoughtful emails from people that have said that maybe and we still need it now i will take that teacher for one year and and even if you have to lay them off next year and i want to ask whether you will all be here next year when we're giving out two three 400 pink slips so this year again we're reducing positions without without laying people off when we're actually laying people off and saying this you know we spent all of that we have no more reserves we have no more cushion are you going to be here saying absolutely we said it we thank you for the year and we're and we're good i have to be honest i don't think you will be i think you'll be frustrated and and so here's the thing i i there are things that can happen in the middle we can go to the state legislature and ask for a lot of money we've done that every legislative session we've we've never we've never got well hold on well it's not necessarily predictable but you can make assumptions based on past years yes next year there will be a following year to go back to so i so i i i i thanks so i just want to say it makes me very nervous that said i i've already indicated i'm comfortable going to six percent on on on which is where we are right now i'm very and but i want to be also clear six percent is dangerously low so best practice is 15 to 16 we never got to that point we were at 11. we're going down to 6 it is dangerously low and when they think about and people say well what could happen oh well like you know a global pandemic right where we have to start using these funds for lots of things i want to be really clear that people understand the consequences if we if something happens and we have to use some of that those reserves next year and we run out and the school district becomes insolvent that's a state takeover that means the school actually shuts down it is not legal for us to operate if we don't have those funds in the bank this is where you know collective bargaining agreements get thrown out right by courts it is it is it is absolutely catastrophic for the district for that to happen and so i just want to keep coming back that if if this was simply because i keep hearing you've got plenty of money and i want to state factually we don't we do not have plenty of money there is an absolute shortfall this year and the balance is how much of that money do we do we essentially keep in our reserve to make sure that the catastrophe doesn't happen and i think that's where this balance that i i i it this this budget i'm willing to support six percent and it still makes me extremely nervous and i'm gonna be saying it next year when we're doing it if if the magic money doesn't fall from the state legislature or somewhere else and and and we're doing these cuts like we're going to have to come back to this conversation and
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recognize these are the decisions we're making so would you like to say something would you do you mind yeah coming up and i i'm way by the way every time i do this they're like do not give that guy the gavel again so please uh thank you um i was trying to be a good student and just raise my hand and wait patiently um so i there are a couple points right i think uh jackson uh student representative weinberg really made a clear point around res jay and how important it is to have everyone on the same page i have i know one of the best ways to build rapport with my students is to apologize because for the first time they see that this adult is willing to be held accountable by a younger human and so i very much value reggie i think one of the biggest concerns especially from educators that we also heard is that we do res j in name but not in spirit so we have had educators who are saying yes let's have a restorative circle let's let's support this student and what administration ends up doing is taking the student and having a quick conversation in elementary school we get uno cards or candy coming back to our classroom and that's it and that was res jay and that's not that's not what we're asking for we're asking for the training which has been promised to us and is in our contract and we still haven't gotten um we are asking for personnel that is dedicated specifically to that in order to provide that pd in order to provide that support for students so i agree i think it needs to be done well it needs to be done comprehensively and then i think when it comes to the budget yes we need to have fiscal responsibility right like this we need to keep our district public and in our hands not in the hands of the state and what i want to propose to y'all um especially as the president-elect who will be on full-time release is that i am dedicated to pushing our legislature to ensure that we are fully funding our district to the qef because when we really stop and think about it we are the largest district in the state we're also the largest educational union in the state together with the support that we've been able to bring to this board we can make some some changes we can push for things right and i know that there's a little bit of that like well that's just pie in the sky but it's also if there is no hope then what's the point right we've got to keep fighting and we've got to keep pushing because we know what's best practice and we can't keep doing less than that and expect a different result and so what i think is really important is you know how can we creatively propose this to the state could we be a pilot program for the qem could the largest district with the largest uh labor partners be the ones working hand-in-hand to ensure that our qem model actually works and what would that funding look like it would be a smaller percentage for the state than doing it across the state right so how other what other ways can we be creative in our proposals to the state to ensure that we start this process because it is 2022. it's about to be 2023. we have been underserving our kids for way too long and we have to do something different um and so i'm willing to put you know my name on the line my position on the line saying that i will be here i will be in salem i will be wherever i need to be and i know that we have tons of families and student leaders and educators willing to be there too and so we're inviting y'all to be part of that solution we understand and i i don't want us to be taken over by the state i hear the concern how do we avoid that how do we push forward how do we ensure that we continue to prioritize our students and so i just wanted to kind of jump in and just share that we're willing we see it we believe you we're willing to do this but we've got to do it together yeah so yeah and i and i 100 appreciate the hope piece right but with hope you got to have a plan and you gotta have a backup right you know when when the civil rights movement happened they was hoping for change but when they got arrested they had a plan and a backup to get bailed out right so i am all for for going and and advocating with the state and all that and and all that and like mr director green always says i don't have a problem standing on the on the table and doing what we got to do to get it but we have to have a plan in case it doesn't happen we want it to happen right we got to have a backup in case it doesn't happen when we want it to happen and that's all i'm that's where i'm coming at it's like let's let's do that you know because when i look at the qem and if i'm correct it's about 18 18 900 per kid we're far from that right now right and this that's what the state has been saying for years
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for years there has been lobbying at the state to to to fund at this level for years you know i talked to us in the new fredericks when he was in there i mean funding from from funding from the state has always been an ongoing battle period that's historically we know that that's not true that's just that's what has happened so if we're going to do that we have to have a plan and a backup plan so that way if something happens our kids because at the end of the day our kids is the one that suffer you don't suffer you don't suffer i don't suffer our kids suffer and so i want to make sure that our kids are not suffering regardless of my feelings around stuff or how i feel that stuff should be done we have to look at what happens with our kids if this doesn't happen in the timing that we want it to happen imagine what we could do with that three billion dollar kicker in education in oregon absolutely and i think too um there have been folks fighting and lobbying for years i do not want to discount that i also wonder when's the last time a school district and their labor partners have come together to ask and advocate for those changes at the state level um i'm going with you okay let's do it let's do it just talking about this at intergovernmental that we want to work together to create opportunities for teachers and parents and students to go to salem during the session next year and to advocate for better funding for our schools and so that's definitely something that the intergovernmental committee will want to talk to you about and find ways that we can work together to make that happen yes and i agree that there needs to be kind of a backup plan and making sure that we're thinking about what are other ways that we what are we going to do if this fails and i think it's really important to kind of pause and ask the why behind some of the spending especially when we're thinking about recruitment and retainment right like i know one of the positions in these materials was adding more central office staff for recruitment um in order to oh oh okay thank you so it is already existing it is not added it was answering a question that was on the faq thanks yeah no problem thanks for the fact check real time um and so i'm just again wondering where are we deciding to invest and is that investment actually congruent with the realities we see on the ground like our atu partners are saying and our seiu partners are saying we can go and put flyers everywhere we can advertisements on the side of the bus but if i'm still getting paid more as a high school student at a summer job than i would be as a custodian at a high school that's a problem so really trying to make trying to think about this as a bigger system while trying to figure out how can we kind of push forward and move things around in order to get a better long-term result but i have probably taken enough of your time thank you appreciate the comments all right i'm going to put a challenge to this board of whether we can approve this budget no later than 10 15 and preferably earlier so let's get things on the table if we have anything or we can sort of move forward i think there's been a lot of conversation so okay take it away i'm sorry nope i spoke a lot during the southeast guiding coalition i just wanted was gary finished with his amendment or he's worked right okay he's going to write it out i want to ask a question about process so i think we can have this conversation without amendments because what the resolution before us says for approval is that we approve the superintendent's proposal and i think that we're about to have a conversation about maybe being a little more directive about some of these funds but not adding funds is what i'm sensing here and so i think we can have a conversation where we talk about trade-offs and we talk about more specificity to certain elements of the superintendent's proposal and um you know ask the superintendent to rework it for our um adoption processing it's going to depend on the nature of what we're asking there are some things if they're in the same bucket and we're asking for a different sort of emphasis that that can be done within the existing budget if we're moving it between buckets then it would need to be amended uh because again what's been filed would need to be amended and then obviously there are bigger changes that would need more the other thing i will say this is not our final bite at the apple so we can also direct the superintendent and his team over the next three weeks to further refine some of these and come back to us with proposals so so for instance one option is you know if if we are interested in in pursuing some of the things that you know that pat put on the table which which i will tell you i am we don't we don't have to we can't amend the budget tonight if we're clear on that we can also direct the superintendent to come back with an amendment in the adopted that does those things so okay director ben edwards thank you um so [Music] i i guess i want to first there's there's some things in here that
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in the 9 million that i want to thank the staff for adding in and i i love the equity in the field trips and travel making this room ada accessible the supports for the southeast portland schools just based on tonight's conversation that's going to be super important but i have a couple more things that i'm still interested in and i definitely would be interested in moving the uh 1.2 into the 40 30 um bucket so that we have those funds available and i'm interested in uh the middle school class sizes um i i just look at those numbers and like having been at ockley green a couple weeks ago it was like there was 25 kids in the class and it was a teeny class and i'm you know there was i don't know five or six kids absent and it was like how could they ever have six more kids in this class um so i'm interested in what that would cost um as a question and then i'm to go back to a conversation we had last week and um there may not be support on the board but i i want to raise it because thank you challenged me um director scott were like what's so magic about 30 when i was talking about the class sizes at the elementary schools and i guess i have a question for the district staff is like what's so magic about 33 because that is the number that like we just put five and i appreciate the the additional five fte that went into schools but that that was to get it so that we have a hundred percent of our of our schools below the maximum and when i'm looking at just different um just different information i'm wondering where the 33 came from because if you look at qem i mean it's way the numbers are way lower if you look at what we agreed to with pat in in terms of this the staffing the staffing model um the maximum threat thresholds like for first third grade or 26 fourth to fifth is 28. and so i i i just i guess i i want to understand the rationale of why 33 because we still have i don't know 13 uh k5s that that still have over over 30. and it's not it's not that it's not magic but it's better and i look at these other models and i don't i don't understand how the districts decided on the max i mean i think it was more of a just like being realistic like hey this in the when the staffing model got built not necessarily based on uh best practice so i'd be interested in like like where the 33 came from and like i said it doesn't necessarily square with the um i say qem prototypes of like best practice or even the what we agreed to in the contract so i i still am focused on that other piece and i see dr adams coming down here to tell me about the thirty three questions that's a nice tie thank you it's meant to mesmerize you so you don't ask me questions it's clearly not working good evening everyone i'm gonna take my mask off so my glasses don't fall off on me i can still see you um and we understand that class sizes are very important to our community and as a special educator i know the value of having fewer students in my classroom and what that meant to me as an educator one of the things that we've tried to do this year i think one let's talk about the pat contract thresholds those are ideals we've agreed to them i think in my estimation in sharon dos don't shoot me with an arrow we would need to revisit those to keep an equity-based staffing model because if those are the thresholds for all schools what can become the thresholds for our title one csi and tsi schools right so that and we know that reaching just those thresholds will cost us um i think it's a hundred 100 fte i don't have that with me this week um because i didn't compile that note and put it back in my binder um i guess i wasn't necessarily i'm just looking at getting it for the lower not getting it not even necessarily getting it down to the pat thresholds but just after the pandemic um i i can't see having 31 32 students in the classroom and i support the equity the equity formula that that should be lower as well but so i'm not suggesting getting down to
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the threshold but i i guess i'm i'm just curious the 33 where did well being new i could say that 33 was here when i got here that's a good idea that's the honest answer no that's that's a good answer it was here when i got here i think that's why we should ask and we do it and work towards sorry as part of your budget you did lower the maximums in middle school by one because we did okay and we lowered at some elementary grades as well yeah you know we did both of those things um trying to be fiscally prudent understanding that we couldn't lower everything across the board for all um i don't know is this working oh there we go knowing that we couldn't lower everything across the board for all types of schools because we did not have we did not project to have the resources to do that so what that's why we continue to say that we're making progress towards those goals that means we're not there yet we're admitting that we're not there yet and that there's still growth and room for us to go and i appreciate i appreciate that because um i i think um it's really hard having spent 25 years going down to salem asking for support i mean one and and having i mean a lot of legislators have kids in our in our school system and um you know i think we do have to set what i found is we're most effective is when we ask for what we think we need versus um what what's going to fit in the budget because if we ask for what we need and this is why i ask the question is like why is it 33 because like what what do we think is the best thing for our students and then how do we work towards that versus like this is the number and i i think a great practice um as somebody who's been around a long time is to challenge the if you got here and that was the number and that's not the right number for our students then we should be looking at like what is the right number for our students um so i really appreciate you um acknowledging that we you know if if we need to look at something different and then go down to salem you know with our labor partners to talk about this you know you want um these supports in the classrooms and uh for us to have an equity focus and have extra resources to support our um um our students of color and historically underserved students and this is what it costs but i think that's the most compelling versus we're going to try it from now so so i think you may let me clarify what i mean two things can be true and two things are true in the situation we can and should advocate for more for students we also have a fiscal reality of how much funding we have for next year and a date by which a budget must be approved and those two things can both be worked on at the same time so what we have presented as a staffing proposal is working within our means to reduce class sizes where we could to the maximum extent possible we realized we still had some yellow sections in that elementary we went back and addressed those because we figured we could afford that in talking to chief del gadil and um we think we should i mean every conversation i've been in with the superintendent has been about qem and talking about how we need to advocate for more so i'm not disagreeing with you i'm saying that we need to do both i have a responsibility to do both is to advocate and to work within what i know is our funding for next year i think what's important in this conversation is that we um not lose sight of how differentiated our staffing formula is and that you know the vast majority of our schools if you look at you know every single classroom particularly going from our title and our csi and tsi schools you're looking at numbers of like 18 20 22 i mean that's that's what is most typical um it gets it gets worse as we get to our higher ses schools and and that's with some exception exceptions and that's where you see these classes bumping up against you know 30 31 which nobody wants to see none of us want to be having that conversation but we don't want to let go of the values behind how we're prioritizing and to just bring it back to hopefully trying to land this conversation i mean i i appreciate that um ms bonilla had a very specific ask around middle schools which is you know less than 30 for our title and tsi schools which i think is probably quite doable and reasonable you got to be careful with middle school because averages don't tell the whole story you know you've got some really small classes you've got some really big classes so for me i would i would prioritize looking at our core um content areas for uh for limiting the for putting those class size limits on and i actually think then we're looking at a number of classrooms that we can address that we can allocate more to yeah and given the
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the proposed budget that we um have before you this evening the question then becomes what would be the additional trade-offs right um so while we did earmark and identify where the additional 9 million could be spent even throughout the budget where we talk about how we are prioritizing the needs of our you know our most critical schools then that comes with a trade-off right if we were to go back and and then what would the cost be what would the additional cost be and then where would those trade-offs land although we have identified through some some savvy switching we have identified 1.2 million dollars that we can put into play and service to these kind of goals well we did point that out i've heard a mixed sort of reaction for the best way to leverage it is it bank it to the fund balance to offset reductions next year or is it come up with a next list of the priorities that we've heard it sounds like middle schools you know as a focus so we're going to need clear direction on where the board is with things and and we're earmarking 40 40 30 monies gary's furiously right so you know we're still in process of developing a recruitment and retention uh grant application and if we're saying that we're all going to be in agreement if we do that then then we'll proceed in that fashion if that's the direction so i want to float an idea for the board about essentially essentially directing the superintendent to come back as part of the adopted budget process with amendments that would do two things i think i'm capturing some of the early testimony would get class sizes at our tsi entitled middle schools to 30 or less and that would all class sizes yeah because i think like band and pe like are we talking about everybody core class sizes i think there's a better term there's performance classes and is it core classes it's the other it's core core core okay okay i mean i'm doing this on the fly so core say so so core classes at 30 or less and restorative justice positions at every middle school and i would separate those out as two two separate amendments and i think that would allow us as part of the adopted budget to look at those trade-offs and and superintendent i guess what i would ask is you know your best recommendation on where that would come from i will just speaking for myself i would prefer not to go below six percent on the fun balance so i prefer to look at other offsets and and if if the new hb 4030 money can be used that's great if there's some other places to look um but but but i want to be clear about those offsets and if those offsets from a staff perspective if you think those offsets are not worth the benefit we would get then let's have that conversation but my suggestion is it gives us a couple weeks to to put together a thoughtful proposal that we can discuss as part of the if that were the direction then of course we've got to do we got to do the calculations and to see well how far can we go with 1.2 to reduce core classroom sizes at the middle grades level and i'm assuming you mean all middle grade classrooms regardless if it's a ke or comprehensive and we might be able to squeeze a little more out of it if our other line items and our principles which are sounding like they're identifying the sort of justice coordinators if if that's taken care of in our other line items we might be able to take the 1.2 further on the middle grades classes and to clarify i did say i just say tsi csi and title middle schools i think if i'm getting the right mm-hmm so we want to include the k-8s yes yes middle class the middle grades in the cage yeah i'm doing this on the fly so i'm open now it's okay i'm open to suggestion i'm just adding a clarification directory but we'll also find in our budget we've already chipped away at this in a lot of places through things that are already included in the budget proposal so it's not and it's not a comprehensive revision to what we have in front of us i just want to make sure director holland heard your statement uh director scott around so what what andrew is proposing is to take the 1.2 million and ask staff to look at how far that can go if we yeah if the 40 30 money works out i'm not so i'm not being quite that prescriptive i'm asking the superintendent to come back with how much would it cost to do those two things and where would staff recommend those offsets come from i would also like to see if we are putting restorative justice professionals in every middle school also you're marking some amount of money for pd for staff and community at schools say that again introduction to professional development adding professional development so that when we're adding these um rj professionals that they can actually do the work that they need to right so it's very clear that you know for those uh staff persons they would need a specific training and development in the true practices
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for rj yeah and also have time to give pd to the teachers or professionals at those schools um i just i wanted to highlight that what i thought you were saying director scott which i got wrong but i i think we have a fundamental question here that that you sort of highlighted and i think that director hollins and and i are interested in talking about which is okay let's say we get the 40 30 money and we're able to offset some of that you know we're looking at i think what i saw on the presentation superintendent was we're looking at 105 million dollars that we're spending this year that we don't think we'll have next year and so 1.2 isn't a lot towards that but it's better than nothing and so that conversation about do we retain that 1.2 then back into the fund balance for the the next storm that's coming or do we spend it now i mean i think that's i was comfortable with the nine but i continue to to really be concerned about the 23-24 school year um and if we're gonna have to make 105 million dollars in cuts based on off from this budget that we have now that is going to be painful well i just want to say that we um best practice around the use of those one-time funds is to prioritize um more yeah capacity building so it wouldn't be 105 million in cuts because they're not they're not going to just to support fte in that way but it still would we will feel it i also wonder as we're decreasing class sizes if the line item of pat overload pay stipend will be decreasing because we'll have less teachers at that stipend where they would need to be that would be true okay okay that doesn't require what i just talked about doesn't require amendment i'm generally seeing nods from folks okay for direction around there uh director holland do you have i think i got it okay let's hit look i got it so if we look we take the 750 out of the general funds for the the 750 general fund then sorry what was the 764 again the 750 was for the middle school support piece right that's from esser i know i know that's from yeah from here okay yeah you said general fun no we put it we're taking it out of the jungle fan so we're gonna be we're going to take it out of the extra dollars we're not going to use effort we're going to take out of the general fund oh okay and then we look at the 1.2 for the retention bonus out of the hb 40 but we anticipate that so that leaves us 750 000 in essence funds to still be used for something else and then that gives us what my math is right that give us 450 000 that we would have used out of that nine that we could potentially put back into the general form yeah i'm sorry i'm still a little bit lost what when you say uh using the so instead of using esther using the general phone what's what's where's the general fund money that's nine million uh especially yeah excited at nine million so if we put the 750 we take the 750 out of this 9 million that leaves us 85 50 or 8 million five five hundred fifteen thousand dollars so that leaves us a balance of 450 because we took him out of here and then that 1.2 is not it's no longer out of that 9 million it's going to come out of the potential money that we get from hb 430. it's essentially matching ongoing money with ongoing programming so that way the if everyone else gets it i'm sorry i'm slow on this but okay so keep keep talking okay [Laughter] before i start um it sounds like these are minimal changes so from the perspective of being able to hit 1015 all kidding aside from the perspective of just moving the process along right we we can always come back and make a moment after july 1st i think just kind of reiterating right what was it dr scott the budget train may be slow maybe fast but it's always on time and knowing that uh the the that july first there or after july 1st is an opportunity to come back and and make any sort of amendments however that's true mr delgadillo um and i'll just interject to to say that if this is the extent of you know the amendment and in concept i think we're on the same page well i think the reason it's if we are it's important to let our school communities know as soon as possible so we can identify these folks who would occupy these positions absolutely that's my only sort of urgency that i would feel yeah because if we wait till july 1 then there's going to be a scramble to hire in time i do still have a concern because we still have to make up 13.3 million
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dollars to get the general fund back in the next three years and i haven't really heard a common comprehensive plan on how to do that especially we're looking at deficits in the next couple budget cycles so hold that thought okay i'll go back to clarifying what i think the current plan is just to as as far as the second uh point being that to not use esser not u7 uh not use esser for the 750k that we had set aside for middle school supports but instead paid out of the general fund because that 1.2 million dollar para stipend would be the idea would be let would be leveraged out of the hb 4030 funding yeah and and right so that's right the caveat is right seeing how hp 4030 comes along getting the feedback from our partners and like working through that uh so but i i wanted to i think i understood can i ask a question director holland would you be comfortable similar to the last thing we asked directing staff to take that and come back with an amendment for the adopted budget some of this is also processed because chief delegation has to get this to tscc tomorrow so you know are we going to make him stay up all night you know rebalancing or are we comfortable coming back to to to to make that amendment at in the adopted budget well i mean how are you going to do that part i mean i still have a fundamental flaw as far as us not really focusing on the next couple of budget cycles so i mean so that piece still is that's going to be yeah and the short answer is going to be an ongoing conversation that's going to start as soon as we get through this i mean we're having the conversation we're talking about the trade-offs but it is going to be a much more in-depth thoughtful conversation and part of that involves the rationale for showing like the pie chart with how we our services are broken up because right we'll have to have those conversations regarding trade-offs and subsequently as i was sitting back there right we're talking about cuts expenses but then what are the opportunities to advocate for revenue and and having those conversations and generally speaking we make up about eight percent it's kind of like a rule of thumb type of revenue uh out of the revenue conversation at the state level so just to meet kind of what we were at to cover our 49 million dollar proposed use of fund balance would require a little over a billion dollars that would need to be added to the state uh formula so we represent eight percent from a biannual perspective right so like over two years so and that's just baseline right we want to do more so dr brunette were to your point like what would we want to do more of and and what would the ideal state look like right those are conversations to flesh out uh but i bring that up dr hollins because yeah it's going to be uh it's going to need to be a very thoughtful and engaging conversation that's going to have to be drawn out over uh drawn out not a negative negative way but just like involved over the course of several several months ahead and just four words this three billion dollar kicker right i mean just do you know you know i mean just honestly when you talk about how broken our state fiscal situation is right yeah three billion dollars just a third of that going towards education would would solve the problem you just outlined yeah yeah and and i think this is also a good time as we talk about revenue in the future we are looking at the levy um and you know renewal of that levy and also then you know how might we increase the levy like as you know we saw that uh last year we were able to fund like 20 more teachers with a levy then we're going to be able to fund so this current year we're able to find about 20 more teachers and we're going to be able to fund for next program year because again our costs keep going up and even though our our tax revenue has done well we're able to fund fewer teachers through the levy than we have um and so that's another conversation as we look at revenue sources the voters in portland have been incredibly generous and supported you know capital campaigns bonds levies um and that that conversation we may have to go to the voters and say um this is the situation we're in and we need more to support our teachers and continuing to advocate for ssa because every biennium that comes back up yeah right to say right there's two sides of the equation one is on the expense side and what can we do on the revenue side yeah the only cautionary note i would say about that having again gone been down to salem every single legislative session since 1995. um like we need to have our parents with us and and our teachers and you know i think if we're not it's always a careful balance about um investing in the classroom and
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you know i this has been a hard three years on on parents and i i continue to be worried about the class size i know it's it's one thing but it also um again this is why like having something aspirational like let's go to salem and get 32 students to a classroom like it's it's not going to inspire people and get people you know people like i already pay a whole bunch of taxes and then to have like a local option that's more i i it's um it's a careful conversation for us to have and what um parents and our community values so i i think we have to be cautious about what we do here to set us up ourselves up to be successful and have having everybody together and i will just say that the pta members with their signs is one of the most quietly um effective um things i've seen and so getting them to come to salem with us with the signs is going to be really really powerful so thank you thank you for being here and students of course jacksonville i'd like to comment as well before we we got one minute we got one this is extremely tough i'm actually waiting for it to get to 12. because it's actually time we need a verbal sprint directly so in in light of everything that we've got going on and um i love what we're talking about i love where the conversation is going i would also uh be remiss if we did not speak to um violence interrupters within our schools so i i love the fact that we're doing stuff with our csas and we're bringing on the the four additional csas but i'm talking about actual violence interrupters who are going to be the ones that are going to get in between the violence who are going to be keeping a pulse on what's happening within the communities what's happening at the schools we got games that are going to be coming up and the violence has not slowed down in fact it has um it is ramped up and our our games our sporting events all of those are actual targets i'm looking at what are we going to be doing for the summer um when we know that we're going to be doing all this amazing summer stuff thank you danny for all the the different ones that she's giving contracts to and stuff but how are we going to be keeping those kids safe while they're walking through and through the community who's going to be interacting on their behalf who's going to be keeping the the school community our teachers our principals our admins aware of the violence that's happening within their schools are we all aware that um roosevelt just got tagged by um by the la ms was like 18 or somebody the the latino gang are we aware that that um and it was on the front door that it was on the that it was on the post i'm sitting with children i'm sitting with kids and they're they're telling me mr green we nobody talked about the fact that a person got shot at our school and then we came to school the next day the bell ring and they said just go to class no these are kids that are extremely traumatized just simply about coming to school then you get all the stuff that we're seeing happening around the world i'm i'm i would be remiss if i did not bring up the fact that i love what we're doing with our csas but they're not enough they need they need supports who's going to be our violence interrupter how are we working with the larger agencies everybody talks about um we we shouldn't have the sros in schools that was a political a political decision that we didn't have to do that because now we don't have any relationship with them and we are getting second-hand third-hand and fourth-hand information and by the time they get to the school i believe our schools have already been the violence has already happened and we're waiting too long there's a lot that we need to be doing around violence interruption and we need to be intentional just as intentional as we are is talking about we want to make sure that our teachers are getting the money and that our our custodians are getting money and the nutrition services workers are getting money we need to be talking about kids can't learn if they're constantly looking around wondering if the if the next person coming in is going to be a threat and so what are we doing where does our budget line up with real violence interruption and again i i love our csas they do an amazing job i know the ones that roosevelt i know you know i'm saying we're doing great and so it's not to knock on what we're doing but the same way you know i'm saying this is where gary and i there there are very few times we disagree and this ain't one of them but it's to spend more money and so i'm trying to figure out how do we spend more money but be intentional about how we're spending that money as far as
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violence interruption goes because it's real and if if today in elementary school we took a moment of silence but let's pause and think about that for a moment that an 18 year old went to an elementary school not a high school but in elementary school and committed a heinous act of violence we have to do something and so i want to know as we look at our budget what's the violence interruption line item and where do we find that money and if that means we go to state then let's go to state i have no problem um going to state and lobbying with folks i'm loud as it is and so i can be loud at state i can be but we need to be doing it together and we need to be intentional about what it is that we're we're asking for so again it's not to say the teachers don't get money it's to say that we need we need more and we need to be intentional about violence and eruption and that and that's where i know that even if we had to go into the conference gary and i would agree on on that regard that's the only reason though that i think that's the only reason everything else got to go everything else got together and i'm going to add on to that because it's not necessary of you know spending more money i think we need to as we look at all of our the whole community piece we have the city we have multnomah county right we have all these other agencies and other invested are supposed to be invested municipalities that supposed to care for our kids so we should be talking with them how do we work with them to help solve that problem how do we work with them to have those resources and find those resources you know how do we share those resources so that way we can provide for that so this is a call out to the city call out to mental county call out to metro whoever has dollars to help our kids right and to to make sure that we are providing that because that is a city thing and we need to make sure we're protecting our most vulnerable which is our kids i appreciate these comments they're connected you're absolutely right danny we've been having conversations with the city in the county on this point exactly maybe you can give a little update yeah i would just reiterate um what director holland just said is that the um in terms of us we're not a public safety entity and so us funding public safety doesn't necessarily make sense from a fiscal in my in my humble opinion from a fiscal uh point of view so what we're trying to do with our summer programming is you poured over the the memo you'll notice that there are several um deep into the the narrative a lot of which might be missed is that several of our providers are those violent interrupters that you know partner with the office of violence prevention that partner with the county that have uh that sort of secondary and tertiary sort of like intervention pieces where we're that they work with the county in the city to provide and then they're working with us on prevention so we have organizations like poic like neo like latino network and part of their summer funding is not only to provide the fun youth employment and the exploring green jobs and sort of field trips to colleges and universities but there is fte built into their budgets that is specific for uh working on uh coordination and safety and doing some of that violent violence interruption and i'm happy to come back to you and let you know the sort of the fte that we're supporting to to do that work we're also working uh closely and i'm meeting with the county and the city uh this week to talk about sort of like now as we go into the summer and we think about the city's resources not just in terms of the police bureau and the office of violence prevention but also parks and the county and the chai program and their juvenile department how can we really sort of make sure that our prevention dollars get leveraged with all of those intervention dollars that are out there in a coordinated way that's working with specific eyes on our schools uh and the surrounding parks and and communities so i i would say that the where our budget mainly talks about that has been you know in this this board and this administration's commitment to working with our culturally specific partners um i'll cite the research all the time the only proven way that violence that gun violence in particular is reduced and where communities are resilient is if there is a strong public public-private partnership with non-profits or cities that have a strong network of non-profits do much better in terms of violence reduction and we've we've got those partnerships and we've invested in those over the over the years and then we've we've got to get out of the what's right in front of us and work on prevention thanks danny i'm going to ask if the board's ready to
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call this question i think i have a few things okay um so the middle school piece we're gonna the superintendent's going to get back to us with a proposal one of the things that i've been talking with staff about this week has to do with our nutrition services and our custodial staff and do we have the budget to change the game there in terms of their wages and it's a tricky ques it's a tricky uh challenge for us right now because we're in ongoing labor negotiations at this moment with them and we're in our budget process as well but i just want to share with my colleagues that i have been sufficiently convinced that this budget has enough resources earmarked for us to follow through in that process and do right by those two employee groups this is something that i don't want to leave unsaid because it's really important to me and if i hadn't been convinced of that i would have sought some kind of some kind of redress in the budget process so we'll all have a chance to visit that together when we're in you know executive session talking about labor negotiations um i want to say thank you especially for the addition of the school support instructors i feel heard i think that's a really important piece for our schools that have a hard time attracting substitutes and it's just heartbreaking that we've had so many unfilled sub positions this year especially in our highest needs schools so i i saw that additional allocation and i appreciate it and i think it's really really meaningful to those school communities because those people they know our kids and and they're they're ready to hit the ground running every day when they're pressed into service i appreciate the additions to special education i wanted to share a question i had and ask the superintendent if you might take another look at this so with our declining enrollment we have a greater number of schools that only have one administrator so they don't have an assistant principal because that's based on an enrollment threshold and it's a very it's a very difficult situation it's not an ideal situation no matter what your enrollment is because there's so many so many different tasks that both the administrators need to handle but we have a particular pain point in our schools that have our ses classrooms our social emotional skills classrooms our high need behavioral classrooms and so there are i think nine of our schools that have ses classrooms that have a single site administrator and i was just for example at heyhurst um this last week which is in that situation and um it's untenable basically and this is another situation like what we were talking about with the restorative justice coordinators some schools have been able to shift around resources when they're not budgeted for an assistant principal to to find administrative support particularly in service to those behavior classrooms but it's it doesn't work very well and it can lead to a kind of disruption and chaos and a lack of stable support that really bleeds out into the rest of the school community so i would like to ask you to take another look at our in our schools with behavior classrooms that have just one administrator and see if there's some opportunity for redress there or some kind of trade-off we can make because it's it's really really a hard situation uh and the just the last thing i wanted to say is the addition of school psychologists is fantastic some of them are funded with one-time dollars but more and more we've invested from our our own ongoing special revenue fund which is the student investment account which is awesome because we can keep them and that's great one thing um that is of interest to me is uh you know in response to a question about school psychologists in this budget process we said there these are all funded under undersped which is great and so many so much of their time is often involved with ieps but our school psychologists do so much more than just support our special education students and i think that that's often undervalued how they're able to be used as resources
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for the general student population and uh so you know i i guess i would like to understand better uh do we have enough support from us do we have enough school psychologists to support the needs particularly in high schools of all of our students or is uh are they pretty much being deployed um just working on ieps and in service to special education and if that's the case then you know thankful for all that we have now but we need more because our overall student population really needs to have access to those uh resources too um that's all i got thank you student representative weinberg yeah i had a quick comment just about the counselor fte ratio um we've kept it the same for the past two years and just i mean we've gone through a pandemic obviously and the social emotional need of students has increased exponentially we're so close to the recommended fte to uh student allocation the high school 300 to one 250 to 1 is the recommendation from the american association of school counselors or some acronyms similar so you get the you get the sense but we're so close in high schools but in elementary schools we're at 400 to 1 which is an extremely high number to serve for elementary and then i just had a i guess a follow-up question to what you said about investment in psych school psychologists because um in the budget under psych services we're seeing a decrease of 5 fte is that fte coming out of special fund not just general fund can you cite what you're looking at so they can follow up yeah general fund um function 2140 psychological services the decrease in fte is five for next year from this year jay you want to come up as well if you have the answer off the top of your head yes i'm sorry is it am i close enough oh sorry um so some of our school psychologists are funded out of other sources like some idea funds some sia dollars and so that may be some of the difference because i can tell you that we didn't make any changes to our building assigned schools psychologists for next year from this year so you know as as long as you're up there sorry sorry too bad um i've had a question i was going to ask the beginning of the evening um so i want to make sure i have the math right there was um 1.8 million cut out of special ed initially is that right a little less than that 1.7 okay so 1.7 we added back 1.5 is that correct and tonight and tonight we were at 1.8 yes 1.8 so so we added um a hundred thousand so we're so we will be back at the fte we would have been when we started this process it's just more expensive fte so we backfilled them and at the same time we're predicting that there's 900 or so students in the pipeline to be evaluated there are somewhere in the neighborhood eight eight to 900 students that are currently in the process so they're the sit teams are engaging with them some of them are being evaluated and determined whether or not they may have disabilities so um i'm just making sure i'm doing the math so um do we have students who graduated out of the system that the those are replacing or is this like the the a bubble and the the pipeline and we're actually even though we added it back we're just have the same we have the same number of special education staff so with potentially 900 800 900 more students who need services so we currently are seeing a larger number of students in process that would be typical um and at that it is it is also typical for us to lose a number of students through leaving graduating moving transfers over the summer start at a lower number in the fall and then and then grow again throughout the year that's pretty typical and that growth usually starts in and around january february because school teams have engaged in intervention work and and determine if students are responding and then they start consideration of special education right around that time and that's about the time we started seeing this and
04h 20m 00s
because students are we're seeing students with more need now there's more students in the process that also does not mean that that many students will be be determined eligible because as we've all heard many of our students are experiencing learning issues as a result of what we've all just come out of and that does not mean they all need special education services so but i'm not going to tell you that our teams are not dealing with a lot right now they are okay thank you for those um what i have what i'm proposing no i'm not proposing um i'm gonna move us to a vote um i think we have direction for the superintendent his team to look at amendments around potential amendments around um middle school staffing at tsi csi in title schools restorative justing restorative justice at every at middle schools and then i'm going to call director holland's amendment which everyone else gets and i'm sure i will i will catch up um and that's where we are and then i think there are some other questions in conversation and i think staff's been taking notes so i hope that what was put on the table we can again get those answers back with that is there any further board discussion before we move to approval of the budget and we've already done public comment so with that resolution 6512 budget committee approval of the 2022-23 budget and the imposition of property taxes all those in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes yes i'll oppose please indicate by saying no no and are there any abstentions oh yes an extension and we've got six of us so resolution 6512 is approved by a vote of four to one with one abstention and student representative weinberg unofficially voting uh no voting no okay thank you i'm gonna have a statement for the record that i meant to submit for the record too okay i will now recess i will also be submitting a statement for the record as well thank you director lowry i will now recess the board as the budget committee and we are reconvened into our regular meeting and at this point i know we're just finishing budget at this point are the is there any other uh there's nothing was pulled from consent agenda is there any other business at this time before we adjourn just a quick comment that i voted no not because i didn't support this budget but just because i wanted more time to look and ask questions i've been in ib testing for the past three weeks and i've just started digging in so it's not that i don't support it i just can't support it until i've looked through everything okay thank you um and he has more sticky notes in his budget than anyone up here with that uh this meeting is adjourned the next regular meeting of the board will be held on june 14th and thank you everyone for coming and staying through this i really appreciated the

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)

2022-05-24 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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Event 1: 5/24/22 PPS Board of Education Regular Meeting

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