2022-09-06 PPS School Board Regular Meeting

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District Portland Public Schools
Date 2022-09-06
Time 18:00:00
Venue BESC Auditorium
Meeting Type regular
Directors Present missing
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Event 1: 9/06/2022 PPS board of Education Regular Meeting

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good evening um this board uh meeting of the board of education for september 6th is called to order for tonight's meeting any item that will be voted on has been posted on the pps website under the board meetings tab meetings being live streamed on pbs tv services website on channel 28 and it will be replayed throughout the next two weeks please check the district website for replay times uh good evening everyone thank you for being here tonight uh director green will be absent for tonight's meeting and director constance may be joining us virtually for a little while but um wasn't 100 sure she could make it before we get started i wanted to share just a few reminders um we asked that all members of the public attending the meeting tonight treat each other staff and the board with respect and please do not interfere with the ability of the board to conduct its business those wishing to play placards signs or banners should remain in the auditorium foe behind the seating area and please don't block any attendees view of the proceedings also please keep the walkways and aisles clear and in general we would just appreciate it if you could be mindful of others in the room and the words you use and be aware of who's watching including our community's children moving on to our consent agenda the board will now vote on the consent agenda board members if there are any items you'd like to pull for discussion we'll set those aside for discussion and vote at the end of the meeting ms bradshaw are there any changes to the consent agenda no great board members are there any items you would like to pull from the consent agenda agenda for discussion or questions great do i have a motion and a second to adopt the consent agenda so moved second great director to pass moves director holland seconds um any further board discussion great i have an issue related but i'm going to just follow this perfect uh ms bradshaw is there any public comment no great the board will now vote on resolution 6568-6572 in favor please indicate by saying yes yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no student representative mcmahon yes thank you are there any of are there any abstentions great the consent agenda is approved by a vote of five to zero with student representative mcmahon voting yes we are now going to turn to student and public comment and let me just quickly review our guidelines for public comment first thank you for taking your time to attend the meeting tonight and providing your comments it really informs and improves our work we look forward to hearing your thoughts reflections or concerns and our responsibility as a board is to actively listen our board office may follow up on board related issues raised during public testimony and we request that complaints about individual employees be directed to the superintendent's office as a personal matter if you have any additional materials or items you'd like to provide to the board or superintendent please email them to public comment all one word at pps.net again it's public comment at pps.net when you begin your comment please clearly state your name and spell your last name for the record you'll have three minutes to speak and you'll hear a sound after three minutes at which point we would appreciate it if you could quickly wrap up and conclude your comments miss bradshaw do we have anyone signed up for student or public comment we do we'll start with ray leary welcome i know mr leary is commissioner leary but uh welcome thank you very much thank you chair board members superintendent before i start i want to express my gratitude uh in the busiest week of the year no doubt the superintendent took time to meet with us to talk with us to hear us out and given the demands that i know was on his office in that first week we were gratified that he made the time to talk with us in regards to that conversation we wanted to make clear that we as a community are in a serious public health crisis and as centers around our concern centers around what we consider and your data suggests as the most vulnerable population within the portland public schools cohort and that is black seventh grade boys if we were to examine the misery index you will see that they are the leaders in god's instructional time in disciplinary engagement attendance not to mention not to mention disciplinary issues
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in addition to that we know that we live in a community where gun violence permeates every aspect of our community and unless we find a way to capture the hearts and the attentions of these young black men in their younger years we will be chasing this demon throughout high school and beyond and there are many partners out there with the capacity and the capability of really putting a foot and a fingerprint on this issue and i don't think we've taken the time to maximize on those resources i don't think we've taken the time to truly empower those partners especially those powers who look just like those providers who look just like our students so toward that end the im academy has tried to position itself to begin to engage the middle school students and we got our first test run in the enrichment program this summer we purposely recruited incoming freshmen from george middle school [Music] and from kellogg middle school to begin to provide them with a platform for entree into high school where they would not be a stranger where they would have cohorts and friends and they would have resources waiting for them there and it pained our hearts not to be in that hall on the first day of school because i know they were expecting us we had made promises that we would be there but again we're working out dynamic and possibilities for being able to expand that opportunity and i would urge you as a board to look deep into the challenges that face middle school black young men and see in this crisis the opportunity it also presents there's no place in the state of oregon that has a more captive audience of black boys than portland public schools if we are going to put a dent in this public safety issue why don't we be the leaders in that why don't we pps decide that we're going to mitigate we're going to minimize we're going to put a halt to gain violence even being an option for young men because we're going to allow them the partnerships necessary to feel secure in their future to feel secure in their schools and to thrive in a very very tough environment if there was ever a board who could understand this dynamic i have had the pleasure of introducing my thoughts to you today i thank you i appreciate your time again superintendent i appreciate your time and i look forward to your support in making sure we provide critical comprehensive services to young middle school black boys thank you hold up mr larry mr larry sorry i have one question one question sir um i i heard about the program um i researched the program and i think it's a great uh a great thing that you're doing what is the capacity to expand that into other middle schools like tubman well we had made entrees because we heard from lentz we heard from kellogg we heard from roseway heights we heard from george we heard from all of these schools asking for these services because they have seventh grade boys as a part of their population there are practitioners out there gary enough to cover the landscape if tubman was a priority the im academy will look very hard at delivering those services there we know that our young men need mail to look like them to provide services that they can trust so if there is a chance for expansion beyond the middle schools that we would like to serve you will get nothing but a warm response from us because we're serious about putting dent in this problem we'll bury too many what would you need to do that we would need the support of this board the budgetary support of resj and the support of the staff and the administration i have letters here from every single school that we've talked about asking for that support i'll be happy to leave that with you but it's not rocket science they're asking for the support they want the support my thought is this if we have the resources and i know we do then why don't we aim them at our most vulnerable our most critical issue
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no one wants to get around to following the money it might just tell the truth i i wanted to follow up with i appreciate um your testimony and uh mr leary would love to just hear um a success from this from this summer what i'm just one it doesn't have to be all of them but i've also kind of checked up on your on the i am academy by asking community members i had a ratio of letters they're handwritten and i could glean from those and share with you but there was one in particular a young lady her name was kennedy and kennedy showed up halfway through the program but once she got there she embraced it full throttle and she wrote a letter that characterized the advantage she now has from having met other people who will be going to roosevelt who she shared fun times with and academic exercises with to the point to where friendships were made first name basis and we've heard back from parents just yesterday we had a pair of twins joshua and jason we bumped into their mom at the grocery store we went in for a small item half hour later we're still talking about jason and joshua and the summer they had and mom was thrilled and we've had those kind of moments throughout the summer michelle the critical point is this we have a bevy of testimonials but nothing beats the fact that when a kid comes back for service they have given you the highest compliment available to them they'll come once if they don't disappear and they come back they have told you they're coming back for something that you've got and it's good for them so we're we're thrilled by the possibility and we have countless testimonials and stories about wonderful things and we have some tragedies as well we had a couple of young men who participated in our summer program in franklin on a thursday week was over friday they were both in the hospital having been shot and they said in our classroom this summer that's why we say to you we're not talking about something that is a data point we're not talking about a data point we're talking about lives we're talking about families and the ripple effects that trap a community that puts staff in fear and makes the buildings questionably unsafe so we're talking about a way to get at a whole host of problems just by serving our most needed community thank you thank you for that all right thank you thank you very to make sure i much that he was in full support of the i am academy um i think he had full transparency i think he said he had or worked there or had some commit some stuff there but he really believes in in the program and so i just i told him i would make sure that that got out here great thank you thank you thank you thank you appreciate it thank you ms bradshaw greg myers welcome good evening i tell you it never fails every time i speak here i'm always following a hard act to beat that was very eloquent my name is greg myers m-e-y-e-r-s i'm a head custodian for the portland public schools and i'm here tonight to talk to the board about covet leave i have a pre-prepared statement i'm just going to read for you so here let's let it rip excuse me our students and staff need safe and healthy schools so we could accomplish our mission when coveted hit our schools closed to in-person learning until we could figure out how to provide a healthy learning environment during a global pandemic when we returned in-person instruction pps adopted a layered approach to covid safety which included social distancing mandatory vaccines for all the staff and masks for the staff and the students pps also allowed all staff who had kova to use quarantine leave we still had problems including schools that had to close due to outbreaks but at least the staff and the students
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knew pps was making a good faith effort this summer pbs stopped letting staff who have coveted use quarantine leave the short-sighted policy change puts our community at risk it also undermines the morale of your staff we've been putting our lives on the line every day for two years we've been speaking at the board meetings about this issue for the last three months and the solution that pps offers is for the staff who have coveted to exhaust all of their sick leave all their vacation time and all of the other various sleeves that the different departments are given before they can access covet leave um i don't know how you guys would feel but feel like you're at the end of the rope at that point if you've exhausted everything before before you even have a chance for a quarantine we need pps to provide coveted leave for all staff who need to stay home to avoid spreading covet i mean i just saw today we've got a new booster that's coming out for the next variant we're heading into fall it's not going away it's going to come back so uh we we know that the parents and the students voices are often necessary for us to to make a change um we will use the upcoming opportunities at the open houses to educate and engage uh parents and students and we will continue to escalate until we get a real solution that ensures our schools are as safe and healthy as possible and one thing on our just a note that's not on here i'm a head custodian i have a staff of custodians that work under me most of the custodians that i have working for me have already before july 1st when this is when our that's when our leave and everything replenishes most of the people that work for me had already burned through all of their sick leave all of their personal leave all of their family illness time and got to the point where i had one person who had coveted three times he was out a week a week a week until finally he was on unpaid so he chose not to get paid versus coming to work with still showing symptoms of covet so there is a reality it does put people in a position to have to make a decision if i'm going to get paid and go to work or if i'm going to stay home and try and protect the safety of others and go without pay so it is a real world issue still for us and we just wanted to make you guys aware of it so thank you for your time thank you for your testimony thank you [Applause] thank you again for everyone's comments tonight um moving on i believe we are joined by our portland association of teachers and i believe vice president dixon is here to say a few words to us tonight welcome [Music] good evening um directors superintendent and um student representative i'm happy to be here it was a very exciting past week i want to say thank you to all of our educators on the ground and our families and and students welcome back i want to start off with some kudos so i want to thank pps for rescinding the 20 tech charge that families were going to have to pay to continue using the one-to-one chromebooks i know 20 doesn't seem like a lot but um if it is it is you know so the families with multiple children that really were impacted by this i think this was a huge win for them and really made a difference so thank you for listening and following through on that um also in the spirit of collaboration community and transparency i have some wonderings and concerns i'd like to communicate on behalf of pat mostly focused on the heat this past week and safe learning and working conditions as well as some professional development concerns so to launch into the heat and working conditions i'm sure it's not a secret it was hot the past week we want to focus on how this is important for the board and our climate committee because our children deserve adequate learning conditions our working conditions are children's learning conditions so educators staff and students have entered our 90 plus schools at pps to start the school year this past week and face temperatures of 90 degrees at most schools we received reports of students and
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staff having heat related illnesses this past week including a student throwing up until they passed out and having a serious medical situation so upon hearing our members concerns around the heat we deployed thermometers to each school and educated members on the oregon osha guidelines around heat illness mitigation so we asked our union representatives to do two things one document the temperature in the excessively hot rooms at their sites and to email their administrators to ask for a heat illness prevention plan which is a requirement listed in osha in the documents i mentioned for when the heat index reached over 90 degrees as pat president angela also communicated with both the head of pps operations and the head of labor relations for pbs hr and requested a hill a heat illness prevention plan and pbs high heat practices plan the district's plan included the following so students and staff were encouraged to stay well hydrated drink plenty of water asking our already overwhelmed and overworked custodians to come in at 6am and open all the windows in the classrooms to try and get the hot air out and the district shared an email with the community that stated each school would provide ample access to water in addition to usual water fountains pps would make water coolers available when necessary and encouraging folks to bring reusable water bottles unfortunately despite the district's plan educators came into buildings where windows were still closed at 7 30 when they arrived and just for those who aren't familiar with the term the heat index is what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature so there's a few high temperatures and heat indices from across the district that i'm going to share here and this is just a handful of many so lane middle school had highs of 100 degrees with 55 humidity that's 124 degree heat index ockley green middle school highs of 90 degrees with 70 humidity that's 106 heat index ida b wells which i visited this week had highs over 95 degrees and humidity hitting about 40 percent which puts them at about 99 degrees on the heat index hosford middle school 93 degrees scott elementary school 95 degrees selwood highs of 90 degrees with 49 humidity sunnyside elementary 91 degrees vernon 92 and grout 92 degrees this is just a handful like when i said most i really met most schools um we we got some pictures of literally temperatures of over 110 degrees in these buildings and we also had the opportunity angela and i to visit a handful of schools cleveland scott sabin perry center and i can say the only school that was comfortable was perry center because it's located in a medical facility and so trillium is responsible for that versus pps schools so there is air-conditioned air conditioning there for students i'm just bringing this to your attention because i know there have been complaints concerns from family and community about the condition of our buildings for a long time and as we know climate change is not going away it's a priority for our students and our families and we want to make sure that we're doing everything to support a path forward other things i want to touch on is the covett agreement like our labor partner greg was talking about earlier we have a labor coalition for pps which is made up of pat the district council of unions portland federation of school professionals and atu and the seiu so we requested a continuation of the moa the agreement that we had into the following year as you all probably know unfortunately we received a response to our request after the expiration of the moa as as greg mentioned so this forced our members along with other coalition members to take unpaid time or use their sick time to stay home after june 30th if they were working over the summer for those who need the income this is an undue hardship folks use their sick time not only for themselves but to care for their family members as well i'm sure many folks in this room have had to take days off to pick up a sick kid it's part of what we do as parents right or to make a doctor's appointment that cannot be rescheduled when staff are trying to hold on to the few days they have they should not have to choose between pay and keeping their community safe from the spread of covid especially within our school system so best case scenario there is that they get to take the covet leave before their
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other leaves as it was previously we're not asking for quarantine for exposure but really just for if you have covid you get a stay home you have five days leaves and our labor partners really need that as well um lastly i just want to touch on um pps attempting to increase our work days so we get paid in pat as members 192 days or 202 days depending on which contract you have so the days added to the calendar for pd for csi and tsi schools were done on non-work days and we've been in communication with pps about this i think since spring kind of back and forth so they now the the educators in those schools now have 195 days due to this change so unless you work at a csi or a tsi school september 23rd october 14th and february 17th are non-work days for non-these are non-student days non-teacher work days they're non-work days according to our contract so what i'm saying here is we can't just break our contract because we're doing it for the kids right we're all doing it for the kids because we love the children but we also need to be paid and we need to be paid fairly according to our contract um so if you review tests or contact families if you go in and plan on your in your classroom on these days you won't be paid that's not in our contract we believe the district should be providing professional development with our 192 or 202 day work year uh not adding days arbitrarily without bargaining that with pat that's also in our contract and we want professional development i want to be clear about that we're not saying that we don't need it um we want it during our work days of our work here we used to take a late opening or early dismissal every month to train staff using courageous conversations around race i know the district can and does prioritize professional development during the school year when it wants to so we're just asking for these days to be worked into the calendar and prioritize like other professional development has been in the past please remember that when we come to this body and email with pps staff as pat we're doing this to advocate for our students so we already have a staffing shortage and we need to make pps a place where folks want to work and where kids can learn and be supported i look forward to collaborating with pps this year to find solutions that center students and keep employees in the district thank you thank you thank you for your comments [Applause] okay next up student representative mcmahon hello everyone so before i begin i'd just like to thank the previous speakers and greg i don't know if you remember but i went to sellwood middle school and you were headquartered in there and i just remember you so well i think that just goes to show i remember you and how much of an impact these staff make even if they're not potentially face-to-face with students all the time but the work that you all do in schools is really important and i want you to know that i do remember and students do really feel the impact of the work you guys do okay so to begin my remarks good evening everyone um i would first like to say happy first week of school it's a very exciting time for all of us as a senior i'm saying a little less exciting and a bit more stressful but i'm feeling pretty good um and i want to start with some celebrations as well so danny cage is a student at grant high school currently a senior and he is our representative on the district student council and he had some pretty amazing and exciting things happened to him within the last couple of weeks and so the first is danny was selected for the i'm gonna try to say this right national association of secretaries of state for the medallion award and he got to go down to salem and receive that award and it's all about the work that he does in his community which for those of you that know him or have heard of him it is a lot and he has been so dedicated not only to district student council to his role last year on the policy committee but also to going to those community events and really putting in the work to show people that he is there to represent them and to be part of that everyday conversation and then also he's a big got a lot of accomplishments here he also was appointed to the environmental justice council at the state level to continue his work which he also does with pbs on environmental justice and so i want to say danny i'll probably clip this and send it to you from the youtube video i love working with you what you do is
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amazing you lead us you help us and i'm so proud to stand beside you i think so many times students have these responsibilities that are overlooked we have to do school we have to take part in family life we have to you know try to fulfill that idea that high school is the best time of your life which in itself is a big constraint and concern and i definitely feel that so i applaud you i congratulate you thank you for putting this work above everything else and thank you for continuing to fight even when times get rough and even when people don't always recognize the work that you do so let's have a round of applause for danny okay and then on the note of thanking congratulating i also want to say a big thank you to our educators and our custodial staff and all of our in-building staff members for continuing to bear the first week of school even in this almost crisis really of both heat as well as obviously concerns around contracts and pay i want to say and you really stated it perfectly that the concerns about the heat have really been mirrored by my peers i go to cleveland high school and i have found that it is hot and it does really make an impact into the conditions for students and especially when we're trying to set the tone for support and how do we make this year better than the last how do we push forward and make students sort of the center of our decision making i really just want to push for this idea that when we hear concerns from students from families from teachers we really do need to listen to them and so i definitely look to this board and i'm excited to work along with you to see as we continue to see the forecasts and these temperatures being high how do we as the district help to facilitate solutions and how do we make sure that we're really there for our students and our staff thank you and happy second week and good luck great thank you student representative um next up we've got board committee conference reports i don't think we'll have a lot tonight um but i did want to let folks know that board assignments have gone out i know that you all are working to get your committee meeting scheduled and agendas up and running this is something we're going to be talking about at the retreat on september 17th as well i do want to very briefly report back um both i want a director to pass i'm going to ask you to report back on school board partners um visit and i'll report back on the osba conference when we travel we do like to just report back on some of the the key takeaways um from those things so i was able to attend the oregon school board association conference in june i think it was june yeah it was late june um just a couple key highlights um there was a keynote right at the very beginning about engaging families and what was really interesting for me um was that obviously engaging families is really important it's it's you know it's it's a key thing that districts do what the keynote speaker whose name i'm blanking on um but he was from from florida and one of the things that he really talked about was and using evidence about how um districts that do a better job at student and family engagement actually have higher student achievement and that makes sense when you think about it but to actually see the hard data around the impact it has um it was really i mean it's really compelling and to sort of hear about how important it is have it integrated into everything we do and and not just because it's the right thing to do but it actually improves student achievement in the districts that do it well um and so i i went in um sort of a little bit skeptical about the data and came out really really converted in terms of that and then i went to sessions about board leadership and sort of the need for board operating agreements that's something we're going to talk about in the retreat as well and some other key things about just hopefully having the best um school district we can have this year so with that director to pass any any words of wisdom from school board partners yes absolutely oh my gosh that's up that's up really high um in i believe july i attended a convening of school board partners which is a non-profit that's dedicated whose mission is to fundamentally change experiences for kids of color in the u.s the fellows are mostly black and brown so very diverse and from diverse urban districts uh like portland atlanta chicago uh a couple of districts in tennessee several in atlanta washington dc etc we had um it was a day and a half convening so it was really quick and held in denver one of the takeaways i had was we'd heard some criticism about our curriculum adoption late in the year this year this spring and so i went to a session on curriculum and the curriculum that we chose was rated like four star green four stars very highly rated by this organization not just school board partners but
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through a partnership a coalition of school board members and other educational leaders that are focused on deeply focused on improving outcomes for kids of color so i was really excited to learn that i haven't circled back with them i know i got some teachers and educators that reached out to me that were very concerned about that curriculum and i was um comforted to know that it's it was the highest rated of i think seven uh different curriculums that we that we looked at um or that school board partners looked at so i want to get that out there in terms of a committee report i don't have one but i'll be chairing the audit committee i'm really excited about that i believe we're i'm going to be meeting four times this year so it's not going to be a very aggressive meeting schedule but also i just want to say to people that are watching um welcome back to school it's a really exciting time um i think at some point i want to definitely want to talk about the the heat in our buildings at some point the city of portland is currently working on a policy that will require commercial buildings to have cooling so it seems like an urgent issue this week because it's really hot it is getting hotter and at some point we won't have a choice it's just a human right at some point so it's it's one of those conditions where it's getting hotter and we haven't prepared for it yet but there's there's quite a bit of action happening at the city level for buildings such as ours commercial buildings in particular so thank you great thank you i'm assuming there are no other committee reports great i mean just assigned them um [Music] superintendent guerrero i think we're going to move on to a report about back to school and i'll turn it over to you yes good evening directors and student representative mcmahon just get the deck up here for a moment i appreciate the opportunity to provide a little bit of a follow-up on how we're doing these first number of days all right well today as you know represented the first full day of whole class kindergarten so senior leadership was out and about again greeting our newest students and families i myself started off my morning at james john elementary school thank you for joining me director de pass where i had the opportunity we had the opportunity to welcome and meet our newest youngest scholars and their families to what will be the start of we hope a 13-year educational journey here at pps consistent with reports from other staff that was out greeting new kindergarteners families didn't seem too nervous they in many cases stayed beyond the student drop-off to mingle get to know one another i want to thank our local ptas and parent leaders who made coffee available and provided an opportunity for our families to continue getting to know each other i also stayed on to visit classrooms after the meet and greet at james john i observed students eager to learn to meet their new teachers and friends so i just want to say kudos to all of our kindergarten educators who welcome their full classes today with a smile and a welcoming classroom environment i know it takes time and effort to prepare those i observe students drawing coloring their desk name tags listening to their teachers share their first read aloud books some very interesting conversations about acurdos comunitarios or community agreements which they started to do some brainstorming about which included a whole host of ideas by our new kindergartners some of their suggestions included reminders like we should be kind help a friend listen attentively try your best so as you can see our young students remind us of everything we need to know already at kindergarten so i would like to call today's first day of school for kindergarten across pps a huge success and also kudos to chief joseph where i also spent the morning visiting their classrooms so today's success i think mirrors uh the sentiment from last week which i have to say has been among the smoothest uh in most folks recent memory as they as they shared uh we've been up and running for a week now uh and visits to and reports from our schools across the city and our leaders are describing a smooth and overall positive start to the school year and i think that's due in large part because of our people i'm grateful to all of our hard-working teachers our support staff our bus drivers maintenance teams and i know our central office staff the majority of them were out at campuses these first number of days to lend a hand and i want to acknowledge that many of our school board members who were able to be out and about invisible in our school communities
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were present as well so thank you for that and thank you everybody for the positive social medias it's good for our community to see we're connecting with our communities and to our students i want to they deserve appreciation also for coming to school prepared to learn it's amazing how as we start up classes again you can already see good learning habits and routines developing it's refreshing after all the pressures and dynamics of the last couple years to again observe the excitement of being back in school and to be squarely focused on student learning again so i like many district leaders had the pleasure of getting around to many of our campuses that includes visiting the new nest also known as lincoln high school to participate in the first day freshman assembly where i encourage students to have fun and to dive into all the rich extracurriculars that our schools offer i also met with families on the first day at the reunited access academy and welcomed them to their first day together as a united school community at their newly renovated schoolhouse overall as i visited classrooms and schools all across pps it confirmed for me that our schools are places of learning where students feel cared about and our task is to cultivate and showcase our students brilliance and for our students in particular who are making new transitions whether it's starting kindergarten sixth grade middle school or high school we understand how important it is for our students to get started off on the right foot so i'm glad that our educators and school communities were able to make a little extra time to welcome our new students so making sure they feel supported and oriented to their new campuses and i i have to give a shout out take a moment to highlight our talented school leaders they've worked tirelessly to make sure their schools were ready they spent the summer interviewing and hiring staff participating and investing in their own professional learning as well our principals and school administrators are tasked with leading their school communities continuous improvement efforts and in pps our administrators maintain a very clear focus on achieving the educational equity that we have as an objective they want every single child and every young adult to succeed and they understand that our black and native students in particular require the extra attention and support so that opportunity gaps are eliminated so for our school leaders out there i appreciate your dedication and your continued focused efforts next up uh i want to have dr renard adams provide the latest student enrollment numbers good evening directors i wanted to provide another brief enrollment update based on our current registrations as of september 2nd so that was last friday we've registered just over 3 000 kindergarten students as you're all aware from the superintendents from marx in your school visits kindergarten started today and so we expect to register enroll additional kindergarten students over the next two weeks before the 10-day drop for kindergarten happens we anticipate we'll reach our projected enrollment numbers for kindergarten this school year at the middle school grade band we're seeing enrollment numbers that are slightly higher than our projection you can see that in the last column while elementary and high school enrollments are now below our projection for this year so that's been a change since last week we met those numbers have gone down a little bit as has been previously shared these enrollment numbers are preliminary they'll continue to firm up as we reach the 10-day drop mark for students in all grades as students either regularly attend we mark them present and we can count them in our enrollment or they don't attend don't show up our parents unenroll them from our schools and transfer them to other schools we know that our principals and our school teams and our teachers are working very hard to to welcome students and families into this new school year and we're so very grateful for their efforts in this regard um finally i just wanted to put a shout out to the staffing team as is typical for this time of year they are closely monitoring schools enrollments um to determine the extent need for fall balancing as we approach those 10-day markers and so we're closely looking at enrollments we're looking at the entire system all schools um that way we can know that we can understand um class sizes and enrollment patterns across the district not only where we have um more active parent associations but also where our as parent associations might be a little bit more quiet and not email us as much we want to also make sure we're taking care of them um with that i'll turn it back to the superintendent thank you dr adams and just like you've provided an enrollment update i want to make sure and provide the board in our community a staffing update so more positive news as i mentioned our school principals and central office teams have continued to make progress in the hiring and onboarding of new educators and school-based staff as of today we are only seven homeroom teacher vacancies short of being at a hundred percent of
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our elementary and k-5 classroom positions and k-8s being filled okay and when it comes to core content classrooms at the secondary level that means subjects of math science language arts and social studies we're looking pretty good there as well so at a time when school systems both locally and across the country are truly struggling to recruit and hire educators we're in a pretty enviable position right now now overall looking at all of our employee groups we're just under about 135 school-based instructional vacancies now many of these are classified support staff roles of a variety for instance but of these positions about a quarter of them are already in the progress or in the process of being welcomed into a pps school so and we're continuing to make some progress on our custodial and nutrition services front we're making progress there as well so if you want some specific numbers we can provide those as well but just the larger group is 75 vacancies for educational assistance so we're still out there if you know anyone and would love to support classroom learning please see us all right director hollins this next one's for you uh we wanted to make sure to give you a little bit of a snapshot on our new uh and rehire demographics for since july just since july 1st that's 534 hires 50 percent of our new school admins are people of color wait for it [Laughter] and even in senior leadership we try to model that 75 percent of our new hires are people of color as well so i i wanted to make sure and include what our student demographic is i think it's important that we're at a minimum proportional and representative of course uh never hurts to have uh educators of color present across the school system you see there that we're faring a little better in some of the labor partner groups however we're doing pretty well in our seiu you heard from earlier uh they're almost at 49 folks of color uh who occupy those positions our pfsp uh folks at 37 and a half percent uh as well again these are our statistics for for a new hire so this is just a snapshot tonight you'll get as we close up uh more finalized staffing numbers across the system and we can take a look at those i also want to mention that almost half of our athletic coaches are folks of color as well so you see the reference point with our students of color but i did want to make sure and include this slide for you this evening okay so uh before i close out uh this quick update i also want to acknowledge that last week's heatwave uh was an obstacle to creating uh the truly joyful and comfortable learning environment we'd all like to see our community like communities around the globe are encountering the realities of of this climate crisis we recognize that the majority of our buildings given our modernization efforts have only started in recent years are not yet entirely ready for the changing weather patterns we hear and share our communities concerns and frustrations and know that with the realities of climate change heat waves and other abnormal climatic events during the school year they're going to become more frequent not less so we know that the heat affects everyone differently and that being impacted by heat is more than just uncomfortable it's an issue of individual and systemic injustice and inequity so community health and resilience is a top district priority and called out specifically as a pillar of our climate crisis response policy passed by this school board in march of this year our climate justice advisor kat davis will work this year with a cross-departmental team to establish a heatwave protocol in alignment with a climate crisis resilience plan as well so as your superintendent just want to assure you that we're working on a tangible solutions for this in the long term it's a large scale issue and know that together we can help both mitigate our impact on exacerbating climate crisis while also coordinating some adaptive measures so our schools are centers for community resilience so we're excited about this work ahead collaborating together learning from each other as we tackle this important issue and imagine together what it looks like to have an inspiring joyful learning environment despite a changing climate and that concludes my update for back to school this evening great thank you superintendent um yeah i just i want to open up for brief questions we're running a little bit behind but just see if there are any um questions from the board uh around the information that we just heard
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well i don't have a question um i have appreciation i appreciate um the slide as far as this disaggregating the data i think for our community um and our kids to see that and you know when we always talk about you know kids um doing better when they have people who look like them i think that's very important um so i want to give appreciation out for that thank you thank you and i have to extend the appreciation to everyone who's a hiring manager whether you're a principal or a department head uh and to our hr staffing team who has to crunch these numbers manually uh so we look forward to sharing some further numbers later this fall i think we've mentioned before what makes this challenging in particular is the candidate pool and organ isn't isn't diverse so uh you know we have to try a little harder and then we have to a hard time keeping people when they get here as well so it's a it's a rough environment not just here well this i'll add to the kudos and i think that you know what we've done on staffing this would be a good year in terms of hiring in a normal year but given the national environment around hiring teachers to to be where we are in terms of of really minimizing those vacancies is pretty exceptional so congratulations to you and your team um for doing that and and i think that's um yeah it's it's a really monumental accomplishment um and the last thing i'll say um maybe for just future um conversation i know other board members have brought this up in the past but looking at those enrollment numbers you know we're still hoping for some kindergarten kids but we are down in a little bit of areas and i i think it's an interesting question about and i believe we've asked this question and your answer has been you know there's sort of some capacity issues but you know what is possible to do in terms of outreach to those families you know finding out a little bit more i think that can help with strategies in the future but also maybe there are some families we can find that you know we can actually bring back into the into the schools yeah and just one more plug i know i've been saying this to families everywhere i go as i visit campuses we have 350 preschool slots folks so please give us a call i know there was another tweet earlier see our website just call any one of our offices head start preschool heads you know we've got seats so if you're a three or four year old out there we'd love to start seeing you now great thank you next up is also an update on summer school so i will turn it back to you superintendent we have a a star-studded crew this evening who are going to share a more comprehensive uh summary of our programming uh this this past summer which is you know had a few different elements to it so that's why you see this cross-departmental uh team here who's gonna share with you and i'm gonna give you the clicker perfect thank you i think we're going to go through zoom i think so here we go all right the cooking is not going to i'll be your clicker okay good evening board president members of the board student trustee superintendent guerrero and portland public school partners my name is dr kimberly armstrong and i have the pleasure of serving as chief academic officer good evening everyone i'm dana narenberg senior director of academic programs in the office of teaching and learning good evening jay bueno interim chief of student support services hi i'm danny ledezma the resg advisor great so i have the pleasure of bringing forth this item under the board goals and priority area while we work our screen and click on i guess i'll just keep going so the summer acceleration program under the board goals thinking of first third grade goals the focus was on non-fiction texts and for fifth grade math we focused on fractions and decimals and for eighth grade readiness we focused on non-fiction texts as well as well as ratios and for high school graduation the goal was credit retrieval and we were able to move some numbers from last year 349 freshmen to this last summer 615 so we're excited about that and then the post-secondary focus for the board we were able to offer programs that included hands-on projects for steam as well as enrichment programs that you'll hear about later
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okay next slide so i just want to go quickly over some data points and i know it may be hard to see it is a revised slide um was updated today and so really just is just to show who attended i have a data slide that shows k8 enrollment by grade band just so that you can see the distribution of students amongst those bands next slide you can't see that yeah yeah let's right it's revised so let me speak to that yep we need to zoom in it's a little small on our side too yeah here we go so 2493 for first through first through fifth and then sixth through eighth this is okay or i'm sorry oh k-8 k-8 457 and 6-8 yeah 581. sorry what was the first the first as far as the k5s k5 right yeah okay okay thank you next slide yes and we're going to speak to um some of that so then just really quickly a snapshot of portland's population by race and ethnicity for the academic year 21 22 and then the next slide shows the population and the summer acceleration academy by race and ethnicity so you'll see similar numbers next slide the average daily attendance we thought that this was important to show the average attendance of students across the sites and show that it was a positive number there were some dips and those dips happen during the week of extreme heat but for the most part the programs maintain their enrollment next slide we also have average daily attendance by race and ethnicity you see the actual percentages at the bottom of the race for ethnicity category but still showing the attendance disaggregated out next slide and then the average daily attendance by program so looking at students who are served through multiple programs and those unique numbers that percentage thank you then on the budget side i just wanted to next slide show the preliminary budget this was what was forecast for summer programming just under 18 million and through the different categories thank you and then the next slide will show the funds that we receive from the oregon department of education so just under 3 million for summer academic support so students who were entering grades 9 through 12 and then for summer enrichment and academic programs so combined the shows the the allocation there is as well so the total um 8.3 million from the oregon department of education and so just a couple of things on the the budget next slide thank you so we were able to make full use of the ode k-8 summer funds we also had additional funds approximately 677 000 from student success act and those were funds that were designated for eight different serving students from eight different schools um across the hub sites and then also 500 000 from esser so just to note that the expenditures are not yet finalized so we don't have a final budget report this evening but we can say that any unused k-8 funds will return to esser and i think what's significant about that is for the forecasting and the budgeting process the team had planned on a budget that was completely supported by esser but through the funds from ode we were able to utilize those funds first and so with that i'd like to turn it over to our direct our senior director of academic programs thank you next slide please so in terms of the different
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programs that we offered this summer we identified and referred students in a myriad of ways we had our school teams look at attendance we had our school teams look at some diagnostic informative assessments academic performance how students were making progress towards their goals specifically for summer acceleration academy we used our mid-year map data and our mid-year dibbles data and provided guidance to school teams to look at other factors in addition to that data that tells that told a more complete story they know which siblings need to go they know which students would eagerly participate and which families would would sign on um as well we partnered for summer scholars part of why those numbers that dr armstrong mentioned were so great for our first year students summer scholars has historically focused on our students closest to the finish line our high school seniors and we also know that if our students leave ninth grade on track they're more likely to graduate on time and so we worked with our ninth grade success teams to identify first-year students in high school who would benefit from the program that's so that was a success there we'll look in a few more slides at some of the numbers of the other programs that we served if we could look at the next slide please thank you go ahead did you [Music] of the number of students who were identified and invited or referred what percentage of them um actually took us up on that and you know was there any sort of learnings of um if there was a gap of one's con student who were invited but participate like what what did we learn about what we could do differently right we have not yet disaggregated that data and we have some resources that will enable us to do so so each school team for summer acceleration academy was allocated a certain number of spots for this hub model so all the schools came together at the 25 sites and we allocated the hub the spots based on an equity model so students schools that needed had more students needing the support and opportunity had more spaces we invited school teams to identify three rounds of kits knowing that some parents plans would change some families would say no thank you and so in some schools we went to all three rounds other schools we didn't and we're prepared to to dig a little bit more into that data specifically finding out when parents decided not to enroll when we could find out why they made that choice so stay tuned we'll get that information to you last summer as you all know was our first summer of summer acceleration academy and we learned a lot and we reached out to some of the best practices in summer programming nationally one big change was growing the program from three to four weeks uh enabling us to do more intensive academic support for our students we added more planning time for our teachers based on feedback from our teachers and provided much more specific instructional guidance so for our core curriculum we used ready reading and ready math we also used fundations ready to rise for first and second grade rising first and second graders it's a specific program intended for summer support that aligns to our high quality instructional materials adoption so our students in the first few days were using some of the same routines and rituals that they use in the classroom we also enrolled our students earlier and used a centralized process and we're hopeful to do that even earlier this year we also began our hiring earlier and we will definitely start earlier this year to get our staff in line and one a really exciting element that was a change from the previous year is most of our site administrators 20 of them in fact are not current building administrators but they're educators within our ranks who hold administrative licenses so we partnered with hr to get that information they might be ptosis they might be classroom teachers they pursued and invested in a credential and yet had not taken the leap so to speak to to lead and so we recruited them and had a terrific time many of them are pursuing administrative roles within our system and a couple also said that wasn't what they wanted to do and that's a good way to learn they still served us beautifully but they also learned that about their the way that they want to lead within the system and that also allowed our principals to have more of a chance to recharge because the previous summer many of our principals were our building leaders we're also in terms of longer term data we're part of a longitudinal study in partnership with nwea air and the calder center to track the longer term impact of participation in summer programming yes air i knew you were going to say that as soon as american institutes of research yes and so it's a consortium i think there's eight to ten school systems nationally where they're tracking how our esser dollars are being used and and going to be able to provide us data back so i think that that first i know that that first map assessment we give in october they'll be able to pull out and tease out which of our students participated they'll be able to track who participated the summer before and see the impact and the longer term benefits for our students next slide please so here's a summary the next two slides are a summary including numbers of all of the range of academic programs that we offered so we had our early kindergarten transition program serving 272 rising kindergartners from 19 sites most of those were in their home school there were just a few where there was construction and they served at other
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campuses so when those kindergartners walked in the door last week for their practice day and then today they were confident and knew their way around there was one side i was up for the very first day and there was a student who was like a koala bear on his mom like not like i mean i was known for principal for many years like would not let go and the following week i was there again and he was like see ya and just like the first in line so it's just real evidence of the effectiveness we serve nearly 373 700 students of rising first or eighth graders at our 25 hub sites and that includes students from every single one of our elementary middle schools and k-8 schools as well as many of the charter schools in our system we had summer arts academy which i got to see with director lowry the amazing end of program celebration we served approximately 160 rising sixth through ninth graders and there was an amazing celebration at the newmark theater the culmination leap into ninth grade is a terrific credit earning opportunity where our 9th graders get to go in earn a half a credit and really get to know their campus in a three-week program and it's just a great way for them to build friendships and relationships and feel confident in their new site summerworks provides amazing professional employment opportunities for our students this summer we were able to employ 306 of our high school students including supporting two of our other programs so they supported summer acceleration academy some future teachers were hoping to recruit and nurture and then also our partners portland interscholastic league math trajectory program a number of their coaches also participated in summer works and earned cte credit for an education course at pcc uh next slide please we also have summer scholars serving 2789 students across two sessions at five sites with an 89 passage rate and that's no small feat for those students to take an entire high school course in three weeks is pretty amazing we got to visit a couple of sites and saw the students really engaged the mass trajectory program that i mentioned served 133 130 middle school students and 34 summer works high school students at mcdaniel and roosevelt and they had a ball and just and that program has a lot of tradition and a lot of students who participated in it came back as coaches this year and they have a really solid set of educators who come back year after year our indian education program served 75 students across a variety of programs so there was a week-long first through fifth grade camp they provided scholarships to omsi tutoring and then the cultural connection canoe experience and then our migrant education program hosted a program at fern at vernon k8 serving 62 students in their four-week program next slide please we've got a few photos oh excuse me sun and then we'll get to some photos so sun is an amazing partner all year round but particularly in the summer and so we've got our five sun partners sei erco impact northwest latino network and portland parks and they offered enrichment programming in the afternoon at 33 sites and served 2232 students some of that most of that was in conjunction with summer acceleration they also had some standalone programming and at one of the sites at kelly where the partner is latino network christina the sunsite manager has been there for a very long time and i got to spend some time with her this summer and she there was a student who needed a little extra tlc and would often come to the sun office for a little extra tlc during academic time but was drawn to legos and then at one point in the summer christina was able to offer a lego program in the afternoons and the student was really engaged and after that participated more fully in the academics so tending to that social emotional need and that interest and that high interest motivated that student to participate more fully in the academics next slide please um just here a few snapshots of what was going on and the great learning that happened across our sites um that picture of some work sets at rigler elementary school so that's a bilingual student who is one of our high school students who was able to support that bilingual classroom there it was just a small smattering there's we served so many kids it was so joyful uh i think the next slide i think that's it i think i'm gonna pass it to jay to jay bruno thank you so good evening i appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about special education specific programming that we provide over the summer that was in addition to everything dana just talked about and and i do have some information in here related to the numbers of students with ieps that participated in all of those programs but um then also talk about the special education specific programming so next slide please so um in special education we like to use acronyms so so i'll talk a little bit about each one of these things individually so every year we we run um an extended school year program and in typically we serve between 100 150 students and the focus of that program is for students who are impacted in their learning over extended learning breaks or extended breaks in learning and it takes longer than would be typical for students to recover and so what we do is we provide additional instruction for them over the course of the summer to help them maintain maintain their learning um and so so we had um that program run this summer in which there was some uniqueness to it
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i'll talk a little bit more about that and then in addition to that we we provided what is called special education recovery services and and the reason i'm going to talk a little bit about that right now is because this is the first year of a two-year cycle where we will provide recovery services um they are specific services outlined in a student's iep that are focused on impacts related to the pandemic so for students who struggled with or weren't able to engage with learning at the same rate that other students would have been due to things like remote learning or other issues that they may have experienced that would have been unique in in the pandemic so we provided recovery services and co-located it with our uh with our summer acceleration programming with this the summer scholars um and with um all of the programs uh part of the the focus in the way we did it was to ensure that students could access um the acceleration program in addition to provide the the specific individualized instruction that was determined in their iep goals for for recovery and so so some of the ways that we ended up doing it in addition to that was intensive group tutoring uh direct instruction uh one-to-one instruction with with a student and a teacher uh we participated summer scholars we we did vocational support and instruction we had students in using the ytp grant access paid internships in in the community to support goals related to employment vocational independent living skills and then also in addition that provided behavior and mental health supports as indicated we had a number of students participate in summer acceleration in our early kindergarten transition services so next slide please one of the things that um and that we learned from last year was that students wanted to access multiple programs and so to enable students to engage with both esy and summer acceleration we went through a process of getting stakeholder input with families uh and students uh in in staff members on adjusting the esy schedule because what we had learned from the previous year is that when we ran esy and summer acceleration at the same time students couldn't participate in both and so this this year we did something unique that has not been done here before and we had esy start as soon as school got out then then summer acceleration occurred and then esy picked up for two more weeks at the beginning of august in an effort to make um programming available to kids and in addition to that to take advantage of staff who who wanted to participate in all of it in addition um we wanted to make sure that our staff uh recruiting and and having folks work during the summer was a specific focus for us so we started recruiting very early in addition to that established committees for that included teachers uh specialists and administrators for planning for programming as we knew that that level of support was important as we move forward so next slide please so overall we serve 1200 students that have an iep in our summer in our summer programming this year that includes everything extended school year was 170 students so we increased number of students that participated usually it's between 100 150 we had 620 students with that have a disability participate in our k-8 summer acceleration and then in our recovery services we were able to provide about 60 hours of additional instruction to students and we had six about another 500 600 students participate across all of our programming so next slide before you move slides huh um just to offer comment um i think the number increase is great i'm glad to see so many students getting services um because of the complexity of the special ed rules and all the different programming and what students and families can expect um you i would think it'd be even better if um there was some sort of uh like one pager explaining the different programs because i think there was some misunderstanding about what sort of services might be offered and i'm not this isn't critical at all but just like so that people have like can know what to expect of like this is this is like this or this is different than the normal school year from this um because i think um it it's quite complex as a layperson to see all the layers but to see the number of students increase is great no i appreciate the comment i i one of the pieces of moving forward that we wanted to do and part of the feedback that we
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gathered from families was to be more specific and explicit related to the different types of programming because at the same time things all came out at once and so um so anyway we wanted to uh grow and be more intentional with that as we move forward also so yes um so so next slide um so i talked about ytp services which is youth transition program services so we had 24 students 24 hour high school age and transition age students participating in summer internships which was a significant increase from last year where i think we had around 10 students so we were able to expand that and then we had 850 students of all ability 857 students of all ability levels participate in our partners programming so the extended programming also so that was awesome and this part i i can't emphasize enough um it's it's this is huge because none of this would have happened without these folks we had over 140 amazing pps educators special educators who came to work during the summer and served and supported these students everybody stepped up we had administrators in classrooms we had perez working for us and teachers working for us and so i can't emphasize enough because of the significant increase in numbers that the folks stepping up and supporting our kids was was just awesome and made all of this possible so um with that all handed danny good evening um so uh i'm here to talk about this resj enrichment and safety uh work and so if we go to the next slide one more so um as you'll recall in keeping with the emphasis on student success this is our second summer that we launched our summer enrichment and safety programming to really complement all the work of the summer academic and acceleration programs our programming goals are really based on two important pieces of research as well as the context of our community um we wanted to make sure that uh that we're doing everything we could to respond to safety research says that the best way for communities to to to contend with youth gun violence is to prevent it and so under your leadership we made a really big investment in preventative programming including employment for many of our youth as well as really great programming that was offered all across the city and gave gave students and parents free programming the other piece around safety is that communities that are more resilient to guns to gun safety have a really strong set of non-profit partners that support institutions and are engaged in this prevention work and so we wanted to make sure that we were complementing the work of our pbs staff with our with our amazing you know embarrassment of riches and that we have so many great partners um the other piece of research that we we know is that enrichment and extended learning does have a direct impact on student achievement and particularly for students of color it gives our students a chance to explore in context to be able to gain some agency around what they want to learn and to give them opportunities to not only have fun have some positive pro-social peer interactions but also explore what they want to learn and potentially one day become so um that being said this summer we were able to serve uh pretty close to our goal we were we were serving 53 69 students and over 50 different programs that are run by our partners if you'll recall 47 of the 50 50 or so programs were culturally specific um many of them were not only culturally specific but also multi-racial we also spent 55 percent of our budget go directed to those culturally specific organizations um because of the work that we've been doing over the past four years about really trying to make sure that our partners are supporting the work of the district we were able to be we had programming in the 26 different hub sites as well as seven off-campus programs we were able to support 278 different student employees who have earned about 129 000 to date our contracts with our partners end uh september 1st so we're still getting in all the final information but wanted to make sure that you knew that we heard from parents their feedback that their students were engaged many of them felt like this was a great transition for them to to be in person with their students and to have that positive peer to peer interaction
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parents talked about the importance of culturally specific services they love the options um and then we heard from many of our partners a consistent theme of students being able to step out of their their comfort zone and try different things and have a have a pretty good time so thank you to student representative mcmahon director brim edwards for coming out and seeing some of our programs and um for all of all of your support i'm going to turn it over to uh two partners so we had 50 partners uh we selected two to tell you a little bit more about their summer so i'm going to invite them up uh the first uh is mashari tyson who's the founder of black excellence and the second is daniel guilfoyle who's the director of student programming at the native american youth and family center next slide next slide thank you and good evening superintendent pps and school board members i promise i'm smiling big smile under here i'm ashari tyson founder of black excellence group um and i'm really it's an honor and privilege to be able to share um this evening some a snapshot of what the summer was like in our b summer of excellence when we say b black excellence so if you hear me say b um it's our shorthand we designed an enrichment program that centered our b students their passions talents as well as connected them to vital supports necessary to thrive this summer our custom intake process allowed us to prioritize and really understand the needs of the most prioritized students that needed those supports during the summer summer so that they could thrive we called those just right supports for the students and families our bee family advocates served as case managers in order to make sure that our students could thrive we're safe and joyful over the summer we served 153 students kinder through eighth grade the representation across those students were rosa parks martin luther king marcum bridal mile jackson middle school and ockley green some of those were our youth employment interns which was really fun to have this summer our layers of support were pretty complex we took a customized approach which it's a big undertaking and we felt really good about it being able to really provide what the students needed hindsight it's really complex about many students but it was a joy to be able to provide supports that made sense for our families so customized camps and experiences we had red zone student tutoring so students that weren't meeting benchmark for math or reading we were able to provide tutoring for those students we designed an early access to middle school program where we were able to hand off our rising sixth graders to middle school so that those black students actually had a warm handoff to their new school and we brought them in with their families and did an orientation and just got them together as a cohort and brought in the existing older students to be able to provide that cohorting kind of experience for the students we also did incentives for engagement and we're really able to customize what the families needed some of the highlights from the camps and experiences were swim nature tutoring sports camp soccer basketball robotics gymnastics you name it we had students all over the city doing amazing things that they were passionate about that they wouldn't otherwise have access to you can go to the next slide i'll keep talking for a second but you can look at some fun pictures of our oh and maybe maybe one more slide are there more photos like a little snapshot oh maybe not okay well i'll pass it out afterwards so you can see it um i'll i'll pass it around there were students that hadn't taken swimming ever that were able to swim for the first time we reserve blocks of swim classes that if you are a parent and you're trying to get swimming lessons for your child are almost non-existent and we're really proud to have a ton of our kids taking swim and doing things that they wouldn't have had access to so the ability to have collaborations with sun and push in and provide black excellence mini camp was an amazing win as well as being able to have a collaboration with radiocab one of the big hurdles for our families is transportation so we did a collaboration with radiocab and ensured that our students could make it to soccer camp or art camp every single week even if it means picking up a family coming back and doing a relay in order to make sure that family got there another just huge win was being able to have a lifeline to groceries and fan distribution and really just be able to have the privilege to have our finger on the pulse of what our families needed and be able to provide that support so we really want to say thank you to the
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pps team and the resj team for just a thoughtful proactive approach for asking the partners to be able to respond with what our families needed it was a really a joy but an honor to be able to support our families so thank you i got to go and see the group of students at black excellence and it was awesome like so great meeting with these kids and seeing them and it's kind of crazy like the community building that you can create in such a short period of time with that many students and on the day we actually did this activity where you it was like a heart on a piece of paper and then you fill it in and i actually have that hanging up in my room so it really was a great experience for me and it was so amazing and i absolutely adored the program it was really cool thank you for coming i still have this shirt also thank you my name is daniel guilfoyle i'm the director of youth and education services at the native american youth and family center and i also want to uh echo the sentiments of my colleague here uh appreciating the support for our programs so this summer we had a variety of programs to serve our community from second grade through 12th grade some of that included our camp rise for middle school youth 9th grade counts program for emerging 9th graders we also had high school age youth attend southern oregon universities conway camp for native american and alaska native youth to give them a college experience away from home which is an amazing experience for many of many of the youth that attended some of those youth really came out of their show you know a lot of our youth are uncomfortable being around non-native people people that don't look like them and we are a very diverse community i myself am seneca from the allegheny reservation in western new york and i like to share that because it's important for people to understand that we all don't look the same like i said we're a very diverse community spread throughout portland public schools so we had our camps primarily at the native american youth and family center in addition to that we also supported our many nations academy with an outdoor experience camp where they were able to learn elective credit some of the activities they did learning about traditional knowledge such as fire making learning how to make arrows you know learning how to shoot a bow and arrow which uh to be to be honest getting archery approved through our liability insurance was was a a real struggle unfortunately i started that about a year and a half two years ago but from that we've been able to certify staff to be certified archery instructors feels kind of colonizing to be honest but uh but it's still we're able to do it and we're able to be insured doing that so our youth were able to make bows make arrows here's some of the pictures there where they're making arrows learning how to start fire we also have staff that are trained in traditional indigenous games some of these are games that you may know like lacrosse some of them you may have learned if you attended the leadership inter in uh leadership institute a game called rock and fist that we play i saw many of the principals in your schools playing these games which is a great bonding experience for all of them we also play games like double ball and shiny stick which are some of the games more typical to this area and so we've got community members that have been doing these games for years you know generations and now we're able to teach people about them again one of the other really amazing resources that we were able to use the res j funding for is to promote our gardens behind nea we have a lot of area there and probably a third of it now we've been able to plan provide hundreds of pounds of food that end up going in those food boxes that we send home and put family but on top of that city kids are learning how to farm and learning how to garden learning traditional plant medicines things like nettle tea which has tons of calcium in it it's good for your joints when you get old like me you know different foods that they may not have experienced but seeing how they grow and how that they can do that for themselves has been an incredible experience for all of them and everybody involved uh some of the other things that we did storytelling and then they took that into a more modern sense by having having the youth make zines from the stories that they're telling like i said we did first food demonstrations with our health equity team traditional medicine gardens campus visits for our ninth grade counts youth then like i said included going to southern oregon university for some of them for a week some of these youth haven't been away from home before and it was a great experience for them to be able to stay in college dorms and kind of get that experience of staying up late and have enjoying themselves in a safe and supported manner yeah so i really appreciate the the support that we've had with the res
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j partnership not only during the summer but during the school year the wrap around services that we were able to provide culturally specific family engagement programming and uh leadership and and positive cultural identity it's so important to our communities we know that when people have a good positive self-image and feel good about who they are as a person that they're going to succeed and have the the the tools that they need to help succeed in a world that oftentimes looks down on us so thank you thank you partners pictures from the be if we go back one slide can we see those pictures from the are those your pictures yeah yeah i just wanted to take a chance to have them up there i think we have another slide of pictures too oh yeah yeah those are great and is there one more slide of maya pictures too oh okay thank you um and just to close out uh just like uh we have so many fabulous partners we also have a really small but mighty team of of our sj staff and so i just want to thank uh man roth nye who manages our sun program uh tara lynn wiley who manages our rsj partners and then the fabulous team of lydia uh lydia lopez gamboa who could run a small country uh amy liu who has worked with all of our partners to really provide a lot of capacity building in terms of billing and invoicing and pam dahlberg who's gotten everyone uh signed up so it was really a great team effort so danny danny beat me to the punch here because i wanted to end by also appreciating for each of these departments that collaborated to bring this comprehensive amount of historic summer programming available for our students that it was uh we were glad for the resources and we're glad that we pumped them all into direct services for our students but it took a small army of staff to really pull it off uh get it organized recruit the instructors the partners and everyone else so my hat's off to everybody who played a role so that's amazing thank you so much for the information from the presentation thank you for bringing some of our partners to the table to talk about your work it's just really exciting to hear firsthand um i think at this point unless there's any more superintendent will open up to the board for questions or comments or thoughts having been around pps for 25 years um this is the first summer i've seen um a really system systemic approach and i i love everything that just got shared it's about engaging kids passion but i really want to focus in on the academic acceleration because that has not been available and the fact that we have curriculum that's aligned that we have teachers that we have pd that is four weeks um i mean it is just like a totally different thing that pps has ever offered so i really want to give a shout out to the team and i appreciate that i had a chance to go see it with the experts who could tell me exactly what was happening in the classroom this summer but i really want to acknowledge that because um if you looked for it which when i had a student who was struggling you couldn't find it you couldn't find it in pbs or in our community partners so um what a gift to our students so i just want to thank uh that the team that uh created it and executed that this summer because i'm sure it's gonna make a huge difference for our students this year if i could just underline that as we shared with all of our elected leaders from the region if they need testimony about the work that can be accomplished on behalf of students when you have resources available to provide this kind of programming i call it the fifth quarter uh we hope that this becomes a perpetual resource that we can make available every year so your your support and advocating for that will be important i really appreciate the fact that we're tracking that with nwea and aaron the calder center that we will have concrete ability to show the benefits of these programs and and be able to share those so we can get more funding for these really key uh initiatives so thank you for that piece of that work as well oh and talk about what uh superintendent was talking about is looking at the budget piece for next year um how are we looking for budget wise to be able to uh continue this stuff next year as well well as you know that's the multi-million dollar question director holland so this was a one-time windfall we directed it to student services so uh we have a little bit on reserve to do some level of programming for the coming
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summer but it sure would be do not it sure would be nice to do a little more uh particularly for those students who we really know need the support so that i guess i'm gonna uh ask my fellow colleagues on who do we need to target and talk to to make sure that we can provide this um on a regular basis and for you know whoever is out there who makes those decisions at the state level or what have you to you know look at you know when we are intentional about um making a difference you know things can happen i have a thought on that um were you asking for a thought alright because i've got one um yeah for i think the academic piece clearly the the legislature um i do think the piece that is the non-academic piece the sort of fit that is fifth quarter activities it's um it doesn't really have a school boundary a school district boundary um aspect to it and that i think about a much potentially more powerful instead of like just districts doing it on their own is a more like a regional approach in partnership with either city or the county or so that it's um so that it's broader because again um kids kids move around all all over the summer and they i think um we'd be much stronger together versus pps just uh pursuing sort of the non-academic enrichment piece by itself i could just quibble i i hear what you're saying i would say that the if you talk to our partners and if you looked at research the enrichment piece plays a critical academic uh role it's not that it's not academic it's that it complements academics and i'm happy to share all the research with you around that yeah i think what i meant is where the funding would come from um because um i think it's i think it would be harder so with the legislature um to sell on that piece whereas i think we we could in partnership with other with other districts um which does um could speak to um the connections you're describing um danny but again i i think there's a bigger play and there's a lot of other districts that probably don't have the ability to do what we did and um the power of working together seems like it would be stronger so i hear what you're saying and so i'm putting a call out to all the governor candidates that's out there to help us answer this question so as they're in the process of running for a real uh election um come november um hopefully that whoever sees this can get these questions and ask these questions um when we are talking with our uh governor the candidates for governor this year you know my thought as i was watching and listening to the presentation was how do we how do we package this up into something that is easily you know talking points right that we can be using that our community partners can be using that folks testifying at the legislature can be using folks talking to other governments you know because you know maybe some of it i agree it might be a hard sell at the legislature for some of this but maybe it's because they need some education right and maybe what we need to be bringing is is our successes down there so they can see these connections with academics i think this is a great topic i think director constance has had to drop off but it's a great topic for the intergovernmental committee to really think about who are all the partners we need to be reaching out to what are all the plays we need to be making in order to making these funding requests and really putting them out there because again these windfalls you're right they were one time but we've done such a good job with that money and we've got some results to show for it and so how do we parlay that into the argument that it was one time that's great and now how do we make it ongoing right how do we get those investments uh where they need to i think that's right chair uh scott and we shared uh an early version of sort of the scale of what we were able to accomplish but just to zoom out also why it's so important and i'm glad our elected school board members can say some things that maybe i can't but you heard for example what we were able to do for our students with disabilities not only did they get their recovery services their extended school year they participated also in the middle of that in our other enrichment and academic programs so they really got sort of in some cases a double triple dose now imagine if we were funded idea at a level that permitted us to do this every single summer a fifth quarter for students with ieps imagine what we could do and what that would mean for our students the federal government has never fully funded idea so [Music] i'm just suggesting thank you very much for the presentation tonight it was really it was great okay uh moving on i think just our last item tonight and i will say it's eight o'clock but we did start about 15 to 20
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minutes late so i'm confident we're gonna finish in the two-hour time frame we had um next we're gonna be voting on the initial members for the racial equity and social justice community advisory committee charter members superintendent guerrero i will turn it back to you yes not so fast miss ledesma so if you recall board uh recently we spoke about sb 732 which requires districts to establish a community advisory uh committee or an educational equity committee we're framing it in our own vernacular here so we talked to you about a phased approach to really fill that out with a cross-section of people representing the school district including students community members educators and so we agreed to come back to you with initial applicants willing to serve and i know you've seen those materials or applications and ms ledesm is here to tell you a little bit more about it and this is just the first set of names hopefully and we're going to enter this more broad campaign now that schools started up to recruit a set of additional permission incoming good evening mr collins directors and directors oh gosh okay good evening uh i just want to uh i get the really distinct honor and um pleasure to be able to introduce you to the superintendent's uh proposed uh three three initial members of our resga community advisory committee um as you'll recall um at pps we like to both meet the spirit of the law as well as the letter of the law um so uh as we as you all passed our charter just weeks ago um we agreed that we would try to meet the letter of the law by getting uh three of our resj uh member slots um to filled prior to september 15th so that we could meet that deadline uh the the thinking behind having our resj partners have not as big be not not as part of the more robust um sort of outreach that we need to do to blanket the rest of the members is because of the deep relationships we have with our resj partners we've been convening them pretty regularly we talk with them all the time we see them here and so once the charter was drafted we engaged with our resj partners the superintendent talked to them about it i talked to them about it and we got three really strong applications um and i still can't i still can't share um the thing so oh sorry i didn't refresh okay so i i want to tell you about the three and i want you to see their pictures because they're lovely but so we have three uh rsj partners so these are part of the now 26 um different resj partners that we contract with to provide one of five investment strategies and so i'm really excited to introduce you first to adrielle pearson adriel is a she's kind of like a she's a triple threat in that she is a oh this is number so you can see all of my tabs that are open it's it's happened to all of us is your lunch order up there anywhere it's not the text for my mom i don't think i did [Music] um why don't i just turn these off [Music]
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is yours um so uh i'm glad that you're able to see this uh this picture of adriel because adriel is a triple threat um not only did she attend uh pbs she works at an organization called poic she's the director of youth services she manages our contracts with poic that where they provide wrap-around services for students who are attending rosemary anderson as well as provides a really awesome youth mentoring program where the high school students and their programs mentor our middle school students and provide just amazing programming adriel uh so she manages all of that she also is a parent of a student and um she volunteered to be part of the southeast guiding coalition um and uh adriel when we when we let partners know about the opportunity for this committee uh she talked to me and took me aside that she said that she was really really wanting to serve on this committee and i said oh after the segc that was a lot of time and she she talked about um really loving the experience of being able to talk not only with um folks like with our board members and with administrators but also with principals and how that's how she can really see the partnership and the relationships deepen and how that is making a difference for not only poic students but for pbs students um she's lovely to work with she's a really um passionate uh leader and uh very well respected our community um yeah she and she's deeply committed to our community um i'm really excited about our next um our next candidate his name is kolini futsui uh he is the pacific islander community coordinator from erko um and for those of you who know kolini that means that he does everything he has been a really just a really powerful resj partner for so many ways he has he's he's very active in our communities in our committees for resj providing not only does he provide direct services he he provides all of the project management and is like he just is something that's everyone he's really passionate about his community and wanting to make sure that we understand the needs and concerns of not just the tongan community but of pacific islanders and i think this is a really given some of our data and some of especially around like discipline i think it's really important to have uh this type of representation from uh from kolini um he's also urco's been a long time partner with us they serve many different cultural communities they're one of our multiracial partners and one of our larger partners they they provide community uh culturally specific family engagement wrap around services mentoring and uh advocacy as well as positive cultural identity development and so they really are active in a lot of our schools the next uh partner uh is ernie guerrero uh no relation to the superintendent um he is the director of step up um and step up is a product of open school ernie guerrero is a really well-respected leader in portland he has served all of his time serving pbs schools very passionate about step up but also really passionate about the collaboration with other rsj partners step up and open school is one of our larger contracts and he's worked with openschool for he he knows all the things he's been through all the different principles and has a really i think a sort of wise and um sort of great perspective that that i think will bring because he's seen he's been working with the district and has seen lots of changes and remains very optimistic about the change that we can make i don't know if you recall during the um during the early stages of the pandemic one of the things that we worked with is we were trying to get high school principals um and our partner data together to sort of see like who was attending who wasn't attending and um ernie uh told me once he was like that was that was my favorite uh thing to do is just to really sort of be able to to
01h 50m 00s
sort of like share data and to sort of like collaborate on that level um and so i think um he'll be a really strong member and that he knows our system and is really passionate about collaboration he's also served on our renaming committee so those are the three um and by the charter and by the legislation the board is the approves the uh approves approves or doesn't approve should you approve these three members we will be able to meet the letter of the law if you'll recall the legislation requires that this is a public meeting so once we get the approval we can post the meetings that folks can know and we can have our first meeting prior to september 15th meaning the letter of the law we'll also be doing some more deeper now that school has started we can do a really robust round of student engagement and staff and parent engagement to fill out the rest of our 12 members great thank you it's a really exciting first slate and i was just going to ask him my understanding is that now you know if we as we if we prove this late tonight and then you'll move forward with engagement for the remaining 12 members of the committee so um very exciting uh let's get a motion on the table we can have a conversation so do i have a motion i just wanted to say that i've worked with all three of those persons and really it's a stellar lineup um really happy to support all three of them great so let's get a motion on the table and then we can converse so do i have a motion a second to adopt resolutions 6573 seconds so moved and seconded um and now is there any more discussion as i was saying they're just all amazing people um ernie guerrero is also very involved in climate and environmental justice issues that's how i know him um kolini if you called him right now he'd be here in half an hour he's show up he's an amazing leader not just in the tongan community but in all communes of color and adriel person is i met through the southeast guiding coalition um i called her up i needed i had five seats available to the united negro college fund this summer like a gala trying to find teenagers in the middle of the summer time to go to some fancy thing you know um and she came through with more than five kids so i had to look for seats for the other three or so great tara scott i'm sorry i did not hear who mo i'm sorry uh yeah director hollins made the motion and director to pass uh second thank you yes i apologize i just want to thank you miss ledezma for this um work because this came through the uh ig committee and we talked about you know how do we do this again to honor the spirit and the letter of the law and to really make sure we have a robust committee so this sort of two-step process where we work first with our partners and then do that deep robust we wanted to do this properly but we also wanted to be in compliance with state law so um thank you for making this work and these are incredible candidates and so i so appreciate the work you've done to to bring these names before us and to start this committee in such a great way student representative mcmahon any thoughts yeah thank you i think i'm kind of mirroring all the comments here but i also really look forward to working with you to find the students to participate in this committee i think it's going to be a great opportunity that i'm sure many students will be excited to participate in so thank you for all your hard work great ms bradshaw any public comment no okay the board will now vote on resolution 6573 approving the racial equity and social justice community advisory committee charter members all in favor please indicate by saying yes yes all opposed please indicate by saying no student representative mcmahon enthusiastic yes excellent any abstentions all right resolution 6573 is approved by a vote of five to nothing with student representative mcmahon voting yes there were no items pulled from the consent agenda is there any other business at this time before we adjourn see none their next regular meeting of the board will be held on september 20th this meeting is adjourned


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