JESSICA MILNEIL:

Hello, next year I will have two students at the East End School. We feel very lucky that East End is our neighborhood school. The administrators and staff are committed, responsive, and loving. Given the budget constraints, I am most concerned about class sizes. East End is one of the elementary schools with the highest fluctuation in enrollment, and I am concerned that setting teacher levels to maximum classroom size will result in overfull classes at other times of the year. This has been a problem in the past, and has even greater potential to be a problem next year. Keeping class size below the maximum levels, throughout the school year, is a priority for me, and to ensure that, I would like to see maximum class sizes reduced throughout the district. 

Additionally, the community coordinator position is essential at East End School. Ms. Lauren has so many roles that make East End a school we brag about to our friends, from distributing food and clothing to compiling community resources for parents. I hope that the community coordinator positions will not be cut unilaterally, and instead applied to the schools where they are meeting the highest need.

I would like to see the superintendents and school board ask for the budget they actually want in order to achieve their goals, rather than the one that is politically expedient, and I want to advocate for that budget with the city council. 

This is what I would say to the city council. I am aware that this is not really useful as a universal text, and strays radically from good talking points:

Hello, my name is Jessica MilNeil and I live in the East End, on Smith St. I am concerned that positions will be cut next year at the East End School. We are one of the highest needs schools in the district, and not only is our enrollment likely to increase mid-year, but our students will be facing even greater needs. I would like the city council to think creatively about paying for its schools. Our public schools provide the city's most essential community service, and your constituents are willing to pay for good schools and student-facing positions. I would like the city to advocate for being able to charge higher property tax rates for higher value properties, and I would like to see a higher property tax rate for commercial properties. The city should be using the tax structure to encourage unused commercial properties to convert to residential. Lastly, I would like the city to consider developing housing on school parking lots. The city is already paying to maintain free parking street-side, and could reserve those spaces during the school day for teachers. I know that neither of these proposals will be popular, but cutting student-facing positions will only result in rich residents fleeing the public schools.

This is what I would say to state reps:

I am proud and I am grateful that Portland is home to so many immigrants and new Mainers, and I am excited that we will be welcoming more this year. Immigration is an important way to ameliorate the challenges faced by an aging state. As you know, this will impact our public schools, and investment in early education has one of the highest returns of any public service. In reality, my neighborhood school, the East End Community School, provides a social safety net for many of its students, providing not only great academics, but also food, clothing, and health resources. It makes sense on paper that state funding would be tied to property values, but at a school like East End, it will result in a school with some of the highest needs losing funding when we need it most.

There are two bills that I would like you to support: LD 1064, which will increase minimum teacher pay, and make it competitive with other New England states, and LD 1402, which would allocate additional funding to school districts with tax exempt properties and large populations of poor students.

Long term, I would like the state to allow the city to charge higher property tax rates to high income property owners. Many people are moving to Portland for its amenities, and driving up property values. The city should have a better mechanism to allow these property owners to contribute to one of things that makes Portland so great: its public schools.

SHARON MCGAULEY:

In learning about the different possibilities for this budget, I learned about some of the differences in class sizes in elementary schools throughout the district. I learned that our wealthiest, most resourced school has the smallest classrooms - which is largely because smaller schools have a harder time cutting classrooms logistically - but leaves us asking some questions when school like EECS - who has most disadvantaged financial population, the most diversity, and second to most english language learners of all our elementary schools - has much bigger classrooms than other, wealthier, less diverse schools. I don’t think this should push us to remove resources from the smaller schools, but I do want to use it to spotlight our goals as a district. If equity is our goal, then bringing class sizes in the largest, most complex, most diverse schools with the greatest needs should strive to have the smallest classrooms. I am happy to see that this current budget proposal is aligned with these important goals and values. Thank you.

MIKE DIXON:

I live on Monument Street and am the parent of one rising first grader and one rising pre-schooler in Portland Public Schools.

I am deeply concerned about reported cuts projected to vital positions at East End Community School and schools throughout our District—threatening vital classroom teaching positions, our Community Coordinators, and our Living Schoolyard Educators—and I implore you to exert every effort to ensure that these critical positions remain in our FY2024-25 school budget so thatthese vital people remain in our schools, communities, and kids’ lives. There are some who have tried to portray community coordinators and living schoolyard educators as somehow less essential than other school staff. Please do not be swayed by this false dichotomy or flawed logic. It may be harder to compile the test scores to quantify their contributions, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable to our children.

Living Schoolyard Educators:

A year ago today, I reminded the school board of the words of Portland Public Schools’ own Superintendent, issued in a March 2022 media release: “Our robust outdoor learning program has been cited as a model nationwide.”

“Outdoor learning is important for all students and especially for the many PPS students that do not have equitable access to green spaces…”

“School-based, meaningful outdoor experiences can help diminish health inequities, increase social-emotional learning benefits, and create new opportunities for learning in the natural environment,”

“[Outdoors learning] will support environmental literacy practices, which are the building blocks and activities that help create sustained and meaningful relationships with the natural world. They aim to help students and teachers understand the interconnectedness of all systems of life through ecological, economic, and cultural contexts.”

These statements related to a grant award to support outdoor learning by building outdoor structures. Structures are great, but we need people to bring our children outdoors, and we don’t just need this in the height of a pandemic, we need it all the time, every year, every season, in every school.

One EECS classroom teacher offered this appreciation for our living schoolyard teacher:

Thank you for coming into our classroom on a weekly basis. The rich discussions you are leading around climate change and our environmental impact is having a deep and lasting impact on my class. Your lessons are leading to connections within our science standards and more meaningful discussion and engagement amongst the other students. The short outings that we have been taking are a good way to incorporate hands-on field experience where my students can see for themselves the human impact on our planet.

The EECS PTO has expressed similar appreciation:

In her time as the Living Schoolyard Educator at East End Community School, she has taught our students sustainability, food science, ecology, math, human migration, and biology. She has made it her objective to teach students to live with the planet, rather than simply on it;. It is imperative that we keep her position alive in our school to continue the uncontested and sustained learning benefits that come with getting our children out of the classrooms and into nature.

As our Living Schoolyard Educator herself put it best, “Taking students outside and away from their computers, they are encouraged to reevaluate their relationship with nature, their peers and themselves; all ages, abilities, socio-economic sectors - everyone - benefits from outdoor learning.”

When I shared these observations with the school board a year ago today, I was promised repeatedly that the Board would exert every effort to ensure that Living Schoolyard Educators were incorporated in the mainstream budget—only to wake up a week ago to learn that the board was instead proposing to cut them entirely. Please do not break your promises.

Community Coordinators

I have had the privilege of working in various capacities with various community coordinators throughout the district and have been impressed at the exponential value that each and every one of them brings to their respective schools, and to the district as a whole, in ways too numerous and diverse to name here. More recently, I have had the pleasure and honor of working alongside our own EECS Community Coordinator, and I have seen and heard first-hand, second- hand, and third-hand countless examples of her indispensable contributions to our kids, the school, and the community at large. She manages the distribution and re-distribution of donated food and clothing that are absolutely essential to our children and families who would otherwise go without weekend meals, or gloves in the winter, or even a pair of shoes that fit. She knows and greets every single child by name with a smile and the kind of joke or question that only someone who knows them both in and out of school could possibly proffer. You can see the connection felt by the children in the look on their face and in the way they greet her in turn. She welcomes parents and volunteers to the school and gives them useful things to do, and she shows up for community events, too, especially when they are tailored to EECS kids such as the neighborhood youth art show that she facilitated. For the two-plus years of the pandemic, many parents like us have been frustrated and disappointed by the chasm that has opened up between our community and our children’s schools. For a long time, our children could not even go to school. Then they could go to school, but we parents, much less community volunteers, could not enter the building. Finally, we are slowly but surely rebuilding relationships between our schools and their neighborhoods. I serve on the board of a neighborhood organization that is eager to know how it can support our neighborhood school. Now, more than ever, we, and, most importantly, our children, desperately need our community coordinators to reconnect schools with families and the community at large—and to reconnect our entire community to our schools.

Don’t Break the Portland Promise

We are told that the Portland Promise is focused on achievement, the whole child, and people, with equity woven throughout. Cutting essential student-facing educational positions will obviously not improve achievement. Cutting the very people who specifically tend to the needs of the whole child, making sure they are seen and known, that they have sufficient food, clothing, and guided time to explore the environment and relationships outdoors will not make a single child feel more whole. Cutting cherished, valued people out of our children’s lives does not help either the people who are lost or the people who suffer that loss. These people are a whole lot more important than some of the other line items still included in this proposed budget. Let’s remember that equity is not about doing the same thing for everyone across the board. Equity is about doing what’s truly fair, making sure that the most resources go to those most in need. Across-the-board percentage cuts have a disproportionately negative impact on the students with the highest needs. This is the opposite of equity. Cutting staff:student ratios across the board has a disproportionately negative impact on those students who most need individual attention. This is the opposite of equity.

:: EECS has more English learners than all but one elementary school in the district.

:: EECS has more economically disadvantaged students than any other elementary school in the district.

:: EECS has THE most diverse student population of any school in the entire district.

In a district where equity is supposed to be the primary goal, EECS cannot afford to lose ANY student-facing staff.

Conclusion

Finally, the pandemic opened a giant breach between our schools and our community at large. For a time, children were not even allowed in school. Then they were able to return, but their own parents could not set foot inside their schools or classrooms. Programs and projects that ran on the power of community volunteers shut down. Now, with the pandemic waning, we can finally begin to reconnect schools and community for the benefit of our children. As a parent and member of the EECS PTO trying to bridge that gap, I implore you: do not cut our community coordinator just as the school doors are opening again to community volunteers, including dozens who want to renew our walking school bus; do not cut our living schoolyard educator just as we finish raising funds from donors who also want to dig in to fully revitalize our schoolyards and gardens; do not cut vital student-facing staff from the schools whose kids most need their individualized support; do not cut us off at the knees just as we are getting back on our feet at the East End Community School.

Thank you for your consideration and for your hard work on behalf of our children.

AVERY YALE KAMILA:

Dear Honorable School Board members,

I'm writing to urge you to make cuts in school administration rather than teaching and classroom positions as you wrestle with this most challenging of budget years. I will be at another city meeting tonight and am unable to attend tonight's School Board meeting, so I'm submitting my comments in writing. Since equity is a major focus on this board, then such a decision to cut from administration rather than classroom positions makes the most sense. I live in downtown Portland and my son goes to the East End Community School, which is slated to lose the living schoolyard educator and two classroom teachers. However, this school is both the most diverse school and the most economically disadvantaged of any in the district. In order to work toward equity, this school should be receiving more classroom teachers rather than losing any. 

The children who attend the East End Community School live in some of Portland's most disadvantaged neighborhoods, which have been affected by past de jure discrimination supported by the government. This included the 1930s redlining that withdrew the ability to obtain a mortgage for properties in Portland neighborhoods with a lot of residents with ancestries other than British. These neighborhoods (Bayside, East Bayside, India Street) are concentrated around Franklin Street and send their elementary students to EECS. Then, when the properties naturally fell into disrepair, the city came in in the 1950s and 1960s with its discriminatory slum clearing program that was resisted by local residents. This discriminatory program removed hundreds of homes and apartments, including owner-occupied homes and local businesses, which had been the earlier targets of redlining. In its place, some low-income apartments were built that offer its occupants no opportunity to build equity in a home. Many of the other knocked down buildings were left as vacant lots that are only now being built up with high-end condos owned mostly by non-residents who only visit a couple times a year and corporate-owned apartments. This government-backed de jure discrimination continues to affect the quality of life in the neighborhoods of Bayside, East Bayside and India Street (where Munjoy South is located). Any additional classroom cuts to EECS will further Portland's history of discriminating against the people who live in these neighborhoods.

This map produced by American Forests shows which Portland neighborhoods have the least tree canopy. This lack of tree canopy lines up with areas that were slum cleared and have high poverty levels today:

https://treeequityscore.org/map/#15.13/43.663073/-70.249982

You can also see these disparities in this Starting Strong report from 2019: 

http://portlandstartingstrong.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PortlandEarlyChildhoodProfile-FINAL.pdf

Thank you for all your work and heavy lifting on this board. I really appreciate and applaud your efforts. I urge you to consider equity as you make these difficult budget decisions and focus your cuts on administration rather than classroom teachers.