My Monthly Column

Listening and learning at the Portland Public Schools

By Ryan Scallon

I am honored to join the Portland Public Schools community as the new superintendent. As I transition into the district, I look forward to listening and learning from all members of our community.

Throughout the selection process, I had the opportunity to engage with students, families, staff and community members. While everyone answered the “What should I know about the Portland Public Schools?” question differently, they all expressed a faith in our school system that’s exciting.

As I begin my third week in the district, I have appreciated the opportunity to talk to community members through our June 26 Meet and Greet at East End Community School, and at our listen-and-learn with members of our multilingual communities at Deering High School July 13. These conversations have reinforced my belief that one of the best parts of Portland are our PPS staff, students, and families, and the community partners that support them. 

I plan to continue to focus on learning from each of you about the great things within PPS that we should build on and where we can do better. I call these first three months my “listen and learn phase.” Two additional sessions are currently scheduled for July:

●      July 24, 4 - 6 p.m. at PATHS/Casco Bay High School

●      July 25, 6 - 8 p.m. at Presumpscot Elementary School


If your schedule permits, please stop by. It’s a great opportunity for us to meet and for your experiences with the district to inform our future strategic plan. 

I will conduct additional listen-and-learn sessions with staff and community groups throughout the summer and into the new school year. We’ll share more information on the website about how you can engage in the listen and learn through town halls, focus groups and surveys, as well as in more informal conversations. 

In October, I’ll share with the Board of Public Education and the community the trends that come from the listen-and-learn sessions as we then engage in a review of our strategic plan and the development of an aligned budget for 2024-2025. It is my expectation that these three phases – (1) listen and learn; (2) strategic planning; and (3) aligned budget – will serve to organize our larger systems work in the district this year.

This crucial work cannot be done alone and I look forward to partnering with the Portland community in this effort.

In the meantime, the exciting work of the district is continuing this summer, and I’d like to highlight a few examples.

We’ve partnered with nine community organizations this summer to provide leadership opportunities for middle schoolers, and camp-like enrichment experiences for elementary-age students, prioritizing enrolling students experiencing homelessness.

The district is excited to be using "high dosage" tutoring to support rapid academic growth. 51 middle school students are being tutored in math four days a week, for eight weeks this summer. Such intensive tutoring “is a well-researched, effective strategy to close academic gaps,” says Jesse Robinson, our director of curriculum and assessment.

A lot of learning is going on at our high schools this summer. For example, Casco Bay High School students are participating in one-week Summer Intensive courses that include “Politics through Art & Music,” “Origami-Geometry,” “Landscapes of Literature” and “Marine Ecology.”

Deering High School multilingual students are learning English while visiting landmarks such as a lighthouse, the Portland Museum of Art and the Portland Observatory and creating digital books detailing their experience. And at Portland High School, a number of multilingual students are participating in summer programming that includes math and literacy, intercultural programming and field trips throughout the city. Read more.

I hope everyone has a wonderful summer!

Our Monthly Column

Powerful Voices Represent the Class of 2023 

By Melea Nalli and Aaron Townsend

We were honored this month to participate in commencement ceremonies for the Portland Public Schools’ three high schools: Portland, Deering and Casco Bay. Each school is unique, and their graduation exercises for the more than 400 graduates of the Class of 2023 reflected their distinctive characteristics.

However, what all three ceremonies had in common was the powerful voices of student class speakers and the unifying themes they expressed.

For example, Deering High speaker Patricio Miguel, who came to this country from Angola three years ago, just before the COVID pandemic began, told how he began high school at Deering taking classes virtually while living in a shelter for families experiencing homelessness. It took a year before he could attend Deering in person, he said.

But he found the school very welcoming and he thanked teachers for encouraging English language learners like him to join sports and clubs and be part of the Deering community. At Deering, he said, no matter where a student comes from, what their background is, what gender they identify with or which religion they practice – “we are all one family, the Rams.”

Portland High School valedictorian Elizabeth Littell told classmates that two ways to improve the divisive world we live in today are to be kind and have an open mind.

She recounted how, as a sophomore riding the bus home from a lacrosse game, another student went out of her way to include Littell in a singalong at a moment when she was feeling excluded. Although the gesture was small, Littell said, “this act of kindness has stayed with me since then.”

She said that illustrates that “we all have the immense power to impact someone’s life… I ask each of you to choose kindness and maybe you’ll inspire someone else to do the same.” She also asked classmates to have an open mind. “Take a step back and have a conversation with those you disagree with, just as you did in your ninth-grade English class.”

At the Casco ceremony, class speaker Lionel Celestino told how supportive classmates had been of his street dance performances at school. Through his dancing, Celestino said, “I felt I was contributing to the community because I brought joy.” He then gave a dance demonstration across the stage, which earned him a standing ovation. 

Celestino said that after his experiences at Casco, “now I truly know what building community is.”

What this year’s graduates at all three high schools also have in common are their academic achievements. Those include 47 students graduating with STEM diploma endorsements recognizing their extensive work in STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 

Also, 63 graduates earned the Seal of Biliteracy for attaining mastery of English and at least one other world language – and one Casco student earned the seal for proficiency in a record-breaking six languages! The ability to speak multiple languages is an undeniable asset in today’s global world.

The Class of 2023 is headed to great colleges and universities across the country and in Maine. In some cases, graduates will be the first in their families to attend college. Numerous students have already gotten a head start by earning college credits in high school. And these graduates collectively earned nearly $3 million in scholarships and grants.

We have one more ceremony, on June 22, when Portland Adult Education holds its 175th commencement at 6 p.m. at Merrill Auditorium. PAE students earn high school diplomas by taking PAE academic classes or by passing the HiSET test.

Congratulations to the amazing Class of 2023!

Our Monthly Column

We appreciate Portland Public Schools staff! 

By Melea Nalli and Aaron Townsend

May is the last full month of school before regular classes end in June, so it’s a good time to thank all our Portland Public Schools staff for their hard work throughout this year. We see them and we appreciate them – not just in May but throughout the year! 

 May 8-12 was National Teacher Appreciation Week, and we want to express our gratitude to our stellar PPS teachers for their service and dedication in support of students and families. 

We also want to give a special shout out to teacher Joshua Chard at East End Community School, who on May 11 was named 2023 Cumberland County Teacher of the Year! That puts him in the running to be the 2024 Maine Teacher of the Year.

We’re proud to say that many of our teachers have been recognized by the Maine Teacher of the Year program within the past decade. Casco Bay High School teacher Matt Bernstein, now the 2023 Maine Teacher of the Year, was the 2022 Cumberland County Teacher of the Year. Cindy Soule, a literacy coach at Talbot Community School, was 2020 Cumberland County Teacher of the Year and 2021 Maine Teacher of the Year; Brooke Teller, the district’s STEM coordinator, was the 2017 Cumberland County Teacher of the Year; and Karen MacDonald, a King Middle School teacher, now retired, was the 2014 Maine Teacher of the Year.

Congratulations to all these teachers! They are exemplary of the high-quality educators we are so fortunate to have in our district.

 May 5 was School Lunch Hero Day. Students can’t learn when they’re hungry, and we are so grateful to all our dedicated Food Service staff for ensuring our students have tasty, nutritious meals to help power their learning. Our Food Service people provide an essential contribution in support of students' learning and social emotional health. We thank them!

 Last week was National Nurses Week, and National School Nurse Day was May 10. Our school nurses provide a wide variety of care for our students every day. They also educate students about health and serve as a trusted support for students. This year’s National Nurses Week theme is “You Make a Difference” and that is very true of our PPS school nurses. We are extremely grateful to them for their positive impact on the lives of our students and families.

 May is Better Hearing and Speech Month, which raises awareness about how speech-language pathologists and audiologists work to improve communication. May 18 is National Speech Language Pathologist Day. Our deep gratitude goes out to our speech-language pathologists for their essential work with our students with speech and language challenges to help them succeed.

 May also is National Mental Health Awareness Month, a time to raise awareness of and reduce the stigma around mental health issues. The Portland Public Schools has been making a concerted effort to support the social-emotional health of not only our students but also our staff in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. We want to recognize our social workers and counselors who provide support to our students and build the capacity of all of us to be responsive to our students’ growing mental health needs.  

While there may not be a special day to recognize them this month, we also want to let all our other staff members know how much we appreciate them. Although their jobs vary, each staff member plays a key role in assisting the Portland Public Schools in realizing its mission of preparing and empowering our students for college and career. Thank you for all that you do!

 

Our Monthly Column

Let’s work together to ensure successful school budget

 By Aaron Townsend and Melea Nalli

 

June 13 is when Portland residents will vote on a school budget for the 2023-2024 school year. Each year, a public referendum concludes our collaborative budget process.

 

“Collaborative” describes something that is accomplished by working together with others. That’s exactly how the Portland Public Schools develops a school budget each year. 

 

We began the FY24 budget process facing daunting fiscal challenges. Inflation and other factors have resulted in higher “rollover” costs to allow our district to simply continue what we currently do. Coupled with an expected $2.4 million loss in state subsidy and other revenue adjustments, that would have required an 8.7 percent tax increase in FY24. Adding in other important programmatic budget needs/requests would have required a tax rate increase of 15.5 percent.

 

Instead, the $143.8 million FY24 school budget that the Portland Board of Public Education approved on April 11 to send to the City Council, entails a 6 percent increase in the school tax rate.

 

This budget is the result of many weeks of hard work on the part of the Board and district and school leaders and staff. It reflects many difficult choices, and numerous requests did not make it in. What is in the budget has been informed by many emails and messages and feedback at public hearings from members of the Portland community.

 

The Board’s recommended budget meets our three key priorities for the 2023-2024 school year: Maintaining the commitment to the Portland Promise goals of Achievement, Whole Student and People – all intertwined with the fourth central goal of Equity; being responsive to the needs of all students, especially those newly learning English; and improving operational effectiveness in such areas as finance and human resources.

 

This budget also is cognizant of Portland taxpayers. We recently learned that the state had miscalculated its education aid to local school districts and that our district’s FY24 subsidy would be $3.6 million, higher than expected. Our health insurance rates were just confirmed as lower than anticipated, resulting in $400,000 in savings. The Board’s budget uses more than $1 million of these funds to reduce the impact on local taxpayers, with the rest used to preserve core programming. The 6 percent school tax rate increase in the Board’s budget is down from the 7 percent increase originally proposed March 14.

 

The 6 percent increase – in line with inflation – would raise the overall school tax rate by nearly 43 cents, for a total rate of approximately $7.48 per $1,000 valuation. It would increase the annual tax bill for the median family home in Portland (valued at $375,000) by just over $159 per year, or about $13.25 per month.

 

The Board also has been working with the Council, which sets the bottom line of the school budget, throughout this budget process. The 6 percent tax increase is within the 5-to-7-percent range city councilors gave the Board as budget guidance.

 

We don’t have space here to detail budget specifics, but you can learn more on our website. We believe this budget is balanced and responsible. It invests in all students, including our newly arrived multilingual learners, provides fair compensation for our hardworking staff and shores up core operations, including finance and human resources, while being mindful of taxpayers.

 

On April 24, the Board’s recommended budget goes to the Council, which will review it before taking a final vote on May 15 to send it to referendum. Please stay engaged as we all work together to achieve a 2023-2024 school budget that supports our Portland Promise goals.

Our Monthly Column

Highlighting the arts at PPS

 By Melea Nalli and Aaron Townsend 

March is National Youth Art Month and also National Music in our Schools Month, so we’re using our column this month to shine a spotlight on recent art and music accomplishments of our students and the dedicated educators who teach them. 

In just one example, PPS High School Orchestra students helped make the 39th Citizenship Ceremony at U.S. District Court in Portland even more momentous by playing beautiful music as dozens of new Americans were sworn in as citizens. Music the orchestra performed at the February event included “Simple Gifts,” a Shaker hymn; “Over the Rainbow;” "Finale" from Beethoven's Symphony No. 5; and Mozart’s “Exsultate Jubilate.”

“The ceremonies are profoundly moving events and the PPS High School Orchestra has been performing in the ceremonies twice a year since 2002,” said music director and orchestra conductor Julianne Eberl. “I am so proud of our students from PHS, the first group to perform since the pandemic suspended the ceremony.”  

An upcoming opportunity to hear the results of music teaching and learning in our schools is at the PPS All-City Concert at 4 p.m. March 15 at Deering High School. The free event is a decades-long tradition that showcases the hard work and talent of our high school and middle school students in vocal and instrumental music. 

These examples are illustrative of the mission of the PPS Music Department, which includes setting high academic standards in music literacy and performance and encouraging students to be productive citizens of the world as musicians and community members.

March also provides an opportunity to view the results of PPS art teaching and learning at the Portland Museum of Art’s annual Youth Art Month exhibition. After being virtual during the pandemic, Youth Art Month has returned to the walls of the PMA this year. Creative works from PPS students are among the more than 80 pieces of artwork on display. 

Each March, in collaboration with the Maine Art Education Association, the PMA presents artwork from Maine students statewide in kindergarten through grade 12. The work of students from East End, Ocean Avenue, Reiche and Talbot elementary schools and from Portland, Deering and PATHS high schools is included in the show, open until April 2.

Chad Hart, art teacher at Talbot Community School and PPS art coordinator, says that “the arts help students make connections to other areas of academics, in ways that no other content area can do.”

A recent art project at Talbot, inspired by the book "Beautiful Blackbird" by Coretta Scott King Award winner Ashley Bryan, is an example of that. This book is about appreciating one’s heritage and discovering the beauty within. The book tells of Blackbird, whose shiny black feathers earn him the title of the most beautiful bird in the forest. Differently colored birds begged Blackbird to paint their feathers with a touch of black so they could be beautiful too. Although Blackbird warns that true beauty comes from within, the other birds persist and each is given a ring of black around their neck or a dot of black on their wings – markings birds have today. In art class, the students looked closely at the illustrations in the book to deepen their understanding of the true meaning of the story, then made their own shiny and reflective blackbirds, using cut-paper collage and gloss medium.

“The skills developed in arts education are profoundly important for students’ learning in academics and in their lives beyond school,” Hart says.  

See more examples of PPS arts teaching and learning on the district’s website. 

Our Monthly Column

 PPS STEM learning rigorous and engaging

By Melea Nalli and Aaron Townsend

Our achievement goal in the Portland Promise, the Portland Public Schools’ strategic plan, commits us to preparing and empowering our students for a productive postsecondary path to college and career. The compelling STEM teaching and learning taking place in our schools serves as a great example of how our achievement goal is realized in the classroom.

Over the past few years, teacher teams from all school levels have worked collaboratively to develop a PPS Science Vision, a PPS Math Vision and a PPS Computer Science Vision to guide decisions around curriculum, professional development for teachers and overarching structures that support the implementation of this work.

Our Science Vision sets a path for the district to provide our students with a rigorous and engaging science education that enables them to become scientifically and ecologically literate, as well as technologically capable problem solvers. Our Math Vision centers on the belief that all students are capable of knowing, doing, and enjoying math. We strive to create a math community where students grapple with rigorous and meaningful problems and engage in productive discourse with their peers to construct a deep conceptual understanding of math. The goal of our Computer Science Vision is for our students to develop a foundation of computer science knowledge and learn new approaches to problem solving that harness the power of computational thinking to become both users and creators of computer technology.

Engaging math and science learning goes on at all school levels. Here’s some examples: 

In our elementary schools, we launched the PPS Mobile Makerspace in September, a mobile lab that provides STEM learning opportunities for elementary school students. Our Makerspace is so unique that Maine Commissioner of Education Pender Makin visited in November to see it in operation – observing fifth-graders learning to program micro:bits for their electric guitars. This winter, Makerspace teacher Karen Shibles helped run Hour of Code activities in our schools and is supporting a robotics rollout. The Makerspace visited six of our elementary schools this fall and will visit the other four this spring.

At Lyman Moore Middle School this fall, seventh-graders raised monarch butterflies, learned about their life cycle and migration, and released them. Students also partnered with the Wild Seed Project to plant monarch meadows in school garden beds. After learning about the relationship between monarchs and native plants, students planted asters, goldenrod and milkweed so the school’s courtyard will attract monarchs returning from Mexico, according to science teacher Hazel Cashman.

Seventh-graders in our schools used their math learning about proportional relationships and percent change to analyze a societal issue: whether systems around minimum wages and tips for restaurant servers are fair. Students considered four servers, each at different restaurants, making a range of pay. Students worked in groups to determine the server's weekly pay based on wages, hours worked, average number of tables served, the amount of the typical bill and average tip. With a referendum in Portland this past November about fair wages for servers, the lesson was timely and engaged middle schoolers in their favorite topic: "What is fair?"

At Portland High School, students in teacher Dan LeGage’s ocean science class recently learned about kelp farming from 1994 PHS graduate Nathan Johnson, who owns Shearwater Ventures. Johnson harvests kelp, recently recognized as valuable to Maine’s marine economy. He detailed the kelp farming process and shared kelp food samples.

These are just a few highlights of the rigorous and engaging  STEM learning in our schools –  you’ll find more examples on our website. They all help prepare and empower students to achieve.

My Monthly Column – January 2023

My Tenure More than Payroll Issues

By Xavier Botana

After nearly seven years of writing here, this is my last column. When I became superintendent of the Portland Public Schools in 2016, I considered the role the capstone of my career. Now I have stepped down, with my last day in the office Jan. 13. 

I am very proud to have had this opportunity to serve Portland’s students, staff and families. I am also very grateful to the broader Portland community for consistently showing how much they value public education. While my tenure ends with significant challenges associated with our payroll, we as a community have achieved much during the course of my tenure. Here are some key examples: 

I started my leadership by working with the Board of Public Education and many members of our staff and community to revise our comprehensive plan to create the Portland Promise. The four goals of the Promise – Achievement, Whole Student, People and the central goal of Equity – have guided our work since then, particularly our policy and budget work. One measure of a successful strategic plan is the degree to which its principles and ideas become the language of the district. By that measure, the Promise has been a resounding success as it has become synonymous with, and shorthand for, our work as a district.

In our budgets, we have secured unprecedented funding for services for students experiencing opportunity gaps: English language learners, students with disabilities, and students who are economically disadvantaged or otherwise marginalized. We have invested in recruiting, supporting and retaining educators of color, so that our staff can be more reflective of our student body, the most diverse in Maine. We have diversified our curriculum and helped students see themselves in our classrooms and in our content. And we now have equity-focused leadership across the system.

On the policy level, we have created a more just and equitable framework for governing the district. We gave voice and place to traditionally underrepresented members of our communities in policy development. Whether in developing our policy against harassment, sexual harassment and discrimination, our gender expansive policy, our discipline policies or carefully threading the role of law enforcement in our schools, we have centered and lifted those voices.

We have brought to culmination a 20+ year process to renovate our elementary schools. City voters in 2017 overwhelmingly approved the four-school Building for our Future bond.  Lyseth Elementary was renovated in 2020 and now a second school – Presumpscot– will be done in a matter of weeks.  The remaining two schools – Reiche and Longfellow – are less than a year from completion.   

Working as a community, we navigated two-and-a-half years of pandemic instruction, making the best decisions we could with the information we had to keep students and staff safe. We leveraged unprecedented federal funding to create a financial cushion to weather challenging times down the road. 

I am proud to have brought stability to the superintendent role, which previously experienced frequent turnover. Now, new leadership will bring closure to our payroll challenges and work on rebuilding trust with our staff and community and passing the 2023-2024 school budget. I am confident that new interim co-superintendents Aaron Townsend and Melea Nalli – formerly our assistant superintendents – will ably lead that work until the Board selects a permanent new superintendent by June.

I wish nothing but the best for the Portland Public Schools and its people. I believe that the district can and will overcome its current challenge and return to stability and effectiveness – and be stronger for having done so.