My Monthly Column – December 2021

 All PPS staff play role in supporting teaching and learning 

By Xavier Botana

In my past three columns, I’ve written about the Portland Public Schools’ four teaching and learning priorities for this school year. All the priorities are aligned to our work of realizing our Portland Promise goals of Achievement, Whole Student, People and Equity.

I’ve already detailed three of these priorities: strengthening core instruction to ensure students master grade-level learning; creating safe and equitable school environments; and fostering a district-wide culture where staff members feel supported to grow professionally in ways that best serve students and families.

The final priority – enabling effective school operations – is the subject of this column.

This fourth priority is designed to elevate and position the work of everyone in the system toward the three other priorities. It is about enabling our teaching and learning staff to focus on that work by minimizing the distractions that keep them from doing that. Creating safe, clean and well-functioning learning environments and effective and responsive support systems help reduce time spent on operational issues by teaching staff, so they can do what they do best.

Everyone in our organization – no matter what their job – has a role in enabling effective school operations because that will advance the other priorities.

For example, all of us have the responsibility of following our health and safety protocols that allow our schools to function in the midst of COVID-19.

The mitigation measures in place this year, including masking, pooled testing and vaccines, have meant fewer students have had to quarantine and lose instruction. Staff members at all levels of the organization – including custodians, bus drivers and nurses – are making sure these measures are followed. By doing that, they play a vital role in ensuring the majority of our students remain able to learn.

Our social workers, Community Partnership Team and Food Service staff work together to get school meals to students who need to quarantine or isolate.  Along with community agencies such as the Southern Maine Agency on Aging, they established a group of 35 volunteers to drive meals to the homes of quarantined students. This ensures our students don’t go hungry because they can’t be in school.

School bus transportation continues to challenge our district, due to an acute bus-driver shortage. We’ve had to cancel buses when we don’t have drivers. I am grateful our community has been able to largely meet the transportation needs through a variety of means. I am also so very grateful to all our staff who have found ways to support our cancellations by organizing walking school buses and driving students to school.  We continue to explore contractual relationships and work to procure smaller vehicles that don’t require a commercial driver’s license to drive.  We are also recruiting volunteers to help with our walking school buses when we cancel buses. Anyone interested in volunteering should fill out an application at this link. 

We have three schools undergoing major renovations under the Buildings for Our Future program and over $9 million in additional construction and renovation efforts. Making sure we keep our facilities in good working order while not disrupting our students’ learning is the challenge facing our facilities and maintenance staff and something we are tracking carefully.

To sum up, the expression “it takes a village” applies to all four of these priorities I have written about in the past few months. All of us at the Portland Public Schools doing our part will enable us to strengthen core instruction; ensure our school environments are safe and equitable; and deepen our professional learning culture.