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.

 

My Monthly Column – December 2022

Awesome Wabanaki Studies learning at PPS

By Xavier Botana

A statewide report this fall praised the Portland Public Schools as an exception to the report’s conclusion that most Maine schools have not complied with a landmark 2001 state law requiring incorporating Wabanaki studies into the curriculum. “There are some successes, including Portland Public Schools, which have collaborated with Wabanaki tribes and experts to reconfigure their curriculum with Wabanaki Studies at the core,” stated the report, a collaborative effort between the Wabanaki Alliance, the Abbe Museum, the Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission and the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine.

A team of PPS teachers has been working with tribal advisors, students, parents, and community partners to build a preK-12 Wabanaki Studies curriculum that weaves Wabanaki studies into varied subjects. The curriculum is being piloted this year, and is slated to be in all elementary classrooms in the 2023-2024 school year and all middle and high school social studies classes in 2024-2025. Meanwhile, learning about the “People of the Dawnland,” as the state’s Indigenous peoples are collectively known, is already underway in many classrooms. 

On Dec. 20, some of those students are combining that learning in a unique project in which Casco Bay High School ninth-graders read their original children's books about Wabanaki Studies to third-graders at Talbot Community School and third- and fifth-graders at Ocean Avenue Elementary School, who also have been engaged in Wabanaki studies. Matt Bernstein, CBHS social studies teacher, said, “We are eager to connect and discuss Wabanaki history and culture with our fellow PPS learners.”

Bernstein, recently named 2023 Maine Teacher of the Year, said the children's book project is the culmination of the “We Are On Indigenous Land” expedition at CBHS. The expedition is designed to spread more accurate and truthful information about the history and present of the land now known as Maine and the experiences of Indigenous peoples in this region.

All CBHS ninth-graders have studied Wabanaki history and culture for several months. “We have used a range of sources to unpack past and present Wabanaki experiences in Maine, we have dived deeply into understanding Wabanaki life before and after European settler colonists arrived and the ways that Wabanaki peoples have been systematically marginalized and oppressed since the arrival of settler colonists,” Bernstein said. “We have also celebrated the resistance, perseverance, and contributions of Wabanaki peoples in the face of inequity and attempted genocide.”

After building background knowledge, students chose a topic for deeper study. They researched their topic, analyzed professional children's books, and created storyboards. “Each student has created their own original children’s book about their topic,” Bernstein said. “Their goal is to use these books to contribute to the awesome ongoing Wabanaki Studies learning happening in PPS elementary schools.” 

The books include "The Ways We See the World" by student Reme Isgro, which focuses on unpacking the differences between common Wabanaki and settler colonist worldviews. Another book, "Erase," by student Aimen Ismail, focuses on the removal of Indigenous children from their homes to place them in residential schools and the foster system.

Jes Ellis, Talbot School third-grade teacher, believes the reading session with the ninth-graders will enhance her students’ learning. 

The district’s third-graders have been participating in the first Wabanaki Studies unit designed by district and tribal leaders. Ellis said the learning has centered around the role of the Presumpscot River in local ecology and history, emphasizing Wabanaki relationships with the environment. Students read books, looked at original sources, and investigated the role and impact of dams on rivers and fish populations, she said. 

Now that her students have built their own background knowledge, Ellis said. “I am excited to see how our students connect with the work of the Casco Bay students.”

My Monthly Column – November 2022

The Portland Public Schools Wants YOU!

By Xavier Botana

The iconic poster in which Uncle Sam urges service to our country by pointing a finger and saying, “I want YOU” is familiar to most Americans. In this column, I want to borrow Uncle Sam’s words and say: “The Portland Public Schools wants YOU – as substitutes, volunteers and regular employees like educational technicians, teachers and bus drivers!”

 As you know, we’re experiencing vacancies due to the labor shortages across Maine and country that make fully staffing all school districts, including ours, a challenge this year. We’re doing many things to address this problem. 

 We are asking our community to help too – by applying for jobs, volunteering and spreading the word about the opportunities at PPS. Do you have friends or family who would like to move to Maine? A well-paying job with great benefits at PPS could enable them to do that!

 One area of employment need is for ed techs. Nov. 16 is Education Support Professionals Day, a time to honor essential employees such as ed techs, who play a vital role in our students’ success. We are very grateful to our ed techs and are doing all we can to attract and retain more of them. 

 The Board of Public Education recently approved a new contract with our ed techs that increased pay, making us more competitive with neighboring districts. The contract includes annual wage and step pay increases that total 5.4 percent, 4.4 percent, and 4.4 percent over the three-year contract. The total increase over the life of the contract is nearly 15 percent. 

 The Maine Department of Education is moving forward with a program that will pay educational technicians in specialized programs such as our district Breathe, Bridge, and Beach programs an additional $2,500 if they participate in a five-week course. We hope to leverage this for recruitment and retention of ed techs in these programs.

We also held our second hiring fair on Nov. 4, focusing on ed techs and substitute teachers. Both that fair and another we held in early October yielded some badly needed candidates. We will continue holding monthly hiring fairs that focus on areas of employment need. The fairs are an opportunity for candidates to apply and interview in person. We are open to job shares for individuals who can only work part-time.

Substitute Educators Day is Nov. 18. We are always thankful for these employees, and especially so this year. We need more subs! To attract these critical staff, we have increased substitute wages on an interim basis for this school year. The daily pay rate for our long-term substitutes is $238; dedicated subs will get $175; state-certified substitutes will be paid $150; and bachelors-degree substitutes will receive $145.  Substitutes with lesser credentials will see an increase in their pay to $95 per day. 

As another hiring incentive, we are temporarily offering any of our staff who refer a candidate for an educational technician or teacher vacancy a $1,000 referral fee if we hire that person and they complete the school year with us.

We also need more bus drivers, food service staff and custodians, so that will be our next area of hiring focus. For substitute or permanent jobs of all types, go to our Human Resources employment page on our website, https://www.portlandschools.org/, to learn more and apply.

Our schools also need caring volunteers. Can you help out? Learn more on our Volunteer page.

Whether you can be a substitute or a volunteer – or can apply for one of the permanent positions – we need YOU to support public education in Portland!

My Monthly Column – October 2022

 School Board will be good fiscal stewards of school budget

 By Xavier Botana

I urge my fellow city residents to join me in voting YES on Question 5 to allow the Portland Board of Public Education to set the school budget before sending it directly to voters. 

Not only do our elected School Board members best understand the needs of students and schools, but they have proved themselves to be responsible fiscal stewards. In my seven years as Portland Public Schools superintendent, I have seen Board members consistently craft budgets that reflect what our students need to succeed while also being cognizant of the pressures we all face as taxpayers.

To give just one example, when our district received an additional $6.2 million in state funding last year, the board voted to use that money to address future budget challenges, which was very fiscally prudent. That extra funding was the result of a successful effort by Gov. Janet Mills and the Legislature to boost state education aid to a voter-mandated 55 percent for the first time in Maine’s history.

In July 2021, our School Board wisely set aside more than half of that funding – $3.41 million – to create a debt service relief fund. We have since been able to use that fund to offset annual increases in the budget driven by debt service for the voter-approved $64 million bond for renovations to four of our elementary schools. 

The Board also allocated over half of the remainder of that funding to offset an increase in property taxes at a time when many city residents were grappling with economic hardship due to the pandemic. Their decision resulted in a 0 percent tax increase in Portland’s combined city and school budgets that year.

The state recently expanded districts’ ability to have unallocated reserves – essentially a rainy day fund. I’m happy to report we expect to be near the maximum allowable 9 percent. 

In short, thanks to our school board’s careful fiscal management, the Portland Public Schools is in a better financial position than ever before to meet further budget challenges, while also advancing our work to meet the Portland Promise. 

Question 5 opponents have made much of a recent city audit, which raised concerns about district finance department operations, of which staffing challenges and vacancies due to the current labor shortage were key factors. To remedy those issues, the Board moved swiftly in May to restructure our finance department to shore up our financial operation.

I’ll note that when this audit – which also raised some red flags about city finances – was conducted for FY21, the City Council was the authority that set the bottom line of the school budget. In light of that, the claim that the Council should remain as the arbiter of the school budget to prevent future audit issues rings hollow.

Question 5 doesn’t give the Board a blank check. If voters don’t like the Board’s budget, they’ll reject it. That’s a powerful check on the Board proposing a budget that’s out of step with voters.

Question 5 opponents contend voter turnout in June is too low to be meaningful, but even in years when other ballot issues draw more voters, the school budget wins handily. The higher the turnout, the better our school budget does.

City voters have the final say on the budget, and they have shown by wide margins each year that they prioritize investing in public education. Let’s give our fiscally responsible School Board the authority to use its educational expertise to craft the school budget – and then let’s trust Portland voters to decide whether to pass it. Vote YES on Question 5!

My Monthly Column – September 2022

Donating to United Way helps our community thrive

By Xavier Botana

 Portland frequently makes national lists as one of the best places to live and work, but that’s not always true for everyone in our community. Opportunity gaps lead to some students struggling to succeed in school, hardworking families can’t afford housing and other basic necessities, and many of our fellow citizens suffer from preventable health problems. Fortunately, Thrive2027, an effort led by United Way of Southern Maine, is a way for us to work together as a community to address these problems.

United Way of Southern Maine recently awarded more than $10 million in grants to a variety of programs and innovative initiatives across southern Maine, as a strategic investment in Thrive2027. That initiative, for which I serve as co-chair, is a collaborative community vision that centers on three 10-year goals for a measurably better community: giving students a strong start so they can succeed in school; ensuring all community members thrive, not just survive; and helping people live longer, better lives.

We at the Portland Public Schools are very grateful to be the recipient of some of this funding, which is made possible through the generous support of donors to United Way.

Talbot Community School, one of our district’s most diverse schools, has been granted a second-year $80,000 grant for academic and social supports for students and families. 

At Talbot, this funding will help the school to organize, coordinate and promote the assets of the entire community and provide academic enrichment services. The school will be able to continue to provide such after-school programming as choir, tutoring, drama, yoga and creative movement and cooking classes for students throughout the year. As Talbot Principal Ann Hanna has explained, these programs enable students to engage in a variety of activities that support their academic, physical, social, and emotional wellbeing in a safe environment, supported by positive adult and peer relationships. The overall effect will be to strengthen the entire Riverton community, where Talbot is located. 

Portland Adult Education (PAE) also will benefit from these grants. PAE has been awarded nearly $88,000 to help more students attain their high school diplomas and go on to college. In addition, PAE will receive more than $40,000 for the Street Academy, a program that works to ensure homeless youth in Maine have the opportunity to thrive, grow and become productive community members through education and workforce training. 

These grants are just the latest examples of the ways that United Way of Southern Maine helps our students and families succeed and prosper. Previous United Way funding has supported our outdoor education program; helped administer school vaccine clinics; and has seeded a new mobile makerspace – a recently launched STEM learning lab that will travel from school to school. United Way also has contributed to the Foundation for Portland Public Schools’ Families in Crisis Fund, which helps PPS families experiencing unemployment, illness, or other challenging situations so that their children can focus on learning.

We are fortunate to benefit from these resources, but please remember that United Way can’t provide them without the financial support of our community. It’s fall, which means that United Way’s annual workplace campaign is getting underway in the near future.

At the Portland Public Schools, we’ll soon be asking our staff members to donate to United Way as part of our Annual Appeal.  I would like to ask the whole Portland community to consider joining me in giving to the 2022 United Way campaign. Collectively, our donations help students, families and other community members thrive, not just survive.

My Monthly Column – August 2022

 Supporting students and staff for a successful new school year

By Xavier Botana

As August draws to a close, I’m hopeful that everyone got a chance to unwind this summer and is ready to start the new school year with a renewed sense of enthusiasm and purpose. At the same time, I’m also mindful that this year follows an incredibly difficult 2021-2022 school year. That’s why one of our key priorities this year will be redoubling our efforts to support the significant mental and behavioral health needs of our students and educators. That will help ensure a safe and successful 2022-2023 school year.

Challenges of the last school year included COVID surges, labor shortages that pushed everyone to the limit in their jobs, and middle school students giving voice to concerns about racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic experiences in our schools. Stress levels were high.

That’s why the Portland Board of Public Education on June 21 approved investing nearly $1 million in federal COVID-related funding for social emotional learning and supports for students and staff.

Among steps we are taking is responding to the clear feedback we have received from school staff that one of their biggest needs is the need for support for student behavior health. This fall, we’ll be expanding from two to four the number of the district’s full-time board-certified behavior analysts. Those professionals study the behavior of students – including those with developmental disabilities and emotional or social issues – and work with teachers and others to create plans to address those issues. 

We’ll also be adding social workers at East End Community School, Rowe Elementary School and Deering High School’s Breathe day treatment program and expanding the half-time social worker position at Deering’s program for recent immigrants with interrupted learning to full time. In addition, we are adding a clinical services director to supervise and support the district’s growing social work team so that they can most effectively do their work.

At our secondary schools, we’ll be doing additional training, consultation and coaching in multiple areas. They include positive behavior interventions and supports or PBIS, a proactive approach to improve school safety and promote positive behavior, de-escalation techniques, and restorative discipline practices. We also will continue working with Maine Seeds of Peace – a nonprofit that works with youth and educators to help develop skills and relationships to work across lines of difference to create more just and inclusive societies – to assist us in tackling the issues our middle school students protested last spring.

Our educators too are in need of support after this past difficult school year.  Our plan includes paying for educators to tap into a pool of resources to support their social emotional needs connected to their roles as educators. Examples could include The Healing Schools Project, which partners with schools and school districts to prevent burnout and improve working conditions; The Teacher Sanctuary, a virtual retreat center for educator restoration and reflection; RISE Kripalu, a program designed to impact individual and organizational performance through yoga and mindfulness-based practices; and other restorative experiences led by Portland Public Schools educators.

The 2021-2022 school year was very hard. I am grateful to our amazing staff for enduring endless shifts in direction, staff shortages and countless pressures of all sorts. I also want to appreciate the patience and grace of our families and students who also endured those same hardships from their vantage point. We got through it by working together. By continuing to do that, I know that we can make the 2022-2023 school year a successful one.

My Monthly Column – June 2022

Ending this school year with gratitude

By Xavier Botana

The Portland Public Schools has just ended an incredibly challenging school year. On top of the everyday demands of running our schools, we had to cope with COVID surges and a labor shortage that stretched our capacity to run school buses and staff classrooms. Yet I am ending this year with a sense of gratitude – for a variety of reasons.

First, I’m deeply grateful to Portland voters for their decisive approval of our $133.1 million budget for the 2022-2023 school year, by a margin of 3 to 1. I'm so proud to live and work in a community that consistently shows it values public education.

I also am grateful to our staff and our Board of Public Education for working very hard over the past six months to bring forward this responsible FY23 budget, which balances the needs of our district and the economic realities we’re all facing. I’m very thankful as well to City Councilors and our mayor for supporting this budget. The approved budget retains current programs and services and covers increased costs for salaries, benefits and debt service. Most importantly, it ensures that our district maintains the equity investments we have made to support our students experiencing opportunity gaps.

I'm grateful too for the broad field of candidates who ran for three vacant Board seats June 14, because that shows community commitment to being engaged in public education. Congratulations and welcome to new Board members Sarah Lentz, Ben Grant and Sarah Brydon!

I also feel incredibly grateful to our amazing Portland Public Schools People for persevering through all the challenges we faced this year. No matter what came our way, their dedication to helping our students succeed never wavered. This school year has demonstrated the value of all us working together and supporting one another. 

We need to continue to do that in order to create a consistently welcoming, safe and responsive school experience for all our students. Our middle school students recently voiced complaints about disparate treatment of students of color and students who are LGBTQ+. These are problems that exist system-wide, and our data backs that up. 

At a June 7 Board workshop, we discussed steps we will be taking immediately, over the summer and into the next school year to support students and work with staff to ensure a more inclusive environment in our schools. I am confident that our Portland Public Schools People are determined and committed to meeting this challenge head-on. As an administration, we pledge to help them to develop their capacity to do so.

I also am grateful to be part of a community that came together June 11 for Portland’s March for Our Lives rally to advocate for gun reform. We called for change so that students, teachers and other Americans don’t become the victims of the gun violence that happens nationwide every day. In my remarks at the rally, I echoed the Board’s 2018 resolution against gun violence following the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. That resolution called upon Congress and state legislatures to prioritize the protection of students and school employees by passing legislation more effectively regulating access to firearms through such measures as closing loopholes in background checks, funding public health research on firearms-related issues and advancing mental health supports.

I am thankful Portland has a Board that is proactive on behalf of our students and staff. It is now up to all of us to make it clear to our elected leaders that gun violence must end now. As the March for Our Lives participants said: “Enough is enough!”

My Monthly Column – May 2022

 Class of 2022 earns an “R” – for resilience

 By Xavier Botana

High school graduation season is my favorite time of year. From their first day of preschool, our goal as educators is to ensure students succeed as learners. Seeing them graduate from high school is as gratifying to us as it is to them. I will be particularly proud to see the Portland Public Schools Class of 2022 graduate in June. Even though the COVID-19 pandemic upended much of their high school experience, this class has persevered with amazing determination to reach this milestone. 

Four years ago, members of the Class of 2022 were excited as they walked through the doors of our three high schools – Portland, Deering and Casco Bay – as freshmen. They looked forward to this new learning experience, not knowing at that time that a pandemic would make 2018-2019 their only normal year of high school.

They successfully navigated that first year to become sophomores. But COVID changed their lives abruptly in March 2020. Due to the pandemic, we suddenly closed our school doors that month for what we thought would be two weeks. Instead, our buildings had to stay shuttered for the rest of the 2019-2020 school year. The Class of 2022’s last day of traditional in-person school turned out to be Friday, March 13.

The class suddenly had to adjust to an immediate switch to remote learning. They had to forgo in-person connections with teachers and classmates and instead learn virtually through Zoom and Google Classroom. Words like “mask,” “social distancing” and “quarantine” became part of their everyday vocabulary.

Their junior year was similarly challenging. While many of our students at other levels had the opportunity of hybrid learning in the 2020-2021 school year, we had to provide our older high school students with instruction that was largely remote for much of that year, due to a variety of factors. It wasn’t until that April, as vaccines became more widely available, that we were able to resume some in-person classes for our 10th- through 12th-graders.   

We had hoped this 2021-2022 school year could return to normal. We resumed in-person learning for all students, but as variants led to a rise in cases at various times over this year, we still had to follow a number of COVID precautions, such as mandatory masking, to keep everyone as safe as possible. We made masking optional on March 14 but on May 12, returned to required masking due to cases increasing again.

The pandemic has caused the Class of 2022 to miss out on many of the social emotional connections and treasured rituals that are part of the high school experience. Throughout all these challenges, however, class members kept their eyes on the prize and continued successfully to complete their coursework to make it to graduation. Many also had outstanding achievements in academics, athletics and other activities.

At graduation in June, I’ll be congratulating the Class of 2022 collectively for a variety of accomplishments, including being accepted by many institutions of higher learning, including elite colleges and universities across the country and in Maine and winning a couple million dollars in scholarships and grants. 

But each and every individual in the class also has earned an “R” – for resilience – for the way they showed great fortitude in the face of unprecedented change to achieve their educational goals. Whatever they set out to do next, this trait will help them accomplish it.

Congratulations, Class of 2022! You’ve demonstrated that you’re prepared and empowered to succeed in the college and career paths that lie ahead. 

My Monthly Column – April 2022

 Time to celebrate school employees!

 By Xavier Botana

This time of year serves as a reminder that “It takes a village to educate a child.” That’s because April and May have many days and weeks designated to recognize and honor a wide variety of school employees. These employees’ jobs are very different, but what they all have in common is that each plays an essential role in helping our students succeed. 

For example, National Assistant Principal Week was in early April. A key responsibility of assistant principals is ensuring all students have someone that knows them well and understands their needs. Thank you to our amazing assistant principals for all they do to make sure our students connect and engage with school.

National School Librarian Day was April 4. We appreciate our librarians for not only creating welcoming learning centers with diverse resources but for being fierce guardians of access to appropriate literature that challenges students to think, question and grow. 

Paraprofessional Appreciation Day, honoring educators such as educational technicians, was April 6. We are so grateful to our ed techs for the wide variety of work they do to support students and teachers. They punch far above their weight!

April 27 is National Administrative Professionals’ Day. We deeply appreciate these vital staff members at our schools and other facilities, including Central Office. Our district simply could not function without everything they do, often behind the scenes. They’re the heart of our district!

April also is Occupational Therapy Month. We’re so grateful to our expert occupational therapists for all their work to reduce barriers to participation for our students and help them succeed!

School Principals Day is May 1. Principals shape their schools’ learning environments and climates through their support and guidance of teachers and other staff and the relationships they forge with students and families. The fact that we have great public schools in Portland is a testament to the amazing educators leading them!

May 2 through 6 is National Teacher Appreciation Week and May 3 is National Teacher Day. The pandemic has given us an even greater appreciation of teachers. We saw them transition to new ways of teaching and learning, and rise to the challenge of finding the best ways to connect with students and engage them in learning. We’re so grateful to our dedicated teachers for all they do.

National Interpreter Appreciation Day is May 4. Our deepest thanks to our multilingual parent community specialists, who assist our families as interpreters, translators and connectors in a wide range of situations, and also help families with food insecurity and employment, housing and health issues.  

On May 6, we celebrate School Lunch Hero Day. Through remote learning, hybrid learning and in-person learning, our Food Service team has made sure students always had access to school meals. Now they’re working with community partners to introduce culturally important foods to our school lunch menus. They truly are heroes!

National School Nurse Day is May 11. A huge shoutout to our school nurses for the pivotal and pressure-packed role they have played throughout this pandemic to keep students and staff safe and learning!

 Speech Pathologist Day is May 18. Thank you to our speech-language pathologists for their tireless work to help students with speech and language problems that can make it hard for them to succeed in school. 

Unfortunately, I don’t have space here to highlight all employee groups here, but please know I am deeply grateful to ALL our PPS People. Thank you to each and every member of our PPS “village” for what you do each day to help students succeed!

My Monthly Column – March 2022

Marking a Pandemic Milestone

By Xavier Botana

This week, almost two years to the day that we shut our doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a mask at the Portland Public Schools became optional for our staff and students. This is a milestone moment for us, so I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight this and other changes in our health and safety protocols, acknowledge our staff, students and families for their patience and cooperation in helping us get to this point, and look ahead.

We feel safe going to optional masking at this point in time due to our data showing continued low cases district-wide, and guidance from the Maine Center for Disease Control and the Maine Department of Education, as well as that of our district medical advisers. 

March 9 was the date that the state set for recommending masks in schools be optional. We waited until this week to transition to optional masking in our district. 

We moved more cautiously and deliberately to ensure that we considered all health and safety factors in making this big change. We are still requiring masks in some instances. Staff and students who test positive will be required to wear a mask if they return to school before their 10th day of quarantine.

“Masking optional” means that staff and students can choose whether to wear masks or not. I want to stress that anyone who wants to continue to wear a mask at the Portland Public Schools should do so. It’s very important that everyone in our community be respectful of the personal choices that staff and students make when it comes to wearing a mask.

We encourage students and staff who have health issues personally or have someone in their immediate households who has health issues to consult with their doctors to seek guidance about wearing masks. We are able to help students obtain masks that are recommended by their healthcare provider.

In addition to optional masking, we have made some changes to our other COVID precautions. We have eliminated limits on indoor gatherings, so more school events can be held indoors instead of outdoors. We’re allowing for increased visitor access. Volunteers must continue to be vaccinated, but masking for them will be optional too. We’ve lifted our restrictions on classroom and lunchroom configurations. We will also be turning water fountains back on as soon as we can complete all of the required testing. Learn more details.

We will continue our pooled testing, hygiene and symptom checks and will keep on encouraging vaccination. All of these measures remain key tools that will allow us to continue to keep our schools safe. We will monitor federal CDC COVID-19 Community Levels, state wastewater testing, and our pooled testing to determine if we need to make any district-wide or school-specific changes to our mitigation strategies. Those could include returning to requiring masking in a specific school or district-wide. 

I am deeply grateful to everyone – staff, students and families – for all they have done to adhere to these and other protocols over the past two years. It has not been easy, but everyone’s collective efforts have helped keep our schools open.

Is this pandemic nearing an end? While the news is encouraging, COVID-19 has thrown us curve balls before. We celebrate this milestone, but we continue to exercise caution.

However, we have reason to hope. Daylight savings has begun, spring is around the corner and we are able to see the smiles of students in our classrooms for the first time in two years. 

My Monthly Column – February 2022

FY23 School Budget Goal: Keep Focus on Teaching and Learning

By Xavier Botana

In just one month, I’ll present my new school budget proposal to the Portland Board of Public Education. While we don’t have all of our numbers yet, steep increases in the cost of living and reduced state funding will make for a challenging road ahead as we plan the FY23 budget. 

Each year, our Portland Public Schools budget has a theme. Last year, the FY22 budget’s core theme was “Advancing Equity.” The theme for our budget for the 2022-2023 school year is: “Keeping the focus on teaching and learning.” This theme communicates our clear direction and that this budget will endeavor to maintain our momentum toward our Portland Promise goals of Achievement, Whole Student and People – which all center around our key fourth goal of Equity.

We are Maine’s largest school district and also the most diverse. Because we value that diversity, we have made it our mission to repay the educational debts and close the opportunity gaps between our economically disadvantaged students (who are mostly students of color, English language learners (ELL), and students with disabilities) and our more advantaged students in Portland (who tend to be white). 

Our FY22 budget contained a historic $3 million in equity investments. Those included hiring more ELL teachers, adding multilingual social workers and investing in multilingual family engagement specialists, increased staff diversity and inclusion efforts and the expansion of our prekindergarten program. Over the past five years, we have invested over $13 million dollars in these efforts. While significant, that’s a relatively small portion of our overall budget.

Our community faces fiscal challenges as we work to stay the course. 

We recently received our projected state and local contribution from the state Essential Programs and Services (EPS) formula, which the state uses to allocate education funds to Maine communities. Due to a variety of factors in that formula, Portland’s share of state education funding this budget cycle will be about $1.5 million less than we received for FY22. 

One key reason for the reduction is that EPS allots less state funding to communities that have high property valuation, expecting those communities to be able to contribute more locally to their students’ education. ​​Portland’s valuation is extremely high, so our share from the state is less. EPS also allocates more money to districts that gain students. Instead, our enrollment is down.

In addition to receiving less state aid, rising costs for all manner of goods and services and contracted increases for our Portland Public Schools People will contribute to making this another challenging budget year. Finally, our debt service is increasing as we bond the renovations to our four elementary schools that were approved by voters in 2017.

I am grateful we have a School Board, a City Council and a community that believe in the value of public education and in making that education accessible for all. I am also grateful that we have significant federal coronavirus-related funding to help to bolster our efforts.

The public plays a key role in our budget process, which includes multiple opportunities for public input and concludes with a voter referendum on June 14. We’ll start with a Zoom public budget forum on March 7 to discuss our goals for the FY23 budget in more detail and answer questions. I invite the Portland community to attend. Also, I hope you stay engaged and involved so we can work together to achieve an FY23 school budget that not only maintains current programs and services, but also the equity investments at the center of our work. 

My Monthly Column – January 2022

PPS aims to be a leader in teaching Black history

By Xavier Botana

In January, we observe Martin Luther King Day, honoring his life and legacy. Black History Month comes in February, a time to celebrate Black Americans’ achievements and recognize their central role in U.S. history. That makes this an opportune time for me to highlight the Black history curriculum that the Portland Public Schools is developing, and to share our vision around this work.

This curriculum will be essential to help our students gain a full understanding of the history of this country and Maine. This curriculum is being created with the recognition that Black history, achievements, excellence and humanity have all systemically been left out of the broad curriculum across the nation, including here at the Portland Public Schools.

The research is clear that it is important for students to be able to see themselves in what they learn in school. To date, our curriculum has done that much better for some students than others. As Maine’s largest and most diverse school district, incorporating Black history is part of our focus on equity, the central goal of the Portland Promise, our district’s strategic plan.  

We’re in the early stages of creating this curriculum. This school year, a group of our teachers and Black education advisors are drafting an outline for a Black history curriculum for our students in preK through grade 12. Curriculum development will be in process during the 2022-2023 school year. We intend for this curriculum to offer opportunities for interdisciplinary learning across all content areas, not just social studies. Implementation of the curriculum will be supported by professional development for all teachers.

Our advisors have direct ties to Black communities and education needs. In response to their guidance, the curriculum we draft will not begin and end with slavery, as many curriculums do. Instead, it will focus on the humanity, resistance, advocacy and, above all, achievements of Black cultures from the ancient and the international to the contemporary and the local. 

The curriculum will use local history to contextualize and connect national and international histories, events, topics, and themes with Maine and New England. To aid in that, the group drafting the curriculum has partnered with the Atlantic Black Box project, a grassroots historical recovery project committed to surfacing New England’s connection to the transatlantic slave trade, while re-centering the stories of its racially marginalized groups. 

Our curriculum will strive to celebrate Black excellence, as defined by Dr. Bettina Love. It will serve as a mirror for Black students from diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, and provide a window into that excellence for the rest of our diverse student body.

Our work dovetails with a new Maine education requirement that was signed into law in June.  The new law requires that African American studies and Maine African American studies be added to what Maine students learn in their American history and Maine studies courses.  

As with our Wabanaki Studies curriculum, our Black history curriculum work isn’t about compliance, but it positions us in an important leadership role in our state. Above all, it will help our students truly understand Maine’s history and its connection to the world and will allow them to see themselves in that history. 

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.

My Monthly Column – November 2021

 Supporting PPS staff so they can best serve students and families

By Xavier Botana

Our Portland Promise commits the Portland Public Schools to realizing four goals: Achievement, Equity, Whole Student and People. To succeed, we need to have our staff – our People – share fully in that vision. 

That’s why we’re prioritizing fostering a district-wide culture where staff members feel supported to grow professionally in ways that best serve students and families.

That’s just one of four teaching and learning priorities this school year. The other three are strengthening core instruction to ensure students master grade-level learning; creating safe and equitable school environments; and enabling effective school operations.

I’m writing a series of columns about these priorities. This month, I’m focusing on our plan to deepen our professional learning culture. 

To begin this work, we’re asking all our educators to individually and collectively reflect on our current student outcomes – what students are expected to know or demonstrate when completing a course or a grade level.

Working together, we’ll use this to build a stronger, shared, instructional vision. This will help deepen our work to achieve equity and assist in providing professional development better aligned to our priorities and connected to our instructional materials and core practices.

This work will also elevate teacher leadership and help all staff collaborate more meaningfully. That will help foster a district-wide culture where people trust each other, work together and welcome feedback to grow professionally to better respond to our students’ needs.

Strategies to achieve this include building a common understanding of what we want students to know and be able to do as they move through the grades. We’re starting by developing a “portrait of a graduate” at the high school level – a vision for the skills, traits, and competencies that students need to succeed in college, career, and life. Educators across the district will develop the portrait to define exactly what we mean when we say that PPS students will graduate “prepared and empowered.”

Once we establish a clear portrait for our high school graduates, we’ll develop eighth-grade and fifth-grade portraits. These will help ensure a shared understanding of what elementary school students need to be prepared and empowered for middle school, and middle school students for high school.

We need all educators to deepen their shared understanding of and commitment to an equity-oriented vision for instruction. Our goal is to build trust, openness and appreciation for diverse approaches and opinions. That requires us all to be comfortable giving and receiving feedback in order to learn from each other and improve. To that end, we are including equity-literacy based language in our teacher evaluation system. 

We are committed to elevating and supporting our People who identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Color by implementing key recommendations from our Educators of Color Report. That report, released last spring, gave us honest feedback from our educators of color about their work experiences and barriers to opportunities in our district. A survey of all our staff also showed lackluster coaching, career development and professional learning opportunities.

As a consequence, we’re focusing this year on creating support structures and career pathways that lead to teaching and leadership opportunities for all staff. Specifically, we’re creating support structures for teachers that want to become administrators and for educational technicians that want to become teachers.

Years of research show that organizations attain their goals when they achieve a truly collaborative professional learning structure where everyone feels they have something to learn and something to contribute. That is what we are committed to accomplishing through our focus on professional culture in our schools.