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!