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.

My Monthly Column – October 2021

Fostering safe, equitable schools where all students feel connected 

By Xavier Botana

Eighteen months of remote and hybrid learning due to the pandemic has disconnected many of our students from school, their teachers and each other. That is why reconnecting our students is a key focus at the Portland Public Schools now that we have returned to full-time, in-person learning.

We’ve made creating safe and equitable school environments, where students feel a sense of belonging and connection, one of our district’s four teaching and learning priorities this year. 

The other three priorities are strengthening core instruction to ensure students master grade-level learning; fostering a district-wide culture where staff feel supported to grow professionally to best serve students and families; and enabling effective school operations. All four teaching and learning priorities are aligned to our Portland Promise goals of Achievement, Whole Student, People and Equity.

I’m writing a series of columns about these priorities. Last month, I wrote about strengthening core instruction. This month, my focus is on safe and equitable schools where students feel connected and engaged.

This priority is responsive to the needs of our students at the current moment. But we are also deepening work that has been underway for the past few years.

Having safe and equitable schools will help us realize our Whole Student and Equity goals. We know that if we prioritize authentic individual relationships with each student, clear and equitable expectations in our schools, and meaningful support structures district-wide, along with deep listening to what our students and families tell us they experience and need, we will create an environment where students feel valued and thrive.

However, just as achievement and opportunity gaps exist between student groups, not all students experience our schools in this way today. Too often, the ones who end up feeling less valued and disconnected from school are our most marginalized students – students who are Black, Indigenous or people of color, are English language learners, have disabilities and are LGBTQ. 

Strategies to address this include strengthening the implementation of having a “Portland Promise Point Person” for every student across all grades, and working with our staff to develop the skills and mindsets to use restorative practices and de-escalation to influence student behavior.

We’ll also be working to develop structures in our system that support the development of meaningful connections for students through our ongoing PBIS work – PBIS stands for positive behavioral interventions and supports and its focus is prevention, not punishment. We’re also implementing our newly revised anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policy and focusing on critical times of transition in our system, especially from eighth to ninth grade.

Some of this work is already underway. Recently, Deering High School senior Balqies Mohamed shared with PPS staff how meeting with teacher advisors helped her during the past school year. “At Deering High School, advisory was not only a place for students to receive support but also for student-teacher collaboration,” Balqies said. She said she and other students worked with two faculty members to co-design lessons centered on equity and anti-racism, using dialogue and interactive activities. The result of the lessons, Balqies said, “was an increase in student engagement as well as, as a school, we took the first step to create an anti-racist and tolerant school culture.”

She added, “Undoubtedly students do look for an adult they can lean on for support, and advisory is a great way to foster those authentic student and teacher bonds.”

My Monthly Column – September 2021

 Strengthening core instruction to help students learn at high levels

By Xavier Botana

School this fall has not been the “return to normal” we all envisioned last June. We continue to battle this pandemic, and are currently focused on fine-tuning our health and safety protocols to protect our students and staff. At the same time, we are committed to realizing our goal of continuously working to improve the quality of education that the Portland Public Schools offers students.

That is why we have developed clear teaching and learning priorities for the 2021-2022 school year. Those priorities are aligned with the goals of the Portland Promise, our strategic plan: Achievement, Whole Student, People and Equity.

Our four priorities this year are key to our students’ success. They are: strengthening core instruction to ensure students master grade-level learning; creating safe and equitable school environments where students feel a sense of belonging and connection; fostering a district-wide culture where staff feel supported to grow professionally to best serve students and families; and enabling effective school operations.

I’m writing a series of columns exploring each priority. This month, I’m focusing on strengthening core instruction, which aligns with our Achievement and Equity goals.

Looking at our achievement data across the district, we consistently see that we do an excellent job with some of our students – but not all of them. Yet we know that all our students have the potential to achieve at high levels and become fully prepared and empowered to pursue whatever their life goals might be.

We understand that we have work to do to change our systems, structures and practices in order to unleash all our students’ full potential. Our Equity goal commits us to addressing achievement and opportunity gaps for our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) students, as well as those who are English language learners (ELL), have disabilities and are economically disadvantaged.

Strengthening core instruction is an important way to do that. We believe that exposing students to grade-level learning with appropriate support is key if we want all our students to learn at high levels.

Our strategies for strengthening core instruction include continuing our math and phonics curriculum work and launching new science and social studies units. For example, we’re implementing a new science unit about the Presumpscot River, including raising and releasing salmon. We’ll also hold professional development sessions for teachers on Wabanaki Studies throughout the year.

To help ensure instruction is equitable, we’ll ensure access to grade-level instruction and rigor for all students, taking such steps as reducing remedial pullouts and tracking. One focus will be supporting our ELL teachers, special educators and classroom teachers as they collaborate together to best meet students’ learning needs.

We’ll also promote inclusive practices and work to include the voices of traditionally underrepresented students and parents to ensure their needs and views are accounted for in our work.

Also, we want to ensure that all our educators experience a clear connection between our equity work and our instructional work. Everything we’re doing around developing curriculum materials, providing opportunities for professional learning and reimagining structures is rooted in our commitment to build a more equitable system where all students are held to high expectations and are supported to reach them.

Of course, everyone’s health and safety are our first responsibility, so we will adjust the cadence of our teaching and learning priorities as needed. Our goal is to balance reacting to the moment and following the steady course of continuous improvement to our teaching and learning that we have set for ourselves, and that our community deserves.