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Portland Public Schools principals and vice-principals, in an eight-page letter to the Portland School Board, delivered an unequivocal message last week: Butt out.
"[C]ertain members of the board are regularly using their official positions to interject themselves in the day-to-day administration of the district," the Dec. 15 letter from the Portland Association of Public School Administrators reads. "The conduct of these board members is substantially interfering with the district's ability to fulfill its fundamental mission of delivering quality education to all 46,070 students PPS is responsible for educating."
In many respects the content of the letter is not surprising. At a Nov. 1 board retreat, interim Superintendent Bob McKean told school board members that some senior staffers estimate they spend a third of their time responding to requests from board members, and that the interference was causing confusion and consternation.
And an outside report on the state of the district, released Dec. 13, echoed those complaints. It detailed how meddling and criticism by the board directed toward staff is "contributing to the tension and anxiety that exists in the organization."
Together, the three incidents mark an unprecedented level of push-back from staff to the school board since the 2015 election ushered in a new, more critical board majority.
The Dec. 15 PAPSA letter does not go into specific detail about the objectionable conduct. It alludes to multiple board members' actions. But it singles out only Steve Buel, who is up for re-election in May, by highlighting a Facebook post Buel is said to have written recently. ("We have done work around changing the attitude of our own administrators to reflect a better attitude and eliminated what was once a blanket o.k. to do whatever you wanted as a principal if you were in a certain group," Buel wrote.)
It goes on to say that the meddling in some cases violates state law and that PAPSA, which acts as an association not a union, is prepared to take legal or "political" action to clarify the roles of the staff and the board, some of whom are presumed by PAPSA to be targeting certain administrators for dismissal.
Buel, for his part, defended his statement on Facebook. "It's in the past tense," he said. "It's not about people who are in the district."
He then noted the letter contained no other specific examples. He said that other than the board secretary, he'd only called a principal once to ask him or her to change a school practice and that that was to deal with something "horrible." He declined to provide details about the incident, saying it was a personnel matter. "The tenor of the letter is totally wrong," he said.
PAPSA members see it differently. "It is important to recognize that the quality administrators the board seeks to retain and attract are the very administrators who have the greatest flexibility in their employment," the letter continues. "A quality administrator who is dissatisfied with their current place of employment can secure work in a different district where their contributions are valued and respected. It is only the lowest performing administrators who cannot. Therefore, when individual board members publicly denigrate licensed administrators, it is only serving to compound the district's administrative problems by making it more difficult for PPS to secure the quality administrators the board says it wants to retain and attract."
Tom Koehler, chairman of the school board, responded Dec. 17 by asking to meet with PAPSA representatives: "The inferences of interference you raise are troubling and it is imperative that PAPSA and the Board be on the same page as partners with different and distinct roles in making our District the best we can make it."