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A Portland School Board policy committee discussion around contracting rules held Tuesday afternoon further emphasized differences in governing styles on the new board.
The School Board’s composition dramatically shifted after the May election, when three longtime incumbents left their seats. The board’s leadership, chair Eddie Wang and vice chair Michelle DePass, have since tried to guide a fresh group of elected officials toward concentrating on big-picture outcomes. That’s in part because of their experience on boards past, where both say time was wasted picking apart tiny details and little was left to show for it.
But in the early months of the new school board, that governing philosophy has faced hiccups. That’s because there are still School Board members who see value in scrutinizing each decision. One clear place where that’s playing out: a Portland Public Schools staff proposal to amend public contracting rules. The major change under consideration is one that would raise contracts required for board approval to $250,000 from the current $150,000 mark, effectively meaning more contracts would fly under the board and public’s radar.
Most contracts are compiled into resolutions that the School Board quickly approves, but that $150,000 benchmark has recently been the subject of some controversy, as the district has made some contentious moves just below the threshold, effectively evading board approval.
One example is Texas-based construction management firm Procedeo. PPS signed an early contract with the firm to try and reduce costs to modernize Jefferson High School for $149,500. (Procedeo then went before the School Board after the district extended its contract by $487,500 to help run the Office of School Modernization, a district office that has seen some major leadership turnover in the last year.)
District staff in the contracting and purchasing offices have said that the proposal to raise the benchmark would help smooth district processes. The $250,000 threshold would, in many ways, reflect inflation since 2010, when the former threshold was set, and is in line with other large school districts in Oregon.
During the meeting, board member Stephanie Engelsman was clear that she thought raising the benchmark would leave a sour taste in some community members’ mouths. She also flagged a 2020 contracting audit that still had 11 outstanding recommendations as reason to leave it as is for now. “If we are no longer seeing a steady decline because we clearly have unhappy families, as well as lowering birth rates and all the other issues people bring up, maybe we consider doing it then,” she said.
“We as a collective board are deciding on whether to raise a number that frankly has already drawn ire from the community when contracts have been just below it,” Englesman said. “I would think that if we raise it significantly, the ire is going to grow.”
But for Wang and DePass, contracting is one place where they see a hands-on approach as inefficient. Wang said that a higher threshold could result in a more efficient central staff at PPS. (For example, Emily Courtnage, PPS’s director of purchasing and contracting, said there are long periods of delays where contracts sit and wait because they require board approval, and that the work “requires a lot of advanced planning for staff.”)
“I’m all for oversight but the problem is there’s a distinct difference between effective oversight and performative oversight,” Wang said at the meeting. “I really don’t want to do performative oversight because we’re afraid of $150,000. We are in a situation where our district is a skeleton crew… so when we can look at ways to make things more effective and efficient, that just means we are freeing up more time and staff to actually help support our schools.”
School Board member Rashelle Chase-Miller echoed Wang’s comments, noting that the School Board should not base its decision-making on “optics or how the community is going to receive it necessarily.” She said that without much insight on contracting or oversight, it would be right of the School Board to put more faith in the district employees hired with that expertise.
The policy committee chose to advance the changes to a discussion at a full board meeting. No decisions or recommendations were made on Tuesday afternoon.
“I have worried that as we follow these rabbit holes around contracting that we’re shifting our focus away from stuff that is directly student-impacting into things we don’t actually have expertise in,” Chase-Miller said. “We can arrive at transparency through perhaps adjusting policy or adding language to request reports or some other mechanisms that can give both us and the community insight into what is happening in that realm. But I don’t think we need to micromanage it.”
