My thoughts exactly. We have elementary schools with roofs that leak and buckets in the hallways for years; and, those roofs are way down the list of the bond measure upgrades and fixes. Note to PPS: pick the low hanging fruit first and fix the leaky roofs at grade schools. Mold? Here we come!

So typical - management is clueless about how to do things, have to hire someone else to do their jobs.

Maybe firing a few bureaucrats that should be doing the work Deckart's hired for would solve the problem

$90K is a pretty good chunk of one teacher's salary - Which they don't have to get another teacher with now.

You'd have to be crazy to send your kids to PPS.

You'd have to be crazy to send your kids to PPS.

So, then, what? We're supposed to suck it up and pay for all the administrators and their health and retirement and vacation and family leave benefits, and then dig down for private school tuition on top of that? Why not insist on better? Pitchforks are cheap at ACE Hardware.

Same old corruption, different day.

"Dig down for private school tuition?"

Depends - Whats your kids future worth? We're actually one of the few states putting less into the classroom (fortunately the same can't be said of benefits).

Then again, some relationships are toxic and can't be fixed. I'd say give out tuition vouchers.

At a voucher being 6k, that still leaves $5k in the public schools and one less student.

Steve,
Good point. Too bad the teacher's unions and the Oregon education czar, Dr. Kitz, will never go for vouchers. Just bringing it up on the left coast makes their hair stand on end.

This proves pps is not one bit underfunded.ridiculous they lie about how flat broke they are and they always have money to burn like this.pps is reckless with our taxpayers and the entire pps school board needs to be removed from office.

If you have to bring in someone from the outside to do "planning, preparation, and professional consultation for upcoming labor negotiations." then you obviously are planning on firing the person who currently had those responsibilities, right ?

PPS has a recently hired HR person so the poor guy is not up to snuff yet. PPS has their own attorney on staff and other private firms on retainer for whatever the issue might be. For example, PPS paid Miller Nash $2365 for review of campaign materials for the May 2011 bond that was defeated. They must have given great advice as only six of the eight PPS higher ups were fined and paid $75 to the SOS.

The infuriating aspect of PPS is that they cannot identify a problem and come up with an appropriate solution. Each successive school board (changing every 2 years) seems to think they have to invent a whole new system and talk it to death and examine every shade of grey.

They—the board and Carole Smith, have some great tools and information available to them. They chose to ignore the obvious, beginning with targeted enrollments and making tough decisions to consolidate. We only need 6 high schools for the amount of students we have but by golly we are going to rebuild all nine of them and then figure out how we might implement a program to graduate more than 62%. I’m sure they won’t waste time and money by doing this because they know best.

Superintendent Smith should be leading and implementing programs to address the many problems our schools have fallen upon. That is the job of a superintendent, supported by a competent staff... not a citizen committee. A citizen committee cannot solve or understand every nuance of running a school district.

"PPS has a recently hired HR person so the poor guy is not up to snuff yet..."

Prior to being hired by PPS, that "poor guy" worked for Deckard... as a labor relations professional.

The PPS Board could save a bunch of money by simply using the experise they already hired.