URAState Board Response

December 3, 2010

I want to thank you all for the opportunity to present this material. As you know the purpose of this presentation is to get you all to value this school enough to over ride the recommendation of the ODE review team. The issues with public education are very complex and everyone from the students themselves, teachers, parents, poverty and TV are being blamed. I believe the answer is going to be similar to finding the cure to a disease. Just as research to find cures are split between the best researchers throughout the world, we need to do the same with education. Each unique student needs a customized education to be successful. We are offering a very innovative idea for a certain type of student that is not doing well in our current public schools. These are students with English as second language. These ELL students as a whole are not successful in Oregon and across the USA. This school offers unique and never tried combinations of approaches and student supports to break through this issue. This model has implications throughout Oregon and the USA. With all the work put forth so far, loosing this opportunity for the students would be a great loss.

Let me move on to convincing you that the application is really strong, that the evaluation committee really feels the application should meet and recommendation to decline this application is an error.

Here are some of the quotes from the evaluation committee that on the whole really liked this application and reflected that in the notes.

“This is the most extensive application I have seen.”

“The proposal is complete and comprehensive and applicant has worked hard to address all additional questions put forward by their district.”

“This school will almost certainly make inroads into the dropout rate for students from the Ukrainian and Russian populations in the metropolitan area and can be relied on to create a successful model for meeting the unique educational challenges of this ethnic group.”

“The community support for the charter school is most compelling. The survey data, the demographic data, and the letters of support all suggest a need for some sort of options for this population.”

The summary of the scoring indicates a very strong application:

  • 27 of 30 sections are passed by the review committee.
  • 2 sections on curriculum are tied 3 to 3. We are not sure why a tie goes to the denied column.
  • 1 section that failed is a commitment to students and staff that we can make right now. This question was not on the district application and to some degree is a technicality in the over 600 pages of excruciating detail.

I would like to address the negative committee comments from sections with 3 meets and 3 did not meet scores. The sections where 3 say the application meets and the 3 say it does not.

“No coverage for PE/Health/art” The district only asked for details of academic subjects. Given the application is full of curriculum examples and mappings to state standards of academic subjects, surely the application demonstrates that these subjects are firmly within our capabilities to develop and document. Further there is nothing in the state ORS that requires every subject to be described to the same extent as subjects that are tested by OAKS and are subject to AYP.

The curriculum for dual immersion is not fully described. Again the 3 to 3 split. Some think ok and some not. We contend that the detail asked for by the negative committee members would be difficult to develop with a planning grant. The development of this innovative program needs real teachers to move into reality. The effort in the application is genuine. The implementation grant phases would allow us to develop the details.

Now to handle the question we missed entirely. “A proposed plan for the placement of public charter school teachers, other school employees and students of the public charter school upon termination or non-renewal of a charter.”This question was not on the district application requirements and there for was not addressed.

URA will form partnerships with the agencies and programs like State of Oregon Employment Department, One Stop Career Centers, Worksource Oregon, Workforce Connections, Oregon Career Information System (CIS), Partnership for Occupational and Career Information (POCI), Career Makers, Career Directions North West, and others to help our employees become competitive in contemporary job market through dissemination of useful information to them, organizing seminars and providing group and individual counseling. URA Board will reserve $5,000 of incentive grant funds for teachers to access an employment finding service provided by private career consulting companies. URA will also form partnership with local Slavic businesses to generate some revenue to cover those costs when the incentive grant funds will exhaust. After that time URA will provide job recommendations and help with placement.

URA will hire career consultants who will work with our students in the following manner: they would prepare several lessons directed towards elementary and middle school students to help them recognize their interests and talents that could be further developed and used for their careers in the future and teach those lessons to the students; they would provide group and individual counseling to high school students to help them with their career choice. The results of this work will be carefully documented and placed in individual career building files for each student. In the event of termination of URA school these consultants will help the students to transition from URA school into other schools by providing detailed recommendation letters to their new schools identifying the work that was done on their career building, counseling on the issues the students might face during the transition period. URA board is fully committed in every case to cooperate fully and work proactively to place every student that is displaced from the URA for any reason including closure of the school.

URA charter school application didn’t pass because 1 section was completely missed since it wasn’t on district application requirement, and the opinions on 2 sections split 3 to 3. We all can agree that it is a very, very close call. There is a Russian saying “He swam through the whole ocean and drowned right next to the seashore.” We hope you understand it means that if a person went through a lot to achieve something, spent a lot of time and efforts on it, managed to come up with widely recognized professional solution to the issue, but didn’t get a result because of a very minor technicality. We would like to plead to the State Board to give us a chance to swim through a couple of yards that we got left so that our project doesn’t drown within only a few seconds of reaching the seashore. We would like to ask the State Board to still vote in favor of this application for the following reasons:

The section that was missed is a very minor issue which can be easily resolved. It is very easy to come up with asound proposed plan for the placement of public charter school teachers, other school employees and students of the public charter school upon termination or non-renewal of a charter, and form the partnerships described above.

We would like to ask the State Board to give us the benefits of the doubt that we would polish our curriculum to the extend that it would have been accepted by the ODE review group if they had seen it after it was polished and described in more details. Please believe us that the fact that some reviewers thought that the curriculum is not described enough doesn’t mean that we will not have a successful program, but it was not simply described enough in this application at this time to satisfy the demands of all the reviewers, but once the implementation grant is received and educational professionals will work on it, it will be perfected the way that all the reviewers would have been satisfied and happy with it.

If the State Board feels that it is not able to vote in favor of URA application at this time, we would like to ask you for a big favor and postpone the voting and/or our presentation until the next State Board meeting on January 21-22, 2011, and give us a chance to prove you that we will be successful in dealing with the 3 sections that didn’t pass by providing you with the extra information that was missed in the above 3 sections.

Please let us explain some more reasons behind our compassion for this project. According to the numerous research data, the best student ratio of dual immersion program is 50/50, when 50% of students consider English to be their native language, and 50% consider a different language to be their native language. We hope to achieve such ratio, when 50% of our students will consider Russian/Ukrainian to be their native languages (some of those students will be Russian/Ukrainian heritage students who recently came from Russia/Ukraine, and some will not), and another 50% of our students will consider English to be their native language (some of those students will be Russian/Ukrainian heritage students who where born here and speak only English, and some of them will not be Russian/Ukrainian heritage students). According to the professors of Russian language in Colleges and Universities in USA (from PSU, PCC, Reed College and others), the majority of students who study Russian language are not Russian heritage students and have nothing to do with Russian ethnicity. Those students are interested in learning Russian language only because Russian is one of the most popular global languages, and they believe that they will be more successful in their careers if they learn it. Those students say that if there was a Russian dual immersion school in their district, they would have definitely studied there. Please read the article “Russia(n) is Back” at and you will understand everything.

When Russian immigrant families teach their children Russian language, and if those children could go to Russian dual immersion school and teach their non-Russian classmates Russian language, that would result in non-Russian students getting tons of extra knowledge of Russian language and culture for free. We believe that it would be a shame to waste such a resource.

Please consider that these are desperate times for public education. We cannot afford to turn away such committed innovators. This is an important population of students throughout Oregon and may be the key to ensure immigrant populations are successful in accessing public education in the USA. The application is strong and the idea innovative. Please approve to enable this school to go forward.

I appreciate your time and attention.

Thank You,

URA Team