News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Parents elected to the Sisters High School site council can now serve a maximum of two two--year terms.
The site council, which serves as a community--staff advisory group for the high school, amended its bylaws to include term limits at its Wednesday, May 12, meeting. The decision currently affects only one person on the site council, parent member Laurie Adams.
Adams questions the decision. According to Adams, parents and other site council members are not serving multiple terms anyway.
"I'm the only person in the history of the site council, I believe, who has opted for a second term," Adams said. "For the parent representatives there is a built--in limit. The parents are only able to be representatives if they have a student in the site school."
Adams said she takes the move personally. She told The Nugget she feels as though she has been targeted for removal because she has been outspoken and critical of what she sees as a slow pace in establishing programs to monitor student progress in the certificate of initial mastery (CIM).
"I don't believe that's true at all," said Lora Nordquist, the administrative member of the council. "I don't think there was any personal agenda."
Both Nordquist and site council chair Glenda Hyde acknowledged complaints by Adams that the school fell short of accomplishing some goals the site council thought were important. The high school was unable to provide "report cards" on students' progress on the CIM. According to Hyde and Nordquist, the state still has not supplied the test score results needed to produce the report cards.
The high school was also unable to host student--led conferences, where students lead parents and a staff advisor through their CIM portfolios to gauge progress. The middle school held such conferences successfully this spring.
According to Hyde, scheduling problems made it impossible to offer the conferences and the staff decided to pull the plug for this year.
Nordquist acknowledged that the decision marked a failure to follow through.
"We as a staff didn't do what we needed to do to be ready for student--led conferences," she said. "The middle school had the same plan and they had them."
Adams believes the decision to pull the plug should have come back to the site council rather than handled as an "executive decision."
She thinks her outspokenness on this and other issues led to the term limits decision.
Hyde and Nordquist said the decision is part of an effort to involve new people in school decisions - but it is not an effort to run Adams off.
In fact, Nordquist said, she encouraged Adams to remain involved in the school's curriculum committee.
"If it had been a teacher - if it had been me - who had been on for four years, the same question could very well have come up," Nordquist said.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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