Steve Swisher takes new job in Brookings

Sisters School Superintendent Steve Swisher will trade the high desert for the beach next school year. He will become interim superintendent of the Brookings-Harbor School district on the southern Oregon coast. Brookings and Harbor are neighboring small towns at the mouth of the Chetco River, not far from the California border.

"I got the call about a week ago," Swisher explained last week. The call was from the Oregon School Boards Association, which was helping Brookings find a new chief executive. The current superintendent, Paul Prevenas, announced recently that he was leaving at the end of the school year to take a job as headmaster of a private school in Hawaii.

Swisher drove from Salem, where he had been attending a meeting, to Brookings for an interview with school board members and other district officials. He was the last of four candidates to be interviewed. But before he was a mile out of town on his way home, he got a call on his cell phone telling him the board wanted him to fill the one-year position.

Swisher, 53, came to Sisters in 1996. He officially retired in January but agreed to continue working on contract until the end of the school year to help with the transition.

The Sisters board last month chose Charles Hellman, 59-year-old superintendent of Rogue River schools near Medford, to succeed Swisher on July 1.

The Sisters school boss originally hoped to become executive director of the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators, but was beaten out in tough competition for that post by an old acquaintance, Bethel School Superintendent Kent Hunsaker.

Swisher said he would not be a candidate for the permanent job in Brookings.

He and his wife will "get an apartment or a small house or something like that" in Brookings but will retain their home in the Tollgate subdivision near Sisters.

One advantage of the new job for Swisher is that Brookings is in Curry County, which has a population of only 22,000.

Public Employee Retirement System rules forbid retirees from working more than about half-time for any PERS employer unless the job is in a county with a population under 35,000.

Brookings-Harbor School District operates three schools -- elementary, middle and high school -- the same as Sisters. But its enrollment is more than half again as large, 1,900 students compared with about 1,200 in Sisters.