District hires new school chief

The Sisters School Board has reason to believe that the third time is a charm. On its third attempt, the board hired a superintendent for the coming year.

The man selected as interim superintendent on a one-year contract last week is Lynn Baker, who has been the superintendent of Cashmere School District in Washington state for the past four years.

About 10 miles west of Wenatchee in the heart of a fruit-growing valley, the Cashmere district is similar in size and character to Sisters. It has 1,400 students who attend three schools -- an elementary, a middle and a high school. The community has many recreational attractions and sees "a lot of tourists coming over from Seattle and Tacoma every weekend," Baker says.

Twice before, the Sisters board agreed on a choice for someone to succeed Superintendent Steve Swisher, who has retired and is leaving at the end of this school year. One nominee, Doug Jantzi of Central Point, withdrew at the last minute while the second, Charles Hellman of Rogue River, could not agree to the board's contract terms after accepting the appointment.

Given the shortage of time, the board then launched a search for an interim superintendent who would work for just one year. For that purpose the board used a list of candidates for interim jobs maintained by the Oregon School Boards Association, a list primarily composed of retired administrators looking for temporary assignments.

Baker was a late addition to the list. He signed up when he heard about the Sisters opening from Joe Crowder, superintendent of the Jackson Education Service District in Medford, whom Baker succeeded in Cashmere. Baker had been looking for an Oregon job because after a person has worked in Washington schools for 30 years, he explained in an interview with The Nugget, "the retirement system becomes regressive. You lose about two percent a year (and) if you do not get at least a 2 percent raise a year you are actually losing on retirement."

The board interviewed three retired Oregon school administrators in addition to Baker. Ironically, Baker made a strong impression on the board partly because he made it clear that he would like to have the job on a regular basis, staying for several years. "One year would not be enough to make a positive difference," he told The Nugget. He said he expects to be a candidate for the permanent position.

With caution born of painful experience, the board did not announce its choice until Baker had agreed to the terms of a contract and had officially signed on.

After everything was completed, Board Chairman Jeff Smith said, "I'm extraordinarily pleased to have Lynn Baker as our interim superintendent. He has a wealth of experience in a variety of districts. He came to us highly recommended by his current board chair and Doug Nelson, the superintendent in Bend" (see below).

Smith confirmed that the new man is interested in staying longer than a year: "Clearly one of the advantages of his availability is the possibility that he could be our long-term superintendent." Nothing is certain in that regard, however. "There is uncertainty about how we'll approach that issue and it is partially dependent upon the relationship we develop with Lynn Baker over the next five or six months," Smith explained.

Baker is a Washington native, born in Aberdeen, where he also got his first teaching job, as a junior high math and language arts teacher in 1971. The next year he moved to an assignment more suited to his training, as a high school social studies teacher in the same district.

Baker received a bachelor's degree in history, with a minor in geography, from Central Washington University in Ellensburg in 1971. He received a master's degree in education from the University of Washington in 1980 and a doctorate in education from Washington State University in 1997.

He held teaching and assistant principal's jobs until 1989, when he was named principal of Pullman High School in eastern Washington. He was actually picked for that job by Doug Nelson, whose name is familiar to Central Oregonians who follow education news.

Nelson, who became superintendent in Pullman just two months before Baker became principal of the district's only high school, was chosen superintendent of the Bend-La Pine School District three years ago. Baker finds the connection a coincidence but says Nelson had nothing to do with his decision to seek the Sisters job.

Baker was clearly aiming for a superintendency when he embarked on his studies for a doctorate at WSU. When he won his first chief executive's job, he had just been elected president-elect of the Washington Association of Secondary School Principals. He never took office, though, because he became a superintendent at the end of the year and in Washington superintendents have their own, separate statewide professional organization.

Although the men were not acquainted before now, there are at least rough similarities between Baker's career and that of the man he will be replacing. Steve Swisher grew up in Klamath Falls and earned his bachelor's degree in math from what was then Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, in 1972. Later he obtained a master of arts in teaching from Lewis and Clark College in Portland.

Swisher started teaching in 1972, just a year later than Baker. He was hired as a math teacher and head wrestling coach at Aloha High School in Beaverton.

Eventually he moved through several secondary school administrative jobs until 1990, when he won his first superintendency, at South Lane School District in Cottage Grove. He left that post in 1994 and worked two years as director of apprenticeship for the Oregon Bureau of Labor before moving back into education in 1996 as the superintendent in Sisters.

Both Swisher and Baker are 53. Baker said he and his wife, Janet, will look for a place to rent in Sisters. They have two daughters and a son, the youngest of whom is graduating from high school.