Three men up for school positions

Three candidates have filed for the May 17 school election — one for each of the Sisters School Board positions that will be on the ballot. The filing deadline is March 17.

Board Chairman Glen Lasken is seeking re-election to Position 5, as previously announced. He is completing six years on the board.

Two businessmen active in school affairs have filed for the seats being vacated by Bill Reed and Eric Dolson, who do not plan to run again (see The Nugget, February 9, page 1). The candidates are Rob Corrigan, Position 1, and Mike Gould, Position 2.

Although the five seats on the Sisters board are numbered, the board is not zoned geographically. All school district voters can vote for all seats that appear on theballot.

Both Corrigan and Gould are 43. And both have children in Sisters schools. Corrigan’s two children are in the third and fourth grade and Gould’s three sons are distributed among all three schools — in the third, seventh and 10th grades.

Corrigan and his family moved to Sisters three years ago. Before that he spent nearly two decades working primarily in “technology startups” in the San Francisco area. He held executive positions with semiconductor, laser, computer and video graphics firms.

Since moving to Sisters he has acted as a management consultant and still deals with a number of Silicon Valley companies.

A native of the Chicago area, Corrigan holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Harvard but has never worked as an architect.

Gould and his family moved to Sisters in 2000 from Wenatchee, Washington. He has spent his professional life in radio in the Northwest, beginning with “a nighttime disc jockey” job at a station in Astoria in 1979. He later owned and managed a number of stations and now operates his own business, Eastlan, which provides ratings and other research information to radio stations in small markets throughout thecountry.

Gould grew up in the Port Townsend area on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. He is a graduate of Chimacum High School there. Gould chaired the citizens committee that led the successful campaign for renewal of a local option levy for Sisters schools last year. Earlier, he served on the campaign committees promoting the original local option levy in 2000 and those promoting high school bond proposals in 2000 (defeated) and 2001 (approved).

Corrigan, too, worked on the 2004 local option campaign committee. He is also on the Sisters Elementary School Site Council and is a board member of the Sisters School Foundation.

Both men speak highly of Sisters schools and do not express a desire for dramatic change, although both acknowledge district problems related to inadequate funding and a potential for rapid enrollment growth.

Corrigan believes his background in corporate financial management can prove useful on the board, while Gould notes that he has become quite familiar with school issues by attending many board meetings since moving to town.