State investigates Sisters school program

Two agencies of state government are trying to determine whether Sisters School District violated laws or regulations when it paid parts of the salaries of some teachers at Sonrise Christian School.

The district and the private school mutually agreed to suspend the pay program at the beginning of the current school year, largely at the instigation of Sisters’ new superintendent, TedThonstad.

Since then, the Audits Division of the Secretary of State’s office has launched a formal investigation with which the Department of Education is cooperating pending a possible investigation of its own.

The activity in Salem became known to local officials in late February when Nancy Young, an audits manager in the Secretary of State’s office, sent a letter to Thonstad saying:

“The Audits Division has started an investigation regarding a complaint received from a citizen that was originally reported to the Oregon Department of Justice, Charitable Activities Section. The complainant alleges that the Sisters School District has sponsored, financially supported and is actively involved with a religiously based private school. More specifically, the complainant alleges that the district is counting religiously based private school students as home educated students in its reporting formula to receive state funding.”

The letter went on to request five broad categories of information, including the numbers of students registered in all alternative education programs since 1999, plus “identification of any programs or students claimed in any other programs affiliated with the Sonrise Christian School.”

On March 31, Thonstad replied with a four-page letter addressing Young’s questions, accompanied by 24 pages of statistical data concerning students and programs. The district prepared this material with the help of the law firm Bryant, Lovlien and Jarvis of Bend, which supplied a copy to The Nugget.

Thonstad’s letter said, in part, “The Sisters School District has developed a variety of innovative educational options in order to serve the education needs and interests of all students residing within the district and prepare them to achieve ‘the academic standards of the school district and the state’ (ORS 332.072 and 336:615).

“Because students can now come and go from the public schools based on parental choice and because students attending private and public schools enter both the middle and high schools at various grades, the district has sought to provide educational services in core subjects areas (math and literacy) in order to insure that these non-attending students are adequately prepared to meet both state CIM (Certificate of Initial Mastery) and NCLB (No Child Left Behind)standards.

“The success of these efforts is demonstrated by scores on the state assessments that exceed the state average, one of the lowest dropout rates for high schools of its size, and the fact that 74 percent of Sisters High School students graduate with a CIM.”

A representative of the Audits Division who asked not to be named told The Nugget last week that the investigation probably won’t produce anything “real solid” until late June or the beginning of July. She was reluctant to give any details because “the information-gathering piece is a really critical time for an investigation, so really the less said the better because we don’t want people to run scared. And it (the fact of an investigation) doesn’t mean anything is wrong. We may look into it and find that everything is A-OK.”

She said the division does several kinds of audits — “opinions, information technology, performance audits and we do fraud investigations.” She said the Sisters inquiry is in the lattercategory.

Meanwhile, Randy Harnisch, the executive officer for the State Board of Education, confirmed that the Department of Education is aware of and is cooperating with the Audits Division investigation. The department’s role so far has been mainly to supplyinformation.

“At this point I can’t say a whole lot because we haven’t got a whole lot to say,” Harnisch said. But he explained that “we are looking into the same set of facts (about Sisters School District) from a different perspective,” one related to a statutory prohibition against any public school district sponsoring, financially supporting or becoming actively involved with religious activity (ORS 327.109).

“At this point I can tell you we’re looking at this to determine if this is something that we should investigate,” Harnisch said.