School program will get a new home

When the Sisters School Board decided last fall to move ahead with remodeling of the retained section of the former middle school building on East Cascade Avenue, that raised an immediate question:

What would the district do with the students who occupy that building now?

Many people are not aware that anyone uses the red brick structure. But in fact, it is home to an important program know as FLEX. That program was described in a letter the district recently sent to the state covering its full panoply of alternative programs:

“This is an off-site alternative education program operated as part of Sisters High School for students enrolled at the high school. Students participating in the FLEX program are placed there due to behavior and/or academic problems. The program provides students with 3.5 hours of small group and/or individual instruction in the morning focused on credit recovery in the core subjects.

“In the afternoon students are involved in work study/placement or may return to the high school to take regular courses. There are 12 to 18 students in the FLEX program at any given time.”

It is, in effect, a rescue effort for students who don’t do well in regular high school classes. Whether their root problem is reading deficiency, as is often the case, or a combination of academic and behavioral failings, FLEX tries to keep them in school, making progress toward a diploma, rather than letting them drop out.

But the district last week ran ads inviting bids for the remodeling of the old brick building, asking for bids by May 26. Even before that date it hopes to put an asbestos abatement contractor to work in the building.

Fortunately, an alternative home has been found for FLEX. You can see it if you look carefully when driving past the high school football field on McKinney Butte Road. Off in the forest just a few yards from the fence around the west side of the field is a grey structure that might be a manufactured home except for a scarcity of windows.

It’s a modular classroom building that contains two identical classrooms. The district bought it used for $38,000 from a Woodburn company that deals in such things.

The final cost, including site work, will be about that.Superintendent Ted Thonstad said last week that the district hopes to move the FLEX program in about three weeks.

The building is not only adequate for this purpose and perhaps others, it is much closer to the high school than the present FLEX site, an advantage that pleases those in charge of the program.

Once FLEX has moved, the district will bear down on its remodeling project.

The renewed brick building ultimately will join two other new public structures — a library and a city hall — to form a civic campus on the former middle school grounds.