Ready or not — it’s time for school

Sisters public school students will start a new year of classes next week.

They won’t all hit the door on the same day, though. Those in grades 1 through 6 and 9 will start on Tuesday, August 30. Those in kindergarten and grades 7, 8 and 10 through 12 will start the last day of the month, Wednesday, August 31.

The 2005-06 instructional calendar will be five days longer than 2004-05, thanks to a legislative appropriation that gives Sisters schools enough money to restore five days that were cut for lack of funds last year. That restoration plus a few other factors pushed the start of classes back to the week before Labor Day, which caused some distress among parents and merchants.

Ray’s Food Place Manager Jeff McDonald told the school board the early start will disrupt his business, which relies on a number of student-workers. But the board held firm, while leaving open the possibility of an adjustment next year that might shorten Sisters’ unusually long (two weeks) spring break.

Other differences this school year show up in the list of people who help run the system.

The superintendent (Ted Thonstad) remains the same, having served one full year. The school board is grateful for this continuity at the top. But the board itself has changed considerably since the beginning of the last school year.

Three new members — Rob Corrigan, Mike Gould and Steve Rudinsky — have replaced former members Eric Dolson, Bill Reed and Tom Coffield. Corrigan and Gould were elected to succeed Dolson and Reed, who chose not to run for another term. Reed and his wife Jan were subsequently killed in a private plane crash. Rudinsky was appointed to replace Coffield, who resigned from the board after two years in office.

The new men, who form a majority of the five-member board, are quite different from their predecessors in a variety of ways (see The Nugget, page 23, August 3), which may produce some changes in policy direction in the coming year. The holdover board members are Chairman Jeff Smith and Vice Chairman Glen Lasken.

The district’s administrative ranks contain two new faces. Mark Stewart, a teacher and coach at Obsidian Middle School in Redmond for the past nine years, is the new assistant principal at Sisters High School. He replaces Jim Golden, who left at the end of the last school year to become the principal of Crooked River High School in Prineville.

And Sisters Elementary School has a new principal, Jan Silberman, who has worked in Bend the past four years. Her predecessor, Tim Comfort, who was principal at the elementary school for the past 10 years, has moved to the district central office where he will wear a couple of hats, one as human resources manager and one as director of special education.

In part, Comfort is taking over duties formerly performed by Jan Martin, the superintendent’s administrative assistant who has moved to a similar job with Crooked River School District. There she will work with Superintendent Steve Swisher, who was the superintendent in Sisters for seven years through 2003.

Although the district is not opening a new school this fall, it is still in the construction business. It is remodeling the more historic part of the former middle school at the corner of Locust Street and Highway 20 on the east end of town.

The remodeled structure will house the district’s central administration offices by the end of October. The project is part of a planned civic trifecta that will ultimately see a new library and city hall on the same general site.