Longtime Sisters teacher will retire

Diane Jacobsen always wanted to be a teacher.

“I was the oldest of four children, the only girl,” she explains, “so I naturally was very bossy and took on the care of my younger brothers quite easily, more than they wanted. So I was holding school at my house when I was just a little girl.”

She went through Salem schools, obtained an education degree from the former Oregon College of Education in Monmouth, and began her public school career teaching sixth graders in Gladstone, a suburb of Portland. She will conclude it in June when she retires, having taught at Sisters Elementary School for the past 27 years.

Most of that time she has spent teaching fourth graders, which she found to be the perfect fit for her interests and temperament.

“I tried teaching third grade one year; that was enough,” she recalls. They required too much spoon-feeding.

“Fourth grade is so exciting because the kids are starting to understand the world and are excited to learn about it. Nothing is stupid…Even by the fifth grade kids will get kind of callous and say, ‘Aw, that’s boring.’ But nothing is boring to a fourth grader. That’s my opinion, anyway.”

In addition to enjoying fourth graders, Jacobsen especially likes teaching the social studies curriculum. “I absolutely love teaching about Oregon history and geography. That’s kind of become my passion and probably will become what I do when I retire.”

Twenty years ago, she and a teaching partner devised “a huge field trip. We (their classes) would study Oregon history and then go out and see the places where we studied. That has become a great tradition and I sure hope it continues.”

The group visits Laurel Hill near Mt. Hood, where the pioneers had to lower their wagons by rope down to the Barlow Road. They also go to Fort Vancouver and the Oregon Trail Museum at Oregon City. This year they’ll go to the special National Geographic presentation on Lewis and Clark at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland.

This is a two-day trip, finishing at the state Capitol, and the travelers spend the night in sleeping bags on the gym floor at the Gladstone school where Jacobsen first taught.

Jacobsen is well-known within Sisters schools for her interest in Oregon history. Tim Comfort, who was her principal at Sisters Elementary for 10 years before taking a central office job this year, says, “She’s probably done more Indian pow-wows than any other teacher in the country.” Families as well as students attend those events.

How did Jacobsen, who started teaching near Portland, wind up in Sisters? She remembers well: In her third year at Gladstone there was a music program at the middle school where she worked. The families were so busy that as each grade level performed, half the students left with their parents. By the time it came to the finale only a handful of kids were still there. “And I thought, I need to live in a smaller, slower-pace-of-life place where the kids and their education are really important.”

So she applied to every school district east of the Cascades. She received offers from Sisters and Culver and chose Sisters. She began teaching sixth grade here in 1979, switching to the fourth grade eight years later.

She has clearly enjoyed her work here, despite the long hours. She is routinely in the building by 6 a.m. on school days and spends Sunday working in her office as well. “I call it my church,” she says with a wry smile.

In a letter to the school board announcing her retirement plans, she wrote: “Thank you so much for letting me teach at this wonderful school. I loved every child and every subject that I taught…It is so great to make a difference — and Sisters has fulfilled my life’s dreams.”

She acknowledges that, at 52, she is relatively young to be choosing retirement. So why is she doing so?

She is pensive for a moment, and then replies, “Because I have seen a lot of changes and I think kids deserve somebody who’s excited about the changes. I’m not that excited about all the changes. I also am at a school now that isn’t the small school (that it used to be) and I miss that a lot. And you know, the parents in Sisters are very busy, the teachers are very busy and you don’t have that slower pace of life that I wanted to have when I came here. Also I just feel that it’s time for me to move to Chapter Two of my life.”

She will need to continue to work at something for the sake of income, but hopes to do so only half-time to leave more time for her family. She and her husband Kirk have a 12-year-old son who attends Sisters Middle School. Diane hopes to remain in Sisters long enough for him to graduate from high school. Kirk is a metal sculptor and since their son was born has been a stay-at-home dad.

Jacobsen doesn’t have anything specific in mind for her next job but hopes it will deal with her love of history, especially state and local history. She wouldn’t mind writing a sequel to “That Was Yesterday,” the main book on the history of the Sisters area, although she doesn’t imagine that would pay much.

Therein lies a coincidence. “That Was Yesterday” was co-authored by Tillie Wilson, who was a Sisters elementary teacher from 1923 to 1961. She holds the longevity record for teaching in Sisters, 38 years. The person with the second-longest record of continuous teaching will be Diane Jacobsen, whose 27 years have extended from 1979 to 2006.