Lora Nordquist leaving Sisters Middle School

One of the pillars of the Sisters school system is leaving. Sisters Middle School Principal Lora Nordquist announced last week that she has accepted a job with Crook County schools in Prineville, beginning with the 2006-07 school year.

Nordquist and her family will continue to live in Tollgate during the first year of her new job to enable her daughter Katie, now a junior, to graduate from Sisters High School.

Nordquist has worked in Sisters for 14 years, coming here from Seaside as a high school English teacher when Sisters resumed its high school program after a 25-year hiatus. She taught in the high school for eight years before becoming principal of the middle school in 2000.

In addition to running the middle school she serves as the district’s curriculum coordinator and is known across the region for her expertise in curriculum and instruction.

Her departure raises to three the number of Sisters school administrators who have taken jobs with Crook County schools since former Sisters School Superintendent Steve Swisher became Crook County superintendent in the fall of 2004 (see related story, page 31.). The Prineville system earlier lured away Sisters High School Assistant Principal Jim Golden and Human Resources Manager Jan Martin.

Local concern over Nordquist’s departure will be heightened by the fact that this fall Sisters will shift its fifth grade classes to the middle school to reduce crowding in the elementary school building. Nordquist has been deeply involved in planning and preparing for that transition.

Nordquist said in an interview last week that she’ll continue to help with the project through the end of this school year and “I’ll still be living a block away” for the first year of her new job.

“It’s really the teachers who are going to make this work and I’m so confident the staff will make this work I’m not really worried about it,” she added.

In Prineville, Nordquist said she will hold “a couple of jobs combined,” both newly created. One will have her serving as the secondary literacy coach, a position in which she’ll be “working with both middle school and high school staffs on reading and writing strategies…helping students be more successful in all areas of literacy.

“That’s a passion of mine,” she said, “something I’ve been working on in this district and doing some training in with the Oregon Writing Project for the past two or three years. It’s something I would like to get better at, so that part is really exciting.”

She will also be the district’s arts and communications coordinator, “so all the fine arts teachers in the district will come under my supervision.”

In addition, Nordquist says she will teach one high school English class, returning to her first love in instruction.

She said that although the literacy coach function will be new to Crook County it is used in several other places, including Beaverton, which is now led by former Redmond Superintendent Jerry Colonna.

“One of the things that has been a nationwide issue in the last few years,” she explained, “is this recognition that we’re doing some pretty great stuff in working with elementary students with a real focus on reading. But then there’s sort of an assumption that, ‘Oh, they’ve got it.’

“There’s an old saying that kids learn to read in grades one through three and then from grade four on we just expect them to read to learn. And some students who might be even on track in grade three, as material becomes more difficult they don’t have a strategy to be successful. There’s just an assumption that they can do it.”

She said there’s more of a challenge in this respect in Crook County, where test scores are not as high as in Sisters and where there’s more poverty in the population being served.

Nordquist, 49, said she is not leaving because of any dissatisfaction with Sisters schools.

“I’m not wearing out on this job, or burning out. I have loved every minute I’ve been here. But opportunities come up and you can’t time when they do, but there it is and you have to jump at it.”

She suggested that another factor played a role: “I’m an Army brat and I’ve lived in Sisters twice as long as I’ve lived anywhere my entire life and I think I have a little bit of a restless spirit in me, like, ‘OK, that was fun. Now what’s next?’ I think I’m just ready for the next challenge.”

Although she was born in Eugene, Nordquist had a peripatetic childhood because of her father’s Army career. “I went to eight schools in my 12 years of public education,” she recalled, “which is part of the reason it’s so important to me to let my daughter finish Sisters High. I learned a lot, but it was very traumatic to change schools that often.”

She graduated from high school in Virginia and attended the University of Virginia, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in English education in 1978. She later received a master’s in education from the University of Oregon.

Her son, Evan, 27, graduated from Sisters High as valedictorian in 2000 and now lives in Australia. Her husband, John, a former English teacher, works as a contractor and built both houses the Nordquists have lived in during their time in Sisters.

A pulp publisher might call it The Great Brain Robbery. Although it wouldn’t make much of a novel, the exodus of school administrators from Sisters to Prineville in the past two years has been notable.

A touch of irony is added by the name of the receiving entity: Crook County School District.

The objects of this educational larceny have been:

• Jim Golden, assistant principal of Sisters High School, who went to Prineville in the fall of 2005 to become principal of Crook County High School.

• Jan Martin, administrative assistant to the superintendent, secretary to the school board and human resources manager, who also took a Crook County job last fall as administrative assistant to the superintendent and school board secretary.

• Most recently, Lora Nordquist, principal of Sisters Middle School, who announced last week that beginning with the next school year she will take a newly created administrative position in the Crook County system (see story, page 1).

High School special education teacher Mark Keel also went to Prineville last fall.

The prime suspect in these changes is Steve Swisher, who was superintendent of Sisters schools for seven years until officially retiring in 2003. His retirement has been in name only. He took an interim superintendency in Gold Beach for a year and then became Crook County superintendent in the fall of 2004.

His years in Sisters made Swisher well acquainted with the ranks of school people here, of course, and it would be naive to imagine that he played no role in encouraging some of those he formerly supervised to consider openings in his current system.

When asked about this, Nordquist acknowledged that she is a big Swisher fan.

“Seriously, I would not be sitting here today if it were not for Steve Swisher,” she said during an interview in her middle school office last week. “He told me I would love being a building principal. I never thought as a teacher that I would want to go into administration, but over about three years he talked me into it and the moment I started doing it I loved it.”

She said that for some period of time she has been in touch with Swisher and others, talking about what she considers some exciting things being done in Crook County schools. When the position she will take was being formed, Swisher talked to her about considering it.

She believes the districtwide responsibilities she will have in Prineville will move her toward her career goal of being a superintendent. “And of course, Steve Swisher has been a personal mentor since I got into administration so (the new job will be) an opportunity to learn from him.”

Although Crook County is more than twice as large as Sisters, with about 3,000 students, the lure for Nordquist wasn’t money. She said she will make approximately the same there as she does here, $77,000 “and change.”