Sisters hires new school principal

Kathryn Miner will be the next principal of Sisters Middle School. For the past three years she has been the principal of Edmund Brown High School, a Redmond alternative school.

She will succeed Lora Nordquist, who in July will take a newly created administrative job in Crook County School District after six years as principal of Sisters Middle School and eight years before that as a Sisters High School English teacher.

“I’m very excited to be coming to such an outstanding school,” Miner said over the weekend. She pledged “to continue the tradition of excellence that Lora has established” and to try to enhance the program by drawing upon her own background and special interests.

Miner was chosen from a field of 29 applicants. Their files were reviewed by a diverse community screening committee, which interviewed several semi-finalists and ultimately recommended two candidates to Superintendent Ted Thonstad. He made the final decision, choosing Miner over an unnamed Bend administrator who was the other finalist.

Three internal candidates applied for the job: fourth grade teacher Kelly Powell, who is also president of the Sisters Education Association; high school counselor Debbie Newport and high school home economics teacher Michelle Herron.

“I’m very pleased with this choice,” Thonstad said. “I think she’ll do an outstanding job. She’s done amazingly innovative things at Brown and she brings a skill set that will be helpful to this district…”

By winning the Sisters job Miner will actually be shortening her daily commute; she already lives in Sisters. She and her family have lived here for the past two years despite the fact that both she and her husband, a chiropractor, have been working in Redmond. She said they moved to Sisters because “the community just felt right.” The couple’s two children, William, a first grader, and Annie, a third grader, attend Sisters Elementary School.

Born in Oakland, Miner grew up there and in Berkeley, ultimately obtaining a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. She later obtained a master’s in special education from Lewis and Clark College in Portland and in June will be awarded a doctorate in education from the University of Oregon. Her special field of study has been educational leadership.

The 45-year-old educator started her career in the San Francisco financial district, working for an insurance brokerage firm and later an advertising agency. She has done some graduate level course work in business.

Her first teaching job was at a court-administered rehabilitative program for adjudicated boys age nine to 12 on the California-Nevada border. That led to several years of work with Mount Bachelor Academy, a private, residential therapeutic program for boys and girls in grades six to 12, in Prineville and Bend.

This was followed by a year as a court school detention teacher in the Juvenile Justice Center in Bend. The next year she was a special education teacher at the River Bend Alternative Middle School in Bend.

From 2000 to 2003 Miner served as the behavior resource specialist at Lynch Elementary School in Redmond, specializing in behavior management. That led to her 2003 appointment as the principal of Brown High School, an alternative high school of 130 students where, according to her resume, she “led staff through a comprehensive three-year school improvement process” that raised attendance from 68 percent to 92 percent.

Next month, Miner will deliver a paper on the general topic of her doctoral dissertation at a conference of the national Council of Chief State School Officers in San Francisco.