How Oregon schools are preparing for the 2022 school year

School is just around the corner. But with staff shortages across the nation, new COVID-19 guidelines and the youth mental health crisis, what is top of mind for school leaders across the state? We’ll hear from three superintendents: Laura Orr from Ukiah School District, Steve Cook from Bend-La Pine Schools and Ryan Carpenter from Estacada School District. They join us to share their plans for this school year and what they’re most looking forward to as school begins.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Summer vacation is ticking away. The new school year is just around the corner. But after years of uncertainty, an ongoing youth mental health crisis, staffing shortages and an evolving pandemic, what is this year going to be like, and how are our school leaders right now getting ready? We’re going to start today with three school superintendents: Laura Orr is from Ukiah, a School District in Umatilla County; Steve Cook is from the Bend-La Pine School District, and Ryan Carpenter leads the Estacada School District in Clackamas County. Welcome to all three of you.

Laura Orr / Steve Cook / Ryan Carpenter: Thank you.

Miller: I want to start with the CDC. They recently loosened some of their guidelines, including getting rid of quarantining after exposure. Also, if someone does test positive, the CDC now recommends masking for 10 days with isolation ending after day five, if people are starting to feel better, if symptoms are going away. Ryan Carpenter, first. What’s all this going to mean in terms of your approach to the pandemic?

Ryan Carpenter: Thanks again for having me, Dave, and we are very appreciative of local school districts to be provided with a little bit more authority in an effort to meet the needs of each of our unique communities that we all serve and represent. And so we appreciate that the CDC, as well as the department of education continue to keep a close watch over what are some best practices in an effort to keep our students and community healthy while still keeping schools open. The Estacada School District is really focused on trying to ensure that we protect and support each individual’s choice and how they choose to navigate school during the pandemic. And so we’re going to continue to focus on really supporting our students and families who choose to come to school, wearing face coverings as well as support and make those who choose not to, feel welcome as well. And so we just want to really honor the individual and their choice as we welcome all kids back to school this year.

Miller: What would it take for you to reinstall a mask mandate in Estacada Schools?

Carpenter: Several factors. First and foremost is teaching, keeping a close watch on the metrics and the, and the level of people who are testing positive. But lastly, it would be a decision that would come ultimately from the community, led by our school board and our executive leadership team. And if we felt like the transmission and or the circumstances in order for our schools to remain open for all kids required us to do something different, that would then become a community conversation as we moved in that direction.

Miller: Laura Orr, in Umatilla County, only 38% of kids ages 12 to 17 have been fully vaccinated and only 12% of younger kids ages 5 to 11. Those are a lot lower than the numbers statewide or in Clackamas or Deschutes Counties. I’m wondering if that factors into your approach to COVID protocols in your school?

Laura Orr: Similarly to Estacada, we’re a community that very much values choice. Many of our community members... we’ve all got a wide range of views on the topic, and yes, our student numbers or youth numbers in terms of vaccination are low. At the same time our district has been live and in person throughout the entire pandemic. So because of that, we have developed some pretty effective protocols in terms of cleaning and checking and monitoring student health, community health, students and families self reporting and having a very big, real active conversation about what’s happening in terms of status and conditions in the county as well as in our community and among family members. So, for us, it’s something that’s not new. We’ve been navigating that the entire time and we will just continue to adjust and adapt as we need to.

Miller: Steve Cook. What about Bend-LaPine, overall? How would you describe your COVID approach as we enter this new school year?

Steve Cook: Dave I think our approach can be best summarized in an action that was taken by our board at about this time last year. Our board passed a resolution that once vaccines were made available to students that would be in our schools, and an appropriate amount of time had passed, our district was going to be out of the responsibility of being the mask police, and I think that, and so when, once the school district had the authority again to make the decision on whether or not students were going to be masked or whether it was going to be a personal decision by families, we governed the district the rest of that way, after March of this past spring. And quite frankly, that worked to the extent that people made very real decisions for themselves. In some cases we had flare ups in classrooms or even grade levels in which we would administer our layered approach a little more strictly and there were cases in which we put particular classrooms back under mandatory masking for a temporary amount of time to kind of manage the hotspots if you will, of increased cases in those classrooms or in those grade levels. And we anticipate going into this year in a very similar fashion that we won’t dictate the masking protocol whatsoever. But I do anticipate generally across all of our schools, but I do anticipate that there will be times when we’ll have issues in classrooms where we’ll have to intervene and we do that in alignment and in accordance to just traditional communicable disease kind of protocols that have been in place for many, many years.

Miller: I want to turn to questions of staffing, a hugely important question for a lot of employment sectors, including schools in the last year. Ryan Carpenter, first, in Estacada, what do your teacher numbers look like right now? And do you have enough?

Carpenter: Thanks for asking such a very important question as we get schools going and the Estacada School District is experiencing a kind of a boom when it comes to our growth in student enrollment. So not only is it important for our school district to staff the needs that we currently have, but Estacada is one of the largest growing communities in the state of Oregon right now. So we actually are working hard to acquire and recruit more additional staff to run and operate our services. We were very fortunate that  during this pandemic to be a school district who focused heavily on employee engagement and working hard to meet the needs of our hardworking classroom teachers, bus drivers, cooks, custodians, etc, during that pandemic. And the Estacada School District this year, this summer, experienced a 92% retention rate. So we’re very proud to see our classroom educators returning for another year inside our school district and we think that’s paramount as we try to build healthy, long lasting relationships with our community as well. And so I can only speak to the Estacada School District, but we are less concerned about the return of our current staff. We are more concerned about ensuring that we can find substitutes to cover for our teachers when they do take their deserved and contractual days. We want our workforce rested and ready to serve our kids at full capacity and our inability to provide substitutes is going to lead to a fatigued staff quicker during the school year.

Laura Orr, what about you? Do you have enough teachers and substitutes and cafeteria workers and other employees?

Laura Orr: We have a very tight teaching staff and support staff. We only have twenty-four kids. So with that comes pretty... there’s not many of us. So jobs, if one takes a day off, we all have to adjust. I don’t have local substitutes. So my next nearest local substitute is fifty miles away and I have to make arrangements ahead of time and it’s a challenge for sure. If my cafeteria cook is sick or takes a day off, it’s kind of a scramble and I have often taken over cafeteria duties and served lunch, because if she’s sick, she’s sick and finding a sub is very challenging, and hiring…

[Voices overlap]

Miller: But aren’t you also, but you’ve been a science teacher yourself, right?

Laura Orr: Yes.

Miller:  And you’re still going to do that and be the high school principal and the superintendent, and then fill in as needed, if you have to cook lunch?

Orr: If I have to, I have to, if there’s only so many people to do the jobs, there’s only so many people to do the job.

Miller: Hmm.

Orr: It’s one of the hard realities, but also positive of a tiny school district. We are very much interconnected. We support each other extremely, and we cover as we can cover, if we know it’s something we can plan for it. If we can make arrangements, we absolutely will make arrangements to get the substitute, give people time off. But it’s based to communication and making sure that we plan as best we can. If it’s an emergency situation, we roll with the situation and we do the best that we can. We might all cover for a half a day while we get a substitute to come in for a day or two. It’s the reality of a rural school district. You cover each other’s back.

Miller: Steve Cook, what about Bend-LaPine? It’s many, many, many times larger than the twenty-four student Ukiah School District. What does staffing look like right now?

Steve Cook: So Dave, we employ over two thousand employees for roughly seventeen thousand, five hundred students that we have in the district. And I can tell you last year there wasn’t a single person in the district office that didn’t go out and substitute somewhere in the district to cover for missing personnel or staff that were sick or absent for one reason or another. And so we have been just profusely recruiting, for mostly our classified positions, our teaching positions are reasonably full. We’re doing pretty well with our teaching positions, but we are still looking to hire our classified positions – nutrition services, and custodial. If anybody’s interested, please come check us out. We’re doing job fairs every Thursday in the district. Thanks for the opportunity to plug that. We need employees. We’ve been fortunate to have a pretty good return on investment in recruitment for our bus drivers, which is going to be a big game changer for us, being able to change our routing systems to keep kids off of buses for shorter amounts of times during the day and start to reintroduce field trips and busing services for extracurricular activities. And so this has been a significant challenge. I don’t think it’s limited to rural districts anymore. I think it’s a public education issue, and I think we’re fighting it all across the country in districts of every size. Every educator I talk to is experiencing similar kinds of challenges.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we’re talking right now with three Oregon School Superintendents, Ryan Carpenter leads the Estacada School District, Laura Orr is from the Ukiah School District and Steve Cook is from Bend-LaPine Schools. Ryan Carpenter, to go back to you. The federal government and a number of medical and professional organizations have been sounding an alarm for more than a year now that we are in the middle of a youth mental health crisis in this country. What does that look like in Estacada Schools and how are you responding to it?

Ryan Carpenter:  Yeah, thank you. Well, I would echo the sentiments of those experts in the field that as students returned to our schools during and post pandemic. We are seeing and experiencing greater social and emotional needs of really, all of our students from all different walks of life, including the learning gaps that we’re still trying to frantically close, but some of those gaps in learning also leads to different escalations of student behaviors. And so thanks to some of the new Oregon legal procedures where the CAT tax [Corporate Activity Tax]  is coming through the student investment accounts and even through some of the federal ESSER [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief] funding, the Estacada School District has been able to attempt to hire more social, emotional psychological expert services, nursing services to meet some of the demands of today’s students, but similar to what we’re communicating in terms of the difficulties of finding substitutes, we’re also experiencing shortcomings in finding qualified personnel to help us do this very heavy lifting of meeting the needs of each kid. And as we all know, especially when it comes to psychological services, relationships are absolutely paramount and trust is paramount. And we’re constantly seeing turnover in those psychological services, limiting the ability for our psychologists to grow trusting relationships with our students who need it the most. So it is an area of high concern for us as we proceed forward.

Miller: And it seems like you have the funding whether from the state or from federal governments, but nevertheless, that’s not enough. You can’t necessarily hire people.

Carpenter: That’s correct. That has been our experience thus far and the people we have gotten have been excellent, but the need just continues to grow.

Miller: Laura Orr, what about you, in a much smaller district?

Orr: Our district, even though it’s small and we’re very tightly connected, we still are facing the same struggles. The kiddos need more support. They’ve lost some of their connections and their relationships with the teachers and schools. Their parents have lost some of those connections. Every single person in our community has been impacted in some way over the last couple of years and those stresses come out in a variety of ways. We’re not any different than anybody else in that respect. We do have some extra challenges in the fact that I’m not a big enough district to hire someone to be a counselor. I had shared a counselor regionally through the ESD [Educational Service District], so I may get services once a week and often those services are remote, which is a challenge. It helps, it’s hard for the kids to build that relationship so that you can move those things forward. Because we understand it’s a need and you cannot have the kids working on those educational gaps and making their needed academic progress if their mindset is not in the right place, we are focusing some of our efforts on staff training and making sure our staff, who really do want to help the kids, understand how to best help these kids, and that’s not something that is typically taught in your general education teacher preparatory classes. You don’t get extreme behavior training. We need that in our staff members so that they can reach out and meet the needs of those kids where they are in their everyday classrooms and as a collective whole, we can move forward. And if our staff has the tools or some resources and support to meet these new, intense demands on their classroom time, where we’re finding and hoping that it continues to be that they are, they feel better prepared and they feel like what they are facing is not quite exhausting, we have less burnout, we have more retention and that can continue to grow partnerships – school, community, students, parents – and we can all move through this better.

Miller: Laura Orr, before we say goodbye, I just want to note that now four generations of your family have gone to Ukiah Schools, the district you are now the superintendent of. You’re just starting there after teaching there for a while, from your grandmother to your own children. What does that family connection mean to you?

Orr: Mine is just one of several in the area. It’s pretty awesome. It really is cool and it’s amazing to be able to look in the hallway where all of the senior pictures for all the graduating classes have been since the forties, and be able to point out family members and longtime family friends. But my family is just one of several in the area that gets to have that same connection and Ukiah might be teeny, tiny and in the middle of nowhere. But it is absolutely the home center for far more people than our active population will indicate. It’s a safe space, it’s a home, it’s a grounding location. So connections are huge, and everywhere.

Miller: Laura Orr, Steve Cook and Ryan Carpenter, thanks very much, and here’s to a great school year.

Orr / Cook / Carpenter: Thank you. Thank you very much. …just take the time.

Miller: Laura Orr is a Superintendent for the Ukiah School District, Ryan Carpenter, Superintendent for Estacada School District and Steve Cook is in charge of the Bend-LaPine School District. Coming up after a break. We’re going to hear why violent crimes against Indigenous people can often fall through the legal cracks.

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