Central Oregonian

Powell Butte charter school opening soon

School still needs 10 more students to enroll by September

RAMONA MCCALLISTER/CENTRAL OREGONIAN

Powell Butte Community Charter School will begin classes on September 7. The school still has room for 10 more students.

Jason Chaney

July 23, 2010

Last year, Crook County School District made the decision to close Powell Butte Elementary School, and the plans for a charter school came together shortly thereafter.

Over the course of the last several months, Powell Butte Community Charter School was formed. Preparations have been made to form a charter agreement with CCSD, design curriculum, and hire a principal. The school also hired seven highly-qualified teachers; Andrea Belding, Tiffnie Ashley, Aubrie Murray, Jackie LaFrenz, Kelly Sherwood, Jennifer Berry-O’Shea, and Shelly Albers.

Dr. Joyce Garrett is also the interim principal for the school for the 2010-2011 school year. She is retired from education, with 34 years of experience. The school will open the search again in November to search for a permanent principal and will hire the most qualified candidate in April.

Garrett’s K-12 experience includes teaching elementary school in Lincoln County and Eugene 4-J school districts, where she worked in both regular and special education. She later served as the Director of Special Education in the Creswell School District.

Garrett also served in higher education as a faculty member and administrator. In 2004, Garrett retired as the Dean of the College of Education at Boise State University and returned to Prineville where she was born and raised.

The school has a selected school board. There are seven members from the community that have shown an interest to serve on the charter school board. Currently, they meet twice a month, and they serve as a public board and are bound by Oregon public meeting laws.

“We are working hard with the Oregon School Board Association (OSBA) to develop all our policies and procedures and to get in-service, so we know how to behave like a public board,” said Garrett.

Charter schools are regulated by federal and state laws as the laws pertain to charter schools. They must follow the charter agreement with the Crook County School District. They must meet Oregon state education standards, and curriculum must align with these standards.

As for the curriculum for the Powell Butte Community Charter School, the board reviewed a number of possibilities. Tom Mottl, Bureau of Land Management, came to the Powell Butte Charter School Board with a proposal for a place-based education model, and after reviewing various options, the board decided on this proposal.

Place-based education is an instructional process using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and other subjects across the curriculum. This form of curriculum helps students to develop the subject matter into a context that they can apply to their own community. Students are immersed in their local environment, heritage and culture. They develop a strong understanding of their immediate surroundings, and then use this understanding of “place” as a base to examine more distant and abstract knowledge throughout the world.

According to Garrett, the theme of focus for the charter school is the watershed. For Powell Butte, that means the Deschutes watershed, but they are also using a great deal of activities from the Ochoco and Crooked River Watershed. It is based around themes within the watershed, she said with each class level studying a different aspect of the watershed.

For example, kindergartners are studying everything they wanted to know about water and more, first grade is studying plants and animals, second grade-rivers and other bodies of water, third grade-community, fourth grade-geology and geography of the watershed, fifth grade-sustainability, and sixth grade is doing a comparative study for watersheds.

The sixth grade is also teaming up with a group of students in Australia who are studying the Murray River Watershed. The curriculum is very hands-on, very field based and very science-based. It incorporates the core subjects of reading, writing, math and social studies skills. The field work involves lots of measuring and data.

In addition to having the curriculum in hand, the school is almost at capacity.

Lynn Lundquist, a member of the board of directors for the new charter school, said that they have room for just 10 more students.

“We are moving forward. We have room for 10 more students. It is critical that we meet our total number of allowed students. Our budget is predicated on that.”

The funding from the state for the charter school comes through the CCSD, and 80 percent goes to the Powell Butte Community Charter School. The remaining funding for the charter school comes from an incentive grant, which is through the Oregon Department of Education. The grant is designed to provide financial assistance for the planning, program design, and initial implementation of high quality charter schools. The funds are also intended to assist the charter school in meeting planning and implementation needs during the initial 36 months.

“We will keep the same calendar that the school district has, and that will enable the transportation to be as efficient as possible,” Lundquist added.

“The first start-up grant helped pay for the curriculum,” said Lundquist.

The school has hired seven teachers onto their staff. One big difference between a charter school and a public school is that a charter school is only required to have 50 percent of the teachers be certified by the Teacher Standards and practices Commission. In the case of Powell Butte, all teachers meet the criteria, and are highly qualified teachers.

“I have seven of the most incredible people you ever witnessed,” said Dr. Garrett. “This week, they are figuring out how to work as a group and how they want to implement this curriculum.”

School will begin on September 7, 2010 at the new charter school.