IN BRIEF
Priests share concerns
about church's future
PORTLAND — Recruiting more
priests to halt the national decline in
their ranks is among the toughest
challenges the Roman Catholic
Church will face in the 21st century,
church leaders say.
About 250 priests from around the
country are attending a conference in
Portland this week to talk about some
of the top issues affecting their work
at the parish level.
Rev. Bob Silva, president of the Na
tional Federation of Priests’ Councils,
urged them to “promote the vocation
of the priesthood” and demonstrate
that “priests are strong in their faith
and courageous leaders” who care
about the integrity of a church that
has suffered through debilitating sex
abuse scandals and is under increas
ing pressure to ordain women.
“We don’t claim to be knights in
shining armor,” Silva said, but a re
newal of commitment to the church
is needed at a time when “there’s a
strong and growing suspicion of in
stitutions of any kind.”
The total population of Catholics
increased 29 percent nationally
from 1978 to 2005 while the number
of priests has declined 26 percent,
according to federation figures.
By comparison, when the
Catholic population more than dou
bled in the United States from
1900-1950, the number of priests
more than tripled.
— The Associated Press
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Lawmakers debate
raising high school
class requirements
BY JULIA SILVERMAN
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
PORTLAND — During a Washing
ton, D.C., meeting of 34 of the nation’s
governors last February, Gov. Ted Ku
longoski proclaimed Oregon one of
13 states newly committed to raising
its high school standards.
But back at home, with a legislature
that’s preoccupied with bickering over
how much money to set aside for
schools in the next two years, that lofty
goal has proved tougher to jump-start.
Most people agree that the state
needs to raise its requirements for high
school graduation. Current require
ments — three years of English and
two years of general math — are
among the lowest in the nation.
But there are looming questions
over how to structure the new require
ments and how to pay for them.
Rep. John Lim, R-Gresham, is spon
soring a bill to add an extra year of
both English and math, with the extra
year of English to begin by 2007 and
the math to follow a year later. Lim
said that means Oregon students
would have to rack up 24 credits to
graduate from high school, up from
the current 22.
The bill has drawn widespread sup
port, including critical backing from
the chairs of the House and Senate Ed
ucation committees, Lim said.
State education officials are on
board too, although they are con
cerned about how much it might
cost to implement such a plan and
are anxious to avoid putting another
unfunded mandate on school dis
tricts already coping with stringent
new federal requirements.
“We need to understand what the
cost will be and what the state will
need to invest to make that opportuni
ty real for students in Oregon,” said
James Sager, an education policy ad
viser to Kulongoski.
Deputy Schools Superintendent
Pat Burk said the state estimates
that 64 percent of Oregon students
would need to take an additional
year of math.
Assuming an average class size of
40 students per room, the
state would have to hire about 109
new math teachers at a cost of
$5.4 million, Burk said.
State estimates of how many stu
dents would need to add another
year of English are slightly higher,
Burk said — about 68 percent —
and could cost at least $5.7 million
for about 115 new teachers.
Those numbers, based on question
naires given to Oregon students who
took the SAT last year, are preliminary
and need to be refined, Burk said. In
dividual school districts could be asked
to pitch in and to report exactly how
many courses students are taking, he
and others said.
Lim said he’s not persuaded that
adding requirements would be proliib
itively costly, pointing to states such as
Arkansas and Kentucky that spend
less per pupil than Oregon does but
have higher graduation requirements.
But he called the state education
agency’s cost estimates “reason
able” and said he hoped to pass his
bill this session, then work the cost
into the education appropriation
lawmakers agree upon during the
2007 legislative session.
“I don’t like mandates and require
ments, but this is something we have
to do,” Lim said.
Education officials have also
warned about the difficulty of recruit
ing qualified math teachers for ad
vanced courses, particularly in rural re
gions of the state.
Still, some districts have already
plunged ahead with raising the gradu
ation requirements on their own, in
cluding Portland, where school board
members are considering a proposal to
have the new standards in place for the
class of 2009.
Currently, in order to gain admission
to one of Oregon’s seven public univer
sities, students must have taken four
years of English courses and three
years of math.
IN BRIEF
U.S Forest Service looks
for sites to close down
PORTLAND — The cash-strapped
U.S. Forest Service can no longer af
ford to maintain several campgrounds
and trailheads and has started ranking
recreational sites for possible closure.
Oregon’s Deschutes and Winema
national forests are among the
first to go up for review, The
Oregonian reported.
Forest Service officials say the
crunch is partly a result of President
Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative, a push
to thin flammable Western forests that
has diverted money away from the up
keep of forest facilities.
The Forest Service is also trying to
sell offices and compounds that bus
tled during the logging heyday but
now sit idle.
The move underlines the hard
choices facing the Forest Service in the
agency’s centennial year.
“Trade-offs were made to keep the
priority on hazardous fuels,” said
Hank Kashdan, Forest Service budget
chief. “The budget is tight, and we had
to make tough calls.”
The public may not notice sales of
scattered ranger housing, offices and
warehouses around the West.
But there may be more obvious
changes in the 2,635 campgrounds,
boat ramps, picnic areas and other
recreation sites in Oregon and Wash
ington national forests.
None will be sold. But all national
forests have been directed to put
those sites through a rating system
by 2007 that will assess their costs,
popularity and how closely they
match what each forest designates
as its “niche” audience.
Those ranking lowest may be shut
down, have their seasons trimmed or
have services, such as garbage collec
tion, cut back to bring spending in line
with budgets dropping by millions of
dollars per year.
“It is likely that most forests will
have to make tough decisions to close
some sites, curtail operations at other
sites and decommission some sites in
order to define a sustainable program,”
former Deputy Chief Tom Thompson
wrote to regional foresters last month.
Others see darker motives. Starving
the agency of cash forces it to keep
only the most lucrative sites and run
public lands like a commercial enter
prise, they say.
“They will close those sites the
public has always enjoyed but which
they cannot afford because they are
not profitable,” said Scott Silver of
the Bend group Wild Wilderness.
“It’s the complete perversion of the
meaning of public lands. ”
— The Associated Press