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CapitalPress.com
Friday, June 25, 2021
Editorials are written by or
approved by members of the
Capital Press Editorial Board.
All other commentary pieces are
the opinions of the authors but
not necessarily this newspaper.
Opinion
Editor & Publisher
Managing Editor
Joe Beach
Carl Sampson
opinions@capitalpress.com | CapitalPress.com/opinion
Our View
Don’t throw out the ‘essential skills’
T
he Oregon Legislature has
suspended through 2024 the
requirement that students show
profi ciency in reading, writing and
math — the aptly named “essential
skills” — as a requirement for getting
a high school diploma.
Is the ability to apply those skills no
longer necessary in everyday life? If
so, we didn’t get the memo.
Essential skills profi ciency was
added as a requirement for graduation
a decade ago.
Teaching kids to read and write and
do basic math was the whole point of
public education when it came into
existence. The public school curric-
ulum has become more complicated
over the years, but has always been
fi lled with courses where students pre-
sumably learned and used those skills.
But, a lot of students were graduat-
ing without the ability to apply them in
real-life situations. Employers weren’t
the only ones to take notice, and the
decision was made to mandate profi -
ciency as a requirement for a diploma.
It does not seem too high of
an expectation after 12 years of
schooling.
School districts had various options
to test that profi ciency. But critics of
the requirement have called those tests
into question, alleging that they are
unfair to non-native English speakers
and racial minorities.
Senate Bill 744 calls a halt to the
testing and the profi ciency require-
ment and orders the Oregon Depart-
ment of Education to evaluate gradua-
tion standards.
“The testing that we’ve been doing
in the past doesn’t tell us what we
want to know,” Sen. Lew Frederick,
D-Portland, told KATU. “We have
been relying on tests that have been,
frankly, very fl awed and relying too
much on them so that we aren’t really
helping the students or the teachers or
the community.”
We see nothing wrong with evaluat-
ing and upgrading graduation require-
ments. We are less enthusiastic about,
but not completely against, alternative
evaluation methods for determining
profi ciency.
But we agree with Republicans in
the legislature who say the state should
not suspend the current standard while
this evaluation takes place.
Our View
Lynden
Lummi
Reservation
British Columbia
United States
Water Resource
Inventory Area 1
Boundary
Bellingham
Nooksack
Reservation
Whatcom County
Skagit County
Detail
area
WASH.
The Nooksack Basin
Washington Department of Ecology
WASH.
Capital Press graphic
Pain but uncertain gain
in adjudication
T
he adjudication of a river basin’s water
rights is the legal equivalent of kidney
stones. Only after the requisite amount of
suff ering can the water fl ow again.
Farmers and others in Whatcom County,
Wash., will soon have that experience, and few of
them are looking forward to it.
The Washington Department of Ecology will
get the festivities underway in 2023 by fi ling a
lawsuit in which water users will be required to
substantiate their claims to water in the Nooksack
River Basin.
The Lummi Nation and Nooksack Tribe asked
the department for the adjudication to sort out
who has rights to surface and ground water in the
basin. About 40,000 acres of farmland are irri-
gated in the county, which is tucked in the north-
west corner of the state.
Anyone with a claim to water will have to jus-
tify it before a judge.
This will take a while. A simpler adjudica-
tion in the Yakima River Basin took more than
40 years. In Whatcom County, 5,400 people have
water rights in the Nooksack Basin, and as many
as 14,000 have wells. The judge will consider both
because the aquifer and the river are connected.
Further complicating the picture are the tribes’
treaty rights, Ecology’s requirement for minimum
stream fl ows for fi sh and unkept promises the
department made to farmers in years past. Based
on a past court decision, the tribes fi gure they
might be entitled to half of all the water.
The adjudication will certainly be a boon to
many professions. Farmers are hiring lawyers,
hydrologists and others to help them protect or
substantiate water rights, some of which date
back a century or more.
The stakes are high. Whatcom County farm-
ers produced $372.8 million in goods, accord-
ing to the most recent USDA Census of Agricul-
ture. Factor in agriculture’s overall impact and
the adjudication could make or break the county’s
economic back. No water means no farms.
The county is unique in one regard. It gets
more than 40 inches of rain a year yet still doesn’t
have enough water. That’s because most of the
rain falls in the winter. Most of the need for water
— for irrigation, watering livestock, fi sh passage
and other purposes — is in the summer, when it
is generally much drier.
Farmers in the region see a lack of fl exibil-
ity on the part of the state’s water laws as another
problem. The “use it or lose it” law means that
no matter how much they need during any given
year they must use their entire water right or pos-
sibly lose access to it. Legislators would do well
to take a look at such outdated and counter-pro-
ductive laws.
Farmers in the region well know the need for
adequate stream fl ows. In the past, they have even
pumped well water into streams during the dry late
summer to boost the fl ow and aid fi sh returning to
spawn. One wonders whether such good deeds will
be recognized in the adjudication.
Above all else, the judge will likely discover that
sorting out water rights is only a piece of the puz-
zle of how to provide adequate water supplies to the
many competing interests in the Nooksack Basin.
“The approach for Senate Bill 744
is to, in fact, lower our expectations
for our kids,” said Oregon House
Minority Leader Christine Drazan.
“This is the wrong time to do that,
when we have had this year of social
isolation and lost learning. It’s the
wrong thing to do in this moment.”
Our biggest fear is that the real
goal of SB 744 is to fi nd more ways
to declare students profi cient without
actually teaching more students to be
profi cient.
Putting your boots in the oven
won’t make them biscuits, and declar-
ing a student profi cient through some
convoluted evaluation won’t make that
so either.
The goal should be for every stu-
dent, regardless of race or ethnicity, to
be profi cient in the essential skills, not
to artifi cially increase the graduation
rates.
To demand less turns an Oregon
high school diploma into a partici-
pation trophy. That would truly be a
disservice to the students and to the
community.
Prescribed
fi res help
take heat off
I
t was 102 degrees
in Medford on
June 1, 2021. Let
me say that again just
in case it didn’t fully
sink in: Medford suf-
fered temperatures as
high as 102 degrees in
spring, making it harder
for firefighters battling
Southern Oregon’s first
fires of the year.
Now, I usually like
Oregon to be in the
record-setting busi-
ness, but not for
hot, dry weather in
April and May. Hav-
ing a 100-degree day
while still in spring-
time should ring alarm
bells for Oregonians
everywhere.
It was not so long
ago that Oregon’s fire
season was only a few
weeks in August and
September. The events
of Memorial Day
weekend only serve
as a reminder that the
human-caused climate
crisis has increased
the frequency of fires
that threaten lives,
businesses and entire
communities.
Over the past week,
I met with forest man-
agers and first respond-
ers in Southern Oregon,
Central Oregon, and the
Willamette Valley to
hear their forecasts for
the 2021 fire year.
The bottom line is
it’s long past time for
nickel-and-dime solu-
tions to billion-dol-
lar problems caused
by wildfire, such as
smoke-related health
issues, damage to local
economies and life-
and-death threats to
Oregonians.
Our state has a back-
log of roughly 2.5
million acres of fed-
eral land in dire need
of wildfire preven-
tion. And Oregonians
don’t want 2.5 mil-
lion excuses about why
there aren’t more for-
est health improve-
ments and prescribed
fire treatments com-
pleted on these 2.5 mil-
lion acres.
They just want these
fire risks reduced as
soon as possible.
The science is clear:
GUEST
VIEW
Sen. Ron
Wyden
controlled burns clear
out dead trees and veg-
etation as well as break
down and return nutri-
ents to the soil, creat-
ing healthier and more
resilient forests. Pre-
scribed burns or fuel
reduction treatments
can head off wildfires
before they have the
chance to burn out of
control, devastating
lives and livelihoods.
I saw this firsthand
in Sisters, where a pre-
scribed burn near the
Whychus Creek pro-
vided key support in
suppressing the 2017
Milli fire before it
could overtake Sisters.
To that end, I
recently introduced
legislation to increase
the pace and scale of
prescribed fires. The
National Prescribed
Fire Act has the support
of conservation groups
as well as leading tim-
ber industry voices
because its passage
would mean healthier
forests for timber har-
vest, forest ecosystems
and outdoor recreation
alike.
It’s going to take all
hands on deck to pre-
vent wildfire in the
coming dry seasons, so
that’s why I have intro-
duced bills to harden
our power grid by bury-
ing power lines, gen-
erate thousands of
good-paying jobs for
young people reducing
fire-causing fuels in the
woods, and meet emis-
sions goals by invest-
ing in the clean energy
sector.
Smart, science-based
forestry policy is
smart climate policy.
If we treat hazardous,
fire-starting fuels now
in the cooler, wetter
months, we can prevent
future fires before they
have a chance to spark.
Ron Wyden, a Demo-
crat, represents Oregon
in the U.S. Senate.