area news
Columbia Chorale
Welcomes New Director
Tuesday Rupp is the new
Artistic Director of Columbia Cho-
rale of Oregon.
Ms. Rupp, who holds a
Music Degree from Boston Univer-
sity and a Master’s Degree in Con-
ducting from Portland State Uni-
Tuesday Rupp - the new Director
of Columbia Chorale.
versity, is a Portland native. She is
currently also the Musical Director
at Milwaukie Presbyterian Church
and the Artistic Director of the clas-
sical cross-over ensemble Roxy
Consort.
Rupp is very excited about
the Columbia Chorale’s upcoming
holiday season of performances, “A
Tradition of Noels,” which will be
held on December 12, at Milwaukie
Presbyterian Church at 7:30 and on
December 13 at the St. Helens High
School at 3:00 PM. “This will be
a fun and festive and really lively
performance featuring seasonal
music from all over the world,” said
Rupp in a recent phone interview.
Columbia Chorale will also be per-
forming at the Grotto in Portland on
December 27 at 8:00 PM, as part of
the annual “Festival of Lights.”
Rupp really enjoys the
community chorus experience, and
the power of voice as an instrument.
“On the surface, we’re just making
music,” she explains. “But with a
choir, we have a chance with words
to create a message. We can ex-
press joy, anger-- express a whole
gamut of emotions. The things we
feel, the whole range of human ex-
perience, we have a chance to ex-
press through our performances.”
Rupp said she joined Co-
lumbia Chorale because her “...ex-
perience and approach to making
music was compatible.” She says
her goals as an artist and with the
ensembles she works with are to “...
not just expose the community to
art but the wonderful presence that
music brings to our lives.”
Rupp and Columbia Cho-
rale are also preparing for a concert
in March which will be a tribute to
Cole Porter and composers from the
Jazz era.
“For me, there isn’t an
instrument more powerful and ex-
traordinary than the human voice,”
says Rupp. “And we try to make
our chorale concerts as accessible
and user friendly for our audience.
If someone is not familiar with
choir music performances, this is a
great way to experience something
new.”
Columbia Chorale of Or-
egon is open to all interested com-
munity members and meets to prac-
tice at the St. Helens high school on
Thursday evenings from 7-9 PM.
For more information, you can con-
tact Betsy Galloway at 503-543-
2915.
The Meier Site Lecture
november
2009
PCC Forum Held in St. Helens
By April Bamburg
7
PCC classes],” she said. “I would like to see
some tutoring for the classes you’re providing
out here.”
“When you’re talking about people in
Columbia County, these people out here are
not exactly following through with the plan of
going to college right after high school gradu-
ation,” she said. “I can very easily see people
being very hesitant to pay $7.60 to ride the bus
to PCC for tutoring.”
There are several factors that can be
challenges to PCC in determining which cours-
es will be offered to Columbia County residents
each term, Rule said. One is that classes re-
quire a minimum enrollment to schedule them,
although there have been instances where PCC
has held classes for local students at lower than
the minimum enrollment, sometimes with as
few as three students. Another challenge is
that it can be challenging to find venues to hold
courses, as rent can be prohibitive, and not all
venues are suitable for instruction. The third
issue is that finding community members quali-
fied to act as PCC instructors can be challeng-
ing.
Currently, Portland Community Col-
lege offers the following services locally:
Math, English, Social Studies, and Art classes
held in Columbia County, access to Teleweb
DVD at the Vernonia Learning Center, the Co-
lumbia County Rider shuttle, which runs from
Columbia County to PCC several times a day
and a partnership in the Regional Public Safety
Training Center Project targeted for Scappoose.
For the 2008-2009 academic year,
1,058 Columbia County residents attended the
Rock Creek Campus, and there are 372 attend-
ing this term, said Meryl Lipman, Community
Relations/PR Manager for the Rock Creek Cam-
pus. She said that when the St. Helens Center
closed in 2001, it was for budgetary reasons.
Scholarships available to local students
PCC is offering seven scholarships for
$2,500 each to students attending in the winter
term and taking at least six credits. Residents of
Columbia, Clatsop and Tillamook counties are
eligible. “These scholarships will cover a full
term’s classes,” Lipman said. Applications are
due November 6 at 5 p.m.
For more information on these schol-
arships, contact Erin Riley, PCC Foundation
Scholarship Coordinator at (503) 977-4385, or
via e-mail at eriley@pcc.edu.
When Portland Community College
representatives met with community members
in St. Helens on October 21, David Rule, presi-
dent of the Rock Creek campus, promised that
within two years, county residents would see
increased opportunities through the college.
Since 2001, county residents attending
classes at Portland Community College have
had to travel to the Rock Creek, Sylvania or
Cascade campuses for classes, to take online
classes or, in some cases, have been able to take
courses offered locally, but the college has not
had a strong presence in the county. Now, col-
lege officials want to change that.
Officials at Portland Community Col-
lege are working with local politicians, school
districts and local businesses to create an aca-
demic master plan for course offerings to ben-
efit attendees from Columbia County.
Discussion so far has centered on ways
to create an academic strategic plan that is sus-
tainable, meaning that if students want to regis-
ter for a series of classes, they can sign up for
the first in the series and know that the future
classes will be offered.
“By December, we will have a broad
outline of an academic plan,” Rule said. The
next step will occur during the first half of win-
ter term, when the college will develop a model
for course delivery including how and where
courses will be delivered.
At this time, the college is not offering
classes in Vernonia, but students in St. Helens
and Scappoose High Schools participate in the
Portland Area Vocational Technical and Edu-
cational Consortium. Last year, Rule said, be-
tween 93 and 95 local students used PAVTEC.
A handful of community members attended the
forum, and several spoke up.
“People get frustrated with [PCC] not
serving the rural areas,” said St. Helens resident
Al Petersen, who suggested that the college
could learn from another community college
headquartered in Pendleton. “Blue Mountain
Community College serves an area twice as big
[as PCC],” he said. “There could be some les-
sons learned [from] BMCC’s outreach beyond
where the central campuses are located. That’s
a policy decision we’re glad you’re trying to This article has been published at April’s web
site, http://www.examiner.com/x-19696-Colum-
change.”
bia-County-Buzz-Examiner.”
“Many feel that Columbia County is
a cash cow for PCC taxes,” commented Brian
Little, a St. Helens resident who is on the board
of the Columbia Learning Center, located in
St. Helens. Little also said that the CLC Board
would be interested in partnering with PCC to
offer services.
An alumnus of PCC asked that tutor-
ing services be offered locally for courses that
county residents are taking. “I’ve had to do the
traveling, and there’s no tutoring locally [for
The October 16 th lecture at Scappoose Peterson Grade School
presented by Dr. Kenneth Ames of Portland State University should have
been titled, “Things Are Not What They Seem” instead of, “Iron and Ce-
dar: The Meier Site and the Archeology of the Lower Columbia River”.
His lively presentation of information about the local Chinook
Native American history was punctuated with lots of slides that today
look like beautiful empty watershed spaces. In the past until around
the mid-1800’s they supported multiple huge cedar plank dwellings of
a dense Native American population. As Dr. Ames expressed it, if only
they had built on basalt pilings so their buildings would have been pre-
served, then this area would have been as famous a tourist draw as the
Southwest Pueblo Indian ruins. The 1833 malaria epidemic which wiped
out the local populations was the “…worst demographic disaster in the
history of the world,” according to Dr. Ames
The area was a hub for a complex society comprised of three
language groups who traded together and up and down the coast, and
was possibly home to the densest population of Native Americans in
North America. With their huge buildings, they were able to store tons of
food for the winter and for trade. They
smoked food stored in the rafters, and
built cellars they filled with baskets of
grains and vegetables.
As an example, the Meier
site is uncovering the story of a plank
dwelling that was home to probably
over 200 people at its peak, as well as
their stored food and trade goods. This
home was divided by status and wealth
levels, so there were three different
economic strata living under one roof,
at least until it was someone’s turn for
Coffin Rock.
Next time you are strolling by
the river, be careful where you walk.
Remember, you are walking on his-
tory. For more information about local
archeology sites or to find out what you
can do, contact: Cindy Ede at 503-543-
3065 or coede@opusnet.com.
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