P2 The SpokeSman • TueSday, april 5, 2022
Wind-driven grass fire burns three acres near Canal
BY TIM TRAINOR
redmond Spokesman
A grass fire burned about
three acres on a gusty Thurs-
day afternoon in Redmond.
No one was injured and no
structures were damaged, ac-
cording to Redmond Fire &
Rescue.
Crews were alerted to the
fire in the 3600 block of NW
Canal Blvd. about 2:48 p.m.,
after a large column of black
smoke became visible in
northeast Redmond.
Crews arrived on scene to
find a wind-driven brush fire
moving across multiple pas-
tures. Due to limited access
and the gusting winds, the fire
burned across open pasture
ground until crews were able
to gain access and stop the
fire’s advancement. Before it
was extinguished, it burned
roughly three acres.
According to an initial in-
vestigation, a landowner was
actively burning a nearby
ditch when the winds picked
up and carried the fire beyond
their control.
Reminder, call 541-504-
5035 to determine if burning
is allowed. Residents planning
to burn are required to have
on hand a shovel, garden hose
or water truck to control any
fires that may get out of con-
trol.
Crooked River Ranch Fire
& Rescue assisted at the scene.
photo courtesy redmond Fire & rescue
A grass fire burned about three acres off Canal in Redmond on Thurs-
day, March 31.
photo courtesy redmond Fire & rescue
Crews mop up after a grass fire burned Thursday in Redmond.
Redmond librarian amplifies culture, diversity in schools
BY BRYCE DOLE
The Bulletin
Pia Alliende says her pas-
sion for storytelling stems
from her parents.
Libraries in her hometown
of Santiago, Chile, were “piti-
ful,” she said. Being a librar-
ian in the capital city, which
sits in a valley at the foot of
the Andes mountains, was
not a popular career choice.
Books were expensive. Her
family was relatively well-off,
but her parents were stern,
urging the family to be cau-
tious with money.
Books and reading became
a family treat, delivered on
Sundays by Alliende’s father,
a lawyer with high standards
and a “strong but soft heart.”
Alliende’s father would read
to the family from books he
crafted with pieces of card-
board and kept in a basket in
the closet.
This was how books be-
came a guiding force for Al-
liende, a librarian whose life
and career have spanned
multiple countries and im-
pacted students, teachers and
libraries around the world.
While school districts
across the country are ban-
ning books about gender and
race amid a national reckon-
ing over equitable education,
Alliende is stocking shelves
in Redmond School District
libraries with books that il-
luminate the experiences of
people from underserved
and marginalized commu-
nities.
The 60-year-old Alliende
has played a major role in
dean Guernsey/The Bulletin
Librarian Pia Alliende in the Elton Gregory Middle School library
Thursday in Redmond. Alliende is one of three librarians in the coun-
try recently nominated for School Librarian of the Year by the School
Library Journal.
revamping libraries in the
district, replacing withered
old books with new ones and
getting rid of literature that
perpetuates racist stereo-
types.
“I want to have books that
represent them, not misrep-
resent them,” said Alliende,
who serves as part of the
Redmond School District
Equity Task Force and is co-
chair of the Oregon Library
Association’s (Equity, Di-
versity and Inclusion) and
Antiracism Committee. She
added: “I feel that it’s really,
really sad that we, as school
librarians, need to fight for
kids to read.”
Alliende’s work has not
gone unnoticed. She is one of
three librarians in the country
recently nominated for School
Librarian of the Year by the
School Library Journal.
CROSSWORD
Alliende’s goal is to provide
students with the option to
explore the stories of people
from backgrounds and cul-
tures different from theirs.
She wants to use storytell-
ing to instill empathy and
compassion, particularly for
those students whose experi-
ences have historically been
ignored. She said, “Some-
times, the kids are invisible.”
Recently, Alliende helped
the district obtain four grants
amounting to more than
$25,000 to improve programs
at libraries in Redmond
schools that have higher con-
centrations of Hispanic and
Spanish-speaking students.
Those include Elton Gregory
Middle School, where more
than one in five students
identify as Hispanic and one
in 10 speak Spanish as their
first language.
In addition, she raised
more than $2,500 by com-
pleting a 347-mile bike-pack-
ing trip through Oregon, just
before her 60th birthday. The
funds went to libraries across
the district, she said.
Alliende uses part of the
grant funds to bring in Span-
ish-speaking authors and
hold monthly bilingual fam-
ily engagement nights where
students and their families
hear stories and play Latin
American games. She said
she wants to “foster the idea
that their Spanish is good,
that their culture is good,
that whatever they do is
good, and feel proud.”
It was through her parent’s
storytelling that Alliende
found an interest in history.
She attended a Catholic high
school and university in
Chile, but she grew bored.
She wanted to go to America.
She applied, and received a
scholarship through the U.S.
Fulbright Program, the flag-
ship international academic
exchange program meant to
foster relationships between
countries. With the grant, Al-
liende traveled to New York
in 1990 to study history at
Stony Brook University.
The move was hard on her
relationship with her parents,
she said. But Alliende fell in
love with big city nightlife
— and with a Spaniard from
the Montana farmlands. Af-
ter college, she struggled to
find work because of lan-
guage barriers. With her new
husband and a child on the
way, Alliende moved back to
Chile and to her childhood
home. “We had nothing,” she
said.
After having children,
Alliende and her husband
moved their family to a
town south of Santiago. She
worked at a private school,
but Chile still wasn’t where
she wanted to raise her kids.
The family headed back to
the United States after ob-
taining work visas. She
landed a job as an interpreter
at a school in Arlington, Vir-
ginia, where she became an
advocate for families from
Latin America.
There, she found a love for
libraries.
Her commute to work
near Washington, D.C. was
long, requiring the family to
leave their kids in day care
for hours. So she proceeded
to look for jobs elsewhere in
the country. She eventually
landed a job as a media li-
brary specialist at Redmond
High School in 2006. Three
years later, amid the nation-
wide housing crisis and en-
suing economic meltdown,
Alliende was laid off.
Fortunately, she found
a job as the head librarian
at the International School
of Seville San Francisco de
Paula in Spain. Her family
moved to Seville, where they
remained for a decade. Al-
liende helped modernize li-
braries and led workshops
for librarians and teachers in
places like Dubai, Budapest,
Thessaloniki, Paris and Ma-
drid. Meanwhile, her chil-
dren, who had lost some of
SUDOKU
their knowledge of Spanish
while living in the U.S., be-
came bilingual, she said.
“That was pretty neat,” she
said of her kids. “I couldn’t
have done it.”
In 2019, after Alliende’s
children finished high
school, the family returned
to Redmond and moved
back into their home on the
Crooked River Ranch. Af-
ter applying to nearly every
school district in Central
Oregon, she accepted a job
as a library technician at a
local elementary school in
Redmond. Alliende looked
toward schools with more
economically disadvantaged
families and saw that many
of the schools had outdated
books. She wanted to help.
The pandemic only
strengthened Alliende’s re-
solve to help struggling stu-
dents. She made weekly
videos for children and
helped them engage with
their schooling as they nav-
igated online learning. She
purchased a reading app for
district students to have ac-
cess to digital materials and
pushed for bilingual vid-
eos. As one of the few Span-
ish-speaking teachers at the
school, she wanted to fos-
ter the idea in students that
“their countries, their cul-
tures, matter.”
She’s moved to help them
by a book she has in her
home, a book written by a
friend and mentor who once
told her: “Everyone has a
story to tell and if you don’t
write it, it doesn’t exist.”
WEATHER
Fill in the grid so every row, every column and every
3x3 box contains the numbers 1 through 9, with no repeats.
FORECAST
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
monday
LAST WEEK
HIGH
LOW
48
66
74
62
55
51
50
25
34
39
34
32
26
27
HIGH
LOW
partly Cloudy
partly Cloudy
partly Cloudy
partly Cloudy
partly Cloudy
partly Cloudy
partly Cloudy
PRECIP
Saturday, march 26
71
28
0
Sunday, march 27
66
39
0
monday, march 28
61
37
0.03
Tuesday, march 29
68
31
0
Wednesday, march 30
54
34
0
Thursday, march 31
53
23
0
Friday, april 1
64
23
0
precipitation to date this year: 1.15 inches
* = daily record
national Weather Service broadcasts are on 162.50 mhz.
Answers on Page 6
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