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THE ASTORIAN • TuESdAy, JANuARy 25, 2022
Pyrosomes: ‘The pyrosomes are just
one indicator that things are changing’
Continued from Page A1
Lydia Ely/The Astorian
Kitchen supplies sit on the counter of the women’s section of the sober living house.
Sober living: Tenants to
stay focused on recovery
Continued from Page A1
Unlike in many sober liv-
ing environments, the people
in the Warrenton house will
get their own bedroom with a
door that locks. A secure space
can mark a major step for peo-
ple trying to take ownership
of their lives, Neal Rotman,
the agency’s housing services
manager, said.
“Once you have a place to
be, and you can move on with
your life, that really changes
everything,” Rotman said.
Tenants will have a mea-
sure of personal freedom.
They won’t be monitored 24/7
or have curfews.
But there will be rules and
structure.
Urinalyses and Breatha-
lyzer tests will be done reg-
ularly. Men and women can
meet outside — the backyard
is fairly large — but they can-
not cross over into the other
unit. The single beds are meant
to discourage overnight guests.
Every week, tenants will
gather for a house meeting to
divvy up chores, resolve con-
flicts, celebrate personal suc-
cesses and talk through chal-
lenges. They will check in
one-on-one with the peer
recovery allies, who serve as
case managers, to discuss their
goals and the barriers to reach-
ing them.
At least five times a week,
tenants must attend programs
like Alcoholics Anonymous or
Narcotics Anonymous to stay
focused on recovery.
“What we don’t want to
do is just have someone iso-
lated and locked in their room
for 24 hours a day, spinning
out in their brain, because they
don’t know what to do next,”
Boudon said. “That’s the most
terrifying thing as a recover-
ing alcoholic or addict, is not
knowing what’s going to hap-
pen next.”
A key part of the program
will be the presence of the
peer recovery allies — a man
for the men’s side, a woman
for the women’s side — most
of the week. The peers, who
are recovered addicts, will be
there to hang out with tenants,
chat with them. “Even just be
like, ‘Hey, do you just want
to sit and talk about how your
day went? I’m sensing that it
wasn’t a good day,’” Boudon
said.
And as tenants’ stays come
to a close, agency staff will
help them make a plan —
composed of small, achievable
tasks — to move into another
living situation.
“That is the ultimate goal,”
Boudon said. “You’re going to
leave here one way or another.
Let’s make sure that it’s a suc-
cessful transition.”
No one knows how the
project will turn out — how
many tenants will recover and
how many will relapse; how
many will use the time to get
a job or return to school; how
many will be able to save
money and create an indepen-
dent life when the program
ends for them.
The sober living house,
like the people who will call it
home, is in a state of potential.
And potential is what the pro-
gram is all about.
Dave Hsiao, a program
manager at Clatsop Behavioral
Healthcare, said, “We’re really
trying to give a few people this
chance to make this work.”
Grad rates: COVID made an impact
Continued from Page A1
“You certainly had the
effect of COVID on kids that
were, up to the time COVID
hit, on track (for graduation)
or not far off track, and it
just blew their worlds up,”
Warrenton Superintendent
Tom Rogozinski said. “ ...
We’re definitely recogniz-
ing that COVID impact, and
at the same time we’re try-
ing to then dial in on, inde-
pendent of that, what are the
additional programs and lev-
els of support we need to put
into place?”
Rogizinski said he con-
siders a graduation rate a
great metric to work from
and be informed by, but the
rate does not necessarily
indicate the efficacy or qual-
ity of a school or district.
After diving into the
numbers, Rogozinski and
his administrators deter-
mined that the state’s data
was out of line with their
own count, and that several
students were miscounted as
not graduating on time.
“While we’re not thrilled
with 80%, that’s typically
more in line with where
we’ve been, and where we
want to work from moving
forward,” Rogozinski said.
Bill Fritz, the Knappa
School District superinten-
dent, also said the state’s data
for Knappa’s graduation rate
did not align with what the
school district found.
Hailey Hoffman/The Astorian
Graduation rates declined in Clatsop County during the last
school year.
The state showed Knappa
as having 83.3% gradua-
tion rate, while Fritz said
the district’s rate was nearly
90%. Fritz pointed to two
students, one of which
was an exchange student,
who should have not been
included in the cohort.
“We always strive for
100% and continue to work
student-by-student to per-
sonalize and guide them
toward success,” said Fritz,
who noted he was particu-
larly pleased with the suc-
cess of economically disad-
vantaged students.
The state listed the Sea-
side School District as hav-
ing a 77.4% graduation rate,
which was below the previ-
ous year’s figure of 80.3%.
The state showed Jew-
ell School District as hav-
ing a 100% graduation rate,
with all seven students grad-
uating on time. The small,
rural school district also had
a perfect rate the previous
year.
Oregon posted the sec-
ond-highest statewide grad-
uation rate in the state’s his-
tory at 80.6% during the
2020-2021 school year, but
the rate declined from 82.6%
the previous year, according
to the state Department of
Education.
The
state
measures
on-time graduation by stu-
dents who take four years to
complete high school.
Caron: ‘It’s like my whole life has changed’
Continued from Page A1
Financial stress contin-
ued to haunt him for years,
but he sought to learn about
the sources of the economic
struggles he shared with so
many others.
When he started earning
money off advertising reve-
nue on his YouTube videos,
he was able to finally pay
off all of his debts.
Just as he found him-
self in the position where
money was not an issue, he
was notified last year that
he and his family would
have to move out of the
home they were renting.
With increasing home
prices on the North Coast,
buying seemed unattain-
able. But Caron could not
find another rental for his
family that would accept
his dog.
He thought about leav-
ing the area, but he man-
aged to buy a home in
Knappa late last year.
Caron credits the suc-
cess of his YouTube
channel.
“It’s like my whole life
has changed,” he said.
Pyrosomes remain one
of the least studied of the
pelagic tunicates, a group of
marine invertebrates found
throughout the world.
But they can form dense
blooms given the right con-
ditions and they seem to
graze readily — and heav-
ily — on phytoplankton
and other microscopic par-
ticles in the water.
If pyrosomes become
a more familiar presence
off the coast as ocean con-
ditions shift under climate
change, researchers believe
they could begin to have a
marked impact on the food
web around them.
The pyrosomes peo-
ple find on North Coast
beaches are usually small,
roughly the size and shape
of a pickle. They are soft
pink or gray, translucent,
gelatinous.
Researcher
Kelly
Sutherland said what peo-
ple find on the beach and
call pyrosomes are not a
single animal. Every pyro-
some is actually a colony
made up of many individ-
ual organisms, each about
the size of a grain of rice.
But pile them together and
a whole colony can be a
foot long — even longer in
some species — comprised
of hundreds of individuals.
Sutherland, an associate
professor of biology at the
Oregon Institute of Marine
Biology at the University
of Oregon, said there are
many basic questions to
answer about pyrosomes
before researchers can truly
understand what it means
to have them here now.
But with pyrosomes still
only occasional visitors to
the ocean waters off the
Pacific Northwest, these
questions remain difficult
to answer.
Julie Schram, an assis-
tant professor of animal
physiology at the Univer-
sity of Alaska Southeast,
co-authored a research
paper about the pyro-
somes’ visit in 2017 with
Sutherland published in
2020. She no longer stud-
ies pyrosomes, but she still
has many questions about
them.
She found they carried
unusually high levels of
docosahexaenoic acid, or
DHA, the omega-3 fatty
acids you find in fish oil
supplements. The pyro-
somes concentrate these
fatty acids in their tissues
when they consume phy-
toplankton, the organisms
actually producing the
lipids.
“of how much we don’t
know about the ocean off
our coast, which limits our
ability to predict future
conditions.”
When pyrosomes are
here in large numbers, it
can be a sign of a certain
set of ocean conditions,
Sutherland said, and the
tunicates play a role in eco-
system dynamics — even if
that role remains a bit of a
mystery.
But the food web is com-
plex, with many players.
Pyrosomes’ size and the
fact that they wash up on
the beach happen to make
them more noticeable.
THE PYROSOMES PEOPLE FIND
ON NORTH COAST BEACHES ARE
USUALLY SMALL, ROUGHLY THE
SIZE AND SHAPE OF A PICKLE.
THEY ARE SOFT PINK OR GRAY,
TRANSLUCENT, GELATINOUS.
But there are many other
marine species that are
more important to humans
commercially. These have
unanswered questions of
their own and often take
priority when it comes to
the allocation of research
funding and resources.
Richard Brodeur, a
recently retired federal
research biologist, thinks
pyrosomes should move up
the priority list. He believes
pyrosomes represent a sig-
nificant ecosystem distur-
bance, the effects of which
researchers are only just
starting to understand.
The appearance of pyro-
somes in Oregon during
the marine heat wave sev-
eral years ago was unprec-
edented. Until then, pyro-
somes had never been
recorded here officially in
at least the past 50 years,
Brodeur said.
It is a reminder, he said,
“But,” Sutherland said, “the
community of tiny plank-
tonic organisms is shifting
all of the time in response
to different environmental
conditions.
“Sometimes
that’s
because of the ‘normal’
patterns like the shift to
upwelling conditions in the
spring and El Nino or La
Nina cycles, but then you
have human-induced shifts
in the environment happen-
ing on top of that.”
“The pyrosomes,” she
said, “are just one indicator
that things are changing.”
This story is part of a
collaboration between The
Astorian and Coast Com-
munity Radio.
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