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East Oregonian
PENDLETON: Umatilla School District also saw growth
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with families on getting them to school.
At the subgroup level, the district
saw a marked improvement in its
American Indian graduation rate — an
area the district has targeted for the past
few years.
The graduation rate for those
students jumped from 55.6 percent in
2014-2015 to 78.1 percent at the end of
2016.
Despite the boost, American Indian
students still lagged behind their white
peers, who graduated at a 86.9 percent
clip.
Although Pendleton has made
specific efforts to make the district more
culturally inclusive, Yoshioka said it
would take time to see if the American
Indian grad rate rise is sustainable.
“You hope it’s not an anomaly and
hope it’s more of a trend,” he said.
Pendleton wasn’t the only local
district that saw higher grad rates — the
Umatilla (64.7 percent to 72.2 percent)
and Morrow County (73.9 percent to
85.1 percent) school districts also saw
substantial growth.
Umatilla superintendent Heidi Sipe
said her district is starting to see payoff
for its career technical education efforts.
Sipe said the district’s renewed
focus on CTE has allowed teachers and
administrators to keep students who
are interested in vocational programs
engaged in school and on the path to
graduation.
“We didn’t want to value that
any less than a traditional four-year
college experience,” she said. “They’re
working toward a productive future and
we support that.”
Sipe said some students now take
the ACT WorkKeys exam instead of the
Smarter Balanced assessment, where
they can apply the lessons they learned
in their vocational classes.
Sipe said Umatilla High School
students are also completing more
college-credit hours than they have in
the past.
She said staff plan to continue dedi-
cating resources toward their current
Department of Education.
Kim Sordyl, Secretary of
State Dennis Richardson’s new
designee to the Board of Educa-
tion, said the board should not
count time missed for inclement
weather as instructional time.
“We are already at the
lowest in the country in terms
of instructional time, and I
don’t want you to easily give
up that precious time,” Sordyl
said, before a unanimous vote
in favor of the temporary rule.
Sordyl does not have a vote on
the board.
Board of Education member
Jerry Colonna said the tempo-
rary rule provides relief to
districts that had different
situations during the storms.
“This is one of those things
where we want to be helpful
instead of just compliance
monitors,” Colonna said. “I
resist the leap that this says we
do not honor instructional time.
I think we honor the differences
around the state, and we want to
helpful in them being successful
in what they want to do.”
The rule is effective only for
this school year and requires
school districts to receive
approval at a public meeting
of their local school board and
to provide a written request
to the Oregon Department of
Education, explaining why
EO file photo
Pendleton’s graduation rate for the 2015-2016 school year was
83.9 percent, a significant improvement from 74.5 percent in 2014-2015.
efforts and expects the class of 2017’s
graduation rate will rise even further.
Morrow County superintendent Dirk
Dirksen said it’s difficult to say any
single factor helped the district improve
its graduation importance, but he did
laud Morrow County’s “wrap-around”
initiatives as being beneficial.
Dirksen said Morrow County has
partnered with other organizations to
offer more school resource officers,
counselors and other officials who work
directly with students.
Dirksen said the intent of adding
these new figures was to get as many
adults involved with student lives as
possible.
“I know the Number 1 thing (with
student success) is a connection with an
adult,” he said.
In the longterm, Dirksen said
Morrow County will continue to dedi-
cate time and energy toward its early
education program with the hope that it
will pay dividends in high school.
He added that the district wouldn’t be
satisfied until Morrow County consis-
tently produced between 95 percent and
100 percent graduation rates.
Stanfield’s graduation rate for the
they cannot meet the minimum
standard for instructional time.
“It’s not enough to solve
the problem so school districts
still will be required to add
back days to comply with the
minimum instructional time,”
said Emily Nazarov, an ODE
operations policy analyst.
Some school districts, such
as Beaverton, shuttered schools
for nearly two weeks. Others,
such as Hermiston, have pushed
back their graduation date by
several days to make up missed
time, according to officials in
those districts.
“We were just notified that
Portland Public Schools is
considering holding school
during Spring break and Satur-
days and extending school days
to make up the time,” Noor
said.
Until 2015 the 14-hour
waiver had been regularly
available to schools to make
up time for missed days due to
inclement weather. That year,
the Board of Education nixed
the provision in order to protect
instructional time, which is
among the lowest amount
required nationwide.
Schools are required to
provide at least 900 hours of
instruction annually to elemen-
tary and middle school pupils
and 990 hours to high school
students, except seniors who
need only 966.
UMATILLA: Did not schedule
any further executive sessions
Continued from 1A
University.
Breyer State University is an
online school not accredited by
the U.S. Department of Educa-
tion.
The university did not return
a request for information about
its degrees, but information on
the current website and archived
versions from 2001 shows an
executive leadership degree
offered but does not specifically
list civil engineering. However,
the website advertised a program
where students can design their
own degree through a “learning
contract” with faculty members,
which could include credits for
work and life experience.
Trott also told the East
Oregonian on Monday he
had concerns about the way
Pelleberg had handled a disci-
plinary letter to city planner
Bill Searles. On Thursday he
said Searles had also submitted
a formal grievance against
Pelleberg to the city’s human
resources department. When
asked about the grievance,
HERMISTON: All
students receive academic
intervention if they are not
at the level they need to be
Continued from 1A
TIME: Hermiston pushed
graduation back several days
Continued from 1A
Friday, January 27, 2017
Searles declined to discuss
it until the city council had a
chance to consider it.
Pelleberg said he had no
comment for the newspaper
other than to note that the city
council did not feel it necessary
to take any action or make any
public comments after Wednes-
day’s meeting. The council also
did not schedule any further
executive sessions.
Since
becoming
city
manager Pelleberg has worked
on a number of revitalization
efforts. In previous interviews
with the East Oregonian he
has discussed writing a master
parks plan, designing possible
new or expanded city parks,
interviewing downtown busi-
ness owners and landlords about
ways the city can help with
economic development, plan-
ning to hire an economic devel-
opment consultant and planning
to create a new community
development department.
———
Contact Jade McDowell at
jmcdowell@eastoregonian.com
or 541-564-4536.
past school year was 85.3 percent, an
improvement from its previous year’s
82.2 percent. Superintendent Shelley
Liscom said while the staff does a good
job working individually with students,
they want to meet the needs of all their
kids. In a graduating class that’s fairly
small, Liscom said she hopes to work
on catching up those few that don’t
graduate.
“Fifteen percent of our class — we’re
still not meeting the needs of (several)
kids,” she said. “We really are striving
for every student to graduate, and finish
high school with a plan for after high
school that they implement.”
Echo School District’s graduation
rate was 84.6 percent, a slight drop from
87.5. Like Stanfield, Echo’s superinten-
dent Raymon Smith said numbers are
easily skewed with such small classes.
“Those just look at four-year grad-
uation rates,” Smith said. “If you look
at fifth-year completions or summer
graduations, it’s closer to 100 percent.”
Smith said he’s happy that the
school’s small size allows teachers to
maintain an individual relationship
with students, which he feels helps with
a higher graduation rate.
years, included students
registered at the district’s
online program, taking
alternative courses of
study or working toward a
GED or modified diploma.
Though that program will
no longer operate through
the district, the online
program will still be avail-
able to all grade levels.
As of this school year,
Browning said, those
students will no longer be
counted as separate from
Hermiston High School.
“The point of (the
center) was that it was a
place for students unlikely
to meet graduation require-
ments in a standard instruc-
tional day,” Browning
said. “We found out from
the Oregon Department of
Education that we can have
the same students as part of
Hermiston High School.”
Browning said rates
were low at the center
because graduation was
not the goal for all students
there.
“The focus for all
Innovative Learning Center
students was not always
a high school diploma,”
Browning said. “It could
be a modified diploma or
an extended diploma or a
GED.”
In addition to the overall
rates for each school and
district, the ODE report
breaks down graduation
data into various subcate-
gories such as gender, race
or ethnicity, and economic
status.
Brown said the district
is always keeping an eye
on certain subgroups,
such as economically
disadvantaged
students
and underserved races and
ethnicities.
The district’s elemen-
tary schools, she said, all
receive Title I funding,
which is aimed at schools
with high populations of
poverty.
“We concentrate those
resources on the elementary
schools,” Browning said.
“Research shows early
learning is the best place to
catch those kids.”
She added that all
students receive academic
intervention if they’re not
at the level they need to be.
Browning said that
some categories for grad-
uation rates change every
year, making it difficult to
compare rates over time.
But she said the general
graduation rate for Herm-
iston High School has
gradually improved for the
past several years.
Browning said while
the district doesn’t set a
specific goal for graduation
rates each year, they expect
the percentage of students
graduating to increase
every year.
“We hold the school
district’s goal that all of our
students will continue to
improve,” she said.
Iowa diesel spill is largest in U.S. since 2010
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) —
Workers were expected to complete
cleaning up Thursday about 140,000
gallons of diesel fuel that spewed
from a broken pipeline onto an Iowa
farm, the largest U.S. diesel spill
since 2010, federal authorities said.
Vacuum trucks were sucking up
the fuel that spilled onto an acre of
grass and tilled farmland when the
pipeline broke.
About 18 percent of the liquid had
been removed, and no fuel entered
rivers or streams, Iowa Department
of Natural Resources spokesman
Jeff Vansteenburg early on Thursday.
No farm field drain lines have been
severed so fuel can’t flow into water-
ways, he said.
Contaminated snow and diesel
are being hauled to a Minneapolis,
Minnesota, facility. Contaminated
soil will be excavated and taken to
a landfill near Clear Lake, Iowa,
Vansteenburg said.
High wind and blowing snow
were complicating cleanup efforts, he
said.
The pipeline, owned by Tulsa,
Oklahoma-based
Magellan
Midstream Partners, was discovered
spewing diesel fuel Wednesday
morning.
More than 70 Magellan represen-
tatives, local responders, regulators
and contractors were on site Thursday
morning, Magellan spokesman Bruce
Heine said. No injuries were reported
and no evacuations needed. He said
the cause of the leak is under inves-
tigation.
“Although we expect to begin
pipeline repairs later today, we do not
have an estimate when pipeline oper-
ations will resume on the affected
segment of our system,” Heine said
on Thursday. “We do not expect this
incident to disrupt supply of gasoline,
diesel and other refined petroleum
products in the region.”
The pipeline was built in the early
1950s, but Heine said the age of a
pipeline is not a safety factor when it’s
adequately inspected and maintained.
The 127-mile stretch of pipe
runs from Rosemount, Minnesota to
Mason City, Iowa.
The incident is the sixth largest
Chris Zoeller /Globe-Gazette via AP
Crews work Thursday to clean up a diesel fuel spill after a pipeline
owned by Magellan Midstream Partners broke on Wednesday.
“We do not expect
this incident to disrupt
supply of gasoline,
diesel and other re-
fined petroleum prod-
ucts in the region.”
— Bruce Heine,
Magellan spokesman
refined petroleum spill reported by
companies to the U.S. Department
of Transportation this decade and
the largest diesel spill since January
2010, according to the department’s
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials
Safety Administration records.
During that time 807s spill have
been reported causing $342 million in
estimated property damage releasing
more than 3 million gallons of gas,
diesel fuel and other petroleum
products.
Magellan, which has nearly 11,000
miles of hazardous liquid pipelines,
has had 218 accidents causing more
than $48 million in property damage
since 2006. Those accidents spilled
more than 832,000 gallons of petro-
leum products.
Over the past decade, Magellan
had 40 enforcement cases against
it for pipeline safety violations,
resulting in $1.4 million in proposed
penalties.
The farm site is located three
miles north and one mile east of
Hanlontown, which is 124 miles
north of Des Moines.
The incident illustrates that petro-
leum pipelines are dangerous, said
pipeline critic Ed Fallon, director of
Bold Iowa, a coalition fighting the
Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil
pipeline projects.
The leak comes at a time when
President Donald Trump has vowed
to renew construction on both of those
massive pipeline projects, which
have been held up by government
regulators after vigorous protests
from environmentalists and Native
American groups.
“We’ve been saying all along it’s
not a question of if a pipeline will
leak, it’s a question of when and
where and how bad it will be,” Fallon
said.
Federal government data shows
Iowa had 13 serious pipeline inci-
dents with one fatality and 16 injuries
between 1996 and 2015. Serious
incidents include a fatality or injury
requiring in-patient hospitalization.
Proposal would establish California as separate nation
LOS ANGELES (AP) —
Another attempt is underway to
establish California as a separate
nation.
Election officials announced
Thursday that a proposal has been
submitted to the Secretary of State’s
Office that would ask voters to
repeal part of the state constitution
that declares California an insepa-
rable part of the United States.
If the proposal qualifies for the
ballot and is approved by voters,
it could be a step to a future vote
on whether California should break
away from the U.S.
Secretary of State Alex Padilla
said the group behind the proposal,
Yes
California
Independence
Campaign, was cleared to begin
attempting to collect nearly 600,000
voter signatures needed to place the
plan on the ballot.
Similar attempts to establish
California as a nation, or break it
into multiple states, have failed.
The election of President Donald
Trump in November rekindled
talk of California seceding from
the union. The proposal makes
no mention of Trump, who was
trounced by Hillary Clinton in Cali-
fornia by more than 4 million votes.
The proposed constitutional
amendment,
titled
California
Nationhood, would also ask voters
to repeal language that states the
U.S. Constitution is the supreme
law. If approved, it calls for
scheduling a vote in 2019 to ask
voters, “Should California become
a free, sovereign and independent
country?”
Threats to secede from the United
States have been a part of American
politics almost since the nation was
founded. The most serious attempt
came before and during the Civil
War, when 11 Southern states left to
form the Confederacy.
Another hurdle would be the
U.S. Constitution, which does not
provide for state secession.
The campaign must submit the
valid voter signatures by July 25
to qualify for the November 2018
ballot.