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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 27, 2019)
Stanfi eld youth taekwondo team shines at Richland tournament | SPORTS, B1 E O AST 143rd Year, No. 223 REGONIAN TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019 WINNER OF THE 2019 ONPA GENERAL EXCELLENCE AWARD Volunteers swarm rodeo grounds $1.50 BACK TO SCHOOL More than 400 volunteers prepare Round-Up Grounds By KATHY ANEY East Oregonian PENDLETON — The to-do list was enormous. More than 400 people swarmed the Pendleton Round-Up Grounds on Saturday, cleaning, repairing, painting, putting up signage and removing things from storage. The giant annual workday signals that the renowned rodeo is only a cou- ple of weeks hence. “This day gets volunteers in the Round-Up mood,” said Pend- leton Round-Up Association Pres- ident Dave O’Neill. “Round-Up fever gets going. It starts to come to life.” One to-do list item involved setting up 600 horse stalls con- structed of 10- and 12-foot pan- els to create enclosures for horses belonging to rodeo contestants, Indian relay teams, judges and others. Below the North Grandstands, longtime volunteer Bill Etter replaced a broken board in a chute and repaired rollers on some of the rolling gates. The Pilot Rock man started volunteering more than 50 years ago at age 18. “It just gets in your blood,” he said. “My granddad did it and now I’m doing it.” The volunteers are largely unsung and many of the tasks are mundane and monotonous. Volun- teers, for instance, ventured into “the dungeon,” where programs and day sheets are stored, clearing out old programs to make room for new ones being printed this week. Other workers hosed down the grandstands and placed more than 1,000 folding chairs in the box seat areas. On their knees by the box seats, Brooke Harley and Carissa Schuening painstakingly painted seat numbers on the cement with bright yellow paint. On the dirt track by the North Grandstand, two men dug a hole, alternating between shovel and digging bar. When it got deep enough, one of them, Round-Up Director Nick Sirovatka, got on his belly and replaced cables that mark the location of the barrel rac- ing barrels and electronic eyes. On the edge of the grass, Tel Thacker whitewashed the PVC pipe that rims the track, using a fl uffy glove that Daylen Ellis peri- odically replenished with paint. Elsewhere on the grounds, volun- teers readied the Roy Raley Room A pickup truck waits behind a stopped school bus on the fi rst day of school in Hermiston on Monday morning. Staff photo by Ben Lonergan Before the bell even rings, Hermiston students start their school day with a journey on the bus Getting students up and moving Research shows that PE in schools can be life changing By JESSICA POLLARD East Oregonian sity of California Santa Barbara professor Michael Gottfried showed that when kin- dergarteners ride the bus to school, they miss fewer days and reduce their chances of being chronically absent, and have a higher chance at success in later grade levels. And according to Stefani Wyant, prin- cipal at Rocky Heights Elementary, it also provides an entirely separate ecosystem from the classroom, complete with its own set of challenges. “One of the biggest things on the bus is that there is one adult, and that adult is driving. Students sometimes tend to know that they are unsupervised,” Wyant said. She said that at Rocky Heights, teach- ers have conversations with students about how to ride the bus properly. “It’s an opportunity to be kind, include everybody and notice each student,” Wyant said. Things can get sticky when a parent fails to reregister their child for the coming school year. If a child’s registration is not up to date, their bus route may not be made clear to the bus driver. UMATILLA COUNTY — School districts around the state are trying their best to keep up with increasing physical educa- tion requirements, even if it means playing around in the classroom. The change is part of an incre- mental plan laid out by the state Legislature in 2007 designed to get Oregon students exercising more — 150 minutes a week for elementary students, and 225 min- utes a week for middle school stu- dents — by the 2017 school year. When schools weren’t able to keep up, another bill was passed, giv- ing districts until the end of the 2020-2021 school year to meet the requirements. Elementary schools are expected to start providing 120 of those minutes this year. That’s where Angie Treadwell, SNAP-Ed coordinator for Oregon State Uni- versity Extensions, comes in. For the past few months, Tread- well and her team have been intro- ducing educators at Hermiston, Umatilla, and Morrow County school districts to in-class kits with activities that meet the state physical education standards. She said that it’s not always realistic for schools to hire another PE teacher in order to reach the requirements. “This kind of thing has the abil- ity to impact these kids for a life- time,” Treadwell said. The kits, dubbed Be Physi- See Buses, Page A8 See Physical Education, Page A8 Staff photo by Ben Lonergan Neely Foster, 8, right, follows her friend onto the school bus for her fi rst day of third grade in Hermiston on Monday morning. See Round-Up, Page A8 By JESSICA POLLARD East Oregonian ERMISTON — Some students may be nervous to hop aboard the bus on the fi rst day of school. But Hermiston third-grader Neely Foster just couldn’t wait. Foster, 8, joined many of her peers on the way to West Park Elementary on Monday morning, the start of the school year for the Hermiston School District. “I love riding the bus,” said Foster, who was priming for her second year of riding. She said she prefers to sit in either the front or the back, and was ready to get to school so she could show off her donut- themed lunchbox and backpack. As the bus pulled up to her block, Foster and two of her friends ceased all conversa- tion to dash across the street, bustling with energy on an otherwise dead morning. As far as school symbolism goes, the big yellow bus is rivaled perhaps only by the Red Delicious apple. And, in reality, it makes a much bigger difference. In 2017, a study published by Univer- H
