4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL March 11, 2015
O PINION
Replacing Harrison School building (soon) is an absolute must
BY JON STINNETT
Sentinel Editor
C
ottage Grove needs a new
Harrison
Elementary
School, and the community has
a good chance in the near future
to build its replacement.
A couple months ago, I was
asked
to
serve on a
committee
of about 40
community
members,
school dis-
trict staff and school board
representatives tasked with dis-
cussing a local option bond levy
that could potentially be used to
replace the nearly 70-year old
building on 10th Street.
My reasons for agreeing to
serve on the committee were
my own, as each member of the
committee would likely agree.
During numerous visits to Har-
rison to cover the activities of
students and staff there, I’ve
become aware over the years of
the cramped conditions at the
school and the calls to replace
it, and as one of the school’s
neighbors, it’s been educational
to watch the area around Har-
rison bog down with the before
and after-school traffi c created
by an almost complete lack of
parking.
There’s also the matter of my
daughter, who at 3 ½ years old
is scheduled to attend Harrison
in the fall of 2016.
Like any parent, I want what’s
best for my child, and I want a
better experience for her, her
friends and peers than can cur-
rently be had at Harrison. At a
tour of the school on Feb. 24,
Principal Ali Nice and South
Lane Maintenance Supervisor
Matt Allen talked of the school’s
many shortcomings, a tour re-
counted in the March 4 edition
of the Sentinel. It’s diffi cult to
imagine anyone taking a similar
tour of the school and not seeing
the need to replace it.
Over the years, I’ve done my
best to cover local issues fairly
while keeping my own personal
perspectives out of the equa-
tion, and as such the invitation
to serve on the Bond Advisory
Committee brought up the po-
tential that I may be too close
to the story to cover it without
bias.
Looking back, it seems that I
may have worked to self-censor
a bit with regard to the situa-
tion at Harrison — my account
of the tour of the school barely
scratched the surface of what is
wrong with a school building
that was built to host far fewer
students than currently attend
school there in an entirely dif-
ferent era for this town. The pic-
tures I managed to take of the
tour did little to showcase the
basic disintegration of the build-
ing or the challenges faced by
staff to simply make the build-
ing comfortable and effective
for the daily education of over
400 young people.
But make no mistake — Har-
rison Elementary School is fall-
ing apart, and remodeling the
building is not an option when
the space needed for an expan-
sion cannot be found at the cur-
rent site. A replacement must be
built, and soon, and school dis-
trict personnel believe the tim-
ing is right to put the issue be-
fore those who have the power
to band together to make it hap-
pen — local taxpayers.
Talk of replacing Harrison
waned in recent years, with
budget slashing by the School
District accompanying a severe
economic downturn. But the
economy continues to recover,
and the opportunity to begin a
new bond for Harrison after a
signifi cant interest rate decrease
on the bond used to build Cot-
tage Grove High School means
the new school could be built
with little to no increase in local
property taxes.
I believe Cottage Grove has a
responsibility to give its young
people the best education pos-
sible, and a safe, functional and
comfortable Harrison School is a
big piece of that effort. As such,
I’ll be wholeheartedly support-
ing a levy to fi nance the con-
struction of a new school at the
Taylor Street site of the former
Cottage Grove High School. In
the meantime, I’ll pass coverage
of the Bond Advisory Commit-
tee’s recommendations to Senti-
nel staffer Matt Hollander.
The potential bond will be a
part of the local conversation
for some time to come, as the
District is targeting either the
May or November 2016 ballot
to put the issue before voters. Of
similar importance to replacing
Harrison will be the decision on
potentially using bond funds to
make other upgrades in the Dis-
trict such as replacing the War-
ren H. Daugherty Aquatic Cen-
ter, and in the coming months,
it will be interesting to see what
the committee recommends in
regard to those upgrades. In the
meantime, the District has set
up a survey on its website aimed
at gauging public opinion on the
potential bond, and I strongly
urge those interested to take a
few minutes to make their views
known. The survey can be found
at https://www.surveymonkey.
com/s/SchoolBondSurvey.
into the sea, then dropped a big
section of the galley roof on top
of it, breaking Zube’s arm and
relieving the desperate crew of
one of their two oars.
“We did our best to get back
to the wreck,” Zube recounted,
“but failed, and, believing all
hands save ourselves were lost,
we got up sail and stood out to
sea. As I knew the coast to be a
desolate one, I thought it best to
keep the boat well out, hoping
to fall into the path of steam-
ships.”
Meanwhile, back on the
hard-pressed Emily G. Reed,
the captain and surviving crew
members — everyone who had
chanced to be on the poop of
the ship when she struck — had
watched in horror as the boat full
of men was apparently swatted
into the sea by the falling gal-
ley roof. Taking refuge as best
they could in the stern of the dy-
ing ship, they hung on, waiting
for daylight, praying that they’d
struck the sand at high tide.
A few hours later, the fi rst
rays of dawn showed them that
they had. The receding waters
had left the battered hulk of the
old freighter in just a few feet
of water. Into this they climbed
and swam and waded up onto
the beach — saddened by what
they’d seen and thankful to be
alive. A head count revealed
that there were just fi ve of them,
including the captain’s wife.
The captain soon faced the grim
duty of reporting the loss of 11
brave men.
While he was doing that,
four of those men were several
miles away off the coast, trying
desperately to keep their badly
damaged lifeboat afl oat. In the
miraculous melee of roiling wa-
ter and broken stanchions and
chunks of the ship’s galley that
had somehow resulted in their
escape from certain death, the
boat had taken heavy blows, and
several holes had been punched
in its hull.
The desperate men raced
against time trying to saw off a
piece of one of the waterproof
compartments with their jack-
knives — a tough task, consid-
ering that the entire boat was
made of galvanized steel. At
length, they managed to wrench
a piece off, and this they used to
bail out the boat.
“It took about half an hour
to get the boat empty, and in
another half an hour we would
have to do it again,” said Zube.
The balance of Valentine’s
Day passed by on the tiny boat
without a hint of rescue, and
night found the men wind-
burned, ravenously hungry and
burning with thirst. They saw
lights twinkling through the
CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
Cottage Grove City Hall: 942-
5501. www.cottagegrove.org/
Garland Burback, Ward 3:
942-4800
Cottage Grove Mayor Tom
Munroe: 942-5501.
Kate Price, Ward 4: 954-9810
Lane County
Commissioners:
Cottage Grove City
Councilors:
Faye Stewart, East Lane
Commissioner
Lane County Public Service
Building
125 East 8th Street
Eugene, OR 97401
Phone: (541) 682-4203
Fax: (541) 682-4616
Mike Fleck, At Large:
942-7302
Heather Murphy, At Large:
942-3444
Jake Boone, Ward 1:
653-7413
Oregon State House of
Representatives:
Jeff Gowing, Ward 2:
942-1900
District: 007
900 Court Street NE
Suite H-288
Salem, OR 97301
Phone: (503) 986-1407
Fax: (503) 986-1130
Email: rep.cedrichayden@
state.or.us
Oregon State Senate:
Sen. Floyd Prozanski (DEM)
District: 004
900 Court Street NE
Suite S-319
Salem, OR 97301-0001
Phone: (503) 986-1704
Fax: (503) 986-1080
Email: sen.fl oydprozanski@
state.or.us
Rep. Cedric Hayden
Offbeat Oregon History
Sailors, miraculously saved from wreck,
drifted 200 miles
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
For the Sentinel
V
alentine’s Day in 1908
was anything but roman-
tic for the crew of the 215-foot
windjammer Emily G. Reed.
The night was dark, the weather
heavy and the seas rough as the
lookout strained his eyes, hop-
ing for a fl ash of light from the
Tillamook Rock Lighthouse to
tell them where they were.
Captain Kessel was a skilled
navigator, and he’d seen worse
than this. But he was worried
about not being able to see the
light. According to his calcula-
tions, they should be approach-
ing it even now.
What Kessel didn’t know,
though, was that his chronom-
eter had broken. He was basing
those calculations off bad data.
And he was about to learn that
the hard way.
Around 1:30 a.m., as the
lookout strained his eyes east-
ward, he suddenly realized the
ship was sailing through break-
ers. And before anyone could do
more than panic, the heavy sail-
ing ship had beached itself with
a mighty crunching shudder that
told of heavy damage.
The Emily G. Reed was a
nearly 30-year-old hull, likely
at least somewhat waterlogged;
and the 2,100 tons of coal in her
holds bore down mercilessly.
With a tremendous cracking
the old vessel’s back broke, and
the bow lay over to port, fac-
ing straight into the teeth of the
oncoming breakers. Walls of
green water started boarding the
stricken ship, carrying scream-
ing sailors off into the frigid
night.
“In a twinkling one of the
lifeboats was smashed by a big
wave,” First Mate Fred Zube
told a reporter for the Portland
Evening Telegram, “and the
decks were so deep in the boil-
ing water that there was no time
to get aft, where Captain Kessel
and his wife and some of the
rest of the crew were.”
In desperation, Zube and three
other crew members leaped into
the remaining lifeboat and cut
the lashings as a second foam-
fl ecked wall of green water de-
scended on the deck. It picked
the metal lifeboat up, half full
of water, and threw it overboard
Please see OFFBEAT, Page 11A
The effects of soda and low-nutrient foods on children’s behavior
BY JOEL FURHMAN, MD
For the Sentinel
T
he standard American
diet, chock full of soda
and other sugary drinks, fast
foods, and other low-nutrient
foods, can have a major impact
on the health and lives of our
children. Rising rates of child-
hood obesity driven by this way
of eating have received much
attention; however, low-nutrient
foods are still having negative
$ PUUBHF ( SPWF 4 FOUJOFM
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effects on the physical and men-
tal health of children who are
not overweight. Children are not
immune to the damaging health
effects of the standard American
diet, which can set them up for
a lifetime of poor health ranging
from heart disease to behavior
problems and lower cognitive
performance.
On average, U.S. children and
teens consume over 200 calories
a day from soda and other sug-
ary drinks, and it is estimated
that about 14 percent of their
calories come from fast food.
As a result of the poor diets of
American children, more than
one-third of normal-weight
teenagers (and about half of
overweight teenagers) have at
least one diet-related risk fac-
tor for heart disease. These di-
etary patterns have the potential
to dramatically affect not only
public health but the productiv-
ity of our future adult popula-
tion; studies have implicated
poor diet in limiting intelligence
and academic performance, and
also have drawn parallels be-
tween consumption of sweets
during childhood and violence
in adulthood.
A study on soda consumption
found an increase in behavior
and attention problems in fi ve-
year-old children (as assessed by
their mothers) with increasing
daily consumption of soda. For-
ty-three percent of the fi ve-year-
olds in the study drank soda at
least once a day. The authors ad-
justed their results for potential
confounding factors that might
affect behavior, such as hours of
television and a stressful home
environment, and still found a
signifi cant association between
soda consumption and aggres-
sion, withdrawn behavior and
poor attention. They proposed
that caffeine and/or fl uctuations
in blood sugar might be respon-
sible for the association between
soda and behavior problems.
Blood glucose levels do affect
the workings of the brain, and
habitual high sugar intake has
been shown to impair cognitive
function. Several previous stud-
ies on high school students have
also associated soda consump-
tion with aggressive behavior,
as well as depression and self-
harm. Plus, higher sugar sweet-
ened beverage consumption is
linked to diabetes, cardiovascu-
lar disease and cancers.
In addition to soda, higher fast
food consumption in fi fth grade
(four or more times per week)
has been associated with poor-
er academic progress in math,
reading and science between
fi fth grade and eighth grade.
Children who ate fast food one
to three times per week—a com-
mon level of intake—compared
to those who ate no fast food
had lower scores in math. These
results suggest that children eat-
ing fast food frequently could
slow their academic progress.
The food habits children de-
velop in their early years have
a substantial impact on their
physical health and mental well
being throughout the rest of
our lives. Parents need to know
this information, so that they
can help their children to live
healthfully, maintain a positive
mindset, and reach their full
cognitive potential.
Dr. Fuhrman is a #1 New
York Times best-selling author
and a board certifi ed family
physician specializing in life-
style and nutritional medicine.
Visit his website at DrFuhrman.
com. Submit your questions and
comments about this column
directly to newsquestions@
drfuhrman.com. The full refer-
ence list for this article can be
found at DrFuhrman.com.
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