TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2020
Baker City, Oregon
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OUR VIEW
Employment
Department
computer
issues are
continuing
State auditors were in the middle of an audit of
the Employment Department’s computer upgrade
when the pandemic hit. Auditors put it on hold. They
didn’t want to put more strain on the department as
it struggled to handle thousands of unemployment
claims.
But a letter to the department from auditors last
week had two themes. The department has done a
good job recently in planning the upgrade and adher-
ing to state procedures.
Encouraging.
It also said: “However, the program faces signifi -
cant risks.”
Worrying.
A legislative report had already highlighted the
history of the failure to upgrade the system after
the last recession. The auditor letter reinforces those
concerns.
The phrase “signifi cant risks” in the auditor letter
is common in reviews of complicated projects. What
matters is how the employment department re-
sponds. Does it take the risks seriously?
Is that needless worry on our part? We don’t think
so. We’ll tell you why. There are two reasons.
Sometimes Oregon government does not take such
warnings seriously. In 2013, we read the monthly, in-
dependent consultant reports about a project known
as Cover Oregon. They were fi lled with warnings
colored red and labeled risky about pulling off the
state’s health insurance website exchange by its fall
deadline. We spoke on the phone with the project’s
director about the reports at that time. He reassured
us that that was just the kind of thing such reports
do. Then-state Sen. Dennis Richardson (he later
became secretary of state) raised similar concerns.
Cover Oregon fl opped and cost the state about $300
million.
The second reason is that the state has known
about the computer problems at the employment
department for a long time. Previous state audits
highlighted them years ago. “Those audits predicted
the problems OED is now experiencing with unem-
ployment claims if the modernization project was not
carried out promptly,” State Sen. Kim Thatcher wrote
this week. She is a Republican who is running for
secretary of state.
We should note the bulk of the auditor’s letter
addressed issues that the department has seemed
to get right. It then mentions at least two risk areas.
One is personnel. Staff turnover has been a recur-
ring problem for the computer upgrade. And there
has been more turnover recently. “From January to
April 2020, staff fi lling six positions on the Modern-
ization Program team have left, though two of these
positions have since been fi lled. In addition, on July
1, 2020, the OED Modernization Director left the pro-
gram,” the letter points out. How can the department
pull off this project if it can’t keep key staff?
The other key risk area identifi ed in the letter is
the timeline. It’s diffi cult to estimate the timeline
on complicated, technological upgrades. That’s no
surprise. But it can lead to unanticipated additional
costs, particularly as the department struggles to
cope with the workload from the pandemic.
Unemployed Oregonians are not getting their
unemployment checks in part because the depart-
ment did not successfully carry out the upgrade of
its computer system after the last recession. Oregon
legislators and Gov. Kate Brown need to do a bet-
ter job of tracking the upgrade’s progress. Take the
signifi cant risks seriously.
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald.
Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions
of the authors and not necessarily that of the Baker City Herald.
Don’t take police from schools
George Floyd’s tragic death prompt-
ed national protests against police
brutality and then a chorus of calls to
defund police departments. The move-
ment swept up school district offi cials,
some of whom are removing armed
offi cers from public schools.
Yet it wasn’t a gun that killed George
Floyd. The video of his death lasted an
excruciating 8 minutes and 46 seconds
and is seared in the national conscious-
ness.
But parents and educators would do
well to recognize that the Floyd video
was 6 minutes longer than it took
Deputy Jimmy Long to stop a 19-year-
old with a gun at a Marion County,
Florida, school on April 20, 2018.
Earlier that year, on Feb. 14, a
student gunman took the lives of 17
students and adults in Parkland,
Florida. A “National School Walkout” to
protest gun violence was organized to
take place April 20, the anniversary of
the Columbine High School massacre
in which two students killed 13 people
and wounded nearly two dozen others.
Just four hours north of Parkland,
students at Forest High School were
preparing to leave the building as part
of the walkout when a gunshot rang
out. A former student had entered the
premises and shot a 17-year-old.
Deputy Long, a school resource of-
fi cer, “ran towards where he thought
the noise came from,” said Sgt. Paul
Bloom, director of public information
for the Marion County Sheriff’s Offi ce.
“That’s what you train for and you
hope you never have to deal with, but
they (school resource offi cers) are there
to protect the children.”
Had Long not been on campus, April
20 might have marked another somber
anniversary.
JONATHAN
BUTCHER
The Minneapolis school board has,
for years, considered removing school
resource offi cers from district schools.
While unrelated to schools, Floyd’s
death prompted the board to offi cially
sever ties with law enforcement last
month. Portland, Oregon, schools
followed. According to reports, school
offi cials in California, Colorado, Illinois,
Maryland, New York, North Carolina,
Washington and Wisconsin are consid-
ering similar moves.
Floyd’s death was brutal, but de-
mands to remove school resource offi -
cers after this event suggest that police
are the problem — a perspective that is
easy to take until a troubled individual
with a weapon walks into your child’s
classroom.
Over the last 25 years, the number of
school resource offi cers in schools has
nearly doubled, often with approval
of school communities, according to
surveys. A 2013 Congressional Re-
search Offi ce report found that, based
on the research available, “the expan-
sion of SRO programs coincided with a
decrease in reported serious violent vic-
timizations of students while at school
and generally lower numbers of violent
deaths and homicides at schools.”
Cameras and smartphones are virtu-
ally everywhere, so videos of aggressive
offi cers go viral quickly. Yet federal data
shows that some 1.4 million incidents
involving criminal activity happen in
schools every year, which means thou-
sands of incidents that offi cers handled
properly go without a headline for every
problem with a school resource offi cer.
Your views
Oregon’s mail-in elections
should be national model
In 106 days from today there will
be the Nov. 3 presidential election. No
matter where you stand on who you
want to see in this country’s highest
offi ce, likely you deem it important
that the ballots — in all 50 states —
are handled properly. Oregon’s mail-in
ballot elections have been around for
Parents and policymakers must
still address the troubling examples of
offi cers abusing their position, however,
and after the Parkland shooting in
2018, state offi cials emphasized the
training programs available to offi cers
assigned to schools. The Federal Com-
mission on School Safety, formed that
year, heard copious testimony on the
importance of such training.
The Commission’s fi nal report listed
programs in Texas, South Dakota, Ar-
kansas, Indiana, Virginia and Ohio, to
name a few. Surveys of school resource
offi cers — including a 2014 survey of
Minnesota police — demonstrate that
offi cers want this training, especially in
the areas of counseling and mentoring
students.
Lawmakers should be wary of
federal proposals to standardize school
resource offi cer responsibilities or
evaluations, and families should object
to across-the-board elimination of the
offi cers from schools. Law enforcement
agencies certainly have best practices
to share, but the 2018 Federal Com-
mission was correct to say “the problem
of school violence is long-standing and
complex” and there “can be no ‘one-size-
fi ts-all’ approach.”
Specifi c training can help, along
with removing the comparatively few
offi cers that harm students. In Florida,
Deputy Long reacted immediately and
relied on what he had been taught.
Sgt. Bloom says Long “did what he was
there for and sworn to do. The parents
of those kids are glad that he did.”
And they would have been devas-
tated had he not.
Jonathan Butcher is a senior policy
analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s
Center for Education Policy.
Letters to the editor
20 years. Results are usually within
24 hours. I believe it would be of great
value that we each contact our Sena-
tors Merkley and Wyden, and Oregon’s
Secretary of State Bev Clarno asking
that they bring up Oregon’s successful
election process to the attention of the
nation. We are all in this together.
Linda Bergeron
Halfway
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OTHER VIEWS
Everyone should heed precautions
Editorial from The New York Daily
News:
Even as Walmart gets with the
public-health program and requires
masks in all its stores nationwide, even
as Alabama’s Republican governor
belatedly issues a mask mandate, even
as an anti-mask Oklahoma governor
tests positive for COVID-19, cleverer-
than-thou twentysomethings here in
America’s fi rst and deadliest corona-
virus epicenter are back to having
devil-may-care parties without social
distancing.
We say to them what we said to
the ultra-Orthodox Jews who defi ed
restrictions during the worst of April’s
agony: Cut it out. You’re going to get
people killed.
Already, New York City offi cials
report that infection rates among
20-29-year-olds rose 43% between mid-
June and the end of the month. Now,
Gothamist reveals that “Multiple ...
underground parties have been taking
place every weekend in the city, spread
via WhatsApp chat groups and text
chains with promoters asking people
not to publicize the illicit events.”
The jig is up. No, COVID-19 isn’t
especially deadly for young people. But
these revelers have parents and grand-
parents and friends, some of whom
work in hospitals and nursing homes.
Fingers crossed and knock on wood,
over months of pain and sacrifi ce, New
York has managed to contain the virus;
it is now fi nally reporting single-digit
daily fatalities and citywide positive
test rates that bounce between 1% and
2%. No one has the right to squander
that hard-won progress: not Floridians,
not Texans, not fellow New Yorkers
who consider themselves invincible.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has a Health
Department. He should send them to
the scene of these crimes in progress
and start handing out the fi nes.