THE BULLETIN • FRIDAY, JANUARY 1, 2021 A5
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Some state
agencies fail to
perform audits
T
wo state agencies — Oregon’s Housing and Community
Services and the state’s Higher Education Coordinating
Commission — have year after year failed to perform
internal audits.
Imagine you were in charge of a
business to ensure Oregonians with
low incomes get stable and afford-
able housing. Or imagine if it was
a business to ensure students — es-
pecially those who are underserved
— can go on to success in higher
education.
Maybe the business generally
does a good job. But year after year,
it failed to perform a requirement
under state law to determine if the
business is doing the best it can to
meet its objectives and spends tax-
payer money wisely. Shouldn’t the
state do something about it?
The answer requires some nu-
ance. First of all, there are ways
around the requirement — it can be
waived. And sometimes, it’s not only
the agency’s fault.
Oregon Housing and Community
Services, known as OHCS, is the state’s
agency to ensure Oregonians with
low incomes get stable and affordable
housing. Oregon’s Higher Education
Coordinating Commission, or HECC,
works to ensure students have paths to
postsecondary success.
State government has many lines of
defense to ensure programs work and
money is spent carefully. There are the
managers at the agency, the employ-
ees, reviews by state legislators and
sometimes audits by the auditors in
the Secretary of State’s Office.
One additional state requirement
for larger state agencies is for an
internal audit function. Those are
essentially people who work in an
agency and are supposed to inde-
pendently evaluate it and ensure it is
functioning properly. Agencies can
also contract out for the work.
State agencies that are big enough
are supposed to do a risk assessment
to identify problem areas and then
perform at least one internal audit
per calendar year. And, as we said,
agencies can be granted waivers
from the requirement. But repeat-
edly granting waivers is like not hav-
ing a requirement.
The state puts out a report at the
end of every year looking back to
see how agencies did. The new re-
port came out Monday. OHCS and
HECC weren’t the only agencies that
did not perform the auditing func-
tions. But they have repeatedly failed
to do so. They both got waivers.
OHCS also did hire an external
firm to do internal audit work in
2020 and hired an internal auditor.
So, it is making progress.
HECC is a relatively new agency,
formed in 2013, though it didn’t come
together until 2015. And the reason it
hasn’t gotten around to its internal au-
dit functions? It asked for funding for
the position in 2017 and 2019. Leg-
islators didn’t fund it until the 2019
session. The auditor is working with
HECC’s management to now live up
to its auditing requirements.
Those explanations are somewhat
encouraging. But if legislators con-
tinue to not fund positions or allow
the requirement to be waived, the re-
quirement can become meaningless
and problems that could be caught
may not be caught.
More needed to track
education performance
M
easure 98 put money in
two places where Oregon
needed it. The November
2016 ballot promised to send educa-
tion dollars to dropout prevention
and career and technical education.
The Bulletin’s editorial board en-
dorsed it. Voters approved it.
A critical component of the mea-
sure was that the Oregon Depart-
ment of Education is supposed to
hold district’s accountable for their
performance with the dollars. An
Oregon Secretary of State audit re-
cently called on the department
to do a bit more to ensure that
happens.
“For instance, ODE annually re-
ceives student-level enrollment data,
such as basic demographic informa-
tion, from school districts and char-
ter schools, but the agency cannot
see how students have performed in
their courses,” the audits says. “Be-
cause some data is held by individual
districts and schools, the team also
cannot easily aggregate that informa-
tion across participants. In addition,
as was noted in a previous audit, basic
information about alternative schools
and programs continues to be lim-
ited. Alternative and online schools
accounted for about 10% of Oregon’s
public high school enrollment in the
2015-16 school year, but nearly half of
the state’s high school dropouts.”
Room for improvement? Yes. And
it’s another example why the money
spent to fund the Secretary of State’s
audit division can be some of the
most important money the state
spends. It’s one thing to fund a pro-
gram. It’s something else to ensure it
is working right.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
Movie theaters need our help to survive
BY ALAN LIGHTMAN
Special to The Washington Post
I
n 1915, my 24-year-old grandfa-
ther, M.A. Lightman, was look-
ing out a hotel window in Colbert
County, Alabama, when he saw a
long line of people waiting to get into
a movie theater. In those early days
of film, many cinemas were simply
converted storefronts outfitted with
a projector and folding chairs for the
audience. Moving pictures were more
than photographs and different from
books. They transmitted romance,
danger and comedy straight into your
emotional bloodstream, with no need
for translation and no intermediaries.
My grandfather, the son of Hun-
garian immigrants, had been trained
as an engineer. But he always fancied
himself a showman. Looking out the
window, he decided to try out the
movie business.
In 1916, M.A. opened his first the-
ater, the Liberty, where he played the
original, silent version of “20,000
Leagues Under the Sea.” In 1931, he
was elected president of the Motion
Picture Theater Owners of America,
the forerunner of today’s National As-
sociation of Theatre Owners.
As a child in the late 1950s, I some-
times ventured into the projection
booths of my grandfather’s movie the-
aters, claustrophobic rooms containing
two movie projectors, each mounted
with a giant reel of celluloid film. Like
a fish tank, the front wall of the booth
was all glass. I can still feel the heat
from the intensely bright “carbon arc
lamps,” which shined a powerful light
through the film. The light then trav-
eled through a focusing lens, then
through the glass wall and out into the
theater, finally landing on the movie
screen 200 feet away.
Even at that age, I knew that some-
thing magical was at work. We were
creating another world out there on
the screen, a world of joy and sadness,
laughter, romance, places far away in
space and in time, heroes and heroines
and ordinary people — a world that
moviegoers could enter and live other
lives. We were giving our audience a
common culture.
Movies are the principal medium
by which we tell and preserve stories.
Think of “Doctor Zhivago,” telling the
story of the Russian Revolution; or
“Schindler’s List,” helping to define our
understanding of the Holocaust; or
“The Big Short,” making the numbers
behind the 2008 financial crash legible
for lay audiences.
Over the decades, movies and movie
theaters have survived many competing
technologies that threatened their ex-
tinction, among them television, VHS
tapes, DVDs, Blu-rays, and streaming.
Through all of these worthwhile ad-
vances, people continued to leave their
homes to watch movies in theaters.
From 2010, just after streaming became
prominent, to the beginning of 2020,
the number of movie theaters nation-
wide remained nearly constant, going
from 5,773 to 5,798. Annual ticket sales
dropped by only 7%, from about 1.33
billion to about 1.24 billion.
Seeing a movie in a public the-
ater on a giant screen, surrounded by
other people, is not only entertain-
ment. It is an experience, a communal
activity, a night out of the house al-
most everyone can afford.
Then came the coronavirus pan-
demic. Few industries have suffered
more than movie theaters. The small
number of theaters that remain open
have seen attendance decline drastically.
National Association of Theatre Own-
ers chief John Fithian recently begged
for federal aid, calling relief “the ONLY
solution that will provide the bridge
that theaters need to see them into next
year.” Although movies will undoubt-
edly still be made and streamed into
private homes, if theaters do not sur-
vive, something irreplaceable will have
been lost.
We are social creatures. No matter
how comfortable our living rooms and
sophisticated our technology, we need
community, we need physical contact
with one another. According to the
General Social Survey, since the 1970s,
there has been a deterioration in partic-
ipation in such communal experiences
as parent-teacher associations, Lions
Clubs and Rotary Clubs, even bowling
leagues. It may be too late to save those
institutions, but it is not too late to save
movie theaters.
I vividly remember my excitement
at seeing the first “Star Wars” movie, in
1977, at a downtown theater in Boston.
That first image of the underside of a
spaceship sailing through the galaxy, on
that large screen, was so startling and
innovative that you could hear every-
one else in the audience gasp along with
you. We were floating in outer space.
Here, writ large on the screen, was
our modern version of the ancient he-
ro’s journey, dating back to the ancient
Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh. Here
were the enduring themes of chivalry,
good vs. evil, conquest and domin-
ion, fashioned for our technological
age. We moviegoers left the theater in
throngs, talking to each other, sharing
impressions, some of us speechless.
But all of us felt that we now shared
some magical bond. Lawmakers
should act to save that magic.
e e
Alan Lightman is a writer, physicist and professor
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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This awful year taught me things about hope
BY MONICA HESSE
The Washington Post
T
he first month of the pandemic
was also supposed to be the
month I got pregnant, but my
clinic closed, and plans changed. Doc-
tors and nurses needed personal pro-
tective equipment to tend to patients
with COVID-19, not women with re-
current miscarriages.
When the clinic reopened several
months later, it turned out my hus-
band and I had only been delaying yet
another loss: In late August, he obeyed
the medical center’s strict coronavirus
protocols by waiting anxiously in the
car while I trudged inside, masked and
hand-sanitized, to receive a miscarriage
diagnosis alone. I searched the ultra-
sound screen for the rhythmic beat of a
heart, and then accepted that whatever
had once been there was now gone.
But that was 2020 for you, consistent
only in its utter crappiness. For every
inspiring video of neighbors applaud-
ing a shift change at the hospital, an-
other video of a bone-tired nurse beg-
ging viewers to believe COVID-19 was
real, it wasn’t a hoax, wear a mask.
For every protest organized by ac-
tivists who understood racism is also a
long-term crisis, an appearance by the
Proud Boys; for every GoFundMe suc-
cessfully raising money for a beloved
teacher’s hospital bills, a bitter acknowl-
edgment that online panhandling is our
country’s version of a safety net.
Millions of citizens stood in line for
hours to vote for the next president
and then endured weeks of legal peti-
tions arguing that their votes should
be negated. The basis for these legal
actions were conspiracy theories too
wild to be believed.
And that was 2020 for you, too: ac-
cepting the increasingly obvious reality
that the country was in peril, built on
iffy foundations that now buckled un-
der pressure.
What kind of delusional person
would even try to get pregnant in this
world? In my case, it would never be
a happy accident; it would always be
a herculean effort. And so it seemed I
should have some answers.
I found myself asking a lot of things
like this in 2020, but really they were all
variations of the same question: What
does it mean to have hope?
But in the middle of this, scien-
tists worked quietly in labs all over
the world. They applied the scientific
method with discipline and speed. A
vaccine was developed. Tens of thou-
sands of volunteers rolled up their
sleeves and said, “try it out on me.”
It was approved, and a nurse from
Long Island was the first American tele-
vised receiving it. Her name was Sandra
Lindsay, an immigrant from Jamaica
who had come to the United States 30
years ago and who had spent the last
year overseeing critical care teams in
back-to-back shifts. She said she had
agreed to go first to show communities
of color, long abused, brushed-off or
condescended to by the medical sys-
tem, that the vaccine was safe.
Here was hope. And more than that,
here was hope from a woman who had
more reason than most to be embit-
tered: an exhausted health care worker
who knew too well America’s hideous
racial past and present, who nonethe-
less also knew there was only one way
out of the tunnel. Here she was, rolling
up her own sleeve, and there were the
lines of hospital employees ready to go
after her, and there were the truck driv-
ers ferrying shipments of syringes.
Sometime in October, a couple of
months after my last miscarriage —
when the country was riding up on
eight months of lonely and stoic birth-
days, graduations, deaths and weddings
— I went into the bathroom and saw
a faint second line on a First Response
pregnancy test. I mentioned it to my
husband and told him that I’d test again
in a few days but that we should assume
the worst would happen.
At my most recent appointment, the
doctor’s office was backed up in a hol-
iday logjam. It all felt precarious. The
current reality always feels precarious.
And yet there we all are together,
searching for signs of life, hoping that
whatever we emerge to can be bet-
ter than what we had before, and that
whatever we build will become our new
legacy. The sonographer finally arrived
and turned on the machine.
There was a heartbeat.
e e
Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington
Post’s Style section