A10 THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2021
Grading
Continued from A1
These hyper-specific rubrics
also remove any confusion
about why a student earned a
particular grade, or how the
student can improve, said Steve
Stancliff, principal at Pilot
Butte Middle School.
“It really clarifies for the
family and the student where
they’re at in regards to a partic-
ular criteria,” he said. “There’s
no guess work.”
Pilot Butte, which also has
instituted standards-based
grading for about five years,
uses a 0-8 grading scale to bet-
ter match the schoolwide In-
ternational Baccalaureate cur-
riculum, Stancliff said.
Standards-based grading
doesn’t penalize students who
start the semester or school year
slowly, Stancliff and DuVal said.
Arts
Continued from A1
“He was commenting that
over the last three months, he’s
had something like three gigs
or so,” Schuurman said. “And
so it got me thinking, OK, is
there anything that I might be
able to do in my own way to
help support them? I had been
familiar with NPR’s Tiny Desk
Concert series, and I thought
that that might be an interest-
ing model to see if that might
work here.”
Using equipment he pur-
chased for a documentation
project, Family Heritage Con-
nects, he set up a socially dis-
tanced studio in his home. The
Bulletin got involved, and a
donation drive effort in part-
nership with arts collaborative
Scalehouse, the Central Ore-
gon Creative Artists Relief Ef-
fort, followed soon after.
The effort will raise dona-
tions to help Central Oregon’s
creative artists — musicians,
visual artists, performers and
creative workers — by offering
grants and a platform to bring
attention to the talent that
needs help to continue thriving
in this community throughout
the pandemic and beyond.
Students
work on
a project
in a com-
puter sci-
ence class
in January
2019 at
Cascade
Middle
School in
Bend.
Bulletin file
photo
Projects and tests at the end
of the year are weighted more
heavily than those at the begin-
ning, to reward students who
finally understand a concept,
they said.
The system also distin-
guishes between simple mis-
takes and completely misun-
derstanding a concept, said
McKae, the math teacher at
Cascade. “Not all errors, par-
ticularly in math, are created
equal,” he said. “So you can
have a precision error on a
problem versus a conceptual
error, and if you grade them
the same way, you’re not going
With the assistance of local
sponsors and help from The
Tower Theatre and KPOV,
CO CAREs will bring recog-
nition to a different artist each
week with a video on The Bul-
letin’s website and a prominent
feature story in GO! Magazine.
Schuurman’s house concerts
will feature acoustic, solo or
duo musicians, while videos
captured by The Bulletin at the
Tower Theatre and other loca-
tions will feature visual artists,
bands and other performers.
The videos will be similar to
NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts or
GO! Magazine’s Anatomy of a
Song series.
People can give tax-deduct-
ible donations to the charity Go-
FundMe CO CAREs account or
to the featured artists’ indepen-
dent account. Links with oppor-
tunities to donate or apply for a
grant will be available at the top
of the website beside the launch
video describing the effort. The
fundraising goal for a first round
of grant-making is $40,000.
“Our tagline is ‘Empowering
our community,’” Wright said.
“The performing and the cre-
ative arts and the whole fabric
of this community is very im-
portant. If we’re going to be part
of the community, whatever we
can do to help, that is part of our
responsibility. We’ve got an au-
dience that I think is caring and
perhaps can help support this
effort. It just made sense.”
Scalehouse, the fiscal sponsor
of the project known for host-
ing the Bend Design Confer-
ence in the fall and for helping
to launch the city’s Creative
Laureate program, will handle
the grant application process
and distribution of funds. The
collaborative launched its own
Creative Relief Fund in Oc-
tober funded by a grant from
The Bend Foundation and will
roll that into CO CAREs.
Grant determinations will
be made by an advisory board
made up of artists, designers
and performers from outside
Central Oregon, including art-
ists from Portland and Eugene.
The application, which can
be found on The Bulletin’s
website, will ask for the artist’s
creative discipline, proof of
creative artistic practice and a
three-sentence artist statement
about their work. Applicants
will also need to provide a dec-
laration of need stating lost
income due to COVID-19 and
how the grant will help.
René Mitchell of Scalehouse
said the art collective was in-
spired by Portland’s Regional
Arts & Cultural Council initia-
tive to provide resources for art-
ists and creative workers greatly
impacted this last year. “Our role
is to identify and recognize the
need, confirm that applicants
are working artists and provide
the awards,” she said. “We are
not here to critique the work —
we want to support those who
entertain us, inspire us and cre-
ate a sense of community.”
This relief is desperately
needed by many Central Or-
egon artists. Bend Burlesque
co-founder Mehama Kaupp,
who features in the CO CAREs
launch video, said the effort
“feels like a really nice little
jump-start with things open-
ing back up a little bit too. Just
get creative juices flowing and
hopefully remind everybody
we’re still out there.”
“It’s been really super diffi-
cult because we were perform-
ing once to twice a month, and
we’ve been completely shut
down,” Kaupp said. “It’s af-
fected the business completely.
We don’t have an office space;
we can’t pay bills; we have no
income coming in. I am on the
verge of, do I shut this down or
do I keep fighting? It’s not been
easy.”
to get a sense of where the mis-
understanding is.”
Bend-La Pine isn’t going to
immediately force this grad-
ing style onto the 10 middle
and high schools that don’t use
it, Legace said. Still, district
leadership is hoping to reform
secondary grading techniques
to create a system that empha-
sizes knowledge acquisition,
rather than solely memorizing
answers and being well-be-
haved.
“It’s important to fall of us, as
educators, to reflect on, what is
the purpose of grading?” Leg-
ace said. “I think it’s important
that a letter grade represents
what a student learned at the
end of the term.”
Sarah Barclay, president of
the Bend Education Associa-
tion teachers’ union, said in an
email that teachers in the few
schools with standards-based
grading support it.
However, if Bend-La Pine
wants to institute something
similar district-wide, Barclay
said that change must happen
carefully and with plenty of
teacher input. An immediate
mandate — like the district’s
decision on Dec. 1 to not allow
teachers to give grades lower
than 50% — isn’t the best idea,
she wrote.
“Our educators are profes-
sionals with years of experi-
ence, training, and education
that must be harnessed to
make a systematic change like
this successful and meaning-
ful,” Barclay wrote. “Educators
are asking for a genuine seat at
the table for this conversation
and (teachers’ union) members
are not experiencing that at
this time.”
e e
Reporter: 541-617-7854,
jhogan@bendbulletin.com
taught at least 100 lessons, prob-
ably more. It’s still really hard
to make a living even with that
much work, especially now that
I’m supporting a family.”
CO CAREs may be coming
a year into the pandemic, but it
will not be pandemic-specific.
The effort will continue be-
yond COVID-19.
“Performing artists and cre-
ative artists are going to need
ongoing support for the next 6
months to a year,” Wright said.
“... We’re going to see how we
do with the first push over the
next six weeks, get funds dis-
tributed and go from there.”
Eric Leadbetter, one of the
first artists to record a video and
House Concert with Schuur-
man, became a father during
the pandemic. At the same time,
most of his work as a full-time
musician and music educator
was wiped out.
“When you dedicate your life
to something you love — in my
case, it’s music — (you’re) not
obviously doing it to make a for-
tune,” Leadbetter said. “Obviously
it would be nice to sell some re-
cords and whatnot, but the art
itself is part of the gratification
of doing it and also helps you
get out of bed in the morning.
Before the pandemic, in 2019 I
played 256 shows that year and
e e
Reporter: 541-617-7814,
bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com
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