A4
OPINION
Blue Mountain Eagle
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Education is the
challenge for
this Legislature
E
very child in Or-
egon deserves an
excellent education
— regardless of where the
student lives or attends
school, regardless of wheth-
er the student comes from
a well-to-do family or an
impoverished one, regard-
less of academic ability and
regardless of ethnicity or
race or background.
The recent Department of
Education report on grad-
uation rates shows that is
not the case in Oregon. But
another report from the Leg-
islature’s Joint Committee
on Student Success provides
a path forward.
Across Oregon, high
school graduation rates
increased by 2 percentage
points last year to almost 79
percent.
The improvement is wel-
come news, but it remains
deeply concerning that one-
fi fth of public high school
students fail to graduate
within four years.
There also are vast vari-
ations among demographic
groups. The graduation rate
was 82 percent for girls
but 75.6 percent for boys.
Graduation rates generally
were lower for students of
color but higher for former
English language learners.
Only 54 percent of homeless
students graduated within
four years of high school.
As members of the Stu-
dent Success commit-
tee said, the public has had
enough. Oregon has been
grappling with these issues
for decades, with too little
progress.
Insuffi cient funding has
been a major obstacle, espe-
cially since voters’ passage
of Measure 5 in 1990 put the
onus on state government
to fund public schools. But
money is not the only issue.
It’s how the money is spent.
On the one hand, the
collaborative approach
espoused by the nonprofi t,
nonpartisan Chalkboard
Project has achieved pro-
found academic gains and
higher staff morale in partic-
ipating school districts. On
the other hand, the state’s
recent audit report on Port-
land Public Schools shows
“how a school district
should not operate,” accord-
ing to Rep. Greg Smith,
R-Heppner.
The bipartisan Student
Success committee has
abundant ideas for reforms
— excellent ideas — but
with a combined price tag
of well over $3 billion. Not
everything can be done.
The Legislature will sig-
nifi cantly increase educa-
tion spending. But PERS’
unfunded actuarial liabil-
ity will consume a huge
chunk of any additional
money earmarked for reduc-
ing class sizes, extending the
school year or making other
improvements. The major-
ity Democrats and Gov. Kate
Brown must face up to their
responsibility to rein in pub-
lic pension costs, instead of
wringing their hands over
court decisions that over-
turned past reforms.
School districts must
accept that additional fund-
ing will come with require-
ments for accountability
in how that money is used.
Unlike previous political
endeavors that chased the
educational fl avor of the day,
the Student Success commit-
tee based its recommenda-
tions on reality. Lawmakers
visited more than 50 schools
— from the coast to eastern
and southern Oregon — and
talked with hundreds of stu-
dents, staff members, par-
ents, business people, civic
leaders and others.
Committee members
are working on determin-
ing which proposals would
achieve the greatest return
on investment and how to
pay for them. Their top pri-
orities include the impor-
tance of early childhood
education and the drastic
need for more school coun-
selors, mental health ther-
apists and other behavioral
health services — through-
out the state.
In their letter submitting
the Student Success report,
the committee’s Demo-
cratic and Republican lead-
ers wrote: “A student’s
achievement should be a
result of their own efforts,
not their parents’ income or
their race, ethnicity, or ZIP
code. Unfortunately, factors
entirely outside of a young
person’s control too often
determine their access to a
high-quality education. Ore-
gon’s students deserve a
public education system that
sets them up for success.”
That is the challenge for
the 2019 Legislature. That is
the challenge for Oregon.
Blue Mountain
EAGLE
Published every
Wednesday by
FARMER’S FATE
Boy Mom: Messy, blessed life
I
heard it before I could see it.
Water poured like Niagara
Falls over the edge of the toi-
let bowl.
I paused in the doorway, unsure
what to do fi rst. About that moment,
the water reached the tips of my
boots. I swiped at the “pretty tow-
els” — the ones usually reserved for
just looking at — and confi ned the
fl ood of water to the bathroom.
“What wrong toilet, Mommy?”
Parker, my 2-year-old, asked with
wide blue eyes.
The heaping pile of wadded toi-
let paper rose above the bowl like
whipped cream on hot cocoa while
the cardboard tube fl oated on the
fl oor.
“You used too much toilet
paper,” I answered sharply. This
wasn’t the fi rst time this had hap-
pened — or the second, or third. It
was becoming a frequent occurrence
— weekly, if not daily.
“Why toilet bwoken, Mommy?”
he asked, just as innocently as
before.
“Because you put too much toilet
paper in it,” I sighed with exaspera-
tion — more concerned with the job
at hand than answering his ever-re-
peating question.
As he asked yet again, Kea-
gan, my 9-year-old, poked his head
around the corner. “It’s like when
you cram your mouth full of cook-
my oldest standing in the bathroom
doorway of the wet bathroom fl oor,
my youngest in the hallway with a
golf club, the toilet plunger fi nally
starting to make progress — wait, a
golf club? I swung my head back to
the hallway in time to see my oldest
duck as a plastic ball zinged through
the air and brushed my neck as it
landed in the bathtub.
“No head shots!” I hollered out
the door. “Body shots only!” My
patience was once again gone.
“Sorry ‘bout that, Mommy,”
Parker said, with just the right
amount of surprise and apology in
his little voice.
I smiled. I really will miss the
rocks in the dryer, tractor toys in
the fridge, little muddy, rubber boot
tracks on my freshly mopped fl oors,
empty rolls of tape next to “fi xed”
ladders, chairs and cupboard doors.
While pregnant, I envisioned
myself to be a Pinterest mother of
blonde, book-loving, tractor-driv-
ing girls. Well, it turns out I’m
more of an Amazon Prime mom of
crazy, messy, loud, smelly, emotion-
ally unstable, frustrating, boys. And
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Unless I sit on a wet toilet seat —
then I have momentary visions of
Pinterest.
Brianna Walker occasionally
writes about the Farmer’s Fate for
the Blue Mountain Eagle.
GUEST COMMENT
Improving Oregon cougar management
By Jim Akenson
To the Blue Mountain Eagle
The fatal cougar attack on a hiker
in the Mount Hood National Forest
last year was a tragic thing.
Evidence evaluation indicated the
cougar was a female in good health.
Is this a surprise? Not really. Cou-
gar numbers are at all-time highs
for our state, and the distribution of
these cats encompasses the entire
state. What has accounted for this
cougar population expansion from
an estimation of less than 3,000 in
the mid-1990s to well over 6,000
today? Some of the answer is biolog-
ical, some is social and much is con-
nected to management capabilities
and practices. We need to fi nd a way
to return to this socio-biological bal-
ance, and looking to the recent past
might just be the best bet — back to
a time when hound hunting was a
legal and effective management tool
in Oregon.
What are the consequences of
there being double the number of
cougars in Oregon? These effects are
best described as alarming and pat-
tern changing. One such pattern is for
prey animals, specifi cally deer, relo-
cating to human development areas
to avoid a higher predation risk. This
relocation is also drawing in cou-
gars that will go where the next meal
can be found. Many hunters and state
wildlife managers report that deer
are now less abundant in the wilder
mountain, high desert and canyon
regions of our state. Meanwhile,
Oregon cities are wrestling with the
number of deer inhabiting city limits,
and cougars are showing up in back-
yards and schoolyards.
As cougars become more com-
fortable in human-altered landscapes,
the probability of negative encoun-
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ters with humans,
as well as pets and
livestock, increases.
So, what is the
solution? Biologi-
cally, it is plain and
simple: more inten-
Jim Akenson
sive cougar man-
agement through
various hunting techniques. With
an estimated population of 6,400
cougars, and roughly 14,000 peo-
ple hunting cougars and harvesting
from 250 to 300 cats per year, this
only equals a harvest rate of 4 per-
cent, which is not enough to even
fl atten the ever-rising cougar popula-
tion curve.
Reducing human threat, increas-
ing deer and elk survival and bring-
ing a cougar population back in bal-
ance with other interests in our state
will require increased management
action and effi ciency. According to
the 2017 Oregon Cougar Manage-
ment Plan, the success rate for 2016
cougar hunters was 1.9 percent, with
13,879 people reporting that they did
hunt cougars. Contrast that with 1994
data, the last year that dogs were
allowed in conservatively controlled,
limited-entry cougar hunting, show-
ing 358 people hunted cougars and
harvested 144 for a success rate of
40.2 percent. Bottom line: Hunting
effi ciency with dogs is dramatically
higher and provides wildlife manag-
ers a reliable tool for maintaining the
cougar population within its manage-
ment objectives.
Oregon’s cougar management
and record keeping are divided into
six zones, each of which is assigned
a desired harvest quota to keep the
population in balance with the varied
activities of all Oregonians. Employ-
ing the current limited management
methods, only one of the six zones
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ies,” he explained.
“Your mouth is so
full you can’t get
them down your
throat. It’s like that
with the toilet.”
I stopped plung-
Brianna
ing for a minute so
Walker
I could watch this
conversation. My
2-year-old looked up at his brother
and was silent a moment as he
seemed to process the simile. Then
he wrinkled up his little nose. “That
gwoss, Keagan!” he responded
animatedly. “Parker not eat toilet
paper!”
Keagan responded with more
patience than I had while he
repeated his analogy. Again, Parker
shook his head with a look of dis-
gust. “Gwoss, Keagan! Parker not
put cookies in the toilet!”
The corners of my lips were
twitching in a smile. Friends had
told me that being a mom of boys
would consist of cleaning pee off
the toilet seat and listening to gig-
gles over body functions. What they
didn’t tell me is that those same
boys (my husband included) would
take me right to the brink of insan-
ity, then melt my heart with a sweet
kiss — and a perfectly timed fart.
“You’re going to miss this,” I
whispered to myself, taking a men-
tal picture of this moment in time:
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send address changes to:
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has met the harvest quota in recent
years. A criterion for quota estab-
lishment is complaint frequency. By
far, the most cougar complaints are
recorded on the west side of the Cas-
cades, including the coastal region, in
Zones A and B. This is also where the
bulk of the human population lives.
More than 350 cougar complaints
per year were received during the last
decade in these two zones. Unfor-
tunately, this recording system was
not initiated until 2001, so we don’t
have data for the time before the dog
ban of 1994. We do have records for
administrative actions connected to
human safety and pet confl icts before
and after the dog ban of 1994. For
eight years before the ban, they aver-
aged only four per year, and then
seven years after the dog ban, these
complaints increased to 27 per year
— nearly a seven-fold increase.
Oregon does have a legislatively
authorized agent program wherein
highly vetted houndsmen are permit-
ted to lethally remove cats to reduce
human confl ict and bolster deer and
elk survival. These agents work
closely with ODFW district biol-
ogists. Even with this program in
place, cougars are steadily increas-
ing in Oregon, where hunting them
is very impractical without the aid of
dogs. At present, the law authorizing
the use of agents is up for renewal,
and hopefully it will receive legis-
lative support and then be applied
more broadly for both reaching
zone harvest quotas and to help curb
the upward statewide population
trajectory.
Jim Akenson is a wildlife
biologist, book author and con-
servation director for the Oregon
Hunters Association. He invested
much of his career in researching
the Northwest’s predators.
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Blue Mountain Eagle
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