Headlight Herald
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2023
TILLAMOOK, OREGON • WWW.TILLAMOOKHEADLIGHTHERALD.COM
VOL. 135, NO. 49 • $1.50
As call volumes continue to rise, Tillamook Fire plans to seek operating levy WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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Firefighters battle a blaze that erupted from a chimney at a house on Pete Street on November 28.
e first saw the fire as we hurtled around a bend on the Wilson River Highway. Tillamook Fire Chief Jeff McBrayer and I had been conducting an interview at the station house in Tillamook and now, moments later, were staring at a snarl of flames engulfing the rear of a house nestled on the bank of the Wilson River. The smoke plume had been visible from Fairview at the edge of Tillamook and as we sped towards the conflagration, McBrayer had confided in me that we would probably see the entire house burn to the ground. But the chief’s team and other partner districts would prove him wrong with an astoundingly fast response to the hydrant-lacking property that saved much of the structure. McBrayer and I pulled onto the frantic scene six minutes after his, Volunteer Captain Jason Sterling, Captain Kyle Adams and SEE TILLAMOOK FIRE PAGE A4
Library Director discusses collections, youth access and materials contest policies WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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n recent months, a group of Tillamook County residents have raised concerns about the inclusion of books with LGBTQ+ characters in Tillamook County libraries’ children and juvenile collections. The group are gathering signatures on a petition asking that those materials require parental consent for borrowing by minors announced in a letter to the editor to the Headlight Herald included in this issue, citing concerns about exposing children to inappropriate materials. Tillamook County Library Director Donald Allgeier sat down with the Headlight Herald to discuss the library’s collections policies and practices, the process to challenge materials in the collection and children’s access. Allgeier said that the library’s function in the community was to provide materials to residents of all viewpoints and that regulating children’s media consumption was the purview of parents. “It is the role of the library to make sure that there is access to materials that people in the community find of interest,” Allgeier said, “it is the role of parents to decide what their children read.” Tillamook Libraries use a team approach to choosing materials for the collection, with five different librarians in charge of different parts of the collection. Allgeier oversees the collection of DVDs, CDs and digital material, while other librarians are in charge of the children’s collection, the teen collection and the fiction and nonfiction collections. Those librarians consult periodicals, book reviews, Amazon
reviews and other sources, as well as fielding community requests for materials to include in the library. The library’s policies prioritize providing materials that will appeal to the broad swathe of interests and people in Tillamook County and that will be borrowed frequently. “We try to make sure that we have a collection that is diverse in terms of the perspectives that are represented, in terms of political perspectives, in terms of cultural perspectives and especially with nonfiction, that’s going to be where you see kind of like the most definitive statements of values,” Allgeier said. Allgeier emphasized that the collections decisions were not driven by his or the librarians’ personal feelings, but rather by the library’s policies promising equitable access to a wide spectrum of material for readers. “There are materials up there that I find personally reprehensible,” Allgeier said. “I have the power to remove those from the library if I should choose to but I don’t act on my personal interest, what I act on is the policies and procedures.” With that being said, Allgeier stressed that there were no pornographic materials in the children’s section of the library, saying that he had heard rumors to the contrary. Allgeier also detailed the library’s policies surrounding youth access to collections, which are designed to allow parental involvement in children’s reading choices. Any resident of Tillamook County is eligible for a library card, but children ten years of age and younger need to be accompanied in the library by an adult. Starting at age 12, youth can access the teen sections of the libraries and parental consent is never required for borrowing. “How the parent and the child interact around the card is between them,” Allgeier said. “It’s not our job to be involved in that nor do we SEE LIBRARY DIRECTOR PAGE A7
Nestucca High students enjoy new CTE building
The exterior of the new CTE building at Nestucca High School in Cloverdale. The building was constructed using steel and solid foam fill. WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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he Nestucca Valley School District has bolstered its career and technical education program with the construction of a new building dedicated to those offerings at Nestucca High School this year. The new building cost around $6 million to construct and gives Nestucca students the opportunity to graduate with hands-on experience, while the district seeks to expand opportunities further in a partnership with the county’s other school districts. “This is light years beyond what we’ve had before,” said Nestucca Administrator of Facilities and Alternate Education Chad
Holloway. Nestucca High School has a long history of career and technical education (CTE) at its campus, with students previously learning skills like wood and metal working in two aging buildings. Holloway said that due to lowerthan-projected costs when building the district’s new kindergarten through eighth grade elementary school building, the district had funds available from that project’s bond issue after construction was complete. District leaders decided to put that money towards building a new, state-of-the-art, 26,000-square-foot CTE facility at the high school. The new facility includes a weight room, two 5,000-squarefoot shops and three classrooms,
including a computer lab. The computer lab offers students the opportunity to learn how to use CAD design software and other engineering tools on the computer, while the shops allow them to practice welding, woodworking and other tasks. One of the shops contains welding stations constructed by a Nestucca graduate and the facility has three 3D printers that the students can use, with plans to add virtual welding trainers soon. Nestucca offers a peer apprenticeship that is sponsored by Tillamook Bay Community College and O’Brien Construction that prepares graduates to begin in a professional apprenticeship program after leaving high school. SEE CTE BUILDING PAGE A7