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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014
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North Bend talks school reconfiguration again BY CHELSEA DAVIS The World
NORTH BEND — North Bend school officials are revving up the reconfiguration discussion again. The two biggest obstacles, the school board noted last month, are where to put fifth-graders and implications from all-day kindergarten. With fifth-graders, educators have to balance an elementary versus middle school
environment. Board members said they want to explore the K-5 option as much as possible, since that model came through “loud and clear” at public meetings last year. “There’s a lot of sentiment and research showing it’s better to keep fifth-graders in elementary school if we can,” board chair Megan Jacquot said. School districts across the nation have tried pretty much
County may add land to beach
Work session The North Bend school board will hold a work session at 6 p.m. Jan. 27 in North Bend High’s Hall of Champions to hear suggestions on reconfiguration.
every configuration you can think of, said David Conley, Ph.D., University of Oregon education professor and director of the university’s Center for Educational Policy Research.
“...Almost every configuration of grades has been tried already and studied, and no one configuration is superior to all others,” Conley said. “Lots of times the configurations are driven by the enrollment patterns in the schools and the need to use facilities efficiently, not on what makes the most sense in terms of student learning.” Last May, the board decided not to reconfigure schools until the 2014-2015 school year. The public
balked at former superintendent BJ Hollensteiner’s proposal to send grades K-2 to Hillcrest, 3-5 to North Bay and 6-8 to North Bend Middle. The idea started brewing after Oregon schools were told they had to implement full-day kindergarten by the 2014-2015 school year (North Bend, along with many other districts, met the requireSEE NORTH BEND | A8
Debut of new parks plan
BY EMILY THORNTON The World
BY TIM NOVOTNY The World
COOS BAY — Decades overdue, and a year and a half in the making, Coos Bay is ready to unveil its new parks master plan. It sets in motion the process to bring about any potential park projects over the next several years by improving the city’s opportunities at winning grant awards. Randy Dixon, Coos Bay’s operations superintendent, said the nearly 100-page document was needed. “Typically, any district, parks and recreation district, and/or municipality — whether it be city, county, state, whatever — ideally you would upgrade your parks
comprehensive plan about every 10 years. The last plan that we had was in 1987 to 1991, so we were way outside. “So, what we wanted to try to do was update that plan with current trends in recreation and communication from basically the community.” They started building this plan, with community involvement, back in 2011. The actual crafting of the document itself began in earnest 18 months ago, with the finished product now approved by the city council and ready to be put on display. The parks commission and staff are hosting two public presentations this week. The first will be tonight at the fire station, at
450 Elrod Ave., and the second one will be Thursday night in Empire Hall on the Southwestern Oregon Community College campus. Both presentations will run from 6 to 7 p.m. Information regarding the contents of the master plan will be presented and the next steps in implementing prioritized projects will also be discussed. “Now we know it’s adopted and we’re done, council has approved it and we are moving forward,” Dixon said. “We’ll talk about how the capital improvement plan plays out in this next 10 years. We’ll indicate what facilities are first on that (list), which is Mingus Park, a dog park, and the city docks and boardwalk. Those are the three assets for
the first fiscal year (2013-2015), so we’re given two years to do improvements to these facilities, totaling over $14 million.” He is quick to add that they are all contingent on getting the vital grant funding, but the odds of that happening are now much improved. “Now they have a current master plan to give to those funding agencies so that they can say, ‘Hey, they’ve got a current plan, we’re looking at it, and it is saying in year one we are doing this.’” While the biggest part of the plan creation process is now behind him, Dixon has plenty of
SEE PARKS | A8
House ready to OK $1.1 trillion budget BY ALAN FRAM The Associated Press WASHINGTON — Shunning the turmoil of recent budget clashes, Congress is ready to approve a massive $1.1 trillion spending bill for this year, a compromise financing everything from airports to war costs and brimming with victories and setbacks for both parties. The huge bill furnishes the fine
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print — 1,582 pages of it — for the bipartisan pact approved in December that set overall federal spending levels for the next couple of years. With that decision behind them and lawmakers eager to use the election year to show they can run a government, there was little suspense about the spending bill’s fate. Reinforcing that was their desire to avoid the potential alternative — a replay of last fall’s
16-day federal shutdown, which disgusted voters. “There’s a desire to show people we can do our job,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho. The Republican-led House was expected to approve the sweeping measure Wednesday, with the Democratic-run Senate following suit by the end of the week. The bill heads off an additional $20 billion in automatic cuts to the Pentagon’s budget — on top of
Up the river ... Stanley Wilkes, Lakeside
Obituaries | A5
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Master plan may go to the dogs in ’14
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SEE BEACH | A8
By Lou Sennick, The World
A man and his dog head down one of the trails in John Topits Park early Tuesday afternoon. Coos Bay is looking into building a dog park area in the park at Middle Empire Lake nearby, according to a new planning document.
DEATHS
COQUILLE — The Coos County Parks Department would like to expand its land at Bastendorf Beach, leasing about 60 acres from Bureau of Land Management. Parks Department Director Larry Robison presented to commissioners on Tuesday his application to lease the land from BLM. The commissioners approved it. They also authorized their legal counsel to move forward with paperwork outlining the agreement for a five-year lease, which could be extended at the end of the lease if the county wished. The final application will cost the parks department about $100 and could take up to a year and a half to complete, Robison said. “I already had the application started, but wanted to see if the board wanted me to continue,” Robison said. The land in question — mostly beachfront and dotted with scotchbroom — is already under a cooperative management agreement between the parks department and BLM, Robison said. Workers from neighboring Sunset Bay State Park helped replenish toilet paper, patrol the area and clean up small messes, he said. There have been some issues with guarding the land from squatters and vandals in years past, but Robison believed improvements made to the land, such as clearing the underbrush and putting in curbs, have discouraged that behavior. The current agreement with BLM likely would make it easier for the county to clear some hurdles, such as BLM’s Resource Management Plan. “There shouldn’t be any strings attached with this,” Robison said. He said the lease agreement would be the first step in one day securing the land solely for the county. Adding a long-term campground was an idea, Robison said. The land currently is used for dayuse and 24-hour camping. There is no fee, but likely there would be with a designated campground. If Robison went through with a campground, he said he’d use a camp host to take care of the land,
$34 billion imposed last year — and cuts to many domestic programs as well. The reductions were being triggered by a 2011 law that forced the cuts after President Barack Obama and Congress failed to negotiate budget savings. By its sheer size and detail, the measure had plenty for liberals and conservatives to dislike. SEE BUDGET | A8
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