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• April 14, 2010 50¢

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BIG NEWS FOR AREA SCHOOLS

3rd Sisters charter closes Bend teachers accept cuts By Patrick Cliff The Bulletin

The parade of troubles for charter schools in Sisters is continuing, with Sisters AllPrep Web Academy closing and suddenly leaving parents unsure of what they will do this year or next. Krista Lynch decided this year to send her daughter Hannah to the academy after home-schooling her since kindergarten. But Hannah, a freshman, wasn’t able to finish this year’s requirements because she was given just a week’s notice of Friday’s closure. Now her mother is scrambling to find

Choosing retirement homes for the space shuttles

a way for Hannah to finish freshman credits, and to decide on a school for next year. Home schooling is the leading candidate, Lynch said. “I think we’ll go back to what’s working before,” she said. The Web Academy joins the Sisters Charter Academy of Fine Arts and Sisters Early College Academy in closing in recent weeks, well before the end of the school year. All of the schools were run by EdChoices/AllPrep, a Clackamas-based company under investigation by the state departments of Education and Justice for questionable finances. See Charter / A4

Furlough days, no cost-of-living increase projected to save $4.5M next year; administrators also make concessions By Sheila G. Miller The Bulletin

Bend-La Pine teachers and administrators have agreed to concessions for the 2010-11 school year, including furlough days and freezes to cost-of-living increases, to help bridge the district’s estimated $6 million budget gap. The board on Tuesday unanimously

approved the agreements, which are expected to save the district approximately $4.5 million. The additional funding gap will likely be closed using the same method district officials used during the 2009-10 school year, with less money going to textbooks and technology. For the 2010-11 school year, teachers

will defer the 3.5 percent cost-of-living increase that was part of their contract, and they will also take two furlough days. Of those two days, 1.5 are noninstructional and students will lose out on one half-day of school. They will also continue to limit tuition reimbursement to 50 percent, the same as during the 2009-10 school year; the freeze on $100 per-teacher professional development will also remain in place. Administrators and supervisors also made concessions. See Bend-La Pine / A4

A N A LY S I S

GLAZE MEADOW RESTORATION PROJECT

Split over tree thinning

Value-added tax: the only increase that just might fly

By Stewart M. Powell Houston Chronicle

By Carolyn Lochhead

The astronauts aboard the orbiting shuttle-station complex celebrated two big anniversaries this week: Monday marked the 49th anniversary of the first human spaceflight — by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961 — and the 29th anniversary of the first shuttle launch. “April 12th’s a really special day for astronauts,” said space shuttle Discovery’s commander, Alan Poindexter. Soon, the astronauts will observe a more somber day: when the space shuttle fleet is retired. NASA has begin weighing 21 bids from visitors’ centers, science museums and educational institutions eager to host one of the three aging space shuttles that will be retired later this year. President Barack Obama could announce the destination of the first retired shuttle as early as Thursday when he travels to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, where he plans to describe his vision for long-term manned space exploration. Competitors to host one of the 76-ton shuttles include natural candidates like Johnson Space Center in Houston, but also two museums in the Northwest: the Museum of Flight in Seattle and the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville. See Shuttles / A5

San Francisco Chronicle

Pete Erickson / The Bulletin

Asante Riverwind, 57, the Sierra Club’s forest organizer for Eastern Oregon, stands next to a ponderosa pine stump at the edge of Glaze Meadow on Monday. The tree was cut down as part of a U.S. Forest Service thinning project, which Riverwind said damaged the wildlife habitat.

By Kate Ramsayer The Bulletin

BLACK BUTTE RANCH — A forest restoration project touted as a model of collaboration now has two local environmental groups at odds. Oregon Wild helped design the U.S. Forest Service’s Glaze Meadow project with the goal of creating healthy, fire-resistant ecosystems while avoiding environmental lawsuits. But when Asante Riverwind, Eastern Oregon forest organizer with the Sierra Club’s Juniper Chapter, saw the first on-the-ground results this winter, he said he was dismayed to see big trees cut down along the meadow’s edge. “I was really upset, frankly,” Riverwind said. The Glaze Meadow project includes efforts to thin out some trees to give the remaining

MON-SAT

The restoration project is designed to be a collaborative effort to move the forest to a more natural condition.

pines room and nutrients to grow, while leaving clumps and patches of denser trees for wildlife cover. Although it involves some commercial timber harvest, the project also calls for crews to thin some areas by hand, mow brush and set prescribed fires. With work on another side of the meadow slated to continue next winter, weather permitting, Riverwind is pushing the conservation group Oregon Wild and others to revise the plans and not cut bigger trees in the dense stands along the grassy meadow. But Tim Lillebo, with Oregon Wild, said the planners did consider Riverwind’s recommendations. And although they accepted some ideas, by leaving more patches of trees at the meadow’s edge, in the end planners decided that to create a more natural habitat, they had to cut down some of the bigger trees. See Glaze / A4

Suttle Lake

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Black Butte

Black Butte Ranch

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To Sisters

Glaze Meadow project Anders Ramberg / The Bulletin

“We weren’t ignoring the Sierra Club. You probably couldn’t get consensus on a project like this with everybody.”

The Associated Press

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U.S. Forest Service’s Glaze Meadow project

2 conservation groups differ on habitat plan

Discovery on the launch pad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in March. The shuttle fleet is slated to be retired this fall.

We use recycled newsprint

WASHINGTON — Americans this week might be filing the lowest taxes they will ever see again. Experts say big tax hikes are inevitable, likely a European-style value-added tax, which resembles a sales tax on steroids. April Paul Volcker, an economic adviser to President Barack Thursday Obama, let the VAT cat out of the bag last Tax Day’s week when he almost here said a valueadded tax is Don’t forget to file less “toxic” by Thursday. For information on than it once extensions and was. Obama budget chief payment options, Peter Orszag visit www.irs.gov. quickly backtracked by telling the Economic Club of Washington that the former Federal Reserve chief was not speaking for the administration. Volcker’s comment was a classic Washington gaffe defined as a politician accidentally telling the truth. The budget arithmetic is ruthless. The federal government is adding an average of $1 trillion in debt each year. Neither party has a plan even to stabilize the deficit. Many experts fear a looming crisis that will force action. In the Senate, Ron Wyden, DOre., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., are pushing to close loopholes in the federal income tax code in an effort to forestall a value-added tax. But the VAT discussion picked up momentum after Volcker’s comments when Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, disclosed to reporters that he had directed his staff to analyze how a VAT would work. “Be prepared for a tax increase in the range of $750 billion a year in today’s dollars,” said Bruce Bartlett, a former official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. That amount assumes equally large spending cuts that would slash programs much as state and local governments are slashing services now. See Taxes / A4

— Tim Lillebo, with Oregon Wild, which helped design the project

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