>Baker City Herald | Baker County Oregon's News Leader

Ruth Woodworth, a Baker Middle School librarian and president of the Baker Chapter of the Oregon School Employees Association, said today that she’s surprised the committee is making its report to the board this early in the process.

“I’m concerned that the committee wasn’t given enough time to fully research and fully understand the impact of its recommendations,” she said. “It feels like they’re still in the brainstorming stages.”

Part of the group’s discussions have included the possibility of contracting out the district’s food, transportation and janitorial services. That would mean the loss of jobs for the district’s cooks, bus drivers and custodians, who are represented by the OSEA, Woodworth said.

The association plans to present information from a February 2008 University of Oregon study titled “All Costs Considered: A New Analysis on the Contracting Out of School Support Services in Oregon” to the school board during its December work session, Woodworth said.

“We’re not in favor of contracting out,” she added. “It hurts us.”

But Cahill hopes concessions will be made by both management and the district’s labor unions to help prepare Baker schools for the future.

“The district can’t continue on the path it’s on right now,” he said. “It’s not good versus evil or us versus them. It’s a we kind of thing.”

In streamlining operations, the committee will urge expanded use of the high school, which has a capacity for 800 to 900 students but is serving just 652 this year, Cahill said. The committee recommends selling the district office building and moving that staff to the high school. Supplies and equipment stored in the basement of the district office could also be moved to the former forestry center at the high school, the group maintains.

One proposal calls for closing the third-story of North Baker Elementary and using the building to house all Baker City kindergartners, English language learners and the Head Start and Early Invention programs.

The long-term goal of that plan would be to eventually close North Baker School and to move all students in kindergarten to Grade 5 to the Brooklyn and South Baker elementary buildings.

Under that alternative, sixth-graders would be moved to the Baker Middle School, reopening the third floor of the Central Building there as needed.

A second alternative proposes closing and selling the Baker Middle School buildings. Under that plan the North Baker School would become the new middle school building; Brooklyn would serve students in kindergarten through Grade 3; and South Baker would house those in Grades 4-6.

Both plans call for excess space at BHS to be leased to Blue Mountain Community College, Eastern Oregon University and other educational entities.

Other items under consideration include:

n Establishing a charter school to serve the estimated 100 home school students in the district and working to recruit those attending private schools to the district.

n Consolidating elementary school management by assigning one principal to two schools with head teachers providing supervision in the principal’s absence from the building.

n Evaluating the money spent on substitute teachers, which are budgeted at the rate of eight per day throughout the district, according to committee member Randy Daugherty.

Other members of the committee at Monday’s meeting were Cindy Schildknecht and Ken Humphrey. Tom Hudson and Don Olsen were absent.

Committee advisers attending were Rick Rembold, a Brooklyn Elementary third-grade teacher; Mike Wickert, a South Baker Elementary custodian; and Melanie Trindle, a district office secretary who coordinates the meetings and keeps minutes of the sessions. Judy Trohkimoinen, a South Baker music teacher and Baker Education Association representative, was in the audience.