Kotek names new leaders for education efforts
Gov. Tina Kotek has named seasoned education policy makers Melissa Goff and Pooja Bhatt to lead improvement efforts for schools and early childhood initiatives.
By Alex Baumhardt – Oregon Capital Chronicle
Alex Baumhardt has been a national radio producer focusing on education for American Public Media since 2017. She has reported from the Arctic to the Antarctic for national and international media, and from Minnesota and Oregon for The Washington Post. She previously worked in Iceland and Qatar and was a Fulbright scholar in Spain where she earned a master's degree in digital media. She's been a kayaking guide in Alaska, farmed on four continents and worked the night shift at several bakeries to support her reporting along the way.
Audit: Community colleges need more oversight after performance, enrollment declines
The Secretary of State’s Office said the commission in charge of Oregon’s 17 community colleges needs to improve student achievement and access, as graduation rates and enrollment decline.
Oregon schools lean heavily on emergency teachers, including untrained ones
Struggling with staffing shortages exacerbated by the pandemic, Oregon schools leaned heavily last year on teachers who received emergency licenses from the state. During the 2021-22 school year, districts employed 438 emergency licensed teachers, up from 181 the year prior…
State forester rescinds wildfire risk map in response to outcry
On Thursday afternoon, just five weeks after publishing a wildfire risk map, the state Forestry Department axed it. That move follows a chorus of complaints from Republican state lawmakers and residents in southern and eastern Oregon who said the roll…
Wyden raises concerns over shortage of firefighters, federal spending on fire prevention
(Enterprise/FILE) Oregon faces a shortage of wildland firefighters that could be “a recipe for trouble,” according to U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden. Wyden wrote to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently with concerns that…
OSU research points to ways to slow wildfires in critical sagebrush rangelands
Trainees in the Bureau of Land Management’s Vale District firefighter school get ready for the fire season in 2020. (The Enterprise/FILE) Nearly 45% of historic sagebrush ecosystems in the Great Basin – 200,000 square miles of California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon,…