Benny Westcott
At its June 13 meeting in the District Office, the Sweet Home School Board unanimously accepted the resignation of Superintendent Lisa Riggs, effective June 30, 2022.
In a letter addressed to the Sweet Home School Board Directors, Riggs wrote, “I am writing to announce my resignation effective June 30, 2022. This will allow me to take the necessary time to complete my doctoral studies and to be closer to family. Thank you for the opportunity to serve as superintendent of Sweet Home School District.”
Riggs became superintendent of the district on Aug. 17, 2021, succeeding Tom Yahraes, who resigned after a half-decade at the helm.
On May 2, school board members approved a leave of absence requested by Riggs for “personal” reasons for the remainder of the school year, which extends until June 30.
Since then, former Sweet Home Junior High Principal Terry Martin has served as acting superintendent.
In concurrence with Riggs’ resignation, the board voted to revise Martin’s title from acting superintendent to interim superintendent, and to revise the title of Mark Looney from acting junior high school principal to interim junior high school principal.
In the aftermath of the Robb Elementary School shooting on May 24 that killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, school safety was a major topic of discussion at the board meeting.
“Obviously, we understand that school safety has come to the forefront of everybody’s mind lately,” Sweet Home Police Department School Resource Officer Geoff Hamlin said.
He said that the district has had ongoing meetings with the Sweet Home Police Department to update a Community Safety Plan. At the meetings, police officers go over the district’s plan, and what their response would be if there were to be an active shooter incident. The last meeting also involved the Linn County Sheriff’s Office and the Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District.
“I think we’ve identified a lot of areas that we can improve on,” Hamlin said. “And each entity is working on making those improvements as they can.”
Additionally, he said the Sweet Home Police Department is trying to coordinate with the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training to host an active shooter training in the district this summer.
“We have a lot of new staff and officers that have never really been through active shooter training,” Hamlin noted.
Martin shared with the board a plethora of safety measures that the district is enacting.
He noted that all of the district’s elementary schools, plus the junior high school, now have safety vestibules in their buildings.
“The high school, we’ll still need to be working on,” he said.
He said there are cameras in all schools that “continue to increase in both numbers and clarity.”
“The police are able to log into our cameras at our request while they are onsite, and they can see in all of the schools in real time,” Martin said.
He said the district also has photo key cards.
“These have been a great step in helping improve,” Martin explained. “We don’t have the number of keys floating around in the community. These can be turned on and off instantly. Plus, you have the ID feature of who it is, and the log of who’s coming and going.”
He further noted that “We’ve got lock blocks on all of our classrooms, and that gives us the ability to lock down quickly. They are very simple to use. You slide the lock block, close the door and it’s locked.”
He said that the district also recently completed the installation of landline telephones in all classrooms district-wide, which he called a “significant step.”
Martin additionally noted that the district is emphasizing single-point access into buildings, rather than offering multiple points of entrance and exit.
The district’s school buses, he explained, are satellite tracked and can be viewed in real time, and have mobile hotspots. He noted that out-of-area alerts go off when a bus goes to an area where it’s not supposed to.
He stated that the district is also piloting use of “sunset visitor badges.” As time goes on, the ink on these badges migrates from the back to the front of the badge, so that the badges are self-voiding. The ink shows up after a predetermined amount of time so the badges cannot be reused.
Board members voted unanimously to officially adopt a budget of $55,584,273 for fiscal year 2022-23.
Budget Committee members who recommended approval of the budget included school board members Sara Hoffman, Kevin Hill, Debra Brown, Jason Van Eck, Dale Keene, Jason Redick, Jim Gourley, and Mike Reynolds, as well as appointed citizens Lori McKinnon and Don Hopkins.