Sean C. Morgan
If Donald Rinehart doesn’t miss school this week, he will finish his pre-college schooling with no absences.
In doing so, he’ll continue what’s becoming a family tradition. He’s the second student in three Sweet Home High School graduating classes to finish school with no absences. The other was his brother Billy.
“There isn’t a secret,” Rinehart said. “It’s just like a job.”
Rinehart, 18, son of Tom and Cindy Rinehart, is the youngest of four brothers and two sisters.
He carries a 3.7 GPA.
Other than school activities, he has never missed a day of school, he said. Skipping class was never an option.
He saw his older brothers skip or get sick and then have to make up the work. It always took more time than just doing it.
He doesn’t have a car, Rinehart said. “So really where am I going to go?
“You just get up and do it. Basically, our only responsibility is school.”
There were times he didn’t want to go to school, he said, after late nights, for example, but “you just do it.”
He had food poisoning once, he said, but he doesn’t generally get sick except for the sniffles maybe once a year.
“There’s a difference between being sick and feeling (lousy),” he said. “Everyone feels lousy sometimes.”
He started realizing he might finish with no absences around the sixth grade, Rinehart said. That’s when he consciously started making an effort not to miss.
“I thought I can do this,” Rinehart said. He credits teachers such as Dustin Nichol and Ammon Mills along with his parents and his brother Billy, for encouraging him through school.
His advice to students in a similar position: “Don’t give up. There’s going to be days when I could go to the lake. Don’t. Just finish and finish strong. Days you really don’t want to go are days you need to.”
That applies to sports, school and life, Rinehart said.
“They better be dead or they’re going to school,” said his mother, Cyndi Rinehart. “If you’re hired for a job, you show up for a job or you get fired.”
Being a student is a student’s job, she said. While she required Donald Rinehart to be in school, he’s “a pretty sharp cookie. You don’t have to tell him much. He figures it out on his own.”
Donald Rinehart attended Holley Elementary, Sweet Home Junior High and Sweet Home High School.
He always liked school, he said. “I think it’s pretty necessary. You need it to develop people skills early on.”
He enjoys learning if it’s a subject that interests him. He enjoys math and science in the lab.
His favorite class is probably construction with Nichol, who, he said, is probably his favorite teacher.
“He’s pretty passionate about what he does, which I like,” Rinehart said. “He’s just a cool guy to be around.”
Rinehart took Woods I and Woods II as a freshman. He was a student assistant to Nichol as a sophomore, and he took Construction Trades his junior and senior year.
Rinehart played football and wrestled his freshman year. He played football as a sophomore. His junior year, he participated in the Game Club. He was on the track team in discus and javelin his junior year and senior year. He started competing in the long jump at the end of this season and earned his letter in the sport.
He plans to dual enroll at Linn-Benton Community College and Oregon State University in the fall and study industrial engineering.
“I will work in factories or construction sites, trying to speed up the production line,” Rinehart said, moving people around or improving machinery to get the job done faster.
“I realized I wanted to be an engineer probably sophomore or junior year,” he said. His brother-in-law, Justice Gibson, is a nuclear engineer, and Rinehart learned from him how many types of engineering he could pursue.
“That was just the one out of them I could see myself doing,” Rinehart said.