After more than a decade in teaching and administration, hailing from a really small town and with a high appreciation for the importance of co-curricular activities, Tim Porter arrives as Sweet Home High School’s new athletic director and assistant principal.
He succeeds Dave Goetz, who is working as athletic director and vice principal at Sweet Home Junior High, in one of several changes in District 55 administrative staff.
Those include Keith Winslow’s move from Oak Heights to assistant principal at Sweet Home High School and Derek Barnhurst’s switch from vice principal at Sweet Home Junior High to principal at Oak Heights. Jack Nickerson is the new principal at Holley School.
“I grew up in a small town in eastern Oregon called Helix,” Porter, 41, said. The town, also known as Griswold, has a population of around 150. He graduated in a class of 10 from Helix High School in 1986.
Porter graduated from Oregon State University in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in science education. He earned his master’s degree in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., in 2004. He has one class and his dissertation remaining to complete a doctorate in education leadership at George Fox University.
After graduating from OSU, he taught for 12 years, including seven years at Weston-McEwen High School, in the Athena and Weston communities of eastern Oregon, Porter said. He also taught for a year at Colton High School before moving on to seminary.
“I’d been teaching for nine years, I guess; and I kind of didn’t know what I wanted to do, to be honest.”
He decided he wanted to be a pastor and started attending seminary, he said. He taught three more years at a private school in Pasadena while attending seminary.
About halfway through completing his master’s degree, Porter started taking leadership classes.
“It just dawned on me,” he said. “Why not combine the leadership with something I’ve already been doing for 11 years?”
That led him to school administration, he said.
He got into teaching in the first place because he liked the idea of teaching kids, he said.
“I had had some excellent teachers when I was in school,” he said. “The ones that were really good really influenced my life.”
Porter didn’t set out initially to teach, he said. Like many others, he had visions of becoming independently wealthy and thought electrical engineering would take him there.
But it wasn’t for him, he said. He recalled sitting in class working on circuit boards. A couple of other students were excited about working on the boards. He wasn’t.
“I didn’t love electrical engineering like they did,” he said.
Athletics have always been important to Porter, he said. “I actually went to Oregon State on a track scholarship.”
That was the year the school ended the program, he said, but he always was involved in athletics somehow. He has coached JV and varsity basketball and was an assistant football coach.
“Athletics, I think, is an integral part of the education experience,” Porter said.
He stressed that it is only one of many co-curricular activities, and other co-curricular activities are equally important to the education experience.
That includes the clubs, art, drama, music and other non-required activities, he said. “Athletics is one avenue kids can pursue through co-curricular activities.”
These activities provide education in leadership and teamwork and help build character, he said. The classroom can provide these experiences but it’s a different environment, and students who may not take leadership roles in a classroom may do it in sports.
The activities provide more opportunities for success, he said.
After receiving his master’s degree, he worked as athletic director and administrator at Crook County High School in Prineville, and then he served as principal at both schools in the Condon School District before coming to Sweet Home this summer.
The Condon district has 120 students and is divided into two schools, kindergarten through eighth grade and ninth through 12th grade.
He had been slated to become superintendent of that district, he said, but he and his wife had been talking about opportunities for their children and thought a “big city” like Sweet Home, with its location and size, would offer more.
“It’s just the right size,” he said. “It’s not so big you’re going to get lost, and when you grow up in eastern Oregon, even Portland seems close.”
When they get too big, cities lose those small-town connections, he said. Sweet Home still has the small-town feel, and it has a lot of options.
He has been in town since July with his family, including wife Traci, and three children, Christian, a freshman; India, a seventh-grader; and Tucker, a fifth-grader; and he has had a chance to meet many members of the community, he said.
“I really enjoy it,” Porter said. “The people are very friendly here. They’re more than willing to help out and go out of their way to introduce themselves. The coaches I’ve met here so far have been fantastic.”