Sweet Home School Board members on March 10 approved an Integrated Guidance Initiative for the district that will allow Sweet Home to take advantage of streamlined processes to apply for state funding.
At their regular monthly board meeting, board members heard a presentation from district administrators about the application before voting unanimously to approve it.
Barbi Riggs, the district’s director of teaching and learning, told the board that the state Department of Education has in recent years worked to “align” the grant application processes for various federal and state educational funding sources focused on educational innovation and improvement.
“In 2020-22 every program had its own applications and deadlines,” Riggs said. “Now, for 2023-25, we have one combined application and deadline: March 31.”
Supt. Terry Martin noted that, after the board approved the district’s application, Sweet Home was the first district in the state to get its application in.
“If you’re waiting till the 31st, you’re in trouble,” Martin said.
Riggs said the team that put the application together included: Martin, Riggs, Business Manager Kevin Strong; Principal Ralph Brown of Sweet Home High School; Kristin Adams, the high school’s student success coordinator, and Alex Nalivaiko of the Linn Benton Lincoln Educational Service District, who specialized in integrated plans. That team replaced multiple committees who were previously tasked with applying for various grants and programs.
Also, she said, the reporting requirements for the various initiatives are now combined as well.
“We’re really happy about that streamlined process,” Riggs said.
Adams said a big emphasis in the district’s Initiative proposal is high school success programs, which involve needs assessments – what students are interested in and what standards industries are looking for, activities such as job fairs or field trips that help students get involved with employers and higher education, and efforts to provide equal opportunity for students who are disabled, homeless or otherwise disadvantaged.
Those programs are funded by Measure 98 High School Success tax monies, approved by voters in 2016.
CTE Programs
Both Adams and Brown explained how the high school’s increasing emphasis on Career and Technical Education – pre-engineering, forestry, agriculture, audiovisual, health occupations, and other integrated and hands-on classes have improved graduation rates and college/career readiness.
Adams said Measure 98 funds were initially intended to expand CTE offerings in school districts across the state, but the legislature later modified it to include drop-out prevention and “college-going opportunities.”
Brown noted that last year Knife River sent representatives to hold job interviews for students on campus and some students have gotten opportunities to work with the Oregon Department of Forestry as wildland firefighters.
“They were tickled to get the kids they had,” he said.
“It’s community engagement, trying to work with our businesses and trying to prepare our kids that we can be proud of them going into the work force and they come back and look for more kids from us.
He said that CTE students are being trained so they can move into “high-wage, high-skilled jobs that are in demand in the workforce.”
“We have a good program, really good connections, and we’re just building more and more.”
Brown recounted how Dustin Nichol and Nikki Stafford created CTE opportunities in forestry, but he said that wasn’t a formal program until 2018, when the district hired Blake Manley to launch a natural resources classroom program.
“Dustin had been doing that for a long time, but we were able to move it into a more formalized situation,” he said.
Brown said that when he arrived in Sweet Home 11 years ago from eastern Oregon, he was “shocked” to learn that Sweet Home had never had an Future Farmers of America program, despite the fact that Linn County is known as the Grass Seed Capital of the World.
“Now, through the leadership of the district, we’ve been able to add FFA, which has been huge, and health occupations,” he said. “In a lot of districts they don’t have that.”
Funding Allows Equipment Purchases
The district gets federal Perkins funds, which has allowed it to purchase nearly $30,000 worth of welding machines and supplies, and nearly $5,000 worth of Autodesk and Adobe software for classroom use. Also, the district was able to send three staff members to a national conference, where they “got great ideas and were able to meet with peers.”
He said $4,000 in federal Pathways funds, “which are nice because they don’t have a lot of strings attached,” have been used to purchase boots and pay fire school fees for students, particularly “young women.”
“A lot of our kids can’t afford good boots, which they need when they go out to use a chainsaw, whatever, so we got some boot sizes for our young women and some really big boot sizes, size 14 or 15 (for boys) so they can go out and participate safely, so they don’t have buy them.”
Brown noted that the state places unfunded demands on the district, which Sweet Home does the best it can to fulfill. An example is a personal finance class the district is required to provide but has received no money for, but has lined up a teacher to make that happen in the fall.
CTE Reflected in Graduation
Adams said that 92% of last year’s graduates had participated in CTE classes and advanced coursework, which can include classes at Linn-Benton Community College.
The district has received $678,000 from the state for the 2025-26 school year, which has to be divided between drop-out prevention, CTE and college educational opportunities. Some 67% of that money has funded staffing for those efforts, she reported, adding that staffing funding contributes to such positions as the forestry instructor, various assistants, a counselor, the district’s audio-visual technician, and various support programs.
Adams said the state is very interested in the district’s on-time graduation numbers, the percentage of freshmen who are on-track to graduate, and the levels of advanced coursework and CTE participation.
“The ninth-grade on-track is a very indicator of how that class is going to end up,” Adams told board members.
Student Investment Account
Strong reported on Student Investment Account spending, which comes primarily from the corporate activity tax passed the legislature in 2020, which was earmarked for providing additional funding for K-12 education.
He said Sweet Home expects to get somewhere between $2.3 and $2.5 million in revenue. That money is expected to fund seven teaching positions to reduce class sizes ($700,000), three special education teachers ($330,000), two counselors ($220,000), two teaching positions to help provide junior high math and English language arts support ($200,000), one alternative education teaching position ($110,000) and $250,000 for classified staff support.
Smaller amounts would go to literacy/ELA support, match support, the district’s “Grow Our Own Staff” initiatives and technology/curriculum support.
Also, he said, the district plans to commit $250,000 to a waiver of “pay-to-play” and “pay-to-participate” fees.
Football League Presentation
Board members also heard from Erick Larkin, who represented the Mid-Valley Football and Cheer Program, which he said is an alternative to other youth football programs in east Linn County.
Larkin said he was there simply to introduce the program to the board
The Mid-Valley program was founded in Lebanon in 2023 “in direct response to community output looking for more competitive youth football,” Larkin told the board. “It’s grown from a small initiative into something much larger.”
He said the program had about 130 participants last year, up from 80 the first year, initially from Lebanon, Brownsville, Halsey and Scio, and then including seven families from Sweet Home last year.
Larkin told the board that the program aims to provide flag and tackle football opportunities to boys, particularly in the third- through sixth-grade age range. He said the organization isn’t interested in competing with established programs at the Junior High or with Sweet Home cheer programs, although he said he’s had discussions with local cheer coaches about the possibility of combining efforts.
“My son’s been heavily involved in baseball and football and my daughter is involved in cheer,” he said. “It would be great to have my daughter cheer for my son.”
Larkin thanked the district for making available a practice field at Oak Heights School for the program and said a “secondary” goal would be to have home games in Sweet Home rather than in Lebanon.
He said the program’s goal is to not just teach sports, but respect for parents, teachers, and leaders in the community.
“Upholding that is our true value,” he said.
It’s also about teaching football “fundamentals, hard work and discipline,” he said.
“I played football growing up. It’s fun to be successful.”
He said the goal is to “hopefully set up a more competitive cohort as they go to middle school and then as they eventually end up with Coach Adams (at the high school).”
He said eight players were named last year to the Oregon Pro Bowl All-State Game, and four will travel to Florida this year to play in an All-American game at the IMG Academy.
Larkin said another emphasis is to keep team sizes “relatively small” enough that every player gets on the field.
“Instead of having 30 kids on the team, we’ll have more reduced sizes,” Larkin said. “I just know that team sizes get so large that when you have minimum play requirements and you have 25 to 30 kids, and you do that times 10, that’s a lot of football plays to get fair and equal playing time for everybody on the team.”