Sweet Home School Board members on Monday, Feb. 9, approved language for a bond measure for the May 19 election that asks voters to essentially continue the current school bond so the district can receive a $12.252 million grant from the state.
The vote was unanimous, though Board Member Mary Speck was absent.
The $40 million bond measure would essentially extend the current bond, which voters approved in 2017.
The money would pay for safety upgrades at all the district’s schools, including updated emergency communication and lockdown systems, Business Manager Kevin Strong told the board.
Other “guiding checkpoints” board members identified in their January meeting for the proposed bond measure include maintaining the current tax rate, which is $1.45 per $1,000 of assessed property value; prioritize classroom and learning facility upgrades at the high school; create schools that are “durable” and “long-lasting;” and leveraging grant money to reduce local costs.
Strong said that, with the board’s approval, the bond measure will now go to the Linn County Clerk’s Office for final tweaks to the ballot title and a final version will then be submitted to voters.
He said, in response to questioning from from Chair Mike Adams, that the bond would be “structured to maintain the existing tax rate, very similar to what we did in 2017, when the community passed the bond for the Junior High School and, in fact, since then, due to growth in assessed values, the actual tax rate has declined.”
“This one would be structured very similar to that, so the intent is for it to maintain (the current tax rate),” he said. “If Sweet Home has a lot of growth – and you see right now the residential areas where they’re putting in infrastructure, that would definitely help and if that continued, we could see reductions over time.”
The key assumption, he said, “is that you would not see an increase in your tax rate.”
Strong noted that the Oregon School Capital Improvement Matching Program (OSCIM, pronounced “awesome”) funding, which was also used to upgrade the Junior High, is critical to the project becoming a reality for Sweet Home.
“That’s huge in reducing the local cost to be able to get that amount of work done that we’re talking about,” he said. “A huge part of this is that grant and how it can help us.”
He said the district wants to “improve safety and security” at “every school” with communication improvements and lockdown systems.
The high school, he reminded board members, was designed and built in an era when campus security was less of a concern.
Also, he said, “where most of the classroom sections are, the thought at that time was ‘we want to build classrooms quickly and affordably.’”
He said the district chose “the quickest, fastest way,” appropriating a “California-style open-breezeway, flat-roofed classroom floor plan: ‘We’re gonna take that and we’re gonna put that right here in Western Oregon.’
“We did, so we have open breezeways and flat-roofed construction for most of our classrooms.”
That approach leaves the current population with two issues: building durability and security.
“Right now, if you walk from off campus onto campus, there are over 40 places where you can just open a door and directly access a classroom, a bathroom or other areas where students are,” Strong said.
Security Concerns
“Security today, the way you design a school, is entirely different than it was when the classroom sections at Sweet Home High School were built.”
A big emphasis of the proposed renovation project would be to replace those classrooms with a classroom wing connected to the main high school building that would require anyone entering the campus to enter through the front office, which would also make it more difficult for students and visitors “and you can define ‘visitor’ in a lot of different ways,” Strong observed, to come and go at will.
“Now, if a student wants to leave campus, they can,” Strong said. “If you want to leave after first period and come back for third period, as it is now, it’s pretty easy to wander into your third-period class.
“Going forward, there’s going to be accountability, where you come in through a monitored front entrance with a security vestibule and you check into school. You can’t just, on your own, wander back into your third-period class any more.
“You can no longer wander in from 18th Avenue onto campus. You can no longer come in down by the west parking lot (off 15th Avenue) and come around multiple corners and wander in. You can’t come across the field south of the high school and come onto campus. If you’re going to be in areas where we have students, you come in through the front door, a secured entry.”
CTE Facility Needs
Another major component of the project is improving and creating new Career and Technical Education facilities.
“We want to prepare our students to be able to go out and get, preferably, local jobs,” he said, adding that those include jobs in manufacturing, welding, health occupations and agriculture.
“A really good example there is if you go into Mr. Scott Jacobson’s (agriculture) classroom, you’ll see plants and grow lights and student desks all kind of crammed together there,” he said, adding that the “makeshift” classroom is located in a former automotive shop facility, of which one wall consists mostly of large “breat-up” roll-up doors that don’t function well.
“They’re making it do, but it was never meant to be a classroom, much less a greenhouse,” Strong said.
“One of the things we want to be able to do for him is build a separate, stand-alone greenhouse, which his students and the FFA program can benefit from.
“What we want to do is provide students with a nice facility for that.”
Strong said the woodshop building, in particular, is “at the end of life” and needs to be replaced.
The metal shop needs improvements as well, he said.
Health occupations, he said, “is a growing field, where graduates can go out and get some pretty well-paying jobs.”
He said the goal is to design and build a facility that will serve the community “for 75-plus years, beyond that.”
“We don’t even know what the next big thing is,” Strong said. “But we have space that can be set up in such a way that we can adjust and provide those skills for our students, so they can be successful.”
‘Major Project’
Board Member Jenna Northern asked how soon construction would start, if voters approve the measure.
Strong said the district has already had “preliminary discussions” with the architect, “but we don’t want to commit a lot of money until we know the will of the voters.”
If approved, he said, most of the construction work at the high school would start in the summer of 2027. The work, he said, would take place in phases, because school would be in session during portions of the construction. It would likely continue through the 2027-28 school year and wrap up during the summer of 2028, although additional work on the existing building would continue to tie it in with what would be a new classroom section and new CTE facilities.
“As much as, I think, we would all like to see it happen quickly, given the nature of construction, this would be a very major project,” Strong said.
“What we are trying to do is position Sweet Home High School to serve students well for decades to come, and so this would be a large project. I think, in the end, just like with the Junior High, everyone will say it was well done, but it’s going to take time.”
In other action, the board:
- Unanimously approved superintendent’s evaluation and a motion by Dale Keene to extend Martin’s contract to three years. Board members had held an executive session, closed to the public, to discuss the evaluation and emerged to vote on that decision, so details of their discussion are not available.
- Approved the 2026-27 School Calendar, which, Supt. Terry Martin said earlier, is very similar to this year’s and had been reviewed by staffers across the district.
- Approved wording for an application for exceptions to the district’s new personal electronic devices policy, to accommodate medical needs and other circumstances.
- Learned that the district had received a “clean” audit report from Pauly Rogers and Co. on its 2024-25 fiscal year financial statements and Student Activity Funds.
- Heard an explanation from Strong regarding a substantial increase in the district’s employer-paid PERS rates this year. Strong told the board that the district’s PERS rate is the largest single reason for a $932,000 increase in district spending thus far this fiscal year over last year.
Strong provided the board an Oregon Journalism Project report detailing why PERS’ investment returns have underperformed in recent years and why that has contributed to school districts and other government employers paying higher rates. (The report can be viewed at www.sweethomenews.com/off-target.)
“PERS is the big gorilla in the room when it comes to our budget,” Strong said.
He said PERS has invested heavily in private equity, “which has not done well” compared to other investment options.
Strong said Sweet Home pays over 30 cents to PERS for every dollar the district pays in wages. He added that a lot of that goes to retirees – not people who are currently working for the school district.
Thanks to district moves in past years, Sweet Home pays lower rates than many other districts, he noted, and he said that district staff have anticipated the rising costs in developing their budgets.
“Going forward, we are better positioned than many,” he said.
- Received a report from Strong on the district’s spending for travel and professional development, an issue raised by now-former Sweet Home High School Vice Principal Luke Augsburger at the January meeting, during which he also tendered his resignation to take another job.
Augsburger returned to the Feb. 9 meeting and stated that he had submitted a public records request to the district for the expense report that Strong provided the board, as well as “all expenditures and receipts.” He complained that it took “around two weeks” to get the records and he did not get all he asked for.
Augsburger said he learned from the reports he received that the district’s spending on travel and professional development was over budget in each of the past three years.
He questioned the expenditures when, he said, the money spent on travel and training could be used for “”a lot of playground equipment, a lot of textbooks, a lot of coats, a lot of shoes” and he noted that the board was about to ask the community for a $40 million bond.
He encouraged the board to “dive into” the issue.
Strong told board members later, in presenting the report, that the annual totals, particularly in 2023-24, included expenses from the previous fiscal year.
He confirmed that COSA is within the district’s administrative professional development expenditures. Strong said later that administrative professional development represents “a very small fraction” of the district’s overall budget.
Board Member Rachel Maynard asked about the Coalition of School Administrators conferences, which are the largest expenditures each year.
Strong explained that COSA hosts various events during the year, including one large end-of-the-school-year conference, held annually in Seaside in recent years. The district pays for transportation, lodging and meals for those events.
Martin said the costs fluctuate from year to year, “depending on what’s pushed down from the state.”
Northern asked how the district compared to similar districts in its travel and professional development costs and Strong said he could find out.
Board members were mixed in their response to Strong’s offer to query other districts.
Maynard said she would like to see a comparison, “just so we have a guideline of what other districts are doing.”
Strong said he agreed that it would be good to “have a benchmark.”