April 1, 2009

ESD eyes chief prospects
Public can meet superintendent candidates Thursday, April 2

By Sam Craig
of The Chronicle

     This week, the finalists who are vying for the position of superintendent at the Columbia Gorge Education Service District (ESD) will be taking a look at what the job entails and getting a chance to meet the public they may be serving.
     The ESD is in search of a new superintendent to take the helm and they’ve narrowed their search to three applicants. The three men who are up for the job, Timothy McGlothlin, Gary Peterson and Dr. Robert Thomason, have their final interviews this Thursday, April 2, and the ESD is taking that opportunity to introduce them to the community and to show them the lay of the land.
     The search to replace the current Columbia Gorge ESD superintendent, Dr. James R. Carnes, has lasted a few months, but is coming to its conclusion. Tomorrow at the final interviews — before which, from 3 to 4 p.m. the public is invited to meet the applicants at the Early Intervention/Early Childhood Special Education Pre-School building, 1717 W. 10th St. in The Dalles.
     As superintendent of the ESD, the person hired for the job will be responsible for looking out for the needs of students in Wasco and Hood River counties. The Columbia Gorge ESD provides extra help to North Wasco County School District, South Wasco County School District, Hood River County School District and the Dufur School District, as well as the Mosier Community School and home schooled kids.
     McGlothlin, Peterson and Thomason all have years of experience working in the educational system. They’ve spent time as teachers, principals and superintendents in different school districts, but for the new ESD superintendent, it will be a completely different ballgame.
     Columbia Gorge ESD isn’t like a typical school district. In fact, it isn’t in charge of any schools at all. The ESD works as an entity within the school districts that provides services to boost student learning, and it will be one of the applicants’ new job to oversee the actions of the ESD’s numerous outreach departments.
     The ESD offers dozens of programs to the districts they serves.
     Their Migrant Education department offers schooling to the children of parents who frequently move around, looking for seasonal or temporary work in the fishing or farm industry. The department gives services to kids who need preschool all the way up to students who want to graduate from high school.
     The ESD’s Student Services Department provides a wide variety of programs for students with a range of needs. They offer services for kids with autism, development and training for special education teachers in Sherman, Wheeler and Gilliam Counties, monitoring for home schooled students, training for people who want to be surrogate parents for special education students and Early Intervention/Early Childhood Special Education for developmentally disabled kids between age three and five.
     The inmates at NORCOR’s juvenile facility are also educated through the ESD’s NORCOR Education Center. They provide five and a half hours of schooling each day for the kids in the facility.
     The Students Recycling Used Technology program, StRUT, is also an arm of the ESD. Through dismantling and recycling old, discarded computers, the program teaches students about technology from the inside out. StRUT is also responsible for the advent of Cisco Systems training in the high schools in local districts.
     Those and many more programs will be the responsibilities for either McGlothlin, Peterson and Thomason.

Tim McGlothlin
     McGlothlin, currently the building administrator at The Dalles Wahtonka High School ninth grade campus, is the one and only local candidate. McGlothlin graduated from Western Washington University in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in music and then went on to get his master’s in education-public school administration from Central Washington University.He plans to return to school to complete his doctorate as well.
     He’s the only candidate with intimate knowledge of The Dalles, having spent 35 years living and teaching in town. Though McGlothlin hasn’t been a superintendant before, his experience in many of the fields the ESD handles along with his international connections, he believes, are his major strengths in the area.
     “What can I bring to the position?,” McGlothlin asked. “My background in technology, my background in special education. I went to a symposium in London, and the connections and network that that provides with distance learning and with new tech strategies and teacher education and professional development. I think that’s a niche that can be developed. So those are the things that I bring to the table. This is just another opportunity to grow.”

Gary Peterson
     Working as the Principal Consultant at the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning in Denver, Colo., Peterson currently lives the farthest from the gorge. Though he does currently live a few states away, Peterson spent the rest of his educational career in Oregon, working various principal and superintendent jobs across the state.
     Peterson got his bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Oregon State University and his master’s in the same category from Western Oregon University in 1980, before going for his superintendant’s license at Lewis & Clark College in Portland in 1996.
     “Part of the appeal of this position,” Peterson said, “is to bring that experience from being a superintendent to a little level and a little different approach, because at the ESD level, you’re working not with individual schools, but individual districts and how you can support them in what they’re doing to support student learning.”

Robert Thomason
     Thomason recieved his bachelor’s degree from California State University, Chico in social science in 1972, his master’s in education administration from California’s University of La Verne and his doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Nevada, Reno.
     He currently lives in Hillsboro and is on sabbatical, and for good reason. He’s spent his career circumnavigating the globe on a teaching quest. Much of it was spent in the lower 48, but when he wasn’t in Oregon, California or Idaho, he was in more exotic locales. He was an international teacher in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, a fifth and sixth grade teacher in Melbourne, Australia, and he just got back from a three-year stint as superintendent in the chilly, 500-person village of Nenana, Alaska.
     “Most of my teaching experience, my superintendenting experience and administrating experience has been either rural or international,” Thomason said. “I went to Alaska because I thought I could really make a difference there.”