» It's a new day

As soon as the balloons dropped from the balcony above the new junior high common area just after 8 a.m. Monday morning, Reedsport Junior/ Senior High School became Reedsport Community Charter School.

Loud cheers came from parents, staff, students, school board and city officials. It has been a long road.

The school was awarded an Oregon Public Charter School Incentive Planning Grant last April. The three-year grant was written by Tricia Law and Jim Akre to the Oregon Department of Education. It provides $55,000 this year for the charter school’s planning phase, and will make available another $450,000 during the next two years for the training and materials necessary to implement an innovative new program of education in Reedsport.

The school’s goal is to enrich each student’s education by working with their individual learning styles and giving them the tools they need for careers in the increasingly high-tech 21st century.

To accomplish this, its focus is threefold: students, community and technology. These are the “three legs of the charter stool,” as RCCS Principal Laura Davis calls it.

The first leg of the stool is community partnerships in elective courses. These will be developed in the form of “registered teachers” who lend their expertise to the school’s certified teachers in their areas of speciality.

Secondly, a Personalized Education Plan, or PEP, will be developed for every student in grades 7-12. School officials believe this will increase family involvement and keep students on track for achieving their own goals, since they had a hand in creating them.

The third leg is about training teachers in new methods and  technologies, and purchasing high-tech equipment for student and teacher use.

One new elective class, Introduction to Health Occupations was created for this second semester of the 2009-10 school year. By next fall, Davis said, other new courses will have been created — or in development phases — that involve community members in teaching about topics including natural resources in western Douglas County, construction techniques and other career-oriented subjects.