Oakridge School Superintendent Appears Likely to Keep Job After Pledging Better Communication

But Teachers and a Group of Parents Dismiss a Consultant’s Conclusion and Say They Aren’t Convinced the Embattled Administrator Will Improve Things

By DOUG BATES/Editor, The Herald

After many weeks of withering criticism from parents and teachers, Oakridge School Supt. Reta Doland promises to “recommit to improving” communication in her rural mountain district of 530 students.

The school board, while mum on the subject, appears poised to keep her in the job, her first as a superintendent of schools.

Doland’s pledge comes on the heels of a brief inquiry by a private consultant who concluded that she should improve her performance but that the outpouring of complaints about her doesn’t warrant termination.

Her removal as superintendent is the central demand of a formal complaint filed in December by Oakridge parent Nicole Sulick. She also submitted a petition with more than 300 signatures in support of her demand that Doland be fired immediately for creating “toxic working conditions” that the complaint says have boiled over during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This has been like losing a half year of learning for my son,” a junior at Oakridge High School, Sulick said in an interview. “His good teachers, who are skilled educators who he trusts and learns from, have left because of her unfair treatment.

“The substitutes are appreciated, but they aren’t nearly as qualified and don’t have the same record of student success as the teachers we’re losing.”

Meanwhile, the Oakridge Teachers Association, representing about 40 teachers, has cast a vote of no confidence in Doland. Third-grade teacher Jill Durham, interim president of the union, said that out of 31 teachers who took part in the anonymous voting, only one supported Doland.

Results of the vote were delivered to the school board in a letter asking for a conversation between teachers and board members.

“But they wouldn’t talk with us, they wouldn’t listen to us,” Durham said in an interview.

Consultant Interviews Two People — Doland and Sulick

In response to the furor, which included a raucous rally of sign-bearing parents on the highway through town, the school board hired consultant Rob Saxton, Oregon’s former deputy superintendent of schools, to investigate the formal complaint. He interviewed two people – Sulick and Doland, and evidently no teachers, according to his 10-page report that the board made public on Feb. 8.

Saxton’s report recommends that Doland restore site councils and safety committees at each school (they’re required by law but have been missing during Doland’s tenure in Oakridge) and that she improve her communications. He blamed the district’s turmoil mainly on stress caused for parents and teachers by the COVID-19 pandemic – stress that he said has occurred in every school district in Oregon.

Why Oakridge? Pleasant Hill, Lowell Avoid COVID-19 Uprisings

Sulick posted a lengthy rebuttal to the Saxton report calling it flimsy and riddled with errors. She says neighboring school districts such as Lowell and Pleasant Hill have had no such tumultuous reaction to pandemic stress, because administrators there have treated teachers and staff with compassion and skill that she says does not exist in the Oakridge district.

On Feb. 9, one day after the Oakridge board released Saxton’s report,  Doland issued a brief letter to her staff vowing to “recommit to improving the district-wide communication, to both you and the community.” She added: “I have avoided talking about this, choosing to wait for the report to be issued.”

Ten days later she declined to discuss the matter. She did reply promptly to The Herald’s request for an interview but said she would talk only about “the great things going on in our district.”

“As far as an interview concerning the investigative report and that issue . . . I will respectfully decline a personal interview on the subject,” she wrote in an email.

Controversy Off-Limits for Interview

Dolan granted The Herald an hour-long interview, which occurred Wednesday morning with masks and distancing. The controversy swirling around her was off-limits, but she gave The Herald a tour of the multi-million-dollar renovation project under way at the high school. That work, among the biggest such undertakings in Oakridge in years, will be the subject of forthcoming stories on this news site.

The school board selected Dolan, 62, for the $112,000-a-year job in 2018. At the time she was curriculum director for the La Grande School District. Prior to that she had worked as a teacher, reading specialist, literacy coach and elementary school principal.

The Herald also requested interviews with all five members of the school board. Only board member Tami Edmunds replied, and she did not appear to be pleased with being contacted.

“As an editor, you should know that I can not speak about this,” she wrote in an email. “We speak with one voice as the board. If anything is communicated it comes from the board chair.

“I was excited and hopeful we were going to have a reliable new news source,” she added.

‘Statements Will Be Made’

Board Chairman John Weddle did not reply to The Herald’s request for comment. Neither did board members Susan Hardy, Kevin Martin and Mikal McPherson.

Doland says “statements will be made” on the subject at the board’s next meeting, a virtual Zoom session set for 6 p.m. March 8. In previous meetings the board has not allowed public comment on the matter, so the Saxton report’s recommendations about improving communication will apparently be put to the test that evening.

The consultant’s report “leaves no doubt that communication is key,” Doland wrote in her Feb. 9 letter to the staff. “It needs to be clear, relevant and more frequent.”

For a school district of any size, a controversy like the Doland firestorm is a complex and sprawling story. In Oakridge the matter is a particularly dense thicket because the district has gone literally decades with little to no news coverage.

“When locally elected officials have been ignored by the media for decades, it’s only natural that they are anxious,” said Sandy Thoele, former co-publisher and owner of Junction City and Veneta’s weekly newspapers.

Media Coverage ‘Beneficial to the Citizenry’

“However, media coverage offers the small-town governmental officials an opportunity to bring greater citizen awareness to their actions, which wise officials welcome,” said Thoele, who lives in Cheshire and serves on The Herald’s nonprofit board.

“Local officials may find they need to brush up on laws governing open meetings and public records. The journalist covering their agency could bring these important matters to their attention.

“It’s beneficial to the citizenry and to the agencies that what happens at their meetings is transparent to the community, and a journalist can provide that opportunity.”

Herald Plans Continuing Coverage

The Herald has broken down the Doland controversy into several parts to be published over the next few weeks:

THE PARENTS: Just what, specifically, has upset Nicole Sulick and her group called Oakridge Voices for Education?

THE TEACHERS: What is behind their vote of no confidence in their superintendent?

THE SUPERINTENDENT: Who is Reta Doland and what are “the great things” she wants to be talking about?

THE INVESTIGATOR: Who is Rob Saxton and how thorough was his inquiry? Is it true, as teachers claim and his report suggests, that he never interviewed any Oakridge teachers?

THE SCHOOL BOARD: Who are these citizens and why did they seek their unpaid elected positions?

THE COMMUNICATION PROBLEM: Do Oakridge schools really have an issue here?

Herald Editor Doug Bates is a retired newspaper journalist who lives in Oakridge.