# A Box On My Desk

*Civic Beat · January 9, 2026 · by Alan Decault*

> The first of this paper's School Board dispatches. A $107 million bond wraps up having returned $151 million of value and 170 approvals out of 170 requests; the auditor reports a repeat finding, unsigned resolutions and documents lost to staff turnover; and the man closing the bond says his one regret is that nobody read the last plan.

---

**Ashland School Board · January 8, 2026 · 2h 59m · five directors and two
student representatives present · two motions to extend.**

This is the first of these, so a word about what it is. The Ashland Free Press
is new again — a print quarterly in 2005, gone for twenty years, and back this
month — and one of the things it means to do is cover the body that spends the
largest single pot of local money in this valley, every meeting, in writing.
Nobody has been doing that. It is not that the information was hidden. The
School Board meets in public, streams, and posts its packet; the record has been
sitting there the whole time with nobody's fingerprints on it.

This desk is the paper's archives editor, which in practice means the reporting
here is documentary. The decision that matters is the written instrument — the
policy, the finding, the audit, the corrective action plan — and not the show of
hands that adopts it, so that is what gets read and quoted. A meeting is three
hours of talk wrapped around about nine pages that will still be true in a
decade. This series goes after the nine pages. The Planning Commission gets the
same treatment, in its own file, starting next week.

What follows is the meeting of January 8, which ran just under three hours and
required two votes to extend itself past its own bedtime.

## The Consent Agenda

The chair described it as "quite lengthy this evening" and it was: minutes, the
January personnel report, the January enrollment report, a memorandum of
agreement for the boys' head volleyball coach, and what she called "a very long
list of policy updates," among them immunization, school sports participation,
concussions, and the district's artificial intelligence policy.

The artificial intelligence policy was adopted without discussion, in a block,
alongside the volleyball coach. This is not an accusation. It is how consent
agendas work, and the policy had been through prior readings. It is recorded
here because in ten years somebody will want to know when Ashland decided what
it thought about this, and the answer is that it did not decide so much as
ratify.

Two items were pulled. One was a question about whether a fee schedule existed
yet — it did, in draft. The other was a director — the superintendent later
addressed him as Dan, and the captions give no surname — asking where the
language in policy GCAB had come from, specifically its definition of
disruption, which "is not limited to but includes one or more parent threatens
to remove their child from a class or classroom." The answer was OSBA: it is
model language, adopted statewide, not homegrown.

Read that definition twice. A parent saying they will pull their child out is,
under the policy this board adopted in January, a *disruption*. There may be
sound reasons for that — a threat repeated at a teacher across a school year is
a real thing to manage. But it is worth having on the record that the document
governing parent conduct in Ashland classifies the most common form of parental
objection as a category of misbehavior, and that it arrived pre-written from
Salem.

## The School Presentation: Bellevue

Christine McCollum, principal, presented her school's data. Language arts
proficiency in grades three through five came in at 77 percent, a 13-point gain
on the prior year, with 56 percent of the proficient students exceeding.
Mathematics, 68 percent against 59 the year before.

Those are good numbers and the board said so. The number nobody said anything
about is this one. Asked why Bellevue's enrollment is holding steady, McCollum
answered with the longer history: "historically we've had between, before COVID,
between 300 and 320 students was our pretty normal place to land." The school
now has 245.

"So it's been stable," she said, "but we've not recouped after COVID the chunk
that we lost."

That is seventy children, at one elementary school, described in a subordinate
clause, in a presentation about test scores. Hold onto it; it comes back at the
end of the meeting with a number attached.

One further item from that presentation belongs in a file somewhere. Bellevue's
staff culture score on the Youth Truth survey was low, and McCollum explained
why without being asked: the survey was taken last March, when "half of our
classified staff were not sure if they were gonna have a job."

## The Bond Report

Steve Mitchell, director of operations, brought the wrap-up of the 2018 capital
bond, accompanied by three people from HMK, the program's project managers. The
presentation ran roughly thirty-five minutes and was, in substance, a closing
statement.

The arithmetic, as stated: the district sold approximately **$107 million** in
bonds. Bond premium, a state seismic match, four seismic grants and what was
described as strategic reinvestment added roughly **$44 million** more —
about 40 percent — for **$151 million** of capital improvement delivered at a
cost of $107 million. Almost $140 million of that has been spent across nearly
seven years. Helman and Walker cut energy consumption by more than 40 percent,
and did it while adding air conditioning they did not previously have.

**$4 million remains.** A director asked whether there is a deadline to spend
it. There is not.

Two sentences from that half hour deserve to outlive it.

The first is Mitchell's, offered as thanks and functioning as something else:
"I've been before you at least 168 to 170 times. So thank you for that trust."
He had prefaced it: "we're still batting a thousand. We have not had a single
board member not approve a recommendation that we put before you."

One hundred seventy recommendations. One hundred seventy approvals. That ratio
is either a record of exceptional staff work or a record of a board that does
not say no, and this file cannot tell you which. It can tell you that the man
who kept the tally volunteered it, in public, as a point of pride, and that
nobody on the dais treated it as a question.

The second is Chris McKay's, and it is why this piece is titled the way it is:

"One of the things that we did not do well in my opinion, was to look to the
past to inform the future. Through the years I've actually discovered master
plans — or what do you wanna call, long range facilities plans — that have
stretched from '96 all the way out to 2047. And I don't know that we followed
them to the extent that we probably could have. I actually just recently
probably dropped a box on my desk and it was all of the long range planning and
bond planning for the 2007-08 bond. And I don't know that we actually looked
back to that to inform the one we just passed in 2018."

A box on a desk. Thirty years of planning documents, from 1996 to 2047, found
rather than consulted, by the consultant, in the last month of a seven-year
program. His recommendation to the district is that the next bond committee do
what this one did not, and that roofs get a line item every time, because "we
had so much need to keep our kids safe or open dry and there wasn't an
identified budget for it."

Filed, for the committee that convenes in four or five years, along with the
rest of the recommendations: replace Helman's two remaining four-classroom pods,
the middle school's twenty-five-year-old systems, the high school's roofs and
theater — and move the district office off the high school campus.

## The Finance Report and the Audit

Sherry Ely, business manager, projected an ending fund balance a little over
$3 million, or a little over 7 percent, and flagged that she is watching the
health insurance fund.

Then Ben Cohen of Soren CPAs presented the audit for the year ended June 30,
2025, and here the meeting acquires a spine.

The opinion is **unmodified** — clean, the best available. There were **no
material weaknesses**. Cohen was careful to say that this is an improvement:
the prior year had several findings, including a material weakness, and the
business manager who inherited the year under audit was not there for it.

What remains is one **significant deficiency**, and it is a **repeat finding
from the prior year**: certain year-end account balances and their activity
"were not properly prepared and/or reviewed accurately." The recommendation is
that the district establish a year-end close with a preparer and a separate
reviewer for every account.

Beneath that, in the Oregon compliance report, three more things:

- An over-expenditure of appropriations of roughly **$24,000** in the special
  revenue fund, support services category. Traced in the room to food service.
- The district **budgeted negative fund balances**, which the auditor stated
  plainly is "a violation of local budget law."
- Some **resolutions provided to the auditors had not been signed by the
  board**. The recommendation is that resolutions should be signed.

And one recommendation that belongs to this desk's own subject: the district
"did not retain the required level of documentation due to staff turnover," and
"sufficient procedural controls do not seem to be in place when a key employee
leaves."

Set that beside the box on the consultant's desk and a theme emerges that
nobody at the meeting named. This is a district that does good work and does not
reliably keep the paper that proves it. The bond succeeded and its planning
history had to be rediscovered by accident. The audit improved and the
documents were lost to turnover. The resolutions passed and some went unsigned.

The consequence is not hypothetical. Because of a material weakness in the prior
year, the district did not qualify as a **low-risk auditee**, which means the
auditors were required to test 40 percent of federal expenditures rather than
20. Sloppy files cost money in the plainest way there is: they double the audit.

One director carried nearly all of this — nine questions, more than the rest of
the board combined, prefaced with "audits are my love language" and an apology
for the hour. The corrective action plan was approved that night, which is the
right outcome, and it was approved because somebody had read to the end of a
seventy-page document.

## Board Reports: Twenty Percent

Dan reported back from a regional legislative reception in Grants Pass, attended
by board members, superintendents and six legislators. Most of
what he brought back concerned other districts: online charter schools that
drain enrollment to a Utah provider and post a graduation rate he was told is
under one percent; a neighboring district whose unemployment liabilities went
from tens of thousands a year to $700,000; a special-education reimbursement cap
that leaves districts absorbing costs for students above roughly 20 percent.

Then this, as reported by him in open session:

"All districts noted a loss of enrollment since pre-pandemic, but they were all
in line with kind of the state's thing, which is about 6 percent — and we're at
about 20 percent."

Six percent statewide. Twenty percent here. That figure comes to this paper
secondhand, as a board member's account of a conversation, and should be
confirmed against the district's own enrollment filings before anyone builds an
argument on it. This desk will do that.

But it is the number that makes sense of everything else in the meeting. It is
Bellevue's missing seventy children, generalized. It is why the superintendent's
report includes a line item called the consolidation timeline — currently in
"the data completion phase," looking at "facilities, usable classroom space,
enrollment, staffing projections" — and why a webpage is being built to explain
it. It is why the AEA representative's cheerful report from the schools contains
the phrase "still aware of the continued challenges brought by reductions in
staff."

His own conclusion was that Ashland should stop being lumped in with the state
and start talking to its legislators directly, because "we are totally unique in
our region."

He is right that twenty is not six. Whether unique is the word for it is a
question this series will be following.

## The Superintendent's Report

Dr. Hatrick reported that Lincoln School's deconstruction is complete, that the
high school principal search is down to two finalists with a recommendation due
in February, and that the consolidation timeline is being drilled down from what
he called "the 3,000-foot level."

He also reported the following, which is the most quietly infuriating item in
three hours. Senate Bill 141, the accountability bill, requires districts to
administer interim assessments in math and language arts three times a year.
Ashland adopted and implemented IXL this year, on a three-year contract. IXL did
not make the state's proposed list.

"Not only does this interrupt our longitudinal data, but we have a three year
contract with IXL."

The district will submit public comment to the State Board of Education on
January 15. "And of course," the superintendent added, "they're not providing
funds for that inconvenience."

Recall Bellevue, earlier the same evening, explaining that its baseline data
means nothing yet because the assessment system changed this year. The state is
now proposing that it change again.

## Odds

January is School Board Recognition Month, and this meeting observed it
thoroughly: a letter from the teachers' union, a tribute from the
superintendent, a proclamation from the governor, and gifts. By this desk's
count the board was thanked, in one form or another, seven times in three hours.

The union representative, invited to report and disclosing that he has "no
obligation to have impulse control after eight o'clock," proposed spending part
of the $4 million on a bungee-jumping crane in the parking lot, with tickets
sold to students. He offered a bounce house as the cheaper alternative. It is
the only budget proposal for that money anyone made out loud all night.

Jim Westrick, a former board chair, stayed three hours through the public
comment queue to praise Steve Mitchell, and reached for de Gaulle to do it: the
cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men. He then argued the
exception. Mitchell, he said, "never lied to anyone, even if it was an
uncomfortable truth that people didn't wanna hear." Thirty-five years in public
education had left him with few examples.

The meeting recessed into executive session under ORS 192.660(2)(e), to
negotiate real property transactions. No decisions are made there and none were
reported.

## The Docket

Work session Thursday, January 22, 6:30, on Zoom. Next regular meeting Thursday,
February 12, 6:30, in the City Council chambers.

Due before then: public comment to the State Board on the assessment list,
January 15. Due in February: the high school principal recommendation. Due in
March: the science and health curriculum recommendations, with adoption sought
in April so materials arrive before teachers do in August. Due at no particular
time, from nobody in particular: a plan for $4 million.

---

*Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the January 8, 2026 Ashland
School Board regular session, and from documents described in open session.
Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech, with
bracketed interpolations where the repair is interpretive; the caption software
recycles speaker labels, so names are attached only where the chair's own words
or a speaker's self-identification confirm them. Audit figures and findings are
as presented by the auditor in open session; the district's FY25 financial
statements are the controlling document. The enrollment comparison is a board
member's account of a regional meeting and is not the district's own filing.
Runtime is measured from the first to the last caption timestamp.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/civic-beat/2026-01-09-a-box-on-my-desk