# A Wall The Coach Built

*Civic Beat · February 16, 2026 · by Alan Decault*

> Two sophomores told the School Board that their softball team changes behind a partition their coach built, that a crack pipe turned up in their equipment room, and that two eighth graders are leaving over it. Board policy forbade anyone from answering. Also: the middle school is down 56 students, and the health insurance fund is short a million dollars.

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**Ashland School Board · February 12, 2026 · 1h 46m · five directors present ·
one public comment, two speakers.**

The most important two minutes of this meeting came at the end, from two people
who do not work for the district and cannot vote on anything, and nobody on the
dais was permitted to reply to them. That is not a criticism of the board. It is
the policy the chair reads aloud before every public comment period, and it
exists for good reasons. But it is worth knowing what the rule cost on the night
of February 12.

## Public Comment

Sojo Blakely and Maggie Hammond, sophomores at Ashland High School, have played
softball at North Mountain Park for about six years. They came with a list, and
they had organized it: safety, growth of the program, and Title IX.

On safety: there are no lights in the parking lot or anywhere around the field.
People sleep in the dugouts and the players cannot see them when they come off a
late game. They have called the police non-emergency line more than once. Gear
has been stolen from the team room. Someone left a crack pipe in it.

On the program: two fields, one usable, partly for want of players and partly
for want of lights. Conflicts with soccer over the same ground. And the part
they said carefully, because they clearly knew what it meant: "we also have two
girls that we know of who are in eighth grade planning on going to other schools
because of our softball program and the safety issues that we have down there at
the field."

On Title IX, three items, delivered flat:

There is no permanent outfield fence. The team plays behind nets, and before
every game the coach walks out to confirm the netting is six feet tall, because
below six feet the game cannot be played.

The team room is simultaneously a team room, an equipment room and a concession
stand that cannot be used as a concession stand. It has no privacy, so — and
this is the sentence that ought to be read into the minutes of every facilities
discussion for the next two years — "our coach actually built us a wall."

Baseball has an indoor hitting facility available before games, for bullpens and
practice. Softball does not. The batting cage they do have adjoins the Parks and
Recreation building where the crews take breaks and store equipment, and is
often unavailable. So on Friday doubleheaders the team leaves school at nine in
the morning to hit somewhere else, which, as Blakely put it, is "taking away
from our education as well."

They also mentioned, in passing, that they gave part of their team room to Parks
and Recreation for storage. That is why the gear is in the concession stand.
That is why there was nowhere to change. That is why there is a wall.

The chair thanked them, noted with evident approval that they know what Title IX
is, and said the thing the rule requires: "I'd like to — we're not allowed to
talk. That's policy."

This desk has no standing to say what the district should do about a field it
does not own, on a schedule it does not control, with money it does not have.
What can be said is narrower and is a matter of record: two students described a
sex-equity disparity in athletic facilities, on the record, at a public meeting
of the body responsible for the program, and the meeting moved directly to the
appointment of budget committee members. Whether it returns to an agenda is the
only test that matters, and this file will be checking.

## The School Presentation: Ashland Middle School

Principal Steve Retzlaff was given, by his own account of the superintendent's
generosity, sixty-five minutes. He used about thirty-two, and the numbers in
them are the most complete public accounting of what enrollment decline actually
does to a building that this desk has seen.

Enrollment at Ashland Middle School, when Retzlaff arrived twenty-one years ago,
was in the mid-700s. It settled in the 600s for years. This year: **463**, which
is **56 fewer than last year** and, he noted, ten more than had been projected.
Next year, 448. Three years out, a little over 400, at which point the cohorts
coming up from the elementaries suggest it levels off.

The clearest single figure is the handoff to the high school. Last year the
middle school sent **193** eighth graders up. This year it will send **157**.

What that has already cost, as presented:

- One of three seventh-and-eighth-grade teams, gone. Two full teams remain, plus
  a two-teacher "Mountain" team of about thirty.
- The fourth homeroom on each sixth-grade team, gone.
- Last year's core reductions: half a math teacher, half a science teacher, half
  a language arts teacher, half a social studies teacher, and a **full-time
  Spanish teacher**.
- Encore reductions: a band section, an orchestra section, a PE section, a WAMS
  section — and the **leadership program closed outright**, about 1.25 FTE.
- Educational assistant time down thirteen hours a day, roughly two and a half
  positions.

Retzlaff was careful about the leadership program, and it is the loss he
returned to. It was not student council and not an election. It was an encore
class every student could take, "the idea was that everybody had the capacity to
be a leader." A student council now exists — fifteen to eighteen students, by
application, meeting at lunch. That is a different thing and he said so.

Two findings from the data he showed.

The first is that Ashland Middle School's language arts scores outperform the
state by 22 points and its math scores by 16, and Retzlaff's explanation for the
gap is staffing continuity: the same five language arts teachers for fifteen
years, writing their own standards-based rubrics and teaching from them, against
persistent turnover in seventh and eighth grade math, where teachers have
historically carried four or five preps. The lesson a board might draw is that
the thing producing the good number is the thing hardest to buy back once cut.

The second is attendance, and it is bleak. Regular attenders were at 80 percent
before the pandemic, level with the state. They fell to 62, then 66, then 68.
They are at **72** now — except that in early January they were at **78**, and
an illness that kept a quarter to a third of the school home for the better part
of a week took six points off. Asked whether the children who started school as
the pandemic ended attend differently, Retzlaff said it is exactly what you would
expect, and that those students are now reaching the middle school.

## The Notification

On January 30 there was a student walkout, and the middle school's attempt to
tell parents about it went wrong. The message intended only for the families of
students who had left campus — telling them their child was not at school — went
instead to all 462 or 463 families.

Retzlaff reported it himself, unprompted, in the middle of a slide about
attendance dips, and did not soften it. "The wrong button was pressed." The
person who pressed it "was sick to their stomach about it." Getting accurate
information back out "took much, much longer than it should have." He named the
harm plainly — "that caused a lot of our families some serious distress and
unnecessary distress" — said the error had been identified, and called the
evening "not our finest moment at Ashland Middle School by any means."

That is the whole item. It is in this file because a public body being told
about its own mistake, in detail, by the person responsible for the building,
before anybody asked, is rare enough to be worth recording when it happens.

## The Finance Report

Sherry Ely's first board meeting was a year ago this month. She is the interim
business manager and, the superintendent announced, has agreed to stay interim
for another year. The chair's comment — "interim becomes permanent over time, I
guess" — is a joke, and it is also the second consecutive month in which
document retention and staff turnover have surfaced in this district's finances.

The general fund is fine: ending fund balance projected around **$3.5 million**,
about 8 percent, up from last month's estimate.

The health insurance fund is not fine, and this is the item from the whole
evening most likely to reach every employee's paycheck.

Ashland School District self-insures. Claims are running above what the actuary
projected, because hospital and physician costs are rising and a district-sized
pool cannot negotiate the discounts a national carrier can — and, Ely noted,
sometimes absorbs the difference the carriers negotiate away. A healthy ending
balance in that fund, she said, would be **at least $1.5 million**. Her current
projection is **$400,000, if the district is lucky.**

Asked whether there is a point at which self-insuring stops being an advantage,
Ely answered: "To be totally transparent. Yes." Asked whether anyone is planning
for a transition: "Yes... A lot of discussions are going on around that very
issue. Can we even afford to do this program anymore?"

Asked whether ending it would be a board decision or an operational one, she
said operational — and then said it should come to the board anyway, "if for
nothing else, for discussion and transparency."

Note that for later. The person who says an operational decision ought to go to
the elected body before it is made is not always the person holding the pen.

## The Word

Under the superintendent's report, the item titled "consolidation" was renamed.

"As promised, this month begins the regular updates on consolidation, and that
is the last time I'm gonna use that word. So I've rebranded it to be
Transformation... It gives the impression, it gives the wrong impression."

The process itself is unchanged and was described in some detail: a leadership
review of facilities, enrollment history, enrollment projections and staffing,
plus a SWOT analysis, running through February; staff engagement in March;
family surveys April through June; then in-person listening sessions at each
site. A webpage will carry the documents.

This desk will use the district's word in the district's mouth and its own
elsewhere, and will note here only that the committee charter, the timeline and
the data phase are all the same document they were in January, and that the
thing being studied is which schools Ashland can afford to keep open.

## Odds

The Southern Oregon ESD's new superintendent, Mark Engel-Hobson, presented the
2026–27 local service plan, redesigned — he asked his communications coordinator
to make it "look more like an engaging children's book" — to show, for the first
time, the agency's budget by division and which positions the plan funds against
which are carried by grants. Approved. He also confirmed, in answer to a
director's question, that a student who leaves for an online charter school is
not a homeschooler and does not register as one, which is how a district can
lose a child without the child appearing anywhere as lost.

The **Grow Your Own** program, which funds classified staff who want to become
teachers, has already been cut once and is "on the chopping block to be
eliminated at the end of this year," pending the legislative session.

The teachers' union report was, in substance, a single complaint repeated by
every school in the district: the conference calendar. Too late in the year to
be useful, too close together, two days where three worked. From Helman, the
part that is not about teachers at all — a week off "is hard financially for
some of our families trying to cover daycare," and "we are also not supporting
food insecurities because some of our families depend on their two meals a day
at school."

The 2026–27 calendar was pulled from this agenda to gather more feedback. It is
due in March.

April Harrison, director of student services, leaves to become superintendent of
the Rogue River School District. Dave Dotterer and Serena Robinson were appointed
to the budget committee. Work sessions move off Zoom and into the district office
conference room, Zoom still available.

## The Docket

Work session **Thursday, February 26**, 6:30, at the district office — the first
one in a room. Next regular meeting **Thursday, March 12**, 6:30, City Council
chambers.

Due in March: the 2026–27 calendar, with the conference schedule that every
building complained about, and the science and health curriculum recommendations.

Filed for **May 19**: the board authorized the superintendent to request a ballot
title from Jackson County Elections for the renewal of the Youth Activities and
Academics Levy. That is the money behind a good deal of what the middle school
report described as still standing.

The meeting closed in executive session under ORS 192.660(2)(i), to evaluate the
performance of a public officer. No decisions are made there and none were
reported.

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*Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the February 12, 2026 Ashland
School Board regular 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.
Enrollment, staffing and financial figures are as presented by staff in open
session. Public commenters are named as they identified themselves at the
podium.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/civic-beat/2026-02-16-a-wall-the-coach-built