School Community

Workers install stained glass chapel windows recalling the old oak felled to make way for a new building at Valley Catholic School in Beaverton. The leaf colors show the tree in all seasons, says artist Ron Rogers, and the pointed arches at the top of each panel recall the shape of cathedral windows. BEAVERTON — A 200-year-old oak tree inspired the stained-glass artist who created chapel windows for the new building that the Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon will open in September.

Artist Ron Rogers of Beaverton admired the oak and nearby trees whenever he drove by the Sisters’ 43-acre Valley Catholic School campus at Southwest Tualatin Valley Highway and Murray Boulevard.

When he was invited to submit designs for seven chapel windows, the artist and sisters agreed that the centerpiece should be the old oak, one of several trees cut down to make room for the $16.2 million structure with classrooms for elementary and middle school students.

This week, Rogers watched as the last of the stained glass windows were installed and framed in oak. In coming weeks, the old tree’s wood will be finished as chapel doors, altar and chairs.

Sister Charlene Herinckx, the superior general of the 125-year-old religious community, said students were dismayed when they learned the oak was to be removed for the 67,000-square-foot building, designed for environmental sustainability by Soderstrom Architects.

“For years upon years,” Sister Charlene said, “the children called it the ‘fairy tree.’ They made little leaf beds for the fairies and had other activities there.”

Rogers, who has been working with glass for more than 35 years, designed the tree trunk, leaves and branches over three central windows in the chapel. Windows on each side of the oak triptych depict the tall sequoias growing outside the chapel. Two windows on the chapel’s east wall show Mount Hood rising above the Willamette River.

Explaining the artwork’s underlying theme, Sister Charlene said, “God is in all of nature.”

In the fall, kindergarten through eighth-grade students will leave classrooms in the 1930s convent and nearby modular structures for the new building, which the sisters hope will receive a gold certification through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Its locally made materials include recycled content. Flooring is made from corn chips instead of a petroleum product. Vegetation on the roof will filter storm water, keep the building cool during hot weather and warm during cold weather. The roof also will be incorporated into science lessons.

Rogers, who started working on the stained-glass windows in March, said, “This has been a fascinating project for me, and I’ve enjoyed working with these sisters. I told my wife that I was almost through with this project, and I’m really going to miss it.”

Ever thoughtful, my former editorial board colleague Ernie Holsendolph sent me this quick note about the APS cheating scandal: Poor neighborhoods, uneducated parents, and homes bereft of stimulation are not new.  I think teaching esprit or lack of it may be new. But how did we get here?

There has been a lot of idiocy on this blog from the usual suspects that black students and teachers cant achieve and the APS cheating reflects that failing. I dont think race plays any role in this.

But I think quotas do.

Over the years, we all have seen news stories of wrongdoing in law enforcement that began with an edict either officially or unofficially   to boost the number of tickets, arrests or zoning citations. Consider that a citizen oversight board found that arrest quotas played a role in the killing of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston in a botched drug raid in 2006. In its report, the board said the Atlanta Police Department unofficially had established arrest quotas of at least nine arrests and two search warrants per month.

If you give people unrealistic quotas, you create a situation where they either fail or cut corners.

A friend of mine still talks about her brief stint managing college students selling magazine subscriptions. When she imposed weekly quotas, sales jumped. Success, she thought. But it turned out that the college students were either buying the subscriptions themselves under false names or having friends buy them and, in both instances, canceling the purchases shortly afterward.

I unearthed an email I received last year from former Georgia child advocate Tom Rawlings, who is now director of the Guatemala office for International Justice Mission. He sent this to me after reading about the APS cheating stories.

It is an excellent distillation of what fueled the cheating scandal in Atlanta. I also think that his comment portends what we will see nationwide if performance pay for teachers is too heavily weighted on student test scores.

Rawlings wrote:

A few years ago I taught a college ethics class, and one of the topics I covered for leadership ethics was how making employees accountable for results over which they had no control would naturally lead to unethical behavior. The example I always cited was a standardized testing scandal in Texas several years ago in which the superintendents bonus, as well as the bonuses and jobs of principals, were dependent on improving test scores. Given that teachers have very little short-term impact on the average test scores of a given school, I argued the resulting cheating scandal was something that leadership should have expected.

The Secondary Six’s Twitter fiasco moves forward. Sadly, the Twitter Egg is gone, replaced by the conference name is giant blue letters.  The conference tried to move forward by posting a link to their Facebook page, which of course was actually a link to the North Dakota Hockey Facebook page.

The good news is the Secondary Six was able to become a trending topic on Twitter immediately following the announcement, thanks in most part to everyone saying, “That’s seriously what they picked?” If only Twitter had existed back in the 1930′s so the Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei could have said, “At least we’re trending!”

The Secondary Six also started their first ever meme with the now-deleted “We are exciting to announce the formation of the NCHC.” An error North Dakota sports information director Jayson Hajdu blamed on North Dakota head coach Dave Hakstol mistyping. At the very least, today’s face-palming errors leave no question which school is driving the bus for the Secondary Six. The question is what direction are they heading in?

The WCHA and CCHA officially responded to today’s press conference. Here is the WCHA’s release, and the CCHA’s release. It’s probably the best they could have done considering the circumstances.

The event today was hosted by Bobby Goldwater of the Goldwater Group and Stafford Sports. Goldwater has a pretty sketchy track record to say the least.

Brad Schlossman brought up the fact that today’s press conference was so short because of the hour of interviews planned afterwards. I guess I forgot how much this group struggles to do things in public and has to work behind closed doors.

So when NBC/Versus starts researching the viability of putting the Secondary Six on their network, hopefully they don’t look at websites that they actually own. Not that NBC has the editorial synchronicity of Fox News, but it still doesn’t look good.

The normal role of the foreign correspondent is to live-abroad and report on events for the audience at home. Mark Tully, as BBC bureau chief in India, found himself catering for a much larger audience than the one in Britain. His reports for home were also broadcast on the BBC World Service to millions of listeners in India who had no other independent source of radio news.

India is a democratic country, though it slid into dictatorship for a brief spell in the 1970s. But the radio broadcast news is still controlled by the government and no independent indigenous station is licensed to provide news and current affairs.

“This created tensions,” says Tully.

For the requirements of broadcasting to a home audience and a distant one are different. The listener in the country being talked about is familiar with the context of the stories reported and expects the journalist to demonstrate a rich acquaintance with detail.

This allows the reporter to skip detail that the audience can be trusted to know. There was, for instance, no need to remind Indian listeners that Indira Gandhi was the daughter of the first Indian prime minister, Nehru.

Writing for the distant audience, the reporter has to repeatedly labour points just like that, on the assumption that the listener knows little, and might in this case even lightly assume that she was the daughter of Mahatma Gandhi.

The editor in London, receiving reports filed for broadcast on the BBC in Britain, expects broad stroke pictures, stripped of distracting detail and simplified for listeners who have no familiarity with the story.

And this editor will resist any suggestion that the demands on the foreign correspondent impose superficiality and simplification. Instead, such editors regard the ability to encapsulate the problems of a foreign political culture in simple language that can be understood by the casual listener as a great skill of which only the best journalists are capable.

But Tully had both audiences and this fact imposed strains on the style which he had to adopt. On occasions, he exasperated London editors with the detail that he put in his stories for his Indian listeners.

During the Emergency in 1975, when Indira Gandhi suspended democracy and jailed opponents, Tully reported lists of the people that had been arrested; people that most listeners in Britain would have never heard of.

“The Foreign Duty Editor said: ‘For God’s sake, why are you giving all these names? We just want one and-a-half minutes.”‘

Tully knew that Indian listeners might have only this one chance to hear the list of those arrested before a news clampdown.

Another consequence of Tully’s reports going out across India, though he was primarily commissioned to serve the BBC at home, was that he became a celebrity there.

Most foreign correspondents have a low profile in the media of the country they report from. Tully, on the other hand, had no rival across the whole Indian subcontinent, for the freshness and independence of the news he reported.

He lives there now, for most of the year, and is remembered affectionately as Tully Sahib. The fate of most other foreign correspondents is that they come back after a time, take up other positions or postings and are remembered and respected only by the audiences they reported to at home.

Have you explored outer space using the WorldWide Telescope? Do you have a favorite tour of space that you share with friends. Now you can share your tours of the universe with 8 million+ people. From now until September 1, 2011, participants in the WorldWide Telescope Tour Contest working alone or in teams can gain fame as winning entries will be featured in the WorldWide Telescope project and on their homepage for millions to see!

With the Worldwide Telescope, you have 3-D navigation to explore the universe. Not only can you visit, but you can create an interactive and educational tour of your journey. And on top of that, you have a chance to have your tour featured in Worldwide Telescope!

• Worldwide Telescope Project
• Worldwide Telescope Website
• Worldwide Telescope Tour Contest Official Rules

The contest is open U.S. Citizens age 14+ and all relevant information, including themes, can be found here: