Blachly charter idea on table.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

BLACHLY - Residents of Lane County's last one-school district aren't crazy about experimenting with their community's most important asset. But at a meeting Wednesday night, many acknowledged that leaving Triangle Lake School "as is" is also risky: Falling enrollment could rob the K-12 school of the state funds it needs to remain viable.

Nearly 20 parents and other district residents gathered in the school's library to discuss the possibility of reorganizing as a charter school. They peppered Superintendent-Principal Bob De La Vergne and three of the district's seven school board members with questions about the potential benefits and pitfalls of such a move.

Many worried that the district would succumb to the temptation to save money by replacing highly qualified teachers with noncertified instructors under the more flexible rules of Oregon's charter law.

Board President Sam Steinhauer said, however, that the district's leaders have no interest in watering down academics at Triangle Lake, ranked "exceptional" at every level in last year's state assessments.

"I can see the benefit for a school like ours to have the ability to hire someone who lives in the community to teach a pottery class or a welding class," he said. "But we're not going to bootleg some English teacher in here who doesn't have the credentials to save money."

De La Vergne added that standards, such as requiring "highly qualified" teachers for all academic subjects, could be written into any Triangle Lake charter.

Some district employees questioned what impact converting to a charter school would have on union contracts. But if community members decided to propose a charter school, they could also write in a requirement that union contracts stay the same, Steinhauer said.

De La Vergne said the primary benefit of becoming a charter school for Triangle Lake would be the creation of "open borders," allowing students from other districts to attend - and bringing their share of state funding with them - regardless of whether their home district approves.

De La Vergne proposed this approach after hearing how other small Oregon districts - mostly east of the Cascades - used the charter school designation to win grant funding and craft creative solutions to state requirements. Triangle Lake has 134 students this year. Only two children have signed up for kindergarten next fall.

De La Vergne said parents of 10 out-of-district students have already expressed interest in sending their children to Triangle Lake. Such an enrollment bump would mean more than $60,000 in additional state revenue.

The meeting ended with residents Jeff Thiessen and Derek Pennel agreeing to head up a charter idea committee. They said they would convene a gathering of other interested patrons to sit down with Paisley School District, a charter district northeast of Klamath Falls, to see what would work and what would need changing to suit Triangle Lake.

School secretary Linda Richardson, for one, was not yet convinced that the charter option was right for Triangle Lake, but she offered to seek answers from state officials and pass them along to others at the meeting.

Thiessen and Pennel also plan to set up a community blog where area residents can post questions for committee members to research.

If the group decides to present a charter quickly for school board consideration, a conversion could happen by the beginning of school next fall, said De La Vergne, who announced Wednesday that he is leaving the district to become superintendent of the Coos Bay School District on July 1.