Oregon schools have served this student well.

Byline: JAKE KLONOSKI For The Register-Guard

WHEN I LEFT OREGON four years ago to attend the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I worried about how my education would stack up against the schooling received by Eastern prep school graduates. I found that with the tools my wonderful teachers in Eugene had given me, I could compete without fear of any feelings of inequity.

Excellence was the key throughout my education in Eugene - at Fox Hollow French immersion school, Roosevelt and O'Hara middle schools, and then South Eugene High School. The teaching and the teachers were superb. No one could have been better prepared for college than this 1998 graduate of the South Eugene International High School.

My worries about the adequacy of my education began to evaporate when the entire School of Foreign Service freshman class joined in what is traditionally a practice of mass failure. Each student is presented with a map of the modern political world and is asked to essentially identify everything on it. As I watched other students throw down their pencils and give up, I reached back to high school classes taught by Robert Veeke, Ron Lancaster and Howard Yank and was able to press on, identifying the participants in the Soccer War, the rivers of Central Africa and the island nations of the Pacific.

In my class of more than 800, five students passed. Thanks to my former teachers' hard work, I was one of them.

My Oregon education also taught me to go beyond the simple facts, to question knowledge, and look beyond obvious answers. In a Jesuit university, these skills were essential in making a student into a participant rather than an observer. In those quiet moments following a professor's question in class, it was my experience in high school classes like Theory of Knowledge, taught by Larry Sutton, that led me to raise my hand - if not always quickly or with the right answer.

An education in Oregon also taught me that learning is a shared experience. My year-long senior-year course in Economics taught by Steve Smith, a class that sometimes met on Saturdays to ensure that students understood the material, turned me into a late-night resource for my fellow dorm members.

Being a college student involves being part of a vibrant community with a constant free flow of ideas outside the classroom. Fortunately, Sue Barr, my former journalism teacher, had given her students a means of navigating that idea flow rather than being swept away. Writing newspaper columns, using her style and format taught in countless hours spent editing articles for The Axe in the newsroom after school, became my way of expressing my viewpoint for the next four years.

Outside academic life, Washington, D.C., beckoned. I worked as an intern for Rep. Peter DeFazio and his staff. Over my four years in Washington, I participated in an investigation that sparked a congressional probe of rail line construction, helped organize Georgetown's campus for the 2000 presidential campaign and worked in the office of Tom Daschle, majority leader of the U.S. Senate. I witnessed the impeachment of the president and his acquittal from the galleries of Congress. I watched the U.S. Supreme Court decide the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. I was on the Senate floor when campaign finance reform legislation was approved. All this was possible because years before, my Eugene teachers encouraged me to try to apply classroom ideas outside the classroom.

An even greater example of education outside the classroom came on Sept. 11 of my senior year, when the entire campus watched the fires and smelled the smoke of the Pentagon burning across the Potomac River. A SEHS class led by Steve Smith, entitled Values and Beliefs, an exploration of the world's religious thought, helped me understand the need to join with other students in organizing a multi-faith prayer service with the Georgetown Office of Campus Ministry for the entire campus as flames still burned at the Pentagon.

Because I went to Georgetown largely on a Navy ROTC scholarship for which an Oregon education and Eugene teachers' recommendations had qualified me, upon graduation I was commissioned into the Navy. My chosen Navy field is that as a submarine officer, and as I train in nuclear engineering, I have discovered the incredible value of the calculus, physics and chemistry classes I took in high school, where unpaid, after-school teaching was often the norm. Without the enlightened instruction of teachers like Kathy Nelson, John Hocken and Eddie Anderson, even attempting the program would be incomprehensible.

The commitment that Oregon educators have to their students leaves one dumbfounded. From the initial application to GU - which my Global Literature teacher, Leslie Skelton, helped edit - to graduation, a very special debt is owed to all those teachers and administrators who opened up doors to another Oregon graduate. So many remain unmentioned here, especially from early school days, but success would have been impossible without their combined efforts.

For many of these years, public education has been under assault, with new ballot measures slashing school budgets every other year. It is truly bewildering that a state so progressive in dealing with the environment and issues of personal autonomy can be so unthinking in providing for the future of its young people. If future Oregon children are to enjoy the opportunities that have been given to me, stable dollars and focused planning are needed.

That being understood, here is one person who looks forward to voting in the affirmative at every opportunity to fund the Oregon school system through statewide ballot measures and local initiatives like "Yes for Schools" this Nov. 2.

But until that same commitment is made by Oregon's legislators and voters, and teachers are paid as much and treated as well as they should be, let me try to make up for it by saying to all of them: Thank you for everything.

Ensign Jake Klonoski currently lives in Charleston, S.C.