From a rear booth at Giovanni's Mountain Pizza, School Board Chairman Arnie White sips coffee, looking out at Highway 22 as he talks. The midday traffic, heading east toward Central Oregon or west toward the Willamette Valley, kicks up sheets of winter rain as it passes. "In a society that is becoming more and more diverse, you can't raise a child without diversity," White says, his hands wrapped around his coffee cup. "It's not that simple anymore. We're going to have to get along with the whole world."
Most of the world bypasses Mill City, a 1,600-resident hamlet hidden in the foothills of the Cascades along the North Santiam River. To Oregonians, Mill City is known mainly as a way station on the road to Bend or Salem. But White has a broader view of the timber-dependent mill town that has been his home for 20 years. He sees a town increasingly tied to the world community, linked to the international marketplace of goods and ideas in which Mill City's children must be prepared to participate.
"It's going to be a global society a lot sooner than we think," he predicts. "The worst thing we can do is to send our children out there with a narrow-minded perspective."
White's global outlook has been influenced to a large degree by one group that not long ago was among Mill City's passersby. Hispanic seasonal workers--once drawn to the area as tree planters, bean pickers, and fruit packers--are dropping out of the migrant stream and settling into permanent jobs. Like many rural Northwest communities, Mill City has experienced a dramatic increase in Hispanic residents as workers settle, often joined by extended families--brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles--who come north from Mexico or other Latin American countries in search of employment and educational opportunities.
The Hispanic influx comes at a time of wrenching change in the Santiam Canyon. Several family-owned mills have closed in recent years after federal timber sales were blocked to protect spotted owl habitat. The closures rippled throughout the canyon. For every mill job lost, another two or three related workers were displaced, says Rob Freres, vice president of Freres Lumber Company, a veneer plant and stud mill in Lyons just west of Mill City.
"It really tore the fabric of the community," Freres says. "Some long-term folks were forced to move. A crisis center was established, where there had never been a need for one in the past."
Faced with logging cutbacks and bitter battles over owls and old growth, many local residents who had always counted on timber began to feel there was no future in the woods and mills. Says Freres: "People in the canyon are not applying for jobs here in the numbers we would like. You can't blame them, after years of being bombarded with bad publicity."
Hispanic workers have stepped in to fill the employment gap.
Plumes of steam rising white against the wooded foothills are the most visible sign of the canyon's economic heartbeat--its mills. Inside the Freres plant equipped with the latest in lasers and computers, Hispanic workers mostly pull green chain, an entry-level job sorting green veneer by size and grade as it drops with a loud ka-thunk! ka-thunk! ka-thunk! onto a conveyor belt. The plant's last 25 openings, in fact, have been filled by Hispanics, who now make up 10 percent of Freres' workforce. Other canyon mills also have taken on Hispanic workers.
"In the late '80s, we would get maybe 10 Hispanic applicants a year; now we get 100," says Personnel Manager Tim McCollister. Freres Lumber also contracts with several Hispanic-owned companies specializing in brush disposal, tree planting, and slash burning.
"Hispanics come from the farms and the fields and the forests, and they're not afraid of hard work," Freres says. "We've seen the Hispanic community starting businesses, buying homes, putting down roots."
"How do you say Super Nintendo in Spanish?" Miguel asks his teacher. Along with his classmates in Gates Elementary School's bilingual, multiage classroom, the first-grader is writing a letter to Santa Claus in Spanish. No sugarplums here: Power Rangers, Barbies, and Rollerblades are the Christmas visions dancing in these kids' heads.
Miguel, like many canyon students whose first language is Spanish, switches easily from his native tongue when conversing with one of the classroom's two bilingual aides, to English when talking to English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher and program coordinator Joyce Gleason. Miguel, in fact, asks Gleason if he can write two letters, one in each language. As an astute member of a multicultural community, Miguel already understands that being multilingual can be advantageous in matters both personal and professional. Who, after all, knows for sure which languages Santa speaks? Why limit your options when Super Nintendo is at stake?
While the first-graders are putting in their orders to the North Pole, the kindergartners are grouped at an adjacent table doing an exercise on days of the week: "Ayer fue jueves; hoy es viernes; mañana será sabado," the children chime along with the bilingual aide as she points to the words displayed on a flip chart. They then recite a poem about a piñata:
Bajen la piñata,
bájenla un tantito,
que le den de palos
poquito a poquito.
"We try to use songs and poems as a connection to their roots, their culture," says Gleason. "We encourage them to use Spanish. We send home books in Spanish so they will read with their parents and older siblings."
Gleason describes Mill City's approach as "first-language literacy with whole-language methods."
"Kids are programmed to learn, to make sense out of language," says Gleason. "If they're surrounded by language, they'll pick it up. Our job is to surround them with language that is important to them, that they can make sense of."
In the decade between 1985 and 1995,
Gleason, who was part-time last year, now spends full days teaching the district's language-minority students. In the mornings, she leads bilingual classes for mixed-aged groupings of kindergartners through fourth-graders. At midday, she works with high school students, teaching English and tutoring kids who come by the migrant education office to study. In the afternoon, she team-teaches with the sixth-grade social studies teacher at the middle school, where language-minority students are served in regular classes with extra support from bilingual aides and peer tutors.
"Some of our teachers," says Gleason, "have teaching styles that are student centered, with lots of hands-on and cooperative learning projects that are ideal for students with limited English proficiency. One of our goals is to help all of our teachers to recognize that thematic units, manipulatives, cooperative grouping, and the use of visuals--graphs, charts, videos, pictures, maps--are beneficial to all students, and are essential for students trying to gain content knowledge through their second language."
But the issues reach far beyond the classroom and go much deeper than curriculum. Superintendent Bob Sari, a longtime rural educator whose door is propped open with a scuffed pair of cowboy boots, has seen the effects of a changing population in Oregon communities as he's moved from small district to small district--from Mt. Vernon to Phoenix to Elgin and Crane and, finally, to Santiam Canyon last year.
"If you travel the state," he says, "the sentiment of a lot of older Oregonians is no different here in Mill City than it is in Woodburn or anywhere else." Those older Oregonians who grew up during the "war years," he says, often view ESL and bilingual education as "baloney." And, Sari adds, the canyon has its share of "redneck folks" who don't welcome diversity. While Sari minimizes the negative attitudes, he admits that the newcomers are shaking up towns like Mill City that not long ago were insular and homogeneous.
"Our whole system, the personality of the community, is being affected by the change in people and how well they are going to meld into the community," Sari observes. "You have a lot of adjusting that's going to be necessary, and a lot of work to blend these people in."
Viewing the classroom experiences of Spanish-speaking children, then, as just one act in a full-length drama that casts the whole community, Gleason and Ang, with solid support from the superintendent and school board, wrote a plan for the district that went to the heart of the matter: attitudes. Racial friction had surfaced in the schools. Two years ago, a pair of promising Hispanic high schoolers dropped out. When Ang pressed them for a reason, they told her, "Some of the kids have been harassing us, and we're just tired of fighting it." Ang recounts other incidents: a group of freshman boys picking fights with Hispanic eighth-graders. Two Hispanic girls becoming frightened when several non-Hispanic girls followed them after school, taunting them with insults.
"The parents were concerned and the police were called," says Ang. "But it has not been handled, I feel, to the level or to the depth that it needs to really resolve the issue. Getting the kids to shake hands and say, æIt's OK' isn't enough because it doesn't solve the inner turmoil."
That turmoil was underlined dramatically again this year when, in two separate incidents, non-Hispanic kids pulled weapons--one was a gun, the other a knife--on Hispanic students off-campus, according to Ang.
"These are the reasons," she asserts, "why we felt it was necessary to approach it on a community level. It was more than the school district could handle alone."
Maria Martinez and her husband harvested lettuce in Southern California until the gangs and traffic and crowds caused them to look northward, toward the forested Oregon river canyon where a relative had prospered pulling green chain at a plywood mill. As the daughter of seasonal laborers who had migrated between Mexico and Texas, Martinez had seen conditions for farmworkers deteriorate: "more work, less pay, more strict," is the way she puts it.
So Martinez--one of three Marias who assist Joyce Gleason in her ESL classrooms--moved to Mill City to settle with her family. She divides her time between the classroom and the Mexican restaurant, Sierra, which she owns and operates with her husband. The canyon, she says, is a good place to raise her three children. Still, the family has had a few painful episodes. She recalls that one administrator, no longer with the district, ignored her whenever she was in the building. "He just pretended I wasn't there," she says. And her middle son, a 10-year-old, came home upset one day after another child made disparaging remarks about his Mexican heritage.
Incidents like these spurred the district to invite Martinez and other Hispanic parents to a November meeting with principals and counselors from each of the district's four schools to air grievances and share perceptions. An impartial translator from nearby Chemeketa Community College acted as an intermediary.
"The parents said they felt that the teachers and administrators needed some training on how to be more culturally aware and sensitive to the needs of Hispanic children," says Ang.
In response, the district invited cultural-competency trainer Daniel Duarte of Tualatin, Oregon, to put on a workshop in January for school staff, police officers, and Hispanic parents to, in Ang's words, "help people become more accepting culturally and know how to cross some of those bridges that separate us."
Meanwhile, the district spearheaded an interagency meeting aimed at brainstorming strategies to calm community jitters about the canyon's changing demographics. Mill City, seeing gang- and drug-related problems arise in the neighboring town of Stayton, wants to head off such troubles, says Ang. Present at the invitational meeting in late November were key community players: police officers, migrant education staff, and representatives of the Canyon Crisis Center and the Santiam Canyon Youth and Families Alliance--a volunteer community agency that has received funds from the Marion County Commission on Children and Families to operate the Family Resource Center (providing bilingual information and resources) and the Community Assistance Center (providing donated food and clothing). Lieutenant Raul Ramirez of the Marion County Sheriff's Office facilitated.
Out of that meeting has emerged what Ang describes as a "loosely structured" group called the Community Awareness and Education Committee to "build relationships" and address the community's cultural, economic, law enforcement, and local government concerns on an ongoing basis.
Other recent or upcoming events include:
The school board has been 100 percent behind the district's initiative on behalf of Hispanic children and their parents, Chairman Arnie White asserts. It's a role that in his mind properly belongs to the schools.
"In a community this size, the school district is the hub," he says. "Almost everything revolves around the hub."
Welcoming parents into the schools and inviting them to take part in their children's education has been a big step toward folding the newcomers into the mainstream of canyon life, White says. "Through ESL and Title I, the school district has played a large role in making the Hispanics feel the community cares about them and is doing something for them," he notes. "For most people, the education of their children is the most important thing. If their children are getting a good education, they won't feel like outcasts in the community."
Maria Martinez is one of the critical points of connection between the schools and Spanish-speaking parents. In her role as bilingual classroom aide, she translates printed information for parents and interprets at parent-teacher conferences. Father-of-four Sergio Sandoval, who was a California farmworker before taking a mill job in the canyon two years ago, found an important ally in Martinez. Sandoval says that when his son was falling behind in class because of health problems or when his daughter failed to get proper recognition for schoolwork she had done, he approached Martinez to bring his concerns to the teachers. "Someone needs to translate," he says. "Someone needs to be the liaison."
The True Value hardware store on Highway 22 is a place where nearly everyone up and down the Santiam Canyon stops sooner or later. Owner Tim Kirsch, who grew up in the canyon, hears a pretty good sampling of community opinions when folks come in shopping for paint or nails.
"You do hear the bigoted slurs now and then," Kirsch admits. "But," he's quick to add, "a lot of it isn't hate-oriented--it's just people talking." He thinks such sentiments are the inevitable growing pains of a community making a rapid transition from uniformity to diversity.
Hispanic families, a rarity in the canyon when Kirsch was in school 20 years ago, now have "a good stronghold in the community," he reports. But he insists that rather than threatening the jobs of locals, as some residents claim, the Spanish-speaking workers are "filling in slack areas" that the local workforce can't or won't fill.
Adds Kirsch wistfully: "I wish I were bilingual. Our client base has a lot of Hispanics."
It's the new reality in the Santiam Canyon, and it's being played out in rural communities everywhere. It's being embraced by people like Arnie White, who's delighted when his five-year-old comes home from kindergarten spouting a new Spanish word. And this expanding multicultural world is being addressed by companies like Freres Lumber, which is collaborating with the community college to enroll its Hispanic millworkers in English classes so they can leave the green chain for more demanding slots.
Like White and Freres Lumber, Tim Kirsch is seeing the future--a future nearly upon us, when commerce and communication cut across cultures, not just in the population centers of Portland and Seattle but in the remotest farmlands and river canyons of the Northwest.
David Rosalez
Oregon Distinguished Educator
Ontario (Oregon) Middle School
(541) 889-5377
Merced Flores
Assistant Superintendent
ompensatory Education
regon Department of Education
503) 378-3606, ext. 675
Gloria Muñiz
Specialist
National Origin/Bilingual/ Migrant Education
Oregon Department of Education
(503) 378-3606, ext. 676
Anita Brunner
Consultant
ESL/Bilingual Education
Idaho Department of Education
(208) 334-2195
Patricia Yates
Technical Assistance Coordinator
Office for Civil Rights, Region X
(206) 220-7924
Ron Guyer
Director, Special Education and Student Services
Ontario (Oregon) School District
(541) 889-8792
Dr. Yolanda Jaini
Director, Complex Instruction
Division of Education and
Psychology
Heritage College
(509) 865-2244
Vivian Ang
Migrant Education Coordinator
Santiam Canyon School District
(503) 897-2009
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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