Siuslaw School Board Candidate for Director Position 4
Maureen Miltenberger runs for reelection to the Siuslaw School Board with a belief she has earned the right to serve another term. “I’m really good at what I do,” she said, when asked why the community should vote for her. Miltenberger has been to every board meeting since she was elected and serves on multiple committees, she said.
The current board works well together, she said. “I feel like we respect each other. We are very professional. We do exactly what they train you to do. Once you make the decision, you make the decision; you move on.”
But that doesn’t mean she is happy with the outcomes. She was on the losing side of a vote that banned the book Flamer from the high school library.
And she is worried about the future. “There’s a lot of things going on right now that to me, are very scary,” she said. She is concerned about decisions at the federal level that could impact the district both financially and in terms of policy. “Discrimination things,” she called them. LGBTQ rights and immigration chief among them.
There are local issues as well. The district’s infrastructure is aging. The High School opened in 1970. Decisions will have to be made, and while a committee is looking into it and Miltenberger is on the committee, the 2018 failed bond proposal to build a new high school looms large.
The board may have to hire a new superintendent in the next few years. Budget decisions will need to be made in the face of federal cuts and potential state reductions.
And academic performance is fundamental to a district’s mission. Oregon, on the whole, tests below the national average according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. And the Siuslaw School District follows that pattern. A closer look at the numbers reveals that while the scores of top-performing students across the state haven’t changed over the past decade, the lowest-performing students are doing much worse.
Miltenberger worked as a teacher early in her career, a year in Yachats, and then two in Guam. She has worked as a director of a community center, the executive director of a community action center in Idaho, worked and lived in Canby and Molalla, and found her way to Florence to retire.
In Florence, she went back to substitute teaching before retiring for real and then running for and being elected to the school board in 2021.
Getting elected was wonderful, she said. But the job is removed from the kids themselves. “I wanted to do more than just look at numbers and look at letters and look at pages and pages and pages and pages of information that you needed to know,” Miltenberger said. So this year she began volunteering in a first-grade class, “every morning that I can get there,”she said.
It’s the reminder of why it all matters. “ I remember now why I wanted to be a teacher. I remember now why I wanted to be on the school board and why I wanted to be around kids. They’re amazing.”
Strong schools are also important to the community at large, even a retirement community like Florence, Miltenberger said. Our doctors, plumbers, restaurant and grocery store employees all want good schools for their children. “A community needs all kinds of people. And if there aren’t good schools, then you’re not going to get those people here.”