Serving Central Oregon since1903 75 $
TUESDAY August13, 2013
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SCHOOL DIRECTORY-
bendbulletin.com TODAY'S READERBOARD
BEND
Expiring levies eyed amid city fire needs
Kicker with Bend ties — Ryan Longwell, who got his football start at Bend High School, is retiring as a Green Bay Packer.C1
San Francisco to L.A. in 30 minutes? — That's the idea behind billionaire entrepreneur Elon
• For Bend-La Pinehigh schools, it meansascheduling challenge; in elementaryschools, smaller classeswere keyto early literacy
Musk's futuristic transportation concept.A3
Easy pickles —Amethod
By Tyler Leeds
for those with no time to can.01
The Bulletin
OSij fOOtball —Freshmen Beavers learn the ropes.C1
Congressional app — Idea by a Bend native keeps Capitol Hill in the loop.B1
ln WOrld neWS —AI-Qalda, under a newname, expands in Syria.A2
And a Web exclusiveBooksellers turn to loyal cus-
tomers for help staying afloat. bendbnlletin.com/extras
EDITOR'SCHOICE
Bigger hospitals may leadto bigger bills
BACK TO SCHOOL
By Hillary Borrud The Bulletin
Bend officials say local governments are on track to pay off construction debt from the Downtown Bend Public Library and several public safety buildings next year, and property owners would see little change on their property tax bills if voters approve a new fire department levy in 2014. Two Deschutes County bonds issued in 1996 are scheduled to expire in 2014. The county used a $14.4 million bond to build the public safety campus, which includes the Sheriff's Office, the inmate work center, the parole and probation building and the juvenile detention center. The county levies a tax rate necessary to pay annual debt service, nearly 13 cents per $1,000 in assessed property in the last tax year, county AccountingManager Jeanine Faria wrote in an email to the Sheriff's Office. County Sheriff Larry Blanton said Bend Fire Chief Larry Langston recently called him to find out whether the Sheriff's Office planned to seek any new levieswhen the campus bond expires in 2014. See Fire/A4
bendbulletin.com/ back2school
The Bend-La Pine Schools budget for the upcoming year will continue to force the district to face tough decisions regarding class sizes and course offerings. Between 2009 and 2012, dwindling school budgets forcedOregon elementary and high school class sizes up 19.6 and 28.6 percent, respectively, according to the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators. In that same period, the teacher workforce was reduced by 15.9 percent. Mirroring this trend, the operating expenditure per student in Bend-La Pine was $8,660 in 2011-12, down from a high of $8,793 in 2008-09, according to the Oregon Department of Education. This situation has created two distinct problems for the Bend-La Pine district. At the high school level, it has forced administrators to tolerate larger class sizes in required courses in order to maintain specializedofferings,such as AP or technical education classes. At the primary level,
Watch for this logo inthe paperand
Class sizesupinBend-LaPine
checkthe Web address above for
continuedcoverageon school-related issues.
Average class size and the student-teacher ratio in Bend-La Pine Schools continue to climb.
CLASS SIZEANDSTUDENT-TEACHERRATIO INBEND-LA PINE HIGH SCHOOLS •
Av erage class size •
40 35 34.4
St u dents per teacher
34.9
35
26 2
ing less time for planning,
35 30
25.8
25 20 15 10
0
34 . 9
spend more of the day teaching, though along with hav-
30
30.8
26 2
In 2011, high schools switched from a 4-block system to a 7-block system '08-'09
'09-'10
'10-'11
'11-'12
'12-'13
'13-'14
Source: Vicki Van Buren, Asst. Superintendent of Secondary Education Andy Zeigert /The Bulletin
class sizes have increased, reversing a trend toward smaller sizes that facilitated the success of the district's
early literacy program.
Faster pace To alleviate large classes at the high school level, the district switched from a four-period day to a seven-
period day in the 2011-12 school year, according to Vicki Van Buren, assistant superintendentofsecondary education. Under the new schedule, teachers still have one planning period, but its lengthhas decreased from a quarter of the school day to one-seventh. Due to this shift, teachers
they seea greater number of students per day. According to numbers provided by Van Buren, the average size of a high school classroom is currently 35.9 students. If the district switched to a four-period schedule, that number would jump to 41. In the 2008-09 school year, when the district used a four-period day, the average class size was 34.4. Had the district used a seven-period day, that number would have been 30.1. "We could take a hit in the number of teachers we had and maintain class sizes we had under a four-period-aday schedule by switching to a seven-period schedule," said Van Buren. "There is pushback because teachers see more students a day, and the pace is also much faster." SeeClass size/A4
Photo illustration /Andy Tullis /The Bulletin file photo
Local leviesthat expirenextyear
By Julie Creswell and Reed Abelson New Yorh Times News Service
Deschntes County public safety campus constructionbond: issued 1996; expires
Hospitals across the nation are being swept up in thebiggestwave ofmergers since the 1990s, a development that is creating giant hospital systems that could one day dominate U.S. health care and drive up costs. • Another The condelay to solidations are part of b e i ng driven by health a confluenceof law,A4 po w erful forces, not least of which is President Barack Obama's signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act. That law, many experts say, is transforming the economics of health care and pushing a growing number of hospitals into the arms of suitors. The changes are unfolding with remarkable speed. Two big for-profit hospital chains, Community Health Systems of Tennessee and Health Management Associates of Florida, are combining in a $7.6 billion deal. SeeHospitals /A4
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sudoku, which appeared Monday, Aug.12, on PageC4,was incorrect. The correct solution
appears below.
bond:issued1996; expires December 2013
•
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They wore the uniform, then were
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deported
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By Kevin Sullivan The Washington Post
HERMOSILLO, Mexico — Milton Tepeyac, who served eight years as a U.S.
Marine, scrapes by on $3 an
By Meeri Kim The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — You feel yourself float up and out of
your physical body. You glide
The Bulletin regrets the
error.
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DowntownBend library construction
27
Explaining the near-death experience
Correction
June 2014
r
toward the entrance of a tunnel, and a searing bright light envelops your field of vision. Rather than an ascent into the afterlife, a new study
TODAY'S WEATHER Mostly sunny High 85, Low 57
page B6
saysthese features ofa neardeath experience may just be a bunch of neurons in your brain going nuts. "A lot of people believed that what they saw was heaven," said lead researcher and neurologist Jimo Borjigin. "Science hadn't given them a convincing alternative."
Scientists from the University of Michigan recorded electroencephalogram — EEG — signals in nine anesthetized rats after inducing cardiac arrest. Within the first 30 seconds after the heart had stopped, all the mammals displayed a surge of brain activity that had features associ-
ated with consciousness and visual activation. The burst of electrical activity even exceededlevelsduring a normal, awake state. In other words, they may have been having the rodent version of a near-death experience. See Near death/A5
The Bulletin
INDEX At Home 01- 6 C lassified E1 - 6 D ear Abby 06 Obituaries Busines s/Stocks 05-6 Comics/Puzzles E3-4 Horoscope 06 Sports Calendar B2 Crosswords E 4 L o cal/State B1-6 TV/Movies
B5 C1-4 06
AnIndependent Newspaper
Vol. 110, No. 225, 30 pages, 5 sections
hour in this northern Mexican city, where he has lived since the U.S. government deported him in April. His rented room floods when it rains. Scorpions skitter in. To kill them, he had to pay an exterminator $40 — a third of his weekly
paycheck. Once he served in Kuwaiti in a recon battalion, a highly trained grunt monitoring the movements of Saddam Hussein's military across the border in Iraq. See Immigration/A5
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