KWSO News for 10/24/19

The Warm Springs K thru 8 held an engagement session last night to talk about what our community in collaboration with the 509-J school district can do to best meet the needs of our students and our community. Class size has often been an area of concern where students can often get overlooked due to overwhelming student to teacher ratio, currently Jefferson county is in a better situation as we are at or below the State of Oregon Average…

With the pass of the Student Success Act, the 509-J school district with the input of partnerships in Jefferson County and community members,  formulating a plan that will help all students be successful.

Continuing today the Water and Wastewater Division of the Public Utilities Branch is working alongside the GELCO contractor to finish the replacement and upgrade of the pressure reducing valves on the agency water system main lines. The work is anticipated to be completed today as they work on the Southeast vault. Some residents have experienced outages with KNT residents being out of water for two days, but was restored yesterday, west hills has been out of water since yesterday with outage anticipated to be resolved by noon today. Other residents may experience outages or low water pressure for short periods of time while the PRV work progresses. If the situation calls for it, the water department will issue a boil water notice in compliance with EPA requirements. If you have any questions or concerns please direct those to the Public Utilities Department at (541) 553-3246.

A state contract for a Central Oregon legal defense group has not been extended after allegations of lying to court staff to receive more money. The Bulletin in Bend reports the general counsel of the Oregon Office of Public Defense Services sent a memo Tuesday to the office’s executive director and the head of its commission telling them why the office had elected to not extend its contract with the Madras Indigent Defense Consortium. The office’s general counsel Eric J. Deitrick wrote that it became clear that MIDC was manipulating case assignments by providing misrepresentations to the court about case quota. Deitrick also wrote that the office learned through news articles that one of the MIDC lawyers is the subject of a law enforcement investigation into the suspected arson of his own law office. Consortium member Tim Gassner called the allegations of manipulating caseload “completely manufactured” and said assertions regarding the arson were rumor-mongering. Deitrick said the 22nd Judicial District doesn’t need two contracted public defense firms and suggested lawyers involved with MIDC could join the 22nd District Defenders.

Locally…Madras Volleyball traveled to Estacada and fell 3 matches to none, in Soccer the Lady Buffs stumbled in their trip to Molalla falling 7-0, while the Buff boys hosted Molalla and came out with the victory 3-2, giving Molalla their first league loss of the season.