PENDLETON — On Tuesday, Aug. 31, nearly half of the Pendleton School District’s student body will be overseen by a new principal when they return to school.

Over the summer, the district needed to replace three veteran administrators who left for other jobs. The new principals — Pat Dutcher at Pendleton High School, Sherri Kilgore at McKay Creek Elementary School and J.P. Richards at Washington Elementary School — were all outside hires. But each had personal connections to Pendleton that drew them to the district. Both Dutcher and Richards left jobs at much larger districts to move to Eastern Oregon.

Washington and Sherwood Heights elementary schools also are getting assistant principals, the first time those schools have filled those positions since a shared position was eliminated in 2017.

At a recent Pendleton School Board meeting, Superintendent Chris Fritsch said the district was fortunate to have a deep pool of applicants when it opened the positions. In a series of interviews, the three new principals explained why they chose to come to Pendleton and what excited them about their schools.

A career full circle

The first time Sherri Kilgore came to Pendleton, it was because she was a first-year teacher looking for a community offering jobs. The second time around, Kilgore’s application was a little more intentional.

Kilgore becoming the principal of McKay Creek represents a homecoming of sorts, having started her educational career as a middle school English teacher in Pendleton. She loved teaching in Pendleton, but when she and her husband started having children, they felt like they needed to be closer to their families in Wallowa County.

“I did not want to move at all,” she said. “I was not a happy camper.”

But the Kilgores made a life for themselves in Wallowa County, with Sherri serving as principal of Joseph Charter School, a K-12 school, for the past 17 years. Before she took over Joseph, Kilgore had always considered herself a secondary-level educator, but she grew more interested in the elementary level as she began to work with it as an administrator.

As time went on, Kilgore’s children grew up and moved away from home to go to college and get jobs. And Kilgore and her husband grew interested in returning to Pendleton.

At the same time, Kilgore’s husband was battling Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Within two weeks of their move to Pendleton he died, but Kilgore said it was still a move her late husband supported.

“The thing about living with someone with a slow terminal disease, you do have time to make a plan,” she said. “He was absolutely part of this decision and the plan to move here. He just needed to know that I was set up and that I was going to be okay, see where I was going to be living.”

Kilgore moved away in 2002, and although a lot has changed in Pendleton since then, she’s already starting to encounter familiar faces. The children of her students from her first stint in Pendleton are now McKay students themselves.

‘A honey spot’

There weren’t many jobs that would have enticed Pat Dutcher out of his job as an administrator for the Salem-Keizer School District.

Dutcher had been a curriculum principal at West Salem High School and spent the past year as a principal at EDGE High School, Salem-Keizer’s online-only high school. But Pendleton offered several appealing qualities to Dutcher and his family.

Dutcher is as close to being from Pendleton that one can be without actually being from Pendleton. Dutcher’s wife is from Pendleton and much of his family also is from the town, meaning he spent many childhood summers in Eastern Oregon.

“Pendleton is really a honey spot in education,” he said.

While Salem-Keizer is one of the largest school districts in the state, Dutcher also has experience in rural school districts, having served as a high school principal in Scio, a small school district east of Albany. Dutcher said he plans to be a visible presence in the high school, not just during school hours or at sporting events but also at other extracurricular activities like FFA competitions and choir concerts.

Dutcher also serves as the principal of Hawthorne Alternative High School, which has struggled with its graduation rate in recent years. He said he has experience raising high school graduation rates at previous jobs, and he plans to support the school’s current efforts to make Hawthorne’s curriculum more project-based.

Principal experience in two languages

Like Dutcher, J.P. Richards comes from a much larger district.

Richards came from Bend-La Pine Schools, where he served as the principal of Bear Creek Elementary School. Richards said he wanted to move to a smaller district because it was easier to forge relationships and make an impact with his decisions in Pendleton than the fastest growing metro area in the state.

“It’s just a different feel,” he said.

Richards started out his career as a high school Spanish teacher, and his language skills have carried over to his administrative career. Bear Creek is a dual-immersion school, meaning many classes are taught in both English and Spanish.

Although Richards is fluent in Spanish, he doesn’t plan on turning Washington into a dual-language school anytime soon. He helped start a dual-language program in Tillamook from the ground up, and said it can be difficult to recruit bilingual teachers to a rural area, as opposed to a larger city such as Bend.

However, Richards said he was intrigued by the use of the Umatilla language at Washington, where it’s featured prominently in signs across the school. While not quite dual language, the signs are meant to offer cultural support to students, where more than 1 in 5 students identifies as American Indian.