5,300 students, staff, teachers and administrators heading back to school in Lincoln County

By SHAYLA ESCUDERO/Lincoln Chronicle

Labels cover every drawer and cabinet inside Brittney Bacon’s classroom. There are whisks, graters, can openers, peelers, measuring cups, garlic presses, lemon squeezers, standing mixers, pots and pans.

At one end of the room there are ovens, a refrigerator and a microwave.

It’s a week before school starts and Bacon, along with every teacher in the Lincoln County School District has returned to classrooms to get ready. But there isn’t much for her to do.

“I pretty much organized everything already last year,” Bacon said of her classroom in Newport High School.

Bacon wasn’t a teacher then, but she cooked a lot in that room helping make dishes for the girls’ volleyball team. The room is meticulously organized but when it comes to Newport High, Bacon is all over the place. She announces the track meets, helps run the nonprofit Abby’s Closet that provides free dresses to students, has served as the assistant girls’ basketball coach and spends the school day floating from classroom to classroom as a special education assistant.

Before that she was a Newport student herself and sent her kids there too; her middle child is an incoming junior.

Bacon went to Linn Benton Community College to study culinary arts and worked in the cafeterias of Newport Middle School and Waldport Middle/High School. She’s been in restaurant kitchens all over Newport, from Szabo’s Steakhouse and Seafood to Georgie’s. Every summer when school is out, she works at Fishtails Cafe in South Beach.

This year is her first year teaching and she’s reviving a career and technical education class that hasn’t been taught at Newport High in more than 20 years. 

“This is my dream,” Bacon said. “When I got out of culinary school, I wanted to teach kids how to cook, so that’s where I’m starting it up.”

So far, she is only teaching one class using a temporary license while she takes classes through Chemeketa Community College to get her license in career and technical education. During the rest of the school day, she will float through classrooms as a special education assistant. The arrangement is part of the school district’s Grow Your Own Program which financially supports community members as they get their license or advance their educational careers.

The first semester of Bacon’s class will focus on nutrition and the second will focus on foods from different cultures. She hopes to have local chefs come and prepare different foods, a field trip to Tel-tvm Siletz Farm and a project that encourages students to share their own family recipes.

Summer bond projects

Spanning 1,000 square miles, the Lincoln County School District encompasses 11 schools as far north as Lincoln City and as far south as Waldport. The district has about 600 employees and 4,700 students – and next week they will be heading back to school. 

Starting Tuesday, grades 1-6 will be back in the classroom while returning students in grades 7-12 start Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on their grade level. Kindergarten and preschool students will be starting Sept. 11. The Siletz Valley and Eddyville charter schools began their school year this week.

Fall sports are already underway, including a rivalry football game Friday night when Newport High heads to Lincoln City to play Taft.

Every fall, the school district welcomes new teachers, new students and new changes.

After a $5 million shortfall in its 2026-27 budget due to declining enrollment, over a dozen staff positions were cut last spring including several assistant principal positions, causing a reshuffling in leadership. Nearly every school in the district has new leadership this fall.

The most visible changes students and staff will notice are their buildings, as construction crews have been busy at work this summer to bring the myriad of the $73 million bond-funded improvement projects to various schools.

In Lincoln City, 11 projects were completed this summer, including bleachers at Taft High School and a new music room at Taft Elementary. Ten projects were completed in Newport, including a new playshed at Yaquina View and bleachers at Newport High School. There were nine projects completed in Toledo including gym walls at Toledo Elementary and six projects in Waldport, including Crestview’s playground and new phone systems at Waldport Middle/High School.

All-staff rally

During a professional development day Tuesday, teachers and staff gathered in Newport for a pep-rally type start to the new school year.

“I’m not going to get political, but public education is under attack,” Superintendent Majalise Tolan told the all-district gathering at Newport High. “It is the amazing work that you are doing that is constantly being questioned, and that is being questioned by people that are not in your classroom, seeing the amazing work that you are doing every single day.”

Oregon Coast Community College president Marshall Mease Roache also spoke.

“Elementary teachers give children their first sense of what’s possible,” Roache said. “High school teachers give students the confidence to succeed, and middle school teachers give students the courage to become themselves.” 

School board president Peter Vince shared images of some of the bond-funded improvements educators would see including auditoriums in Waldport, Toledo and Newport that will begin rising this year and shared words of encouragement heading into the new school year.

“The school year always makes me feel real hopeful, “Vince said. ”I feel like I’m catching the wave of all the potential about to be realized.”

• Shayla Escudero is an enterprise reporter for the Lincoln Chronicle covering local governments, education, housing and social services and can be reached at [email protected]