ELECTION 2023
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Wednesday, May 10, 2023
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Band heads to state, choir wins second place
The team has performed in several concerts throughout the year to prepare them for the end of the season, and the group will be confident going into states after winning first place in the Cowapa League competition.
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he St. Helens High School Wind Ensemble band is heading to Corvallis this week to seek its second consecutive state championship. The Wind Ensemble is a 36-member auditioned/director recommended ensemble and will compete May 10 at the LaSells Stewart Center on the Oregon State University’s campus. Band Director Noelle Freshner and her band are a close-knit and cohesive group, a byproduct of the continuity of the band’s senior members and Freshner’s commitment to her students. This is Freshner’s 16th year directing the band, and she said each year is different and brings new challenges. With a big chunk of the band being seniors, Freshner reflected on what the seniors have meant to the group this year. “This group of seniors was strong from the beginning. I was their beginning band teacher and their intermediate band teacher, and so I could tell from that first year that they were going to be something special,” Freshner said. “They’ve lived up to that expectation. Huge group. They’ve continued through COVID; they didn’t give up. I didn’t lose kids from that class. And they kept working really, really hard.” Developing success Senior Andrew Worlitz is one of the band’s 22 seniors and plays the trumpet; he gave some insight into the legacy of success at the school and Freshner’s role in that success. “I think it is a bit of a legacy. I think one of the main compliments that we get from the judges is that
Developing the band of the future
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The Wind Ensemble is made up of 36 members, and 22 of them are seniors.
Senior Crevan Keefe, the lead trombone, is another holdover from last season’s state champions and has taken on the responsibility of helping out some of the younger folks in the band that will take on more significant roles when the seniors graduate. “A couple of us are in our concert band, so our lower band, and I know I’ve been trying to help them, like there was a kid that wasn’t sure if he wanted to try and move up to Wind Ensemble,” Keefe said. “But I encouraged him, I got him a new mouthpiece so he could open up his sound and stuff. And I think they’re going to be fine, and there’s other people who have been encouraging in other ways too.” Keefe said that Freshner’s teaching approach has not only helped him improve, but he’s also been able to give the critiques she’s given him to other band members to help them develop. This is Keefe’s sixth year participating in band, but he still hasn’t lost the excitement or the nerves of performing. “I’m definitely excited, but there’s hard parts in the pieces, so I get nervous at those times, but once I start playing, I kind of lose the nerves,” Keefe said.
they always like hearing St. Helens’ bands, just because of the way Freshner teaches us,” Worlitz said. “For a while, she was also teaching middle school, so we’d have that consistency of the same teacher, which allowed us to adjust, and she knew all of us and our tendencies in playing, and could work really closely and one-on-one with us to make sure that we improve.” This year’s set of songs will be a “mountain set,” according to Worlitz. They will open with the robust Mount Everest before diving into the Pavanne as arranged by middle school Band Director (and Noelle Freshner’s husband) Travis Freshner. They will close with Vesuvius,
which Worlitz described as a “really strong” piece.
Senior Litia Miller, who plays the oboe and a little bit of French horn, is playing in the
Wind Ensemble for the first time this after playing in St. Helens’ developmental concert band last year. Miller is also a student who has had Mrs. Freshner as a teacher since middle school and has grown under her support. “Something I’ve seen happen every year, just repetitively, is that she’s really supportive. She doesn’t see messing up as a failure; she sees it as a way of growing and learning and becoming a better musician,” Miller said. “I’ve just taken that and tried to push it through my brain that when I fail, it’s not a ‘failure’ necessarily; it’s more of just stepping stones to getting better.”
Pritchett decided between donating the steers to the food bank or the senior center and ultimately decided to donate to the senior center because he has a connection there through his daughter, Amy Pritchett. The Meating Place, a butcher business owner from Hillsboro, brought out a truck to help butcher the steer so they could be donated. The hanging weights for the cows are 790 lbs., 817 lbs., and 1,101 lbs. St. Helens Senior Center Activities Coordinator Amy Pritchett said that the meat they received will help provide meals for their home-delivered meals program as well as their in-house congregates. That program sees the senior center serving home-delivered meals to over 175 people aged 60 or older throughout
Columbia County. “It’s a program aimed at promoting better health among our homebound adults, and older segments of the population,” Amy Pritchett said. The St. Helens Senior Center serves a total of about 500 people each year, according to Amy Pritchett. When the senior center assesses how they will use the meat, they may also donate some to the food bank. For Jerry Pritchett, donating the steer to the community was a good way to give back, but it’s bittersweet to part with the cows who maintained his land after all these years. “I miss them, they were my friends, you know, I raised them all from the bottle,” Jerry Pritchett said.
The three-steer donated by Jerry Pritchett weighed in at 790 lbs., 817 lbs., and 1,101 lbs.
presentation by Sheriff Pixley. At a work session on April 19, the St. Helens City Council decided not to publicly support the sheriff’s levy. St. Helens has a city police department offering 24-hour coverage within the city limits. The council members’ consensus was that they did not feel they could ask city residents to pay more without more information about the measure. “I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the levy because I haven’t looked at their finances; I know they’ve been struggling for years now to have 24-hour service; I’m surprised it wasn’t campaigned better,” Mayor Rick Scholl said at the meeting on the 19th. “I wish there would have been more campaigning done at the county level, and there would have been more of an open transparency to their budget needs for the levy. And I have not seen enough there.” On May 4, the St. Helens City
Council heard a presentation from Sheriff Pixley about the levy at their work session. At the conclusion of the presentation, the council discussed their concerns over the measure with Pixley. St. Helens Mayor Rick Scholl began by raising issues of the county commissioners’ budget, saying that he had been unable to review that information to do “due diligence” about the fiscal need for the levy. Scholl then asked Pixley whether he had been guaranteeing student resource officers in schools in the county. Pixley said that notion is “absolutely preposterous” and that he has only had preliminary discussions with school districts about what the process of getting School Resource Officers would look like. Council President Jessica Chilton raised the question of how the success of the levy will be measured. Pixley said it would ultimately come down to the voters.
Pixley also denoted that there will not be “overnight success” because the process of getting officers trained and out in the county could take up to a year and a half. Councilor Patrick Birkle raised the concern of compression due to passing multiple levies and whether the sheriff’s levy would put the county past the compression threshold. Ultimately, it was decided that an assessor would be needed to analyze how close the levy would take the county to the compression point. The council had concerns about what the burden of this levy, in addition to potential future levies, could have. Councilors Mark Gundersen, Brandon Sundeen, and Birkle expressed that they would support the levy as county members but said they would leave the decision up to the voters. Mayor Scholl emphasized his concerns with the budget. “I’m more so challenging the budget and the fiscal means, and
I could tell from that first year that they were going to be something special. ~ Noelle Freshner, Band Director
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Senior Center gets big beef donation WILL LOHRE Country Media, Inc.
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he St. Helens Senior Center has benefited from a donation of three full-grown steers courtesy of a longtime St. Helens resident. Hill Top Off Road Mudding owner Jerry Pritchett had the steers since they were young and bought them to help maintain the grass around his property. “I got them to eat the grass down so it wasn’t a fire hazard around the property, and then I would butcher one occasionally for my own beef,” Pritchett said. “But they just got so big I needed to do something with them, and I wanted to help out the community.”
Courtesy photo from Amy Pritchett
A closer look at the proposed Sheriff’s Levy WILL LOHRE Country Media, Inc.
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he $7.9M 4-year Columbia County Sheriff’s Levy Measure 5-290 proposed by Columbia County Sheriff Brian Pixley will add seven new sheriff’s deputies. The new tax to support the levy would be 29 cents per $1,000 in assessed value. This means a home taxed on a $400,000 assessed value would add $116 to its yearly property tax bill. City council supports levy Both the Clatskanie and the Rainier City Councils voted to support the levy on May 1, following a News and Views ...... A4 Poll ............................ A4 Obituaries ................. A5 Classified Ads ......... A6 Crossword ............... A6 Legals ....................... A7 Election 2023 ........... A8 Sports ..................... A10 Vol. 141, No. 20
the campaign that was behind it in order to get where we are,” Scholl said. “And I hope that anybody in opposition or in favor of this can at least appreciate my asking about fiscal responsibility of our tax dollars.” At the regular council session on May 4, the council voted on whether they would support the sheriff’s levy. Councilor Birkle motioned to approve a letter of support for the levy, and Councilor Sundeen seconded it. Scholl reiterated the comments he made at the April 19 meeting when the council did not support the measure. Councilors Birkle, Sundeen, and Gundersen said they felt the pros of the levy outweighed the cons. Sundeen, Gundersen, and Birkle all voted in favor, while the mayor voted no. Councilor Chilton was not present at the meeting.
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