Bethel group shows they take pride in their school

They are two moms with two big hearts. And if you think a little thing like being part of a school district facing an almost $6.5 million budget shortfall for the 2011-12 school year is going to get in their way, then you don’t know Brooke Cottle and Margaret Hansen.

“They are amazing,” Bethel School District Superintendent Colt Gill said, sweat beading on his forehead Friday morning as he took a break from pulling up shrubs in front of Willamette High School. “It’s just incredible. They never stop. They keep going.”

A couple of months ago, Cottle and Hansen — who each have four children they say will one day soon be Willamette Wolverines — formed a group they call Willamette Pride.

It’s a subcommittee of the Bethel Education Foundation in which Cottle serves as president and Hansen as secretary. It consists of volunteers, parents, students and district staff, who have taken it upon themselves to raise money and jump-start projects in these financially challenging times for school districts.

And the group’s first order of business? Sprucing up the 62-year-old high school that is the heart and soul of the Bethel area.

The Bethel School Board voted in February against placing a $10 million bond measure for school repairs and upgrades on the May ballot, as the Eugene School District has done, because the district didn’t want Bethel voters to get confused with the city of Eugene income tax measure for schools.

Enter Cottle and Hansen.

“People will see that something’s going on, something’s happening at Willamette,” Cottle said Friday, as about 25 volunteers, including Gill and the high school’s vice principal, Andy Van Fleet, worked on the nearby landscaping project.

Friday was one of 10 budget-reduction/furlough days for the Bethel School District this school year, the result of money problems that have plagued school districts across the state and the nation the past couple of years. And it was the third Willamette Pride work party this spring at the high school. Another will be held May 20.

Cottle and Hansen have been on the phone for weeks now, asking area businesses to contribute whatever they can to upgrade the high school, which has an interior that appears to be stuck in the 1970s.

A truckload of 40 brand-new desks is en route to the school from Cameron, Texas, of all places. And Angell Flight Asphalt of Eugene has agreed to provide $7,100 worth of parking lot resurfacing this summer, said Hansen, a substitute teacher at the district’s Meadow View School. Hansen and her husband, Greg, have four children — Bennett, Lauren, Parker and Lowden, in grades 1 through 7, respectively — who attend Meadow View.

Why from Texas?

Because Cottle, who has two children in the district right now, eighth-grader Avery and kindergartner Liam, as well as two toddlers at home, got online and began searching furniture companies across the nation, eventually finding one, Royal Seating in Cameron, that agreed to make a donation.

“You can have them, but you’ve got to come get them,” the infectiously bubbly Cottle said she was told by someone at Royal Seating. Cottle, whose husband, Brady, is dean of students at Springfield Middle School, said she actually thought about going to Texas herself and driving the desks back in a U-Haul, but figured that would cost $1,000 and defeat the purpose.

Then someone suggested that she call Willamette High School graduate Mike Ware in Portland, who owns www.mybinding.com, a Hillsboro-based binding and laminating company. Ware said he had a shipping service he could use to get the desks to Eugene.

Problem solved.

“We are so impressed,” said Linda Mohr, who splits time teaching art between Willamette High and Meadow View, as she helped put in new plants and shrubs Friday. “These parents are so gung-ho, I’m thinking how we need to support them.”

Cottle and Hansen want to put the new Navy-blue desks in a classroom at Willamette High School, where they hope to create a “showroom” model of how all classrooms should look — with new desks, new computers, new carpeting, etc. — to show potential donors.

This summer, group members plan to paint the interior of the high school with paint donated from local dealers for Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams, Rodda Paint and Forrest Paint Co.

Terry Thorn, a 1987 Willamette High School graduate who owns Delta Landscape and Irrigation, was there Friday, backing up a dump truck filled with dirt. Stangeland & Associates of Eugene, a landscape architecture company, even has created a design blueprint of what the front of the school will look like when the project’s done. It includes an entry garden with low Oregon grape, blue fescue, sun rose, blue oat grass, rosemary, hydrangea and black-eye susan.

“We tell people it’s the ‘Extreme Makeover — high school edition,’ ” Hansen said.