Employers in rural communities across Oregon complain that a shortage of housing makes it difficult to recruit qualified workers.

The Monument School District is doing something about it.

The district broke ground on a two-bedroom, 720-square-foot home on Wednesday, Jan. 4 that would be used exclusively for a new teaching hire.

And if that effort is successful, it could provide a model for other rural school districts to follow.

The project is a partnership between the Monument School District and the Eastern Oregon Regional Educator Network, which is providing a $100,000 grant that will fund most of the construction costs of the new home. The structure will sit next to an existing home that was built for the same purpose.

The district will be responsible for the cost of pouring a foundation and connecting the home to utilities. Monument Superintendent Laura Thomas said she didn’t have a dollar figure for that work.

The eventual occupant of the residence will have to pay rent, Thomas added, although the amount hasn’t been determined yet.

An area of need

Located in the northwest corner of Grant County, Monument has just 115 residents and little in the way of available housing. That adds considerably to the recruiting challenges faced by the Monument School District, which currently has seven certified teachers and seven non-certified staff serving 66 students from pre-K through 12th grade.

Thomas said the idea to build a new home for a potential teaching hire grew out of discussions with the Eastern Oregon Regional Educator Network, or REN, which recognized that a lack of available housing was a challenge for small, rural school districts throughout its five-county service area.

“The Eastern Oregon REN decided that this was kind of an area of need in the region that they wanted to tackle,” Thomas said.

Regional network lends a hand

The Eastern Oregon REN is one of 10 regional bodies set up by the Educator Advancement Council, which was created by the Oregon Legislature in 2017. It supports educators in Harney, Grant, Malheur, Lake and Wallowa counties, as well as Huntington School District in Baker County.

The network has four main focus areas:

• Increasing equitable access to professional development.

• Providing support to novice educators.

• Providing additional opportunities for collaboration between educators.

• Recruiting high-quality educators.

According to Eastern Oregon REN coordinator Jennifer Martin, the idea to award a grant to build educator housing started with the formation a team of people throughout the region that had in interest in addressing educator recruitment issues.

Martin said one of the first issues brought up to that team was housing. Eastern Oregon REN surveyed school districts in the region to ask them if educator housing was a barrier to recruiting teachers into their district and if they’d be interested in a project related to that.

“We started with whichever superintendents or districts responded to the survey, and from that we took the responses from the survey and scored them against a rubric,” Martin said. “There were several districts with interest and need, and Monument just won out in our scoring process.”

Martin said Monument School District beat out 13 other Eastern Oregon districts in obtaining the $100,000 housing grant.

A change of plans

The initial idea was to just purchase a tiny home and set it up onsite, but Thomas and Martin encountered a number of obstacles, including city ordinances, building requirements for tiny homes and simply being able to acquire a tiny home in a reasonable time frame.

“We were just really running into a lot of roadblocks,” Thomas said.

Those roadblocks prompted a change in strategy from purchasing a tiny home to building a home from the ground up.

“Then it was like, can I use the money and just build a house from the ground up and design it? It was like, yeah, why not? That’s how we kind of ended up at this point,” Thomas said.

The effort to build the house will involve the student body, with Thomas hoping the school’s career and technical education students will assist CB Construction, the company chosen to build the home.

“We would like to have our CTE students kind of working alongside the contractor when it is appropriate,” she said. “We’re going to work the kids into it as much as possible.”

CB Contracting is based in La Grande and has been in the construction business for around four years. The company has done work in Grant County before, including projects in Dayville and Prairie City as well as some seismic upgrades for the Monument School District.

Owner Derek Howard said his 80-employee outfit was totally on board with the teacher housing project after learning of the district’s request for proposals.

“We were pretty interested in it just based on our past history with Monument and the seismic upgrade. It was a project that we felt like we wanted to do for the school district,” Howard said.

Pilot project

The project in Monument is something the Eastern Oregon REN hopes to replicate in other rural school districts across Eastern Oregon. Martin stressed that grant funds aren’t available to solve all of the educator housing issues in the region, but the hope is that other districts will want to partner with the Eastern Oregon REN on similar projects in the future.

“I think the limitation is that we don’t have money to put a house in all 40 districts, at least all at once. We’d like to try to make an impact maybe one year at a time,” Martin said.

The project is about making sure students have the same type of opportunities in Monument, Burns, Nyssa and Lakeview as they do anywhere else in the state, according to Martin.

“Ultimately, our goal is to impact opportunities that students have in our region. If you can’t find a math teacher and kids have to take online math, that’s taking opportunities away from kids and putting them at a disadvantage if they want to go to college,” she said.

Maurizio Valerio is a member of the Eastern Oregon REN board as well as a field coordinator for the Ford Family Foundation who attended the groundbreaking ceremony as a member of the REN board. Like Martin, Valerio hopes that the success of this project leads to other parties wanting to partner with the Eastern Oregon REN sometime in the future.

“That’s one of the things we were talking about, give them a tangible example that they can see,” he said. “If you say ‘housing for educators,’ sometimes that’s hard to see. When you can point to a successful project somewhere, it’s much easier to follow.”