MYRTLE POINT - Calling the future of Myrtle Point's children her "uppermost" priority, Gail Schrader was appointed Monday night to a seat on the board of the Myrtle Point School District.

At a one-hour, 40-minute meeting attended by 14 people at district headquarters, the school board voted 4-1 to choose Schrader from among four candidates to replace Charlotte Kohl, who resigned after the June meeting. Schrader will hold Position No. 6 for the two years remaining in Kohl's four-year term.

Board President Robert Little joined Dal King, Jane Snyder and Neil Westfall in choosing Schrader for the seat, with Bryan Zumwalt dissenting. Board member Ed Groves was absent.

Before the vote, the four nominees for the school board position - including Wayne Hilderbrand, Ed Tyner and Linda Rochek - fielded questions from the board about their stances on maintaining academic standards in the face of declining state support that on June 23 led the board to close Maple Primary School, which housed grades K-2, and transfer seventh-grade students from Myrtle Crest Elementary School to Myrtle Point High.

Schrader credited her three years on the board's Budget Committee with bringing home to her the difficulty of reducing school budgets without harming the quality of teaching.

"It gave me a much better understanding of what the school board goes through every year," she told the council, adding, "Uppermost for me are the children. Whatever keeps up the quality of education for the children is most important."

Though most discussion at the meeting revolved around dealing with funding shortfalls, Zumwalt unexpected posed a different, unexpected question to the candidates: how they would deal with increased funding.

Schrader urged a caution in trying to restore school services and the former grade layout, rather than starting construction projects for a shrinking population and enrollment base.

"It looks like the student body will continue declining for a period of time," she said.

The other candidates concurred, calling for the school district to find a way to reverse the redeployment of students.

"I would put the seventh-graders back into Myrtle Crest," Tyner told the board. "As it is, the eighth-graders (currently the youngest students at Myrtle Point High) are being forced to grow up quicker than they should."

"My main concern," Rochek said, "is not only education but also the socialization of the children. You had to make decisions this spring dealing with socialization," she added, referring to the transfer of the seventh-graders out of Myrtle Crest.

While supporting the move, Rochek called for similarly important decisions to be discussed jointly among faculty, parents and board members to avoid the animosity that boiled over in a failed bid to recall most of the school board.

"That way, the public would have swallowed the decision better than they did," she said. "A spoonful of sugar would have helped."

Earlier, Secretary Jodi Bouska swore in Little and Zumwalt, who won re-election May 20 to the school board.

In other business, the Myrtle Point School District board:

€ appointed Robert Johnstone, who served as legal counsel to the McMinnville School District for 29 years, its attorney of record;

€ heard a proposal by Russell Car-penter of the Library Building Committee that the former Maple School be considered as the future site of combined library and community center to replace the Flora M. Laird Memorial Library;

€ and set an executive session for the board's Sept. 8 meeting to consider offers from prospective buyers of the Forestry Land Lab, an 11-acre parcel owned by the district. The board will not make a decision at that meeting to sell the land, according to Superintendent Gene Carlson.

- by Howard Yune, staff writer