30 years of giving
Longtime Ontario teacher, administrator LaVelle Cornwell hangs up hat
By LARRY MEYER
ARGUS OBSERVER
Monday, May 26, 2008 11:15 AM PDT
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| Ontario Middle School Principal LaVelle Cornwell listens to Quincy Sullivan, a sixth-grader, during a conversation in the hallway, Friday. Cornwell is retiring after 30 years in the Ontario School District. |
ONTARIO — Ontario Middle School Principal LaVelle Cornwell grew up in rural Eastern Oregon, and when she found a teaching job in Ontario she established roots locally for her entire career in education. Nor does she have any plans to leave now that she’s retiring after 30 years in the Ontario School District.
Cornwell grew up in Monument, a small community situated near the confluence of the North Fork and the Middle Fork of the John Day River, and between U.S. Highway 395 and Oregon Highway 19.
“It’s like being in a large, extended family,” Cornwell said about small town life. “We never worried about safety. We never locked the doors.”
Summer activities included riding horses down to the river to go swimming, and then more horseback riding.
“Our parents always knew where we were,” she said.
A brother of Cornwell’s is the fourth-generation owner of the family-run single store in the town of about 151 people that also features a motel and municipal airport.
When Cornwell was in high school, she was a tutor and coached volleyball in the junior high school and found she enjoyed working with other students. That led her to Eastern Oregon University, where she got her teaching degree.
“I just continued in a career,” she said.
She began teaching in the Ontario Middle School in 1978.
“After I got here (Ontario), I didn’t want to leave,” she said. “People support you.”
Cornwell taught health and coached athletics in the middle school and high school. After 19 years as a health teacher, it was to help her students that she went back to college to get her master’s degree, which, in turn, led her into administration.
“I was teaching health sciences,” Cornwell said. “I had to have a master’s for my students to get college credit.”
Upon receiving her master’s, Cornwell said, she found she was only few classes short of obtaining an administrative certificate and proceeded in that direction.
She became assistant principal at the Ontario Middle School in 1999 then became principal two years later when her predecessor retired.
One of the highlights has been seeing “children of children” she had taught earlier in her career now coming into school, plus seeing students grow and mature, Cornwell said.
“I will miss the people,” she said.
Buildings have been among her biggest challenges, she said.
Friday morning, for example, 30 feet of roofing had been lost at the middle school, allowing water to leak into the building.
“I have two classrooms I can’t use,” she said.
But buildings continue to be a challenge every year, Cornwell said, adding she remembers one year when there was water in one of the basements.
“The biggest challenge is helping students to meet the (state and federal) requirements — looking for the best ways to help our kids,” Cornwell said. Another challenge has to been changing the public’s perception of the middle school, she added.
Cornwell said she has no big plans for her retirement, other than going to visit family — which includes seven grandchildren, and she will wait see what opportunities arise.
“We will still be part of the community,” she said of herself and husband, Mark Cornwell, who was also an educator and coach.
