Happy Sunday! I’m sorry that this edition of Your Weekend Reader is posted later than usual; I was sidetracked Saturday by work-related activities. But the way I figure it — because I’m a math genius — is that Sunday still makes up roughly 50% of the weekend. And to make up for this week’s tardiness, this edition is packed with extra goodies.

The Corvallis School Board voted last week to close Cheldelin Middle School and Letitia Carson Elementary in the face of budget shortfalls and declining enrollment (the Corvallis School District has been shedding students more or less since 2017). Parents and students were saddened at the end of the board’s marathon meeting, with some arguing that the closure plans seemed to be hobbled together in haste. And they might have a point, which raises a question I didn’t see answered in any of the coverage: The enrollment decline surely hasn’t been a surprise to district officials, although the total size of the funding shortfall wasn’t clear until relatively recently. What kind of long-range planning has the district done over the last few years around the issue of declining enrollment?

I noticed in the Gazette-Times story about the board’s meeting last week that some parents vowed to organize to vote out any trustees who were in favor of the closures — regardless of whether their terms expire in 2027 or 2029. While that probably won’t reopen any buildings or make any more state money available for local schools, it could boost turnout in school board elections, which is shockingly low. (Turnout in Benton County in the May 2025 election, which included four races for the Corvallis School Board, was 30.25%.) Or perhaps consider running for the school board yourself — three of those four races were unopposed.

Also on this topic (and something I had hoped would never be necessary to say): It is not OK to say at a school board meeting (or, at any other time, for that matter) that public officials who voted in a way that you don’t like should be shot. It’s also worth remembering at times like these that school board trustees are volunteers.

One final thought about that school board meeting: It ran for six-and-a-half hours. I recently covered another public board meeting that lasted for nearly five hours. I understand that governing boards are groaning under weighty agendas, and that they want to be sure that the public gets every opportunity to speak. But at some point, the sheer length of meetings becomes a real barrier to public accessibility.

The Pentagon announced Sunday that it was planning to withdraw some National Guard troops from Portland and Chicago. You may recall that the troops were dispatched to Portland after President Donald Trump noted that the City of Roses had become a war-torn “hellhole” because of protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. The troops did arrive in Portland, but never were deployed on the streets because of legal challenges. Here’s a tip to the Portland protesters who made national news with their whimsical and nonviolent actions: Take advantage of the moment to get the frog costumes cleaned, but keep them handy.

Speaking of ICE, it seems increasingly likely that the agency has eyes on Newport for a detention facility. But the folks in the town itself are raising a ruckus.

There’s a Corvallis link to a series of burglaries that have targeted Asian American households in Eugene and throughout the nation. (Lookout Eugene-Springfield, where I work, has done reporting about these sophisticated burglaries, and The New York Times offered a story with a national focus last week.) One of the burglaries in Eugene targeted the owners of the Corvallis store Rice N Spice Oriental Foods. A GoFundMe campaign has been launched to assist the owners, Chong Man Kim and Byung Sook.

You probably noticed this week the news that the U.S. government has stopped minting pennies. Because you’ve probably spent as much time as I have thinking about the fate of the penny — which is to say, none at all — this question almost certainly never occurred to you: What is the U.S. government planning to do with the estimated 300 billion (yes, billon) pennies in circulation? If you had asked that question, you might have assured yourself that, yes, surely the government has a plan. In this very funny article from The Atlantic, Caity Weaver explains how badly mistaken you are to think the government has a plan, and she includes this paragraph, which is my favorite bit of writing from the week:

Wow—you are talking like a baby angel raised by puppies in a beachfront palace with no right angles, who has never attempted to wrench useful information out of a government agency’s public-affairs officer. I would give anything to spend 30 narcotic minutes in your gumdrop world. 

Perhaps you are saying something like, “Well, no wonder the government has no plan for the pennies; it’s been shut down for more than a month.” That’s fair. The federal government is in the midst of reopening, after Democrats (as the Reader predicted weeks ago) eventually folded on subsidies for health insurance. But the bill to reopen the government carried some side effects: It contains a provision for a ban on many hemp products. The ban, which goes into effect in November 2026, could wipe out Oregon’s nascent hemp industry and could spell the end of hemp products such as CBD gummies. U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell — remember him? — apparently essentially snuck the hemp provision into the government-reopening bill, an old legislative trick and one that flies in the face of the idea that government actions should be transparent. (I know: At this point, I am talking like a baby angel raised by puppies.)

Speaking of animals, have you seen the video of the baby otter being reunited with its mother? I understand that the otters we fawn over at aquariums actually can be nasty little jerks, but this video features wild otters, and I’m sure they’re nice.

And still speaking of critters, researchers have found that food-snatching seagulls are less likely to harass you if you shout at them. The study was published in the Annals of Obvious Findings — no, that’s wrong, it was published in the journal Biology Letters, and apparently is another sign, as Stephen Colbert might say, that science has run out of things to study.

Over the last three months, Hollywood has released into theaters 25 dramas and comedies — you know, the sorts of movies that don’t have “Predator” in the title and which are geared to we adults. Many of them featured big stars. We adults pretty much ignored all 25 of them, triggering yet another panic in Hollywood. This is why, at some point, we adults need to get up off our couches, where we aimlessly sort through our streaming options, and instead gather at an actual movie theater. (I know; first, you want to see Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” on Netflix, and I can’t blame you. But, after that, let’s get ourselves out of the house and go to the Darkside or the AMC 12 — lest at some point, the streamers have become our only option.) Unless you’re OK with these “Predator” movies, which still are drawing big audiences even after four decades.

Writing in Variety, the critic Owen Gleiberman (whom I respected even back when he was writing for Entertainment Weekly), has a prescription: Indie filmmakers, he says, need to be focusing first on storytelling — and points to a couple of independent movies that have emerged as recent hits, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” (which is, granted, an action movie with comic touches) and Celine Song’s “Materialists,” the bracingly anti-romantic romantic comedy. (I haven’t seen the Anderson movie yet — I know, I know — but I can recommend “Materialists.”)

That’s it for this weekend, except for this final note: I referred last week to a photo of a First Amendment sign that my boss had painted on a wall at the Lookout offices in Eugene. I placed the photo as the “featured image” in my WordPress blog, forgetting that only a portion of the photo shows up in the post. Here it is, in its full glory — and, yes, some of us at the Lookout office had a couple of gripes about the punctuation.