Chemeketa Voices

Giving It Back:
Rep. Betty Komp

Oregon State Rep. Betty Komp was a 35-year-old single mother of four when she began investigating college opportunities. Even still, she was scared walking through the doors of the Chemeketa Community College’s Woodburn campus.

If the receptionist and the placement test coordinator hadn’t grabbed her when she walked in the door, her life might have taken a much different course.

“I would have walked back out,” Komp said.

Komp had just finished harvesting hops for a local farmer and his wife. She’d promised the couple she would look into returning to school at the end of the season.

“I was working 12-13 hours a day and I just knew there had to be something better,” Komp said. “The two women didn’t let me leave the campus without a plan.”

Experiential learning

Komp started behind the curve from the outset of grade school.

 “We didn’t have anything to read in the house until I reached the sixth grade,” Komp said. “When I started school, I didn’t understand the concept of letters, much less how they combine to make sounds.”

As the third of what would eventually be 13 children and growing up on a dairy farm, education came second to work. Komp quickly became the primary caregiver for her younger siblings. It imbued in her a sense of fierce independence and self sufficiency.

“We were a family, but everything was part of the larger job of keeping the farm running,” she said. “We didn’t have time to support each other emotionally the way people think of it in the present day. Dinner still had to get made – even if we had a bad day.”

She married at 18 and started a family, but later found herself raising four children on her own. Tending her own garden and sewing clothes for the kids were manifestations of the values she’d learned on the farm.

She found it all the more surprising then, that there were people at Chemeketa willing and able to help her achieve her goal of becoming a teacher.

New understanding

Komp was encouraged to ease back into education. In addition to core classes, she took an art class for fun and found other ways to make the transition back to school less daunting.

“I would always park by the gym because I knew I’d be able to find my way back if I got lost,” she said.

Her first term built on her initial impressions and paved the way for her eventual success.

“My first professors were incredibly welcoming, and there were people all along the way who helped support me,” Komp said.

She discovered a home away from home in the math department as a work-study student.

“The people in that department took me under their wings and guided me from one term to the next,” she said.

Komp transferred to Western Oregon University where she set a new goal of finishing her degree before her 40th birthday. She crossed the finish line with two weeks to spare.

She began working as a substitute in the Woodburn School District, was hired as a resource teacher at Woodburn High School and, three years later, she was hired as the school’s assistant principal.

“I began working on my master’s degree right after I finished my bachelor’s, and I knew I wanted to become an administrator,” she said.

In some ways, Komp was intent on moving up the administrative ladder because she was seeking answers that had dogged her since becoming an active member of her children’s PTA groups.

“Even as a PTA member, I would ask questions about fiscal issues and I would get responses like, ‘Well, that’s the way it’s always been done,’” Komp said.

She encountered the same difficulty in obtaining straight answers as an administrator as she did when she was a member of the PTA. In the end, that’s why she decided to run for the state legislature.

“I thought it was about a lack of transparency, but in reality, it was simply that we haven’t had the technology to keep up the kinds of records I was asking for. It wasn’t until the past couple of years that we’ve had easy access to previous data.”

Giving it back

The lessons Komp learned at Chemeketa went far beyond her textbooks, it’s those lessons she carries throughout her daily life and into the Oregon legislature.

“I always think back to my wonderful colleagues in the math department. I saw them work as a team and support everybody in the immediate area,” she said. “I take the same attitude when working with my colleagues across the aisle.”

There are also more personal lessons. When Komp learned she had to take placement tests, she told the coordinator she wasn’t sure she could do it.

“She asked me how I knew I couldn’t do it if I never tried. It taught me that I needed to inform my decisions,” she said.

She puts the lesson to use in her role as chair of the Legislature’s Sub Committee on Education Innovation.

“We always cover a huge range of topics because I want to have all the information before I make a decision,” she said.

Perhaps most importantly, she learned about the importance of accepting help when it’s offered and repaying the kindness in turn.

“I remember telling one of my instructors that I didn’t feel comfortable accepting financial aid, I felt there were others who would need it more,” she said. “He asked me who would deserve it more. I said, ‘Not me.’ And he said, ‘Yeah you, because you’ll give it back somehow.’”

By Eric A. Howald. Have a great Chemeketa story? Send us an e-mail.

Updated October 2, 2007 by Marketing and Student Recruitment.