Education Secretary Linda McMahon visited Crook County High School and Crooked River Elementary in Prineville, Oregon, on Monday — the latest stop on her fifty-state "Returning Education to the States" tour, and the first visit by a sitting Education Secretary to the county. [1] The stop was facilitated by Representative Cliff Bentz's Oregon office staff; Bentz was in session in Washington and did not attend. County Commissioner Seth Crawford coordinated the schedule with Superintendent Joel Hoff. [1]

The visit was about career and technical education, not confrontation. McMahon toured construction, health, and business CTE programs, reviewed the district's science-of-reading elementary curriculum, and left. [2] "Schools are the foundation of our communities, essential to the economic and social survival of the rural parts of our country," she said in a district statement. [2] The tour is one month into its nationwide calendar and has produced itineraries through Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and now Oregon's Second Congressional District. [3]

What the tour has not produced: the names of the two universities the paper has tracked as having refused to host McMahon, still undisclosed seven days after the April 15 GSA DEI-certification rule widened the Department's federal-funds leverage. McMahon's April 11 AI-grant priority rule takes effect May 13 — twenty-two days from Tuesday — and reorders Title IV research-priority ranking to favor AI-curriculum grants. Monday's Prineville stop is the tour's quietest day by press footprint; the AI-rule clock is the louder calendar.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington