Trillium Charter School

Stephanie Hinkle (Director)

Stephanie is a co-founder of Trillium Charter School. She is a long time advocate for public schools and for public school choice. She has experience in leadership positions in other programs, and has a background in financial services. Stephanie has a BS in liberal arts, a minor in Communication, and an Urban Studies Certificate from Portland State University. She reorganized and ran the children's program at a local women's shelter, and has worked with disadvantaged children and families. Stephanie is the parent of two school age daughters, and has been interested in schools and education since childhood.

Nick Fenger (Information Technology, Middle School Math Teacher)

At Trillium, all of us wear a multitude of hats and my hats include: middle school math and technology teacher, information systems analyst, database programmer and technology coordinator. Prior to joining Trillium during the 02-03 school year (the school's second year), I was employed in the private sector as an engineer, technical trainer and project manager at several different companies. I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Milwaukee School of Engineering ('94) and a Master of Education from Portland State University ('02) with a focus on Math and Science Education. I also hold an Oregon Teaching License in High School Physics and Middle School Science.

I am a strong advocate for the open community both in my teaching and technological pursuits. In education, the open community believes that information should be accessible by all and not held by commercial entities. In the technological community, open relates to tools for our students and teachers to use including open source software, operating systems and tools that are free and supported by the open source community. As teachers, we have access to a tremendous number of free lessons, wiki's and online content provided by individuals and institutions throughout the world. Technologically, we employ a wide variety of open source software technologies including K12LTSP, K12Linux, Fedora Linux, Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice, Drupal, Moodle, Apache, Open LDAP and many others. This generation of students is the first ever to have this kind of access to information and open source tools and Trillium is the perfect place to reinvent education in this new paradigm.

Ramona Fischer (Secretary)

Ramona Fischer has been a part of the Trillium community from the start as both a parent and a staff member. Three out of her four children attend school here in the 6th, 9th and 11th grades. Her oldest daughter is a 12th grader at Franklin H.S. Ramona's responsibilities for the past 2 school years have included helping to run the front desk, clerical & staff support and meal program support. For her first 3 years at Trillium she was the school janitor. Before Trillium, she did daycare for 12 years.

Ramona is a native Portlander and went to Washington High School. Her main passion in life is being a mom and being a wife to her husband, Matthew, for the last 23 years. So working close to her children brings her great satisfaction. Almost as much satisfaction as snuggling around the fire with her family.