From left: President Janet Peters, membership chair Parri Van Dyke, Al Weiss, Sarah Barbour and Melinda Fischer.

FOREST GROVE, Ore. (Apr. 29, 2023) – The Rotary Club of Forest Grove is proud to welcome its newest members, Al Weiss & Sarah Barbour.

Al & Sarah was inducted as members during the club’s weekly meeting on Apr. 19. Al & Sarah’s middle daughter, Blue, is the club’s current Rotary Youth Exchange outbound student and is currently abroad in Ecuador. Al & Sarah were sponsored for membership by Melinda Fischer.

Al & Sarah moved to Forest Grove in 2011 with Al becoming Pacific University’s first director of educational technology and curricular innovation.  Prior to coming to Pacific, Al spent 15 years studying and working in educational technology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Al & Sarah met in Japan in the late 1990s, where they were both part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, a teaching exchange run by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

Al was raised in Wayne, New Jersey and earned his bachelor’s degree from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Immediately after college, Al moved to Hawaii where he had brief stints as a pizza delivery driver and substitute teacher before beginning his career in education as a seventh and eighth-grade science and math teacher and working with fourth and fifth-grade students with dyslexia.

Al received Pacific University’s Outstanding Leadership Award in 2021 for his work in supporting Pacific’s pivot to online education in 2020 and 2021 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sarah also grew up on the East Coast and earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Richmond. Her work career includes teaching English in Japan and managing the special collections library at the University of Illinois, where she received her master’s degree in library science.

Sarah currently works as a freelance finance writer, working primarily with firms in the private equity, mergers and acquisitions and accounting industries.

Together, Al and Sarah have three daughters. The oldest, Sophie, is studying at Reed College in Portland and their youngest, Irene, is in her final year at the Forest Grove Community School. Upon her return from Ecuador, Blue will be a senior at Forest Grove High School.