School officials happy with decision

School districts throughout the county breathed a sigh of relief when the Flathead County commissioners dropped a controversial proposal Monday.

The commissioners’ decision not to consolidate the Superintendent of Schools’ Office with the County Treasurer’s Office was met with approval among school districts throughout the county.

The commissioners will study the option of consolidation over the next few years.

“I’m very pleased with the outcome,” West Glacier Principal Cortni King said. “I think the right decision was made today.”

West Glacier and other rural schools would have suffered significantly without a full-time county superintendent’s office, King said.

Rural districts rely on the county office for everything from fiscal assistance to mediating parent and personnel conflicts to finding resources on education-related legal issues.

The superintendent’s office “is a centralized point that a lot of that stuff comes out of,” said Renee Boisseau, principal of Kila School. “We would just be somewhat lost without that.”

Boisseau said she was disappointed the county commissioners didn’t contact her or other rural principals to get their input on consolidation, since they would be directly impacted by the decision and know better than anyone the services garnered from the superintendent’s office.

“From reading through [Commissioner Joe Brenneman’s] plan and listening to what was put out, none of them really have the knowledge of what it takes to run a school,” Boisseau said.

She and other principals took issue with Brenneman’s suggestion that school districts should operate more like for-profit businesses.

“They want education to run like a business. It’s not a business. It’s an essential need,” Marion School Principal Jay Hurder said.

“You cannot run a school like you run a business, and the people that think you can aren’t educators,” Hurder said. “If that was the case, there really isn’t any need for education specialists.”

Boisseau said she has relied on the county superintendent’s office expertise for as long as she has been an administrator.

“As a fledgling principal when I started 13 years ago, with nobody else to turn to, I had to turn to the county superintendent’s office,” she said. “That was invaluable.”

Hurder agreed. This is his first year at the school, and he has depended heavily on the superintendent’s office for information.

“Being a new administrator to the area, [County Superintendent Marcia Sheffels] has certainly been a huge resource to me — and not just Marcia, but her whole staff,” he said. “You can’t replace that kind of help, and you cannot do that stuff in-house when you’re small.”

The superintendent’s office provides important services for schools, such as maintaining a matrix of substitute teachers, Boisseau said. Instead of individual districts trying to conduct background checks and rate individual substitutes, the county superintendent’s office maintains a sub list all school districts can access.

“There is no way my clerk or secretary have the man-hours to screen substitute teachers and rank them like the county superintendent’s office has done,” Boisseau said.

Even with things as simple as school closures, Sheffels’ office provides a valuable service, Boisseau added. While some districts have purchased phone systems that allow them to contact families directly to notify them of snow days, that solution isn’t practical in every district, Boisseau said.

The county superintendent handles closures for many districts.

“If we don’t have a central location to do that, it wreaks havoc. It’s one of the hardest jobs Marcia deals with,” Boisseau said.

Joel Voytoski, superintendent of the Evergreen School District, agreed.

“They [the superintendent’s office] get the word first and notify the schools” if an emergency road closure is declared, Voytoski said. “We ultimately make the call [on whether to close school], but they key thing for us is we’ve got to get word. [Sheffels] is critical in that.”

The county superintendent’s office also plays a critical role in serving as the fiscal host for the Northwest Montana Curriculum Cooperative and the Flathead Special Education Cooperative. Rural districts especially benefit from these services, especially the latter, which serves 15 rural schools.

Approving the consolidation would have jeopardized the special education co-op’s interlocal agreement, director Noranne Yeager said.

“If we don’t have our county superintendent to align our co-op with, we either have to find a school district willing to be our prime agency, or we need to go to another county superintendent’s office to get that agreement,” she said.

The Superintendent of Schools Office has what curriculum co-op director Eliza Sorte calls the “MasterCard effect.” While the commissioners can put a price tag on transportation and insurance, she isn’t sure they can do the same thing with the superintendent.

“What I kept thinking is she’s not associated with any one district, so she represents all of them, from the little school to the big school. It’s priceless — sort of the MasterCard effect,” Sorte said. “That collective knowledge and voice is priceless, and I think we’re shortsighted if we don’t take that into account.”

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com