Lawmakers chastise Superintendent Arntzen over alleged delays, inefficiencies at Montana’s K-12 education agency

Montana lawmakers formally expressed their disappointment Wednesday with state Superintendent Elsie Arntzen’s unwillingness to appear before a legislative committee to resolve conflicts over the implementation of new education laws passed last session.

In a letter approved by the Education Interim Budget Committee, members called upon Arntzen to “turn your attention to faithfully fulfilling the duties of the office to which you were elected,” arguing that the people most harmed by ongoing friction between the Legislature and the Office of Public Instruction are “Montana’s school children.” The committee’s message came in response to allegations of institutional inefficiencies and delays at OPI — allegations that prompted the committee’s chair and primary author of the letter, Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, to express his view that Arntzen had “failed to meet her constitutional obligation” as head of Montana’s K-12 public school system.

“I have high regard for the employees working at the OPI,” Bedey said during a committee hearing in Helena Wednesday. “Many of them are indispensable, and some of those indispensable folks have left the organization recently. But be that as it may, at the end of the day, leadership matters, and an organization depends upon its leadership.”

Arntzen fired back within minutes of the committee’s vote to send the letter, both in an emailed press release and in a statement read to committee members by her deputy and chief legal counsel Rob Stutz. In her statement, Arntzen vowed to stand firm on several positions she and Stutz have taken in relation to several pieces of legislation passed in 2023.

“This is a political persecution,” Arntzen wrote. “I am being attacked because I am a conservative. I stood up for limited bureaucracy, fought the radical transgender agenda, opposed woke-ism, promoted good government, and delivered results for our children, parents, and schools.”

The criticism of OPI’s performance under Arntzen’s leadership, leveled during a two-day span of interim legislative hearings in Helena, ranged from delays in the agency’s implementation of new education laws passed last year to insufficient communication with school districts and educators. One local school official, Bonner School District Superintendent Jim Howard, told lawmakers OPI did not adequately notify his staff last year of a change to the application deadline for a program incentivizing raises for starting teachers, costing the small district east of Missoula more than $18,000 in state funding.

“When we inquired about the value of appealing for an opportunity to late-file, we were told [by OPI] that another district had appealed up the food chain to the superintendent and had already been denied,” Howard said.

Howard’s testimony Tuesday echoed the flurry of criticism aired by lawmakers themselves. Citing feedback from local school officials and statewide education associations, members of two education-oriented legislative committees expressed grave concerns about OPI’s handling of new laws addressing early childhood literacy, public charter schools, out-of-district student enrollment and reporting requirements for instruction on Indigenous culture. 

Looming over the debate was Arntzen’s absence from the proceedings as Stutz fielded questions and provided information on her behalf. Lawmakers repeatedly cast her absence as a barrier to promptly resolving disagreements between the Legislature and OPI over an unprecedented wave of change to Montana’s public education system.

“I don’t fault your sitting in place of her,” Rep. Linda Reksten, R-Polson, told Stutz. “But I do fault the fact that this is a shift in some of the educational legislation that requires a steady hand and careful leadership as we move forward into the next legislative session. So, with all due respect, we need that kind of attendance.”

OPI spokesperson Brian O’Leary told Montana Free Press via email Tuesday that Arntzen had “personal obligations that were not able to be rescheduled.” Asked whether those obligations were related to Arntzen’s official OPI duties or her Republican primary campaign for Montana’s eastern congressional district, O’Leary wrote that “private obligations are not OPI obligations, as those would be publicly available. This is the only information I have.”

Much of the tension this week boiled down to conflicting legal interpretations of several high-profile bills passed by the 2023 Legislature with strong bipartisan support. Lance Melton, executive director of the Montana School Boards Association, told lawmakers that divergence has led to improper or contrary messaging to districts by OPI about new legal requirements — a situation he added appeared “fairly coordinated and calculated.”

“This level of interference in the implementation of legislation is something I haven’t seen in my 30-plus years lobbying the Legislature,” Melton said.

One such example centered on House Bill 352, which provides state funding for local programs to strengthen reading and language comprehension for children through third grade. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Brad Barker, R-Roberts, told lawmakers his intent was for summer programs to start at the end of the 2023-24 school year — a position upheld by other lawmakers and school officials. Reksten added that any delay in opening those programs will likely lead to lower participation rates as families look for alternative options at the beginning of the summer.

However, Stutz argued HB 352’s effective date prevents OPI from providing funding for any activity that occurs prior to July 1, 2024, and that doing otherwise would expose the agency to a potential audit. His stance drew strong criticism from School Administrators of Montana Executive Director Rob Watson, who accused the agency of stalling the law’s implementation, as well as from leaders of the Legislature’s education committees.

“It seems to me, given the clear legislative intent, the contrary legal opinion to that held by OPI, and the chief concern being some possible audit that might happen in the future, we’re doing children a disservice by not starting this program this summer,” Bedey said. Sen. Dan Salomon, R-Ronan and chair of the education interim committee, added the agency’s concern over an audit was “kind of a ridiculous argument.”

A similar dispute crystallized around House Bill 203, which rewrote how per-pupil funding flows between districts for out-of-district students, and around House Bill 338, which applies new reporting mandates on districts for their use of state Indian Education for All funding. Regarding the latter, OPI has argued in recent months that it’s the responsibility of Montana’s Board of Public Education to ensure funds are withheld from districts failing to adequately report their activities. 

The board’s executive director, McCall Flynn, along with several lawmakers countered it’s OPI’s duty to enforce the new law. Legislative analyst Pad McCracken characterized the action under HB 338 not as a withholding of funds but rather a “mechanical, mathematical ineligibility” for one of the components of state funding distributed to districts by OPI. Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, said he was troubled to hear that roughly 40% of schools in Montana had underreported their spending of state funds for Indigenous cultural instruction, and he reproached Stutz for OPI’s interpretation of the bill he sponsored.

“It confused me more than anything as far as what the OPI was shirking its duties, shifting it to the Board of Public Ed,” Windy Boy said. “For me, that was not my intent. That was not the intent of this.”

The debate also extended to OPI’s implementation of House Bill 549, Montana’s new public charter school law. Last month, the Board of Public Education gave public school districts the green light to open 19 charter schools in nearly a dozen communities — well in excess of the five public charter schools lawmakers anticipated and budgeted for over the next two years. All but one of the approved charter schools plan to open by this fall.

That timeline could now be impacted by OPI’s interpretation of the bill, which, Stutz argued this week, would require each of the 19 charters to comply with existing state laws governing the opening of new public schools. That process calls for additional review and approval by the state superintendent, county superintendents and county commissions. Despite Stutz’s insistence that the laws address practical matters such as building inspections and assigning individual school codes for state reporting, Flynn and lawmakers maintained the Legislature clearly intended for the Board of Public Education’s approval process to serve in place of those laws.

“There is absolutely no question on [HB] 549 what the intent of the Legislature is, and you’re looking for a reason not to do it,” Salomon told Stutz during a follow-up discussion Wednesday. “You found one, and we’re really disappointed in that, especially since you said, ‘Yes, we’re going to adhere to what the legislative intent was.”

Even in the face of increasingly pointed criticism Wednesday, Stutz remained unwavering in OPI’s position on the bills. He pushed back on the characterizations made of the agency by committee members and association leaders, saying it was unfair to accuse OPI of a “pattern of being obstructionist” based on a string of recent disagreements.

“OPI is committed to education,” Stutz said, “and so for a few words in a few pieces of legislation to really shade the good work that OPI is doing is unfair to the hardworking state employees at OPI who are doing excellent work every day.”

However, the Legislature butted heads with OPI over more than laws this week. Lawmakers continued to grill Stutz Wednesday regarding another point of recent friction between the legislative and executive branches of public education: a multi-million dollar effort to modernize the collection and sharing of student data in Montana.

The 2021 Legislature earmarked roughly $13.4 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds for OPI to upgrade data systems tied to a host of statewide functions, including teacher licensing and tracking student academic performance. Concern about the pace of OPI’s progress on the project and its temporary loss of procurement authority last spring prompted lawmakers in the 2023 session to pass legislation increasing the level of outside oversight and involvement in the agency’s spending practices. Throughout the process, Arntzen has insisted that federal privacy protections prohibit OPI from sharing individual student information with other state agencies such as the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education — a message Stutz reiterated on her behalf this week.

“When we’re talking about individual student-level data, the privacy concerns are paramount,” Stutz said. “I mentioned FERPA [the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] because that’s the one we’re all familiar with, but I also mention we’ve got privacy concerns under state law as well.”

While the dispute over what data could be collected and shared between agencies through OPI’s new modernized data systems reached an impasse in December, the agency and the Legislature appeared to have identified a potential resolution by Wednesday. That resolution will come through data-sharing decisions reached by the Education and Workforce Data Governing Board, an entity established last year under House Bill 949 that includes the state superintendent, commissioner of higher education and commissioner of labor and industry among its members.

The growing detente on database modernization didn’t prevent Bedey and other lawmakers from pressing Stutz for stronger assurances that OPI will meet the expectations of other state leaders in helping develop more robust methods for tracking student success through all levels of education and workforce engagement. And it didn’t erase broader concerns that OPI’s actions in the wake of the 2023 session suggest deeper institutional issues at the agency tasked with overseeing Montana’s more than 800 public schools.

On Tuesday, Reksten sought to address what she called the “elephant in the room,” asking Stutz directly whether Arntzen’s absence from the proceedings and the number of staff reductions and turnover at the agency during her tenure were contributing factors to the issues raised by district officials. Bedey took her assertion one step further, claiming Arntzen has publicly celebrated her efforts to reduce staffing levels at the agency.

“This problem in the OPI, the staff reductions, is a fact,” Bedey said. “What’s underappreciated is the amount of turnover that goes on at OPI, which I think compounds the problem. And unfortunately, I think this is what brings us to a lot of the problems that we’re seeing in implementations of bills.”

In his email to MTFP on Arntzen’s behalf, O’Leary at OPI rebuffed Bedey’s assessment.

“Chair Bedey’s remarks that the superintendent ‘celebrates a reduction of staff’ are misleading, ill-informed and inflammatory,” O’Leary wrote, adding that the agency currently has five open positions and that 70% of its regular employees now work remotely. “The superintendent has celebrated a reduction of in-office staff due to an increase in agency teleworkers.”

Prior to the culmination Wednesday in the committee’s letter of disappointment, members positioned themselves publicly on the dispute. Sen. John Esp, R-Big Timber, and Sen. John Fuller, R-Kalispell, acknowledged their general agreement that the week’s developments were troubling but said any issues with OPI’s implementation of the laws would be more properly adjudicated in court. Both voted against sending the letter.

Of the remaining six members who supported sending the letter, Rep. Connie Keogh, D-Missoula, said that despite the shared disappointment in the agency’s recent actions, she recognized there are “many people at OPI that are working really hard and doing some really great work.” Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, said he’d “lost confidence” that a slate of promising policies will have the positive effect on education lawmakers envisioned, adding that the “losers here are parents, kids, schools.” Bedey, the chair, spoke most strongly, telling his colleagues it was their job to protect the Legislature’s prerogatives and “not simply be a doormat,” and sharing his opinion that “the superintendent has failed to do her duty.”

“Frankly, we are powerless to force anything to happen,” Bedey said. “However, we are not powerless to communicate our discontent.”

Alex Sakariassen is a reporter for the Montana Free Press, a Helena-based nonprofit newsroom, and can be reached at asakariassen@montanafreepress.org.