Trego's Mountain Ear

These maps are taken from the county website, and I believe that they were drawn up in the county planner’s office.  I also believe that the school district map is in error – when the railroad relocation occurred, Trego school district boundaries were presented as shown in the voter precinct map:

The next illustration shows the school district maps.  Notice how Eureka Elementary district now has a township wide strip west of Trego (School District 53) that includes only National Forest, but puts Eureka (School District 13) adjacent to, and surrounding School District 53 and claiming the area which I would describe as Wolf Prairie.  Wolf Prairie includes a large amount of railroad, a bit of small private land (as I recall), and a significant amount of corporately owned forest lands.  (While my memory is from 35 years back, I covered a lot of the area while working on cadastral surveys)

I noticed the change when I called up the map and was looking for the location where our district border touched Libby.  Obviously, I was a little shocked to find that it no longer does.

The area south of Trego is part of the Lincoln County High School District (High School District 13) and this error may have resulted from the 1988 attempt to consolidate LCHS and Eureka Elementary – though the strip taken from the east edges of McCormick and Yaak argues for a deliberate decision rather than a decision made through conflation of elementary district 13 and LCHS district 13.

If I am correct, the area south of Trego, shown as elementary district 13, should be shown as Trego, district 53.  The area to the west should be returned to McCormick and Yaak.

You might wonder at the Gerrymandered shape of Yaak and McCormick.  This was done in the early history of Lincoln County, stretching those districts across the Kootenai valley in a spot where it included only national forest lands.  The location was selected to make sure all the school districts at the time included a few miles of railroad land to kind of equalize the tax burdens (according to the answer I received from school superintendent Wilda B. Totten about sixty years ago).

We (Joel Graves and I) were unable to find the minutes where the consolidation of LCHS and Eureka Elementary was rejected – yet it must have been because Montana law requires the high school to forfeit county high school status if it becomes part of a consolidated district.  It’s still Lincoln County High School 37 years after the vote to consolidate (though the vote to consolidate failed in both Fortine and Trego districts.

I do not expect the Superintendent’s office records to show the missing documents.  The consolidation vote occurred in the middle of 1988, and Superintendent Cindy Middig made a temporary change in the LCHS board structure to reflect that decision and instructed that board in the actions it had to complete in order to consolidate the district.  I believe that the county superintendent’s old records went the same way as Extension’s did back in 1997 or 98.  Records were stored in the annex basement and a broken wastewater (sewage) line ruined most of them.  The commissioners records – somewhere between May and September of 1988 may provide relevant information on what the LCHS board did or did not do.

After instructing the new LCHS board in their required actions, Cindy Middig resigned and left the county.  About six months later, Mary Hudspeth was appointed as County Superintendent – but in those months without a superintendent, everything about the consolidation fell through the cracks.

So far as the district maps are concerned – I had a similar problem with our most recent county election administrator who re-issued my voter registration showing a non-Trego school district residence (LCHS).  New to the position, she did not realize that state law requires school board members to be registered in the school district.  I had not realized why she made the mistake (and argued that there was no need to correct it) until I saw this map.

Assuming I am correct and there has been no redistricting to include an area where Eureka’s buses have never run, we need to correct the errors in the map, and make certain that Eureka elementary is not, and has not, been taxing the Lincoln County High School District.  Additionally, we should look at correcting the LCHS board membership to reflect that LCHS is not, and apparently never has been consolidated with Eureka Elementary.