Trego's Mountain Ear

May 19th, I left the school board, and my successor was installed. I’ve learned as I have moved from one job, one position to the next that you don’t have a replacement, you have a successor.

It hasn’t been an easy six years – somehow a culture of conflict, best described through the Karpman drama triangle developed over the years, and overcoming it became a terrible challenge. In the Karpman triangle, there are three positions – a victim, a persecutor and a rescuer. The roles are interchangeable – if you think back to Little Red Riding Hood, Little Red is the victim, the wolf is the persecutor, and the woodsman who tackles the wolf with his axe is the rescuer. Seems simple, until you look at things from the wolf’s perspective. As Wolfie is being chopped by the woodsman with his axe, Wolfie is pretty darned sure he’s the victim. Hopefully the Karpman drama triangle is gone, where rescuers become persecutors.

The emphasis has moved to a classical education model – reading, writing and arithmetic. The emphasis is on taking the exams and having all the students proficient or above in the basic skills. I have no doubt that the students who start at Trego will achieve those goals. It’s a bit harder to predict the level of those who transfer in where the kids may not have studied under the same emphasis.

The legislation that has been passed over my lifetime has made it all but impossible for school boards to function well – the proliferation of rules calls for an expensive administrator for small schools as well as large ones. If we encounter a perceived problem, the answer is at Helena – either OPI can develop a new rule, or our legislators can pass a new law. We’ve seen how the new laws can work – Zooey Zephyr of Missoula did a better job at looking out for Trego School than Neil Durum and Mike Cuffe. It’s an eyeopener when a University administrator can see the problems that the local elected officials are blind to.

There are two items on my list now – personal is getting a knee rebuilt and recovering from the surgery. The public task is correcting the Lincoln County High School Board. Since 1988, the LCHS board responsibilities have been held by the Eureka Elementary board and a pair of token board members, one from Trego and one from Fortine. This is not in keeping with state law – A county high school’s board, by state law, consists of 4 members from the district where the high school is located and three from the other districts. Eureka’s elementary board has been operating the high school as part of a unified district – yet they did not unify the districts. A simple way of describing this is that they have unlawfully taken and kept powers that the Montana laws deny them for almost 37 years.

I am hoping that a return to a school board that matches the composition called for by state law will move toward a high school that performs in, at least, the top half of the evaluated schools. And, as my successor deals with the new challenges of Trego Elementary, I’ll be writing on what happened at Eureka, where the Elementary board has been operating the county high school, in opposition to state law, since July 1, 1988.