Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: Trego School

  • Trego School Continues Distance Learning

    Trego School has adopted something of a wait-and-see approach to determining the date they will resume in-person learning.

    In any school, the requirement that individuals that have been exposed must quarantine themselves for fourteen days can quickly make in-person learning impossible. Substitute teachers are always difficult to find, and finding one that is able to teach two weeks’ worth of classes on short notice is even more difficult. School districts with multiple staff members required to quarantine can quickly exhaust their “sub lists”.

    In a smaller school, while there are fewer staff members and students to expose one another, there is also a greater degree of interaction. While in large school districts, kindergartners are seldom exposed to 8th graders, interaction among students is almost guaranteed in smaller schools.

    It’s worth remembering, especially as favorite places are closed and much anticipated events are postponed and cancelled, that the school board is not responsible for mandating/enforcing quarantine. Rather, they have the difficult challenge of figuring out how to keep education continuing. For further information on who exactly is responsible, I’ll quote the county health department.

    You can read the full text of the County Health Department’s COVID FAQ here.

    Updates on the number of active cases of Corona Virus can be found from the county health department, and from the state. Monday’s update has a total of 67 active cases in North Lincoln County, with no current hospitalizations in the county. While the county does break the cases down by location and age, it doesn’t combine the two.. The county had 53 cases in the 0-19 range, but knowing it at the county level isn’t as good as knowing it at the school district level. The requirements of quarantine create a situation that mandates quick decisions. The available data? Never as good as we’d like it to be.

  • Game Camera Fails

    Game Camera Fails

    At 6 am, Mike was out collecting firewood from the stack to start the days fire. Kiki, the older, chubby white Pomeranian was out with him.  Kiki positioned herself off the back steps and started trying to raise the dead with her bark. With enough firewood in hand, Mike called Kiki to the house.  Remarkably, she came when called.  Mike noted that some critter was out there but thought a follow up investigation was better left until daylight.

    Later that day, we received a call. “Looks like a grizzly walked down your driveway” the caller reported. We had received 1 ½ inches of snow during the night.  “How’d they know it was a grizzly?” I wondered. Mike replied the prints probably had claws. 

    Bear tracks wider than a size 12 insulated boot but not as long as the boot

    Wandering down the driveway with the dogs, we found the tracks in the fresh snow.  Holy **** ! That’s a big bear. We followed the tracks up and down the driveway. The bear had lumbered by all 3 game cams.  I pulled the SD cards from the cameras to look for pictures of a big bear.  The Stealth camera did not have pictures of a bear despite the bear slowly walking by the camera. The Stealth camera’s record remained unbroken. (Game Cam 2 link) The Herter’s camera missed the bear.  It had daylight photos of cars and deer but no nighttime photos.  Time to change the batteries.  Only the Cabela’s camera had a not very good picture of the big, fat, healthy grizzly.

    The grizzly that left the bear tracks on the driveway at 5:53 am

    This grizzly approached the driveway through the woods, lumbered onto the driveway and exited onto Fortine Creek Road before making its way back to the creek bottom. From the time stamp, by the time Kiki was reporting on it at volume the bear was probably on the road.  Our neighbor reported that the bear had been leaving signs in the lower pastures that bordered the creek for several weeks.   Seems we might have a couple more weeks of bears around the place. 

    Great pictures of game cameras are frequently a matter of luck.  We have a “good enough” picture to confirm the type and relative size of the bear.  Two of of the cameras completely missed the bear. Even the “best” camera had 1 poor picture but that time stamp sure caught our attention.

    Update: A day later with the fresh snow and more reports of tracks, we again went hunting.  This time we found 2 sets of tracks. One large set and a smaller set of tracks that sometimes were adjacent to the larger tracks and sometimes they overlapped the larger tracks. We followed the tracks into the woods to find a deposit from the smaller bear.  Lots of hair in that deposit;  the bears appear to be eating well. Again the bears had walked by 2 game cameras.  Not 1 picture of either bear on any camera.  There are multiple reports of bear tracks in the neighborhood. The bears appear to be making a large loose loop around the Trego school.

    -Patches

    Part 1
    Part 2
    Part 3

  • Trego School moves to Distance Learning

    Trego School moves to Distance Learning

    In accordance with the school’s Health and Safety Plan, the school has moved temporarily to distance learning. The School’s Health and Safety Plan is a three part plan outlining the response to each potential scenario. Part A is “Traditional Learning with Precautions” and has been in place since the school year started in September.

    The screens around the desks are one of the precautions outlined in Part A of the Health and Safety Plan.

    The school had recently moved to Part B, “In the event a community member in School District becomes infected”. During Part B, traditional in-person learning continued with additional precautions beyond those outlined in Part A.

    As of Monday (October 19th), Trego School is in Part C: “In the event a student or staff member in School becomes infected”. Taking advantage of some very lucky timing, the school board has been able to put over two weeks between the date of potential exposure and on-site learning resuming with only a week of distance learning.

    How? As parents know, last week had some time off of school. While there were not holidays there was MEA, a statewide conference hosted by the Montana Educators Association. This, combined with well timed absences, will allow for two weeks between the potential exposure and on-site learning, with a single week of distance learning.

    In keeping with the Health and Safety Plan, the school bus will be delivering breakfast and lunch to students. On-site learning is scheduled to resume on Monday (October 26th). The school board, after taking input from parents, will be deciding whether to resume on-site learning in Part A or Part B of the Health and Safety Plan, but it regardless, students will be back to in-person learning on Monday.

  • Be Nice to the Candidates

    I can claim that I am an elected school trustee.  So can the school board members in Fortine and Eureka.  Yet I (and probably most of them) was elected by acclamation.  There may be a more politically correct way to describe it – but the reality is that I was elected without anyone voting for me.  A lot of school trustees share that reality – but I don’t believe it is a good situation.

    The challenge is that, on far too many local boards and commissions, we have the same situation.  When a candidate can be elected by acclamation, without a single vote on a ballot, the concept of representative government breaks down.  On local district boards, it has broken.

    The first reason to be nice to the candidates – all of them – is that they have expressed a willingness to spend time in meetings.  I’ve spent a lot of time in meetings.  Faculty meetings, departmental meetings, board meetings.  Usually I left with the feeling that a couple of hours of my life had just been taken from me.  I don’t care which party a candidate belongs to – he or she has expressed a willingness to attend meetings.  That deserves courtesy at the least.

    Encouraging more candidates – being nice to them, regardless of party, just might reduce the need for term limits.  Often, we wind up with a long-serving politico who claims 10, 20 or 30 years of experience, but actually has two years experience repeated 5, 10 or 15 times. 

    Encourage the candidates.  Reduce the unpleasantness of running for office – any office.  I will feel that I have done my job as a school trustee well if a better candidate beats me like a drum, with over half the district actually voting.  Elected by acclamation is a mark of a democracy in decline.

  • Trego School Annual Fishing Field Trip

    Trego School Annual Fishing Field Trip

    As the first chills of autumn hang in the air, and the salmon run, the older students of Trego School spend the day fishing with their teachers and support staff. While this year’s trip was marked by somewhat fewer salmon and smaller fish, students returned grinning and eager to show off their catch.

    Photos by Lindy Ziemke-Smith

    Field trips are a favorite for students and an opportunity to take the classroom outdoors. The salmon themselves offer a chance to talk about the way nutrients flow through ecosystems, the ecology of our streams, and of course the life cycle of the fish themselves. Of course, it’s also an opportunity for students that have never gone salmon snagging to experience it first-hand.

    When the students returned, school board chair, Ken Smith, and school cook, Joe Puryer, cleaned the fish. Cheerful students sat around them, talking about their day and asking questions about the fish.

    School Board Chair Ken Smith cleans fish and explains how to tell the difference between male and female salmon

    It was, by all accounts, a very good trip, though many of the adults came back rather sodden from wading into the water to rescue tangled fishing lines.

    Fish were carefully packaged and chilled before they were taken home.

  • HEPA Filters and Wildfire Smoke

    HEPA Filters and Wildfire Smoke

    As I stepped into Trego School on a warm smoky afternoon, I developed a sudden admiration for HEPA filters. About a month ago, I wrote about the school’s new HEPA filters, purchased as part of their Health and Safety plan. As it turns out, HEPA filters are excellent for wildfire smoke.

    HEPA filters are good at filtering out the really small, which is what the most harmful particles in wildfire smoke are. Last week, as our air quality worsened, I wrote about the problems associated with breathing smoke, such as headaches and coughing.

    The tiniest particles of smoke (less than 2.5 microns) are the most dangerous. This is because they are small enough to find their way deep into the lungs, some even reaching the bloodstream. When air quality is monitored, it is these tiny particles that are of utmost concern.

    Fortunately, HEPA filters are quite capable of removing these tiny particles from the air. With air quality as poor as it has been, stepping into Trego School last week was a literal breath of fresh air. The filters turn themselves on automatically if air quality worsens. They remain quiet, and are present in each of the school’s classrooms.

    Since children are among “sensitive groups” that the EPA expects to be most impacted by wildfire smoke, the HEPA filters seem to have been an especially good investment for the school, one which will continue to be useful in years to come.