Hostilities between Montana’s top education official and the legislators whose laws she’s tasked with implementing have ratcheted up yet again.
Superintendent Elsie Arntzen called members of the Legislature's Education Interim Budget Committee “schoolyard bullies,” and, in a statement Monday, accused them of turning legislative hearings into “kangaroo courts with predetermined outcomes.”
“Montana children, parents and communities want the Legislature to focus on delivering results,” she wrote. “Some in the Legislature are acting more childish than the children we are supposed to be serving. I remember when we used to resolve legislative issues with real solutions, not name-calling and politically motivated stunts.”
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At last week’s Education Interim Budget Committee meeting, a bipartisan group of legislators voted 6-2 to submit a formal complaint against Arntzen, a Republican. They asserted in a written letter that the superintendent has failed to satisfy the duties of her office, and that she has intentionally impeded the implementation of laws passed during the last legislative session.
“I’ve lost confidence that the bills are going to be able to do positive and good work for students because we continually find ourselves here,” said Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, during the committee meeting. “The losers here are parents, kids, students and schools.”
This complaint doesn’t have real teeth over the superintendent, a position that’s elected by statewide voters. The committee can't remove the superintendent or compel the Office of Public Instruction to take certain action. But legislators said it was important to establish their role as a separate branch of government that expects laws passed to be rolled out by the respective agencies and to publicly call for a change moving forward.
“This is not a publicity stunt,” Sen. Dan Salomon, R-Ronan, said during last week's meeting. “This is to get things resolved.”
Tension mounted as the interim committee spent hours grilling staffers from the Office of Public Instruction about slowdowns on a number of laws as well as reported confusion from school districts and educators about the agency’s guidance on other legislation.
"Our membership feels that funding has been bottlenecked by the lack of available assistance with both general guidance and cash requests," said Shelley Turner, the executive director of the Montana Association of School Business Officials, in an email. "My membership is concerned that the current staff at the OPI are overwhelmed as well and valuable institutional knowledge has been lost with the extreme turnover that the OPI has experienced."
A 2021 report from the Montana Free Press noted a 90% turnover rate in the office since 2017, the year Arntzen took the helm.
On laws pertaining to school choice, Indian Education for All, early literacy targeted intervention programs, public charter schools, teacher pay and a multimillion-dollar data modernization project, legislators and OPI disagreed vehemently on what the law allows for and requires of the agency.
Debates ensued about details of how these laws are penned relative to legislative intent. For example, House Bill 352, which creates the opportunity for districts to begin summer programs for students who need extra support with reading, is written to go into effect for the school year beginning July 1, 2024. Legislators say their intent was to make these programs accessible this summer, which would require starting in June, but OPI says the letter of the law doesn’t allow for that start date.
Another example of this dissent is around the $14.5 million project codified into law in the 2021 and 2023 legislative sessions that’s supposed to streamline data-sharing between agencies such as OPI and the state Department of Labor and Industry, as well as give teachers the tools to make real-time adjustments to improve student outcomes.
Lawmakers wrote out a list of data metrics dubbed the “data dictionary.” They say their intent was that OPI would collect all this information through the new system. OPI says the law is written in such a way that allows the agency to collect this exhaustive list of metrics, but does not require it to do so.
“These schoolyard bullies are attacking me because I’m a constitutional conservative who has stood for good governance, protected girls’ sport and fought against the ‘woke’ agenda currently infiltrating our schools,” said Arntzen in her written statement. “The false accusation that (OPI) is not adequately implementing certain pieces of legislation is bizarre.”
Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, chair of the Education Interim Budget Committee, characterized this assertion as “nonsense” in an interview with Lee Montana, referring to the legal opinions of legislative staff lawyers and outside counsel that found OPI’s interpretation of the bills in question to be “flawed.”
He noted that the statement issued by Arntzen and her response to the complaint appeared to be an attempt at shifting attention away from the real issues.
“It is difficult to see how it is persecution to expect the director of one of the state's largest agencies to appear before a legislative oversight committee and to engage in the committee over concerns that are critical not just to the Legislature but to schools across the state,” he said.
Arntzen will term out of her role as superintendent next year, and she plans to run for election to represent Montana's second congressional district.