Superintendents Still Apprehensive Educators Express Uncertainty At Meeting With Fox

Public schools chief Anne Fox continues her first tour through Idaho with a session in Lewiston on Friday to brief local officials on how this year’s state appropriation and new laws will affect them .

And some superintendents are still leery.

Since Fox fired one of the Department of Education’s top finance experts and another quit earlier this year, school administrators are having to learn to trust the information she gives them.

“I think it’s safe to say there’s a level of apprehension,” Kimberly Superintendent John Garner said. “Two of those people who have done in-services in the past, who held our collective hands in the past, are no longer in the state department.”

Burley Superintendent Everett Howard, who has attended the annual meetings for 13 years - all with Fox’s predecessor, retired Superintendent of Public Instruction Jerry Evans - said there has never been such uncertainty.

Aggravating some has been Fox’s failure to provide them with the department’s estimates of state support for the coming year so they can put their budgets together and determine whether supplemental financing is needed. Evans provided that information almost immediately after lawmakers adjourned.

Potlatch Superintendent Don Armstrong is looking for that information at the tour session with Fox this week. He will not prepare his budget estimates until after that.

“Our taxpayers have been very, very good to work with,” Armstrong said. “They want to know up front where the money is going to be spent, and we’ve always worked very well with that.”

In past years, superintendents received a detailed agenda for the superintendent’s post-session meetings. But this year, Howard received only a brief notification letter.

“There’s always things that come out of the Legislature and you’re anxious to get to the meeting to find out more about it,” he said. “But we had a little more confidence … It’s sort of an unknown this year.”