Ed Board’s Meyer Makes The Grade Faces Challenge Of Dwindling Dollars

Judith C. Meyer fought for education when she first moved to Idaho in 1968 - as a mom-to-be lobbying for kindergarten in a state that didn’t offer it.

Today, the 55-year-old Hayden businesswoman still advocates for education, but with more clout and more problems begging her attention.

This month, Meyer took over as president of the Idaho Board of Education. The board, unlike in any other state, sets policy for students from kindergarten to graduate school.

“This is hard work, and so intense,” Meyer said this week. “The decisions have long-term implications…”

Meyer is stepping into her new role as schools are caught in the pinch between funding shortfalls and taxweary voters.

Instructors’ salaries still lag, only some of Idaho’s classrooms are wired for computers and public schools provide more services with less money. Legislators bemoan education’s shrinking share of state money as corrections demands explode.

“The Legislature says ‘State board, you go fix that,’ and then it’s like ‘whoa, yikes,’ there are all these other things drawing on the resources we have.”

For the past 12 years, presidents had Executive Director Rayburn Barton directing operations of the board. He’s leaving this month and taking more than a decade of institutional knowledge with him.

In Meyer’s back yard, a former school trustee in Sandpoint is suing the state for not properly funding education. North Idaho College lacks not only a president, but a dean and several board members.

Meyer’s Kootenai County ties aren’t likely to produce a shift in board attention to North Idaho. “The votes aren’t in the north so I have to just play an advocacy role.”

She championed the North Idaho Initiative last year, increasing cooperation between the University of Idaho, Lewis-Clark State College and NIC. The schools are scrambling to jointly expand Panhandle offerings.

Meyer also helped negotiate the UI’s Riverbend Research and Training Park in Post Falls. Providing incentives and training to recruit new businesses is one of Meyer’s fortes. She and her husband, Stephen Meyer, are partners in a commercial real estate development company.

Parkwood Business Properties’ projects include the Prairie Commerce Park, the new Prairie Avenue Albertson’s opening in Hayden, Ironwood Business Park, and Interlake Medical Building.

It was partly Meyer’s business ties that prompted former NIC President Bob Bennett to recommend that then-Gov. Cecil Andrus appoint her to the board. “He said it would be good to have a woman, it would be good to have business and it would be good to have someone from the north,” explained Meyer.

“My business sense is to always look at the economics of an issue, but (decision-making) needs to be both the heart and the head.”

Meyer carefully reads the letters and e-mail each month from students, teachers, parents and others. “It’s the people component that replenishes me.”

Meyer directs the board with diplomacy and humor. At last week’s Lewiston meeting, Idaho Falls board member Harold Davis said his children gave him a waffle iron for Christmas because of his stance on issues.

Meyer then quipped, “It’s a rotisserie next year,” implying he’d be roasted for flip-flopping. Meyer has long been active in Coeur d’Alene’s women’s groups and civic organizations. She served on the American Association of University Women board of directors and the League of Women’s Voters. She was on the Chamber of Commerce board and spent nine years on the hospice board. She currently serves on the Blue Cross board and the county library.

When the electronics company her husband worked for in the ‘60s demanded a move back East, they stayed to raise a family and start a business.

“We have been so fortunate in our life. Our health is good and we were able to find a business and live in northern Idaho when the corporate world said go do something else. Now we want to give something back.”

To remind her, she keeps a Sufi eastern Indian blessing posted on her wall: “From you I receive, to you I give, together we share and by this we live.”

She turns to family for advice, and is inspired by the late Francis Heard, a former NIC instructor and civic activist, and former long-time state Sen. Mary Lou Reed, a Democrat.

Meyer’s political ties reach back into the 1970s. She first met Andrus through her environmental activism during his attempts to protect the White Cloud Mountains in the Sawtooth National Recreational Area.

Of all the talented Idahoans he badgered into serving publicly, Meyer’s at the top of the list, Andrus said recently. There was only one vehement opponent to her appointment.

“A little gray-haired lady came into my office the same day I was having a meeting with Judy and said ‘Do not appoint her to the board, she has a family and business and you are just going to wear her out.”’

But Andrus bucked the advice of Meyer’s mother-in-law, and doesn’t regret it. “It was one of my better moves, frankly. I wanted somebody on the state board with community college knowledge. A roomful of alums with Vandal booster or BSU on their chest is important, but not to give us a balance.”

It was Meyer’s experience on NIC’s board of trustees that rankled Coeur d’Alene tax activist Ron Rankin. The only person to testify against Meyer’s appointment, Rankin, now a Kootenai County commissioner, opposed Meyer because she had supported student efforts to start a gay and lesbian student club on campus.

But unlike a current controversy over gay research at Idaho State University, NIC’s club was supported with student fees, not taxpayer’s dollars, Meyer pointed out.

This spring, the state board refused to fund an ISU professor’s research on gays in small communities. The American Civil Liberties Union has threatened the state board with a lawsuit.

“When we are responsible for state funds, the political reality of spending state funds needs to be factored into these decisions,” Meyer said.

The board chose to deny funding the controversial research project, but has been hesitant to address specific school district flaps, such as Bonner County’s budget problems.

“We are giving back to the local folks their local control. Citizens don’t need big sister at the state board thumping on them,” Meyer said.

She responds similarly to questions about the forced resignation of NIC’s Bennett. The state board doesn’t directly oversee NIC, but the Legislature did allocate state money for the first time last year to ease property taxes. That $5 million could be in jeopardy if legislators disagree with trustees’ management.

“It’s another local control issue. But the twist to it is if the legislators aren’t happy with what’s going on there may be some repercussions there. This could affect future funding.”

The board instead must focus on broader statewide issues, Meyer said, like computer literacy, high school graduation standards, and controlling the growth of prison costs, which board members feel is hurting education.

Coeur d’Alene School District Superintendent Doug Cresswell said Meyer is correct to concentrate on the bigger picture.

“They set policy,” Cresswell said of the board. “But the local boards know best what their constituents need in their local schools.”

Meyer, who holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Kalamazoo College in Michigan, taught at a Philadelphia reform school for delinquent black adolescent girls in the late ‘60s. She taught third grade in a Philadelphia public school and fifth grade in Chicago before moving to Idaho, where she substituted in the Coeur d’Alene School District.

Meyer’s children attended Montessorri schools early on, which has helped keep her open-minded about emerging educational alternatives, like voucher programs, charter schools and the Western Governor’s University, an Internet-based “college” that offers academic programs from throughout the nation.

“We need to be very creative about making lots of different ways for people to learn and be open to new ideas,” she said.

That includes improving opportunities for the 70 percent of Idaho’s workforce that needs post-high school training or career retraining, but not necessarily a college degree.

One of the job’s biggest frustrations, Meyer said, is the increased expectations despite declining dollars. The public’s perception of “not getting their money’s worth,” is bunk, Meyer said.

“Society expects so much from the classroom teachers and the public schools. We now do breakfasts and lunches and so much more with the same budgets and without a lot more retraining of our teachers.

I’m often humbled by what I see, by how much people are doing under difficult circumstances.”

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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Judith C. Meyer Age: 55 Occupation: Partner in Parkwood Business Properties Paid: $6.25 an hour plus travel for state board-related work Married: Stephen Meyer Children: Andrew, 25, a river raft guide and Chris, 22, a college student in England Relevant Experience: Appointed to the Idaho Board of Education in 1994; former North Idaho College trustee; taught public school in Philadelphia and Chicago; substituted at NIC and the Coeur d’Alene School District. Interests: Hiking, foreign travel, whitewater river rafting, swimming, downhill and cross-country skiing, tennis, reading.