Board won’t reconsider splitting district

North Idaho’s lone representative on the state Board of Education expressed interest Thursday in reconsidering a request to split the Lake Pend Oreille District in two.

But because Sue Thilo wasn’t on the board at the time the request was denied, she wasn’t allowed to make a motion to reconsider.

The board voted in April to deny the Hope-Clark Fork Coalition for Quality Education’s petition to split Hope and Clark Fork schools from the rest of the district. The grass-roots group of parents and community members appealed.

Board spokeswoman Luci Willits said that to reconsider the decision, one of the board members who voted to deny the split would have to make a motion to reconsider. Nobody at Thursday’s board meeting in Lewiston made a motion.

“It was a long drive down for a very little bit of time they spent on it,” said Vickie Pfiefer, chairwoman of the Lake Pend Oreille School Board. She and Superintendent Mark Berryhill represented the district at Thursday’s meeting.

A few members of the coalition also attended, Pfiefer said. None could be reached for comment Thursday afternoon.

The coalition has argued that Hope and Clark Fork schools would be better off with a small school district of their own. They said the move could increase community support for the schools.

If the split had been approved, it would have been the second deconsolidation effort in the district within five years. The December 1998 deconsolidation split the Bonner County School District into East and West Bonner districts.

East Bonner was renamed the Lake Pend Oreille School District.

If the coalition wants to continue pursuing the split, they will need to file a motion in District Court, Willits said.

Pfiefer said she wasn’t sure if the coalition wanted to do that. She said Thursday’s board meeting provides some closure.

“We need to move on now from here,” she said. “It’s kind of been hanging out there for a few months, not knowing what way it was going to go with the appeal. As a district we need to move forward and work with the folks in Hope and Clark Fork.”