Rural School Administrators Report Mounting Mandates, Limited Support from State and Federal Agencies

On any given day, Marion School Superintendent Julia Maxwell takes on dozens of different tasks. She shepherds the school through curriculum changes, steps in for absent teachers, plans the calendar, puts Band-Aids on scraped knees, monitors outdoor recess and mops the hallway after students trudge in with snowy boots. 

“Larger districts have specific people,” she said, speaking from her office in the roughly 150-student school. “I do all of that.”

Maxwell is Marion’s “superintendent with principal duties” — a common position in Montana, where dozens of small school districts dot the state. In addition to the responsibilities of a school superintendent, which deal largely with administration and operations, administrators in Maxwell’s position also take on principal duties, which center around day-to-day happenings, from student behavior to parent meetings. 

Though Montana’s school administrators have long worn many hats, a recent uptick in reporting and testing requirements from state and federal agencies has created mounting responsibilities for superintendents like Maxwell who sit at the helm of small, single-administrator districts. In the past two years, districts like Marion have had to implement a new state accreditation system, new standardized testing, laws out of the state Legislature on everything from school board meeting recordings to enrollment policies, and audits on special education and Title I programming. 

“It was just kind of a perfect storm,” Maxwell said, discussing the policy changes. “Everything kind of unrolled at one time.”

While educators hope new leadership at the Montana Office of Public Instruction will help address some of the burden, the requirements have sent ripples through the Flathead Valley, where administrators report having to complete more work with stagnant support, and where many are leaving their jobs this spring. 

In Flathead County alone, there are 23 school districts, nine of which have one administrator responsible for both superintendent and principal duties. Two districts — West Glacier and Pleasant Valley — are administered by a lead teacher who also has classroom responsibilities. The county’s elementary school districts vary in size from 801 students at West Valley to nine at Pleasant Valley. 

While larger districts like Kalispell and Whitefish have assistant superintendents, business managers, payroll specialists, special services coordinators and human resources specialists, superintendents at small districts often take on all of those roles — and more — at once. 

“Some of the processes that they’re expecting for us small school administrators, we’re one person wearing all of these hats, it makes it extremely difficult to complete it all,” Olney Bissell School Principal/Superintendent Trevor Dahlman said. 

“Larger districts have specific people,” Maxwell, of the Marion School, said. “There’s nobody to do it but me.”

Small school administrators have long handled large workloads. Yet local superintendents say that the past three years have been marked by a significant uptick in reporting and testing requirements from the state and federal government, which have overwhelmed staff and pulled administrators away from the classroom, where their support is needed. 

The Montana Office of Public Instruction (OPI) in 2023 rolled out major revisions to Chapter 55, the section of Montana code that governs school accreditation. After extensive debate and, at times, pushback from public education advocates, the state adopted the amended rules designed to keep Montana’s schools up to certain standards of educational quality. The standards added financial literacy graduation requirements, required districts to adopt plans to engage with families, and mandated written evaluations of all instructional personnel under OPI guidance, among other provisions. 

While former OPI Superintendent Elsie Arntzen said the newly revised standards would prioritize local control, school officials reported an overwhelming effort required to adopt the new standards and load data into the OPI portal. 

“The amount of resources that we have to have, and the amount of data and the amount of community input is significantly more than it was,” Dahlman said. 

Cayuse Prairie Superintendent/Principal Amy Piazzola said it took at least 15 hours just to upload information from her computer to the OPI accreditation platform. 

On top of accreditation, districts struggled to adopt Montana Alternative Student Testing (MAST), a new standardized testing program that promised an improved model for measuring student performance in third through eighth grades. MAST requires educators to give students shorter, more frequent tests in math and reading rather than a long, summative assessment at the end of the year.

Laurie Barron, superintendent of the Evergreen School District and president of the northwest region of the Montana Association of School Superintendents (MASS), said implementing the MAST testing has been “overwhelming.” 

With shorter, more frequent tests, Barron and others said it’s a constant struggle to keep track of student absences and re-administer assessments to those who missed tests. 

Dahlman of Olney Bissell said using a secure browser to administer the tests has been “a nightmare.” 

Lawmakers in 2023 also passed a host of bills pertaining to career and technical education, student evaluation, teacher support and school choice. 

House Bill 338 intensified reporting requirements for schools that receive Indian Education for All funds. House Bill 352 provided targeted literacy interventions for some students under 5. House Bill 588 expanded incentives to boost starting teacher pay. Some bills required changes to district policy in concert with attorneys and, at times, the implementation of entirely new programs.

A bill allowing for open enrollment across Montana’s public schools has been particularly arduous. The majority of schools in the Flathead Valley already had informal “open enrollment” policies before the bill’s passage. Now, superintendents and district clerks are required to process large stacks of paperwork for the state and exchange tax dollars with other schools for out-of-district students. 

Administrators said they believe the new policies are well intentioned, but a lack of input from rural districts has made it difficult to translate them from the Capitol to the classroom. 

“A lot of this legislation that comes down, it makes sense on paper, but it doesn’t always make sense in practice,” Deer Park Superintendent/Principal Sheri Modderman said. 

Piazzola of Cayuse Prairie said, “If any of those legislators that voted for this had the insight of working in a school to know what the paperwork would be, I think it would have turned out totally different.” 

On the federal level, schools are required to submit a host of reports pertaining to civil rights data collection, employment, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and career and technical education. 

While various reporting and monitoring requirements often hit schools on two- or three-year cycles, Barron, of Evergreen, said many state and federal requirements landed on the Flathead Valley’s rural schools all at once over the past two years. 

“I don’t think the state or the federal government is intentionally trying to make things hard,” she said. 

“They all just keep hitting at the same time.”

At the heart of some of the challenges has been a lack of communication with OPI, which, until January, was run by the embattled former Superintendent Elsie Arntzen. During Arntzen’s tenure, OPI faced criticism for failing to implement new education laws and potentially misusing $67 million in federal funds. 

Dahlman said it’s been challenging to get in touch with staff at OPI when he has needed support.

Modderman, of Deer Park, said the office failed to give clear guidance on the new reporting and testing systems. 

Administrators say they’re hopeful about the office’s new superintendent, Susie Hedalen, who was formerly the superintendent of the Townsend School District and served as the vice-chair of the Montana Board of Public Education. 

Hedalen campaigned on her experience teaching in and running public schools, and said in a conversation with the Beacon that she plans to bring a “practitioner’s lens” to the job. 

“I’ve been in the field. I’ve had to complete these reports and fulfill these requirements,” Hedalen said. “I understand the administrative burden, and I’ve been one of those people who’s been very vocal about this for many years.”

Changes are already underway at OPI. 

Hedalen is working to shorten the length of MAST exams so teachers can administer the tests in one class period. OPI plans to hold a summer institute on MAST where educators can discuss concerns and solutions. Hedalen is working on creating separate accreditation requirements for rural schools, which she said should not be held to the same reporting standards as the state’s biggest districts. 

“That’s something I was vocal about last year as a school superintendent in the field. The accreditation process was requiring a lot from our schools. It was very time consuming,” she said. 

Hedalen said she is working with lawmakers to ensure new laws are feasible for schools — honing in on details like implementation dates and funding calendars. 

“They have great intentions and want to see our student outcomes improve,” Hedalen said, discussing the Legislature. “But we also have to think about what it takes to implement some of these policies on the school level.”

The superintendent, who is a Republican, also said she is hopeful that the Trump Administration will cut back on reporting requirements from the federal Department of Education. 

Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education. His nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, said that, if confirmed, she plans to “return education to the states where it belongs.”

Montana schools currently receive around $3,300 per pupil from the federal government, compared to $6,100 from the state and $6,100 from local funding. 

Hedalen said she “looks forward” to the Trump administration’s plans to “move some of those federal programs to the state level.” 

Other challenges remain for Montana’s public schools: teacher shortages, funding gaps, aging infrastructure and difficulty passing local levies. 

Five schools in Flathead County are set to lose their top administrators this year. 

Somers-Lakeside Superintendent Joe Price and Swan River Superintendent/Principal JJ Lamb are retiring. Fair-Mont-Egan Superintendent/Principal Brandy Carlenzoli, Creston Principal Rachel Stevens and Kila Superintendent/Principal Shannon Marshall are resigning. In Creston and Kila, district clerks Tammy Bartos and Sharon Leach are also stepping down. 

Carlenzoli said she has loved her job, but that the workload has become “untenable.” 

Administrators in the Flathead say they remain committed to keeping Montana’s small, rural schools alive. 

Some small districts in the state have consolidated to save money. A bill introduced in the Legislature this session by Rep. Fiona Nave, R-Columbus, sought to consolidate all independent elementary school districts into their local high school district by 2029. It was tabled unanimously in committee.

The idea remains unpopular in the Flathead Valley. 

“It defeats the purpose, I think, of what we try to do as small schools and why people want to be at small schools,” Modderman, of Deer Park, a 168-student school, said.  “I would hate to see that happen”

“Small districts are what built Montana,” Maxwell said. “They’re very important to our culture.”

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