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HELENA — On Friday, the Montana Office of Public Instruction delivered an update to the state Board of Public Education about the status of federal COVID-19 relief funds for K-12 schools. According to the figures presented by OPI Chief Financial Officer David Williams, Montana has so far expended roughly $29 million of the $593 million allocated through a trio of laws passed by Congress since the onset of the pandemic. The bulk of the relief funding disbursed to schools so far came from the original CARES Act passed in March 2020. Williams i...
HELENA — Montana’s five-member redistricting commission voted earlier this month to formally adopt criteria to guide its work in establishing lines for the state’s new congressional district. A vote on criteria governing how the commission will redraw state legislative boundaries was pushed to this week. The Districting and Apportionment Commission’s votes came after nearly a full day of debate among Democratic and Republican members, with each side pushing its preferred criteria in the face of strong opposition from the other. Those proposa...
When Al Ekblad woke up on Nov. 4, 2020, his mind immediately turned to the approaching legislative session. Montana voters had just elected a slate of Republican candidates to statewide offices - candidates the AFL-CIO, with Ekblad as executive secretary, had actively messaged against - by wider margins than pollsters had predicted. Republican supermajorities consolidated power in the statehouse. Election night was "pretty eye-opening," Ekblad said, and he emerged from it knowing that another...
HELENA - The Montana Office of Public Instruction submitted a plan to the U.S. Department of Education Tuesday outlining how it intends to spend $382 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds. The plan reflects more than a month of legislative debate this spring over the allocation of money from the American Rescue Plan Act. Lawmakers ultimately approved an ARPA spending plan, House Bill 632, in April, that identified learning loss and enrollment-induced budget gaps as key funding priorities....
After months of legislative debate, Montanans are beginning to glimpse how new laws passed by the 67th Legislature are poised to impact their lives. For county and municipal leaders, those impacts amount to a notable reduction in their ability to respond at a local level on a range of issues including public health, affordable housing and agricultural sustainability. One of the highest-profile examples of a major change local officials now have to contend with is House Bill 121, which requires that any rules or regulations proposed by local hea...
The Montana Board of Regents announced last week it will push for a judicial review of the state's new "constitutional carry" law, which is poised to allow students and university staff to carry concealed weapons on campuses across Montana beginning June 1. The regents were expected next week to review an implementation strategy for House Bill 102 developed by the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education. But after a weeks-long effort to gather public feedback, the regents met virtually We... Full story
Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen highlighted several legislative priorities for the state's public schools Thursday, including a push to offer increased funding security for special needs students in Montana. Arntzen's statements came during a formal State of Education address forecasting the road ahead in 2021 for an education system still contending with the challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back to this time last year, Arntzen said, there's much that...
Throughout 2020, political contenders of all stripes made the same straightforward promise, one that's now as familiar to Montana voters as spring runoff or November snowstorms: to be a champion for public lands. This election-year refrain arrived in the form of television ads, campaign mailers and stump speeches. It drove debate responses, spawned attacks and spurred outside groups to sift through voting records in an attempt to glean how sincere the promise might or might not be. Now, with a...
In mid-June, as Montana's COVID-19 case count began its summer climb, the Missoula City-County Health Department announced it would begin testing asymptomatic frontline workers. The declaration seemed to signal progress on the path to expanded testing capability, fitting neatly into the hopeful picture painted by Gov. Steve Bullock when he set a goal in April of conducting 60,000 COVID tests statewide per month. Within a week, however, Missoula health officials were inundated with people...
