Trustees look for community feedback

POLSON — Polson School Board trustee Brian Havlovick made a plea Monday night for community members to address their concerns with the Polson School District and, at least a little bit more, got his wish at the monthly board meeting that took place at Polson High School.

“Over the last several months, people in the community, friends and neighbors have come up to me and made statements about the board or school,” Havlovick said. “I’ve always made the plea to folks like that that they need to show up to meetings and the community needs to speak.”

Polson parent Keith Edmondson took the floor, reading from a prepared letter, urging the board to shift its focus from internal feuds to where its attention belongs: the students.

“Since the election of the new board, focus on student welfare has been minimal at best,” Edmonson said. “The most recent meeting lasted close to five hours with less than 20 minutes of that time being devoted to student issues. Meetings have devolved into legal ramblings and maneuvers. Teamwork and congeniality have been nonexistent… Kids come first, period.”

Polson Middle School fifth-grade teacher Charles Bertsch then spoke, taking issue with Edmonson’s claim that the current board has been the problem in recent months.

“I take it upon myself to attend every board meeting that I can and I’ve done it for two-and-a-half years,” Bertsch said. “I can tell you that what is happening is not because of the present board members. What I can tell you is what has happened, happened prior to them coming here.”

Bertsch then cited two incidents involving Superintendent David Whitesell and controversial comments Whitesell made about teachers and the school’s failure to make AYP.

Bertsch was followed by Cherry Valley Elementary principal Elaine Meeks, who said that while that was Bertsch’s truth and she respected his right to say it, her personal truth was that certain members of the board were responsible for creating division between schools in the district, but the faculty in each location needed to overcome that and work together.

“I really feel that it is important as professional educators that we rise above the division,” Meeks said. “We are all in this together. We are not one school, one school, one school, one school.”

In the district goals update, Polson High School Athletic Director Scott Wilson informed the board that they only received 20 responses from the community after sending out district goal surveys via Take Home Tuesdays and surveymonkey.com. Wilson’s primary concern was that the goals outlined might not have been as clear as possible, a point Havlovick echoed a few minutes later.

The low response count prompted a discussion as to how to get more feedback from the community, with trustee Nancy Lindsey mentioning the best way would be to be more forward-looking by starting within the community to develop goals, while trustee Bob Hanson advocated for a concrete and clarified set of goals that would get the community more involved.

“I’d rather be able to give the community a solid proposal and let them take shots at it,” Hanson said.

Ultimately, Wilson decided that the next step is to come up with objectives under the goals that would better outline the direction that the district is looking to go.