Rural education centers envisioned

COEUR d'ALENE — Like many others tasked with administering public education in rural districts, Judi Sharrett wears multiple hats. She is the Plummer-Worley School District superintendent and also serves as the director of the district's special education program.

"I've got a lot on my plate — a lot of us have that — and sometimes we just don't have the time, and our district doesn't have the money, for everything we have to do," Sharrett said.

Sharrett gives high marks to a state Department of Education plan that would create a support center for rural schools in North Idaho. Legislation that would have allocated $300,000 toward the creation of the support center passed in the Idaho House during the legislative session that ended Friday, but failed to receive a vote on the Senate floor before the session adjourned.

"Every little district can't afford everything it needs to be compliant and go forward in an optimal way," Sharrett said. "It would be a way of consolidating services as opposed to consolidating districts."

Jeff Church, spokesman for Idaho Department of Education, told The Press Monday he is confident support for the bill, from both educators and legislators, will translate into the momentum needed for the legislation to pass when lawmakers meet again next year.

"We have a lot to be proud of in education, and we had a lot of support but unfortunately we just ran out of time," State Superintendent Sherri Ybarra wrote in an email update. "I wanted to show my support for our rural districts in Idaho, so we will continue this work during the next session as it's something that provides equity and equal opportunity for our rural students to achieve."

The department will continue to work in the meantime, on educating legislators on the vision for the center, as well as highlighting the needs of rural districts, Church said.

"The conversations I've had with a number of superintendents is, when you think about what rural school districts face it really boils down to two things and those are time and geography," Church said. "When I say time it's not in the sense of 'I don't have time for that,' it's in the sense of, if you look at what a superintendent faces on a day to day basis — potentially also being the principal of the high school, possibly the athletic director and bus driver — it's the ability to provide the time to accomplish that task of providing that resource within their school district."

In addition to time, Church mentioned rural school districts often have great distances between each other. The purpose of the centers, he added, is to have a director who would serve as a hub for individual districts to bring their needs to, in an effort to have those needs addressed.

Sharrett used professional development as an example of how a rural education support center could be beneficial to her district. Plummer-Worley has a difficult time hiring and keeping personnel to meet statewide requirements for professional development.

"That's a compliance issue and a rural cooperative could provide contacts needed in order to help us fill some of those positions," Sharrett said, adding a possible solution would be sharing personnel with another district.

Providing dual-enrollment opportunities to students through technology is becoming a larger and larger priority for school districts throughout the state, Sharrett added as another example of where a support center could offer assistance. Rural districts are sometimes able to provide classes, like foreign language, through technology.

"But that is contingent upon a technology director," Sharrett said. "In small rural places it can be hard to find and keep people that know the level of specification you need to have to maintain and keep those services."

According to Church, 13 rural districts in North Idaho have expressed interest in participating in the first center if it is approved next session. Those districts would serve as a pilot program, and Church said districts themselves would work together on creating a list of services, or "menu items," that the center would provide.

"It would be true local control in the sense that those local districts’ boards of trustees and their superintendents are the ones that are driving what occurs in the rural education center," he added. "It certainly would not be the other way around."

Sharrett told The Press that, prior to being hired by the Plummer-Worley School District, she worked in Washington as a teacher and administrator. Washington, she said, has created educational service districts, similar to the centers Idaho is pursuing, that were helpful with providing hard-to-fill resources.

That experience, she added, only solidifies her support for the creation of rural education support centers in Idaho.

"I just see this as nothing but a winning proposition," Sharrett said. "I am very much an advocate for these centers and I will become even more of an advocate. It would provide the opportunity for us to do everything we need to do in more than a minimal fashion."