MY TURN: Zero is a placeholder
A zero is a placeholder. It has no value, but it does serve an important function. It temporarily occupies the position of another person or thing. Our elected board of trustees at North Idaho College currently contains two placeholders, Zimmerman and Corkill, elected in 2022. They were recruited by the North Idaho Republicans (NIR), a group not even affiliated with the official Republican Party in Idaho. This makes them shining examples of “Republicans in Name Only,” or RINOs. Their presence on the board has had little, if any, positive effect on the accreditation crisis. The other three trustees, aka “the conservative majority,” recruited by the official Kootenai County Republican Party (KCRCC), have given voters a good return on their trust. They’ve done the very heavy lifting. The conservative contingency has moved the college out of 12 years of consistent decline in enrollment and will soon return the school to good standing with the accreditation board.
For the past year, Chairman Mike Waggoner has led the efforts to stave off loss of accreditation, and he has acknowledged that NIC needed big changes long before the college was ever sanctioned. In a recent interview with The Kootenai Journal, Waggoner said, “Those changes started in 2021 with the board replacing the management (then President MacLennan). This was strongly resisted, but it has worked. We need to thank those members who made the original changes. They are Todd Banducci, Greg McKenzie and Michael Barnes.”
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