Last month, a panel of Montana lawmakers attempted to gain clarity regarding the state education department’s handling of millions of dollars in federal funds. Legislative auditors had just briefed them on $67.5 million in questioned costs associated with low-income students, special needs programs and the ongoing effects of COVID-19. In a tone bordering on paternal dissatisfaction, Senate President Jason Ellsworth described the findings as “significant.”The legislators’ quest for explanations proved slow going, in part due to the absence of Montana’s top education official, Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen. Ellsworth noted that Arntzen was traveling — “in the air,” he said, at the very moment her agency’s audit was up for discussion — but assured committee members he’d been in touch with her via text. Through a succession of upper-level OPI staffers and, later, a call from Arntzen herself, Ellsworth and his colleagues began to glean a clearer understanding of the issues underlying the agency’s negative audit findings.“In the room, their responses were perplexing on issues of that magnitude,” Democratic Vice Chair Laura Smith of Helena told Montana Free Press. “Some questions were answered, many were not, and I feel very deeply about ensuring accountability moving forward because these are issues impacting real children in our communities.”Arntzen already knew about the concerns uncovered by the routine federally mandated audit. In an interview with MTFP a week earlier, she’d previewed the crux of her defense of OPI’s approach to pandemic relief spending. Citing one district’s documented use of the funds to buy massage chairs for its teachers lounge, Arntzen posed a rhetorical question: who is she to tell a local district what it needs to improve the school-day lives of its teachers and students?“I said yes, that was an allowable use [of pandemic relief funds] because of the mental health capacity and the rural nature and the understanding in [the] community that to keep teachers teaching, that they needed to have that,” Arntzen told MTFP. “Now they’re saying that was not an allowable use from the state auditors, and I’m saying, I guess we beg to disagree.”Superintendent Elsie Arntzen’s self-described goals during her two terms heading the Office of Public Instruction have been to reduce bureaucracy, limit federal overreach and heed the will of Montana parents — goals that have won her ardent fans and staunch critics. Credit: Zeke Lloyd / MTFPHer trademark deference to the decision-making authority of local education officials notwithstanding, Arntzen and her staff have since worked to shore up the documentation of federal spending by Montana’s public schools. Still, Arntzen insists that her agency has already communicated with federal compliance officers and “satiated their requests,” deflecting any implied criticism about OPI’s performance while excusing government bureaucracies like the one she’s led for two terms as imperfect and, hopefully, in a constant state of improvement.On the surface, last month’s hearing was a cautionary tale about financial accountability. But stirring below the surface are well-documented and ongoing concerns over the condition of the agency tasked with supporting Montana’s more than 800 public schools. Many of OPI’s most tenacious watchdogs praise the perseverance and dedication of the department’s rank-and-file employees, placing responsibility for the agency’s hiccups and hardships squarely at the feet of its elected head of the past seven and a half years.“Leadership matters,” Rep. David Bedey, a three-term Republican from Hamilton and chair of the Legislature’s education budget committee, told MTFP. “In any organization.”After an unsuccessful attempt at Montana’s eastern district congressional seat in the 2024 Republican primary, Arntzen’s nearly two decades in public office is now nearing its end. The former Billings schoolteacher turned six-term state lawmaker will close out her second and final term as state superintendent on Dec. 31, handing over the reins of Montana’s K-12 school system and one of the state’s largest agency budgets to a successor to be determined Nov. 5. But before voters decide which candidate’s vision they prefer, there’s an underlying question at play: How has OPI — and, by extension, public education in Montana — changed over the past eight years?When Arntzen eased into OPI past Democratic rival Melissa Romano by 16,000 votes in November 2016, the result marked a fundamental shift at the top of Montana’s education hierarchy. For nearly 30 years prior, the post of state superintendent had been held by the political left, most recently Denise Juneau, two-term anchor of the state’s Democratic bench and the first Indigenous woman elected to a statewide executive office in U.S. history. Arntzen’s victory coincided with the statewide ascendancy of fellow Republicans Matt Rosendale and Corey Stapleton, who respectively wrested the offices of auditor and secretary of state from Democratic dominance, and foreshadowed the storied “red wave” of 2020 that solidified conservative control of every office of state government. The partisan gap at the superintendent level had been steadily closing in Republicans’ favor for more than two decades. When Linda McCulloch ran in 1988 for the first of her three consecutive terms — before Montana’s adoption of term limits — she defeated Republican opponent Barbara Foster by nearly 76,000 votes. In 2012, Juneau eked out reelection with a lead of just 2,200 votes. From the start, Arntzen’s campaign was built on a less-is-more approach to government involvement in education. She chided federal requirements regarding standardized testing, promoted local control and argued that accountability starts in the classroom. Montana’s then-largest public employees union, MEA-MFT, balked at her candidacy, attributing its opposition to her legislative record of support for charter schools and tax credits for private school scholarship donations.In an interview with MTFP, Tim Tharp speculated that at the time Arntzen was elected, the bulk of OPI staff had likely come onboard under Democratic leadership. A member of Arntzen’s 2016 transition team and her first deputy superintendent, Tharp now serves as chair of Montana’s Board of Public Education and the elected school superintendent for Richland County. He said the shift from a Democratic state superintendent to a Republican one obviously brought with it a different political philosophy. Navigating that change, he added, was among the new Arntzen administration’s earliest challenges.“It’s one thing to come in and just decide, OK, we’re just going to blow this all up and make it our own. But you do that, you are literally going to blow it up,” Tharp said. “You’re not going to have anything left. So it was a matter of trying to figure out where we could make an impact and where the philosophy could be part of that.”Like a teacher organizing a lesson plan, Arntzen sorted her goals for OPI into four distinct columns, assigning each its own thematic title: Montana Hope, with its stated focus on student mental health; Montana Teach, encompassing initiatives impacting the teaching profession; Montana Learn, signaling efforts aimed at student achievement; and Montana Ready, the bucket housing Arntzen’s endeavors in career and technical education. Those four pillars quickly became part of the agency’s external branding, appearing in red lettering on signs and press releases alongside the official OPI logo — itself the subject of several alterations before Arntzen finally landed on the now-familiar red-inked “A+” set against the outline of Montana.But Arntzen’s philosophy also manifested early on in a lack of engagement in policy debates at the Montana Legislature. Whereas the OPI of previous administrations had taken active stances on bills impacting public education, Arntzen held a strict no-advocacy line on everything except the Legislature’s routine consideration of an inflationary increase to state funding for schools. As she told the Board of Public Education during the 2017 session, “No one in our office is going to be wearing a lobbying pin.”Meanwhile, Arntzen billed herself as a “gatekeeper” against federal overreach, a stance put to the test during her first year in office when Congress canned the beleaguered George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act and passed in its place the Every Student Succeeds Act. Tharp, who left as Arntzen’s deputy after a year, recalled that the agency’s feedback on those federal rewrites presented one of the first opportunities for the new Republican leadership to stretch its philosophical legs by suggesting minor tweaks to reporting and compliance practices.It didn’t take long for change at OPI to rankle legislative Democrats and leaders at the state teachers union. By August 2017, the latter was publicly chastising Arntzen for her abrupt takeover of the Montana Teacher of the Year Program. For 22 years MEA-MFT had taken point on fielding nominations and selecting a local educator for statewide distinction each year, and while the union acknowledged Arntzen’s right to step in, it was nonetheless chagrined.“Elections have consequences,” MEA-MFT wrote in a public response to the news. “This is one of them. Small perhaps, but indicative of how Elsie looks upon her role as our superintendent.”Inside the agency, some staffers began to feel the leadership shift in their daily work. In a 2021 interview with MTFP, former assistant superintendent BJ Granberry said her involvement in high-level policy conversations at OPI quickly waned as Arntzen’s team took charge, relegating her to more bureaucratic duties. No longer able to influence the direction of the divisions she oversaw, Granberry accelerated her retirement plans and departed in July 2017.She wasn’t the first, nor the last, of the agency’s staff to leave during Arntzen’s tenure. According to records obtained by MTFP this fall, 268 full-time employees departed OPI between January 2017 and September 2024 — a turnover rate of more than 150% of the budgeted full-time positions at the agency in 2017. The listed reasons for those departures include 60 retirements, 68 “personal reasons,” four “for cause” terminations and at least two employee deaths. The 268 figure does not include a subset of employees classified as short-term or temporary, whose jobs are typically attached to time-fixed programs or grants and whose departures are listed in agency records as “end of assignment.”Critics of Arntzen’s leadership often cite turnover at OPI as a top concern, claiming that the resulting loss of institutional knowledge and fluctuation in staffing in particular divisions have triggered downstream impacts for local educators. Rob Watson, former Missoula County Public Schools superintendent and current executive director of the School Administrators of Montana, summed up the effect as “inconsistency” in both the processes and procedures local school officials rely on and among the state-level experts they turn to for help.“What changed for us is it became really almost transactional under new leadership,” Watson said of the relationship between OPI and local administrators. “There were the people that felt like they had a good line of communication but then maybe it broke down because somebody switched over. Just really inconsistent with regards to getting our concerns addressed, to a point now where sometimes you want to follow through with that concern, and sometimes you kind of just let it go because you’re not quite sure if it’s going to make a difference.”Watson is quick to clarify that his inconsistency concern is not meant as a criticism of the agency’s staff, whom he describes as “in it for the right reasons” and, particularly for those new to their roles, “trying to do the best they can.” It’s a distinction that, while Watson was still at MCPS in late 2021, he and the heads of Montana’s other seven large AA school districts tried to impart even as they publicly expressed their lack of confidence in Arntzen’s leadership. Their joint letter — penned nearly a year into Arntzen’s second term, as OPI staff departures were approaching their highest annual total of 44 employees — hit home. Arntzen released a public response acknowledging the concerns, adding, “I look forward to continuing to make OPI the best office possible.”School Administrators of Montana Executive Director Rob Watson describes Arntzen’s tenure at OPI as one of “inconsistency” in the agency’s responsiveness to the needs of local school officials, though he’s quick to note that’s not a criticism of hard-working, dedicated state employees. Credit: Tailyr Irvine / MTFPIn the three years since, staff departures have shown little sign of slowing. Asked for a fresh perspective this month, Arntzen referenced several factors she believes have driven high turnover at OPI. Chief among them, she said, was her inheritance of a workforce already largely on the cusp of retirement. That, she said, coupled with her broader push to reshape the size and structure of the agency, has resulted in a younger agency with fewer collective years of experience in the public education system. Arntzen argues the change was the intentional result of the agency discarding the past practice of hiring seasoned later-career veterans in favor of younger “innovators” and “risk-takers” eager to make a professional impact.“It was kind of like a progression. You work in a school district, then you work at the state level,” Arntzen said. “That’s not where we are at this point. I have a very young staff, and the young staff may have only worked three to four years within a school agency and not retired. I pulled them out of the field and gave them the opportunity, under the banner of innovation, to be able to take what they could maybe want, to be able to put it into the agency.”Not quite halfway through Arntzen’s tenure as state superintendent, public instruction across Montana was thrust into a sudden and protracted era of turmoil. On March 15, 2020, then-Gov. Steve Bullock declared a statewide school closure in an effort to contain the mounting COVID-19 pandemic. His office had been in regular contact with OPI ahead of the shutdown, and the two administrations appeared to be in agreement about the need for such action even as OPI raced to ensure students had continued access to educational resources and school meals.“I have a very young staff, and the young staff may have only worked three to four years within a school agency and not retired. I pulled them out of the field and gave them the opportunity, under the banner of innovation, to be able to take what they could maybe want, to be able to put it into the agency.” State Superintendent Elsie ArntzenAs the weeks stretched into months, that bipartisan unity started to crack under questions about when and how Montana might return to classroom instruction. Bullock and Arntzen each released their own guidance for local school officials, with Arntzen accusing Bullock of excluding her agency from decisions impacting teachers, students and parents. Tension seeped down to the community level, creeping like a brushfire from one school board meeting to the next until, a year and a half into the global confusion, parents were alternately accusing local officials of doing too much or not enough to keep their children safe.Fears tied to the coronavirus helped usher in a now-established movement espousing largely conservative Christian values in the guise of “parental rights.” Lawsuits targeting school mask mandates have given way to challenges seeking the removal of specific LGBTQ- and race-centric books from school libraries and classrooms. These so-called culture wars have gripped the entire nation, featuring prominently in the highest-profile federal campaigns. They’ve also proven to be a lightning rod in conversations surrounding OPI and its outgoing leader.In August 2023, Arntzen claimed during a radio interview that her agency had evidence of litter boxes in Montana schools. Her claim, though brief and lacking in detail, raised a red flag among public school advocates. Republican lawmakers and parental rights advocates elsewhere in the country had leveled identical and baseless allegations, claiming teachers were allowing students who identify as cats to use litter boxes as toilets. The not-so-subtle implications: public schools go too far in encouraging students to explore nonbinary sexual orientations and gender identities.State Superintendent Elsie Arntzen addresses a crowd of parents, teachers and school officials at Stevensville Elementary School Dec. 13 during the second of four feedback forums she’s conducting. Arntzen said her goal is to hear directly from community members about their concerns with K-12 education in Montana. Credit: Alex Sakariassen / MTFPOPI was unable to furnish MTFP with any evidence to support Arntzen’s claim, which Montana School Boards Association Executive Director Lance Melton described at the time as “ludicrous.” Asked about the episode again in an interview last month, Arntzen reiterated what her office told MTFP at the time: the allegation initially came to her from a citizen at a community forum in Miles City. Arntzen added that residents in eastern Montana repeated the claim to her this year during her Republican primary campaign for the state’s eastern district congressional seat. “It is not up to me to say, ‘I’m going to fact-check you,’” Arntzen told MTFP. “That is not up to me.”The COVID-19 pandemic served as an accelerant not just for the ideological battles waging around OPI, but for a dramatic shift in the agency’s internal structure. As Montana began its slow plod back toward normalcy, Arntzen seized on the remote work approach necessitated by Bullock’s statewide shutdown to further her goal of reducing government spending (legislative records show the agency’s budget for state-level activities has declined roughly $1 million since 2017.) She endorsed telework, reshaping the agency’s policies and encouraging new hires to forego the move to Helena in favor of staying in their home communities. According to agency data, 112 full-time OPI employees — 64% of the agency’s full-time workforce— now work remotely.As a direct result, OPI’s physical presence in the state capital has shrunk from three buildings to one, which Arntzen claims has saved taxpayers three-quarters of a million dollars in office leases and travel costs per year. She also argues that having OPI staff living and working across Montana — in more than 50 different cities and 24 different counties, according to agency information — is keeping the state’s public education agency firmly rooted in the communities it serves. Arntzen has even urged state lawmakers to revisit a law prohibiting OPI and other agencies from employing out-of-state remote workers, arguing that such permission would alleviate hiring challenges and allow her to hire the most qualified candidates for particular positions.Watchdogs of Arntzen’s leadership question if that’s truly how things have played out, with Montana Federation of Public Employees President Amanda Curtis claiming that phone calls and questions from educators in the field still often go “unanswered.” For his part, Tim Tharp said he cautioned against a concerted move toward telework during his early stint as Arntzen’s deputy. One of Tharp’s primary goals at OPI was to “eliminate the silos” that kept various divisions of the agency separated and cultivate a more integrated, collaborative work environment. “I’m afraid that might be lost with the support and emphasis on remote employees, and this is where you see the conservative values of Elsie coming out,” Tharp said. “We had three office buildings and now she’s down to one office building with all the people who are working remote. I think there’s a lack of understanding exactly what everybody else is doing by having all of that remote work.”Arguably the pandemic’s greatest impact on OPI, however, was an unprecedented flood of $605 million in federal aid to address COVID-19’s immediate and long-term effects. Montana schools directed the funding at a host of challenges, from upgrading aging infrastructure to hiring behavioral health specialists to establishing programs for students struggling to get back on track academically. OPI served as overseer of those funds, collecting proposals and providing technical assistance to the state’s far-flung districts, all while managing its own slice of federal relief dollars carved out by the Montana Legislature to finance the agency’s projects.The window to commit the last of those funds closed Sept. 30, and in a race to ensure the money was spent, Arntzen directed $1.5 million of OPI’s allowance this fall to the nonprofit crowdsourcing platform DonorsChoose. All told, 3,332 teachers in 488 Montana schools utilized the portal before the funds were exhausted, each securing less than $500 worth of supplies for classroom projects. Each DonorsChoose project page included a note stating that it was “brought to life by Superintendent Elsie Arntzen and the Montana OPI.”“I think there’s an understanding among educators that this is one person’s problem and that this one person has not been able to lead her staff in a way that’s congruent with what’s actually happening in our schools. She’s made herself into much more of a politician than she is an education leader.” MFPE President Amanda CurtisBut as has happened in other states, the sudden influx in federal funding is generating questions about how the money was spent. When state auditors presented their OPI findings to lawmakers last month, the pandemic-era assistance program accounted for 77% of the $67.5 million in spending they felt required greater scrutiny. The audit report noted administrative weaknesses in OPI’s ability to document that the money was spent in compliance with federal requirements and recommended the agency improve its process for collecting receipts from local districts related to such spending.OPI partly rebuffed the audit’s conclusions, attributing some of the negative findings to issues with federal reporting systems and arguing it had documentation from the U.S. Department of Education affirming the funds were used appropriately. In an interview with MTFP, Arntzen doubled down on that assertion, explaining that OPI had already begun improving its internal controls prior to last month’s findings.“My master is the federal government,” Arntzen said with regard to the questioned expenses, “therefore half of those findings are something that I’ll deal with with the federal government.”For Rep. David Bedey, the state audit’s findings appear to reflect the ongoing challenges created by staff turnover and its impacts on institutional knowledge within the agency. The Legislature’s chief custodian of education funding and a longtime Arntzen foil in education policy debates, Bedey remains uncertain how the agency’s financial questions will play out.As head of the Legislature’s education budget committee, Rep. David Bedey has emerged as a strong critic of Arntzen’s handling of key responsibilities at OPI, namely the implementation of bipartisan education policies and a $14-million effort to upgrade the agency’s data systems. Credit: Tailyr Irvine / MTFP“I don’t know what the ultimate consequence of this will be with the federal government,” Bedey said. “Worst case scenario, the feds might contemplate clawing that money back, which would be an enormous hit on the general fund. But I think it’s too early to make that dire prediction.”Bedey’s own scuffles with the administration at OPI have at turns involved pandemic relief funding — specifically, a nearly $14 million bucket he and other state lawmakers set aside to help the agency update and improve its public education data systems. The Legislature’s goal was to create a more reliable way to track the academic progress of individual students and gauge the efficiency of state-funded programs designed to bolster that progress. But the pace of the project and Arntzen’s insistence that federal student privacy laws restrict some of what lawmakers hoped to achieve have drawn Bedey’s ire.He doesn’t fault the vendor OPI ultimately contracted with to develop the system, nor the “hardworking people at OPI that have worked on this.” However, in an interview with MTFP, Bedey counted the “limping along” of the project as a “failure” of the current administration.“Based on some discussions I’ve had, I’m optimistic we will eventually have a database modernization system that fulfills the legislative intent and that serves the state of Montana well,” Bedey said. “I’m a little concerned that it may require some additional funding that would not have been necessary had we gotten on this a little sooner, but that was based upon decisions made by the superintendent and her approach to the implementation and execution of this project.”Speed also became a concern for lawmakers earlier this year with regard to OPI’s implementation of the most sweeping legislative agenda to hit public education in recent memory. The 2023 session saw the bipartisan creation of new policies enabling public charter schools in existing school districts, guaranteeing state funding for programs to improve early childhood literacy and applying stricter reporting requirements to funds aimed at teaching Indigenous culture and history. But scathing accounts from the field last March suggested a lackluster rollout of those initiatives, and lawmakers called on Arntzen to account for a growing chorus of local complaints.As with the audit committee hearing, Arntzen was unable to attend the budget committee’s proceedings at the state Capitol, with her office citing “personal obligations.” In her stead, OPI chief legal counsel and Deputy Superintendent Rob Stutz sought to counter lawmakers’ assertions that the office was mishandling the Legislature’s directives. Meanwhile, in a press statement released during the hearing, Arntzen decried the criticism as “political persecution” of her conservative bid to rein in bureaucracy, promote good government and fight the “radical transgender agenda.”Such rhetorical flourishes, delivered in the midst of a charged discussion about responsible governance, have a broad impact. Tharp said the rumors and accusations he’s heard advanced by fellow conservatives have at times made him “cringe,” and can prove damaging not only to state-level leaders but to local education officials as well. Sharyl Allen, another of Arntzen’s former deputies who left last year to pursue a failed Republican primary bid for Arntzen’s office, concurred. “We live in a time of conflict and divisiveness and partisan politics. It’s not the factual that we listen for anymore,” Allen told MTFP. “What we get is a lot of opinions but not a lot of fact or truth. And when opinions become truth, that’s dangerous.”Allen said part of her role as deputy superintendent at OPI was “to do damage control and have the back of the superintendent.” And, she added, she did so by maintaining connections with local leaders in the field and doing what she could from within the agency to mitigate their concerns. Referencing the December 2021 letter from Montana’s AA district superintendents condemning Arntzen’s leadership, Allen argued that “scathing indictments” of an individual do little to foster resolution in a dispute. But according to Allen, what she didn’t tell Arntzen at the time was that before she interceded on the superintendent’s behalf, smaller districts in the state were contemplating drafting a letter of their own.Prior to the pandemic’s arrival and the frenzy of education reform at the 2023 Legislature, Arntzen’s critical view of bureaucracy had thrust OPI into yet another era-defining undertaking: the formal revision of state regulations governing many of the most critical aspects of the K-12 system. State law mandates that the exhaustive process occur every 10 years, but in some cases Montana’s rule books were overdue for an update.Madalyn Quinlan, who worked at OPI for 27 years and served as chief of staff to three different state superintendents prior to joining the Board of Public Education in 2019, applauded the emphasis Arntzen’s administration placed on reviewing public education’s regulatory framework. The agency spent months convening working groups and task forces on chapters directing teacher licensing practices, curriculum standards and school quality benchmarks, forwarding recommended rewrites to the board for consideration, public input and potential adoption. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen addresses a crowd supporting school choice in front of the Montana State Capitol on Friday, Jan. 27, 2023. Credit: Samuel Wilson / Bozeman Daily Chronicle“It’s been a heavy lift for the board, but I think it’s been a good thing,” Quinlan said. “I think our new [school] accreditation process in particular is going to be something that we will be happy with in the long run.”Here too, OPI’s work has been partly influenced by Arntzen’s vision of public education as a whole — a vision that’s given rise to disagreement. In a purported effort to give local administrators and school board trustees greater flexibility in their staffing decisions, the agency called for eliminating mandatory staffing ratios for librarians and counselors in Montana schools. Citing the state’s ongoing teacher shortage, Arntzen also called for loosening teacher licensing requirements to create a wider hiring pool for struggling districts.Both proposals drew fire from statewide education organizations and educators who viewed the changes as an erosion of professional standards and an imminent threat to the well-being and academic success of Montana students. In the end, the Board of Public Education preserved librarian and counselor ratios in its new accreditation rules, but adopted new licensing regulations that make it easier for military spouses to obtain in-state teacher certification.Teacher licensure also served as the catalyst for Arntzen’s latest critique of her fellow state education officials. In a September press release, she rebuked the board for a roughly $75 increase to teacher licensing fees implemented last November — fees that once flowed to the board itself but, after a successful push by Arntzen, were diverted to OPI last legislative session to pay for the agency’s new online licensing system. Board members argued in 2023 that raising the fees, which had been fixed at $6 since 1991, was necessary to cover OPI’s estimated expenses. But according to an OPI analysis released last month, the increased fees generated more than $112,000 in excess revenue. “Teachers should not bear the burden of covering the cost of the licensing when they already struggle to make ends meet,” Arntzen said in a press statement. “The efficiencies of our new licensing system have clearly been met. It is beyond time that the Board of Public Education respect our teacher’s wallets and lower the licensing fees.”It’s not the first time Arntzen has professed to take a stand on behalf of teachers faced with low pay, a rising cost of living and a growing list of professional demands. During her tenure, OPI has implemented a paid residency program designed to offset the financial burden of student teaching, hosted virtual teacher job fairs, and sought educator input on new standards for math, reading and civics curricula. But advocating for lower licensing fees marks one of the few instances when Arntzen’s stance has aligned with that of the union representing those teachers, the Montana Federation of Public Employees.By MFPE President Amanda Curtis’ account, her organization’s concerns about OPI under Arntzen’s administration are the same as those articulated by MEA-MFT prior to the 2018 union merger that birthed MFPE. The ascension to state superintendent of a lawmaker who had supported public funding for charter schools “sent shockwaves through the education community in Montana,” Curtis said, and Arntzen’s promotion of educational options outside the public school system hasn’t changed much in the years since.“I think there’s an understanding among educators that this is one person’s problem and that this one person has not been able to lead her staff in a way that’s congruent with what’s actually happening in our schools,” Curtis said. “She’s made herself into much more of a politician than she is an education leader.”For others, Arntzen’s embrace of a conservative-styled agenda on school choice and parental rights has been a refreshing change, and could open the door for a more expanded role for the Office of Public Instruction. Trish Schreiber, senior education fellow at the Helena-based free market think tank Frontier Institute, told MTFP the agency is already playing a hand in some of Montana’s latest steps toward alternative education. Legislation passed in 2023 put OPI in charge of overseeing state-funded savings accounts for parents seeking special education instruction outside the public school system. The agency will also hold the state pursestrings for the 2023 Legislature-enabled system of “community choice” schools, which, pending the outcome of ongoing litigation, would be exempt from the bulk of Montana laws governing public education.“The superintendent of public instruction, much like the Board of Public Education, is tasked with having general supervision over the public schools and districts,” said Schreiber, who last year was appointed chair of the new state oversight commission for future community choice schools. “So some of these new options will fall under the umbrella of the Office of Public Instruction.”While Schreiber acknowledged Arntzen’s support for educational alternatives, she said she doubts whether even an oppositional superintendent could have curbed the success of such initiatives during the last session. She credited those advancements for school choice to public sentiment and an increased legislative appetite, noting that the issue will wind up in front of Arntzen’s successor regardless of their political stance.Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen speaks at a parental rights rally at the state Capitol on Friday, Oct. 1, 2021. Credit: Alex Sakariassen / MTFP“I hope for the future that whoever is at the helm [of OPI] will in fact embrace what the people of Montana want, regardless of political party,” Schreiber said, “because they’re going to have to be the superintendent of all the schools and all the districts and whatever the Legislature puts on their plate to implement.”Arntzen’s stands in defense of school choice and “parental rights” have resulted in many of the highest-profile instances when the long-serving Republican has side-stepped her avowed disinclination to engage in legislative affairs. Though her advocacy of specific bills has remained confined to matters of OPI process, she’s headlined rallies on the Capitol steps and in the Rotunda on several occasions, sharing portable lecterns with members of Moms for Liberty and other grassroots conservative champions of the Legislature’s more controversial forays into education policy.Critics tend to view her overall approach to the duties of superintendent with disappointment or even disdain. When Bedey first entered the Legislature in 2019, he had “pretty high expectations” for Arntzen’s leadership in matters pertaining to public school funding and oversight. It was a role he said she seemed “reluctant” to take on, and he’s noted a steady decline in their working relationship, which he once considered cordial.“I hope for the future that whoever is at the helm [of OPI] will in fact embrace what the people of Montana want, regardless of political party, because they’re going to have to be the superintendent of all the schools and all the districts and whatever the Legislature puts on their plate to implement.” Trish Schreiber, senior education fellow, Frontier Institute“We basically don’t have a relationship anymore,” Bedey said, adding that “it would not be out of the question for someone to say I bear responsibility for our relationship as well.”In many ways, the changes of direction and detail that Arntzen has brought to OPI are best understood through the lens of a conservative philosophy of governance that views bureaucracy as a hindrance, federal overreach as a threat and local control as the optimal reflection of community values. Her tenure has coincided with a global pandemic and a dramatic shift in state education policy and regulation, challenges exacerbated by internal turnover and external political division. And none of it begins to touch on the myriad other emerging issues pressing on public schools, from now-routine active shooter drills to the academic questions raised by artificial intelligence software.With that as a backdrop, Montana voters will decide next month between two candidates vying to craft their own vision for public education in the state. Both have extensive experience — Democrat Shannon O’Brien as a Missoula parent and state senator active on recent education reform, and Republican Susie Hedalen as a former Arntzen deputy, current Townsend Public Schools superintendent and vice chair of the state Board of Public Education. Sitting in the center of OPI’s one remaining office building, a bouquet of carnations and a framed photo of her school-age granddaughter on the table in front of her, Arntzen said she hopes her successor at least shares one of the most central elements of her personal educational philosophy. It’s one her critics would surely be quick to weigh in on, and one that helps explain even the most controversial of her stances over the past eight years. Parents, she says again, are “the first teacher.”The post Elsie Arntzen’s OPI appeared first on Montana Free Press.