The MT Lowdown is a weekly digest that showcases a more personal side of Montana Free Press’ high-quality reporting while keeping you up to speed on the biggest news impacting Montanans. Want to see the MT Lowdown in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here.A bill introduced this week aims to ensure that a unique subset of educators doesn’t get left out of the prominent teacher recruitment and retention discussions before the 2025 Legislature.Lawmakers are already discussing specific methods to raise the low wages driving Montana’s teacher shortage, and Gov. Greg Gianforte has requested $100 million to help pay for those efforts. One position that conversation hasn’t focused on, however, is the certified educational interpreters who work to help deaf and hard-of-hearing students access classroom instruction — an omission Rep. Connie Keogh, D-Missoula, said House Bill 151 looks to remedy.Montana Free Press has written extensively about the state’s complex education funding formula, and one of the keys to that funding process is a legal definition of “quality educator.” It’s a phrase that guides certain state payments to districts and determines who qualifies for state loan assistance or participation in teacher residency programs. It will likely prove central in the push to raise teacher pay. As members of the House Education Committee learned Wednesday, “quality educator” applies to a wide range of licensed school positions including teachers, counselors, nurses, cultural specialists, speech pathologists and psychologists. But it doesn’t include all the certified sign-language interpreters in schools across the state.“We know that there is a critical shortage of educational interpreters,” Keogh said, noting there are currently seven open educational interpreter postings across four of Montana’s largest districts. “Our parents are concerned, and the educational future of children who are deaf and hard of hearing is at stake.” Speaking in favor of the bill, School Administrators of Montana Executive Director Rob Watson said he learned during his time as a district superintendent that educational interpreter is one of the most difficult positions for public schools to fill. Where HB 151 could have an even more outsized impact is at the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind, an institution that serves several dozen students from across the state with visual or hearing impairments. Superintendent Paul Furthmyre told the House Education Committee his school is the only one in Montana that’s unable to recruit teachers from in-state campuses, since none of them have educational interpreter programs. Keogh’s proposal, he continued, would make his pitch to graduates around the country more competitive.“It allows us to recruit, to go to [out-of-state colleges], wherever I might need to go, and say if you want to do your last year of student teaching in Montana, there is a program that will pay you $1,400 a month for 10 months,” Furthmyre said, referencing one of several forms of state assistance that prospective MSDB interpreters would become eligible for under HB 151.The bill, which arose from interim discussions and drew no opposition in a hearing Wednesday, certainly won’t be the biggest news of the 2025 session. Nor will it generate a note of fiscal impact at the scale of this spring’s big-ticket education budget items. But not all of the changes the Legislature pursues are earth-shattering. Sometimes a lawmaker’s push for progress just boils down to a few new lines of legal code and a nod to a group that may have gone overlooked.—Alex SakariassenSay Again? 🤔“In the 2025 biennium, [Montana State Hospital] and Galen experienced chronic phone systems and network connectivity issues due to significant damage and aging infrastructure that had been largely ignored over time. Most problems were related to the transition from winter to spring, when ditches where cables resided were either flooded or, unfortunately, damaged by pastured cows.”—Carrie Albro, chief information officer for the state Department of Public Health and Human Services, speaking to lawmakers on the health department’s budget subcommittee on Jan. 14.The Viz 📈A series of storms that swept through the state over the past few weeks brought a welcome surge of precipitation to many basins that were in a decidedly different position at this time last year.As of Thursday, the Bear Paw basin, located near Havre, was sitting at 236% of its typical mid-January snowpack. That’s a more than fourfold increase from Jan. 16, 2024, when many basins were reporting record-low snowpacks. The Rocky Boy snowpack monitoring site is currently reporting nearly 10 inches of precipitation, a threshold it didn’t reach until the very tail end of last winter. Though certainly welcomed by farmers, anglers, fire managers and others eager for a robust snowpack to support summertime streamflows, the recent glut of snow created some logistical challenges. Bear Paw Ski Bowl stayed closed Saturday to allow plows to clear a path to the ski area, which on Jan. 12 reported that 3 feet of snow had fallen through the weekend. Last winter the 65-year-old ski area was so starved for snow that it wasn’t able to open.Over the coming weekend, a different weather-related challenge will emerge. Bitter cold temperatures, brought by a mass of air that’s traveled over the North Pole from Siberia, will bring the coldest temperatures Montana has seen this winter. In Havre, lows with wind chill are expected to approach -40 on Monday.—Amanda EggertNews of the News 📰The next generation of newspaper owners has arrived in Cascade, and it turns out to be Gen Z. Announced last week, 24-year-old Jeb Boettger is the new owner and editor-in-chief of The Cascade Courier, a weekly newspaper that covers communities along the Missouri River between Great Falls and Helena.“I really want us to focus up on our community news,” Boettger told MTFP on Thursday. “Wolf Creek, Ulm, Craig, Cascade. Out of those four towns, we’re the only one with a newspaper, and we really want to focus on getting local stories that people want to hear.”Boettger, who started working at the newspaper in 2019, said that he owes a lot to The Courier and the previous owners, Ray and Toni Castellanos. He learned by reading the paper about COVID-era funds that helped him attend college that he otherwise couldn’t afford. He met his girlfriend through working at the paper and said the reporting keeps him connected to the community. Like many who work at local newspapers, Boettger does multiple jobs, including designer, photographer, reporter and editor. His design work received two first-place awards at the 2024 Better Newspaper Contest organized by the Montana Newspaper Association.Late last year, Boettger was first to publish a story on the closure of a local after-school program that lost grant funding. He felt the breaking-news rush.“I got the chance to report on that as it was happening,” he said. “We like to brag that it’s one of the stories that we beat [regional TV outlet] KRTV to.”It’s not always breaking news at a small community newspaper, Boettger said, but the steady presence of local news is an invaluable resource. In a Q and A set to publish in MTFP’s Great Falls This Week newsletter on Monday, Boettger nicely summed up the importance of local media at a time when those resources are endangered in Montana and elsewhere.“We’re here to amplify local voices, document the town’s progress and preserve its history for future generations,” Boettger wrote.—Matt HudsonVerbatim 💬“I’m going to support this bill, but I would hope that our friends, our thoughtful friends, in the Senate will take a look at some of the suggestions that come to the sponsor or others to make this a more effective bill that is not harmful to anyone but rather achieves the objectives put forward by the bill sponsor.”—Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, speaking about his decision to vote in favor of House Bill 121, on Jan. 15 during debate on the House floor.The bill, sponsored by Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, R-Billings, would require public and some private facilities to provide sex-segregated multi-user bathrooms, changing rooms and dormitories based on a person’s XX or XY chromosomes and reproductive biology. Supporters say the bill is needed to protect women from men masquerading as women who are intent on harassing them in vulnerable areas. Similar measures in other states, commonly referred to as “bathroom bills,” have been widely opposed by transgender, gender non-conforming people and LGBTQ+ allies who say such legislation intentionally undermines their ability to comfortably exist in public. Critics in Montana testified last week that HB 121 will only put people whose appearances don’t match stereotypical gender presentations at risk of harassment and violence. Photo Op 📸Last fall, Montana Free Press ran a series on the future of southeastern Montana’s coal country, accompanied by black-and-white images illustrating how the vastness of the Powder River Coal Basin intersects with the region’s economic options.That’s a sort of thing we’re hoping to do more of, which is why we’re adding a visual journalist to our team this summer via a fellowship position in partnership with CatchLight.The fellowship role will help us illustrate more of our in-depth reporting on bureaucracy and the wonky nuts and bolts that make government tick, stories that can be difficult to convey in words alone. As we saw with the coal country coverage, visual journalism can dovetail with writing to produce coverage that resonates as something that’s greater than the sum of those parts.  I’m excited too, that we’ll be working with CatchLight, a San Francisco-based visual media organization that seeks to provide inclusive, accurate and locally contextualized information to the public. Our newsroom was chosen along with several others across the country as part of the first cohort in a national visual journalism initiative.Fellowship applications are open until Feb. 3. —Holly MichelsHighlights ☀️In other news this week —Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte delivered his State of State address, highlighting his tax, education and energy policy proposals.Montana lawmakers will again try to pass a bill aimed at protecting residents of mobile home parks.On Our Radar Alex — Actor Adam Scott made a surprise public appearance this week inside a glass cube in New York’s Grand Central Station. Why? Friday kicks off the long-anticipated (like, three freaking years) second season of the Scott-led AppleTV series “Severance,” a brilliant blend of humor and sci-fi bewilderment that poses the question: What if your work life and personal life were literally separated, in every sense of the word?Holly — Though I’m not known for having a loud voice, I do let loose my frustrations with drivers who don’t take care around pedestrians, to the point that I was briefly worried my kid’s first words would be of the four-letter variety. After a pedestrian was hit by a truck and seriously hurt when crossing a street near the Capitol this week, I’m taking this opportunity to yell in newsletter-safe language: DON’T BE A $#(*).JoVonne — Gusty winds are a normal part of Montana’s everchanging weather. It’s something I experienced in my hometown of Browning. Something I don’t often see firsthand, however, is when box trucks topple over, or almost topple over, from high winds, like this one did earlier this week as it was leaving Browning. Katie — The weekend forecast gives me the perfect excuse to cozy up to a new hobby that hopefully is more fun than frustrating — assembling a miniature Tokyo street scene. Zeke — When the temperature drops outside, I like to pick up a book and imagine an even colder place from underneath an enormous blanket. “I, Robot,” Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of science fiction stories focused on robots facing the question of what it means to be human, will transport you from frigid asteroids to cold, metal hearts. Mara — Two weeks into the session, I am overwhelmingly grateful for the magical freezer stockpile of pre-made, homemade breakfast burritos. Transparently, my household made up the recipe on the fly, but this one pretty closely matches my overall breakfast-on-the-go philosophy.Eric — I knew Bob Flexner, who died at 84 last month, as the guy who wrote the authoritative book on the often-baffling art of applying finish to wood furniture. His obituary, though, tells a story of a life that was rich beyond woodworking gurudom, including a 54-year marriage, a stint as a U.S. Navy ROTC officer, and co-founding “one of the nation’s first student-run counter-culture newspapers.”*Some stories may require a subscription. Subscribe!The post Tackling a teacher shortage within the teacher shortage appeared first on Montana Free Press.