High school association proposals heard by Havre school board

At their monthly meeting Tuesday, the Havre Public Schools Board of Trustees was updated on voting items at an upcoming meeting of the Montana High School Association, as well as presentations and updates on a number of other issues.

HPS Superintendent Brian Gum said he and Havre High School Activities Director Mark Irvin will be going to the MHSA meeting later this week and they wanted to bring the board up to speed on the voting items they will be looking at.

Irvin said there are a lot of voting items this year, many of which are uncontroversial policy changes proposed by MHSA's Executive Board.

He said the board tends to think through their proposals thoroughly and none of them would be detrimental to the Havre district, so he'll likely support them.

Among the proposals is to establish a new board member representing the interests of Native American Schools specifically.

Irvin said the association has been discussing this proposal for some time and he thinks having someone on the board who understands the unique aspects and challenges faced by Native American schools is a good idea.

A proposal he does expect will be controversial, he said, is one proposing that the association set up a committee to study e-sports as a possible competitive afterschool activity.

He said he has mixed feelings about introducing e-sports to the schools, and he's not sure he would support it if it meant hiring coaches or anything like that, but he can see it potentially working as a competitive after school club activity depending on how it was handled.

Regardless, he said, he sees no problem with at least studying it.

Irvin said the proposal was brought up last year as well, and he voted in favor of it, but it was shot down by an almost two-thirds vote so clearly it was divisive.

He said it seems like there has been an increase in interest in the subject in the past year but he wonders if it's enough to tip the scales.

Another vote would be on a policy regarding how home-school and children from non-accredited schools can participate in inter-school competitions, he said.

He said he has a lot of questions about how the proposed policy would actually work, and he needs to talk to more people at the association before making any decision.

Irvin said once they get to the meeting they will have time to hear from board members, who can provide a more detailed look into all of these proposals and their intent, so his opinion on some of them may well change, but he wanted to give the board an idea of the kind of things the association is talking about.

In addition to this discussion, the board was also presented with a raft of new and revised policies presented by Gum.

He said he thought they were done with new and revised policies for a while, but some new suggested changes were recently sent to them by the Montana Office of Public Instruction.

One of the most substantial of these suggested policies had to do with the permitted uses of so-called artificial intelligence tools in classes and in school work.

Gum said there are teachers who make use of AI tools in their course curriculum and the new policy will not interfere with that, but it does make clear that student use of these tools must be done with the approval of teachers, and dishonest use of such tools will not be tolerated.

When asked if teachers are given training in the use of these tools, Gum said teacher associations have been giving seminars on them, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to make such training more widely available.

Another policy was one mandating that board meetings be recorded and made available to the public within five days.

Board members had some questions about the specifics of the policies but passed them on the first reading.

Gum said there will be a chance to follow up with more specific questions and discuss the policies in more depth before the second reading.

Trustees also heard updates on efforts to repair Havre High School's stage, which has developed a number of soft spots that need to be addressed soon.

Gum said the project will be around $15,000 and the Havre Public Schools Education Foundation, with help from Montana Actors' Theatre, is looking into grant opportunities.

Foundation Chair Kyle Leeds said grants are always a crapshoot, but there are a lot of grants available for this kind of thing, so he's confident they can find some funds to help pay for the project.

Leeds said the arts have a lot of support from the community, so they could probably raise the money locally, but they don't want to unnecessarily burden community members if they can make use of grant funding.

If it did end up being more difficult than expected to find grants right away, he said, they could probably raise the money themselves and backfill with a grant as long as they know they are getting it.

On the subject of grants, Gum also talked about a Community-Oriented-Policing-Services grant the district got in 2022.

Gum said they received $365,000 for improved school security and they need to have a project done by September of 2025 so he's making sure they are proceeding with that.

He said they are looking at updates and upgrades to various systems in the district that will be good uses of the grant money.

The board also heard from Havre High School Student Body President Trayden Riley, who said students are mostly gearing up for their end of semester finals, so there isn't much to report at the moment.

Riley said one thing the student council has on their agenda is the installation of a memorial bench for former HPS Superintendent Craig Mueller, who died unexpectedly in late 2022 at the age of 50.

He said the council has raised money for the bench and it's installation is a priority project once the weather breaks.

The board also heard a presentation from HPS Multi-Tiered-Systems-of-Support Director Lisa Passon about what she has been doing for the district.

The Multi-Tiered-Systems-of-Support is a system schools across the state use for general education and behavioral intervention, that evaluates students in need of extra attention and provides increasingly targeted assistance to them based on their level of need.

Passon said they are developing a comprehensive framework for supporting educators and how they can use this system to increase positive outcomes for students using evidence-based practices, and a great deal of progress has been made in the past year.

She said people interested in the specifics of the program can go to the https://opi.mt.gov/Educators/Teaching-Learning/Multi-Tiered-Systems-of-Support to learn more.

During the meeting the board also heard the announcement of this month's winner of the Pony Pride Award, District Maintenance Specialist Mike Nesslar.

After thanking the previous winner, Lincoln-McKinley Primary School teacher Jane Leinwand, and the district for recognizing him as last month's winner, Lincoln-McKinley Primary School Head Custodian Bob Newbauer said he's decided to give the award to Nesslar.

For 27 years, he said, Nesslar has taken great pride in making sure the district grounds look great and that facilities are in good shape, and that pride, commitment and performance makes him the perfect candidate for this award.

Nesslar was not able to be at the meeting to accept the award.

Before the end of the meeting Board Chair Tim Scheele said he wanted to give everyone a heads up that next month's regular meeting will be on a Monday rather than a Tuesday.