State super visits Newcastle

Kim Dean
NLJ Managing Editor
 
Wyoming State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow stopped in Newcastle on March 11 after making stops in Gillette, Moorcroft, and Hulett to view the efforts that schools are making “Beyond the Bell,” which is Balow’s focus in her current role as the national president of the Association of State Superintendents. 
Balow’s platform is focused on how education is enhanced before school, after school and outside the classroom, she said. She viewed the after-school program in Moorcroft and saw the breakfast program that the town of Hulett offers students. 
During her visit with Weston County School District No. 1 Superintendent Brad LaCroix, Balow said she learned of ongoing communications between the Northeast Wyoming Economic Development Coalition and the school district in their efforts to ensure that courses and skills taught in the school are of value in the workplace. 
“And in an urban area and in a lot of states, that conversation takes years to happen, and in Newcastle, it’s just there. It’s both parties saying we need to make sure that we’re doing the best for kids and sometimes that’s lost in other places,” Balow said.
Balow will serve as national president until November. She pursued the role because she wanted Wyoming to have a larger voice in decisions that Congress makes about rural education policy, assessments and standards.
“It was really intentional for the last five years to try to grow in my national presence to put Wyoming and Wyoming kids on the map,” she said.
Balow cited funding as another key reason for her national role. She has spoken with funders such as Bill and Melinda Gates, the Mott Foundation and others in regards to philanthropy dollars being focused on urban areas where more bang can be seen for their buck.
“For instance, like if we drop $100,000 into Harlem, we can see the effects of that, but it takes more in rural Wyoming to have the same sort of effect,” Balow said, “and so I’ve been doing a lot of talking with funders to think about rural education pilots, and just really trying to spotlight some of the great work that we do in Wyoming education.”
Balow’s platform also goes hand in hand with Wyoming first lady Jenny Gordon’s Hunger Initiative. Some really great things are happening in the state to address hunger in Wyoming, she said, with local producers making sure that food is on the table and with innovative breakfast programs. Two that she cited as examples are universal breakfast, where every student gets breakfast, and grab and go breakfasts in a bag that is taken to class.
“And in Wyoming it’s almost a necessity across our state with the number of kids who come to school hungry and with just our geography with kids who spend an hour riding a bus to school,” Balow said. 
Teachers have reported that behavior problems are decreasing, she said, and attendance rates and test scores have also increased. 
Balow said she was most surprised at student responses when she asked what they liked best about grab-n-go breakfast. What they told her was, “I’m growing and I need food and the extra meal helps me concentrate and make it to lunch.”
Balow said she, as well as University of Wyoming trustee LaCroix, were involved in interviewing and selecting UW’s new president, Edward Seidel. She said she is excited to work with Seidel on Wyoming’s computer science initiative and  his vision on ways that technology can enhance business and strengthen the university.
With the coronavirus now on the nation’s mind, Balow said that she has reached out to the custodians and nurses associations to make sure they had what they needed in dealing with the virus.
“My guidance to districts is pretty clear and that is from Weston County to Laramie County: every single community has the capacity and the ability to make really great decisions. So follow best practices for cleanliness and prevention and make common sense decisions,” Balow said.
Another topic of concern for Weston County School District No. 1 is school safety. Written threats to the district’s schools spurred the recent formation of a parent advisory group to address the issue. Balow reflected on her efforts to gain legislative support for a statute ensuring that a framework is in place statewide for threat assessment protocol.
“For the last two years, I’ve worked and advocated really hard for legislation that creates a framework for schools to follow because what we know is that it’s an issue in every community,” she said, “but we also know is that there is no framework at the state level that exists to say at a minimum this is what you should have in place. And so that’s really been my goal, from a legislative standpoint, was to try to do a couple things.” 
The first, Balow said, is to teach legislators about the nine policy areas that other state legislatures have thought about and have enacted laws on. 
“This is where Wyoming is, and the truth is we can’t really say where Wyoming is because we don’t have a structure for it, we don’t have a framework for it,” she said. “This year Sen. Ellis on the education committee put a bill forward with lots of cosponsors, including the chairs of the education committee, that would have made threat assessments.” 
Threat assessments are something that the Secret Service and others in the school safety arena have said is needed at a minimum, Balow said. 
“You should have a protocol in place that identifies and provides interventions and consequences and plans for students who pose a harm to themselves or a harm to others,” she said.
The bill made it all the way through, having broad support from both the committees on the House side and the Senate side, Balow said. It passed out of the Senate overwhelmingly only to run out of time in the House. Balow said she is disappointed that a state agreement cannot be reached as far as a minimum framework on threat assessment protocol for student safety. Balow said that while most schools may be following the threat assessment protocol, the legislation is important for the ones that are not.
“I can go to visit schools, which I do often, and say almost every school that I am in has safety precautions that to a parent’s eye or a public citizen’s eye look really good,” Balow said. 
But what she can’t tell by looking, she said, is whether a school has “a threat assessment in place that really safeguards a student’s well-being and or the student body’s well-being and proven prevention of school violence and other issues like suicide.”
Balow said partnering with other schools and entities such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Superintendents Association in providing training in safety and security around best practices and what the research says helps with student safety measures.
Each school district has local safety dollars in the form of a block grant provided by the state for school safety, she said. How the money is spent is decided by each district’s school board. Local safety dollars can be used to employ school resource officers. 
There are a number of ways to achieve the goal of having a school resource officer, Balow said. In Torrington, a partnership between the school and the police department provides a resource officer. In Hulett, two liaison police officers were in the schools during her visit.
Additional funding through the Department of Homeland Security, sometimes through Balow’s office, in the form of federal grants is available and many districts use these funds to provide active shooter training or student well-being training.
Homeland Security and the Department of Criminal Investigation has an app called Safe2Tell, she said, that students in Wyoming can download on their phone for reporting anything from sexual assault to bomb threats and bullying in class. The calls are transferred to the appropriate channels within each community – to the principal and/or law enforcement. Safe 2Tell Wyoming also provides regular media releases with statistics breaking out the number of calls received by category. 
Balow intends to keep advocating for the state to legislate having a minimum framework in place for student safety.
A March 6, 2020, Forbes article titled “Wyoming Public School Salaries Finally Posted Online: Payrolls Cost Taxpayers $1 Billion” reported that 321 Wyoming educators made more than $100,000 and that 534 educators outearned Balow’s $92,000 salary as state superintendent of public instruction. The report says that after three years of trying to obtain Wyoming public school salaries, OpenTheBooks.com finally received the information. Many of the state’s superintendents and assistant superintendents, according to the article, earn more than the governors of 50 U.S. states. Terry Snyder, the Fremont No. 25 (Riverton) superintendent, holds the top slot for pay, earning  $157,218 by fixed contract and payments in kind of an $8,400 car allowance and $23,582 retirement annuity and health insurance. 
Balow told the News Letter Journal that a lot of the states cap or at least control the salaries in their states, but Wyoming does not.
“As a local control state, I guess it’s twofold. No. 1, to recruit and retain really good educators in Wyoming, we have to be in the upper quartile of what we pay because there are not an abundance of people who want to come to Wyoming and make less than they could in a neighboring state that has more amenities. On the flip side of that, I think that the Forbes article and the information really does bring to light at the very least a disparity and, at the very most. It may cause some school districts to hit the reset button,” Balow said. 
The article raises many questions for school boards and that every district, as well as the legislature, should be having robust conversations about those questions, she said.
Balow believes that, as an elected public official, she should not be overly compensated.  
“From my perspective, well, it would be wonderful to make more money. I’m an elected official, and I ran for this job in 2014 when there was a lot of controversy around the position that I hold and whether this should be an elected or appointed position. I wouldn’t have ran for the position if I thought it should be appointed. I think it’s really important to have your state superintendent elected. I don’t just herald or toot the horn of educators. I speak on behalf of Wyoming citizens who care about education, which is everyone, and I represent everyone,” Balow said. Balow also addressed the issue of releasing public employees’ names, along with their salary information. She said she was not in favor of the state releasing the names out of concern for people who might not want their names released because of domestic violence issues or restraining orders. “I wasn’t in favor of releasing names from the state level because they are not my employees… It ought to be locally elected boards that release their names and not the state superintendent,” Balow said. 
“The short answer is I believe in transparency, I believe in following the law, which is what I did, but I would much rather see names and salaries released at the local level not at the state level.”