Something doesn’t fit. After Monday night’s budget presentation by Great Falls Public Schools, the Great Falls Tribune painted a grim picture of the District’s per-pupil technology spending compared to other AA school districts. Sarah Dettmer for the Tribune reported: According to data collected from fiscal year 2016, Great Falls is spending $21.66 per student for technology. GFPS…
I thought the following comment on the City Commission post, below, was worth elevating: Don I would agree with you. I was there last night, I’ve been researching this and I think the city’s got something up their sleeves. Ordinance 4138 is far too inclusive. So is Ordinance 3149. There’s more to come too, with…
The City of Great Falls delivered a hat trick of ordinances last night, with the passage of Ordinances 3148, 3149, and 3153 — all of which were opposed by Commission-goers but adopted unanimously by the Commissioners. This before Assistant City Attorney Joe Cik at one point amusingly referred to himself as “some sort of medieval person on an epic quest” to clean…
A philosopher once said that we are really three quite different people; the one we see as our self, the one others see, and the one we really are. All very different and the first two are merely reflections. The recent discourse concerning the Q & A session between representatives of the Great Falls Public Schools and…
Sarah Dettmer, the Great Falls Tribune’s education reporter, seems to have it out for Elsie Arntzen. Yesterday, Dettmer published a heavily self-referential, self-congratulatory article to explain away some of the blowback from her hit job on the freshly-elected Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction, Republican Elsie Arntzen. Dettmer writes: Then, Great Falls Public Schools Superintendent Tammy Lacey stood up to…
After our reporting (and thanks to our tipsters!), KRTV ran a story about Brett Doney’s gloomy review of the Great Falls job market. Apparently, the state of Montana disagrees with Doney: But the Montana Department of Labor says the GFDA report is inconsistent with state numbers. Chief Economist Barbara Wagner says there were roughly 300 jobs…
After waging the only unsuccessful state-wide campaign among Montana Republicans, former gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte seems to have the inside track on his party’s nomination for the upcoming special election for the U.S. House. After weeks of contrived “Will he or won’t be?” speculation (was there ever any doubt?), Gianforte is now officially in the mix. With all due…
A number of people, including the target of the piece, Tammy Lacey, took issue with the fact that a contributor to this blog posted anonymously about Tammy Lacey in a piece about her comments toward the OPI Superintendent, Elsie Arntzen. In short: Get over it. Here’s something from the first iteration of Electric City Weblog…
We should be at the Defcon 1 level of concern after hearing Brett Doney’s comments about our local economy. His analysis in this instance is very disturbing but not surprising. Not surprising to me because I’ve been watching what I call the ‘Glass Half Empty/Half Full Switcheroo” for a long time in this town. Here’s how it…
Showboating. Grandstanding. Those are the only words that readily come to mind to describe Great Falls Public Schools Superintendent Tammy Lacey’s tirade against the recently elected, Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction, Elsie Arntzen. According to the Tribune, Lacey “asked the superintendent whether she had plans to publicly fund preschool for the less fortunate children in the state, unlike Arntzen’s own…