Schools, events highlight chamber of commerce luncheon

Local school superintendents Doug Hazen and Matt Davidson gave an update on the start of the 2024-25 school year during the monthly general membership meeting of the Lovell Area Chamber of Commerce last Monday, Oct. 21.

Hazen, superintendent of Big Horn County School District No. 2 in Lovell, said the first two months of the school year have gone well.

“I think we’ve had a strong start to our school year thus far,” Hazen said. “There are a couple of the major projects, if you’ve been around campus, that were completed over the summer. You’ll see a new track. Community members who have been to a football game or been out near the high school campus saw that the track was resurfaced, which was quite a large project for us this summer.

“The other really major one was our middle school. I used to be the principal there, so I know this firsthand. They have not had air conditioning for the last 30 years. So a really great school and great system, just no AC. And so that has finally changed over and so we now have air conditioning throughout the building.”

Along with the air conditioning came new carpet in many classrooms, cabinets and painting on interior walls.

“If you haven’t been to the middle school, I encourage you to go in. It looks like a very updated building,” Hazen said. “And again, a biased opinion, but I always have thought that the layout of that school was very well designed in the first place. And so, although my custodial staff will tell you that we just pulled out the best boiler system that we had in all of the district, because now we have rooftop units, I know the staff and students there have been pretty happy, especially since we’ve kind of had an extended summer here this year.”

Hazen gave what he called a sneak preview of recently released test results, noting, “All of our schools met the expectations from the state on our WY-TOPP testing and some of that. So generally, I would say that those results are really positive, and at the next board meeting, we’ll get into a few more of the details, but we’ve been waiting on that for quite a while to be able to release it.”

Hazen reported on a pair of recent speakers Sam Glenn and Steven MacDonald. Glenn, he said, delivered an early school year talk to both District One and District Two in a positive and humorous manner with his main point being “complain less, compliment more.”

“That was a good start for our staff,” Hazen said. “Those are good words to live by: lighten up, laugh a little bit more and then, finally, find what inspires you, find your passion. So that was the general message. I think it was a really positive thing for our staff, who then hopefully were going to take that and integrate it with their classes and with our students at the school.”

MacDonald, of Safer Schools Together, spoke on October 15 for the parent engagement night, also meeting with students in each building that day. MacDonald presented a program on social media awareness, from online games and chatting to the integration of artificial intelligence into social media.

“It was some really good information at times,” Hazen said, “maybe a little bit scary, because our kids are always ahead of us, even the idea of who they’re chatting with when they think they’re playing a game with somebody from Timbuktu. Who is that person on the other end? How do we keep them safe?”

As for staffing, Hazen said the district is “basically fully staffed,” adding, “I think we’re pretty fortunate. We’ve been basically fully staffed the whole year, which I’m sure not every district in the state can say.”

He said the district is always looking for support staff from bus drivers to substitute teachers “that virtually all districts are in need of.”

Hazen added that enrollment “bounced back” a bit this year, adding, “We’re holding steady right now and generally look OK.”

District One

School District No. 1 Supt. Davidson spoke next and said enrollment in the brick-and-mortar school is down a bit in the district, while enrollment for the online Connections Academy is up.

“That’s a trend that we continue to see over the last few years since COVID,” Davidson said. “The number of home school students in the Big Horn Basin continues to increase, as well. One of the things we’re looking at right now as a district is what kind of calendar we want to have. We talked about a four-day schedule and revamping our Fridays. We have a lot more families who are doing vacations during the school year, (wanting to) take the kids for a week or sometimes 10 days. So attendance is an ongoing thing, as well.

“So we’re having lots of different discussions and looking at what lots of different districts are doing with calendars. And the other part of scheduling that we’re grappling with right now is that teachers are asked to do more all the time with less time to do it. We’ll try and figure out how to get some time for teachers to do all the work that they have to do besides teaching. And that’s a complicated process that we need to figure out.”

The result, Davidson said, is fewer young people coming into the teaching profession, with education enrollment down at the University of Wyoming and nationally.

“In our district, we’re trying to figure out how to support teachers better,” Davidson said.

Davidson said the district has some mechanical projects going on at Rocky Mountain Elementary and in Burlington, and he said the time it takes to acquire equipment due to supply chain issues is frustrating, noting that what used to take six to eight months to acquire now takes 24 months, like the components for the boilers and cooling system at Rocky Mountain Elementary.

Another issue the district is wrestling with is housing for new staff hires, Davidson said, noting that rentals are hard to come by in Burlington and Cowley. He said the district is exploring building some teacherages “in the hopes that being able to provide for new staff a place to live will be perceived as an incentive to come and work for us, and we’re also trying to put more teachers in the communities where they’re teaching.”

“We’ll see how that goes,” he said. “It’s really expensive right now to build, but we’re in the process of buying some property in Burlington, and we’ve got some property by the high school in Cowley already.”

Speaking to a room full of businesspeople, Davidson noted that the district has had positive results from the hiring of a career coordinator for the district, funded by a three-year grant, Sally Bernhisel.

“It has been really positive getting our kids out to see businesses and do job shadowing and other types of activities that way,” he said. “We’re having lots of discussions right now about work based learning and how we can increase that for our kids.”

Davidson asked what business owners and managers would recommend for giving kids exposure to a variety of career opportunities while they’re still in school, noting that one of the issues in Burlington is that the school is 30 to 45 miles from businesses, so it takes a lot of travel time for a student to spend an hour at a business.

“We’re trying to work through those kinds of details,” he said. “I think what we expose kids to in high school is actually fairly limited as far as career opportunities. It’s easy to do a lot of online things where you try to give a survey of different jobs and things to really know what a plumber does or what an electrician does or a mechanic or a contractor. That’s hard to do.”

He said the district puts students in contact with business owners through a monthly “pizza with a professional” program but would like to foster more actual job experience.

“What we’d like to do is (for students to) actually be able to spend more time in a business setting to the point where it’s not just job shadowing, but it would be more of an internship, the beginning of some real work experiences and be able to see if that’s something they should pursue.”

Business owner Cindy Asay of Wild Edge Screen Printing said she has worked with several Lovell High School students, including a girl who comes in three days a week for an hour and another student who comes in for a two-hour period.

“That’s easy, because I’m five minutes from high school, but last year I had a student come over from Greybull, and he got to spend the entire day, and that was more effective than just 45 minutes in and out.”

North Big Horn Hospital CEO Eric Connell said if the district does go to a four-day school week at some point, the hospital district would “love to get people for half a day or for three or four hours of time consistently,” adding, “The earlier you can get connected with your passion, the more likely you are to find your way to that career. So, yeah, so we’d be open to that. We’d be happy to take a half day at a time if we can get it.”

Announcements

The meeting began with Stacy Bair announcing that she and husband Devin are planning to host an open house event for local soldiers who will be deploying to the Middle East in December. The Open House Deployment Farewell will take place Saturday, Nov. 23, the day of the Main Street Mingle, from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the Bairs’ Michael Jordan Court at 1050 Shoshone Avenue in Lovell.

Bair said she expects five local soldiers to be present, along with two colonels from Cheyenne. There will be no food except for traditional cake.

“I would appreciate if all you guys tell your friends and it’s just a pop in, pop out thing (that will) give you a chance to shake their hands and remind them that we know that this still happens and celebrate them before they are gone from their families for nine months or so,” Bair said. “You can literally just take 20 minutes to pop in and shake their hands, meet them and pop out and then go to the rest of the mingle activities.”

North Big Horn Hospital District CEO Eric Connell gave a brief report on some of the recent activities of the hospital. He noted the hiring of emergency room provider Rustin Myrick, who grew up in Powell and is married to “a local gal” in Charlyn Ferbrache Myrick.

He also noted the new mobile MRI truck that will be in the community weekly, and he announced the hiring of board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist Brenda Camp, who will begin practicing in Lovell around January 1.

“We’re really excited to have Dr. Camp joining us,” Connell said. “She’s got about 15 years of experience in her specialty and just brings a ton of support for the women in our community. We feel like that’s an area where we knew that we probably weren’t meeting all the needs, and so we’ll be excited to have her here. She’ll be able to see women in the clinic. She has her surgical specialty, as well.

“When I spoke with her references, I spoke to two of her colleagues in Denver, and they both had great things to say. They were a little bit disappointed that she was leaving them to come to the Wyoming.”

April Rodriguez from Heart Mountain Broadcasting in Powell spoke about her radio stations, two of which are licensed in North Big Horn County – Cowley and Lovell. She offered to help promote any events coming up in the community.