School Board Election Guide
Interviews for the May 5 school board election have been edited for length and clarity:
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Incumbent Kevin Black:
Q: How would you describe your leadership style?
A: With my background of coaching and being on many different boards, ‘team’ is probably the number one thing that I look at. From a leadership standpoint, trying to get everybody included and listen to what their perspectives are. Listening to people first and being present for their comments. [That’s] how I would define leadership.
Q: As a current board member, what's something that you've worked on to implement or change on the board?
A: Being the chair has provided me some opportunities to do something differently in our board meeting. Every trustee is only 12.5%. We all have to lead together to be able to make changes. I'm proud of being on our school board for the last 6 years. Especially the last 4 years, I think we've worked really well together. This year, I've had a few opportunities to make some simple changes, whether it's how we ask questions to our award winners. When we're going to schools, we recently just added where we go out and thank basically anybody and everybody in the school. So those are a couple that are just small, simple things, but I'm hoping that they mean a lot.
Q: What's one thing that you'd like to change if reelected?
A: Off the top of my head, I don't have anything specifically, like I'd like to change. The biggest thing is just working on the goals, the LSRP [Long Range Strategic Plan] that we've already established. I'm really excited to see where we go with [staff and student wellness].
Q: What's the biggest challenge that the district faces today?
A: The biggest challenge that I see going forward still is going to be funding. We just don't have funds to do everything that we want. The funding piece is the biggest challenge, not only because we have a high cost of living, but we also want to do great things, and we have a lot of good people doing amazing work throughout our district. Just trying to make sure that those people feel like they're being heard and seen and that we can get additional funds.
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Incumbent Greg Neil:
Q: How would you describe your leadership style?
A: I served in actual board leadership on the school board for five years. It's important that you, as a leader, don't take yourself too seriously. My style is a lot of developing personal relationships with those around you, and more of an inclusive collaborative type of leadership style. Leaning on those around you, and trusting those people and developing relationships is the style that I personally use.
Q: As a current board member, what's something that you've worked on to implement or change on the board?
A: Having served on this school board for nine years, I'm proud of many things that we've accomplished. I don't have any kind of agenda as far as wanting to change something specifically. I've been a part of listening to the community about what to do about our bursting at the seams high school when I first came onto the board, and whether or not the community wanted to pay for renovations to make Bozeman High huge or to split, and build a second high school. I was very heavily involved with committees planning for the opening of Gallatin High School and the renovation and reworking of Bozeman High School. From there, we entered a messy period during the Pandemic era. I think that my leadership style during that era was important for getting us through those challenging times. Since then, I think Bozeman School District has reached a place where we're really clicking at a high level from a perspective of what we actually do educating kids. We have a high-performing superintendent. One thing I'm really proud of is for the first time in the history of Bozeman School District, we're going to have over 90% that are seniors right now graduate.
Q: What's one thing that you'd like to change if reelected?
A: I'm not looking to change specifically anything. Bozeman School District is not broken. It doesn't need to be fixed. There are always opportunities for improving things. I want to continue to support Bozeman's kids. I want to continue to support Bozeman's teachers. I've sat on the consensus-based negotiation committee twice for negotiating with a union for teacher phrases, and I've always been an advocate of maximizing that out.
Q: What's the biggest challenge that the district faces today?
A: Recruiting and retention, as it relates to our high cost of living, high quality teachers, continuing to navigate the increasing multi-language English learner student population in our school district where we have a constitutionally mandated obligation to provide a high quality education to every student that enters our doors regardless of what language they speak, and we don't have any specific funding for for that. The overly complex and broken funding system for how public schools in Montana are funded. I want to continue to advocate for changes and improvements there. That's not something that can be accomplished in Bozeman at the school board level, but advocacy through the legislature in Helena is needed for that. Those three things I just mentioned are probably our biggest challenges.
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Challenger Patrick Zimny:
Q: How would you describe your leadership style?
A: It's probably more of a team player, servant leadership style. I work for Swan Bitcoin. We provide financial services. We approach the world like it is going to be regulated, and so everything we do, we do it to the T. A lot of it has to do with making sure everything is foundational—everyone knows what's happening across the board first. Second, it would be, trusting the people that you actually pass the work onto. And then third would be making sure you're able to verify that it's doing what you expect.
Q: What's one thing that you'd like to change if elected?
A: That's a hard question. Our current board is doing a great job. Since COVID, people [have been] very riled up. So it's really hard, especially in public governance, to want to include additional stakeholders and people in the community. Making sure people know the right way to go about their question, or if they don't, being able to educate them. So if I had to choose one thing for the board to fix, I would love to get better community involvement. Signing up for kindergarten, for example. I have two kids. I have one in the district right now, one I signed up for kindergarten just a couple months ago. You only know when to sign up if your preschool is telling you or you're actively bothering the district to figure it out. There's really no reason why those kind of processes aren't more easily available.
Q: What's the biggest challenge that the district faces today?
A: If I had to choose one, it'd be the support of teachers across the board. I'm talking about all classified workers. Custodians to lunchroom workers. Everyone. I think that the key thing there is making sure they have the support they need from within the school itself. So that has to do with teacher retention, that has to do with classified employee retention, that has to do with curriculum, that has to do with student success. I recommend checking out the website. So if you go to www.patrickzimny.com and then just all the way at the bottom, I was curious: what have schools taken on? I went back to 1917. There are 73 services that I saw they start running today, where parents used to come in. If your kid had anything medical, parents used to come in and give you your shots. Now there are nurses in the school district. Tthe school has started being more of a social service. One thing a teacher needs is the ongoing support, knowing your principal that is there for you, or knowing your teammates are there for you. It's being able to verify that they're at least asking the individual schools and the individual student bodies that they're getting what they need. But also making sure the communication channels are open so people can feel like they can speak up.
