Missoula, MontanaKGVO-AM News) – On Thursday’s Talk Back, KGVO listeners first met Susie Hedalen, who announced she is running as a Republican to replace impeached OPI Superintendent Elsie Arntzen from his functions in 2024.
Hedalen, currently superintendent of the Townsend, Montana, school district, first emphasized the importance of a safe and secure environment for Montana’s schoolchildren.
Hedalen stressed the importance of basic courses for schoolchildren
“Parents deserve and have a right to know what their students are learning and that they are safe,” Hedalen began. “For this reason, we must refocus on learning, and our classrooms must be that place of learning. Reading, writing, math, science, and history are so important. In fact, historically, children were taught to write in cursive because our Constitution is written in cursive. We cannot lose these incredible foundations and they are what we must focus on in education.
A caller asked Hedalen if there would be “woke” bias in Montana schools if she were elected.
“We need to make sure our teachers can focus on these subjects and teach students without bias,” she said. “If we do this great work, we will see our test scores go up. We need to remove this fear from parents and make sure they feel comfortable bringing their students to school and know what they are going to learn each day.
Hedalen said students should spend at least 90 minutes a day on reading and literacy.
Hedalen placed a strong emphasis on teaching children the importance of reading and literacy in the classroom.
“We need to spend at least an hour and a half on reading and literacy in the morning at school,” she said. “If students are not on track to read in third grade, we need to put those supports in place and things in place for them to have that opportunity.” And we need to detect that early on with these interventions.
School safety was a topic Hedalen discussed on Thursday’s Talk Back.
“One of the big advancements right now is threat assessment, and that’s the direction we’ve been moving in, and that’s to ensure that we detect these issues before they arise.” , she said. “So we need to watch for those red flags and train our staff and our schools in that effort, because a lot of times when research has shown and studies have been done on schools that have experienced unfortunate events, there have been telltale signs, and so we We want to get ahead of the curve, which is why we do a ton of training on threat assessment.
Current Superintendent Elsie Arntzen has already served two terms and cannot run again.
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