The following statements are from a Missoula Independent article written in June (June 26, 2008) by Patrick Klemz during the lease renewal discussions of Prescott School by the private spanish emersion school, Missoula International School.
Getting schooled
The renewal of an MCPS building lease angers residents
by Patrick Klem
'Jeanne Joscelyn and Ross Best are like conversational pad thai.'
The article goes on to say -
The pair’s message, however, is one in the same. Joscelyn and Best serve as the mouthpiece for what’s informally known as “the Opposition,” a group of Missoula County Public Schools (MCPS) district residents highly critical of the board of trustees for its practice of leasing closed school buildings to private competition. The Opposition’s latest battles focus on Prescott, a Rattlesnake neighborhood middle school closed in 2004 and leased out to the Missoula International School that same year for less than $1 per square foot.'
"One year remains on the International School’s five-year lease, but the MCPS board is already talking renewal. The topic first came up during a June 10 public meeting of the trustees, but a lack of quorum prevented the vote. With MCPS still working on a building appraisal, Opponents complain that trying to rush ahead a lease renegotiation now would be irresponsible,"
“You are trustees—entrusted with public school buildings. Your behavior has not been worthy of trust,” Best railed at the last board meeting. “It has, in fact, been disgraceful and this is shaping up to be one more disgraceful action.”
Joscelyn and Best suspect interested parties wanted to get the deal sewn up before the July retirement of Superintendent Jim Clark, a proponent of dispensing schools deemed as excess. But the superintendent says the June 10 agenda item intended to conditionally approve the lease and then let MCPS iron out details later in the year when the appraisal is finished.
The Opposition came together during the similar Roosevelt School controversy, in which MCPS came under fire for the 2005 sale of another closed school to a Catholic education foundation after it had passed on a separate and higher offer.
Trying to avoid a similar result, Opponents began tracking the paperwork on Prescott back before its board-ordered closure.
The Opponents are concerned that selling schools like Prescott leaves the district standing short should it one day need more classroom space. The idea of public support for the privatization of local education also doesn’t sit well with many residents. UM mathematician David Patterson, a critic of the 2004 Prescott deal, points out that cheap leases don’t make fiscal sense when one takes into account the amount districts lose when students defect to private schools.
“There’s no rocket science here,” Patterson says. “Doing nice things for private schools
is not a part of the public interest.”
District records show the current contract on Prescott costs the International School about half as much per square foot as Walla Walla University’s lease of the nearby Mount Jumbo School.
“We recognize the current base price is low based on the market value,” says Missoula International School trustee Matt Lunder. “The problem with their argument is that it assumes if the board voted to not extend our lease that the Missoula International School would say ‘Shucks, lets just send all of our kids to public school.’ We would just go somewhere else.” (blogger's note- Matt Lunder lived on Van Buren, just a couple of blocks from Prescott School. The enrolling of neighborhood children was a concern of some responsible MCPS Trustees during the 2004 lease discussions.)
Yet, Opposition members’ beef goes deeper still. They allege MCPS’s long-standing trend of favorable treatment toward the private school is a direct result of special interest engineering—something Best calls “rigged transactions.”
Joscelyn points to one person in particular: former International School board president and current MCPS chair Toni Rehbein. Though Rehbein recused herself from both the 2004 lease vote and the June 10 renewal item, she advocated extending the International School a new lease at various meetings and once queried publicly whether the lessee would go for purchasing Prescott outright.
The Opposition argues the ethical problems speak for themselves, though the situation does not technically constitute a violation of office. According to county attorneys, only official action can be cited as a conflict of interest under Montana code.
“When I was involved in the Missoula International School, my daughter was
in preschool,” Rehbein says. “I don’t have any personal interest in it at all.” (psm blogger - See MIS documents on lead blog post at beginning of blog to see the disingenuousness of this statement)
'One International School report from 2000 shows Rehein’s name circled numerous times and tagged with the commentary, “To whom is Toni Rehbein loyal?”
“The facts don’t support that. It’s not character assassination—we have documents,” Joscelyn responds. “This is just the truth.”
