Out of Touch? MV School Board Faces Important Choice in Selecting New Director

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With the departure of Frank Kline from the school board effective Sept. 1, Dana Stromberger becomes the only person on the board with meaningful experience in the private sector.

Stromberger is the office and front desk manager at Nectar Day Spa and Boutique in Winthrop, which she helped open, according to her bio on the site. Anyone who has operated a business knows how challenging it can be. Some years are better than others. A wildfire can tank tourists and your bottom line. Interest rates affect expansion. A competitor can run you out of business. Businesses have to adapt to survive.

That is not what is happening in our school district. Their core product (education) leaves much to be desired, a problem that isn’t unique to our district or Washington State. Customers aren’t coming back. State enrollment is flat and enrollment projections are dropping. Administrators’ de facto response is to ask for more money.

Nary a school board meeting went by when former Superintendent Tom Venable, who spent 32 years in public education, lamented the lack of state funding. Despite facing a $15 billion shortfall over the next four years, Olympia allocated 43.2% of the state’s operating budget toward funding K-12 education, a drop from 52.4% of the state’s operating budget in 2019. Public school students make up only 12.5% of Washington State’s population. So, what’s going on here?

According to a report by the National Education Association dated April 2025, the average estimated teacher salary in Washington State for the 2024-25 school year is $94,221, not counting benefits. Our per pupil expenditure is $19,429, more than some private schools. And, we’re adding more staff than students.

We’re not funding education. We’re funding an education industrial complex.

Our former school superintendent and our state superintendent have been clear- they want a return to half the state’s operating budget going toward education, even if operating revenues are increasing and public school enrollment is decreasing.

What does the community get for that level of spending? According to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, 44% of LBHS students aren’t reading at a college level, which OSPI perplexingly calls “consistent grade-level knowledge.” Only a third of LBHS students are ready for college level math.

When confronted with these statistics, Venable and school board directors pointed to what they saw as a feather in their cap- qualitative data about their students. Venable insisted that by talking to (certain) students, he was able to gauge that the school district was doing a good job.

That presumption was shattered in March following a threat of a school shooting by a pupil attending MVSD. A subsequent inquiry found that students in the district experienced “a sense of apathy” and “disconnection.”

LBHS Principal Elyse Darwood was more blunt.

“Students don’t care about each other,” she told the Methow Valley News.

This is a shocking admission for a district that took so much pride in its school community. Behind the scenes, there were reports about bullying that were covered by MVE, but not by MVN. When parents asked the school board for a special meeting following the school shooting threat, the directors and Venable refused. They knew people would move on, and they did.

When long time school board director Gary Marchbank resigned last December, the school board had many candidates to choose from. Among them was a business owner, a physician, a nurse, and a private school administrator.

Most inspiring, perhaps, was an applicant who overcame a severe learning disability to have career success.

That person wasn’t even selected for an interview.

Instead, the board chose another retired teacher- Boo Schneider- who has 34 years of public school teaching experience and also served as a union rep.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, the school board is doing its job.

It already has on its board another retired teacher in Judith Hardmeyer-Wright. There’s also Jennifer Zbyzsewski, a retired program manager with the U.S. Forest Service. Stromberger and Kline, a real estate broker, round out the five-person board and are the only ones with private sector experience. Whomever the board chooses to replace Kline won’t have to run for election until 2027.

Stromberger is now the only representative on the board that has earned a paycheck that wasn’t cut by the government. This experience matters if the school board really wants to change the conversation and direction of public education.