Reporting the education beat in 2023

I’ve been struggling the past few weeks to land on a word that captures, without embellishment, the magnitude of change that 2023 brought to public education in Montana. And my mind keeps coming back to one: seismic. It started last spring with a legislative session that education sources repeatedly characterized as unprecedented. I lost count of how many distinct bills I covered impacting the lives and daily routines of educators, students and parents. Some debuted without controversy, driven by a concerted bipartisan effort to reform aspects of Montana’s K-12 system. Others triggered fie