Dear Editor:
Inviting guest speakers into a high school classroom is always a dicey proposition. When you find a good one, you know it. Sen. Jon Tester was the best.
He never said no. He’d let kids videotape interviews with him, and didn’t ask to see the videos or preview the questions. He was open that way.
He knew how to engage with high school students. Believe me, that is not an easy skill to master. I still remember him opening a video Q&A conference by asking which of the students played the trumpet. The trumpet player got to ask the first question – of a United States Senator! That kid felt honored.
You see Sen. Tester everywhere. A group of friends saw Jon Tester at the Billings Clinic Classic, and ran over to see if he would let them get a picture because “we’re all in the class of ’74.” Sen. Tester laughed, and said, sure. He wasn’t worried about protecting his image.
Sen. Tester is a neighborly guy, and that value is reflected in his policy stands as well as in his personal style. In contrast, Sen. Tester’s opponent has attached himself to someone who considers being unpleasant an asset. President Trump picks fights with everybody, even the recently deceased war hero John McCain.
Matt Rosendale fits nicely into this pugnacious mode. The central promise of his campaign is that he will fight. But fight what, and for whom? Matt Rosendale has a long history of actively fighting the values that make Montana what it is.
Take the policy area that means the most to me because I spent 30 years in Montana classrooms: Montanans’ commitment to public education.
Montanans don’t just value public education. They prize it. We enshrined it in our constitution. We said it straight out: we believe in “a system of education which will develop the full educational potential of each person,” and we require that equality of educational opportunity be guaranteed every Montanan through free, high-quality public education.
Matt Rosendale’s record teems with examples that he dismisses this core Montana value.
Rosendale supported charter school legislation in the 2013 Legislature, even as all of these Montana organizations told him it was wrong for Montana: the Montana School Boards read more
