ID: A Baffling Hiring Decision And Another Type Of District Takeover

There's another type of school takeover happening out there, and for one example we'll look to Idaho. There the West Bonner County School District has decided they'd like to hire Branden Durst as their next superintendent. It's a baffling decision, but it tells us a lot about the way some winds are blowing these days.

Who is Branden Durst?

The broad outlines of his career are pretty simple. Born in Boise. Attended pacific Lutheran University (BA in poli sci with communication minor), grad school at Kent State and Claremont Graduate University (public policy, international political economy), then Boise State University (Master of Public Administration). In 2022, he went back to BSU for a degree in Executive Educational Leadership.

His LinkedIn account lists 20 "experience" items since 2000, and Durst seems to have bounced quickly from job to job until 2006, when he was elected as an Idaho State Representative for four years. Then in 2012 he was elected to the state senate, a job that he held for one year. He did all that as  Democrat; in 2016, he switched his party to the GOP.

Then independent consultant, a mediator for a "child custody and Christian mediation" outfit. Then an Idaho Family Policy Center senior policy fellow. IFPC advocates for the usual religious right causes, but they have a broader focus as well: "To advance the cultural commission." They see the Great Commission in a dominionist light-- the church is to teach "nations to obey everything Jesus has commanded." And they suggest you get your kid out of public school.

Durst's current gig is with the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a right tilted thinky tank that wants to "make Idaho into a Laboratory of Liberty by exposing, defeating, and replacing the state's socialist public policies." The run a Center for American Education which, among other things, maintains a map so you can see where schools are "indoctrinating students with leftist nonsense." They recommend you get your child out of public school. 

Nowhere in any of this will you find Durst holding any sort of education or school-related job. He's never been a teacher or any kind of school administrator. Not so much as a two-year Teach for America tourist visit to the job. He did claim, at some point, to have worked as a substitute teacher and coach.

You would think that would be kind of a red flag.

Speaking of baggage...

Durst comes with some baggage. That one year tenure in the Senate? Durst resigned because the press got ahold of the fact that he was actually was living in Idaho only part time; his wife was working as a teacher near Seattle was living there at least part of the time with his family. KTVB, the station that followed the story, "observed his home looked empty of furniture when stopping by to knock on the door last week." Durst insisted that his bed and clothes were there. And he blamed the split living arrangement on Idaho schools:

There's a big difference between living out of your district for an entire year, and having a family member who is a teacher that doesn't get treated well because they live in Idaho and have to find employment someplace else. I think there's a big difference, Durst said.

For a while, it looked like he would fight the charge. But in the end he resigned his seat.

2022 was not a great year for Durst. After the Idaho Senate failed to advance the parental rights bill that he was promoting, Durst confronted Senator Jim Woodward with enough aggressiveness that Woodward called the cops on him. After blowing off a meeting with GOP leadership, Durst blasted senators on social media. The Senate GOP majority wrote a letter condemning Durst for "spurious attacks against members of the Senate, meant to coerce votes and influence elections." In a press release, GOP leaders condemned Durst and said his actions "demonstrate egregious conduct unbecoming of anyone, especially a former legislator and current statewide political candidate."

The "candidate" part refers to Durst's run for the office of state superintendent. He told EastIdahoNews, “Parents are tired. They don’t feel respected or trusted and they want some real change in their school superintendent. They’re all talking about the same things. They want to stop the indoctrination that’s happening in their schools, they want to (be able) to make decisions for their kids." He ran on three priorities-- end common core, stop critical race theory, and school choice ("fund students, not systems"). He came in second in the GOP primary, losing to Debbie Critchfield by about 25,000 votes.

Durst had remarried in 2016 (in Washington state), and in 2022, his wife and ex-wife got into a scuffle that almost blew up into abuse allegations against Durst and his wife over a whack with a wooden spoon on a 14-year-old child. He explained later, “The child wasn’t being respectful, wasn’t obeying … It wasn’t even very hard, but things can happen in the political world where things get taken out of proportion, and that’s what happened here." Certainly his candidacy made the story bigger than it might otherwise have been.

His candidacy for school superintendent

Durst's proposed contract had some unusual features. One was that he would be hard to fire-- the trustees would need a super-majority to vote him out. The draft contract also required the district to provide his legal counsel, requiring the district to protect Durst and his wife from “any and all demands, claims, suits, actions, and legal proceedings brought against the Superintendent for all non-criminal incidents arising while the Superintendent is acting within the scope of his employment.” (This seems to speak to his experiences with his ex-wife). The proposed contract also included a vehicle, a housing allowance, and district-provided meal services. Plus an ability to work remotely. 

All of this would be contingent on Durst being provisionally certified to hold a superintendent's position. That's usually given to someone with relevant experience in education, but Durst says he's like to see the process opened up so that districts can have "the flexibility they need to make the right hiring decision for them." One has to wonder what sort of district feels that the best fit for them is someone with no actual qualifications. 

West Bonner School District has issues of its own

The district has been through three superintendents in one year. The interim superintendent was Susie Luckey, who has spent nearly four decades in the district as teacher and principal. She was the other candidate considered for the job--the one that the board didn't hire.

I told you all about Branden Durst not to badmouth him. I probably disagree with him on pretty much everything about education, but I don't have any reason to think he's an evil man. But one has to wonder what exactly qualifies him to be a school district superintendent.

So, why?

Trustee Keith Rutledge voted for Durst (it was a 3-2 vote), and explained via email to The Spokesman:

“He has a vastly superior understanding of the legal, financial, administrative, and educational philosophy aspects of the job,” Rutledge wrote, adding that Durst is popular among Bonner County voters and “has the broad support of the nearly 13,000 residents of our district.”

That last is an apparent reference to Durst's campaign for state superintendent; he took 60% of the vote in Bonner County. Given that Durst has no apparent experience in the legal, financial or administrative aspects of the job (certainly not more than a four-decade veteran of classroom and administration), it seems likely that it's Durst's philosophy that attracted the board, and we've seen where he comes from in that department.

Educational philosophy is certainly part of the superintendent job, but there are also a host of nuts-and-bolts, day-to-day, keep the lights on and the buses running aspects to the job. It takes practical acumen to make it possible for teachers to do their jobs and students to get what they need. 

Some community members say he's just what they need. Jim Woodward, the GOP lawmaker that Durst accosted, has a different assessment, per the Coeur d'Alene Press:

"I think is that he's an emotional person," Woodward said Thursday. "He couldn't control himself in the Senate committee room. How would you do any better in a school setting? He can't control himself and I think the real takeaway here is not only that he has a history of different problems in interacting with people. But he also is not qualified for … being a superintendent of a school district."

This kind of district take over--the installation of an unqualified leader with the "right" philosophy--is usually attempted by states (see, for instance, the takeover of schools in Lorain, Ohio). But nowadays, as hard-right candidates take over school boards, they are performing their own version on the school takeover, installing district members who are ideologically pure, even if they have no real qualifications for the job. Heck, it worked for Betsy DeVos's bid for the US Secretary of Education post.

That's a feature, not a bug

The conservative agitation group, Moms for Liberty, told us this was the goal. This was Tiffany Justice on the Steve Bannon show:

BANNON: Are we going to start taking over the school boards?

JUSTICE: Absolutely. We're going to take over the school boards, but that's not enough. Once we replace the school boards, what we need to do is we need to have search firms, that are conservative search firms, that help us to find new educational leaders, because parents are going to get in there and they're going to want to fire everyone. What else needs to happen? We need good school board training. We need lawyers to stand up in their communities and be advocates for parents and be advocates for school board members who are bucking the system.

There are multiple problems with this, starting with the idea of having public schools run by people who want to either convert them to centers for promoting only a single point of view (theirs) or else simply gut them and replace them with private schools. But for parents, the problems become more practical-- a school where things don't work because the person in charge doesn't know how to make them work. 

Despite some uproar over literal backroom shenanigans, the trustees appear committed to hiring Durst. For his part, Durst says he's ready to talk to those who oppose his hiring and convince him of his good intentions. Which is at least non-combative, but intentions and goals and philosophies don't, by themselves, run a district.

I'll let a parent that The Spokesman spoke with have the last word here.

Hailey Scott-Yount, a mother with two kids attending school in the district, said picking Durst as superintendent was “asinine.”

“Why on earth would you hire a mechanic to bake your wedding cake?” Scott-Yount said. “It’s terrifying.”