Two Candidates File for Bozeman School Board

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Two candidates file for Bozeman School Board

 By Gail Schontzler Chronicle Staff Writer  Feb 24, 2016

Two seats on the Bozeman School Board will be open in the May 3 school election, and candidates have already filed to run to represent Bozeman elementary voters.

Vice Chair Andy Willett, a Bozeman attorney who has served on the board nearly four years, and Tanya Reinhardt, who works for a business consulting firm and ran unsuccessfully last year, have both filed to run for three-year terms.

Incumbent Elizabeth Williamson said she has decided not to run for a second term.

“I love the board,” Williamson said, but her daughters are still young and “it’s hard to do both.” She said the School Board requires a lot of night meetings and she wants to be deeply involved as a parent with her children’s school, which creates a conflict of interest when she’s a School Board trustee.

The eight-member Bozeman School Board has seven trustees representing the Bozeman elementary district and one representing rural voters in the high school district. They serve three-year terms for no pay, set policy and budgets and hire staff for the school district.

Reinhardt, 49, was one of six candidates who ran last year for three seats, and she came in fourth.

“I still believe I have something to contribute to the School Board, both with my past experience and my interests in serving,” she said.

Reinhardt represents parents as one of 40-some members of the Bozeman High School Advisory Committee, which is evaluating options for coping with the hundreds of additional students expected to enroll in the next few years.

She said the committee is leaning toward having two separate schools instead of expanding Bozeman High on Main Street from the current 2,000 students to 3,000 students, and she agrees. “I think the space is too limited and lacks flexibility to grow,” Reinhardt said. She is still weighing whether it would be better to build a freshman academy or a second full-fledged high school on a new site.

The daughter of teachers, Reinhardt attended high school in Great Falls and earned a bachelor’s degree from Montana State University and a master’s from the University of Oklahoma. After MSU she served in the Army for 13 years and retired from the Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel after 22 years of service. She works for BMGI, a business-consulting firm based in Denver.

She and her husband, Brent, scholarship and enrollment director for Army ROTC at MSU, have two children at Bozeman High, son Aiden, a freshman, and daughter Allison, a junior. Reinhardt added that her grandmother graduated from Gallatin County High School in 1944.

Willett said he’s running again because there’s so much unfinished business, it’s a way to give back to public schools, and because, “I love it.”

Willett, 47, is a partner with the law firm Drysdale, McLean, Younkin & Willett.

A Montana native, he graduated from Ennis High School, where his dad was an administrator, his mom a teacher for 42 years and his grandfather served on the school board more than 20 years. He said his own goal is to serve on the Bozeman board for 10 years, to get through the expansion of Bozeman High and following transition.

Willett said he serves on the high school executive committee – with Superintendent Rob Watson, Board Chair Wendy Tage and others – so at this point he still wants to “hold back and listen” to ideas about the high school options, rather than express a preference.

Willett graduated from the University of Montana, where he studied finance and economics. He worked for 10 years in Denver as a commercial loan officer, and graduated from the University of Denver law school. Returning to Montana, he worked for a real estate lending company before joining the Drysdale law firm. He served six years on the nonprofit Bozeman Schools Foundation board.

The School Board appointed Willett to fill a vacancy in 2012 and in 2013 he won election to the board. He has coached kids’ football, basketball, soccer and baseball teams, and volunteered at the Bozeman Senior Center, in classrooms and on the school’s finance committee. He and his wife, Albee, an accountant, have two children in Bozeman schools, Brooke, a Bozeman High sophomore, and Hudson, an eighth-grader at Sacajawea Middle School.

Gail Schontzler can be reached at 406-582-2633 or [email protected].

Tanya Reinhardt Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/Chronicle +1

Andy Willett Photo from Bozeman Schools Foundation

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 Bozeman Gail Schontzler

Gail Schontzler covers schools and Montana State University for the Chronicle.

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