Clearwater Valley High Principal Charlotte McKinney rolled out the red carpet for students Monday — literally.

It was the first day of school for students and for the Clearwater Valley School District, one of the two that formerly made up the Mountain View district. The other district, Grangeville, also started school this week, marking the first completed deconsolidation of Idaho school districts in two decades.

Superintendents for both districts say the first days went smoothly, but behind the scenes they are still sorting out what, they hope, are the last finance and technology issues.

‘It’s complex’

Students in Grangeville schools aren’t seeing many new faces their first week.

Superintendent Amanda Bush said her human resources director confirmed the schools have the fewest new teachers they’ve ever had.

Bush promoted several staff from within, including a special education teacher to special education coordinator. Bush herself added the role of superintendent to her job as high school principal.

“We’ve been growing our own for a while,” Bush said.

Students shouldn’t feel many of the behind-the-scenes changes that create a new district.

“Our goal was to be really seamless,” Bush said. “Like a divorce, you don’t want kids to feel that something huge has changed in their world.”

The first few days of school have been “utter chaos, but that’s how the first week always is,” Bush said.

The heaviest lift has been integrating new technology systems while splitting old data. Standardized test data must be split into two different entities, then integrated with a new student information system.

“Every staff and student email is no longer the same handle,” Bush said. “That has been a tremendous effort by our technology team.”

“It just goes on and on,” she said of the changes. “Every time you finish one you find another.”

Even things Bush thought were sorted out often come back with another issue to fix.

“You discover, oops, that didn’t roll over the way we thought it would,” Bush said.

Idaho hasn’t split a district in 20 years, so it’s all a first for Bush and her counterpart in Clearwater Valley.

“Everybody is kind of trying our best, but it’s complex,” Bush said.

Bush is excited the district purchased vans to transport smaller student groups in hopes of saving money. Curriculum adoptions that were put off pending deconsolidation can also resume, Bush said. She hopes to buy new math and science curriculum for next school year.

The last joint meeting of the Clearwater Valley and Grangeville school boards will take place in November.

“We want to do it right, but we want it done,” she said.

Clearwater Valley community commits

There are a few new faces in the Clearwater Valley School District.

One is McKinney, who welcomed students with a speech and red carpet rollout Monday morning.

She was Mountain View’s special education director, a duty she will continue, in addition to being high school principal.

But there’s “nothing officially different than the start of a normal school year,” said Clearwater Valley Superintendent Vincent Martinez.

The high school got a new gym floor after a flood last year, breathing “new life and pride” into the facility, Martinez said. He also hired two high school teachers and a part-time art teacher at the elementary school. The elementary school has a new principal, Krisi Pratt, who is returning to Clearwater Valley after a few years in Asotin, Washington.

A longtime paraprofessional stepped up to teach a textiles and apparel course at the high school, the start of an eventual family consumer science program. Martinez expected a handful of students to sign up, but 13 enrolled in the class.

“We feel pretty good about that,” Martinez said.

There are still deconsolidation details being sorted behind the scenes. Most of that work is being done by Grangeville staff, where the Mountain View District office was located, Martinez said.

“They have done a fabulous job,” he said. “They’ve been great to work with.”

As in Grangeville, there have been a few hiccups in the technology realm.

“Every student, every teacher, every staff member got new emails,” Martinez said.

The district switched from Skyward to Lumen Touch, a new student information system, but all the related apps weren’t working.

The systems weren’t communicating properly, Martinez said.

Students had their passwords changed by Lumen and Google three times.

“We overcame that barrier,” he said.

Despite the technology irritations, the community has been supportive of the shift, he said. The board of trustees held a community forum last month to discuss rerunning the district’s $811,000 levy for another year.

“It was a good community conversation,” Martinez said, noting that after years of negative and contentious levy conversations in Mountain View, this moment “felt good.”