OPINION: A northern Idaho community college is saved, thankfully

If you’re in favor of higher education — and today that includes some but clearly not all voters — then the general election had one definite bright spot in the Idaho Panhandle: the voters’ choices to fill three seats on the North Idaho College board in Coeur d’Alene.

Count it as something in the Gem State to be thankful for this season.

The college has been teetering on the edge of losing accreditation, which could mean, in effect, the end of the college. This is not a subtle threat or much in dispute, or unimportant. The college’s future was hanging in the balance with the choices voters made to fill three critical spots on what normally, in most years until recently, has been an obscure governing body. Community college boards are quiet and publicly obscure — like a lot of offices in government — as long as they stay out of trouble.

North Idaho College has no inherent massive problems. There’s nothing about its teachers or students or administrators or facilities or the other people (vendors, community partners) raising any red flags. It long has operated like a normal community college, offering some collegiate courses and some aimed at vocational and technical training. Nothing terribly contentious there.

Until the Kootenai County Republican organization decided a few years ago to turn the nonpartisan board into a culture war battlefield (and in campaigns, vivid apocalyptic imagery). With the support of that organization, which for a couple of decades has been politically dominant in Kootenai, new members were elected to shake things up at the college.

Shake them they did. Their tenure of control, which has extended over not all but most of the last four years — since voters in November 2020 elected a majority which set about demolishing normal practices at the college — has been a time of chaos and uproar at the college. It included fired presidents and attorneys and others, and a wider mix of key players, some evidently quite capable and others evidently not. The college was in endless uproar for years, and the reason was easy to point to: the elected board.

Finally, the regional organization that accredits colleges stepped in and warned that the college’s credentials, which translates to the usefulness and recognition by the outside world of its education program, was at imminent risk of being lost.

That finally seems to have gotten the attention of Kootenai County voters. It was not all of them, and far from enough to constitute a landslide at the polls, but enough to change the membership of the board in a direction aimed at restoring the college’s conventional role as a community college.

The stakes were public enough in the last couple of elections, but this year they finally moved front and center, ahead and in front of the bogus culture war topics that dominated so much local attention in previous cycles.

The slate of candidates trying to save the college ran under the slogan “Save NIC Now” and the campaign language was blunt: “They aren’t here to play games; they’re here to clean up the board and get NIC back on track. If you care about NIC and the future of this community, these are the folks you need to vote for.”

It worked.

On Nov. 20, the newly elected board members, Rick Durbin, Eve Knudtsen and Mary Havercroft, were sworn in amid applause and no doubt deep relief. And they got to work right away on starting to repair the damage from the last few years.

This isn’t the end of the story. Word on ensuring accreditation will go on for months, as the accreditors move toward their final decisions. But the odds of success have improved.

What happened politically in Kootenai County could blunt efforts in other parts of the state to take other colleges down the same road NIC traveled. Attempts in southern Idaho were turned back a couple of years ago; thanks to the voters in Kootenai County, they may have a harder time gaining traction in future. Maybe some broader lessons will sink in, too.

It’s something to be thankful for, we can hope.

Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. He may be contacted at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com.