24. Rethinking What School Can Be

Most people have opinions about public schools, but few see the complexity behind running them. Kalispell Public Schools Superintendent Matt Jensen joins us for a candid look at leading a district serving more than 6,000 students—from working with an elected board and navigating Montana’s local-control model to aligning K-8 and high school expectations. At the heart of it all is urgency: students only get one chance at each grade, and the decisions made today have lasting consequences.

Matt also explores the district’s move toward personalized, competency-based education, where demonstrating mastery matters more than simply accumulating points. We discuss student agency, expanding work-based learning and internships, and how community expectations are helping shape graduates who can adapt, collaborate, and succeed beyond the classroom. Matt also tackles misconceptions about school funding, audits, levies, and bonds, and shares his five-year vision for greater clarity, stability, and excellence across Kalispell schools.

Links

• Kalispell Public School District 5
• Episode 17 - School Levies: Funding Gaps, Voter Fatigue, and What Works with Jinn Mariman

Heart of the Flathead is brought to you by:

• Glacier Investment Management
• Whitefish Financial Services

Heart of the Flathead, is produced by David Wigginton, in partnership with LeftBrainRightBrain Marketing. Listeners can find the podcast online at HeartoftheFlathead.com and LeftBrainRightBrain Marketing at lbrbm.com. The content for Heart of the Flathead podcasts and any show notes and transcripts are copyrighted by David Wigginton. All rights are reserved. Reproduction and rebroadcasting, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited without written permission. Contact David Wigginton by clicking the Send Us a Text link at the top of the episode description. 

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host or production team. Appearance on the show does not constitute an endorsement of any goods, services, or opinions discussed. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered professional, legal, medical, or financial advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making decisions based on the content of this show.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Heart of the Flathead, where we sit down with the change makers, the unsung heroes, and everyday folks who give this place its pulse. If you live here, love here, or just want to know what makes Kalispell and the Valley tick, you're in the right place. And now here's your host, Dave Wigginton.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to another episode of Heart of the Flathead. I'm excited to introduce our guest for this episode, Matt Jensen, superintendent of School District 5 here in Kalispell, Montana. Matt, welcome to Heart of the Flathead.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Hey, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Absolutely. So gosh, education. We're just getting started with the school year again. What better time to have the superintendent from School District 5 on Heart of the Flathead? So, Matt, you know, we're gonna talk a lot about School District 5 today and about your role as superintendent.

Matt Jensen's Background and path to the present

SPEAKER_01 0:51

But before we get going, I'd like to spend a few minutes getting to know you a little bit, maybe about who you are, where you're from, maybe a little bit about your life's journey and how you ended up as the superintendent for School District 5.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Yeah, I'd be glad to share. I actually grew up here, thankful to be born and raised in the Flathead Valley. My dad was an electrician for the aluminum plant, and my mom worked for semi-tool back in the day, now applied material. Graduated Flathead High School and then went off and played a little college basketball my first year of college just to get my foot in the door. And then Where'd you do that? Williston, North Dakota. Yeah, I had a coach, a high school coach that was from North Dakota. So he was generous enough to get me a train ticket and introduced me to some of his friends over in North Dakota. So I tried out for a couple schools and ended up picking a junior college and hoped to play a little bit and just had a great opportunity just to start college, doing a sport and having fun. And then came back that summer and started dating the woman who is now my wife. And she was a track athlete at Missoula. So I made an August decision to transfer to the University of Montana, which was the best decision I ever made. And then finished up school there. Student taught in Big Fork as a government teacher half the day and a sixth grade teacher the other half of the day, which was fun to see the ends of those spectrums on a daily basis. And then was fortunate enough to get a job the next year at Big Fork. Stayed here, built a home, have four beautiful kids, and I taught at Big Fork, was a high school principal at Big Fork, was the elementary middle school principal, then the superintendent, a total of 17 years in Big Fork before coming to Calisbell.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Oh, wow. Dang, that's quite the journey. So your time in Willis, then were there oil fields there then, or did they come after your time there?

SPEAKER_02 2:42

No, it was kind of in between booms. There was one before and then one after, but it it was kind of a dead town when I was there.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Okay. A good move to Missoula then for sure. So 17 years in the Big Fork School District. Wow, that's quite a lengthy time. What did you enjoy about that? And what did you learn from that and that you carried forward into your role as uh superintendent here in Kalispaw?

SPEAKER_02 3:01

You know, it's just so special to live in a small community and have an opportunity to cut your teeth in so many different areas. And you just grow so close to people and the community. You know, as a as a high school principal, I had an opportunity to work with an amazing, ambitious group of high school staff that really wanted to reinvent what the high school looked like. We did the same thing in the elementary and middle school. And then when I was superintendent, just had broad community support. We passed a levy in the first time in many years, and then we're able to pass a high school bond, and that high school building hadn't been touched in about 50 years. So the before and after and what the services look like for students afterwards was pretty amazing. But just the relationships you build. And then at a small school, when you're superintendent, you're also the HR director. You're also overseeing food service, you're also overseeing transportation, and you get to know all of those areas of a school system pretty intimately because you're just managing it on a daily basis. So, you know, the experience and the requirements to be in the weeds on so many things and get to know the operation side of things was just amazing memories.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Yeah, I'm sure. And is it much different in Calispell versus Big Fork? I recognize CalSpell is a little bit bigger community, but it's not that much bigger, really, is it?

SPEAKER_02 4:14

Yeah, it's it's actually quite a bit different. So from a student perspective, we've got about had about a thousand students in Big Fork and Calspell's sitting over 6,000 students. And then just the scope and the scale changes. You know, you have multiple people overseeing those departments. So you're you're one layer removed, and it's just a different opportunity and different challenges, but also the same opportunities to connect with people. People are people wherever you go. And I think we're all motivated by a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose. We all want excellence, and that's pretty universal.

What A Superintendent Actually Does

SPEAKER_01 4:48

So what does a superintendent of a school district do?

SPEAKER_02 4:53

Well, my primary responsibility is to uh work with the board of trustees. We have 11 elected trustees, and trustees are in place to set the vision for the district, and then they work with the superintendent to find how do you take a vision for a community, for a school system, and make it actually happen. It doesn't happen top down. So there's some vision settings, some big broad ideas, but then you're working with staff to see what the current realities are. So a superintendent's really in between and finding common ground, common vision, and then strategies to implement that vision.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

So just to clarify for the audience, the trustees are also known as the school board, correct?

SPEAKER_02 5:35

Correct. They're all elected positions, and depending on the what the geography looks like of an area, different numbers of trustees are elected. So in the Callus Bell area, we have 13 partner districts, and those partner districts sometimes have three partner districts combined for one elected trustee. And in other places across the state, it's less diverse of a geographic outreach. 60% of our high school students, for example, come from our partner districts, which people I don't think fully appreciate. So we have an 11-member board, which is the largest in Montana. Some boards are five, seven, nine member boards. We have an 11-member board in Calspell Public Schools.

The challenges of with with the School Board

SPEAKER_01 6:17

How difficult is that then? So the more people you add to a board, I envision the more opinions you introduce and the more preferences. And is it hard to build consensus with that many people?

SPEAKER_02 6:32

Well, I joke that I have four kids, and if we're all in the car, so we're a family of six, and I'm trying to coordinate what restaurant we're gonna eat at, and a restaurant typically has, you know, 20 plus menu items, it's hard to get our family of six to agree on a restaurant that has 30 options. So if if you think about what it looks like for 11 elected leaders, and typically the profile of somebody that's running for office and gets elected, they're passionate about things. They care, they want to be involved. So these are all good things. These are the motives are all pure in the sense of we want to be uh collectively making our community better. But of course, there's differences in the approach or the what the priority is. I've been very fortunate with the boards I've worked with from both Big Fork and Calispell that at the end of the day, people can recognize that it's not about them, it's about what they're doing in service of students. And so we find a lot of common ground on, you know, lots of opportunity for strong opinions, but then at the end of the day, a lot of agreement on what we can agree on that we believe is best right now for this group of students.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

So, you know, it's it's interesting. I I grew up in a different area and it was the school districts, I feel like were bigger. And

Why are there so many school districts?

SPEAKER_01 7:50

we have a lot of school districts in the valley here. What's the rationale for that? And dovetailing or piggybacking off a comment you made earlier, how do they all interact to make sure that they're all working in the same direction?

SPEAKER_02 8:04

Yeah, good question. It's really a Montana thing. Montana is a local control state, which means that each community has their own elected trustees, representatives in different political avenues. So we end up with a lot of representatives per capita in Montana because of that desire to be locally controlled. In Calispell, our elementary district, and this is one of the things people confuse it, and I understand if you're not in schools, how you can see the lines getting blurred a little bit. But our elementary district is comprised of our six elementary schools and the one middle school. We have the largest middle school in the state of Montana. They're supported by the six different elementary schools. And then our high school district is much different. So our high school district runs from basically Whitefish, Columbia Falls, Big Fork, all the way to the Libby school district. So that geographic area is huge and brings in all of our partner districts. And our partner districts, the bigger ones that people would think of would be Evergreen, West Valley, Summers Lakeside, and then some of the smaller ones, only Bissell, Deer Park. Those would be the smaller districts that it's Flathead on the map, but it's supports Flathead and Glacier high school district.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

How challenging is that? Seems like that would be a lot of moving back and forth trying to figure out how students where students go and how they all fit into the resources that we have here.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

Yeah, it's a unique challenge for the Flathead Valley. In other parts across the state, they'll have one school system in the elementary that directly partners with their high school or feeds into their high school system where we need to coordinate on lots of different levels. And one of the ways we've tackled that recently is through the Doris Mountain Summit. So it's education summit that we hold in June every year. This year was our third annual. And it's really just about excellence in teaching and learning. So we take the best ideas wherever they're happening and bring people together. We have teachers and educators from across the country that join us across the Flyhead Valley. And the intent of that is how can we all be on the same page with excellence in teaching and learning so that when our students come together in high school, they have the same experiences in K-8. And there's just a lot of power. I said earlier that I think everybody wants to belong to something excellent. And when you identify what's excellent and teachers have an opportunity to go to somebody else's classroom, do a site visit to study what's happening. There's just the most incredible, humble, hardworking people, and they want their classrooms to be the same. So that collaborative nature and that cohesion around a common vision of what is what does it look like for a graduate? And our goal is to grow students towards that graduate profile, there's a lot of unity in those opportunities.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

So what you know, you mentioned the the board, he just talked about goals and that sort of thing. As you look at this upcoming school year, the one that we just started here, do

Planning goals and objectives

SPEAKER_01 11:05

you plan specific goals and objectives for a year, or does just an individual school year fit into a broader, let's say, five-year or 10-year plan?

SPEAKER_02 11:13

Yeah, both. So the board will outline a strategic plan. And those strategic plans are typically five-year plans, and we're at the tail end of a five-year strategic plan set by the board of trustees. And then the specifics year to year is what can you bite off in chunks? And I try not to think of it in years because that promotes kind of this fixed mindset of the time that you have to achieve something. And the way we try to look at things is what is the next opportunity that we have? And then where will we go next? And what's the sense of urgency? So when you're talking about being entrusted with somebody else's kid, there's this huge sense of urgency around we can't create things that take three years to implement. That would be like saying, well, if you're a third grader, the change will happen when you're in sixth grade, right? Students only get one year in second grade. They only get one year as a freshman. So there's this urgency. If we know better, we need to do better. We need to implement something as quickly as we can, but also making sure that we are doing it the correct way. So it's really finding those balances with our goals. Over the last three years specifically, our district has been pursuing personalized competency-based education. And that's really around how do we make the instruction that's happening in the classroom more personalized to that individual student? And then how do we ensure competency? On the personalized side, it means that all students don't just start a lesson all in the same spot. Different students bring in different backgrounds, they bring in different skill sets. So starting everybody on the same page just doesn't make sense in a modern classroom. And then competency means instead of a traditional education system where students know how to play the school game and they can grab this assignment for this amount of points and this assignment for this amount of points or extra credit here and navigate a system, they're held accountable to actually learning the content so that they have the competency. And I personally believe that that's where confidence comes from. And if in the both of those systems, students can gain confidence, but it looks drastically different. So if you're grabbing points from this assignment and grabbing points from that assignment and grabbing extra credit, you gain confidence in knowing that you can navigate a school structure and navigate the game of school versus if you can grab a competency and you know that you can do whatever objective is in front and you can apply it in a real-world, unpredictable situation. That gives you confidence over a skill. And leading students into these wild statistics right now of the students we have now are projected to have five to seven different careers in a lifetime. It's important that they understand that they're competent and they have abilities, diverse abilities to be able to be flexible, adaptable, change to a changing workforce landscape, not that they know how to play a traditional education game.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Got it. So that's really interesting what you just said there. I mean, and and I think we all know this in the back of our mind, but you don't really unless you're an educator and you're doing this day in and day out, you don't recognize that one size doesn't fit all.

unknown 14:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

So you're trying to mix and match with with the different students. And I guess that largely falls on the teachers. What is the school board and the superintendent's role in helping to facilitate that?

SPEAKER_02 14:35

Well, the first thing that, you know, is setting that vision and then finding models of excellence. So one of the things we've done is we've identified districts across the country that are modeling this. And then we applied for a grant through the state of Montana and we're recipients of that grant to do this work. And we're proud that we're pioneering and leading a lot of other districts across the state in this work. And then through that grant, we've had the financial resources to be able to send teachers across the country to see these model schools, be in a classroom, make those personal connections with those teachers, and then come back and in cohorts, start implementing some of these strategies and these changes to make this happen. And we've seen it take off. So over the last four years, we've been doing this work and just making milestone after milestone of connection and connection to seeing the ripple effect of what's happening. And so now we're in a position to where we're hosting educators from across the state, and then we're bringing them into our schools and they're seeing what's happening. That would be the vision from here's what it looks like, and then here's how we're implementing it, and then involving teachers in that implementation process.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

You may not have this handy. I've seen this in some presentations that I think

How Kalispell compares to other districts

SPEAKER_01 15:52

have been given. But how does our school district here in Callis Wall, School District 5 stack up against the other comparable school districts in the state based on just this grant that you've received and the benchmarking that you're going through?

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Are you speaking to data, like student achievement data, or what do you think?

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah, what what do you think is relevant, I guess? I mean, I'm just wondering like how does it, I mean, yeah, achievement, accomplishments, I mean, yeah, those sorts of things I think would be interesting to know.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Yeah, I think when people want to fully understand how is the school system doing, that's ultimately the question that I think parents or community members want to know. Is like, hey, how how are you doing? And then how do we measure success? And what does success look like? There's lots of different measurements that we face as a district. A lot of our priorities come from the state. So the state will say, hey, we want to see these things happening. I'll I'll take uh work-based learning for an example. That's been an initiative across our state for the last couple of legislative sessions. And then there's always the question of is our early K programs, are they producing academic results worth the investment? So there's those types of questions. So when we look at success as a school district, we're first trying to identify what is the heart of what we believe should be happening in the classroom. And what we believe should be happening in the classroom is evidence that students are taking more ownership for their learning. And more ownership is marked by evidence where students are tracking their own progress. It's really clear to the student what they're expected to know and be able to do. And then they're taking applicable steps to apply that to their individual future. One of the ways this is most evident for us is besides the hard evidence of a data notebook when you walk into your child's elementary classroom and they're tracking their own progress and keeping track of their own data. Fast forward that to high school when we're speeding up our internships and our work-based learning opportunities. And we have a goal of every student having an opportunity to do a work-based learning or internship by the time they graduate high school. And three years ago, we had about 90 students participating in those activities. We were probably leading the state in the number of opportunities per capita for our high school. Last year we were right around 430 work-based learning internships. So just blowing up that model and allowing kids to just push into the community and take that ownership. And then you break down the on the academic data side, and there's lots of different lenses to look at this, but our most viable data is the data that we keep internally, and it's based on the assessments that are measuring growth. I actually was just able to sit down with the instructional coach yesterday from Russell and Elrod and look at some of the growth they're making. And it's incredible the trajectory that's happened over the last two years. The state, unfortunately, has been piloting some assessment data over the last two years. So we don't have real good benchmarking, but we're confident in the internal mechanisms that we're measuring that growth and excited to watch that translate.

Managing expectations of parents and the community

SPEAKER_01 18:57

How do you manage the community's parents, students' expectations versus the limitations of reality, just in general? Because people want certain things that maybe aren't possible. You mentioned needing to move things quickly, and you don't you can't necessarily take three to five years to implement something. How do you juggle that natural friction?

SPEAKER_02 19:20

Well, I think talking to parents and having open dialogue with what is it that you actually want. A couple of years ago, we did a pretty broad survey where we just sat down and asked parents, hey, what are your hopes and dreams for your kids? And as parents, I challenge all of us to think about what the answer to that is for our kids, whether you're an educator or business owner or whatever walk of life. What we heard from parents wasn't we want our kid to get a 32 on the ACT. What we heard from parents is we want our kids to have flexible skills, to be adaptable, to be able to navigate complex relationships, to be collaborative. And I think that's one of the ways that education's changed in the last 20 years, where maybe when I was growing up, there wasn't a lot of access to technology at home. And so you would send your kids to school and you would hope that they had these experiences where they could have access to technology and learn to navigate systems that might be applicable to them when they go off to the workforce. Now it's almost the opposite, right? We have abundant technology at home, and parents want their kids to come to school to have these rich opportunities to collaborate and figure out relationships and navigate complex, use technology, sure, but be able to accomplish complex tasks that involve working with other people. I think just goes back to asking and talking to people, what are your what are your hopes and dreams for your kids? And I believe that we have a school system that's modeling that. Our internships that I was speaking about, that's sped up the clock of this traditional system where that typically happens when a somebody's a junior in college, sophomore junior in college. Well, it's too late. You've invested thousands of dollars and lots of time and energy into career field, and then you discover when you're a junior in college that's really not what you're interested in. Man, wouldn't that be great to learn that when you're a junior in high school? And those are the things that resonate with parents that just make sense of how we should be caring for other people's kids.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

Makes

What's the most common misperception about how our schools work

SPEAKER_01 21:20

a lot of sense. What would you say are one or two things that the public misunderstands about public education generally, and maybe more specifically about school district five?

SPEAKER_02 22:44

Regardless of the district across the state, what I hear boards and administrators struggling with is the school funding piece. That seems to constantly be a point of of rub, contention, and just really hard to explain. I think most people don't understand that schools are very limited in the pots of money they get. They get money for certain things. And then the lack of flexibility that schools really have when it comes to budgets. I I had a question pop up several times during the last levy and it and it said, well, if schools were audited once every five years, we'd have more trust in the system. Well schools are audited every year. So there's high accountability to every dollar spent in a public school system. I think people lose track of some of those details and maybe there's a misconception. It's very different than any other business where the transparency is it's very clear.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Who audits the schools?

SPEAKER_02 23:38

Schools are responsible for entering into an auditing contract as an independent third party. So there's different auditors in every county that trusts private companies or are they public servants or yeah they're private companies and they're they need to be neutral third party and then they create an audit and then turn it back to the state I think that makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

And are those audit results available to the general public?

SPEAKER_02 24:05

Yep. So they're every year their that complete audit is posted on our website is also posted at the state level and it's intended to be public facing.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

And so what is what what are these specific results that the audit produces?

SPEAKER_02 24:20

Well it's looking big picture at like stability of a district but it's also looking at when they have some sort of finding is a mechanism that's set up by the state to spend this this amount of money that was allocated for this did the spending stay within that category? For example, if the school district receives money for transportation, did the funding for transportation stay inside of transportation?

SPEAKER_01 24:45

Okay, that makes sense. So it sounds like then and this is natural people look at a school district or any nonhousehold entity as a household. Hey I've got this pot of money I can deal whatever I want but that's not the reality for a school district. And so there is an audit then that helps to make sure that school districts are operating within the parameters of their budgets and that they don't deviate from that. Is that a fair summary?

SPEAKER_02 25:11

That's exactly right. Yeah. So you much more discretion in comparison to a family budget of, hey, we're going to shift priorities here so we're going to shift money around we're going to put less in savings for more in savings. That's just not the case with a school district. And then the other misconception is with levies and bonds. So levies are for learning bonds are for buildings you don't mix the two

Levy v Bonds

SPEAKER_02 25:34

and when you run a levy people say we just ran a levy last year. Well the mechanism set up by the state is they're intended to be run every year. So you pass a levy it's for a fixed dollar amount that never increases. So as student enrollment increases as inflation increases the mechanism to stay funded is a levy. And I think that's hard for people to understand because people visualize the levy we we want to fully fund our schools is what they're saying when they pass a levy. They have a hard time understanding that they're only making that choice for one year. If they want to keep their schools fully funded they need to pass a levy every year, which is a very tough thing to communicate because it runs counter to how we do business in other parts of our community we had Jen Merriman one of the trustees on the podcast back in the spring and she kind of talked about that in more detail I would encourage listeners to go back and listen to that episode to learn a little bit more about how that works and what's being done to help try and change that so we don't have to have a levy every year for just to keep up with spending.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

As you think about the vision you talked about the vision at the outset that the the board and you set together you're coming up to the tail end of this five year

Matt's vision for the school district

SPEAKER_01 26:47

plan. What's your vision for school district five for the next five years?

SPEAKER_02 26:54

Yeah right now this year we are full throttle on clarity and student agency. So on a clarity standpoint is as educators, we want to be super clear about what we expect students to know and be able to do at every grade level, at every content level. For students, we want students to take more ownership for their learning and see how they can apply their learning in real life unpredictable ways. We're just in the trenches right now of that work and that's we're so fortunate to be in that spot because we've worked really hard over the last three years to put ourselves in a position to be able to ask those questions and define those things more broadly as a school district in the next five years. We really need to get to financial stability. We need to create systems and processes that better align to keeping our facilities and all of the operation side of our business in a more stable, predictable environment for our students. And then I think we're stepping into this really unique and humbling position to lead in our state. And we're leading in a lot of different ways but the way that we're most proud of is we're leading in excellence and teaching and learning. And it's humbling and fun to be partners with other educators across the state and share out things that we're doing. And education is one of these businesses that shouldn't be competitive. It should be collaborative. So we can save the competitive nature to the Friday night football games and all that rivalry and that that's fun. But when we're talking about lifting up kids and growing skills and abilities of students in Montana, we want to be collaborative and we want to share best practice and we want to lean into that space. So more and more we're seeing opportunities for our teachers and our administrators to be able to present and share and grow and network. And I think our next five years is going to be full of continuing to find the best models and then bring those home and implement those and then share out those best models and be in that cycle.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Matt, thank you so much for all that you and the school board the trustees are doing for our local school district and thank you for coming on Heart of the Flathead. We're going to wrap up now with our our flathead five which are the five questions we ask all of our guests and are just meant to be short, rapid fire

Flathead Five And Final Wrap

SPEAKER_01 29:11

short response questions. So uh what's your favorite hidden gem in the community?

SPEAKER_02 29:16

South South Fork River. That's an easy one grizz what's your favorite outdoor activity in the Valley Hunting what do you know today that you wish you knew when you started out how fast time goes when your story's over what is the one or two sentence review you'd like to be for your book I would hope that people would think of me as somebody that lived out my faith and loved my family.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Awesome. Matt thank you so much again really appreciate your time and and all that you're doing and uh good luck with this coming school year and with the next five year plan.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

Hey thanks for having me appreciate you guys thanks for listening to this episode of Heart of the Flathead. We'd love to hear your thoughts about today's episode and the podcast in general. You can listen at heartoftheflathead.com or wherever you listen to podcasts and you can reach David via the contact page at heartoftheflathead.com or by clicking on the send us feedback link at the top of the episode description in your favorite podcast app. Heart of the Flathead is produced by David Wiginton in partnership with LeftBrain Right Brain Studios. Listeners can find the podcast online at heartoftheflathead.com and LeftBrainRightBrain Studios at lbrbstudios.com The content for Heart of the Flathead podcasts and any show notes and transcripts are copyrighted by David Wigginton. All rights reserved reproduction and rebroadcasting in whole or in part is strictly prohibited without written permission. Contact DavidWiginton at heartoftheflathead.com with your request the views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host or the production team. The podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered professional, legal, medical or financial advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making decisions based on the content of this show