IDAHO

In other items, students at The College of Idaho come away with honors from a model United Nations event, and a State Board of Education official will chair a Western cooperative.

Some conservative lawmakers have pushed for a variety of school choice options, such as education savings accounts, tax credit programs or scholarship funds.

Idaho parents with adjusted gross income at or below $60,000 have until 8 p.m. on Friday to submit an application and qualify for the first wave of prioritized funding.

“My goal is to be able to serve on day one, and filling key positions is a reflection of this priority,” the state superintendent-elect said in a news release.

New schools will serve students in the Lewiston and Treasure Valley areas.

Sen. Dave Lent, R-Idaho Falls, who co-chairs the interim committee, hopes the group will have some “deliverables” in the coming weeks.

Inspectors try to get into every K-12 school in Idaho every three years — looking for structural flaws or procedural problems that put kids and staff at risk. Last year, they barely made it into a fifth of the state’s schools.

Less than half of current 28,000 applications have been approved, education department says.

“There’s nothing special about me,” Shiva Rajbhandari said. “Any student can serve on a school board and really bring a lot of value to the conversations that they’re having about policy, about facilities and really just about everything the board does.”