POCATELLO — An Idaho state senator is challenging long-established educational models and seeking to transform public education through a series of hands-on, informational discussions in cities across the Gem State.

Sen. Dave Lent, R-Idaho Falls, is a veteran school board member and former nuclear industry professional who is engaging in community discussions from Sandpoint to Soda Springs in an effort to systematically change and reimagine the way society approaches education.

“The landscape in public education is changing very rapidly,” Lent said. “It has been for the last 50 years, and we’ve seen it more significantly in the last few years since COVID. Not only has the education system that we’ve been using become less and less relevant in today’s culture, but we’re finding that our kids are different, our parents are different, the culture is different and expectations are different.”

Lent said he believes the popularity of the school choice movement was brought about by dissatisfaction with the abilities of the current public system to evolve and meet the challenges of the modern era.

In an effort to evoke change in education and gather tangible data on how his constituents across the political spectrum feel about educational reform, Lent is hosting a series of discussions in towns and cities in Idaho to find solutions that can lead to policy changes.

Area residents can engage in a hands-on discussion with Lent beginning at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in the North and Middle Fork rooms at the Idaho State University Pond Student Union Building. He will pose questions to the audience and break participants into groups to brainstorm solutions and alternative outcomes to how society educates its youth.

“I refer to it as a once-in-a-century opportunity for us to step back, take a look at our system and see if it’s providing what we need,” Lent said. “The way I do this in these discussions is I say, ‘Let’s clear the table and start over. If we could reinvent public education today, what could it look like?’”

Lent poses three critical questions: the purpose of public education, how to measure its success and how trust in the public education system can be restored.

Lent takes this information to meet with stakeholders, state educational leaders and business and industry professionals in a bid to find commonality and create policies and legislation. Lent believes it’s the duty of the Legislature to establish and maintain a system of schools. For that reason, Lent said the expectation cannot be on the school systems to make these kinds of changes — it has to come from a different level.

Lent highlighted the dramatic shifts in learning environments initially brought on by the Industrial Revolution and how over the decades the United States has transformed education with the advent of technological advancements through the 1990s and into the modern era. Lent argued that any new change requires a reimagining of how society approaches education.

“We have created factories of education,” Lent said. “If you move away from that to a student-centered approach, it’s really about helping kids in the junior high range find the spark that they’re really interested in and then providing paths for them.”

Lent said that in today’s world, high school seniors are being churned out too soon and are unprepared to be successful in life.

“Only about a third of our population graduates from college, so there’s two-thirds of our population that is at risk,” Lent said. “At the same time, business and industry is saying, ‘We need something more than high school, but not necessarily a four-year degree.’ That’s the gap. If we can rethink our public system to meet the need, that’s the secret sauce. We go for effectiveness, not just efficiency.”

Lent’s initiative emphasizes a nonpartisan approach to education and finding pathways that will provide better outcomes to students by creating a sustainable future.

As the education landscape continues to evolve rapidly, Lent’s grassroots approach to educational reform represents a new facet in how communities conceptualize learning in the 21st century.

“That’s really what this is about,” Lent said. “This is about starting the conversation, having people, as I explain it, reach up and look outside the rut for a minute as to what it could be and use that as a starting point. I don’t know where it will end up for sure, but I do know that we need to start somewhere. Really big things usually start with really small conversations.”