Johanna Osborn was serving as Arrowhead's principal with superintendent duties before the title caught up with the job this school year.

"I officially moved into the combined Superintendent and Principal role," she wrote in answers to written questions from The MTEdTribune.

She also closed the question these appointments usually leave open.

"This is a permanent rather than interim appointment," she wrote. She said she is excited to continue serving the district and community.

Fifty-five students, eight of them in the middle grades

Montana published 55 students at Arrowhead School District^↗ET in 2025-26, the most recent school year in the state's published enrollment record. Of those, 47 were in kindergarten through fifth grade and 8 were in grades 6 through 8.

That grade picture is unusually legible, because it is complete. Montana published eight grade rows for Arrowhead in 2025-26, and those eight rows sum to exactly 55, the same figure the state publishes as the district total. Nothing was suppressed. Seventh grade is the one grade with no row at all, and because the arithmetic closes on the published total, that is an absence of students rather than an absence of data. Sixth grade held 6 students. Eighth grade held 2.

Osborn confirmed that reading of the file. "That is correct, there were no 7th grade students," she wrote of that year.

She also said the empty grade has carried forward. Arrowhead has no eighth graders in the school year now under way, she wrote, because "there were none to move to that grade level and we didn't have any move-ins." That is the district's own account of a year Montana has not published, and no count in this article covers it.

Osborn also described what the published total leaves out. "State reporting of student numbers is for the K-8 grades," she wrote, and the Arrowhead grade record runs exactly that way, kindergarten through eighth. She said the district additionally runs a prekindergarten classroom on a three-quarter-time schedule. Those children are outside the collection, so they are not in the published district total, and the count of them is hers rather than the state's.

Osborn described the middle grades as the district's known pressure point, and she named where the students go.

Osborn said Arrowhead students eventually transition to larger districts in Gardiner or Livingston for high school. "We have historically seen some enrollment decline in the middle school years as families choose to transition their children to a larger district earlier, particularly because of opportunities to participate in sports and other extracurricular activities," she wrote.

The published record cannot check that account. It counts students in Arrowhead; it does not record where a student who left enrolled instead, or why. What it does establish is the shape she is describing. The three middle grades hold eight of the district's 55 students, and the six grades beneath them hold 47.

What is new this year is an arrangement aimed straight at that stretch.

"This year, we established an agreement with the Livingston and Gardiner school districts that allows our middle school students to participate in extracurricular sports and activities while attending Arrowhead School," she wrote. "We hope that providing those opportunities will help our students remain connected to Arrowhead while also giving them access to experiences that a small school cannot provide on its own."

The agreement is too new to appear in any published count. The first school year that could reflect it is 2026-27, which Montana has not published.

Montana's statewide record shows a version of the same narrowing at scale. RELATED: Montana reported more twelfth graders than first graders in 2026ET

A district that swings

Arrowhead published 62 students in 2017-18 and 55 in 2025-26, across nine published years. That is 7 fewer students, a decline of 11.3%, against a 3.2% decline in Montana's published statewide total across the same endpoints.

The endpoints understate what happened between them. The nine-year record runs from a low of 51 students in 2019-20 to a high of 78 in 2023-24, a band of 27 students. In a district that published 55 students in its most recent year, that band is roughly half the school.

The high predates Osborn's superintendent duties. Arrowhead reached 78 students in 2023-24. The next published year came in at 55, a drop of 23 students or 29.5%. The year after that also came in at 55.

Percentages behave violently on a base this small, and that is the finding rather than a caveat. A movement that would be a rounding error in a large district redraws Arrowhead's headline number by nearly a third. A handful of families arriving or leaving is a visible trend line. The state file establishes that these counts happened. It does not say why, and this article does not assert a cause.

One more note on the record itself: Montana published a single school row under this district through 2024-25 and two school rows, an elementary school and a middle school, in 2025-26. The state file alone does not establish whether the district changed its schools or its reporting, so no school-level trend is drawn across that split.

What holding both jobs looks like

Osborn began her career in Nebraska, serving, as she wrote, "in a variety of teaching and leadership roles" before her family moved to Montana. Arrowhead, she wrote, was her first choice when a job opened.

"The appeal of a small, rural school with unique learning opportunities for students, combined with the beautiful setting of Paradise Valley, was a big part of what drew me to Arrowhead," she wrote. She said she had missed the daily contact with students that she gave up when she first moved from the classroom into administration.

"At Arrowhead, I get to greet every student in the morning, support them throughout the day, and wish them a good evening at the end of the day," she wrote.

The combined role is what a district of 55 students can staff, and Osborn's account of an ordinary day reads accordingly.

"On a typical day, that can mean supporting students and staff, supervising students in the morning, during lunch and at dismissal, working with parents and community members, managing schedules and ordering, substitute teaching, writing and monitoring grants, completing state reporting, conducting staff evaluations, working with the school board, and planning for the future of the district," she wrote.

She added a qualifier to her own list. "There really isn't a typical day in the traditional sense," she wrote.

She is doing the job and the coursework for it at the same time. "To obtain my superintendent certification, I enrolled in Montana State University's Superintendent Certification Program this past spring," she wrote. She said she is completing its internship while serving in the role.

Housing, childcare and a September fundraiser

Osborn put student achievement first among this year's priorities and described gains in English language arts.

"We have seen a significant increase in student achievement, particularly in English language arts," she wrote, adding that her goal is to build on that progress.

Montana's published assessment output covers the state as a whole across the available years and carries no rows for Arrowhead, so the state record cannot independently check that account at district level. It is Osborn's, and it is reported here as hers.

Her longest answer went to something that is not a school program at all.

"Finally, one of our biggest long-term priorities is developing staff housing and a community childcare center on our campus," she wrote. "We have received a generous donation from our school sponsor, Bank of the Rockies, as well as a matching funds grant through the AMB West Community Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation."

Osborn wrote that the district planned a fundraising event, with a meal, a silent auction and live music from the local band Band of Drifters, to raise the matching funds the grant requires.

"There are many young families moving into the valley, and there is a significant need for accessible childcare," she wrote. "We want to create a school community that can support families from infancy through eighth grade."

She also said the district is adding a licensed school counselor and building partnerships with local businesses to expand career education for middle school students.

What the record can and cannot say next

Every year in Arrowhead's published enrollment record was written before Osborn's title changed, including the 78-student high and the two years at 55 that followed it. None of it is hers, and none of it forecasts anything.

What it supplies is the shape her plans have to fit. Six grades held 47 students in the latest published year. Three grades held eight. The activities agreement with Livingston and Gardiner began this school year, and the first published count that could register it is 2026-27, still unreleased. Osborn has already said one thing about that year the file cannot yet show, which is that the empty seventh grade of 2025-26 is an empty eighth grade now. Until the state publishes, the record says what it says: a very small district that moves a long way in percentage terms on very few students, with its middle grades the thinnest end in the last published file.

Enrollment, school and grade figures come from the Montana Office of Public Instruction published enrollment record, end_year 2018 through 2026. Montana publishes Arrowhead as a single elementary district record. Ms. Osborn answered written questions from The MTEdTribune in September 2026 and wrote again on September 14 to describe how the grade rows look from inside the district. All quotations come from those two written messages. Her account of the 2026-27 school year, including the prekindergarten classroom, is the district's own and is not in any state file.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.