All six candidates running for the Juneau School District Board of Education say finding fiscal stability after last year’s whirlwind budget crisis and school consolidation process is a top concern for them.
But, as they campaign in this year’s municipal election, some differ in what they think is the best way to approach it.
There are three open seats on the board in this municipal election. All incumbents are running again, but they face off against three challengers. The incumbents are Will Muldoon, Elizabeth Siddon and Amber Frommherz. Their challengers are Michele Stuart Morgan, Jeff Redmond and Jenny Thomas.
Rebuilding after consolidation
Last year, the district faced an abrupt multimillion-dollar deficit, which had to be solved in a matter of months. That led to the consolidation of Juneau’s middle and high schools.
Incumbent candidate Siddon said the aftermath of that continues to be the biggest challenge the district faces right now.
“There are certainly going to be sort of pressure points we find as the dust settles around that, and we’ll continue to find solutions to those,” she said in an interview. “But at the bigger level, I think it’s rebuilding the trust and the communication with the community.”
Challenger Stuart Morgan said it’s important that board members have an adequate understanding of how the district does its finances moving forward.
“I think one would be understanding how the calculations are done,” she said. “The first thing I would like to do is get trained on that as if I was a person working there, understanding how that works, understanding how we receive our funding.”
Thomas agreed and said there should also be more transparency and communication in how the board makes big decisions like the consolidation process. Along with being a candidate for the school board, Thomas is also one of the leaders of a recall effort on the ballot this year to oust the board’s current president and vice president.
“The school board members need to be direct and communicate with the public about what’s going on,” she said. “They need to let the public know that they’re hearing them rather than it falling on deaf ears, and you just think they’re doing whatever they want.”
Tackling declining enrollment, state funding uncertainties
With continued uncertainty about education funding in the state, paired with the district’s declining enrollment, incumbent Frommherz said she thinks more difficult conversations are likely ahead.
“I foresee that the school district will have to consolidate some more if it’s continued flat funding; all the expenses are increasing every year,” she said in an interview. “I believe it’ll be at the other end of the spectrum, which would be at the elementary level. And we’re looking for areas where there are multiple geographic consolidations, so it’d most likely be in the Valley area is what I would predict.”
But incumbent Muldoon thinks there still is time to figure out if the district will need to turn to more school consolidation.
“I would say in the immediate term, hopefully not,” he said in an interview. “We are doing our best, but as far as the best way to tackle that, I think it’s fully bringing our budget software online and having a relational database model for all finances and dollars in and dollars out, and then modeling that data for timely and accurate reports and a public-facing dashboard.”
And Redmond said he thinks the district will have to play a balancing act when it comes to how closing schools might affect future funding.
“It’s kind of a self-fulfilling issue. So if it does need to continue, then again, just looking ahead more than 30 days would be like a kind of a basic first step. However, seeking alternate funding is a big one for me,” he said. “I understand that there are some constraints on that, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no way to explore that.”
Find more election coverage at ktoo.org/elections.
