Bridget Dowd

From cake-pop pig heads to edible dinosaur cakes, the Thunder Mountain High School library was sweeter than usual on Tuesday. AP Literature students were presenting their final projects in the Great Literature Bake-Off. 

Thunder Mountain teacher Corrine Marks asked her students to choose a novel they read in high school and to represent one of its scenes, themes or symbols — with cake.

“[The class is] all seniors, and it’s their last semester,” Marks said. “So you know, let’s have a little fun and celebrate with cake.”

Students made mock-up drawings of their cakes explaining their meaning. Then cakes were judged by district staff members.

“It’s been fun to watch their process and their ideas and some of the crazy creativity that’s come out,” Marks said.

The pig head group chose “Lord of the Flies.” Another group used maple syrup to imitate the poison from “Romeo and Juliet.”

There were four prizes: Student Choice, Best Use of Materials, Best in Show and Best Representation of Literature. Winning students received gift cards from local businesses.

Abigail Sparks won the student choice category. She created a T-Rex out of cake and added something a little extra, too.

“I’ve always been obsessed with Jurassic Park, both the movies and the books and the overall science behind it,” Sparks said. “I ended up making a peach mango Jell-O bowl thing with a mosquito in it to represent the amber, which is where all the stuff in Jurassic Park comes from.” 

In the story, scientists mine for amber to find blood-sucking insects trapped inside, then clone dinosaurs from blood preserved in the mosquitoes.

Sparks said she wouldn’t call herself a baker, but she does love watching the Great British Bake Off. 

“It’s all like pre-made boxed cake mix and pre-made frosting,” she said. “I did make the modeling chocolate from scratch, which was difficult, but the fondant and the frosting and stuff was just me mixing dyes together and calling it a day.” 

It took her about 10 hours over several days to complete the project. 

After judging was complete, the class ate their projects.

Sparks will attend the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the fall to study geology and paleontology. She hopes to eventually work with fossils at a museum or do field research.

For Sparks and the other students in her class, more than half of their high school career has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s been an odd experience,” she said. “I guess I expected more from my high school career. It’s nice to have like a semi-normal senior year, to be able to just put everything to a close and move on to the next chapter.”

Graduation for Thunder Mountain students will be on Sunday, May 29, 2022 at 7 p.m. The Juneau Douglas High School Yadaa.at Kalé commencement ceremony will be on the same day at 4 p.m.

Juneau’s two public high schools saw an increase in new COVID-19 cases following their proms. Masks were optional at both events.

Juneau Douglas High School Yadaa.at Kalé has reported more than 30 cases since its prom was held at Eaglecrest Ski Area on Saturday, May 7. 

But Juneau School District Superintendent Bridget Weiss says there’s no way to know for sure if that event caused the spike.

“There’s a lot of end of the year activities,” Weiss said. “We had prom on May 7, but we also had a lot of teams traveling for sports right about the same time.”

Weiss says there was more of a noticeable spike at Juneau Douglas High School, which could be due to it having a smaller venue. But Thunder Mountain High School’s prom was held a week later on May 14th on campus. There have been nine reported cases at the school since then.

“The JDHS cases really came pretty quickly following that prom,” Weiss said. “Like we started to see the cases as early as Tuesday (May 10). We have not seen the exact same result from the Thunder Mountain prom, although it could happen.”

Weiss says the schools are doing their best to make sure students can keep their end-of-year traditions and those events always come with risk. Graduations for both schools are expected to be indoors with masks highly encouraged, but not required, on May 29.

In the late ’90s, Juneau had two Taco Bells. But by the early 2000s, they were both gone. Juneau has a history of fast food franchises coming and going, but the disappearance of the Taco Bells left a lot of rumors in its wake, from “employees were selling drugs” to “wasn’t it hepatitis?”

“Every business is gonna have drama and rumors and this and that,” said Jennifer Solano, who used to work at the Taco Bell in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley. “To be honest, Taco Bell was a good, wholesome place to work. They taught me enough that I’ve been able to raise a family, continuing my career managing fast food restaurants.”

Solano runs a Subway in Anchorage now, but she started working for Taco Bell in Juneau as a teenager. In the mid-nineties, it sat where the Asiana Garden restaurant is now, across from Super Bear. 

“We were having repeated problems with the [produce] shipments,” Solano said.  “We would have to throw away sour cream, cheeses, lettuce, tomatoes. They were coming in continuously frozen when they were only supposed to be refrigerated, and we were having to waste a lot of money.”

Solano eventually became an assistant manager. She said getting quality produce from the Lower 48 was just one of many problems.

“Everything in the building was just kind of crumbling and falling apart,” Solano said. “There were so many times that the grease trap had to be re-done because the pipes underneath all the flooring were so old and brittle that they were actually collapsing.”

Plumbers were called in to try to fix the issue at night, which meant workers the next morning were walking on temporary floorboards.

“It’s not an overnight project,” she said. “So then we tried to keep staffing minimal so nobody was running into each other or getting hurt.”

The maintenance turned into a cycle. A pipe would be fixed, the flooring would be replaced, and another pipe would collapse somewhere else. 

The Valley Taco Bell also went through several different managers. Solano said she often picked up the slack when one of them was attending meetings in Anchorage. At one point, it became a combination Taco Bell and Baskin Robbins.

“They would expect somebody that’s making burritos to go over and make a frappuccino,” Solano said. “You know, you gotta make cakes out of ice cream and you have to be able to decorate them and trying to run a Taco Bell side and trying to make cakes was pretty rough for me.”

Repairs became so expensive that the owners started looking for a new building to move to.

“But there was no good place in Juneau 18-20 years ago to put a fast food restaurant with a drive-thru in it,” Solano said. “So they decided they were gonna cut their losses and just go ahead and close the doors.”

Some workers didn’t even have advance notice that the restaurant was closing. They showed up the next day to a note on the door and were told to pick up their compensation checks.

The Valley location was the last Taco Bell to exist in Juneau, but at one point, the city had two — there was a smaller Taco Bell Express downtown. It shared a space with a Subway in a building where Sealaska Heritage is now.

Charles McKenry started there in 1987 and worked his way up to general manager.

“Taco Bell was doing a competition called the Golden Bell,” McKenry said. “We managed to take that store to number seven in the nation for quality and service out of 1,500 franchise stores.”

But the downtown restaurant wasn’t very profitable. It closed in the summer of 1999 when the corporate office decided to focus its efforts on the Valley location. McKenry was transferred there as a shift manager to try to improve the service.

“The gentleman running the store insisted that no one listen to me because it was his store and he would teach them his way, not necessarily the Taco Bell way,” McKenry said. “He didn’t care about quality or service. It was all about his bottom line, even if it meant not being honest about some of the numbers.”

Eventually McKenry quit because of that manager, but his experience wasn’t all bad.

“We had great people,” McKenry said. “It was a fantastic product. I mean I thoroughly enjoyed working for Taco Bell itself, but you can only take so much.”

Now if you’re craving a Crunchwrap Supreme, the Lunch Crunch Wrap at the Lemon Creek Breeze In is pretty similar.

Masks are optional again at Juneau schools. The district’s board of education held a special meeting Tuesday night to address the issue.

The Juneau School District had gone back to requiring masks at the beginning of the week, after just a few weeks of loosening the mandate.

In the announcement on Saturday, the district said it was because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had increased Juneau’s community risk level.  

Families were sent emails and texts on Saturday, saying that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had increased Juneau’s community risk level. The CDC updates its metric once a week.

After a more careful examination, Superintendent Bridget Weiss said that might not have been the best way to make mask policy decisions in schools.

“We’ve learned a lot since Friday about that metric and what it means,” she said. “That CDC metric is really out of alignment with our local metric and health conditions.”

Weiss said the CDC metric actually includes other Southeast communities outside of Juneau.

The change caused fallout from the community and disrupted learning at the beginning of the week. Some students still chose not to wear face coverings. They sat in the commons instead of their classrooms on Monday and Tuesday.

At the special meeting Tuesday night, board president Elizabeth Siddon explained what caused the switch over the weekend.

“The current mask policy was adopted in March of 2022,” Siddon said. “Its implementation included a trigger that if the CDC community level went to high, that masks would be mandatory in Juneau School District facilities.”

Before taking action, the board heard more than an hour of public testimony from students, parents and educators. Some students were concerned that without the protection of masks, they might lose out on prom and graduation. They said they wouldn’t mind wearing masks for the rest of the year if it meant they could keep their end-of-year traditions.

Several parents wanted masking to be a personal choice, saying they had pulled their kids out of school when it became a requirement again. 

Teachers reported the disruptions in their classrooms early in the week and how they were still responsible for kids who were learning in the commons. Others were concerned about the health risks for certain educators and special needs students.

After more than an hour of public testimony from parents, students and educators, the board voted unanimously to bring back a mask-optional policy. 

The policy calls for masks to be optional in JSD buildings, with a few stipulations. People who are in contact with another person who is identified as “high risk” for severe disease can be required to mask up around those individuals indoors. The same goes for people who’ve been exposed to someone with COVID-19.

Superintendent Bridget Weiss has the authority to require masks in those situations. She says she’s sorry for all the confusion.

“It’s really frustrating and disappointing to all of us that we made it this far without having this kind of experience to then have it now,” Weiss said. “I am so apologetic to everyone. I’m sorry that our community, our kids, and our staff are experiencing this.”

The new mask-optional policy went into effect immediately following Tuesday’s vote. 

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional information from the board of education’s special meeting.

Right now, there’s only one way for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists to cross from Juneau to Douglas Island. It’s the Douglas Bridge, off of 10th St. downtown.

But the city is moving ahead with an effort to change that. 

Members of the public can soon weigh in on how to connect Juneau to the north end of Douglas Island. The state Department of Transportation is hosting the first of three open houses to get community feedback on the Juneau Douglas North Crossing project.

Juneau Senior Planner Irene Gallion said it’s an idea that’s been studied since the 1980s, but has never gotten very far. 

“Some of the challenges with the past studies has been that they come in with a preconceived idea,” Gallion said. “So what we want to do first is figure out what the challenges are that we’re trying to address.”

Then they’ll consider which solution would best fit those needs. That could be a bridge, a ferry, a tunnel or something else.

Past studies have turned up several reasons for the need for a second crossing, like concerns about safety and emergency response if the current bridge is closed, as well as congestion during peak periods at the nearby intersection.

In 2010, voters shot down a ballot question to fund a crossing. In 2020, the city signed an agreement with the state to start studying a crossing in earnest.

Gallion said another crossing might allow for more development on the west side of Douglas Island.

“It feels like right now, with our housing shortages and some of the challenges that our businesses are having with finding good commercial land, that our lack of investment in infrastructure has come home to roost,” Gallion said.

The first open house is scheduled for May 11th at 4:30 p.m. on Zoom. 

Masks are once again required indoors at Juneau School District buildings.

Kristin Bartlett, the school district’s chief of staff, made the announcement via email Saturday morning.

“Due to increasing COVID-19 cases in Juneau, the CDC shifted our COVID-19 Community Level from Low to High, which prompted a return to universal masking indoors at Juneau School District facilities,” Bartlett wrote.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updates community levels weekly. Juneau schools have been mask-optional for less than a month. The requirement was lifted on April 4.

At the time, JSD updated its mask policy to say:

“Assuming CDC community level remains Medium or Low, masks, or similar facial coverings designed to mitigate COVID-19 transmission and are well-fitted covering the mouth and nose, are optional for all persons indoors in Juneau School District facilities and on school grounds.”

Families were alerted about the reinstated mask requirement through text and email on Saturday. Face coverings will be required through at least the next week.