Bridget Dowd

The Juneau School District is looking for input from the community as it heads into a new year with fewer pandemic-related challenges.

With the help of a newly-released survey, administrators hope to address concerns from teachers, students and families.

Over the last few months, superintendent Bridget Weiss met with school staff and board members, asking for their thoughts on the challenges and successes of the past school year. 

“We are transitioning from really an emergency situation into a recovery phase, but that is a transition,” Weiss said. “It’s not something where we flip a switch and go from one to the other. It really is a merging into more normalized operations.”

Now, they’ve launched a brief online survey with open-ended questions, so stakeholders in the community can weigh in as well. 

“It could be around instruction, it could be around COVID-related mitigation,” Weiss said. “We really left the door wide open so that people really have an open invitation to share whatever was important to them and not have it be narrowly defined by us.”

Every family in the district received the survey in an email and it’s also available on the JSD website. Once all the data is gathered, school leaders will look for themes and use the input to plan the next year. 

Weiss says they already know schools will be back in session five days a week starting August 16th, but some questions have not been answered like: “What will the mask policy be?” and “How should the district spend its funding from the American Rescue Plan Act?”

“When we look at the recovery dollars that we are receiving,” Weiss said, “are those on mark with where we see the need and with where our community, our families and our staff see the need?”

More than 400 people have already responded to the survey. It will be open to responses for at least another week. 

In this newscast:

• Alaska House Speaker Louise Stutes expressed confidence Friday that the House will vote on Monday to avert much of state government shutting down.
• The pandemic may be waning in the state, but its ripple effects have made for a weird summer for visitor industry businesses and for seasonal workers trying to decide if it’s even worth coming back for a short summer.
• A discovery of baby dinosaur bones on Alaska’s North Slope has paleontologists rethinking the animal’s lives and physiology.

In this newscast:

• Nearly 250 doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed at Juneau’s airport since the shots were made available there in mid-May, but public health officials continue to see a decrease in demand for the shots.
• In the latest installment of KTOO’s avalanche series, Claire Stremple explores the mix of personal choices and policy decisions that keep people in at-risk areas.
• Construction is underway as workers fix the bumpy road work on Glacier Highway to improve access for pedestrians and vehicles.

Nearly 250 doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed at Juneau’s airport since the shots were made available there in mid-May.

City Emergency Manager Robert Barr said among those who were vaccinated at the airport, about 70% were residents and 30% were nonresidents.

“Those nonresident numbers could be anyone,” Barr said. “So they can be residents of another state, they could be non-U.S. residents, just anyone who doesn’t have an Alaskan address.”

Barr said they’d expected to see slightly more nonresidents take advantage of the program. Public health officials continue to see a decrease in demand for the shots.

Separately, the Juneau Chamber of Commerce recently doubled its gift card incentives from $20 to $40 in hopes of attracting more people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. That offer is available to people who get shots at participating city and public health clinics.

Barr said people won’t get a gift card at the airport because that’s a state program, but some commercial pharmacies are participating.

“SEARHC will be participating, Genoa Healthcare, Ron’s Apothecary and Juneau Urgent Care are also all participating in that program,” Barr said. “I would say it’s going pretty well. We are seeing about a tenth of a percent of our population in vaccine doses every day which has definitely slowed down.”

The city has been receiving fewer requests for pop-up clinics as well. Barr said he doesn’t expect to see any major changes in numbers until children under 12 can get the vaccine. But at this point, that’s not likely to happen before September.

In this newscast:

• The third part of KTOO’s series about Juneau’s unique urban avalanche danger talks about what researchers can learn from tree rings.
• Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has announced a new initiative to examine the loss of life and traumatic legacy of boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
• The Alaska Marine Highway’s two former fast ferries are tentatively scheduled to be loaded Friday onto a heavy-lift ship headed for Spain.

In this newscast:

• The second part of KTOO’s series about Juneau’s unique urban avalanche danger explores the history of the Behrends neighborhood.
• Many fishermen are unsure whether or not they still need to register their vessels with the Department of Motor Vehicles, which has been a requirement for a few years, a new state house bill has put that on pause.