Claire Stremple

Juneau public health officials say they hope to have COVID-19 vaccines available for children under five by Friday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended vaccine use for children as young as six months this weekend.

One shipment of Moderna vaccines has already arrived at the Juneau Public Health office, but they are waiting for Pfizer vaccines to arrive before opening appointments to Juneau’s youngest residents.

Vaccines will be available through the Juneau Public Health office, SEARHC and Juneau Urgent Care. Juneau Public Health offers vaccine clinics for all ages on Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Juneau will receive 200 total doses — 100 Moderna and 100 Pfizer.

This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.

The Juneau School District posted new information to its website about how floor sealant was served to students instead of milk.

It says that in the spring of 2021 a pallet of floor sealant was mistakenly delivered to a district warehouse reserved for food at the same time as four pallets of shelf-stable milk. The district did not say who delivered the pallet.

On Tuesday, a worker from NANA Management Services, the district’s food services contractor, picked up three boxes from the sealant pallet and delivered one to servers at Sitʼ Eeti Shaanáx̱ Glacier Valley Elementary School. Servers poured the sealant into cups and served it to students.

Other boxes of sealant were delivered to Harborview Elementary School and Mendenhall River Community School, but those were unopened. The floor sealant has been removed from those schools.

The district did not respond to requests for comment about the new information.

Meanwhile, the Juneau Police Department says its investigation is still underway.

“We had detectives go there to start talking to people, not in a belief that there was any kind of criminal wrongdoing because there just wasn’t enough information at that time,” said Lieutenant Krag Campbell. “Really just a fact-finding mission to find out like, ‘Hey, what happened? How did this happen?’ And getting all the information so we can figure out to see if there was anything, any wrongdoing by anybody.”

He said investigation results will first go to the district attorney’s office. If no criminal charges are filed, the investigation results will be made public — either by the district or JPD.

Campbell says the investigation is close to being done. He expects definitive answers and an information release by the end of next week.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

Sealaska Heritage Institute bills the Toddler Regalia Review as the most adorable event at Celebration, the biennial festival of Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian culture. It delivers.

For many of the young participants, it was their first time at Celebration due to pandemic cancellations. The event went virtual in 2020 and was canceled in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

That was true for 4-year-old Kai Young, who took the stage on June 10 in a raven robe designed by her father and sewed by her mother.

“This is her first time wearing any regalia,” said her mother, Molly Sharp.

“She was born right before the last Celebration, so we did not get to come and then with it being canceled the last few years this is her first kind of big cultural event. So it’s pretty exciting.”

Each child walked across the stage with a family member while an emcee described their clan regalia, who made it, and what it represents. Some toddlers were shy. Others were ready for an audience, with a few spins or some dancing.

Lori David’s 5-year-old triplet sons wore blue-and-black Kaagwaantaan wolf tunics and waved to their father John from the stage. He said it felt cool to see his boys up there.

All 22 participants gathered on stage at the end of the review for a photo — a showcase of toddler-sized regalia from clans throughout Southeast Alaska.

On Tuesday, students at a Juneau summer school program were served a chemical floor sealant instead of milk. Twelve children and two adults drank the sealant. Some of the children were back in school on Wednesday, but not Donna Baldwin’s grandson.

She said that when she picked the 8-year-old boy up on Tuesday, he burst into tears and asked if he was going to die. 

He told her the milk burned his throat, that his stomach hurt and that he was dizzy. She took him to the emergency department. She says they checked his oxygen levels, which were normal. 

But he’s still dizzy and nauseated a day later. Baldwin says she wants to be sure there’s no permanent damage, so she’s taking him to Seattle Children’s Hospital for some follow-up tests.

She’s one of several parents who told KTOO they felt that calls from the school came much too late. She says the school should have notified families immediately after the incident, not hours later.

“The more I process, the madder I get that it was not immediately taken care of. If I was there, I would have called medical right away,” she said. “This was minimized, and it’s not okay.”

Superintendent Bridget Weiss says the reason it took so long to contact parents was that staff prioritized making sure the kids were safe. They called poison control and monitored the children before reaching out to parents.

“This was a really unfortunate incident. We’re grateful it was an isolated incident. And we’re still learning some pieces of how it happened,” she said.

Weiss says the school district is investigating the issue. She says what they know so far is that boxes containing large pouches of milk and boxes containing large pouches of floor sealant were delivered to the school on the same pallet. 

But she said she doesn’t know who was responsible for that.

“That shouldn’t have happened. So we don’t ever transport or store chemicals with commodities, right? Those are two very separate things,” she said.

NANA Management Services is the contractor that prepares and serves food for the district. Weiss says staff mistook the sealant pouches for milk and put them in the milk dispenser. 

“It’s a little hard to imagine unless you’ve used it, but many chemicals do look very much milk-like — they are white, the consistency is the same as milk,” Weiss said.

She said that the sealant is odorless, so staff did not catch the mistake until students drank it. 

The school board was scheduled to vote to renew NANA Management Services’ contract Tuesday night. They voted unanimously to postpone that decision.

Update — June 14, 7:51 p.m.

Parents say they got a call Tuesday from administrators of the RALLY summer school program in Juneau after their children were given floor sealant instead of milk to drink at breakfast.

Juneau School District officials say 12 children and two adults drank the sealant.

The Rally program serves kids ages 5-12. The incident happened at Sít’ Eetí Shaanáx – Glacier Valley School.

Barry Nydam’s 7-year-old daughter drank some of the sealant. He said he was shocked and infuriated.

“I don’t see my daughter going there anymore,” he said. “You’d have to have the people running it removed and new people running it.”

His wife, Rhyan Nydam, says she got the call from a program administrator around noon — hours after the incident. And initially parents heard it was paint thinner in the milk, not sealant.

“She called and told me that there were traces of paint thinner in the drinks,” she said. “And I’m just like, ‘what does that even mean?’”

The sealant was a product called Hillyard Seal 341. Its safety data sheet says it’s “expected to be a low ingestion hazard.”

Nydam was told that the administration took the cups away from the children and called a poison control center, then waited and monitored the children.

Nydam says she was told that no one needed to be hospitalized.

“I just can’t believe it took so long even just to tell me, you know? If I wanted to run my kid to the hospital, I wouldn’t have even known,” she said.

Nydam says when she asked for more information, administrators told her the issue was under investigation. She says her daughter is fine so far, other than an upset stomach.

The RALLY program did not respond to requests for comment from KTOO, but at a previously scheduled Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Bridget Weiss confirmed the incident was under investigation and said the Juneau Police Department is involved.

“That is transpiring literally as we speak, so that we can understand exactly what happened, how it happened. We obviously need to make sure that it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

Weiss said the fluid was mistaken for milk.

“Which sounds hard to believe, but if you have yourself used anything similar, it is surprising — it is white, milky fluid,” she said.

She called the incident “concerning.”

This story has been updated to include comment from the superintendent and to include the full name of the school.

A group of about a dozen state health nurses and volunteers met in Juneau on Friday to assemble opioid emergency kits for fish processing plants in Southeast Alaska.

They’re red metal boxes full of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, sharps containers, fentanyl test strips, rubber gloves and CPR masks.

The kits are part of a new state Department of Health and Social Services program to prevent opioid overdose deaths among industrial workers, starting with Southeast Alaska fisheries.

Sitka public health nurse Denise Ewing is spearheading the project. Its goals are raising awareness around opioid overdoses, educating people about the risks of fentanyl and providing industrial workers with overdose prevention resources.

The initiative is called Project Gabe. It’s named for Ewing’s son, Gabe Johnston, who died of an opioid overdose this January.

“Our son struggled with opioids for many years, and we went through that struggle with him,” she said.

Ewing’s partner and another one of her sons have both worked in seafood processing.

“When he passed, it was something that we wanted to do together,” said Ewing. “We’ve got to stop this — this is stoppable, but it’s going to take a long time — if I have to give a one-on-one education to every person.”

So Ewing decided to try to get her message out across the seafood industry.

She started in Sitka, where she’d build relationships with fish processing plants as a state nurse during the pandemic. She said at first she thought it would be hard to sell the idea because of the stigma that surrounds opioids and addiction. But processors and employees were on board.

Ewing educated new hires about opioids at their start-of-the-season orientation meetings. She talked about the risk of fentanyl, a potent and cheap synthetic opioid that’s been driving record overdose rates in the state.

After her talks, she said employees shared stories with her of the people that they knew who passed away from opioid abuse.

She mounted opioid emergency boxes with life-saving naloxone in the same locations at each plant.

“Seafood processors kind of hop from seafood place to seafood place often. So we standardized it so that they knew that if they were in the galley, there was one in the galley. If they knew they were near the fish dock, there was one of the fish dock,” Ewing said.

Mike Duckworth Jr. is the plant manager for Silver Bay Seafood in Sitka. He said when Ewing reached out about Project Gabe, the idea “hit home” for him — a member of his extended family had overdosed, too.

He says there’s around 400 people working at his plant, and they haven’t needed one of the kits yet, but he’s glad to have them as a precaution.

“We absolutely do feel safer,” he said.

“This is my 25th year working in this industry. And I can say that I have been at other plants and facilities in Alaska that, you know, this would have saved somebody’s life.”

Duckworth says he’s expecting all Silver Bay plants in the state to adopt the program.

Juneau Public Health Nurse Sarah Hargrave helped pack boxes with the volunteer crew. She wants to see that success spread across the region.

“What we’re doing now is trying to expand that work regionally. Our goal is to have these mounted and standardized places in seafood processors, and also with docks and harbors across Southeast,” she said.

The group filled about 150 boxes. Some will stay in Juneau, others will go to places like Cordova, Tenakee Springs, Pelican and Gustavus.

The state plans to expand the program to other regions and industries in the future.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Gabe Johnston’s last name.