Jamie Diep

A Juneau musician is giving his final organ performance in the State Office Building this Friday. T.J. Duffy is retiring after 16 years of live concerts on the nearly century-old instrument.

The theater organ concert will mostly feature holiday music, according to a press release. He will also perform Christmas carols that audience members can sing along to. 

In the release, Duffy said he is retiring as a state employee at the end of the year and thought it would be a good time to retire from the organ concerts as well.

The Kimball organ is located in the State Office Building and is the only publicly available instrument of its kind in Alaska. Duffy is one of several musicians who regularly perform on Fridays.

The nearly 100-year-old instrument is nearing the end of its usable life. Repairing it would cost more than $250,000 and requires shipping it to Portland, Oregon for a year.

Duffy’s final concert will be this Friday at noon at the State Office Building.

The Juneau School District Board of Education took another step toward finding a new superintendent. 

At a special board meeting Monday, the board approved a contract with a national search firm to find its next leader in a 5 to 1 vote, with board member Melissa Cullum absent.

The search comes after Superintendent Frank Hauser announced his resignation in September.

The board approved a $29,000 contract with search firm McPherson & Jacobson LLC. It previously worked with the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District and Valdez City School District to hire superintendents, according to the firm’s website.

Board member Amber Frommherz was the only no vote. She says she proposed having an interim superintendent in place following Hauser’s resignation, which the board decided not to do. 

“I’m struggling with this vote right now and still, in the moment, still struggling in terms of the vote,” she said. “It’s not the lack of trust in the committee, but in the general route.”

During its last search, the board contracted with Ray & Associates and hired Hauser in 2023. 

Hauser was hired with a yearly salary of $185,000. He currently makes $197,000.

The district will finalize the contract with the firm this week. Hauser’s last day as superintendent will be June 30. 

Editor’s note: Amber Frommherz serves on KTOO’s Board of Directors.

A group of 14 student athletes from Angoon finally returned home from Juneau Friday morning after a cancelled ferry left them stuck in the capital city for four extra days.

The students came to Juneau on Dec. 3 for a basketball tournament. Angoon School principal Emma Demmert was on the trip with the team and said their trip home on state ferry M/V LeConte was cancelled following record-breaking snowfall across Southeast Alaska.

While in Juneau, she said it was challenging to keep the cost of staying extra days from rising too much, but since Angoon and Juneau are so connected, local residents stepped up to keep students fed.

“I’m very thankful to be a part of the community that I’m in, because without them, you know, our kids wouldn’t have food,” she said. “And you know, they’ve really been reaching out and helping us in any way possible.”

Demmert said a Goldbelt Incorporated employee who went to school in Angoon as a child opened the corporation’s classroom up for students to use during the week.

Despite the change in plans, Demmert said the students behaved well, thanks to a schedule that included time for schoolwork, meals and swimming at Dimond Park Aquatic Center. 

“They’ve been going swimming at the swimming pool because it’s cheap entertainment, and it keeps them busy and it gets them tired,” she said.

Demmert said when the ferry was canceled, the group moved from their tournament lodging into the Aspen Suites hotel until they could leave on the next available ferry four days later.

Being stranded in other communities can be financially challenging; the cost of food and additional lodging eats into the school’s activities budget. But Demmert said traveling to other communities is worth the risks of getting stranded because the students work hard to maintain their eligibility and compete.

“They come to practice every day. They keep their grades up. Because of eligibility, they have to have a certain grade point average in order to even be able to travel,” Demmert said. “So given that, it’s like an award for all the hard work they’ve been doing.”

Despite incurring extra costs from this week in Juneau, Demmert said they hope to work out travel for competitions taking place over the rest of the school year.

Listen here:

This week, Thunder Mountain Middle School joined the growing number of schools composting food waste. Before rolling out the program, students in an environmental club led their peers through sorting out their trash and seeing how much of it can avoid the landfill.

Seventh grader Thalea Headings stuck her arm deep into a trash can, and seemed pretty grossed out by what she found. Dressed in aprons and blue plastic gloves, her science class sorts through the remains of lunch at Thunder Mountain Middle School.

They dug through trash cans filled with yogurt, half eaten sandwiches, loose vegetables and seemingly endless cartons of chocolate milk. They sort the trash into two separate buckets: one for food waste and one for everything else. At the end of the class, they weighed and kept a record of the different types of waste.

Thalea found some interesting items, to the disgust of her classmates. And sometimes it was hard to tell what’s what. She said sorting through trash hasn’t been as gross as she thought it would be.

“There’s more plastic than actual food,” Thalea said. “I was thinking there’s gonna be more food because when I’ve seen the trash cans before, there’s a lot of ranch and gross stuff in it.”

What these students are doing is called a waste audit. All the food waste they sorted out will be composted. This effort is being led by a newly formed club at the middle school called Ocean Guardians. It’s part of a program from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that encourages schools to protect the ocean.

Seventh grader Maebell Bos helped bring the club to Thunder Mountain. She was part of the Ocean Guardian club at her former elementary school, Sayéik: Gastineau Community School, and didn’t want to give it up.

“When we went to middle school, we kind of thought to just bring it over, and we are excited that we can do that,” she said.

Maebell worked with her friends in the club to create presentations to all of the middle school science classes about what a waste audit is and what things are compostable before actually doing the audits.

Cheyenne Cuellar teaches science and math at the middle school and supervises the club. She worked with Monica Haygood, the Ocean Guardians teacher at Sayéik, to learn what the process was and applied for grant funding to bring composting to the middle school.

Though she’s in charge, she said it’s the club members that have done the bulk of the work for the waste audits. 

“It’s not like I’m there helping to make sure this happened,” she said. “The Ocean Guardian kids are really just taking the lead of teaching these, for each science class, two to three class periods, of being the leaders within that class.”

The students are auditing their trash while Juneau is having its own reckoning with waste.  Juneau’s landfill will likely fill up in the next decade. Composting is a way to keep food waste out of there. Maebell, the club member, said it was challenging to get some students to get on board with the waste audit and composting.

“Some people are either unaware of, like, the problems that are going on, like, on how fast our landfill is filling up and they aren’t aware. And then other people, they just don’t care for it as much,” she said. “We’re trying to make it something positive and something that we can do to help our environment.”

Still, some students simply didn’t want to go through trash. But, Aria Gribbin, another club member, said once the audit happened, those students realized it’s not that bad. 

“It’s been a bit hectic trying to get all the classes to agree to it and not have a bunch of kids be like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be sick tomorrow,’ so they don’t have to do it,” Aria said. “It’s been hectic trying to get that, but once they did it, I think they realized it’s a bit gross, but it’s also kind of fun.”

By the end of all the audits, students sorted out 319.88 pounds of food waste. And instead of going to the landfill, it was composted. Thunder Mountain joins four other schools in the district all composting their food waste.

Educator turnover rates in Alaska have increased overall, beyond levels preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data from the Institute of Social and Economic Research, or ISER. It comes as the state continues working on ways to improve teacher retention and recruitment in the state. 

Dayna DeFeo is the director of the Center for Alaska Education Policy Research, a clearinghouse for education-related work with ISER. She said at a State Board of Education Meeting on Wednesday that the teacher and principal turnover rate has generally risen beyond rates seen before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re seeing just a fairly steady, consistent upward trend,” she said. “We’re going to see this pattern no matter how we splice the data.”

In 2024, 17% of teachers and 27% of principals left their school districts. While turnover decreased during the pandemic, the new data marks an overall increase since 2013. The research builds on previous work from Regional Education Laboratory Northwest, which studied turnover rates in 2019 and 2021. While principal turnover is generally higher than teacher turnover, DeFeo said the trend depends on the type of community.

“When we start to dig into the data, they show that educator turnover is not a monolith,” she said. “It looks different. It looks different in different places, it looks different in different contexts. And as we develop policies and as we develop programs to interrupt these patterns, it’s kind of useful to look at the nuances of these data.”

For example, in 2024, principals left schools at a higher rate than teachers in communities outside of cities. But the opposite is true for urban schools, where about 30% of teachers left as opposed to 21% of principals.

According to a University of Alaska report to the state Legislature, teacher turnover rates statewide sat above the national average between 2012 and 2021. High turnover is associated with negative student outcomes.

The state has been working on improving teacher retention since at least 2020. That includes a teacher apprenticeship at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Fairbanks campuses. University of Alaska Southeast also expects to begin a principal training program next fall.

DeFeo said in an interview with KTOO on Thursday that her team plans on surveying teachers in February to see which factors play into their decisions to leave.

“What we can see pretty clearly is who stays and who goes. We can do that very accurately,” she said. “What we don’t know all the time is, why? Why they make those choices.”

ISER plans to publish a full report on turnover rates next spring.

The University of Alaska will host listening sessions in Juneau, Fairbanks and Anchorage next week as it ramps up its search for a new president. 

This comes after UA President Pat Pitney announced her retirement plans last month. The university contracted with WittKieffer, a global executive search firm, to help with the search. During the session, it hopes to get input on what the university community wants to see from the next president.

In Juneau, the firm will host sessions on Dec. 8. There will be four separate sessions, one each for University of Alaska Southeast faculty, staff, students and community members. 

All Juneau sessions will be in the Glacier View Room Egan Library Classroom Wing at the University of Alaska Southeast at the following times:

• UAS faculty — 9 to 9:50 a.m.
• UAS staff — 10 to 10:50 a.m.
• UAS students — 12 to 12:50 p.m.
• Juneau community — 6 to 7 p.m.

The firm will then hold sessions at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. A community session will be held on Dec. 9 for the public. Faculty, students and staff will meet for sessions the following day.

• Fairbanks community — Dec. 9, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Schaible Auditorium
• UAF faculty — Dec. 10, 9 to 9:50 a.m. at Schaible Auditorium
• UAF students — Dec. 10, 10 to 10:50 a.m. at Schaible Auditorium
• UAF and UA System Office staff — 1:30 to 3:00 p.m. in Room 106 at the Butrovich Building

Anchorage listening sessions will happen on Dec. 11 for students, faculty, staff and community members in the University of Alaska Anchorage Engineering and Industry Building Solarium at the following times:

• UAA staff — 9 to 9:50 a.m.
• UAA students — 10 to 10:50 a.m.
• UAA faculty — 11 to 11:50 p.m.
• Anchorage community — 6 to 7 p.m.

University students, faculty and staff will also be able to attend sessions over Zoom. Community members will only have an in-person option. Anyone unable to attend the meeting can also fill out an anonymous survey until Dec. 15 at 2 p.m.

According to a university press release, recruitment is expected to open in early January, with a president hired between April and May.

A 13-member search committee will review and interview candidates. Members of the community include university regents, governance representatives, as well as Alaska city and corporation leaders.