I dig into questions about the forces and institutions that shape Juneau, big and small, delightful and outrageous. What stirs you up about how Juneau is built and how the city works?
The Juneau School Board has selected a national search firm to find the school district’s next superintendent.
The board voted Tuesday to authorize board President Sally Saddler to contract Ray and Associates, which is based in Iowa with an office in Tacoma, Wash. The firm’s base fee is $16,000, which doesn’t include travel costs.
Besides Ray and Associates, the board considered proposals from firms based in Illinois and Nebraska, as well as the Juneau-based Alaska Association of School Boards. Cost estimates from the firms ranged from $9,000 to $37,000.
Superintendent Glenn Gelbrich is leaving the district at the end of June for personal and private reasons. The board accepted Gelbrich’s resignation last week. Gelbrich joined the Juneau school district in 2009.
Anchor Pat Race interviews a banana republic dictator who says banana production was in decline, so he fixed banana taxes, and now his family works as consultants to banana corporations and he drives a Lamborghini.
A Pick.Click.Give. spoof cut to footage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill asks Alaska to “let your heart spill over” for Exxon.
A send up of the ShamWow infomercial featuring Lou Logan with a fauxhawk and headset selling a towel that cleans up oil spill-related court troubles.
Lou Logan spoofs the ShamWow! informercial in Alaska Robotics latest satirical news short. (Screen capture courtesy Alaska Robotics)
And real U.S. Sen. Mark Begich speaks out against the post-9/11 expansion of intelligence gathering, including “psychically powered pre-cog units.”
Alaska Robotics is a label Pat Race, Aaron Suring and Lou Logan use for their creative projects.
Superintendent Glenn Gelbrich offers a brief critique of the school system in his resignation letter.
Juneau School District Superintendent Glenn Gelbrich at a recent board meeting. (Photo by Casey Kelly/KTOO)
Gelbrich writes,
“Clinging to the status quo will not produce a different result. Without broader support for systemic instructional changes, our students who now struggle will continue to struggle in the system. While we have dramatic gains in the graduation rate, academic improvement has been modest. Change is needed — for the sake of so many of our community’s kids.”
Gelbrich began as Juneau’s superintendent in July 2009. At the end of his first year, the district’s graduation rate was 69 percent, according to state education statistics. By the end of his fourth year, the graduation rate had risen to 79.3 percent. Standardized test scores in reading, writing, math and science were stagnant.
The letter, dated March 12, is only four paragraphs. Gelbrich goes on to thank school and community leaders who “understand that we are capable of stronger, more systemic practice.”
Gelbrich writes that he does not have another job lined up, but that he must move on “for personal and private reasons.” He has declined discussing his resignation. In a board memo, Gelbrich estimates finding a new superintendent is likely to cost $30,000 or more.
The Juneau School Board meets Tuesday to approve its budget for the 2014-2015 school year, discuss its evaluation of the outgoing superintendent and formally accept his resignation. The board meets at 6:15 p.m. at Juneau-Douglas High School.
(Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct which budget the school board is meeting about. It’s the budget for the 2014-2015 school year, not the 2015-2016 school year.)
An otter covered with oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill – ACE6 (Photo by ARLIS Reference)
Twenty-five years ago, Marta Lastufka saw a puzzling ill omen at a party where a woman was giving readings with tarot cards.
“And everybody kept getting this scary card, it was like, the death card, or something,” says Lastufka, a page for the Senate Finance Committee. “She said, ‘You know, I don’t know what this means, but something is going to happen that’s going to affect all of you.’ And that was probably just a few days before the Valdez oil spill. And then we realized, oh, that was it.”
The Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground 25 years ago today, spilling hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in Prince William Sound. Around the state Capitol Building, the memories for many are still fresh.
The spill brought a frenzy of activity to Alaska, including workers, reporters and profiteers. Legislative aide Ron Clark had a front seat. He was a special assistant to Gov. Steve Cowper. Clark and the governor flew up to Valdez a few days after the spill.
After they got off the plane, Clark remembers the governor asking him, “Are you ready for this?”
“And I said, ‘I dunno, what’s this?’ He says, ‘You’ll see,'” Clark recalls. “The doors open and, like, two dozen Klieg lights flash on. All these camera lenses suddenly are trained on him, microphones being thrust at him, and people shouting questions, and, and, he kind of pauses before he wades into this, and he turns to me and says — ‘That’s ‘this’. This is what I meant.’ And he just — pwoo! — walked into this amazing scrum of press people.”
Clark says entrepreneurs came, too, by the thousands, clawing for a few minutes of the governor’s time to hawk their cleanup solutions. His voice tightens as he imitates the frantic tone: “Here, governor, here! Here’s the cure to the spill, here’s what you need to–this product is just what you need!”
He calls it a bizarre and surreal time. One man tried to sell nylon mesh bags full of chicken feathers as an alternative to oil boom. Within a few weeks, bankers’ boxes filled with spill-related mail lined the hallways of the Capitol’s third floor, Clark says.
“You know, there was a whole section on sea otters. You know, oiled sea otters: Clean them and release them? Kill them humanely? Every category of letter had a banker’s box, and we just had piles and piles and piles of these letters that just kept pouring in,” Clark says.
The impact wasn’t so immediate for Sen. Gary Stevens. He was in Kodiak at the time teaching history. There, the first weeks were part of an awful waiting game.
“I’ve heard people say anything that falls in the water in Prince William Sound is going to wind up on the beaches of Kodiak,” Stevens says.
The news reached Kodiak weeks before the clumpy oil balls fouled the beaches.
“It was just a horrendous experience as we watched that oil over time slowly move out of Prince William Sound and eventually hit the beaches of Kodiak. We knew it was going to happen, and it was just like one of those inexorable things that you know it’s going to happen, you know it’s going to happen, and then finally it does,” Stevens says.
Stevens remembers the sight of oiled birds, oiled animals and the oiled workers trying to clean it all up.
The workers at sea needed a way to clean themselves up, too. Rep. Paul Seaton was a commercial fisherman at the time and one of his fish tenders was repurposed for just that. He put an old house with a boiler and tanks aboard the ship to supply fresh water and serve as a decontamination unit.
“Because all these people were out there cleaning up and they had no place to take showers, or wash, or wash any clothes for the first part. And so we became the vessel that was out there providing cleanup for the clean-uppers,” Seaton says.
For the most part, the oil has come and gone. Still, Stevens says sharing these stories is important.
“Because it needs to be commemorated. It was something that we just cannot forget. It happened. It really happened, it’s a part of our history and we can’t forget the impact that the oil spill, the Exxon Valdez oil spill had on Alaska,” Stevens says.
Superintendent Glenn Gelbrich at a recent school budget meeting. (Photo by Casey Kelly/KTOO)
Juneau School District Superintendent Glenn Gelbrich is resigning effective June 30.
Gelbrich was unavailable for comment, but district spokeswoman Kristin Bartlett says he turned in his letter of resignation on Thursday.
“The Board spent a considerable amount of time trying to discourage him from leaving and they expressed their unanimous support for him to stay and continue the work,” Bartlett says in an email.
Gelbrich’s contract ends in 2016. It is not known yet if there will be repercussions for breaking it early. Gelbrich has headed up Juneau schools since 2009.
Bartlett says over the past couple of months the superintendent has discussed with school board leaders the likelihood that he would be leaving.
He finally announced his intention to the full board on Tuesday, March 4, during an executive session on his evaluation, which Bartlett says was positive.
He has said he wants to live closer to family in the Pacific Northwest. At least twice this year, he was a finalist for superintendent positions out of state. He was ultimately passed up for jobs in Idaho and Montana.
(Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct when the school board held its executive session to evaluate Gelbrich. The evaluation occurred Tuesday, March 4, not Tuesday, March 11.)
Alaska Robotics’s latest satirical news short imagines the Capitol as a monster truck rally and House Speaker Mike Chenault as a mechanized tyrannosaurus. (Screen capture courtesy Alaska Robotics)
Rep. Les Gara mixes up personal and state business, blaming the dietary fat substitute Olestra for years of oil and gas issues.
A fan swoons over the legislature’s youngest member, Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins; his new found confidence and maturity are embodied in an epic fake beard.
In an advertisement selling Capitol legislative proceedings like a monster truck rally, House Speaker Mike Chenault is caricatured as a mechanized tyrannosaurus with flaming exhausts.
Pat Race, Aaron Suring and Lou Logan use Alaska Robotics as a label for their creative projects.
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