Katie Anastas

The Juneau School District and its teachers union hope to agree on a new contract this week. If they don’t, negotiations could be headed to arbitration.

Juneau Education Association President Chris Heidemann said meetings with a federal mediator scheduled for Thursday and Friday are “critical.” If they can’t reach an agreement, they’ll go to arbitration, meaning a third party would hear both sides and come up with a solution.

“It’s certainly on the horizon,” Heidemann said.

The teachers’ previous contract expired in June 2022, and the union declared an impasse with the district in January. One major concern for the union has been the district’s proposed cuts to monthly contributions to health premiums. 

Heidemann said teachers are feeling “demoralized.”

“They don’t feel valued, and they’re just tired,” he said. “And that’s starting to show up in our resignations. We already have over 35 people that have officially put in their paperwork to leave the district at the end of the year.”

Cassee Olin, the district’s director of administrative services, said reaching an agreement by the end of the school year would be ideal. She said that, along with more certainty around state funding, would let the district revise its budget before the start of the fiscal year.

“Which helps us have an idea if we are in the need to get more teachers or if there are other cuts we have to do before the school year begins,” she said.

The school district built next year’s budget around a $400 increase in per-student state funding. 

“What they have to do now is they have to appropriate their funds in such a way that they can make a financial offer to JEA that is a respectful financial package,” Heidemann said.

Olin said she’s optimistic that the district and union will reach an agreement before moving to arbitration.

“We’ve made a lot of steps and progress in the last six days that we’ve done mediation, so there’s hope that we can get this through and come to an agreement and a contract before this year’s out,” Olin said. “I think we all have hope that we can get there.”

Musicians from across Southeast Alaska will perform at the Alaska Folk Festival in Juneau this week. A Tuesday night event called “Unceded” will highlight artists of color.

On Juneau Afternoon last week, organizer Tripp Crouse said it’s been a long time coming.

“This was really a brainchild from 2017 — my first Folk Fest,” Crouse said. “Being a brown kid from the Midwest in a very white area, I didn’t understand why we weren’t highlighting the Indigenous musicians that were here.”

Crouse shared the idea for a side stage on Facebook in February. Local painter and poet Dita Devi jumped in as a co-organizer. She said the concept resonated with community members of all backgrounds.

“I think it’s something that people have been craving, they just didn’t verbalize it and start to put the movement into it,” she said.

Devi said it’s important to provide a dedicated space for artists of color during Folk Fest.

“There are so many different stages, there are so many side stages,” Devi said. “But often, I think that we are — not overtly — but we are encouraged to take up less space. And I want us to take up a whole lot of space.”

Admission to the event is free, but musicians will still get paid, thanks to support from local businesses.

“We wanted to make that music available to anyone who wanted to participate and listen,” Crouse said.

Qacung is one of the artists performing on Tuesday. He said events like Unceded, along with the Indigenous music festival Aak’w Rock, ensure that artists of color are heard and celebrated on their own terms.

“Creating venues and spaces like this for Indigenous voices, BIPOC voices, it’s rare,” he said. “I’ve been in this business for almost 30 years performing with my band, and we’ve often been that tokenized group. It’s basically a career filled with that. One of the things that became very apparent with my peers in the industry is that we need to just create those spaces ourselves.”

Other performers include Air Jazz, Daniel Firmin, Lisa Puananimōhala’ikalani Denny, Lester Joel Rodriguez, Sunny Porch, Rochelle Kaachgóon Smallwood, RRAINS, Sonia Kumar, Christian Jensen and Nicole Church.

Unceded begins at 8 p.m. at The Alaskan.

City leaders outlined a proposed budget to the Juneau Assembly’s finance committee Wednesday night that balances increased costs with higher tax revenue. Now, Assembly members will spend the next several weeks deciding how much property tax to collect through the mill rate.

City manager Rorie Watt said his proposed budget reflects increases in both revenue and expenses.

“Almost everything is up,” he said at the start of Wednesday’s meeting. “Costs are certainly up, inflation has driven up the price of everything – commodities, capital projects, labor. All revenues are up. We’re projecting a record number of tourists this summer.”

Property values are also up. Watt’s proposed total mill rate of 10.28 is slightly lower than last year’s, but because of higher property values, the city would still get nearly $6 million more in property tax revenue.

“The property tax burden is the mill rate times the value, so how you set the value will ultimately determine how much more people pay for municipal services,” Watt said. “They’re certainly not going to pay less for municipal services. That’s just not possible.”

Watt said demand for those services has increased, which is why he’s proposed adding some new positions, including a swim instructor, a recreation coordinator for the Treadwell Arena and HR staff.

Though the mill rate applies to all homeowners equally, the increases to property values varied depending on the neighborhood. Single-family home values in the Flats went up by 10%, while values downtown went up 21%. Some residents reported increases as high as 40%.

“Sure, we’re dropping the mill rate to the lowest level it’s been in decades,” Assembly member Greg Smith said. “Some people will still see very significant increases on their tax.”

City finance director Jeff Rogers said the Assembly may want to increase the mill rate further if it decides to add new recurring expenses.

“If you’re taking on a recurring cost that we should expect indefinitely, we would encourage you to set a mill rate that pays for that cost but doesn’t take in any unnecessary revenue either,” he told the Assembly.

He noted that most property tax goes to schools. The proposed budget includes $9.7 million more for the school district than last year’s.

“We are spending more property tax on the Juneau School District than we are spending on everything else that CBJ does in its general government,” he said. “More than half of the non-debt property tax is paying for schools.”

The proposed budget also increases general government spending by $6 million and capital improvement project spending by $7.7 million. The city would spend $6 million less on the hospital, airport, water utilities, docks and harbors, mostly because of cost reductions at the hospital.

Watt is also proposing a few one-time expenditures. They include $10 million toward building a new City Hall and $2 million toward upgrading the police department’s radio system. 

“I do not propose these investments lightly, and I suspect that these one-time investments will garner significant public and committee attention during the budget process,” Watt wrote in a message to the Assembly.

The proposed budget also pays off $3.2 million of a $6.6 million park bond approved last year. Assembly member Wade Bryson said they should consider paying it off more slowly in order to keep the mill rate as low as possible.

“That message going to the public would be huge,” Bryson said.

The proposed budget leaves the city with an unrestricted fund balance of $12 million, $20 million in restricted general fund reserves and a $15 million deficit. It uses savings to fill that budget gap.

Juneau residents will have the opportunity to comment on the proposed city and school district budgets, capital improvement plan and mill rate during the April 26 Assembly meeting. The Assembly plans to adopt the final budget on June 12.

Tuesday was the first day back for 3 to 5-year-olds at Gold Creek Child Development Center.

Being back in the classroom might take some getting used to, lead teacher Jessica De Leon told her students. When she asked whether they were feeling excited, shy or sad, many kids raised their hands for all three.

“It’s okay if we’re feeling really big emotions,” De Leon said. “If we’re feeling a little sad because we’ve been home with mom and dad, or we haven’t seen our friends.”

The center temporarily closed in January as its board continued to search for a new executive director. Now, that search has come to an end: Nicole Koenneker will start work as the center’s new director later this month.

Ashley Heimbigner is a member of Gold Creek’s volunteer board. She said Koenneker will bring administrative experience and personal connection to the job.

“She is a parent here at Gold Creek and stepped in, raised her hand when we were really facing some staffing struggles at the end of last year and put in countless hours as a volunteer while also having a full-time job and two little ones,” Heimbigner said. “The more time we spent with her, the more we realized that she’s the leader that we need for Gold Creek.”

Filling the executive director position meant Gold Creek could open its doors again, though they’re starting off small.

“When the center closed on Jan. 13, there were four classrooms open,” Heimbigner said. “We’re opening with just one classroom now, which is a combined preschool/pre-K classroom.”

That class has 12 to 14 students on a given day. Before the closure, Gold Creek had about 40 total. The lower number of students means not all staff were rehired. Heimbigner said some of them found jobs at other childcare centers during Gold Creek’s closure.

But Jessica De Leon said she held out.

“I held out for a really long time, because I believed in Gold Creek and that it would reopen,” she said during a snack break. “It’s exciting to see everybody back.”

De Leon submitted applications to other childcare centers during the closure.

“But something in the back of my mind was telling me to just keep holding on,” she said. “My heart was with Gold Creek.”

Heimbigner said the center hopes to hire more staff and reopen the infant and toddler rooms as soon as possible. She expects Gold Creek will face some of the hiring challenges other centers are facing throughout the state, but she says work by groups like the Southeast Alaska Association for the Education of Young Children offers some hope.

“It does feel like everyone is trying to come together to rebuild this resource for our community and provide opportunities for real professional development and career building in this sector,” she said. “But it’s just a start. There’s so much work left to be done.”

After 50 years of operation, Juneau’s Augustus Brown Pool has closed for major renovations.

City Aquatics Manager Terra Patterson described some of the upcoming improvements on Juneau Afternoon last week. They include resurfacing the pool, new electric plumbing and ventilation upgrades.

“The locker rooms are probably the biggest piece that people will notice the most,” Patterson said. “The locker rooms are being completely renovated.”

But one part of the locker rooms will live on in a new art installation — the tiles painted in 1999 by Juneau kids.

Christy Simonson — then Christy Race — painted one of those tiles. She was working as a lifeguard, and the second and third graders needed help painting tiles. She and her sister, Marta, volunteered. 

They also painted tiles of their own. For more than 20 years, those tiles have lined the women’s locker room.

Simonson’s tile has streaks of green across a dark blue sky.

“It looks like I did some Northern Lights on the horizon, which I still love to this day,” Simonson said. “It’s interesting that in high school, I appreciated nature and that kind of scenery. Now, as an adult, I appreciate it even more.”

Her sister painted stick figures swimming in a pool lane and wrote “I love to swim at 4:45 a.m.” — a nod to their early morning high school swim practices.

“There were snow blizzards we were driving through in the pitch black, freezing cold, to come swimming in the pool for an hour before high school would start,” Simonson said. “No one really loves doing that, but we loved the sport and being with the team, so it was worth it.”

Simonson’s love of swimming started early. She joined the Glacier Swim Club at age 6, in 1985.

“From then until ‘99, I was here,” she said. “It was my life.”

She built a community around the teammates, coaches, coworkers and Juneau residents who visited the pool every day. She taught swim lessons for kids. One summer, she led aerobic activity classes for seniors, guiding them through different motions in the water.

“It was a great way, from a teenager’s perspective, to connect with the seniors in the community and develop a relationship,” she said.

In the remodeled lobby, high-resolution photos of the 1999 tiles will sit alongside new art by Juneau kids. Last month, the city asked kids to submit drawings of their favorite experiences at the pool.

Simonson hopes the new generation of artists will look back fondly on their artwork — and the pool — like she does.

“It kind of is like a church,” Simonson said. “It’s a sanctuary for people to come and exercise and let your stresses go.”

The Augustus Brown Pool will remain closed until at least the end of the year. In the meantime, Juneau residents can swim at the Dimond Park Aquatic Center in the Mendenhall Valley.

Alaska students, teachers and sexual assault survivors spoke against a bill Gov. Mike Dunleavy says would support parents’ rights and increase transparency in schools.

The bill would require written permission from parents before students could participate in sex education classes, use different names or pronouns at school and attend clubs related to gender and sexuality. It would also require schools to divide bathrooms by gender assigned at birth, give students access to single stall restrooms or take other “safety and privacy” measures.

During nearly five hours of public testimony Thursday night, the vast majority of participants spoke against the bill, saying it could put LGBTQ+ students at risk at school and at home.

Nelson Merrell is a parent and commercial fisherman who lives in Juneau. He wore a shirt that read “Protect LGBT+ Youth” in rainbow letters.

“The trans community is in perpetual fear of policies and hateful ideology like what this bill represents,” he told the committee.

Several teachers spoke against the bill. Thunder Mountain High School special education teacher Meagan Hinton said providing sex education and respecting the names and pronouns of transgender students hasn’t been controversial.

“Parents are able to opt out of sexual education. I have students who are transgender, and let me tell you, at the school it is not an issue,” she told the committee. “You are making it an issue. The governor is making it an issue.”

Anchorage resident Erin Willahan said the bill prioritized the views of one group of parents over the rights of all students.

“Particularly in the age of the internet, kids are going to learn about the world regardless of legislative attempts to ban books, censor conversations, remove access to sex ed and demonize LGBTQ+ classmates and parents,” she said. “Allow children the safety of exploring themselves and the world with the guidance that a teacher, curriculum and supportive environment can offer.”

The bill would also require school districts to tell parents that they can sue the district if it violates the bill’s statutes. Juneau resident Pat Race said that would hurt districts that are already struggling financially.

“We’re looking at a time when school districts are strapped for cash, and we’re trying to pile up a bunch of lawsuits against them,” he said. “I don’t think that’s going to be helpful.” 

Juneau School Board member Martin Stepetin said the bill is at odds with the state’s support of local control. He said the Juneau School District already has policies on sex education, bathrooms and student name changes.

“It doesn’t matter what school board you’re from, whether it’s from Mat-Su or Juneau,” Stepetin said. “Just like the state of Alaska doesn’t like the feds overreaching into the state of Alaska’s affairs, local governments do not like the state of Alaska reaching into our local affairs.”

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District banned transgender students from using bathrooms and playing on sports teams that match their gender identity last year.

April Smith, a member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board, supports the bill. She said a statewide policy would help school boards focus on other district needs.

“I’m always advocating for local control,” she said. “But some of these issues have been binding up the local boards so much that we can’t get to our normal work that we need to do – revising our policies and making sure that our teachers are getting the best training available – because we’re bogged down with these particular issues.”

Other supporters of the bill said respecting transgender students’ names and pronouns went against their Christian values. They said parents should know what’s being taught in school.

Parents can already opt their children out of sex education classes, and in many districts, view health curriculum plans online.

Some opponents who spoke Thursday worried that the bill would require parents to opt in to sexual abuse awareness and prevention curriculum required by the Alaska Safe Children’s Act. 

That curriculum can start as early as kindergarten, and Dunleavy’s bill would ban sex education before fourth grade.

At a committee meeting Wednesday, Soldotna Republican Rep. Justin Ruffridge questioned whether that curriculum, which teaches kids about “good touch” and “bad touch” to identify abuse, would be available for young students if the bill passes.

“What would be the way to be able to teach that and not have this bill apply? I’m curious as to how those things are able to live together,” he said. “How is someone supposed to be able to teach a child about what’s inappropriate without being in violation of some of the things that are in this chapter?”

Heidi Teshner, acting commissioner of the state Department of Education, said curriculum related to sexual abuse and healthy relationships would remain opt out, rather than opt in, if Dunleavy’s bill passes.

The bill remains in the House Education Committee. The Senate version of the bill has been referred to the Judiciary Committee.