Katie Anastas

University of Alaska President Pat Pitney has appointed a new chancellor for the University of Alaska Southeast.

Aparna Palmer is vice president of Front Range Community College in Colorado. She was previously the assistant vice president for academic affairs at Colorado Mesa University, where she taught biology.

At a public forum earlier this year, Palmer said her work as a marine biologist made her especially happy to be in Juneau.

“I’m really excited to be here between the mountains and the ocean, because this is the biology that excites me the most,” she said.

Palmer holds a doctorate in zoology from Washington State University and bachelor’s degrees in biology and English from Colorado State University. 

She said her priorities include student recruitment and fiscal stability, and she wants to work with local industries to connect graduates with jobs.

“We don’t grow if the region doesn’t grow,” she said at the forum.

Palmer was born in India and moved to the United States as a child. She said promoting equity and inclusion is personally important to her.

“I think about how important it is to me that I have a language that I inherited from my family, and how sad it would be for me if I didn’t have that language, because it’s so particular to the way you understand the world,” she said.

Palmer’s first day as chancellor will be July 1. She replaces Karen Carey, who is retiring after three years on the job.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced a bill Tuesday that would increase the amount of parental permission needed to teach sex education and change students’ names or pronouns in school.

If passed by the Legislature, students would need their parents’ permission before taking a sex education class or joining a program or club related to gender and sexuality.

“There should never be a case where a parent sends their kids to school, and the child comes back having discussions about things they’ve learned in school that may be a sensitive issue or an affront to a parents’ values,” Dunleavy said at a press conference Tuesday.

The bill would require school districts to separate student locker room and bathroom facilities by biological sex rather than gender identity, provide access to single stall restrooms or adopt other protocols to address “the physical safety and privacy of students in locker rooms and restrooms,” according to Dunleavy’s office.

Parents would also need to provide written permission for students to change their names or pronouns at school.

Anchorage Democratic Sen. Löki Tobin chairs the Senate Education Committee. She said the bill could increase feelings of isolation among LGBTQ students.

“They are probably our most vulnerable young people, and in many cases, their public school is the safest place for them,” she said. “It’s where there’s a trusted adult that sees them for who they are. It’s where they can go by their correct name and their correct pronouns and where they get to be a kid.”

Dunleavy denied that the bill targets queer and transgender youth. Instead, he said, it’s meant to strengthen parental rights and increase transparency in schools.

“This isn’t targeting anybody,” he said. “This is really reaffirming parental rights, and that the parents of these children have the right to know what their children are doing in school.”

Dunleavy also introduced a bill Tuesday to increase teacher recruitment and retention by giving full-time teachers an annual payment for the next three years. Payments could be $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 depending on the district, with the highest payments going to teachers in the most remote areas.

The Juneau School District is asking the Assembly for more than $2.5 million to resolve deficits ahead of the next fiscal year.

Alaska’s school funding formula allows local governments to contribute their own money up to a certain point. The City and Borough of Juneau has allocated the maximum amount of local funding to the school district annually for more than a decade.

School boards can also ask local governments for funding beyond that cap, and during last year’s budget process, the school board asked for $2.2 million. Now, the board is asking for an additional $2.5 million.

More than $1.2 million of that would go toward a growing transportation funding deficit. Transportation is funded on a per-student basis from the state, and Superintendent Bridget Weiss said declining enrollment led to a deficit in the fund last year. District leaders expect the deficit to grow at the end of this school year, since enrollment was once again lower than projected.

“When we went into COVID and we had a drop in enrollment, there was a hold harmless statute that supported us for a couple of years,” Weiss told the Assembly Finance Committee on Wednesday. “That was true for general funding, but it was not true for transportation funding.”

She said fuel costs have also gone up.

The other big item on the list is $750,000 for RALLY, the district’s after-school program. Weiss said many RALLY staffers work as paraeducators in schools during the day and then overtime at RALLY, which has driven costs up last year and this year. She said the program is experiencing the same hiring challenges as the rest of Juneau’s child care providers. 

“Because of our negotiated agreement, that means we’re paying overtime, which is more expensive,” she told the committee. “If we pass those costs onto the family, then what we’ve discovered is it makes it unaffordable.”

Weiss said the funding would also go toward costs that have come up this year related to middle school wrestling, summer school and community classes for adults. 

Weiss said if the Assembly doesn’t give the district the additional $2.5 million, the district would have to fill the gap with funds it hopes to spend on instruction next year.

“Our K-12 instructional money is the only other pot we have,” Weiss said in an interview. “We would have to use those instructional dollars to pay these deficits, and that would eat up some of our operating fund.”

Assembly member Alicia Hughes-Skandijs asked school board President Deedie Sorensen how much the school board had discussed the possibility of not getting the extra funding from the city.

“We have not spent an exceptional amount of time on these. We spent a bunch of time trying to decide whether or not we were going to make this ask of the Assembly,” Sorensen said. “Most of our budgetary discussions have been how much we need to cut in order to deal with the structural deficit.”

Some Assembly members pushed back against the request. Member Wade Bryson said the Assembly was being asked to provide an easy way out of the district’s budget problems.

“If you know that there are spots that are losing money, bring it to our attention so that we can do something about it instead of handing us a bill at the end and asking us to reward poor budgeting practices,” Bryson said.

But Weiss said the root of the problem is flat-funding from the state. The base student allocation, the amount of money per student school districts get from the state, hasn’t increased since 2017.

“This isn’t about bad budgeting. It isn’t about bad spending,” Weiss told the committee. “This is about K-12 education being underfunded, drastically underfunded.”

The finance committee voted to move an ordinance to allocate up to $2,540,737 to the full Assembly for a final vote, with members Bryson, Hughes-Skandijs and Maria Gladziszewski voting against it.

The school board’s first reading of next year’s budget is set for Tuesday.

In this newscast:

• Farmers, scientists and entrepreneurs gather for the Southeast Alaska Farmers Summit.
• The smallest group of teams in the Iditarod’s history are signed up to compete this year.
• Striking school bus drivers in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District could return to work as soon as Monday if a tentative agreement is approved.

A scammer stole more than $269,000 from the Juneau School District last fall. 

City and Borough of Juneau Finance Director Jeff Rogers outlined the incident in a memo shared with the Assembly Finance Committee during its meeting Wednesday.

He said someone claiming to be one of the district’s vendors asked to change their banking information. They used a “spoofed email address that varied slightly from the vendor’s last known email address,” according to the memo.

CBJ recommends that staff contact vendors separately to verify requests like these. But the district didn’t double check with the real vendor, Rogers wrote. Once the banking information was changed, the scammer stole $93,477.17 on Oct. 7 and $175,600.23 on Nov. 4. 

By the time the city’s finance department contacted the FBI, Juneau Police Department, CBJ Law Department and First National Bank of Alaska on Dec. 7, it was too late to recover the funds.

At an Assembly Finance Committee meeting Wednesday night, Rogers said it’s a strategy school district staff should have known about.

“This particular scheme is very common,” he said. “You can’t listen to a webinar about fraud, you can’t go to a financial conference, you can’t step out your front door without hearing that this is really a very successful method for fraudsters to use.”

Scammers used a similar method in 2019 to steal more than $329,000 from the city.

The city has a risk fund for these kinds of events and could cover $250,000 of the district’s loss. But, according to Rogers, the Juneau School District hasn’t filed a claim with the CBJ Risk Manager or the city’s third-party insurers. 

“I know that there has been communication from the CBJ Risk Manager to the school district, and there has not been communication back,” Rogers told the Assembly.

The district also hasn’t discussed the loss publicly, he wrote in his memo.

“Since mid-December, CBJ Finance, Law, Risk and the Manager have been in regular contact with JSD staff about the importance of disclosing this financial crime to the public. To-date, that disclosure has not occurred,” Rogers wrote. “Hence, I feel it is my fiduciary responsibility as the CBJ Finance Director to disclose this event to the CBJ Assembly and the Juneau public at this time.”

Juneau School District Superintendent Bridget Weiss said she has communicated with the city.

When reached Thursday afternoon, Weiss said she told the city in mid-February that the school board would discuss potential insurance claims in executive session at its March 7 meeting. She said the district received Rogers’ memo shortly before the finance committee meeting began.

“I think we have been in contact. Have we made all the final decisions related to this? We have not,” Weiss said. “And the board has a planned executive session on Tuesday to have this very conversation, and that was scheduled when Jeff Rogers submitted his memo to the Assembly.”

Rogers said city leaders have asked the district to make the public aware of the incident since mid-December. But Weiss said the district was waiting for more information from the investigation, which is still ongoing.

“We very much work hard as a district and a school board in being transparent, but we wanted to make sure we had all the information we could have, because then we can share more publicly if we know exactly what happened and what can be shared,” she said.

Weiss said the attack was external, and not from someone within the district. She said the district requires annual cybersecurity training and is reviewing its protocol.

Wednesday’s Assembly Finance Committee meeting also included a discussion of the school district’s request for additional funding from the city. The committee moved the request to the full Assembly for a final decision.

This story has been updated with comment from Juneau School District Superintendent Bridget Weiss. 

Juneau schools will release students an hour early Wednesday due to snow.

Students will get out at 1:30 p.m. from elementary schools, 2 p.m. from middle schools and optional programs and 2:45 p.m. from high schools, according to a release from the Juneau School District. 

Most after school programs are canceled, including JAMM, RALLY, afternoon pre-K and high school sports practices. High school basketball games have been rescheduled for Thursday.

Middle school activity buses will not be running. First Student, the district’s bus service, is using snow routes and told parents to expect delays. 

Some Juneau parents took to social media to question why the district hadn’t told students to stay home Wednesday morning. In a message to families, district leaders apologized for the inconvenience.

“Conditions were better at 4:30 this morning when the initial call to hold school was made, and often the weather doesn’t hit as forecasted,” the district wrote. “The Juneau School District apologizes for the inconvenience. The district gathers information from JPD, City Roads Engineer, City Manager, DOT, First Student and the weather service to help make snow related decisions. Sometimes the conditions require us to change the plan.”

The University of Alaska Southeast also canceled classes for the day.

City and Borough of Juneau offices and facilities will close at 1 p.m. Wednesday, including city hall, public libraries, pools, the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, Treadwell Arena and the Zach Gordon Youth Center.

City bus service is suspended on Cordova Street, Franklin and Fourth Street downtown.

A blizzard warning is in effect until 6 p.m. Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.

This story will be updated as more information becomes available.