Lisa Phu

Riverbend Elementary School went into stay-put mode this afternoon after receiving a suspicious call pertaining to a school shooting. Thunder Mountain High School also went into stay-put since it’s nearby. This is the fifth time in two weeks that a school has received a threatening phone call.

Juneau School District spokeswoman Kristin Bartlett says the call came in around 1:30 p.m.

“From what I understand it was another computer generated or digitally altered voice type message,” Bartlett said.

The Juneau Police Department responded to the situation and didn’t find anything wrong. Officers made sure the school was secure and the stay-put was lifted after about 30 minutes.

The suspicious calls started last Monday. Juneau-Douglas High School and Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi Alternative High School each received one. Glacier Valley Elementary School got one this past Monday and went into lock down mode. Juneau-Douglas received a second call on Tuesday.

In a statement, Juneau Police says the messages were not identical but all the threats were related to a school shooting. A detective is reviewing all the threats and the department is working with the Alaska State Troopers and the FBI in the investigation.

Several other schools across the state have also received threatening phone calls in the last two weeks.

On the first of June, the University of Alaska Southeast will have a new chancellor. Rick Caulfield will replace outgoing chancellor John Pugh, who announced his retirement last October.

Rick Caulfield has been UAS’s provost, or chief academic officer, for the past five years. Prior to that, he was a professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks for about 20 years. He started out in the UA System as an instructor at UAF’s Bristol Bay campus in 1985.

As chancellor, Caulfield says his biggest challenge will be dealing with budget cuts.

“At this point, we’re still uncertain about the exact dollar amount that will impact UAS. We think it’ll be something like $2.3 million,” Caulfield says.

The school’s total budget is $59 million.

Across the three UAS campuses in Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka, there are about 110 full-time faculty and 220 staff members. Caulfield says, due to the unfinished state budget, he doesn’t know how many positions the college will cut.

“But I would say, at the same time, we’re looking at ways to generate new revenue, whether it’s federal funding, grant opportunities or ways of attracting more students to our programs,” Caulfield says.

He hopes to build up UAS online degree programs. He wants to attract Alaskans who never completed college but want to. UAS has about 3,000 students, most are part-time.

Caulfield says he also hopes to expand the college’s programs in Northwest Coast art. UAS worked with Sealaska Heritage Institute to submit a federal grant proposal for $2.3 million.

Caulfield says he intends to maintain John Pugh’s legacy of focusing efforts on students who aren’t traditional students — people who work and have families while taking classes.

“He deeply cares about student success. He deeply cares about engaging with students and encouraging them in their education and my hope is to continue that practice of showing how at UAS we really care about the success of our students,” Caulfield says.

Caulfield is originally from California but just celebrated his 40th year in the state. He came to Alaska in 1975 and later married his wife Annie in Gustavus. He earned his doctorate in the United Kingdom in 1994 based on research on aboriginal subsistence whaling in Greenland and the Arctic.

Update | 8:50 a.m.

University of Alaska President Patrick Gamble selects Richard Caulfield as the next chancellor of University of Alaska Southeast. Caulfield is UAS’s current provost. He’ll replace John Pugh.

Original story | 6 a.m.

UAS chancellor search down to two finalists

The University of Alaska Southeast may be announcing its next chancellor by the end of the week.

John Pugh has led UAS for 16 years. After he announced his retirement last October, a search committee started a nationwide search in January. Twenty-six people applied. The committee narrowed the pool down to two finalists – Richard Caulfield, provost at UAS, and Margaret Madden, provost and vice president for academic affairs at State University of New York Potsdam. Both attended community and university receptions last week.

Vice Chancellor Michael Ciri is the search committee chair. He says both candidates are strong and have received letters of support from the campus community. Ciri says the committee sent its recommendation to UA President Patrick Gamble Tuesday.

“We did forward both candidates as strong candidates for consideration. We did not exclude either of the finalists,” Ciri says. “The president did get an opportunity to meet with both of the candidates specifically as part of this recruitment and sit down and talk to them, so he had a chance to form his own opinion as well as taking in the feedback that we were giving him as a committee.”

Ciri says both candidates also went through a ranking process. Gamble will make the final selection.

Pugh’s last day as UAS chancellor is May 29.

Update | 5:20 p.m.

Sgt. Krag Campbell with the Juneau Police Department says the caller reported an active shooter at JDHS, and what sounded like gunshots could be heard in the background.

Campbell says officers responded and were able to determine that the school was secure and students were safe before lifting the “stay put.”

“These type of threats are always very concerning,” Campbell says.

He says JPD is investigating the incident, along with the two other recent cases of threatening calls to local schools. He could not say whether the cases are related.

At least six officers were still at JDHS this afternoon as students were leaving the campus. Campbell says the incidents disruptive to both JPD and schools.

Original post | 4:26 p.m.

Juneau-Douglas High School went into stay-put mode this afternoon for about 35 minutes.

School district spokeswoman Kristin Bartlett says the main office of the high school received a “threatening” phone call around 3:15 p.m. It’s the district’s second one in two days. Yesterday’s lockdown was at Glacier Valley Elementary School.

Bartlett says the district finds the threatening phone calls “disturbing.”

“We are treating every incident as its own incident,” Bartlett says. “We’re definitely taking each phone call seriously and we just want to make sure that everybody’s safe. And depending on the circumstances, schools will go into lockdown or stay put and we’ll continue to respond appropriately.”

Last Monday, Juneau-Douglas High School, Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi Alternative High School and Harborview Elementary School went into “stay put” mode after a similar threat last week.

Bartlett says Juneau Police was at Juneau-Douglas High School during the lockdown actively investigating.

This is a developing story. Please check back later for details.

Gov. Bill Walker signed a bill this morning officially naming the new State Libraries, Archives and Museum Building after Father Andrew P. Kashevaroff. The signing took place in the historical library in Juneau’s State Office Building.

Of Russian and Native heritage, Father Kashevaroff was the first librarian and curator of the Alaska Historical Museum and Library when it relocated to Juneau in 1919.

Bob Banghart is deputy director of the Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums.

“He was charged with the task of getting it on its feet and going forward with it, and if you look at the diagrams of the old facility, it would almost appear to be a cabin of curiosities. He was pulling in material from all over,” Banghart says. “But you read his writings and he was deeply engaged in social issue, the studying of cultures.”

Kashevaroff acquired thousands of objects for the museum. He held the position for 20 years until his death in 1940. Kashevaroff was also the Russian Orthodox priest of Juneau’s St. Nicholas Church.

Juneau Sen. Dennis Egan’s bill naming the SLAM building also honors former Rep. Richard Foster from Nome. A reading room upstairs in the facility will be named after him.

“Richard was in the archives all the time. If he was missing on the House floor, they’d have a page go down to archives and there would be Richard,” Egan says.

The Father Andrew P. Kashevaroff State Library, Archives, and Museum Building is being built in downtown Juneau. It’s scheduled to open to the public next May. Kashevaroff’s portrait will be on the Founders Wall located off to the right as you enter the facility.

Video footage of the House floor discussion on the bill provided by Gavel Alaska. 

The start of the cruise ship season brings a new excursion from one of the oldest tour outfits in Southeast. Allen Marine Tours is set to run hovercraft trips to the Taku Glacier starting this week.

It’s been about 20 years since Allen Marine last brought visitors to the Taku Glacier, located near Juneau at the head of Taku Inlet. John Dunlap is vice president of Allen Marine Tours. He says the company used to go to the glacier with a large catamaran back in the 1990s.

“We would get as close to the glacier as we could, which at a low tide was several miles away and at a higher tide, we could maybe get within a few miles of the face of the glacier,” Dunlap says. “So it was kind of a pretty variable experience.”

So variable that Allen Marine stopped doing it after a few years.

“But we always thought, ‘Gosh, if we had the right kind of vehicle, we’d like to come back up here and do this better,'” Dunlap says.

Allen Marine bought a hovercraft from a Washington company last year and started experimenting with it.

“It doesn’t matter whether the tide’s out or not. You can travel with equal ease over water or if you’ve got to pass over shallow water and sand bars, that’s fine, too,” Dunlap says.

The hovercraft will soon start carrying paying customers. The 4-hour tour includes more than an hour on the hovercraft. Tourists leave from downtown Juneau on a jet-powered catamaran to lower Taku Inlet, where Allen Marine will have a larger ship staged that serves as the hover base. There, tourists will transfer into an 8-person hovercraft which will take them close to the face of the glacier, where they disembark for 30 minutes.

The whole trip costs more than $300 per adult. Dunlap admits it’s quite a bit more than Allen Marine’s established whale watching tours and Tracy Arm trips.

“For us, it’s a little bit more like having a helicopter tour which tend to be fairly expensive tours because of the equipment involved than what we’ve traditionally done with boat tours that have higher capacity and are a little bit more efficient to run,” says Dunlap.

Hovercrafts travel on a trapped bubble of air. Dunlap describes it as a small barge that sits on an inflated rubber skirt. Allen Marine hopes to have three running this summer. It has one now and has ordered two more. Each one is 22 feet long and about 10 feet wide. Dunlap says they don’t make any more noise than a boat of similar size.

Ron Maas owns 150 acres on the Taku River. He says he bought the property about 20 years ago because of its direct view of the glacier. He’s not excited about the new Allen Marine tours.

“That puts a whole different light on that property of ours. We consider it something very special but, Jesus, if we have to listen to this all the time, it’s not going to be much fun. There’s so much traffic up there now that it’s a constant thing,” Maas says.

Maas acknowledges his role in the traffic and noise near the glacier. He’s the former owner of the Taku Glacier Lodge. Visitors to Juneau are brought there by float planes.

“I had 14 aircraft when I sold out and, of course, we made eight trips a day with each airplane, so I really can’t complain a lot about noise, but we tried to control the noise the best we could,” Maas says.

He also doesn’t like the idea of seeing people walk near the face of the glacier. Dunlap says Allen Marine has state and federal permits allowing people to walk in that area.

Juneau commercial fisherman Jim Becker is wondering if the hovercraft will affect juvenile salmon coming out of the Taku River. He’s been gillnetting for Taku River salmon for 40 years.

“The concern is we have outmigrating smolt coming out of the river and some fry, and I don’t know what the depth is in front of the glacier and what kind of water depth they’re going to be operating in, so I think that needs to be checked out,” Becker says.

Alaska Fish and Game biologist Leon Shaul doesn’t foresee any issues.

“In that area near Taku Glacier, I wouldn’t think it would have much impact,” Shaul says. “That’s a pretty open area and tidal influenced, so I wouldn’t imagine it’d be a lot different than a boat.”

Dunlap says Allen Marine will not be going up the river.

He says cruise ship passengers have already started signing up for the hovercraft tours. As interest grows, Dunlap expects Allen Marine to operate consistent tours within a few weeks.