Quinton Chandler, KTOO

The state’s Division of Juvenile Justice said the number of kids being sent their way is almost half what it was 10 years ago.

When a minor is arrested or charged with a crime, they’re generally referred to Juvenile Justice for punishment or treatment, or both.

The reason behind the decrease isn’t completely clear, but it’s a nationwide trend.

Two juvenile crime experts said we have to remember the past to understand today’s lower numbers.

“Most of the kids never see the inside of one of our buildings,” said Rob Wood, Juvenile Justice director. “We deal with them informally or with parental supervision rather than put them in one of our programs.”

Wood has witnessed the decrease firsthand. He started with Juvenile Justice in 1990.

“We’ve seen a fairly steady decrease for about the last 15 years,” he said. “When I started with the division as a probation officer, my office in Anchorage got more cases referred to it than the entire state does now.”

Wood doesn’t know for certain why the number of referrals fell off so dramatically, but he has some ideas.

“We have better services in the communities, we have better mental health services, we have better responses, kind of up and down the continuum, and perhaps that is leading to less kids being arrested,” Wood said.

Melissa Sickmund, the director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, agreed with Wood but wanted to approach the question from a different direction.

“You’re asking the question about, ‘Why did things come down?’ I think we need to step back and first ask, ‘Why had they gone up?’” Sickmund said.

She pulled up a graph of violent juvenile crime arrests in the U.S. since 1980. The arrests started climbing in the late 1980s, and peaked in the 1990s.

“For people who are old like me, you can remember that time,” Sickmund said. “People were very fearful of kids, there was actually a lot of kind of blaming kids for all the violence in the country which was not accurate, but it got everyone’s attention.”

The line fell hard after the 1994 peak.

Each year, Sickmund said she waited in suspense to see if the crime numbers had fallen again. They kept going down.

There were years when they rose again but not by much and then they fell even more.

Sickmund emphasized that this is national data and every community is different. However, numbers from Alaska show a similar trend.

So why did it happen? Sickmund pointed to one specific drug.

“People have hypothesized about crack hitting the streets and the violence associated with the crack market,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s an issue in Alaska.”

Wood said it was.

“And maybe that was in part because of the transiency of population,” he said. “There was a lot of money to be made in drugs, and crack was an easy drug to manufacture and to sell. Some of the gangs out of California moved into Alaska not necessarily to be gangs but to be businessmen.”

Wood and Sickmund both said the crack industry was extremely violent and Sickmund said kids played a huge role in it.

“Everybody responded to it,” Sickmund said.

Everybody included parents, schools, legislatures and law enforcement.

“There was a lot of money put into the system,” Sickmund said. “There was also a lot of money spent on research to try to understand what was going on, what happens with kids, what works with kids and with adults too.”

She said everybody did what they could to reduce the violence and eventually it turned around.

The result in Alaska is eight youth detention facilities that are housing fewer juveniles than they could hold. Wood said in the 1990s, the Anchorage youth center had a capacity of about 30 kids but averaged around 70.

The Ketchikan Regional Youth Facility is closing on Sept. 15 and its youths will be sent to Juneau’s Johnson Youth Center, which is also under capacity.  Both have been housing a fraction of the juveniles they were built to hold.

A handful of kids in Ketchikan could be transferred to Juneau’s Johnson Youth Center next month before a youth facility in Ketchikan closes. Rob Wood, director of the Division of Juvenile Justice said the incoming kids from Ketchikan shouldn’t overburden the Juneau facility.

“It’ll certainly increase the workload but (the) Johnson (Youth) Center, over the past three years, has averaged about 50 percent occupancy,” Wood said. “So the number of kids that are moved to Juneau won’t necessarily affect their work.”

Wood said the transfer will force the youth center to speed up its recruitment process for staff positions they were already planning to fill.

He said Monday, his most recent reports showed four kids at the Johnson Youth Center and seven in the Ketchikan facility, but those numbers will most likely change. He said some of the Ketchikan kids could be released and some could get assigned to other facilities.

“And if the court decides they should be in one of our long-term treatment facilities that process will start,” Wood said. “Our long-term treatment facilities are either in Juneau, Anchorage, Fairbanks or Bethel,”

Wood said moving kids being detained away from their families can make the work more difficult and it’s “rarely a good idea.” But, he said the state is responding to budget problems and there isn’t another choice.

“We’ll need to make more significant efforts to keep kids in touch with their families. We use our video conferencing quite a bit so kids can see their parents,” he said. “The reason we put programs around the state was to keep kids as close to home as we could.”

The Ketchikan Regional Youth Facility is scheduled to close on September 15. Wood said the kids detained there will be moved before then.

A Juneau school board candidate is figuring out that life in the public eye will require making some unforeseen changes to his life on social media.

Dan DeBartolo is the creator and a moderator of the Facebook page Juneau Community Collective. It’s a public group with more than 5,500 members. Since DeBartolo started it a couple of years ago, the page has been a popular place to discuss community issues. But lately, he’s seeing more and more people talking politics.

“Now that I’m involved in an actual local candidacy for a school board seat, I felt like I was put in an odd position, because I’ve had to remove some posts because they directly advocated for a local house seat or a municipal seat, and they weren’t naturally part of just a conversation on the page,” DeBartolo said.

He said he realized if he removes political posts that break the page’s rules, there’s a danger it’ll look like he’s acting in his own interests as a political candidate and not as a neutral moderator.

“I didn’t see it coming,” DeBartolo said.

He said his decision to run for school board largely hinged on the amount of time he’d spend away from his family.

“I certainly didn’t think about the span of it touching my online life or even who I was going to bump into in the street saying, ‘Hey thanks for running for school board,’” DeBartolo said. “So, it has opened my eyes to a whole new world.”

DeBartolo asked the collective how he should handle the conflict of interest. So far, he’s received 66 public responses as well as some private messages. He said the majority were against posts about national elections because there are plenty of other forums to discuss them. Some told him to stop moderating political posts and some said he should stop moderating the page altogether.

DeBartolo said he’s going to keep moderating but he’s giving oversight of the political posts to other page administrators.

“There are other issues that are going on that have nothing to do with the school board and have nothing to do with the education system that I believe I contribute to as, not only a moderator but as a citizen,” DeBartolo said.

He said he wants to make sure there’s a fair discussion of those issues and he doesn’t want to overburden the other administrators with his entire share of the work.

DeBartolo added, “To a certain degree it’s my baby in a way, and I don’t want to let it go and not be a part of it anymore altogether when I believe there’s middle ground.”

DeBartolo has created a campaign Facebook page to further separate his political activity from the Juneau Community Collective.

He said his wife recently pointed out that since he’s set his sights on public office, it’s possible there’ll be many more aspects of his life he’ll have to reexamine through the lens of a political candidate.

The unofficial results of a tight House primary race are in. Dean Westlake of Kotzebue appears to have won the Democratic nomination for House District 40 from incumbent Rep. Benjamin Nageak of Barrow.

Previously Westlake had a lead of only three votes. Absentee and questioned ballots tallied Friday widened Westlake’s lead to 21 votes.

Division of Elections officials have said it will likely take another week to certify the results. But, Westlake’s win might not be definite. Because the race was so close, the state would probably grant a request for a recount.

Nageak or 10 qualified voters would have to file for a recount no later than five days after the state’s final review of District 40’s ballots.

A Cessna aircraft made a hard landing Friday evening in the Mendenhall Wetlands State Game Refuge, east of the Juneau International Airport runway.

Capital City Fire/Rescue Assistant Chief Ed Quinto said the plane was coming into Juneau from Hoonah when it lost power and made a forced landing about 2,000 feet from the end of the airport runway.

All four people aboard walked away with no injuries.

Quinto said airport maintenance workers were sent to remove the aircraft from the wetlands.

Summer vacation is over and as hundreds of students walk back into classrooms, school administrators are eagerly counting how many kids they’ll have under their watch.

This year, the Juneau School District is bucking a trend of declining enrollment. The district has counted more students than expected and higher enrollment could land it enough money to cover part of a near $450,000 cut in state funding.

Michelle Coutu just moved to Juneau from Ashburn, Virginia. She recently registered two of her boys at Harborview Elementary School, and a third in middle school.

“It was pretty easy, I’ve got three boys so I had to do the same paperwork for three boys. I probably should have photocopied it. It probably would’ve made it a little easier,” Coutu said.

Like every other parent who enrolled kids in Juneau schools this year, Coutu is a contributor to what could turn out to be a huge win for the Juneau School District. According to a district budget document, enrollment has mostly fallen over the past decade. This year it could be at its highest since 2013.

David Means, the district’s director of administrative services, said more students mean more money from the state.

“We’re about 230 students more than projected at this point in time. However, our projections really count during the month of October,” Means explained.

In October, school districts send a tally of students to the state to determine exactly how much of the education money appropriated by the legislature each district will get.

Means said his projections don’t include all the new kindergarteners or dropouts, and he doesn’t know how many special education students the district will have. He said the district gets about 13 times the money for some students with special needs.

In October, Means will have more certainty on all those numbers.

“Usually our initial numbers are (a) little bit high at this time of year and they come down a little bit in October,” he said.

Means believes the actual increase will fall somewhere between 160 and 200 additional students. That would give the district a boost in funding it could really use.

In June, Gov. Bill Walker cut the state’s education budget by more than $58 million through a series of vetoes. The vetoes left the Juneau School District with a $200,000 cut to its operating fund and a $250,000 cut to its student transportation funding.

Means believes the additional funding from higher enrollment could cover much of the loss.

“Plus, because we have more students, we’ve had to add almost the equivalent of three additional teachers in various schools across the district,” he said. “So that additional state funding will pay for the salaries, and benefits, and supplies of those new teaching positions as well.”

Means doesn’t know why there’s a gap between this year’s actual and projected enrollment. He said the higher numbers are unusual. In the past three years, the district’s final enrollment was either the same as projections or it was lower than predicted.

He may not be able to explain the increase, but Means said it’s a big help. Parents like Michelle Coutu may have unknowingly saved the school district the trouble of solving a bothersome funding problem.

Editor’s Note: Originally this story stated Juneau School District faced a $200,000 deficit. That was inaccurate. Governor Walker’s vetoes led to a near $200,000 cut to the district’s operating fund and a near $250,000 cut to its Pupil Transportation Fund.