Southcentral

The Anchorage School Board passed the first reading of a new suspension policy Monday evening, but they plan to delve deeper into the issue later this summer.

The new suspension policy requires teachers and administrators to provide parents and guardians with a “brief statement of facts” about why the student was suspended. Previously the letters home only included coded reasons for the suspensions.

School Board member Eric Croft says the new policy is not in response to the litigation against the district, which argues ASD needs to provide more details to families when students are suspended.

The first reading of the policy passed unanimously, but it must go through a second reading in two weeks.

School Board member Pat Higgins says the revisions of the suspension policies will not end here.

“Suspensions right now are too much attributed to a discipline as opposed to a constructive move to make the child more successful,” he said.

Higgins recently attended a conference on suspensions and says studies show that suspensions are not always the fault of the student.

“Most of the time the suspensions are directly related to the teachers as well and the connection they don’t have with the student,” Higgins said. “So when you look at some of the reasons why kids are acting the way they are, the interaction isn’t there, the connection isn’t there, and that contributes to it.”

The district’s Multicultural Advisory Committee and Special Education Advisory Committee plan to present suspension policy recommendations in August, says Starr Marsett, who sits on both committees.

“School board members should be leading the charge to reduce the practice of out of school suspensions and instead push comprehensive strategies for preventing the removal of students from schools or classes or placing them in alternative schools,” she said during the public comment period.

Data compiled by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies for 2011-2012 show that African-American secondary school students are about three times more likely to be suspended than white students in the Anchorage School District. The same is true for Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders. Students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended.

I arrived at the discovery lab before any of the school groups. But when I walked in, I realized the kids wouldn’t be the only ones fascinated by this sandbox. The adults setting up the lab couldn’t walk by it without reaching in to play with it.

“This thing begs you to stick your hands in it,” says Alana Vilagi.

She’s right; it really does, because this is no ordinary sandbox. From mountains to rainstorms, this sandbox can bring the natural world to life. When you put your hands into it, and move the sand around, a topographic map projected onto the sand changes. So if you pile the sand up, the topo map shows a mountain, if you dig it out, you get a valley.

This is the senior design project she completed with fellow students George Stevens, Austin Hunt and Cody Klingman for the College of Mines.

“We loved it. When we first saw it, our meeting was just to talk about the sandbox, but I think the whole time we had our hands in the sand,” says Vilagi.

The project had to be a physical model of some sort; it couldn’t just be an idea. So they decided to modify the augmented reality sandbox for use in classrooms.

“The first version that we were shown was fixed,” says Vilagi. “So, it’s a lot harder to take apart. It’s not really designed to travel. This, we have a big case for it. It folds down to like a quarter of the size.  And I envision this going to rural villages, traveling all over the state.”

But what exactly is the purpose of a tabletop topo sandbox aside from being really awesome and way too much fun to play with?

“Well you know, what I think this sandbox is particularly helpful for is showing us a relationship between something flat, like a two-dimensional topographic map and then the real, three-dimensional topography that that map is trying to represent,” says Eric Stevens, a science liaison for UAF. “Mostly I work between the university system and the National Weather Service with regard to weather satellite imagery and data.”

Today, his job is to help explain to visitors the technology that makes this sandbox special.

“There’s an arm extended well above the sandbox. It’s got a couple of gadgets on it. One of the gadgets pointed from this arm down onto the sand, is a Kinect from a Microsoft Xbox, the video game console,” says Stevens.

Kinect sensors were first released for Xbox in 2010. They allow players to interact with games without a controller. The Kinect uses a webcam-type device that senses a player’s motions and responds to them, says Vilagi.

“The way that the Kinect sensor works is it has three different lenses. One of those lenses projects an infrared grid onto the sand. The other one is able to interpret the levels of the sand, based on how the grid is rising closer to it. And then the projector projects a topographic map onto it; it projects those levels.”

It uses a special, light-colored fine-grain sand to register the image. But, Stevens says, it doesn’t stop with the ground.

The sensor is programmed to register several inches above the sand as the atmosphere. So, if you hold your hand there, the Kinect reacts by “raining” underneath it, as if it were a cloud. The water then follows natural paths down the mountains and forms lakes on valley floors.

“If you put your hand in the water, it’ll react, it’ll splash,” says Vilagi. “If you put an object in, it’ll displace the water. It can sense there’s a volume to the object.”

And water systems education was the purpose of the first sandbox, says Vilagi. It was built by researchers at the University of California, Davis Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Science. Then, it was adapted in-state by the Geographic Information Network of Alaska.

Stevens says he sees the dynamic sandbox as a priceless teaching tool for kids and adults alike.

“And I wish that 25 years ago, when I was in meteorology 101, that they had something like this to help me understand what we’re depicting when you look at temperature contours on pressure maps and all these intersecting lines and such,” says Stevens.

That’s the point says Vilagi. It’s great for getting students engaged with the world around them and it’s so easy to set up, any educator can use it. She says there are plans for the sandbox to travel around Alaska, with a focus on getting to rural villages.

“One of the biggest attractions is this isn’t going to be something that sits in somebody’s garage after we’re done graduating,” says Vilagi. “This is going to be something that lives on after we’re done. That was really important to me.”

Vilagi and her group are now constructing a second sandbox that will also make its way across the state.

An airborne collision between two airplanes hospitalized an Eagle River man Sunday evening.

At 5:15 p.m. the Alaska State Troopers responded to a report of the collision at the Talkeetna State Airport.

According to reports from Troopers and other witnesses, a Cessna 185 belonging to Talkeetna Air Taxi was piloted by Antonio Benavides and carrying four passengers when it collided with a Cessna 172 piloted by Cole Hagge of Eagle River approximately 100 feet in the air.  Both planes suffered significant damage.

Hagge was transported to Mat-Su Regional Medical Center with what Troopers are calling non-life threatening injuries.  The passengers and pilot aboard the Cessna 185 were uninjured.

Shaun Williams, who is investigating the incident for the National Transportation Safety Board, says that both aircraft were descending to land at the Talkeetna Airport when the incident occurred.  He says a preliminary report will likely be issued in the next five-to-ten days, but that the full report could take up to a year to be released.

 

The City of Houston is facing such severe financial woes that all but three city employees have been furloughed. Houston mayor Virgie Thompson is working without pay, and volunteers are keeping the wheels of city government turning.

Houston, on the Parks Highway in the Susitna Valley, has hit the financial wall. Thompson blames the crisis on unpaid property taxes.

“There’s a little over $35,000 delinquent,” Thompson says. “In other words, they haven’t paid it. So that’s $35, 000 right now that we don’t have that we projected to have.”

The city of about 2,000 residents is just beyond commuting distance to Anchorage. There are few local jobs, and state revenue sharing funds from this fiscal year are running out. Thompson says the city’s greatest source of revenue is property taxes, and that the much ballyhooed Alaska Railroad spur linking Houston and Port Mackenzie is not helping bring in any money.

“Part of that is owned by the borough, and you can’t tax the borough. The other part is owned by the state, and you can’t tax the state. The basic infrastructure is there, but until the private sector comes in and does something with it, it’s not taxable,” Thompson says.

Thompson says she’s putting in the 80 hours a month required by city law, but is not turning in her time card to the finance clerk to keep her $1,500 monthly salary in the coffers.

The finance clerk, along with the city’s fire chief and city clerk, are the only Houston city employees now drawing a paycheck.

The city is not legally allowed to borrow money. City sales taxes bring in some revenue during the tourism season, which has barely started, and next year’s state revenue sharing is still on the horizon. There is some money in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough budget for Houston: $9,500 for the fire department and a $21,000 block grant to be used at the city’s discretion.

The Mat-Su Borough budget for next year has been approved, but is awaiting expected vetoes from Mayor Larry DeVilbiss, which will be announced this week.

Thompson says it’s normally June before money gets tight.  This year she says the financial squeeze started in April.  Thompson says the city will struggle to provide the services that property owners who did pay taxes deserve.

 

Just a day after two federal lawsuits involving the Pebble Mine were in the news, mine opponents Friday hailed the Alaska Supreme Court’s decisions on two state cases.

The justices unanimously overturned a 2011 ruling in a case that challenged whether the DNR permits issued for exploratory work at the Pebble site should’ve included some public notice.

The plaintiffs, including Nunamta Aulukestai, Vic Fischer, and former first lady Bella Hammond, argued that DNR was essentially disposing of public lands when it permitted the drilling of more than 1,000 holes and dozens of seismic blast lines as Pebble explored the deposit north of Lake Iliamna.

An Anchorage Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the State of Alaska, and Pebble, which had joined the lawsuit. The plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the 2011 ruling.

The second case, linked to the first, involved the matter of collecting legal fees after a lawsuit. After the first case was ruled on in 2011, Pebble and the State of Alaska sought costs and attorney’s fees of nearly a million dollars from the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs argued they had brought a non-frivolous constitutional claim, and didn’t have a sufficient economic motive for doing so. The Supreme Court justices unanimously agreed.

 

Homer resident Dr. Linda Chamberlain has been selected to participate in the Fulbright Arctic Initiative. The initiative seeks to create a network of scholars on the Arctic. Sixteen researchers from the United States, Canada, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden will meet over the next year to collaborate on multidisciplinary research on Arctic energy, water, health and infrastructure issues. Individuals will also make international trips for their specific areas of study.

“We work in cross disciplines to find the common ground of different issues. For example, our climate up here is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the world. How does that affect communities relative to family, wellness, health and sustainability,” Chamberlain says.

Chamberlain will contribute to the initiative by sharing her more than 20 years of experience studying ACEs, or Adverse Childhood Experiences. Simply put, she says ACEs are examples of childhood trauma.

“The original research on ACEs looked at all forms of child maltreatment: sexual, physical, and emotional. It also looked at neglect,” Chamberlain says.

She says ACEs also stem from household dysfunction caused by substance abuse, domestic violence, divorce and a number of other issues. The other side of her work is building community resiliency.

“What can we do to keep those tough times during childhood from affecting brain development, a child’s school performance, and the long term health effects that we know can happen with this,” says Chamberlain.

Chamberlain says problems in households that negatively impact children can be triggered or worsened by outside stressors, such as climate change.

“That is affecting subsistence living. It affects the fish. It affects the fishing lifestyles [and] families’ economic welfare. Then you have another layer of pressure on a family or community that may already be struggling with these issues,” Chamberlain says.

Chamberlain will work to understand what effect ACEs can have on the issues her fellow researchers are studying. She expects the opportunity to learn from her Fulbright colleagues will be priceless.

“Communities like Homer are working to become ‘trauma informed’. I think we’ve learned a lot from communities elsewhere [that] are doing a lot of work around that and now we have an opportunity to learn from communities who live like we do in the circumpolar world,” Chamberlain says.

The researchers met for the first time this week for a program orientation in Iqaluit — the largest city in the Canadian territory Nunavut. Over the next year they will conduct research at home as well as travel to institutions located in the home countries of the initiative’s participants.

Chamberlain will visit Finland in June to give a presentation on ACEs and from there she’ll travel to a research center in Nova Scotia that studies community resilience.

“Then I’ll be back home laying out what my research plan will be,” Chamberlain says.

Once all the teams’ research is complete and the results are analyzed, the initiative will culminate in a final meeting next year in Washington D.C. Chamberlain plans to share the end result of her research online.