Southcentral

The Anchorage School District plans to cut 57 currently-filled positions next year because of a $16.7 million funding cut from the state legislature.

Superintendent Ed Graff presented the cuts to the media Thursday afternoon. They include 37 classroom teachers, 12 literacy coaches, and all of the pilot programs focused on early learning and updating science teaching tools.

Graff says they didn’t want to eliminate anything. “But when you get to this point of $17 million that you have to cut on top of the reductions that we already had to address the prior years, there’s no way around it. It’s going to have an impact on everything we do.” Especially students.

The school board must vote on the cuts on Monday even though the state’s budget has not been signed by the governor. They are required to inform tenured teachers about layoffs by May 15 and other staff by the end of the school year.

The revised budget also eliminates the 20 new positions the board added into next year’s budget to reinstate middle school elective teacher team planning time as well as three maintenance positions, supplies, and technology upgrades.

“So we’re going to have to reverse all of those things we planned for, and prepared for, and the students expected, and the community expected. We need to figure all of that out. We’re moving in the wrong direction.”

They will maintain the sports programs and instructional support for English Language Learners and Special Education.

ASD also plans to go forward with the school renovations funded by the recently approved school bonds, despite confusion over whether or not it will be partially reimbursed by the state. State Attorney General Craig Richards recently wrote a letter to the governor saying the bill passed by the legislature that ends school bond reimbursement is retroactive. That means no bonds passed after January 1, 2015 will be reimbursed even though the law doesn’t take effect until 90 days after it’s signed.

Graff says the district does not interpret the law that way and is still seeking reimbursement.

New documents are coming to light that complicate the biography of Anchorage mayoral candidate Amy Demboski.

Court records show Demboski was enlisted in the Air Force shortly after high school, which she did not previously mention in detailed interviews about her resume. The documents, included in a post on the blog Mudflats Thursday, reveal she was involved in divorce proceedings that ended in 1997. The documents include an order invalidating an earlier proceeding because of a forged signature.

The campaign does not have a statement regarding the documents, according to spokesman David Boyle.

Demboski has publicly referred to military values and family as part of her campaign and approach to policy.

Think about being sixteen, in high school, and standing in front of a group of friends and strangers telling a story. Your story. That’s what a new Anchorage organization called Story Works Alaska is teaching local students to do while helping them build community at the same time.

20 years ago, when Regan Brooks was in high school, a teacher gave them each an assignment — tell a story about yourself. Brooks can’t recall what she wrote about. What she really remembers is a story a classmate told.

“She shared a story in front of our whole class that,” Brooks pauses, thinking of the best explanation. “Abolished all my assumptions about her. And really made me realize there’s this person there haven’t ever bothered to get to know that I wanted to get to know more.”

Brooks says storytelling helps people see each other differently and through that new level of understanding, builds community.

So that’s the task she and a group of teachers and volunteers have given more than 700 students in Anchorage — tell your story. Brooks launched the project in February of 2014 and since then has visited five of the city’s high schools. She recently led a workshop at Service High in Anchorage.

Hauling chairs, Brooks moves out into the hallway with a group of students and prepares to listen to their stories and give them feedback. But first, some quick advice:

“You want to try to begin your story without the word ‘so’ and end it without saying ‘And yeah…’”

With that, 11th grader Kevin Goodman launches into a tale about the first time he went hunting with his father.

“It all started on a muggy morning when we drove seven hours up to Paxson, which is about 70 miles from Glennallen,” Goodman starts as he incessantly clicks on his pen.

He tells about camping in the rain, wading through cold streams with jagged rocks, and trying in vain to find a moose.

“And you know that scene in ‘Lord of the Rings’ where everybody has to duck because of all the birds flying over their heads?” he asks the listeners. “Well, it was kind of like that except we had a gun and we shot them.”

Goodman says he chose to share that story because it sparked his imagination and was an important turning point in his life.

“It was my first big, week-long hunting trip. It was kind of a coming of age, I guess, for me. Because my dad’s pretty strict on what your capabilities have to be on hunting.”

And then the group of listening students and story coaches start giving feedback: this detail is great, you didn’t stutter at all, but maybe you should change some things…

“How can you tell the story in a way so that when you get to the ending we all go, ‘Oh, that’s right! They didn’t get the moose but sounds like they still had a great time!” asks story teller Jack Dalton. “Or, ‘They didn’t get the moose, but I can only imagine all those ptarmigan!’”

English teacher Lisa Wiley says that’s part of the reason she wanted to get her students involved with Story Works — so they could get feedback from other people.

“I can never get outside perspective on their work within my classroom. It’s always me as the audience,” she says. “So this raises the level, the audience is now other people. Students respond differently to that. They are trying harder because there are strangers looking at their work.”

The project is also teaching them reading, writing, and public speaking, all required topics in an English class.

Two weeks after the story coaching workshop the students preformed for each other, some enthusiastically, some with a bit of hesitation. But Wiley’s already ramping up for next year, ready to have her students tell stories all over again.

Three Anchorage men are under arrest and charged with cruelty to animals, wanton waste and tampering with evidence in a bizarre moose killing in a city park. 25 year old Johnathon Candelario, 28 year old James Galloway and Nick Johnston, 33, were seen by witnesses attacking a young moose with a knife Tuesday evening. Witnesses called police, but when APD officers arrived, the animal was dead.

APD spokeswoman Anita Shell says the officers located the suspects near the scene. They were wearing bloody clothes and matched witness descriptions. Shell said the witnesses who called police say the men were jumping on the animal and stabbing it with a large knife.

“I have never seen anything like this in my time at the police department. It is very unusual for somebody to attack a large animal such as a moose like they did.” Shell said.

Witnesses told police that the moose was not aggressive, nor did it provoke the attack.

The incident occurred about 7:20 p.m. Tuesday on a public bike path south of Russian Jack Springs Park, in East Anchorage.

The three men are being held in the Anchorage Correctional Complex. The moose meat has been salvaged by a local charity.

More than 4,000 people in Nepal have died as a result of Saturday’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake. Much of the capital Katmandu and the surrounding villages were destroyed. Some members of Anchorage’s 80-member Nepalese community were visiting at the time. Jeet Tamang’s wife and nephew were among them. He says it took 10 hours to get through to them because phone services were down. His family members, including his siblings who still live there, all survived, but their homes were severely damaged.

“They were physically okay, but they were camping out near by the house in the open area,” Tamang says of his wife and nephew. “Cooking outside and sleeping out there. Which the whole city is going through that.”

Tamang says his family members are nervous to be there, and they’re not sure if they’ll be able to come home this week as planned.

It’s “kind of scary to walk around. Nobody knows if it’s going to fall down or not. Anything is possible. The worst thing is the aftershocks are really making more damages and scaring people around.”

He says so far, no one in Anchorage has reported lost family members. The community is collecting money for the non-profit Helping Hand for Nepal, which runs small-scale aid projects in the country.