Juneau Schools

The Juneau School District is facing a $9.7 million deficit for the next fiscal year, caused by a likely drop in enrollment, an end to one-time state funding and increases in staff salaries and other costs. That’s on top of the deficit in the current year’s budget.

District leaders are considering closing schools to balance the budget, which would allow them to lay off duplicate staff, like principals, nurses and librarians. But those cuts alone would not be enough to balance the budget.

“Anything that is not realized in structural savings is coming straight from the very finite levers we have, which is staff,” Superintendent Frank Hauser said at a school board work session on Saturday.

Lyle Melkerson, the district’s human resources director, estimated how many other layoffs it would take to close the budget gap depending on how many schools they close.

Filling the budget gap after combining just the middle schools would require laying off 60 to 100 people, depending on their positions. But combining middle schools, combining high schools and closing an elementary school could cut the number of layoffs needed in half.

The district has 309 teachers. Melkerson said 30 to 50 typically leave the district each year.

“I believe we can hit those marks with natural attrition by the end of the year, or close to it,” he said.

District leaders said combining the high schools would also help them staff elective classes. Board president Deedie Sorensen said students already have limited course offerings, which can make it hard to meet graduation requirements. 

“I don’t think we have two comprehensive high schools right now. I think we have two high schools that are grossly understaffed,” Sorensen said. “We are relying on a whole range of online courses to provide electives to students who should be able to get those electives in an in person class.”

Andy Bullick teaches construction and welding at Yadaa.at Kalé Juneau-Douglas High School. He said it’s important for kids to have access to electives like his.

“It’s a fun outlet for them. It allows them to discover things they like to do,” he said. “A lot of kids that have gone through these classes we’ve offered, it’s sparked an interest in them and they have really good jobs.”

At a school board meeting last week, Juneau Education Association president Chris Heidemann said layoffs would lower the quality of education in the district and push more young people out of Juneau.

“Layoffs will continually and repeatedly damage this community because the people that are laid off, according to our collective bargaining agreements, are the youngest, early career teachers who will leave this town,” he told the board. “This town will continue to get older, we will have fewer kids to educate and our schools will continue to suffer.”

The board asked district staff to come up with a plan that would keep both high school buildings in use, and from there, use as few buildings as possible. One example they discussed was putting 10th through 12th graders at Thunder Mountain High School and seventh, eighth and ninth graders, along with students from the optional programs, at Yadaa.at Kalé Juneau-Douglas.

The board’s next meeting is on Thursday, Feb. 22.

The Juneau Tlingit and Haida Community Council has donated $150,000 to the Juneau School District. The funding will support school activities, a snack program and Indian Studies programs.

Rhonda Butler is the president of the community council, an elected group that represents Juneau’s Tlingit and Haida citizens. The council’s weekly bingo games fund their annual donation program, and Butler said they’ve donated to the school district in the past.

“This year it was a little bit higher, especially when we were getting notice from different tribal members that the need for food was on a rise,” she said.

The council donated $55,000 to help pay for snacks at the district’s schools.

They also donated $45,000 to support student activities, including the high school basketball teams, Thunder Mountain’s wrestling team, Yadaa.at Kalé Juneau-Douglas High School’s cheer team, the district’s Native Youth Olympics programs and the Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy program’s robotics team.

The council also donated $50,000 for the district’s Indian Studies programs, which help address academic and cultural needs of Alaska Native students.

Butler said partnerships like this will be key to supporting all of Juneau’s students through the district’s budget crisis. The district is facing an $8 million deficit for the current school year and is considering closing schools.

“I think with collaboration and partnership a lot of these deficits or financial cuts might be lesser in the future,” she said.

The Juneau School Board accepted the donation at its meeting Tuesday night.

The Juneau School District is facing a nearly $8 million budget deficit for the current school year. District leaders are considering closing or reorganizing schools and cutting staff to balance the budget. 

At community input sessions over the past week, teachers, parents and students shared their concerns about combining high schools and splitting elementary levels.

One option district leaders have proposed is closing Thunder Mountain High School and sending its students to Yadaa.at Kalé Juneau-Douglas. According to the district, Juneau-Douglas has 545 students, putting it at 50% capacity. Thunder Mountain has 569 students, which is 76% of its capacity. Thunder Mountain opened in 2008 under the assumption that Juneau’s population would continue to grow. 

Some coaches and students at the input sessions worried about limiting the amount of space on high school sports teams. Josiah Loseby, Thunder Mountain’s head swim and dive coach, said sports help many kids keep their grades up.

“Sports across the board and activities across the board keep students engaged, keep students coming to school, and encourage them to do well,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a drastic reduction in the graduation rate, a drastic reduction in student performance overall.”

Thunder Mountain senior Jade Hicks attended Tuesday’s input session. She said parking is a big concern for students who drive — Juneau-Douglas doesn’t have Thunder Mountain’s large parking lot. Plus, she said, students like having high school options.

“There’s a reason people choose their own respective schools,” Hicks said. “I chose Thunder Mountain because I wanted to learn Russian.”

School board member Emil Mackey said if they don’t close a high school, the district might have to offer fewer electives instead.

“Consolidating the schools, I believe, will actually preserve more student activities and more electives, because you’ll have more people under a common roof to actually provide those services,” he said.

Another proposal is to change how elementary grades are split. Right now, Juneau’s elementary schools house kindergarten through fifth grade. The district is considering dividing elementary buildings into kindergarten through third grade schools and fourth through sixth grade schools.

In an interview, Superintendent Frank Hauser said savings would come from distributing students more evenly among classrooms according to the pupil-teacher ratio, which the district uses to allocate teachers among grade levels.

“If there’s only three schools that have second graders, versus six schools, you have more opportunity to get that ideal number across more teachers in those three schools,” Hauser said.

But splitting up the elementary grades worried many teachers, including Janarose Odenheimer, a special education teacher at Sayéik: Gastineau Community School.

“The people who are going to get hurt the worst are the lower socioeconomic students and families within our district,” Odenheimer said. “Absenteeism will go up, because how are my sixth grader and fifth grader going to bring my kindergartener and first grader to school?”

Rosemary Slotnik, a behavioral paraeducator at Sayéik: Gastineau Community School, told district leaders on Thursday that having siblings at the same school helps build relationships with families.

“In a neighborhood school, the school knows and supports the whole family,” she said. “If a second grader is struggling, we can check in with the fourth grade teacher of an older sibling and see if they’re seeing what we see. We know which family needs extra support.”

Some savings from school closures would come from eliminating duplicate staff positions, like principals, nurses, librarians and office staff. The district estimates it would save $668,000 by closing an elementary school, $913,000 by closing a middle school and $1.3 million by closing a high school from salaries alone.

Hauser said the district would also save on utilities, custodial and maintenance costs. Exact savings would vary depending on the school. 

“Thunder Mountain is a more modern building that has more energy saving features, but it’s a smaller footprint, so it’s going to have less utilities cost,” he said. “JD is going to be able to have more capacity for students but has a different cost for property insurance.”

Hauser said enrollment projections are a key piece to estimating the full savings for the different options, since school size affects state funding. The district is still waiting on demographic projections for next year.

In the meantime, the district is asking the Juneau Assembly to cover nearly $4 million in maintenance, utilities and property insurance costs.

The Assembly Finance Committee will discuss the request at a meeting Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. The meeting will be open to the public at City Hall and on Zoom.

Last week, the Juneau School District outlined its budget crisis at a community meeting in the Yadaa.at Kalé Juneau-Douglas High School auditorium.

Many parents asked how the district got here – how accounting errors by the district’s school finance manager, who resigned last month, could have created most of the deficit.

But others, like parent Kate Hudson, wanted to know what’s next. 

“Are schools going to close?” she asked. “Are teachers going to be sacked? Are teachers going to be told they need to take retirement? What are you actually saying?”

School Board members said all of those options were on the table.

“The thing we need from the public is an awareness and an acceptance that nobody is coming out untouched,” member Emil Mackey said. “Nobody.”

During a board retreat on Saturday, Superintendent Frank Hauser brought the board three examples of what school closures might look like.

The first model involves moving sixth grade to elementary schools and consolidating seventh and eighth grade at one campus. That would let the district close one middle school.

“All the elementary schools in the neighborhood become K through 6 schools,” Hauser said. “Sixth grades would no longer go to the middle schools. It would consolidate Floyd Dryden and D’zantiki Heeni to one school with grades 7 and 8.”

The second model goes a step further and splits elementary grades into kindergarten through third grade schools and grades 4 through 6 schools. District staff said that could allow them to consolidate the services it provides for younger and older elementary students.

The third model would close two schools through a combination of splitting grades and consolidating. Elementary grades would be split into K through third grade schools and grades 4 through 6 schools. Thunder Mountain High School would become a junior high, with grades 7 through 9. Grades 10 through 12 would go to Yadaa.at Kalé Juneau-Douglas High School.

But board member Will Muldoon said he was hesitant to split up high school grades.

“No other district does that, and I don’t know how that impacts activities, athletics,” he said. “We hear that those are the reasons that kids come to school.”

All three models would save money by eliminating staff positions like principals, office staff and nurses. Increasing class sizes could lead to further staff cuts.

Saturday’s meeting included some good news: further analysis puts the district’s estimated deficit at $8.5 million instead of $9.5 million. Finance contractor Lisa Pearce said she and district staff found $1 million in savings related to health insurance.

But addressing the deficit will still require other cost saving measures.

District leaders discussed splitting custodial, maintenance and utilities costs with the City and Borough of Juneau. District and city leaders have also discussed moving programs like Community Schools over to the city. After Sitka’s Community Schools ended in 2019 amid budget cuts, the City and Borough of Sitka revived it as a city program.

The board also asked the superintendent to look into four-day school weeks, something the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District is also considering.

The district has created a reorganization committee made up of teachers, community members and school board members to provide input on potential school consolidations. The board’s next budget work session is Tuesday at 5:30 p.m.

Juneau residents will soon see improvements to the lighting and visibility near Mendenhall River Community School. That comes after a woman and two young children were hit by a truck on Back Loop Road last month. 

Officials with the state, city and school district met Thursday to discuss the incident. Juneau School Board Vice President Emil Mackey said that improving safety near the school is not just a district problem. 

“This is also a community problem because we have playgrounds that are used year-round, whether schools are in or out of session — it’s essentially a park,” he said.  

Greg Lockwood, with the state’s Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, said some short-term fixes are already underway, like reflective flagging on signs and high-performance LED lights at the school’s entrance. 

The lights should get shipped to Juneau next week. District Superintendent Frank Hauser said installing them will be a priority for the district. 

“As soon as they come in, we will get the team to get them installed as quickly as possible so they’re in place,” he said. 

Denise Koch, the city’s director of Engineering and Public Works, said another short-term measure is the city’s plan to move its Capital Transit bus stop across the street from the school’s entrance, to a spot that sees less traffic. She says that change is planned for early February. 

School Board President Deedie Sorensen, who taught at the school for over two decades, said she thinks it’s a miracle that only now has a serious accident happened there. 

“Over the years, the district has done everything they could to discourage people in that neighborhood from walking to school,” she said. “While we can offer all sorts of inducements to people, that does not necessarily change their behavior.”

Sorensen said she hopes the DOT can find ways to slow down drivers in the area.

Lockwood said the DOT is also planning a highway safety improvement project in the area. He says one of the first steps will be a pedestrian crossing study. That will help show how many people are crossing in the area, and what measures might protect them.

At a Juneau school board meeting Tuesday night, Superintendent Frank Hauser said the district needs to cut about 10% of its budget to address its $9.5 million deficit.

“With the magnitude of this problem and these numbers, I don’t believe it’s possible any longer for the district to make small, targeted cuts to address these huge numbers,” he said.

The size of the deficit — which was driven in part by accounting errors and shrinking enrollment — only came to light this month. On Tuesday, Hauser presented a list of immediate changes the district can make to start chipping away at it. 

His list included a hiring freeze, limiting travel and reducing summer school offerings to high school credit recovery, grant-funded classes and Alaska Reads Act requirements — a small slice of the deficit.

“These are a rough saving estimate of approximately $350,000,” Hauser said. “I actually have a goal of identifying $1 million in savings to enact before June 30.”

Hauser also outlined broader changes the board could consider, like increasing class sizes or consolidating schools. Hauser said that increasing the ratio of students to teachers by two in elementary grades and three in secondary grades could save more than $2 million. But he warned that closing schools could cost the district state funding because the state’s school funding formula benefits smaller schools.

From there, Hauser said, the district could start thinking about more targeted cuts. That could include eliminating certain positions, like librarians, counselors, nurses and office staff. 

The board could also consider cutting elective classes. Hauser said it could be complicated.

“The question of what is ‘not required’ has a lot of variables for the board to consider,” Hauser said. “Teachers might teach one section of a required class, like English 9, and one section of an elective class, maybe yearbook.”

Board member David Noon, a professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, said he understood how district employees might be feeling. Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposed major budget cuts for the university system in 2019.

“Those of us who worked there spent six months in a kind of continual panic over the future of our positions,” he said. “And I know there are a lot of people watching this meeting right now who are also concerned about the future of their employment with the district.”

Even with major cuts, the district won’t be able to close its budget gap in one year. Hauser said the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development is giving the district five years to address the deficit.

But the district will still be required to pass a balanced budget. Hauser said the district could consider taking out a loan. For example, he said, if the district made enough cuts to get the deficit to $5 million, it could take out a $5 million loan.

That would require approval from the state. And board finance committee chair Will Muldoon said the district would still need to address its underlying budget challenges.

“Even if the agreement with DEED does work out, it still does not change the size of the deficit. It just changes the size of the runway that we have to land this issue,” he said.

The school board and district leaders will continue discussing budget cuts in the coming weeks. The board’s finance committee will meet on Thursday at 12 p.m. on Zoom.