Juneau Schools

Juneau schools will be closed Tuesday after more than 20 inches of snow fell over the holiday weekend.

RALLY and after-school activities are also canceled, and there will be no remote learning.

A school board meeting on the district’s budget will be held by Zoom only, at 6 p.m.

Most city offices and facilities, including City Hall, will open at 10 a.m. Tuesday. Dimond Park Aquatic Center will open at 11 a.m., and Treadwell Arena will open at 12:15 p.m.

The Parks and Recreation Department’s youth basketball practice is canceled.

Capital Transit buses are running on winter routes until 12 a.m. Wednesday morning. The city expects to return to normal service on Wednesday.

This story has been updated to reflect Wednesday’s update from Capital Transit.

George Houston spent a lot of time in the gymnasium at Yadaa.at Kalé Juneau-Douglas High School over the course of his life – first as a student in the 60s, then as a gym teacher and eventually for 30 years as a basketball coach.

He died in October. In December, the gym was named after him. At a memorial on Monday, former players and friends shared his legacy. 

Groups of teenagers sat with their teammates in the bleachers. Adults sat in folding chairs on the court. Everyone wore the school colors – black and red. 

One by one, people who loved George Houston told stories about him. Like former Olympian and NBA player, Carlos Boozer Jr.

“Outside of my family, Coach was the first person that believed in me,” Boozer told the crowd. “I had a crazy obsession with basketball. I met somebody who had a crazy obsession with basketball.”

Boozer said Houston would leave him phone messages during his NBA games.

“He’d be like, ‘Great game, 25 points, and 10 rebounds. But that really wasn’t Crimson Bear defense,’” he said.

Houston’s longtime friend, Jeff Kemp, said he was picturing Houston in his usual spots in the gym. 

“He would be embarrassed and sheepish with the amount of people that were here tonight honoring him and celebrating his life,” he said. “And I can see him now, peering right outside that old office door right there, thinking, ‘How the hell can I get out of here?’”

Houston played basketball at JDHS as a student. In 30 years of coaching, he led teams to two state championships. Though he retired in 2006, he was still on the court most days helping out up until last summer.

Former Juneau schools superintendent Bridget Wiess grew up with Houston and witnessed his skill as a coach. 

“George could have gone a lot of places to coach, at a lot of higher levels. But he was so committed to Juneau, and the kids of Juneau,” she said. “Arenʼt we the lucky ones?”

Weiss said Houston inspired her to be the kind of leader he was.

“Think about George, what he was to you, and be that for somebody around you,” she said.

Houstonʼs niece Jeannie Wolfe organized the memorial. She’s a teacher now, too.

“George was family, right? First and foremost. And then as I heard more and more stories, I learned that he was more of a legend,” Wolfe said.

The service ended with a student band — the Radio Flyers — playing Neil Young’s Harvest Moon. It was Houston’s favorite song.

Juneau School District leaders are bracing for tough decisions as they face a projected $9.5 million budget deficit.

“The truth is that this district must make both immediate and long-term financial changes,” Superintendent Frank Hauser told the school board on Wednesday.

After Administrative Services Director Cassee Olin resigned last month, the district temporarily hired Lisa Pearce to manage the budget. Pearce found that this year’s budget overestimated revenues by $5 million and underestimated expenses by about $2 million.

The incorrect estimates were partly due to accounting errors, Pearce said. Some numbers were entered incorrectly in the district’s accounting software. Others were left out — for example, the budget didn’t include the superintendent’s salary or benefits.

Board member David Noon, who was elected to the board in October, said he was “incandescent with rage.” He said the budgeting errors made it harder to advocate for more state funding, which educators across the state say hasn’t kept up with inflation.

“These are appalling errors,” he said. “This makes our advocacy position with the state a lot more difficult.”

Pearce said she didn’t find signs of intentional mismanagement of funds. Instead, she said the district’s revenue estimates were off, which allowed them to avoid budget cuts.

“You didn’t have Hawaii trips and you didn’t have $50,000 bonuses,” she said. “You were being squashed from a revenue side, and the bottom side on the expenditures was not stopping. It was kind of a freight train that was coming from both directions.”

The district’s funding from the state is based on enrollment. Each year, the school board agrees on an enrollment estimate when building the budget. This year’s budget was based on a mid-level projection, which ended up being an overestimate. And that meant the district overestimated this year’s revenue. 

“The board has been, I guess, optimistic — not wildly optimistic — but certainly not willing to acknowledge the downward trend in our student population,” board President Deedie Sorensen said. “And I think part of that is that, just like everyone else in town, we don’t want to acknowledge that Juneau is shrinking.”

Pearce told the board she didn’t think it was possible to resolve the $9.5 million deficit in one year. The City and Borough of Juneau already contributes as much as it can to the district’s operating fund.

Hauser called the district’s budget crisis “uncharted territory” for Juneau. He mentioned the Copper River School District, which filed for bankruptcy in 1986 and had to reduce teacher salaries.

The board asked Hauser to come up with a list of all possible budget cuts. Their next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 16.

The Juneau School District is facing a $9.5 million deficit in its operating fund as it begins work on next year’s budget, City Manager Katie Koester told the Assembly on Monday night. District leaders will have to address the deficit by the end of June.

The city consistently contributes as much money as it can to the school district’s operating fund. But at an Assembly meeting Monday night, Mayor Beth Weldon said that their options for helping with the deficit are limited.

“We have to look as an Assembly at how we can help them,” Weldon said. “But unfortunately, because we fund to the cap, our hands are pretty well tied. If you have creative ideas, I’m sure they want to hear it.” 

Nearly $2 million of the deficit carried over from the last fiscal year, and $7.5 million comes from the current year.

The district has temporarily hired Lisa Pearce, a school finance consultant who previously worked as the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District’s chief financial officer, for budget development. She’s taken over for Cassee Olin, the district’s director of administrative services who resigned last month. 

According to a report the district provided to city leaders on Friday, staff salaries and health benefits were “significantly under budgeted” this year. That makes up more than $5 million of this year’s deficit.

Employer contributions to staff retirement plans were also under budgeted, according to the report. Lower-than-expected enrollment has also contributed to the deficit because state funding is based on the number of students in a district.

In an interview after the meeting, Koester said the Assembly could consider moving some expenses from the district’s budget to the city’s.

“That doesn’t mean that the Assembly will, and that doesn’t mean that the school district will want to have those conversations, but I think that’s the kind of creative thinking the mayor was talking about,” Koester said.

Questions about state funding will also loom over this year’s budget process. Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposed state budget does not include a permanent increase to per-student funding, nor does it extend the one-time education funding passed last year.

District leaders will discuss the updated budget on Tuesday night. The school board’s work session begins at 4:30 p.m. on Zoom, and the regular meeting starts at 6 p.m. at the Juneau-Douglas Yadaa.at Kalé High School library and on Zoom.

KTOO’s Clarise Larson contributed reporting.

The Juneau School District’s director of administrative services, who oversees the district’s budget, has resigned. On Friday, the school board authorized spending up to $50,000 on contract work for the district’s upcoming budget cycle.

Cassee Olin had held the role since 2021. Before that, she worked as the Sitka School District’s business manager. Her resignation was effective Dec. 1, according to a school district report. Olin declined to comment on her decision to resign.

Last month, an audit of the district showed it ended the previous fiscal year with an almost $2 million deficit in its operating fund. Lower-than-expected enrollment has grown that deficit to nearly $3 million. 

Budget revisions to address that deficit could include hiring freezes for certain positions, Superintendent Frank Hauser said Friday.

The district is now seeking a contractor to help revise this year’s budget and develop next year’s. Will Muldoon, who chairs the school board’s finance committee, estimates that the district will be facing a $7 million shortfall as COVID relief and one-time state funding ends. 

The district is also seeking a new administrative services director. Hauser told the board that the new hire would work with the contractor on next year’s budget.

“The plan is that they’ll be working hand in hand on the budget development process, kind of onboarding the new director of administrative services,” he said. “The contractor will have a more solid understanding of our budget, having worked with it probably a month to two months more.”

Hauser said other district directors and the chief of staff will take on the role’s other duties in the meantime.

Students were evacuated from Harborview Elementary School Friday after the school received a bomb threat via phone call. 

The threat came in at just before noon, according to an update sent on the Juneau School District app. Juneau Police Department spokesperson Lt. Krag Campbell said Friday afternoon that the FBI assisted in the investigation and confirmed that the phone call was sent from a number connected to threats made to different schools across the state in recent months.

The update said students were briefly evacuated to the playground while police cleared the school. Classes were back to normal as of 1 p.m. A brief stay-put order was also put in place at the Juneau-Douglas Yadaa.at Kalé High School, but has since ended.

District Superintendent Frank Hauser said in an interview Friday that the safety of students is the district’s top priority. 

“I just want to really appreciate the principal and the staff for acting so quickly and the Juneau Police Department for responding so quickly,” he said. “I’m saddened to think that there are individuals on the internet and out there that are propagating these messages and causing such disruptions in our schools.”

Campbell said the investigation is ongoing. 

“We take all these threats seriously and try to respond as soon as possible to determine if there is anything unsafe, or there’s any credibility to the threats,” he said. “The ultimate goal is to keep our residents and community members and our children safe.”

Mass threats to schools have been on the rise across the country. In September, several schools across the state received threats via email. A Peruvian man was later arrested for sending more than 150 bomb threats to U.S. schools, including in Alaska.

This story has been updated with additional information from the Juneau Police Department.