Juneau Schools

Update, Thursday 7 p.m.:

All Juneau schools are now closed Friday due to the storm.

The Juneau School District notified parents and staff of the closure Thursday night and said that no remote instruction will take place Friday.

Update, Thursday 5 p.m.:

As of Thursday afternoon, Juneau School District Chief of Staff Kristen Bartlett said the district hasn’t received information that more schools need to be closed for snow removal. She said the city’s engineering team is monitoring schools daily, and that decisions are made on a day-to-day basis.

“It’s a balancing act of making sure that we’re continuing to educate kids and making sure that everyone can be safe while that’s happening,” Bartlett said. 

Students successfully evacuated to Thunder Mountain Middle School where parents were able to pick them up Thursday afternoon. They have mixed feelings on how the district has handled the winter storm.

Michael Kohan is a parent of a preschooler at Mendenhall River Community School. She said she appreciates the way the district has handled its response to the storm.

“I’m glad that the school took the precautions that they did, to act out of an abundance of caution and move the kids to TM today and cancel school tomorrow to get snow removal taken care of,” she said.

Sarah Overton has multiple children at the school. She said she wishes the schools weren’t open at all this week.

“I’m glad that I was able to come get them and nothing happened, but I feel like they shouldn’t have had school in session at all if there was any sort of concern, and if they hadn’t shoveled the roof,” she said. 

The district expects snow removal at Sít’ Eetí Shaanáx — Glacier Valley Elementary to wrap up Friday as it begins work at Mendenhall River Community School.

Juneau School District Facilities Director Kristy Germain says the school will offer remote learning while closed. 

“That process of clearing the roof will continue through the weekend, is the plan,” Germain said. “And then our public announcement to families also includes that we will be communicating if it needs to continue with remote learning on Monday.”

Original story:

Students and staff at Mendenhall River Community School were evacuated from the elementary school Thursday morning due to growing concern about the snow load on the gym roof. 

In a news release, the Juneau School District said everyone inside the school is being relocated to Thunder Mountain Middle School “out of an abundance of caution” and that “all students and staff are safe.”

The district is instructing families to pick up students after 1 p.m. from the middle school. Parents and guardians should go to the Thunder Mountain gym entrance facing the Dimond Park Aquatics Center for pick up and must show ID. Any Mendenhall River students not picked up by 2:30 p.m. will be sent home on a school bus. 

Crews will start clearing snow from the roof of Mendenhall River school Friday. While the building is closed, the school will offer remote learning.

“Crews will be working through the weekend clearing MRCS. We are hopeful that MRCS will open on Monday, but remote learning may need to be extended into next week if shoveling is not complete,” the district said in the release. 

This comes after back-to-back snowstorms dumped more than four feet of snow on Juneau, leading to the city and tribal governments issuing a joint disaster declaration Tuesday. The district says it will continue to monitor all schools as an atmospheric river is forecast to hit Southeast Alaska late Thursday night. 

The district closed Sít’ Eetí Shaanáx — Glacier Valley Elementary Wednesday to clear snow off its roof and planned to keep it closed the rest of the week. This followed district-wide closures Monday and Tuesday. 

This story has been updated. 

The Juneau School District plans to close at least two schools to remove snow on the buildings’ roofs following recent record-breaking snowstorms. 

The district closed Sít’ Eetí Shaanáx – Glacier Valley Elementary first and reopened the rest of its schools Wednesday, following district-wide closures Monday and Tuesday.

During a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Juneau Assistant City Manager Robert Barr said a team of engineers determined the elementary school needs to be shoveled first. 

“We started there due to pre-existing damage that we knew about at that facility that made us more concerned for them,” he said.

Barr said the city contracted with a 25-person, out-of-state team to work on the school.

As of Wednesday, the district says no school is above its load capacity based on measurements taken. Sít’ Eetí Shaanáx – Glacier Valley will remain closed for the rest of this week.

Mendenhall River Community School is next in line for shoveling. 

Though most schools are open, Superintendent Frank Hauser said students will be excused if they can’t attend school due to unsafe weather conditions.

“Even when schools are open, you know the conditions in your immediate neighborhood and are the best judge of whether or not to send your child to school,” he said.

With parking limited at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé, the district encourages high school students to take the school bus or public transit to school. Students also have the option to park at Thunder Mountain Middle School and take a school bus in. 

School buses will be running snow routes all week, the district says, and will not be going to trailer parks due to conditions. 

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, or DEED, found that the Juneau School District did not provide occupational therapy services to some students that were supposed to receive them last school year.

According to a report from the department, the district lost an occupational therapist last year and did not follow the correct procedure to ensure students would continue to receive services. Some students with an individualized education program, or IEP, require a certain amount of occupational therapy during the school year.

Don Enoch is DEED’s special education administrator. He said when a school loses staff that provide a specific special education service, a replacement should be found as quickly as possible and a compensatory education plan must be offered to students in the meantime. 

“The IEP guarantees the parents will receive those services for their students, and when that’s not done, the district’s obligated to make that right,” he said.

The report states that the district must offer services to make up for lost time. JSD also has to send a spreadsheet to DEED that lists which students qualify for services, and whether families decided to go through with the services.

The initial complaint was filed in June, and DEED issued the final report in November. In an email to KTOO, Juneau School District Student Services Director Jason DeCamillis said the district was already addressing the issue before the complaint was filed, and had resolved the issue before November.

He said fewer than 30 students were affected. Before the state’s report was completed, DeCamillis said the district hired new staff, provided make-up services or created a plan to provide services in the current school year.

“We do take these gaps very seriously and proactively address known issues as soon as possible, with as much communication as possible,” he wrote. 

In addition to a systemic complaint made about occupational therapy, an individual complaint was also filed to the state this year related to occupational therapy services. An investigation concluded that specific student is owed 330 minutes of compensatory occupational therapy services.

Enoch said many parents don’t realize the state is a resource to help students with IEPs. In addition to investigating complaints, DEED can also hold due process hearings and mediate meetings between parents and the school district about IEPs. 

He said DEED can also help explain an IEP to parents. He wants more parents to reach out to DEED if they are having issues.

“We don’t get very many calls from parents at all, and it’s kind of concerning sometimes, because we hear things that are going on out in the communities, and we have to go out and investigate,” Enoch said. “But one phone call from a parent could help clue us into problems that a district is having.”

The district has until the end of next year to complete all compensatory services as outlined by DEED. Parents with concerns about their children’s special education services can call DEED’s special education office at 907-465-8693.

Clarification: This story has been updated to better reflect the Juneau School District’s response timeline. 

The Juneau School District Board of Education took another step toward finding a new superintendent. 

At a special board meeting Monday, the board approved a contract with a national search firm to find its next leader in a 5 to 1 vote, with board member Melissa Cullum absent.

The search comes after Superintendent Frank Hauser announced his resignation in September.

The board approved a $29,000 contract with search firm McPherson & Jacobson LLC. It previously worked with the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District and Valdez City School District to hire superintendents, according to the firm’s website.

Board member Amber Frommherz was the only no vote. She says she proposed having an interim superintendent in place following Hauser’s resignation, which the board decided not to do. 

“I’m struggling with this vote right now and still, in the moment, still struggling in terms of the vote,” she said. “It’s not the lack of trust in the committee, but in the general route.”

During its last search, the board contracted with Ray & Associates and hired Hauser in 2023. 

Hauser was hired with a yearly salary of $185,000. He currently makes $197,000.

The district will finalize the contract with the firm this week. Hauser’s last day as superintendent will be June 30. 

Editor’s note: Amber Frommherz serves on KTOO’s Board of Directors.

Juneau schools will be closed Monday due to weather conditions. A winter storm warning is currently in effect for the Juneau area.

After-school activities and events are also canceled. A special school board meeting scheduled at noon will take place on Zoom.

City and Borough of Juneau facilities will open at 1 p.m. Monday, according to the city. Capital Transit buses are running on winter routes.

Listen here:

This week, Thunder Mountain Middle School joined the growing number of schools composting food waste. Before rolling out the program, students in an environmental club led their peers through sorting out their trash and seeing how much of it can avoid the landfill.

Seventh grader Thalea Headings stuck her arm deep into a trash can, and seemed pretty grossed out by what she found. Dressed in aprons and blue plastic gloves, her science class sorts through the remains of lunch at Thunder Mountain Middle School.

They dug through trash cans filled with yogurt, half eaten sandwiches, loose vegetables and seemingly endless cartons of chocolate milk. They sort the trash into two separate buckets: one for food waste and one for everything else. At the end of the class, they weighed and kept a record of the different types of waste.

Thalea found some interesting items, to the disgust of her classmates. And sometimes it was hard to tell what’s what. She said sorting through trash hasn’t been as gross as she thought it would be.

“There’s more plastic than actual food,” Thalea said. “I was thinking there’s gonna be more food because when I’ve seen the trash cans before, there’s a lot of ranch and gross stuff in it.”

What these students are doing is called a waste audit. All the food waste they sorted out will be composted. This effort is being led by a newly formed club at the middle school called Ocean Guardians. It’s part of a program from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that encourages schools to protect the ocean.

Seventh grader Maebell Bos helped bring the club to Thunder Mountain. She was part of the Ocean Guardian club at her former elementary school, Sayéik: Gastineau Community School, and didn’t want to give it up.

“When we went to middle school, we kind of thought to just bring it over, and we are excited that we can do that,” she said.

Maebell worked with her friends in the club to create presentations to all of the middle school science classes about what a waste audit is and what things are compostable before actually doing the audits.

Cheyenne Cuellar teaches science and math at the middle school and supervises the club. She worked with Monica Haygood, the Ocean Guardians teacher at Sayéik, to learn what the process was and applied for grant funding to bring composting to the middle school.

Though she’s in charge, she said it’s the club members that have done the bulk of the work for the waste audits. 

“It’s not like I’m there helping to make sure this happened,” she said. “The Ocean Guardian kids are really just taking the lead of teaching these, for each science class, two to three class periods, of being the leaders within that class.”

The students are auditing their trash while Juneau is having its own reckoning with waste.  Juneau’s landfill will likely fill up in the next decade. Composting is a way to keep food waste out of there. Maebell, the club member, said it was challenging to get some students to get on board with the waste audit and composting.

“Some people are either unaware of, like, the problems that are going on, like, on how fast our landfill is filling up and they aren’t aware. And then other people, they just don’t care for it as much,” she said. “We’re trying to make it something positive and something that we can do to help our environment.”

Still, some students simply didn’t want to go through trash. But, Aria Gribbin, another club member, said once the audit happened, those students realized it’s not that bad. 

“It’s been a bit hectic trying to get all the classes to agree to it and not have a bunch of kids be like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be sick tomorrow,’ so they don’t have to do it,” Aria said. “It’s been hectic trying to get that, but once they did it, I think they realized it’s a bit gross, but it’s also kind of fun.”

By the end of all the audits, students sorted out 319.88 pounds of food waste. And instead of going to the landfill, it was composted. Thunder Mountain joins four other schools in the district all composting their food waste.