Juneau Schools

Deeper education cuts in the Senate’s version of the operating budget could mean making an additional $2.2 million in reductions to Juneau’s schools. It would likely hit teachers the most.

“The Senate funding is very alarming to us and if that should come to pass, that will be a very dramatic hit to our budget for next year. It will hurt us very much. It will hurt the high schools quite a bit,” says David Means, the Juneau School District’s finance head.

The school board approved last month an $86 million budget for next school year. It maintains current class sizes, cuts three instructional teaching coaches and decreases funding for activities.

Means says the district was reluctant to make cuts to the classroom.

“But if we have a 4.1 percent decrease to our state funding for next year, on top of the other decreases in state funding, we’ll have to look at our classroom and that means we could potentially be reducing about 18 teacher positions,” Means says.

Class sizes in grades six to 12 could increase by three more students. Kindergarten to fifth grade class sizes would increase by one.

The approved budget already has cuts to high school activities. Means says the Senate’s version of the budget may end funding to elementary and middle school activities.

The district will talk about budget issues tonight with the Juneau Assembly.

Means says the district will present the budget as approved by the school board, which means asking for a local contribution of almost $25 million, and another almost $800,000 for activities and other expenses. Means say he’ll also bring up the potential legislative reductions.

The Juneau School Board has approved an $86 million budget for next school year. It maintains current class sizes, cuts three instructional teaching coaches and decreases funding for activities.

Superintendent Mark Miller says the district isn’t putting any operating fund money toward high school activities travel, coaches, officials or supplies.

“The only way money is going to get into that pot of money, if you will, is through what the CBJ gives us and what we get from the people who participate in the activities and what we can get from the community and businesses as support,” Miller says.

The budget approved Tuesday night includes a number of placeholders, as the school district waits for the city and state budgets to be adopted.

It assumes the Juneau Assembly will give the maximum local contribution allowed by state law, almost $25 million.

It also assumes the Assembly will contribute $565,000 to high school activities. Another $200,000 will hopefully come from a student activities fee and community fundraising. The district is putting close to $500,000 toward a high school activities director, and elementary and middle school activities.

Director of Administrative Services David Means says another big assumption is state funding. For one thing, the district doesn’t know whether it will get the $1.1 million in one-time state funding that was in last year’s education bill. The approved budget assumes it’ll get half.

“The second thing is, is there’s uncertainty whether they’ll continue to fund the Alaska pre-K pilot program. We use that to support our Head Start classes in our schools here in Juneau,” Means says. “The third program that’s up in the air is their funding for the Construction Trades Academy.”

Means says the pre-K program and trades academy account for roughly $650,000 in the school budget.

If the district doesn’t get any of the $1.1 million in one-time state funding, Superintendent Miller says class sizes in grades three to 12 will get bigger. If there is one-time funding, he says the administration and school board can discuss restoring items like instructional coaches and activities.

The school district will submit the budget to the Assembly on March 31. The Assembly Finance Committee will start looking at it on April 8.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Shots are fired in your child’s school. A shooter is on the loose.

Police are on the way. But in the meantime, your child’s life is in the hands of school officials.

In the past, teachers and students have been taught to lock down or shelter-in-place during an active shooter event. But that’s changing nationwide, including Juneau, where teachers, students and public officials are learning a new tactic for dealing with such emergencies.

The new strategy is called ALICE That’s short for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate.

Tom Mattice is emergency programs manager for the City and Borough of Juneau. He says ALICE is not a sequential checklist of things to do in the event of an active threat. Instead, he says, it gives people options.

“If I heard gunshots at the other end of the building and I knew there was a safe way to evacuate, it would be the first thing I did,” Mattice says. “If I don’t know where the threat’s coming from, I may need to lockdown for a second.”

Mattice says the “Alert” aspect of ALICE is easy: Once you can safely call the police, do so.

“Inform” teaches people to gather information about the threat.

“Counter” may sound like a suggestion to directly engage, but he says that’s only if there’s no other choice. Mattice says it actually takes advantage of the brain’s natural fight or flight instincts.

“We tell people to lock the door and get on the floor in the corner and sit and wait, and that’s not a natural instinct,” he says. “Not only that, when the intruder comes into the room, we make easy targets of ourselves.”

Dozens of YouTube videos from the for-profit ALICE Training Institute show how to counter an active shooter, including throwing things. For students and teachers in classrooms that could mean books, staplers, scissors, anything that’s not nailed down.

Another method is called swarming, where several people rush toward and try to disarm a shooter.

Blain Hatch is a school resource officer and a 22-year veteran of the Juneau Police Department. He says the lockdown response to an active threat came from the jail system.

“Which made sense. You have a problem, you lock down, isolate your threat, deal with it and move on,” Hatch says. “So, in the ‘70s, the L.A. school district took that philosophy, because they had a lot of gang problems. But it was outside, there were shootings, there were fights. Well unfortunately, in our society in the last 25-ish years, that violence has now moved into large areas—churches, malls, schools.”

JPD hosted a statewide ALICE training for school officials and first responders in December. Recently, the department held its first drill with local students and teachers at Floyd Dryden Middle School. This week, more than 50 people attended a free public training.

Hatch says the concept works well in any large setting.

“We stress, we’re not training people to be ninjas. We’re not telling you to get involved,” he says. “But if you have somebody come into a room, why would you cower down and be a victim? Try and remove yourself from the room.”

Last May, Hatch was the first officer on scene at Thunder Mountain High School after reports of a gun on campus. After determining the firearm was no longer inside the building, Hatch and the school’s principal made the decision to put classrooms in lockdown. In that situation, he says, it was the appropriate response.

“But the teachers, man, they were barricading, they were getting stuff ready in case the person came in (or) there was another threat,” says Hatch. “But yeah, that was why, because the information all dictated that the threat was outside of the school.”

Some critics of ALICE training programs have argued there’s no hard evidence that it prevents people from dying in mass shootings or other emergencies. There’s also concern about whether younger students or students with developmental disabilities can fully grasp the concepts.

But the city and Juneau School District have adopted and begun to implement the strategy.

Juneau Douglas High School teacher Sara Hannan is a member of the Juneau Education Association executive committee. She says the teachers’ union does not have a position on ALICE, but as with all district policies JEA will push for adequate training.

Hannan says she personally doesn’t have a problem with it.

“I have always been out of compliance with what our training was, and I usually told my administration that I did not intend to sit quietly if we have an emergency going on, that I would self-evacuate,” Hannan says. “And I always, you know, I kind of jokingly say to the students, but then show them, there in the corner of the room I have one of those fire escape ladders, and that we would evacuate.”

Hatch and Mattice say they hope schools will hold regular ALICE practice drills. They say fire drills essentially ended deaths from school fires, and maybe the same thing can happen with school shootings.

*Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said the “C” in ALICE stands for “combat.” It actually stands for “counter.”

During a meeting of the Juneau Assembly and School Board Monday night, Superintendent Mark Miller asked the city to fully fund K-12 education next year.

“Let’s just be flat out honest. I believe what the board is asking, what we’re asking is to fund to the cap and see if we can get some of those activities funds back. I know that’s a hard ask. We’re all hurting,” Miller said.

Last year was the first time anyone can remember the Assembly not funding schools to the maximum extent possible, opting instead to shave $500,000 from its contribution. It also reduced funding for activities by almost $400,000.

Miller said trimming the budget over the years means putting more kids in each classroom. Compared to districts in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Kenai and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Juneau anticipates having some of the biggest average elementary and middle school classroom sizes with 28 to 29 students.

“When you have to decrease your funding, the only real way to make real significant difference is to take the same number of kids and have less teachers,” Miller said.

Assemblywoman Mary Becker wants to explore how feasible it is to give schools additional money from the city’s current budget.

“I think it would mean one more teacher, two more teachers. It would mean something that we could help, so I would like to ask that we consider that in the Finance Committee,” Becker said.

Finance Committee Chair Karen Crane questioned where the money would come from.

“If we do that out of funding this year, it’s that much less money we have to meet the deficit next year,” Crane said.

The city faces its own $7 million deficit for the coming fiscal year.

The school district’s budget is due to the Assembly at the end of the month. Administrative Services Director David Means said the district could be asking for a local contribution upwards of $25.5 million, or about $900,000 more than what the city gave last year.

Today is Elizabeth Peratrovich Day in Alaska, and Juneau school kids have spent recent weeks learning about the Native civil rights leader.

When the territorial legislature passed the Anti-Discrimination Act in 1945, it gave minorities in Alaska legal protections from racial bias two decades before the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Elizabeth Peratrovich’s testimony was crucial to overcoming comments like this from Allen Shattuck, a territorial senator from Juneau:

“Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?”

On a recent afternoon at Harborview Elementary School, fourth and fifth graders in the Tlingit Culture Language and Literacy program are rehearsing a shadow puppet play based on Peratrovich’s testimony. Half the kids are actors, reading lines from the territorial senate meeting where lawmakers approved the anti-discrimination bill. The rest are puppeteers, using paper cutouts to cast shadows on a backlit screen.

“I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights,” says Lyric Ashenfelter, who plays Peratrovich.

The 9-year-old says she was chosen for the part because she’s got a good, strong voice, and because she paid attention in class when they learned about Peratrovich’s testimony.

“She helped stop discrimination, and she was such a wide-hearted lady, and she was speaking for her rights,” Ashenfelter says.

Before the anti-discrimination act became law, segregation and racial prejudice were common in Juneau. Movie theaters, restaurants and shops refused entrance to Alaska Natives. Elizabeth Peratrovich and her husband, Roy, faced discrimination in finding housing because they were Tlingit.

It’s a different story today for Ashenfelter, who’s learning to speak Tlingit in school.

“Lyric yóo xat duwasáakw,” she says. “Which means I am Lyric, or my name is Lyric.”

Orion Dybdahl is Roy Peratrovich in the shadow puppet drama.

“Orion yóo xat duwasáakw,” he says. “I am Raven, yéil, Taakw.aaneidí, which is the sculpin clan.”

He adds that it was sad to learn about what Alaska Natives went through before the anti-discrimination act.

“It’s sad that they treated us differently, because where we were from or how we spoke,” Dybdahl says.

Ruby Hughes is the cultural specialist at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School, where students are eating cake to celebrate Elizabeth Peratrovich’s life. Hughes says a lot has changed since she grew up in Juneau.

“When I was a kid we didn’t have Tlingit language in the schools,” Hughes says. “Occasionally we’d have an elder come in and they would speak fluent Tlingit. But it wasn’t really taught on the level that it is right now. So I think that’s pretty neat.”

Hughes made a timeline of Tlingit history that’s hanging in the commons at Dzantik’i Heeni. It starts in 1648 – the year Russian explorers first came to Alaska – and includes several entries that show the mistreatment and prejudice Alaska Natives experienced throughout history. The last entry on the timeline shows Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott, who’s Tlingit.

Hughes says Elizabeth Peratrovich helped make that possible.

Only one person from the public signed up to comment during the Juneau School District’s 2-hour budget forum Tuesday night.

Laurie Berg brought up the district’s plans to expand the Montessori Borealis program into its own school, and the extra money the district is likely to gain. Through the change, the district could receive another $800,000 a year or more from the state and city.

Berg said some of that money should go to struggling students at other schools and not just to bulking up Montessori’s staff.

“The allocation formula that the board developed was never developed with a high preforming alternative school in mind. A policy call for the board in reviewing their goals should be to revisit the formula,” Berg said. “You’re never going to reduce this achievement gap if you’re going to give your high performing school at a needy time all this additional staff. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

A few principals also reported on what site councils prioritized in cutting and saving.

Gastineau Elementary School Principal Brenda Edwards said her site council advocated not to increase class sizes and thought the best use of instructional coaches was to work directly with students.

In her own comments, Edwards expressed different priorities. She said her school’s instructional coach is an integral part of professional development.

“She was able to provide teachers an opportunity to reflect on their teaching, which we know is the best way to grow as a person and a professional. I would advocate for increasing PTR in order to keep our current instructional coach model,” Edwards said.

PTR means “pupil-teacher ratio.”

The district has six instructional coaches and is looking to cut three.

There will be another opportunity for the public to weigh in on the school budget on Feb. 9.