Juneau Schools

The Juneau School Board elected new officers last night in its first meeting since the municipal election two weeks ago.

Phyllis Carlson is the new president. She’s serving her fourth term on the board.

“I have not taken a role with the board awhile and I think it’s time for me to step back in, since I have time and some flexibility, which I think the role of chair and facilitator needs in this case,” Carlson said. “So I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and get back to work on this.”

Andi Story, also in her fourth term, will be vice president. Lisa Worl, who was appointed to the board in 2011, will be clerk.

All three were nominated without opponents and elected without objection.

Tuesday’s meeting was also the first for newly elected Brian Holst, and the beginning of Sean O’Brien’s third term. Both men were sworn in last week and participated by phone.

Holst replaces Sally Saddler on the board. She was the previous board president and didn’t seek re-election.

The Juneau School Board started work Tuesday on a plan for putting together the school district’s next budget.

Among the proposals from Superintendent Mark Miller: Get rid of an advisory committee tasked with making budget recommendations to the board.

School board members didn’t directly oppose Miller’s plan, but suggested changes to increase public involvement.

“That’s my biggest concern, that’s my only concern,” said Brian Holst.

In the last budget cycle, Holst chaired the advisory committee on the chopping block. Now, Holst is the newest member of the Juneau School Board.

“There just seems to be a pretty severe reduction in opportunity for public input,” he said.

Even so, Holst and several other board members said they were willing to try the new approach.

In a blog post, Miller critiqued the advisory committee process. He said the committee is too big. The members are appointed by individual schools’ site councils, which fails to create accountability between the board and the committee, and can pull the focus away from the big picture.

Parent Josh Keaton told the superintendent and board that he opposed axing the committee and doesn’t think the plan will work.

“I question, isn’t that the point of the committee? To collect the opinions of the public no matter how far they differ from yours? Sure, there’s going to be controversy, but eliminating a public process that has the attention of the general public–and I believe that budget committee did have the attention and it was the single focal point for a lot of parents and the public to be involved–is not the solution,” Keaton said.

He also said relying on school principals and their site councils for budget input, as Miller proposes, is a bad idea. Keaton said principals have a professional conflict of interest: pleasing the school board, and critiquing their budget.

The advisory budget committee process began in 2009 and has evolved over time. But in 2009, longtime board member Andi Story said it was a good thing, increasing transparency and public participation.

Almost six years later, Story said there’s been progress on both of those fronts. She said the public’s understanding of the budget and level of detail in questions and input from the public is evidence of that.

“And this has increased to people asking more programmatic questions because the numbers are very clear about what things are costing and so we’re getting into weighing, looking at programs,” Story said. “And I think it’s also a reflection of 5 years of budget cuts. So yes, I think that we have, continue to have a very transparent budget process.”

But, she said, she’s willing to try budgeting without the advisory committee, too.

In addition to making site councils more involved, Superintendent Miller’s plan also calls for more budget-specific meetings and forums to educate the public and solicit input.

Miller said he will incorporate the board’s input on his plan and formalize it for a vote at the board’s Nov. 18 meeting. If the new process is adopted, it will used to develop the budget for the 2015-2016 school year.

As an athlete at Juneau-Douglas High School, junior Jon Scudder doesn’t think hazing is an issue, even in light of last May’s hazing incident when seven incoming seniors paddled six incoming freshmen. He’s been playing soccer and tennis since freshman year.

“I think that it got carried away this one time, but I do not think it’s a problem,” Jon says.

He says he hasn’t noticed an uptick of anti-bullying or anti-hazing messages from his coaches or teachers since the paddling.

“At the beginning of the sport, whatever it is, every student gets a talk about how bullying is not all right, drugs are not all right. Just the standard talk about all the things that you can’t do if you want to participate in these sports and I think it’s pretty standard every single year,” Jon says.

During the Juneau school board’s September meeting, state education commissioner Mike Hanley said athletic coaches are partly responsible for changing the culture of hazing. A couple weeks later, Juneau School District superintendent Mark Miller says he met with around 80 middle and high school coaches and activity instructors during two closed meetings.

“I made it clear – and everybody was on the same page before; I just reiterated – that hazing and bullying is not acceptable and that coaches need to be proactive in stopping it and report it immediately if they find out that it’s occurred,” Miller says.

The school district has spent at least $20,000 on the hazing investigation. Now, the district is in discussions with Gonzalez Marketing, an advertising and media firm in Anchorage. Miller says the firm will train sports and activities staff on how to more effectively communicate with media, parents and students. He says how staff represents the district is important.

“All coaches have at one time or another said something that they in retrospect would take back or speak differently. This is just a way to get everybody together and do some practicing,” Miller says.

The district is also sending two staff members to Arizona for intensive training on restorative justice, an alternative to traditional punishments of suspension and expulsion. It focuses on promoting respect, taking responsibility and strengthening relationships.

Miller says the goal is to implement a restorative justice plan throughout the district.

“Sending kids home from school as punishment has been shown to be terribly ineffective in both changing behavior and in improving the quality of education in the district,” he says.

The district never released who was punished for the May hazing incident due to student privacy rights. There was one appeal from the discipline process and Miller says the school board will decide tonight behind closed doors what to do with the student grievance.

Jon Scudder says he doesn’t need to know what the punishment was. As a student, he thinks the message on hazing is clear.

“People have realized that, like, if you do it, you will get caught and that it’s not all right,” Jon says.

He just wants everyone to focus on the positive.

“I feel like there was an incident that was a problem but that’s in the past and that we can move on and I think we’ve learned from it and that we can be a stronger community as a whole,” Jon says.

Jon will be a senior next year and he plans to welcome the incoming class with the same respect and encouragement he received as a freshman.

Four schools in the Juneau School District have improved over last year, according to the Alaska School Performance Index. It rates public schools on a one to five star system for academic proficiency. ASPI uses a 100-point scale.

Johnson Youth Center now has three stars instead of two, Yaakoosge Daakahidi Alternative High School doubled their previous one-star rating to two stars, and Glacier Valley and Riverbend Elementary Schools went from three to four stars.

That means all six elementary schools, Juneau Community Charter School and both middle schools have a four-star rating. Auke Bay Elementary scored the highest in the district with 93.91, less than a tenth of a point shy of five stars.

Teaching and learning director Ted Wilson says there’s good news for Juneau-Douglas High School and Thunder Mountain High School.

“When it comes to their four-year on-time graduation rate, they were both up and they’re both very strong,” Wilson says.

The graduation rate of both high schools is around 90 percent.

In addition to academic proficiency, star ratings are based on attendance, graduation rates, and college and job readiness test scores.

This is the second year Alaska schools have used the star rating system. It replaces the federal Adequate Yearly Progress based on the No Child Left Behind law.

It’s back to school Wednesday for 4,837 Juneau children. That’s about 50 more students than the Juneau School District expected.

Already, new superintendent Mark Miller plans to add a new teacher at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School and a half-time position at Gastineau Elementary.

“It’s always good to have a few more students than you projected because we can bring on an extra teacher if we need to, but if you guess low, you’re going to kill your budget because you don’t get enough money for the students you’re staffed for,” Miller says.

Most school district funding comes from the state of Alaska and is based on the number of students enrolled in mid-October.

Enrollment was down last school year, resulting in less funding and major budget cuts.

Economist Gregg Erickson forecasts enrollment for Juneau schools. He says the city lost a number of state and federal government jobs early last year, resulting in fewer students.

“Typically you lose a student for every four jobs or so,” he says.

Erickson says current employment data shows Juneau is still in a small recession. He says that could affect enrollment through 2015, when it would start slowly growing again.

“In June of last year it appears we lost about 317 jobs over the previous year. The data I have now goes six months forward and it seems to suggest that those job losses have actually accelerated a little bit and that we’ve now lost more than 400 jobs,” he says.

When students take their seats Wednesday morning, they will be counted. The October numbers go to the state education department and are used for calculating the amount districts will get for school operations.  But the budget is written in March and the district doesn’t know the amount of state funding until the legislature adjourns in mid April.

Out of Juneau schools’ 661 staff members this year, 355 are teachers. That’s 18 fewer teachers than last year, but no one was laid off. The reductions were made through attrition, according to Kristin Bartlett, district chief of staff.

Juneau police have launched an investigation into the alleged hazing of incoming high school freshmen.

Lt. David Campbell says two officers have been assigned to look into accusations reported earlier this week in the Juneau Empire about some upperclassmen paddling and injuring several students.

Campbell says the department had not heard from any victims prior to the story. Officers have since contacted a couple of parents of possible victims.

“We are actively investigating it to see what crimes were committed, if the victims and their families want to press charges,” he says.

Campbell says police are also working with the school district.

The alleged incidents happened after school was over for the summer and were not on school property.

District spokeswoman Kristin Bartlett says the administration has received reports of hazing and it doesn’t appear to be limited to one group of students.

“All three of our high school principals, from Juneau Douglas High School, Thunder Mountain High School, and Yaakoosge Daakahidi Alternative High School, are working together to follow any leads that they get on the issue,” Bartlett says.

Juneau School District has specific policies on bullying and hazing. The policies that define hazing as any act that endangers a person’s health or safety, or subjects them to physical discomfort and embarrassment because they’re part of a certain classroom, grade, or school activity.

Consequences can include expulsion.

It’s not clear how many students were involved in the recent incidents, but Bartlett says it’s important that parents and students tell school officials about the activity.

She also says it’s an opportunity to begin to change a culture that seems to accept hazing and bullying.

“If kids feel like this is something that just happens, we as a community need to speak up and make  sure that kind of an attitude gets addressed,” Bartlett says.

TMHS head football coach Jeep Rice claims some of his players have been injured in hazing. He has coached high school football for years in Juneau, beginning in the 1980s at JDHS.

He says he has no tolerance for hazing. He recalls the time when his teenager was hazed.

“We were in the same boat 25 years ago as a scared parent of an incoming freshman who was thrown into Gold Creek semi-naked with girls all around to laugh it up and whatnot, you know with seniors there. It wasn’t life threatening, but we were pretty upset, we were pretty scared,” he says.

Rice says he tells parents whose teens have been victims of hazing to “prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.”

Lt. Campbell says there are similarities between bullying, hazing, and domestic violence, including fear, retribution, and peer pressure, but there aren’t laws per se against bullying.

“You can’t turn to the bullying law in Title 11 of Alaska Statutes or in Title 42 of the CBJ statute, but a lot of the actions that get mentioned do meet some of the statutes and that’s what we have to look at,” he says. “Was a person injured, was a person placed in fear, was there offensive physical contact, were they engaged in challenging people to a fight, there’s all these things that do constitute violation of laws and we have to see if we have the elements of those offenses.”

Campbell says the officers assigned to the investigation are following up with witnesses, victims and parents to see if JPD can proceed with an actual case.