University of Alaska

The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, requires institutions receiving public money or providing a public service, including colleges, offer a level playing field to people who have disabilities.

In 2008, the act was amended to expand the definition of disability. That fall, 23 University of Alaska Southeast students were using disability services. By the spring semester of this year, there were 119. The upward trend is also true at the Universities of Alaska Anchorage and Fairbanks, but it’s not as dramatic.

Margie Thomson is the coordinator of counseling and disability services for the UAS Juneau campus. She thinks there are a couple of reasons for the increase including the amendment to ADA.

“Which includes a lot more other hidden disabilities or temporary disabilities,” Thomson said. “We also have better psychotropic meds and people who may have been ruled out for college because of a mental health issue, are now able to go.”

Thomson said hidden disabilities are conditions that aren’t easy to see like mental health conditions, medical issues, or learning disabilities like dyslexia. She said students’ temporary disabilities are usually the result of injuries, surgeries and other short-term medical conditions.

She was a one-person office when she started in disability services the year the ADA amendment passed. About three years ago the campus hired another person part-time to help out.

“For me it was awesome. I guess I’ve been a disability rights advocate for a long time,” Thomson said. “It’s been a little tricky sometimes working with all the services in the university. It’s involved more collaboration with facilities for physical accommodations.”

Many times, she said, faculty don’t recognize hidden disabilities.

Traci Taylor works in the Juneau campus’ IT department and is considering going to graduate school. She graduated from UAS in May with a degree in marine biology. Thomson said Taylor struggles with a disability that might not have been covered by ADA before the 2008 amendment.

Taylor said it was, “Anxiety, I just (was) very stressed out and have a hard time keeping things straightened out in my head and my mind just trails from one thing to the next thing as the list of things just keep piling up and it’s just very stressful.”

A couple of her teachers did notice her struggling and recommended she go to the Disability Services office. She said she did and the staff recommended she use a Livescribe pen, which recorded lectures for her.

“It’s great to be able to go back and listen to whatever I missed during that time,” Taylor said. “I started proctoring … having my exams proctored so that it was just a quieter location and there wasn’t as much noise distraction (and) I could focus better on the exam.”

Test proctoring is just one disability service the university system provides. Taylor said her test scores improved and school got easier. She said other students who think they could have a disability should speak up and get help.

Doug Toelle is with Access Alaska, an independent living center and advocate for the disabled based in Anchorage. He has his own theories for the increase.

“Students entering the University System now grew up with the ADA,” Toelle said. “The ADA was passed 26 years ago in 1990, so they’ve maybe grown up with expectations that previous students didn’t have for accommodation.”

Additionally, Toelle said there are likely more veterans with “hidden disabilities” coming into Alaska’s universities.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 73,000 veterans were living in Alaska between 2013 and 2014.

No matter the reason, Thomson said it’s a good thing more students are being helped. She believes it’s a “community-wide responsibility to accommodate diversity.”

University officials couldn’t readily produce dollar figures for what it costs to provide disability services. However, citing fear of violating the ADA, they requested an additional $250,000 for disability services earlier this year. The legislature denied it.

Each of the three main University of Alaska campuses are accredited separately. A study released this week asks would it be more cost effective to bring all the campuses together under one accreditation. The answer: probably not.

The report suggests condensing the three accreditations into one would be a monumental process with few benefits. But there are other cost savings options.

University president Jim Johnsen says the college already is looking into some of those possibilities.

“We’ve got seven teams working as we speak on four administrative areas and three academic areas, to see how we can restructure to reduce costs and drive higher performance,” Johnsen said.

One option is consolidating administrative departments for academic programs that exist on multiple campuses, such as engineering, teacher education, and business administration.

“We have three schools of management; we have three schools of education,” Johnsen said. “Are we gonna continue to have those three or is it gonna be somehow changed?”

Condensing the programs would require accreditations on a program-by-program basis, but he’s confident that would be possible, he said.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities grants accreditation based on certain sets of academic standards.

The report notes that even if that commission approves a move to bring the university system under a single accreditation – which is uncertain – the process would take at least two years, and a significant amount of faculty, staff, and administrative resources to complete.

And, once the process is finished, the report says there’s no guarantee it will result in more students or higher quality programs, or meet the state’s higher education needs.

Regardless of the report’s recommendations, Johnsen says it’s an avenue deserving of a closer look.

“I’m agnostic when it comes to three accreditations, one accreditation, 38 accreditations,” Johnsen said. “It’s about our mission for the state of Alaska. That trumps everything.”

No decisions have been made regarding the university system’s accreditation strategy, but it’s a topic scheduled for discussion at the next Board of Regents meeting in September.

An Alaskan assigned to the New Horizons science team says the distant dwarf planet Pluto has an atmosphere that is much different than what they earlier imagined.

“The expectation was a very expanded, puffed up atmosphere,” said Peter Delamere of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute. “When New Horizons arrived, we found something very different. It was a very compressed, somewhat colder atmosphere. But with the new measurements, they discovered some new sort of compounds within the atmosphere.”

Delamere is part of the New Horizons science team that recently had three papers published on their latest research. The first two papers describing Pluto’s atmosphere and how it interacts with the space environment were published in the journal Science while a third paper focusing on the solar wind interactions was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Space Physics by the American Geophysical Union.

The New Horizons probe was launched in January 2006 and flew by Pluto and its moons in July 2015. Scientists are still analyzing the data that was sent back to Earth for months after the probe’s closest approach.

Delamere specializes in space physics or how the various particles in space interact with each other.

Imagine how air would flow around the fuselage of a speeding airplane and you would have a good idea of how plasma or charged particles from the solar wind might flow around a planet, only at much greater velocities. Planets like Earth and Jupiter, for example, have a very strong magnetic field which can shield the atmosphere and deflect the solar wind around it. The size or bluntness of the planetary object can determine the size and extent of the bow shock just upstream of the planet.

Pluto, however, does not have a magnetic field.

“As it turns out, the apparent or what it looks like a bow shock crossing didn’t occur until essentially you were on top of Pluto,” Delamere said. “It’s almost as if it is an attached shock, if it is a shock at all. It’s not clear.”

Delamere said they discovered that Pluto’s atmosphere is much more compressed that previously thought. Aside from nitrogen and methane, the cooler-than-expected atmosphere likely has additional compounds that may act as a heat or energy sink.

“Normally, like a methane molecule may absorb solar UV radiation and heat. So, you can puff an atmosphere up if you‘ve got a way of heating it,” he said.

Delamere also said they discovered that Pluto’s atmosphere, very tenuous when compared to Earth’s, is being stripped away by the solar wind at an unexpectedly high rate.

“It’s a big number. It’s a few times 10²⁵ particles per second, for example, that may fly off of this planet. But it’s just a tiny, tiny amount of mass per second that is stripped from the atmosphere,” Delamere said. “And, so, over the age of Pluto, it’s a negligible amount of Pluto’s mass that is ultimately lost that way.”

He suspects the atmosphere may be sustained by sublimation of the planet’s surface ice.

“You can just go straight to the gaseous state. So, if you have particle bombardment on an icy surface or you have just sublimation by illuminating it with solar radiation, you can form an atmosphere that way. These particles become airborne and, with the weak gravity, they have some dwell time,” Delamere said. “It may be a fairly collisionless atmosphere. You can imagine it really very tenuous so that it’s not like our atmosphere which is a very dense and collisional fluid medium.”

Although geology and glaciology are not his specialties, Delamere said he’s also fascinated by the images that suggest a rich geologic history from when the dwarf planet was perhaps much warmer.

“When you look at the surface images, you see things that look like glaciers, like lakes, maybe even rivers. These are nitrogen ices and you realize, well, the surface temperature isn’t that far below the melting point for nitrogen,” Delamere said. “So, perhaps at some point in the past, these nitrogen ices were liquid and there were rivers and lakes and whatnot.”

The New Horizons probe has several instruments designed to measure particles. They include a dust detector built by students at the University of Colorado, the Solar Wind at Pluto or SWAP instrument that measures low energy ionized particles, and a high energy instrument called Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation or PEPSSI.

Pluto is currently 56 AU or astronomical units from the Sun. Each AU corresponds to the approximate mean distance from the Earth to the Sun, or about 93 million miles.

The New Horizons probe is still speeding on a course out of the solar system and is headed for a fly-by of the Kuiper belt object called 2014 MU69 in early 2019.

One of the issues dividing Alaska’s legislators is the level of state spending. Some lawmakers want to continue to cut spending before considering introducing or raising taxes, or making long-term cuts to  Permanent Fund dividends. Others are concerned about the loss of services and the effect on the state’s economy from deeper cuts.

Some House members said the spending level is too high, before they ended an abbreviated special session in mid-July. Their comments ranged from Anchorage Eagle River Republican Rep. Lora Reinbold, who said, “The biggest threat to the Permanent Fund and to the dividend is big government,” to Wasilla Republican Rep. Wes Keller, who said, “Alaska has a spending problem. We have a huge spending problem.”

There’s some evidence to back up assertions that Alaska has a high level of spending. As recently as 2013, Alaska spent 38 percent more per resident than any other state on combined state and local spending, according to the nonprofit Tax Policy Center.

In just state spending, Alaska spent more than twice as much per resident in 2014 than all but 11 other states.

In three broad categories, education, higher education and corrections, Alaska spent the most per resident. It also was second in public assistance (after Massachusetts) and transportation (after North Dakota). And it was seventh in Medicaid spending.

But focusing on state spending doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s because many states require local government to provide services that Alaska’s state government provides.

Demographics and policy choices also play a role, according to Brian Sigritz, director of state fiscal studies for the National Association of State Budget Officers in Washington.

“Overall, there’s definitely a lot of variations in what states spend money on, and how much state support goes to various different areas of the state budget.”

And things have changed dramatically in the past four years. The portion of the state budget controlled by the legislature has dropped by 45 percent, while the amount spent on state agencies has fallen by 10 percent. These drops were even more dramatic if you account for population growth and inflation.

But even with these changes, the amount of proposed state spending directly controlled by the Alaska Legislature was projected to be nearly 25 percent more per person than any other state in the current fiscal year, based on data compiled by the National Association of State Budget Officers and census population estimates.

There are also factors unique to Alaska. That’s what Walker pointed to when asked why state spending was the highest per capita.

“It’s not very complicated as far as on a per-capita basis, we’re the largest state in the union – one-fifth of the entire United States and we have … one of the smallest populations,” Walker said. “We’re spread all over the state and so … on a per-capita basis, Rhode Island versus Alaska, you’re going to see a significant difference.”

Economist Gunnar Knapp, who recently stepped down as director of the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute for Social and Economic Research, said the state’s large amount of natural resources, unusually high healthcare costs, and  the challenge of providing services to isolated, low-income communities contribute to higher spending.

“It’s not a simple question to say: ‘Oh, because we spend more than other states, we must be wasteful,’ ” Knapp said.

But Knapp also said  the oil and gas revenue that used to flow into the state’s coffers – and that bounced back after previous recessions – is staying low. This puts Alaska’s government in a new position – being forced to decide whether residents will accept lower spending in areas like education or lower PFDs or higher taxes.

“Really, for the first time since oil started flowing, we’re going to face that question in a big way, where we’re going to realize that we’re going to have to make hard choices,” Knapp said.

The primary election in three weeks, and the general election in November, may provide a signal from voters about what they want the legislature to do.

A university professor is well on his way to a full recovery after being mauled by a bear this spring.

On April 18, University of Alaska Southeast assistant professor Forest Wagner was mauled by a brown bear while leading a six-day mountaineering course outside Haines.

The incident occurred on the northeast side of Mt. Emmerich. Wagner was on skis and apparently surprised the bear, which charged and attacked. In retrospect, Wagner said he suspects the bear was not hibernating due to an unusually warm spring, and that his ski track likely landed too close to the bear’s den. A bear cub was seen nearby.

Bear biologists have found that many bears across coastal Alaska did not fully hibernate during the past winter. Typically they hibernate into May.

In a release Wagner said he was thankful that the bear did not hurt any of the people he led onto Mt. Emmerich. He said he was grateful for the overwhelming support he’s received since the incident from family, friends, and colleagues.

“It is my privilege and obligation to share and participate in adventure settings in the natural world. I harbor no ill feelings toward the bear,” Wagner said.

After 10 surgeries and ongoing physical rehabilitation, Wagner is now walking around and has even climbed peaks on the weekends in Anchorage where he is living during his recovery. A major injury on his left side will require a skin graft.

Medical professionals have indicated that he is healing well and expect him to make a full recovery, according to the release. Wagner expects to return to Juneau in August in time for the start of the new academic year at UAS.

Among Gov. Bill Walker’s vetoes announced earlier this week is the re-appropriation of nearly $19 million meant for the controversial Northern Access Project in Anchorage’s U-Med District.

But, that doesn’t mean the money can be used for other projects.

The legislature in May opted to reallocate funding for the Northern Access Project – otherwise known as the U-Med Road – to the University of Alaska after the project stalled.

The university wants the new road but Mayor Ethan Berkowitz declined to use the funds for the road extension project, citing a lack of support from area residents.

Gov. Walker’s veto reverts that money back to the municipality, where it was originally appropriated in 2013.

“So that $18 million will just remain in the account until we have a little bit better picture of what the future holds in terms of state support for Anchorage road and infrastructure projects,” Susanne Fleek-Green, Mayor Berkowitz’s chief of staff, said.

Given the fiscal uncertainty and local push-back against the proposed road through Anchorage’s U-Med District, Mayor Berkowitz halted work on the Northern Access Project when he took office last year – and Fleek-Green says that’s unlikely to change.

“For now, there’s enough neighborhood concerns with the project and lack of funding for other projects around town that we’re gonna remain in that wait-and-see mode,” Fleek-Green said.

The city’s top priority leading into the legislative session this year was securing funding to modernize the Port of Anchorage.

East Anchorage Rep. Ivy Spohnholz believes this veto is largely a result of the governor listening to widespread dissent from area residents.

“Every single community council in the nearby affected area has actively opposed the U-Med Northern Access Road,” Spohnholz said. “And what this says to me is that he’s actually listening to individual Alaskans and not just organizations whose business interests would be served by it.”

The University of Alaska and area hospitals have been among the biggest proponents of the project.

For now, the $18.8 million will remain with the municipality. If the money isn’t used by Fiscal Year 2019, it will return to the state, or the legislature could reappropriate the funds to other needs.