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A Juneau child care center is set to open in a new location nearly a year after being displaced by flooding. But challenges in finding and preparing the site have left families with few options to fill a monthslong gap in child care. 

Glacier Valley Kids, one of about 20 licensed child care providers in Juneau, went through many changes in the past year.

They started when the center – which Carolina Sekona runs out of a house in the Mendenhall Valley – was damaged by last year’s glacial outburst flood. The City and Borough of Juneau then placed the center temporarily in the recently vacated Floyd Dryden Middle School to maintain child care coverage for about a dozen families.

“They wanted me to avoid closure because child care, it’s in crisis right now in Juneau,” she said. “So the idea was to continue to provide care while my home was being renovated.”

But Sekona had to move again this spring, and she couldn’t find a place to go. She gave families 30 days notice that Glacier Valley would close.

Kimmy Lamb was a parent with a child at Glacier Valley. She said 30 days didn’t feel like enough time to figure things out for her youngest son, Liam.

“It was definitely a shock, because we were just getting used to – or Liam was just getting used to – being around other kids, and he really likes Carolina and the other gals, and so it was very stressful,” she said.

Lamb said her parents came back to Juneau from the Philippines in time to step in and provide child care for her son. And Lamb was able to help Sekona find a new, permanent location for Glacier Valley in the Twin Lakes neighborhood. It’s a former private school run by Juneau’s Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Sekona was able to renovate the space with additional help from the church, the city and Southeast Alaska Association for the Education of Young Children, a local nonprofit that supports child care. And she expanded the center’s capacity from 12 children at a time to 30 when it reopens.

Lamb said she’s glad she was able to help Sekona find a new space. But she’s waiting until the end of the year to bring her son back to Glacier Valley Kids in order to save money. 

“We’re excited for that,” Lamb said. “I know he’ll probably miss out on the socialization with the kids, but I feel confident that it’ll be still a good time with his grandparents.”

Ashley Anderson, another former Glacier Valley parent, has already been forced to find alternative child care several times. Still, she said this most recent experience was hard on her family.

“We went into panic mode,” she said. “We were kind of freaking out, and, you know, starting to think like,’ oh my gosh, we have bad luck with child care, like, what’s going on?’”

Anderson was able to find another provider, but she said it was hard for her and her child. She said she hopes it’s the last transition for him before he goes to school.

There are some bright spots to the moves. Sekona had to leave the temporary space at Floyd Dryden so a bigger child care venture – with money to renovate the space – could move in. The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Tribes of Alaska plans to house four of the tribe’s early education programs there, including the Lingít language immersion program Haa Yoo X̲’atángi Kúdi and Head Start. That will eventually expand child care options in Juneau when they open Aug. 26.

Tlingit and Haida also worked with tribal citizens receiving subsidized care at Glacier Valley Kids to find child care alternatives and added them to enrollment lists for the Floyd Dryden programs.

Meanwhile, Sekona and Glacier Valley have moved back to her old place in the Valley. She can provide child care to four children this month while waiting on a license to operate at the permanent location near Twin lakes. But that state license has become an obstacle – and Sekona is on a deadline. She needs to leave the house before the next outburst flood that’s expected in August. 

She said it’s been difficult getting her application processed.

A state task force established by Gov. Mike Dunleavy recommended the state take steps to ease the application process including developing an online application that can track paperwork. But Sekona said she had issues uploading paperwork, and had to email documents directly to a caseworker. And she faced another set of challenges with that.

“I turn all my paperwork to one caseworker, and then days later, I hear that caseworker is no longer there, so I’m transferred to another person,” Sekona said. “And this other person does not know what’s going on, and then I have to resubmit everything that I just submitted to the other worker, and it’s been a nightmare.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health, which oversees child care licensing, wrote that the department is still improving its system as they receive feedback from providers.

Sekona said the state won’t be able to inspect the permanent space until the first week of August, and she won’t get licensed until September at the earliest. That means families who use child care vouchers that require them to go to licensed providers will have to wait at least another month before they can enroll in Glacier Valley Kids.

But Sekona said she’s ready to fully open again, which is a big deal as child care centers across the state struggle to hire and retain qualified staff.

“Lucky me. I do have all my staff,” she said. “Everybody has their certifications, and everybody’s been through the process and the trainings, and, yeah, we’re all ready.”

In the meantime, Sekona plans to provide care without a license in her new location starting next month. That means she and a coworker can care for only eight children, instead of the 30 she will be able to care for when she gets state approval.

The Trump Administration’s new tax and spending bill cuts hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for Medicaid. That’s likely to affect the more than 250,000 Alaskans who rely on the program.

Medicaid is a joint state-federal funded health insurance program that covers people with low incomes or disabilities. More than 70 million Americans — including children — rely on the program to get critical care. Here in Alaska, 1 in 3 residents is enrolled in Medicaid. 

In Juneau, that’s going to affect the municipality-owned Bartlett Regional Hospital. CEO Joe Wanner said — in a worst-case scenario — it stands to lose between $3 to $4 million annually in Medicaid spending once the law goes into effect. 

“I don’t see this as the end of Bartlett,” he said. “It might be tough for a period of time. We will survive. We will continue to provide good patient care to the residents of Juneau.”

The new law will mean that most Medicaid recipients will need to meet certain work requirements to qualify for care. It will also compel the state to increase its eligibility checks and monitoring of recipients. Those requirements are expected to begin as early as January 2027, though the state plans to apply for waivers to push compliance back to 2029. 

The Alaska Department of Health retracted a recent estimate that Alaska could lose up to $500 million annually in Medicaid spending due to the cuts. Now, it’s saying the full impact of the changes is complicated to project because many Alaskans will be exempted from the new requirements. Officials say they are working on updated estimates. 

Alaska has consistently ranked among the top states in the country for the highest health care costs per person, according to a 2022 study published by Health Affairs. And, a report released by the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development earlier this month found that Juneau had the second-highest health care costs out of more than 250 cities surveyed in the U.S. 

Wanner said Juneau’s hospital will use the meantime to financially prepare for the changes and figure out what they will look like in practice.

“With everything health care, all you have to do is try to be in this position where you’re able to survive,” he said. 

Last spring, the hospital faced a multimillion-dollar deficit that threatened bankruptcy. Its board controversially chose to reduce staffing and shut down multiple programs to keep that from happening. 

“We’re in a much better place than we were a year ago,” he said. “As long as we keep on our trajectory, we’re able to sustain our financial viability that we’ve seen over the last 12 months, we should be able to build some reserves up to weather the storm before.”

The bill included $50 billion toward what’s called a Rural Health Transformation Program, which is aimed at offsetting the loss of Medicaid spending in rural areas. Wanner said that funding could help Bartlett. But for now, a lot is unknown.

Matt Carle, a spokesperson for the other major medical care provider in Juneau, Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC, says it is still assessing the impacts of the bill on its services.

The Alaska Department of Health said Wednesday it is still assessing how President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act will affect the state’s Medicaid program. State officials say they do not have reliable estimates of how many Alaskans could lose coverage or how much the new law will reduce federal health care spending.

On Monday, the Department of Health shared a document with the Anchorage Daily News saying the bill could reduce Medicaid spending in Alaska by $300 million to $500 million per year. But the Department of Health retracted the estimate Wednesday, with a spokesperson saying the document overestimated the impact and that the figures were “not correct at all.”

“Unfortunately, some of the information it contained was based on national models that had not yet been updated and did not account for the final version of the bill passed by the Senate,” Communications Director Shirley Sakaye said.

Emily Ricci, the deputy health commissioner in charge of Alaska’s Medicaid program, said in an interview that the department’s earlier projections didn’t account for exemptions that will apply to many Alaskans that the state’s congressional delegation inserted into the bill in the final days before it passed.

“There’s a lot of research that we have to do on our end to really think about how these exemptions that are in the bill, how they align with our Medicaid population, and what our projections are,” Ricci said.

The bill creates what it calls “community engagement requirements” that require able-bodied Medicaid recipients ages 18 to 64 to work, volunteer or study 80 hours per month. Advocates say those will likely push some recipients off the program, in part because they make applying for benefits more complicated.

But Ricci said the state plans to apply for waivers that would move the effective date of the work requirements to 2029. The department plans to launch an “integrated eligibility enrollment system” in 2028 that should simplify benefits applications, Health Commissioner Heidi Hedberg said.

In addition, many Alaskans are likely to qualify for exemptions even once the work requirements take effect, Ricci said.

There’s a long list of people who would be eligible. According to a webpage the Department of Health published Wednesday, they include:

• Alaska Native people
• People with disabilities
• Children
• People under 26 who were enrolled
• People enrolled in Medicare
• Parents with kids 13 or younger
• Pregnant women
• People with serious mental illnesses, including substance abuse
• People who have another serious or complex medical condition

Residents of boroughs and census areas with high unemployment will also be exempt. Fifteen Alaska regions currently qualify for that exemption, though that could change by the time the work requirements take effect. There are additional flexibilities for seasonal workers, like fishermen, construction workers or people who work in tourism.

Alaska is insulated from some other Medicaid cuts included in the bill because it’s the only state that does not finance its program using so-called provider taxes or state-directed payments, Ricci said.

Hospitals and medical providers raised concerns in the leadup to the bill’s passage, saying Medicaid cuts could force some hospitals in rural areas to close or cut back services.

But Hedberg, the health commissioner, said in an interview that the last-minute addition of a $50 billion fund for rural health should blunt the impact on Alaska’s medical system. Over the next five years, half will be distributed equally to all 50 states, and Hedberg said the other half will be distributed at the discretion of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“We are one of the most rural states, and the healthcare delivery system is very different in Alaska compared to the Lower 48 so I think that we are well-positioned with this funding,” Hedberg said.

Rural health groups say they still have questions about how the money will be distributed.

One in three Alaskans is enrolled in Medicaid. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the final version of the bill will reduce federal Medicaid spending in Alaska by 11%, or $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion over the next decade.

Hedberg said the state is working with a contractor to get a more accurate estimate.

Thousands of Alaskans are still caught in backlogs as they try to get government benefits intended to help people facing disabilities and poverty.

That’s despite a yearslong effort by state officials to keep up with paperwork. And some say the problems will only get worse with new federal work requirements for Medicaid.

One Alaskan caught in the quagmire is Juneau resident Joy Lee.

Several times a month, Lee faces unimaginable pain.

“All of a sudden you’ve got half your mouth is a toothache, and your eyeball’s falling out of your face, and your face is on fire, and you’ve got a severe earache — but it’s not real,” she said in a recent interview.

Lee is 63. She has multiple sclerosis, a treatable, but ultimately incurable, autoimmune disease. One of her symptoms is a chronic pain condition known as trigeminal neuralgia.

For a while, she said, she could manage it. At one point, she recalled, she had to be on a work call while lying on the floor during an episode. But eventually, it got to be too much.

Lee exited the workforce in 2007, after working since the age of 14. She qualified for disability payments from Social Security. She started receiving state-administered aid from Adult Public Assistance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

These days, from her Juneau apartment, Lee spends a lot of time keeping up with all the paperwork — saving digital files, paper backups, all her receipts. She likes to think she’s on the ball.

So Lee was shocked when the state said she wasn’t.

“I sent in all my paperwork, and then 30 days later, I got a notification saying that they didn’t get my paperwork and I was having all my benefits cut,” she said.

Lee called the Division of Public Assistance, the state agency that handles Medicaid, SNAP, Adult Public Assistance and other benefits programs.

“They looked at my paperwork and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got all your paperwork, but it’s an automatic letter, because there’s no agents to do the cases,'” she said.

Lee called it a “paperwork nightmare.” And she’s far from alone.

It’s a problem that first gained public attention thanks to reporting by KTOO beginning in 2022. Despite court orders, lawsuits and efforts by state officials to address the issue, it persists.

Lee’s struggle is “a variation of a story that we’ve heard many times,” said Nick Feronti, an attorney with the Northern Justice Project, which has sued the state on behalf of Alaskans unable to access social safety net programs like SNAP, Medicaid and Adult Public Assistance. It’s hard to see evidence that things are improving, he said.

“They are either getting worse or maintaining, and there has not been much positive news, which is very sad for the residents of our state,” Feronti said.

Feronti feels like lawmakers and the governor haven’t prioritized eliminating the backlog, he said. He contrasted that with the attention state leaders give to the Permanent Fund Dividend.

“If our PFDs were delayed, people would be in the streets, and the executive branch of our government would take notice and fix the PFD delays right away,” he said. “But I think that because this is happening to poor people or to disabled people, they are pushed to the margins of our society, and they are neglected.”

As of the latest report on July 1, the state is only processing about half of Alaskans’ applications for SNAP benefits on time. But state officials say they are making progress — in June, the state told a federal court its SNAP backlog declined by 16%.

“I’m here every day working to solve the problem,” Division of Public Assistance Director Deb Etheridge said in an interview. “I have just an amazing group of eligibility technicians and amazing, you know, tremendous support from the commissioner’s office and the governor’s office to work towards (a) solution.”

But nearly 4,000 Alaskans are still caught in the SNAP backlog, and nearly 800 applications for the Adult Public Assistance program have languished for more than a month.

In the state’s Medicaid program, the backlog is much larger. Nearly 30,000 Alaskans are awaiting delayed decisions on their applications, according to state data provided by Feronti.

Etheridge emphasized that many stalled Medicaid applications are likely duplicates, and she said people with pending applications are still able to access medical care.

“We have a team that works with providers to receive that information and process anything that’s identified as urgent and emergent,” she said. “We’re really trying to work on all fronts.”

On average, it now takes 45 days for the state to process SNAP applications, roughly two weeks longer than federal law requires. That number has risen this year, due in part, Etheridge said, to the division’s decision to prioritize older cases.

“We want to get everybody closer to 30 days. We don’t want to have those aging,” she said.

But Etheridge says people caught in the backlog and people like Joy Lee, who are at risk of losing them, do have options. One is to file a request for what’s known as a “fair hearing.” That’s an option for anyone who’s received an adverse decision from the Division of Public Assistance, whether related to SNAP, Medicaid, heating assistance, Adult Public Assistance or something else.

The division’s call center can help people apply for fair hearings, Etheridge said. Alaskans can also request them via email.

Feronti, the attorney, said Alaskans having trouble accessing SNAP and Adult Public Assistance can contact his firm for help.

The Division of Public Assistance is also hiring aggressively and having some success filling positions, Etheridge said. But despite her best efforts, she said she’s not sure when the division will be able to catch up.

“We’re still working our way out of it, and so I would be naive to say a date,” Etheridge said.

This year’s state budget funds 15 new benefits processing jobs, but staffing levels are still roughly 20% lower than they were before lawmakers and the governor cut more than 100 positions in 2021, according to state budget documents.

Benefits processor and state employee union official Billy Stapleton Jr. said that’s the root of the problem: not enough staff.

“There’s no Band-Aid fix,” he said. “We need a permanent solution to do this job correctly, and we just simply need more workers.”

In the coming years, Stapleton said, there’s reason to believe the problem will get significantly worse as a result of Medicaid changes included in President Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill.” Once its provisions take effect in the coming years, it will require some Medicaid recipients to prove they’re working or volunteering — and file forms with the state twice a year rather than annually.

That means even more paperwork.

For now, Joy Lee said the Division of Public Assistance has told her she won’t be cut off. At least, not this month.

But thousands aren’t so lucky, she said. Lee wishes more Alaskans would stand up and tell their leaders it’s unacceptable, she said.

“You gauge a country by how it takes care of the least of these,” she said, referencing a passage from the Bible. “When our country all of a sudden doesn’t care about anybody … it just breaks my heart.”

A record 30 students have started their medical education this month in a special multistate collaborative program, the University of Alaska Anchorage and University of Washington announced.

The 30 students this month entered the WWAMI program, named after the first letters of the states that participate through universities: Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho. The program allows students to begin their medical education at universities in their home states — at UAA, in the case of Alaska — and complete their work toward medical degrees at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.

The WWAMI program offers Alaska’s only in-state education toward a medical degree. There is no medical school in Alaska. Students in the program typically spend their first 18 months taking classes and doing training work at UAA before moving onto studies at University of Washington. There are other options, including an option to complete the entire program in Alaska.

The milestone of 30 Alaska students starting their WWAMI education marks a turnaround in fortunes for the program.

In 2019, Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposed entirely eliminating state funding for the Alaska portion of the WWAMI partnership. At the time, he characterized WWAMI as a waste of state money.

Three years later, Dunleavy took the opposite position. He proposed expanding WWAMI funding so that the program could expand from 20 students from each cohort year, which was the  enrollment at the time, to 30 per cohort year.

The Legislature in 2023 approved a funding increase that allowed 25 students to start the WWAMI program last year and 30 this year.

The WWAMI program’s history dates back to 1971, when nine students enrolled in preliminary courses at the University of Alaska Fairbanks arranged in partnership with the University of Washington. They then completed their education in Seattle. Montana and Idaho entered the program in 1972, and Wyoming entered it in 1996, according to a history compiled by UAA. Alaska WWAMI relocated from UAF to UAA in 1989.

This article has been updated to include that there is an option to complete the program inside Alaska. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture axed a program this week that was supporting farmers and food producers, including those in Alaska.

The department created the Regional Food Business Centers program in 2023 to strengthen local food economies. But on Tuesday, it abruptly ended that program, which was originally funded with pandemic relief money through the American Rescue Plan Act. USDA officials said in a press release there was no long-term way to finance it.

Robbi Mixon is the executive director of the Alaska Food Policy Council, which was in charge of the program locally. Mixon says this decision pulls back over $6 million in investment for Alaska, where the majority of food is imported and many villages are not on the road system.

“This was a chance for real economic investment into our food and farm businesses and fishers,” Mixon said. “It was a way to attract more investment as well, in terms of grants and loans and things like that. So it’s just really sad to see it all go down like this.”

A dozen business centers across the country were part of the program. Each one worked to allocate grants to food producers and farmers and help them with grant writing, marketing and business planning.

The Alaska Food Policy Council was working within one of those centers. Mixon says it was a strategic effort to build coordination and long-term infrastructure across Alaska’s food sectors.

“The program was tailored to address specific challenges in Alaska,” Mixon said. “So, our huge geography, our huge transportation and logistic costs, and our community size.”

The council planned to award grants to over 50 food and farm businesses across Alaska. But as they approached the time to award grants last winter, the Trump administration froze the funding, and they had to pause their grant program.

The Department of Agriculture stated in its release that it will honor existing commitments to farmers and food businesses. But in Alaska, Mixon says, almost none of the businesses had an official contract yet – they were only preparing for that collaboration to begin.

“We were working with an organization that was looking to set up more fresh produce markets in rural Alaska. We were working with an organization that wanted to provide technical assistance for home-based food businesses,” Mixon said. “And we did have tribal partners as well.”

Still, Mixon says the food council will use its volunteer board and statewide working groups to advocate for investments and build stronger food systems for all Alaskans.