AASB and Alaska Public Entities Insurance (APEI) have teamed up to bring you the 8th annual Maintenance Employees Conference, January 12-13 at the Lakefront Anchorage.

This 2-day conference will focus on providing content centered on school district maintenance issues and safety.

The Association of Alaska School Boards is seeking a full-time staff person to fill the Community Dialogue/Family Coordinator (CFC) position.

This CFC is dedicated to supporting families, schools, and communities. A Juneau applicant is preferred, but applicants residing in other communities in Alaska will be considered. Please provide a cover letter explaining your interest and experience and a resume to lmiller@aasb.org.

For additional information please contact lgrassgreen@aasb.org. Applicants will be reviewed on a rotating basis, but applications should be submitted by January 6.

For the full description click here.

On December 10, AASB hosted the latest edition of Law & Policy Day which was an in-person in depth focus on “A Free and Ordered Space.” What was interesting and enlightening to me was to listen to the speakers provide their unique perspectives on not only what A Free and Ordered Space means to them, but how it actually impacts their view of and work in public education.

The term “pass the gavel” refers to a situation where the chair of a meeting (the presider, the person running the meeting) temporarily gives up the position of chair (the authority to run the meeting) to allow another person to preside over the meeting.

Governor Dunleavy's 14-member Task Force on Broadband released a report with recommendations, the vision of the report focuses on the state facilitating access to the benefits of broadband internet. The Broadband Task Force has been meeting since July. The Task Force consisted of Alaska Native leaders, local government officials, urban and rural business leaders, State legislators, rural healthcare representatives, a rural school district superintendent, the telecommunications industry, the Commissioner of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, the Commissioner of the Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development, and several other participants.

The U.S. Department of Education announced approximately $20 million in grants to Tribal Educational Agencies (TEAs) to meet the urgent needs of students in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The state’s annual draw from the Permanent Fund is a lot of money — currently more than $3 billion.

For some lawmakers, the primary way that money should be used is clear: to pay PFDs. But other lawmakers say the fund can help settle one of the state issues that’s been debated even longer than the PFD: how to pay for public education.

While state public school funding has been flat the past five years, its value has been eroded by rising prices. And some teachers have received pink slips while waiting for the Legislature to pass the budget. Anchorage Democratic Rep. Ivy Spohnholz said the uncertainty is hurting schools.

Alaska's politicians are beginning to adjust to a new political map defined by the state's redistricting board, even as dissatisfied governments and groups file lawsuits and seek to change the board's work.

If the new redistricting map survives legal challenge, observers say it will not radically change the number of seats controlled by Republicans and Democrats. But because the Alaska House is so closely divided, even a small change may determine whether the House is controlled by Republicans or a predominantly Democratic coalition. A district changing from a moderate Republican to one further right could have a similar impact.

An installment of the University of Alaska Southeast’s fall lecture series podcast, Evening at Egan.

In this discussion, you’ll learn about the Alaska Native Success Initiative (ANSI), led by Dr. Pearl Brower and Ronalda Cadiente Brown - UA Senior Advisor for Alaska Native Success, Institutional Diversity, and Student Engagement, and UAS Associate Vice Chancellor for Alaska Native Programs.

The Superintendent of the Chatham School District Bruce Houck died suddenly on Tuesday. The rural school district covers four village schools in Southeast Alaska, including Klukwan. An Alaska State Trooper traveled to Angoon on Wednesday to investigate the death, according to troopers spokesperson Tim DeSpain. He said the investigation revealed that the 61-year-old died of natural causes alone in his sleep. No foul play is suspected and the State Medical Examiner’s Office released the body to his family. Houck lived in Angoon, and was the head administrator for the district which included Angoon, Gustavus, Tenakee Springs and Klukwan.

After several hours of debate and discussion at its November 23 meeting, the Anchorage Assembly unanimously passed the city’s operating budget. The budget restores money for early education, police officers in schools and a roving team of crisis mental health providers. The school board had argued that the mayor’s budget proposal put additional financial stress on the school district, which has seen budget crunches due to the COVID-19 pandemic and stagnant state funding. “The proposed budget will shift more than $2 million onto the shoulders of the district and disrupt an already fragile school environment,” the school board wrote in a letter to the Assembly. The Assembly ultimately sided with the school board, and amended the mayor’s budget to fund school resource officers through the end of the school year, at a cost of around $1.2 million.

Starting in January, the Anchorage School District will no longer require universal masking among students, instead leaving it up to parents to decide whether their children should wear face coverings at school. Superintendent Deena Bishop said COVID-19 numbers at the moment indicate lower virus spread and case counts in the city and district that are trending down. The numbers, combined with other protective actions like vaccines and quick-turn testing in schools, made way for the change.

The Chatham School District has been awarded $1,104,917 in federal COVID relief funding, most recently $706,428 in American Rescue Plan funding, according to the state’s education website. The federal relief money has not been mentioned in nearly three months of highly emotional and often tense public negotiations between the district’s board of education and Klukwan leadership over the future of its school. Klukwan’s enrollment dropped to six students this October, below the threshold of 10 – the minimum to receive state funding.

Cordova School Board officials will consider updates on COVID-19 mitigation measures when the board convenes its next meeting, said Alex Russin, the city’s superintendent of schools. Russin issued a letter to parents, the community, staff and students reminding them that the school district has been working with the community’s medical response team and encouraging increasing vaccinations, including those now available for younger children. “We look forward to hearing perspectives and guidance related to our mitigation strategies, including universal masking,” he said.

Masking in Cordova’s public schools will be optional starting in 2022, under updated guidelines unanimously approved by the school board, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread for a third year in Alaska. The Cordova School Board voted Dec. 8 to adjust its universal making requirement as part of its mitigation plan at the start of the new semester on Jan. 3. Masking will be optional in the schools, including the district’s some 335 students, “but if we have a serious outbreak, we may pull back on that,” Superintendent Alex Russin said.

A task force is calling for three elementary schools — Joy, Nordale and Anderson — to be closed and for the sixth grade to be shifted to middle schools to help address declining enrollment and a budget deficit.

Face masks become optional in public school buildings, including charter schools, starting Jan. 3 after a 4-3 vote of the Board of Education late Tuesday. The vote comes as Covid-19 cases among staff and students have dropped to the lowest number – 15 cases last week and eight cases so far this week – since school began on August 18. School Board Chair Jennifer Luke said some of the rationale for adopting mandatory face masks inside school buildings three months ago was that young children could not be vaccinated.

Charter schools seek power to mandate face masks

Local students have a new way to acquire a public library card.

The Fairbanks North Star Borough Public Libraries announced a new partnership with Fairbanks North Star Borough public schools.

There was reaction from City and Borough of Juneau Manager Rorie Watt while a guest on Action Line to Governor Dunleavy's proposal in his budget for next fiscal year that provides one hundred percent funding for the school bond debt reimbursement program. "I'm glad the state is meeting its obligations to provide assistance to education to Alaska. That's straight out of the constitution. These are projects that were previously approved by our voters in the state program and am glad the Governor included that in the budget." For the last couple of years Watt said they have budgeted based on receiving fifty percent of that state obligation.

Christmas came early for parents who use the RALLY child care program as school officials announced a substantial price reduction that started this month. Short for Relationships and Leadership, Learning for Youth, RALLY provides before- and after-school care to families with school-age children and has long been a fixture of child care in Juneau. For a combination of reasons — including labor costs, sagging enrollment after the pandemic and debt from prior years — monthly rates soared to as high as $999 a month per child earlier this year.

Juneau’s board of education has approved new oral narrative standards for its Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy program.

These are the first oral narrative standards to be developed for Lingít language to be taught to school children. The literacy program is available to kindergartners through fifth graders in the Juneau School District. It requires an application and acceptance through a lottery process. The school district has been working with community partners like Sealaska Heritage Institute, the Douglas Indian Association, and Goldbelt Heritage Foundation to foster the revitalization of Lingít language.

The Juneau Police Department was called on Monday afternoon after a student made a comment about shooting a local school.

The incident was resolved in-house without charges being issued, said Lt. Krag Campbell. “A student was upset about a phone being taken away and made an offhand comment about shooting up the school. JPD responded and investigated,” Campbell said in an email. “After speaking with everyone involved, there are no criminal charges and it is being handled within the school.”

Ashlyn O'Hara, Homer News

Ashlyn O'Hara, Homer News

Kenai Peninsula Borough School District staff and students identified as close contacts of someone who test positive for COVID-19 may have the option to return to school immediately under new protocols implemented by the district. Prior to Nov. 29, people identified as close contacts followed different protocols depending on whether or not they were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or had been positive for COVID-19 in the past 90 days.

Holiday gifts for at-risk youth were presented to representatives from the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District during the annual awards ceremony of the Kenai Peninsula Association of Realtors on Thursday. The association filled 20 duffel bags with holiday presents for kids enrolled in the district’s Students in Transition program.

Posted by Eric Stone

Ketchikan’s school board is set to consider resuming its search for a new superintendent. The recruiting effort has been on hold since July. That’s when the board said it couldn’t agree on three qualified finalists from the dozen applications submitted this summer. Board members said at the time they’d resume the search in the fall. The school board on Wednesday will consider a roughly $7,300 agreement with the Association of Alaska School Boards to keep looking.

All Ketchikan School District schools will operate at the high risk level of the KSD Start Strong COVID-19 mitigation plans through Sunday, the district announced on its website. The risk level was set at high due to the number of cases reported as active as of Ketchikan Public Health's latest update to the community information dashboard on Friday. At that time, 110 cases were active — above the 49-case threshold for moving down to the substantial risk level of the Start Strong plan.

An $832,000 grant from the Afognak Native Corp. will help pay for a number of Kodiak Island Borough School District purchases, following the Board of Education’s action Monday night. The grant comes from the native corporation’s share of original CARES Act funding signed by former President Donald Trump in March 2020, according to a staff report from Damon Hargraves, the district’s director of federal programs.

Kodiak Island Borough School District’s effort to further develop its career technical education (CTE) program got a slight bump thanks to the school board accepting a competitive grant at a recent regular meeting. The grant, worth just under $25,000, will be used to develop two goals: that CTE programs are industry-informed and responsive to workforce needs and CTE programs are data-informed and responsive to student achievement.

The Kodiak Island Borough School District in July announced it would be spending some of its $3.7 million in COVID-19 federal relief funding to do a deep overhaul of its health curriculum with the goal to focus on the “whole student’s needs.” The overhaul, to be overseen by Director of Curriculum Katrina Stewart and newly-hired health care curriculum coordinator Theresa Miller, will also need committee members, according to a letter released Wednesday by Superintendent Larry LeDoux. The committee would draw in members of the public, parents, health officials, district staff and teachers to work together, according to Miller.

Northern Michigan University’s Career Services will be collaborating with the Lower Kuskokwim School District to host an information session about teaching in the “bush” of Alaska. The information session will go over important details on living and working in the “bush.” Common questions involve how cold the area gets, how expensive it is to live in the “bush,” what healthcare is provided, and more. In addition to the information session, time will be provided for attendees to ask their own questions. The LKSD does roughly 70 job fairs per year in the lower 48 states in order to meet their need for educators. Alaska only produces about 18% of the educators needed in the state.

This story originally appeared in the Washington Post Magazine. It aimed to bring the issue of existential environmental threats, which Napakiak and many other communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta face, to a national audience.

On the first day of school in August, Principal Sally Benedict gathered her 22 high school students to explain why they had moved from their K-12 school into a detached portable unit next door. “Technically, you guys are called displaced children,” Benedict said. “We’re doing this because of the erosion.” The William Miller Memorial School in Napakiak, a Yup’ik village on a small island in Western Alaska, is tucked in a bend of the longest free-flowing river in the United States: the Kuskokwim. The river provides the lifeblood for Napakiak’s 370 residents, but now also threatens their existence.

It’s been six years since the Kilbuck school burnt down in Bethel. Since then, the students of Ayaprun Elitnaurvik, the Yup’ik immersion school, have been learning in what used to be a grocery store. The school district is planning on finally beginning construction of a new school in summer 2022, but COVID-19 may get in the way. After the Kilbuck school burned down in Bethel in 2015, a legal battle ensued between the Lower Kuskokwim School District and its insurance companies. The disagreement lasted years and included a lawsuit, all the while delaying construction of a replacement school. Last fall, the district finally came to a settlement with its insurers.

Nearly all school-age children are now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. The Lower Kuskokwim School District is working with the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation to offer the vaccines in schools. The student vaccination effort is underway while COVID-19 is still disrupting classrooms in a big way. Several months into the school year, Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Kimberly Hankins says that students are rotating in and out of school. “We have averaged between 5% and 8.5% of our total student population, on any given week, being out of school for quarantine,” Hankins said.

Zaz Hollander, Anchorage Daily News

The Petersburg School Board will be meeting in regular session Tuesday at 6 p.m. and there is a very light agenda. The meeting will focus on reports from the superintendent, school principals, and the activities director. The school board will also see a presentation from the middle school robotics team. The 7^th and 8^th graders competed in a regional tournament this past weekend and won an award for “innovative project”.In a written report prepared for the meeting, Superintendent Erica Kludt-Painter said the school district will continue with current COVID protocols moving into the holidays. That will include universal masking.

Dozens of parents spoke out against masks in Sitka’s public schools Wednesday (12-1-21) during a meeting of the Sitka School Board. The school district requires masks unless the community’s coronavirus alert level is ‘low’, But so far Sitka’s case count has been high enough to warrant masks all year. Some parents questioned the efficacy and the safety of masks and asked that the district let families decide whether their children donned masks in the classroom.

Skagway’s school will relax its mask policy in the new year following a recent school board meeting. Superintendent Josh Coughran says the board’s decision allows mask rules to be eased for some fully vaccinated students and teachers.

With the coming new year comes the need to begin drafting a new budget, and Wrangell’s school district has been without a permanent business manager to oversee the process. The school board recently moved to hire a business manager who lives off-island. Since last year, Wrangell schools’ business manager position has been filled first by a business manager intern, and then an interim manager. Wrangell’s superintendent Bill Burr says that in an ideal world, the district would have a business manager on campus.

Daishen Nix, who was born and raised in Alaska, entered the game for the Houston Rockets on Monday, adding one more name to the very short list of players with Alaska roots to reach the NBA. Nix, a shooting guard, was called up from NBA G League’s Rio Grande Valley for the game in Houston against the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The Juneau Bears football team, an all-star roster from the Juneau Youth Football League senior division, had the biggest test of their young careers last week at the National Youth Football Championships in Las Vegas, Nevada. “Unfortunately we got classed into the wrong division,” head coach Josh Mahle said. “We were playing against kids in high school.” The Juneau Bears range in age from 13-14 and had one 12-year old and one 15-year old on their roster. Playing up a bracket meant they played against rosters of high school freshmen ages 15-16. The Bears fell to Colorado 41-0 on Thursday and lost to California 30-0 on Saturday.

While they came close to qualifying, the Unalaska girls volleyball team won’t be heading to the state tournament this year. They finished up their season at Lumen Christi High School in Anchorage last weekend, after coming in third place against five other teams at regionals. With just one teammate who has ever traveled to the regional tournament, Head Coach Rachel Peter said she’s proud of the athletes for making it as far as they did.