Evergreen Elementary School’s two-dozen third-grade students hold out their hands for sanitizer and trickle into the music room to sit criss-cross on a colorful rug in front of music teacher Tasha Morse. 

“Back in the day,” Morse says, “The third graders, we would all take a field trip down to the Island to Faith Lutheran Church, they used to have an elders’ luncheon down there. And we would go and sing these songs in person for our elders. But recently since COVID, they haven’t been doing that. But we still want to be able to spread some awesome joy for the entire community. So we are going to sing for Miss Smiley for the radio station and for the whole entire community today. Does that sound like a great plan?”

“Yeah,” chorus the students. 

“Remember, I told you everything that you could expect,” Morse says, “That Miss Smiley would be at the front of the room, she’d have a really nice microphone and her box that records us?”

“You didn’t tell us she’d wear headphones,” quips a student in the front row.

“Well, that’s just so she can hear,” Morse says, pulling up lyrics to the first song: ‘Alaska’s Flag’.

All eyes are trained on Morse as she silently cues in the singers. 

“Watch my hands, because there’s an introduction,” she says. 

The students also perform a local favorite: “The Wrangell song, which was written by third graders over 20 years ago,” Morse says. Her mother-in-law, Karen Morse, helped write the song. 

“What a cool experience that we get to share this with everybody,” Morse says when the third-graders finish singing. “What do you guys think?”

“Squishy,” one student emphatically responds.  

“Squishy? I don’t know what that has to do with anything,” Morse says, with a laugh. 

LISTEN TO THE RADIO VERSION OF THIS STORY BELOW:

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell High School’s boys’ cross country team are state champions for the second year in a row. The seven boys ran down the state title at the Division III ASAA Cross-Country State Championships in Palmer on October 7. 

The Wrangell boys’ winning streak is new – last year (2022) was the team’s first state win in the history of the program. 

Sophomore Boomchain Loucks took the individual state title for the 3.1-mile race in 17:28, and senior Keegan Hansen raced down second place in the state, beating the third-place competitor from Cordova by less than a second. 

But the rest of the team wasn’t far behind – out of the 80 athletes competing in the boys’ Division III state championships this year, all but one of Wrangell’s runners placed in the Top 25. 

Junior Daniel Harrison came in 5th, sophomore Ian Nelson came in 12th, freshman Jackson Carney came in 19th, sophomore Jackson Powers came in 22nd, and freshman Everett Meisnner came in 51st.

It’s the second year in a row that a Wrangell runner won the boys’ individual title, after Daniel Harrison won state last year as a sophomore.

As a team, Wrangell boys finished far ahead of the competition. For a team score, runners’ places are converted to points. The lower the place, the lower the points. Wrangell’s boys’ team scored 28 points, more than 40 points less than the second-place team (Cordova, 72 points) and third-place team (Petersburg, 75 points). 

The state win came on the heels of a decisive team regional title win in Juneau at the ASAA Region V (5) Cross Country Championships in late September. Last year, the team also won regionals – its first regional win since 2004. 

This year, Wrangell didn’t have enough runners to field a full girls’ team. But two Wrangell girls’ cross country runners individually qualified for state. Freshman Alana Harrison placed 8th in the girls’ state cross country championships and freshman Kalee Herman placed 32nd. 

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell students head back to school in less than a month. And while school officials say they’ll make the district’s dwindling budget work this year, they’re grappling with the potential longer-term effects of the governor’s statewide cuts to education funding. 

While students might be thinking about new clothes for school and adults might be signing kids up for extracurricular activities, Wrangell’s school Superintendent Bill Burr is thinking about money. 

“Even before the school starts, we have to look at: where do we make cuts?” Burr says. The amount of money the district receives from the state, based on its student population, hasn’t substantially increased in the past decade, even as inflation has skyrocketed. 

“Can we make cuts this year?” he asks. “Can we roll things back this year that might help us next year? And when we’re only looking at removing programs or deducting things, or cutting back in staff, none of that is positive to education.”

Alaska’s legislature passed a budget this spring with a one-time increase to the funding – $680 per student. It was supposed to help offset inflation costs. Governor Mike Dunleavy’s veto cut it in half. 

“The impact is pretty significant,” Burr says. It’s not that the district was counting on the money – Burr says Wrangell’s school district chose to budget without planning on a funding increase from the state. 

“We were not going to count on anything that wasn’t already in hand,” Burr says, “So when we built the budget, we anticipated a zero increase, knowing that we desperately needed funding that was there, but trying to figure out how it was going to work.”

The $5 million budget approved by Wrangell’s school board earlier this spring had a $120,000 deficit, to be paid from the district’s savings. The remaining half of the one-time funding will help fill that hole, but won’t entirely cover the shortfall. 

The district is facing huge financial roadblocks in the coming years. One is the requirements of the state’s Alaska Reads Act – aimed at boosting literacy in early education. 

For Wrangell, it means adding a teacher more dedicated to literacy. The state approved a $30 increase to its per-student payment to offset the increased teaching demands of the Alaska Reads Act. Burr says it won’t even come close.

“Not all those costs are seen either,” Burr explains. “If students are screening at a level below where they should be, that requires additional support, additional time, additional staffing, additional tutoring, as well as additional summer time education, none of which is currently budgeted. We don’t know where we’re going to be.”

Initially, the district plans to try and make it work by combining federal Title One money and some local funding for a hybrid position that will cover literacy and other support programs, “so we’re working hard on seeing if we could survive without a significant increase,” Burr says. But that’s only for the short term. 

The district has been paying for two school principals out of a pandemic relief grant. That money runs out next year, and without an increase to the base student allocation or BSA, the per-student funding formula, there’s not many other places to find that funding – around $250,000. 

“If we would have gotten a full BSA addition this year, we would have been able to offset that and know that we are on good financial footing,” Burr says. “We don’t have that.”

Staffing, more broadly, is by far the biggest cost for Wrangell’s school district. And Burr says it’s pared down the budget enough that staff is one of the only places left to cut. 

“Prices go up,” Burr says, “Salaries and negotiations are on the list this year. And we can’t continue just asking for more when our community also is trying to make things happen.”

He says it’s terrible to watch opportunities for students in Wrangell dwindle. All the factors come together – the state’s funding has remained near-stagnant even as inflation and costs rise, on top of other challenges like a shrinking Alaska Marine Highway System, which has all but eliminated a cheap option for student travel to extracurricular activities. 

Vetoes could also affect the schools’ physical condition. The governor also slashed funding for the Department of Education and Early Development’s capital improvement project grant program, leaving funding for just five projects throughout the state. 

It’s a program the school district and borough government planned to apply to this year, for much-needed exterior and system repairs to the three public school buildings in the borough. The cut means the maintenance grants will be much more competitive. 

“We know that we have a lot of critical infrastructure to address,” explains Wrangell’s borough Finance Director Mason Villarma. Wrangell voters approved a $3.5 million bond last October in the hopes of leveraging additional state money – $6.5 million from the state’s DEED CIP Major Maintenance grant program, for a project total of $10 million, “which would really help in addressing the exterior and mechanical components of the high school, middle school and potentially elementary school as well,” Villarma continues. 

“It’s super important,” he says. “It’s right on the hill in our community. So we want it to look good and we want kids and families to move here because we have top-notch educational facilities both physically and otherwise.”

The cut in funding for the program this year doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Villarma says the school district will have two cycles to apply to the state major maintenance grant. 

“If we miss the second round, we’ll simply spend $3.5 million,” Villarma says. “We can’t hold the bonds for more than three years without having the project substantially complete. These bonds were for a purpose approved by the voters. And so we have to fulfill that purpose, meaning construction needs to be about 80% within three years of bond issuance.”

Basically, if Wrangell’s grant applications aren’t successful, they still have to do the project, just on a much smaller scale.  

“We will have to narrow the scope of the project,” Villarma says. “It will continue to be the high school, middle school, elementary school, but we might just work on one building to try to maximize the resources we’re putting into work.”

The struggle funding the major school maintenance project is part of a broader borough issue. Villarma says the way the borough is funding the schools isn’t sustainable. The City and Borough isn’t immune from the tough financial landscape of today. 

“The fact is, we’ve gotten to a point where we have so much critical infrastructure needs that are very material, we have to figure out how to efficiently spend our existing resources,” Villarma says. 

Currently, Villarma explains, the borough funds the school district through 20% of its sales taxes, plus additional funding from the federal government called Secure Rural Schools (SRS). With SRS funding diminishing – the borough received $1.1 million last fiscal year, and $300,000 less this year. Villarma says that gap could be the difference between long-term sustainability and funding crisis. 

Plus, Villarma explains, SRS funds aren’t only for schools. 

“Secure Rural Schools is used for roads, too,” Villarma says. “A lot of communities like to use that for major maintenance and roads. And we haven’t been able to do that for, as you can see, for quite some time. So it’d be great to maximize efficiency for the school district and the borough, [and] retain some of the SRS funding for, a half a million million dollar road project each year.”

Villarma says that will probably require some sort of change.

“There’s been ideas tossed around to save [money] between the borough and the school, whether it’s insurance plans or consolidating facilities of some sort, or maybe the borough consolidates facilities,” Villarma says. “Whatever it is, it needs to be material enough for us to save enough money to contribute to the school sustainably.”

So both on the per-student funding front and maintenance front, Superintendent Burr says the district is struggling. 

“The vetoes on both sides are affecting us dramatically,” Burr says, “Not as much this year. But it will all come due next year. Having a $250,000 gap from funding from this year without an increase in enrollment is going to be very difficult.”

Burr says he anticipates next year being another fight to secure funding for students and schools. 

“The governor has shown over the last five years that education is definitely on the list for vetoes,” Burr says, “So even next year, if we do get [additional funding] approved, and we do get everything that we wanted, the odds of another veto coming are pretty high.”

“So,” he continues, “We don’t know what it will look like. But we’re going to have to do the same thing we did this year. And that is to base [our budget] on current funding, and hope that the state will support education.”

Both Burr and Villarma say it’s probably going to prompt some difficult conversations between the borough and school district – they’ll meet at the end of August to discuss pressing needs at the schools and throughout the broader borough.          

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell’s school district is in the process of updating its strategic plan. The new plan will help set the direction and goals for the borough’s public schools over the next five years. Earlier this month, the district held a series of roundtable discussions – called a “charette” – to solicit input from community members, and there are more opportunities for feedback. 

What should kids learn or experience before they graduate high school? 

What should be the top priority of the local school district? 

With a declining budget, how should the district save money while still prioritizing education? 

Where have you seen glimpses of new ideas or strategies that could be implemented in Wrangell’s school district? 

What potential change to Wrangell’s education system would you be willing to be a part of?

These are the types of questions Wrangell’s school district wants the community to answer. The answers will help the school board and district officials craft a plan to steer the schools through the next five years. 

There’s no right answer, either. After an evening of roundtable discussions, district officials left with eight pages of bullet point notes with ideas from a dozen or so community members. But they still want more. 

So far, collaboration and flexibility have been repeated messages as the district crafts a new strategic plan. 

That includes collaboration with the community, whether that’s enlisting new volunteers, partnering with the local Tribal or municipal governments, or looking for partnerships with businesses in town. 

Collaboration could also mean regional or statewide partnerships like the pre-existing tech education-focused T3 Alliance, or educational opportunities at higher education institutions in the state. Or, what if Wrangell’s schools collaborated with other school districts for educational opportunities? 

Community members have also repeatedly spoken up in favor of flexibility. Adaptations that the COVID-19 pandemic forced on the schools seem to be top of mind. 

Wrangell’s school-age population has trickled down in recent years, after a huge drop during the early pandemic. Could consolidating schools – or consolidating some parts of schools like the libraries – help shift resources to educational opportunities like more art classes, or classes in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) realm?

But parents and community members also say they support more tailored learning options, and want an education for Wrangell kids that will help them navigate relationships and life outside of school. In discussions, people brought up concerns and excitement about technology and how it can be used in education. They want kids to learn to be critical thinkers. 

It’ll take a lot of work to take the hopes and dreams of Wrangell students, parents, teachers and community members and meld them into a working document to inform the school district’s vision for the coming half-decade. They’ll need all the feedback they can get. 

Wrangell Public School District is still looking for feedback as it works to update its strategic plan for the schools. 

Read a summary of community ideas about the future of Wrangell’s schools so far here.

Find a link to the district’s Strategic Plan survey here. 

Wrangell Public School District also welcomes input by email, phone or in-person. Call the district office at 907-874-2347. 

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell Public Schools and the local borough are seeking a condition survey to prioritize renovations to the community’s aging school buildings.

The school district operates two campuses which are located about three blocks apart. The buildings – an elementary, middle and high school – were built between 1969 and 1985, with expansions and periodic upgrades from the 1980s to the 2000s and early 2010s. 

Wrangell’s elementary school occupies one campus, and has a two-part building. The primary building, originally housing kindergarten through third grade, was built in 1969 and upgraded in 1982. The intermediate portion of the building, for fourth through sixth graders, was built in 1979 and upgraded in 2003. 

What is now the middle school building was built at the secondary school campus at the same time as the intermediate portion of the elementary school in 1979. The middle school was originally built as a vocational education building. It was upgraded along with the intermediate elementary school building in 2003. 

Also at the secondary school campus, Wrangell High School was built in two phases – mainly focusing on classrooms in 1985 and the gym, lockers and commons in 1987. The high school received minimal upgrades in 2011.

But even with renovations over the years, the buildings themselves are aging and major maintenance needs at the schools are piling up. The estimated cost to fix it all could be as much as $10 million. But if all goes according to plan, that wouldn’t all be paid by the borough and school district. 

Mayor Patty Gilbert says that the borough is trying to qualify for a state education grant program that could more than triple the amount of project money available. 

“We passed a $3.5 million bond, the public voted in favor of that,” she explained at a special borough meeting May 1, “And the school is trying to maximize the return on that bond money to up to $6.5 million for a total of $10 million. One of the conditions for the grant being awarded to Wrangell Public Schools is this condition survey.”

A condition survey will tell the school district and borough exactly what’s needed for repairs. It’s a pricey project. After a competitive bid process, the borough selected Juneau-based Northwind Architects to complete the survey of the school buildings. It’ll cost $266,000, paid out of a pot of federal money given to former logging communities. The assembly also approved an additional $30,000 to set aside as contingency funding. 

Northwind Architects is the same group that recently did a condition assessment on the community’s Public Safety Building. It’s also in rough shape, but borough voters rejected a bond measure last October that would have funded renovations to the building, which houses the police, volunteer fire department, courthouse, DMV and jail. 

Capital Facilities Director Amber Al-Haddad explained at the May 1 special meeting that the borough selected Northwind Architects because of their strong application that focused on experience providing surveys for communities hoping to secure just the kind of grant that Wrangell is gunning for. 

“Both firms that submitted proposals are very well-qualified,” Al-Haddad said, adding: “Northwind spoke much more to their past experience developing condition surveys for the Department of Education CIP projects […] which is what kind of pushed them over as far as the [bid] scoring goes and put them as ranked number one.”

If the survey stays on schedule, it should be complete by mid-July. That’ll give the borough a few months to review the survey and prepare its application to the state education grant program to try and leverage additional funding to repair the schools. 

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell’s borough assembly will contribute $1.6 million to its public schools next year. That’s roughly the same as its contribution last year, but it’ll still leave the school district walking a financial tightrope unless the state also increases funding. 

Wrangell Public Schools gets the vast majority of its funding from local and state governments. Locally, the money comes from sales taxes and federal aid for former logging communities that the borough passes on to the district. 

The school board and borough met earlier this spring to talk about the district’s budget. The assembly first proposed sending $1.5 million to the schools for the coming fiscal year (FY24, which begins in July). But Wrangell superintendent Bill Burr told assembly members their proposed contribution to the schools actually fell around $70,000 short of the district’s budget. He said some potential new expenses have come up since that meeting.

“We are going to have to sign contracts prior to knowing additional funding,” Burr explained, adding that the district has some incoming students with higher needs, as well as looming demands related to the Alaska Reads Act – which could require a new full-time reading specialist and another full-time reading teacher for the district and could cost upwards of $240,000. 

Burr says the small district doesn’t necessarily need that many staff members. He says the district will try to shuffle around grant-funded positions to make it work, so that one teacher would have combined duties to fulfill the requirements of the Alaska Reads Act.

“The school district, we think we can find the money to pay for half of a teacher,” he told the Wrangell Assembly, but said that the school district needs additional funding to pay for that second half. 

That could potentially be covered by state funding, but there are big questions about how much money the district will receive from the state – state funding is based on a per-student payment to districts, and increases are being discussed in the current session of the Alaska State Legislature. The payment hasn’t significantly increased since 2017.

“Five-hundred dollars ($500) is probably our basement of what we need to see, to not only just do the minimum, but to support our kids and in many areas, including sports, which is always overrun,” Burr said, “And with the lack of the ferry system, as well as raising rising costs on everything. We know that there are opportunities that are going to cost additional money. Five hundred ($500) – it’s not a perfect number, but it’s pretty close to what we need in Wrangell Public Schools to break even.”

Even if the legislature passed a $500 increase to the Base Student Allocation (BSA), it might not make it past the governor’s red pen.

“Our governor stated that schools are hiding money and that they shouldn’t receive any funding,” Burr said. “Because Alaska is a line-item budget, even if a BSA is decided on and turned in on May 17, the last day of the legislature, there is a possibility that the governor could veto it.” 

There’s also some question about how much money the borough can actually give the school district. There’s a maximum local contribution in place, which is right around $1.6 million. But assembly members don’t know whether that cap is for local funding only, or whether it includes the federal passthrough. 

Assembly member Bob Dalrymple said it’s time to get a hard and fast answer. 

“Outside of this process, for the future, can we get clarification from the state?” Dalrymple asked, “Because this has come up pretty much every year.”

But all assembly members expressed support for doing as much as they can for the district. They unanimously approved increasing the local contribution to $1.6 million. (Assembly member Brittani Robbins did not vote, because she’s also a member of the school board.)

For the next school year the assembly approved that money from the federal passthrough, not from local sales taxes. That isn’t school board president David Wilson’s ideal situation – he hoped the money could come from taxes to leave the federal money for a rainier day. 

“I’m just asking that however you structure, the amount that you can give us the maximum we possibly can out of our taxes,” Wilson asked before the assembly’s decision, “So that we know we can draw and get more out of the timber receipts to make up for even more when we need it.”

The legislature is still weighing its school funding options. A budget passed by the House earlier this month included a $680, one-time boost to the per-student amount, and the Senate Finance committee has passed a similar proposal.

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell Public Schools has passed a $5 million budget for the coming year, ahead of its May 1 deadline to submit a financial plan to the borough. 

The budget passed by the school board on March 20 is more than $300,000 less than the current year’s revised budget. But even with expenses tightened down, the FY24 budget projects a $53,000 deficit, which will be paid using the district’s savings. 

District officials say that’s not a sustainable model to spend reserve money, but they don’t have many other choices. The vast majority of the budget goes to the salaries and benefits of teachers and school staff at the district’s three schools. 

Kristy Andrew with Wrangell’s contracted business management company, K12 Business Services, told school board members the budget will shift somewhat, but there’s not a lot of wiggle room.

“One thing that we really want to keep an eye on is going to be our fund balances,” Andrew explained. “We’re estimating a balance at year-end of about $432,000. And with the 10% limitation [it will be] $189,000, which is really quite low, so I just want the board to be aware of that as we move through budget revisions and into the next fiscal year.”

By state law, school districts can’t have savings of more than 10% of what they spend in a given year. 

And while the district can make do with spending some reserves this coming year, there’s a major financial burden looming in the following year (FY25). Right now, the district is paying the salaries of its two principals out of a federal pandemic relief grant (ESSER-III). That money will run out, and the schools will have to find a way to absorb the approximately $260,000-worth of salaries and benefits for principals. 

The school district could get more state funding if lawmakers decide to increase the Base Student Allocation (BSA), or the amount of money Alaska sends school districts per student. That payment hasn’t grown since 2017, even while inflation has spiked, leaving Alaska school districts doing more with less money. But multiple bills making their way through the state legislature could address that issue. 

One proposal – state Senate Bill 52 – would raise the BSA by $1,000. But even that increase wouldn’t entirely make up for inflation in the last five years. In the state house, Ketchikan independent Rep. Dan Ortiz, who represents Wrangell and other southern Southeast communities, has proposed an increase of $1,250 – just over 21%.

While Wrangell’s school board isn’t counting on a BSA increase to balance its budget, school officials are doing all they can to lobby for more funding for the state’s public schools. 

The district’s budget for the coming year assumes a slight drop in local funding – a total of $1.6 million: $725,000 from borough taxes and $875,000 from a passthrough of federal money given to former logging communities. 

It’ll be up to Wrangell’s Borough Assembly to approve the amount of funding the borough ultimately passes on to the school district before passing their own budget later this spring. 

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell’s school district is looking at downsizing to one school building in the coming years as enrollment declines and prices rise. The school board, borough assembly and community members say it’s not a decision to be taken lightly, but the district is running out of ways to save money. 

Bankruptcy isn’t really an option for a school district – throughout the country, only a few districts have gone bankrupt in the last 60 years. So it’s up to the district to find solutions or ask the local government for more money. Wrangell’s school district is trying both. 

The district’s $5 million draft budget requests around $1.6 million from the borough, $725,000 from local taxes and the remaining $875,000 via a passthrough of federal money given to former logging communities. 

But even with that contribution, the district projects it won’t quite break even, and will absorb a $53,000 deficit with savings. And it’s only going to get worse in the coming years. 

“There are financial concerns coming from the school district,” Superintendent Bill Burr told Wrangell school board and Borough Assembly members at a joint work session March 6. He painted a dire financial picture. 

“We had requested last year for an increase in the contribution [from the borough] because we needed it to break even. And that was cutting positions where people were leaving, we just didn’t fill it. Even with that, we were on a razor-thin margin, as you can see that our reserve substantially depleted and won’t sustain the principals coming back on board.”

That’s because the district is currently paying the salary and benefits of the elementary and secondary school principals out of a federal pandemic relief grant, ESSER-III. But next year, that grant will run out, and the salaries and benefits, which amount to a quarter-million dollars, will have to be paid from the school’s general fund. It won’t be able to absorb the cost.

Brittani Robbins sits on both the borough assembly and school board. And she suggested an idea that’s been floated more and more frequently – consolidating Wrangell’s schools.  She said the district estimates it would save around $266,000 if it wasn’t operating the elementary school building.

“$260,000 for two principals,” Robbins pointed out, “Which is what we’re spending on to operate a single building [the elementary school] at a very small capacity.”

It would mean moving around 130 elementary students to the middle and high school building, which houses about the same number of students: 133 secondary students, 64 in the middle school and 69 in the high school. 

Superintendent Burr is not sure putting all students under one roof is the answer. He said the district needs the borough’s help to brainstorm solutions. 

“Consolidation of the campuses is not a perfect fit,” Burr cautioned. That’s a point he’s emphasized in the past as well. “There are many things that would be lost in the process […] So we would be looking at the borough assembly to help us find out how we’re going to stay functional. And that I think is the biggest request we would have is: it’s not all financial. But what’s the best thing for students? And if we can do that as a school district – pretty happy about that.”

Inflation has hit Wrangell Public Schools hard, especially since per-student state funding has plateaued over the last six years. There are also just less students.

Enrollment in Wrangell’s schools dropped precipitously in 2020 – the district lost more students per capita than any other district in the state. While numbers have bounced back somewhat – there are 263 students enrolled this year up from 140 during the pandemic – it’s still lower than the past. That means less money from the state. 

“The question that we have in all of our school board meetings is: Is it good for kids?” Burr said. “Moving everybody to one building is not the best concept. But neither is the inability to have classes, to have electives, to have staff. We’re at a paper-thin level of staffing.”

And “paper-thin” staffing can be detrimental for a school district. 

Wrangell’s Special Education Director Ryan Howe serves on the borough assembly. Howe says he’s especially concerned about how much the district struggles to retain aides and how little financial wiggle room there is. 

“Litigation is always an inch away,” Howe said, “And if it comes, you can’t say as a public institution, ‘We can’t afford it.’ You can’t say you can’t afford it. If you get a kid come in who needs full-time nursing care, as a public school, you’ll pay for it. Because you can’t say ‘You can’t play.’”

While consolidation might help the district find more money for paraprofessionals, there are also significant physical roadblocks to a potential school merge. There’s very little parking at Wrangell’s secondary schools, which are more centrally-located than the elementary school. 

Teacher Arlene Wilson represented elementary school teachers and students at the meeting. She brought up a host of other issues and questions: toilets in the secondary schools aren’t designed for small students. Would there be a library for younger students? What about crosswalk safety in the busier downtown area? What about storage for multiple subjects’ worth of materials in elementary classrooms? Plus, there’s no playground. 

“Outside free spaces are extremely important for the development, for many different physical as well as social-emotional skills, and in a gym for recess does not allow for free play,” Wilson said, “Nor does the gym have the equipment needed for developing physical skills.”

Another teacher, Winston Davies, also pointed out that a K-12 school isn’t ideal for growing a larger student population on the island.

“You’re trying to attract families to this community,” he pointed out, “And they’re coming – we’ve had this quite a few times where families come to the school to get a tour to see what the school system is like. If they see that they’ve got K-12 crammed in this one building, there’s a playground way over there that we can’t use, they’re gonna be like ‘I don’t know about this, this doesn’t look good.’ So I get that the budget is very important. But again, what’s best for our kids too?”

So the district is in a pickle. How does it do what’s best for students and families while not running itself financially into the ground?

Many cost-saving measures are on the table. Some school board members have proposed a four-day school week or adding a Wrangell-run homeschooling option. Assembly members proposed trying to share an IT professional between the borough and district, though that would be a huge job. Mayor Patty Gilbert even suggested that the borough could give the district a price break on borough-run electricity.

Meanwhile, the district is cutting everything it can. Next year’s proposed student travel budget to get athletes to games and musicians and artists to festivals is slashed by 20% ($17,200).

And school staff are doing everything they can to save money, down to replacing lightbulbs. “It may not seem like much,” School Board President David Wilson said, “But when you’ve got as many lights as we’ve got, changing them all out to LED is a savings.”

There are major maintenance projects to fund at the schools as well. 

The fire alarm and elevators at the middle and high schools are in desperate need of repair or replacement – those projects are scheduled to happen this summer. There’s an environmentally unsafe diesel storage tank at the high school that needs to be replaced.  

Borough voters approved a $3.5 million bond last October, which Wrangell hopes to use to leverage an additional $6.5 million of state grant funding for structural repairs to all its schools. 

And that caused some heartburn for assembly member Jim DeBord. 

“One of my fears with this, if we don’t make a decision soon,” DeBord said, “Is that we pay a couple hundred thousand, 300-, 400,000 to fix the elementary school and then we shutter it two or three or four years from now because we’re forced into that versus it being a decision. And then we’ve kind of done a disservice to the community as a whole because we spent a ton of money and then we mothball the place. I get that there’s no good answer. But if we could get ahead of it rather than being forced to make the decision, that’s my fear.”

Whatever the district decides will involve a lot of community input, said Mayor Patty Gilbert. 

“Anybody who lived through the moving sixth grade over to middle school,” Gilberd pointed out, “[Knows] that took a lot of community notice and meetings and so forth.”

School Board President Wilson agreed. Plus, he said, the district needs to do some research. What if the incoming elementary class sizes balloon? 

“Do we consolidate schools now and then in five years from now, say, ‘We don’t have the room, we’ve got to go back to the other building again’?” Wilson asked, continuing: “Then we’re in a big fix there. So I think we need to gather some data: how many students are coming in for the next three or four years, compared to how many students are going out?”

School board and assembly members and parents alike say it’s a Catch-22. When the district can’t offer Advanced Placement classes or find the approximately $112,000 to hire an art teacher – art is currently taught by the music teacher – it pushes students and families to look at homeschooling, boarding schools like Mt. Edgecumbe in Sitka, or moving out of the community altogether. 

Teacher and parent Mikki Angerman said the situation is heart-rending.

“Families want to move here knowing that they’re going to have their kids in a school that’s going to prepare them for what’s next,” she said, “And if we can’t do that, then they’re going to look for a different place to go.”

“When you’re talking about ‘There’s no perfect answer,’” Angerman continued. “Consolidating schools is not a perfect answer. But I don’t want to see us also lose more programs. So which are you going to pick… which is a disgusting place for us to have to be. I wish we could do better for our kids.”

Whether the Wrangell district ultimately decides to consolidate its schools, it won’t happen this next school year. But community leadership agrees that all possible solutions to the district’s budget woes should remain on the table – at least for now. 

Wrangell’s school board is set to adopt a budget for the coming year (FY24) on Monday, March 20 at 6:30 p.m. The school board meeting will be held over Zoom and is open to the public. 

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell’s school board is hoping for community feedback on its budget for the coming year, which proposes spending just over $53,000 in savings to cover a projected budget gap.

Wrangell schools’ Business Manager Tammy Stromberg, who oversees the budget, says that using the district’s reserves isn’t a sustainable model but there’s not much more the school district can cut. Ninety percent of the budget goes to paying teachers and maintaining the buildings. 

“We have struggled to keep our spending within our budget,” Stromberg told board members at a meeting February 20. “We’re coming close every year. We cut positions last year, so we’ve done that. The only real difference occurring in FY23 (which ends in June) is that the business office accounting clerk went from full-time to part-time, so that decreased insurance costs. Now we’re going to contracted services. But at some point, there will be an end to where you can cut those other pieces to take care of that inflationary, decreasing funding.” 

Wrangell’s school district plans to move to contracted business services because Stromberg is leaving her position. They’ll pay Washington-based K12 Business Services at least $7,500 per month to cover district financial matters. 

The district’s draft FY24 budget is just over $5 million. That’s about $300,000 less than the current fiscal year. It assumes a slight drop in local funding of around $1.6 million – that’s money from borough taxes and a passthrough of federal aid to former logging communities. 

One major funding source that could change the trajectory of Wrangell Public Schools’ budget is a potential increase to the Base Student Allocation, or the amount of money the State of Alaska pays out to districts based on the amount of students enrolled. There hasn’t been an increase since 2016, but in that time, inflation has jumped around 20%. That means the district has been doing the same, with 20% less funding. 

“When […] 90% of your budget is taken up with maintenance and operations and instructions, and then you have a 20% decrease because you didn’t get an inflationary increase on your foundation funding, it starts to cause a squeeze. And that’s what has happened to us,” Stromberg said, “So anything we can do to support the Base Student Allocation really helps.”

One proposal – state Senate Bill 52 – would raise the BSA by $1,000. But even that increase wouldn’t entirely make up for inflation in the last five years. In the state house, Ketchikan independent Rep. Dan Ortiz, who represents Wrangell and other southern Southeast communities, has proposed an increase of $1,250 – just over 21%.

Stromberg says that it’s difficult to put together a budget while major funding pieces like the BSA are up in the air, but it’s also standard when running schools. 

“That’s the nature of school business, we always have to spend our money before we really know how much we get,” Stromberg explained: “Like what we’re doing at this point right now is we’re already signing contracts to teachers to make sure we have teaching staff next year, because we know what a minimum we have to teach kids. We’re not sure how many kids and even after we have counted the kids and turn them into the state, we’re not sure those numbers are going to stick because we have to wait for the department to reconcile them across the state.”

In the meantime, the district is looking for feedback and ideas from the Wrangell community about the proposed budget for next year. District administration has also held a meeting with students about what they want to see in next year’s budget.

And the school board will hold a hearing on the FY24 budget over Zoom on February 27 at 6:30 p.m. to solicit input from the Wrangell public, and encourages community members to attend. 

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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Wrangell’s school district is working to transition its COVID-19 mitigation policy to one more generally focused on keeping illnesses out of schools. Superintendent Bill Burr went through policy changes with school board members at a January 16 meeting. 

“We want to protect our students from every illness, not just COVID-specific,” Burr explained. He says the district is still focused on keeping sickness out of schools – but it’s a new phase of the pandemic. 

One of the biggest changes was actually implemented last month, Burr says, but he highlighted the policy change again Monday: Wrangell student-athletes are no longer required to test before traveling to other communities for games. 

“We’re encouraging testing before travel,” Burr said, adding: “The CDC still recommends group travel. But we have gotten a good testing program. It is optional, we do have tests, and we still encourage people [to test].”

The schools’ revised mitigation plan still encourages masking when recovering from illnesses like COVID. 

The CDC recommends that anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 isolate for at least five days. If they’ve been fever-free for 24 hours, they can return to work or school but should wear a mask for the next five days. Health officials say anyone with the flu should stay home for 3 to 4 days after symptoms develop, or until 24 hours after their last fever, whichever comes later.

“[Masking when showing symptoms] is highly encouraged,” Burr explained, “And this doesn’t apply just to COVID symptoms. We do have a number of illnesses that have gone around. It’s not a requirement, but I just wanted to clarify that it’s still encouraged for the sake of our staff and other students.”

Masking in schools has been controversial throughout the pandemic. District officials pointed to mask rules as a factor in the major enrollment drop Wrangell saw during the 2020-2021 school year. 

Get in touch with KSTK at news@kstk.org or (907) 874-2345.

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