A group of Kenai Peninsula residents wants to recall the peninsula’s nine school board members. The petitioners say board members should have done more to push back on a health clinic that was proposed for the high school in Nikiski. But plans for the clinic were never formalized and petitioners have hit some road bumps.
Jeanne Reveal is spearheading the recall effort. She ran unsuccessfully for the school board’s Kenai seat last year. So far, she’s submitted the names of three of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s nine board members, according to copies of the petitions obtained by KDLL via a public records request.
“We had all nine of them done in just a few couple weeks,” Reveal said. “So people are excited, and we have a lot of people who are getting ready to run for office, too.”
The Kenai Peninsula Borough clerk’s office, which runs borough elections, rejected Reveal’s petitions. The clerk’s office said, among other things, that Reveal’s explanation of the grounds for recall centered on action by Superintendent Clayton Holland as opposed to the board. Holland isn’t an elected official, and therefore isn’t eligible for recall.
Holland says his discussions with Central Peninsula Hospital about a student clinic at Nikiski Middle/High School never came of anything.
“It would have been interesting at some places to see how that could have worked,” he said.
He says he learned about the clinic proposal the same way everyone else did – the hospital newsletter. Pushback from some community members was swift. Concerns ranged from parental rights to the scope of services provided.
“Of course, we would never do anything with a kid without parental consent,” he said. “And so that's just part of that kind of nonsense that's put out there, but no, so it never even happened.”
Bruce Richards is Central Peninsula Hospital’s external affairs director. He says the clinic proposal was tied to a grant opportunity that targeted underserved communities.
“The hope of it was to prevent people from having to travel all the way out from Nikiski, all the way into our existing urgent care in Kenai, or all the way to Soldotna to an emergency room,” he said.
Richards says the clinic would have functioned like an urgent care – for say, a bashed finger, or sore throat. Unlike a traditional school nurse’s office, a student would have been able to connect with a hospital physician via telehealth.
But he says it was an easy idea to shelve once it was clear the community wasn’t interested.
“If people didn't want it, then we were of the opinion, okay, well, we won't provide it,” he said. “You know, nobody wants to go someplace where you're not wanted and that was kind of how it turned out. And so we just decided to move on.”
Even though the clinic never got off the ground, Reveal is eyeing school board members for accountability. She says they should have spoken up and against the talks as they were happening.
“If you know something's wrong, and you see something's wrong, and you don't say, ‘I don't support that,’ or ‘I do support that’ – there was no vote,” she said. “There was no process to put that in front of the people.”
Three school board members are already up for reelection this fall, so they can’t be recalled. And until she successfully gets the first round of petitions submitted, Reveal says she’s holding off on filing the other three.
Reveal says she’s reworking the rejected petitions and plans to resubmit them. As of Monday, the borough clerk’s office said it hadn’t received those resubmissions yet. The next borough election is Oct. 7.
