The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s working budget draft closes four schools, totally eliminates library employees and increases student activity fees, among other things. The cuts are being proposed as school board members trying to reconcile a roughly $8.5 million forecast budget shortfall, and come as community members fervently advocate to keep their programs.
There weren’t many people who gave school board members their thoughts on budget cuts through the district’s gamified software this year. But Superintendent Clayton Holland says one priority stood out among the feedback they did receive.
“Most definitively regarding PTR in the classrooms was the biggest, ‘Please don't impact this,’ with comments coming in about other options, including school consolidation,” he said.
PTR refers to the pupil-teacher-ratio, or the number of students for each teacher. In response to the feedback, the board’s working budget draft keeps that rate status quo.
The board is also proposing to close Seward Middle School, Tustumena Elementary School in Kasilof, Sterling Elementary School and River City Academy in Soldotna.
Shuttering those programs is expected to save the district around $2 million the first year after the closure. But those savings will diminish over time. That’s because state law simultaneously rewards multiple small schools over a few consolidated ones and attempts to smooth out funding levels after abrupt changes.
Holland says it seems like closing schools is an inevitability this year.
“There's not a way to keep operating schools with decreasing enrollment everywhere across the district without making – we have to make changes,” he said. “No, I don't see a way out without consolidation.”
In recent years, proposals to close school buildings have been unpopular. Families in the Russian Old Believer Village of Nikolaevsk unsuccessfully pleaded with the district to keep their school open. And Sterling Elementary took to the streets to protest the potential loss of their school, which they said came out of nowhere.
Some school board members worried this year’s draft budget still doesn’t give schools enough time to prepare for a possible closure. But Finance Committee Chair Sarah Douthit says it’s always going to be a tough topic.
“There’s never going to be enough time to consolidate a building,” she said. “It’s just such a difficult conversation for parents.”
During Monday’s school board meeting, half of the audience was a sea of jade, Tustumena Elementary’s school color. A few attendees held up signs that said things like, “Keep Tustumena Open!” and “Proven Success at Tustumena.”
Ross Fay’s son is in kindergarten at Tustumena this year. He says closing the school would require his son to take a school bus 50 miles away to the K-12 school in Ninilchik. On snowy days, he says that could keep his son on a school bus for multiple hours a day, which he doesn’t want.
“If Tustumena is closed, my child will not be going to another school in the school district,” Fay said. “We will do something else.”
In 2023, the district estimated there were around 2,500 school-aged children living on the Kenai Peninsula who were home-schooled. Less than half of those were enrolled in Connections, the school district’s home-school program, according to the district.
River City Academy ninth grader Talitha Wilcox is a member of the student council and asked board members to keep her school open.
“Every other school I’ve gone to, I’ve felt really lonely and I haven’t been able to connect with people,” she said. “But I’ve never had that problem at RCA.”
But closing schools is far from the only way the district is proposing to save money.
The same draft budget also totally eliminates library staff and increases middle and high school activity fees. And it halves funding for the district’s middle college program, for middle school reading tutors and for tutors who help students learn English as a second language.
Tamra Wear is the librarian at Soldotna High School, the largest district school. Her position is one that’d be cut under the budget scenario favored by the board. Holland, the superintendent, says eliminating library and library aide positions doesn’t necessarily mean school libraries would close. Wear disagrees.
“That's just semantics,” she said. “Libraries are like these, these living organisms that move and change with the student body. We're just constantly – it's like a flow and so when you don't have any staffing, that flow stops.”
For now, the district’s proposed budget is just that – a proposal. The board has until May to submit a balanced budget to the borough assembly, which hasn’t yet decided how much money it will give the district this year.
The district has previously asked for the maximum funding allowable under state law. But the draft budget assumes the district will get the same amount of money it got from the borough last year, instead.
Borough Mayor Peter Micciche has said he favors an inflationary bump to what he proposed last year. The difference between the maximum allowable and Micciche’s proposal is around $9.6 million – enough to cover the projected deficit.
Speaking to local business leaders at a joint Kenai-Soldotna chamber of commerce luncheon Wednesday, Micciche reiterated his longtime assertion that education funding is flawed at the state level. He favors annually adjusting school funding to Anchorage’s consumer price index, or CPI. He says the borough cannot afford to keep picking up the state’s slack.
“It is a difference between affordable on a curve that has some semblance to CPI, and funding at a point where we double our taxes in nine years,” he said.
The borough and school district will meet in the coming weeks to hash out differences between their proposals. Borough assembly members must pass a balanced spending plan for the borough, including school funding, by the end of June.
