The Kenai Peninsula Borough met with community members earlier this month to discuss what to do with the now vacant Tustumena Elementary School building in Kasilof. School board members voted to close the school earlier this year.
Student artwork still hung on the wall in a room at Tustumena Elementary School that was packed with people. Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche stood at the front of the room and explained what happens now that the school is shutting its doors.
“We're having these discussions with those communities just to see what kind of community support uses we might be able to provide, and that's what we're at now,” he said.
Tustumena is one of four schools closed by the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Board of Education earlier this year to save money. The K-6 school serves Kasilof, about 15 miles south of Soldotna. The district plans to bus former Tustumena students to schools in Soldotna or Ninilchik. The future of the roughly 47,000-square foot building is murkier.
The Kenai Peninsula Borough owns all school district buildings. So when the district has a building it’s no longer using, the facility is typically handed back over to the borough. That’s what happened in Nikolaevsk, the Russian Old Believer village east of Anchor Point. The school board closed the community’s K-12 school last year and gave the building back to the borough.
But the building is on track to reopen as a charter school this fall. The borough assembly voted 7-2 last week to sell the building to a nonprofit organization that serves as the fundraising arm of the new Nikolaevsk Charter School. An assembly member moved to reconsider the vote at the group’s upcoming meeting.
Assembly members said the sale shouldn’t be considered a precedent for other shuttered schools. But some in Kasilof say it’s what they want for Tustumena.
“Nikolaevsk got a pretty sweet deal from you guys on a charter school,” said one attendee. “Are you willing to offer that for this community?”
Micciche said it’d be tough, and that Nikolaevsk’s remote location uniquely limits the school building’s potential use.
Waynette Coleman was in the audience. She’s from Ninilchik and suggested the Alaska Legislature use vacant schools to conduct state business in more communities.
“It has all of the rooms, it has the restrooms, it has the Wi-Fi, it has everything connected, but actually get our legislators up here near us, where we could get to them on a road system,” she said.
Tim Brand is a Tustumena Elementary alum and served as vice president of the school’s parent teacher organization for seven years. He has two school-age children who don’t know where they’re going to school in August since the board closed Tustumena. But he said he’s leaning toward home-school.
“I think that they jumped the gun on closing schools to save a couple dollars instead of having a solid plan in place,” he said.
Even when school isn’t in session, Brand said the school is an important community hub for Kasilof’s youth. He’s afraid that will change if the building is sold to an entity that doesn’t share that priority.
“If I can't turn it into a school, I'd like to see the opportunity for charter schools, maybe something with a Title I program,” he said. “The kids that are in this community still need to be able to gather together and have something in their community.”
Before it closed, Tustumena was one of the district’s 24 Title I schools. That means more than 40% of the school’s estimated 136 students were considered economically disadvantaged. The community also took a hit last summer, when the school lost its after-school Boys and Girls Club program due to a loss of federal funding.
State law disincentivizes school districts from reopening a school it closed due to enrollment for at least four years. Micciche, the borough mayor, says it’s possible for a school to reopen sooner if the district agrees to repay the state for financial assistance it accepted to offset the budget impacts of closing a school.
Seward Middle School, Sterling Elementary and River City Academy all also shut their doors this summer. It’s not clear what’s happening with those facilities either.
