The superintendent of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District says school board members should vote down a proposed elementary charter school in Soldotna.
During a board work session Monday, Clayton Holland said his recommendation is based on “ … no facility, the concerns with the budget, a number of other maybe smaller issues, but the uncertainty of transportation — all of that, enrollment, are all reasons not to do that.”
It’s been less than a month since the school board group tasked with charter school oversight got its first look at the proposed Soldotna Elementary Charter School. The idea comes from a group of current Soldotna Elementary School parents and teachers in response to the planned consolidation of Soldotna-area schools. That group is headed by Ben Cheah.
“Our mission is to ensure that every student grows, achieves and leaves with the foundation skills needed to succeed in their next stage of education and life,” he said. “Our approach is grounded in strong core academics and reinforced by supportive and consistent school culture.”
As proposed, organizers envision opening a K-6 charter in the building currently occupied by Soldotna Elementary School and Soldotna Montessori Charter School. The school district and Kenai Peninsula Borough plan to move those schools to other buildings.
Since first going before the board committee, charter school organizers have reworked their proposal to reflect feedback. The committee met with organizers twice before sending the charter to the full school board. During the work session, district leadership brought in various department heads to highlight some of its concerns.
The district’s finance director estimates the proposed charter budget is $1.1 million short of what it will actually cost to run the school. The director of planning and operations said the school would further strain limited school bus routes. And the director of student support services said the group will need more teachers to support students with intensive needs.
Multiple school board members said they’re concerned about those things, too. And several referenced ongoing uncertainty about what the final configuration of Soldotna-area schools will look like. That’s as the Kenai Peninsula Borough works to implement a school maintenance bond and students from outlying communities relocate to Soldotna amid school closures.
But Kaiti Syverson, another organizer, says that’s exactly what the proposers are concerned about.
“The consolidation is the concern,” she said. “That’s what the families want to have addressed. They’ve tried to talk. They have not been heard. And that is kind of how all this started.”
As of Tuesday, the school district and the Kenai Peninsula Borough plan to demolish part of the existing Soldotna Elementary School, turn the currently vacant Soldotna Prep School into a K-3 school and make Redoubt Elementary a 4-6 school.
As passed by voters, the school maintenance bond would have reconstructed Soldotna Elementary and relocated district administration and other programs to the prep school. Then the borough proposed combining Soldotna and Redoubt elementaries into the prep school. After the board closed Sterling and Tustumena elementaries, some of those students began attending Soldotna schools, prompting concerns about overcrowding in a single building.
Multiple board members said Monday they share the district’s concerns about a charter elementary school in Soldotna.
“There’s just a lot of moving pieces in this,” said Sarah Douthit. “There are definitely a lot of questions and I think some of them have been answered today, but a lot of them may be not fully answered.”
And when it comes to the million-dollar budget discrepancy, organizers say they don’t have a good answer.
“I don’t know if there is any path forward without additional support from the district to make that happen,” Cheah said. “So I guess that’s, you know, I don’t think I have anything else to say about that.”
The Soldotna charter proposal isn’t the first to hit a wall with the school board committee. School board members rejected a charter school proposal in the Russian Old Believer community of Nikolaevsk for years before it got final approval. And Kenai’s Aurora Borealis Charter School got an initial “no” on a proposed high school program before getting a scaled-back version approved.
The board won’t officially vote the charter up or down until next week. But organizers aren’t able to make changes to the charter before then. Other deadlines don’t allow the board to postpone a decision if the school wants to open next year. That means organizers would need to wait until fall of 2027 to bring a new proposal forward.
