2024 Juneau Municipal Election
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the Juneau School District right now?
- What makes you a good candidate for the Juneau Assembly?
- The city is asking voters to approve adding nearly $23 million to the city’s debt for public health and safety improvements. What are your thoughts on the two ballot initiatives?
- Do you think the Ship-Free Saturday ballot initiative will benefit Juneau residents? Why or why not? If so, how?
- Juneau has now experienced record-breaking glacial outburst flooding events two years in a row. What role should the city play in mitigating damage to residential property in the future?
- The city is moving forward with a redevelopment plan for the Telephone Hill neighborhood in the coming years. How should the Assembly balance the need for more affordable housing downtown with the costs the city may have to shoulder to get those requirements in place?
- What do you think are the most important issues facing Juneau right now?
- School Board
- What makes you a good candidate for the Juneau school board?
- What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the Juneau School District right now?
- Last year, the district had to solve an abrupt multimillion-dollar deficit in a matter of months. Not all residents were happy with the decisions made and it prompted a recall effort this election for two of its current members. Moving forward, what role does each school board member play in ensuring that the district remains on firm financial footing?
- The school board voted to consolidate Juneau’s high schools and middle schools this past winter. And, with the uncertainty about education funding in the state and the district’s declining enrollment, do you think more school consolidation will be necessary in the future? If so, how will you tackle that situation?
- With hundreds of more students at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé this year, issues with the lack of parking have been a hot topic. What more could the district be doing to mitigate that?
- Is student achievement where it should be in Juneau? What can the district do to improve reading and math scores as students grapple with major shifts in their school environments?
School Board
Amber Frommherz
Candidate for School Board
The biggest challenge facing Juneau School District right now is the same challenge, the biggest challenge that all Alaska public schools are facing right now – it’s the lack of state funding and the long-term lack of state funding. Underfunding public education is a challenge for the entire state, and I think this coming school year will be another challenging year for the school board, with an administration at the governor’s office just being very unpredictable, but with a tendency and a pattern of lack of support financially for the school and predictable support for the school district.
Jenny Thomas
Candidate for School Board
I think the biggest challenge is going to be how we navigate this next year and the following years due to the consolidation. And, how we make that work best for our students, our families, the staff, especially with the budget still not quite where we want it to be. Obviously, the BSA [Base Student Allocation] flat funding. You know, there’s a lot of things coming up in the budget that’s going to make a lot of challenges in providing good education to all of our students.
Michele Stuart Morgan
Candidate for School Board
That’s the million-dollar question, or however millions it is. Probably the budget and getting the information through to the community. Also, our community shrinking, older people are staying, and younger people are moving. So it’s all connected – the school district, with housing, with everything else that’s going on. But I think right now, as we all can say, is the budget and then all the changes that that’s going to cause that’s going to trickle down to your commute on how long it takes you to get your kid to school in the morning.
Will Muldoon
Candidate for School Board
So number one is clearly going to be finances. You know, this year is probably the hardest the district has faced. But as we were dealing with that, we were also made aware the first week of December in 2023 that the State Department of Education is looking into Alaska administrative code changes regarding the way we fund activities, RALLY, transportation and all supplemental non-instructional funding. And that, combined with our shared services agreement, which may also be impacted, could see us having to make adjustments similar in size and scale to the ones we just went through. So that is the number one issue that keeps me up and keeps me, takes up my time.
Jeff Redmond
Candidate for School Board
Basically, in my mind, it’s just the recent turmoil. There’s a couple of angles on it, like there’s kind of just the reality of declining student enrollment. However, there are also ways that we can mitigate some of that, but I think a bigger challenge is the way that it has been handled recently. A big theme for me is just being able to look ahead quite a bit more. I feel like they were put in a bad position. And, on that date, when they had exactly four weeks to figure something out, they probably did the best that they could do, but I feel like there’s no reason they should have got to that point without being able to look ahead a little bit further. So I think some of these are our biggest challenges right now.
Elizabeth (Ebett) Siddon
Candidate for School Board
The biggest challenge right now, I think, is settling out from the reconfiguration that the district went through last year. And with that comes, I also think, rebuilding trust in the board and the district and the community. Like, among all of the stakeholders, we are now in this new configuration. There are certainly going to be sort of pressure points we find as the dust settles around that, and we’ll continue to find solutions to those. But at the bigger level, I think it’s rebuilding the trust and the communication with the community.