2024 Juneau Municipal Election
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?
- 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
I foresee that the school district will have to consolidate some more, provided that the state funding stays the same. If it’s continued flat funding, all the expenses are increasing every year. So if that’s going to be the case again, there’s going to be another way to mitigate that would be consolidation. And I believe it’ll be at the other end of the spectrum, which would be at the elementary level. And we’re looking for areas where there are multiple geographic consolidations, so it’d most likely be in the Valley area is what I would predict.
Jenny Thomas
Candidate for School Board
I think we’re looking at definitely some consolidation in the future, and I think we should start tackling that now. In September [2023], the city and the school district had somebody reevaluate a study that was done in 2017 and they had a series of suggestions. And so I think that that should start to be evaluated right now with what currently has been done because they did an in-depth facility study. So they should look and say, ‘OK, what have we’ve done now, what’s our best way to move forward with as least impact to neighborhood schools as possible?’ And evaluating what schools offer. There are elementary schools that have special classrooms where kids with special needs, so we need to take that into effect, you know. What it’s going to do for the overcrowding, what’s our teacher stuff going to do? So it’s more than just building consolidation. They need to do a little bit more creative thinking for other programs. Maybe there could be some shared services as well.
Michele Stuart Morgan
Candidate for School Board
I don’t have a crystal ball for that one. Hopefully, we can go forward and address some of those things now, so that if it does happen, they won’t be a surprise. I think that’s about looking forward. I know, since I was a kid, school districts always had money crunches. I remember doing bake sales as a kid, you know, with my mom, my grandmother. So I think just being more informed, looking at things so that we don’t get that big surprise. And we can get more community feedback, and we can get things ironed out a little quicker than we did this time.
Will Muldoon
Candidate for School Board
Necessary is probably the word doing the biggest lift there, and I would say in the immediate term, hopefully not. You know, I am extremely concerned with the Alaska administrative code changes that could be taking effect as early as next March, a week before we pass our budget. And so if we need to find funding for high school activities, we’re going to have to make changes, and I don’t know what that would look like. You know, we are doing our best, but as far as the best way to tackle that, I think it’s fully bringing our budget software online and having a relational database model for all finances and dollars in and dollars out, and then modeling that data for timely and accurate reports and a public-facing dashboard. And that’s, as the Finance Chair, that’s my current workload. That’s my primary task.
Jeff Redmond
Candidate for School Board
As we shut down buildings that’s also going to affect future funding, and so it’s kind of a self-fulfilling issue. So if it does need to continue, then again, just looking ahead more than 30 days would be like a kind of a basic first step. However, seeking alternate funding is a big one for me, and I understand that there are some constraints on that, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no way to explore that, even if we have to go talk to some government or somehow we need to be able to pay to teach our kids as a culture. So I think there’s something that can be done.
Elizabeth (Ebett) Siddon
Candidate for School Board
I think if the declining trend in enrollment continues, we will likely be having a conversation about, or I should say, continuing the conversation we started this year around the potential need to close an elementary school. Thankfully, that process, we started that conversation a bit through last year’s process, so we have a little bit of information around some buildings that have particular facilities that wouldn’t be easy to replicate in other buildings. So it’s a little bit easier to know exactly where we might start that conversation.