2024 Juneau Municipal Election
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?
- 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’m prior Navy and anytime we’re in the Navy, there’s a saying that there’s always room for improvement. So be that as it may, I do think there’s always room for improvement, including reading and math scores can be improved. And students do have a two-pronged challenge here. They have to grapple with the school environment shift, and then also our hopes for them to bring up scores. I think the district can help our students by ensuring that we’re mitigating turnover for teachers. Teachers build relationships with students, and students learn in relationships. So ensuring that our students have the same teachers coming back year after year, especially in reading and math, will be helpful. And this is a negotiation year, so the goal is to keep our staff here.
Jenny Thomas
Candidate for School Board
Student achievement can always be improved, I believe. I don’t know what it was ranked in the middle schools or the elementary schools, because my kids aren’t in there, but Thunder Mountain and JD[HS] placed fourth and fifth in the state. So I mean, they were on a good track.
The major shifts in the school environment is I’m afraid it’s going to be harmful to our test scores, simply for the fact of the kids being stressed. A lot of kids I know have empty periods, including freshmen, so there’s a lot that goes into that, but I also believe that reading and math scores are not the end all be all of how successful a school district is.
Michele Stuart Morgan
Candidate for School Board
Well, they just published some of the reads [Alaska Reads Act] data, and some of our schools did really well. Other schools, they’re still kind of struggling. We’re still getting through COVID. I taught reading at Gastineau elementary school [Sayéik: Gastineau Community School], during COVID, so I know that there’s still a little whiplash from that happening.
Also getting our students used to coming back into the classroom. You’re like, ‘Well, that was three years ago,’ it’s still happening. It takes a lot to get those things ironed out. I think that our teachers, they do a great job. I know the reads [Alaska Reads Act] program, I’ve done some of that testing with some of the students, and that’s at least showing us what’s happening. And, knowing what’s happening would allow us to address it later on and I think that’s a good program to keep in our schools.
Will Muldoon
Candidate for School Board
This is again a really tricky one to get answered succinctly, but we just received the assessment results, and we’ve seen improvements in some areas to pre-COVID levels. We’ve seen some other areas where we’re struggling. And you know, unfortunately, there isn’t just one reductive quotient that we could say ‘We are at a B and we should be at an A,’ or ‘We’re at an A, and that’s good enough for now.’ I think that we’ve seen these last few years where some areas were doing better than others, and some buildings are doing better than others. And my primary focus is to understand what causes those differences, and how can we minimize them and lift all students and all buildings.
Jeff Redmond
Candidate for School Board
So this brings up a big one for me, that as we get into all the politics and the back and forth about what we did wrong and our anger at some of the people, you know, I have concerns about some of the people running right now, and that they’re coming in with anger, and that’s just not going to be a cohesive group to move forward. So keeping the students first is the big one. It is like we’re getting lost in all the details, but remembering that we’re actually all here to serve the kids and educate our children. So, are we doing well enough? Now, I would always say no – there’s always something that we can do better. However, we are where we are, and I’m excited to move forward.
Elizabeth (Ebett) Siddon
Candidate for School Board
This is a topic, in my time on the board, I’ve continuously served on the program evaluation committee, so we learn a lot about the different academic programs across the district. And we look as a full board at achievement indicators of success every year. That’s the backbone to how we fund and put our dollars where we want them to be for achievement. And we have a program called the multi-tier systems of support in our elementary schools. And we’ve sort of leaned into that again after COVID trying to help students. The goal, if students are behind, make more than one year of academic growth in a year, and those sort of layered tiers of support are one way that we address that.