By Jake Dye

Special to the Homer Independent Press


Under a draft budget proposal advanced by the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s Board of Education on Tuesday, at least four schools will be closed next year, in addition to deep cuts to staff and programming. That proposal does not include closing Paul Banks Elementary School in Homer, at least for the 2026-27 school year.

The district has been grappling with a projected $8.5 million deficit for the coming fiscal year — which starts on July 1. That deficit comes from a status quo budget from the current year, which already featured cuts to staff and programming and the closure of one school to account for last year’s projected $17 million deficit. Though the Alaska Legislature secured a permanent increase in per-student funding last year, district leadership say state funding still falls far short of inflation, and the district’s financial woes are compounded by declining attendance. 

A budget scenario advanced during a work session of the board’s finance committee on Tuesday calls for flat funding from the state and the Kenai Peninsula Borough. The latter would require the borough assembly to increase the level of funding to the district, by roughly $3 million, from the amount proposed by Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche. 

The budget proposal would close Seward Middle School, Sterling Elementary School, Tustumena Elementary School and River City Academy. 

Closure of Paul Banks Elementary School, which had been raised as a possibility last month, isn’t included as of this week, because of a lease to Fireweed Academy for building space to West Homer Elementary School that district leadership described as a “prohibitive factor.” While it isn’t set to be closed now, Board President Jason Tauriainen said he would want to see the school included if a path could be found to get around the lease issue.

“Paul Banks would still have an elementary school five minutes away,” Tauriainen said. “Where the other schools have more distance, there’s going to be more bus driving with Tustumena and Sterling.”

All of the school district’s pools are set for closure under the budget proposal. Also set to be eliminated are library aides, distance education staff, middle school reading staff and a communications specialist position added to district office this year but never filled.

The budget also describes reductions to programmatic staffing, custodian work days and library staffing beyond the aide elimination. There will be less support for students who are learning English as a second language, cuts to the Kenai Peninsula Middle College, and less money for curriculum, school supplies, travel and transportation.

Student fees for extracurricular athletics and academics will be increased to generate around $1 million to fund coaching stipends for those programs, which will no longer be funded by the district. 

The budget proposal does not include any increases to the pupil-to-teacher ratio in district schools. That ratio defines general staffing in each building, but doesn’t necessarily align to the number of students in a classroom. A PTR increase last year slashed more than $2 million in teacher salaries and benefits. Though no increases are proposed for the current year, the school board on Monday heard a presentation on reform for its PTR system from Human Resources Director Nate Crabtree, with Tauriainen saying they may explore changes “in a time when we’re not dealing with so many other things that need to be handled immediately.”

Preventing increases to the PTR, KPBSD Superintendent Clayton Holland said Monday, is why so many school closures are planned for the coming year.

“Consolidation does not occur: district wide PTR increases and larger class sizes across schools, further program reductions, fewer electives and opportunities for our students,” he said. “It’ll impact every community and changes will be felt in every building.”

Tim Daugharty, who represents Homer on the board, said Monday that he supported the plan to close Seward Middle, Tustumena, Sterling and RCA this year.

“It tears all of us up to say it, those four should probably go this year,” he said. “I think the second year we have to do Paul Banks, Nikiski Middle-High School. We have to serve notice, probably before we leave here today, the communities need to get ready to do that.”

“We have to act,” Daugharty said.

The board plans to vote to approve the budget at their next meeting on April 6.

In recent years, the district has been able to reverse some cuts as funding increases came late in the process — like last year’s increase in state funding that was secured after the current fiscal year had already begun and the budget had already been implemented. Sarah Douthit, who represents Kenai on the board, called for school closures to be off the table for reversing later.

“It’s too volatile for students and staff to not be certain whether or not their school is going to close or not,” she said. “I think if we’re going to make school consolidation decisions, that we’re going to make them regardless of the level of funding that we receive from the borough.”

Much of the discussion on Tuesday centered on the proposed elimination of library aides from district schools. Despite the term “aide” in their title, many library aides are the only library staff in their schools, and Holland said that schools would need to “get creative” if they wanted to keep their libraries operating without library aides.

Mica Van Buskirk, who represents the east peninsula, said that eliminating library aides would be “catastrophic for our students and our schools.” She championed a series of alternate cuts to keep that line item from the proposed budget — like closing theaters, slashing tech spending and closing Nikiski Middle/High School — unsuccessfully. Cutting the 21 library aides from the district would save more than $700,000 according to the reduction proposal.

The Tuesday work session where the board advanced the budget proposal followed a full meeting of the board on Monday where dozens of students, staff and teachers voiced opposition to school closures and programming cuts. 

Many yellow cards were held aloft with messages including “Don’t close our community’s home,” “Proven success at Tustumena” and “Tustumena: Where every child is known.”

Supporters of Tustumena, an elementary school in Kasilof with an enrollment of 115 students as of this week, represented the largest cohort of testifiers on Monday, but the board also heard pleas to preserve River City Academy and and McNeil Canyon School — the latter of which was raised as a possibility for closure during a board discussion, but not included in any of the budget scenarios considered this week.  

Some of the Tustumena parents who spoke highlighted the amount of time their children would spend traveling north to Soldotna and back every day. One father said that if Tustumena were closed his child would not be commuting to another school in the district — “we will do something else.”

Collette Henderson said she felt her community was being punished for decisions that they haven’t made; Tustumena’s declining enrollment is cited as reason to close the school, but cuts to programming have discouraged families from enrolling. 

Amanda DeBoer said the small town feel of Kasilof is part of what attracted her family to invest their lives in the school.

“We’re out there for a reason,” she said. “We don’t want to be in the city. We don’t want the larger class sizes.”

Many who spoke for Tustumena also spotlighted the way the smaller school is able to provide unique service to students with greater needs. Some worried their children would not get the support they need at a larger school in Soldotna.

Similarly, people who spoke for River City Academy, an alternative school currently housed within Skyview Middle School with a population of 58, described the school as an important option for students who need programming unavailable in a standard high school.

Lisa Bass said River City Academy is a school “that is working, changing lives and serving students who are not well served anywhere else.”

River City Academy, Kylie Wilcox said, provides flexibility and individualized learning for students like her own — “choosing to close a program like RCA will only serve to push more kids out of KPBSD and into private or homeschool options.”

The KPBSD Board of Education will next meet on April 6, in Homer. A recording of this week’s meeting and work sessions will be made available at the district’s BoardDocs website.