By Jake Dye

Special to the Homer Independent Press


Homer’s public pool will be defunded, four schools in other towns will be closed, librarians will be eliminated and teachers will lose their jobs under a budget adopted Monday by the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Board of Education.

The budget could still change depending on funding decisions elsewhere. The school board is assuming flat funding from the state and a cutback in local support proposed by Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche.

But some of the cuts are related more to policy than to funding shortages. The proposed closure of school pools is meant to shift funding responsibility to local communities, while the school closures are coming in the face of changing demographics and declining enrollments.

The board heard hours of testimony at a meeting in Homer that stretched to midnight, ultimately voting to approve a budget that cuts nearly $3 million in teacher salaries and benefits, closes all the school district’s pools, eliminates all library staff and makes other deep cuts to staff and programs, including many elective classes. The board also held votes to close Seward Middle School, Tustumena  Elementary School, Sterling Elementary School and River City Academy — an alternative school housed within Skyview Middle School. 

Closure of the four schools — which altogether have an enrollment of roughly 380 students — is projected to save the district around $2 million next year. Closing the elementary schools means that there will be no school in Sterling or Kasilof. Children at those schools now face what district leadership estimate could be up to hour-long bus rides in each direction as they commute to Soldotna for school.

Ben Bohart of Seward was the lone speaker on behalf of Seward Middle School. He said that the cuts to schools in Seward and other cities on the peninsula will be damaging to communities, but pointed to the state’s failure to invest in education as the root of the current struggle.

“Until Alaskans are ready to pay for good things, we can’t have nice things,” he said. “We can’t just depend on oil companies to pay for them anymore. We can’t point fingers and blame you. We can’t point fingers and blame our legislators. We have to point at ourselves and talk to each other and say ‘let’s start paying for nice things.’”


Mica Van Buskirk, who represents Seward on the board, said closing Seward Middle was heartbreaking.

“The simple fact is over 20% of our students have left our brick and mortar schools, for a variety of reasons, in the last 20 years.” she said, audibly emotional. “We have to eliminate some of our schools with this kind of student loss.”

Much of the testimony for Sterling and Tustumena centered on the distances children will be asked to travel and fears that those children will be lost in the shuffle of larger Soldotna schools.

Cat Cramer said she doesn’t think hour long bus rides — twice a day and potentially exacerbated by major Sterling Highway construction projected to begin this year — will be good for her children or others. She said she wouldn’t stay in Sterling, or in the district.

Rachel Farley said Tustumena has a class of students with special needs who may not get the same level of care at another school — and may struggle with being on a bus for hours each day.

Sarah Douthit, who represents Kenai on the board, said that when she attended Sterling Elementary it was home to nearly 400 students. There are currently 105 students enrolled.

“I would not be here, contemplating this decision, if there was other viable options at this point,” she said. 

Consecutive cuts

Deep cuts come for the local district for the second year in a row, KPBSD Superintendent Clayton Holland said Monday, because of a conflux of factors that include declining enrollment, stagnant state funding and rising property values triggering a “cost-shift” within the state’s complicated education funding formula that is putting increasing financial pressure on the Kenai Peninsula Borough. The district is also facing rising costs of gas for student transportation and salary negotiations with the unions that represent teachers and support staff, which have dragged for over a year. 

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Board of Education projects a $8 million deficit with reduced funding from both the State of Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula Borough at the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District meeting in Homer, April 6. (Photo by Daniel Zatz)


On a status quo budget, Holland said, the district is projecting an $8 million deficit. Because of the shift in burden from the state to the borough — compounded by declining enrollment — the district expects to receive roughly $5 million less from the state this year. At the same time, Borough Mayor Micciche has said that the rising pressures on local municipal government to fund schools are unsustainable. He is proposing a level of funding to local schools that’s $3 million less than last year.

Last year’s funding from the borough was increased to the maximum allowable amount by a vote of the borough assembly. That total is determined by a calculation of property value and this year the new “cap” would be sufficient in theory to cover the full projected deficit. But Holland said Micciche has been “very clear” that such a level of funding will not be approved this year. The board last month developed a budget assuming that the borough would ultimately fund to the same level as last year — a difference of $3 million — but this week advanced a budget that assumes flat state funding and the mayor’s lower budget proposal.

Members of the board called the budget that they unanimously approved on Monday a “starting point.” They said that as funding may materialize later in the year — the borough doesn’t have to finalize its budget until June and state funding wasn’t finalized until July last year — changes will be made and some cuts will be reversed. A resolution passed on a 5-4 vote of the board outlines cuts to teaching staff and some librarians that could be reversed if the borough increases funding later.

“I hate this budget,” board president Jason Tauriainen said. “But I have some excitement over it, because I want to get this done so we can start advocating for proper funding from the state and the borough so we can fix a lot of this. This is the beginning. It’s not the end.”

Though there may be changes in the months ahead, the budget in place as of this week calls for elimination of all librarians and library aides; closure of pools; elimination of staff for distance education, middle school reading, and other programs; and millions of dollars in reduced spending on teaching staff through an increase in the pupil-to-teacher ratio used to determine staffing in each district school. 


Colette Choate, who works at McNeil Canyon Elementary School in Homer, said her school is served only by a library aide — who knows their students, understands their interests and guides them to books that could spark a love of reading. Data show that students at McNeil Canyon are reading at or above grade level, and every student checks out at least one book each month.

Colette Choate speaks to elimination of the library aide position at McNeil Canyon School at the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District meeting in Homer, April 6. (Photo by Daniel Zatz)


“Those outcomes are not accidental,” Choate said. “They are the result of a well-designed, well-led library program. Although the position is labeled library aide, the work being done is far more complex and impactful.”

LoAna Benton, principal of Port Graham School, said that the distance learning program “ensures our students have access to qualified content area teachers, helps close the gap between rural schools, gives our students access to broader opportunities and helps them graduate with more choices for the future. With the elimination of all staff for the program, she said, students will not have access to those courses and will have fewer alternatives that might rely on “pre-packaged curriculum or significantly increased workload on teachers.”

“Neither option serves students well,” she said.

Michelle Borland spoke on the reduction in programmatic staffing funding, which can be allocated by schools to provide courses outside of core reading, writing, math and others. Under the cuts, she said, Homer High School will be at risk of losing foreign languages, ceramics, art, band, shop and home economics. These are the classes that get kids excited to come to school, she said, which teach real-world, 21st-century skills.

“I’m a little scared that my son will not have opportunities that I had when I graduated from Homer High School,” she said. “He’s facing a diminished education compared to what my husband, and I and his grandmother all had at Homer High School.”

Now that the district has adopted a budget for the coming fiscal year, it will be considered by the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly, which will finalize its budget in June. Holland and Tauriainen on Tuesday presented the budget during a work session of the assembly.

Members of the assembly during the work session repeatedly pointed to an exodus of students to IDEA Homeschool rather than the district’s own Connections Homeschool, which causes local education funds to be redirected to Galena, as among the greatest challenges facing the local district and driving enrollment declines. Holland said Connections has worked to compete. 

“I feel [Connections] is the best program in the state, and they’ve done a lot there to make it that way,” he said.

Micciche said that the “only hope of a long-term solution” is changes in education policy and funding at the state level. The vast majority of borough expenditures go to schools, he said — “we are huge supporters of education.” 

At Tuesday’s borough assembly meeting, the night after the district’s budget was approved, Micciche said “my hat’s off” to the school board for voting to close the schools. 

“Of the 43 schools that are remaining, eight are above 80% full, and 16 are below 45% full,” Micciche said. “In order for us to survive this, no matter where funding is coming from, tough decisions must occur.” 

Micciche said Tuesday that he doesn’t expect the closure of all the district pools to ultimately be carried out. Though he declined to name any of the groups he was speaking with, he said interest had been voiced by “swim groups,” “nonprofits,” and “health-related services.” 

“It won’t be all pools, I can tell you that right now,” the mayor said. “There’s going to be a couple of pools that close, but I think the pieces are there for covering the district’s cost.”

“Primary pools,” Micciche said, will stick around. He did not specify which pools would be considered among that group. The district operates pools in Homer, Seward, Seldovia, Ninilchik, Soldotna and Kenai.