It is believed that the Sitka School Board is facing the dreadful prospect of cutting 15 teaching positions in the coming year unless the legislature comes through with an eleventh-hour fund to support education throughout the state.
The six teaching jobs that are on the verge of being eliminated are retiring positions. This approach to shrinking the number of employees is the most straightforward, however it leaves some difficult decisions about how to fill vacant positions, how to increase the size of certain classes which is often referred to as the PTR, also known as the pupil-teacher ratio or programs to eliminate completely.
In addition to the six retirees, eight or so teaching jobs will need to be eliminated in the event that nothing changes. The district currently has 27 teachers who haven’t completed the full three years required to be tenured and — in anticipation of cuts, have not yet been given contracts.
In a budget-related work meeting with school boards on March 9th the superintendent Frank Hauser said that shifting the teachers in the last unemployed classes to fill important roles will not be easy.
“Of those 27 that we have, we may need to be displaced in the event that the board decides to alter some PTRs or cut down on PTRs at specific schools, which could result in ripple effects and lead to the removal of staff members,” Hauser said. “We are aware that we have two positions available for positions at Baranof Elementary School. If we lose certain teachers at Keet Gooshi Heen that is, they could be transferred to another school, based on their credentials.”
This problem is present in every school district’s board rooms across the state during this season, as Alaska is among the few states that do not allocate funds for education until the districts have made their budgets for the coming year.
In the past legislative sessions there have been at least two bills that have been proposed to increase the allocation to students or the amount the state provides for the education of every pupil within the public school system. If a student has special needs, the amount increases to a multiple of 13 but the additional income may not be enough of the funds required to cover the additional support for students with special needs.
District director of special education Chris Voron said that Baranof Elementary will require the services of a special needs case manager to help manage the 12 expected special needs children in the first and kindergarten classes next year.
Voron stated that it was an untypical set of events in addition to other issues, resulting in the special need bubble.
“The most prevalent areas of the need for eligibility are speech impairment or developmental delay in early childhood These are the categories of early childhood , and I would suggest there’s an increase in the need which we’re trying to identify,” Voron explained. “So the pandemic has had an consequences for our special educational requirements. But, we’d claim that this doesn’t explain everything we’re witnessing. This is just the families, they are students who are in the present, about to go into the kindergarten class next year. There is a large number of students who are classified as “low incidence,” which means students with autism, children with medical issues, or students who are more likely to have these demands.”
Sitka school Board members didn’t have many thoughts at this point with the exception of a general desire to make use of district reserves in order to fund the budget in the coming year. But not all of the reserves. They considered scenarios in which the state would increase the allocations to students for base education in different amounts, ranging from $250 to $450 and even $1,000 that many advocates for education claim is the minimum amount needed to keep pace with the rate of inflation since 2016the last time that it was that the BSA has been adjusted.
Any of those numbersshould they are able to be realizedthey could provide relief to the district. Sitka Assembly member Tim Pike sat in on the meeting. Tim is also an instructor of the High School. The uncomfortable discussion around possible teacher layoffs was not new as it occursat least in partall the time.
He encouraged board members to develop an idea, and hoped they don’t need to implement it.
“I am able to recall former superintendents saying”Gosh I’m crying every single day here ” Pike said. “You knowthat eventually, that will happen but the majority times and until this point, and throughout my time here, it’s never been seen. Since the state comes through with money at the final, but we won’t know how until we’ve been through the suffering and pain of this whole process.”
The Sitka School Board’s budget draft for 2024 has a figure of less than $24 million. The board is expected to finish the budget for adoption and then submit it for approval by Sitka Assembly Sitka Assembly, on April 20.
