District adopts budget with severe cuts, school closures

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s Board of Education on Wednesday adopted a preliminary budget that assumes a $680 increase in per-student funding from the state. It describes the closure of Sterling Elementary and Nikolaevsk School as well as heavy cuts to staff and programs.

As the group deliberated during a special meeting of the board, they repeatedly described the budget they adopted as a draft document that will change over time. The district has to submit a budget to the Kenai Peninsula Borough by May 1 — a deadline they will meet after Wednesday’s action — but still doesn’t know how much money it will receive from the state and local governments.

Board President Zen Kelly said that the district’s budget will be a “working document,” adjusted as the realities of their funding coalesce. It won’t be finalized, he said, until into July when they submit it to the State Department of Education and Early Development.

The budget adopted Wednesday is based on “big assumptions.” That is, it assumes that an increase in funding from the state equals to at least $680 more per student will be approved by the Legislature and governor. It also assumes funding from the borough government to the maximum allowable amount, roughly $62 million.

The governor last week vetoed a bill that increased school funding; an effort to override the veto failed Tuesday. The borough mayor has said that his budget proposal, introduced next month, will call for roughly $5 million less than the district is requesting. He said on Wednesday that education is the “number one priority” of the borough, but that the state must be pressured to meet the challenge of inflation.

The budget, assuming a $680 increase that hasn’t manifested yet and funding from the borough to an amount greater than the mayor supports, calls for the closure of Sterling Elementary and Nikolaevsk School, as well as elimination of elementary school counselors, small school counselors, Quest teachers, counseling assistants, student support liaisons, pool managers and theater technicians.

The budget describes cuts to staff for distance education, at Kenai Alternative High School and Connections Homeschool, in the district office and in the district’s warehouse. The Kenai Peninsula Middle College School would be eliminated, and funds for extracurricular stipends would be sharply cut.

The staffing formula for all the district’s brick-and-mortar schools, whereby each school is staffed at a level defined by its student population, would see the pupil-to-teacher ratio increased by one. That change would result in a reduction of nearly $1.2 million in teacher salaries and benefits.

A document attached to the budget, authored by board members Virginia Morgan and Sarah Douthit, describes the cuts that would be reversed if the district received more money from the state than it is budgeting for. At a $1,000 per-student increase, the amount vetoed by the governor last week, the district would not close Sterling Elementary. It also wouldn’t implement cuts to the staffing formula for district schools, close most of its pools, cut extracurricular stipends and eliminate the Kenai Peninsula Middle College. Cuts to small school counselors and counseling assistants would be reversed, and hits to distance education would be lessened, among other things.

Even at that higher funding level, closures of pools in Ninilchik and Seldovia, closure of Nikolaevsk School, and elimination of Quest teachers, among other things, are still set to move forward.

“We’re looking at cuts across the board,” Kelly said. “Even if you get $1,000, we’re looking at significant changes to the landscape of our district.”

The cuts, Student Representative Emerson Kapp, represent opportunities that she values that are being diminished for others. The position the district and the board is in, she said, is one where it has to take opportunities away.

“It’s kind of like taking a home from someone,” she said. “Taking it away brick by brick. You still technically have a building, but you’re slowly not making it a home anymore.”

Speaking up for schools

Much of the public testimony on the budget on Wednesday was focused on Sterling Elementary School. Dozens of parents and teachers filled the assembly chambers, many wearing their school’s colors, several wiping tears from their eyes. Sterling was included among nine district schools considered for closure this year but hadn’t been added to the list of cuts until the day before the meeting.

Krystal Duval, a kindergarten teacher at Sterling Elementary, pointed to a young girl in the audience who is hoping to start kindergarten next year. If Sterling is closed, she’d be busing into Soldotna instead.

“She’s going to be a kindergartner and you want her to ride a bus for 10 hours each week,” she said.

Others championed Sterling Elementary as central to their community. Without it, they said, people would turn instead to homeschooling or leave the Kenai Peninsula entirely.

Tracy Smith, an assistant principal at Soldotna High School, said her school would lose as many as six teachers under the proposed cuts. Her school will lose activities that bring students to school and encourage them to succeed.

“To ask a school of this size to absorb this kind of loss and still deliver the quality education and support that our students deserve and that this community demands is, quite frankly, asking the impossible,” she said.

Noble Cassidy, a Soldotna student of the Kenai Peninsula Middle College, said that he came to the meeting champion the program as worthy of preserving because it allowed him to take on his education at his own pace — ultimately securing an associate’s degree the same year he graduates from high school. But, he said, he wants to see younger students experience the same quality of schools and teachers that he did.

“I’ve been privileged with wonderful, loving parents and great teachers,” he said. “Some kids — if their schools get closed — unfortunately won’t have either of those.”

In response to the calls to protect Sterling Elementary, as well as to reverse other proposed cuts, the board told people to call on their legislators to support an increase to school funding. Kelly pointed to his own state representative, Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, who repeatedly has messaged her disinterest in increasing school funding — even as a school in her district is set to be closed.

The document that describes cuts that would be reversed if per-student funding was increased by $1,000 is part of that advocacy, the board said.

“This is our plea to the Legislature to fund education the way it should be,” Douthit said. “Please keep fighting for this.”

The budget will continue to be considered and adjusted at meetings of the Board of Education in the coming months. For more information, and the full budget document, visit the KPBSD BoardDocs website.

Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.