The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District recently negated rumors that Seward students were involved in a construction project at the high school.
During a KPBSD meeting on Dec. 1, a faculty member and student at Seward High School said construction was taking students out of classes and creating a distracting learning environment. In a Dec. 19 email to the Clarion, district superintendent Clayton Holland said student involvement in any construction is purely “based on rumor, not fact.”
Tara Swanson, a fifth grade teacher at Seward Elementary, said she was frustrated with the district’s lack of communication as to why the construction was happening “in such a rushed way.”
“It’s happening during the school day,” she said during the meeting. “It’s impacting learning, and students are being involved in construction more than moving books.”
She spoke of a specific instance in which construction workers arrived in the middle of the day to replace light bulbs in the elementary school’s gym. The school couldn’t use the gym for the rest of the day and administrative staff wasn’t made aware in advance that the work was happening.
During the meeting, Holland said the district didn’t know the construction workers were planning to fix the light bulbs on the day they arrived unannounced at Seward Elementary.
“If somebody has something specific, they can tell me that,” he said. “But I’ve checked with the borough, the principal and our own facilities person a couple of times to check in on that. So, certainly not any truth there either. A little frustrating to have that out there.”
Lucas Scott, a junior at Seward High School, said that for two days, he and three other students spent over three hours each day removing shelves and putting up a wall in a classroom. He said the construction started a couple weeks ago when Seward High School Principal Henry Burns announced that students could receive on-the-job-credit for helping with the work.
“It started off with just moving a bunch of books upstairs,” he said. “But we were provided power tools, and there was no PPE. We didn’t have any goggles or anything, but we took down a shelf, we had drills and we even had a mallet and we took stuff down — we didn’t just move books.”
In an email to the Clarion, Holland said he asked Burns about the wall Scott was referring to. According to Burns, the “wall” is a stage prop a teacher at Seward High wanted to use as a partition in her classroom. He said students removed the wooden boards from the prop’s frame so it would fit into the classroom’s door, then replaced them once it was inside.
According to Holland, Burns asked Scott if the wall he referenced during the school board meeting was the stage prop.
“The student confirmed that it was and shared that a teacher at the elementary school (who also testified that night) encouraged him to state he had participated in demolition work,” Holland wrote in the email.
Holland also said the task counted as three of the 40 hours of volunteer work seniors are required to perform before graduating, not OJT credit.
“At no point did anyone who testified that evening check with the principal about this,” Holland concluded in the email.
The meeting was recorded and is available to watch on the KPBSD BoardDocs website.
