Mat-Su Borough growth shows in education

PALMER — In an ever-growing valley, the Mat-Su Borough School District and School Board are trying to plan ahead.

At a joint school board and borough assembly meeting on Tuesday evening, school district superintendent Gene Stone revealed this year’s district-wide enrollment. As of Sept. 6, it stood at 18,841 students — just a handful more than initially projected, but the schools are already overfull.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 101,095 people reside in the Mat-Su Borough, as of 2015 — a 13.6 percent increase from 2010, when the population was just under 89,000. The borough gained 1,094 students in that same timeframe, and 709 more from 2014 to 2015.

Mike Brown, executive director of operations for the school district’s IT department, said in his presentation to the board and assembly that the district sent four portables to Redington Jr./Sr. High School, which opened last fall, and one to the brand new Dena’ina Elementary School this year, to accommodate excessive enrollment. Tanaina Elementary, Machetanz Elementary and Burchell High School also got one portable each, for the same reason.

Even after static computer labs at Machetanz, Snowshoe Elementary, Pioneer Peak Elementary, Meadow Lakes Elementary and Colony Middle School were replaced by laptops on mobile carts, and a total of 10 classrooms have been added district-wide (not including Dena’ina), Brown said, the portables are still needed.

“We’re doing as much as we can with the resources we have,” Brown said.

When the construction of the Redington school began, the plan was to later build another school nearby that would serve the Knik-area high school population, at which point the current building would operate solely as a junior high or middle school. But that high school isn’t scheduled to be built until at least 2019, Brown said, as part of the district’s six-year capital improvement plan.

The plan also includes the proposed development of a Wasilla-area elementary school in 2020, a Palmer-area elementary school in 2021 and another Knik-area elementary school in 2023.

School Board President Susan Pougher saidthe district was looking at property near Hyer Road for the future Wasilla school, and assemblywoman Barbara Doty suggested the district consider building the future Palmer school somewhere along Palmer-Fishhook Road, an area she said has grown significantly in the last couple years.

The location of a given school is typically decided by a formal School Site Selection Committee gathered by the Mat-Su Borough. However, there hasn’t been such a committee since the last one imploded in fiscal year 2013, as a result of “disastrous” differences in opinions about why a school should or should not be built at a particular location, according to school board member Ole Larson.

Now, Larson said, it’s time to bring the committee back.

“If we keep the site committee out of politics … it’ll work,” he said.

Financial resources

Finding funding for new borough schools and for maintaining the existing one is also proving to be a challenge, school district officials said.

In the spring of 2015, the Alaska State Legislature suspended its school bond reimbursement program until 2020, which means no 60-to-70-percent payback from the state for new schools in the Mat-Su Borough, as was previously provided.

And if there’s no payback, President Pougher said the district won’t be issuing any bonds to build new schools.

“If we bond before 2020, the local community is on the hook for the whole 100 percent. We’re not planning on doing that,” she said.

MSBSD also took a hit this summer when Gov. Bill Walker vetoed $2.2 million of the local school district’s budget, though Superintendent Stone said the Department of Education and Early Development (DEED) has agreed to restore $821,000 of that after further analysis.

While several assembly and board members agreed with Pougher, disgruntled that the state had “reneged” on an important promise, assemblyman George McKee criticized the borough manager and other naysayers for seeing things that way.

“(As a resident), I read the bond issues before I voted on them, and it said that the state at some point might not reimburse at the level it had. It wasn’t any shock to me because I can read English. So, the state did not renege,” McKee said. “It’s nice to write them and say please give us money, but they didn’t renege on it.”

Despite the district’s losses — MSBSD also cut $1.3 million reduction in transportation costs this year, according to the district’s assistant superintendent of business and operations, Luke Fulp — the Mat-Su is in better shape than most.

According to Stone, the school district’s budget for FY 2017 is $250.6 million, about 74 percent of which goes to student instruction (including special education) and support services. Of the “Big 5” Alaska school districts, MSBSD had the lowest per-pupil operating cost in FY 2015 at $11,739. The Anchorage School District came in a close second at $11,755, whereas the Kenai Peninsula ranked fifth with $14,594 per student.

All were agreed at the end of the meeting that the school district has a long road ahead, but that the Mat-Su has a good track record of success in hard times.

Assemblyman Steve Colligan equated the borough’s school-related dilemmas with flying an airplane when the pilot knows there will be a mechanical failure.

“You either start screaming and yelling and panicking and crash to the ground, or you can hold onto the yoke and steer the plane and the passengers for a safe landing,” he said.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.