Anchorage School Board keeps control of closed-school planning after lawyer advises against Assembly task force

The Anchorage School Board will keep control of planning for school buildings emptied by closures, with Assembly members invited to sit in but not vote, after the district's outside lawyer advised against a joint task force.

School board member Paul McDonogh proposed the task force in a Sept. 15 paper, arguing that "nothing defines what happens to a building once it leaves classroom use." Of the last eight closures, he wrote, six buildings went to charter schools. His plan would have seated three voting members from each body to take stock of buildings and their condition, set criteria for reusing or disposing of them and run joint community outreach. Decisions on whether to close a school would have stayed with the school board alone.

Two days later, Lee Baxter of the law firm Schwabe, Williamson and Wyatt told Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt in a memo that the setup wouldn't work. Closures belong to the board alone, he wrote, so anything a joint group decided would only be advisory. Assembly members are elected by district and would have a natural interest in opposing closures in their own districts, while board members are elected citywide. And unlike districts in Seattle, Denver and California, which own their buildings, Anchorage's district hands surplus property back to the city, which alone decides what to do with it. Either way, Baxter wrote, members of one body would be "weighing into decisions that they were not elected to decide."

The two documents rest on different parts of state law. McDonogh pointed to a provision giving the Assembly the say over where school buildings go, with due consideration to the board's recommendations. Baxter pointed to one putting each district under the "management and control of a school board," and to an Alaska Supreme Court case he said gives the board exclusive authority over closures.

Instead, the board chartered a Rightsizing Advisory Committee made up of all seven board members, with McDonogh as chair. Each of the Assembly's six districts gets one non-voting seat, with the representatives chosen by Assembly Chair Anna Brawley. The charter says the committee won't recommend specific closures and has no dedicated budget. It runs until the board's standing committees endorse its work or the board reorganizes its leadership, expected in early May 2027.

The board voted Feb. 24 to close Fire Lake, Lake Otis and Campbell STEM elementary schools. The old Abbott Loop Elementary building and the Campbell STEM building are slated to go back to the city, and plans for both aren't fully developed, according to McDonogh's paper. District enrollment fell about 13% from 2013 to 2024, to 42,638 students, and a district survey summary puts next year's projected shortfall at more than $40 million. In April polling released with Friday's joint meeting materials, 62% of respondents said they support the district using fewer schools to cut costs.

Rightsizing was on the agenda for Friday's joint meeting of the school board and the Assembly as an informational item. The two bodies meet jointly again Dec. 4.