2025 10 21 WorkSession

I'm going to call this work session to order for the Anchorage School Board on October 21st at 4:02 PM.

Um, we do have in the room Member Higgins, Member Donnelly, our Superintendent. I see that President Jacobs is online, who is not feeling well and did not want to infect the entire school district or the public, so he's participating from home. And they're on, or— okay, Member Wilson and Member Lessens are online as well. So with that, we do have an agenda in front of us. We are going to change the order in here from AASB second, but lead off with a report on right-sizing Um, to the Superintendent, you have the floor.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Um, so I'll hand it off to our team in just a moment. Um, we're joined by Jim Anderson, our Chief Operating Officer, and our guests from THREDD. We're excited to share more about the child care initiative that we referenced, but also we'd like to share some more in-depth details as it relates to the, the right-sizing proposal at large. Mr. Anderson. Good evening.

We're going to start with some discussion with Stephanie Berglund. She's the CEO, President of KCI.

Good evening. Good afternoon, I guess. Thank you, members of the school board and leadership at ASD and all the public. I'm Stephanie Berglund, the CEO of THREDD, and if you're not familiar are not familiar with our organization, we are a statewide nonprofit focused on a vision of strengthening access to affordable and high-quality child care. So we provide a large menu of services and supports to the sector, and I am excited to share a little bit of some of those details with you this afternoon.

But I want to start by thanking you all for considering how you can strengthen the partnership, including your infrastructure in childcare. Childcare across the state and in Anchorage continues to be in crisis. There's a huge gap in the need and demand for childcare with the supply available. We were just looking at recent numbers, and in Anchorage alone, there's a gap of over 8,000 children who don't have access to childcare that they need it. That means all of their adults in the household are working and don't have access to quality childcare during the day.

So thank you for considering how there, there can be options for partnership with the school district. Co-locating childcare with other sectors and industries is a trend that we're seeing grow across the country where there's partnership for co-location of childcare in senior centers, government buildings, and school districts like you're considering. So I want to acknowledge your effort and the the research that you've done so far and commend you for exploring this.

As I described, THREDD is a private nonprofit working across the state. We are primarily a social service, direct service organization, and I gave you all our brochure, which is a helpful frame of our services. We provide services to families, to early educators, to early childhood education programs, and also businesses and community and This afternoon, I just wanted to highlight some of those specific services that we provide to early educators and to early childhood education programs, since that's an area specifically that you're focused on and looking at. When I say early childhood education programs, THREDD is a hub of supports and resources for all early childhood education programs. So that includes child care, Head Start and Early Head Start, and includes our pre-K programs, including in the, in the ASD and other school districts across the state.

And we are providing services and supports for our tribal and military child, child care programs as well. So we offer, like I said, a large menu of services and wanted to highlight a few of those for you today.

For early educators, THREDD is the largest provider of training and professional development supports and services for early educators in the state. We provide free training and access to individualized supports to help our early educators through their professional development trajectory. You're the perfect audience to know that the number one indicator in a classroom of quality is the teacher, and that's no different in early childhood. So THREDD works closely to offer targeted training and targeted technical assistance to our individual early childhood teachers across the state. So we do that through training, we do that through technical assistance and consultation.

Teachers can contact us to ask ask about individual classroom support. We're often helping with teacher modeling in the classrooms. We're helping with maybe room arrangement or transitions. A large conversation has been more children showing up to child care with challenging behaviors and needing additional support, so we're offering that technical assistance to teachers to help them feel more competent and confident in the classroom. To To support their professional development, we also house and manage our larger system for early education development.

That's called SEED. It's also in one of the flyers I provided for you. And SEED offers really a pathway for individuals to advance their professional development. What's great about SEED is we also often have financial resources available to teachers, so that helps offset their higher education costs. We can give them pathways for scholarships and sponsor some of their access to training that we don't provide.

And to programs, um, since you're considering partnering with child care programs, I wanted to share that for licensed child care across the state, we offer our largest menu of services. Right now, all of our training that I mentioned is free, and many of our supports and resources for programs are also free of charge at THREDD. Our largest area of services, I mentioned that technical assistance for early education, But we also have targeted initiatives that we are offering annually on a short-term basis to help programs with their quality improvement. So based on maybe a program or classroom's goals, we're helping them with targeted training, technical assistance, and then connect that to financial support. Right now we have an exciting entrepreneurship, I guess, opportunity called Start a Business of Caring, and I also brought a brochure for that.

The application unfortunately opens— is only open until next week, but when we have funding available, it's a line of business we intend to keep growing and expanding at THREDD. I mentioned at the very beginning of my remarks that we have a huge access issue for child care across the state, so THREDD is looking at how we can continue to raise money and resources to help more entrepreneurs start up child care. The Business of Caring initiative is really focused on how we can help people work through the licensing process and achieve a licensed child care status and also the supports and resources and financial assistance available. So they're working toward— I think this answers your question, but they're working toward things like a certain amount of teacher training and some targeted training They're focused on skills in administration like program management and HR. They're focused on some targeted activities and standards around family engagement and teacher-child interactions, so focused on kind of that social-emotional development of teachers supporting young children.

So I just wanted to close by mentioning that our services and supports, like I said, are, are available. To all licensed early childhood education programs, with most of them available to all child care programs. Of course, as funding and resources change and evolve, you know, sometimes our different programs initiatives can be targeted to different classrooms, communities, or types of care. But really our goal in all that we're doing is try to strengthen and offer resources and supports to all of the types of care that I mentioned under the early childhood education umbrella. So I'm happy to take other questions or talk more about our services.

Member Higgins. Thank you. You mentioned a significant need for the— obviously for the, for the childcare. The question is, one, if we had the space and we had it, are we going to have people to actually move in to provide that? Staffing's an issue.

And then the other one is location. Where, you know, is there a spread out or do you have any idea within the city, within Anchorage, where the biggest need is at? And are we going to be able to staff it even if we had the space? How is that going to play out? Thank you for your question.

Those are the right questions to be asking. I would—. I'll answer your second question first in terms of location. We know that there's a huge demand in all zip codes in the Anchorage Bowl. So I think already the schools are well placed, you know, to accommodate where families and children are in need of education services and support.

So I would really look to you all to help determine the right space. I mean, our community is small enough that— and the demand is large enough right now that we know parents are traveling longer than even maybe they would like to access the care that they need. But of course, most Families will look for care close to home or close to work, and that varies depending on family, you know, need and makeup.

The second question that you have is around the workforce. That is a fair concern. We have a huge shortage of the early childhood workforce right now. Part of the supply problem that we have is even of the existing child care programs that are open, they're not all serving their full capacity that they even have space for because they can't recruit enough teachers. So they can't open all of their classrooms.

So the recruitment and retention, as I know you all are familiar with, even of K-12 teachers, is a huge issue in early childhood. Early childhood teachers are making an average of just under $18 an hour in Anchorage, and they do not— most do not receive comprehensive benefits. So it's a competitive market. When it's a high-skilled, high labor, and it's a hard job caring for babies and infants and toddlers. And it's, it's one to recognize as a profession, and the pay and benefits often is impactful for, for that recruitment and retention.

So that is a concern. I think the workforce and how we can support more entering and staying in the workforce is, is something to consider. So when we first started looking into whether this was even possible, one of the thoughts was if they could get out of really expensive leases and go into our schools where their overhead costs were lower, that they might be able to pay a little bit more, just like we try to do with student nutrition, bus drivers, all of those others that, that we finally were able to overcome all the vacancies we had because we finally were competitive in the market. And so, you know, I have had 4 child care providers already reach out to me personally. So I know there's interest.

They want to ask a lot of questions. And frankly, a little over 2 years ago when I met Stephanie the first time, we knew that we didn't have anybody on staff that really understood child care. And so I talked to Bill Popp at the time. Went to the muni and talked to their childcare department, and both of them said you really need to talk to THREDD. They're the people who actually understand the business, how to get people trained and licensed and certified and things ASD couldn't do.

And frankly, we're not running the childcare site if they open up in our school. It's a separate entity and they have their own business operations. So when we put out the ITB and start evaluating and they start having questions, especially the entrepreneur folks. You know, I think between really Thread is going to be our biggest partner to answer those questions about how do you go from I've got an idea to a business, and she's got the expertise, the people who can help them actually figure this out. Whereas ASD, we're really going to be landlords for that space, but they need someone smart like Stephanie and her team to work through.

How do I build my business model? How do I get training? How do I, um, do all those things? And that's really what THREDD does for the— for this community. Do any of these function as a nonprofit versus— they do?

Yes, there's all different types of private child care. Um, so, uh, private, there's also nonprofit, there's faith-based, there's, um, maybe a philosophy-based program like a Montessori program or other type of, you know, philosophy-based program as well.

Any other questions? Do we have any questions from folks online?

Seeing none, thank you very much for your presentation.

And to clarify, I did say we didn't have anyone on staff. We actually have someone in IT who knows a lot about the child care business, but really Stephanie has been, is really our font of knowledge.

So now we're going to get to the second brief of this fiscal year for right-sizing, and I'll turn it over to Dr. Bryant for opening comments. Thank you. So we'll go ahead and complete a deeper dive into where we're at since the initial announcement of our proposal, including feeder patterns and, uh, various demographic spreads of students. So, uh, Mr. Anderson, take it from here.

So this slide is not unfamiliar to you. We are looking at, as one of the main tenets this year, we looked through a lot of our schools and we tried to find spaces and places within our schools that we could better utilize. And in, in the, in that regard, some of them are offices and storage areas for CIT and migrant, and others can we get out of leases But really this year we wanted to focus on let's try to do something with childcare. And I think you'll see later in this brief, actually at the very end of the brief, that we have found some schools that are, are located all around the Anchorage Bowl in order to recognize that we are a childcare desert. And of course, we'll talk again about boundary adjustments and then we'll talk about the two school consolidations that we briefed 2 weeks ago.

So I showed this slide a couple weeks ago and, and it kind of talked through quite a few of them on we really don't account for the space properly if we use the state formula for capacity. And that's going to be a multi-month process to try to reshape how we look at square footage. And really just one good example is if you go back to 2010, we had about 500+ intensive needs students. Now, we may have lost 6,000 students since then, but now we're up to 1,100, which is 180% growth. So that classroom of 114 square feet per person that the state uses doesn't account for the diversity of the needs of our classes, where some of them really do, for good reason, only have 3 or 4 students in them and not a classroom of 25.

So we'll keep working that process. I would like to point some attention down to Lake Otis though. We don't know that how many children we're going to get from the relief evacuation effort. We got a little over 130, I think, by tomorrow, 140 now. So we have about 140 enrolled by tomorrow morning.

That number will keep moving up over the next couple weeks and maybe even over the next month or so. Uh, the bulk of the elementary are going to be going to College Gate, although depending on where they live and family members and, and parental choice, which is always real, um, they may not all go to College Gate. There'll be some spattered around and to Alaska Native Cultural Charter School. But if there ends up being a really large amount, Lake Otis really is in a great position to be a backup school, and I just wanted to put that out now. Because we don't know what's going to happen in 2 weeks any more than 3 weeks ago, we didn't know a typhoon was going to hit and we were going to spend the next 8 days, 9 days straight trying to help out these families and children from the villages.

As we go through this and the evacuation continues, slows down, or stops, it could be some go back to the village. We'll keep tracking it. Obviously, I just didn't want it to be a surprise in 2 weeks if all of a sudden we have a large influx that's actually moving into Lake Otis, and that would of course change the facts behind whether that would be the best school to close and consolidate. So can we stay on that slide for a second, Jim? One thing I do want to point out to this slide with the capacities is, um, 3 of the schools that we're going to talk about of receiving some of the students are in the top 5 of lowest capacity schools.

And sometimes we don't talk about what those receiving schools capacities are, but we will be talking about Ocean View, Alpenglow, and Eagle River here in this brief today. So looking at the first, and we went over this the last time, so I'll kind of go through quickly. Fire Lake Elementary School, when we're looking at less than 5 students going to Chugiak Elementary School, 41 going to Fire Lake or Birchwood Elementary School, and 143 going to Eagle River Elementary School. When you look at those adjusted capacities. Birchwood's capacity goes from 64% this year to 72% next year.

Chugiak Elementary, it goes down because there's so many— so few kids going and we have the, the loss of students over time. Eagle River Elementary School goes from 57% up to 84%. So those capacities, especially with Birchwood and Eagle River, go up substantially.

So I'll walk you through the next 3 slides. Um, I showed a little bit last 2 weeks ago, but these are all the schools in the Eagle River area, and I wanted to just walk— one, explain this slide for the people who are watching this either recorded or live, but to make sure the board members understand. So when you see Alpenglow students at the top You can see that 245 from within the Alpenglow zone choose to go to school at Alpenglow Elementary. All of those other students choose different schools. They're in the Alpenglow zone, but there are 3 of them are going to Aurora, and you can go all the way down and see that 20 are going to Ravenwood.

This is pretty typical of Eagle River that about a third of all of the students in any one school zone, and, and it goes up to 45% for, um, a couple of the schools. They choose to go to a different school, and not just in the Eagle River area but all across town. And then as you move down, you can see it's the same thing for Fire Lake. Um, 160 of the almost 250 kids in the Fire Lake zone are going to Fire Lake. And, and of course, students from other zones are also going to Fire Lake.

And, and to just give you an idea on this slide, those are all of the schools to include— whoops, let me go back to Eagle Academy. So you can see where the Eagle Academy gets their students. This— I did not put a list that shows everywhere they get them from. I really just stuck with the Eagle River area. Because that's the school zones that we're talking about.

They obviously, like every charter school, get students from all over the district.

But if you look at the far right at the bottom column, this whole column shows lives in on the left, and that's the number of students that live in that school zone. And then it goes how many attends in that zone, how many transfer out, And you can see that Eagle River is really roughly overall a little bit more than a third choose to go out of a school, go to a school outside of their zone. And when we get to the Lake Otis area, you'll see it's even bigger. It's, it's larger numbers in that area are choosing to go to other schools. And it really makes sense because there's more charter schools in the Anchorage area proper near Lake Otis.

There's a lot of schools that are close to Lake Otis, to include, um, the Yupik Immersion at College Gate, and every other— all of those options that are available within miles of Lake Otis, you'll see the numbers are actually a little bit higher.

Uh, we're going to get there, we're going to get— it's quite a few down, but we're almost there. So looking at the maps of Lake Otis Elementary School and where the students would go We have a real small number going to Airport Heights, not, not too many going to College Gate, a number going to, I think 25 going to Rogers Park, and then kind of the Tudor-Cassoon area down below. We break up into a small, into bigger, more detailed in the next slide. Kind of looking at this slide was looking at how, what are the different pockets of kids. But really, the following slide is the one that shows us that we're looking at 37 students going to Tudor Elementary School and 125 going to Kassoon Elementary School.

This is— this map is different than the first time we briefed this, as we needed to figure out, as we were figuring out special education populations and programmatic needs and stuff. Um, this has changed since the last time we briefed it. Looking at the overall percentages of capacity, Kassoon Elementary will go from 74% to 95%. Rogers Park goes from 66 to 65 because that number does not— of extra students does not exceed the number of students that we're anticipating to be leaving. And then Tudor Elementary School goes from 82 to 92%.

Then looking at the zone exempts. So here's all the zone exemptions near Lake Otis. This College Gate is, is going to be one of the schools where, between that and A&CCS, that we focus on those Yupik students who choose to register for those schools. Airport Heights, the same kind of thing. And then for— there's not a school on this list.

And really, Cassoone kind of surprised me at— within the Cassoone area, just how many go out of bounds or out of their school zone. But it's really this slide that, uh, this area within town, parental choices is far bigger than Eagle River because it has really— Eagle River's got, if you want to look at you know, special programs or something unique. You've got the Spanish Immersion, you've got, uh, Birchwood, and you've got Eagle Academy. But in this area, they really are going out of their zone at rather large numbers. They're also taking kids in from all of the other zones around them, which is why they have the enrollment that they do.

So now these next slides, Jason Helasny, our Director of Special Education, will go over kind of the special education ramifications of, of each of these closure recommendations. All right, thanks, Sven. Good evening, Dr. Bryant, members of the board. Again, my name is Jason Helasny. I'm the Director of Special Education Instruction.

These are just a few high-level factors to share, just, just to kind of set the stage here. We, we have some legal obligations under IDEA to place children as close as possible to their, to their home. So that's a legal obligation. We do have— our goal is to minimize transitions as much as possible, especially for students with disabilities. We do aim to provide access to typical peers from a child's neighborhood by identifying regional placement locations that feed to the same middle and high school.

So that's a really important thing to align with the, the feeder middle school. And then of course, by remaining in the middle school and high school feeder zone, zones are more condensed and transportation times are decreased. So just a few high-level points to share. Next slide.

Uh, just a quick overview of a couple of our programs. We do have a structured learning program here in the district. And this is designed for students that really do need a high level of structure and predictability, routine, lots of visual supports, these specialized services and supports that are beyond what we would typically do in most and all elementary schools. These are special programs that are considered regional placements. We do have a Life Skills program as well.

I see the next one is SBBSS. SBBSS is our School-Based Behavior Supports program. These are regional programs for students that demonstrate significant and challenging behaviors. So we do focus on behavior plans and functions of behavior and interventions that, that do support students that have these emotional, behavioral, and social needs.

A couple here of our proposals for Lake Otis students who are identified as resource. They would be going with their other schools that they're going to be following our gen ed students based on their address, of course. So that's just, they're going to be following gen ed students based on their address. At Lake Otis, we do have a life skills program. Currently, we have 4 classrooms over at Lake Otis.

We have 4 teachers and 11 paraprofessionals. About 39 students currently receive our life skill services and supports at Lake Otis. For next year, we're projecting 30 to 35 students. This is about, again, 4 classrooms So our plan is to expand Airport Heights from 2 programs, 2 classrooms, to 3. And then we plan to open a new life skills program at Russian Jack Elementary with 3 classrooms.

And so these schools were selected for several reasons. One, to keep students in the same middle and high school feeder zone that I mentioned earlier as their gen ed peers. And spaces available at these schools.

For Kossun SBBS, in order to have enough classrooms at Kossun to accommodate the approximate 125 students we're anticipating from Lake Otis Elementary, we are proposing that the school-based behavior supports, or SBBS, program be relocated to Ocean View Elementary School. Ocean View selected for several reasons. Again, to keep students in the same middle and high school feeder zones as their gen ed peers, and there is space at Ocean View, and currently we do not have any special programs at Ocean View, and I believe they're at about 46% capacity at Ocean View. Jason, could I make one other point about Ocean View as well? I think it's important for the board to, uh be informed that in the Kassoon SBBS program, a majority of those students live in South Anchorage.

And while Kassoon is our furthest south program for SBBS, there are, there are schools like Ocean View that are closer that have the room. And so really, if you look at moving SBBS closer to that South Anchorage neighborhood area, students have a shorter bus ride, and parents can readily access to that school more readily, so to be involved with their school's programming and, and child's education. So I just wanted to make that note as well. Thank you, Kristen. So, uh, we'll go to the next slide.

So for the proposed Fire Lake closure, again, our resource students would— they would follow the same residential boundaries as gen ed students. We do have a structured learning program currently at Fire Lake, and that is— we have 3 classrooms, 3 teachers, and 7 paraprofessionals in that program. There are currently 22 students who receive services in the SLC program at Fire Lake. So for next year, there's projected 17 to 22 students, and this is again 3 classrooms. Our, our proposal, our plan is to relocate the SLC program from Fire Lake to Birchwood ABC.

And then for Birchwood ABC, they currently host a life skills program, 3 classrooms, about 16 students, and we would be relocating this to Elpingleau Elementary School. And some of the reasons for this is to align the life skills and structured learning programs with their middle school feeder zones, which kind of goes back to the alignment that I mentioned earlier. So students in the new Birchwood SLC program will be able to transition with their gen ed peers to Mirror Lake Structured Learning. As Mirror Lake Middle School is the only middle school in Eagle River/Chugiak area to host an SLC program. And then for the new Elp and Glow Life Skills program, we will be able to transition with their gen ed peers to Greening Life Skills, which is our regional life skills program in the, in that Eagle River/Chugiak area.

So it aligns much better.

So I thought we could talk about the anticipated community feedback. We know that we spent weeks and weeks, months getting community feedback last year. We know that no matter which school you pick, to the people that work there, go there, live there, it's always going to be the wrong school. It, it has been the last 3 times we have talked about closing and consolidating schools. Um, but there's also going to be a lot of public comment, and of course we have the community conversations.

Um, so I think I briefed a couple weeks ago about the new housing, um, in the Eagle River area. There is new housing being built. I talked through that over the next several years there will probably be 138 houses if the construction continues in and around the Fire Lake building. Most families have reduced down to one child per family. And so even if you had more than that, 70, 80 kids at 0 through 12, it still probably wouldn't significantly change the enrollment at one school.

There, there is that development of four 2 apartment buildings just on the other side of the highway. One of them has been built with 19 units. Those are 2 and 3-bedroom apartments. There certainly is potential that we, we will get students from that area. But again, if you look at the capacity at Birchwood and the other schools, there's still the capacity to absorb it.

There's going to be curricular concerns about anyone going to an ABC school. They didn't want to go to an ABC school. And as you saw in the charts around Lake Otis, where 50% almost of most zones choose to go somewhere else, and in the Eagle River area, 30 to 45%, that trend will continue and parents will continue to make choices based off what's best for their families and what's best for their children. But it is true, it's a different curriculum. It, it's great for some, it's not as great for others.

But I don't suspect it's going to markedly change the percentage of students moving from one zone to another, as we see all over this district. We heard a lot about the moving the SLC program last year, and I, I know we're going to hear it again. Uh, people will, will talk about, well, we could re-boundary and close a different school. That's true. You could take any group of schools and say, well, let's change the boundary around any one low-capacity school to bring all the other families in from the other boundaries.

But what we're going to see is that movement, that parent choice of 30 to 45% in the Eagle River area and 40 to 55%, um, in the part near Lake Otis. And parents will continue to choose, regardless of where you put the boundaries, where they really want their child to go. So thinking that you can keep your school safe by changing the boundaries and closing a different school, it may not actually change the number of kids enrolled in your school all that much when you see such a high volume of parents, um, choosing to go outside of zone. And then the Eagle River Elementary School, I have sat there many times this year and looked at morning traffic and afternoon traffic. That was brought up last year.

Honestly, Um, they're doing a great job there. I, I think over time parents have figured out how to get their kids in for, uh, the, the optional program at Eagle River Elementary. And, and if you go back to the Fire Lake charts, um, earlier in the game or earlier in the brief, you'll see that, you know, almost a few dozen from the Fire Lake area already going to Eagle River Elementary. Now they're going to get a bus if the board chooses to close that school. So you're actually going to reduce the volume of cars from that perspective.

Um, so I do expect these to come out again and just wanted to be open. They're, they're all valid from the people's— from the person's view that says it. Um, they definitely don't want their school to close. I, I— we talked to their staff, um, we've talked to their community for a long time last year. And, and I suspect all of these will come up yet again.

And then if you look at Lake Otis, um, just as we saw, uh, with the closure of Lake Hood, I suspect that, um, some people may not want any type of program that's not their program coming to their school. That will always happen in Anchorage, all across the district. When we close down Mount Iliamna on base because a lot of parents frankly couldn't get on base to see their kids in school. That was one of the, the reasons why we closed Mount Eliamna. There were areas that, that weren't happy that we were standing up new programs, and I think that will continue.

Lake Otis is a Title I school. We're looking at their economically disadvantaged numbers, and by the time we have the community listening sessions, we'll be able to have a much better analysis as to whether one of the receiving schools might change to be a CEP school or change its status in some other way. Lake Otis is also an after-school program for 21st Century, and, and of course for those families that use it, it's important. But I will say that, that the other schools are not that far away from where Lake Otis is, or we would not even have brought that name up. Um, you know, I think 3 years ago, 4 years ago, whenever we first started talking about, uh, closing schools, we, we talked about how you pick an area where hopefully there's multiple schools in a small radius or a small diameter where you can easily move kids from one school to the other.

I mean, you can look at Aurora and Orion on Jay Bear where they— you can physically see the other school, Ursa Minor, Ursa Major, very close together. All over the east side of Anchorage, we've got lots of schools very close together. Um, frankly, Lake Otis is near several other schools. That's why we were able to come up with a plan to, um, re-boundary and move those students to other schools. The life skills, uh, students at Lake Otis they, they would obviously be moving, as Jason briefed, and, and I suspect the board will hear from that.

So moving to another part of this right-sizing this year, and that is relieving some stress over at Romec Middle School and West High School and changing a couple of boundaries. The first one that we did last time, we'll just kind of go over them again, is just south of Tudor Road and west of The Seward Highway is a small group of students that are in the traditional Rogers Park Elementary Zone that go actually to Romegan West, whereas everybody else that are in the, in the, in the neighborhood school goes to Wendler in East. We are proposing to move that group of students over to the Wendler in East boundary. And then the second one is the The north half of Taku Elementary's boundaries currently go to Romegan West. Now that 76th has an access underneath the Seward Highway, we're proposing to take that group to Hanchu and Service, which is a shorter bus ride.

Looking at enrollments for the Hanchu, um, Hanchu will go up from 799 to 831. For next year. Wendler will go up to 644, but Romeg will lose, um, uh, they'll go from 1,117 to 959. So it does support some of the move, some of the, um, relieve some of the pressure at Romeg. And then for the high schools, the services slated to only increase by 11 students even after getting 71 because of the traditional loss of students.

And Betty Davis East Anchorage High School is actually looking at increasing by about 36, and West will lose about 67 students. So it does relieve some of that, some of that stress on those. One thing that we, uh, we said we'd bring up this time that we didn't know last time is what would we do with students that currently go to Romek West After looking at all of the options with busing and everything, we are going to allow for students to stay at Romeg, but they will not have transportation. So they can stay through their 8th grade year at Romeg, but they would have to transport themselves. And that is also the case for the high school, whereas when we've done other ones such as Diamond Estates where it was one particular spot and it made sense and easy, and it was easy to bus one group of students.

It's not that easy. We will continue to look at that, but at this point, um, we'll allow a student that started their schooling at West High School to stay there. But right at this point, we don't have an option to be able to have busing bring those students to West High. And also, another thing is that any student that moves in high school to another school because of because of boundary changes gets automatic athletic eligibility at the new school. So that is an area that we would not want to, uh, lose for those students.

Now we are doing going out, and I don't think we have— we don't, do we? Oh yes, we do. Okay, that's it for that part, so we'll get to the next part.

Okay, so whoops.

So we identified a number of schools all around the Anchorage Bowl to include the Eagle River area that are, um, very well suited to be able to hold a commercial child care operation with some renovations, um, depending on the ages. And we wouldn't know right now, depending on the ages, what they have. It would be different bathroom configurations. Different changing table requirements. As we submit— if the board approves this plan to move forward, as we submit an ITB and we find out what operators are interested in doing and what ages and what hours, then we'll have to look at each school independently and, and determine what changes would have to be done.

But all of these have a door where you can make it its own private entrance to that operation. You could put a wall up somewhere to segregate it. If you do that, it would even by the current deed rules take that square footage off of our, the list, and it wouldn't count against us for getting major maintenance grants. It could be that this list changes over time. I have had 4 childcare operators already try to—.

Yes. Member Donald, I didn't understand that, that we would wall it off so that it was separate from the school, but it wouldn't affect the deed calculation for maintenance. Oh no, it would, it would, it would reduce that square footage. It could be a door, right? It's, it's a wall by deed, like something that segregates that space, but it could be a door like we're putting in a— it would reduce the eligibility.

It would, it would help us on the major maintenance grants. You said the inverse. It's not enough though. We've got to go that extra step and get those the special ed classrooms and all the other things that we use schools for to also count, um, I think for us long term. So we'll continue down that capacity road, but we won't be able to get there in 2 weeks, obviously.

Um, but this is what would go out in the ITB for these 5 schools. We'd put the square footage in, we put the parameters of what we expect them to come back with, um, as we start evaluating bids and looking at things like that. We're obviously going to reach out to experts like Stephanie to help us understand the business lingo, what exactly they're asking for. We have already spoken more than, well, quite a few times to the municipality and the child care director office there is willing to help us as well. And this is going to be a very methodical, very, very intentional to get the, the buildings modified, just like we're doing at Fairview.

Fairview, we went through step by step, very methodical. Um, it's— the design is almost done. The renovations will be done by probably sometime between March and April, and in May or June, they'll be moving their operation into Fairview Elementary School. They'll have their own separate entrance. They've got doorways that segregate that square footage.

And I, I think working with KCI, uh, has, has really helped us figure out how to do this bigger with more schools. So a year ago almost, on December 17th, the board directed us to, uh, come back with more school closures. The board directed us to look at boundaries. And I think this brief gives a good overview, one, of, of the directive we were given and where we're headed, I hope, with child care operations in our schools. And I see a hand up.

Yeah, uh, President Jacobs has a question. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Um, could the team explain what level of capital investment is required to modify these buildings into location spaces, and where do we picture getting those funding stacks from for future buildings?

Sure. Well, it depends on the building. Um, if you go to Chugiak High School, you'll see that they've already got water pipes in the area very near all of these classrooms. Depending on the ages, they may or may not need a bathroom in that room. If they do, we would have to put it in.

Um, if you look at what we're doing at Fairview, work through AC to get a grant which covers a good chunk of the construction. And I think because we have such a friendly local government and that committee specifically, once we figure out the costs for these, we're certainly going to look at that as a possible source because we're not just doing this for Anchorage. School district employees only. We're doing this for the whole community, and I think it's going to be embraced if we can get operators to, uh, to take the chance and form a business and, and try to operate in our schools.

Was there a follow-up?

I'm good for now, thank you. Uh, Member Watson had a question, and then Member Higgins. Yeah, thank you. Uh, President Jacobs mostly asked my question, but I will follow up Um, when would we see, um, essentially an overview of those capital costs? I presume after the, the ITBs go out, but maybe you guys can help us understand the timeline a little bit more.

Actually, it would be after we've received the bids from the prospective operators and we look at what they're looking for in the age groups that they want to primarily operate around, and then we will look at the facilities and be able to determine it. That's probably 6+ months out. The other option, of course, is, you know, not doing anything. Doing nothing is always an option.

Member Higgins, thank you. Um, you made an interesting point a few minutes ago about 30-something kids in 4 classrooms because of special How does all that factor into the utilization? You've got so much square footage, you're using the state's formula, but you've got, you've got part of that that's not really readily available to be used at a larger classroom amount unless you move it out. So when we look at utilization, the rates and what that really represents, that's the concern coming from the public right off the bat. I can tell you that's coming in all over the place, that, that all numbers are simply not accurate or not reasonable because you're not factoring out the spaces that are not being able to be fully utilized.

And, you know, in the sense of so many kids in a classroom. So are you, are you looking at that? Are you factoring that in to decide how much space, how much is utilized or not? I'm in complete agreement with you. I think the last two briefings I gave focused on changing the way we look at capacity focused on taking credit for a classroom that by design can only have 3 to 4 kids in it and getting the state to change their rules on what defines capacity.

I think, I, I think that was really my main focus on, on the first brief. It's going to probably take us easily the rest of the school year, and then it's going to be trying to get the state to change its regulations on how they account. There's going to be You know, we have a gentleman on our staff who's on the committee at the state. He knows this better than— I mean, there's only a few other people in the whole state that understand it better. And I think we have to go after and say that we're not like the Anchorage School District of 50,000 kids and 570 intensive needs.

We're the Anchorage School District that looks like 42,000 kids and 1,100 intensive needs and try to get the state to realize that all children at elementary level are not 114 square feet. They're all different, and I think it's going to take months for us to finish all of the schools program by program, which will keep changing, right? So you look at, uh, special ed pre-K, we, we've already got a full class or two classes just in testing in the, in the first month and a half of school that we're going to have to stand up classrooms in January that we never would have stood up in 2010. So the needs are going to keep changing, and so schools need to be defined by each individual program within the school and the limitations of each program on what that means for capacity. But we can't— there's no chance we'll get all of the work done and approved by DEED and change the regulation in 2 weeks.

I mean, that's not going to happen. I'm looking at this saying, okay, now what the state has, it has this formula to say how much space you can have and, you know, the like. I understand, but how does that compel us on how we decide whether a school stays open or not or what we do? I don't see where we're compelled on that, and I think when we're looking at decisions, I remember the, the proposal with Bear Valley. It's low, it's all, it's being utilized all over the place.

We've got other schools out there, and that's what I'm hearing, the public feedback. You asked about that. I'm hearing it, okay? It's, it's loud, and one of them is You don't factor in the utilization rate in a way that's reasonable, and yet you want to target a school, this neighborhood, and then when they're Title I schools, the parents around there are going to be much more participating in that school than they will if it's removed. So you're going to impact— what they want to hear is the pros and cons, and they're not hearing the cons as much.

The cons are that these parents are not going to be as engaged with the kids. The outcome will not be as good. If the kids, if the parents are not involved, if we don't get that type of involvement. And Title I is more in a category of transportation's more of a challenge. Well, we did go through every elementary room, room by room, and look for space that was being used in the best possible way.

So you could go to an elementary school that's 50% capacity and they would put something in 5 or 6 different rooms that that in a normal elementary school you wouldn't have. And I'll go back to Lake Hood. When we walked through Lake Hood, there was one room that had several basketballs and some other gym equipment and a desk for a PE teacher because they had the space. They truly were, um, our lowest capacity school. And all around that school, you saw rooms where they put something because they could, not because any other elementary school would have something in there.

And, and I go back to what I said up front. You're right, any school we pick is the wrong school to somebody. And the con is, if you go to that school and you love that school and you work at that school and you live near that school, that any other school is a better choice. But the board directed us on December 17th to come back with more school closures. I will say that I voted for that because I wanted that recommendation of a school to come to us early, not late.

So that we would end up reviewing and deciding on it in an early thing, not because I'm committed to closing the school, but because we didn't want to go in with the last minute again like we did last year, so late that we wanted to do it early. That was a recommendation. I think it— I don't remember who it was from. I thought about it and I didn't want to wait. So they wanted a school closure.

Didn't say you have to have more, but just a school closure. Come in, come in early so that we can review it, not that we were committed that we wanted to know what school we're going to close. We're going to decide that based on it. We're the voice of the public, and I can tell you the voice of the public is loud on both of these schools. And, and I'm visiting— I visit the schools, I visit the ones that they're going to be going to, uh, because I really want to understand and walk through it.

And I'm telling you, the utilization is an issue, and that is something that I just don't see is calculated. And then in parental involvement with these schools gets impacted when you don't have the— particularly for Title I, and that's probably a big issue.

I do want to remind the board we don't have any items on our executive session agenda, so we will run into that time because we still have another presentation in the work session. President Jacobs, your hand was up. I just wanted to make sure we extended our work session formally to hear the other agenda topic. Thank you. Without objection, we'll extend it.

Other questions from the board?

Seeing no hands, um, we did have one more slide. I wanted to make sure we get this on the record of our different community convenings next week. Okay, please continue. On Monday the 27th, there's a Joint Advisory Committee, so the MECAC, the SEAC, and the NAC committees will all be coming together, um, on, on Monday. On Tuesday, we're going to have boundary meetings at both Wendler and Hanshew at the same time.

And then on Wednesday, we're at East High School for a community convening regarding the right-sizing and the closures. And Thursday, we will be at Chugiak High School And then, then Saturday, next Saturday on November 1st, we're going to be here. All the other meetings are 6:00. The November 1st one is at noon, the one that's here on Saturday. So I wanted to make sure everybody saw that we have—.

Is it online at 6:30?

I thought they were at 6:00. It's 6:00 to 8:00, I believe. 6:00. Okay, can I—. Member Jacobs.

Oh, okay, sorry. Uh, Member Higgins. Yeah, I'm just going to request that, um, if we can get America's to send out a list of all those meetings so I can put it on my calendar. I didn't scribble it down. I'm going to screw it up, I admit that.

But I would like it on my calendar. Add it. Thank you.

Right.

Okay. Thank you very much.

We will move to a presentation from ASB via Zoom. Ms. Gasgreen, if you're— Grassgreen, if you're online. I am. Thank you. Thanks for making space for ASB on the agenda tonight.

Mostly our intent of this is to connect with school boards to make sure they understand the grant partnerships that we have working with each district. So we've been just reaching out to different school boards, and I hope that you'll find it useful. I have a couple slides here that I'm going to share. I also sent the link to Mr. Jacobs. Um, actually, it is not letting me share my screen.

Uh, would I be able to put the link in the chat and someone would be able to share it on that side? That work? I'm hearing yes. Excellent. Um, okay.

Well, is there— there isn't a chat, huh? Because we're in— I'm in presenter mode.

Who should I get that to? Okay, just one. We think we have the link.

Yeah, I think you have the link. Thank you for doing that. I'll get started while that's working in. I'm getting that going. Appreciate whoever is helping on the technical side there.

Uh, my name is Lori Grassgreen. I'm the director of our Conditions for Learning team at AASB. Uh, currently we have two grants right now with the Anchorage School District. One is the Alaska Family Engagement Center grant, and the other one is called Alaska Strong, and that was recently just funded again. It will have a new name.

I think it's called Thrive now, but it's the same, the same work there. So I think in the Anchorage School District, the program is called Atautchikung. And so I wanted to tell a little bit about the Alaska Family Engagement Center. It's a QR code that takes you to the website with the resources for family engagement and for educators and to sign up for spotlights around family engagement events. So in listening to your previous conversation, I already hear the passion in folks' voices that you already understand the connection between family involvement and outcomes for students.

And so the purpose of this goal here— you can keep— you can move the next slide, um, unless— yeah, uh, thank you— just about really building true partnerships between families and schools to drive student success and And sometimes we talk about that really generally, but what we've been trying to do with the Alaska Family Engagement Center is kind of to dip into different areas of family engagement and community engagement. So maybe linking that to learning in particular areas, maybe it's around literacy, maybe it's around post-secondary. So we'll talk a little bit more about that partnership. So, and we could— thank you. There are a lot of different districts there in that purple box that are partnering with the And we have— obviously we're trying to reach families and students, and we have a family advisory board, and some of our statewide family advisory board members are from Anchorage.

So I just wanted to make sure you knew that. Keep rolling.

So with AFEC, we have a lot of different offerings. We have done some Family Partnership Foundation trainings. Some community dialogue or cafe trainings. I know that we've tailored some different conversations around post-secondary, and we're working on SEL and family. And I think that Anchorage Over Time has reached out on a few of the different trainings.

Karen Halpin, who used to work in your school district, who works for AASB, has helped with a few, and Emily Ferry. And then We also have, in addition to training and tailored supports like that, we also have some mini grants. And so I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes here. So I'm not going to talk too much about this, but like I said, we have a few Anchorage— 5 Anchorage family members that are on the Family Advisory Board. We have a lot from Western Alaska and Northern Alaska and a couple from Southeast, and we have one Anchorage School District staff member that participates in the Family Advisory Board.

And that Family Advisory Board really guides us around some of our statewide needs, some of the gaps that we're seeing, sometimes if there's resources that are needed. So it's a— you have an in if there are like resources that you're wanting around family partnership. So keep rolling.

And I know some of you were able to participate in the Tribal Consultation and Education Day that we hosted as a part of our spring boardsmanship academy, and we had tribal partners that attended. Hopefully for those of you that attended, you received this book. It's the, basically the harvest of what came out of that conversation. Of what folks were saying were some of the next steps and big chunks to do that tribal consultation work. And as part of the Alaska Family Engagement Center, AASB can support some of that tribal consultation work if that is of interest.

So, and there'll be a little bit more about that at annual conference. So for those of you that will be there around that. So we also offer mini grants that can go be up to $20,000 for school to apply if they have a specific idea of how they want to work on family engagement. So far in Anchorage, the only one that's written a mini grant or proposed one is ANCCS. And so I just wanted to get that out there.

If you know of schools that are doing family engagement work and they could use some extra funds, it's a pretty simple process to access a small pot of funds there for that. So, um, a lot of schools, um, in your district have accessed our Family Reading Night toolkits. I have a list of those, so I could let you know which schools there are, but I think there's at least 6 schools that have accessed— they get the full kit, instructional all the books, and sometimes some other plushies or other things that go with that. And then we follow up and we do some coaching or brainstorming and just learning about how those toolkits were working. And we had some different topics in the kit, but we did try to keep them Alaska-themed, and we had some that were focused on SEL and online safety.

The new batch that's coming out have a little bit more about thinking about the future and literacy for a little bit older students, as that was requested by the teachers we worked with. So, yeah, we have a series too that we're offering for families directly. So if you all want to circulate it and you think some of your families would be interested, the topic— we have two twice a month, the same topic, and then we have different topics every month. So they're the first and third Wednesdays, and any families in the state are welcome to join virtually.

So we just wanted to say that families, you know, we've had a really good response both from families and staff that have participated in the Family Literacy Night. And so 98% of your staff— this is for Anchorage specifically— who participated in the training reported their increased capacity to work with families to meet the academic and developmental needs of their children. So we feel like that was a pretty good response from the schools that participated, and statewide it was pretty similar. We had pretty high responses there.

Um, also as a part of the Family Engagement Center, you all already participate in the School Climate and Connectedness Survey, and I know that you're using your data in different ways. And we use them for any of these grants that we're working on. That's a part of our reporting tools. But we also try to create some snapshots, and so that your district team and other schools, if they're interested, could have a snapshot just of some of the highlights of the family partnership pieces. And, you know, you can see here that this is a comparison just between Families, staff, and students and their perceptions about the schools being welcoming places for families and how the school involves parents.

And so we can use these as tools sometimes just to say, well, what, what is your strength here and what are some areas you still want to grow with your family partnership work? So, you know, honestly, for some statewide, believe it or not, I know you all are making some really hard decisions right now. And in the past year, but this school involves families in making important decisions. That is above like the state average there, so I'd say good job on that. But it is the one that usually can be the lowest at different points, but it seems like you all have been doing some really good outreach.

So, so I just wanted to see if there are any questions around the Family Engagement Center grant. There's lots of ways that we are partnering and still can partner. But before we move into Ataachikung, I wanted to just see if there are any questions about the opportunity with the Alaska Family Engagement Center grant.

Any questions from the board? Let's see, no hands online, no one in the room. Great. Don't think we've got a question. Thank you.

All right. I can work with that. So I wanted to highlight this other partnership. This partnership we've had for over 5 years. We applied for it as Alaska Strong, and it's really a way to engage families, but also has a cultural activities component and sort of a connection and conversation component.

And through that, uh, over 100 Anchorage families were served. And, um, the current cycle is ending December 31st, but we just received a new 5-year grant partnership. So we're working on that memorandum of agreement, uh, between the Anchorage School District and AASB. Um, and we hear so many positive comments. Like, sometimes recruiting can be hard and And because it's a multi-session, it's not a one-off thing, it's, it's like a cohort where, you know, you have multiple sessions with families together and folks get to know each other.

But one thing we know is that most of the folks that participate have really said, can we continue to do this? It has been really important for me to connect with other families and even connect within my own family. And there's a quote down there that just says, a big takeaway for me was to be brave and try new things as a family and to involve other families, especially parents we're in the same cohort with. And it's important to take time as a family to connect and keep growing as parents. We learned traditional values and became aware of our own values that are important to pass on to our kids.

So we've had really good reviews and This is something that we fund a staff position or two in this case to carry out this, and we work closely with the staff to create the curriculum, to support families, and to look at what the— there's some light case management wraparound around that piece too. So that's that slide. So, um, Yeah, these are just— this is the example of a, um, the calendar. And usually there's an activity where they're making something together, but there's also conversations around topics. And sometimes it includes topics around SEL or topics around like family goals or learning, but it's all happening within the context of, um, you know, working on busy hands together.

So, okay, so, um, that might actually— is that the last slide there? So I just— we just wanted to share and give an opportunity to either to ask questions or to say, hey, you know, as you're supporting family engagement work, we really hope that, you know, you'll think about this, or if there's, there's something that would be important to the Anchorage School District around your, um, family engagement partnership that we have.

Any questions from the board?

I see none at this time. Great. The only other thing we wanted to say is that, you know, our hearts go out to all the families that have been displaced from Western Alaska, and we see that Anchorage is doing such a good job trying to welcome the families. If there are ways that— we know that there's families that, you know, and students that aren't going to have any basic school supplies or, you know, other things. So we just hope that folks will be in touch, and if there's something that we can do in partnership with the grants to support families around that, we, we want to make sure that we're able to do that.

So that's all I have for you. Okay, thank you very much for your presentation. And yeah, we're, uh, working our way forward on connecting with all those families, figuring out exactly where they're going to be and how long they're going to be with us. So it's going to be an interesting beginning of winter. Thank you.

Well, if there is a wish list, please keep us in mind to think about how we might be able to help. Help. So, okay, definitely will. Thank you very much for your presentation. Right.

Okay, uh, with that, we do not have an agenda for the executive session, so I would entertain a motion for us to adjourn the work session.

Move we adjourn. Uh, second. Moved by Member Donnelly, seconded by Member Higgins. We are adjourned until 6 PM.